Journal articles on the topic 'Correctness expectations'

The article presents an assessment of students studying economics who belong to the Generation Y. Generation Y is a group of people born in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century. The aim of this study was to verify the correctness of judgments about Generation Y. The article presents results concerning the behaviour of students in 2001 and 2015 years. Subjective evaluation of opinion of Generation Y was examined in the areas of faculty chosen, work, internet, mobility. Data analysis was performed using positional statistics, bar diagrams and parallel set. It was confirmed almost all opinions about Generation Y, indicating only a small difference in the perception of mobility by young students of economics.

The article is devoted to the study of the impact of the resilience of Greek migrants on their expectations for future employment in connection with resettlement to permanent residence on the territory of the Russian Federation. The survey was applied on two original questionnaires and psychological testing (a questionnaire of resilience; methods of assessment of job satisfaction; scale of satisfaction with life). Some differences in the expectations of migrants are established. Thus, persons with a high degree of vitality are focused on the fact that the future work would be pleasing, stable, and there would be career prospects. Migrants with a low degree of resilience rely on a special social status of work and a good relationship with the leader. The general pattern is that resilience gives workers labour mobility, potentiates their confidence in the correctness of the decision on migration. Ultimately, migrants linked their lives to the host country through work.

Have you ever asked students for a written explanation of their thinking or how they solved a problem, and their responses did not meet your expectations? Because the teaching of mathematics continues to move away from a sole focus on correctness and a finished product to include a focus on process, context, and understanding (Miller 1991; NCTM 2000), students need opportunities to express their ideas. A writing task can be an ideal tool for supporting this important learning activity.

AutoTutor is an intelligent tutoring system that holds conversations with learners in natural language. AutoTutor uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to match student answers to a set of expected answers that would appear in a complete and correct response or which reflect common but incorrect understandings of the material. The correctness of student contributions is decided using a threshold value of the LSA cosine between the student answer and the expectations. In previous work LSA has shown to be effective in detecting good answers of students. The results indicate that the best agreement between LSA matches and the evaluations of subject matter experts can be obtained if the cosine threshold is allowed to be a function of the lengths of both student answer and the expectation being considered. Based on some of our experiences with LSA and AutoTutor, we are developing a new mathematical model to improve the precision of AutoTutor's natural language understanding and discriminative ability.

This article is inspired in my doctorate thesis, whose main subject is punctuation. The interest in the issue was born in the field of early writings: texts with no punctuation at all, or, on the other hand, mysteriously punctuated, with signs showing up in slots were they were not supposed to appear. How can we apprehend this irregular punctuation? How to explain such heterogeneous punctuation episodes through the perspective of normative constraints? Children’s written productions do not correspond to the adult’s regularity expectations. The adult is already “immersed” in the conventions of language use and when his literate logic is projected in the child’s text, a collision takes place: two distinct logics conflict and the expectations of correctness, organization, cohesion, etc. are frustrated. In the text presented below, we discuss the theme of punctuation in regard to the field of language acquisition. Despite being a subject commonly related to proficient writing, punctuation is a very fruitful source of questions concerning the child’s linguistic productions. As mentioned before, childrens’ early writings are characterized by non-predictable, somewhat bizarre occurences, that oblige the investigator to suspend his/her previous knowledge and certainties about language functioning. The strangeness provoked by non-systematic uses of punctuation – or even the absence of it – will be, then, the object of our considerations in this article.

The process of analyzing the requirements for information security management systems is considered. The obligation to comply with the requirements of the international standard ISO/IEC 27001 is shown. This provides confidence to stakeholders in the proper management of information security risks with an acceptable level. This is due to the internal and external circumstances of influencing the goal and achieving the expected results of organizations. In addition, the identification of stakeholders, their needs and expectations from the development of information security management systems are also considered. It is established that now the main focus is on taking into account the requirements for the process of developing these systems or to ensure information security in organizations. The transformation of the needs, expectations and related constraints of stakeholders into an appropriate systemic solution has been overlooked. These limitations have been overcome through the method of analyzing the requirements for information security management systems. Its use allows, based on the needs, expectations and related constraints of stakeholders, to identify relevant statements in established syntactic forms. There is need to check each of them for correctness of formulation and compliance with the characteristics of both the individual requirement and the set of requirements. For their systematization, establishment of relations the graphic notation SysML is applied. In view of this, the requirement is considered as a stereotype of a class with properties and constraints. Relationships are used to establish relationships between requirements. Their combination is represented by a diagram in the graphical notation SysML and, as a result, allows you to specify the requirements for information security management systems. In the prospects of further research, it is planned to develop its logical structure on the basis of the proposed method.

Errors in thinking contribute to harm, delays in diagnosis, incorrect treatments, or failures to recognize clinical changes. Models of cognition are useful in understanding error occurrence and avoidance. Intra-team conflict can represent failures in joint cognitive processing. The authors developed training focused on recognizing and managing cognitive bias and resolving conflicts. The program provides context and introduces models of cognition, concepts of bias, team cognition, conflict resolution, and 2 tools. “IDEA” incorporates 4 de-biasing strategies: Identify assumptions; Don’t assume correctness; Explore expectations; Assess alternatives. “TLA” presents strategies for resolving conflicts: Tell your thoughts; Listen actively, and Ask questions. A total of 4941 care providers participated in training using didactic presentations, group discussion, and simulation. Learners rated training effectiveness at 4.68 on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 as optimum) and perceived improvement in recognizing or managing errors. Nonphysician caregivers reported greatest improvement. Training to improve critical thinking is feasible, well received, and effective.

This paper presents a novel to model application domain. Application domain description precedes requirements engineering, and is the basis for the development of a software or information system that satisfies all expectations of its users. The domain model is used to generate project specific process models. Our aim is to develop a model description for processes which permits to create comprehensive scenarios. Modeling can be divided into a structural, and behavioral. This paper projects that an important future direction in software engineering is domain-specific software engineering. From requirements specification to design, and then implementation, a tighter coupling between the descriptions of a software system with its application domain has the potential to improve both the correctness and reliability of the software system. The greatest challenge in this area is the evolution of the application domain itself. We show how the application domain description can be mapped to requirements and discuss engineering of application domain descriptions.

The excess money supply did not lead to a rapid rise in the price index, which in turn triggered inflation. In this case, the redetermination of the demand for money is particularly important. At the same time, with the continuous expansion of the capital market and the rapid development of the virtual economy, the virtual economy is gradually deviating from the real economy. When selecting assets, microentities often incorporate virtual economic assets into investment considerations. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a money demand model that considers the impact of virtual economic assets. This paper uses the asset selection of microentities as the microfoundation to establish a money demand model to explain its economic significance. And based on the money demand model established, a dynamic equilibrium model of the money market was established, and the stability of the dynamic equilibrium point of the money market was verified through mathematical deduction. Based on the dynamic equilibrium model of the money market, the impact of money supply was analyzed. In order to verify the correctness of the aforementioned theory, this paper conducts an empirical analysis. Through cointegration analysis and the vector error correction model (VECM model), the correctness and applicability of the established money demand model are verified, and money demand, total social wealth, spreads between expected stock returns and interest rates, and real estate expectations are found. There is a long-term equilibrium relationship between the rate of return and the interest rate. The total amount of social wealth, the expected rate of return on stocks, and the interest rate spread will have an impact on the demand for money in the short term.

