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The aim of this paper is to argue for a revised and precisified version of the infamous Verifiability Criterion for the meaningfulness of declarative sentences. The argument is based on independently plausible premises concerning probabilistic confirmation and meaning as context-change potential, it is shown to be logically valid, and its ramifications for potential applications of the criterion are being discussed. Although the paper is not historical but systematic, the criterion thus vindicated will resemble the original one(s) in some important ways. At the same time, it will also be more modest insofar as meaningfulness will turn out to be relativized linguistically and probabilistically, and different choices of the linguistic and probabilistic parameters may lead to different verdicts on meaningfulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines ways the relationship between Buddhism and analytic philosophy function and dysfunction. Topics discussed are religious argument against Buddhist philosophy and its metaphysical characteristics and verification principle, as well as the diversification of professional philosophy including faculty and curricula, and the systemic racism endemic to institutional philosophy.

Induction has been viewed as a scientific method. That is to say that scientific hypothesis, theories and laws are arrived at by means of induction. But induction has its problem; the problem of justifying the inductive inference from the observed instances to unobserved instances. This is the problem of hasty conclusion. Thus, in induction, the inference is rationally unjustified. This explains why the truism of induction as a method of science was challenged by Karl Popper who contended that induction by its very nature cannot bring about progress in science even as it cannot really enable us demarcate what is scientific from what is not. In contrast, Popper propounded his famous theory of falsificationism where he asserts that the criteria of the scientific status of a theory are its falsifiability or refutability, or testability. In this way, Popper believes that progress in science would be achieved. This study employs the method of analysis to bring to the fore, the problems associated with induction and which have prompted and propelled Popper's conception of science. This study reveals that, for Popper, induction is not capable of assuring progress in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a theory-oriented model that examines the predictors and outcomes of people's verification of COVID-19 misinformation. Using an online experiment with 400 U.S. adults, this study showed that those who believed that others might be influenced by misinformation and that such influence had serious consequences for others as well as those with a higher level of fear and anxiety were more likely to perform institutional verification by using search engines, prestigious medical sites, or fact-checking sites. The intention to conduct institutional verification increased individuals' efficacy beliefs regarding correcting misinformation, which motivated them to correct misinformation on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To extend the existing research examining multiple text comprehension and its assessment, we developed a verification task approach to assessing of information that was explicitly and implicitly presented within and across nine texts. A nonparametric form of signal detection theory was used to analyse the performance of 47 middle school students using a rating response scale to judge the truth value of specific statements. The results showed that the four types of statements in the verification task (explicit and implicit; within- and across- text) behaved systematically: within-text explicit statements were the easiest for students to verify as true and across-text implicit statements were the most difficult. Practical implications of these results regarding assessment of complex comprehension processes are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes a model of collective choice in voting when information is verifiable and pre-voting deliberation is allowed. Each voter has, independently of the others, a positive probability of receiving a private signal about the true state; with complementary probability, the voter is uninformed. Verifiable information means that lying is disallowed during deliberation: informed voters can publicly reveal or hide their signals, while uninformed voters have to disclose their ignorance. We first provide sufficient and necessary conditions under which all voters reveal information fully. Moreover, we derive a counterintuitive result with verifiable information: Voting preceded by deliberation may lead to worse social decisions than a voting process without deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas mentions a kind of judgment of virtue through inclination. He uses it to explain how, through the gift of grace, a finite human being can know an infinite God. His arguments show that his negative judgment of the significatory capacity of speculative likeness, as source of knowing God, does not have to be taken as his last word on the possibility of positive (albeit imperfect) knowledge of Him in this life. Rather, it becomes clear that Thomas thinks that, as the forming of the tendency of the will through pursuit of a natural good can be the 'remote' (to use his term), non‐discursive, source of judgment of that good, so the divine good of the gift of grace in the essence of the soul can be a remote source of positive (albeit