Political integration in the European Union creates the need for a common means of communication among the various linguistic communities in Europe. One way of meeting this need is unilingualism: the use of a single language as a "lingua franca". While this option has been thought to be efficient, this does not mean that we should necessarily choose it. This paper argues that a unilinual Europe will inevitably be unfair despite recent attempts to show otherwise, since non-native speakers of the (...) lingua franca will pick up the costs of learning it while native speakers can free-ride on their efforts. This unfairness provides a reason for preferring alternative means of facilitating communication. In particular, multilingualism - communication through translators and interpreters - may be preferable. (shrink)

In order to deal with high-dimensional distributed data, this article develops a novel and communication-efficient approach for sparse and high-dimensional data with the penalized quantile regression. In each round, the proposed method only requires the master machine to deal with a sparse penalized quantile regression which could be realized fastly by proximal alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm and the other worker machines to compute the subgradient on local data. The advantage of the proximal ADMM algorithm is that it could (...) make every parameter of iteration to have closed formula even in high-dimensional case, which greatly improves the speed of calculation. As for the communication efficiency, the proposed method does not sacrifice any statistical accuracy and provably improves the estimation error obtained by centralized method, provided the penalty levels are chosen properly. Moreover, the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimation and the convergence of the algorithm are convincible. Especially, it presents extensive experiments on both the numerical simulations and the HIV drug resistance data analysis, which all confirm the significant efficiency of our proposed method in quantile regression for distributed data by comparative and empirical analysis. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge in accounts motivated by information theory that consider language production to be partially driven by a preference for communicative efficiency. Evidence from discourse production (i.e., production beyond the sentence level) has been argued to suggest that speakers distribute information across discourse so as to hold the conditional per-word entropy associated with each word constant, which would facilitate efficient information transfer (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). This hypothesis implies that the conditional (contextualized) probabilities of (...) linguistic units affect speakers’ preferences during production. Here, we extend this work in two ways. First, we explore how preceding cues are integrated into contextualized probabilities, a question which so far has received little to no attention. Specifically, we investigate how a cue's maximal informativity about upcoming words (the cue's effectiveness) decays as a function of the cue's recency. Based on properties of linguistic discourses as well as properties of human memory, we analytically derive a model of cue effectiveness decay and evaluate it against cross-linguistic data from 12 languages. Second, we relate the information theoretic accounts of discourse production to well-established mechanistic (activation-based) accounts: We relate contextualized probability distributions over words to their relative activation in a lexical network given preceding discourse. (shrink)

There is ample evidence that individual-level cognitive mechanisms active during language learning and use can contribute to the evolution of language. For example, experimental work suggests that learners will reduce case marking in a language where grammatical roles are reliably indicated by fixed word order, a correlation found robustly in the languages of the world. However, such research often assumes homogeneity among language learners and users, or at least does not dig into individual differences in behavior. Yet, it is increasingly (...) clear that language users vary in a large number of ways: in culture, in demographics, and—critically for present purposes—in terms of cognitive diversity. Here, we explore how neurodiversity impacts behavior in an experimental task similar to the one summarized above, and how this behavior interacts with social pressures. We find both similarities and differences between autistic and nonautistic English-speaking individuals, suggesting that neurodiversity can impact language change in the lab. This, in turn, highlights the potential for future research on the role of neurodivergent populations in language evolution more generally. (shrink)

Biosemiosis is a process of choice-making between simultaneously alternative options. It is well-known that, when sufficiently young children encounter a new word, they tend to interpret it as pointing to a meaning that does not have a word yet in their lexicon rather than to a meaning that already has a word attached. In previous research, the strategy was shown to be optimal from an information theoretic standpoint. In that framework, interpretation is hypothesized to be driven by the minimization of (...) a cost function: the option of least communication cost is chosen. However, the information theoretic model employed in that research neither explains the weakening of that vocabulary learning bias in older children or polylinguals nor reproduces Zipf’s meaning-frequency law, namely the non-linear relationship between the number of meanings of a word and its frequency. Here we consider a generalization of the model that is channeled to reproduce that law. The analysis of the new model reveals regions of the phase space where the bias disappears consistently with the weakening or loss of the bias in older children or polylinguals. The model is abstract enough to support future research on other levels of life that are relevant to biosemiotics. In the deep learning era, the model is a transparent low-dimensional tool for future experimental research and illustrates the predictive power of a theoretical framework originally designed to shed light on the origins of Zipf’s rank-frequency law. (shrink)

