Confluence Of Ideas Research Articles

A dialectic on validity: Explanation-focused and the many ways of being human

In line with the journal volume’s theme, this essay considers lessons from the past and visions for the future of test validity. In the first part of the essay, a description of historical trends in test validity since the early 1900s leads to the natural question of whether the discipline has progressed in its definition and description of test validity. There is no single agreed-upon definition of test validity; however, there is a marked coalescing of explanation-centered views at the meta-level. The second part of the essay focuses on the author's development of an explanation-focused view of validity theory with aligned validation methods. The confluence of ideas that motivated and influenced the development of a coherent view of test validity as the explanation for the test score variation and validation is the process of developing and testing the explanation guided by abductive methods and inference to the best explanation. This description also includes a new re-interpretation of true scores in classical test theory afforded by the author’s measure-theoretic mental test theory development—for a particular test-taker, the variation in observed test-taker scores includes measurement error and variation attributable to the different ecological testing settings, which aligns with the explanation-focused view wherein item and test performance are the object of explanatory analyses. The final main section of the essay describes several methodological innovations in explanation-focused validity that are in response to the tensions and changes in assessment in the last 25 years.

Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan by Eiko Maruko Siniawer

Reviewed by: Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan by Eiko Maruko Siniawer Peter Wynn Kirby (bio) Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan. By Eiko Maruko Siniawer. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 2018. x, 398 pages. $49.95, cloth; $24.99, E-book. Eiko Maruko Siniawer's Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan is an ambitious book on a fascinating topic but is undermined by problems in its conception and, to some degree, its execution. In a brief introduction that gives a good foretaste of the central themes to come, Siniawer states her aims in crafting the volume. In a section headed "A History of Postwar Japan," she writes, "This book is at once a history of waste and a history of postwar Japan. … Only by examining the entirety of this period might we have more productive debates about its persistent challenges, moments of fracture, and defining qualities" (p. 12). It is certainly the case that waste has been an important and evocative element of everyday life in postwar Japanese society, and understanding how conceptions of waste have shifted over time, how policy has responded to deal with waste, and how waste overlaps with and influences consumption and identity are fine ways of relating the history of Japan since 1945. Nevertheless, these twin goals of the book—a history of waste on the one hand and a history of postwar Japan on the other—come into tension with one another frequently, and the author's attempts to reconcile the competing aims of the volume sometimes serve to limit the insights it seeks to provide. To take one telling example: Siniawer points (e.g., pp. 9, 308 note 15) to Japan's long self-conception as a "small island nation poor in resources." This resource-scarcity discourse served as a powerful driver of Japanese policy throughout the twentieth century; its reach was extensive, influencing ideas of frugality, energy efficiency, recycling, environment, and selfsufficiency for many decades in ways that are profound and far-reaching. Yet to read Siniawer's account, this resources fixation is primarily a postwar phenomenon of postwar significance (with a couple cursory mentions of pre-1945 links). She does not seek to show how concern over resources rose from the 1920s, during Japan's growing militarism, in turn feeding Japan's sense of geopolitical insecurity.1 It is no exaggeration to say that the Japanese empire's prewar fixation on resources, particularly energy resources, shaped its actions considerably and helped launch Japan into its disastrous role in the Pacific War. The consistent freight of concepts such [End Page 163] as "resources" (shigen), of great importance to Japan's development, is one reason why some scholars prefer to conceive of the "transwar period" to take account of the continuities of such themes. Siniawer cites the 2006 doctoral dissertation of one of these scholars2 but doesn't go into a real discussion of these issues. In my opinion, it is unfortunate that Siniawer has not chosen to note the historical ramifications of such an important set of concepts, since many undergraduates—a key intended audience for the book—would likely not be familiar with them. This brings up another linked issue. If the book is a history of postwar Japan, when does the postwar period end? Does it go on indefinitely? Siniawer mulls this over (pp. 14–15) but doesn't go so far as to give a concrete endpoint or a very satisfactory answer. One could argue that the seismic 2011 triple disasters, commonly referred to as "3.11" in Japan, offered a fine—though imperfect—opportunity to declare the end of Japan's postwar period. Naturally, there is an ongoing debate on this point and perhaps the continuities with pre-2011 Japan outweigh the differences and upheaval that the tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi crisis ushered in. At the very least, this confluence of ideas and arguments for and against would merit a thorough discussion. The book is curiously reticent on the disasters and their ramifications. In the months and years after 3.11, Japan engaged in history's largest decontamination effort, with thousands of workers having scraped about 16 million tons of radioactive dirt, etc., from hundreds of square kilometers of the irradiated surface...

