Computer graphics as a memory aid and a thinking ald

Abstract The increasing use of microcomputers in classrooms opens up new possibilities for using visual, diagrammatic methods of teaching. This article sets out to explain why we sometimes abandon words and turn to graphical methods of communication. It is argued that a well designed graphical display can function as a kind of memory store. This view of the graphical display as a memory aid and a thinking aid suggests three principles for the program designer: parsimony, accessibility and reflection. 'Progressive graphics', where a display changes in step with the users' thinking, seem particularly suited to implementation on a computer.     

A framework for dynamic multiple-criteria decision making

The classic multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) model assumes that, when taking a decision, the decision maker has defined a fixed set of criteria and is presented with a clear picture of all available alternatives. The task then reduces to computing the score of each alternative, thus producing a ranking, and choosing the one that maximizes this value.However, most real-world decisions take place in a dynamic environment, where the final decision is only taken at the end of some exploratory process. Exploration of the problem is often beneficial, in that it may unveil previously unconsidered alternatives or criteria, as well as render some of them unnecessary.In this paper we introduce a flexible framework for dynamic MCDM, based on the classic model, that can be applied to any dynamic decision process and which is illustrated by means of a small helicopter landing example. In addition, we outline a number of possible applications in very diverse fields, to highlight its versatility.     

C3Fire in command and control research

New and envisioned technological means and abilities for exerting command and control have increased the interest of man-machine research in a military context. Although there are many current proposals for how new command and control systems should be designed, many of the proposed properties that are considered advantageous have never been tested or could even be impossible to test in real-world situations. In spite of that, proposed design solutions are generally held valid in many Western countries where developments of major command and control system projects are in progress. An important question is how microworlds can be used for research on team decision-making. The use of microworlds gives us the possibility to create controlled settings and the opportunity to use advanced monitoring tools to study the subjects. Our studies indicate that the microworld concept, even though the simulation is fairly simple, reflects some of the crucial aspects of team-work in dynamic settings. The article presents results from a study in command and control using the C3Fire microworld (). Results and methodological issues are discussed.

不确定性多属性决策中的ER方法改进

基于对不确定性多属性决策问题中ER方法的研究,提出一种不确定性多属性决策中的改进ER方法,井证明该方法完全满足证据合成的4个公理．通过实例运算,进一步验证了新方法的有效性和合理性．     

Monitoring experiences from command and control research with the C3Fire microworld

This paper discusses experiences from monitoring command and control in research with the C3Fire microworld environment. The experiences are based on three microworld studies where a total of 192 persons participated as students. 132 of these students were computer-literate undergraduate students and 60 were professional military officers. During the three studies, different monitoring strategies were used to meet the goals of the studies. The main monitoring goal has been to detect different aspects of the teamwork performed by the subjects in the experiments. The focus of the monitoring goal was: 1) to monitor the effectiveness of the students' work and the communication patterns between the students in a command and control situation 2) to monitor the students' situation awareness (SA) when the students were using a graphical- or a textual-based information system 3) to monitor the students' work procedures and the possibilities of automatically analysing textual information sent by e-mail.     

The Decision Value of Management Support Systems for Strategic Hospital Management

Several studies have shown that selected management support systems (MSS) favorably impact decision making. Others have theorized that additional benefits could be achieved by consolidating the separate system functions to form an integrated management support system. There have been few, if any, reported empirical tests of this theory. This article offers empirical evidence on integrated MSS effectiveness. It points to the general literature on MSS effects, notes an empirical gap in this literature, and reports the results of experiments that assess the influences of a specific integrated MSS on the process and outcomes of strategic hospital decision making.     

综合集成与决策

在探索“从定性到定量的综合集成法”提出的动机与基本原理的基础上，讨论了综合集成与决策之间的关系，认为从定性到定量的综合集成体系的研究不能局限于决策与决策支持系统，而应将其视为科学创新的方法论．面对当前众多复杂的重大决策问题，应以综合集成理论作为决策研究的指导，建立综合集成型决策支持系统．     

Strategic Decision‐making in a New Millennium: The Contribution from Hybrid Decision‐making Modes

Empirical studies have provided scope for examining strategic decision‐making behaviours under a range of conditions including those involving environmental ‘jolts’ to expectations, and multiple‐decision activities. Effective decision‐making under turbulent conditions repeatedly involved a hybrid of rational and cybernetic (or experimental information‐seeking) behaviours. This was unpredicted. We have labelled this new mode Promethean rationality. A second hybrid mode was identified, under a more restricted range of conditions, and characterised as Confucian rationality combining rationality with appeal to ‘expert knowledge’. Inspection of a real‐life decision making case under an environmental jolt revealed preliminary evidence of Promethean rationality. The implications are the more valuable as in the rise of a new century, the environment around decision makers becomes more turbulent.     

