1,884 research outputs found
Western upturn
Federal Reserve District, 12th ; Economic conditions - West (U.S.)
Pride, Prostitution, and Pretty Paradoxes
Jennifer Levy\u27s comic, Pride, Prostitution, and Pretty Paradoxes, received honorable mention in Penn Libraries\u27 comic book contest. The comic contest was designed in conjunction with the Year of the Comic and inspired by the Penn Reading Project selection, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin.https://repository.upenn.edu/showcase_comics/1005/thumbnail.jp
Relationship Between Teton Science School Programs and Teachers\u27 Ability to Teach About the Environment
This thesis presents an analysis of 1996/97 survey research data regarding the relationship between three types of Teton Science School (TSS) programs and classroom teachers \u27 ability to teach about the environment. Based on observations by resident instructors and faculty at TSS, three research questions were developed. The primary objective of the research questions was to consider the relationship between TSS residential education programs and participating teachers\u27 ability to teach about the environment.
Analyses are based on comparing descriptive statistics of teachers who have participated in one of the three types ofTSS programs or a combination of the three types of programs. Where appropriate, first-order distributional comparisons are considered.
Findings of the thesis include: 1) in general, teachers who participate in TSS programs reported doing a great deal of teaching about the environment and have a positive attitude toward environmental education (EE); 2) both TSS residential education programs and outreach programs, although specifically designed for students, help teachers to incorporate EE into their teaching; 3) specific components of TSS teacher workshops, TSS residential education programs, and TSS outreach programs, which include spending time outdoors and observing others teach, were rated very highly by participating teachers for teachers\u27 ability to incorporate EE into their teaching.
This thesis supports the idea that teacher training in environmental education can include programs that are designed for students, specifically participation in residential education programs. This thesis contributes to the future design of programs at TSS and similar centers and to the literature on long-term evaluation studies in EE, specifically teacher training in EE
Prompting is not a substitute for probability measurements in large language models
Prompting is now a dominant method for evaluating the linguistic knowledge of
large language models (LLMs). While other methods directly read out models'
probability distributions over strings, prompting requires models to access
this internal information by processing linguistic input, thereby implicitly
testing a new type of emergent ability: metalinguistic judgment. In this study,
we compare metalinguistic prompting and direct probability measurements as ways
of measuring models' linguistic knowledge. Broadly, we find that LLMs'
metalinguistic judgments are inferior to quantities directly derived from
representations. Furthermore, consistency gets worse as the prompt query
diverges from direct measurements of next-word probabilities. Our findings
suggest that negative results relying on metalinguistic prompts cannot be taken
as conclusive evidence that an LLM lacks a particular linguistic
generalization. Our results also highlight the value that is lost with the move
to closed APIs where access to probability distributions is limited.Comment: Camera-ready version for EMNLP 202
Evaluation of quantum dot conjugated antibodies for immunofluorescent labelling of cellular targets
Semiconductor quantum dots (Qdots) have been utilised as probes in fluorescence microscopy and provide an alternative to fluorescent dyes and fluorescent proteins due to their brightness, photostability, and the possibility to excite different Qdots with a single wavelength. In spite of these attractive properties, their implemenation by biologists has been somewhat limited and only a few Qdot conjugates are commercially available for the labelling of cellular targets. Although many protocols have been reported for the specific labelling of proteins with Qdots, the majority of these relied on Qdot-conjugated antibodies synthesised specifically by the authors (and therefore not widely available), which limits the scope of applications and complicates replication. Here, the specificity of a commercially available, Qdot-conjugated secondary antibody (Qdot-Ab) was tested against several primary IgG antibodies. The antigens were labelled simultaneously with a fluorescent dye coupled to a secondary antibody (Dye-Ab) and the Qdot-Ab. Although, the Dye-Ab labelled all of the intended target proteins, the Qdot-Ab was found bound to only some of the protein targets in the cytosol and could not reach the nucleus, even after extensive cell permeabilisation
A Rate–Distortion view of human pragmatic reasoning
What computational principles underlie human pragmatic reasoning? A prominent approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework, which formulates pragmatic reasoning as probabilistic speakers and listeners recursively reasoning about each other. While RSA enjoys broad empirical support, it is not yet clear whether the dynamics of such recursive reasoning may be governed by a general optimization principle. Here, we present a novel analysis of the RSA framework that addresses this question. First, we show that RSA recursion implements an alternating maximization for optimizing a tradeoff between expected utility and communicative effort. On that basis, we study the dynamics of RSA recursion and disconfirm the conjecture that expected utility is guaranteed to improve with recursion depth. Second, we show that RSA can be grounded in Rate-Distortion theory, while maintaining a similar ability to account for human behavior and avoiding a bias of RSA toward random utterance production. This work furthers the mathematical understanding of RSA models, and suggests that general information-theoretic principles may give rise to human pragmatic reasoning
Expectations over Unspoken Alternatives Predict Pragmatic Inferences
Scalar inferences (SI) are a signature example of how humans interpret
language based on unspoken alternatives. While empirical studies have
demonstrated that human SI rates are highly variable -- both within instances
of a single scale, and across different scales -- there have been few proposals
that quantitatively explain both cross- and within-scale variation.
Furthermore, while it is generally assumed that SIs arise through reasoning
about unspoken alternatives, it remains debated whether humans reason about
alternatives as linguistic forms, or at the level of concepts. Here, we test a
shared mechanism explaining SI rates within and across scales: context-driven
expectations about the unspoken alternatives. Using neural language models to
approximate human predictive distributions, we find that SI rates are captured
by the expectedness of the strong scalemate as an alternative. Crucially,
however, expectedness robustly predicts cross-scale variation only under a
meaning-based view of alternatives. Our results suggest that pragmatic
inferences arise from context-driven expectations over alternatives, and these
expectations operate at the level of concepts.Comment: To appear in TACL (pre-MIT Press publication version
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