This paper discusses and criticizes Joseph Nye’s account of soft power. First, we set the stage and make some general remarks about the notion of social power. In the main part of this paper we offer a detailed critical discussion of Nye’s conception of soft power. We conclude that it is too unclear and confused to be of much analytical use. However, despite this failure, Nye is aiming at explaining an important but also neglected form of social power: the power (...) to influence the will and not just the behavior of other agents. In the last part of this paper we briefly discuss Steven Lukes’ alternative view of a “third dimension” of power and end with a sketch of a more promising way to account for this neglected form of power. (shrink)

The Planteome project provides a suite of reference and species-specific ontologies for plants and annotations to genes and phenotypes. Ontologies serve as common standards for semantic integration of a large and growing corpus of plant genomics, phenomics and genetics data. The reference ontologies include the Plant Ontology, Plant Trait Ontology, and the Plant Experimental Conditions Ontology developed by the Planteome project, along with the Gene Ontology, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, Phenotype and Attribute Ontology, and others. The project also provides (...) access to species-specific Crop Ontologies developed by various plant breeding and research communities from around the world. We provide integrated data on plant traits, phenotypes, and gene function and expression from 95 plant taxa, annotated with reference ontology terms. (shrink)

East Asians and Westerners differ in various aspects of perception and cognition. For example, visual memory for East Asians is believed to be more influenced by the contextual aspects of a scene than is the case for Westerners (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). There are also differences in visual search: for Westerners, search for a long line among short is faster than for short among long, whereas this difference does not appear to hold for East Asians (Ueda et al., submitted). However, (...) it is unclear how these group-level differences originate. To investigate the extent to which they depend upon environment, we tested visual search and visual memory in East Asian immigrants who had lived in Canada for different amounts of time. Recent immigrants were found to exhibit no search asymmetry, unlike Westerners who had spent their lives in Canada. However, immigrants who had lived in Canada for more than two years showed performance comparable to that of Westerners. These differences could not be explained by the general analytic/holistic processing distinction believed to differentiate Westerners and East Asians, since all observers showed a strong holistic tendency for visual recognition. Results instead support the suggestion that exposure to a new environment can significantly affect the particular processes used to perceive a given stimulus. (shrink)

Michael H. Mitias argues that friendship is a central moral value constituting an integral part of the good life and therefore deserving a prominent place in ethical theory. He consequently calls upon ethicists to make immediate and decisive adjustments toward accommodating what he regards as a neglected organic relationship between friendship and morality. This is not a fanciful amendment to our standard conception of morality but a radical proposal grounded in a unifying vision to recapture the right way of doing (...) ethics. While the assessment is compelling, and the plea well-placed, neither has been fully understood in the scholarly reception of Mitias. This paper clarifies both. What sets it apart from other reactions to Mitias is a holistic approach drawing on literary considerations as well as philosophical ones. The combined aim is to demonstrate that Mitias is not seeking simply to restore friendship to its rightful place in normative ethical theory, which is indeed the full extent of his formal mission, but that he is seeking to do so specifically within virtue ethics. This interpretation rests on a broad engagement with Mitias’s publications beyond the recent treatise often taken understandably yet erroneously to be his only work on the subject. (shrink)

I give a pedagogical derivation of the Cramer-Rao Bound, which gives a lower bound on the variance of estimators used in statistical point estimation, commonly used to give numerical estimates of the systematic uncertainties in a measurement.

In this article, the concept of system of symbolic 2-plithogenic linear equations and its solutions are introduced and studied. The Cramer's rule was applied to solve the system of symbolic 2-plithogenic linear equations. Also, provided enough examples for each case to enhance understanding.

Models are indispensable tools of scientific inquiry, and one of their main uses is to improve our understanding of the phenomena they represent. How do models accomplish this? And what does this tell us about the nature of understanding? While much recent work has aimed at answering these questions, philosophers' focus has been squarely on models in empirical science. I aim to show that pure mathematics also deserves a seat at the table. I begin by presenting two cases: Cramér’s random (...) model of the prime numbers and the function field model of the integers. These cases show that mathematicians, like empirical scientists, rely on unrealistic models to gain understanding of complex phenomena. They also have important implications for some much-discussed theses about scientific understanding. First, modeling practices in mathematics confirm that one can gain understanding without obtaining an explanation. Second, these cases undermine the popular thesis that unrealistic models confer understanding by imparting counterfactual knowledge. (shrink)

