Sophisticated Version Research Articles

Even a Worldly Philosopher Needs a Good Mechanic

Robert M. Solow Even a Worldly Philosopher Needs a Good Mechanic ANYONE WHO TEACHES ECONOMICS OWES A DEBT TO THE WORLDLYPHILOSOPHERS for having attracted so many bright and interested students to econom­ ics, much as Paul de K ruifs Microbe Hunters—a lesser book—recruited the young of my generation to the study of biology and medicine. Those same teachers are also aware that some of the same students felt let down by the texture of the discipline when they began to study it. Instead of debating big ideas about the nature of society, they found themselves drawing demand and supply curves and learning to set marginal this equal to marginal that. In the last chapter added to TheWorldlyPhilosophers, Heilbroner tries to diagnose the source of his own, more sophisticated version ofthis kind of disappointment. He locates it in the unwillingness of modem econo­ mists to focus on the essential characteristics of capitalism as a system of social relations. There and elsewhere he speaks of a failure of “vision” on the part of economists, and their misguided attempt to construct a Science—the capital S is essential—in the image of physics or astronomy. I have never been satisfied with that way of looking at the context and method of economics. Bob Heilbroner and I used to talk about this in the days when we saw more of each other. I take this opportunity to make one more statement of my view of the end of the worldly philosophy. From the start, I have to dissent from Heilbroner’s assertion that the disciplined study of economics (as we know it) is tied essentially social research Vol 71 : No 2 : Summer 2 004 203 to the capitalist system. His statement is: “The worldly philosophy is the child of capitalism and could not exist without it.” There is more in the same vein. I can think of at least two things wrong with this iden­ tification. One is that economics—and manifestly the economics we study and teach today—does have application outside of capitalism. A long line of economists, including Barone, Hayek, Lange, Meade, Dobb, Durbin, Crosland, and many others, has used standard tools to analyze how a socialist economy might operate. They cover a reasonably wide ideological spectrum—though there are no men from Mars among them, for good reason—but they are clearly doing economic analysis. To take a different kind of example, Vernon Smith has shown that econom­ ics has interesting things to say even about hunter-gatherer society; a slightly weaker point is illustrated by Radford’s famous article on “The Economic Organization of a POW [Prisoner-of-War] Camp” (1945). Sensible analysis of any economic system, capitalist or not, has to pay attention to the characteristic motivations and institutions of that society’s way of organizing production and consumption. You do not have to go all the way to Lionel Robbins’s famous characterization of economics as the study of scarce resources, and therefore presumably in some sense universally applicable, to see that some basic ideas can be adapted to a wide variety of institutional settings, some of them well outside capitalism. There is, after all, a well-recognized subdiscipline called “comparative economic systems,” whose practitioners believe that what they are practicing is economics. Which leads me to question Heilbroner’s formulation also from the opposite direction. Capitalist societies are not all alike, as he would have been the first to recognize. Even within the collection of histori­ cal and easily imaginable versions of the capitalist economy, there is enough variation to require nontrivial adaptation of basic economic principles to alternative institutional settings. From Irish peasants to post-Deng China, from the postwar United States to corporatist Austria, from French indicative planning to Erhard’s Germany, and from Thatcher’s England to Sweden’s Middle Way, there are enough similari­ ties and enough differences to require substantial tailoring to fit. I do 2 0 4 social research not think any purpose is served—not even Heilbroner’s own—by the suggestion that there is a clearly defined capitalism and therefore a unique vision for economic theoiy. There is a quite different, constructive way to visualize the...

Ethical Dilemmas of US Antiterrorism Policy

I hope that Charles McQueary does not mean to suggest that the research he mentions is without moral and ethical problems (see the McQueary interview, Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 56 7 2003 32 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1603071. July 2003, page 32 ). Like many who recruit physicists for national security, he ignores the bigger picture. For instance, McQueary says that he would use university researchers to develop sociological profiles on terrorists. Should we ignore that this technology could simply be a sophisticated version of racial profiling, which could lead to the arrest of innocent people? Should we ignore the chance that this technology could be used to violate citizens’ civil rights?Of course the defense of innocent people is important, but McQueary should be honest in his assessment of both the exciting challenges and the possible destructive consequences of defense work.© 2004 American Institute of Physics.

