Causal Context Research Articles

Inward FDI and ICT: are they a joint technological driver of entrepreneurship?

This paper investigates whether inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and investment in information and communication technologies (ICTs) advance the development of entrepreneurial activity in the host economy. We propose that the combination of inward FDI with investment in ICT is a joint technological driver of entrepreneurship. Under a feedback causality context, a co-integrated vector autoregressive approach is used to examine the 'pull' effect of ICT and the 'push' effect of FDI. On the one hand, ICT 'pulls' FDI; on the other hand, FDI 'pushes' investment in ICT. Under a neo-Schumpeterian approach, the long term economic relationship among entrepreneurial activity, FDI and ICT drives creative destruction through the creation of further SMEs, thus revitalising the entrepreneurial innovative capacity of the host economies.

Context-aware end-to-end QoS diagnosis and quantitative guarantee based on Bayesian network

To support quality of service (QoS) management on current Internet working with best effort, we bring forth a systematic approach for end-to-end QoS diagnosis and quantitative guarantee. For QoS diagnosis, we take contexts of a service into consideration in a comprehensive way that is realized by exploiting causal relationships between a QoS metric and its contexts with the help of Bayesian network (BN) structure learning. Context discretization algorithm and node ordering algorithm are proposed to facilitate BN structure learning. The QoS metric is diagnosed to be causally related to its causal contexts, and the QoS metric can be quantitatively guaranteed by its causal contexts. For quantitative QoS guarantee, those causal relationships are first modeled quantitatively by BN parameter learning. Then, the QoS metric is guaranteed to certain value with a probability given its causal contexts tuned to suitable values, that is, quantitative QoS guarantee is reached. Simulations with three sequential stages: context discretization, QoS diagnosis and quantitative QoS guarantee, on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, are discussed and our approach is validated to be effective.

Another Kind of Spinozistic Monism

1.0 Introduction – Raising the question The momentous opening pages of Spinoza’s Ethics are well known for his efforts to prove a remarkable thesis: there is only one possible substance and it necessarily exists. But concurrent with his drive towards substance monism is another equally striking but more easily overlooked monistic project. This project concerns the relations between various kinds of metaphysical dependence. What, according to Spinoza, are the relationships between causation, inherence, conceptual connectedness, following-from, and existential dependence? My proposed answer is that Spinoza thinks all metaphysical dependence relations are conceptual containment relations, a single kind of dependence that Spinoza labels “conceptual involvement.” I call Spinoza’s thesis that every relation of metaphysical dependence just is a relation of conceptual dependence the thesis of conceptual dependence monism. Although the topic of dependence relations in Spinoza may have the air of hyper-specialized historical arcana, understanding Spinoza’s conceptual dependence monism yields important insights into many of his most striking and pervasive metaphysical views, including the intensionality of causal contexts, the nature and relations of substance and modes, necessitarianism, the demands of metaphysical perfection, and the content of his explanatory rationalism. It also provides us with a neglected step in Spinoza’s proof for his more famous substance monism, one that prevents the whole proof from otherwise begging the question against substance pluralists like Leibniz. And whereas Spinoza’s substance monism may appear to be an historically interesting, but philosophically untenable project 1 , Spinoza’s interest in the relationship between various kinds of metaphysical dependence mirrors a vibrant research project in contemporary metaphysics.

Context-aware end-to-end QoS qualitative diagnosis and quantitative guarantee based on Bayesian network

To support Quality of Service (QoS) management on current Internet working with best effort, we propose a systematic approach for end-to-end QoS qualitative diagnosis and quantitative guarantee. Both QoS metrics and contexts of a service are considered in a comprehensive manner in our approach, which consists of three sequential stages: context discretization, QoS qualitative diagnosis and QoS quantitative guarantee. Based on Fuzzy set, an automatic unwatched discretization algorithm for discretizing continuous numeric-value is brought forth to reshape these QoS metrics and contexts into their discrete forms. For QoS qualitative diagnosis, causal relationships between a QoS metric and its contexts are exploited with the help of K2 Bayesian network (BN) structure learning by treating QoS metrics and contexts as BN nodes. A QoS metric node is qualitatively diagnosed to be causally related to its parent context nodes. An ordering method is proposed to arrange orders for nodes involved in K2 algorithm. To guarantee QoS quantitatively, those causal relationships are next modeled quantitatively by BN parameter learning. BN inference is referred to calculate the marginal on a QoS metric node given its tunable parent context nodes. Then, the QoS metric is guaranteed to a specific value a user demands with certain probability by tuning its causal contexts to suitable values suggested by BN inference, that is, QoS quantitative guarantee is reached by now. Simulations, on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, about the above three sequential stages are discussed and our approach is validated to be soundable and effective. We also argue that our approach can be reached in a polynomial time complexity in practice.

