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This chapter is dedicated to elucidating the range of known infix-creating ambiguities in language. As such, it offers a diachronic typology of infixation. It shows that edge-oriented infixes ultimately originate from adpositional affixes (i.e., prefixes or suffixes). Their peripheral origins give rise to their synchronic edge-oriented profile. Ultimately, it is the preponderance of such infixes with adpositional origin that gives rise to the observed Edge-Bias Effect.

This chapter contains the introduction to Hirschman's collection of essays on development at the close of the 1960s, A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development in Latin America. Here, Hirschman points to the importance of the interplay between economic and political forces: not just the economic theories of politics, nor simply the political dimensions of economic phenomena, but the interactions between two fields that can open up spaces for alternatives. Hence, this chapter urges more flexibility and realism and less reliance on general laws to explain social phenomena. Freedom and creativity—in short, “a passion for the possible”—were Hirschman's watchwords in this piece.

The Aims of this Chapter are to Provide a brief introduction to Roman provincial coinage as background to the book as a whole, and to outline the key developments in Roman provincial coin iconography from a chronological perspective. Geographical diversity will only be touched on here, but emerges strongly from the regional studies within this volume. It is also the main theme of Burnett’s paper which compares the Roman East with the Roman West. This chapter is based mainly on the material contained in the first two volumes of the Roman Provincial Coinage (RPC) series, which cover the Julio- Claudian and Flavian periods from 44 BC to AD 96, and the database of the RPC IV project. The latter embraces the Antonine period, the time from the accession of Antoninus Pius in ad 138 to the death of Commodus in AD 192. Provincial coins from the reigns of Nerva to Hadrian (ad 96–138) and the third century AD have not yet been catalogued systematically. Consequently, their treatment within this chapter can only be impressionistic, and will require refinement and revision once the RPC series has been completed. Readers in search of a more extended, but still impressionistic, treatment of key themes in the iconography of the period from ad 180 onwards are referred to Harl 1987. Finally, many of the examples given in this chapter are deliberately drawn from the rich material from the Roman province of Asia, as this region is not the subject of a dedicated chapter in this book. Types of Roman Provincial Coins and their Characteristics During the three and a half centuries from 44 BC the Roman empire embraced different categories of coinage. Scholars have divided the material into two main groups: ‘Roman imperial coins’ on the one hand and ‘Roman provincial coins’—also known as ‘Greek imperial coins’—on the other. Roman imperial mints produced coins in gold, silver, and ‘bronze’. Roman imperial gold coins (aurei) circulated throughout the empire, with the possible exception of Egypt. Imperial silver coins (denarii) and—from the reign of Caracalla onwards—also radiates or antoniniani increasingly circulated alongside provincial silver in the east.

Sensor performance characteristics are generally divided into at least two categories: static and dynamic. Additional categories sometimes used include drift and exposure errors. The performance of sensors in conditions where the measurand is constant or very slowly changing can be characterized by static parameters. Dynamic performance modeling requires the use of differential equations to account for the relation between sensor input and output when the input is rapidly varying. Static characteristics due to friction or other nonlinear effects would vastly complicate the differential equations so, even when the input is not steady, static and dynamic characteristics are considered separately. Static characteristics are determined by carefully excluding dynamic effects. Dynamic characteristics are assessed by assuming that all static effects have been excluded or compensated. Many of these terms have been encountered in chaps. 1 and 2, although without formal definitions. Analog signal. A signal whose information content is continuously proportional to the measurand. If an electrical temperature sensor has a voltage output, that voltage signal fluctuates with the sensor temperature. Voltage output would be continuously proportional to the measurand (temperature) and is analogous to it, hence we refer to the sensor output as an analog signal. Data display. Any mechanism for displaying data to the user. The stem of a mercury-in-glass thermometer with attached scale is a data display. Data storage. A memory element or mechanism for holding data and later recovering them such as a disk or magnetic tape. Again, this could be as simple as a piece of paper. Data transmission. The process of sending a signal from one place to another. The data transmission medium could be a piece of paper, a magnetic tape, radio or light waves, or telephone wires. Digital signal. A signal whose information content varies in discrete steps. The step size can be made arbitrarily small such that a plot of a digitized signal could also resemble the analog signal. However, the granularity of a digital signal will be revealed if it is examined in sufficient detail.

