Disease burden, cost modelling and the AIDS funding debate-towards clarity on whether the world is spending 'too much' on HIV/AIDS

With pressures from the recent financial crisis forcing donors to carefully review their spending priorities, some have claimed, firstly, that HIV/AIDS receives too much money relative to its disease burden and, secondly, that the future costs of treating those with the disease will become unmanageable. This paper seeks to clarify each of these two areas..

Acreage response before and after the deregulation of the South African maize industry : the role of SAFEX in price discovery and price risk managment

Includes abstract.~Includes bibliographical references (leaves 39-41).The withdwal of the Maize Board in 1996 meant that farmers could no longer rely on their pre-planting price or "voorskat" for price discovery and price risk management. Some have claimed (UNCTAD, 2007) that the South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX) can provide these functions. We test this claim and analyse the impliacation of it

Philosophical expertise under the microscope

Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussion is problematically imprecise, we will finesse the notion of ‘philosophical expertise’ in order to better reflect the complex reality of the different practices involved in philosophical inquiry. On this basis, we offer a new version of the expertise defence that allows for distinct types of philosophical expertise. The upshot of our approach is that wholesale vindications or rejections of the expertise defence are shown to be unwarranted; we must instead turn to local, piecemeal investigations of philosophical expertise. Lastly, in the spirit of taking our own advice, we exemplify how recent developments from experimental philosophy lend themselves to this approach, and can empirically support one instance of a successful expertise defence

On the alleged simplicity of impure proof

Roughly, a proof of a theorem, is “pure” if it draws only on what is “close” or “intrinsic” to that theorem. Mathematicians employ a variety of terms to identify pure proofs, saying that a pure proof is one that avoids what is “extrinsic,” “extraneous,” “distant,” “remote,” “alien,” or “foreign” to the problem or theorem under investigation. In the background of these attributions is the view that there is a distance measure (or a variety of such measures) between mathematical statements and proofs. Mathematicians have paid little attention to specifying such distance measures precisely because in practice certain methods of proof have seemed self- evidently impure by design: think for instance of analytic geometry and analytic number theory. By contrast, mathematicians have paid considerable attention to whether such impurities are a good thing or to be avoided, and some have claimed that they are valuable because generally impure proofs are simpler than pure proofs. This article is an investigation of this claim, formulated more precisely by proof- theoretic means. After assembling evidence from proof theory that may be thought to support this claim, we will argue that on the contrary this evidence does not support the claim

The Double-Lined Spectrum of LBV 1806-20

Despite much theoretical and observational progress, there is no known firm upper limit to the masses of stars. Our understanding of the interplay between the immense radiation pressure produced by massive stars in formation and the opacity of infalling material is subject to theoretical uncertainties, and many observational claims of ``the most massive star'' have failed the singularity test. LBV 1806-20 is a particularly luminous object, L~10^6 Lsun, for which some have claimed very high mass estimates (M_initial>200 Msun), based, in part, on its similarity to the Pistol Star. We present high-resolution near-infrared spectroscopy of LBV 1806-20, showing that it is possibly a binary system with components separated in velocity by ~70 kms. If correct, then this system is not the most massive star known, yet it is a massive binary system. We argue that a binary, or merged, system is more consistent with the ages of nearby stars in the LBV 1806-20 cluster. In addition, we find that the velocity of V_LSR=36 kms is consistent with a distance of 11.8 kpc, a luminosity of 10^6.3 Lsun, and a system mass of ~130 Msun.Comment: ApJL, accepte

Hold the Champagne on GE Capital\u27s Breakup

General Electric announced last week plans to sell off the bulk of its financing arm, GE Capital. Some have claimed that this move is a win for regulators trying to curb too big to fail conglomerates and suggested it\u27s a sign that financial reform is working. I\u27m not so sure. I think it just means that the conglomerates left standing are now even more homogeneous and risk-prone

The Effect of Music on Reading

It is apparent that music and language reading are both perceptual acts. To read either language or music one obviously must pay close attention to selective details of a graphic display. To listen to music or to words read aloud also involves some common perceptual abilities. Therefore, it is predictable that some have claimed that children\u27s experiences with music will help them to learn to read language. There are several parallels in music and language reading, Monroe contends

Toward the tenseless analysis of a tenseless language

In this paper, I argue, based on data from West Greenlandic, that languages can be truly tenseless, in the sense that their inflectional systems contain no node dedicated to the encoding of relations between speech time and reference time. My idea is that the burden of encoding temporal information actually falls mostly on the VP rather than on tense; so that true tenselessness entails neither a radical indeterminacy in the temporal interpretation of tenseless sentences nor a radically different description of the linguistic properties of tensed and tenseless languages, as some have claimed