TAXATION-THE LINCOLN ELECTRIC QUESTION: MUST ORDINARY AND NECESSARY BUSINESS EXPENSES BE ALSO REASONABLE IN AMOUNT

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has recently determined in Commissioner v. Lincoln Electric Co. that the element of reasonableness is inherent in the phrase ordinary and necessary as used in the paragraph of the Internal Revenue Code authorizing deductions for business expenses. It will be of interest to develop the history of the case throughout its ten years of litigation, to examine some of the collateral points raised, and to attempt a critique of the merits of the court\u27s position

Low-energy fusion caused by an interference

Fusion of two deuterons of room temperature energy is studied. The nuclei are in vacuum with no connection to any external source (electric or magnetic field, illumination, surrounding matter, traps, etc.) which may accelerate them. The energy of the two nuclei is conserved and remains small during the motion through the Coulomb barrier. The penetration through this barrier, which is the main obstacle for low-energy fusion, strongly depends on a form of the incident flux on the Coulomb center at large distances from it. In contrast to the usual scattering, the incident wave is not a single plane wave but the certain superposition of plane waves of the same energy and various directions, for example, a convergent conical wave. As a result of interference, the wave function close to the Coulomb center is determined by a cusp caustic which is probed by de Broglie waves. The particle flux gets away from the cusp and moves to the Coulomb center providing a not small probability of fusion (cusp driven tunneling). Getting away from a caustic cusp also occurs in optics and acoustics

Inferring choice criteria with mixture IRT models: A demonstration using ad hoc and goal-derived categories

Whether it pertains to the foods to buy when one is on a diet, the items to take along to the beach on one’s day off or (perish the thought) the belongings to save from one’s burning house, choice is ubiquitous. We aim to determine from choices the criteria individuals use when they select objects from among a set of candidates. In order to do so we employ a mixture IRT (item-response theory) model that capitalizes on the insights that objects are chosen more often the better they meet the choice criteria and that the use of different criteria is reflected in inter-individual selection differences. The model is found to account for the inter-individual selection differences for 10 ad hoc and goal-derived categories. Its parameters can be related to selection criteria that are frequently thought of in the context of these categories. These results suggest that mixture IRT models allow one to infer from mere choice behavior the criteria individuals used to select/discard objects. Potential applications of mixture IRT models in other judgment and decision making contexts are discussed

Norms of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words

Abstract not availableMarc Brysbaert, Michaël Stevens, Simon De Deyne, Wouter Voorspoels, Gert Storm

Classical Logical versus Quantum Conceptual Thought: Examples in Economics, Decision theory and Concept Theory

Inspired by a quantum mechanical formalism to model concepts and their disjunctions and conjunctions, we put forward in this paper a specific hypothesis. Namely that within human thought two superposed layers can be distinguished: (i) a layer given form by an underlying classical deterministic process, incorporating essentially logical thought and its indeterministic version modeled by classical probability theory; (ii) a layer given form under influence of the totality of the surrounding conceptual landscape, where the different concepts figure as individual entities rather than (logical) combinations of others, with measurable quantities such as 'typicality', 'membership', 'representativeness', 'similarity', 'applicability', 'preference' or 'utility' carrying the influences. We call the process in this second layer 'quantum conceptual thought', which is indeterministic in essence, and contains holistic aspects, but is equally well, although very differently, organized than logical thought. A substantial part of the 'quantum conceptual thought process' can be modeled by quantum mechanical probabilistic and mathematical structures. We consider examples of three specific domains of research where the effects of the presence of quantum conceptual thought and its deviations from classical logical thought have been noticed and studied, i.e. economics, decision theory, and concept theories and which provide experimental evidence for our hypothesis.Comment: 14 page

UNMANNED UNDERWATER VEHICLE MISSION SYSTEMS ENGINEERING PRODUCT REUSE RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) accomplish a wide spectrum of missions ranging from generic to extremely specific. Although not all UUVs can accomplish all missions, there is significant replication of the requirements and the systems across the family of UUVs. The design process for UUVs balances operational requirements, design feasibility, expected performance, schedule, budget, and ultimate system and life-cycle costs. The U.S. Department of Defense does not have an established process for developing UUV Systems Engineering (SE) requirements. This results in duplicative development efforts adding unnecessary costs to UUV programs. This paper investigates the SE requirements and interfaces across various UUV mission spaces to establish complexity and reuse weights. A Constructive SE Cost Model (COSYSMO) is applied to determine the cost advantage to reuse SE requirements for UUV assets across different mission spaces to determine an overall SE effort. Requirements from the baseline mission are then compared with requirements from eight other missions, and the efforts compared to determine a return on investment (ROI) for using previous missions as a baseline. Utilizing the resulting UUV requirement cost versus ROI can serve as a starting point for future UUV program concept design.Civilian, Department of the NavyCivilian, Department of the NavyCivilian, Department of the NavyCivilian, Department of the NavyCivilian, Department of the NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Associative strength and semantic activation in the mental lexicon: evidence from continued word associations

In a word association task, the probability of producing a certain response to a cue is considered to be a direct measure of associative strength between words in the mental lexicon. The common single word association procedure is limited, since the number of words connected to a cue might be underestimated when a single response is asked. The continued association task overcomes this limitation by asking a person to generate multiple associative responses. To test whether continued strengths allow a better approximation of our lexicon, an experiment was conducted in which participants judged the associative strength between words. Our results show that in contrast to other semantic tasks, continued strength predicts weak to moderate judgments only. Two explanations based on the sampling of information and differential semantic activation of later responses in continued association are proposed. Theoretical implications for semantic activation and methodological implications for derivation of strength are discussed.Simon De Deyne, Daniel J. Navarro, Gert Stormshttp://cognitivesciencesociety.org/conference2013/index.htm

When cheating is an honest mistake

Dishonesty is an intriguing phenomenon, studied extensively across various disciplines due to its impact on people’s lives as well as society in general. To examine dishonesty in a controlled setting, researchers have developed a number of experimental paradigms. One of the most popular approaches in this regard, is the matrix task, in which participants receive matrices wherein they have to find two numbers that sum to 10 (e.g., 4.81 and 5.19), under time pressure. In a next phase, participants need to report how many matrices they had solved correctly, allowing them the opportunity to cheat by exaggerating their performance in order to get a larger reward. Here, we argue, both on theoretical and empirical grounds, that the matrix task is ill-suited to study dishonest behavior, primarily because it conflates cheating with honest mistakes. We therefore recommend researchers to use different paradigms to examine dishonesty, and treat (previous) findings based on the matrix task with due caution