Prophylactic Neutrality, Oppression, and the Reverse Pascal's Wager

In Beyond Neutrality, George Sher criticises the idea that state neutrality between competing conceptions of the good helps protect society from oppression. While he is correct that some governments are non-neutral without being oppressive, I argue that those governments may be neutral at the core of their foundations. The possibility of non-neutrality leading to oppression is further explored; some conceptions of the good would favour oppression while others would not. While it is possible that a non-neutral state may avoid oppression, it is argued that the risks are so great that it is better to bet on government being neutral, thereby minimizing the possibility of oppression

Religious delusion or religious belief?

How shall we distinguish religious delusion from sane religious belief? Making this determination is not usually found to be difficult in clinical practice – but what shall be our theoretical rationale? Attempts to answer this question often try to provide differentiating principles by which the religious “sheep” may be separated from the delusional “goats.” As we shall see, none of these attempts work. We may, however, ask whether the assumption underlying the search for a differentiating principle – that religious beliefs and religious delusions can usefully be considered species of a common genus – is a good one. In this paper, we outline an alternative, “disjunctive,” understanding of religious belief and religious delusion. By reminding ourselves both of what is central to any delusion and of what distinguishes bona fide religious claims from their pretenders, we show how to resolve our reflective puzzlement about religious delusion without recourse to differentiating principles

Twins Among the Low Mass Spectroscopic Binaries

We report an analysis of twins of spectral types F or later in the 9th Catalog of Spectroscopic Binaries (SB9). Twins, the components of binaries with mass ratio within 2% of 1.0, are found among the binaries with primaries of F and G spectral type. They are most prominent among the binaries with periods less than 43 days, a cutoff first identified by Lucy. Within the subsample of binaries with P<43 days, the twins do not differ from the other binaries in their distributions of periods (median P~7d), masses, or orbital eccentricities. Combining the mass ratio distribution in the SB9 in the mass range 0.6 to 0.85 Msun with that measured by Mazeh et al. for binaries in the Carney-Latham high proper motion survey, we estimate that the frequency of twins in a large sample of spectroscopic binaries is about 3%. Current theoretical understanding indicates that accretion of high specific angular momentum material by a protobinary tends to equalize its masses. We speculate that the excess of twins is produced in those star forming regions where the accretion processes were able to proceed to completion for a minority of protobinaries. This predicts that the components of a young twin may appear to differ in age and that, in a sample of spectroscopic binaries in a star formation region, the twins are, on average, older than the binaries with mass ratios much smaller than 1.Comment: Accepted by the Astronomical Journa

Reflecting tidal wave beams and local generation of solitary waves in the ocean thermocline

It is generally accepted that ocean internal solitary waves can arise from the interaction of the barotropic tide with the continental shelf, which generates an internal tide that in turn steepens and forms solitary waves as it propagates shorewards. Some field observations, however, reveal large-amplitude internal solitary waves in deep water, hundreds of kilometers away from the continental shelf, suggesting an alternative generation mechanism: tidal flow over steep topography forces a propagating beam of internal tidal wave energy which impacts the thermocline at a considerable distance from the forcing site and gives rise to internal solitary waves there. Motivated by this possibility, a simple nonlinear long-wave model is proposed for the interaction of a tidal wave beam with the thermocline and the ensuing local generation of solitary waves. The thermocline is modelled as a density jump across the interface of a shallow homogeneous fluid layer on top of a deep uniformly stratified fluid, and a finite-amplitude propagating internal wave beam of tidal frequency in the lower fluid is assumed to be incident and reflected at the interface. The induced weakly nonlinear long-wave disturbance on the interface is governed in the far field by an integral–differential equation which accounts for nonlinear and dispersive effects as well as energy loss owing to radiation into the lower fluid. Depending on the intensity of the incident beam, nonlinear wave steepening can overcome radiation damping so a series of solitary waves may arise in the thermocline. Sample numerical solutions of the governing evolution equation suggest that this mechanism is quite robust for typical oceanic conditions

