Surviving, and Maybe Thriving, on Vouchers

The Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the new law restructuring the nation's workforce development system, marks a significant change for job seekers and the practitioners who serve them. Under WIA, eligible job seekers will be issued Individual Training Accounts (ITAs), or vouchers, that can be used to enter training programs from a state-approved list. Whether vouchers will meet the goal of improving the quality of training will not be known for some time. However, the impact on organizations that serve job seekers will be immediate. Surviving, and Maybe Thriving, on Vouchers offers workforce development practitioners critical lessons about how they can adapt to this new environment, based on the experiences of organizations in jurisdictions that are already relying on vouchers

Is Consciousness Computable? Quantifying Integrated Information Using Algorithmic Information Theory

In this article we review Tononi's (2008) theory of consciousness as integrated information. We argue that previous formalizations of integrated information (e.g. Griffith, 2014) depend on information loss. Since lossy integration would necessitate continuous damage to existing memories, we propose it is more natural to frame consciousness as a lossless integrative process and provide a formalization of this idea using algorithmic information theory. We prove that complete lossless integration requires noncomputable functions. This result implies that if unitary consciousness exists, it cannot be modelled computationally.Comment: Maguire, P., Moser, P., Maguire, R. & Griffith, V. (2014). Is consciousness computable? Quantifying integrated information using algorithmic information theory. In P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, & B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Societ