Brains as naturally emerging turing machines

Abstract—It has been shown that a Developmental Network (DN) can learn any Finite Automaton (FA) [29] but FA is not a general purpose automaton by itself. This theoretical paper presents that the controller of any Turing Machine (TM) is equivalent to an FA. It further models a motivation-free brain — excluding motivation e.g., emotions — as a TM inside a grounded DN — DN with the real world. Unlike a traditional TM, the TM-in-DN uses natural encoding of input and output and uses emergent internal representations. In Artificial Intelligence (AI) there are two major schools, symbolism and connectionism. The theoretical result here implies that the connectionist school is at least as powerful as the symbolic school also in terms of the general-purpose nature of TM. Furthermore, any TM simulated by the DN is grounded and uses natural encoding so that the DN autonomously learns any TM directly from natural world without a need for a human to encode its input and output. This opens the door for the DN to fully autonomously learn any TM, from a human teacher, reading a book, or real world events. The motivated version of DN [31] further enables a DN to go beyond action-supervised learning — so as to learn based on pain-avoidance, pleasure seeking, and novelty seeking [31]. I

Navy SEALS - Crossing Cultures: Cross-Cultural Competence and Decision Styles

U.S. military cross-cultural competence is currently deficient, as Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel assessments fail to explicitly consider aspects related to cross-cultural competence and lack processes specifically tailored to cross-cultural personnel assignments. Researchers, however, have identified eleven attributes that contribute to military cross-cultural competence; this study uses these attributes to explore whether decision styles and demographics correlate with cross-cultural competence. Building on existing work on the attributes of military cross-cultural competence (defined in this study as the ability to quickly and accurately assess, then effectively act, in a culturally complex environment to achieve mission results), I first examined the attribute profiles of experienced Navy Sea, Air, and Land Forces (SEALs) to distinguish between cross-cultural superior and substandard scorers. Logistic regression analysis was then used to estimate relationships between several demographic and decision-style factors and individual scores in cross-cultural competence. The analysis concluded with a comparison of attribute profiles of experienced and newly minted SEALs. Throughout the analyses, all statistical testing was done at the 5% level of significance or stronger. Although 7.5% of the entire active SEAL community participated in the research (n = 253), the empirical results are suggestive but far from conclusive. For example, results revealed statistically significant correlations among the 11 factors associated with cross-cultural competence and decision-style factors (especially the need for cognition) and two demographic traits. Based on the attribute profiles of superior and substandard scorers, it appears SEALs have registered strong cross-cultural competence baselines. Furthermore, mean scores for the entire SEAL population in the study revealed a strong cognitive style attribute profile from a cross-cultural competence perspective. Additional analysis indicated newly minted SEALs, especially those with high scores in need for cognition, may be better positioned than the average experienced SEAL to perform well when engaging with foreign partners. Although this is the first study that assesses a decision-style model for correlation with cross-cultural competence (and more research is needed), it suggests decision styles may be a useful tool for selection, assessment, and assignment of military personnel who deal extensively across cultures (e.g., Army Green Berets, Foreign Area Officers, and SOF Liaison Officers)

Collaborative water-resource governance in the UK: Understanding network structure and functionality of a catchment-based approach to water-quality management

Since 2011 water resource governance in the UK has begun to integrate a collaborative multi-stakeholder approach to water-quality management. The Catchment-Based Approach (CaBA) facilitates local partnerships of stakeholders to co-create plans, align actions, and make collective decisions about efforts to improve and protect local river and stream environments. The approach offers potential for the enactment of effective, equitable and sustainable water management, but it is often unclear how such efforts are characterised practically. The multiplicity of stakeholders and complexity of issues and influences contribute to difficulty in discerning how governance change is functioning. This thesis uses a case study of the River Wear Catchment, North East England, where stakeholders have been operating CaBA, to begin to explore the patterns and drivers of actions and interactions that facilitate collaborative water-resource governance at the stakeholder level. Drawing on the concept of the catchment as a complex, social-environmental system, this research utilises insights from stakeholders and a combination of analytical methods, including a network approach and agent-based modelling, to provide new perspectives on the network structure and functioning of multi-stakeholder water management. A network approach is used to build a picture of interactions amongst stakeholders and to reveal the nature of the new relationships built through CaBA. Qualitative analysis of interview data identifies key influences on the decision-making of stakeholders and the functionality of new and existing networks of relations at three levels; the interactional, individual and contextual. Agent-based modelling is then used as a heuristic research tool to combine knowledge of relational structures with influences on stakeholder behaviour to experiment with potential dynamics of the system through a specific water-quality, problem-based scenario. The combination of these analytical methods allows a more in-depth and dynamic understanding of the patterns and processes of CaBA than has been revealed previously. The thesis ultimately comments on the utility of such methods for creating new understandings of the operationalisation of water governance processes, and for the utility of those new understandings to inform and question the facilitation of effective and satisfactory delivery of collaborative multi-stakeholder water-quality management at the catchment-scale

A cognition-analogous approach to early-stage creative ideation support in music composition software