Abstract With recent trends in manufacturing automation, control software in automated production systems becomes more complex and has more variability to keep pace with customer and market requirements. Quality assurance also becomes more and more important to ensure that the systems live up to expectations. However, correctness of automation software is rarely verified using formal techniques in spite of their high coverage. One of the main reasons is the lack of specification languages suitable for this application area that are both comprehensible and sufficiently expressive. Generalized test tables (GTTs), which are a specification language for reactive systems, were presented recently as an accessible representation for application engineers. This formalism achieves both the comprehensibility of concrete test tables and the coverage of formal methods. In our approach, the specification provided by GTTs is used for formal verification, especially model checking. In this paper, we present four new features for GTTs: the progression flag, strong repetition, row grouping, and specification on internal variables. We demonstrate the applicability and evaluate the comprehensibility of GTT-based specification and verification using a range of diverse scenarios from the community demonstrator, the extended Pick & Place Unit.

Nowadays, organizations through the appropriate motivational activities create employee behavior. They should apply available material and non-material incentives in a sustainable manner. Therefore, it is necessary to create such a motivation system within the organization’s activity that will generate employees’ right attitudes, beneficial for them and for the entire organization as well. The purpose of the work was to determine the employees’ subjective feelings related to motivational instruments used in the company. The research object was EnergiaPro S.A. with its registered seat in Wroclaw. The basic research technique was a survey, which was carried out anonymously among the employees of the administrative division. Research has shown that the company uses methods of material and non-material motivation. Employees particularly appreciate the system of cash incentives, especially bonuses. It is the motivator for them to work more efficiently. Not without significance for them is also non-cash motivating (training, social allowances and the use of additional leave). They have positive feelings about the correctness of the motivational methods used, although their expectations regarding cash motivation, especially salaries, are higher. They expect wage increases and fair awards, recognizing that this is a major problem in the company.

Machine learning approaches to problem-solving are growing rapidly within healthcare, and radiation oncology is no exception. With the burgeoning interest in machine learning comes the significant risk of misaligned expectations as to what it can and cannot accomplish. This paper evaluates the role of machine learning and the problems it solves within the context of current clinical challenges in radiation oncology. The role of learning algorithms within the workflow for external beam radiation therapy are surveyed, considering simulation imaging, multimodal fusion, image segmentation, treatment planning, quality assurance, and treatment delivery and adaptation. For each aspect, the clinical challenges faced, the learning algorithms proposed, and the successes and limitations of various approaches are analyzed. It is observed that machine learning has largely thrived on reproducibly mimicking conventional human-driven solutions with more efficiency and consistency. On the other hand, since algorithms are generally trained using expert opinion as ground truth, machine learning is of limited utility where problems or ground truths are not well-defined, or if suitable measures of correctness are not available. As a result, machines may excel at replicating, automating and standardizing human behaviour on manual chores, meanwhile the conceptual clinical challenges relating to definition, evaluation, and judgement remain in the realm of human intelligence and insight.

The international disability music scene is a thriving musical subculture consisting of performers self-identifying as disabled who use their performances to explore experiences of living with disability. As a genre predominantly written by, about and for people with disabilities, it provides a space for discourse about life with disability which is largely unmediated by governmental policy, political correctness or able-bodied facilitators. As such, it is a medium through which people with disability are free to express opinions about sex and romance rarely seen in mainstream media. This article examines the ways in which the topics of sexuality and romance are explored within disability music culture. It will focus on four case study songs, I Love My Body (1988) by Johnny Crescendo, Vagina Ain’t Handicapped (2011) by Laura Martinez, Def Deaf Girls (2012) by Sean Forbes and No Goodbyes (2012) by Rory Burnside and Rohan Brooks from Rudely Interrupted. These four songs will be used to explore the themes of body image, cultural expectations of the disabled body, the benefits of dating fellow members of the disability community and relationships. This article also draws on the author’s own experience as a person with disability and a musician in a band that regularly performs on the disability music scene.

Ground handling services constitute an important element of airline operations and significantly affect traffic stability and punctuality. In this article, the existing and potential impact of airline handling on air traffic volatility is reviewed from the point of view of airlines and ground operations. The issues of airline expectations towards ground handling agents (including handling rates, turnaround time, passenger services, and ramp services) are explored. In addition, the impact of an airline’s schedule and the volatility of its operations on the performance and operational requirements of handling agents is discussed, including actions required by handling agents in response to the above challenges. The mechanism of how the volatility of an airline’s schedule and its operations may impact the volatility of ground operations (directly and indirectly) is considered. The statistics of airline delays caused by ground operations are presented and discussed. The issue of the correctness of air traffic delays reporting by airlines is investigated.Furthermore, this article investigates internal factors of ground handling agents and their impact on air traffic volatility. The existing and potential considerations discussed include staff management issues (in particular, employee rotation resulting in staff shortages and service quality, including punctuality), resources management, the ground service support equipment (including new developments aiming at limiting ground safety incidents), and their impact on performance.

Diversification of translation services, adequacy and quality expectations in an increasingly globalized translation industry has accentuated the significance of translation quality assessment. Under present circumstances the goal of translation is considered to be the reference point for an interpreter or a translator. It is the goal of translation that enables the choice of the translation strategy that meets the requirements of the specific nature and the features of the communicative situation of translation. Adequacy proves to be the primary parameter of translation quality assessment necessitating the need of its evaluation as a precondition for translators’ professional activity efficiency increase and development of didactic basics of translators’ professional training. Translation adequacy assessment, i.e. achievement of the goal of translation is carried out with regard whether replication or alteration of the features of the source text (ST) takes place. Consequently, the criterion “Degree of Relevant Resemblance of the ST and Target Text (TT)” is singled out, within which the following sub-criteria are considered: relevant information rendering, ST genre and stylistic features rendering, ST formal and structural features rendering, ST pragmatic adaptation. The strategy of the communicative translation foresees obligatory rendering the listed features, within the latest two strategies their rendering is optional. Moreover, the following translation adequacy assessment criteria are singled out: the correctness of data arrangement and the adequacy of linguistic arrangement. These criteria are considered to be normative requirements when assessing translation adequacy within any strategy of translation and do not provide any options.

Lexical cohesion significantly contributes to a text’s thematic progression, and by meansof it to perceived coherence. Therefore, the ability to express lexical cohesive relationsrepresents one of the areas of learners’ inter-language that are to be developed in foreignlanguage instruction. The paper reports on the development of lexical cohesion (namelythe class of reiteration) in EFL undergraduate and postgraduate academic writing as aresult of participation in a purely online academic writing course involving no face-tofaceinteraction. The course was delivered at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.To determine the effect of the treatment, a quasi-experimental one-group pre-test post-testdesign was followed, with the genre of argumentative essay assigned for both measures.The pre/post-test analysis comprised two stages: the identification and classificationof reiteration pairs based on Tanskanen’s framework (2006) followed by subsequentevaluation of each pair in terms of its appropriateness/correctness. Thus, every pair wasclassified either as appropriate/well-formed or as displaying a sign of immature writingwith respect to given genre expectations. The occurrence of key lexical items formingchains of cohesion was also monitored. After the treatment, the use of reiteration devicesin students’ compositions improved in several respects. A greater variety of reiterationrelations was observed, with a statistically significant decline in simple repetition andcorresponding increases in other categories of reiteration relations. In addition, thepre/post-test comparison showed a statistically significant increase in the number ofreiteration pairs that were classified as appropriate/well-formed, and in the frequency ofkey lexical items.

