The Broad Escape from Narrow Fictionalism

[1] Hartry Field, Realism, Mathematics and Modality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). [2] Bob Hale, 'Modal fictionalism: a simple dilemma', Analysis this issue 63-67. [3] Peter Menzies and Philip Pettit, 'in defence of fictionalism about possible worlds' Analysis 54 (1994) 27-36. [4] Gideon Rosen, 'Modal fictionalism', Mind 99 (1990) 327-54. [5] Gideon Rosen, 'Modal fictionalism fixed', Analysis this issue 68-73.

Some foundational questions concerning language studies: With a focus on categorial grammars and model-theoretic possible worlds semantics

This paper examines the social impact of a large-scale marine conservation project (Marine Park) in the coastal region of Mtwara, southeastern Tanzania, following displacement and the enforcement of restrictions on fishing and extracting marine resources. Through an analysis of interviews and focus group discussions with residents in six villages, the paper illustrates how the undesired effects of the Marine Park have become part of people’s everyday discourse regarding hardships and their experiences of the violence of everyday life. Elicited narratives provide insights into how the Marine Park, in combination with a multiplicity of factors leading to displacement, dispossession, and social dislocation, has intensified hardships, especially among female-headed households, due to their increasing poverty, marginalization, and food-related insecurity. The narratives shed light on people’s lived experiences of disempowerment, feelings of humiliation, anger, despair, low self-esteem, and extreme resentment—in essence, their social suffering. The paper makes a case for addressing the human dimensions of marine biodiversity and conservation interventions as a key step in making them genuinely collaborative and sustainable in terms of social equity and ecological effectiveness.

The standard approach to the modalities necessity and possibility is given by modal logic together with possible worlds semantics. In the view of some philosophers, this semantics requires a realism which a fortiori is presupposed for the understanding of modalities. In this paper we will discuss some philosophical problems of this approach, and propose an alternative view which overcome some of these problems; in particular, it dispense with realism for possible worlds.

This paper presents the first possible world semantics for concessive conditionals (i.e., even if A, C conditionals) constructed in a compositional way. First, the meaning of if is formalized through a semantics that builds on the proposal given by Stalnaker [1968]. A major difference from Stalnaker’s approach is that irrelevant conditionals (i.e., conditionals where the antecedent and the consequent have no connection) are false in this new setting. Second, the meaning of even is analyzed through a formal semantics based on the notion of scale. This analysis overcomes the problems arising in standard approaches, in which even is analyzed with the help of pragmatic presuppositions. Finally, the two particles are combined in order to provide a formal analysis of even if. This theory predicts the major phenomena concerning the behavior of concessive conditionals and without any call to pragmatic explanations. More generally, this approach creates the possibility of a compositional analysis of other conditionals such as if then or only if forms.

Decision letter: Temporal derivative computation in the dorsal raphe network revealed by an experimentally driven augmented integrate-and-fire modeling framework

Editor's evaluation: Temporal derivative computation in the dorsal raphe network revealed by an experimentally driven augmented integrate-and-fire modeling framework

The standard numerical approach to determining matrix elements of local operators and width of resonances uses the finite volume dependence of energy levels and matrix elements. Finite size corrections that decay exponentially in the volume are usually neglected or taken into account using perturbation expansion in effective field theory. Using two-dimensional sine-Gordon field theory as "toy model" it is shown that some exponential finite size effects could be much larger than previously thought, potentially spoiling the determination of matrix elements in frameworks such as lattice QCD. The particular class of finite size corrections considered here are mu-terms arising from bound state poles in the scattering amplitudes. In sine-Gordon model, these can be explicitly evaluated and shown to explain the observed discrepancies to high precision. It is argued that the effects observed are not special to the two-dimensional setting, but rather depend on general field theoretic features that are common with models relevant for particle physics. It is important to understand these finite size corrections as they present a potentially dangerous source of systematic errors for the determination of matrix elements and resonance widths.

For evaluated nuclear cross-section uncertainties, most standard approaches are based on experimental cross-section measurements, reflecting that these measurements have uncertainty on their own and, in particular, undetermined correlations. We propose here focusing on the estimation of experimental covariances and bypassing the direct empirical estimator, which cannot be used due to the small amount of available data. Because of the nonlinearity of experimental cross sections, an alternative method to the classical propagation error formula is presented. This method exploits a regression model of the experimental cross sections to generate pseudomeasurements and thereby allows an empirical estimation of experimental covariances. Moreover, thanks to a bootstrap, a quality measure for the estimation is provided. The empirical matrix estimation is then improved with shrinkage. The validity of the approach is confirmed through numerical experiments on a toy model. Finally, the procedure is applied to the real case of the 5525Mn nucleus.

