Rapid handwriting, popularly known as shorthand, involves writing symbols and abbreviations in lieu of common words or phrases. This method increases the speed of transcription and is primarily used to record oral dictation. Someone skilled in shorthand will be able to write as fast as the dictation occurs, and these patterns are later transliterated into actual, natural language words. A new kind of rapid handwriting scheme is proposed, called the Pattern-Based Shorthand. A word on a keyboard involves pressing a unique (...) sequence of keys in a particular order. This sequence forms a pattern that defines the word. Such a pattern forms the shorthand for that word. Speech recognition involves identifying, by a machine, the words spoken by a speaker. These spoken words form speech input signals to a computer that is equipped to correctly recognize the words and do further action, such as convert it to text. From this text input, unique shorthand patterns are generated by the system. The system employs machine learning to improve its performance with experience, by creating a dictionary of mappings from word to patterns in such a way that the access to existing patterns is faster with progression. This forms a new knowledge representation schema that reduces the redundancy in the storage of words and the length of information content. In conclusion, the speech is converted into textual form and then reconstructed into Pattern-Based Shorthand. (shrink)

Byzantine Empire; economic and social conditions; history.

Properties sometimes attributed to the “particle” aspect of a neutron, e.g., mass and magnetic moment, cannot straightforwardly be regarded in the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics as localized at the hypothetical position of the particle. This is shown by examining a series of effects in neutron interferometry. A related thought-experiment also provides a variation of a recent demonstration that which-way detectors can appear to behave anomolously in the Bohm theory.

The underlying psychological processes that enable framing effects are often described as cognitive. Yet, recent studies suggest that framing effects may also be mediated by emotional response. The role of specific emotions in mediating the framing effect process, however, has yet to be fully empirically investigated. In an experimental survey design, this study tests two positive and two negative emotions as mediators of framing effects. Our results show that while anger and enthusiasm mediate a framing effect, contentment and fear do (...) not. These findings deepen our understanding of which discrete emotions are relevant when studying mediated framing effects. (shrink)

The astute manger should be aware that, in organizations, the deck is frequently ‘stacked’ against higher levels of ethical behavior. This deck stacking occurs because of socialization processes, environmental influences, and the organization hierarchy. As a result of bosses using hierarchical leverage to take the ethical dimension of decision-making away from subordinates, the stage is set for a they-made-me-do-it defense of their moral integrity by these subordinates if and when violations of ethical norms come to light. There is also at (...) work, however, an I-made-them-do-it situation in which professionals who prefer to ‘nest’ in the more technical aspects of their work ‘delegate’ — upward — to their bosses ethical decision-making. Understanding these dynamics is crucial in an age which is especially sensitized to the ethical facet of organizational behavior. (shrink)

Features Foundations of Political Theory, a section of the American Political Science Association that exists to advance the linkage of political theory and philosophy with political science as a discipline. Lists the officers and contains bylaws and membership information. Offers information on recent books, journals, and conferences, as well as on fellowships and grants. Links to the APSA home page.

J. S. Bell's classic 1966 review paper on the foundations of quantum mechanics led directly to the Bell nonlocality theorem. It is not widely appreciated that the review paper contained the basic ingredients needed for a nonlocality result which holds in certain situations where the Bell inequality is not violated. We present in this paper a systematic formulation and evaluation of an argument due to Stairs in 1983, which establishes a nonlocality result based on the Bell-Kochen-Specker “paradox” in quantum mechanics.

Since the millennium, first person accounts of experience have been accepted as philosophically valid, potentially useful sources of information about the nature of mind and self. Several Vedic sciences rely on such first person accounts to discuss experience and consciousness. This paper shows that their insights define the information structure of experience in agreement with a scientific theory of mind fulfilling all presently known philosophical and scientific conditions. Experience has two separate components, its information content, and a separate ‘witness aspect’, (...) which can reflect on all forms of experience, and with training be strengthened until its power of reflection identifies it as the innermost aspect of ‘self’. The Vedic sciences, Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta develop these themes. Sankhya identifies the different aspects of experience, outer and inner; Yoga practices lead the mind to inner states without information content (samadhi) in which the experience of the witness (sakshi) is strengthened and deepened. Vedanta states the nature of the ‘self’ is to know itself directly without intermediary. All this requires the witness to have a singular loop structure. The information structure of experience therefore has two aspects, information content plus a singular loop endowing it with a subjective sense of ‘Self’. (shrink)

Philosophical study of knowledge and self esteem.

Collected articles of a renowned Pushto poet about human life.

The Uniformly Reflexive Structure was introduced by E. G. Wagner who showed that the theory of such structures generalized much of recursive function theory. In this paper Uniformly Reflexive Structures are constructed as factor algebras of Free nonassociative algebras. Wagner's question about the existence of a model with no computable splinter ("successor set") is answered in the affirmative by the construction of a model whose only computable sets are the finite sets and their complements. Finally, for each countable Boolean algebra (...) R of subsets of a countable set which contains the finite subsets, a model is constructed with R as its family of computable sets. (shrink)

This note is viewing survival data of a natural cohort as being generated by a possibly nonlinear, nonhomogeneous death process. It proves that the usual conditional distributions of the number of survivors at a certain age are binomial if and only if the death process is linear. Thus the customary statistical methods for the analysis of life table data are, strictly speaking, invalid whenever the underlying death process is nonlinear. For example, if a contagious disease is the cause of some (...) or all of the deaths, the deaths will not be independent and the death process, not linear. One should then base the statistical analysis on a model for the spread of the disease rather than the routine binomial model. (shrink)