scholarly journals Scientific Variables

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Benjamin C. Jantzen
Keyword(s):  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Inductive Inference ◽  
Equivalence Classes ◽  
Granular Soils ◽  
Inference Algorithm ◽  
Real Numbers ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Structure Preserving ◽  
The World ◽  
Series Of Experiments

Despite their centrality to the scientific enterprise, both the nature of scientific variables and their relation to inductive inference remain obscure. I suggest that scientific variables should be viewed as equivalence classes of sets of physical states mapped to representations (often real numbers) in a structure preserving fashion, and argue that most scientific variables introduced to expand the degrees of freedom in terms of which we describe the world can be seen as products of an algorithmic inductive inference first identified by William W. Rozeboom. This inference algorithm depends upon a notion of natural kind previously left unexplicated. By appealing to dynamical kinds—equivalence classes of causal system characterized by the interventions which commute with their time evolution—to fill this gap, we attain a complete algorithm. I demonstrate the efficacy of this algorithm in a series of experiments involving the percolation of water through granular soils that result in the induction of three novel variables. Finally, I argue that variables obtained through this sort of inductive inference are guaranteed to satisfy a variety of norms that in turn suit them for use in further scientific inferences.

Encircling Graphs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Benjamin ◽  
Gary Chartrand ◽  
Ping Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Real Number ◽  
Traveling Salesman Problem ◽  
Complex Number ◽  
Traveling Salesman ◽  
Complex Numbers ◽  
Real Numbers ◽  
Hamiltonian Graphs ◽  
The World ◽  
The Traveling Salesman Problem

This chapter considers Hamiltonian graphs, a class of graphs named for nineteenth-century physicist and mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton. In 1835 Hamilton discovered that complex numbers could be represented as ordered pairs of real numbers. That is, a complex number a + b i (where a and b are real numbers) could be treated as the ordered pair (a, b). Here the number i has the property that i² = -1. Consequently, while the equation x² = -1 has no real number solutions, this equation has two solutions that are complex numbers, namely i and -i. The chapter first examines Hamilton's icosian calculus and Icosian Game, which has a version called Traveller's Dodecahedron or Voyage Round the World, before concluding with an analysis of the Knight's Tour Puzzle, the conditions that make a given graph Hamiltonian, and the Traveling Salesman Problem.

Synechism & Law

1996 ◽  
pp. 69-148
Author(s):  
Vincent G. Potter
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
The Road ◽  
The World ◽  
Logical Principle ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
Working Out

This chapter examines the role of synechism in Charles S. Pierce's pragmatism. Pierce frequently remarked that his pragmaticism was intimately related to synechism or the doctrine of continuity. Indeed, Peirce’spent the better part of twenty years working out his synechistic cosmology. According to him, synechism as a logical principle forbids one to consider any inexplicability as a possible explanation, and this is nothing more or less than the assumption behind the scientific enterprise as such, namely, that the world is knowable. The synechistic principle does not deny that there is an element of the inexplicable and of the ultimate and brute in the world. This does not, however, block the road of inquiry, but rather stimulates one to generalize from the experience, to form new hypotheses, because one is convinced that the facts can be understood—that they manifest another mode of being other than brutishness, namely, obedience to rationality and to law.

scholarly journals PREREGISTRATION TO FACILITATE A REPLICABLE SCIENCE OF AGING

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S400-S400
Author(s):  
Walter R Boot
Keyword(s):  
False Positive ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Intervention Studies ◽  
Attentional Processing ◽  
Replication Crisis ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Common Misconceptions

Abstract Psychology and other sciences have been in the midst of a replication crisis. One proposal to address this crisis is the preregistration of studies, including study hypotheses, methods, measures, and analysis approaches to reduce false positive findings resulting from “experimenter degrees of freedom.” This talk will explore the benefits, and also the challenges, of preregistration, along with common misconceptions about preregistration. A preregistration case study will be presented involving a series of experiments exploring different hypotheses regarding the mechanism behind changes in attentional processing associated with aging (http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.26). This talk will present a brief tutorial of how to preregister studies and where to preregister them. The importance of preregistration for intervention studies will be emphasized.

scholarly journals Validation of six years of TES tropospheric ozone retrievals with ozonesonde measurements: implications for spatial patterns and temporal stability in the bias

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 1413-1423 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. W. Verstraeten ◽  
K. F. Boersma ◽  
J. Zörner ◽  
M. A. F. Allaart ◽  
K. W. Bowman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Temporal Stability ◽  
Lower Troposphere ◽  
Temporal Variations ◽  
Upper Troposphere ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Tropics

