Stoics against stoics in Cudworth's "A Treatise of Freewill"

In his 'A Treatise of Freewill', Ralph Cudworth argues against Stoic determinism by drawing on what he takes to be other concepts found in Stoicism, notably the claim that some things are ‘up to us’ and that these things are the product of our choice. These concepts are central to the late Stoic Epictetus and it appears at first glance as if Cudworth is opposing late Stoic voluntarism against early Stoic determinism. This paper argues that in fact, despite his claim to be drawing on Stoic doctrine, Cudworth uses these terms with a meaning first articulated only later, by the Peripatetic commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias

Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty

This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings

Chronic Childhood Exposure to Tobacco Smoke Causes Skeletal Diseases Later in Life

A child will breath up to 3 times the volume per body weight compared to an adult.  A child’s organs and immune system are not fully developed to offer protection from airborne and residual toxins compared to an adult.  A child is unable to control their environment or escape their home environment, an adult can change jobs or leave a toxic  environment.  Thus, children are the most susceptible to the effects of toxins in their environment.  Tobacco Smoke exposure is the greatest toxic exposure risk a child faces in a home environment.  Tobacco Smoke exposure starts in the womb when the embryo embeds in the mother’s uterus and connects to their mother’s blood flow.  Tobacco smoke contains many osteotoxic, nephrotoxic, cytotoxic, and genotoxic chemicals that significantly alter genetic material in the developing fetus and child, which has long-term health effects leading to poor bone health and skeletal diseases later in life.  Three of the many thousands of toxins in tobacco smoke which are most osteotoxic, nephrotoxic, cytotoxic, and genotoxic are lead, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

A Systematic Review of Research to Determine Toxicity of Involuntary Tobacco Smoking as Compared to First Hand Smoking and if Chronic Involuntary Tobacco Smoking during Childhood Causes Skeletal Diseases Later in Life

A child will breath up to 3 times the volume per body weight compared to an adult.  A child’s organs and immune system are not fully developed to offer protection from airborne and residual toxins compared to an adult.  A child is unable to control their environment or escape their home environment, an adult can change jobs or leave a toxic  environment.  Thus, children are the most susceptible to the effects of toxins in their environment.  Tobacco Smoke exposure is the greatest toxic exposure risk a child faces in a home environment.  Tobacco Smoke exposure starts in the womb when the embryo embeds in the mother’s uterus and connects to their mother’s blood flow.  Tobacco smoke contains many osteotoxic, nephrotoxic, cytotoxic, and genotoxic chemicals that significantly alter genetic material in the developing fetus and child, which has long-term health effects leading to poor bone health and skeletal diseases later in life.  Three of the many thousands of toxins in tobacco smoke which are most osteotoxic, nephrotoxic, cytotoxic, and genotoxic are lead, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

Web service approaches for providing enriched data structures to generalisation operators

Web service technologies can be used to establish an interoperable framework between different generalisation systems. In a previous article three categories of generalisation web services were identified, including support services, operator services and processing services. This paper focuses on the category of support services. In a service-based generalisation system, the purpose of support services is to assist the generalisation process by providing auxiliary measures, procedures and data structures that allow the representation of structural cartographic knowledge. The structural knowledge of the spatial and semantic context and the modelling of structural and spatial relationships is critical for the understanding of the role of cartographic features and thus for automated generalisation. Support services should extract and model this knowledge from the raw data and make it available to other generalisation operators. On the one hand the structural knowledge can be expressed by enriching map features with additional geometries or attributes. On the other hand, there exist various hierarchical and nonhierarchical relationships between map features, many of which can be represented by graph data structures. After a brief introduction to the interoperable web service framework, this paper proposes a taxonomy of generalisation support services and discusses its elements. It is then shown how the complex output of such services can be represented for use with web services and stored in a reusable fashion. Finally, the utilisation of support services is illustrated on four implementation examples of support services that also highlight the interactions with the generalisation operators that use these auxiliary services