Intellectual Limitations Research Articles

Toward a Sparse Self-Organizing Map for Neuromorphic Architectures

Neurobiological systems have often been a source of inspiration for computational science and engineering, but in the past their impact has also been limited by the understanding of biological models. Today, new technologies lead to an equilibrium situation where powerful and complex computers bring new biological knowledge of the brain behavior. At this point, we possess sufficient understanding to both imagine new brain-inspired computing paradigms and to sustain a classical paradigm which reaches its end programming and intellectual limitations. In this context, we propose to reconsider the computation problem first in the specific domain of mobile robotics. Our main proposal consists in considering computation as part of a global adaptive system, composed of sensors, actuators, a source of energy and a controlling unit. During the adaptation process, the proposed brain-inspired computing structure does not only execute the tasks of the application but also reacts to the external stimulation and acts on the emergent behavior of the system. This approach is inspired by cortical plasticity in mammalian brains and suggests developing the computation architecture along the system's experience. This article proposes modeling this plasticity as a problem of estimating a probability density function. This function would correspond to the nature and the richness of the environment perceived through multiple modalities. We define and develop a novel neural model solving the problem in a distributed and sparse manner. And we integrate this neural map into a bio-inspired hardware substrate that brings the plasticity property into parallel many-core architectures. The approach is then called Hardware Plasticity. The results show that the self-organization properties of our model solve the problem of multimodal sensory data clusterization. The properties of the proposed model allow envisaging the deployment of this adaptation layer into hardware architectures embedded into the robot's body in order to build intelligent controllers.

Cultural Difference in George Macartney’s An Embassy to China, 1792–94

Sir George Macartney’s British embassy to the court of the Qiánlóng emperor in 1792-94 was a political and commercial failure. This essay seeks to think critically about Macartney’s failure as it pertains to his journal—the posthumously published Journal of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China in the Years 1792, 1793, and 1794 (1807)—and its imaginative engagement with Chinese culture. While Macartney’s narrative partakes of formal and aesthetic qualities associated with travel writing from the Grand Tour and with scientific exploration, it cannot wholly be identified with either. Instead, Macartney adopts a skeptical, self-conscious position with regard to his diplomatic and intellectual limitations in dealing with the Qing. Critical analysis of his narrative’s literary qualities, as well as manuscripts in the Charles W. Wason Collection at Cornell University, enable an appreciation of the sophistication and deliberateness of Macartney’s narrative. Thus, I argue that Macartney’s “failure” is predicated on his understanding and exploration of cultural difference—his narrative opens a space that brings British and Chinese representatives together while also revealing differences between the two cultures. To illuminate that rich yet liminal cultural space in Macartney’s narrative, I draw on a parallel moment in Sino-British cultural relations in the years leading up to the Opium wars—George Chinnery’s painting, Rev. Morrison Translating the Bible in to Chinese (1829). Reading Macartney’s narrative through the lens of Chinnery’s painting, a work that also represents a relationship between the two cultures, brings out the distinctive tone and historiographical understanding of Macartney’s An Embassy to China, 1792-94.

Validation of the Educational Game for Seniors: “Live Well, Live Healthy!”

A literature review was conducted as part of a development project to flesh out a number of issues: How can game component design be adapted to accommodate seniors’ physical or intellectual limitations? How should a game interface and its components be displayed on the screen to facilitate game navigation? What restrictions should be considered when selecting computer game equipment to be used by seniors? What are the guidelines for efficient game audio, video and text readability? This communication first presents the pedagogical and technological adaptations of the online educational game: “Live Well, Live Healthy!” This adaptation of the Bingo game has allowed us to introduce learning content with the objective of improving the quality of life for seniors. Second, the methodology used for the validation of the ergonomics of this educational game with seniors and third, the results of validation and the recommendations from the seniors to improve the ergonomic conditions.

