Are you sitting down? Towards cognitive performance informed design

With many digital interaction designs, we can choose to operate the devices from a variety of postures – what we call self-positioning. In this paper we test two of these choices – sitting vs standing against standard neuropsychological assessments of cognitive executive function. We show that such choices do have significant effects on various cognitive processes. We argue therefore that there is an opportunity to extend parameters of digital interaction design to include self-position in order to optimize that design’s effectiveness for its intended activity

Developments in Communication Ethics: The Ethics Commission, Code of Professional Responsibilities, Credo for Ethical Communication

This article looks at the state of communication ethics study and practice in the U.S. Ethics has always been a dimension of communication theory and practice. But the definition of its role and the awareness of and emphasis given to it varies from communication theorist to theorist and practitioner to practitioner. These variations can be traced from the rhetorical theories and practices of ancient Greece to the present. Similarly, the approach to and emphasis given ethics as an element in communication has varied in the communication field\u27s teaching and research. The academic units historically identified as speech, speech communication, communication arts or by similar rubrics typically are not preparing individuals to enter a specific profession. Teachers and students in these units working within the prevailing standards of the culture rarely identified ethical issues for detailed specific treatment and emphasis. The treatment of ethical issues depended on the emphasis given by the text, the instructor and classroom events. In contrast, journalism places significant, overt emphasis on ethical practices. Journalism texts stress the ethical requirements of the profession. This emphasis appears in introductory texts and there are numerous textbooks devoted to journalism ethics. Newspapers and magazines provide ethical codes that govern the work of reporters, photographers and editors. Violations of the code requirements result in censure and in some recent prominent cases firing of the individual

Scholarship Reconsidered: The Changing Reward System

This article proposes a paradigm shift in the reward system within the U.S. higher education. The thesis of the paper is that changing the reward system to respond to the current criticism of higher education being voiced in the larger society and manifest in legislative actions in reducing funds available to higher education and efforts to monitor or control certain aspects of the higher education process--accountability, outcome measures, workload studies, hours of classroom contact--to a degree that may be perceived as being micromanagement requires a paradigm shift by those who are within the academy. Typically one would think of a paradigm shift as occurring within a discipline or field. But changing the reward system in higher education will require what may be seen, metaphorically, as a paradigm shift as well

Development of Future Habitat Suitability Models for the Swift fox (Vulpes velox) in the American Southwest

The Swift fox (Vupes velox) is a habitat specialist species of short or mixed grass prairie. We used bioclimatic envelope models and habitat suitability models under three future climate scenarios (based on CO2 emission rates) from "www.climatewizard.org":http://www.climatewizard.org to fit species distribution models, using the maximum entropy method. Current suitable habitat for the swift fox covers an area of 161,984 km2. Under the future climate scenarios the habitat decreases by 27% in the low emission scenario, 63% for medium emissions, and 53% in the high emissions scenario. This decrease in suitable habitat corresponded to an overall decrease in total grassland landcover. The current total area of grassland is 423,440 km2. Under the future climate scenarios the grassland decreased by 12% in the low emissions scenario, 24% for medium emissions, and 16% in the high emissions scenario

Self-Distillation for Gaussian Process Regression and Classification

We propose two approaches to extend the notion of knowledge distillation to Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and Gaussian Process Classification (GPC); data-centric and distribution-centric. The data-centric approach resembles most current distillation techniques for machine learning, and refits a model on deterministic predictions from the teacher, while the distribution-centric approach, re-uses the full probabilistic posterior for the next iteration. By analyzing the properties of these approaches, we show that the data-centric approach for GPR closely relates to known results for self-distillation of kernel ridge regression and that the distribution-centric approach for GPR corresponds to ordinary GPR with a very particular choice of hyperparameters. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the distribution-centric approach for GPC approximately corresponds to data duplication and a particular scaling of the covariance and that the data-centric approach for GPC requires redefining the model from a Binomial likelihood to a continuous Bernoulli likelihood to be well-specified. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed approaches are the first to formulate knowledge distillation specifically for Gaussian Process models.Comment: 10 pages; code at https://github.com/Kennethborup/gaussian_process_self_distillatio

Mammalian Distribution Within Biotic Communities of Northeastern Jewell County, Kansas

The purpose of this investigation was threefold. First, to obtain as complete a list as possible of mammals occuring in the area through collecting and observational procedures. Second, to determine their specific distribution within the study area, and third, to correlate and elucidate the relationships between their distribution and the major vegetational regions within the study area.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/fort_hays_studies_series/1059/thumbnail.jp