Social networks and web minorities

The conception of appropriate models of information retrieval is a crucial step for the actual growth and development of the web. In addition to traditional information retrieval techniques, nowadays search engines have adopted methods for taking into account the social network deriving from the pattern of interconnections. Using different arguments, it has been shown that this is very effective in practice. In this paper we subscribe that point of view, but state also that social networks based ranking schemes operating on the whole web, like Google’s , prevent small communities to become visible on the Web, regardless of the quality of the information. Hence, we strongly advocate the development of new cognitive models of the whole process of information retrieval which are capable of facing this problem. We give a picture of distributed architectures which incorporates topic-based intelligent agents and personal agents for capturing the user’s profile.     

Philosophical behaviorism: a review of things that happen because they should: a teleological approach to action, by Rowland Stout.

Mentalistic terms such as belief and desire have been rejected by behavior analysts because they are traditionally held to refer to unobservable events inside the organism. Behavior analysis has consequently been viewed by philosophers to be at best irrelevant to psychology, understood as a science of the mind. In this book, the philosopher Rowland Stout argues cogently that beliefs and desires (like operants such as rats' lever presses) are best understood in terms of an interaction over time between overt behavior and its overt consequences (a viewpoint called teleological behaviorism). This book is important because it identifies the science of the mind with the science of overt behavior and implies that the psychologists best equipped to study mental life are not those who purport to do so but those who focus on the experimental analysis of behavior.     

Stronger reactivity to social gaze in virtual reality compared to a classical laboratory environment

People show a robust tendency to gaze at other human beings when viewing images or videos, but were also found to relatively avoid gaze at others in several real-world situations. This discrepancy, along with theoretical considerations, spawned doubts about the appropriateness of classical laboratory-based experimental paradigms in social attention research. Several researchers instead suggested the use of immersive virtual scenarios in eliciting and measuring naturalistic attentional patterns, but the field, struggling with methodological challenges, still needs to establish the advantages of this approach. Here, we show using eye-tracking in a complex social scenario displayed in virtual reality that participants show enhanced attention towards the face of an avatar at near distance and demonstrate an increased reactivity towards her social gaze as compared to participants who viewed the same scene on a computer monitor. The present study suggests that reactive virtual agents observed in immersive virtual reality can elicit natural modes of information processing and can help to conduct ecologically more valid experiments while maintaining high experimental control.     

学校资源对青少年早期幸福感发展的影响：意向性自我调节的纵向中介作用

通过对1214名初中生历时3年的3次追踪测量, 考察了青少年早期的学校资源、意向性自我调节及幸福感的发展趋势, 并对意向性自我调节在学校资源与幸福感发展间的纵向中介作用机制进行检验。结果发现, 在青少年早期, 学校资源具有相对的稳定性, 意向性自我调节及幸福感均呈线性增长; 学校资源对幸福感发展的作用机制表现为：一方面, 学校资源通过意向性自我调节的初始水平分别对幸福感的初始水平和发展速度起间接作用, 另一方面, 学校资源通过意向性自我调节的发展速度对幸福感的发展速度起间接作用。结论：青少年早期, 学生的学校资源水平保持稳定, 意向性自我调节和幸福感的发展均呈线性递增趋势; 学校资源能够通过意向性自我调节的初始水平和发展速度对幸福感的发展起间接作用。     

Distributive Justice and Co-Operation in a World of Humans and Non-Humans: A Contractarian Argument for Drawing Non-Humans into the Sphere of Justice

Various arguments have been provided for drawing non-humans such as animals and artificial agents into the sphere of moral consideration. In this paper, I argue for a shift from an ontological to a social-philosophical approach: instead of asking what an entity is, we should try to conceptually grasp the quasi-social dimension of relations between non-humans and humans. This allows me to reconsider the problem of justice, in particular distributive justice. Engaging with the work of Rawls, I show that an expansion of the contractarian framework to non-humans causes an important problem for liberalism, but can be justified by a contractarian argument. Responding to Bell’s and Nussbaum’s comments on Rawls, I argue that we can justify drawing non-humans into the sphere of distributive justice by relying on the notion of a co-operative scheme. I discuss what co-operation between humans and non-humans can mean and the extent to which it depends on properties. I conclude that we need to imagine principles of ecological and technological distributive justice.     

现象学伦理学的基础:意向性感受

E. Husserl’s reflections in Logical Investigations on “intentional feelings” and “non-intentional feelings” are significant in both his later ethical explorations and M. Scheler’s thought on ethics. Through the incorporation of the views of Husserl and Scheler, we find that the phenomenology of the intentional feeling-acts is not only the foundation of the non-formal ethics of values in Scheler’s phenomenology, but also at least the constitutive foundation of the ethics of Husserl’s first orientation. Translated by Yu Xin and Zhang Wei from Huazhong keji daxue xuebao 华中科技大学学报 (Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology), 2007, (6): 14–20     

虚拟代理技术在电子商务中的应用及有关的人机工程学问题

电子商务是一种以信息网络为载体的新的经济运作模式。本文介绍了电子商务网站智能型虚拟代理的概念与用途,概述了电子商务网站在设置与使用虚拟代理时需要考虑的人机工程学问题,其中包括可信任度、中介性能、可靠、灵活性、增值服务和娱乐性等。最后,对这一新兴领域的研究趋势作了展望。     

不同学习成绩的小学生有意遗忘过程的实验研究

该研究的实验材料为单字和双字词,利用字表方式呈现。被试为小学六年级的30名学生,按学习成绩好和差各选15名。实验结果为,（1）对单字材料,被试既对要记忆的项目进行了有意的复述,又对指示遗忘的材料产生了提取抑制;对双字词材料,被试只有对指示遗忘的材料产生提取抑制,而没有对要记忆的项目进行有意复述;（2）学习成绩好的学生的有意遗忘的抑制能力明显高于学习成绩差的学生。     

发展的行动观述评

本文介绍了行动观的主要理论观点,认为个体有意识的自我发展和自我调节对于发展具有重大意义,进而阐述了自我观察、自我评价和自我调节的过程和机制。行动观克服了哲学的决定论和因果机制的局限,把发展的多样性和规律性统一起来,并有效地整合了文化和个体自身对于发展的作用。