Concepções de professores da educação especial (APAEs) sobre a aprendizagem e desenvolvimento do aluno com deficiência intelectual: um estudo a partir da teoria vigotskiana

O presente estudo teve por objetivo identificar concepções de professores que atuam na educação especial sobre a aprendizagem e desenvolvimento de alunos com deficiência intelectual, buscando averiguar como estes compreendem esse processo, bem como suas percepções sobre o papel da mediação na aprendizagem. Foi desenvolvido em duas escolas de Educação Básica na modalidade de Educação Especial para deficiente intelectual (Associação de pais e amigos dos excepcionais) localizadas no Interior do Estado do Paraná. O estudo contou com a participação de oito professoras das séries iniciais do Ensino Fundamental, sendo quatro de cada escola. Os dados foram coletados mediante a técnica de entrevista semiestruturada. Estes foram analisados a partir da análise de conteúdo. Os principais resultados permitiram compreender que para as participantes da pesquisa a aprendizagem e desenvolvimento do aluno com deficiência ocorre de forma lenta, justificado pela limitação deste, e que a mediação docente não é vista como de fundamental importância para o aprendizado e desenvolvimento do mesmo. Estes resultados apontam para o fato destes professores estarem desenvolvendo sua prática pedagógica ancorada numa visão segregacionista do aluno com deficiência, com concepções reducionistas, enfatizando as limitações em detrimento das potencialidades. Dessa forma, é essencial um repensar sobre a deficiência e a educação escolar que vem sendo ofertada ao aluno com deficiência intelectual.

Fitzgerald and the Idea of Society

Fitzgerald and the Idea of Society

Book Review: The C. S. Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity and the Public Sphere

The C. S. Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity and the Public Sphere. By Samuel Joeckel. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-88146-4375. Pp. 403. $30.00. It can be like discovering a jewel to find a book that is both scholarly and argumentatively sound. It is a rare thing indeed for that same book to offer keen insights into the life of a profound writer, as well as provide organizational categories for that writers work that are both complex and accessible. Samuel Joeckel has shaped such a jewel in his recent book, The C. S. Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity and the Public Sphere. The book is a delight to read, as Joeckel progresses through a carefully constructed series of definitions and assertions toward understanding Lewis as a intellectual. Joeckel's primary claim is that Lewis' persona as a created the ways in which Lewis responded to truth claims and the methods that he used to construct the arguments in his works. With the rise of the sphere that began with Enlightenment presumptions, so Joeckel argues, the place of one type of public became a response to the challenge that atheism offered to Christianity. The introduction to this lengthy book sets up key terms that Joeckel will spend the remainder of part 1 (of three parts) defining, with careful examples from Lewis' culture and works: public intellectual, de-conversion, transcendent character, the genre of and vantage point. Chapter 1 overviews the qualities and role of the who used Enlightenment standards of reasoned argument to assume a neutral, or objective, arguer (de-converted stance in Joeckel's term) who used logical discourse to carefully move through an argument and that by doing so, the argument could be acceded on solely rational grounds. Drawing on Russell Jacoby's (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, Joeckel defines a as a figure who defends religious, political, or ideological beliefs in a manner that requires the expertise of a scholar, possessing the learning and critical acumen to engage with proficiency complex issues, and the communicative skills of a journalist, capable of making those complex beliefs understandable to the layperson (7). As is evident from this quote, Joeckel himself writes--at times--in a style that captures key ideas in loaded, but succinct language. Since this laconic language is not always present in the book, the argument is well worth some unnecessary repetition by Joeckel. Defining the allows Joeckel to argue that the or nonconformist role assumed by those taking on the persona is one Lewis assumed in his apologetics, as well as his apologue, which Joeckel argues are works organized as a fictional example of the truth of a formulable statement or a series of such statements (qtd. Sacks Fiction and the Shape of Belief 26, Joeckel 3). Lewis' personality as is upheld by his arguments against modernity and moral relativism, as well as the rise of scientism during the twentieth century. As a defender of Christianity, Lewis assumed the outsider stance to the new atheism that gained support during the twentieth century. As a translator of difficult messages, Lewis assumed a de-converted stance that attempts to reduce (or remove) bias before analyzing ideas, often employing transcendent characters (another Joeckel term as he so fondly and repeatedly reminds the reader through the 400-page book) who adopt Olympian perspectives on truth and reason that transcend the intellectual limitations endemic to the human condition (22). In his second chapter Joeckel argues that the challenge of atheism along with changes in Christian apologetics work together to create a moment perfect for Lewis' rise to popularity--a unique and unrepeatable moment. …

