Imprecise Notions Research Articles

Do smaller P300 amplitudes in schizophrenia result from larger variability in temporal processing?

The P3b is a prominent event-related potential (ERP) with maximal amplitude between 250 ms and 500 ms after the onset of a rare target stimulus within a sequence of standard non-target stimuli (oddball paradigm). Several studies found reduced P3b amplitudes in patients with schizophrenia compared to neurotypicals. Our work and the literature suggest that temporal imprecision may play a large pathophysiological role in schizophrenia. Here, we investigated whether reduced P3b amplitudes result from reduced neural activity (power) or temporal imprecision (inter-trial phase coherence; ITC) in delta and theta bands, using two EEG datasets from different studies with different oddball paradigms (Study 1: 19 patients with schizophrenia and 17 matched controls, Study 2: 26 patients and 26 controls). Both studies revealed typical P3b ERP components with smaller amplitudes in patients. Reduced ITC in patients was found in the delta band, which correlated with P3b peak amplitudes for all participant groups (ρ = 0.58–0.89). In Study 1, we also found significant differences between patients and controls in ITC in the theta band, which also correlated with P3b peak amplitudes (patients’ ρ = 0.64, controls’ ρ = 0.54). This was not found in Study 2. The results indicate that P3b amplitude reduction in patients with schizophrenia is linked to a reduction in temporal precision of neural activity. These results expand the notion of imprecision in temporal processing at phenomenological, psychological, and neurological levels that have been related to disturbances of the sense of self. They confirm that temporal imprecision may be more important than the reduction of neural activity itself.

The Essence of What it Is to Act Rationally: A Perspective on Distinctively Human Action Based on Aristotelian Philosophy and Evolutionary Science.

The purpose of this article is to understand the distinctively human behavior from Aristotelian ethics and evolutionary science to offer a perspective of what it means to act rationally. We argue that this way of acting is characterized by a decision informed by the analysis of whether or not it is worth pursuing an end, and by certain means, which takes place through a weighting of consequences from the body of knowledge that the person has so far We also argue that such a process can occur quickly (and requiring a less cognitive effort) or slowly (and demanding more cognitive effort), depending on whether or not the person has previous experiences of choices that have generated good consequences in the type of context presented; What does it mean for a person to have or not rational heuristics established in their minds, which are those that are connected to the most current network of "whys" and that has been consolidated precisely because they have proven effective in pointing out what is best to do in that kind of context. Finally, we apply the perspective we are offering to evidence three imprecise notions about "acting rationally".

Perception is rich and probabilistic

When we see a stimulus, e.g. a star-shaped object, our intuition is that we should perceive a single, coherent percept (even if it is inaccurate). But the neural processes that support perception are complex and probabilistic. Simple lines cause orientation-selective neurons across a population to fire in a probabilistic-like manner. Does probabilistic neural firing lead to non-probabilistic perception, or are the representations behind perception richer and more complex than intuition would suggest? To test this, we briefly presented a complex shape and had participants report the correct shape from a set of options. Rather than reporting a single value, we used a paradigm designed to encourage to directly report a representation over shape space—participants placed a series of Gaussian bets. We found that participants could report more than point-estimates of shape. The spread of responses was correlated with accuracy, suggesting that participants can convey a notion of relative imprecision. Critically, as participants placed more bets, the mean of responses show increased precision. The later bets were systematically biased towards the target rather than haphazardly placed around bet 1. These findings strongly indicate that participants were aware of more than just a point-estimate; Perceptual representations are rich and likely probabilistic.

Benchmarking Unsupervised Outlier Detection with Realistic Synthetic Data

Benchmarking unsupervised outlier detection is difficult. Outliers are rare, and existing benchmark data contains outliers with various and unknown characteristics. Fully synthetic data usually consists of outliers and regular instances with clear characteristics and thus allows for a more meaningful evaluation of detection methods in principle. Nonetheless, there have only been few attempts to include synthetic data in benchmarks for outlier detection. This might be due to the imprecise notion of outliers or to the difficulty to arrive at a good coverage of different domains with synthetic data. In this work, we propose a generic process for the generation of datasets for such benchmarking. The core idea is to reconstruct regular instances from existing real-world benchmark data while generating outliers so that they exhibit insightful characteristics. We propose and describe a generic process for the benchmarking of unsupervised outlier detection, as sketched so far. We then describe three instantiations of this generic process that generate outliers with specific characteristics, like local outliers. To validate our process, we perform a benchmark with state-of-the-art detection methods and carry out experiments to study the quality of data reconstructed in this way. Next to showcasing the workflow, this confirms the usefulness of our proposed process. In particular, our process yields regular instances close to the ones from real data. Summing up, we propose and validate a new and practical process for the benchmarking of unsupervised outlier detection.

