Eliciting negative stereotypes about ageing commonly results in worse performance on many physical, memory, and cognitive tasks in adults aged over 65. The current studies explored the potential effect of this “stereotype threat” phenomenon on older adults’ emotion recognition, a cognitive ability that has been demonstrated to decline with age. In Study 1, stereotypes about emotion recognition ability across the lifespan were established. In Study 2, these stereotypes were utilised in a stereotype threat manipulation that framed an emotion recognition task (...) as assessing either cognitive ability, social ability, or general abilities. Participants then completed an emotion recognition task in which they labelled dynamic expressions of negative and positive emotions. Self-reported threat concerns were also measured. Framing an emotion recognition task as assessing cognitive ability significantly heightened older adults’ reports of stereotype threat concerns. Despite this, older adults’ emotion recognition performance was unaffected. Unlike other cognitive abilities, recognising facially expressed emotions may be unaffected by stereotype threat, possibly because emotion recognition is automatic, making it less susceptible to the cognitive load that stereotype threat produces. (shrink)

International legal scholars tend to think of their work as the interpretation of rules: the application of a law 'out there' to concrete situations. This book takes a different approach to that scholarship: it views doctrine as a socio-linguistic practice. In other words, this book views legal scholars not as law-appliers, but as constructing knowledge within a particular academic discipline. By means of three close-ups of the discourse on cyberwar and international law, this book shows how international legal knowledge is (...) constructed in ways usually overlooked: by means of footnotes, for example, or conference presentations. In so doing, this book aims to present a new way of seeing international legal scholarship: one that pays attention to the mundane parts of international legal texts and provides a different understanding of how international law as we know it comes about. (shrink)

Medical research involving human subjects can be risky and burdensome. Therefore, such research must be reviewed and approved by a Research Ethics Committee (REC). To guarantee the safety of the subjects, it is very important that these studies be conducted in accordance with the approved protocol. An important issue in this respect is whether studies include the requisite number of subjects based on the research question. The research question is unlikely to be answered reliably if the requisite number of subjects (...) is not met. In such cases, subjects are exposed to unnecessary risks and burdens. In this descriptive study, the authors evaluated how frequently studies are completed with the required number of subjects. Moreover, the authors identified the characteristics of research that does and does not include the required number of subjects. The results of this study show that a considerable proportion of studies (41/107) were terminated although they failed to recruit a sufficient number of subjects. Furthermore, the authors found that investigator-initiated studies have significantly (p=0.028) more problems in recruiting the requisite number of subjects than studies initiated by pharmaceutical companies. Potential solutions are discussed to reduce the number of studies that do not include a sufficient number of subjects. (shrink)

„My sole purpose in this paper is to try and correct what I take to be a common misinterpretation of Hume’s opinions on mathematics. I shall not enquire whether he was right or wrong in holding these opinions. Nor shall I offer opinions of my own.“.

R. F. Atkinson; XIII*—Explanation in History, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 241–256, https://doi.org/10.1093/a.

Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 120-121.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:XY/XOLianne SimonAs a boy child I might once have thrived, but the loss of a Y chromosome in one of the first few cell divisions left me a faie half–girl struggling for life—like some changeling left in place of a human baby. My genetic mosaic of XY and XO cell lines created a fetal legacy of Turner Syndrome medical issues. Among these were delayed growth, a largely absent puberty, (...) and micrognathia—a small jaw that feminized my face. [End Page E11]At two I weighed just eighteen pounds. My parents worried they might lose their little boy, I was that frail. All I knew was I was the smallest of my peer group and had a cute pixie face. I imagined myself a high–spirited elfin princess, but was in truth shy—almost timid—and prone to tears.I first responded to the Gospel at vacation Bible school. One of the women there read me Bible stories. I didn’t understand them all, but I wanted to love Jesus and be a good girl.At nine I was the size of a 6–year–old. By then I’d started growing faster, so my mother stopped taking me to the doctors. I didn’t see one again until an emergency appendectomy in college.Fifth grade brought surprises. Jim melted my heart with his Beatles love songs and cute smile. I dreamed of being his bride. Karen was the first classmate ever shorter than me. We were best friends, but one day the principal said I should play softball with the boys instead of hopscotch with her.My parents allowed me dolls and tea sets, even an Easy–Bake oven. But wearing my sister’s clothes triggered a sad–eyed lecture—boys didn’t do such things. No dresses. No talking with my hands. No long hair. And no crushes on boys.If I prayed hard enough, if I was really good, maybe God would make me a real boy—tall and strong, fast and agile—like my older brother. Two years later, puberty cracked my high–pitched squeal of a voice and sent it sliding down to a mellower soprano. I grew taller, but didn’t get muscles or body hair, and I remained hopelessly uncoordinated. An inguinal hernia kept me from running very far.High school turned my prayers into pleas for mercy. I despaired of ever fitting in. Some Christians might not have welcomed a feminine boy, but the pastor of our Southern Baptist mission considered me one more sinner in need of the saving grace of a forgiving God. He led me to faith in Christ. As a new believer, I assumed I could be a boy for real. Maybe even find a girlfriend. Instead, the mask that allowed me to function socially crumbled, leaving me no place to hide.In the spring of 1970, I registered for the draft. Me fighting in Vietnam seemed a real possibility. Or at least spending time in prison for refusing induction. Except that a delicate intersex kid would never have passed the physical. Nearly perfect SAT scores won me a scholarship to Miami, so I left a supportive home in Illinois for a boys’ dorm in south Florida.My surname then was Klett. The worst of the guys called me Clit, or sometimes Clitoris. Others derided my small size and lack of virility. One propositioned me. Another used to pin me to my bed and lie on top of me until I quit struggling. Though he stopped each time I surrendered, my defenses lay in ruin.A few of the boys were nice. David took me for long rides on his motorcycle, with my arms wrapped tight around his waist. He treated me with gentle kindness and asked nothing in return.To escape the dorm, I studied in the library stacks, where only honors and graduate students were allowed. The next year I found a derelict building where the university stored old theatrical sets. It even had a quiet place to sit in the sun. Best of all—nobody ever went there.One day my imagination wandered through the wardrobe. What would I have worn... (shrink)

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book addresses the age-old problem of infinite regresses in epistemology. How can we ever come to know something if knowing requires having good reasons, and reasons can only be good if they are backed by good reasons in turn? The problem has puzzled philosophers ever since antiquity, giving rise to what is often called Agrippa's Trilemma. The current volume approaches the old problem in a provocative and thoroughly contemporary (...) way. Taking seriously the idea that good reasons are typically probabilistic in character, it develops and defends a new solution that challenges venerable philosophical intuitions and explains why they were mistakenly held. Key to the new solution is the phenomenon of fading foundations, according to which distant reasons are less important than those that are nearby. The phenomenon takes the sting out of Agrippa's Trilemma; moreover, since the theory that describes it is general and abstract, it is readily applicable outside epistemology, notably to debates on infinite regresses in metaphysics. The book is a potential game-changer and a must for any advanced student or researcher in the field. (shrink)

Firewalls are an important tool in the assurance of network security. Packet filtering firewalls are configured by providing a set of rules that identify how to handle individual data packets that...

In Chapter 4 of his essay Utilitarianism, “Of what sort of Proof the Principle of Utility is susceptible,” J. S. Mill undertakes to prove, in some sense of that term, the principle of utility. It has very commonly been argued that in the course of this “proof” Mill commits two very obvious fallacies. The first is the naturalistic fallacy which he is held to commit when he argues that since “the only proof capable of being given that an object is (...) visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner … the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.”1 Here Mill appears to hold that “X is desirable ”—a value judgment—follows deductively from “People desire x”—a factual statement. And the second is the fallacy of composition which seems to be involved in Mill'zs argument that since “each person's happiness is a good to that person … the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.”2. (shrink)

