Choice Of Categories Research Articles

Zero‐price effect and consumer welfare: Evidence from online classified real estate service

AbstractWe test whether the tendency to overvalue a free service over a paid alternative may lead to inferior economic outcomes. We examine data from an online classified real estate service in Israel that allows private and commercial owners to offer their real estate properties for sale and lease under either free‐basic or paid‐premium listing categories. Estimation results indicate a zero‐price effect in owners’ choice of a listing category. Moreover, although the vast majority of owners opt for the free‐ad category, the paid‐premium category generates increased buyer demand, greater transaction price, and decreased time‐on‐market—adding up to an average net benefit of about 3.5%–3.8% of the average transaction price (equivalent to about $12K–$13K). Outcomes are robust to a series of identification and test‐design issues.

The use of categories and methods of natural sciences in jurisprudence and political science

The authors of the present article demonstrate the inaccuracy of the idea proposed by the Vienna Circle positivists that it is necessary to extend the terminology and methods of natural sciences to political and legal studies in order for these studies to produce truly scientific knowledge, which, as suggested by these positivists, should present a set of statements formalized through the usage of mathematics. The authors contend that this theoretical approach opposes natural sciences to jurisprudence and political science and therefore are incorrect. It is the authors’ stance that social sciences, including jurisprudence and political science, as well as other areas of scientific research, explore the nature. Thus, jurisprudence and political science belong to natural sciences. Accordingly, in every area of scientific research the qualities of its results are controlled by the specifics of the sphere of nature under examination. It is this sphere that dictates a choice of categories and methods employed for this examination. These categories and methods are determined by the aforesaid specifics and, as a result, are also specific. For example, this is true not only for mathematics and physics but also for jurisprudence and political science. It is worth noting that every area of research has its own, distinctive findings or scientific results produced by means of the unique system of notions and methods, utilized in the course of the research. Spheres of nature examined within separate areas of research overlap with each other. Consequently, a given area of research may adopt categories and methods of cognition that were initially devised within another area of research. However, such an adoption should be undertaken only if it leads to the achievement of original scientific results.

Weaker number sense accounts for impaired numerosity perception in dyscalculia: Behavioral and computational evidence.

Impaired numerosity perception in developmental dyscalculia (low "number acuity") has been interpreted as evidence of reduced representational precision in the neurocognitive system supporting non-symbolic number sense. However, recent studies suggest that poor numerosity judgments might stem from stronger interference from non-numerical visual information, in line with alternative accounts that highlight impairments in executive functions and visuospatial abilities in the etiology of dyscalculia. To resolve this debate, we used a psychophysical method designed to disentangle the contribution of numerical and non-numerical features to explicit numerosity judgments in a dot comparison task and we assessed the relative saliency of numerosity in a spontaneous categorization task. Children with dyscalculia were compared to control children with average mathematical skills matched for age, IQ, and visuospatial memory. In the comparison task, the lower accuracy of dyscalculics compared to controls was linked to weaker encoding of numerosity, but not to the strength of non-numerical biases. Similarly, in the spontaneous categorization task, children with dyscalculia showed a weaker number-based categorization compared to the control group, with no evidence of a stronger influence of non-numerical information on category choice. Simulations with a neurocomputational model of numerosity perception showed that the reduction of representational resources affected the progressive refinement of number acuity, with little effect on non-numerical bias in numerosity judgments. Together, these results suggest that impaired numerosity perception in dyscalculia cannot be explained by increased interference from non-numerical visual cues, thereby supporting the hypothesis of a core number sense deficit. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: A strongly debated issue is whether impaired numerosity perception in dyscalculia stems from a deficit in number sense or from poor executive and visuospatial functions. Dyscalculic children show reduced precision in visual numerosity judgments and weaker number-based spontaneous categorization, but no increasing reliance on continuous visual properties. Simulations with deep neural networks demonstrate that reduced neural/computational resources affect the developmental trajectory of number acuity and account for impaired numerosity judgments. Our findings show that weaker number acuity in developmental dyscalculia is not necessarily related to increased interference from non-numerical visual cues.

