Accurate Representation Of Reality Research Articles

The validity of simplifying gaming simulations

Simplifications of the real world affect the validity and reliability of gaming simulations. This challenges the application of gaming simulations as an instrument for experiential learning, reflective practices and data collection. This study investigates the effects of simplification on extracting tacit knowledge from human behavior by answering the research question: Can tacit knowledge in a simplified design of a gaming simulation be transferred without compromising the validity and reliability corresponding to the real-world complexity? By applying a participatory design a gaming simulation is tested as an instrument to extract tacit knowledge. To test and evaluate the validity of this application, simulation sessions have been performed with experts from the field. In simplifying reality, participants' participation emphasized that the most accurate representation of reality is a prerequisite for capturing tacit knowledge. This in turn contributes again to the validity of the simulation design. The results show that simplification of the real world didn't affect participants' perspective on the use of the gaming simulation as an experiential tool to enable learning processes or create awareness. And that a simplified simulation design, is still valid in addressing the real-world complexity, with minimization of the level of abstraction and maximization of the truthfulness.

Investigating immersion and migration decisions for agent-based modelling: A cautionary tale

Background Agent-based modelling provides an appealing methodological choice for simulating human behaviour and decisions. The currently dominant approaches based on static transition rates or unverified assumptions are restrictive, and could be enhanced with insights from cognitive experiments on actual decision making. Here, one common concern is that standard surveys or experiments may lack ecological validity, limiting the extent to which research findings can be generalised to real-life settings. For complex, highly emotive decision-making scenarios, such as those related to migration, the typically used short, methodical survey questions may not appropriately map onto complex real-world decisions of interest. Immersive contexts may offer more accurate representations of reality, potentially enhancing the usefulness of experimental information in multi-disciplinary modelling endeavours. Methods This pre-registered study of migration decisions, aimed at informing a multi-disciplinary construction of an agent-based model of migration, presents a choice-based interactive fiction game in which players make migration decisions to advance through a story. Participants (N = 1000 Prolific users) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, three involving different renditions of the game attempting to create immersion, with the last condition presenting the decisions in standard survey format. Results Although addressing the lack of ecological validity in survey data is important for improving agent-based modelling methodology, the experimental design used to tackle this issue, while responding directly to modelling needs, proved too complex. The created experimental conditions ended up too distinct from each other, involving stimuli that differed in quantity and content. This introduced several unintended and uncontrolled confounds, making it impossible to meaningfully interpret the results of this experiment on its own. Our results act as a cautionary tale for agent-based modellers, highlighting that the modelling needs should not override the principles of experimental design, and provide motivation for more rigorous research on this topic.

Assessing the economic and environmental impacts of battery leasing and selling models for electric vehicle fleets: A study on customer and company implications

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) powered by renewable energy hold promise for significantly decarbonizing land-based transport. However, the environmental impacts of BEVs remain a critical concern. This paper investigates the circular business model (CBM) of leasing batteries for BEVs and compares its economic and environmental impacts with the linear model of selling and buying batteries. A comprehensive approach combining a battery fleet model, net present value (NPV) analysis, and cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment (LCA) is employed. By considering diverse driving profiles instead of the single “average” profile used in previous studies, the battery fleet model provides a more accurate representation of reality. The findings reveal that while leasing batteries can be as profitable as selling them, companies that lease may require higher revenues and tax contributions to obtain a comparable NPV. To generate additional income, companies may need to charge fees that do not always benefit customers. Notably, battery purchasing remains the most cost-effective option for users driving over 10,000 km/year. The LCA results indicate that the environmental benefits of leasing batteries over selling them are marginal. Leasing offers advantages such as user flexibility, and it encourages battery repair, repurposing, and recycling; however, there is insufficient evidence to support the cost-effectiveness of leasing or significant environmental improvements over traditional buying and selling models. The findings may be relevant for other business models targeting a substantial user base in the BEV domain, such as battery-as-a-service (BaaS) programs and battery swapping.

Alternative Scale(ing) Practices in Architectural Design Studio

Commonly associated with the accurate representation of reality according to a specific ratio, which depends mainly on measuring and precision, the notion of scale has been considered an operative tool in architecture to perceive and indicate the size of anything according to a reference system. An effort to challenge the concept of scale(ing) to include diverse reference units and their scalar articulations holds the potential of instigating novel associations in architectural design studios. Possible readings of these alternative scale(ing) conditions are discussed in the paper in reference to a series of design exercises conducted at architectural design studios. The main intention is to question these unmediated associations to the reference unit in the determination of size and proportion, thus possible scales of architectural space. This particular method of analysis aims to arrive at various scale(ing) conditions, whose internal reference system is challenged by the changes and shifts in the definition of the major reference unit. Each different scale(ing) condition studied through the given exercise was regarded as an act of confrontation for readings of scale as well as presenting provocative challenges to the architectural design processes. With this standpoint, the paper proposes a multi-layered reading of scale that argues the reference unit’s instrumentality in the definition of architectural space and proposes an alternative methodology of integrating scale in architectural design education.

