Errorless learning and memory performance in schizophrenia

There is evidence that patients with schizophrenia have impaired explicit memory and intact implicit memory. The present study sought to replicate and extend that of O'Carroll et al. [O'Carroll, R.E., Russell, H.H., Lawrie, S.M. and Johnstone, E.C., 1999. Errorless learning and the cognitive rehabilitation of memory-impaired schizophrenic patients. Psychological Medicine 29, 105-112.] which reported that for memory-impaired patients with schizophrenia performance on a (cued) word recall task is enhanced using errorless learning techniques (in which errors are prevented during learning) compared to errorful learning (the traditional trial-and-error approach). Thirty patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia and fifteen healthy controls (HC) participated. The Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test was administered and from their scores, the schizophrenic patients were classified as either memory-impaired (MIS), or memory-unimpaired (MUS). During the training phase two lists of words were learned separately, one using the errorless learning approach and the other using an errorful approach. Subjects were then tested for their recall of the words using cued recall. After errorful learning training, performance on word recall for the MIS group was impaired compared to the MUS and HC groups. However, after errorless learning training, no significant differences in performance were found between the three groups. Errorless learning may play an important role in remediation of cognitive deficits for patients with schizophrenia. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Lean software management case study: Timberline Inc.

This paper is believed to be the first documented account of a full adoption of lean by a software company. Lean techniques were devised by Toyota and other manufacturers over the last 50 years. The techniques are termed lean because they require less resource to produce more product and exceptional quality. Lean ideas have also been successful in service industries and product development. Applying lean to software has been advocated for over 10 years. Timberline, Inc started their lean initiative in Spring 2001 and this paper records their journey, results and lessons learned up to Fall 2003. This case study demonstrates that lean thinking can work successfully for software developers. It also indicates that the extensive lean literature is a valuable source of new ideas for software engineering.

Role of peripheral afference during acquisition of a complex coordination task

It has long been supposed that the interference observed in certain patterns of coordination is mediated, at least in part, by peripheral afference from the moving limbs. We manipulated the level of afferent input, arising from movement of the opposite limb, during the acquisition of a complex coordination task. Participants learned to generate flexion and extension movements of the right wrist, of 75degrees amplitude, that were a quarter cycle out of phase with a 1-Hz sinusoidal visual reference signal. On separate trials, the left wrist either was at rest, or was moved passively by a torque motor through 50degrees, 75degrees or 100degrees, in synchrony with the reference signal. Five acquisition sessions were conducted on successive days. A retention session was conducted I week later. Performance was initially superior when the opposite limb was moved passively than when it was static. The amplitude and frequency of active movement were lower in the static condition than in the driven conditions and the variation in the relative phase relation across trials was greater than in the driven conditions. In addition, the variability of amplitude, frequency and the relative phase relation during each trial was greater when the opposite limb was static than when driven. Similar effects were expressed in electromyograms. The most marked and consistent differences in the accuracy and consistency of performance (defined in terms of relative phase) were between the static condition and the condition in which the left wrist was moved through 50degrees. These outcomes were exhibited most prominently during initial exposure to the task. Increases in task performance during the acquisition period, as assessed by a number of kinematic variables, were generally well described by power functions. In addition, the recruitment of extensor carpi radialis (ECR), and the degree of co-contraction of flexor carpi radialis and ECR, decreased during acquisition. Our results indicate that, in an appropriate task context, afferent feedback from the opposite limb, even when out of phase with the focal movement, may have a positive influence upon the stability of coordination.

“If I’m brutally honest research has never appealed to me …”: The Problems and Successes of a Peer Research Project

This paper describes the use of a peer research methodology to explore disaffected young people’s views on alternative education. This model was adopted in order to try to ensure an equilibrium of power between interviewer and interviewee, allow marginalised young people’s voices to be heard and help generate social action. The approach is examined from the perspective of both the peer research and adult research teams. An experiential and honest account is given including the problems and successes, as well as the lessons learned. The paper concludes by considering the value of the model, whether it helps to reach those alienated from education and any evidence that it provides an opportunity for them to have a stake in their future.

No longer Sukumbasis: Challenges in grassroots-led squatter resettlement program in Kathmandu with special reference to Kirtipur Housing Project.

