Sophisticated Version Research Articles

Potencials of sap flow evaluation by means of acoustic emission measurements

The work deals with measurement techniques of water conducting system in the trees. Water conducting system (including xylem and phloem) indicates its importance for related physiological processes. There are still problems how to measure its functioning (which variables and how), especially in the open field (e.g., forests and orchards) in order to get maximum information about it. Simple band dendrometers measuring seasonal dynamics of stem growth have been already applied for many years, being gradually replaced by their more sophisticated electronic versions most recently. The sap flow is a suitable variable, because it links roots and crowns and provide information about transporting the largest amount of mass in plants, which can be decisive for their behavior. Following pioneering work in the last century (Huber, 1932), many types of sap flow measurement methods based on a variety of principles (e.g., thermodynamic, electric, magneto-hydrodynamic, nuclear magnetic resonance, etc.) have been described. Only a few of these, particularly those based on thermodynamics, have been widely used in field-grown trees. E.g., heat pulse velocity system developed by Green (1998) and Cohen et al. (1981). Heat ratio method also works with pulses, but interpreted the data in more sophisticated way (Burgess, 2001). Widely used is a simple heat-dissipation method (Granier, 1985). Direct electric heating and internal sensing of temperature was applied in the trunk heat balance method (Čermák et al., 1973, 1976, 1982, 2004; Kučera et al., 1977; Tatarinov et al., 2005). The heat field deformation method is based on measurement of the deformation of the heat field around a needle-like linear heater (Nadezhdina et al., 1998, 2002, 2006; Čermák et al., 2004).Another important variable is water potential, which could be measured in the past only periodically on selected pieces of plant material using pressure (Scholander) bomb, but most recently also continuous measurements became possible due to application of psychrometric method (Dixon and Tyree, 1985). There exist also other physical variables carrying important information, which can be measured using different principles. This includes e.g., acoustic methods, which can detect quantitative variation of pulses occurring during cavitation events, associated with interruptions of water columns in vessels. This must not necessarily be a single source of acoustic emissions. In this study we are focused on a general description of acoustic events measurable in a wide range of their spectrum. The first aim was to detect such signals and the second to learn them and gradually analyze in order to better understand the associated processes causing their occurrence and their relations to plant life.

Loving People for Who They Are (Even When They Don't Love You Back)

AbstractThe debate on love's reasons ignores unrequited love, which—I argue—can be as genuine and as valuable as reciprocated love. I start by showing that the relationship view of love cannot account for either the reasons or the value of unrequited love. I then present the simple property view, an alternative to the relationship view that is beset with its own problems. In order to solve these problems, I present a more sophisticated version of the property view that integrates ideas from different property theorists in the love literature. However, even this more sophisticated property view falls short in accounting for unrequited love's reasons. In response, I develop a new version of the property view that I call the experiential view. On this view, we love a person not only in virtue of properties shaped by and experienced in a reciprocal loving relationship, but also in virtue of perspectival properties, whose value can be properly assessed also outside of a reciprocal loving relationship. The experiential view is the only view that can account not only for reciprocated love's reasons, but also for unrequited love's reasons.

Pliability and resistance: Feyerabendian insights into sophisticated realism

In this paper we focus on two claims, put forward by Feyerabend in his later writings (especially in Conquest of Abundance, 1999a), which constitute the metaphysical core of his view of scientific inquiry. The first, that we call the pliability thesis, is the claim that the world can be described by indefinitely many conceptual systems, none of them enjoying a privileged status. The second, that we call the resistance thesis, is the claim that the pliability of the world is limited, i.e., not all the different conceptual systems that can be used to describe the world will be equally successful: the world offers resistance to some attempts to describe it. We show that, in spite of the later Feyerabend’s notorious antirealist leanings, the pliability thesis is fully compatible with a robustly realist view of science, and we suggest that, surprisingly, Feyerabend’s insights concerning the limited pliability of the world turn out to be those of a potential ally of sophisticated versions of scientific realism.

