An empirical investigation of intuitions about uptake

Since Austin’s introduction of the locutionary-illocutionary-perlocutionary distinction, it has been a matter of debate within speech act theory whether illocutionary acts like promising, warning, refusing and telling require audience ‘uptake’ in order to be performed. Philosophers on different sides of this debate have tried to support their positions by appealing to hypothetical scenarios, designed to elicit intuitive judgements about the role of uptake. However, philosophers’ intuitions appeared to remain deadlocked, while laypeople’s intuitions have not yet been probed. To begin rectifying that, we ran two experiments probing lay intuitions about the implications of uptake failure. Overall, we found that participants’ responses were skewed towards agreement that speech acts were performed, despite the lack of uptake. There were, however, significant differences across the four different speech act types we investigated (with the highest levels of agreement found for refusing, followed by warning, then telling, and finally promising). We also obtained evidence of complex effects relating to the (high or low) stakes involved in the scenarios. While this study only represents an initial exploration of intuitions about uptake, our results form a basis for further research into their nature and significance, across a range of speech acts, scenarios, and experimental designs

Experimental Testing of Door Panel Boundary Conditions to Determine NVH Variability

The variability of measured frequency response functions (FRFs) from nominally identical structures is a well-known phenomenon and trying to eradicate it increases the design challenge for automotive manufacturers. In this paper a vehicle door is experimentally tested in order to assess the effect of variability in the attachment boundary conditions between the door structure and trim components upon measured FRF data. Plastic clips can be used to hold the trim to the door panel, so individual clips were systematically removed and then replaced in order to generate a set of measured FRFs that demonstrate how individual property changes can influence the global structure. Point and transfer FRFs, with corresponding normalised standard deviations, were measured by exciting the door panel and measuring the response both on the door panel and on the attached trim. The door response was found to vary by up to 10% over all clip combinations, and this is compared to the test variability. A newly developed function that predicts the FRF variability due to measurement test error was also applied. The results of this prediction match closely with the normalised standard deviation calculated from repeat FRF measurements taken on the structure. This will therefore enable test-to-test variability to be separated from structure-to-structure variabilit

A study of vehicle and measurement NVH variability

A range of nominally identical automotive vehicles have been tested for NVH variability by exciting the engine mount with an impact hammer and measuring the responses at different points on the vehicle. Normalised standard deviations were calculated from the mobility, which fell well within the boundaries of previous comparable measurements. The measurement variability was determined by taking repeat measurements on a single vehicle, which were found to be very repeatable, varying by up to 2.9%. A function that uses the coherence to determine the random error was applied to the data to determine the variability due to the measurement taking process. This was compared with repeat measurements taken on a single vehicle and was shown to agree well with one another. A design of experiments has also been created that determines the effect of each variable such as the temperature and angle of impact on the overall vehicle to vehicle variability

Quantum dimer models and exotic orders

We discuss how quantum dimer models may be used to provide "proofs of principle" for the existence of exotic magnetic phases in quantum spin systems.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. Contributed talk at the PITP-Les Houches Summer School on "Quantum Magnetism", June 200

Phase transition and hyperscaling violation for scalar Black Branes

We investigate the thermodynamical behavior and the scaling symmetries of the scalar dressed black brane (BB) solutions of a recently proposed, exactly integrable Einstein-scalar gravity model [1], which also arises as compactification of (p-1)-branes with a smeared charge. The extremal, zero temperature, solution is a scalar soliton interpolating between a conformal invariant AdS vacuum in the near-horizon region and a scale covariant metric (generating hyperscaling violation on the boundary field theory) asymptotically. We show explicitly that for the boundary field theory this implies the emergence of an UV length scale (related to the size of the brane), which decouples in the IR, where conformal invariance is restored. We also show that at high temperatures the system undergoes a phase transition. Whereas at small temperature the Schwarzschild-AdS BB is stable, above a critical temperature the scale covariant, scalar-dressed BB solution, becomes energetically preferred. We calculate the critical exponent z and the hyperscaling violation parameter of the scalar-dressed phase. In particular we show that the hyperscaling violation parameter is always negative. We also show that the above features are not a peculiarity of the exact integrable model of Ref.[1], but are a quite generic feature of Einstein-scalar and Einstein-Maxwell-scalar gravity models for which the squared-mass of the scalar field is positive and the potential vanishes exponentially as the scalar field goes to minus infinity.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures. In the revised version it has been pointed out that the Einstein-scalar gravity model considered in the paper also arises as compactification of black p-branes with smeared charge

