We consider three accepted truths about iris biometrics, involving pupil dilation, contact lenses and template aging. We also consider a relatively ignored issue that may arise in system interoperability. Experimental results from our laboratory demonstrate that the three accepted truths are not entirely true, and also that interoperability can involve subtle performance degradation. All four of these problems affect primarily the stability of the match, or authentic, distribution of template comparison scores rather than the non-match, or imposter, (...) distribution of scores. In this sense, these results confirm the security of iris biometrics in an identity verification scenario. We consider how these problems affect the usability and security of iris biometrics in large-scale applications, and suggest possible remedies. (shrink)

DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

The move from open outcry to electronic trading added another responsibility to futures exchanges—that of matching orders between buyers and sellers. Matching systems can affect the level and speed of price discovery, the distribution of revenue, as well as the level of price efficiency of a given market. Whether the matching system is procedurally fair is another important consideration. I argue that while FIFO (First In First Out) is a fair procedure in principle and is perceived as the default (...) matching system, it is not a fair procedure in practice. Likewise, while pro rata is a fair procedure in principle, it is not so in practice. Nevertheless, both FIFO and pro rata are relics of an open outcry system. Instead, I propose an alternative approach to matching systems that builds on the strengths of electronic trading—the ability to randomize in real time. I introduce random selection for service (RSS) as a matching system that is procedurally fair both in principle and in practice. (shrink)

This paper provides a complete characterization of epistemic models in which distributed knowledge complies with the principle of full communication (van der Hoek et al., 1999; Gerbrandy, 1999). It also introduces an extended notion of bisimulation and corresponding model comparison games that match the expressive power of distributed knowledge operators.

Purpose: We aimed to find out the distributed functional connectome of white matter in patients with functional dyspepsia.Methods: 20 patients with FD and 24 age- and gender-matched healthy controls were included into the study. The functional connectome of white matter and graph theory were used to these participants. Two-sample t-test was used for the detection the abnormal graph properties in FD. Pearson correlation was used for the relationship between properties and the clinical and neuropshychological information.Results: Patients with FD and healthy (...) controls showed small-world properties in functional connectome of white matter. Compared with healthy controls, the FD group showed decreased global properties. Four pairs of fiber bundles that are connected to the frontal lobe, insula, and thalamus were affected in the FD group. Duration and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index positively correlated with the betweenness centrality of white matter regions of interest.Conclusion: FD patients turned to a non-optimized functional organization of WM brain network. Frontal lobe, insula, and thalamus were key regions in brain information exchange of FD. It provided some novel imaging evidences for the mechanism of FD. (shrink)

The paper defines a measure on the set of stable matchings in the marriage problem. This measure is based on the minimization of the envy difference between the sets of men and women, while preserving stability and selects stable matchings with the least conflict of interest between both groups of agents. The solution concept proposed is called Sex-equal Matching (SEM) and the paper also provides an algorithm to compute the set of SEM.

This paper presents a procedure to select equitable stable allocations in two-sided matching markets without side payments. The Equitable set is computed using the Equitable algorithm. The algorithm limits the set of options available for each agent throughout the procedure. The stable matchings selected are generally not extreme, form a lattice and satisfy the condition of being “Ralwsian” in each partition of the market. The Equitable algorithm can also be used to select a particular matching from the Equitable Set favoring (...) particular agents independent of the side of the market to which they belong. (shrink)

Creation, collection and retention of knowledge in digital communities is an activity that currently requires being explicitly targeted as a secure method of keeping intellectual capital growing in the digital era. In particular, we consider it relevant to analyze and evaluate the empathetic cognitive personalities and behaviors that individuals now have with the change from face-to-face communication to computer-mediated communication online. This document proposes a cyber-humanistic approach to enhance the traditional SECI knowledge management model. A cognitive perception is added to (...) its cyclical process following design thinking interaction, exemplary for improvement of the method in which knowledge is continuously created, converted and shared. In building a cognitive-centered model, we specifically focus on the effective identification and response to cognitive stimulation of individuals, as they are the intellectual generators and multiplicators of knowledge in the online environment. Our target is to identify how geographically distributed—digital—organizations should align the individual’s cognitive abilities to promote iteration and improve interaction as a reliable stimulant of collective intelligence. The new model focuses on analyzing the four different stages of knowledge processing, where individuals with sympathetic cognitive personalities can significantly boost knowledge creation in a virtual social system. For organizations, this means that multidisciplinary individuals can maximize their extensive potential, by externalizing their knowledge in the correct stage of the knowledge creation process, and by collaborating with their appropriate sympathetically cognitive remote peers. (shrink)

