Developing the ethical competence of future teachers based on a synergetic approach

This article reveals the impact of technology cooperation on the performance of studentsin the elementary class. When they work together, students find out from each other everything that isnot clear to them. If necessary, they are not afraid to ask the teacher for help. Students learn to see forthemselves the problems of the world around them and find ways to solve them. Each studentunderstands that the success of the group depends not only on memorizing the ready information givenin the textbook, but also on the ability to independently acquire new knowledge and skills, and applythem in specific tasks

Property Blockchains have Failed to Realize Their Promise

We analyze the introduction of blockchain technology in the U.S. home sales market. The introduction of blockchain technology into the real estate industry has failed to meet high expectations to streamline operations and reduce costs. Required legal changes in the management of property deeds, high investment costs and unproven technology met resistance in a fragmented industry with many players, some holding monopoly control. Many parties in the complex chain of real estate transactions have resisted the natural Schumpeterian wave of creative destruction which, at the macro level, should bring huge savings. At the micro level, title insurers have the most to lose if a decentralized ‘trustless’ chain is created, since they extract high rents as middlemen

Integrated Robot Task and Motion Planning in the Now

This paper provides an approach to integrating geometric motion planning with logical task planning for long-horizon tasks in domains with many objects. We propose a tight integration between the logical and geometric aspects of planning. We use a logical representation which includes entities that refer to poses, grasps, paths and regions, without the need for a priori discretization. Given this representation and some simple mechanisms for geometric inference, we characterize the pre-conditions and effects of robot actions in terms of these logical entities. We then reason about the interaction of the geometric and non-geometric aspects of our domains using the general-purpose mechanism of goal regression (also known as pre-image backchaining). We propose an aggressive mechanism for temporal hierarchical decomposition, which postpones the pre-conditions of actions to create an abstraction hierarchy that both limits the lengths of plans that need to be generated and limits the set of objects relevant to each plan. We describe an implementation of this planning method and demonstrate it in a simulated kitchen environment in which it solves problems that require approximately 100 individual pick or place operations for moving multiple objects in a complex domain.This work was supported in part by the NSF under Grant No. 1117325. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We also gratefully acknowledge support from ONR MURI grant N00014-09-1-1051, from AFOSR grant AOARD-104135 and from the Singapore Ministry of Education under a grant to the Singapore-MIT International Design Center. We thank Willow Garage for the use of the PR2 robot as part of the PR2 Beta Program

SERKET: An Architecture for Connecting Stochastic Models to Realize a Large-Scale Cognitive Model

To realize human-like robot intelligence, a large-scale cognitive architecture is required for robots to understand the environment through a variety of sensors with which they are equipped. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Serket that enables the construction of a large-scale generative model and its inference easily by connecting sub-modules to allow the robots to acquire various capabilities through interaction with their environments and others. We consider that large-scale cognitive models can be constructed by connecting smaller fundamental models hierarchically while maintaining their programmatic independence. Moreover, connected modules are dependent on each other, and parameters are required to be optimized as a whole. Conventionally, the equations for parameter estimation have to be derived and implemented depending on the models. However, it becomes harder to derive and implement those of a larger scale model. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose a method for parameter estimation by communicating the minimal parameters between various modules while maintaining their programmatic independence. Therefore, Serket makes it easy to construct large-scale models and estimate their parameters via the connection of modules. Experimental results demonstrated that the model can be constructed by connecting modules, the parameters can be optimized as a whole, and they are comparable with the original models that we have proposed

Videocentric criticism, postmodernism and the deconstruction of television

This research offers an alternative method to the study of visual narrative. It criticizes Western society\u27s videocentrism, or centering of television as the predominant medium of communicating to mass society. This method is known as videocentric criticism; Chapter one assesses the modern and postmodern condition. Philosophy from the Greek and modern Enlightenments suggests that Western society\u27s videocentrism is a developing process originating in these periods. It then addresses modernity and postmodernity. Postmodern cultural phenomena that progressed in proximity with the evolution of television is discussed; Chapter two defines videocentric criticism. Narrative, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction are applied to televisual information. An example of televisual information is partially deconstructed; Chapter three proposes the Levels of Televisual Reality, which are similar to Plato\u27s Divided Line Analogy. The Levels of Televisual Reality suggest a person interacts with televisual information as an artificial form of: environment, experience, and consciousness. Examples are used

Canon, delgadez y desnudez del cuerpo: cinco miradas sobre la belleza

En el presente artículo se reflexiona sobre algunas concepciones de la belleza contem- poránea, en su articulación con una serie de arquetipos corporales, en los cuales, la delgadez constituye un imperativo. Trabajando en la perspectiva de la construcción social del cuerpo y de lo femenino, se analiza un conjunto de propuestas artísticas, a través de las cuales, se evidencian los procesos de significación del cuerpo y la jerarquización del mismo, dentro de ciertos modelos anatómico–estéticos. Se asume, como premisa, que la belleza contemporánea se define en un escenario complejo de mediatización del cuerpo y de primacía de un paradigma de plasticidad y de perfectibilidad de la apariencia