College of Charleston

Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts for organisations, society, and individuals. Offering multi-disciplinary insight into some of these, this article brings together 43 contributions from experts in fields such as computer science, marketing, information systems, education, policy, hospitality and tourism, management, publishing, and nursing. The contributors acknowledge ChatGPT’s capabilities to enhance productivity and suggest that it is likely to offer significant gains in the banking, hospitality and tourism, and information technology industries, and enhance business activities, such as management and marketing. Nevertheless, they also consider its limitations, disruptions to practices, threats to privacy and security, and consequences of biases, misuse, and misinformation. However, opinion is split on whether ChatGPT’s use should be restricted or legislated. Drawing on these contributions, the article identifies questions requiring further research across three thematic areas: knowledge, transparency, and ethics; digital transformation of organisations and societies; and teaching, learning, and scholarly research. The avenues for further research include: identifying skills, resources, and capabilities needed to handle generative AI; examining biases of generative AI attributable to training datasets and processes; exploring business and societal contexts best suited for generative AI implementation; determining optimal combinations of human and generative AI for various tasks; identifying ways to assess accuracy of text produced by generative AI; and uncovering the ethical and legal issues in using generative AI across different contexts.

Mediation analyses abound in social and personality psychology. Current recommendations for assessing power and sample size in mediation models include using a Monte Carlo power analysis simulation and testing the indirect effect with a bootstrapped confidence interval. Unfortunately, these methods have rarely been adopted by researchers due to limited software options and the computational time needed. We propose a new method and convenient tools for determining sample size and power in mediation models. We demonstrate our new method through an easy-to-use application that implements the method. These developments will allow researchers to quickly and easily determine power and sample size for simple and complex mediation models.

Summary Fine roots acquire essential soil resources and mediate biogeochemical cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. Estimates of carbon and nutrient allocation to build and maintain these structures remain uncertain because of the challenges of consistently measuring and interpreting fine‐root systems. Traditionally, fine roots have been defined as all roots ≤ 2 mm in diameter, yet it is now recognized that this approach fails to capture the diversity of form and function observed among fine‐root orders. Here, we demonstrate how order‐based and functional classification frameworks improve our understanding of dynamic root processes in ecosystems dominated by perennial plants. In these frameworks, fine roots are either separated into individual root orders or functionally defined into a shorter‐lived absorptive pool and a longer‐lived transport fine‐root pool. Using these frameworks, we estimate that fine‐root production and turnover represent 22% of terrestrial net primary production globally – a c . 30% reduction from previous estimates assuming a single fine‐root pool. Future work developing tools to rapidly differentiate functional fine‐root classes, explicit incorporation of mycorrhizal fungi into fine‐root studies, and wider adoption of a two‐pool approach to model fine roots provide opportunities to better understand below‐ground processes in the terrestrial biosphere. Contents Summary 505 I. Introduction 506 II. Ordered variation in fine‐root traits – different functions of different roots 506 III. Pitfalls and platforms – understanding bias and improving estimates of root processes 508 IV. Moving forward using root orders and functional classifications 512 V. Can we integrate mycorrhizal fungi with root classifications? 513 VI. Conclusions and recommendations 514 Acknowledgements 515 References 515

Gastronomy is becoming an important attribute in the development of niche travel and niche destinations. Although the literature supports the view that there is a connection between tourism and gastronomy, little is known about gastronomy tourists. For example, is there a gastronomy-tourism market segment? Does a destination's gastronomy contribute to the tourists' quality of experiences while visiting the destination? Do tourists return to the destination to resample its gastronomy? This study was undertaken in Hong Kong, which is arguably a city destination that offers unique and diverse gastronomy. The results of the study provide evidence suggesting that motivation to travel for gastronomy reasons is a valid construct. Also, the results of the data analysis reveal that gastronomy plays a major role in the way tourists experience the destination, and indicate that some travelers would return to the same destination to savor its unique gastronomy. Implications for practitioners are also discussed.

