This chapter discusses Japanese scrambling. It has been noticed that there arises a dilemma when we consider how clause-internal scrambling is characterized in terms of A/A’-properties: while it shows an A’-property with respect to reconstruction effects of Condition C, it shows A-properties with respect to anaphor binding and weak crossover. It is argued that this dilemma is solved by explaining the Condition C reconstruction effects under our movement theory of anaphora. As evidence for this approach, it is demonstrated (...) that Condition C reconstruction effects are not affected by scope reconstruction. It is further argued that with a proper constraint on the timing of lexical overlay, we can explain the fact that relevant Condition C reconstruction effects are suppressed when pronouns that would induce Condition C violations are located within the VP domain or in the embedded clauses. We finally consider how to characterize chains produced by scrambling in general. It is argued that the A-properties of clause-internal scrambling arise when the resulting chains constitute part of larger chains that establish operator-variable relations. Given that long-distance scrambling shows only A’-properties, we are led to conclude that scrambling produces an operator-variable chain unless it needs to be taken as a semantically vacuous chain. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes what was argued in this book. Most importantly, I developed a new movement theory of anaphora that builds mainly on Abe’s (A movement theory of anaphora. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2014) original one and incorporates Higginbotham’s (Linguistic Inquiry 14:395–420, 1983) insights on binding theory. This movement theory was couched under Abe’s (Minimalist syntax for quantifier raising, topicalization and focus movement: A search and float approach for internal merge. Springer, Berlin, 2016) Search and Float framework, according to which (...) Search must be minimal (i.e., minimal Search) and Float is subject to Minimize chain links. As a result, traditional Binding Conditions A, B, and C, as proposed by Chomsky (Lectures on government and binding, Foris, 1981), are absorbed into this movement theory. This book also dealt with reconstruction effects, especially Condition C reconstruction effects, including strong crossover cases, under our movement theory. The book also discussed a variety of consequences of our movement theory of anaphora: backward binding, copy reflexivization, binding condition reconstruction effects in parasitic gap constructions, Condition C reconstruction in scrambling, and the anti-c-command requirement on argument ellipsis. (shrink)

This chapter describes the aim of this book, outlining the main proposals and their consequences. The main purpose of the book is to reformulate binding conditions and other related constraints in the realm of binding theory in terms of a movement theory that is refined and elaborated on the basis of Abe’s (A movement theory of anaphora. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2014) work. The important points of this newly-revised theory are (i) to incorporate various insights of the linking theory developed (...) by Higginbotham (Linguistic Inquiry 14:395–420, 1983) and (ii) to adopt Abe’s (Minimalist syntax for quantifier raising, topicalization and focus movement: A search and float approach for internal merge. Springer, Berlin, 2016) Search and Float framework, in which two kinds of minimality conditions, namely minimal Search and Minimize chain links, play a vital role. The book also discusses some consequences of the proposed movement theory of anaphora, which have to do with Condition C reconstruction, peculiar reconstruction patterns in parasitic gap constructions, the anti-c-command requirement on argument ellipsis, and Condition C reconstruction effects in Japanese scrambling. (shrink)

This volume brings together studies in the domain of weak referentiality, the phenomenon that a definite or indefinite noun phrase lacks its usual referential force. Several papers investigate syntactic or semantic properties of indefinite noun phrases, such as modality, number neutrality, narrow scope, incorporation, predication, and case marking, and that in a range of languages (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, German, Papiamentu, Russian). Other papers deal with weakly referential definite noun phrases in various languages (Basque, Dutch, English, French) involving scrambling, (...) modification, possession, and accessibility. The papers demonstrate a range of empirical methods and theoretical models. This volume will not only be of interest to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, but also in psycholinguistics and language typology. (shrink)

The global inequality in the distribution of vaccines is unjust. As countries scrambled to ensure enough vaccines, the world’s poorest were left to fend for themselves, and the generosity meant to mitigate this through COVAX was not sufficiently forthcoming. In light of this, I proposed a vaccine tax, which obligates those willing and able to pay to protect their own population to contribute to protecting those residing in the world’s low-income countries. Petrovic has offered an important critique of this proposal, (...) questioning both the fairness and the efficiency of the tax. However, when properly specified, the vaccine tax is not vulnerable to these critiques. (shrink)

The paper is a critical comment on D. Hoffman. The Scrambling Theorem: A simple proof of the logical possibility of spectrum inversion. Consciousness and Cognition, 2006, 15, 31–45.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The History of Ideas:Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and BeyondAnthony GraftonIn the middle years of the twentieth century, the history of ideas rose like a new sign of the zodiac over large areas of American culture and education. In those happy days, Dwight Robbins, the president of a fashionable progressive college, kept "copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that (...) had no name" on the table in his waiting room. True, Robbins did not exist: he was the fictional president of Randall Jarrell's equally fictional Benton, a liberal arts dystopia where "[h]alf of the college was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe."1 But Jarrell's notation of the Journal's status was accurate nonetheless.2The Journal, in the twenty years or so after its foundation, attracted attention from many quarters, some of them unexpected. And it occupied a unique position, between the technical journals of history and philology, [End Page 1] each firmly identified with a discipline, in which professional humanists normally published their results, and the quarterlies, often based not in disciplines but in liberal arts colleges and universities, which cultivated a mixed readership to which they offered fiction and poetry as well as essays. By contrast with both, the JHI fifty years ago ran on a rich mix of technical articles and wide-ranging essays that could easily have attracted the attention of a sophisticated administrator—or at least made a good impression on his coffee table. Bliss was it to be a subscriber in that happy day when the JHI glowed with something of the luster that haloed Representations in the 1980s and Critical Inquiry more recently.3The main reason for the Journal's prominence was that it represented a new field, appealingly located between disciplines as the Journal was between other sorts of periodical. In its postwar heyday, the history of ideas was not a dim subdivision of history, itself a discipline whose luster has worn off with time, but an intellectual seismic zone where the tectonic plates of disciplines converged and rubbed against one another, producing noises of all sorts. In recent years, it has sometimes seemed impossible, even to the best informed observers, that intellectual history, or the history of ideas, ever enjoyed this sort of prestige. A quarter century ago, Robert Darnton surveyed the state of intellectual and cultural history in the United States in an informative and influential essay. Using a language more resonant of the historical President Carter than the fictional President Robbins, Darnton detected "malaise" everywhere he looked. In the fifties, he noted, intellectual historians had seen "their discipline as the queen of the historical sciences. Today she seems humbled." True, desperate cries for help were not yet called for. Historians continued to write histories of ideas, and even to cast them in the technical languages of A.O. Lovejoy or Perry Miller: "one still finds 'unit-ideas' and 'mind' among the trendier terms." The just-published Dictionary of the History of Ideas, moreover, offered a vast selection of Lovejoyan formal analyses, systematically organized, to the reading public.4 [End Page 2]But for the last ten years, Darnton argued, younger scholars, especially graduate students, had been scrambling over the gunwales of the good ship History of Ideas, abandoning the effort to converse abstractly with the mighty dead, and clambering in hordes over the side of a newer vessel, Social History, which boasted a Hogarthian passenger list of heretics, misfits, and military women. At the level of the dissertations written in history departments, social history was outpacing intellectual, by a proportion of three to one. At the level of the scholarly journal, too, social history had forged ahead, though by a smaller margin. In the murkier, but no less significant, world of opinion, finally, the decline of intellectual history appeared clearest. History of ideas no longer occupied the cutting edge in young scholars' mental vision of their discipline.Social history, after all, had captured the minds of a generation—or a large percentage of it—in the 1960s, thanks both to the power of... (shrink)