Investigating immersion and migration decisions for agent-based modelling: A cautionary tale

Background: Agent-based modelling provides an appealing methodological choice for simulating human behaviour and decisions. The currently-dominant approaches based on static transition rates or unverified assumptions are restrictive, and could be enhanced with insights from cognitive experiments on actual decision making. Here, one common concern is that standard surveys or experiments may lack ecological validity, limiting the extent to which research findings can be generalised to real-life settings. For complex, highly emotive decision-making scenarios, such as those related to migration, the typically-used short, methodical survey questions may not appropriately map onto complex real-world decisions of interest. Immersive contexts may offer more accurate representations of reality, potentially enhancing the usefulness of experimental information in multi-disciplinary modelling endeavours. Methods: This pre-registered study of migration decisions, aimed at informing a multi-disciplinary construction of an agent-based model of migration, presents a choice-based interactive fiction game in which players make migration decisions to advance through a story. Participants (N = 1000 Prolific users) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, three involving different renditions of the game attempting to create immersion, with the last condition presenting the decisions in standard survey format. Results: Although addressing the lack of ecological validity in survey data is important for improving agent-based modelling methodology, the experimental design used to tackle this issue, while responding directly to modelling needs, proved too complex. The created experimental conditions ended up too distinct from each other, involving stimuli that differed in quantity and content. This introduced several unintended and uncontrolled confounds, making it impossible to meaningfully interpret the results of this experiment on its own. Our results act as a cautionary tale for agent-based modellers, highlighting that the modelling needs should not override the principles of experimental design, and provide motivation for more rigorous research on this topic.

The Subversion of the Meanings of Food Tropes in Salman Rushdie’s Novel “Midnight’s Children”

The article investigates the subversion of the meanings of food tropes in Salman Rushdie’s novel “Midnight’s Children”. The research is carried out within the theoretical framework of Postethnic Narrative Criticism, which postulates that historical and political contexts are relevant for understanding and interpreting the postethnic literary work; however, literature should not be perceived as an accurate representation of reality outside the world of fiction or interpreted as such. The article provides an analysis of the key connotations of the tropes in the description of Doctor Aziz and his family, emphasizing that food-related tropes are restricted to the private life of the characters discussed and are mainly associated with female characters. In portraying the Azizes’ children, the initial meanings of the tropes are subverted and undermined. The process of subversion is determined by societal changes which impact the main characters’ public and private lives.

The Influence of Characteristic Sea State Parameters on the Accuracy of Irregular Wave Field Simulations of Different Complexity

The accurate description of the complex genesis and evolution of ocean waves, as well as the associated kinematics and dynamics is indispensable for the design of offshore structures and the assessment of marine operations. In the majority of cases, the water-wave problem is reduced to potential flow theory on a somehow simplified level. However, the nonlinear terms in the surface boundary conditions and the fact that they must be fulfilled on the unknown water surface make the boundary value problem considerably complex. Hereby, the contrary objectives with respect to a very accurate representation of reality and numerical efficiency must be balanced wisely. This paper investigates the influence of characteristic sea state parameters on the accuracy of irregular wave field simulations of different complexity. For this purpose, the high-order spectral method was applied and the underlying Taylor series expansion was truncated at different orders so that numerical simulations of different complexity can be investigated. It is shown that, for specific characteristic sea state parameters, the boundary value problem can be significantly reduced while providing sufficient accuracy.

Big data a problem reprezentacji poznawczej

In this article, the author reflects on Big Data analytics in the context of the problem of cognitive representation. There are many voices declaring that the era of Big Data has brought a radical breakthrough in human cognitive abilities. Some – especially in the world of business and marketing, and to a lesser extent in the field of science – argue that for the first time we can reach a clean, objective picture of reality and keep track of its changes. The article is a critical commentary to this thesis. In Big Bata analytics, cognitive activities are assessed not from the point of view of their compliance with reality, but the possibility of achieving set goals. Big Data mining can be, and often is, an important tool for reality control and forecasting – which does not mean it can discover objective truth and create accurate representations of reality.

