The content, consequence and likeness approaches to verisimilitude: compatibility, trivialization, and underdetermination

Theories of verisimilitude have routinely been classified into two rival camps—the content approach and the likeness approach—and these appear to be motivated by very different sets of data and principles. The question thus naturally arises as to whether these approaches can be fruitfully combined. Recently Zwart and Franssen (Synthese 158(1):75–92, 2007) have offered precise analyses of the content and likeness approaches, and shown that given these analyses any attempt to meld content and likeness orderings violates some basic desiderata. Unfortunately their characterizations of the approaches do not embrace the paradigm examples of those approaches. I offer somewhat different characterizations of these two approaches, as well as of the consequence approach (Schurz and Weingartner (Synthese 172(3):415–436, 2010) which happily embrace their respective paradigms. Finally I prove that the three approaches are indeed compatible, but only just, and that the cost of combining them is too high. Any account which combines the strictures of what I call the strong likeness approach with the demands of either the content or the consequence approach suffers from precisely the same defect as Popper’s—namely, it entails the trivialization of truthlikeness. The downside of eschewing the strong likeness constraints and embracing the content constraints alone is the underdetermination of the concept of truthlikeness.     

Rethinking free, libre and open source software

This special issue includes seven articles that make significant contribution to the literature pertaining to knowledge and public policy around Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Focusing on questions in two themes (i) motivation and organization and (ii) public policy, the articles in this volume develop new analytic models and report on new empirical findings, as an important step in bridging the wide gap that exists in public policy literature around FLOSS. Warning against rhetorical pitfalls that have been prevalent in FLOSS research, this introduction starts with a short history of FLOSS development, continues with a brief thematic literature review and review of the misconceptions surrounding FLOSS, and concludes with a first introduction of the articles that follow. He is part of the Dutch Institute of Government (NIG), the research school for public administration and political science. His research focuses on the organization of open source communities. He received two grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for research related to open source communities. The first grant was to study the interplay between intellectual property rights and open source communities. The results are published in Governing the Virtual Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He has written numerous articles on open source, which have appeared in journals like Electronic Markets; Knowledge, Technology and Policy; and the International Journal of IT Standards & Standardisation Research. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of York (UK) in 2004. Her Ph.D. research investigated the heterogeneity and contingency in the Free, Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) social worlds, which is based on a constellation of hacking practices, from the sociological perspective. Her principal research interests center on FLOSS studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), virtual communities and knowledge-sharing. Shay is also a fellow at The Information Society Project at the Yale Law School. Shay holds a B.Sc. in computer science and a B.A. in philosophy, magna cum laude, from Tel-Aviv University, and an M.A. from New York University where his interdisciplinary research thesis focused on the political economy of free and open source software and file sharing networks. Shay is an entrepreneur that co-founded two software start-up companies, and was involved for several years in cutting edge software research, combining open source and proprietary software.     

Strategies in the information search process: interaction among task structure, knowledge, and source

The authors explored the information search strategies of 145 individuals in the predecisional stage. Decision-making participants selected pieces of information from a list including relevant and irrelevant data. The authors investigated the influence of the individual's knowledge and information source. In Experiment 1, the authors experimentally manipulated the information source reliability. The results revealed that participants tended to use a sequential strategy when the authors presented information as supplied by a reliable source. In Experiment 2, the authors analyzed the interaction between information source and the individuals' knowledge. When participants believed the source to be reliable, even knowledgeable participants adopted a strategy as sequential as that chosen by naive individuals. In Experiment 3, a mediational model corroborated the hypothesis that the search strategy affects the final judgment. The results were consistent with the constructivist framework, which emphasizes the role of individual, task, and context in the decision-making process.     

