For two decades, the formalism of quantum mechanics has been successfully used to describe human decision processes, situations of heuristic reasoning, and the contextuality of concepts and their combinations. The phenomenon of 'categorical perception' has put us on track to find a possible deeper cause of the presence of this quantum structure in human cognition. Thus, we show that in an archetype of human perception consisting of the reconciliation of a bottom up stimulus with a top down cognitive expectation pattern, there arises the typical warping of categorical perception, where groups of stimuli clump together to form quanta, which move away from each other and lead to a discretization of a dimension. The individual concepts, which are these quanta, can be modeled by a quantum prototype theory with the square of the absolute value of a corresponding Schr\"odinger wave function as the fuzzy prototype structure, and the superposition of two such wave functions accounts for the interference pattern that occurs when these concepts are combined. Using a simple quantum measurement model, we analyze this archetype of human perception, provide an overview of the experimental evidence base for categorical perception with the phenomenon of warping leading to quantization, and illustrate our analyses with two examples worked out in detail.

Navigating a career constitutes one of life's most enduring challenges, particularly within a unique organization like the US Navy. While the Navy has numerous resources for guidance, accessing and identifying key information sources across the many existing platforms can be challenging for sailors (e.g., determining the appropriate program or point of contact, developing an accurate understanding of the process, and even recognizing the need for planning itself). Focusing on intermediate goals, evaluations, education, certifications, and training is quite demanding, even before considering their cumulative long-term implications. These are on top of generic personal issues, such as financial difficulties and homesickness when at sea for prolonged periods. We present the preliminary construction of a conversational intelligent agent designed to provide a user-friendly, adaptive environment that recognizes user input pertinent to these issues and provides guidance to appropriate resources within the Navy.

Smart deadbolts eat batteries for breakfast. I know, because I have five of them installed on various entry doors in my own smart home, and I replace the batteries in each one two to three times a year. So when I learned that the Array by Hampton was not only powered by a rechargeable battery, but that its battery is continuously topped off by an integrated solar panel, I thought "Brilliant!" After thorough testing, I can say Hampton has solved the battery problem, but as good as it is, this lock won't be the right addition for every smart home. The Array's biggest drawback (for people who live in smart homes, at least) is one that Hampton touts as a feature: It connects to Wi-Fi, with no additional hub needed.

On Thursday, five years after launching and two and half years after being acquired by Ford for a reported $65 million, the app-based shuttle service announced it is rolling to a permanent stop. Transportation technology companies have never been sexier than in the past decade, but this stumble is a potent reminder that creating a profitable transportation business can be far harder than it seems. When Chariot launched in 2014, it joined a wave of Uber-inspired "microtransit" tech companies hoping to disrupt transportation services by providing faster, more efficient options for riders sick of--and underserved by--traditional public transit. Less than half a decade on, most have gone the way of the Hawaiian tree snail. San Francisco-based, elitist-wooing Leap Transit closed up shop just three months after its March 2015 launch, amid a regulatory fight with California.

A massive school of fish in the ocean forms a fascinating natural sight. But for sharks, they become breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A vacationer with a drone camera captured a scene fit for a horror movie: a group of sharks, also known as a shiver, feasting on a school of menhaden fish off the coast of New York's Hamptons, one of the most famous vacation spots in the United States. Gregory Skomal, a senior scientist with Massachusetts Marine Fisheries, says sharks often feed on large schools like this, even off popular vacation spots like the Hamptons. "Sharks' travel patterns in the area are well documented, and include regularly feeding on large schools of fish," he said.

Solution providers that are willing to inject artificial intelligence technologies into their customer's business processes could benefit from gaining more information, garnering better business outcomes. Digital Nebula, a solution provider that specializes in AI and data management, is doing just that, according to channel veteran John Shaw, CEO of the Austin, Texas-based company. Shaw outlined real-world AI use cases to demonstrate its benefits to a room full of solution providers at The Channel Company's XChange 2017 conference in Orlando, Fla. on Tuesday. Companies will spend about $2.5 billion worldwide on AI this year, Shaw said. About 15 percent of enterprises are proactively working with service providers on AI solutions, but the vast majority of companies don't know where to start with AI, and that signals an opportunity for partners, said Shaw (pictured).