The paper is the outcome of a systematic effort to study and analyze the experiences of the Kirtipur Housing Project (KHP), the first ever grassroots-led squatter resettlement project in Kathmandu. It is widely hailed as a success story as it has been able to provide a legal, affordable and good quality housing solution to the Sukumbasis through grassroots mobilization. The paper analyses the dynamics of this mobilization and the roles of different actors to show how community empowerment, civil actions and local government interests have converged to create a constructive partnership in line with wider enabling principles. Apart from meeting the narrowly defined objective to rehouse 44 households, the project reflects capacity of the community, quite apart from lobbying and protest, in areas of project planning and management. While no grassroots mobilisation can be expected to replicate in a dynamic environment, the paper draws some policy insights that indicate the ability of the grassroots mobilization in Kathmandu to continue and grow. Conversely, the lessons learned from the project also point to limitations in terms lack of prerequisite critical mass or economic benefits to influence the government to prepare a policy framework under which it can foster in a more structured way.

Experiencia colaborativa de enseñanza y aprendizaje entre estudiantes de diferentes ámbitos universitarios. Narrativa en torno a los Desayunos Donostia-Barcelona

El texto presenta una experiencia socioconstruccionista que une el trabajo entre estudiantes de Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Barcelona y de Magisterio de la Universidad del País Vasco. Un trabajo colaborativo entre docentes y estudiantes que conllevó compartir conocimientos y saberes a través del uso de nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (Skype y Blogs). El foco del artículo está situado en las relaciones de enseñanza y aprendizaje propias y singulares de una experiencia concreta, y en lo que se deriva de ello en el desarrollo de identidades de discentes y docentes; en esta línea, surgieron temas vinculados con: las posicionamientos emergentes, los modos de colocarse en los espacios de aprendizaje, las formas de relacionarse con los conocimientos, resistencias y potenciales del uso de nuevas tecnologías, etc. El texto está articulado en dos partes: una primera en la que brevemente se muestra el anclaje teórico que sustentó el trabajo (la investigación narrativa, y el trabajo educativo basado en Leaning by Desing); y una segunda parte que, llevando por título Desayunos Donostia–Barcelona y con una retórica basada en la novela de ficción, presenta experiencias significativas que hablan de los encuentros entre estudiantes y docentes. Dichas experiencias se inscriben dentro de las actividades de los grupos de innovación docente Indaga-t (2010PID-UB/33) y Elkarrikertuz (IT433-10), y es el resultado de trabajos colaborativos entre docentes e investigadores miembros de los mismos.El texto, que parte de la relación entre los grupos de innovación Indaga-t (2010PID-UB/33) y Elkarrikertuz (IT433-10), muestra una experiencia de colaboración que permite a los estudiantes establecer puentes entre diferentes comunidades y entre dos lugares de aprendizaje supuestamente alejados como son las facultades de Bellas Artes y Magisterio. Además nos ha ofrecido la oportunidad de construir experiencias de aprendizaje donde hemos aprendido a trabajar de un modo colaborativo entre docentes y estudiantes.

Influence of social status on the welfare of growing pigs housed in barren and enriched environments

One hundred and twenty-eight pigs were reared in barren or enriched environments from birth to slaughter at 21 weeks of age. Pigs remained as litter-mate groups until 8 weeks of age when they were mixed into groups of eight animals. These groups were balanced for gender and weight and contained two pigs from each of four different litters. Each pig was assigned high or low social status on the basis of relative success in aggressive interactions at mixing. Injury levels were assessed on a weekly basis from 8 to 2 1 weeks of age. Pigs were exposed to two group food competition tests after a period of food restriction at 10 weeks of age, and to an individual novel pen test at 11 weeks of age. Behavioural and plasma cortisol responses to both types of test were recorded. Low social status was associated with increased injuries to the head, neck and ears, and therefore reduced welfare. Pigs with low social status showed reduced resource-holding ability in the food competition test, and greater avoidance of a novel object during the novel pen test. It is suggested that avoidance of the novel object reflected 'learned' fearfulness in these individuals. Environmental enrichment did not negate the effect of low social status on injury levels, but did appear to reduce the negative influence of low social status on stress during food restriction, and led to a reduction in fearfulness in response to the novel pen test. These results suggest that environmental enrichment may improve the we/fare of growing pigs with low social status.