AbstractThis article analyzes two interconnected narratives of violence in the Dead Sea Scrolls by drawing upon some recent treatments of religious violence employing social-scientific approaches—in particular, the "scarce resources" theory—and more general sociological approaches to sectarianism. The first narrative of violence revolves around the origins of the community's violent worldview as embodied in its debates with its opponents. Early sectarian literature represents sectarian debates and polemics in terms of an exclusive understanding of the meaning of Scripture, the application of ritual and cultic law, and the identity of God's elect. These aspects become focal points of ideological debate as the community attempted to convince the "outsiders" of the correctness of the sectarian way. By tracing the development of these debates in sectarian literature, however, I reveal how they are transformed from innocuous elements of disagreement into focal points for the emergence of violence as a central preoccupation of the Qumran community. The "scarce resources" theory explains why these specific points of disagreement become infused with violence. The second narrative of violence involves the continued appearance of these debates within the community's eschatological literature as a rhetorical device to legitimize its violent expectations. Unlike related groups in Second Temple Judaism (e.g., the Zealots), for the Qumran community, violence outside of the framework of the eschatological battle is not legitimized and presumably did not exist. By delaying all punishment until the eschaton, the community simultaneously defused its own violent worldview. The simultaneous infusion and defusion of violence is explained in the context of the sectarian structure of the community.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to determine the homogeneity and replicability of carburized layers obtained by a continuous single-piece flow method. Design/methodology/approach: A series of 100 gears was carburized under low pressure atmosphere using the single-piece flow method. The microstructures of the obtained carbon layers were investigated. Hardness penetration pattern and carbon concentration profiles were tested. Findings: The findings have shown the validity/correctness of the microstructures of the carburized layers obtained by the single-piece flow method. It has been proved that the carbon layer in every gear is uniform, what confirms that each element is affected by the same process conditions and the gears in the whole series can be precisely reproduced. Research limitations/implications: The short-pulse low-pressure carburizing technology needs further investigation to understand its all mechanisms fully. Practical implications: The single-piece flow method provides the uniform and reproducible carburized layers with the precision magnitude exceeding the abilities of currently used thermo-chemical furnaces. When applying the method it is possible to obtain a uniform carburized case in every single gear from the whole series of elements subjected to the process. Optimized configuration of process parameters and carbon-carrying mixture allows to meet the high expectations of a modern and future industry, what is most crucial in exploiting carburized steel gears. Originality/value: The applicability of the LPC single-piece flow method to a demanding mass production has been verified. The statistical validity of research results of the whole manufactured series of gears is being performed for the first time.

This work addresses the problem of workflow requirements specifications considering the realistic assumptions that, it involves experts from different domains (i.e. representatives of different business policies); not all the possible execution scenarios are known beforehand, during the early stage of specification. In particular, since the main purpose of a workflow is to achieve a certain (bussiness) goal, we propose a formalism which enables the users to specify their requirements (and expectations) and test if the information that they have provided is, in a sense, sufficient for the workflow to behave "as desired", in terms of the goal. Our methodology allows domain experts to express not only their knowledge, but also the "ignorance" (the semantics allows for unknown values to reflect a realistic situation of agents dealing with incomplete information) and the possibility of occurrence of exceptional situations. As a basis for formalizing the process of equirements specifications, we are using the recent results on reasoning about actions. We propose a high level language AW which enables specifying the effects that activites have on the environment and how they should be coordinated. We also describe our prototype tool for process specification. Strictly speaking, in this work we go "one step" before actual analysis and design, and offer a formalism which enables the involved partners to see if the extent to which they have expressed their domain knowledge (which may sometimes be subject to a proprietary restricions) can satisfy the intended needs and behaviour of their product_to_be. We define an entailment relation which enables reasoning about the correctness of the specification, in terms of achieving a desired goal and, also testing about consequences of modifications in the workflow descriptions.

The article defines the reasons influencing the translation decisions as to recreation of cultural realia in the Slovak and Czech multiple translations of I. Goncharov’s key novels. It has been found that ethnocultural elements of the text, first of all the realia, can be a source of mistakes when translated since the modern generations of readers do not possess the background knowledge on the level needed for the perception of important information contained in the classics’ works, in particular in those by I. Goncharov. That is why a contemporary translator must introduce the reader to the elements of the text connected with the life of people, their culture and world outlook when works of art are being translated. The knowledge of material and moral realia, customs and traditions is an integral part of the background knowledge of a writer, a translator and a reader as well. Much depends on a translator’s aspiration to realize the modern readers’ expectations and update the archaic realia when translated in order to bring the past times closer to the present days. This requires a translator’s freedom from an original. This way there is the only possible to preserve artistic peculiarities of an original since translators in the past strived to recreate the precise structure of a text (sentences) by means of literal translation. However, it was an illusion as to the correctness of translation. That is why translators should be aware of the fact that they should preserve the invariant part of the contents of an original, which should be the result of their work. Herewith, translators should maintain all artistic properties of a classic work.

The ghost of Tiananmen stubbornly refuses to leave the mansion of Chinese politics. Since Deng Xiaoping mobilized the PLA against the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Chinese government has refused to review the event or its suppression. A brief flurry of publications and public gestures affirmed the correctness of the decision in the months after 4 June until all official acknowledgments of the incident were withdrawn from circulation in November 1989: Tiananmen was best forgotten. The 15th-year anniversary in June 2004 might have been an appropriate moment to lay the ghost to rest. Jiang Yanyong, the PLA doctor who publicized China's failure to deal with SARS in 2003, attempted to puncture the silence by calling for an official re-evaluation, but he achieved little beyond being made to disappear for seven weeks. The power of silence is strong, but so too is the power of memory. Tiananmen will remain an unexploded mine on the battlefield of Chinese politics until it is properly defused.Dingxin Zhao's study of the sociology of knowledge and action during the democracy movement provides a rich and persuasive portrait of how this power came into being. The core of his argument is that the democracy movement arose at a particular moment of alienation – a naively idealistic but disillusioned intelligentsia facing a post-ideological regime of dwindling legitimacy – within a particular ecology of social interaction – a poorly organized society facing a state that could penetrate from above but not inspire investment from social actors below. By astutely blending structural and contingent factors, Zhao is able to show how student activists and state representatives produced effects or forced reactions that neither could anticipate or control. This interplay generated emotional expectations and disappointments that each side consistently misread, thereby pushing the terms of debate onto a moral ground from which there could be no retreat.

Bus stops are an essential element of the public transport system and affect its users’ safety level. They are where the passengers gather who want to use bus transport, and where vehicles stop to exchange passenger flows. Most studies devoted to assessing bus stops’ safety focus on two evaluation methods: (1) statistical analysis of traffic crash data and (2) traffic conflict analysis. However, there is a need to develop a methodology to define priorities and scope for the improvement of increasing bus stops’ safety. For this reason, the aim of the article is to present a method of assessing bus stops’ safety, which is dedicated to the process of auditing and designing point infrastructure in the city. The use of the proposed method of evaluating bus stops is aimed not only at determining the current status, but above all at assigning priorities to actions aimed at increasing safety and improving the quality of life of residents. The article presents in detail the algorithm of the research procedure consisting of the proposed method and its implementation for the evaluation of stops in a selected city. In total, 151 bus stops serving all fast lines in the studied agglomeration were assessed. As part of the results, the ratings obtained by individual stops were presented. The level of fulfilment of individual evaluation criteria, divided into conducted classification procedures, was also analysed. The implementation of the method in the real system allowed us to assess the correctness of the procedure and the usefulness of the obtained results. The obtained results of the evaluation of bus stops and the fulfilment of individual criteria should constitute the basis for the created schedules of the required ongoing works related to the improvement of public transport passenger safety, but also the creation of long-term plans related to the improvement of the bus stop infrastructure and its adaptation to changing safety requirements and passengers’ expectations.

Individuals typically evaluate whether their performance and the obtained feedback match. Previous research has shown that feedback negativity (FN) depends on outcome probability and feedback valence. It is, however, less clear to what extent previous effects of outcome probability on FN depend on self-evaluations of response correctness. Therefore, we investigated the effects of outcome probability on FN amplitude in a simple go/no-go task that allowed for the self-evaluation of response correctness. We also investigated effects of performance incompatibility and feedback valence. In a sample ofN=22participants, outcome probability was manipulated by means of precues, feedback valence by means of monetary feedback, and performance incompatibility by means of feedback that induced a match versus mismatch with individuals’ performance. We found that the 100% outcome probability condition induced a more negative FN following no-loss than the 50% outcome probability condition. The FN following loss was more negative in the 50% compared to the 100% outcome probability condition. Performance-incompatible loss resulted in a more negative FN than performance-compatible loss. Our results indicate that the self-evaluation of the correctness of responses should be taken into account when the effects of outcome probability and expectation mismatch on FN are investigated.