This essay surveys varieties of the luck egalitarian project in an exploratory spirit, seeking to identify lines of thought that are worth developing further and that might ultimately prove morally acceptable. I do not attend directly to the critics and assess their concerns; I have done that in other essays. 7 I do seek to identify some large fault lines, divisions in ways of approaching the task of constructing a theory of justice or of conceiving its substance. These are controversial (...) in the sense that in the present state of discussion it is unclear how best to view them or to which side it is better to scramble. But in the end of course I’m not a moral geographer and map-maker, just an involved spectator/tourist offering yet another view of the cathedral. (shrink)

More than 20 years ago, Ned Block (1995) famously called ’consciousness’ a „mongrel concept“. Indeed, the same term had been used for many different things, leading to much misunderstanding and controversy in consciousness research. As it appears, the currently massively used set of priors related concepts such as ’prior’, ’prediction’, ’expectations’, ’attention’, etc likewise hide premises for multiple parallel interpretations of the same data or misattributions to various constituent underlying mechanisms. This makes debates and discussions less fruitful than they could (...) be when the terminology would be more carefully used. Let me first provide briefly the published research background for the problem. Prior information processed before an actual stimulus-event has been shown to influence whether and how this stimulus event will be explicitly perceived (Andersen, Overgaard, and Tong, 2019; Auksztulewicz et al., 2018; Berggren and Eimer, 2019; Chao et al., 2018; Crawford, Corbin, and Landy, 2019; de Lange, Heilbron, and Kok, 2018; Friston, 2005; Gandolfo and Downing, 2019; Hohwy, 2013; Lumaca et al., 2019; Hutchinson and Barrett, 2019; Keller and Mrsic-Flogel, 2018; Meijs et al., 2019; Pennartz et al., 2019; Stefanics, Stephan, and Heinzle, 2019; Whyte, 2019; Wokke and Ro, 2019; Wolfe, 2019). The effects span across facilitation, inhibition, illusory distortion and hallucination (Aru and Bachmann, 2017a; Aru, Tulver, and Bachmann, 2018; Brascamp et al., 2018; Buschman and Miller, 2007; Corlett et al., 2019; Flounders et al., 2019; Harrison and Rideaux, 2019; Hullfish, Sedley, and Vanneste, 2019; Powers, Mathys, and Corlett, 2017; Tappin and Gadsby, 2019; Tulver et al., 2019; Valton et al., 2019; Varrier et al., 2019). Influence of priors may originate from long term memory or from actual perceptual processing of the information preceding the imperative stimulus-event to be identified, recognized or psychophysically evaluated. However, the known phenomenology and behavioral nomenclature of the effects of priors has been explained by a multitude of concepts which are not necessarily mutually exclusive and bear complex interrelations, therefore creating confusion and contradictory standpoints in the theoretical discourse of consciousness science.To illustrate the point, in Table 1 a couple of mutually related concepts are presented, indicating mutual overlap where it appears to be present. (In this paper I restrict the discourse to research where typical trial-by-trial stimuli presentation is used and responses of participants are recorded in order to measure objective veridicality and/or subjective evaluation of the stimuli.) The effects of mechanisms attributed to information processing under the umbrella of one such concept are possibly caused or partly influenced by the mechanisms covered by some other such concept. It should be clear that in order to have clear-cut crispiness and validity of interpretations of the experimental results, experimental designs must allow avoiding hidden confounds or, at least, these possible confounds must be listed in the limitations part of studies. (The standard requirement to stick to one concept and avoid unexplained parallel use of different concepts for the same effect goes without saying.) The large range of overlap between the underlying perceptual-cognitive mechanisms signified by the different corresponding concepts in Table 1 shows how easy it is to create scientific misunderstanding, if not invalid interpretations.For example, we encounter a synonymous use of concepts together with avoidance of use of a possible alternative causal mechanism leading to the experimental results (Blom et al., 2020). The authors reported an effect of the expected position of a subsequent stimulus on the EEG markers of representing the expected stimulus even if its sensory signals were not presented in part of the trials. They used alternatedly concepts like ’prior’, ’prediction’, ’expectation’, ’anticipation’ (our Table intersections 1x2, 1x4, 1x9), but avoided ’attention’ (4xe5), although the spatial-attention mechanism may have been either causally involved or representing a hidden confound. Rungratsameetaweemana and colleagues (2018) did not use ’prior’, but used ’expectation’, which was for some reason contrasted with ’attention’ (suggesting replacement of the Table entry 4xe5 by 0). Another example comes from Coll et al. (2020). They used frequency tagging methods to record EEG markers of processing alternative visual stimuli. Participants (with varying levels of autistic trits) were individually conditioned to expect one of the stimuli more than the other in the scrambling/unscrambling oscillating sequence. Relative weight of the expectation related top-down signals in the EEG markers decreased with increase in autistic traits. Concepts of ’prediction’ and ’prior experience’ were used (1x2), but ’anticipation’ or ’conditioning’ were not used (1x9, 2x/e9, 1x10, 2e10).Obviously, the pattern of possible confounds and hidden sources of misinterpretation becomes even more complex and intricate when we distinguish between pre-conscious (unconscious) and conscious levels of sources of the effects related to most of the table entries. Also, it is realistic to bear in mind that no single study, even if based on many experiments, would be capable of providing finalized valid explanations for priors related phenomena and behavioral/subjective regularities of effects. (Likewise, it has been shown that multidimensional, brainwide activity is what drives sensory-perceptual processes – Stringer et al., 2019.) Therefore, collective research efforts are recommended, capable of disentangling the different priors related causal factors, with division of tasks well thought through and agreed upon between the participating labs (consortia). At the level of single lab efforts the main recommendation would be to use clever converging operations (orthogonal factorial design) planned so as to take apart contributions of different levels and types of priors. Some studies can be mentioned as examples of such approaches (e.g., Zuanazzi and Noppeney, 2019; Oxner et al., 2019; see also Shalev, Nobre, and van Ede, 2019). Some other authors have drawn attention to additional important distinctions if we want to have reliable predictive coding related theories: a model must be able to (i) explain how the often incompatible tasks of reflecting veridicality of the actual environment and conveying meaningful context dependent information are solved within this same model (Larkum, 2013; Press, Kok, and Yon, 2019); (ii) account for both, long term priors related effects and the effects of priors involved in ongoing processing (Aru and Bachmann, 2017b; White, 2018); (iii) in vision as well as auditory perception, one of the priority tasks for developing valid models must be to distinguish attention effects from other predictive prior effects (e.g., Alilovic et al., 2019; Aru, Tulver and Bachmann, 2018; Kompus et al., 2019). There have been also promising attempts to differentiate between types of priors such as structural and contextual expectations (Seriès and Seitz, 2013). Yet, the task of disentangling the varieties of priors is complicated as there seems to be no general factor of the effects of priors on perception (Tulver et al., 2019). On the other hand, this may be caused just by the fact that priors is a mongrel concept.Understandably, there could be an explosion of differentiated concepts if we admit that even some of the subordinate level concepts themselves are “mongrels”. (For ‘attention’ this is reflected in some recommendations to abandon this concept for good – Anderson, 2011; Hommel et al., 2019. Alternatively, this concept could well be taken apart – Luo and Maunsell, 2019.) Yet the main call inherent in this paper remains. Therefore, I guess many would like to see that in the papers dealing with predictive coding the „mongrel“ concepts will be taken apart and the (possible) mutual effects and levels of action of the constituent mechanisms become clearly separated and specified. But even before this, a conceptual taxonomy is in the waiting. Who could accomplish the task? We have a lot of prior knowledge about the likely candidates, or have we? (shrink)

