This paper studies how well computable functions can be approximated by their Fourier series. To this end, we equip the space of Lp-computable functions with a size notion, by introducing Lp-computable Baire categories. We show that Lp-computable Baire categories satisfy the following three basic properties. Singleton sets {f } are meager, suitable infinite unions of meager sets are meager, and the whole space of Lp-computable functions is not meager. We give an alternative characterization of meager sets via Banach-Mazur (...) games. We study the convergence of Fourier series for Lp-computable functions and show that whereas for every p > 1, the Fourier series of every Lp-computable function f converges to f in the Lp norm, the set of L1-computable functions whose Fourier series does not diverge almost everywhere is meager. (shrink)

We define the effective integrability of Fine-computable functions and effectivize some fundamental limit theorems in the theory of Lebesgue integrals such as the Bounded Convergence Theorem, the Dominated Convergence Theorem, and the Second Mean Value Theorem. It is also proved that the Walsh-Fourier coefficients of an effectively integrable Fine-computable function form a Euclidian computable sequence of reals which converges effectively to zero. This property of convergence is the effectivization of the Walsh-Riemann-Lebesgue Theorem. The article is closed with the effective (...) version of Dirichlet's test. (shrink)

Beyond being the first substantial publication on Fourier, this work contains the text of Fourier's seminal paper of 1807 on the propagation of heat, marking the first time it has ever appeared in print. This paper incorporates many of the mathematical creations on which Fourier's fame rests, including derivation of the diffusion equation, the separation of the treatment of surface phenomena from internal phenomena, the use of boundary values and initial conditions, and the development of "Fourier (...) series" and the so-called "Bessel functions."When submitted to the examiners of the Institut de France, the originality of the paper and the surprising nature of some of its mathematical revelations caused great controversy, and it was denied publication both in 1807 and in later years. Fourier had the support, among the examiners, of Laplace and Monge, but Lagrange was adamantly in opposition, so that Fourier's work did not appear in print until 1822, reworked into book form.Fourier's mathematical discoveries are intimately related to his interest in the solution of physical problems and their experimental verification. The mathematical methods he developed in connection with heat diffusion apply to physical situations far beyond the boundaries of this area. Generally, Fourier may be credited with one of the first major extensions of mathematical physics beyond the applications of Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation.The opening biographical chapter of this book follows Fourier's career up to the submission of the 1807 paper, and the two closing chapters take up his life and work from that point on. Fourier had strong political motivations and spent much of his life in the public service. These chapters trace his political difficulties, both before and after 1807, when he was the prefect of a department of France and was subjected to the dislocations of Napoleon's ups and downs. These chapters also describe aspects of the turbulent but productive development of French science from the Revolution to 1830.The core of the book presents the paper of 1807 in its original French and with the original notation. Grattan-Guinness has divided the paper into sections by the sequence of the problems taken up, and he introduces and, where necessary, closes each section with commentary relevant to Fourier's later work in these areas. The paper itself (cllows the chronology of Fourier's discoveries, and among the topics treated are, in this order: heat diffusion between disjoint bodies and in continuous bodies; the appearance of partial differential equations; the special solution for the lamina; sine and cosine series for an arbitrary function; reflections on the vibrating string problem; solution for the annulus; the full Fourier series for an arbitrary function; reflections on n-body analysis; solution for the sphere; solution for the cylinder; steady-state diffusion in the rectangular prism; time-dependent diffusion in the cube; and Fourier's experimental work. (shrink)

