Given that the core issues of attention research have been recognized for millenia, we do not know as much about attention as we should. I argue that the reasons for this failure are (1) we create spurious dichotomies, (2) we reify attention, treating it as a cause, when it is an effect, and (3) we equate a collection of facts with a theory. In order to correct these errors, we need a new techn...

Is the Introspection Thesis true? It certainly isn’t obvious. Introspection is the faculty by which each of us has access to his or her own mental states. Even if we were to suppose that mental states are identical to brain states, it doesn’t follow immediately from this supposition that we can introspect our mental states as brain states. This point is analogous to the following. It doesn’t fo...

conomists love to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. But the Chilean government agency responsible for school grants, Junta Nacional de Auxilio Escolar y Becas (JUNAEB), is an exception to the rule. During the school year, JUNAEB provides breakfast and lunch for 2 million children in primary and secondary public schools. In a developing country where about 14 percent of children u...

The recent loss of lives and traffic jams (Figure 1) for tens of miles as hurricanes Rita and Katrina approached the Gulf coast demonstrate the enormous difficulty in evacuating urban areas [6]. Besides hurricanes, evacuation may be necessary due to other potential disasters, e.g., fire, terrorism, and nuclear or chemical plant accidents. Thus, the local emergency management community engages i...

This paper addresses the identification of hurricanes in low-resolution global climate models (GCM). As hurricanes are not fully resolvable at the coarse resolution of the GCMs (typically 2.5 × 2.5 deg), indirect methods such as analyzing the environmental conditions favoring hurricane formation have to be sought. Nonetheless, the dynamical cores of the models have limitations in simulating hur...

Disruptions to supply chains come in many forms. There are natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and disasters perpetrated by humans, such as terrorist attacks. And there are dislocations that have more to do with the nature of business. Globalisation is stretching supply chains internationally at a time when market volatility is increasing, exposing companies to greater uncerta...

Coastal hurricanes create tremendous environmental change and generate huge financial losses. The relative infrequency of severe coastal hurricanes implies that empirical probability estimates of the next big catastrophe will be unreliable. Here we model hurricane activity and resulting insured losses using extreme value theory and Bayesian models. The occurrence of a hurricane above a specifie...