Individuality in Fish Behavior: Ecology and Comparative Psychology

This work is a brief review of a series of studies of the phenotypic organization and ecological significance of individual differences in fish behavior. The following species were studied: guppy Poecilia retuculata, lion-headed cichlid Steatocranus cassuarius, and the convict cichlid Archocentrus nigrofasciatum. We developed methods for the analysis of individual differences in fish behavior and studied their structure, development, and ecological and evolutionary significance

Language, Subjectivity and Individuality

It is clear that within Deleuze and Whitehead’s work, there is an important re- description of the time, place and status of all subjectivity, a subjectivity which is not limited to the ‘human’. Both writers provide compelling reasons as to why, and how, contemporary analyses should avoid positing the human person as either an object or a subject. Rather, ‘human’ individuality is to be envisaged as an aspect within the wider, processual effectivity whereby the virtual becomes actual (Deleuze), or the solidarity of the extensive continuum becomes actualized into individuality (Whitehead). It may appear that I am eliding or confusing the distinction between subjectivity and individuality here. However, one of the arguments that I wish to set out in this chapter is that the validity and complexity of such a distinction can be helpfully re-thought through a sustained engagement with the work of Whitehead and Deleuze

(WP 2014-03) Bounded Rationality and Bounded Individuality

This paper argues that since the utility function conception of the individual is derived from standard rationality theory, the view that rationality is bounded suggests that individuality should also be seen as bounded. The meaning of this idea is developed in terms of two ways in which individuality can be said to be bounded, with one bound associated with Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory and the ‘new’ behavioral economics and a second bound associated with Simon’s evolutionary thinking and the ‘old’ behavioral economics. The paper then shows how different bounded individuality conceptions operate in nudge economics, agent-based modeling, and social identity theory, explaining these conceptions in terms of how they relate to these two behavioral economics views of bounded rationality. How both the ‘new’ and ‘old’ individuality bounds might then be combined in a single account is briefly explored in connection with Kirman’s Marseille fish market analysis

Individuality and Source of Violence

This is a (very) introductory paper to a forthcoming existentalist account of moral absolutism and violence. It was written for and presented at ICPR Seminar 2018. In feminist ethics, the freedom to choose one's way of living is primary to the struggle against patriarchy. Such a choice to live a certain way is a manifestation of one's individuality. This assertion of individuality is accompanied by responsibility towards consequences of the way of living. To explore the relation between individuality and responsibility, I develop and build the hypothetical situation of a mother and daughter with different ways of living. The notion of a good life for each of them is mentioned and we ask: To what extent is the daughter responsible for the anguish that the mother undergoes in her assertion of individuality (through her choice of way of living)? My primary aim in this paper is to question the nature of individuality and to probe the claim that individuality is a source of violence. This will involve discussing the scope of responsibility for one's choices and the difficulty in forming a criterion to delineate such a scope

Coffee and Conversation: Conformity and individuality."

Weekly Coffee and Conversation on the topic of conformity and individualityBoston University Howard Thurman Center for Common Groun

Hierarchical mixture models for assessing fingerprint individuality

The study of fingerprint individuality aims to determine to what extent a fingerprint uniquely identifies an individual. Recent court cases have highlighted the need for measures of fingerprint individuality when a person is identified based on fingerprint evidence. The main challenge in studies of fingerprint individuality is to adequately capture the variability of fingerprint features in a population. In this paper hierarchical mixture models are introduced to infer the extent of individualization. Hierarchical mixtures utilize complementary aspects of mixtures at different levels of the hierarchy. At the first (top) level, a mixture is used to represent homogeneous groups of fingerprints in the population, whereas at the second level, nested mixtures are used as flexible representations of distributions of features from each fingerprint. Inference for hierarchical mixtures is more challenging since the number of unknown mixture components arise in both the first and second levels of the hierarchy. A Bayesian approach based on reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo methodology is developed for the inference of all unknown parameters of hierarchical mixtures. The methodology is illustrated on fingerprint images from the NIST database and is used to make inference on fingerprint individuality estimates from this population.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS266 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org