Egypt’s civil society crackdown: A test for US-Egyptian relations

By Sarah E. Yerkes. The relationship between the United States and Egypt has reached one of its lowest points in decades following a series of steps by the Egyptian military to prevent the operation of both international and domestic civil society organisations. Culminating in a raid on the offices of several NGOs on December 29, the Egyptian military regime (known as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF) has initiated a harsh crackdown on Egyptian human rights organisations as well as US and European NGOs operating in Egypt. This crackdown is a test for the US-Egyptian relationship. Will the United States stand by as the SCAF rolls back Egyptian rights of association and expression? Or will the US government use the large weapon in its arsenal – $1.3 billion in military aid – to show the SCAF that its behavior has consequences

Nurses\u27 Alumnae Association Bulletin - Volume 2 Number 2

Coming Events Come On, \u2732 Ballot for Officers Hospital News Legislation Scholarship Fund Notes Refresher Course Correspondence Use of Heparin in Modern Treatment The Jefferson Medical College Library Nursing School Education Action - Camera - Seniors Degrees Received Engagements Weddings Births Deaths Attention Alumnae Bulletin Progress Of Special Interest Army Assignments Organized Staff Meeting

Emotional engagements predict and enhance social cognition in young chimpanzees

Social cognition in infancy is evident in coordinated triadic engagements, that is, infants attending jointly with social partners and objects. Current evolutionary theories of primate social cognition tend to highlight species differences in cognition based on human-unique cooperative motives. We consider a developmental model in which engagement experiences produce differential outcomes. We conducted a 10-year-long study in which two groups of laboratory-raised chimpanzee infants were given quantifiably different engagement experiences. Joint attention, cooperativeness, affect, and different levels of cognition were measured in 5- to 12-month-old chimpanzees, and compared to outcomes derived from a normative human database. We found that joint attention skills significantly improved across development for all infants, but by 12 months, the humans significantly surpassed the chimpanzees. We found that cooperativeness was stable in the humans, but by 12 months, the chimpanzee group given enriched engagement experiences significantly surpassed the humans. Past engagement experiences and concurrent affect were significant unique predictors of both joint attention and cooperativeness in 5- to 12-month-old chimpanzees. When engagement experiences and concurrent affect were statistically controlled, joint attention and cooperation were not associated. We explain differential social cognition outcomes in terms of the significant influences of previous engagement experiences and affect, in addition to cognition. Our study highlights developmental processes that underpin the emergence of social cognition in support of evolutionary continuity

Directing the students’ mind games : A game theoretical view of the learning process

Experimental data consistently shows that the students’ beliefs about their own academic ability have a significant effect on their performance and their level of engagement. The aim of this paper is to offer an original game-theoretical model that supports and explains such empirical data: the student is modelled as being engaged in a game, in which his/her decisions on how much to study are affected by his/her self-efficacy beliefs or self-confidence. It is argued that if game theory is used to analyse such games, it is possible to gain insights that might otherwise be missed. One of the implications for practice is that the tutor is in a position to intervene in the interaction involving the student and the student’s own beliefs. Attempting to enhance the student’s self-confidence levels through feedback is likely to result in greater engagement and better performance, even in cases where the student’s current performance does not inspire very encouraging feed-backPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Primate Numerical Competence: Contributions Toward Understanding Nonhuman Cognition

Nonhuman primates represent the most significant extant species for comparative studies of cognition, including such complex phenomena as numerical competence, among others. Studies of numerical skills in monkeys and apes have a long, though somewhat sparse history, although questions for current empirical studies remain of great interest to several fields, including comparative, developmental, and cognitive psychology; anthropology; ethology; and philosophy, to name a few. In addition to demonstrated similarities in complex information processing, empirical studies of a variety of potential cognitive limitations or constraints have provided insights into similarities and differences across the primate order, and continue to offer theoretical and pragmatic directions for future research. An historical overview of primate numerical studies is presented, as well as a summary of the 17-year research history, including recent findings, of the Comparative Cognition Project at The Ohio State University Chimpanzee Center. Overall, the archival literature on number-related skills and counting in nonhuman primates offers important implications for revising our thinking about comparative neuroanatomy, cross-species (human/ape) cognitive similarities and differences, and the evolution of cognition represented by the primate continuum

Natural and projectively equivariant quantizations by means of Cartan Connections

The existence of a natural and projectively equivariant quantization in the sense of Lecomte [20] was proved recently by M. Bordemann [4], using the framework of Thomas-Whitehead connections. We give a new proof of existence using the notion of Cartan projective connections and we obtain an explicit formula in terms of these connections. Our method yields the existence of a projectively equivariant quantization if and only if an \sl(m+1,\R)-equivariant quantization exists in the flat situation in the sense of [18], thus solving one of the problems left open by M. Bordemann.Comment: 13 page

Perry County - Place Names

Place names of Perry County, Kentucky

About the Importance of Interface Complexity and Entropy for Online Information Sharing

In this paper, we describe two experiments that show the powerful influence of interface complexity and entropy on online information sharing behaviour. 134 participants were asked to do a creativity test and answer six open questions against three different screen backgrounds of increasing complexity. Our data shows that, as an interface becomes more complex and has more entropy users refer less to themselves and show less information sharing breadth. However, their verbal creativity and information sharing depth do not suffer in the same way. Instead, an inverse U shaped relationship between Interface complexity and creativity as well as information sharing depth can be observed: Users become more creative and thoughtful until a certain tipping point of interface complexity is reached. At that point, creativity and th inking suffer, leading to significantly less disclosure. This result challenges the general HCI assumption that simplicity is always best for computers interface design , as users'creativity and information sharing depth initially increases with more interface complexity. Our results suggest that the Yerkes Dodson Law may be a key theory underlying online creativity and depth of online disclosures