Causal Frame Research Articles

Does Place Determine Destiny? How "Neighborhood Mechanisms" Mediate Food Vendor Success in Nang Loeng, Bangkok

“Neighborhood effects” research has rarely probed how geography influences job success among self-employed individuals in emerging markets. This article explores why two different sub-populations of food vendors in the Nang Loeng neighborhood of Bangkok experience divergent outcomes, using the causal frame of “neighborhood mechanisms.” Ultimately, geographically based differences in social exchanges,location choices, and regulatory enforcement matter. Specifically, vendors suffer economically where social exchange is non-reciprocal, where location choice isnon-economic, and where regulation is variable and volatile. The spatial landscape, then, has an important place in economic development literature.

Causality in Biological Transmission: Forces and Energies.

Transmission is a basic process in biology that can be analyzed in accordance with information theory. A sender or transmitter located in a particular patch of space is the source of the transmitted object, the message. A receiver patch interacts to receive the message. The "messages" that are transmitted between patches (eventually located in different hierarchical biological levels) are "meaningful" biological entities (biosemiotics). cis-acting transmission occurs when unenclosed patches acting as emitter and receiver entities of the same hierarchical level are linked (frequently by a vehicle) across an unfit space; trans-acting transmission occurs between biological individuals of different hierarchical levels, embedded within a close external common limit. To understand the causal frame of transmission events, we analyze the ultimate, but most importantly also the proximate, causes of transmission. These include the repelling, centrifugal "forces" influencing the transmission (emigration) and the attractive, centripetal "energies" involved in the reception (immigration). As transmission is a key process in evolution, creating both genetic-embedded complexity-diversity (trans-acting transmission, as introgression), and exposure to novel and alternative patches-environments (cis-acting transmission, as migration), the causal frame of transmission shows the cis-evolutionary and trans-evolutionary dimensions of evolution.

"Ultimately about Dignity": Social Movement Frames Used by Collaborators in the Food Dignity Action-Research Project

Social movement theory suggests that effectively framing the cause of a problem (diagnostic fram­ing), its solutions (prognostic framing), and reasons to support its solutions (motivational framing) is likely to be essential for reaching movement goals. In this paper, we apply social movement framing theory to empirically identify prognostic, diag­nostic, and motivational frames in the growing food justice movement in the U.S. We use the case of the Food Dignity project, a five-year, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)–funded, action and research collaboration between academics and leaders at five community-based food justice organizations. We coded multiple data sources, both public and internal to the project, to identify the strongest and most common diagnostic, prog­nostic, and motivational frames used by 25 indivi­dual collaborators in the Food Dignity project. Results suggest that the majority of diagnostic frames used by Food Dignity partners did not relate directly to food, but included instead insufficient resources, loss of place, degraded community, and constrained choice and response-ability (Minkler, 1999) as causes of problems—though a broken food system also emerged as a causal frame. Similarly, solution framing included one overarching food-related strategy, which we labelled “great food.” The other prognostic frames were reclaiming power, growing the local economy, strengthening community, fostering sustainable organizations, and networking. We did not find any motivational frames in the first round of semi-open coding. However, when we returned to reexamine the data with a hypothesis informed by our project experience beyond the textual data, we identified the motivational frame that we call recompense. Recompense suggests that those who have bene­fited from our current food systems should now work toward justice for those who sacrificed, usually unwillingly, to create them. This frame was mostly used indirectly and by community-based (rather than academic) partners in the project. Identifying these food justice diagnostic, prognos­tic, and motivational frames may help movement leaders to more explicitly examine and employ them and is an essential step for future research in assessing their effectiveness for creating a just, sustainable and healthy food system.

Two-stage filtration algorithm with interframe causal processing for multichannel image with presence of uncorrelated noise

Introduction. When solving a number of practical problems the usage of multichannel images is common practice. Multichannel of this data permits or increases the efficiency of solving the problem, or allows to obtain useful information, which in principle cannot be extracted from the single-channel images. One of the main types of noise occurring in a multichannel image is uncorrelated noise. The optimal image filtering algorithms require enormous computational cost. Therefore, the important practical value is the synthesis of multi-channel image filtering algorithms, providing the required performance indicators at moderate computational cost. Theoretical results. Using conditional independence properties, the expression for the a posteriori probability density of pixels at the two-stage multi-channel image filtration with causal frame processing in the presence of uncorrelated noise is obtained. Gaussian algorithm for determining the estimates of image pixels and error variance estimation with causal intra and inter-frame processing is obtained in the case of multichannel image. Experimental results. The developed algorithm for considered example allows increasing the filtration accuracy of the sequence of homogeneous Gaussian images on a 20% - 45% compared to inter-frame averaging algorithm. Conclusion. Optimal and quasi-two-stage multi-channel image filtration algorithms were synthesized. In algorithms the first stage is one-dimensional causal filtration along each of the coordinates, and the second is the union of the results. These algorithms allow reducing the computational cost in comparison with the optimal algorithm and thus ensuring acceptable accuracy characteristics.

