Quantum field theory (QFT) presents a genuine example of the underdetermination of theory by empirical evidence. There are variants of QFT which are empirically indistinguishable yet support different interpretations. This case is of particular interest to philosophers of physics because, before the philosophical work of interpreting QFT can proceed, the question of which variant should be subj...

Natural deduction, which is a method for establishing validity of propositional type arguments, helps develop important reasoning skills and is thus a key ingredient in a course on introductory logic. We present two core components, namely solution generation and practice problem generation, for enabling computer-aided education for this important subject domain. The key enabling technology is ...

Public finance is the sub-discipline of economics that deals with taxes, fiscal policy and government enterprise in general. In order to assess the case in behalf of taxation commonly made in this field, I shall analyze the public finance textbooks of ATKINSON and STIGLITZ 119801, DUE [1963], MUSGRAVE I19591 and SHOUP [1969]'. I have chosen textbooks because they are a distillation of knowledge...

Many probability and genetics textbooks pose standard questions about eye color, birth defects, sexes of children, and so on. Solutions to these questions, specifically about sexes, generally make two assumptions: first, that a randomly selected embryo is equally likely to be male or female; second, that the sexes of successive children from the same parents are independent. In other words, pro...

The potential for multimedia to enhance the statistics curriculum is clear, but how to develop instructional materials that take advantage of the riches that multimedia has to offer is not as transparent. It requires more than a simple translation of textbooks into HTML and statistical software into Java in order to obtain a product that is functional, effective, and artful. Accepted definition...

There are many introductory hazard analyses (HazAn) of engineered system designs to be found in safety textbooks. A pressure vessel with relief system is considered in [KamHas99]. A pressure vessel is also the first example in [KumHen96], which then includes a small «motor overheating» example and follows with a running example of a pressurised-water reactor, interspersed with a small example o...

Many introductory ecology textbooks illustrate succession, at least in part, by using certain classic studies (e.g. sand dunes, ponds/bogs, glacial till, and old fields) that substituted space for time (chronosequence) in determining the sequences of the succession. Despite past criticisms of this method, there is continued, often uncritical, use of chronosequences in current research on topics...

While many good textbooks are available on Protein Structure, Molecular Simulations, Thermodynamics and Bioinformatics methods in general, there is no good introductory level book for the field of Structural Bioinformatics. This book aims to give an introduction into Structural Bioinformatics, which is where the previous topics meet to explore three dimensional protein structures through comput...

Benford's Law describes the finding that the distribution of leading (or leftmost) digits of innumerable datasets follows a well-defined logarithmic trend, rather than an intuitive uniformity. In practice this means that the most common leading digit is 1, with an expected frequency of 30.1%, and the least common is 9, with an expected frequency of 4.6%. Currently, the most common application o...

Sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology (EP) have struggled to gain ground within the social sciences over the past 30 years. While some have heralded the Triumph of Sociobiology (Alcock, 2001), others have critiqued it as a poor approach to understanding human behavior and would prefer that a Darwinian perspective remain outside the domain of human social sciences. We attempt t...