Showing papers on "Surprise published in 1990"

How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified

Abstract: How Designers Think is based on Bryan Lawson's many observations of designers at work, interviews with designers and their clients and collaborators. This extended work is the culmination of twenty-five years' research and shows the author's belief that we all can learn to design better. The creative mind continues to have power to surprise and this book aims to nurture and extend this creativity. This book is not intended as an authoritative description of how designers should think but to provide helpful advice on how to develop an understanding of design. 'How Designers Think' will be of great interest, not only to designers seeking a greater insight into their own thought processes, but also to students of design in general from undergraduate level upward.

Discourse ability and brain damage : theoretical and empirical perspectives

Abstract: Nonspecialists are often surprised by the issues studied and the perspectives assumed by basic scientific researchers. Nowhere has the surprise traditionally been greater than in the field of psychology. College students anticipate that their psychology courses will illuminate their personal problems and their friends' per sonalities; they are nonplussed to discover that the perception of geometric forms and the running ofT-mazes dominates the textbooks. The situation is comparable in the domain of linguistics. Nonprofessional observers assume that linguists study exotic languages, that when they choose to focus on their own language, they will examine the meanings of utterances and the uses to which language is put. Such onlookers are taken aback to learn that the learning of remote languages is a marginal activity for most linguists; they are equally amazed to discover that the lion's share of work in the discipline focuses on issues of syntax and phonol ogy, which are virtually invisible to the speaker of a language. Science moves in its own, often mysterious ways, and there are perfectly good reasons why experimental psychologists prefer to look at mazes rather than at madness, and why linguists study syntax rather than Sanskrit. Nonetheless, it is a happy event for all concerned when the interests of professionals and non specialists begin to move toward one another and a field of study comes to address the "big questions" as well as the experimentally most tractable ones. Discourse Ability and Brain Damage reflects this trend in scientific research."

Courting surprise : unbidden perceptions in clinical practice

Abstract: KNOWING THAT WE AUTHOR even the most startling of our own thoughts does nothing to demystify that common experience of merely recording them. The unexpected thought or image or feeling seems to come to us; one feels like a conduit. The experience is ubiquitous enough to have spawned myriad descriptions. Most of this remarkably common and consistent testimony has come from artists, especially and not surprisingly from writers. Here is Joyce Carol Oates: \"If I say that I write with the enormous hope of altering the world—and why write without that hope?—I should first say that I write to discover what it is I will have written \" (1982, p. 1). Gabriel García Márquez: \"I'm very curious, as I'm writing this book, to see how the characters go on behaving. It's a true investigation. I could almost say that one writes the novel to see how it will turn out. And to be able to read it\" (quoted by Simons, 1985, p. 18). And here is Raymond Carver, convincing and a little touching in his surprise at discovering he is not alone in not knowing what he will write: \"(Flannery) O'Connor says she most often did not know where she was going when she sat down to work on a short story. ... When I read this some years ago, it came as a shock that she, or anyone for that matter, wrote stories in this fashion. I thought this was my uncomfortable secret, and I was a little uneasy with it. For sure I thought this way of working on a short story somehow revealed my own shortcomings. I remember being tremendously heartened by reading what she had to say on the subject.\" In the passage which heartened Carver, O'Connor (says Patricia Hampl [1989], from whose essay the quotations from both writers are drawn) was discussing her story, \"Good Country People.\" When she began the story, she did not know \"there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a wooden leg.\" Then, also with no particular plan in mind, she invented and introduced a Bible salesman. \"I didn't know he was going to steal that wooden leg, \" continues O'Connor, \"until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable.\" Apparently the conscious application of technique is no more responsible for good fiction than it is for good psychoanalysis!

