National academic award winners over time: their family situation,education and interpersonal relations

The article presents the results of a study focusing on the family situation, education and interpersonal relations of adults (26–35 years old) who in their adolescence (16–19 years old) displayed exceptional giftedness. One group of those surveyed were national academic award winners (90). The control group consisted of 90 people of no outstanding academic achievement. The research found many differences between these two groups, both in the family situation and in interpersonal relations. High achievers were raised in families of higher social and professional status, and almost 72.2% of them decided to continue their academic career after they had graduated from university. The national academic award winners showed higher scores in shyness and lower scores in sociability in interpersonal relations.     

Inhibition of delay of the two-way avoidance response and warning-signal salience

Effects of extended training (nine sessions, 50 trials each) on two-way avoidance response latencies were studied. For each rat, auditory and visual warning signals (CS) were presented on separate trials, either according to a Gellermann series or in 25-trial blocks. Intermittent presentation of the two kinds of trials yielded shorter latencies and higher levels of avoidance performance in response to the noise CS than in response to the darkness CS. Presentation of trials in blocks revealed stronger response-eliciting properties of stimuli presented during the second half of the session than of those presented during the first half. A significant decrease of avoidance performance in the early portions of the delay period, an index of inhibition of delay, was obtained on auditory trials presented in the second half of the sessions. Results indicate that strong fear of the warning signal is required for inhibition of delay of avoidance responses.     

Tackling knowledge ‘like a business’? Rethinking the modernisation of higher education in Poland

The year 1989 marked the official end of communist rule in Poland and the replacement of ‘Gosplan’ by new instruments for liberal-democratic governance. In terms of the economy this heralded a departure from Gosplan’s five-year planning cycles, performance targets and the ‘propaganda of success’. Paradoxically, however, 27 years later, the marketisation of higher education in Poland has been accompanied by a continuation of Gosplan thinking. This is manifested in a neoliberal vision of the modern, ‘corporate’ university as a largely utilitarian enterprise, but subject to a style of performance management strongly resonant of the Soviet era. This article analyses the thinking, ideas and ideologies that have shaped contemporary higher education in Poland. It is contended that the rise of the ‘corporate university’ signals the twilight of the Humboldtian tradition and raises questions about what the corporate ideal of ‘excellence’ may mean for the future of the university.     

Humanities students and epistemological obstacles related to limits

The article presents a report on four 45 minute sessions with a group of 17 year old humanities students. These sessions were the first of a series organised with the aim of exploring the possibilities of elaborating didactical situations that would help the students overcome epistemological obstacles related to limits. Students' attitudes pertinent to the development of the notion of limit, as well as changes of these attitudes, are described and analysed.     

False memory for orthographically versus semantically similar words in adolescents with dyslexia: a fuzzy-trace theory perspective

The presented research was conducted in order to investigate the connections between developmental dyslexia and the functioning of verbatim and gist memory traces—assumed in the fuzzy-trace theory. The participants were 71 high school students (33 with dyslexia and 38 without learning difficulties). The modified procedure and multinomial model of Stahl and Klauer (simplified conjoint recognition model) was used to collect and analyze data. Results showed statistically significant differences in four of the model parameters: (a) the probability of verbatim trace recollection upon presentation of orthographically similar stimulus was higher in the control than dyslexia group, (b) the probability of verbatim trace recollection upon presentation of semantically similar stimulus was higher in the control than dyslexia group, (c) the probability of gist trace retrieval upon presentation of semantically similar stimulus was higher in the dyslexia than control group, and (d) the probability of gist trace retrieval upon target stimulus presentation (in the semantic condition) was higher in the control than dyslexia group. The obtained results suggest differences of memory functioning in terms of verbatim and gist trace retrieval between people with and without dyslexia on specific, elementary cognitive processes postulated by the fuzzy-trace theory. These can indicate new approaches in the education of persons with developmental dyslexia, focused on specific impairments and the strengths of their memory functioning.     

On knowledge-poor methods for person name matching and lemmatization for highly inflectional languages

Web person search is one of the most common activities of Internet users. Recently, a vast amount of work on applying various NLP techniques for person name disambiguation in large web document collections has been reported, where the main focus was on English and few other major languages. This article reports on knowledge-poor methods for tackling person name matching and lemmatization in Polish, a highly inflectional language with complex person name declension paradigm. These methods apply mainly well-established string distance metrics, some new variants thereof, automatically acquired simple suffix-based lemmatization patterns and some combinations of the aforementioned techniques. Furthermore, we also carried out some initial experiments on deploying techniques that utilize the context, in which person names appear. Results of numerous experiments are presented. The evaluation carried out on a data set extracted from a corpus of on-line news articles revealed that achieving lemmatization accuracy figures greater than 90% seems to be difficult, whereas combining string distance metrics with suffix-based patterns results in 97.6–99% accuracy for the name matching task. Interestingly, no significant additional gain could be achieved through integrating some basic techniques, which try to exploit the local context the names appear in. Although our explorations were focused on Polish, we believe that the work presented in this article constitutes practical guidelines for tackling the same problem for other highly inflectional languages with similar phenomena.

Coexistence of proangiogenic potential and increased MMP-9, TIMP-1, and TIMP-2 levels in the plasma of patients with critical limb ischemia

Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE B - 本研究通过比较间歇性跛行 (IC)...