CTM-YOLOv8n: A Lightweight Pedestrian Traffic-Sign Detection and Recognition Model with Advanced Optimization

Traffic-sign detection and recognition (TSDR) is crucial to avoiding harm to pedestrians, especially children, from intelligent connected vehicles and has become a research hotspot. However, due to motion blurring, partial occlusion, and smaller sign sizes, pedestrian TSDR faces increasingly significant challenges. To overcome these difficulties, a CTM-YOLOv8n model is proposed based on the YOLOv8n model. With the aim of extracting spatial features more efficiently and making the network faster, the C2f Faster module is constructed to replace the C2f module in the head, which applies filters to only a few input channels while leaving the remaining ones untouched. To enhance small-sign detection, a tiny-object-detection (TOD) layer is designed and added to the first C2f layer in the backbone. Meanwhile, the seventh Conv layer, eighth C2f layer, and connected detection head are deleted to reduce the quantity of model parameters. Eventually, the original CIoU is replaced by the MPDIoU, which is better for training deep models. During experiments, the dataset is augmented, which contains the choice of categories ‘w55’ and ‘w57’ in the TT100K dataset and a collection of two types of traffic signs around the schools in Tianjin. Empirical results demonstrate the efficacy of our model, showing enhancements of 5.2% in precision, 10.8% in recall, 7.0% in F1 score, and 4.8% in mAP@0.50. However, the number of parameters is reduced to 0.89M, which is only 30% of the YOLOv8n model. Furthermore, the proposed CTM-YOLOv8n model shows superior performance when tested against other advanced TSDR models.

Bayesian ART for incomplete datasets

Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) models allow for categorizing data in a fast and incremental manner. In particular, the Bayesian ART leverages Bayesian methodology to capture complex relationships between categories. While Bayesian methods are well-known for handling uncertainty, Bayesian ART models are at the mercy of a recurring foe: missing data. When data is missing, practitioners must rely on off-the-shelf solutions to impute the data before using Bayesian ART, effectively truncating the uncertainty quantification. To overcome such limitation, we (I) estimate the distribution of missing data entries using a Gaussian mixture model and (II) modify the three steps of Bayesian ART (category choice, matching, and update) to propagate the uncertainty around the missing entries. Experiments in a variety of tabular datasets show that, in general, our novel methodology leads to better results than using off-the-shelf imputation solutions. The performance gap becomes especially noticeable as the number of missing data entries increases.

THE INFLUENCE OF CHANGES IN COMPETITION RULES ON TACTICS OF WEIGHT CATEGORY CHOICE IN WRESTLING

The article presents the types and specifics of tactics of the weight category choice in women’s, freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling. In modern scientific papers participation tactics of athletes in the competition system is covered fragmentally. Moreover, tactics of weight category choice is not described at all. We analyzed the dynamics of performances and results of 72 elite wrestlers who won gold, silver and bronze medals at the Games of XXXI Olympiad 2016 in Rio de Janeiro in different weight categories (four athletes in each one). In general, we compared the results of 24 women, 24 freestyle and 24 Greco-Roman wrestlers. There were discovered eight types of tactics which athletes used during four seasons in 2013–2016 Olympic cycle. Some types provided performances only in one Olympic weight category, while others were connected with participation in tournaments in two or even three weight categories during the same season. In all cases elite wrestlers used one weight category (mainly an Olympic one) as prior, while one or two weight categories were considered as additional. We established that the choice of the particular weight category depended on the specifics of the Olympic qualification system-2016, the prospects of obtaining the Olympic quota place in the International Qualification Tournaments and the results demonstrated at official international events in various weight categories. It was also discovered that in 2013 and 2016 the most popular was a tactics that involved performances in one prior Olympic weight category (70.83% of wrestlers used it). In 2014 and 2015 some athletes (1.39–11.11%) performed in the prior weight category and used one or two of them as additional. The largest number of tactics was used by representatives of women’s and freestyle wrestling as the upper limits of weight categories were changed more than in Greco-Roman wrestling.