Metronome LKM: An open source virtual keyboard driver to measure experiment software latencies

Experiment software is often used to measure reaction times gathered with keyboards or other input devices. In previous studies, the accuracy and precision of time stamps has been assessed through several means: (a) generating accurate square wave signals from an external device connected to the parallel port of the computer running the experiment software, (b) triggering the typematic repeat feature of some keyboards to get an evenly separated series of keypress events, or (c) using a solenoid handled by a microcontroller to press the input device (keyboard, mouse button, touch screen) that will be used in the experimental setup. Despite the advantages of these approaches in some contexts, none of them can isolate the measurement error caused by the experiment software itself. Metronome LKM provides a virtual keyboard to assess an experiment’s software. Using this open source driver, researchers can generate keypress events using high-resolution timers and compare the time stamps collected by the experiment software with those gathered by Metronome LKM (with nanosecond resolution). Our software is highly configurable (in terms of keys pressed, intervals, SysRq activation) and runs on 2.6–4.8 Linux kernels.     

Aesthetic Terms,Metaphor, and Categories: a Reply to De Clercq

In his paper, “Aesthetic Terms, Metaphor and the Nature of Aesthetic Properties”, Rafael De Clercq claims to (i) offer a category-based explanation of the metaphorical uninterpretability of aesthetic terms, and (ii) establish that the concept of an aesthetic property is fully analyzable in non-aesthetic terms. Both would be interesting and noteworthy achievements if accomplished. However, I argue in this discussion piece that he fails to achieve either goal.     

The MUSOS (MUsic SOftware System) Toolkit: A computer-based,open source application for testing memory for melodies

Despite numerous innovative studies, rates of replication in the field of music psychology are extremely low (Frieler et al., 2013). Two key methodological challenges affecting researchers wishing to administer and reproduce studies in music cognition are the difficulty of measuring musical responses, particularly when conducting free-recall studies, and access to a reliable set of novel stimuli unrestricted by copyright or licensing issues. In this article, we propose a solution for these challenges in computer-based administration. We present a computer-based application for testing memory for melodies. Created using the software Max/MSP (Cycling ’74, 2014a), the MUSOS (Music Software System) Toolkit uses a simple modular framework configurable for testing common paradigms such as recall, old–new recognition, and stem completion. The program is accompanied by a stimulus set of 156 novel, copyright-free melodies, in audio and Max/MSP file formats. Two pilot tests were conducted to establish the properties of the accompanying stimulus set that are relevant to music cognition and general memory research. By using this software, a researcher without specialist musical training may administer and accurately measure responses from common paradigms used in the study of memory for music.     

如何利用开源工具分析fMRI数据：基于多体素模式的有监督机器学习算法介绍

摘要：目前,多体素模式分析（MVPA）日渐普遍地应用于脑影像研究。近些年,机器学习的模式分类等算法在MVPA方法中被广泛应用,因其具有能够抽取高维数据模式,提高数据利用率的优点。其中一种典型的应用是利用解码的思想来解决神经表征问题,本文主要介绍了利用基于Python语言的工具库中有监督学习算法分析数据的过程。除介绍Nilearn结合Scikit-learn分析数据的步骤外,还比较不同算法的效率,为算法的选择及参数设备提供具体参考。     

Justice and forgiveness: Experimental evidence for compatibility

A 3 (justice prime: restorative, retributive, no prime) × 3 (contextual prime: criminal justice system, intimate relationship, workplace) experimental design was used with 173 participants reading hypothetical transgression scenarios to test the hypothesis that people associate forgiveness more with restorative justice than with retributive justice, and that such relationships hold regardless of the social context. As predicted, there were main effects for justice prime, with participants more likely to associate benevolent responding, and less likely to associate revenge and avoidant responses, with restorative justice than with retributive justice. They were also more likely to associate benevolence, and less likely to associate revenge and avoidant responses, with intimate relationships than with criminal justice and the workplace. Also as predicted, there was no interaction between justice and context for benevolence and revenge. Although one should be cautious about extrapolating from ‘no difference’ hypotheses, these results provide some indication that the forgiveness-justice relationship may be generalised beyond the criminal justice system.     