imperfect) judgment of divine things. The differences and similarities of the two kinds of judgment are discussed, and verification issues are examined in conclusion. Thomas' remarks on the two kinds of judgment deserve more study, since they challenge the almost universal acceptance of relativism as well as the extent of authority given to post‐enlightenment methods of verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the peer assessment performance of information technology undergraduate students who completed a semester-long group project. They were asked to provide feedback on their peers' contributions and learning processes using a set of indicators delivered in two different prompt types (closed and open-ended questions). The students had the choice to change their marks on each Likert scale item after responding to the open-ended questions. We compared the scores of each indicator between prompt types and explored the content of the responses to the open-ended peer assessment prompt in terms of verification, verification type and elaboration. The results of paired t-tests showed that many students made changes to the scores for some or many items on the closed-ended question prompt after completing the open-ended question prompt, although there were no significant statistical differences between the scores based on prompt-type. Many responses to the open-ended peer assessment prompt were on-topic, included positive evaluation, and provided general or informative feedback. The findings demonstrated that students exhibit the potential to assess their peers' contributions and learning processes in group projects. The study results suggest that peer assessment should be designed to support students to create and manage their learning processes independently, reflect on their learning, and receive peer feedback on their learning processes and performances in group work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ciphertext policy is a promising cryptographic technique for smart home data security, and the secrecy of the encryption key purely depends on the security of the key derivation mechanism. In a smart home network, many devices have limited computational and communication resources, and any such mechanism to create a security key should consider these computational and communicational constraints. In this paper, we propose a collaborative and verifiable key derivation protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography for smart home security. Our construction realizes a distributed computation of the security key without adding any extra energy consumption. The proposed collaborative mechanism effectively solves not only the key derivation mechanism security issue, but also adds a verifiability function to avoid keys falsification. Meanwhile, it helps markedly reduce the key derivation overhead at the energy constrained device. A comparison with other collaborative and non collaborative key derivation schemes, demonstrates that our scheme has somewhat better performance in terms of energy overhead at the constrained device side. Also, we provide proof of security of the proposed protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the time-series properties of the Ohlson (1995) model and examines their implications for empirical studies that use timeseries data but do not explicitly account for such properties. Based on a sample of 95 firms with complete data from 1958 to 1994, we show that the null hypothesis that market value and book value are nonstationary cannot be rejected for most of the sample firms. More importantly, book value and residual income do not cointegrate with market value for 80 percent of the sample firms. We demonstrate the importance and relevance of the time-series properties of the model to OLS regressions by showing that the OLS out-of-sample forecasts of market value are significantly more accurate and less biased for the cointegrated firms than for the noncointegrated firms. We also explore methods to improve the specification of OLS regressions based on the Ohlson (1995) model and suggest that scaling the variables with lagged market value can significantly alleviate the problem with nonstationarity of the unscaled time-series data. While the generality of our results is limited by the survivorship bias of our sample, we believe that our paper has some important implications for studies motivated by the Ohlson (1995) model. First, because market value and book value are nonstationary and book value and residual income do not cointegrate with market value for most firms, the other information variable has to be nonstationary so that a linear combination of the independent variables can cointegrate with market value. Second, direct tests of the Ohlson (1995) model through OLS regressions using time-series data are questionable because they are likely to be misspecifled. This may partially explain the underestimation of market value widely documented by previous studies and the significant difference between parameters predicted by the Ohlson (1995) model and estimated from OLS regressions. Third, our results also suggest that scaling the data with lagged market value can mitigate the problems with nonstationarity. For studies using unscaled time-series data, a cointegration test should be conducted first and a sensitivity analysis based on the cointegrated subsample should be performed to examine whether the results based on the full sample are robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ʿĀmir b. ʿĀmir al-Baṣrī, according to evidence in his tāʾiyya , composed this long didactic mystical poem either in 700/1300-1301 or 