Empirical Discovery Research Articles

Ligand-Modulated Palladium-Catalyzed Aerobic Alcohol Oxidations

The discovery and investigation of ligand-modulated Pd-catalyzed aerobic alcohol oxidations is documented. The project has evolved from a simple empirical discovery that (-)-sparteine, in combination with Pd(II) salts, facilitates the aerobic oxidative kinetic resolution of secondary alcohols to an in-depth physical organic investigation that has provided key insights into how new, more effective catalysts can be designed. Mechanistic investigations, the substrate scope for the catalysts developed, and implications to oxidation catalysis are discussed.

The Reliable Identification of Disease-Gene Associations

A recent Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention editorial proposed guidelines for prioritizing publication of genetic association studies in cancer ([1][1]). In their Introduction, they indicate that the journal will “… increasingly prioritize the publication of reports that are more

Does the World Leak Into the Mind? Active Externalism, “Internalism” and Epistemology

One of the arguments for active externalism (also known as the extended mind thesis) is that if a process counts as cognitive when it is performed in the head, it should also count as cognitive when it is performed in the world. Consequently, mind extends into the world. I argue for a corollary: We sometimes perform actions in our heads that we usually perform in the world, so that the world leaks into the mind. I call this internalism. Internalism has epistemological implications: If a process gives us an empirical discovery when it is performed in the world, it will also give us an empirical discovery when it is performed in the head. I look at a simple example that highlights this implication. I then explore the relation between internalism and active externalism in more detail and conclude by comparing internalism with mental modeling.

Multifractal Analysis of a Class of Additive Processes with Correlated Non-Stationary Increments

We consider a family of stochastic processes built from infinite sums of independent positive random functions on $R_+$. Each of these functions increases linearly between two consecutive negative jumps, with the jump points following a Poisson point process on $R_+$. The motivation for studying these processes stems from the fact that they constitute simplified models for TCP traffic on the Internet. Such processes bear some analogy with Lévy processes, but they are more complex in the sense that their increments are neither stationary nor independent. Nevertheless, we show that their multifractal behavior is very much the same as that of certain Lévy processes. More precisely, we compute the Hausdorff multifractal spectrum of our processes, and find that it shares the shape of the spectrum of a typical Lévy process. This result yields a theoretical basis to the empirical discovery of the multifractal nature of TCP traffic.

De l'idéographie divinatoire à Confucius et Zhuang Zi

Unlike Western thought, tending to the analytic and valuing personal reflection, Chinese thought is profoundly characterized by holism and impersonality. May these characteristics be determined by the language in which the thought is shaped and, more particularly, by the written language which in the West is conveyed in an analytical, alphabetic script and in China in an ideography of a holistic nature? Chinese ideography has its origins in scapulomantic divination whose extraordinary technical achievements coincide with the birth of this ideography at the beginning of the Yin epoch. One may think that it was the production of standardized divinatory graphs expressing various degrees of bad or good fortune that led to the empirical discovery of semanticity. A selective collection of documents produced in this original divination ideography served as the basis for the Confucian canon. Confucianism thus guarded against innovative, personal creations, always speculating on this canonical basis in a globalizing cosmological manner. Zhuang zi, who broke away from Confucianism, demystified Chinese ideography, stripping it of any divinatory transcendentalism while making it, on the other hand, a marvellous instrument of literary creation. However, he remained influenced by this ideography, as is seen in the impersonal form of his writing and the holistic polarization of his thought.