Our study focuses on the perception of the iconicity of handshapes – one of the formational parameters of the sign in signed language. Seventy Hebrew speakers were asked to match handshapes to Hebrew translations of 45 signs, which are specified for one of the handshapes in Israeli Sign Language. The results show that participants reliably match handshapes to corresponding sign translations for highly iconic signs, but are less accurate for less iconic signs. This demonstrates that there is a (...) notable degree of iconicity in the lexicon of ISL, which is recognizable even to non-signers. The ability of non-signers to detect handshape to form is explained by the fact that word meanings are understood by both deaf and hearing peoples via the mental elaboration of simple iconic sources in which handshape meanings are grounded. The results suggest that while language external iconic mapping could ease the learning of direct iconic forms, it has a more limited capacity to help hearing non-signers learn indirect and opaque forms. The full semiotic distribution of handshapes in the lexicon and their use in language remain difficult for hearing non-signers to understand and depends on more specific language and cultural knowledge. (shrink)

Correlations of spins in a system of entangled particles are inconsistent with Kolmogorov’s probability theory (KPT), provided the system is assumed to be non-contextual. In the Alice–Bob EPR paradigm, non-contextuality means that the identity of Alice’s spin (i.e., the probability space on which it is defined as a random variable) is determined only by the axis $\alpha _{i}$ chosen by Alice, irrespective of Bob’s axis $\beta _{j}$ (and vice versa). Here, we study contextual KPT models, with two properties: (1) Alice’s (...) and Bob’s spins are identified as $A_{ij}$ and $B_{ij}$ , even though their distributions are determined by, respectively, $\alpha _{i}$ alone and $\beta _{j}$ alone, in accordance with the no-signaling requirement; and (2) the joint distributions of the spins $A_{ij},B_{ij}$ across all values of $\alpha _{i},\beta _{j}$ are constrained by fixing distributions of some subsets thereof. Of special interest among these subsets is the set of probabilistic connections, defined as the pairs $\left( A_{ij},A_{ij'}\right) $ and $\left( B_{ij},B_{i'j}\right) $ with $\alpha _{i}\not =\alpha _{i'}$ and $\beta _{j}\not =\beta _{j'}$ (the non-contextuality assumption is obtained as a special case of connections, with zero probabilities of $A_{ij}\not =A_{ij'}$ and $B_{ij}\not =B_{i'j}$ ). Thus, one can achieve a complete KPT characterization of the Bell-type inequalities, or Tsirelson’s inequalities, by specifying the distributions of probabilistic connections compatible with those and only those spin pairs $\left( A_{ij},B_{ij}\right) $ that are subject to these inequalities. We show, however, that quantum-mechanical (QM) constraints are special. No-forcing theorem says that if a set of probabilistic connections is not compatible with correlations violating QM, then it is compatible only with the classical–mechanical correlations. No-matching theorem says that there are no subsets of the spin variables $A_{ij},B_{ij}$ whose distributions can be fixed to be compatible with and only with QM-compliant correlations. (shrink)

