Kant’s theory of conscience

In this paper I discuss Kant’s theory of conscience. In particular, I explicate the following two claims that Kant makes in the Metaphysics of Morals: (1) an erring conscience is an absurdity and (2) if an agent has acted according to his/her conscience, then s/he has done all that can be required of him/her. I argue that (1) is a very specific claim that does not bear on the problem of moral knowledge. I argue that (2) rests on a strongly internalist line of argument

New considerations on scale extrapolation of wing pressure distributions affected by transonic shock-induced separations

Use of this analytical parameter, it is shown, highlights the distinction between cases which are dominated by trailing-edge separation, and those for which separation at the shock foot is dominant. Use of the analytical parameter and the distinction noted above greatly improves the correlation of separation data and the extrapolation of wind tunnel data to flight conditions

Why Do Leaders Matter? The Role of Expert Knowledge

Why do some leaders succeed while others fail? This question is important, but its complexity makes it hard to study systematically. We draw on a setting where there are well-defined objectives, small teams of workers, and exact measures of leaders’ characteristics and organizational performance. We show that a strong predictor of a leader’s success in year T is that person’s own level of attainment, in the underlying activity, in approximately year T-20. Our data come from 15,000 professional basketball games and reveal that former star players make the best coaches. This ‘expert knowledge’ effect is large

Cross-modal cue effects in motion processing

The everyday environment brings to our sensory systems competing inputs from different modalities. The ability to filter these multisensory inputs in order to identify and efficiently utilize useful spatial cues is necessary to detect and process the relevant information. In the present study, we investigate how feature-based attention affects the detection of motion across sensory modalities. We were interested to determine how subjects use intramodal, cross-modal auditory, and combined audiovisual motion cues to attend to specific visual motion signals. The results showed that in most cases, both the visual and the auditory cues enhance feature-based orienting to a transparent visual motion pattern presented among distractor motion patterns. Whereas previous studies have shown cross-modal effects of spatial attention, our results demonstrate a spread of cross-modal feature-based attention cues, which have been matched for the detection threshold of the visual target. These effects were very robust in comparisons of the effects of valid vs. invalid cues, as well as in comparisons between cued and uncued valid trials. The effect of intramodal visual, cross-modal auditory, and bimodal cues also increased as a function of motion-cue salience. Our results suggest that orienting to visual motion patterns among distracters can be facilitated not only by intramodal priors, but also by feature-based cross-modal information from the auditory system.First author draf

Predictor Aided Tracking in a System with Time Delay - Performance Involving Flat Surface, Roll, and Pitch Conditions

Predictor aided human tracking performance with time delay control under flat surface, roll, pitch, and roll and pitch condition

Why Do Leaders Matter? The Role of Expert Knowledge

Why do some leaders succeed while others fail? This question is important, but its complexity makes it hard to study systematically. We examine an industry in which there are well-defined objectives, small teams, and exact measures of leaders’ characteristics. We show that a strong predictor of a leader’s success in year T is that person’s own level of attainment, in the underlying activity, in approximately year T-20. Our data come from 15,000 professional basketball games. The effect on team performance of the coach’s ‘expert knowledge’ is large and is discernible in the data within 12 months of his being hired.organizational performance, firms, leadership, fixed-effects, productivity

A DMRG Study of Low-Energy Excitations and Low-Temperature Properties of Alternating Spin Systems

We use the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method to study the ground and low-lying excited states of three kinds of uniform and dimerized alternating spin chains. The DMRG procedure is also employed to obtain low-temperature thermodynamic properties of these systems. We consider a 2N site system with spins $s_1$ and $s_2$ alternating from site to site and interacting via a Heisenberg antiferromagnetic exchange. The three systems studied correspond to $(s_1 ,s_2 )$ being equal to $(1,1/2),(3/2,1/2)$ and $(3/2,1)$; all of them have very similar properties. The ground state is found to be ferrimagnetic with total spin $s_G =N(s_1 - s_2)$. We find that there is a gapless excitation to a state with spin $s_G -1$, and a gapped excitation to a state with spin $s_G +1$. Surprisingly, the correlation length in the ground state is found to be very small for this gapless system. The DMRG analysis shows that the chain is susceptible to a conditional spin-Peierls instability. Furthermore, our studies of the magnetization, magnetic susceptibility $\chi$ and specific heat show strong magnetic-field dependences. The product $\chi T$ shows a minimum as a function of temperature T at low magnetic fields; the minimum vanishes at high magnetic fields. This low-field behavior is in agreement with earlier experimental observations. The specific heat shows a maximum as a function of temperature, and the height of the maximum increases sharply at high magnetic fields. Although all the three systems show qualitatively similar behavior, there are some notable quantitative differences between the systems in which the site spin difference, $|s_1 - s_2|$, is large and small respectively.Comment: 16 LaTeX pages, 13 postscript figure

Anisotropy effects in a mixed quantum-classical Heisenberg model in two dimensions

We analyse a specific two dimensional mixed spin Heisenberg model with exchange anisotropy, by means of high temperature expansions and Monte Carlo simulations. The goal is to describe the magnetic properties of the compound (NBu_{4})_{2}Mn_{2}[Cu(opba)]_{3}\cdot 6DMSO\cdot H_{2}O which exhibits a ferromagnetic transition at $T_{c}=15K$. Extrapolating our analysis on the basis of renormalisation group arguments, we find that this transition may result from a very weak anisotropy effect.Comment: 8 pages, 10 Postscript figure