Can Bitcoin be Trusted? Quantifying the economic value of blockchain transactions

Bitcoin is the largest blockchain, and provides the underlying UTXO architecture used by many other cryptocurrencies. We identify an inherent bias embedded in this architecture (the Notebreaker mechanism) which forces users to ‘spend’ the entire content of a wallet address in order to make a payment, receiving ‘change’ into a unique new address. This inflates both the apparent volume transacted and network users, as well as minimizing the apparent fees of transacting. We develop an innovative Transaction Identification Methodology (TIM) to quantify the economic value of transactions from raw blockchain data. Using four different algorithms across three stages, we achieve 95% accuracy in quantifying the degree of bias in these measures. Validated across more than 430 million Bitcoin transactions involving 600 million wallet addresses, our methodology reveals that the Notebreaker mechanism inflates transaction volumes 8 times, makes the actual costs of blockchain transactions appear 3–7 times more expensive than what is commonly reported, and inflates wallet counts – a common heuristic of unique adopter counts. We provide a remediation strategy to make Bitcoin blockchain data a more accurate representation of reality, and provide a daily data set of these remediated volumes and transaction fees.

Interindividual Variation Refuses to Go Away: A Bayesian Computer Model of Language Change in Communicative Networks.

Treating the speech communities as homogeneous entities is not an accurate representation of reality, as it misses some of the complexities of linguistic interactions. Inter-individual variation and multiple types of biases are ubiquitous in speech communities, regardless of their size. This variation is often neglected due to the assumption that “majority rules,” and that the emerging language of the community will override any such biases by forcing the individuals to overcome their own biases, or risk having their use of language being treated as “idiosyncratic” or outright “pathological.” In this paper, we use computer simulations of Bayesian linguistic agents embedded in communicative networks to investigate how biased individuals, representing a minority of the population, interact with the unbiased majority, how a shared language emerges, and the dynamics of these biases across time. We tested different network sizes (from very small to very large) and types (random, scale-free, and small-world), along with different strengths and types of bias (modeled through the Bayesian prior distribution of the agents and the mechanism used for generating utterances: either sampling from the posterior distribution [“sampler”] or picking the value with the maximum probability [“MAP”]). The results show that, while the biased agents, even when being in the minority, do adapt their language by going against their a priori preferences, they are far from being swamped by the majority, and instead the emergent shared language of the whole community is influenced by their bias.

La Métaphore : modes d'emploi ou « Voici des îles »

Cet article se veut une étude portant sur l’emploi de la métaphore dans un texte littéraire. Dans un premier temps nous revenons sur la métaphore elle-même comme procédé de création linguistique (la métaphore « vive » de Ricoeur), mais l’essentiel, c’est de montrer que le sens véritable de la métaphore et sa fonction dans le texte dépendent des intentions de l’auteur. Nous nous référons à trois auteurs en particulier. Pour Proust, la métaphore permet de mieux dire le réel parce qu’elle traduit plus fidèlement les sensations. Pour Colette la métaphore joue sur le plan psychologique en permettant à l’auteure de ramener les êtres et les choses à une esthétique particulière. Et pour Camus la métaphore signifie le désordre qui laisse pourtant entrevoir un ordre possible meilleur. La formule, « Voici des îles », est empruntée à Michel Serres.

Ghastly Results: The Banning of Children of The Wasteland (1953) and The Stellar Rise and Demise of Its Maker The Boy Bishop

In 1953, the Australian film censor and the New South Wales Chief Secretary’s Office simultaneously banned a locally produced dramatised documentary Children of the Wasteland from exhibition and export. This article investigates the films interdiction and the events following that governmental action. It also explores the role of the films maker, the newly enthroned Anglican bishop of North Queensland Ian Shevill, in the propagation of a racial conversion theology that defined Indigenous peoples as inferior and exalted the cause of the ‘civilising process’. For the most part, his non-fiction films intended their audiences to perceive them as accurate representations of reality. This article argues that they instead presented a skilfully concocted filmic reality designed to garner credence for a social engineering project: to transform ‘pagan natives’ into compliant Christian citizens who would eventually be absorbed into a wider homogeneous community. It will elucidate the representation of Indigenous Australians in these films within a contesting socio-political context and the communication of racial ideology via the media, a site of hegemonic struggles over meaning.