Growth and form, Lie algebras and special functions.

The formation of a biological organism, or an organ within it, can often be regarded as the unfolding of successive equilibria of a mechanical system. In a mathematical model, these changes of equilibria may be considered to be responses of mechanically constrained systems to a change of a reference configuration and of a reference metric, which are in turn driven by genes and their expression. This paper brings together three major threads of research. These are: Lie-type symmetries of equations; models as well as data on growth and pattern formation; and the relation between Lie algebras (and groups) and special functions associated with them. We show that symmetry methods can be generalized to map between solutions to models with different reference metrics. In the case in which we attempt to obtain such equations, they seem too complicated to be of any immediate service to the community of researchers on cortical growth. However, models and data on growth may be used to obtain generators of these Lie algebras empirically and numerically. These generators result in new classes of special functions. The paper is an invitation to develop what we may call empirical Lie algebras and associated functions. The hypothesis that remains to be tested is whether the confluence of ideas described in the paper, namely the Lie algebraic-related consequences of pattern formation and growth, prove useful for deepened understanding of biological growth patterns.

Moments in Pearson's Four-Step Uniform Random Walk Problem and Other Applications of Very Well-Poised Generalized Hypergeometric Series

This paper considers the representation of odd moments of the distribution of a four-step uniform random walk in even dimensions, which are based on both linear combinations of two constants representable as contiguous very well-poised generalized hypergeometric series and as even moments of the square of the complete elliptic integral of the first kind. Neither constants are currently available in closed form. New symmetries are found in the critical values of the L-series of two underlying cusp forms, providing a sense in which one of the constants has a formal counterpart. The significant roles this constant and its counterpart play in multidisciplinary contexts is described. The results unblock the problem of representing them in terms of lower-order generalized hypergeometric series, offering progress towards identifying their closed forms. The same approach facilitates a canonical characterization of the hypergeometry of the parbelos, adding to the characterizations outlined by Campbell, D'Aurozio and Sondow (2020, The American Mathematical Monthly127(1), 23-32). The paper also connects the econometric problem of characterizing the bias in the canonical autoregressive model under the unit root hypothesis to very well-poised generalized hypergeometric series. The confluence of ideas presented reflects a multidisciplinarity that accords with the approach and philosophy of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.

The Tox21 10K Compound Library: Collaborative Chemistry Advancing Toxicology.

Since 2009, the Tox21 project has screened ∼8500 chemicals in more than 70 high-throughput assays, generating upward of 100 million data points, with all data publicly available through partner websites at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), and National Toxicology Program (NTP). Underpinning this public effort is the largest compound library ever constructed specifically for improving understanding of the chemical basis of toxicity across research and regulatory domains. Each Tox21 federal partner brought specialized resources and capabilities to the partnership, including three approximately equal-sized compound libraries. All Tox21 data generated to date have resulted from a confluence of ideas, technologies, and expertise used to design, screen, and analyze the Tox21 10K library. The different programmatic objectives of the partners led to three distinct, overlapping compound libraries that, when combined, not only covered a diversity of chemical structures, use-categories, and properties but also incorporated many types of compound replicates. The history of development of the Tox21 “10K” chemical library and data workflows implemented to ensure quality chemical annotations and allow for various reproducibility assessments are described. Cheminformatics profiling demonstrates how the three partner libraries complement one another to expand the reach of each individual library, as reflected in coverage of regulatory lists, predicted toxicity end points, and physicochemical properties. ToxPrint chemotypes (CTs) and enrichment approaches further demonstrate how the combined partner libraries amplify structure–activity patterns that would otherwise not be detected. Finally, CT enrichments are used to probe global patterns of activity in combined ToxCast and Tox21 activity data sets relative to test-set size and chemical versus biological end point diversity, illustrating the power of CT approaches to discern patterns in chemical–activity data sets. These results support a central premise of the Tox21 program: A collaborative merging of programmatically distinct compound libraries would yield greater rewards than could be achieved separately.

Graphene gets bent

Graphene gets bent

From ‘Cultural Revolution’ to the Weariness of the Self: New Struggles for Recognition

The ‘Cultural Revolution’ emerged at a confluence of ideas, practices, and discourses in the social-cultural sphere that promoted new figurations for individuality, liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although the achievements of the 1960s and 1970s were transformative, fifty years later the post-modern world is facing unexpected socio-political hardships and witnessing the social suffering and the exhaustion of individuals. This paper aims to explore, drawing on reflections of philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis and group analysis, some of the conscious and unconscious shifts of the last 50 years and their psychosocial consequences. To achieve this aim, it criticizes individualism as ideology by revisiting some of the socio-philosophical bases of Western societies, introducing as well the concepts of ‘freedom with’ and ‘social freedom’ to understand the new struggles for recognition posed to post-modern subjects.

