Psychical research in the history and philosophy of science. An introduction and review.

As a prelude to articles published in this special issue, I sketch changing historiographical conventions regarding the 'occult' in recent history of science and medicine scholarship. Next, a review of standard claims regarding psychical research and parapsychology in philosophical discussions of the demarcation problem reveals that these have tended to disregard basic primary sources and instead rely heavily on problematic popular accounts, simplistic notions of scientific practice, and outdated teleological historiographies of progress. I conclude by suggesting that rigorous and sensitively contextualized case studies of past elite heterodox scientists may be potentially useful to enrich historical and philosophical scholarship by highlighting epistemologies that have fallen through the crude meshes of triumphalist and postmodernist historiographical generalizations alike.Research for this essay was funded by a Wellcome Trust (grant no. 089723/Z/09/Z) medical humanities doctoral studentship. Cedar Creek Institute, Charlottesville, VA, and the Perrott-Warrick Fund at Trinity College, Cambridge, have kindly supported the writing up of this article.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.08.00

Non-perturbative tests of HQET in small-volume quenched QCD

We quantitatively investigate the quark mass dependence of current matrix elements and energies, calculated over a wide range of quark masses in the continuum limit of small-volume quenched lattice QCD. By a precise comparison of these observables as functions of the heavy quark mass with the predictions of HQET we are able to verify that their large quark mass behaviour is described by the effective theory.Comment: Lattice2004(heavy), 3 pages, latex2e, uses espcrc

Adaptive optimal operation of a parallel robotic liquid handling station

Results are presented from the optimal operation of a fully automated robotic liquid handling station where parallel experiments are performed for calibrating a kinetic fermentation model. To increase the robustness against uncertainties and/or wrong assumptions about the parameter values, an iterative calibration and experiment design approach is adopted. Its implementation yields a stepwise reduction of parameter uncertainties together with an adaptive redesign of reactor feeding strategies whenever new measurement information is available. The case study considers the adaptive optimal design of 4 parallel fed-batch strategies implemented in 8 mini-bioreactors. Details are given on the size and complexity of the problem and the challenges related to calibration of over-parameterized models and scarce and non-informative measurement data. It is shown how methods for parameter identifiability analysis and numerical regularization can be used for monitoring the progress of the experimental campaigns in terms of generated information regarding parameters and selection of the best fitting parameter subset.BMBF, 02PJ1150, Verbundprojekt: Plattformtechnologien für automatisierte Bioprozessentwicklung (AutoBio); Teilprojekt: Automatisierte Bioprozessentwicklung am Beispiel von neuen Nukleosidphosphorylase

Léon Marillier and the veridical hallucination in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French psychology and psychopathology.

Recent research on the professionalization of psychology at the end of the nineteenth century shows how objects of knowledge which appear illegitimate to us today shaped the institutionalization of disciplines. The veridical or telepathic hallucination was one of these objects, constituting a field both of division and exchange between nascent psychology and disciplines known as 'psychic sciences' in France, and 'psychical research' in the Anglo-American context. In France, Leon Marillier (1862-1901) was the main protagonist in discussions concerning the concept of the veridical hallucination, which gave rise to criticisms by mental specialists and psychopathologists. After all, not only were these hallucinations supposed to occur in healthy subjects, but they also failed to correspond to the Esquirolian definition of hallucinations through being corroborated by their representation of external, objective events.Andreas Sommer’s contribution to this article was made possible through support by the Perrott-Warrick Fund, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and Cedar Creek Institute, Charlottesville, VA.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957154X1456275

Analyzing customer sentiments in microblogs – A topic-model-based approach for Twitter datasets

In the Social Commerce customers evolve to an important information source for companies. The customers use communication platforms of the Web 2.0, for example Twitter, in order to express their opinions about products or discuss their experiences with them. These opinions can be very important for the development of products or the product range of a company. Our approach enables a company viewing opinions about its products which are published using the microblogging service Twitter. A first step in our research progress is detecting topics in a specific context. In a further step the entries corresponding to these topics has to be analyzed for opinions. For topic detection we use topic modeling with the Latent Dirichlet Allocation. In our paper we found event-based topics in the context of Sony’s 3D TV sets. In future work we are able to implement Opinion Mining algorithms to determine sentiments in the entries corresponding to the detected topics

Consumer inattention, heuristic thinking and the role of energy labels

Energy labels have been introduced in many countries to increase consumers’ attention to energy use in purchase decisions of durables. In a discrete-choice experiment among about 5,000 households, we implement randomized information treatments to explore the effects of various kinds of energy labels on purchasing decisions. Our results show that adding annual operating cost information to the EU energy label promotes the choice of energy-efficient durables. In addition, we find that a majority of participants value efficiency classes beyond the economic value of the underlying energy use differences. Our results further indicate that displaying operating cost affects choices through two distinct channels: it increases the attention to operating cost and reduces the valuation of efficiency class differences