Who “Owns” Dis/ability? The Cultural Work of Critical Special Educators as Insider–Outsiders

The article describes the work of critical special education scholars and teacher educators in the field of Disability Studies who challenge the fundamental assumptions on which special education is founded, illustrating implications for all educators. A brief history of the field acknowledges the enormity of the institutionalization of special education as a complex, multi-faceted, multi-layered establishment. The intellectual limits of that institution are described through the medicalized knowledge base that has arisen within special education, a base that gives rise to specific, restricted discourses of what constitutes a dis/ability and why. The author presents alternative sociocultural knowledge bases, as informed by Disability Studies and put forth by critical special educators, that broaden the understanding of dis/ability. Contrasting these theoretical groundings, implications for teacher dispositions toward differences among students are discussed, and ways in which a new perspective on dis/ability is related to the goals and practices of social education are identified.

Neutralizing Freud: The Lycée Philosophy Class and the Problem of the Reception of Psychoanalysis in France

One of the classic puzzles in the history of the transnational diffusion of ideas is the reception of psychoanalysis in France. In part because a cosmopolitan circle of disciples surrounded Sigmund Freud almost from the beginning, his ideas spread out from their Viennese place of origin quite rapidly in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Americans greeted them with notable enthusiasm, which the ever-pessimistic Freud could only see as a bad sign: given their well-known superficiality, Freud surmised, the Americans must be watering down his theories in order to accept them. Nonetheless, Freud deliberately aided the popularization effort by tailoring his 1909 lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to what he perceived as the prejudices and intellectual limitations of his American audience; and in the wake of World War I, according to one historian, an ambient Freudianism meshed perfectly with the new Fordist consumer economy in the United States.1 Closer to home, the

Detection of Cognitive Malingering or Suboptimal Effort in Defendants Undergoing Competency to Stand Trial Evaluations

The present study evaluated the usefulness of two popular tests of cognitive malingering in a real-life forensic setting. Only 25 of 166 defendants referred for competency to stand trial evaluations claimed to have memory problems. Compared with the rest of the defendants, these individuals had a significantly higher incidence of affective disorders and lower incidence of psychotic disorders. Almost half failed both the Rey 15-Item Test (RFT) and the Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM), and 64% failed one or both. Seven of the eight suspected malingerers diagnosed with psychotic disorders failed both the RFT and TOMM. The incidence of psychotic disorders was significantly higher in those who failed the RFT than those who passed and somewhat higher in those who failed the TOMM than those who passed. The possibility that some defendants scored below the recommended cutoff scores because of intellectual limitations or concentration problems stemming from their psychotic illness is discussed.

