Isaac Newton was brilliant except when he was not

He was my son, not a dying baby.

Conversing happily with my son we had been driving home when my mobile phone rang. Startled at the sound of my obstetrician’s voice I had pulled off to the side of the road. At 18 weeks gestation I was told in a factual tone that the results from my serum screen had come back, indicating that our baby was at increased risk of Trisomy 18. Gripping the steering wheel my head had spun as he talked...

When Nuclear Power Was Flying

When I Was a Patient

This account of her experiences as a patient in a mental hospital has been sent to Mental Health by Susan X. We cannot, of course, print her name in full.

When the Field was Young

When the IEEE Computer Society (CS) was born on 31 December 1970, Computer was a young publication in a young eld, and it was the product of a young organization— the Society’s predecessor, the IEEE Computer Group. The president of the freshly franchised Society wrote that the time was right for looking back on the accomplishments of the founding IEEE Computer Group before “we start 1971 as the...

Did He Jump or Was He Pushed? Abductive Practical Reasoning

In this paper we present an approach to abductive reasoning in law by examining it in the context of an argumentation scheme for practical reasoning. We present a particular scheme, based on an established scheme for practical reasoning, that can be used to reason abductively about how an agent might have acted to reach a particular scenario, and the motivations for doing so. Plausibility here ...