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Article
Publication date: 1 June 2010

J. Ferret

The study of anticipatory systems assumes the existence of two distinct types of systems in nature. Some systems anticipate the future and such anticipation forms part of the

856

Abstract

Purpose

The study of anticipatory systems assumes the existence of two distinct types of systems in nature. Some systems anticipate the future and such anticipation forms part of the system itself, while other systems, however, do not anticipate and solely rely on past states. This article aims to argue that this distinction is inadequate given the current understanding of fundamental physics and it seeks to propose instead that all systems need to be considered fundamentally anticipatory.

Design/methodology/approach

The analysis centers on showing how classical and quantum mechanics implies the concept of anticipatory system by showing how systems are relational and inherently anticipatory because of the potential interaction from a given reference frame of another system.

Findings

This article shows the fundamental relationship between the physical state of the system and its energy, first in classical mechanics and then in quantum mechanics. This serves, first, to remind that energy is arbitrary and so is the system, and second, that the role of potential energy is precisely one of anticipation of interaction with another system at the boundaries.

Research limitations/implications

This article shows there is a fundamental concept of anticipation built in the concept of a closed system, but open systems can get around the analysis presented.

Practical implications

Systems engineering and decision theory fields may benefit from a renewed understanding of the role of anticipation in systems.

Originality/value

This analysis contributes to the fundamental understanding of the concept of anticipation, systems, and their fundamental role in physics.

Details

Foresight, vol. 12 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-6689

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Article
Publication date: 1 June 2010

Roberto Poli

After summarizing the theories of anticipation proposed over the past century, the paper aims to distinguish between anticipation as an empirical phenomenon and the conditions

2809

Abstract

Purpose

After summarizing the theories of anticipation proposed over the past century, the paper aims to distinguish between anticipation as an empirical phenomenon and the conditions that make anticipation possible. The paper's first part seeks to show that many scholars from various research fields worked on the many nuances of anticipation. The paper's second part seeks to discuss the difference between the capacity of anticipation and the nature of systems able to exhibit anticipatory behavior. The former endeavor adopts a descriptive attitude, whilst the latter seeks to understand what it is that makes anticipation possible.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper presents a theoretical and experimental analysis of anticipation and anticipatory systems.

Findings

Anticipation is a widely studied phenomenon within a number of different disciplines, including biology and brain studies, cognitive and social sciences, engineering and artificial intelligence. There is a need for relying on at least two different levels of analysis, namely anticipation as an empirical phenomenon and the idea of an anticipatory system or the study of the internal structure that a system should possess so that it can behave in an anticipatory fashion.

Research limitations/implications

The literature summarized by the paper is only part of a substantially larger body of documents. More extensive analyses are needed to firmly establish the conclusions suggested.

Practical implications

The paper allows better understanding of the complexity of anticipation and the differences between types of anticipation (e.g. between explicit versus implicit anticipation).

Originality/value

For the first time, the distinction implicitly present in the surveyed literature between anticipation as an empirical phenomenon and the idea of anticipatory system as the study of the conditions that make anticipation possible is raised explicitly.

Details

Foresight, vol. 12 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-6689

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 1 June 2010

Vesselin Petrov

The paper aims to investigate what is the best ontological framework of anticipatory systems. Its aim is to argue the thesis that the ontology on which anticipatory systems are

1033

Abstract

Purpose

The paper aims to investigate what is the best ontological framework of anticipatory systems. Its aim is to argue the thesis that the ontology on which anticipatory systems are based should be a dynamic one: a kind of process ontology. It seeks to include a demonstration of the fruitfulness of such an ontological framework for the investigation of anticipatory systems.

Design/methodology/approach

The methodology of the paper is a process ontological one. The objectives are achieved by a comparative analysis of the static and dynamic approaches to the ontological framework.

Findings

A process ontological framework is a reliable basis for the substantiation of the thesis that there is no great gap between living and non‐living systems as far as anticipation is concerned.

Practical implications

An example is represented of an anticipatory non‐living system that is artificially created and is programmed as a self‐control system. In this respect the paper has some practical implications.

Originality/value

A new approach is suggested to the investigation of anticipatory systems. It could be of interest not only for philosophers, but also for scientists who work on ontology as technology.

