Modeling Life as Cognitive Info-Computation

This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved from the simplest to the most complex organisms, based on new empirical and theoretical results. It addresses three fundamental questions: what cognition is, how cognition works and what cognition does at different levels of complexity of living organisms. By explicating the info-computational character of cognition, its evolution, agent-dependency and generative mechanisms we can better understand its life-sustaining and life-propagating role. The info-computational approach contributes to rethinking cognition as a process of natural computation in living beings that can be applied for cognitive computation in artificial systems.Comment: Manuscript submitted to Computability in Europe CiE 201

From individualism to co-construction and back again:Rethinking research methodology for children with profound and multiple learning disabilities

Children with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) are said to experience severe congenital impairments to consciousness and cognition stemming from neurological damage. Such children are understood as operating at the pre-verbal stages of development, and research in the field typically draws conceptual resources from psychology to devise educational interventions and assessment tools. Criticism has been levelled at studies that treat children with PMLD as objects of research rather than subjects to be consulted. Proponents of the latter view have attempted to redress the situation by exploring how personal experiences can be gleaned through adapted qualitative methods. Debate about methodology in the PMLD field tends to coalesce around these individualist polemics: either children with PMLD are positioned as incompetent and lacking voice; or researchers are positioned as lacking the appropriate tools to gain access to such voice. This paper offers an alternative position to the individualism of post-positivist/constructivist approaches, identifying the need for a critical and participatory approach that sees knowledge about children with PMLD as situated and co-constructed through regular and longitudinal interaction between the researcher, children with PMLD, and significant others. Context to this argument is provided by exploring the application of this approach to an inclusive education research project for a child with PMLD

Syndromic surveillance of influenza-like illness in Scotland during the influenza A H1N1v pandemic and beyond

Syndromic surveillance refers to the rapid monitoring of syndromic data to highlight and follow outbreaks of infectious diseases, increasing situational awareness. Such systems are based upon statistical models to described routinely collected health data. We describe a working exception reporting system (ERS) currently used in Scotland to monitor calls received to the NHS telephone helpline, NHS24. We demonstrate the utility of the system to describe the time series data from NHS24 both at an aggregated Scotland level and at the individual health board level for two case studies, firstly during the initial phase of the 2009 Influenza A H1N1v and secondly for the emergence of seasonal influenza in each winter season from 2006/07 and 2010/11. In particular, we focus on a localised cluster of infection in the Highland health board and the ability of the system to highlight this outbreak. Caveats of the system, including the effect of media reporting of the pandemic on the results and the associated statistical issues, will be discussed. We discuss the adaptability and timeliness of the system and how this continues to form part of a suite of surveillance used to give early warnings to public health decision makers

On Higgs Bundles on Nodal Curves

This is a review article on some applications of generalised parabolic structures to the study of torsion free sheaves and $L$-twisted Hitchin pairs on nodal curves. In particular, we survey on the relation between representations of the fundamental group of a nodal curve and the moduli spaces of generalised parabolic bundles and generalised parabolic $L$-twisted Hitchin pairs on its normalisation as well as on an analogue of the Hitchin map for generalised parabolic $L$-twisted Hitchin pairs

Evaluating Applicability of E-Service Quality in Online Hotel Bookings

This study evaluates applicability of E-service quality measurements in the context of online hotel bookings. Data was collected from an online survey of undergraduate college students at two universities in the United States. The Transaction Process-based Framework (eTransQual) conceptualized by Bauer et al. (2006) was adapted, and the dimensionality of e-service quality was identified. The study identified process/reliability as the most important factor influencing overall quality of booking websites

Introductory students’ attitudes and approaches to physics problem solving: major, achievement level and gender differences

Students’ attitudes and approaches to problem solving are claimed to be related to their ways they learn physics and to their success in solving physics problems. In this study, the Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving (AAPS) survey was used to reveal Turkish introductory university students’ attitudes and approaches to physics problem solving. The data were collected from 175 students, in the spring semester of 2015-2016 academic year, from an introductory physics course at a university in the Black See Region of Turkey. The analysis of the data was conducted by grouping the data by major, achievement level, and gender. They were no statistically significant differences between the averages of civil engineering and molecular biology majors, and between male and female students. However, we obtained a small sample correlation between students’ attitudes and exam grades that suggests high achievers’ attitudes and approaches to physics problems are more expert-like than the attitudes and approaches of low achievers. Implications for problem solving strategies and directions for further research are discussedPeer Reviewe