Cosmic American Studies

There is not only an existential poignancy but also an intellectual piquancy to the 1950 suicide note of F. O. Matthiessen, one of the founders of American studies: “I am depressed over world conditions. I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective” (“F. O. Matthiessen”). Matthiessen attributed his fateful decision to a situation—the Cold War—in which it increasingly seemed difficult to assert credibly and pursue effectively a socialist agenda without being presumed or pressured to hold commitments to materialism, atheism, and secularism. The dominant narrative of American studies is that the Cold War gave the field its life—the ideological impetus and institutional infrastructure to produce and peddle a sophisticated version of American exceptionalism (Radway 47-49; Wise 308-12). But Matthiessen's tragic case suggests instead that the Cold War may have killed American studies, at least a possible version of it. Matthiessen's fatal dilemma, I want respectfully to suggest, might instruct us how to reconstruct the history and future of a field whose “bread-and-butter concerns” have always included religion (Stein and Murison 1; cf. Modern). Matthiessen's political credentials as a socialist were bona fide, and his intellectual inclinations were toward deep historicist analysis, but he couldn't commit to Marxism, despite his frank acknowledgment of its indispensable contribution not only to intellectual culture but also to his own thinking. Clearly, personal religious reasons played a role—“I am a Christian, not through upbringing but by conviction, and I find any materialism inadequate” (Matthiessen, “Education” 180). But I want to underscore Matthiessen's intellectual objections, which arose from the evidence of his historical inquiry into American literature and culture. That is to say, I want to distinguish between how his theological convictions may have prejudiced him against Marxism's secularist teleology and how his scholarly investigation of American literature and culture raised legitimate questions about Marxism's implicit secularization narrative. In reviews of the Marxist literary histories of his Americanist colleagues V. F. Calverton and Granville Hicks, Matthiessen complained of their inability to comprehend what he called “the main development of religious idealism from Edwards through the transcendental movement” and “the strain of affirmation of the ideal that runs from the seventeenth century to the twentieth” (Responsibilities187, 195). The secularist premises of Marxist analysis—at least in the crude form espoused by Calverton and Hicks—seemed to Matthiessen blunt instruments with which to accomplish deep understanding of the pronounced “religious idealism” of American literature and culture.

Habitus, reflexividade e neo-objetivismo na teoria da prática de Pierre Bourdieu

A tentativa de superação da dicotomia subjetivismo/objetivismo está na raiz da perspectiva praxiológica de Bourdieu, cujo cerne é a relação dialética entre condutas individuais subjetivamente propelidas por disposições integradas em um habitus, de um lado, e estruturas objetivas ou "campos" de relações entre agentes diferencialmente posicionados e empoderados, de outro. No entanto, esta abordagem tem sido retratada por críticos como uma versão sofisticada de neo-objetivismo e não como uma teoria sintética satisfatória da relação agência/estrutura. O artigo avalia o sentido desta crítica, argumentando que ela é parcialmente justificada e defendendo a tese de que a principal fonte do neo-objetivismo na obra de Bourdieu deriva de sua ênfase, valiosa porém unilateral, sobre o caráter tácito ou "pré-reflexivo" da operação do habitus, a qual leva-o a uma teorização negligente quanto à significação agêntica da consciência reflexiva do ator. Com base nesse diagnóstico, o texto delineia, por fim, alguns percursos teóricos pelos quais o esquema analítico bourdieusiano pode ser orientado para um tratamento mais genuinamente dialético da interdependência causal entre ações individuais e estruturas sociais.

Design formula to evaluate the NSM FRP strips shear strength contribution to a RC beam

This paper presents the closing step of a synthesis process aiming at deriving, from a previously developed more complex model, a simple design formula to evaluate the shear strength contribution provided by a system of Near Surface Mounted (NSM) Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) strips to a Reinforced Concrete (RC) beam. The self-contained and ready-to-implement set of analytical equations and logical operations is presented along with the main underlying physical-mechanical principles and assumptions. The formulation proposed is appraised against some of the most recent experimental results and its predictions are also compared with those obtained by the two previous and more sophisticated versions of the same modeling strategy. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out in order to appraise the sensitivity of the NSM shear strength contribution prediction to the value assumed by the input parameters.