So many of the cartographers I've gotten to know while writing about maps seem to genuinely love their jobs. It's one of those professions with a disproportionate number of people who are really happy to be there. I suspect that one reason for this could be that many of them have loved maps since they were kids, and they've managed to turn that love into a career. This collection of childhood maps made by eight professional cartographers backs up that theory. I interviewed each of them about their early mapmaking, how they found their way into cartography, and what they love about their jobs today. Their stories all have their individual quirks, but there are some common threads.

Philosophers and psychologists have always been interested in the deep nature of human concepts, how they are formed, how they combine to create more complex conceptual structures, as expressed by sentences and texts, and how meaning is created in these processes. Unveiling aspects of these mysteries is bound to have a massive impact on a variety of domains, from knowledge representation to natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The original idea of a concept as a'container of objects', called'instantiations', which can be traced back to Aristotle, was challenged by the first cognitive tests by Eleanor Rosch, which revealed that concepts exhibit aspects, like'context-dependence', 'vagueness' and'graded typicality', that prevent a too naïve definition of a concept as a'set of defining properties that are either possessed or not possessed by individual exemplars' [1, 2]. More, these tests infused the suspicion that concepts do not combine by following the algebraic rules of classical logic. A first attempt to preserve a set theoretical modeling came from the'fuzzy set approach': concepts would be represented by fuzzy sets, while their conjunction (disjunction) satisfies the'minimum (maximum) rule of fuzzy set conjunction (disjunction)' [3]. However, also this approach was confuted by a whole set of experiments by cognitive psychologists, including Osherson and Smith, who identified the'Guppy effect' (or'Pet-Fish problem') in typicality judgments [4], James Hampton, who discovered'overextension' and'underextension' effects in membership judgments [5, 6], and Alxatib and Pelletier, who detected'borderline contradictions' in simple propositions of the form "John is tall and John is not tall" [7]. More recently, some of us proved that these data violate Kolmogorov's axioms of classical probability theory [8], thus revealing that classical structures,

Since the mid-'70s, when electromechanical transmission systems became standard, the technology and what it requires to repair it has grown like wildfire, creating new jobs and forcing existing workers to adapt. That's not a description of the next sci-fi blockbuster, but one of the world that now exists, and it's a world, experts note, creating new jobs and requiring the current workforce to adjust its roles and acquire new skills to make a living in a science-fictional universe. Automotive technology is one area which has required some of the most significant jumps in the learning curve, especially for those who keep cars and trucks running, said Jerry Hampton, program coordinator for Hill College's Automotive Technology program in Cleburne. Since the mid-'70s, when electromechanical transmission systems became standard, the technology and what it requires to repair it has grown like wildfire, he said. By the 1980s, the earliest onboard diagnostic computers appeared -- equipment more sophisticated and with more control than the systems in the Apollo spacecraft that went to the moon, he said. This diagnostic equipment is now about 10 generations along and will keep moving forward as technology moves toward more automated systems, including autonomous driving systems.

We present modeling for conceptual combinations which uses the mathematical formalism of quantum theory. Our model faithfully describes a large amount of experimental data collected by different scholars on concept conjunctions and disjunctions. Furthermore, our approach sheds a new light on long standing drawbacks connected with vagueness, or fuzziness, of concepts, and puts forward a completely novel possible solution to the 'combination problem' in concept theory. Additionally, we introduce an explanation for the occurrence of quantum structures in the mechanisms and dynamics of concepts and, more generally, in cognitive and decision processes, according to which human thought is a well structured superposition of a 'logical thought' and a 'conceptual thought', and the latter usually prevails over the former, at variance with some widespread beliefs