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Experimental Practice (experimental + practice)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Life Sciences40%

Selected Abstracts

Conduct and reporting of efficacy evaluation trials, including good experimental practice

EPPO BULLETIN, Issue 1 2004
Article first published online: 8 APR 200
First page of article [source]

Civil Society and the Re-imagination of European Constitutionalism

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 4 2003
Michael A. Wilkinson
Recognising this necessarily dynamic relationship, an essentialist reading of a constitutionalisation of the demos is abandoned, and an examination of the extent to which the dialectic can credibly or legitimately be played out in a supranational ,community' and in the context of an emerging transnational civil society can be undertaken. Rather than seeking credibility or legitimacy through the rationalisation of a community by an ethical consensus as in some forms of republicanism and communitarianism, the dialectic opens up the norms and boundaries of the polity and leads to an understanding of the ,community' in less rigid and more diffuse, even plural, terms. Once understood in this way the possibility emerges for legitimacy to be pursued through a public sphere enlarged by a context-transcending constitutional discourse mediated by transnational civil society. Alternatively the normative ,openness' of the polity might be prioritised and with it the uncertainty/fluidity of the constitutional arrangement itself; in this way the legitimate pursuit of constitutionalism is understood in terms of a never-ending agonistic struggle or experimental practice. [source]

The all-too-flexible abductive method: ATOM's normative status,

JOURNAL OF CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 9 2008
Jan-Willem Romeijn
Abstract The author discusses the abductive theory of method (ATOM) by Brian Haig from a philosophical perspective, connecting his theory with a number of issues and trends in contemporary philosophy of science. It is argued that as it stands, the methodology presented by Haig is too permissive. Both the use of analogical reasoning and the application of exploratory factor analysis leave us with too many candidate theories to choose from, and explanatory coherence cannot be expected to save the day. The author ends with some suggestions to remedy the permissiveness and lack of normative force in ATOM, deriving from the experimental practice within which psychological data are produced. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 64:1,14, 2008. [source]

Do cuckoos choose nests of great reed warblers on the basis of host egg appearance?

JOURNAL OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY, Issue 3 2007
M. I. CHERRY
Abstract Prevailing theory assumes cuckoos lay at random among host nests within a population, although it has been suggested that cuckoos could choose large nests and relatively active pairs within host populations. We tested the hypothesis that egg matching could be improved by cuckoos choosing nests in which host eggs more closely match their own, by assessing matching and monitoring nest fate in great reed warblers naturally or experimentally parasitized by eggs of European cuckoos. A positive correlation between cuckoo and host egg visual features suggests that cuckoos do not lay at random within a population, but choose nests and this improves egg matching: naturally parasitized cuckoo eggs were more similar to host eggs as perceived by humans and as measured by spectrophotometry. Our results suggest a hitherto overlooked step in cuckoo,host evolutionary arms races, and have nontrivial implications for the common experimental practice of artificially parasitizing clutches. [source]

Construction and Optimality of a Special Class of Balanced Designs

QUALITY AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING INTERNATIONAL, Issue 5 2006
Stefano Barone
Abstract The use of balanced designs is generally advisable in experimental practice. In technological experiments, balanced designs optimize the exploitation of experimental resources, whereas in marketing research experiments they avoid erroneous conclusions caused by the misinterpretation of interviewed customers. In general, the balancing property assures the minimum variance of first-order effect estimates. In this work the authors consider situations in which all factors are categorical and minimum run size is required. In a symmetrical case, it is often possible to find an economical balanced design by means of algebraic methods. Conversely, in an asymmetrical case algebraic methods lead to expensive designs, and therefore it is necessary to adopt heuristic methods. The existing methods implemented in widespread statistical packages do not guarantee the balancing property as they are designed to pursue other optimality criteria. To deal with this problem, the authors recently proposed a new method to generate balanced asymmetrical designs aimed at estimating first- and second-order effects. To reduce the run size as much as possible, the orthogonality cannot be guaranteed. However, the method enables designs that approach the orthogonality as much as possible (near orthogonality). A collection of designs with two- and three-level factors and run size lower than 100 was prepared. In this work an empirical study was conducted to understand how much is lost in terms of other optimality criteria when pursuing balancing. In order to show the potential applications of these designs, an illustrative example is provided. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]