This study addresses the problem of output quasisynchronization for coupled complex-valued memristive reaction-diffusion complex networks via the distributed event-triggered control scheme. First, by using the separate method, set value mapping, and intermediate value theorem, the complex-valued memristive reaction-diffusion complex networks can be transferred into two semi-uncertain real-valued reaction-diffusion complex networks. Second, a distributed output piecewise event-triggered control scheme with spatial sampled-data is first proposed including a spatial sampling event-triggered generator and spatiotemporal sampling state feedback controller. Furthermore, this (...) scheme can effectively save the measurement resources and lower the update rate of controllers in spatial and time domain. Third, the synchronization analysis is considered by utilizing an appropriate Lyapunov function, the Halanay inequality, and the improved Wirtinger inequality. Subsequently, several output event-triggered quasisynchronization criteria are derived. The relations among event trigger conditions, spatial sampling interval, convergence rate, and control gain are given by rigorous mathematical derivation. Finally, multiple simulations are compared to substantiate the validation of the OPETC scheme. (shrink)

A manifestly covariant relativistic statistical mechanics of a system of N indistinguishable events with motion in space-time parametrized by an invariant “historical time” τ is considered. The relativistic mass distribution for such a system is obtained from the equilibrium solution of the generalized relativistic Boltzmann equation by integration over angular and hyperangular variables. All the characteristic averages are calculated. Expressions for the pressure and the energy density are found, and the relativistic equation of state is obtained. Validity criteria are (...) defined. The Galilean limit is considered; the theory is shown to pass over to the usual nonrelativistic statistical mechanics of indistinguishable particles. Anti-events are introduced; for an event-anti-event system the equation of state p, ρ ∝ T 6 is found, which gives the value of the sound velocity c 2 = 0.20, in agreement with the “realistic” equation of state suggested by Shuryak for hot hadronic matter. (shrink)

We find the equation of state p, ρ ∫ T 6,which gives the value of the sound velocity c 27 = 0.20,in agreement with the “realistic” equation of state for hot hadronic matter suggested by Shuryak, in the framework of a covariant relativistic statistical mechanics of an event-anti-event system with small chemical and mass potentials. The relativistic mass distribution for such a system is obtained and shown to be a good candidate for fitting hadronic resonances, in agreement (...) with the phenomenological models of Hagedorn, Shuryak, et al. This distribution provides a correction to the value of specific heat 3/2,of the order of 5.5%,at low temperatures. (shrink)

This study proposes a new quadrat method that can be applied to the study of point distributions in a network space. While the conventional planar quadrat method remains one of the most fundamental spatial analytical methods on a two-dimensional plane, its quadrats are usually identified by regular, square grids. However, assuming that they are observed along a network, points in a single quadrat are not necessarily close to each other in terms of their network distance. Using planar quadrats in such (...) cases may distort the representation of the distribution pattern of points on a network. The network-based units used in this article, on the other hand, consist of subsets of the actual network, providing more accurate aggregation of the data points along the network. The performance of the network-based quadrat method is compared with that of the conventional quadrat method through a case study on a point distribution on a network. The χ2 statistic and Moran's I statistic of the two quadrat types indicate that (1) the conventional planar quadrat method tends to overestimate the overall degree of dispersion and (2) the network-based quadrat method derives a more accurate estimate on the local similarity. The article also performs sensitivity analysis on network and planar quadrats across different scales and with different spatial arrangements, in which the abovementioned statistical tendencies are also confirmed. (shrink)

Extreme events, which are usually characterized by generalized extreme value models, can exhibit long-term memory, whose impact needs to be quantified. It was known that extreme recurrence intervals can better characterize the significant influence of long-term memory than using the GEV model. Our statistical analyses based on time series datasets following the Lévy stable distribution confirm that the stretched exponential distribution can describe a wide spectrum of memory behavior transition from exponentially distributed intervals to power-law distributed ones, extending (...) the previous evaluation of the stretched exponential function using Gaussian/exponential distributed random data. Further deviation and discussion of a historical paradox are also provided, based on the theoretical analysis of the Bayesian law and the stretched exponential distribution. (shrink)

The external worlds do not objectively exist for living systems because these worlds are unknown from within systems. How can they escape solipsism to survive and reproduce as open systems? Living systems must construct their hypothetical models of external entities in the form of their internal structures to determine how to change states (i.e., sense and act) appropriately to achieve a favorable probability distribution of the events they experience. The model construction involves the generation of symbols referring to external (...) entities. This paper attempts to provide a new view that living systems are an inverse-causality operator. Inverse causality (IC) is an algorithmic process that generates symbols referring to external reality states based on a given data sequence. For applying this logical model involving if–then entailments to living systems involving material interactions, the cognizers-system model was employed to represent the IC process; here, living systems were modeled as a subject of cognition and action. A focal subject system is described as a cognizer composed of sub-cognizers, such as a sensor, a signal transducer, and an effector. Analysis using this model proposes that living systems invented the “measurers” for conducting IC operations through their evolution. (shrink)

