In the literature on global justice, there has been a lengthy debate about what world’s rich owe to poor. Some have argued that individuals positive duties of beneficence help poor, while others only negative not harm them. A common objection former view is once it accepted exist, fulfilling these will be overdemanding since can almost always little more. tried overcome this overdemandingness b...

The Model Penal Code l drafted by the American Law Institute in 1962 contains the following paragraph: "As used in this Article the terms 'mental disease or defect' do not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct." This paragraph was meant to exclude the designation of antisocial personality as an illness. which could result in a plea of insani...

In this article, I define and then defend the principle of information closure (PIC) against a sceptical objection similar to the one discussed by Dretske in relation to the principle of epistemic closure. If I am successful, given that PIC is equivalent to the axiom of distribution and that the latter is one of the conditions that discriminate between normal and non-normal modal logics, a main...

We develop an optimization model based on Markovian approach to determine the optimum value of thresholds in a proposed acceptance sampling design. Consider an acceptance sampling plan where items are inspected and when the number of conforming items between successive defective items falls below a lower control threshold value, then the batch is rejected, and if it falls above a control thresh...

The idea of phenotypic novelty appears throughout the evolutionary literature. Novelties have been defined so broadly as to make the term meaningless and so narrowly as to apply only to a limited number of spectacular structures. Here I examine some of the available definitions of phenotypic novelty and argue that the modern synthesis is ill equipped at explaining novelties. I then discuss thre...

Suppose we would like to check whether a given array of real numbers is sorted (say, in nondecreasing order). Performing this task exactly requires reading the entire array. Here we consider the approximate version of the problem: testing whether an array is sorted or “far” from sorted. We consider two natural definitions of the distance of a given array from a sorted array. Intuitively, we wou...