Can a dog be jealous?

Whether humans alone experience complex emotions like jealousy or envy remains hotly debated, partly because of the difficulty of measuring them without a verbal report. Cook, Berns and colleagues use functional brain imaging to identify in dogs neural responses very similar to those evoked by jealousy in humans. When dogs see their caregiver reward a facsimile dog, their amygdala is activated and the strength of this response predicts aggressive behavior — just as jealousy leads to aggression in humans. The authors conclude that dogs feel something very similar to human jealousy. This novel and creative study tackles one of the most vexing challenges in neuroscience — understanding the unstated thoughts and feelings of others — with practical applications that go beyond getting closer to man’s best friend. The issue of whether a dog can be jealous nevertheless remains far from settled, as we discuss below

Numerical investigation of the conditioning for plane wave discontinuous Galerkin methods

We present a numerical study to investigate the conditioning of the plane wave discontinuous Galerkin discretization of the Helmholtz problem. We provide empirical evidence that the spectral condition number of the plane wave basis on a single element depends algebraically on the mesh size and the wave number, and exponentially on the number of plane wave directions; we also test its dependence on the element shape. We show that the conditioning of the global system can be improved by orthogonalization of the local basis functions with the modified Gram-Schmidt algorithm, which results in significantly fewer GMRES iterations for solving the discrete problem iteratively.Comment: Submitted as a conference proceeding; minor revisio

Critical educational praxis in university ecosystems: enablers and constraints

Universities serve several important functions in society today through research, education, and community engagement, not least helping people to live meaningfully in society and create a world worth living in. A kind of practice that seems particularly important in fulfilling such responsibilities is critical educational praxis, a social-justice oriented, educational practice/praxis, with a focus on asking critical questions and creating conditions for positive change. Yet, the contemporary university is not exactly a niche for critical educational praxis. There are practices and arrangements within higher education that make the enactment of critical educational praxis challenging. This paper explores this concern by explicating the notion of critical educational praxis and examining enablers and constraints for critical educational praxis drawing on an empirical study conducted in one university setting. Our aim is to prompt consideration of the kind of university ecosystems currently being created, and the implications for academic communities and society.</p

An integrated hardware/software design methodology for signal processing systems

This paper presents a new methodology for design and implementation of signal processing systems on system-on-chip (SoC) platforms. The methodology is centered on the use of lightweight application programming interfaces for applying principles of dataflow design at different layers of abstraction. The development processes integrated in our approach are software implementation, hardware implementation, hardware-software co-design, and optimized application mapping. The proposed methodology facilitates development and integration of signal processing hardware and software modules that involve heterogeneous programming languages and platforms. As a demonstration of the proposed design framework, we present a dataflow-based deep neural network (DNN) implementation for vehicle classification that is streamlined for real-time operation on embedded SoC devices. Using the proposed methodology, we apply and integrate a variety of dataflow graph optimizations that are important for efficient mapping of the DNN system into a resource constrained implementation that involves cooperating multicore CPUs and field-programmable gate array subsystems. Through experiments, we demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness with which different design transformations can be applied and integrated across multiple scales of the targeted computing system

Kohti reflektiivistä katsomuskasvatusta

Tässä artikkelissa käsitellään reflektiivisyyttä katsomuskasvatuksen kontekstissa filosofisista ja teoreettisista näkökulmista. Katsomuskasvatus tulkitaan tässä laajasti: se kattaa elämänkatsomustiedon ja uskontojen opetuksen lisäksi kaiken kasvatuksen, joka tukee katsomuksen muodostumista ja identiteettityötä. Reflektiivinen katsomuskasvatus asettuu vastakohdaksi indoktrinatiiviselle kasvatukselle, jossa pyritään iskostamaan tietynlaiseen oppiin tai uskomusjärjestelmään perustuva ajattelutapa oppilaiden mieliin. Reflektiivisen katsomuskasvatuksen tarkoitus on antaa lapselle ja nuorelle välineitä määritellä identiteettiään ja maailmankuvaansa. Artikkelissa esitetään uusi reflektiivisen katsomuskasvatuksen malli, jossa sovelletaan indoktrinaation kriittistä teoriaa sekä identiteetin ja kriittisen reflektion käsitteitä. Mallin pohjalta ehdotetaan, että katsomusreflektiivinen kasvatus edellyttää sekä kasvattajan minäpositioon kohdistuvaa identiteettireflektiivisyyttä että yhteisöön ja siinä vallitseviin kasvatuskäytäntöihin kohdistuvaa käytäntöreflektiivisyyttä.In this article, reflectivity is discussed in the context of worldview education from the philosophical and theoretical perspectives. Worldview education is understood in a broad sense: it covers not only teaching (secular) Ethics and religions but all education that supports worldview and identity work. Reflective worldview education contrasts with indoctrinative education, which seeks to instill a given doctrine or a belief system in  students’ minds. The purpose of reflective worldview education is to provide children and young people with tools to achieve their personal identity and worldview. In this article, we introduce a novel model for reflective worldview education. In this model, theories of critical indoctrination, identity work and critical reflection are applied. Based on the model, it is concluded that worldview-reflective education requires both identity-reflectivity about the positioned self of the educator, and a practice-reflective approach to the prevailing educational practices

On stability of discretizations of the Helmholtz equation (extended version)

We review the stability properties of several discretizations of the Helmholtz equation at large wavenumbers. For a model problem in a polygon, a complete $k$-explicit stability (including $k$-explicit stability of the continuous problem) and convergence theory for high order finite element methods is developed. In particular, quasi-optimality is shown for a fixed number of degrees of freedom per wavelength if the mesh size $h$ and the approximation order $p$ are selected such that $kh/p$ is sufficiently small and $p = O(\log k)$, and, additionally, appropriate mesh refinement is used near the vertices. We also review the stability properties of two classes of numerical schemes that use piecewise solutions of the homogeneous Helmholtz equation, namely, Least Squares methods and Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods. The latter includes the Ultra Weak Variational Formulation

Hyperpolarizability of plasmonic meta-atoms in metasurfaces

Plasmonic metasurfaces are promising as enablers of nanoscale nonlinear optics and flat nonlinear optical components. Nonlinear optical responses of such metasurfaces are determined by the nonlinear optical properties of individual nanostructured plasmonic meta-atoms, which are the building blocks of the metasurfaces. Unfortunately, no simple methods exist to determine the nonlinear coefficients (hyperpolarizabilities) of the meta-atoms hindering designing of nonlinear metasurfaces. Here, we develop the equivalent RLC circuit model of such meta-atoms to estimate their second-order nonlinear optical parameter i.e. the first-order hyperpolarizability in the optical spectral range. In parallel, we extract from second-harmonic generation experiments the spectrum of the 1st-order hyperpolarizabilities of individual meta-atoms consisting of asymmetrically shaped (elongated) plasmonic nanoprisms. Moreover, we verify our results using nonlinear hydrodynamic-FDTD and with calculations based on nonlinear scattering theory. All three approaches: analytical, experimental, and computational, yield results that agree very well. Our empirical RLC model can thus be used as a simple tool to enable efficient design of nonlinear plasmonic metasurfaces

Receptor for advanced glycation endproducts (RAGE) deficiency protects against MPTP toxicity

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Peer reviewedPublisher PD