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The claim that episodic memory is immune to error through misidentification enjoys continuing popularity in philosophy. Psychological research on observer memory—usually defined as occurring when one remembers an event from a point of view other than that that from which he originally experienced it—would seem, on the face of it, to undermine the IEM claim. Relying on a certain view of memory content, Fernández (Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02050-3, forthcoming), however, has provided an ingenious argument for the view that it does not. This paper reconstructs Fernández' argument and shows that there is reason to reject the definition of observer memory and the view of memory content on which it relies. Once these are rejected, it turns out that observer memory does indeed imply that the IEM claim is false. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of IUG Journal of Islamic Studies is the property of Islamic University of Gaza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A pair of studies demonstrates that simply asking children to make a blatantly false accusation in the guise of helping others can result in both immediate and long-term false claims. In the pilot study, the initial willingness to make a blatantly false statement was associated with some children making false statements a week later despite being told that the first interviewer had made mistakes during the initial interview. On a positive note, the majority of participants accurately stated that they did not have first-hand knowledge of their accusation's accuracy. Across both studies, the rate of false accusation rates was high. The main experiment demonstrated that children who were young, possessed the lowest verbal intelligence or who were from the lowest SES homes made the most accusations. These findings illustrate not only the dangers of encouraging children to make false statements, but the ease and durability of making such false statements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an article published in an open-access journal, (Pennebaker et al. PLoS One, 8(11), e79774, 2013) reported that an innovative computer-based system that included daily online testing resulted in better student performance in other concurrent courses and a reduction in achievement gaps between lower and upper middle-class students. This article has had high impact, not only in terms of citations, but it also launched a multimillion-dollar university project and numerous synchronous massive online courses (SMOCs). In this study, I present a closer look at the data used in the Pennebaker et al. study. As in many cases of false claims, threats to internal validity were not adequately addressed. Student performance increases in other courses can be explained entirely by selection bias, whereas achievement gap reductions may be explained by differential attrition. It is hoped that the findings reported in this paper will inform future decisions regarding SMOC courses. More importantly, our field needs watchdogs who expose such unsupported extravagant claims—especially those appearing in pay-to-publish journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2016 US federal election, political actors have weaponized online fake news as a means of gaining electoral advantage (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019). To advance understandings of the actors and methods involved in perpetuating fake news, this article focuses on an Australian story that circulated on and offline through different discourses during the 2019 federal election. We use content analyses of 100,000 media articles and eight million Facebook posts to trace false claims that the centre-left Labor party would introduce an inheritance tax dubbed a 'death tax' if it won office. To understand this evolution of 'death tax' discourse on and offline – and its weaponization by various actors – we draw from existing theorems of agenda setting, backfire effects, and propose our own recursion theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talk of fraud dominated President Donald J. Trump's campaign and time in office. In this article, we explore whether members of Congress followed Trump's lead in discussing all types of fraud, including electoral fraud as well as fraud, waste, and abuse. Using a unique dataset of the universe of congressional electronic newsletters from 2010 to 2021, we show that Republicans wrote to constituents about fraud much more than Democrats, especially about electoral fraud after Trump's election, but it was Democrats who used angrier rhetoric to discuss fraud, a check on the President and many of the false claims about voter fraud in 2016 and 2020. These findings show an important aspect of the inter-party and inter-branch dynamics at play during Trump's presidency; once keen to focus on fraud, waste and abuse in government congressional Republican attention shifted once the head of the executive branch was a co-partisan to parroting the claims of electoral and voter fraud made by the President. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Shipin Kexue/ Food Science is the property of Food Science Editorial Department and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We examine the role of overconfidence in news judgment using two large nationally representative survey samples. First, we show that three in four Americans overestimate their relative ability to distinguish between legitimate and false news headlines; respondents place themselves 22 percentiles higher than warranted on average. This overconfidence is, in turn, correlated with consequential differences in real-world beliefs and behavior. We show that overconfident individuals are more likely to visit untrustworthy websites in behavioral data; to fail to successfully distinguish between true and false claims about current events in survey questions; and to report greater willingness to like or share false content on social media, especially when it is politically congenial. In all, these results paint a worrying picture: The individuals who are least equipped to identify false news content are also the least aware of their own limitations and, therefore, more susceptible to believing it and spreading it further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I evaluate the claim that the equivalence of multiple intensionally distinct definitions of random sequence provides evidence for the claim that these definitions capture the intuitive conception of randomness, concluding that the former claim is false. I then develop an alternative account of the significance of randomness-theoretic equivalence results, arguing that they are instances of a phenomenon I refer to as schematic equivalence. On my account, this alternative approach has the virtue of providing the plurality of definitions of randomness with conceptual unity and a rationale for certain investigations that are carried out in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cumhuriyet Ilahiyat Dergisi / Cumhuriyet Theology Journal is the property of Cumhuriyet Universitesi, Ilahiyat Fakultesi / Cumhuriyet University, Faculty of Theology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

False quality claims have recently rocked the automobile industry. To promote customer demand while seemingly complying with regulations, manufacturers may cheat even at the risk of incurring severe penalties. As a result, the production horizon becomes uncertain. Assuming it is socially critical to enforce quality standards (e.g., specific emission levels or safety levels for food, drugs, or transportation), we study dynamic production policies under the threat of penalties and assess when a false quality claim can be optimal for the firm. We find that regardless of the specific form of a convex penalty function, the production rate will gradually decrease to slow down the increase in the probability of getting caught. We show that the government or regulatory department can determine a minimal finite penalty to prevent the manufacturer from cheating. In the context of an underlying supply chain, we show that vertical competition between the manufacturer and its suppliers can play a socially positive role by reducing the batch produced under a false quality claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discretely-constrained Nash-Cournot games have attracted attention as they arise in various competitive energy production settings in which players must make one or more discrete decisions. Gabriel et al. (Netw Spat Econ 13(3):307–326 2013) claim that the set of equilibria to a discretely-constrained Nash-Cournot game coincides with the set of solutions to a corresponding discretely-constrained mixed complementarity problem. We show that one direction of this claim is false by providing counterexamples to show that there exist solutions to the discretely-constrained Nash-Cournot game that do not coincide with solutions to the discretely-constrained mixed complementarity problem. The updated theorem in this note formally states that every solution to the discretely-constrained mixed complementarity problem is a solution to the discretely-constrained Nash-Cournot game, but not vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research indicated that corrective information can sometimes provoke a so-called "backfire effect" in which respondents more strongly endorsed a misperception about a controversial political or scientific issue when their beliefs or predispositions were challenged. I show how subsequent research and media coverage seized on this finding, distorting its generality and exaggerating its role relative to other factors in explaining the durability of political misperceptions. To the contrary, an emerging research consensus finds that corrective information is typically at least somewhat effective at increasing belief accuracy when received by respondents. However, the research that I review suggests that the accuracy-increasing effects of corrective information like fact checks often do not last or accumulate; instead, they frequently seem to decay or be overwhelmed by cues from elites and the media promoting more congenial but less accurate claims. As a result, misperceptions typically persist in public opinion for years after they have been debunked. Given these realities, the primary challenge for scientific communication is not to prevent backfire effects but instead, to understand how to target corrective information better and to make it more effective. Ultimately, however, the best approach is to disrupt the formation of linkages between group identities and false claims and to reduce the flow of cues reinforcing those claims from elites and the media. Doing so will require a shift from a strategy focused on providing information to the public to one that considers the roles of intermediaries in forming and maintaining belief systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the False Claims Act's (FCA) socially beneficial task to allow better information for physicians and third-party payers on appropriate off-label use as of 2021. Topics covered include its prohibition of fraudulent submission of claims for reimbursements to the government, and its public advise on obscure, scientific information, and a pharmaceutical firm's fraudulent conduct. Also noted is the criticism of the FCA's application to penalize off-label promotion.

