Actions Are Not Events: An Ontological Objection to the Causal Theory of Action

One of the central puzzles in the philosophy of action is how to provide a coherent account of agency within a wholly natural worldview. More specifically, the challenge is to explain how a person’s performing actions – the essential means by which she gets things done – could be a part of the natural order. In contemporary philosophy, a prominent and perhaps the most influential answer to this challenge is the so-called “causal theory of action” (henceforth, the CTA). Proponents of the CTA believe that what makes it the case that behavioral events are actions is that they are caused by the person’s prior mental events or states (e.g., desire-belief pairs, or intentions), and, in addition, that the prior mental causes constitute her reasons for the action in question. The CTA is an event-causal theory of action that attempts to understand human agency in terms of event-causality and treat human actions as particular events in the network of event causation.In this dissertation, I raised an ontological objection to the CTA that actions are not events. Since actions are not events, any attempt to account for the notion of action by appealing to how actions enter into the event-causal relations necessarily fails. The ontological objection consists in three separate arguments sharing the same spirit, each of which gives the same conclusion: actions are not events. Near the end of the dissertation, I anticipate and reject a Davidsonian response that appears to neutralize the force of my ontological objection. The response is that the difference between followers of the CTA and me is just another manifestation of the perennial dispute between nominalists and realists. I argue it is not. I close the dissertation by briefly explaining what a non-causal account of agency might look like

Neural System Combination for Machine Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) becomes a new approach to machine translation and generates much more fluent results compared to statistical machine translation (SMT). However, SMT is usually better than NMT in translation adequacy. It is therefore a promising direction to combine the advantages of both NMT and SMT. In this paper, we propose a neural system combination framework leveraging multi-source NMT, which takes as input the outputs of NMT and SMT systems and produces the final translation. Extensive experiments on the Chinese-to-English translation task show that our model archives significant improvement by 5.3 BLEU points over the best single system output and 3.4 BLEU points over the state-of-the-art traditional system combination methods.Comment: Accepted as a short paper by ACL-201

Numerical characterization of the hard Lefschetz classes of dimension two

We study the numerical characterization of two dimensional hard Lefschetz classes given by the complete intersections of nef classes. In Shenfeld and van Handel's breakthrough work on the characterization of the extremals of the Alexandrov-Fenchel inequality for convex polytopes, they proposed an open question on the algebraic analogue of the characterization. By taking further inspiration from our previous work with Shang on hard Lefschetz theorems for free line bundles, we formulate and refine the conjectural picture more precisely and settle the open question when the collection of nef classes is given by a rearrangement of supercriticality, which in particular includes the big nef collection as a special case. The main results enable us to refine some previous results and study the extremals of Hodge index inequality, and more importantly provide the first series of examples of hard Lefschetz classes of dimension two both in algebraic geometry and analytic geometry, in which one can allow nontrivial augmented base locus and thus drop the semi-ampleness or semi-positivity assumption. As a key ingredient of the numerical characterization, we establish a local Hodge index inequality for Lorentzian polynomials, which is the algebraic analogue of the local Alexandrov-Fenchel inequality obtained by Shenfeld-van Handel for convex polytopes. This result holds in broad contexts, e.g., it holds on a smooth projective variety, on a compact K\"ahler manifold and on a Lorentzian fan, which contains the Bergman fan of a matroid or polymatroid as a typical example.Comment: 37 pages; comments welcome! arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2011.04059 by other author

Hard Lefschetz properties, complete intersections and numerical dimensions

We study the positivity of complete intersections of nef classes. We first give a sufficient and necessary characterization on the complete intersection classes which have hard Lefschetz property on a compact complex torus, equivalently, in the linear case. In turn, this provides us new kinds of cohomology classes which have Hodge-Riemann property or hard Lefschetz property on an arbitrary compact K\"ahler manifold. We also give a complete characterization on when the complete intersection classes are non-vanishing on an arbitrary compact K\"ahler manifold. Both characterizations are given by the numerical dimensions of various partial summations of the given nef classes. As an interesting byproduct, we show that the numerical dimension endows any finite set of nef classes with a loopless polymatroid structure.Comment: comments welcome

