Science and the welfare state program: The growth of state activism in finland

Finland has followed the Scandinavian model of the welfare state in which the level of state activism is high, the economic pressures on the scientific activities are strong, and the left-wing parties and the Center Party have formulated the main ideas. In the 1970s welfare ideology was adopted in science policy by emphasizing the promotion of socially relevant scientific activities and the expansion of the university system as a means of effecting equal opportunity. Currently, the trend is toward a mixed welfare economy. Programs have been prepared in spite of the radical cut in government expenditure, and without a consideration of the long-term consequences.     

Using self-evaluation to improve difficult-to-read handwriting of secondary students

We used delayed multiple-baseline and multiple-probe techniques to assess the effects of self-evaluation training on the legibility of cursive handwriting. Five secondary special education students with difficult-to-read handwriting served as participants. All participants improved the legibility of their handwriting during self-evaluation training. A systematic withdrawal of the training package demonstrated maintenance of treatment effects. For the most part, the students' handwriting remained at least 90% legible to judges following the systematic withdrawal of the self-evaluation training.     

An X Windows tool for synthesizing face images from eigenvectors

An X Windows software tool for the construction of faces with a weighted combination of eigenvectors is described. The eigenvectors were extracted from an autoassociative matrix that comprised 100 face images. The program input consists of eigenvectors and sets of weights that describe individual faces and combines these to create face images. The tool creates a panel of buttons that permits the display of individual eigenvectors and the display of an average face as well. Facilities for on-line changes to the intensity of individual eigenvectors can be used to change the appearance of a face. Previously, O’Toole, Abdi, Deffenbacher, and Bartlett (1991) have shown that the intensity of certain individual eigenvectors contains reliable information for determining the sex and race of the face.     

A collection of 4,741 word fragments that have unique completions with respect to 146,205 words

A collection of 4,741 word fragments that have a unique completion is described. All word fragments are specified by two letters (e.g.,__Q__U__can only be completed by the word LIQUEURS). The words completing these fragments range in length from five to nine letters. The fragments are unique with respect to a pool of 146,205 words, which helps rule out the possibility that obscure words could be used as a completion to the fragments. The collection of fragments as well as the words that complete them is available in ASCII format on computer disks or in printed form.     

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.