Rich Counter-Examples for Temporal-Epistemic Logic Model Checking

Model checking verifies that a model of a system satisfies a given property, and otherwise produces a counter-example explaining the violation. The verified properties are formally expressed in temporal logics. Some temporal logics, such as CTL, are branching: they allow to express facts about the whole computation tree of the model, rather than on each single linear computation. This branching aspect is even more critical when dealing with multi-modal logics, i.e. logics expressing facts about systems with several transition relations. A prominent example is CTLK, a logic that reasons about temporal and epistemic properties of multi-agent systems. In general, model checkers produce linear counter-examples for failed properties, composed of a single computation path of the model. But some branching properties are only poorly and partially explained by a linear counter-example. This paper proposes richer counter-example structures called tree-like annotated counter-examples (TLACEs), for properties in Action-Restricted CTL (ARCTL), an extension of CTL quantifying paths restricted in terms of actions labeling transitions of the model. These counter-examples have a branching structure that supports more complete description of property violations. Elements of these counter-examples are annotated with parts of the property to give a better understanding of their structure. Visualization and browsing of these richer counter-examples become a critical issue, as the number of branches and states can grow exponentially for deeply-nested properties. This paper formally defines the structure of TLACEs, characterizes adequate counter-examples w.r.t. models and failed properties, and gives a generation algorithm for ARCTL properties. It also illustrates the approach with examples in CTLK, using a reduction of CTLK to ARCTL. The proposed approach has been implemented, first by extending the NuSMV model checker to generate and export branching counter-examples, secondly by providing an interactive graphical interface to visualize and browse them.Comment: In Proceedings IWIGP 2012, arXiv:1202.422

Photoevaporation of protoplanetary discs I: hydrodynamic models

In this paper we consider the effect of the direct ionizing stellar radiation field on the evolution of protoplanetary discs subject to photoevaporative winds. We suggest that models which combine viscous evolution with photoevaporation of the disc (e.g. Clarke, Gendrin & Sotomayor 2001) incorrectly neglect the direct field after the inner disc has drained, at late times in the evolution. We construct models of the photoevaporative wind produced by the direct field, first using simple analytic arguments and later using detailed numerical hydrodynamics. We find that the wind produced by the direct field at late times is much larger than has previously been assumed, and we show that the mass-loss rate scales as $R_{in}^{1/2}$ (where $R_{in}$ is the radius of the instantaneous inner disc edge). We suggest that this result has important consequences for theories of disc evolution, and go on to consider the effects of this result on disc evolution in detail in a companion paper (Alexander, Clarke & Pringle 2006b).Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Control via electron count of the competition between magnetism and superconductivity in cobalt and nickel doped NaFeAs

Using a combination of neutron, muon and synchrotron techniques we show how the magnetic state in NaFeAs can be tuned into superconductivity by replacing Fe by either Co or Ni. Electron count is the dominant factor, since Ni-doping has double the effect of Co-doping for the same doping level. We follow the structural, magnetic and superconducting properties as a function of doping to show how the superconducting state evolves, concluding that the addition of 0.1 electrons per Fe atom is sufficient to traverse the superconducting domain, and that magnetic order coexists with superconductivity at doping levels less than 0.025 electrons per Fe atom.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Staphylococcus aureus FadB is a dehydrogenase that mediates cholate resistance and survival under human colonic conditions

Staphylococcus aureus is a common colonizer of the human gut and in doing so it must be able to resist the actions of the host’s innate defences. Bile salts are a class of molecules that possess potent antibacterial activity that control growth. Bacteria that colonize and survive in that niche must be able to resist the action of bile salts, but the mechanisms by which S. aureus does so are poorly understood. Here we show that FadB is a bile-induced oxidoreductase which mediates bile salt resistance and when heterologously expressed in Escherichia coli renders them resistant. Deletion of fadB attenuated survival of S. aureus in a model of the human distal colon

Automatic Abstraction for Congruences

One approach to verifying bit-twiddling algorithms is to derive invariants between the bits that constitute the variables of a program. Such invariants can often be described with systems of congruences where in each equation $\vec{c} \cdot \vec{x} = d \mod m$, (unknown variable m)$is a power of two,$\vec{c}$is a vector of integer coefficients, and$\vec{x}$ is a vector of propositional variables (bits). Because of the low-level nature of these invariants and the large number of bits that are involved, it is important that the transfer functions can be derived automatically. We address this problem, showing how an analysis for bit-level congruence relationships can be decoupled into two parts: (1) a SAT-based abstraction (compilation) step which can be automated, and (2) an interpretation step that requires no SAT-solving. We exploit triangular matrix forms to derive transfer functions efficiently, even in the presence of large numbers of bits. Finally we propose program transformations that improve the analysis results