The Preschooler's Understanding of the Causes and Consequences of Emotion

Abstract: RUSSELL, JAMES A. The Preschooler's Understanding o!f the Causes and Coirseyueirces of Emotion. CHILI) 1990, 61, 1872-1881. This article reports evidence on 2 issues: (a) the preDEVELOPI~ENT. schooler's understanding of the causes and consequences of basic emotions, and (h) the relative power of a word, such as happy, versus a facial expression, such as a smile, to evoke that knowledge. Preschoolers (N = 120, mean age = 4-11)completed stories about fear, anger, sadness, happiness, and surprise by telling either why the protagonist felt that way or what the protagonist did when feeling that way. Responses were scored both "sul>jectively" (rated as appropriate or not) and more "objectively" (frequency of a judge guessing the question asked). By both criteria, the children did well, distinguishing causes from consequences and between most of the emotions. Conh-ary to what is co~n~nonl~ assumed, children were no more accurate-and sometimes less accurate-when the emotion was specified by a prototypical facial expression than when specified by a word. The study reported in this article was than 7 have been portrayed as understanding aimed at gathering information on two ques- only those emotions associated with a charactions about children's knowledge of emotion: teristic facial or other nonverbal display (Har(a) how much preschoolers know about the ris, 1989, p. 82). And the power of faces precauses and consequences of basic emotions, sumably remains through adulthood, when and (b)the relative power of a word versus a communication of emotion is said to be more facial expression to evoke that knowledge. I powerful through nonverbal than through vershall begin with the second issue. bal channels (Mehrabian, 1972).

Effects of Disturbing News on Recall of Subsequently Presented News

Abstract: Both male and female respondents were exposed to a television news program. Immediately following exposure to either an emotionally disturbing or an innocuous, affectively neutral news story, respondents watched a sequence of standard news items. The placement of these items was systematically varied through three time slots of 90 s each. In the two preexposure conditions, all items appeared equally often in all time slots, thus allowing comparisons over time as well as at given times. A surprise information-acquisition test was administered for the contents of the news items. Compared with the control condition, the acquisition of information from the news items following the emotionally charged, disturbing story was significantly poorer for a period of 3 min. No appreciable difference in information acquisition was observed thereafter. The apparent impairment of information acquisition, processing, storage, and retrieval after emotionally charged news stories is discussed in terms of emotion theory. Pra...

Pitch-Class Set Analysis: An Evaluation

Abstract: hat I have a problem with "pitch-class set analysis," as formulated and developed by Allen Forte and a vast number of dedicated first-generation disciples and, by now, their students as well, will come as no surprise to anyone in this audience.* But the real nature of my problem cannot help but be camouflaged in the reasoned, logical, and objective statements that argument requires and that it is my intention to offer. My critique of the Forte system does not begin with an objective and reasoned appraisal of it, and I think it would be worthless if it did. My critique begins with the subjective, 151 intuitive, and spontaneous experience of one who has spent a lifetime listening to music, composing it, playing it, and thinking about it, and then finds himself confronted with ways of talking about and analyzing music that have nothing whatever to do with what I would call this "common sense" experience. But at such a fundamental level the act of musical judgment is a private one, a matter that must be left to one's self and one's conscience.

Repetition and surprise: a clinical approach to the necessity of construction and its validation.

Abstract: The analysis of a dream revealed, to the surprise of both patient and analyst, identifications corresponding to different times and places. The (re)construction led to the discovery of conflicts involving three generations. We explore the clinical conditions for this discovery, and we develop the links between the concepts of 'historicity' and '(re)construction'. The concept of (re)construction, in its very structure, implies a very fertile paradox: being by definition retroactive, it is at the same time anticipatory, in the sense that it establishes a pre-condition for access to psychical truths. The revelation of unconscious identifications (telescoping of generations) through construction enables the analyst to gain a retroactive understanding of how the patient has understood the interpretations. The analyst obtains thus the means to understand (also in a retroactive way) the value and the limits of his interpretations.

