There is a long tradition in both philosophy and psychology to separate process accounts from dependency accounts of causation. In this paper, we motivate a unifying account that explains people’s causal attributions in terms of counterfactuals defined over probabilistic generative models. In our experiments, participants see two billiard balls colliding and indicate to what extent ball A cause...

Cadaveric knees replaced with the Geomedic, ICLH, Marmor and Total Condylar prostheses were tested in axial compression, in rotation and in hyperextension in order to observe the strength of fixation of the tibial components. In axial compression the strengths at failure varied widely, both with any one prosthesis and between prostheses. This is attributed largely to the strength of the cancell...

It has been shown experimentally that boundary friction is proportional to load (commonly known as Amontons’ law) for more than 500 years, and the fact it holds true over many scales (from microns kilometres, from nano-Newtons Mega-Newtons) materials which deform both elastically plastically subject of much research, in order fully understand its wide applicability (and also find any deviations...

Multistage model predictive control is a robust MPC formulation that takes into account parametric uncertainty by constructing finite set of coupled scenarios. As the amount scenarios increase so does computational cost and real-time implementation might not be possible. Scenario decomposition has been proposed to distribute computations make possible, however, typically subproblems are coordin...

New measurements of the velocity dispersion of the globular cluster ω Centauri allow to trace its gravitational potential down to an acceleration of 8 × 10 cm s. It is found that the dispersion profile remains flat well inside the tidal radius as soon as the acceleration of gravity approaches a0, a result that finds its simplest explanation within the contest of MOND. A similar behavior is obse...

Abstract Background Interference screw is commonly used for graft fixation in anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction. However, previous studies had reported that the insertion of interference screws significantly caused laceration. The purposes this study were to (1) quantitatively evaluate laceration from one single PEEK screws; and (2) determine whether different types sutures reduce...

Motivated by recent experiments on DNA torsion-force-extension characteristics we consider the writhing geometry of open stiff molecules. We exhibit a cyclic motion which allows arbitrarily large twisting of the end of a molecule via an activated process. This process is suppressed for forces larger than femto-Newtons which allows us to show that experiments are sensitive to a generalization of...

Detecting all local extrema or the global extremum of a polynomial on the torus, the sphere or the rotation group is a tough yet often requested numerical problem. We present a heuristic approach that applies common descent methods like nonlinear conjugated gradients or Newtons methods simultaneously to a large number of starting points. The corner stone of our approach are FFT like algorithms,...

There are many possible means of determining exposure ranging from self-reports of physical exposure to measures of muscle activations and estimated spinal loads. In epidemiologic studies, issues of validity make instrumented measures preferable, however issues of cost and practicability tend to force investigators to less costly but less valid and less reliable measures of exposure, such as se...