The spacetime algebra (STA) is the natural, representation-free language for Dirac's theory of the electron. Conventional Pauli, Dirac, Weyl, and Majorana spinors are replaced by spacetime multivectors, and the quantum σ- and γ-matrices are replaced by two-sided multivector operations. The STA is defined over the reals, and the role of the scalar unit imaginary of quantum mechanics is played by a fixed spacetime bivector. The extension to multiparticle systems involves a separate copy of the STA for each particle, and it (...) is shown that the standard unit imaginary induces correlations between these particle spaces. In the STA, spinors and operators can be manipulated without introducing any matrix representation or coordinate system. Furthermore, the formalism provides simple expressions for the spinor bilinear covariants which dispense with the need for the Fierz identities. A reduction to2+1 dimensions is given, and applications beyond the Dirac theory are discussed. (shrink)

Using a comprehensive sample of U.S. non-profit hospitals from 2011 to 2015, we examine the effects of state community benefits regulation on the amount of charity care provided by and the operational efficiency of U.S. non-profit hospitals. First, we document that, under such regulations, non-profit hospitals provide more charity care and less compensated care as a proportion of net revenue. We infer from these findings that CBR has the potential to increase both non-profit hospitals’ amount of charity care and (...) their efficiency of operations. Second, by examining variation in CBR types, we find no differences between having provision or having reporting requirements on the amount of charity care offered. Moreover, when we consider CBR with both provision and reporting requirements, the combination of these two requirements does not incrementally enhance charity care offerings, suggesting that the requirements may serve as substitutes with comparable effect. Lastly, we show that several state-level characteristics influence the relationship between CBR and charity care: CBRs in states with a higher gross domestic product and percentage of revenue received in taxes have incrementally lower associations with charity care, while hospitals in states where populations have, on average, higher household incomes have greater associations between CBR and charity care. Our findings highlight the effects that state-enacted regulation can have on socially beneficial behavior by non-profits. (shrink)

Logical frameworks that are sensitive to features of sentences’ subject-matter—like Berto’s topic-sensitive intentional modals (TSIMs)—demand a maximally faithful model of the topics of sentences. This is an especially difficult task in the case in which topics are assigned to intensional formulae. In two previous papers, a framework was developed whose model of intensional subject-matter could accommodate a wider range of intuitions about particular intensional conditionals. Although resolving a number of counterintuitive features, the work made an implicit assumption that the subject-matter (...) of an intensional conditional is a function of the subject-matters of its subformulae. This assumption—which I will call a principle of topic sufficiency—runs counter to some natural intuitions concerning topic. In this paper, we will investigate topic sufficiency and offer a semantic account that is state-sensitive, providing an implementation through the introduction of topic-sensitive logics related to William Parry’s prototypical $\mathsf {PAI}$. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 6, Page 882-903, July 2022. Indigenous conservation through patrimonialization is the product of political and legal decisions made by a non-indigenous agent: the liberal state, using the law to retain a form of bios. We propose that patrimonialization is the device by which liberal states have processed and integrated indigenous claims into a form of bios ultimately designed to safeguard state legal structures. We argue that, to uphold the rule of law (...) in contexts of struggle and resistance that challenge the very understanding of the law, states respond by wielding the law in the form of the rule by law, that is, pushing the law to the limit to give normative content to the criteria by which the state conducts its affairs, without straying from the individual rights framework. We hold that the rule by law is an operation that defines the patrimonialization of indigenous peoples. It increases their visibility while imposing limits on political action to keep them from becoming sui juris subjects capable of breaching the distinction between zoe and bios. In this article, we try to understand the political–ideological intent of these decisions, the intentions beyond the letter of the law of patrimonialized peoples. (shrink)

After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, organized rescue operations in both Europe and the United States were put in place to save European intellectuals before or after their exile. However, it was mostly the brilliant and the productive who were helped in coming to America. From among the victims of Nazism, American foundations and endowments, universities, and research institutions primarily supported those who were viewed as having the greatest potential usefulness for the United States. This (...) chapter discusses the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation, the New School for Social Research, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (shrink)

To improve the safety and the performance of operators involved in risky and demanding missions, human-machine cooperation should be dynamically adapted, in terms of dialogue or function allocation. To support this reconfigurable cooperation, a crucial point is to assess online the operator’s ability to keep performing the mission. The article explores the concept of Operator Functional State, then it proposes to operationalize this concept on the specific activity of drone swarm monitoring, carried out by 22 participants on (...) simulator SUSIE. With the aid of supervised learning methods, physiological and contextual are classified into three classes, corresponding to different levels of OFS. This classification would help for adapting the countermeasures to the situation faced by operators. (shrink)

