Paintings and their implicit presuppositions : a preliminary report

In a series of earlier papers (Social Science Working Papers 350, 355. 357) we have studied the ways in which differences in "implicit presupposi tions" (i. e •• differences in world views) cause scientists and historians to reach differing conclusions from a consideration of the same evidence. In this paper we show that paintings are characterized by implicit presuppositions similar to those that characterize the written materials -- essays, letters, scientific papers -- we have already studied

Paintings and their implicit presuppositions: High Renaissance and Mannerism

All art historians who are interested in questions of "styles" or "schools" agree in identifying a High Renaissance school of Italian painting. There is, however, a disagreement, which has seemed nonterminating, regarding Mannerism: Is it another distinct school or is it merely a late development of the Renaissance school? We believe that this disagreement can be terminated by distinguishing questions of fact about paintings from questions about the definitions of schools. To this end we have had two representative subsets of paintings--one earlier, one later--rated on four of the dimensions of implicit presuppositions that we have introduced in other Working Papers. When the paintings are scaled in this way a very distinct profile emerges for the earlier, or Renaissance, paintings. In contrast, the later, or Mannerist, paintings are so heterogeneous that we conclude that they are best described as deviations from the Renaissance profile, rather than a separate school. These results are not unimportant--at least for art historians. But they are more important methodologically inasmuch as the procedures applied here can be used in classifying and distinguishing from one another all kind of cultural products

Non-malleable codes for space-bounded tampering

Non-malleable codes—introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs at ICS 2010—are key-less coding schemes in which mauling attempts to an encoding of a given message, w.r.t. some class of tampering adversaries, result in a decoded value that is either identical or unrelated to the original message. Such codes are very useful for protecting arbitrary cryptographic primitives against tampering attacks against the memory. Clearly, non-malleability is hopeless if the class of tampering adversaries includes the decoding and encoding algorithm. To circumvent this obstacle, the majority of past research focused on designing non-malleable codes for various tampering classes, albeit assuming that the adversary is unable to decode. Nonetheless, in many concrete settings, this assumption is not realistic

Love of the purest kind : Heteronormative rigidity in the homoerotic fiction of Ann Herendeen

This paper deals with the conflict slash fiction proposes for the heteronormative endings typical of the popular romance genre, specifically within the works of Ann Herendeen

The chaining lemma and its application

We present a new information-theoretic result which we call the Chaining Lemma. It considers a so-called “chain” of random variables, defined by a source distribution X(0)with high min-entropy and a number (say, t in total) of arbitrary functions (T1,…, Tt) which are applied in succession to that source to generate the chain (Formula presented). Intuitively, the Chaining Lemma guarantees that, if the chain is not too long, then either (i) the entire chain is “highly random”, in that every variable has high min-entropy; or (ii) it is possible to find a point j (1 ≤ j ≤ t) in the chain such that, conditioned on the end of the chain i.e. (Formula presented), the preceding part (Formula presented) remains highly random. We think this is an interesting information-theoretic result which is intuitive but nevertheless requires rigorous case-analysis to prove. We believe that the above lemma will find applications in cryptography. We give an example of this, namely we show an application of the lemma to protect essentially any cryptographic scheme against memory tampering attacks. We allow several tampering requests, the tampering functions can be arbitrary, however, they must be chosen from a bounded size set of functions that is fixed a prior

Daily Stress Recognition from Mobile Phone Data, Weather Conditions and Individual Traits

Research has proven that stress reduces quality of life and causes many diseases. For this reason, several researchers devised stress detection systems based on physiological parameters. However, these systems require that obtrusive sensors are continuously carried by the user. In our paper, we propose an alternative approach providing evidence that daily stress can be reliably recognized based on behavioral metrics, derived from the user's mobile phone activity and from additional indicators, such as the weather conditions (data pertaining to transitory properties of the environment) and the personality traits (data concerning permanent dispositions of individuals). Our multifactorial statistical model, which is person-independent, obtains the accuracy score of 72.28% for a 2-class daily stress recognition problem. The model is efficient to implement for most of multimedia applications due to highly reduced low-dimensional feature space (32d). Moreover, we identify and discuss the indicators which have strong predictive power.Comment: ACM Multimedia 2014, November 3-7, 2014, Orlando, Florida, US

Some Implicit Presuppositions of Typical Writings in the Field of American Intellectual History

This paper reports a study made of some of the implicit presuppositions contained in the following materials: The Federalist, papers 10 and 51 by Madison, selections from de Tocqueville's Democracy in America; Emerson's "The American Scholar"; Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"; "Washington as Commander in Chief” in Bancroft's History of the United States; and "A Small Group of Men Hold in their hands the Business of this Country," a Senate speech by Robert M. LaFollette, Fifteen students at the Claremont Graduate School, who had taken a course in which these materials were studied, rated them on seven scales, or "dimensions, " each of which represents one of a contrasting pair of implicit presuppositions which we have identified and defined. At 19 of the 42 choice points at which decisions had to be made (six selections on seven dimensions) the ratings proved to be significant at p < .05 level. These results thus expand the "scope" of our set of implicit presuppositions to include new materials not previously investigated. In short, it has been shown that readers who are guided by our definitions are able to agree on some of the implicit assumptions contained in a representative sample of writings in the field of American intellectual history

Some Implicit Presuppositions Involved in the Disagreement over the DNA Guidelines

This paper is one of a series reporting studies we have made of differences in implicit presuppositions and of how such differences affect the ways people reason. In the study reported here 26 students (14 at Caltech; 12 at Claremont) read and rated four letters which had appeared in the correspondence columns of Science. Two of the letters defended the guidelines governing DNA research; two criticized them. The students rated the letters on six scales, or "dimensions," each of which represents a contrasting pair of implicit presuppositions, which we have identified and defined. For two of the six dimensions all four of the letters were rated in the predicted direction, and all are statistically significant. On a third dimension all four of the letters were rated in the predicted direction, but only three of the four are statistically significant. For the other three dimensions there was no consistent pattern, though some of the results on some of the dimensions were in the predicted direction and are statistically significant. Thus this study shows that in certain important respects the presuppositions of the proponents and the presupposition of the opponents of the guidelines are not only different but diametrically opposed

Astrophysical Implication of Low E(2^+_1) in Neutron-rich Sn Isotopes

The observation and prediction of unusually depressed first excited 2^+_1 states in even-A neutron - rich isotopes of semi-magic Sn above 132Sn provide motivations for reviewing the problems related to the nuclear astrophysics in general. In the present work, the beta-decay rates of the exotic even Sn isotopes (134,136Sn) above the 132Sn core have been calculated as a function of temperature (T). In order to get the necessary ft values, B(GT) values corresponding to allowed Gamow Teller (GT-) beta-decay have been theoretically calculated using shell model. The total decay rate shows decrease with increasing temperature as the ground state population is depleted and population of excited states with slower decay rates increases. The abundance at each Z value is inversely proportional to the decay constant of the waiting point nucleus for that particular Z. So the increase in half-life of isotopes of Sn, like 136Sn, might have substantial impact on the r-process nucleosynthesis.Comment: 4th International Workshop on Nuclear Fission and Fission Product Spectroscopy, CEA Cadarache, May 13 - 16, 2009, 4 pages, 2 figure

Ariel - Volume 6 Number 1

Editors John Lammie Curt Cummings Frank Chervenak J.D. Kanofsky Mark Dembert Entertainment Robert Breckenridge Joe Conti Gary Kaskey Photographer Larry Glazerman Overseas Editor Mike Sinason Circulation Jay Amsterdam Humorist Jim McCann Staff Ken Jaffe Bob Sklaroff Halley Faus