The abundance of helium in the Sun's interior is estimated by the method of`model-oriented' helioseismic inversion of solar oscillation frequencies. In this method, the equations of state and thermal balance are used in addition to the hydrostatic equation. By inverting the observed p-mode frequencies, direct evidence for gravitational settling of helium has been obtained. However, the helium s...

The social psychological literature on automatic social inferences has focused on one construct that helps explaining human behavior—traits (e.g., Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988; Trope, 1986; Winter & Uleman, 1984). The dispositional roots of behavior, however, go beyond relatively stable constructs such as traits to include more transient causes such as one s intentions and goals. Evidence fro...

Speeding up inferences made from large knowledge bases is a key to scaling up AI systems. The query-tree is a powerful tool for analyzing KBs containing Horn rules which takes into consideration the semantics of interpreted predicates that appear in the rules (e.g., order and sort predicates). It is a nite structure that encodes all derivations of a given set of queries and tells us which rules...

If someone falls off of a 14th story roof, very predictably death will result. The conditions under which readers appear to infer such predictable outcomes were examined with three different retrieval paradigms: immediate recognition test, cued recall, and priming in word recognition. On immediate test, responses to a word representing the implicit outcome (e.g., dead) were slow, but on delayed...

We investigate the features people use in making inferences about continuity of individual persons. Using a transformation paradigm, we show that people weigh both continuity of the brain and continuity of mental content. Across experiments, we document instances in which participants are more likely to assert individual continuity than continuity of personhood. We discuss these results in term...

I am still impressed that the textbook language of organic chemistry is so successful in explaining the reactions that we find in nature. Thismight not have been anticipated because we find that biological reactions are invariably stereospecific whereas nonbiological reactions are invariably not. This realization came to light about 150 years ago when Pasteur found that only half of chemically ...