Product recommendation system is realized by applying business rules acquired by data maining techniques. Business rules such as demographical patterns of purchase, are able to cover the groups of users that have a tendency to purchase products, but it is difficult to recommend products adaptive to various personal preferences only by utilizing them. In addition to that, it is very costly to gather the large volume of high quality survey data, which is necessary for good recommendation based on personal preference (...) model. A method collecting kansei information automatically without questionnaire survey is required. The constructing personal preference model from less favor data is also necessary, since it is costly for the user to input favor data. In this paper, we propose product recommendation system based on kansei information extracted by text mining and user's preference model constructed by Category-guided Adaptive Modeling, CAM for short. CAM is a feature construction method that can generate new features constructing the space where same labeled examples are close and different labeled examples are far away from some labeled examples. It is possible to construct personal preference model by CAM despite less information of likes and dislikes categories. In the system, retrieval agent gathers the products' specification and user agent manages preference model, user's likes and dislikes. Kansei information of the products is gained by applying text mining technique to the reputation documents about the products on the web site. We carry out some experimental studies to make sure that prefrence model obtained by our method performs effectively. (shrink)

This inclusive cross-cultural study rethinks the nexus between engineering education and context. In so doing the book offers a reflection on contextual boundaries with an overall boundary crossing ambition and juxtaposes important cases of critical participation within engineering education with sophisticated scholarly reflection on both opportunities and discontents. Whether, and in what way engineering education is or ought to be contextualized or de-contextualized is an object of heated debate among engineering educators. The uniqueness of this study is that this debate (...) is given comprehensive coverage - presenting both instrumentally inclined as well as radical positions on transforming engineering education. In contextualizing engineering education, this book offers diverse commentary from a range of disciplinary, meta- and interdisciplinary perspectives on how cultural, professional, institutional, and educational systems contexts shape histories, structural dynamics, ideologies and challenges as well as new pathways in engineering education. Topics addressed include examining engineering education in countries ranging from India to America, to racial and gender equity in engineering education and incorporating social awareness into the area. Using context as "bridge" this book confronts engineering education head on. Contending engineering ideologies and corresponding views on context are juxtaposed with contending discourses of reform. The uniqueness of the book is that it brings together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences and engineering from Europe - both East and West - with the United States, China, Brazil, India and Australia. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the works of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard that were discovered after his death on November 11, 1855. These papers were compiled by his nephew Henrik Lund and were later given to his brother Bishop Peter Christian Kierkegaard. Four major editions of the papers were published, which include Af Soren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer, Soren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker, Soren Kierkegaards Papirer, and Soren Kierkegaards Skrifter. The chapter also considers some aspects of Kierkegaard's working process.

This book brings together phenomenological studies of the experience of forgiveness. The contributors, from psychological, philosophical, and theological backgrounds, set aside theoretical presuppositions, approach this topic with fresh eyes, and address problematic aspects of the existing literature.

Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of the cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary education, and even modern electoral politics. Along the way, the book turns to a set of art works from mobile steampunk sculptures to bicentennial adaptations of Frankenstein to a musical about the US Presidential election that ask how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, (...) responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly. (shrink)

Comparative studies of DNA sequences provide opportunities for testing the neutral and the selection theories of molecular evolution. In particular, the separate estimation of the numbers of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions is a powerful tool for detecting selection of the latter. The difference in the patterns of these two types of substitutions of mammalian genes turned out to be in accord with the slightly deleterious or nearly neutral mutation theory for nonsynonymous changes. Interaction systems at the amino acid level were (...) suggested to be responsible for such nearly neutral, or very weak, selection. Synonymous substitutions are not strictly neutral, but because of their minute effect, random drift predominates such that the rate of substitution is only slightly less than the completely neutral prediction. It was concluded that the strictly neutral theory has not held up as well as the nearly neutral theory, yet remains invaluable as a null hypothesis for detecting selection. On the other hand, the main difference between the nearly neutral and the traditional selection theories is that the former predicts rapid evolution in small populations, whereas the latter predicts rapid evolution in large populations. (shrink)

From the distance of four decades, it may be hard to recall or to imagine the time when doing history was felt to be profoundly dissonant, even antithetical to doing theory. This was in no small pa...