Intersection theoretic inequalities via Lorentzian polynomials

We explore the applications of Lorentzian polynomials to the fields of algebraic geometry, analytic geometry and convex geometry. In particular, we establish a series of intersection theoretic inequalities, which we call rKT property, with respect to $m$-positive classes and Schur classes. We also study its convexity variants -- the geometric inequalities for $m$-convex functions on the sphere and convex bodies. Along the exploration, we prove that any finite subset on the closure of the cone generated by $m$-positive classes can be endowed with a polymatroid structure by a canonical numerical-dimension type function, extending our previous result for nef classes; and we prove Alexandrov-Fenchel inequalities for valuations of Schur type. We also establish various analogs of sumset estimates (Pl\"{u}nnecke-Ruzsa inequalities) from additive combinatorics in our contexts.Comment: 27 pages; comments welcome

Hard Lefschetz theorems for free line bundles

We introduce a partial positivity notion for algebraic maps via the defect of semismallness. This positivity notion is modeled on $m$-positivity in the analytic setting and $m$-ampleness in the geometric setting. Using this positivity condition for algebraic maps, we establish K\"ahler packages, that is, Hard Lefschetz theorems and Hodge-Riemann bilinear relations, for the complete intersections of Chern classes of free line bundles.Comment: 14 pages; comments welcome

Role of Defects on the Particle Size-Capacitance Relationship of Zn-Co Mixed Metal Oxide Supported on Heteroatom-Doped Graphenes as Supercapacitors

[EN] Supercapacitors are considered among the most promising electrical energy storage devices, there being a need to achieve the highest possible energy storage density. Herein small mixed Zn-Co metal oxide nanoparticles are grown on doped graphene (O-, N- and, B-doped graphenes). The electrochemical properties of the resulting mixed Zn-Co metal oxide nanoparticles (4 nm) grown on B-doped graphene exhibit an outstanding specific capacitance of 2568 F g-1 at 2 A g-1 , ranking this B-doped graphene composite among the best performing electrodes. The energy storage capacity is also remarkable even at large current densities (i.e., 640 F g-1 at 40 A g-1 ). In contrast, larger nanoparticles are obtained using N- and O-doped graphenes as support, the resulting materials exhibiting lower performance. Besides energy storage, the Zn-Co oxide on B-doped graphene shows notable electrochemical performance and stability obtaining a maximum energy density of 77.6 W h Kg-1 at 850 W Kg-1 , a power density of 8500 W Kg-1 at 28.3 W h Kg-1 , and a capacitance retention higher than 85% after 5000 cycles. The smaller nanoparticle size and improved electrochemical performance on B-doped graphene-based devices are attributed to the higher defect density and nature of the dopant element on graphene.The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the "MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/, the FEDER funds (PDI2021-126071-OB-C21)", the Generalitat Valenciana (Prometeo 2021-038), and the European Union project H2020-LC-CS3-2020-RES-RIA "Eco2Fuel"(grant agreement 101006701). J.H. thanks the Chinese Scholarship Council for doctoral fellowship.Hu, HJ.; Peng, Y.; Albero-Sancho, J.; García Gómez, H. (2022). Role of Defects on the Particle Size-Capacitance Relationship of Zn-Co Mixed Metal Oxide Supported on Heteroatom-Doped Graphenes as Supercapacitors. Advanced Science. 9(34):1-11. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.20220431611193

Long-term finance provision: National development banks vs commercial banks

Despite its practical significance in promoting long-term economic growth, long-term finance is often in short supply, especially in developing countries. Governments in both developed and developing countries have established national development banks (NDBs) to provide much-needed long-term loans. We have built the first database on NDBs worldwide to systematically examine whether NDBs lend longer than commercial banks in deciding the maturity of their loans. We find that long-term loans constitute a larger proportion of the total loan portfolio in NDBs than that in commercial banks in general and privately owned commercial banks in particular. This result is statistically significant after controlling for country- and bank-level factors. Our study contributes to the literature on loan maturity because we are the first to use a comprehensive panel data to systematically examine whether NDBs—an understudied but important financial intermediary—play a maturity-lengthening role in filling the financing gap.Fil: Hu, Bo. Peking University; ChinaFil: Schclarek Curutchet, Alfredo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba; ArgentinaFil: Xu, Jiajun. Peking University; ChinaFil: Yan, Jianye. China Agricultural University; Chin