Failing by a Wide Margin: Methods and Findings in the 2003 Social Security Trustees Report

On March 17, 2003, the trustees of the Social Security program released their annual report on the system's financial status. Many observers took the report's extension of the trust fund's solvency one year to 2042 to mean that Social Security's financial health had improved. In fact, Social Security's actuarial balance declined and its cash flow deficits over the next 75 years increased to $25.33 trillion (in 2003 dollars). More important, the report contained significant new methodologies that are central to the debate over personal retirement accounts. The trustees now measure Social Security's deficits over the infinite horizon, providing remedies to the previous 75-year scoring window that substantially understates the costs of the current program and overstates the costs of personal account plans. Under this new perpetuity benchmark, the present value of Social Security's cash flow shortfalls totals$11.9 trillion, versus only $4.9 trillion over 75 years. To cover Social Security's cash deficits permanently would demand an immediate tax increase equal to 4.47 percent of payroll. The 2003 report also includes a "stochastic analysis" accounting for the variability of the economic and demographic factors affecting Social Security's finances, finding there is less than a 1-in-40 chance of Social Security remaining solvent for even 75 years without reform. The 2003 Trustees Report shows that Social Security's cash deficits are large, growing, and unlikely to fix themselves without action. Only personal account proposals have been certified to eliminate Social Security's multitrillion dollar cash shortfalls

Doctorateness: where should we look for evidence?

This chapter considers the possibility of an “institutional theory of artistic research”. It proposes four distinct quadrants in which one might look for evidence for such a theory, which needs to have the capacity to accommodate the diverse positions on artistic research in the literature. The quadrants ("explicit", "implicit", "generic", and "specific") form a Boolean square with which one may also consider the contested term “doctorateness” in any field. The chapter concludes in due course, artistic research will gain a voice that causes researchers to re-describe activity in other disciplines owing to the way in which artistic research will be described.Peer reviewe

Non-human Intention and Meaning-Making: An Ecological Theory

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97550-4_12Social robots have the potential to problematize many attributes that have previously been considered, in philosophical discourse, to be unique to human beings. Thus, if one construes the explicit programming of robots as constituting specific objectives and the overall design and structure of AI as having aims, in the sense of embedded directives, one might conclude that social robots are motivated to fulfil these objectives, and therefore act intentionally towards fulfilling those goals. The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of this description of social robotics on traditional notions of intention and meaningmaking, and, in particular, to link meaning-making to a social ecology that is being impacted by the presence of social robots. To the extent that intelligent non-human agents are occupying our world alongside us, this paper suggests that there is no benefit in differentiating them from human agents because they are actively changing the context that we share with them, and therefore influencing our meaningmaking like any other agent. This is not suggested as some kind of Turing Test, in which we can no longer differentiate between humans and robots, but rather to observe that the argument in which human agency is defined in terms of free will, motivation, and intention can equally be used as a description of the agency of social robots. Furthermore, all of this occurs within a shared context in which the actions of the human impinge upon the non-human, and vice versa, thereby problematising Anscombe's classic account of intention.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The Second Subconstituent of some Strongly Regular Graphs

This is a report on a failed attempt to construct new graphs that are strongly regular with no triangles. The approach is based on the assumption that the second subconstituent has an equitable partition with four parts. For infinitely many odd prime powers we construct a graph that is a plausible candidate for the second subconstituent. Unfortuantely we also show that the corresponding graph is strongly regular only when the prime power is 3, in which case the graph is already known.Comment: 9 page