基于前景理论的交互式群组风险决策方法

为了克服现有方法因立论假设过于理想而存在决策结果的科学性和满意性较差以及决策过程效率低下等缺陷,基于前景理论构建了能够吸纳多种模糊信息且能从中识别有效前景的优选模型及判别定理,并针对结果价值的交互学习提出了具有收敛性的交互式决策方法。数值模拟分析表明,所提出的方法既能反映群组成员风险偏好,保证决策结果具有科学性、满意性,又能平衡信息完善程度与其获取成本之间的矛盾关系,保证决策过程具有有效性和可行性。     

高职计算机基础教学改革

培养高素质的人才首先必须注重创新,创新思维能力是人最重要的素质,是各项素质的核心.就目前高等职业技术教育的现状,论述如何在高职计算机基础教学中培养创新能力.     

Action diversity in a simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

This article explores the strategies used by Israeli students to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the interactive computer game, PeaceMaker. Students played PeaceMaker in the roles of both the Israeli Prime Minister and the Palestinian President in random order. Students must take actions satisfying constituents on both sides of the conflict in order to win the game. The diversity of actions taken in each role was measured. Several hypotheses test the degree to which Israeli students, depending on which role they played and their own demographic variables, exploited a consistent set of actions or explored a more diverse range of actions across three main types: construction, political, and security. The results show that (1) greater action diversity increases success in both roles, (2) Israeli students engaged in less diverse actions when playing the Israeli role than when playing the Palestinian role, (3) students’ religiosity and political Hawkishness negatively predicted action diversity when playing the Palestinian role, and (4) action diversity mediates the relationship between a student’s background knowledge about the conflict and success in the Israeli role. The significance of these findings for understanding attitudes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are discussed, including implications for conflict resolution more generally.     

Strategic Talk in Film

Conversational robots and agents are being designed for educational and/or persuasive tasks, e.g., health or fitness coaching. To pursue such tasks over a long time, they will need a complex model of the strategic goal, a variety of strategies to implement it in interaction, and the capability of strategic talk. Strategic talk is incipient ongoing conversation in which at least one participant has the objective of changing the other participant’s attitudes or goals. The paper is based on the observation that strategic talk can stretch over considerable periods of time and a number of conversational segments. Film dialogues are taken as a source to develop a model of the strategic talk of mentor characters. A corpus of film mentor utterances is annotated on the basis of the model, and the data are interpreted to arrive at insights into mentor behavior, especially into the realization and sequencing of strategies.     

Dynamic intuition in military command and control: why it is important,and how it should be developed

This paper considers combat dynamic intuition (CDI). We define CDI as the cognitive capability possessed by a military commander when conducting operations. The paper serves two purposes: firstly, we briefly review the previous research on decision making and learning in dynamic systems, in order to discuss the role of microworlds as training environments to improve CDI. In particular, we focus on the advantages of applying system dynamics techniques when designing microworlds to represent "real world" operational challenges. Secondly, we draw implications from a microworld-based experiment, where task complexity is the manipulated variable. The results indicate that environment simplification in itself is not enough to enhance learning in a microworld setting—a conscious pedagogical program, aimed at increasing the training intensity, should also be developed in support of such training. The latter suggestion should be considered an opportunity for further research on CDI improvement.

