1,993 research outputs found

    Investigating the learning potential of the Second Quantum Revolution: development of an approach for secondary school students

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    In recent years we have witnessed important changes: the Second Quantum Revolution is in the spotlight of many countries, and it is creating a new generation of technologies. To unlock the potential of the Second Quantum Revolution, several countries have launched strategic plans and research programs that finance and set the pace of research and development of these new technologies (like the Quantum Flagship, the National Quantum Initiative Act and so on). The increasing pace of technological changes is also challenging science education and institutional systems, requiring them to help to prepare new generations of experts. This work is placed within physics education research and contributes to the challenge by developing an approach and a course about the Second Quantum Revolution. The aims are to promote quantum literacy and, in particular, to value from a cultural and educational perspective the Second Revolution. The dissertation is articulated in two parts. In the first, we unpack the Second Quantum Revolution from a cultural perspective and shed light on the main revolutionary aspects that are elevated to the rank of principles implemented in the design of a course for secondary school students, prospective and in-service teachers. The design process and the educational reconstruction of the activities are presented as well as the results of a pilot study conducted to investigate the impact of the approach on students' understanding and to gather feedback to refine and improve the instructional materials. The second part consists of the exploration of the Second Quantum Revolution as a context to introduce some basic concepts of quantum physics. We present the results of an implementation with secondary school students to investigate if and to what extent external representations could play any role to promote students’ understanding and acceptance of quantum physics as a personal reliable description of the world

    Soundscape in Urban Forests

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    This Special Issue of Forests explores the role of soundscapes in urban forested areas. It is comprised of 11 papers involving soundscape studies conducted in urban forests from Asia and Africa. This collection contains six research fields: (1) the ecological patterns and processes of forest soundscapes; (2) the boundary effects and perceptual topology; (3) natural soundscapes and human health; (4) the experience of multi-sensory interactions; (5) environmental behavior and cognitive disposition; and (6) soundscape resource management in forests

    2023 GREAT Day Program

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    SUNY Geneseo’s Seventeenth Annual GREAT Day. Geneseo Recognizing Excellence, Achievement & Talent Day is a college-wide symposium celebrating the creative and scholarly endeavors of our students. http://www.geneseo.edu/great_dayhttps://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1017/thumbnail.jp

    The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000

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    The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective on the history of the continent of the past 500 years. Each major theme is dissected through three chronological sub-chapters, revealing how major social, political and historical trends manifested themselves in different European settings during the early modern (1500–1800), modern (1800–1900) and contemporary period (1900–2000). This resource is of utmost relevance to today’s history students in the light of ongoing internationalisation strategies for higher education curricula, as it delivers one of the first multi-perspective and truly ‘European’ analyses of the continent’s past. Beyond the provision of historical content, this textbook equips students with the intellectual tools to interrogate prevailing accounts of European history, and enables them to seek out additional perspectives in a bid to further enrich the discipline

    Intelligent interface agents for biometric applications

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    This thesis investigates the benefits of applying the intelligent agent paradigm to biometric identity verification systems. Multimodal biometric systems, despite their additional complexity, hold the promise of providing a higher degree of accuracy and robustness. Multimodal biometric systems are examined in this work leading to the design and implementation of a novel distributed multi-modal identity verification system based on an intelligent agent framework. User interface design issues are also important in the domain of biometric systems and present an exceptional opportunity for employing adaptive interface agents. Through the use of such interface agents, system performance may be improved, leading to an increase in recognition rates over a non-adaptive system while producing a more robust and agreeable user experience. The investigation of such adaptive systems has been a focus of the work reported in this thesis. The research presented in this thesis is divided into two main parts. Firstly, the design, development and testing of a novel distributed multi-modal authentication system employing intelligent agents is presented. The second part details design and implementation of an adaptive interface layer based on interface agent technology and demonstrates its integration with a commercial fingerprint recognition system. The performance of these systems is then evaluated using databases of biometric samples gathered during the research. The results obtained from the experimental evaluation of the multi-modal system demonstrated a clear improvement in the accuracy of the system compared to a unimodal biometric approach. The adoption of the intelligent agent architecture at the interface level resulted in a system where false reject rates were reduced when compared to a system that did not employ an intelligent interface. The results obtained from both systems clearly express the benefits of combining an intelligent agent framework with a biometric system to provide a more robust and flexible application

