Straightforward Answer Research Articles

Time-resolved electron transport with quantum trajectories

It is shown that Bohmian mechanics applied to describe electron transport in open systems (in terms of waves and particles) leads to a quantum-trajectory Monte Carlo algorithm where randomness appears because of the uncertainties in the number of electrons, their energies and the initial positions of the trajectories. The usefulness of this formalism to provide predictions beyond DC, namely AC regime, transient and noise, in nanoelectronic devices, is proven and discussed in detail. In particular, we emphasize the ability of this formalism to provide a straightforward answer to the measurement of the total current and its advantages to deal with the many-body problem in electron transport scenarios. All the results presented along the manuscript have been obtained using the electron device simulator BITLLES.

Comparisons of three data storage models in parametric temporal databases

The parametric temporal data model captures a real world entity in a single tuple, which reduces query language complexity. Such a data model, however, is difficult to be implemented on top of conventional databases because of its unfixed attribute sizes. XML is a matured technology and can be an elegant solution for such challenge. Representing data in XML trigger a question about storage efficiency. The goal of this work is to provide a straightforward answer to such a question. To this end, we compare three different storage models for the parametric temporal data model and show that XML is not worse than any other approaches. Furthermore, XML outperforms the other storages under certain conditions. Therefore, our simulation results provide a positive indication that the myth about XML is not true in the parametric temporal data model.

Reshaping the response space with kulenikka in beginning to respond to questions in Korean conversation

Respondents have various ways of resisting the constraints that questions impose on them. In this article I show one way in which Korean speakers deal with trouble of responding to questions as put when beginning to respond: Prefacing their responses with kulenikka. The analysis shows that kulenikka marks the response as departing from the question's terms and signals a reshaping of the response space. Three common contexts for this departure are: Respondents (1) cannot conform to the question's terms due to the question's inadequate presuppositions; (2) defer a straightforward or type-conforming answer; and (3) evade the question. The findings contribute to a developing body of conversation analytic research on how question recipients display resistance to questions, and more generally how turn-beginnings serve as an important place in interaction.

Professional Development for Science Teachers

The Next Generation Science Standards will require large-scale professional development (PD) for all science teachers. Existing research on effective teacher PD suggests factors that are associated with substantial changes in teacher knowledge and practice, as well as students' science achievement. But the complexity of the U.S. educational system continues to thwart the search for a straightforward answer to the question of how to support teachers. Interventions that take a systemic approach to reform hold promise for improving PD effectiveness.

Can hydrate form in carbon dioxide from dissolved water?

Transport of carbon dioxide in offshore pipelines involves high pressures and low temperatures, which may lead to formation of hydrate from the residual dissolved water and carbon dioxide. While thermodynamics is able to tell us whether the hydrate phase will be stable, the question of whether its formation will actually occur under given pipeline conditions does not have a straightforward answer. In this work, we have made use of water properties obtained from molecular simulations to examine the thermodynamics of hydrate formation from water dissolved in carbon dioxide. This paper proposes a method that allows estimation of absolute thermodynamic properties and thus makes it possible to compare free energy changes due to several possible phase transitions and determine the most probable transition. This information can be used directly to choose the optimum hydrate prevention strategy. We have found that hydrate formation from a carbon dioxide solution will be thermodynamically viable at water concentration exceeding a certain level; a conclusion also supported by several previous studies. We have also extended the quantitative analysis of the thermodynamics and the kinetics of formation through a modified version of phase field theory (PFT). The work presents the way to obtain parameters required for the practical implementation of the PFT in the case of hydrate formation, as well as outlines the estimation of thermodynamic properties for systems unable to reach true equilibrium.

Trading Freedom in the Russian Empire: The Extent to Which Russia Attempted to Solve the Jewish Question by Granting Jews Rights Only in Scenerios that Economically Benefited the State

Ever since its first known usage during the so-called "Jew Bill" controversy concerning the naturalization process for English Jews in the 1750s, the term Jewish Question has connoted a fairly simple, straightforward idea: How should a state craft policies to "properly" handle its Jewish population. However, its inherent subjectivity and the sheer multitude of possibilities ensured that no correspondingly simple, straightforward answer to the Jewish Question was offered in any country throughout Europe. Mired in centuries-old religious strife, constantly shifting boundaries and mounds of legislation, Russia's encounter with the Jewish Question stands out as one of the most complex— capable of perplexing even its most dedicated and knowledgeable scholars. Given this track record of bewilderment, historian Simon Dubnow questioned Tsar Alexander III's request for the formation of the High Commission for the Study of Existing Laws on the Jews in early 1883, which followed two years of heavy anti- Jewish pogroms centered in southwestern Russia. As a student of history, the quick-witted Dubnow recognized that the group better known as the Pahlen Commission faced a "Sisyphus task" that previous "bureaucratic creations" in Russia had promptly abandoned due to the perceived impossibility of the task. Despite these well documented difficulties, one member of the Pahlen Commission single-handedly drafted an explanation of the Jewish Question that belied its perceptions as an endlessly confusing labyrinth of religion and policy.

