Negative Rules Research Articles

Environmental (De-) Regulation, Competition, and Policy Rules

This article analyzes some problems regarding our knowledge of environmental policy. Sustainable development as the prospective enlargement of the political agenda has been identified as a long-term challenge for economic policy which could get trapped in a new form of interventionism. The evolutionary market approach that is presented here focuses on development risks of environmental policy that are mostly neglected in standard theory. A transfer of the Hayekian concept of negative rules to the realm of environmental policy is critically discussed. A straight-forward transfer of Hayek's theory stressing the importance of negative rules cannot be recommended, since even the negative rules carry some development risks in the realm of environmental policy. Some preliminary political consequences are drawn which are appropriate to limit the extension of environmental targets in the future.

Comparison of Salivary and Serum Enzyme Immunoassays for the Diagnosis ofHelicobacter pyloriInfection

Infection with Helicobacter pylori has been established as an important risk factor for the development of peptic ulcer disease, gastritis and gastric cancer. The diagnosis of H pylori infection can be established by invasive or noninvasive techniques. Two noninvasive enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) for antibody detection - HeliSal and Pylori Stat - were compared with histology. Both assays detect immunoglobulin (Ig) G directed against purified H pylori antigen. The test populations consisted of 104 consecutive patients scheduled for upper gastrointestinal endoscopy. Of these patients, 97 (93%) had symptoms compatible with peptic ulcer disease. Saliva and serum were collected simultaneously at the time of endoscopy. Salivary EIA had a sensitivity of 66%, specificity of 67%, positive predictive value of 67% and negative predictive value of 66% compared with the serum EIA, where the results were 98%, 48%, 64% and 96%, respectively. Although the salivary EIA is an appealing noninvasive test, it was not a sensitive and specific assay. The serum EIA also lacked specificity, but was highly sensitive with a good negative predictive value. Although a negative serum EIA rules out H pylori infection, a positive result must be interpreted in the clinical context and confirmed with a more specific measure.

Knowledge-based fuzzy MLP for classification and rule generation

A new scheme of knowledge-based classification and rule generation using a fuzzy multilayer perceptron (MLP) is proposed. Knowledge collected from a data set is initially encoded among the connection weights in terms of class a priori probabilities. This encoding also includes incorporation of hidden nodes corresponding to both the pattern classes and their complementary regions. The network architecture, in terms of both links and nodes, is then refined during training. Node growing and link pruning are also resorted to. Rules are generated from the trained network using the input, output, and connection weights in order to justify any decision(s) reached. Negative rules corresponding to a pattern not belonging to a class can also be obtained. These are useful for inferencing in ambiguous cases. Results on real life and synthetic data demonstrate that the speed of learning and classification performance of the proposed scheme are better than that obtained with the fuzzy and conventional versions of the MLP (involving no initial knowledge encoding). Both convex and concave decision regions are considered in the process.

Adolescents' Conceptions of Teachers' Authority and Their Relations to Rule Violations in School

Conceptions of teachers' authority and reported misconduct regarding 20 moral, conventional, personal, contextually conventional, and prudential issues were assessed in 120 fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh graders (mean ages = 10.66, 12.88, 15.04, and 17.25 years, respectively). Adolescents viewed moral, conventional, and prudential issues as legitimately subject to teachers' authority and personal issues as under personal jurisdiction, but they were equivocal about contextually conventional issues. Fifth graders judged all acts as more legitimately subject to teachers' authority, all rule violations as more negative, and personal and prudential issues as personal more than did older students. Conventional misconduct was more frequent and moral misconduct was less frequent than other rule violations, but both were greater among boys than girls. Adolescents' negative rule evaluations, fewer rules, greater dislike for school, poorer grades, and living in single- or step-parent families predicted teacher- and self-reported misconduct. Relations to previous research on conceptions of adult authority, school misconduct, and autonomy development are discussed.

Negation as Instantiation

We propose a new negation rule for logic programming which derives existentially closed negative literals, and we define a version of completion for which this rule is sound and complete. The rule is called "Negation As Instantiation" (NAI). According to it, a negated atom succeeds whenever all the branches of the SLD-tree for the atom either fail or instantiate the atom. The set of the atoms whose negation is inferred by the NAI rule is proved equivalent to the complement of T c ↓ ω, where T c is the immediate consequence operator extended to non-ground atoms (M. Falaschi et al. , 1989, Theoret. Comput, Sci. 69 (3), 289-318). The NAI rule subsumes negation as failure on ground atoms, it excludes floundering, and can be efficiently implemented, We formalize this way of handling negation in terms of SLDNI-resolution (SLD-resolution with Negation as Instantiation). Finally, we amalgamate SLDNI-resolution and SLDNF-resolution, thus obtaining a new resolution procedure which is able to treat negative literals with both existentially quantified variables and free variables, and we prove its correctness.

