Thickness and Evaluation

This is a review essay devoted to Pekka Väyrynen’s The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty. Väyrynen’s book, concerned with thick terms and thick concepts, argues for a pragmatic view on the evaluativeness associated with these terms and concepts. The essay raises a number of critical questions regarding what Väyrynen’s arguments for his view actually show. It deals with, for example, thick properties, the fact-value distinction, what it is for terms and concepts to be (semantically) evaluative, and whether Väyrynen’s arguments generalize to thin evaluative concepts

Holography and the conformal window in the Veneziano limit

We discuss holographic QCD in the Veneziano limit (the V-QCD models), concentrating on phenomena near the "conformal" phase transition taking place at a critical value of the ratio x = N_f/N_c. In particular, we review the results for the S-parameter, the technidilaton, and the masses of the mesons.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures. Contribution to Sakata Memorial KMI Workshop on "Origin of Mass and Strong Coupling Gauge Theories (SCGT15)", 3-6 March 2015, Nagoya Universit

The Riesz representation theorem and weak∗{}^* compactness of semimartingales

We show that the sequential closure of a family of probability measures on the canonical space of c{\`a}dl{\`a}g paths satisfying Stricker's uniform tightness condition is a weak${}^*$ compact set of semimartingale measures in the pairing of the Riesz representation theorem under topological assumptions on the path space. Similar results are obtained for quasi- and supermartingales under analogous conditions. In particular, we give a full characterization of the strongest topology on the Skorokhod space for which these results are true.Comment: V1-V6 differ substantially from v7-v8 in exposition v9 adds lemma 3.5, example 3.9, remark 5.6, proposition 5.7 (i) and some other minor remark