An assessment of the ecological validity of immersive videos in stated preference surveys

Images, videos, and virtual reality have been widely used in the literature to portray complex attributes to survey respondents. It is reasonable to expect immersive videos will be increasingly used in the future due to their decreasing costs and potentially more accurate representation of reality. Nevertheless, the literature has not sufficiently tested their ecological validity, which can be defined as the extent to which the results they produce in a laboratory setting, such as in choice experiments, are close enough to the results that would have been obtained in a real-life setting. The following work presents a comparison of two representation formats, images and immersive videos, to verify if they can elicit the same perceptual responses of pedestrians as real environments. To do this, a survey was carried out using these two formats as well as on-site interviews. Using a MIMIC approach, and after controlling for all relevant sociodemographic variables, results show that perceptions elicited through immersive videos were not different from those elicited in reality in one qualitative variable (perception of safety and security) out of three relevant ones identified. Furthermore, results also show immersive videos can induce a smaller distortion than photographs.

Validation & Vindication – Comparing Electronic Health Records with Hospital Notes

IntroductionNo doubt your Electronic Health Records have been meticulously gathered, imported, validated and standardised. However, if you want to be certain that they are an accurate representation of reality, you can’t beat physically going to hospitals and cross-checking their records against yours. Our biobank did exactly this.
 Objectives and ApproachOur validation exercise encompassed all reported cases in our follow-up data of three key conditions: stroke, heart disease, and cancer. Key data about each hospitalisation was extracted and exported to tablet computers running custom software. Our staff then visited each hospital in this dataset seeking the corresponding medical notes, and collected additional data from those that they found including photographs of key documents. These results were then adjudicated by specialist physicians to determine the accuracy of the diagnosis, and identify disease phenotypes of interest. Finally, all these results were merged back into our follow-up data.
 ResultsNot only was gathering the data a huge logistical and technical challenge, integrating it back into the database presented its own difficulties. Our initial plan was to assign each sought event a status of ‘validated’, ‘corrected’ or ‘unfound’. However, this proved inadequate for addressing the complexities of the data, as we will discuss, with examples.
 Our solution was to initially treat the retrieved hospital notes as simply another source of follow-up data. We were thus able to use our existing systems for validating, standardising and aggregating events; and thus produce validated endpoints that were meaningfully comparable to our reported endpoints. We could then implement and test definitions of the required validation statuses at a participant level for each disease of interest.
 Conclusion/ImplicationsThis validation project was a huge and daunting undertaking, but repaid our investment with proof that our Electronic Health Records were generally very reliable, and also with much richer data about disease diagnosis and phenotyping. Other projects using Electronic Health Records may wish to adopt this approach.

Beyond the thinking and doing dichotomy: integrating individual and institutional rationality

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce a dynamic and integrative epistemology as a substitute to normative epistemology.Design/methodology/approachA philosophical argument based on the critique of literature.FindingsNormative epistemology implies that knowing leads to certainty, and it has to be objective and universal because it is an accurate representation of reality. Dynamic and integrative epistemology uphold that knowing leads to accumulating insights though information processing. Knowing is a unified but fourfold process of experiencing, understanding, judging and acting (Lonergan, 1990). It occurs at four levels of consciousness: the empirical, the intellectual, the evaluative and the pragmatic (Lonergan, 1990). Dynamic and integrative epistemology extends rationality, knowledge and intelligence to non-humans because institutions have substantive, structural, behavior and teleological dimensions and processes that enable them to process information, i.e. to know.Research limitations/implicationsTranslating a conceptual paper into practical action, organizational structuring or product design can be difficult.Practical implicationsExtending the concept of rationality to non-humans implies realizing that human abilities are limited and need to be augmented by proper institutional design and artificial tools.Social implicationsThe design of intelligent organizations, societies and artificial tools.Originality valueNormative epistemology which considers reason and faith, empirical (experience) and rational (understanding), positive (facts) and ideal (principles, representations or wishes), physical (objects) and “mental” (ideas or concepts), practice and theory, knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa), reflection and action as opposed and mutually exclusive can be replaced by a dynamic and integrative epistemology which puts emotional, intellectual, evaluative and pragmatic dimensions of human knowing in an order of succession through a unified but yet differentiated process which can be augmented by non-human “experts”.

On the upscaling of process-based models in deltaic applications

Process-based numerical models are increasingly used to study the evolution of marine and terrestrial depositional environments. Whilst a detailed description of small-scale processes provides an accurate representation of reality, application on geological timescales is restrained by the associated increase in computational time. In order to reduce the computational time, a number of acceleration methods are combined and evaluated for a schematic supply-driven delta (static base level) and an accommodation-driven delta (variable base level). The performance of the combined acceleration methods is evaluated by comparing the morphological indicators such as distributary channel networking and delta volumes derived from the model predictions for various levels of acceleration. The results of the accelerated models are compared to the outcomes from a series of simulations to capture autogenic variability. Autogenic variability is quantified by re-running identical models on an initial bathymetry with 1cm added noise. The overall results show that the variability of the accelerated models fall within the autogenic variability range, suggesting that the application of acceleration methods does not significantly affect the simulated delta evolution. The Time-scale compression method (the acceleration method introduced in this paper) results in an increased computational efficiency of 75% without adversely affecting the simulated delta evolution compared to a base case. The combination of the Time-scale compression method with the existing acceleration methods has the potential to extend the application range of process-based models towards geologic timescales.