What does quilting have to do with electric circuit theory? The answer is just one of the fascinating ways that best-selling popular math writer Paul Nahin illustrates the deep interplay of math and physics in the world around us in his latest book of challenging mathematical puzzles, Mrs. Perkins's Electric Quilt. With his trademark combination of intriguing mathematical problems and the historical anecdotes surrounding them, Nahin invites readers on an exciting and informative exploration of some of the many ways math (...) and physics combine to create something vastly more powerful, useful, and interesting than either is by itself. In a series of brief and largely self-contained chapters, Nahin discusses a wide range of topics in which math and physics are mutually dependent and mutually illuminating, from Newtonian gravity and Newton's laws of mechanics to ballistics, air drag, and electricity. The mathematical subjects range from algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus to differential equations, Fourier series, and theoretical and Monte Carlo probability. Each chapter includes problems--some three dozen in all--that challenge readers to try their hand at applying what they have learned. Just as in his other books of mathematical puzzles, Nahin discusses the historical background of each problem, gives many examples, includes MATLAB codes, and provides complete and detailed solutions at the end. Mrs. Perkins's Electric Quilt will appeal to students interested in new math and physics applications, teachers looking for unusual examples to use in class--and anyone who enjoys popular math books. (shrink)

This book examines the different areas of knowledge, traditions, and conceptual resources that contributed to the building of Max Planck's theory of radiation. It presents an insightful comparative analysis that not only sheds light upon a fundamental chapter in the history of modern physics, but also enlarges our understanding of how theoreticians work. Coverage offers a deep investigation into the technical aspects behind the theory and extends in time the notion of quantum revolution. It also presents a full-fledged discussion of (...) the combinatorial part of Planck's theory and places emphasis on the epistemological role of mathematical practices. By painstakingly reconstructing both the electromagnetic and the combinatorial part of Planck's black-body theory, the author shows how some apparently merely technical resources, such as the Fourier series, effectively contributed to shape the final form of Planck's theory. For decades, historians have debated the conditions of possibility of Max Planck's discovery as a paradigmatic example of scientific revolution. In particular, the use of combinatorics, which eventually paved the way for the introduction of the quantum hypothesis, has remained a puzzle for experts. This book presents a fresh perspective on this important debate that will appeal to historians and philosophers of science. (shrink)

T. Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions has repeatedly been the subject of criticism. It is important to note that Kuhn pays very limited attention to the phenomenon of the scientific revolution itself, comparing the revolution either with a religious conversion or with a gestalt switch. Such comparisons, however, are very superficial. This paper outlines a new understanding of the scientific revolution as a result of the resonance of the intellectual trends of the early modern period. It was the quasi-simultaneous action (...) of various factors that led to revolutionary changes in natural philosophy, which, in turn, gave rise to the actual scientific revolution. In addition, the article shows that the Copernican Revolution cannot be described within the model of scientific revolution developed by T. Kuhn. Ptolemy’s theory was mathematically constructed so that it could not make inaccurate predictions of planetary motion, because – as we are now clear – the function characterizing the trajectory of planetary motion was actually represented as a Fourier series. The Copernican revolution was not a Kuhn-type scientific revolution, nor was it caused by the empirical failures of Ptolemaic astronomy. Events unfolded according to a different scheme. Copernicus set out to carry out the principle of the uniform circular motion of the planets more consistently than had been done in Ptolemy’s theory, at the same time presenting to this theory those requirements of an aesthetic and methodological order, which the cognitively fragmented system of Ptolemy, for all its flexibility, could not satisfy and, by the conditions of its creation, could not satisfy. In addition, the article shows that Copernicus, in constructing his heliocentric theory, was essentially seeking answers to the challenges that Alberti’s artificial perspective and Nicholas of Cusa’s theological speculation posed to the visual experience in the sixteenth century. (shrink)

Aims to show graduate students and researchers the vital benefits of integrating mathematics into their study and experience of the physical world. This book details numerous topics from the frontiers of modern physics and mathematics such as convergence, Green functions, complex analysis, Fourier series and Fourier transform, tensors, and others.

