Kind Of Lack Research Articles

An improved entorpy-based representation for mixed uncertainty about intervals and points data

In engineering design problems, intervals refer to any kind of lack of information. This paper presents an improved entorpy-based methodology for a probabilistic representation of a stochastic quantity for which only sparse point data and/or interval data may be available. The combined entropy function is used to measure the uncertainty in data, which is evaluated from the non-parametric probability density function for sparse point data and the cumulative distribution function for interval data, Wherein the entire non-parametric distribution can be discretized at a finite number of points and the probability density values at these points can be inferred using the principle of maximum-entropy, thus avoiding the assumption of any particular distribution. The proposed improved Entorpy-based methodology is then employed in the attempt of interval uncertainty propagation, with the results compared with previous studies. Examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of present method. The study reveals great potentials of the probabilistic method for the treatment of the uncertainty in presence of the sparse point data and/or interval data.

Philosophy

David Conan Wolfsdorf has done a great service in putting together the thirty chapters (only a handful by women) that make up the new collection Early Greek Ethics. As he notes, ethical thinking prior to Socrates has generally been neglected or, in some cases, simply denied. Wolfsdorf's classification of ‘early’ as the ‘formative period’ (late sixth to early fourth centuries bce) prior to Plato's and Aristotle's major ethical works allows him to bring together a rich and diverse group of individuals and topics. He himself acknowledges that different people will feel different kinds of lack within the collection, but he is explicit that its aim is to be ‘quite’, rather than entirely, comprehensive. He is also clear that his aim is to focus on Greek ‘philosophical ethics’ (as he understands it) rather than the sort of significant ethical thinking we might think can be found in Greek tragedy, for example.

REPUBLIC 585B–D: ARGUMENT AND TEXT

The so-called ‘Olympian’ proof in Plato's Republic contains one of the first explicit distinctions between the nature of intellectual and bodily pleasures. The argument for the superiority of the former rests on a) identifying pleasure and pain with certain kinds of filling and emptying (583b1–585a7), and b) differentiating between bodily and intellectual pleasures according to the kind of filling: (i)Bodily depletions differ from depletions of the soul in the kind of lack and, accordingly, in the kind of thing that fills the lack: hunger and thirst are bodily lacks which food and drink can cure, whereas ignorance and folly are cured by intelligence (585a8–b8).Thus, (ii), the kind of lack (belonging to the soul vs belonging to the body), together with the kind of filler (‘food’ for the soul vs food for the body), and derivatively the method of filling (eating vs learning) determine the kind of filling.(iii)Kinds of filling differ in truth: filling A is truer than filling B if and only if the kind of fillers used in A are more than the kind of fillers used in B and the kind of thing filled via A is more than the kind of thing filled via B (cf. 585d7–10).(iv)Fillers of the soul are more than bodily fillers (585b11–d4).(v)The soul is more than the body (585d5–6).Therefore, (vi), filling of the soul is truer than bodily filling, that is, filling of the soul is more really a filling (585d7–10).

World Without Tears: A Devotional

Coda: I climbed all the way inside Your tragedy I got behind The majesty Of the different shapes In every note The endless tapes Of every word you wrote Preface: Twilight of the Idols Much has already been said about the gay men and their beloved tragedy queens. From Oscar Wilde to Judy Garland to Lady Gagas current acid reign over the homosexuals who overpopulate her fan base, it is indeed possible, and far too easy, to cast a certain genealogy of tragedy queens who have held court in the hearts and minds of modern gay men. Rather than orchestrate or even critique the cultural impacts of these figures, whose stories and identities have already been told and retold, this essay will offer up Lucinda Williams as an overlooked tragedy country queen, carrying with her an approach to ruin that transcends the hackneyed misrecognition of camp to be creative, forceful, and, in the end, something other than just ruined. The problem with the fixation and attachment to the archetypical tragedy queens I have laid out before you is that the interest in them that gay men have cultivated and held dear has been based on bad faith and misrecognition. While my decision to draw on Wilde, Garland, and Lady Gaga may seem, to some, too subjective or general, I would like to simply point to the significant role that themes and invocations of tragedy have to play in the reception and affiliation that undergirds each of their individual constructions as iconic figures in the imagination From the scandalous, failed, and even pert ways Wilde himself presented the details of his private life to the public, to Garland s unfortunate and very wellknown problems with substance abuse, to the tears that Lady Gaga conjures up and weeps for her 'Tittle monsters, the publicity machine that has produced this particular line of tragedy queens has relied on sentimentalizing and protecting the bond made with their gay audience around a shared sense of misfortune. Tragedy operates here not only as a spectacle to behold, but also as a site of identification and affiliation necessary in the maintenance of the bond held between tragedy queens and their homosexual audience - failed women bonded to failed men. Lucinda Williams is the subterranean, all-powerful, aural, post-tragic queen of ruin. Composing her ruin as a work of art, Lucindas approach to destruction and loss finds capacity in despair and invents a new form of musical expression that intensifies violence and romances ruin as a way of becoming-imperceptible. While tragedy, and indeed the term woman itself, may imply, both discursively and historically, a kind of lack, Lucindas ruin is about capacity - to act upon it, to sing about it, and to find glory within it. More than a transformation of a negative term into a positive one, Lucindas creative approach to ruin is a kind of becoming - a decomposition of loss and an invention of force within experiences we might mistakenly write off as merely tragic. Ruin is Lucindas style and not just her burden. Style is a process of being and becoming yourself - a way of performing and broadcasting difference before the world that both defies and travels through familiar ways of being. Quentin Crisp, the subject of my dissertation project on style and failure, is, like Lucinda and indeed any object of my attention and affection, a counterhero in the story he has to tell about the life of the modern homosexual. Failure is a source of creativity for him in the same way that ruin and tragedy operate for Lucinda as a process of invention and artistic creation in her body of work. Style, for both Quentin and Lucinda, constitutes a sacred endeavor: of both constituting and spreading themselves unto the world by not only being, but also becoming their failures and tragedies, which are able to become events and beautiful objects in and of themselves. How personality and creativity are tethered to any project of style is exactly what, in Quentin s terms, we must lament about the ways our celebrities and our cultural icons have become historical moments and fashion trends in and of themselves: We have lost forever our capacity for reverence. …