Details

Foresight, vol. 12 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-6689

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Article
Publication date: 3 August 2021

Chuanming Yu, Haodong Xue, Manyi Wang and Lu An

Owing to the uneven distribution of annotated corpus among different languages, it is necessary to bridge the gap between low resource languages and high resource languages. From…

288

Abstract

Purpose

Owing to the uneven distribution of annotated corpus among different languages, it is necessary to bridge the gap between low resource languages and high resource languages. From the perspective of entity relation extraction, this paper aims to extend the knowledge acquisition task from a single language context to a cross-lingual context, and to improve the relation extraction performance for low resource languages.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes a cross-lingual adversarial relation extraction (CLARE) framework, which decomposes cross-lingual relation extraction into parallel corpus acquisition and adversarial adaptation relation extraction. Based on the proposed framework, this paper conducts extensive experiments in two tasks, i.e. the English-to-Chinese and the English-to-Arabic cross-lingual entity relation extraction.

Findings

The Macro-F1 values of the optimal models in the two tasks are 0.880 1 and 0.789 9, respectively, indicating that the proposed CLARE framework for CLARE can significantly improve the effect of low resource language entity relation extraction. The experimental results suggest that the proposed framework can effectively transfer the corpus as well as the annotated tags from English to Chinese and Arabic. This study reveals that the proposed approach is less human labour intensive and more effective in the cross-lingual entity relation extraction than the manual method. It shows that this approach has high generalizability among different languages.

Originality/value

The research results are of great significance for improving the performance of the cross-lingual knowledge acquisition. The cross-lingual transfer may greatly reduce the time and cost of the manual construction of the multi-lingual corpus. It sheds light on the knowledge acquisition and organization from the unstructured text in the era of big data.

Details

The Electronic Library , vol. 39 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0264-0473

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Article
Publication date: 9 February 2015

Joseph Bahun and Walter E. Block

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the viability of free market environmentalism. This is the philosophy that has as its basic premise the view that laissez faire…

210

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the viability of free market environmentalism. This is the philosophy that has as its basic premise the view that laissez faire capitalism and concomitant private property rights, far from being an impediment to the well-functioning of the environment, are actually the last best hope for this desiderata.

Design/methodology/approach

The prairie dog and the ferret are not the species usually associated with concern over endangerment. Typically, it is the whale, the elephant and the rhino that are subjected to such an analysis. The authors approach this issue through the “eyeglasses” of the economist who sees value in our free enterprise institutions.

Findings

The authors found that the tragedy of the commons works in this case as it does in all other relevant venues: if land is not privately held, but rather open to all, a tragedy occurs: there is economics misallocation and a too swift use of resources compared to the optimal situation.

Originality/value

The authors know of no other examination of the prairie dog and the ferret in the Conata Basin. This is an important case in point in amassing evidence of the workings of the private property system vis-à-vis the environment.

Details

Humanomics, vol. 31 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0828-8666

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Article
Publication date: 1 October 1953

A pet phrase of a competent teacher of mathematics years ago was: “Figures by themselves have no meaning.” And everyone knows that statistics are deceitful things. Mr. W…

18

Abstract

A pet phrase of a competent teacher of mathematics years ago was: “Figures by themselves have no meaning.” And everyone knows that statistics are deceitful things. Mr. W. Johnston's batting average in this country this year was 102, although his position in the batting order was never higher than number 11. He is reported indeed to have said of himself: “I am the ferret of the Australian team; they put me in after the rabbits.” But his position at the head of the batting averages could lead to a preposterously erroneous conclusion.

Details

British Food Journal, vol. 55 no. 10
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0007-070X

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Article
Publication date: 11 June 2024

Tajana Čop and Mario Njavro

Understanding farmer and consumer behavior is essential to the successful implementation of behavior change interventions. The purpose of this study is to summarize existing…

274

Abstract

Purpose

Understanding farmer and consumer behavior is essential to the successful implementation of behavior change interventions. The purpose of this study is to summarize existing research, provide a comprehensive overview of nudge interventions, and identify important trends in behavioral agricultural economics. Research on nudge interventions can help policymakers encourage farmers and consumers to change their behavior in desired direction like switching to organic agriculture or eco-labeled products and promote innovation in sustainable agriculture.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper contains a bibliometric analysis of nudge research in general and agricultural economics as well as a literature review of the 53 empirical studies on nudge interventions between 2003 and 2023.

Findings

The frequency of nudge research in all research fields and in agricultural economics has increased over the years. This study summarizes nudge interventions that can be used by farmers and consumers on a variety of agricultural economic issues. Information, social norms, and social comparison as nudge interventions are most prominent in the publications, while green nudges have not been researched to a greater extent.

