Collins und Akritas (1976) have described the Descartes method for isolating the real roots of an integer polynomial in one variable. This method recursively subdivides an initial interval until Descartes’ Rule of Signs indicates that all roots have been isolated. The partial converse of Descartes’ Rule by Obreshkoff (1952) in conjunction with the bound of Mahler (1964) and Davenport (1985) lea...

Descartes's distinction between material and thinking substance gives rise to a question both about our knowledge of the external world and about our knowledge of another mind. Descartes says surprinsingly little about this second question. In the Second Meditation he writes of our (single) judgement that the figures outside his window are men and not automatic machines. It is argued in this pa...

Let L be any number field or p-adic field and consider F := (f1, . . . , fk) where fi∈L[x 1 , . . . , x±1 n ]\{0} for all i and there are exactly μ distinct exponent vectors appearing in f1, . . . , fk. We prove that F has no more than 1+ ( ln(μ− n+ 1)min{1,n−1}(μ− n)2 log μ )n geometrically isolated roots in Ln, where l is an explicit and effectively computable constant depending only on L. Th...

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her co-authors have written a densely argued book about one of the most fascinating topics in semiotics “How do we recognize the presence of language?”. This encompasses ‘What is Language? What is its function? and where does it come from in terms of mentation?’. The major study subject of this book, Apes Language and the Human Mind, is a Bonobo named Kanzi who is widely...

Descartes talks about the presence of immaterial soul in material body multiple places his writings and letters. Interpreters do not agree whether he had mind substantial holenmeric or mere operational powers soul. I discuss both views this paper, argue that neither is plausible. The former turns out to be poorly motivated context Descartes?s other metaphysical commitments insufficiently textua...

Tatiana Bedarida,* Stephanie Baron,* Emilie Vessieres, Francoise Vibert, Audrey Ayer, Carmen Marchiol-Fournigault, Daniel Henrion, Jean-Louis Paul, Florence Noble, Jean-Louis Golmard, Jean-Louis Beaudeux, Charles-Henry Cottart, and Valerie Nivet-Antoine Unite Mixte de Recherche-S 1140 Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Faculty of Pharmacy, Paris Descartes University, Par...

Ever since the first generation Cartesian Gerauld de Cordemoy wrote a selfstanding book dedicated to the problem of other minds philosophers have proceeded as though Descartes’ work entails some version of the problem. In this paper I evaluate Descartes’ own contribution to creating and answering skepticism about other minds. It is my contention, first, that for most of his working life Descart...

We investigate the Oja sign covariance matrix (Oja SCM) for estimating partial correlations in multivariate data. The Oja SCM estimates directly a multiple of the precision matrix and is based on the concept of Oja signs, which generalise the univariate sign function and obey some form of affine equivariance property. We compare it to the classical MLE as well as to estimates based on two alter...

This paper deals with the problem of finding sign occurrences in a sign language (SL) video. It begins with an analysis of sign models and the way they can take into account the sign variability. Then, we review the most popular technics dedicated to automatic sign language processing and we focus on their adaptation to model sign variability. We present a new method to provide a parametric des...

Alexandra Rolland, Institut de Physique du Globe, Université de Strasbourg, 5 rue René Descartes, 67084 cedex, Strasbourg, France ([email protected]) Renaud Toussaint, Institut de Physique du Globe, Université de Strasbourg, 5 rue René Descartes, 67084 cedex, Strasbourg, France ([email protected]) Patrick Baud, Institut de Physique du Globe, Université de Strasbourg, 5 rue ...