Some Methodological Comments on The Directional Policy Matrix

Abstract: In his introduction the author expresses surprise that such a potentially rich tool as the Directional Policy Matrix (DPM) appears to be used so infrequently in practice. Many academics share similar feelings about what they perceive as helpful devices or methods which should aid and improve managerial decision‐making. (Why, for example, don't managers attempt to assess the expected value of information?) Perhaps the answer is that the academics have failed to communicate both the nature of the technique and its application. If this is so then the burden of proof rests with the advocate and in this paper the reader is led from simple to complex issues which the author has found to be the causes of misunderstanding or misuse in his own extensive consulting experience.

Market response to earnings announcements : the effects of firm characteristics

Abstract: This study develops a two period model of investment in which the ratio of share price response to earnings surprise is a function of the earnings retention rate, marginal productivity, and the cost of capital. These factors are examined empirically using dividend yield, Tobin 's q ratio, and beta as proxies. Empirical results indicate that each of the factors significantly impacts the return/surprise relation in the direction predicted by the theoretical model, with the exception of dividend yield for positive earnings surprise. The results prevail even after controlling for the information environment.

Unconcern at dawn, surprise at sunset: Egyptian intelligence appreciation before the Sinai campaign, 1956

Abstract: (1990). Unconcern at dawn, surprise at sunset: Egyptian intelligence appreciation before the Sinai campaign, 1956. Intelligence and National Security: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 7-56.

China's Long Winter

Abstract: In the beginning there was surprise, for a short while elation, then shock, disgust, and finally grief. Intense emotions once again gripped Westerners as they watched the unfolding of events in China—above all, disbelief. The prevailing Western image, propagated by journalists, foreign diplomats, and the Chinese government alike, had been of a popular, dynamic, liberalized leadership that was successfully opening up China economically, politically, and socially. In ways that seemed gratifying, the Chinese were becoming more and more like us—Westernized and modern, dancing to rock-'n'-roll music, drinking Coca-Cola, and eating McDonald's hamburgers.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds

Abstract: The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells’s most brilliant work, is at the same time one of the few novels which have transcended the fantastic nature of their premises and become a part of world literature.2 This double assertion requires justification. Indeed, my opening claim may come as a surprise, since Wells wrote many books, of which this is one of the earliest — the fourth, following The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The Island of Dr Moreau (1897).3

Commentary: A Partnership is Needed

Abstract: I agree with Hoadley and Kettenring that statisticians have serious problems communicating with engineers and physical scientists. Their article does a good job of focusing the issue, defining its dimensions, and offering some ways to improve the process. The fact that this problem exists is no surprise, as "communication" is typically a critical issue whenever two or more persons or organizations are involved. We all own the problem. Improved communication must be worked on every day, by everyone, through our behavior, as well as our oral and written communications.

‘The Trouble Is It's Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory

Abstract: Many people have a problem with psychoanalytical theory because it is grounded in the concept of the unconscious. They find this concept distasteful and justify their distaste on the basis of two fundamental criticisms: that they can find no empirical evidence for it and that it is ahistorical. In this paper I want to begin by looking briefly at what I think constitutes evidence for the unconscious and then move on to consider the charge of it being ahistorical and examine what this charge really means. I shall then argue that rejection of the unconscious on these grounds is part of a more serious problem for the production of feminist knowledge of the personal - the problem of anxiety often experienced as distaste. A feminist knowledge which can theorize the link between sociology and psychoanalytic theory - integrate social and psychical reality - may only be possible if we can find a way of moving beyond anxiety to an integration of our own personal social and psychical dimensions in the form of insight. Most of us are familiar with the following kind of behaviour. We feel anxious - guilty - or vulnerable, so we hit out at the people closest to us and act as if they were attacking us. This mechanism is known in psychoanalytic theory as 'projection'. We find a part of ourselves unacceptable (the thing we feel guilty about - our anxiety or insecurity, our vulnerability) and instead of allowing ourself to consciously feel and acknowledge the feelings we don't like, we project them onto other people and then feel under attack from these people. These same people then represent to us the alienated part of ourself we've thrown out. Feeling under attack we attack them (usually much to their surprise!). At it's simplest it's the 'kicking the cat' reaction (much as I dislike that

Intention, capability and surprise: A comparative analysis

Abstract: (1990). Intention, capability and surprise: A comparative analysis. Journal of Strategic Studies: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 19-40.