The Nature of Evil

The Nature of Evil

The Telescope as Prosthesis

The Telescope as Prosthesis Anna Henchman (bio) In 1845, William Parsons, the Earl of Rosse, completed a 56-foot long reflector telescope with a 6-foot wide mirror that would remain the largest telescope in the world until 1917. Telescopes are not conventionally described as prostheses, a word that tends to refer to devices that supplement a lack, replacing or augmenting a part of the body that is in some way missing or defective. Yet by adding to what the human body can do, telescopes hold strong structural similarities to such prosthetic devices as artificial hands, legs, or teeth: they extend human vision into distant regions of space, supplementing the capacities of a healthy eye and enabling a vastly intensified level of perception. The question of whether telescopes are best thought of as prosthetic devices or merely as tools sheds light on longstanding debates about the relative importance of scientific instruments and the human beings who use them to advance science. Any account of the role of telescopes in the history of astronomy tends, at least implicitly, to be based on some conception of the relationship between eye and telescope, and, by extension, the relationship between human being and machine. Writings on astronomy usually emphasize either the abilities of the astronomer looking through the glass or the power of the telescope itself. Frequently those writers who focus on the power of the telescope stress the [End Page 27] relative deficiencies of unassisted human vision, characterizing human vision as having the kind of lack that would require a prosthetic device. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Lord Rosse's reflector telescope, with a 6-foot wide mirror, built in the 1840s. By permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's 2007 Objectivity explores the assumptions behind dueling conceptions of the scientist in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The authors contrast faith in "mechanical objectivity," which places instruments and machines at the centre of scientific inquiry, with the ideal of the scientist as learned seer. The synthesizing mind of the seer absorbs extensive empirical data and then extrapolates from that data the image of an ideal type. By contrast, those who begin to doubt the objectivity of the human eye and mind rely increasingly on information gathered by machines. In this model, the impersonality of the machine becomes preferable to the unpredictable human observer, and mechanical instruments are valued for their abilities to make up for specific lacks in human vision or in the judgment of individual observers. This is a helpful framework to apply to discussions of telescopes, because it sheds light on why one writer might place so much importance on the role of the astronomer, for whom the telescope is simply a tool, while another imagines the telescope to work almost without a human agent. William Herschel (1738-1822), John Keats's famous "watcher of the skies," in many ways conforms to the model of the scientist as seer ("On First Looking [End Page 28] into Chapman's Homer," line 9). Herschel emphasizes the importance of human knowledge and experience in the collaboration between eye and telescope. For much of the eighteenth century, the most important developments in astronomy had been the result of theoretical, mathematical calculations rather than observation through a telescope.1 Newton's 1687 explanation of the universal law of gravitation holding the solar system together had depended on calculations and theory rather than empirical research. Starting in the 1780s, however, Herschel placed empirical observation through telescopes, rather than mathematical theory, back at the centre of the study of astronomy. He virtually invented stellar astronomy by developing a series of telescopes that made it possible to study the stellar universe—as opposed to the contents of the solar system—in unprecedented detail.2 Herschel's theory that stars began as amorphous nebulae and gradually evolved into systems of stars, planets, and moons was based on decades of meticulous empirical observation. While his work relied heavily on telescopic observation, Herschel emphasized the importance of training the eye and mind over the powers of the telescope. In a 1782 letter, he characterized his own interpretive ability as the...

“Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?”

“Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?”

Measures of Lack of Fit for Response Surface Designs and Predictor Variable Transformations

Some first-order (2 k–p two-level factorials and fractional factorials plus center points) and second-order (cube plus star plus center-point composite) response surface designs are discussed from the point of view of their ability to detect certain likely kinds of lack of fit of degree one higher than has been fitted. This leads to consideration of conditions for representationa adequacy of first- and second-order models in transformed predictor variables. It is shown how to use the estimated regression coefficients from the higher degree model to check if power transformations of the predictor variables could eliminate the lack of fit, and also actually to estimate the transformations.