Lucky Accident Research Articles

Signal Communication and Modular Theory

We propose a conceptual frame to interpret the prolate differential operator, which appears in Communication Theory, as an entropy operator; indeed, we write its expectation values as a sum of terms, each subject to an entropy reading by an embedding suggested by Quantum Field Theory. This adds meaning to the classical work by Slepian et al. on the problem of simultaneously concentrating a function and its Fourier transform, in particular to the “lucky accident” that the truncated Fourier transform commutes with the prolate operator. The key is the notion of entropy of a vector of a complex Hilbert space with respect to a real linear subspace, recently introduced by the author by means of the Tomita-Takesaki modular theory of von Neumann algebras. We consider a generalization of the prolate operator to the higher dimensional case and show that it admits a natural extension commuting with the truncated Fourier transform; this partly generalizes the one-dimensional result by Connes to the effect that there exists a natural selfadjoint extension to the full line commuting with the truncated Fourier transform.

How I overcame problems in in vitro fertilisation of livestock animals

In my research life of 35 years, growing with IETS as a researcher of in vitro maturation and fertilisation (IVM/IVF) of porcine and cattle oocytes, I suffered from hard times related to solving problems that prevented the progress of my research and conferment of my degrees. Many researchers may have similar problems. Thus, I would like to address a few examples of how I overcame these problems related to IVF and help young researchers with similar troubles. There were four main problems to be solved in my experiments. Problem 1: Establishment of IVF using only defined medium in pigs. Problem 2: Establishment of successful in vitro culture (IVC) of IVM/IVF bovine oocytes in defined medium. Problem 3: Low rate of male pronucleus formation in IVM porcine oocytes after IVF. Problem 4: Sedimentation of Ca2+ in the sperm capacitation solution for IVF in pigs. Problem 1 was solved by a lucky accident, in which a sperm suspension that would have otherwise been discarded happened to be successfully used for IVF in pigs. Problems 2, 3 and 4 were solved by communication with scientists whose fields were different from mine, where similar problems had been solved already. Young researchers are encouraged to transcend the boundaries of their research fields and solve problems by interacting with researchers in different fields. There are many good connections or answers around us that may be effective in resolving the problems that are hindering the progress of pending research.

Lucky accident helps scientists find ‘revolutionary’ way to create H2

Lucky accident helps scientists find ‘revolutionary’ way to create H2

Virtue Epistemology as Anti-luck Epistemology

The idea that knowledge as an individual mental attitude with certain propositional content is not only true justified belief but a belief the truth of which does not result from any kind of luck, is widely spread in contemporary epistemology. This account is known as anti-luck epistemology. A very popular explanation of the inconsistency of that concept of knowledge with the luck-dependent nature of truth (so called veritic luck taking place when a subject’s belief could not be true if not by mere coincidence) presumes that the status of propositional knowledge crucially depends on the qualities of actions that result in the corresponding belief, or processes backing them, which reflect the socalled intellectual virtues mainly responsible for subject’s relevant competences. This account known as Virtue Epistemology presumes that if a belief is true exclusively or mainly due to its dependence on intellectual virtues, it just cannot be true by luck, hence no place for lucky knowledge. But this thesis is hard to prove given the existence of true virtuous beliefs which could nevertheless be false if not for some lucky (for the knower) accident. This led to an appearance of virtue epistemological theories aimed specifically at an assimilation of such cases. Their authors try to represent the relevant situations as such where the contribution of luck is not crucial whereas the contribution of virtues is crucial. This article provides a critical analysis of the corresponding arguments as part of a more general study of the ability of Virtue Epistemology to provide justification for the thesis of incompatibility of propositional knowledge with veritic luck. It is shown that there are good reasons to doubt that Virtue Epistemology can do this.

Erratum to "A Lucky Accident: Brugada Syndrome Associated with Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest".

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1155/2018/1465867.].

