Newton's "Experimental Philosophy"

My talk today will be about Newton’s avowed methodology, and specifically the place of experiment in his conception of science, and how his ideas changed significantly over the course of his career. I also want to look at his actual scientific practice and see how this influenced his views on the nature of the experimental sciences

Evaluation of World Wide Web-based Lessons for a First Year Dental Biochemistry Course

First year dental students at The University of Texas Dental Branch at Houston (Dental Branch) are required to take a basic biochemistry course. To facilitate learning and allow student self-assessment of their progress, WWW-based lessons covering intermediary metabolism were developed as a supplement to traditional lectures. Lesson design combined text, graphics, and animations and included learner control, links to other learning resources, and practice exercises and exams with immediate feedback. Results from an on-line questionnaire completed by students in two different classes showed that they completed 50% of the lessons and spent an average of 4 hrs. on-line. A majority of the students either agreed or strongly agreed that practice exercises were helpful, that the ability to control the pace of the lessons was important, that the lesson structure and presentation was easy to follow, that the illustrations, animations, and hyperlinks were helpful, and that the lessons were effective as a review. The very positive response to the WWW-based lessons indicates the usefulness of this approach as a study aid for dental students

Planning and Proof Planning

. The paper adresses proof planning as a specific AI planning. It describes some peculiarities of proof planning and discusses some possible cross-fertilization of planning and proof planning. 1 Introduction Planning is an established area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) whereas proof planning introduced by Bundy in [2] still lives in its childhood. This means that the development of proof planning needs maturing impulses and the natural questions arise What can proof planning learn from its Big Brother planning?' and What are the specific characteristics of the proof planning domain that determine the answer?'. In turn for planning, the analysis of approaches points to a need of mature techniques for practical planning. Drummond [8], e.g., analyzed approaches with the conclusion that the success of Nonlin, SIPE, and O-Plan in practical planning can be attributed to hierarchical action expansion, the explicit representation of a plan's causal structure, and a very simple form of propo..

Delegation and Positive-Sum Bureaucracies

I develop a formal model of bureaucratic policymaking to investigate why a legislature would choose to delegate authority to a bureaucratic agency whose actions can be controlled, ex post , by an executive with divergent policy preferences. Because the executive and legislature might find different policies to be salient to their constituencies, I demonstrate that executive review of agency rulemaking can benefit both branches of government, relative to legislative delegation without the possibility of such review. In trying to undermine the impacts of executive oversight, agencies propose policies that could benefit the legislature were the executive to choose not to intervene in agency policymaking. Likewise, if the executive does intervene, executive review allows him to implement a policy more desirable than absent such review. This joint-desirability of executive review is more likely when legislative and executive policy preferences are relatively aligned, and when legislative and agency policy preferences are relatively divergent. The broader social welfare consequences of executive review depend on the relative effectiveness of the executive's oversight of agency policymaking. These results provide insight for why mediating lawmaking institutions such as the Office of Information and Regulatory Analysis (OIRA) continue to survive in a separation of powers system despite their potential to advantage one branch of government at the expense of the other.

Piracy Accommodation and the Optimal Timing of Royalty Payments

This paper generalizes the two-period model of Watt (2000) who demonstrates the possibility of optimal accommodation of a pirate when the royalty rate applying to a creation is uniform and second-period Cournot competition applies. Admitting nonlinear contracts with period-specific royalty rates that leave total payments unchanged, simulation analysis shows that a producer of originals does better to increase the royalty rate in period 1 and decrease the rate to a negative level in period 2, thereby more than offsetting the usual cost advantage available to a pirate. Watt's illustrative examples regarding piracy accommodation (but not piracy exclusion) are overturned when a nonlinear contract is chosen optimally, although accommodation remains optimal in some other cases. Further, where exclusion is impossible under uniform royalties, cases exist where exclusion is feasible under nonlinear royalties. Even so, accommodation may be a preferable strategy.accommodating copyright piracy; nonlinear royalty contracts