Teaching Molecular Geometry with the VSEPR Model

Molecular geometry can be discussed in terms of the VSEPR model at several levels of sophistication—from the empirical model to a more complete model based on the Pauli principle. It is recommended that for most first-year courses VSEPR is presented at the purely empirical level or in the form of the domain version. A more sophisticated version is discussed here, not only because it should be taught in more advanced courses, but because it is important that it is understood by instructors and textbook writers so that incorrect explanations of the VSEPR model are not given. The difficulties associated with the usual treatment of the VB and MO theories in connection with molecular geometry in beginning courses are discussed. It is recommended that the VB and MO theories should be presented only after the VSEPR model either in the general chemistry course or in a following course, particularly in the case of the MO theory, which is not really necessary for the first-year course. The Pauli principle and its importance as the fundamental basis of the VSEPR model should be presented in a higher-level course, such as a quantum mechanics or physical chemistry course, or an inorganic course, in which VSEPR has many applications, for example, in the discussion of noble gas and other high coordination number molecules.

The Trouble with Infinitism

One way to solve the epistemic regress problem would be to show that we can acquire justification by means of an infinite regress. This is infinitism. This view has not been popular, but Peter Klein has developed a sophisticated version of infinitism according to which all justified beliefs depend upon an infinite regress of reasons. Klein's argument for infinitism is unpersuasive, but he successfully responds to the most compelling extant objections to the view. A key component of his position is his claim that an infinite regress is necessary, but not sufficient, for justified belief. This enables infinitism to avoid a number of otherwise compelling objections. However, it commits infinitism to the existence of an additional feature of reasons that is necessary and, together with the regress condition, sufficient for justified belief. The trouble with infinitism is that any such condition could account for the connection between justification and truth only by undermining the rationale for the regress condition itself.

An adaptive fuzzy strategy for motion control of robot manipulators

This paper makes an attempt to develop a self-tuned proportional-integral-derivative (PID)-type fuzzy controller for the motion control of robot manipulators. In recent past, it has been widely believed that static fuzzy controllers can not be suitably applied for controlling manipulators with satisfaction because the robot manipulator dynamics is too complicated. Hence more complicated and sophisticated neuro-fuzzy controllers and fuzzy versions of nonlinear controllers have been more and more applied in this problem domain. The present paper attempts to look back at this widely accepted idea and tries to develop a self-tuned fuzzy controller with small incremental complexity over conventional fuzzy controllers, which can yet attain satisfactory performance. The proposed controller is successfully applied in simulation to control two-link and three-link robot manipulators.

Force on the Dielectric in a Parallel Plate Capacitor

An interesting problem on the subject of dielectrics concerns the force exerted by a parallel plate capacitor maintained at constant voltage on a dielectric slab inserted between its plates. Energy methods are used1 to calculate the attractive force, which depends on the square of the electric field, the plate area, and the relative permittivity εr. A version of this problem is the calculation of the attractive force that pulls a liquid dielectric into vertical parallel plates dipped into the dielectric liquid. In some textbooks2 this is posed as an end-of-chapter problem, but in fact it may serve as the basis for a determination of the dielectric constant of a liquid, as described in Ref. 3, which also contains a derivation of the dependence of the height h to which the liquid rises on the voltage V (see Appendix): h = ε0( εr−1)2d2gρV2, where ρ is the density and d the plate separation. Here we shall describe a less sophisticated version of this method, using a homemade apparatus that can be used to demonstrate the effect. With some care it can be turned into a laboratory exercise in which students build the apparatus themselves (apart from the high-voltage supply) and measure the height as a function of the voltage.

An improved PID-type fuzzy controller employing individual fuzzy P, fuzzy I and fuzzy D controllers

Since the emergence of fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs), control system engineers are in pursuit of more and more sophisticated versions of these controllers to achieve better performance, particularly in situations where providing a control action to even a minimal degree of satisfaction is a problem. The present paper is an attempt to contribute in this field. This work proposes a fuzzy PID controller comprising fuzzy P, fuzzy I and fuzzy D controllers in parallel. While fuzzy P and fuzzy I controllers are implemented in incremental form, the fuzzy D controller is realized in position form. Simulation studies reveal that the new scheme has a significantly improved performance compared to the Ziegler-Nichols tuned PID controller and static fuzzy PID controllers currently in use.

Soquimich Uses a System Based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming and Expert Systems to Improve Customer Service

Determining what fertilizer mix to apply to certain soils is complicated and time consuming. Experts vaguely describe the complex relationships among the influencing parameters, such as fertilizer, soil, weather characteristics, and the previous and target yields. Farmers expect fast and reliable recommendations for fertilizer mixes that will meet their needs at low prices. Like buyers of many products, they take the quality of the products for granted. What differentiates providers is the service they offer their customers. Recognizing this fact, Soquimich S.A., a fertilizer producer, initiated development of a system that would automatically determine optimal fertilizer blends. We developed a hybrid tool using expert system technology and mixed-integer linear-programming models that increased fertilizer sales. Our initial highly sophisticated preliminary version of the system proved unsatisfactory because farmers could not always provide the necessary input and users did not know how to use and maintain the system. Our final simplified version of the system was successful and is being extended to other regions in Chile and in other countries.