Proposals which speed up function-space MCMC

Inverse problems lend themselves naturally to a Bayesian formulation, in which the quantity of interest is a posterior distribution of state and/or parameters given some uncertain observations. For the common case in which the forward operator is smoothing, then the inverse problem is ill-posed. Well-posedness is imposed via regularization in the form of a prior, which is often Gaussian. Under quite general conditions, it can be shown that the posterior is absolutely continuous with respect to the prior and it may be well-defined on function space in terms of its density with respect to the prior. In this case, by constructing a proposal for which the prior is invariant, one can define Metropolis–Hastings schemes for MCMC which are well-defined on function space (Stuart (2010) [1], Cotter et al. [2]), and hence do not degenerate as the dimension of the underlying quantity of interest increases to infinity, e.g. under mesh refinement when approximating PDE in finite dimensions. However, in practice, despite the attractive theoretical properties of the currently available schemes, they may still suffer from long correlation times, particularly if the data is very informative about some of the unknown parameters. In fact, in this case it may be the directions of the posterior which coincide with the (already known) prior which decorrelate the slowest. The information incorporated into the posterior through the data is often contained within some finite-dimensional subspace, in an appropriate basis, perhaps even one defined by eigenfunctions of the prior. We aim to exploit this fact and improve the mixing time of function-space MCMC by careful rescaling of the proposal. To this end, we introduce two new basic methods of increasing complexity, involving (i) characteristic function truncation of high frequencies and (ii) Hessian information to interpolate between low and high frequencies. The second, more sophisticated version, bears some similarities with recent methods which exploit local curvature information, for example RMHMC, Girolami and Calderhead (2011) [3], and stochastic Newton, Martin et al. (2012) [4]. These ideas are illustrated with numerical experiments on the Bayesian inversion of the heat equation and Navier–Stokes equation, given noisy observations.

Is Radical Phenomenology Too Radical? Paradoxes of Michel Henry's Phenomenology of Life

Is Radical Phenomenology Too Radical? Paradoxes of Michel Henry's Phenomenology of Life

The geometry of special relativity: a concise course by N. Dragon

This book arises from several years of the author’s teaching special relativity; it gives an interesting, if idiosyncratic, overview of the subject. The first chapter sets the scene for the subsequent development, introducing the notion of space-time, ideal clocks and measuring rods, and the invariant nature of the speed of light. This is used to give a pictorial explanation of simultaneity, and how observers in relativemotionwill therefore disagree not only about whether two distinct events take place at the same place, but also whether they take place at the same time. This geometric and pictorial approach is developed in the next chapter in a rather sophisticated version of Bondi’s k-calculus. Using only elementary geometrical ideas and symmetry assumptions the standard kinematical results of special relativity are obtained: composition of velocities, time dilation and length contraction, the Doppler effect, and the standard (non-)paradoxes of the twins and the pole-in-barn (here, carin-garage) are given a clear and careful development. The discussion is also extended to the full four dimensional space-time, not confined to the two dimensional case. Chapter three builds on this by finding the relationship between inertial coordinate systems: the Lorentz transformation. With the Lorentz transformation in hand, one can now consider what a moving object actually looks like to a stationary observer. A particularly nice example is the argument in terms of aberration that a moving sphere presents a circular appearance to a stationary observer. This chapter is rounded off by the introduction of the dynamical quantities of energy and momentum. Up to this point, the arguments have used little, if any, mathematics beyond what might be met in high school, or the early part of the undergraduate curriculum of a

Biasing the beat regime of a solid-state ring laser: from a magnetometer to a multioscillator rotation sensor

In this paper, we discuss the possible applications of a solid-state ring laser comprising a feedback loop for stabilizing the bidirectional regime and a magneto-optic element for frequency-shifting the counterpropagating modes. In a first simple two-mode configuration, this device is shown to be sensitive to small changes in the rotation rate and external magnetic field. In a second more sophisticated version, the magnetic sensitivity can be significantly reduced thanks to multioscillator operation. The results of our proof-of-principle four-mode experiment are discussed, and some improvements are suggested toward a high-performance solid-state ring laser gyroscope without lock-in.