Adaptive procedures are developed to reduce the burden of data collection in psychophysics by creating more efficient experimental test designs and methods of estimating either statistics or parameters. In some cases, these adaptive procedures may reduce the amount of testing by as much as 80% to 90%. This chapter begins with a description of classical staircase procedures for estimating the threshold and/or slope of the psychometric function, followed by a description of modern Bayesian adaptive methods for optimizing psychophysical tests. We introduce applications of Bayesian adaptive procedures for the estimation of psychophysically measured functions and surfaces. The bias, precision and efficiency of estimates is considered. Each method is accompanied by an illustrative example and sample results and a discussion of the practical requirements of the procedure.

A more generous welfare state (particularly with an aging population) has financing needs that immigrants could fill. With high-skilled immigrants more likely to pay in rather than draw on the welfare state, more generous welfare states are more inclined to try to attract high skilled. Israel ranks third in the world in the number of university graduates per capita, after the United States and the Netherlands. It possesses the highest per capita number of scientists in the world, with 135 for every 10,000 citizens (compared to 85 per 10,000 in the United States). Israelis took full advantage of the immigration skill bias. When examining the index for educated émigrés, i.e., those with a college degree, the average index is 12.41 and Israel's index is more than three times higher, 41.45. Using this index, Israel is higher than Portugal and the gap between Israel and Ireland (49.09) narrows considerably.

This chapter discusses the politically and morally contentious issue of whether strict fairness and justice in a rationing system can be accomplished in a democracy like the United States. Fairness dictates that similar cases should be similarly treated, and morally irrelevant facts about people should be exactly that: irrelevant. However, it seems difficult to imagine (for example) that undocumented immigrants would be offered the same benefits under a comprehensive and rationed healthcare system as citizens, due to public opposition. On the other hand, the “better angels of our nature” have occasionally prevailed against apparent dominant opinion, such as in the case of civil rights. However, it is acknowledged that the tyranny of the majority may have to be mollified if that would ensure acceptance of comprehensive healthcare reform.

This chapter compares and contrasts the personal goods of pleasure and meaning, focusing most on highlighting important differences between them. Specifically, after arguing that there is a largely unrecognized negative or disvaluable dimension of meaning, parallel to the way that pain is the opposite of pleasure, the chapter contrasts pleasure and meaning with respect to six value-theoretic factors, among them: what the logical sources of these values are, how luck can play a role in their realization, which attitudes are appropriate in response to them, and whether they exhibit Derek Parfit’s idea of ‘bias toward the future’ regarding when they are preferred in a life. The chapter concludes by suggesting that a pleasant life is to be identified with a happy one, which means that happiness and meaningfulness are two basic goods that can each contribute to making a life worthwhile.

Lysaght and Campbell note the promise of regenerative medicine and call for a broader philosophical and public discourse that extends beyond questions surrounding the moral status of embryos. While this is a laudable aim, it fails to confront the pernicious, controlling and suffocating impact that religion has had on debates surrounding stem cell research, regenerative medicine and science more broadly. While bioethics should privilege tolerance and pluralism, it also has an important role in activism and as a critic of positions and institutions that seek to dominate and control public discourse.

Inertia in science is a major hurdle, as the documentation of neurotoxicity builds only gradually. Scientific tradition demands verification and replication before reaching firm conclusions. Worse, vested interest have explored this inertia by demanding proof and by raising doubt about scientific documentation. Meanwhile, more than a generation of children have suffered chemical brain drain, while the evidence was debated and no decision reached. These adverse effects could have been prevented. However, in a contentious environment, where conflicting interests abound, scientists tend to hedge their conclusions in soft language in an attempt to justify a balanced position. Often, existing uncertainties are interpreted as a demand for more research, from which the researchers themselves may benefit, and preventive action is then postponed. The picture is muddled by unrecognized or unreported biases and by the influence of vested interests that have manipulated or manufactured doubt and uncertainty.

It is argued that false belief is often better for a person than true belief, by appeal to cases of “partiality bias” (bias in favor of a positive conception of one’s friends) and “charitable bias” (bias in favor of a positive conception of people in general). Friendship sometimes requires partiality bias, and moral virtue requires charitable bias. This argument assumes that friendship and moral virtue are constituents of wellbeing.

