Another gun dismantled : ABSCISIC ACID INSENSITIVE4 is not a target of retrograde signaling

Article Commentary: News and Views.Peer reviewe

How do we approach intrinsic motivation computationally? : a commentary on: What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches. by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Frederic Kaplan

What is the energy function guiding behavior and learningµ Representationbased approaches like maximum entropy, generative models, sparse coding, or slowness principles can account for unsupervised learning of biologically observed structure in sensory systems from raw sensory data. However, they do not relate to behavior. Behavior-based approaches like reinforcement learning explain animal behavior in well-described situations. However, they rely on high-level representations which they cannot extract from raw sensory data. Combinations of multiple goal functions seems the methodology of choice to understand the complexity of the brain. But what is the set of possible goals. ..

STATE AIDS AND ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS FROM THE EUROPEAN UNION PERSPECTIVE

Forbidden by the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (EEC Treaty), but permitted in exceptional cases, State aids are constantly under the “eye” of the European executive as regards the granting mechanisms, as well as concerning its monitoring. In order to undertake a more efficient control of State aids, the European Commission has adopted a new Block Exemption Regulation which came into force in 20 days from its publication in the EU Official Journal, respectively on 29th of August 2008. In this article I shall present certain aspects of the new normative act.State aid, exemption, notification, control, EU, competitiveness

Communities need journals

ARTICLE COMMENTARY What has changed for the scholarly journal over 350 years? What has remained the same? Many of our modern concerns, including the engagement of wider publics and the challenge to our academic conceptions of expertise, are not at all new, and many of the same issues were discussed at length in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are also moments of stark discontinuity. In the nineteenth century, dictionaries were published as periodicals; papers read at Royal Society meetings were refereed, but authors could normally make only ‘verbal’ (and not intellectual) changes to the text in response; the science writing of chemistry and physics was once categorized in the pages of some journals alongside poetry under the heading of ‘literature’

Article Commentary on "Microdosimetric and radiobiological effects of gold nanoparticles at therapeutic radiation energies" [T.M. Gray et al., IJRB 2023, 99(2), 308-317]

In the recently published article by T.M. Gray et al. "Microdosimetric and radiobiological effects of gold nanoparticles at therapeutic radiation energies" (IJRB 2023, 99(2), 308-317) results of Monte Carlo simulations and radiobiological assays on the dosimetric effects of gold nanoparticles were presented. This commentary points out that the results of the two parts of the study are in contradiction and that the predicted magnitude of dose enhancement and its dependence on the shape of the nanoparticle appear implausible. Possible reasons for these observations are discussed.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to IJR

The Amending Clause in the New York Constitution and Conventionphobia

The amending clause is the nineteenth of the New York State Constitution’s twenty articles. Followed only by the enacting clause, for all intents and purposes this is the document’s final word. Well, maybe not the final word. An alternative is to think of this amending clause as a part of an ongoing several-centuries-long conversation. The clause is a message from one past group of designers and drafters of New York’s governing system, the 1846 Constitutional Convention majority, to all of us who gave them the charge to “secure [for us] the blessings of freedom,” that is to “we the people” of New York