The piece discussed in this chapter is the twentieth of the twenty-one items which Plotinus had written before Porphyry joined his circle in 263. It generally circulated under the title ‘On Dialectic’. It is short; and it is light — for the question which it addresses is neither intricate nor difficult to resolve. People's destination — the place to which people must travel — is not a secret: people must ascend to the Idea of the Good. The journey has two (...) stages: first, people must scramble from the sensible world to the intelligible world; and then people must climb up through the ranges of the intelligible world. Musicians, lovers, and philosophers are all, in their own ways, equipped for undertaking the journey; but they need to prepare for it, and to prepare for it in different fashions. (shrink)

This book is about the never-ending need we have to make choices. If you think about it, we have to decide what time to wake up every morning, what to wear (unless we need to wear a uniform), what to have for breakfast (if we eat breakfast), lunch and dinner (and if we eat in restaurants, what to order), and our need to make all kinds of other choices all day long. Some of our choices are mundane, like what to (...) have for breakfast (if we eat breakfast): to have coffee or tea (and if so, plain or with milk), cereal, toast or a bagel (and if so, what kind: plain, with poppy seeds, with everything) or a sweet roll, eggs (if so, fried, soft boiled, scrambled), and so on. Most of the choices we make are not important, and we often develop habits to relieve us of having to think about our choices. For example, I have the same thing for breakfast every day: a bowl of oatmeal with chia seeds and flax seeds, hot milk, a cup of espresso coffee with hot milk, and half a bagel with butter. Occasionally, I have a soft-boiled egg, as well. But other choices we have to make are life-changing, such as how to live (single, living with a partner, or getting married), what kind of education to get, what kind of job or profession to choose, where to live and what kind of house to buy (if you can afford a house), whom to vote for, and so on. After reading this book, you will better understand the role that the choices we make play in society and culture and in our everyday lives." -- Back cover. (shrink)

This study examines the methods students use to cheat on class examinations and suggests ways of deterring using an international sample from Australia, China, Ireland, and the United States. We also examine the level of cheating and reasons for cheating that prior research has highlighted as a method of demonstrating that our sample is equivalent to those in prior studies. Our results confirm the results of prior research that primarily employs students from the United States. The data indicate that actions (...) such as having multiple versions of the examination and scrambling the questions on these versions would deter cheating. In addition, given the increased level of cheating and students' increased perception of the social acceptability of cheating in college, the data provided by our international sample also suggest that some relatively simple precautions by instructors could dramatically reduce the level of cheating on in-class examinations. (shrink)

