Harry Choates (1922–1951) as Cajun folk hero

Publisher PD

Changing Attitudes: Writing Center Workshops in the Classroom

In a recent WPA-L discussion thread initiated by a “newbie writing center director,” Christopher Ervin offers the following suggestion: “I guess my best advice, if you want to grow your writing center, is to develop relationships with various potential stakeholders across campus. Doing so would help you do a lot that you might find more difficult if you don't branch out.” Ervin’s advice is practical and valuable for a writing center director, but it is also a daunting task for new faculty members. Trying to understand the historical, political, social, and economic landscapes of a new university is difficult enough, but add to that the administrative work and relationshipbuilding necessary to effectively run or develop a writing center, and new directors can feel like they have an insurmountable challenge ahead of them. However, with a combination of inquiry-driven conversations and effective demonstrations of writing center practices, a writing center director can forge relationships with faculty across campus that lead to productive and engaged conversations about writing. In doing so, writing center directors are positioned to move their centers beyond the image of the “fix-it” shop and into a cultivator of intellectual engagement on campus. Using my interactions with a business faculty member, I hope to offer other writing center administrators and practitioners a trajectory to follow as they begin to create their own networks on campus.University Writing Cente

Primitive prime divisors in the critical orbit of z^d+c

We prove the finiteness of the Zsigmondy set associated to the critical orbit of f(z) = z^d+c for rational values of c by finding an effective bound on the size of the set. For non-recurrent critical orbits, the Zsigmondy set is explicitly computed by utilizing effective dynamical height bounds. In the general case, we use Thue-style Diophantine approximation methods to bound the size of the Zsigmondy set when d >2, and complex-analytic methods when d=2.Comment: This version includes numerous typographical changes and expanded exposition, and a simplified proof of Theorem 6.1. 30 pages, to appear in International Math Research Notice

Patterns, Information, and Causation

This paper articulates an account of causation as a collection of information-theoretic relationships between patterns instantiated in the causal nexus. I draw on Dennett’s account of real patterns to characterize potential causal relata as patterns with specific identification criteria and noise tolerance levels, and actual causal relata as those patterns instantiated at some spatiotemporal location in the rich causal nexus as originally developed by Salmon. I develop a representation framework using phase space to precisely characterize causal relata, including their degree of counterfactual robustness, causal profiles, causal connectivity, and privileged grain size. By doing so, I show how the philosophical notion of causation can be rendered in a format that is amenable for direct application of mathematical techniques from information theory such that the resulting informational measures are causal informational measures. This account provides a metaphysics of causation that supports interventionist semantics and causal modeling and discovery techniques

Trauma Care in Georgia Building a Better System

A focus on the need for Georgia to build a coordinated, regionalized, and accountable trauma system

Causal Modeling and the Efficacy of Action

This paper brings together Thompson's naive action explanation with interventionist modeling of causal structure to show how they work together to produce causal models that go beyond current modeling capabilities, when applied to specifically selected systems. By deploying well-justified assumptions about rationalization, we can strengthen existing causal modeling techniques' inferential power in cases where we take ourselves to be modeling causal systems that also involve actions. The internal connection between means and end exhibited in naive action explanation has a modal strength like that of distinctively mathematical explanation, rather than that of causal explanation. Because it is stronger than causation, it can be treated as if it were merely causal in a causal model without thereby overextending the justification it can provide for inferences. This chapter introduces and demonstrate the usage of the Rationalization condition in causal modeling, where it is apt for the system(s) being modeled, and to provide the basics for incorporating R variables into systems of variables and R arrows into DAGs. Use of the Rationalization condition supplements causal analysis with action analysis where it is apt