ERPs (event-related potentials) correlates are largely used in cognitive psychology and specifically for analysis of semantic information processing. Previous research has underlined a strong correlation between a negative-ongoing wave (N400), more frontally distributed, and semantic linguistic or extra-linguistic anomalies. With reference to the extra-linguistic domain, our experiment analyzed ERP variation in a semantic task of comprehension of emotional facial expressions. The experiment explored the effect of expectancy violation when subjects observed congruous or incongruous emotional facial patterns. Four prototypical (anger, (...) sadness, happiness and surprise) and four morphed faces were presented. Moreover, two distinct cognitive tasks (an implicit vs an explicit elaboration) were analyzed in order to evaluate the influence of spontaneous decoding in N400-like effects. An automatic, high-order cognitive process was found, elicited by a negative ERP variation similar to the linguistic N400 effect, which allows us to explain the congruous/incongruous decoding in semantic extra-linguistic comprehension. (shrink)

Distributional semantic models (DSMs) are a primary method for distilling semantic information from corpora. However, a key question remains: What types of semantic relations among words do DSMs detect? Prior work typically has addressed this question using limited human data that are restricted to semantic similarity and/or general semantic relatedness. We tested eight DSMs that are popular in current cognitive and psycholinguistic research (positive pointwise mutual information; global vectors; and three variations each of Skip-gram and continuous bag of words (CBOW) (...) using word, context, and mean embeddings) on a theoretically motivated, rich set of semantic relations involving words from multiple syntactic classes and spanning the abstract–concrete continuum (19 sets of ratings). We found that, overall, the DSMs are best at capturing overall semantic similarity and also can capture verb–noun thematic role relations and noun–noun event-based relations that play important roles in sentence comprehension. Interestingly, Skip-gram and CBOW performed the best in terms of capturing similarity, whereas GloVe dominated the thematic role and event-based relations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results, make recommendations for users of these models, and demonstrate significant differences in model performance on event-based relations. (shrink)

The paper tries to examine the effects of economic crisis on philosophical considerations of distributive justice. It tackles the problem of a radical increase in scarcity as a condition of justice. Instead of assuming a relatively fixed (“moderate”) level of scarcity as a background against which justice in distribution obtains, the paper examines what happens when this level risks falling below and how does that change our views of distributive justice. It takes upon the recent events in the United (...) States to construe a specific philosophical model and ask how crisis distribution, where that favors wealthier actors, can be justified. By analyzing the crisis distribution principle, it ultimately aims to suggest that moderate scarcity should not be seen as a mere condition, but an important and vital object of justice. As such it falls within, not beyond legitimate obligations of democratic governance. (shrink)

The event-triggered consensus control for leader-following multiagent systems subjected to external disturbances is investigated, by using the output feedback. In particular, a novel distributed event-triggered protocol is proposed by adopting dynamic observers to estimate the internal state information based on the measurable output signal. It is shown that under the developed observer-based event-triggered protocol, multiple agents will reach consensus with the desired disturbance attenuation ability and meanwhile exhibit no Zeno behaviors. Finally, a simulation is presented to verify (...) the obtained results. (shrink)

Plurality, Conjunction and Events presents a novel theory of plural and conjoined phrases, in an event-based semantic framework. It begins by reviewing options for treating the alternation between `collective' and `distributive' readings of sentences containing plural or conjoined noun phrases, including analyses from both the modern and the premodern literature. It is argued that plural and conjoined noun phrases are unambiguously group-denoting, and that the collective/distributive distinction therefore must be located in the predicates with which these noun phrases combine. (...) More specifically, predicates must have a hidden argument place for events; the collective/distributive distinction may then be represented in the part/whole structure of these events. This allows a natural treatment of `collectivizing' adverbial expressions, and of `pluractional' affixes; it also allows a unified semantics for conjunction, in which conjoined sentences and predicates denote groups of events, much like conjoined noun phrases denote groups of individuals. (shrink)

An influential approach to engineering ethics is based on codes of ethics and the application of moral principles by individual practitioners. However, to better understand the ethical problems of complex technological systems and the moral reasoning involved in such contexts, we need other tools as well. In this article, we consider the role of imagination and develop a concept of distributed responsibility in order to capture a broader range of human abilities and dimensions of moral responsibility. We show that in (...) the case of Snorre A, a near-disaster with an oil and gas production installation, imagination played a crucial and morally relevant role in how the crew coped with the crisis. For example, we discuss the role of scenarios and images in the moral reasoning and discussion of the platform crew in coping with the crisis. Moreover, we argue that responsibility for increased system vulnerability, turning an undesired event into a near-disaster, should not be ascribed exclusively, for example to individual engineers alone, but should be understood as distributed between various actors, levels and times. We conclude that both managers and engineers need imagination to transcend their disciplinary perspectives in order to improve the robustness of their organisations and to be better prepared for crisis situations. We recommend that education and training programmes should be transformed accordingly. (shrink)

In this paper we examine interactions of the reciprocal with distributive and collective operators, which are encoded by prefixes on verbs expressing the reciprocal relation: namely, the Czech distributive po and the collectivizing na-. The theoretical import of this study is two-fold. First, it contributes to our knowledge of how word-internal operators interact with phrasal syntax/semantics. Second, the prefixes po and na generate (a range of) readings of reciprocal sentences for which the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (SMH) proposed by Dalrymple et (...) al. (1998) does not make the right predictions. The distributive prefix po prefers the Strong Reciprocity reading, although the SMH predicts that a weakening should take place, while with the prefix na we find cases where weaker reciprocal readings are preferable to the stronger ones predicted by the SMH. This behavior of po and na is, we propose, due to the way in which they modulate two factors that are crucial in the interpretation of reciprocal sentences: (i) the relevant subpluralities in the group denoted by the reciprocal's antecedent, and (ii) the strength of reciprocal relations. We provide a detailed analysis of the semantics of the prefixes po and na and their contribution to the meaning of reciprocal sentences within the general framework of event semantics with lattice structures. (shrink)

