When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a mental model or a user model of the conversational partner. Such adaptation has been shown to improve listeners' comprehension, their satisfaction with an interactive system, the efficiency with which they execute conversational tasks, and the likelihood of achieving (...) higher level goals such as changing the listener's beliefs and attitudes. We focus on one aspect of adaptation, namely the tailoring of the content of dialogue system utterances for the higher level processes of persuasion, argumentation and advice-giving. Our hypothesis is that algorithms that adapt content for these processes, according to a user model, will improve the usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of dialogue systems. We describe a multimodal dialogue system and algorithms for adaptive content selection based on multi-attribute decision theory. We demonstrate experimentally the improved efficacy of system responses through the use of user models to both tailor the content of system utterances and to manipulate their conciseness. (shrink)

Two major functions of the visual system are discussed and contrasted. One function of vision is the creation of an internal model or percept of the external world. Most research in object perception has concentrated on this aspect of vision. Vision also guides the control of object-directed action. In the latter case, vision directs our actions with respect to the world by transforming visual inputs into appropriate motor outputs. We argue that separate, but interactive, visual systems have evolved for the (...) perception of objects on the one hand and the control of actions directed at those objects on the other. This 'duplex' approach to high-level vision suggests that Marrian or 'reconstructive' approaches and Gibsonian or 'purposive-animate-behaviorist' approaches need not be seen as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary in their emphases on different aspects of visual function. (shrink)

The vast majority of contributions to the literature on spirituality in nursing make extravagant claims about transcendence, eternity, the numinous, higher powers, higher levels of existence, invisible forces, cosmic unity, the essence of humanity, or other supernatural concepts. Typically, these assertions are made without the support of argument or evidence; and, as a consequence, alternative ways of theorizing ‘spirituality’ have been closed off, while the lack of consistent scholarship has turned the topic into a metaphysical backwater. In this paper, I (...) adopt a different premise, rejecting unsupported claims, and surveying the ‘spirituality’ terrain from a naturalistic and reductionist perspective. I argue that, if we rid ourselves of non‐naturalistic assumptions, we will discover theoretical and clinical resources in health psychology, social psychology, neuropsychology, and pharmacopsychology – resources which confirm that it is possible to conceptualize the study of existential concerns, and how health professionals might respond to them, in a properly scientific manner. In order to illustrate the potential usefulness of these resources, I will take palliative care as an example. (shrink)

This text explores how human beings construe experience: experience as a resource, as a potential for understanding, representing and acting on reality.

This year is the seventieth since the birth of the distinguished Soviet philosopher, M. A. Dynnik. Dynnik is known for his work in the history of philosophy, the history of dialectics, and the critique of contemporary bourgeois philosophy. Dynnik's works are a significant contribution to Marxist philosophy, and to the methodology of research into so important a field as the history of philosophy. Dynnik is also known as a remarkable teacher, whose brilliant lectures are always heard with immense interest.

Domestic violence is one of the most serious forms of violation of basic human freedoms and rights regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion, and status. A reflection on many international statistics shows that women are the most frequent victims of domestic violence. Based on the definition of the phenomenon of domestic violence, the forms of abuse, the manner how violence is treated, the possibility of children, men, extramarital spouses, brothers, sisters, and old people living in an extended domestic community, of also (...) being victims is not excluded. Since domestic violence is not only a national problem but a worldwide problem, international organizations have worked towards the eradication of this phenomenon by sanctioning it in various international conventions. Also, the legal systems of many countries prohibit and sanction domestic violence by special laws obliging the state authorities to act in all situations when there are indications that there are direct or indirect violent acts in a family. In this paper, the authors present only the domestic violence against children as an evident problem in families, but which is often unreported. The legal frameworks of the Republic of North Macedonia and Republic of Kosovo are presented in this paper with the aim to describe the material-legal and procedural-legal treatment of domestic violence by pointing out the failure of the state authorities in implementing the laws on protection and prevention of this phenomenon. The authors take the approach of only treating the legal consequences of child abuse by parents that in both legislations is deprivation of parental rights for the violent parent. They conclude that the state authorities should intensify their work in taking control measures towards all the families where there are suspicions that the parental rights are neglected, and the child is abused. Because many cases of abuse have not been detected or reported, and in both countries a special study especially on domestic violence against children does not exist, the possibility that the number for this type of child abuse is great. (shrink)

