Regional versus global finite-state error repair

[Abstract] We focus on the domain of a regional least-cost strategy in order to illustrate the viability of non-global repair models over finitestate architectures. Our interest is justified by the difficulty, shared by all repair proposals, to determine how far to validate. A short validation may fail to gather sufficient information, and in a long one most of the effort can be wasted. The goal is to prove that our approach can provide, in practice, a performance and quality comparable to that attained by global criteria, with a significant saving in time and space. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first discussion of its kind.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia; TIN2004-07246-C03-02Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia; HP2002-0081Xunta de Galcia; PGIDIT03SIN30501PRXunta de Galcia; PGIDIT02SIN01

Predicting the Knowledge: Recklessness Distinction in the Human Brain

Criminal convictions require proof that a prohibited act was performed in a statutorily specified mental state. Different legal consequences, including greater punishments, are mandated for those who act in a state of knowledge, compared with a state of recklessness. Existing research, however, suggests people have trouble classifying defendants as knowing, rather than reckless, even when instructed on the relevant legal criteria. We used a machine-learning technique on brain imaging data to predict, with high accuracy, which mental state our participants were in. This predictive ability depended on both the magnitude of the risks and the amount of information about those risks possessed by the participants. Our results provide neural evidence of a detectable difference in the mental state of knowledge in contrast to recklessness and suggest, as a proof of principle, the possibility of inferring from brain data in which legally relevant category a person belongs. Some potential legal implications of this result are discussed

Isolamento de Toxoplasma gondii a partir de cérebro e músculo de gatos serologicamente positivos utilizando culturas celulares

O isolamento de Toxoplasma gondii é imprescindível quer para efeitos de diagnóstico definitivo da infecção, quer para estudos visando a genotipagem de estirpes circulantes, tanto nos animais como no ser humano. O bioensaio é presentemente considerado o método de eleição para isolamento de T. gondii de amostras biológicas, no entanto, para além de eticamente questionável, a inoculação em ratinho é dispendiosa e laboriosa. O ensaio in vitro utilizando culturas celulares é frequentemente mencionado como alternativa, contudo o investimento nesta área tem sido diminuto, sendo raros os trabalhos que referem o recurso a este método para isolamento de T. gondii a partir de tecidos animais. Este estudo teve como objectivo testar diferentes métodos de isolamento de T. gondii em culturas de células. Para a preparação dos inóculos, colhemos amostras de tecido cerebral e muscular (coração e membros) de 16 gatos serologicamente positivos, durante a necrópsia. O tecido cerebral foi homogeneizado com agulha e seringa em meio de cultura e o tecido muscular digerido numa solução de ácido clorídrico e pepsina. A inoculação dos homogeneizados de cérebro e músculo em culturas de células Vero resultou, respectivamente, numa taxa de isolamento de 37,5% (6/16) e 62,5% (10/16). A visualização microscópica de taquizoítos nas culturas celulares foi possível 5-14 dias pós-inoculação, utilizando homogeneizados de cérebro e 7-32 dias pós-inoculação, utilizando homogeneizados de tecido muscular. Todos os isolados foram confirmados por n-PCR visando a região ITS1 do rDNA de T. gondii

Political conversations on Twitter in a disruptive scenario: The role of "party evangelists" during the 2015 Spanish general elections