This is the first in a series of papers in which a method of harmonic analysis in terms of functions over the groupSU(2) is applied to the description of interaction between matter and the electromagnetic field. Carmeli'sSU(2) formulation of Maxwell's equations is extended to anSU(2) formulation of the equations for the electromagnetic vector potential. The four functions which describe the vector potential are expanded in a generalized Fourier series [SU(2) harmonic analysis] and the equations for the coefficients (...) are derived. These equations are not independent of each other, but in a given order they can be solved consecutively one at a time. (shrink)

Compactified Minkowski spacetime is suggested by conformal covariance of Maxwell equations, while E. Cartan's definition of simple spinors leads to the idea of compactified momentum space. Assuming both diffeomorphic to (S 3 × S 1 )/Z 2 , one may obtain in the conformally flat stereographic projection field theories both infrared and ultraviolet regularized. On the compact manifold themselves instead, Fourier integrals of wave-field oscillations would have to be replaced by Fourier series summed over indices of spherical (...) eigenfunctions: n, l, m, m′. Tentatively identifying those wave structures with spacetime itself (in the frame of Big-Bang) and/or with matter and radiation distribution, some large-scale (hydrogenic) and small-scale (lattice) space structures are conjectured. (shrink)

The theory of Participatory Discrepancies (or PDs) claims that minute temporal asynchronies (microtiming) in music performance are crucial for prompting bodily entrainment in listeners, which is a fundamental effect of the “groove” experience. Previous research has failed to find evidence to support this theory. The present study tested the influence of varying PD magnitudes on the beat-related body movement behavior of music listeners. 160 participants (79 music experts, 81 non-experts) listened to twelve music clips in either Funk or Swing style. (...) These stimuli were based on two audio recordings (one in each style) of expert drum and bass duo performances. In one series of six clips, the PDs were downscaled from their originally performed magnitude to complete quantization in steps of 20%. In another series of six clips, the PDs were upscaled from their original magnitude to double magnitude in steps of 20%. The intensity of the listeners’ beat-related head movement was measured using video-based motion capture technology and Fourier analysis. A mixed-design four-factor ANOVA showed that the PD manipulations had a significant effect on the expert listeners’ entrainment behavior. The experts moved more when listening to stimuli with PDs that were downscaled by 60% compared to completely quantized stimuli. This finding offers partial support for PD theory: PDs of a certain magnitude do augment entrainment in listeners. But the effect was found to be small to moderately sized, and it affected music expert listeners only. (shrink)

Infinity is an intriguing topic, with connections to religion, philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and physics as well as mathematics. Its history goes back to ancient times, with especially important contributions from Euclid, Aristotle, Eudoxus, and Archimedes. The infinitely large is intimately related to the infinitely small. Cosmologists consider sweeping questions about whether space and time are infinite. Philosophers and mathematicians ranging from Zeno to Russell have posed numerous paradoxes about infinity and infinitesimals. Many vital areas of mathematics rest upon some version (...) of infinity. The most obvious, and the first context in which major new techniques depended on formulating infinite processes, is calculus. But there are many others, for example Fourier analysis and fractals.In this Very Short Introduction, Ian Stewart discusses infinity in mathematics while also drawing in the various other aspects of infinity and explaining some of the major problems and insights arising from this concept. He argues that working with infinity is not just an abstract, intellectual exercise but that it is instead a concept with important practical everyday applications, and considers how mathematicians use infinity and infinitesimals to answer questions or supply techniques that do not appear to involve the infinite.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. (shrink)

The Heisenberg-Gabor uncertainty principle defines the limits of information resolution in both time and frequency domains. The limit of resolution discloses unique properties of a time series by frequency decomposition. However, classical methods such as Fourier analysis are limited by spectral leakage, particularly in longitudinal data with shifting periodicity or unequal intervals. Wavelet transformation provides a workable compromise by decomposing the signal in both time and frequency through translation and scaling of a basis function followed by correlation or (...) convolution with the original signal. This study aimed to compare the accuracy of predictive models in mental arithmetic in time and frequency domains. Analysis of the author's response time at mental arithmetic using a soroban was modeled for two periods, an initial period, and a return period both separated by an interval of 370 days. The median response times in seconds was longer for all tasks during the TI compared to the TR period, for addition [CTAdd 62 vs 50 s] and summation [CTSum 68 vs 57 s]. Response times were longer for errors regardless of the study period or task. There was an increasing phase difference for the addition and summation tasks during the TI period toward the end of the series 49.65o compared to the TR period where the phase difference between the two tasks was only 2.05o, indicating that both tasks are likely demonstrating similar learning rates during the latter study period. A comparison between time and time/frequency domain forecasts for an additional 100 tasks demonstrated higher accuracy of the maximum overlap discrete wavelet transform model, where the mean absolute percentage error ranged between 5.48 and 8.19% and that for the time domain models [autoregressive integrated moving average, generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity ] was 6.16–10.80%. (shrink)

