Books on the topic 'Cause-effect analysis'

The multidimensional open epistemological active network MOGAN is the basis for the transition to a qualitatively new level of creating logical artificial intelligence. Mivar databases and rules became the foundation for the creation of MOGAN. The results of the analysis and generalization of data representation structures of various data models are presented: from relational to "Entity — Relationship" (ER-model). On the basis of this generalization, a new model of data and rules is created: the mivar information space "Thing-Property-Relation". The logic-computational processing of data in this new model of data and rules is shown, which has linear computational complexity relative to the number of rules. MOGAN is a development of Rule - Based Systems and allows you to quickly and easily design algorithms and work with logical reasoning in the "If..., Then..." format. An example of creating a mivar expert system for solving problems in the model area "Geometry"is given. Mivar databases and rules can be used to model cause-and-effect relationships in different subject areas and to create knowledge bases of new-generation applied artificial intelligence systems and real-time mivar expert systems with the transition to"Big Knowledge". The textbook in the field of training "Computer Science and Computer Engineering" is intended for students, bachelors, undergraduates, postgraduates studying artificial intelligence methods used in information processing and management systems, as well as for users and specialists who create mivar knowledge models, expert systems, automated control systems and decision support systems. Keywords: cybernetics, artificial intelligence, mivar, mivar networks, databases, data models, expert system, intelligent systems, multidimensional open epistemological active network, MOGAN, MIPRA, KESMI, Wi!Mi, Razumator, knowledge bases, knowledge graphs, knowledge networks, Big knowledge, products, logical inference, decision support systems, decision-making systems, autonomous robots, recommendation systems, universal knowledge tools, expert system designers, logical artificial intelligence.

The monograph examines the historical and economic aspects of state regulation of the economy, and concludes that the national results of identical economic policies pursued by individual countries at different stages of development are heterogeneous. The necessity of improving the mechanism of centralized influence on economic activity in the Russian Federation by finding the optimal combination of various tools, taking into account the specifics of state regulation of the oil and gas complex as a structural element of the national economy, is proved. The article examines the world experience of oil-producing countries with a developed market structure, analyzes the cause-and-effect relationships between global processes on the world energy market and the internal economic specifics that arose during the modernization of production and the reform of the regulatory mechanism of the Russian oil and gas complex. It is recommended to everyone who is interested in the issues of state regulation of the economy and the development of the domestic oil and gas sector: state civil servants working in the fuel and energy sector, managers and employees of oil and gas enterprises, teachers, doctoral students, postgraduates and students.

When dealing with probability in causal claims, conditional reasoning seems unavoidable since we will want to know the probability of an effect, if the cause occurs. Conditional probability is typically defined in terms of the ratio of the unconditional probabilities of the elements. But when it comes to cause and effect, there are good reasons to think that this does not hold and that the conditional probability is primitive. It can be shown that a number of problematic but valid inferences from classical logic reproduce in the calculation of conditional probability if the ratio analysis is employed. The primitivist response is to take the conditional connection as unanalysable.

Metaphysicians often focus on what is vertically fundamental, appealing to grounding or truth-making, rather than what is horizontally fundamental: what must be common to any metaphysical picture of the universe. There is a case for causation being one such feature. But how should it be characterized? A revised semantics for counterfactuals provides the basis for a new counterfactual analysis of causation that is compatible with Humean supervenience but also appropriate for a non-Humean metaphysical framework. Causes (independently of their competitors) both make the chance of an effect very much greater than its mean background chance in the circumstances and actually influences the probability of the effect in this way at the time at which the effect occurred via a complete causal chain. Causation understood in this way is a non-transitive relation. It is neutral over the metaphysics of causes and effects but allows a natural way for events to be understood as one fundamental type of causation, the other being property causation. Although negative causal statements are true, there are no cases of negative causation. The analysis explains how causation involving substantial processes is only one variety of causation, others include double prevention. It allows for a variety of micro- and macro-properties to be the basis of the difference between cause and effect. Laws are patterns of causation realized in different ways in different metaphysical pictures. The analysis of causation characterizes a horizontally fundamental property whose modal character depends upon its different realizations.

This chapter introduces readers to the narrative traditions in the Old Testament, their contexts, and basic perspectives in reading them. They exist as separate books and as parts of others books in the OT and they function as explanations for ancient Israel’s identity. Several characteristics of narrative analysis are identified as aids in reading these texts, including plot, character, point of view, and style. And some broad characteristics of Hebrew narrative style are identified, including the preference for speech and the omniscience of the author in presenting cause and effect. The broader historical setting of ancient Israel is sketched as necessary background for interpreting Old Testament narratives.