731/1330-1331, while he was exiled to Sīwās in Anatolia. The object of this paper is fourfold. First, to give a brief sketch of his life gleaned from the extant Sunnī sources and determine the date of al-tāʾiyya 's composition or completion. Second, to review critically all the three editions of his al-tāʾiyya. Third, to scrutinize the contents of his poem, generally known as al-tāʾiyya l-ṣuġrā in contradistinction to al-tāʾiyya l-kubrā of Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235). This Ode is crucial in establishing an unequivocal argument that the poet was an unorthodox Imāmī (Twelver) Šīʿī-Ṣūfī. Fourth, to refute the claims of ʿĀrif Tāmir, Muṣṭafā Ġālib and Yves Marquet that al-Baṣrī was an Ismāʿīlī. The first two scholars do not present any tangible evidence to support their contention except the fact that copies of his tāʾiyya are to be found among the Syrian Ismāʿīlī-Nizārī communities. Yves Marquet, on the other hand, argues and speculates on the basis of his [mis]reading of certain internal and external evidences that the author was a high ranking Ismāʿīlī missionary. Unable to support his contention Marquet as a final point of defense opines that al-Baṣrī was probably affiliated with the Nizārī branch; however, he says this without any substantial internal or external verification. Contrarily, al-Baṣrī is not known at all in the Ismāʿīlī sources, either those of the Mustaʿlī-Ṭayyibīs in the Yemeni era, or of the Nizārīs during the post-Alamūt period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a set of distinct empirical points with uniform tolerance, based on the LDP algorithm proposed by Fassino and Torrente, we provide a verification algorithm that computes a polynomial, an admissible perturbed point set with verified error bound, such that the polynomial is guaranteed to vanish at a slightly admissible perturbed point set within computed error bound. The effectiveness of our algorithm is demonstrated in several examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of the historico-scientific debates on the “death of contemporary witnesses", the medial interpretive competitions in contemporary history and the emerging interest in the secondary exploitation of oral history sources, the article undertakes the task of historians in oral history projects to rebalance. By “sharing the past in conversation" (Welzer), contemporary witnesses and interviewers are to be understood as producers of sources of memories. For the contextualization and intersubjective verifiability of these sources, not only a precise description of the contemporary witness biography and the interview circumstances, but also a project-related autobiographical self-information of the interviewer in the Ego-Oral History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As spirited debate continues on the appropriate philosophical and methodological foundations for consumer research, participants claim the literature has been full of misconceptions, misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and mischaracterizations. Through historical methodology, this article shows that these "misses" stem, at least in part, from the debate's having been historically ill informed about the origins and fundamental beliefs of a group of philosophers called logical positivists. After addressing a fundamental premise of the entire debate (i.e., that contemporary social science and consumer research are dominated by positivism), this article advocates critical pluralism and documents a favorable prognosis for rapprochement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management by objectives (MBO) is perhaps potentially the most powerful technique of managing that has ever been developed. But, despite its potential and the high enthusiasm for it, both in the U.S. and abroad, the record of successful implementation of MBO has not been encouraging. This article outlines the nature and advantages of MBO, its limitations, the weaknesses that have been experienced in its practice, and the author suggests what can be done to make MBO effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the article "Orofacial Pain and Jaw Muscle Activity: A New Model" and its development of a new model to try and correct inconsistencies from the hypotheses Vicious Cycle Theory (VCT) and Pain Adaptation Model (PAM). He mentions that the article generalizes data obtained from jaw muscles to locomotor and low-back muscles and comments that the central wiring of skeletal muscles and jaw muscles differ. He suggests that the simplicity of VCT and PAM lies with their attractiveness to researchers. He states that the new model has so many factors that it cannot be falsified or verified as a whole, and fails to explain the underlying mechanism behind orofacial pain and jaw activity.

Abstract The aim of this article is to present a comprehensive methodology for the verification of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers with a special attention to aspects pertinent to discretizations with orders of accuracy (OOAs) higher than two. The method of manufactured solutions (MMS) is adopted and a series of manufactured solutions (MSs) is introduced that examines various components of CFD solvers for free flows (not bounded by walls), including inviscid, laminar and turbulent problems when the latter are modeled by the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations. The treatment of curved elements is also examined. These MSs are furthermore conceived with demonstrated suitability for the verification of OOAs up to the sixth. Each MS is as well utilized to discuss salient aspects useful to the code verification methodology such as the relative qualities of the most useful norms in measuring the discretization error, the sensitivity analysis of the verification process to forcing function terms, the relation between residual minimization and discretization error convergence in iterative solutions and finally the sensitivity of high-order discretizations to grid stretching and self-similarity. Furthermore, scripts and code are provided as accompanying material to assist the interested reader in reproducing the verification results of each manufactured solution (MS). