scholarly journals The Need for Negativity

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-266
Author(s):  
Stephen Braude
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Physical Interaction ◽  
Present Level ◽  
The World ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Errors And Confusions ◽  
Shed Light

Several of my recent Editorials have dealt with terminological/conceptual errors and confusions that have been all too prevalent among psi researchers. In this Editorial, I want to consider a related issue often raised about parapsychological concepts and explanation. Probably we’ve all heard the complaint that parapsychology’s core concepts have only been defined negatively, with respect to our present level of ignorance—for example, taking “telepathy” to be “the causal influence of one mind on another independently of the known senses.” Perhaps some of you have even expressed that complaint yourselves. Of course, the assumption underlying those complaints is that this definitional strategy is a problem. However, it seems like a perfectly reasonable procedure to me, and I can easily accept the possibility that we might eventually learn enough about phenomena so defined that we can later construct better, detailed, and more informative analytical definitions. But at least as far as psi research is concerned, I consider it presumptuous—at our present (and considerable) level of ignorance—to proceed any other way. We hardly have the barest hint, based on all the available data, as to what psi is doing in the world (i.e., both inside and outside the lab). In fact, formal, experimental evidence has been particularly unilluminating. It has barely succeeded, if it’s succeeded at all, in convincing parapsychological fence-sitters that there are any genuine paranormal phenomena to study (I’ve explored some reasons for this in Braude, 1997). And it certainly hasn’t shed light on how pervasive, extensive, and refined psi effects might be, or whether effects of radically different magnitudes would be the result of substantially different processes. At best, typical quantitative research examines only straitjacketed expressions of phenomena that non-laboratory evidence suggests occur more impressively (if not flamboyantly) “in the wild.” So it strikes me as appropriately modest and circumspect to define “PK” (for example) as “the effect of an organism on a region r of the physical world without any known sort of physical interaction between the organism's body and r.” (For additional specific parapsychological definitions, see Braude, 2002).

Causality Then and Now

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Karen Harding
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Theory ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Mechanical Model ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Way

Ate appearances deceiving? Do objects behave the way they do becauseGod wills it? Ate objects impetmanent and do they only exist becausethey ate continuously created by God? According to a1 Ghazlli, theanswers to all of these questions ate yes. Objects that appear to bepermanent are not. Those relationships commonly tefemed to as causalare a result of God’s habits rather than because one event inevitably leadsto another. God creates everything in the universe continuously; if Heceased to create it, it would no longer exist.These ideas seem oddly naive and unscientific to people living in thetwentieth century. They seem at odds with the common conception of thephysical world. Common sense says that the universe is made of tealobjects that persist in time. Furthermore, the behavior of these objects isreasonable, logical, and predictable. The belief that the univetse is understandablevia logic and reason harkens back to Newton’s mechanical viewof the universe and has provided one of the basic underpinnings ofscience for centuries. Although most people believe that the world is accutatelydescribed by this sort of mechanical model, the appropriatenessof such a model has been called into question by recent scientificadvances, and in particular, by quantum theory. This theory implies thatthe physical world is actually very different from what a mechanicalmodel would predit.Quantum theory seeks to explain the nature of physical entities andthe way that they interact. It atose in the early part of the twentieth centuryin response to new scientific data that could not be incorporated successfullyinto the ptevailing mechanical view of the universe. Due largely ...

Varieties of Understanding

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Normative Considerations ◽  
Shed Light

According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.

The Metaphysics of Representation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Robert G. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Representational Content ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Public Language ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Final Layer ◽  
The World ◽  
Interactive Relationship ◽  
Compositional Interpretation ◽  
The One

What is representation? How do the more primitive aspects of our world come together to generate it? How do different kinds of representation relate to one another? This book identifies the metaphysical foundations for representational facts. The story told is in three parts. The most primitive layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of sensation/perception and intention/action, which are the two most basic modes in which an individual and the world interact. It is argued that we can understand how this kind of representation can exist in a fundamentally physical world so long as we have an independent, illuminating grip on functions and causation. The second layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of (degrees of) belief and desire, whose representational content goes far beyond the immediate perceptable and manipulable environment. It is argued that the correct belief/desire interpretation of an agent is the one which makes their action-guiding states, given their perceptual evidence, most rational. The final layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of words and sentences, human artefacts with representational content. It is argued that one can give an illuminating account of the conditions under which a compositional interpretation of a public language like English is correct by appeal to patterns emerging from the attitudes conventionally expressed by sentences. The three-layer metaphysics of representation resolves long-standing underdetermination puzzles, predicts and explains patterns in the way that concepts denote, and articulates a delicate interactive relationship between the foundations of language and thought.

