Kinds Of Statements Research Articles

Interpretations of Generic Versus Comparative Statements About Groups: Similarities and Differences

We compare interpretations of two kinds of statements that are important for stereotype transmission: generics (e.g., “women are helpful”) and comparatives (e.g., “women are more helpful than men”). Participants ( N = 338) read and interpreted generic or comparative statements about positive and negative features of gender (Experiment A) and age groups (Experiment B). We found similarities and differences. Participants interpreted both generics and comparatives as conveying information not only about the target (women in the example) but also about the referent (men in the example), whether the statement explicitly mentioned the referent (in comparatives) or not (in generics). When statements said something positive (negative) about the target, they also communicated a rather negative (positive) view of the referent. Remarkably, although comparatives explicitly contrast groups while generics do not, generics implied bigger differences between the groups and provoked more extreme assumptions about the groups. We discuss implications for stereotype transmission.

PLATO, SOPHIST 259C7–D7: CONTRARY PREDICATION AND GENUINE REFUTATION

AbstractThis paper defends an interpretation of Plato, Soph. 259c7–d7, which describes a distinction between genuine and pretender forms of ‘examination’ or ‘refutation’ (ἔλεγχος). The passage speaks to a need, throughout the dialogue, to differentiate the truly philosophical method from the merely eristic method. But its contribution has been obscured by the appearance of a textual problem at 259c7–8. As a result, scholars have largely not recognized that the Eleatic Stranger recommends accepting contrary predication as a condition of genuine refutation. After reviewing various proposals to change the text, the paper defends this reading. Finally, the paper turns to the methodological significance of accepting contrary predication. The dialogue depicts contrary predication as an instance of a class of statements that compel the soul's disbelief. Soph. 259c7–d7 suggests that these kinds of statements are a crossroad: one can either reject them and turn to eristic discourse or accept them and practise genuine refutation. The paper reflects on what this indicates about Plato's meditations on contradiction and philosophy.

An International Spokesman for Chinese Nationalism

An International Spokesman for Chinese Nationalism Han Zhang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Eric Li gives a TED Talk in 2013. (TED/YouTube) [End Page 48] In late 2019, as the first COVID-19 cases were emerging in Wuhan, the Chinese venture capitalist and media figure Eric Li went for lunch with a Financial Times correspondent in Shanghai. Over a $640, eleven-course meal, Li, who is a founder of Guancha, a leading nationalist online media outlet, took the opportunity to proclaim the end of liberalism in China. For decades, people had been “debating what kind of government and society they want,” Li said. “That debate is over.” There were “leftover liberal phrases” and “liberal thoughts” held by academics and other holdouts, but he predicted they would soon change their minds. These kinds of statements are common today in China, where anti-liberal nationalism has become increasingly mainstream. Li is a notable figure in this sphere, in part because of his deep ties to the West. A graduate of Berkeley and Stanford, he is affiliated with the Aspen Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Li’s Western education and experience with elite institutions gives him a unique platform for espousing nationalist opinions outside China; he has contributed to various English-language publications, including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and the Economist. In a 2013 TED Talk, he delivered a full-throated defense of China’s one-party system and argued that electoral democracy doesn’t work (a point he punctuated with a photo of former President George W. Bush in front of the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner). The talk has attracted over 3 million views. Born in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, Li was raised by his grandmother in Shanghai while his academic parents weathered the storm in the capital. He is proud of his roots in the city, which emerged as a center of modern glamor and Western sophistication in the first decades of the twentieth century. When Li moved to the United States for college in the 1980s, he became, according to his TED Talk, a “Berkeley hippie.” (If that was the case, his counterculture days were short-lived; he worked on Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign.) After almost a decade in the United States, he moved back to China. In 1999, Li helped launch Chengwei [End Page 49] Capital, a venture fund that manages about $2 billion and has invested in many companies that are household names in China. The Financial Times compared Li to Steve Bannon, and over the expensive lunch Li himself expressed admiration for Trump’s crusade against “global elites.” Like Bannon, Li wears a flashy erudition on his sleeve. He likes to sprinkle quotes by John Locke, Abraham Lincoln, and Bhikhu Parekh into arguments, to contrarian effect. He has also mastered the vernacular of American liberalism, using terms like “broadening,” “pluralizing,” and “diversity” to promote authoritarianism. From Li’s perspective, if you take a big step back and squint your eyes, “autocracy” can be seen as a form of “democracy.” As he put it in the Economist, he thinks democracy should be measured “not by procedures but by outcomes.” In a conversation in Guancha, Li tried to get Francis Fukuyama to sign on to his idea that informal information collection conducted by the party as an alternative to elections “have been effective.” Fukuyama was unmoved: “It depends on your measure of effectiveness.” Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, nationalist ideas have thrived in China. The government has encouraged a sense of national pride and tightened censorship and regulations over domestic media and the internet, suppressing any news that may reflect badly on the party-state. Xi has also pushed propagandists to publish and broadcast overseas in order to influence arguments outside the country. Li is no doubt seen as an asset in this strategy—a sleek, Western-educated capitalist as a face of the new Chinese nationalism. His success should be seen in the context of a broader effort to cement the transformation of nationalist politics from a grassroots insurgency into a state-supported ideology. From the Angry Youth to the Little Pinks...

