Alternative Statements Research Articles

Arquitectura escolar moderna: interferencias, representación y pedagogía

This paper is part of a line of work that addresses the interference between Architecture and Pedagogy, examining those cases where projects and school buildings legitimize and promote pedagogical statements. In this framework we analyze the selection and dissemination in the 1930s of a set of modern architectural experiences centered on the spatial, typological and linguistic renovation of primary schools. Many of the mainly European and American “models” presented, legitimized or promoted different adjectives for modern architecture, as well as a series of innovative or alternative pedagogical statements. It is in this context that the GATEPAC and AC magazines are introduced as key pieces of the link between modern architecture and pedagogy. Moreover, concepts, such as representation and character, are redefined, in order to use them to research, the architectural resources through which these new ideals were materialized. Questioning the history of the approach to children´s culture from historical examples with an interdisciplinary standpoint paves the way for the creation of a reservoir of the links between architectural and pedagogical models applied to school architecture with the intent of transforming reality.

On Danckwerts’ Boundary Conditions for the Plug-Flow with Dispersion/Reaction Model

Accurate predictions of oxygen utilization with position in plug-flow like (aka serpentine) reactors employed for aerobic activated-sludge treatment of municipal and industrial wastewaters are desired. Three non-ideal reactor models—completely-mixed flow reactors (CMFRs) in series, segregated flow, and plug-flow with dispersion (PFD)—and the ideal plug-flow model were investigated considering typical reaction kinetics and a typical reactor configuration to perform such predictions. Significant differences arose between predictions from the PFD model relative to those from the CMFR in series and segregated flow models. These differences led to re-examination of the PFD model and the inlet/outlet boundary conditions postulated more than six decades ago by P. V. Danckwerts. Major criticisms are found in the literature addressing the PFD model arising from the concentration “jump” at the inlet boundary necessitated by specification of conservation of reactant flux at the expense of continuity of target reactant concentration. A fresh theoretical examination of the dispersive/reactive processes within a closed reactor with particular attention paid to the inlet and outlet boundary planes led to alternative statements for the inlet and outlet boundary conditions. Revisions proposed herein to Danckwerts’ boundary conditions for the PFD/reaction model preserve both continuity of reactant concentration and conservation of reactant flux at both inlet and outlet boundaries. Hypothetical computations based on pseudo-first-order kinetics for a reaction carried out within a serpentine reactor of typical configuration illustrate the differences between concentration profiles through the reactor predicted using the proposed and Danckwerts’ boundary conditions.

Global Approach to Scalar Implicatures in DRT

It has been disputed whether scalar implicatures (=SIs) arise globally or locally. Basically, SIs should be global because they are calculated by comparing the strengths of whole alternative statements arising from a scalar set. On the other hand, localists claim that local SIs are sometimes favored and they are obtained by applying an operator to part of a statement. In this paper, I show that seemingly local SIs are effects that follow from anaphoric bindings of some variables in global SIs or from the contributiveness constraint. Moreover, some SIs do not correspond to any clause-type syntactic structures. In this paper, I propose an analysis of SIs within the discourse representation theory. The maxim of quantity provides the basic SI, which is the weakest one. The basic SI undergoes some processes in which some variables can be bound or some conditions are eliminated. In these processes, global SIs get the effects of local SIs, and some SIs arise from non-sentential constituents. Then among the resul...

Ignorance and Inference: Do Problems with Gricean Epistemic Reasoning Explain Children’s Difficulty with Scalar Implicature?

