South Africa’s Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Freedom Charter are globally ground-breaking for providing provisions of non-discrimination, and, of particular note, on the basis of sexual orientation. Since the introduction of these protective frameworks, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) communities, allies, and advocates in the country have won major legal battles on these issues; however, in spite of these successes, LGBTIQ communities continue to face hostility and violence. As a result, South African LGBTIQ individuals often travel to urban centres, such as Johannesburg, in the hope that these spaces will be more tolerant of their sexual orientation and gender identity; the reality, however, suggests otherwise. Moreover, despite South Africa’s designation as a safe haven for LGBTIQ communities, migrants from other African countries — where same-sex relationships are criminalised — are overwhelmingly met with xenophobic verbal, emotional, physical, and political violence. This article describes the authors’ engagement with nine lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) migrants and asylum seekers from Zimbabwe, Malawi, and elsewhere in South Africa during a weeklong poetry workshop exploring their lived experiences in Johannesburg. This workshop followed a body mapping and narrative writing workshop held previously with the same participants. This article investigates the themes identified from the body mapping process that guided the poems produced: migration, violence, citizenship, and freedom. The poetry created during the workshop illuminates how lesbian, gay, and bisexual migrants in Johannesburg work on a daily basis to build social trust as they demand to be seen and recognised, to enact their rights, to make and remake homes, to show up in public as Black people, as LGB individuals, and as human beings. We explore these strategies of citizen-making as informed by the LGB poets with whom we had the opportunity to work. Of particular note, the Equality Clause in Section 9 of the Constitution  Zolani Mkiva  project and Seattle University, which began in 2014. Using a visual arts methodology (body mapping) and narrative writing, the project explored the lived experiences of LGB migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees living in Johannesburg  was provided in addition to refreshments throughout the workshop and lunch each day. After an information session held at the start of the workshop, all poets gave consent to participate and for the poems of their choosing to be made publicly available online and in print, and for them to be used in other associated publications, such as this article. On the final day of the workshop, poets gave a reading of their work at the Women’s Gaol at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg; a fitting site to share stories of struggle. This was followed by a tour of the Constitutional Court and a celebratory lunch. Each poet invited two guests to the celebration for whom transport costs were reimbursed, and a printed chapbook of the poems was produced.The November 2015 workshop was organised around four themes identified from an analysis of the body maps, narrative writing and reflections produced in the 2014 workshop — migration, violence, citizenship, and freedom. During the November 2015 workshop, the poets reflected upon and discussed how these themes impact their lives, read poems from published poets across the pan-African diaspora, and wrote “interpretive poems” , shares the following:Ten kilometers barefooted the bushStarted raining on the wayShe tried hiding under a tree to save her childLightning caught herFriends, relatives ran for herit was too lateHusband came runningPoor man held his dead wifeKnelt down and prayed for thisIt was too lateShe is goneIn this excerpt, Modise describes the verbal abuse enacted by being called derogatory names for women and lesbians. At the end of the poem, she offers her own strong retort, meaning “get out of my business.” The poets also described verbal and physical abuse due to their intersectional histories and identities as sort of an erasure of the self. Consequently, the group wrote Erasure poemsIn this Erasure poem, Hotstix recounts a narrative of poverty, strategies of survival, but ultimately a violent death.She needs to be loved and to make love sometimesBut how? Master need a clean ironed suitListening to those kids noise kills herShe left hers, her heart pounds with angerShe is supposed to take care of catsYet her grandchild is dyingShe is black and not freeShe is black and she should die workingShe is black and strong,She is my GrannyOn the third day of the poetry workshop, we discussed the theme of citizenship, as the previous days’ discussion began to highlight the limited recognition and rights that they have being Black, migrants, and LGB. In this excerpt from ‘Black Maid,’ Hotstix continues the themes from ‘She is Gone,’ reflecting on the multiple burdens that Black women, with liminal ‘citizenship,’ must endure. She shares:My Silence doesn’t mean am a foolI might Be a Kwere-Kwere but still a Human beingTreat me with Respect.In describing the liminal citizenships of migrants, in ‘A Cry of a Kwere-kwere’, Shane, a gay man from Zimbabwe, shares:“Kwere-Kwere,” said to be an onomatopoeic term for how migrants and immigrants sound to South Africans, becomes a derogatory term for “foreigners” like Shane.Taboo, unnatural, outcast, became,Lesson learnt at least nowYou know, a shame, disgusting, evilI brought, both to the family andto the nation.Here I am the son of theSoil, never learnt, read, borrowor inherit it, I am convinced I amnot one, we a lot, only that youare hiding or denying aboutIt’s unAfrican western thing,I never attended a white schoolOr never been with them, I amPure African-Zimbabwean, never beenOut of African-I am a real blackfaggot.Tino, also a gay man from Zimbabwe, continues to describe this liminal citizenship, particularly for someone with multiple marginalised identities, being Black, a migrant, and gay. Leaning on Kgositsile’s poem and our article’s title, in an excerpt from ‘Son of Soil,’ Tino shares:Oh mama AfricaIt’s been long Since we Children of AfricaWe have been crying for freedomWe don’t even knows where we belong anymoreOH MAMA AFRICAWe don’t have a place to call home anymoreSince we run away from our original homesTo the foreign countryOH MAMA AFRICAWe are one we belong to the same placeLet’s put our weapons downOn the fourth day of the poetry workshop, we discussed and interrogated the theme of freedom. Many of the poets wrote Praise poems - an African traditional form often in which elders remind the youth who they are, that they belong, that they are loved, and that they each have special gifts. In an excerpt from ‘Mama Africa,’ Timzy, a gay man from Malawi, shares:Oh any day nowI swearI shall be releasedIn imagining freedom, Timzy repeats the direct address to “Mama Africa” and speaks of migration, violence, and the lack of citizenship with which marginalised populations must contend. At the end of the poem, he reminds us that “we are one.” “Mama Africa” is also South African singer and activist, Miriam Makeba’s moniker. In an Erasure poem of her song ‘Thulasizwe/I Shall Be Released’ Makeba, , Jonso, As I step into the light, my face revealedI am in motion, moving, I am proceedingAs the poets explore this pursuit of freedom, Marlon expounds on this process:In March 2016, a public exhibition and publication launch that included the body maps produced by the participants alongside their narrative stories and poems was showcased at the Workers’ Museum in Newtown - an inner-city area of Johannesburg.“People need to be exposed to our stories as often as possible. In order for our lives to improve we need the public to understand the issues and challenges that we face. Maybe this way the Department of Home Affairs will change and do the right thing.”The exhibition ran for two months and has received positive feedback from the general public.“The workshops were amazing and I learned so much about myself from them. When I was creating my body map I had no idea that I would visit painful stories in my life but through that work and through the writing and the poems I have been able to heal some of those wounds and this is so important for me as a person. Seeing the exhibition up makes me feel so strong and proud to be who I am.”The re-telling of life stories in an artistic form can legitimise the experience of the participant, and according to O’Neil :75, “outQueer Crossings was the first time that LGB migrants and asylum seekers in South Africa had shared their stories and memories in print and with the public. According to Anthony Manion, the Director of GALA at the time of the projects:the works powerfully convey the experiences of LGB migrants and asylum seekers who had hoped that Johannesburg would be a safe haven and instead have met serious challenges in terms of safety and access to services. In many cases the contributors to this anthology share stories that they had kept hidden out of fear that they would be victimised if their sexuality or gender identity were discovered.The exhibition and publication of He goes further by saying, “It is hoped that the stories contained in this anthology will contribute to a better understanding of the experiences of this marginalised group and stimulate further discussion, research and activism” MoVE, :12.Poet, politician, and founder of the Negritude Movement, Aimé Césaire said that “poetic knowledge” is the notion that poetry creates the kind of knowledge needed to transform oppressive conditions Cesaire, :9. The pSome of the refugees become migrants, once the immediate danger is past. Some migrants become refugees, caught in an unexpected vortex of malice. Don’t let yourself be spun into a language of hatred and exclusion, at this hot moment in which it’s deemed OK to support refugees but still condemn migrants. I say refugee, I say migrant, I say neighbor, I say friend, because everyone is deserving of dignity. Because moving for economic benefit is itself a matter of life and death. Because money is the universal language, and to be deprived of it is to be deprived of a voice while everyone else is shouting. Sometimes the gun aimed at your head is grinding poverty, or endless shabby struggle, or soul crushing tedium Cole, .Like many migrants, the poets in our workshop moved for, in their words, “better” opportunities. As lesbian, gay and bisexual people on the African continent, they emphasised that they moved to South Africa for the “protection” of being out and lesbian, gay, and bisexual that the Constitution and Bill of Rights promises. The poets indicated that they have specifically moved to Johannesburg, known locally as eGoli (city of gold); a reference to when gold was discovered in the reef upon which Johannesburg, initially a temporary mining camp, was established in the late 1800s. Known as a “city of migrants” Crush, , JohanneWhen the poets in our workshop shared that they found their home towns or countries to be “unbearable” and they felt “uncared for” there they sought out Johannesburg as a safe haven. Although they experience Johannesburg as better, with “shackles broken” and “paths chosen,” as migrants they feel that their refuge is transitory or temporary and that they are constantly rebuilding a sense of home.The end of Apartheid and the development of South Africa’s Constitution is associated with a so-called non-violent and “miraculous” transition Klug, : 83, butcitizen, which is an ingredient of that 19th century omelette. That word came to us as part of the package that contained the bible and the rifle. But moagi, resident, is there and it has nothing to do with any border or boundary you may or may not have crossed before waking up on the piece of earth where you currently live (Kgositsile, In my language there is no word for In ‘No serenity here,’ Kgositsile said:Although “citizen” may not be found in indigenous South African languages, migrants to Johannesburg, from elsewhere in South Africa and beyond, still experience tenuous citizenship. LGB migrants and asylum seekers in South Africa navigate the spectrum between invisibility and hypervisibility in their home communities and countries, as well as in Johannesburg. In relation to their tribes, their institutions of faith, and the state, they often “shapeshift” Cox,  in theirQueer Crossings since 2014, including in the #weareallpoets workshop in 2015 and the exhibition in 2016, LGB migrants and asylum seekers have built social trust or network-based social capital (Carpiano, The poets begin to pursue freedom by migrating to the safe haven, however tenuous, of Johannesburg. They imagine freedom through writing and performing their poetry. They continue to pursue “freedom” being out as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, in their words “taking off masks” and “not hiding.” They conceive of freedom as being able to “chill” and as a “release.” Moreover, LGB migrants and asylum seekers work to imagine and pursue freedom in Johannesburg, creating what scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “abolition geographies” Gilmore, . Through


