This paper targets a key question for the philosophy and sciences of the mind: what does consciousness contribute to the guidance of action? I begin by focusing on a construct that seems initially promising in this connection – the sense of agency. I argue that work on the sense of agency is beset by conceptual problems. But, I argue, the sense of agency can be fruitfully re-conceived, treated as the product of metacognition, and placed in a promising framework for understanding (...) the flexible control of behavior. On this reconception, the sense of agency results from monitoring two aspects of action control processes, action quality and action cost. This monitoring undergirds metacognitive feelings connected to action quality (fluency, control, or reliability) as well as action cost (effort, or straining). And these feelings are in turn embedded in the role of cognitive control in guiding and driving motor planning and execution. (shrink)

Cognitive effort is thought to be familiar in everyday life, ubiquitous across multiple variations of task and circumstance, and integral to cost/benefit computations that are themselves central to the proper functioning of cognitive control. In particular, cognitive effort is thought to be closely related to the assessment of cognitive control’s costs. I argue here that the construct of cognitive effort, as it is deployed in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is problematically unclear. The result is that talk of cognitive (...) effort may paper over significant disagreement regarding the nature of cognitive effort, and its key functions for cognitive control. I highlight key points of disagreement, and several open questions regarding what causes cognitive effort, what cognitive effort represents, cognitive effort’s relationship to action, and cognitive effort’s relationship to consciousness. I also suggest that pluralism about cognitive effort – that cognitive effort may manifest as a range of intentional or non-intentional actions the function of which is to promote greater success at paradigmatic cognitive control tasks – may be a fruitful and irenic way to conceive of cognitive effort. Finally, I suggest that recent trends in work on cognitive control suggests that we might fruitfully conceive of cognitive effort as one key node in a complex network of mental value, and that studying this complex network may illuminate the nature of cognitive control, and the role of consciousness in cognitive control’s proper functioning. (shrink)

Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima facie plausible idea that we wish to explore (...) in this paper is that control is non-accidental in virtue of requiring knowledge – either knowledge-that or knowledge-how (e.g., Beddor and Pavese 2021; cf., Setiya 2008; 2012 and Habgood-Coote 2018). We review in detail some key recent work defending such knowledge-centric theories of control, and we show that none of these accounts holds water. We conclude with some discussion about how control opposes the sort of luck intentional action excludes without doing so by requiring knowledge (that- or how). (shrink)

This essay argues that current theories of action fail to explain agentive control because they have left out a psychological capacity central to control: attention. This makes it impossible to give a complete account of the mental antecedents that generate action. By investigating attention, and in particular the intention-attention nexus, we can characterize the functional role of intention in an illuminating way, explicate agentive control so that we have a uniform explanation of basic cases of causal deviance (...) in action as well as other defects of agency, explain cases of skilled agency and sharpen questions about the role of thought in agency. This provides for a different orientation in the theory of action. (shrink)

Even though the idea that privacy is some kind of control is often presented as the standard view on privacy, there are powerful objections against it. The aim of this paper is to defend the control account of privacy against some particularly pressing challenges by proposing a new way to understand the relevant kind of control. The main thesis is that privacy should be analyzed in terms of source control, a notion that is adopted from discussions (...) about moral responsibility. (shrink)

A restrictive view of self-control identifies exercises of self-control with synchronic intrapsychic processes, and pictures diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies not as proper instances of self-control, but as clever ways of avoiding the need to exercise that ability. In turn, defenders of an inclusive view of self-control typically argue that we should construe self-control as more than effortful inhibition, and that, on grounds of functional equivalence, all these diverse strategies might be properly described as instances of (...) self-control. In this paper, I take a fresh look at this debate by focusing on cases of addiction. I argue that addicted agents face a paradigmatic sort of self-control challenge, which makes addiction an important test case for theories of self-control. And I discuss evidence that highlights both the unreliability of synchronic intrapsychic strategies and the crucial role that is played by diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies in successful attempts at achieving abstinence by addicted individuals. Abstaining addicts are a paradigmatic case of agents who successfully exercise self-control, and they mostly do so by relying on diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies. This, I argue, lends further support to an inclusive view of self-control. (shrink)

The international debate on the ethics and legality of autonomous weapon systems (AWS), along with the call for a ban, primarily focus on the nebulous concept of fully autonomous AWS. These are AWS capable of target selection and engagement absent human supervision or control. This paper argues that such a conception of autonomy is divorced from both military planning and decision-making operations; it also ignores the design requirements that govern AWS engineering and the subsequent tracking and tracing of moral (...) responsibility. To show how military operations can be coupled with design ethics, this paper marries two different kinds of meaningful human control (MHC) termed levels of abstraction. Under this two-tiered understanding of MHC, the contentious notion of ‘full’ autonomy becomes unproblematic. (shrink)

A standard account of privacy says that it is essentially a kind of control over personal information. Many privacy scholars have argued against this claim by relying on so-called threatened loss cases. In these cases, personal information about an agent is easily available to another person, but not accessed. Critics contend that control accounts have the implausible implication that the privacy of the relevant agent is diminished in threatened loss cases. Recently, threatened loss cases have become important because (...) Edward Snowden’s revelation of how the NSA and GCHQ collected Internet and mobile phone data presents us with a gigantic, real-life threatened loss case. In this paper, I will defend the control account of privacy against the argument that is based on threatened loss cases. I will do so by developing a new version of the control account that implies that the agents’ privacy is not diminished in threatened loss cases. (shrink)

