Affordances, as for example grasping possibilities, are known to play a role in the guidance of human attention but have not been considered in artificial attention systems so far. Extending our earlier work, we investigate the combination of affordance estimation and visual saliency in an artificial visual attention model. Different models based on saliency, affordance estimation, or their com...

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...

A sustainable future requires a change of human activities at a global scale. Global agreements have not been very effective. At the local level there are many examples of successful efforts to solve collective action problems within social-ecological systems. The study of these examples has led to an understanding of the principles of self-governance. We propose to scale up these insights of s...

This paper reports on initial findings in comparing two distance universities’ approaches to trialling tablet technology to enhance communication between instructors and students. There were different reasons for initiating the trials and different approaches to each of the trials, but there were also some striking similarities. For instance both trials were led from the bottom up, however they...

Important factors involved in odontogenesis in mouse dental papillae disappear between the pre- and post-natal stages of development. Therefore, we hypothesized that certain genes involved in odontogenesis in dental papillae were subject to pre-/post-natal down-regulation. Our goal was to identify, by microarray analysis, which genes were down-regulated. Dental papillae were isolated from embry...