Changing times and local terms on the Rio Negro, Brazil: Amazonian ways of depolarizing epistemology, chronology and cultural Change

Partway along the vast waterways of Brazil's middle Rio Negro, upstream from urban Manaus and downstream from the ethnographically famous Northwest Amazon region, is the town of Castanheiro, whose inhabitants skillfully negotiate a space between the polar extremes of 'traditional' and 'acculturated.' This paper takes an ethnographic look at the non-polarizing terms that these rural Amazonian people use for talking about cultural change. While popular and academic discourses alike have often framed cultural change in the Amazon as a linear process, Amazonian discourse provides resources for describing change as situated in shifting fields of knowledge of the social and physical environments, better capturing its non-linear complexity and ambiguity

The high energy limit of the trajectory representation of quantum mechanics

The trajectory representation in the high energy limit (Bohr correspondence principle) manifests a residual indeterminacy. This indeterminacy is compared to the indeterminacy found in the classical limit (Planck's constant to 0) [Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 15, 1363 (2000)] for particles in the classically allowed region, the classically forbiden region, and near the WKB turning point. The differences between Bohr's and Planck's principles for the trajectory representation are compared with the differences between these correspondence principles for the wave representation. The trajectory representation in the high energy limit is shown to go to neither classical nor statistical mechanics. The residual indeterminacy is contrasted to Heisenberg uncertainty. The relationship between indeterminacy and 't Hooft's information loss and equivalence classes is investigated.Comment: 12 pages of LaTeX. No figures. Incorporated into the "Proceedings of the Seventh International Wigner Symposium" (ed. M. E. Noz), 24-29 August 2001, U. of Maryland. Proceedings available at http://www.physics.umd.edu/robo

The Equivalence Postulate of Quantum Mechanics

The Equivalence Principle (EP), stating that all physical systems are connected by a coordinate transformation to the free one with vanishing energy, univocally leads to the Quantum Stationary HJ Equation (QSHJE). Trajectories depend on the Planck length through hidden variables which arise as initial conditions. The formulation has manifest p-q duality, a consequence of the involutive nature of the Legendre transform and of its recently observed relation with second-order linear differential equations. This reflects in an intrinsic psi^D-psi duality between linearly independent solutions of the Schroedinger equation. Unlike Bohm's theory, there is a non-trivial action even for bound states. No use of any axiomatic interpretation of the wave-function is made. Tunnelling is a direct consequence of the quantum potential which differs from the usual one and plays the role of particle's self-energy. The QSHJE is defined only if the ratio psi^D/psi is a local self-homeomorphism of the extended real line. This is an important feature as the L^2 condition, which in the usual formulation is a consequence of the axiomatic interpretation of the wave-function, directly follows as a basic theorem which only uses the geometrical gluing conditions of psi^D/psi at q=\pm\infty as implied by the EP. As a result, the EP itself implies a dynamical equation that does not require any further assumption and reproduces both tunnelling and energy quantization. Several features of the formulation show how the Copenhagen interpretation hides the underlying nature of QM. Finally, the non-stationary higher dimensional quantum HJ equation and the relativistic extension are derived.Comment: 1+3+140 pages, LaTeX. Invariance of the wave-function under the action of SL(2,R) subgroups acting on the reduced action explicitly reveals that the wave-function describes only equivalence classes of Planck length deterministic physics. New derivation of the Schwarzian derivative from the cocycle condition. "Legendre brackets" introduced to further make "Legendre duality" manifest. Introduction now contains examples and provides a short pedagogical review. Clarifications, conclusions, ackn. and references adde

Applications of artificial intelligence to mission planning

The scheduling problem facing NASA-Marshall mission planning is extremely difficult for several reasons. The most critical factor is the computational complexity involved in developing a schedule. The size of the search space is large along some dimensions and infinite along others. It is because of this and other difficulties that many of the conventional operation research techniques are not feasible or inadequate to solve the problems by themselves. Therefore, the purpose is to examine various artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to assist conventional techniques or to replace them. The specific tasks performed were as follows: (1) to identify mission planning applications for object oriented and rule based programming; (2) to investigate interfacing AI dedicated hardware (Lisp machines) to VAX hardware; (3) to demonstrate how Lisp may be called from within FORTRAN programs; (4) to investigate and report on programming techniques used in some commercial AI shells, such as Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE); and (5) to study and report on algorithmic methods to reduce complexity as related to AI techniques

Tuberculosis and gender: exploring the patterns in a case control study in Malawi.