In this paper, we present robust methods for automatically segmenting phases in a specified surgical workflow by using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and hidden Markov model (HMM) approaches. More specifically, our goal is to output an appropriate phase label for each given time point of a surgical workflow in an operating room. The fundamental idea behind our work lies in constructing an HMM based on observed values obtained via an LDA topic model covering optical flow motion features of general working contexts, including medical staff, equipment, and materials. We have an awareness of such working contexts by using multiple synchronized cameras to capture the surgical workflow. Further, we validate the robustness of our methods by conducting experiments involving up to 12 phases of surgical workflows with the average length of each surgical workflow being 12.8 minutes. The maximum average accuracy achieved after applying leave-one-out cross-validation was 84.4%, which we found to be a very promising result. In recent years, with advancements in technology and medicine, the operating room has evolved into a highly complex and technologically rich environment. Unfortunately, safety in such an environment remains not only unimproved and incommensurate with quality, but also a political issue. Errors are an inevitably integral part of human life, but errors in medicine are increasingly one of the most serious issues we face in daily practice. Although numerous research projects have focused on reducing medical errors and positive results have been achieved, there are still no radical solutions to stop such errors from occurring . Aside fMoreover, in developed countries such as Japan, because the population is aging and declining, additional problems, such as a lack of medical staff, are occurring at increased rates in hospitals. To compensate for lack of staff, it is required to have either automated systems that can perform daily medical work in place of staff, or medical education support systems that can help to train larger numbers of staff in, among other areas, surgical techniques.Many concepts and research topics have been proposed to solve the above medical problems using a step-by-step approach. In the operating room, patient safety system concepts, such as the context-aware operating room, which is able to monitor the safety of a surgical workflow in the operating room by having an awareness of all general working contexts within it, have been designed . The conTo realize such a system, we first need to have an awareness of information regarding the current state of the surgical workflow. In general, if the system cannot detect the current state , it will not be able to identify which surgical instruments should be used and what the staff must do in next phase; thus the system will not be able to issue any warnings and the decision-making process is severely hampered.Because of the importance of such safety systems and in light of the growing interest in this field, in this paper, we propose new methods using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and hidden Markov model (HMM) approaches to automatically segment the phases of a specified surgical workflow based on the motion features of the working contexts. Motion features are obtained by quantizing optical flow (OF) vectors extracted from videos captured by multiple synchronized cameras in the operating room. Note that LDA is a generative topic model that is widely used in natural language processing. Further, HMM is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process with unobserved  states. Actually, in our previous work , surgicaIn addition to this introductory section, this paper is organized as follows. In Numerous methods have been developed for identifying intraoperative activities, segment common phases in a surgical workflow, and combine all gained knowledge into a model of the given workflows –7. In seRecently, decision forests have become a very versatile and popular tool in the field of medical image analysis. In , Suzuki For medical terms, HMM has been used successfully in several research studies to model surgical activities for skill evaluation –15. In , Leong e phase in our paper indicates a specified task or state in a surgical workflow. In each task of any surgical workflow, staff perform surgery by doing sequential actions. Therefore, using OF extraction to extract motions from these actions can provide effective features. Moreover, because each type of surgery has its own order of phases that must be done and there is no switching of this order between these phases, our approach is to construct an HMM based on this characteristic with the number of hidden states corresponding to the number of phases in the surgical workflow. The observed value of the HMM at a given time point will thus be calculated from normalized motion features learned via OF extraction and LDA after using a foreground detection method to reduce noise. The output likelihood of the HMM will indicate the appropriate phase corresponding to that time point. As noted above, analyzing the surgical workflow, in particular, for surgical phase segmentation, is a research domain that has seen increased interest in context-aware operating room environments. The goal of our present work is to output an appropriate phase label for each given time point of multiple synchronized videos captured from a surgical workflow in an operating room. The termForeground detection is a crucial technique wherein a frame's foreground, for example, a person, an animal, and a vehicle, is detected before operating further complex processes for segmentation, recognition, tracking, and so forth. Like other computer vision tasks, after a frame preprocessing stage (such as a Gaussian blur filter to eliminate noise) is applied, foreground detection is applied in our work to extract the area that contains staff performing surgery, as well as the movements of surgical instruments or materials, namely, the region of interest (ROI) from the background of a frame sequence in the operating room. static frame difference method, which uses a manually selected static background frame to compute the absolute difference between it and each video frame, is the simplest approach; however, a static frame is not the best choice because the background may change over time and therefore limit accuracy. Alternatively, we deem it better to use the frame difference approach, which uses the previous frame rather than a static frame to compute differences. By using this method, background changes can be resolved, but if the foreground object suddenly stops moving, the foreground detection process will fail. Therefore, more robust methods are needed to adapt to more complex environments.Many FD methods have been designed, using such techniques as frame difference, mean filter to statistical methods using single or multiple-Gaussian models, statistical methods using color and texture features, fuzzy or neural networks methods, and methods based on eigenvalues and eigenvectors . Each of frame difference and multicue [ FrameDiff is only able to detect the contour of the moving staff, whereas MultiCue tends to also detect the region inside the contour.In our work, we used two methods, namely,multicue , to dete grid intersection OF extraction, while the other is called grid block OF extraction. For convenience, we use the abbreviations shown in OF is the pattern of the apparent motion of objects, surfaces, and edges between two video frames with a small time interval. Used in a variety of studies , 18, OF In this method, using synchronized videos acquired from multiple cameras, we extract OFs from each consecutive pair of Gaussian-blurred frames at points  arranged on a grid with a spacing of fixed pixels using the techniques described in . First,  GridIntersect method, are used to divide each frame into a grid of equal blocks; however, in the GridBlock method, OFs at all points in each block are extracted rather than at the intersection points between lines. In particular, from all extracted OFs, we ignore OFs that have own magnitudes outside of the given threshold range  in the surgical workflow videos at all grid blocks . The number of words in the corpus in this case, also known as vocabulary size, is therefore 2 × 10 × 10 × 4 or 800.After extracting OFs between each pair of consecutive frames, all OFs are quantized in terms ofM represents the number of documents, N denotes the number of words in a document, and K represents the number of topics. Further, α is the parameter of the Dirichlet prior on the per-document topic distributions, β is the parameter of the Dirichlet prior on the per-topic word distributions, θi is the topic distribution for document i, ϕk is the word distribution for topic k, zi,j is the topic for the jth word in document i, and wi,j represents a specific word.As described in , LDA is  document, and word are well-known in natural language processing, these terms are abstract here and should not be limited to normal text documents; as such, these terms can also be applied to other kinds of data, including images and speech. In our present work, LDA is used to infer topics that appear inside each time point of a surgical workflow; these inferences are based on the motion features represented by OFs extracted from the movements of staff and any surgical instruments or materials in the operating room. The main purpose of using LDA in this work is to learn not only the appearance of OFs, but also the dependencies among them. Without LDA, OFs which were extracted in Although LDA,ς one-second clips, where ς is the number of synchronized cameras. Indeed, each clip corresponds to a document in LDA, while each document is represented by the words accumulated over its entire set of frames , which is actually the ratio of all topics for each document. This output can be understood simply as the motion features learned by both OF extraction and LDA; thus we can represent each second of the surgical workflow by a K-dimensional feature vector, presented as follows:K represents the number of topics.As explained in Before training an HMM from all motion feature vectors of the training surgical workflow videos, we use a feature normalization method to translate these feature vectors into a more familiar range; we also construct a faster and more accurate HMM. We achieve this because we not only eliminate noise, but also facilitate faster convergence of the iterative parameter estimation method that is part of the HMM. Top as One, Another as Zero, the second method uses a k-means approach, which is a hard clustering method to yield new feature vectors. Like other sections, for convenience, we denote the abbreviations for our methods as shown in ith one-second clip).x, y) denotes the coordinate of grid intersection point or block. d is one of four directions, namely, up, down, left, and right. n is the number of OFs acquired in one second. θi,j is the ratio of jth topic in ith document. K is the number of LDA topics.In this subsection, we therefore introduce two methods to normalize the features. While the first method is rather simple, calledK-dimensional feature vector θi is assigned to a new binary-based K-dimensional vector, namely, θi∗, in which only the dimension with the maximum value in the old vector takes on values of one, whereas the others are set to zero, summarized as follows:In this method, each K-means clustering is a method for vector classification that solves the well-known clustering problem in data mining. In unsupervised learning, k-means is one of the simplest algorithms in that its procedure follows a straightforward method for classifying a given set of n feature vectors into a certain number of clusters  in which each feature vector belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean.k-means is to define c centers, with each center corresponding to a cluster. Because the different locations of these centers cause different results, it is better to