The generally accepted explanation of the Hermann grid illusion is Baumgartner’s hypothesis that the illusory effect is generated by the response of retinal ganglion cells with concentric ON-OFF or OFF-ON receptive fields. To challenge this explanation, some simple distortions to the grid lines were introduced that make the illusion disappear totally, while all preconditions of Baumgartner’s hypothesis remained unchanged. Psychophysical experiments in which the distortion tolerance was measured showed the level of distortion at which the illusion disappears at a given type of distortion for a given subject. Statistical analysis shows that the distortion tolerance is independent of grid-line width within a wide range and of the type of distortion, except when one side of each line remains straight. The conclusion is the main cause of the Hermann grid illusion is the straightness of the edges of the grid lines. Similar results have been obtained in the scintillating grid.

This chapter discusses diagnostic reasoning from the perspective of causal inference. The computational framework that provides the foundation for the analyses—probabilistic inference over graphical causal structures—can be used to implement different models that share the assumption that diagnostic inferences are guided and constrained by causal considerations. This approach has provided many critical insights, with respect to both normative and empirical issues. For instance, taking into account uncertainty about causal structures can entail diagnostic judgments that do not reflect the empirical conditional probability of cause given effect in the data, the classic, purely statistical norm. The chapter first discusses elemental diagnostic inference from a single effect to a single cause, then examines more complex diagnostic inferences involving multiple causes and effects, and concludes with information acquisition in diagnostic reasoning, discussing different ways of quantifying the diagnostic value of information and how people decide which information is diagnostically relevant.

This work studies the history of two major Scottish shipbuilding firms based on the River Clyde - Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company and Lithgows Limited. It traces each firm’s origin, success, decline, and collapse, and places the events into the historical context of maritime Britain. The aim is to enhance the academic understanding of the cause and effect of the decline of the British shipbuilding industry, delving beyond the factors of poor industrial relations, international market conditions, and entrepreneurial failure in search of further answers. As a private company, Lithgows Limited provides useful insights into company management outside of state control. The authors base their analysis on the catalogued volumes of Scotts and Lithgows records, though due to the large number of gaps in the data, they also conducted interviews with major players in each company from the post-war period. Public, business, and banking records also provide supplementary material. The book is separated into eight chapters, plus a concluding ninth, an appendix listing ships built by Scott Lithgow Limited between 1970-1987, and a select bibliography.

In Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, Edouard Machery argues that resolving many traditional and contemporary philosophical issues is beyond our epistemic reach and that philosophy should reorient itself toward more humble, but ultimately more important intellectual endeavors. Attempts to resolve such issues are modally immodest: Any resolution would require an epistemic access to metaphysical possibilities and necessities, which, Edouard Machery argues, we do not have. In effect, then, Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds defends a form of modal skepticism. The book assesses the main philosophical method for acquiring the modal knowledge that the resolution of modally immodest philosophical issues turns on: the method of cases, that is, the consideration of actual or hypothetical situations (which cases or thought experiments describe) in order to determine what facts hold in these situations. Canvassing the extensive work done by experimental philosophers over the last fifteen years, Edouard Machery shows that the method of cases is unreliable and should be rejected. Importantly, the dismissal of modally immodest philosophical issues is no cause for despair: Many important philosophical issues remain within our epistemic reach. In particular, reorienting the course of philosophy would free time and resources for bringing back to prominence a once-central intellectual endeavor: conceptual analysis.

Some dispositions are causally relevant to or causally efficacious for their manifestations. But according to the Inert Dispositions Thesis, dispositions are causally inert. Some philosophers claim that grounded dispositions are causally impotent. According to Analyticity Arguments, the analytic connection between a disposition term and a manifestation term indicates that there is no causal connection between their referents. According to Independence Arguments, cause and effect must be independent in a way that dispositions and manifestation are not. According to Exclusion Arguments, a disposition’s causal basis causally explains its manifestation, leaving no causal work for the disposition to do. These arguments for the Inert Dispositions Thesis do not succeed. Higher-level, grounded dispositions can be causally efficacious with respect to their manifestations.

