Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Combining Learning Approaches For Incremental On-Line Parsing, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael B. Manookin

Faculty Publications

This paper discusses the integration of two different machine learning approaches to modeling language, NL-Soar and analogical modeling (AM). The resulting hybrid system is capable of functionality that is not possible when using only one of the systems in isolation. After a brief introduction of each system, an explanation is given of how AM is used to provide information useful to NL-Soar for two tasks. Examples are given, and related issues are outlined.

Editorial Statement

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

The Legacy Of The Danish Resistance In World War Ii, Joy Ibsen

The Bridge

When I first heard about this conference, I immediately thought of this topic, because I believe the Danish Resistance in World War II provides a legacy of critical importance. It is one which can be of help in guiding our way through today's murky social and political problems as we grapple with terrorist threats and moral issues confronting us in this new millennium. It is a story of special significance to all Danes and Danish-Americans.

The Impact Of American Jazz On Denmark: From The 1950s To The 1970s, Merete Von Eyben

The Bridge

This is how Leonard Malone, an American writer who lived in Denmark until his death in 1998, described Dexter Gordon's first appearance at Jazzhus Montmartre. "Harold Goldberg had arranged for Dexter to appear at the Montmartre, beginning the first week in October ... On the ninth of October 1962, Dexter finally appeared .. .late. Thin. Very thin. Tall. Very tall. Charismatic...When he finished playing ... the audience was in a state that could best be characterized as a delightful state of shock.Dexter was in town and was burning! From that evening on, Dexter became "' our man in Copenhagen."'

The Archive And History: Reflection And Anticipation, Niel Johnson

The Bridge

Engraved on the front of the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, is this statement: This Library will belong to the people of the United States. My papers will be the property of the people and be accessible to them. And this is as it should be. The papers of the President are among the most valuable sources of material for history. They ought to be preserved and they ought to be used.

Appendix B

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

An Examination Of The Mechanisms Of Action In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Bulimia Nervosa, Scott A. Baldwin, Diane L. Spangler, W. Stewart Agras

Faculty Publications

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for bulimia nervosa (BN) has received consid- erable empirical support for its efficacy. However, few investigators have examined the mechanisms proposed to account for the reduction of BN symptoms during CBT. The current study examined the associations between therapist interventions, client mechanisms, and symptoms during treatment in a sample of 56 clients under- going CBT for BN. Results suggested that behavioral interventions were most asso- ciated with symptom change during treatment whereas relational interventions were most associated with change in client mechanisms such as client engagement. Addi- tionally, some changes in BN symptoms were mediated by changes …

American Fatherhood Types: The Good, The Bad, And The Uninterested, Loren Marks, Rob Palkovitz

Faculty Publications

This paper presents four contemporary types of American manhood: (a) the new, involved father, (b) the good provider, (c) the deadbeat dad, and (d) the paternity-free man. These four types are compared, contrasted, and contextualized with related data from the classic Middletown studies of the 1920s and 1930s. The significance and implications of the trend toward paternity-free manhood are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.

Adapt: A Cognitive Architecture For Robots, Deryle W. Lonsdale, D. Paul Benjamin, Damian M. Lyons

Faculty Publications

The goal of the ADAPT project is to create a robot that can model its environment accurately in real time, and use that model to perform tasks and interact with people using natural language.

Expanding Tree Adjoining Grammar To Create Junction Grammar Trees, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Ronald Millett

Faculty Publications

Junction Grammar (JG) combines junction operators, multiple linked syntax/semantics trees, and flexible traversal algorithms. The multiple tree and flexible ordering characteristics of MC-TAG and other TAG extensions are somewhat analogous. This paper proposes that these similarities can be integrated to form a new approach, JG-TAG. Relevant aspects of both theories and the proposed new model are discussed in turn, and representative examples are sketched.

80 Miles From The Nearest Library, With A Research Paper Due Monday: Extending Library Services To Distance Learners, Allyson Washburn, Jessica Draper

Faculty Publications

This presentation reports the results of a project to extend the services and resources of Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library to distance-education students located in many areas of the world. Focusing on students enrolled in university-level English courses, the project team created a one-stop, integrated Web portal of library services and resources in Independent Study courses. This Library portal includes links to subscription databases, interlibrary loan, and personal reference services such as Ask a Librarian Live. The project team promoted faculty members' use of library research in the assignments for their Independent Study English courses. Finally, to ascertain …

Fathering In A Beijing, Chinese Sample: Associations With Boys' And Girls' Negative Emotionality And Aggression, Chongming Yang, Craig H. Hart, David A. Nelson, Christin L. Porter, Susanne F. Olsen, Clyde C. Robinson, Shenhua Jin