The aging psyche and the question of artistic change: An examination of one career

Abstract: A long-time lover of music, I confess to having a bizarre penchant for trying to test my informally trained musical intelligence in situations which require quick recognition, be it a piece, a composer, a performer, or some such feature. In fact, this article originated with my failure to recognize a theretofore unfamiliar work and with the surprise I experienced upon learning it was Verdi's last opera,Falstaff, composed when he was nearly 80. For a listener familiar withLa Traviata orAida, it appeared quite strange and surprising. Moreover, as I found out later, the sense of puzzlement was not merely a matter of subjective impression but rather exemplified an overall stylistic departure in Verdi's late life work, its salient features being compression and urgency rather than spaciousness, flowing line, a pervasive use of biting irony compared to the straightforward lyricism of the earlier work, a retreat from psychological realism in favour of sketchy, abstract portrayals, an overall impatience with established operatic convention, and a symphonic rather than linear or melodic conception. Some of these characteristics have also been found in the late works of painters and sculptors (e.g., Arnheim, 1986; Clark, 1972; Munsterberg, 1983). Taken together these observations raised for me the issue of artistic change, an issue of considerable significance to the understanding of creative endeavour in general.

An Essay Concerning Robotic Understanding

Abstract: The question of whether a computer can think like a person is once again a hot topic. Somewhat to my surprise, this philosophical question seems to have direct practical implications for AI, especially language understanding. The following analysis has been helpful to me and might be of some value to others.

The Sigma igma game for management

Abstract: Project management within a complex organization resembles a game, which the authors call Sigma igma game, as it results from the summation of many interactions of people trying to reassure resources availability. This work focuses on capturing the dynamics of the game and on the measurement of the player's performance, with the aim of increasing productivity and providing meaningful comparison of different projects. A term names the PERT surprise is defined and measured which expresses the discrepancy between actual behavior and previous planning along the project history. A group surprise term is added to the individual one to ensure fairness. The winner is the player who is least surprised. The dynamics is caught by a computer tool present in every meeting and useful during conversation. The tool should allow multiple views to be held and opinions tested on the spot against facts. An example and implementation issues are discussed. >

Going Creative: Becoming Free:

Abstract: Originally an address at a pre-primary conference, this paper examines the real possibility of creative activity in schools that are institutionalised and state-controlled. The dominance of left-brain activity, the bureaucratic pressure and the maintenance of the status quo argue against any full respect for creativity. The extent to which pre-primary schooling is part of such a schooling system is implicitly examined. As a useful alternative, Huston Smith's fourfold education scheme, subjective education, education for surprise, education for surrender and education for words, is presented as providing important contrasts to current education priorities.

Special report, Part I. Lab staffing in the shortage era.

Abstract: Respondents to MLO's exclusive survey indicate that trends identified three years ago continue. To no one's surprise, a serious shortage looms large. Here's how labs are coping.

Jude the Obscure : Origins in Life and Literature

Abstract: Hardy’s life was relatively uneventful, and but for his creative imagination and literary successes it would not have been very exciting; it certainly was not very sensational, apart from the effect on the public of works such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Why a story of dreams or aspirations and continued failure, of inveiglement into marriage by seduction, of broken marriages, unmarried lovers who live together and rear children only to find them hanged, of marriages which please God in the eyes of the Church and lead to suicide and spiritual death — why Jude the Obscure, in short — should have led early reviewers to deduce that it was ‘honest autobiography’ must surely occasion surprise. Not until nearly twenty-four years later, when Hardy was roused by a letter from ‘an inquirer with whom the superstition still lingered’, did he trouble to reply, dictating a letter to his wife Florence, who wrote: ‘To your inquiry if Jude the Obscure is autobiographical, I have to answer that there is not a scrap of personal detail in it, it having the least to do with his own life of all his books.’ When, in the course of preparing his Life, he reached the period ending with the 1895–96 reviews of Jude, he reverted to this letter, and added: Some of the incidents were real in so far as that he had heard of them, or come in contact with them when they were occurring to people he knew; but no more. It is interesting to mention that on his way to school he did once meet with a youth like Jude who drove the bread-cart of a widow, a baker, like Mrs Fawley, and carried on his studies at the same time, to the serious risk of other drivers in the lanes; which youth asked him to lend him his Latin grammar.1

