Various researchers and policy analysts have made empirical studies of innovation systems in order to understand their current structure and trace their dynamics. However, policy makers often experience difficulties in extracting practical guidelines from studies of this kind. In this paper, we operationalize our previous work on a functional approach to analyzing innovation system dynamics int...

We often describe lives (or parts of lives) as meaningful or as not meaningful. It is also common to characterize them as more or less meaningful. Some lives, we tend to think, are more meaningful than others. But how then can one compare lives with respect to how much meaning they contain? Can one? This paper argues that (i) only a notion of rough equality can be used when comparing different ...

Information, Uncertainty, and Subjective Entitlements in Bargaining More often than not production processes are the joint endeavor of people having different abilities and productivities. Such production processes and the associated surplus production are often not fully transparent in the sense that the relative contributions of involved agents are blurred; either by lack of information about...

In this short technical note we show how PADL – the process algebraic architectural description language of Bernardo, Ciancarini and Donatiello – can be used to specify AFrames. AFrames exist to structure the machine in a Problem Frames development, and are important in that framework as they allow architectural expertise to be captured and reused therein. Because of the close proximity of PADL...

The dynamic window approach is a well known navigation scheme developed in Fox et al. (1997) and extended in Brock and Khatib (1999). It is safe by construction and has been shown to perform very efficiently in experimental setups. However, one can construct examples where the proposed scheme fails to attain the goal configuration. What has been lacking is a theoretical treatment of the algorit...

Do People Seek to Maximize Their Subjective Well‐Being?* In a new survey we ask respondents, after a standard Subjective Well‐Being (SWB) question, if they can think of changes in their lives that would improve their SWB score. If the SWB score is just one argument among others in the respondents’ goals in life, they should easily find ways to improve it, at the expense of other dimensions they...

In order to train distance learning students the discernment abilio, teachers often suggest to them web courseware on some specific topics, such as a controversial social issues, with different view points. Traditional discriminating strategies based on simple keyword matching often lead to low accuracy of discrimination. This paper proposes a method called DRSA (Discriminating via Representati...

This paper is part of an ongoing research program to understand the cognitive and functional bases for the origins and evolution of spatial language. Following a cognitive-functional approach, we first investigate the cross-linguistic variety in spatial language, with special attention for spatial perspective. Based on this language-typological data, we hypothesize which cognitive mechanisms ar...

In order to adjust personality measurements to children's developmental level, we constructed the Pictorial Personality Traits Questionnaire for Children (PPTQ-C). To validate the measure, we conducted a study with a total group of 1028 children aged between 7 and 13 years old. Structural validity was established through Exploratory Structural Equation Model (ESEM). Criterion validity was confi...

In this paper, we present various functional means in the sense of convex analysis. In particular, a logarithmic mean involving convex functionals, extending the scalar one, is introduced. In the quadratic case, our functional approach implies immediately that of positive operators. Some examples, illustrating theoretical results and showing the interest of our functional approach, are discussed.