OBJECTIVE Racism is related to policies preferences and behaviors that adversely affect blacks and appear related to a fear of blacks (e.g., increased policing, death penalty). This study examined whether racism is also related to gun ownership and opposition to gun controls in US whites. METHOD The most recent data from the American National Election Study, a large representative US sample, ...

A common misunderstanding is that there is something logically amiss with the classical square of opposition, and that the problem is related to Aristotle’s and medieval philosophers’ rejection of empty terms. But [Parsons 2004] convincingly shows that most of these philosophers did not in fact reject empty terms, and that, when properly understood, there are no logical problems with the classi...

An estimated 10 14 microbes live on our mucosal surfaces, exceeding by far the number of cells in our body (approximately 10). Survival depends on our ability to recognize, wall off, and eliminate unwanted intruders. The doubling of life expectancy over the last century has created an internal burden of degenerating tissue, cellular debris, and malignant transformation, adding considerable stre...

This paper uses the distribution and interpretation of antonymous adjectives in comparative constructions as an empirical basis to argue that abstract representations of measurement, or ‘degrees’, must be modeled as intervals on a scale, rather than as points, as commonly assumed. I begin by demonstrating that the facts in this domain must be accounted for in terms of the interaction of the sem...

Three public opinion studies examined public attitudes toward prevalence reduction (PR; reducing the number of people engaging in an activity) and harm reduction (HR; reducing the harm associated with an activity) across a wide variety of domains. Studies 1 and 2 were telephone surveys of California adults’ views on PR and HR strategies for a wide range of risk domains (heroin, alcoholism, toba...

For all $a,b>0$, the following two optimal inequalities are presented: $H^{alpha}(a,b)L^{1-alpha}(a,b)geq M_{frac{1-4alpha}{3}}(a,b)$ for $alphain[frac{1}{4},1)$, and $ H^{alpha}(a,b)L^{1-alpha}(a,b)leq M_{frac{1-4alpha}{3}}(a,b)$ for $alphain(0,frac{3sqrt{5}-5}{40}]$. Here, $H(a,b)$, $L(a,b)$, and $M_p(a,b)$ denote the harmonic, logarithmic, and power means of order $p$ of two positive numbers...

Electromagnetism-like Optimization (EMO) is a global optimization algorithm, particularly well-suited to solve problems featuring non-linear and multimodal cost functions. EMO employs searcher agents that emulate a population of charged particles which interact with each other according to electromagnetism’s laws of attraction and repulsion. However, EMO usually requires a large number of itera...