The polish economic reform: Transgressive decision making

The paper presents a transgressive decision study into the Polish economic reform of 1989–1991, commonly known as the Balcerowicz Program. The set of decisions made in order to attain a certain goal is called a decision cluster. The author discusses in detail the decisions comprised by the anti-inflation decision cluster. The process of choice is presented in the form of decision trees composed chiefly of gain chains and loss chains. The main body of the paper is devoted to transgressive decision rules, among them negative rules, positive rules, and a metarule called the gain gravity center. The decisions made under the Balcerowicz Program evoked strong reactions from both supporters and opponents of the reform, giving rise to phenomena such as perception bias and amplification bias. The paper closes with some theoretical conclusions on transgressive decision making.

Un Système Simple de Levée des Homographies

This paper presents a software who's goal is to ease automatic analysis of natural language by solving two analysis problems: — resolution of syntactic ambiguities; — identification of fixed forms. In order to fulfil this goal, it appears that using negative rules make this system really powerful and easy to use, as long as sentences are represented by a graph structure. There are three main points to this paper: — the graph structure of the sentence; — the use of negative rules; — the identification of fixed forms based upon a new categorization of those forms. It's important to stress the industrial dimension of this work: actually, two systems are already using in software, namely a translating system for concept and a grammatical corrector for newspapers.

Condorcet efficiency of two stage constant scoring rules

Previous research has developed a representation for the Condorcet efficiency of plurality and negative plurality rules on three candidates for large electorates under the impartial culture condition. This study considers the two stage voting rules on three candidates, plurality elimination and negative plurality elimination. A representation is obtained for the Condorcet efficiency of each for large electorates under impartial culture. The Condorcet efficiencies of both rules are equal and are shown to be substantially greater than the Condorcet efficiency of plurality and negative plurality.

Formation rules and minority governments

Abstract. This research note focuses on the importance of rules for coalition formation in parliamentary democracies. Traditionally, coalition theorists have assumed that only majority coalitions can be winning. The more recent literature has shown that coalitions can be winning even if they do not control more than half of all legislators. However, the literature has continued to overlook the fact that there exist two different types of government formation rules. In this note, the two types—positive and negative rules—are presented and it is shown that minority governments are more frequent in the countries with negative rules.

Does a negative transesophageal echocardiographic study rule out infective endocarditis?

Does a negative transesophageal echocardiographic study rule out infective endocarditis?

Weak Generalized Closed World Assumption

Explicit representation of negative information in logic programs is not feasible in many applications such as deductive databases and artificial intelligence. Defining default rules which allow implicit inference of negated facts from positive information encoded in a logic program has been an attractive alternative to the explicit representation approach. There is, however, a difficulty associated with implicit default rules. Default rules such as the CWA and the GCWA, which closely model logical negation, are in general computationally intractable. This has led to the development of weaker definitions of negation such as the Negation-As-Failure (NF) and the Support-For-Negation (SN) rules which are computationally simpler. These are sound implementations of the CWA and the GCWA, respectively. In this paper, we define an alternative rule of negation based upon the fixpoint definition of the GCWA. This rule, called the Weak Generalized Closed World Assumption (WGCWA), is a weaker definition of the GCWA that allows us to implement a sound negation rule, called the Negation-As-Finite-Failure (NAFF), similar to the NF-rule and less cumbersome than the SN-rule. We present three definitions of the NAFF. Two declarative definitions similar to those for the NF-rule and one procedural definition based on SLI-resolution.

