The Conservation Assessment: A Proposed Model for Evaluating Museum Environmental Management Needs

Provided to help museums assess environmental needs, identify problems, and implement technical solutions. Also available in Spanish

Comparing Typical Opening Move Choices Made by Humans and Chess Engines

The opening book is an important component of a chess engine, and thus computer chess programmers have been developing automated methods to improve the quality of their books. For chess, which has a very rich opening theory, large databases of high-quality games can be used as the basis of an opening book, from which statistics relating to move choices from given positions can be collected. In order to find out whether the opening books used by modern chess engines in machine versus machine competitions are ``comparable'' to those used by chess players in human versus human competitions, we carried out analysis on 26 test positions using statistics from two opening books one compiled from humans' games and the other from machines' games. Our analysis using several nonparametric measures, shows that, overall, there is a strong association between humans' and machines' choices of opening moves when using a book to guide their choices.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 6 table

Design issues in the production of hyper‐books and visual‐books

This paper describes an ongoing research project in the area of electronic books. After a brief overview of the state of the art in this field, two new forms of electronic book are presented: hyper‐books and visual‐books. A flexible environment allows them to be produced in a semi‐automatic way starting from different sources: electronic texts (as input for hyper‐books) and paper books (as input for visual‐books). The translation process is driven by the philosophy of preserving the book metaphor in order to guarantee that electronic information is presented in a familiar way. Another important feature of our research is that hyper‐books and visual‐books are conceived not as isolated objects but as entities within an electronic library, which inherits most of the features of a paper‐based library but introduces a number of new properties resulting from its non‐physical nature

From Iconic Design to Lost Luggage: Innovation at Heathrow Terminal 5

This paper aims to contribute to understanding of how organizations respond to risk and uncertainty by combining and balancing routines and innovation. It shows how approaches to risk and uncertainty are shaped by the contractual framework in large multi-party projects. The paper addresses a gap in the literature on how risk and uncertainty is managed to deliver innovation in large-scale ‘megaprojects’. These megaprojects are notorious for high rates of failure that conventionally evoke organizational strategies avoiding risks and uncertainties. Yet strategies for managing risk and uncertainty are essential to the routines and innovation that overcome the challenges of successfully delivering large-scale, complex projects.

Modeling Option and Strategy Choices with Connectionist Networks: Towards an Integrative Model of Automatic and Deliberate Decision Making

We claim that understanding human decisions requires that both automatic and deliberate processes be considered. First, we sketch the qualitative differences between two hypothetical processing systems, an automatic and a deliberate system. Second, we show the potential that connectionism offers for modeling processes of decision making and discuss some empirical evidence. Specifically, we posit that the integration of information and the application of a selection rule are governed by the automatic system. The deliberate system is assumed to be responsible for information search, inferences and the modification of the network that the automatic processes act on. Third, we critically evaluate the multiple-strategy approach to decision making. We introduce the basic assumption of an integrative approach stating that individuals apply an all-purpose rule for decisions but use different strategies for information search. Fourth, we develop a connectionist framework that explains the interaction between automatic and deliberate processes and is able to account for choices both at the option and at the strategy level.System 1, Intuition, Reasoning, Control, Routines, Connectionist Model, Parallel Constraint Satisfaction

The role of ICT in teacher education. The development of web pages by project method

This paper is a description of an in-service teacher training experience that used ICT to develop a project that involved teachers (nursery and primary) and also children, parents and other members of the educational community. Its aim was to build an Internet site that would give information about school life. It's an open web space where teachers, parents and students can express and share their ideals and activities. This project is still in progress and is being developed in three interconnected phases: conception, development and evaluation. The most important issue to relate is that the technical or instrumental learning is dependent on the ideas and purposes of teachers, students and parents. We believe that when we talk about ICT in schools and also in teacher education we shouldn't only be concerned with the 'means', that is to say, how to introduce computers or how to use a word processor and Internet resources, but also with the 'ends'. Only when we question the ends do we begin to pay attention to what we do, that is, to construct a story that is worth telling " ... to tell that we are merely tools makers (and tools users) is to miss the entire narrative aim? We are world's makers and world's weavers" (Postman, 2002, p. 108)