The Factors of the Distribution of Grammatical Categories and Phenomena in Contemporary Czech

As to the application of the grammar within communication, we distinguish between two contingencies: a) grammatical categories which attach to the objective reality (verbal tenses, number, gender etc.), b) those which do not (in Czech for example the category of case). The relation between grammar and objective reality is not naturally rectilinear and troublefree. It could be complicated by various factors - not only the different type of language but also actualization which we comprehend as the unusual application of a grammatical form (often in order to gain more expressive term) - for example the sentence in the future tense Budeš psát (You will write) functions as that in the stressed imperative mood. To speakers with the advanced knowledge of Czech it is possible to present also special unmarked grammatical categories where a respective grammatical form can have more than one meaning. In the sentence Studuje český a německý jazyk (He studies Czech and German languages) the word jazyk (language) has the form of singular but the meaning of plural. There are many factors which influence the adequate choice of a grammatical category. In this respect the semantics are applied to a large extend and in various ways. The important role can be also played by number and so-called signal words which need the usage of a concrete morphological category (for example after the adverb včera (yesterday) must the preterite tense follow). From the linguo-didactic point of view this theme is very important and it is necessary to go on working it out.

Co-occurring dominance and ideal point processes: A general IRTree framework for multidimensional item responding

Responding to rating scale items is a multidimensional process, since not only the substantive trait being measured but also additional personal characteristics can affect the respondents’ category choices. A flexible model class for analyzing such multidimensional responses are IRTree models, in which rating responses are decomposed into a sequence of sub-decisions. Different response processes can be involved in item responding both sequentially across those sub-decisions and as co-occurring processes within sub-decisions. In the previous literature, modeling co-occurring processes has been exclusively limited to dominance models, where higher trait levels are associated with higher expected scores. However, some response processes may rather follow an ideal point rationale, where the expected score depends on the proximity of a person’s trait level to the item’s location. Therefore, we propose a new multidimensional IRT model of co-occurring dominance and ideal point processes (DI-MIRT model) as a flexible framework for parameterizing IRTree sub-decisions with multiple dominance processes, multiple ideal point processes, and combinations of both. The DI-MIRT parameterization opens up new application areas for the IRTree model class and allows the specification of a wide range of theoretical assumptions regarding the cognitive processing of item responding. A simulation study shows that IRTree models with DI-MIRT parameterization provide excellent parameter recovery and accurately reflect co-occurring dominance and ideal point processes. In addition, a clear advantage over traditional IRTree models with purely sequential processes is demonstrated. Two application examples from the field of response style analysis highlight the benefits of the general IRTree framework under real-world conditions.

Dualities in One-Dimensional Quantum Lattice Models: Topological Sectors

It has been a long-standing open problem to construct a general framework for relating the spectra of dual theories to each other. Here, we solve this problem for the case of one-dimensional quantum lattice models with symmetry-twisted boundary conditions. In Ref. [PRX Quantum 4, 020357], dualities are defined between (categorically) symmetric models that only differ in a choice of module category. Using matrix product operators, we construct from the data of module functors explicit symmetry operators preserving boundary conditions as well as intertwiners mapping topological sectors of dual models onto one another. We illustrate our construction with a family of examples that are in the duality class of the spin-12 Heisenberg XXZ model. One model has symmetry operators forming the fusion category Rep(S3) of representations of the group S3. We find that the mapping between its topological sectors and those of the XXZ model is associated with the nontrivial braided autoequivalence of the Drinfel’d center of Rep(S3). Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Bibliometric analysis of Advanced Oxidation Processes studies with a focus on Life Cycle Assessment and Costs.

Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) are wastewater treatment technologies that stand out for their ability to degrade Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CECs). The literature has extensively investigated these removal processes for different aqueous matrices. Once technically mature, some of these systems have become accredited to be applied on a large scale, and therefore, their systemic performances in the environmental and cost spheres have also become essential requirements. This study proposed corroborating this trend, analyzing the available literature on the subject to verify how experts in the AOP area investigated this integration during 2015-2023. For this purpose, a sample of publications was treated by applying the Systematic Review (SR) methodology. This resulted in an extract of 83 studies that adopted life-cycle logic to estimate environmental impacts and process costs or evaluated them as complementary to the technical dimension of each treatment technology. This analysis found that both dimensions can be used for selecting or sizing AOPs at the design scale. However, the appropriate choice of the impact categories for the environmental assessment and establishing a methodology for cost analysis can make the approach still more effective. In addition, a staggering number of processes would broaden the reality and applicability of the estimates, and adopting multicriteria analysis methodologies could address essential aspects of decision-making processes during the design of the arrangements. By meeting the original purposes, the study broadened the requirements for designing AOPs and disseminating their use in mitigating the discharge of CECs.

