4,509 research outputs found
Two Sorts of Natural Theology
Usually, natural theology is understood as the project of providing arguments for the existence of God. This project is endorsed by Moreland and Craig. McGrath, on the other hand, says that this project fails. In the first part of this article, I show how McGrath’s dismissal of arguments for the existence of God follows from his view of natural theology. In the second part, I argue that McGrath’s natural theology contains an accurate critique of Moreland and Craig’s way of doing natural theology, a critique that exposes two major problems in their treatment of the moral argument for the existence of God. In the third part, I propose a way of providing arguments for the existence of God that avoids the problems pointed out by McGrath, namely a way of arguing that seek to show how theology may improve a certain non-theistic understanding of a natural phenomenon
Distributional Robustness of K-class Estimators and the PULSE
Recently, in causal discovery, invariance properties such as the moment
criterion which two-stage least square estimator leverage have been exploited
for causal structure learning: e.g., in cases, where the causal parameter is
not identifiable, some structure of the non-zero components may be identified,
and coverage guarantees are available. Subsequently, anchor regression has been
proposed to trade-off invariance and predictability. The resulting estimator is
shown to have optimal predictive performance under bounded shift interventions.
In this paper, we show that the concepts of anchor regression and K-class
estimators are closely related. Establishing this connection comes with two
benefits: (1) It enables us to prove robustness properties for existing K-class
estimators when considering distributional shifts. And, (2), we propose a novel
estimator in instrumental variable settings by minimizing the mean squared
prediction error subject to the constraint that the estimator lies in an
asymptotically valid confidence region of the causal parameter. We call this
estimator PULSE (p-uncorrelated least squares estimator) and show that it can
be computed efficiently, even though the underlying optimization problem is
non-convex. We further prove that it is consistent. We perform simulation
experiments illustrating that there are several settings including weak
instrument settings, where PULSE outperforms other estimators and suffers from
less variability.Comment: 85 pages, 15 figure
The effect of perceived autonomy support from the coach and ego- and task-involvement upon ego and task environments in junior elite ice hockey
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The relationship between motivation, goal orientation, and perceived autonomy support from the coach in young Norwegian elite hockey players.
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Coloring Graphs with Forbidden Minors
Hadwiger's conjecture from 1943 states that for every integer , every
graph either can be -colored or has a subgraph that can be contracted to the
complete graph on vertices. As pointed out by Paul Seymour in his recent
survey on Hadwiger's conjecture, proving that graphs with no minor are
-colorable is the first case of Hadwiger's conjecture that is still open. It
is not known yet whether graphs with no minor are -colorable. Using a
Kempe-chain argument along with the fact that an induced path on three vertices
is dominating in a graph with independence number two, we first give a very
short and computer-free proof of a recent result of Albar and Gon\c{c}alves and
generalize it to the next step by showing that every graph with no minor
is -colorable, where . We then prove that graphs with no
minor are -colorable and graphs with no minor are
-colorable. Finally we prove that if Mader's bound for the extremal function
for minors is true, then every graph with no minor is
-colorable for all . This implies our first result. We believe
that the Kempe-chain method we have developed in this paper is of independent
interest
Self-determination theory as a possible explanation for the motivation of Norwegian outdoor life students
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Efficacy of new-generation antidepressants assessed with the Montgomery-Asberg depression rating scale, the gold standard clinician rating scale : a meta-analysis of randomised placebo-controlled trials
It has been claimed that efficacy estimates based on the Hamilton Depression Rating-Scale (HDRS) underestimate antidepressants true treatment effects due to the instrument's poor psychometric properties. The aim of this study is to compare efficacy estimates based on the HDRS with the gold standard procedure, the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating-Scale (MADRS)
How can autonomy support from a coach, basic psychological needs, and the psychological climate explain ego and task involvement?
The aim of this study was to consider the relationships among the autonomy support an athlete perceives from their coach, the three basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness), the psychological motivational climate of the team (a task or ego climate), and the athlete’s motivational orientation (ego or task involvement). No other studies have investigated this. My three hypotheses were as follows: autonomy support from a coach will have an impact on motivational involvement, all three basic needs will have an impact on motivational involvement, and motivational involvement will be explained by the motivational climate. A total of 175 elite male ice hockey players from Norway, ranging in age from 15 to 18 years old, answered questionnaires about autonomy support, perceived motivational climate, achievement goal orientation, and basic psychological needs. A multiple regression analysis was conducted to predict ego–task involvement using autonomy support from the coach, the need for autonomy, the need for competence, the need for relatedness, the task climate, and the ego climate. The only two variables that statistically significantly predicted ego–task involvement were the autonomy support from the coach (std. beta = 0.28, sign = 0.05) and the ego climate (std. beta = 0.34, sign = 0.01). The analysis revealed that the athletes had a higher score on task (M = 4.85) than ego (M = 3.34) involvement, but when these were transformed into two variables (high and low) for task and ego involvement, we found that most players scored high for both task and ego involvement. We found that autonomy support from the coach had a positive relationship with a high score for players on both task and ego involvement. We also found that the three basic psychological needs had no impact on the motivational involvement of the athletes. Lastly, we found that the ego climate had an impact on motivational involvement. There was a positive relationship between a high score for the ego climate and a high score for both ego and task involvement.publishedVersio
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