UNDERSTANDING INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IN CHILE: AN OVERVIEW OF POLICY AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract The development of the concept of inclusive education was based on several sources and surrounded by other notions, such as failure, quality and effectiveness, which influence its interpretation and implementation. This article is a theoretical discussion that seeks to understand, from an educational perspective, how this confluence of ideas was formed. To that end, we establish a historical chronology of international policies, national Chilean policies, and research trends, which are understood as universal concerns, work hypotheses and objects of study, respectively. The discussion reveals the complexity of the concept when we contextualize it and when we clarify its logic in psycho-pedagogical terms and in terms of resource effectiveness, quality and inclusion.

The Flood as Sabbatical Rest: A Comparison of Genesis 6–9 and Leviticus 25

Jacob Milgrom once juxtaposed the flood (Gen 6–9) and Babylonian exile (Lev 26), with the Sabbatical Year as its crux. This article expounds upon the parallels between the Flood Narrative (Gen 6–9) and the law concerning the Sabbatical Year (Lev 25:1–7). The directionality of composition between the Priestly source (P) and Holiness Code (H) is examined, as well as the appropriation of alternate source material to bolster the theological propositions of P and H. The confluence of ideas between Gen 6–9 and Lev 25:1–7 (and 26:34–35, 43) include, among other secondary matters: the phenomenon of a yearlong land-fallowing, non-occupancy (or sabbatical rest), divinely granted superabundant bumper-crop which lasts for a year (or two), and concern for the faunae and their peaceful coexistence with humankind on the land where tranquillity is realised by all three entities.

Science Diplomacy Transcend National Boundaries to Promote Greater Global Peace, Prosperity and Stability

Science facilitates a confluence of ideas, knowledge, expertise, and resources that transcend national boundaries and traditional disciplines towards efficiently addressing global problems. Science should be leveraged to promote effective knowledge-based international partnerships to solve common problems. Science diplomacy transcends borders, politics, culture, and religion where all accept the universality of science. It is through the use of international scientific cooperation more excellent quality can be fostered. The collaboration among the peoples of diverse geography from all nations can promote greater global peace, prosperity, and stability. However, there are invisible walls in accepting science as diplomacy; the bridge needs to be built.

Em torno da crítica literária em jornal: sobre Lima Barreto e José Veríssimo

The article aims to analyze the relationship of the literary critic José Veríssimo (1857-1916) with the writer Lima Barreto (1881-1922). It takes press as a starting point. Both the critic and the writer worked at the newspaper, which inspires Lima’s debut novel. But beyond their confluence of ideas, the relationship is analyzed by the prism of the communication circuit in which they are inserted. Criticism is taken as an instance related to journalism. Primary sources contribute to the composition of snapshots of the communication circuit that allows to analyze Sevcenko’s proposal that Veríssimo was a “tutelary master” of Lima. This proposition is confirmed in some aspects, especially with regard to social criticism.

The New Commodity: Technicity and Poetic Form

One of the key strands of early thinking by the Language Poets, notably Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews and Steve McCaffery, was that the poem—particularly the mainstream, American lyric in thrall to the Imagist tradition—should be understood as partaking in the commodity system, either in its capacity of presenting the world itself as consumable or as a commodity itself. Strategies to retool the poem included an exaggerated de-naturalization of language (akin to Brecht’s Verfremdung Effekt), the permanent deferral of epiphany as “pay off” (i.e., writing as ongoing phenomenological investigation), and, most extremely, the poem as engaged in a “general” as opposed to a “closed” economy—as pure expenditure, linguistic waste, in George Bataille’s sense. These practices, however, while they might have, in theory, “de-commodified” the poem (the evidence weighs against it, but it’s quite impossible to prove), have nonetheless confirmed the centrality of the early notion by William Carlos Williams that a poem is a “machine,” an autonomous producer of meanings, and to that extent an object. The French philosopher Gilbert Simondon argues in his theory of technicity that something human lies at the heart of the technical object and that its technical essence, like any player in the Darwinian evolution, has its own evolutionary journey through time. In Bernard Stiegler’s succinct formulation, “[a]s a ‘process of exteriorization,’ technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life.” This confluence of ideas suggests a possibility: that the technical elements of poems—what might have formerly been understood as stylistic tics, characteristic methods, visual and prosodic features—are themselves engaged in a quest for “life,” and that poems are in fact always already objects, existing outside of the system of commodities if only by virtue of obtaining an ontological status both: (1) irreducible to an over-determined system of exchanges (an unreachable “essence” in Graham Harman’s “object-oriented ontology”), and (2) autonomous from the life, actions and intentions of the poem him/herself. To that degree, the focus of early Language poetry on configuring the poem against the system of commodities overstepped its reach by attempting to “de-objectify” the poem, to dissolve it among systems of relation. Poems are less human to the degree that they are not proxies for the poet him/herself or total subjects to the “social,” but more human to the degree that they contain—as a steam engine, a diode or a Swiss watch—a technical essence.

