J. Martin

Spatial objects may not only be perceived visually but also by touch. We report recent experiments investigating to what extent prior object knowledge acquired in either the haptic or visual sensory modality transfers to a subsequent visual learning task. Results indicate that even mental object representations learnt in one sensory modality may attain a multi-modal quality. These findings seem incompatible with picture-based reasoning schemas but leave open the possibility of modality-specific reasoning mechanisms.

It may be quite rightly stated that the EFQM Model of the European Foundation for Quality Management is the basic reference model for those organisations whose aim is to achieve excellence. It offers an integral and integrating approach to the most relevant dimensions of the reality of the organisation and permits the establishment of framework that is both objective and rigorous and based on a structured diagnosis.The EFQM Excellence Model is based on a humanist approach that situates the client (in all aspects/senses) as the centre and ultimate reason of the activity of the organisation, emphasizing the role of the latter as a responsible member of the community. An ethical approach is therefore adopted as the best way to serve the long-term interest of the organisation and the people that integrate it (as well as their sustainability in time), exceeding expectations and the policy of society in general.

Local deterministic string-to-string transductions arise in natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as letter-to-sound translation or pronunciation modeling. This class of transductions is a simple generalization of morphisms of free monoids; learning local transductions is essentially the same as inference of certain monoid morphisms. However, learning even a highly restricted class of morphisms, the so-called fine morphisms, leads to intractable problems: deciding whether a hypothesized fine morphism is consistent with observations is an NP-complete problem; and maximizing classification accuracy of the even smaller class of alphabetic substitution morphisms is APX-hard. These theoretical results provide some justification for using the kinds of heuristics that are commonly used for this learning task.

Both the physiological and the pathological morphogenetic processes that we can meet in embryogenesis, neogenesis and degenerative dysgenesis present common features: they are ruled by three different kinds of mechanisms, one related to cell migration, the second to cell differentiation and the third to cell proliferation. We deal here with an application to the cambial growth which essentially involves the third type of mechanism.Woody plants produce secondary tissue (secondary xylem and phloem) from a meristematic tissue called vascular cambium, responsible for the radial growth of a tree. This paper focuses on the formation of secondary xylem, considered in two dimensions in a cross-section framework. A new discrete modelling approach is used, based on the cellular scale, in order to attain a more accurate understanding of how the elementary microscopic behaviour of each cell takes part in the macroscopic morphogenesis. The mathematical model essentially uses an occurrence method simulating the main features of radial growth with simple geometric rules, such as Thom's division rule (Thom,1972)to account for the cell proliferation. The study applies to concrete instances in which the changes made in the geometrical cellular patterns of the vascular cambium clearly affect the shape of the tree, as in Pinus radiata (D. Don.).