What is the Epistemic Significance of Disagreement?

Over the past decade, attention to epistemically significant disagreement has centered on the question of whose disagreement qualifies as significant, but ignored another fundamental question: what is the epistemic significance of disagreement? While epistemologists have assumed that disagreement is only significant when it indicates a determinate likelihood that one’s own belief is false, and therefore that only disagreements with epistemic peers are significant at all, they have ignored a more subtle and more basic significance that belongs to all disagreements, regardless of who they are with—that the opposing party is wrong. It is important to recognize the basic significance of disagreement since it is what explains all manners of rational responses to disagreement, including assessing possible epistemic peers and arguing against opponents regardless of their epistemic fitness

Ergodic Actions and Spectral Triples

In this article, we give a general construction of spectral triples from certain Lie group actions on unital C*-algebras. If the group G is compact and the action is ergodic, we actually obtain a real and finitely summable spectral triple which satisfies the first order condition of Connes' axioms. This provides a link between the "algebraic" existence of ergodic action and the "analytic" finite summability property of the unbounded selfadjoint operator. More generally, for compact G we carefully establish that our (symmetric) unbounded operator is essentially selfadjoint. Our results are illustrated by a host of examples - including noncommutative tori and quantum Heisenberg manifolds.Comment: 18 page

Tree species’ tolerance to water stress, salinity and fire

According to climate change predictions, water availability might change dramatically in Europe and adjacent regions. This change will undoubtedly have an adverse effect on existing tree species and affect their ability to cope with a lack or an excess of water, changes in annual precipitation patterns, soil salinity and fire disturbance. The following chapter will describe tree species and proven-ances used in European forestry practice which are the most suitable to deal with water stress, salinity and fire. Each subchapter starts with a brief description of each of the stress factors and discusses the predictions of the likelihood of their occurrence in the near future according to the climate change scenarios. Tree spe-cies and their genotypes able to cope with particular stress factor, together with indication of their use by forest managers are then introduced in greater detail

Young measures supported on invertible matrices

Motivated by variational problems in nonlinear elasticity depending on the deformation gradient and its inverse, we completely and explicitly describe Young measures generated by matrix-valued mappings \{Y_k\}_{k\in\N} \subset L^p(\O;\R^{n\times n}), \O\subset\R^n, such that \{Y_k^{-1}\}_{k\in\N} \subset L^p(\O;\R^{n\times n}) is bounded, too. Moreover, the constraint $\det Y_k>0$ can be easily included and is reflected in a condition on the support of the measure. This condition typically occurs in problems of nonlinear-elasticity theory for hyperelastic materials if $Y:=\nabla y$ for y\in W^{1,p}(\O;\R^n). Then we fully characterize the set of Young measures generated by gradients of a uniformly bounded sequence in W^{1,\infty}(\O;\R^n) where the inverted gradients are also bounded in L^\infty(\O;\R^{n\times n}). This extends the original results due to D. Kinderlehrer and P. Pedregal

Federal Action to Cure State Inaction: Protecting Consumers from the Perils of Payday Lending

The United States thrives under its unique brand of federalism, allowing states to become laboratories of democracy, tailoring their innovations to meet the needs of constituents. Yet, when state governments are unable or unwilling to take action, it is incumbent upon the federal government to establish a baseline. The rather recent rise of payday loans presents a case study that illustrates a scenario where state innovation, or lack thereof, produced vastly disparate laws among the states. While some states take more consumer-friendly approaches to combat the adverse outcomes of payday loans, a majority of states have done little to quell such outcomes. As such, this note provides historical context to the development of payday loans, noting the undeniable demand in the consumer credit market and the various state and federal laws enacted to regulate these high-interest loans. In light of the state and federal inaction, and in conjunction with the overwhelming deluge of negative data surrounding payday loans’ effects on consumers, this note then outlines what the federal government should do to bridge the gap between the varying approaches of regulating payday loans

Controllability of protein-protein interaction phosphorylation-based networks: Participation of the hub 14-3-3 protein family

Posttranslational regulation of protein function is an ubiquitous mechanism in eukaryotic cells. Here, we analyzed biological properties of nodes and edges of a human protein-protein interaction phosphorylation-based network, especially of those nodes critical for the network controllability. We found that the minimal number of critical nodes needed to control the whole network is 29%, which is considerably lower compared to other real networks. These critical nodes are more regulated by posttranslational modifications and contain more binding domains to these modifications than other kinds of nodes in the network, suggesting an intra-group fast regulation. Also, when we analyzed the edges characteristics that connect critical and non-critical nodes, we found that the former are enriched in domain-to-eukaryotic linear motif interactions, whereas the later are enriched in domain-domain interactions. Our findings suggest a possible structure for protein-protein interaction networks with a densely interconnected and self-regulated central core, composed of critical nodes with a high participation in the controllability of the full network, and less regulated peripheral nodes. Our study offers a deeper understanding of complex network control and bridges the controllability theorems for complex networks and biological protein-protein interaction phosphorylation-based networked systems.Fil: Uhart, Marina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Cienicas Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; ArgentinaFil: Flores, Gabriel. Eventioz/eventbrite Company; ArgentinaFil: Bustos, Diego Martin. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Cienicas Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; Argentin