Washington state’s plans for a public health response to a pandemic or natural disaster were largely untested prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual institutions were unprepared for a crisis of the scale and severity of the pandemic, and they faced a myriad of ethical questions that required expertise and experience. The pandemic also revealed the fundamental need for local, state, and regional collaboration during times of resource scarcity. As individual institutions scrambled to organize and implement strategies for dealing with scarcity (...) in a way that was both effective and fair, the lack of a regional or national system to organize those efforts impaired a timely response and resulted in duplicated efforts and differing approaches. This article describes the authors’ pediatric institutional response to the pandemic within the context of a broader cooperative statewide approach. The authors explain the rationale for starting with a utilitarian framework and the ways in which its shortcomings were addressed. The structures and approaches described continue to be utilized and modified for other situations that lead to resource scarcity of all kinds. Although changes at the national level to create a national response would be ideal, collaboration and investment at the state and regional level is both critical and pragmatic in ensuring that all patients can access the health care they need. (shrink)

Various experimental procedures aimed at measuring individual risk aversion involve a list of pairs of alternative prospects. We first study the widely used method by Holt and Laury :1644–1655, 2002), for which we find that the removal of some items from the lists yields a systematic decrease in risk aversion and scrambles the ranking of individuals by risk aversion. This bias, that we call embedding bias, is quite distinct from other confounds that have been previously observed in the use of (...) the HL method. It may be related to empirical phenomena and theoretical developments where better prospects increase risk aversion. Nevertheless, we also find that the more recent elicitation method due to Abdellaoui et al., also based on lists but using only one and the same probability in the list, does not display any statistically significant bias when the corresponding items of the list are removed. Our results suggest that methods other than the popular HL one may be preferable for the measurement of risk aversion. (shrink)

Canadian institutions face public and political pressure to include Indigenous voices and Indigenous Knowledge in their governing structures. This often results in a scramble to retrofit boards and committees to demonstrate inclusivity, often by inviting Indigenous representatives or knowledge from Indigenous sources. However, representation does not mean attributing equal power to those representatives if institutions do not challenge their inner policy structures. In research spaces, this can be observed in research ethics policy, which has been widely challenged but remains stubborn (...) to change. This report seeks to identify the procedures and policies within animal care and ethics that categorically exclude knowledge and knowledge-holders falling outside the Western Scientific Knowledge realm. We explore this subject by identifying exclusive policies and procedures within an exemplar ethics board, an Animal Care Committee under the guidelines of the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC). We briefly identify some of the foundational beliefs underlying animal care and ethics policy, how they inform current policy, and how they are exclusive of knowledge outside the Western Scientific worldview. We urge ACC committees at institutions to revisit these policies and to adapt their vision on knowledge, credibility, respectful protocols, and acceptable justification for research, for which we provide several recommendations. (shrink)

Constructive Neutral Evolution theory provides selectively neutral explanations of the origin and maintenance of biological complexity. This essay provides an analysis of CNE as an explanatory strategy defined by a tripartite set of conditions, and shows how this applies to cases of the evolution of complexity at higher-levels of the biological hierarchy. CNE was initially deployed to help explain a variety of complex molecular structures and processes, including spliceosomal splicing, trypansomal pan-editing, scrambled genes in ciliates, duplicate gene retention and fungal (...) ATP synthetase structure. CNE has also been generalized to apply to phenomena at the cellular level, including protein-protein interaction network modularity, obligate microbial symbioses, eukaryogenesis and microbial unculturability. This essay further extends CNE to cases of complexity at levels of organization higher than the molecular and cellular. These are multicellular phenotypic complexity, multicellular ecological complexity and, some cases of cultural complexity. (shrink)

This book is the most comprehensive, integrated explanatory account yet published of the properties of question formations and their variation across languages. It makes an important contribution to the current debate over whether syntax should be understood derivationally, arguing that thebest model of language is one in which sentences are constructed in a series of operations that precede or follow each other in time. The central problem it addresses is the nature of the difference between (a) languages in which all (...) wh-words move overtly to a clause-initial position (exemplified byBulgarian); (b) languages in which one wh-phrase moves per clause but all others remain in situ (exemplified by English); and (c) languages in which there is no overt movement at all (exemplified by Japanese). Professor Richards focuses on the nature of syntactic movement in order to see what this reveals about the syntactic derivation. He considers the nature of interactions between movement operations and investigates the behaviour of multiple overt wh-movement, scrambling, cliticization, and objectshift. His general conclusions about the relationship between movement and multiple specifiers follow straightforwardly from basic principles of Shortest Move and Shortest Attract. He develops a PF-imposed well-formedness condition on movement chains (essentially, a requirement that a single memberof the chain be unambiguously identified as the copy to be pronounced), which allows for the development of theories of anti-agreement, the that-trace effect, and the conditions on participial agreement in Romance, among other phenomena. He defends the claim that well-formed dependencies can improvethe status of ill-formed dependencies created later in the derivation, illustrating the explanatory power, under certain structural conditions, of his Principle of Minimal Compliance. He uses data on the locality of wh-movement to argue that the Principle of Minimal Compliance is responsible for anumber of the apparent distinctions between overt and covert movement. This book will interest syntacticians at graduate level and above as well as linguistic theorists concerned with the syntax-semantics interface. (shrink)

An NP-hardness proof for non-local Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammar (MCTAG) by Rambow and Satta (1st International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammers 1992 ), based on Dahlhaus and Warmuth (in J Comput Syst Sci 33:456–472, 1986 ), is extended to some linguistically relevant restrictions of that formalism. It is found that there are NP-hard grammars among non-local MCTAGs even if any or all of the following restrictions are imposed: (i) lexicalization: every tree in the grammar contains a terminal; (ii) dominance links: (...) every tree set contains at most two trees, and in every such tree set, there is a link between the foot node of one tree and the root node of the other tree, indicating that the former node must dominate the latter in the derived tree. This is the version of MCTAG proposed in Becker et al. (Proceedings of the 5th conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 1991 ) to account for German long-distance scrambling. This result restricts the field of possible candidates for an extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar that would be both mildly context-sensitive and linguistically adequate. (shrink)

