Voting and the Cardinal Aggregation of Judgments

The paper elaborates the idea that voting is an instance of the aggregation of judgments, this being a more general concept than the aggregation of preferences. To aggregate judgments one must first measure them. I show that such aggregation has been unproblematic whenever it has been based on an independent and unrestricted scale. The scales analyzed in voting theory are either context dependent or subject to unreasonable restrictions. This is the real source of the diverse 'paradoxes of voting' that would better be termed 'voting pathologies'. The theory leads me to advocate what I term evaluative voting. It can also be called utilitarian voting as it is based on having voters express their cardinal preferences. The alternative that maximizes the sum wins. This proposal operationalizes, in an election context, the abstract cardinal theories of collective choice due to Fleming and Harsanyi. On pragmatic grounds, I argue for a three valued scale for general elections

An assessment of attitudes towards plastics and bioplastics in Europe

Over the last 50 years, conventional fossil-based plastics have become an integral part of our everyday lives. Apart from their low production costs, this is due to a number of their unique properties, including durability, strength, lightness, electrical and thermal insulation, resistance to chemicals and corrosion. The production of plastics has increased from 1.5 million metric tons in 1950 to 359 million metric tons in 2018. Of this total, 61.8 million metric tons were produced in Europe. There are various problems associated with plastic use and disposal that pose a serious threat to both the physical environment and human health. Since public behaviour plays a key role when it comes to the use of plastic, this paper reports on a study that focused on an assessment of attitudes towards plastics and bioplastics in Europe. The results showed that packaging is the most frequent modality of plastic used among participants. In addition, majority of participants are aware that plastic waste can affect environment and human health and therefore segregate and properly dispose plastics. Also, even though most respondents were aware of the environmental problems related to plastic use and showed a positive inclination towards using bioplastic materials, their limited availability and lack of relevant information about bioplastics pose a problem for wider use. Departing from the assumption that the public attitude is a determining factor in the consumption of plastics as a whole and bioplastics in particular, this paper also sheds some light on the current situation, identifying some trends and information gaps which should be addressed in order to encourage a more rational use of plastics in Europe

On the Global Existence of Bohmian Mechanics

We show that the particle motion in Bohmian mechanics, given by the solution of an ordinary differential equation, exists globally: For a large class of potentials the singularities of the velocity field and infinity will not be reached in finite time for typical initial values. A substantial part of the analysis is based on the probabilistic significance of the quantum flux. We elucidate the connection between the conditions necessary for global existence and the self-adjointness of the Schr\"odinger Hamiltonian.Comment: 35 pages, LaTe

Proposals for evaluating the regularity of a scientist'sresearch output

Evaluating the career of individual scientists according to their scientific output is a common bibliometric problem. Two aspects are classically taken into account: overall productivity and overall diffusion/impact, which can be measured by a plethora of indicators that consider publications and/or citations separately or synthesise these two quantities into a single number (e.g. h-index). A secondary aspect, which is sometimes mentioned in the rules of competitive examinations for research position/promotion, is time regularity of one researcher's scientific output. Despite the fact that it is sometimes invoked, a clear definition of regularity is still lacking. We define it as the ability of generating an active and stable research output over time, in terms of both publications/ quantity and citations/diffusion. The goal of this paper is introducing three analysis tools to perform qualitative/quantitative evaluations on the regularity of one scientist's output in a simple and organic way. These tools are respectively (1) the PY/CY diagram, (2) the publication/citation Ferrers diagram and (3) a simplified procedure for comparing the research output of several scientists according to their publication and citation temporal distributions (Borda's ranking). Description of these tools is supported by several examples

Security in the Age of Systemic Risk: Strategies, Tactics and Options for Dealing with Femtorisks and Beyond

The world today is increasingly confronted with systemic threats and challenges, in which femtorisks - small-scale dangers that are inherent to system structures and function and which pose asymmetrically catastrophic risks - can build in consequence, spreading uncontrollably like epidemics in both natural and social systems in such diverse areas as ecology, epidemiology, finance, the Internet, terrorism, and international relations. They have been successfully modeled in ecology in the context of complex adaptive systems: systems made up of individual agents, whose interactions have macroscopic consequences that feed back to influence individual behavior. While acknowledging challenges, this paper argues for the value of applying to societal systems the approaches that natural scientists have developed in quantifying and modeling biological interactions and ecosystems

