Dynamics of Spatial Game Theory Networks with Novel Modifications

Introduction: Advances in biotechnology have shed light on many biological processes. In biological networks, nodes are used to represent the function of individual entities within a system and have historically been studied in isolation. Network structure adds edges that enable communication between nodes. An emerging fieldis to combine node function and network structure to yield network function. One of the most complex networks known in biology is the neural network within the brain. Modeling neural function will require an understanding of networks, dynamics, andneurophysiology. It is with this work that modeling techniques will be developed to work at this complex intersection. Methods: Spatial game theory was developed by Nowak in the context of modeling evolutionary dynamics, or the way in which species evolve over time. Spatial game theory offers a two dimensional view of analyzingthe state of neighbors and updating based on the surroundings. Our work builds upon this foundation by studying evolutionary game theory networks with respect to neural networks. This novel concept is that neurons may adopt a particular strategy that will allow propagation of information. The strategy may therefore act as the mechanism for gating. Furthermore, the strategy of a neuron, as in a real brain, isimpacted by the strategy of its neighbors. The techniques of spatial game theory already established by Nowak are repeated to explain two basic cases and validate the implementation of code. Two novel modifications are introduced in Chapters 3 and 4 that build on this network and may reflect neural networks. Results: The introduction of two novel modifications, mutation and rewiring, in large parametricstudies resulted in dynamics that had an intermediate amount of nodes firing at any given time. Further, even small mutation rates result in different dynamics more representative of the ideal state hypothesized. Conclusions: In both modificationsto Nowak's model, the results demonstrate the network does not become locked into a particular global state of passing all information or blocking all information. It is hypothesized that normal brain function occurs within this intermediate range and that a number of diseases are the result of moving outside of this range.

Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces

Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovereignty, or rule by chance. This allows us to see camps and borders not only as the outcomes of humanitarian projects but also of anxieties about governance and rule; to see their inhabitants not only as abject recipients of aid, but also as individuals who make decisions and choices in complex conditions; and to show that while the outcome of projects within such spaces is often unpredictable, the assumptions that undergird such projects create regular cycles of implementation and failure.

Must We Forgive?: Exploring the Limits and Possibilities of Forgiveness and Resentment

Conflict has marked civilization from Biblical times to the present day. Each of us, with our different and competing interests, and our desires to pursue those interests, have over time wronged another person. Not surprisingly then, forgiveness is a concern of individuals and groups¿communities, countries, religious groups, races¿yet it is a complex idea that philosophers, theologians, political scientists, and psychologists have grappled with. Some have argued that forgiveness is a therapeutic means for overcoming guilt, pain, and anger. Forgiveness is often portrayed as a coping mechanism¿how often we hear the phrase, ¿forgive and forget,¿ as an arrangement to help two parties surmount the complications of disagreement. But forgiveness is not simply a modus vivendi; the ability to forgive and conversely to ask for forgiveness, is counted as an admirable trait and virtue. This essay will explore the nature of forgiveness, which in Christian dogma is often posited as an unqualified virtue. The secular world has appropriated the Christian notion of forgiveness as such a virtue¿but are there instances wherein offering forgiveness is morally inappropriate or dangerous? I will consider the situations in which forgiveness, understood in this essay as the overcoming of resentment, may not be a virtue¿when perhaps maintaining resentment is as virtuous, if not more virtuous, than forgiving. I will explain the various ethical frameworks involved in understanding forgiveness as a virtue, and the relationship between them. I will argue that within Divine Command Theory forgiveness is a virtue¿and thus morally right¿because God commands it. This ethical system has established forgiveness as unconditional, an idea which has been adopted into popular culture. With virtue ethics in mind, which holds virtues to be those traits which benefit the person who possesses them, contributing to the good life, I will argue unqualified forgiveness is not always a virtue, as it will not always benefit the victim. Because there is no way to avoid wrongdoing, humans are confronted with the question of forgiveness with every indiscretion. Its limits, its possibilities, its relationship to one¿s character¿forgiveness is a concern of all people at some time if for no other reason than the plain fact that the past cannot be undone. I will be evaluating the idea of forgiveness as a virtue, in contrast to its counterpart, resentment. How can forgiveness be a response to evil, a way to renounce resentment, and a means of creating a positive self-narrative? And what happens when a sense of moral responsibility is impossible to reconcile with the Christian (and now, secularized imperative of) forgiveness? Is it ever not virtuous to forgive? In an attempt to answer that question I will argue that there are indeed times when forgiveness is not a virtue, specifically: when forgiveness compromises one¿s own self-respect; when it is not compatible with respect for the moral community; and when the offender is unapologetic. The kind of offense I have in mind is a dehumanizing one, one that intends to diminish another person¿s worth or humanity. These are moral injuries, to which I will argue resentment is a better response than forgiveness when the three qualifications cannot be met.