In the past decades, considerable attention has been paid to the chaos-based image encryption schemes owing to their characteristics such as extreme sensitivity to initial conditions and parameters, pseudo-randomness, and unpredictability. However, some schemes have been proven to be insecure due to using a single chaotic system. To increase the security, this work proposes a novel image encryption scheme based on the piecewise linear chaotic map and the standard map. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first chaos-based (...) image encryption scheme combining the PWLCM with the standard map, which adopts permutation-diffusion structure. Unlike the traditional scrambling way, a hierarchical diffusion strategy, which not only changes the pixel position but also modifies the value, is employed in the permutation phase. The operation model of row-by-row and column-by-column is further used to enhance the efficiency in the diffusion process. Consequently, a good trade-off efficiency and security can be achieved. Furthermore, the numerical simulations and performance analyses illustrate that the proposed encryption scheme can be used in practical application scenarios requiring lightweight security. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to engage with the social issues emerging from the increasing reliance upon app-driven services, as they pertain to precarious labor and ethical standpoints in a digital era. Popular ride services such as Uber have been lauded for bringing much needed transportation services that are superior to expensive taxis or unpleasant or inaccessible public transit. Design/methodology/approach As a result of over three years of ongoing research and analysis, this paper is a comprehensive assessment of a number of (...) social issues facing the integration of practices both signified and enacted in an economy driven by apps such as Uber. While these companies are indeed profitable, questions remain as to just how much of a panacea these practices actually herald. Findings Findings indicate that privatization and a lack of labor regulation may present a significant savings to the user, but full cost economics suggest that the social and environmental costs require consideration. Research limitations/implications The recommendations here refer to the ethical considerations forwarded in this paper and serve to open up dialog to further discuss the persistent issues facing a precarious future. Practical implications In terms of practical implications, there is a point of tension between governmental/regulatory bodies, disruptive innovators and users. Social implications Stakeholders of all stripes are scrambling to keep up with the pace and problematics of digital innovations and an inclusive critical dialog on app-driven services has yet to become a priority. Originality/value The original value of this analytical framework from a social justice perspective stands to catalyze action on a number of pervasive social issues surrounding digital ethics and policy. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a method to design the pseudorandom number generator using three kinds of four-wing memristive hyperchaotic systems with different dimensions as multientropy sources. The principle of this method is to obtain pseudorandom numbers with good randomness by coupling XOR operation on the three kinds of FWMHSs with different dimensions. In order to prove its potential application in secure communication, the security of PRNG based on this scheme is analyzed from the perspective of cryptography. In addition, PRNG (...) has passed the NIST 800.22 and ENT test, which shows that PRNG has good statistical characteristics. Finally, an image encryption algorithm based on PRNG is adopted. In the encryption algorithm, the optimized Arnold matrix scrambling method and the diffusion processing based on XOR are used to obtain the final encrypted image. Through the evaluation of encryption performance, it is concluded that there is no direct relationship between the pristine image and encrypted image. The results show that the proposed image encryption scheme has good statistical output characteristics and security performance in line with cryptography. (shrink)

Three experiments demonstrate that biological movement facilitates young infants’ recognition of the whole human form. A body discrimination task was used in which 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants were habituated to typical human bodies and then shown scrambled human bodies at the test. Recovery of interest to the scrambled bodies was observed in 9- and 12-month-old infants in Experiment 1, but only when the body images were animated to move in a biologically possible way. In Experiment 2, nonbiological movement was (...) incorporated into the typical and scrambled body images, but this did not facilitate body recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. A preferential looking paradigm was used in Experiment 3 to determine if infants had a spontaneous preference for the scrambled versus typical body stimuli when these were both animated. The results showed that 12-month-olds preferred the scrambled body stimuli, 9-month-olds preferred the typical body stimuli and the 6-month-olds showed no preference for either type of body stimuli. These findings suggest that human body recognition involves integrating form and movement, possibly in the superior temporal sulcus, from as early as 9 months of life. (shrink)

This article aims to open a discussion on better ethical assurance for non-university research actors drawing on democratic norms. It derives from the author’s experience of a gap in ethical assurance for social science and humanities (SSH) research that takes place outside academia, for example within international organisations, public bodies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and by private entities. Many of these actors commission, conduct or sub-contract research activities involving human participants on a regular basis, an activity that often increases during times (...) of crisis where researchers in both the public and private sphere scramble to generate the new knowledge necessary to respond and prevent further harms. The ethical assurance frameworks for such research, while growing, remain limited. Discussion of research conducted by actors outside of university settings and their ethical assurance frameworks are both subjects under-interrogated within the literature. This paper seeks to open that discussion by presenting this broad non-university research context through the frame of research in crisis settings, where the ethical requirements of ‘do no harm’ and the ‘dual imperative’ possess an even heavier significance in research ethics. Furthermore, the global and diverse nature of crisis settings often gives rise to conversations concerning the positioning of the research actor and the need to empower the research participant. This paper presents an early vision of the non-university research actor and ethical assurance process based on the democratic norms of equality and inclusivity. (shrink)

Based on the novel data collected through original fieldwork on five syntactic phenomena (the position of the finite verb in embedded clauses, in sentences with a modal verb, negative concord, position of focused light/heavy objects in main clauses with a complex tense, scrambling) in the heritage language Mòcheno, we show that i) there exist two populations – one exhibiting intra-speaker variation between German and Italian word orders, and one lacking it; ii) these two populations are the result of diatopic (...) variation and, to a lesser extent, of diastratic variation. The results reached through quantitative statistical analysis are partially convergent with those arrived at by traditional theoretical syntax on Mòcheno, but our analysis has allowed us to shed new light on a series of so-far neglected or poorly understood phenomena. More specifically, we discovered that there exists micro-variation fed by diastratic (age) variation within the Roveda variety, which represents the only case in Mòcheno in which age is a relevant factor in determining variation. We also showed that the traditional claim that the Palù variety is “more German” than the other Mòcheno variety is surely to be confirmed, but we could refine it by showing that German word orders are also accepted by speakers of other varieties and that the acceptability of these word orders in competition with the Italian syntax is not fed by the age of speakers (no diastratic variation). Finally, we showed that the acceptance of German word orders across speakers varies according to the phenomenon investigated: negation is the phenomenon in which German word orders are more likely to be accepted, whereas embedded clauses are the phenomenon in which German word orders are more likely to be rejected. (shrink)

