Post Truth, Newspeak and Epidemiological Causality

The Newspeak Programming Platform

Cadence is developing a high productivity development platform based around the Newspeak programming language. Newspeak supports advanced capabilities not found in mainstream languages, such as mixins, virtual classes and class hierarchy inheritance. Newspeak is based on an object capability model which provides a solid foundation for security. The language has a powerful module system designed...

Proof of causality: deduction from epidemiological observation.

Bad faith, medical education, and post-truth

The choice to not study ‘actual use’ of feedback in clinical practice seems to me to be a flaw in research design, an inevitable consequence of which is that the study report is peppered with use of the conditional tense—‘would’ and ‘could’. In situating the study’s results in the world of the possible and not the actual, the authors mirror the common medical education practice of learning thro...

Somatic Markers, Rhetoric, and Post-truth

Emotions play an important role in many volitional processes. In this regard, the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) (Damasio et al., 1991; Damasio, 1994, 1996) has proven enormously influential in cognitive science. Despite having been formulated more than two decades ago, much related bibliography has appeared in recent years (e.g., Leland and Grafman, 2005; Reimann and Bechara, 2010; Olsen et a...

Executable Grammars in Newspeak

We describe the design and implementation of a parser combinator library in Newspeak, a new language in the Smalltalk family. Parsers written using our library are remarkably similar to BNF; they are almost entirely free of solutionspace (i.e., programming language) artifacts. Our system allows the grammar to be specified as a separate class or mixin, independent of tools that rely upon it such...