In this paper, a possible worlds framework for representing general belief change operators is presented. In common with many approaches, an agent’s set of beliefs are specified by a subset of the set of possible worlds. The central intuition is that there is a distance given between every pair of possible worlds, giving the similarity of one world to another; the set of worlds together with th...

Studies suggested that electronic social sites are popular with undergraduates. Virtual worlds, one of the emergent facets of the Internet, are also seeing tremendous worldwide participation. Of interest to educators is the applicability of this new technology as a learning tool. As a result, this study was untaken to empirically examine undergraduate familiarity and interest in virtual worlds ...

In this paper I investigate the contribution Text World Theory (Werth 1999, Gavins 2007) can make to an understanding of how viewpoint effects are brought about in prose fiction. Text World Theory is concerned with how language, as well as the context in which it is produced/received, leads the participants in the discourse to build mental representations for the situations being described, des...

In this Chapter, I will explore the use of modeling in order to understand how Science works. I will discuss the modeling of scientific communities, providing a general, non-comprehensive overview of existing models, with a focus on the use of the tools of Agent-Based Modeling and Opinion Dynamics. A special attention will be paid to models inspired by a Bayesian formalism of Opinion Dynamics. ...

Small world models are networks consisting of many local links and fewer long range ‘shortcuts’. In this paper, we consider some particular instances, and rigorously investigate the distribution of their inter–point network distances. Our results are framed in terms of approximations, whose accuracy increases with the size of the network. We also give some insight into how the reduction in typi...

The cosmology of the Randall-Sundrum scenario for a positive tension brane in a 5-D Universe with localized gravity has been studied extensively recently. Here we extend it to more general situations. We consider the time-dependent situation where the two sides of the brane are different AdS/Schwarzschild spaces. We show that the expansion rate in these models during inflation could be larger t...

The existence of spacetime singularities is irrelevant for the irreversible appearance of black holes. However, confirmation of the latter’s unitary dynamics would require the preparation of a coherent superposition of a tremendous number of appropriate “Everett worlds”.

Permission to make digital/hard copies of all or part of this material for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage , the copyright notice, the title of the publication an its date appear, and notice is given that Abstract VRML —the Virtual Reality Modeling Language— has established as the standard d...

Bayesian treatments of inductive inference and decision making presuppose that the structure of the situation under consideration is fully known. We are, however, often faced with having only very fragmentary information about an epistemic situation. This tension was discussed in decision theory by Savage (1954) in terms of ‘small worlds’ and ‘large worlds’ (‘grand worlds’ in Savage’s terminolo...