I Introduction What is the epistemic significance of discovering that one of your beliefs depends on an irrelevant causal factor? Suppose that you have a relatively high degree of belief in some proposition. Suppose that you then come to learn that your belief was (in part) caused by an irrelevant factor, a factor that does not bear on the truth of the proposition or on your possession of evide...

This material is covered in Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Smith “Introduction to Algorithms” — Appendix C. You can also look at the lecture notes for MIT course 6.042 Mathematics for Computer Science by Lehman and Leighton on http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/∼e lehman/mathcs.pdf — Chapters 18 to 24. (See also http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/classes/6.042/spring05/) You should also take a look at Trevisan’s ...

Introduction: The dose in computed tomography (CT) often approach or exceed the optimum levels, thereby increasing the probability of cancer induction. With wide application of this diagnostic test, it is expedient to determine the effective dose (ED) for each patient to estimate their cancer risk. This study was conducted to investigate the patient-specific dose (PSD) and cancer risk in CT exa...

Epigenetic mechanisms impact several phenotypic traits and may be important for ecology and evolution. The introduced house sparrow (Passer domesticus) exhibits extensive phenotypic variation among and within populations. We screened methylation in populations from Kenya and Florida to determine if methylation varied among populations, varied with introduction history (Kenyan invasion <50 years...

We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization. Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed d...