Generating physically realistic kinematic and dynamic models from small data sets: An application for sit-to-stand actions.

Kinematic and dynamic models are used to create simplified, yet accurate representations of reality. In application to biological systems, there is often a choice on what level of complexity is appropriate for the model. This paper introduces a structured method for obtaining an accurate model that can represent the sit-to-stand motion and reproduce the associated contact forces in the standing phase. These models are generated from small datasets, just five measured sit-to-stand actions, and result in simple, physically realisable dynamic models. The assumptions made apriori on the model are minimal, with the number of segments, axes of rotation, marker allocation and location, and dynamic model all determined from this small dataset. From this initial analysis, the use of a triple pendulum with a simple point mass at the centre of the torso was found to be representative. Through the generation of these simple, repeatable models, this work aims to develop a modelling framework that is suitable for the study of biological systems and clinical use.

War in Rio: the city goes to the movies

Urban violence exacerbates existing trends of inefficient urban planning and social fracture. On the one hand, some actors instrumentalize violence to legitimate aggressive security plans and, on the other hand, discourses that depict specific urban territories as territories of violence and others as ordered spaces polarize citizens in two groups, as if each was irreconcilable, and circulate an atmosphere of generalized anxiety. Getting ready for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics has implied numerous and regular surges of violence for the Cidade Maravilhosa. If those events activated debates about public security in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil in general, another event, this one cultural, has also created a debate on the same issues. The two movies Tropa de Elite (2007) and Tropa de Elite 2 (2010) by director José Padilha, not only were the most popular movies of Brazilian cinema but also occupied a great deal of the news. Rapidly, the line between the discourse circulated about the violence in Rio and the discourse about the movies was blurred. My paper seeks to explore how Tropa de Elite 1 and 2 produced and circulated a specific conception of place, violence and the city. My intention is, thus, not to consider movies as an object giving a more or less accurate representation of reality, but as set of relations that together create specific subjectivities and, ultimately, territorial representations. These representations will be looked at in the context of the preparation for the 2016 Olympics.

Building Economic Models Corresponding to the Real World

AbstractIncreasingly, there are calls to audit models used in public policy for how accurately they portray the reality facing policy makers. Although models cannot be logically verified as accurate representations of reality, past work concludes that modelers can reasonably demonstrate the degree of correspondence. How to establish real‐world correspondence remains an open question. This paper outlines a framework of pre‐modeling data diagnostics to provide evidence of correspondence. The scheme—based on Nonlinear Time Series Analysis—provides a rigorous benchmark for specification and testing of policy models that reduces the likelihood that a misspecified model is discredited by an unanticipated crisis.

Extensive Conformational Heterogeneity within Protein Cores

Basic principles of statistical mechanics require that proteins sample an ensemble of conformations at any nonzero temperature. However, it is still common to treat the crystallographic structure of a protein as the single structure of its native state, largely because high-resolution structural characterization of protein flexibility remains a profound challenge. To assess the typical degree of conformational heterogeneity within folded proteins, we construct Markov state models describing the thermodynamics and kinetics of proteins ranging from 72 to 263 residues in length. Each of these models is built from hundreds of microseconds of atomically detailed molecular dynamics simulations. Examination of the side-chain degrees of freedom reveals that almost every residue visits at least two rotameric states over this time frame, with rotamer transition rates spanning a wide range of time scales (from nanoseconds to tens of microseconds). We also report substantial backbone dynamics on time scales longer than are typically addressed by experimental measures of protein flexibility, such as NMR order parameters. Finally, we demonstrate that these extensive rearrangements are consistent with room-temperature crystallographic data and NMR experiments probing both ps-ns and μs-ms timescales. Altogether, these results depict the interior of proteins not as well-ordered solids, as is often imagined, but instead as dense fluids, which undergo substantial structural fluctuations despite their high packing fraction. Moreover, the degree of agreement between our models and experiments suggests the ensembles we generate are an accurate representation of reality and should be of tremendous value for understanding and rationally manipulating biomolecules.