26 research outputs found

    Volume XCIII, Number 24, May 17, 1974

    Get PDF

    Modeling multiple time units delayed gene regulatory network using dynamic Bayesian network.

    Get PDF

    Pattern formation in the amphibian retinotectal system

    Get PDF

    The lexeme in descriptive and theoretical morphology

    Get PDF
    After being dominant during about a century since its invention by Baudouin de Courtenay at the end of the nineteenth century, morpheme is more and more replaced by lexeme in contemporary descriptive and theoretical morphology. The notion of a lexeme is usually associated with the work of P. H. Matthews (1972, 1974), who characterizes it as a lexical entity abstracting over individual inflected words. Over the last three decades, the lexeme has become a cornerstone of much work in both inflectional morphology and word formation (or, as it is increasingly been called, lexeme formation). The papers in the present volume take stock of the descriptive and theoretical usefulness of the lexeme, but also adress many of the challenges met by classical lexeme-based theories of morphology

    Branching processes with biological applications

    Get PDF
    Branching processes play an important role in models of genetics, molecular biology, microbiology, ecology and evolutionary theory. This thesis explores three aspects of branching processes with biological applications. The first part of the thesis focuses on fluctuation analysis, with the main purpose to estimate mutation rates in microbial populations. We propose a novel estimator of mutation rates, and apply it to a number of Luria-Delbruck type fluctuation experiments in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Second, we study the extinction of Markov branching processes, and derived theorems for the path to extinction in the critical case, as an extension to Jagers' theory. The third part of the thesis introduces infinite-allele Markov branching processes. As an important non-trivial example, the limiting frequency spectrum for the birth-death process has been derived. Potential application of modeling the proliferation and mutation of human Alu sequences is also discussed

    Mind as Machine: Can Computational Processes Be Regarded As Explanatory of Mental Processes?

    No full text
    The aim of the thesis is to evaluate recent work in artificial intelligence (AI). It is argued that such evaluation can be philosophically interesting, and examples are given of areas of the philosophy of AI where insufficient concentration on the actual results of AI has led to missed opportunities for the two disciplines — philosophy and AI — to benefit from cross-fertilization. The particular topic of the thesis is the use of AI techniques in psychological explanation. The claim is that such techniques can be of value in psychology, and the strategy of proof is to exhibit an area where this is the case. The field of model-based knowledge-based system (KBS) development is outlined; a type of model called a conceptual model will be shown to be psychologically explanatory of the expertise that it models. A group of major philosophies of explanation are examined, and it is discovered that such philosophies are too restrictive and prescriptive to be of much value in evaluating many areas of science; they fail to apply to scientific explanation generally. The importance of having sympathetic yardsticks for the evaluation of explanatory practices in arbitrary fields is defended, and a series of such yardsticks is suggested. The practice of providing information processing models in psychology is discussed. A particular type of model, a psychological competence model, is defined, and its use in psychological explanation defended. It is then shown that conceptual models used in model-based KBS development are psychological competence models. It follows therefore that such models are explanatory of the expertise they model. Furthermore, since KBSs developed using conceptual models share many structural characteristics with their conceptual models, it follows that a limited class of those systems are also explanatory of expertise. This constitutes an existence proof that computational processes can be explanatory of mental processes

    From Jeu DEsprit to Exact Science: Speculation, Science, and Literary Expression in the US, 1870-1895

    Get PDF
    From Jeu D’Esprit to Exact Science: Speculation, Science, and Literary Expression in the US, 1870-1895 argues that as the nineteenth century closes, speculative prerogatives become practically forbidden as a motive for scientific inquiry, yet more common in literary writing and other imaginative extrapolations. Linking this development to two metascientific concepts, gradualism and descriptionism, which come to fruition in the second half of the century, I explore how a variety of texts, including novels, short stories, editorials, and scientific reports of the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, advance and confront these concepts. The introduction establishes 1870-1895 as a period of diverse definitions, prerogatives, and print mediations of science. Each subsequent chapter examines an element of this cacophony. Chapter two, “Speculation, Extraction, and Polytechnical Education in The Gilded Age,” reads Twain and Warner’s The Gilded Age as a critique arising from the gold and silver rushes of the 1850s and 60s in which the authors recommend organized, professional, systemic science over haphazard prospecting activity. Chapter three, “Demarcation Problems: Speculation, Extrapolation, and Pseudo/science in the Works of Ignatius Donnelly,” argues Donnelly’s pseudoscientific writing on broadly geological topics urges his readers to reimagine humanity’s place in the universe. Moving from her earliest writing to her superlative treatment of the individual as document in A Country Doctor, chapter four, “The Value of an Individual: Sarah Orne Jewett as Statistician,” suggests that Jewett’s regionalist fiction responds to statistically-driven social science by doing another kind of statistical description, rather than rejecting statistics outright. Finally, in chapter five, “‘Speculation Has Exhausted Itself’: Iola Leroy, Social Con/science, and Racial Uplift,” I contrast the sentimentalism of Francis Ellen Watkins Harper’s historical romance, Iola Leroy, to ethnologies by Alexander Crummell, William Wells Brown, and George Washington Williams. I argue that Harper’s narrative envisions a Christian humanism that champions affective certitude over propositional scientific truth, making individual experience the arbiter of sociological description rather than the other way around

    Annual Report

    Get PDF
    corecore