Kant’s (Non-Question-Begging) Refutation of Cartesian Scepticism

Interpreters of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism face a dilemma: it seems to either beg the question against the Cartesian sceptic or else offer a disappointingly Berkeleyan conclusion. In this article I offer an interpretation of the Refutation on which it does not beg the question against the Cartesian sceptic. After defending a principle about question-begging, I identify four premises concerning our representations that there are textual reasons to think Kant might be implicitly assuming. Using those assumptions, I offer a reconstruction of Kant’s Refutation that avoids the interpretative dilemma, though difficult questions about the argument remain

Open access in Australia: an odyssey of sorts?

Scholarly communication change and open access (OA) initiatives in Australia have followed an Odyssean path in the last decade. The stop-start nature of early initiatives demonstrates that institutional leadership is essential for the successful deposit of academic content in an institutional repository. Similarly, OA policies from the two Australian Research Councils were delayed for nearly a decade, partly due to publisher pressure and bureaucratic conservatism. More successful has been the development of full, or hybrid, open access university e-presses. These presses, usually embedded in the scholarly infrastructure of the university, provide monographic models for wider global consideration. Australian universities are now reflecting, partly through recent Research Council edicts and monitoring global OA developments, greater awareness of the need for action in scholarly communication change Journal: Insights 26.3 (2013): 282-28

Connectivity for bridge-alterable graph classes

A collection of graphs is called bridge-alterable if, for each graph G with a bridge e, G is in the class if and only if G-e is. For example the class of forests is bridge-alterable. For a random forest $F_n$ sampled uniformly from the set of forests on vertex set {1,..,n}, a classical result of Renyi (1959) shows that the probability that $F_n$ is connected is $e^{-1/2 +o(1)}$. Recently Addario-Berry, McDiarmid and Reed (2012) and Kang and Panagiotou (2013) independently proved that, given a bridge-alterable class, for a random graph $R_n$ sampled uniformly from the graphs in the class on {1,..,n}, the probability that $R_n$ is connected is at least $e^{-1/2 +o(1)}$. Here we give a more straightforward proof, and obtain a stronger non-asymptotic form of this result, which compares the probability to that for a random forest. We see that the probability that $R_n$ is connected is at least the minimum over $\frac25 n < t \leq n$ of the probability that $F_t$ is connected.Comment: Amplified the discussion on raising the lower bound 2/5 to 1/

Defining ethnicity in a cultural and socio-legal context : the case of Scottish gypsy-travellers

Scottish Gypsy/Travellers are 'to be regarded' as an ethnic group in Scotland by both the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Executive until a test case in a court of law clarifies matters. Since 2000-01 this fact has not been contested in any meaningful way and it is now the case that Gypsy/Traveller children, if they choose, can tick their own box in school Census counts. It logically follows from this that they can, in principle, experience racial discrimination. As it stands Scottish Gypsy/Travellers are undoubtedly as much an 'ethnic group' as any other which is currently protected by the Race Relations Act 1976 (as amended 2000) despite the fact that at the moment they generally lack the substantive protection of the Act in the Scottish context. It follows that Scottish Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland or Britain can experience racial discrimination which is not dissimilar to that experienced by all the minority ethnic groups currently protected by race relations legislation, including English Gypsies and Irish Travellers. Whether they do experience racism is, of course, a matter for the police and courts to address in the individual cases that occur rather than any academic analysis. The next stage of the process will, eventually, see a test case come before the Scottish courts and complete its journey through the legal system. Only when this happens will the socio-legal status of Scottish Gypsy/Traveller ethnicity be firmly decided

Baryon spectroscopy on the lattice: recent results

Progress in determining the baryon spectrum using computer simulations of quarks and gluons in lattice QCD are summarized and some future plans are outlined.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, talk presented at the Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics, New York, NY, May 19-24, 2003, submitted to American Institute of Physics Conference Proceedings. After publication, it will be found at http://proceedings.aip.org/proceedings