Standard Occupational Classification Codes: Gaps in Federal Data on the Public Health Workforce.

Objectives. To determine whether US Department of Labor standard occupational classification (SOC) codes can be used for public health workforce research. Methods. We reviewed past attempts at SOC matching for public health occupations and then used the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Industry and Occupation Computerized Coding System (NIOCCS) to match the actual job titles for 26 516 respondents to the 2021 Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS) with SOC codes, grouped by respondents' choice of job category in PH WINS. We assessed the accuracy of the NIOCCS matches and excluded matches under a cutpoint using the Youden Index. We assessed the percentage of SOC matches with insufficient information and diversity of SOC matches per PH WINS category using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. Results. Several key public health occupations do not have a SOC code, including disease intervention specialist, public health nurse, policy analyst, program manager, grants or contracts specialist, and peer counselor. Conclusions. Without valid SOC matches and detailed data on local and state government health departments, the US Department of Labor's data cannot be used for public health workforce enumeration. (Am J Public Health. 2024;114(1):48-56. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307463).

Categorization and discrimination of Mandarin lexical tones by naïve English listeners

Unlike tone languages such as Mandarin, English lacks tones at the sub-lexical level. Accordingly, English listeners have difficulty perceptually assimilating tones as categorized or uncategorized native segments (Perceptual Assimilation Model, PAM: Best, 1995). While English listeners can categorize the four lexical tones of Mandarin, i.e., level contour, rising, dipping, and falling, when given question, statement, exclamation, and uncertainty intonations as category choices (So & Best, 2011, 2014), this does not address tone assimilation at the segmental level. We reasoned that they might assimilate tones as non-assimilable nonspeech patterns if given visual icons as tone category choices (flat, rising, dipping, and falling lines, respectively), with no reference being made to English intonation categories. Accordingly, 76 monolingual English listeners (M age = 24.85 years, 50 females) were set two tasks: to use visual icons to categorize Mandarin tones in naturally produced tone-words (/ga, ti, tu, pu/ × 4 tones) and to discriminate all six pairwise tone contrasts. All tone pairs showed ceiling-level discrimination, and listeners split their categorizations of falling and level stimuli between the falling and flat icons, suggesting that when given visual icons, tone-naïve English listeners perceive Mandarin tones as nonspeech acoustic patterns, which is consistent with PAM’s non-assimilation predictions.

A Comparative Corpus-linguistic Study of Thick Adjectives: Cases of the PRC Criminal Law and the Model Penal Code

With the promotion of law-based governance in China, laws and regulations play an ever more important role in our country whilst placing further demands on PRC law translation. Guided by previous research, this paper conducts a comparative study into the adjective phenomenon from the two selected corpus--the Model Penal Code and the PRC Criminal Law, respectively representing professional legal discourse and Chinese law translation. Concerning the research result, the author concludes the legal norms drawn from Model Penal Code and puts forward improvement proposals for the official Chinese-English law translations in terms of adjective distribution and category choices. The findings demonstrate that legal language tends to avoid adjectives and that thick concepts are more commonly used due to their evaluative intensity. By contributing to the promotion of future C-E legal translation, this paper aims to support China's legal system in its increasingly important role on the global stage.

