Local Acausality

The final publication is available at link.springer.com: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10701-014-9796-yA fair amount of recent scholarship has been concerned with correcting a supposedly wrong, but wide-spread, assessment of the consequences of the empirical falsification of Bell-type inequalities. In particular, it has been claimed that Bell-type inequalities follow from "locality tout court" without additional assumptions such as "realism" or "hidden variables". However, this line of reasoning conflates restrictions on the spatio-temporal relation between causes and their effects ("locality") and the assumption of a cause for every event ("causality"). It thus fails to recognize a substantial restriction of the class of theories that is falsified through Bell-type inequalities

Eating Goldstone Bosons in a Phase Transition: A Critical Review of Lyre's Analysis of the Higgs Mechanism

In this note, I briefly review Lyre's (2008) analysis and interpretation of the Higgs mechanism. Contrary to Lyre, I maintain that, on the proper understanding of the term, the Higgs mechanism refers to a physical process in the course of which gauge bosons acquire a mass. Since also Lyre's worries about imaginary masses can be dismissed, a realistic interpretation of the Higgs mechanism seems viable. While it may remain an open empirical question whether the Higgs mechanism did actually occur in the early history of the universe and what the details of the mechanism are, I claim that the term can certainly refer to a physical proces

The Higgs discovery as a diagnostic causal inference

I reconstruct the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS collaboration at CERN as the application of a series of inferences from effects to causes. I show to what extent such diagnostic causal inferences can be based on well established knowledge gained in previous experiments. To this extent, causal reasoning can be used to infer the existence of entities, rather than just causal relationships between them. The resulting account relies on the principle of causality, attributes only a heuristic role to the theory’s predictions, and shows how, and to what extent, data selection can be used to exclude alternative causes, even “unconceived” ones

Characterizing a collaboration by its communication structure

I present first results of my analysis of a collection of about 24,000 email messages from internal mailing lists of the ATLAS collaboration, at CERN, the particle physics laboratory, during the years 2010–2013. I represent the communication on these mailing lists as a network in which the members of the collaboration are connected if they reply to each other’s messages. Such a network allows me to characterize the collaboration from a bird’s eye view of its communication structure in epistemically relevant terms. I propose to interpret established measures such as the density of the network as indicators for the degree of “collaborativeness” of the collaboration and the presence of “communities” as a sign of cognitive division of labor. Similar methods have been used in philosophical and historical studies of collective knowledge generation but mostly at the level of information exchange, cooperation and competition between individual researchers or small groups. The present article aims to take initial steps towards a transfer of these methods and bring them to bear on the processes of collaboration inside a “collective author.

Minimal Assumption Derivation of a Bell-type Inequality

John Bell showed that a big class of local hidden-variable models stands in conflict with quantum mechanics and experiment. Recently, there were suggestions that empirically adequate hidden-variable models might exist which presuppose a weaker notion of local causality. We will show that a Bell-type inequality can be derived also from these weaker assumptions. IntroductionThe EPR-Bohm experimentLocal causalityBell's inequality from separate common causes 4.1 A weak screening-off principle4.2 Perfect correlation and ‘determinism'4.3 A minimal theory for spins4.4 No conspiracyDiscussio

Swiss CRM 2013 : Einsatz und Trends in Schweizer Unternehmen

StudieDie aktuelle Swiss CRM Studie beleuchtet den Status Quo sowie die Trends des CRM in der Schweiz. Der Schwerpunkt der diesjährigen Ausgabe liegt im Bereich Customer Experience Management. Dabei wird erstmals nicht nur die Unternehmenssicht, sondern auch die Kundenperspektive am Beispiel von drei teilnehmenden Unternehmen abgefragt

Draft Genome Sequences of Enterococcus mundtii Strains Isolated from Beef Slaughterhouses in Kenya

We present here draft genome sequences of Enterococcus mundtii strains K7-EM, P2-EM, C11-EM, and H18-EM, which were isolated from slaughterhouse equipment, carcasses, and personnel of small- and medium-sized beef slaughterhouses in Kenya

Evaluation of two workflows for whole genome sequencing-based typing of influenza A viruses

We compared two sample preparation protocols for whole genome sequencing of influenza A viruses. Each protocol was assessed using cDNA quantity and quality and the resulting mean genome coverage after sequencing. Both protocols produced acceptable result for samples with high viral load, whereas one protocol performed slightly better with limited virus count

The Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration: History, Philosophy, and Culture

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figur