The current popularity of DNA barcoding relates to its potential power coupled with its intuitively pleasing simplicity. It is based on the premise of using a standard short region of DNA as a universal tool for identifying organisms.2 The aim is to establish a large-scale reference sequence database against which unknown samples can be queried for identification. Where sequences are found that are divergent from others in the database, the corresponding specimens are flagged up as potential new species warranting further (...) investigation. Costa and Carvalho3 describe some of the potential societal benefits of DNA barcoding in the context of fish identification and also summarise some of the potential benefits to the discipline of taxonomy itself. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

Here is a dilemma. By robust common sense, the sun exists. Yet the sun is a vague object, lacking exact identity conditions, and therefore by widely accepted standards of objecthood does not exist. What goes for it goes for almost all other material things. Standard solutions to the problem of vagueness for predicates fall flat for vague objects. This paper attempts a theory which accounts for our common beliefs about vague objects by taking them as well-founded phenomena, founded on collections (...) of more exact objects. The key notions allowing us to assign sensible truth-values to propositions about vague objects are those of truth-value density and expected truth-value. These will be illustrated in use. (shrink)

Critical Thinking : A Methodology for Interpreting Information 'deconstructs' common errors in thinking and teaches students to become smarter consumers of research results. Written to complement a textbook or a collection of readings, this brief methods book strengthens students' ability to interpret information whenever and wherever data are used. It includes a wide range of examples along with end of chapter exercises for further discussion. This book will be a coursebook for the undergraduate social science courses where critical thinking, numeracy, (...) and data literacy are common learning objectives"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

RAID-II is a high-bandwidth, network-attached storage server designed and implemented at the University of California at Berkeley. In this paper, we measure the performance of RAID-II and evaluate various architectural decisions made during the design process. We first measure the end-to-end performance of the system to be approximately 20 MB/s for both disk array reads and writes. We then perform a bottleneck analysis by examining the performance of each individual subsystem and conclude that the disk subsystem limits performance. By adding (...) a custom interconnect board with a high-speed memory and bus system and parity engine, we are able to achieve a performance speedup of 8 to 15 over a comparative system using only off-the-shelf hardware. (shrink)

This paper sets out to capture the emergence between 1760 and 1840 of a recognizable science of agriculture in Europe. The first attempts to explain and to theorize husbandry as practiced on the farm emanated from economists and agronomists employing the ‘encyclopedic’ approach of the Enlightenment generation. Despite significant additions to chemical knowledge in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries the task of applying this knowledge to agriculture initially appeared insurmountable. Only in the 1820s and the 1830s were (...) the obstacles gradually removed. A more rigorous approach to experimentation and to quantification evolved, and it was combined with investment in institutions seeking to educate landowners and farmers. As a result of these developments chemists secured pride-of-place above all other professionals in the management of agriculture as the primary food-producing sector of the economy. (shrink)

The grounded theory research method embodies a crucial element of postmodernist thinking due to its aversion to theory verification and its ability to imbue analysts with the power to discover theory. These processes closely mirror systems thinking because they allow for holistic examination. Postmodern systems thinking combines the worldview of postmodernism with systems thinking, creating a mechanism that is both respectful to the variations of human interaction and the need for "de-compartmentalizing" complex systems. The postmodern systems thinking framework united with (...) grounded action research could be a potent approach for the dissemination of localized, culture-specific ideas in countries susceptible to Western hegemony. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a series of hypotheses for further study that are related to potential negative impacts of non-traditional export agriculture (NTEA) on peasantfarmers in Central America. International lenders and donor agencies are promoting this diversification of agricultural exports as part of structural adjustment programs in the region, in order to increase foreign exchange earnings and raise the incomes of the rural poor.There is growing evidence, however, that the impact on the rural poor may not be favorable. I (...) argue that because NTEA can introduce powerful economies of scale, it is likely to accelerate social differentiation in the countryside and expel large numbers of peasant farmers from their lands. In this sense NTEA may be similar to previous export ‘booms,’ leading to rapid intensification of social instability and conflict in an already troubled region. This raises the serious question of the long term sustainability of this development strategy.There is a shortage of published studies that directly address these issues, making further work essential for the adequate review of NTEA policies. I formulate six testable hypotheses based on the economies of scale associated with NTEA. Each is related to a resource essential for successful agricultural production: land; credit; prices, costs, and subsidies; technology; technical assistance; and markets. I suggest that as NTEA grows, small farmer access to each is reduced, eventually making peasant production for domestic consumption an unviable alternative, while those who venture into NTEA encounter unacceptable levels of risk. (shrink)

