Classical image statistics, such as contrast, entropy, and the correlation between central and nearby pixel intensities, are thought to guide ocular fixation targeting. However, these statistics are not necessarily task relevant and therefore do not provide a complete picture of the relationship between informativeness and ocular targeting. Moreover, it is not known whether either informativene...

The problem addressed in this paper is this: 'the main epistemic problem concerning science ... is the explication of how we compare and evaluate theories '" in the light of the available evidence' (van Fraassen 1983: 27). In other and more mundane words, the question is: what is a good theory, and when is one theory better than another theory, given these data and those background assumptions?...

The first case is usually referred to as omissive and the second as commissive. What is traditionally perceived as paradoxical is that although such statements may well be true, asserting them is clearly absurd. An account of Moore’s Paradox is an explanation of the absurdity. In the last twenty years, there has also been a focus on the incoherence of judging or believing such propositions. In ...

In this paper we examine the role that compositional mechanisms and lexical semantics play in the determination of informativeness at the phrasal and clausal level. While the computation of the “relevance” of an utterance is largely determined by pragmatic factors (such as quantity), we argue that phrasal informativeness can, in many cases, be computed compositionally and independently of pragm...

It is possible to partially order cities according to the informativeness of neighborhoods about their ethnic groups. It is also possible to partially order cities with two ethnic groups according to the Lorenz criterion. We show that a segregation order satisfies four well-established segregation principles if and only if it is consistent with the informativeness criterion. We then use this re...

We consider a model of intermediated trade for a financial asset. Agents' valuation for the asset includes both a private and a common value component. A third party posts a price at which trade can occur, and a buyer and seller simultaneously decide whether to accept or reject the trade. We show that trade can be ex post inefficient, in the sense that a high value seller sells the good to a lo...

In this paper, we describe an unsupervised measure for quantifying the ‘informativeness’ of correlation matrices formed from the pairwise similarities or relationships among data instances. The measure quantifies the heterogeneity of the correlations and is defined as the distance between a correlation matrix and the nearest correlation matrix with constant off-diagonal entries. This non-parame...

This paper presents a study of the temporal organization of lexical repair in spontaneous Dutch speech. It assesses the extent to which offset-to-repair duration and repair tempo can be predicted on the basis of offset timing, reparandum tempo and measures of the informativeness of the crucial lexical items in the repair. Specifically, we address the expectations that repairs that are initiated...