Purpose: To determine whether learning curves can be observed with deliberate practice when the goal is to apply a consistent rate of force at 5 N/second during pressure pain threshold (PPT) testing in healthy volunteers. Methods: In this prospective study, 17 clinician participants completed PPT targeted rate-of-application testing with healthy volunteers using three different feedback paradig...

the steady growing innovations in the area of information and communication technology have raised new concepts and possibilities in different life aspects. in the field of further education and professional training, electronic learning and web-based education are perhaps the most prominent ones. proponents of this technology claim that e-learning courses are at least as effective as correspon...

This paper presents a new competitive learning algorithm for data clustering, named the dynamically penalized rival competitive learning algorithm (DPRCA). It is a variant of the rival penalized competitive algorithm [1] and it performs appropriate clustering without knowing the clusters number, by automatically driving extra seed points far away from the input data set. It doesn’t have the "de...

The population of students all over the world is growing without a proportionate increase in teaching/learning resources/infrastructure. There is also much quest for learning in an environment that provides equal opportunities to all learners. The need to provide an equal opportunity learning environment that will hitherto improve the system of education globally has therefore become imperative...

A model of unsupervised learning is studied, where the environment provides N{ dimensional input examples that are drawn from two overlapping Gaussian clouds. We consider the optimization of two diierent objective functions: the search for the direction of the largest variance in the data and the largest separating gap (stability) between clusters of examples respectively. By means of a statist...

We derive an algorithm for selecting from the set of samples gathered by a reinforcement learning agent interacting with a deterministic environment, a concise set from which the agent can extract a good policy. The reinforcement learning agent is assumed to extract policies from sets of samples by solving a sequence of standard supervised learning regression problems. To identify concise sets,...

We report the results of an experiment in which human subjects were trained to perform a perceptual matching task. Subjects were asked to manipulate comparison objects until they matched target objects using the fewest manipulations possible. An unusual feature of the experimental task is that efficient performance requires an understanding of the hidden or latent causal structure governing the...

This study examined the relationships among learning styles, study habits, and learning performances in an online programming language course. Sixty-two sophomore students who enrolled in an online introductory programming course participated in the study. Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory (LSI) was used to measure the students’ learning styles. Another inventory developed by the researcher was u...

A field experiment was organized during a handgun shooting workshop for armed officers (N 36). In-depth stress analyses involved anticipatory distress, subjective stress, and salivary cortisol reactivity triggered by reality-based handgun shooting practice and, more specifically, by being in an uncontrollable situation with the risk of being shot at. Subsequently, the study examined to what ext...

We consider a simple model in which a population of individuals with idiosyncratic willingnesses to pay must choose repeatedly either to buy or not a unit of a single homogeneous good at a given price. Utilities of buyers have positive externalities due to social interactions among customers. If the latter are strong enough, the system has multiple Nash equilibria, revealing coordination proble...