BACKGROUND: In many populations there is an excess of tuberculosis in young women and older men. We explored possible explanations for these patterns, concentrating on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status, pregnancy, smoking, cooking smoke exposure, contact with tuberculosis cases within the household or outside, and gender differences in health service usage and diagnostic delay. DESIGN: Case control study in Karonga District, Malawi. METHODS: Cases were new tuberculosis patients with bacteriological or histological evidence of tuberculosis. Controls were selected in the community using field-based random sampling. RESULTS: The study included 598 tuberculosis cases and 992 controls, with an excess of tuberculosis in young females and older males. This was more marked in HIV-positive individuals. HIV infection was a similarly strong risk factor for tuberculosis in both men and women. Tuberculosis was associated with having a family or household contact with tuberculosis for both men and women. For women, but not men, contacts outside the close family and household were also a risk factor for tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was not associated with current or recent pregnancy, or with smoking or smoke exposure. There were no differences between men and women in health service usage or delay. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, HIV infection and contacts with known tuberculosis patients are important determinants of the gender distribution of cases

Age grading \u3cem\u3eAn. gambiae\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eAn. arabiensis\u3c/em\u3e using near infrared spectra and artificial neural networks

Background Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is currently complementing techniques to age-grade mosquitoes. NIRS classifies lab-reared and semi-field raised mosquitoes into \u3c or ≥ 7 days old with an average accuracy of 80%, achieved by training a regression model using partial least squares (PLS) and interpreted as a binary classifier. Methods and findings We explore whether using an artificial neural network (ANN) analysis instead of PLS regression improves the current accuracy of NIRS models for age-grading malaria transmitting mosquitoes. We also explore if directly training a binary classifier instead of training a regression model and interpreting it as a binary classifier improves the accuracy. A total of 786 and 870 NIR spectra collected from laboratory reared An. gambiae and An. arabiensis, respectively, were used and pre-processed according to previously published protocols. The ANN regression model scored root mean squared error (RMSE) of 1.6 ± 0.2 for An. gambiae and 2.8 ± 0.2 for An. arabiensis; whereas the PLS regression model scored RMSE of 3.7 ± 0.2 for An. gambiae, and 4.5 ± 0.1 for An. arabiensis. When we interpreted regression models as binary classifiers, the accuracy of the ANN regression model was 93.7 ± 1.0% for An. gambiae, and 90.2 ± 1.7% for An. arabiensis; while PLS regression model scored the accuracy of 83.9 ± 2.3% for An. gambiae, and 80.3 ± 2.1% for An. arabiensis. We also find that a directly trained binary classifier yields higher age estimation accuracy than a regression model interpreted as a binary classifier. A directly trained ANN binary classifier scored an accuracy of 99.4 ± 1.0 for An. gambiae and 99.0 ± 0.6% for An. arabiensis; while a directly trained PLS binary classifier scored 93.6 ± 1.2% for An. gambiae and 88.7 ± 1.1% for An. arabiensis. We further tested the reproducibility of these results on different independent mosquito datasets. ANNs scored higher estimation accuracies than when the same age models are trained using PLS. Regardless of the model architecture, directly trained binary classifiers scored higher accuracies on classifying age of mosquitoes than regression models translated as binary classifiers. Conclusion We recommend training models to estimate age of An. arabiensis and An. gambiae using ANN model architectures (especially for datasets with at least 70 mosquitoes per age group) and direct training of binary classifier instead of training a regression model and interpreting it as a binary classifier

Managerial information, the basics

A problem exists in the defitiition of information, particularly in its application in management. The problem emerges from the inability of academics and practitioners alike to differentiate adequately between data and information. Our failure to comprehend the concept of information casts doubt on the efficacy of analyses and development of information systems. As evidenced in the literature and surveys, this paper presents a collection of differing emphases in definitions of information. It then sifts for the basics and proposes a definition of managerial information