scholarly journals Communicating uncertainty in risk descriptions: the consequences of presenting imprecise probabilities in time critical decision-making situations

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Joacim Rydmark ◽  
Jan Kuylenstierna ◽  
Henrik Tehler
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-191
Author(s):  
Jonas Karge ◽  

How strongly an agent beliefs in a proposition can be represented by her degree of belief in that proposition. According to the orthodox Bayesian picture, an agent's degree of belief is best represented by a single probability function. On an alternative account, an agent’s beliefs are modeled based on a set of probability functions, called imprecise probabilities. Recently, however, imprecise probabilities have come under attack. Adam Elga claims that there is no adequate account of the way they can be manifested in decision-making. In response to Elga, more elaborate accounts of the imprecise framework have been developed. One of them is based on supervaluationism, originally, a semantic approach to vague predicates. Still, Seamus Bradley shows that some of those accounts that solve Elga’s problem, have a more severe defect: they undermine a central motivation for introducing imprecise probabilities in the first place. In this paper, I modify the supervaluationist approach in such a way that it accounts for both Elga’s and Bradley’s challenges to the imprecise framework.


2011 ◽  
pp. 203-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subhashini Ganapathy ◽  
Sasanka Prabhala ◽  
S. Narayanan ◽  
Raymond R. Hill ◽  
Jennie J. Gallimore

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (25) ◽  
pp. 6629-6634 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander T. Topham ◽  
Rachel E. Taylor ◽  
Dawei Yan ◽  
Eiji Nambara ◽  
Iain G. Johnston ◽  
...  

Plants perceive and integrate information from the environment to time critical transitions in their life cycle. Some mechanisms underlying this quantitative signal processing have been described, whereas others await discovery. Seeds have evolved a mechanism to integrate environmental information by regulating the abundance of the antagonistically acting hormones abscisic acid (ABA) and gibberellin (GA). Here, we show that hormone metabolic interactions and their feedbacks are sufficient to create a bistable developmental fate switch in Arabidopsis seeds. A digital single-cell atlas mapping the distribution of hormone metabolic and response components revealed their enrichment within the embryonic radicle, identifying the presence of a decision-making center within dormant seeds. The responses to both GA and ABA were found to occur within distinct cell types, suggesting cross-talk occurs at the level of hormone transport between these signaling centers. We describe theoretically, and demonstrate experimentally, that this spatial separation within the decision-making center is required to process variable temperature inputs from the environment to promote the breaking of dormancy. In contrast to other noise-filtering systems, including human neurons, the functional role of this spatial embedding is to leverage variability in temperature to transduce a fate-switching signal within this biological system. Fluctuating inputs therefore act as an instructive signal for seeds, enhancing the accuracy with which plants are established in ecosystems, and distributed computation within the radicle underlies this signal integration mechanism.


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