About thirty years ago, when the Internet started to be commercialised, access to the medium became a topic of research and debate. Up-to-date evidence about key predictors, such as age, is crucial because of the Internet's ever-changing nature and the challenges associated with gaining access to it. This paper aims to give an overview of New Zealand's Internet access trends and how they relate to age. It is based on secondary analysis of data from a larger online panel survey with (...) 1,001 adult respondents. The Chi-square test of independence and Cramer's V were used in the analysis. The study provides new evidence to understand the digital divide. Specifically, it uncovers a growing disparity in the quality of Internet connectivity. Even though fibre is the most common type of broadband connection at home, older adults are less likely to have it and more likely to use wireless broadband, which is a slower connection type. Additionally, a sizable majority of people in all age categories have favourable opinions on the Internet. Interestingly, this was more prevalent among older people, although they report an increased concern about the security of their personal information online. The implications of the results are discussed and some directions for future research are proposed. (shrink)

The explicit history of the “hidden variables” problem is well-known and established. The main events of its chronology are traced. An implicit context of that history is suggested. It links the problem with the “conservation of energy conservation” in quantum mechanics. Bohr, Kramers, and Slaters (1924) admitted its violation being due to the “fourth Heisenberg uncertainty”, that of energy in relation to time. Wolfgang Pauli rejected the conjecture and even forecast the existence of a new and unknown then elementary particle, (...) neutrino, on the ground of energy conservation in quantum mechanics, afterwards confirmed experimentally. Bohr recognized his defeat and Pauli’s truth: the paradigm of elementary particles (furthermore underlying the Standard model) dominates nowadays. However, the reason of energy conservation in quantum mechanics is quite different from that in classical mechanics (the Lie group of all translations in time). Even more, if the reason was the latter, Bohr, Cramers, and Slatters’s argument would be valid. The link between the “conservation of energy conservation” and the problem of hidden variables is the following: the former is equivalent to their absence. The same can be verified historically by the unification of Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Schrödinger’s wave mechanics in the contemporary quantum mechanics by means of the separable complex Hilbert space. The Heisenberg version relies on the vector interpretation of Hilbert space, and the Schrödinger one, on the wave-function interpretation. However the both are equivalent to each other only under the additional condition that a certain well-ordering is equivalent to the corresponding ordinal number (as in Neumann’s definition of “ordinal number”). The same condition interpreted in the proper terms of quantum mechanics means its “unitarity”, therefore the “conservation of energy conservation”. In other words, the “conservation of energy conservation” is postulated in the foundations of quantum mechanics by means of the concept of the separable complex Hilbert space, which furthermore is equivalent to postulating the absence of hidden variables in quantum mechanics (directly deducible from the properties of that Hilbert space). Further, the lesson of that unification (of Heisenberg’s approach and Schrödinger’s version) can be directly interpreted in terms of the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics in the cherished “quantum gravity” as well as a “manual” of how one can do this considering them as isomorphic to each other in a new mathematical structure corresponding to quantum information. Even more, the condition of the unification is analogical to that in the historical precedent of the unifying mathematical structure (namely the separable complex Hilbert space of quantum mechanics) and consists in the class of equivalence of any smooth deformations of the pseudo-Riemannian space of general relativity: each element of that class is a wave function and vice versa as well. Thus, quantum mechanics can be considered as a “thermodynamic version” of general relativity, after which the universe is observed as if “outside” (similarly to a phenomenological thermodynamic system observable only “outside” as a whole). The statistical approach to that “phenomenological thermodynamics” of quantum mechanics implies Gibbs classes of equivalence of all states of the universe, furthermore re-presentable in Boltzmann’s manner implying general relativity properly … The meta-lesson is that the historical lesson can serve for future discoveries. (shrink)

I happen to believe that though human experiences are to be characterized as pluralistic they are all rooted in the one reality. I would assume the thesis of pluralism but how could I maintain my belief in the realism? There are various discussions in favor of realism but they appear to stay within a particular paradigm so to be called “internal realism”. In this paper I would try to justify my belief in the reality by discussing a special use of (...) indexicals. I will argue for my indexical realism by advancing the thesis that indexicals can be used as an inter-agentic referential term. Three arguments for the thesis will be presented. The first argument derives from a revision of Kaplan-Kvart’s notion of exportation. Their notions of exportation of singular terms can be analyzed as intra-agentic exportation in the context of a single speaker and theirs may be revised so as to be an inter-agentic exportation in the context of two speakers who use the same indexicals. The second is an argument from the notion of causation which is specifically characterized in the context of inter-theoretic reference. I will argue that any two theories may each say “this” in order to refer what is beyond its own theory. Two theories address themselves to ‘this’ same thing though what ‘this’ represents in each theory turn out to be different objects all together. The third argument is an argument which is based on a possibility of natural reference. Reference is used to be taken mostly as a 3-place predicate: Abe refers an object oi with an expression ej. The traditional notion of reference is constructive and anthropocentric. But I would argue that natural reference is a reference that we humans come to recognize among denumerably many objects in natural states: at a moment mi in a natural state there is a referential relation among objects o1, o2, o3, . . , oj, o j+1, . . which interact to each other as agents of information processors. Natural reference is an original reference which is naturally given and to which humans are passive as we derivatively refer it by using ‘this’. (shrink)