This article develops a political economy approach to the study of international NGOs. We argue that many aspects of these organizations can be explained through a materialist analysis. We advance two theoretical propositions. First, the growing number of international NGOs has increased uncertainty, competition, and insecurity for all actors in a given NGO sector, disputing the claim that NGO proliferation is invariably positive. Second, we suggest that the "marketization" of many NGO activities, including competitive tenders and renewable contracts, may generate (...) perverse incentives that can lead to dysfunctional outcomes. We test these claims on three cases of NGO behavior, including humanitarian aid for refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo, civilian protection during the Bosnian war, and technical assistance in Kyrgyzstan. (shrink)

... the phenomenon of variable word order within a clause. Ross (), who was one of the first to discuss this phenomenon within the generative paradigm,...

As the federal government distributed remdesivir to some of the states COVID-19 hit hardest, policymakers scrambled to develop criteria to allocate the drug to their hospitals. Our state, Michigan, was among those states to receive an initial quantity of the drug from the U.S. government. The disparities in burden of disease in Michigan are striking. Detroit has a death rate more than three times the state average. Our recommendation to the state was that it should prioritize the communities that bear (...) a disproportionate burden of suffering in the allocation of the new potential treatment. This recommendation is justified not only for new drugs with uncertain effects, but also for drugs of certain benefit or vaccines. For states with significant health disparities, such as Michigan, this allocation priority may help to repair them. In fact, any other allocation strategy may make them worse. (shrink)

Corporations have scrambled to bring to market products positioned and advertised as addressing the needs of the environmentally-conscious consumer. The vast majority of claims presented in support of these products are best described, however, as confused, misleading or outright illegal. Ethical considerations have not yet been integrated into environmental marketing, and as a result, long-term harm on both the individual and societal level may result. A framework for reversing this trend is presented. It identifies the sequence of actions necessary for (...) the development and communication of ethical environmental marketing claims. The sequence is based upon two aspects of ethical theory: moral style and normative behavior. Specific implications for marketers'' actions at each stage in the sequence of framework development are also discussed. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent., was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention. The editors recommend that to experience the drifiting thought (...) that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terro(i)r Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage (Take One) * * * * Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking from continent. on Vimeo. How do people perceive changing landscapes and lifestyles in our neighborhood? We were drawn to this question, perhaps like our interviewees, because we are interested in a certain mystique in Ballard, because we enact something important about it when we go to its coffee shops and restaurants, and because we are transients from other places. Furthermore, we are not always sure of our place in the city, or how our points of reference here may be changing. Much can be said about Seattle’s role in white settlement and in its original industries: shipping, canning, and logging. Much can be said about the arrival of Scandinavian laborers in Ballard, or how the town of Ballard came to be incorporated into Seattle. But as in maps, while these accounts may ground key details, they do not encompass our imaginations of place. Over the last few decades, new meanings in Ballard have been drawn from the built environment. An old railroad track, since converted into a bike path, allows close-up views of storage lots, dry docks and shipyards still lining the ferryway at Ballard’s south edge. Hardware stores and auto repair shops remain clustered along an early bridge and what used to be the city’s first major highway. Nearby, along Market Street and Ballard Avenue, a parallel world of leisure has sprung up celebrating craft processes of work. This is a world of artisan beer, gluten-free pizza, organic coffee, vintage clothing, designer furniture, and one of the city’s finest year-round farmer’s markets. In the past, a noodle shop, a tapas bar, and a Mexican food cart might all have been out of place, but today, they all hang in the balance. As a widening array of consumer spaces channels urban trajectories into the future, contemporary landscapes and lifestyles are retrofitted to traces of the past. The functional and aesthetic components of cities are affected by scales far outside the neighborhood. But as Ballard’s rapidly changing housing market attests, people resituate themselves and the places around them by winnowing out distances and connections between self and other. Condo owners, young couples, single adults, students, senior citizens, and the homeless scramble, revise and recompile landscapes in dynamic and uneven ways. Often, these shifts are an open secret in which past and future are sutured together — debated, digested, and dreamed over. (shrink)

