Similarity-based cognition is commonplace. It occurs whenever an agent or system exploits the similarities that hold between two or more items—e.g., events, processes, objects, and so on—in order to perform some cognitive task. This kind of cognition is of special interest to cognitive neuroscientists. This paper explicates how similarity-based cognition can be understood through the lens of radical enactivism and why doing so has advantages over its representationalist rival, which posits the existence of structural representations or (...) S-representations. Specifically, it is argued that there are problems both with accounting for the content of S-representations and with understanding how neurally-based structural similarities can work as representations in guiding intelligent behavior. Finally, with these clarifications in place, it is revealed how radical enactivism can commit to an account of similarity-based cognition in its understanding of neurodynamics. (shrink)

Empiricist modal epistemologies can be attractive, but are often limited in the range of modal knowledge they manage to secure. In this paper, I argue that one such account – similarity-based modal empiricism – can be extended to also cover justification of many scientifically interesting possibility claims. Drawing on recent work on modelling in the philosophy of science, I suggest that scientific modelling is usefully seen as the creation and investigation of relevantly similar epistemic counterparts of real target (...) systems. On the basis of experiential knowledge of what is actually the case with the models, one can draw justified conclusions about what is de re possible for the target systems. (shrink)

We describe a method for automatic word sense disambiguation using a text corpus and a machine- readable dictionary (MRD). The method is based on word similarity and context similarity measures. Words are considered similar if they appear in similar contexts; contexts are similar if they contain similar words. The circularity of this definition is resolved by an iterative, converging process, in which the system learns from the corpus a set of typical usages for each of the senses (...) of the polysemous word listed in the MRD. A new instance of a polysemous word is assigned the sense associated with the typical usage most similar to its context. Experiments show that this method performs well, and can learn even from very sparse training data. (shrink)

To achieve more cost-effective deterrence of unreasonable risktaking through civil liability, I propose and demonstrate previously unrecognized benefits of using simple random sampling to resolve multiple claims against a business or government defendant in the aggregate. I show that counter to intuition and prevailing assumptions and practice, simple sampling will enhance, not compromise, deterrent results regardless of the number of claims and the variety and significance of differences among them. Indeed, it can be used to resolve multiple claims that bear (...) no resemblance to one another except for targeting the same defendant. The proposal can thus be employed to increase the efficiency of resolving relatively similar claims in class and consolidated actions and, by extending the application of such collectivizing processes, lower the cost of resolving all other claims that would be adjudicated as separate actions. I close by sketching a design for a reformed civil liability system that fully integrates and exploits the law enforcement benefits of sampling to better achieve the primary social objectives of accident risk deterrence and insurance. (shrink)

The target article postulates that rule-based and similarity-based categorization are best described by a unitary process. A number of recent empirical dissociations between rule-based and similarity-based categorization severely challenge this view. Collectively, these new results provide strong evidence that these two types of category learning are mediated by separate systems.

The concept of similar systems arose in physics, and appears to have originated with Newton in the seventeenth century. This chapter provides a critical history of the concept of physically similar systems, the twentieth century concept into which it developed. The concept was used in the nineteenth century in various fields of engineering, theoretical physics and theoretical and experimental hydrodynamics. In 1914, it was articulated in terms of ideas developed in the eighteenth century and used in nineteenth century (...) mathematics and mechanics: equations, functions and dimensional analysis. The terminology physically similar systems was proposed for this new characterization of similar systems by the physicist Edgar Buckingham. Related work by Vaschy, Bertrand, and Riabouchinsky had appeared by then. The concept is very powerful in studying physical phenomena both theoretically and experimentally. As it is not currently part of the core curricula of STEM disciplines or philosophy of science, it is not as well known as it ought to be. (shrink)

This paper considers current personalized recommendation approaches based on computational social systems and then discusses their advantages and application environments. The most widely used recommendation algorithm, personalized advice based on collaborative filtering, is selected as the primary research focus. Some improvements in its application performance are analyzed. First, for the calculation of user similarity, the introduction of computational social system attributes can help to determine users’ neighbors more accurately. Second, computational social system strategies can be adopted (...) to penalize popular items. Third, the network community, identity, and trust can be combined as there is a close relationship. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method that uses a computational social system, including a trust model based on community relationships, to improve the user similarity calculation accuracy to enhance personalized recommendation. Finally, the improved algorithm in this paper is tested on the online reading website dataset. The experimental results show that the enhanced collaborative filtering algorithm performs better than the traditional algorithm. (shrink)

A personalized recommender system is broadly accepted as a helpful tool to handle the information overload issue while recommending a related piece of information. This work proposes a hybrid personalized recommender system based on affinity propagation, namely, APHPRS. Affinity propagation is a semisupervised machine learning algorithm used to cluster items based on similarities among them. In our approach, we first calculate the cluster quality and density and then combine their outputs to generate a new ranking score among clusters (...) for the personalized recommendation. In the first phase, user preferences are collected and normalized as items rating matrix. This generated matrix is then clustered offline using affinity propagation and kept in a database for future recommendations. In the second phase, online recommendations are generated by applying the offline model. Negative Euclidian similarity and the quality of clusters are used together to select the best clusters for recommendations. The proposed APHPRS system alleviates problems such as sparsity and cold-start problems. The use of affinity propagation and the hybrid recommendation technique used in the proposed approach helps in improving results against sparsity. Experiments reveal that the proposed APHPRS performs better than most of the existing recommender systems. (shrink)