The information processing capacity of the human mind is limited, as is evidenced by the so-called ‘‘attentional-blink’’ deficit: When two targets (T1 and T2) embedded in a rapid stream of events are presented in close temporal proximity, the second target is often not seen. This deficit is believed to result from competition between the two targets for limited attentional resources. Here we show, using performance in an attentional-blink task and scalp-recorded brain potentials, that meditation, or mental training, affects the (...) class='Hi'>distribution of limited brain resources. Three months of intensive mental training resulted in a smaller attentional blink and reduced brain-resource allocation to the first target, as reflected by a smaller T1-elicited P3b, a brain-potential index of resource allocation. Furthermore, those individuals that showed the largest decrease in brain-resource allocation to T1 generally showed the greatest reduction in attentional-blink size. These observations provide novel support for the view that the ability to accurately identify T2 depends upon the efficient deployment of resources to T1. The results also demonstrate that mental training can result in increased control over the distribution of limited brain resources. Our study supports the idea that plasticity in brain and mental function exists throughout life and illustrates the usefulness of systematic mental training in the study of the human mind. (shrink)

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally (...) different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. (shrink)

1. John Rawls' A Theory of Justice represented a rare intellectual event. It advanced a fresh, detailed and powerful conception of political economy, and rooted that conception in an elaborately worked out political and moral philosophy. Rawls' two principles of justice, with the celebrated maximin standard of distributive justice, represent the point of departure for any serious discussion of this subject. The details of Rawls' proposal are too well known to require summary. Instead, I shall call attention to the (...) basic premise of his work and to a significant anomaly in it, as setting the stage for my own proposal. (shrink)

Being a member of both local and global teams requires constant distribution and re-distribution of attention, engagement, and intensive communication over synchronous and asynchronous channels with remote and local partners. We explore in this paper the increasing number of social worlds such participants distribute their attention to, how this affects their level of engagement and attention, and how the workspace, collaboration technologies, and interaction modes afford and constrain the communicative events. The use of information and collaboration technologies (ICT) (...) shapes and reshapes work spaces, processes, and social interactions among team members, and team members reshape ICT and the way it is used. We use as a testbed the AEC Global Teamwork course established at Stanford in 1993 in collaboration with universities worldwide and provide examples from two sites—Stanford PBL Lab, California USA and Chalmers University, Goteborg Sweden. We used temporal analysis and qualitative methods of inquiry in order to study participants’ attention, how they used the site and the means, i.e., their social and material resources, to accomplish their interaction needs, and how they engaged throughout project reviews. (shrink)

Contributors to this book include key theorists and practitioners from media theory, Native Science, bio-media and sound art, philosophy, art history and design informatics. Collectively, they examine the becoming-technique of animal-human- machinic perceptibilities; and micro-perceptions that lie beneath the threshold of known perceptions yet create energetic vibrations. Who, what, and where perceives, and how? What are the sedimentations, inscriptions and axiologies of animal, human and machinic perceptions? What are their perceptibilities? Deleuze uses the word 'visibilities' to indicate that visual perception (...) isn't just a physiological given but cues operations productive of new assemblages. Perceptibilities are, by analogy, spatio- temporal, geolocative, kinaesthetic, audio-visual, and haptic operations that are always already memory. In the case of strong inscriptions, they are also epigenetic events. The contributors show distributed perception to be a key notion in addressing the emergence and persistence of plant, animal, human and machine relations. An invaluable reference for students and scholars in a range of areas including Media Theory, Sociology, Philosophy, Art and Design. (shrink)

Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term 'language' as defined in the language sciences of the 20th century and the traditions these have drawn on, have arguably, limited our thinking about what language is and does. The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault's study articulate crucially important aspects of an emerging new perspective shift on language - the Distributed Language view - that is now receiving more and more attention internationally. Rejecting the classical view that the fundamental (...) architecture of language can be localized as a number of inter-related levels of formal linguistic organization that function as the coded inputs and outputs to each other, the distributed language view argues that languaging behaviour is a bio-cultural organisation of process that is embodied, multimodal, and integrated across multiple space-time scales. Thibault argues that we need to think of human languaging as the distinctively human mode of our becoming and being selves in the extended human ecology and the kinds of experiencing that this makes possible. Paradoxically, this also means thinking about language in non-linguistic ways that break the grip of the conventional meta-languages for thinking about human languaging. Thibault's book grounds languaging in process theory: languaging and the forms of experience it actualizes is always an event, not a thing that we 'use'. In taking a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, the book relates dialogical theories of human sense-making to the distributed view of human cognition, to recent thinking about distributed language, to ecological psychology, and to languaging as inter-individual affective dynamics grounded in the subjective lives of selves. In taking this approach, the book considers the coordination of selves in social encounters, the emergent forms of self-reflexivity that characterise these encounters, and the implications for how we think of and live our human sociality, not as something that is mediated by over-arching codes and systems, but as emerging from the endogenous subjectivities of selves when they seek to coordinate with other selves and with the situations, artefacts, social institutions, and technologies that populate the extended human ecology. The two volumes aim to bring our understanding of human languaging closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling while also showing how languaging enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue with cultural tradition. Volume 1 focuses on the shorter timescales of bodily dynamics in languaging activity. Volume II integrates the shorter timescales of body dynamics to the longer cultural-historical timescales of the linguistic and cultural norms and patterns to which bodily dynamics are integrated. (shrink)