Bluestocking Feminism Revisited: The Satirical Figure of the Bluestocking

Recent debates about the Bluestockings have focused on the lives, writings and political opinions of the Bluestockings themselves. This article argues that the significance of the Bluestockings, however, lies in the ways in which they were figured in public representations. It examines the tradition of satires of the Bluestockings, showing how this tradition both continued earlier traditions of satire against the learned lady and invented the comic figure of the literary hostess. The satires’ crude attacks on intellectual women ultimately raised the profile of the learned lady, a figure whose incipient feminism bore no necessary relation to the historical Bluestockings themselves.

Learning design contingent valuation (LDCV): NOAA guidelines, preference learning and coherent arbitrariness

We extend the contingent valuation (CV) method to test three differing conceptions of individuals' preferences as either (i) a-priori well-formed or readily divined and revealed through a single dichotomous choice question (as per the NOAA CV guidelines [K. Arrow, R. Solow, P.R. Portney, E.E. Learner, R. Radner, H. Schuman, Report of the NOAA panel on contingent valuation, Fed. Reg. 58 (1993) 4601-4614]); (ii) learned or 'discovered' through a process of repetition and experience [J.A. List, Does market experience eliminate market anomalies? Q. J. Econ. (2003) 41-72; C.R. Plott, Rational individual behaviour in markets and social choice processes: the discovered preference hypothesis, in: K. Arrow, E. Colombatto, M. Perleman, C. Schmidt (Eds.), Rational Foundations of Economic Behaviour, Macmillan, London, St. Martin's, New York, 1996, pp. 225-250]; (iii) internally coherent but strongly influenced by some initial arbitrary anchor [D. Ariely, G. Loewenstein, D. Prelec, 'Coherent arbitrariness': stable demand curves without stable preferences, Q. J. Econ. 118(l) (2003) 73-105]. Findings reject both the first and last of these conceptions in favour of a model in which preferences converge towards standard expectations through a process of repetition and learning. In doing so, we show that such a 'learning design CV method overturns the 'stylised facts' of bias and anchoring within the double bound dichotomous choice elicitation format. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Weather Prognostics in Anglo-Saxon England

Prognostics concerning the day of the week on which kalendae ianuariae and Christmas Day fall, commonly known as the Revelatio Esdrae , purport to be a set of prophecies by the Biblical Esdras. They make predictions about the weather and other natural phenomena for the year to come, and they then extend their predictions to the field of human affairs. A remarkable number of copies of the Revelatio appear in English manuscripts from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. Some of these versions have been attributed to Bede and Abbo of Fleury as part of their computus works.

Both R. M. Liuzza and L. S. Chardonnens point out the frequent occurrence of the Revelatio in religious and scientific manuscripts and therefore reject the label of folklore, stressing instead the probable monastic origin of this prognostication. This study will provide the first complete collation and analysis of the surviving exemplars, to give as full an idea as possible of their circumstances of composition, their transmission, and their relationship to one another. It will consider how the Revelatio Esdrae was copied and used in Anglo-Saxon England, the audience to which it was addressed, and whether any conclusion can be drawn from its appearance in particular manuscripts, alongside certain other texts.

The regular occurrence of the Revelatio along with computistical material supports the case for its monastic origin and learned nature. Such a text would have been a helpful handbook to be used by monks and priests, and was among the standard holdings of continental and Anglo-Saxon monasteries and scriptoria, giving further proof of the monks’ intellectual eclecticism and their knowledge of the kinds of continental literature from which this text derives.

A heterosynaptic learning rule for neural networks

In this article we intoduce a novel stochastic Hebb-like learning rule for neural networks that is neurobiologically motivated. This learning rule combines features of unsupervised (Hebbian) and supervised (reinforcement) learning and is stochastic with respect to the selection of the time points when a synapse is modified. Moreover, the learning rule does not only affect the synapse between pre- and postsynaptic neuron, which is called homosynaptic plasticity, but effects also further remote synapses of the pre-and postsynaptic neuron. This more complex form of synaptic plasticity has recently come under investigations in neurobiology and is called heterosynaptic plasticity. We demonstrate that this learning rule is useful in training neural networks by learning parity functions including the exclusive-or (XOR) mapping in a multilayer feed-forward network. We find, that our stochastic learning rule works well, even in the presence of noise. Importantly, the mean leaxning time increases with the number of patterns to be learned polynomially, indicating efficient learning.