The Process and Factors of Language Shift and Maintenance: Sociolinguistic Research into the Romanian Minority Community in Hungary

This study of the process of language shift and maintenance in the bilingual community of Romanians living in Hungary was based on 40 tape-recorded Romanian sociolinguistic interviews. These were transcribed into computerised form and provide an excellent source of sociolinguistic, contact linguistic and discourse analysis data, making it possible to show the effect of internal and external factors on the bilingual speech mode. The main topics considered were the choice of Romanian and Hungarian in community interactions, factors of language choice, code-switching: introlanguage and interlanguage, reasons for code-switching, the relationship between age and the frequency of code switching in the interview situation, and the unequal competition of minority and majority languages at school.

The Process and Factors of Language Shift and Maintenance: Sociolinguistic Research into the Romanian Minority Community in Hungary"

This study of the process of language shift and maintenance in the bilingual community of Romanians living in Hungary was based on 40 tape-recorded Romanian sociolinguistic interviews. These were transcribed into computerised form and provide an excellent source of sociolinguistic, contact linguistic and discourse analysis data, making it possible to show the effect of internal and external factors on the bilingual speech mode. The main topics considered were the choice of Romanian and Hungarian in community interactions, factors of language choice, code-switching: introlanguage and interlanguage, reasons for code-switching, the relationship between age and the frequency of code switching in the interview situation, and the unequal competition of minority and majority languages at school.