Faculty Publications

Whether specific patterns of parenting are similarly associated with child outcomes in diverse cultural contexts has been a topic of inquiry for the past several decades. Most recently, attention has focused on Asian parenting and the indigenous meanings of parental control among specific Asian groups as contrasted with Western cultures (Chao & Tseng, 2002). Recent debates in this literature center on whether coercive parenting has similar meanings for mainland Chinese and North American children and their parents (e.g., Grusec, 2002; Lau & Yeung, 1996). To further address the question of whether there is a universal nature to parenting and its …

Latter-Day Saint Returned Missionaries In The United States: A Survey On Religious Activity And Postmission Adjustment, Bruce A. Chadwick, Richard J. Mcclendon

Faculty Publications

Each year, approximately twenty to thirty thousand Latter-day Saint young adults leave to serve missions throughout the world. Once these young adults return home from their missionary service, most go on to further their education, begin a career, marry, and establish a family. Returned missionaries are a unique group in the Church and are often a point of interest. Parents, for example, note the challenges their missionary has as he or she makes the transition from the mission field to home. They sometimes observe their returned missionary confronting increased stress levels as he or she shifts from the singular focus …

Integrating Perception, Language And Problem Solving In A Cognitive Agent For A Mobile Robot., Deryle W. Lonsdale, D. Paul Benjamin, Damian M. Lyons

Faculty Publications

We are implementing a unified cognitive architecture for a mobile robot. Our goal is to endow a robot agent with the full range of cognitive abilities, including perception, use of natural language, learning and the ability to solve complex problems. The perspective of this work is that an architecture based on a unified theory of robot cognition has the best chance of attaining human-level performance.

This agent architecture is an integration of three theories: a theory of cognition embodied in the Soar system, the RS formal model of sensorimotor activity and an algebraic theory of decomposition and reformulation.

These three …

A Computational Approach To Resolving Certain Issues In Spanish Stress Placement, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Previous research into Spanish stress assignment suggests that accentuation involves learning and storing individual word tokens along with their inherent stress patterns, and analogizing on stored words when the need arises to determine the stress pattern of an unknown or unavailable word. Exactly what variables are most relevant to stress assignment has been hotly debated. In the present study, a number of analogical simulations were carried out to determine whether elements of the CV tier, syllable weight, phonemic representation, or a combination of these, best accounts for accentuation in Spanish.

The Longterm Effects Of Television Mediation On Lds Young Single Adults: An Exploratory Study, Jennia Parkin

Theses and Dissertations

This exploratory study examines what Latter-day Saint young single adults remember about their parents mediating the television and its use, and how those recollections contribute to their current attitudes and values toward the media, as well as their media choices. A stratified random sample of 267 LDS young single adults across the United States and outside the state of Utah responded to a cross sectional mail or online survey. The three mediation styles established by Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, and Marseille (1999)—Restrictive, Instructive, and Coviewing—were used as the independent variables while scales assessing television offensiveness levels, attitudes, orientation, and usage were …

Money Talks: Conversations With Poor Households In Bangladesh About Managing Money, Stuart Rutherford

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

This paper describes the money management behavior of 42 low-income Bangladeshi households, half of them rural and half living in urban slums. They were found to be active managers of their financial resources. Thirty-three varieties of financial instrument were found to be in use by the sample households during the research year. As well as using a wide variety of instruments, most households engaged in multiple uses of the instruments: on average each household initiated a new money management arrangement every two weeks. The sums of money involved are large, both absolutely and relative to incomes. The average “turnover” (the …

Vol. 05 No. 2 Journal Of Microfinance, Journal Of Microfinance

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

No abstract provided.

Balancing Supply And Demand: The Emerging Agenda For Microfinance Institutions, Thankom Arun, David Hulme

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

No abstract provided.

Announcements, Journal Of Microfinance

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

No abstract provided.

Rural Finance, Poverty Alleviation, And Sustainable Land Use: The Role Of Credit For The Adoption Of Agroforestry Systems In Occidental Honduras, Ruerd Ruben, Luud Clercx

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

This paper analyzes the relationship between financial services provided by different agents, the adoption of agroforestry systems, and the implications for food security and sustainable soil management. Attention is focussed on the role of rural finance in reducing risk and stabilizing household income and yields. We conclude that credit provision performs critical functions for reinforcing the resilience of rural livelihoods in less-favored areas. Rural development programs in the Occidental region of Honduras have been rather reluctant to provide rural financial services. Unfavorable agroclimatic conditions and the scarcity of infrastructure lead to extreme poverty. The local economy is fairly dynamic due …

Attitudes Of Rural Branch Manages In Madhya Pradesh, India, Toward Their Role As Providers Of Financial Services To The Poor, Howard Jones, Marylin Williams, Yashwant Thorat, Abba Thorat

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

Discussions on banking reforms to reduce financial exclusion have referred little to possible attitudinal constraints, on the part of staff at both branch and institutional levels, inhibiting the provision of financial services to the poor. The research project, funded by the ESCOR (now Social Science Research) Small Grants Committee, has focused on this aspect of financial exclusion. The research commenced in May 2001 and was completed in April 2002. Profiles of the rural bank branch managers, including personal background, professional background and workplace, are presented. Attitudes of managers toward aspects of their work environment and the rural poor are examined, …

Front Matter, Journal Of Microfinance

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

No abstract provided.