Impairment of self-control is often said to be a defining feature of addiction. Yet many addicts display what appears to be a considerable amount of control over their drug-oriented actions. Not only are their actions clearly intentional and frequently carried out in a conscious and deliberate manner, there is evidence that many addicts are responsive to a wide range of ordinary incentives and counter-incentives. Moreover, addicts have a wide variety of reasons for using drugs, reasons which often seem (...) to go a long way towards explaining their drug-oriented behavior. Many use drugs, for example, to cope with stressful or traumatic experiences. In this article I argue that some standard philosophical explanations of addicts’ impairment of self-control are inadequate, and propose an alternative. (shrink)

The contribution of the body to cognition and control in natural and artificial agents is increasingly described as “off-loading computation from the brain to the body”, where the body is said to perform “morphological computation”. Our investigation of four characteristic cases of morphological computation in animals and robots shows that the ‘off-loading’ perspective is misleading. Actually, the contribution of body morphology to cognition and control is rarely computational, in any useful sense of the word. We thus distinguish (1) (...) morphology that facilitates control, (2) morphology that facilitates perception and the rare cases of (3) morphological computation proper, such as ‘reservoir computing.’ where the body is actually used for computation. This result contributes to the understanding of the relation between embodiment and computation: The question for robot design and cognitive science is not whether computation is offloaded to the body, but to what extent the body facilitates cognition and control – how it contributes to the overall ‘orchestration’ of intelligent behaviour. (shrink)

A great deal of common law jurisprudence—especially within criminal and constitutional law—treats an agent’s control as a primary (though not the sole) factor in determining the scope of the agent’s reasonable expectation of privacy. We raise a new philosophical challenge for this ‘control theorist’ approach. The challenge concerns a class of cases in which it seems that an agent both loses control over information and retains a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to that information. Faced with (...) our challenge, some will abandon the control theorist’s tight link between privacy and control. We instead use the challenge to motivate a more refined account of the relationship between privacy and control on behalf of the control theorists. By refining an existing framework for adjudicating privacy’s scope, we show how the control theorist’s connection between privacy and control, far from being an impediment to robust privacy protections in a digital world, potentially provides an elegant tool for extending privacy’s scope. (shrink)

Decision theory explains weakness of will as the result of a conflict of incentives between different transient agents. In this framework, self-control can only be achieved by the I-now altering the incentives or choice-sets of future selves. There is no role for an extended agency over time. However, it is possible to extend game theory to allow multiple levels of agency. At the inter-personal level, theories of team reasoning allow teams to be agents, as well as individuals. I apply (...) team reasoning at the intra-personal level, taking the self as a team of transient agents over time. This allows agents to ask, not just “what should I-now do?’, but also ‘What should I, the person over time do?’, which may enable agents to achieve self-control. The resulting account is Aristotelian in flavour, as it involves reasoning schemata and perception, and it is compatible with some of the psychological findings about self-control. (shrink)

How do you control a superintelligent artificial being given the possibility that its goals or actions might conflict with human interests? Over the past few decades, this concern– the AGI control problem– has remained a central challenge for research in AI safety. This paper develops and defends two arguments that provide pro tanto support for the following policy for those who worry about the AGI control problem: don’t talk about it. The first is argument from counter-productivity, which (...) states that unless kept secret, efforts to solve the control problem could be used by a misaligned AGI to counter those very efforts. The second is argument from suspicion, stating that open discussions of the control problem may serve to make humanity appear threatening to an AGI, which increases the risk that the AGI perceives humanity as a threat. I consider objections to the arguments and find them unsuccessful. Yet, I also consider objections to the don’t-talk policy itself and find it inconclusive whether it should be adopted. Additionally, the paper examines whether the arguments extend to other areas of AI safety research, such as AGI alignment, and argues that they likely do, albeit not necessarily as directly. I conclude by offering recommendations on what one can safely talk about, regardless of whether the don’t-talk policy is ultimately adopted. (shrink)

This paper examines the philosophical and ethical boundary between invention and interference in the relationship between science and nature. While science originated as a method of understanding natural laws, contemporary practice increasingly reflects a shift toward manipulation, control, and alteration of natural systems. The paper argues that this shift is driven not by science itself, but by the unconscious use of it—where human intention overrides natural balance. It further explores the illusion of control as a central mistake of (...) humanity and critiques the emerging desire for species-level immortality. The study concludes that this unconscious pursuit of control is not preserving life, but actively driving its destruction, including the very species that seeks to dominate. (shrink)

Stump and Timpe have recently proposed Thomistic based solutions to the traditional problem in Christian theology of how to relate grace and free will. By taking a closer look at the notion of control, I subject Timpe’s account – itself an extension of Stump’s account – to extended critique. I argue that the centrepiece of Timpe’s solution, his reliance on Dowe’s notion of quasi-causation, is misguided and irrelevant to the problem. As a result, Timpe’s account fails to avoid Semi-Pelagianism. (...) I canvass two alternatives, each of which adheres to the broad theological assumptions made by Stump and Timpe, including the positing of only one “unique” grace. I conclude that each of these proposals fails, although I argue that one comes as close as it is possible to get to a solution given the assumptions made. -/- . (shrink)

A summary of The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States is presented: I claim that a convincing account of the emotions requires a rethink of how the mind as a whole is structured. I provide this reconceptualization by introducing a fundamental type of mental concept called “valent representation" and then systematically elaborating this fundamental type in stages. In this way, accounts are provided of the various sorts of affective states ranging from pains and pleasures to character traits.

Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is lag- ging behind the development of controllers. This has become even more prominent with the advent of compliant, deformable or "soft" bodies. These carry substantial potential regarding their exploitation for control – sometimes referred to as "mor- phological computation" in the sense of (...) offloading computation needed for control to the body. Here, we will argue in favor of a dynamical systems rather than com- putational perspective on the problem. Then, we will look at the pros and cons of simple vs. complex bodies, critically reviewing the attractive notion of “soft” bodies automatically taking over control tasks. We will address another key dimension of the design space – whether model-based control should be used and to what extent it is feasible to develop faithful models for different morphologies. ----- This paper was also published in the 2014 AISB proceedings http://aisb50.org/representation-of-reality-humans-animals-and-machines/ - http://doc.gold.ac.uk/aisb50/. (shrink)

The current rise of neurodevelopmental disorders poses a critical need to detect risk early in order to rapidly intervene. One of the tools pediatricians use to track development is the standard growth chart. The growth charts are somewhat limited in predicting possible neurodevelopmental issues. They rely on linear models and assumptions of normality for physical growth data – obscuring key statistical information about possible neurodevelopmental risk in growth data that actually has accelerated, non-linear rates-of-change and variability encompassing skewed distributions. Here, (...) we use new analytics to profile growth data from 36 newborn babies that were tracked longitudinally for 5 months. By switching to incremental (velocity-based) growth charts and combining these dynamic changes with underlying fluctuations in motor performance – as the transition from spontaneous random noise to a systematic signal – we demonstrate a method to detect very early stunting in the development of voluntary neuromotor control and to flag risk of neurodevelopmental derail. (shrink)

This paper proposes the concept of the Effect-Field, a structural layer responsible for action execution within the architecture of self-manifestation. Three modes of action are distinguished: instinct, reflex, and driven motion. Their roles are analyzed within a multi-field loop involving the Tuning-Field, Experience-Field, and Intention-Field. The framework suggests a closed action-control structure that accounts for habit formation, automatic behaviors, and phenomena such as phantom limb experiences. The paper further introduces the concept of a Private-Field of Instruments, proposing that tools (...) and technologies, once incorporated into an action loop, can become extensions of bodily capability. This field-based framework provides a structural perspective for understanding neural motor control, cognitive architecture, robotics control systems, and brain–computer interface integration. (shrink)

Intelligent defence support systems are confronted with the need to manage ever-increasing floods of data in a way that raises significant challenges because the data are described and presented using different terminologies and formats. How, on this basis, is it possible to reach a common understanding of the information content of these data among people and software agents? How is it possible to ensure that domain knowledge is reused in consistent fashion in a way that makes this information available for (...) integration and analysis? How can we support the identification, selection, composition, and orchestration of services based on such diverse data providing homogeneous support by a service-oriented architecture? This collection is devoted to the use of ontologies to answer questions such as these. (shrink)

I explore the possibility and rationality of interpersonal mechanisms of doxastic self-control, that is, ways in which individuals can make use of other people in order to get themselves to stick to their beliefs. I look, in particular, at two ways in which people can make interpersonal epistemic commitments, and thereby willingly undertake accountability to others, in order to get themselves to maintain their beliefs in the face of anticipated “epistemic temptations”. The first way is through the avowal of (...) belief, and the second is through the establishment of collective belief. I argue that both of these forms of interpersonal epistemic commitment can function as effective tools for doxastic self-control, and, moreover, that the control they facilitate should not be dismissed as irrational from an epistemic perspective. (shrink)

The goal of the Department of Defense Net-Centric Data Strategy is to improve data sharing throughout the DoD. Data sharing is a critical element of interoperability in the emerging system-of-systems. Achieving interoperability requires the elimination of two types of data heterogeneity: differences of syntax and differences of semantics. This paper builds a path toward semantic uniformity through application of a disciplined approach to ontology. An ontology is a consensus framework representing the types of entities within a given domain and the (...) relations between them. The construction of an ontology begins when a Community of Interest (COI) identifies its authoritative data sources (ADS), which are usually manifest in relevant doctrinal publications, glossaries, data dictionaries, and logical data models. The identified terms are then defined in relation to a common logical framework that has been designed to ensure interoperability with other ontologies created on the basis of the same strategy. As will be described, the Command and Control (C2) Ontology will include representations of a substantial number of entities within the Command and Control (C2) domain. If domain ontologies (e.g. Strike and Counterinsurgency) semantically align with the C2 Ontology, then a substantial barrier to systems interoperability is thereby crossed. (shrink)

