ONE YEAR AGO, THE UNITED STATES EXPERIENCED one of the worst natural disasters in its history. Hurricane Katr ina caused wel l documented, widespread death and destruction, reducing hospital capacity by 80% and safety-net clinics by 75% in New Orleans alone. The hurricane also created a diaspora of more than a million evacuees to every state in the nation. This disaster could be viewed as an is...

Pauli’s theorem asserts that the canonical commutation relation [T,H] = iI only admits Hilbert space solutions that form a system of imprimitivities on the real line, so that only non-self-adjoint time operators exist in single Hilbert quantum mechanics. This, however, is contrary to the fact that there is a large class of solutions to [T, H] = iI, including self-adjoint time operator solutions...

Despite the clinical importance of trisomy 21, we have been ignorant of the causes of meiotic nondisjunction of chromosome 21. Recently, however, genetic mapping studies of trisomy 21 families have led to the identification of the first molecular correlate of human nondisjunction; i.e. altered levels and positioning of meiotic recombinational events. Specifically, increases in 0 exchange events...

Two things are striking about this medieval definition. The first is that it is very close to the modern conception of formal consequence one finds in Bolzano and Tarski3. The second is that although Buridan and the other fourteenth-century logicians state these distinctions with a great deal of precision, they say almost nothing about the point of the distinctions. Why are these distinctions d...

This paper develops a probabilistic reconstruction of the No Miracles Argument (NMA) in the debate between scientific realists and anti-realists. The goal of the paper is to clarify and to sharpen the NMA by means of a probabilistic formalization. In particular, I demonstrate that the persuasive force of the NMA depends on the particular disciplinary context where it is applied, and the stabili...