Journal of Semantics Advance Access published December 4, 2014 Journal of Semantics, 0, 2014: 1–29 doi:10.1093/jos/ffu015 LARA HOCHSTEIN University of California, San Diego ALAN BALE Concordia University DANNY FOX The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Massachusetts Institute of Technology DAVID BARNER University of California, San Diego Abstract Unlike adults, children as old as 9 years of age often fail to infer that a sentence like, ‘Some of the children slept’ implies the falsity of its stronger alternative, ‘All of the children slept’—an inference referred to as a ‘scalar implicature’. Several explanations have been proposed to account for children’s failures with scalar implicature, including domain-general processing limitations, pragmatic deficits or an inability to access the relevant alternatives in a lexical scale (e.g. all as an alternative to some). Our study focused on the role of Gricean epistemic reasoning in children’s failures by testing their ability to compute ‘ignorance implicatures’, which require reasoning about speaker knowledge and informativeness but which differ from scalar implicature with respect to the alternative statements that are involved. We administered two matched tasks to 4- and 5-year-old children: one that assessed their ability to compute ignorance implicatures, and another that assessed their ability to compute scalar implicatures. Five-year-olds successfully computed ignorance implicatures despite failing to compute scalar implicatures, while 4-year-olds failed at both types of inference. These results suggest that 5-year-olds are able to reason about speaker knowledge and informative- ness, and thus that it is difficult to explain their deficit with scalar implicature via these factors. We speculate about other possible sources of their difficulties, including pro- cessing limits and children’s access to the specific scalar alternatives required by scalar implicature. s The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, San Diego on December 5, 2014 Ignorance and Inference: Do Problems with Gricean Epistemic Reasoning Explain Children’s Difficulty with Scalar Implicature?

Sensing membrane stresses by protein insertions.

Protein domains shallowly inserting into the membrane matrix are ubiquitous in peripheral membrane proteins involved in various processes of intracellular membrane shaping and remodeling. It has been suggested that these domains sense membrane curvature through their preferable binding to strongly curved membranes, the binding mechanism being mediated by lipid packing defects. Here we make an alternative statement that shallow protein insertions are universal sensors of the intra-membrane stresses existing in the region of the insertion embedding rather than sensors of the curvature per se. We substantiate this proposal computationally by considering different independent ways of the membrane stress generation among which some include changes of the membrane curvature whereas others do not alter the membrane shape. Our computations show that the membrane-binding coefficient of shallow protein insertions is determined by the resultant stress independently of the way this stress has been produced. By contrast, consideration of the correlation between the insertion binding and the membrane curvature demonstrates that the binding coefficient either increases or decreases with curvature depending on the factors leading to the curvature generation. To validate our computational model, we treat quantitatively the experimental results on membrane binding by ALPS1 and ALPS2 motifs of ArfGAP1.

Adaptation of the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire in a Spanish Sample of Athletes

In this paper, we offer a general version of the Spanish adaptation of Athlete Burnout Questionnaire (ABQ) designed to measure the syndrome of burnout in athletes of different sports. In previous works, the Spanish version of ABQ was administered to different samples of soccer players. Its psychometric properties were appropriate and similar to the findings in original ABQ. The purpose of this study was to examine the generalization to others sports of the Spanish adaptation. We started from this adaptation, but we included three alternative statements (one for each dimension of the questionnaire), and we replaced the word "soccer" with the word "sport". An 18-item version was administered to a sample of 487 athletes aged 13 and 29 years old. Confirmatory factor analyses replicated the factor structure, but two items modification were necessary in order to obtain a good overall fit of the model. The internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the questionnaire were satisfactory.

Some degenerations of Kazhdan–Lusztig ideals and multiplicities of Schubert varieties

We study Hilbert–Samuel multiplicity for points of Schubert varieties in the complete flag variety, by Gröbner degenerations of the Kazhdan–Lusztig ideal. In the covexillary case, we give a manifestly positive combinatorial rule for multiplicity by establishing (with a Gröbner basis) a reduced limit whose Stanley–Reisner simplicial complex is homeomorphic to a shellable ball or sphere. We show that multiplicity counts the number of facets of this complex. We also obtain a formula for the Hilbert series of the local ring. In particular, our work gives a multiplicity rule for Grassmannian Schubert varieties, providing alternative statements and proofs to formulae of Lakshmibai and Weyman (1990) [26], Rosenthal and Zelevinsky (2001) [37], Krattenthaler (2001) [22], Kodiyalam and Raghavan (2003) [21], Kreiman and Lakshmibai (2004) [24], Ikeda and Naruse (2009) [13] and Woo and Yong (2009) [40]. We suggest extensions of our methodology to the general case.