Abstract. In this analysis, Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) V004 nadir ozone (O3) profiles are validated with more than 4400 coinciding ozonesonde measurements taken across the world from the World Ozone and Ultraviolet Radiation Data Centre (WOUDC) during the period 2005–2010. The TES observation operator was applied to the sonde data to ensure a consistent comparison between TES and ozonesonde data, i.e. without the influence of the a priori O3 profile needed to regulate the retrieval. Generally, TES V004 O3 retrievals are biased high by 2–7 ppbv (7–15%) in the troposphere, consistent with validation results from earlier studies. Because of two degrees of freedom for signal in the troposphere, we can distinguish between upper and lower troposphere mean biases, respectively ranging from −0.4 to +13.3 ppbv for the upper troposphere and +3.9 to +6.0 ppbv for the lower troposphere. Focusing on the 464 hPa retrieval level, broadly representative of the free tropospheric O3, we find differences in the TES biases for the tropics (+3 ppbv, +7%), sub-tropics (+5 ppbv, +11%), and northern (+7 ppbv, +13%) and southern mid-latitudes (+4 ppbv, +10%). The relatively long-term record (6 yr) of TES–ozonesonde comparisons allowed us to quantify temporal variations in TES biases at 464 hPa. We find that there are no discernable biases in each of these latitudinal bands; temporal variations in the bias are typically within the uncertainty of the difference between TES and ozonesondes. Establishing these bias patterns is important in order to make meaningful use of TES O3 data in applications such as model evaluation, trend analysis, or data assimilation.

scholarly journals Induction and Natural Kinds Revisited

2021 ◽  
pp. 284-300
Author(s):  
Howard Sankey
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Inductive Inference ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Problem Of Induction ◽  
Shared Set ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Dispositional Essentialism ◽  
Previous Account

Howard Sankey reconsiders a special issue closely connected with causal powers—the problem of induction. He addresses a deep version of problem of circularity originally raised by Psillos, and argues that the circularity can be avoided. The key is recognizing certain epistemically externalist results of the Megaric consequences of the commitment to dispositional essentialism. Circularity can be avoided, Sankey argues, because it is the way the world is, rather than the inductive inference itself, that grounds the reliability of the inductive inference in his previous account. What are doing the work for Sankey here are the Megaric consequences of his adoption of Ellis’s dispositional essentialism. The uniformity in question is one that stretches across possible worlds: nature is uniform in the precise sense that there are natural kinds whose members all possess a shared set of essential properties. The significance of this commitment lies in how the possible and the temporal intersect through restrictions placed on the accessibility relation between the actual and the possible. Ipso facto, when considering questions about the future behaviours of objects, which is how Sankey understands the problem of induction to be, the uniformity of nature can ground the reliability of beliefs about those future behaviours precisely because the domain of possibility is restricted to those worlds accessible to the actual world, which is fixed by the commitments of dispositional essentialism.

scholarly journals The Incidental Learning of Feature Distributions in Supervised Classification

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan T. Thevenow-Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Supervised Classification ◽  
Incidental Learning ◽  
Statistical Properties ◽  
Classification Task ◽  
Learning Situation ◽  
The World ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
Use Categories

Categorization allows us to organize and extend our knowledge to make predictions about new things in the world. My dissertation presents series of experiments about how the statistical properties of stimuli incidental to a supervised classification task influence later learning. After exposure to task-irrelevant but statistically varying features, do people “transfer in” such knowledge to new problems where that information is suddenly applicable, or do they learn nothing at all in the first place such that they have nothing to transfer out of the first learning situation. What information about irrelevant features bias people when they move to another task where those features become relevant?The literature is unclear about how irrelevant features are used in later tasks, and most studies use categories that are binary: either the feature is present or absent. Few studies present continuous features with many distributions, and no study has systematically compared different distributions between tasks, especially with a large number of participants recruited online.These findings will inform how we can structure environments and tasks to prepare people to learn without explicitly teaching them before the task. This could make learning well-designed curricula and tasks more efficient. Another outcome of this dissertation research will be a number of open-source projects making online psychology experiments easier to perform, analyze, and replicate.

Representations of Well-Founded Preference Orders

1983 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 496-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Cenzer ◽  
R. Daniel Mauldin
Keyword(s):  
Utility Function ◽  
Binary Relation ◽  
Linear Order ◽  
Equivalence Classes ◽  
Preference Order ◽  
Real Numbers ◽  
Order Preserving Map ◽  
Preference Orders ◽  
Reasonable Sense ◽  
Natural Relation

A preference order, or linear preorder, on a set X is a binary relation which is transitive, reflexive and total. This preorder partitions the set X into equivalence classes of the form . The natural relation induced by on the set of equivalence classes is a linear order. A well-founded preference order, or prewellordering, will similarly induce a well-ordering. A representation or Paretian utility function of a preference order is an order-preserving map f from X into the R of real numbers (provided with the standard ordering). Mathematicians and economists have studied the problem of obtaining continuous or measurable representations of suitably defined preference orders [4, 7]. Parametrized versions of this problem have also been studied [1, 7, 8]. Given a continuum of preference orders which vary in some reasonable sense with a parameter t, one would like to obtain a continuum of representations which similarly vary with t.