Comparing motivations of individual programmers and firms to take part in the open source movement: From community to business

The first urgent question for any scholar willing to study the Open Source (OS) movement has been clearly put by Glass (1999, 104): I don’t know who these crazy people are who want to write, read and even revise all that code without being paid anything for it at all. A growing body of economic literature has been addressing the motivations at the basis of the participation in the OS movement since when the new paradigm has become successful and triggered the entrance on the market of firms offering Open Source based products and services (Open Source firms). However, most of the empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect companies that adopt Open Source business models. This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the incentives of the firms that engage in OS activities. Findings on firms’ motivations are compared His recent research interests are in the economics of science, industrial dynamics in high technology industries, and theory and empirics of diffusion of technologies with network externality. He has authored or edited five books and written 80 papers in international journals and conferences. His studies have been published in several top refereed journals. He is member elected of the Executive Committee of the PRIME (Policies for Research and Innovation in the Move towards the European Research Area) Network of Excellence (6^th Framework Programme) and has previously coordinated or contributed actively to several EU research projects (within TACIS-ACE, DG III, DG XII and DG XXII). She got her Ph.D. in economics and management of innovation at Sant’ Anna School in November 2003. At present, she collaborates also with the Department of Electrical Systems and Automation of the University of Pisa. Her research interests deal with the economics of open source software (OSS) and focus on profit-oriented firms that offer open source-based products and services (open source firms). Under a theoretical point of view, she is now investigating the motivations that lead individuals to provide a continuous stream of contributions to collective goods that are immaterial in their nature (e.g., participation in OSS projects, participation in the scientific community). with the results of the surveys on individual programmers aiming at analyzing the role played by different classes of incentives (social, economic and technological) in determining the involvement in the movement of different typologies of agents (Individual vs. organizations).     

Government policy toward open source software: The puzzles of neutrality and competition

For a variety of policy reasons, governments throughout the world are now adopting different legislative and administrative strategies that support the development of FLOSS. Some governments have actually begun to procure FLOSS, whereas others have channeled public funds to large-scale FLOSS projects. This study demonstrates both the benefits and the risks of government policy favoring FLOSS from the perspective of economics, technology, and politics, and to further analyze whether these same policy goals can be achieved through government support of FLOSS. The most fundamental argument of the study is that, in lending its support to FLOSS, the difference between a government user and a business user is that the government should take into account society’s long-term interests, not merely its own interests as a consumer. His research interests include free/open source software, intellectual property, and digital technology policy.     

Neighbors,relatives, and friends: Finding constructive approaches to religious others

The way we approach, describe and interpret the faiths of others impact significantly on the relationship between different religious traditions. This article develops resources from Christian theology to show how it provides important elements for the development of constructive relationships. It also offers some comments on the present proposals put forward by the ELCA. By emphasizing how religious traditions orient and transform believers, it points to how practices can appear as meaningful across traditional borders. To develop constructive relationships with religious others is, fundamentally, a way to practice belief in God as love.     

Theoretical approaches to psychological trauma: Implications for research and practice

In recent years, a range of counselling and psychotherapy interventions have been developed in work with clients and patients suffering from the psychological effects of trauma. This paper outlines various theoretical models of psychological trauma, selected because they can specifically encompass both the external aetiology (i.e. the traumatic event) and also explain (to a greater or lesser extent) the enormous range of reactions to that event. These models are critically discussed in terms of their implications for counselling practice, and as guides to further research. Examples are given of ways in which the author has drawn on different theoretical frameworks to inform her own therapeutic practice in work with people experiencing post‐traumatic stress disorder.     

Web-MCQ: A set of methods and freely available open source code for administering online multiple choice question assessments

E-learning approaches have received increasing attention in recent years. Accordingly, a number of tools have become available to assist the nonexpert computer user in constructing and managing virtual learning environments, and implementing computer-based and/or online procedures to support pedagogy. Both commercial and free packages are now available, with new developments emerging periodically. Commercial products have the advantage of being comprehensive and reliable, but tend to require substantial financial investment and are not always transparent to use. They may also restrict pedagogical choices due to their predetermined ranges of functionality. With these issues in mind, several authors have argued for the pedagogical benefits of developing freely available, open source e-learning resources, which can be shared and further developed within a community of educational practitioners. The present paper supports this objective by presenting a set of methods, along with supporting freely available, downloadable, open source programming code, to allow administration of online multiple choice question assessments to students.