Victorian Jamaica ed. by Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest

Reviewed by: Victorian Jamaica ed. by Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest B.W. Higman (bio) Barringer, Tim, and Wayne Modest, eds. Victorian Jamaica. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018, xx + 722 pp. US$34.95 paperback. ISBN 9780822360681. Also cloth and e-book. How “Victorian” was Victorian Jamaica? And how viable is this form of regnal periodization? Queen Victoria’s long reign, from 1837 to 1901, might seem enough to define an age, but historians of Jamaica generally regard 1865 as a vital watershed, and see no significant turning point at 1901. Developments within the colony, rather than imperial policy, determined the pattern of social and cultural change. Even “Victorian England” does not work perfectly, especially for the closing years of the reign, when the world had moved on, and for key elements such as architecture. It was simply a lucky accident that Victoria’s ascent to the throne coincided with the abolition of slavery, thus granting her an unearned but long-lasting folk status as benevolent liberator. The idea that the Queen was on the side of the oppressed had broader currency, but everywhere it was an illusion.1 Certainly, values and attitudes commonly termed Victorian contributed to the civilizing mission of the imperial British: ideals such as industry, respectability, social uplift and polite behaviour. However, these virtues were typically advocated with the assumption that Jamaica’s poor—though having barely escaped slavery—should be content to continue as plantation labourers, graciously accepting their lot in life. This was the essence of the “Queen’s Advice” of 1865. The common people of Jamaica were not easily persuaded. As demonstrated in two recent books by Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, the people picked and chose, rejecting much of this baggage but also accepting such elements of culture that proved functional.2 This was part of a complex process of creative conflict and accommodation—the process of hybridizing and creolizing—that had deep roots in Jamaica. Victorian Jamaica builds on this understanding by placing a firm focus on the visual and material culture of the island. It may also be seen, as the editors suggest, as an extension of recent studies of the Jamaican art of Isaac Mendes Belisario (1794–1849) and his contemporaries.3 The [End Page 228] sources analysed in Victorian Jamaica include written documents but more often artefacts, where these survive, as well as representational forms, stretching from clothing and architecture to mapping and photography. Most of the material comes from curated collections, notably the rich resources of the National Library of Jamaica and of the National Gallery. With three hundred images, Victorian Jamaica is a visual feast. Another significant coincidence is the emergence of (still, black and white) photography as a viable technology, generally dated to 1839, immediately after the crowning of Victoria and the end of slavery. Photographers quickly began to document daily life in Jamaica, as detailed by the late David Boxer, who contributed to Victorian Jamaica.4 It was a special moment in the history of photography, before movies and colour, before cameras fell into the hands of the masses. The existence of such “real” imagery, for the first time, underpins and helps define our image of the Victorian Age. Victorian Jamaica is the work of thirty writers, contributing twenty-three substantial chapters and twenty-two brief “Object Lessons”, the authors being drawn from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. Placed between the Introduction and the main chapters, the Object Lessons each focus on a single item, typically a piece of representational art or photography, but occasionally material artefacts such as a table or a door lock. Essentially, this attempt at “history from things” points to things other than written documents, but the examples drawn from everyday activity are few, perhaps because of the preoccupation with curated collections. The objective is to catch the attention of the reader. Many of the Object Lessons are indeed individually interesting, but being placed all together, at the beginning of the book, the effect seems random and fragmentary. They might perhaps have been more effective scattered through the book or absorbed into the text. The chapters are arranged in three parts. The first, “Making...

