Growing Explanations

Growing Explanations PDF Author: M. Norton Wise
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333197
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components—nuclei into protons and neutrons, proteins into amino acids, and so on—but over the past forty years there has been a marked turn toward explaining phenomena by building them up rather than breaking them down. This collection reflects on the history and significance of this turn toward “growing explanations” from the bottom up. The essays show how this strategy—based on a widespread appreciation for complexity even in apparently simple processes and on the capacity of computers to simulate such complexity—has played out in a broad array of sciences. They describe how scientists are reordering knowledge to emphasize growth, change, and contingency and, in so doing, are revealing even phenomena long considered elementary—like particles and genes—as emergent properties of dynamic processes. Written by leading historians and philosophers of science, these essays examine the range of subjects, people, and goals involved in changing the character of scientific analysis over the last several decades. They highlight the alternatives that fields as diverse as string theory, fuzzy logic, artificial life, and immunology bring to the forms of explanation that have traditionally defined scientific modernity. A number of the essays deal with the mathematical and physical sciences, addressing concerns with hybridity and the materials of the everyday world. Other essays focus on the life sciences, where questions such as “What is life?” and “What is an organism?” are undergoing radical re-evaluation. Together these essays mark the contours of an ongoing revolution in scientific explanation. Contributors. David Aubin, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, Richard Doyle, Claus Emmeche, Peter Galison, Stefan Helmreich, Ann Johnson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Ilana Löwy, Claude Rosental, Alfred Tauber

Growing Explanations

Growing Explanations PDF Author: M. Norton Wise
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333197
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book

Book Description
For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components—nuclei into protons and neutrons, proteins into amino acids, and so on—but over the past forty years there has been a marked turn toward explaining phenomena by building them up rather than breaking them down. This collection reflects on the history and significance of this turn toward “growing explanations” from the bottom up. The essays show how this strategy—based on a widespread appreciation for complexity even in apparently simple processes and on the capacity of computers to simulate such complexity—has played out in a broad array of sciences. They describe how scientists are reordering knowledge to emphasize growth, change, and contingency and, in so doing, are revealing even phenomena long considered elementary—like particles and genes—as emergent properties of dynamic processes. Written by leading historians and philosophers of science, these essays examine the range of subjects, people, and goals involved in changing the character of scientific analysis over the last several decades. They highlight the alternatives that fields as diverse as string theory, fuzzy logic, artificial life, and immunology bring to the forms of explanation that have traditionally defined scientific modernity. A number of the essays deal with the mathematical and physical sciences, addressing concerns with hybridity and the materials of the everyday world. Other essays focus on the life sciences, where questions such as “What is life?” and “What is an organism?” are undergoing radical re-evaluation. Together these essays mark the contours of an ongoing revolution in scientific explanation. Contributors. David Aubin, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, Richard Doyle, Claus Emmeche, Peter Galison, Stefan Helmreich, Ann Johnson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Ilana Löwy, Claude Rosental, Alfred Tauber

Growing Explanations

Growing Explanations PDF Author: M. Norton Wise
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390086
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components—nuclei into protons and neutrons, proteins into amino acids, and so on—but over the past forty years there has been a marked turn toward explaining phenomena by building them up rather than breaking them down. This collection reflects on the history and significance of this turn toward “growing explanations” from the bottom up. The essays show how this strategy—based on a widespread appreciation for complexity even in apparently simple processes and on the capacity of computers to simulate such complexity—has played out in a broad array of sciences. They describe how scientists are reordering knowledge to emphasize growth, change, and contingency and, in so doing, are revealing even phenomena long considered elementary—like particles and genes—as emergent properties of dynamic processes. Written by leading historians and philosophers of science, these essays examine the range of subjects, people, and goals involved in changing the character of scientific analysis over the last several decades. They highlight the alternatives that fields as diverse as string theory, fuzzy logic, artificial life, and immunology bring to the forms of explanation that have traditionally defined scientific modernity. A number of the essays deal with the mathematical and physical sciences, addressing concerns with hybridity and the materials of the everyday world. Other essays focus on the life sciences, where questions such as “What is life?” and “What is an organism?” are undergoing radical re-evaluation. Together these essays mark the contours of an ongoing revolution in scientific explanation. Contributors. David Aubin, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, Richard Doyle, Claus Emmeche, Peter Galison, Stefan Helmreich, Ann Johnson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Ilana Löwy, Claude Rosental, Alfred Tauber

Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems. Theory and Foundations

Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems. Theory and Foundations PDF Author: Jesús Medina
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319914731
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 835

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Book Description
This three volume set (CCIS 853-855) constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems, IPMU 2017, held in Cádiz, Spain, in June 2018. The 193 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 383 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on advances on explainable artificial intelligence; aggregation operators, fuzzy metrics and applications; belief function theory and its applications; current techniques to model, process and describe time series; discrete models and computational intelligence; formal concept analysis and uncertainty; fuzzy implication functions; fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence problems; fuzzy mathematical analysis and applications; fuzzy methods in data mining and knowledge discovery; fuzzy transforms: theory and applications to data analysis and image processing; imprecise probabilities: foundations and applications; mathematical fuzzy logic, mathematical morphology; measures of comparison and entropies for fuzzy sets and their extensions; new trends in data aggregation; pre-aggregation functions and generalized forms of monotonicity; rough and fuzzy similarity modelling tools; soft computing for decision making in uncertainty; soft computing in information retrieval and sentiment analysis; tri-partitions and uncertainty; decision making modeling and applications; logical methods in mining knowledge from big data; metaheuristics and machine learning; optimization models for modern analytics; uncertainty in medicine; uncertainty in Video/Image Processing (UVIP).

Grow

Grow PDF Author: Jim Stengel
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307720373
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Ten years of research uncover the secret source of growth and profit … Those who center their business on improving people’s lives have a growth rate triple that of competitors and outperform the market by a huge margin. They dominate their categories, create new categories and maximize profit in the long term. Pulling from a unique ten year growth study involving 50,000 brands, Jim Stengel shows how the world's 50 best businesses—as diverse as Method, Red Bull, Lindt, Petrobras, Samsung, Discovery Communications, Visa, Zappos, and Innocent—have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes. In fact, over the 2000s an investment in these companies—“The Stengel 50”—would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. Grow is based on unprecedented empirical research, inspired (when Stengel was Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble) by a study of companies growing faster than P&G. After leaving P&G in 2008, Stengel designed a new study, in collaboration with global research firm Millward Brown Optimor. This study tracked the connection over a ten year period between financial performance and customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy. Then, in a further investigation of what goes on in the “black box” of the consumer’s mind, Stengel and his team tapped into neuroscience research to look at customer engagement and measure subconscious attitudes to determine whether the top businesses in the Stengel Study were more associated with higher ideals than were others. Grow thus deftly blends timeless truths about human behavior and values into an action framework – how you discover, build, communicate, deliver and evaluate your ideal. Through colorful stories drawn from his fascinating personal experiences and “deep dives” that bring out the true reasons for such successes as the Pampers, HP, Discovery Channel, Jack Daniels and Zappos, Grow unlocks the code for twenty-first century business success.

Arbitrary Lines

Arbitrary Lines PDF Author: M. Nolan Gray
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642832545
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
It's time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary--if not sufficient--condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common misconceptions about how American cities regulate growth and examining four contemporary critiques of zoning (its role in increasing housing costs, restricting growth in our most productive cities, institutionalizing racial and economic segregation, and mandating sprawl). He sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Arbitrary Lines is an invitation to rethink the rules that will continue to shape American life--where we may live or work, who we may encounter, how we may travel. If the task seems daunting, the good news is that we have nowhere to go but up

The Growth of Government Expenditure

The Growth of Government Expenditure PDF Author: International Monetary Fund
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1451922841
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
This paper reviews the extensive empirical literature on the growth and determinants of government expenditure. Although the coverage does not aim to be exhaustive, the authors provide an overview of the quantitative approaches to analyzing the growth in government expenditure. The main debates in the literature are described, and the authors present a few tests of some theories and describe one or two of their own experiments in others. The paper highlights the data problems and the technical difficulties of hypothesis testing and model estimation in this area, many arising from the nature of the problem studied. It is contended that the quantitative analysis of government expenditure growth has often improved the formulation of hypotheses, but that data and theoretical limitations have meant that the methods employed have not always been justified.