This paper investigates various properties that may by possessed by quantum states, which are believed to be specifically “quantum” and their opposites. It also considers their “absolute” counterparts in the following sense: a given state has a given property absolutely if after an arbitrary unitary transformation it still possesses it. The known relations between the listed properties and between their absolute counterparts are summarized. It is proven that the only two-qubit state that has zero quantum discord absolutely is (...) the maximally mixed state. Finally, related conceptual issues concerning the terms “classical” and “quantum” are discussed. (shrink)

It has been argued that complex subjective sense of self is linked to the brain default-mode network (DMN). Recent discovery of heterogeneity between distinct subnets (or operational modules - OMs) of the DMN leads to a reconceptualization of its role for the experiential sense of self. Considering the recent proposition that the frontal DMN OM is responsible for the first-person perspective and the sense of agency, while the posterior DMN OMs are linked to the continuity of ‘I’ experience (including autobiographical (...) memories) through embodiment and localization within bodily space, we have tested in this study the hypothesis that heterogeneity in the operational synchrony strength within the frontal DMN OM among patients who are in a vegetative state (VS) could inform about a stable self-consciousness recovery later in the course of disease (up to six years post-injury). Using EEG operational synchrony analysis we have demonstrated that among the three OMs of the DMN only the frontal OM showed important heterogeneity in VS patients as a function of later stable clinical outcome. We also found that the frontal DMN OM was characterized by the process of active uncoupling (stronger in persistent VS) of operations performed by the involved neuronal assemblies. (shrink)

Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings are increasingly used to evaluate patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) or assess their prognosis outcome in the short-term perspective. However, there is a lack of information concerning the effectiveness of EEG in classifying long-term (many years) outcome in chronic DOC patients. Here we tested whether EEG operational architectonics parameters (geared towards consciousness phenomenon detection rather than neurophysiological processes) could be useful for distinguishing a very long-term (6 years) clinical outcome of DOC patients whose EEGs were registered (...) within 3 months post-injury. The obtained results suggest that EEG recorded at third month after sustaining brain damage, may contain useful information on the long-term outcome of patients in vegetative state: it could discriminate patients who remain in a persistent vegetative state from patients who reach a minimally conscious state or even recover a full consciousness in a long-term perspective (6 years) post-injury. These findings, if confirmed in further studies, may be pivotal for long-term planning of clinical care, rehabilitative programs, medical-legal decisions concerning the patients, and policy makers. (shrink)

This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental (...) class='Hi'>state types make distinct contributions to generating emotional responses to stories. Finally, the differences between the mental states illuminate how a given story can be both shared with others and at the same time experienced as personal. (shrink)

The minimally conscious sta te (MCS) is usually ascribed when a patientwith brain damage exhibits obser vable volitional behaviors that predict recovery ofcognitive funct ions. Nevertheless, a patient with brain damage who lacks motorcapacit y might nonetheless be in MCS. For this reason, some clinicians use neuralsignals as a communicative means for MCS ascription. For instance, a vegetativestate patient is diagnosed with MCS if activity in the motor area is observed whenthe instruction to imagine wiggling toes is given. The validi (...) ty of using neuralsignals in ascribing MCS requires a special sort of inference. That is, no-reportparadigmatic assessments must have inductively strong ways of inferring a pur-ported informationa l content from the observed neural signal that grounds the factthat the patient has top-down cognitive control (or residual volition). Shannon’smathemat ical theory of communication and Bayes’ theorem reveals the formalstructure of neural communication. On the basis of relevant data from the neuro-science literature, I conclude that the formal structure combined with the data showsthat neural signals can be used as a communicative means for operational diagnosticcriteria for MCS ascription. (shrink)

Using theoretical analysis of self-consciousness concept and experimental evidence on the brain default mode network (DMN) that constitutes the neural signature of self-referential processes, we hypothesized that the anterior and posterior subnets comprising the DMN should show differences in their integrity as a function of meditation training. Functional connectivity within DMN and its subnets (measured by operational synchrony) has been measured in ten novice meditators using an electroencephalogram (EEG) recording in a pre-/post-meditation intervention design. We have found that while the (...) whole DMN was clearly suppressed, different subnets of DMN responded differently after 4 months of meditation training: The strength of EEG operational synchrony in the right and left posterior modules of the DMN decreased in resting post-meditation condition compared to a pre-meditation condition, whereas the frontal DMN module on the contrary exhibited an increase in the strength of EEG operational synchrony. These findings combined with published data on functional–anatomic heterogeneity within the DMN and on trait subjective experiences commonly found following meditation allow us to propose that the first-person perspective and the sense of agency (the witnessing observer) are presented by the frontal DMN module, while the posterior modules of the DMN are generally responsible for the experience of the continuity of ‘I’ as embodied and localized within bodily space. Significance of these findings is discussed. (shrink)

