This paper studies general numerical networks with support and attack. Our starting point is argumentation networks with the Caminada labelling of three values 1=in, 0=out and ½=undecided. This is generalised to arbitrary values in [01], which enables us to compare with other numerical networks such as predator?prey ecological networks, flow networks, logical modal networks and more. This new point of view allows us to see the place of argumentation networks in the overall landscape of networks and import and export ideas (...) to and from argumentation networks. We make a special effort to make clear how general concepts in general networks relate to the special case of argumentation networks. We pay special attention to the handling of loops and to the special features of numerical support. We find surprising connections with the Dempster?Shafer rule and with the cross-ratio in projective geometry. This paper is an expansion of our 2005 paper and so we also consider higher level features such as numerical attacks on attacks, and propagation of numerical values.We conclude with a brief view of temporal numerical argumentation and with a detailed comparison with related papers published since 2005. (shrink)

The traditional Dung networks depict arguments as atomic and study the relationships of attack between them. This can be generalised in two ways. One is to consider various forms of attack, support, feedback, etc. Another is to add content to nodes and put there not just atomic arguments but more structure, e.g. proofs in some logic or simply just formulas from a richer language. This paper offers to use temporal and modal language formulas to represent arguments in the nodes of (...) a network. The suitable semantics for such networks is Kripke semantics. We also introduce a new key concept of usability of an argument. This is the beginning of a continuing research for adding contents to the nodes of an argumentation network. This research will allow us to address notions like ?what does it exactly mean for a node to attack another? or ?what does it mean for a network to be consistent? or ?can we give proper proof rules to manipulate networks?, and more. (shrink)

Managing grand challenges demands a relational leader who encourages collaboration, coordination, and trust with various stakeholders. Although leaders appear to play a critical role in addressing grand challenges, relatively little research exists about the factors that inform stakeholder perceptions of leaders during a grand challenge. To address this limitation, we integrate implicit leadership theory and gender role theory to consider stakeholders’ gender prescriptive expectations when evaluating leader effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic. We theorize that stakeholders advantage female leaders based on (...) mental schemas of what is required in a pandemic—relational leadership—and stakeholders’ prescriptive expectations of female leaders as more relational. Using a laboratory experiment, we find that female leaders are perceived as more relational, and hence, more effective than their male counterparts. Our findings advance scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of strategic leadership, stakeholder management, and grand challenges. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to communicate some developments in what we call the new logic. In a nutshell the new logic is a model of the behaviour of a logical agent. By these lights, logical theory has two principal tasks. The first is an account of what a logical agent is. The second is a description of how this behaviour is to be modelled. Before getting on with these tasks we offer a disclaimer and a warning. The disclaimer (...) is that although the new logic is significantly different from it, we have no inclination to see the new logic as a rival of mathematical logic. We do not advocate the displacement of, e.g. model theory, but rather its supplementation or adaptation. The warning is that, whereas mathematical logic must eschew psychologism, the new logic cannot do without it. The fuller story of the new logic must eschew psychologism, the new logic cannot do without it. The fuller story of the new logic is part of our book, The Reach of Abduction, scheduled to appear in 2001 or early 2002. (shrink)

Stone-walling dialogues are exercises in structured non-cooperation. It is true that dialogue participants need to cooperate with one another and in ways sufficient to make possible the very dialogue they are now having. Beyond that there is room for non-cooperation on a scale that gives great offence to what we call the Goody Two-Shoes Model of argument. In this paper, we argue that non-cooperation dialogues have perfectly legitimate objectives and that in relation to those objectives they need not be considered (...) at all subpar to conversations that brim with sunny amity.Two categories of stone-walling non-cooperation dialogues are here examined. They are called MindClosed and NoEngage. They are exemplified by the following cases:1. Hostile Police Interrogation2. Judicial Cross-Examination3. Department Store Complaints Management4. Lakatosian Science5. Gödel's First Incompleteness Proof. (shrink)

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

of (from Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics).

This chapter is offered as a contribution to the logic of down below. We attempt to demonstrate that the nature of human agency necessitates that there actually be such a logic. The ensuing sections develop the suggestion that cognition down below has a structure strikingly similar to the physical structure of quantum states. In its general form, this is not an idea that originates with the present authors. It is known that there exist mathematical models from the cognitive science of (...) cognition down below that have certain formal similarities to quantum mechanics. We want to take this idea seriously. We will propose that the subspaces of von Neumann-Birkhoff lattices are too crisp for modelling requisite cognitive aspects in relation to subsymbolic logic. Instead, we adopt an approach which relies on projections into nonorthogonal density states. The projection operator is motivated from cues which probe human memory. (shrink)

Access to abortion services in the United States continues to decline. It does so not because of significant changes in legislation or court rulings but because fewer and fewer physicians wish to perform abortions and because most states now have "conscientious objection" legislation that makes it easy for physicians to refuse to do so. We argue in this paper that physicians have an obligation to perform all socially sanctioned medical services, including abortions, and thus that the burden of justification lies (...) upon those who wish to be excused from that obligation. That is, such persons should have to show how requiring them to perform abortions would represent a serious threat to their fundamental moral or religious beliefs. We use current California law as an example of legislation that does not take physicians' obligations into account and thus allows them too easily to declare conscientious objection. (shrink)