Causality attribution biases oculomotor responses.

When viewing one object move after being struck by another, humans perceive that the action of the first object "caused" the motion of the second, not that the two events occurred independently. Although established as a perceptual and linguistic concept, it is not yet known whether the notion of causality exists as a fundamental, preattentional "Gestalt" that can influence predictive motor processes. Therefore, eye movements of human observers were measured while viewing a display in which a launcher impacted a tool to trigger the motion of a second "reaction" target. The reaction target could move either in the direction predicted by transfer of momentum after the collision ("causal") or in a different direction ("noncausal"), with equal probability. Control trials were also performed with identical target motion, either with a 100 ms time delay between the collision and reactive motion, or without the interposed tool. Subjects made significantly more predictive movements (smooth pursuit and saccades) in the causal direction during standard trials, and smooth pursuit latencies were also shorter overall. These trends were reduced or absent in control trials. In addition, pursuit latencies in the noncausal direction were longer during standard trials than during control trials. The results show that causal context has a strong influence on predictive movements.

Causal networks in the rat barrel cortex provide a signature of stimulus encoding

Identifying stimulus-dependent cortical circuits is a fundamental goal in systems neuroscience. Graph-theoretic techniques provide an elegant tool to infer such circuitry. Recently, we have proposed to use Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN) as an efficient graphical model that explains the observed spike train data in local cortical circuits. A unique advantage of DBNs over other metrics of neuronal connectivity (such as crosscorrelograms) is its ability to explain the temporally precise activity of an observed neuron taking into account the activity of the entire observed population. We recorded simultaneously the ensemble neural activity using 32-channel microelectrode arrays from Layer V of the primary somatosensory (barrel) cortex in 3 anesthetized rats. An average population size of 20±7 single units/rat was identified. Responses were recorded during stimulation of individual whiskers (3 whiskers/rat). Each whisker was horizontally deflected with a displacement of 80 μm for 100 ms at 1 Hz frequency. Spike trains within 100 ms of stimulus onset were analyzed using DBN. To rule out the existence of spurious connections inferred by co-modulation of firing rates, a jittered version of the spike trains was formed in which each spike was randomly jittered in a uniform interval of [-5,5] ms. Common connections inferred in the original and jittered data were eliminated. Results demonstrate that stable stimulus-driven network states were obtained, with 22% of the inferred connections appearing in more than 35% of the trials. To examine the validity of these results, we computed the correlation between the response latency of each neuron and the number of inferred pre-synaptic/post-synaptic connections for each stimulated whisker. In a causal network context, we hypothesized that pre-synaptic neurons that fire before other post-synaptic neurons in the observed population should have shorter response latency reminiscent of a “signaling mechanism” to other neurons about stimulus presence. Therefore, these neurons were expected to have more post-synaptic connections than their large response latency counterparts. Correlation between the response latency and the number of post-synaptic (pre-synaptic) connections was -0.63 (+0.61) consistent with our hypothesis. Finally, we used 90% of the trials to obtain a template network model for each whisker stimulated. We then decoded the spike trains in the remaining 10% of the trials to determine the corresponding whisker identity. A decoding accuracy of 97% was obtained indicating that the obtained causal networks are stimulus-dependent in which the population acts cooperatively rather than independently to encode the underlying stimulus.

