This year many meetings will celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of Thomas Reid (figure 1). One, organised by the British Society for the History of Philosophy, was suitably divided between Aberdeen and Glasgow. Reid was born in Strachan (in the north-east of Scotland) on 26 April 1710 and entered the ministry after studying at Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1752 he became professor of phi...

This theoretical essay purports to explore the conceptual significance of amae for Japanese communication research. The essay first reconsiders the interrelationship of amae with the enryo-sasshi interaction style by reviewing the pertinent literature within and outside the discipline of communication. Second, the essay reconceptualizes amae as two types of human communication needs (i.e., mess...

Surface features of essays include nonlinguistic characteristics such as total number of words per essay (essay length), sentence length, and word length as well as linguistic characteristics such as the total number of grammatical errors, the types of grammatical errors, or the kinds of grammatical constructions (e.g., passive or active) that appear in an essay. This study examines the feasibi...

This study investigates the roles of cohesion and coherence in evaluations of essay quality. Cohesion generally has a facilitative effect on text comprehension and is assumed to be related to essay coherence. By contrast, recent studies of essay writing have demonstrated that computational indices of cohesion are not predictive of evaluations of writing quality. This study investigates expert r...

Three studies were conducted with the aim of investigating whether choice of behavioral alternative increases intention-behavior consistency. In Study 1 undergraduates were asked to write and mail back an essay on a topic they either chose or were assigned. Demonstrating an effect of choice, significantly more subjects who chose an essay topic mailed back the essays. These subjects also rated t...

. Although it may well be unreliable and illogical, is a well-known habit to form firm, lasting, and definite first impressions. That they are often ^accurate and always superficial is to be admitted, but nevertheless they frequently form the basis of our later estimations and prejudice our views for good or evil, the more so when the situation is a new one to us, or one whose arrival we have b...

I have spent the majority of my biology career located between the macro world and the micro world. While majoring in Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I came to appreciate animal life histories and ecological and evolutionary principles. On the other hand, I filled my elective class schedule with courses that most wildlife ecology students would consider obscure, such a...

Vernalization is the process by which prolonged exposure to cold temperatures promotes flowering. Over the past century, this process has been studied extensively at the physiological level. Recent studies have provided some insight into the molecular basis of vernalization. The rich history of vernalization research has been discussed in detail in many reviews (Chouard, 1960; Lang, 1965; Berni...

Standardized tests are hampered by the manual effort required to score student-written essays. In this paper, we show how linear regression can be used to automatically grade essays on standardized tests. We combine simple, shallow features of the essays, such as character length and word length, with part-of-speech patterns. Our combined model gives significant reduction in prediction error. W...

Vernalization is the process by which prolonged exposure to cold temperatures promotes flowering. Over the past century, this process has been studied extensively at the physiological level. Recent studies have provided some insight into the molecular basis of vernalization. The rich history of vernalization research has been discussed in detail in many reviews (Chouard, 1960; Lang, 1965; Berni...