Ggalluvial: Layered Grammar for Alluvial Plots.

Alluvial diagrams use stacked bar plots and variable-width ribbons to represent multi-dimensional or repeated-measures data comprising categorical or ordinal variables (Bojanowski & Edwards, 2016; Rosvall & Bergstrom, 2010). The ggalluvial package extends the layered grammar of graphics of ggplot2 (Wickham, 2016) to generate alluvial diagrams from tidy data (Wickham, 2014). The package makes two key contributions to the R ecosystem. First, ggalluvial anchors the imprecise notion of an alluvial diagram to the rigid grammar of graphics (Wilkinson, 2006), which lends the plots more precise meaning and opens up many combinatorial possibilities. Second, ggalluvial adopts a distinctive geological nomenclature to distinguish "alluvial plots" and their graphical elements from Sankey diagrams and parallel sets plots, which I hope prove useful as these visualization tools converge toward common standards.

Microhomology of Viral/Host DNAs and Macrostructure of Herpesviral Genome

In 2015, we described short continuous fragments of human herpesvirus DNA, identical to the cellular ones, which we called microhomology (hits) because of their small size (≥ 20 nt). We noticed that generally the increase in the density (D) of these hits in human herpesviruses is inversely proportional to a decrease in the pathogenicity of these viruses. In this small work, we are considering the question of the existence of more objective features of HHV DNA (which can accompany the dynamics of the density of hits from HHV5 to HHV7), rather than a very imprecise notion of the degree of pathogenicity of a viral infection.

Contract Law and the Constitution: Bredenkamp v Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd (SCA)

Case Note

FISICA E REALISMO

The question of realism in physics is addressed by following the path laid out by Einstein and Bell. After an exposition of the problem of the completeness of quantum mechanics and a discussion of some aspects of the debate between Einstein and Bohr, we outline what are the requirements of a formulation of quantum mechanics that is not based on such vague and imprecise notions as “ measurement” or “ observer.” Finally , we show that a physical theory that describes “stuff” in the space that evolves over time makes transparent the relationship between theory and empirical reality. The conclusion has a Kantian flavor.

Offer Elaboration: New Confidence Indexes to take into account Uncertainty

In order to respond to a call for tenders, bidders must define and evaluate potential solutions, based upon the specifications of customer’s requirements and their capabilities (skills, existing solutions, resources … etc.). The definition and the evaluation of potential solutions are not trivial activities. The lack of relevant information makes the evaluation imprecise and uncertain. Therefore bidders choose the most suitable solution based upon the standard indicators (cost, performance and lead time) and their subjective feeling. Unfortunately, this may leads to the choice of unfeasible solution regarding customer’s expectations (cost, performance and delivery time). Therefore, the aim of this paper is twofold: (i) first, to clarify the notion of imprecision and uncertainty in the evaluation of potential solutions; and (ii) second, to propose two Confidence Indexes (CI) in order to take into account uncertainty in offer elaboration. The first one (CIS) characterizes the confidence in the technical system solution and the second one (CIP) the confidence in the implementation process of the technical system. The proposed CIS and CIP will enable bidders to choose the most relevant solution not only based upon the standard indicators but also considering the confidence in the potential solutions.

Challenges and obstacles in the production of cross-border territorial strategies

Cross-border strategies have been flourishing over the last few decades in Europe, mostly in a favourable context where European funding is available and legal instruments are well-developed. However, one may wonder which objectives are really targeted within this very broad and imprecise notion of cross-border strategy. The purpose of this paper is, first, to provide a theoretical framework in order to better understand the different meanings of the notion of cross-border integration and to provide a more critical perspective on its effects. Secondly, it analyses the policy content of the cross-border territorial strategy developed within the Greater Region before, in the final section, pointing out the difficulties faced by policy-makers during its elaboration. This final section is based on the insights brought both by the regional stakeholders interviewed and by our expertise as moderators and scientific advisors within the working group in charge of the realisation of the cross-border territorial strategy. The main finding of our analysis is that the consensus that has been reached by all the stakeholders is the “smallest common denominator”; that is to say, the least constraining.

