Concert etiquette demands that audiences of classical concerts avoid inept noises such as coughs. Yet, coughing in concerts occurs more frequently than elsewhere, implying a widespread and intentional breach of concert etiquette. Using the toolbox of (behavioral) economics, we study the social costs and benefits of concert etiquette and the motives and implications of individually disobeying su...

Ambient computing as an ideal demands levels of functional attainment that have thus far not been realised. Ambient applications require that the computing application be subsumed into the everyday context in an unobtrusive manner with interaction modalities that are natural, simple and appropriate to both the individual user and their associated context. Within this paper, we consider the use ...

Our study evaluates the moral reasoning skills of healthy and chronically ill 3 and 4 year olds with respect to illness and treatment, by use of an interview technique that reduces verbal demands on the child. We presented children with pairs of scenarios comparing ill characters with characters acting immorally and characters being punished, as well as with pairs of scenarios comparing treated...

A wide range of abilities was assessed in 56 high-functioning children with autism and 56 age- and IQ-matched controls. Stepwise discriminant analyses produced good group discrimination for sensory-perceptual, motor, complex language, and complex memory domains but lower agreement for the reasoning domain than previously obtained for adults. Group discrimination did not occur for attention, sim...

The vision of ambient intelligence is one where the populas is supported in the conductance of their everyday lives through the pro-active, opportunistic support of non-intrusive computing devices offering intuitive interaction modalities. This chapter advocates the adoption of mobile intentional agents as a key enabler in the delivery of ambient intelligence. Ambient computing, as an ideal, de...

This paper is a limited overview of a preliminary research task carried out for the National Security Agency (NSA) having to do with developing a basic understanding of the notions and concepts of intent, intentionality, and intentional behavior. These notions clearly have significant implications for intelligence analysis and especially predictive intelligence; modern-day “asymmetric threats” ...

A well-understood reason for component-based software engineering (CBSE) is improved productivity. CBSE is also important for another basic reason. It enables compositional or modular reasoning, and therefore, it facilitates production of high quality systems. In compositional reasoning, it is possible to reason about the behavior of the system using the behavioral specifications of reused comp...

Neural correlate of human inductive reasoning process is still unclear. Number series and letter series completion are two typical inductive reasoning tasks, and with a common core component of rule induction. Previous studies have demonstrated that different strategies are adopted in number series and letter series completion tasks; even the underlying rules are identical. In the present study...

Designing a task with a reasonable level of cognitive complexity has always been important for syllabus designers, teachers, as well as researchers. This is because task manipulation may lead to different results in oral production. The present study was an attempt to explore the effect of this  manipulation  -  based  on  Robinson’s  resource-directing  model  (reasoning  demands, number of el...

Veterinary medicine is an ethically challenging profession, but the ethical reasoning abilities of practising veterinarians in the UK have never been formally assessed. This study investigated moral reasoning ability in 65 qualified veterinarians (38 practising and 27 academic) and 33 members of the public in the UK using the Defining Issues Test. Academic veterinarians had higher scores than m...