The minimal transformation to orthonormality

The solution is presented to the problem of finding that orthonormal matrix closest in the least-square sense to a given matrix of full rank. An application is shown to the problem in multiple regression analysis of determining the importance of each independent variable.     

Source variability and recall of auditory material 1

Recall of auditory narrative material was measured under three conditions of presentation. These were a single source condition with material from one speaker, a four source fixed sequence condition with material from four speakers in a fixed sequence of 3-sec. lengths, and a four source random condition with material from four speakers in a random sequence of 3-sec. lengths. Recall was better for the single source condition than for the four source conditions. No significant difference was found between the fixed and random sequential presentations. Results are discussed in terms of the attentional behaviors involved in the tasks.     

BIOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Abstract. The sciences may be conceptualized as a hierarchy ranked by level of organization (e.g., many-body physics ranks above particle physics). Each science serves as an antidiscipline for the science above it; that is, between each pair, tense but creative interplay is inevitable. Biology has advanced through such tension between its subdisciplines and now can serve as an antidiscipline for the social sciences—for anthropology, for example, by examining the connection between cultural and biological evolution; for psychology, by addressing the nature of learning and the structure of the unconscious; for economics, by examining economically irrational behavior and by comparing economic activity in humans and other species. Sociology, concerned mainly with advanced literate societies, is relatively remote from the genetic basis of human social behavior. However, moving between biological and social levels of organization generates richness and points to new and unexpected principles.     

Connecting the Commodore 64 to the IBM PC

Hardware is described that permits bidirectional transfer of data between the Commodore 64 and an IBM-compatible PC. Commercial terminal programs can be used to transmit data. The hardware, which can be constructed for less than $15, opens up several opportunities for making good use of the cost-effective C64 computer.     

Short-term psychodynamic intervention in an urban health clinic: A case report

This paper describes the application of short-term dynamic therapeutic techniques to treat both symptom disturbance and character pathology in an urban mental health clinic. Short-Term dynamic psychotherapy focuses extensively on the subjectivity and inner life of the patient with emphasis on repressed anger, sadness and desire. Methods to overcome patient ambivalence and resistance to psychotherapy are presented. The clinical psychodynamics associated with early life trauma are illustrated with a case of an African-American patient.Acknowledgments for support & critical feedback are expressed to Christine Baker, Ph.D., John Swanson, ACSW, Duncan Walton, Ph.D., and Isabelle Beveridge (Graphics).     

Variations on incremental interpretation

The strict competence hypothesis has sparked a small dialogue among several researchers attempting to understand its ramifications for human sentence processing and incremental interpretation in particular. In this paper, we review the dialogue, reconstructing the arguments in an attempt to make them more uniform and crisp, and provide our own analyses of certain of the issues that arise. We argue that strict competence, because it requires a synchronous computation mechanism, may actually lead to more complex, rather than simpler, models of incremental interpretation. Asynchronous computation, which is arguably both psychologically more plausible and conceptually more basic, allows for incremental interpretation to fall out naturally, without additional machinery for interpreting partial constituents. We show that this is true regardless of whether the presumed interpretation mechanism is top-down or bottom-up, contra previous conclusions in the literature, and propose a particular implementation of some of these ideas using a novel representation based on tree-adjoining grammars.The research in this paper was supported in part by grant IRI-9157996 from the National Science Foundation to the first author. The authors would like to thank Fernando Pereira, Edward Stabler, and Mark Steedman for discussions on the topic of this paper and for their comments on previous drafts.