    The Artful Eye: Exploring Visual Engagement with Artworks in Different Contexts

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    Artworks are increasingly experienced in non-traditional platforms, from digital collections on museum websites to virtual gallery tours, making it important to investigate the context-dependent and context-independent aspects of aesthetic experience. While some studies have shown that artworks in the museum elicit a higher visual engagement than when presented on a screen, others reported divergent findings. This thesis suggests that such discrepancies may be due to the interaction between the artwork's physical and contextual characteristics and investigates how diverse aspects of viewing behaviour change between the museum, on-screen laboratory, and virtual gallery laboratory contexts. Fifteen paintings by different Australian artists from the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) were included as stimuli for the studies in this thesis. Mobile and screen-based eye movement recordings were used to index visual engagement (number of fixations, total and average fixation duration) with artworks across the three different contexts. Our first study (Chapter 2) compared the visual engagement of museum visitors in the AGNSW to that of participants looking at their digital reproductions in laboratory. We focused on how aspects of viewing behaviour, including viewing distance in the gallery condition and eye gaze measures such as fixation count, total fixation duration and average fixation duration are affected by the artworks’ physical characteristics, including size and image statistics properties such as Fourier amplitude spectrum, fractal dimension and entropy. The effects of these factors on visual engagement were then explored in a virtual gallery replica of the exhibition (Chapter 3). In a virtual gallery context, we also tested the impact of two additional context-dependent factors: the curatorial arrangement and further manipulations of the relative size of the paintings. Overall, the results show significant differences in viewing behaviour across different contexts, but also that the effects of presentation contexts are modulated by the artworks’ physical characteristics. In the final two studies, the thesis explores the effect of mere exposure on viewing behaviour in different contexts (Chapter 4) and the spatial and temporal image statistics of fixated compared to non-fixated regions of artworks in both the museum and on- screen viewing contexts (Chapter 5). The results show that visual engagement in the museum, but not on-screen, is enhanced by previous exposure to digital reproductions of artworks. Finally, Chapter 5 demonstrates that fixated and randomly selected regions differed in both spatial and temporal image statistics with more pronounced differences in the on-screen viewing condition. In sum, the thesis demonstrates that a combination of context-dependent variables (e.g., navigation, curatorial setting and relative size) and the low-level properties (e.g., fractal dimension, amplitude spectrum, entropy) of artworks influence visual engagement

    Aspects of holography and higher spins in three-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetimes

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    This thesis deals with the application of the holographic principle to asymptotically flat spacetimes in three dimensions, with a particular focus on higher-spin generalisations of Einstein gravity. The inquiry about different examples of holographic theories apart from well-studied AdS/CFT implementations, in particular such models that include (quantum) gravitational theories relevant to observable physics, is an imperative step towards a broadened understanding of the overall applicability of the holographic principle. Simultaneously, the existence of non-trivially interacting higher-spin theories in flat spacetimes poses an interesting question on itself

    Complexity Science in Human Change

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    This reprint encompasses fourteen contributions that offer avenues towards a better understanding of complex systems in human behavior. The phenomena studied here are generally pattern formation processes that originate in social interaction and psychotherapy. Several accounts are also given of the coordination in body movements and in physiological, neuronal and linguistic processes. A common denominator of such pattern formation is that complexity and entropy of the respective systems become reduced spontaneously, which is the hallmark of self-organization. The various methodological approaches of how to model such processes are presented in some detail. Results from the various methods are systematically compared and discussed. Among these approaches are algorithms for the quantification of synchrony by cross-correlational statistics, surrogate control procedures, recurrence mapping and network models.This volume offers an informative and sophisticated resource for scholars of human change, and as well for students at advanced levels, from graduate to post-doctoral. The reprint is multidisciplinary in nature, binding together the fields of medicine, psychology, physics, and neuroscience

    Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology

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    The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals. To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification. There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge -- one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted. In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure where relevant, with extensive documentation. Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.Comment: PhD thesis cop
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