3,011 research outputs found
Nonspecific perjury
Since 1970, a United States prosecutor can prove perjury without specifying which statement is perjurious. A bold prosecutor could concede ignorance of which statement is false. A bolder prosecutor could further concede that the witness himself does not know. The boldest prosecutor could concede there is no specific lie. Instead of there being a statement that is intrinsically perjurious, the perjury is relational. Just as two statements can be inconsistent without either being inconsistent, two statements can be perjurious without either being perjurious. These consequences are reconciled with the generalisation that all perjury involves lying. Corollaries about culpability are drawn from the phenomenon of nonspecific perjury. The reasoning is generalised to other forms of illegal lying.Peer reviewe
Venezuelan higher education and national development
The author spent four years in Latin America--almost three of those years in Maracaibo, Venezuela (1962-1965). As a Student Affairs Grantee with the United States Information Agency and working out of the cultural America House, it was his duty to know the university scene, and especially its student leaders. Among other duties were the teaching and organizing of English classes within the university and assisting the American Embassy by providing student leaders to conference where prominent North American and Venezuelan educators would speak and offer an exchange of ideas regarding the contemporary university scene.
During that time it was his pleasure to become acquainted with the Director of the Planning Commission and Dean of the School of Architecture, Dr. Miguel Casas Armengol, and his assistant, Dr. Alberto Mendoza, whose unyielding efforts served as an inspiration and impetus for this thesis
How to lie to God : Kant’s Thomistic turn
For most of his career, Kant accepts Augustine's requirement that lying requires an intention to deceive. However, he eventually converts to Aquinas, following him in rejecting this requirement in favor of Aristotle's teleological conception of lying. This change of view amounts to an improvement, for it makes room for the possibility of lying to an omniscient being—and such lies, we argue, are indeed possible. We accompany these historical and philosophical theses with a biographical thesis taking the form of the following story. Kant believed that in his youth he had lied to God, largely because of his religious training. He adopted policies designed to help him resist the habit of lying to God. However, this program conflicted with his desire to lead a well-rounded life as a public intellectual. This worldly ambition led him to forego the Quaker solution to the problem of lying to God: refuse to swear any oath to God, avoid set prayers and hymns, decline offers of intercession by clergy. Kant's worldly compromise served him well, but as he entered his twilight years, he came to worry that his only surviving argument for theism—the moral argument—might constitute a relapse into the vice of lying to God.Peer reviewe
Probing the dynamics of an optically trapped particle by phase sensitive back focal plane interferometry
The dynamics of an optically trapped particle are often determined by
measuring intensity shifts of the back-scattered light from the particle using
position sensitive detectors. We present a technique which measures the phase
of the back-scattered light using balanced detection in an external Mach-Zender
interferometer scheme where we separate out and beat the scattered light from
the bead and that from the top surface of our trapping chamber. The technique
has improved axial motion resolution over intensity-based detection, and can
also be used to measure lateral motion of the trapped particle. In addition, we
are able to track the Brownian motion of trapped 1 and 3 m diameter beads
from the phase jitter and show that, similar to intensity-based measurements,
phase measurements can also be used to simultaneously determine displacements
of the trapped bead as well as the spring constant of the trap. For lateral
displacements, we have matched our experimental results with a simulation of
the overall phase contour of the back-scattered light for lateral displacements
by using plane wave decomposition in conjunction with Mie scattering theory.
The position resolution is limited by path drifts of the interferometer which
we have presently reduced to obtain a displacement resolution of around 2 nm
for 1.1 m diameter probes by locking the interferometer to a frequency
stabilized diode laser.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure
Constraints on composite Dirac neutrinos from observations of galaxy clusters
Recently, to explain the origin of neutrino masses a model based on confining
some hidden fermionic bound states into right-handed chiral neutrinos has been
proposed. One of the consequences of condensing the hidden sector fields in
this model is the presence of sterile composite Dirac neutrinos of keV mass,
which can form viable warm dark matter particles. We have analyzed constraints
on this model from the observations of satellite based telescopes to detect the
sterile neutrinos in clusters of galaxies.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, minor modifications, a reference is added, this
manuscript is published in Physics Letters
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