"This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Communication Review on 2019, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714421.2019.1599642"[EN] During election campaigns, candidates, parties, and media share their relevance on Twitter with a group of especially active users, aligned with a particular party. This paper introduces the profile of ¿party evangelists,¿ and explores the activity and effects these users had on the general political conversation during the 2015 Spanish general election. On that occasion, the electoral expectations were uncertain for the two major parties (PP and PSOE) because of the rise of two emerging parties that were disrupting the political status quo (Podemos and Ciudadanos). This was an ideal situation to assess the differences between the evangelists of established and emerging parties. The paper evaluates two aspects of the political conversation based on a corpus of 8.9 million tweets: the retweet- ing effectiveness, and the sentiment analysis of the overall conver- sation. We found that one of the emerging party¿s evangelists dominated message dissemination to a much greater extent.The present research was supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad [CSO2013-43960-R] [CSO2016-77331-C2-1-R]. The present research was supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Spain, under Grants CSO2013-43960-R ("2015-2016 Spanish political parties' online campaign strategies") and CSO2016-77331-C2-1-R ("Strategies, agendas and discourse in electoral cybercampaigns: media and citizens"). This work was possible thanks to help received from Emilio Giner in his task of extracting the corpus of tweets and from assistance provided by Mike Thelwall and David Vilares in the use of the SentiStrength application. We have benefited from valuable comments on drafts of this article from professors Joaquín Aldás, Amparo Baviera-Puig, Guillermo López-García, and especially Lidia Valera-Ordaz.Baviera, T.; Sampietro, A.; García-Ull, FJ. (2019). Political conversations on Twitter in a disruptive scenario: The role of "party evangelists" during the 2015 Spanish general elections. The Communication Review. 22(2):117-138. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2019.1599642S117138222Alvarez, R., Garcia, D., Moreno, Y., & Schweitzer, F. (2015). Sentiment cascades in the 15M movement. EPJ Data Science, 4(1). doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-015-0042-4Anduiza, E., Cristancho, C., & Sabucedo, J. M. (2013). Mobilization through online social networks: the political protest of theindignadosin Spain. Information, Communication & Society, 17(6), 750-764. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.808360Anstead, N., & O’Loughlin, B. (2011). The Emerging Viewertariat and BBC Question Time. 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I., Marlow, C., Franceschetti, M., Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2014). Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks. PLoS ONE, 9(3), e90315. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0090315D’heer, E., & Verdegem, P. (2014). Conversations about the elections on Twitter: Towards a structural understanding of Twitter’s relation with the political and the media field. European Journal of Communication, 29(6), 720-734. doi:10.1177/0267323114544866Dang-Xuan, L., Stieglitz, S., Wladarsch, J., & Neuberger, C. (2013). AN INVESTIGATION OF INFLUENTIALS AND THE ROLE OF SENTIMENT IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON TWITTER DURING ELECTION PERIODS. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 795-825. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.783608Díaz-Parra, I., & Jover-Báez, J. (2016). Social movements in crisis? From the 15-M movement to the electoral shift in Spain. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 36(9/10), 680-694. doi:10.1108/ijssp-09-2015-0101Dubois, E., & Gaffney, D. (2014). The Multiple Facets of Influence. American Behavioral Scientist, 58(10), 1260-1277. doi:10.1177/0002764214527088Enli, G. (2017). Twitter as arena for the authentic outsider: exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. European Journal of Communication, 32(1), 50-61. doi:10.1177/0267323116682802Felt, M. (2016). Social media and the social sciences: How researchers employ Big Data analytics. Big Data & Society, 3(1), 205395171664582. doi:10.1177/2053951716645828Ferrara, E., & Yang, Z. (2015). Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media. PLOS ONE, 10(11), e0142390. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0142390(2015). Journal of Communication, 65(5). doi:10.1111/jcom.2015.65.issue-5Guerrero-Solé, F. (2018). Interactive Behavior in Political Discussions on Twitter: Politicians, Media, and Citizens’ Patterns of Interaction in the 2015 and 2016 Electoral Campaigns in Spain. Social Media + Society, 4(4), 205630511880877. doi:10.1177/2056305118808776Guo, L., & Vargo, C. (2015). The Power of Message Networks: A Big-Data Analysis of the Network Agenda Setting Model and Issue Ownership. Mass Communication and Society, 18(5), 557-576. doi:10.1080/15205436.2015.1045300Himelboim, I., McCreery, S., & Smith, M. (2013). Birds of a Feather Tweet Together: Integrating Network and Content Analyses to Examine Cross-Ideology Exposure on Twitter. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18(2), 40-60. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12001Huckfeldt, R., Johnson, P. E., & Sprague, J. (2004). Political Disagreement. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511617102Brundidge, J. (2010). Encountering «Difference» in the Contemporary Public Sphere: The Contribution of the Internet to the Heterogeneity of Political Discussion Networks. Journal of Communication, 60(4), 680-700. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01509.xJungherr, A. (2015). Analyzing Political Communication with Digital Trace Data. 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C., Mourão, R. R., & Molyneux, L. (2017). Twitter as a tool for and object of political and electoral activity: Considering electoral context and variance among actors. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 14(2), 154-167. doi:10.1080/19331681.2017.1308289McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 415-444. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415Medhat, W., Hassan, A., & Korashy, H. (2014). Sentiment analysis algorithms and applications: A survey. Ain Shams Engineering Journal, 5(4), 1093-1113. doi:10.1016/j.asej.2014.04.011Min, Y. (2004). News Coverage of Negative Political Campaigns. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 9(4), 95-111. doi:10.1177/1081180x04271861Newman, M. (2010). Networks. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199206650.001.0001Orriols, L., & Cordero, G. (2016). The Breakdown of the Spanish Two-Party System: The Upsurge of Podemos and Ciudadanos in the 2015 General Election. South European Society and Politics, 21(4), 469-492. doi:10.1080/13608746.2016.1198454Park, C. S. (2013). Does Twitter motivate involvement in politics? Tweeting, opinion leadership, and political engagement. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4), 1641-1648. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2013.01.044Riquelme, F., & González-Cantergiani, P. (2016). Measuring user influence on Twitter: A survey. Information Processing & Management, 52(5), 949-975. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2016.04.003Robinson, J. P. (1976). Interpersonal Influence in Election Campaigns: Two Step-Flow Hypotheses. Public Opinion Quarterly, 40(3), 304. doi:10.1086/268307Robles, J. M., Díez, R., R. Castromil, A., Rodríguez, A., & Cruz, M. (2015). El movimiento 15-M en los medios y en las redes. Un análisis de sus estrategias comunicativas. Empiria. 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Genotoxic effects of occupational exposure to lead and influence of polymorphisms in genes involved in lead toxicokinetics and in DNA repair