Originality/value

This study provides a comprehensive overview of nudge research in agricultural economics with potential for theoretical and policy implications. It highlights potential nudge interventions among farmers and consumers that can be applied in practices.

Details

China Agricultural Economic Review, vol. 16 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1756-137X

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 1 January 1984

WM. JR. STEWART MOUNTS and CLIFFORD B. SOWELL

In introductory macroeconomics students first learn of the role of the Federal Reserve in the inflationary scheme of things. This usually involves a discussion of monetary policy…

16

Abstract

In introductory macroeconomics students first learn of the role of the Federal Reserve in the inflationary scheme of things. This usually involves a discussion of monetary policy and, in general, its recent failings. At lecture's end, the most pessimistic student (probably the most attentive) queries whether there has ever been, in the eyes of the profession, a good chairman given his significant role in monetary discipline. This lecture is given near the end of the term by which time students have tired of the answer ‘it depends’ or ‘yes and no’ or ‘normative questions have many answers,’ and also by which time the instructor has tired of answering ‘it depends’ or ‘yes and no’ or ‘normative questions have many answers.’ Thus, a likely reply might be, “Since the fifties, and judging by each chairman's inflation record, one might rank Martin first, Burns second, and Miller third. The jury is still out on Volcker.” (The latter remark is made to keep the student from adopting a doomsday attitude prior to the final exam.) The student basks in the precision, and acts as if his utility has been maximized by appearing tangential.

Details

Studies in Economics and Finance, vol. 8 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1086-7376

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Article
Publication date: 13 June 2016

Marwa Naili, Anja Habacha Chaibi and Henda Hajjami Ben Ghezala

Topic segmentation is one of the active research fields in natural language processing. Also, many topic segmenters have been proposed. However, the current challenge of…

172

Abstract

Purpose

Topic segmentation is one of the active research fields in natural language processing. Also, many topic segmenters have been proposed. However, the current challenge of researchers is the improvement of these segmenters by using external resources. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to integrate study and evaluate a new external semantic resource in topic segmentation.

Design/methodology/approach

New topic segmenters (TSS-Onto and TSB-Onto) are proposed based on the two well-known segmenters C99 and TextTiling. The proposed segmenters integrate semantic knowledge to the segmentation process by using a domain ontology as an external resource. Subsequently, an evaluation is made to study the effect of this resource on the quality of topic segmentation along with a comparative study with related works.

Findings

Based on this study, the authors showed that adding semantic knowledge, which is extracted from a domain ontology, improves the quality of topic segmentation. Moreover, TSS-Ont outperforms TSB-Ont in terms of quality of topic segmentation.

Research limitations/implications

The main limitation of this study is the used test corpus for the evaluation which is not a benchmark. However, we used a collection of scientific papers from well-known digital libraries (ArXiv and ACM).

Practical implications

The proposed topic segmenters can be useful in different NLP applications such as information retrieval and text summarizing.

Originality/value

The primary original contribution of this paper is the improvement of topic segmentation based on semantic knowledge. This knowledge is extracted from an ontological external resource.

Details

International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, vol. 9 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1756-378X

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 1 May 1993

Bristol Voss

CORPORATE STRATEGISTS ARE NOT CELEBRITIES. They're rarely household names. But, increasingly, it's their work that is shaping America's corporations—allowing them to compete in a…

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Abstract

CORPORATE STRATEGISTS ARE NOT CELEBRITIES. They're rarely household names. But, increasingly, it's their work that is shaping America's corporations—allowing them to compete in a decade that's turning out to be far more challenging, stressful, and, nonetheless, exciting than we'd expected. In an effort to ferret out strategic planning's unsung heroes, to put titles to challenges, names to titles, and faces to names, we cast a wide net. We scoured the business press. We checked in with our advisory board as well as our regular and occasional contributors. We asked subscribers, Wall Street analysts, academics, and even the people we interviewed for other articles. In particular, we were looking for individuals whose names are not familiar, who bring unusual backgrounds to their tasks, who have recently taken on new assignments, or who, because of the company they work for, face remarkable, difficult, and unusual challenges. According to our sources, those strategists we found, whose names, titles, and challenges appear on the next four pages, share a unique capacity for visualizing where they want to be, for solving problems, and then for doing what is necessary to carry their visions through. We'll be charting their success—watch for updates in JBS as the year goes on.

Details

Journal of Business Strategy, vol. 14 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0275-6668

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