The Representation of Motherhood in Polish Cinema

The project aimed to analyse representations of motherhood in Polish cinema as a special case of a more general system within the representation of women. It concentrated on the image of the Polish Mother created during the 19th century in Polish culture under the influence of specific political, social and religious factors. Ms. Ostrowska's initial hypothesis was that this symbolic image became one of the most stable elements in Polish cinema and as her research revealed, it was valuable for the preservation of national identity but nevertheless a fiercely constraining model for Polish femininity. In order to fully understand the nature of this persistent image it was initially necessary to related it to broader contexts and issues in representation. These included the image of the Polish Mother within general mythological structures (using the notion of myth in the Barthesian sense). Following her initial research Ms. Ostrowska felt that it was most appropriate to view the myth of the Polish Mother as a dominant ideological structure in the discourse of motherhood within Polish culture. An analysis of the myth of the Polish Mother can provide an insight into how Polish society sees itself at different periods in time and how a national identity was constructed in relation to particular ideological demands stemming from concrete historical and political situations. The analysis of the film version of this myth also revealed some aspects of the national character of Polish cinema. There the image of woman has become enshrined as the "eternal feminine", with virtues which are inevitably derived directly from Catholicism, particularly in relation to the networks of meanings around the central figure of Mary, Mother of God. In 19th century Poland these were linked with patriotic values and images of woman became part of the defence of the very idea of Poland and Polishness. After World War Two, this religious-political image system was adapted to the demands of the new communist ideology. The possibility of manipulating the ideological dimensions of the myth of the Polish Mother is due to the very nature of the image, which as a symbol of civil religion had been able to function independently of any particular state or church institution. Although in communist ideology the stress was on the patriotic aspect of the myth, its pronounced religious aspect was also transmitted, consciously or not, in the denotation process, this being of great significance in the viewer's response to the female character. This appropriation of elements derived from the national patriotic tradition into the discourse of communist ideology was a very efficient strategy to establish the illusion of continuity in national existence, which was supposed to convince society of the rightness of the new political situation. The analysis of films made in the post-war period showed the persistence of this discourse on motherhood in a range of cinematic texts regardless of the changing political situation. Ms. Ostrowska claims that the stability of this discursive formation is to a certain extent the result of the mythological aspect of the mother figure. This mythological structure also belongs to the ideology of Romanticism which in general continues to prevail in Polish cultural discourse as a meta-language of national community. The analysis of the films confirmed the hypothesis of the Polish Mother as a myth-sign whose signifier is stable whereas the signified depends on the specific historical conditions in which it is set. Therefore in the famous propaganda documentary Kobiety naszych dni (Women of Our Days, 1951) by Jan Zelnik, and in other films made after the October 1956 "thaw" it functions as an "empty sign. She concludes that it would be difficult to deny that the myth of the Polish Mother has offered Polish women a special role in national life, granting them a high moral position in the social, hierarchy. However the processes of idealisation involved have resulted in a deprivation of her subjectivity and the right to decide about her own life. This idealisation also served to strengthen traditional patriarchal structures through this set of female obligations to the mother land. In Polish ideology it is not a man who demands sacrifice from a woman but the motherland, which, deprived of the institutions of male power for nearly 150 years, had functioned as a feminine structure. That is why oppressive aspects of the myth have been obscured for so long. While Polish women were doubtless able to accept the constrictions because of their sense of national duty and any misgivings were overridden by the argument of the cause, it is important to recognise that the strength of these constructions, compounded by the ways in which they spoke of and continue to speak of a certain perfection, make them persist into contemporary Poland. Poland is however no longer embattled and the signs that made these meanings are potentially empty. This space for meaning will be and is already being contested and increasingly colonised by current western models of femininity. Ms. Ostrowska's final question is whether this will help to prevent a possible resentful victimisation of the silent and noble Polish Mother.

Estimating the number of motor units using random sums with independently thinned terms

The problem of estimating the numbers of motor units N in a muscle is embedded in a general stochastic model using the notion of thinning from point process theory. In the paper a new moment type estimator for the numbers of motor units in a muscle is denned, which is derived using random sums with independently thinned terms. Asymptotic normality of the estimator is shown and its practical value is demonstrated with bootstrap and approximative confidence intervals for a data set from a 31-year-old healthy right-handed, female volunteer. Moreover simulation results are presented and Monte-Carlo based quantiles, means, and variances are calculated for N in{300,600,1000}.

Tissue-specific induction of EROD activity and CYP1A protein in Sparus aurata exposed to B(a)P and TCDD

The purpose of this study was to compare xenobiotic CYP1A induction in liver, gills, and excretory kidney of gilthead seabream, Sparus aurata. Fishes were exposed via water for 20 days to different concentrations of benzo(a)pyrene (B(a)P) or 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). CYP1A was measured at the enzyme activity level as 7-ethoxyresorufin-O-deethylase (EROD) activity, and at the protein level by means of ELISA. The liver displayed the highest absolute levels of EROD activity, both under non-exposed and exposed conditions. Organ- or inducer-related differences in the time course of CYP1A induction were moderate; however, the magnitude of the induction response varied between the organs and between B(a)P and TCDD. In the case of TCDD, liver, and kidney yielded a comparable induction response, whereas in the case of B(a)P, the kidney showed a substantially higher maximum induction factor than the liver. In the gills, the two xenobiotics resulted in similar maximum induction factors. In B(a)P-exposed seabream, EROD activities and CYP1A protein levels showed a good correlation in all three organs, whereas with TCDD as inducer the correlation was poor, what was mainly due to a decrease of EROD activities at the higher concentrations of TCDD, while CYP1A protein levels showed no concomitant decline. Overall, the study revealed both similarities and differences in the time-, concentration-, and inducer-dependent CYP1A responses of the three target organs, liver, kidney, and gills. Although, the findings of this study principally confirm the notion of the liver as the major metabolic organ in fish, they also provide evidence for substantial metabolic potential in gills and particularly in the kidney.

