In this paper we are primarily concerned with political expertise, interest, and agreement as factors that might accelerate the flow of information between citizens. We examine dyadic exchanges of information as a function of two primary sets of factors: the characteristics of the citizens in the dyadic relationship and the characteristics of the larger network within which the dyad is located. Moreover, we compare political communication within dyads across several different national contexts: Germany, Japan, and the United States. We assume (...) that citizens are more likely to obtain information from people they trust, but why do they trust some individuals more than others? Is the frequency of communication predicated on shared political preferences? Or is it based on one citizen's assessment regarding the political expertise of another? The answers to these questions have important implications for whether social communication and social capital create added value in the collective deliberations of democratic politics. (shrink)

Humans' voice offers the widest variety of motor phenomena of any human activity. However, its clinical evaluation in people with movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease lags behind current knowledge on advanced analytical automatic speech processing methodology. Here, we use deep learning-based speech processing to differentially analyze voice recordings in 14 people with PD before and after dopaminergic medication using personalized Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks and Phone Attribute Codebooks. p-CRNN yields an accuracy of 82.35% in the binary classification of ON (...) and OFF motor states at a sensitivity/specificity of 0.86/0.78. The PAC-based approach's accuracy was slightly lower with 73.08% at a sensitivity/specificity of 0.69/0.77, but this method offers easier interpretation and understanding of the computational biomarkers. Both p-CRNN and PAC provide a differentiated view and novel insights into the distinctive components of the speech of persons with PD. Both methods detect voice qualities that are amenable to dopaminergic treatment, including active phonetic and prosodic features. Our findings may pave the way for quantitative measurements of speech in persons with PD. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper analyzes the public fasts of two Italian “hunger artists,” Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti, in Paris in 1886, and their ability to forego eating for a long period (thirty and fifty days respectively). Some contemporary witnesses described them as clever frauds, but others considered them to be interesting physiological anomalies. Controversies about their fasts entered academic circles, but they also spread throughout the urban public at different levels. First, Succi and Merlatti steered medical debates among physicians on (...) the “scientific” explanations of the limits of human resistance to inanition, and acted as ideal mediators for doctors’ professional interests. Second, they became useful tools for science popularizers in their attempt to gain authority in drawing the boundaries between “orthodox” and “heterodox” knowledge. Finally, in the 1880s, Succi and Merlatti’s contest, the controversy around the liquids they ingested, and their scientific supervision by medical doctors, all reinforced their own professional status as itinerant fasters in a golden decade for that kind of endeavor. For all those reasons, Succi and Merlatti can be viewed as useful, epistemologically-active charlatans. (shrink)

All existing impossibility theorems on judgment aggregation require individ- ual and collective judgment sets to be consistent and complete (in some recent results with completeness relaxed to deductive closure), arguably a demand- ing rationality requirement. They do not carry over to aggregation functions mapping pro…les of (merely) consistent individual judgment sets to (merely) consistent collective ones. We prove that, whenever the agenda of propositions under consideration exhibits mild interconnections, any such aggregation func- tion that is "neutral" between the acceptance and (...) rejection of each proposition is dictatorial. We relate this theorem to the literature. (shrink)

How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. (...) Our first theorem simultaneously characterizes some prominent aggregation rules in the cases of probability, judgment and preference aggregation, including linear opinion pooling and Arrovian dictatorships. Our second theorem abstracts even further from the specific kinds of attitudes in question and describes the properties of a large class of aggrega tion rules applicable to a variety of belief-like attitudes. Our approach integrates some previously disconnected areas of investigation. (shrink)

Condorcet's famous jury theorem reaches an optimistic conclusion on the correctness of majority decisions, based on two controversial premises about voters: they are competent and vote independently, in a technical sense. I carefully analyse these premises and show that: (i) whether a premise is justi…ed depends on the notion of probability considered; (ii) none of the notions renders both premises simultaneously justi…ed. Under the perhaps most interesting notions, the independence assumption should be weakened.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Martial: The World of the EpigramSven LorenzWilliam Fitzgerald. Martial: The World of the Epigram. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. x + 258 pp.At the beginning of The World of the Epigram, Fitzgerald asks, “How does one read an epigrammatist?” (1). It is the question of how to come to terms with “the paradox of a book that is at the same time a random collection of (...) self-contained units” (4). At the end, Fitzgerald comes to the conclusion that the question “might be answered quite simply by replying that one can’t” (198).The heterogeneity of Martial’s Book of Epigrams makes it hard for us to get a grip on their respective character. Fitzgerald sees this as an apt representation of the world that Martial lives in. Like the Epigrammaton libri, everyday life in the city of Rome comprises numerous little bits and pieces, which may even be contradictory, and yet form a coherent whole: “The paradoxes and tensions of urban experience, as chronicled by Martial, are the worldly counterpart to the juxtapository environment of his books” (5). The concept of “juxtaposition” is crucial to Fitzgerald’s argument. For him, it is one of the main structural principles in Martial’s books.Having come up with a reading of the Epigrammaton libri as a kaleidoscopic representation of urban life myself (Erotik und Panegyrik: Martials epigrammatische Kaiser [Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2002], 15–16), I certainly agree with Fitzgerald’s much more complex approach to read the books of epigrams as heterogeneous entities that are determined by “the combination of closeness and separation” (5). This, in turn, is also “a feature of urban environments, and one that decisively affects the urbanite’s experience” (5). It is especially convincing when Fitzgerald compares the reception of Martial’s books with “the paradoxical effect of the newspaper’s random juxtaposition of miscellaneous items” (7). And this reminds us of the fact that the seeming disorder of the books of epigrams may well be carefully planned, unlike the heterogeneity presented on modern newsprint.One of the most complex aspects of Martial’s careful design is the presentation of his poetic persona. The speaker of the epigrams is a contradictory character whose opinions may vary according to different situations. This, of course, is rather fitting for an author of such a diverse collection of poems. Fitzgerald reads the versatility of Martial’s poetic “I” as typical of a sophisticated character: “The succession of short, pointed, and various epigrams... creates the fiction of a man who can successfully negotiate the adversarial and competitive world of the city” (11–12). It is true that Martial’s persona plays a clever game of self-deprecation and the presentation of his own, lowly, genre as the top of the genre hierarchy (cf. David Banta, “Literary Apology and Literary Genre in Martial,” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1998, one of the very few relevant titles that are missing from Fitzgerald’s extensive bibliography). And yet, the speaker’s tendency to contradict himself, as well as the various instances when he suffers sexual frustration or when other failures turn him into the butt of his own jokes, make me doubt whether he is really presented as a successful person. I still [End Page 439] prefer to see him as a comic figure that is not much better than the people who are attacked in many of Martial’s so-called “satiric” epigrams. Fitzgerald himself mentions the contradictory nature of the speaker and concedes that “in some respects he exemplifies the very qualities he mocks” (13).A case in point are the numerous allusions to Ovid’s exile poetry, which usually express the notion of distance: in Martial’s case, the distance between him and his powerful contemporaries or, in Books 3 and 12, the physical distance between him and the city of Rome. Fitzgerald is right to point out that “Martial’s condition is more fortunate” than Ovid’s. According to his interpretation (cf. R. A. Pitcher, in Toto notus in orbe: Perspektiven der Martial-Interpretation, ed. Farouk Grewing [Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998], 61–62), Martial describes “a different kind of distance, one... (shrink)