Advise with Permission?: The Effects of Advice Solicitation on Advice Outcomes

Two studies examine reactions to permitted (offered and permission granted), volunteered (given without offer or assent), and imposed advice (offered and given even though declined). In Study 1, participants’ ratings of advice quality and implementation intention were higher for volunteered and permitted than imposed advice. Only for a task that was highly personal did recipients have a significantly higher intention to use permitted than volunteered advice. Study 2 replicated results from Study 1 with a nonstudent sample. In addition, Study 2 found stronger differences between volunteered and permitted advice, with permitted advice rated more positively. Study 2 also examined the effect of using you pronouns, which have been linked to confrontation and criticism, when giving advice, but found no consistent effects on advice outcomes.     

刘平勇小说的道德批判精神

刘平勇的小说集《另一种悬崖》，着力刻画了滇东北贫困农村的弱势群体形象，鲜明展现了他们复杂多样的道德生活、道德观念和道德境界．明确表现了作家强烈的道德批判精神，具有积极的道德教育作用。     

关于密度函数公式的注记

给出了Z=X^2/a^2＋Y^2/b^2,Z=X^2/a^2-Y^2/b^2,Z=√X^2/a^2＋Y^2/b^2,Z=Y/aX^2的密度函数公式.     

Knowledge creation processes as critical enablers for innovation

Knowledge conversion is a prominent theme within the knowledge management field and the question arises how knowledge creation processes can grow innovation capability maturity. This notion provides the platform for aligning knowledge creation processes to the requirements for innovation capability growth from one maturity level to the next. In order to achieve this alignment, the authors identified a knowledge creation path as a key enabler for maturity growth in each innovation capability area. Knowledge management tools and organisational facilitating conditions that support the specific knowledge processes highlighted in the identified path were identified through a literature study and subsequently synthesised to form a framework. This framework provides guidelines for the use of knowledge creation processes as a vehicle to improve innovation. The amount of time needed to practically test the framework does not allow for the practical implementation of the framework and the impact of the framework was demonstrated by discussing a practical organisational scenario.     

Making desegregation work: Extracurricular activities

Southern desegregated high schools with high levels of black or white student extracurricular participation have students who report more interracial contact, higher self-esteem, more positive attitudes toward school, more parent visits to schools, and more personal contact with teachers. The results are derived from regression equations based on responses from 10,000 students in 200 schools, controlling on student and school background factors. The author recommends that secondary schools place high priority on encouraging extracurricular participation and argues that this enhances the school's ability to teach because it increases student attachment to the school, reduces student alienation, provides alternative channels for students to develop self-esteem, and increases the opportunity for positive interracial contact.     

No Child Left Behind: Implications for college student learning

What does No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have to do with higher education? Turns out plenty, according to Teniell L. Trolian and Kristin S. Fouts. They argue that NCLB has signifcant consequences for college learners.     

Novel model reference adaptive control laws for improved transient dynamics and guaranteed saturation constraints

In classical model reference adaptive control (MRAC), the adaptive rates must be tuned to meet multiple competing objectives. Large adaptive rates guarantee rapid convergence of the trajectory tracking error to zero. However, large adaptive rates may also induce saturation of the actuators and excessive overshoots of the closed-loop system’s trajectory tracking error. Conversely, low adaptive rates may produce unsatisfactory trajectory tracking performances. To overcome these limitations, in the classical MRAC framework, the adaptive rates must be tuned through an iterative process. Alternative approaches require to modify the plant’s reference model or the reference command input. This paper presents the first MRAC laws for nonlinear dynamical systems affected by matched and parametric uncertainties that constrain both the closed-loop system’s trajectory tracking error and the control input at all times within user-defined bounds, and enforce a user-defined rate of convergence on the trajectory tracking error. By applying the proposed MRAC laws, the adaptive rates can be set arbitrarily large and both the plant’s reference model and the reference command input can be chosen arbitrarily. The user-defined rate of convergence of the closed-loop plant’s trajectory is enforced by introducing a user-defined auxiliary reference model, which converges to the trajectory tracking error obtained by applying the classical MRAC laws before its transient dynamics has decayed, and steering the trajectory tracking error to the auxiliary reference model at a rate of convergence that is higher than the rate of convergence of the plant’s reference model. The ability of the proposed MRAC laws to prescribe the performance of the closed-loop system’s trajectory tracking error and control input is guaranteed by barrier Lyapunov functions. Numerical simulations illustrate both the applicability of our theoretical results and their effectiveness compared to other techniques such as prescribed performance control, which allows to constrain both the rate of convergence and the maximum overshoot on the trajectory tracking error of uncertain systems.     

Using genetic algorithms to evolve a population of topical queries

Systems for searching the Web based on thematic contexts can be built on top of a conventional search engine and benefit from the huge amount of content as well as from the functionality available through the search engine interface. The quality of the material collected by such systems is highly dependant on the vocabulary used to generate the search queries. In this scenario, selecting good query terms can be seen as an optimization problem where the objective function to be optimized is based on the effectiveness of a query to retrieve relevant material. Some characteristics of this optimization problem are: (1) the high-dimensionality of the search space, where candidate solutions are queries and each term corresponds to a different dimension, (2) the existence of acceptable suboptimal solutions, (3) the possibility of finding multiple solutions, and in many cases (4) the quest for novelty. This article describes optimization techniques based on Genetic Algorithms to evolve “good query terms” in the context of a given topic. The proposed techniques place emphasis on searching for novel material that is related to the search context. We discuss the use of a mutation pool to allow the generation of queries with new terms, study the effect of different mutation rates on the exploration of query-space, and discuss the use of a especially developed fitness function that favors the construction of queries containing novel but related terms.