Effects of beliefs about meaning construction and task instructions on interpretation of narrative text

Two dimensions of students’ beliefs about meaning construction in reading processes, transmission and transaction beliefs, were studied. According to transmission beliefs, the reader’s task is to understand the author’s intended meaning, while transaction beliefs assign to the reader the role of active meaning constructor. Students’ beliefs were ascertained by means of a questionnaire (Schraw, 2000), and the effects of these beliefs on narrative text comprehension and interpretation were examined. The first study, involving 52 students in grade 11, showed that transaction beliefs positively affected text interpretation in the form of personal and thematic responses. Study 2, involving 202 students in grades 7 and 11, revealed the influence of transaction beliefs on text comprehension, thematic, and personal interpretative responses, and overall meaning construction. It also showed the positive effects of giving specific rather than generic instructions for the interpretative task. Moreover, grade level significantly affected text comprehension and interpretation. Finally, differences in student performances were also related to the type of high school they were enrolled in.     

Stochastic identification and digital control of a heat exchanger: a simulation test case

In this paper, an extended simulation study is presented by which the power of modern digital identification and control methodology is tested against the nontrivial dynamics of a relatively simple yet nonelementary plant. Many critical issues which may significantly affect the success of the entire design process can be discussed along the lines of this study. The plant considered here is a liquid-saturated steam heat exchanger, where the liquid flow-rate is manipulated to regulate the outlet liquid temperature. All the numerical experiments have been conducted by digital simulation of a fairly standard nonlinear distributed parameter model.     

Preventive thermographic diagnosis of historical buildings for consolidation

Conserving architectural heritage usually requires a multidisciplinary approach involving a variety of professionals and organizations. Since the evaluation of the state of conservation of historical buildings using destructive techniques should be avoided to prevent the integrity of the cultural heritage, the development of non-destructive and non-contact techniques is very important. InfraRed (IR) thermography is a non-destructive powerful tool for fast and accurate building diagnostics. In the investigation of historical structures, where a restoration or conservation treatment can cause irreversible damage to the structure, it is considered to be of most importance. A campaign of thermographic surveys were conducted on a large part of the historical cultural heritage of L’Aquila and its surroundings. In this paper we present the results of the study for the Church of Santa Maria ad Cryptas (XIII century), one of the most ancient buildings in the surroundings of L’Aquila and one of the best examples of Gothic art in Abruzzo, with the aim to evaluate the correspondence between the damage induced by the earthquake and the previous thermographic results, in order to validate the effectiveness of thermography and its role in preventive diagnosis.     

Configural conditioning in the CER: A possible artifact

Gray and Lethbridge (1976) have reported a demonstration of configural conditioning in the CER in rats. With repeated reinforcement of a compound CS, suppression to the elements diminished considerably, while suppression to the compound remained substantially intact. The basic form of the Gray and Lethbridge findings has been replicated in the present study. We observed, however, that suppression to the compound itself diminished with repeated reinforcement of the compound. Further, we also tested the compound after deliberate extinction of the elements. This test of the excitatory effect of the “configurai cue” indicated that it also had diminished with repeated reinforcement of the compound. The observed greater suppression to the compound than to the elements can be parsimoniously interpreted as a simple summation effect, and the attenuation of suppression with repeated reinforcement is common in CER studies. Thus, the data require no appeal to configural conditioning.     

Patterns of diffusion of electronics technologies: An international comparison with special reference to the Italian case

The paper analyzes the patterns of diffusion of information- and microelectronics-based production technologies in Western Europe, USA and Japan. The evidence suggests asymmetries in both levels and rates of changes in their adoptions between the three areas and within Europe itself, with little support to any hypothesis of long-term convergence among these regional and national patterns.Some suggestions on why diffusion rates differ are then examined together with the likely consequences on the patterns of competitiveness.     

The effect of citation analysis on query expansion for patent retrieval

Patent prior art search is a type of search in the patent domain where documents are searched for that describe the work previously carried out related to a patent application. The goal of this search is to check whether the idea in the patent application is novel. Vocabulary mismatch is one of the main problems of patent retrieval which results in low retrievability of similar documents for a given patent application. In this paper we show how the term distribution of the cited documents in an initially retrieved ranked list can be used to address the vocabulary mismatch. We propose a method for query modeling estimation which utilizes the citation links in a pseudo relevance feedback set. We first build a topic dependent citation graph, starting from the initially retrieved set of feedback documents and utilizing citation links of feedback documents to expand the set. We identify the important documents in the topic dependent citation graph using a citation analysis measure. We then use the term distribution of the documents in the citation graph to estimate a query model by identifying the distinguishing terms and their respective weights. We then use these terms to expand our original query. We use CLEF-IP 2011 collection to evaluate the effectiveness of our query modeling approach for prior art search. We also study the influence of different parameters on the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves the recall over a state-of-the-art baseline which uses the link-based structure of the citation graph but not the term distribution of the cited documents.     

Artificial moral agents: moral mentors or sensible tools?

The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of the notion of artificial moral agent (AMA) and of its impact on human beings’ self-understanding as moral agents. Firstly, I introduce the topic by presenting what I call the Continuity Approach. Its main claim holds that AMAs and human moral agents exhibit no significant qualitative difference and, therefore, should be considered homogeneous entities. Secondly, I focus on the consequences this approach leads to. In order to do this I take into consideration the work of Bostrom and Dietrich, who have radically assumed this viewpoint and thoroughly explored its implications. Thirdly, I present an alternative approach to AMAs—the Discontinuity Approach—which underscores an essential difference between human moral agents and AMAs by tackling the matter from another angle. In this section I concentrate on the work of Johnson and Bryson and I highlight the link between their claims and Heidegger’s and Jonas’s suggestions concerning the relationship between human beings and technological products. In conclusion I argue that, although the Continuity Approach turns out to be a necessary postulate to the machine ethics project, the Discontinuity Approach highlights a relevant distinction between AMAs and human moral agents. On this account, the Discontinuity Approach generates a clearer understanding of what AMAs are, of how we should face the moral issues they pose, and, finally, of the difference that separates machine ethics from moral philosophy.