Everyday inductive inferences are often guided by rich background knowledge. Formal models of induction should aim to incorporate this knowledge, and should explain how different kinds of knowledge lead to the distinctive patterns of reasoning found in different inductive contexts. We present a Bayesian framework that attempts to meet both goals and describe four applications of the framework: ...

Considering each lattice site with a spin occupied and the lattice site without a spin unoccupied, we could formally show that the partition functions of many Ising-like spin models are the generating functions of correlated percolation models. Each correlated percolation model has the same critical properties as the corresponding spin model. From such connections, we could physically understan...

An insect-based algorithm inspired by the division of labor in insect colonies is proposed and applied to the solution of an online scheduling problem. A painting facility is considered for illustrating the problem: Trucks leave an assembly line to get painted in painting booths. The goal is to minimize the makespan, that is, the time needed for painting all given trucks. In this paper we addre...

We report femtosecond laser micromachining of micron-size curved structures using tailored accelerating beams. We report surface curvatures as small as 70 μm in both diamond and silicon, which demonstrates the wide applicability of the technique to materials that are optically transparent or opaque at the pump laser wavelength. We also report the machining of curved trenches in silicon. Our res...

A complex contagion is an infectious process in which individuals may require multiple transmissions before changing state. These are used to model behaviours if an individual only adopts a particular behaviour after perceiving a consensus among others. We may think of individuals as beginning inactive and becoming active once they are contacted by a sufficient number of active partners. These ...

The financial crisis has decreased the opportunities of small businesses to acquire financing through conventional financial actors, such as commercial banks. This credit constraint is partly the reason for the emergence of new alternatives of financing, in addition to the spreading opportunities for communication and secure financial transfer through Internet. One of the most interesting venue...

Recurrence-plot-based recurrence networks are an approach used to analyze time series using a complex networks theory. In both approaches – recurrence plots and recurrence networks –, a threshold to identify recurrent states is required. The selection of the threshold is important in order to avoid bias of the recurrence network results. In this paper, we propose a novel method to choose a recu...

A formalization of the Threshold Theory, called the Probabilistic Threshold Model, is introduced. According to the Threshold Theory semantic categorization decisions come about through the placement of a threshold criterion along a dimension that represents items’ similarity to the category representation. The adequacy of this theory is assessed by applying the Probabilistic Threshold Model to ...

There has been a great deal of effort to try to model social influence-including the spread of behavior, norms, and ideas-on networks. Most models of social influence tend to assume that individuals react to changes in the states of their neighbors without any time delay, but this is often not true in social contexts, where (for various reasons) different agents can have different response time...

How to establish basic granules of knowledge is a fundamental issue for data mining from incomplete decision tables. In the existing methods, basic granules under similarity relation contain too many objects and disturb the later knowledge mining, while granules under limited similarity relation, although simplifying the granules through introducing a limited threshold on two objects satisfying...