A Matter of Degree

Moral Status As a Matter of Degree?

Some people contend t h a t fetuses have moral s ta tus but less t h a n t h a t of paradigm persons. Many people hold views implying that sent ient animals have moral s t a t u s but less t h a n that of persons. These positions suggest tha t moral s ta tus admits of degrees. Does it? To address this question, we must first clarify what it means to speak of degrees of moral status. The paper b...

A Matter of Degree: Strength of Brain Asymmetry and Behaviour

Research on a growing number of vertebrate species has shown that the left and right sides of the brain process information in different ways and that lateralized brain function is expressed in both specific and broad aspects of behaviour. This paper reviews the available evidence relating strength of lateralization to behavioural/cognitive performance. It begins by considering the relationship...

Assessing (in)sensitivity to causal asymmetry: A matter of degree

Blocking effects and associations Contiguity or the pairing of events has long been recognized by learning theorists as insufficient to explain basic associative processes. In 1968, Leon Kamin described the blocking phenomenon as a demonstration of this insufficiency (Kamin, 1968). Using a two-phase design, as shown in Table 4.1, Kamin conditioned a group of animals to associate a single cue wi...

It's All a Matter of Degree: Using Degree Information to Optimize Multiway Joins

We optimize multiway equijoins on relational tables using degree information. We give a new bound that uses degree information to more tightly bound the maximum output size of a query. On real data, our bound on the number of triangles in a social network can be up to 95 times tighter than existing worst case bounds. We show that using only a constant amount of degree information, we are able t...

A Matter of Degree: Improved Approximation Algorithms for Degree-Bounded Minimum Spanning Trees