. Epochs present in the voiced speech are defined as time instants of significant excitation of the vocal tract system during the production of speech. Nonstationary nature of excitation source and vocal tract system makes accurate identification of epochs a difficult task. Most of the existing methods for epoch detection require prior knowledge of voiced regions and a rough estimation of pitch frequency. In this paper, we propose a novel method that relies on time-order representation based on short-time Fourier–Bessel (...) series expansion which can be employed on entire speech signal to detect epochs without any prior information. The proposed method automatically detects voiced regions in the speech signal by computing the marginal energy density with respect to time in the low frequency range from the energy distribution in the time-frequency plane. An estimate of pitch frequency for each detected voiced region is then obtained by computing the marginal energy density with respect to frequency in the LFR from the energy distribution in the time-frequency plane. Epochs are located for each detected voiced region as peaks in the derivative of the low pass filtered signal corresponding to falling edges of peak negative cycles in the LPF signal synthesized from TOR coefficients corresponding to LFR. Experimental results obtained by the proposed method on speech signals taken from the CMU-Arctic database are found to be promising. The proposed method detects epochs with high accuracy and reliability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse by Jean-Paul EngélibertCyril CamusJean-Paul Engélibert. Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse [Fabulating the end of the world: The critical power of apocalypse fiction]. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2019. 239 pp. Print. 20€. ISBN 978-2-348-03719-1.Jean-Paul Engélibert is a well-established expert on apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction. His exploration of the genre thus far includes (...) the monograph Apocalypses sans royaume: Politique des fictions de la fin du monde, XX–XXIe siècles (2013), numerous articles, as well as the essay collection L’Apocalypse: Une imagination politique, XIXe–XXIe siècles (2018), which he co-edited. In his latest book, Fabuler la fin du monde, he returns to several texts and aspects of the genre previously covered, delving deeper into what he calls “fictions of the end of the world.” In the ten chapters, gathered in five parts, he approaches his subject as a seasoned scholar in the field of comparative literature, and his analysis draws from comparisons between modern fiction’s representation of apocalypse and biblical literature’s visions of apocalypse and messianism. The book also offers ecocritical insights into the specter of Anthropocenic manifestations in fiction, with reflections on the interrelated genres of utopia and dystopia, theories of cinema, and philosophical writings on the catastrophic history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.The range of fictional works discussed is wide, including Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme (1805); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Émile Souvestre’s Le monde tel qu’il sera (1846); Didier de Chousy’s Ignis (1883); Robert Merle’s Malevil (1972); José Saramago’s Blindness (1995); Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels (1999); Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003); Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); Céline Minard’s Le dernier monde (2007); Davide [End Page 163] Longo’s The Last Man Standing (2010); and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake [2003], The Year of the Flood [2009], and MaddAddam [2013]). Engélibert also touches on feature-length movies such as Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2012), and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), as well as on other literary and audiovisual fictions, such as E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1909), Edward Bond’s dramatic trilogy The War Plays (1985), and the first season (2014) of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s TV series The Leftovers (2014–17).Engélibert’s exegeses of the genre build around two aspects of the evolving relationship of apocalyptic narratives to the context of their production. Apocalypse (in the sense of “the end of the world” rather than the etymological sense of “revelation”) is no longer primarily a religious myth: the creation and use of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the theorization of the