To Adopt the Intentional Stance

Abstract: We begin our commentary with a bit of common-sense or everyday psychology, because intention is a notion that originates in our everyday understanding of human action. This introductory analysis allows us then to attend efficiently to Lewis's article. We conclude by mentioning some related research of our own. Much of our everyday reasoning about people is concerned with the psychological causes of, or explanations for, their behavior. Why did he take that job? Why is she going to Alaska? Why is he divorcing his second wife? In attempting to explain these sorts of things we seek motivations, and an important everyday construct is desire-what the person wants. In this everyday conception (see Wellman, 1990), a desire is a mental state or attitude about an object or event that motivates possible actions toward that object or event. To elaborate, we can compare desires to other sorts of explanatory constructs such as drives and tropisms. For example, both drives (e.g., he is hungry) and desires (e.g., he wants an apple) are constructs ordinarily used to describe internal motivational states behind certain actions, such as relieving hunger or obtaining an apple. But in specifics and in emphasis, drives and desires are quite different sorts of everyday descriptions. Drives describe something like the organism's internal physiological state, whereas desires focus on a specific object (or event or state of affairs) that is sought. Drives are relatively silent about objects, whereas desires are silent about physiology. For example, being hungry can be satisfied by an apple, a banana, or a hamburger. The object is not (essentially) described by stating the drive. But "wanting an apple" is not satisfied by a banana; the object is essential. In short, although drives and desires are similar in some respects, they are different in that desires, not drives, encompass a specified object. What about tropisms? Tropisms seem to have an object directedness, as for example, plants that grow toward sunlight or mosquitoes that seek blood. However, in everyday conception, desires are psychological states whereas tropisms are not. The flower does not want to grow to the sun, the mosquito does not desire blood. How do we differentiate the two? An answer seems to lie in the relationship between desires and other psychological states. Desires are intimately linked to companion psychological states, in particular, to emotions. Tropisms, in contrast, are not linked to emotions. The flower is not happy when it orients toward the sun; the mosquito is not sad if everyone at the picnic is wearing insect repellent. But if Bill wants an apple, he will be happy or pleased to get one and sad or angry or disappointed not to. A consideration of the everyday notion of desire is helpful in discussing two importantly different senses of the word intention. Intention, in the everyday colloquial sense, involves a purpose or goal. Perhaps the simplest such intention is a desire; if Bill buys an apple because he wants one, then he does so intentionally. Intention in the broader philosophical sense refers to a class of mental states known as intentional states or propositional attitudes. These mental states are attitudes toward a proposition, or mental states "about" some external real-world object or state of affairs. In this sense having a thought about an apple, a memory of an apple, as well as a goal to get an apple, are all "intentional." Lewis tends to obscure this distinction in his article, but it is important to keep straight. Desires are especially intriguing because they partake of both senses. Wanting an apple is "about" an apple and hence is a classic intentional state in the philosophical sense. Wanting an apple also implies a goal-directed state in the more everyday sense of intention. Now we turn to Lewis's article. Lewis addresses issues of intention in children; his focus and his terminology have their roots, initially, in such everyday notions as goals, desires, and purposes. Here is the thrust of Lewis's complex article, as we see it: The article begins with an inspiration, encompasses an intriguing empirical phenomenon, identifies a conceptual problem, and proposes a solution which attempts to advance the inspiration and circumvent the problem. In more detail, Lewis asks when we can attribute intentions to the child, and what forms intention might take within and between levels of development. The inspiration behind this endeavor seems to be that a good deal can potentially be understood about intention by tracing it to its earliest roots. Lewis tries to advance this initial inspiration in several ways. One way is to discuss some intriguing data from infants. The intrigue of these data as we see them concerns the implication of emotions for analyses of intentions. Here Lewis trades on the common-sense notion that desires are intimately tied to emotions somewhat as described earlier. Lewis finds that 2-month-old infants, for example, will increase their arm pulling to activate the presentation of a pleasurable stimulus. Critically, in addition to increased arm pulling, when the arm pulling succeeds, his young subjects show increased interest and joy. When the contingency is changed, and arm pulling no longer produces the expected result, the infants show anger, frustration, and surprise. According to a common-sense psychological framework, if infants show happiness when the arm pulling works and sadness or anger when it does not work, it is sensible and illuminating to say that they desire the event to happen, and in this limited sense to say that they are acting intentionally. All this seems well and good-to trace the origins of intention is admirable, and studies with infants linking their actions and emotions may, if fully developed, reveal unexpected competencies. At this point (at least as we reconstruct his argument) Lewis goes on to sketch a developmental theory of intention. This theory has a peculiar shape to it, however, and this shape stems from Lewis's attempt to craft a theory designed to solve what he sees as a deep problem. There are two components to this problem. First, he does not want to claim that 2-month-old infants are revealing full adult intentionality. But their behavior may prove to be motivated by something like desires. Thus, Lewis advocates that we adopt a broad view of intention, broad enough so that his 2-montholds and adults exist on the same continuum. Second, when Lewis considers the origin of intentionality in the child he feels he faces a logical or conceptual obstacle. Crudely put, the obstacle is how to get intention out of a system if it is not

