1. a sociological understanding of contemporary social problems and accurate information about them; 2. awareness of their social origins, collective definition, and how they might be effectively treated; 3. discernment on the importance of sociological theory, methods, and multilevel analyses; 4. a social ethics approach to public policy addressing social problems; 5. social activism—a commitm...

We generalize the TBM (transferable belief model) to the case where the frame of discernment is the extended set of real numbersR = [−∞,∞], under the assumptions that ‘masses’ can only be given to intervals. Masses become densities, belief functions, plausibility functions and commonality functions become integrals of these densities and pignistic probabilities become pignistic densities. The m...

The concept of movable evidence masses that flow from supersets to subsets as specified by experts represents a suitable framework for reasoning under uncertainty. The mass flow is controlled by specialization matrices. New evidence is integrated into the frame of discernment by conditioning or revision (Dempster's rule of conditioning), for which special specialization matrices exist. Even som...

Interest in the analysis of networks has grown rapidly in the new millennium. Consequently, we promote renewed attention to a certain methodological approach introduced in 1974. Over the succeeding decade, this two-stage–double-standardization and hierarchical clustering (single-linkagelike)–procedure was applied to a wide variety of weighted, directed networks of a socioeconomic nature, freque...

Endomyocardiofibrosis is a restrictive cardiomyopathy characterized by fibrotic involvement of the endocardium and adjacent myocardium, and by diastolic dysfunction caused by changes in distensibility making ventricular filling inadequate while preserving the systolic function. Clinically, it appears as heart failure, but etiological symptomatic discernment, suspicion and a clinical examination...

The educational challenge of polysemy of words used both in non-formal (every-day) and scientific formal languages is addressed. An analysing tool, the triadic approach, has been elaborated to make this kind of polysemy of words explicit by discerning three different sets of meaning: non-formal, a scientific quality and a physical quantity, respectively. The discernment process is a particular ...

In collected data information about a single property may be presented with variable resolution and focus. The present paper describes how hierarchically structured attribute domains support the transfer of knowledge between alternative frames of discernment allowing to flexibly serve information needs and facilitate the processing of inhomogeneous data. The approach is later extended to accomm...