The No No-Miracles-Argument Argument

The No Miracles Argument is commonly used as a defense of scientific realism. I claim that the No Miracles Argument is begging the question because of the way it uses the notion of ``best explanation.\u27\u27 I show this by giving a fundamental account of explanation, describing how these explanations can be compared, and showing that, in the case of the No Miracles Argument, the use of the notion of ``best explanation\u27\u27 will entail a correspondence theory of truth. I also show that the first premise of the No Miracles Argument and a correspondence theory of truth entail realism. Hence, the No Miracles Argument is begging the question

Mind the Is-Ought Gap

The is-ought gap is Hume’s claim that we can’t get an ‘ought’ from just ‘is’s. Prior (“The Autonomy of Ethics,” 1960) showed that its most straightforward formulation, a staple of introductory philosophy classes, fails. Many authors attempt to resurrect the claim by restricting its domain syntactically or by reformulating it in terms of models of deontic logic. Those attempts prove to be complex, incomplete, or incorrect. I provide a simple reformulation of the is-ought gap that closely fits Hume’s description of it. My formulation of the gap avoids the proposed counterexamples from Prior and offers a natural explanation of why they seem compelling. Moreover, I show that my formulation of the gap is guaranteed by standard theories of the semantics of normative terms, and that provides a more general reason to accept it

Building hype: the musicking body in university bhangra

This thesis explores questions of identity and the body in performance in collegiate competitive bhangra, a South Asian diasporic popular dance form, through the analytical frameworks of hype and the musicking body. I explore the relatively recent shift of bhangra from a club scene to a college-level, competitive context in order to understand the ways in which this contemporary bhangra still offers participants a meaningful expression of South Asian identity, when the context in which the music is produced and consumed seems to have changed dramatically from the original context in which the genre emerged as a popular cultural form in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. I analyze the way in which hype, an intangible element of contemporary bhangra that is essential for successful performance, is built up and maintained through the embodied practices of the co-producers of bhangra

Of course we share! Testing Assumptions about Social Tagging Systems

Social tagging systems have established themselves as an important part in today's web and have attracted the interest from our research community in a variety of investigations. The overall vision of our community is that simply through interactions with the system, i.e., through tagging and sharing of resources, users would contribute to building useful semantic structures as well as resource indexes using uncontrolled vocabulary not only due to the easy-to-use mechanics. Henceforth, a variety of assumptions about social tagging systems have emerged, yet testing them has been difficult due to the absence of suitable data. In this work we thoroughly investigate three available assumptions - e.g., is a tagging system really social? - by examining live log data gathered from the real-world public social tagging system BibSonomy. Our empirical results indicate that while some of these assumptions hold to a certain extent, other assumptions need to be reflected and viewed in a very critical light. Our observations have implications for the design of future search and other algorithms to better reflect the actual user behavior

A Longitudinal Student Outcomes Evaluation of the Buffalo State College Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Buffalo State College (Buffalo State) is the largest of the 13 colleges of arts and sciences in the SUNY (State University of New York) system. Its total enrollment is nearly 11,000, with an undergraduate enrollment of 9,139. Experiential pedagogies, including undergraduate research, are reflected across the undergraduate programs and Buffalo State College has placed increasing emphasis and resources on expanding undergraduate research opportunities for students in all academic disciplines. Our use of the term ‘research’ is broadly defined by the standard practices established within each academic discipline and includes scholarship and creative activities. It is assumed that the activity will produce original results and contribute to the body of knowledge and creative works within a discipline

Hadwiger's problem for bodies with enough sub-Gaussian marginals

Hadwiger's conjecture in convex geometry, formulated in 1957, states that every convex body in $\mathbb{R}^n$ can be covered by $2^n$ translations of its interior. Despite significant efforts, the best known bound related to this problem was $\mathcal{O}(4^n \sqrt{n} \log n)$ for more than sixty years. In 2021, Huang, Slomka, Tkocz, and Vritsiou made a major breakthrough by improving the estimate by a factor of $\exp\left(\Omega(\sqrt{n})\right)$. Further, for $\psi_2$ bodies they proved that at most $\exp(-\Omega(n))\cdot4^n$ translations of its interior are needed to cover it. Through a probabilistic approach we show that the bound $\exp(-\Omega(n))\cdot4^n$ can be obtained for convex bodies with sufficiently many well-behaved sub-gaussian marginals. Using a small diameter approximation, we present how the currently best known bound for the general case, due to Campos, Van Hintum, Morris, and Tiba can also be deduced from our results

Comparing the Effect of Rational and Emotional Appeals on Donation Behavior

We present evidence from a pre-registered experiment indicating that a philosophical argument––a type of rational appeal––can persuade people to make charitable donations. The rational appeal we used follows Singer’s well-known “shallow pond” argument (1972), while incorporating an evolutionary debunking argument (Paxton, Ungar, & Greene 2012) against favoring nearby victims over distant ones. The effectiveness of this rational appeal did not differ significantly from that of a well-tested emotional appeal involving an image of a single child in need (Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic 2007). This is a surprising result, given evidence that emotions are the primary drivers of moral action, a view that has been very influential in the work of development organizations. We did not find support for our pre-registered hypothesis that combining our rational and emotional appeals would have a significantly stronger effect than either appeal in isolation. However, our finding that both kinds of appeal can increase charitable donations is cause for optimism, especially concerning the potential efficacy of well-designed rational appeals. We consider the significance of these findings for moral psychology, ethics, and the work of organizations aiming to alleviate severe poverty

Challenging management dogma where evidence is non-existent, weak or outdated

Medical practice is dogged by dogma. A conclusive evidence base is lacking for many aspects of patient management. Clinicians, therefore, rely upon engrained treatment strategies as the dogma seems to work, or at least is assumed to do so. Evidence is often distorted, overlooked or misapplied in the re-telling. However, it is incorporated as fact in textbooks, policies, guidelines and protocols with resource and medicolegal implications. We provide here four examples of medical dogma that underline the above points: loop diuretic treatment for acute heart failure; the effectiveness of heparin thromboprophylaxis; the rate of sodium correction for hyponatraemia; and the mantra of “each hour counts” for treating meningitis. It is notable that the underpinning evidence is largely unsupportive of these doctrines. We do not necessarily advocate change, but rather encourage critical reflection on current practices and the need for prospective studies

STORM 1.0: a simple, flexible, and parsimonious stochastic rainfall generator for simulating climate and climate change

Assessments of water balance changes, watershed response, and landscape evolution to climate change require representation of spatially and temporally varying rainfall fields over a drainage basin, as well as the flexibility to simply modify key driving climate variables (evaporative demand, overall wetness, storminess). An empirical–stochastic approach to the problem of rainstorm simulation enables statistical realism and the creation of multiple ensembles that allow for statistical characterization and/or time series of the driving rainfall over a fine grid for any climate scenario. Here, we provide details on the STOchastic Rainfall Model (STORM), which uses this approach to simulate drainage basin rainfall. STORM simulates individual storms based on Monte Carlo selection from probability density functions (PDFs) of storm area, storm duration, storm intensity at the core, and storm center location. The model accounts for seasonality, orography, and the probability of storm intensity for a given storm duration. STORM also generates time series of potential evapotranspiration (PET), which are required for most physically based applications. We explain how the model works and demonstrate its ability to simulate observed historical rainfall characteristics for a small watershed in southeast Arizona. We explain the data requirements for STORM and its flexibility for simulating rainfall for various classes of climate change. Finally, we discuss several potential applications of STORM