Long-distance seed dispersal influences many key aspects of the biology of plants, including spread of invasive species, metapopulation dynamics, and diversity and dynamics in plant communities. However, because long-distance seed dispersal is inherently hard to measure, there are few data sets that characterize the tails of seed dispersal curves. This paper is structured around two lines of argument. First, we argue that long-distance seed dispersal is of critical importance and, hence, that we must collect better data from the tails of seed dispersal curves. To make the case for the importance of long-distance seed dispersal, we review existing data and models of long-distance seed dispersal, focusing on situations in which seeds that travel long distances have a critical impact (colonization of islands, Holocene migrations, response to global change, metapopulation biology). Second, we argue that genetic methods provide a broadly applicable way to monitor long-distance seed dispersal; to place this argument in context, we review genetic estimates of plant migration rates. At present, several promising genetic approaches for estimating long-distance seed dispersal are under active development, including assignment methods, likelihood methods, genealogical methods, and genealogical/demographic methods. We close the paper by discussing important but as yet largely unexplored areas for future research.

In addition to considerable debate in the recent evolutionary literature about the limits of the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s, there has also been theoretical and empirical interest in a variety of new and not so new concepts such as phenotypic plasticity, genetic assimilation and phenotypic accommodation. Here we consider examples of the arguments and counter-arguments that have shaped this discussion. We suggest that much of the controversy hinges on several misunderstandings, including unwarranted fears of a general attempt at overthrowing the Modern Synthesis paradigm, and some fundamental conceptual confusion about the proper roles of phenotypic plasticity and natural selection within evolutionary theory.

The LA ‐ ICP ‐ MS U‐(Th‐)Pb geochronology international community has defined new standards for the determination of U‐(Th‐)Pb ages. A new workflow defines the appropriate propagation of uncertainties for these data, identifying random and systematic components. Only data with uncertainties relating to random error should be used in weighted mean calculations of population ages; uncertainty components for systematic errors are propagated after this stage, preventing their erroneous reduction. Following this improved uncertainty propagation protocol, data can be compared at different uncertainty levels to better resolve age differences. New reference values for commonly used zircon, monazite and titanite reference materials are defined (based on ID ‐ TIMS ) after removing corrections for common lead and the effects of excess 230 Th. These values more accurately reflect the material sampled during the determination of calibration factors by LA ‐ ICP ‐ MS analysis. Recommendations are made to graphically represent data only with uncertainty ellipses at 2 s and to submit or cite validation data with sample data when submitting data for publication. New data‐reporting standards are defined to help improve the peer‐review process. With these improvements, LA ‐ ICP ‐ MS U‐(Th‐)Pb data can be considered more robust, accurate, better documented and quantified, directly contributing to their improved scientific interpretation.

Speeded visual word naming and lexical decision performance are reported for 2428 words for young adults and healthy older adults. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to investigate the unique predictive variance of phonological features in the onsets, lexical variables (e.g., measures of consistency, frequency, familiarity, neighborhood size, and length), and semantic variables (e.g. imageahility and semantic connectivity). The influence of most variables was highly task dependent, with the results shedding light on recent empirical controversies in the available word recognition literature. Semantic-level variables accounted for unique variance in both speeded naming and lexical decision performance, level with the latter task producing the largest semantic-level effects. Discussion focuses on the utility of large-scale regression studies in providing a complementary approach to the standard factorial designs to investigate visual word recognition.

The search for water on the surface of the anhydrous Moon had remained an unfulfilled quest for 40 years. However, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) on Chandrayaan-1 has recently detected absorption features near 2.8 to 3.0 micrometers on the surface of the Moon. For silicate bodies, such features are typically attributed to hydroxyl- and/or water-bearing materials. On the Moon, the feature is seen as a widely distributed absorption that appears strongest at cooler high latitudes and at several fresh feldspathic craters. The general lack of correlation of this feature in sunlit M3 data with neutron spectrometer hydrogen abundance data suggests that the formation and retention of hydroxyl and water are ongoing surficial processes. Hydroxyl/water production processes may feed polar cold traps and make the lunar regolith a candidate source of volatiles for human exploration.

This study explores travel blogs as a manifestation of travel experience. Visitor opinions posted on leading travel blog sites were analyzed to gain an understanding of the destination experience being manifested. Travel blogs on Charleston, South Carolina, were collected through the three most popular travel blog sites and three blog search engines. Blogs were analyzed using semantic network analysis and content analysis methods to ascertain what bloggers were communicating about their travel experiences. Results revealed that major strengths of the destination were its attractions: historic charm, Southern hospitality, beaches, and water activities. Major weaknesses included weather, infrastructure, and fast-service restaurants. Qualitative results demonstrated that travel blogs are an inexpensive means to gather rich, authentic, and unsolicited customer feedback. Information technology advances and increasingly large numbers of travel blogs facilitate travel blog monitoring as a cost-effective method for destination marketers to assess their service quality and improve travelers' overall experiences.

