Memristor-based oscillators are of recent interest, and hence, in this paper, we introduce a new Wien bridge oscillator with a fractional-order memristor. The novelty of the proposed oscillator is the multistability feature and the wide range of fractional orders for which the system shows chaos. We have investigated the various dynamical properties of the proposed oscillator and have presented them in detail. The oscillator is then realized using off-the-shelf components, and the results are compared with that of the numerical results. (...) A combination synchronization scheme is proposed which uses more than one driver systems to synchronize with one response system. Indeed, we use two different techniques where the first one consists of splitting the transmitted signals into two parts where each part is loaded in different drive systems, while the second one consists of dividing time into different intervals and loading the signals in different drive systems. Such techniques improve the antiattack capability of the systems when used for secure communication. (shrink)

Meena Srinivasan began teaching in order to touch lives, but with the demands of covering her curriculum she all but forgot her aspiration. During a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, Meena learned for the first time about mindfulness. In Teach, Breathe, Learn, Srinivasan highlights how mindfulness can be an effective tool in the classroom. What makes this book truly unique is Srinivasan's perspective as a classroom teacher, wrestling daily with the conditions about which she writes. Each chapter (...) begins with a personal narrative concerning a challenge Srinivasan faced during the school day and how a specific mindfulness practice helped. Testimonials from students, colleagues, and parents appear in each chapter, along with a mindfulness practice. Part 1 helps teachers develop compassion and shift from "reacting" to "responding" to demands. Part 2 offers techniques for cultivating loving-kindness and seeing students, colleagues, and parents as oneself. The author shares what research says about the effects of mindfulness practice on academic, social, and emotional learning. The last section of the book introduces the complete curriculum teachers can use to incorporate mindfulness into their classroom, replete with lesson plans, PowerPoint diagrams, handouts, and homework assignments. (shrink)

What ought one to do, epistemically speaking, when faced with a disagreement? Faced with this question, one naturally hopes for an answer that is principled, general, and intuitively satisfying. We want to argue that this is a vain hope. Our claim is that a satisfying answer will prove elusive because of non-transparency: that there is no condition such that we are always in a position to know whether it obtains. When we take seriously that there is nothing, including our own (...) minds, to which we have assured access, the familiar project of formulating epistemic norms is destabilized. In this paper, we will show how this plays out in the special case of disagreement. But we believe that a larger lesson can ultimately be extracted from our discussion: namely, that non-transparency threatens our hope for fully satisfying epistemic norms in general. (shrink)

This paper explains how the practice of ‘no platforming’ can be reconciled with a liberal politics. While opponents say that no platforming flouts ideals of open public discourse, and defenders see it as a justifiable harm-prevention measure, both sides mistakenly treat the debate like a run-of-the-mill free speech conflict, rather than an issue of academic freedom specifically. Content-based restrictions on speech in universities are ubiquitous. And this is no affront to a liberal conception of academic freedom, whose purpose isn’t just (...) to protect the speech of academics, but also to give them the prerogative to determine which views and speakers have sufficient disciplinary credentials to receive a hearing in academic contexts. No platforming should therefore be acceptable to liberals, in principle, in cases where it is used to support a university culture that maintains rigorous disciplinary standards, by denying attention and credibility to speakers without appropriate disciplinary credentials. (shrink)

This article presents a novel challenge to epistemic internalism. The challenge rests on a set of cases which feature subjects forming beliefs under conditions of “bad ideology”—that is, conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining, and are sustained by, systems of social oppression. In such cases, the article suggests, the externalistic view that justification is in part a matter of worldly relations, rather than the internalistic view that justification is solely a matter of how things stand (...) from the agent’s individual perspective, becomes the more intuitively attractive theory. But these “bad ideology” cases do not merely yield intuitive verdicts that favor externalism over internalism. These cases are, moreover, analogous to precisely those canonical cases widely taken to be counterexamples to externalism: cases featuring brains-in-vats, clairvoyants, and dogmatists. That is, such “bad ideology” cases are, in all relevant respects, just like cases that are thought to count against externalism—except that they intuitively favor externalism. This, the author argues, is a serious worry for internalism. What is more, it bears on the debate over whether externalism is a genuinely “normative” epistemology. (shrink)

