ECONOMETRICS AND REALITY

Starting with a realist ontology the economic methodologist, Tony Lawson, argues that econometrics is a failed project. Apparently more sympathetic to econometrics, the philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, again from a realist perspective, nonetheless argues for conditions of applicability that are so stringent that she must seriously doubt the usefulness of econometrics. In this paper, I reconsider Lawson''s and Cartwright''s analyses and argue that realism supports rather than undermines econometrics properly interpreted and executed.

In vivo anomalous diffusion and weak ergodicity breaking of lipid granules

Combining extensive single particle tracking microscopy data of endogenous lipid granules in living fission yeast cells with analytical results we show evidence for anomalous diffusion and weak ergodicity breaking. Namely we demonstrate that at short times the granules perform subdiffusion according to the laws of continuous time random walk theory. The associated violation of ergodicity leads to a characteristic turnover between two scaling regimes of the time averaged mean squared displacement. At longer times the granule motion is consistent with fractional Brownian motion.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, REVTeX. Supplementary Material. Physical Review Letters, at pres

ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

B

Software reliability and dependability: a roadmap

Shifting the focus from software reliability to user-centred measures of dependability in complete software-based systems. Influencing design practice to facilitate dependability assessment. Propagating awareness of dependability issues and the use of existing, useful methods. Injecting some rigour in the use of process-related evidence for dependability assessment. Better understanding issues of diversity and variation as drivers of dependability. Bev Littlewood is founder-Director of the Centre for Software Reliability, and Professor of Software Engineering at City University, London. Prof Littlewood has worked for many years on problems associated with the modelling and evaluation of the dependability of software-based systems; he has published many papers in international journals and conference proceedings and has edited several books. Much of this work has been carried out in collaborative projects, including the successful EC-funded projects SHIP, PDCS, PDCS2, DeVa. He has been employed as a consultant t

The Classical Limit of QuantumTheory

This essay treats of the relationship between quantum and classical mechanics. Both physicists and philosophers hold that quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics as h-\u3e0, or that classical mechanics is a special case of quantum mechanics in this limit. If one theory reduces to another, certain formal and nonformal conditions must be satisfied. These conditions are formulated and it is shown that the Wigner transformation can serve as a natural reduction function in a reduction which satisfies the formal and nonformal conditions. Finally, it is argued that this reduction does not aid in solving the problem of providing an adequate metaphysical interpretation of quantum theory

Uncertainty in Engineering

This open access book provides an introduction to uncertainty quantification in engineering. Starting with preliminaries on Bayesian statistics and Monte Carlo methods, followed by material on imprecise probabilities, it then focuses on reliability theory and simulation methods for complex systems. The final two chapters discuss various aspects of aerospace engineering, considering stochastic model updating from an imprecise Bayesian perspective, and uncertainty quantification for aerospace flight modelling. Written by experts in the subject, and based on lectures given at the Second Training School of the European Research and Training Network UTOPIAE (Uncertainty Treatment and Optimization in Aerospace Engineering), which took place at Durham University (United Kingdom) from 2 to 6 July 2018, the book offers an essential resource for students as well as scientists and practitioners