Intention regulates conflicting desires in human decision making

It is an ancient insight that human actions are driven by desires. This insight inspired the formulation that a rational agent acts to maximize expected utility (MEU), which has been widely used in psychology for modeling theory of mind and in artificial intelligence (AI) for controlling machines’ actions. Yet, it's rather unclear how humans act coherently when their desires are complex and often conflicting with each other. Here we show desires do not directly control human actions. Instead, actions are regulated by an intention — a deliberate mental state that commits to a fixed future rather than taking the expected utilities of many futures evaluated by many desires. Our study reveals four behavioral signatures of human intention by demonstrating how human sequential decision-making deviates from the optimal policy based on MEU in a navigation task: “Disruption resistance” as the persistent pursuit of an original intention despite an unexpected change has made that intention suboptimal; “Ulysses-constraint of freedom” as the proactive constraint of one’s freedom by avoiding a path that could lead to many futures, similar to Ulysses’s self-binding to resist the temptation of the Siren’s song; “Enhanced legibility” as an active demonstration of intention by choosing a path whose destination can be promptly inferred by a third-party observer; “Temporal leap” as committing to a distant future even before reaching the proximal one. Our results showed how the philosophy of intention can lead to discoveries of human decision-making, which can also be empirically compared with AI algorithms. The findings showing that to define a theory of mind, intention should be highlighted as a distinctive mental state in between desires and actions, for quarantining conflicting desires from the execution of actions.

Intermediate schools today : an examination of certain aspects

My original intention, when I was a member of the staff of a post-primary school, was to carry out an investigation into the Post-primary Examination system in this country, but on my appointment to my present position at the beginning of this year, I decided that the best and quickest way of becoming acquainted with the Intermediate School system in New Zealand would be to make a survey of the schools of this country as they are at present.

Intermediate schools today : an examination of certain aspects

My original intention, when I was a member of the staff of a post-primary school, was to carry out an investigation into the Post-primary Examination system in this country, but on my appointment to my present position at the beginning of this year, I decided that the best and quickest way of becoming acquainted with the Intermediate School system in New Zealand would be to make a survey of the schools of this country as they are at present.

The Search for Forms of Interaction between Technical Institutes, Regional Authorities and the Industries in the 1920s-1930s (by the Example of Ekaterinburg - Sverdlovsk)

In the 1920–1930s the Ural industries and regional authorities were in need of qualified economists and engineers, which resulted in establishing in Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) its own university, technical institutes, and the Ural Branch of the USSR Academy of Science. The article reveals the reasons of failures in technical institutes’ development and the mistakes in training of economic specialists. The educational organizations and scholarly institutions faced the lack of funding from national and local authorities, whose intention was to make the process cheaper and faster, which resulted in disrupting operation of technical institutes and decreasing the quality of the students’ training. Such attitude on the part of the authorities became the crucial factor for the crises of higher education in the city. Poor communication with the local industry, ideologically based restrictions in teaching of economic disciplines, as well as separate reporting lines of technical institutes, higher education establishments and scholarly institutions also negatively affected the situation. The article proves that the best solution for the city could have been establishing a single research and education center at the State University, which was the original intention of its foundation in 1920. The lack of funding and inconsistent policy of the national and local authorities have led to abandoning the initial program of the university development. Only in 2019, they returned to the program at a new level, when they started to establish a research and education cluster at the Ural Federal University.

From the life school to the gallery wall, via the portfolio: the collection, treatment, and display of oil sketches on paper produced in the contexts of the Carracci school

The three oil sketches on paper forming the basis of this study—all of elderly, male sitters—are attributed to unknown sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Bolognese artists: painters associated with the Carracci family and their Academia degli Incaminati. This context was notable for its near-constant examination of the world around it through consistent drawing and painting, and for its success in exporting its negotiations of the contemporary religious landscape beyond Bologna, to Rome and further afield. A brief overview of the original intention, forms and early functions of these works is given, before focus turns to traditions of ownership and collection in the generations immediately after their creation. The British contexts that the sketches entered during the eighteenth century—collections at Stourhead House, Saltram House and General John Guise's bequest to Christ Church—are then explored through consideration of the social and artistic milieux in which these works were acquired. All three sketches have been mounted on to canvas or panel supports: this conservation history sheds light on how these works have been altered structurally, aesthetically and in functionality as they moved from an early didactic purpose to that of display in the eighteenth century.

