Born Undead

Crisis in Cognitive Science? Rise of the Undead Theories

The controversy that followed the publication of Bem’s (2011) surprising results had the merit of focusing discussions on the validity of the current paradigm in psychological science. It has been argued that a tendency of journals to avoid publishing null results, in addition to the further extinguishing of null results through questionable researcher practices, is leading to the promulgation ...

UNDEAD: Detecting and Tolerating Deadlocks in Production Software

Deadlocks are critical problems afflicting parallel applications, causing software to hang with no further progress. Existing detection tools suffer not only from significant recording performance overhead, but also from excessive memory and/or storage overhead. In addition, they may generate numerous false alarms. Subsequently, after problems have been reported, tremendous manual effort is req...

Vampires: Social Constructivism, Realism, and Other Philosophical Undead

Undead argument: the truth-functionality objection to fuzzy theories of vagueness

From Fine and Kamp in the 70’s—through Osherson and Smith in the 80’s, Williamson, Kamp and Partee in the 90’s and Keefe in the 00’s—up to Sauerland in the present decade, the objection continues to be run that fuzzy logic based theories of vagueness are incompatible with ordinary usage of compound propositions in the presence of borderline cases. These arguments against fuzzy theories have bee...

First born and last born: a critique.

In a recent article Cushna et ale (I) reported that when a sample of 327 first and 32.5 last born children brought to a child development clinic were examined, it was found that "among functional behavior disorders there were twice as many first borns as last borns," 64 versus 32. The authors argue that the data support the Adlerian hypothesis that birth rank influences the life style. Although...