How illusory is the solitaire illusion? Assessing the degree of misperception of numerosity in adult humans

open3siopenAgrillo, Christian; Parrish, Audrey E.; Beran, Michael J.Agrillo, Christian; Parrish, Audrey E.; Beran, Michael J

When Terrorists Govern: Protecting Civilians in Conflicts with State-Building Armed Groups

Many existing U.S. counter-terrorism policies, including those governing targeting and detention, rely on an empirical assumption that terrorist groups are primarily military organizations. This assumption may be appropriate in the case of al-Qaeda, but it fails to describe terrorist groups that engage not only in warfare but also in governance and state-building such as the Islamic State, a self-declared “caliphate” that—at the height of its expansion in 2014—claimed sovereignty over an estimated 34,000 square miles and 10 million civilians. This Article identifies a category of “state-building” terrorist groups that can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) the presence of a non-military wing analogous to a civilian bureaucracy that provides services, including food, electricity, and healthcare to the governed population; (2) dual-use institutions that simultaneously perform military and civilian functions; and (3) a degree of coercive control over civilians that creates observational equivalence between victims and supporters of the group. As a result of these characteristics, existing U.S. targeting doctrines that were designed with primarily military groups such as al-Qaeda in mind, tend to penalize civilians when applied to state-building terrorist groups that govern people and territory. This argument is supported by archival Islamic State documents, social media data generated by users in or near Islamic State-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq, interviews with former Islamic State combatants and civilian employees, and original data on the targeting of 11 different zakāt offices on 19 different occasions. These zakāt offices, which are located in densely populated urban areas, simultaneously collect taxes (a war-sustaining activity) and distribute cash assistance and food to civilians (a humanitarian activity), and illustrate the costs of targeting dual-use institutions that perform both military and civilian functions. The Article concludes with targeting recommendations that take into consideration the structural vulnerability of civilians living in areas controlled and governed by terrorist groups while still allowing governments to prosecute civilians who aid such groups under domestic material support laws

Triadic Legal Pluralism in North Sinai: A Case Study of State, Shari\u27a, and \u27Urf Courts in Conflict and Cooperation

To the extent that legal scholars have addressed the post-authoritarian transitions underway in the Middle East, the scope of their work has been primarily confined to the formal infra-structure of state-manufactured law. Attention has focused on the activities of high courts, parliaments, and the administrative apparatus of official justice systems, while largely neglecting to acknowledge the importance of non-state institutions and systems of normative rules that operate in the shadow of modern bureaucratic governments. The concept of legal pluralism, defined as the coexistence of multiple legal or normative orders within a common geographical area, has been applied extensively in European, South American, and sub-Saharan African contexts, but is underutilized in analysis of revolutionary and transitional change in the Middle East. Nowhere is the presence of legal pluralism more apparent than in Egypt’s geographically remote Sinai Peninsula, where non-state Islamic courts that emerged in the post-revolutionary security vacuum in 2011 claim to have absorbed 75 percent of the caseload once handled by Egypt’s official justice system and aspire to achieve full autonomy from the state. This paper, based on field research conducted in the governorate of North Sinai, argues that the rapid institutionalization of non-state shari‘a courts since the 2011 uprising can be explained in part by two historical trends: (1) the Islamizing effects of state-sponsored development and labor migration policies on Bedouin society in North Sinai; and (2) growing disillusionment with state and tribal judiciaries, which are often viewed as complicit in the disenfranchisement of the Bedouin and expropriation of their lands

Evidence-Based Transitional Justice: Incorporating Public Opinion into the Field, with New Data from Iraq and Ukraine