Truth may not explain predictive success, but truthlikeness does

In a recent paper entitled “Truth does not explain predictive success” (Analysis, 2011), Carsten Held argues that the so-called “No-Miracles Argument” for scientific realism is easily refuted when the consequences of the underdetermination of theories by the evidence are taken into account. We contend that the No-Miracles Argument, when it is deployed within the context of sophisticated versions of realism, based on the notion of truthlikeness (or verisimilitude), survives Held’s criticism unscathed.

Human Rights: A Critique of the Raz/Rawls Approach

This paper examines and criticizes the suggestion that we should interpret the “human” in “human rights” as (i) referring to the appropriate sort of action when certain rights are violated rather than (ii) the (human) universality of certain rights. It considers first a crude version of (i) — the view that human rights are rights in response to whose violation we are prepared to countenance humanitarian intervention; then it considers more cautious and sophisticated versions of (i). It is argued that all versions of (i) distract us with side issues in our thinking about human rights, and sell short both the individualism of rights and the continuity that there is supposed to be between human rights and rights in national law. The paper does not deny that there are difficulties with views of type (ii). But it denies that the positing of views of type (i) gives us reason to abandon the enterprise of trying to sort these difficulties out.

LASAGNA: a novel algorithm for transcription factor binding site alignment.

BackgroundScientists routinely scan DNA sequences for transcription factor (TF) binding sites (TFBSs). Most of the available tools rely on position-specific scoring matrices (PSSMs) constructed from aligned binding sites. Because of the resolutions of assays used to obtain TFBSs, databases such as TRANSFAC, ORegAnno and PAZAR store unaligned variable-length DNA segments containing binding sites of a TF. These DNA segments need to be aligned to build a PSSM. While the TRANSFAC database provides scoring matrices for TFs, nearly 78% of the TFs in the public release do not have matrices available. As work on TFBS alignment algorithms has been limited, it is highly desirable to have an alignment algorithm tailored to TFBSs.ResultsWe designed a novel algorithm named LASAGNA, which is aware of the lengths of input TFBSs and utilizes position dependence. Results on 189 TFs of 5 species in the TRANSFAC database showed that our method significantly outperformed ClustalW2 and MEME. We further compared a PSSM method dependent on LASAGNA to an alignment-free TFBS search method. Results on 89 TFs whose binding sites can be located in genomes showed that our method is significantly more precise at fixed recall rates. Finally, we described LASAGNA-ChIP, a more sophisticated version for ChIP (Chromatin immunoprecipitation) experiments. Under the one-per-sequence model, it showed comparable performance with MEME in discovering motifs in ChIP-seq peak sequences.ConclusionsWe conclude that the LASAGNA algorithm is simple and effective in aligning variable-length binding sites. It has been integrated into a user-friendly webtool for TFBS search and visualization called LASAGNA-Search. The tool currently stores precomputed PSSM models for 189 TFs and 133 TFs built from TFBSs in the TRANSFAC Public database (release 7.0) and the ORegAnno database (08Nov10 dump), respectively. The webtool is available at http://biogrid.engr.uconn.edu/lasagna_search/.

