Originally published in 1944, this book was originally intended as a continuation of the 1943 publication Nautical Mathematics, which is also reissued in this series. In it, the principles set out in Nautical Mathematics are given practical applications, and the text is supplied with exercises to test and clarify the lessons. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of education in the forces during WWII.

The socioeconomic and ethnic characteristics of parents are some of the most important correlates of adverse health outcomes in childhood. However, the relationships between ethnic, economic, and behavioral factors and the health outcomes responsible for this pervasive finding have not been specified in child health epidemiology. The general objective of this paper is to propose a theoretical approach to the study of maternal behaviors and child health in diverse ethnic and socioeconomic environments. The specific aims are: (a) to describe a (...) causal pathway between the utility that women obtain through work outside the home and through child care and disease hazard rates in childhood using an optimization model; (b) to specify the influence of ethnic and socioeconomic factors on model constraints; (c) to use the model as a tool to learn about how different combinations of maternal wage labor and child care time might influence child health outcomes in diverse social contexts; (d) to identify parameters that will require measurement in future research; (e) to discuss research strategies that will enable us to obtain these measurements; and (f) to discuss the implications of the model for biostatistical modeling and public health intervention. Optimization models are powerful heuristic tools for understanding how ethnic, environmental, family, and personal characteristics can place important constraints on both the quality and quantity of care that women can provide to their children. They provide a quantitative appreciation for the difficult trade-offs that most women face between working in order to purchase basic goods that children cannot do without (e.g., food, clothing, shelter, health insurance), and increasing offspring well-being through child care (e.g., training in social skills, affection, protection from environmental hazards, help with homework). (shrink)

Even though female food acquisition is an area of considerable interest in hunter-gatherer research, the ecological determinants of women’s economic decisions in these populations are still poorly understood. The literature on female foraging behavior indicates that there is considerable variation within and across foraging societies in the amount of time that women spend foraging and in the amount and types of food that they acquire. It is possible that this heterogeneity reflects variation in the trade-offs between time spent in food (...) acquisition and child care activities that women face in different groups of hunter-gatherers. In this paper we discuss the fitness trade-offs between food acquisition and child care that Hiwi and Ache women foragers might face. Multiple regression analyses show that in both populations the daily food acquisition of a woman’s spouse is negatively related to female foraging effort. In addition, nursing mothers spend less time foraging and acquire less food than do nonnursing women. As the number of dependents that a woman has increases, however, women also increase foraging time and the amount of food they acquire. Some interesting exceptions to these general trends are as follows: (a) differences in foraging effort between nursing and nonnursing women are less pronounced when fruits and roots are in season than in other seasons of the year; (b) foraging return rates decrease for Ache women as their numbers of dependents increase; and (c) among Ache women, the positive effect of number of dependents on foraging behavior is less pronounced when fruits are in season than at other times of the year. Lastly, in the Hiwi sample we found that postreproductive women work considerably harder than women of reproductive age in the root season but not in other seasons of the year. We discuss how ecological variation in constraints, the number of health insults to children that Hiwi and Ache mothers can avoid, and the fitness benefits they can gain from spending time in food acquisition and child care might account for differences and similarities in the foraging behaviors of subgroups of Hiwi and Ache mothers across different seasons of the year. Valid tests of the explanations we propose will require considerable effort to measure the relationship between maternal food acquisition, child care, and adverse health outcomes in offspring. (shrink)

A psychiatrist recounts a case of a man presenting with severe depression who claimed to have abused children and his pet dog.Clinical management of the case hinged on whether this claim was true, a lie or delusional. The uncertainty over this raised complex ethical dilemmas regarding confidentiality and protection of the public.