Relationship between Pregnant Women’s Perception of the Integrated ANC Program with Pregnant Women’s Behavior in the Integrated ANC Program Urip Tugiyarti(1), Santoso (2), Muhammad Akhyar(3), Sapja Anantanyu(4) 1) Study Program of Community Development/Empowerment Counseling in Health Promotion Interest, Universitas Sebelas Maret Surakarta 2)Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Sebelas Maret Surakarta 3) Faculty of Education, Universitas Sebelas Maret Surakarta 4) Development Counseling Study Program, Universitas Sebelas Maret Surakarta ABSTRACT Background: Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) is very high in the world; recorded 800 women die every day due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth. The causes of maternal mortality in Indonesia are very diverse, both medical and non-medical. For this reason, efforts to accelerate the reduction of MMR and accelerate the SDGs achievement must be carried out comprehensively by involving cross-programs in the Health Office, across sectors, DPRD in local government, professional, religious/community organizations, private sector, NGOs and donor institutions. This is relevant as a reference, because maternal health conditions, especially pregnant women, in Indonesia are still far from expectations. Ensuring maternal health efforts is not limited to curative treatment, but must be balanced with preventive efforts. Preventive efforts are very important, because health status cannot be obtained instantly. The preventive effort aims to prevent the occurrence of maternal deaths and fulfill the rights of every pregnant woman to obtain quality health services so that she is able to undergo a healthy pregnancy, deliver safely and give birth to a healthy and quality baby, and pregnant women must understand and carry out integrated antenatal care (ANC). The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between perceptions of pregnant women about the integrated ANC program with the behavior of pregnant women in the integrated ANC program. Subject and Method: This study uses a quantitative research method with a cross sectional approach carried out in Bantul Regency. 175 respondents were selected using the cluster proportional random sampling technique. The criteria of respondents are pregnant women with more than 12 weeks gestational age in second and third Trimester. The instruments of data collection used were questionnaires. Data were analyzed with path analysis method and SEM to test the correctness of the structural models available on the lisrel program. Research Result: The results of the analysis show that there is a relationship between the perception of pregnant women about the integrated ANC program with the mother behavior in the integrated ANC program (0.42, t value = 8.70). Conclusion: There is a positive and significant relationship between the perceptions of pregnant women about the integrated ANC program with the mother behavior in the integrated ANC program. Keywords: pregnant women, perception, pregnant women behavior, integrated ANC program.

SummaryObjectives: Detecting hints to public health threats as early as possible is crucial to prevent harm from the population. However, many disease surveillance strategies rely upon data whose collection requires explicit reporting (data transmitted from hospitals, laboratories or physicians). Collecting reports takes time so that the reaction time grows. Moreover, context information on individual cases is often lost in the collection process. This paper describes a system that tries to address these limitations by processing social media for identifying information on public health threats. The primary objective is to study the usefulness of the approach for supporting the monitoring of a population's health status.Methods: The developed system works in three main steps: Data from Twitter, blogs, and forums as well as from TV and radio channels are continuously collected and filtered by means of keyword lists. Sentences of relevant texts are classified relevant or irrelevant using a binary classifier based on support vector machines. By means of statistical methods known from biosurveillance, the relevant sentences are further analyzed and signals are generated automatically when unexpected behavior is detected. From the generated signals a subset is selected for presentation to a user by matching with user queries or profiles. In a set of evaluation experiments, public health experts assessed the generated signals with respect to correctness and relevancy. In particular, it was assessed how many relevant and irrelevant signals are generated during a specific time period.Results: The experiments show that the system provides information on health events identified in social media. Signals are mainly generated from Twitter messages posted by news agencies. Personal tweets, i.e. tweets from persons observing some symptoms, only play a minor role for signal generation given a limited volume of relevant messages. Relevant signals referring to real world outbreaks were generated by the system and monitored by epidemiologists for example during the European football championship. But, the number of relevant signals among generated signals is still very small: The different experiments yielded a proportion between 5 and 20% of signals regarded as “relevant” by the users. Vaccination or education campaigns communicated via Twitter as well as use of medical terms in other contexts than for outbreak reporting led to the generation of irrelevant signals.Conclusions: The aggregation of information into signals results in a reduction of monitoring effort compared to other existing systems. Against expectations, only few messages are of personal nature, reporting on personal symptoms. Instead, media reports are distributed over social media channels. Despite the high percentage of irrele vant signals generated by the system, the users reported that the effort in monitoring aggregated information in form of signals is less demanding than monitoring huge social-media data streams manually. It remains for the future to develop strategies for reducing false alarms.

One of the key prerequisite for a scalable, effective and efficient sensor network is the utilization of low-cost, low-overhead and high-resilient fault-inference techniques. To this end, we propose an intelligent agent system with a problem solving capability to address the issue of fault inference in sensor network environments. The intelligent agent system is designed and implemented at base-station side. The core of the agent system – problem solver – implements a fault-detection inference engine which harnesses Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate fault probabilities of sensor nodes. To validate the correctness and effectiveness of the intelligent agent system, a set of experiments in a wireless sensor testbed are conducted. The experimental results show that our intelligent agent system is able to precisely estimate the fault probability of sensor nodes.

It is an open problem whether a classical client can delegate quantum computing to an efficient remote quantum server in such a way that the correctness of quantum computing is somehow guaranteed. Several protocols for verifiable delegated quantum computing have been proposed, but the client is not completely free from any quantum technology: the client has to generate or measure single-qubit states. In this paper, we show that the client can be completely classical if the server is rational (i.e., economically motivated), following the ``rational proofs" framework of Azar and Micali. More precisely, we consider the following protocol. The server first sends the client a message allegedly equal to the solution of the problem that the client wants to solve. The client then gives the server a monetary reward whose amount is calculated in classical probabilistic polynomial-time by using the server's message as an input. The reward function is constructed in such a way that the expectation value of the reward (the expectation over the client's probabilistic computing) is maximum when the server's message is the correct solution to the problem. The rational server who wants to maximize his/her profit therefore has to send the correct solution to the client.

The trends of teaching mathematical thinking and the existence of two thinking skills (critical dan creative thinking) the required by 21st-century skills have created needs for teachers to know their students’ thinking processes. This study is intended to portray how mathematics teachers expect their students showing their thinking processes in students’ written work. The authors surveyed Whatsapp and Telegram group of mathematics teachers. First, the authors shared the result of the literature review and the governmental regulations about the need to develop thinking skills. Second, the authors stated that the potentials of students’ written works as a tool for knowing students’ thinking processes. Third, the authors sent a simple mathematical problem with the topic of algebra and asked the mathematics teachers how should their students answer that problem such that they can easily monitor and assess their students’ thinking processes. A total of 25 teachers participated voluntarily in this survey. Results of the survey were triangulated with direct trial data in lecture classes at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The result indicates that participating mathematics teachers do not expect too much for their students to show their thinking processes in written work. Teacher’s focus is mostly on the accuracy and the correctness of their students’ mathematics answer.