Rethinking language faculty. Has language evolved for other than language related reasons?

Attempting to give a straightforward answer to the question, I put forward in this paper – Has language evolved for other than language related reasons?, I would emphatically say – No, it has not!, as long as language has still anything to do with symbolic expression of a person’s thoughts – that is, making them public, as well as symbolic exchange, which next to the exchange of goods, and next to the exchange of women, is, according to antropologists, the cornerstone of our culture. But if we understand language as a system of internal computations in a living organism, which are based on recursion and resemble a prototype of general intelligence, and which can be used in the domain of social exchange of goods, perception of kinship, communication, counting livestock, navigation, and setting order in a sentence, then I would have to affirmatively say – Yes, it has! Do these skills have anything to do with language seen as a means of communication or language seen as a paring of sound and meaning? Well, probably no more than the exchange of goods has to do with the exchange of symbols. I draw the general conclusion: in my initial question – Has language evolved for other than language related reasons? – the most important concept is not that of evolution or the faculty of language, but what I call “language related reasons,” as it means anything we may wish it to, depending on what is meant by “language.”

Inflammatory Bowel Disease: One or Two Diseases?

This chapter addresses the longstanding question of whether inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is really one or two diseases. The straightforward answer is that ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD) embody separate diseases more than a single syndrome. In reality, however, the question is more complex. This chapter makes the case that there are actually many more than just two diseases under the rubric of IBD.

CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers by Tom Tyler (review)

Reviewed by: CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers by Tom Tyler Etienne Benson (bio) Tom Tyler, CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 320 pp. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. As I was beginning to think about preparing this review, a colleague picked up Tom Tyler’s CIFERAE off my desk and began flipping through its pages. A few moments later, he put it back down and expressed some bewilderment about its title and chapter headings, which include such mysteries as “On the Ring Finger a Ram’s Testicles” and “The Thumb Is a Little Hand, Assistant to the Greater”—each of the five chapter titles evoking one of the fingers of the hand. What, he asked, is this book supposed to be about? I can now give a straightforward answer: this book investigates and rejects the idea that epistemological anthropocentrism is a necessary component of realist, relativist, and pragmatist philosophies of knowledge. It also makes a less straightforward and possibly more interesting point about how philosophers can and should engage with nonhuman animals. And it does so precisely through its inscrutable titles and playful design, which includes 101 (CI in Roman numerals) illustrations of more or less wild animals (ferae). What might at first appear to be postmodernist obscurantism and needless noodling around turns out to be neither postmodernist nor needless, and indeed essential to Tyler’s project. First, the straightforward argument. Tyler is concerned with what he calls “first-and-foremost anthropocentrism” or “epistemological anthropocentrism,” which he defines as the notion that humans “are stopped up, as if within a bleak, restricting container, unable to access the wider world except through the translucent but necessarily distorting sides of their prison” (p. 3). His focus is therefore not on that kind of anthropocentrism that has been called speciesism, which simply asserts the superior importance and moral status of humanity, but rather on the more subtle claim that knowledge as such is “inevitably . . . determined by the human nature of the knower” (p. 21). After an introductory discussion, Tyler dedicates one chapter each to realism, relativism, and pragmatism. For each of the three philosophical approaches, he investigates the ontology, utility, and validity of knowledge: that is, what knowledge is (either “mediating representation” or “immersive practice”), what it does (“explanation of the world” or “interpretations of a worldview”), and what it claims (“transcendental truth” or “partial perspective”) (p. 210). He concludes with a chapter on the figure supposedly at the center of knowledge—anthropos, Homo sapiens, humanity, “man”—and on [End Page 327] one of its allegedly defining attributes, the hand. This admittedly rigid scheme leads Tyler through an eclectic menagerie of Western thinkers, not all of them philosophers, and through the aforementioned 101 ferae. It will probably come as no surprise that the pragmatists have the best of it. Try rolling each of the following terms around on your tongue: “naïve realism,” “naïve relativism,” “naïve pragmatism.” The last probably feels a bit awkward; we are more accustomed to offhand dismissals of the first two. To be fair, although Tyler admits to some Procrustean snipping and stretching to fit particular philosophers into the three beds he has made, he gives them all a respectful hearing. Although pragmatism comes off as the most reasonable option and the one most helpful for getting over the human/animal divide, his main aim is to disassociate all three schools from any necessary connection to epistemological anthropocentrism. Among the thinkers that appear in the book, certain ones emerge as particularly vital. These include, in no particular order, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georges Bataille, Immanuel Kant, G. E. Moore, Richard Dawkins, William James, Ferdinand de Saussure, Martin Heidegger, Charles Darwin, Michel Foucault, Benjamin Whorf, Richard Rorty, and—just beating out Kant for the longest entry in the index—Friedrich Nietzsche. The realists and relativists are criticized for their commitment to representationalism, the pragmatists praised for their focus on knowledge as practice. But whatever your personal preference may be, Tyler argues, none of these positions necessarily entails epistemological anthropocentrism. Moreover, the very concept of anthropos built into anthropocentrism is suspect. As Tyler argues in his chapter on the hand and the human...