Re-Conceptualising Public Health Interventions in Government: A Response to Recent Commentaries.

In their responses to ‘Understanding the role of public administration in implementing action on the social determinants of health and health inequities,’1 authors Clavier,2 Breton,3 O’Flynn4 and De Leeuw5 raise a range of additional insights from public administration and the frontline of public health policy advocacy. These include the importance of ideas and ideation processes,2 structural changes to policy administration and the creation of boundaries4 and the prominent but potentially limited initiative Health in All Policies (HiAP).3,4 When we put these together, an important confluence of ideas emerges that speak to contemporary public health challenges. In my response, I use HiAP as an anchor by which to interrogate how these insights might come together to focus our research and action agenda.

Active learning and decision making: an introduction to the collection.

The importance of exploratory behaviors by which agents actively sample information has been long appreciated in a range of disciplines. However, because of their complexity and cognitive nature, these behaviors have been difficult to characterize. In recent years, a resurgence of interest in this question has been based on a confluence of ideas from multiple fields, including machine learning, development, perceptual learning and attention and decision making. This collection of articles in F1000Research aims to provide a home for a broad range of studies addressing this topic. We welcome full length research articles, brief communications, single figure studies, and review/opinion articles, and studies using computational, behavioral or neural approaches. Here, we provide an introduction to the collection which we hope will grow and become a valuable resource for the researchers exploring this topic.

Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts: A Slice of Life from the Rainbow Region

Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts: A Slice of Life from the Rainbow Region

Relationship between errors on Raven’s Progressive Matrices (SPM plus and APM) and eductive ability

The aim of this study was to analyze the relationship between errors on Standard Progressive Matrices Plus (SPM Plus) and Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) and eductive ability. A large sample (n = 4535) of secondary school pupils aged 11 to 19 was used. For both SPM Plus and APM, the two-parameter logistic model which includes item difficulty (b) and discrimination (a) parameters was used for the eductive ability estimation. At first, analysis of responses to SPM Plus and APM items (including such response options as “a subject omitted an item” and “a subject didn’t reach an item”) was conducted using the Classical Test Theory (CTT) difficulty and discrimination power indices as well as the Item Response Theory (IRT) Option Characteristic Curves (OCCs). The analysis has confirmed that response alternatives lacking only one correct feature are more likely in the middle range of ability and from this range upward, whereas subjects of low ability often choose alternatives that are incorrect on more than one and / or more salient features. It has also been found that higher ability subjects are prone to omit an item that is too difficult for them instead of guessing an answer as opposed to lower ability subjects who may use a random guessing as a RPM solving strategy. The analysis has also shown that higher-scoring subjects have no time enough to finish all the RPM items more often than lower-scoring individuals. This finding suggests that higher-ability subjects invest more time in solving RPM items, and therefore a time limit is not suitable for assessing a high eductive ability. Next, the APM types of error analysis has revealed that the type of errors made on APM is related to the ability level of the subjects. Errors due to failure to attend to all relevant aspects of the item, i.e. incomplete correlate errors, were made by subjects of higher ability as compared to errors due to the confluence of ideas or repetition. This finding suggests that an answer of incomplete correlate type shows a relatively high eductive ability (as compared to the confluence of ideas or repetition type answer) since it requires a correct, although incomplete, reasoning.

Local stability implies global stability for the planar Ricker competition model

Under certain analytic and geometric assumptions we show that local stability of the coexistence (positive) fixed point of the planar Ricker competition model implies global stability with respect to the interior of the positive quadrant. This result is a confluence of ideas from Dynamical Systems, Geometry, and Topology that provides a framework to the study of global stability for other planar competition models.

