Modulation of Mediotemporal and Ventrostriatal Function in Humans by Delta 9-Tetrahydrocannabinol A Neural Basis for the Effects of Cannabis sativa on Learning and Psychosis

Context: Cannabis sativa use can impair verbal learning, provoke acute psychosis, and increase the risk of schizophrenia. It is unclear where C sativa acts in the human brain to modulate verbal learning and to induce psychotic symptoms. Objectives: To investigate the effects of 2 main psychoactive constituents of C sativa, Delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Delta 9-THC) and cannabidiol, on regional brain function during verbal paired associate learning. Design: Subjects were studied on 3 separate occasions using a block design functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm while performing a verbal paired associate learning task. Each imaging session was preceded by the ingestion of Delta 9-THC (10 mg), cannabidiol (600 mg), or placebo in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, repeated-measures, within-subject design. Setting: University research center. Participants: Fifteen healthy, native English-speaking, right-handed men of white race/ethnicity who had used C sativa 15 times or less and had minimal exposure to other illicit drugs in their lifetime. Main Outcome Measures: Regional brain activation ( blood oxygen level-dependent response), performance in a verbal learning task, and objective and subjective ratings of psychotic symptoms, anxiety, intoxication, and sedation. Results: Delta 9-Tetrahydrocannabinol increased psychotic symptoms and levels of anxiety, intoxication, and sedation, whereas no significant effect was noted on these parameters following administration of cannabidiol. Performance in the verbal learning task was not significantly modulated by either drug. Administration of Delta 9-THC augmented activation in the parahippocampal gyrus during blocks 2 and 3 such that the normal linear decrement in activation across repeated encoding blocks was no longer evident. Delta 9-Tetrahydrocannabinol also attenuated the normal time-dependent change in ventrostriatal activation during retrieval of word pairs, which was directly correlated with concurrently induced psychotic symptoms. In contrast, administration of cannabidiol had no such effect. Conclusion: The modulation of mediotemporal and ventrostriatal function by Delta 9-THC may underlie the effects of C sativa on verbal learning and psychotic symptoms, respectively.

Enriched behavioral prediction equation and its impact on structured learning and the dynamic calculus

This theoretical note describes an expansion of the behavioral prediction equation, in line with the greater complexity encountered in models of structured learning theory (R. B. Cattell, 1996a). This presents learning theory with a vector substitute for the simpler scalar quantities by which traditional Pavlovian-Skinnerian models have hitherto been represented. Structured learning can be demonstrated by vector changes across a range of intrapersonal psychological variables (ability, personality, motivation, and state constructs). Its use with motivational dynamic trait measures (R. B. Cattell, 1985) should reveal new theoretical possibilities for scientifically monitoring change processes (dynamic calculus model; R. B. Cattell, 1996b), such as encountered within psycho therapeutic settings (R. B. Cattell, 1987). The enhanced behavioral prediction equation suggests that static conceptualizations of personality structure such as the Big Five model are less than optimal.

A Feedback Learning and Mental Models Perspective on Strategic Decision Making

This study aims to be a contribution to a theoretical model that explains the effectiveness of the learning and decision-making processes by means of a feedback and mental models perspective. With appropriate mental models, managers should be able to improve their capacity to deal with dynamically complex contexts, in order to achieve long-term success. We present a set of hypotheses about the influence of feedback information and systems thinking facilitation on mental models and management performance. We explore, under controlled conditions, the role of mental models in terms of structure and behaviour. A test based on a simulation experiment with a system dynamics model was performed. Three out of the four hypotheses were confirmed. Causal diagramming positively influences mental model structure similarity, mental model structure similarity positively influences mental model behaviour similarity, and mental model behaviour similarity positively influences the quality of the decision.