Since its inception, Shannon's information theory has attracted interest for the study of language and music. Recently, a wide range of converging studies have shown how efficient communication pervades language, from phonetics to syntax. Efficient principles imply that more resources should be assigned to highly informative items. For instance, average information content was shown to be a better predictor of word length than frequency, revisiting the famous Zipf's law. However, in spite of the success of the efficient communication framework in (...) the study of language and speech, very little work has investigated its relevance in the analysis of music. Here, we examine the organization of harmonic information in two large corpora of Western music, one made of MIDI files directly sequenced from scores, and the other made of MIDI recordings of live performances of highly skilled piano players. We show that there is a clear positive relationship between (contextual) information content of harmonic sequences and two essential musical properties, namely duration and loudness: the more unexpected a harmonic event is, the longer and the louder it is. (shrink)

Since sending explicit messages can be costly, people often utilize “what is not said,” i.e., informative silence, to economize communication. This paper studies the efficient communication rule, which is fully informative while minimizing the use of explicit messages, in cooperative environments. It is shown that when the notion of context is defined as the finest mutually self-evident event that contains the current state, the efficient use of informative silence exhibits the defining property of indexicals in natural languages. While the efficient (...) use of silence could be complex, it is also found that the efficient use of silence can be as “simple” as the use of indexicals in natural languages if and only if the information structure satisfies some centrality and dominance properties. (shrink)

Semantic categories in the world's languages often reflect a historical process of chaining: A name for one referent is extended to a conceptually related referent, and from there on to other referents, producing a chain of exemplars that all bear the same name. The beginning and end points of such a chain might in principle be rather dissimilar. There is also evidence supporting a contrasting picture: Languages tend to support efficient, informative communication, often through semantic categories in which all exemplars (...) are similar. Here, we explore this tension through computational analyses of existing cross-language naming and sorting data from the domain of household containers. We find formal evidence for historical semantic chaining, and evidence that systems of categories in this domain nonetheless support near-optimally efficient communication. Our results demonstrate that semantic chaining is compatible with efficient communication, and they suggest that chaining may be constrained by the functional need for efficient communication. (shrink)

Over the last few years, a new methodology to address the P versus NP problem has been developed, based on searching for borderlines between the nonefficiency of computing models and the presumed efficiency. These borderlines can be seen as frontiers of efficiency, which are crucial in this methodology. “Translating,” in some sense, an efficient solution in a presumably efficient model to an efficient solution in a nonefficient model would give an affirmative answer to problem P versus NP. In (...) the framework of Membrane Computing, the key of this approach is to detect the syntactic or semantic ingredients that are needed to pass from a nonefficient class of membrane systems to a presumably efficient one. This paper deals with tissue P systems with communication rules of type symport/antiport allowing the evolution of the objects triggering the rules. In previous works, frontiers of efficiency were found in these kinds of membrane systems both with division rules and with separation rules. However, since they were not optimal, it is interesting to refine these frontiers. In this work, optimal frontiers of the efficiency are obtained in terms of the total number of objects involved in the communication rules used for that kind of membrane systems. These optimizations could be easier to translate, if possible, to efficient solutions in a nonefficient model. (shrink)

Using a comprehensive sample of U.S. non-profit hospitals from 2011 to 2015, we examine the effects of state community benefits regulation on the amount of charity care provided by and the operational efficiency of U.S. non-profit hospitals. First, we document that, under such regulations, non-profit hospitals provide more charity care and less compensated care as a proportion of net revenue. We infer from these findings that CBR has the potential to increase both non-profit hospitals’ amount of charity care and (...) their efficiency of operations. Second, by examining variation in CBR types, we find no differences between having provision or having reporting requirements on the amount of charity care offered. Moreover, when we consider CBR with both provision and reporting requirements, the combination of these two requirements does not incrementally enhance charity care offerings, suggesting that the requirements may serve as substitutes with comparable effect. Lastly, we show that several state-level characteristics influence the relationship between CBR and charity care: CBRs in states with a higher gross domestic product and percentage of revenue received in taxes have incrementally lower associations with charity care, while hospitals in states where populations have, on average, higher household incomes have greater associations between CBR and charity care. Our findings highlight the effects that state-enacted regulation can have on socially beneficial behavior by non-profits. (shrink)