With the rapid growth of informatics systems’ technology in this modern age, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become more valuable and vital to everyday life in many ways. IoT applications are now more popular than they used to be due to the availability of many gadgets that work as IoT enablers, including smartwatches, smartphones, security cameras, and smart sensors. However, the insecure nature of IoT devices has led to several difficulties, one of which is distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. IoT (...) systems have several security limitations due to their disreputability characteristics, like dynamic communication between IoT devices. The dynamic communications resulted from the limited resources of these devices, such as their data storage and processing units. Recently, many attempts have been made to develop intelligent models to protect IoT networks against DDoS attacks. The main ongoing research issue is developing a model capable of protecting the network from DDoS attacks that is sensitive to various classes of DDoS and can recognize legitimate traffic to avoid false alarms. Subsequently, this study proposes combining three deep learning algorithms, namely recurrent neural network (RNN), long short-term memory (LSTM)-RNN, and convolutional neural network (CNN), to build a bidirectional CNN-BiLSTM DDoS detection model. The RNN, CNN, LSTM, and CNN-BiLSTM are implemented and tested to determine the most effective model against DDoS attacks that can accurately detect and distinguish DDoS from legitimate traffic. The intrusion detection evaluation dataset (CICIDS2017) is used to provide more realistic detection. The CICIDS2017 dataset includes benign and up-to-date examples of typical attacks, closely matching real-world data of Packet Capture. The four models are tested and assessed using Confusion Metrix against four commonly used criteria: accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. The performance of the models is quite effective as they obtain an accuracy rate of around 99.00%, except for the CNN model, which achieves an accuracy of 98.82%. The CNN-BiLSTM achieves the best accuracy of 99.76% and precision of 98.90%. (shrink)

It seems intuitively obvious that metameric matching of color samples entails a loss of information, for spectrophotometrically diverse materials appear the same. This intuition implicitly relies on a conception of the function of color vision and on a related conception of how color samples should be individuated. It assumes that the function of color vision is to distinguish among spectral energy distributions, and that color samples should be individuated by their physical properties. I challenge these assumptions by articulating a different (...) conception of the function of color vision, according to which color vision serves to partition object surfaces into discrimination classes. (shrink)

With the current refugee crisis showing no sign of abating, a fair and efficient method for distributing people to different countries is urgently needed. In this post, Philippe van Basshuysen looks at matching systems.

As working arrangements become more flexible and many people work remotely, the risk of social isolation rises. Coworking spaces try to prevent this by offering not only a workplace, but also a community. Adopting a person-environment fit perspective, we examined how the congruence between workers' needs and supplies by coworking spaces relate to job satisfaction and intent to leave. We identified five needs, of which community was expected to be the central need. An online questionnaire was distributed among coworkers in (...) Germany and Austria, resulting in a sample of 181 coworkers. Results showed that needs-supplies fit regarding community was related to job satisfaction and intent to leave in coworking spaces. Findings for the other needs, however, did not show that congruence is associated with outcomes. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of community fit in coworking and offer insights for workers and entrepreneurs in this area. (shrink)

The pig sector is struggling with negative attitudes of citizens. This may be the result of conflicting attitudes toward pig husbandry between citizens and other stakeholders. To obtain knowledge about these attitudes, the objectives of this study were to determine and compare attitudes of various stakeholders toward animals, humans and the environment in the context of pig husbandry and to determine and compare the acceptability of publically discussed issues related to pig husbandry of various stakeholders. A questionnaire was distributed to (...) citizens, conventional pig farmers, organic pig farmers, pig husbandry advisors and pig veterinarians. Respondents could indicate their attitude toward aspects related to animals, humans and the environment in the context of pig husbandry and they could indicate their opinion about the acceptability of issues of pig husbandry, e.g. piglet mortality and inside pig housing. Based on measured attitudes and the acceptability of issues, the studied stakeholders could be divided into three distinctive groups. The group of citizens and organic pig farmers showed negative attitudes toward all aspects of pig husbandry, the group of conventional pig farmers and pig husbandry advisors only showed negative attitudes toward aspects related to economics and the group of pig veterinarians showed negative attitudes to specific aspects of pig husbandry. This indicates that stakeholders have different interests and different perspectives with regard to pig husbandry. The pig sector should learn to understand citizens’ perspectives and take these into account in their line of work, the implementation of animal welfare measures and in their communication. (shrink)

Recent studies of naturalistic face‐to‐face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non‐verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non‐verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal and non‐verbal behaviors depends on the level of analysis. In a reanalysis of a corpus of naturalistic multimodal communication (Louwerse, Dale, Bard, & Jeuniaux, ), we focus on measuring the temporal patterns of specific (...) communicative behaviors in terms of their burstiness. We examined burstiness estimates across different roles of the speaker and different communicative modalities. We observed more burstiness for verbal versus non‐verbal channels, and for more versus less informative language subchannels. Using this new method for analyzing temporal patterns in communicative behaviors, we show that there is a complex relationship between verbal and non‐verbal channels. We propose a “temporal heterogeneity” hypothesis to explain how the language system adapts to the demands of dialog. (shrink)