Testing the Significance of Calendar Effects

Working Paper 2005-2 January 2005 Abstract: This paper studies tests of calendar effects in equity returns. It is necessary to control for all possible calendar effects to avoid spurious results. The authors contribute to the calendar effects literature and its significance with a test for calendar-specific anomalies that conditions on the nuisance of possible calendar effects. Thus, their approach to test for calendar effects produces robust data-mining results. Unfortunately, attempts to control for a large number of possible calendar effects have the downside of diminishing the power of the test, making it more difficult to detect actual anomalies. The authors show that our test achieves good power properties because it exploits the correlation structure of (excess) returns specific to the calendar effect being studied. We implement the test with bootstrap methods and apply it to stock indices from Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Bootstrap p- values reveal that calendar effects are significant for returns in most of these equity markets, but end-of-the-year effects are predominant. It also appears that, beginning in the late 1980s, calendar effects have diminished except in small-cap stock indices. JEL classification: C12, C22, G14 Key words: calendar effects, data mining, significance test 1. Introduction Calendar effects are anomalies in stock returns that relate to the calendar, such as the day-of-the-week, the month-of-the-year, or holidays. Two leading examples are the Monday effect and the January effect. Economically small calendar specific anomalies need not violate no-arbitrage conditions, but the reason for their existence, if they are indeed real, is intriguing. Much effort continues to be devoted to research on calendar effects. Yet, the literature remains open about the significance of these effects for asset markets. One reason is that the of specific calendar effects could be a result of data mining. Even if there are no calendar anomalies, an extensive search - or data mining - exercise across a large number of possible calendar effects can yield significant results of an by pure chance. (1) Another reason data mining is a plausible explanation is that theoretical explanations have been suggested only subsequent to the empirical discovery of the anomalies. The universe of possible calendar effects is not given ex ante from economic theory. Rather, the number of different calendar effects that potentially could be analyzed is only bounded by the creativity of interested researchers. Since an extensive empirical analysis of calendar effects is likely to suffer from data mining problems, it is therefore surprising that there is little work that aims to limit the problem. The reason might be that an explicit control for data mining is costly because it is less likely that a true anomaly will be found to be significant. The best remedy for preserving the ability to detect true anomalies, is to employ a test for calendar effects that is as powerful as possible. A robust test for a specific calendar effect needs to condition on the nuisance of all conceivable effects, unless one is willing to violate basic principles for inference. We construct a powerful test to evaluate the significance of calendar effects in this paper. This test combines and incorporates the information from all calendar anomalies to achieve good power properties without compromising test size by exploiting the correlation structure that is specific to this testing problem. The new test is asymptotically F-distributed. However, we implement a bootstrap version of the test that diminishes possible small sample problems. Our new test of calendar effects can be interpreted as a generalized-F test. It is related to some recent methods for comparing forecasting models that have been proposed byWhite (2000) and Hansen (2001), who builds on results of Diebold & Mariano (1995) and West (1996). …

The urban-rural interface: Urbanization and tropical forest cover change

A considerable body of empirical and theoretical literature on the causes of tropical deforestation has emerged over the last twenty years. Recognizing that small-farmers in the Amazon Basin are a key agent in the process of primary forest conversion, a growing genre of studies at the household level have attempted to quantify the influence of various factors on small-farmer land-use decisions. Many of these studies have acknowledged the seeming importance of urban centers as hubs of propulsive activity and information, yet none have comprehensively captured the “urbanization factor” in rural land use decisions. I argue that this methodological shortcoming in empirical work to-date reflects an inadequate conceptualization of the range of urban-based networks and their inter-relationships. In an effort to overcome this roadblock to further empirical discovery, I review several leading schools of thought that might be pressed into service in developing a framework for interpreting the urban influences on rural landscapes. I call this construct the “Urban-Rural Interface.” This is not a complete theoretical model or a unique methodology, but rather an initial effort to develop a general framework from which more sophisticated formulations might proceed.

From science to technology to products and profits: Superconductivity at General Electric and Intermagnetics General (1960–1990)

We follow the evolution of superconductivity from empirical discovery to theory development, to proof of the theory by General Electric (GE) laboratory experiments by Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever, to the development, design and manufacture of superconducting materials and magnets, to the creation of new venture (Intermagnetics General, IGC), to application to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which resulted in GE's world leadership. We highlight the role of R&D management in encouraging creativity, transferring technology to operations and achieving leadership through technology. We also discuss implications for R&D managers and entrepreneurs in established companies who wish to start an internal venture, and for technological entrepreneurs who are planning a spin-off.

Mercury detoxification with transgenic plants and other biotechnological breakthroughs for phytoremediation

Phytoremediation, or the use of plants for removal and detoxification of environmental pollutants, has garnered great attention in recent years. This heightened interest is both scientifically, due the fascinating processes utilized by plants for tolerance and removal of harmful compounds, and commercially, as plants represent a more environmentally compatible and less expensive method of site remediation compared to standard approaches. The majority of phytoremediation studies have been with naturally occurring plant species after empirical discovery of their exceptional abilities for such applications. This has led to a growing body of literature and wider acceptance for plants in many aspects of environmental rehabilitation. However, this has occurred with little understanding of their basic biological mechanisms of action or investigation of alternative strategies for enhancing the capabilities of these extraordinary plants. Better understanding of plant physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology in response to specific contaminants is critical for optimization and advancement of phytoremediation. By applying the tools of biotechnology, the potential for plants as an aggressive method of environmental decontamination may be realized. This paper will serve as an introduction to the first Symposium assembled exclusively to review the use of molecular genetic and biotechnological methods for improvement of plants for phytoremediation. After a brief review of the other invited speakers' works (with more extensive papers following), the pioneering work using bacterial genes expressed in plants for removal of mercurial compounds will be surveyed.