Jonathan Maskit challenges the ‘standard view’ that the most important division in contemporary aesthetics is that between cognitivists (those who believe that concepts, usually scientific concepts, are essential for the aesthetic appreciation of nature) and non-cognitivists (those who do not so believe). Both camps tend to agree that our goal ought to be to figure out the one correct way to appreciate an environment appropriately. Such a characterization of the field suggests an Anglo-American bias. If we confront New World with Old World perspectives an alternative distinction come to the fore, that between universalists, who are analytic in their methods, and cultural historicists, who use hermeneutic methods. Universalists generally hold that culture and history are unimportant when trying to figure out what nature is or how people should appreciate it aesthetically. Cultural historicists, by contrast, believe that one’s culture or the history of the observer or the place are crucial to working out one’s environmental aesthetic. Crucially, from the cultural historicist standpoint, the very idea of there being one correct or appropriate way to appreciate nature aesthetically makes no sense.

In this chapter, the author argues that optimistically biased beliefs that agents tend to have about themselves and their future have the potential for epistemic innocence. Such beliefs—inflated beliefs about the agent’s self-worth and rosy predictions about the agent’s health prospects or romantic relationships—are not sufficiently sensitive to the evidence available to the agent and count both as ill-grounded and impervious to counterevidence. However, optimistic beliefs also play a role in supporting agency. When agents believe that they are skilled and that things are going to go well for them, they are more motivated to continue to pursue their goals in the face of inevitable obstacles and setbacks. Persistence in goal pursuit sometimes translates in successful performance. Moreover, optimistic agents are more motivated to change their behaviour to achieve the goals they believe to be attainable, and thus cope better with crises in their health or relationships.

This final chapter concludes the findings of the journal. It states that contrary to the ‘popular story’ there exists no convincing evidence that passengers in the third class surged against authority and disrupted evacuation efforts, and instead summarises available evidence to determine that third class men had severely restricted access to lifeboats. It cites the moral problem of the dangerous individuals theory as a major contributing factor to the crew’s bias against them.

Chapter 4 focuses on how citizens can ’get it wrong’ when assigning responsibility to the European Union. It shows that people’s views of EU responsibility demonstrate bias, coloured either by their support forthe EU project or their Euroscepticism. Similarly to partisanship in the national political domain, EU support acts as a perceptual screen. Using both survey and experimental data, the chapter demonstrates that EU supporters are more likely to claim responsibility for the EU when things are going well and less likely to say that the EU is responsible when things are going badly. It shows that judgements of responsibility are thus not merely a product of institutional differences in responsibility, but importantly are also used to reconcile predispositions about the EU with changing information about policy performance.

This chapter discusses the user testing process in a lab and the inevitability of biases when testing under these conditions. It also describes the difficulties to obtain the data needed by the researcher when the conditions are closer to real life, and the difficulties to project data to everyday situations when closer to experimental conditions. Lastly, it describes the importance of reducing biases in the study to increase its validity in order to obtain more useful and meaningful results.

We prefer the term “statistical communication,” but the phrase “how to lie with statistics” is a good hook to get students thinking about the issues involved. We try throughout to dampen the natural cynicism that comes with this topic and emphasize that, to most effectively tell the truth, you must avoid lying by accident as well as on purpose. We illustrate the difficulties of statistical communication by bringing news articles to class to discuss. These activities move between small group and whole class discussion. Examples cover problems with ignoring the baseline, misleading comparisons, data dredging, and distinguishing sources of bias.

This chapter looks at further topics pertaining to the effective use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo to sample from hard- and soft-constrained exponential random graph models. The chapter considers the question of how moves can be sampled efficiently without introducing unintended bias. It is shown mathematically and numerically that apparently very similar methods of picking out moves can give rise to significant differences in the average topology of the networks generated by the MCMC process. The general discussion in complemented with pseudocode in the relevant section of the Algorithms chapter, which explicitly sets out some accurate and practical move sampling approaches. The chapter also describes how the MCMC equilibrium probabilities can be purposely deformed to, for example, target desired correlations between degrees of connected nodes. The mathematical exposition is complemented with graphs showing the results of numerical simulations.