Implications Of Financial Innovations For The Poorest Of The Poor In The Rural Area: Experience From Northern Bangladesh, Mohammed Emrul Hasan

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

Providing microfinance to the poorest of the poor in rural areas remains a challenge. Grameen demonstrated that the poor are viable clients for loans and reached them on a massive scale. However, they reach only the upper level of the poor and provide narrow and limited financial services with rigid systems and procedures, which in many ways do not address the needs of the poorest. Despite earning signs of success with their SafeSave innovative approach to serving the poorest in the urban area, this rural adaptation and experiment has faced challenges because of the different social and economical structures of …

A Challenge To The Orthodoxy Concerning Microfinance And Poverty Reduction, Ana Marr

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

As a response to many partial and simplistic theoretical and empirical studies, this paper presents a more comprehensive analytical framework to assess the success of microfinance in achieving its dual objectives of financial sustainability and poverty reduction. By giving center stage to the study of group dynamics and using principles of imperfect information and social psychology, the paper argues that microfinance not only has failed to solve the original problems of information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders but also, in its pursuit of financial sustainability, is destroying the very foundations of these schemes by disrupting the social fabric of communities, …

Beyond Micro-Credit: Putting Development Back Into Micro-Finance By Thomas Fisher And M. S. Sriram, James R. Bradshaw

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

No abstract provided.

Predictors Of General Medical Use Among Individuals Seeking Therapy For Marital And Family Problems, Jacob D. Christenson

Theses and Dissertations

A number of studies have examined variables associated with medical use. However, most of the studies deal with samples that are not easily generalizable to other populations. In particular, no study is known to have looked at general medical use among people seeking services for marital and family problems. In this study, medical use of participants from the marriage and family therapy services at Brigham Young University Comprehensive Clinic was investigated to determine the best predictors of general medical use. Best subsets multiple linear regression showed that the best overall predictors of general medical use were anxiety and hostility.

Public Child Welfare And The American Indian: A California Profile, Gordon E. Limb, Robin Perry

Faculty Publications

Historically, American Indians have been disproportionately represented in public child welfare services. This article reports findings from a survey of all public child welfare workers in California (N= 5,741) in 1998. A descriptive profile of American Indian clients (where they reside and who works with them) and American Indian child welfare workers ( n= 1 71) is detailed. Attempts are made to identify counties with a disproportionately high number of American Indians represented on public child welfare caseloads and to estimate the probability that an American Indian worker would have a higher proportion of American Indians on his or her …

Long Memory Inflationary Dynamics: The Case Of Brazil, Mark E. Jensen, Valderio A. Reisen, Francisco Cribari-Neto

Faculty Publications

It has been argued by several authors that the inflationary dynamics in Brazil follow a unit root process, thus displaying some inertia. Indeed, Cati, et al. (Journal of Applied Econometrics, 1999) have found that the inflationary dynamics in Brazil are nearly fully inertial. We estimate the fractional differencing parameter using an ARFIMA specification for the inflation rate in that country and our results suggest that the inflationary dynamics are better modeled by a long memory process than by a unit root mechanism, thus implying that there is no inertia in inflation, contrary to what has been found by other researchers. …

Studying "Working Fathers": Comparing Fathers' And Mothers' Work-Family Conflict, Fit, And Adaptive Strategies In A Global High-Tech Company, E. Jeffrey Hill, Alan J. Hawkins, Vjollca Märtinson, Maria Ferris

Faculty Publications

Working fathers are underrepresented-conceptually and empirically-in work-family research. Using a global corporate sample of working fathers from 48 countries (N = 7,692), this study compares working fathers to working mothers on key work-family variables as suggested by Voydanoff's (2002) application of ecological systems theory. It examines the direction and the path of the predictors of work-family fit and whether a scarcity or expansion model better explains these results. Finally, it considers what work-family adaptive strategies may affect those relationships. Although fathers consistently reported less family-to-work conflict than mothers, they reported equal amounts of work-to-family conflict. That is, fathers struggled as …