Ockham's Razor: sharpen or re-sheathe?

Neuronal tuning: To Sharpen or Broaden?

Sensory and motor variables are typically represented by a population of broadly tuned neurons. A coarser representation with broader tuning can often improve coding accuracy, but sometimes the accuracy may also improve with sharper tuning. The theoretical analysis here shows that the relationship between tuning width and accuracy depends crucially on the dimension of the encoded variable. A ge...

Human factors, education help sharpen the OR count process.

P-121: Which Developmental Stage is Suitable for Re-vitrification? Compact Stage Re-vitrification or Early Blastocyst Stage Re-vitrification

Background: The aim of this study was evaluation of developmental rate and Bax, Bcl-2 and ErbB4 genes expression following re-vitrification in compact and early blastocysts stages. Materials and Methods: 5-8 cell embryos were collected from female mature mice, 60-62 hours post hCG injection. The embryos were divided to five groups including: fresh, vitrified at 5-8 cells, vitrified at blastocys...

The ETTO principle as ETTOing – or Occam’s Razor redux

The Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off (ETTO) principle is a convenient way to characterise the adjustments that are an essential part of everyday performance in complex socio-technical systems. This trade-off between efficiency and thoroughness, however, applies not only to how people cope with the complexity at work (and at leisure), but also to what scientists do when they try to understand o...

Occam's Razor

The Bayesian paradigm apparently only sometimes gives rise to Occam’s Razor; at other times very large models perform well. We give simple examples of both kinds of behaviour. The two views are reconciled when measuring complexity of functions, rather than of the machinery used to implement them. We analyze the complexity of functions for some linear in the parameter models that are equivalent ...