Compressible laminar streaks with wall suction

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Inductive Risk and Regulatory Toxicology: A Comment on de Melo-Martín and Intemann

In a recent paper, Inmaculada de Melo-Martín and Kristen Intemann consider several ways in which, from the perspective of the argument from inductive risk, ethical and political values might "sometimes [be] necessary in decisions at the core of scientific reasoning." Specifically, they consider whether these kinds of values are logically, epistemically, pragmatically, or ethically necessary; and argue that there are significant conceptual problems in each case. In this comment, using regulatory uses of high-throughput toxicology at the US Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] as a case study, I suggest some clarifications and corrections to some of their claims about pragmatic necessity. I conclude that, while an inductive risk framework has some significant limitations, it is still conceptually and rhetorically valuable

Inductive Risk and Regulatory Toxicology: A Comment on de Melo-Martín and Intemann

In a recent paper, Inmaculada de Melo-Martín and Kristen Intemann consider several ways in which, from the perspective of the argument from inductive risk, ethical and political values might "sometimes [be] necessary in decisions at the core of scientific reasoning." Specifically, they consider whether these kinds of values are logically, epistemically, pragmatically, or ethically necessary; and argue that there are significant conceptual problems in each case. In this comment, using regulatory uses of high-throughput toxicology at the US Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] as a case study, I suggest some clarifications and corrections to some of their claims about pragmatic necessity. I conclude that, while an inductive risk framework has some significant limitations, it is still conceptually and rhetorically valuable

The Two-Dimensional Values Gap in the GMOf Controversy: An Extended Abstract

In this extended abstract, I introduce a framework for understanding the dysfunctional state of the public controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms used for food (GMOf). This framework highlights various ways in which interlocutors fail to engage with the values involved in the controversy, and provides a site for combined work in science communication, philosophy of science, and ethics

Flashy purchases are associated with higher levels of violent crime in the U.S.

From the Occupy Wall Street movement, to Thomas Piketty’s more recent Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the notion of inequality has become increasingly prescient to politicians and the public in general. In new research, Daniel L. Hicks and Joan Hamory Hicks find that one very visible aspect of that inequality, conspicuous consumption by the rich, is associated with higher levels of violent crime. They write that one potential explanation for their findings is that rising inequality could then increase feelings of relative deprivation among those who are unable to succeed legally, and lead them to commit crimes against their neighbors

tmfast fits topic models fast

tmfast is an R package for fitting topic models using a fast algorithm based on partial PCA and the varimax rotation. After providing mathematical background to the method, we present two examples, using a simulated corpus and aggregated works of a selection of authors from the long nineteenth century, and compare the quality of the fitted models to a standard topic modeling package