Listeria monocytogenes: No Spreading without NO

In infectious disease immunology, inducible nitric oxide (NO) synthase-derived NO is believed to function primarily as an antimicrobial and immunoregulatory molecule. In this issue of Immunity, Cole etal. (2012) show that NO helps the intracellular bacteria Listeria monocytogenes to spread.

VP-internal Structure of Idioms and A-movement

When the object is given specificity or contrastiveness, it should move out of the VP, so that discourse effects such as specificity or contrastiveness cannot be internally interpreted within the structural domain of VP. Only a string of words forming a unitary constituent with an idiosyncratic interpretation can be an idiom. The idiomatic subject should originate internally within VP and such clausal idioms are VP idioms which require a fixed choice of head, complement and specifier in the VP containing them (Radford 2009). In this vein, the VP-internal Subject Hypothesis provides a straightforward answer for forming an idiomatic meaning within VP. The subject and predicate forming an idiom can come to be separated from each other, as far as the of the subject is concerned. The English ECMed constituent internally originates within VP and then undergoes to the matrix clause, still bearing an idiomatic meaning. It follows that while keeps the idiomatic meaning sustainable, A-movement induces it to be gone.

Governmental Power: Quality or Identity? Comment on Alon Harel's Argument against Outsourcing Violence

What is the appropriate division of power between public officials and private individuals? The straightforward answer to this question, it seems, is that an official should have a power if she employs it (morally) better compared to a private individual. However, Alon Harel argues that this answer is misguided, or at least partially, since there are some decisions—mainly concerning the employment of violence—that should be made and implemented only by public officials regardless of the (relative) moral quality of the decision or action. In this comment I consider and criticize this argument.

Case-Specific Sociological Inference

Our article critical of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) amicus brief in Wal-Mart v. Dukes (Mitchell, Monahan, and Walker 2011 [pp. 60520, this issue]) sought to engage sociologists and other social scientists on the methods and norms that should guide a social scientist who testifies as an expert witness and offers opinions that are directly linked to the specific parties in a case. Some reactions to our article proceed from mistaken assumptions and beliefs that distract from a clear discussion of how experts should arrive at case-specific opinions. In this brief essay, we note our agreement with much of what Sorensen and Sharkey (2011 [pp. 635-45, this issue]) say, note our disagreement with much but not all of what Tomaskovic-Devey (2011 [pp. 621-34, this issue]) says, identify some points of agreement and dispute with Nielsen, Myrick, and Weinberg (2011 [pp. 646-67, this issue]), and provide a straightforward answer to the prescriptive question of how scientifically reliable case-specific opinions should be presented to courts.

On ‘Stabilising’ medical mechanisms, truth-makers and epistemic causality: a critique to Williamson and Russo’s approach

In this paper I offer an anti-Humean critique to Williamson and Russo’s approach to medical mechanisms. I focus on one of the specific claims made by Williamson and Russo, namely the claim that micro-structural ‘mechanisms’ provide evidence for the stability across populations of causal relationships ascertained at the (macro-) level of (test) populations. This claim is grounded in the epistemic account of causality developed by Williamson, an account which—while not relying exclusively on mechanistic evidence for justifying causal judgements—appeals nevertheless to mechanisms, and rejects their anti-Humean interpretation in terms of capacities, powers, potencies, etc. By using (and expanding on) Cartwright’s basic critique against Humean mechanisms, I suggest that, in order to move beyond the level of plausibility, Williamson and Russo’s position is in need of a clarification as to the occurent reading of the components, functioning and interferences of mechanisms. Relatedly, as concerns Williamson’s epistemic account of causation, I argue that this account is in need of a more straightforward answer as to what truth-makers its causal claims should have.