How the Golem Came to Prague

This article examines the emergence of the Golem legend associated with the Maharal of Prague in the first half of the nineteenth century, with specific attention to the innovations found in two little-known versions by important Jewish literary figures of the era: the Bohemian-born Viennese poet and editor Ludwig Frankl and the Danish writer Meir Aaron Goldschmidt. These versions, it is argued, reveal several crucial mechanisms that help explain the shift from a Golem tale distributed among various individual places and rabbis, to one with little or no specificity at all, and finally to the Prague version that dominates the subsequent literary and artistic manifestations of the legend. The proliferation of non-Jewish renditions of the legend in the first quarter of the century, starting with the folklorist Jakob Grimm’s brief report in 1808, provides a context for several Jewish reconfigurations of the material around the centrality of Prague and its most famous rabbi, the Maharal. By 1847, the transition is complete with the near-canonical version published by Leopold Weisel in the popular and influential anthology of Bohemian Jewish tales, Sippurim. But in the decade leading up to Weisel’s publication, Frankl and Goldschmidt both produce intricate and sophisticated versions that offer a glimpse into the motifs and techniques engaged by the Jewish literary imagination of the period.

E. K. Farran and A. Karmiloff-Smith: Neurodevelopmental Disorders Across the Lifespan: A Neuroconstructivist Approach

Understanding developmental changes, both typical and atypical, as they occur throughout the lifespan is the central question that defines this book. The authors look through the lens of Williams Syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder that has been intensively investigated over the past decade across multiple levels of analysis (molecular, brain, cognitive, behavioural, and most recently at the environmental level). Although relatively rare, Williams syndrome provides a unique window of opportunity to explore complex yet dynamics changes in cognition as it unfolds across the lifespan. Farran and Karmiloff-Smith do an outstanding job in bringing together researchers who have made exceptional contributions to this field. The reader will begin with an exploration of why development itself is critical for understanding neurodevelopmental disorders (known as the neuroconstructivist approach) and from the onset, this book brings to the forefront the core challenges that face researchers in achieving this goal. One of the most insightful chapters focuses on developmental trajectories and how best to capture dynamic but often subtle changes across development rather than continue to rely on a more traditional yet static approach of accruing ‘‘snapshots’’ of performance across different time-points. Across multiple cognitive domains that include numeracy, literacy, perception, face processing, and attention; and journeying from infancy through childhood and into adulthood, the reader is presented with compelling empirical evidence that the pattern of developmental outcomes is not necessarily the same as the pattern of low-level deficits in the start-state in infancy. That is, one can never assume that the adult profile of cognitive and behavioural strengths and difficulties across and within domains is simply a more sophisticated version of the infant start-state. The authors also highlight and introduce the importance of recognising the impact of ‘domain-general’ mechanisms from ‘domain-specific’ ones, and argue against the notion that you can map directly from genes to cognition. This is a difficult concept to articulate but is expertly articulated in this book; in part because real-world examples are given that clearly demonstrate the non-linearity and complex relationship between genes and developmental outcomes (see in particular the chapter by Steele et al. that focuses on cross-syndrome and cross domain development), but also because Williams syndrome is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder that involves numerous deletions of genes. Indeed, researchers for decades have been piecing together the puzzle of how specific genes map onto the Williams syndrome phenotype. The journey continues. Overall, this is an impressive book from an internationally renowned team of researchers. It sets the scene for the next generation of developmental research to embrace a neuroconstructivist approach to investigate developmental changes across the lifespan, the constraints that shape later cognitive outcomes and the different mechanisms and pathways that lead to cross syndrome associations and dissociations. My hope is that research of the calibre described in this book will ultimately have a significant and long-lasting impact on the lives of affected children and adults, their families, clinicians and educators.

How the laser helped to improve the test of special theory of relativity

In this paper of I have reviewed the test done for validating the special theory of relativity using masers and lasers in last one century. Michelson-Morley did the first experimental verification for the isotropy of space for the propagation of light in 1887. It has an accuracy of 1/100 th of a fringe shift. The predicted fringe shift on the basis of propagation of light through ether was 0.4 but Michelson-Morley did not observe any fringe shift and came up with a negative result. Their experiment was repeated with modern and more sophisticated versions using highly monochromatic masers and lasers which have kept any ether drag to the limit of < 1/1000 th of the earth’s orbital velocity and validated the isotropy of the space to the extraordinary limit of one part in10 15 . The necessary discussion on masers, lasers, its properties and applications with brief definition of beats is also given in this paper for the completeness of the discussion apart of the experimental method for validating the constant speed of light in different directions using masers and lasers.