Superluminal X-shaped beams propagating without distortion along a coaxial guide

In a previous paper [Phys. Rev. E64 (2001) 066603; e-print physics/0001039], we showed that localized Superluminal solutions to the Maxwell equations exist, which propagate down (non-evanescence) regions of a metallic cylindrical waveguide. In this paper we construct analogous non-dispersive waves propagating along coaxial cables. Such new solutions, in general, consist in trains of (undistorted) Superluminal "X-shaped" pulses. Particular attention is paid to the construction of finite total energy solutions. Any results of this kind may find application in the other fields in which an essential role is played by a wave-equation (like acoustics, geophysics, etc.). [PACS nos.: 03.50.De; 41.20;Jb; 83.50.Vr; 62.30.+d; 43.60.+d; 91.30.Fn; 04.30.Nk; 42.25.Bs; 46.40.Cd; 52.35.Lv. Keywords: Wave equations; Wave propagation; Localized beams; Superluminal waves; Coaxial cables; Bidirectional decomposition; Bessel beams; X-shaped waves; Maxwell equations; Microwaves; Optics; Special relativity; Coaxial metallic waveguides; Acoustics; Seismology; Mechanical waves; Elastic waves; Guided gravitational waves.]Comment: plain LaTeX file (22 pages), plus 15 figures; in press in Phys. Rev.

A genetic approach for long term virtual organization distribution

Electronic versíon of an article published as International Journal on Artificial Intelligent Tools, Volume 20, issue 2, 2011. 10.1142/S0218213011000152. © World Scientific Publishing Company[EN] An agent-based Virtual Organization is a complex entity where dynamic collections of agents agree to share resources in order to accomplish a global goal or offer a complex service. An important problem for the performance of the Virtual Organization is the distribution of the agents across the computational resources. The final distribution should provide a good load balancing for the organization. In this article, a genetic algorithm is applied to calculate a proper distribution across hosts in an agent-based Virtual Organization. Additionally, an abstract multi-agent system architecture which provides infrastructure for Virtual Organization distribution is introduced. The developed genetic solution employs an elitist crossover operator where one of the children inherits the most promising genetic material from the parents with higher probability. In order to validate the genetic proposal, the designed genetic algorithm has been successfully compared to several heuristics in different scenarios. © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Company.This work is supported by TIN2008-04446, TIN2009-13839-C03-01, CSD2007-00022 and FPU grant AP2008-00600 of the Spanish government, and PROMETEO 2008/051 of the Generalitat Valenciana.Sánchez Anguix, V.; Valero Cubas, S.; García Fornes, AM. (2011). A genetic approach for long term virtual organization distribution. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools. 20(2):271-295. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218213011000152S27129520

Algebraic Comparison of Partial Lists in Bioinformatics

The outcome of a functional genomics pipeline is usually a partial list of genomic features, ranked by their relevance in modelling biological phenotype in terms of a classification or regression model. Due to resampling protocols or just within a meta-analysis comparison, instead of one list it is often the case that sets of alternative feature lists (possibly of different lengths) are obtained. Here we introduce a method, based on the algebraic theory of symmetric groups, for studying the variability between lists ("list stability") in the case of lists of unequal length. We provide algorithms evaluating stability for lists embedded in the full feature set or just limited to the features occurring in the partial lists. The method is demonstrated first on synthetic data in a gene filtering task and then for finding gene profiles on a recent prostate cancer dataset

Total immersion : Designing for affective symbiosis in a virtual reality game with haptics, biosensors, and emotive agents

Peer reviewe

Dynamical principles in neuroscience

Dynamical modeling of neural systems and brain functions has a history of success over the last half century. This includes, for example, the explanation and prediction of some features of neural rhythmic behaviors. Many interesting dynamical models of learning and memory based on physiological experiments have been suggested over the last two decades. Dynamical models even of consciousness now exist. Usually these models and results are based on traditional approaches and paradigms of nonlinear dynamics including dynamical chaos. Neural systems are, however, an unusual subject for nonlinear dynamics for several reasons: (i) Even the simplest neural network, with only a few neurons and synaptic connections, has an enormous number of variables and control parameters. These make neural systems adaptive and flexible, and are critical to their biological function. (ii) In contrast to traditional physical systems described by well-known basic principles, first principles governing the dynamics of neural systems are unknown. (iii) Many different neural systems exhibit similar dynamics despite having different architectures and different levels of complexity. (iv) The network architecture and connection strengths are usually not known in detail and therefore the dynamical analysis must, in some sense, be probabilistic. (v) Since nervous systems are able to organize behavior based on sensory inputs, the dynamical modeling of these systems has to explain the transformation of temporal information into combinatorial or combinatorial-temporal codes, and vice versa, for memory and recognition. In this review these problems are discussed in the context of addressing the stimulating questions: What can neuroscience learn from nonlinear dynamics, and what can nonlinear dynamics learn from neuroscience?This work was supported by NSF Grant No. NSF/EIA-0130708, and Grant No. PHY 0414174; NIH Grant No. 1 R01 NS50945 and Grant No. NS40110; MEC BFI2003-07276, and Fundación BBVA