The Persian Gulf or the Red Sea? Two axes in ancient Indian Ocean trade, where to go and why

From the first century bce until the third century ce, Roman trade with the Indian Ocean passed by way of two major axes: the Red Sea–Nile and the Persian Gulf–Syrian Desert. The overall distance by way of the Persian Gulf–Syrian Desert route was considerably shorter, but the overland part of the journey was almost four times longer, and goods had to pass through politically tense border regions between the Parthian and Roman empires. Although the relative importance of the two routes probably varied, both were in operation at the same time and for a prolonged period. How can this be explained? This article explores the passages from India to the Mediterranean in the Roman imperial period and argues that a relatively straightforward answer is to be found in the annual rhythms of movement responding to ocean winds, desert weather and river floods.

How do men and women differ in research collaborations? An analysis of the collaborative motives and strategies of academic researchers

Do men and women academic faculty vary in their research collaboration patterns and strategies? This straightforward question does not lend itself to a straightforward answer. A great many sex-correlated variables could possibly mitigate the relationship of sex and collaboration. If one finds sex-correlated differences in the number of collaborators, can one infer that there is something intrinsic to men's and women's work strategies and preferences? Or would such differences owe instead to women's and men's different positions in work structures and hierarchies? The focus here is on two sets of research collaboration variables, numbers of collaborators and the collaboration strategies employed. The study uses questionnaire data from the U.S. National Survey of Academic Scientists ( n = 1714) and tests several hypotheses about collaboration numbers and strategies. Regression results indicate, counter to the core hypotheses and almost all published literature, that in a properly specified model, one taking into account such factors as tenure, discipline, family status and doctoral cohort, women actually have somewhat more collaborators on average than do men. For both men and women, those with more industrial interactions and those affiliated with university research centers have more collaborators. Men and women differ in their collaborator choice strategies. Men are more likely to be oriented to “instrumental,” and “experience” strategies, while both men and women are motivated by “mentoring” strategies. Regression analyses show that for both men and women, having a coherent collaborator choice strategy predicts the number of collaborators.

Numerical cladistics, an unintentional refuge for phenetics—a reply to Wiley et al.

The assertion that phylogenetic inference algorithms are not authoritarian because results are repeatable, predictable and freely available misses the point that the authority resides in underlying algorithm models that are not cladistic. We show that optimization procedures can group using symplesiomorphy and that optimization is not always equivalent to cladistic argumentation. Because parsimony and Bayesian algorithms can obtain the same answer from the same data set is not evidence that they are Hennigian; examples exist where these methods do not provide the same result from the same data. Using ‘reversals’ as evidence in systematics is problematic because the question, “Reversal to what?” has no straightforward answer. This confusion can be eliminated by recognizing that homologues are the parts of organisms and homologies are the relationships between the parts, and that the latter is a hierarchical concept rather than transformational. We clarify that Hennig’s auxiliary principle pertains to potential synapomorphy, meaning for molecular work that it is the presence of a particular derived nucleotide that is shared in a given position of aligned sequences of two or more taxa that should be considered homologous until proven otherwise, not simply the alignments themselves. We reiterate that not all data are evidence and we specifically reject homoplasy as a source of ‘evidence’ for systematics. We further reject the view that conflict among data should be resolved through methodology. It is the data that should be our primary focus, as it is our attempts to identify and clarify homologues worthy of suggesting relationships (homology) that are primary in systematics.

“Faith” and “Fable” in the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill

and fable, terms set for this roundtable discussion on poetry of Geoffrey Hill, are themselves Hillian, and so are problems of their brute juxtaposition. Tracking appearance of terms in his work offers a way to introduce topic concisely, and it may help to formulate some preliminary questions. Since MLA discussion in 2009, Hill has published a new book of poems, Oraclau/Oracles (Clutag, 2010), and a second is imminent, Clavics (Enitharmon, 2011). A third, Odi Barbare, is scheduled for next year (Clutag, 2011). Two further books, one of them titled Al Tempo de' Tremuoti, will appear in Collected Poems: 1952-2012 (Oxford, planned for 2013), along with an expanded and revised Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres. Hill's poems in this issue are taken from Odi Barbare, written in a form of sapphics, and currently untitled book, which adopts a form of Robert Lowell's poem Rebellion as its stanza model. The poems have not appeared elsewhere, and this is first time a selection from fifth book has been published. The noun appears in all but two of Hill's books of poetry (the exceptions are For Unfallen and Mercian Hymns). Along with its cognates it is used about sixty times in poetry, once each in King Log, The Mystery of Charity of Charles Peguy, Scenes from Comus, and Clavics, and as many as eleven times in Canaan and ten in The Triumph of Love. The statistics in themselves do not have much significance, but even crude fact of changing frequency of term should prompt us to acknowledge variety and variability of Hill's poetic undertaking from book to book. It seems to me that Christian is main concern of five books-Tenebrae, The Mystery of Charity of Charles Peguy (and Hymns), Canaan, The Triumph of Love and Al Tempo de' Tremuoti (published as yet only in part)--but that in other books it does not engage his imagination as centrally. When Hill explores Christian themes, he is attracted to heterodox expression of faith. In his short note accompanying The Mystery of Charity of Charles Peguy, Hill describes Peguy as self-excommunicate but adoring (he also contrasts Peguy's rediscovery of the solitary ardours of faith with consolations of religious practice). In interview with John Haffenden in 1981, he applies Joseph Cary's description of Montale's poem Iride to his own work, a heretic's dream of salvation, expressed in image of orthodoxy from which he is excommunicate A half dozen examples of show its range of meaning in Hill's poetry: Funeral Music: I would scorn mere instinct of faith To William Cobbett: I say it is not faithless / to stand without faith Mysticism and Democracy: Flesh has its own spirit ... deeper than most rooted faiths Triumph of Love CXXI: So what is if it is not / inescapable endurance The Orchards of Syon VI: I say trust / so far as it goes Scenes from Comus 49: Faith stands confirmed in trigonometry Al Tempo de' Tremuoti 55: became / Of true better to blaspheme On basis of such statements (Hill, like Yeats, is a poet of emphatic statement), we might wish to redirect to Hill Eliot's public challenge to Pound: What does Mr. Pound believe? Pound did not reject question; he gave what he thought was a simple, explicit, and straightforward answer (I believe Ta Hio). Yet Hill's combination of passionate utterance and historical distance--in Haffenden interview Hill insists that it is not a shortcoming in a poet to be moved by religious experience as a historical phenomenon--makes relevance of question to his poetry hard to judge. We should both ask What does Professor Hill believe? and wonder whether this is a proper question for his work. …

Re-examining the gesture engram hypothesis. New perspectives on apraxia of tool use

In everyday life, we are led to reuse the same tools (e.g., fork, hammer, coffee-maker), raising the question as to whether we have to systematically recreate the idea of the manipulation which is associated with these tools. The gesture engram hypothesis offers a straightforward answer to this issue, by suggesting that activation of gesture engrams provides a processing advantage, avoiding portions of the process from being reconstructed de novo with each experience. At first glance, the gesture engram hypothesis appears very plausible. But, behind this beguiling simplicity lies a set of unresolved difficulties: (1) What is the evidence in favour of the idea that the mere observation of a tool is sufficient to activate the corresponding gesture engram? (2) If tool use can be supported by a direct route between a structural description system and gesture engrams, what is the role of knowledge about tool function? (3) And, more importantly, what does it mean to store knowledge about how to manipulate tools? We begin by outlining some of the main formulations of the gesture engram hypothesis. Then, we address each of these issues in more detail. To anticipate our discussion, the gesture engram hypothesis appears to be clearly unsatisfactory, notably because of its incapacity to offer convincing answers to these different issues. We conclude by arguing that neuropsychology may greatly benefit from adopting the hypothesis that the idea of how to manipulate a tool is recreated de novo with each experience, thus opening interesting perspectives for future research on apraxia.

Robert Maillart’s Innovative Use of Concrete

Robert Maillart’s innovative views concerning the use of concrete come within the scope of the history of structures, structural materials and concrete as a material of structure. It will even lead us far beyond these issues. At the end, the point of view expressed in this article will be the view of a structural designer. When preparing this reflection, I realise that there is no straightforward answer to the question: “What is in fact Maillart’s real innovation considering all the contributions he made to the art of engineering?” Putting forward the different aspects mentioned above as an introduction seems to be a more relevant way to find a contemporary answer taking time and context into account. Consequently the first part of this text is a general presentation of Maillart’s works. Following we will make a detour to make what I, and many others, consider to be the most revolutionary aspects of Maillart’s practice fully comprehensible. So starting from the historical development of reinforced concrete as a structural material, we will move to the contemporary context to figure out how the intrinsic structural complexity of concrete is managed today. We will see that some difficulties emerge from the behaviour of concrete in relation to the classic theories of mechanics. If some Modern theories find an answer to the problem, it will become obvious that Maillart had already found a convincing way of dealing with these difficulties. We will then return to Maillart’s works to answer the question through the status he was to give concrete when it came to structural design and the methods he used to achieve his objectives. I hope this will lead us to consider Maillart’s approach as one of the most visionary ever devised.