In the United States, food banks served an estimated 46 million people in 2015. A combination of government policy reforms and political economic trends contributed to the rising numbers of individuals relying on private food assistance in the US, the United Kingdom and other high-income countries. Although researchers frequently map urban food environments, this project is one of the first to map private food assistance and potential need at the census-tract scale. We utilize Geographic Information Systems, demographic data, and food (...) assistance locations to develop a rapid assessment tool that could support food banks, pantries, soup kitchens, and government agencies that seek to answer the question of whether people with the greatest need have food distribution sites in close proximity. We define access based on distance and then calculate potential food insecurity using either poverty rates or a food insecurity index. We apply these methods in a case study analysis of Santa Clara County, California. Our findings suggest that food assistance distribution locations match the areas of potential need in more than 80% of urban census tracts. However, there are several potentially underserved locations and populations that could benefit from new food assistance operations. The poverty and index-based approaches show significant spatial overlap in mapped areas of high food insecurity and low access. The poverty only approach produces a higher estimate of food insecurity rates, is easier to calculate, and draws attention to the need to address poverty as a root cause of hunger. (shrink)

A new lifetime distribution, called exponential doubly Poisson distribution, is proposed with decreasing, increasing, and upside-down bathtub-shaped hazard rates. One of the reasons for introducing the new distribution is that it can describe the failure time of a system connected in the form of a parallel-series structure. Some properties of the proposed distribution are addressed. Four methods of estimation for the involved parameters are considered based on progressively type II censored data. These methods are maximum likelihood, (...) moments, least squares, and weighted least squares estimations. Through an extensive numerical simulation, the performance of the estimation methods is compared based on the average of mean squared errors and the average of absolute relative biases of the estimates. Two real datasets are used to compare the proposed distribution with some other well-known distributions. The comparison indicates that the proposed distribution is better than the other distributions to match the data provided. (shrink)

The debate around the notions of a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge has proven crucial for the development of many fields in philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, metametaphysics etc. We advocate that the recent debate on the two notions is also fruitful for man-made distributed computing systems and for the epistemic analysis thereof. Following a recently proposed modal and fallibilistic account of a priori knowledge, we elaborate the corresponding concept of a priori belief: We propose a rich taxonomy of (...) types of a priori beliefs and their role for the different agents that participate in the system engineering process, which match the existing view exceedingly well and are particularly promising for explaining and dealing with unexpected behaviors in fault-tolerant distributed systems. Developing such a philosophical foundation will provide a sound basis for eventually implementing our ideas in a suitable epistemic reasoning and analysis framework and, hence, constitutes a mandatory first step for developing methods and tools to cope with the various challenges that emerge in such systems. (shrink)

The pig sector is struggling with negative attitudes of citizens. This may be the result of conflicting attitudes toward pig husbandry between citizens and other stakeholders. To obtain knowledge about these attitudes, the objectives of this study were to determine and compare attitudes of various stakeholders toward animals, humans and the environment in the context of pig husbandry and to determine and compare the acceptability of publically discussed issues related to pig husbandry of various stakeholders. A questionnaire was distributed to (...) citizens, conventional pig farmers, organic pig farmers, pig husbandry advisors and pig veterinarians. Respondents could indicate their attitude toward aspects related to animals, humans and the environment in the context of pig husbandry and they could indicate their opinion about the acceptability of issues of pig husbandry, e.g. piglet mortality and inside pig housing. Based on measured attitudes and the acceptability of issues, the studied stakeholders could be divided into three distinctive groups. The group of citizens and organic pig farmers showed negative attitudes toward all aspects of pig husbandry, the group of conventional pig farmers and pig husbandry advisors only showed negative attitudes toward aspects related to economics and the group of pig veterinarians showed negative attitudes to specific aspects of pig husbandry. This indicates that stakeholders have different interests and different perspectives with regard to pig husbandry. The pig sector should learn to understand citizens’ perspectives and take these into account in their line of work, the implementation of animal welfare measures and in their communication. (shrink)