A Feedback Learning and Mental Models Perspective on Strategic Decision Making

This study aims to be a contribution to a theoretical model that explains the effectiveness of the learning and decision-making processes by means of a feedback and mental models perspective. With appropriate mental models, managers should be able to improve their capacity to deal with dynamically complex contexts, in order to achieve long-term success. We present a set of hypotheses about the influence of feedback information and systems thinking facilitation on mental models and management performance. We explore, under controlled conditions, the role of mental models in terms of structure and behaviour. A test based on a simulation experiment with a system dynamics model was performed. Three out of the four hypotheses were confirmed. Causal diagramming positively influences mental model structure similarity, mental model structure similarity positively influences mental model behaviour similarity, and mental model behaviour similarity positively influences the quality of the decision

Challenges for e-learning and adult students in higher education

This article examines Lifelong Learning, from the perspective of the adult learner in higher education, by presenting some of the results of a project, funded by the European Commission's Socrates Programme, LIHE, Learning in Higher Education. It is structured as follows: first, the background of the project is described, then the experiences of the adult student, concerning their induction and tuition, are presented. Some future trends concerning adults in higher education and lifelong learning are outlined and conclusions drawn.

Word learning and text organisation: an intervention case

In the present study we focus on the interaction between the acquisition of new words and text organisation. In the acquisition of new words we emphasise the acquisition of paradigmatic relations such as hyponymy, meronymy and semantic sets. We work with a group of girls attending a private school for adolescents in serious difficulties. The subjects are from disadvantaged families. Their writing skills were very poor. When asked to describe a garden, they write a short text of a single paragraph, the lexical items were generic, there were no adjectives, and all of them use mainly existential verbs. The intervention plan assumed that subjects must to be exposed to new words, working out its meaning. In presence of referents subjects were taught new words making explicit the intended relation of the new term to a term already known. In the classroom subjects were asked to write all the words they knew drawing the relationships among them. They talk about the words specifying the relation making explicit pragmatic directions like is a kind of, is a part of or are all x. After that subjects were exposed to the task of choosing perspective. The work presented in this paper accounts for significant differences in the text of the subjects before and after the intervention. While working new words subjects were organising their lexicon and learning to present a whole entity in perspective.

The invisible factors that can make the difference. Language management and knowledge transfer in multinational sites

The knowledge-based society we live in has stressed the importance of human capital and brought talent to the top of most wanted skills, especially to companies who want to succeed in turbulent environments worldwide. In fact, streams, sequences of decisions and resource commitments characterize the day-to-day of multinational companies (MNCs). Such decision-making activities encompass major strategic moves like internationalization and new market entries or diversification and acquisitions. In most companies, these strategic decisions are extensively discussed and debated and are generally framed, formulated, and articulated in specialized language often developed by the best minds in the company. Yet the language used in such deliberations, in detailing and enacting the implementation strategy is usually taken for granted and receives little if any explicit attention (Brannen & Doz, 2012) an can still be a “forgotten factor” (Marschan et al. 1997). Literature on language management and international business refers to lack of awareness of business managers of the impact that language can have not only in communication effectiveness but especially in knowledge transfer and knowledge management in business environments. In the context of MNCs, management is, for many different reasons, more complex and demanding than that of a national company, mainly because of diversity factors inherent to internationalization, namely geographical and cultural spaces, i.e, varied mindsets. Moreover, the way of functioning, and managing language, of the MNC depends on its vision, its values and its internationalization model, i.e on in the way the MNE adapts to and controls the new markets, which can vary essentially from a more ethnocentric to a more pluricentric focus. Regardless of the internationalization model followed by the MNC, communication between different business units is essential to achieve unity in diversity and business sustainability. For the business flow and prosperity, inter-subsidiary, intra-company and company-client (customers, suppliers, governments, municipalities, etc..) communication must work in various directions and levels of the organization. If not well managed, this diversity can be a barrier to global coordination and create turbulent environments, even if a good technological support is available (Feely et al., 2002: 4). According to Marchan-Piekkari (1999) the tongue can be both (i) a barrier, (ii) a facilitator and (iii) a source of power. Moreover, the lack of preparation for the barriers of linguistic diversity can lead to various costs, including negotiations’ failure and failure on internationalization.. On the other hand, communication and language fluency is not just a message transfer procedure, but above all a knowledge transfer process, which requires extra-linguistic skills (persuasion, assertiveness …) in order to promote credibility of both parties. For this reason, MNCs need a common code to communicate and trade information inside and outside the company, which will require one or more strategies, in order to overcome possible barriers and organization distortions.