Is cystic echinoccocosis re-emerging in western Spain?

2015 ◽  
Vol 143 (15) ◽  
pp. 3351-3357 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. LOPEZ-BERNUS ◽  
M. BELHASSEN-GARCÍA ◽  
A. CARPIO-PEREZ ◽  
L. PEREZ DEL VILLAR ◽  
A. ROMERO-ALEGRIA ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Hydatid Disease ◽  
Mediterranean Region ◽  
Endemic Area ◽  
Health Plans ◽  
Watch And Wait ◽  
Notifiable Disease ◽  
Real Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
Important Health ◽  
Western Spain

SUMMARYCystic echinococcosis (CE) remains an important health problem in many areas of the world, including the Mediterranean region. We performed a retrospective study of cases reported from 1998 to 2012 in order to review and update the epidemiology of this disease in a highly endemic area situated in western Spain. A total of 471 patients were diagnosed with hydatid disease. Of these cases, 55·8% were male, with an average age of 62·3 ± 19·5 years. More importantly, 1·5% of patients were children, and 20·5% were aged <45 years. An active therapeutic approach was implemented for 92·6% of the CE patients with primary diagnoses; however, a ‘watch and wait’ strategy was used in 59·3% of all secondary CE diagnoses. The incidence rate of hydatid disease was significantly higher compared to the incidence described in the Notifiable Disease System in this area. Furthermore, a significant decrease in hydatid incidence during the years included in the study was observed (β = −0·4357, P < 0·001). CE incidence has diminished in recent years, although active transmission remains in paediatric cases. Additionally, CE incidence remains high in our region despite public health plans for its control. The documented incidence of CE disease clearly underestimates the real numbers.

Dynamical Characteristics of a Hydraulic Soft Actuator With Three Degrees of Freedom

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qing Xie ◽  
Tao Wang ◽  
Shiqiang Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Model ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Soft Actuator ◽  
Dynamical Characteristics ◽  
Geometrical Features ◽  
Highly Nonlinear ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Soft Actuators ◽  
Modeling Of Dynamics ◽  
Three Degrees Of Freedom

Abstract In recent years, increasing attention and expanding research have been devoted to the study and application of soft actuators. Inherent compliance equips soft actuators with such advantages as incomparable flexibility, good environmental adaptability, safe interaction with the environment, etc. However, the highly nonlinear also bring challenges to modeling of dynamics. This study aims to explore the dynamical characteristics of an underwater hydraulic soft actuator. The actuator has three fiber-reinforced elastomer chambers distributed symmetrically inside. By controlling the pressure in the chambers through a hydraulic power system, the actuator can achieve spatial motion with three degrees of freedom. To describe the relationship between the input pressure combination and the actuator movement, a dynamic model considering the nonlinearity of viscoelastic material is developed based on Lagrangian method and constant curvature hypothesis. A series of experiments are carried out, including single-chamber actuation and multi-chamber actuation. The test results verify the effectiveness and precision of the model. Finally, the effects of the geometrical features on dynamic response are investigated through model-based simulation, which can provide guidance to parameter optimization. The proposed dynamic model can also contribute to behavior analysis, performance prediction, and motion control of the hydraulic soft actuator.

The Seduction of Science

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Ben Trubody
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Thomas Kuhn ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Jean Baudrillard ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This chapter aims to give an account of paradigmatic science as retold through Jean Baudrillard's concept of ‘seduction'. Using concepts developed by Thomas Kuhn and Jean Baudrillard it will be argued that ‘seduction' as understood by Baudrillard can be found at varying levels of the scientific enterprise. The two main features of Baudrillard's seduction are ‘ambiguity and ‘reversibility', where we cannot be sure who is seducing who (ambiguity), where each seeks to become the other (reversibility), but in doing so only highlights their differences. In terms of Kuhn's work the more the paradigm seeks to become identical with the world, the more it begins to collapse under the weight of its own anomalies and stand out from the world. Yet when a paradigm is at its height we cannot be sure whether ‘nature' looks the way it does because the paradigm demands it or that nature is leading science to postulate said paradigm? These themes will be examined at the metaphysical, psychological and social levels of science.

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