Who Believes What? Singers’ Belief in Vocal Health Information and Misinformation

Information about voice care is abundant, provided by a variety of sources, including books, the internet, and word of mouth. Some information may not be factual, which, if followed, may affect the well-being of a singer’s voice. This article reports on a survey of 386 singers, who responded to 50 statements about voice health practices, stating whether they had heard the statement, and whether they agreed/believed, were unsure, or disagreed/disbelieved. The statements were grouped by their factual nature: Generally Accepted Belief, Previously Accepted Belief, Misconception Likely Benign, and Misconception Potentially Consequential. Singers were divided into Performance Statuses (Professional, Semi-Professional, Amateur) and Generation (Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials). Statistical analysis was performed to compare the responses to the various kinds of statements by Performance Status and by Generation. Amateurs were significantly different from Professionals on the Generally Accepted Belief statements, and Millennials were different from some or all of the other generations on the other three kinds of statements. The authors examined the possible reasons for these differences, providing a cautionary tale regarding the information and misinformation available to singers. Suggestions are/were provided for how teachers can optimize the proliferation of factual information on voice care.

Distance learning — a few remarks on the margins of the problem

The problem of the quality of distance learning — or e-learning — has not had much importance attached to it thus far. After all, distance learning is at least 200 years old — if not more — and e-learning is nothing new, either. However, they were a kind of “addition” to the educational process. However, as a result of the current world-wide pandemic, the situation has changed rapidly. From what was in essence an auxiliary form of learning, has suddenly become a basic form. Thus, what has affected both higher education and, above all, secondary, primary and pre-school education is something new. This is due to the suddenness of introducing both methods (techniques) of education, and not because of their technical side. Since this problem has become the subject of a large number of different kinds of statements, and even the first book devoted to this issue has been published — it is worth looking at these issues again and try to present a few more general comments. The main thesis of the article is: the technical help side is basically correct; the problems are: i) preparing teachers for this form of teaching, ii) preparation of full-text databases adapted to secondary school curricula, iii) adaptation (in secondary schools) of e-education programs, e.g. to university syllabuses (with links to specific texts, not entire databases), iv) “Rebuilding” the way of educating teachers so that they learn these technical skills from the university or improve them via additional courses and training.

Заявление и согласие как односторонние сделки в жилищном праве

The article discusses the features of various kinds of statements and consents in housing law, which can be attributed to unilateral transactions. An assessment of judicial practice is made, which develops on the issue of qualification of applications and consents. Species division of transactions-statements and transactions-consents was made taking into account the classification proposed by B.B. Cherepakhin (the division of unilateral transactions into unilaterally binding and unilaterally enabling transactions). It is noted that a feature of the unilateral transactions under consideration is that they come or are directed to public authorities, which makes it difficult to qualify them as civil law facts, however, certain signs can be highlighted that allow this. But at the same time, attention is focused on the fact that not all applications and transactions in housing law have a civil law nature, which means that not all can be qualified as unilateral transactions.

‘Soft Law’ in the Mechanism of the International and National Protection of the Constitutional Electoral Rights

The publication explores the phenomenology and content of ‘soft law’ in the international and national law and reveals the designation of ‘soft law’ in protecting the electoral rights of the citizens. ‘Soft law’ is intended to mean optional international documents, most of which are resolutions of the intergovernmental organisations containing statements, commitments, guidelines, common positions or statements on policy or intentions. ‘Soft law’ documents are usually adopted by the statutory bodies of the international organisations on issues that reflect new problems, tendencies or trends in the field of electoral law, for which there is no political will or the accordance of all the member states in the form of a classical international treaty. When it comes to the content, the ‘soft law’ documents are all kinds of statements, obligations, guidelines, codes of conduct, codes of ethics, guidelines and standards, common positions or statements of policy or intentions.