Terminology and knowledge engineering conference. New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

To meet the increasing demands of the complex inter-organizational processes and the demand for continuous innovation and internationalization, it is evident that new forms of organisation are being adopted, fostering more intensive collaboration processes and sharing of resources, in what can be called collaborative networks (Camarinha-Matos, 2006:03). Information and knowledge are crucial resources in collaborative networks, being their management fundamental processes to optimize. Knowledge organisation and collaboration systems are thus important instruments for the success of collaborative networks of organisations having been researched in the last decade in the areas of computer science, information science, management sciences, terminology and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this area didn’t give much attention to multilingual contexts of collaboration, which pose specific and challenging problems. It is then clear that access to and representation of knowledge will happen more and more on a multilingual setting which implies the overcoming of difficulties inherent to the presence of multiple languages, through the use of processes like localization of ontologies. Although localization, like other processes that involve multilingualism, is a rather well-developed practice and its methodologies and tools fruitfully employed by the language industry in the development and adaptation of multilingual content, it has not yet been sufficiently explored as an element of support to the development of knowledge representations - in particular ontologies - expressed in more than one language. Multilingual knowledge representation is then an open research area calling for cross-contributions from knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences. This workshop joined researchers interested in multilingual knowledge representation, in a multidisciplinary environment to debate the possibilities of cross-fertilization between knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences applied to contexts where multilingualism continuously creates new and demanding challenges to current knowledge representation methods and techniques. In this workshop six papers dealing with different approaches to multilingual knowledge representation are presented, most of them describing tools, approaches and results obtained in the development of ongoing projects. In the first case, Andrés Domínguez Burgos, Koen Kerremansa and Rita Temmerman present a software module that is part of a workbench for terminological and ontological mining, Termontospider, a wiki crawler that aims at optimally traverse Wikipedia in search of domainspecific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologicallyunderpinned multilingual terminological databases. In this paper the authors describe the basic principles behind the crawler and summarized the research setting in which the tool is currently tested. In the second paper, Fumiko Kano presents a work comparing four feature-based similarity measures derived from cognitive sciences. The purpose of the comparative analysis presented by the author is to verify the potentially most effective model that can be applied for mapping independent ontologies in a culturally influenced domain. For that, datasets based on standardized pre-defined feature dimensions and values, which are obtainable from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have been used for the comparative analysis of the similarity measures. The purpose of the comparison is to verify the similarity measures based on the objectively developed datasets. According to the author the results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model of Generalization provides for the most effective cognitive model for identifying the most similar corresponding concepts existing for a targeted socio-cultural community. In another presentation, Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger and Dagmar Gromann present an ongoing work and propose an approach to automatic extraction of information from multilingual financial Web resources, to provide candidate terms for building ontology elements or instances of ontology concepts. The authors present a complementary approach to the direct localization/translation of ontology labels, by acquiring terminologies through the access and harvesting of multilingual Web presences of structured information providers in the field of finance, leading to both the detection of candidate terms in various multilingual sources in the financial domain that can be used not only as labels of ontology classes and properties but also for the possible generation of (multilingual) domain ontologies themselves. In the next paper, Manuel Silva, António Lucas Soares and Rute Costa claim that despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. These questions become, according to the authors, more complex when the conceptualization occurs in a multilingual setting. To tackle these issues the authors present a collaborative platform – conceptME - where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework, allowing the inclusion of multilingual data as a way to promote knowledge sharing and enhance conceptualization and support a multilingual ontology specification. In another presentation Frieda Steurs and Hendrik J. Kockaert present us TermWise, a large project dealing with legal terminology and phraseology for the Belgian public services, i.e. the translation office of the ministry of justice, a project which aims at developing an advanced tool including expert knowledge in the algorithms that extract specialized language from textual data (legal documents) and whose outcome is a knowledge database including Dutch/French equivalents for legal concepts, enriched with the phraseology related to the terms under discussion. Finally, Deborah Grbac, Luca Losito, Andrea Sada and Paolo Sirito report on the preliminary results of a pilot project currently ongoing at UCSC Central Library, where they propose to adapt to subject librarians, employed in large and multilingual Academic Institutions, the model used by translators working within European Union Institutions. The authors are using User Experience (UX) Analysis in order to provide subject librarians with a visual support, by means of “ontology tables” depicting conceptual linking and connections of words with concepts presented according to their semantic and linguistic meaning. The organizers hope that the selection of papers presented here will be of interest to a broad audience, and will be a starting point for further discussion and cooperation.