Intermediated voluntary disclosure is a rapidly diffusing practice that addresses broad stakeholder demand for credible information transparency on corporate policies and performance along dimensions of societal interest. Building upon substantial literatures on proprietary disclosure, research has begun to rigorously document antecedents and outcomes of intermediated disclosure. However, theory remains relatively silent on how two important aspects of this mechanism—lack of audit oversight and provision of evaluative ratings—create incentives for uptake of an overlooked mode of misleading disclosures: false accounts. Moreover, research has not definitively addressed the degree to which intermediated voluntary disclosures are verifiable or truthful, nor the associated significance for long-term institutional credibility. This study uses forensic analysis of detailed corporate disclosures to one prominent intermediary to develop and validate novel constructs that establish evidence of false claims. Our findings demonstrate that firms routinely manipulate intermediary ratings with false claims, undermining institutional and societal goals. The results identify several factors that may improve ability to differentiate substantive firm performance from false accounts. This study contributes to our understanding of firm incentives and strategies for engagement with voluntary mechanisms and the ability of those practices to improve governance; it also identifies new opportunities for theoretical and empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Polio is considered a serious threat to public health in Pakistan. • Online commenters show empathy for polio health care workers. • Misinformation on polio vaccine as an amplification of new polio cases. • Online commenters correct misinformation and false claims by providing factual information on polio. • Pakistan launches the Perception Management Initiative (PMI) to block anti-vaccination propaganda social media pages. Polio, which is caused by poliovirus, is a contagious, potentially crippling, and deadly disease. Pakistan is one of the countries in which polio is still endemic in the 21st century. In 2019, 146 polio cases were reported across the country with some resulting in deaths. Following the spread of rumors insinuating that children were falling sick after receiving an anti-polio vaccine, a mob attacked and set fire to a small hospital in the Peshawar district in April 2019. The present study investigates readers' discussions that emerged from Dawn's online readers' comments on polio-related news stories in Pakistan. Using thematic analysis, we analyzed (N = 2216) comments made by readers in the polio-related news stories published on Dawn.com from January 1, 2012, to March 1, 2020. Seven major themes emerged from the analysis of the comments: 1) reasons for and challenges resulting in the failure to eradicate polio; 2) proposed solutions and policy changes to eradicate polio; 3) misinformation; 4) criticism, frustration, and shame; 5) comparison of Pakistan to other countries; 6) the internet as a public sphere; 7) suffering, empathy, and appreciation. Overall, our findings suggested that commenters are knowledgeable about polio vaccines and consider polio a serious threat to public health in Pakistan. Our study not only validated previous study findings such as reasons, challenges, and issues related to polio vaccination, but also found new challenges in online news sites concerning misinformation on polio and polio vaccination in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tolerance, equality, and universal love are all strategies that veil the reality of the relationship between the Self and the Other. Whether in the writings of Slavoj Žižek, Arthur Miller, or Jacques Lacan, the definition of "reality", as they explain, is something hidden with all sorts of false claims about the "real". The real is ugly, and reality is just an illusion that conceals the ugly truth. Each of these writers establishes that the self is living in an illusion that does not transcend the nature of itself in order to find out that the ugliness of what is really there. To Žižek, the concept of the "real" Other includes all his/her traumatic vulnerability, weakness, and imperfection. He argues in "Love Thy Neighbor, No Thanks!" that the access to the Real is possible, but threatening. By answering the question of "Who is the neighbor", Žižek refers to Lacan by stating that "the neighbor is the real". Loving the Other or the "neighbor", thus, is an experience of aggression and trauma. With the same line of thought, Arthur Miller deals with the paradox of the real in Death of a Salesman by portraying the life of Willy as having an illusion of himself as a successful business man that everybody respects but he's actually not that successful. Understanding Willy's background and life portrays the truth of what is the "real", for the reader understands that Willy is not what he claims to be. His "real" life is ugly, and he's just hallucinating that he's successful. This paper suggests that the concept of reality and illusion in the texts are explained by the use of dialogue which gave the characters a distinctive voice that acted as a persuasive force. I will explore how conversation is used effectively by the main characters in Death of a Salesman to suggest that the "real" is the "ugly". Also, I will illustrate the concept of reality vs. illusion in Death of a Salesman by drawing on Slavoj Žižek's "Love Thy Neighbor, No Thanks!" where he explains the "real" through the use of several examples. My aim is to acknowledge the persuasive force that lies behind the conversations illustrated by both authors in their texts, and to examine how this force is powerfully used in order to convince the reader of the reality of an object. This persuasive force was used as a key to communicate knowledge of certain concepts through certain techniques the authors used in their texts, which had an impact on the different definitions and notions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misinformation often has an ongoing effect on people's memory and inferential reasoning even after clear corrections are provided; this is known as the continued influence effect. In pursuit of more effective corrections, one factor that has not yet been investigated systematically is the narrative versus non-narrative format of the correction. Some scholars have suggested that a narrative format facilitates comprehension and retention of complex information and may serve to overcome resistance to worldview-dissonant corrections. It is, therefore, a possibility that misinformation corrections are more effective if they are presented in a narrative format versus a non-narrative format. The