Vitamin D deficiency and its effect have attracted considerable research interest due to its relation to glucose homeostasis, insulin secretion, sensitivity and synthesis. This study aimed to evaluate vitamin D levels in patients with type II diabetes mellitus aged between 35-65 years and investigate their relations with glycemic control and obesity. The study included 74 Libyan patients with a known history of type II diabetes mellitus (33 males and 41 females). Serum glucose, glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) and vitamin D levels (...) were biochemically estimated in these patients. Further, body mass index (BMI) was calculated for all diabetic patients (weight in kilogram per height in meter square). The mean level of plasma glucose level was 150.58±63.82 mg/dl (mean±SD). The mean of HbA1c level was 7.90±8.48% (mean±SD). The mean level of vitamin D was 22.75±14.97 ng/ml. The mean of BMI was 26.55±4.10 Kg per m2. The findings showed that 58.10% of the cases had vitamin D deficiency (Out of which 24.24% were males and 85.36% were females). This study showed significant differences in glucose, HbA1c, vitamin D and BMI between male and female patients. Moreover, elderly ages for both sexes had adverse effects on vitamin D status. Vitamin D levels have negatively been correlated with levels of glucose, HbA1c and BMI. It is concluded that vitamin D deficiency has an adverse effect on glucose homeostasis in patients with type II diabetes mellitus and this can be a contributing risk factor in complications of type II diabetes mellitus development in Libyan patients. (shrink)

This paper introduces Living Intelligence as a control-theoretic framework for continuously adaptive intelligent systems, formalized as continuously adaptive stochastic controllers (CASCs). The framework establishes stochastic stability guarantees via Lyapunov analysis, characterizes a compact invariant set with explicit exponential convergence rates, and proves stability-preserving exploration under a Fisher information threshold switching policy. The unifying result is the Lyapunov-Information Equivalence Principle (LIEP): a necessary and sufficient condition linking Lyapunov boundedness and information-regularized optimality in a single inequality. Connections to rate-distortion theory and (...) maximum-entropy reinforcement learning are established. No phenomenological or biological equivalence claims are made. (shrink)

Engineers fine-tune the design of robot bodies for control purposes, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent, and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is lagging behind the development of controllers. This has become even more prominent with the advent of compliant, deformable or ”soft” bodies. These carry substantial potential regarding their exploitation for control—sometimes referred to as ”morphological computation”. In this article, we briefly review different notions of computation by physical (...) systems and propose the dynamical systems framework as the most useful in the context of describing and eventually designing the interactions of controllers and bodies. Then, we look at the pros and cons of simple vs. complex bodies, critically reviewing the attractive notion of ”soft” bodies automatically taking over control tasks. We address another key dimension of the design space—whether model-based control should be used and to what extent it is feasible to develop faithful models for different morphologies. (shrink)

We argue that lack of direct and conscious control is not, in principle, a reason to be afraid of machines in general and robots in particular: in order to articulate the ethical and political risks of increasing automation one must, therefore, tackle the difficult task of precisely delineating the theoretical and practical limits of sustainable delegation to robots.

Dubreuil (Biol Phil 25:53–73, 2010b , this journal) argues that modern-like cognitive abilities for inhibitory control and goal maintenance most likely evolved in Homo heidelbergensis , much before the evolution of oft-cited modern traits, such as symbolism and art. Dubreuil’s argument proceeds in two steps. First, he identifies two behavioral traits that are supposed to be indicative of the presence of a capacity for inhibition and goal maintenance: cooperative feeding and cooperative breeding. Next, he tries to show that these (...) behavioral traits most likely emerged in Homo heidelbergensis . In this paper, I show that neither of these steps are warranted in light of current scientific evidence, and thus, that the evolutionary background of human executive functions, such as inhibition and goal maintenance, remains obscure. Nonetheless, I suggest that cooperative breeding might mark a crucial step in the evolution of our species: its early emergence in Homo erectus might have favored a social intelligence that was required to get modernity really off the ground in Homo sapiens. (shrink)

La finalidad del presente ensayo consiste en partir de las nociones interrelacionadas de "capitalismo mundial integrado" (Guattari) y de "sociedad de control" (Deleuze) para intentar una deriva que cruce géneros, épocas y nombres propios: de la filosofía al cine y a la poesía (caminos de ida y vuelta), de Benjamin a Serres pasando por Homero, Kavafis, Cioran o Godard, del tardío imperio romano y sus incertidumbres a la imprecisión de nuestro propio tiempo. Posiblemente, pensar hoy la identidad humana sea (...) como nunca antes un asunto de mezcla, de viaje a través de territorios viejos que demandan una nueva cartografía. -/- The purpose of this essay is to depart from the interrelated notions of "whole global capitalism" (Guattari) and the "control society" (Deleuze) to attempt a drift across genders, epochs and proper names: from philosophy to cinema and poetry (roundtrip roads), from Benjamin to Serres, passing through Homer, Kavafis, Cioran or Godard, from the late Roman empire and its uncertainties to our own time. Possibly, thinking today about human identity is as never before, a matter of mixture, of travel through old territories that demand new maps. (shrink)