The article analyzes the implementation of an online educational module and its impact on the organization of the classroom’s interaction order. The latter is institutionally constrained by the presence of a goal and the distribution of roles between teacher and students. The introduction of a digital learning platform adds a technological context to the institutional setting. The article considers technologies as possessing communicative affordances — opportunities for action made possible or delimited through their use. Technologies bring new interactive resources to (...) the process of ed­ucation and can affect the organization of the classroom’s interaction order. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we analyzed video recordings of the telemediated interaction of Russia-based students and teachers within a gamified online educational module. We investigate a case in which a student’s correct answer is nevertheless corrected by the teacher. We dem­onstrate that the teacher initiates the correction because they are guided by the ordering of the game elements within the interface. Based on a detailed analysis of the teacher’s mouse movement in relation to ongoing turns-at-talk, we show that this orientation is sustained by all participants. The work contributes to classroom interaction studies and affordance theory and develops the methodology of multimodal transcription for mediated contexts. The primary result of the study is an empirical demonstration that the relevance of technological affordances for interactants is situation­ally produced, and that this process is associated with the interweaving of the institutional and technical context of interaction. The conclusion discusses the relationship between affordances and institutional norms. (shrink)

By decision of the World Council of Peace, progressive mankind marked, on October 5, 1963, the 250th anniversary of the birth of an outstanding representative of the French Enlightenment, Denis Diderot. Diderot occupies an honored place in the history of world thought on esthetics, as one of the greatest theoreticians of realist art. The esthetic theory founded by Diderot, calling for the representation of nature, was directed against the feudal, theological world view and against the aristocratic art of the court. (...) Diderot's esthetics, like his philosophy, served the cause of ideological preparation for the bourgeois revolution at the end of the 18th century in France. "Each age has its distinctive spirit," said Diderot. "The spirit of our age is the spirit of freedom.". (shrink)

The study presents the broad outlines for a relationalist interpretation of the Indian epistemological doctrine svataḥ prāmāṇya. Due to the inadequacy of the main western interpretations thereof, the paper’s approach can be considered an inference to the best explanation. Its main part is devoted to the typologization of various epistemological doctrines based on the svataḥ prāmāṇya principle in terms of strong and weak disjunctivism. Three paradigm cases of strong disjunctivism and a special variety of weak disjunctivism have thus been identified (...) in Indian epistemology, which allowed to draw a conclusion that strong disjunctivism constituted one of its general paradigms. (shrink)

Metabolism is a criterion of life. Three senses are distinguished. The weakest allows strong A-Life: virtual creatures having physical existence in computer electronics, but not bodies, are classes as 'alive'. The second excludes strong A-Life but allows that some non-biochemical A-Life robots could be classed as alive. The third, which stresses the body's self-production by energy budgeting and self-equilibrating energy exchanges of some (necessary) complexity, excludes both strong A-Life and living non-biochemical robots.

Our sense of self includes awareness of our thoughts and movements, and our control over them. This feeling can be altered or lost in neuropsychiatric disorders as well as in phenomena such as “automatic writing” whereby writing is attributed to an external source. Here, we employed suggestion in highly hypnotically suggestible participants to model various experiences of automatic writing during a sentence completion task. Results showed that the induction of hypnosis, without additional suggestion, was associated with a small but significant (...) reduction of control, ownership, and awareness for writing. Targeted suggestions produced a double dissociation between thought and movement components of writing, for both feelings of control and ownership, and additionally, reduced awareness of writing. Overall, suggestion produced selective alterations in the control, ownership, and awareness of thought and motor components of writing, thus enabling key aspects of automatic writing, observed across different clinical and cultural settings, to be modelled. (shrink)