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Cambridge Pragmatism , Cheryl Misak rounds out the distinctive narrative regarding Anglo-American philosophy in the 20th Century that she initiated in her 1995 book on Verificationism and subsequently developed significantly in her 2013 The American Pragmatists. In this brief essay, I address Cambridge Pragmatism in the context of the broader historical account she has been developing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reference to the notions of verifiability and observability is widespread in contract theory. This paper is a contribution towards a formalization, and related characterizations, of these two notions. In particular we first define them, through knowledge operators, and then provide characterization results in terms of the relevant state spaces. Since, when referring to a contract, observability typically pertains to parties while verifiability to the court, we define them differently. A main finding of the paper is that for proper contract verifiability to obtain the court must imagine true states and have information processing abilities as good as the parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'In one area of his prose work, the Croatian writer Pavao Pavličić belongs to a group of writers in the 1970s who used a fantastic narrative model and thematized irrational parallel worlds as opposed to a realist model of narration. Pavličić’s novel Evening Act (published as Večernji akt in 1981) has a realistic beginning, but it slips into fantastic narration when the main character, a young man called Mihovil, discovers his ability to falsify documents and works of art. At the same time, he is capable of recognizing falsified art works and documents that are accepted as an integral part of social, cultural, and historical memory. When this ability becomes dangerous, Mihovil falsifies his own body to escape from his unbearable reality. This paper will analyse the function of the fantastic model in Pavličić’s novel as a postmodern play with traditions of Croatian and world literature and culture. The ludic layer of the novel has a highly symbolic value: it draws attention to the relationship of cultural institutions and society to the authenticity of art works, the role of art, and ways of preserving (or destroying) cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voter-verifiable voting systems place significant demands of both effort and knowledge onto ordinary voters who have only limited incentives to participate. We suggest the use of third-party verifiable voting systems, harnessing the very strong incentives for candidates and observers to verify that votes are correctly counted. A generic modification enabling this via the use of pre-filled ballots and secure depositing is outlined and we demonstrate this modification by applying it to two major voter-verifiable voting systems. Additionally, potential vulnerabilities of this approach are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicate encryption (PE), a generalization of attribute-based encryption (ABE), is a versatile tool for providing access control over data. The underlying predicate for a PE is parametrized by an index, called system parameter or simply system-index. A system-index, in general, consists of component(s) from $$\mathbb {N}$$ . Yamada et al. in PKC 2011 proposed a verifiability-based conversion from CPA to CCA-secure ABE. This conversion was generalized by Yamada et al. in PKC 2012 from ABE to PE. In the later conversion, the authors considered the system-index to be a single component. In practice, there are many schemes, e.g., functional encryption for general relations and hierarchical-inner product (HIP) encryption schemes of Okamoto-Takashima in CRYPTO 2010, CANS 2011 and EUROCRYPT 2012, where system-indices consist of more than a single component. Therefore, for these schemes, the conversion of Yamada et al. (in PKC, 2012) is out of scope. In this paper, we revisit the CPA to CCA conversion for PE and propose a new conversion based on verifiability. The proposed conversion works irrespective of the number of components in the system-indices. It generalizes the existing conversion of Yamada et al. (in PKC, 2011) from ABE to PE. The PE schemes which are realized by the conversion of Yamada et al. (2011) are also realized by our conversion. Therefore, the conversion of ours has more scope than the conversion proposed in 2012. We show that all the aforementioned CPA-secure schemes for general relations and HIP relation are easily converted to the corresponding CCA-secure schemes by our conversion. Further, we show a generic conversion from CPA to CCA-secure functional encryption for regular languages which captures the existing PE schemes for regular languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the age of spirited debates about the mediating role of technologies, the other side of the coin is the state of direct experience in contemporary news production, that is, cases in which news reporters still rely on traditional channels such as “legwork,” “firsthand