scholarly journals A set of distinct facial traits learned by machines is not predictive of appearance bias in the wild

AI and Ethics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Steed ◽  
Aylin Caliskan
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Personality Traits ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Processing Technology ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Interpretable Model ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractResearch in social psychology has shown that people’s biased, subjective judgments about another’s personality based solely on their appearance are not predictive of their actual personality traits. But researchers and companies often utilize computer vision models to predict similarly subjective personality attributes such as “employability”. We seek to determine whether state-of-the-art, black box face processing technology can learn human-like appearance biases. With features extracted with FaceNet, a widely used face recognition framework, we train a transfer learning model on human subjects’ first impressions of personality traits in other faces as measured by social psychologists. We find that features extracted with FaceNet can be used to predict human appearance bias scores for deliberately manipulated faces but not for randomly generated faces scored by humans. Additionally, in contrast to work with human biases in social psychology, the model does not find a significant signal correlating politicians’ vote shares with perceived competence bias. With Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), we provide several explanations for this discrepancy. Our results suggest that some signals of appearance bias documented in social psychology are not embedded by the machine learning techniques we investigate. We shed light on the ways in which appearance bias could be embedded in face processing technology and cast further doubt on the practice of predicting subjective traits based on appearances.

Lawful Remedy or Illegal Response? Resolving the Issue of Foreign Subsidization Under WTO Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Victor Crochet ◽  
Marcus Gustafsson
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
World Trade Organization ◽  
World Trade ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Fair Competition ◽  
Trade Law ◽  
International Trade Law ◽  
The World ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Do So

Abstract Discontentment is growing such that governments, and notably that of China, are increasingly providing subsidies to companies outside their jurisdiction, ‘buying their way’ into other countries’ markets and undermining fair competition therein as they do so. In response, the European Union recently published a proposal to tackle such foreign subsidization in its own market. This article asks whether foreign subsidies can instead be addressed under the existing rules of the World Trade Organization, and, if not, whether those rules allow States to take matters into their own hands and act unilaterally. The authors shed light on these issues and provide preliminary guidance on how to design a response to foreign subsidization which is consistent with international trade law.

scholarly journals Multi-Task Learning Using Task Dependencies for Face Attributes Prediction

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 2535
Author(s):  
Di Fan ◽  
Hyunwoo Kim ◽  
Jummo Kim ◽  
Yunhui Liu ◽  
Qiang Huang
Keyword(s):  
Human Computer Interaction ◽  
Video Surveillance ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Learning Task ◽  
Face Verification ◽  
Task Learning ◽  
The World ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Learning Architectures

Face attributes prediction has an increasing amount of applications in human–computer interaction, face verification and video surveillance. Various studies show that dependencies exist in face attributes. Multi-task learning architecture can build a synergy among the correlated tasks by parameter sharing in the shared layers. However, the dependencies between the tasks have been ignored in the task-specific layers of most multi-task learning architectures. Thus, how to further boost the performance of individual tasks by using task dependencies among face attributes is quite challenging. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning using task dependencies architecture for face attributes prediction and evaluate the performance with the tasks of smile and gender prediction. The designed attention modules in task-specific layers of our proposed architecture are used for learning task-dependent disentangled representations. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed network by comparing with the traditional multi-task learning architecture and the state-of-the-art methods on Faces of the world (FotW) and Labeled faces in the wild-a (LFWA) datasets.