Multivariate Granger causality and generalized variance

Granger causality analysis is a popular method for inference on directed interactions in complex systems of many variables. A shortcoming of the standard framework for Granger causality is that it only allows for examination of interactions between single (univariate) variables within a system, perhaps conditioned on other variables. However, interactions do not necessarily take place between single variables but may occur among groups or "ensembles" of variables. In this study we establish a principled framework for Granger causality in the context of causal interactions among two or more multivariate sets of variables. Building on Geweke's seminal 1982 work, we offer additional justifications for one particular form of multivariate Granger causality based on the generalized variances of residual errors. Taken together, our results support a comprehensive and theoretically consistent extension of Granger causality to the multivariate case. Treated individually, they highlight several specific advantages of the generalized variance measure, which we illustrate using applications in neuroscience as an example. We further show how the measure can be used to define "partial" Granger causality in the multivariate context and we also motivate reformulations of "causal density" and "Granger autonomy." Our results are directly applicable to experimental data and promise to reveal new types of functional relations in complex systems, neural and otherwise.

Sex and the Shaheed: Insights from the Life Sciences on Islamic Suicide Terrorism

Theoretical insights from evolutionary psychology and biology can help academics and policymakers better understand both deep and proximate causes of Islamic suicide terrorism. The life sciences can contribute explanations that probe the influence of the following forces on the phenomenon of Islamic suicide terrorism: high levels of gender differentiation, the prevalence of polygyny, and the obstruction of marriage markets delaying marriage for young adult men in the modern Middle East. The influence of these forces has been left virtually unexplored in the social sciences, despite their presumptive application in this case. Life science explanations should be integrated with more conventional social science explanations, which include international anarchy, U.S. hegemony and presence in the Middle East, and culturally molded discourse sanctioning suicide terrorism in the Islamic context. Such a consilient approach, melding the explanatory power of the social and life sciences, offers greater insight into the causal context of Islamic fundamentalist suicide terrorism, the motivation of suicide terrorists, and effective approaches to subvert this form of terrorism.

Next Gen Ambivalent Sexism: Converging Correlates, Causality in Context, and Converse Causality, an Introduction to the Special Issue

The special issue on Ambivalent Sexism (Glick and Fiske 1996, 1999, 2001) reflects the current landscape of ambivalent sexism research. This introduction reviews the theory, exploring the particularly insidious case of benevolent sexism. Next, it presents the included papers, which range broadly, but generally fit one of three research streams in the development of ambivalent sexism research. Some papers focus on converging correlations, exploring ambivalent sexism’s relation to other ideologies and cultural dimensions. Other papers demonstrate causality in context, revealing impact on targets and the prescriptive power of ambivalent ideologies. A third line documents converse causality, illustrating impact on perceivers’ self processes. Finally, we discuss possible future areas of research.

Extending and interpreting Post’s programme

Computability theory concerns information with a causal–typically algorithmic–structure. As such, it provides a schematic analysis of many naturally occurring situations. Emil Post was the first to focus on the close relationship between information, coded as real numbers, and its algorithmic infrastructure. Having characterised the close connection between the quantifier type of a real and the Turing jump operation, he looked for more subtle ways in which information entails a particular causal context. Specifically, he wanted to find simple relations on reals which produced richness of local computability-theoretic structure. To this extent, he was not just interested in causal structure as an abstraction, but in the way in which this structure emerges in natural contexts. Post’s programme was the genesis of a more far reaching research project. In this article we will firstly review the history of Post’s programme, and look at two interesting developments of Post’s approach. The first of these developments concerns the extension of the core programme, initially restricted to the Turing structure of the computably enumerable sets of natural numbers, to the Ershov hierarchy of sets. The second looks at how new types of information coming from the recent growth of research into randomness, and the revealing of unexpected new computability-theoretic infrastructure. We will conclude by viewing Post’s programme from a more general perspective. We will look at how algorithmic structure does not just emerge mathematically from information, but how that emergent structure can model the emergence of very basic aspects of the real world.

Applying critical realism to information and communication technologies: a case study

Critical realism is a philosophy of science which has been developed as an alternative to positivism and interpretivism. It has been argued that critical realism should be applied to research concerned with information and communication technologies (ICTs). In particular, it has been argued that critical realism can increase understanding of causal mechanisms and contexts that are needed in order to achieve outcomes from actions. However, there is a lack of examples of how critical realism might be applied in practice. The aim of the research was to investigate the potential for practical application of critical realism to research concerned with ICTs. Four interrelated examples are presented from practical application of critical realism during ICT research. These are examples of causal mechanism, technological context, social context and business context. Findings suggest that practical application of critical realism to ICT research in AECO may be possible without any particular training or extensive prior knowledge.