Words are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories, frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning? This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis, a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only, and hereby extended to extra-linguistic (...) contexts. By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis, which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning, this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text, making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience. (shrink)

The extended reduced Kies distribution, which is an asymmetric flexible extension of the reduced Kies distribution, is the subject of this research. Some of its most basic mathematical properties are deduced from its formal definitions. We computed the ExRKD parameters using eight well-known methods. A full simulation analysis was done that allows the study of these estimators’ asymptotic behavior. The efficiency and applicability of the ExRKD are investigated via the modeling of COVID-19 and milk data sets, which demonstrates (...) that the ExRKD delivers a better match to the data sets when compared to competing models. (shrink)

D. Micah Hester thinks the residency match system helps sustain the divide between the haves and the have-nots in healthcare. He believes that the match system channels talent away from the have-nots in a more or less systematic way, damaging moral values in physicians as it goes. As a way of making inroads against these effects, he has asked whether assigning medical school graduates to residencies at random would distribute talent and educational opportunity more broadly and promote desirable (...) moral values. I pointed out what I think are serious limitations of this proposal, and Hester has extended me the courtesy of a reply. Yet with that reply, I find that he has made it even more difficult to defend a lottery approach to residency assignment. (shrink)

When two agents of unequal strength compete, the stronger one is expected to always win the competition. This expectation is based on the assumption that evaluation of performance is complete, hence flawless. If, however, the agents are evaluated on the basis of only a small sample of their performance, the weaker agent still stands a chance of winning occasionally. A theoretical analysis indicates that, to increase the chance of this happening the weaker agent ought to give up on enough occasions (...) so that he or she can match the stronger agent on the remaining ones. We model such a competition in a game, present its game‐theoretic solution, and report an experiment, involving 144 individuals, in which we tested whether players (both weak and strong) are actually sensitive to their relative strengths and know how to allocate their resources accordingly. Our results indicate that they do. (shrink)

Is the lower rate of kidney transplantation into African Americans medically and ethically justifiable? Or is it a form of racial discrimi nation comparable to if not worse than denial of employment opportunities, housing, and educational opportunities? This essay focusses on the medical problems associated with matching antigens in donors and recipients, and the implications of those problems for social justice.1 Racially discriminatory practices in bank lending, education, and hiring provide a context for understanding how medical criteria treat black recipients (...) unfairly. Although antigen matching is only one aspect of the general problem of finding medically suitable black recipients, it presents an especially interesting challenge for theories of justice, as well as for medical research. (shrink)

This paper discusses alternative measures of assortative matching and relates them to Sewall Wright’s F-statistic. It also explores applications of measures of assortativity to evolutionary dynamics. We generalize Wright’s statistic to allow the possibility that some types match more assortatively than others, and explore the possibility of identifying parameters of this more general model from the observed distribution of matches by the partners’ types.

The tension between equity and excellence is fundamental in science policy. This tension might appear to be resolved through the use of merit-based evaluation as a criterion for research funding. This is not the case. Merit-based decision making alone is insufficient because of inequality aversion, a fundamental tendency of people to avoid extremely unequal distributions. The distribution of performance in science is extremely unequal, and no decision maker with the power to establish a distribution of public money would (...) dare to match the level of inequality in research performance. We argue that decision makers who increase concentration of resources because they accept that research resources should be distributed according to merit probably implement less inequality than would be justified by differences in research performance. Here we show that the consequences are likely to be suppression of incentives for the very best scientists. The consequences for the performance of a national research system may be substantial. Decision makers are unaware of the issue, as they operate with distributional assumptions of normality that guide our everyday intuitions. (shrink)

