Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) for providing feedback, limited research has explored how to achieve high-quality feedback. This case study introduces an evaluation framework to assess different zero-shot prompt engineering methods. We varied the prompts systematically and analyzed the provided feedback on programming errors in R. The results suggest that prompts suggesting a stepwise procedure increase the precision, while omitting explicit specifications about which provided data to analyze improves error identification.

People earn a living a multitude of ways which is why the occupations they pursue are almost as diverse as people themselves.This makes quantitative analyses of free-text occupational responses from surveys hard to impossible, especially since people may refer to the same occupations with different terms.To address this problem, a variety of different classifications have been developed, such as the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 (ISCO) (ILO, 2012) and the German Klassifikation der Berufe 2010 (KldB) (Bundesagentur für Arbeit, 2011), narrowing down the amount of occupation categories into more manageable numbers in the mid hundreds to low thousands and introducing a hierarchical ordering of categories.This leads to a different problem, however: Coding occupations into these standardized categories is usually expensive, time-intensive and plagued by issues of reliability.Here we present a new instrument that implements a faster, more convenient and interactive occupation coding workflow where respondents are included in the coding process.Based on the respondent's answer, a novel machine learning algorithm generates a list of suggested occupational categories from the Auxiliary Classification of Occupations (Schierholz, 2018), from which one is chosen by the respondent (see Figure 1).Issues of ambiguity within occupational categories are addressed through clarifying follow-up questions.We provide a comprehensive toolbox including anonymized German training data and pre-trained models without raising privacy issues, something not possible yet with other algorithms due to the difficulties of anonymizing free-text data.

Wordle, Minecraft and Scrabble are played online by millions. Gamifying experiments can make behavioural research more inclusive, rigorous and reproducible — if it’s done right. Wordle, Minecraft and Scrabble are played online by millions. Gamifying experiments can make behavioural research more inclusive, rigorous and reproducible — if it’s done right.

When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations across cultures. We collected 1,615 recordings of infant- and adult-directed speech and song produced by 410 people in 21 urban, rural and small-scale societies. Infant-directedness was reliably classified from acoustic features only, with acoustic profiles of infant-directedness differing across language and music but in consistent fashions. We then studied listener sensitivity to these acoustic features. We played the recordings to 51,065 people from 187 countries, recruited via an English-language website, who guessed whether each vocalization was infant-directed. Their intuitions were more accurate than chance, predictable in part by common sets of acoustic features and robust to the effects of linguistic relatedness between vocalizer and listener. These findings inform hypotheses of the psychological functions and evolution of human communication. Across 21 societies, people alter their speech and song when interacting with infants. These infant-directed vocalizations are recognized by listeners. This suggests that forms of human vocalizations may be shaped by their functions.

Music is characterized by acoustic forms that are predictive of its behavioural functions. For example, adult listeners accurately identify unfamiliar lullabies as infant-directed on the basis of their musical features alone. This property could reflect a function of listeners' experiences, the basic design of the human mind, or both. Here, we show that US infants (N= 144) relax in response to eight unfamiliar foreign lullabies, relative to matched non-lullaby songs from other foreign societies, as indexed by heart rate, pupillometry and electrodermal activity. They do so consistently throughout the first year of life, suggesting that the response is not a function of their musical experiences, which are limited relative to those of adults. The infants' parents overwhelmingly chose lullabies as the songs that they would use to calm their fussy infant, despite their unfamiliarity. Together, these findings suggest that infants may be predisposed to respond to common features of lullabies found in different cultures. Infants listened to lullabies and other songs recorded in cultures and languages that were unfamiliar to them. They relaxed more in response to the lullabies. This suggests that infants may be predisposed to respond to common features of lullabies.

283 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision impairment or blindness; many today rely on lens-based optical aids of limited use. Electronic pass-through zoom headsets are extremely expensive and provide narrow feature sets with compromised comfort and ease-of-use, while mobile app-based aids provide useful functionality but in an inconvenient form factor. The present project explores the development of an aid for the visually impaired, designed as a software solution running on off-the-shelf optical see-through augmented reality head-mounted display devices such as the Microsoft HoloLens, to deliver a broad feature set while reducing cost and optimizing comfort and usability.

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.