34,772 research outputs found

    How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket

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    Hohwy (Hohwy 2016, Hohwy 2017) argues there is a tension between the free energy principle and leading depictions of mind as embodied, enactive, and extended (so-called ‘EEE1 cognition’). The tension is traced to the importance, in free energy formulations, of a conception of mind and agency that depends upon the presence of a ‘Markov blanket’ demarcating the agent from the surrounding world. In what follows I show that the Markov blanket considerations do not, in fact, lead to the kinds of tension that Hohwy depicts. On the contrary, they actively favour the EEE story. This is because the Markov property, as exemplified in biological agents, picks out neither a unique nor a stationary boundary. It is this multiplicity and mutability– rather than the absence of agent-environment boundaries as such - that EEE cognition celebrates

    Behavioral Economics and Developmental Science: A New Framework to Support Early Childhood Interventions

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    Public policies have actively responded to an emergent social and neuroscientific evidence base documenting the benefits of targeting services to children during the earliest period of their development. But problems of low utilization, inconsistent participation, and low retention continue to present themselves as challenges. Although most interventions recognize and address structural and psycho-social barriers to parent’s engagement, few take seriously the decision making roles of parents. Using insights from the behavioral sciences, we revisit assumptions about the presumed behavior of parents in a developmental context. We then describe ways in which this framework informs features of interventions that can be designed to augment the intended impacts of early development, education and care initiatives by improving parent engagement

    From Predicting Solar Activity to Forecasting Space Weather: Practical Examples of Research-to-Operations and Operations-to-Research

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    The successful transition of research to operations (R2O) and operations to research (O2R) requires, above all, interaction between the two communities. We explore the role that close interaction and ongoing communication played in the successful fielding of three separate developments: an observation platform, a numerical model, and a visualization and specification tool. Additionally, we will examine how these three pieces came together to revolutionize interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME) arrival forecasts. A discussion of the importance of education and training in ensuring a positive outcome from R2O activity follows. We describe efforts by the meteorological community to make research results more accessible to forecasters and the applicability of these efforts to the transfer of space-weather research.We end with a forecaster "wish list" for R2O transitions. Ongoing, two-way communication between the research and operations communities is the thread connecting it all.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, Solar Physics in pres

    The evolution of retail banking services in United Kingdom: a retrospective analysis

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    The purpose of this paper is to assess the sequence of technological changes occurred in the retail banking sector of the United Kingdom against the emergence of customer services by developing an evolutionary argument. The historical paradigm of Information Technology provides useful insights into the ‘learning opportunities’ that opened the way to endogenous changes in the banking activity such as the reconfiguration of its organizational structure and the diversification of the product line. The central idea of this paper is that innovation never occurs without simultaneous structural change. Thus, a defining property of the banking activity is the diachronic adaptation of formal and informal practices to an evolving technological dimension reflecting the extent to which the diffusion of innovation (re)generates variety of micro level processes and induces industry evolution.Information Technology; Retail Banking; History of Technology; Innovation Systems.

    Pair programming and the re-appropriation of individual tools for collaborative software development

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    Although pair programming is becoming more prevalent in software development, and a number of reports have been written about it [10] [13], few have addressed the manner in which pairing actually takes place [12]. Even fewer consider the methods used to manage issues such as role change or the communication of complex issues. This paper highlights the way resources designed for individuals are re-appropriated and augmented by pair programmers to facilitate collaboration. It also illustrates that pair verbalisations can augment the benefits of the collocated team, providing examples from ethnographic studies of pair programmers 'in the wild'

    Computing and data processing

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    The applications of computers and data processing to astronomy are discussed. Among the topics covered are the emerging national information infrastructure, workstations and supercomputers, supertelescopes, digital astronomy, astrophysics in a numerical laboratory, community software, archiving of ground-based observations, dynamical simulations of complex systems, plasma astrophysics, and the remote control of fourth dimension supercomputers

    From Principles to Practice: Sustainable Supply Chain Management in SMEs

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    Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) is an evolving discipline, and incorporates the environmental and social performance dimensions of sustainability with the traditional measure of economic performance; current SSCM research indicates a skew towards economic performance and its interaction with environmental performance, while social performance is underrepresented (Pagell and Wu, 2009, Schaefer, 2004, Sharma and Ruud, 2003). The UK clothing industry represents a relevant research focus due to its supply chain complexity, and scale and scope of its environmental and social impacts; this thesis further recognises the tendency for academic research to focus on Large Enterprises (LE) (Curran and Blackburn, 2001) and investigates how SSCM is implemented in UK SME clothing supply chains to understand how and why they address economic, environmental and social performance and the potential contribution to developing the SSCM concept. An inductive case study methodology is employed and the research focuses on 4 UK clothing SMEs with primary data collection a series of semi-structured interviews, supported by observation, company documentation and archival data. Three theoretical lenses are applied and the findings indicate that SMEs manage their supply chains for sustainability in ways that strongly align with their specific characteristics and apply a greater emphasis on long-term, trust-based and mutually beneficial supplier relationships. A rich view of SSCM practice in SMEs is developed, which reflects the more intangible and human components of sustainability and supply chain relationships, and how these can be harnessed to achieve firm specific commitments. This thesis fulfils an identified need to study how sustainability is addressed in SME supply chains within a single industry; SSCM research to date has focused on large organisations and multiple industry perspectives. It contributes to knowledge in both the SSCM and SME research fields by identifying key gaps within the combined literature, critiquing sustainability models and developing a conceptual framework from the findings, which aims to embed social performance and offer a more integrated approach to SSCM in this context
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