witnessing,” or “shoe-leather reporting.” The present study is a systematic attempt to identify journalists’ reasons for engaging in legwork, by recreating item by item the work processes and reasoning behind hundreds of individual news reports produced in the digital age, across Israeli print, television, radio, and online news outlets (N = 859). Insofar as legwork can serve as a proxy for painstaking journalism, journalists’ decisions make some difference in determining if more or less legwork will ensue. The data avail an opportunity to explore scholarly musings about journalists’ motivations behind legwork: be they knowledge related, medium related, or event related. We find support for all three possibilities and discuss the implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A delegated quantum computation protocol that includes three servers Bob1, Bob2 and Bob3 and a client Alice is proposed, which is with four-particle χ -type entangled states that have a good property is the other two particles can collapse into a certain Bell state if the first two particles are measured. Alice only needs to be capable of getting access to quantum channels and perform Pauli operation and also has a memory of two graph states brickwork state and blind topological entangled state, but she does not need to prepare any quantum state in this paper. Our protocol is without a trusted center which will save funds, sources and quantum devices, and can verify the correctness of measurement outcomes by quantum entanglement of | χ ij 〉 3124 . At last, we also give blind analysis and proof rigorously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations deploy the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems for centralized management of security alerts for securing their multimedia content. The SIEM system not only preserves events data, generated by devices and applications, in the form of logs but also performs real-time analysis of the event data. The SIEM works as the Security Operation Centre (SOC) in an organization, therefore, errors in the SIEM may compromise the security of the organization. In addition to focusing on the architecture, features, and the performance of the SIEM, it is imperative to carry out a formal analysis to verify that the system is impeccable. The ensuing research focuses mainly on the formal verification of the OSTORM a SIEM system. We have used High-Level Petri Nets (HLPN) and Z language to model and analyze the system. Moreover, Satisfiability Modulo Theories Library (SMT-Lib) and Z3 solver are used in this research to prove the correctness of the overall working of the OSTORM system. We demonstrate the correctness of the underlying system based on four security properties, namely: a) event data confidentiality, b) authentication, c) event data integrity, and d) alarm integrity. The results reveal that the OSTORM system functions correctly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the development of complex software systems, we often resort to component-based approaches that separate the different concerns, enhance verifiability and reusability, and for which microkernel-based implementations are a good fit to enforce these concepts. Composing such a system of several interacting software components will, however, lead to complex precedence and blocking relations, which must be taken into account when performing latency analysis. When modelling these systems by classical task graphs, some of these effects are obfuscated and tend to render such an analysis either overly pessimistic or even optimistic. We therefore firstly present a novel task (meta-)model that is more expressive and accurate w.r.t. these (functional) precedence and mutual blocking relations. Secondly, we apply the busy-window approach and formulate a modular response-time analysis on task-chain level suitable but not restricted to static-priority scheduled systems.We show that the conjunction of both concepts allows the calculation of reasonably tight latency bounds for scenarios not adequately covered by related work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incentive mechanisms of crowdsensing have recently been intensively explored. Most of these mechanisms mainly focus on the standard economical goals like truthfulness and utility maximization. However, enormous privacy and security challenges need to be faced directly in real-life environments, such as cost privacies. In this paper, we investigate offline verifiable privacy-protection crowdsensing issues. We firstly present a general verifiable privacy-protection incentive mechanism for the offline homogeneous and heterogeneous sensing job model. In addition, we also propose a more complex verifiable privacy-protection incentive mechanism for the offline submodular sensing job model. The two mechanisms not only explore the private protection issues of users and platform, but also ensure the verifiable correctness of payments between platform and users. Finally, we demonstrate that the two mechanisms satisfy privacy-protection, verifiable correctness of payments and the same revenue as the generic one without privacy protection. Our experiments also validate that the two mechanisms are both scalable and efficient, and applicable for mobile devices in crowdsensing applications based on auctions, where the main incentive for the user is the remuneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by recent research showing that liars are reluctant to include verifiable details in their accounts, we explored in two studies (N = 125;N = 105) whether participants who report fabricated symptoms (‘malingerers’) present