Recent times have seen increasing interest in conversational assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa) designed to help users in their daily tasks. In military settings, it is critical to design assistants that are, simultaneously, helpful and able to minimize the user’s cognitive load. Here we show that embodiment plays a key role in achieving that goal. We present an experiment where participants engaged in the desert survival task in augmented reality. Participants were paired with a voice assistant, an embodied assistant, or no (...) assistant. The assistants made suggestions verbally throughout the task, whereas the embodied assistant further used gestures and emotion to communicate with the user. Our results indicate that both assistant conditions led to higher performance over the no assistant condition, but the embodied assistant achieved this with less cognitive burden on the decision maker than the non-embodied assistant. We discuss implications for the design of intelligent collaborative systems for the warfighter. (shrink)

Recent developments in the natural and social sciences have brought great benefits to humanity, both in terms of our material wellbeing and our intellectual and conceptual capacities. Yet, despite a broad ethical consensus and highly developed innate faculties of reason and conscience, there seems to be a significant discrepancy between how we ought to behave and how we actually behave, leading to a disregard for the dignity of human persons across the globe. This book suggests that the problem arises from (...) various misunderstandings of the nature of the self and that the solution could lie in adopting a holistic concept of the human person within the context of a carefully cultivated ethical literacy. It argues that the ideas of the Iranian philosopher Ostad Elahi (1895–1974) provide a powerful and compelling alternative to the dominant post-Enlightenment understanding of selfhood, education and morality. (shrink)

Gandhara, an area that welcomed Buddhism and where the earliest monasteries are found from the late third century BC, was also a ‘land of immigration’.With the aim of converting the Greco-Iranian peoples to Buddhism, the dignitaries in charge of these provinces under Asoka had identified in Greek and Aramaic vocabulary equivalents of Hindu or Buddhist themes. But the Gandhara Buddhists seem not to have continued this attempt to translate their sacred texts into Greek, Aramaic and probably Middle Iranian. On the (...) other hand the Buddhists from Bactrian, Sogdian and Xinjiang translated the great texts of Buddhism from Sanskrit into the indigenous languages. (shrink)

The expansion of commerce between the Chinese and Persian states, and the re-establishment of caravan routes, helped make possible the arrival of the first Manichaean missionaries to China in the seventh century of our era. Thus, in 694, a Persian with the title of fuduodan appeared before the Chinese court carrying “the false religion contained in The Book of the Two Principles,” Erzongjing. In 719 another Manichaean dignitary, bearing the title of muzhu and versed in astronomy, was sent to the (...) Chinese emperor by the viceroy of Tokharestan. Some twenty years later, on 16 Jul, 731, a Manichaean Bishop, also called a fuduodan, completed the Compendium of the Doctrines and Rules of the Religion of Mani, the Buddha of Light. The resulting edict, which required the translation of this work, was designed to allow the Chinese authorities both to obtain a complete overview of Manichaeism and to indicate what attitude to take in its regard. Accordingly, the next year (732), an edict was promulgated which, while condemning Manichaeism, granted religious freedom to its non-Chinese adherents. (shrink)

“Additional needs children” is a term often used in the education system to describe children with school-based problems characterised by learning difficulties arising from academic, social and emotional stressors including, but not limited to, clinically diagnosed Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD). What has seldom been investigated is what biopsychosocial characteristics and other common comorbid behaviours are associated with academic learning difficulties. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between anxiety levels (Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale- Parent Report), autism traits (...) (Autism Spectrum Quotient – Child Version) and sleep quality (Sleep Disturbance Scale for Children) in ‘additional needs children’ with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Language Impairment or Mixed Diagnosis without an intellectual disability. The results demonstrated that the ASD group reported more impairments associated with comorbid anxiety and sleep compared to the other clinically diagnosed groups. Similarly, greater anxiety level was positively associated with a greater number of autism traits and poorer sleep quality regardless of diagnostic group. This suggests that higher anxiety symptoms are a core biomarker of children who often first come to their teacher’s attention with reading and learning difficulties (i.e. “additional needs”), irrespective of the primary cause of school-based problems. (shrink)

This volume is the first in the series to present a long Greek text. The version in the scroll represents an early revision of the Septuagint towards a closer correspondence with the Hebrew text of the Bible - the revision given the name kaige by D. Barthélemy. After an extensive introduction the volume contains an edition of the text, both with and without reconstructions, notes on the palaeography and reconstructions, an extensive commentary on the translation technique, orthographic peculiarities and textual (...) relations, and is supplemented by an index of all words, as well as twenty plates. (shrink)