The investigation of visual categorization has recently been aided by the introduction of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which achieve unprecedented accuracy in picture classification after extensive training. Even if the architecture of CNNs is inspired by the organization of the visual brain, the similarity between CNN and human visual processing remains unclear. Here, we investigated this issue by engaging humans and CNNs in a two‐class visual categorization task. To this end, pictures containing animals or vehicles were modified to contain (...) only low/high spatial frequency (HSF) information, or were scrambled in the phase of the spatial frequency spectrum. For all types of degradation, accuracy increased as degradation was reduced for both humans and CNNs; however, the thresholds for accurate categorization varied between humans and CNNs. More remarkable differences were observed for HSF information compared to the other two types of degradation, both in terms of overall accuracy and image‐level agreement between humans and CNNs. The difficulty with which the CNNs were shown to categorize high‐passed natural scenes was reduced by picture whitening, a procedure which is inspired by how visual systems process natural images. The results are discussed concerning the adaptation to regularities in the visual environment (scene statistics); if the visual characteristics of the environment are not learned by CNNs, their visual categorization may depend only on a subset of the visual information on which humans rely, for example, on low spatial frequency information. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the so called "quantum omelette" created by Bohr and Heisenberg through the mix of objective accounts and subjective ones within the analysis of Quantum Mechanics. We will begin by addressing the difficult relation between ontology and epistemology within the history of both physics and philosophy. We will then argue that the present "quantum omelette" is being presently cooked in two opposite directions: the first scrambling ontological problems with epistemological solutions and the second scrambling (...) epistemic approaches with ontological questions. A good example of the former is a new type of argumentation strategy attempting to justify the use of decoherence, namely, the "For All Practical Purposes" type of justification. We will argue that 'FAPP-type solutions' remain, at best, epistemological answers which not only escape the ontological questions at stake -regarding the quantum to classical limit- but also turn the original problem completely meaningless. The latter omelette can be witnessed in relation to some criticisms raised against the epistemic Bayesian approach to QM. We will argue that QBists have produced a consistent scheme that might allow us to begin to unscramble -at least part of- the "quantum omelette". In this respect, we will show why the epistemic QBist approach is safe from several criticisms it has recently received. We end our paper with a discussion about the importance of ontological approaches within foundations of QM. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to analyze the physical and philosophical meaning of quantum contextuality. We will argue that there exists a general confusion within the foundational literature arising from the improper “scrambling” of two different meanings of quantum contextuality. While the first one, introduced by Bohr, is related to an epistemic interpretation of contextuality which stresses the incompatibility of measurement situations described in classical terms; the second meaning of contextuality is related to a purely formal understanding of contextuality (...) as exposed by the Kochen–Specker theorem which focuses instead on the constraints of the orthodox quantum formalism in order to interpret projection operators as preexistent or actual properties. We will show how these two notions have been scrambled together creating an “omelette of contextuality” which has been fully widespread through a popularized “epistemic explanation” of the KS theorem according to which: The measurement outcome of the observableAwhen measured together withBor together withCwill necessarily differ in case\, and\. We will show why this statement is not only improperly scrambling epistemic and formal perspectives, but is also physically and philosophically meaningless. Finally, we analyze the consequences of such widespread epistemic reading of KS theorem as related to statistical statements of measurement outcomes. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to analyze the physical and philosophical meaning of quantum contextuality. In the first part we will argue that a general confusion within the literature comes from the improper "scrambling" of two different meanings of quantum contextuality. The first one is related to an epistemic interpretation of contextuality, introduced by Bohr, which stresses the incompatibility of quantum measurements. The second, is related to an ontic notion of contextuality, exposed through the Kochen-Specker theorem, which focuses on (...) the constraints to discuss about actual properties within the orthodox formalism of QM. We will show how these two notions have been scrambled together creating an "omelette of contextuality" which has been fully widespread through a popularized "epistemic explanation" of the KS theorem according to which: The outcome of the observable A when mea- sured together with B or together with C will necessarily differ in case [A,B] = [A,C] = 0, and [B,C] ̸= 0. We will show why this statement is not only improperly scrambling epistemic and ontic perspectives, but is also physically and philosophically meaningless. In the second part of the paper, we will analyse the relation between ‘classical contexts’ and QM. We will show that three accepted presuppositions found within the orthodox literature are, in general, false. Namely: that quantum contextuality does not preclude an objective description of physical reality, that the choice of a context restores a classical description of reality, and that the choice of a context is a necessary condition for accounting for empirical statements in QM. (shrink)

It's not that we haven't always been here, since there was a here. It is that the letters of our names have been scrambled when they were not totally erased, and our fingertips upon the handles of history have been called the random brushings of birds. (Lorde, ix) Because… [racialized peoples'] dehumanization has not been successful, conceiving of self and others and their exercise of themselves both against dehumanization and toward liberatory possibilities has meant living double lives backed up by (...) peopled ways of living, acting, perceiving, thinking familiar with the interstitial, liminal, and with breaking up with, delinking from, colonial modernity. (Lugones, this issue, 20; my emphasis) We are not born women of color. We become women of color. To become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each other's histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse allowing mythologies to replace knowing about one another…. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each other's company. (Alexander, 91; italics in original). (shrink)

Abstract:This paper connects geography, gender studies, and the histories of science and empire. It uses the framework of geography, exploration, and adventure travel to shed light on the interplay of gender, nationalism, and space in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British society. During this period, the extent of the British Empire reached a peak, as did its sponsorship for exploration, and scores of men and a few women scrambled to fill in the world’s remaining blank spaces. Drawing on archival sources, (...) travel accounts as well as contemporary scholarship, this study investigates the shifting identities of Victorian explorers. It connects British exploration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to broader societal norms of gender and nationalism, then it shows how female explorers both reaffirmed and challenged these traditional Victorian values. This investigation demonstrates that Victorian explorers were often self- described outsiders in British society who deliberately chose their profession as a vehicle for liberation or escape. Space played a critical role in these agents’ ability to both reaffirm and evade British national identity. British nationalist rhetoric celebrated such figures as quintessential Britons who expanded their nation’s influence and modeled its prestige, strength, dignity, and grace. Yet agents of British exploration operated primarily on the physical, social, and ideological frontiers of British society. On these margins of empire, British understandings of gender and national identity were formed, reaffirmed, challenged, and ultimately transformed. This study contributes to contemporary scholarship by highlighting the value of a spatial lens in histories of science, gender, and empire. (shrink)

The autonomy of chronic patients in Iranian hospitals is challenged by impaired functioning resulting from chronic illness, a negative image in society, and effects related to hospitalization. Comprehensive interviews and observations of 34 patients, nurses, and physicians were performed to assess the autonomy of chronic patients in Iran. Conceptualization, constant comparison, and the combination of data resulted in the identification of 5 main categories related to autonomy: welcoming paternalism, self-expression, self-proof, shared decision making, and self-determination. Authority scrambling was a (...) central category describing chronic patients’ perceptions of their autonomy during hospitalization. These patients sought to maintain their independence despite serious threats to their autonomy. (shrink)