‘Talking sense’ about art: Evaluation of theatre as a social process

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with collective judgement-making in the theatre field. Using the empirical case of expert theatre panels, it explores the rules of communicating, testing, and validating judgements in social interactions. The research is based on interviews with 30 theatre critics who served on review panels at the National Contemporary Polish Drama Staging Competition. The results shed light on what kind of statements, behaviour, and actions are perceived as manifestations of rationality in group decision-making. The analysis of data allows to elucidate different tactics, strategies, and efforts – such as providing justifications or preserving emotional distance – undertaken by panel members to secure and cultivate what they believe is a proper evaluation.

Conditional probability logic, lifted Bayesian networks, and almost sure quantifier elimination

We introduce a formal logical language, called conditional probability logic (CPL), which extends first-order logic and which can express probabilities, conditional probabilities and which can compare conditional probabilities. Intuitively speaking, although formal details are different, CPL can express the same kind of statements as some languages which have been considered in the artificial intelligence community. We also consider a way of making precise the notion of lifted Bayesian network, where this notion is a type of (lifted) probabilistic graphical model used in machine learning, data mining and artificial intelligence. A lifted Bayesian network (in the sense defined here) determines, in a natural way, a probability distribution on the set of all structures (in the sense of first-order logic) with a common finite domain D. Our main result (Theorem 3.14) is that for every “noncritical” CPL-formula φ(x¯) there is a quantifier-free formula φ⁎(x¯) which is “almost surely” equivalent to φ(x¯) as the cardinality of D tends towards infinity. This is relevant for the problem of making probabilistic inferences on large domains D, because (a) the problem of evaluating, by “brute force”, the probability of φ(x¯) being true for some sequence d¯ of elements from D has, in general, (highly) exponential time complexity in the cardinality of D, and (b) the corresponding probability for the quantifier-free φ⁎(x¯) depends only on the lifted Bayesian network and not on D. Some conclusions regarding the computational complexity of finding φ⁎ are given in Remark 3.17. The main result has two corollaries, one of which is a convergence law (and zero-one law) for noncritial CPL-formulas.

Paradoxes of white moral experience

Paradoxes of white moral experience

Reconciling Police and Communities with Apologies, Acknowledgements, or Both: A Controlled Experiment

When police officers harm civilians, police leadership almost invariably makes a public statement about the incident, and these communications usually address issues of public mistrust in the police. In addressing public mistrust, political pressures may motivate police leadership to avoid acknowledging the role of police in creating that distrust. The study reported in this article examines the consequences of avoiding versus acknowledging responsibility for the role of police in creating mistrust, along with issuing an apology or not issuing an apology, in public statements. How do these various kinds of gestures shape public cooperation with police? This study reports on an experiment designed to answer that question, with our analysis focusing on the impact of these various kinds of statements on the people who are least likely to trust police. The evidence suggests that police leaders should combine acknowledgement of responsibility for the mistrust with an apology if they want to enlist the cooperation of people who are least likely to trust the police.

Detection of SQL Injection Attacks Based on Improved TFIDF Algorithm

Detecting SQL injection attacks (SQLIAs) effectively is one of the critical issues to be solved in Web secure fields. Aiming at the problem that the distribution of feature words in the same kind of statements is not considered when using TFIDF algorithm to vectorize the text of SQL statements, a method of detecting SQLIAs based on improved Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) algorithm is proposed. Firstly, TFIDF algorithm is improved based on the distribution of feature words in the same kind of statements. Then, the improved TFIDF (ITFIDF) algorithm is used to vectorize the dataset of SQL statements to increase the feature weight of the SQL statement. Finally, the detection of SQLIAs is carried out based on Support Vector Machine (SVM). The experimental results show that the combination of SVM and ITFIDF has higher accuracy, recall rate and F-score compared with other similar methods. At the same time, the experimental results also show that SVM has better classification performance when dealing with this problem than other machine learning models such as DNN and Decision Tree.