Anthropocene, and the mainstreaming of concerns over climate change have made the term “apocalypse” a very real, tangible prospect for the future. Engélibert relies on Günther Anders’s Die atomare Drohung (1981) to highlight the importance of the A-bomb in bringing home the reality of potential annihilation to people’s collective consciousness. Yet his second contextual/historical point is that the Anthropocene (albeit unnamed at the time) actually started with the Industrial Revolution, and that thinkers and polemicists such as Charles Fourier or Eugène Huzar, as well as contemporary fiction writers, were already acknowledging the environmental impact of humans and their economic/industrial/technological activity as threats to human and nonhuman life, and to the health of the planetary system itself.1Citing the work of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Christophe Bonneuil on the history of climate science, Engélibert analyzes in detail several nineteenth-century novels (namely Le Dernier homme, Frankenstein, Le monde tel qu’il sera, and Ignis) and one early-twentieth-century story (Forster’s “The Machine Stops”) that denounce the harm that the idol of the time, Progress, was already wreaking on nature and human life... (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In the present text, we are going to introduce a series of notes without excessive pretensions. In these pages, we will try to study figures like Cabet, Fourier or Saint - Simon, and we will do so in order to achieve better understanding concerning their own historical and their own intellectual context. Consequently and leaving our papers on Robert Owen behind, we plan to set special emphasis on the European Continent now. In a special way, we raise (...) awareness on the very significant role that these "utopian socialists" played between modernity and industrial modernity, and also between the 18th and 19th Centuries. Key words: Christianity, Modernity, Industrialism, Utopian Socialism, Socialism, Rationality, History. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality-the first volume of which was published in 1976-exerts a vast influence across the humanities and social sciences. However, Foucault's interest in the history of sexuality began as early as the 1960s, when he taught two courses on the subject. These lectures offer crucial insight into the development of Foucault's thought yet have remained unpublished until recently. This book presents Foucault's lectures on sexuality for the first time in English. In the first series, held (...) at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, Foucault asks how sexuality comes to be constituted as a scientific body of knowledge within Western culture and why it derived from the analysis of "perversions"-morbidity, homosexuality, fetishism. The subsequent course, held at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969, shows how Foucault's theories were reoriented by the events of May 1968; he refocuses on the regulatory nature of the discourse of sexuality and how it serves economic, social, and political ends. Examining creators of political and literary utopias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sade to Fourier to Marcuse, who attempted to integrate "natural" sexualities, including transgressive forms, into social and economic life, Foucault elaborates a double critique of the naturalization and the liberation of sexuality. Together, the lectures span a range of interests, from abnormality to heterotopias to ideology, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the evolution of Foucault's transformative thinking on sexuality. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Auswahl von Texten des französischen Sozialphilosophen und Gesellschaftstheoretikers Charles Fourier (1772-1837) hat zwei Schwerpunkte: Zum einen thematisiert sie die wesentlichen Aspekte und die gedankliche Struktur von Fouriers weitreichendem Œuvre; zum anderen macht sie verständlich, welche Überlegungen Fouriers für heutige Theoretikerinnen und Theoretiker anregend oder anschlussfähig sind. Zu den Themen, die Fourier in den im vorliegenden Band publizierten Schriften behandelt, zählen das Ideal einer exakten Sozialwissenschaft; die Grundlagen der Anthropologie; die „neue Welt“ der Liebe und des Konsums; (...) die Relevanz der Arbeit für ein gelingendes Leben; die Grundstruktur nicht-entfremdeter Gesellschaften; sowie die Kritik an der Philosophie und den Gesellschaftswissenschaften, insbesondere der Ökonomik. Zahlreiche der im Band versammelten Texte werden erstmals auf Deutsch veröffentlicht. (shrink)