A Retributive Argument Against Punishment

This paper proposes a retributive argument against punishment, where punishment is understood as going beyond condemnation or censure, and requiring hard treatment. The argument sets out to show that punishment cannot be justified. The argument does not target any particular attempts to justify punishment, retributive or otherwise. Clearly, however, if it succeeds, all such attempts fail. No argument for punishment is immune from the argument against punishment proposed here. The argument does not purport to be an argument only against retributive justifications of punishment, and so leave open the possibility of a sound non-retributive justification of punishment. Punishment cannot be justified, the paper argues, because it cannot be demonstrated that any punishment, no matter how minimal, is not a disproportionate retributive response to criminal wrongdoing. If we are to hold onto proportionality—that is, proportionality as setting a limit to morally permissible punishment—then punishment is morally impermissible. The argument is a retributive argument against punishment insofar as a just retributive response to wrongdoing must be proportionate to the wrongdoing. The argument, that is, is concerned with proportionality as a retributive requirement. The argument against punishment is set out on the basis of a familiar version of the ‘anchoring problem’, according to which it is the problem of determining the most severe punishment to anchor or ground the punishment scale. To meet the possible criticism that we have chosen a version of the anchoring problem particularly favourable to our argument, various alternative statements of the anchoring problem are considered. Considering such statements also provides a more rounded view of the anchoring problem. One such alternative holds that the punishment scale must be anchored not just in the most severe punishment, but in the least severe punishment as well. Other alternatives hold that it is necessary and sufficient to anchor the punishment scale in any two punishments, neither of which needs to be the most or least severe punishment. A further suggestion is that one anchoring point anywhere along the punishment scale is sufficient, because it is possible to ‘project’ from such a point, so as to determine the correlative punishments for all other crimes, and so derive a complete punishment scale. Finally, the suggestion is considered that one can approach the issue of a punishment scale ‘holistically’, denying any distinction between anchoring and derived (or ‘projected’) punishments.

Rare Tumors: An Appeal for Justice~!2010-02-24~!2010-05-25~!2010-08-24~!

While cancers with 40,000 or fewer diagnoses a year are considered rare, they make up about 25% of cancer mortalities. Despite this, rare cancers remain largely ignored by investigators because of insufficient research funding. Their neglect has been justified in the belief that a focus on common tumors will yield benefits for all tumors, including rare tumors. This however has not happened. One solution proposed to address this problem is to mobilize those diagnosed with rare tumors to advocate for research in rare tumors. But is it fair to place a burden of self-advocacy on some cancer patients but not on others? A better solution, proposed here, invokes a theory of justice developed by John Rawls, and offers an alternative statement of the ethical basis for involving human subjects in research and suggestions for restructuring the cancer research enterprise itself.

Common Misconceptions Concerning Heuristic Search

This paper examines the following statements about heuristic search, which are commonly held to be true:More accurate heuristics result in fewer node expansions by A* and IDA*.A* does fewer node expansions than any other equally informed algorithm that finds optimal solutions. Any admissible heuristic can be turned into a consistent heuristic by a simple technique called pathmax.In search spaces whose operators all have the same cost A* with the heuristic function h(s)=0 for all states, s, is the same as breadth-first search.Bidirectional A* stops when the forward and backward search frontiers meet.The paper demonstrates that all these statements are false and provides alternative statements that are true.

