A Survey on Development and Applications of the Multi‐criteria Decision Making Method MULTIMOORA

This paper focuses on the MULTIMOORA method. Specifically, it discusses its development as well as extensions alongside with an overview of their applications. Indeed, the MULTIMOORA is a relatively new multi‐criteria decision making method consisting of the three parts. Therefore, it is specific with peculiarities of both complete and partial aggregation techniques. The MULTIMOORA method consists of the three parts, namely the Ratio System, the Reference Point, and the Full Multiplicative Form. The paper discussed the extensions of MULTIMOORA into the fuzzy environment and group decision making. The carried out survey identified the two major areas of application of MOORA and MULTIMOORA, namely engineering decision support for technological development and economic researches. The economic researches can further be classified into those related to micro‐level or macro‐level analyses. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temporal frames of reference in three Germanic languages: Individual consistency,interindividual consensus,and cross-linguistic variability

A task like “moving a meeting forward” reveals the ambiguity inherent in temporal references. That speakers of U.S. English do not agree on how to solve it is well established: Roughly one half moves the meeting futurewards, the other half pastwards. But the extent to which individual speakers, rather than groups of speakers, consider such phrases as ambiguous has not been scrutinized. Does the split in readings result from a lack of intraindividual consistency or from a lack of interindividual consensus? And how specific is U.S. English in this regard when compared to other closely related Germanic languages? Based on a taxonomy of spatiotemporal frames of reference (FoRs), we conducted two experiments with speakers of Swedish, U.S. English, and German to assess individual preferences for temporal FoRs, intra- and cross-linguistic variability, consistency and long-term stability of these preferences, and possible effects of priming a spatial FoR. The data reveal cross-linguistic differences, both in terms of which temporal FoRs speakers prefer (the absolute FoR in Sweden, the intrinsic FoR in German, and both of these in the US) and in terms of the extent to which these preferences are shared and stable (high consensus and consistency in Sweden and Germany, and low consensus and partial consistency in the US). Overall, no effect of spatial priming was observed; only speakers of U.S. English with a baseline preference for the absolute temporal FoR seemed to be susceptible to spatial priming. Thus, the assumption that temporal references are affected by spatial references is only weakly supported.     

Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology

The democratic egalitarian ideal requires that everyone should enjoy equal power over the world through voting. If it is improper to vote twice in the same election, why should it be permissible for dual citizens to vote in two different places? Several possible excuses are considered and rejected.     

Distractor Interference in Selective Reaching: Dissociating Distance and Grouping Effects

In the present experiment, the authors sought to differentiate between a distance and a grouping explanation for the symmetric versus asymmetric patterns of distractor interference in selective reaching. Participants (N = 16) pointed to a green target that appeared either with or without a red distractor. Target-distractor separation was manipulated within an array of 5 closely grouped stimulus boxes, and distractor interference (difference in performance between trials with and trials without a distractor) was measured in reaction time, movement time, percentage errors, and movement endpoints. Small distances (5 mm) between target and distractor yielded a symmetric pattern of interference, whereas large distances (20 mm) yielded an asymmetric pattern, with more interference from near than from far distractors. Those findings support the distance account of distractor interference and refute the grouping account.     

Christian Perspectives on Spiritual Needs of a Human Being

SUMMARY

Each human being, independent of culture, time, and age has three fundamental needs. A need for biophysical exchanges, a need for psychosocial exchanges, and a need for spiritual-integrated exchanges. Spiritual needs are not separated from biological, social, psychological, and material aspects of life. Christian spirituality today is oriented toward responding to life, to its beauty and injustices, to the universe, and is responsive and responsible to the poor. Some specific tasks for older people today are commitment to the great causes of justice, peace, and environmental protection, and a deeper bond of love for God and fellow man.     

基于预期理论的参照依赖

参照依赖是指个体基于某一参照点对得失价值进行判断:参照点之上,个体感受为收益,反之即为损失.参照依赖现象广泛存在于生活中的各种领域.当前,对参照依赖心理机制的解释主要有预期理论、后悔理论和三阶段参照点理论.参照依赖的影响因素主要包括经验、情绪状态、文化、目标和认知对象的特点等.未来的研究应主要集中于参照依赖的产生根源,深入探讨参照依赖的神经机制,加强动态参照点、多重参照点以及群体中参照依赖现象的研究.     

The semiotics of religion: Reflections from a semanticist

Robert Yelle's The Semiotics of Religion makes important contributions on two fronts. First, it offers powerful and compelling analyses of a considerable range of religious phenomena. Second, it advances significant theoretical and meta-theoretical frameworks that underpin those analyses. The theoretical framework is semiotic in its broad outlines, but the meta-theoretical one is more pragmatically oriented: i.e., don't be dogmatically committed to any particular theoretical doctrine, but rather use whatever resources help to shed more light on the subject matter. Despite that meta-theoretical positioning, several of Yelle's analyses remain stubbornly committed to a set of core doctrines that limit the extent of his investigations and lead to questions about the persuasiveness of certain details of his analyses. In other words, Yelle does not always follow his own meta-theoretical recommendations. The author diagnoses the source of those limiting assumptions and suggests some perspectives from within the philosophy of language more generally that might potentially serve to bring his method closer to his meta-theoretical ideals.     

Music Sight-Reading Skill in Flute Players

This article reports an investigation of factors related to music sight-reading skill. Flute players (N = 30) performed six tasks: (a) sight-reading standard music, (b) sight-reading random music, (c) recall of music notation, (d) recall of letters, (e) eye-performance span, and (f) choice reaction time for playing individual notes. Sight-reading ability was significantly correlated with eye-performance span (.85), and music recall (.80), but not with letter recall (-.39), thus replicating results of previous work with pianists. Sight-reading skill was correlated with choice reaction time to notes (- .54), and there was a significant partial correlation between sight-reading skill and eye-performance span, with music-reading ability controlled. These results are consistent with the idea that increased skill involves both the speed-up of individual processing stages, and an increase in the degree to which these stages operate in parallel.     

Visual working memory retains movement information within an allocentric reference frame

What frame of reference do we use to remember observed movements? One possibility is that visual working memory (VWM) retains movement information using a retinotopic frame of reference: A coordinate system with respect to the retina that retains view-dependent information. Alternatively, VWM might retain movement information using an allocentric frame of reference: A coordinate system with respect to the scene that retains view-invariant information. To address this question, I examined whether VWM retains view-dependent or view-invariant movement information. Results show that (1) observers have considerable difficulty remembering from which viewpoints they observed movements after a few seconds' delay, and (2) the same number of movements can be retained in VWM whether the movements are encoded and tested from the same viewpoint or from different viewpoints. Thus, movement representations contain little to no view-dependent information, which suggests that VWM uses an allocentric reference frame to retain movement information.