Retractions: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Retractions play an important role in research communication by highlighting and explaining how research projects have failed and thereby preventing these mistakes from being repeated. However, the process of retraction and the data it produces is often sparse or incomplete. Drawing on evidence from 2046 retraction records, Quan-Hoang Vuong discusses the emerging trends this data highlights and argues for the need to enforce reporting standards for retractions, as a means of de-stigmatising retraction and rewarding practising integrity in the scholarly record

Advertising: "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"

We model the choice of firms competing in prices in a differentiated products market to bundle advertising messages with their goods in return for payment from advertisers. From the firms’ perspective, the potential to earn revenue from advertisers, makes advertising a “good”. However, because consumers in the product market dislike such advertising, the bundling dampens demand and in this sense is a “bad”. There is also a third role played by advertising, however. Since a firm that bundles advertisements with its good sells a less attractive good, it has to price more aggressively than one that does not do such bundling. Thus, bundling advertisements with the good can lead to more aggressive product pricing and thereby intensify product market competition. In this sense, advertising can make things “ugly”.

Preserving History – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Historian Ray Rickman on the violent history that Americans try to forget, and why it’s important to remember

Steel Policy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

While the US steel industry has been in distress for decades, the "steel crisis" of 1999-2001 was particularly acute. More than 30 steel producing and steel processing firms fell into bankruptcy between 1997 and 2001, and most of the failures occurred after President Bush took office. During his presidential campaign, Bush promised steelworkers that he would not neglect them. As the crisis worsened, the steel industry and the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) pressed the Bush administration to make good on its campaign promise.

D-Term Inflation: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

An inflationary stage dominated by a D-term avoids the slow-roll problem of inflation in supergravity and can naturally emerge in theories with a non-anomalous or anomalous U(1) gauge symmetry. In this talk different aspects of D-term inflation are discussed.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX file, uses sprocl.sty. Based on the invited plenary talk given at the COSMO97 Conference, Ambleside, England, September 15-19 1997 and on the talk given at the Phenomenological Aspects of Superstring Theories (PAST97) Conference, ICTP Trieste, Italy, October 2-4 1997. To appear in the Proceeding

The good, the bad and the ugly

This paper discusses the neo-logicist approach to the foundations of mathematics by highlighting an issue that arises from looking at the Bad Company objection from an epistemological perspective. For the most part, our issue is independent of the details of any resolution of the Bad Company objection and, as we will show, it concerns other foundational approaches in the philosophy of mathematics. In the first two sections, we give a brief overview of the "Scottish" neo-logicist school, present a generic form of the Bad Company objection and introduce an epistemic issue connected to this general problem that will be the focus of the rest of the paper. In the third section, we present an alternative approach within philosophy of mathematics, a view that emerges from Hilbert's Grundlagen der Geometrie (1899, Leipzig: Teubner; Foundations of geometry (trans.: Townsend, E.). La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1959.). We will argue that Bad Company-style worries, and our concomitant epistemic issue, also affects this conception and other foundationalist approaches. In the following sections, we then offer various ways to address our epistemic concern, arguing, in the end, that none resolves the issue. The final section offers our own resolution which, however, runs against the foundationalist spirit of the Scottish neo-logicist program