Recently, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) got much attention from researchers even though ITS educational technology began in the late 1960s and ITS is just embryonic from laboratories into the field. In this paper we outline an intelligent tutoring system for teaching basics of the databases system called (MDB). The MDB was built as education system by using the authoring tool (ITSB). MDB contains learning materials as a group of lessons for beginner level which include relational database system and lessons in (...) the process to install and set up a database. MDB system has exams for each level of the Lessons. An evaluation was done to see the effectiveness the MDB among learners and instructors. The outcome of the evaluation was promising. (shrink)

This paper presents an ethical approach to the use of lobbying within the context of the relationships among U.S. organizations, their lobbyists, and government officials. After providing a brief history of modern-day lobbying activities, lobbying is defined and described focusing on its role as a strategic marketing tool. Then ethical frameworks for understanding the impact of these practices on various external constituencies are delineated with an emphasis on the communitarian movement advanced by Etzioni. Consistent with the call for "informed advocacy" (...) by Laczniak (1993), the paper closes with an examination of the ethics of specific lobbying activities. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Feminist scholarship on the relative importance of working-class institutional strength in the economy and in the state has led to two divergent conclusions. Radical feminists argue that working-class institutions dominated by men produce male-biased outcomes; socialist feminists hold that working-class institutions promote classwide interests that benefit women as well as men. This article addresses this debate by applying generic and gendered working-class strength models of the welfare state in an examination of women's public pension quality. Quality is measured as women's (...) average pension compared with that of men, relative to women's average earnings, and compared with the average wage in the society. The authors find support for the socialist feminist view. Working-class institutions, having historically organized and represented the interests of working men, benefit women by improving the security and adequacy of their retirement incomes, but it is women's access to working-class economic and political institutions that brings greater economic equality with men in old age. (shrink)

In this exploratory paper, we investigate the extension of Haidt’s :814–834, 2001, The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, 2012) Moral foundations theory, operationalized as the MFQ30 questionnaire, from a sample of the general public across many countries to a sample of business students. MFT posits that people rely on five major concerns, or foundations, when making moral judgments. The five concerns are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, respect/authority, and purity/degradation. In addition, Haidt suggests that intuition, rather (...) than reasoning, leads to moral judgment. We replicate Haidt’s measurement model and find that the measurement model based on our sample is consistent. This indicates support for MFT. Further, we find structural differences in the measurement model between the genders and between areas of study. Our findings suggest that all students in the sample focus substantially on the fairness foundation. Ethics education and research may seek to expand the number of moral foundations individuals consider when discerning whether something is right or wrong. (shrink)

Background: Many people participating in dementia research may lack capacity to give informed consent and the relationship between cognitive function and capacity remains unclear. Recent changes in the law reinforce the need for robust and reproducible methods of assessing capacity when recruiting people for research.Aims: To identify numbers of capacitous participants in a pragmatic randomised trial of dementia treatment; to assess characteristics associated with capacity; to describe a legally acceptable consent process for research.Methods: As part of a pragmatic randomised controlled (...) trial of Ginkgo biloba for mild-moderate dementia, we used a consenting algorithm that met the requirements of existing case law and the exigencies of the new Mental Capacity Act. We decided who had capacity to give informed consent for participation in the trial using this algorithm and sought predictors of capacity.Results: Most participants with mild-moderate dementia in this trial were unable to give informed consent according to the legal criteria. When adjusted for confounding, the Mini Mental State examination did not predict the presence of capacity.Conclusion: Cognitive testing alone is insufficient to assess the presence of capacity. Researchers and clinicians need to be aware of the challenging processes regarding capacity assessment. We outline a procedure which we believe meets the ethical and legal requirements. (shrink)

Before Euro-American settlement, many Native American nations intercropped maize (_Zea mays_), beans (_Phaseolus vulgaris_), and squash (_Cucurbita pepo_) in what is colloquially called the “Three Sisters.” Here we review the historic importance and consequences of rejuvenation of Three Sisters intercropping (3SI), outline a framework to engage Native growers in community science with positive feedbacks to university research, and present preliminary findings from ethnography and a randomized, replicated 3SI experiment. We developed mutually beneficial collaborative research agendas with four Midwestern US Native (...) American nations. Ethnographic data highlighted a culturally based respect for 3SI as living beings, the importance it holds for all cultural facets of these Native nations, and the critical impact the practice has on environmental sustainability. One concern expressed by Native growers during ethnographic research was improving soil health—part of the rationale for establishing the 3SI agronomic experiment. To address this, we collaboratively designed a 3SI experiment. After 1 year, 3SI increased short-term soil respiration by 24%, decreased salt-extractable nitrate by 54%, had no effect on soil microbial biomass (but increased its carbon-to-nitrogen ratio by 32%) compared to the average of monoculture crops. The overarching purpose of this collaborative project is to develop a deeper understanding of 3SI, its cultural importance to Native communities, and how reinvigorating the practice—and intercropping in general—can make agroecosystems more sustainable for people and the environment. (shrink)

