Michaels reported a compatibility effect in which responses were fastest at the destination of a moving stimulus; she interpreted this "destination" compatibility effect in terms of catching actions "afforded" by the stimulus motion. The present study evaluated implications of the catching-affordance account and compared them with those of an account based on spatial coding of relative directio...

Metaphors are ubiquitous in language and developing methods to identify and deal with metaphors is an open problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this paper we describe results from using a maximum entropy (ME) classifier to identify metaphors. Using the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus, we annotated all the verbal targets associated with a set of frames which includes frames of spati...

We apply the Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (GPLVM) to tackle the inverse kinematic problem in character animation during a ball catching scenario. The goal is to generate realistic upper-body movements with only the tip of the hand specified as the constraint. We ran a series of motion capture experiments to capture the body movement in a subject as he performs a ball catching task and...

Our focus is on creating interesting, realistic behaviors for humanoid robots and virtual characters. Among the methods we use to create human-like movements are a template-based approach, where example movements from humans are stored for later use, and a dynamical systems approach where new movements are generated from motion primitives as they are needed. Here we discuss a dynamical systems ...

I am quite aware that anybody doubting the value of vaccines and vaccination for smallpox, to which you refer in this article, is at once written down as an ignorant crank. I have, however, been studying the Registrar-General's figures and other facts relating to smallpox, and I am bound to say, so far, I cannot find anything whatever in favour of the practice. I wish you could help me to find ...

With China’s rapid economic growth in recent years, many Chinese firms especially in high-tech industries have started to technically lead in the international market. In this study, we aim to uncover the root causes that lead to Chinese firms’ catching up from network perspective. By taking Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. as a case, we integrate absorptive capacity development and firm-level catc...

We introduce the "ball-catching task", a novel computerized task, which combines a tangible action ("catching balls") with induced material cost of effort. The central feature of the ball-catching task is that it allows researchers to manipulate the cost of effort function as well as the production function, which permits quantitative predictions on effort provision. In an experiment with piece...