Synesthetic Perception as Continuous with Ordinary Perception, or

It appears that the distinctive feature at the core of our understanding of synesthesia—informational integration between psychological systems—is also ubiquitous in normal perception. This observation invites the question whether synesthesia is a fundamentally distinct, pathological outlier, or a syndrome continuous with capacities present in normal perception. In this chapter I offer several arguments for the continuity view. I suggest that the forms of integration in synesthetic and normal perception exhibit striking, detailed, and unexpected similarities, while the evidence some have taken to reveal significant, qualitative dissimilarities is less decisive than it may first appear. Moreover, the continuity view correctly predicts the otherwise surprising result that synesthetes perform better than non-synesthete controls in integrative perceptual tasks that don’t implicate synesthetic perception. I’ll conclude that synesthetic perception is usefully viewed as closer to non-synesthetic perception (a fortiori, less clearly pathological) than standard views allow.

How Informational Integration Can Improve The Relationship Between Buyer And Supplier Of Logistical Services:Empirical Evidence From Vietnam

<p>Having initiated economic liberalization in 1986, Vietnam is a particularly interesting emerging economy to study. The logistics industry in the country is developing strongly because manufacturers are willing to outsource their logistical activities to specialized businesses called logistics service providers (LSPs). To be sustainable partners of manufacturers, LSPs must adopt an informational integration policy that improves the functioning of their customers’ supply chains. To find out whether Vietnamese manufacturers value information integration, a questionnaire survey was administered to 139 food industry managers. The main research finding is that informational integration between manufacturer and LSP strongly impacts the manager’s perception of its own logistics performance. This result has major implications for foreign LSPs that want to carve out a significant place on the Vietnamese market.</p>

Applying Universal Linking of Engineering Objects in the Automotive Industry: Practical Aspects, Benefits, and Prototypes

The bi-directional communication of CAD programs with subsequent applications such as process planning remains a key challenge in design-for-the-lifecycle. While it seems sensible that individual applications use their own collection of feature types and thereby allow users to have their specific perspective of the product, it is still difficult to automatically close the gap between the variety of applications. Universal Linking of Engineering Objects (ULEO) targets this concern. It is general enough to facilitate informational integration of the applications along the process chain. This paper examines a number of scenarios for exploiting ULEO’s benefits in the field of automotive development and reports on the associated prototypical software implementations. Principle alternatives and technical aspects relevant for applying ULEO are discussed in some detail beforehand.