A hybrid neural network model for consciousness

INTRODUCTION The goal of understanding the brain and making artificial minds has propelled many scientificfields greatly. In a sense it may be the final goal othe whole science. It is impossible that one unifiedtheory will be sufficient for explaining the brain’functionality because of its unimaginable complexity. Multi-discipline combinations havebrought about so many achievements towards thigoal. Taylor (1994) introduced the “relationamind” approach in …     

A Systematic Approach to Teaching Reading and Spelling to a Nine‐year‐old Boy with Severely Impaired Literacy Skills

Abstract An attempt was made to develop reading and spelling skills in a nine year‐old boy who was a severe underachiever in both areas, over an 18 month treatment period. A structured and systematic approach was used with provision of incentives via token reinforcement which could be exchanged for back‐up reinforcers of the child's choice. The remedial reading programme was successful in developing systematic reading strategies which were applied to the decoding of new words. These gains generalised outside the tutoring situation and were reflected in performance on a standardised test of reading. The spelling programme was less successful although the goal of lessening the disparity between spelling age and chronological age was achieved. Follow‐up at 14 months indicated continued gains although the rate of progress was considerably slower following the cessation of regular remedial teaching particularly in the area of spelling. Implications for the development of future remedial programmes are discussed.     

Content Analysis by the Crowd: Assessing the Usability of Crowdsourcing for Coding Latent Constructs

Crowdsourcing platforms are commonly used for research in the humanities, social sciences and informatics, including the use of crowdworkers to annotate textual material or visuals. Utilizing two empirical studies, this article systematically assesses the potential of crowdcoding for less manifest contents of news texts, here focusing on political actor evaluations. Specifically, Study 1 compares the reliability and validity of crowdcoded data to that of manual content analyses; Study 2 proceeds to investigate the effects of material presentation, different types of coding instructions and answer option formats on data quality. We find that the performance of the crowd recommends crowdcoded data as a reliable and valid alternative to manually coded data, also for less manifest contents. While scale manipulations affected the results, minor modifications of the coding instructions or material presentation did not significantly influence data quality. In sum, crowdcoding appears a robust instrument to collect quantitative content data.     

Preconceptions and relations used by children in the construction of food chains

This study shows two aspects: the predator–prey relations and the preconceptions held by children (9–10 years old) on the construction of food chains. The subjects of the study were 506 fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children from the Mexican education curriculum. The conclusions are based on a single application of an instrument after a lecture in the classroom. The instrument consists of three tasks. The outcome showed that the classification of herbivorous and carnivorous is based in children's preconceptions of size and ferocity. These preconceptions guide the children's selection of the higher-level predator in the construction of a food chain. Another element used by children is the predator-prey relation in the construction of a food chain. The results shed light on the difficulties students have at higher education levels in the resolution of food webs and the relationships with ecosystems.     

Molecular Representations: Building Tentative Links Between the History of Science and the Study of Cognition

This paper addresses questions concerning the cognitive character of nineteenth-century British molecular discourse. At a time when no proof of the existence or the intimate structure of the material particle was yet available or even possible, scientists were free to suggest and discuss possible, alternative, or even incompatible, molecular pictures of the unseen level of the material substratum, leaving aside all realistic considerations. The role of these molecular representations was to provide the necessary causal links between physical phenomena and underlying mechanisms, thus infusing intelligibility into scientific explanations. Focusing on processes of thinking rather than on formal theories, the analysis in this paper will suggest that, precisely because of its fluid character, molecular discourse produced a common universe of meanings which sustained an on-going thought experiment regarding the intimate structure of matter, and that, by so doing, it initiated a process of familiarisation of scientists with the unobservable realm. Beyond realism and scepticism, the attitude of nineteenth-century molecularists, which can be adequately described as `suspension of judgement', may prove highly suggestive in science education.     

Learning from the past to inform the future

In this final issue of 2017, we are in a reflective mood at the Health Information and Libraries Journal as we say goodbye to Audrey Marshall, Regular Feature Editor of Dissertations into Practice. While Audrey departs, Dissertations into Practice is now a firm fixture of the Health Information and Libraries Journal; there remains no better place for students to see their writing, possibly for the first time, in print. This issue also provides an opportunity to review the breadth of health information writing through the editorials of past Virtual Issues of the Health Information and Libraries Journal, all still available, free of charge, via the journal's home page at http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hilj .     

The role of index compression in score-at-a-time query evaluation

This paper explores the performance of top k document retrieval with score-at-a-time query evaluation on impact-ordered indexes in main memory. To better understand execution efficiency in the context of modern processor architectures, we examine the role of index compression on query evaluation latency. Experiments include compressing postings with variable byte encoding, Simple-8b, variants of the QMX compression scheme, as well as a condition that is less often considered—no compression. Across four web test collections, we find that the highest query evaluation speed is achieved by simply leaving the postings lists uncompressed, although the performance advantage over a state-of-the-art compression scheme is relatively small and the index is considerably larger. We explain this finding in terms of the design of modern processor architectures: Index segments with high impact scores are usually short and inherently benefit from cache locality. Index segments with lower impact scores may be quite long, but modern architectures have sufficient memory bandwidth (coupled with prefetching) to “keep up” with the processor. Our results highlight the importance of “architecture affinity” when designing high-performance search engines.