Two things are striking about this medieval definition. The first is that it is very close to the modern conception of formal consequence one finds in Bolzano and Tarski3. The second is that although Buridan and the other fourteenth-century logicians state these distinctions with a great deal of precision, they say almost nothing about the point of the distinctions. Why are these distinctions d...

Derived varieties were invented by P. Cohn in [4]. Derived varieties of a given type were invented by the authors in [10]. In the paper we deal with the derived variety Vσ of a given variety, by a fixed hypersubstitution σ. We introduce the notion of the dimension of a variety as the cardinality κ of the set of all proper derived varieties of V included in V. We examine dimensions of some varie...

This paper develops a probabilistic reconstruction of the No Miracles Argument (NMA) in the debate between scientific realists and anti-realists. The goal of the paper is to clarify and to sharpen the NMA by means of a probabilistic formalization. In particular, I demonstrate that the persuasive force of the NMA depends on the particular disciplinary context where it is applied, and the stabili...

In this proceedings we summarize our recent letter (Jarvis & McLure 2002) where we suggested that by correcting for the inevitable effects of inclination, the black-hole masses of flat-spectrum quasars (FSQ) with intrinsically powerful radio jets are confined, virtually exclusively, to MBH > 108 M⊙. After considering realistic Doppler boosting factors, many of the FSQ would be more accurately c...

We develop an innovative data preprocessing algorithm for classifying customers using unbalanced time series data. This problem is directly motivated by an application whose aim is to uncover the customers’ churning behavior in the telecommunication industry. We model this problem as a sequential classification problem, and present an effective solution for solving the challenging problem, wher...

In this chapter we present an innovative approach to combine common results of Markov decision theory and series expansions for optimization. We call our algorithm the series expansion optimization algorithm. Our algorithm efficiently determines the optimal policy of continuous-time Markov decision processes exactly or alternatively up to an arbitrarily small precision. We prove its convergence...

So as to create innovative car silhouettes, we propose in this paper a model based on an Interactive Genetic Algorithm using an encoding of a design solution by a Fourier analysis approach. This model permits the designer to browse through generations of car profiles from an initial population of existing silhouettes. By qualitatively assessing each individual, the designer converge towards sol...