User Profiling and Knowledge Extraction For Tourism

O sector do turismo é uma área francamente em crescimento em Portugal e que tem desenvolvido a sua divulgação e estratégia de marketing. Contudo, apenas se prende com indicadores de desempenho e de oferta instalada (número de quartos, hotéis, voos, estadias), deixando os indicadores estatísticos em segundo plano. De acordo com o “ Travel & tourism Competitiveness Report 2013”, do World Economic Forum, classifica Portugal em 72º lugar no que respeita à qualidade e cobertura da informação estatística, disponível para o sector do Turismo. Refira-se que Espanha ocupa o 3º lugar. Uma estratégia de mercado, sem base analítica, que sustente um quadro de orientações específico e objetivo, com relevante conhecimento dos mercados alvo, dificilmente é compreensível ou até mesmo materializável. A implementação de uma estrutura de Business Intelligence que permita a realização de um levantamento e tratamento de dados que possibilite relacionar e sustentar os resultados obtidos no sector do turismo revela-se fundamental e crucial, para que sejam criadas estratégias de mercado. Essas estratégias são realizadas a partir da informação dos turistas que nos visitam, e dos potenciais turistas, para que possam ser cativados no futuro. A análise das características e dos padrões comportamentais dos turistas permite definir perfis distintos e assim detetar as tendências de mercado, de forma a promover a oferta dos produtos e serviços mais adequados. O conhecimento obtido permite, por um lado criar e disponibilizar os produtos mais atrativos para oferecer aos turistas e por outro informá-los, de uma forma direcionada, da existência desses produtos. Assim, a associação de uma recomendação personalizada que, com base no conhecimento de perfis do turista proceda ao aconselhamento dos melhores produtos, revela-se como uma ferramenta essencial na captação e expansão de mercado.

Level of behavior and knowledge concerning human papillomavirus among university students of a nursing college

INTRODUCTION: Human pappilomavirus is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, and persistent HPV infection is considered the most important cause of cervical cancer. It is detected in more than 98% of this type of cancer. This study aimed to determine the level of knowledge concerning human papillomavirus among nursing college students of a private educational institution located in the City of Bauru, SP, and correlate their knowledge according to the course year. METHODS: A descriptive study with a quantitative approach, performed with a questionnaire that permitted the quantification of data and opinions, thus guaranteeing the precision of the results without distortions in analysis or interpretation. The survey was applied to randomly selected 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-year nursing college students. Twenty students from each level were selected during August 2009, totaling 80 students of both genders. RESULTS: Observation revealed that 4th-year students had greater knowledge than 1st-year students, reflecting the greater period of study, the lack of knowledge of 1st-year students was due to the low level of information acquired before entering college. CONCLUSIONS: The need for complementary studies which determine the profile and knowledge of a larger number of teenagers in relation to HPV was established. The need for educational programs that can overcome this lack of information is undeniable, especially those aimed at making adolescents less susceptible to HPV and other STDs.