Print news coverage of the 2010 Iowa egg recall: Addressing bad eggs and poor oversight

This paper examines the print news coverage of the 2010 Iowa egg recall, the largest in the United States, in order to determine how the news media conveyed messages regarding the recall and its causes, as well as what consumers might do in response to the recall. The news media has long been both a primary source of consumer information relating to food safety and a notable contributor to the policy agenda. A content analysis of 160 articles from four national US newspapers, the largest regional paper in Iowa, and the Associated Press revealed that the recall was framed both as a failure of government oversight and as an instance of poor production practices by the farmers in question. Proposed responses to the recall similarly fell into two distinct categories: changing consumer purchasing and food preparation habits in order to minimize the immediate risk of infection, and supporting legislative and regulatory food safety reforms that would minimize the risk of future outbreaks. Particular media focus was given to both the US Food Safety Modernization Act and the FDA Egg Rule. Relatively little media attention was given to industrial agriculture as a causal frame or the purchasing of “alternative” eggs as a potential response. Overall, coverage conveyed the policy relevance of the recall but failed both to fully contextualize the outbreak within the history of previous outbreaks and food safety concerns and to convey the relationship of the outbreak to the current system of industrial agriculture.

Causal framing for medical instrumentality

This paper explores the linguistic patterns of instrumentality in the titles of English medical research papers, at the interface between conceptual and linguistic structure, and offers a contribution to the little studied interrelationships between static and dynamic conceptual relations in medical ontology and LSP terminology. It is demonstrated how causal cues constitute the conceptual background against which instrumentals are profiled in the causal chain of the medical model. Taking inspiration from Talmy, frame semantics and construction grammar, the linguistic patterns in which causal and instrumental frame elements are co-activated are transcribed as complex patterns with partial morphological, syntactic and lexical marking of the conceptual relations under study. The paper offers an exploratory typology of causal cues for instrumentals and describes how multiple instruments can appear in medical LSP. The findings are relevant for those interested in the nexus between ontology, constructional aspects of expert language and frame semantics

Interference between cues requires a causal scenario: Favorable evidence for causal reasoning models in learning processes

In an interference-between-cues design (IbC), the expression of a learned Cue A–Outcome 1 association has been shown to be impaired if another cue, B, is separately paired with the same outcome in a second learning phase. The present study examined whether IbC could be caused by associative mechanisms independent of causal reasoning processes. This was achieved by testing participants in two different learning situations. In the Causal Scenario condition, participants learned in a diagnostic situation in which a common cause (Outcome 1) caused two disjoint effects, namely Cues A and B. In the Non-Causal Scenario condition, the same IbC design and stimulus conditions were used. However, instructions provided no causal frame to make sense of how cues and outcomes were related. IbC was only found in the Causal Scenario condition. This result is consistent with Causal Reasoning Models of causal learning and raises important difficulties for associative explanations of IbC.

Belated Concerns and Latent Effects

In this issue of Epidemiology, Stalberg and colleagues report the lack of an association between prenatal ultrasound and risk of schizophrenia in adulthood. These findings contribute to the search for unintended effects of an intervention designed to improve prenatal care. Although no adverse effect of ultrasound was reported, other gestational exposures have been associated with increased risk of schizophrenia. By extending the causal time frame to include long-term latent effects we are confronted with a potential paradox: interventions beneficial in early life may have undetected adverse consequences in adulthood.

Comments on Honderich, Sprigge, Dreyfus and Rubin, and Elster

A principal thought of Ted Honderich's paper is that no non-mental kind of representation brought into the analysis to save the idea of content will suffice, for it may be understood as nothing more than a causal component, at most the mere occurrence of an impression of the object in question. But, for the reasons Honderich mentions, "im pression", for all that the associated notions of copy and trace, etc. have traditionally done to give it a representational feel, cannot do the work required of "representation". To achieve the focus implicit in the latter, that is to identify the relevant causal frame, we also need the idea of content. Or if we do not, that is because this idea has already been built into what we mean by an impression, and then impression is not simply a causal notion. How can we grasp the idea of things being given, rather than mediated by contents or representations, images or whatever, in experiences that are nevertheless dependent on content in order to be the experiences they are? This is how the scene is set. There is a notion of content in visual experience that plays a part in the explanation of behaviour; content and subject form an inseparable pair, giving a duality to mental events that is poorly captured in the currencies of "qualia", "being something it is like", etc.; and content does not reduce to the mere occurrence of impressions. When we see the trees out there, they are among the causes of that experience, but the causal relation cannot account for the fact that the experience is specifically of the trees. For this we need the notion of representation. Treating the causal relation between the trees and the experience in one way leaves you wondering whether "representation" is the correct word, for then experience becomes a private thing in relation to a world only poorly described as public, for the shared reality out of which the causal chain emerges is not one we can describe as green and dendritic. On the other hand, if you treat the causal relation simply as an unmedi ated relation between green, dendritic things and behaviour or brain

Causality, time, and deadlines

The paper explores how time-related concepts can be treated in a strictly causal way. Clocks in a local, global and regional variant are modelled within a causal frame. Perhaps the most critical use of clocks is for defining deadlines. To analyze their meaning, two relevant distinctions are made: (1) contingent vs. strict deadline requirements and (2) descriptive vs. prescriptive part of a deadline requirement. A deadline delay paradox that appears on a seemingly semantically invariant inversion of the requirement specification can be dissolved on the basis of these distinctions. The conceptual frame for discussing causality is taken from Petri net Theory.

Development and genetic analysis of bithorax phenocopies in Drosophila.

PHENOCOPIES are developmental abnormalities which closely resemble known mutants, and can be induced experimentally1. Phenocopies of a given mutant can be induced by various physicochemical agents, which share a unique and restricted effective period in development. In some instances it has been shown that the period of sensitivity to the agent coincides in turn with the effective period of the mutant itself2,4. This is of special relevance because it places the phenomenon of the phenocopy in the same causal frame as that of gene action. Some of the morphogenetic mutants of Drosophila have been studied in clonal analysis and shown to act cell autonomously5,6. We have investigated whether their phenocopies also result from events taking place at the cellular level.