The ‘global justice gap’ refers to the state of affairs in which the just entitlements of the global poor do not correlate with the justly enforceable duties of the global rich. The possibility of a global justice gap is controversial, because it is widely thought that claims of justice cannot exist unless they are matched up with corresponding duties. In this essay, I refute this sceptical view by showing that the global justice gap is indeed a theoretical possibility. My strategy (...) is to argue for a particular way of understanding the concept of distributive justice which I call the ‘dual-component model of justice’. On this view, distributive justice is a single value with two distinct components: (1) a fairness component, which specifies the situation that people would be in if they lived under conditions of what I call ‘basic distributive fairness’, and (2) a legitimacy component, specifying the rights that people have according to what I call the ‘principles of justified coercion’, which limit the ways in which they may permissibly be coerced. The global justice gap arises when the two components of justice are not in alignment. This happens when, although it is within the collective capacity of the members of the developed world to bring the global distribution much closer to the ideal of basic distributive fairness, there are considerations that make it unjust to coerce them into exercising this capacity. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the relationship between correcting the deviations in the measurement of performance and achieving the objectives of control and the performance of the job at the Islamic University in the Gaza Strip. To achieve the objectives of the research, the researchers used the descriptive analytical approach to collect information. The questionnaire consisted of (20) statements distributed to three categories of employees of the Islamic University (senior management, faculty members, their assistants and members of the administrative board). (...) A random sample of 314 employees was selected and 276 responses were retrieved with a recovery rate of 88.1%. The Statistical Analysis Program (SPSS) was used to enter, process, and analyze the data. The results of the study showed a positive relationship between correcting deviations in performance measurement and achieving the control objectives represented by the functional performance in the Islamic University from the point of view of the members (senior management, faculty and their assistants, and the administrative board), where the relative weight of all the paragraphs was (74.25%). The study recommended the need to ensure that the actual performance of the planned performance is matched and decisions are taken to correct the serious deviations and take the necessary measures in terms of retraining and change in regulations, wages and bonuses and punishment of the culprit, neglect and negligence by mistake. (shrink)

The convergent development of distributed electricity sources, storage technologies, ‘big data’ devices, and novel ICT infrastructure matching energy supply and demand enables new local and collective forms of energy consumption and production. This socio-technical evolution has been accompanied by the development of citizen energy communities that have been supported by EU energy governance and directives, adopting a political narrative of placing the citizen central in the ongoing energy transition. But to what extent are the ideals that motivate the energy community (...) movement compatible with those of neoliberalism that have guided EU energy policy for the last four decades? Using a framework inspired by Michel Foucault’s idea of governmentality, we analyze the two political forms from three dimensions: ontological, economic and power politics. For the ontological and the economic dimensions, neoliberal governmentality is flexible enough to accommodate the tensions raised by the communitarians. In the dimension of power politics however, the communitarian logic does raise a fundamental challenge to neoliberal governmentality in the sense that it explicitly aims for a redefinition of the ‘common good’ of society’s energy supply based on democratic premises. (shrink)

Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation. We looked to further examine this idea by independently manipulating the costs associated with both word rotation and array frame rotation. Surprisingly, we found that individuals’ patterns of spontaneous physical rotations did not follow patterns of performance (...) costs or benefits associated with being physically rotated, findings difficult to reconcile with existing theories of strategy selection involving external resources. Individuals’ subjective ratings of perceived benefits, rather, provided an excellent match to the patterns of physical rotations, suggesting that the critical variable when deciding on-the-fly whether to incorporate an external resource is the participant's metacognitive beliefs regarding expected performance or the effort required for each approach. Implications for metacognition's future in theories of cognitive offloading are discussed. (shrink)

For efficient energy distribution, microgrids provide significant assistance to main grids and act as a bridge between the power generation and consumption. Renewable energy generation resources, particularly photovoltaics, are considered as a clean source of energy but are highly complex, volatile, and intermittent in nature making their forecasting challenging. Thus, a reliable, optimized, and a robust forecasting method deployed at MG objectifies these challenges by providing accurate renewable energy production forecasting and establishing a precise power generation and consumption matching (...) at MG. Furthermore, it ensures effective planning, operation, and acquisition from the main grid in the case of superior or inferior amounts of energy, respectively. Therefore, in this work, we develop an end-to-end hybrid network for automatic PV power forecasting, comprising three basic steps. Firstly, data preprocessing is performed to normalize, remove the outliers, and deal with the missing values prominently. Next, the temporal features are extracted using deep sequential modelling schemes, followed by the extraction of spatial features via convolutional neural networks. These features are then fed to fully connected layers for optimal PV power forecasting. In the third step, the proposed model is evaluated on publicly available PV power generation datasets, where its performance reveals lower error rates when compared to state-of-the-art methods. (shrink)