place them as far away from one another as possible. The first step is to associate each feature vector to the nearest center and then achieve an early group age. In the next step, the c centers must be recalculated based on the associated results from the previous step. After c new centers are generated, each feature vector is reassociated with the nearest new center. These actions are repeated until there are no more changes in the location of the c centers.The main idea behind θi of K-dimensional feature vectors, with i = 0,…, n − 1, k-means classifies the n feature vectors into c (≤n) clusters S = S0, S2,…, Sc−1 by finding positions μi, i = 0,…, c − 1, of the cluster centers that minimizes the within-cluster sum of squares, which serve as the distances from feature vectors to the clusters centers, namely,More specifically, given set K-dimensional feature vector θi is assigned to a new binary-based c-dimensional, θi∗, which corresponds to c clusters, using  states or phases . Each states see .q to state q′ is calculated viaNq→q′ represents the number of transitions from state q to state q′ and − indicates all states. Because of the characteristics of the left to right HMM, the transition probability distribution can then be expressed as the following matrix:Q represents the number of states in the HMM.First, the transition probability from state Second, the initial state probability distribution, which represents the probability that a state is the starting state of the HMM, is defined asθi∗, i = 0,…, n − 1, obtained in q is calculated using i ∈ q) is the number of documents in state q, ∑(i ∈ q∣θi∗ = θ∗) is the number of documents in state q with normalized feature vectors, also known as observation value  θ∗, and ϵ is a smoothing term. Note that ∑q∑i(i ∈ q) will simply be n, the number of documents in the surgical workflow.Third, from the normalized feature vectors The HMM is initialized with all parameters calculated above. These model parameters are then estimated with the goal of maximizing the likelihood of the data given the model. We accomplish this via the Baum-Welch algorithm , which i Top in k-means in c cluster centers μ. Normalized feature of each one-second clip is finally used to estimate phase label for that clip based on probabilities in  Top in kities in .In this section, we describe experiments that we conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed methods . We firsThe surgical workflow used in our experiments was cholecystectomy, which is a typical laparoscopic surgery. This surgical workflow has a basic flow assumed to consist of the 12 phases shown in We recorded the surgical workflow 28 times with seven different participants, each participant being recorded four times by the three different cameras; thus we obtained a total of 84 videos. The average length of surgical workflows was 12.8 minutes. The frame rate of all video cameras was 24 frames per second. The average number of frames of each video was then 18432. The participants in our experiments are normal people who imitate surgery operation. For each parameters setting, of the 28 recorded surgical workflows, 27 were used for training; the remaining surgical workflow recordings were used to test the accuracy of our proposed methods. We used this approach such that every set of videos was used for testing once in a leave-one-out cross-validation strategy. From this, all results shown in K, was increased from 10 to 100 by a step of 10. Parameters α and β for the LDA were set to 50/K and 0.1, respectively. Smoothing term ϵ in  yielded better accuracy.k-means were always better than ones using Top. Further, the use of GridBlock OF extraction yielded higher levels of accuracy than that of GridIntersect OF extraction, but the differences here are not entirely clear. We note for these results that GridIntersect extracts only OFs at a fixed number of points, namely, at the intersection of vertical and horizontal lines; thus it is easy to lose important motion features. On the other hand, GridBlock uses averaged OFs; thus it is able to learn more important movements.We also observe in  FrameDiff to detect the foreground was far better than using MultiCue in terms of both maximum average accuracy and error. While FrameDiff detects only the contour of moving contexts, MultiCue tends to also detect the region inside the contour  to obtain characteristics of pixel texture, pixel color, and local image appearance for detecting foreground. In OF extraction step, we observe that GridBlock was far slower than GridIntersect. It can be explained because GridBlock calculates OFs at all foreground pixels in each block, while GridIntersect calculates them at only the intersection pixels between lines .They ran at a high speed (in cases ofThey used camera sensor, which not only is easy to set up, but also has a substantial advantage as compared to other sensors; that is, despite the existence of cameras in the operating room, all staff do not notice the presence of such cameras; thus there is no risk for the surgical workflow to be negatively impacted due to their existence.They used OF extraction for acquiring motion features of all general working contexts; thus not only medical staff motions, but also information about equipment and materials being used is covered.In this paper, we described new methods that use LDA and HMM approaches to automatically segment phases of a specified surgical workflow. The input to these methods consists of multiple videos acquired from multiple synchronized cameras. After all processes, including foreground detection, OF extraction, and topics modeling, using both LDA and HMM construction are completed, we are able to estimate the appropriate phase at a given time point of the workflow. Our proposed methods accomplished the following:unusual event detection system to reduce medical errors,medical education support system to train larger numbers of staff,automated system that can perform daily medical work in place of staff,surgical decision-making system to recommend or prompt the appropriate actions during surgical workflow,documentation generation system to automatically generate documents, reports, and so forth, after each surgical workflow.For our future work, we plan to recognize the use of surgical instruments and improve upon our phase segmentation algorithm to obtain higher levels of performance. As a next step, we will further develop an automatic moving camera system, in which cameras can automatically move on the wall and ceiling to positions that can acquire the most meaningful and important information, via human and object tracking algorithms. This means that, in case of more complex and realistic operating room, namely, if there are multiple staff performing surgery, our system can automatically separate targets for each camera, and each camera can then track, focus on, and acquire motion information from only one staff. As a result, the phase segmentation becomes more accurate. Next, we plan to extend our proposed system for constructing


In short, the rejection of phonemes is based on a false analysis and a too-narrow consideration of the relevant data.Phonemes play a central role in traditional theories as units of speech perception and access codes to lexical representations. Phonemes have two essential properties: they are ‘segment-sized’ (the size of a consonant or vowel) and abstract . Nevertheless, there is a long history of challenging the phoneme hypothesis, with some theorists arguing for differently sized phonological units (e.g. features or syllables) and others rejecting abstract codes in favour of representations that encode detailed acoustic properties of the stimulus. The phoneme hypothesis is the minority view today. We defend the phoneme hypothesis in two complementary ways. First, we show that rejection of phonemes is based on a flawed interpretation of empirical findings. For example, it is commonly argued that the failure to find acoustic invariances for phonemes rules out phonemes. However, the lack of invariance is only a problem on the assumption that speech perception is a bottom-up process. If learned sublexical codes are modified by top-down constraints (which they are), then this argument loses all force. Second, we provide strong positive evidence for phonemes on the basis of linguistic data. Almost all findings that are taken (incorrectly) as evidence against phonemes are based on psycholinguistic studies of single words. However, phonemes were first introduced in linguistics, and the best evidence for phonemes comes from linguistic analyses of  Within traditional linguistic theory, phonemes are units used to represent the ‘the psychological equivalent of a speech sound’  and the base John (stored in the lexicon). The access codes to words need to support transparency of relations like this. Thus, we reconsider the claims made in the context of single words (Part 2) and pay special attention to arguments in favour of phonemes derived from linguistic analysis of more complex items (Part 3). It is the linguistic arguments that provide the strongest evidence for the psychological reality of phonemes as access units in speech perception that can support further language comprehension.In this article we consider conceptual and empirical challenges to the phoneme. One common feature of these criticisms is that they are predominantly advanced in the context of theories addressing monomorphemic single-word identification. Yet a key consideration for units of lexical representation is that they should be able to support linguistic computations across The organisation of the article is as follows. Part 1 defines the phoneme from the perspective of linguistic theory and discusses which properties it must have in order to enable an interface between lexical representation and their acoustic and articulatory-motor counterparts. Part 2 discusses conceptual and empirical challenges to the claim that phonemes serve as sublexical access codes to phonological word forms. On alternative views, the sublexical units are items other than phonemes or phonemes are artefacts of an alphabetical reading system. In each case, we show that the rejection of phonemes as a general feature of speech perception is unjustified. Part 3 provides a set of arguments for indispensability of the phoneme from various linguistic phenomena, ranging from single words to phrases. Indeed, phonemes were first proposed out of linguistic considerations, and linguistic evidence continues to provide the best evidence for their existence. Part 4 discusses a way of including phonemes into models of speech processing.lexicon, a long-term memory repository for words and significant subword parts (morphemes).A considerable share of the speaker’s linguistic knowledge is knowledge about words. An average speaker retains knowledge of tens of thousands of distinct word forms that enable reference to a wide range of objects, properties and events. Most generally, knowing a word amounts to knowing the link between a sound form  and a meaning, as well as morphosyntactic properties of the word, such as grammatical category, gender, and so forth. Words  are stored in the phonemes, that is, abstract and discrete symbolic units of a size of an individual speech segment, such as a consonants or vowel . A phonological form of a word is an ordered sequence of phonemes, for example, the sequence of phonemes /k/ - /æ/ - /t/  refers to a meowing domesticated feline animal or /d∧k/ to a quacking avian. Apart from special cases such as homonymy or polysemy, two words that are distinct in meaning differ in phonological form, with a minimal difference being exactly one phoneme within the same position in the word (e.g. /kæt/ ‘cat’ vs. /mæt/ ‘mat’). Furthermore, different words can employ the same set of phonemes but in different orders (e.g. cat  /kæt/ vs. act  /ækt/ vs. tack  /tæk/). A language typically uses a repertoire of a few dozens of phonemes that are combined to produce all of the thousands of word forms.Understanding how phonological forms of words are stored in the lexicon is key for any theory of language. The boundary conditions are that a language user should be able to recognise the phonological forms of words during speech comprehension and utter them appropriately in language production. A traditional answer from linguistic theory Dresher,  is that h] in cat and a plain or unreleased [k˺] in duck. This exemplifies a more general point: phonemes may be realised via different phones depending on the position within the syllable or word, on the neighbouring sounds, on whether the phoneme occurs within a stressed or