Willing but wary: Australian women experts’ attitudes to engaging with the news media

Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110070
Author(s):  
Kathryn Shine
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Time Constraints ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Female Participation ◽  
News Content ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Quantitative Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
Almost All

Numerous quantitative studies from around the world have found that women are under-represented as sources in news content. This study aims to add to the existing quantitative research by describing female experts’ attitudes about being interviewed as news sources, and their experiences of interacting with journalists. It reports the findings of semi-structured interviews with 30 Australian female academic experts from a broad range of disciplines. Almost all of the women experts in the group were willing to be interviewed by a journalist, and reported that their experiences with the news media had generally been positive. However, they referred to various factors that may act as deterrents. These included a lack of confidence, a reluctance to appear on camera, time constraints and a lack of understanding about how the news media operates. This research provides valuable insights for journalists and editors, and outlines recommendations about how to encourage female participation in the news.

Analyse des réseaux de personnages dans les textes de Leslie Kaplan : du postmodernisme à l’inconscient

2021 ◽  
pp. 095715582110024
Author(s):  
Murielle El Hajj
Keyword(s):  
Identity Crisis ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Real ◽  
The World ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Shed Light

The texts of Leslie Kaplan question the irreducible opposition between the real and the non-real. Her characters and their intentional absence confuse the repository and fictional worlds, not only to point out the thin margin between reality and fiction, but to underline the impossible delimitation between the real and the fictional, or even between the text and the world. This article studies the characters of Kaplan and aims to demonstrate their identity crisis through the study of their literary onomastic and the use of the neutral pronoun ‘it’ and allegoric expressions. In addition, the objective of this article is to shed light on the Kaplanian characters as Kunderian models, while stressing the particularity of their physionomy, which consists to present ‘fuzzy’ characters that are present and absent at the same time, engaging the reader in the fictional process as a try to complete the missing details. This article concludes that the Kaplanian characters are not only the prototypes of the postmodern being, but they are also introverted, psychopaths and a demonstration of different facets of the unconscious.

Belief Movement, Uncertainty Reduction, and Rational Updating*

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ned Augenblick ◽  
Matthew Rabin
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Tests ◽  
Uncertainty Reduction ◽  
The State ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
New Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Market Beliefs ◽  
Over Time

Abstract When a Bayesian learns new information and changes her beliefs, she must on average become concomitantly more certain about the state of the world. Consequently, it is rare for a Bayesian to frequently shift beliefs substantially while remaining relatively uncertain, or, conversely, become very confident with relatively little belief movement. We formalize this intuition by developing specific measures of movement and uncertainty reduction given a Bayesian’s changing beliefs over time, showing that these measures are equal in expectation and creating consequent statistical tests for Bayesianess. We then show connections between these two core concepts and four common psychological biases, suggesting that the test might be particularly good at detecting these biases. We provide support for this conclusion by simulating the performance of our test and other martingale tests. Finally, we apply our test to data sets of individual, algorithmic, and market beliefs.

scholarly journals Monitoring invasive mammalian predator populations sharing habitat with the Critically Endangered Puerto Rican parrot Amazona vittata

Oryx ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Engeman ◽  
Desley Whisson ◽  
Jessica Quinn ◽  
Felipe Cano ◽  
Pedro Quiñones ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Habitat Type ◽  
Critically Endangered ◽  
Mammal Species ◽  
Forest Sites ◽  
The World ◽  
Mammalian Predators ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Amazona Vittata ◽  
Black Rats

Critically Endangered Puerto Rican parrots Amazona vittata are one of the rarest birds in the world. Several exotic mammal species capable of preying on Puerto Rican parrots cohabit the Caribbean National Forest with the only wild population of these parrots. We used tracking plates, monitoring blocks and trapping to index black rats, small Indian mongooses and feral cats in parrot habitat and in public-use areas in the same habitat type. We had high trap success for black rats at all sites (42% of all sites combined), among the highest reported in the world. Rat response to monitoring (nontoxic bait) blocks was universally high, regardless of ground or tree placement. Mongooses were present at all sites, with a greater proportion of plates tracked within the forest than at public-use sites. Cats were present at all forest sites and one of the public-use sites. Presence of the three species did not appear to be linked to human disturbance. Because only 30–40 Puerto Rican parrots survive in the wild, with as few as three pairs nesting in 2002, we concluded that the abundance and pervasiveness of exotic mammalian predators poses a greater threat to the parrots than has been generally acknowledged. This is evidenced by mammalian predation during recent parrot breeding seasons, including six fledglings taken by mongooses and one nest failure from rats during 2000–2003.

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