3,994 research outputs found
Epistemic Schmagency?
Constructivist approaches in epistemology and ethics offer a promising account of normativity. But constructivism faces a powerful Schmagency Objection, raised by David Enoch. While Enoch’s objection has been widely discussed in the context of practical norms, no one has yet explored how the Schmagency Objection might undermine epistemic constructivism. In this paper, I rectify that gap. First, I develop the objection against a prominent form of epistemic constructivism, Belief Constitutivism. Belief Constitutivism is susceptible to a Schmagency Objection, I argue, because it locates the source of normativity in the belief rather than the agent. In the final section, I propose a version of epistemic constructivism that locates epistemic normativity as constitutive of agency. I argue that this version has the resources to respond to the Schmagency Objection
Superstatistics, thermodynamics, and fluctuations
A thermodynamic-like formalism is developed for superstatistical systems
based on conditional entropies. This theory takes into account large-scale
variations of intensive variables of systems in nonequilibrium stationary
states. Ordinary thermodynamics is recovered as a special case of the present
theory, and corrections to it can be systematically evaluated. A generalization
of Einstein's relation for fluctuations is presented using a maximum entropy
condition.Comment: 16 pages, no figures. The title changed, some explanations and
references added. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Genome-wide linkage scan for athlete status in 700 British female DZ twin pairs
Association studies, comparing elite athletes with sedentary controls, have reported a number of genes that may be related to athlete status. The present study reports the first genome wide linkage scan for athlete status. Subjects were 4488 adult female twins from the TwinsUK Adult Twin Registry (793 monozygotic [MZ] and 1000 dizygotic [DZ] complete twin pairs, and single twins). Athlete status was measured by asking the twins whether they had ever competed in sports and what was the highest level obtained. Twins who had competed at the county or national level were considered elite athletes. Using structural equation modeling in Mx, the heritability of athlete status was estimated at 66%. Seven hundred DZ twin pairs that were successfully genotyped for 1946 markers (736 microsatellites and 1210 SNPs) were included in the linkage analysis. Identical-by-descent probabilities were estimated in Merlin for a 1 cM grid, taking into account the linkage disequilibrium of correlated SNPs. The linkage scan was carried out in Mx using the π-approach. Suggestive linkages were found on chromosomes 3q22-q24 and 4q31-q34. Both areas converge with findings from previous studies using exercise phenotypes. The peak on 3q22-q24 was found at the SLC9A9 gene. The region 4q31-q34 overlaps with the region for which suggestive linkages were found in two previous linkage studies for physical fitness (FABP2 gene; Bouchard et al., 2000) and physical activity (UCP1 gene; Simonen et al., 2003). Future association studies should further clarify the possible role of these genes in athlete status
Optical quenching and recovery of photoconductivity in single-crystal diamond
We study the photocurrent induced by pulsed-light illumination (pulse
duration is several nanoseconds) of single-crystal diamond containing nitrogen
impurities. Application of additional continuous-wave light of the same
wavelength quenches pulsed photocurrent. Characterization of the optically
quenched photocurrent and its recovery is important for the development of
diamond based electronics and sensing
Open Gromov-Witten Invariants of Toric Calabi-Yau 3-Folds
We present a proof of the mirror conjecture of Aganagic-Vafa
[arXiv:hep-th/0012041] and Aganagic-Klemm-Vafa [arXiv:hep-th/0105045] on disk
enumeration in toric Calabi-Yau 3-folds for all smooth semi-projective toric
Calabi-Yau 3-folds. We consider both inner and outer branes, at arbitrary
framing. In particular, we recover previous results on the conjecture for (i)
an inner brane at zero framing in the total space of the canonical line bundle
of the projective plane (Graber-Zaslow [arXiv:hep-th/0109075]), (ii) an outer
brane at arbitrary framing in the resolved conifold (Zhou [arXiv:1001.0447]),
and (iii) an outer brane at zero framing in the total space of the canonical
line bundle of the projective plane (Brini [arXiv:1102.0281, Section 5.3]).Comment: 39 pages, 11 figure
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