14,164 research outputs found
The Kuhnian mode of HPS
In this article I argue that a methodological challenge to an integrated history and philosophy of science approach put forth by Ron Giere almost forty years ago can be met by what I call the Kuhnian mode of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS). Although in the Kuhnian mode of HPS norms about science are motivated by historical facts about scientific practice, the justifiers of the constructed norms are not historical facts. The Kuhnian mode of HPS therefore evades the naturalistic fallacy which Giere’s challenge is a version of. Against the backdrop of a discussion of Laudan’s normative naturalism I argue that the Kuhnian mode of HPS is a superior form of naturalism which establishes contact to the practice of science without making itself dependent on its contingencies
Positional Games and QBF: The Corrective Encoding
Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising
Tic-tac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games
into Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBF) such that a game instance admits a
winning strategy for first player if and only if the corresponding formula is
true. Our approach improves over previous QBF encodings of games in multiple
ways. First, it is generic and lets us encode other positional games, such as
Hex. Second, structural properties of positional games together with a careful
treatment of illegal moves let us generate more compact instances that can be
solved faster by state-of-the-art QBF solvers. We establish the latter fact
through extensive experiments. Finally, the compactness of our new encoding
makes it feasible to translate realistic game problems. We identify a few such
problems of historical significance and put them forward to the QBF community
as milestones of increasing difficulty.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 23rd International Conference on
Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT2020
Gender Differences in Output Quality and Quantity under Competition and Time Constraints: Evidence from a Pilot Study
Gender gaps in income and level of position in the workplace are widespread. One explanation for this inequality is that the genders perform differently under competitive conditions, as previous experimental studies have found a significant gender gap in competitive tasks that are perceived to favor men. In this paper, we use a verbal task that is perceived to favor women and find no gender difference under competition per se. We also reject the hypothesis that a .stereotype threat. explains the inability of women to improve performance under competition. We propose an alternative explanation for gender inequality: namely, that women and men respond differently to time pressure. With reduced time pressure, competition in verbal tasks greatly increases the performance of women, such that women significantly outperform men. This effect appears largely due to the fact that extra time in a competition improves the quality of women’s work, leading them to make fewer mistakes. On the other hand, men use this extra time to increase the quantity of work, which results in a greater number of mistakes.Gender Differences, Competition, Effects of Time Pressure
Rethinking Business Cycle Models – Workshop at the MNB
‘DSGE Models: A Closer Look at the Workhorse of Macroeconomics’ was the title of the international workshop organised for the 8th time by the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB) jointly with the London-based Center for Economic Policy Research on 3-4 September 2009. The recent sub-prime debacle, the resulting financial meltdown and the substantial policy responses gave the topicality of the event; even more so as the unexpected extent of the crisis stirred a heated debate within and outside the economics profession about the applicability and usefulness of the current business cycle models.2 The keynote speakers of the event were professors Lawrence Christiano (Northwestern University) and Mark Gertler (New York University, NYU), who are both world-renowned for their essential and continuing contributions to the development of the current versions of business cycle models. The keynote speakers with the 15 presenters from 10 countries and their discussants provided important attempts to challenge or defend basic assumptons of the models (e.g. sticky developments in prices or rational and forward-looking expectations); argue for adding long missing factors (e.g. an explicit financial sector and imperfect credit markets) to the models, or for dropping others (e.g. money-demand) which seem non-essential. There was general agreement among the participants with Governor of the MNB András Simor, who said that in the current crisis ‘we need [models of business cycles] more than ever,’ but they need to be developed further to be able to analyse and quantify factors that the current crisis showed essential.business cycle models, learning, price stickiness, optimal monetary policy, emerging market business cycles, estimation, country portfolios.
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