Responding to the Psychiatric Diagnosis Deniers

Another day, another book or blog post that boldly proclaims attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or some other psychiatric disorder really doesn’t “exist” and is instead a conspiracy of the pharmaceutic industry or an excuse people use to justify underachievement. To child and adolescent psychiatrists, these old accusations are pesky annoyances. But to our patients, these kinds of statements can really hurt, as they send the very clear message to them and everyone around them that there is no actual reason for their suffering and they should get themselves back on track immediately without any additional fuss. This is how stigma is generated and maintained, leading people to feel ashamed of their struggles and to avoid seeking help from anyone until the situation becomes dire.

Assessment sensitivity in legal discourse

We explain three phenomena in legal discourse in terms of MacFarlane’s assessment-sensitive semantics: incompatible applications of law, assessments of statements about what is legally the case, and retrospective overruling. The claim is that assessment sensitivity fits in with the view, shared by many legal theorists at least with respect to hard cases, that the final adjudicator’s interpretation of legal sources is constitutive of the applied norm. We argue that there are strong analogies between certain kinds of statements in legal discourse as understood in light of that view and discourse about matters of taste and future contingents. Thus, if assessment-sensitive semantics provides a compelling account of discourse about matters of taste and future contingents, then it likewise provides a compelling account of those statements in legal discourse.

The synthetization of human voices

The synthetization of voices, or speech synthesis, has been an object of interest for centuries. It is mostly realized with a text-to-speech system, an automaton that interprets and reads aloud. This system refers to text available for instance on a website or in a book, or entered via popup menu on the website. Today, just a few minutes of samples are enough to be able to imitate a speaker convincingly in all kinds of statements. This article abstracts from actual products and actual technological realization. Rather, after a short historical outline of the synthetization of voices, exemplary applications of this kind of technology are gathered for promoting the development, and potential applications are discussed critically to be able to limit them if necessary. The ethical and legal challenges should not be underestimated, in particular with regard to informational and personal autonomy and the trustworthiness of media.

What About Their Performance Do Free Jazz Improvisers Agree Upon? A Case Study

When musicians improvise freely together—not following any sort of script, predetermined harmonic structure, or “referent”—to what extent do they understand what they are doing in the same way as each other? And to what extent is their understanding privileged relative to outside listeners with similar levels of performing experience in free improvisation? In this exploratory case study, a saxophonist and a pianist of international renown who knew each other's work but who had never performed together before were recorded while improvising freely for 40 min. Immediately afterwards the performers were interviewed separately about the just-completed improvisation, first from memory and then while listening to two 5 min excerpts of the recording in order to prompt specific and detailed commentary. Two commenting listeners from the same performance community (a saxophonist and drummer) listened to, and were interviewed about, these excerpts. Some months later, all four participants rated the extent to which they endorsed 302 statements that had been extracted from the four interviews and anonymized. The findings demonstrate that these free jazz improvisers characterized the improvisation quite differently, selecting different moments to comment about and with little overlap in the content of their characterizations. The performers were not more likely to endorse statements by their performing partner than by a commenting listener from the same performance community, and their patterns of agreement with each other (endorsing or dissenting with statements) across multiple ratings—their interrater reliability as measured with Cohen's kappa—was only moderate, and not consistently higher than their agreement with the commenting listeners. These performers were more likely to endorse statements about performers' thoughts and actions than statements about the music itself, and more likely to endorse evaluatively positive than negative statements. But these kinds of statements were polarizing; the performers were more likely to agree with each other in their ratings of statements about the music itself and negative statements. As in Schober and Spiro (2014), the evidence supports a view that fully shared understanding is not needed for joint improvisation by professional musicians in this genre and that performing partners can agree with an outside listener more than with each other.

Approaches to the (Beckett) Archives: Popper, Coetzee, and Scientific Validity

This paper concerns the nature of the archive and the kinds of statements that might be drawn from our interaction with the archive. In the first part, Karl Popper's concept of ‘falsifiability’ is examined, particularly insofar as it features in Nabokov criticism (via Brian Boyd) and in Beckett studies (through Matthew Feldman). Falsifiability brings with it the authority of science, which Feldman uses to challenge certain kinds of Beckett-based orthodoxies – such things as the unquestioned centrality of Descartes to the work, and the (perceived) imprecision of theory-driven readings. One of Feldman's key claims, with regard to the archives of Beckett studies, is that Beckett only read and studied philosophy between 1928–1938. But although his argument begins from empirical evidence, it further develops interpretations based on a reading of this evidence. These interpretations thus involve presuppositions with regard to how Beckett might have worked with or attacked ideas otherwise developed by philosophers. In the second part, a counter-approach to the use of the archive is examined, via the readings that J. M. Coetzee developed in writing his 1969 dissertation, The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis. This example demonstrates both the value and limits of a quantifiable scientific approach to an analysis of the archives (in particular, to Coetzee's use of the methods of stylostatistics) as well as exemplifying how an approach to the archives might generate other benefits (in this case related to Coetzee's own fiction and its extension into the archival space). That is, Coetzee offers different answers to the question of how one might approach the archive and what might thereby be achieved. These answers gave him unquantifiable insights into the writing process and left him with questions he could pursue in his own writings.