unstressed syllable, and other factors. So, the American English phoneme /t/ is realized as an aspirated [th] syllable-initially as in top, as an unaspirated [t] following /s/ as in star, or as an unreleased [t˺] in the syllable-final position as in cat. The above statement is an instance of a phonological rule of American English whereby an abstract, context- and/or position-independent phoneme /t/ is related to its allophones  that are context- and/or position-dependent. Across languages phonemes may be realised via different phones; for example, in (European) French /t/ is not realised as [th]  when the phonemic representation is uttered . Features can be defined in terms of both their articulatory requirements and their acoustic consequences, as illustrated for manner features in Table While being minimal units of lexical representation, in modern linguistic theories, phonemes are analysed as having further internal structure  of a certain type or size. These other units coexisting with phonemes may fit into a single processing hierarchy or operate on parallel streams; the essential part that remains on the phoneme-based view is that the lexicon cannot be robustly accessed until a direct or mediated mapping from the speech signal to phonemes has taken place. Second, the critical claim behind phonemes constitutes how knowledge is stored in long-term memory rather than how this knowledge is activated during speech perception. On the phoneme-based view, there are discrete (nonoverlapping) representations devoted to each phoneme in long-term memory, but these representations can be activated in a gradient manner. For instance, the phoneme /b/ may be partially activated by the input /d/ because /b/ and /d/ share acoustic features. . In Part 2 we review psycholinguistic findings that are frequently used to reject phonemes as units of speech perception, and we show that the conclusion is unwarranted. The argument is the same in majority of cases, namely, researchers report evidence that units other than phonemes  play a role in speech perception, and based on these findings, phonemes are rejected. However, the findings only show that phonemes are not the only sublexical phonological codes involved in perception, a claim we agree with  or smaller (e.g. features) than phonemes to the exclusion of the latter.explain carefully pronounced as explain clarefully, same state → same sate) or their exchange  or single phonological features syllable or a smaller unit such as feature. We consider this evidence next.Massaro  advancedA key (implicit) assumption of this view is that phonemes  are learned in a bottom-up manner. Given this premise, we agree, that the acoustic variability of phonemes may be problematic. But Massaro’s argument loses its force when phonemes are seen as linguistic units that are shaped by additional constraints in order to play a more general role in language processing. That is, if top-down constraints from words and morphemes play a role in learning sublexical representations, then the perceptual system can map together distinct acoustic versions of a phoneme to a common code. To illustrate, in the domain of visual word identification, there is widespread agreement that letters are coded in an abstract format despite the fact that there is no visual similarity (invariance) between many upper- and lowercase letters  and another group heard ambiguous [s]-final words . Listeners who had heard [?] in f-final words were subsequently more likely to categorize ambiguous syllables on an /ef/ – /es/ continuum as [f] than those who heard [?] in s-final words, and vice versa. That is, participants altered the boundary of the phonemes to be consistent with its lexical context . The important implication for present purposes is that the rejection of phonemes based on the lack of acoustic invariance is misguided because the invariance need not be present in the bottom-up signal. To be clear, the evidence for top-down learning does not by itself provide evidence for phonemes , but it does undermine a common argument against phonemes  and had to identify as quickly as possible whether it contained a certain phoneme (e.g. /b/) or syllable (e.g. barg). Response times were consistently faster for syllables compared to phonemes  is constructed of several nonsense words—for example, the stream.... p_r_g_, b_d_k_ or m_l_t_ that were combined with different vowels to produce four words in each family . This outcome could not be achieved via tracking TPs between syllables, which were the same for syllables within and across word boundaries and instead required tracking TPs between consonants that were higher within-word than across word boundaries. The parser’s ability to track statistical regularities between nonadjacent consonants (or vowels) clearly demonstrates that segment-sized units are functional in speech perception.The critical evidence that similar statistical inferences can be made at the phoneme level comes from studies by Newport and Aslin ; BonattiA similar conclusion can be reached on the basis of the findings by Chambers, Onishi, and Fisher , who trabanket into the target ear and lanket into the other ear yields misreports such as blanket; similarly, pay–lay pair yields misreports such as play, go–row yields grow, and tass–tack yields tacks or task. As argued by Morais, Castro, Scliar-Cabral, Kolinsky, and Content (ban and lan) would result in the perception of a CCVC syllable blan (rather than combine into a CVCCVC string banlan or lanban).Another important piece of evidence in support of segments in speech perception is provided by phonological fusions—that is, incorrect responses given by listeners reporting the stimulus from the target ear in a dichotic listening task Cutting, . For exa Content , these pTo summarize, we have challenged theoretical and empirical arguments used to reject segment-sized perceptual units in favour of larger sublexical units and provided empirical evidence for segment-sized units in speech production and perception.In another line of research phonemes are rejected in favour of smaller units of speech perception, namely, features. Typically this research finds empirical evidence for features and concludes that phonemes are superfluous. By contrast, we argue that while features are real, they exist as internal constituents of phonemes but cannot replace phonemes.mask versus /maks/ in Max. Introducing more structure to a syllable’s feature list admits the necessity to bundle features . As another example, consider the coda [pst] as in lapsed, which on the phoneme-based view is represented as the sequence of three phonemes—that is, /p/ represented as {stop, labial, voiceless}, /s/ represented as {fricative, alveolar, voiceless}, and /t/ represented as {stop, alveolar, voiceless}. In order to yield the output [pst], the timing of the switch from stop to fricative must coincide with the switch in place from labial to alveolar; otherwise, a spurious output such as [pft] may be obtained, /f/ being {fricative, labial, voiceless}. Hence again, a coordinated bundling of features into phonemes cannot be dispensed with.Consider again Hickok’s  model, wpay–lay pair yields play but not way, even though the labial approximant /w/ combines acoustic features of /p/ and /l/.A similar point can be made on the basis of the phonological fusion data by Cutting , discussMesgarani, Cheung, Johnson, and Chang  report nTo summarize, there is well-accepted evidence for segments in speech production, growing evidence for segment-sized units in perception, and fundamental flaws in the arguments that are commonly put forward against segment-sized units. We conclude that segment-sized units play a role in both speech production and perception.In addition to challenging phonemes on the basis of their size, researchers have questioned the claim that speech perception involves abstract representations. On traditional phonological theories, words are represented in long-term memory as sequences of phonemes In contrast with the normalization processes involved in identifying phonemes in traditional theory, episodic theories of speech perception claim that much or all the above variability remains in the sublexical and lexical representation, and this variability plays a functional role in word perception Johnson, , 2010b. Empirical evidence for the claim that spoken word identification involves accessing acoustically detailed rather than abstract phoneme representations comes from demonstrations that indexical information and fine phonetic details impact on word identification. In what follows we argue that indexical and fine phonetic detail, respectively, can indeed impact on word identification, but nevertheless, there is no reason to reject the hypothesis that phonemes are abstract.A commonly used method to assess the impact of indexical or environmental variation on spoken word identification is long-term priming. In this procedure, participants listen to a series of (often degraded) words during a study phase and later  the words are repeated along with a set of new control words. Priming is obtained when repeated words are identified more quickly or more accurately than nonrepeated control items  that processes more detailed acoustic representations so that the listener can use indexical information in adaptive ways, such as identifying the speaker based on their voice or the emotionality of speech  prototypicality effects, (b) effects of fine phonetic detail stemming from phoneme variation due to neighbouring segments, or (c) position within a word or syllable.Similarly, it is premature to reject phonemes on the basis of studies showing that word identification is influenced by fine phonetic detail, as the term bear) while looking at a visual display containing an image of a bear and an competitor image of a pear. The VOT of the initial consonant of the target varied such that although the segment always fell within the /b/ category, some VOT values were prototypical of /b/ and others closer to the b/p categorical boundary. Participants gave more looks to the picture of a pear as the VOT of the initial consonant approached the categorical boundary, which was taken as evidence that fine-grained phonetic differences within a phonemic category impact on word identification. . Indeed, position-independent phonemes are widely accepted for speech production  than when they did not . Critically, facilitation was found even when the shared phoneme switched its syllable/word position (e.g. green flag). As acoustic realisation of the same phoneme (/g/ in the last example) varies by position, the facilitatory effect cannot be fully attributed to motor-articulatory planning and supports abstract position-independent representations in speech production. For further empirical evidence, see Reilly and Blumstein . What we would emphasize here is that in both cases theorists are rejecting position-invariant phonemes and are replacing them with more detailed representations that code for both identity of a segment and its order.Instead of positing position-invariant phonemes, theorists tend to assume that segments are coded differently when they occur in different contexts and positions within words. For example, Wickelgren , 1976 reIt is important to note, however, that the there are ways to code for order using position-independent phoneme representations. Indeed, in the visual word-recognition literature, a similar issue arises regarding how to order letters, and both context-specific , there is no reason to expect that the perception of ‘a’ has been in any way altered. In the same way, the absence of generalisation from one allophone to another is expected on any account, and accordingly, this observation does not serve as evidence against phonemes in speech perception phones is provided by selective adaptation studies Ades, . For exafor allophones is in no way evidence against phonemes, merely that the task was viewed as being more relevant to phones. Second, a number of studies provide positive evidence in support of position-invariant phonemes. For example, a recent selective adaptation study by Bowers et al.  or a final position . The listeners then judged an ambiguous target b/dump (produced by morphing the words bump and dump). A significant adaptation effect was found both with initial and final adaptors . Further evidence for position-independent phonemes in speech perception comes from Toscano, Anderson, and McMurray’s . Listeners showed more fixations to anadromes (e.g. sub when bus is the target) than either to unrelated words (well) or to words that share fewer phonemes (sun). This finding cannot be