Travel route preferences can strongly interact with the events that happened in networked traveling, and this coevolving phenomena are essential in providing theoretical foundations for travel route recommendation and predicting collective behaviour in social systems. While most literature puts the focus on route recommendation of individual scenic spots instead of city travel, we propose a novel approach named City Travel Route Recommendation based on Sequential Events Similarity by applying the coevolving spreading dynamics of the city tour networks (...) and mine the travel spatiotemporal patterns in the networks. First, we present the Event Sequence Similarity Measurement Method based on modelling tourists’ travel sequences. The method can help measure similarities in various city travel routes, which combine different scenic types, time slots, and relative locations. Second, by applying the user preference learning method based on scenic type, we learn from the user’s city travel historical data and compute the personalized travel preference. Finally, we verify our algorithm by collecting data of 54 city travellers of their historical spatiotemporal routes in the ten most popular cities from Mafeng.com. CTRR-SES shows better performance in predicting the user’s new city travel sequence fitting the user’s individual preference. (shrink)

In this paper, the sine, cosine and cotangent similarity measures of interval rough neutrosophic sets is proposed. Some properties of the proposed measures are discussed. We have proposed multi attribute decision making approaches based on proposed similarity measures. To demonstrate the applicability, a numerical example is solved.

The automated identification of national implementations of European directives by text similarity techniques has shown promising preliminary results. Previous works have proposed and utilized unsupervised lexical and semantic similarity techniques based on vector space models, latent semantic analysis and topic models. However, these techniques were evaluated on a small multilingual corpus of directives and NIMs. In this paper, we utilize word and paragraph embedding models learned by shallow neural networks from a multilingual legal corpus of European directives (...) and national legislation to develop unsupervised semantic similarity systems to identify transpositions. We evaluate these models and compare their results with the previous unsupervised methods on a multilingual test corpus of 43 Directives and their corresponding NIMs. We also develop supervised machine learning models to identify transpositions and compare their performance with different feature sets. (shrink)

Chaotic systems with hidden multiscroll attractors have received much attention in recent years. However, most parts of hidden multiscroll attractors previously reported were repeated by the same type of attractor, and the composite of different types of attractors appeared rarely. In this paper, a memristor-based chaotic system, which can generate composite attractors with one up to six scrolls, is proposed. These composite attractors have different forms, similar to the Chua’s double scroll and jerk double scroll. Through theoretical analysis, (...) we find that the new system has no fixed point; that is to say, all of the composite multiscroll attractors are hidden attractors. Additionally, some complicated dynamic behaviors including various hidden coexisting attractors, extreme multistability, and transient transition are explored. Moreover, hardware circuit using discrete components is implemented, and its experimental results supported the numerical simulations results. (shrink)

In this article, the authors present several topics related to the nascent development of a merit-based hiring system in North Macedonia. This paper employs a normative approach. We advocate for a merit-based hiring system, similar to the American model. First, we explore the pressure exerted by the European Commission to adopt a merit-based system at all levels of government as a condition for entry into the European Union. Second, we delve into the patronage system in North Macedonia. (...) Third, we provide a short history of patronage in the United States and the difficulty that nation had in curbing its entrenched patronage system. Fourth, we discuss the advantages of a merit-based hiring system, namely the creation of good governance, the improvement of employee morale, the development of more public confidence in government, the reduction of the influence of ethnic politics and the furtherance of the rule of law. Finally, we present an example drawn from the American federal government about the basic procedures of a merit-based hiring process. (shrink)

Detecting Intrusions and anomalies is becoming much more challenging with new attacks popping out over a period of time. Achieving better accuracies by applying benchmark classifier algorithms used for identifying intrusions and anomalies have several hidden data mining challenges. Although neglected by many research findings, one of the most important and biggest challenges is the similarity or membership computation. Another challenge that cannot be simply neglected is the number of features that attributes to dimensionality. This research aims to come (...) up with a new membership function to carry similarity computation that can be helpful for addressing feature dimensionality issues. In principle, this work is aimed at introducing a novel membership function that can help to achieve better classification accuracies and eventually lead to better intrusion and anomaly detection. Experiments are performed on KDD dataset with 41 attributes and also KDD dataset with 19 attributes. Recent approaches CANN and CLAPP have showed new approaches for intrusion detection. The proposed classifier is named as UTTAMA. UTTAMA performed better to both CANN and CLAPP approaches w.r.t overall classifier accuracy. Another promising outcome achieved using UTTAMA is the U2R and R2L attack accuracies. The importance of proposed approach is that the accuracy achieved using proposed approach outperforms CLAPP, CANN, SVM, KNN and other existing classifiers. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose some transfor mations based on the centroid points between single valued neutrosophic numbers. We introduce these trans formations according to truth, indeterminacy and falsity value of single valued neutrosophic numbers. We propose a new similarity measure based on falsity value between single valued neutrosophic sets. Then we prove some properties on new similarity measure based on falsity value between falsity value between single valued neutrosophic sets. Furthermore, we propose similarity (...) measure based on falsity value between single valued neutrosophic sets based on the centroid points of transformed single valued neutrosophic numbers. We also apply the proposed similarity measure between single valued neutrosophic sets to deal with pattern recognition problems. (shrink)

