Oscar Pistorius and the Future Nature of Olympic, Paralympic, and Other Sports

Oscar Pistorius is a Paralympic bionic leg runner and record holder in the 100, 200, and 400 meters who wants to compete in the Olympics. This paper provides an analysis of a) his case; b) the impact of his case on the Olympics, the Paralympics and other -lympics and the relationships between the -lympics; c) the impact on other international and national sports; d) the applicability of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It situates the evaluation of the Pistorius case within the broader doping discourse and the reality that new and emerging science and technology products increasingly generate internal and external human bodily enhancements that go beyond the species-typical, enabling more and more a culture of increasing demand for, and acceptance of modifications of the human body (structure, function, abilities) beyond its species-typical boundaries and the emergence of new social concepts such as transhumanism and the transhumanisation of ableism

Pivotal tricategories and a categorification of inner-product modules

This article investigates duals for bimodule categories over finite tensor categories. We show that finite bimodule categories form a tricategory and discuss the dualities in this tricategory using inner homs. We consider inner-product bimodule categories over pivotal tensor categories with additional structure on the inner homs. Inner-product module categories are related to Frobenius algebras and lead to the notion of $*$-Morita equivalence for pivotal tensor categories. We show that inner-product bimodule categories form a tricategory with two duality operations and an additional pivotal structure. This is work is motivated by defects in topological field theories.Comment: 64 pages, comments are welcom

The Transcendence Degree over a Ring

For a finitely generated algebra over a field, the transcendence degree is known to be equal to the Krull dimension. The aim of this paper is to generalize this result to algebras over rings. A new definition of the transcendence degree of an algebra A over a ring R is given by calling elements of A algebraically dependent if they satisfy an algebraic equation over R whose trailing coefficient, with respect to some monomial ordering, is 1. The main result is that for a finitely generated algebra over a Noetherian Jacobson ring, the transcendence degree is equal to the Krull dimension

Multi-Dimensional Inheritance

In this paper, we present an alternative approach to multiple inheritance for typed feature structures. In our approach, a feature structure can be associated with several types coming from different hierarchies (dimensions). In case of multiple inheritance, a type has supertypes from different hierarchies. We contrast this approach with approaches based on a single type hierarchy where a feature structure has only one unique most general type, and multiple inheritance involves computation of greatest lower bounds in the hierarchy. The proposed approach supports current linguistic analyses in constraint-based formalisms like HPSG, inheritance in the lexicon, and knowledge representation for NLP systems. Finally, we show that multi-dimensional inheritance hierarchies can be compiled into a Prolog term representation, which allows to compute the conjunction of two types efficiently by Prolog term unification.Comment: 9 pages, styles: a4,figfont,eepic,eps