Credible Worlds: The Status of Theoretical Models in Economics

2012 ◽  
pp. 476-510
Author(s):  
Robert Sugden
2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 53-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Laurent ◽  
Marielle Berriet-Solliec ◽  
Marc Kirsch ◽  
Pierre Labarthe ◽  
AurélieT AurélieTrouvé

Various theoretical models of public policy analysis are used to treat situations of decision-making in which public deciders have to take into account the multifunctionality of agriculture. For some, science-society relations are not really problematical. Others acknowledge the current attempts of these policy-makers to find adequate scientific knowledge, and the difficulties they encounter. These difficulties stem partly from the very content of knowledge produced by research. Could other modes of production be more efficient? The status of the knowledge produced by these approaches is a subject of debate. Bridging the divide between science and policy more effectively is not only a question of knowledge brokerage.Accessibility and reliability of the existing evidences are also problems to be addressed. The debates around evidence-based practices may provide some landmarks in this new situation although they also emphasize the limits of the tools that can be built for this purpose.  


Author(s):  
Mark Wollaeger

This chapter considers points of intersection between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Joseph Conrad. By Ngũgĩ’s own account, his rewriting of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) as A Grain of Wheat (1967) triggered a crisis of audience that ultimately led him to abandon English for his native Gikuyu. To further complicate the question of influence, Wollaeger also examines the relationship between two works of nonfiction: Conrad’s A Personal Record (1912) and Ngũgĩ’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986). At the heart of Ngũgĩ’s attempt to fashion premodern tribalism into a utopian space are two problems that still animate critical discussion. What is the status of the local and the indigenous? Does attention to influence reinstate a center-periphery model in postcolonial criticism? This chapter shows the extent to which Conrad and Ngũgĩ both anticipate and generate theoretical models later used to articulate modernism and postcolonialism as fields of inquiry.


Galaxies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
José-María Martí

Numerical simulations have been playing a crucial role in the understanding of jets from active galactic nuclei (AGN) since the advent of the first theoretical models for the inflation of giant double radio galaxies by continuous injection in the late 1970s. In the almost four decades of numerical jet research, the complexity and physical detail of simulations, based mainly on a hydrodynamical/magneto-hydrodynamical description of the jet plasma, have been increasing with the pace of the advance in theoretical models, computational tools and numerical methods. The present review summarizes the status of the numerical simulations of jets from AGNs, from the formation region in the neighborhood of the supermassive central black hole up to the impact point well beyond the galactic scales. Special attention is paid to discuss the achievements of present simulations in interpreting the phenomenology of jets as well as their current limitations and challenges.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (03) ◽  
pp. 1450022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hatim Machrafi ◽  
Georgy Lebon

The purpose of this work is to study heat conduction in systems that are composed out of spherical micro-and nanoparticles dispersed in a bulk matrix. Special emphasis will be put on the dependence of the effective heat conductivity on various selected parameters as dimension and density of particles, interface interaction with the matrix. This is achieved by combining the effective medium approximation and extended irreversible thermodynamics, whose main feature is to elevate the heat flux vector to the status of independent variable. The model is illustrated by three examples: Silicium-Germanium, Silica-epoxy-resin and Copper-Silicium systems. Predictions of our model are in good agreement with other theoretical models, Monte-Carlo simulations and experimental data.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Punit Prakash

Thermal tissue ablation is an interventional procedure increasingly being used for treatment of diverse medical conditions. Microwave ablation is emerging as an attractive modality for thermal therapy of large soft tissue targets in short periods of time, making it particularly suitable for ablation of hepatic and other tumors. Theoretical models of the ablation process are a powerful tool for predicting the temperature profile in tissue and resultant tissue damage created by ablation devices. These models play an important role in the design and optimization of devices for microwave tissue ablation. Furthermore, they are a useful tool for exploring and planning treatment delivery strategies. This review describes the status of theoretical models developed for microwave tissue ablation. It also reviews current challenges, research trends and progress towards development of accurate models for high temperature microwave tissue ablation.


