This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place—from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the South, (...) where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower. (shrink)

This volume contains thirteen papers that were presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/Société canadienne d’histoire et de philosophie des mathématiques, which was held at Ryerson University in Toronto. It showcases rigorously reviewed modern scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century. A series of chapters all set in the eighteenth century consider topics such as John Marsh’s techniques (...) for the computation of decimal fractions, Euler’s efforts to compute the surface area of scalene cones, a little-known work by John Playfair on the practical aspects of mathematics, and Monge’s use of descriptive geometry. After a brief stop in the nineteenth century to consider the culture of research mathematics in 1860s Prussia, the book moves into the twentieth century with an examination of the historical context within which the Axiom of Choice was developed and a paper discussing Anatoly Vlasov’s adaptation of the Boltzmann equation to ionized gases. The remaining chapters deal with the philosophy of twentieth-century mathematics through topics such as an historically informed discussion of finitism and its limits; a reexamination of Mary Leng’s defenses of mathematical fictionalism through an alternative, anti-realist approach to mathematics; and a look at the reasons that mathematicians select specific problems to pursue. Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible to not only mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also anyone with a general interest in mathematics. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

Originally published in 1972, Should Trees Have Standing? was a rallying point for the then burgeoning environmental movement, launching a worldwide debate on the basic nature of legal rights that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, in the 35th anniversary edition of this remarkably influential book, Christopher D. Stone updates his original thesis and explores the impact his ideas have had on the courts, the academy, and society as a whole. At the heart of the book is an eminently (...) sensible, legally sound, and compelling argument that the environment should be granted legal rights. For the new edition, Stone explores a variety of recent cases and current events--and related topics such as climate change and protecting the oceans--providing a thoughtful survey of the past and an insightful glimpse at the future of the environmental movement. This enduring work continues to serve as the definitive statement as to why trees, oceans, animals, and the environment as a whole should be bestowed with legal rights, so that the voiceless elements in nature are protected for future generations. (shrink)

MutL family proteins contain an N‐terminal ATPase domain (NTD), an unstructured interdomain linker, and a C‐terminal domain (CTD), which mediates constitutive dimerization between subunits and often contains an endonuclease active site. Most MutL homologs direct strand‐specific DNA mismatch repair by cleaving the error‐containing daughter DNA strand. The strand cleavage reaction is poorly understood; however, the structure of the endonuclease active site is consistent with a two‐ or three‐metal ion cleavage mechanism. A motif required for this endonuclease activity is present in (...) the unstructured linker of Mlh1 and is conserved in all eukaryotic Mlh1 proteins, except those from metamonads, which also lack the almost absolutely conserved Mlh1 C‐terminal phenylalanine‐glutamate‐arginine‐cysteine (FERC) sequence. We hypothesize that the cysteine in the FERC sequence is autoinhibitory, as it sequesters the active site. We further hypothesize that the evolutionary co‐occurrence of the conserved linker motif with the FERC sequence indicates a functional interaction, possibly by linker motif‐mediated displacement of the inhibitory cysteine. This role is consistent with available data for interactions between the linker motif with DNA and the CTDs in the vicinity of the active site. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 234-275.

Laws of nature have been traditionally thought to express regularities in the systems which they describe, and, via their expression of regularities, to allow us to explain and predict the behavior of these systems. Using the driven simple pendulum as a paradigm, we identify three senses that regularity might have in connection with nonlinear dynamical systems: periodicity, uniqueness, and perturbative stability. Such systems are always regular only in the second of these senses, and that sense is not robust enough to (...) support predictions. We thus illustrate precisely how physical laws in the classical regime of dynamical systems fail to exhibit predictive power. *R. G. Holt gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Center for Physical Acoustics at Oxford, Mississippi, and the Office of Naval Research. (shrink)