Kwoma Death Payments and Alliance Theory

Recent analyses of exchange in the structure of Papua New Guinea societies have focussed predominantly on competitive or ceremonial forms of reciprocity, such as the Moka, Tee, and Kula, rather than the complex, multigenerational exchange relationships that marriages commonly establish between wife-giving and wife-taking groups. One consequence of the neglect of affinal in favor of ceremonial exchange is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine for many otherwise well-described societies what affinal transactions take place, how they are related to such other aspects of social structure as the extensive negative marriage rules characteristic of this region, and in those societies where competitive systems are found, how the ceremonial and affinal aspects of exchange are articulated. To take one of several possible examples, Feil (1984) reports that the Tee competitive exchange system of the Tombema Enga is built upon and interdigitates with a base of affinal exchange relationships. But Feil is ambiguous as to whether affinal and competitive exchange are distinguishable institutions or a unitary phenomenon. For instance, he states that exchange partners in the Tee are invariably conceptualized as affines--i.e., as linked by a marriage (e.g., Feil 1984:101, 156)--but he also states that not all affines are exchange partners (Feil 1984:102, 127-8). What is not clear from Feil's various reports is whether affinal transactions ever take place outside the context of the Tee and, if so, to what extent; whether some categories of affines are more likely to be chosen as exchange partners than others and on what grounds; and what the implications are for kinship relationships generally of passing over particular affines (including matrilateral relatives) as exchange partners in the Tee. In contrast to many recent Papua New Guinea ethnographers, however, Feil (1980) provides a detailed account of the wide-ranging Tombema marriage prohibitions, and how these are related to the structure of the competitive exchange system. This paper has two aims. The first is to contribute to the ethnography of affinal exchange systems in New Guinea by describing the cross-generational exchange relationships and wider alliances that marriages establish between individuals and groups in one lowland Papua New Guinea society. The structure of these alliances shows a striking similarity to those underlying affinal exchanges in many other Papua New Guinea societies and points to some very widespread but largely neglected similarities in the structures of both lowland and highland social systems (but see Rubel and Rosman 1978). It is beyond the scope of this article to examine these similarities in detail, but I will allude to some of the most basic in the discussion of two highland societies in the conclusion.

Correction to a definition of negation

In [3] a definition of negation was presented for the system K′ of extended basic logic [1], but it has since been shown by Peter Päppinghaus (personal communication) that this definition fails to give rise to the law of double negation as I claimed it did. The purpose of this note is to revise this defective definition in such a way that it clearly does give rise to the law of double negation, as well as to the other negation rules of K′.Although Päppinghaus's original letter to me was dated September 19, 1972, the matter has remained unresolved all this time. Only recently have I seen that there is a simple way to correct the definition. I am of course very grateful to Päppinghaus for pointing out my error in claiming to be able to derive the rule of double negation from the original form of the definition.The corrected definition will, as before, use fixed-point operators to give the effect of the required kind of transfinite induction, but this time a double transfinite induction will be used, somewhat like the double transfinite induction used in [5] to define simultaneously the theorems and antitheorems of system CΓ.

An improved initial solution of a long transportation problem

An efficient algorithm to obtain an improved initial feasible solution of a long transportation problem which saves 70–90% of simplex iterations executed by the “Most Negative Rule” as a basic change criteria is presented.

Developmental and Transfer Errors: Their Common Bases and (Possibly) Differential Effects on Subsequent Learning

This article presents three interrelated theses on the mechanisms underlying developmental and transfer errors, and exemplifies these with reference to a number of English L2 developmental structures. The first thesis states that formal properties inherent to the L2 which give rise to developmental errors also set up structural predispositions for L1 transfer (Zobl 1980a). The second thesis states that, when an L1 structure conforms more closely to general acquisition regularities or processes than the L2 structure to be acquired, then the occurrence of transfer is promoted (Zobl 1980b). The third thesis, developed with reference to negation by Spanish L1 learners, states that, although the mechanisms involved in the genesis of developmental and transfer errors are the same, transfer errors may retard subsequent restructuring. The nature of the structural constellation between Spanish Li and developmental regularities in the acquisition of negation in English are examined, and a framework is proposed in which linguistic factors are seen to play a major role in protracting the restructuring of the preverbal negation rule by Spanish learners.

Learning of Negative Cue Validities as a Function of Statistical Sophistication and Instruction

The effects of cue-criterion instructions on subjects' achievement, consistency, and matching were examined. The probability-learning task involved two cues which were negatively related to the criterion. Subjects varied in their degree of mathematical training prior to the experiment. On all measures, mathematical sophistication enhanced rate of performance. Increasingly detailed information about cue-criterion relationships and negative linear functions greatly improved level of achievement, demonstrating that subjects can immediately utilize a negative rule if given thorough instruction. Results are discussed with respect to their implications concerning theoretical probability-learning processes and suggestions for improving human decision-making in probabilistic environments.

