4,358 research outputs found

    HIT and brain reward function: a case of mistaken identity (theory)

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    This paper employs a case study from the history of neuroscience—brain reward function—to scrutinize the inductive argument for the so-called ‘Heuristic Identity Theory’ (HIT). The case fails to support HIT, illustrating why other case studies previously thought to provide empirical support for HIT also fold under scrutiny. After distinguishing two different ways of understanding the types of identity claims presupposed by HIT and considering other conceptual problems, we conclude that HIT is not an alternative to the traditional identity theory so much as a relabeling of previously discussed strategies for mechanistic discovery

    An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

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    How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

    Against Monetary Functionalism: a Social Ontology of Money

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    This paper explores the concepts of individualism and holism in social ontology through an analysis of the ontology of money by integrating insights from the Critical Realist tradition as well as the distinction between metaphysical grounds and anchors. In doing so it examines alternative explanations of money\u27s ontology like the paradigmatic approach of John Searle. The results of the inquiry are then connected in relation to the models of social explanation in mainstream economics

    Mathematical Formula Recognition and Automatic Detection and Translation of Algorithmic Components into Stochastic Petri Nets in Scientific Documents

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    A great percentage of documents in scientific and engineering disciplines include mathematical formulas and/or algorithms. Exploring the mathematical formulas in the technical documents, we focused on the mathematical operations associations, their syntactical correctness, and the association of these components into attributed graphs and Stochastic Petri Nets (SPN). We also introduce a formal language to generate mathematical formulas and evaluate their syntactical correctness. The main contribution of this work focuses on the automatic segmentation of mathematical documents for the parsing and analysis of detected algorithmic components. To achieve this, we present a synergy of methods, such as string parsing according to mathematical rules, Formal Language Modeling, optical analysis of technical documents in forms of images, structural analysis of text in images, and graph and Stochastic Petri Net mapping. Finally, for the recognition of the algorithms, we enriched our rule based model with machine learning techniques to acquire better results

    Investigation into the acupuncture and meridian system

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    The Meridian system conceived by the ancient Chinese has been described and referenced for more than a thousand years. The Meridians meaning paths are the main trunks that run longitudinally within the body. The Meridian system consists of about 400 acupuncture nodes and 20 Meridian channels connecting most of these points. It deals with the routing and distribution of certain signals that may affect physiological functions. It integrates meridians, tissues and organs into a complex system. Initially, modeling of the acupuncture system is investigated. The physical effect of injecting an acupuncture needle at a node is suggested by an equivalent model of a current (voltage) source based on a simple Faraday disk generator concept. The motion of the needle due to hand manipulation in the presence of Earth\u27s magnetic fields acts as a Faraday\u27s dynamo and causes accumulation of positive (negative) charges at the tip of the needle. Due to clockwise (counter clockwise) rotation, further increase of accumulated charges at the tip results in their release in the form of an equivalent current (voltage) source. This effect has been enhanced by connecting a variable frequency source on a needle inserted into one of the nodes of the meridian system. Voltage variations at the adjacent nodes along the same meridian are measured and the relative connectivity has been observed to verify the concept of a network. It is observed that the induced voltages are proportional to the corresponding path lengths, and further more, the existence paths are found to be frequency dependent. An equivalent transmission line model is suggested. The presence of minute electrical currents also suggests that there is magnetic field along the meridian and therefore the inclusion of series inductance is appropriate. This has already been confirmed by SQUID measurements carried out and reported by [Lo 2003]. The presence of the inductive (resistive) path suggests that capacitive effects due to accompanying electric fields have to be included as shunt capacitance in the equivalent model. It shows that distributed resistance and inductance plus the shunt capacitance perfectly simulate the equivalent transmission line that is essential for signal propagation along the meridians of the acupuncture system. Measurements carried out indicate the presence of lossy resistive paths along the meridian consisting of three nodes. This has been carried out in an acupuncture clinic and two human subjects are subjected to testing on three different occasions. Sinusoidal signals in the frequency range between 20 to 80 Hz are used with different amplitudes, and strengths of propagated signals are measured to verify the existence of the electrical transmission path along that meridian. Additional hypothesis is made suggesting that the cluster water wire can be used to model the pathways of the acupuncture system. One of the reasons for this approach is that cluster water wires are ideal to model tiny nano-size capillaries. They may be present but their presences have not been verified yet physically, even through the SQUID measurements confirm the flow of minute currents along the acupuncture meridians. Petri net formulation has been developed as an attractive alternative to model bionetwork consisting of acupuncture nodes and meridians. However, validating this assumption requires an extensive measurement to be carried out, which is beyond the currently available capabilities and resources. Future work includes much more accurate modeling of pathways and nodes on each meridian, their coupling with each other. Further frequency dependent system identification in terms of equivalent parameters and their coupling behavior in the complex network, i.e., Petri net formation is required to solve the unexplained acupuncture meridian system. The presence of 20 meridians involving more than 400 nodes suggests that the acupuncture system is ideal to model a biological network

    Document similarity

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    In recent years, development of tools and methods for measuring document similarity has become a thriving field in informatics, computer science, and digital humanities. Historically, questions of document similarity have been (and still are) important or even crucial in a large variety of situations. Typically, similarity is judged by criteria which depend on context. The move from traditional to digital text technology has not only provided new possibilities for discovery and measurement of document similarity, it has also posed new challenges. Some of these challenges are technical, others conceptual. This paper argues that a particular, well-established, traditional way of starting with an arbitrary document and constructing a document similar to it, namely transcription, may fruitfully be brought to bear on questions concerning similarity criteria for digital documents. Some simple similarity measures are presented and their application to marked up documents are discussed. We conclude that when documents are encoded in the same vocabulary, n-grams constructed to include markup can be used to recognize structural similarities between documents.publishedVersio

    Residual acceleration data on IML-1: Development of a data reduction and dissemination plan

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    The research performed consisted of three stages: (1) identification of sensitive IML-1 experiments and sensitivity ranges by order of magnitude estimates, numerical modeling, and investigator input; (2) research and development towards reduction, supplementation, and dissemination of residual acceleration data; and (3) implementation of the plan on existing acceleration databases

    Knowledge Expansion of a Statistical Machine Translation System using Morphological Resources

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    Translation capability of a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT) system mostly depends on parallel data and phrases that are not present in the training data are not correctly translated. This paper describes a method that efficiently expands the existing knowledge of a PBSMT system without adding more parallel data but using external morphological resources. A set of new phrase associations is added to translation and reordering models; each of them corresponds to a morphological variation of the source/target/both phrases of an existing association. New associations are generated using a string similarity score based on morphosyntactic information. We tested our approach on En-Fr and Fr-En translations and results showed improvements of the performance in terms of automatic scores (BLEU and Meteor) and reduction of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. We believe that our knowledge expansion framework is generic and could be used to add different types of information to the model.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

    Modeling video art. Bergsonian approach

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