Some useful topological properties of the moment space of the family of distributions with increasing failure rates are established. These results are exploited to obtain tight inequalities for moments of such distributions and also to derive some interesting facts concerning weak convergence within this family.

Many epistemologists have responded to the lottery paradox by proposing formal rules according to which high probability defeasibly warrants acceptance. Douven and Williamson (2006) present an ingenious argument purporting to show that such rules invariably trivialise, in that they reduce to the claim that a probability of 1 warrants acceptance. Douven and Williamson’s argument does, however, r...

In the project OASIS – Playful Spaces for Learning and Collaboration at Work (2014–2015), funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund, the experience of playfulness and the incentives and thresholds of adult play at the workplace were examined. The research focused on a single academic work community, and it was closely connected to research enabled by OASIS, an informal social space for studen...

We study the space of all extensions of a real hyperplane arrangement by a new pseudo-hyperplane, and, more generally, of an oriented matroid by a new element. The question whether this space has the homotopy type of a sphere is a special case of the “Generalized Baues Problem” of Billera, Kapranov & Sturmfels, via the Bohne-Dress Theorem on zonotopal tilings. We prove that the extension space ...

Open environments present an attention management challenge for conversational systems. We describe a kiosk system (based on Ravenclaw–Olympus) that uses simple auditory and visual information to interpret human presence and manage the system’s attention. The system robustly differentiates intended interactions from unintended ones at an accuracy of 93% and provides similar task completion rate...

Open urban public spaces comprise an important element for the development of social, cultural and economic activities of the population in the modern cities. These spaces are also considered regulators of the region’s climate conditions, providing better thermal, visual and auditory conditions which can be optimized by the application of appropriate strategies of bioclimatic design. The paper ...

Flows of cells growing as a quasimonolayer in a confined space can exhibit streaming, with narrow streams of fast-moving cells flowing around clusters of slowly moving cells. We observed and analyzed this phenomenon experimentally for E. coli bacteria proliferating in a microfluidic cell trap using time-lapse microscopy. We also performed continuum modeling and discrete-element simulations to e...

The diffusion of a pulse of small grains in an horizontal rotating drum is studied through discrete elements methods simulations. We present a theoretical analysis of the diffusion process in a one-dimensional confined space in order to elucidate the effect of the confining end-plate of the drum. We then show that the diffusion is neither subdiffusive nor superdiffusive but normal. This is demo...

This contribution gives an overview about different approaches to semantic spaces. It is not a exhaustive survey, but rather a personal view on different approaches which use metric spaces for the representation of meanings of linguistic units. The aim is to demonstrate the similarities of apparently different approaches and to inspire the generalisation of semantic spaces tailored to the repre...