Network Diversity: A Security Metric for Evaluating the Resilience of Networks Against Zero-Day Attacks

Diversity has long been regarded as a security mechanism for improving the resilience of software and networks against various attacks. More recently, diversity has found new applications in cloud computing security, moving target defense, and improving the robustness of network routing. However, most existing efforts rely on intuitive and imprecise notions of diversity, and the few existing models of diversity are mostly designed for a single system running diverse software replicas or variants. At a higher abstraction level, as a global property of the entire network, diversity and its effect on security have received limited attention. In this paper, we take the first step toward formally modeling network diversity as a security metric by designing and evaluating a series of diversity metrics. In particular, we first devise a biodiversity-inspired metric based on the effective number of distinct resources. We then propose two complementary diversity metrics, based on the least and the average attacking efforts, respectively. We provide guidelines for instantiating the proposed metrics and present a case study on estimating software diversity. Finally, we evaluate the proposed metrics through simulation.

Schoolteacher trainees’ difficulties about the concepts of attribute and measurement

“Attribute” and “measurement” are two fundamental concepts in mathematics and physics. Teaching these concepts is essential even in elementary school, but numerous studies have pointed out pupils’ difficulties with them. These studies emphasized that pupils must learn about attributes before being taught how to measure these attributes, which can be done through activities involving comparing and sorting. In France, as in numerous English-speaking countries, official teaching instructions for the elementary-school years (Grades 1 to 5) recommend this approach. We consider that to be able to teach attributes, teachers themselves must master and differentiate the concepts of attribute and measurement. Indeed, these concepts are part of any teacher’s subject matter knowledge, especially of what Ball called “specialized content knowledge”, which is needed to effectively teach both attributes and measurement. In this study, we analyze the level of mastery of these concepts among French teacher trainees. Our findings suggest that future teachers do not clearly differentiate these concepts, and that the concept of attribute is the less well understood. We highlight that an erroneous understanding of attribute is extremely prevalent: almost half of our participants think of attribute as a vague, imprecise notion. Finally, we discuss the possible causes of this misconception and its implications for teaching.

Shareholders in the United Kingdom

This paper, a version of which will appear in Research Handbook on Shareholder Power (Randall Thomas & Jennifer Hill eds, forthcoming 2015) analyses the extent of shareholder power in the United Kingdom. In part, it confirms the generally held view of institutional dominance of the share registers of listed companies and the consequent capacity of institutional shareholders to influence the ‘rules of the game’ as they relate to shareholder influence over management. This is especially true for rules set by subordinate rulemakers (ie not by the legislature directly) or self-regulatory bodies. However, institutional shareholder influence has always been more extensive in relation to rule setting than with regard to interventions to alter managerial policy at portfolio company level, a disparity which is attributed mainly to free-rider problems and conflicts of interest. However, the paper argues that the standard account of institutional shareholder influence in the UK is likely to be significantly affected for the future by four developments. First, the proportion of the overall market for listed shares held by UK institutions, especially insurance companies and pension funds, has declined this century to the point where it is little or no higher than it was in the 1960s. Second, their place has been taken foreign investors, predominantly US or continental European institutional investors. Third, government is no longer content to leave the level of portfolio company intervention to be decided by the institutions in their own interests but, through the imprecise notion of ‘stewardship’, generates some pressure on institutional shareholders to intervene, to combat ‘short-termism’. Fourth, hedge fund activism, although less developed than in the US, is a distinct feature of the current market. The combined result of these factors for institutional activism, at both ‘rules of the game’ and portfolio company level, is uncertain. UK institutions may have a lesser capacity to intervene in view of their lower overall holdings, whilst foreign institutions may be less motivated to do so. The coordination costs of both types of investor may increase. This does not bode well for the stewardship policy. On the other hand, the crucial matter for intervention, at least in the medium-term, may not be the concentration of share ownership but the concentration of share management. There is some evidence that investment in the UK market continues to be concentrated in the hands of UK-based managers, even whilst institutional shareholding has become less concentrated. Finally, the coordination costs of institutional shareholders, domestic and foreign, may be reduced by hedge fund activism.

Spraycan: A PPGIS for capturing imprecise notions of place

It is increasingly common for participatory data to be collected from the public via a PPGIS, in order to gain a greater understanding both of the world around us, and people's experience of it. The place-based thoughts and feelings of an individual do not, however, always fit well with the space-based points and polygons into which they are typically reduced in such a system, which can limit the effectiveness of many traditional PPGIS' for data collection. In order to address this issue, an alternative PPGIS platform is presented, which allows the collection, storage and analysis of spatial data from the public without the requirement to artificially reduce these data to geographic primitives. The ‘Spraycan’ platform allows participants to create spatial representations on a map using a familiar airbrush-style interface, permitting the creation of vague regions and boundaries that better reflect the places to which they refer. Data are stored within a ‘multi-point-and-attribute’ data structure whereby each individual ‘dot’ of ‘paint’ created using the airbrush is stored as a discrete geographical object, and is joined to all other associated ‘dots’, as well as a variety of other demographic and contextual data, including free-text data in which the participants may add context to their spray patterns. The flexibility of this data structure provides a wide and extensible variety of analytical choices for the researcher, as is shown here by an example study demonstrating the use of the Spraycan for decision-support, as well as a number of real-world ‘in the wild’ applications. It is hoped that this work will open up the agenda for alternative PPGIS interfaces, in order to further explore the possibilities associated with the capture and analysis of ‘fuzzy’ place-based data.