Most of us are familiar with reports of lab animals that, when presented with a lever that provides opioids or cocaine, will press the lever over and over at the expense of food and water (Deneau, Yanagita, and Seevers 1969; Weeks 1962; Deroche-Gamonet, Belin, and Piazza 2004). This paradigm has not only been used by researchers to study drug effects but also entered the culture as an anti-drug parable. In the most famous of these types of studies (Olds and Milner (...) 1954) the lever wasn't delivering drugs, but direct electrical stimulation to the brain’s reward circuits. This research inspired a genre of 'wireheading' (Niven 1969); speculative fiction in which humans build technologies that allow them to directly manipulate reward systems. The general theme of these stories is that self-stimulation leads to loss of agency and social decay. The framework of social distaste does not do justice to the biological, technical, and philosophical implications of an intelligent agent finding ways to subvert its own control system. When we consider the goals and relationships of genomes, nervous systems, social systems, and artificial intelligence, we find that the subversive behavior of hacking your own reward system is not an aberration. Rather, reward hacking it is the default behavior of both evolved and engineered intelligent agents and is overcome only by constant innovation and effort on the part of control systems. The more capabilities available to an intelligent agent, the more likely it is to find ways to hack its own reward system. At the extreme, an organism smart enough to gain complete control over its own reward system, i.e. build itself a golden lever to press, should be expected to completely cease functioning. The seemingly inevitable non-functional endpoint to increasing the capabilities of an intelligent agent is the self-control paradox. By asking whose goals are being subverted when reward systems are hacked, we can better understand our relationship to our genome, to each other, and to artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This article proposes an interpretation of evolution as a continuous process of escalation of control architectures. Rather than organizing physical, chemical, biological, cognitive, and technological evolution around ontological levels or the emergence of new types of entities, the paper analyzes evolution in terms of increasing control power and successive reorganizations of regulatory architecture. The framework identifies regulatory thresholds at which existing architectures lose stability and must be restructured in order to maintain coherent system trajectories. The approach is functional, (...) non-normative, and non-teleological, and is intended as a conceptual basis for further formal and empirical work, including the analysis of stability and safety in high-power technological systems. (shrink)

The Joint Battle Management Language (JBML) is an XML-based language designed to allow Command and Control (C2) systems to interface easily with Modeling and Simulation (M&S) systems. While some of the XML-tags defined in this language correspond to types of entities that exist in reality, others are mere syntactic artifacts used to structure the messages themselves. Because these two kinds of tags are not formally distinguishable, JBML messages in effect confuse data with what the data represent. In this paper (...) we show how a realism-based ontology combined with a rule language can be used to make these distinctions explicit. The approach allows storage of the contents of JBML messages in a Referent Tracking System in a format that mimics the structure of reality thereby providing an aid to message validation. (shrink)

Wegner and colleagues have offered an explanation of the sense of agency over one’s bodily actions. If the orthodox view is correct and there is a sense of agency deficit associated with delusions of alien control, then Wegner and colleagues’ model ought to extend to an explanation of this deficit. Data from intentional binding studies opens up the possibility that an abnormality in representing the timing of mental events leads to a violation of the principle of priority in those (...) suffering from delusions of alien control. However, the model ultimately fails as it is unable to accommodate action monitoring deficits associated with delusions of alien control, in particular the theory of mind deficiencies predicted by such accounts have not materialised. There are theory of mind problems associated with schizophrenia but they are not associated with delusions of alien control. Such accounts thereby fail to adequately explain delusions of alien control. (shrink)

Probability updating via Bayes' rule often entails extensive informational and computational requirements. In consequence, relatively few practical applications of Bayesian adaptive control techniques have been attempted. This paper discusses an alternative approach to adaptive control, Bayesian in spirit, which shifts attention from the updating of probability distributions via transitional probability assessments to the direct updating of the criterion function, itself, via transitional utility assessments. Results are illustrated in terms of an adaptive reinvestment two-armed bandit problem.

Background: Infection control is critical in hematology units as patients with blood disorders are highly vulnerable to acquiring healthcare-associated infections. The increased risk of infection is high due to the nature of various immunosuppressive treatments, including chemotherapy, bone marrow transplantation, and CAR-T cell therapy. -/- Objective: This systematic review assesses European blood disorder treatment facilities through evidence evaluation and synthesis regarding their infection control measures as they impact patient safety and intervention outcomes. -/- Methods: A systematic review followed (...) the PRISMA 2020 guidelines throughout its conduct. The PubMed database served as the primary information source for our research in February 2025. The research used "infection control" alongside "blood disorders" and "hematology" as search parameters, along with names of particular European nations. Researchers included studies based on infection control interventions that targeted hematology or transfusion settings between 2010 and 2024. The authors extracted key information regarding study design, intervention type, patient data, implementation obstacles, and measured outcomes. -/- Results: The research analysis included eight eligible studies involving expert consensus guidelines, observational analyses, and modeling studies. The study identified pathogen reduction technologies (PRTs) and HEV screening as well as blood culture standardization and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance and infection prophylaxis in CAR-T cell therapy and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) safety among the infection control strategies. Multiple research studies found that effective infection reduction methods and improved diagnostics were successful, yet variations existed between national guideline practice and monitoring programs. -/- Conclusions: European healthcare institutions for hematology patients show an increasing tendency towards implementing proactive, evidence-based infection control practices. High-quality guidelines and modern technologies remain accessible, but differences emerge during implementation. The region requires coordinated efforts to standardize healthcare practices while improving screening mechanisms and funding distribution to protect patients equitably on an equal basis. (shrink)

This paper proposes an intelligent control model utilizing deep learning techniques to enhance the efficiency of renewable energy systems, specifically focusing on a hybrid solar and wind energy system. The model aims to address challenges related to energy production fluctuations due to weather conditions, ultimately reducing energy losses. Performance evaluations will compare this algorithm with existing systems to demonstrate its effectiveness.

