Evidence based medicine has been a topic of considerable controversy in medical and health care circles over its short lifetime, because of the claims made by its exponents about the criteria used to assess the evidence for or against the effectiveness of medical interventions. The central epistemological debates underpinning the debates about evidence based medicine are reviewed by this paper,...

Researchers have estimated differential mortality across socioeconomic groups by classifying individuals using income in the previous year. The first problem with this strategy is reverse causation. Second, annual income is a noisy measure of permanent income. This paper tackles these two drawbacks by using better measures of lifetime earnings from administrative records to classify individuals...

It is widely acknowledged that causation entails more than spatial-temporal contiguity or correlation, but efforts to specify that extra component of experience have been elusive. In this paper, we argue that the representation of causal relations is based on the feeling of force as understood through the sense of touch. Grounding causation in people’s sense of touch allows us to address long-s...

In his in uential book Making ings Happen (Oxford, ) and in other places, JimWoodward has noted some affinities between his own account of causation and that of Menzies and Price (‘Causation as a secondary quality’, BJPS, ), but argued that the latter view is implausibly ‘subjective’. In this piece I discussWoodward’s criticisms. I argue that theMenzies and Price view is not as different fromW...

We read with interest Charlie Poole’s commentary [1] on our paper, “Redundant causation from a sufficient cause perspective,”[2] in which he questions the utility of the sufficient component cause (SCC) model for examining differences between etiologic and excess effects. Poole contends that the concept we term “redundant causation” is uncomplicated and (we presume), well understood. He questio...

Decays of Λ in nuclei, nonmesonic mode, are studied by using the ΛN → NN weak transition potential derived from the meson exchange mechanism and the direct quark mechanism. The decay rates are calculated both for the Λ in symmetric nuclear matter and light hypernuclei. We consider the exchange of six mesons (π,K, η, ρ, ω,K). The form factor in the meson exchange mechanism and short range correl...

We consider two hypothesis testing problems with N independent observations on a single m-vector, when m > N , and the N observations on the random m-vector are independently and identically distributed as multivariate normal with mean vector μ and covariance matrix Σ, both unknown. In the first problem, the m-vector is partitioned into two subvectors of dimensions m1 and m2, respectively, and ...