With the rapid development of the Internet, recommendation systems have received widespread attention as an effective way to solve information overload. Social tagging technology can both reflect users’ interests and describe the characteristics of the items themselves, making group recommendation thus becoming a recommendation technology in urgent demand nowadays. In traditional tag-based recommendation systems, the general processing method is to calculate the similarity and then rank the recommended items according to the similarity. Without considering the (...) influence of continuous user behavior, in this article, we propose a personalized recommendation algorithm based on social tags by combining the ideas of Markov chain and collaborative filtering. This algorithm splits the three-dimensional relationship of into two two-dimensional relationships of and. The user’s interest degree to the tags is calculated by the Markov chain model, and then the items corresponding to them are matched by the recommended tag set. The influence between tags is used to model the satisfaction of items based on the correlation between the tags contained in the matched items, and collaborative filtering is used to complete the sparse values when calculating the interest and satisfaction between user–tags and user–items to improve the accuracy of recommendations. The experiments show that in the publicly available dataset, the personalized recommendation algorithm proposed in this article has significantly improved in accuracy and recall rate compared with the existing algorithms. (shrink)

Clustering plays an important role in data mining, pattern recognition, and machine learning. Single-valued neutrosophic sets are useful means to describe and handle indeterminate and inconsistent information that fuzzy sets and intuitionistic fuzzy sets cannot describe and deal with. To cluster the data represented by single-valued neutrosophic information, this article proposes single-valued neutrosophic clustering methods based on similarity measures between SVNSs. First, we define a generalized distance measure between SVNSs and propose two distance-based similarity measures of (...) SVNSs. Then, we present a clustering algorithm based on the similarity measures of SVNSs to cluster single-valued neutrosophic data. Finally, an illustrative example is given to demonstrate the application and effectiveness of the developed clustering methods. (shrink)

Recently, the pandemic caused by COVID-19 is severe in the entire world. The prevention and control of crimes associated with COVID-19 are critical for controlling the pandemic. Therefore, to provide efficient and convenient intelligent legal knowledge services during the pandemic, we develop an intelligent system for legal information retrieval on the WeChat platform in this paper. The data source we used for training our system is “The typical cases of national procuratorial authorities handling crimes against the prevention and control of (...) the new coronary pneumonia pandemic following the law”, which is published online by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of the People’s Republic of China. We base our system on convolutional neural network and use the semantic matching mechanism to capture inter-sentence relationship information and make a prediction. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary learning process to help the network better distinguish the relation between two sentences. Finally, the system uses the trained model to identify the information entered by a user and responds to the user with a reference case similar to the query case and gives the reference legal gist applicable to the query case. (shrink)

Structure–activity relationship and quantitative SAR are modeling methods largely used in assessing biological properties of chemical substances. QSAR is based on the hypothesis that the chemical structure is responsible for the activity; it follows that similar molecules are expected to have similar properties. Similarity plays an important role in read across, which categorizes molecules primarily on the basis of similarity. Similarity, and chemical similarity too, is a property differently perceived by humans. The various proposed metrics (...) often disagree with human judgment, and no a unique metric for chemical similarity is universally adopted. Researchers argued that categorization is not only explained by similarity but depends as well on abstract knowledge and the task to accomplish. Moreover, similarity cannot be the unique explanation of a categorization, as different perceptual processes take place in category formation. Assuming that similarity judgments are deeply rooted in human knowledge and perception, cognitive sciences contributions are as important as the mathematical considerations of the classical theories. After an excursus in the many views of similarity in philosophy, mathematics, and cognitive science, the paper explores how connectionist systems, which loosely mimic the human cognitive system, could improve similarity-based choices. A case study on building SARs using connectionism and deep neural networks shows the role of similarity in building and explaining those models. A discussion about deep learning for QSAR and as a modeling tool for science concludes the presentation. (shrink)

Memristor is the fourth basic electronic element discovered in addition to resistor, capacitor, and inductor. It is a nonlinear gadget with memory features which can be used for realizing chaotic, memory, neural network, and other similar circuits and systems. In this paper, a novel memristor-based fractional-order chaotic system is presented, and this chaotic system is taken as an example to analyze its dynamic characteristics. First, we used Adomian algorithm to solve the proposed fractional-order chaotic system and yield a (...) chaotic phase diagram. Then, we examined the Lyapunov exponent spectrum, bifurcation, SE complexity, and basin of attraction of this system. We used the resulting Lyapunov exponent to describe the state of the basin of attraction of this fractional-order chaotic system. As the local minimum point of Lyapunov exponential function is the stable point in phase space, when this stable point in phase space comes into the lowest region of the basin of attraction, the solution of the chaotic system is yielded. In the analysis, we yielded the solution of the system equation with the same method used to solve the local minimum of Lyapunov exponential function. Our system analysis also revealed the multistability of this system. (shrink)

