"Superhero" or "mere mortal"

Why No Mere Mortal Has Ever Flown Out to Center Field

The English past tense system has recently been used to argue that formal grammatical categories (such as root. rule, and lexical item) may not be necessary to explain the acquisition and knowledge of language. Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) devised a connectionist model relying solely on phonological information; it is often suggested that any deficiencies of such a model can be remedied by s...

Mere Generation: Essential Barometer or Dated Concept?

The computational creativity community (rightfully) takes a dim view of supposedly creative systems that operate by mere generation. However, what exactly this means has never been adequately defined, and therefore the idea of requiring systems to exceed this standard is problematic. Here, we revisit the question of mere generation and attempt to qualitatively identify what constitutes exceedin...

DNA transfer: informed judgment or mere guesswork?

With the advances of analytical sensitivity, it is now possible to detect a DNA profile from minute quantity of DNA. It opens new investigative avenues (in cold cases for example), but also new interpretative challenges. Here, forensic scientists deal with items bearing DNA cellular material from areas showing no visible stain and have limited means to identify the nature of the body fluid invo...

Subitizing: magical numbers or mere superstition?

It is widely believed that humans are endowed with a specialized numerical process, called subitizing, which enables them to apprehend rapidly and accurately the numerosity of small sets of objects. A major part of the evidence for this process is a purported discontinuity in the mean response time (RT) versus numerosity curves at about 4 elements, when subjects enumerate up to 7 or more elemen...

Social dominance orientation: Cause or ‘mere effect’?