Aspects of holography for theories with hyperscaling violation

We analyze various aspects of the recently proposed holographic theories with general dynamical critical exponent z and hyperscaling violation exponent $\theta$. We first find the basic constraints on $z, \theta$ from the gravity side, and compute the stress-energy tensor expectation values and scalar two-point functions. Massive correlators exhibit a nontrivial exponential behavior at long distances, controlled by $\theta$. At short distance, the two-point functions become power-law, with a universal form for $\theta > 0$. Next, the calculation of the holographic entanglement entropy reveals the existence of novel phases which violate the area law. The entropy in these phases has a behavior that interpolates between that of a Fermi surface and that exhibited by systems with extensive entanglement entropy. Finally, we describe microscopic embeddings of some $\theta \neq 0$ metrics into full string theory models -- these metrics characterize large regions of the parameter space of Dp-brane metrics for $p\neq 3$. For instance, the theory of N D2-branes in IIA supergravity has z=1 and $\theta = -1/3$ over a wide range of scales, at large $g_s N$.Comment: 35 pages; v2: new references added; v3: proper reference [14] added; v4: minor clarification

The accommodative ciliary muscle function is preserved in older humans

Presbyopia, the loss of the eye’s accommodation capability, affects all humans aged above 45–50 years old. The two main reasons for this to happen are a hardening of the crystalline lens and a reduction of the ciliary muscle functionality with age. While there seems to be at least some partial accommodating functionality of the ciliary muscle at early presbyopic ages, it is not yet clear whether the muscle is still active at more advanced ages. Previous techniques used to visualize the accommodation mechanism of the ciliary muscle are complicated to apply in the older subjects, as they typically require fixation stability during long measurement times and/or to have an ultrasound probe directly in contact with the eye. Instead, we used our own developed method based on high-speed recording of lens wobbling to study the ciliary muscle activity in a small group of pseudophakic subjects (around 80 years old). There was a significant activity of the muscle, clearly able to contract under binocular stimulation of accommodation. This supports a purely lenticular-based theory of presbyopia and it might stimulate the search for new solutions to presbyopia by making use of the remaining contraction force still presented in the aging eye

Toward High-Precision Measures of Large-Scale Structure

I review some results of estimation of the power spectrum of density fluctuations from galaxy redshift surveys and discuss advances that may be possible with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I then examine the realities of power spectrum estimation in the presence of Galactic extinction, photometric errors, galaxy evolution, clustering evolution, and uncertainty about the background cosmology.Comment: 24 pages, including 11 postscript figures. Uses crckapb.sty (included in submission). To appear in ``Ringberg Workshop on Large-Scale Structure,'' ed D. Hamilton (Kluwer, Amsterdam), p. 39

Dynamics on expanding spaces: modeling the emergence of novelties

Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individuals, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process, come up with something that is not only new to us, but to our entire society so that what is a personal novelty can turn into an innovation at a global level. Innovations occur throughout social, biological and technological systems and, though we perceive them as a very natural ingredient of our human experience, little is known about the processes determining their emergence. Still the statistical occurrence of innovations shows striking regularities that represent a starting point to get a deeper insight in the whole phenomenology. This paper represents a small step in that direction, focusing on reviewing the scientific attempts to effectively model the emergence of the new and its regularities, with an emphasis on more recent contributions: from the plain Simon's model tracing back to the 1950s, to the newest model of Polya's urn with triggering of one novelty by another. What seems to be key in the successful modelling schemes proposed so far is the idea of looking at evolution as a path in a complex space, physical, conceptual, biological, technological, whose structure and topology get continuously reshaped and expanded by the occurrence of the new. Mathematically it is very interesting to look at the consequences of the interplay between the "actual" and the "possible" and this is the aim of this short review.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figure

Polarization of coalitions in an agent-based model of political discourse

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors in a policy domain. This article explains the formation of polarized advocacy or discourse coalitions in this complex phenomenon by presenting a dynamic, stochastic, and discrete agent-based model based on graph theory and local optimization. In a series of thought experiments, actors compute their utility of contributing a specific statement to the discourse by following ideological criteria, preferential attachment, agenda-setting strategies, governmental coherence, or other mechanisms. The evolving macro-level discourse is represented as a dynamic network and evaluated against arguments from the literature on the policy process. A simple combination of four theoretical mechanisms is already able to produce artificial policy debates with theoretically plausible properties. Any sufficiently realistic configuration must entail innovative and path-dependent elements as well as a blend of exogenous preferences and endogenous opinion formation mechanisms