Reaction network is a promising framework for representing complex systems of diverse and even interdisciplinary types. In this approach, complex systems appear as self-maintaining structures emerging from a multitude of interactions, similar to proposed scenarios for the origin of life out of autocatalytic networks. The formalism of chemical organization theory mathematically specifies under which conditions a reaction network is stable enough to be observed as a whole complex system. Such conditions specify the notion of organization, crucial in COT. (...) In this paper, we show that the structure and operation of organizations can be advanced towards a formal framework of resilience in complex systems. That is, we show that there exist three fundamental types of change defined for reaction networks, and that these perturbations not only provide a general representation of perturbations in the context of resilience but also pave the ground to formalize different forms of resilient responses. In particular, we show that decomposing the network’s operational structure into dynamically decoupled modules allows to formalize what is the impact of a perturbation and to what extent any potential compensation to that perturbation will be successful. We illustrate our approach with a toy model of a farm that operates in a sustainable way producing milk, eggs, and/or grains from other resources. With the help of simulations, we analyze the different types of perturbations and responses that the farm can undergo and how that affects its sustainable operation. (shrink)

In this paper, the cosine similarity measure of neutrosophic refined (multi-) sets is proposed and its properties are studied. The concept of this cosine similarity measure of neutrosophic refined sets is the extension of improved cosine similarity measure of single valued neutrosophic. Finally, using this cosine similarity measure of neutrosophic refined set, the application of medical diagnosis is presented.

The basis of Islamic alchemy and matter theory is found in the works of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (d. 200/815). Jābir developed an element theory similar to Aristotle’s system. Still, he interpreted matter and substance differently by transferring the basis of the theory from elements to qualities. In Jābir’s system, qualities are more often expressed by the term “natures” (ṭabā’iʻ). In Jābir’s thought, four na- tures precede the four elements, and due to the combination of two different natures with the sub- (...) stance each time, four distinct elements with different qualities occur. In Jābir, the “primary bodies” of the natural world are no longer the four Empedoclean elements but the “four natures”; air, water, earth, and fire are made up of these natures. Thus, Jābir gave the four primary Aristotelian qualities the role of genuine elements by making them tangible, independent, and corporeal entities. According to Jābir, the operation of transforming (transmutation) of ajsād (‘bodies’) such as iron, copper, tin, and lead, which is the primary purpose of the Art of alchemy, into silver and gold is carried out within the framework of the science of mīzān. The core of this transformation is based on an idea of causality in which the four natures and their specific proportions and measures are at the center. With the idea of causality that allows chemical transformation, Jābir also succeeded in extending the possibility of transformation in alchemy from the inorganic world to the organic world to an extensive range of entities. This study will discuss Jābir’s thoughts on body, substance, and experimental causality by ex- amining Jābir’s corpus through primary sources. (shrink)

Case-based reasoning has played an important role in legal reasoning systems. As one criteria for similarity of cases, temporal relationsamong affairs in legal cases should be compared. Thus far in many legalreasoning systems, cases have been described as sequences of pointwiseevents, or at best, simple time intervals, and they have been related bypredicates such as before, after, while,and so on. However, such relations may depend on each implementer'spersonal view, and also require much labor to write down (...) by hand. In this paper, we first propose a classification of affair types by their temporal features, and according to those types, we propose several assumption rules that prescribe the temporal relations between affair types. The temporal relations are automatically generated by these rules. Thereafter, we discuss how thesetemporal relations work in the comparison of similarity of cases. Inthe process of comparison, inadequate temporal relations need to beamended. For this purpose, we introduce revision rules, that refute theresults of assumption rules. (shrink)

The robustness of a health system can often be assessed by its response to unpredictable circumstances that demand resourcefulness and resilience. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has similarly challe...

The common law system is a legal system that values precedent, or previous court decisions, in the resolution of current cases. As the availability of legal documents in digital form has increased, it has become more difficult for legal professionals to manually identify relevant past cases due to the vast amount of data. Researchers have developed automated systems for determining the similarity between legal documents to address this issue. Our research explores various representations of a legal document and (...) discusses a novel paragraph filtering process to identify key paragraphs using legal citation information to remove unnecessary text paragraphs without disturbing the concept of the legal document. State-of-the-art techniques like TF-IDF, BERT, Legal Bert, Doc2Vec, and Legal-longformer are used for the performance analysis of the proposed approach with document comparison. It has been shown that a model trained on the proposed filtered paragraphs can achieve better results than a model trained on the complete text and can also shorten the document by over 40%. The proposed filtering strategy could be helpful for models like BERT, where the maximum token length is fixed. (shrink)

