scholarly journals Movement Variability and the Use of Nonlinear Tools: Principles to Guide Physical Therapist Practice

2009 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regina T Harbourne ◽  
Nicholas Stergiou

Fields studying movement generation, including robotics, psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, utilize concepts and tools related to the pervasiveness of variability in biological systems. The concepts of variability and complexity and the nonlinear tools used to measure these concepts open new vistas for physical therapist practice and research in movement dysfunction of all types. Because mounting evidence supports the necessity of variability for health and functional movement, this perspective article argues for changes in the way therapists view variability, both in theory and in action. By providing clinical examples, as well as applying existing knowledge about complex systems, the aim of this article is to create a springboard for new directions in physical therapist research and practice.

Author(s):  
Robert Chodat

The 1960s saw the triumph of cognitive science over behaviorism. This chapter examines three literary–philosophical objections to this shift: “West Coast” phenomenology, Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, and the writings of Walker Percy, the first of the postwar sages featured in this book. For “West Coast” philosophers, cognitive science ignores the way human action is structured by what we “give a damn” about—a sense of significance that orients our actions. Powers’s novel goes a step further: no more than machines do we know what to give a damn about. Percy’s essays and fiction challenge both these positions, asking us to see analogies between the significance we find in language and the significance we find in living a Christian life. Establishing such an analogy is the goal of Percy’s 1971 Love in the Ruins, which seeks to embody—with only partial success—what terms such as “faith” and “community” might mean.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-61
Author(s):  
Francesc Fusté-Forné ◽  
Tazim Jamal

Research on the relationship between automation services and tourism has been rapidly growing in recent years and has led to a new service landscape where the role of robots is gaining both practical and research attention. This paper builds on previous reviews and undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the research literature to discuss opportunities and challenges presented by the use of service robots in hospitality and tourism. Management and ethical issues are identified and it is noted that practical and ethical issues (roboethics) continue to lack attention. Going forward, new directions are urgently needed to inform future research and practice. Legal and ethical issues must be proactively addressed, and new research paradigms developed to explore the posthumanist and transhumanist transitions that await. In addition, closer attention to the potential of “co-creation” for addressing innovations in enhanced service experiences in hospitality and tourism is merited. Among others, responsibility, inclusiveness and collaborative human-robot design and implementation emerge as important principles to guide future research and practice in this area.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (13) ◽  
pp. 2403-2406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Karsenti

In this essay I describe my personal journey from reductionist to systems cell biology and describe how this in turn led to a 3-year sea voyage to explore complex ocean communities. In describing this journey, I hope to convey some important principles that I gleaned along the way. I realized that cellular functions emerge from multiple molecular interactions and that new approaches borrowed from statistical physics are required to understand the emergence of such complex systems. Then I wondered how such interaction networks developed during evolution. Because life first evolved in the oceans, it became a natural thing to start looking at the small organisms that compose the plankton in the world's oceans, of which 98% are … individual cells—hence the Tara Oceans voyage, which finished on 31 March 2012 in Lorient, France, after a 60,000-mile around-the-world journey that collected more than 30,000 samples from 153 sampling stations.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Gibson ◽  
Richard Futrell ◽  
Steven T. Piantadosi ◽  
Isabelle Dautriche ◽  
Kyle Mahowald ◽  
...  

Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we review studies that deploy formal tools from probability and information theory to understand how and why language works the way that it does, focusing on phenomena ranging from the lexicon through syntax. These studies show how apervasive pressure for efficiency guides the forms of natural language and indicate that a rich future for language research lies in connecting linguistics to cognitive psychology and mathematical theories of communication and inference.


Author(s):  
E. V. Mikhailovskaia ◽  
O. V. Sapunova

The article outlines the way the English system of punctuation marks is presented in contemporary ELT research and practice. The following types of sources are considered and analyzed in the article: grammar books for teaching English as the first, second or foreign language; reference books and web-sites aimed at preparing students for IELTS and TOEFL; books belonging to the genre known as popular science; purely scientific works on punctuation in general and the semicolon in particular. The main goals of the research are to reveal the central tendencies in teaching English punctuation on the example of the so-called weighty stops of vertical segmentation, namely the semicolon, and to see whether they manage to present a certain norm of using the stop. Thus, the present paper focuses on the semicolon one of the most controversial stops in the system, which has been proved to function both at the syntactic and stylistic levels. It is shown that a formal / grammatical approach is the most common way to treat punctuation in ELT literature; however, it does not take into account stylistic and prosodic peculiarities of the stops and thus fails to show the whole spectrum of its usage, as well as its phonetic and stylistic potential. Consequently, such an approach should not be applied to English one of the languages exhibiting a semantic-stylistic type of punctuation. It is proposed that the approach to be used in teaching English punctuation most effectively is pragmalinguistics, since it exploits a wide range of methods and means of analyzing a text, and also considers and highlights all the aspects of using the stops (their syntactic function, stylistic capacities and prosodic characteristics). Moreover, the article poses the question that the current methodology of the approach has to be further developed.


Author(s):  
Max Persson

Gavin Brent Sullivan (ed.) (2014)<br />Understanding Collective Pride and Group Identity:New Directions in Emotion Theory, Research and Practice<br />Routledge<br />ISBN 978-0-415-62895-2<br />£52.00 (hardcover)<br />216 pp


Author(s):  
Karen Neander

In the second chapter, the author describes some research by cognitive scientists, who posit nonconceptual representations to explain certain perceptual capacities (and incapacities). This research and the way in which it is reported illustrate the type of theoretical work done by an error-permitting notion of nonconceptual representation, alongside a malfunction-permitting notion of function. One set of studies (led by McCloskey) that is described in some detail focuses on an unusual deficit in locating visual targets (in a young woman, AH), which were intended to contribute to understanding normal human vision. The author makes clear why the contents ascribed to the underlying representational states, where the errors first occur, are referential-intentional contents, not merely (natural-factive) informational contents, and why their ascriptions count as intensional, according to standard criteria. Toward the end of the chapter, the author reminds readers of a familiar conundrum: if a representation’s having content is not causally potent in a psychological process, why is it (still) a central tenet of mainstream cognitive science that such a process should be understood as representational?


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