Disability Rights and Resources in Nevada

Attitudes toward people with disabilities have changed dramatically over the course of the last hundred years. In the 19th century, individuals with serious physical or mental issues were singled out for pity and urged to accept their afflictions as the will of God. The government offered no assistance to these persons, relying instead on alms giving from religious institutions and philanthropic organizations

Evaluating the Deductive Competence of Large Language Models

The development of highly fluent large language models (LLMs) has prompted increased interest in assessing their reasoning and problem-solving capabilities. We investigate whether several LLMs can solve a classic type of deductive reasoning problem from the cognitive science literature. The tested LLMs have limited abilities to solve these problems in their conventional form. We performed follow up experiments to investigate if changes to the presentation format and content improve model performance. We do find performance differences between conditions; however, they do not improve overall performance. Moreover, we find that performance interacts with presentation format and content in unexpected ways that differ from human performance. Overall, our results suggest that LLMs have unique reasoning biases that are only partially predicted from human reasoning performance.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, under revie

Expanding the Set of Pragmatic Considerations in Conversational AI

Despite considerable performance improvements, current conversational AI systems often fail to meet user expectations. We discuss several pragmatic limitations of current conversational AI systems. We illustrate pragmatic limitations with examples that are syntactically appropriate, but have clear pragmatic deficiencies. We label our complaints as "Turing Test Triggers" (TTTs) as they indicate where current conversational AI systems fall short compared to human behavior. We develop a taxonomy of pragmatic considerations intended to identify what pragmatic competencies a conversational AI system requires and discuss implications for the design and evaluation of conversational AI systems.Comment: Pre-print version of paper that appeared at Multidisciplinary Perspectives on COntext-aware embodied Spoken Interactions (MP-COSIN) workshop at IEEE RO-MAN 202

The Role of 3D Modelling and Printing in Orthopaedic Tissue Engineering: A Review of the Current Literature.

Orthopaedic surgery lends itself well to advances in technology. An area of interest and ongoing research is that of the production of scaffolds for use in trauma and elective surgery. 3D printing provides unprecedented accuracy in terms of micro- and macro-structure and geometry for scaffold production. It can also be utilised to construct scaffolds of a variety of different materials and more recently has allowed for the construction of bio-implants which recapitulate bone and cartilage tissue. This review seeks to look at the various methods of 3DP, the materials used, elements of functionality and design, as well as modifications to increase the biomechanics and bioactivity of 3DP scaffolds.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Bentham Science via http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/1574888X1166616042912223

Spherically symmetric inhomogeneous bianisotropic media: Wave propagation and light scattering

We develop a technique for finding closed-form expressions for electromagnetic fields in radially inhomogeneous bianisotropic media, both the solutions of the Maxwell equations and material tensors being defined by the set of auxiliary two-dimensional matrices. The approach is applied to determine the scattering cross-sections by spherical particles, the fields inside which correspond to the Airy-exponential waves

Lateral radiative forces exerted by evanescent fields along a hyperbolic metamaterial slab

We show and investigate the optical forces acting on a particle in the vicinity of a planar waveguide which is lled with hyperbolic material and supports propagation across its plane (two-dimensional). The anisotropy axis of its medium lies in plane of the waveguide. In contrast to commonly considered pushing or pulling forces, acting in one-dimensional guiding structures, in the case of two-dimensional wave propagation, the angles between the momentum and the total energy ow may take any value around the circle. Accordingly, evanescent elds out of the slab exert lateral radiative forces on a nanoparticle oriented parallel to momentum being controllably di erent from the total energy ow direction. This provides a exibility in manipulation by nanoparticles by employing suitably engineered hyperbolic structures