Thousands of people will suffer and die this year because we do not donate enough substances of human origin, including blood plasma. To solve this, some recommend that we allow commercial organizations to assist in collecting these and that we permit donor compensation as a tool to encourage donations. Many object to these proposals, including for semiotic or expressive reasons. But insofar as these objections rely on meanings and these meanings are social constructs, we can revise the meaning of these (...) practices to avoid commodification. Revision may work in principle, but in practice some complain that changing meanings may be too difficult or practically infeasible. This essay attempts to show that this is not so in a wide range of cases and uses the case of commercial compensated blood plasma collection as an illustration. Getting people to conceive of this practice not as payment for blood plasma but as compensation for the time, effort, and inconvenience associated with the giving of plasma is practically feasible and preferable to prohibition. (shrink)

Viṣamapadavyākhyā: A Commentary on Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s Śabdakaustubha Attributed to Nāgeśabhaṭṭa. Edited by James W. Benson. American Oriental Series, vol. 97. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2015. Pp. xl + 233.

In "meaning and modality" lewy claims the only ground for rejecting disjunctive syllogism as acceptable for entailment is rejection of bivalence. Examining lewis's 'proofs' of the paradoxes of strict implication he suggests the proof of 'if a then (b or not-B)' suppresses a premiss, Restoration of which blocks the paradox, Whereas the proof of 'if (a and not-A) then b' cannot be so blocked. But the paradoxes are dual, So he should have treated them dually by restoring a suppressed disjunct (...) in the consequent of the second. When this is done, The second paradox is blocked and disjunctive syllogism fares no better than the principle lewy discarded. (shrink)

(2) All X’s have to be Y’s is to be brought out by glossing the latter as a stronger, nomological generalization involving counterfactural claims, thus: (3) All X’s are Y’s and further if any z that is not an X were an X, then z would be a Y. Professor Rescher points out that while (1) is equivalent to its contrapositive..

In this article, I offer a background to digital theology and its methodology, exploring especially aspects of transhumanism and metaphysical enquiry. The article moves on to engage with several articles given at the Science and Religion Forum at Birmingham in 2022, especially the Gowland Lecture given by Professor Niels Gregersen and the Peacocke Lecture by Andrew Jackson. Both offer a metaphysical approach to information linked closely to the concept of Logos drawn from the Prologue of John—Jackson focusing on Maximus the (...) Confessor's exploration of phylogenetic logoi; Gregersen on a further development of “Deep Incarnation” through the title “God with Clay” drawn from Bonaventure. The article extends this engagement with John by querying the model of incarnation in “deep incarnation” but building on the Logos/logoi to set out some initial building blocks for an alternative metaphysics of information. (shrink)

This book present research in ethics with topics including a step-by-step guide to students; wellbeing and disadvantage; ethical disposition of accounting and business management students; collegiality of journals and self-citation on annual bibliometric scorings; trends of tainted publications and their authors' publication profiles; from bioethics to biopolitics and the limits of liberalism.

Drawing on Ciceronian rhetorical tropes, Thomas Aquinas treats the rite of the Eucharist in terms of the classical ars memoriae. The Eucharist, for Aquinas, is the schooling in desire whereby we are trained to order the associations of our memory to their proper objects in terms of their relations to God. He thus conceives of the liturgy of the Mass as rhetoric proper, which truly teaches, moves and delights. Since memory is the condition of all thought, as both Thomas and (...) Augustine claim, the Eucharist is the “site” of all theological production, and therefore the liturgy is the art of memory of which all other similar arts are derivative. (shrink)

The thesis of this bk is that the brain is innately constructed to initiate behaviors likely to promote the survival of the species & to sensitize sensory systems to stimuli required for those behaviors. Intended for behavioral & brain scientists.

