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"Dawson, Michael"
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What is cognitive psychology?
What Is Cognitive Psychology? identifies the theoretical foundations of cognitive psychology—foundations which have received very little attention in modern textbooks. Beginning with the basics of information processing, Michael R. W. Dawson explores what experimental psychologists infer about these processes and considers what scientific explanations are required when we assume cognition is rule-governed symbol manipulation. From these foundations, psychologists can identify the architecture of cognition and better understand its role in debates about its true nature. This volume offers a deeper understanding of cognitive psychology and presents ideas for integrating traditional cognitive psychology with more modern fields like cognitive neuroscience.
eBook
Development of new polymyxin derivatives for multi-drug resistant Gram-negative infections
Over the last decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in polymyxins owing to the rapid rise in multi-drug resistant Gram-negative bacteria against which polymyxins offer a last-resort treatment. Although having excellent antibacterial activity, the clinical utility of polymyxins is limited by toxicity, especially renal toxicity. There is much interest therefore in developing polymyxin analogues with an improved therapeutic index. This review describes recent work aimed at improving the activity and/or reducing the toxicity of polymyxins. Consideration to providing activity against emerging strains with reduced susceptibility to polymyxins is also made.
Journal Article
Selling out or buying in? : debating consumerism in Vancouver and Victoria, 1945-1985
\"Until the late 1950s residents of Vancouver and Victoria negotiated a shopping landscape that would be unrecognizable to today's consumers: most stores were closed for at least half the day on Wednesdays, prevented from opening during the evenings, and were banned from operating on Sundays. Since that decade, however, British Columbians, and Canadians generally, have made significant strides in gaining greater and easier access to consumer goods. Selling Out or Buying In? is the first work to illuminate the process by which consumers' access to goods and services was liberalized and deregulated in Canada in the second half of the twentieth century. Michael Dawson's engagingly written and detailed exploration of the debates amongst everyday citizens and politicians regarding the pros and cons of expanding shopping opportunities, challenges the assumption of inevitability surrounding Canada's emergence as a consumer society. The expansion of store hours was a highly contested and contingent development that pitted employees, owners and regulators against one another. Dawson's nuanced analysis of archival and newspaper sources reveals the strains that modern capitalism imparted upon the accepted and established rhythms of daily life.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Artificial Neural Networks Solve Musical Problems With Fourier Phase Spaces
How does the brain represent musical properties? Even with our growing understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of music, the answer to this question remains unclear. One method for conceiving possible representations is to use artificial neural networks, which can provide biologically plausible models of cognition. One could train networks to solve musical problems, and then study how these networks encode musical properties. However, researchers rarely examine network structure in detail because networks are difficult to interpret, and because many assume that networks capture informal or subsymbolic properties. Here we report very high correlations between network connection weights and discrete Fourier phase spaces used to represent musical sets. This is remarkable because there is no clear mathematical relationship between network learning rules and discrete Fourier analysis. That networks discover Fourier phase spaces indicates that these spaces have an important role to play outside of formal music theory. Finding phase spaces in networks raises the strong possibility that Fourier components are possible codes for musical cognition.
