3,436 research outputs found
Psychological Universals in the Study of Happiness: From Social Psychology to Epicurean Philosophy
Within the framework of Positive Psychology and Needing Theories, this article reviews cultural practices or perceptions regarding what happiness is and how it can be achieved. Mainly research on Subjective Well-Being (SWB) has identified many cultural differences in the pursuit of happiness, often described as East-West splits along categories such as highly expressed affect vs. quiet affect, self-assertion vs. conformity to social norms, independence vs. interdependence and the like. However, it is the overall goal of this article to show that whatever the normative content of a culture’s or subculture’s view of happiness may be, it involves the same basic psychological needs beyond how people may choose to report or express resulting emotions. In particular, the theory of happiness proposed by the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus provides broader, more inclusive categories and concepts which can be used to explain and possibly harmonize assumptions from particular traditions
The Age of Neuroeducation
Neuroeducation as an amalgamation of neuroscience, cognitive science and educational psychology has the explicit aim of improving classroom teaching and learning and has repeatedly stressed the role of the teacher in student motivation and learning. This article briefly reviews the nature of human learning from the perspective of neuroeducation and presents four factors of successful learning as a consequence of this line of research. These four factors relate to the credibility of the teacher, individual differences, the role of a positive classroom climate and the activation of previous knowledge
Utilizing the Project Method for Teaching Culture and Intercultural Competence
This article presents a detailed methodological outline for teaching culture through project work. It is argued that because project work makes it possible to gain transferrable and applicable knowledge and insight, it is the ideal tool for teaching culture with the aim of achieving real intercultural communicative competence (ICC). Preceding the pedagogical presentation, the term culture is conceptualized as small-c culture/deep culture, that is, as the sociopsychological programming of a given community. This concept is developed with practical examples and conceptualizations for pedagogical implementability. Finally, a project course with American undergraduate students conducted in Germany is briefly presented. This presentation includes project sheets, the methodological rationale of each project, and the observations the participants made during the course. These observations include many aspects of the way German and U.S. American deep culture differ and also shed light on the “truth” behind some German cultural clichés
Judith Butler's Critique of Binary Gender Opposition in Gender Trouble: A Task-Based Lesson Sequence
This chapter presents a task-based lesson sequence based on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Gender Trouble is a great piece of philosophical literature. However, as philosophical literature is a genre rarely found in EFL teaching, this chapter first demonstrates in detail the merits of this genre for the teaching ofEnglish for Academic Purposes. After a brief analysis of the source text, which deconstructs the entire sex-gender link and presents both sex and gender as free-floating, this chapter presents task-based methodology and how it is utilized in a lesson aimed at building gender awareness and acceptance. In the target task students are asked to take the role of an ethics teacher at an Irish high school, in which the discussion arose whether the school should introduce unisex toilets and changing rooms in order to not discriminate against transsexual students. Tue study of Butler's philosophy will provide students with both the knowledge and language to accomplish this task. Open follow-up discussions often lead to powerful ethical insights in the context of gender, homo- and transsexuality
Neural system identification for large populations separating "what" and "where"
Neuroscientists classify neurons into different types that perform similar
computations at different locations in the visual field. Traditional methods
for neural system identification do not capitalize on this separation of 'what'
and 'where'. Learning deep convolutional feature spaces that are shared among
many neurons provides an exciting path forward, but the architectural design
needs to account for data limitations: While new experimental techniques enable
recordings from thousands of neurons, experimental time is limited so that one
can sample only a small fraction of each neuron's response space. Here, we show
that a major bottleneck for fitting convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to
neural data is the estimation of the individual receptive field locations, a
problem that has been scratched only at the surface thus far. We propose a CNN
architecture with a sparse readout layer factorizing the spatial (where) and
feature (what) dimensions. Our network scales well to thousands of neurons and
short recordings and can be trained end-to-end. We evaluate this architecture
on ground-truth data to explore the challenges and limitations of CNN-based
system identification. Moreover, we show that our network model outperforms
current state-of-the art system identification models of mouse primary visual
cortex.Comment: NIPS 201
A Nonliearly Dispersive Fifth Order Integrable Equation and its Hierarchy
In this paper, we study the properties of a nonlinearly dispersive integrable
system of fifth order and its associated hierarchy. We describe a Lax
representation for such a system which leads to two infinite series of
conserved charges and two hierarchies of equations that share the same
conserved charges. We construct two compatible Hamiltonian structures as well
as their Casimir functionals. One of the structures has a single Casimir
functional while the other has two. This allows us to extend the flows into
negative order and clarifies the meaning of two different hierarchies of
positive flows. We study the behavior of these systems under a hodograph
transformation and show that they are related to the Kaup-Kupershmidt and the
Sawada-Kotera equations under appropriate Miura transformations. We also
discuss briefly some properties associated with the generalization of second,
third and fourth order Lax operators.Comment: 11 pages, LaTex, version to be published in Journal of Nonlinear
Mathematical Physics, has expanded discussio
Photon-Photon Interaction in a Photon Gas
Using the effective Lagrangian for the low energy photon-photon interaction
the lowest order photon self energy at finite temperature and in
non-equilibrium is calculated within the real time formalism. The Debye mass,
the dispersion relation, the dielectric tensor, and the velocity of light
following from the photon self energy are discussed. As an application we
consider the interaction of photons with the cosmic microwave background
radiation.Comment: REVTEX, 7 pages, 1 PostSrcipt figur
An AB effect without closing a loop
We discuss the consequences of the Aharonov-Bohm effect in setups involving
several charged particles, wherein none of the charged particles encloses a
closed loop around the magnetic flux. We show that in such setups, the AB phase
is encoded either in the relative phase of a bi-partite or multi-partite
entangled photons states, or alternatively, gives rise to an overall AB phase
that can be measured relative to another reference system. These setups involve
processes of annihilation or creation of electron/hole pairs. We discuss the
relevance of such effects in "vacuum Birefringence" in QED, and comment on
their connection to other known effects.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Robotic control of the seven-degree-of-freedom NASA laboratory telerobotic manipulator
A computationally efficient robotic control scheme for the NASA Laboratory Telerobotic Manipulator (LTM) is presented. This scheme utilizes the redundancy of the seven-degree-of-freedom LTM to avoid joint limits and singularities. An analysis to determine singular configurations is presented. Performance criteria are determined based on the joint limits and singularity analysis. The control scheme is developed in the framework of resolved rate control using the gradient projection method, and it does not require the generalized inverse of the Jacobian. An efficient formulation for determining the joint velocities of the LTM is obtained. This control scheme is well suited for real-time implementation, which is essential if the end-effector trajectory is continuously modified based on sensory feedback. Implementation of this scheme on a Motorola 68020 VME bus-based controller of the LTM is in progress. Simulation results demonstrating the redundancy utilization in the robotic mode are presented
Reconstructing Generalized Exponential Laws by Self-Similar Exponential Approximants
We apply the technique of self-similar exponential approximants based on
successive truncations of continued exponentials to reconstruct functional laws
of the quasi-exponential class from the knowledge of only a few terms of their
power series. Comparison with the standard Pad\'e approximants shows that, in
general, the self-similar exponential approximants provide significantly better
reconstructions.Comment: Revtex file, 21 pages, 21 figure
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