The field of “transitional justice” refers to a range of processes and mechanisms for accountability, truth-seeking, and reconciliation that governments and communities pursue in the aftermath of major societal traumas, including civil war, mass atrocities, and authoritarianism. This relatively new field emerged in the 1980s as scholars, practitioners, and policymakers looked for guidance to support post-authoritarian and post-communist transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Since then, the field has grown rapidly—so rapidly that it is outpacing its capacity to learn from past mistakes. Recent methodological advances in the study of public attitudes about transitional justice through quantitative surveys and qualitative interview methods provide unprecedented insights into how different mechanisms—including domestic and international prosecutions, truth commissions, amnesty laws, and compensation—are perceived by their intended beneficiaries. The results have been troubling. Numerous studies in diverse contexts found that some of the most well-known transitional justice mechanisms, including those employed in South Africa, Rwanda, and Cambodia, failed to achieve their objectives of peacebuilding and reconciliation. In some cases, these policies had harmful consequences for their intended beneficiaries, including retraumatization and perceived “justice gaps” between victims’ preferred remedies and their actual outcomes. There is an urgent need for the field of transitional justice to learn from this growing body of empirical research to develop evidence-based policies and programs that achieve their intended objectives. This Feature critically reviews the intellectual development of the field, consolidating empirical findings of relevant studies across disciplines—law, political science, sociology, economics, public health, psychology, and anthropology—and identifying open debates and questions for future research. We focus on research about public attitudes toward transitional justice in the communities directly impacted by conflict. In addition to reviewing previous research, we present new data from original public opinion surveys in Iraq and Ukraine relevant to ongoing transitional justice efforts in those countries. We use this evidence to identify lessons learned, including mistakes, in the design and implementation of previous transitional justice processes. We conclude by discussing the normative and prescriptive implications of our findings for efforts to improve future transitional justice laws and policies

Causality and the semantics of provenance

Provenance, or information about the sources, derivation, custody or history of data, has been studied recently in a number of contexts, including databases, scientific workflows and the Semantic Web. Many provenance mechanisms have been developed, motivated by informal notions such as influence, dependence, explanation and causality. However, there has been little study of whether these mechanisms formally satisfy appropriate policies or even how to formalize relevant motivating concepts such as causality. We contend that mathematical models of these concepts are needed to justify and compare provenance techniques. In this paper we review a theory of causality based on structural models that has been developed in artificial intelligence, and describe work in progress on a causal semantics for provenance graphs.Comment: Workshop submissio

Colonization of the Americas, 'Little Ice Age' climate, and bomb-produced carbon: their role in defining the Anthropocene

A recently published analysis by Lewis and Maslin (Lewis SL and Maslin MA (2015) Defining the Anthropocene. Nature 519: 171–180) has identified two new potential horizons for the Holocene−Anthropocene boundary: 1610 (associated with European colonization of the Americas), or 1964 (the peak of the excess radiocarbon signal arising from atom bomb tests). We discuss both of these novel suggestions, and consider that there is insufficient stratigraphic basis for the former, whereas placing the latter at the peak of the signal rather than at its inception does not follow normal stratigraphical practice. Wherever the boundary is eventually placed, it should be optimized to reflect stratigraphical evidence with the least possible ambiguity

An open trial assessment of "The Number Race", an adaptive computer game for remediation of dyscalculia

BACKGROUND: In a companion article [1], we described the development and evaluation of software designed to remediate dyscalculia. This software is based on the hypothesis that dyscalculia is due to a "core deficit" in number sense or in its access via symbolic information. Here we review the evidence for this hypothesis, and present results from an initial open-trial test of the software in a sample of nine 7–9 year old children with mathematical difficulties. METHODS: Children completed adaptive training on numerical comparison for half an hour a day, four days a week over a period of five-weeks. They were tested before and after intervention on their performance in core numerical tasks: counting, transcoding, base-10 comprehension, enumeration, addition, subtraction, and symbolic and non-symbolic numerical comparison. RESULTS: Children showed specific increases in performance on core number sense tasks. Speed of subitizing and numerical comparison increased by several hundred msec. Subtraction accuracy increased by an average of 23%. Performance on addition and base-10 comprehension tasks did not improve over the period of the study. CONCLUSION: Initial open-trial testing showed promising results, and suggested that the software was successful in increasing number sense over the short period of the study. However these results need to be followed up with larger, controlled studies. The issues of transfer to higher-level tasks, and of the best developmental time window for intervention also need to be addressed

From 'trading zones' to 'buffer zones': Art and metaphor in the communication of psychiatric genetics to publics

Psychiatric genetics has a difficult relationship with the public given its unshakeable connection to eugenics. Drawing from a five-year public engagement programme that emerged from an internationally renowned psychiatric genetics centre, we propose the concept of the Buffer Zone to consider how an exchange of viewpoints between groups of people – including psychiatric geneticists and lay publics - who are often uneasy in one another’s company can be facilitated through the use of art and metaphor. The artwork at the exhibitions provided the necessary socio-cultural context for scientific endeavours, whilst also enabled public groups to be part of, and remain in, the conversation. Crucial to stress is that this mitigation was not to protect the science; it was to protect the discussion