Common Sense Research Articles

Fundamental Laws and Quantum Dynamics

Background: Recently, we obtained a unitary theory of quantum mechanics and general relativity, where a quantum particle is a continuous distribution of matter in the two conjugate spaces of the coordinates and momentum, quantized by the equality of the mass parameter describing the relativistic dynamics of the matter, with the mass as an integral of the matter density. However, in this framework, we have not explicitly revealed the connection between our new theory and the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. Methods: We analyzed in detail the three fundamental laws of quantum mechanics, explicitly describing experimental data: 1) Planck’s law of the blackbody electromagnetic radiation of a system of electrically charged harmonic oscillators, 2) Einstein’s law of the photon energy proportionality with the photon frequency, and 3) de Broglie’s law of the quantum particle as an oscillator in space. Results: We reobtained the two dynamical equations, in the conjugate spaces of the coordinates and momentum, as functions of the Lagrangian system, unlike the Schrödinger equation, depending on the Hamiltonian. Conclusion: According to the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics, a quantum particle is a continuous distribution of matter with an intrinsic mass, unlike the conventional quantum mechanics for the state occupation probabilities of punctual entities moving with the light velocity and getting an apparent mass only by collisions with some bosons pervading the whole universe. According to these laws, we obtained a quantum theory in agreement with common sense, classical logic, and general relativity.

Commas and coordinating conjunctions: Too many rules or no rules at all?

Although it is unclear why punctuation should be pushed to the sidelines, it generally continues to be a neglected research area in mainstream contemporary linguistics. Common sense and empirical evidence both suggest that punctuation is so much more than a stylistic device, its presence or absence creating new strata and shades of meaning. Punctuation is also a matter of some controversy, all too often employed as a symbol of confrontation between linguistic conservatives and their more permissive colleagues. An already difficult situation is made even more difficult with different sources (e.g. course and reference books, online blogs and articles, etc.) supplying contradictory information with a rigor that does not tolerate disagreement, obsessing over rules for the sake of rules themselves and disregarding the real stories behind them. Shifting focus from a rulegoverned behavior and identifying a relatively limited context of punctuation, the smallscale research addresses the issue of comma usage before the coordinating conjunctions and, but, or, nor, so, yet and for. In addition to a sketchy overview of this complex relationship illustrative of significant differences of opinion, the paper touches upon regional and generic factors influencing comma usage before coordinating conjunctions, utilizing the massive database of the Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA). The main idea behind the paper is to observe and account for tendencies and discrepancies by providing critical commentary on authentic examples taken from the corpora rather than seek confirmation for rules and take the prescriptive norm for granted.

Social Work and Common Sense: A Critical Examination, Paul Michael Garrett

Social Work and Common Sense: A Critical Examination, Paul Michael Garrett

Judges and lawyers’ beliefs in repression and dissociative amnesia may imperil justice: further guidance required

ABSTRACT This article examines continuing misunderstanding about memory function especially for trauma, across three UK samples (N = 717). Delayed allegations of child sexual and physical abuse are prevalent in Western legal systems and often rely upon uncorroborated memory testimony to prove guilt. U.K. legal professionals and jurors typically assess the reliability of such memory recall via common sense, yet decades of scientific research show common sense beliefs often conflict with science. Recent international surveys show controversial notions of repression and accurate memory recovery remain strongly endorsed. In historical cases, these notions may lead to wrongful convictions. The current study surveyed the U.K. public, lawyers, and mental health professionals’ beliefs about repression, dissociative amnesia and false memories. Study findings give unique data on judges’ and barristers’ beliefs. Overall, the study findings reinforce international scientists’ concerns of a science – knowledge-gap. Repression was strongly endorsed by lay, legal and clinical participants (> 78%) as was dissociative amnesia (> 87%). Moreover, suboptimal professional legal education and juror guidance may increase misunderstanding. Correcting beliefs about memory function, and extending the contribution of memory science in the courtroom remains an important quest for cognitive scientists.

Common Sense and Science: One World or Two?

Common Sense and Science: One World or Two?

Development and validation of the COVID-19 vaccine beliefs scale for the Chinese population