fewer verifiable details than participants who report genuine ill-health symptoms. In Study 1, participants were instructed to describe a typical day on which they had experienced a genuine or malingered symptom. Truth tellers’ statements included significantly higher proportions of verifiable details concerning the reported symptoms than malingerers’ statements. Compared with truth tellers, malingerers generated longer statements with more unverifiable details. In Study 2, we informed participants that their statements may be assessed for verifiable or checkable details. Malingerers often mentioned ‘false’ witnesses to provide checkable information and differences between malingerers and truth tellers in statement length, and checkable and uncheckable details were no longer significant. The utility and implications of the Verifiability Approach to detection of malingering are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of verifiable database (VDB) enables a resource-constrained client to securely outsource a very large database to an untrusted server and the client could later retrieve a database record and update it efficiently. Meanwhile, any tampering with the database by the server will be detected by the client. We argue that all existing VDB schemes can only support the updating operation called replacement . That is, the client can efficiently update a data record by assigning a new value. However, the proposed solutions are not applicable for other updating operations such as insertion and deletion . In this paper, we first propose a new VDB scheme that supports all updating operations of replacement, deletion, and insertion by incorporating the techniques of commitment binding and hierarchical commitment. Security evaluation shows that the proposed construction can achieve the desired security properties in the standard computational Diffie–Hellman assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The Verifiability Approach (VA) is verbal lie detection tool that has shown promise when applied to insurance claims settings. This study examined the effectiveness of incorporating a Model Statement comprised of checkable information to the VA protocol for enhancing the verbal differences between liars and truth tellers. Method The study experimentally manipulated supplementing (or withholding) the VA with a Model Statement. It was hypothesised that such a manipulation would (i) encourage truth tellers to provide more verifiable details than liars and (ii) encourage liars to report more unverifiable details than truth tellers (compared to the no model statement control). As a result, it was hypothesized that (iii) the model statement would improve classificatory accuracy of the VA. Participants reported 40 genuine and 40 fabricated insurance claim statements, in which half the liars and truth tellers where provided with a model statement as part of the VA procedure, and half where provide no model statement. Results All three hypotheses were supported. In terms of accuracy, the model statement increased classificatory rates by the VA considerably from 65.0% to 90.0%. Conclusion Providing interviewee’s with a model statement prime consisting of checkable detail appears to be a useful refinement to the VA procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carnap's search for a criterion of empirical significance is usually considered a failure. I argue that the results from two out of his three different approaches are at the very least problematic, but that one approach led to success. Carnap's criterion of translatability into logical syntax is too vague to allow for definite results. His criteria for terms-introducibility by chains of reduction sentences and his criterion from 'The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts'-are almost trivial and have no clear relation to the empirical significance of sentences. However, his criteria for sentences-translatability, verifiability, falsifiability, confirmability-are usable, and under the assumptions needed for the Carnap sentence approach, verifiability, falsifiability, and translatability become equivalent. As a result of the Carnap sentence approach, metaphysics is rendered analytic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the argument that Tarski’s classic definitions permit an intelligence—whether human or mechanistic—to admit finitary evidence-based definitions of the satisfaction and truth of the atomic formulas of the first-order Peano Arithmetic PA over the domain N of the natural numbers in two, hitherto unsuspected and essentially different, ways: (1) in terms of classical algorithmic verifiabilty; and (2) in terms of finitary algorithmic computability. We then show that the two definitions correspond to two distinctly different assignments of satisfaction and truth to the compound formulas of PA over N — I PA ( N , SV ) and I PA ( N , SC ) . We further show that the PA axioms are true over N , and that the PA rules of inference preserve truth over N , under both I PA ( N , SV ) and I PA ( N , SC ) . We then show: (a) that if we assume the satisfaction and truth of the compound formulas of PA are always non-finitarily decidable under I PA ( N , SV ) , then this assignment corresponds to the classical non-finitary standard interpretation I PA ( N , S ) of PA over the domain N ; and (b) that the satisfaction and truth of the compound formulas of PA are always finitarily decidable under the assignment I PA ( N , SC ) , from which we may finitarily conclude that PA is consistent. We further conclude that the appropriate inference to be drawn from Gödel’s 1931 paper on undecidable arithmetical