First Person Nautical: Poetry and Play at Sea

First Person Nautical: Poetry and Play at Sea Hester Blum (bio) and Jason R. Rudy (bio) The sea has been a siren for writers meditating on mythic voyages; on dissolution; on the boundaries between different states of being; on spaces of lawlessness and danger, what Hans Blumenberg calls the “immoderate[ness]” of the ocean’s vastness.1 One might lose oneself in such vastness, come undone, experience revolutions within, question established connections and affiliations. And yet for all the vast literature about the sea from Homer onward, little attention has been paid to the surprising amount and variety of literature written at sea. In this essay we look to poetic production aboard long-voyaging Anglo-American ships in order to think about the place of poetry within nineteenth-century communities whose circuits were at once prosaic and eccentric. Shipboard poetry, produced in an environment uncongenial to most forms of inscription, invites us to imagine archives ungrounded and on the move. The tracklessness of the sea, as well as the indeterminate sense of being in between one’s home and a past or future abroad, or perhaps a life of perennial wandering, expands imaginative possibilities for writers at sea. The archive of shipboard [End Page 189] poetry itself may open today a range of possible readings outside the land-based norm: for reconsidering the boundaries of nationality, and how ideas of nation have constructed our canon; for discovering literary coteries at the scene of their labor; for theories of exchange, travel, and community; and for prolific literary traditions that have hitherto gone missing beyond the horizon of our landlocked critical retrospect. In first-person sailor writing of the nineteenth century we find the constraint and discipline of shipboard life invoked as a narrative hedge against the boundlessness of the sea.2 Similarly, poetry—in its generic attention to meter, rhythm, and tone, to a line that can be traced— offers a regulatory corrective to the drift and dislocation of nautical travel. Nearly all the formal structures practiced at sea were understood to be rooted in national traditions: ballad stanzas, heroic couplets, hexameters.3 Yet their reproduction on ships outside national boundaries, in transitional cultural spaces, complicates an easy association between aesthetic form and nationalist sentiment. Literary history has most often considered the sea from the vantage point of the land, to which the sea’s immoderateness moves in antithesis. The emerging field of oceanic studies seeks instead to reorient our critical perception to the heaving, uncertain surfaces and depths of the sea, to recognize the artificiality and intellectual limitations of national, political, linguistic, and geophysical boundaries. Reading shipboard poetry within the context of oceanic studies, in other words, helps us think more acutely about modes of being and exchange that are necessarily constituted by—and yet can stand in formal counterpoint to—fluidity, contingency, and mutability.4 If not precisely national, literary production at sea was necessarily collective, consisting of small bodies of shared interest that in and of themselves constituted, for a set interval, a totality of community. Whether laboring sailors or paying passengers, those aboard ship had little to no space for privacy, no retreat; the circumscribed nature of the built environment meant that maritime community necessarily took the form of a coterie. In what follows we look briefly to two classes of coteries of nautical poets in the long nineteenth century: passengers aboard British emigrant ships, and sailors participating in Anglo-American expeditions to Antarctica and the Arctic. For British emigrants voyaging to Australia—a three-month trip at midcentury—ship newspapers offered both relief from monotony and the comfort of the familiar features one would have found in periodicals at home: weather [End Page 190] reports, birth and death announcements, short stories and word puzzles, opinion pieces, and poetry. Most of the content was written by the passengers themselves, who were solicited for original contributions, and the newspapers were printed by either members of the crew or volunteers. Polar voyagers, on the other hand, produced works for literary exchange only during the long polar winters, when their ships were ice-bound and consigned to darkness and relative oceanic stillness. Their sketches, satires, essays, and poems in shipboard...

Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus from Tolstoy to Mamakaev

Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus from Tolstoy to Mamakaev

The intellectual frameworks and theoretical limits of Arab feminist thought

This is a critical assessment of the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of Feminism in the Arab world across the different phases in its evolution. The paper notes what has been achieved in respect of some specific issues but takes the view that overall the movement has failed to transform the views, consciousness and situation of most Arab women. Attempts to incorporate and/or redefine women's aspirations and roles in Islamic terms are seen as having taken over from earlier feminist voices. Where these voices do remain they are confined to a narrow intellectual elite and have failed to galvanize or inform women across the socio-economic spectrum. The article concludes that the contemporary feminist movement is repeating the same errors as in the past by adopting intellectual perspectives that do not suit the intellectual, ideological and value foundations of Arab culture. There is a need, therefore, to revise the intellectual foundations of the movement and make a rapprochement between this current and the reality of Arab societies.

Avaliação da aprendizagem e inclusão escolar: a singularidade a serviço da coletividade

Pretende-se com este trabalho discutir a avaliação da aprendizagem escolar como meio de inclusão/exclusão a partir da análise de conceitos que permeiam as duas temáticas. Através de um estudo teórico são apresentados aspectos relevantes que possibilitam ou dificultam a consolidação do processo de avaliação para a diversidade, em torno das seguintes questões: Como analisar a inclusão se não a partir da reflexão sobre a sua lógica contrária, a exclusão? Como avaliar para a inclusão, considerando as diferenças, sem relativizá-las ou centrá-las apenas nas limitações físicas, intelectuais ou sociais? Foram adotadas, como referencial, teorias críticas na intenção de superar uma visão determinante acerca das características individuais, que compreendam os seres humanos inseridos em um contexto social, histórico e cultural amplo e repleto de contradições. Conclui-se que a escola deve preparar indivíduos capazes de avaliar suas ações, generalizar conhecimentos e experiências, fazer análises e sínteses, considerando não apenas a dimensão individual, mas, sobretudo, coletiva.