BackgroundAt present, there is no culturally appropriate scale designed to measure Chinese people’s attitudes and beliefs about COVID-19 vaccines. Understanding people’s attitudes and beliefs about vaccines can help policy makers and health care professionals better evaluate local beliefs to increase vaccine coverage and minimize COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.MethodsWe developed a COVID-19 vaccine attitudes and beliefs scale comprising items based on qualitative research data. We then conducted an explorative and confirmatory factor analysis using data from two online sources.ResultsThe 26-item vaccine belief scale includes a five-factor model: vaccine benefit (VB), vaccine concern (VC), observing others’ reactions to vaccination (VR), the influence of authority and others toward vaccination (VI), and common sense about vaccination (VS). The multivariate analysis results showed that VB (OR = 1.065, 95% CI 1.035–1.097), VR (OR = 0.878, 95% CI 0.832–0.927), and VS (OR = 1.076, 95% CI 1.032–1.122) were associated with the intention to receive the vaccine. These results implied that VC (OR = 0.957, 95% CI 0.928–0.987) could predict the choice not to be vaccinated. A correlation between beliefs about vaccines and conspiracy theories and fear of COVID-19 was also found and discussed.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that the locally designed and culturally sensitive scale has good reliability and validity. The questionnaire provides researchers with a standardized assessment tool to measure Chinese people’s beliefs about the COVID-19 vaccine.

I'm in Charge, But Not Always in Control: A Qualitative Exploration of Female's Beliefs and Knowledge About Their Pelvic Pain.

Beliefs and knowledge about pain can influence how an individual approaches pain management. At present, there have been no investigations into the beliefs and knowledge that females hold about their pelvic pain; therefore, pain intervention approaches may not be targeted at current patient understandings. Exploring beliefs and knowledge may help inform and subsequently improve pain intervention outcomes for pelvic pain by allowing more tailored content to be delivered. This study aimed to identify beliefs and knowledge that females hold about their pelvic pain. Semi-structured interviews (n=12) were conducted. Based on the Common Sense Model, interview questions investigated participants' beliefs and knowledge related to the identity (diagnostic labels), cause, consequence, control, and timeline of their pelvic pain. Transcribed interviews were analysed using an Interpretive Description Framework. Participants reported holding biopsychosocial understandings of pain; however, many described their own pain experience in a way that was more aligned with the biomedical model of pain, suggesting incongruence in pain understandings. Participants valued their ability to take charge of their pain management, highlighting bodily autonomy and being proactive in pain management approaches. This approach to management did not provide total control over participants' pelvic pain. Pelvic pain was perceived as disruptive of life, both at present and into the future, with predictability of pain varying over time. This study provides insight into the perspectives of females with pelvic pain. Recommendations for clinicians are provided with a focus on delivering targeted education and equipping patients with helpful representations of their pain.

Creating communities that care: social representation of mental health in two urban poor communities in Ghana

Building caring communities is fundamental to achieving a community-based approach to mental health. Understanding how communities perceive mental illness provides critical insight into fostering mental health awareness and care. We explored the perceptions of mental illness among members of two urban poor communities in Accra, Ghana. Qualitative data were collected from 77 participants through key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and situated conversations. Using theory-driven thematic analysis based on social representations theory, findings revealed cognitive-emotional representations of mental illness. The communities demonstrated high awareness of the multilevel factors contributing to mental illness risk and experiences, drawing on five sources of knowledge: embodied, common sense, medical, cultural, and religious. Mental illness representations informed the classification and legitimization of mental illness based on the severity of conditions and the identity of sufferers. These findings provide valuable insights for planning community mental health interventions that address both social and institutional care needs.

Opium in science and society: numbers and other quantifications

AbstractIn science and beyond, quantifications are omnipresent when it comes to justifying judgments. Which scientific author, hiring committee-member, or advisory board panelist has not been confronted with page-long publication manuals, assessment reports, evaluation guidelines, calling for p-values, citation rates, h-indices, or other numbers to judge about the ‘quality’ of findings, applicants, or institutions? Yet, many of those of us relying on and calling for quantifications may not understand what information numbers can convey, and what not. Focusing on the uninformed usage of bibliometrics as worrisome outgrowth of the increasing quantification of science, in this opinion essay we place the abuse of quantifications into historical contexts and trends. These are characterized by mistrust in human intuitive judgment, obsessions with control and accountability, and a bureaucratization of science. We call for bringing common sense back into scientific (bibliometric-based) judgment exercises. Despite all number crunching, many judgments—be it about empirical findings or research institutions—will neither be straightforward, clear, and unequivocal, nor can they be ‘validated’ and be ‘objectified’ by external standards. We conclude that assessments in science ought to be understood as and be made as judgments under uncertainty.

K-Rich Spinel Interface of Air-Stable Layered Oxide Cathodes for Potassium-Ion Batteries.

Potassium-containing transition metal layered oxides (KxTmO2), although possessing high energy density and suitable operating voltage, suffer from severe hygroscopic properties due to their two dimensional (2D)layered structure. Their air sensitivity compromises structural stability during prolonged air exposure, therefore increasing the cost. The common sense for designing air-stable layered cathode materials is to avoid contact with H2Omolecules. In this study, it is surprisingly found that P3-type KxTmO2 forms an ultra-thin, potassium-rich spinel phase wrapping layer after simply water immersion, remarkedly reduces the reaction activity of the material's surface with air. Combined with Density Function Theory (DFT) calculations, this spinel phase is found to be able to effectively withstand air deterioration and preserving the crystal structure. Consequently, the water-treated material, when exposed to air, can largely maintain its good electrochemical performance, with capacity retention up to 99.15% compared to the fresh samples. Such an in situ surface phase transformation mechanism is also corroborated in other KxTmO2, underscoring its effectiveness in enhancing the air stability of P3-type layered oxides for K+ storage.

