Two Ways to Satisfy (and No Way to Satisfy Utilitarians)

Preference utilitarianism holds that an action is morally good iff it maximizes overall preference satisfaction. In principle, there are two ways to satisfy preferences: either you alter the facts such that they fit the subject’s pref- erences, or you change the subject’s preferences such that they fit the facts. While standard preference utilitari- anism focuses on the first strategy, the present paper will explore the prospects and limits of the second strategy. I will firstly argue that there are cases in which it seems morally right to aim at preference satisfaction by prefer- ence change, but secondly acknowledge that an action that induces a global change of preferences doesn’t neces- sarily seem morally right. The real philosophical challenge is to distinguish those cases where altering a subject’s preferences is morally right from those where it isn’t. The paper ends with a skeptical outlook on the possibility of justifying the distinction on purely preference-utilitarian grounds

Love and Privacy: Three Stories

This thesis is compiled of stories written and revised while the author was a Master‟s candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Accompanying these stories is a brief introduction in which the author considers elements of craft in fiction

The theory of form logic

We investigate a construction schema for first-order logical systems, called “form logic”. Form logic allows us to overcome the dualistic commitment of predicate logic to individual constants and predicates. Dualism is replaced by a pluralism of terms of different “logical forms”. Individual form-logical systems are generated by the determination of a range of logical forms and of the formbased syntax rules for combining terms into formulas. We develop a generic syntax and semantics for such systems and provide a completeness proof for them. To illustrate the idea of form logic, and the possibilities it facilitates, we discuss three particular systems, one of which is the form-logical reconstruction of standard first-order predicate logic

Annual- to interannual temperature variability in the Caribbean during the Maunder Sunspot minimum

We reconstruct Caribbean seawater temperatures from sclerosponge Sr/Ca ratios using a specimen of Ceratoporella nicholsoni that grew at 20 m below sea level in a reef cave at Jamaica. We sample the time interval from 1620 to 1745 A.D. with almost monthly resolution. This interval includes the Maunder sunspot minimum, one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age. Reconstructed annual temperature amplitudes are on the order of about 1°C. The mean growth rate calculated from the annual Sr/Ca variations corresponds perfectly with U-Th-based growth rates. We find that the interannual climate variability is determined by El Niño–Southern Oscillation and by a decadal signal, most likely originating from the tropical North Atlantic. On a multidecadal timescale the Maunder Minimum is characterized by a 1°–2°C cooling and reduced amplitudes of the interannual and decadal temperature variations

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Surface rupture of multiple crustal faults in the 2016 Mw 7.8 Kaikōura, New Zealand, earthquake

Multiple (>20 >20 ) crustal faults ruptured to the ground surface and seafloor in the 14 November 2016 M w Mw 7.8 Kaikōura earthquake, and many have been documented in detail, providing an opportunity to understand the factors controlling multifault ruptures, including the role of the subduction interface. We present a summary of the surface ruptures, as well as previous knowledge including paleoseismic data, and use these data and a 3D geological model to calculate cumulative geological moment magnitudes (M G w MwG ) and seismic moments for comparison with those from geophysical datasets. The earthquake ruptured faults with a wide range of orientations, sense of movement, slip rates, and recurrence intervals, and crossed a tectonic domain boundary, the Hope fault. The maximum net surface displacement was ∼12  m ∼12  m on the Kekerengu and the Papatea faults, and average displacements for the major faults were 0.7–1.5 m south of the Hope fault, and 5.5–6.4 m to the north. M G w MwG using two different methods are M G w MwG 7.7 +0.3 −0.2 7.7−0.2+0.3 and the seismic moment is 33%–67% of geophysical datasets. However, these are minimum values and a best estimate M G w MwG incorporating probable larger slip at depth, a 20 km seismogenic depth, and likely listric geometry is M G w MwG 7.8±0.2 7.8±0.2 , suggests ≤32% ≤32% of the moment may be attributed to slip on the subduction interface and/or a midcrustal detachment. Likely factors contributing to multifault rupture in the Kaikōura earthquake include (1) the presence of the subduction interface, (2) physical linkages between faults, (3) rupture of geologically immature faults in the south, and (4) inherited geological structure. The estimated recurrence interval for the Kaikōura earthquake is ≥5,000–10,000  yrs ≥5,000–10,000  yrs , and so it is a relatively rare event. Nevertheless, these findings support the need for continued advances in seismic hazard modeling to ensure that they incorporate multifault ruptures that cross tectonic domain boundaries

Plastizität

Plastizität ist ein zentrales Konstrukt der Lebensspannenpsychologie und beschreibt die Fähigkeit einer Person, durch kognitive, behaviorale und/oder neuronale Neuorganisation auf veränderte Anforderungen oder Möglichkeiten aus der Umwelt zu reagieren. Plastizitätsprozesse werden durch ein zeitlich andauerndes Ungleichgewicht zwischen den Voraussetzungen einer Person und den Anforderungen der Umgebung ausgelöst. Plastizität ist bis ins hohe Alter nachweisbar, nimmt aber in ihrer Effizienz im Alter ab. In der Psychologie des Alterns ist Plastizität ein theoretisch zunächst breit angelegtes Konstrukt; empirisch ist jedoch vor allem die Plastizität der kognitiven Leistungsfähigkeit untersucht worden. In traditionellen Interventionsprogrammen wurden hierbei in der Regel Strategien zur Kompensation altersbedingter Abbauprozesse (z.B. Gedächtnisstrategien) trainiert. Während diese Interventionen bei kognitiv gesunden Erwachsenen oft eine Verbesserung in den trainierten Bereichen erzielen können, bleiben Transfereffekte auf nicht-trainierte Domänen eher gering. Eine aktuell in den Fokus getretene Alternative sind Trainings von exekutiven Funktionen und des Arbeitsgedächtnisses, bei denen – auch im höheren Erwachsenenalter – erste erfolgversprechende Befunde zur Plastizität dieser Prozesse wie auch zu Transfereffekten vorgelegt wurden

Die Perspektive des Richters

Beckermann A. Die Perspektive des Richters. In: Freitag W, Rott H, Sturm H, Zinke A, eds. Von Rang und Namen : philosophical essays in honour of Wolfgang Spohn. Münster: mentis; 2016: 1-14