Stress-Inspired Modulation of Robotic Deliberative Functions

The study analyzes somatic idioms used in business English, which constitute an essential part of the linguistic worldview of native speakers. Phraseological units recorded in lexicographic sources were analyzed, and 212 English somatic idioms were selected. The research examines the semantic classification of somatic idioms covering thematic groups such as external human body parts, internal human body parts and external animal body parts. Idioms referring to external human body parts form the most substantial category of somatic phraseological units, comprising 141 examples or 66.5% of the analyzed corpus. It is followed by idioms involving external animal body parts (45 idioms, making up 21.2%), while idioms with lexemes nominating internal human body parts form the smallest group (26 units, representing 12.3%). The idioms under study were classified by their level of semantic opacity into pure (32.4%), semi-idioms (41.4%), and literal (26.2%). Special attention was given to translation techniques applied for adapting somatic idioms in interlingual communication. Results show that the most common translation methods are analogy (34.9%) and near equivalent (27.4%), whereas absolute equivalents (14.6%), descriptive translation (19.8%) and calques (3.3%) are less frequently used. The external human body parts thematic group exhibited the greatest variability in translation methods, indicating the universality of this group for constructing metaphorical meanings. The study demonstrates that metaphorical expressions involving lexemes that nominate human body parts are a rich source of idioms across languages. Among them, references to external body parts tend to carry meanings that are widely understood and easily translatable across cultures. In contrast, idioms involving lexemes nominating internal organs or animal anatomy often reflect culturally specific associations, making direct translation more challenging and frequently requiring explanation or adaptation. The originality of this paper lies in its focus on semantic features of somatic idioms used in business English, a topic that has received limited attention in linguistic research. By grouping these idioms into thematic categories - external human body parts, internal human body parts, and external animal body parts - and analyzing their meanings and translation techniques employed in rendering them in Ukrainian, the study offers new insights into how figurative language works in professional communication. Conclusion. The study highlights the richness of somatic idioms in business English and their semantic features. It shows that idioms based on external human body parts are the most common and easiest to translate due to their universal meanings. In contrast, idioms involving internal body parts or animal anatomy tend to be more culture-specific, often requiring explanation.

Despite the coherence and seeming directness of our bodily experience, our perception of the world, including that of our own body, may constitute an inference based on ambiguous sensory data and prior expectations. In this article, I apply a 'psychologised' version of the recently proposed free energy framework to the understanding of certain disorders of neurological unawareness in order to examine how inferential processes may determine our body perception. I specifically consider three facets of body perception in such disorders: namely, the 'external body' as inferred on the basis of exteroceptive signals and related predictions; the 'internal body' as inferred on the basis of proprioceptive and interoceptive signals and related predictions; and lastly the 'impersonalised body' as inferred on the basis of signals from social and third-person perspectives on the body and related predictions. Several conclusions will be drawn from these considerations: (a) there is a deep interdependency of prior beliefs and sensory data; as the brain uses sensory data to update its virtual model of the world, lack or imprecision of sensory prediction errors may lead to aberrant inferences influenced disproportionally by outdated, premorbid predictions; (b) interoception and interoceptive salience have a unique role in our inferences about body awareness and (c) social, 'objectified' prior beliefs about the body may have a silent but potent role in our bodily self-awareness. Finally, the article emphasizes that our learned, virtual model of the body is depended on the nature and thus integrity of the very body that allowed the model to be formed in the first place.

A slab detachment and delamination model for the generation of Carboniferous high-potassium I-type magmatism in the Eastern Pontides, NE Turkey: The Köse composite pluton