A standard system, which is a powerful tool in maintaining the normal operations and development of a specific industry, is intrinsically a complex network composed of numerous standards which coordinate and interact with each other. In a networked standard system, the identification of critical standards is of great significance when drafting and revising standards. However, a majority of the existing literature has focused on the citation relationships between standards while ignoring the intrinsic interdependent relationships between the contents of standards. To (...) overcome this limitation, we utilize the text similarity approach to quantify the relationship intensity between each pair of standards, in order to generate a directed weighted network. The critical contribution of this study is that the similarity computed by the TSA is incorporated into the traditional PageRank algorithm for the identification of critical standards. The improved algorithm comprehensively considers the quantity and importance of neighboring standards and the citation intensity, as quantified by TSA. The algorithm is finally validated using the Chinese environmental health standards through comparison with the traditional PageRank algorithm and different classic measurements. (shrink)

Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to (...) rules. The systems serve complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. (shrink)

Acquiring perceptual expertise is slow and effortful. However, untrained novices can accurately make difficult classification decisions by reformulating the task as similarity judgment. Given a query image and a set of reference images, individuals are asked to select the best matching reference. When references are suitably chosen, the procedure yields an implicit classification of the query image. To optimize reference selection, we develop and evaluate a predictive model of similarity-based choice. The model builds on existing psychological literature (...) and accommodates stochastic, dynamic shifts of attention among visual feature dimensions. We perform a series of human experiments with two stimulus types and nine classification tasks to validate the model and to demonstrate the model's potential to boost performance. Our system achieves high accuracy for participants who are naive as to the classification task, even when the classification task switches from trial to trial. (shrink)

After describing the challenges, myths, exclusions and opportunities of urban regeneration, this article explores the potential interface between faith-based action and different forms of urban regeneration. Focusing on different South African cities, it considers how faith-based action could participate in regenerative urban work. Faith-based action will refer to the varied responses of churches and faith-based organisations to urban challenges and transitions. It interrogates whether faith-based action only represents many similar approaches that address urban problems superficially (...) without mediating long-term, systemic change, or whether it indeed contributes to urban transformation in the sense of radical inclusivity and socio-structural spatial justice. Finally, it considers socio-theological sources that could potentially ground urban faith-based action theologically – such as an urban spirituality, an understanding of regeneration as integral liberation and mobilising socio-spiritual capital – whilst making a distinctive contribution to the processes of socially inclusive urban regeneration. (shrink)

The similarities and differences in dream content at the cross-cultural, gender, and individual levels provide one starting point for carrying out studies that attempt to discover correspondences between dream content and various types of waking cognition. Hobson and Kahn’s . Dream content: Individual and generic aspects. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 850–858.) conclusion that dream content may be more generic than most researchers realize, and that individual differences are less salient than usually thought, provides the occasion for a review of findings (...) based on the Hall and Van de Castle . The content analysis of dreams. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.) coding system for the study of dream content. Then new findings based on a computationally intensive randomization strategy are presented to show the minimum sample sizes needed to detect gender and individual differences in dream content. Generally speaking, sample sizes of 100–125 dream reports are needed because most dream elements appear in less than 50% of dream reports and the magnitude of the differences usually is not large. (shrink)

Appraisal is the way language users express their attitude towards things, people, behaviour or ideas. In the last few decades, significant achievements have been made in Appraisal Theory research, yet little attention has been paid to appraisal in scientific texts, especially in relation to the contrast to how it is applied in English and Chinese. This title examines the similarities and differences of Appraisal systems in English and Chinese scientific research articles. Using a self-constructed corpus of scientific research articles, (...) the authors make cross-linguistic comparisons in terms of the quantity and distribution patterns of categories of appraisals. They creatively categorise articles into theoretical scientific research articles and applied studies and discover that for both languages, each genre can have its own favorite mode of distribution for the realization of appraisal systems. In addition, this research helps appraisal theory systems to become more explicit, specific, and more applicable for the analysis of scientific research articles. Students and scholars of applied linguistics, comparative linguistics and corpus linguistics will find this an essential reference. (shrink)