The aim of this study was to review the typical factors related to physician’s liability in obstetrics and gynecology departments, as compared to those in internal medicine and surgery, regarding a breach of the duty to explain.

BackgroundA physician's duty to provide an adequate explanation to the patient is derived from the doctrine of informed consent and the physician's duty of disclosure. However, findings are extremely limited with respect to physicians' specific explanatory behaviours and what might be regarded as a breach of the physicians' duty to explain in an actual medical setting. This study sought to identify physicians' explanatory behaviours that may be related to the physicians' legal liability.MethodsWe analysed legal decisions of medical malpractice cases between (...) 1990 and 2009 in which the pivotal issue was the physician's duty to explain (366 cases). To identify factors related to the breach of the physician's duty to explain, an analysis was undertaken based on acknowledged breaches with regard to the physician's duty to explain to the patient according to court decisions. Additionally, to identify predictors of physicians' behaviours in breach of the duty to explain, logistic regression analysis was performed.ResultsWhen the physician's explanation was given before treatment or surgery (p = 0.006), when it was relevant or specific (p = 0.000), and when the patient's consent was obtained (p = 0.002), the explanation was less likely to be deemed inadequate or a breach of the physician's duty to explain. Patient factors related to physicians' legally problematic explanations were patient age and gender. One physician factor was related to legally problematic physician explanations, namely the number of physicians involved in the patient's treatment.ConclusionThese findings may be useful in improving physician-patient communication in the medical setting. (shrink)

The time when Guerras civiles de Granada was written produced a long process of assimilation and acculturation for the moriscos. The occurrences in this process mark the narrative tone of each part of the work, which is, more than a mere reflection of the epoch, an appeal to the contemporaries for consideration of the moriscos’ cause. The first part hints at the same direction as El Abencerraje and the second, Libros plúmbeos.

En el tiempo cuando se escribió Guerras civiles de Granada se produjo un largo proceso de asimilación y aculturación de los moriscos. Los acontecimientos en dicho proceso marcan el tono narrativo de cada parte de la obra, que es, más que el mero reflejo de la época, llamamiento a la sociedad contemporánea para invitarla a reflexionar sobre la causa morisca. La primera parte apunta la misma dirección que la de El Abencerraje y la segunda, la de los Libros plúmbeos.

The success of the London 2012 Paralympic Games not only revealed new public possibilities for the disabled, but also thrust the debates on the relationship between elite Paralympians and advanced prosthetic technology into the spotlight. One of the Paralympic stars, Oscar Pistorius, in particular became celebrated as ‘the Paralympian cyborg’. Also prominent has been Aimee Mullins, a former Paralympian, who became a globally successful fashion model by seeking to establish a new bodily aesthetic utilizing non-organic body parts. This article examines (...) how the modern discourse of prostheses has shifted from the made-up and camouflaged body to the empowered and exhibited body to create a new cultural sensitivity in terms of body image – prosthetic aesthetics. Prosthetic aesthetics oscillates between two polarized sensitivities: attractiveness/‘coolness’, which derive from the image of a perfect human-machine synthetic body, and from abjection/the uncanny, which is evoked by the actual materiality of the lived body incorporating a lifeless human-made body part. (shrink)

In the study of reference assignment, the question of what pragmatic criteria are used to evaluate the resulting interpretation seems not yet to have been properly dealt with. This paper addresses the issue by examining factors which affect the acceptability of various cases of bridging reference. It demonstrates that even highly successful accounts of reference assignment which place major emphasis on accessibility factors, e.g. the accessibility of candidate referents and the accessibility of contextual assumptions, must nonetheless involve some pragmatic criterion (...) with which hearers can evaluate the resulting interpretation. Moreover, it argues that the pragmatic criterion used in reference assignment is not the truth-based one, which has been widely accepted, but the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance proposed by Sperber and Wilson. Various accounts are tested against a wide range of examples on which I have conducted experimental tests with several sets of subjects. (shrink)