Politics of prevention: The emergence of prevention science

BackgroundThis article critically examines the political dimension of prevention science by asking how it constructs the problems for which prevention is seen as the solution and how it enables the monitoring and control of these problems. It also seeks to examine how prevention science has established a sphere for legitimate political deliberation and which kinds of statements are accepted as legitimate within this sphere. MethodsThe material consists of 14 publications describing and discussing the goals, concepts, promises and problems of prevention science. The analysis covers the period from 1993 to 2012. ResultsThe analysis shows that prevention science has established a narrow definition of “prevention”, including only interventions aimed at the reduction of risks for clinical disorders. In publications from the U.S. National Institute of Drug Abuse, the principles of prevention science have enabled a commitment to a zero-tolerance policy on drugs. The drug using subject has been constructed as a rational choice actor lacking in skills in exerting self-control in regard to drug use. Prevention science has also enabled the monitoring and control of expertise, risk groups and individuals through specific forms of data gathering. Through the juxtaposition of the concepts of “objectivity” and “morality”, prevention science has constituted a principle of delineation, disqualifying statements not adhering to the principles of prevention science from the political field, rendering ethical and conflictual dimensions of problem representations invisible. ConclusionThe valorisation of scientific accounts of drugs has acted to naturalise specific political ideals. It simultaneously marginalises the public from the public policy process, giving precedence to experts who are able to provide information that policy-makers are demanding. Alternative accounts, such as those based on marginalisation, poverty or discrimination are silenced within prevention science.

Algunas observaciones sobre Putnam y la justificación racional

In Reason, Truth and History, Hilary Putnam characterized informal rationality as an alternative that allows to overcome limitations evidenced by the formalist conceptions of rationality. Initially, the paper reviews the characterization provided by Putnam, trying to determine what kind of statements may function as principles of rationality within an informal framework. It establishes that, while Putnam denies any universal principle of rationality, he accepts relative, general and vague principles, that remain subject to needs of cognitive interrelationship with the environment. It shows that principles make exceptions, do not have specific contents and do not provide conclusive results; however, this does not prevent us from assessing the adequacy of conflicting principles. If two individuals have different conceptual schemes, this is due to the fact that they have different cognitive purposes, and it can be asserted that the choices of both are rational. From this point, the paper defends and analyzes the possibility of reviewing principles whose denial is currently not conceivable. Finally, it states that both expressing and maintaining beliefs of controversy are historical elements that should be contemplated by an informal conception of rationality.

A comparison of grammatical genetic programming grammars for controlling femtocell network coverage

We study grammars used in grammatical genetic programming (GP) which create algorithms that control the base station pilot power in a femtocell network. The overall goal of evolving algorithms for femtocells is to create a continuous online evolution of the femtocell pilot power control algorithm in order to optimize their coverage. We compare the performance of different grammars and analyse the femtocell simulation model using the grammatical genetic programming method called grammatical evolution. The grammars consist of conditional statements or mathematical functions as are used in symbolic regression applications of GP, as well as a hybrid containing both kinds of statements. To benchmark and gain further information about our femtocell network simulation model we also perform random sampling and limited enumeration of femtocell pilot power settings. The symbolic regression based grammars require the most configuration of the evolutionary algorithm and more fitness evaluations, whereas the conditional statement grammar requires more domain knowledge to set the parameters. The content of the resulting femtocell algorithms shows that the evolutionary computation (EC) methods are exploiting the assumptions in the model. The ability of EC to exploit bias in both the fitness function and the underlying model is vital for identifying the current system and improves the model and the EC method. Finally, the results show that the best fitness and engineering performances for the grammars are similar over both test and training scenarios. In addition, the evolved solutions' performance is superior to those designed by humans.