Marie Cosnay's Roman-fleuve

Marie Cosnay's Villa Chagrin (2006), the third title in a body of work that now includes eleven books, may not be a roman-fleuve in the strict sense of that term (indeed it may not even be a novel), but a river most certainly runs through it, from first page to last. That river is the Adour, as seen from its right bank, across from Bayonne, in a place called Saint-Esprit. At some seventy-five pages, this text is certainly no Jean-Christophe, no Chronique des Pasquier. Nonetheless, it flows in full spate, picking up and melding along its way an impressive variety of narrative currents: the story of the painter Bram van Velde and his companion, Marthe Arnaud-Kuntz; an examination of the nature of disaster, conceived both as a collective phenomenon and as a personal one; a love story wherein absence looms far larger than presence; a meditation on the image and the fate of the image in representation; a parable of writing and its uses; and more besides. Like the Adour, Villa Chagrin is very fluid, very dynamic. Its author, a classicist by profession, is well placed to understand why a river seemed so apt to Heraclitus as a figure of time; and just like a river, this novel (for that is what I shall call it) is mutable in astonishing ways. Michel Charles has argued eloquently for a vision of the literary text as an artifact constantly in motion, one that is difficult to apprehend in any way other than on the run, as it were. (1) That way of looking at textuality is particularly productive in the case of a work such as Cosnay's, wherein a powerful continuity is achieved through a narrative technique that seems, on the face of it at least, constantly interrupted. The multiple diegetic threads that I mentioned contribute to that sense of interruption. More telling still is the fact that Cosnay structures her novel like a diary, with dated entries and a progressive intercalated narration. Maurice Blanchot reminded us long ago that any discourse at all relies in some measure on interruption for its coherence, (2) and in that perspective it is easier to understand how Cosnay enlists multiplicity in the service of singularity. The image of the river is also helpful in that regard, as is Michel Charles's characterization of literary textuality as essentiellement un long discours, ou recit apparait par intermittence (199). One important consideration that such a manner of conceiving a work of literature suggests is that any reading we bring to it must strive to be as mobile as the text itself--a tall order, certainly, and one that inevitably calls us to attention. The incipit of Villa Chagrin invokes both time and space, and appears to situate the narrative instance precisely: Le 15 novembre je suis rest& a la maison, evitant la brume sur l'Adour et flot cotonneux apercu la veille vers sept heures quarante cinq quand j'allais dans l'invisible, roulant vers lieu plus familier de la ville (9). Yet that invocation relies significantly on imprecision for its effect, and the narrator insists upon phenomena (la brume, le flot cotonneux, l'invisible) that serve to thematize the notion of imprecision. It is a technique that Marie Cosnay will exploit throughout her novel, and one that is deeply imbricated in the fluvial images that teem therein. Those images are extremely various, and they serve a variety of purposes. From time to time, Cosnay personifies the river, in order to underscore the narrator's state of mind, either by identification or by contrast: Le fleuve etait imperturbable (10). It is a thing both alive and reactive, whose spirits and modes of being change continually: Non loin de la villa Chagrin, a Saint-Esprit, je regardais l'Adour. Il clegueulait un peu. Des ponts successifs barraient. La brume est venue (35). Like the narrator and every other human that she puts on stage, the river has traversed a significant span of both time and space in order to arrive at the here and the now: Ville oil la riviere joint fleuve qui sur deux cents kilometres a parcouru jusque-la les monts rougis de bruyere (10). …

Gaining the trust of ‘highly resistant’ families: insights from attachment theory and research

ABSTRACTDespite being a contested and imprecise notion, the term ‘highly resistant families’ has grown in usage over the past few years. It refers, at one end of a spectrum, to parents who have been falsely accused of maltreating a child and to violent, even dangerous individuals, at the other. To complicate matters, the notion of false or ‘disguised’ compliance describes some family members who may confuse practitioners by appearing to co‐operate while merely going through the motions. Excluding parents who have been falsely accused, resistant or reluctant family members are likely to find considerable difficultly ‘mentalizing’– a concept similar to empathy, derived from contemporary applications of attachment‐based research – which we discuss in this paper. From an innovative study by Forrester et al., we note en passant that empathy was rarely observed when social workers were asked to enact a child protection referral in vignettes conducted by actors playing the role of parent. We summarize key neurobiological research underpinning pioneering new insights into empathy and mentalization, along with their implications for child protection social workers. We conclude by briefly outlining a promising mentalization‐based intervention already proving to be effective with reluctant or resistant parents.