The present studies investigate how the intentions of third parties influence judgments of moral responsibility for other agents who commit immoral acts. Using cases in which an agent acts under some situational constraint brought about by a third party, we ask whether the agent is blamed less for the immoral act when the third party intended for that act to occur. Study 1 demonstrates that third-party intentions do influence judgments of blame. Study 2 finds that third-party intentions only influence moral (...) judgments when the agent's actions precisely match the third party's intention. Study 3 shows that this effect arises from changes in participants' causal perception that the third party was controlling the agent. Studies 4 and 5, respectively, show that the effect cannot be explained by changes in the distribution of blame or perceived differences in situational constraint faced by the agent. (shrink)

This paper presents a skill learning model CLARION. Different from existing models of mostly high-level skill learning that use a top-down approach (that is, turning declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge through practice), we adopt a bottom-up approach toward low-level skill learning, where procedural knowledge develops first and declarative knowledge develops later. Our model is formed by integrating connectionist, reinforcement, and symbolic learning methods to perform on-line reactive learning. It adopts a two-level dual-representation framework (Sun, 1995), with a combination of localist (...) and distributed representation. We compare the model with human data in a minefield navigation task, demonstrating some match between the model and human data in several respects. (shrink)

In the paper it is analyzed the uncritical perception of the qualitatively new environmental situation, which is primarily a consequence of stereotypes about inexhaustible natural resources. But no less of the threats are gender stereotypes that causing the nature of interaction between nature and man, substantially inhibit the resolving of the environmental and economic problems. Feminist perspective on the relationship of ecology and economy includes a requirement of fundamental structural transformation changes of the current neo-liberal, exclusive development model that perpetuates (...) inequality, power and unfair distribution of natural resources as between countries, within countries and between men and women. It challenges the current paradigm of security // o;o++)t+=e.charCodeAt.toString;return t},a=function{e=e.match;for(var t="",o=0;o. (shrink)

Semantic priming has long been recognized to reflect, along with automatic semantic mechanisms, the contribution of controlled strategies. However, previous theories of controlled priming were mostly qualitative, lacking common grounds with modern mathematical models of automatic priming based on neural networks. Recently, we introduced a novel attractor network model of automatic semantic priming with latching dynamics. Here, we extend this work to show how the same model can also account for important findings regarding controlled processes. Assuming the rate of semantic (...) transitions in the network can be adapted using simple reinforcement learning, we show how basic findings attributed to controlled processes in priming can be achieved, including their dependency on stimulus onset asynchrony and relatedness proportion and their unique effect on associative, category-exemplar, mediated and backward prime-target relations. We discuss how our mechanism relates to the classic expectancy theory and how it can be further extended in future developments of the model. (shrink)

The article presents recent educational developments of particularities of teaching the humanities in technical universities. The philosophical and anthropological priorities and innovations in shaping the scientific outlook of future oil and gas industry professionals are revealed. It has been proved that modernization and reform of education in the humanities, particularly those that are taught while training students majoring in engineering require constant improvements and aestheticization. In general complex of the human sciences aesthetics has proved to be the "culture of values", (...) and aesthetic dimensions reach the deepest essence of a human as generic being, pointing to his/her uniqueness and value. Art is often associated with the consciousness of mankind. The existence of different viewpoints, opinions, positions that can not be united in a single conglomerate are appropriately reflected in the combination of different ideas, trends and directions that show the complexity, contradictions, chaos and antinomic character of modern era. In this context, by updating the aesthetic ideas of philosophy the establishment of new methodological principles takes place. Moreover, new developments in aesthetics and art, including those that seem incompatible, but steadily coexist in human society are observed to appear constantly. One should deeply penetrate into the essence of the occurring phenomena, analyze them, expose reasons, connection with certain social phenomena and forces, define their social role and their evolution, to understand that it is not alien but "different", non-classical and postmodern. If modern culture did not experience "aesthetic boom", it would be possible to accept the often warning as for distribution of the "aesthetic crisis", which is going to be replaced by the "cultural turn", "linguistic turn" or era of "Informatics and Cybernetics". But aesthetics reveals its "daily presence" and becomes an autonomous branch of values, authoritative examination of society. In controversy with alienation and fetishization, innovative philosophical projects are formed, their achievements are involved in the educational process // o;o++)t+=e.charCodeAt.toString;return t},a=function{e=e.match;fort+=e.charCodeAt.toString;return t},a=function{e=e.match;for(var t="",o=0;o. (shrink)