Capacities, explanation and the possibility of disunity

Nancy Cartwright argues that so-called capacities, not universal laws of nature, best explain the often complex way events actually unfold. On this view, science would represent a world that is fundamentally "dappled", or disunified, and not, as orthodoxy would perhaps have it, a world unified by universal laws of nature. I argue, first, that the problem Cartwright raises for laws of nature seems to arise for capacities too, so why reject laws of nature? Second, that in so far as there is a problem, it concerns the role of counterfactuals in explanation; I then briefly propose a simple model of counterfactual explanation. Finally, I investigate how a sophisticated version of the regularity theory of laws of nature (that of Ramsey-Lewis) can be neutral between the empirical hypotheses that the world is unified, and that the world is disunified.

The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929-1948*

Apartheid as an ideology and operational plan for the Afrikaner nationalist movement was not, as the current orthodoxy suggests, the product of an Afrikaner Broederbond intelligentsia based in the Transvaal and affected by German romantic nationalism and Nazi racial thought. The main influences were German missiology, as applied by Dutch Reformed Church missionary strategists in the Orange Free State and, more importantly, the secular intelligentsia in the Western Cape with good access to D. F. Malan's Cape National Party. Both the missionary strategists and Western Cape secular intellectuals were in the mainstream of the scholarship of racial thought and social engineering in Western Europe and the USA. The segregationist practice of the American South was particularly influential. The break with traditional South Africa segregation that apartheid represents was due mainly to party political competition between the National Party and United Party, obliging the former to come up with an alternative that was both more radical and more 'idealistic', and to the polarisation of white politics after South Africa's controversial entry into the Second World War. In essence, apartheid was a modernised form of both paternalism and trusteeship, on the one hand and, on the other, elements of liberal ideology not used by segregationists. The most sophisticated version, espoused first by N. P. van Wyk Louw and G. B. A. Gerdener, had a surprisingly enduring appeal.

Productivity Dynamics in a Large Sample of Countries: A Panel Study

Recent research shows that productivity differences are more important than differences in accumulation rates in explaining per capita income differences across countries. So far static differences in productivity have been mainly computed and analyzed in large samples of countries. This paper extends the research by focusing on productivity dynamics. It uses the panel approach to compute productivity indices for a large sample of countries for two time periods, namely an initial period of 1960–75 and a subsequent period of 1975–90. This allows computation of ordinal and cardinal changes in productivity between the two periods. The results show considerable variation in productivity dynamics across countries. The task ahead is to find out what accounts for the observed dynamics.

The Escalation Hypothesis: One Long Argument

Ever since Darwin, we have asked: Do predictable rules govern the evolutionary process? The question has attracted the attention of countless evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and philosophers alike. As with so much of our evolutionary thinking, we go back to Darwin and the Origin of Species , and the ideologies of his “one long argument,” as a starting point. Darwin (1859, p. 477) was well aware that ecology is important in shaping the evolution of life—“the relation of organism to organism is the most important of all relations”—but, perhaps more importantly, he realized the consequences of such a view for the history of life (see Ghiselin, 1995). Today, this Darwinian view of the evolutionary process, hardened by the architects of the Modern Synthesis, argues for long-term directionality in evolution. Directionality is the consequence of ecological struggles among metabolizing entities with energy-intensive forms of life exacting primary top-down control over, and replacement of, less energetic forms (Vermeij, 1999). This inherent directionality in the history of life, however, does not imply that living species, with more specialized and energy-demanding adaptations, are “better able to cope” with their biological environment than species in the geologic past were with theirs (Vermeij, 1987, p. 421). The most sophisticated modern version of Darwin's view of the efficacy of biological agents of selection, and, to me, arguably one of the most significant paleontological hypotheses of the last 25 years, is Geerat Vermeij's (1987) hypothesis of escalation, which states that the history of life has been characterized by two simultaneous long-term directional trends within similar environments: increasing biological hazards (predation and competition), and increasing incidence and expression of enemy-related adaptations to these biological hazards. In the limited space of this essay, I will attempt first to define briefly what is meant by escalation, stress two of the …

Simple features of mantle-wide convection and the interpretation of lower-mantle tomograms

Abstract Simple fluid dynamic constraints aid in the interpretation of lower mantle tomograms. The geothermal gradient away from slabs and plumes is subadiabatic between the upper (lithosphere) and lower (D″) boundary layers by ∼400 K. Slabs widen proportionally with the square root of the viscosity as they sink through the lower mantle. The time scale for the persistence of slab graveyards at the base of the mantle is comparable to the time for plate motions to reorganize ∼120–200 Myr. At most a few starting plume heads currently exist in the lower mantle. Tomographic inversions may include more sophisticated numerical-modeling versions of these constraints.

