Three notes on ALSCAL

It is reported that (1) a new coordinate estimation routine is superior to that originally proposed for ALSCAL; (2) an oversight in the interval measurement level case has been found and corrected; and (3) a new initial configuration routine is superior to the original.     

Enhancing dynamic graphical analysis with the Lisp-Stat language and the ViSta statistical program

Presented is a sample of computerized methods aimed at multidimensional scaling and psychometric item analysis that offer a dynamic graphical interface to execute analyses and help visualize the results. These methods show how the Lisp-Stat programming language and the ViSta statistical program can be jointly applied to develop powerful computer applications that enhance dynamic graphical analysis methods. The feasibility of this combined strategy relies on two main features: (1) The programming architecture of ViSta enables users to add new statistical methods as plug-ins, which are integrated into the program environment and can make use of all the functions already available in ViSta (e.g., data manipulation, editing, printing); and (2) the set of powerful statistical and graphical functions integrated into the Lisp-Stat programming language provides the means for developing statistical methods with dynamic graphical visualizations, which can be implemented as ViSta plug-ins.     

Millennials' changing mobility preferences: A telecommuting case in Istanbul

Daily mobility behaviors, especially in cities with high traffic density, are among the most fundamental drivers of quality of life. Obligatory commuting necessitates individuals sacrificing their time, money, and geographic freedom to ensure their mobility. The personal cost of fatigue, stress, and environmental cost of carbon emissions is likewise substantial. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a widespread shift to telecommuting. The pandemic has permitted an unprecedented opportunity to study Millennials' attitudes towards commuting and telecommuting. A semi-structured interview method was used with Millennial (now the largest percentage of the workforce) white-collar (disproportionately able to do their work remotely) workers living in the megacity of Istanbul to understand how telecommuting has altered consumer commuting habits, values, preferences, and well-being. The results of this study show that Millennial white-collar workers in Istanbul see compulsory commuting as a waste of time, a stress factor, and an unwanted task. The shift towards telecommuting lowered the Millennials' tolerance for traffic and long commutes and reveals willingness for immobility at peak hours and appreciation of spatial independence as a lifestyle that increases quality of life. The need for understanding transport decisions has never been more pressing with the growth of megacities and the climate change crisis. This research has important implications for white-collar employees and their employers, as well as academics and public policy makers, who seek to understand mobility preferences and lifestyles of different generations and the environmental implications in a dynamic environment.     

Further developmental stages of the interest in money

Ferenczi, in his psychoanalytic classic on the ontogenesis (development in the individual) of the interest in money, without designating it as such, traced a phylogenetic or evolutionary sequence that took us by a series of transformations from the anal-cloacal erotism of valuation of a fecal body product (the infant's love of feces) to deodorized (like mud), dehydrated (like sand), decolorized, hardened, smooth (like stones and buttons) fecal substitutes that finally as coins are made to shine. This is to consider money as shiny possessable objects that would be of equal interest to simian species. Surely money can be analogized to other body products; and I have previously suggested (1969) that words also are a treasury of wealth that are valued as body products and also archaically associated with feces. But the youngest of the 18 suburban children in this pilot study seemed already to have related money to the love of their parents and grandparents. Further developmental stages of the human interest in money, here only suggested, appear to proceed as follows: curiosity about money as a belonging of the parents in oedipal-stage grasp of family politics (which may persist if childhood selfishness remains unleavened); money as a reward and exchange in latency trading (whether by boys and girls or grown-up "traders" in the financial "game"); money as a measure of status and class and as an indication of group identity in adolescence (which may persist in senses of group entitlement); and various levels of mature appreciation of money as a system of universal agreement, as a translatable, fungible form of information to register relative value, and as capital, an ingredient of productivity. Further study of the mental stages of the appreciation of money is warranted, but the social context appears unavoidably central. Ultimately money may be purely a mean that finally (harking back to its symbolic body origin) will be fully separated from the self in acts of riddance and gifting that vary from exercising power to loving bestowal (Kolb), and from jealous greed to generosity. Piagetian cognitive stages are exemplified by the children's approach to money at different ages; for example, even in this limited sample there is indication of a principle of conservation of value (here proposed) that appears in latency as an equivalent of the principle of conservation of volume. Neuropsychiatric impairment may lead to increasing concreteness in the representation of money as feces (which I have termed "the return of Ferenczi").(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Perceptual dimensions of tactile surface texture: A multidimensional scaling analysis

The purpose of this study was to examine the subjective dimensionality of tactile surface texture perception. Seventeen tactile stimuli, such as wood, sandpaper, and velvet, were moved across the index finger of the subject, who sorted them into categories on the basis of perceived similarity. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques were then used to position the stimuli in a perceptual space on the basis of combined data of 20 subjects. A three-dimensional space was judged to give a satisfactory representation of the data. Subjects’ ratings of each stimulus on five scales representing putative dimensions of perceived surface texture were then fitted by regression analysis into the MDS space. Roughness-smoothness and hardness-softness were found to be robust and orthogonal dimensions; the third dimension did not correspond closely with any of the rating scales used, but post hoc inspection of the data suggested that it may reflect the compressional elasticity (“springiness”) of the surface.     

On the Argument from Divine Arbitrariness

William Rowe in his Can God be Free? (2004) argues that God, if there is a God, necessarily chooses the best. Combined with the premise that there is no best act of creation, this provides an a priori argument for atheism. Rowe assumes that necessarily God is a ??morally unsurpassable?? being, and it is for that reason that God chooses the best. In this article I drop that assumption and I consider a successor to Rowe??s argument, the Argument from Arbitrariness, based on the premise that God does not act arbitrarily. My chief conclusion will be that this argument fails because, for all we know, there can be non-arbitrary divine choices even if there is no best act of creation.     

Mereotopology without Mereology

Mereotopology is that branch of the theory of regions concerned with topological properties such as connectedness. It is usually developed by considering the parthood relation that characterizes the, perhaps non-classical, mereology of Space (or Spacetime, or a substance filling Space or Spacetime) and then considering an extra primitive relation. My preferred choice of mereotopological primitive is interior parthood. This choice will have the advantage that filters may be defined with respect to it, constructing “points”, as Peter Roeper has done (“Region-based topology”, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 26 (1997), 25–309). This paper generalizes Roeper’s result, relying only on mereotopological axioms, not requiring an underlying classical mereology, and not assuming the Axiom of Choice. I call the resulting mathematical system an approximate lattice, because although meets and joins are not assumed they are approximated. Theorems are proven establishing the existence and uniqueness of representations of approximate lattices, in which their members, the regions, are represented by sets of “points” in a topological “space”.