Based on event history analysis, this study examined the survival distribution of the duration of online public opinions related to major health emergencies and its influencing factors. We analyzed the data of such emergencies that took place in China during a period of 10 years. The results of the Kaplan-Meier method and Cox proportional hazards regression analysis showed that the average duration of online public opinions regarding health emergencies is 43 days, and the median is 19 days, which (...) dispels the myth of the “Seven-day Law of Propagation.” Furthermore, the duration of online public opinions can be divided into three stages: the rapid decline stage, the slowdown stage, and the disappearing stage. In addition, the type of event, and the volume of both social media discussion and traditional media coverage all had significant impacts on the duration. Our findings provide practical implications for the carrying out of targeted and stage-based governance of public opinions. (shrink)

This article offers a Nietzschean theory of digital will to power to conceptualize the temporality of social media feeds run by algorithms. Stylistic and methodological temporalities of Nietzsche are discussed as well as their influence in subsequent social theory of political technologies. The paradox of heavy investment in both subjective expression and nonhuman temporalization in social media milieus is addressed with the concept of an event-without-witness drawn from Nietzsche’s account of himself as the solitary thinker of catastrophe of nihilism (...) and psychoanalytical and deconstructive literatures on the catastrophes of the 20th century. Nietzsche’s fundamental resistance to and fascination with the philosophical and cultural modes of mummyfication, i.e. eternalization as an expression of the will to power is used to think the will to power in the creative algorithmic temporalization of social interactions through the selection, distribution and serialization of data for social media feeds. (shrink)

Contention about who discovered the compound nature of water (the 'water controversy') occurred in two phases. During the first phase, in the 1780s, the claimants to the discovery (Antoine Lavoisier, Henry Cavendish, and James Watt) produced the work on which their claims were based. This phase of controversy was relatively short and did not generate much heat, although it was part of the larger debates surrounding the 'chemical revolution'. The second phase of controversy, in the 1830s and 1840s, saw heated (...) exchanges in Britain between advocates of Watt on the one hand and of Cavendish on the other. This paper concentrates on this second phase. The concern is not to arbitrate the contest but to delineate the pattern of advocacy and the arguments used to support the opposing cases. 'Discovery' is not treated as an event but as the outcome of an after-the-fact process of attribution of credit. Apart from identifying the opposing argumentative strategies employed in making different attributions, the paper also seeks to explain why there was so much concern about this priority dispute long after the deaths of the protagonists. It is shown that while Scottish-English rivalries were important they were not the only or most significant impetus. Ideological struggles over the nature of science provided a context in which the attribution of discovery to Cavendish or to Watt was of major import. These ideological struggles are shown to have roots in the politics of early Victorian science that ultimately lay behind the second phase of the water controversy and shaped the course that it took. (shrink)

This paper concentrates on the event-triggered H ∞ filter design for the discrete-time Markovian jump neural networks under random missing measurements and cyber attacks. Considering that the controlled system and the filtering can exchange information over a shared communication network which is vulnerable to the cyber attacks and has limited bandwidth, the event-triggered mechanism is proposed to relieve the communication burden of data transmission. A variable conforming to Bernoulli distribution is exploited to describe the stochastic phenomenon since (...) the missing measurements occur with random probability. Furthermore, seeing that the communication networks are vulnerable to external malicious attacks, the transferred information via the shared communication network may be changed by the injected false information from the attackers. Based on the above consideration, sufficient conditions for the filtering error system to maintain asymptotically stable are provided with predefined H ∞ performance. In the end, three numerical examples are given to verify the proposed theoretical results. (shrink)

This chapter is concerned with plural discourse in the grammatical sense. The goal of the chapter is to urge the value of the event analysis of the matrix of action sentences in thinking about logical form in plural discourse about action. Among the claims advanced are that: -/- 1. The ambiguity between distributive and collective readings of plural action sentences is not lexical ambiguity, either in the noun phrase (NP) or in the verb phrase (VP), but an ambiguity tracing (...) to the scope of the event quantifier introduced by the action verb. 2. This allows us to analyze collective action sentences in a way that commits us only to individual agents acting when we say that groups act, without denying that there are groups as such or that we talk about them as such. 3. Intermediate readings, that seem to be neither purely distributive nor purely collective, can be explained in terms of the same apparatus. (shrink)