The study aims to identify the efficiency of the university education performance from the perspective of postgraduate and undergraduate students in international and Palestinian universities. The analytical descriptive approach was used for this purpose and the questionnaire was used as a main tool for data collection. The study community consists of: post graduate students, (23850) graduate students and (146355) undergraduate students. The sample of the study was 378 graduate students and 383 undergraduate students. The random stratified sample was used. (...) The Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS) was also used for data analysis. The study reached a number of results, the most important of which are: The level of efficiency of educational performance in Palestinian and international universities from the point of view of postgraduate and undergraduate students was high. And that there are significant differences between the average views of the sample of the study on the efficiency of educational performance in Palestinian and international universities attributed to the University and to the benefit of international universities. The study concluded many recommendations, the most important of which is the necessity of continuing to develop e-learning strategies that affect the efficiency of educational performance and research commensurate with the university's position in the local and international community, which puts it on the best classification between local and international universities through e-learning. (shrink)

Why should we make our beliefs consistent or, more generally, probabilistically coherent? That it will prevent sure losses in betting and that it will maximize one’s chances of having accurate beliefs are popular answers. However, these justifications are self-centered, focused on the consequences of our coherence for ourselves. I argue that incoherence has consequences for others because it is liable to mislead others, to false beliefs about one’s beliefs and false expectations about one’s behavior. I argue that the moral obligation (...) of truthfulness thus constrains us to either conform to the logic our audience assumes we use, educate them in a new logic, or give notice that one will do neither. This does not show that probabilistic coherence is uniquely suited to making truthful communication possible, but I argue that classical probabilistic coherence is superior to other logics for maximizing efficiency in communication. (shrink)

The importance of the topic of the article lies in the fact that in the era of postmodernism, informatization of the elementary school allows you to improve the quality of the educational process, through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to simplify management of the educational process, to organize the exchange of teaching experience, to expand didactic capabilities of the lesson. The purpose of the article is the need to study and justify the importance of using new ICT (...) in primary school lessons, to expand the experience of e-learning in primary school. The article expands the concept of information and communication technologies and their benefits in primary school; given the rationale for conducting a lesson using ICT; the experience of e-learning in the primary school of the postmodern era is characterized. Thus, one of the priorities of the development of education in postmodern society is the professional application in all areas of information technology and e-learning, which can increase the interest of present students and improve the ability to adapt to current electronic information society. The formation of knowledge and skills in the field of computer literacy of teachers and students will be an indicator of compliance of its level with current requirements. (shrink)

Efficient community detection in a complex network is considered an interesting issue due to its vast applications in many prevailing areas such as biology, chemistry, linguistics, social sciences, and others. There are several algorithms available for network community detection. This study proposed the Sigmoid Fish Swarm Optimization algorithm to discover efficient network communities. Our proposed algorithm uses the sigmoid function for various fish moves in a swarm, including Prey, Follow, Swarm, and Free Move, for better movement and community detection. The (...) proposed SiFSO algorithm’s performance is tested against state-of-the-art particle swarm optimization algorithms in Q-modularity and normalized mutual information. The results showed that the proposed SiFSO algorithm is 0.0014% better in terms of Q-modularity and 0.1187% better in terms of NMI than the other selected algorithms. (shrink)

The article investigates characteristics of legal concepts as found in academic articles, focusing upon the knowledge base of legal experts. It is a cognitively oriented study of one of the semiotic basics of communication for academic legal purposes. The purpose is to study the structure of knowledge elements connected to the concept of “Criminal liability of corporations” from US law in and across individual experts in order to look for individual differences and similarities. The central concern is to investigate the (...) conditions for the observable efficiency of semiosis in academic discourse. In a first basic section I discuss aspects relevant for a cognitively oriented study of academic discourse. The empirical part of the article consists of an analysis of text passages from two articles in American law journals. The results of the study support the assumption that high efficiency and precision of semiosis is due rather to the use of specific cognitive processing skills than to total identity of cognitive structures across individual experts. (shrink)