Dynamics of crop category choices reveal strategies and tactics used by smallholder farmers in India to cope with unreliable water availability

CONTEXTChanging cropping pattern is a potentially effective lever to cope with unreliable water resources, but given the multiple factors driving crop choices, assessing if farmers actually use it specifically for this objective remains difficult. OBJECTIVEWe aimed at analyzing whether and how farmers choose crop categories with different water requirements to cope with limited water resources in peninsular India. METHODSWe monitored over a 10 year period crop choices, weather, and groundwater level for the three cropping seasons in 205 irrigable farms in the Berambadi watershed, in southern India. We categorized crops according to their seasonal water requirement. We built farm types based of Sequence Analysis and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering of crop category sequences over 10 years for each cropping season. For each type, we correlated the variation in crop category choices to variations in rainfall and groundwater availability, to identify tactical adaptations. Finally, we grouped the crop category choices of the three seasons to identify the main strategic pathways followed by farmers. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSSequence analysis of crop category choices revealed different types of crop category sequences, reflecting farmers' different strategies, which were not significantly linked with groundwater availability. We identified five main pathways across the three cropping seasons, including combining long-cycle irrigated crop and other crop categories, specializing in short-cycle irrigated crops over two or three seasons, specializing in rainfed crops or abandoning agriculture. Within each type, correlations between variation in water availability and crop categories highlighted specific tactical adaptations. SIGNIFICANCEThe opportunity for farmers to choose their crops among a variety of species encompassing a large range of water requirements allows them to base their system resilience on a large diversity of strategies and tactics. This suggests that some farmers empirically estimate the water balance of their cropping systems at seasonal scale to take tactical decisions. Providing them with science-based tools to refine this estimation could therefore improve their decision-making. This also implies that modelling farmer decisions must account for their diversity. Maintaining or increasing the capacity of farmers to cultivate a broad range of crops with different seasonal water requirements is important for farming system resilience, and should therefore be part of the agenda of policy makers for agricultural or environmental regulations.

Feature-specific reactivations of past information shift current neural encoding thereby mediating serial bias behaviors.

The regularities of the world render an intricate interplay between past and present. Even across independent trials, current-trial perception can be automatically shifted by preceding trials, namely the "serial bias." Meanwhile, the neural implementation of the spontaneous shift of present by past that operates on multiple features remains unknown. In two auditory categorization experiments with human electrophysiological recordings, we demonstrate that serial bias arises from the co-occurrence of past-trial neural reactivation and the neural encoding of current-trial features. The meeting of past and present shifts the neural representation of current-trial features and modulates serial bias behavior. Critically, past-trial features (i.e., pitch, category choice, motor response) keep their respective identities in memory and are only reactivated by the corresponding features in the current trial, giving rise to dissociated feature-specific serial biases. The feature-specific automatic reactivation might constitute a fundamental mechanism for adaptive past-to-present generalizations over multiple features.

Investigator-Determined Categories for Fever of Unknown Origin (FUO) Compared With International Classification of Diseases-10 Classification of Illness: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis With a Proposal for Revised FUO Classification.

Classifying fever of unknown origin (FUO) into categorical etiologies (ie, infections, noninfectious inflammatory, oncologic, miscellaneous, and undiagnosed disorders) remains unstandardized and subject to discrepancies. As some disease classifications change, a systematic review of studies would help physicians anticipate the frequency of illness types they may encounter that could influence care. We systematically reviewed prospective FUO studies published across the Medline (PubMed), Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science databases from January 1, 1997, to July 31, 2022. We performed a meta-analysis to estimate associated pooled proportions between the investigator-determined choice of disease category and those determined by the International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition (ICD-10), methodology. The proportion of patients with a difference between the investigator and ICD-10-adjusted noninfectious inflammatory disorder category was 1.2% (95% CI, 0.005-0.021; P < .001), and the proportion was similar for the miscellaneous category at 1.5% (95% CI, 0.007-0.025; P < .001). The miscellaneous and noninfectious inflammatory disorders categories demonstrated significant across-study heterogeneity in the proportions of patients changing categories, with 52.7% (P = .007) and 51.0% (P = .010) I2 , respectively. Adjusting FUO-associated diagnoses by ICD-10 methodology was associated with a statistically significant risk of over- or underestimation of disease category frequency approximation when using a 5 FUO category system. An FUO diagnostic classification system that better reflects mechanistic understanding would assist future research and enhance comparability across heterogenous populations and different geographic regions. We propose an updated FUO classification scheme that streamlines categorizations, aligns with the current understanding of disease mechanisms, and should facilitate empirical decisions, if necessary.