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to describe the opportunities and challenges of a curricular review process in an entry-level doctor of physical therapy geriatric curriculum. The curricular review process utilized an external interprofessional reviewing body, in conjunction with an established internal curricular reviewing body, to determine inclusion of Essential Competencies in order to prepare students for best clinical practice in the care of the older adult. Method: The methodology of our curricular review process included both internal and external reviewing bodies but the intent of this article is to highlight how the review process was implemented including an external interprofessional reviewing body. The internal reviewing body involved two faculty members with expertise in geriatrics, the Program Curriculum Committee members, and the faculty members within the entry-level doctor of physical therapy program. The external reviewing body was comprised of the 2012-2014 members of the Faculty Development Collaborative Program in Geriatrics (FDCPG), a national interprofessional learning community representing multiple disciplines involved in the care of older adults. Results: The outcomes of including an external interprofessional reviewing body in the geriatric curricular review process were: the FDCPG justified the need for the review of the Essential Competencies, deemed their role as important in healthcare education, and reported a greater understanding of the role of physical therapists as part of an interprofessional healthcare team. The Program Curriculum Committee created a policy for consideration of other published competencies, including a recommendation for “other necessary consultation” based on our use of an external reviewing body, noting its value. The outcomes of the overall curricular review process included: 53/61 Essential Competencies were identified as already in the curriculum and the remaining 8/61 Essential Competencies were added. Conclusions and Recommendations: The addition of an external interprofessional reviewing body to an already established internal reviewing body within the geriatric curricular review process in an entry-level doctor of physical therapy program produced a curriculum that will hopefully prepare students for best clinical practice in the care of the older adult. This comprehensive curricular review process involved opportunities and challenges yet still can be used across multiple disciplines, across multiple curricular structures, and is in line with the current state of healthcare practice.

This paper provides an overview of the bottom-up approach to artificial intelligence (AI), commonly referred to as behavior-oriented AI. The behavior-oriented approach, with its focus on the interaction between autonomous agents and their environments, is introduced by contrasting it with the traditional approach of knowledge-based AI. Different notions of autonomy are discussed, and key problems of generating adaptive and complex behavior are identified. A number of techniques for the generation of behavior are introduced and evaluated regarding their potential for realizing different aspects of autonomy as well as adaptivity and complexity of behavior. It is concluded that, in order to realize truly autonomous and intelligent agents, the behavior-oriented approach will have to focus even more on lifelike qualities in both agents and environments.

This thesis focuses on the problem of efficiently allocating resources for enhancing the performance of an autonomous robotic agent. Such an agent is expected to operate in complex dynamic environments by continuously monitoring its internal states and the external events. These requirements give raise to countless problems that have populated research in the autonomous robotics community in the last two decades. Among these issues, one of the most relevant is to coordinate different low and high-level behaviors, giving them, from time to time, different priority values both for resource allocation and for action selection processes. The main problem in achieving this requirement is that the number and complexity of the stimuli received by each behavior may be quite high and also the effects on the emerging activity may be very hard to foresee. It is clear that it is not possible for the robotic control system to process all the incoming information, especially for real-time applications. Thus, it becomes necessary to build mechanisms able to guide this sensory input selection process and to choose the best action to perform, assuring an efficient use of the robot limited sensorial and cognitive resources. For this purpose, attentional mechanisms, balancing sensors elaboration and actions execution, can be very useful since they play two main roles: they focus the attention on salient regions of the space and they distribute resources and activities in time. As a result of the application of these mechanisms within the robotic control system for sensory-motor coordination, the robot behavior is improved: the robot becomes able to react faster to task-related or safety-critical stimuli and to opportunely split resources among concurrent behaviors. Attentional mechanisms applied to autonomous robotic systems have already been proposed, but mainly for vision-based robotics; conversely, the contribution introduced by the present thesis is the use of an artificial attentional mechanism suitable both for optimizing the use of resources and for execution monitoring and control.

Introduction. In the face of the loss of vast territories at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, human resources, including the NKVD and the NKGB staff became the most important value, which were supposed to fight against violations of law and ensure state security in new places. The purpose of the article is to study the quantitative and qualitative composition of officers of the internal affairs and security bodies which were evacuated to the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic from the Union republics of the USSR in July – October 1941. Materials and Methods. The source base of the study was made up of materials extracted from the fund of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Mordovian ASSR of the Central State Archive of the Republic of Mordovia. The methodology of the work is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity and consistency, historical-genetic and idiographic methods, as well as quantitative analysis. Results. In the course of the study data was analyzed on where the evacuated personnel of law enforcement officers came to the MASSR, as well as the dynamics of the arrival of the evacuees by months, the timing of their stay on the territory of Mordovia. Discussion and Conclusion. The Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in July – October 1941 of the Great Patriotic War deployed on its territory 1 868 officers of internal affairs and state security agencies and their family members. The largest number of officers of the internal affairs and state security bodies came from the Ukrainian SSR; in second place was the Byelorussian SSR, in third one – the Lithuanian USSR. Much smaller number of employees were evacuated to Mordovia from the Latvian, Estonian, Moldavian and Karelo-Finnish Union republics. Many officers of the internal affairs and state security bodies were evacuated to the MASSR worked together at their former places of service. It could have a positive effect on the effective work of the newly reconstructed structures in the long run. Most of the officers of the bodies stayed on the territory of the MASSR for two months, after which they were sent to new places of service.