Action is a means of acquiring perceptual information about the environment. Turning around, for example, alters your spatial relations to surrounding objects and, hence, which of their properties you visually perceive. Moving your hand over an object’s surface enables you to feel its shape, temperature, and texture. Sniffing and walking around a room enables you to track down the source of an unpleasant smell. Active or passive movements of the body can also generate useful sources of perceptual information (Gibson 1966, (...) 1979). The pattern of optic flow in the retinal image produced by forward locomotion, for example, contains information about the direction in which you are heading, while motion parallax is a “cue” used by the visual system to estimate the relative distances of objects in your field of view. In these uncontroversial ways and others, perception is instrumentally dependent on action. According to an explanatory framework that Susan Hurley (1998) dubs the “Input-Output Picture”, the dependence of perception on action is purely instrumental: "Movement can alter sensory inputs and so result in different perceptions… changes in output are merely a means to changes in input, on which perception depends directly" (1998: 342). -/- The action-based theories of perception, reviewed in this entry, challenge the Input-Output Picture. They maintain that perception can also depend in a noninstrumental or constitutive way on action (or, more generally, on capacities for object-directed motor control). This position has taken many different forms in the history of philosophy and psychology. Most action-based theories of perception in the last 300 years, however, have looked to action in order to explain how vision, in particular, acquires either all or some of its spatial representational content. Accordingly, these are the theories on which we shall focus here. -/- We begin in Section 1 by discussing George Berkeley’s Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), the historical locus classicus of action-based theories of perception, and one of the most influential texts on vision ever written. Berkeley argues that the basic or “proper” deliverance of vision is not an arrangement of voluminous objects in three-dimensional space, but rather a two-dimensional manifold of light and color. We then turn to a discussion of Lotze, Helmholtz, and the local sign doctrine. The “local signs” were felt cues for the mind to know what sort of spatial content to imbue visual experience with. For Lotze, these cues were “inflowing” kinaesthetic feelings that result from actually moving the eyes, while, for Helmholtz, they were “outflowing” motor commands sent to move the eyes. -/- In Section 2, we discuss sensorimotor contingency theories, which became prominent in the 20thcentury. These views maintain that an ability to predict the sensory consequences of self-initiated actions is necessary for perception. Among the motivations for this family of theories is the problem of visual direction constancy—why do objects appear to be stationary even though the locations on the retina to which they reflect light change with every eye movement?—as well as experiments on adaptation to optical rearrangement devices (ORDs) and sensory substitution. -/- Section 3 examines two other important 20th century theories. According to what we shall call the motor component theory, efference copies generated in the oculomotor system and/or proprioceptive feedback from eye-movements are used together with incoming sensory inputs to determine the spatial attributes of perceived objects. Efferent readiness theories, by contrast, look to the particular ways in which perceptual states prepare the observer to move and act in relation to the environment. The modest readiness theory, as we shall call it, claims that the way an object’s spatial attributes are represented in visual experience can be modulated by one or another form of covert action planning. The bold readiness theory argues for the stronger claim that perception just is covert readiness for action. -/- In Section 4, we move to the disposition theory, most influentially articulated by Gareth Evans (1982, 1985), but more recently defended by Rick Grush (2000, 2007). Evans’ theory is, at its core, very similar to the bold efferent readiness theory. There are some notable differences, though. Evans’ account is more finely articulated in some philosophical respects. It also does not posit a reduction of perception to behavioral dispositions, but rather posits that certain complicated relations between perceptual input and behavioral provide spatial content. Grush proposes a very specific theory that is like Evans’ in that it does not posit a reduction, but unlike Evans’ view, does not put behavioral dispositions and sensory input on an undifferentiated footing. (shrink)

We investigate the role of perceptual similarity in visual metaphor comprehension process. In visual metaphors, perceptual features of the source and the target are objectively present as images. Moreover, to determine perceptual similarity, we use an image-based search system that computes similarity based on low-level perceptual features. We hypothesize that perceptual similarity at the level of color, shape, texture, orientation, and the like, between the source and the target image facilitates metaphorical comprehension and aids (...) creative interpretation. We present three experiments, two of which are eye-movement studies, to demonstrate that in the interpretation and generation of visual metaphors, perceptual similarity between the two images is recognized at a subconscious level, and facilitates the search for creative conceptual associations in terms of emergent features. We argue that the capacity to recognize perceptual similarity—considered to be a hallmark of creativity—plays a major role in the creative understanding of metaphors. (shrink)

In order to better assist investors in the evaluation and decision-making of financial data, this paper puts forward the need to build a reliable and effective financial data prediction model and, on the basis of financial data analysis, integrates deep learning algorithm to analyze financial data and completes the financial data analysis system based on deep learning. This paper introduces the implementation details of the key modules of the platform in detail. The user interaction module obtains and displays the (...) retrieval results through data parsing, calling the background, and computing engine. The data cleaning module fills, optimizes, and normalizes the data through business experience; the calculation engine module uses the algorithm and extracts the database information to get the similar time series and matching financial model. Finally, the data acquisition module fills the database with historical data at the initialization stage and updates the database every day. The data analysis platform for quantitative trading designed and implemented in this paper has carried out demand analysis, design, implementation, and test. From the perspective of function test and performance test, two functions of similar stock search and financial matching model are selected and tested, and the results are in line with the expected results. (shrink)

The book takes as its point of departure the notion that similarity and contiguity are fundamental to meaning. It shows how they manifest in oral, literate, print and internet cultures, in language acquisition, pragmatics, dialogism, classification, the semantics of grammar, literature and, most centrally, metaphor and metonymy. The book situates these reflections on similarity and contiguity in the interplay of language, cognition, culture, and ideology, and within broader debates around such issues as capitalism, biodiversity, and human control over (...) nature. Positing that while similarity-focused systems can be reductive, and have therefore been contested in social science, philosophy and poetry, and contiguity-based ones might disregard useful statistical and scientific evidence, Andrew Goatly argues for the need for humans to entertain diverse metaphors, models, and languages as ways of understanding and acting on our world. The volume also considers the cognitive connections between the similarity-contiguity duality and the noun-verb distinction. This innovative volume will appeal to scholars involved in wider debates on meaning, within the fields of cognitive semantics, pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy theory, critical discourse analysis, and the philosophy of language. Equally, the motivated and intelligent general reader, interested in language, philosophy, culture and ecology, should find the later chapters of the book fascinating, and the earlier technical chapters accessible. (shrink)