Narrowband emitter identification is used to correctly identify unknown narrowband emitters from the results of direction finding (DF). In this paper, we modeled the set of azimuth angles by a mixture of Gaussian densities, and divided narrowband emitter identification into two different stages. In the first stage, a competitive stop expectation-maximization (CSEM) algorithm was developed, which was based on Shapiro-Wilk test and minimum description length variant (MDL2) criterion. The CSEM only employed the estimated azimuth angles at all the signal-occupied frequency bins as feature parameters, while the frequency information implied in each cluster was not exploited sufficiently. So based on the implied frequency information, a postprocessing algorithm was introduced in the second stage. The experimental results show that the CSEM algorithm is more robust, and it has an increased capability to find the underlying model while maintaining a low execution time. By adopting CSEM and postprocessing algorithm in narrowband emitter identification, we are able to identify narrowband emitters with high correctness.

One of the defining characteristics of pragmatism over the years has been its commitment to the primacy of practical over theoretical rationality. This has often been motivated by doubts about the adequacy of the “representationalist paradigm” that has dominated philosophy of mind and epistemology in the modern period. Thus, many pragmatists have sought to replace the notion of representation with one or another explanatory concept derived from the analysis of action or behaviour. But this strategy has encountered persistent difficulties, and precisely where one might expect. Without some primitive notion of representation, it is difficult to provide an account of the conceptual content of our beliefs, the standards of correctness that govern our practices of inference, or the expectation of convergence that informs scientific inquiry. These difficulties, which pertain to the analysis of meaning, justification, and truth respectively, have done a lot to keep pragmatism more a set of promissory notes than a coherent philosophical program.

Exploiting potential thread-level parallelism (TLP) is becoming the key factor to improving performance of programs on multicore or many-core systems. Among various kinds of parallel execution models, the software-based speculative parallel model has become a research focus due to its low cost, high efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. The performance of the guest program under the software-based speculative parallel execution model is closely related to the speculation accuracy, the control overhead, and the rollback overhead of the model. In this paper, we first analyzed the conventional speculative parallel model and presented an analytic model of its expectation of the overall overhead, then optimized the conventional model based on the analytic model, and finally proposed a novel speculative parallel model named HEUSPEC. The HEUSPEC model includes three key techniques, namely, the heuristic value prediction, the value based correctness checking, and the dynamic task granularity resizing. We have implemented the runtime system of the model in ANSI C language. The experiment results show that when the speedup of the HEUSPEC model can reach 2.20 on the average (15% higher than conventional model) when depth is equal to 3 and 4.51 on the average (12% higher than conventional model) when speculative depth is equal to 7. Besides, it shows good scalability and lower memory cost.

At higher levels of second language proficiency, the speaking skill is frequently measured in interviews, but the use of guided tests and group discussions is common too and can improve efficiency. Guided test and discussion create rather different speech situations and might well elicitate dissimilar kinds of oral production: the informal setting of group discussion is certainly less 'anxiety-provoking' and elicitates more natural speech, but it may lead to the use of elementary and unmonitored, minimally correct speech. In this article we report on a small-scale empirical investigation intended to lay bare differences between the language used in a guided test and in a group discussion at the level of 1st year university students of French. Although the discussion subject was defined in such a way that it would enable students to discuss a rather wide range of aspects, even superficial analysis of guided test and discussion subject suggested the first to be more content valid: this quality manifested itself in the higher proportion of different words used in the guided test answers. In other respects, there were no systematic differences between test and discussion: proportions of unique words and of less frequent words, in relation to the number of different words, were nearly the same in the two kinds of speech production. Contrary to intuitive expectation, the number of lexical and grammatical errors was greater in test production (i.e. in the formal setting) than in discussion, the guided test being perhaps a more demanding task, but the possible conclusion that the overall quality of second language use was less good in the guided test was not supported by other findings: mean scores of the three raters did not show systematic differences between test and discussion. Correlations between test scores and discussion scores were about .77, suggesting that as tests of speaking proficiency when the criterion is correctness, guided test and discussion are not as different as they may seem. The main difference between the two is in rater reliability: interrater correlations for the test were about .82; for the discussion the mean of three correlations was .52, but two of them approximated .60. One of the problems of rating discussions may be the rather unequal participation of the members of the group. The quality of discussion as a speaking proficiency test can, in our opinion, be improved by defining its subject in such a way that the aspects discussed will be sufficiently diverse and by training or instructing students: they should all participate actively and pay attention to regular turn-taking.