Many states make use of personal identity numbers to govern people living in their territory and jurisdiction, but only a few rely on an all-purpose PIN used throughout the public and private sectors. This article examines the all-purpose PIN in Finland as a political technology that brings people to the sphere of public welfare services and subjects them to governance by public authorities and expert institutions. Drawing on documentary materials and interviews, it unpacks the history and uses of the PIN (...) as an elementary building block of the Nordic welfare state, and its emerging uses in the post-welfare data economy. The article suggests that, although the PIN is capable of individualizing, identifying, and addressing individuals, its most important and widely embraced feature is the extent to which it enables interoperability among public authorities, private businesses, and their data repositories. Interoperability, together with advances in computing and information technology, has made the PIN a facilitator of public administration, state knowledge production, and everyday life. More recently, in the post-welfare data economy, interoperability has rendered the PIN a national asset in all the Nordic countries, providing a great advantage to biomedical research, innovation business, and healthcare. (shrink)

For over four decades, "Introduction to Operations Research" by Frederick Hillier has been the classic text on operations research. While building on the classic strengths of the text, the author continues to find new ways to make the text current and relevant to students. One way is by incorporating a wealth of state-of-the-art, user-friendly software and more coverage of business applications than ever before. The hallmark features of this edition include clear and comprehensive coverage of fundamentals, an extensive set (...) of interesting problems and cases, and state-of-the-practice operations research software used in conjunction with examples from the text. The ninth edition introduces a new partnership with the Institute for Operations Research and Management (INFORMS). These two pillars of the OR world have come together to showcase some of the award-winning applications of operations research and integrate them with this text. (shrink)

The study investigated the perceived potential of motivational strategies operating in school to impact teacher effectiveness in public secondary schools in Ondo State, Nigeria. One research question was raised and two hypotheses formulated for the study. Descriptive-survey design was adopted. Main population consisted of 304 public secondary schools in the state while teachers in the 304 schools constituted the target population. Ten public secondary schools and 200 teachers were selected through multi-stage, stratified and simple-random sampling techniques and used (...) for the study. Data were gathered using a questionnaire, validated by a professional and tested for reliability using test-retest approach, coefficient of reliability being 0.80. Data were analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences, frequency counts while hypotheses were tested using chi-square statistic. It was found that provision of instructional materials, improvement of school environment, assignment of add... (shrink)

Although several studies propose that the integrity of neuronal assemblies may underlie a phenomenon referred to as awareness, none of the known studies have explicitly investigated dynamics and functional interactions among neuronal assemblies as a function of consciousness expression. In order to address this question EEG operational architectonics analysis (Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2001, 2008) was conducted in patients in minimally conscious (MCS) and vegetative states (VS) to study the dynamics of neuronal assemblies and operational synchrony among them as a function (...) of consciousness expression. We found that in minimally conscious patients and especially in vegetative patients neuronal assemblies got smaller, their life-span shortened and they became highly unstable. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the extent/volume and strength of operational synchrony among neuronal assemblies was smallest or even absent in VS patients, intermediate in MCS patients and highest in healthy fully-conscious subjects. All findings were similarly observed in EEG alpha as well as beta1 and beta2 frequency oscillations. The presented results support the basic tenets of Operational Architectonics theory of brain-mind functioning and suggest that EEG operational architectonics analysis may provide an objective and accurate means of assessing signs of (un)consciousness in patients with severe brain injuries. Therefore this methodological approach may complement the existing “gold standard” of behavioral assessment of this population of challenging patients and inform the diagnostic and treatment decision-making processes. (shrink)

In the October 1937 number of Philosophy of Science Lindsay has made certain criticisms of the adequacy of the “operational method” of analyzing and giving meaning to the concepts of physics, documenting his criticisms chiefly from my own writings. In these criticisms he has made statements as to the method which I would by no means accept. This is not characteristic of his paper only, for I have seldom indeed seen a printed discussion of the method which I would accept (...) as being an adequate or sometimes even fair representation of what I understand by it. It will perhaps pay therefore if I attempt to state what I conceive it to be all about, particularly since I have never attempted such a comprehensive statement and since my own ideas on the subject have been developing since I first wrote in the Logic of Modern Physics. For one reason I have hesitated to do this, for fear of seeming to subscribe to the not uncommon idea that we are dealing with some elaborate and profound new theory of the nature of knowledge or of meaning. I believe that I myself have never talked of “operationalism” or “operationism”, but I have a distaste for these grandiloquent words which imply something more philosophic and esoteric than the simple thing that I see. What we are here concerned with is an observation and description of methods which at least some physicists had already, perhaps unconsciously, adopted and found successful—the practise of the methods already existed. What I have attempted is to analyze these successful methods, not to set up a philosophical system and a theory of the properties that any method must have if it hopes to be successful. Since I was concerned with a technique already extant, my principal method of getting others to see what the technique involved has been to exhibit examples of the technique in action, rather than to attempt any exhaustive characterization of the technique itself. (shrink)