The three commentaries of Van Orden, Spivey and Anderson, and Dietrich (with Markman’s as a backdrop) form a tableau that reminds me of a fable by Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769 - 1844), in which a swan, a pike, and a crawfish undertake jointly to move a cart laden with goods. What transpires then is not unexpected: the swan strives skyward, the pike pulls toward the river, and the crawfish scrambles backward. The call for papers for the present ecumenically minded special (...) issue of JETAI was designed to minimize this kind of discord, by charging the authors to examine the possibility of epistemological pluralism in cognitive science — a field whose very diversity makes fundamental disagreement more likely than in other sciences. No doubt, the road mapped out by the editor had been conceived with good intentions in mind, but where did it lead us? It has been said that no good intention must go unpunished. To celebrate this venerable academic tradition (and also because I have a reputation to maintain), the following remarks will therefore be mostly other than conciliatory; caveat lector. (shrink)

"If you are ahead of your time, your time will catch up with you" - I attribute this proposition to Nietzsche, but is it from him actually? Was it devised earlier, was it a Nietzsche imitator who devised it, or is it an accidental convergence in style (by my lights)? Anyway, I think it is natural (or natural for us) to interpret the proposition as conveying the following: you may be a significant innovator in a certain field and ahead of (...) all your contemporaries in terms of what you do, but in due course, 100 years say, your innovations will have been absorbed and will be regarded as familiar. I have a different interpretation, which perhaps applies to individuals who are slightly ahead of their time. It focuses on what such an individual can actually observe. Such an individual is a scientist, let us imagine. He visits a family (or she does). The parents become competitive: “We are scientists too,” they convey. But they don't compete that well. However, then the children start competing and they are not very old. But they are somehow doing better than their parents. You can literally observe contemporaries (people alive at the same time) catching up with you! “See I told you,” the aphorism maker is disposed to say? Anyway, I have devised this coding/programming task: take a three letter word, scramble it up randomly, and print the result, e.g. "dog" becomes "odg" in the random scramble. This is the beginning of such a program, in GWBASIC or QBASIC (which I still use - what is the advantage of Python, by the way?), with semicolons for line breaks (please press enter instead). 10 THR$ = ""; 20 INPUT "What is your three letter word for scrambling? ", THR$; 30 LL = LEN(THR$); 40 IF LL = 30 THEN GOTO 70; 50 PRINT "Three letters long please!"; 60 GOTO 20; 70 PRINT "Yes, that is a length of three";. (shrink)

As nuclear scientists scrambled to contain the technology behind the splitting of the atom, another group of scientists was just beginning to come into its own. Out of necessity, World War II brought heavy investment in analog and digital computing machines. The Nazis had made tremendous advances since World War I in encrypted communication. The Allied forces responded by allocating significant time and energy to codebreaking efforts, necessitating the rapid evolution of computing machinery to crack the Nazi codes.Computers would soon (...) have as much impact on the world as the harnessing of the atom, but as we will learn, they also brought their own set of unique ethical challenges. (shrink)

More laws obtain in the world,it appears, than just those of microphysics –e.g. laws of genetics, perceptual psychology,economics. This paper assumes there indeedare laws in the special sciences, and notjust scrambled versions of microphysical laws. Yet the objects which obey them are composedwholly of microparticles. How can themicroparticles in such an object lawfully domore than what is required of them by the lawsof microphysics? Are there additional laws formicroparticles – which seems to violate closureof microphysics – or is the ``more'' (...) acoincidental outcome of microphysics itself? This paper argues that the appearance ofviolation is illusory, and the worry aboutcoincidence misleading. We cannot expect tounderstand the special sciences at the level ofthe microparticles. (shrink)

In two experiments, participants solved anagram problems while their eye movements were monitored. Each problem consisted of a circular array of five letters: a scrambled four-letter solution word containing three consonants and one vowel, and an additional randomly-placed distractor consonant. Viewing times on the distractor consonant compared to the solution consonants provided an online measure of knowledge of the solution. Viewing times on the distractor consonant and the solution consonants were indistinguishable early in the trial. In contrast, several seconds prior (...) to the response, viewing times on the distractor consonant decreased in a gradual manner compared to viewing times on the solution consonants. Importantly, this pattern was obtained across both trials in which participants reported the subjective experience of insight and trials in which they did not. These findings are consistent with the availability of partial knowledge of the solution prior to such information being accessible to subjective phenomenal awareness. (shrink)

Given authoritarianism’s resurgence, defenders of democracy are scrambling to identify political antidotes. Corporate civil disobedience (CCD), or politically motivated lawbreaking by business corporations that is civil (or public-minded), morally conscientious, nonviolent, public, and respectful of the law, seems to offer one useful political tool. This article sketches the strongest case for CCD before moving to consider its normative and political perils. Despite its many strengths, CCD’s proponents sideline harsh organizational realities of (especially) large for-profit business corporations, many of which (...) are best characterized as more-or-less authoritarian private governments. As such, it is unlikely that CCD can meet the relatively demanding conditions of civil disobedience, as standardly conceived. Given liberal democracy’s necessary commitment to political equality, it does not make sense to provide space for CCD, though the case of small business may be an exception. However, democratic backsliding complicates matters. With reference to John Rawls, I posit that the problematic case for CCD becomes less so when democracy faces severe authoritarian challenges. CCD may be permissible in the context of democratic backsliding to an extent that is not the case under more-or-less ordinary democratic conditions. (shrink)

Categories intentionally create discontinuities. By breaking the world up into cognizable chunks, they simplify the information environment. But the signals they provide may be inaccurate or scrambled by strategic behavior. This Article considers how law might approach the problem of optimal categorization, given the role of categories in managing and transmitting information. It proceeds from the observation that high categorization costs can be addressed through two opposite strategies—making classifications more fine-grained (splitting), and making classifications more encompassing (lumping). Although continuizing and (...) other forms of splitting offer intuitive answers to inaccurate classification and gaming along category lines, lumping is sometimes a better solution. If category membership carries multiple and offsetting implications, the incentive to manipulate the classification system is dampened. To take a simple example, insurance that covers only one risk is more vulnerable to adverse selection than is an insurance arrangement that covers two inversely correlated risks. Making categories larger, more durable, and more heterogeneous can produce such offsets. These and other forms of bundling can arrest damaging instabilities in categorization. (shrink)