Letter processing and font information during reading: beyond distinctiveness, where vision meets design

Letter identification is a critical front end of the reading process. In general, conceptualizations of the identification process have emphasized arbitrary sets of distinctive features. However, a richer view of letter processing incorporates principles from the field of type design, including an emphasis on uniformities across letters within a font. The importance of uniformities is supported by a small body of research indicating that consistency of font increases letter identification efficiency. We review design concepts and the relevant literature, with the goal of stimulating further thinking about letter processing during reading

Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy Methods for the Analysis of Nanoparticles

Here we review the scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) characterization technique and STEM imaging methods. We describe applications of STEM for studying inorganic nanoparticles, and other uses of STEM in biological and health sciences and discuss how to interpret STEM results. The STEM imaging mode has certain benefits compared with the broad-beam illumination mode; the main advantage is the collection of the information about the specimen using a high angular annular dark field (HAADF) detector, in which the images registered have different levels of contrast related to the chemical composition of the sample. Another advantage of its use in the analysis of biological samples is its contrast for thick stained sections, since HAADF images of samples with thickness of 100–120 nm have notoriously better contrast than those obtained by other techniques. Combining the HAADF-STEM imaging with the new aberration correction era, the STEM technique reaches a direct way to imaging the atomistic structure and composition of nanostructures at a sub-angstrom resolution. Thus, alloying in metallic nanoparticles is directly resolved at atomic scale by the HAADF-STEM imaging, and the comparison of the STEM images with results from simulations gives a very powerful way of analysis of structure and composition. The use of X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy attached to the electron microscope for STEM mode is also described. In issues where characterization at the atomic scale of the interaction between metallic nanoparticles and biological systems is needed, all the associated techniques to STEM become powerful tools for the best understanding on how to use these particles in biomedical application

Staffing decisions for heterogeneous workers with turnover

In this paper we consider a firm that employs heterogeneous workers to meet demand for its product or service. Workers differ in their skills, speed, and/or quality, and they randomly leave, or turn over. Each period the firm must decide how many workers of each type to hire or fire in order to meet randomly changing demand forecasts at minimal expense. When the number of workers of each type can by continuously varied, the operational cost is jointly convex in the number of workers of each type, hiring and firing costs are linear, and a random fraction of workers of each type leave in each period, the optimal policy has a simple hire- up-to/fire-down-to structure. However, under the more realistic assumption that the number of workers of each type is discrete, the optimal policy is much more difficult to characterize, and depends on the particular notion of discrete convexity used for the cost function. We explore several different notions of discrete convexity and their impact on structural results for the optimal policy.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45844/1/186_2005_Article_33.pd

Probing the Links between Political Economy and Non-Traditional Security: Themes, Approaches, and Instruments

This is a pre-print of an article published in International Politics. The definitive publisher-authenticated version of: Hameiri, Shahar, and Lee Jones. "Probing the links between political economy and non-traditional security: Themes, approaches and instruments." International Politics (2015), is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/ip.2015.1In recent decades, the security agenda for states and international organisations has expanded dramatically to include a range of ‘non-traditional’, transnational security issues. It is often suggested that globalisation has been a key driver for the emergence or intensification of these problems, but, surprisingly, little sustained scholarly effort has been made to examine the link between responses to the new security agenda and the changing political economy. This curious neglect largely reflects the mutual blind-spots of the sub-disciplines of International Security Studies and International Political Economy, coupled with the dominance of approaches that tend to neglect economic factors. This special issue, which this article introduces, aims to overcome this significant gap. In particular, it focuses on three key themes: the broad relationship between security and the political economy; what is being secured in the name of security, and how this has changed; and how things are being secured – what modes of governance have emerged to manage security problems. In all of these areas, the contributions point to the crucial role of the state in translating shifting state-economy relations to new security definitions and practices

Epistemic Constraints on Autonomous Symbolic Representation in Natural and Artificial Agents

We set out to address, in the form of a survey, the fundamental constraints upon self-updating representation in cognitive agents of natural and artificial origin. The foundational epistemic problem encountered by such agents is that of distinguishing errors of representation from inappropriateness of the representational framework. Resolving this conceptual difficulty involves ensuring the empirical falsifiability of both the representational hypotheses and the entities so represented, while at the same time retaining their epistemic distinguishability. We shall thus argue that perception-action frameworks provide an appropriate basis for the development of an empirically meaningful criterion for validating perceptual categories. In this scenario, hypotheses about the agent’s world are defined in terms of environmental affordances (characterised in terms of the agent’s active capabilities). Agents with the capability to hierarchically-abstract this framework to a level consonant with performing syntactic manipulations and making deductive conjectures are consequently able to form an implicitly symbolic representation of the environment within which new, higher-level, modes of environment manipulation are implied (e.g. tool-use). This abstraction process is inherently open-ended, admitting a wide-range of possible representational hypotheses — only the form of the lowest-level of the hierarchy need be constrained a priori (being the minimally sufficient condition necessary for retention of the ability to falsify high-level hypotheses). In biological agents capable of autonomous cognitive-updating, we argue that the grounding of such a priori ‘bootstrap’ representational hypotheses is ensured via the process of natural selection

Situation, Figuration und Gewalt. Versuch eines gewaltsoziologischen Dialoges zwischen Randall Collins und Norbert Elias am Beispiel sexueller Kriegsgewalt

Ebner J, Stopfinger M. Situation, Figuration und Gewalt. Versuch eines gewaltsoziologischen Dialoges zwischen Randall Collins und Norbert Elias am Beispiel sexueller Kriegsgewalt. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie. 2020;45(S1):43-67.In diesem Beitrag werden zwei in der soziologischen Gewaltforschung etablierte Ansätze – die mikrosoziologisch-situationistische Gewalttheorie von Randall Collins und die figurations- bzw. prozesssoziologische Perspektive von Norbert Elias – auf ihre Eignung für die Analyse von sexueller Kriegsgewalt überprüft. Nach einer kurzen Diskussion des Forschungsstandes zu sexueller Kriegsgewalt wird dieses Thema einmal mit Collins und einmal mit Elias beleuchtet. Danach werden die beiden Zugänge einander gegenübergestellt, um Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten herauszuarbeiten. Darauf aufbauend wird versucht, die Fruchtbarkeit eines „pragmatischen Dialoges“ zwischen einem mikro- und einem figurationssoziologisch inspirierten Ansatz auszuloten. Abschließend wird diskutiert, welche Folgerungen sich daraus für die Forschung zu sexueller Kriegsgewalt ergeben.In this paper, two approaches established in sociological violence research – Randall Collins’ micro-sociological theory of violence and Norbert Elias’ figuration- and process-sociological perspective—are examined for their suitability for the analysis of sexual violence in war. After a brief discussion of the current state of research on sexual violence in war, this topic will be examined once with Collins and once with Elias. The two approaches are then juxtaposed in order to highlight differences and similarities. Building on this, the fruitfulness of a “pragmatic dialogue” between a micro- and a figuration-sociologically inspired approach will be explored. The concluding section discusses the implications for research on sexual violence in war