A Decade of Dark Energy: 1998 - 2008

The years 1998 to 2008 were very exciting years for cosmology. It was a pleasure to accept this invitation to describe my contributions to the development of our knowledge and understanding of the universe over the course of the past decade. Here, I begin by describing some of my work on radio galaxies as a modified standard yardstick and go on to describe model-independent studies of the accelerating universe and the properties of the dark energy. During the course of these studies, I came upon interesting ways to study the spin and other properties of supermassive black holes, some of which are briefly mentioned.Comment: Proceedings of the 2008 UCLA Conference "Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe," submitted to AIP Conference Proceedings, 6 page

Executive functioning affects health behaviour in older people too

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A bidirectional relationship between physical activity and executive function in older adults

Michael Daly gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/L010437/1). David McMinn was funded by the Scottish Government, Rural and Environment Science & Analytical Services (RESAS) division. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, interpolation of these data, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A bidirectional relationship between executive function and health behavior : evidence, implications, and future directions

This work was supported by a grant from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ES/L010437/1).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A social support intervention to reduce intentions to drop-out from youth sport:the GAA super games centre

Research has highlighted that drop-out from youth sport has emerged to become a global trend with drop-out rates exceeding 30% in some countries. This study aimed to investigate the effect of a change in perceived support on intentions to drop out from youth sport at the end of a social support intervention. A pre-intervention examination of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 2012 identified a 19.38% drop-out rate involving 3,491 participants between the ages of 12-16 years. A psychosocial intervention developed for the GAA called the Super Games Centre was delivered and evaluated over a 24-week period to 103 participants. The findings demonstrated that higher perceived available support was significantly associated with lower levels of intentions to drop out at the end of the intervention. Furthermore, social identity emerged as a significant mediating factor in explaining the association between changes in perceived support and intentions to drop out. A post-intervention examination in 2018 found that the GAA had established 95 Super Games Centres since 2015, and this has led to an increase in 7,012 new participants between the ages of 12-16 years. Future research and implications for social support intervention methodology are discussed

Estimation of the Multiple Testing Burden for Genomewide Association Studies of Common Variants

Genomewide association studies are an exciting strategy in genetics, recently becoming feasible. While pioneering studies are being underway, it is already clear that the analytic issue of determining the significance of results presents a challenge to the wide community of researchers. Rather than each study engaging in independent evaluation, there is need in the community to have standards set for whole-genome significance. 
We have therefore undertaken the task of developing such standards, based on data collected with collaborators in the International Haplotype Map Consortium. We report an estimated burden of a million independent tests genomewide in Europeans, and twice that number in Africans. We further identify the sensitivity of the testing burden to the required significance level, with implications to staged design of association studies.
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Automated System Performance Testing at MongoDB

Distributed Systems Infrastructure (DSI) is MongoDB's framework for running fully automated system performance tests in our Continuous Integration (CI) environment. To run in CI it needs to automate everything end-to-end: provisioning and deploying multi-node clusters, executing tests, tuning the system for repeatable results, and collecting and analyzing the results. Today DSI is MongoDB's most used and most useful performance testing tool. It runs almost 200 different benchmarks in daily CI, and we also use it for manual performance investigations. As we can alert the responsible engineer in a timely fashion, all but one of the major regressions were fixed before the 4.2.0 release. We are also able to catch net new improvements, of which DSI caught 17. We open sourced DSI in March 2020.Comment: Author Preprint. Appearing in DBTest.io 202

In defence of existence questions

Do numbers exist? Do properties? Do possible worlds? Do fictional characters? Many metaphysicians spend time and effort trying to answer these and other questions about the existence of various entities. These inquiries have recently encountered opposition: a group of philosophers, drawing inspiration from Aristotle, have argued that many or all of the existence questions debated by metaphysicians can be answered trivially, and so are not worth debating. Our task is to defend existence questions from the neo-Aristotelians' attacks

Deferentialism

There is a recent and growing trend in philosophy that involves deferring to the claims of certain disciplines outside of philosophy, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, and linguistics. According to this trend— deferentialism , as we will call it—certain disciplines outside of philosophy make claims that have a decisive bearing on philosophical disputes, where those claims are more epistemically justified than any philosophical considerations just because those claims are made by those disciplines. Deferentialists believe that certain longstanding philosophical problems can be swiftly and decisively dispatched by appeal to disciplines other than philosophy. In this paper we will argue that such an attitude of uncritical deference to any non-philosophical discipline is badly misguided. With reference to the work of John Burgess and David Lewis, we consider deference to mathematics. We show that deference to mathematics is implausible and that main arguments for it fail. With reference to the work of Michael Blome-Tillmann, we consider deference to linguistics. We show that his arguments appealing to deference to linguistics are unsuccessful. We then show that naturalism does not entail deferentialism and that naturalistic considerations even motivate some anti-deferentialist views. Finally, we set out deferentialism’s failings and present our own anti-deferentialist approach to philosophical inquiry