In competitive business environments, Supply Chain Management (SCM) has emerged as a vital operational strategy, aiding organizations to enhance their inventory management, customer service delivery, and overall operational performance. Importance of SCM Integrated System for organisations to improve procurement coordination, inventory optimisation, customer responsiveness and operational sustainability. But many organizations, especially those in developing economies, still have limited visibility of their inventory, poor coordination with suppliers, poor forecasting systems, and weak technological integration, all of which have a negative impact on (...) service delivery and organizational efficiency. Although many empirical studies have been conducted to capture the operational aspects of SCM, the few studies that have studied the operational aspects of SCM have not used advanced multivariate and predictive analytical techniques. It became necessary, therefore, to have a more comprehensive and analytically complete analysis of SCM practices and inventory service performance, which was the reason behind this study. The specific objectives were: to explore the relationship between SCM practices and inventory service performance; to test the impact of profitability, customer base, operational importance and organizational impact on inventory service outcomes; to test the latent structure of SCM variables using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA); to test the dimensionality of SCM variables by Principal Component Analysis (PCA); and to measure the predictive value of the SCM indicators. The structured questionnaires were used to gather primary data from the organizational staff in charge of supply chain and inventory operations. Chi-square statistics, binary logistic regression, ordinal logistic regression, EFA and PCA were used to analyze data. The results showed that there is a significant relationship between inventory control with customer service performance (χ² = 13.76, p = 0.001), SCM significance (χ² = 5.88, p < 0.001), and SCM impact (χ² = 5.78, p < 0.001). The profitability (OR = 1.995 × 10²¹) and customer base (OR = 5.915 × 10⁸) were the two factors which were positively affected by inventory service outcomes. The first principal component of the PCA explained a 94.14% of the total variance. The study found that implementing effective SCM practices can significantly enhance inventory efficiency, customer satisfaction, and organizational performance. For improving the operational sustainability and service efficiency, the study suggested using integrated technological elements of supply chain and designing profitability oriented and customer oriented policies for supply chains. (shrink)

The study examined predictive value of locus of control on psychological well-being of senior secondary school adolescents in Anambra State. The population of the study comprised 20,889 senior secondary two (SS2) students while 763 SS 2 students serve as the sample. Instruments titled Locus of Control of Behaviour Scale (LCBS) and Psychological well-being Scale (PWS) were used for data collection. The face validation of the instruments were established by three experts. The internal consistency of the items for each (...) instrument was determined using Cronbach Alpha and coefficient values of 0.72 for locus of control and 0.86 for psychological well-being were established. Findings indicated, among others, that locus of control and psychological well-being were significantly related. Based on the findings of the study, it is concluded that locus of control is a predictor of psychological well-being of senior secondary school adolescents in Anambra State. Amongst the recommendations is that Ministry of Education should support functional guidance and counselling services by providing and making funds available for research and to improve rendering of professional assistance to students. (shrink)

Intelligent defence support systems are confronted with the need to manage ever-increasing floods of data in a way that raises significant challenges because the data are described and presented using different terminologies and formats. How, on this basis, is it possible to reach a common understanding of the information content of these data among people and software agents? How is it possible to ensure that domain knowledge is reused in consistent fashion in a way that makes this information available for (...) integration and analysis? How can we support the identification, selection, composition, and orchestration of services based on such diverse data providing homogeneous support by a service-oriented architecture? This collection is devoted to the use of ontologies to answer questions such as these. -/- Contents -/- Bill Mandrick: Creating an extensible command and control ontology, 215-231 -/- Chris Partridge; Mike Lambert; Mike Loneragan; Andrew Mitchell; Pawel Garbacz: A novel ontological approach to semantic interoperability between legacy air defence command and control systems, 232-262 -/- Michael Gerz; Olivier Meyer: Defining C2 semantics by a platform-independent JC3IEDM, 263-285 -/- Kevin Gupton; Curtis Blais; Kevin Heffner: Management of C2 data standards with modular OWL ontologies, 286-307. (shrink)

Data access control is a challenging issue in public cloud storage systems. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) has been adopted as a promising technique to provide flexible, fine-grained and secure data access control for cloud storage with honest-but- curious cloud servers. However, in the existing CP-ABE schemes, the single attribute authority must execute the time-consuming user legitimacy verification and secret key distribution, and hence it results in a single-point performance bottleneck when a CP-ABE scheme is adopted in a large-scale (...) cloud storage system. Users may be stuck in the waiting queue for a long period to obtain their secret keys, thereby resulting in low-efficiency of the system. Although multi authority access control schemes have been proposed, these schemes still cannot overcome the drawbacks of single-point bottleneck and low efficiency, due to the fact that each of the authorities still independently manages a disjoint attribute set. In this paper we propose a system that improves the approach of CP-ABE from text based asymmetric to Image based symmetric approach for faster encryption as well as access to data. We also propose a multiple access policy generation for single user where we will be able to implement one to many and many to many methodology. (shrink)