We discuss dispersion forces, beginning with toy models that illustrate the limitations of various standard approaches. For metallic cohesion of very thin layers, we show that because the local density approximation (LDA) misses distant dispersion interactions, it also makes significant errors in the maximum cohesive force, a short‐ranged property. Furthermore, perturbative methods fail for such large planar systems, and CI methods are impractical. For large planar and linear systems in the well‐separated limit we show that insulating and metallic systems can exhibit very different dispersion forces, pairwise summation of atomic R−6 terms failing for the metallic cases. This could have implications for the interaction between nanotubes and between graphene planes: these planes are zero‐gap insulators at large separation and weak metals at graphitic equilibrium. Graphitic cohesion and intercalation are fundamental to a hydrogen economy and to various nanotechnologies, yet our arguments strongly suggest that all standard methods are inadequate for these phenomena. We argue that nonlocal RPA‐like correlation energy formulae contain all the required “seamless” physics of long‐ and short‐ranged interaction, as needed for graphitic and other soft‐matter systems. Indeed full calculations of this type are currently being attempted for graphite, and appear to be very delicate. We discuss recent efforts to approximate these calculations, and propose a new scheme. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2005

Many research institutions, clinical diagnostic laboratories, and blood banks are desperately searching for a possibility to identify and quantify heme in different physiological and pathological settings as well as various research applications. The reasons for this are the toxicity of the heme and the fact that it acts as a hemolytic and pro-inflammatory molecule. Heme only exerts these severe and undesired effects when it is not incorporated in hemoproteins. Upon release from the hemoproteins, it enters a biologically available state (labile heme), in which it is loosely associated with proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, or other molecules. While the current methods and procedures for quantitative determination of heme have been used for many years in different settings, their value is limited by the challenging chemical properties of heme. A major cause of inadequate quantification is the separation of labile and permanently bound heme and its high aggregation potential. Thus, none of the current methods are utilized as a generally applicable, standardized approach. The aim of this Feature is to describe and summarize the most common and frequently used chemical, analytical, and biochemical methods for the quantitative determination of heme. Based on this overview, the most promising approaches for future solutions to heme quantification are highlighted.

Sensitive determination of free benzophenone-3 in human urine samples based on an ionic liquid as extractant phase in single-drop microextraction prior to liquid chromatography analysis

A wire-mesh sensor (WMS) is a widely used instrument to visualize and estimate derived parameters of multiphase flows, e.g., gas void fraction or liquid hold-up. The spatial resolution of obtained flow images is associated with the number of crossing points formed by the transmitter and receiver wires of a given sensor. This may be a limitation for applications that require high spatial resolution since WMS is an intrusive device and the increase of electrodes may increase pressure drop and deform/fragment bubbles. In order to minimize such undesirable effects and maximize the sensor resolution, we employed a reconstruction algorithm based on the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimator to increase image resolution of WMS with fewer wires than commonly reported in the literature, i.e., here, we apply <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$8\times 8$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6\times 6$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4\times 4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2\times 2$ </tex-math></inline-formula> sensors for 1-in pipe. Since standard regularization approaches may provide incorrect solutions for such configurations, a new methodology to obtain the prior model is presented. In our approach, the prior is assumed as a multivariate Gaussian model, which is extracted from experimental flow data of a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$16\times 16$ </tex-math></inline-formula> WMS (the most common resolution for 1-in pipe). Finally, the sensitivity matrix obtained by electric field simulation and the experimental prior model is incorporated into the MMSE algorithm to restore experimental flow data of the low-resolution sensors. The experiments were performed in a flow loop operating at slug flow. The experimental results suggest that the MMSE estimator combined with the experimental prior model has a high potential not only to improve image resolution but also to correct the average void fraction estimation.

To provide a meta-analysis of the effects of music interventions on patients with dementia, separating, for the first time, between different types of interventions and different outcome measures, namely affective, behavioural, cognitive and physiological. Music therapy is an attractive form of intervention for the growing number of demented patients, for whom pharmacological interventions are not always effective and may lead to undesired side effects. While music is more frequently applied in clinical settings for each year, no meta-analysis has considered effects of music interventions on affective, behavioural, cognitive and physiological outcomes separately. A standard meta-analysis approach was applied. We include all original studies found for the key words music and dementia. Mean effect sizes and confidence intervals are computed from study effect sizes according to standard methods, and these are considered for various common types of music interventions separately. Nineteen studies with a total of 478 dementia patients exhibit effect sizes ranging from 0·04-4·56 (M = 1·04). Many of these indicate large positive effects on behavioural, cognitive and physiological outcome measures, and medium effects on affective measures. Music interventions seem to be effective and have the potential of increasing the quality of life for patients with dementia. Many studies in this area suffer from poor methodological quality, which limits the reach of meta-analysis and the strength and generalisability of these conclusions. Being inexpensive and largely without adverse side effects, current knowledge seems to indicate that music interventions can be recommended for patients in all stages of dementia.

A method was evaluated for reducing the biting behavior of a 2½‐year old child in a preschool for children with developmental disabilities. Previously, a variety of standard treatment approaches for the problem had failed. Contingent oral application of an aversive liquid was found to result in clinically significant reductions in attempted bites of staff and classmates. The procedure was simple to implement and produced no identified undesirable physical or emotional effects on the subject.