On Compositionality

The goal of inquiry in this essay is to ascertain to what extent the Principle of Compositionality – the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meaning of its parts and its mode of composition – can be justifiably imposed as a constraint on semantic theories, and thereby provide information about what meanings are. Apart from the introduction (Chapter One) and the concluding chapter (Chapter Seven) the thesis is divided into five chapters addressing different questions pertaining to the overarching goal of inquiry. Chapter Two is an attempt to determine whether the Principle of Compositionality is a trivial principle. It is argued that this is not the case in the context of providing the semantics of natural languages since it is an open question whether the best theories that respect available syntactic and semantic data are compositional. Chapter Three and Chapter Four ask whether there are reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is true. It is argued that the three most commonly cited reasons for thinking that correct semantic theories must be compositional – Linguistic Creativity, Productivity and Systematicity – in fact only give us reasons to think that the meaning of complex expressions depend on the meanings of their parts and their modes of composition, but not that the meaning of complex expressions depend ONLY on those factors. Chapter Five asks whether there are any reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is false. It is argued that all the phenomena that have been suggested entail non-compositionality are in fact compatible with some versions of compositionality. Even if this conclusion is reached in this chapter, the conclusion of the previous two chapters entails that we are not justified in imposing the Principle of Compositionality as an adequacy constraint on Semantic theories. Chapter Six explores the ways in which information about what meanings are can be derived by imposing constraints on semantic theories. It is argued that the distinction emphasized in Chapter Three and Chapter Four between depending on and depending ONLY on is of critical importance. It is demonstrated that the informative potential of the Principle of Compositionality goes far beyond that of the principle we are in fact justified in imposing on semantic theories. So not only is it the case that we cannot learn anything about meanings from the justified imposition of the Principle of Compositionality – since we cannot justifiably impose it as a constraint on semantic theories – what we could have learned from it had we been justified in imposing it is very different from what we can learn from the principle that we are justified in imposing

The modifier effect and property mutability

The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However Experiment 6, which provided a brief context for the modified concepts to lend them greater credibility, did reveal the predicted interaction. It is argued that the modifier effect arises primarily from a general lack of confidence in generic statements about the typical properties of unfamiliar concepts. Neither prototype nor classical models of concept combination receive support from the phenomenon

Industrial waste management within manufacturing: a comparative study of tools, policies, visions and concepts

Industrial waste is a key factor when assessing the sustainability of a manufacturing process or company. A multitude of visions, concepts, tools, and policies are used both academically and industrially to improve the environmental effect of manufacturing; a majority of these approaches have a direct bearing on industrial waste. The identified approaches have in this paper been categorised according to application area, goals, organisational entity, life cycle phase, and waste hierarchy stage; the approaches have also been assessed according to academic prevalence, semantic aspects, and overlaps. In many cases the waste management approaches have similar goals and approaches, which cause confusion and disorientation for companies aiming to synthesise their management systems to fit their waste management strategy. Thus, a study was performed on how waste management approaches can be integrated to reach the vision of zero waste in manufacturing

Kinds of Learning and the Likelihood of Future True Beliefs: Reply to Jäger on Reliabilism and the Value Problem

We reply to Christoph Jager's criticism of the conditional probability solution (CPS) to the value problem for reliabilism due to Goldman and Olsson (2009). We argue that while Jager raises some legitimate concerns about the compatibility of CPS with externalist epistemology, his objections do not in the end reduce the plausibility of that solution

Robust feature representation for classification of bird song syllables

A novel feature set for low-dimensional signal representation, designed for classification or clustering of non-stationary signals with complex variation in time and frequency, is presented. The feature representation of a signal is given by the first left and right singular vectors of its ambiguity spectrum matrix. If the ambiguity matrix is of low rank, most signal information in time direction is captured by the first right singular vector while the signal’s key frequency information is encoded by the first left singular vector. The resemblance of two signals is investigated by means of a suitable similarity assessment of the signals’ respective singular vector pair. Application of multitapers for the calculation of the ambiguity spectrum gives an increased robustness to jitter and background noise and a consequent improvement in performance, as compared to estimation based on the ordinary single Hanning window spectrogram. The suggested feature-based signal compression is applied to a syllable-based analysis of a song from the bird species Great Reed Warbler and evaluated by comparison to manual auditive and/or visual signal classification. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms well-known approaches based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and spectrogram cross-correlation

En undersökning av effektiviteten på OMX Stockholm

Abstrakt Uppsatsen behandlar fenomenet effektiva marknader och undersöker huruvida två olika marknader på Stockholmsbörsen uppvisar olika grader av effektivitet. Marknaderna som studerades var Stockholmsbörsens Small Cap respektive Large Cap lista. Studien genomfördes genom att studera Finansinspektionens insynsregister och insynspersoners transaktioner. Genom att studera verkställande direktörer på respektive marknad och deras överavkastning kunde vi dra slutsatser om de studerade marknaderna uppvisar olika grad av effektivitet. Vi kunde dessvärre inte statistiskt påvisa att avkastningarna skiljde sig signifikant från varandra när de båda marknaderna jämfördes. Därför dras slutsatsen att Small Cap respektive Large Cap uppvisar liknande grad av effektivitet. Nyckelord: Insiderhandel, Asymmetrisk information, Effektiva marknadshypotesen, EMH

Inviwo -- A Visualization System with Usage Abstraction Levels

The complexity of today's visualization applications demands specific visualization systems tailored for the development of these applications. Frequently, such systems utilize levels of abstraction to improve the application development process, for instance by providing a data flow network editor. Unfortunately, these abstractions result in several issues, which need to be circumvented through an abstraction-centered system design. Often, a high level of abstraction hides low level details, which makes it difficult to directly access the underlying computing platform, which would be important to achieve an optimal performance. Therefore, we propose a layer structure developed for modern and sustainable visualization systems allowing developers to interact with all contained abstraction levels. We refer to this interaction capabilities as usage abstraction levels, since we target application developers with various levels of experience. We formulate the requirements for such a system, derive the desired architecture, and present how the concepts have been exemplary realized within the Inviwo visualization system. Furthermore, we address several specific challenges that arise during the realization of such a layered architecture, such as communication between different computing platforms, performance centered encapsulation, as well as layer-independent development by supporting cross layer documentation and debugging capabilities

DNA heats up : Energetics of genome ejection from phage revealed by isothermal titration calorimetry

Most bacteriophages are known to inject their double-stranded DNA into bacteria upon receptor binding in an essentially spontaneous way. This downhill thermodynamic process from the intact virion toward the empty viral capsid plus released DNA is made possible by the energy stored during active packaging of the genome into the capsid. Only indirect measurements of this energy have been available until now using either single-molecule or osmotic suppression techniques. In this paper, we describe for the first time the use of isothermal titration calorimetry to directly measure the heat released (or equivalently the enthalpy) during DNA ejection from phage lambda, triggered in solution by a solubilized receptor. Quantitative analyses of the results lead to the identification of thermodynamic determinants associated with DNA ejection. The values obtained were found to be consistent with those previously predicted by analytical models and numerical simulations. Moreover, the results confirm the role of DNA hydration in the energetics of genome confinement in viral capsids.Comment: 24 pages including figures and tabl

Doing and undoing post-anthropocentric design

The chairs' introductory editorial for the theme track 'Doing and Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design'