Book review: contesting democracy: political ideas in twentieth century Europe by Jan-Werner Müller

Jan-Werner Müller presents a major account of political thought in twentieth century Europe. Müller argues that the Second World War was pivotal in shaping the democratic values so familiar in the European community. Although the author carefully considers the most familiar thinkers alongside those now forgotten, Bill Kissane feels that the book still tells only half the story

Emergent Leadership Detection Across Datasets

Automatic detection of emergent leaders in small groups from nonverbal behaviour is a growing research topic in social signal processing but existing methods were evaluated on single datasets -- an unrealistic assumption for real-world applications in which systems are required to also work in settings unseen at training time. It therefore remains unclear whether current methods for emergent leadership detection generalise to similar but new settings and to which extent. To overcome this limitation, we are the first to study a cross-dataset evaluation setting for the emergent leadership detection task. We provide evaluations for within- and cross-dataset prediction using two current datasets (PAVIS and MPIIGroupInteraction), as well as an investigation on the robustness of commonly used feature channels (visual focus of attention, body pose, facial action units, speaking activity) and online prediction in the cross-dataset setting. Our evaluations show that using pose and eye contact based features, cross-dataset prediction is possible with an accuracy of 0.68, as such providing another important piece of the puzzle towards emergent leadership detection in the real world.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Review of Jean Moritz Müller, The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling.

Review of Jean Moritz Müller, The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling

Secrets of Pawnless Endings

It is now 32 years since Ströhlein’s pioneering computation of KRKN and ten years since the publication of Nunn’s Secrets of Rook Endings. This book defined a new genre under his authorship and editorship (Nunn, 1992, 1994, 1995; Müller and Lamprecht, 1999, 2001) and has merited a second edition. Now comes the second edition of Secrets of Pawnless Endings

Comment on "Searchinger et al. (2018), Assessing the efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change (Nature 564: 249)"

Some days ago, the article from Searchinger et al. 2018 has been published and caused quite some discussion in the media, basically being reported to show that organic agriculture is bad for the climate. In the following, Adrian Müller (FiBL) present some fastly written compilation of thoughts on this article and this claim from the media that reported on it

Conditioned blocking and schizophrenia: a replication and study of the role of symptoms, age, onset-age of psychosis and illness-duration

Introduction: Measures of selective attention processing like latent inhibition (LI) and conditioned blocking (CB) are disturbed in some patients with schizophrenia. (LI is the delay in learning about the associations of a stimulus that has been associated with no event [vs. de novo learning]; CB is the delay in learning the associations of a stimulus-component when the other component has already started to acquire these associations.) We proposed, - a) to replicate the reported decreases of CB in patients without paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms, b) to see if CB depends on the age of illness-onset and its duration, as reported for LI. Methods: We studied 101 young and old, acute and chronically ill patients with schizophrenia, of whom 62 learned a modified 'mouse-in-house' CB task, and compared them with 62 healthy controls matched for age, education and socio-economic background. Results: 1/ CB was more evident in patients with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia than other subtypes. 2/ An unusual persistence of high CB scores through testing was associated with productive symptoms (including positive thought disorder). 3/ Reduced CB related to the increased expression of a) Schneider's first rank symptoms of ideas-of-reference and b) to negative symptoms like poor rapport and poor attention. 4/ CB was less evident in the older patients (age range 9.5-63.3y) and those with an earlier illness-onset (range 8.5-45.8y). Conclusions: In contrast to the similar LI test of selective attention CB is found in patients with paranoid schizophrenia and, unlike LI, the expression of CB by patients with schizophrenia is not related closely to illness-duration. Reduced CB tended to be found in those with an earlier onset, a group often noted for more severe cognitive problems. These results imply that CB and LI reflect the activity of different underlying processes. We suggest that reduced CB on the first few test-trials in nonparanoid schizophrenia reflects the unusual persistence of controlled information processing strategies that would normally become automatic during conditioning. In contrast continued CB during testing in patients with positive (paranoid) symptoms reflects an unusual persistence of automatic processing strategies

A catalog of Bryophyta types deposited at the National Museum of Brazil

While visiting the Herbarium of the Botany Department of the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (code, R), we located the types of 219 bryophyte names, most of which were published by Karl Müller (cited as Müller Hallensis), whose holotypes were lost during the bombing of the Berlin Herbarium in 1943. A total of 181 names (82%) are possible candidates for lectotypification and most likely not to be found elsewhere. We also found the complete collection of Müller's "Bryologia Serrae Itatiaiae", made by Ernst Ule

Skryf Afrikaans van A tot Z.

Dalene Müller. Skryf Afrikaans van A tot Z. 2003, 718 pp. ISBN 1 86890 037 1. Kaapstad: Pharos Woordeboek