One world, but how many standards of care?

One world, many pathogens!

A World of Standards but not a Standard World: Toward a Sociology of Standards and Standardization*

Standards and standardization aim to render theworld equivalent across cultures, time, and geography. Standards are ubiquitous but underappreciated tools for regulating and organizing social life in modernity, and they lurk in the background of many sociological works. Reviewing the relevance of standards and standardization in diverse theoretical traditions and sociological subfields, we point...

International relations : One world , many theories

Why should policymakers and practitioners care about the scholarly study of international affairs? Those who conduct foreign policy often dismiss academic theorists (frequently, one must admit, with good reason), but there is an inescapable link between the abstract world of theory and the real world of policy. We need theories to make sense of the blizzard of information that bombards us daily...

How many positions can we perceptually encode, one or many?

Here we show that our sensitivity for discriminating relative position across the visual field is limited. In experiment 1 we show that we are much worse at detecting a texture defined by the relative position of elements within an array than would be expected if we had access to multiple estimates of relative position across the visual field. In experiment 2 we show that human performance is i...

How Many Lions Can One Man Avoid?

A pride of lions are prowling among the vertices and edges of an n × n grid. If their paths are known in advance, is it possible to design a safe path for a man that avoids all lions, assuming that man and lion move at the same speed? In their recent paper [2], Dumitrescu et al. employed probabilistic arguments to show that the number of lions which can always be avoided, k(n), lies in Ω( √ n)....