Введение. Выбор подхода к анализу художественного перевода объясняется тем, что интерпретация при переводе предполагает со-творчество переводчика и автора оригинального произведения, благодаря чему может возникнуть его новое понимание. Цель статьи – выявить отличия между авторской интерпретацией комедии «Ревизор» и ее переводческой интерпретацией К. Гарнетт. Это позволит проследить смысловые трансформации произведения при е го вхождении в англоязычную культуру. Материал и методы. Материалом исследования является комедия Н. В. Гоголя «Ревизор» и ее перевод на английский язык, выполненный британской переводчицей К. Гарнетт. В основе методологии настоящего исследования – сравнительно-сопоставительный метод, а также метод изучения перевода с точки зрения понятия «переводческой интерпретации». Результаты и обсуждение. Переводчица не выделяет название «Немая сцена» в отдельный заголовок и пишет его мелким курсивом слитно с предыдущим текстом. Это снижает ее значимость для английских читателей. Кроме того, К. Гарнетт в переводе пьесы убирает деление на явления, которое поддерживает классицистическую симметричность и правильность архитектоники, демонстрируя при этом заданность бытия, его подчиненность божественному замыслу. Это позволяет предположить, что в восприятии переводчицы уже не существовало изначально гармоничных законов бытия человека. Что касается антропонимики, все имена и фамилии персонажей передаются К. Гарнетт с помощью транслитерации. Это значит, что для англоязычного читателя их «говорящее» значение утрачивается. Такой способ перевода также может иметь более глубокое значение. В оригинальном произведении героев объединяет их причастность к пороку, символическим воплощением которого они являются. Связывает их и общее ожидание расплаты за свои деяния и, несомненно, принадлежность к одному народу, поскольку этот вопрос был важен для Гоголя. В то же время в этом воплощается и влияние на него традиций романтизма. В комедии единство народа демонстрирует, в частности, общий национальный характер героев. Наличие и характер порока в каждом отдельном случае выражаются в числе прочего посредством фамилии персонажа. Но поскольку при транслитерации в переводе эта семантика утрачивается, связующая нить становится уже не такой очевидной для англоязычного читателя. Утрате изначальной семантики принадлежности героев к единому народу способствует и перевод фразеологических оборотов, пословиц и поговорок, встречающихся в тексте оригинала. В переводе К. Гарнетт идиоматичность речи героев, указывающая на их народный характер, была в значительной степени редуцирована. Аналогичной особенностью является частая замена просторечных выражений героев лексемами литературного языка. В связи с этим речь персонажей становится в большей степени нейтральной и теряет свою выразительность. Из-за преобладающего количества подобных трансформаций характеры героев в переводе комедии сложно назвать народными. Относительно перевода российских реалий нужно отметить, что К. Гарнетт заменила многие из них английскими. И хотя нельзя говорить, что это относится ко всем реалиям, однако таких абсолютное большинство, что не может не влиять на читательское восприятие. Помимо прочего, К. Гарнетт добавляет в список действующих лиц Жандарма, что не соответствует замыслу Гоголя, до мельчайших подробностей продумавшего все детали своей комедии. Жандарм в комедии выступает как «вестник Страшного суда», и в его фигуре проявляется «надличностная сила», именно поэтому он и отсутствует на сцене. Однако появление в списке действующих лиц в тексте перевода полностью лишает его возможности воплощать десницу Божию. В совокупности с нивелированием значимости «Немой сцены» это лишает комедию ее подлинного смысла, который стремился выразить Гоголь. Заключение. Возникновение подобного варианта перевода комедии можно связать с тем, что работа К. Гарнетт приходится на начало эпохи модернизма, «коренным свойством литературы которого является, в частности, убеждение в замкнутости, отчужденности и конечной абсурдности каждого индивидуального существования и всего макрокосма действительности». Это во многом способствует формалистическому подходу к вопросам поэтики, который в данном случае и избирает переводчица. Это выражается в том, что К. Гарнетт воспроизводит текст без учета влияния контекста биографии автора и его взглядов. Нельзя сказать, что в достаточной мере был учтен культурно-исторический контекст оригинала и восприятие Гоголем литературных традиций. Трансформации при переводе привели к тому, что персонажи воспринимаются как части безликой толпы, каждого члена которой ничто между собой не связывает, а не как народ, черпающий одухотворенность в своем единстве. Герои по-прежнему вместе ожидают ревизора, но смысл его появления теряет свое сакральное значение кары Божьей. В такой интерпретации существование героев комедии предстает абсурдным и даже в некоторой степени трагическим, поскольку не намечается ни позитивной, ни негативной динамики. Таким образом, хотя изначальный авторский смысл не был воссоздан К. Гарнетт в переводе «Ревизора» на английский язык, можно констатировать, что возник новый, передающий мироощущение безысходности рубежа XIX−XX вв. Introduction. The choice of approach to the analysis of literary translation in this article is explained by the fact that interpretation in translation involves co-creation of the translator and the author of the original work, so that a new understanding of it can arise. Aim and objectives. The aim of the article is to identify the differences between the author’s interpretation of the comedy “The Government Inspector” and its translation interpretation by K. Garnett. It will allow us to see the semantic transformations of the work as it penetrates into the English-speaking culture. Material and methods. The material of the research is the comedy “The Government Inspector” by N. V. Gogol and its translation into English, made by the British translator K. Garnett in 1926. The methodology of this research is based on a comparative method, as well as a method for studying translation through the concept of “translation interpretation”. Results and discussion. The translator does not put the name “Silent scene” in a separate title and writes it in small italics merged with the previous text. This reduces its significance for English readers. In addition, K. Garnett in the translation of the play removes the division into scenes, which supports the classical symmetry and correctness of architectonics, while demonstrating the subordination of being to the divine plan. This suggests that in the understanding of the translator there were no initially harmonious laws of human existence. As for anthroponomy, all the names and surnames of the characters are conveyed by K. Garnett using transliteration. This means that for the English-speaking reader, their “speaking” meaning is lost. At the same time, this method of translation may also have a deeper meaning. In the original work, the characters are united by their involvement in vice, the symbolic embodiment of which they are. They are also connected by a common expectation of punishment for their actions and, undoubtedly, by belonging to the same people, since this issue was important for Gogol. It embodies the influence of the romanticism traditions on him. In comedy, the unity of the people demonstrates, in particular, the common national character of the dramatic personae. The presence and nature of the vice in each individual case is expressed, among other things, by the name of the character. But since this semantics is lost due to transliteration in translation, the connecting thread becomes less obvious to English-speaking reader. The loss of the original semantics of belonging of heroes to a common nation is facilitated by the translation of phraseological phrases, proverbs and sayings found in the original text. In the translation by K. Garnett, the idiomatic speech of the characters, indicating their folk character, was largely reduced. A similar feature is the frequent replacement of colloquial expressions of heroes with lexemes of the literary language. Therefore, the characters’ speech becomes more neutral and loses its expressiveness. Due to the prevailing number of such transformations, the characters of the dramatic personae in the translation of the comedy can hardly be called folk. Regarding the translation of Russian realities, it should be noted that K. Garnett replaced many of them with English ones. And although we cannot say that this applies to all realities, but they are the absolute majority, which cannot but affect readers reception. Among other things, K. Garnett adds a Gendarme to the list of actors, which does not correspond to Gogol’s conception. The Gendarme in the comedy acts as a “herald of the Last judgment” and his figure shows “transpersonal power”, which is why he is not on the stage of the theater. However, the appearance of the Gendarme in the list of actors in the translation text completely deprives him of the opportunity to embody the hand of God. Together with the “Silent scene” leveling this deprives comedy its significance and true meaning, which Gogol sought to express. Conclusion. The emergence of such a version of the comedy translation can be attributed to the fact that K. Garnett worked at the beginning of the modernist era, “the root characteristic of the literature of which is, in particular, the belief in the isolation, alienation and ultimate absurdity of each individual existence and the entire macrocosm of reality”. This largely contributes to the formalistic approach to poetics, which in this case is chosen by the translator. This is expressed in the fact that K. Garnett reproduces the text without taking into account the influence of the author’s biography and views. It cannot also be said that the cultural and historical context of the original and Gogol’s reception of literary traditions were sufficiently taken into account. Transformations in translation have led to the fact that characters are perceived as part of a faceless crowd, each member of which is not connected by anything, and not as people drawing inspiration from their unity. The characters are still together waiting for the Government Inspector, but the meaning of his appearance loses its sacred meaning of God’s punishment. In this interpretation, the existence of comedy characters appears absurd and even tragic to some extent, since there is no positive or negative dynamics. Thus, although the original author’s meaning was not recreated by K. Garnett in the translation of “The Government Inspector” into English, it can be stated that a new one that conveys a sense of hopelessness at the turn of the XIX−XX centuries has emerged.

The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has significantly affected the education process of young people in primary, secondary, and tertiary education, as well as those who improve their competences through various courses and trainings. The practically incessant lockdown in education has resulted in a situation in which distance learning, which most often plays a supplementary role, now constitutes the basic form of education. This situation has forced the selection and adaptation of the available e-learning tools to the types of classes and levels of education. Despite great progress in the development of e-learning technologies, constant stimulation and maintenance of students’ interest in the content presented and monitoring their activity still pose a problem, which also concerns the education of computer science students in issues related to computer graphics. Currently, the preferred model of distance learning is based on various technologies and IT tools that enable the implementation of synchronous and asynchronous work. Prompt acquisition of data on students’ activity allows trainers to adjust the form and content of the presented material to their expectations. It also makes it possible to identify issues that pose great difficulties to students. This paper discusses modern solutions and trends in designing e-learning courses based on the new interactive e-learning platform Quizer. The aim of the research is to determine the course effectiveness using the user activity-monitoring module designed and implemented for the Quizer e-learning platform. The correctness of the answers correlates with the number of attempts to answer it (−0.65). The time devoted to a given question was usually high for questions with low correctness of answers.

Abstract Background Splenic rupture is an emergency condition and a vast number of cases are secondary to trauma. Several underlying pathologies have also been associated with splenic rupture, such as hematological diseases, malignancies, and infectious and inflammatory diseases. Case presentation The patient was a 52-year-old man who referred to the Poursina Hospital in Rasht while complaining of abdominal pain from the day before hospitalization. The patient reported a history of lethargy, fever, and nausea. In the examinations performed, there was a brief tenderness in the patient’s epigastrium. The patient was monitored and about 12 h after hospitalization, ill appearance, respiratory (respiratory distress) symptoms, and high fever were reported for the patient. According to the examination, the patient was immediately transferred to the operating room and underwent laparotomy. During the operation, contrary to our expectations, a lot of blood (about 1000 cc) was observed in the patient’s abdomen. After blood suctioning, the left upper quadrant (LUQ) was bleeding and the rupture of the spleen could also be observed. Therefore, a splenectomy was performed. In the examinations performed for the patient, the patient’s rtPCR test confirmed COVID-19. Conclusion The evaluation of the spontaneous splenic rupture (SSR) in our case shows that this type of risk should also be considered in patients with COVID-19 who refer to medical centers with abdominal pain, and if more cases are reported, the correctness of this process can be commented on.

