For many libertarians, the thesis of self-ownership is the foundation of their political philosophy. Natural rights to life, liberty, and propertyÑthe protection of which is, according to the libertarian, governmentÕs sole legitimate functionÑderive from self-ownership, in particular oneÕs ownership of his body and its parts, of his capacities and labor, and, by extension, of whatever he can ac...

In a recent Public Opinion Quarterly article “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?,” John Zipp and Rudy Fenwick pit themselves against “right-wing activists and scholars,” citing our scholarship (Klein and Stern in Academic Questions 18(1): 40–52, 2005a; Klein and Western in Academic Questions 18(1): 53–65, 2005). Here, we analyze Zipp and Fenwick’s characterization of our research and find it fa...

Noisy training data have a huge negative impact on machine learning algorithms. Noise-filtering algorithms have been proposed to eliminate such noisy instances. In this work, we empirically show that the most popular noise-filtering algorithms have a large False Positive (FP) error rate. In other words, these noise filters mistakenly identify genuine instances as outliers and eliminate them. Th...

A standard assumption underlying traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change, that an agent’s belief state should be modified minimally to incorporate new information. In this paper we introduce a novel account of belief change in which the agent’s belief state is modified minimally to incorporate exactly the new information. Thus a revision by p∨q will result in a ...

EEciently identifying polygons that are visible from a changing synthetic viewpoint is an important problem in computer graphics. Even with hardware support, simple algorithms like depth-buuering cannot achieve interactive frame rates when applied to geometric models with many polygons. However, a visibility algorithm that exploits the occlu-sion properties of the scene to identify a superset o...

Justifying the truth value of a goal resulting from query evaluation of a logic program corresponds to providing evidence, in terms of a proof, for this truth. In an earlier work we introduced the notion of justification [8] and gave an algorithm for justifying tabled logic programs by post-processing the memo tables created during evaluation. A conservatve justifier such as the one described i...

Players’ beliefs may be incompatible, in the sense that player i can assign probability 1 to an event E to which player j assigns probability 0. One way to block incompatibility is to assume a common prior. We consider here a different approach: we require players’ beliefs to be conservative, in the sense that all players must ascribe the actual world positive probability. We show that common c...

Consistencies are properties of Constraint Networks (CNs) that can be exploited in order to make inferences. When a significant amount of such inferences can be performed, CNs are much easier to solve. In this paper, we interest ourselves in relation filtering consistencies for binary constraints, i.e. consistencies that allow to identify inconsistent pairs of values. We propose a new consisten...

Classical Bayesian mechanism design is “centralized”, that is, the designer is assumed to know thedistribution D from which the players’ type profile has been drawn. We instead investigate a very “de-centralized” Bayesian model, where the designer has no knowledge at all, and each player only has someprobabilistic information about D.For this decentralized model and many con...