55 research outputs found

    Ten Misconceptions from the History of Analysis and Their Debunking

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    The widespread idea that infinitesimals were "eliminated" by the "great triumvirate" of Cantor, Dedekind, and Weierstrass is refuted by an uninterrupted chain of work on infinitesimal-enriched number systems. The elimination claim is an oversimplification created by triumvirate followers, who tend to view the history of analysis as a pre-ordained march toward the radiant future of Weierstrassian epsilontics. In the present text, we document distortions of the history of analysis stemming from the triumvirate ideology of ontological minimalism, which identified the continuum with a single number system. Such anachronistic distortions characterize the received interpretation of Stevin, Leibniz, d'Alembert, Cauchy, and others.Comment: 46 pages, 4 figures; Foundations of Science (2012). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1108.2885 and arXiv:1110.545

    Computer training of attention and inhibition for youngsters with obesity : A pilot study

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    Obesity is a widespread problem that starts from an early age. Previous studies suggest that obese youngsters have an attentional bias and an automatic approach tendency towards high-calorie food and display difficulties inhibiting impulses, which may result in a higher intake of (high-calorie) food. An interesting idea for improvement of the current obesity treatment is adding a program that enables to train their difficulties. Subjects were 36 youngsters aged 9-15 years old from an inpatient treatment program for obesity, randomized over a training group and an active control group. The training consisted of six training sessions with cognitive tasks aimed at enhancing inhibition towards unhealthy food items (with a go/no-go task), as well as decreasing a food approach bias (using an approach/avoidance task) and a food attentional bias (using a dot-probe task). The current study evaluated the feasibility, acceptability and initial effectiveness of the training and explores if these characteristics helps obese youngsters to maintain weight-loss once they return home at the end of their inpatient treatment program. Results on the cognitive performances were investigated during two measurement sessions, spread over 5 weeks while weight evolution was followed over 13 weeks. Results showed that the training program was feasible and acceptable to the majority of participants and clinicians. Furthermore, the preliminary findings suggest that the training tasks used were ineffective in this group of obese children. Lessons learned and suggestions for future research are discussed

    TAXI at SemEval-2016 task 13: A taxonomy induction method based on lexico-syntactic patterns, substrings and focused crawling

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    We present a system for taxonomy construction that reached the first place in all subtasks of the SemEval 2016 challenge on Taxonomy Extraction Evaluation. Our simple yet effective approach harvests hypernyms with substring inclusion and Hearst-style lexicosyntactic patterns from domain-specific texts obtained via language model based focused crawling. Extracted taxonomies are evaluated on English, Dutch, French and Italian for three domains each (Food, Environment and Science). Evaluations against a gold standard and by human judgment show that our method outperforms more complex and knowledge-rich approaches on most domains and languages. Furthermore, to adapt the method to a new domain or language, only a small amount of manual labour is needed

    Subtyping youngsters with obesity : a theory-based cluster analysis

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    Psychological mechanisms play a crucial role in explaining weight gain. Aim of the present study was to identify subtypes in youngsters with obesity in line with these mechanisms. Defining homogeneous clusters within this heterogeneous group provides relevant information for personalized treatments. Data were collected in N = 572 participants (51% boys, aged 7-19) with extreme obesity (%BMI M = 187.8; SD = 30.9) recruited in an inpatient treatment centre. Based on psychological models of overweight/obesity, the Affect Regulation Model, the Reward Deficiency Model and The Dual Pathway Model, cluster variables were selected assessing emotional eating, reward reactivity and regulative capacities. Youngsters reported on emotional eating (DEBQ Emotional Eating) and reward sensitivity (BAS), while parents reported on children's regulative Executive Functions (BRIEF). Characteristics of the different clusters were examined concerning weight variables (pre and post treatment) and variables indexing problematic eating (DEBQ External Eating, ChEDE), affect regulation (FEEL-KJ) and depressive symptoms (CDI). Hierarchical cluster analyses supported the presence of three clusters, further evaluated by K-means cluster analyses. The cluster solutions differed according to age and sex (boys 7-13, boys 14-19, girls 7-13, girls 14-19). In all four age and gender subsamples, an "Emotional Eating" cluster displaying a vulnerable profile (high depression, maladaptive emotion regulation, problematic eating) and a "Reward Deficiency" cluster displaying a more resilient profile were detected. In girls 7-13, a "Weak Executive Functioning" indicative of insufficient self-regulative capacities, showed moderate to high emotional problems and problematic eating. In the other subgroups, the "Mean Level Functioning" cluster also showed elevated emotional problems and problematic eating. Given that different clusters can be identified, and given that these clusters have different profiles on emotional problems and problematic eating, subtyping youngsters with severe obesity is indicated, setting the stage for personalized treatments
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