Being Positive about Selection

Being Positive about Selection

H ow has language developed in humans and what genetic changes underlie our unique cognitive abilities? Accounts of positive selection that lead to such abilities in humans fascinate us because of the insight they provide into our own evolution, and into the many genetic differences that distinguish us from other apes. The genes that became fi xed in our lineage as a result of positive selectio...

Being more positive about negative ventilation?

Mechanical ventilation is undoubtedly a lifesaving procedure for patients with acute respiratory failure [1]. Unfortunately the procedure is also associated with a number of unwanted side-effects. Firstly, until recently, mechanical ventilation required endotracheal intubation either through a tracheostomy or with a translaryngeal tube, procedures which can carry some risks [2, 3]. Secondly, by...

Being Realistic about Reasons

In my first lecture I listed seven questions about reasons that seemed to require answers. These were: Relational Character: Reasons are reasons for an agent. How is this relational character to be understood? Ground of Truth: In virtue of what are claims about reasons true, when they are true? Does the idea that claims about reasons are true or false, independent of our opinions about them, an...

A Cross-Cultural Study about Positive and Negative Emotions and Its Relation to Health and Well-being

Being careful about theory combination

One of the main shortcomings of traditional methods for combining theories is the complexity of guessing the arrangement of variables shared by the individual theories. This paper presents a reformulation of the Nelson-Oppen method that takes into account explicit equality propagation and can ignore pairs of shared variables that the theories do not care about. We show the correctness of the ne...