This article proposes a framework for the analysis of experienced discrimination in home mortgages. It addresses the problem of home mortgage lending discrimination in one of the richest areas of northern Italy. Employees of a local hospital were interviewed to study their perception of discriminatory behavior related to home financing. The analysis follows two steps. The first evaluates self-selection and the second focuses on the likelihood that applications are accepted by the bank. Findings show that discrimination is likely to appear (...) when the applicant’s nationality is considered. In addition to its findings, the study provides an original econometric model on a two-step procedure to test perceived discrimination and suggests a method and approach that may constitute a point of reference for those willing to study perceived discrimination. (shrink)

The humanist theory of the nude is one of the places where what can be called a ‘poor metaphysics’ developed during the Renaissance. To construct the concept of the nude as a representation of man in his own right, art theorists used common scholastic categories such as substance and accident, form and matter, potentiality and actuality, quantity and quality, whole and part, soul and body. Resolutely poor in its object – the human body, the work of art – and in (...) its form – technical treatise, fictional dialogue, or simple working notes – this reflection is nonetheless rich and original because of what constitutes its very weakness: the contamination of the Aristotelian metaphysical tradition with Neoplatonism, Vitruvianism, elements of natural philosophy, musical theory, and even Kabbalah. It testifies less to the permanence of scholastic metaphysics during the Renaissance than to the ingenious adaptation of its tools to new, humbler, and more rebellious objects of thought. (shrink)

The text commonly known as the Babylonian Poem of Creation has attracted scholarly attention since it was first translated in the late nineteenth century, although critical editions have appeared only recently. In 2014 there was published a lengthy study on enūma eliš that presents a number of original approaches to the ancient composition. This new book is the subject of the following notes.

Objective: To evaluate feasibility of the guidelines of the Groupe Francophone de Réanimation et Urgence Pédiatriques for limitation of treatments in the paediatric intensive care unit .Design: A 2-year prospective survey.Setting: A 12-bed PICU at the Hôpital Jeanne de Flandre, Lille, France.Patients: Were included when limitation of treatments was expected.Results: Of 967 children admitted, 55 were included with a 2-day median delay. They were younger than others , had a higher paediatric risk of mortality score , and a higher paediatric (...) overall performance category score at admission ; all p<0.002. 34 children died. A limitation decision was made without meeting for 7 children who died: 6 received do-not-resuscitate orders and 1 received withholding decision. Decision-making meetings were organised for 31 children, and the following decisions were made: 12 DNROs , 4 withholding , with 14 withdrawing and 1 continuing treatment . After limitation, 21 children died and 10 survived . 13 procedures were interrupted because of death and 11 because of clinical improvement . Parents’ opinions were obtained after 4 family conferences , 3 days after inclusion. The first meeting was planned for 6 days after inclusion and held on the 7th day after inclusion; 80% of parents were immediately informed of the decision, which was implemented after half a day.Conclusions: GFRUPs procedure was applicable in most cases. The main difficulties were anticipating the correct date for the meeting and involving nurses in the procedure. Children for whom the procedure was interrupted because of clinical improvement and who survived in poor condition without a formal decision pointed out the need for medical criteria for questioning, which should systematically lead to a formal decision-making process. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the idea that computation is a key tool that can help us understand how the human brain works. Recent years have seen a revolution in the kinds of tasks computers can perform. Underlying these advances is the burgeoning field of machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, which aims at creating machines that can act without being programmed, learning from data and experience. Rather startlingly, it turns out that the same methods that allow us to make intelligent (...) machines also appear to hold the key to explaining how our brains work. In this chapter, we explore this exciting new field and some of the questions that it raises. (shrink)

Enūma eliš exhibits a masterful array of intertextual borrowings that makes it exceptional among Akkadian literary texts. In this paper I discuss “intertextu- ity” as an analytical category and its suitability and limitations for the study of ancient compositions. I consider three different levels of intertextuality and present instances from an assorted group of texts. I finally show how a variety of intertextual types that are usually found in isolation are combined in Enūma eliš to create an original piece.