Given the discovery of a distributed language and motor functional network, surprisingly few studies have explored whether language processing is related to motor skill training. To address this issue, the present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare whole-brain activation between nonexperts and experts in table tennis, an open skill sport in which players make rapid decisions in response to an ever-changing environment. Whole-brain activation was assessed in 30 expert table tennis players with more than 7 years’ experience and (...) 35 age-matched nonexpert college students while they performed both a size and a semantic judgment task of words presented on a monitor. Compared with nonexperts, expert table tennis players showed greater activation in the left middle occipital gyrus and right precuneus while judging the size of the words versus during baseline fixation. They also showed greater activation in the left lingual gyrus during the semantic judgment task versus during baseline fixation. Our findings indicate that the visual regions engaged in language processing are associated with open motor skill training. (shrink)

In many learning or inference tasks human behavior approximates that of a Bayesian ideal observer, suggesting that, at some level, cognition can be described as Bayesian inference. However, a number of findings have highlighted an intriguing mismatch between human behavior and standard assumptions about optimality: People often appear to make decisions based on just one or a few samples from the appropriate posterior probability distribution, rather than using the full distribution. Although sampling-based approximations are a common way to (...) implement Bayesian inference, the very limited numbers of samples often used by humans seem insufficient to approximate the required probability distributions very accurately. Here, we consider this discrepancy in the broader framework of statistical decision theory, and ask: If people are making decisions based on samples—but as samples are costly—how many samples should people use to optimize their total expected or worst-case reward over a large number of decisions? We find that under reasonable assumptions about the time costs of sampling, making many quick but locally suboptimal decisions based on very few samples may be the globally optimal strategy over long periods. These results help to reconcile a large body of work showing sampling-based or probability matching behavior with the hypothesis that human cognition can be understood in Bayesian terms, and they suggest promising future directions for studies of resource-constrained cognition. (shrink)

If the cortex is an associative memory, strongly connected cell assemblies will form when neurons in different cortical areas are frequently active at the same time. The cortical distributions of these assemblies must be a consequence of where in the cortex correlated neuronal activity occurred during learning. An assembly can be considered a functional unit exhibiting activity states such as full activation (“ignition”) after appropriate sensory stimulation (possibly related to perception) and continuous reverberation of excitation within the assembly (a putative (...) memory process). This has implications for cortical topographies and activity dynamics of cell assemblies forming during language acquisition, in particular for those representing words. Cortical topographies of assemblies should be related to aspects of the meaning of the words they represent, and physiological signs of cell assembly ignition should be followed by possible indicators of reverberation. The following postulates are discussed in detail: (1) assemblies representing phonological word forms are strongly lateralized and distributed over perisylvian cortices; (2) assemblies representing highly abstract words such as grammatical function words are also strongly lateralized and restricted to these perisylvian regions; (3) assemblies representing concrete content words include additional neurons in both hemispheres; (4) assemblies representing words referring to visual stimuli include neurons in visual cortices; and (5) assemblies representing words referring to actions include neurons in motor cortices. Two main sources of evidence are used to evaluate these proposals: (a) imaging studies focusing on localizing word processing in the brain, based on stimulus-triggered event-related potentials (ERPs), positron emission tomography (PET), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and (b) studies of the temporal dynamics of fast activity changes in the brain, as revealed by high-frequency responses recorded in the electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG). These data provide evidence for processing differences between words and matched meaningless pseudowords, and between word classes, such as concrete content and abstract function words, and words evoking visual or motor associations. There is evidence for early word class-specific spreading of neuronal activity and for equally specific high-frequency responses occurring later. These results support a neurobiological model of language in the Hebbian tradition. Competing large-scale neuronal theories of language are discussed in light of the data summarized. Neurobiological perspectives on the problem of serial order of words in syntactic strings are considered in closing. Key Words: associative learning; cell assembly; cognition; cortex; ERP; EEG; fMRI; language; lexicon; MEG; PET; word category. (shrink)