Biologically inspired distributed machine cognition: a new formal approach to hyperparallel computation

The irresistable march toward multiple-core chip technology presents currently intractable pdrogramming challenges. High level mental processes in many animals, and their analogs for social structures, appear similarly massively parallel, and recent mathematical models addressing them may be adaptable to the multi-core programming problem

Media Multitasking Among American Youth: Prevalence, Predictors and Pairings

In recent years, the issue of media multitasking has sparked a broad discussion about the potential impact on children and youth and has raised concerns among non-profits about how best to engage young people with social marketing campaigns.To help advance understanding about the issues that surround media multitasking, the Kaiser Family Foundation hosted a forum, The Teen Media Juggling Act: The Implications of Media Multitasking Among American Youth.Forum participants included executives from MTV and eMarketer, a leading market research firm, along with one of the nation's top cognitive neuroscientists, and experts on media use among young people

Institutional Cognition

We generalize a recent mathematical analysis of Bernard Baars' model of human consciousness to explore analogous, but far more complicated, phenomena of institutional cognition. Individual consciousness is limited to a single, tunable, giant component of interacting cogntivie modules, instantiating a Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, seem able to multitask, supporting several such giant components simultaneously, although their behavior remains constrained to a topology generated by cultural context and by the path-dependence inherent to organizational history. Surprisingly, such multitasking, while clearly limiting the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, does not eliminate it. This suggests that organizations (or machines) explicitly designed along these principles, while highly efficient at certain sets of tasks, would still be subject to analogs of the subtle failure patterns explored in Wallace (2005b, 2006). We compare and contrast our results with recent work on collective efficacy and collective consciousness

Institutional paraconsciousness and its pathologies

This analysis extends a recent mathematical treatment of the Baars consciousness model to analogous, but far more complicated, phenomena of institutional cognition. Individual consciousness is limited to a single, tunable, giant component of interacting cognitive modules, instantiating a Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, support several, sometimes many, such giant components simultaneously, although their behavior remains constrained to a topology generated by cultural context and by the path-dependence inherent to organizational history. Such highly parallel multitasking - institutional paraconsciousness - while clearly limiting inattentional blindness and the consequences of failures within individual workspaces, does not eliminate them, and introduces new characteristic dysfunctions involving the distortion of information sent between global workspaces. Consequently, organizations (or machines designed along these principles), while highly efficient at certain kinds of tasks, remain subject to canonical and idiosyncratic failure patterns similar to, but more complicated than, those afflicting individuals. Remediation is complicated by the manner in which pathogenic externalities can write images of themselves on both institutional function and therapeutic intervention, in the context of relentless market selection pressures. The approach is broadly consonant with recent work on collective efficacy, collective consciousness, and distributed cognition

Links of personality traits to media multitasking: Conscientiousness predicts mobile phone use in the college classroom

The present study investigated the relation among mobile phone use in the college classroom and Big Five personality traits, which had not been addressed in previous research. Undergraduate students (83 males and 92 females) whose average age was 20 (SD = 5.1) completed questionnaires on demographic characteristics, mobile phone use, impulse control, and Big Five personality traits. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to examine whether each personality trait made a unique contribution in predicting mobile phone use in the classroom after taking into consideration the contribution of impulse control in this prediction. The results show that impulse control and conscientiousness are significant, independent predictors of in-class mobile phone use over and above each other after controlling for demographic characteristics and general mobile phone use. These results suggest that some aspects of conscientiousness unexplained by impulse control may also be related to media multitasking in the college classroom, and the present study sheds light on the importance of continued research on the relation between conscientiousness and in-class media multitasking

Management learning at the speed of life:Designing reflective, creative, and collaborative spaces for millenials

This paper introduces the concept of "management learning at the speed of life" as a metaphor to inspire millenials. Millenials may face three major problems in relation to management learning: lack of concentration, lack of engagement, and lack of socialization. Management learning at the speed of life addresses these potential problems through three dimensions: reflective, creative, and collaborative learning. This paper illustrates the benefits of reflective, creative, and collaborative spaces for millenials using practices from leadership and personal development courses that were offered over seven years in Canada, Turkey, and the UK. These courses incorporated the latest technology that brought the course activities up to the speed of life

Media multitasking in adolescence

Media use has been on the rise in adolescents overall, and in particular, the amount of media multitasking—multiple media consumed simultaneously, such as having a text message conversation while watching TV—has been increasing. In adults, heavy media multitasking has been linked with poorer performance on a number of laboratory measures of cognition, but no relationship has yet been established between media-multitasking behavior and real-world outcomes. Examining individual differences across a group of adolescents, we found that more frequent media multitasking in daily life was associated with poorer performance on statewide standardized achievement tests of math and English in the classroom, poorer performance on behavioral measures of executive function (working memory capacity) in the laboratory, and traits of greater impulsivity and lesser growth mindset. Greater media multitasking had a relatively circumscribed set of associations, and was not related to behavioral measures of cognitive processing speed, implicit learning, or manual dexterity, or to traits of grit and conscientiousness. Thus, individual differences in adolescent media multitasking were related to specific differences in executive function and in performance on real-world academic achievement measures: More media multitasking was associated with poorer executive function ability, worse academic achievement, and a reduced growth mindset.Bill & Melinda Gates Foundatio

The Role of Pragmatics in Cross-cultural

We here try to find out the role of pragmatics in the cross-cultural contexts. Pragmatics is the way we convey meaning through communication (Deda, 2013). Other factors beyond competence are the adjustments between contexts and situations that can change the ordinary meaning of elements/sentences according to the language situation. The culture of an organization decides the way employees behave amongst themselves as well as the people outside the organization. Pragmatic culture more emphasis is placed on the clients and the external parties. Customer satisfaction is the main motive of the employees in a pragmatic culture. In linguistics, pragmatic competence is the ability to use language effectively in a contextually appropriate fashion. Pragmatic competence is a fundamental aspect of a more general communicative competence