Pāṇinīyavyākaraṇodāharaṇakośaḥ; La grammaire paninéenne par ses exemples; Paninian Grammar through Its Examples, vol. I: Udāharaṇasamāhāraḥ; L’ensemble des exemples; The Collection of Examples; saṁśodhitaprakāśanam, édition révisée, revised edition. Two parts. By F. Grimal, V. Venkataraja Sarma, S. Lakshminarasimham, K. V. Ramakrishnamacharyulu, and Jagadeesh Bhat. Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha Series, vols. 309, 310; Collection indologie 93.1.1, 2. Tirupati: Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha; Pondichéry: École française d’Extrème-Orient; Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2018. Pp. xiii + 757 + 481. Rs. 680, 450.

In his recent work, ‘Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor’, Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the ‘cornerstone of aesthetic theory’. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend the (...) usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyi’s distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, yet until now there has been no full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. This has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of such classical philosophical (...) concepts as identity, individual, class, substance and accident, matter, form, essence, dependence, and integral whole. It also enables the author to offer new solutions to long-standing problems surrounding these concepts, such as the Ship of Theseus Problem and the issue of mereological essentialism. The author shows by his use of formal techniques that classical philosophical problems are amenable to rigorous treatment, and the book represents a synthesis of issues and methods from the analytical tradition and from the older continental realist tradition of Brentano and the early Husserl. (shrink)

The purpose of this note is to examine the claim made by Howard Smokler that “Goodman's paradox should be considered as an independent argument against a conception of inductive logic which makes use of rules of acceptance”.Smokler's claim arises from his treatment of Goodman's paradox in the form given it by Israel Scheffler. Schefflerhas discussed this paradox primarily in the context of a methodology of induction which views inductive rules as rules of acceptance permitting one to assert detached conclusions. The (...) inductive rule considered by Scheffler is described as follows: What leads us to make one particular prediction rather than its opposite is not its deducibility froIII evidence but rather its congruence with a generalization thoroughly in accord with all such evidence, and the correlative disconfirmation of the contrary generalization by the same evidence.. (shrink)

This paper discusses the philosophical background to the paper by lejewski in this issue. lejewski offers an ontologically neutral logic for the first two types (individuals and classes thereof). some peculiarities of the logic used are noted, in particular the distinction between empty individual terms, empty class terms, and non-empty class terms designating the empty class. lejewski ends by denying the truth of the formula meaning "there are classes," but we argue that the way in which truth-conditions for formulae containing (...) class terms are introduced absolves us from taking this as seriously committing us to the existence of classes. the main (inclining but not necessitating) reason for being a platonist lies in the sheer mass of mathematical results for which a non-platonist account has yet to be given. the theory of classes as fictions suggested by our modification of lejewski's view is insufficient to support frege-russell style logicism, but for a non-platonist the upper reaches of cantor's paradise must be regarded as fictitious anyway. (shrink)

Since early in this century, a number of cultural anthropologists and archaeologists have been theorizing that some of the very culture traits Boehm regards as ‘primitive’ are, in fact, partial products of the difficult circumstances of the last few thousand years. For instance, the mobility and egalitarianism of some foragers may have been amplified by their culture contact experiences. Boehm must consider these theories if he hopes to identify foragers whose cultures may be representative of the past.

Papers presented at the Conference of the Cardinal Newman Society, November, 2001, the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.

Recently Albert and Hemmo and Shenker have argued that, contrary to what is sometimes suggested, Liouville's theorem does not prohibit a Maxwellian demon from operating but merely places certain restrictions on its ability to operate. There are two main claims made in this article. First, that the restrictions Liouville's theorem places on Maxwell's demon's ability to operate depend on which notion of entropy one adopts. Second, that when one operates with the definition of entropy that is usual in this debate, (...) the restrictions put on Maxwell's demon are not even as severe as Albert and Hemmo and Shenker argue. (shrink)