As ações pedagógicas do professor de educação física do ensino superior: analogias com a trajetória formativa

This article is the result of research carried out that aimed to understand how is the construction of the identity of the teacher in higher education during his career and professional development and how it may influence the pedagogical actions developed for teacher training. This construction emerges from the confluence of ideas from a field theory combined with field research with three teachers in higher education that has used as instruments for data collection: semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis, analyzed using the technique of triangulation of information. The findings indicate that the training path influences in different ways the teachers' actions, depending on the perspective that each building with respect to its performance and professional development. We conclude that teaching in higher education needs of a project training and professional development group. We point out the way to go through the orientation of communicative rationality

Beckett's Proust/Deleuze's Proust

Collections of short essays, especially when they derive from academic conference papers, run the risk of intellectual dispersal: too many ideas not sufficiently developed, repetition without a modicum of redemptive difference. Based upon an international conference held at Cardiff University in Beckett's Centenary Year, 2006, the essays in Beckett's Proust/Deleuze's Proust only occasionally fall into this trap; only occasionally do they echo each other superficially and non-productively. For the most part, the reader of this multifaceted and well-constructed volume can only be impressed by the intelligence of the essays' writers, by their knowledge of the trio Proust–Beckett–Deleuze, and by the clarity with which they articulate their respective arguments. Usefully organized into three large sections — ‘Reading Encounters’, ‘Visual, Cinematic and Sonic Encounters’, and ‘Bodily Encounters’ — the collection as formatted by Bryden and Topping succeeds in mapping the quite diverse literary, filmic, musical, somatic, and psychosomatic levels at which the texts of Proust, Beckett, and Deleuze intersect, diverge, coalesce, and illuminate each other. The editors believe, justifiably, that the collected essays demonstrate a ‘confluence of ideas’ (p. 6) between and among the three writers; and it is no coincidence that one of them — Gilles Deleuze, occasionally accompanied by Félix Guattari — provides the theoretical armature (for example, the notions of ‘transversals’, the ‘rhizome’, and ‘deterritorialization’) with which to describe this ‘confluence’ with some sophistication. Thus the volume is by no means a contemporary rehash of an ‘influence study’, but rather an ensemble or assemblage that, in showing quite variously and quite precisely how Proust, Beckett, and Deleuze read each other, contributes in significant ways to a general theory of reading, if one understands that theory to mean the process of appropriation/misappropriation by which one writer invests but also divests himself, ingests but also eliminates from herself, the texts of that other writer to whom one is temporarily devoted or even enslaved. (In a wonderful pastiche, chosen, quite appropriately, as the Epilogue, Jérôme Cornette, an original young scholar whose premature death forms part of the texture of the collection, imagines letters written from Proust to both Deleuze and Beckett, illustrating playfully but also profoundly the uncanny textual relation whereby the earlier author appears to be the unlikely reader of his successors, linked to them in strange but beautiful ways — producing the kind of textual effect that Proust himself called ‘le côté Dostoïevski des Lettres de Madame de Sévigné’.) Although all of the essays brought together here command respect for their intellectual integrity, those that rise a bit above the others detail more than a ‘confluence of ideas’ in that they address quite concretely issues of style, of rhetoric, of linguistic immanence. Proust may doubtless have appealed to the young, philosophically inclined Beckett and to Deleuze the conceptual thinker for his ‘ideas’, but it is as craftsman, as artisan of language that he created a work that, precisely because it is appropriated by others, remains new.

Pedagogia universitária: a aprendizagem docente como um desafio à professoralidade

The present article arises from studies developed at the GPFOPE, and its theme is teacher education, considering the processes engendered to their constitution. Thus, its fabric emerges from the confluence of ideas from a theoretical field within the field of University Pedagogy, combined with field research of these investigations. The main authors, within this line, who subsidize this study are: Bolzan (2001; 2002-2005; 2006; 2007-2009) and Isaia and Bolzan (2004; 2006; 2007). The findings indicate that the professor is formed in the course of his career training, thereby evidencing, the idea of incompleteness, which presupposes focusing professor formation in the perspective of a permanent learning process for teaching. Furthermore, as the studies indicate, it is equally necessary to consider that life trajectories have specific marks, which gives pause to the concept of personalized training. Therefore, it is understood that it is inherent to think that the learning of teaching and, therefore, professional development, Consequently, it is understood that it becomes inherent to think that learning how to teach, and therefore professional development, is stimulated when reflective practice are incorporated in conjunction with collaborative activities among the subjects of training.