Event segmentation theory posits that people segment continuous experience into discrete events and that event boundaries occur when there are large transient increases in prediction error. Here, we set out to test this theory in the context of story listening, by using a deep learning language model (GPT‐2) to compute the predicted probability distribution of the next word, at each point in the story. For three stories, we used the probability distributions generated by GPT‐2 to compute the (...) time series of prediction error. We also asked participants to listen to these stories while marking event boundaries. We used regression models to relate the GPT‐2 measures to the human segmentation data. We found that event boundaries are associated with transient increases in Bayesian surprise but not with a simpler measure of prediction error (surprisal) that tracks, for each word in the story, how strongly that word was predicted at the previous time point. These results support the hypothesis that prediction error serves as a control mechanism governing event segmentation and point to important differences between operational definitions of prediction error. (shrink)

The ways in which given and new information are distributed, and the functions associated with the distribution, are examined here in terms of information content of relative and adverbial clauses in oral and written narratives. The conventional view that subordinate clauses tend to code given rather than new information is shown to be inadequate. Moreover, a comparison of oral and written narratives of the same events reveals both extensive differences in the two modalities, and at the same time striking (...) similarities in terms of the information distribution within relative clauses. Relative clauses are found to be far more frequent in oral narratives than in their written analogues. However, when the differences are examined in terms of the relative frequencies of given and new relative clauses, the oral narratives are shown to have far more given relative clauses than the written versions, whereas the frequencies for the new relative clauses is virtually identical in the two modalities. This result is attributed to memory constraints. (shrink)

Popper functions allow one to take conditional probabilities as primitive instead of deriving them from unconditional probabilities via the ratio formula P=P/P. A major advantage of this approach is it allows one to condition on events of zero probability. I will show that under plausible symmetry conditions, Popper functions often fail to do what they were supposed to do. For instance, suppose we want to define the Popper function for an isometrically invariant case in two dimensions and hence require the (...) Popper function to be rotationally invariant and defined on pairs of sets from some algebra that contains at least all countable subsets. Then it turns out that the Popper function trivializes for all finite sets: P=1 for all A ) if B is finite. Likewise, Popper functions invariant under all sequence reflections can’t be defined in a way that models a bidirectionally infinite sequence of independent coin tosses. (shrink)

Due to the complexity of the network structure, log analysis is usually necessary for the maintenance of network-based distributed systems since logs record rich information about the system behaviors. In recent years, numerous works have been proposed for log analysis; however, they ignore temporal relationships between logs. In this paper, we target on the problem of mining informative patterns from temporal log data. We propose an approach to discover sequential patterns from event sequences with temporal regularities. Discovered patterns are (...) useful for engineers to understand the behaviors of a network-based distributed system. To solve the well-known problem of pattern explosion, we resort to the minimum description length principle and take a step forward in summarizing the temporal relationships between adjacent events of a pattern. Experiments on real log datasets prove the efficiency and effectiveness of our method. (shrink)

North America is in the grips of an epidemic of opioid-related poisonings. Overdose education and naloxone distribution programmes emerged as an option for structurally vulnerable populations who could not or would not access mainstream emergency medical services in the event of an overdose. These task shifting programmes utilize lay persons to deliver opioid resuscitation in the context of longstanding stigmatization and marginalization from mainstream healthcare services. OEND programmes exist at the intersection of harm reduction and emergency services. One (...) goal of OEND programmes is to help redress the health-related inequities common among people who use drugs, which include minimizing the gap between people who use drugs and the formal healthcare system. However, if this goal is not achieved these inequities may be entrenched. In this article, we consider the ethical promises and perils associated with OEND as task shifting. We argue that public health practitioners must consider the ethical aspects of task shifting programmes that may inadvertently harm already structurally vulnerable populations. We believe that even if OEND programmes reduce opioid-related deaths, we nevertheless question if, by virtue of its existence, OEND programmes might also unintentionally disenfranchise structurally vulnerable populations from comprehensive healthcare services, including mainstream emergency care. (shrink)

It is a commonplace of the critical innovation literature that experiment has replaced mass production as the driving force of accumulation. But while many theorists have explored the politics and dynamics of such economies of experiment under the rubric of ‘immaterial’, cognitive or affective labour, few have examined the intersection of labour, experiment and the speculative in the clinic. Taking the clinic as representative of contemporary transformations in the commodity-form, labour and innovation, this article will look at recent attempts to (...) reform the clinical trial, arguing that these developments represent a far-reaching shift in our understanding of medicine. First, I investigate recent efforts (associated with the discourse of ‘translational medicine’) to rethink the interface between experimental lab-based science and the clinic. I also look at closely associated efforts to reintroduce an element of experimental surprise into the clinical trial process itself, through the adoption of novel trial designs. If the randomized controlled trial was conceived essentially along the lines of a product testing procedure, recent efforts have attempted to reintroduce surprise into the testing process itself – in other words, to invent a trial process capable of producing unexpected events as leads for further innovation. I then move from the experimental clinic to what I call the distributed experiment. Here I focus on efforts to outsource pharmacological innovation to a distributed public of patients through the use of social networking software. These platforms allow drug developers to escape the limits of the conventional clinical trial by tracking the experimental practices taking place in the distributed clinic of unregulated drug consumption. (shrink)

Distributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co‐occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co‐occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co‐occurrences with vector accumulation. All of these models learned from positive information only: Words that occur together within a context become related to each other. A recent class of distributional models, referred to as (...) neural embedding models, are based on a prediction process embedded in the functioning of a neural network: Such models predict words that should surround a target word in a given context (e.g., word2vec; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013). An error signal derived from the prediction is used to update each word's representation via backpropagation. However, another key difference in predictive models is their use of negative information in addition to positive information to develop a semantic representation. The models use negative examples to predict words that should not surround a word in a given context. As before, an error signal derived from the prediction prompts an update of the word's representation, a procedure referred to as negative sampling. Standard uses of word2vec recommend a greater or equal ratio of negative to positive sampling. The use of negative information in developing a representation of semantic information is often thought to be intimately associated with word2vec's prediction process. We assess the role of negative information in developing a semantic representation and show that its power does not reflect the use of a prediction mechanism. Finally, we show how negative information can be efficiently integrated into classic count‐based semantic models using parameter‐free analytical transformations. (shrink)

Culture and social structure may affect the testosterone–behavior link by shaping the way we construe events; by muting, channelling, or amplifying the drives that testosterone produces; and by affecting the distribution and level of testosterone in various parts of the population. Research on testosterone, culture, and social class has produced suggestive results, opening broad areas for research.

In the early years of the 1990s, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists became enthused about the idea that mental states are spatially and temporally distributed in the brain, and that this has significant consequences for philosophy of mind. Daniel Dennett (1991), for example, appealed to the spatial and temporal distribution of cognitive processes in the brain in order to argue that there is no unified place where or time when consciousness occurs in the brain. Dennett used this (...) interim conclusion as a premise in a series of arguments designed to undermine what he calls the “Cartesian Theater” view of consciousness, according to which there is an independent and fact of the matter about when and where conscious mental states occur. Most famously, Dennett argues that anyone who believes there are such facts of the matter must choose between “Orwellian” and “Stalinesque” theories of the timing of consciousness, in order to accommodate certain data about the spatial distribution of the timing of consciousness-related brain events. But, he claims, that distinction is a distinction without a difference: The choice between “Orwellian” and “Stalinesque” views is either nonsense, or at the very least one that we could never be justified in making. And this, Dennett takes it, is a reductio ad absurdum of any theory of consciousness that says there is a fact of the matter about when and where is occurs. (shrink)

Despite the many successes of the relativistic quantum theory developed by Horwitz et al., certain difficulties persist in the associated covariant classical mechanics. In this paper, we explore these difficulties through an examination of the classical. Coulomb problem in the framework of off-shell electrodynamics. As the local gauge theory of a covariant quantum mechanics with evolution paratmeter τ, off-shell electrodynamics constitutes a dynamical theory of ppacetime events, interacting through five τ-dependent pre-Maxwell potentials. We present a straightforward solution of the classical (...) equations of motion, for a test event traversing the field induced by a “fixed” event (an event moving uniformly along the time axis at a fixed point in space). This solution is seen to be unsatisfactory, and reveals the essential difficulties in the formalism at the classical levels. We then offer a new model of the particle current—as a certain distribution of the event currents on the worldline—which eliminates these difficulties and permits comparison of classisical off-shell electrodynamics with the standard Maxwell theory. In this model, the “fixed” event induces a Yukawa-type potential, permitting a semiclassical identification of the pre-Maxwell time scale λ with the inverse mass of the intervening photon. Numerical solutions to the equations of motion are compared with the standard Maxwell solutions, and are seen to coincide when λ≳10−6 seconds, providing an initial estimate of this parameter. It is also demonstrated that the proposed model provides a natural interpretation for the photon mass cut-off required for the renormalizability of the off-shell quantum electrodynamics. (shrink)

This chapter aims to establish the relation between contemporary VJing and the works of Anton Chekhov and Aeschylus through the philosophical thoughts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It examines the way in which theatre and performance can incline themselves towards a wider distribution of difference in life and argues that the VJing event is a democratising performance-form that engages in combat with the normative configurations of image-culture. It argues that it is more important to evaluate the role (...) of performance in directly adding to, or diminishing, life as lived than to evaluate it in terms of the success or failure of its representation of life. (shrink)

In both the Consequences of Compassion and his response to my article, Goodman outlines a consequentialist theory that is both coherent and, in many ways, compelling. One can imagine that out of a concern toward—as Goodman puts it—“the impersonal events which fill the world”, we will accept “momentary experiences as the morally significant units”, and our actions will aim to promote the existence of “good dharmas.” However, as this brief reply argues, Goodman’s equating of a consequentialism focused on good dharmas (...) to a consequentialism focused on individual well-being is unjustified, and, as a consequence, the textual evidence he presents does not support his consequentialist view... (shrink)