Increasingly, voices in the growing neurodiversity movement are alleging that individuals who are neurologically divergent, such as those with conditions related to bipolar disorder, autism, schizophrenia, and depression, must struggle for their civil rights. This movement therefore raises questions of interest to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as to concerned members of the general public. These questions have to do with such matters as the accessibility of knowledge about mental health; autonomy and community within the realm (...) of the mentally ill; and accommodation in civil society and its institutions. The contributors to Ethics and Neurodiversity explore these questions, and the traditional philosophical questions related to them. The authors pay special attention to the need to examine the policies and practices of institutions, such as higher education, social support, and healthcare. (shrink)

We have only limited awareness of the system by which we control our actions and this limited awareness does not seem to be concerned with the control of action. Awareness of choosing one action rather than another comes after the choice has been made, while awareness of initiating an action occurs before the movement has begun. These temporal differences bind together in consciousness the intention to act and the consequences of the action. This creates our sense of agency. Activity in (...) the anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex is associated with awareness of our own actions and also occurs when we think about the actions of others. I propose that the mechanism underlying awareness of how our own intentions lead to actions can also be used to represent the intentions that underlie the actions of others. This common system enables us to communicate mental states and thereby share our experiences. (shrink)

Recent experimental work by T.D. Wilson et al. indicates that a consequence of asking subjects to reflect on their attitudes is that they not only reduce the consistency between their attitudes and behavior, but they perform actions which they come to regret. Wilson interprets this work via intra-psychic concepts, and arrives at the conclusion that it is rational to avoid deliberating about a wide range of attitudes and behaviors. This consequence has objectionable implications for philosophical theories of deliberative practical rationality. (...) I respond to this challenge by reinterpreting the experimental results in a way which is not only consistent with a certain theory of deliberative practical rationality but in which the results lend support to that theory. My interpretive focus is on attending closely to the social circumstances of subjects in the experiments[1]. (shrink)

Abstract The thesis that teleological explanations are best understood as causal explanations is defended (contra Valentine). I shift the focus of debate from behavior simpliciter to allegedly rational behavior. Teleological explanation, in the case of rational agents, involves reason?giving; and the reasons agents give for acting must be causative of that action if those agents are to be rational in practice. I argue initially that to abandon the claim that reasons are causes of action is to abandon that which renders (...) many generalisations of systematic human behavior intelligible. I then adduce and defend against two major objections to the secondary thesis that reasons can be causes of action: (1) Experiments in attribution research suggest that agents are characteristically mistaken when reporting on the causes of their behavior; (2) Causal explanation must refer to some law, and reasons cannot enter into such laws as causes of action. In responding to these objections, I note that strict predictability is probably not a reliable indicator of genuine causal explanation; some explanations will afford predictions, others will not. (shrink)

Environmental ethics has reached a certain level of maturity; further significant advances require reexamining its status within the larger realm of moral philosophy. It could aim to extend to nonhumans one of the familiar sets of principles subject to appropriate modifications; or it could seek to break away and put forward its own paradigm or paradigms. Selecting the proper course requires as the most immediate mission exploring the formal requirements of an ethical system. In general, are there constraints against bringing (...) our moral relations with different sorts of things under different mIes of govemance? In particular, how much independence can an environmental ethic (or ethics) aim to have? (shrink)

1 Boolean retrieval 1 2 The term vocabulary and postings lists 19 3 Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval 49 4 Index construction 67 5 Index compression 85 6 Scoring, term weighting and the vector space model 109 7 Computing scores in a complete search system 135 8 Evaluation in information retrieval 151 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion 177 10 XML retrieval 195 11 Probabilistic information retrieval 219 12 Language models for information retrieval 237 13 Text classification and Naive Bayes 253 (...) 14 Vector space classification 289 15 Support vector machines and machine learning on documents 319 16 Flat clustering 349 17 Hierarchical clustering 377 18 Matrix decompositions and latent semantic indexing 403 19 Web search basics 421 20 Web crawling and indexes 443 21 Link analysis 461.. (shrink)

