Awareness of universals

Book synopsis: The work of Mark Sainsbury has made a significant and challenging contribution to several central areas of philosophy, especially philosophy of language and logic. He has made significant contributions to puzzles concerning the nature of thought and language and pioneered research in the philosophical theory known as fictionalism. In this outstanding volume, twenty contributors engage with Sainsbury's work but also go beyond it, exploring fundamental problems in the philosophy of language, mind and logic. Topics covered include propositional thought, intentionality, the mind-body problem, singular thoughts, the individuation of concepts, nominalisation, logical form, non-existent objects and vagueness. Thought: Its Origin and Reach will be of interest to professional philosophers and students working in philosophy of mind, language, epistemology, and metaphysics

YOLO-ET: a machine learning model for detecting, localising and classifying anthropogenic contaminants and extraterrestrial microparticles optimised for mobile processing systems

Imminent robotic and human activities on the Moon and other planetary bodies would benefit from advanced in situ Computer Vision and Machine Learning capabilities to identify and quantify microparticle terrestrial contaminants, lunar regolith disturbances, the flux of interplanetary dust particles, possible interstellar dust, -meteoroids, and secondary impact ejecta. The YOLO-ET (ExtraTerrestrial) algorithm, an innovation in this field, fine-tunes Tiny-YOLO to specifically address these challenges. Designed for coreML model transference to mobile devices, the algorithm facilitates edge computing in space environment conditions. YOLO-ET is deployable as an app on an iPhone with LabCam® optical enhancement, ready for space application ruggedisation. Training on images from the Tanpopo aerogel panels returned from Japan’s Kibo module of the International Space Station, YOLO-ET demonstrates a 90% detection rate for surface contaminant microparticles on the aerogels, and shows promising early results for detection of both microparticle contaminants on the Moon and for evaluating asteroid return samples. YOLO-ET’s application to identifying spacecraft-derived microparticles in lunar regolith simulant samples and SEM images of asteroid Ryugu samples returned by Hayabusa2 and curated by JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences indicate strong model performance and transfer learning capabilities for future extraterrestrial applications

Reform of parachute payments in the English Football Championship

Purpose: This research seeks to assess the conflicting claims of the merits, or otherwise, of parachute payments made to football clubs relegated from the first tier league of football in England, called the Premier League, and to propose an objective solution. Design/methodology/approach: The research uses the financial account of football clubs in the second tier league called the Championship together with information on parachute payments made to them for the seasons from 2004/05 to 2021/22 to assess the necessity for these payments and their effect on competition in the Championship. Findings: The research finds that the system needs to be reformed. Payments are justified for a maximum of only two years, the amounts should be reduced and the ability to abuse the system eliminated. However, the evidence does not support the claim that these payments unfairly distort the competitive balance of the Championship. Originality/value: Scant attention has been given to this issue in the academic literature but this research provides evidence and recommendations that should be of academic value with regard to the financial regulation of football and of practical value to the English Football League and any regulator that may be appointed for football by the UK Government

A critical review of corpus-based pedagogic perspectives on thesis writing: specificity revisited

Thesis writing (used here as an umbrella term to cover both master's and doctoral postgraduate-level writing) is a high-stakes genre for postgraduate students. This important student genre has been well-researched from a corpus-based perspective. Corpora of theses and also research articles have been used for data-driven learning (DDL) of this key genre. The purpose of this article is to critically examine key DDL initiatives, some of which take a ‘research into practice’ orientation. Importantly, the discussion is framed around the notion of ‘specificity’ in the context of needs analysis, and whether the initiatives take a wide-angle, narrow-angle or move from a wide-angle to a narrow angle approach. Accounts which focus on DIY (do-it-yourself) mini-corpus compilation and use by students are also reviewed. The final section of the article presents a critique of current pedagogic applications, taking a closer look at the issue of ‘specificity’ within the wider context of needs analysis and mapping out areas for future consideration. It is suggested that an ethnographic perspective may be particularly useful for conceptualising specificity relating to students' present situation needs. The article also considers the impact of AI/ChatGPT on future corpus-based pedagogy of thesis writing

Correlation clustering with vertex splitting

We explore CLUSTER EDITING and its generalization CORRELATION CLUSTERING with a new operation called permissive vertex splitting which addresses finding overlapping clusters in the face of uncertain information. We determine that both problems are NP-hard, yet they exhibit significant differences in terms of parameterized complexity and approximability. For CLUSTER EDITING WITH PERMISSIVE VERTEX SPLITTING, we show a polynomial kernel when parameterized by the solution size and develop a polynomial-time 7-approximation. In the case of CORRELATION CLUSTERING, we establish para-NP-hardness when parameterized by the solution size and demonstrate that computing an n^{1-ε}-approximation is NP-hard for any constant ε > 0. Additionally, we extend an established link between CORRELATION CLUSTERING and MULTICUT to the setting with permissive vertex splits