Designing a New Material World

In this month9s essay, Gregory B. Olson of Northwestern University traces the routes of modern materials science and engineering, from the medieval alchemists9 attempts to base metals into gold to the modern materials engineer9s use of complex processing to transmute the multilevel microstructure of materials to achieve the essential property of gold, namely, economic value. The emerging systems approach, he contends, is leading researchers beyond an era of empirical discovery into a new Age of Design, marked by the systematic invention of new, more capable materials.

The future of oncology: more of the same?

R eminiscent of President Kennedy's pledge in the early 1960s to land a man on the moon within the decade, in 1971 US President Richard Nixon declared a war on that was to eradicate the disease within that decade. Researchers and politicians have since become more prudent about the promises they make, but similar euphoric projections continue to be issued in conjunction with announcements of breakthroughs in Today, these are more likely to be targeted at the stock market than at the scientific community, and the public has become increasingly sceptical. In reality, improvement in the cure rate has been minimal over the past 15 years, despite the unprecedented amount of new information about the biology of cancer. The rise in cancer mortality is due more to the higher incidence of neoplasms that occur subsequent to survival of other diseases, and overall longer survival, than to the real, age-adjusted higher incidence of some tumours (eg, melanomas, lymphomas, lung cancers). In the early years of the new millennium a third to a fourth of all deaths will be cancer-related, at least in the developed world. Does this imply that no major therapeutic progress can be expected for the next 10-20 years? Not necessarily. Although the improvement in the cure rate of some tumours Cancer cell in the 1960s and 1970s was due chiefly to technological factors (surgical techniques, highenergy equipment in radiotherapy, the empirical discovery of new drugs such as cisplatin), the next major step forward will probably come from the biological revolution, of which the discovery of the BRCAI and BRCA2 genes in breast cancer is only the beginning. In coming decades, the availability of individual cancerrisk assessment based on molecular genetics will render a much more individualised approach to preventive measures: changes in lifestyle are easier to achieve when people are confronted with a personal as opposed to a population-based risk assessment. The flipside of the coin, however, is the possibility that this evolution will generate more bad than good news. Lifestyle changes can in fact prevent the occurrence of only some tumours, and it is currently impossible to predict when chemopreventive agents are likely to become available (current results with tamoxifen are much too preliminary). Meanwhile, the most immediate consequence of greater clarification of molecular genetics, and of the advent of novel tumour markers, could simply be an increase of anxiety in individuals at risk. Such developments will ultimately lead to an improved cure rate, but they could also dramatically increase the number of cases without a clear localisation of the primary tumour. It is difficult to see how such patients could then be treated with the current cytotoxic chemotherapies, The future of oncology: more of the same?

Molecular design versus empirical discovery in peptide-based vaccines. Coming to terms with fuzzy recognition sites and ill-defined structure–function relationships in immunology

In view of our increased understanding of the molecular basis of immunological recognition, it is commonly believed that it should be possible to apply molecular design strategies to the development of peptide-based vaccines. The stated aim is to transform the development of a vaccine from a trial and error empirical operation into a so-called rational, structure-based process. In the present review, it is argued that it is misleading to oppose rational and empirical approaches in vaccine research since both are needed in the practice of experimental science. Many reasons are given for the view that the molecular design of synthetic vaccines is not a realistic scientific enterprise. The capacity of a peptide to induce a protective immune response depends on many extrinsic factors and regulatory mechanisms of the recipient host which are not amenable to molecular design of the peptide immunogen. It seems safe to predict that the development of peptide-based vaccines will continue to be driven by empirical discovery rather than by so-called rational design.

The future in comparative politics

This article is based upon a key speech that Professor Robert Bates gave at the 13th Annual Conference of the Association of Chinese Political Studies (ACPS) held in Bethesda, Maryland between October 17–18, 1998. Professor Bates observes that there is a sense of crisis among comparative political scientists and central to their concerns is an apparent loss of diversity. Professor Bates believes that homogenization presents an opportunity for comparatists to redirect their comparative social inquiries. He argues that comparative politics is a field that is based upon method; that the presumed homogenization of politics, globally, and the existence of large-scale collections of data, highlight the utility of returning to large-N, cross-national research; and that the subfields of political economy and development are best positioned to secure rapid advances from their redirection. He also emphasizes that we need to blend cross-national statistical research with in-depth case studies, arguing that the two are not substitutes but rather complements, and should be pursued in tandem. Professor Bates further argues that there is an “over supply” of theory in comparative politics and debates over theory should be based on assessments of the theory’s capacity to account for outcomes. In this sense, questions of theory cannot and should not be separated from questions of method. A good theory, in practice, provides a powerful engine of empirical discovery.