The Political Uses of Some Economic Ideas: The Trade‐Off Between Efficiency and Equality

AbstractThe notion of a trade‐off between efficiency and equality is pervasive in many disciplines across the social sciences. Moreover, an imprecise notion of this well‐known dilemma is an integral part of the discourse of politicians and policy‐makers. The scientific status of the idea of a trade‐off between efficiency and equality is, however, a matter of contention. Philosophical dissections of the idea have already deflated the analytical cogency of most of its versions, while the economic literature trying to assess the empirical relation between growth and equality has shown contradicting results. This article, by focusing on the role this idea plays both in the discourse and strategy of social‐democratic parties, and in the social science explanations of their trajectories, argues that the pervasiveness of the notion of the trade‐off between efficiency and equality is best explained in terms of the political functions it can fulfill.

Concepções docentes sobre o construtivismo e sua implantação na rede estadual de ensino fundamental

No presente relato de pesquisa, são apresentadas as concepções dos professores sobre o construtivismo, investigadas através de entrevista com quarenta professores do ensino fundamental de duas escolas de uma cidade do interior de São Paulo. As entrevistas foram gravadas e transcritas literalmente, e os resultados foram submetidos à Análise de Conteúdo. As entrevistas indicaram que a maioria dos professores tem uma noção imprecisa sobre o construtivismo. Os professores consideraram que, devido à falta de estudo, orientação e apoio da escola, não têm preparo para trabalharem com o construtivismo. Dessa forma, supõe-se que os pressupostos construtivistas não foram transmitidos de maneira adequada aos docentes. Constatou-se que, para os professores, o construtivismo foi mais uma reforma educacional imposta a eles. De maneira geral, os professores não são desfavoráveis à implantação do construtivismo no cotidiano escolar, porém não concordam com a forma como se deu essa implantação.

Kryzys liberalnej demokracji w Polsce na tle innych państw członkowskich Unii Europejskiej

The issue of the condition of Polish democracy and Polish (democratic) society has certainly been among the most significant subjects of analyses of political science and sociology over recent years. Such considerations have emerged both in academic studies and journalistic publications. It is unfortunate that a majority of the authors refer to the general and imprecise notion of ‘democracy’, and they intentionally or unintentionally ignore the need for its clarification. This clarification involves the addition of the adjective ‘liberal’, which may appear trivial, yet it carries a profound and highly important meaning. The contemporary model of democracy, frequently referred to as ‘Western democracy’, concerns liberal democracy in contrast to the Antique, socialist, controlled democracy (the term applied to the political system of Russia, among others), or the authentic democracy mentioned in numerous texts that discuss the standpoint of the Catholic Church. The greatest actual threat to the liberal-and-democratic political system in general, and particularly in Poland, does not appear to be posed by ‘classical’ authoritarianism, but rather by the non-liberal version of democracy. Jacek Żakowski emphasizes that the latter is in principle different to ‘the system Poland built after 1989 and what the democratic West used to term as democracy for the previous fifty years’.

Scenes of Translation: Responses to Responses

In his “Response to Responses,” Vicente Rafael thanks and answers the questions raised during the forum. To Gary Devilles’s comment of his “remaining silent” in the way translation can be “radicalized into an ethical technology or a strategic pedagogy,” Rafael offers the trope of revenge—a desire for justice, which results from the Spanish misrecognition of Filipino attempts at translation—and the language of secrecy and solidarity of the 1896 Revolution—which results from the failure of Castilian to become lingua franca—as political technics in themselves. To Ramon Guillermo’s comment of the book’s impoverished, restrictive, and imprecise notions of translation, Rafael reiterates and contends his multivalent conception of translation: always doubled and open-ended; dialectical and dialogical; “that which is new and for this reason yet to be assimilated and understood;” in sum, “that which is always inside and outside, eccentric yet inherent to the social order,” constitutive as well as disruptive. To Remmon Barbaza’s Heideggerian reading, Rafael thankfully re-emphasizes the recurrent motif of the foreign as call and the affinity of this with the foreign as promise. Finally, to Roland Tolentino’s “disconcerting” series of questions, Vince Rafael warns against the fetishization of translation when detached from its particularity, and its envisagement as “the subjugation of the other in order to realize one’s sense of self, a self predicated on the mastery of the other’s discourse.”