In any age, at any given time, there are leaders who fail to lead by example. The desires which motivate them, and the means they deploy to cover for this fact, can weave paths of destruction with social costs borne by those who can least afford them—including within the academy. Taking the right steps—both professionally and spiritually—at least theoretically make this avoidable. This article addresses select topics in light of ancient perspectives and recent phenomena alike, including those of: the harmony (...) of Thomistic personalism with stakeholder theory and transformational leadership, respectively; the relationship of Augustinian realism to cognitive dissonance theory and the composition of boards. (shrink)

This article studies the emergence of ambiguity in communication through the concept of logical irreversibility and within the framework of Shannon’s information theory. This leads us to a precise and general expression of the intuition behind Zipf’s vocabulary balance in terms of a symmetry equation between the complexities of the coding and the decoding processes that imposes an unavoidable amount of logical uncertainty in natural communication. Accordingly, the emergence of irreversible computations is required if the complexities of the coding and (...) the decoding processes are balanced in a symmetric scenario, which means that the emergence of ambiguous codes is a necessary condition for natural communication to succeed. (shrink)

Cross-linguistic studies focus on inverse correlations (trade-offs) between linguistic variables that reflect different cues to linguistic meanings. For example, if a language has no case marking, it is likely to rely on word order as a cue for identification of grammatical roles. Such inverse correlations are interpreted as manifestations of language users’ tendency to use language efficiently. The present study argues that this interpretation is problematic. Linguistic variables, such as the presence of case, or flexibility of word order, are aggregate (...) properties, which do not represent the use of linguistic cues in context directly. Still, such variables can be useful for circumscribing the potential role of communicative efficiency in language evolution, if we move from cross-linguistic trade-offs to multivariate causal networks. This idea is illustrated by a case study of linguistic variables related to four types of Subject and Object cues: case marking, rigid word order of Subject and Object, tight semantics and verb-medial order. The variables are obtained from online language corpora in thirty languages, annotated with the Universal Dependencies. The causal model suggests that the relationships between the variables can be explained predominantly by sociolinguistic factors, leaving little space for a potential impact of efficient linguistic behavior. (shrink)

This article sets forth the argument that Christian ministry in Africa must become socially and culturally informed and constructed or else it will not touch the African soul and thus remain superficial. Black African people aspire above everything else to experience fullness of life and wellbeing here and now, as demonstrated by their greetings that are actually an enquiry into each other's health and an expression of the wish for the other's good health and wellbeing. The mainline churches that operate (...) in Africa should embrace the scripturally sound Christian healing ministry in obedience to Christ's commission to preach the gospel and heal the sick, if they are to prosper. Hence, this article discusses the following eight points, namely, good health and healing as Africans' important aspiration, healing as the work of God and thus of the church, the imperative of serious consideration of and respect for the African worldview, membership decline and mainline churches' loss of influence, rethinking church in African Christianity, the need for the black African church to adopt a therapeutic or healing community ecclesial model in order to position itself strategically to cater for the holistic needs of African church members and surrounding communities, the rationale of the healing ministry in today's Reformed Church in Africa and the recommended healing ministry. The article closes with a few concluding statements and advice. (shrink)

Despite their diversity, human languages share consistent properties and regularities. Wherefrom does this consistency arise? And does it tell us something about the problem that all languages need to solve? The authors provide an intriguing analyses which focuses on the “communicative function of ambiguity” whose resolution entailed an equally intriguing “speaker–listener cross‐entropy objective for measuring the efficiency of linguistic systems from first principles of efficient language use.”.

Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross‐linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim that, beyond this general tendency, communicative needs play an important role in shaping colexification patterns. We approach this question by means of a series of human experiments, using an artificial language communication game paradigm. Our results across four experiments match the previous cross‐linguistic findings: all (...) other things being equal, speakers do prefer to colexify similar concepts. However, we also find evidence supporting the communicative need hypothesis: when faced with a frequent need to distinguish similar pairs of meanings, speakadjust their colexification preferences to maintain communicative efficiency and avoid colexifying those similar meanings which need to be distinguished in communication. This research provides further evidence to support the argument that languages are shaped by the needs and preferences of their speakers. (shrink)