The science of administration, the founders, and theories of political association

Drawing on the work of Michael Oakeshott, this paper seeks to examine the theory of political association underlying Luther Gulick and L. Urwick's Papers on the Science of Administration and to contrast this theory with that underlying the Constitution. It is argued that the authors of the Papers clearly viewed the state as a form of purposive association whereas the Founders of the Constitution in large part saw the state as a form of civil association. This explains the difficulties that reformers such as Gulick faced in realizing their vision of administration within our constitutional framework. Luther Gulick and L. Urwick's Papers on the Science of Administration (1) represent one of the most important attempts at a synthesis of doctrines in the field of public administration prior to World War II. While the Papers exhibit a variety of approaches and views, they are best known for those authors who, like Gulick and Urwick themselves, took a more classical approach to administration. Such an approach rests on a belief in the virtues of hierarchy and centralization of authority and power in the chief executive; a belief in efficiency as the central value of administration; a belief that there must exist certain principles for good administration applicable to all organizations, regardless of institutional setting; and a belief that such principles are susceptible to empirical scientific discovery and verification. These doctrines, expounded so forcefully in the Papers, formed the basis for the administrative reform movement of the time including the President's Committee on Administrative Management, of which Gulick himself was a member. Indeed, the Papers continue to strongly influence modern efforts at administrative reform.(2) The purpose of this article is to examine the particular vision of political association which seems to underlie the Papers, and to compare it with the vision of political association which guided the Founders of the Constitution. In doing so, the article will draw upon the political thinking of the late Michael Oakeshott, a British political theorist and philosopher. I shall argue that there is a tension between the vision of political association held by the authors of the Papers and that held by the Founders, and that this tension explains the failure of administrative reformers to reshape the administrative state along the lines of classical public administration doctrines.

Heritability and biological explanation.

Modern neuroscientific and genetic technologies have provoked intense disagreement between scientists who envision a future in which biogenetic theories will enrich or even replace psychological theories, and others who consider biogenetic theories exaggerated, dehumanizing, and dangerous. Both sides of the debate about the role of genes and brains in the genesis of human behavior have missed an important point: All human behavior that varies among individuals is partially heritable and correlated with measurable aspects of brains, but the very ubiquity of these findings makes them a poor basis for reformulating scientists' conceptions of human behavior. Materialism requires psychological processes to be physically instantiated, but more crucial for psychology is the occasional empirical discovery of behavioral phenomena that are specific manifestations of low-level biological variables. Heritability and psychobiological association cannot be the basis for establishing whether behavior is genetic or biological, because to do so leads only to the banal tautology that all behavior is ultimately based in the genotype and brain.

The King's Many Bodies: The Self-Deconstruction of Law's Hierarchy

The article connects two strands of the recent sociolegal debate: (1) the empirical discovery of new forms of spontaneous law in the course of globalization, and (2) the emergence of deconstructive theories of law that undermine the law's hierarchy. The article puts forward the thesis that law's hierarchy has successfully resisted all old and new attempts at its deconstruction; it breaks, however, under the pressures of globalization that produced a global law without the state, as self-created law of global society that has no institutionalized support whatsoever in international politics and public international law. Consequently, the article criticizes deconstructive theories for their lack of autological analysis. These theories do not take into account the historical conditions of deconstruction. Accordingly, deconstructive analysis of law would have to look for new legal distinctions that are plausible under the new conditions of a doubly fragmented global society. The article sketches the contours of an emerging polycontextural law. I. Deconstructing Systems After deconstruction, what is left of law as a hierarchy of rules, founded on a political constitution, endowed with an institutional identity, based on the distinction between legislation and adjudication and legitimated through democratic representation and constitutional rights? Derrida (1990) uses the conceptual tools of deconstruction to dismantle the political architecture of the legal system: Deconstruction is generally practiced in two ways or two styles, although it most often grafts one to the other. One takes the demonstrative and apparently ahistorical allure of logico-formal paradoxes. The other, more historical or more anamnesic, seems to proceed through readings of texts, meticulous interpretations and genealogies. (Derrida 1990:957, 959) Deconstruction reveals the foundation of law, the origin of its authority, to be a grandiose logico-formal paradox. Law is grounded only on itself, based on an arbitrary violence without ground, la fondation mystique de l'autorite. Nor does the genealogy of legal decisions reveal law's stable identity as a system of valid rules, but only exposes law's recurrent aporias, situations of undecidability with ever shifting unstable differences in changing historical contexts. Law becomes a deconstructed disunity of discursive fragments which at the same time is haunted by the never satisfiable specter of justice.1 At first sight, theory stands in stark contrast to the intentionally obscure language of deconstructivism, which is not willing to reveal its theoretical presuppositions. The contrast holds true for style as well as for substance. While deconstructivism refuses to define a specific method or determine a guiding theoretical intention (Derrida 1988:82), systemism stylizes itself as an orderly theory cultivating conceptual precision and elaborating systematic theory constructs.2 In substance, the theory of law as an autopoietic system stresses law's autonomy, its normative closure, structural determination, dynamic stability, emerging eigenvalues in binary codes and normative programs, and its reflexive identity.3 How does this theory respond to the challenge of deconstruction? Is the radical constructivism of autopoietic law the very counter-program to anti-metaphysical deconstructivism? Second-order theory's first answer to deconstruction, may come as an surprise.4 Instead of reaffirming law as a system of rules, it observes law as a chain of operations that observes other operations under a certain scheme. Thus, it does away with any stable identity of law. Observing systems in its double meaning dissolves the stable order of legal structures into a fluid sequence of differences that acts simultaneously as the subject and the object of legal distinctions and indications. In second-order observation, law loses any fixed identity, any welldefined ontological status (Luhmann 1989). …

