Powerful Ideas Research Articles

Digital technologies as a means of accessing powerful mathematical ideas. A study of adults with low schooling in Mexico

Abstract This paper derives from a study which main purpose was to investigate how a group of adults with low schooling can have access to powerful mathematical ideas when working with activities that involve the use of technology resources and that take into account the adults’ previous experience with mathematics. Specifically, adults’ previous experience with area calculation was considered. Principles of the Theory of Didactical Situations (TDS) formulated by Brousseau guided the study design, and Pick’s theorem was recreated in a dynamic digital setting, with which it is possible to calculate the area of regular and irregular polygons. In this approach, intuitive notions of area and perimeter are resorted to, seeking to promote the experience with powerful ideas such as ‘the generality of a method’, ‘realizing the existence of different methods used for one and the same end’ and ‘realizing that each method possesses advantages and limitations’. Analysis of interview protocols from three noteworthy cases (which include both adults’ work in the digital setting and their discussions with the researcher) suggests the presence of powerful underlying mathematical ideas, such as the idea of generality and the power of a method and the features of the constituent elements of a geometric figure that are involved in calculating its attributes, attributes such as area.

On effort and causal power: Maine de Biran’s critique of Hume revisited

ABSTRACT Rejections of Hume’s account of agency as ‘implausible’ and ‘defective’ have not been uncommon in recent commentary, but these responses have been elaborated without acknowledgement that Maine de Biran offered a critique of the Scottish philosopher on this point two centuries earlier. In criticizing Hume, Biran argues that awareness of the power of the will in effort, understood as the relation of will to resistance, is the fundamental fact of all consciousness. This article revisits Biran's critique in the light of a recent defence of Hume and with reference to the first Enquiry's crucial footnote denying that effort can ground the idea of causal power. The article also addresses one of the background motivations for Hume’s sceptical account of agency to which Biran does not respond directly, namely what the first Enquiry presents as the ‘inconsistency’ of the idea of free will as a power removed from all causal determination. I conclude by arguing that Biran cannot offer an adequate response to Hume on this point, and that a fuller, more compelling response can be found in the development of the French spiritualist tradition.

Rewarding for Causal Impact: Integrating Policy Evaluation and Incentive Alignment in the Design of Cross-Sector Contracts

Despite the emergence of contracts between governments and private actors involved in public services, a critical issue is how to enforce payments based on outcomes such as student learning or prisoner recidivism. Imperfect measurement may fail to reflect changes in outcomes that were caused by superior managerial effort. A possible way to address this problem is to adopt policy evaluation techniques that use control groups to examine what would have happened without the intervention, as is done in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and other methods of counterfactual assessment. However, our database of outcome-based contracts launched or in development worldwide shows that the majority of contracts (70%) simply assess changes in outcomes measured in the treated population. In this paper we bridge the literatures of contractual incentives and policy evaluation to explain this puzzle. We develop a theoretical model to compare payment rules based on the assessment of the treated to payment rules based on a comparison between treated and control groups. Building on the idea of statistical power, we show that the later contracts may under certain conditions undermine effort. This occurs, for instance, when the number of treated subjects is small and there is limited investment per treated subject, which is associated with potential effect size. Preliminary evidence from our database of outcome-based contracts is consistent with our predictions. Our results suggest that under certain conditions RCTs and other evaluation techniques may not be optimal to reward for social outcomes, even though they are considered best practice to assess policy interventions.

A multilevel neighborhood sequential decision approach of three-way granular computing

The fusion of three-way decision and granular computing provides powerful ideas and methods to understand and solve the problems of cognitive science by thinking and information processing in threes. As a typical representation of three-way granular computing, sequential three-way decision focuses on making a multiple stages of decisions by a sequence of trisecting-acting-outcome (TAO) models. To construct more general granules, levels, and hierarchies, we investigate an integrative multi-granularity approach to sequential three-way decision in a neighborhood system by the evolution mechanism of data and parameters. We employ the γ-cut similarity neighborhood relation based on Gaussian kernel function to the hierarchical granulation of universe. Subsequently, we propose the multilevel neighborhood granular structures by the combinations of horizontal granularity and vertical granularity, and discuss the monotonicity of level measurements associated with the uncertainty of decision. Based on such a neighborhood structured approach, a multilevel framework of sequential three-way decision is examined from coarser to finer concerning the granularity of neighborhood information. Finally, we report a series of experiments to demonstrate the performance of proposed models and algorithms.