“All Land Is One Land Under the Sea”: Mapping Memory in Canada and the Caribbean

the hummingbird's tongue is forked. My father is dead.These two things I know to be true - the rest is speculation. Fortunately, as a writer of speculative fiction, I am accustomed to using my imagination to fill in the blanks, and my generalised anxiety disorder prompts me to endlessly ask, What if? For over a year I have been formulating an experimental memoir on memory, migration, and mental illness, but I have struggled to find a form that will lend coherence to the complicated history that led my father to leave the Caribbean following his mothers alleged death in an Antiguan asylum in 1956. My goal in writing my planned memoir The Hummingbird's Tongue is to map my father's journey as well as my own; there have been times in my life when I have followed closely in my father's footsteps, yet I have also tried to open some of the doors he closed as I reverse the migration I suspect he meant to be final.Since I am not yet ready to write this memoir, I instead have been thinking about islands and the different archipelagos to which I have been drawn over the years. My first overseas trip was to Jamaica when I was fifteen, and five years later I left Canada for England, the island - for better or worse - to which I am most drawn. I currently live in New York City, which is another archipelago, and from here I have started to build relationships with the people in Nevis that my father loved but left behind. When I sit down to write and no words appear on the page, I wonder if my psychic distance from the Caribbean is to blame. Antiguan author and avid gardener Jamaica Kincaid began to dig flowerbeds in her Vermont backyard and did not realise until she put the shovel down that her chaotic design resembled an archipelago. I am unlikely to have such a lucky accident, so I must find or develop a form for prose that reflects the separateness and the unity of a chain of islands.In 2005 I wrote my first memoir, Stranger in the Family. Following the death of my father and the unexpected termination of what was supposed to be a year-long teaching assignment in East Africa, I moved back into my childhood home in Toronto and wrote a series of essays in order to make sense of my grief and rage. Unable to find a Canadian publisher, I returned to the USA, set the manuscript aside for three years, and then chose to selfpublish it as a mixed-media memoir that examines the shifting terrain upon which we negotiate race, kinship, and identity. A couple of years before his death, in the heat of an argument, my father said, You're a stranger in this family. I decided to use his accusation as the title of my memoir since it also accurately reflected the feeling of alienation I experienced in Djibouti and within my country of origin, Canada.I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, dreaming of magical wardrobes and secret gardens. Doors figured rather prominently in my imagination, and the books I read were windows into other worlds. They were not, however, much of a mirror for my young black female self. I learned early on that only white children had wonderful adventures in distant lands; only white children were magically transported through time and space; only white children found the buried key that unlocked their own private Eden. Looking back on those days now at the age of forty, I marvel at the girl I once was. Why would a plump, brown-skinned girl with an Afro embark on a quest to read all the books she could find by C.S. Lewis and Frances Hodgson Burnett? Was I an Anglophile in training, or was my taste in books inevitable given the lack of multicultural literature available in Canada? Up until grade three, I started each school day by singing God Save the Queen, so perhaps my taste in literature was the inevitable result of Canada's colonial legacy.Whatever the reason, I have since made peace with my past self - or at least I have tried. In his unfinished memoir my father wrote, Deep underneath may be the desire to break out of who we have been made [into] and create a new me, but we can't, and on this one point, at least, we agree. …

John Ross

John Ross

Observation of Sumatran striped rabbit (Nesolagus netscheri) in the wild

No abstract available

An Engagement with Rorty

I do not know how to argue the question of whether it is better to see human beings in [the] biologistic way [advocated above] or to see them in a way more like Plato’s or Kant’s. So I do not know how to give anything like a conclusive argument for the view which my critics call ‘relativism’ and which I prefer to call ‘antifoundationalism’ or ‘antidualism.’ It is certainly not enough for my side to appeal to Darwin and ask our opponents how they can avoid an appeal to the supernatural. That way of stating the issue begs many questions. It is certainly not enough for my opponents to say that a biologistic view strips human beings of their dignity and their self-respect. That too begs most of the questions at issue. I suspect that all that either side can do is to restate its case over and over again, in context after context. The controversy between those who see both our species and our society as a lucky accident, and those who find an immanent teleology in both, is too radical to permit of being judged from some neutral standpoint. (xxxii)

Identifying two ancient enzymes in Archaea using predicted secondary structure alignment.