The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms to correct the literature, much time and money is wasted on research based on a crumbling foundation. These guidelines serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record. Delineating these complementary roles and proposing solutions for common (...) barriers provide a foundation for best practices. (shrink)

The recently uncovered role of Fukutin‐related protein (FKRP) in fibronectin glycosylation has challenged our understanding of the basis of disease pathogenesis in the muscular dystrophies. FKRP is a Golgi‐resident glycosyltransferase implicated in a broad spectrum of muscular dystrophy (MD) pathologies that are not fully attributable to the well‐described α‐Dystroglycan hypoglycosylation. By revealing a new role for FKRP in the glycosylation of fibronectin, a modification critical for the development of the muscle basement membrane (MBM) and its associated muscle linkages, new possibilities (...) for understanding clinical phenotype arise. This modification involves an interaction between FKRP and myosin‐10, a protein involved in the Golgi organization and function. These observations suggest a FKRP nexus exists that controls two critical aspects to muscle fibre integrity, both fibre stability at the MBM and its elastic properties. This review explores the new potential disease axis in the context of our current knowledge of muscular dystrophies. (shrink)

In evolutionary psychology predictions, women’s mate preferences shift between fertile and nonfertile times of the month to reflect ancestral fitness benefits. Our meta-analytic test involving 58 independent reports was largely nonsupportive. Specifically, fertile women did not especially desire sex in short-term relationships with men purported to be of high genetic quality. The few significant preference shifts appeared to be research artifacts. The effects declined over time in published work, were limited to studies that used broader, less precise definitions of the (...) fertile phase, and were found only in published research. (shrink)

RNA localization is a powerful strategy used by cells to localize proteins to subcellular domains and to control protein synthesis regionally. In germ cells, RNA targeting has profound implications for development, setting up polarities in genetic information that drive cell fate during embryogenesis. The frog oocyte offers a useful system for studying the mechanism of RNA localization. Here, we discuss critically the process of RNA localization during frog oogenesis. Three major pathways have been identified that are temporally and spatially separated (...) in oogenesis. Each pathway uses a different mechanism to effect RNA localization. In some cases, localization elements within the 3' untranslated region have been identified and have provided unique insights into the localization process. This important field is still in its infancy, however, and much remains to be learned. BioEssays 21:546–557, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...) made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration. (shrink)

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is small deviations from perfect symmetry in normally bilaterally symmetrical traits. We examined the relationship between FA of five body traits (ear height, length of three digits, and ankle circumference) and self-reported scores of physical and verbal aggression in a sample of 90 boys aged 10 to 15 years. The relationships between FA and scores of aggression (particularly physical aggression) were found to be negative; in other words, the most symmetrical boys showed highest aggression. One trait (ankle (...) circumference) showed the characteristics of “ideal” FA—parametric mean of zero and a normal distribution. Mean asymmetries calculated from six repeated measures of ankle FA in 30 subjects taken over a period of five months showed strong negative associations with scores of physical aggression which were independent of age, height, and weight.It is argued that soft tissue “cyclical” FA (as opposed to “fixed” bony FA) is dependent on the secretion of hormones: for example, cortisol. Causal associations between behavioral traits such as aggresion and hormones will lead to similar correlations between FA and behavior. (shrink)

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...) made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the continued circulation and use of retracted science as a complex problem: Multiple stakeholders throughout the publishing ecosystem hold competing perceptions of this problem and its possible solutions. We describe how we used a participatory design process model to co-develop recommendations for addressing this problem with stakeholders in the Alfred P. Sloan-funded project, Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS). After introducing the four core RISRS recommendations, we discuss how the issue of retraction-related stigma (...) gives rise to recommendation #4, Educate stakeholders about retraction and pre- and post-publication stewardship of the scholarly record. This recommendation is important for training publishing professionals and realizing this recommendation will require further collaborative design work across scholarly communications. We highlight ongoing stakeholder work which is now re-starting the design cycle. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing activities facilitating uptake and refinement of RISRS research and the implementation agenda. (shrink)

The complexity of biobank research raises concerns about individuals’ understanding of the information conveyed in the consent process for such research.. We report the results of a qualitative, cognitive interview study with an ethnically, linguistically, and educationally diverse sample of 43 respondents to assess the clarity and utility of a multimedia tool developed for a biobank. Using weighted randomization, respondents were assigned to either view the multimedia tool or read a written consent document . The study illustrates the utility of (...) cognitive interviews for gaining insights from prospective research participants about the clarity of informed consent tools. Findings suggest that a multimedia tool is useful for communicating key messages but should be combined with a written consent document and personal interaction with the study staff. We recommend that the potential value of multimedia tools should be more rigorously tested in a randomized controlled trial. (shrink)