Analysis of Senior Management Teams that Have Demonstrated a Proclivity for Growth

Analysis of Senior Management Teams that Have Demonstrated a Proclivity for Growth PDF Author: David Thomas
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1445742330
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This book is a PhD thesis that is highly relevant to anyone involved in management. It identifies and analyses in depth the key constructs of leadership, teamwork and enterprise that are vital for a successful 'growth' business. The focus is on leadership, enterprise and the make-up of senior management teams, but the research outcomes can equally be applied to any management team environment, such as committees, working groups, panels, or administrative bodies. Critically, an unsuitable leader will almost guarantee failure, so having the ability to recognise leaders that are capable of delivering success is crucial. This book is invaluable for those people who need to understand how leadership, teamwork and enterprise interact to create dynamic and highly successful management teams.

Systems Biology

Systems Biology PDF Author: Fred Boogerd
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 9780080475271
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Systems biology is a vigorous and expanding discipline, in many ways a successor to genomics and perhaps unprecedented in its combination of biology with a great many other sciences, from physics to ecology, from mathematics to medicine, and from philosophy to chemistry. Studying the philosophical foundations of systems biology may resolve a longer standing issue, i.e., the extent to which Biology is entitled to its own scientific foundations rather than being dominated by existing philosophies. * Answers the question of what distinguishes the living from the non-living * An in-depth look to a vigorous and expanding discipline, from molecule to system * Explores the region between individual components and the system

The Organization of the Expert Society

The Organization of the Expert Society PDF Author: Andreas werr
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317365127
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
It is often claimed that we live in an expert society, a society where more and more individuals take expert roles in increasingly narrow fields. In contrast to more traditional experts most of these new experts lack generally accepted mechanisms for the certification and legitimation of their expertise. This book focuses on these new as well as established experts and the efforts undertaken to secure and legitimate their expertise. We view these efforts as organizing attempts and study them on four different levels – the society, the market, the organization and the individual. Based on empirical studies on these four levels of analysis, The Organization of the Expert Society makes the argument that current organizing initiatives in the expert society are based in an objectifying view of expertise that risks concealing and downplaying key aspects of expertise. Well-intended organizing initiatives in the expert society thus run the risk of promoting ignorance rather than securing expertise. Focusing on a current, general and global phenomenon, the rise and organization of an expert society. The Organization of the Expert Society will be key reading for scholars, academics and policy makers in the management fields of Organizational Theory, Management Consulting, Organizations & Society, Critical Management Studies as well as the disciplines of Sociology, Political Science and Social Anthropology.

The Quantum of Explanation

The Quantum of Explanation PDF Author: Randall E. Auxier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351792474
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
The Quantum of Explanation advances a bold new theory of how explanation ought to be understood in philosophical and cosmological inquiries. Using a complete interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical and mathematical writings and an interpretive structure that is essentially new, Auxier and Herstein argue that Whitehead has never been properly understood, nor has the depth and breadth of his contribution to the human search for knowledge been assimilated by his successors. This important book effectively applies Whitehead’s philosophy to problems in the interpretation of science, empirical knowledge, and nature. It develops a new account of philosophical naturalism that will contribute to the current naturalism debate in both Analytic and Continental philosophy. Auxier and Herstein also draw attention to some of the most important differences between the process theology tradition and Whitehead’s thought, arguing in favor of a Whiteheadian naturalism that is more or less independent of theological concerns. This book offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy and is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in American philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics and physics, and issues associated with naturalism, explanation and radical empiricism.