Based on accumulating evidence, simulation appears to be a basic computational mechanism in the brain that supports a broad spectrum of processes from perception to social cognition. Further evidence suggests that simulation is typically situated, with the situated character of experience in the environment being reflected in the situated character of the representations that underlie simulatio...

The origins and physical significance of the Casimir effect are reviewed, linking the zero-point energy of the vacuum in quantum electrodynamics with a force between conducting plates. It is shown how, by the use of dimensional and other simple physical arguments, the major features of the phenomenon can be derived.

E-government facilitates provision of relevant government information in electronic form to the citizens in a timely manner and better service delivery to citizens. Information Technology today is recognized as an effective tool for turning the economic activity in efficient governance and in developing human resource. E-government is a kind of governmental administration which is based on ICT ...

ed across the situated conceptualizations constructed for each kind of situation (e.g., Barsalou, 1992, 1999, 2003a). Within the frame, local outputs of the situation processing architecture constitute slots/variables (e.g., setting, agent, object, action, etc.), with the global relations integrating slots in a predicate-like manner. Interestingly, the individual networks comprising the situati...

Model Conceptualization is the most important activity in the development of a system dynamics model. Since Randers’ classic paper 23 years ago, researchers in the field have worked in the development and refinement of tools and methods to improve the process. Although progress has been made, we still lack understanding of the process itself. The purpose of the paper is to review the progress i...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a mechanism to characterize websites, at the conceptualization stage, whose information content can be defined in terms of hybrid conceptual models. Usually in this type of website, some of the domain information units are modeled in terms of classes/entities while others remain as heterogeneous irregular elements. Websites built on this type of h...

This paper tries to bridge the gap from agent conceptualization to formal specification in the field of requirement engineering. The IAM (Intentionnal Agent Method) approach aims to integrate the agent ontology with Time Petri Nets (TPN) in the development process helps in the construction of efficient and safe large software system. TPNs deals formally with concurrency. Mathematically, it allo...

Diversity, an important issue in higher education admission policy and practice, is addressed in this paper in terms of the construct’s conceptualization and measurement. Several measures of diversity are identified, and a commonly-used demographic measure based on racial classification is examined. Differences among undergraduate students’ diversity seeking behavior associated with living and ...

The science of health care improvement had advanced dramatically through the work of pioneers such as Avedis Donabedian and health care providers who championed systematic use of evidence-based medicine. This work helped lay the groundwork for an emerging body of consensus measures based on evidence that provided important tools for assessing the care delivered by health care providers. However...

Narrative is emerging as a notion that may enable overcoming the limitations of the discovery functionality (only ranked lists of objects) offered by information systems to their users. We present preliminary results on modelling narratives by means of formal ontology, by introducing a conceptualization of narratives and a mathematical expression of it. Our conceptualization tries to capture fu...