It is now possible to compare life forms at high levels of detail and completeness due to the increasing availability of whole genomes from all three domains. However, exploration of interesting hypotheses requires the ability to recognize a correspondence between proteins that may since have diverged beyond the threshold of detection by sequence-based methods. Since protein structure is far better conserved than protein sequence, structural information can enhance detection sensitivity, and this is the basis for the field of structural genomics. Demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach, we identify two important but previously elusive Archaeal enzymes: a homolog of dihydropteroate synthase and a thymidylate synthase. The former is especially noteworthy in that no Archaeal homolog of a bacterial folate biosynthetic enzyme has been found to date. Experimental confirmation of the deduced activity of both enzymes is described. Identification of two different proteins was attempted deliberately to help allay concern that predictive success is merely a lucky accident.

Mathematical Constructivism in Spacetime

To what extent can constructive mathematics based on intuitionistc logic recover the mathematics needed for spacetime physics? Certain aspects of this important question are examined, both technical and philosophical. On the technical side, order, connectivity, and extremization properties of the continuum are reviewed, and attention is called to certain striking results concerning causal structure in General Relativity Theory, in particular the singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose. As they stand, these results appear to elude constructivization. On the philosophical side, it is argued that any mentalist-based radical constructivism suffers from a kind of neo-Kantian apriorism. It would be at best a lucky accident if objective spacetime structure mirrored mentalist mathematics. the latter would seem implicitly committed to a Leibnizian relationist view of spacetime, but is it doubtful if implementation of such a view would overcome the objection. As a result, an anti-realist view of physics seems forced on the radical constructivist.

The Concept of Governmental Management: Or, What's Missing in the Gore Report

Since President Clinton and Vice President Gore released the report of the National Performance Review--better known as the Gore Report (or the Reinventing Government report)--in September of 1993, most of the public, and congressional, discussion has centered on just one aspect of the proposal: the promise to cut 252,000 jobs from the government payroll (later raised by Congress to 273,000). In addition, Mr. Gore has been able to get some publicity a few vignettes of improved governmental performance, such as reduction in the number of steps required to process veterans' claims and the redesign of fish ladders on the Columbia River. But virtually nothing has been said about what is potentially by far the most important and constructive recommendation in the report's entire 124 pages--presumably because in and of itself it is undramatic and carries little human-interest appeal. That is the recommendation buried on page 89, which reads: Every federal department and agency will designate a chief operating officer. The chief operating officer (or COO) will, among other things, be responsible for applying quality principles in transforming the agencies' day-to-day cultures, improving performance to achieve agency goals, reengineering administrative processes, implementing other National Performance Review recommendations, and--inserted almost as an afterthought--for ensuring that the President's and agency head's priorities are implemented. Add up all those responsibilities and it becomes clear that, at long last, every federal department and agency is intended to have a manager, in the full and modern meaning of that word, as it is understood in business and industry and city government and every other kind of organization. And one need only read the horror stories sprinkled throughout the report, as well as those that appear regularly in the newspapers, to know that overstaffing, red tape, excessive centralization, procedural rigidity, insensitivity to public and clientele convenience, horrendous case backlogs, obsolete computer systems, and so on, are palpable evidence that the government has never established over the years a tradition and a structure that would ensure consistent attention by competent managers to the day-to-day operations of its departments and agencies. Why the lack of attention? Because direction of the government's operations is, with some notable exceptions, placed in the hands of political appointees. Managerial background, competence, and interest usually rank low among the criteria applied in staffing the top political positions in any administration. Political appointees normally get their jobs a variety of other reasons--because they stand the right policy positions and will be articulate in promoting them, because they have records of loyal service to the president or his party, because they represent demographic or interest groups important within the party, because they served well in the presidential campaign, and so on. Some of these appointees sometimes turn out to be highly competent managers, but that is likely to be the consequence not of design but of lucky accident. Often the political appointees placed in charge of multi-million- and even multi-billion-dollar operations have never managed anything of significant size in their entire careers. Some are lawyers, who at most may have managed middle-sized law firms. Some are academics, who may not even have had the managerial responsibilities of a deanship. Some are former members of Congress, or aides to members, who have never run an organization larger than their personal office staffs, plus perhaps a subcommittee or committee staff. Appointees from those backgrounds tend to be more accustomed to doing their own work than to delegating, organizing, and supervising the work of others. Transforming a management culture is likely to be not only quite outside their experience but also, initially at least, beyond their comprehension. …