According to statistics, there is an increasing gun-related deaths, violence and trafficking of small arms are emergent consequents of failure towards gun regulation and irresponsible gun ownership worldwide. Thus, this study was conducted to examine the implementation of the Gun Control Policy in Caraga Region focusing on the aspect of enforcement and monitoring. Also, the study aimed to investigate the problems encountered in the implementation of the gun control policy in enforcement and monitoring with the gun owners/operators and (...) PNP personnel as respondents. This study was conducted using the descriptive correlational research design. The study revealed the following findings: Majority of the Gun Operator/Owner respondents are college level, employed to private institutions who owned 1 to 2 guns, license for 1-5 years, mostly under type-1 category. For the PNP Personnel respondents, most of them are purely Baccalaureate holders who served the organization for 6-10 years and have 5 to 10 years’ experience as licensing officers. In terms of the enforcement and monitoring of the gun control policies, the respondents basically rated it as Highly Implemented. On the test of significance, there was a significant difference on the assessment of the respondents in gun control policy monitoring but showed to have no significant difference on the respondent’s assessment in enforcement. Both Gun owners and PNP respondents considered the problems encountered in enforcement and monitoring as highly prevalent problems. On the test of significance, there was no significant difference in the assessment of the respondents for both enforcement and monitoring of Gun Control policies. On the test of significant relationship, there was a significant relationship on the Gun control policies enforcement and monitoring with its problems encountered. It can be concluded that the Gun Control policies were fairly implemented by the government despite the challenges like the problems encountered in its enforcement and monitoring. The problems encountered in enforcement and monitoring were highly prevalent thus it needs serious actions by the PNP organization. It can further be concluded that there is a correlation between the Gun control policies and its problems encountered. Thus, the PNP must conduct series of orientation and forum among the gun owners / operators to strengthen the implementation of the gun control policies, must adopt technology in a form of online app design to hasten the documentation and tracing of expired gun licenses, create more information campaign to prevent gun violence in the future maximizing various platforms, must create “hotline” call center as support mechanism in monitoring unregistered and lost firearms and create online gun licensing system. (shrink)

WHAT THIS PAPER ARGUES. Gilles Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990) is six pages long, among the most cited essays in twentieth-century social theory, and an explicit, direct extension of Foucault in exactly the direction this corpus's Biological Zero-Day Mechanism operates. It has not, until this paper, been cited anywhere in this corpus, despite The Archive Beneath the Index engaging Foucault directly and despite BZM's own formal architecture being built, unknowingly, in the image of the disciplinary form (...) Deleuze's essay argues is already being superseded. Deleuze distinguishes disciplinary societies, organized around enclosure — discrete, bounded institutional spaces the individual passes through one threshold at a time, each a mold that casts a fixed shape — from societies of control, organized around modulation: continuous, boundless variation with no enclosure to cross and no discrete threshold to pass, a sieve whose mesh transmutes from point to point rather than a mold that fixes a form. This paper argues the Biological Zero-Day Mechanism, examined against this distinction, is a discipline-era instrument: its formal properties — discreteness, a dated event, institutional authorship — are built to detect exactly the kind of threshold discipline produces and control does not. The generative process underneath BZM's discrete precipitates, AI-accelerated biological discovery, is by contrast pure Deleuzian control: continuous, unbounded, never enclosed in a fixed protocol the way a clinical trial once enclosed drug development, modulating constantly rather than passing through fixed stages. This produces the paper's central finding: BZM, built to detect discipline's discrete thresholds, is structurally positioned to miss an entire class of continuous, sub-threshold biopolitical modulation — continuously updated polygenic risk scores, continuously ingested biomarker streams, continuously repriced insurance premiums — that never crystallizes into any single dated coverage decision and yet produces real, differential, modulated exposure exactly as discretely-attributed BZM events do. The paper further shows that Deleuze's dividual, the infinitely divisible, continuously sampled data-subject that control substitutes for discipline's bounded individual, gives Rose's ethopolitics and this corpus's own vicarious ethopolitics a reason for their felt inescapability that neither prior paper supplied: discipline's enclosure could be left; control's modulation has no outside to leave, because it was never bounded to begin with. The paper closes by naming, cautiously, the direction this corpus's own market material may already be heading — from discrete purchase toward continuous subscription — and what remains unformalized about that shift. (shrink)

In this paper, modelling designing and simulation of a simple voltage amplidyne system is done using robust control theory. In order to increase the performance of the voltage amplidyne system with H optimal control synthesis and H optimal control synthesis via-iteration controllers are used. The open loop response of the voltage amplidyne system shows that the system can amplify the input 7 times. Comparison of the voltage amplidyne system with H optimal control synthesis and H optimal (...) control synthesis via-iteration controllers to track a desired step input have been done. Finally, the comparative simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed voltage amplidyne system with H optimal control synthesis controller in improving the percentage overshoot and the settling time. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se examinan varias propuestas que abordan la argumentación como un ejercicio válido y necesario de control judicial; ello, a través del estudio de diversos elementos doctrinales, como lo son la representación democrática argumentativa, la interpretación previa y la debida justificación de las decisiones, así como la ponderación y la aplicación de los principios, entre otros. Al margen de lo anterior, nuestra intención no es otra sino la de presentar una descripción del estado del arte de (...) dichas cuestiones, el cual es presentado en un repaso detallado en varios planteamientos teóricos que, directa o indirectamente, evalúan el papel de la argumentación como eje del control judicial. (shrink)

