Milton Keynes: an outline cost-benefit study

This is a preliminary survey of some of the factors which would need to be investigated in the design and cost-benefit analysis of alternative transport systems for Milton Keynes. It outlines the framework within which further work can be developed and provides some order-of-magnitude estimates for basic elements in the transport cost-benefit equations

Milton Keynes - preliminary estimates of regional traffic flows in 1981

The Milton Keynes Development Corporation and their planning consultants have asked the College Transport Group to investigate the scale of likely regional traffic flows into and out of Milton Keynes. At this stage the emphasis is on providing information for the preparation of a Master Plan for the city itself, rather than detailed traffic estimates for planning transport systems in the surrounding region. Population estimates for 1981 have been obtained from County Councils for areas within a 20 mile radius of the new city, and the proportions attracted to Milton Keynes for work and shopping assessed using gravity model techniques. Separate estimates have been made of work journeys from the city to regional employment and to London. Possible upper and lower limits to these forecasts are included to account for many uncertainties in the absolute and relative growth of population, employment and shopping opportunities in the city itself and in the surrounding region. The results are presented as traffic flews into and out of octant sectors around the city. Flows to the east are greater than to the west with work trip flows of the order of 2,500 person trips each way in the most heavily loaded sectors. A 1981 city population of 150,000 is likely to produce at least 1,500 daily commuters to London using the fast rail service, with an additional 200 commuters from the region using Milton Keynes railway station

Aristotle on Mind and the Science of Nature

On the basis of two premises to which he is committed, it would seem that Aristotle must be a “naturalist” about the investigation of the soul: 1. Natural things have both a material and a formal nature. 2. In the case of living things, their formal nature is their soul. This paper deals with a complication in the above inference. In De partibus animalium I 1, Aristotle insists that the natural scientist should not speak of all soul, since not all of the soul is a nature, though one or more parts of it is (641b8–9). In this paper I argue that this claim is consistent with everything he says in the De anima about the investigation of reason, and is a consequence of his views about the methodological norms of natural science. Aristotle is a naturalist when it comes to those parts of the soul human beings share with other animals, but his views about the mind are much more complicated

Aristotle and the Functions of Reproduction

I shall argue that the function of the reproductive capacity is not to perpetuate the kind (or species), but to allow the individual reproducer to be eternal: not eternal without qualifications, but in a way. The basic premise in the arguments which establish this conclusion distinguishes between things which are numerically eternal and those which are formally eternal. This of this latter sort must be members of an everlasting series of individuals which are one-in-form (ἕν εἴδει, in Aristotle\u27s usage). The full understanding of these passages, therefore, requires a proper interpretation of the distinction between numerical and formal unity. with this distinction clarified, and with a better understanding of Aristotle\u27s teleological explanations of reproduction and sex, i close by suggesting another \u27function\u27 of reproduction - eliminating forms as independent paradigms for natural substances

Aristotle and Darwin: Antagonists or Kindred Spirits?

In the decades following the forging of the so-called Neo-Darwinian Synthesis in the 1940s, a number of its philosophical defenders created a myth about what Charles Darwin was up against, a viewpoint called “typological essentialism” often attributed to Aristotle. In this paper I first sketch the history of how this myth was created. I then establish that it is a myth by providing an account of Aristotle’s essentialism as it is actually displayed in his philosophy of biology and in his biological practice. It has nothing to do with the ‘mythic’ version. We then turn to what Darwin was really up against—a common, anti-evolutionary way of defining the species concept in Darwin’s time (that owes nothing to Aristotle), and to his attempts to re-orient thinking about it. I will close by reconsidering Aristotle and Charles Darwin: Does it make any sense to think about the relationship between two thinkers separated by more than two millennia living in such vastly different cultures? What did Charles Darwin himself think about Aristotle

An Extremely Luminous Galaxy at z=5.74

We report the discovery of an extremely luminous galaxy lying at a redshift of z=5.74, SSA22-HCM1. The object was found in narrowband imaging of the SSA22 field using a 105 Angstrom bandpass filter centered at 8185 Angstroms during the course of the Hawaii narrowband survey using LRIS on the 10 m Keck II Telescope, and was identified by the equivalent width of the emission W_lambda(observed)=175 Angstroms, flux = 1.7 x 10^{-17} erg cm^{-2} s^{-1}). Comparison with broadband colors shows the presence of an extremely strong break (> 4.2 at the 2 sigma level) between the Z band above the line, where the AB magnitude is 25.5, and the R band below, where the object is no longer visible at a 2 sigma upper limit of 27.1 (AB mags). These properties are only consistent with this object's being a high-z Ly alpha emitter. A 10,800 s spectrum obtained with LRIS yields a redshift of 5.74. The object is similar in its continuum shape, line properties, and observed equivalent width to the z=5.60 galaxy, HDF 4-473.0, as recently described by Weymann et al. (1998), but is 2-3 times more luminous in the line and in the red continuum. For H_0 = 65 km s^{-1} Mpc^{-1} and q_0 = (0.02, 0.5) we would require star formation rates of around (40, 7) solar masses per year to produce the UV continuum in the absence of extinction.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, Latex with emulateapj style file; to appear in the Astrophysical Journal (Letters