Derivatives of 3-Amino-4-Methoxytoluene

This product, known technically as cresidine, was first obtained by Hofmann and Miller [Ber., 14, 573 (1881)]. Before the present work, however, only two substitution products had been obtained from it, viz., the 6-nitro and the 6-chloro derivatives. In this work a monobrom derivative has been prepared and its structure established. It readily forms a quaternary ammonium iodide, therefore the bromine atom does not occupy position 2, adjacent to the amino group, as this would hinder the formation of such a salt. 3-5-Dibrom-4-methoxytoluene was synthesized and found to be different from the dibrom derivative obtained from the compound in question by replacement of the amino group by bromine. This leaves the structure of the monobrom derivative as 3-amino- 4-methoxy-6-bromotoluene. The new bromine compound was characterized by the preparation of the following derivatives: 3-acetylamino-4-methoxy-6-bromotoluene, 3-benzoylamino-4-methoxy-6-bromotoluene (3-acetylamino-4-methoxy-6-bromobenzoic acid.

Strategies for distributing goals in a team of cooperative agents

This paper addresses the problem of distributing goals to individual agents inside a team of cooperative agents. It shows that several parameters determine the goals of particular agents. The first parameter is the set of goals allocated to the team; the second parameter is the description of the real actual world; the third parameter is the description of the agents' ability and commitments. The last parameter is the strategy the team agrees on: for each precise goal, the team may define several strategies which are orders between agents representing, for instance, their relative competence or their relative cost. This paper also shows how to combine strategies. The method used here assumes an order of priority between strategie

Models of Plans to Support Communication: An Initial Report

Agents collaborating to achieve a goal bring to their joint activity different beliefs about ways in which to achieve the goal and the actions necessary for doing so. Thus, a model of collaboration must provide a way of representing and distinguishing among agents’ beliefs and of stating the ways in which the intentions of different agents contribute to achieving their goal. Furthermore, in collaborative activity, collaboration occurs in the planning process itself. Thus, rather than modelling plan recognition, per se, what must be modelled is the augmentation of beliefs about the actions of multiple agents and their intentions. In this paper, we modify and expand the SharedPlan model of collaborative behavior (Grosz and Sidner 1990). We present an algorithm for updating an agent’s beliefs about a partial SharedPlan and describe an initial implementation of this algorithm in the domain of network management.Engineering and Applied Science

Development of a new integration algorithm for parallel implementation of the finite element elasto-plastic analysis

The accurate integration of stress-strain relations is an important factor in element analysis for elasto-plastic problems. The conventional method for this problem is the Euler algorithm which divides the whole integration process into a number of smaller substeps of equal size. It is difficult to control the errors in such integration scheme. In this paper, we will present a new algorithm for integrating strain-stress relations. It is based on the third and the fourth order Runge-Kutta method. This substepping scheme controls the errors in the integration process by adjusting the substep size automatically. In order to implement the substepping scheme on parallel systems, a parallel preconditioned conjugate gradient method is developed. The resulting algorithms have been implemented on a parallel environment defined by a cluster of workstation and their performance will be presented

Reducing the Overlap Between Machiavellianism and Subclinical Psychopathy: The M7 and P7 Scales

Machiavellianism (Mach) and subclinical psychopathy are two widely studied antagonistic personality traits with distinct theoretical conceptualizations. Mach is conceptualized by strategic deviousness, cynicism, and pragmatic morality, whereas subclinical psychopathy is conceptualized by impulsive antisocial tendencies, callousness, and rule-breaking. However, existing measures of the two traits are typically highly correlated and have very similar nomological networks. Notably, even though psychopathy scales should be more strongly positively associated with antisocial impulsivity and more strongly negatively associated with conscientiousness than Mach scales, existing Mach and psychopathy scales tend to be similarly related to these constructs. We created a new Mach scale, the M7, and a new psychopathy scale, the P7, by selecting items from existing Mach and psychopathy scales on the basis of the correlations of these items with antisocial impulsivity and conscientiousness. Across three studies (combined N = 4,607), the M7 and P7 showed acceptable to good psychometric properties in terms of closeness to unidimensionality, measurement precision, temporal stability, measurement invariance across language and gender groups, and convergent and discriminant validity (nomological network, self-other agreement, and interpersonal perceptions in group interactions). Most importantly, the new scales assess clearly distinct latent traits that are more in line with their theoretical conceptualizations than established scales are

