2½‐Year‐Old Children Use Animacy and Syntax to Learn a New Noun

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 × 3 design, animacy status (e.g., animate agent, inanimate patient) and labeling syntax (agent, patient, nonlabel control) were varied. Across most events, 2 1/2‐year‐old participants responded as if they expected animate entities to be named. However, in a prototypical (animate agent‐inanimate patient) event condition, children responded differentially across different syntactic structures. Thus, the clearest evidence for attention to syntactic cues was found in the prototypical event condition. These results suggest that young children attend to the animacy status of unfamiliar entities, that they have expectations about animacy relations in events, and that these expectations support emerging syntactic knowledge.     

Banks winners in tournaments are difficult to recognize

Given a tournament T, a Banks winner of T is the top vertex of any maximal (with respect to inclusion) transitive subtournament of T. In this technical note, we show that the problem of deciding whether some fixed vertex v is a Banks winner for T is NP-complete. Received: 22 February 2002/Accepted: 20 June 2002 Supported by the START program Y43-MAT of the Austrian Ministry of Science. I would like to thank two thank the referees for a careful reading of the paper, for helpful remarks, and for many suggestions how to improve the presentation.     

Unresolved Conflicts in the Regional Security System: The Case of the South Caucasus

The collapse of the USSR was accompanied by transformation of the South Caucasian latent ethnopolitical conflicts into local wars. Today the situation in the area of the conflicts is “neither war, nor peace”. Three unresolved conflicts of the South Caucasus can be considered as one of the most serious obstacles for establishing a regional security system.The article gives the general characteristics of these conflicts, the trends of their development, taking into account the time factor, and analyzes the behavioral models of the main players – de jure recognized and unrecognized de facto states of the South Caucasus. The basic objective of the main players should be to keep the situation on a level preventing the resumption of the armed conflicts. The attempts of forced resolution of the conflicts are fraught with destabilization of the situation not only in the area of any of these conflicts but in the whole region.     

Generalized quasi-likelihood

The quasi-score function, as defined by Wedderburn (1974) and McCullagh (1983) and so on, is a linear function of observations. The generalized quasi-score function introduced in this paper is a linear function of some unbiased basis functions, where the unbiased basis functions may be some linear functions of the observations or not, and can be easily constructed by the meaning of the parameters such as mean and median and so on. The generalized quasi-likelihood estimate obtained by such a generalized quasi-score function is consistent and has an asymptotically normal distribution. As a result, the optimum generalized quasi-score is obtained and a method to construct the optimum unbiased basis function is introduced. In order to construct the potential function, a conservative generalized estimating function is defined. By conservative, a potential function for the projected score has many properties of a log-likelihood function. Finally, some examples are given to illustrate the theoretical results. This paper is supported by NNSF project (10371059) of China and Youth Teacher Foundation of Nankai University.     

Ideas versus ideology: The origins of modern labor economics

Starting with its early twentieth century origins, the development of Labor Economics is traced to the present. We describe an intellectual revolution in which an earlier tra-dition that focused primarily on the institution of the labor union has been replaced by a perspective that emphasizes the various roles played by labor markets in an eco-nomic system. That earlier tradition contained very significant ideological elements, whereas its successor deals much more with the world of ideas. In the course of the debate, which still continues, ideas triumphed over ideology and created modern Labor Economics.     

Estimation of Metabolic Rate Constants in PBPK‐Models from Liver Slice Experiments: What Are the Experimental Needs?

A mechanistic model is presented describing the clearance of a compound in a precision-cut liver slice that is incubated in a culture medium. The problem of estimating metabolic rate constants in PBPK models from liver slice experiments is discussed using identifiability analysis. From the identifiability problem analysis, it appears that in addition to the clearance, the compound's free fraction in the slice and the diffusion rate of the exchange of the compound between culture medium and liver slice should be identified. In addition, knowledge of the culture medium volume, the slice volume, the compound's free fraction, and octanol-water-based partition between medium and slice is presupposed. The formal solution for identification is discussed from the perspective of experimental practice. A formally necessary condition for identification is the sampling of parent compound in liver slice or culture medium. However, due to experimental limitations and errors, sampling the parent compound in the slice together with additional sampling of metabolite pooled from the medium and the slice is required for identification in practice. Moreover, it appears that identification results are unreliable when the value of the intrinsic clearance exceeds the value of the diffusion coefficient, a condition to be verified a posteriori.     

An Existential Approach to Risk Perception

Existential, or existential-phenomenological philosophical approaches to the social psychology of risk perception provide a novel framework for understanding issues that are common to all humanity, such as fear of death, freedom and responsibility, isolation and meaninglessness, as these anxieties are a function of existing, or being-in-the-world. These fundamental anxieties can be related theoretically to the ways people perceive risks within social and cultural milieus, and can also be used practically within case studies, as demonstrated in the three examples presented, which examine perceptions of climate change, food-related risks, and environmental awareness via a mixture of quantitative and qualitative techniques. The discussion focuses on the possible insights that can be gained from taking an existential perspective on risk perception, and relates notions of contemporary technologically-oriented societies to the existential challenges faced by individuals and societies in the contemporary world.