This paper presents the design and evaluation of “the man-machine interface” a punchable interface designed to explore and criticize the values inherent in modern systems that favour one type of user (linguistically and technically gifted) and alienate another (physically gifted). In the study, participants used the device to express their opinions and then engaged in a group discussion about t...

The article lays the foundation for a dialog between scholars of Brazilian social thought and historians of sociology as a discipline. In order to achieve this objective, I analyze recent developments in the field of the history of sociology, highlighting the incorporation of historiographic methods and the emergence of a transnational approach, which points toward a global history of the disci...

The hypothesis that theories might influence observation was proposed in the important early work of Hanson (1958) and Kuhn (1962). It has been brought to a new focus by the interchanges between Fodor (1984, 1988) and Churchland (1979, 1988). Fodor has argued that perception is not cognitively penetrable, while Churchland has argued for a strong form of theory-Iadenness. This issue has led to v...

Our experience in scientific committees for the assessment of environmental and health risks of GMOs, and in biological, biostatistical research and medicine, allowed us to review and criticize mammalian feeding trials with GMOs, and make new proposals. Mammalian feeding trials have been usually performed for regulatory purposes, in order to obtain authorisation or commercialisation for GM plan...

This research presents a dual-perspective, or bipartite view of teleology (i.e . purpose) and uses it to criticize qualitative models of cardiovascular systems in a manner that highlights the relationships between circulatory topology, behavior and function . The Bipartite Teleology Model (BTM) attributes 'purposefulness' to both steady-state and regulatory behavior thereby providing a split-le...

Several of our studies indicate that persuasive-arguments theory by itself is an adequate explanation of polarization. Sanders and Baron (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1977,13,303-314) criticize this research. More generally, they contend that both argumentation and comparison are involved, “with persuasive arguments facilitating the shifts motivated by social comparison.” We feel ...

An information theoretic approach to the evaluation of 2 x 2 contingency tables is proposed. By investigating the relationship between the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the maximum likelihood estimator, information identities are established for testing hypotheses, in particular, testing independence. These identities not only validate the calibration of p values, but also yield unified power...

'Abd al-Latīf al-Baghdādī's (d. 1231) work Book of the Two Pieces of Advice (Kitāb al Nasīhatayn) challenges the idea that Islamic medicine declined after the twelfth century AD. Moreover, it offers some interesting insights into the social history of medicine. 'Abd al-Latīf advocated using the framework of Greek medical epistemology to criticize the rationalist physicians of his day; he argued...

Digital inpainting can be described as a technique of filling gaps or occlusions in an input image for making it more visually plausible. It is a method of image reconstruction. We know that image reconstruction is done to recover degeneration or degradation caused to the images due to some image processing activities. The filling of gaps or lost area is done using data from remaining region of...

We clarify under what circumstances the nucleon–nucleon final state interaction fixes the energy dependence of the total cross–section for the reaction NN → NNx close to production threshold, where x can be any meson whose interaction with the nucleon is not too strong. We strongly criticize the procedure used recently by several authors to include the final state interaction in the reactions u...