CHURCH’S RESPONSE AS NOSTRUM TO THE CHALLENGES OF STUDENT ACTIVISM MOVEMENT IN NIGERIAN HIGHER INSTITUTION OF LEARNING

Students’ populace serves as a key stakeholder in education which cannot be disregarded in decision making. Also, education impacts students with knowledge, skills and empowerment to be active in developing the society, part of the educational structure in higher education is student activism movement. Students Activism movement in higher institution of learning performs these activities to the student’s populace and the society - Student Welfare, Academic development, Social Activities, Community Service, Infrastructural Development and others. Moreover, the benefits students derive in this movement are – Confidence booster, enables the student to get involved in reformation, building new connections, discovery of hidden talents and developing ability to move out of comfort zone. However, the movement is faced with diverse challenges that combat its original intention. Such challenges are – Cultism, Examination malpractice, Indiscipline, Insecurity, Frequent harassment and others. Furthermore, nostrum to the challenges of this movement is the intervention of the faith-based organization like the Church. The church is therefore, saddled with the responsibilities of constant enlightenment to the prospective students on the activity of the movement. The writer thus recommends the following to combat the challenges of student activism movement in the Nigerian higher Institution of learning - Student Activism movement should return to its original purpose of existence as enumerated by its founder, government should create enabling school climate for the students of higher institutions in Nigeria, the church should give proper enlightenment to the prospective students on the activities of student in the higher institution of learning. KEYWORDS: Student Activism, Church, Education.

From Users’ Intentions to IF-THEN Rules in the Internet of Things

In the Internet of Things era, users are willing to personalize the joint behavior of their connected entities, i.e., smart devices and online service, by means of trigger-action rules such as “IF the entrance Nest security camera detects a movement, THEN blink the Philips Hue lamp in the kitchen.” Unfortunately, the spread of new supported technologies makes the number of possible combinations between triggers and actions continuously growing, thus motivating the need of assisting users in discovering new rules and functionality, e.g., through recommendation techniques. To this end, we present , a semantic Conversational Search and Recommendation (CSR) system able to suggest pertinent IF-THEN rules that can be easily deployed in different contexts starting from an abstract user’s need. By exploiting a conversational agent, the user can communicate her current personalization intention by specifying a set of functionality at a high level, e.g., to decrease the temperature of a room when she left it. Stemming from this input, implements a semantic recommendation process that takes into account ( a ) the current user’s intention , ( b ) the connected entities owned by the user, and ( c ) the user’s long-term preferences revealed by her profile. If not satisfied with the suggestions, then the user can converse with the system to provide further feedback, i.e., a short-term preference , thus allowing to provide refined recommendations that better align with the original intention. We evaluate by running different offline experiments with simulated users and real-world data. First, we test the recommendation process in different configurations, and we show that recommendation accuracy and similarity with target items increase as the interaction between the algorithm and the user proceeds. Then, we compare with other similar baseline recommender systems. Results are promising and demonstrate the effectiveness of in recommending IF-THEN rules that satisfy the current personalization intention of the user.

Identifying Operational Benefits of the Arrival Management System – A KPI-Based Experimental Method by Evaluating Radar Trajectories

The arrival management (AMAN) system is a decision support tool for air traffic controllers to establish and maintain the landing sequence for arrival aircraft. The original intention of designing the AMAN system is to improve the efficiency of air traffic management (ATM), but few studies are investigating the operational benefits of this system based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and evaluating actual data in a real-time environment. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a KPI based transferable comparative analysis method for identifying the operational benefits of the AMAN through radar trajectories. Firstly, six KPIs are established from a joint study of the mainstream ATM performance frameworks worldwide. Secondly, appropriate evaluation technique approaches are determined according to the characteristics of each KPI. Finally, a Chinese metropolitan airport is taken for the case study, and three periods are defined to form data samples with high similarity for comparative experiments. The results validate the feasibility of the proposed method and find comprehensive performance improvements in arrival operations under the effects of the AMAN system.

Cabinet of Curiosities, a Dwelling Place

This Instagram “Weekly Writing” assignment is a social-media-based, low-stakes, and longitudinal approach to teaching and experimenting with multimodal composition. Students create an account for the purposes of the class and follow each other. They post three times per week, sometimes freely and sometimes in response to a prompt or challenge. Together, we use the platform and its rich multimodal resources to consider how in-the-moment multimodal composing can spur invention, place the writer in the perpetual position of noticing, and create an archive of experience that holistically communicates beyond the author’s original intention. This article discusses the pedagogical rationale for this approach, along with the issues to consider before adopting and adapting this practice.

Visual Tracking Control of Cable-Driven Hyper-Redundant Snake-Like Manipulator

The cable-driven hyper-redundant snake-like manipulator (CHSM) inspired by the biomimetic structure of vertebrate muscles and tendons, which consists of numerous joint units connected adjacently driven by elastic materials with hyper-redundant DOF, performs flexible kinematic skills and competitive compound capability under complicated working circumstances. Nevertheless, the drawback of lacking the ability to perceive the environment to perform intelligently in complex scenarios leaves a lot to be improved, which is the original intention to introduce visual tracking feedback acting as an instructor. In this paper, a cable-driven snake-like robotic arm combined with a visual tracking technique is introduced. A visual tracking approach based on dual correlation filter is designed to guide the CHSM in detecting the target and tracing after its trajectory. Specifically, it contains an adaptive optimization for the scale variation of the tracking target via pyramid sampling. For the CHSM, an explicit kinematics model is derived from its specific geometry relationships and followed by a simplification for the inverse kinematics based on some assumption or limitation. A control scheme is brought up to combine the kinematics with visual tracking via the processing tracking errors. The experimental results with a practical prototype validate the availability of the proposed compound control method with the derived kinematics model.