C.S. Jenkins and Daniel Nolan Introduction A lot of our ordinary theorizing about the world is suffused with disposition talk, broadly construed. We classify things as fragile, explosive, poisonous, and so on. We talk freely of the capacities and abilities of things and people, and indeed we talk explicitly about dispositions (particularly of people) in everyday discourse. We will describe some...

THERE ARE MOMENTS when experience tells you to be less earnest and direct, and a little more Delphic in style. At these times, half ideas can be useful and a little lack of clarity can be effective.

Block diagram method is an old approach for the modeling and simulation of differential equations. Modeling and simulation of some kind of differential equations such as differential-algebraic equations (DAE) is cumbersome, difficult, or even impossible with this approach. Scicos which is a modeling and simulation software based on Block diagram approach has recently been developed to simulate ...