Common Sense Matters: Reply to Janzen, Sonu, and Myrebøe’s Reviews of In Search of Responsibility as Education

Common Sense Matters: Reply to Janzen, Sonu, and Myrebøe’s Reviews of In Search of Responsibility as Education

Culturally constituted self in Taylor and Gramsci: A concern for philosophy of education

This article addresses the problem of two extreme positions in the self-understanding of human beings namely ignoring culture or its over-determination. Though Charles Taylor and Antonio Gramsci are widely known to differ from each other in many respects, we endeavor a congruent reading to evolve a comprehensive perspective. We make avail of their concepts, such as background, horizon, and common sense, to comprehend the nature of the culturally constituted self and its relevance for education. For both Taylor and Gramsci, the human self is situated in a cultural framework. Though the relation between self and culture is constitutive and inevitable, culture does not entirely determine or overshadow the self. This stance gives space for upholding freedom, dignity and liberation of the human self in both of them. While preserving the essential role of culture in the formation of the human self, education must not be reduced to identity politics. Education must incorporate culture, be critical of it and pay attention to forming a critical self.

From Recognition to Prediction: Leveraging Sequence Reasoning for Action Anticipation

The action anticipation task refers to predicting what action will happen based on observed videos, which requires the model to have a strong ability to summarize the present and then reason about the future. Experience and common sense suggest that there is a significant correlation between different actions, which provides valuable prior knowledge for the action anticipation task. However, previous methods have not effectively modeled this underlying statistical relationship. To address this issue, we propose a novel end-to-end video modeling architecture that utilizes attention mechanisms, named Anticipation via Recognition and Reasoning (ARR). ARR decomposes the action anticipation task into action recognition and sequence reasoning tasks, and effectively learns the statistical relationship between actions by next action prediction (NAP). In comparison to existing temporal aggregation strategies, ARR is able to extract more effective features from observable videos to make more reasonable predictions. In addition, to address the challenge of relationship modeling that requires extensive training data, we propose an innovative approach for the unsupervised pre-training of the decoder, which leverages the inherent temporal dynamics of video to enhance the reasoning capabilities of the network. Extensive experiments on the Epic-kitchen-100, EGTEA Gaze+, and 50salads datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods. The code is available at https://github.com/linuxsino/ARR .

The future of comparative immunology

« Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future of comparative immunology” could one say to paraphrase Niels Bohr. Yet, if one avoids mistakes of the past and fashions, if one remains ready to welcome surprises an do not to get drowned in big data while profiting from new technologies, if one keeps common sense between expanding and restricting one's scope of investigation in front of the enormous diversity of the tree of life, comparative immunologists are going, in new areas of research and with new tools, to keep contributing enormously to immunology. They will reveal, with the eyes open to homologies and analogies among multiple species, more variations on the theme of immunity and will put the human immune system in perspective a necessary situation to face the questions that remain to be answered in order to improve health or to understand evolution of immune systems. There will always be room in comparative immunology for fundamental approaches to these subjects. A proper education, aimed at combining competences, will be essential to achieve these goals.

A multifaceted approach to detect gender biases in Natural Language Generation

Recent advances in generative models have skyrocketed the popularity of conversational chatbots and have revolutionized the way we interact with artificial intelligence. At the same time, research has shown that machine learning models can unconsciously reflect and amplify human biases. This is particularly dangerous for generative models given the huge popularity of such technologies. Specifically, a fundamental source of bias of such technologies is the resources on which the models are trained. To address this issue, this paper proposes a methodology to analyze intrinsic gender bias in Natural Language Generation (NLG). Some works already propose metrics and approaches to measure bias in the Natural Language processing field. However, there is a lack of standard methodology to measure gender bias in NLG. Therefore, adapting the Bias Score approach, our proposal involves three sequential stages applied to individual texts to detect intrinsic gender bias on NLG effectively. Those steps are as follows: (i) word scoring; (ii) word filtering; and (iii) generative-word analysis. This methodology is applied to recent datasets and pre-trained models widely used for the generation of text with common sense. In particular, this paper analyzes the potential gender bias in CommonGen and C2Gen datasets and the SimpleNLG and T5 models. The results show the ability of the proposed methodology to detect gender bias in word distributions, presenting a strong correlation with the words typically associated with a specific gender. Results indicate that both tested datasets are intrinsically gender-biased, and therefore, tested models fine-tuned with those datasets also are.