Gilboa and Schmeidler provide a paradigm for modelling decision making under uncertainty. Unlike the classical theory of expected utility maximization, case-based decision theory does not assume that decision makers know the possible 'states of the world' or the outcomes, let alone the decision matrix attaching outcomes to act-state pairs. Case-based decision theory suggests that people make decisions by analogies to past cases: they tend to choose acts that performed well in the past in similar situations, and to avoid (...) acts that performed poorly. It is an alternative to expected utility theory when both states of the world and probabilities are neither given in the problem nor can be easily constructed. The authors describe the general theory and its relationship to planning, repeated choice problems, inductive inference, and learning; they highlight its mathematical and philosophical foundations and compare it with expected utility theory as well as with rule-based systems. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate how to represent and reason about legal abrogations and annulments in Defeasible Logic. We examine some options that embed in this setting, and in similar rule-based systems, ideas from belief and base revision. In both cases, our conclusion is negative, which suggests to adopt a different logical model. This model expresses temporal aspects of legal rules, and distinguishes between two main timelines, one internal to a given temporal version of the legal system, and (...) another relative to how the legal system evolves over time. Accordingly, we propose a temporal extension of Defeasible Logic suitable to express this model and to capture abrogation and annulment. We show that the proposed framework overcomes the difficulties discussed in regard to belief and base revision, and is sufficiently flexible to represent many of the subtleties characterizing legal abrogations and annulments. (shrink)

Purpose – This paper aims to present an overview of the various ethical, societal and critical issues that micro- and nanotechnology-based small, energy self-sufficient sensor systems raise in different selected application fields. An ethical approach on the development of these technologies was taken in a very large international, multitechnological European project. The authors approach and methodology are presented in the paper and, based on this review, the authors propose general principles for this kind of work. Design/methodology/approach – (...) The authors’ approach is based on a great amount of experience working together in multi-disciplinary teams. Ethical issues have usually been handled in the authors’ work to some degree. In this project, the authors had the opportunity to emphasise the human view in technological development, utilise the authors’ experience from previous work and customise the authors’ approach to this particular case. In short, the authors created a wide set of application scenarios with technical and application field experts in the authors’ research project. The scenarios were evaluated with external application field experts, potential consumer users and ethics experts. Findings – Based on the authors’ experiences in this project and in previous work, the authors suggest a preliminary model for construction activity within technology development projects. The authors call this model the Human-Driven Design approach, and Ethics by Design as a more focussed sub-set of this approach. As all enabling technologies have both positive and negative usage possibilities, and so-called ethical assessment tends to focus on negative consequences, there are doubts from some stakeholders about including ethical perspectives in a technology development project. Research limitations/implications – The authors argue that the ethical perspective would be more influential if it were to provide a more positive and constructive contribution to the development of technology. The main findings related to the ethical challenges based on the actual work done in this project were the following: the main user concerns were in relation to access to information, digital division and the necessity of all the proposed measurements; the ethics experts highlighted the main ethical issues as privacy, autonomy, user control, freedom, medicalisation and human existence. Practical implications – Various technology assessment models and ethical approaches for technological development have been developed and performed for a long time, and recently, a new approach called Responsible Research and Innovation has been introduced. The authors’ intention is to give a concrete example for further development as a part of the development of this approach. Social implications – The authors’ study in this particular case covers various consumer application possibilities for small sensor systems. The application fields studied include health, well-being, safety, sustainability and empathic user interfaces. The authors believe that the ethical challenges identified are valuable to other researchers and practitioners who are studying and developing sensor-based solutions in similar fields. Originality/value – The authors’ study covers various consumer application possibilities of small sensor systems. The studied application fields include health, well-being, safety, sustainability and empathic user interfaces. The findings are valuable to other researchers and practitioners who are studying and developing sensor-based solutions to similar fields. (shrink)

Professionals in various disciplines adopt significantly different lexicons to report their discoveries and arguments. Scientists discover, philosophers argue, whereas legal practitioners apply and consider. Reporting, as a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon, has its disciplinary characteristics. In court judgments, it reflects the way judges identify the evidence of different documents or other courts. In the self-built court judgment corpus, the paper focuses on the way that judicial arguments are constructed through reporting verbs. On the basis of the analysis of the representation and (...) distribution of reporting verbs in court judgments, the study identifies the reporting verbs with high frequencies in court judgments and compares these reporting verbs with those in the comparable reference corpus, written sampler of British National Corpus, which works as a reference corpus. It is found that the tokens of reporting verbs in court judgments are slightly less than those in general texts; the distribution pattern of the speech act verbs and mental verbs in the self-built court judgment corpus is similar to the pattern of two kinds of reporting verbs in the reference corpus; judicial speech act verbs are employed to express the authority of the statements, whereas the judicial mental verbs illustrate the legal reasoning process with individual agents; and there is a significant difference in terms of the reporting verbs’ frequencies within the court judgments and general texts. The results show that the reporting verbs in court judgments have their uniqueness, which may cast light on both judicial and pedagogical practices. (shrink)

