The effect of WWW document structure on students' information retrieval

This experiment investigated the effect the structure of a WWW document has on the amount of information retained by a reader. Three structures common on the Internet were tested: one long page; a table of contents leading to individual sections; and short sections of text on separate pages with revision questions. Participants read information structured in one of these ways and were then tested on recall of that information. A further experiment investigated the effect that 'browsing' - moving between pages - has on retrieval. There was no difference between the structures for overall amount of information retained. The single page version was best for recall of facts, while the short sections of text with revision questions led to the most accurate inferences from the material. Browsing on its own had no significant impact on information retrieval. Revision questions rather than structure per se were therefore the key factor

Ab initio calculations of reactions with light nuclei

An {\em ab initio} (i.e., from first principles) theoretical framework capable of providing a unified description of the structure and low-energy reaction properties of light nuclei is desirable to further our understanding of the fundamental interactions among nucleons, and provide accurate predictions of crucial reaction rates for nuclear astrophysics, fusion-energy research, and other applications. In this contribution we review {\em ab initio} calculations for nucleon and deuterium scattering on light nuclei starting from chiral two- and three-body Hamiltonians, obtained within the framework of the {\em ab initio} no-core shell model with continuum. This is a unified approach to nuclear bound and scattering states, in which square-integrable energy eigenstates of the $A$-nucleon system are coupled to $(A-a)+a$ target-plus-projectile wave functions in the spirit of the resonating group method to obtain an efficient description of the many-body nuclear dynamics both at short and medium distances and at long ranges.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physic

What is Computational Intelligence and where is it going?

What is Computational Intelligence (CI) and what are its relations with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? A brief survey of the scope of CI journals and books with ``computational intelligence'' in their title shows that at present it is an umbrella for three core technologies (neural, fuzzy and evolutionary), their applications, and selected fashionable pattern recognition methods. At present CI has no comprehensive foundations and is more a bag of tricks than a solid branch of science. The change of focus from methods to challenging problems is advocated, with CI defined as a part of computer and engineering sciences devoted to solution of non-algoritmizable problems. In this view AI is a part of CI focused on problems related to higher cognitive functions, while the rest of the CI community works on problems related to perception and control, or lower cognitive functions. Grand challenges on both sides of this spectrum are addressed

Alchemical normal modes unify chemical space

In silico design of new molecules and materials with desirable quantum properties by high-throughput screening is a major challenge due to the high dimensionality of chemical space. To facilitate its navigation, we present a unification of coordinate and composition space in terms of alchemical normal modes (ANMs) which result from second order perturbation theory. ANMs assume a predominantly smooth nature of chemical space and form a basis in which new compounds can be expanded and identified. We showcase the use of ANMs for the energetics of the iso-electronic series of diatomics with 14 electrons, BN doped benzene derivatives (C$_{6-2x}$(BN)$_{x}$H$_6$ with $x = 0, 1, 2, 3$), predictions for over 1.8 million BN doped coronene derivatives, and genetic energy optimizations in the entire BN doped coronene space. Using Ge lattice scans as reference, the applicability ANMs across the periodic table is demonstrated for III-V and IV-IV-semiconductors Si, Sn, SiGe, SnGe, SiSn, as well as AlP, AlAs, AlSb, GaP, GaAs, GaSb, InP, InAs, and InSb. Analysis of our results indicates simple qualitative structure property rules for estimating energetic rankings among isomers. Useful quantitative estimates can also be obtained when few atoms are changed to neighboring or lower lying elements in the periodic table. The quality of the predictions often increases with the symmetry of system chosen as reference due to cancellation of odd order terms. Rooted in perturbation theory the ANM approach promises to generally enable unbiased compound exploration campaigns at reduced computational cost