What kind of free will did the Buddha teach?

The modern version of the problem of free will is usually described as a collision between two beliefs: the belief that we are free to choose our actions and the belief that our actions are determined by prior necessary causes. Determinism—the view that events are determined by specific causes—makes most aspects of reality intelligible. It works quite well, for example, when explaining aspects of the natural world (quantum physics aside). When heat, fuel, and oxygen come together there is fire. There must be fire. To borrow a famous Buddhist simile, when a mango seed is given the right conditions, it will grow to become a mango tree. It cannot grow to be anything else. However, we do not usually think of agents as being caused in the same way. We tend to think that agents somehow transcend natural causation by their ability to choose freely. If we also think that agents are part of the natural order, we face a paradox. This is, in short, the problem of free will

Selling Technology: The Changing Shape of Sales in an Information Economy

[Excerpt] This book describes and explains the changing nature of sales through the daily experiences of salespeople, engineers, managers, and purchasing agents who construct markets for emergent technologies through their daily engagement in sales interactions… [It] provides a grounded empirical account of sales work in an area that has been the subject of insufficient study, namely contemporary industrial markets where firms trade with other firms

On mixing and sparse ergodic theorems

We consider Bourgain's ergodic theorem regarding arithmetic averages in the cases where quantitative mixing is present in the dynamical system. Focusing on the case of the horocyclic flow, those estimates allows us to bound from above the Hausdorff dimension of the exceptional set, providing evidence towards conjectures by Margulis,Shah and Sarnak regarding equidistribution of arithmetic averages in homogeneous spaces. We also prove the existence of a uniform upper bound for the Hausdorff dimension of the exceptional set which is independent from the spectral gap.Comment: Updated version, to appear in Journal of Modern Dynamic

Radiative Mechanisms in GRB prompt emission

Motivated by the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope results, in recent years immense efforts were given to understanding the mechanism that leads to the prompt emission observed. The failure of the optically thin emission models (synchrotron and synchrotron self Compton) increased interest in alternative models. Optically thick models, while having several advantages, also face difficulty in capturing several key observables. Theoretical efforts are focused in two main directions: (1) mechanisms that act to broaden the Planck spectrum; and (2) combining the optically thin and optically thick models to a hybrid model that could explain the key observables.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, 1 table; Invited review, to appear in the proceedings of the Gamma-Ray Burst Symposium 2012- IAA-CSIC - Marbella, editors: Castro-Tirado, A. J., Gorosabel, J. and Park, I.

Hofer growth of C1C^1-generic Hamiltonian flows

We prove that on certain closed symplectic manifolds a $C^1$-generic cyclic subgroup of the universal cover of the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms is undistorted with respect to the Hofer metric.Comment: 20 page