accounted for via perceptual units such as (demi-)syllables (as sub is no closer to bus than sun is) or via phones (as at this level sub is farther from bus than sun) but can be naturally explained in terms of phonemes . Finally, Kazanina, Phillips, and Idsardi  psycholinguistic evidence in support of phonemes accepted, it is possible to raise another objection, namely, phonemes are an artificial by-product of literacy and accordingly do not constitute a core component of speech recognition. .To conclude Part 2, current psycholinguistic data are consistent with the hypothesis that syllables, features, indexical, fine phonetic detail, as well as phonemes may all have a role in spoken word identification. There is no reason to reject phonemes on the basis that additional representations may be involved in word identification.for syllables. That is, there is at least a further assumption of an Ockham’s razor for the argument to go through. The fact that there is some positive evidence in support of phonemes from the psycholinguistic literature syllables, contextual or positional variants of phonemes, or features.k ‘to’, z ‘from’, s ‘with’, and v ‘in’  or combinations of morphemes (e.g. government consists of govern and -ment). Just like words, morphemes must be stored in the lexicon , the verbal present tense third-person singular suffix /z/ (he runs), or the verbal past tense suffix /d/ (played)—are all single consonants. The important point is that it is not enough to recognize a word such as books or played, listeners also should be able to relate them to book or play. Without phonemes, these relations would be nontransparent and arbitrary, and these pairs would be no more similar than cat and cap, leading to a mounting load on the memory system.The point above can be extended to a very wide range of languages if ‘words’ are replaced with ‘morphemes’. Morphemes are minimal pairings between a phonological form and a concept. Words are stand-alone morphemes . However, this view—as well as the demi-syllable and the phone based views—experience difficulty due to the existence of phonological processes in Hebrew that affect root consonants. First, the spirantisation process in Hebrew turns a stop into a fricative with the same place of articulation in certain contexts (primarily following vowels), for example, p → f, b → v, k → x. Accordingly, the root /k-t-b/ ‘write’ can be pronounced in several ways, depending on the position that the consonants occupy in the vocalised form (e.g. [yi-xtov] ‘he will write’ with /k-t-b/ here pronounced [x…t…v]). In addition, Hebrew has voicing assimilation for consonants in clusters; consequently, the first consonant of the root k-t-b can be pronounced in several ways, that is,  . Hence a template that corresponds to a common lexicosemantic representation cannot be formed solely on the basis of acoustic considerations.An alternative could be proposed that morphologically related forms in Semitic languages are abstracted to an acoustic frame A strong rationale for postulating context-independent phonemes in linguistic theory is that they enable a parsimonious account of sound changes, alternation, and variation that takes place synchronically (i.e. at a given time) or diachronically (i.e. as a language changed through time). Synchronically, many pronunciation changes are associated with morphological derivation, as building larger forms often results into changes in how a constituent morpheme is realised phonetically. Next, we survey productive morphological processes in various languages to demonstrate that an adequate mapping between speech inputs and long-term memory requires phonemes as access codes.Across the world’s languages there are several ways in which morphemes combine to form words: suffixation, prefixation, infixation, and reduplication.stamping) and prefixation  are the two most common morphological processes. Both processes ubiquitously lead to changes in the phonetic realisation of morpheme, in particular, to reassignment of phonemes to syllables (‘resyllabification’). For example, stamp [stæmp] combined with -ing [ɪŋ] yields stamping [stæm.pɪŋ], with /p/ resyllabified from the coda of the first syllable into the onset of the second. Now consider the task of recognizing stamp in stamping. If the speech perception system operates strictly on the basis of syllable-sized units, relating the input [stæm.pɪŋ] to the morpheme sequence {stæmp}{ɪŋ} during lexical access is an arbitrary associative process based on rote memory. That is, the relation between the syllable [stæm] and the morpheme {stæmp} would be no more similar than that between [ræm] ‘ram’ and {ræmp} ‘ramp’. On the phoneme view, on the other hand, the resyllabification of /p/ (so that the second syllable has an onset in line with a linguistic principle of ‘onset maximization’) does not affect the mapping process. Moreover, the /p/ moves coherently into the next syllable . Plentiful similar examples of resyllabification that yields misalignment between morpheme and syllable boundaries can be easily found for prefixation (e.g. in Russian the prefix /raz/ ‘extra’ combines with /o.det’/ ‘to dress’ to form /ra.zo.det’/ ‘overdress’) and across languages, emphasizing the universality of the phenomenon and need for a robust and general solution.Suffixation . Note that there is no solid in solidity if phonological forms of words were represented via phones or (demi-)syllables. From the learner’s perspective, this means that knowing the word solid and its meaning is not the basis for deducing that solidity is about firmness or hardness. That this is clearly wrong has been known since Berko’s  illicit, or similarly /səlɪd/ with /-li/ (i.e. solidly *[səlɪdlɪ])? We also note that while perceptual proximity is an extremely useful dimension for contemplating and establishing morphological relatedness, it is insufficient to distinguish morphological versus nonmorphological relations among words .A more exotic type of word formation is infixation, whereby a morpheme is inserted within another morpheme. English employs this in a limited fashion in “expletive” infixation, as in ’ Klein, . The inffancy-schmancy syllables or phones. Phoneme-based encoding of lexical representations highlights the regularity in the lexicon and makes it more learnable.enchainement (‘chaining’) and liaison (‘linking’) in French ’ yields the output [nu.vɛ.la.mi], with the final consonant of the adjective resyllabified into the initial syllable of the noun. Similarly, combining amie with jeune [ʒõe] ‘young’ or petite [pə.tit] ‘small’ results into [ʒœ.na.mi] or [pə.ti.ta.mi]. Liaison presents little difficulty to French listeners who can identify a word such as amie equally well whether it occurred in a canonical form or in a liaison context phones, (demi-)syllables, or features alone.The boy is running, the verb is agrees in number and person with the subject the boy). During language comprehension, the human parser verifies and uses such nonadjacent agreement relations to assign words to their positions in the syntactic structure . Thus, there is a relation between a syntactic unit that consists of all and only the content of the subsyllabic, monosegmental clitic /z/ and the noun king at a distance. Another example comes from the English monophonemic plural suffix /z/. The final phoneme /z/ in boys must be recognized as the plural marker to establish patterns of agreement between the article and noun, as in thesethree boys, and between the subject and verbs, as in The boysfrom New Yorkaretired.Consider the English possessive clitic ’To summarise, establishing relations between words and interpreting them as part of a larger syntactic and semantic structure requires verifying that morphosyntactic features  properly agree. Ability to access these features requires phonemes; hence, phoneme-based representations must be visible to syntactic and semantic computations.blue → [uble] . In so doing, the listeners must ignore the difference between the tongue positions for /b/ in the game versus the real form of blue (before [e] in [lube] vs. before [l] in [blu]), or the devoicing of [z] in the game form of Tom’s (cf. [tamz] vs. [amste]), all while listening at normal speech rates.Language games  because of the coarticulation in the context of the following vowel. This highlights the abstract nature of alliteration in that it ignores allophonic variation. The same abstraction away from allophonic variation is exhibited by 3-month-old children  from a prominent 8th-century poet Tu Fu . Chinese is a nonalphabetic language, yet phonemes must be parsed out from the syllables in order to evaluate the lines of poetry for alliteration.Likewise, Liu  gives exTo conclude Part 3, a variety of linguistic data, including morphological derivation, language games, and poetry, demonstrate that linguistic generalisations require phonemes as units of representation. Access to phonemes is required beyond the immediate task of retrieving words from the lexicon but also to interpret syntactic and semantic relations between words in phrases or sentences. In language games and in poetry, phoneme-based regularities are widely used for producing an effect on the listener. Thus, phonemes must be access codes to the lexicon and a speech perception unit. Importantly, these linguistic observations extend to illiterates, again suggesting that phonemes are not a by-product of learning to read an alphabetic script.In Fig. The incoming speech signal (at the very bottom of the figure) is filtered into critical bands in the peripheral auditory system and is represented in primary auditory cortex via a large number of spectrotemporal receptive fields  Also, because of its aspiration, [kʰ] signals the beginning of a stress foot in English (shown as in the prosody box), a position that is also statistically predictive of the beginning of a word in English .Considering the specific example of input Returning to phone and phoneme computations in the middle of the diagram, sequences of phones are related to sequences of phonemes via the phonological regularities of the language. We emphasize sequences here because of the violations of linearity and biuniqueness Chomsky, , in whics, indicated in Fig. solid) and [səlɪd] (solid-ity), can be recognized, as the realizations contain the same phoneme string with different prosodic parsings. Yet we emphasize that in normal language comprehension, it is the cooperation of multiple modules from the mid layer and top-down influences from the lexical representations that underlies our ability to identify words so successfully (compare the relative difficulty of identifying phonemes reliably in nonce or foreign words).The primacy of phonemes (coordinated feature bundles) in our approach lies primarily in the preservation of the phoneme sequence in subsequent linguistic computations, such as the parsing of the English genitive clitic ’j] in key and [kɣ] in cool as belonging to the same phoneme category /k/, or for listeners’ difficulty in discriminating between different allophones of the same phoneme (e.g. the perceptual magnet effect; Kuhl, The other proposals which come closest to ours in the recognition of the importance of phonemes to subsequent linguistic computations are those which posit phonemes following perception Hickok, . The fauAlthough phonemes are the core of the system that we propose, this is not to say that all language capacities are computed solely by the core phoneme system. Indeed, a range of psycholinguistic phenomena show that additional representations play a role in word perception and language processing more generally. For example, right hemisphere systems may encode the speech in quantitatively or qualitatively different ways in order to encode the emotional and various indexical features of language processing Poeppel, . SimilarHowever our goal here is not to detail how the right hemisphere, episodic memory, and all the various sublexical phonological representations interact in order to support speech perception and comprehension. Rather, our goal is to argue that phonemes are necessary and serve as access codes to lexemes. On our view, any attempt to discard phonemes for alternative sublexical representations will fail, and the main reason why so many theorists have attempted to replace phonemes with various alternative sublexical representations is that they have not considered the core reasons why phonemes were introduced in the first place, namely, various linguistic phenomena concerning how complex word forms and syntactic processes are accomplished, which require access to subsyllabic feature bundles coordinated in time.