We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that (...) this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them. (shrink)

A cohesive power of a structure is an effective analog of the classical ultrapower of a structure. We start with a computable structure, and consider its effective power over a cohesive set of natural numbers. A cohesive set is an infinite set of natural numbers that is indecomposable with respect to computably enumerable sets. It plays the role of an ultrafilter, and the elements of a cohesive power are the equivalence classes of certain partial computable functions determined by the cohesive (...) set. Thus, unlike many classical ultrapowers, a cohesive power is a countable structure. In this paper we focus on cohesive powers of graphs, equivalence structures, and computable structures with a single unary function satisfying various properties, which can also be viewed as directed graphs. For these computable structures, we investigate the isomorphism types of their cohesive powers, as well as the properties of cohesive powers when they are not isomorphic to the original structure. (shrink)

Current EEG research emphasizes gamma band coherence as a signature of functional integration, that is, the solution to the binding problem. We note that spatial patterns of coherent neural activity are also observed at other EEG frequencies. If these oscillations reflect Nunez's resonant modes, they offer a solution to the binding problem that emerges naturally from the architecture of cortical connections.

Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin-for-error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin-for-error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (...) assumptions. In this paper I bolster the margin-for-error premise against these attacks by recasting Williamson's own two-part defence, the first part intended to work on the assumption that there is no constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic, and the second intended to work without this assumption. Pace various luminists, I argue that the appeals to safety needed for Williamson's two-part defence are plausible. I also argue that all that is needed to generate the margin-for-error premise from these safety conditions is an empirical assumption about the kinds of creatures we are: that is, creatures whose beliefs are structured by certain dispositions. By recasting the anti-luminosity argument in this way, we can understand what is really at stake in the debate about luminosity: that is, whether we are luminous. (shrink)

Metaphors and other tropes are commonly thought to reflect asymmetries in concreteness, with concrete sources being used to talk about relatively more abstract targets. Similarly, originating sense...

We examined proactive and reactive control effects in the context of task-relevant happy, sad, and angry facial expressions on a face-word Stroop task. Participants identified the emotion expressed by a face that contained a congruent or incongruent emotional word. Proactive control effects were measured in terms of the reduction in Stroop interference as a function of previous trial emotion and previous trial congruence. Reactive control effects were measured in terms of the reduction in Stroop interference as a function of current (...) trial emotion and previous trial congruence. Previous trial negative emotions exert greater influence on proactive control than the positive emotion. Sad faces in the previous trial resulted in greater reduction in the Stroop interference for happy faces in the current trial. However, current trial angry faces showed stronger adaptation effects compared to happy faces. Thus, both proactive and reactive control mechanisms are dependent on emotional valence of task-relevant stimuli. (shrink)

Text document classification and clustering is an important learning task which fits to both data mining and machine learning areas. The learning task throws several challenges when it is required to process high dimensional text documents. Word distribution in text documents plays a very key role in learning process. Research related to high dimensional text document classification and clustering is usually limited to application of traditional distance functions and most of the research contributions in the existing literature did not consider (...) the word distribution in documents. In this research, we propose a novel similarity function for feature pattern clustering and high dimensional text classification. The similarity function proposed is used to carry supervised learning based dimensionality reduction. The important feature of this work is that the word distribution before and after dimensionality reduction is the same. Experiment results prove the proposed approach achieves dimensionality reduction, retains the word distribution and obtained better classification accuracies compared to other measures. (shrink)

Mindfulness can be understood as the mental ability to focus on the direct and immediate perception or monitoring of the present moment with a state of open and nonjudgmental awareness. Descriptions of mindfulness and methods for cultivating it originated in eastern spiritual traditions. These suggest that mindfulness can be developed through meditation practice to increase positive qualities such as awareness, insight, wisdom, and compassion. In this article we focus on the relationships between mindfulness, with associated meditation practices, and the cognitive (...) neuroscience of attention and awareness. Mindful awareness is related to distributed attention, phenomenal consciousness, and momentary self-awareness, as characterized by recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience as well as in influential consciousness models. Finally, we outline an integrated neurocognitive model of mindfulness, attention, and awareness, with a key role of prefrontal cortex. (shrink)

