Many philosophers have worried about what philosophy is. Often they have looked for answers by considering what it is that philosophers do. Given the diversity of topics and methods found in philosophy, however, we propose a different approach. In this article we consider the philosophical temperament, asking an alternative question: What are philosophers like? Our answer is that one important ...

Computer-supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is a widely accepted group-teaching and learning methodology. It focuses on communication and collaboration aspects among learning entities, between instructors and students. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly we introduce a novel, role-based concept of collaborative learning where both instructors and students/student groups oper...

In 1953 A. Grothendieck introduced the property known as Dunford-Pettis property [18]. A Banach space X has the Dunford-Pettis property (DPP in the sequel) if whenever (xn) and (ρn) are weakly null sequences in X and X∗, respectively, we have ρn(xn) → 0. It is due to Grothendieck that every C(K )-space satisfies the DPP. Historically, were Dunford and Pettis who first proved that L1(μ) satisfie...

The classical problem of the dining philosphers is solved and implemented with Java threads, without central coordination. Apart from the initialization the program is symmetric. The philosophers are the synchronized objects whereas the forks between the philosophers are unsynchronized. It is proved that every hungry philosopher eats within bounded delay, in a certain formalized sense.

Thomas Edison is often credited with creating the first research laboratory. a Legend has it that when a new hire asked about the rules of the lab, Edison responded with a wisecrack: " We don't have rules. We're trying to accomplish something. " What do we try to accomplish in research? Research has an exciting objective, for in it we are trying to ask and answer the most difficult questions kn...

In this paper we show how quantitative program logic [14] provides a formal framework in which to promote standard techniques of program analysis to a context where probability and nondeterminism interact, a situation common to probabilistic distributed algorithms. We show that overall performance can be formulated directly in the logic and that it can be derived from local properties of compon...

A problem that often arises in using abstraction is the generation of abstract states, called spurious states, that are—in the abstract space—reachable from some abstract image of a state s, but which have no corre-image of a state s, but which have no corresponding state in the original space reachable from s. Spurious states can have a negative effect on pattern database sizes and heuristic q...

In this paper we show how quantitative program logic 13] provides a formal framework in which to promote standard techniques of program analysis to a context where probability and nondeterminism interact, a situation common to probabilistic distributed algorithms. We show that overall performance can be formulated directly in the logic and that it can be derived from local properties of compone...