Minimal assumption derivation of a weak Clauser-Horne inequality

According to Bell's theorem a large class of hidden-variable models obeying Bell's notion of local causality (LC) conflict with the predictions of quantum mechanics. Recently, a Bell-type theorem has been proven using a weaker notion of LC, yet assuming the existence of perfectly correlated event types. Here we present a similar Bell-type theorem without this latter assumption. The derived inequality differs from the Clauser-Horne inequality by some small correction terms, which render it less constraining.

Moving from sustainable management to sustainable governance of natural resources: The role of social learning processes in rural India, Bolivia and Mali

The present paper discusses a conceptual, methodological and practical framework within which the limitations of the conventional notion of natural resource management (NRM) can be overcome. NRM is understood as the application of scientific ecological knowledge to resource management. By including a consideration of the normative imperatives that arise from scientific ecological knowledge and submitting them to public scrutiny, ‘sustainable management of natural resources’ can be recontextualised as ‘sustainable governance of natural resources’. This in turn makes it possible to place the politically neutralising discourse of ‘management’ in a space for wider societal debate, in which the different actors involved can deliberate and negotiate the norms, rules and power relations related to natural resource use and sustainable development. The transformation of sustainable management into sustainable governance of natural resources can be conceptualised as a social learning process involving scientists, experts, politicians and local actors, and their corresponding scientific and non-scientific knowledges. The social learning process is the result of what Habermas has described as ‘communicative action’, in contrast to ‘strategic action’. Sustainable governance of natural resources thus requires a new space for communicative action aiming at shared, intersubjectively validated definitions of actual situations and the goals and means required for transforming current norms, rules and power relations in order to achieve sustainable development. Case studies from rural India, Bolivia and Mali explore the potentials and limitations for broadening communicative action through an intensification of social learning processes at the interface of local and external knowledge. Key factors that enable or hinder the transformation of sustainable management into sustainable governance of natural resources through social learning processes and communicative action are discussed.

An Anarchist Foreign Minister?: The Ideological Background of Rudolf Holsti

Former Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rudolf Holsti, ended his professional career as a professor at Stanford University. In spring 1941, he encountered a news article on Alexandra Kropotkina and was encouraged to send her a letter. In this letter, Holsti revealed his admiration for her father, "anarchist prince" Pjotr Kropotkin. Holsti’s letter to Alexandra Kropotkina further related that as foreign minister he had even sent food from the Finnish embassy in Moscow to Kropotkin while he was being held in custody by the Soviet authorities. The notion of an anarchist foreign minister is profoundly paradoxical, but the aim of my research is to find Kropotkin’s influences in Holsti's work and publications. Before entering politics, Holsti defended his thesis for PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1913 with a rather anarchist theme, “The Relation of War to the Origin of the State.” My paper and presentation will attempt to answer: how are Kropotkin's ideas present in Holsti's academic work? In addition, Holsti and Kropotkin are case studies who guide my interests in the co-relation between the scientific revolution and social thinking in the 19th century.