Democratizing the Doctrine of Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments: The Puzzle of Amending the Judiciary Branch

Abstract The increasing interest of legal academia on the doctrine of Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments and its growing enforcement by the judiciary in different jurisdictions has started to normalize a doctrine that was considered controversial and extraordinary. This paper seeks to cast some doubts on the use of this doctrine, especially when the Court that enforces it is the subject of the amendment itself. In the first section it will question the conceptual foundations of the doctrine by recourse to legal theory, focusing not only on the idea of constituent power, but also on those of the rule of law and accountability. In the second section, some comparative cases of unconstitutional constitutional amendments will be analyzed, focusing on those where the judiciary itself was the subject of the amendment. Finally, from a normative and conceptual standpoint, a dialogic approach to the application of the doctrine will be proposed, to mitigate the fact that Constitutional Courts can become an unaccountable accountability-holder.

Democratizing the Doctrine of Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments: The Puzzle of Amending the Judiciary Branch

Abstract The increasing interest of legal academia on the doctrine of Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments and its growing enforcement by the judiciary in different jurisdictions has started to normalize a doctrine that was considered controversial and extraordinary. This paper seeks to cast some doubts on the use of this doctrine, especially when the Court that enforces it is the subject of the amendment itself. In the first section it will question the conceptual foundations of the doctrine by recourse to legal theory, focusing not only on the idea of constituent power, but also on those of the rule of law and accountability. In the second section, some comparative cases of unconstitutional constitutional amendments will be analyzed, focusing on those where the judiciary itself was the subject of the amendment. Finally, from a normative and conceptual standpoint, a dialogic approach to the application of the doctrine will be proposed, to mitigate the fact that Constitutional Courts can become an unaccountable accountability-holder.

Combination of c oxidase subunit I based deoxyribonucleic acid barcoding and HPLC techniques for the identification and quality evaluation of Pheretima aspergillum.

This study aimed to identify Pheretima aspergillum (Guang-Pheretima) and its adulterants using the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I based deoxyribonucleic acid barcoding technology, and further to evaluate their quality using an optimized high-performance liquid chromatography method. For deoxyribonucleic acid barcoding identification, the Kimura-2-Parameter model was used to analyze genetic distance, and phylogenetic neighbor-joining tree was constructed for species identification of 20 labeled Guang-Pheretima samples. A high-performance liquid chromatography method was developed for the simultaneous determination of seven nucleoside components for quality evaluation. Compared with the GenBank database, 10 samples were identified as real Guang-Pheretima (P. aspergillum), and the others as the adulterants-Metaphire magna. The maximum intraspecific genetic distances of c oxidase subunit I sequence for P. aspergillum were smaller than the minimum interspecific genetic distances between P. aspergillum and M. magna. Ten P. aspergillum and 10 M. magna samples were clearly clustered in the neighbor-joining tree. The contents of seven nucleosides components in P. aspergillum were significantly higher than that in its adulterant-M. magna. The incidence of adulterants for Guang-Pheretima was high (up to 50%) with an alarming quality. This study provided a powerful idea for the quality evaluation of other highly valuable plant- or animal-derived products for safety concerns to avoid misidentification.

Reinventing Regional Security Institutions in Asia and Africa: Power Shifts, Ideas, and Institutional Change. By Kei Koga. London: Routledge, 2017. 226p. $125.00 cloth, $39.96 paper.

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Revealing Narratives in Before and After Photographs of Cosmetic Breast Surgeries

Feminist cosmetic surgery scholars have been attentive to cosmetic breast surgeries as emblematic of a range of issues and questions. Breast implant and reduction surgeries have been analyzed by scholars as psychologically beneficial, as representative of unethical practices in the cosmetic surgery industry, as exemplar of the objectification of women’s bodies, and as connected to powerful cultural ideas about breasts. A curious dearth in previous scholarship is a sufficient engagement with the ubiquitous library of photographs that document these procedures. This essay discusses before and after photographs of cosmetic breast surgeries, which occupy a liminal space as medical and sexual, verification and fantasy. In this essay, I argue that before and after photographs of cosmetic breast surgeries should be read as revealing of the conditions under which patients and surgeons operate, rather than solely as proof of an operation’s results. To make this argument, I focus on two examples of before and after photographs – one of a breast augmentation and one of a breast reduction – and guide my analysis of the images in relation to narrative interviews with three women who underwent cosmetic breast surgeries.

Guest Editorial Special Issue on Vehicular Clouds

Cloud Computing, a catchy metaphor for utility computing, implemented through the provisioning of various types of hosted services over the Internet, has seen phenomenal growth and quasi-universal adoption in the past two decades. The underlying business model of cloud computing is the familiar “pay-as-you-go” model of metered services, where a user pays for whatever he/she uses and no more, and where additional demand for service can be met in real time. This powerful idea was suggested, at least in part, by the pervasive low-cost high-speed Internet, a good handle on virtualization, and advances in parallel and distributed computing. Three aspects are novel in conventional cloud computing: First, it gives users the illusion of infinite computing resources available to them on demand. Second, it eliminates the up-front financial commitment by cloud users, allowing them to increase hardware/software resources as needed. Third, it gives users the ability to pay for resources on a short-term basis and release them when they are no longer needed.

