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1. On effects that do occur versus effects that can be made to occur

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2023.1193349  

   Brauer, Markus; Kennedy, Kevin R (August 2023, Frontiers in Social Psychology)

   Following Douglas Mook's lead we distinguish between research on “effects that can be made to occur” and research on “effects that do occur” and argue that both can contribute to the advancement of knowledge. We further suggest that current social psychological research focuses too much on the former type of effects. Given the discipline's emphasis on innovation, many published effects are shown to exist under very specific circumstances, i.e., when numerous moderator variables are set at a particular level. One often does not know, however, how frequently these circumstances exist for people in the real world. Studies on effects that can be made to occur are thus an incomplete test of most theories about human cognition and behavior. Using concrete examples, this article discusses the shortcomings of a field that limits itself to identifying effects that might—or might not—be relevant. We argue that it is just as much a scientific contribution to show that a given effect actually does occur as it is to provide initial evidence for a new effect that could turn out to be important. The article ends with a series of suggestions for researchers who want to increase the theoretical and practical relevance of their research. 

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2. To Tile or not to Tile, That is the Question

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPSW63119.2024.00096  

   Haan, Altan; Popovici, Doru Thom; Sen, Koushik; Iancu, Costin; Cheung, Alvin (May 2024, IEEE)
3. Listening to Those That Matter: Deans' Responses to the Barriers that Latiné/x/a/o Contingent faculty at HSI's face.

   Downey, R.J.; Muñoz, J.; Villanueva Alarcón, I. (January 2023, American Society of Engineering Education, Minorities in Engineering Division)

   The authors of this paper hosted a 2-day conference that brought a group of Latiné/x/a/o contingent faculty from the California State University (CSU) system together to better understand the barriers they face in their professional roles and responsibilities while also identifying assets they bring to the classroom and institutions. Contingent faculty face mounting and compounding barriers that have devastating effects, not only on the faculty, but also the students they serve since a majority of contingent faculty are hired to teach first-generation, working class, and students of color. This paper seeks to synthesize a follow-up to the conference in where five STEM deans within CSU system were recruited to do a reading and reflection about the findings connected to the 2-day conference for the contingent faculty. From the dean’s responses, the authors paint a picture on the challenges that also impact deans from making changes for contingent faculty. 

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4. Rebel agents that adapt to goal expectation failures

   Mohammad, Zahiduddin; Cox, Michael T.; Molineaux, Matthew (January 2020, Proceedings of the Integrated Execution / Goal Reasoning Workshop (held at the Thirtieth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling - ICAPS-20))

   Humans and autonomous agents often have differing knowledge about the world, the goals they pursue, and the actions they perform. Given these differences, an autonomous agent should be capable of rebelling against a goal when its completion would violate that agent’s preferences and motivations. Prior work on agent rebellion has examined agents that can reject actions leading to harmful consequences. Here we elaborate on a specific justification for rebellion in terms of violated goal expectations. Further, the need for rebellion is not always known in advance. So to rebel correctly and justifiably in response to unforeseen circumstances, an autonomous agent must be able to learn the reasons behind violations of its expectations. This paper provides a novel framework for rebellion within a metacognitive architecture using goal monitoring and model learning, and it includes experimental results showing the efficacy of such rebellion. 

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5. CSS codes that are oblivious to coherent noise

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISIT45174.2021.9518206  

   Hu, J.: Liang; Rengaswamy, N.; Calderbank, R (July 2021, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory)

   Physical platforms such as trapped ions suffer from coherent noise that does not follow a simple stochastic model. We view coherent errors as rotations about a particular axis, and observe that since they can accumulate coherently over time, they can be more damaging. It is natural to consider coherent noise acting transversally giving rise to an effective error, which is a Z-rotation on each qubit by some angle. Rather than addressing coherent noise through active error correction, we instead investigate passive mitigation through decoherence free subspaces. In the language of stabilizer codes, we require the noise to preserve the code space, and to act trivially (as the logical identity operator) on the protected information. Thus, we develop necessary and sufficient conditions for all transversal Z-rotations to preserve the code space of a stabilizer code. 

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