Guidelines provided by the Director of Public Prosecutions suggest that anyone assisting another to commit suicide in England and Wales, or elsewhere, will not be prosecuted provided there are no self-seeking motives and no active encouragement. This reflects the position in Switzerland. There, however, no difference is made between assistance and inducement. In addition, the Swiss approach makes it possible to establish organisations to assist the suicides of both their citizens and foreign visitors. It should not be assumed that this (...) approach is without controversy in Switzerland. Proposals for reform continue to be debated there, not least because of the concern about some of the actual practices of certain end-of-life organisations. It is likely that a few English citizens will continue to avail themselves of these services in Switzerland if they cannot find the help they require here. This paper explores the legitimacy of the current restrictive position adopted towards assisted suicide in England. It argues that the provisions within the guidelines prohibiting organisations that assist suicides, leaves some without the help they need. While legislative decriminalisation of assisted suicide and the establishment of state-sponsored suicide centres would represent the most permissive regime, this paper proposes that this would be a step too far. The preference here is for decriminalisation but adopting a ‘middle way’ between the two extremes: the more permissive approach provided by the ‘Swiss model’ is one that could be employed here, albeit within a more robust regulatory regime. (shrink)

Skyrms has pointed out differences between the results of rational choice theory and evolutionary game theory. This commentary argues that there is a great deal of agreement on the Nash Bargaining Solution, which maximizes the product of player payoffs, in both rational-choice-based and evolution-based theories of equilibrium selection. While evolutionary game theory has the potential to explain how we arrive at the behavioural rules that govern what we do, realistic models will require calibration through laboratory experiments. Indeed, experimental evidence strongly (...) supports the Nash Bargaining Solution. (shrink)

Punishment and democracy appear to exacerbate each other’s worst features. The institutions and moral intuitions used to punish those that break the law can hollow out civic participation, distort the electorate, and undermine core democratic values. Likewise, many have argued the decentralized character of democracy is a key, albeit indirect, cause of increasingly punitive public policies that are divorced from any reasonable penological purpose. Given the effects of electoral politics, many have called for the separation, or general insulation, of state (...) punishment from public influence. However, recent empirical work on punitive attitudes and institutional design has begun to chip away at this common sense. This article contextualizes and qualifies the various mechanisms of policy feedback and public opinion formation thought by political theorists to undermine democratic participation in penal institutions and makes a normative case that insulating the public from penal law actively sustains injustice. (shrink)

Probabilistic methods are providing new explanatory approaches to fundamental cognitive science questions of how humans structure, process and acquire language. This review examines probabilistic models defined over traditional symbolic structures. Language comprehension and production involve probabilistic inference in such models; and acquisition involves choosing the best model, given innate constraints and linguistic and other input. Probabilistic models can account for the learning and processing of language, while maintaining the sophistication of symbolic models. A recent burgeoning of theoretical developments and online (...) corpus creation has enabled large models to be tested, revealing probabilistic constraints in processing, undermining acquisition arguments based on a perceived poverty of the stimulus, and suggesting fruitful links with probabilistic theories of categorization and ambiguity resolution in perception. (shrink)

This paper presents the first use of a computational model of natural logic—a system of logical inference which operates over natural language—for textual inference. Most current approaches to the PAS- CAL RTE textual inference task achieve robustness by sacrificing semantic precision; while broadly effective, they are easily confounded by ubiquitous inferences involving monotonicity. At the other extreme, systems which rely on first-order logic and theorem proving are precise, but excessively brittle. This work aims at a middle way. Our system finds (...) a low-cost edit sequence which transforms the premise into the hypothesis; learns to classify entailment relations across atomic edits; and composes atomic entailments into a top-level entailment judgment. We provide the first reported results for any system on the FraCaS test suite. We also evaluate on RTE3 data, and show that hybridizing an existing RTE system with our natural logic system yields significant performance gains. (shrink)

This book argues that the othering and criminalization of Black people in times of crisis is part of the religious meaning of America that fuels the problem of mass incarceration. The author develops a religious interpretation of the significance of these images to America’s political economy the produces the very problems we punish as a society.