Philosophers and social scientists have recently turned to Lewis sender–receiver games to provide an account of how lexical terms can acquire meaning through an evolutionary process. However, the evolution of meaning is contingent on both the particular sender–receiver game played and the choice of evolutionary dynamic. In this paper I explore some differences between models that presume an infinitely large and randomly mixed population and models in which a finite number of agents communicate with their neighbors in a social network. (...) My results show that communication with neighbors is more conducive to the evolution of meaning than communication with strangers. Additionally, I show that the behavior of the system is highly dependent on the topological structure of the social network. I argue that a specific class of networks—small world graphs—is especially conducive to the evolution of meaning. This is because small world graphs have a short characteristic path length while still maintaining a high degree of correlation between neighbors. Since many actual social networks, such as friendship networks and nervous systems, are conjectured to be small world structures, these results indicate that these networks are quite hospitable to the efficient evolution of meaning. (shrink)

How do communities establish shared communication systems? The Common Knowledge view assumes that symbolic conventions develop through the accumulation of common knowledge regarding communication practices among the members of a community. In contrast with this view, it is proposed that coordinated communication emerges a by‐product of local interactions among dyads. A set of multi‐agent computer simulations show that a population of “egocentric” agents can establish and maintain symbolic conventions without common knowledge. In the simulations, convergence to a single conventional system (...) was most likely and most efficient when agents updated their behavior on the basis of local rather than global, system‐level information. The massive feedback and parallelism present in the simulations gave rise to phenomena that are often assumed to result from complex strategic processing on the part of individual agents. The implications of these findings for the development of theories of language use are discussed. (shrink)

With the development of mobile communication technology, location-based services are booming prosperously. Meanwhile privacy protection has become the main obstacle for the further development of LBS. The k-nearest neighbor search is one of the most common types of LBS. In this paper, we propose an efficient private circular query protocol with high accuracy rate and low computation and communication cost. We adopt the Moore curve to convert two-dimensional spatial data into one-dimensional sequence and encrypt the points of interest information with (...) the Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan homomorphic encryption scheme for privacy-preserving. The proposed scheme performs the secret circular shift of the encrypted POIs information to hide the location of the user without a trusted third party. To reduce the computation and communication cost, we dynamically divide the table of the POIs information according to the value of k. Experiments show that the proposed scheme provides high accuracy query results while maintaining low computation and communication cost. (shrink)

A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One long-standing puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye, Milin, Futrell, and Ramscar enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender confers. Yet this raises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial to processing, what does this mean for languages that make (...) do without them? Here, we compare the communicative function of gender marking in German to that of prenominal adjectives in English, finding that despite their differences, both systems act to efficiently smooth information over discourse, making nouns more equally predictable in context. We examine why evolutionary pressures may favor one system over another and discuss the implications for compositional accounts of meaning and Gricean principles of communication. (shrink)

Can quantum communication be more efficient than its classical counterpart? Holevo's theorem rules out the possibility of communicating more than n bits of classical information by the transmission of n quantum bits—unless the two parties are entangled, in which case twice as many classical bits can be communicated but no more. In apparent contradiction, there are distributed computational tasks for which quantum communication cannot be simulated efficiently by classical means. In some cases, the effect of transmitting quantum bits cannot be (...) achieved classically short of transmitting an exponentially larger number of bits. In a similar vein, can entanglement be used to save on classical communication? It is well known that entanglement on its own is useless for the transmission of information. Yet, there are distributed tasks that cannot be accomplished at all in a classical world when communication is not allowed, but that become possible if the non-communicating parties share prior entanglement. This leads to the question of how expensive it is, in terms of classical communication, to provide an exact simulation of the spooky power of entanglement. (shrink)