The World Could Not Contain the Books

Abstract: In this final chapter I should like to move almost beyond the book by considering a work from the Bible. Part of the surprise of the fourth gospel, which has already illuminated the notion of self, is that it engages with all the matters which I have discussed, though it does so, of course, not strictly as a piece of literature but as an act of witness. Should we take it on anything like its own terms, we have to see it as different, in ways to be defined; and yet the more one reads it, the more evidently it is concerned with a whole range of questions which we think of as literary: with writing, and re-writing, and interpretation; with beginning and ending; with the place of the writer in the text; with the relations between narrative and history, story and persons, words and the Word. Anyone who doubts its claims may wish to argue that this presents the evangelist with problems, for his announcing of religious truth. Maybe the problems are rather for us. He seems in any case to have pushed further in these areas than other writers, even to the extent of providing a model for what occurs elsewhere, and the first thing to do, whatever one’s beliefs, is to learn by following him carefully.

A social history of women’s leisure

Abstract: A historical perspective is essential for those of us who are interested in exploring and understanding women’s lives, given that leisure does not exist in a vacuum, but is shaped by the broader social ]context. As Rojek (1985), among others, has pointed out, leisure should be seen as a part of dynamic relations which change over time. It comes as little surprise, then, to find that the social and economic changes that have taken place in Britain from the eighteenth century on have had clear implications for the way in which leisure is currently shaped and perceived. This applies not only to the leisure ‘choices’ that are possible in terms of the kind of provision and the material resources available to individuals or groups, but also to our broader definitions of leisure and our ideas about what leisure is, or ought to be.

The Thrill of Discovery

Abstract: In the process of communicating to the student or the lay person, we often forget to point out why it is that scientists are involved in their esoteric explorations of the universe. As a result, the scientific endeavor is painted as being somewhat removed from “real life.” This unfortunate misconception can be remedied by discussing the thrill of discovery. Scientists love to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” The act of discovery produces a heady sensation akin to the thrill of victory for an athlete. The thrill may come as a surprise, as the result of a serendipitous turn of events, or may be experienced at the conclusion of a dedicated piece of research whose end-point was always understood. In either case the joy is associated with the revelation of what was previously unknown or not understood. It is this joy that is the reward for the researcher.