Schlinger  providedWhen Skinner  wrote thWe entirely agree with Skinner, and have said so repeatedly  and believed to explain behavior. Cognitive states, mental states, hunger, concepts, associations, ideas, identity, will, preference, intention, cognitive rules, encoding, storage, retrieval, knowledge, propositions, representation are all mentalisms Skinner, . One of not mentalistic. Mentalisms are inferred or theorized states or functions; pristine inner experience is directly apprehended . We claim that Susan at 1:52:12 was directly apprehending (imaginarily) her boyfriend ; she was not inferring that the boyfriend was present to her; she was not theorizing about the boyfriend's presence-to-her. We did not claim that Susan was in some mental or cognitive state (that putatively resulted in the seeing of the boyfriend)—we know nothing about any state. We claimed direct apprehension: Susan was innerly seeing the boyfriend.We entirely agree with Skinner's criticism of mentalism , neither that something caused Susan's inner seeing nor that her inner seeing caused anything. We have claimed only that Susan apprehended her inner experience. We have not Susan's inner seeing of her boyfriend is a private event—such a seeing could not possibly present itself to anyone other than Susan. Privacy of observation is indeed a problem for science, but it is not the terminal problem that Schlinger maintains. Our claim is that Susan's inner experience, while private, was directly apprehended.We cited Hurlburt's “claim that pristine inner experience is …directly apprehendable, as Skinner and the behaviorists required” .Privacy in the study of inner experience is no more fatal than privacy of the physicist alone in her lab reading her voltmeter: the observation is private, and physics must figure out a way  to validate and integrate the private physicist's result into the network of physical observations. So too must a mature science of inner experience figure out a way to validate and integrate private inner experiences into the network of the experiential. If, for example, it could be shown that inner experience feel that she (innerly) saw him; she (innerly) saw him. The difference between descriptions of pristine inner experience and the other procedures that are typically called “subjective” is important; it can be debated whether “radically non-subjective” was a felicitous descriptor.The literature uses the term “subjective” in a variety of ways that might, broadly speaking, be divided into three meanings: “private,” “open to bias,” and “loosely specified” . Pristine inner experience is, of course, subjective in the “private” usage. Hurlburt (Schlinger holds that “descriptions of inner experience are metaphors because when we say that we covertly (or ‘innerly’) ‘see’ or ‘hear’, we are not reacting to actual visual and auditory stimuli” , you could inquire about the trumpet's putatively visual characteristics (Gold or silver? Was someone holding it or was it on a stand? Shiny or dented?) or its auditory characteristics (High or low notes? Loud or soft? Quick or slow?); if she answered appropriately, it would boost your confidence. Chimera's trumpet observation is private, but because Chimera reliably, confidently, mostly unerringly knows the difference between seeing and hearing in the real world, you will likely accept her report as being descriptive, not metaphorical.In the real world, we recognize ourselves as seeing or hearing In 2009, Schlinger wrote that “behavior analysts assume a behavioral continuity in space and time in which behavior (and stimuli) are on a continuum from public to private (replacing the old distinction between objective and subjective). The only difference is the methodological difficulty of observing private events”  ‘see’ or ‘hear,’ we are not reacting to actual visual and auditory stimuli”  visual stimuli.” But we are Hurlburt et al. , using DHurlburt et al. …state that some individuals either rarely or never talk to themselves; this is their “pristine experience.” Just because some individuals report rarely talking to themselves does not mean that is so. A simpler explanation is that they are not aware of doing so. In other words, some people may never have learned to label their covert self-talk.  everyone's pristine inner experience includes frequent self-talk, whether they are aware of it or not.Note that Schlinger does Thus, Schlinger seems to be claiming that there are two kinds of people: (a) those who engage in self-talk and are aware of it (can therefore label it as such); and (b) those who engage in self-talk but are not aware of it .do not engage in self-talk and are aware of that lack ; and (d) those who do not engage in self-talk but mistakenly believe that they do so .We think there are actually at least four categories; we would add (c) those who Our DES investigations of inner experience have accepted the possibility of any of those categories, as well as any combination thereof, or any in-between categorization, or any other categorization not yet contemplated. We have not pre-judged, pre-favored, or pre-supposed any results. We have tried to constrain ourselves to discovering the phenomena that present themselves, whatever those phenomena are, taking seriously the hundred or so constraints that Hurlburt  presenteAcross many (we think even-handed) DES investigations over many years, category (d) is far more common than is category (b).theoretical grounds , we have no quarrel . But to the extent that Schlinger's disagreement is based on observation of self-talk, we must strongly object, unless he can show that those observations submit to the constraints that Hurlburt  self-observation for the DES carefully crafted attempts at apprehension.We happily accept the criticism that even though we and DES Hurlburt  outlinesHurlburt  is one sPristine inner experiences are directly apprehended phenomena, not mentalisms, not the result of inference or theory. There is reason to believe  that there is scientific utility in understanding pristine inner experience.Descriptive experience sampling (DES) has a limited goal: to apprehend and describe with fidelity ongoing pristine inner experience. It does not seek to specify any causative significance for pristine experience—that is left to others. DES is a careful method, trying to live within the constraints discussed by Hurlburt  as it deWe are critical of unconstrained attempts at self-observation.RH drafted this response on behalf of the other original authors. BA, CF, and SK consulted in the process.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.


In 2015, the 3rd Annual International Weight Stigma Conference was held in Reykjavik, Iceland.Part of the problem is that the very act of labeling is a process of othering, one that creates a distinction between us and them; which raises the question: who is entitled to do the labeling and why, and in what conditions is such a distinction needed? For example, it is undoubtedly useful to define a group for research purposes, for example, so that the barriers and discrimination they face can be quantified and addressed. However, within the medical setting, the main reason to create a separate category for larger bodies is because they are to be treated differently than slimmer patients. Whether or not such differential treatment is perceived to be necessary reflects fundamentally divergent framings of higher-weight bodies. It is unlikely there can ever be agreement between people whose “solution” to body diversity is social justice and acceptance of this diversity, and those whose “solution” is elimination of the difference.And yet, there has been a move in recent years, particularly among weight-focused research journals, to mandate the ubiquitous use of “person-first” language, such as “person with obesity,” rather than “obese person”  characteristic. However, a number of new, and likely unintended, consequences arise from this approach. Hudak , distingWhat is more, person-first language is mired in the medicalization of body state. Since the American Medical Association controversially declared “obesity” a disease in 2013 (Frellick, And yet, resolving to use the language preferred by the target group itself does not simplify the decision. While some obesity organizations that call for the use of person-first language claim to speak for all higher-weight people, this population is far from homogeneous, and individuals who do engage with such organizations will be a self-selecting group who are seeking a medical solution to something they consider inherently problematic. Indeed, a coalition of size-acceptance and fat rights groups have challenged the claim that these organizations speak for larger people as a whole, criticizing the top-down setting of the terminology agenda and the absence of grassroots input from social justice organizations that fight for fat people's interests NAAFA, .a priori to think of weight as a problem. Secondly, the 11 terms used in the Weight Preference Questionnaire were chosen after consultation with patients in treatment-seeking settings (Wadden and Didie, In contrast, several studies have attempted to ascertain actual individual preferences. A number of these studies have used the Weight Preference Questionnaire (Dutton et al., Support for this contention comes from a qualitative study of the lived experience of 76 Australian adults with a BMI greater than 30 (Thomas et al., Importantly, Smith et al.  noted thYet, despite the word “fat” being almost universally considered pejorative within the wider community (Brochu and Esses, against those demanding legal and civil rights (Ehrenreich, Ideally, it should be the target group itself that gets to decide on the label used to describe them. To date, however, research on the preferences of this group has been skewed toward treatment-seeking populations (Wadden and Didie, Ultimately, whether you describe somebody as “fat,” “overweight” “obese,” “big,” “heavy,” “voluptuous,” or simply “higher-weight,” these labels all reflect certain culturally constructed values. It behooves us to ask ourselves whether the words we use do indeed affirm the respect and human dignity of the target group, whether they place the group as equal to other social groups, and whether they promote or hamper the wellbeing and empowerment of that group. If not, we will only perpetuate the stigma we are claiming to abolish. As a first step, we suggest that best practice in research, publishing, and healthcare would be to use neutral terms, with “weight” and “higher weight” likely to be suitable in the majority of situations. We would also exhort journal editors to remove the insistence on person-first terminology that precludes more nuanced consideration of the implications of language use.AM and SD both contributed to the conception and writing of this paper, and final approval of the written version. AM and SD agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.


