The psychological problem of uncovering the mechanisms by which people select mates or marriage partners and the demographic problem of understanding the emergence of population-level patterns of marriage can be brought together to illuminate each other. In this paper we combine a top-down demographic approach with a bottom-up psychological approach to study marriage and mate search via agent-b...

A key debate in the curriculum field has centred on the extent to which teachers should or could achieve agency over the curriculum they enact. Threats to teacher agency have come from top-down control of curricula, either through input regulation (prescription of content, methods and/or teaching materials) or output regulation (steering through outcomes). Drawing upon an ecological model to ex...

This paper introduces a novel method for online recognition of handwritten mathematical formulas. The method is based on the combination of a structural analysis with a statistical model specifying relations of individual symbols. A description of all recognition phases is given, focusing mostly on the structural analysis stage. The recognition process following a bottom-up manner is driven by ...

Agent based models are computer based simulations that model a situation or phenomena from the bottom up using ‘agents’. Agent based models are often computationally intensive as they tend to simulate micro behaviours in order to examine the emerging system-level phenomena. Historically the size and scope of agent based models has been limited by a lack of accessible high performance computing ...

The waiting time needed for a stock market index to undergo a given percentage change in its value is found to have an up–down asymmetry, which, surprisingly, is not observed for the individual stocks composing that index. To explain this, we introduce a market model consisting of randomly fluctuating stocks that occasionally synchronize their short term draw-downs. These synchronous events are...

In different times, people use different words to describe concepts. Change and stability in word usage are possible indicators of wider socio-cultural changes. To gain insight into how people perceive concepts, it is valuable to trace how the words denoting a certain concept change over time. Existing tools for exploring historical concepts, such as keyword searching or topic modeling, are ill...

Traditionally, the top-down design method and analysis techniques, such as system dynamic model, have been used extensively for understanding complex systems. In top-down approach, a system is specified in terms of global state and the desired analyses are performed using aggregated macro-behaviour that represents the overall system. Essentially, the individual elements and their peculiarities ...

In beginning the development of a theory of brain-object using a top-down approach to mindbrain science, the first problem to be faced is one of developing research methodology. Between the starting point in mental physics and the ending point (a theory of soma), it can be reasonably anticipated that many intermediate steps will be required. This is regardless of whether the approach methodolog...

To investigate how top-down (TD) and bottom-up (BU) information is weighted in the guidance of human search behavior, we manipulated the proportions of BU and TD components in a saliency-based model. The model is biologically plausible and implements an artificial retina and a neuronal population code. The BU component is based on feature-contrast. The TD component is defined by a feature-templ...

The relationship between attention and consciousness is a close one, leading many scholars to conflate the two. However, recent research has slowly corroded a belief that selective attention and consciousness are so tightly entangled that they cannot be individually examined. We distinguish between exogenous, saliency-driven, task-independent attention and top-down, endogenous and voluntary att...