Differential operators which commute with characteristic functions with applications to a lucky accident

The differential operator associated with the prolate spheroidal functions commutes with a certain integral operator. Its kernel is the reproducing kernel of the Paley-Wiener space restricted to a bounded interval. This “lucky accident” occurs because both the differential operator and its Fourier transform commute with multiplication by the characteristic function of an interval. It is the only operator of its type to do so.

Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape

WHO WAS `THE FAMOUS MR. BROWN', and why are his parks still so important? Today he is credited with laying out every piece of parkland in Britain, while others accuse him of single-handedly sweeping away all the formal gardens that preceded the Landscape Movement. If he was indeed the greatest of all designers of man-made landscapes, how should we properly understand and appreciate his work and his legacy? In this comprehensive study of the man and his creations, the author follows an introduction to the culture and society of 18th-century England by tracing the rise of the Landscape Movement. He then provides a carefully researched account of Lancelot Brown's humble origins and rising fortunes, his marriage and family, the course of his career and mounting fame and recognition, culminating in his appointment as Master Gardener to George III. `We have reached the peak of perfection', wrote Horace Walpole, `we have given the true model of gardening to the world; let other countries mimic or corrupt our taste.' The idyllic landscapes which surround so many of the great country houses seem to be native English landscape at its best; yet they are not some lucky accident of nature but the result of careful planning, perfect taste and a vast amount of groundwork and planting, shaped by one man's vision. In a unique exploration of Brown's style and techniques, 15 of his major works are described in full and illustrated with original plans, 18th-century pictures and modern photographs. The Gazetteer provides detailed information on all his other estates and their present condition. This important work first appeared in 1985 since when the author has revised the text, now re-set, and updated the Gazetteer. For those whose interests lie in understanding the history of gardening, landscape design or 18th-century society there is much to be found here, but equally this book will sharpen the appreciation of Brown's work for all those who have visited his estates and enjoyed his enduring achievements.

Five Late Manuscripts of Euripides, Hippolytus

Barrett has given a brief account of the affiliations of Hn with the manuscripts which he has collated. He derives his information about the readings of Hn from the reports of nineteenth-century editors, and he does not report this manuscript in his apparatus criticus. He concludes that ‘In three instances (72, 641, 817) Haun. has the truth, or an approximation to it, where the rest of our tradition is at fault (though in two of them there are traces of the same reading in O) … in each case the reading can be accounted for as a lucky accident, and so I judge it in fact to be.’ Of the other four manuscripts, which editors have not collated, he gives no account. ‘From a number of readings cited by Turyn it appears that they are all more or less closely related to Haun.’ K. Matthiessen has voiced a mild regret that Barrett did not settle the question by collation. I have collated these five manuscripts from photographs or microfilms.

