Moonstruck, or How to Ruin Everything

How to be a consequentialist about everything

Over the last few decades, there has been an increasing interest in global consequentialism. Where act-consequentialism assesses acts in terms of their consequences, global consequentialism goes much further, assessing acts, rules, motives — and everything else — in terms of the relevant consequences. Compared to act-consequentialism it offers a number of advantages: it is more expressive, it i...

Individual Based Models in Ecology: An Evaluation, or How Not to Ruin a Good Thing

Background: What are now increasingly called individual based models (IBMs) have been used in ecology since the 1970s when theoretical ecology began in earnest. The best known examples from that time include the forest computer simulation model (named JABOWA) of Daniel Botkin (Botkin et al 1972) and the computer simulation model of Donald DeAngelis (DeAngelis et al 1991) for a freshwater fish c...

Semiotics inside - out and / or outside - in : how to understand everything and ( with luck ) influence people

Everything is Knowable – How to Get to Know

Fitch showed that not every true proposition can be known in due time; in other words, that not every proposition is knowable. Moore showed that certain propositions cannot be consistently believed. A more recent dynamic phrasing of Moore-sentences is that not all propositions are known after their announcement, i.e., not every proposition is successful. Fitch’s and Moore’s results are related,...

Ten ways to ruin or market your oral scientific communication.

The impact of an oral ‘free’ communication at a scientific meeting depends on many factors. The main factor is probably the importance of the problem addressed anduor the originality of the data presented. A seminal work, representing a breakthrough in the field, is indeed very likely to arouse great interest w1x. Not less important is the accuracy of the design of the study and of the methods ...