Selective removal of organic contaminants and ascorbic acid enhancement effect based on the magnetic Fe0/FeS2-doped carbon nanolayer.

Developing highly effective iron-based catalyst to selectively remove organic contaminants has garnered considerable attention. Herein, a magnetic Fe0/FeS2-doped carbon nanolayer (S-Fe@NC) was synthesized through a straightforward one-step pyrolysis method, pyrolyzing a mixture composed of 4,6-dihydroxypyrimidine, trithiocyanuric acid, and FeCl3·6H2O. With the presence of PMS, S-Fe@NC demonstrated the ability to remove almost 100% bisphenol-A (50μM) within 3min, attributed to its excellent graphitization degree and high FeS2/Fe0 content. Furthermore, the S-Fe@NC catalyst demonstrated an impressive kobs value of 1.476min-1, which surpassed the traditional Fenton system by 77 times and even exceeded the commercial Fe0 catalyst by 127 times. More importantly, the S-Fe@NC/PMS system succeeded in selectively removing organic contaminants based on the hydrophobic interaction between catalyst and contaminants. Besides, the result of electron paramagnetic resonance and the radical quenching experiments indicated that ·OH, SO4·-, 1O2, and O2·- were involved in the organic contaminants removal. Interestingly, after adding ascorbic acid (AA) to the S-Fe@NC/PMS system, more ROS could be generated to result in the kobs augmenting by 4.16 times (6.133min-1), completely different from the common sense that AA was usually used as a radical quencher. Additionally, the magnetically separable catalyst also exhibited excellent reusability and broad pH adaptability (2.0-12.0). This study provided a valuable insight for developing highly selective and effective Fe-based catalyst for practical wastewater treatment.

Systematic exploration and in-depth analysis of ChatGPT architectures progression

The fast evolution of artificial intelligence frameworks has resulted in the creation of increasingly sophisticated large language models (LLM), ChatGPT being the most famous one. This study paper dives into this LLM with a case study of ChatGPT’s architecture and provides a thorough comparative analysis of its numerous versions, tracking its history from its conception to its most recent incarnations. This research intends to give a full knowledge of the model’s history by investigating the underlying mechanisms and enhancements provided in each edition. The comparative analysis covers key aspects such as model size, training data, fine-tuning techniques, and performance metrics. Furthermore, this study evaluates the limits of ChatGPT in its many incarnations. These limitations include common sense reasoning difficulties, biased replies, verbosity, sensitivity to input wording, and others. Each constraint is investigated for potential remedies and workarounds. This research article also provides a complete analysis of the ChatGPT architecture and its progress through multiple iterations. It gives vital insights for academics, developers, and users wanting to harness the promise of ChatGPT while managing its restrictions by exploring both the model’s strengths and limitations. The distinctiveness of this paper rests in its comprehensive assessment of ChatGPT’s architectural development and its practical strategy for resolving the myriad difficulties in producing cohesive and contextually relevant replies.

Ensino religioso no Brasil e na Argentina: entre confessionalidades e laicidades

2017 was a crucial year for defining the place and model of religious education to be taught in public schools in both Brazil and Argentina. With a difference of less than three months between one decision and the next, the Supreme Courts of these countries dealt with the constitutionality of the rules that guaranteed the provision and teaching of this subject in state establishments. In this article, we will analyze the justifications presented by the courts to support their decisions, investigating in these contexts how legal common sense shapes, defines and establishes the limits of the religious and the non-religious. In other words, rather than evaluating the merits and legitimacy of the implementation of religious education in public schools, our aim is to make visible the narratives and discourses through which the members of the Supreme Federal Courts of the two countries under analysis give materiality to what they understand by (non) religion.

The Apostle of “Common Sense”: The Historical Roots of Duhem’s Distinction between Physics and Metaphysics

The Apostle of “Common Sense”: The Historical Roots of Duhem’s Distinction between Physics and Metaphysics

Unity in Reason: Mendelssohn on the Conflict between Common Sense and Speculation

The paper aims to clarify Mendelssohn’s stance on speculative philosophy by connecting the conflict between common sense and speculation with the notion of approval-drive. It argues that Mendelssohn identifies a principle of existence in the faculty of approval, aligning common sense with the divine nature, thereby challenging the skepticism inherent in metaphysical speculation. By invoking God’s creative impetus, Mendelssohn demonstrates that the ontologically abundant world conceived by common sense is more consistent with the divine nature than the ontologically impoverished worlds envisioned by metaphysicians. This approach positions Mendelssohn within the tradition of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, emphasizing the role of the divine intellect as the guarantee of the accord between perceived and actual reality.