An integrated framework for empirical discovery

In this article we present a framework that integrates three aspects of empirical discovery—the formation of taxonomies, the generation of qualitative laws, and the detection of numeric relations. We specify a control structure that integrates these component processes, embedding qualitative discovery within taxonomy formation, and embedding numeric discovery within both of these activities. We also describe the framework's basic representation and organization of knowledge, which combines elements from recent work in machine discovery and qualitative physics. In addition, we describe IDS, a running system that instantiates this framework, and report its behavior on problems from the history of science. Finally, we discuss some limitations of the system as revealed by experimental studies, and propose some directions for future research.

Data-driven approaches to empirical discovery

In this paper we track the development of research in empirical discovery. We focus on four machine discovery systems that share a number of features: the use of data-driven heuristics to constrain the search for numeric laws; a reliance on theoretical terms; and the recursive application of a few general discovery methods. We examine each system in light of the innovations it introduced over its predecessors, providing some insight into the conceptual progress that has occurred in machine discovery. Finally, we reexamine this research from the perspectives of the history and philosophy of science.

Macro Defect Free (MDF) Cements

SUMMARY Ordinary cement products based on calcium silicate (Portland cement) or calcium aluminate (refractory, rapid hardening cements) exhibit a number of interesting properties but are deficient in strength and toughness. The purpose of the ICI work on cements was to understand the cause of these deficiencies in order to design improved cement materials. Our early study of existing products showed that strong cements can be produced by high pressure moulding of cement powder, a phenomenon discovered about 50 years ago. Unfortunately this is only practical for small articles such as catalyst supports. A more recent empirical discovery was the improvement in properties of cements extruded using polymer extrusion aids. This process was patented in 1976. The problem was to explain these effects. Review of the literature also revealed a remarkable paradox in the theory of cement strength. Traditionally it had been believed that cement strength depended on the volume of pores in the material, which could be up to 30% porous. In contrast, it was also thought that cement behaved as a brittle material, in which case the presence of long cracks would be most critical. Our contribution was to propose and verify a theory which explained the separate effects of volume porosity and long crack-like pores. The study of cement microstructure and rheology demonstrated that large crack-like pores were the main problem in cements. Processes for removing these pores were developed and shown to give cement products an order of magnitude better than those on the market. The paper describes the progress of this development in detail.

Some Reflections upon the Macro-Micro Problem in the Sociology of Education

The macro-micro problem has been a prominent feature of British sociology of education since the early 1970s. In this discipline macro and micro have each come to be associated with particular theoretical perspectives, notably Marxism and interactionism respectively. This has had several unfortunate consequences. First, arguments about the value of macro and micro work have often been little more than dismissals of one perspective by proponents of another. Second, the macro-micro debate has conflated several quite distinct methodological issues. This article focuses on one of these issues: the question of whether social events can best be explained as the product of large or small scale structures. It is claimed that this issue cannot be resolved by philosophical analysis alone, the answer is a matter for empirical discovery. Moreover, the problem cannot be settled at the moment because we have insufficient well-established theories. Only when more such theories are available will we be able to resolve the question of whether valid macro and micro theories are possible. What stands in the way of achieving this, however, is precisely what led to the fruitless character of the macro-micro dispute in the first place: the organization of the sociology of education around theoretical perspectives rather than around substantive research problems.