Integrated information theory of consciousness proposes an identity between its causal structure and phenomenology. Through this assertion, IIT aims to explain consciousness by prioritizing first-person experience. However, despite its phenomenology-first stance, developments in IIT have overlooked temporality. As such, we argue that at present IIT’s phenomenological analysis is incomplete. In this critique, we show how IIT takes a non-identical illusionist stance towards the experiences of continuity, flow, and extent of our experiences. Moreover, in isolating temporal grains of experience to a (...) single timescale, IIT misses out on capturing the multi-scale nested nature of temporal phenomena. Hence, we contend that IIT needs an axiom for time, through which its causal structure can be refined to account for temporal experiences. Here, we propose an axiom to address these concerns. We conclude by discussing how IIT may need to be revised if our concerns hold true. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:We extend the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) poverty-alleviation approach by recognizing the poor as valuable suppliers—specifically of intellectual property. Although the poor possess huge reserves of intellectual property, they are unable to participate in global knowledge networks owing to their illiteracy and poverty. This is a crippling form of social exclusion in today’s growing knowledge economy because it adversely affects their capabilities for advancement at several levels. Providing the poor access to global knowledge networks as rightful participants—as suppliers of (...) intellectual property—leads to poverty alleviation as a result of their increased social inclusion, not only through economic benefits, but also through the poor’s improved well-being as a result of their increased self-esteem and dignity. Using concepts from social network theory, we develop a poverty-alleviation approach to harness and integrate the intellectual property of the poor into global knowledge networks through trust-based partnerships among the poor, non-governmental organizations, and multinational corporations. (shrink)

. This paper endeavors to formalize imperatives that convey actions. Imperatives, unlike propositions, do not hold the value of true or false. Peter Vranas proposed an alternate logical formalism in the literature of imperative logic with three values, namely: Satisfaction (), Violation () and Avoidance (). Although this formalism takes into account the conditional imperatives, it does not address imperatives from the perspective of actions. According to Mīmāṁsā, the prime motive of an imperative is to carry out action so as (...) to reach the goal. This paper modifies the notion of Vranas' imperative logic using Mīmāṁsā principles. The resulting imperative formalism, focusing on action representation, is presented with syntax, deduction rules and semantic tables. The effectiveness of this representation is demonstrated in the area of artificial intelligence planning. (shrink)

What is it for an analytic philosopher to do ideology critique? Just how useful are the proprietary tools of analytic philosophy when it comes to thinking about ideology, and in what sense ‘useful’, and to whom? And to what end might analytic philosophers pursue ideology critique? Here I attempt to say something about these questions by commenting on a recent contribution to analytic ideology critique, Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works.¿Qué significa para un filósofo analítico hacer crítica de la ideología? ¿En (...) qué medida son útiles las herramientas propias de la filosofía analítica cuando se trata de pensar sobre la ideología, y en qué sentido de ‘útiles’, y para quién? Y ¿con qué fin podrían emprender los filósofos analíticos la crítica de la ideología? Aquí pretendo decir algo acerca de estas cuestiones comentando una reciente contribución a la crítica analítica de la idelogía, la obra de Jason Stanley How Propaganda Works. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of regulation and legislation on influencing the development and diffusion of technologies and methods of crop production. To do this, the change in pesticide registration under European Regulation 1107/2009 ‘Placing Plant Protection Products on the Market’ was followed through the UK’s agricultural system of innovation. Fieldwork included: a series of interviews conducted with scientists, agronomists and industry organisations; a programme of visiting agricultural events; as well as sending an electronic survey to British potato growers. The (...) innovation system is noted to have made the legislation less restrictive than originally proposed. The most notable system response to the legislation is the adjustment of agrochemical company pesticide discovery strategy and their expansion into biologically derived treatments. There have also been other innovation responses: agricultural seed companies have been breeding in pathogen resistance in their cultivars; agricultural consultancies are prepared to recommend pathogen-resistant seeds; scientists are using the change as justification for adopting their solutions; the agricultural levy boards funded research into off-label pesticide uses; and producers, potato growers in particular, have been seeking advice, but not changing their growing practices. (shrink)