The power of choice

About 30 years ago when I was conducting research in cognitive science, I carried out a very simple experiment and obtained very simple results. The implications of the findings, however, were immense and relevant to this discussion. Of the 40 subjects in this experiment, one-half were shown a list of five three-letter words (cat, hat, mat, rat, bat) and asked to select one. Then, after a warning tone, tire selected word was presented on a screen in front of tire subject, and he or she pressed a lever as fast as possible after seeing the word. The delay in milliseconds between the presentation of the word and the subject s response was a measure of simple reaction time. 

This sequence of warning signal, word presentation, and subject reaction occurred for 25 trials. If a subject reacted before the stimulus word was presented, the reaction time was not counted, and the trial was repeated. The experimental session took less than 15 minutes per subject. 

The word selected by a particular subject was used as tire presentation stimulus for the next subject. Thus, this subject did not have the opportunity to choose the stimulus word. As a result, the word choices of 20 subjects were assigned (without choice) to 20 other subjects. Therefore, this simple experiment had two conditions—a choice condition (in which subjects chose a three-letter word for tiieir stimulus) and an assigned condition (in which subjects were assigned the stimulus word selected by the previous subject). The mean reactions of subjects in the choice group were significantly faster than those of subjects in the assigned group. 

I explained these results by presuming the opportunity to choose a stimulus word increased motivation to perform in tire reaction time experiment. 1 must admit, however, I did not expect the differences to be as large as they were. How could the simple choice of a three-letter word motivate faster responding in a simple reaction time experiment 1 frankly did not feel confident in my explanation for these results, and thus I did not pursue publication of these data in a professional research journal. However, subsequent laboratory studies verified these findings and were published (Monty et al., 1979 Monty and Perlmuter 1975 Perlmuter et al., 1971). 

I told the 8 00 class they could choose the order in which the ten textbook chapters would be presented, they could submit multiple choice questions for me to consider using for the chapter quizzes, and they could hand in short answer and discussion questions for possible use on the final exam. The 11 00 class received the order of textbook chapters selected previously by the 8 00 class in an open discussion and voting process. Also, the 11 00 class was not given an opportunity to submit quiz or exam questions. 

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Solar Electricity The Power of Choice, Second Quarter, 2001 www.nrel.eov/ncpv. 

The nine-year-old Rick had made these choices innocently and unconsciously, not knowing how greatly they d affect him over the years. His job now was to bring those choices into the light of awareness, realizing that when we make choices unconsciously, we actually lose the power of choice. And the price for losing that power can be enormous. 

Crossfire has proven to perform both on the battlefield and in the workplace. You have the power of choice with 28 models of safety eyewear including foam lined, polarized, readers and fit overs. Contact Crossfire Safety at 770-975-4711 or visit our website www.crossfiresafety.com. Booth 334. Circle 52... 

We need only reflect on our own lives to appreciate the power of choice and how the perception of choice and personal control makes us more motivated, involved, and committed. Choice activates and sustains actively caring behavior. 

While volume is a convenient variable for the calculations of theoreticians, the pressure is nomially the variable of choice for experimentalists, so there is a corresponding equation in which the equation of state is expanded in powers of p ... 

GAUSSIAN or GAMESS implementation and at a level of theory r6-.31G(d), etc.] of your choosing. Your choice of implementation and level will likely be dictated by the power of the computer system you have. Construct a graph showing the energies of the four isomers on a veilical scale. Comment on the graph you obtain (see Li et al.. 1999). 

Electric utihties are therefore expected to build new power plants or to extend the Hves of existing, older ones. Ready availabiUty, secure supply, and low price are expected to make coal the fuel of choice for most of the new baseload generating capacity. 

Natural gas is the fuel of choice wherever it is available because of its clean burning and its competitive pricing as seen in Figure 1-30. Prices for Uranium, the fuel of nuclear power stations, and coal, the fuel of the steam power plants, have been stable over the years and have been the lowest. Environmental, safety concerns, high initial cost, and the long time from planning to production has hurt the nuclear and steam power industries. Whenever oil or natural gas is the fuel of choice, gas turbines and combined cycle plants are the power plant of choice as they convert the fuel into electricity very... 

Where replacement of pretreatment and purification equipment is required, RO is often the technology of choice to supplant softeners, dealkalizers, and demineralization units, whether the boiler is a 100 psig unit for HVAC, an aging 1,000 MW fossil-fuel power plant, or a 2,000+ MW supercritical supplying power and district heat. 

Sometimes, even in this electronic age , paper is still the medium of choice. For retained records that must be made available to personnel responding to an emergency, paper is a better medium than electronic media, because paper can remain accessible during emergency events (e.g., power outages, fires, floods, etc.) that could render electronic records inaccessible. 

The PPP-MO method has proved extremely successful for the prediction of a wide range of colour properties, and it is currently the most extensively used method for this purpose. It does have some deficiencies. For example, the method carries out its calculations based on rc-electrons only and therefore cannot, except in a rather empirical way, account for some of the subtle effects of a-electrons on colour. Among such effects commonly encountered are hydrogen bonding and steric hindrance. As more and more powerful computing facilities become accessible, there is clear evidence that colour chemists are turning their attention towards the use for colour prediction of more sophisticated molecular orbital techniques which take into account all valence electrons, such as the CNDO and ZINDO approaches, and in due course they may well prove to be the methods of choice. However, at the present time, it has not been established with absolute certainty that these methods will routinely provide superior colour prediction properties. 

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