Stance is inherent in conversational interaction and is interactional in nature. When speakers take a stance, they pay attention to both prior stances and stance relations, as well as to the anticipated consequences of their stancetaking. They manage stance relations as a way of dealing with the “sociocognitive relations” of intersubjectivity (Du Bois 2007). Using the dialogic framework proposed by Du Bois, this paper shows that the discourse marker Well in American English works as a resource for the management of (...) relationships among stances. With its referential and grammatical flexibility, it is uniquely characterized as a meta-stance marker because, rather than indexing a specific stance, it negotiates and regulates stance relations. Well is analyzed in two contextual categories: first, at stance divergence among utterances, and second, at stance shifts embedded in topic shift. (shrink)

Stance is inherent in conversational interaction and is interactional in nature. When speakers take a stance, they pay attention to both prior stances and stance relations, as well as to the anticipated consequences of their stancetaking. They manage stance relations as a way of dealing with the “sociocognitive relations” of intersubjectivity. Using the dialogic framework proposed by Du Bois, this paper shows that the discourse marker well in American English works as a resource for the management of relationships among stances. (...) With its referential and grammatical flexibility, it is uniquely characterized as a meta-stance marker because, rather than indexing a specific stance, it negotiates and regulates stance relations. Well is analyzed in two contextual categories: first, at stance divergence among utterances, and second, at stance shifts embedded in topic shift. (shrink)

Speakers often construct their utterances based on the immediately co-present utterances of dialogue partners. They array their linguistic resources parallel to their partners¿ and activate resonance. Based on the theories of dialogic syntax and cognitive linguistics, this study undertakes to explain how speakers activate resonance and how parallelism contributes to constructing linguistic forms as well as to shaping the ongoing flow of conversation. Three phases of resonance activation are illustrated in relation to cognitive processes: (a) parallelism constituted with extension of (...) multiple categories in synthesis; (b) parallelism meeting or failing the previous speaker¿s intention due to schematization; and (c) parallelism achieved as a consequence of priming through schematization and extension. It is concluded that linguistic forms develop in the ongoing flow of socially coordinated cognition, where patterns emerge through activation of mapping relations between linguistic elements. This process is anchored in speakers¿ concepts of grammatical equivalences, ability of categorization, and grasp of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. By Seth Jacobowitz. Harvard East Asian Monographs, vol. 387. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 299. $39.95.

We describe a novel Internet-based method for building consensus and clarifying con icts in large stakeholder groups facing complex issues, and we use the method to survey and map the scienti c and organizational perspectives of the arti cial life community during the Seventh International Conference on Arti cial Life (summer 2000). The issues addressed in this survey included arti cial life’s main successes, main failures, main open scienti c questions, and main strategies for the future, as well as the (...) bene ts and pitfalls of creating a professional society for arti cial life. By illuminating the arti cial life community’s collective perspective on these issues, this survey illustrates the value of such methods of harnessing the collective intelligence of large stakeholder groups. (shrink)

What makes a cell? How are cells able to replicate themselves in a stable manner? How did cellular life emerge on our planet? The answer to these fundamental questions lies at the base of biology. Cellular life is the basic unit of living organization and defines the presence of a stable information reservoir connected through the external world by a well-defined boundary. Inside the cell, chains of computations and chemical reactions take place, sustained by self-assembled molecular machines. At the cell (...) membrane, the environment and the cell communicate with each other through proteins that are able to detect small concentration changes and send the appropriate signals. But modern cells are very sophisticated entities and extracting the logic of cell organization from them is a gigantic effort. In order to answer these questions, we need to look at cells in a more basic level: a reduction of complexity is needed. Protocells, roughly defined as the simplest instances of autonomous cell-like structures, have been a matter of exploration for decades. Although most of the original work in this area was largely theoretical, the end of the twentieth century was marked by very active experimental research on minimal cells. One approach has been the top-down strategy, where living organisms (the simplest life forms) are being selectively modified to reduce their genome complexity. Such a minimal genome would be the smallest one able to sustain reproduction and growth under a given set of external constraints (mainly available molecules). The second approach is the bottom-up one, very much in the tradition of research into the origins of life. Under this approach, extremely simple life forms are built from basic chemical components, including lipids and a basic.. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between people living relatively simple lives and the cultural complexity of their live worlds by rethinking culture in terms of complexity theory.

