In this chapter I try to provide a systematic overview of various aspects of cultural theories – as they have developed in different disciplines and cultures. A variety of cultural theories have dealt with the phenomenon of culture from different epistemological and historical perspectives. The article discusses definitions of concepts of culture in a comparative analysis, as they have develope...

Roald Hoffmann and other theorists claim that we we ought to use highly idealized chemical models (“qualitative models”) in order to increase our understanding of chemical phenomena, even though other models are available which make more highly accurate predictions. I assess this norm by examining one of the tradeoffs faced by model builders and model users — the tradeoff between precision and ...

We show that some characteristics of multiply-imaged QSO systems are very modelindependent and can be deduced accurately by simply scrutinizing the relative positions of images and galaxy-lens center. These include the time-ordering of the images, the orientation of the lens potential, and the rough morphology of any ring. Other features can differ considerably between specific models; H0 is an...

Probabilistic independence has proved to be a fundamental tool that can dramatically simplify the task of eliciting, representing, and computing with probabilities. We advance the position that notions of utility independence can serve similar functions when reasoning about preferences and utilities during decision making. In this paper we first summarize existing results and definitions concer...

qualitative decision theory: its motivating tasks and issues, its antecedents, and its prospects. Qualitative decision theory studies qualitative approaches to problems of decision making and their sound and effective reconciliation and integration with quantitative approaches. Although it inherits from a long tradition, the field offers a new focus on a number of important unanswered questions...

Drawing on sociological role theory, this chapter introduces and explains the distinction between cosmopolitan and local role orientations as status categories in international teams. Qualitative data from a multimethod field study conducted at a leading international development agency illustrates that the high status of cosmopolitans and locals in this setting was based on expectations that t...

We study the stability of orbits in large Boolean networks. We treat the case in which the network has a given complex topology, and we do not assume a specific form for the update rules, which may be correlated with local topological properties of the network. While recent past work has addressed the separate effects of complex network topology and certain classes of update rules on stability,...

Kelvin waves (kelvons), the distortion waves on vortex lines, play a key part in the relaxation of superfluid turbulence at low temperatures. We present a weak-turbulence theory of kelvons. We show that nontrivial kinetics arises only beyond the local-induction approximation and is governed by three-kelvon collisions; a corresponding kinetic equation is derived. We prove the existence of Kolmog...