Reviews: 2030: The Future of Medicine: Avoiding A Medical Meltdown

2030: THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE: AVOIDING A MEDICAL MELTDOWN RICHARD BARKER Oxford University Press, 2011 PB, 129 pp, £14.99, 9780199600663 THE RISE AND FALL OF MODERN MEDICINE JAMES LE FANU 2nd edn, Hachette, 2011 PB, 291 pp, £14.99, 9780748131433 ![][1] ![][2] > ‘For the family doctor to remain an expert resource for the management of the more complex conditions, they will need three kinds of capability at their fingertips: on-line decision support, so that their diagnosis and treatment choices reflect the best clinical practice: access to community based diagnostics and imaging; and telemedicine links with specialists for the diagnosis and management of the most difficult cases.’ > ‘The personal doctor listens carefully to what he is being told. He or she performs the irreducible minimum of investigations necessary to establish a diagnosis. He confines himself to the matter in hand and does not stray beyond to give impudent or gratuitous advice. He recognises the intellectual limits of human understanding and the practical limits of what medicine can legitimately be expected to achieve.’ Which doctor would you rather be? Which would you prefer to be seen by? The first is the doctor of the future characterised by Richard Barker in 2030: The Future of Medicine: Avoiding a Medical Meltdown . The second is the doctor for all times evoked by James Le Fanu in The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine and described further in a referenced paper by James McCormick called ‘ Death of the Personal Doctor ’.1 Barker writes mainly of the future and Le Fanu largely about the past but both make predictions based on questionable readings of history. In 2030 Barker writes that ‘over the last 20 years, designer drugs, specifically shaped to fit known pockets in the proteins involved in disease, have largely replaced those found by trial and error’. I'm not sure that's accurate. Later he asks, ‘When should we use genetic information?’ and … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif [2]: /embed/graphic-2.gif

Sisterhood and After: Individualism, Ethics and an Oral History of the Women's Liberation Movement

In this article, we address the question of ethics in the study of social movements from the perspective of ‘Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project’, which will record life history interviews of 50 key activists in the UK for the British Library Sound Archive. Our research is inspired by the democratic ideals of oral historical methods and of feminism itself, yet we have discovered tensions concerning the status of individual experience and the practicalities of selection and method. Turning to other feminist scholars of women's movements we identify four broad justifications for focusing on the individual: a political understanding of the personal; situated knowledge; an investment in interview relationships and a psycho-social framework of analysis. Testing these justifications against some of the oral histories we have gathered, we conclude that they go a long way to answering the paradox of studying a movement through a few individuals' stories. But we are frank about the ethical and intellectual limits that a life history method imposes on capturing social movements. Examples from interviews with Mia Morris, Beatrix Campbell, Lesley Abdela, Ellen Malos and Juliet Mitchell will illuminate the history at stake.

Racial Difference in Therapy

The culture of lower-class and underclass African Americans is distinctly different from that of the professionals who treat them in analysis, whether they are Black, White, or of some other race. Children are often raised by mothers who are very young, without the involvement of the father, and are often exposed to violence and trauma. Ego development may therefore be poor, leading to depression and intellectual limitations. Therapists must carefully examine their own preconceptions about people from other races and be prepared for racialized transference and countertransference. They must also be sensitive to the possibility that a child may have had important parental figures other than his or her biological mother, and probe for these in composing the patient's history.