Situation based strategic positioning for coordinating a team of homogeneous agents

. In this paper we are proposing an approach for coordinating a team ofhomogeneous agents based on a flexible common Team Strategy as well as onthe concepts of Situation Based Strategic Positioning and Dynamic Positioningand Role Exchange. We also introduce an Agent Architecture including a specifichigh-level decision module capable of implementing this strategy. Ourproposal is based on the formalization of what is a team strategy for competingwith an opponent team having opposite goals. A team strategy is composed of aset of agent types and a set of tactics, which are also composed of several formations.Formations are used for different situations and assign each agent a defaultspatial positioning and an agent type (defining its behaviour at several levels).Agents reactivity is also introduced for appropriate response to the dynamicsof the current situation. However, in our approach this is done in a way thatpreserves team coherence instead of permitting uncoordinated agent behaviour.We have applied, with success, this coordination approach to the RoboSoccersimulated domain. The FC Portugal team, developed using this approach wonthe RoboCup2000 (simulation league) European and World championshipsscoring a total of 180 goals and conceding none

Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody, and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of 35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling changed

Incremental Negotiation and Coalition Formation for Resource-bounded Agents: Preliminary Report

We explore a class of task allocation mechanisms that are incremental and can be tuned to the computational resource limitations of agents. Our focus is on distributed task and resource allocation problems involving coalitions of cooperative agents that must negotiate among themselves on the distribution of tasks. Our emphasis is on the design of mechanisms with desirable real-time and dynamic properties. We describe preliminary work in four areas: the design of what we call time-bounded commitment networks that are extensions of task-auctions and contract nets and that support a notion of reciprocal commitment; anytime algorithms for combinatorial task allocation that take into account both positive and negative task interactions, organizational frameworks for efficient task allocation in highly dynamic domains involving hundreds of agents, and logical tools for analyzing dynamic emergent properties of agent societies.Engineering and Applied Science

Embodied Knowledge: Writing Researchers’ Bodies Into Qualitative Health Research

After more than a decade of postpositivist health care research and an increase in narrative writing practices, social scientific, qualitative health research remains largely disembodied. The erasure of researchers’ bodies from conventional accounts of research obscures the complexities of knowledge production and yields deceptively tidy accounts of research. Qualitative health research could benefit significantly from embodied writing that explores the discursive relationship between the body and the self and the semantic challenges of writing the body by incorporating bodily details and experiences into research accounts. Researchers can represent their bodies by incorporating autoethnographic narratives, drawing on all of their senses, interrogating the connections between their bodily signifiers and research processes, and experimenting with the semantics of self and body. The author illustrates opportunities for embodiment with excerpts from an ethnography of a geriatric oncology team and explores implications of embodied writing for the practice of qualitative health research

Fargo: Seeing the significance of style in television poetics?

This article explores the adaptation of the original film to television and how a strain of art or independent cinema contributed to the development of the first series of Fargo (2014–present). By making this comparison, the transition to television of the storyworld established by the Coen brothers raises questions about who is talking in the TV drama – the Coens or makers of the series. At the same time, Fargo can be more easily explained and understood as a strategy by writers, directors and producers that further complicate ideas to do with Noah Hawley, as its showrunner and the show’s single-author status. In Fargo, fidelity to the Coen brothers as a testament to the memory of the original film is set against questions about the reliability of storytelling using complex imagery. By alternating between different levels of narration signified by its stylistic tonal qualities, Fargo succeeds in producing multiple meanings, representations and effects that call attention to textual pleasures in the complex television series