In many languages, terms denoting parts of a human body have special grammatical properties. In Tariana, a North Arawak language from north-west Amazonia (Brazil), external and internal body parts are obligatorily, inalienably, possessed. They are used in double-object constructions, where the body part and its owner are both marked as objects. Terms for internal and external body parts can occur with classifiers in derivational function. Bodily fluids and detachable parts (such as ‘hair’) are treated as optionally possessed and do not participate in double-object constructions; they do not occur with classifiers. Of all the terms for internal body parts, only -kale ‘heart’ can refer to the locus of emotions and feelings, and the essence of a human being (notably in shamanic incantations); in this sense it has a number of special features. Unlike other body-part terms, including ‘heart’ as a physical part of human body, it cannot take classifiers; nor does it occur in double-object constructions. It occurs in double-subject constructions: ‘I am sad’ translates in Tariana as ‘My heart I-shrink’, where both ‘my heart’ and ‘I’ have subject properties. Differences in the grammatical behavior of the term ‘heart’ in its two distinct meanings reflect the ways in which the entity is conceptualized. Grammatical properties of internal and external body parts are then compared with their cognates in the closely related North Arawak languages Baniwa of Içana-Kurripako and Piapoco, within the context of the Arawak language family.

The differential roles of inner and outer body parts attitudes in predicting the self-concepts of late adolescents (107 female and 72 male undergraduates) were assessed in order to test derivations from Erikson's notions (1964) about sex differences in the import of inner and out body “space” for personality. To assess knowledge about inner body space, subjects drew and labeled their internal body parts within an asexual frontal outline figure. Affect associated with internal and external body parts was assessed by rating 36 body characteristics in terms of their importance in making subjects attractive, effective people. Subjects responded also to a short self-concept scale. Females demonstrated greater knowledge of their inner body and attached generally higher levels of importance to their internal (and external) body parts than did males. However, completely opposite to the tested Eriksonian notions, inner body parts attitudes predicted self-concepts for males, but not for females. Moreover, more external than internal body parts were significant predictors of females' self-concepts, and the former parts accounted for more variance in self-concept than the latter ones. The results are interpreted to speak against theories which attempt to dichotomize the source of sex differences in personality development into either biologically or societally based contributions.

Mark Solms suggests that the internal body, equated with the id and represented at the brainstem structures, gives us the self-as-subject consciousness, while the external body, equated with the ego, is represented as an object, analogous to any other object in the world. Is memory space the sole, or at least the most important, contribution that the ego can make to the id? I would like to argue that it is not. Even though the basis of phenomenal consciousness—the “being-me” state—might be given by the brainstem consciousness, the most important function of the ego is precisely that it can represent my body as an object and identify it with the internal body. Thus, both bodies need to be represented as self-specific, and inevitably this will require the contribution of a cortical network. Both the ego and the id, in Solms’s terms, co-constitute self-specificity.

To be an autonomous agent is to determine one's own path in life. However, this cannot plausibly be seen as a one-off affair. An autonomous agent does not merely set herself on a particular course and then lock the steering wheel in place, so to speak, but must maintain some form of ongoing control over her direction in life-must keep her eyes on the road and her hands on the wheel. Circumstances often change in important and unexpected ways, after all, and it is reasonable to think that a crucial part of autonomy consists of the ability and disposition to recognize and properly respond to such changes. This implies, I contend, that a patient whose initial decision to undergo a given treatment satisfied plausible requirements of autonomy, but who is now unable to recognize that available evidence indicates the need to reconsider her medical situation and options has come to lack autonomy with respect to her desire to continue that treatment. However, and despite its importance with respect to both theoretical understandings of autonomy and applications of the concept to clinical ethics, this ongoing aspect of autonomy has received little attention. This paper aims to go some way toward remedying that. I first critically review two of the few theories of autonomy that do address "evidence-responsiveness" so as to identify and elaborate what I take to be the most promising way in which to account for this aspect of autonomy. After considering and responding to a possible objection to the evidence-responsiveness condition I propose, I conclude by discussing its clinical implications. That condition, I argue, is not merely theoretically sound, but can and should be applied to clinical practice.