Treating sexual offenders with intellectual limitations in the community

PurposeThis study summarises the results of a cognitive‐behavioural treatment group for sexual offenders (n=14) with intellectual limitations in the community.Design/methodology/approachAll participants were convicted sex offenders serving probation orders or prison licences who attended a 14‐month treatment programme designed for sex offenders with intellectual limitations. The programme comprised of five main components: sex education; cognitive distortions; offending cycle; victim empathy; and relapse prevention. All participants completed psychometric measures specifically designed for people with intellectual limitations before and immediately after completing the treatment programme. The four core measures include: Victim Empathy; Sexual Attitudes and Knowledge Assessment (SAK); Questionnaire on Attitudes Consistent with Sexual Offenders (QACSO); and Sex Offences Self‐Appraisal Scale (SOSAS).FindingsPost assessment results reveal significant improvements in sexual offence related attitudes; reductions in attitudes relating to cognitive distortions and pro‐sexual assault beliefs; and significant improvements in victim empathy.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough none of the participants have been reconvicted for committing new sexual offences during the follow‐up period, given that the follow‐up was restricted to 12 months post‐treatment, it is not possible to conclude this intervention was successful in reducing risk of sexual recidivism.Originality/valueThe results from this study support the use of cognitive‐behavioural approaches in demonstrating positive cognitive shift (reconstructing cognitive distortions and attitudes to victim empathy) for sexual offenders with intellectual limitations.

The Myth of the Model Minority Myth

With continued cost increases as well as demands for charitable donations and economic subsidies, universities are concerned with public relations and political legitimacy. The latter are fostered by the Model Minority Myth which implicitly asserts the moral superiority of universities and their graduates by condemning American society in general and the white working class in particular as being racist. Despite its intellectual and empirical limitations, the Model Minority Myth persists because it promotes the political power of universities in the current era of increasing inequality and the rising exploitation of the working class that are fostered by educational credentialism.

Leadership potential as a key factor in the success of managers in companies of Ulyanovsk Region

Modern economy is the economy of information and knowledge, resulting in increasing speed of changes occurring in it; accordingly, it requires new tools and approaches to industrial activity. In conditions of high degree of uncertainty in the environment and in order to enhance their role, the entire staff and not only the top management become the protagonists in the organization. Thanks to the skills, abilities, knowledge of each organization item, one can not only achieve their strategic objectives (this is the role of management care in the classical management), but also form a strategic aim (which featured the activities of management in the classical management). Objective intellectual limitation of the organization leader is due to the fact that speed of changes in the external environment makes it necessary to use the potential of subordinates, who often have greater intellectual potential than leaders do. Thus, by combining efforts, the organization receives a significant synergetic effect. But this approach requires changes in organization management: control system based on coercion needs to be changed to a system based on the cooperation of all organization subjects, on the interaction of leadership qualities, leadership potential of every individual, but on condition that they are all ready to take on leadership functions. Key words: New management paradigm, creative organization, total leadership.

Agents of Discussion in Walter Bagehot's <i>Physics and Politics</i>

Physics and Politics is a unique attempt to apply Darwin’s theory of natural selection to the social and political realms. Adopting a “survival of the fittest” framework, the work traces historical developments within an individual society and between societies. Ultimately, Bagehot concludes that the factor which differentiates societies which have stagnated in a “cake of custom” and societies which have achieved some level of tangible “progress” is the ability to develop a taste for discussion of abstract principles. In turn, the results of intellectual discussion are incorporated into a particular society’s form of government, and government itself becomes government by discussion. However, Bagehot himself, in somewhat of a modernist fashion, acknowledges his own intellectual limits and claims that he is unable to explain precisely why some societies are capable of discussion and others never develop this capacity. The aim of this paper is, first, to further explore this dichotomy between “custom” societies and “discussion” societies by looking at several possible explanations posed by Bagehot himself: The Roman family law idea of patria potestas (or shift in family power from mother to father), differences in education, different ideas of tolerance, and the implications of natural selection itself. Second, this paper seeks to examine the effects, if any, of colonization in a concrete sense on the custom/discussion dichotomy. Put differently, it will attempt to answer the question, viewed from the time of Bagehot’s writing, is there any hope for imperial rule to cause the germination of abstract discussion in a society stagnated in Bagehot’s “cake of custom?” An answer in the affirmative will be offered, though not without great difficulty. This type of analysis has not been attempted by any other scholarship.