Consumer Welfare Consequences of Armenia’s EAEU Accession

ABSTRACT This study provides an empirical assessment of the impacts of Armenia’s accession to the Eurasian Economic Union on consumer welfare. Specifically, it combines primary individual-level expenditure survey data with the recent advances in consumer theory to examine the welfare consequences of rising prices of a broad range of widely consumed dairy products. The choice of the dairy category reflects its importance in the structure of the modern Armenian diet, with its respective nutritional and financial implications. Our findings shed light on the disproportionate effects of the EAEU-induced dairy price surge in Armenia and may prove useful in designing information-based alleviation policies.

Intelligent packaging in the transition from linear to circular economy: Driving research in practice

Developing packaging with enhanced features helps organisations transition from a linear to a circular economy. The paper aims at mapping the barriers, incentives and potential outcomes which can be reached by organisations via such innovative packaging solutions and providing insights to researchers concerning the application of their knowledge in this complex field. Our study comprises 130 articles from 1991 to 2021, identified through a systematic review methodology. The evolution of intelligent packaging was classified and mapped taking into account the principles of circular economy, the main incentives and barriers which can help or hinder the upsurge of the packaging with enhanced features, and the potential outcomes that can be achieved by organisations. By using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) combined with the Choice of Active Categories (COREM) approach, three clusters were identified: (i) buying process, (ii) value chain issues, (iii) collaborative issues. These clusters enable researchers to position their future contributions in the area and associated insights linked to new trends in the packaging field should facilitate managers in developing strategic pathways and supporting action research to enhance their packaging solutions. The paper also suggests to “decompose” the field, by starting with bottom-up studies with a circumscribed scope, and then synergically puts them together into a more general perspective.

Kant’s Categories of Quantity and Quality, Reconsidered: From the Point of View of the History of Logic and Natural Science

According to Kant, the division of the categories “is not the result of a search after pure concepts undertaken at haphazard,” but is derived from the “complete” classification of judgments developed by traditional logic. However, the sorts of judgments that he enumerates in his table of judgments are not all ones that traditional logic has dealt with; consequently, we must say that he chose the sorts of judgments in question with a certain intention. Besides, we know that his choice of judgments and categories is strongly influenced by certain views of natural science that he fully accepts. For this reason, his argumentations are sometimes seriously inconsistent. As to Kant’s argumentations of categories, many problems have already been pointed out, but in this paper, I take up the categories of quantity and quality once more, and make clear his argumentations’ hidden logic and its distortion from the point of view of the history of logic and natural science. First, I confirm that there are non-negligible problems in his explanation to the effect that his derivation of the categories of quantity and quality is based on the quantity and quality of judgments. Next, I reconsider the meaning of his treating the categories of quantity and quality as pure concepts of the understanding. Finally, I conclude that by having recourse to the categories of quantity and quality Kant tried unjustly to apriorize the distinction between the “extensive magnitude” and “intensive magnitude” that has a long formational history since Aristotle.

Influence of Transaction Cost Determinants on Credit Customer Category of Commercial Banks in Tanzania

The provision of credit services in rural areas is a challenge as agriculture and other rural economic activities have unique characteristics of dependence on natural resources, long production cycles and vulnerability to multiple risks. This paper aims to analyse transaction cost as the determinants of the choice of credit customer category for commercial bank’s credit business scale-up in Tanzania. Primary data for this study were collected from 37 registered and licensed commercial banks in January 2018 through structured questionnaires. The main sources of secondary data were peer-reviewed journal articles on transaction cost economics and rural financing. Data were analysed quantitatively through the logistic regression method. Key findings revealed that commercial banks have failed to scale up their credit operations to rural-based customers due to high transaction costs. This fact emanated from commercial banks’ preference of transacting credits directly with individual borrowers instead of using intermediaries, thus multiplying transaction costs, especially when dealing with rural-based borrowers. Therefore, commercial banks believe to be better off with few urban-based credit customers. This study recommended that commercial banks should use multiple credit governance structures (CGSs)\ (methods for credits delivery) to mitigate transaction costs when giving credits. Direct channels should be opted for when dealing with urban-based borrowers since low transaction costs are involved. Indirect channels with intermediaries should be opted for when scaling-up credit operations to rural-based borrowers since they allow the spreading of credit transaction costs throughout the credit supply channel.