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre–post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines the interactive effects of apology source and apology components on forgiveness. Results revealed a significant source by component interaction. A remorseful employee apology was more successful than a remorseful CEO apology because consumers felt more empathy for the employee. Furthermore, a compensatory CEO apology was more effective than a compensatory employee apology because CEOs could significantly affect consumer perceptions of justice. No significant differences were found between apology source and the apology component of acknowledging violated rules and (...) norms. (shrink)

We are reviewing and summarizing evidence for the processes of acquisition of information outside of conscious awareness (processing information about covariations, nonconscious indirect and interactive inferences, self-perpetuation of procedural knowledge). A considerable amount of data indicates that as compared to consciously controlled cognition, the nonconscious information-acquisition processes are not only much faster but also structurally more sophisticated in the sense that they are capable of efficient processing of multidimensional and interactive relations between variables. Those mechanisms of nonconscious acquisition of information (...) provide a major channel for the development of procedural knowledge which is indispensable for such important aspects of cognitive functioning as encoding and interpretation of stimuli and the triggering emotional reactions. (shrink)

This paper examines social network size in contemporary Western society based on the exchange of Christmas cards. Maximum network size averaged 153.5 individuals, with a mean network size of 124.9 for those individuals explicitly contacted; these values are remarkably close to the group size of 150 predicted for humans on the basis of the size of their neocortex. Age, household type, and the relationship to the individual influence network structure, although the proportion of kin remained relatively constant at around 21%. (...) Frequency of contact between network members was primarily determined by two classes of variable: passive factors (distance, work colleague, overseas) and active factors (emotional closeness, genetic relatedness). Controlling for the influence of passive factors on contact rates allowed the hierarchical structure of human social groups to be delimited. These findings suggest that there may be cognitive constraints on network size. (shrink)

When searching for concepts in memory—as in the verbal fluency task of naming all the animals one can think of—people appear to explore internal mental representations in much the same way that animals forage in physical space: searching locally within patches of information before transitioning globally between patches. However, the definition of the patches being searched in mental space is not well specified. Do we search by activating explicit predefined categories and recall items from within that category, or do we (...) activate and recall a connected sequence of individual items without using categorical information, with each item recalled leading to the retrieval of an associated item in a stream, or both? Using semantic representations in a search of associative memory framework and data from the animal fluency task, we tested competing hypotheses based on associative and categorical search models. Associative, but not categorical, patch transitions took longer to make than position-matched productions, suggesting that categorical transitions were not true transitions. There was also clear evidence of associative search even within categorical patch boundaries. Furthermore, most individuals' behavior was best explained by an associative search model without the addition of categorical information. Thus, our results support a search process that does not use categorical information, but for which patch boundaries shift with each recall and local search is well described by a random walk in semantic space, with switches to new regions of the semantic space when the current region is depleted. (shrink)

The need for a theoretical grounding of the human-animal relationship is addressed from the perspective of the motivational bases of attitudes toward animals. Building on recent developments in attitude theory, and integrating themes from the historical and cultural background to Western attitudes, a model is developed that proposes three fundamental motivational bases, where responses to animals depend on instrumental self interest, empathylidentification, or people's beliefs and values about the nature and status of animals. Initial empirical studies using the model revealed (...) reduced instrumentality, heightened empathy, and strong commitment to a value perspective endorsing equal status for humans and animals among animal rights supporters. Farmers exhibited an opposite pattern, and supported the dominant status of humans. The urban public evidenced moderate levels of instrumentality and empathy, and a neutral value position with some individuals exhibiting considerable ambivalence . Gender differences on instrumentality and empathy , were less evident for values, and were confined to female and male farmers. Directions for future research are discussed, as is the practical value of this approach. (shrink)

We consider the desirability, or otherwise, of various forms of induction in the light of certain principles and inductive methods within predicate uncertain reasoning. Our general conclusion is that there remain conflicts within the area whose resolution will require a deeper understanding of the fundamental relationship between individuals and properties.