The objective of the work is to propose a formal technique encompassing the logic and the illogic involved in the security of information science. The received or collected information about the existing or past security incidents in business processes is to be identified for their correctness and preciseness. The emphasis on various segments of the information is analyzed as per the intention of the informer and the involvement of the recipient. The expectation and the acceptance of business information is quantitatively modeled so as to take a correct decision with the proposed logics when multiple business processes handling variety of information with different truth factors are collaborated. The logical deduction, abduction and induction techniques are applied to minimize the vagueness and ambiguity factors. The preciseness of the present information and the emphasis of the past information related to security are formally used to predict the reality of future information security incidents in a business scenario.

Abstract Reading Wordsworth’s Prelude implicates us immediately in the politics of autobiographical writing — which deliberately elides, to use Felicity Nussbaum’s words, “the subject’s fragmentations and discontinuities.” But at the same time, one cannot help suspecting that the seemingly reasonable expectation of factual correctness in autobiography can also mask a deep denial of these essential fragmentations and discontinuities in the name of truth. Wordsworth’s revisions of the Prelude afford an insightful means of understanding these issues: here the imperatives of narrative self-constitution far outweigh the imperatives of literal facts. But the misdating of crucial events — such as the composition of the Glad Preamble — do not detract from its validity as autobiographical writing, but rather gives evidence of the self-problematising nature of origins. In fact, the interest in works such as the Prelude lies not in how closely they adhere to historical particularities, but how tenaciously their metaphoric transcendence resists reduction back to these historical particularities. Romantic subjectivity makes no clear distinction between self and the outer world of phenomena — and also it seems between self and self. This becomes abundantly clear in Wordsworth’s appropriation of Dorothy’s experience. In the Prelude this process is traceable eminently through the process of textual revisions as the present study argues.

AbstractThe analysis of longitudinal, heterogeneous or unbalanced clustered data is of primary importance to a wide range of applications. The linear mixed model (LMM) is a popular and flexible extension of the linear model specifically designed for such purposes. Historically, a large proportion of material published on the LMM concerns the application of popular numerical optimization algorithms, such as Newton–Raphson, Fisher Scoring and expectation maximization to single-factor LMMs (i.e. LMMs that only contain one “factor” by which observations are grouped). However, in recent years, the focus of the LMM literature has moved towards the development of estimation and inference methods for more complex, multi-factored designs. In this paper, we present and derive new expressions for the extension of an algorithm classically used for single-factor LMM parameter estimation, Fisher Scoring, to multiple, crossed-factor designs. Through simulation and real data examples, we compare five variants of the Fisher Scoring algorithm with one another, as well as against a baseline established by the R package lme4, and find evidence of correctness and strong computational efficiency for four of the five proposed approaches. Additionally, we provide a new method for LMM Satterthwaite degrees of freedom estimation based on analytical results, which does not require iterative gradient estimation. Via simulation, we find that this approach produces estimates with both lower bias and lower variance than the existing methods.