Development, education and gender: challenging the empowerment rhetoric from an ethnographic study in rural Nepal

ABSTRACT Education and gender have become central issues within development discourses and practices in Nepal, under the powerful idea that school enables equality for women, collective wellbeing, and the nation’s development. While hegemonic approaches to development are being increasingly challenged, critical contributions focusing on the education-gender intersection are still scarce. Drawing on data from an ethnographic research in a Himalayan village and school, this paper analyses the forms of knowledge, styles and relationships within learning processes in/outside the school, and its implications for the gender regime (re)production. Findings challenge the idea of schooling as an empowering tool for women by showing not only the coexistence of contradictory or differentiated models of transmission and acquisition of culture but also of contents, meanings, and its value change, in a Nepal governed by and within the paradigm of development.

On Digital Twins, Mirrors, and Virtualizations: Frameworks for Model Verification and Validation

Abstract A powerful new idea in the computational representation of structures is that of the digital twin. The concept of the digital twin emerged and developed over the last decade, and has been identified by many industries as a highly desired technology. The current situation is that individual companies often have their own definitions of a digital twin, and no clear consensus has emerged. In particular, there is no current mathematical formulation of a digital twin. A companion paper to the current one will attempt to present the essential components of the desired formulation. One of those components is identified as a rigorous representation theory of models; most importantly, governing how they are verified and validated, and how validation information can be transferred between models. Unlike its companion, which does not attempt detailed specification of any twin components, this paper will attempt to outline a rigorous representation theory of models, based on the introduction of two new concepts: mirrors and virtualizations. The paper is not intended as a passive wish list; it is intended as a rallying call. The new theory will require the active participation of researchers across a number of domains including: pure and applied mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering. The paper outlines the main objects of the theory and gives examples of the sort of theorems and hypotheses that might be proved in the new framework.

Abstracting probabilistic models: Relations, constraints and beyond

Abstraction is a powerful idea widely used in science, to model, reason and explain the behavior of systems in a more tractable search space, by omitting irrelevant details. While notions of abstraction have matured for deterministic systems, the case for abstracting probabilistic models is not yet fully understood.In this paper, we provide a semantical framework for analyzing such abstractions from first principles. We develop the framework in a general way, allowing for expressive languages, including logic-based ones that admit relational, deterministic and hierarchical constructs with stochastic primitives. We motivate a definition of consistency between a high-level model and its low-level counterpart, but also treat the case when the high-level model is missing critical information present in the low-level model. We go on to prove properties of abstractions, both at the level of the parameter as well as the structure of the models. We conclude with some observations about how abstractions can be derived automatically.

The Ne Bis In Idem Principle in Tax Law: European and Italian Frameworks

In the national and supranational legal area, the need to address the ne bis in idem principle is justified by the growing interest aroused by the most recent pronouncements of the European Courts. The principle prohibits anyone who has already been acquitted or convicted in a previous trial from being tried again. Moreover, it has become a fundamental right enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. The interest in the issue also derives from the need to understand whether the approach of the Italian legal system – or any other similar national order – can be considered compliant with European tax law and case law, based on the definitions of criminal and tax offences. Thus, talking about a European legal space means rethinking the idea of punitive power in a dimension that tends to be ‘solidarity-based’. The State can consider itself impervious to repressive demands from outside but is instead called to cooperate actively to safeguard its own guarantees. The traditional self-referential conception of criminal repression effectively summarised in the expression ‘punitive sovereignty’ gives way to an idea of jurisdiction that draws directly from the principle of mutual recognition. In this scenario, the profile of the protection of the individual from the risk of a duplication of the exercise of punitive power for the same fact in different states assumes the role of the first magnitude. Hence, there is a need to act on two levels at the same time: to seek solutions aimed at resolving possible conflicts of jurisdiction (prohibition of competing prosecutions for the same fact), and to attribute, within each Member State, preclusive effects to the previously judged foreigner (ne bis in idem).