Models of risk-taking as used in the social sciences may be improved by including concepts from life history theory, particularly environmental unpredictability and life expectancy. Community college students completed self-report questionnaires measuring these constructs along with several well-known correlates. The frequency of risk-taking was higher for those with higher future unpredictability beliefs and shorter lifespan estimates (as measured by the Future Lifespan Assessment developed for this study), and unpredictability beliefs remained significant after accounting for standard predictors, such as sex and (...) temperament. The results demonstrate the usefulness of applying concepts from life history theory to enhance our understanding of human behavior. (shrink)

How, and how well, do people switch between exploration and exploitation to search for and accumulate resources? We study the decision processes underlying such exploration/exploitation trade‐offs using a novel card selection task that captures the common situation of searching among multiple resources (e.g., jobs) that can be exploited without depleting. With experience, participants learn to switch appropriately between exploration and exploitation and approach optimal performance. We model participants' behavior on this task with random, threshold, and sampling strategies, and find that (...) a linear decreasing threshold rule best fits participants' results. Further evidence that participants use decreasing threshold‐based strategies comes from reaction time differences between exploration and exploitation; however, participants themselves report non‐decreasing thresholds. Decreasing threshold strategies that “front‐load” exploration and switch quickly to exploitation are particularly effective in resource accumulation tasks, in contrast to optimal stopping problems like the Secretary Problem requiring longer exploration. (shrink)

I have taken a Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation. My thesis is that by perpetuating derogatory myths about womankind, for the sake of financial gain, the pornography industry treats the class of women as a means only, and not as composed of individuals who are ends in themselves. It thus de-grades all women, as members of this class, imputing to them less than full human status.

Developing and implementing a meaningful code of conduct by managers or consultants may require a change in orientation that modifies the way these precepts are determined. The position advocated herein is for a different approach to understanding and organizing the guiding parameters of the firm that requires individual reflection and empowerment of the entire organization to advance their shared values. The processes involved are discussed using four discrete stages that move from the personal to the work team and to the (...) unit to the full company, followed by the board of directors’ evaluation. The hoped-for end product is dynamic, employee-driven, codes of conduct that recognize the systemic and far-reaching impact of organizational activities across internal and external stakeholders. Operational details for and some issues associated with its implementation are also provided. (shrink)

We examine the effects of leader–member exchange differentiation on team members’ outcomes by using team moral disengagement as a psychological mechanism mediating this relationship and LMX differentiation bases moderating the relationship. Analysis of multilevel data collected from 289 frontline employees organized into 76 finance-related customer service teams shows that LMX differentiation significantly reduced team moral disengagement only when the performance basis was high, and that the negative relationship between LMX differentiation and team moral disengagement was significant only when the personal (...) liking basis was low. Furthermore, we found that the LMX bases moderated the indirect effect of LMX differentiation on team members’ outcomes through team moral disengagement. The findings advance team moral disengagement as a novel mechanism for cross-level relationship between LMX differentiation and team members’ outcomes at the individual level, and project differentiation bases as a condition under which LMX differentiation unpacks the reasons for team members’ favorable or unfavorable responses. They reveal LMX differentiation as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, whose essence can only be understood if examined from multiple levels. We also contribute to the literature by revealing the cognitive pathway through which LMX differentiation may be associated with team members outcomes. (shrink)

Search can be found in almost every cognitive activity, ranging across vision, memory retrieval, problem solving, decision making, foraging, and social interaction. Because of its ubiquity, research on search has a tendency to fragment into multiple areas of cognitive science. The proposed topic aims at providing integrative discussion of the central role of search from multiple perspectives. We focus on controlled search processes, which require a goal, uncertainty about the nature, location, or acquisition method of the objects to be searched (...) for, and a method for sampling through the search environment. While this definition of search is general and applicable to different domains, the specific mechanisms in the search process will likely differ. The goal of this issue is to compare and contrast how these search processes are similar and differ in different cognitive activities, with the goal of understanding the general nature of search in terms of the three characteristics stated above. We expect that given its cross-domain nature, the topic on search will be of broad interest to cognitive scientists, including psychologists, behavioral ecologists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, linguists, and sociologists. (shrink)

Studies on transposable elements of the Ac family have led to different models for excision gap repair in either plants or Drosophila. Excision products generated by the plant transposable elements Ac and Tam3 imply a more or less straightforward ligation of broken ends; excision products of the Drosophila P element indicate the involvement of ‘double‐strand break’ (DSB) repair. Recent findings that excision products of Ac and Tam3 can also contain traces of the element ends indicate, however, that DSB repair might (...) be an alternative repair mechanism in plants. A functional DSB repair mechanism in plants can also be deduced from the observed rapid increases of Ac copy number during plant development and from the involvement of Ac in the generation of internal Ac deletions. On the other hand, alternative repair mechanisms may also be functional in Drosophila, because some of the ‘footprints’ generated upon P excision can be explained by a mechanism that has been postulated for excision gap repair in plants. It is concluded that plants and Drosophila can use similar repair mechanisms, but that the predominance of a certain repair mechanism is determined by the host. (shrink)