Biology is, better than anything else, about existence in time. Hence biological reality cannot be deened without reference to a temporally situated observer. The coupled or detached character of this observer (with respect to the own time variable of the system) provides a link between the observer and the observed. This connections delimits the kinds of scientiic descriptions that can be give...

We briefly review the inside-outside and EM algorithm for probabilistic context-free grammars. As a result, we formally prove that inside-outside estimation is a dynamic-programming variant of EM. This is interesting in its own right, but even more when considered in a theoretical context since the wellknown convergence behavior of inside-outside estimation has been confirmed by many experiment...

Asset pricing theory has long recognized that financial markets compensate investors who are exposed to some components of uncertainty. This is where macroeconomics comes into play. The economy-wide shocks, the primary concern of macroeconomists, by their nature are not diversifiable. Exposures to these shocks cannot be averaged out with exposures to other shocks. Thus, returns on assets that d...

Microblogging has recently generated a lot of research interest. Yet very little is known about how corporate employees use microblogging tools. This study examined microblogging in the workplace by conducting a content analysis comparing posts from individuals who were using an internal proprietary tool and Twitter simultaneously. In both settings, posts that provided information or were direc...

For decades, the British philosopher of science Nicholas Maxwell has been promoting a new approach to science called aim-oriented empiricism. Maxwell’s basic claim is that the regular way of doing science, called standard empiricism, is untenable because it does not account for the basic general assumptions that scientists actually adhere to without acknowledgment. Standard empiricism is unable...

Citizens, policy-makers and scientists all face the problem of assessing maverick scientific claims. Via a case study, I show the different resources available to experts and non-experts when they make these judgements and reflect upon what this means for technological decision-making in the public domain.