Aging and integration of contingency evidence in causal judgment.

Age differences in causal judgment are consistently greater for preventative/negative relationships than for generative/positive relationships. In this study, a feature analytic procedure (Mandel & Lehman, 1998) was used to determine whether this effect might be due to differences in young and older adults' integration of contingency evidence during causal induction. To reduce the impact of age-related changes in learning/memory, the authors presented contingency evidence for preventative, noncontingent, and generative relationships in summary form; the meaningfulness of causal context was varied to induce participants to integrate greater or lesser amounts of this evidence. Young adults showed greater flexibility in their integration processes than did older adults. In an abstract causal context, there were no age differences in causal judgment or integration, but in meaningful contexts, young adults' judgments for preventative relationships were more accurate than older adults' and young adults assigned more weight to the contingency evidence confirming these relationships. These differences were mediated by age-related changes in processing speed. The decline in this basic cognitive resource may place boundaries on the amount or type of evidence that older adults can integrate for causal judgment.

Comment on causality and pathway search in microarray time series experiment

Abstract Contact: nagarajanradhakrish@uams.edu

Postcolonial Theory and the History of Zionism

For the historian whose academic-scientific discipline aims to attain particularizing rather than generalizing forms of knowledge, theory—any theory—serves not as an end in itself, but rather as a ...

Children's environment in Central Europe: Threats and chances

Many of the “classical” environmental hazards and risks (such as anthropogenic chemical and physical factors, e.g., asbestos, dioxin, electromagnetic fields and “pesticides”) are in our countries not major determinants of children's health and well being; however, there may exist unseen or unrecognized causal contexts. Some hazards, such as UV light, noise, fine particles, tobacco smoke, legal and illegal drugs, and radon, are considered important by experts, but are still largely ignored by the public. In our society, despite of, or maybe because of the multitude of information and disinformation, adequate risk perception continues to be a problem. Furthermore, ever-new environmental toxicants will come to the surface and occupy medial interest, and thus, continuing attention is warranted. Of our children's environment, yet other facets are of prime importance: nutrition, housing and traffic and public media. Most important, however, is the fact that society (governments, administration, industry and consumers) are disregarding the long-term sustainability of their actions and behaviour, thus endangering the future of our children and grandchildren. This is in contrast with the existing declarations and official action plans. In future, ranking of priorities for research and actions will be necessary, taking into account costs and effectiveness since resources to be invested into these issues certainly will remain limited.

Chronic Treatment with Resveratrol Induces Redox Stress- and Ataxia Telangiectasia-mutated (ATM)-dependent Senescence in p53-positive Cancer Cells

The induction of senescence, an irreversible growth arrest, in cancer cells is regarded as a mean to halt tumor progression. The phytoalexin resveratrol (RV) is known to possess a variety of cancer-preventive, -therapeutic, and -chemosensitizing properties. We report here that chronic treatment with RV in a subapoptotic concentration induces senescence-like growth arrest in tumor cells. In contrast to the widely accepted antioxidant property of RV, we demonstrate that one causative stimulus for senescence induction by chronic RV is an increased level of reactive oxygen species (ROS). The ROS formed upon RV exposure include hydrogen peroxide and superoxide and originate largely from mitochondria. Consistently, co-incubation with the antioxidant N-acetyl cysteine interfered with RV-mediated reactivation of the senescence program. Molecular mediators on the way from increased ROS levels to the observed growth arrest include p38 MAPK, p53, and p21. Moreover, we provide evidence that RV-initiated replication stress, apparent by activation of the ataxia telangiectasia-mutated kinase pathway, is associated with increased ROS levels and senescence induction. This is the first report linking cell cycle effects with a pro-oxidant and pro-senescent effect of RV in cancer cells.