动态直觉模糊多属性决策的VIKOR扩展方法

隐变量是观察不到或虚拟的变量,直接利用数据驱动的学习方法难以有效地发现隐变量,因而需要结合概率图结构分析的方法。针对基于结构分析的隐变量发现方法中难以确定隐变量个数和位置的问题,提出一种基于结构分解和因子分析的隐变量发现算法(S-FAHF)。S-FAHF算法利用联合树算法生成具较强依赖关系的变量子集,利用因子分析思想,通过求变量子集的特征值和累积贡献率确定变量子集中隐变量的个数,利用负荷矩阵确定隐变量的位置,最后利用打分函数测试所发现的隐变量的有效性。通过算法比较和实验结果表明,该方法能准确地确定贝叶斯网络中隐变量的个数及位置。     

Multi-step ranking of alternatives in a multi-criteria and multi-expert decision making environment

In this work we introduce a decision model, in the form of a recursive aggregation algorithm, that attempts to mimic a multi-step ranking process of a set of alternatives in a multi-criteria and multi-expert decision making environment. The main idea is rather intuitive. Each alternative is initially assigned a list of values, representing the group experts’ opinion about the extent to which the alternative satisfies a set of given criteria. Then the values for each alternative are combined with the weighted mean operator according to vectors of weights, one for each decision maker in the group. These weights express the personal judgement of the decision makers about the relative importance of the individual criteria. Consequently, a new vector of values is obtained for each alternative. These new values are combined again with the weighted mean operator taking into account the different degrees of influence each decision maker accepts from the rest of the group. The latter aggregation step is repeated again and again for each alternative until a consensus is attained.     

群决策监督模糊模式识别模型

从模糊模式识别概念出发,以群决策成员的经验、偏好为监督,建立一种全体决策成员对所有方案集的全体级别加权广义欧氏权距离平方和最小为目标函数的非线性规划模型.利用该模型可以在确定目标指标和决策人权重的同时确定决策方案相对优属度.为群决策支持系统研究提供了一种新的途径.     

基于直觉模糊推理的多属性群决策方法研究*

针对属性取值以直觉模糊数形式给出的多属性决策问题,提出了基于直觉模糊推理的多属性群决策方法。首先针对专家的评价信息构建直觉决策推理规则,然后根据规则之间的关系给出了决策推理模型,进而给出了基于直觉模糊推理的决策方法;最后通过购房实例验证了该方法的正确性和有效性。     

New aggregation operators based on the Choquet integral and 2-tuple linguistic information

Considered in this paper is the group decision making problem with inter-dependent or interactive attributes, where evaluation values of decision makers are in linguistic arguments. By using the Choquet integral, some new aggregation operators are introduced, including the 2-tuple correlated averaging operator, the 2-tuple correlated geometric operator and the generalized 2-tuple correlated averaging operator. The proposed operators can better reflect the correlations among the elements. After investigating properties of these operators, a new multiple attribute decision making method based on the new operators is proposed. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.     

A dialogic understanding of the relationship between CSCL and teaching thinking skills

How to teach flexible thinking and learning skills, particularly creativity and the skill of “learning to learn,” is a key concern for CSCL in the context of the emerging Networked Society. The currently dominant paradigms for supporting pedagogical design within CSCL, including socio-cultural theory, are limited in the support that they can offer to the project of teaching general thinking skills. This paper uses critical literature review, conceptual analysis, and evidence from case studies to argue for the value of a dialogic interpretative framework that links the goal of teaching thinking with the method of CSCL. The evidence reviewed suggests that dialogue is itself the primary thinking skill from which all others are derived. It is argued from this that dialogic theory offers a possible solution to the problem of how to conceptualize general thinking skills for CSCL: this is that teaching dialogue as an end in itself promotes the learning of general thinking skills. Implications of the proposed framework for pedagogical design are brought out through case studies illustrating the use of CSCL to broaden and deepen dialogic spaces of reflection.     

Support for real-time decision making in mobile financial applications

Mobile users making real-time decisions based on current information need confidence that their context has been taken into consideration in producing the system’s recommendations. This chapter reviews current use of mobile technologies for context-aware real-time decision support. Specifically, it describes a framework for assessing the impact of mobility in decision making. The framework uses dynamic context model of data quality to represent uncertainties in the mobile decision-making environment. This framework can be used for developing visual interactive displays for communicating to the user relevant changes in data quality when working in mobile environments. As an illustration, this chapter proposes a real-time decision support procedure for on-the-spot assistance to the mobile consumer when choosing the best payment option to efficiently manage their budget. The proposed procedure is based on multi-attribute decision analysis, scenario reasoning, and a quality of data framework. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated with a mobile decision-support system prototype implementation. This article is part of the “Handbook on Decision Support Systems” edited by Frada Burstein and Clyde W. Holsapple (2008) Springer.