Clausal complements of different kinds of attitude verbs such as believe, doubt, be surprised, wonder, say, and whisper behave differently semantically in a number of respects. For example, they differ in the inference patterns they display. This paper develops a semantic account of clausal complements using partial logic which accounts for such semantic differences on the basis of a uniform meaning of clauses. It focuses on explaining the heterogeneous inference patterns associated with different kinds of attitude verbs, but it contributes (...) also to explaining differences among clausal complements of attitude verbs regarding the possibility of de re reference, anaphora support, presupposition satisfaction, and the distribution of subjunctive in certain languages. Moreover, it gives a new account of factivity. The point of departure of this paper is the general observation that the failure of inferences from attitude reports is relative in that it depends both on the general type of attitude and on the particular instance of the attitude described. Thus, from John is surprised that P and Q one cannot infer John is surprised that P and John is surprised that Q, though this is possible with believe. Conversely, one can infer from John believes that P and John believes that Q, to John believes that P and Q, but only as long as the same belief state of John is involved. In order to capture this dependency of inferences from attitude reports on a particular mental state or act, I propose an account on which clausal complements of attitude verbs (as well as independent sentences) characterize the intentional state or act described by the attitude verb in question, rather than referring to independent propositions. The semantic account of attitude reports of this paper can hence be called an 'event-based account' of clauses. Formally, the denotation of any sentence, both independent and embedded, is construed as a function mapping an intentional state or act to a function from situations (which form the content of the state or act) to truth values.. (shrink)

The Generalized Poisson Distribution (GPD) adds an extra parameter to the usual Poisson distribution. This parameter induces a loss of homogeneity in the stochastic processes modeled by the distribution. Thus, the generalized distribution becomes an useful model for counting processes where the occurrence of events is not homogeneous. This model creates the need for an inferential procedure, to test for the value of this extra parameter. The FBST (Full Bayesian Significance Test) is a Bayesian hypotheses test (...) procedure, capable of providing an evidence measure on sharp hypotheses (where the dimension of the parametric space under the null hypotheses is smaller than that of the full parametric space). The goal of this work is study the empirical properties of the FBST for testing the nullity of extra parameter of the generalized Poisson distribution. Numerical experiments show a better performance of FBST with respect to the classical likelihood ratio test, and suggest that FBST is an efficient and robust tool for this application. (shrink)

Past research reveals a tension between children's preferences for egalitarianism and ingroup favoritism when distributing resources to others. Here we investigate how children's evaluations and expectations of others' behaviors compare. Four- to 10-year-old children viewed events where individuals from two different groups distributed resources to their own group, to the other group, or equally across groups. Groups were described within a context of intergroup competition over scarce resources. In the Evaluation condition, children were asked to evaluate which resource distribution (...) actions were nicer. In the Expectation condition, children were asked to predict which events were more likely to occur. With age, children's evaluations and expectations of others' actions diverged: Children evaluated egalitarian actions as nicer yet expected others to behave in ways that benefit their own group. Thus, children's evaluations about the way human social actors should behave do not mirror their expectations concerning those individuals' actions. (shrink)

The article defines the algorithm and details the sequential tasks for building an effective model of automated classification of events in the information space. On the eve and during the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the consequences of external negative information influence were noticeable. Therefore, the organization and implementation of counteraction to such influence is urgent. An important component of this activity is the classification of information events in the information space in order to further analyze them (...) and form proposals for decision-making to counteract the negative information impact. Given the fact that in the global information space and, in particular, the information space of the state in the interests of counteracting such influence, it is necessary to constantly process a significant amount of information, so the task of improving the efficiency of this process is provided by automating its components. The algorithm of the automated classification process is based on a number of consecutive tasks, namely: data retrieval, preelection of messages, saving pre-selected messages in the database, determining a set of indicators for automated classification of information events, pre-processing a single document, distribution of messages by criteria by categories, presentation of information in a convenient form, saving the results of classification in the database. The proposed material reveals the content of these tasks. The proposed algorithm will serve to automatically divide information events of different nature into categories in order to increase the efficiency of assessing the level of negative information impact on target audiences for timely response to its manifestations. (shrink)

This article provides empirical results indicating that acting in a socially respon- sible and lawful manner is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for increasing shareholder wealth. It meta-analyzes 27 event studies that have mea- sured the stock market's reaction to incidences of socially irresponsible and illicit behavior. It finds that for firms engaging in socially irresponsible and illicit behavior, the effect on shareholder wealth is negative (wealth decreases), statisti- cally significant (p <.001), and so substantial in size (D (...) = -.932) that the distribution of abnormal returns is shifted nearly a full standard deviation to the left (i.e., negatively) from their expected standard normal distribution. This result gives rationally self-interested firms a self-interested reason to act in a socially responsible and law-abiding manner. It also provides support for a moral position called enlightened self-interest, which prescribes that firms should act in a socially responsible manner to promote the shareholders' interests. (shrink)

1. Introduction: The problems of time and consciousness What is time? St. Augustine remarked that when no one asked him, he knew what time was; however when someone asked him, he did not. Is time a process which flows? Is time a dimension in which processes occur? Does time actually exist? The notion that time is a process which "flows" directionally may be illusory (the "myth of passage") for if time did flow it would do so in some medium or (...) vessel (e.g. minutes per what?) [1]. But if time is a dimension in which processes occurred, e.g. as one component of a 4 dimensional spacetime, then why would processes occur unidirectionally in time? Yet we perceive time as an orderly, unidirectional process. An alternative explanation is that time does not exist as either a process or dimension, but that reality is a collage of discrete, disconnected and haphazardly arranged configurations of the universe, e.g. as described in Julian Barbour's "The end of time" [2]. In this view our perception of a unidirectional flow of time occurs because each moment, or "Now" as Barbour terms them, involves memory of other conceptually relevant moments, and the orderly flow of time is an illusion. Barbour's deconstruction of time contrasts the Newtonian reality of objects moving deterministically through 4 dimensional spacetime. Newton's contemporary (and rival) Leibniz [3] viewed the world in a manner consistent with Barbour (and with Mach's principle that the spatiotemporal structure of the universe is dependent on the distribution of mass, a foundation of Einstein's general relativity). According to Leibniz the world is to be understood not as matter/mass moving in a framework of space and time, but of more fundamental snapshot-like entities that momentarily fuse space and matter into single possible arrangements or configurations of the entire universe. Such configurations, which can be fabulously rich and complex considering the vastness of the universe, are the ultimate "things" of reality, which Leibniz termed "monads".. (shrink)

