Some Origins of Singularity of thought and Social Conformity

Louis Althusser suggested eight forms of ideology which comprise the Ideological State Apparatuses ISA According to Althusser these ISA s manage hegemony without the need for the state repressive force This original effort suggests that in the wake of massive historical and social change two additional ideologies must be added to Althusser concepts a the Mass Culture Ideology and b Technological Nihilism Indeed both ideologies operate in tandem with each other resulting in the singularity of thought social conformity and hegemon

Unbiased likelihood-free inference of the Hubble constant from light standard sirens

Multimessenger observations of binary neutron star mergers offer a promising path toward resolution of the Hubble constant ( H 0 ) tension, provided their constraints are shown to be free from systematics such as the Malmquist bias. In the traditional Bayesian framework, accounting for selection effects in the likelihood requires calculation of the expected number (or fraction) of detections as a function of the parameters describing the population and cosmology; a potentially costly and/or inaccurate process. This calculation can, however, be bypassed completely by performing the inference in a framework in which the likelihood is never explicitly calculated, but instead fit using forward simulations of the data, which naturally include the selection. This is likelihood-free inference (LFI). Here, we use density-estimation LFI, coupled to neural-network-based data compression, to infer H 0 from mock catalogues of binary neutron star mergers, given noisy redshift, distance and peculiar velocity estimates for each object. We demonstrate that LFI yields statistically unbiased estimates of H 0 in the presence of selection effects, with precision matching that of sampling the full Bayesian hierarchical model. Marginalizing over the bias increases the H 0 uncertainty by only 6% for training sets consisting of O ( 10 4 ) populations. The resulting LFI framework is applicable to population-level inference problems with selection effects across astrophysics

The Crab pulsar light curve in the soft gamma ray range: FIGARO II results

The FIGARO II experiment (a large area, balloon borne, crystal scintillator detector working from 0.15 to 4.3 MeV) observed the Crab pulsar on 1990 Jul. 9 for about seven hours. The study of the pulse profile confirms some structures detected with a low significance during the shorter observation of 1986, and adds new important elements to the picture. In particular, between the two main peaks, two secondary peaks appear centered at phase values 0.1 and 0.3, in the energy range 0.38 to 0.49 MeV; in the same energy range, a spectral feature at 0.44 MeV, interpreted as a redshifted positron annihilation line, was observed during the same balloon flight in the phase interval including the second main peak and the neighboring secondary peak. If the phase interval considered is extended to include also the other secondary peak, the significance of the spectral line appears to increase

Negative Equity and Foreclosure: Theory and Evidence

Millions of Americans have negative housing equity, meaning that the outstanding balance on their mortgage exceeds their home's current market value. Our data show that the overwhelming majority of these households will not lose their homes. Our finding is consistent with historical evidence: we examine more than 100,000 homeowners in Massachusetts who had negative equity during the early 1990s and find that fewer than 10 percent of these owners eventually lost their home to foreclosure. This result is also, contrary to popular belief, completely consistent with economic theory, which predicts that from the borrower's perspective, negative equity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for foreclosure. Our findings imply that lenders and policymakers face a serious information problem in trying to help borrowers with negative equity, because it is difficult to determine which borrowers actually require help in order to prevent the loss of their homes to foreclosure

Subgroup deliberation and voting

We consider three mechanisms for the aggregation of information in heterogeneous committees voting by Unanimity rule: Private Voting and voting preceded by either Plenary or Subgroup Deliberation. While the first deliberation protocol imposes public communication, the second restricts communication to homogeneous subgroups. We find that both protocols allow to Pareto improve on outcomes achieved under private voting. Furthermore, we find that when focusing on simple equilibria under Plenary Deliberation, Subgroup Deliberation Pareto improves on outcomes achieved under Plenary Deliberation