When a computer takes forever to load a website, it may be annoying, but it is nothing more serious than that. If, however, the electronics in a car or a plane don’t process commands exactly when they are supposed to, the consequences can be fatal. Björn Brandenburg and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken study how to construct real-time s...

We define Almost Sure Productivity (ASP), a probabilistic generalization of the productivity condition for coinductively defined structures. Intuitively, a probabilistic coinductive stream or tree is ASP if it produces infinitely many outputs with probability 1. Formally, we define almost sure productivity using a final coalgebra semantics of programs inspired from Kerstan and König. Then, we i...

Partial search has been proposed recently for finding the target block containing a target element with fewer queries than the full Grover search algorithm which can locate the target precisely. Since such partial searches will likely be used as subroutines for larger algorithms their success rate is important. We propose a partial search algorithm which achieves success with unit probability.

The Vicarious Learner project is investigating the roleof dialogue in learning and, more specifically, how learners benefit fromopportunities to ’overhear’ other learners. A direct challenge to thisconcept comes from a study by Schober and Clark which claims that only direct participants can learneffectively from dialogue. We dispute this claim both on grounds thattheir own data indicate otherw...

I welcome the chance to revisit my review of Making Things Happen and the book itself (Woodward 2003; Strevens 2007) in the light of Woodward’s response to the review (henceforth “Woodward’s reply”). In what follows I hope to provide a surer footing for some of the claims made in the original review, to address the new definition of unrelativized causation proposed in Woodward’s reply, and to e...

The color in the aleurone cells of maize early attracted the attention cf geneticists as affording ideal material for testing the segregation of characters in the second generation of hybrids. The first cases that were investigated led to the idea of only one unit o r factor being involved in the production of an aleurone color. With the progress of investigation, however, it became necessary t...

In a Letter to the Editor of mBio, Professor Ron Fouchier published a calculation (1) in which he finds a very low probability, P1, for a laboratory-acquired infection (LAI) for a single lab for a single year. Claiming numerous safety precautions in his biosafety level 3 (BSL3 ) laboratory, Fouchier calculates P1 1 10–7 per person per year, and since there are 10 workers with access to his labo...

In 1956, Fraisse, et al. reported subjects judged that lines were longer when voluntary attention was focused on the lines than when attention was distracted from the lines. In the many attempts to repeat these results, none has ascertained whether attention on reported line length was a phenomenal effect. In the present study, 46 subjects were shown as stimuli pairs of horizontal or vertical b...

3 " If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction, if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas. There would be nothing worth checking, because we would know what is true. So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but non...