Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Burdens of Judgment

Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin have argued that substantive versions of value pluralism are incompatible with pragmatism, and that all such versions of pluralism must necessarily collapse into versions of strong metaphysical pluralism. They also argue that any strong version of value pluralism is incompatible with pragmatism’s meliorist commitment and will block the road of inquiry. I defend the compatibility of a version of value pluralism with pragmatism, and offer counterarguments to all of these claims

HAT-P-30b: A Transiting Hot Jupiter on a Highly Oblique Orbit

We report the discovery of HAT-P-30b, a transiting exoplanet orbiting the V = 10.419 dwarf star GSC 0208-00722. The planet has a period P = 2.810595 ± 0.000005 days, transit epoch Tc = 2455456.46561 ± 0.00037 (BJD), and transit duration 0.0887 ± 0.0015 days. The host star has a mass of 1.24 ± 0.04 M_⊙, radius of 1.21 ± 0.05 R_⊙, effective temperature of 6304 ± 88 K, and metallicity [Fe/H] = +0.13 ± 0.08. The planetary companion has a mass of 0.711 ± 0.028 M J and radius of 1.340 ± 0.065 R J yielding a mean density of 0.37 ± 0.05 g cm^(–3). We also present radial velocity measurements that were obtained throughout a transit that exhibit the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. By modeling this effect, we measure an angle of λ = 73.°5 ± 9.°0 between the sky projections of the planet's orbit normal and the star's spin axis. HAT-P-30b represents another example of a close-in planet on a highly tilted orbit, and conforms to the previously noted pattern that tilted orbits are more common around stars with T_(eff*) ≳ 6250 K

Torn Curtain: The Secret History of the Cold War

This is a 5-part series and website which investigates key themes and episodes in Cold War history. Through the use of declassified documents, archival research, original interviews with participants (former officials, diplomats, intelligence officers, political activists etc), interviews with academic historians, journalists, contemporary witnesses, and archival sound material, the series delivers new insights and an original perspective on Cold War history and the underlying geo-political, ideological and cultural forces which shaped it. (5 x 53â57

Aboriginal Canada

The program was produced for Background Briefing, ABC Radio Nationalâs flagship investigative journalism program. It is 54 minutes in duration and the product of 6-7 weeks of intensive research, interviewing, editing, sound design, writing and production Canada's relationship with its Aboriginal peoples has many similarities with Australia's - from the early beginnings of European colonisation to the ways Canada is wrestling with the legacy of its own stolen generations of Aboriginal children. The research for this program was undertaken with the assistance of a Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Travel Bursary in February 200

BioWar

The program was produced for Background Briefing, ABC Radio Nationalâs flagship investigative journalism program. The programs listed below are each 54 minutes in duration and the product of 6-7 weeks of intensive research, interviewing, editing, sound design, writing and production. America has beefed up biological weapon research by $6 billion, and 11,000 people now have hands-on access to virulent biological agents. Scientists and analysts question the sanity of such a strategy. Remember anthrax was dispersed by an American

Australian Muslim Youth

The program was produced for Background Briefing, ABC Radio Nationalâs flagship investigative journalism program. The programs listed below are each 54 minutes in duration and the product of 6-7 weeks of intensive research, interviewing, editing, sound design, writing and production In Muslim communities across the world there's an intense battle of ideas going on about how to confront extremism and isolationism; what it means to be a Muslim in a modern, globalizing world - and how Muslims should live in non-Muslim societies. That same battle is happening here - and Australian Muslim youth are on the frontline. Young Muslims see debate and diversity as a sign of strength and maturity

A large scale prediction of bacteriocin gene blocks suggests a wide functional spectrum for bacteriocins

Bacteriocins are peptide-derived molecules produced by bacteria, whose recently-discovered functions include virulence factors and signalling molecules as well as their better known roles as antibiotics. To date, close to five hundred bacteriocins have been identified and classified. Recent discoveries have shown that bacteriocins are highly diverse and widely distributed among bacterial species. Given the heterogeneity of bacteriocin compounds, many tools struggle with identifying novel bacteriocins due to their vast sequence and structural diversity. Many bacteriocins undergo post-translational processing or modifications necessary for the biosynthesis of the final mature form. Enzymatic modification of bacteriocins as well as their export is achieved by proteins whose genes are often located in a discrete gene cluster proximal to the bacteriocin precursor gene, referred to as \textit{context genes} in this study. Although bacteriocins themselves are structurally diverse, context genes have been shown to be largely conserved across unrelated species. Using this knowledge, we set out to identify new candidates for context genes which may clarify how bacteriocins are synthesized, and identify new candidates for bacteriocins that bear no sequence similarity to known toxins. To achieve these goals, we have developed a software tool, Bacteriocin Operon and gene block Associator (BOA) that can identify homologous bacteriocin associated gene clusters and predict novel ones. We discover that several phyla have a strong preference for bactericon genes, suggesting distinct functions for this group of molecules. Availability: https://github.com/idoerg/BOAComment: Accepted for publication in BMC Bioinformatic

Chrono: A System for Normalizing Temporal Expressions

The Chrono System: Chrono is a hybrid rule-based and machine learning system written in Python and built from the ground up to identify temporal expressions in text and normalizes them into the SCATE schema. Input text is preprocessed using Python’s NLTK package, and is run through each of the four primary modules highlighted here. Note that Chrono does not remove stopwords because they add temporal information and context, and Chrono does not tokenize sentences. Output is an Anafora XML file with annotated SCATE entities. After minor parsing logic adjustments, Chrono has emerged as the top performing system for SemEval 2018 Task 6. Chrono is available on GitHub at https://github.com/AmyOlex/Chrono. Future Work: Chrono is still under development. Future improvements will include: additional entity parsing, like “event”; evaluating the impact of sentence tokenization; implement an ensemble ML module that utilizes all four ML methods for disambiguation; extract temporal phrase parsing algorithm to be stand-alone and compare to similar systems; evaluate performance on THYME medical corpus; migrate to UIMA framework and implement Ruta Rules for portability and easier customization