This chapter considers the types of weapon that are the subject of certain specific Protocols under the CCW. The text of each of these CCW Protocols is analysed to determine the range of weapons and activities covered by the instrument and to interpret the obligations that the Protocol introduces. The first Protocol discussed is the Protocol on Non-Detectable Fragments, which prohibits the use of any weapon the primary effect of which is to injure by fragments which in the human body escape detection by X-rays. The chapter then turns to the Incendiary Weapons Protocol, which prohibits certain activities altogether while limiting the circumstances in which others may be lawfully undertaken. The discussion concludes with an overview of the Laser Weapons Protocol, whose main operative provision is to prohibit the employment of laser weapons specifically designed as a combat function to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision.

Any public debate about air pollution starts with the premise that air pollution cannot be good for you, so we should have less of it. However, it is much more difficult to determine how much is dangerous, and even more difficult to decide how much we are willing to pay for improvements in measured air pollution. Recent UK estimates suggest that fine particulate pollution causes about 6500 deaths per year, although it is not clear how many years of life are lost as a result. Some deaths may just be brought forward by a few days or weeks, while others may be truly premature. Globally, household pollution from cooking fuels may cause up to two million premature deaths per year in the developing world. The hazards of black smoke air pollution have been known since antiquity. The first descriptions of deaths caused by air pollution are those recorded after the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. In modern times, the infamous smogs of the early twentieth century in Belgium and London were clearly shown to trigger deaths in people with chronic bronchitis and heart disease. In mechanistic terms, black smoke and sulphur dioxide generated from industrial processes and domestic coal burning cause airway inflammation, exacerbation of chronic bronchitis, and consequent heart failure. Epidemiological analysis has confirmed that the deaths included both those who were likely to have died soon anyway and those who might well have survived for months or years if the pollution event had not occurred. Clean air legislation has dramatically reduced the levels of these traditional pollutants in the West, although these pollutants are still important in China, and smoke from solid cooking fuel continues to take a heavy toll amongst women in less developed parts of the world. New forms of air pollution have emerged, principally due to the increase in motor vehicle traffic since the 1950s. The combination of fine particulates and ground-level ozone causes ‘summer smogs’ which intensify over cities during summer periods of high barometric pressure. In Los Angeles and Mexico City, ozone concentrations commonly reach levels which are associated with adverse respiratory effects in normal and asthmatic subjects. Ozone directly affects the airways, causing reduced inspiratory capacity. This effect is more marked in patients with asthma and is clinically important, since epidemiological studies have found linear associations between ozone concentrations and admission rates for asthma and related respiratory diseases. Ozone induces an acute neutrophilic inflammatory response in both human and animal airways, together with release of chemokines (e.g. interleukin 8 and growth-related oncogene-alpha). Nitrogen oxides have less direct effect on human airways, but they increase the response to allergen challenge in patients with atopic asthma. Nitrogen oxide exposure also increases the risk of becoming ill after exposure to influenza. Alveolar macrophages are less able to inactivate influenza viruses and this leads to an increased probability of infection after experimental exposure to influenza. In the last two decades, major concerns have been raised about the effects of fine particulates. An association between fine particulate levels and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality and morbidity was first reported in 1993 and has since been confirmed in several other countries. Globally, about 90% of airborne particles are formed naturally, from sea spray, dust storms, volcanoes, and burning grass and forests. Human activity accounts for about 10% of aerosols (in terms of mass). This comes from transport, power stations, and various industrial processes. Diesel exhaust is the principal source of fine particulate pollution in Europe, while sea spray is the principal source in California, and agricultural activity is a major contributor in inland areas of the US. Dust storms are important sources in the Sahara, the Middle East, and parts of China. The mechanism of adverse health effects remains unclear but, unlike the case for ozone and nitrogen oxides, there is no safe threshold for the health effects of particulates. Since the 1990s, tax measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions have led to a rapid rise in the proportion of new cars with diesel engines. In the UK, this rose from 4% in 1990 to one-third of new cars in 2004 while, in France, over half of new vehicles have diesel engines. Diesel exhaust particles may increase the risk of sensitization to airborne allergens and cause airways inflammation both in vitro and in vivo. Extensive epidemiological work has confirmed that there is an association between increased exposure to environmental fine particulates and death from cardiovascular causes. Various mechanisms have been proposed: cardiac rhythm disturbance seems the most likely at present. It has also been proposed that high numbers of ultrafine particles may cause alveolar inflammation which then exacerbates preexisting cardiac and pulmonary disease. In support of this hypothesis, the metal content of ultrafine particles induces oxidative stress when alveolar macrophages are exposed to particles in vitro. While this is a plausible mechanism, in epidemiological studies it is difficult to separate the effects of ultrafine particles from those of other traffic-related pollutants.