AI In the Communications Circuit

A roundtable at the 2024 SHARP conferenc

Sentiment and time-series analysis of direct-message conversations

Social media and mobile communications in general are an extremely rich source of digital forensic information. We present our new framework for analysing this resource with an innovative combination of time series and text mining methods. The framework is intended to create a tool to analyse and operationally summarise extended trails of social media messages, thus enabling investigators for the first time to drill down into specific moments at which sentiment analysis has detected a change of tone indicative of a particularly strong and significant response. Crucially, the method will give investigators an opportunity to reduce the time and resource commitment required for ongoing and hands-on analysis of digital communications on media such as Texts/SMS, WhatsApp and Messenger

A hidden diversity of ornithischian dinosaurs: UK Middle Jurassic microvertebrate faunas shed light on a poorly represented period

Current research suggests that ornithischians originated in the Middle–Late Triassic and achieved a global distribution by the Early Jurassic, but the Middle Jurassic was a pivotal period in which the clade underwent rapid diversification and radiation. However, Middle Jurassic ornithischian fossils are rare, with few named taxa and numerous occurrences of isolated teeth with disputed identifications. Here, we apply detailed morphological comparisons to a suite of isolated ornithischian teeth from Bathonian microvertebrate sites in the U.K., to assess their taxonomic affinities. These reveal a hitherto unknown, highly diverse ornithischian fauna that significantly increases the known diversity of ornithischians from this time period in the U.K. Comparisons indicate the presence of six ornithischian morphotypes: an indeterminate ornithischian, a heterodontosaurid, two indeterminate thyreophorans, a stegosaur, and an ankylosaur. These results confirm the predictions made by phylogenetic studies that Ornithischia rapidly diversified in the Middle Jurassic, fill in temporal gaps within lineages, and also include recognition of one of the oldest global occurrences of stegosaurs. In addition, the mixture of non-eurypodan and eurypodan morphotypes identified suggests that not only did non-eurypodans survive until at least the Middle Jurassic but they also co-existed with early eurypodans

Biodiversity responses to Lateglacial climate change in the subdecadally-resolved record of Lake Hämelsee (Germany)

Anthropogenically-driven climate warming and land use change are the main causes of an ongoing decrease in global biodiversity. It is unclear how ecosystems, particularly freshwater habitats, will respond to such continuous and potentially intensifying disruptions. Here we analyse how different components of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems responded to natural climate change during the Lateglacial. By applying a range of analytical techniques (sedimentology, palaeoecology, geochemistry) to the well-dated sediment archive from Lake Hämelsee (Germany), we show evidence for vegetation development, landscape dynamics and aquatic ecosystem change typical for northwest Europe during the Lateglacial. By particularly focussing on periods of abrupt climate change, we determine the timing and duration of changes in biodiversity in response to external forcing. We show that onsets of changes in biodiversity indicators (e.g. diatom composition, Pediastrum concentrations) lag changes in environmental records (e.g. loss-on-ignition) by a few decades, particularly at the Allerød/ Younger Dryas transition. Most biodiversity indicators showed transition times of 10–50 years, whereas environmental records typically showed a 50–100 year long transition. In some cases, transition times observed for the compositional turnover or productivity records were up to 185 years, which could have been the result of the combined effects of direct (e.g. climate) and indirect (e.g. lake stratification) drivers of ecosystem change. Our results show differences in timing and duration of biodiversity responses to external disturbances, suggesting that a multi-decadal view needs to be taken when designing effective conservation management of freshwater ecosystems under current global warming

'Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely': Serious Openings and Subversive Epigraphs in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

The American author, Thomas Pynchon, the focus of this paper, is famed, it could be argued, mostly for three things. The first is the extreme lengths of his novels and the bewildering numbers of characters and plotlines in said books. Gravity’s Rainbow, his 1973 work that remains unfinished by most who own a copy, contains over 400 characters for example. The second, and the point to which this paper is devoted, is the famous opening to that novel, which most readers do reach, the howl of the V-2 rocket that soars at supersonic speed above the landscape: “a screaming comes across the sky” it reads. The third is that this novel was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize but denied the prize at the last minute on the grounds of being “turgid, overwritten, and obscene”