It is well known that when data are nonnormally distributed, a test of the significance of Pearson's r may inflate Type I error rates and reduce power. Statistics textbooks and the simulation literature provide several alternatives to Pearson's correlation. However, the relative performance of these alternatives has been unclear. Two simulation studies were conducted to compare 12 methods, including Pearson, Spearman's rank-order, transformation, and resampling approaches. With most sample sizes (n ≥ 20), Type I and Type II error rates were minimized by transforming the data to a normal shape prior to assessing the Pearson correlation. Among transformation approaches, a general purpose rank-based inverse normal transformation (i.e., transformation to rankit scores) was most beneficial. However, when samples were both small (n ≤ 10) and extremely nonnormal, the permutation test often outperformed other alternatives, including various bootstrap tests.

Abstract This volume defends an integrated account of the psychological mechanisms underlying “mindreading,” the commonplace capacity to understand the mind. The authors maintain that it is, as commonsense would suggest, vital to distinguish between reading others’ minds and reading one’s own. In reading other minds, the imagination plays a central role. As a result, the authors begin with an explicit and systematic account of pretense and imagination which proposes that pretense representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, the “Possible World Box,” which is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. The mechanisms subserving pretense get recruited in reading other minds, a capacity that implicates multifarious kinds of processes, including those favored by simulation approaches to mindreading, those favored by information-based approaches, and processes that don’t fit into either category. None of these mechanisms or processes, though, explains how we read our own minds, which, according to the authors, requires invoking an entirely independent set of mechanisms.

Abstract The primary objective of this paper is twofold: (i) to investigate the impact of perceived risk on the tendency to travel internationally; and (ii) to explore if there is any difference in the perception of risky places among three clusters segmented based on the Hofstede's uncertainty avoidance index. The sample population of the study consists of 1180 international travellers visiting Hong Kong in the fall of 2003. The research findings show that the majority of travellers are more likely to change their travel plans to a destination that has elevated risk while the minority reports they are more unlikely. These findings suggest that international travellers appear to be sensitive towards the occurrence of any type of risk in their evoked destinations. Differences were also observed from one continent to another in terms of the influence of perceived risks. The final note is that travellers from different national cultures may have varying degrees of the perceived risk. Implications both for theory and practitioners are also discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Phenotypic plasticity is ubiquitous and generally regarded as a key mechanism for enabling organisms to survive in the face of environmental change. Because no organism is infinitely or ideally plastic, theory suggests that there must be limits (for example, the lack of ability to produce an optimal trait) to the evolution of phenotypic plasticity, or that plasticity may have inherent significant costs. Yet numerous experimental studies have not detected widespread costs. Explicitly differentiating plasticity costs from phenotype costs, we re-evaluate fundamental questions of the limits to the evolution of plasticity and of generalists vs specialists. We advocate for the view that relaxed selection and variable selection intensities are likely more important constraints to the evolution of plasticity than the costs of plasticity. Some forms of plasticity, such as learning, may be inherently costly. In addition, we examine opportunities to offset costs of phenotypes through ontogeny, amelioration of phenotypic costs across environments, and the condition-dependent hypothesis. We propose avenues of further inquiry in the limits of plasticity using new and classic methods of ecological parameterization, phylogenetics and omics in the context of answering questions on the constraints of plasticity. Given plasticity's key role in coping with environmental change, approaches spanning the spectrum from applied to basic will greatly enrich our understanding of the evolution of plasticity and resolve our understanding of limits.

This article examines the reliability of implicit feedback generated from clickthrough data and query reformulations in World Wide Web (WWW) search. Analyzing the users' decision process using eyetracking and comparing implicit feedback against manual relevance judgments, we conclude that clicks are informative but biased. While this makes the interpretation of clicks as absolute relevance judgments difficult, we show that relative preferences derived from clicks are reasonably accurate on average. We find that such relative preferences are accurate not only between results from an individual query, but across multiple sets of results within chains of query reformulations.