propositions is that we can define PA formulas which—under any interpretation over N —are algorithmically verifiable as always true over N , but not algorithmically computable as always true over N . We conclude from this that Lucas’ Gödelian argument is validated if the assignment I PA ( N , SV ) can be treated as circumscribing the ambit of human reasoning about ‘true’ arithmetical propositions, and the assignment I PA ( N , SC ) as circumscribing the ambit of mechanistic reasoning about ‘true’ arithmetical propositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the process of developing requirements for modeling and simulation (M&S), and describes various examples of poor requirements as well as the ramifications of specific examples. Verification, Validation and Accreditation (W&A) activities naturally improve upon M&S requirements, particularly if the verification and validation (V&V) are accomplished early in the development process. This article also provides a general approach, showing how establishing the credibility of M&S through W&A activities also improves and better specifies requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We theoretically and experimentally analyze the role of verifiability and privacy in strategic performance feedback using a “one principal–two agent” context with real effort. We confirm the theoretical prediction that information transmission occurs only in verifiable feedback mechanisms and private–verifiable feedback is the most informative mechanism. Yet, subjects also exhibit some behavior that cannot be explained by our baseline model, such as telling the truth even when this will definitely hurt them, interpreting “no feedback” more optimistically than they should, and being influenced by feedback given to the other agent. We show that a model with individual-specific lying costs and naive agents can account for some, but not all, of these findings. We conclude that although agents do take into account the principal's strategic behavior to form beliefs in a Bayesian fashion, they are overly optimistic and interpret positive feedback to the other agent more pessimistically than they should. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New techniques have recently been developed to quantify the location-dependent spatial agreement between ensemble members, and the spatial spread-skill relationship. In this article a summer of convection-permitting ensemble forecasts are analysed to better understand the factors influencing location-dependent spatial agreement of precipitation fields and the spatial spread-skill relationship over the UK. The aim is to further investigate the agreement scale method, and to highlight the information that could be extracted for a more long-term routine model evaluation. Overall, for summer 2013, the UK 2.2 km grid spacing ensemble system was found to be reasonably well spread spatially, although there was a tendency for the ensemble to be overconfident in the location of precipitation. For the forecast lead times considered (up to 36 h), a diurnal cycle was seen in the spatial agreement and in the spatial spread-skill relationship: the forecast spread and error did not increase noticeably with forecast lead time. Both the spatial agreement and the spatial spread-skill were dependent on the fractional coverage and average intensity of precipitation. A poor spread-skill relationship was associated with a low fractional coverage of rain and low average rain rates. The times with a smaller fractional coverage, or lower intensity, of precipitation were found to have lower spatial agreement. The spatial agreement was found to be location dependant, with higher confidence in the location of precipitation to the northwest of the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this experiment, we tested the verifiability approach in an insurance claim setting. Core of the verifiability approach is that truth tellers give more details that can be verified than liars. Fifty undergraduate students took part, who produced true and false insurance claim statements related to theft, loss, or damage. These statements were coded in terms of verifiability (the number of details that could be checked by an investigator) and witness factors (friends, police, other officials and CCTV cameras). Truth tellers provided more verifiable details than liars and liars provided more unverifiable details than truth tellers. In addition, truth tellers (versus liars) more frequently informed their friends about the incident or referred to CCTV footage of the incident. The potential and limitations of using the verifiability approach in insurance settings are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In group-oriented applications, it is often required to verify a group of signatures/messages. The individual verification of signed messages in such applications comes at a high cost in terms of computations and time. To improve computational efficiency and to speed up the verification process, a batch verification technique is a good alternative to individual verification. Such a technique is useful in many real-world applications, such as mail servers, e-commerce, banking transactions, and so on. In this work, we propose a new, efficient identity-based signature (IDS) scheme supporting batch verifications. We prove that the proposed IDS scheme and its various types of batch verifications is tightly related to the Computational Diffie-Hellman problem under a random oracle paradigm. We compare the efficiency of the proposed scheme with related schemes that support batch verifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]