Event integration – the conflation of multiple events into a unitary event – plays a vital role in language and cognition. However, the conditions under which event integration occurs in linguistic representation and the differences in how linguistic forms encode complex events remain unclear. This corpus study examines two types of Japanese complex predicates – compound verbs [V1-V2]V and complex predicates consisting of a deverbal compound noun and the light verb suru ‘do’ [[V1-V2]N suru]V – using an original “related-event approach”. (...) Findings indicate that [[V1-V2]N suru]V can be established based on coextensiveness alone, whereas [V1-V2]V typically requires direct or shared causality (“the inevitable co-occurrence constraint”). The related-event approach examines related events of linguistic concepts, such as causes and purposes of an event, identified through “complex sentences” from ultra-large-scale web corpora. This study demonstrates that such an approach is effective in clarifying causal relationships between verbs. Furthermore, this paper contributes to the “iconicity versus frequency” debate by showing that conceptually more accessible events (causality plus coextensiveness) tend to be represented in a simpler form than less accessible events (coextensiveness only), due to “efficiency”. The frequency of usage is a result of the nature of concepts rather than the driving force of coding asymmetries. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

This paper describes a theory that explains both the creativity and the efficiency of people's conceptual combination. In the constraint theory, conceptual combination is controlled by three constraints of diagnosticity, plausibility, and informativeness. The constraints derive from the pragmatics of communication as applied to compound phrases. The creativity of combination arises because the constraints can be satisfied in many different ways. The constraint theory yields an algorithmic model of the efficiency of combination. The C3 model admits the full (...) creativity of combination and yet efficiently settles on the best interpretation for a given phrase. The constraint theory explains many empirical regularities in conceptual combination, and makes various empirically verified predictions. In computer simulations of compound phrase interpretation, the C3 model has produced results in general agreement with people's responses to the same phrases. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to identify the extent of the efficiency of the internal control environment in the Palestinian higher educational institutions in Gaza Strip from the perspective of employees in the Palestinian universities in Gaza Strip, where researchers used in the study five universities. The researchers adopted in their study the descriptive and analytical approach. The research community consists of administrative employees and academic employees with administrative duties. Senior management or the University Council was excluded. The (...) study population compromises of (392) employees. A stratified random sample was chosen and (197) questionnaires were distributed. (160) questionnaires were received back with a return rate of (81.2%).The researchers used a questionnaire to collect that which then was analyzed using (SPSS) to get the results. The research found the following results: the absence of a fundamental difference between the responses of males and females. The lack of significant difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the variable age. The lack of significant difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the variable of years of service. And the existence of a fundamental difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the university variable. The existence of a fundamental difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the Qualification variable. The existence of a fundamental difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the administrative level variable. The research found a group of recommendations including: the need to raise awareness of censorship as the basis for the protection of employees in all administrative levels from making mistake.Updating the systems and instructions of control periodically and parallel with the scientific progress and technology.Benefit from regional and international experiences in the application of internal control standards which commensurate with the administrative system of the institution. (shrink)

Organs for transplantation are a scarce resource. Markedly, the transplant community’s primary challenge is the stark disparity between the number of patients awaiting deceased donor organ transplants and the rate at which organs become available. However, the allocation of a limited number of organs poses another constant challenge: maintaining an equilibrium between renal transplant utility and equity, that is, striking a balance between the utilitarian argument of medical efficiency and the principle of equity. In this comprehensive overview, the authors (...) delve into the challenge of maintaining an acceptable balance between equity and efficiency and elaborate on some of the factors that might inform a decisionmaker’s evaluation of the extent to which a given allocation scheme is efficient or equitable. (shrink)

We used agent-based modelling to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of several management styles in biology, ranging from centralized to egalitarian ones. In egalitarian groups, all team members are connected with each other, while in centralized ones, they are only connected with the principal investigator. Our model incorporated time constraints, which negatively influenced weakly connected groups such as centralized ones. Moreover, our results show that egalitarian groups outperform others if the questions addressed are relatively simple or when the communication among (...) agents is limited. Complex epistemic spaces are explored best by centralized groups. They outperform other team structures because the individual members can develop their own ideas with less interference of the opinions of others. The optimal ratio between time spent on experimentation and dissemination varies between different organizational structures. Furthermore, if the evidence is shared only after a relevant degree of certainty is reached, all investigated groups epistemically profit. We discovered that the introduction of seminars to the model changes the epistemic performance in favour of weakly connected teams. Finally, the abilities of the principal investigator do not seem to outperform cognitive diversity, as group performances were not strongly influenced by the increase of her abilities. (shrink)

Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort. This observation explains the famous finding that the most frequent words in a language tend to be short. A related prediction is that, even within words of the same length, the most frequent word forms should be the ones that are easiest to produce and understand. Using orthographics as a proxy for phonetics, we test (...) this hypothesis using corpora of 96 languages from Wikipedia. We find that, across a variety of languages and language families and controlling for length, the most frequent forms in a language tend to be more orthographically well‐formed and have more orthographic neighbors than less frequent forms. We interpret this result as evidence that lexicons are structured by language usage pressures to facilitate efficient communication. (shrink)

Communication is rule governed; so are greetings which serve as a polite way of communication. The rules vary depending on the cultural context or the cultural context helps to define the rules and so communication rules are culturally diverse. It is important for foreign language learners to learn that communication rules are both culturally and contextually bound to achieve effective and efficient communication.

Teaching the art of profession-related communication to students of non-linguistic study fields allows instructors to explain their students how to keep up the conversation using facts, data, concepts etc. specific to the area of their future profession. It activates the acquisition processes as well as increases students' motivation to study. The formation of oral monologue speaking skills in students of non-linguistic study fields is one of the tasks within the course of Foreign ( English) Language for Specific Purposes.This process is (...) associated with certain difficulties, which can inhibit learning and demotivated students to study. Among strategies and techniques aiding learning that can be used to improve performance and study outcomes during the course and can be implemented for the enhancement of speaking on occupation-related topics, the mind mapping technique is of specific relevance. It can serve as an interesting and useful tool serving to enhance quality of oral speaking skills in students majoring in Psychology as the representatives of non-linguistic study fields. The article analyses the carried out research concerning the facilitating impact of mind mapping on the oral speech performance of Psychology students. The study hypothesis implies that the use of the mind-mapping technique in the process of preparing for and presenting the talk in the study sessions enhances students' oral monologue speech performance. In order to check the hypothesis, we have conducted the experiment in Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University of Cherkasy at the Department of Psychology. The study involved 46 first-year students, including 34 female and 12 male participants. The respondents were randomly assigned to the experimental mind-mapping group of 23 students ( including 6 males) and the control group of 23 students ( including 6 males as well). The students in the experimental group were involved into the experiment using the mind-mapping technique during their study, and the students in the control group continued their study in the usual way. The hypothesis was confirmed. The mind map use stimulates activity of both brain hemispheres, thus making it easier for students to memorize thematic vocabulary, follow the logical sequence of the talk when speaking. The research findings have shown the effectiveness of implementing the mind-mapping technique into the university course teaching English for Specific Purposes to develop, advance and master students' professional communicative competence. Consistent use of mind maps will also promote the educational process efficiency and have positive effects on the general formation of competitive skilled specialists. (shrink)

With online communication being of growing importance in the organizational context, the aim of this research is to measure its relevance and acceptance among Nigerian businesses and employees. Therefore, a case study focusing on Nigeria Breweries Plc. has been designed and conducted, permitting conclusions on the implementation, efficiency, overall perception, and challenges related to the use of online communication tools in the context of Nigerian businesses of today and tomorrow.

Background Community involvement in research has been advocated by researchers, communities, regulatory agencies, and funders with the aim of reinforcing subjects’ protection and improving research efficiency. Community involvement also has the potential to improve dissemination, uptake, and implementation of research findings. The fields of community based participatory research conducted with indigenous populations and of participatory action research offer a large base of experience in community involvement in research. Rules on involving the population affected when conducting research have been established (...) in these fields. But what is the role of community engagement in clinical research and observational studies conducted in biomedical research outside of these specific areas? Main body of the abstract More than 20 years ago, in the field of HIV medicine, regulatory bodies and funding agencies recommended the constitution of a formal organism, the Community Advisory Board, as part of the study requirements for HIV trials. More recently, CABs have been adopted and used in other fields of medical research, such as malaria. CABs are not without limitations, however, and there is little research on the effectiveness of their use in achieving community protection and participation. Nevertheless, CABs could be a model to import into clinical trials and observational research where no alternative model of community representation is currently being used. Conclusions Allocating more resources to training and shifting more power to community representatives could be part of the solution to current CAB limitations. However, for researchers to be able to apply these recommendations on community involvement, certain conditions need to be met. In particular, funding agencies need to recognize the human and financial resources required for serious community involvement, and the academic environment needs to take community involvement into account when appraising, mentoring, and training researchers. (shrink)