Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many‐to‐many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side‐stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered deep learning networks allow robust, real‐world automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the complexities of deep learning architectures and training regimens make it difficult to use them to (...) provide direct insights into mechanisms that may support HSR. In this brief article, we report preliminary results from a two‐layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short‐term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans. This allows the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human‐like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition. Internal representations emerge that resemble phonetically organized responses in human superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that the model develops a distributed phonological code despite no explicit training on phonetic or phonemic targets. The ability to work with real speech is a major advance for cognitive models of HSR. (shrink)

In this article Quine's program for reducing ontology to the semantic level is compared to Aquinas' metaphysical ontology. Some internal inconsistencies of Quine's quantificational account of existence are discussed. Aquinas' account of existence is explicated in response to Quine' mischaracterization of Scholastic ontology. The general nature of an amended logical account of existence incorporating Aquinas' ontological categories is indicated. Finally, recent attempts to harmonize Thomism and analytic philosophy are criticized for failing to note that the quantificational account of existence is (...) motivated by analytic philosophy's rejection of metaphysical ontology. Nothing short of a logical account of existence within the broader framework of the philosophy of being can legitimate the efforts of analytical Thomists. (shrink)

EDITOR’ ABSTRACTLi Aiyong starts from a thorough analysis of the academic background, theories, and approaches of New Qing History. This suggests that its emergence in North America and the controversy it continues to cause in China have to be understood within the respective academic traditions and cultural environments and calls on Chinese academia to actively impact the writing of Qing history overseas.

AbstractHume is perhaps the most skeptical of all the great philosophers; and so it might reasonably have been assumed that he would have doubted the existence of a standard of taste in an area of human activity, the arts, where very many people, not ordinarily considered of a skeptical turn of mind, have doubted the existence of any standard according to his 1757 essay Of the Standard of Taste.

This year is the Eightieth anniversary of the May Fourth movement, as well as the last decennial of the May Fourth movement in the twentieth century.

This paper provides an exploratory comparative assessment of the institutional pressures influencing corporate social responsibility in a developed country, UK, vs. a developing country, Brazil, based on a survey of different actors. Information on sustainability concerns, organizational strategies and mechanisms of pressure was collected through interviews with environmental regulatory agencies, financial institutions, media and non-governmental organizations. Our results confirm that the more advanced awareness and CSR responsiveness in the UK is a consequence of a predominance of coercive and normative forces (...) on the organizational field. The institutional forces tend to build a Brazilian organizational field that is relational based and risk intensive. The findings lend support to the view that CSR responses are unlikely to be easily transformed into uniform standardized practices across the globe. This paper contributes to a collective understanding of the organizational field and a common template for CSR in the context of developed and developing countries. (shrink)

本研究得到国家社会科学基金“法制与法治国家”重大项目、教育部“社会变迁中的中国法治的理论与实践”项目以及北京大学“985”项目的资助.

Resumen Se estudia comparativamente el desempeño de adultos mayores y de adultos jóvenes en una tarea concurrente que consiste en leer oraciones ecuacionales mientras, al mismo tiempo, se retienen en la memoria tres palabras. El propósito del experimento es averiguar si existe un efecto de las variables edad, memoria operativa, complejidad sintáctica e interferencia de una carga concurrente de memoria en el procesamiento y comprensión de oraciones de sintaxis compleja. El análisis estadístico multinivel realizado revela que tanto el procesamiento en (...) línea de las oraciones ecuacionales como su comprensión se ven afectados significativamente por la edad de los participantes cuando opera una carga de memoria concurrente. Las variables memoria operativa y complejidad sintáctica, por su parte, afectan también significativamente el desempeño de los sujetos, pero independientemente de su edad.The performance of older and young adults in a concurrent task -to read equational sentences while at the same time the subjects retain in memory three words- is comparatively studied. The purpose of the experiment is to find out if there is an effect of the variables of age, working memory, syntactic complexity and interference of a concurrent memory load processing on the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences. The multilevel statistical analysis reveals that both online processing of cleft sentences as their understanding is significantly affected by the age of participants when operating a concurrent memory load. The working memory variables and syntactical complexity, meanwhile, also significantly affect the performance of subjects, but regardless of age. (shrink)

Between the Spiritualistic tendency, which characterizes itself for seeing man as rational soul, and the body as its cage; and, on the other hand, the Materialistic tendency of viewing man as a body, the Thomistic Anthropology conceives man as compound of body and soul, matter and spirit. Thomas of Aquinas, within an ontological analysis of the sensible real, establishes from the ontological unity between body and soul, the possibility for one to observe the external movement of the body as evidence (...) of its deep structure, where sensations, memories, feelings, desires and thoughts are wrought and reflected the latter’s way of acting. The intelligible being is involved in the sensitive existence. (shrink)