This work was partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PSI2010-15115) and Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (grants PDCT/SAU-OBS/59821/2004, PTDC/QUI/ 67522/2006 and PTDC/SAU-OSM/105572/2008, and fellowship SFRH/ BD/22612/2005 to M. Pingarilho).publishersversionpublishe

Political candidates in infotainment programmes and their emotional effects on Twitter: An analysis of the 2015 Spanish general elections pre-campaign season

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Contemporary Social Science on 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21582041.2017.1367833.[EN] The infotainment format offers candidates an informal setting to show a more personal side of themselves to the electorate, opening themselves up to potential voters. An example of media hybridisation, social networks users can immediately comment on infotainment television programmes, a process known as second screening. These second screeners tend to be especially active in politics. This paper analyses the immediate emotional reaction of these users as they watch infotainment programmes that air during the campaign or pre-campaign seasons and feature political candidates as guests. We have confirmed that second screeners react more emotionally towards the candidate when his or her party is mentioned, and less emotionally when the host displays an aggressive attitude through his or her non-verbal communication. When issues related to the candidate¿s personal lives are discussed, users¿ emotional reactions improve slightly. The relevance of this research stems from the fact that we are witnessing the consolidation of a politics that increasingly strays from ideological questions, and instead focuses on more emotional and personal issues.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad under Grants CSO2013-43960-R and CSO2016-77331-C2-1-R.Baviera, T.; Peris, À.; Cano-Orón, L. (2019). Political candidates in infotainment programmes and their emotional effects on Twitter: An analysis of the 2015 Spanish general elections pre-campaign season. Contemporary Social Science. 14(1):144-156. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2017.1367833S144156141Baum, M. A., & Jamison, A. S. (2006). TheOprahEffect: How Soft News Helps Inattentive Citizens Vote Consistently. The Journal of Politics, 68(4), 946-959. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00482.xBravo-Marquez, F., Mendoza, M., & Poblete, B. (2014). Meta-level sentiment models for big social data analysis. Knowledge-Based Systems, 69, 86-99. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2014.05.016Casero-Ripollés, A., Feenstra, R. A., & Tormey, S. (2016). Old and New Media Logics in an Electoral Campaign. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 21(3), 378-397. doi:10.1177/1940161216645340Ceron, A., & Splendore, S. (2016). From contents to comments: Social TV and perceived pluralism in political talk shows. New Media & Society, 20(2), 659-675. doi:10.1177/1461444816668187Chadwick, A. (2013). The Hybrid Media System. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759477.001.0001Dang-Xuan, L., Stieglitz, S., Wladarsch, J., & Neuberger, C. (2013). AN INVESTIGATION OF INFLUENTIALS AND THE ROLE OF SENTIMENT IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON TWITTER DURING ELECTION PERIODS. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 795-825. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.783608Giglietto, F., & Selva, D. (2014). Second Screen and Participation: A Content Analysis on a Full Season Dataset of Tweets. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 260-277. doi:10.1111/jcom.12085Grabe, M. E., & Bucy, E. P. (2009). Image Bite Politics. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372076.001.0001Guo, L., & Vargo, C. (2015). The Power of Message Networks: A Big-Data Analysis of the Network Agenda Setting Model and Issue Ownership. Mass Communication and Society, 18(5), 557-576. doi:10.1080/15205436.2015.1045300Harrington, S. (2008). Popular news in the 21st century Time for a new critical approach? Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 9(3), 266-284. doi:10.1177/1464884907089008López-Rico, C.-M., & Peris-Blanes, À. (2017). Agenda e imagen de los candidatos de las elecciones generales de 2015 en España en programas televisivos de infoentretenimiento. El Profesional de la Información, 26(4), 611. doi:10.3145/epi.2017.jul.05Maruyama, M., Robertson, S. P., Douglas, S., Raine, R., & Semaan, B. (2017). Social Watching a Civic Broadcast. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. doi:10.1145/2998181.2998340Medhat, W., Hassan, A., & Korashy, H. (2014). Sentiment analysis algorithms and applications: A survey. Ain Shams Engineering Journal, 5(4), 1093-1113. doi:10.1016/j.asej.2014.04.011Saif, H., He, Y., & Alani, H. (2012). Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 508-524. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-35176-1_32Shah, D. V., Hanna, A., Bucy, E. P., Lassen, D. S., Van Thomme, J., Bialik, K., … Pevehouse, J. C. W. (2016). Dual Screening During Presidential Debates. American Behavioral Scientist, 60(14), 1816-1843. doi:10.1177/0002764216676245Sullivan, D. G., & Masters, R. D. (1988). «Happy Warriors»: Leaders’ Facial Displays, Viewers’ Emotions, and Political Support. American Journal of Political Science, 32(2), 345. doi:10.2307/2111127Thelwall, M., Buckley, K., Paltoglou, G., Cai, D., & Kappas, A. (2010). Sentiment strength detection in short informal text. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(12), 2544-2558. doi:10.1002/asi.21416Vergeer, M., & Franses, P. H. (2015). Live audience responses to live televised election debates: time series analysis of issue salience and party salience on audience behavior. Information, Communication & Society, 19(10), 1390-1410. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1093526Vilares, D., Thelwall, M., & Alonso, M. A. (2015). The megaphone of the people? Spanish SentiStrength for real-time analysis of political tweets. Journal of Information Science, 41(6), 799-813. doi:10.1177/0165551515598926Wohn, D. Y., & Na, E.-K. (2011). Tweeting about TV: Sharing television viewing experiences via social media message streams. First Monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v16i3.336

Bayesian Integration and Non-Linear Feedback Control in a Full-Body Motor Task

A large number of experiments have asked to what degree human reaching movements can be understood as being close to optimal in a statistical sense. However, little is known about whether these principles are relevant for other classes of movements. Here we analyzed movement in a task that is similar to surfing or snowboarding. Human subjects stand on a force plate that measures their center of pressure. This center of pressure affects the acceleration of a cursor that is displayed in a noisy fashion (as a cloud of dots) on a projection screen while the subject is incentivized to keep the cursor close to a fixed position. We find that salient aspects of observed behavior are well-described by optimal control models where a Bayesian estimation model (Kalman filter) is combined with an optimal controller (either a Linear-Quadratic-Regulator or Bang-bang controller). We find evidence that subjects integrate information over time taking into account uncertainty. However, behavior in this continuous steering task appears to be a highly non-linear function of the visual feedback. While the nervous system appears to implement Bayes-like mechanisms for a full-body, dynamic task, it may additionally take into account the specific costs and constraints of the task

Predictive coding and representationalism

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition (PCT), brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system