Ethical codes in adult education as subjects of comparative analysis

In the process of professionalisation of adult educators, a significant role is played by qualification, educational and evaluation standards. However, they do not often deal with ethical questions which can arise from their relationship with participants of the educational process, from their membership in professional associations or from the relationship with an educational institution. This gap is filled by ethical codes, which are not legal standards but they are adult educators’ voluntary obligations. The importance of codes was a reason for the comparison of 26 ethical codes aiming to find their common features and non-standard regulations, to point out the prevailing structures and contents and disciplinary measures when the code is violated. The contribution of this study is to enrich the andragogical theory with a deeper understanding of the purpose of ethical codes, their structural elements and content. From the point of view of education policy, an analysis of codes can work as a specific monitoring of the market of educational services. It can serve for designing certification courses of adult educators as well as subjects in graduate studies in andragogy. The limitation of this study lies in the fact that the selection of codes was limited to codes written in four languages; however, one of them was English, which is a world language. As for the territorial scope, codes cover North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. (DIPF/Orig.

Auto-Regressive Next-Token Predictors are Universal Learners

Large language models display remarkable capabilities in logical and mathematical reasoning, allowing them to solve complex tasks. Interestingly, these abilities emerge in networks trained on the simple task of next-token prediction. In this work, we present a theoretical framework for studying auto-regressive next-token predictors. We demonstrate that even simple models such as linear next-token predictors, trained on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data, can approximate any function efficiently computed by a Turing machine. We introduce a new complexity measure -- length complexity -- which measures the number of intermediate tokens in a CoT sequence required to approximate some target function, and analyze the interplay between length complexity and other notions of complexity. Finally, we show experimentally that simple next-token predictors, such as linear networks and shallow Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), display non-trivial performance on text generation and arithmetic tasks. Our results demonstrate that the power of language models can be attributed, to a great extent, to the auto-regressive next-token training scheme, and not necessarily to a particular choice of architecture

A Phenomenological-Hermeneutic Study of Adept Practitioners\u27 Experiences of Focusing

This study presents a qualitative analysis of six accounts of focusing, a method of embodied reflection. Six expert practitioners were interviewed, and each participant`s account was brought under two rounds of analysis. First, a modified descriptive phenomenological analysis was performed on a portion of the interview in which the participant described a particular focusing experience. This was followed by an interpretive phenomenological analysis of the participant`s interview as a whole. Analyses resulted in the identification of explicit and implicit themes that were constitutive of focusing experiences across participants. Several themes that were identified include: the importance of social support and validation for experiences that depart from the norms and values of materialist culture, the exquisite gentleness and receptivity of the focusers` attitude toward their experiences, and the dialogical qualities of the practice. The details and significance of the dialogue, which is a synesthetic exchange between the focuser and responses arising in her perceptual field, is explored in the discussion. Attention is paid to the fluid and at times ambiguous self-other experience suggested by the dialogue, and an archetypal framework for interpreting this dialogue is introduced. Additionally, the two phenomenological methods employed are reviewed and compared for their relative merit in the study of focusing