Education and Ideologies of the Knowledge Economy: Europe and the Politics of Emulation

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously proposed a style of philosophy that was directed against certain pictures [bild] that tacitly direct our language and forms of life. His aim was to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle and to fight against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 1953, 115). In this context Wittgenstein is talking of philosophical pictures, deep metaphors that have structured our language but he does also use the term picture in other contexts (see Owen 2003, 83). I want to appeal to Wittgenstein in my use of the term ideology to refer to the way in which powerful underlying metaphors in neoclassical economics have a strong rhetorical and constitutive force at the level of public policy. Indeed, I am specifically speaking of the notion of ‘the performative’ in Wittgenstein and Austin. The notion of the knowledge economy has a prehistory in Hayek (1937; 1945) who founded the economics of knowledge in the 1930s, in Machlup (1962; 1970), who mapped the emerging employment shift to the US service economy in the early 1960s, and to sociologists Bell (1973) and Touraine (1974) who began to tease out the consequences of these changes for social structure in the post-industrial society in the early 1970s. The term has been taken up since by economists, sociologists, futurists and policy experts recently to explain the transition to the so-called ‘new economy’. It is not just a matter of noting these discursive strands in the genealogy of the ‘knowledge economy’ and related or cognate terms. We can also make a number of observations on the basis of this brief analysis. First, there has been a succession of terms like ‘postindustrial economy’, ‘information economy’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘learning economy’, each with a set of related concepts emphasising its social, political, management or educational aspects. Often these literatures are not cross-threading and tend to focus on only one aspect of phenomena leading to classic dichotomies such as that between economy and society, knowledge and information. Second, these terms and their family concepts are discursive, historical and ideological products in the sense that they create their own meanings and often lead to constitutive effects at the level of policy. Third, while there is some empirical evidence to support claims concerning these terms, at the level of public policy these claims are empirically underdetermined and contain an integrating, visionary or futures component, which necessarily remains untested and is, perhaps, in principle untestable.

Some considerations on the potential contributions of intercultural social work...

Social work at global levels, and across international and intercultural divides, is probably more important now than ever before in our history. It may be that the very form our ideas about intercultural work take need to be re-examined in the light of recent global changes and uncertainties. In this short position paper I wish to offer some considerations about how we might approach the field of intercultural social work in order to gain new insights about how we practise at both local and global levels. For me, much of the promise of an intercultural social work (and for the purposes of this paper I see aspects of international social work in much the same light) lies in its focus on the way we categorise ourselves, our ideas and experiences in relation to others. The very notion of intercultural or international social work is based on assumptions about boundaries, differences, ways of differentiating and defining sets of experiences. Whether these are deemed "cultural" or "national" is of less importance. Once we are forced to examine these assumptions, about how and why we categorise ourselves in relation to other people in particular ways, the way is opened up for us to be much more critical about the bases of our own, often very deep-seated, thinking. This understanding, about how and why notions of "difference" operate in the way they do, can potentially open our understanding to all the other ways, besides cultural or national labelling, in which we categorise and create differences between ourselves and others. Intercultural social work, taken as a potential site for understanding the creation of difference then, has the potential to help us critically examine the bases of much of our practice in any setting, since most practice involves some kind of categorisation of phenomena.

EU Data Protection Law and Targeted Advertising: Consent and the Cookie Monster - Tracking the crumbs of online user behaviour

This article provides a holistic legal analysis of the use of cookies in Online Behavioural Advertising. The current EU legislative framework is outlined in detail, and the legal obligations are examined. Consent and the debates surrounding its implementation form a large portion of the analysis. The article outlines the current difficulties associated with the reliance on this requirement as a condition for the placing and accessing of cookies. Alternatives to this approach are explored, and the implementation of solutions based on the application of the Privacy by Design and Privacy by Default concepts are presented. This discussion involves an analysis of the use of code and, therefore, product architecture to ensure adequate protections.

The price elasticity of demand for common stock

We study the price elasticity of demand for the common stock of an individual corporation. Despite the prevelance of assumptions that demand is perfectly elastic, there is little if any direct evidence in the literature to either support or reject that contention. Consistent with the notion of finite price elasticities, we find that the announcement of primary stock oferings by regulated firms depresses their stock prices and little if any evidence that this decline is the result of adverse information about future cash flows. Attempts to relate offer announcement effects directly to possible determinants of price elasticities, however, are inconclusive.