古賀慶著『アジア・アフリカにおける地域安全保障制度の変化』（Kei Koga, Reinventing Regional Security Institutions in Asia and Africa: Power Shifts, Ideas, and Institutional Change. Routledge, 2017, xii+226 p.）

古賀慶著『アジア・アフリカにおける地域安全保障制度の変化』（Kei Koga, Reinventing Regional Security Institutions in Asia and Africa: Power Shifts, Ideas, and Institutional Change. Routledge, 2017, xii+226 p.）

Modern Mechanisms of Formation, Identification and Protection of the Will of the People

The paper analyzes the academic legacy of Prof. Ekaterina I. Kozlova in the part of her research of fundamental issues of the theory of democracy and various forms of its manifestation and mechanisms of implementation. Over the years of her academic career Ekaterina I. Kozlova researched the evolution of the conceptual foundations of democracy in the Russian Federation, and the will of the people is the quintessence of it. The basic ideas of Prof. Kozlova are manifested in both the modern doctrine of constitutional and municipal law and jurisprudence. The paper investigates the local community as a way of formation and identification of the will of residents of the municipality. The author has elucidated the modern development of ideas of people’s representation in the concept of representative democracy, municipal and public representation and substantiated the idea, structure and content of the public power. The development of the society and scientific and technological progress create new risks, which require new mechanisms and updating of existing ones. With this regard, the author has investigated ideas of modern authors concerning “people’s accusation”.

Missing conceptual links in the international environmental policy debate: power, time and transfer

ABSTRACTOver the past 20 years, scholars have examined the role policy transfer has had on the development of environmental policies across the globe. The literature in this area has discussed everything from the movement of cap-and-trade policies to the movement of rain barrels. As the name ‘policy transfer’ implies, studies tend to focus on the successful movement of a policy or program. Part of the reason for this focus is that studies tend to neglect the role power and time play in the transfer process. To begin addressing this, the concepts of power most commonly associated with the three faces of power debate and ideas of political time, policy time and ‘chronological’ time (i.e. timing, tempo, time) can help explain a range of environmental transfers (or non-transfers) better than the existing literature.

What Constitution? On Chile’s Constitutional Awakening

This paper explores the political awakening of the Chilean people that began in October 2019. It puts forward an alternative reading of the people’s claim for a new constitution. The first section briefly describes the October outcry and provides some context with regards to the nature of the social movement at its root. The two following sections examine two periods in Chilean recent history, the Pinochet regime and the period that has come after its overturn, focusing on two elements: the neoliberal model set up by the dictatorship and the Constitution of 1980, which was designed to block the people’s political agency for the purpose of protecting the model. The final section works with these two elements in order to provide an alternative scheme by which to examine Chile’s awakening, the central question being: what does the claim for a new constitution mean? And critical for these purposes: what constitution is being overturned? Pinochet’s political project distorted constitutional ideas in such a way that only by clarifying the conceptual horizon is it possible to visualize how the concept of constitution and its relationship with the idea of a constituent power of the people can be of help to understand Chile’s constitutional awakening.

A Hierarchical Attention Model for Social Contextual Image Recommendation

Picture based easy going affiliations are among the most obvious individual to singular correspondence benefits beginning late. With monster pictures moved each day, understanding clients' inclinations on client made pictures and causing suggestions to have progressed toward transforming into an essential need. Indeed, different half and half models have been proposed to join different sorts of side data (e.g., picture visual delineation, social affiliation) and client thing chronicled lead for improving suggestion execution. Regardless, as a result of the astonishing qualities of the client conveyed pictures in social picture composes, the past assessments neglect to get the astounding perspectives that impact clients' propensities in a bound together structure. Additionally, by a long shot the majority of these half breed models depended upon predefined stacks in combining various sorts of data, which guideline talking acknowledged flawed proposition execution. To this end, in this paper, we build up a powerful idea model for social critical picture proposition. In spite of essential torpid client enthusiasm appearing in the standard framework factorization based proposition, we see three key focuses (i.e., move history, social impact, in addition, proprietor venerate) that effect every client's dormant inclinations, where each perspective outlines a canny factor from the eccentric relationship among clients and pictures. Beginning there forward, we plan a powerful idea coordinate that ordinarily reflects the diverse levelled relationship (fragments in each point level, and the viewpoint measurement) of clients' lethargic central focuses with the perceived key perspectives. In particular, by taking installing's from forefront huge learning models that are only fitted for every sort of information, the dynamic idea structure could comprehend how to go to distinctively to essentially substance. At long last, extensive starter results on genuine world datasets surely show the intensity of our proposed model.

Das Reich und Böhmen um die erste Jahrtausendwende

The review of an often-debated topic relies on a very broad theoretical reevaluation of basic ideas of political power, relationships and concepts. Author proposes a broad summary of the nature of power and government in Central Europe in the given period. The development of the political power in Bohemia and its relation to the imperial world is put in the context of the other Central European states. The relationship is described since its very beginnings in 805, although the first century gives us only a very limited number of sources. Later contacts such as the church connections, possible regular payments from Bohemia, the possibility of a regular feudal oath are thoroughly described by the author. Bohemia is then understood as a part of a broader imperial world, almost similarly to the other duchies of the Empire. This position could be also beneficial for the building of the political power of the Přemyslids.