Examination of the underlying principles of creativity reveal theoretical aspects that have not been well explored in creativity facilitation software. Most significantly of these, there has been little investigation into exploiting the distinctions between early- and late-stage creative processes and the attendant differences in cognitive processing active at those times, nor into employing the structural scaffolding embedded within creative works and the manner in which these can be extracted and harnessed to define levels of abstraction through which the material can be viewed and manipulated. The Wheelsong project was conceived to exploit these principles, in the service of devising more creatively facilitative music composition tools, by focusing on these earlier, exploratory stages of the creative process, and by privileging structure over minutiae, in alignment with the mode of cognition (and corresponding user needs) that dominate the exploratory phase. Explorations conducted with Wheelsong demonstrate that the platform embraces broad stylistic and cultural ranges of output. Experiments comparing the creative merits of early-stage, fragmentary outputs produced by Wheelsong against those produced by traditional representation schemes show a substantial improvement in both subjective quality and diversity indicators adhering to the structurally produced candidates, as measured by human judges

Race, Retreat, and Refuge: Black Voices, American Nature Writing, and Ecocritical Exile

While existing scholarship has begun to recognize the extensive environmental experience of African Americans during the nineteenth century, black-authored environmental writing from the era is conspicuously scant in studies and anthologies into the present, even in volumes devoted to ecocritically-inflected texts by authors of color. My dissertation argues that contemporary, racially-aligned divides and gaps in environmental discourse have roots in the 1840s and 50s, when the nature writing genre coalesced into its most enduring form in the works of Henry David Thoreau, literary artist turned cultural icon. This key era—during which black Americans were frequently subject to systematic deprivation of literacy, liberty, and agency—is also the period when the American nature writing genre emerged as a definitive fusion of environmental encounter and writing. I contend that there do exist published works from the mid-nineteenth century that include numerous first-person accounts of black eco-actors in intensive relationship with the natural environment, but that these narratives have been rendered invisible as nature writing (and even black writing) because although the experiences were lived and spoken by black environmental actors, they were written down by a white amanuensis. I read Thoreau’s nature writing against a little-studied volume called The Refugee, a contemporaneous collection of first-person narratives by black refugees who fled the United States to settle in the wilderness of Ontario, their accounts recorded by abolitionist Benjamin Drew. Thoreau’s work establishes a tradition of “retreat” values such as voluntary solitude, individualism, separatism, and universality. Retreat values come to have a hegemonic influence on subsequent environmental discourse. The narratives from Thoreau’s black counterparts, however, express a set of “refuge” values that emphasize community, connection, practical experience, and the recognition of inequalities and contingencies. Narratives of refuge work as corrective acts of resistance against the assumptions of easy universality in the white-authored nature retreat. In establishing and fleshing out the dialectical categories of retreat and refuge, this dissertation brings to light black-authored environmental narratives that serve to unsettle, invigorate, and reconstitute the nature writing genre

Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics

The Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics provides readers with insight into the central questions of development ethics, the main approaches to answering them, and areas for future research. Over the past seventy years, it has been argued and increasingly accepted that worthwhile development cannot be reduced to economic growth. Rather, a number of other goals must be realised: Enhancement of people's well-being Equitable sharing in benefits of development Empowerment to participate freely in development Environmental sustainability Promotion of human rights Promotion of cultural freedom, consistent with human rights Responsible conduct, including integrity over corruption Agreement that these are essential goals has also been accompanied by disagreements about how to conceptualize or apply them in different cases or contexts. Using these seven goals as an organizing principle, this handbook presents different approaches to achieving each one, drawing on academic literature, policy documents and practitioner experience. This international and multi-disciplinary handbook will be of great interest to development policy makers and program workers, students and scholars in development studies, public policy, international studies, applied ethics and other related disciplines

Research Data Management Practices And Impacts on Long-term Data Sustainability: An Institutional Exploration

With the \u27data deluge\u27 leading to an institutionalized research environment for data management, U.S. academic faculty have increasingly faced pressure to deposit research data into open online data repositories, which, in turn, is engendering a new set of practices to adapt formal mandates to local circumstances. When these practices involve reorganizing workflows to align the goals of local and institutional stakeholders, we might call them \u27data articulations.\u27 This dissertation uses interviews to establish a grounded understanding of the data articulations behind deposit in 3 studies: (1) a phenomenological study of genomics faculty data management practices; (2) a grounded theory study developing a theory of data deposit as articulation work in genomics; and (3) a comparative case study of genomics and social science researchers to identify factors associated with the institutionalization of research data management (RDM). The findings of this research offer an in-depth understanding of the data management and deposit practices of academic research faculty, and surfaced institutional factors associated with data deposit. Additionally, the studies led to a theoretical framework of data deposit to open research data repositories. The empirical insights into the impacts of institutionalization of RDM and data deposit on long-term data sustainability update our knowledge of the impacts of increasing guidelines for RDM. The work also contributes to the body of data management literature through the development of the data articulation framework which can be applied and further validated by future work. In terms of practice, the studies offer recommendations for data policymakers, data repositories, and researchers on defining strategies and initiatives to leverage data reuse and employ computational approaches to support data management and deposit