Assurance Views of Testimony

Assurance theories of testimony attempt to explain what is distinctive about testimony as a form of epistemic warrant or justification. The most characteristic assurance theories hold that a distinctive subclass of assertion (acts of “telling”) involves a real commitment given by the speaker to the listener, somewhat like a promise to the effect that what is asserted is true. This chapter sympathetically explains what is attractive about such theories: instead of treating testimony as essentially similar to any other kind of evidence, they instead make testimonial warrant depend on essential features of the speech act of testimony as a social practice. One such feature is “buck-passing,” the phenomenon that when I am challenged to defend a belief I acquired through testimony, I may respond by referring to the source of my testimony (and thereby “passing the buck”) rather than providing direct evidence for the truth of the content of the belief. The chapter concludes by posing a serious challenge to assurance theories, namely that the social practice of assurance insufficiently ensures the truth of beliefs formed on the basis of testimony, and thereby fails a crucial epistemological test as a legitimate source of beliefs

Ownership and Commodifiability of Synthetic and Natural Organs

The arrival of synthetic organs may mean we need to reconsider principles of ownership of such items. One possible ownership criterion is the boundary between the organ’s being outside or inside the body. What is outside of my body, even if it is a natural organ made of my cells, may belong to a company or research institution. Yet when it is placed in me, it belongs to me. In the future, we should also keep an eye on how the availability of synthetic organs may change our attitudes toward our own bodies

Elliptic solutions to a generalized BBM equation

An approach is proposed to obtain some exact explicit solutions in terms of the Weierstrass' elliptic function $\wp$ to a generalized Benjamin-Bona-Mahony (BBM) equation. Conditions for periodic and solitary wave like solutions can be expressed compactly in terms of the invariants of $\wp$. The approach unifies recently established ad-hoc methods to a certain extent. Evaluation of a balancing principle simplifies the application of this approach.Comment: 11 pages, 2 tables, submitted to Phys. Lett.

On the non-abelian Brumer-Stark conjecture and the equivariant Iwasawa main conjecture

We show that for an odd prime p, the p-primary parts of refinements of the (imprimitive) non-abelian Brumer and Brumer-Stark conjectures are implied by the equivariant Iwasawa main conjecture (EIMC) for totally real fields. Crucially, this result does not depend on the vanishing of the relevant Iwasawa mu-invariant. In combination with the authors' previous work on the EIMC, this leads to unconditional proofs of the non-abelian Brumer and Brumer-Stark conjectures in many new cases.Comment: 33 pages; to appear in Mathematische Zeitschrift; v3 many minor updates including new title; v2 some cohomological arguments simplified; v1 is a revised version of the second half of arXiv:1408.4934v

Demographic history and genetic differentiation in apes

SummaryComparisons of genetic variation between humans and great apes are hampered by the fact that we still know little about the demographics and evolutionary history of the latter species [1–4]. In addition, characterizing ape genetic variation is important because they are threatened with extinction, and knowledge about genetic differentiation among groups may guide conservation efforts [5]. We sequenced multiple intergenic autosomal regions totaling 22,400 base pairs (bp) in ten individuals each from western, central, and eastern chimpanzee groups and in nine bonobos, and 16,000 bp in ten Bornean and six Sumatran orangutans. These regions are analyzed together with homologous information from three human populations and gorillas. We find that whereas orangutans have the highest diversity, western chimpanzees have the lowest, and that the demographic histories of most groups differ drastically. Special attention should therefore be paid to sampling strategies and the statistics chosen when comparing levels of variation within and among groups. Finally, we find that the extent of genetic differentiation among “subspecies” of chimpanzees and orangutans is comparable to that seen among human populations, calling the validity of the “subspecies” concept in apes into question

Finding Multiple New Optimal Locations in a Road Network

We study the problem of optimal location querying for location based services in road networks, which aims to find locations for new servers or facilities. The existing optimal solutions on this problem consider only the cases with one new server. When two or more new servers are to be set up, the problem with minmax cost criteria, MinMax, becomes NP-hard. In this work we identify some useful properties about the potential locations for the new servers, from which we derive a novel algorithm for MinMax, and show that it is efficient when the number of new servers is small. When the number of new servers is large, we propose an efficient 3-approximate algorithm. We verify with experiments on real road networks that our solutions are effective and attains significantly better result quality compared to the existing greedy algorithms

Critical behaviour of the two-dimensional Ising susceptibility

We report computations of the short-distance and the long-distance (scaling) contributions to the square-lattice Ising susceptibility in zero field close to T_c. Both computations rely on the use of nonlinear partial difference equations for the correlation functions. By summing the correlation functions, we give an algorithm of complexity O(N^6) for the determination of the first N series coefficients. Consequently, we have generated and analysed series of length several hundred terms, generated in about 100 hours on an obsolete workstation. In terms of a temperature variable, \tau, linear in T/T_c-1, the short-distance terms are shown to have the form \tau^p(ln|\tau|)^q with p>=q^2. To O(\tau^14) the long-distance part divided by the leading \tau^{-7/4} singularity contains only integer powers of \tau. The presence of irrelevant variables in the scaling function is clearly evident, with contributions of distinct character at leading orders |\tau|^{9/4} and |\tau|^{17/4} being identified.Comment: 11 pages, REVTex