Research based on construal level theory (CLT) suggests that thinking about the distant future can prime people to solve problems by insight (i.e., an “aha” moment) while thinking about the near future can prime them to solve problems analytically. In this study, we used a novel method to elucidate the time-course of temporal priming effects on creative problem solving. Specifically, we used growth-curve analysis (GCA) to examine the time-course of priming while participants solved a series of brief verbal problems. Participants (...) were tested in two counterbalanced sessions in a within-subject experimental design; one session featured near-future priming and the other featured far-future priming. Our results suggest high-level construal may temporarily enhance analytical thinking; far-future priming caused transient facilitation of analytical solving while near-future priming induced weaker, transient facilitation of insightful solving. However, this effect is short-lived; priming produced no significant differences in the total number of insights and analytical solutions. Given the fleeting nature of these effects, future studies should consider implementing methodology that allows for aspects of the time-course of priming effects to be examined. A method such as GCA may reveal mild effects that would be otherwise missed using other types of analyses. (shrink)

Thomas Hill, a leading figure in the recent development of Kantian moral philosophy, presents a set of essays exploring the implications of basic Kantian ideas for practical issues. The first part of the book provides background in central themes in Kant's ethics; the second part discusses questions regarding human welfare; the third focuses on moral worth-the nature and grounds of moral assessment of persons as deserving esteem or blame. Hill shows moral, political, and social philosophers just how valuable (...) moral theory can be in addressing practical matters. (shrink)

Part biography and part constructive ethical inquiry, this book is an original interpretation of the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson’s ethical method and view of ethical integrity, with an emphasis on his Analysis, Institutes, and Principles.

The moral crises of our time -- Ethics at the crossroads -- In search of our moral heritage -- Re-connecting with the earth -- Re-connecting with one another -- Re-connecting with the enemy.

Provides invaluable information about one of the most significant yet least understood new religious movements of the twentieth century.

Respect, Pluralism, and Justice is a series of essays which sketches a broadly Kantian framework for moral deliberation, and then uses it to address important social and political issues. Hill shows how Kantian theory can be developed to deal with questions about cultural diversity, punishment, political violence, responsibility for the consequences of wrongdoing, and state coercion in a pluralistic society.

The Beloved Self is about the holy grail of moral philosophy, an argument against egoism that proves that we all have reasons to be moral. Part One introduces three different versions of egoism. Part Two looks at attempts to prove that egoism is false, and shows that even the more modest arguments that do not try to answer the egoist in her own terms seem to fail. But in part Three, Hills defends morality and develops a new problem for egoism, (...) an epistemological problem. She shows that it is not epistemically rational to believe the most plausible versions of egoism. The first part of the book will be most relevant to those interested in moral theory, as it contains detailed discussions of recent interpretations of virtue ethics and especially of Kant's moral theory. The second and third part of the book turn to epistemology, particularly moral epistemology, and include an account of the relationship between knowledge and action, a new theory of moral understanding, and a discussion of the epistemically rational response to various kinds of disagreement. Hills also defends a new account of virtue and of morally worthy action. (shrink)

This paper examines social network size in contemporary Western society based on the exchange of Christmas cards. Maximum network size averaged 153.5 individuals, with a mean network size of 124.9 for those individuals explicitly contacted; these values are remarkably close to the group size of 150 predicted for humans on the basis of the size of their neocortex. Age, household type, and the relationship to the individual influence network structure, although the proportion of kin remained relatively constant at around 21%. (...) Frequency of contact between network members was primarily determined by two classes of variable: passive factors (distance, work colleague, overseas) and active factors (emotional closeness, genetic relatedness). Controlling for the influence of passive factors on contact rates allowed the hierarchical structure of human social groups to be delimited. These findings suggest that there may be cognitive constraints on network size. (shrink)

We propose an Analogy Principle in the context of Unary Inductive Logic and characterize the probability functions which satisfy it. In particular in the case of a language with just two predicates the probability functions satisfying this principle correspond to solutions of Skyrmsʼ ‘Wheel of Fortune’.

