Philosophers have often noted a contrast between practical and theoretical reasons when it comes to cases involving equally balanced reasons. When there are strong for A-ing, some incompatible option, B-ing, the agent is permitted make an arbitrary choice them, having sufficient reason A B. But evidence P ~ P, one isn’t simply believe or other. Instead, must withhold belief, neither believing t...

What is it to have a reason? According to one common idea, the Factoring Account, you have a reason to do A when there is a reason for you to do A which you have—which is somehow in your possession or grasp. In this paper, I argue that this common idea is false. But though my arguments are based on the practical case, the implications of this are likely to be greatest in epistemology: for the p...

Since at least 1930, theorists working in moral philosophy and normativity more generally have recognized the importance of accounting for trade-offs in normative theories of what we ought to do.1 The most common way to do this is to appeal to contributory or pro tanto reasons. The thought is that the reasons for and against the options open to the agent interact and compete—in highly complex w...

Over the past three decades the protein folding field has undergone monumental changes. Originally a purely academic question, how a protein folds has now become vital in understanding diseases and our abilities to rationally manipulate cellular life by engineering protein folding pathways. We review and contrast past and recent developments in the protein folding field. Specifically, we discus...

In this document I describe how the standard way the socle operator is set up for a module, and a neater way is can be set up using the lattice of submodules. I indicate why this way is neater by showing how the construction can be iterated. I go through the various constructions first for the straight socle, and then for the socle relative to a given hereditary torsion theory.

Technological developments have altered pedagogies in classroom teaching but approaches to teacher professional development have remained largely unchanged. The purpose of this paper is to describe an evolving learning process that spans the last decade and draws from three different investigations into professional development. The author compares and contrasts the key findings from two indepe...

Historically, living was divided from dead, inert matter by its autonomous activity. Today, a number of materials not themselves alive are characterized as having inherent activity, and this activity has become the subject of a hot new field of physics, "Active Matter", or "Soft matter become alive." For active matter scientists, the relation of physics to biology is guaranteed in one direction...

We present in this paper a framework of approximate probabilistic inference which is based on three simple concepts. First, our notion of an approximation is based on “relaxing” equality constraints, for the purposes of simplifying a problem so that it can be solved more readily. Second, is the concept of “compensation,” which calls for imposing weaker notions of equality to compensate for the ...

In October 2006, in the first issue of this journal, I described the idea of ‘democratizing science’ — a state of affairs in which non-experts have active and constructive roles in science policy decisions1. At that time, there were expectations that nanotechnology would be a laboratory for experimenting with the idea of democratizing science. From this came an impressive battery of focus group...