Purpose: Despite the prevalent use of the golden ratio in the environment design for autistic users, there is no experimental research that explains their desired space ratio. This study aims to find the desired ratio in the learning environment, like an occupational therapy room for autistic users, while considering effective variables on their choices. Methodology: Based on McAllister's (2012) study, a scale model inspired by a dollhouse has been chosen to work and play with autistic children directly and find their (...) desired space ratio. Meanwhile, the furniture configuration and the access type in the environment could also define the ratio for interviewees. Accordingly, the scale model was designed with six different scale rooms containing three ratios and two spatial access types represented by the furniture arrangement. 50 autistic children of different ages, genders, and disorders in the moderate and medium spectrum have been randomly sampled. Then, they were asked to choose their desired ratio by playing with the scale model and putting the doll in their preferred room. This study also included 50 non-autistic children as a control group with different genders and defined ages. Result: After interviewing both groups, the chi-square test with Cramer's V calculation analyzed the result to find the statistically significant correlation between control variables, among which two independent variables had a statistically significant correlation with the chosen ratio for all the interviewees. First, being autistic significantly impacted their desired ratio choice as autistic children went for a ratio of 2:5, and no autistic ones had a high tendency toward the golden ratio (1:1.6). The chi-square test also showed that the access type in the scale model was the effective variable for both groups when choosing their desired ratio. Conclusion: The access type of the room with its furniture configuration impacted how users perceived the room's ratio, as well as being autistic or non-autistic users. (shrink)

