Instrumentalism is the dominant methodological position amongst orthodox economists, which holds that realism of the theories is irrelevant. This paper challenges this view, arguing that the standard instrumentalist defence of abstract theories is inapplicable when the goal of the analysis is not prediction. Moreover, it demonstrates that the good empirical performance does not confer legitimac...

We consider the problem of inferring an ancestral state from observations at the leaves of a tree, assuming the state evolves along the tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process. We establish a general branching rate condition under which maximum parsimony, a common reconstruction method requiring only the knowledge of the tree, succeeds better than random guessing uniformly in the...

Twkyr is a new interface for musical expression that emphasizes realtime manipulation, audification, and visualization of waveforms with a multitouch display, offering different interactivity at different time scales, within the same waveform. The interactive audiovisual design of Twkyr is motivated by the need for increased parsimony and transparency in electronic musical instruments and draws...

A phylogenetic tree represents historical evolutionary relationships between different species or organisms. The space of possible phylogenetic trees is both complex and exponentially large. Here we study combinatorial features of neighbourhoods within this space, with respect to four standard tree metrics. We focus on the splits of a tree: the bipartitions induced by removing a single edge fro...

Reverse transcription of cellular RNA was used to obtain sequences from regions of 18S and 26/28S ribosomal RNA for eight species of ascaridoid nematodes. Phylogenetic relationships among these species were inferred from the aligned sequences by maximum-parsimony and maximum-likelihood methods. Seventy-nine of the 168 sites that varied were phylogenetically informative in parsimony analysis. Ph...

Within the field of phylogenetics there is great interest in distance measures to quantify the dissimilarity of two trees. Here, based on an idea of Bruen and Bryant, we propose and analyze a new distance measure: the Maximum Parsimony (MP) distance. This is based on the difference of the parsimony scores of a single character on both trees under consideration, and the goal is to find the chara...

The fact that Parsimony may fail is not new. However, here we proved that no mater of what topology the true 9-taxon and greater species tree is the only thing you need to fail Parsimony is to have in this tree three consecutive edges with lengths T1, T2, T3 of some proportions. Obviously, the probability to meet these lengths is growing in general with the size of species tree. Therefore, Pars...

The social impact assessment of large-scale projects could help effectively control, prevent, or mitigate possible negative impacts caused by such projects, and thus has been gradually developed nationally and internationally. However, due to some inherent problems, conventional index assessment system could not accurately measure and evaluate the social impact over local communities. As a new ...

The time it takes to read or produce a word is in ̄uenced by the word's age of acquisition (AoA) and its frequency (e.g. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12 (1973) 85). Lewis (Cognition 71 (1999) B23) suggested that a parsimonious explanation would be that it is the total number of times a word has been encountered that predicts reaction times. Such a cumulative-frequency hypothesis,...

Donald Black’s The Behavior of Law contains the most powerful sociological theory of legal variation ever produced. Despite the critical reactions of some analysts, the generality, testability, originality, and validity of the theory have been well-established. The one area where the theory can be improved, however, involves the criterion of “parsimony.” The following paper demonstrates that ro...