Do participants bring their own priors to an experiment? If so, do they share the same priors as the researchers who design the experiment? In this article, we examine the extent to which self-generated priors conform to experimenters’ expectations by explicitly asking participants to indicate their own priors in estimating the probability of a variety of events. We find in Study 1 that despite being instructed to follow a uniform distribution, participants appear to have used their own priors, which (...) deviated from the given instructions. Using subjects’ own priors allows us to account better for their responses rather than merely to test the accuracy of their estimates. Implications for the study of judgment and decision making are discussed. (shrink)

This dissertation provides a model-theoretic semantics for English sentences atttributing a property or action to a group of objects, either collectively or distributively. It is shown that certain adverbial expressions select for collective predicates; therefore collective and distibutive predicates must be distinguishable. This finding is problematic for recent accounts of distributive predicates which analyze such predicates as taking group-level arguments, and hence as not distinguishable from collective predicates. ;A group-level treatment of distributives is possible, however, if predicate denotations are relativized (...) to a set of events for which a part/whole relation is defined. An event in which a group performs an action distributively will have subevents in which each of the group's members perform the same action; an event in which the group performs the action collectively will not. ;This analysis also makes possible an account of the fact that adverbials expressing collective action commonly have an additional use expressing spatial proximity, both in English and cross-linguistically. . A spatial "trace" function on the set of events allows formal definitions for the spatial uses of such adverbials to exactly parallel the definitions for the collectivizing uses. ;The dissertation also provides arguments for a set-theoretic model for plurality, in which the group membership relation is distinct from the subgroup relation. ;Certain quantifiers are shown sensitive to distinction between different sorts of group-level event. To accommodate this fact, it is suggested that verbal denotations provide, for each event, both an "inclusion set" and an "exclusion set"--corresponding roughly to positive and negative denotations. If the inclusion and exclusion sets are allowed under certain circumstances not to complement each other, correct results obtain. ;The splitting of verbal denotations into inclusion and exclusion sets also allows the solution of certain problems in previous accounts of the semantics of subject-verb agreement for number. The dissertation closes with a defense of the hypothesis that agreement is conditioned primarily by the semantics. (shrink)

A great deal of scholarship defines rational thought in terms of probability theory. An important problem with such an approach is that disasters, particularly large disasters, do not provide us with a meaningful distribution of events that would approximate a normal curve. Here, I propose that using possibilistic thinking can helpfully complement probabilistic thinking regarding risk and disaster. Possibilistic thinking highlights consequences of actions or events, while not ignoring their likelihood of occurrence. I point out the myriad ways that (...) individuals and organizations use possibilistic thinking, even if they do not recognized it as such. I propose several conceptual tools to help discipline a possibilistic approach. (shrink)

We describe a dual-process theory of how individuals estimate the probabilities of unique events, such as Hillary Clinton becoming U.S. President. It postulates that uncertainty is a guide to improbability. In its computer implementation, an intuitive system 1 simulates evidence in mental models and forms analog non-numerical representations of the magnitude of degrees of belief. This system has minimal computational power and combines evidence using a small repertoire of primitive operations. It resolves the uncertainty of divergent evidence for single events, (...) for conjunctions of events, and for inclusive disjunctions of events, by taking a primitive average of non-numerical probabilities. It computes conditional probabilities in a tractable way, treating the given event as evidence that may be relevant to the probability of the dependent event. A deliberative system 2 maps the resulting representations into numerical probabilities. With access to working memory, it carries out arithmetical operations in combining numerical estimates. Experiments corroborated the theory's predictions. Participants concurred in estimates of real possibilities. They violated the complete joint probability distribution in the predicted ways, when they made estimates about conjunctions: P, P, P, disjunctions: P, P, P, and conditional probabilities P, P, P. They were faster to estimate the probabilities of compound propositions when they had already estimated the probabilities of each of their components. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of probabilistic reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate how certain types of predicates should be connected with certain types of degree scales, and how this can affect the events they describe. The distribution and interpretation of various degree adverbials will serve us as a guideline in this perspective. They suggest that two main types of degree scales should be distinguished: (i) quantity scales, which are characterized by the semantic equivalence of Yannig ate the cake partially and Yannig ate part of the cake; (...) quantity scales only appear with verbs possessing an incremental theme (cf. Dowty 1991); (ii) intensity scales, which are characterized by degree modifiers (e.g., extremely, perfectly) receiving an intensive interpretation; intensity scales typically occur with verbs morphologically related to an adjective (to dry). More generally, we capitalize on a typology of degree structures to explain how degrees play a central role with respect to event structure. (shrink)