The understanding of the interrelationship between brain and mind remains far from clear. It is well established that the brain's capacity to integrate information from numerous sources forms the basis for cognitive abilities. However, the core unresolved question is how information about the "objective" physical entities of the external world can be integrated, and how unifiedand coherent mental states (or Gestalts) can be established in the internal entities of distributed neuronal systems. The present paper offers a unified methodological and conceptual (...) basis for a possible mechanism of how the transient synchronization of brain operations may construct the unified and relatively stable neural states, which underlie mental states. It was shown that the sequence of metastable spatial EEG mosaics does exist and probably reflects the rapid stabilization periods of the interrelation of large neuron systems. At the EEG level this is reflected in the stabilization of quasi-stationary segments on corresponding channels. Within the introduced framework, physical brain processes and psychological processes are considered as two basic aspects of a single whole informational brain state. The relations between operational process of the brain, mental states and consciousness are discussed. (shrink)

Based on the theoretical analysis of self-consciousness concepts, we hypothesized that the spatio-temporal pattern of functional connectivity within the default-mode network (DMN) should persist unchanged across a variety of different cognitive tasks or acts, thus being task-unrelated. This supposition is in contrast with current understanding that DMN activated when the subjects are resting and deactivated during any attention-demanding cognitive tasks. To test our proposal, we used, in retrospect, the results from our two early studies ([Fingelkurts, 1998] and [Fingelkurts et al., (...) 2003]). In both studies for the majority of experimental trails we indeed found a constellation of operationally synchronized cortical areas (indexed as DMN) that was persistent across all studied experimental conditions in all subjects. Furthermore, we found three major elements comprising this DMN: two symmetrical occipito-parieto-temporal and one frontal spatio-temporal patterns. This new data directly supports the notion that DMN has a specific functional connotation – it provides neurophysiologic basis for self-processing operations, namely first-person perspective taking and an experience of agency. (shrink)

United States Army Special Forces who deployed to Iraq in mid-2014, and who were seeking to help Iraqi forces to combat Islamic State faced a considerable challenge: how could a force of fewer than 50 operators provide guidance and support to their Iraqi allies while also keeping in line with Washington’s policy of seeking to avoid any possibility of combat casualties among deployed U.S. Special Forces? Their solution to this dilemma came to be dubbed ‘Remote Advise and Assist’. By (...) cobbling together a system of voice and text communications, cameras, interactive maps and mobile handsets, these Special Forces personnel found they could ‘virtually accompany’ their Iraqi partners into hot zones where U.S. boots on the ground were forbidden. This approach seems to have been extremely successful, but potentially raises a range of ethical concerns. Against the backdrop of a general account of the ethics of employing surrogate forces, this paper explores the ethical questions raised by the practice of ‘Remote Advise and Assist’. (shrink)

In this work, the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking to offers major new accounts of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state, and the way it should operate in relation to its citizens and (...) other people. (shrink)

This study investigates the significance of understanding police perspectives on community policing as a means of addressing insecurity, particularly within the context of localised and asymmetrical conflicts. It highlights the pivotal role of the police in shaping community security and the substantial impact they can have (positive or negative) in fragile environments. The study contends that the localised nature of the community policing effectively addresses security and development issues and empowering citizens. Qualitative interviews were conducted with senior police in Islamabad, (...) to assess the implementation and potential impacts of community policing in Pakistan’s Federal Capital Territory. The findings reveal how the historical foundations of police structures and operations – which date back to the colonial period – have led to the promotion of fear, mistrust and manipulation under successive regimes. Despite these challenges, the findings are promising highlighting enhanced human security through context-specific community policing. Finally, the paper argues that the movement towards community-oriented policing marks a departure from the control of elites within state systems, and encourages values such as local ownership, social cohesion, mutual engagement, accountability and agency. These developments have profound implications for global security and justice. (shrink)