Ethnography, education and on-line research

This paper is an attempt to establish the methodological basis for carrying out ethnographies of online education communities, in particular in the Continuing Professional Development VITAL project co-ordinated by the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University www.vital.ac.uk/ A much shorter earlier draft version of this paper was given at the Qualitative Research For Web 2.0/3.0: The Next Leap! 25 & 26 March 2010 in Berlin. Organised by Merlien. The arguments and references in this paper are almost all to be found in two books 'one authored and one edited – by Professor Christine Hine of Surrey University, UK (Hine 2000; Hine 2005)

Interpersonal and Ideological Kindness: A Biocultural Approach

In accordance with Richard Dawkins’ materialist “selfish gene” theory of human behavior, altruism is a subject matter that is treated conservatively by biologists, whose understanding of the human version of altruism tends toward mutualistic and sometimes reputation-based explanations of charity, kindness, and helping. Trivers (1971) first stated that non-kin altruism could evolve if altruistic behavior is balanced between partners over time, implicating a strictly mutualistic domain for kindness. But kindness herein is defined, beyond mere mutualism or reciprocity, as “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.” Further, kindness tends to have an action-oriented dimension, as in Goetz et al.’s (2010) definition of compassion, denoting helpfulness, the reduction of another’s suffering, or self-sacrifice. In this paper, I will employ a biocultural approach in exploring the psychological and neuroscientific data on the evolutionary aspect of social behavior as it pertains to kindness. First, I will draw on evolutionary theories of cooperation in suggesting that an individual and ideological ethos of kindness could have evolved as an adaptive orientation that, in a Durkheimian sense, preempted ostracism and cemented alliances as a beneficial balance to the fitness risks inherent in altruism. Then, consulting data on the neurochemical profiles of dopamine and oxytocin, I will describe the sort of human psychological variation that would reveal a complimentary continuum of evolved social proclivities, from selfish to giving. In proposing that non-reciprocal kindness indeed exists, however, I argue that its presence in human societies is statistically rare, as assumptions about human biology suggest. This study thus concludes with a cautious message about the human condition: while the rareness of kindness should have a profoundly fundamental explanatory value in social analysis, scientific confirmation of its fragility would recommend further scholarship designed to highlight its exceptional biological position vis-à-vis the selfish gene

Lithuanian Retail Internationalization: Features and Prospects

Purpose of the article: To distinguish and describe Lithuanian retail internationalization of the peculiarities in the last twenty-four years and bases on the changes in the future. Methodology/methods: The retail internationalization literature explores the theories, concepts, experiences in different countries is the methodological basis for the assessment of the process and the prospect of these process changes in Lithuania. Lithuanian retail internationalization progress of the investigation from the beginning, development and future prospects is divided into three phases. From a methodological point of view, this is a difficult research because even after twenty years. Scientific aim: To analyse retail internationalization process in Lithuania – features and prospects. Findings: Investigate and evaluate three Lithuanian retail internationalization stages showed that each of them has distinct features. A survey of retailers allowed to set retail internationalization level in 2013. Conclusions: The retail trade internationalisation process in Lithuania, which started immediately after the destruction of the socialist economy and proceeded as the foundation for market economy was being laid, was particular in the sense that famous foreign retail trade companies did not immediately enter the Lithuanian retail market. The characteristic feature of the process in Lithuania was the establishment of joint capital companies, while individual foreign businessmen often started their business in the country by opening their first store. Research limitations: no interest of retailers to be in contact regarding research and wide theme was as serious limitations to find out and explore the Lithuanian retail internationalization features. This is the original article, exploring the small market of retail internationalization process characteristics from its beginning until 2014

A Survey of Monte Carlo Tree Search Methods

Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a recently proposed search method that combines the precision of tree search with the generality of random sampling. It has received considerable interest due to its spectacular success in the difficult problem of computer Go, but has also proved beneficial in a range of other domains. This paper is a survey of the literature to date, intended to provide a snapshot of the state of the art after the first five years of MCTS research. We outline the core algorithm's derivation, impart some structure on the many variations and enhancements that have been proposed, and summarize the results from the key game and nongame domains to which MCTS methods have been applied. A number of open research questions indicate that the field is ripe for future work