Reproductive senescence in human females takes place long before other body functions senesce. This fact presents an evolutionary dilemma since continued reproduction should generally be favored by natural selection. Two commonly proposed hypotheses to account for human menopause are (a) a recent increase in the human lifespan and (b) a switch to investment in close kin rather than direct reproduction. No support is found for the proposition that human lifespans have only recently increased. Data from Ache hunter-gatherers are used to (...) test the kin selection hypothesis. Ache data do not support the proposition that females can gain greater fitness benefits in old age by helping kin rather than continuing to reproduce. Nevertheless, one crucial parameter in the model, when adjusted to the highest value within the measured 95% confidence interval, would lead to the evolution of reproductive senescence at about 53 years of age. Further investigation is necessary to determine whether the kin selection hypothesis of menopause can account for its current maintenance in most populations. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Part biography and part constructive ethical inquiry, this book is an original interpretation of the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson’s ethical method and view of ethical integrity, with an emphasis on his Analysis, Institutes, and Principles.

The computational genomics community has come increasingly to rely on the methodology of creating annotations of scientific literature using terms from controlled structured vocabularies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). We here address the question of what such annotations signify and of how they are created by working biologists. Our goal is to promote a better understanding of how the results of experiments are captured in annotations in the hope that this will lead to better representations of biological reality through (...) both the annotation process and ontology development, and in more informed use of the GO resources by experimental scientists. (shrink)

This study examines how low-income African American mothers of children with sickle cell disease cope with the reproductive implications of having passed a genetic disease on to their children. Based on in-depth interviews with 29 African American mothers, I found that most mothers knew about SCD prior to having a child with the disease; many knew they were carriers of the sickle cell trait. In explaining why this knowledge did not lead them to alter their reproductive behaviors, mothers invoked a (...) theme of medical mismanagement; that is, they said the genetic screening programs for SCD did not provide them with enough medical knowledge about the disease. The implication that adequate knowledge about SCD would have affected their childbearing choices, however, is contradicted by their subsequent reproductive behaviors. I argue that the SCD diagnosis threatened motherhood, an important cultural value among low-income African American women, and that they protected their reproductive autonomy by obfuscating SCD medical knowledge. (shrink)

It is widely believed that gendered expectations are communicated to children in the process of socialization. However, there is reason to ask whether and how gender is constructed in Black families. An early perspective that still continues to inform some contemporary research is assimilationism, which assumes that Black people embrace and pass on to their children the gender norms of the dominant white society. The Afrocentric perspective challenges this view, maintaining that the unique historical experiences of Blacks have militated against (...) an emphasis on rigid gender distinctions, and that relative gender neutrality exists in Black families' child-rearing practices. The development of multicultural feminist theory, which argues that the impact of race on gender varies by social class, implies that both assimilationism and Afrocentrism may be overgeneralizations. Yet, little systematic research has been done on whether race makes a difference in how parents view gender. The authors use data from surveys completed by a nonrandom sample of parents in 202 African American and 204 white families in two large metropolitan school districts to examine the impact of gender, race, and class on parents' self-reports of their immediate priorities and long-term goals for their children, their view of the parenting role, and their discipline strategies. The findings are consistent with multicultural feminist theory: Race and social class interact to shape the intergenerational construction of gender in families. (shrink)

With the progress of science we become more and more aware of the undiscovered, and of our feebleness to visualize or express what is dimly known to us. Geologists estimate that man evolved some 1,000,000 years ago on an earth which astronomers say is some 2,000,000,000 years old. Caution is required in accepting such figures, for we must remember how far out Lord Kelvin was in estimating the age of the earth—before the discovery of radium. Man has been civilized for (...) some 5,000 years, and Galileo, with his telescope and revolutionary ideas, lived some 300 years ago. There may be, we are told, a million million years before the sun grows weak and the earth becomes farther from the sun so that all life freezes. Long before this man may use up the metals available for his machines, and those ready sources of energy now so wastefully used, by which he at present multiplies and swarms in cities. In such case he will return through birth control or famine, or both, to a simple, uncrowded, pastoral existence. There is little likelihood of his being able to use atomic energy, other than that which reaches the earth as sun radiation and is available directly or as energy stored in water-power, wood, coal, and oil. (shrink)