Fast algorithms for long transportation problems

The paper deals with large transportation problems in which the number of destinations ( n) is much larger than the number of origins ( m), and in which some or many of the paths from origins to destinations may be inadmissible. Using a new approach, with certain auxilary lists, it is proved that the ordinary simplex algorithm (“Most Negative Rule”) can be performed in O( m 2+ m log n) computer operations per iteration, as against O( mn) in the usual approach. A search-in-a-row simplex algorithm (“Row Most Negative Rule”), for which the total number of iterations is probably only somewhat larger, is shown to require just O( m + σm log n) operations per iteration, where σ is the density of the cost matrix (i.e. the proportion of admissible paths). For these rigorous results one needs computer storage which is not considerably larger than that required for storing the cost matrix. For smaller memory an efficient algorithm is also proposed. A general tentative rule for die amount of scanning per iteration is introduced and applied. Computer experiments are reported, confirming theoretical estimates.

RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF TEACHER ATTENTION AND THE “GOOD BEHAVIOR GAME” IN MODIFYING DISRUPTIVE CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR1

A variety of behavioral procedures have been employed in recent years to modify disruptive classroom behavior. Such methods have been developed with the belief that curtailing disruptive behavior would strengthen positive classroom performance. In this study, two procedures, the good behavior game and the teacher‐attention method, were compared to determine short‐run effectiveness. Four teachers (two fourth‐grade and two fifth‐grade) implemented both methods in their classrooms over a five‐week period. Presentation of methods was alternated in a counterbalanced design to control for order effects. Each of the four classrooms consisted of 25 students. A time‐sampling procedure was used to record the presence or absence of disruptive behavior within 15‐second intervals. Disruptive behavior was defined as any talking‐out or out‐of‐seat behavior without permission. The results indicated that both procedures were effective in modifying disruptive classroom behavior, but that the good behavior game reduced disruptive behavior significantly better than the teacher‐attention method. In addition, all teachers preferred the game to the teacher‐attention procedure. This reaction seemed related to the effort involved in initiating the two activities. The good behavior game required less effort on the teacher's part. However, use of the game alone raises certain ethical considerations. One such issue involves abuse of peer pressure. Also, there is a possibility that negative rules may tend to promote resentment. Positively stated rules would ameliorate that problem. Another relates to the possibility that some teachers might be carried away by the ease of the game's implementation to the extent that behavior control becomes the primary objective in the classroom. As a result, one might consider use of the game to maximize short‐term change, but then phase out this procedure in favor of another method (e.g., teacher attention) for long‐run effects.

Negative Transportation and Tag Questions

The syntactic evidence provided by Robin Lakoff for the existence of a negative transportation rule is examined, and is found to be insufficient to establish the rule. It is shown that performatives are not the only verbs requiring tag questions to be formed on the next S down, and that this is of crucial importance in arriving at an adequate account of tag questions. Attention is drawn to certain semantic regularities which seem to account for the pattern of occurrence of tag questions without recourse to a rule of negative transportation. In the final section, an attempt is made to widen the field of discussion in the negative transportation debate by raising a new problem.*

Benefit-Cost Analysis of Coding Techniques for the Primal Transportation Algorithm

A computer code for the transportation problem that is even more efficient than the primal-dual method is developed. The code uses the well-known (primal) MODI method and is developed by a benefit-cost investigation of the possible strategies for finding an initial solution, choosing the pivot element, finding the stepping-stone tour, etc. A modified Row Minimum Start Rule, the Row Most Negative Rule for choice of pivot, and a modified form of the Predecessor Index Method for locating stepping-stone tours were found to perform best among the strategies examined. Efficient methods are devised for the relabeling that is involved in moving from one solution to another. The 1971 version of this transportation code solves both 100 × 100 assignment and transportation problems in about 1.9 seconds on the Univac 1108 Computer, which is approximately the same time as that required by the Hungarian method for 100 × 100 assignment problems. An investigation of the effect on mean solution time of the number of significant digits used for the parameters of the problem indicates that the cost parameters have a more significant effect than the rim parameters and that the solution time “saturates” as the number of significant digits is increased. The Minimum Cost Effect, i.e. the fact that total solution time asymptotically tends to the time for finding the initial solution as the problem size is increased (keeping the number of significant digits for the cost entries constant), is illustrated and explained. Detailed breakup of the solution times for both transportation and assignment problems of different sizes is provided. The paper concludes with a study of rectangular shaped problems.