Journal Article
A Canadian girl in South Africa : a teacher's experiences in the South African War, 1899 1902
\"As the South African War reached its grueling end in 1902, colonial interests at the highest levels of the British Empire hand-picked teachers from across the Commonwealth to teach the thousands of Afrikaner women, children, and non-combatants held in concentration camps. Highly educated, hard working, and often opinionated, E. Maud Graham joined the Canadian contingent of forty teachers. Her account reveals the complexity of relations and tensions at a controversial period in Britain's history. Graham presents a lively historical travel memoir, and the editors have provided rich political and historical context to her narrative in the Introduction and generous annotations. This is a rare primary source for experts in Colonial Studies, Women's Studies, and Canadian, South African, and British Imperial History.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Probability matching in perceptrons: Effects of conditional dependence and linear nonseparability
Probability matching occurs when the behavior of an agent matches the likelihood of occurrence of events in the agent's environment. For instance, when artificial neural networks match probability, the activity in their output unit equals the past probability of reward in the presence of a stimulus. Our previous research demonstrated that simple artificial neural networks (perceptrons, which consist of a set of input units directly connected to a single output unit) learn to match probability when presented different cues in isolation. The current paper extends this research by showing that perceptrons can match probabilities when presented simultaneous cues, with each cue signaling different reward likelihoods. In our first simulation, we presented up to four different cues simultaneously; the likelihood of reward signaled by the presence of one cue was independent of the likelihood of reward signaled by other cues. Perceptrons learned to match reward probabilities by treating each cue as an independent source of information about the likelihood of reward. In a second simulation, we violated the independence between cues by making some reward probabilities depend upon cue interactions. We did so by basing reward probabilities on a logical combination (AND or XOR) of two of the four possible cues. We also varied the size of the reward associated with the logical combination. We discovered that this latter manipulation was a much better predictor of perceptron performance than was the logical structure of the interaction between cues. This indicates that when perceptrons learn to match probabilities, they do so by assuming that each signal of a reward is independent of any other; the best predictor of perceptron performance is a quantitative measure of the independence of these input signals, and not the logical structure of the problem being learned.
Journal Article
The harvest of American racism : the political meaning of violence in the summer of 1967
\"In the summer of 1967, in response to violent demonstrations that rocked 164 cities across the U.S., the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly known as the Kerner Commission, was formed. As part of its work, the Commission employed social scientists to research the root causes of the disturbances, including the role that law enforcement played. Chief among its research projects was a study of 23 American cities, headed by social psychologist Robert Shellow. Shellow's social scientists worked from the vast material brought back by teams of Commission investigators who fanned out across those cities, conducting interviews and gathering data. An early draft of the scientists' analysis was delivered on November 22, 1967. Their report, titled \"The Harvest of American Racism: The Political Meaning of Violence in the Summer of 1967\" provoked the Commission's staff by uncovering political causes for the unrest; the team of researchers was fired, and the controversial report remained buried at the LBJ Presidential Library until now. The first publication of the Harvest report half a century later reveals that many of the issues it describes are still with us, including how cities might more effectively and humanely react to groups and communities in protest.\"--Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Review of the diversity, traits, and ecology of zooxanthellate jellyfishes
Many marine organisms form photosymbioses with zooxanthellae, but some, such as the medusozoans, are less well known. Here, we summarize the current knowledge on the diversity of zooxanthellate jellyfishes, to identify key traits of the holobionts, and to examine the impact of these traits on their ecology. Photosymbiosis with zooxanthellae originated at least seven times independently in Medusozoa; of these, five involve taxa with medusae. While most zooxanthellate jellyfishes are found in clades containing mainly non-zooxanthellate members, the sub-order Kolpophorae (Scyphozoa: Rhizostomeae) is comprised—bar a few intriguing exceptions—of only zooxanthellate jellyfishes. We estimate that 20–25% of Scyphozoa species are zooxanthellate (facultative symbiotic species included). Zooxanthellae play a key role in scyphozoan life-cycle and nutrition although substantial variation is observed during ontogeny, or at the intra- and inter-specific levels. Nonetheless, three key traits of zooxanthellate jellyfishes can be identified: (1) zooxanthellate medusae, as holobionts, are generally mixotrophic, deriving their nutrition both from predation and photosynthesis; (2) zooxanthellate polyps, although capable of hosting zooxanthellae rarely depend on them; and (3) zooxanthellae play a key role in the life-cycle of the jellyfish by allowing or facilitating strobilation. We discuss how these traits might help to explain some aspects of the ecology of zooxanthellate jellyfishes—notably their generally low ability to outbreak, and their reaction to temperature stress or to eutrophication—and how they could in turn impact marine ecosystem functioning.
Journal Article