The basic idea in PRINCIPLES AND PARAMETERS THEORY is to distinguish the invariants of human language (the principles) from the major points of crosslinguistic variation (the parameters). Both principles and parameters are taken to reflect innately determined, biological characteristics of the human brain (see UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR). In the course of normal child development, however, the two diver...

The author highlights the importance of emotions in all ethical reflections. He describes the most common positions of ethicists employing duties and rights as the basis for ethical thought. The author, goes to Freudian theory as viewed by the utilitarians, stating that the 'quest for pleasure' is not necessarily egocentric, especially for adults. For example, the feeling of solidarity emerges ...

The above approaches certainly have their place but also have their limitations. The repeated invocation of archival material tends to create an impression that ethical edicts are merely of historical significance and are irrelevant today. Some of the historical texts on medical ethics are based on morality, at times even bordering on the spiritual or the religious. This could be a hindrance to...

Remnant low-energy effects of Planck-scale Lorentz breaking in candidate fundamental theories typically include modified one-particle dispersion relations. Theoretical constraints on such modifications are discussed leading to the exclusion of a variety of previously considered Lorentz-violating parameters. In particular, the fundamental principle of coordinate independence, the role of an effe...

1 Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems Faculty of Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1081A, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands 2 Computer and Law Institute Faculty of Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands 3 The Center for Law, Public Administration and Informatization Faculty of Law, Tilburg University Warandelaan 2, 5000...

This report summarizes the Fifth Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS 2009), which was held in conjunction with the SOSP 2009 conference. This report presents the motivation for holding the workshop and summarizes the workshop contributions.

<1> Introduction It is generally assumed that in a language with the accusative case system a sentence with a finite predicate must have the subject NP marked with the nominative case. The abstract Case system developed by the Principles and Parameters approach (PPA) is based on this assumption, using the mechanism of the nominative and accusative Case checking for licensing the NPs with the st...

In this paper, non-standard tight closure is proposed as an alternative for classical tight closure on finitely generated algebras over C. It has the advantage that it admits a functional definition, similar to the characteristic p definition of tight closure, where instead of the characteristic p Frobenius, its ultraproduct, the non-standard Frobenius, is used. This new closure operation cl(·)...