A Natural Law of Succession 1

Rejoinder on: Natural induction: An objective Bayesian approach

Girón and Moreno. We certainly agree with Professors Girón and Moreno on the interest in sensitivity of any Bayesian result to changes in the prior. That said, we also consider of considerable pragmatic importance to be able to single out a unique, particular prior which may reasonably be proposed as the reference prior for the problem under study, in the sense that the corresponding posterior ...

Ecological succession as an energy dispersal process

Ecological succession is described by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. According to the universal law of the maximal energy dispersal, an ecosystem evolves toward a stationary state in its surroundings by consuming free energy via diverse mechanisms. Species are the mechanisms that conduct energy down along gradients between repositories of energy which consist of populations at various thermodyn...

A Natural Law of Succession

Consider the following problem. You are given an alphabet of k distinct symbols and are told that the i symbol occurred exactly ni times in the past. On the basis of this information alone, you must now estimate the conditional probability that the next symbol will be i. In this report, we present a new solution to this fundamental problem in statistics and demonstrate that our solution outperf...

Roman-Dutch law in modern South African succession law

A Therapeutic Jurisprudential Framework of Estate Planning

Drawing upon the burgeoning field of therapeutic jurisprudence, this Article analyzes the psychological consequences of estate planning. This analysis reveals that the preparation and implementation of an estate plan through the execution of a will and other estate-planning documents has both therapeutic and antitherapeutic characteristics. This analysis also suggests that the positive and nega...