<em>Abstract.—</em>The two main species of freshwater eels in New Zealand, the shortfin <em>Anguilla australis </em>and the endemic longfinned eel <em>A. dieffenbachii</em>, are extensively commercially exploited and also support important customary fisheries. Since there are no commercial glass eel fisheries in New Zealand, other indices must be used to indicate changes in recruitment over time. While there is some anecdotal evidence of reductions in glass eel recruitment, there is evidence of poorly represented cohorts of longfins within some populations, and modeling of these data indicate a substantial reduction in recruitment over the past two decades. Growth of both species is typically slow at 2–3 cm per year, meaning that both species are susceptible to commercial capture for many years until spawning escapement. Extensive commercial fishing has resulted in more substantial changes in length-frequency distributions of longfins than in shortfins; likewise, regional reductions in catch per unit effort are more significant for longfins. Theoretical models of silver eel escapement indicate that longfin females are especially susceptible to overexploitation. Shortfins would have been more impacted than longfins by loss of wetlands, but the impact of hydro stations on upstream access for juvenile eels and downstream access for silver eels would have been more severe for longfins. Overall, there is no clear evidence that the status of shortfin eel stocks has been seriously compromised by the extensive commercial eel fishery, but there is increasing evidence that longfins are unable to sustain present levels of exploitation.


Theory plays an important role in education. It is the baseline premise that evokes further investigation, and through valid study, the status of a proposed explanation can be changed from conjecture to research-based fact. This chapter poses three theoretical frameworks. The Bio-Ecological Theory/Human on Human Development posits that a child's physiological development combines with consistent exposure to his/her environment throughout the early stages of life to play a significant role in a child's overall development. The Social Model Theory on Disability suggests that society's understanding of what is considered a “disability” along with certain perceptions and biases about immigrants can inhibit effective fulfillment of learning needs on behalf of children from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) background.


2018 ◽  
pp. 29-48
Author(s):  
Sebastian Matzner

Taking its cue from Horace’s paradoxical dictum that ‘Greece took captive its brutish conqueror and brought its arts to rustic Latium’ (Ep. 2.1.156–7), this chapter explores parallels between the history of Latin literature and theoretical models elaborated by scholars of post-colonial literature. Continuing the first chapter’s broader methodological considerations, it models a post-colonially inflected reading strategy to analyze more lucidly the inter- and intracultural dynamics and politics of Latin texts shaped by (and, in turn, shaping and sustaining) the fraught Greco-Roman cultural relationship: how, where, and to whose (dis-)advantage does Greece work—and is made to work—as a silent referent in Roman literary and literary-critical knowledge? Horace’s Letter to Augustus serves to illustrate the insights this approach can generate in the study of individual Latin texts, of Roman philhellenism as a cultural paradigm, and in current debates on the status of European literature within post-colonial frameworks of world literature.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-150
Author(s):  
Irina N. Griftsova ◽  
Natalia Yu. Kozlova ◽  

This contribution examines the status of the rhetoric of science in two contexts. The first one is the effect that the changing interpretation of logic (the changing 'image of logic') has had on the status of the rhetoric of science. The second is the role that imagery has in scientific discourse. It is argued that the very possibility of a rhetorical interpretation of science depends on how the logic of science is understood. Informal logic, which acts here as a variant of argumentation theory or a logic of argumentation, is proposed as such a logic. This leads to a revision of the nature of justification in science in general, the substitution of apodictic logic for a logic of argumentation as a principal tool, and the consideration of strict formal ways of material implication-based justification as mere individual cases of a logic of argumentation. The role of imagery in scientific discourse is analysed. It is demonstrated that the situation of rhetoric and perception of imagery is paradoxical: although using rhetorical mechanisms in scientific communication is unavoidable, rhetoric has been criticised for many centuries. It is shown that the negative attitude to using rhetorical elements in scientific texts has long historical roots going back to ancient philosophical thought, namely, Socrates's criticism of eloquence and sophistic rhetoric. Analysis of the functions of imagery in scientific discourse suggests that imagery is an inalienable mechanism of both professional communication and the creation of theoretical models of knowledge.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Finkbeiner

The status of identical constituent compounds (ICCs) (e.g. Künstler-Künstler, ‘artist-artist’) is discussed controversially in the morphological literature on German. In this paper, it is claimed that ICC formation is a productive word formation pattern in German. In the first part of the paper, I investigate the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties of ICCs in German. Based on this description, I discuss in more detail two conflicting claims about their meaning constitution: the ‘prototype reading claim’ and the ‘context-dependency claim’. I argue that ICCs do not behave differently, in principle, from canonical N+N compounds with respect to context-dependency. Based on a discussion of selected theoretical models of nominal compounds, an approach is sketched that takes into account not only semantic and contextual, but also stored conceptual and experiential knowledge as main sources of knowledge in ICC interpretation. In the second part of the paper, the results of a pilot experimental study are presented in which 40 native speakers were asked to paraphrase a set of context-free German ICCs. The findings clearly indicate that ICCs are systematically interpretable in isolation, with a significant preference for ‘prototype’ (e.g. Winter-Winter: ‘very cold winter’) and ‘real’ readings (e.g. Holz-Holz: ‘real wood, not artificial wood’).


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