A set of sentential revision operations can be generated in a select-direct way within a new framework for belief change named descriptor revision firstly introduced in Hansson [8]. In this paper, we adopt another constructive approach to these operations, based on a relation \ on sentences named believability relation. Intuitively, \ means that the subject is at least as prone to believe or accept \ as to believe or accept \. We demonstrate that so called H-believability relations and basic believability (...) relations, the second of which the is axiomatically characterized with a set of weak postulates, are faithful alternative models for two typical select-direct sentential revision operations. Then we investigate additional postulates on believability relations that correlate with properties of the generated revision operations. Finally, we show that traditional AGM revision operations can be reconstructed from a strengthened variant of the basic believability relation and there is a close connection between this relation and the standard epistemic entrenchment relation. (shrink)

[v. 1. Basic theories]--v. 2. Applications.--v. 3. Theory of plants and other essays.

In 1959, the Chinese government conducted a democratic reform in Tibet, and thoroughly abolished feudal serf system. Feudal serf system in Tibet before that time was dark and ferocious, vandalizing “human character, personality, human rights and humanity”, seriously obstructing overall progress of the Tibetan society, and isolating Tibet from the modern civilized world. The fact in Tibet that “millions of serfs acquired freedom and liberation, and thence became human in its actual meaning” was in line with the goal of human (...) rights campaign without doubt. Therefore, the Chinese government and people made another great contribution to the human rights campaign and human civilized progress. (shrink)

The current president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, is an outstanding thinker of our times. He first became famous as a dramatist, then later became a prominent dissident and philosopher; and, following a series of revolutions in Czechoslovakia and other Central European states after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he was elected president of the Czech Republic, [a post that] he has now [held] for nine years.

The rise and development of the characteristics of all peoples and nations, their cultural-psychological structure, and the formation and continuation of all traditions of thought originate in actual material existence.

First, we should reinvestigate and clarify the meaning of the categories "substance" and "application".1.

“Rough set” is a theory put forward by the polish scholar Z. Pawlak, which is a useful mathematics tool for dealing with vague and uncertain information. Rough set theory can achieve a subset of all attribute which preserves the discernible ability of original features, by using the data only with no additional information. As a typical system of multi-agent, the decision-making system of soccer robot has the features of multi-layered, antagonism, and cooperation. On the bases of rough set theory, this (...) paper established a decision making system with complete information for soccer robot, and then reduce the condition and decision attributes and their values, to get the simply decision rules. On the otherwise, considering the situation of information loss, we study decision making of imperfect information system, extract the decision rules and calculate the reliability, so that the rules can assist the agent to make right decision in competition. The simulation result shows that the algorithm is correct and effective. (shrink)

Resumen: Los profesores universitarios ocupamos mucho tiempo en ofrecer retroalimentación oral o escrita a los trabajos de los estudiantes. Sin embargo, una de las preocupaciones que surge es saber qué hacen los estudiantes con dichas sugerencias ¿Las siguen? ¿Las omiten? El objetivo de esta investigación es presentar los resultados del análisis de las acciones ejecutadas por estudiantes universitarios a partir de los 434 comentarios escritos ofrecidos por dos profesores guías a un total de 6 borradores durante el desarrollo de una (...) investigación final de grado. Para ello, adaptamos la taxonomía de Faigley y Witte para analizar las acciones realizadas por escritores a partir de la retroalimentación recibida. Analizamos, a partir del texto terminado, las acciones realizadas por los estudiantes en términos de adopción, no adopción o supresión de las sugerencias ofrecidas para mejorar el escrito. Los resultados demuestran que los estudiantes adoptan prácticamente todas las sugerencias ofrecidas. Básicamente lo que más hacen es consolidar y sustituir en el escrito. Asimismo se reporta que existe alguna relación entre la manera como se ofrecen los comentarios y las acciones que realizan los escritores. Si bien se trata de un estudio de caso, es interesante notar una cierta relación entre la oferta de órdenes y la adición, y entre preguntas con reformulaciones en el escrito.: We, university teachers, invest most of our time in offering written or oral feedback to the student’s assignments. However, one of the issues is to know what students do with these comments. Do they follow them? Do they omit them? The aim of this research is to present the results of the analysis carried out about the actions that students perform based on 434 written comments provided by 2 supervisors teachers in total of 2 drafts produced in the development of the final undergraduate research. To analyze the actions carried out by the writers from the feedback received, Faigley and Witte taxonomy was adapted. These actions were analyzed in terms of adoption, non adoption or suppression of the suggestions offered to improve the text. The results show that students adopt almost all the suggestions offered. Basically, what they do the most is to consolidate and substitute. Likewise, it is possible to report that there is a relation between the way comments are offered and the actions the writers carry out. While, this is a case study, it is interesting to notice a certain relation between offering order and the text addition and questions with the text modifications. (shrink)