This paper on cultural loops will begin slightly off-track, drawing on lessons that can be learned from a very basic non-terminating program, written in basic programming language: 100 Print "an infinite loop is" 110 Goto 100 Run an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is ... The output will continue looping through this cycle ad infinitum. Suppose that somebody has entered this program into a computer and entered a "Run" command as illustrated above. This somebody has then left the room and we enter a moment later. What we appear to be looking at is, strictly speaking, an "infinite loop," a programming sequence that has no condition for termination except for activation of the self same sequence. The screen has been filled with seemingly endless repetitions of the same string: "an infinite loop is" (or is it "is an infinite loop," or "loop is an infinite," or "infinite loop is an"?). In any case, we do not know that the loop is endless, nor even that this is a loop. Perhaps we could imagine that after so many repetitions the output will change. Perhaps we imagine that our absent programmer is really hard up for ways to pass the time and has spent countless hours entering repetitions of the same string into just one single line of programming: 100 Print "infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is ... After several hours, perhaps the programmer finally tired of the exercise and finished off: ... an infinite loop is really a finite loop that thinks it can last forever and ever amen." For this matter, we might also wonder, as we watch the text scrolling up the screen, whether all of the preceding text has followed this exact pattern. Perhaps we just happened to stumble into the room at that moment, reflected in the current output, when our absent programmer decided to interrupt typing up a treatise on infinite loops with a banal illustration of what might constitute a loop of this sort. Wait for just a second or two more and surely the output will be different. Of course, in the present instance, we will be waiting for a very long time for any kind of change to appear in the output—how long is infinity again, does anybody know? Perhaps there is folly in trying to second guess the next piece of output produced by a program, particularly when the evidence on the screen provides no genuine clues to the structure of the program for which it is the output. At this point I hear the cries of dissent. How can I possibly say that the output of this program provides no clues to the structure of the program? After all, are we not faced here with output that, at the very least, appears to be endlessly repetitive? Without being drawn into a detailed discussion about the phenomenology of repetition, it is fair to say that, yes, when faced with the output on the screen as we enter the room, a reasonable expectation is that this output is several repetitions of a non-terminating series of repetitions. As each string is preceded and followed by the same string, the evidence suggests that the strings running off both the top and bottom of the screen have been preceded by and will be followed by the same string, according to the pattern. Yet I maintain that we can never be absolutely certain that the next thing that will appear on the screen will be yet another repetition of the same string. We cannot know the mind of the creator with sufficient certainty to predict this with perfect accuracy. Certainly, anybody who presumes that the string of strings on the screen is part of some non-repeating body of text is less likely to be right than the person who sees the pattern and guesses that the program for which this text is the output is an infinitely looping one. We need only to stop the program and bring it up on the screen to confirm the latter's suspicions to be correct. With this very strategy, however, we also illustrate the correctness of the claim I have made. In order to know with certainty what the program will be likely to output next, at some point we are required to terminate it and look at the program itself rather than its output. In other words, we need to stop the output if we want to know what will be put out next. The irony of this situation is of course that we cannot know from any series of outputs within an infinite loop that the loop is in fact infinite (or even that it is a loop), without first terminating the loop to look beyond its repeating output. An infinite loop is indeed a finite loop that we think can last forever and ever, amen. Douglas Hofstadter makes a similar point about the relationship between infinity and the finite parameters of strange loops in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). Strange loop phenomena emerge "whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started" (10). A sense of paradox is associated with strange loops because they bring our notions of the finite and the infinite into conflict. Some object (A) always seems to contain or be the root cause of some other object (B) in a finite relationship, yet B also seems to contain or be the root cause of A, a paradox of infinite indeterminacy. Yet the paradox emerges because we are blinded from looking beyond what appears to be a fully self-contained system of determinations, even if we are unable to resolve the paradox of whether A determines B or vice versa. As we move upwards or downwards through the hierarchies in the system, we presume that we will move closer to its limit in either direction, yet we find ourselves perpetually drawn to reproduce the same steps within the hierarchy. For this reason, Hofstadter also refers to strange loops as tangled hierarchies (passim). The tangle is what draws us to repeat the same system of determinations endlessly, but Hofstadter points out that any system includes a protected or "inviolate level" which always remains "unassailable by the rules on other levels, not matter how tangled their interactions may be among themselves" (688). In the work of M.C. Escher, in particular, Hofstadter finds the most powerful visual realisations of strange loop phenomena: in Ascending and Descending, monks walk up and down staircases that loop around to join each other; in Waterfall, water falls into a pool that leads to an aqueduct flowing down to the waterfall that empties into the same pool; and in Drawing Hands, there are two hands that appear to be drawing each other. In each of these cases, however, the resolution of the apparent paradox is in realising the hand of Escher at work beyond the hierarchy: [In Drawing Hands,] levels which ordinarily are seen as hierarchical—that which draws and that which is drawn—turn back on each other, creating a Tangled Hierarchy. But the theme ... is borne out, of course, since behind it all lurks the undrawn but drawing hand of M.C. Escher, creator of both LH and RH. (689) The non-terminating program with which I began this paper provides a variation on this theme, since the output provides evidence of an infinite loop lurking in the structure of the program. A termination of the loop to look beyond the output will confirm this. Yet beyond the program is of course the programmer and, not necessarily the same person, the person who entered the "run" command to execute the program. In other words, there are several inviolate levels to consider in dealing with computer programs. The program itself contains the inviolate rules determining repetitions in the output. Beyond the program is the programmer. We might also consider the programming language and limitations of the technology mediating between the programmer and the program that is written, but I want to press ahead expeditiously. Beyond the programmer, there is also an executor, somebody who activates the program, making possible the generation of output. Perhaps we could refer to these two inviolate levels as those of the creator and the generator. In his examination of the strange loop of Escher's Drawing Hands, Hofstadter points out the hand of the creator lurking within the inviolate level beyond the frame of the picture. We might add that as a work of art, the picture is not a free-floating object presented to us in any unmediated way. The image circulates within an array of cultural institutions and contexts, all of which mediates our access to it, and which might be thought of here as the conditions for the generation of the image. Consider, for example, that we had never seen Drawing Hands before reading Hofstadter's book. We would have to take Hofstadter's word on the matter, that this drawing had been done by this Dutchman named Escher. Hofstadter—or, to be more precise, the book which carries his name as its authorial signature—has made possible our access to the image. Furthermore, it is within the context of a discussion about strange loops and such matters that we are asked to look at the image. Now, suppose we were to put the book down and think little of it for some time, perhaps because we are not very mathematically minded and we sort of got muddled up a bit by some of the other parts of Hofstadter's book. Years later, we find ourselves in an art gallery, and there is a special exhibit of Escher's work. We stumble upon the original, stare at it for a moment, then realise that we have seen it before. Suddenly, Hofstadter's discussion springs to mind and we are reminded of strange loops and we think smugly, ah, this is no paradox, since the hand of Escher existing at an inviolate level has drawn both the left and right hands which appear to be drawing each other. This situation leads to a strange cultural loop, since our reception of an original artwork has been already shaped by something we have seen elsewhere, in this instance, a copy of that exact same artwork. The point is of course that cultural products circulate within precisely just these sorts of loops all of the time. Indeed, I maintain that such loops constitute culture. Allow me to explain. What makes an object an example of a culture is its capacity to resonate with features that it has in common with other objects created within the same culture. Words such as genre, movement, poetics or style (among others) refer to ways in which original works of art remain tied together within structures of repetition of core features. In a similar vein, archaeologists excavating a dig and finding numerous pots will look for repeated patterns, shapes, and techniques to determine cultural affiliations. The strange loop emerges around the vexed question of origins: is a culture made up of repeated patterns on pots, or does a culture determine repetitions of patterns on pots? At this point it should be pertinent to bring cultural theory into play. According to the theoretical anthropology developed by Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures (1975), culture can be defined as "a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures" (7). The ethnographic method that he calls "thick description" is designed to enable anthropologists to sort out these structures from the concrete complexes of behaviour that are observed in the field. He takes as a reference point a question posed by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle: when is the closing of one eyelid a wink and when is it a twitch? As Stephen Greenblatt summarises the point, the distinction is in the shared code, a distinction that "is secured by the element of volition that is not itself visibly manifest in the contraction of the eyelid; a thin description would miss it altogether" (Practicing 23). To compare this situation with the situation I described earlier, we can imagine thick description as a method for second guessing cultural output by moving from the perceived pattern to expectations about the mind and method of the creator. The thickness of the description inheres in its intent to take fuller account of the conditions for the generation of this cultural output. Yet in practice, the method sometimes seems to rigidify. For example, Greenblatt's own literary criticism—referred to most commonly as New Historicism, although he himself prefers the name Cultural Poetics—is often accused of flattening out culture. The method typically proceeds by considering together a literary text and the text of some contemporary domestic circumstance or event (a legal extract, a travel journal, a royal decree or such like), so as to find patterns pointing to the system of meanings underlining both texts. Being unable to terminate the infinite loop of cultural production, whereupon all texts echo all other texts in something akin to what Michel Foucault called the "fantasia of the library," the new historicist tries to work backward from the conventions of textual production to the cultural matrix beneath. While Greenblatt frequently argues that a cultural poetics recognises the agency of the individuals who produce these texts, the core issues of methodology have at base been recently defined in terms of the inviolability of the base level of determination—the archive: If every trace of a culture is part of a massive text, how can one identify the boundaries of these units? What is the appropriate scale? There are, we conclude, no abstract, purely theoretical answers to these questions. To a considerable extent the units are given by the archive itself—that is, we almost always receive works whose boundaries have already been defined by the technology and generic assumptions of the original makers. (Practicing 14) Here again the tension emerges between the infinite and the finite in the attempt to come to terms with unidentifiable boundaries of the units of culture. The resolution, curiously enough, is a loop at the core of Greenblatt's cultural poetics: the structure of the archive determines for us the units of perception within which we view traces of culture, to determine the structure of the archive. Thus, from the perspective of Greenblatt's cultural poetics, the stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures constituting culture is a tangled hierarchy. Lurking at the inviolate level is, of course, Greenblatt himself. Greenblatt, Geertz and many others who practice these methods for reading culture as a text recognise this inviolate level openly. In the introduction to his landmark work, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Greenblatt confesses, "the resonance and centrality we find in our small group of texts and their authors is our invention" (6). This confession leads me one step closer to my final point here. Even as the method of cultural poetics tends at times to flatten culture out to nodes of production arising from a single, static archive, and threatens to forget the agency of cultural producers, the method itself relies entirely on the creative and constitutive role of the observer. Greenblatt's literary and cultural criticism functions in a way that bears striking resemblance to the flights of fancy we undertook in the opening passages of this paper, looking at a pattern of output and trying to imagine what the structure of production would be like behind this output. Like the archaeologists staring at patterns on pots, cultural theorists could sometimes be forgiven for overlooking the question of agency altogether. One of the reasons for this is that we tend to think of agency in terms of a capacity to effect change, rather than in terms of the repetition of existing patterns and structures. "Structure" and "agency" might seem to be mutually opposed terms in discussions of cultural production. Yet the lesson we might be able to learn from these discussions of strange loops and cultural production is that agency is just as necessary to shaping the cultural matrix as it is to the realisation of this system in the production of culture. When we find patterns, we are exercising the wholly productive force of the imagination. Beyond creators, generators, programs, archives and so on, there is the observer whose capacity for making sense of texts is what ultimately gives to culture its contours, patterns and limits. Furthermore—what remains to be discussed in another forum—this constitutive capacity is something that is present in everyday practice, not simply in the realms of anthropology or cultural studies. The person sitting in front of the television, for example, is in much the same situation as when we stared at the computer screen waiting to see if the output would change. The decisions we make about whether we recognise patterns, locate meaningful structures and so on are similar to cultural reception or consumption, which I maintain is as productive as creation or generation. It is the decisions we make that insinuate infinity when we observe a loop. As we observed at the outset here, the infinity of the loop is not inherent in the structure of the output but in the way we choose to make sense of the patterns, what we imagined to have preceded the present text and to be likely to come after. To illustrate the comparison between observation of an infinite loop and agency in the field of cultural production, in conclusion, we need only to go back again to where we started here, but I leave that task up to the reader. References Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. D.F.Bouchard and S.Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Hutchinson, 1975. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. ---. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Johnson, Laurie. "Agency" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/agency.php>. Chicago Style Johnson, Laurie, "Agency" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/agency.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Johnson, Laurie. (2002) Agency. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/agency.php> ([your date of access]).