Necessity and sufficiency in abstract conditional reasoning

The necessity and sufficiency of the cause relates to the conclusions people draw on everyday conditional inference problems. The current research explores the effects of necessity and sufficiency in an abstract causal context. Three experiments showed that the subjective ratings of necessity and sufficiency diverge from the objective levels: A sufficient and necessary cause is more often labelled as sufficient than a sufficient and not-necessary cause. Likewise, a necessary and sufficient cause is more often labelled necessary than a necessary and not-sufficient cause. In Experiments 1 and 2 we observed that the robust effects of sufficiency on MP and MT, and of necessity on AC and DA found on everyday reasoning generalise to abstract conditionals. There were also partial effects of sufficiency on AC and DA, and of necessity on MP and MT. When the problem presentation is simplified, as in Experiment 3, these partial effects on reasoning disappear. The reasoning results then relate to the objective levels and less to the subjective levels of necessity and sufficiency. This divergence sheds doubt on the idea that reasoners base their inferences on an active assessment of the necessity and/or sufficiency of the causal relation.

The mid-domain effect and species richness patterns:what have we learned so far?

If species' ranges are randomly shuffled within a bounded geographical domain free of environmental gradients, ranges overlap increasingly toward the center of the domain, creating a "mid-domain" peak of species richness. This "mid-domain effect" (MDE) has been controversial both in concept and in application. Empirical studies assess the degree to which the evolutionary, ecological, and historical processes that undeniably act on individual species and clades produce geographical patterns that resemble those produced by MDE models. MDE models that resample empirical range size frequency distributions (RSFDs) balance the risk of underestimating and overestimating the role of MDE, whereas theoretical RSFDs are generally biased toward underestimating MDE. We discuss the inclusion of nonendemic species in MDE models, rationales for setting domain limits, and the validity of one- and two-dimensional MDE models. MDE models, though null models, are not null hypotheses to be simplistically rejected or accepted. They are a means of estimating the expected effect of geometric constraints within the context of multiple causality. We call for assessment of MDE on an equal statistical footing with other candidate explanations for richness gradients. Although some critics have categorically dismissed MDE, an overview of the 21 MDE studies published to date reveals a substantial signature of MDE in natural patterns and justifies continued work.

Acquisition and use of mental operators: the influence of natural order of events.

The present article reports two experiments investigating the influence of natural order of events on the acquisition and use of knowledge about operations, in short mental operators. The principle of use specificity states that task performance depends directly on the similarity between acquisition context and the present situation. In contrast, the principle of natural order proposes that knowledge about operations can always be applied easier (faster) if reasoning follows the natural order of events. In Experiment 1, participants had to apply alphabet-arithmetic operators and LISP functions in a prognosis task (A + 2 = ?) or a retrognosis task (? - 2 = A). In alphabet-arithmetic, an advantage for the first kind of task at the beginning of training decreased with increasing practice. In LISP, however, a preference for this task (corresponding with a prospective knowledge use) emerged with increasing practice. In Experiment 2, arithmetic relations between digit pairs had to be induced. In a causal context condition, relations were described as input and output of electric circuits, in a neutral context the relations were described as arithmetic dependencies. A preference for the prognosis task was found for the causal context condition (corresponding with a prospective knowledge use) but not for the neutral one. The findings suggest that the natural order of events moderates the acquisition and use of mental operators. Further research is required to clarify the bases for this moderation.

Questioning the stability of sense of coherence--the impact of socio-economic status and working conditions in the Canadian population.

Much debate exists about the stability of the sense of coherence measure. This study examined changes in sense of coherence (SOC), and the variables associated with these changes, over a 4-year period, in a representative sample of the Canadian labour force (n=6,790). Two methods were used to assess change in SOC: (1) Change outside of that which could be considered as indistinguishable from measurement error, and (2) Change of more than 10%, which was originally proposed by Antonovksy, the scales designer. Over the study period, 35.4% of the population reported changes in SOC outside the range we consider possible due to measurement error, with 58% reporting change greater than 10%. Unskilled occupations were associated with declines in SOC, with household income demonstrating a curvilinear relationship with decline in SOC in the female population only. None of the variables used predicted increases in SOC. Given the degree of change in SOC, and the representativeness of the study sample, we suggest that SOC has a large state component. Given this lack of stability, we recommend caution if using the SOC to represent a stable global orientation within a causal context.