心路历程--外科手术

一生之中,我们成长的过程就是不断超越自己的过程。不同的经历、不同的体验让我们的生活变得更加丰富,也让我们更加珍惜生活的每一个成功、每一个挫折所带来的感受。     

Innovative techniques for advanced writing classes: Modification of point of view

Changing narrators in a literary passage is a pedagogical technique that can enliven composition, yet which still presents a challenge to students. Assuming the original narrator to be omniscient, any new narrator's perception of a situation can only be fragmentary. The challenge lies in giving that new narrator total awareness of events, and in doing so logically. This means rearranging events, modifying the text, and essentially recreating it. The degree of difficulty can be increased by selecting as narrator a character with limited perception of a situation, or one totally absent from the story. For an added dimension of novelty and challenge, the passage can be narrated from the perspective of an inanimate object.His training was in medieval French literature, and he published articles on the chansons de geste in a number of journals over the years. Beginning quite recently, he has become more interested in pedagogy, i.e., the teaching of French, civilization, creative writing, etc. He has written articles that have appeared and are scheduled to appear in such journals as French Review, Contemporary French Civilization, ADFL Bulletin, on such varied topics as Business French, Creative Writing, and the French Liberation. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University.     

Symbolic,identity, and probe delayed matching of sounds by the bottlenosed dolphin

The short-term memory for sounds of the bottlenosed dolphin was tested using symbolic, identity, and probe forms of the delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) task. The forms differed in the number (one or two) or nature (symbolic or identity matches of sample sounds) of postdelay test stimuli available as memory retrieval cues. Although symbolic DMS was difficult to learn, the final performance level was approximately equal to that for identity or probe DMS. On all tasks, the dolphin’s responses were above 80% correct through to delays of 90 sec and, in some cases, through to delays of 180 and 240 sec, the “limits” being governed mainly by the dolphin’s reluctance to continue being tested at long delays. Encoding of sample stimuli into their learned symbolic representation was hypothesized to have reduced symbolic DMS to a recognition memory task, resulting in the observed equivalence of performance with the other two recognition memory tasks. The probe DMS results, unlike those for identity or symbolic DMS, showed no significant proactive interference effects from samples of prior trials. Instead, proactive interference was traceable to the probe value of the prior trial. Overall, the auditory DMS data for the dolphin were functionally similar to results reported for monkeys tested on symbolic, identity, and probe visual DMS tasks.     

Highbrows in University Education

Is it still possible to combine two programmes of study in higher education, and if so, what are the characteristics of these double‐students and what kind of obstacles do they face? In the Netherlands, about 10 percent of students in university education take two studies at the same time.

Different theoretical approaches offer hypotheses to explain the choice of students for a second study, compared to students who pursue the regular one‐study programme. Human capital as well as financial (socio‐economic) capital theory provides some insights in this choice process. Education programme‐related factors, as well as motivational and (social and academic) integration (Tinto, 1987 Tinto V 1987 Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition Chicago The University of Chicago Press  [Google Scholar]) factors, will possibly be important determinants for pursuing one or two study programmes in higher education.     

心路历程--建议

Dear Friends,Giving advice is one of the most popular pastimes known to mankind. Everyone has some advice to give to everyone else. It is easier to give advice than it is to take advice. Most of us have been given more advice than we can possibly use.I am drawn to this topic because many of our readers ask me to give them advice on a variety(变化,多样性)of different prob-lems.This can be very flattering(讨人喜欢的), and I appreciate your willingness to ask me. I respond to your questions, and I feel free to give my opinions and my comments on any subject. These comments     

The dolphin’s grammatical competency: Comments on Kako (1999)

Kako (1999) reviews the evidence for syntactic competencies in several animal species exposed to artificial language systems, emphasizing the importance of core syntactic properties such as argument structure and closed-class items. We present evidence from our dolphin studies for the acquisition of the closed-class functionality of demonstratives, prepositions, conjunctions, and locatives. Sensitivity to argument structure is also evidenced by wholly untrained and consistent interpretations of the dolphin to probes of anomalous syntactic structures. These results are generated within our comprehension-based paradigm, which enables us to provide convincing objective evidence for the development and generalization of concepts by the dolphin subject. Demonstrations of animal language competencies may illuminate certain aspects of human linguistic competence by suggesting that the particular modeled subsets can derive from general cognitive mechanisms, rather than language-specific ones.     

KDD, data mining, and the challenge for normative privacy

The present study examines certain challenges that KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) in general and data mining in particular pose for normative privacy and public policy. In an earlier work (see Tavani, 1999), I argued that certain applications of data-mining technology involving the manipulation of personal data raise special privacy concerns. Whereas the main purpose of the earlier essay was to show what those specific privacy concerns are and to describe how exactly those concerns have been introduced by the use of certain KDD and data-mining techniques, the present study questions whether the use of those techniques necessarily violates the privacy of individuals. This question is considered vis-à-vis a recent theory of privacy advanced by James Moor (1997). The implications of that privacy theory for a data-mining policy are also considered.     

The HPT model applied to a kayak company's registration process

This case study describes the step‐by‐step application of the traditional human performance technology (HPT) model at a premier kayak company located on the coast of North Carolina. The HPT model was applied to address lost revenues related to three specific business issues: misinformed customers, dissatisfied customers, and guides not showing up for tours or lessons at the kayak company. The case study includes problem statements, organizational analysis, environmental analysis, gap analysis, cause analysis, and proposed interventions.