The conduciveness of CA-rule graphs

Given two subsets A and B of nodes in a directed graph, the conduciveness of the graph from A to B is the ratio representing how many of the edges outgoing from nodes in A are incoming to nodes in B. When the graph's nodes stand for the possible solutions to certain problems of combinatorial optimization, choosing its edges appropriately has been shown to lead to conduciveness properties that provide useful insight into the performance of algorithms to solve those problems. Here we study the conduciveness of CA-rule graphs, that is, graphs whose node set is the set of all CA rules given a cell's number of possible states and neighborhood size. We consider several different edge sets interconnecting these nodes, both deterministic and random ones, and derive analytical expressions for the resulting graph's conduciveness toward rules having a fixed number of non-quiescent entries. We demonstrate that one of the random edge sets, characterized by allowing nodes to be sparsely interconnected across any Hamming distance between the corresponding rules, has the potential of providing reasonable conduciveness toward the desired rules. We conjecture that this may lie at the bottom of the best strategies known to date for discovering complex rules to solve specific problems, all of an evolutionary nature

Esoteric Reliabilism

Survey data suggest that many philosophers are reliabilists, in believing that beliefs are justified iff produced by a reliable process. This is bad news if reliabilism is true. Empirical results suggest that a commitment to reliable belief-formation leads to overconfident second-guessing of reliable heuristics. Hence, a widespread belief in reliabilism is likely to be epistemically detrimental by the reliabilist’s own standard. The solution is a form of two-level epistemic consequentialism, where an esoteric commitment to reliabilism will be appropriate for an enlightened few, while a form of epistemic fetishism—on which some heuristics are treated as fundamental epistemic norms—is appropriate for the rest of us

A Positive Case for the Visuality of Text in Warring States Manuscript Culture

International audienceThis talk explores the evidence for visual copying vs. oral transmission in duplicate Warring States manuscripts

A Graded Bayesian Coherence Notion

Herzberg F. A Graded Bayesian Coherence Notion. Erkenntnis. 2014;79(4):843-869

Factors Affecting the Student Persistence in Online Education: A Qualitative and Quantitative Investigation

Online education has been gaining popularity thanks to the advent of the Internet. There has been success in providing online education to many students who otherwise would not have had access to higher education. However, many students were dropping out of the online program. In addition, only a few studies have looked at this phenomenon closely and intensively for the purely online students. The current study was therefore initiated to not only find the manifest factors of persistence that apply to online students in degree-granting institutions, but also to discover latent structures and linkages among those factors. The study is unique and vigorous in that it used two methods of data collection and two methods of data analysis. The data collection methods were content analysis and questionnaire, and the two data analysis methods were qualitative and quantitative techniques. A content analysis of over 500 research studies was performed to identify the factors that affect student persistence from the body of literature. The factors were submitted in a survey to faculty members who teach online courses, with a request for comments and/or addition to the list. The resulting list from the two data collection methods was then used in a survey of online students to determine what factors were important to them for persisting in the online program. Qualitative analysis of data was conducted through open coding with the help of a content analysis software. Quantitative analyses were performed which included descriptive statistics as well as three multivariate techniques (i.e., factor analysis, cluster analysis, and multi-dimensional scaling). The latent structure discovered in the study categorized the factors into four groups, namely, personal commitment, social support, institutional commitment and academic confidence. The findings of the study have significant pedagogical, technical, and administrative implications for online education. In pedagogy, the factors found in academic confidence and institutional commitment can be used to enhance persistence-promoting programs, courses, and projects. Implications in technology come from the institutional commitment factors that can be applied to HCI, user experience, and the development of supporting devices and applications. The administration of online education can benefit from factors in personal commitment and social support

The effect of soil physico-chemical characteristics on the severity of Fusarium wilt of bananas

Ryan Orr investigated the effect of nitrogen fertiliser and micronutrient availability on Fusarium wilt of banana. He found that nitrogen fertiliser, unlike micronutrient availability, may provide a means to reduce disease severity. Farmers in Australia and internationally are using his finding to improve production methods for infected farms

The effect of soil physico-chemical characteristics on the severity of Fusarium wilt of bananas

Banana production is under threat globally from Fusarium wilt, caused by the soil-borne pathogen Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense (Foc) Tropical Race 4. Foc Tropical Race 4 was first discovered in Australia’s primary banana production region of North Queensland in 2015 and has slowly spread since. To date there are no agronomically suitable disease resistant varieties and no known treatments, so quarantine has been the primary management tool, though it is not a permanent solution. The objective of this thesis was to increase understanding of how soil physico-chemical characteristics affect the severity of Fusarium wilt of banana

Internalism and the Nature of Justification

There are many important dimensions of epistemic evaluation, one of which is justification. We don’t just evaluate beliefs for truth, reliability, accuracy, and knowledge, but also for justification. However, in the epistemological literature, there is much disagreement about the nature of justification and how it should be understood. One of the controversies that has separated the contemporary epistemological discourse into two opposing camps has to do with the internalism-externalism distinction. Whereas internalists defend certain core assumptions about justification from the pre-Gettier tradition, externalists generally think that the traditional conception is untenable and should be replaced. In this compilation thesis, I argue for, defend, and develop a particular brand of internalism, both in general and with respect to specific sources of justification. In papers 1 and 2, I defend a couple of well-known arguments for mentalism and accessibilism. Moreover, I also point out how prominent versions of these theses are vulnerable to serious problems (e.g., about over-intellectualization and vicious regresses). Part of my goal in the first couple of papers is to figure out what commitments the internalist should take on in order to avoid the externalist's objections, while at the same time receiving support from considerations that have motivated internalism in the past. In papers 3 and 4, I start from the assumption that mentalism is true and attempt to answer the following questions: 1) which non-factive mental states can play a justification-conferring role with respect to empirical belief? And 2) why does this set of states play the epistemic role it does? In response to question 1, I argue that all and only one's beliefs and perceptual experiences have justificatory relevance. In response to question 2, I argue that one's beliefs and perceptual experiences are one's strongly representational states, and that strongly representational states necessarily provide support to certain empirical propositions. Having done so, I then defend mentalism about scientific evidence from a couple of prominent objections in the recent literature. Lastly, in papers 5 and 6, I argue for a particular brand of internalism about testimonial and memorial justification and show how that position has a dialectical advantage over its main competitors