The impact of goal orientation, self-reflection and personal characteristics on the acquisition of oral presentation skills

Although many educators help others to develop oral presentation skills, little research is available to direct the instructional design activities of these educators. In the present article an explorative study on university freshman is described, in which goal-setting, self-reflection, and several characteristics of the subjects during oral presentations were analysed. The research results emphasize the critical impact of motivational constructs, such as self-efficacy and goal orientation, next to the topic of the oral presentation on the acquisition of oral presentation skills

Morphology transition at depinning in a solvable model of interface growth in a random medium

We propose a simple, exactly solvable, model of interface growth in a random medium that is a variant of the zero-temperature random-field Ising model on the Cayley tree. This model is shown to have a phase diagram (critical depinning field versus disorder strength) qualitatively similar to that obtained numerically on the cubic lattice. We then introduce a specifically tailored random graph that allows an exact asymptotic analysis of the height and width of the interface. We characterize the change of morphology of the interface as a function of the disorder strength, a change that is found to take place at a multicritical point along the depinning-transition line.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Using Semantic Web Technology to Automate Data Integration in Grid and Web Service Architectures

While the Grid and Web Services have helped us support heterogeneous resource access through the use of service oriented architectures, they have not addressed the issue of heterogeneous data representation. Since service providers often describe their service interfaces using different data models than those assumed by the client, it is common for additional processing to be required to compensate for the mismatch in data formats. By utilising technology from the Semantic Web, we are able to augment existing Web Service systems with middleware to automatically perform data harmonisation when a syntactic mismatch occurs. To achieve this, we have developed a mapping language which can be used to annotate XML data structures with OWL concepts and properties, a Mapping Language Engine to implement this language, and a Dynamic Web Service Invocation component to execute Web Services

Automated syntactic mediation for Web service integration

As the Web Services and Grid community adopt Semantic Web technology, we observe a shift towards higher-level workflow composition and service discovery practices. While this provides excellent functionality to non-expert users, more sophisticated middleware is required to hide the details of service invocation and service integration. An investigation of a common Bioinformatics use case reveals that the execution of high-level workflow designs requires additional processing to harmonise syntactically incompatible service interfaces. In this paper, we present an architecture to support the automatic reconciliation of data formats in such Web Service worklflows. The mediation of data is driven by ontologies that encapsulate the information contained in heterogeneous data structures supplying a common, conceptual data representation. Data conversion is carried out by a Configurable Mediator component, consuming mappings between \xml schemas and \owl ontologies. We describe our system and give examples of our mapping language against the background of a Bioinformatics use case

Dynamic Discovery of Composable Type Adapters for Practical Web Services Workflow

As the Web Services and Grid community adopt Semantic Web technology, we observe a shift towards higher-level workflow composition and service discovery practices. While this provides excellent functionality to non-expert users, more sophisticated middleware is required to hide the details of service integration. By investigating a common Bioinformatics use case, we observe the need for Type Adaptor components to be inserted into Workflows to harmonise syntactically incompatible interfaces. In this paper, we propose a generic Type Adaptor description approach that can be used in conjunction with existing service registries to facilitate automatic syntactic mediation. We demonstrate our implementation before evaluating both the translation approach we employ, and the relative cost of using a registry for Type Adaptor discovery

Semiotic Dynamics Solves the Symbol Grounding Problem

Language requires the capacity to link symbols (words, sentences) through the intermediary of internal representations to the physical world, a process known as symbol grounding. One of the biggest debates in the cognitive sciences concerns the question how human brains are able to do this. Do we need a material explanation or a system explanation? John Searle's well known Chinese Room thought experiment, which continues to generate a vast polemic literature of arguments and counter-arguments, has argued that autonomously establishing internal representations of the world (called 'intentionality' in philosophical parlance) is based on special properties of human neural tissue and that consequently an artificial system, such as an autonomous physical robot, can never achieve this. Here we study the Grounded Naming Game as a particular example of symbolic interaction and investigate a dynamical system that autonomously builds up and uses the semiotic networks necessary for performance in the game. We demonstrate in real experiments with physical robots that such a dynamical system indeed leads to a successful emergent communication system and hence that symbol grounding and intentionality can be explained in terms of a particular kind of system dynamics. The human brain has obviously the right mechanisms to participate in this kind of dynamics but the same dynamics can also be embodied in other types of physical systems