This article examines how ‘trauma’ has been conceptualised in the unresolved state of mind classification in the Adult Attachment Interview, introduced by Main and Hesse in 1990. The unresolved state of mind construct has been influential for three decades of research in developmental psychology. However, not much is known about how this measure of unresolved trauma was developed, and how it relates to other conceptualisations of trauma. We draw on previously unavailable manuscripts from Main and Hesse's personal archive, including various (...) editions of unpublished coding manuals, and on Main–Bowlby correspondence from the John Bowlby Archive at the Wellcome Trust in London. This article traces the emergence of the unresolved state of mind classification, and examines the assumptions about trauma embedded in the construct. These assumptions are situated both in the immediate context of the work of Main and Hesse and in terms of wider discourses about trauma in the period. Our analysis considers how a particular form of trauma discourse entered into attachment research, and in doing so partly lost contact with wider disciplinary study of trauma. (shrink)

The coupled Dyson-Schwinger equations for the gluon and ghost propagators in QCD are shown to have solutions that correspond to a unique running coupling that has a nite infrared xed point and the expected logarithmic decrease in the ultraviolet. The infrared coupling is large enough to support chiral symmetry breaking and quarks are not con ned, but they cannot be isolated.

In this paper we consider persuasion in the context of practical reasoning, and discuss the problems associated with construing reasoning about actions in a manner similar to reasoning about beliefs. We propose a perspective on practical reasoning as presumptive justification of a course of action, along with critical questions of this justification, building on the account of Walton. From this perspective, we articulate an interaction protocol, which we call PARMA, for dialogues over proposed actions based on this theory. We outline (...) an axiomatic semantics for the PARMA Protocol, and discuss two implementations which use this protocol to mediate a discussion between humans. We then show how our proposal can be made computational within the framework of agents based on the Belief-Desire-Intention model, and illustrate this proposal with an example debate within a multi agent system. (shrink)

In multi-agent systems (MAS), abstract argumentation and argumentation schemes are increasingly important. To be useful for MAS, argumentation schemes require a computational approach so that agent...

An eight parameter family of the most general nonnegative quadruple probabilities is constructed for EPR-Bohm-Aharonov experiments when only 3 pairs of analyser settings are used. It is a simultaneous representation of 3 Bohr-incompatible experimental configurations valid for arbitrary quantum states.

A recent claim that in quantum chromodynamics in the Landau gauge the gluon propagator vanishes in the infrared limit, while the ghost propagator is more singular than a simple pole, is investigated analytically and numerically. This picture is shown to be supported even at the level in which the vertices in the Dyson- Schwinger equations are taken to be bare. The gauge invariant running coupling is shown to be uniquely determined by the equations and to have a large finite infrared (...) limit. S0556-2821 98 04421-X.. (shrink)

quantum electrodynamics. In quasilinear approximation, the integral equation is solved by Mellin transformation, followed by the calculation of the Muskhelishvili index of the resultant singular integral operator.

A nonlinear integrodifferential equation is solved by the methods of S-matrix theory.

It is argued that probability should be defined implicitly by the distributions of possible measurement values characteristic of a theory. These distributions are tested by, but not defined in terms of, relative frequencies of occurrences of events of a specified kind. The adoption of an a priori probability in an empirical investigation constitutes part of the formulation of a theory. In particular, an assumption of equiprobability in a given situation is merely one hypothesis inter alia, which can be tested, like (...) any other assumption. Probability in relation to some theories – for example quantum mechanics – need not satisfy the Kolmogorov axioms. To illustrate how two theories about the same system can generate quite different probability concepts, and not just different probabilistic predictions, a team game for three players is described. If only classical methods are allowed, a 75% success rate at best can be achieved. Nevertheless, a quantum strategy exists that gives a 100% probability of winning. (shrink)

The classical electrodynamics of point charges can be made finite by the introduction of effects that temporally precede their causes. The idea of retrocausality is also inherent in the Feynman propagators of quantum electrodynamics. The notion allows a new understanding of the violation of the Bell inequalities, and of the world view revealed by quantum mechanics. Published in The Universe, Visions and Perspectives, edited by N. Dadhich and A. Kembhavi, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, pages 35-50.