According to a growing trend in theoretical neuroscience, the human perceptual system is akin to a Bayesian machine. The aim of this article is to clearly articulate the claims that perception can be considered Bayesian inference and that the brain can be considered a Bayesian machine, some of the epistemological challenges to these claims; and some of the implications of these claims. We address two questions: (i) How are Bayesian models used in theoretical neuroscience? (ii) From the use of Bayesian (...) models in theoretical neuroscience, have we learned or can we hope to learn that perception is Bayesian inference or that the brain is a Bayesian machine? From actual practice in theoretical neuroscience, we argue for three claims. First, currently Bayesian models do not provide mechanistic explanations; instead they are useful devices for predicting and systematizing observational statements about people's performances in a variety of perceptual tasks. That is, currently we should have an instrumentalist attitude towards Bayesian models in neuroscience. Second, the inference typically drawn from Bayesian behavioural performance in a variety of perceptual tasks to underlying Bayesian mechanisms should be understood within the three-level framework laid out by David Marr ( [1982] ). Third, we can hope to learn that perception is Bayesian inference or that the brain is a Bayesian machine to the extent that Bayesian models will prove successful in yielding secure and informative predictions of both subjects' perceptual performance and features of the underlying neural mechanisms. (shrink)

Objective Compare outcome of dogs that did and did not receive fresh frozen plasma (FFP) for treatment of pancreatitis. Design Retrospective case series between 1995 and 2005. Setting University referral hospital. Animals Seventy-four dogs were enrolled with a total of 77 Cases as 2 dogs had repeat episodes of pancreatitis. Diagnosis of pancreatitis was based on clinical signs, physical examination, and abdominal ultrasonographic examination. Interventions The medical database was searched for dogs with a diagnosis of pancreatitis. Information collected included (...) signalment, vital signs, CBC, use of FFP, length of stay, use of antimicrobials and supplemental nutrition, surgical intervention, preexisting illness, evidence of a coagulopathy and outcome. Outcome was compared between those patients that did and did not receive FFP. Measurements and Main Results Fifty-nine dogs survived to discharge. Two dogs with repeat pancreatitis survived to discharge after each episode. Thirteen dogs died and 2 were euthanized. FFP was administered to 20 dogs. Two dogs that were hospitalized for repeat pancreatitis did not receive FFP. Seven of 20 (35%) cases that received plasma died or were euthanized compared with 6 of 57 (12%) cases that did not receive plasma. Plasma administration was significantly related to outcome (P<0.001). Severity of illness scores were difficult to assign, however, dogs meeting criteria for systemic inflammatory response syndrome were not more likely to receive FFP. Other therapies included supplemental nutrition, antimicrobials, and surgical intervention, which did not affect outcome. Conclusions Mortality rate for those dogs receiving plasma was higher than those that did not. Severity of illness scores were difficult to assign; however, preexisting illness, evidence of systemic inflammatory response syndrome, and presence of a coagulopathy were not significantly different between the groups that did and did not receive FFP. No benefit for administration of FFP was noted. Additional investigation should be performed to confirm this result. 2009 Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society. (shrink)

This chapter discusses Descartes' answers to two questions still being asked today: Can machines fully imitate the functioning and behavior of living things? Can machines think? Descartes answers the first affirmatively and the second negatively. Descartes' two categorical answers are each rooted in the principle of the substantial distinction between body and soul—that is to say, in a metaphysical argument. In the Discourse on Method he asserts that there are two very certain means of distinguishing true men from anthropoid machines (...) intentionally designed to throw us off the track: the first is that they could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. The second is that these machines would inevitably fail in other [things], which would reveal that they were acting not through understanding but only through the composition of their organs. Given this fact, the nature of the machinery a man of his time might have in mind is irrelevant in the chapter's discussion, and the modest development of 17th-century mechanization ought not to invalidate the perhaps exaggerated boldness of the positive answer to the first question, any more than it explains or, a fortiori, justifies the negative answer to the second. (shrink)

The Material and Ideological Base of the Old Babylonian State: History, Economy, and Politics. By Lukáš Pecha. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. Pp. xvii + 316. $115.