I shall be dealing, throughout this book, with a set of related problems: the relationship between morality and reasoning in general, the way in which moral reasoning is properly to be carried on, and why morality is not arbitrary. The solutions to these problems come out of the same train of argument. Morality is not arbitrary, I shall argue, because the acceptance of certain qualities of character as virtues and the rejection of others as vices is forced on us by (...) the co-operative basis of human life. The co-operation in human life is unavoidable; the alternative is a literal Hobbesian state of nature, and that is impossible. It is not that co-operation between people is a good thing or even a very good thing; it is simply unavoidable in human life, and it is impossible unless the qualities of character counted as virtues are encouraged and are at least fairly common. The possibility of human life presupposes a theory of human nature, and working out that theory of human nature is the main job of moral philosophy. These virtues or qualities of character or attitudes lead us towards a theory of reasons. A person with a sense of justice is a person inclined to accept certain sorts of facts as reasons for acting, and if the virtues are presupposed by human life then the acceptance of those sorts of facts as reasons for acting is presupposed by human life. A condition of the life of reasoning beings (a more accurate term here than 'human beings') is that moral reasons are reasons for acting and are at the very basis of reasoning. And from this it follows that properly conducted moral reasoning is ultimately guided by the virtues rather than ultimately guided by a set of rules. (shrink)

Armstrong holds the Supervenience Theory of instantiation, namely that the instantiation of universals by particulars supervenes upon what particulars and what universals there are, where supervenience is stipulated to be explanatory or dependent supervenience. I begin by rejecting the Supervenience Theory of instantiation. Having done so it is then tempting to take instantiation as primitive. This has, however, an awkward consequence, undermining one of the main advantages universals have over tropes. So I examine another account hinted at by Armstrong. This (...) is the Operator Theory of instantiation, by which I mean the theory that universals are operators, and that a particular instantiates a monadic universal because the universal operates on the particular, resulting in the state of affairs. On this theory the state of affairs supervenes on the instantiation rather than vice versa. In the second part of the paper I develop this theory of universals as operators, including an account of structural universals, which are useful for accounts of modality and of mathematics. (shrink)

: Presently more than 80,000 Americans await an organ transplant, while 10 to12 people die each day because of the lack of organs. The program proposed here would allow federal inmates additional "time off" for agreeing to become living donors or to provide organs or their bodies upon death. Such a program could add 100 to 170 thousand new organ donors to the pool, with another 10 to 12 thousand added annually. If the program were applied to all state (...) inmates, up to 4 million new donors might be added, with another 10 to 13 thousand added annually. Given the extreme need for more organ donors and the need for more living donors, the current National Transplant Act of 1984 and the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act must be amended, while still retaining control of donation procedures. (shrink)

We present a stronger variation of state MV-algebras, recently presented by T. Flaminio and F. Montagna, which we call state-morphism MV-algebras. Such structures are MV-algebras with an internal notion, a state-morphism operator. We describe the categorical equivalences of such state MV-algebras with the category of unital Abelian ℓ-groups with a fixed state operator and present their basic properties. In addition, in contrast to state MV-algebras, we are able to describe all subdirectly irreducible (...) state-morphism MV-algebras. (shrink)

This article aims to discuss the discourses and debates on Khilafah system in Muslim countries and how it transforms into a nation-state system, specifically in Indonesia. These dicourses and debates include the contestation and trends in the connection between Islam as a religion and Indonesia as a nation-state, which reemerged after the ban of Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) in 2017 and The Front of Islamic Defenders (Front Pembela Islam/FPI) in 2020 accordingly under President Jokowi’s administration. This article employs (...) descriptive qualitative analysis to investigate the historical sequences of the discourses and debates on the genealogy, contestation, and relation between the Khilafah system and the nation-state system in Indonesia to uncover the fundamental ideology which underlines the conflicting interests in the debate. It operates the historical-sociological approaches to examine the data collected from books, articles, journals, and newspapers which contain the opinions of the prominent Muslim scholars gearing the dynamic discourses and debates on the nation-state system and Khilafah system. This article, therefore, attempts to demonstrate how Khilafah system idea emerged after the death of the prophet Muhammad and how this idea was contested by Muslim scholars and leaders today. This article suggests that in the struggle of ideology, thought, and movement inside the Muslim countries including Indonesia, the Khilafah system and the system of nation-state came into conflict. Further, the two forms of engagement between Islam and the nation-state are driven by nationalism. (shrink)

