Beautiful and Damned

“Damned by Faint Praise”: A Bayesian account

“Damned by Faint Praise” is the phenomenon whereby weak positive information leads to a negative change in belief. However, in a Bayesian model of belief revision positive information can seemingly only exert a positive change in belief. We introduce a version of Bayes’ Theorem incorporating the concept of epistemic closure. This reformalization is able to predict the conditions under which a ‘...

Indonesia's New Anti-Terrorism Law: Damned if you Do, Damned if you Don't

Government Regulations in Lieu of Law (Peraturan Pemerintah Pengganti Undang-Undang) or Perpu derive their authority the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia (as amended). Although under Article 20 lawmaking is the exclusive right of the DPR (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, People's Representative Assembly) or legislature, Article 22 provides, that "in the event of a compelling emergency", t...

Simulation of Large Spiking Neural Networks on Distributed Architectures, The "DAMNED" Simulator

This paper presents a spiking neural network simulator suitable for biologically plausible large neural networks, named DAMNED for “Distributed And Multi-threaded Neural Event-Driven”. The simulator is designed to run efficiently on a variety of hardware. DAMNED makes use of multi-threaded programming and non-blocking communications in order to optimize communications and computations overlap. ...

Publish or be damned.

The DAMNED Simulator for Implementing a Dynamic Model of the Network Controlling Saccadic Eye Movements

The DAMNED simulator is a Distributed And Multithreaded Neural Event-Driven framework designed for implementing Spiking Neuron Networks (SNNs). This paper shows the power of DAMNED for simulating the temporal dynamics of a biologically inspired model of the system controlling saccadic eye movements. A fundamental neural structure for the saccade generation is the Superior Colliculus (SC). The p...