Traditional Ballads Musically Considered

Seventy years ago, George Lyman Kittredge published his standard, invaluable-but tuneless-abridgment of the massive collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, issued serially in ten parts between the years 1882 and 1898, by his revered master, Francis James Child. Child's work was primarily a library job, though he circulated appeals both in this country and in Britain for whatever scraps of traditional balladry might be recovered from oral sources. Contact at first hand with the bearers of tradition as song was for Child only a lucky accident, but the lack of such contact resulted in deceptive conclusions. Moreover, though interested, he did not see the music of the ballads as an essential part of his editorial responsibility, and perhaps hardly conceived of scholarly ways of incorporating the tunes into a systematic survey of the genre with all its international relations. Toward the end of Child's life, the interest of collectors had begun to turn to the recovery of the folk tunes, which could be gathered only from the lips of living singers. Singers sang what they liked, and it turned out that, among much else, they were fond of the traditional ballads which Child had searched for but had hardly found elsewhere than as texts in written or printed records. Now, surprisingly, was uncovered a vast treasury of fresh oral versions, which virtually transformed the subject from an antiquarian study to a sociomusicological inquiry grounded in contemporary evidence. There seemed reason to believe that such evidence could be enlarged continually by knowledgeable, persistent seekers. The (English) Folk Song Society was founded by a relatively small body of enthusiasts in 1898. Their initially antiquarian bias was soon swallowed up and superseded by the response to the living music now being discovered. Its appeal, in turn, drew in a number of

Two Recent Acquisitions in Belgrade Museums

Discovered by a lucky accident, a Roman bronze head of remarkable quality was unearthed in 1969 in the village of Boleč near Belgrade (Plates V–VII).Roman portraits in the Danubian provinces, where they are of above-average quality, invariably represent emperors or members of the imperial family. In the case of this bust, the type of beard and the general style show that we are dealing with a personage of the Severan period. The appearance of the beard may suggest a certain resemblance to the emperor Pupienus, but the identification does not bear further inspection, since his portraits differ from the new head significantly in most other details.

John Evershed, 1864-1956

John Evershed was born on 26 February 1864 at Gomshall in Surrey. He was the seventh child of John Evershed and Sophia, daughter of David Brent Price of Portsmouth. John Aubrey, F.R.S., in his History of Surrey , refers to the Eversheds of Evershed, in the parish of Ockley ‘a family here rather before than since the Conquest’. The earliest member of the family, of whom there is record, was Thomas de Evereshavede, a witness to a charter in 1240. The Eversheds wrere yeoman farmers and have been traced from father to son living on the same farm for 500 years, until 1716, when the last John Evershed of Evershed, Sheriff of Surrey, died without heirs. Evershed’s grandfather, John Evershed of Albury, was descended from a younger branch of the family, who had continued as yeoman farmers in the neighbouring parish of Newdigate. He was the last of the branch to carry on an unbroken family tradition as yeoman farmers in Surrey for over 600 years. Evershed’s maternal great-grandfather kept a shop in Portsmouth where he sold nautical almanacs and charts; he was well known to Nelson. The only relative of Evershed’s of scientific attainments was his brother Sydney, who invented electrical apparatus and electrical measuring instruments for the Navy and carried out researches in permanent magnetism. Evershed was educated at a preparatory school of the Unitarian persuasion at Brighton, where he had Neville Chamberlain as a school-fellow, and at a more advanced school at Croydon, where, as he said ‘by a lucky accident I passed the only examination I have ever been subjected to’. He remembered stealing out of bed at Brighton in the middle of the night to see a fine comet (Coggia 1874). While still at school, when the planet Mars was in a near opposition (1877), he constructed a telescope with odd lenses.

THE USE OF HYPNOTICS

This is one of a series of articles written by eminent clinicians for the purpose of extending information concerning the official medicines. The twenty-four articles in this series have been planned and developed through the cooperation of the U. S. Pharmacopeial Committee of Revision and The Journal of the American Medical Association.—Ed. The poet's dream of a harmless sleeping potion achieved reality through a lucky accident coupled with scientific vision when Liebreich 1 noted that animals went into an apparently normal sleep when given chloral hydrate and awoke without evident harm. Since that time, enormous industry and ingenuity have been expended to improve on this drug. 2 In no field of pharmacology has the relationship between physiologic action and chemical constitution been more assiduously studied. And yet, in some experiments done in 1930, chloral still stood at the head of the list of efficient hypnotics. 3 Most