BackgroundOver the past few years, five domains of importance about the current state of bioethics in Saudi Arabia have shaped the perspective of most research: doctor-patient relationship, informed consent, do-not-resuscitate, organ donation, and transplantation, medical students’ knowledge and attitudes about medical ethics curriculum. This systematic review aimed to systematically identify, compile, describe and discuss ethical arguments and concepts in the best-studied domains of bioethics in Saudi Arabia and to present cultural, social, educational, and humane perspectives. MethodsSix databases were searched (...) using Boolean operators from December 2020–June 2021. The search and report process followed the statement and flowchart of preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses.ResutlsThe search resulted in 1651 articles, of which 82 studies were selected for a final review and assessment. There is a gradual increase in research, whereby a substantial increase was observed from 2017. Most of the published articles focused on ‘Organ Donation & Transplantation’ with 33 articles, followed by ‘Doctor-Patient Relations’ with 18 publications. Most of the published articles were from Central Province, followed by Western Province. The authorship pattern showed a collaborative approach among researchers. The thematic analysis of keywords analysis showed that ‘Saudi Arabia,’ ‘attitude PHC,’ ‘organ donation,’ ‘knowledge and education,’ and ‘donation’ have been used the most commonly.ConclusionThis systematic quantitative synthesis is expected to guide researchers, stakeholders, and policymakers about the strengths and gaps in knowledge and attitudes regarding medical ethics in Saudi Arabia, both among the general public and health professionals. (shrink)

Two operations, e.g. measurements, successively applied to the state of a system are said to be non-commutative if the sequence of their application makes a difference for the final result. Non-commuting operations play a crucial role in quantum theory, where they are intimately related to concepts as central as those of complementarity and entanglement. However, their significance is not restricted to the small dimensions of the microworld. For reasons easy to understand, non-commuting operations must be expected to be the (...) rule rather than the exception for operations on mental systems. We demonstrate this with a few examples from our own work, and hope this may contribute to the increasing attention that this exciting new area in consciousness studies is currently attracting worldwide. (shrink)

Segmentation of post-operative glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is essential for the planning of Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) treatment and other clinical applications. Recent methods developed for pre-operative GBM segmentation perform poorly on post-operative GBM MRI scans. In this paper we present a method for the segmentation of GBM in post-operative patients. Our method incorporates an ensemble of segmentation networks and the Kullback–Leibler divergence agreement score in the objective function to estimate the prediction label uncertainty and cope with noisy labels and inter-observer (...) variability. Moreover, our method integrates the surgery type and computes non-tumorous tissue delineation to automatically segment the tumor. We trained and validated our method on a dataset of 340 enhanced T1 MRI scans of patients that were treated with TTFields (270 scans for train and 70 scans for test). For validation, we developed a tool that uses the uncertainty map along with the segmentation result. Our tool allows visualization and fast editing of the tissues to improve the results dependent on user preference. Three physicians reviewed and graded our segmentation and editing tool on 12 different MRI scans. The validation set average (SD) Dice scores were 0.81 (0.11), 0.71 (0.24), 0.64 (0.25), and 0.68 (0.19) for whole-tumor, resection, necrotic-core, and enhancing-tissue, respectively. The physicians rated 72% of the segmented GBMs acceptable for treatment planning or better. Another 22% can be edited manually in a reasonable time to achieve a clinically acceptable result. According to these results, the proposed method for GBM segmentation can be integrated into TTFields treatment planning software in order to shorten the planning process. To conclude, we have extended a state-of-the-art pre-operative GBM segmentation method with surgery-type, anatomical information, and uncertainty visualization to facilitate a clinically viable segmentation of post-operative GBM for TTFields treatment planning. (shrink)

Four hundred seventy-six nuclear power plants are in operation or under construction around the world. Are concepts for designing and operating plants safely sufficient? Conventional approaches are premised on expectations of predictability and control of radiation release and on assumptions that plant operations are closed systems. Field observations in the industry find, however, that the periodic necessity to refuel, test safety equipment, and continuously upgrade plant designs introduces challenges to control not originally calculated. The social and cultural contexts of markets, (...) regulation, and work systems create additional contingencies. In this dynamic environment, reactor operations produce invaluable data about the states of the entire technology and organizational system. Rereading these dynamics as "experiments" suggests an alternative epistemol ogy that synthesizes science's values of doubt, discovery, and documentation with engineering's values of efficiency, optimization, and problem solving. This redefines plant-based risk handlers as ethologists, geologists, and anthropologists of an ecology of visible and invisible hazards. (shrink)

A theory is usually said to be time reversible if whenever a sequence of states S 1, S 2, S 3 is possible according to that theory, then the reverse sequence of time reversed states S 3 T, S 2 T, S 1 T is also possible according to that theory; i.e., one normally not only inverts the sequence of states, but also operates on the states with a time reversal operator T. David Albert and Paul Horwich have suggested (...) that one should not allow such time reversal operations T on states. I will argue that time reversal operations on fundamental states should be allowed. I will furthermore argue that the form that time reversal operations take is determined by the type of fundamental geometric quantities that occur in nature and that we have good reason to believe that the fundamental geometric quantities that occur in nature correspond to irreducible representations of the Lorentz transformations. Finally, I will argue that we have good reason to believe that space-time has a temporal orientation. (shrink)