The first non-avian reptile genome has been sequenced, that of the North American green anole lizard (Anolis carolinensis). The anole is an emerging model for the study of adaptive radiation and convergent evolution. The genome includes a previously unknown X chromosome, with no homology to known amniote sex chromosomes, and microchromosomes that share a common ancestry with those in birds, but without their unusual characteristics. The evolution of the amniotic egg was one of the great evolutionary innovations in the history of life, freeing vertebrates from an obligatory connection to water and thus permitting the conquest of terrestrial environments1. Among amniotes, genome sequences are available for mammals and birds2,3,4, but not for non-avian reptiles. Here we report the genome sequence of the North American green anole lizard, Anolis carolinensis. We find that A. carolinensis microchromosomes are highly syntenic with chicken microchromosomes, yet do not exhibit the high GC and low repeat content that are characteristic of avian microchromosomes2. Also, A. carolinensis mobile elements are very young and diverse—more so than in any other sequenced amniote genome. The GC content of this lizard genome is also unusual in its homogeneity, unlike the regionally variable GC content found in mammals and birds5. We describe and assign sequence to the previously unknown A. carolinensis X chromosome. Comparative gene analysis shows that amniote egg proteins have evolved significantly more rapidly than other proteins. An anole phylogeny resolves basal branches to illuminate the history of their repeated adaptive radiations.

This review covers the main aspects of black hole accretion disk theory. We begin with the view that one of the main goals of the theory is to better understand the nature of black holes themselves. In this light we discuss how accretion disks might reveal some of the unique signatures of strong gravity: the event horizon, the innermost stable circular orbit, and the ergosphere. We then review, from a first-principles perspective, the physical processes at play in accretion disks. This leads us to the four primary accretion disk models that we review: Polish doughnuts (thick disks), Shakura-Sunyaev (thin) disks, slim disks, and advection-dominated accretion flows (ADAFs). After presenting the models we discuss issues of stability, oscillations, and jets. Following our review of the analytic work, we take a parallel approach in reviewing numerical studies of black hole accretion disks. We finish with a few select applications that highlight particular astrophysical applications: measurements of black hole mass and spin, black hole vs. neutron star accretion disks, black hole accretion disk spectral states, and quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs).

Effective visual design of e-commerce websites enhances website aesthetics and emotional appeal for the user. To gain insight into how Internet users perceive human images as one element of website design, a controlled experiment was conducted using a questionnaire, interviews, and eye-tracking methodology. Three conditions of human images were created including human images with facial features, human images without facial features, and a control condition with no human images. It was expected that human images with facial features would induce a user to perceive the website as more appealing, having warmth or social presence, and as more trustworthy. In turn, higher levels of image appeal and perceived social presence were predicted to result in trust. All expected relationships in the model were supported except no direct relationship was found between the human image conditions and trust. Additional analyses revealed subtle differences in the perception of human images across cultures (Canada, Germany, and Japan). While the general impact of human images seems universal across country groups, based on interview data four concepts emerged—aesthetics, symbolism, affective property, and functional property—with participants from each culture focusing on different concepts as applied to website design. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The everyday capacity to understand the mind, or mindreading plays an enormous role in our ordinary lives. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich provide a detailed and integrated account of the intricate web of mental components underlying this fascinating and multifarious skill.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the ability of Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior to predict entrepreneurial intent in 12 countries representing all ten of the global regional clusters as identified in the GLOBE project. Design/methodology/approach Ajzen's model was operationalized to address entrepreneurial intent and a questionnaire was developed consisting of previously used scales, as well as a new measure of entrepreneurial autonomy. A total of 1,748 usable questionnaires were collected from university business students in 12 countries. Findings The results suggest that Ajzen's model of planned behavior, as operationalized in this study, does successfully predict entrepreneurial intent in each of the study countries, although as foreseen by Ajzen, the significant contributing model elements differ by country as does the percent of the variance explained by the model, although one model element, social norms, was a significant predictor of entrepreneurial intent in each country. Originality/value This is the first paper to provide insight to the role of cognition in the entrepreneurial process by examining a model of planned behavior in countries representing all global regional culture clusters. The paper also provides guidance for future entrepreneurial research and individual development of entrepreneurs.