This paper presents ARTEMIS, a control system for autonomous robots or software agents. ARTEMIS is able to create and capture artificial emotions during interactions with its environment, and we describe the underlying mechanisms for this. The control system also realizes the capturing of knowledge about its past artificial emotions. A specific interpretation of a knowledge graph, called an Agent Knowledge Graph, represents these artificial emotions. For this, we devise a formalism which enriches the traditional factual knowledge in knowledge graphs with the representation of artificial emotions. As proof of concept, we realize a concrete software agent based on the ARTEMIS control system. This software agent acts as a user assistant and executes the user’s orders. The environment of this user assistant consists of autonomous service agents. The execution of user’s orders requires interaction with these autonomous service agents. These interactions lead to artificial emotions within the assistant. The first experiments show that it is possible to realize an autonomous agent with plausible artificial emotions with ARTEMIS and to record these artificial emotions in its Agent Knowledge Graph. In this way, autonomous agents based on ARTEMIS can capture essential knowledge that supports successful planning and decision making in complex dynamic environments and surpass emotionless agents.

As information machines become increasingly autonomous, not only partial and predetermined aspects of contracting are delegated to them, but also the very deliberations pertaining to whether to enter a contract, with whom, and with what content. After considering the different aspects of autonomy, I argue that the use of autonomous contracting agents involves the delegation of cognitive tasks. Consequently, such agents should be considered the real authors of the contracts they conclude. Not only do they exercise discretion in contracting, but they also have those cognitive states that are relevant to the contracts they form (beliefs, goals and intentions). Consequently, the rules that apply to human agents should in principle also apply to autonomous digital agents. This does not presuppose that digital agents should be granted legal personality, understood as the ability to bear rights and duties, since the normative effects of their activity will fall upon their users. Finally, I consider some of the legal and social issues that may result from the widespread delegation of contracting to digital agents. INTRODUCTION Contracting takes place today in a new socio-technological space, the so-called infosphere, based on digital information and information machines. In such a context, several contract-related tasks are either accomplished with the support of machines, or are completely delegated to them. As information machines become increasingly autonomous, not only are partial and predetermined aspects of contracting delegated to them, but also the very deliberations pertaining to whether to enter a contract, with whom, and with what content. I shall address some emerging dimensions of contracting in the ICT-based infosphere, focusing on artificially intelligent contracting parties. First, I shall address the embeddedness of contractual activities in active, responsive, and connected informational environments. I will argue that in such environments a vast expansion of contractual interactions is likely to happen, since contracting enables distributed autonomous collaboration between humans and artificial entities, and between such entities themselves. Contractual relations will be entered into by both virtual artefacts (e.g., online bots) and physical artefacts (e.g., autonomous cars), as interactions with physical artefacts take place through their interconnected digital interfaces. I will then focus on how contracting may take place with and between Autonomous Contracting Agents – ‘ACA’ s. I will characterise the idea of autonomy as including three aspects: independence of action, high-level cognitive skills, and adaptive/teleologic architecture.

This paper examines the implementation of a standalone 1 MW Wave Energy Converter (WEC), based on a novel concept of a class of WECs, consisting in fully enclosed appropriate internal body configurations, which provide inertial reaction against the motion of an external vessel. Acting under the excitation of the waves, the external vessel is subjected to a simultaneous surge and pitch motion in all directions, ensuring maximum wave energy capture. The internal body is suspended from the external vessel body in such an appropriate geometrical configuration, that a symmetric four bar mechanism is essentially formed. The first advantage of this suspension geometry is that a linear trajectory results for the center of the mass of the suspended body with respect to the external vessel, enabling the introduction of a quite simple form of a Power Take-Off (PTO) design. The simplicity and symmetry of the suspension geometry and of the PTO, ensure a quite simple and robust technological implementation. Mass and inertia distribution of the internal body are optimized, ensuring maximal conversion and storage of wave energy. As a result, the internal body assembly is essentially, dynamically equivalent to a vertical physical pendulum. However, the resulting equivalent pendulum length and inertia can far exceed those that can be achieved by a simple horizontal or vertical pendulum, suspended or inverted, leading to a significant reduction of the suspended mass.

The analysis of foreign experience in the use of robotic technological systems (RTS) shows that there are many possible areas of their practical application in the activities of state enforcement agencies. In the activities of the Russian police small-sized ground-based robotic systems and unmanned aerial vehicles have been used, which expand the capabilities of the internal affairs bodies in the course of resolving official tasks. The article presents the current state of the use of RTS in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, discusses the main problems to be solved, and considers the prospects for development of police robotic systems. The scope of use of RTS for various purposes is determined, depending on the application environment and the method of basing.