New type of phase transition in gravitational theories

We set forth a new type of phase transition that might take place in gravitational theories whenever higher-curvature corrections are considered. It can be regarded as a sophisticated version of the Hawking-Page transition, mediated by the nucleation of a bubble in anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. The bubble hosts a black hole in its interior, and separates two spacetime regions with different effective cosmological constants. We compute the free energy of this configuration and compare it with that of thermal AdS. The result suggests that a phase transition actually occurs above a certain critical temperature, ultimately changing the value of the cosmological constant. We discuss the consistency of the thermodynamic picture and its possible relevance in the context of AdS/CFT.

Treg in CNS autoimmune disease

The cellular interactions underlying the inflammatory component of MS are complex and involve counteracting pro-inflammatory and regulatory lymphocyte populations. Our understanding of these has been influenced by the use of increasingly sophisticated versions of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) in the mouse. CD4+ T cells are the key drivers of EAE, although the exact means by which they exert their pathogenic influence are still not fully understood. These are balanced by the regulatory activities of T cell and non-T cell populations, both at the early stages of T cell activation in the lymphoid system and within the CNS itself once inflammation is underway. To better understand the regulation of CNS inflammation we have focused on some key molecules involved in promoting EAE pathogenesis (e.g., IL-6, GM-CSF, T-bet) and others involved in resolution (e.g., IL-10, IFN-γ). B cells are an important source of IL-10, limiting the size of the encephalitogenic cohort that develops. This effect seems restricted to the lymphoid system. The key IL-10-producing population within the CNS itself are Foxp3+ T regulatory (Treg) cells. Mice that lack either of these IL-10-producing populations fail to recover from EAE. IL-6 is required to drive pathogenic function in T cells. Although B cells can also provide IL-6, this function is not required. Instead, dendritic cells provide a sufficient and short-lived source, early after T cell activation. T cells later lose IL-6 receptor expression such that those in CNS (both effector and Treg populations) are insensitive to IL-6. This predicts that IL-6-blocking strategies might not influence T cell autoaggression during ongoing disease, but also explains why CNS Treg resist conversion to IL-17-producing effector function. Gene expression studies highlight marked differences between the spleen and CNS in both the T effector and the Treg populations, providing possible mechanistic insights into Treg function and new therapeutic opportunities. As part of this, the ability of CNS Treg to modulate their expression of cytokine receptors, and therefore their sensitivity to cytokines that might divert them from their regulatory duties, seems a key feature in maintaining Treg function in the face of tissue inflammation.

What time travelers cannot not do (but are responsible for anyway)

The Principle of Alternative Possibilities is the intuitive idea that someone is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done otherwise. Harry Frankfurt has famously presented putative counterexamples to this intuitive principle. In this paper, I formulate a simple version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a course-grained notion of actions. After warming up with a Frankfurt-Style Counterexample to this principle, I introduce a new kind of counterexample based on the possibility of time travel. At the end of the paper, I formulate a more sophisticated version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a certain fine grained notion of actions. I then explain how this new kind of counterexample can be augmented to show that even the more sophisticated principle is false.

Varieties of Ontological Argument

I consider what I hope are increasingly sophisticated versions of ontological argument, beginning from simple definitional forms, through three versions to be found in Anselm, with their recent interpretations by Malcolm, Plantinga, Klima and Lowe. I try to show why none of these work by investigating both the different senses of necessary existence and the conditions under which logically necessary existence can be brought to bear. Although none of these arguments work, I think that they lead to interesting reflections on the nature of definition, on the conditions for possessing the property of necessary existence and point towards a different, neo-Platonic ground for God’s meeting the criteria for being logically necessary.