Narrative and descriptive text revising strategies and procedures

Forty-eight children and forty-eight adults of contrasting degrees of expertise made a series of corrections in order to improve a text (narrative or description) in which three within-statement errors and three between-statement errors had been inserted. Subjects used a simplified word processor (SCRIPREV) which recorded all movements of linguistic units. The purpose of this research was to study revising strategies by examining the correction-sequencing procedures implemented by these subjects. The procedures, which were coded in the form of time series, were compared to the time series of model revising procedures (i.e. effective ones) representing three strategies based on certain predefined functional principles (linguistic level, execution order). The adults used two of these strategies. The Simultaneous Strategy for the narrative, and the Local-then-Global Strategy for the description. The children used the Local-then-Global Strategy for the narrative, but did not use any identifiable procedure to revise the description, which they did not manage to totally improve in the expected manner

Committee chair selection under high informational and organizational constraints

This article draws on major theories of committee organization to explain committee chair selection in contexts with high informational and organizational constraints. We test our theoretical expectations through a series of fixed effects conditional logit models ran on an original data set which includes all legislators who have served in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 2012. The findings indicate that sector knowledge matters more for committee chair selection in the first post-communist terms, while chair seniority and party credentials acquire relevance later on. The effect of sector knowledge is stronger than that of chair seniority for the committees that the members of parliament perceive to be the most important, while party leaders have privileged access to the chair position irrespective of how salient the committee is

Single molecule experiments in biophysics: exploring the thermal behavior of nonequilibrium small systems

Biomolecules carry out very specialized tasks inside the cell where energies involved are few tens of k_BT, small enough for thermal fluctuations to be relevant in many biomolecular processes. In this paper I discuss a few concepts and present some experimental results that show how the study of fluctuation theorems applied to biomolecules contributes to our understanding of the nonequilibrium thermal behavior of small systems.Comment: Proceedings of the 22nd Statphys Conference 2004 (Bangalore,India). Invited contributio

Rewriting, academic fraud and falsification: analyzing cases of academic practice in St. Petersburg, Russia

The article discusses phenomenon of plagiarism forms in academic end education practice and its detection and reaction system

Decentralised Clinical Guidelines Modelling with Lightweight Coordination Calculus

Background: Clinical protocols and guidelines have been considered as a major means to ensure that cost-effective services are provided at the point of care. Recently, the computerisation of clinical guidelines has attracted extensive research interest. Many languages and frameworks have been developed. Thus far, however,an enactment mechanism to facilitate decentralised guideline execution has been a largely neglected line of research. It is our contention that decentralisation is essential to maintain a high-performance system in pervasive health care scenarios. In this paper, we propose the use of Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) as a feasible solution. LCC is a light-weight and executable process calculus that has been used successfully in multi-agent systems, peer-to-peer (p2p) computer networks, etc. In light of an envisaged pervasive health care scenario, LCC, which represents clinical protocols and guidelines as message-based interaction models, allows information exchange among software agents distributed across different departments and/or hospitals. Results: We outlined the syntax and semantics of LCC; proposed a list of refined criteria against which the appropriateness of candidate clinical guideline modelling languages are evaluated; and presented two LCC interaction models of real life clinical guidelines. Conclusions: We demonstrated that LCC is particularly useful in modelling clinical guidelines. It specifies the exact partition of a workflow of events or tasks that should be observed by multiple "players" as well as the interactions among these "players". LCC presents the strength of both process calculi and Horn clauses pair of which can provide a close resemblance of logic programming and the flexibility of practical implementation

Self as social practice: rewriting the feminine in qualitative organizational research

This paper offers a reflexive discussion of the paradox of researching others and offering to represent multiple voices whilst suppressing the voice of the researcher. Martin’s (2002) injunction to repair research accounts by ‘letting the “I” back in’ is problematised by identifying four typically unacknowledged discursive subject positions which constitute the multiple nature of the “I” in such texts: the empirical ‘eye”, the analytical I, the authorial I and the I as semiotic shifter. It is argued that this shifting multiplicity is stabilised by the relationship between self and research text being corporeally grounded and gendered. From this discussion, three possible approaches to gender are considered: the discursive/textual approach (as developed inter alia by Foucault); the performance/social practice approach (as developed inter alia by Judith Butler) and the corporeal multiplicity approach (as developed inter alia by Elizabeth Grosz and Dorothea Olkowski). The paper concludes by suggesting a tripartite approach to writing self-multiplicity in research which extends the possibilities opened up by the social practice approach: re-citing (redeploying discursive resources in intertextuality); re-siting (changing the positioning of the self in power relations by reinscribing); and re-sighting (opening up new, virtual visions of possibility)

Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications, part 2

Topics relative to the application of artificial intelligence to space operations are discussed. New technologies for space station automation, design data capture, computer vision, neural nets, automatic programming, and real time applications are discussed