Science denial is a pressing social problem, contributing toinactivity in the face of climate change, or to a resurgencein outbreaks of preventable diseases. Cognitive factors are asignificant driver of science denial, in addition to social fac-tors such as political ideology. Biases pertaining to judgmentsof contingency (i.e., inferring causal relationships where noneexist) have been associated with misbeliefs, such as belief inthe paranormal and conspiracy theories. Here, we examinewhether contingency biases likewise predict science denial.We show that (a) various tasks used to study relevant biases doin fact load on a single latent ‘contingency illusion’ factor; (b)this contingency illusion bias is associated with increased sci-ence denial; (c) the contingency illusion bias mediates the re-lationship between intuitive (vs. analytic) cognitive style andscience denial; and (d) this holds even when accounting forpolitical ideology.

Using parallel file systems efficiently is a tricky problem due to inter-dependencies among multiple layers of I/O software, including high-level I/O libraries (HDF5, netCDF, etc.), MPI-IO, POSIX, and file systems (GPFS, Lustre, etc.). Profiling tools such as Darshan collect traces to help understand the I/O performance behavior. However, there are significant gaps in analyzing the collected traces and then applying tuning options offered by various layers of I/O software. Seeking to connect the dots between I/O bottleneck detection and tuning, we propose DXT Explorer, an interactive log analysis tool. In this paper, we present a case study using our interactive log analysis tool to identify and apply various I/O optimizations. We report an evaluation of performance improvement achieved for four I/O kernels extracted from science applications.