Evidence for a navigational map stretching across the continental US in a migratory songbird

Billions of songbirds migrate several thousand kilometers from breeding to wintering grounds and are challenged with crossing ecological barriers and facing displacement by winds along the route. A satisfactory explanation of long-distance animal navigation is still lacking, partly because of limitations on field-based study. The navigational tasks faced by adults and juveniles differ fundamentally, because only adults migrate toward wintering grounds known from the previous year. Here, we show by radio tracking from small aircraft that only adult, and not juvenile, long-distance migrating white-crowned sparrows rapidly recognize and correct for a continent-wide displacement of 3,700 km from the west coast of North America to previously unvisited areas on the east coast. These results show that the learned navigational map used by adult long-distance migratory songbirds extends at least on a continental scale. The juveniles with less experience rely on their innate program to find their distant wintering areas and continue to migrate in the innate direction without correcting for displacement.

Sensory systems and spatial memory in the fruit bat Rousettus aegyptiacus

The megachiropteran fruit bat Rousettus aegyptiacus is able to orient and navigate using both vision and echolocation. These two sensory systems have different environmental constraints however, echolocation being relatively short range when compared with vision. Despite this difference, an experiment testing their memory of a perch location demonstrates that once the location of a perch is learned R. aegyptiacus is not influenced by the movement of local landmark cues in the vicinity of the perch under either light or dark conditions. Thus despite the differing constraints of vision and echolocation, this suggests a place is remembered as a location in space and not by associations with landmarks in the vicinity. A decrease in initial performance when the task was repeated in the dark suggested the possibility that a memory of a location learned using vision does not generalize to echolocation.

Near-surface temperature cycling of stone and its implications for scales of surface deterioration

Many previous studies into internal temperature gradients within stone have assumed smooth, exponential increases and decreases in sub-surface temperatures in response, for example, to diurnal patterns of heating and cooling and these have been used to explain phenomena such as large-scale contour scaling. This high-resolution experimental study, in which a porous limestone block was subjected to alternate surface heating and cooling using an infrared lamp, demonstrates that internal temperature gradients in response to short-term environmental cycles (measured in minutes) can in fact be complex and inconsistent. Results confirm the significance of very steep temperature/stress gradients within the outer 10 mm or less of exposed stone. Below this the data indicate complex patterns of temperature reversals, the amplitudes of which are attenuated with depth and which are influenced in their intensity and location by variations in the relative duration of heating and cooling phases. It is suggested that the reversals might represent ‘interference patterns’ between incoming and outgoing thermal waves, but whatever their origin they are potentially important because they occur within the zone in which many stone decay processes, especially salt weathering, operate. These processes invariably respond to temperature and moisture fluctuations, and short-term interruptions to insolation could, for example, trigger these fluctuations on numerous occasions over a day. In particular, the reversals occur at a scale that is commensurate with decay by multiple flaking and could indicate an underlying control on this previously little-researched pattern of weathering. In the context of this publication, however, the main lesson to be learned from this study is that differing scales of behaviour require different scales of enquiry.

The development of University Technology Transfer stakeholder relationships at a regional level: Lessons for the future

The increasing importance placed upon regional development and the knowledge-based economy as economic growth stimuli has led to a changing role for Universities and their interaction with the business community through (though not limited to) the transfer of technology from academia to industry. With the emergence of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) replacing the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), there is a need for policy and practice going forward to be clearly informed by a critique of TTO (Technology Transfer Office)–RDA stakeholder relationship in a lessons learned approach so that LEPs can benefit from a faster learning curve. Thus, the aim of this paper is to examine the stakeholder relationship between three regional universities in the context of its TTO and the RDA with a view to determining lessons learned for the emerging LEP approach. Although the issues raised are contextual, the abstracted stakeholder conceptualisation of the TTO–RDA relationship should enable wider generalisation of the issues raised beyond the UK. Stakeholder theory relationship and stage development models are used to guide a repeat interview study of the TTO and RDA stakeholder groupings. The findings, interpreted using combined category and stage based stakeholder models, show how the longitudinal development of the TTO–RDA stakeholder relationship for each case has progressed through different stakeholder pathways, and stages where specific targeting of funding was dependant on the stakeholder stage. Greater targeted policy and funding, based on the stakeholder relationship approach, led to the development of joint mechanisms and a closer alignment of performance measures between the TTO and the RDA. However, over-reliance on the unitary nature of the TTO–RDA relationship may lead to a lack of cultivation and dependency for funding from other stakeholders.