Indifference to Anti-Humean Chances

An indifference principle says that your credences should be distributed uniformly over each of the possibilities you recognise. A chance deference principle says that your credences should be aligned with the chances. My thesis is that, if we are anti-Humeans about chance, then these two principles are incompatible. Anti-Humeans think that it is possible for the actual frequencies to depart from the chances. So long as you recognise possibilities like this, you cannot both spread your credences evenly and defer to the chances. I discuss some weaker forms of indifference which will allow anti-Humeans to defer to the chances

Characterizing and Predicting Email Deferral Behavior

Email triage involves going through unhandled emails and deciding what to do with them. This familiar process can become increasingly challenging as the number of unhandled email grows. During a triage session, users commonly defer handling emails that they cannot immediately deal with to later. These deferred emails, are often related to tasks that are postponed until the user has more time or the right information to deal with them. In this paper, through qualitative interviews and a large-scale log analysis, we study when and what enterprise email users tend to defer. We found that users are more likely to defer emails when handling them involves replying, reading carefully, or clicking on links and attachments. We also learned that the decision to defer emails depends on many factors such as user's workload and the importance of the sender. Our qualitative results suggested that deferring is very common, and our quantitative log analysis confirms that 12% of triage sessions and 16% of daily active users had at least one deferred email on weekdays. We also discuss several deferral strategies such as marking emails as unread and flagging that are reported by our interviewees, and illustrate how such patterns can be also observed in user logs. Inspired by the characteristics of deferred emails and contextual factors involved in deciding if an email should be deferred, we train a classifier for predicting whether a recently triaged email is actually deferred. Our experimental results suggests that deferral can be classified with modest effectiveness. Overall, our work provides novel insights about how users handle their emails and how deferral can be modeled

Deference and essentialism in the categorization of chemical kinds

Psychological essentialism has been subject to much debate. Yet a key implication – that people should defer to experts in categorizing natural kinds – has not been widely examined. Three experiments examine deference in the categorization of chemical kinds. The first establishes borderline cases used in the second and third. These latter show limited deference to experts, and some deference to non-experts. These data are consistent with a perspectival framework for concepts in which categorization is sometimes based on micro-structural properties and sometimes on appearance and function

Real Options Valuation : an application to the portuguese real estate market

The contribution of real options analysis on the valuation of Portuguese undeveloped building sites is significant on the decision making regarding the apartment-buildings construction. Using the options model developed by Quigg (1993), and including the necessary readjustments for the Portuguese market, it was found that the scale price elasticity parameter and construction expenditures’ elasticity of scale parameter had a strong impact on building sites’ values. The empirical analysis revealed that the option to defer adds value to undeveloped building sites’ valuations. This fact cannot be ignored when deciding upon an investment’s implementation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Pulsed Feedback Defers Cellular Differentiation

Environmental signals induce diverse cellular differentiation programs. In certain systems, cells defer differentiation for extended time periods after the signal appears, proliferating through multiple rounds of cell division before committing to a new fate. How can cells set a deferral time much longer than the cell cycle? Here we study Bacillus subtilis cells that respond to sudden nutrient limitation with multiple rounds of growth and division before differentiating into spores. A well-characterized genetic circuit controls the concentration and phosphorylation of the master regulator Spo0A, which rises to a critical concentration to initiate sporulation. However, it remains unclear how this circuit enables cells to defer sporulation for multiple cell cycles. Using quantitative time-lapse fluorescence microscopy of Spo0A dynamics in individual cells, we observed pulses of Spo0A phosphorylation at a characteristic cell cycle phase. Pulse amplitudes grew systematically and cell-autonomously over multiple cell cycles leading up to sporulation. This pulse growth required a key positive feedback loop involving the sporulation kinases, without which the deferral of sporulation became ultrasensitive to kinase expression. Thus, deferral is controlled by a pulsed positive feedback loop in which kinase expression is activated by pulses of Spo0A phosphorylation. This pulsed positive feedback architecture provides a more robust mechanism for setting deferral times than constitutive kinase expression. Finally, using mathematical modeling, we show how pulsing and time delays together enable “polyphasic” positive feedback, in which different parts of a feedback loop are active at different times. Polyphasic feedback can enable more accurate tuning of long deferral times. Together, these results suggest that Bacillus subtilis uses a pulsed positive feedback loop to implement a “timer” that operates over timescales much longer than a cell cycle

Characterization of the precipitation in southwestern part of Greece with X-band Doppler radar, 2-D video disdrometer and rain gauges

International audienceWe document precipitation in the southwestern part of Greece with the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) X-band radar, NOA 2D video disdrometer and a network of rain gauges. The observations were collected between February and April 2004. Time evolution of the drop size distribution (DSD) is presented for the 9 March 2004 case where rain rate (computed on 1-min period) was measured up to 80 mm/h and reflectivity at the location of the disdrometer exceeded 40 dBZ. We then present the differences of DSD as function of the rain rate for the studied case as well as for the entire observations of the field experiment. It shows that higher the rain rate is, larger the range of the DSD and higher the concentration of the raindrops are

The Law of 'Not Now'

Administrative agencies frequently say “not now.” They defer decisions about rulemaking or adjudication, or decide not to decide. When is it lawful for them to do so? A substantial degree of agency autonomy is guaranteed by a recognition of resource constraints, which require agencies to set priorities, often with reference to their independent assessments of the relative importance of legislative policies. Unless a fair reading of congressional instructions suggests otherwise, agencies may also defer decisions because of their own policy judgments about appropriate timing. At the same time, agencies may not defer decisions, or decide not to decide, if Congress has imposed a statutory deadline, or if their failure to act amounts to a circumvention of express or implied statutory requirements, or amounts to an abdication of the agency’s basic responsibility to promote and enforce policies established by Congress

To defer or not defer? : UK state pension and work decisions in a life cycle model

The UK state pension (which depends only on age) includes an option to defer take up which yields either a subsequent lump sum or higher weekly pension. We analyse the joint decisions on pension deferral and intertemporal labour supply/participation in a lifecycle setting. We show that deferral is purely a financial decision, but the impact of deferral on work decisions depends on preferences, wage rates, non-labour income and initial wealth. To exactly characterize this, we use a quasilinear utility function and provide calibrated simulations. We also discuss the choice between a lump sum or increased weekly pension