Social scientists are often interested in understanding how the dynamics of social systems are driven by the behavior of individuals that make up those systems. However, this process is hindered by the difficulty of experimentally studying how individual behavioral tendencies lead to collective social dynamics in large groups of people interacting over time. In this study, we investigate the role of social influence, a process well studied at the individual level, on the puzzling nature of success for cultural (...) products such as books, movies, and music. Using a “multiple‐worlds” experimental design, we are able to isolate the causal effect of an individual‐level mechanism on collective social outcomes. We employ this design in a Web‐based experiment in which 2,930 participants listened to, rated, and downloaded 48 songs by up‐and‐coming bands. Surprisingly, despite relatively large differences in the demographics, behavior, and preferences of participants, the experimental results at both the individual and collective levels were similar to those found in Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006). Further, by comparing results from two distinct pools of participants, we are able to gain new insights into the role of individual behavior on collective outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Web‐based experiments to address questions of collective social dynamics. (shrink)

Based upon literature that argues technology, and even simple classification systems, embody cultural values, I ask if software bug tracking systems are similarly value laden. I make use of discourse within and around Web browser software development to identify specific discursive values, adopted from Ferree et al.'s "normative criteria for the public sphere," and conclude by arguing that such systems mediate community concerns and are subject to contested interpretations by their users.

Biomimicry studies natural systems and attempts to use the gained knowledge and understanding to solve human problems. Can biomimicry, if applied in urban planning, help to make our cities more sustainable or, precisely, more friendly for walkable and 15-minute city models? Various researchers identify the following features of natural systems as form fits function, catalysis of cooperation, local contextuality, continuity of development, diversity, integrity, redundancy, decentralization, multifunctionality, and less energy consumption (e.g. TOD if the energy needed for transportation (...) is considered), hierarchy, fractality, etc. The presented research has two objectives: analyze the possibility of describing and evaluating the degree of expression of the features of natural systems in urban spatial structures to use them for comparison, benchmarking, or creation of a biomimicry index; evaluate if cities with more strongly expressed biomimicry features could be considered more walkable and close to the 15-minute city concept. To give answers to the above-presented questions Riga, Vilnius, and Tallinn were investigated. They represent both certain similarities and differences in terms of history, urban planning, political context, size, etc. A simulative mathematical graph model was used as the main tool to describe and analyze complex urban structures based on spatial configurations. Various graph centralities were employed to describe and compare the expression of natural systems’ features in the selected cities. OSM data was used to overlap graph models with such information as the density of inhabitants, concentrations of various points of interest in order to evaluate walkability and 15-minute city friendliness. The research results could be seen as an important step for better understanding of informal principles of biomimicry that can help transform urban areas. (shrink)

Network reconfiguration is one of the most effective methods to reduce line power loss in the distribution system, which causes higher losses than the other parts of the power system. This paper proposes a modified symbiotic organisms search algorithm to solve the NR problem. For the purpose of enhancing the effectiveness of MSOS, the mutualism and parasitism strategies of the original symbiotic organisms search have been modified to create better new solutions. In the mutualism strategy, the so-far best solution is (...) updated immediately as soon as new solutions are created. In the parasitism strategy, the update is only implemented for the first half of control variables, whereas another half still remains unchanged. The comparison results between MSOS and SOS on twenty-five benchmark functions and different scales of test distribution systems with 14, 33, 69, and 119 nodes show that the improvement level of MSOS over SOS is significant with higher success rates and better quality of gained solutions. Similarly, MSOS also reaches better results than other methods in the literature. Consequently, MSOS can be a favorable method for determining the most appropriate configurations for the distribution systems. (shrink)

Infonorma is a multi-agent system that provides its users with recommendations of legal normative instruments they might be interested in. The Filter agent of Infonorma classifies normative instruments represented as Semantic Web documents into legal branches and performs content-based similarity analysis. This agent, as well as the entire Infonorma system, was modeled under the guidelines of MAAEM, a software development methodology for multi-agent application engineering. This article describes the Infonorma requirements specification, the architectural design solution for those requirements, (...) the detailed design of the Filter agent and the implementation model of Infonorma, according to the guidelines of the MAAEM methodology. (shrink)

This paper concerns exchangeable analogical predictions based on similarity relations between predicates, and deals with a restricted class of such relations. It describes a system of Carnapian λγ rules on underlying predicate families to model the analogical predictions for this restricted class. Instead of the usual axiomatic definition, the system is characterized with a Bayesian model that employs certain statistical hypotheses. Finally the paper argues that the Bayesian model can be generalized to cover cases outside the restricted class (...) of similarity relations. (shrink)