Seek[ing] to minimize many of the sources of error and distortion in first-person judgments ...doesn’t justify according to beeper reports a place of such high epistemic privilege that these should serve as a sort of tribunal, before which present tense judgments, and those made in response to more targeted questions, can be tried. ... Insufficient reasons have been offered to think other repor...

Conformance testing is a formal and structured approach to verifying system correctness. We propose a conformance testing algorithm for cyber-physical systems, based on the notion of hybrid conformance by Abbas and Fainekos. We show how the dynamics of system specification and the sampling rate play an essential role in making sound verdicts. We specify and prove error bounds that lead to sound...

Both prosecutors and defense attorneys have presented religious appeals and testimony about a defendant's religious activities in order to influence capital jurors' sentencing. Courts that have objected to this use of religion fear that religion will improperly influence jurors' decisions and interfere with their ability to weigh aggravators and mitigators. This study investigated the effects o...

Courts are an important element in the institutional framework of labor markets, often determining the actual degree of employment protection. German labor courts provide a vivid example in this regard. However, we know relatively little about actual court behavior. A unique data set on German labor court verdicts reveals that social and other criteria like employee characteristics, the type of...

Electronic fetal monitoring (EFM) has been used for four decades, after its introduction without clinical trials. EFM spawned a birth injury litigation crisis centered on the myth that it predicts cerebral palsy (CP). The myth has resulted in lottery-like judgments against physicians. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and sister organizations worldwide have the pow...

The influence of decision task and deliberation style on the verdict of the juries. In the Kameda's Deliberation Style Model the emission of verdicts of responsibility when the deliberation style of the juries (elemental/compound) and the type of decision task (disjunctive/conjunctive) are jointly manipulated, is favoured in certain conditions. Given the consequences that these approaches could...

We present a learning-based method to identify single-snippet answers to definition questions in question answering systems for document collections. Our method combines and extends two previous techniques that were based mostly on manually crafted lexical patterns and WordNet hypernyms. We train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) on vectors comprising the verdicts or attributes of the previous tec...

Physicians who make mistakes are not necessarily negligent, contrary to prevailing opinion in the medical community. The article discusses the legal concepts of "standard of care" and "proximate cause." The incidence of favorable jury verdicts in those cases in which malpractice suits are litigated is quite high. The effects of insurance company policies in decisions about settlements on the in...

When an agent undergoes fission, how should the beliefs of the fission results relate to the pre-fission beliefs? This question is important for the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, but it is of independent philosophical interest. Among other things, fission scenarios demonstrate that “self-locating” information can affect the probability of uncentred propositions even if an agent h...