Viewing Events in the Center-of-Mass System

In elementary physics, collisions are usually studied by employing the conservation of momentum, and sometimes also the conservation of kinetic energy. However, in nuclear reactions, changes of mass that complicate the situation often occur. To illustrate the latter, we shall cite two examples of endoergic nuclear reactions,1 i.e., those for which energy must be supplied to make the reaction proceed. A typical situation is given by the equation A + B → C + D + Q, (1) where particles A, B, C, and D are expressed in terms of the energy-equivalent of the particle masses, according to the Einstein relation E = mc2, and where Q is a negative energy quantity, corresponding to the excess of mass of (C + D) over that of (A + B). Equation (1) is just an alternate statement of the conservation of total energy. Typically, in the lab system (L), energy is supplied as kinetic energy “T” of particle A, and particle B is at rest. Thus, to conserve momentum, particles C and D must compensate for the momentum corresponding to T. Often, it is desirable to know the minimum value of T that will conserve both energy and momentum, i.e., the threshold value of T, known as Tth, that will just allow the reaction to proceed. At threshold, the particles C and D will have their minimum possible kinetic energies. In the center-of-mass system of coordinates (Z) in which the input momentum is zero, at threshold, the products C and D are each stationary, and this requirement will allow us to calculate the corresponding Tth in the lab system (L). The Z system is often termed the “center-of-mass” system, but it is more properly termed the “zero-momentum” system.

Thinking strategically about thinking strategically: the computational structure and dynamics of managerial problem selection and formulation

A new model of managerial problem formulation is introduced and developed to answer the question: ‘What kinds of problems do strategic managers engage in solving and why?’ The article proposes that a key decision metric for choosing among alternative problem statements is the computational complexity of the solution algorithm of alternative statements. Managerial problem statements are grouped into two classes on the basis of their computational complexity: P-type problems (canonically easy ones) and NP-type problems (hard ones). The new model of managerial cognitive choice posits that managers prefer to engage with and solve P-type problems over solving NP-type problems. The model explains common patterns of managerial reasoning and decision making, including many documented ‘biases’ and simplifying heuristics, and points the way to new effects and novel empirical investigations of problem solving-oriented thinking in strategic management and types of generic strategies, driven by predictions about the kinds of market- and industry-level changes that managers will or will not respond to. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Unified tame theorem

The well-known tame theorem tells that for a given tame bocs and a positive integer n there exist finitely many minimal bocses, such that any representation of the original bocs of dimension at most n is isomorphic to the image of a representation of some minimal bocses under a certain reduction functor. In the present paper we will give an alternative statement of the tame theorem in terms of matrix problem, by constructing a unified minimal matrix problem whose indecomposable matrices cover all the canonical forms of the indecomposable representations of dimension at most n for each non-negative integer n.

Situational leadership theory: A test of three versions

Three versions of the leadership dynamics derived from Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership Theory were identified: (1) the original, 1972, statement of the theory; (2) the revised, 2007, theory; and (3) an alternative statement of the theory's essential principle of differential follower response to “autonomy afforded by the leader” in conjunction with “follower developmental level” (as indexed by employee job experience). Survey data collected from 357 banking employees and 80 supervisors, sampled from 10 Norwegian financial institutions, were analyzed for predicted interactions. Results indicated that the 2007 revised theory was a poorer predictor of subordinate performance and attitudes than the original version. The third, alternative, version (which predicted an autonomy × job experience interaction) offered promise for further exploration of the theory's essential principle that employee outcomes are associated with prescribed leader behaviors in combination with follower developmental level, although this version also did not add substantially to accounting for criterion variance.

Thinking strategically about thinking strategically: the computational structure and dynamics of managerial problem selection and formulation

AbstractA new model of managerial problem formulation is introduced and developed to answer the question: ‘What kinds of problems do strategic managers engage in solving and why?’ The article proposes that a key decision metric for choosing among alternative problem statements is the computational complexity of the solution algorithm of alternative statements. Managerial problem statements are grouped into two classes on the basis of their computational complexity: P‐type problems (canonically easy ones) and NP‐type problems (hard ones). The new model of managerial cognitive choice posits that managers prefer to engage with and solve P‐type problems over solving NP‐type problems. The model explains common patterns of managerial reasoning and decision making, including many documented ‘biases’ and simplifying heuristics, and points the way to new effects and novel empirical investigations of problem solving‐oriented thinking in strategic management and types of generic strategies, driven by predictions about the kinds of market‐ and industry‐level changes that managers will or will not respond to. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Proof of the Spherically Symmetric Overbounding Theorem For Linear Systems