This chapter reviews Europe's contributions to basic assumptions made in international law and governance. It examines the internal legal models that Europe created and that became foundational blueprints for modern liberal democracies. The chapter also focuses on international legal structures that were designed to operate in a manner consistent with the domestic European model e.g., liberalization of trade, legal protections for foreign investors, or uniform codes of commercial law for international transactions. The post‐Second World War regulation of commerce and livelihood (...) in the European statecraft model came hand‐in‐hand with the protection of personal rights. The modern liberal democratic state derived its legitimacy from management of a social and political structure that bettered the material lot of its nationals. The historical process of formation of the European nation‐states’ geographical map created blocs that had clear boundaries associated with national identity. (shrink)

Psychophysiological correlations form the basis for different medical and scientific disciplines, but the nature of this relation has not yet been fully understood. One conceptual option is to understand the mental as “emerging” from neural processes in the specific sense that psychology and physiology provide two different descriptions of the same system. Stating these descriptions in terms of coarser- and finer-grained system states macro- and microstates, the two descriptions may be equally adequate if the coarse-graining preserves the possibility to obtain (...) a dynamical rule for the system. To test the empirical viability of our approach, we describe an algorithm to obtain a specific form of such a coarse-graining from data, and illustrate its operation using a simulated dynamical system. We then apply the method to an electroencephalographic recording, where we are able to identify macrostates from the physiological data that correspond to mental states of the subject. © 2009 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.3072788. (shrink)

Spin is a fundamental and distinctive property of the electron, having far-reaching implications. Yet its purely formal treatment often blurs the physical content and meaning of the spin operator and associated observables. In this work we propose to advance in disclosing the meaning behind the formalism, by first recalling some basic facts about the one-particle spin operator. Consistently informed by and in line with the quantum formalism, we then proceed to analyse in detail the spin projection operator (...) correlation function \=\left\langle \left \left \right\rangle \) for the bipartite singlet state, and show it to be amenable to an unequivocal probabilistic reading. In particular, the calculation of \\) entails a partitioning of the probability space, which is dependent on the directions \.\) The derivation of the CHSH- or other Bell-type inequalities, on the other hand, does not consider such partitioning. This observation puts into question the applicability of Bell-type inequalities to the bipartite singlet spin state. (shrink)

A theory is usually said to be time reversible if whenever a sequence of states S 1 , S 2 , S 3 is possible according to that theory, then the reverse sequence of time reversed states S 3 T , S 2 T , S 1 T is also possible according to that theory; i.e., one normally not only inverts the sequence of states, but also operates on the states with a time reversal operator T . David Albert (...) and Paul Horwich have suggested that one should not allow such time reversal operations T on states. I will argue that time reversal operations on fundamental states should be allowed. I will furthermore argue that the form that time reversal operations take is determined by the type of fundamental geometric quantities that occur in nature and that we have good reason to believe that the fundamental geometric quantities that occur in nature correspond to irreducible representations of the Lorentz transformations. Finally, I will argue that we have good reason to believe that space-time has a temporal orientation. (shrink)

A fundamental result from Boolean modal logic states that a first-order definable class of Kripke frames defines a logic that is validated by all of its canonical frames. We generalise this to the level of non-distributive logics that have a relational semantics provided by structures based on polarities. Such structures have associated complete lattices of stable subsets, and these have been used to construct canonical extensions of lattice-based algebras. We study classes of structures that are closed under ultraproducts and whose (...) stable set lattices have additional operators that are first-order definable in the underlying structure. We show that such classes generate varieties of algebras that are closed under canonical extensions. The proof makes use of a relationship between canonical extensions and MacNeille completions. (shrink)