Young people – especially women – are risking their health in pursuit of a tanned skin that they associate with celebrity, beauty and wellbeing. Tatum Anderson reports. Australian Clare Oliver was just 26 when she died of skin cancer. Speaking from her hospital bed in the city of Melbourne to an Australian television crew, she blamed the spread of melanoma on her regular use of sunbeds.“I’ve been told I have weeks to live and I don’t think a solarium, and looking good with a golden tan is worth that,” she said.Ten years after her death in 2007, Oliver is still very much in Australians’ minds, says Craig Sinclair, head of the Prevention Division at the Cancer Council Victoria, a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for ultraviolet (UV) radiation.Oliver’s interview triggered a media frenzy and a shift in the debate on sunbeds in Australia, prompting the state of Victoria to ban their use by people aged under 18 years. The move was quickly endorsed by the federal health minister and the prime minister of Australia at the time.By 1 January 2016, all six Australian states had gone a step further by imposing a ban on the use of commercial sunbeds for everyone.Australia is one of several countries to have placed restrictions on the use of sunbeds to reduce skin cancer.The use of artificial tanning devices – including sunbeds, stand up booths and facial tanners – is responsible for an estimated 450 000 non-melanoma skin cancer cases and more than 10 000 melanoma cases each year in the United States of America, Europe and Australia combined. These figures do not account for eastern Europe and Latin America, where sunbeds are also commonly used.Women – especially young women – are the biggest users of artificial tanning devices.“Skin cancer incidence has risen among light-skinned populations and artificial tanning devices have contributed to this increase over the last three decades,” says Emilie van Deventer, team leader of WHO’s radiation programme in Geneva.Artificial tanning devices: public health interventions to manage sunbeds, countries need to educate the public about the health risks of UV exposure from sunbeds and apply regulations to restrict their use. This year, WHO issued guidance on the various policy options for countries seeking to restrict solarium use. According to “There are several policy options for governments. They can make licensing for tanning salons mandatory,” van Deventer says. “They can require tanning salons to inform customers about the health risks and they can prohibit the marketing and promotion of sunbeds.”The WHO guidance provides examples of these and other policy actions countries are already taking, such as introducing additional taxes for tanning sessions. “This is similar to other taxes or levies on tobacco, alcohol, sugar and fat that are now commonly used to drive down demand,” van Deventer says.Public health campaigns are useful, as seen in Australia, Denmark and Italy, but voluntary codes have largely failed to protect the public, the guidance notes.A compulsory code of practice in Brazil failed because of the challenges of verifying compliance, says Rafael Fernandes, a specialist in regulation and inspection at the Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária (ANVISA), the country’s health regulatory agency. For example, operators were supposed to limit the strength and intensity of sunbed equipment. However, inspectors did not always have the technical knowledge to gather the required data. In addition, it was a challenge to determine whether clients were minors, whether sessions were time-limited and whether clients received advice from operators on the risks. In 2009, Brazil imposed a general ban on sunbeds, becoming the first country to do so. ANVISA’s decision to impose the ban was based on the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) classification of UV-emitting tanning devices as carcinogenic a few months earlier and its conclusion that there is no safe limit for UV from such devices.The 2009 Brazilian law prohibited trade in artificial tanning devices and their use unless prescribed by a doctor for health reasons. In addition, lawmakers are considering new legislation on the distribution of sunscreen by the public health system and by employers for their outdoor workers.For Sinclair, the general ban on sunbeds was feasible as a policy option for Australia’s six state governments because it was supported by three elements: scientific evidence of the harm to people’s health, government support to help sunbed operators switch to other services and economic studies showing the benefits of such a ban in terms of reducing related health costs. In addition, the sunbed industry lobby in Australia was relatively small at the time the general ban was imposed, Sinclair says. In contrast, the sunbed lobby in Europe and North America is powerful and vocal in challenging government policy to restrict sunbed operators’ activities. A 2007 study by researchers from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research was particularly influential. They predicted that for a cohort of 100 000 young Australians, more than 1000 melanomas and 12 000 squamous cell carcinomas could be prevented by banning sunbeds, saving 12.2 million Australian dollars (US$ 9.4) in health-care expenditure. Sinclair says that it is partly thanks to intense public health messaging on the risks of UV exposure in Australia, which has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, that the ban has been well received by the public.slip, slop, slap,” he says, referring to an acclaimed campaign in Australia and New Zealand urging people to “slip” on long-sleeved clothes, “slop” on sunscreen and “slap” on their hats.“We have a 30-year history of sun protection campaigns starting with The ban in Australia helped challenge widespread misperceptions. “Many people wrongly assumed that tanning on a sunbed was healthier than tanning in the sunshine. Some people thought that if the skin tans, but does not burn, then there’s no damage to their skin,” he says.Since the general ban on sunbeds, more people in Australia read about melanoma– the most lethal type of skin cancer – on the internet and looked for alternatives, such as spray tans. Moreover, there is little evidence of a black market, when individuals buy sunbeds for personal use, which is not restricted, and provide illicit solarium services from their homes.In Brazil, the national ban has also exploded myths about sunbeds and tanning. “Solarium equipment is very simple and only the lamps are visible, so I don’t think people realised how dangerous it is,” Fernandes says.Several tanning salons in Brazil have brought lawsuits to lift the national ban and some of those are still ongoing today.Perhaps Brazil’s general ban on the use of sunbeds was quick to gain public support because solariums were not as popular as they are in other – usually colder – countries in Europe and North America.Fernandes says another benefit of a sunbed ban has been that more people are aware of the health risks of UV exposure.Last year, echoing IARC’s findings, the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks of the European Commission issued a scientific opinion that “there is no safe limit for exposure to UV radiation from sunbeds” and therefore restrictions on the use of artificial tanning devices are justified, including an outright ban on them. The committee also made it clear that the beneficial effects of sunbed use, such as for the generation of vitamin D, are outweighed by the adverse effects. “There is no need to use sunbeds to induce vitamin D production because alternative sources of vitamin D are readily available,” the committee said.While the arguments for a general national ban are strong, however, only Brazil and Australia have taken this policy path so far. Countries where sunbeds are popular, such as Germany, have pursued partial restrictions and voluntary codes with limited success.Germany imposed a ban on the use of commercial sunbeds by those aged under 18 years in 2009, and issued a set of UV protection regulations in 2012. Such a ban also exists in Austria, Belgium, France, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Portugal and Spain. Tanning salons in Germany must limit UV irradiation to a low level, sunbeds must have timers so that they automatically switch off, and goggles must be provided to protect users’ eyes. In addition, staff must advise customers with skin that burns, but does not tan, against using sunbeds.“A 2012 study shows that, despite the current ban, around 5% of minors continue to use sunbeds,” says Christian Greipl, head of the Radiological Protection Directorate in Germany’s federal environment ministry.Sunbed-use: needs for action study known as the “SUN-Study”.Also, despite the requirement for the presence of trained staff, self-service tanning salons are still in operation, he says, referring to the According to that study, the typical sunbed user in Germany is female and between 18 and 25 years, and women use sunbeds twice as often as men of the same age.“Although the health risks of sunbed use are scientifically well documented, many people in Germany did not appear to be aware of them,” Greipl says, adding: “Many sunbed users reported continued use despite knowing about the potential health risks.”Compliance is a big challenge, he says. Yet, while a general ban may be the only way to ensure comprehensive, effective radiation protection to safeguard human health, such a ban is deemed – according to the government’s assessment so far – an infringement on personal freedoms enshrined in the constitution.“Because minors are especially vulnerable and still developing, the government’s duty of care towards this group is strong enough to warrant a ban to protect them from the health risks of artificial UV radiation,” Greipl says.