The book, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (1995), by Alfred R. Mele, deals primarily with two main concepts, “self-control” and “individual autonomy,” and the relationship between them. The book is divided into two parts: (1) a view of self-control, the self-controlled person, and behaviour manifesting self-control, and (2) a view of personal autonomy, the autonomous person, and autonomous behaviour. Mele (Ibid.) defines self-control as the opposite of the Aristotelian concept of akrasia, or the contrary (...) of akrasia, which implies weakness of will, incontinence, or lack of self-control—the state of mind in which one acts against one’s better judgement. According to Mele, the concept of self-control can be approached from two perspectives: (a) how self-control affects human behaviour, and (b) how self-control-associated behavior can enhance our understanding of ‘personal autonomy’ and ‘autonomous behaviour’—personal autonomy requires self-control, and autonomous persons and autonomous behaviour are naturally found together. Therefore, I might say that self-control is essential to enhancing one’s autonomy. In part I, we find an account of self-control where Mele argues that even an ideally self-controlled person might lack autonomy. In part II, Mele gives an explicit account of autonomy and explains what must be added to self-control to achieve autonomy. This is the pivotal claim made by Mele (dismantling the intuitively connected notions of self-control and autonomy). (shrink)

The extensive involvement of nonconscious processes in human behaviour has led some to suggest that consciousness is much less important for the control of action than we might think. In this article I push against this trend, developing an understanding of conscious control that is sensitive to our best models of overt action control. Further, I assess the cogency of various zombie challenges—challenges that seek to demote the importance of conscious control for human agency. I argue (...) that though nonconscious contributions to action control are evidently robust, these challenges are overblown. (shrink)

Self-control is integral to successful human agency. Without it we cannot extend our agency across time and secure central social, moral, and personal goods. But self-control is not a unitary capacity. In the first part of this paper we provide a taxonomy of self-control and trace its connections to agency and the self. In part two, we turn our attention to the external conditions that support successful agency and the exercise of self-control. We argue that what (...) we call moral security is a critical foundation for agency. Parts three and four explore what happens to agency when moral security is lacking, as in the case of those subject to racism, and those living in poverty. The disadvantages suffered by those who are poor, in a racial minority or other oppressed group, or suffering mental illness or addiction, are often attributed to a lack of individual self-control or personal responsibility. In particular, members of these groups are often seen as irresponsibly focused on short-term pleasures over long-term good, a view underwritten by particular psychological theories of self-control. We explore how narratives about racism and poverty undermine moral security, and limit and distort the possibility of synchronic and diachronic self-control. Where moral security is undermined, the connection between self-control and diachronic goods often fails to obtain and agency contracts accordingly. We close with some preliminary reflections on the implications for responsibility. (shrink)

One of the central problems in the philosophy of action is to spell out the distinction between action and what merely happens, e.g., a wink versus an eye twitch. This essay proposes a theory of action offering an account of this distinction. The central claim of the theory is that action is movement that is controlled by the mover, where movement is understood capaciously and control is characterized by a trio of conditions consisting of an aim condition, a modal (...) condition, and an explanatory condition. Importantly, being controlled is shown to be a determinable property of movements, and its determination dimensions are isolated. Paired with the claim that action is movement that is controlled by the mover, this account of control as a determinable illuminates the diversity within the category of action. (shrink)

Living organisms act as integrated wholes to maintain themselves. Individual actions can each be explained by characterizing the mechanisms that perform the activity. But these alone do not explain how various activities are coordinated and performed versatilely. We argue that this depends on a specific type of mechanism, a control mechanism. We develop an account of control by examining several extensively studied control mechanisms operative in the bacterium E. coli. On our analysis, what distinguishes a control (...) mechanism from other mechanisms is that it relies on measuring one or more variables, which results in setting constraints in the control mechanism that determine its action on flexible constraints in other mechanisms. In the most basic arrangement, the measurement process directly determines the action of the control mechanism, but in more complex arrangements signals mediate between measurements and effectors. This opens the possibility of multiple responses to the same measurement and responses based on multiple measurements. It also allows crosstalk, resulting in networks of control mechanisms. Such networks integrate the behaviors of the organism but also present a challenge in tailoring responses to particular measurements. We discuss how integrated activity can still result in differential, versatile, responses. (shrink)

Perceptual-control theory offers a physically reductive way to account for teleology or goal-directedness, ranging from the initial emergence of life, to creatures capable of regulating their own consciousness. This broad framework motivates key aspects of the perceptual-control model including the flexibility of behaviour, the hierarchy of aims or values, and the links between control and affective states. In this way, perceptual control theory integrates the psychological constants of representation, evaluation, and action.

This paper discusses the idea that the concept of privacy should be understood in terms of control. Three different attempts to spell out this idea will be critically discussed. The conclusion will be that the Source Control View on privacy is the most promising version of the idea that privacy is to be understood in terms of control.