Partial belief and flat-out belief

About the book: The idea that belief comes in degrees is based on the observation that we are more certain of some things than of others. Various theories try to give accounts of how measures of this confidence do or ought to behave, both as far as the internal mental consistency of the agent as well as his betting, or other, behaviour is concerned. This anthology is the first book to give a balanced overview of these theories. It also explicitly relates these debates to more traditional concerns of the philosophy of language and mind, and epistemic logic, namely how belief simpliciter does or ought to behave. The paradigmatic theory, probabilism (which holds that degrees of belief ought to satisfy the axioms of probability theory) is given most attention, but competing theories, such as Dempster-Shafer theory, possibility theory, and AGM belief revision theory are also considered. Each of these approaches is represented by one of its major proponents. The papers are specifically written to target advanced undergraduate students with a background in formal methods and beginning graduate students, but they will also serve as first point of reference for academics new to the area

Enterprise profiles in deprived areas: Are they distinctive?

This paper examines the extent to which segmenting business activity on the basis of the relative deprivation of a given area provides additional understanding (in terms of analysis and policy) that is not obtained by alternative divisions, e.g., by sector, size, etc. The paper is primarily motivated by the explicit inclusion of a deprived area dimension to many UK small business/enterprise policies introduced since 1997. We use two datasets drawn from the customer records of Barclays Bank PLC to obtain an initial analysis of the business stocks and dynamics in deprived and non-deprived areas of England. The data indicate that the deprived areas of England vary systematically from the wider economy in terms of several business stock characteristics and associated dynamics. These differences include a lower proportion of business service firms, lower female involvement in the owner-manager base and a poorer risk profile. The analysis supports the view that there are likely to be benefits from the tailoring of small business/ enterprise policies to sub-national levels

(1S)-1-phenylethanaminium 4-{[(1S,2S)-1-hydroxy-2,3-dihydro-1H,1'H-[2,2'-biinden]-2-yl]methyl}benzoate

Copyright 2012 © International Union of Crystallography.The title molecular salt, C8H12N+·C26H21O3-, contains a dimeric indane pharmacophore that demonstrates potent anti-inflammatory activity. The indane group of the anion exhibits some disorder about the [alpha]-C atom, which appears common to many structures containing this group. A model to account for the slight disorder was attempted, but this was deemed unsuccessful because applying bond-length constraints to all the bonds about the [alpha]-C atom led to instability in the refinement. The absolute configuration was determined crystallographically as S,S,S by anomalous dispersion methods with reference to both the Flack parameter and Bayesian statistics on Bijvoet differences. The configuration was also determined by an a priori knowledge of the absolute configuration of the (1S)-1-phenylethanaminium counter-ion. The molecules pack in the crystal structure to form an infinite two-dimensional hydrogen-bond network in the (100) plane of the unit cell

Quantifying the mechanisms of domain gain in animal proteins.

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.BACKGROUND: Protein domains are protein regions that are shared among different proteins and are frequently functionally and structurally independent from the rest of the protein. Novel domain combinations have a major role in evolutionary innovation. However, the relative contributions of the different molecular mechanisms that underlie domain gains in animals are still unknown. By using animal gene phylogenies we were able to identify a set of high confidence domain gain events and by looking at their coding DNA investigate the causative mechanisms. RESULTS: Here we show that the major mechanism for gains of new domains in metazoan proteins is likely to be gene fusion through joining of exons from adjacent genes, possibly mediated by non-allelic homologous recombination. Retroposition and insertion of exons into ancestral introns through intronic recombination are, in contrast to previous expectations, only minor contributors to domain gains and have accounted for less than 1% and 10% of high confidence domain gain events, respectively. Additionally, exonization of previously non-coding regions appears to be an important mechanism for addition of disordered segments to proteins. We observe that gene duplication has preceded domain gain in at least 80% of the gain events. CONCLUSIONS: The interplay of gene duplication and domain gain demonstrates an important mechanism for fast neofunctionalization of genes.Published versio

New venture survival and growth: Does the fog lift?