この巻は少し古いが、殺人の心理学を特に扱う最近の人気のある本はほとんどなく、数ドルで利用可能な簡単な概要なので、それでも努力する価値があります。それは包括的な試みを行うおらず、読者は彼の他の多くの本と 暴力に関する膨大な文献から空白を埋めることが期待されている場所でやや表面的です。更新については、例えば、バス、進化心理学のハンドブック第2位 v1 (2016) p 265、 266, 270-282, 388-389, 545-546, 547, 566, 進化心理学第5回,(2015年) p 26, 96-97,223, 293-4, 300, 309-312, 410 およびシャックフォードハンセンと進化 200444 暴力.彼は数十年にわたりトップの進化心理学者の一人であり、彼の作品の中で幅広い行動をカバーしていますが、ここでは、個々の人々が殺害を引き起こす心理的メカニズムとEEA(進化適応の環境、すなわち過去10 0万年ほどの間のアフリカの平原)におけるその可能な進化機能にほぼ完全に集中しています。 バスは、他の行動と同様に、精神病理学、嫉妬、社会環境、集団圧力、薬物、アルコールなどの「代替」説明は、なぜこれらの殺人的衝動を生み出すのかという疑問がまだ残っているので、彼らは近位の原因であり、究極の 進化(遺伝的)ものであるわけではないことを知ることによって始まります。いつものように、それは必然的に包括的なフィットネス(親族の選択)に煮詰まるので、すべての生物のすべての行動のための究極の説明である 仲間やリソースへのアクセスのための闘争に。社会学的データ(および常識)は、若い貧しい男性が殺す可能性が最も高いことを明らかにしています。彼は、先進国からの殺人データ、部族文化、動物における特異な殺害、 考古学、FBIデータ、そして通常の人々の殺人ファンタジーに関する彼自身の研究を提示します。多くの考古学的証拠は、先史時代に、グループ全体、または若い女性を差し引いたグループを含む殺人の蓄積を続けていま す。 Bussのコメントを調査した後、私は私の他の多くの記事や本で広く取り上げられている意図的心理学(合理性の論理的構造)の非常に簡単な要約を提示します。 進化的な観点から殺人的暴力の詳細な歴史を望む多くの時間を持つ人は、スティーブン・ピンカーの「なぜ暴力が衰退したのか私たちの自然のより良い天使たち」(2012)に相談し、私のレビューはネットと私の最近の 本の2冊で簡単に入手できます。簡単に言えば、ピンカーは、殺人は飼育者として私たちの時代から約30倍の着実かつ劇的に減少していると指摘しています。だから、銃は今では誰もが殺すことを非常に簡単にしているに もかかわらず、殺人ははるかに一般的ではありません。ピンカーは、これは私たちの「より良い天使」を引き出す様々な社会的メカニズムによるものだと考えていますが、主に私たちの惑星の無慈悲な強姦からの資源の一時 的な豊富さ、警察の存在の増加と相まって、それが罰せられる可能性がはるかに高い通信と監視と法制度によるものだと思います。これは、警察の短い、地元の不在さえあるたびに明らかになります。 現代の2つのシス・エムスの見解から人間の行動のための包括的な最新の枠組みを望む人は、私の著書「ルートヴィヒ・ヴィトゲンシュタインとジョン・サールの第2回(2019)における哲学、心理学、ミンと言語の論 理的構造」を参照することができます。私の著作の多くにご興味がある人は、運命の惑星における「話す猿--哲学、心理学、科学、宗教、政治―記事とレビュー2006-2019 第3回(2019)」と21世紀5日(2019年)の自殺ユートピア妄想st Century 5th ed (2019)などを見ることができます。 バスは、他の行動と同様に、精神病理学、嫉妬、社会環境、集団圧力、薬物、アルコールなどの「代替」説明は、なぜこれらの殺人的衝動を生み出すのかという疑問がまだ残っているので、彼らは近位の原因であり、究極の 進化(遺伝的)ものであるわけではないことを知ることによって始まります。いつものように、それは必然的に包括的なフィットネス(親族の選択)に煮詰まるので、すべての生物のすべての行動のための究極の説明である 仲間やリソースへのアクセスのための闘争に。社会学的データ(および常識)は、若い貧しい男性が殺す可能性が最も高いことを明らかにしています。彼は、先進国からの殺人データ、部族文化、動物における特異な殺害、 考古学、FBIデータ、そして通常の人々の殺人ファンタジーに関する彼自身の研究を提示します。多くの考古学的証拠は、先史時代に、グループ全体、または若い女性を差し引いたグループを含む殺人の蓄積を続けていま す。 p 12で、彼は、資源をめぐる各個人と世界中の戦争は、概念、母親の食べ物を奪い、彼女の体を強調することによって成長し始め、そして彼女のシステムが概念のために頻繁に致命的な結果で反撃するとき、概念から始まる と指摘しています。彼は、自発的中絶の推定値がすべての概念の約30%の範囲にあることを教えておらず、年間8000万人もの人が死亡し、母親が妊娠していることを知らないほど早く、おそらく彼女の生理は少し遅れ ています。これは、私たちが敗北に成功していない自然の優生学の一部です。 文明の全体的な異形成効果は続いており、毎日生まれた約30万人は、世界人口が20万人増加し、地球を破壊するためにこれまで以上に大きな「不適当な」人口を持つ約10万人よりも、平均して肉体的にわずかにフィッ トしていない。 p13では、OJシンプソンが有罪であったことははっきりとは分からないと言いますが、裁判に関係なく、彼の奇妙な行動を含む事件の事実の唯一の合理的な解釈なので、私たちは彼が知っていると言うでしょう。また、 数百万ドルの弁護人が司法を覆すために出席していなかったその後の民事裁判では、彼はすぐに有罪判決を受け、資産の添付につながり、武装強盗の有罪判決と投獄につながった。 彼はp20に関して、過去100年間に世界中で約1億件の既知の殺人事件があり、報告されていないすべての殺人が含まれていれば、おそらく3億件もの殺人があったと指摘している。彼は中国共産党(約100万人では ない)によって約4000万を数えるとは思わない。飢えた6000万人、スターリンの1000万人。 tenまた、ほとんどの犠牲者の犠牲者を救う世界クラスの医療システムにより、アメリカの殺人率は約75%減少することを念頭に置いておく必要があります。私は、メキシコは約20倍の米国とホンジュラスの殺人率を 約5倍持っており、あなたの子孫は確かにアメリカの多様性の致命的な抱擁のために、その方向に移動する私たちのレートを楽しみにすることができると付け加えます。「アディオス・アメリカ」(2015年)のアン・コ ールターは、ヒスパニックが過去数十年間にここで約23,000件の殺人を犯したと指摘しています。今のところ、何も行われず、国境が解散し続け、環境崩壊と倒産に近づくにつれて、ここでの犯罪は経済を解消するに つれて、メキシコのレベルに達するでしょう。2014年だけでも、100人の米国市民が殺害され、130人以上が誘拐され、他の人が失踪し、他の外国人やメキシコ人を加えれば数千人に及ぶ。詳細については、私の「 民主主義による自殺」2 nd ed(2019年)を参照してください。 .