In Ref. 1 we have considered the finite-dimensional quantum mechanics. There the quantum mechanical space of states wasV=C r. It is known that the second quantization of this space is the space of square-summable functions of finite number of variables(L 2(Rr,dx)) (Segal isomorphism). Creation and annihilation operators were introduced in Ref. 1, and the former coincided with the usual position and momentum operators in the conventional quantum mechanics. In this paper we shall investigate the spectral properties of field operators. We (...) shall show that the isomorphism between the exponential ofV andL 2(Rr,dx) can be understood as the decomposition by generalized eigenvectors of field operators (“Fourier transform”). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Operating in a Contemporary Safety NetJason D. KeuneIt is summer, and I have just started my fourth year of general surgery residency, having just returned from two years in the lab. My “lab years” were spent as a Scholar–in–Residence of the American College of Surgeons. The scholarship that I engaged in included obtaining an MBA and a Graduate Certificate in Professional Ethics. The ethics component was self–designed with help (...) from an advisor, and was made up of graduate courses in political theory, healthcare financing law and bioethics. To say that I was reflective as I returned to the clinical rotations of the fourth year of residency would be understated.During this two–year period, I did not operate. I did do some clinical work during this time, but there wasn’t anyone in town willing to hire a partially–trained surgeon to do anything operative. I ended my third year of residency very happy with my technical skills, and was not sure just how these skills would survive a two–year hiatus. The challenge, as I thought of it then, would be to return to clinical rotations with this insecurity in mind and try to gain insight into just how rusty my skills were in a short period of time, and rectify them. I was in for a surprise.I felt a chill of trepidation when I discovered that the rotation that had been selected for me to return to was one in which I would be assigned to operate on and care for a low–income population of uninsured or underinsured patients with surgical problems—with minimal attending supervision. The patients were referred from the Federally Qualified Health Centers in town. The rotation had arisen from altruistic roots. The surgical service, provided at a large, academic urban hospital, was established when the city’s last remaining public hospital closed its doors for surgical patients. The service was an upright attempt to provide surgical continuity for this population. As I started the rotation and performed my first surgeries in two years with very minimal supervision, I realized that I would be participatory in what sums to a thoroughly unjust healthcare system. I would be caught in a swirl of humanitarian justice celebrated and a focus on a justice that seemed to fall short of a mark.The indigent hospital itself managed the clinic with a full complement of staff befitting a contemporary surgical clinic, albeit with a rather rudimentary computer system. The recordkeeping mechanism in our surgical office, however, was done without administrative assistance. We occupied a small room amongst the academic surgical offices at our home institution. The chief resident sat at a large [End Page 12] desk, the intern at a smaller desk, and the medical student had a chair and a laptop. The recordkeeping mechanism tracking who needed surgery, who had had surgery, and who needed follow–up on pathology was maintained by all members of the team. It involved one labyrinthine Excel spreadsheet, with multiple tabs, and a complex color–coordinated scheme of organization. The team would scan the entire thing on a daily basis to make sure nothing would be missed.When it came time to schedule a patient for the operating room, it was my responsibility as a chief resident to get an attending to “cover the case”, which amounted to finding an attending who agreed, at the bare minimum, to be present for the “critical portion” of the case. If the case was complex or very difficult, an attending surgeon would have to be sought who would scrub in and help perform the procedure. Not every attending would cover a charity case—the reasons why were not forthcoming. One surgeon would scrub every case he was asked to cover, stating that he felt every patient should have the same chance at the best treatment. Another would come to the room, but sit along the wall and review manuscripts as we operated, there to grant reassurance, and answer questions, but not, presumably, to direct the overall decision–making. All patients with breast cancer were seen, and operated on by one very dedicated breast surgeon with a humanitarian bent.I... (shrink)

Dag Prawitz’s theory of grounds proposes a fresh approach to valid inferences. Its main aim is to clarify nature and reasons of their epistemic power. The notion of ground is taken to denote what one is in possession of when in a state of evidence, and valid inferences are described in terms of operations that make us pass from grounds we already have to new grounds. Thanks to a rigorously developed proof-as-chains conception, the ground-theoretic framework permits Prawitz to overcome (...) some conceptual difficulties of his earlier proof-theoretic explanation. Though from different points of view, anyway, the two accounts share an issue of recognizability of relevant operational properties. (shrink)

The study aims to contribute to understand the Vitruvian design system through the analysis of the temples described in the text leading to the three key concepts related: proportio, commensus and commodulatio. At first, it is proposed a conceptual discussion about the origin of the compositional elements, and further it is discussed the concept of proportio as an operation of sizing and scaling these elements individually. Analyzed the definition and types of elements, it is proposed to continue the discussion on (...) the relationship that must be built as a way of associating elements in a consistent way, leading to the notion of symmetria, understood as an ideal state in which the elements maintain dimensional and/or geometrical relationships between them, creating a relational harmony. From the operational point of view, it is sought to demonstrate that the Vitruvian symmetria is fetched from two types of relations: a modular and a dimensional. (shrink)

Some interpretations of quantum mechanics regard a mixed quantum state as a ensemble, each individual member of which has a definite but unknown state vector. Other interpretations ascribe a state vector only to anensemble of similarly prepared systems, but not to anindividual. Previous attempts to detect the hypothetical individual state vectors have failed, essentially because the state operator enters the relevant equations linearly. An example from nonlinear dynamics, in which a density matrix enters nonlinearly, (...) is examined because it might appear to circumvent this difficulty. However, it is shown that the hypothetical individual state vectors can not be detected this way, so the adequacy of theensemble interpretation survives a critical test. (shrink)