Rife and Gebre-Egziabher 's recent paper (1) considers linear mappings of random variables from spherically symmetric probability distributions in the context of overbounding correlated ranging errors. This theory has potential implications for ensuring the integrity of differential GPS (DGPS) navigation systems. We first give a succinct rederivation of their preliminary result. The extension to a cascade of two discrete-time, lin- ear time-invariant filters, the main result in (1), is then formulated using a precise definition of spherical sym- metry for scalar random processes. The relationship between the input and output probability densities when the input density is spherically symmetric is derived using linear systems theory. This yields an alternative statement of the spherically symmetric overbounding theorem in terms of the system matrices. A precise defini- tion is given of the filter impulse response coefficients and the multi-dimensional convolution operation that is needed to ensure the validity of the overbounding theorem in (1). The equivalence between the two representa- tions is formally proved. Numerical simulations are provided that support the derived results.

Mechanics of media with stress-state dependent properties

The paper analyzes experimental findings on the deformation of heterogeneous materials that contain microcracks, pores, inclusions, and other structural singularities. The dependence of deformation properties of the materials on loading conditions was examined and common mechanisms and some peculiarities of their behavior were clarified. Constitutive equations for elastic and elastoplastic media with properties responsive to the stress-state type were formulated. Alternative statements of problems for which conventional approaches are inapplicable were proposed and solutions for some of the problems were obtained.

The Influence of Sensitivity Disclosures on Investor Judgments

This study presents the results of an experiment that examines how sensitivity disclosures influence investors' judgments of the reliability of financial statement items. A sensitivity disclosure uses to describe the slope of change in a financial statement item value in response to change in an input that underlies the item. Since sensitivity can be depicted using any two points along the slope of change, managers can choose different parameters to communicate the same sensitivity. In our experiment, we manipulate the magnitude of the parameters (i.e., points along the slope of change) used in the sensitivity disclosure for the capitalized software development asset of a hypothetical firm. The results indicate that investors' reliability judgments decrease as the reported parameters increase. Mediation analysis provides evidence that the effect of parameters on investors' reliability judgments occurs through their impact on the size of the set of alternative financial statement item values investors perceive as a result of observing the sensitivity information. Additional evidence suggests that the effect of parameters reflects an unintentional reliance on the set of alternative values made available by the parameters, rather than a conscious response to a perceived management signal about reliability through parameter choice. This study has implications for disclosure requirements given the increasing acceptance of measurement attributes that require estimation (e.g., fair value), and improves our understanding of how disclosures influence investors' reliability judgments.

Alternative statements of optimal load-bearing structure design problems

We analyze the well-known statements of optimal design problems for load-bearing maximum rigidity structures in which a principle of the minimum of total potential energy of structure deformation is used. A version of the generalized statement of optimization problems for processes described by linear equations with a symmetric operator is proposed. On the basis of the version outlined, we present a mathematical algorithm for obtaining beam structures of maximum rigidity, in which the finite element method is used to solve an analytical problem. We give the numerical results of solving two problems of optimal design of maximum rigidity structures that are simulated by cantilever and statically indeterminate beams.

Children's left parietal brain activation during mental rotation is reliable as well as specific

Some recent evidence suggests that mental rotation of characters in children aged 7 or 8 years might be lateralized to the left parietal hemisphere. An alternative statement exists, however, the finding might be completely unspecific for mental rotation but either be simply a function of task difficulty or a consequence of the use of characters as stimuli. To test these alternatives, ERPs of 24 second graders were measured twice: (a) during mental rotation with characters as stimuli and orientations of 30°, 90°, or 150° and (b) during memory scanning with characters as stimuli and set sizes of 1, 2, or 3 letters. In both cases, an amplitude modulation was found. The effect of mental rotation as a function of character orientation turned out to be lateralized to the left parietal hemisphere. The effect of memory scanning as a function of set size, however, turned out to be completely non-lateralized. Thus, children's left hemisphere activation during mental rotation is reliable as well as specific.