I wish to present a codi cation of syntactic approaches to dealing with ergative languages and argue for the correctness of one particular approach, which I will call the Inverse Grammatical Relations hypothesis.1 I presume familiarity with the term `ergativity', but, brie y, many languages have ergative case marking, such as Burushaski in (1), in contrast to the accusative case marking of Latin in (2). More generally, if we follow Dixon (1979) and use A to mark the agent-like argument of (...) a transitive verb, O to mark the patient-like argument of a transitive verb, and S to mark the single argument of an intransitive verb, then we can call ergative any subsystem of a language that groups S and O in contrast to A, as shown in (3). (shrink)

This book takes readers on a fascinating journey to the very heart of Tantra: its key teachings, foundational lineages, and transformative practices. Since the West's discovery of Tantra 100 years ago, there has been considerable fascination, speculation, and more than a little misinformation about this spiritual movement. Now, for the first time in the English language, Tantra Illuminated presents an accessible introduction to this sacred tradition that began 1,500 years ago, in the far north of India. The book uses translations (...) from primary Sanskrit sources, offers a profound look at spiritual practice, and reveals Tantra's rich history and powerful teachings. (shrink)

We propose a model of natural language inference which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We extend past work in natural logic, which has focused on semantic containment and monotonicity, by incorporating both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our model decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits linking premise to hypothesis; predicts a lexical semantic relation for each edit; propagates these relations upward through a semantic composition tree according to properties of (...) intermediate nodes; and joins the resulting semantic relations across the edit sequence. A computational implementation of the model achieves 70% accuracy and 89% precision on the FraCaS test suite. Moreover, including this model as a component in an existing system yields significant performance gains on the Recognizing Textual Entailment challenge. (shrink)

The Quaestiones super Physica Aristotelis traditionally attributed to Iohannes Canonicus survive in over 35 manuscripts and at least 8 printings from 1475 to 1520. Yet historians have disagreed about the century, the place of origin, the name and the institutional position of the author. This brief paper combines old and new evidence proving that the text was authored by an Augustinian Canon Regular of the Cathedral of Tortosa named Francesc Marbres, a Catalan from Barcelona, while he was Master of Arts (...) at the University of Toulouse around 1330. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new architecture for textual inference in which finding a good alignment is separated from evaluating entailment. Current approaches to semantic inference in question answering and textual entailment have approximated the entailment problem as that of computing the best alignment of the hypothesis to the text, using a locally decomposable matching score. While this formulation is adequate for representing local (word-level) phenomena such as synonymy, it is incapable of representing global interactions, such as that between verb negation (...) and the addition/removal of qualifiers, which are often critical for determining entailment. We propose a pipelined approach where alignment is followed by a classification step, in which we extract features representing high-level characteristics of the entailment problem, and give the resulting feature vector to a statistical classifier trained on development data. (shrink)

Christopher Frith is a research professor at the Functional Imaging Laboratory of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College, London. He explores, experimentally, using the techniques of functional brain imaging, the relationship between human consciousness and the brain. His research focuses on questions pertaining to perception, attention, control of action, free will, and awareness of our own mental states and those of others. As the following discussion makes clear, Frith investigates brain systems involved in the choice of (...) one action over another and in the understanding of other people. Such investigations are aimed at understanding brain basis of autism and schizophrenia. In his widely cited study of schizophrenia, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia , Frith argues that many of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions of control, auditory hallucinations, and thought insertion, involve problems of self-monitoring. Patients, in effect, lose track of their own intentions and mistakenly attribute agency for their own actions to someone else. Frith employs models of motor control, involving comparator mechanisms and efference copy, not only to explain delusions that involve movement, but also to develop a neurocognitive explanation of delusional cognition. (shrink)

Mechanisms of selective attention are vital for coherent perception and action. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have yielded key insights into the relationship between neural mechanisms of attention and eye movements, and the role of frontal and parietal brain regions as sources of attentional control. Here we explore the growing contribution of reversible neurodisruption techniques, including transcranial magnetic stimulation and microelectrode stimulation, to the cognitive neuroscience of spatial attention. These approaches permit unique causal inferences concerning the relationship between neural processes (...) and behaviour, and have revealed fundamental mechanisms of attention in the human and animal brain. We conclude by suggesting that further advances in the neuroscience of attention will be facilitated by the combination of neurodisruption techniques with established neuroimaging methods. (shrink)