Does our ability to predict the performance of new ventures improve in the years after start-up? We investigate the growth and survival of 6247 new ventures that are tracked using the customer records at Barclays Bank. We put forward Gambler’s Ruin as a simple theory for understanding new venture growth and survival. Gambler’s Ruin predicts that the R2 remains low for growth rate regressions, but that the R2 increases in the years since start-up for survival regressions. The Nagelkerke R2 obtained from growth rate regressions decreases significantly in the years after start-up, which suggests that the fog gets thicker with respect to growth. When we focus only on firms surviving until the end of the period, however, there is no visible change in the R2 over time. In contrast, the Nagelkerke R2 of survival regressions increases in the years after start-up. Interestingly, a blip in year 5 suggests that macro-economic factors may have a strong effect on the amount of ‘fog’

Genome annotation for clinical genomic diagnostics: strengths and weaknesses

The Human Genome Project and advances in DNA sequencing technologies have revolutionized the identification of genetic disorders through the use of clinical exome sequencing. However, in a considerable number of patients, the genetic basis remains unclear. As clinicians begin to consider whole-genome sequencing, an understanding of the processes and tools involved and the factors to consider in the annotation of the structure and function of genomic elements that might influence variant identification is crucial. Here, we discuss and illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of approaches for the annotation and classification of important elements of protein-coding genes, other genomic elements such as pseudogenes and the non-coding genome, comparative-genomic approaches for inferring gene function, and new technologies for aiding genome annotation, as a practical guide for clinicians when considering pathogenic sequence variation. Complete and accurate annotation of structure and function of genome features has the potential to reduce both false-negative (from missing annotation) and false-positive (from incorrect annotation) errors in causal variant identification in exome and genome sequences. Re-analysis of unsolved cases will be necessary as newer technology improves genome annotation, potentially improving the rate of diagnosis

Modelling for the proposed roll-out of the ‘111’ service in Wales: a case study

NHS Direct Wales provides a single point of access where members of the public can telephone and seek medical support and/or advice. The service is provided for all the Health Boards in Wales by a single virtual call centre run from a main location in Swansea with 2 satellite locations. Patients in Wales can also access a local General Practitioner service during the evenings and at weekends, by phoning their Out of Hours service. The introduction of a ‘111’ service is intended to combine these two operations on a pan-Wales basis using the existing NHS Direct Wales call centre and staff, with the existing Health Board Out of Hours ‘hubs’. The merger of the two services is intended to improve the overall performance of both services. This paper focuses on the planned introduction of ‘111’ in Cwm Taf and Hywel Dda University Health Boards. The purpose of the case study was to support the merger of the two telephony systems from both an organisational and service delivery perspective, by developing a Discrete Event Simulation to model the impact on service levels and staffing. In particular, to examine the percentage increase / decrease in the staffing requirements needed under partial or full integration of the two services. The results from the scenario analysis highlight that extra staffing resources would be required in certain groups (nurses and call handlers) whilst savings could be achieved in others, provided that there wasn’t an increase in call volume after implementation of the new service

The item versus the object in memory: on the implausibility of overwriting as a mechanism for forgetting in short-term memory

The nature of forgetting in short-term memory remains a disputed topic, with much debate focussed upon whether decay plays a fundamental role (Berman et al., 2009; Altmann and Schunn, 2012; Barrouillet et al., 2012; Neath and Brown, 2012; Oberauer and Lewandowsky, 2013; Ricker et al., 2014) but much less focus on other plausible mechanisms. One such mechanism of long-standing in auditory memory is overwriting (e.g., Crowder and Morton, 1969) in which some aspects of a representation are “overwritten” and rendered inaccessible by the subsequent presentation of a further item. Here, we review the evidence for different forms of overwriting (at the feature and item levels) and examine the plausibility of this mechanism both as a form of auditory memory and when viewed in the context of a larger hearing, speech and language understanding system