The 2017 winner is Dr. Aviv Regev, Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a core member and chair of the faculty of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. Regev will receive her award and deliver a keynote address during Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology/European Conference on Computational Biology (ISMB/ECCB) 2017 in Prague, Czech Republic .https://www.hhmi.org/scientists/aviv-regev). However, she discovered her interest in biology in the classroom of evolutionary biologist Eva Jablonka. Regev said, “I found biology because of her—in my first year as an undergrad, I took a genetics course with her in what is now called the ‘flipped classroom’ style. It was all abstract and inferential, and I was hooked.”Aviv Regev  first puBefore starting her PhD thesis at Tel Aviv University, Regev began to really think about cells as computers, particularly how they are comprised of circuits. Regev’s deep interest in this concept started at a conference where new approaches for modelling concurrent computations were featured, and she immediately considered this as a way to model cell circuitry. She was able to develop her ideas into a PhD project under the mentorship of Udi Shapiro and Eva Jablonka, and she recalled, “No one was working on this type of project. I did, however, have the great fortune to find Udi, who listened to my idea. He thought it was important. He didn’t want to work on it himself, but he wanted me to be able to work on it.”Regev completed her PhD in 2002 and was selected to be a Bauer Fellow at the Center for Genomics Research at Harvard University, which gave her an intellectual community as well as freedom and funding to build a small independent research group. She continued to pursue her interest in modelling cell circuits using gene expression and genomic data, and with her colleagues, she developed several widely used algorithms and computational tools, including Module Networks and Synergy. She received early support from Andrew Murray at Harvard University, who shared Regev’s view that it was critical to deeply understand both theory and experiments.In 2006, Regev was given a joint faculty appointment at MIT and the Broad Institute, and she started applying her cell-circuit modelling algorithms to understanding different cell types, particularly cells of the immune system. Once again, Regev struck out on an independent line of research. She recalled, “Many people were not focused on circuits. But that was OK. I wanted to build and be part of a community that would open a new direction.” Eric Lander at Broad—a long-time supporter of female and young scientists with leadership potential—stood behind and supported Regev’s independent scientific vision at this critical point in her career.Regev’s independent research program has blossomed since she founded her lab, and she has applied her interest in how cellular circuits function and rewire to a wide range of biological questions, including how immune cells rapidly respond and differentiate, how hematopoietic stem cells develop into different blood cells, and how evolutionary changes occur over millions of years. She is both a computational biologist with keen instincts about how to extract insight from data and an experimental biologist with the ability to create new methods and deploy cutting-edge technology to address fundamental questions.Regev continues to be drawn to seemingly intractable problems, such as biological scenarios with a massive number of hypothetical combinations or interactions and making them into manageable problems by using sampling approaches. Her work on cells of the immune system reflects this focus, and she recalls one of her most unexpected findings emerged in 2012 while working with collaborators on applying single-cell RNA-seq to the analysis of dendritic cells. In contrast to present-day technology, which enables the profiling of thousands of cells quickly and cheaply, this study only looked at 18 cells and required a tremendous effort. Regev recalled, “What we found was surprising in 2 ways. First, we were examining just one cell type, which we thought was well defined, so we did not expect to find major differences in gene expression between the cells—yet we saw 1,000-fold differences, from which we could recover regulatory molecules that accounted for this variation. Second, we discovered surprising patterns in alternative splicing—some cells preferentially used one isoform; others used another. We had been expecting the cells to use both. This added up to a bigger surprise: we weren’t really looking at 1 group of cells. We were looking at 2 subgroups, which we now know represent different developmental programs. A great deal of my work now focuses on understanding heterogeneity of this type—defining and understanding cells at a much higher resolution than we could before.”Regev has passed along her love of science through her mentorship of postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates, and outside of the lab, she has maintained an intense teaching load and worked to overhaul the undergraduate genetics course to include quantitative content. She is grateful to her mentors who gave her freedom to pursue her own scientific interests, and this has guided her style of mentorship. She said, “Today, when I see a person with an idea, I don't care about career stage—maybe they're a grad student or an undergrad; maybe they are a seasoned staff scientist—I care about who they are. Do they show the seeds of independence, vision, and leadership? And what is their idea? If it's challenging in entirely new ways and can transform the world, it should be grown. As I mentor my students and postdocs, I try to let them spread their own wings—to be their colleague and collaborator.”At Broad, Regev was recently appointed chair of the faculty, and in this role, she has been focusing on initiatives to strengthen and build communities around computational biology and advance software engineering approaches to biological data analysis. She has served the greater computational biology community in many ways through work on numerous advisory boards, journal editorial boards, and program committees for conferences. Regev has been a reviewing editor for eLife since its inception and, more recently, a senior editor with a major responsibility for computational biology, genomics, and theory papers.Regev is gratified by her selection for the 2017 ISCB Innovator Award, and she said, “Biology is such a data science now, and ISCB is the community that made that happen, so it is especially exciting and gratifying to be receiving such an honor from peers in this community.”


This work presents an analytical solution of some nonlinear delay differential equations (DDEs) with variable delays. Such DDEs are difficult to treat numerically and cannot be solved by existing general purpose codes. A new method of steps combined with the differential transform method (DTM) is proposed as a powerful tool to solve these DDEs. This method reduces the DDEs to ordinary differential equations that are then solved by the DTM. Furthermore, we show that the solutions can be improved by Laplace–Padé resummation method. Two examples are presented to show the efficiency of the proposed technique. The main advantage of this technique is that it possesses a simple procedure based on a few straight forward steps and can be combined with any analytical method, other than the DTM, like the homotopy perturbation method. Differential equations are relevant tools to model a wide variety of physical phenomena across all areas of applied sciences and engineering. Analytical techniques are applied to find the exact solutions of some cases of differential equations; nevertheless, when the differential equations are nonlinear there are no general techniques of solutions. Therefore, numerical methods are important tools to study and understand the quantitative behavior of the nonlinear differential equations with unknown exact solutions. However, such methods can exhibit numerical instabilities, oscillations or false equilibrium states, among others Gumel . This meTime DDEs appear in propagation and transport phenomena, population dynamics, bioscience problems, neural network model, control problems, electrical networks containing lossless transmission lines and economical systems where decisions and effect are separated by some time intervals, among many other applications  Zhou . We willu(t) is analytical with respect to t in the domain of interest, thenu(t).Zhou  If a funZhou  The diffmentclass2pt{minimSystem  is supplution of  can be wApplying the DTM to the initial conditions  and systm is the approximation order of the solution. The exact solution of problem (Using  and 8),,8), the  problem –5) is t is t\docU(k) and V(k) are the differential transforms of u(t) and v(t) respectively, then the main operations of the DTM are shown in Table If Apply the differential transform to the initial conditions .Apply the differential transform to the differential system  to obtaiUse the transformed initial conditions  and the Use the differential inverse transform formula  to obtaiThe process of the DTM can be described as:The solutions series obtained from the DTM may have limited regions of convergence. Therefore, we propose to apply the Laplace–Padé resummation method  which are considered here are given byFor the nonlinear lag function ution of –11) is  is \docuTo solve –11), we, we11), mentclasspt{minimamentclasspt{minimaTo solve –15), th, th15), Using –17), th, th17), To solve –22), th, th22), Using –24), th, th24), u(t) with Maclaurin’s expansionu(t) of order  which we denote by Given an analytical function u(t) and The numerator and the denominator in  are consNote that for a fixed value of he error  is smallhe error  have theSeveral approximate methods provide power series solutions . Nevertheless, sometimes, this type of solutions lack large domains of convergence. Therefore, Laplace–Padé resummation method , th, th37), Note that one can use more terms in the above series solutions. Nevertheless, sometimes, this may not increase the accuracy of the solution for large intervals. Therefore, we use the Laplace–Padé resummation method presented in “s as followsApplying Laplace transform to equation –35)..\documenIn a similar manner, the second interval of approximation is determined. The conditions To solve –51), th, th51), L/M] LMs as followsApplying Laplace transform to equation –49)..\documenFinally, combining  and 61)61), the  problem –33) is  is \docuConsider the following nonlinear variable delay differential equationFor this problem the lag function is  problem –63) is  is \docuTo solve –67), th, th67), From recursion , the folTo enlarge the domain of convergence of the approximate solution or to find the exact solution, the Laplace–Padé resummation method is used as in the previous example.s as followsApplying Laplace transform to equation –65) is  is \docuIn a similar manner, the second interval of approximation is determined. This interval is obtained by solving the inequalities To solve –80), th, th80), From recursion , the fols as followsApplying Laplace transform to equation –78) is  is \docuFinally, combining  and 89)89), the  problem –63) is  is \docuVariable delays differential equations (DDEs) with arbitrary types of nonlinear functions for the time delay is an open area of research that require new numerical and analytical methods in order to deal with their solution. Therefore, from the examples above, it is worthwhile to remark that the multi-step technique proposed in this work combined with modified differential transform method (DTM) Zhou  based onAs far as the knowledge of authors goes, no numerical or analytical approximation methods to solve the type of case studies of this work have been reported in the literature. Hence, we propose as a proof of concept, to solve problems with known exact solutions. Therefore, this multi-step technique in combination with the DTM and Laplace–Padé resummation was able to obtain the exact solutions within the given intervals. However, it is still pending for future work in order to treat DDEs with unknown exact solutions. For such hard to solve problems, we will measure the error of approximation using the mean square residual (MSR) error as in Benhammouda and Vazquez-Leal . FinallyThis article deals with the solution of nonlinear DDEs with variable delays using a new multi-step method and the DTM Zhou . This te