present study tests this possibility. We designed corrections that are either narrative or non-narrative, while minimizing differences in informativeness. We compared narrative and non-narrative corrections in three preregistered experiments (total N = 2279). Experiment 1 targeted misinformation contained in fictional event reports; Experiment 2 used false claims commonly encountered in the real world; Experiment 3 used real-world false claims that are controversial, in order to test the notion that a narrative format may facilitate corrective updating primarily when it serves to reduce resistance to correction. In all experiments, we also manipulated test delay (immediate vs. 2 days), as any potential benefit of the narrative format may only arise in the short term (if the story format aids primarily with initial comprehension and updating of the relevant mental model) or after a delay (if the story format aids primarily with later correction retrieval). In all three experiments, it was found that narrative corrections are no more effective than non-narrative corrections. Therefore, while stories and anecdotes can be powerful, there is no fundamental benefit of using a narrative format when debunking misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowhurst and Michael (2005) develops an OT analysis of the complex word stress system of Nanti, an Amazonian language of the Kampa group. They claim that the difficulty of developing a transformational analysis of the system clearly demonstrates the superiority of OT. One goal of this paper is to show that their claim is false and the complexities of the system are well within the scope of transformational phonology; a straightforward analysis is possible. The second goal is to show how prominence can naturally be included in rule systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let A ∈ R n × n be a nonnegative irreducible square matrix and let r (A) be its spectral radius and Perron-Frobenius eigenvalue. Levinger asserted and several have proven that r (t) : = r ((1 − t) A + t A ⊤) increases over t ∈ [ 0 , 1 / 2 ] and decreases over t ∈ [ 1 / 2 , 1 ]. It has further been stated that r (t) is concave over t ∈ (0 , 1). Here we show that the latter claim is false in general through a number of counterexamples, but prove it is true for A ∈ R 2 × 2 , weighted shift matrices (but not cyclic weighted shift matrices), tridiagonal Toeplitz matrices, and the 3-parameter Toeplitz matrices from Fiedler, but not Toeplitz matrices in general. A general characterization of the range of t , or the class of matrices, for which the spectral radius is concave in Levinger's homotopy remains an open problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Turkish Culture & Haci Bektas Veli Research Quarterly is the property of Turkish Cultur & Haci Bektas Veli Research Quarterly and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 2016, decentralized fraud enforcement under the federal False Claims Act (FCA) recovered $ 2.5 billion spent on healthcare fraud without increasing spending. The FCA induces private citizens to pursue civil fraud claims on behalf of both themselves and the government, or qui tam; incentives to pursue legal action for Medicaid fraud vary at the state level. We hypothesize that fraud enforcement agencies shift strategies as incentives for private citizens to monitor civil offenses rise. We find that state‐level FCAs did not increase the number of filed qui tam suits as incentives rose. Among filed cases, case quality did not change. Instead, agencies pursued fewer civil cases and case length increased. Our findings suggest potential qui tam plaintiffs are constrained by an ability to pursue cases, not incentives. Government‐led civil fraud enforcement may thus overestimate the capacity to decentralize fraud enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on Social Dominance Theory (SDT), this study investigates the relationships between ideologically conservative attitudes (social dominance orientation, SDO; right-wing authoritarianism, RWA), legitimizing myths (false belief in asylum seekers as bogus; perception of in-group threats), and citizens' support for restricted reception and rejection of asylum policies. A sample of 539 people living in Italy filled in an anonymous questionnaire administered using a cross-sectional design. The results support the expectations, showing that people high in SDO and RWA were more likely to hold the belief that asylum seekers are making false claims and to perceive that the latter pose a threat to the in-group, which in turn increased support for both of restrictive policies. Findings suggest that conservative ideologies can positively affect citizens' support for restrictive asylum seeker policies based on both rejection and restricted reception by supplying ideological justification for not accommodating them in the host society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Adab Al-Kufa is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The task of temporal slot filling (TSF) is to extract values of specific attributes for a given entity, called "facts", as well as temporal tags of the facts, from text data. While existing work denoted the temporal tags as single time slots, in this paper, we introduce and study the task of Precise TSF (PTSF), that is to fill two precise temporal slots including the beginning and ending time points. Based on our observation from a news corpus, most of the facts should have the two points, however, fewer than 0.1% of them have time expressions in the documents. On the other hand, the documents' post time, though often available, is not as precise as the time expressions of being the time a fact was valid. Therefore, directly decomposing the time expressions or using an arbitrary post-time period cannot provide accurate results for PTSF. The challenge of PTSF lies in finding precise time tags in noisy and incomplete temporal contexts in the text. To address the challenge, we propose an unsupervised approach based on the philosophy of truth finding. The approach has two modules that mutually enhance each other: One is a reliability estimator of fact extractors conditionally on the temporal contexts; the other is a fact trustworthiness estimator based on the extractor's reliability. Commonsense knowledge (e.g., one country has only one president at a specific time) was automatically generated from data and used for inferring false claims based on trustworthy facts. For the purpose of evaluation, we manually collect hundreds of temporal facts from Wikipedia as ground truth, including country's presidential terms and sport team's player career history. Experiments on a large news dataset demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]