In the study of reference assignment, the question of what pragmatic criteria are used to evaluate the resulting interpretation seems not yet to have been properly dealt with. This paper addresses the issue by examining factors which affect the acceptability of various cases of bridging reference. It demonstrates that even highly successful accounts of reference assignment which place major emphasis on accessibility factors, e.g. the accessibility of candidate referents and the accessibility of contextual assumptions, must nonetheless involve some pragmatic criterion (...) with which hearers can evaluate the resulting interpretation. Moreover, it argues that the pragmatic criterion used in reference assignment is not the truth-based one, which has been widely accepted, but the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance proposed by Sperber and Wilson. Various accounts are tested against a wide range of examples on which I have conducted experimental tests with several sets of subjects. (shrink)

Speakers often construct their utterances based on the immediately co-present utterances of dialogue partners. They array their linguistic resources parallel to their partners' and activate resonance. Based on the theories of dialogic syntax and cognitive linguistics, this study undertakes to explain how speakers activate resonance and how parallelism contributes to constructing linguistic forms as well as to shaping the ongoing flow of conversation. Three phases of resonance activation are illustrated in relation to cognitive processes: parallelism constituted with extension of multiple (...) categories in synthesis; parallelism meeting or failing the previous speaker's intention due to schematization; and parallelism achieved as a consequence of priming through schematization and extension. It is concluded that linguistic forms develop in the ongoing flow of socially coordinated cognition, where patterns emerge through activation of mapping relations between linguistic elements. This process is anchored in speakers' concepts of grammatical equivalences, ability of categorization, and grasp of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

Following the Body & Society special issue, Skin Matters: Thinking Through the Body’s Surfaces, Tomoko Tamari conducted an interview with the special issue editor, Marc Lafrance. He argues for the skin as an interface, which both resists and reinforces binary oppositions. Lafrance is particularly interested in the relationship between the skin and subjectivity, focusing on those who are suffering from traumatic stigmatizing experiences. This theme is also elaborated in the debates around the issue of human-made skin in ‘regenerative medicine’. (...) He argues that while the development of medical technology for human-made organic skin tends often to be welcomed, the actual experience of face-transfer patients following skin graft surgeries is one of physical and psychological hardship along with a complex sense of self-wholeness and ‘reflexive embodiment’. Reflexivity is also an important phenomenon encouraged by the media and social media, which constantly feature representations of the skin. (shrink)

Steen Brock paints a cross-disciplinary picture of the philosophical and scientific background for the rise of the quantum theory. He accounts for the unity of Kantian metaphysics of Nature, the Helmholtzian principles, and the Hamiltonian methods of modern pre-quantum physics. Brock shows how Planck's vision of a generalization of classical physics implies that the original quantum mechanics of Heisenberg can be regarded as a successful attempt to maintain this modern unity of physics.However, for Niels Bohr, the unity of science (...) and metaphysics did not end in the world of physics. The development of quantum physics had general implications both for other sciences and for various philosophical issues. Brock discusses these matters with respect to recent topics within the philosophy of science and major interpretations of Bohr's ideas. The author invites the reader to follow a long andwinding route of thought which, in the end, culminates in Bohr's ideas of complementarity, culture and Spirit. (shrink)

This study aims to disentangle the often-confounded effects of input frequency and morphophonological complexity in the acquisition of inflection, by focusing on simple and complex verb forms in Japanese. Study 1 tested 28 children aged 3;3–4;3 on stative and simple past forms, and Study 2 tested 30 children aged 3;5–5;3 on completive and simple past forms, with both studies using a production priming paradigm. Mixed effects models for children's responses were built to test the prediction that children's verb use is (...) explained by the relative bias in input frequency between the two inflectional forms. Although Study 1 did not show a significant effect of input bias, Study 2, which corrected for this problem, yielded the predicted relationship. These findings suggest that input frequency effects, at the level of different inflectional forms of the same verb stem, hold even after controlling for morphophonological complexity. (shrink)

This piece focuses on the work of Juhani Pallasmaa who introduces phenomenological aspects of kinesthetic and multisensory perception of the human body into architecture theory. He argues that hand-drawing is a vital spatial and haptic exercise in facilitating architectural design. Through this process, architecture can emerge as the very ‘material’ existence of human embodied ‘immaterial’ emotion, feelings and wisdom. Hence, for Pallasmaa, architecture can be seen as an artistic practice, which entails multisensory and embodied thought in order to establish the (...) sense of being in the world. (shrink)