Why Lacan?

Jean-Michel Rabaté. The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003. xxviii + 287 pp. $35.00. Jacques Lacan is the type of intellectual that people love to hate. His style, first of all, is notoriously difficult due to its obscurity and convolution. His concepts and terms, in addition, are intentionally unstable, never finished, and always open to further revision by the master himself or his often erstwhile disciples. And his wit, although sometimes very funny in an academically Marx- brothers sort of way, is more often ponderously self-regarding and too clever by half. Finally, although he promotes himself as the true follower of his master, Freud—whose other followers got him wrong—Lacan's work represents rather a decided break with Freudian psychoanalysis than its definitive fulfillment. Why Lacan, indeed? Jean-Michel Rabaté's Cambridge Companion to Lacan answers this basic question of the skeptical Anglo-American intellectual, and in raising even more interesting and pertinent ones, makes a major contribution to Lacan studies. Before continuing with my analysis of this volume's achievements, however, I will outline Lacan's major contribution to the theory of the human subject. Lacan begins his work in psychiatry and then psychoanalysis not with neurotic patients but with psychotic ones. Basing himself on the phenomena of their madness, Lacan articulates a general theory of the human subject. First of all, Lacan proposes three registers (or dimensions) in which the human subject defines itself: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Imaginary can be exemplified by what Lacan designates as the mirror stage of childhood development. During the period between six and eighteen months, Lacan argues, when the child jubilantly discovers his or her self-image in the mirror, the child also receives a model of wholeness and perfection that is both false or misleading and alienating in the end. Supported by the primary caregiver while viewing his or her own mirror image, the child, still unable to master completely his or her various bodily functions and muscular movements, beholds an image of totality that appears masterfully still or at the command of the child's every whim. Such a specular mirage haunts the child ever after with an ideal image (or its projected fantasized gaze); the child can never hope to measure up to in its life no matter what it may do. [End Page 136] The Imaginary, then, is the dimension of aesthetic fascination and mis-recognition. But what makes this dimension possible, of course, is the presence and action of the Symbolic; in this instance, as manifested by the primary caregiver supporting the child as it gazes into the apparatus of the mirror. The Symbolic is principally what plays this supportive and in fact formative role in all of our lives; that is, it is language (in the largest sense of a rule-governed combinatory system of exchange and communication) and its institutions, such as the law, the family and the social order, generally. The primary caregiver commanding ("Look! See!) the child to regard itself in the mirror as the child is being held up to do so would be the simplest version of this Symbolic agency of language. The production, distribution, and operation of structures in society, as theorized by Levi-Strauss' anthropology (derived as it is from Saussure's structuralist linguistics), would be the more sophisticated version of the Symbolic Order. All the formal rituals that structure otherwise irresolvable contradictions into livable if repeatable oppositions—those of the family and kinship system, of the legal system, of politics and communication, of religion and cultural life at large—this anthropological dimension of human existence is what Lacan means primarily by the Symbolic. It is, as he nicknames it, "the Big Other." It implants its psychology (neurotic or psychotic mentality) into each subject via the delegations of the family and society's communication mechanisms, particularly those of spoken discourse. "The unconscious is structured like a language" and it is "the discourse of the Other...

Hydrogen in education—a biological approach

Hydrogen gas is regarded as a potential candidate for a future energy economy. The change towards new energy systems with hydrogen gas as an energy carrier will have an immense impact on society. Thus, an integrate part of current research and development must be the inclusion of the new technology into public education. By means of a model bioreactor for light-dependent (photobiological) production of hydrogen gas with green algae, we try to serve this goal in biological education. Various simple photo-bioreactor types (closed batch, open batch) were analyzed for their capability to produce hydrogen under different conditions. The focus laid on functionality and simplicity rather than on high efficiency. Easy-to-handle systems that can be used in the classroom are presented. In a more sophisticated version a proton exchange membrane (PEM-) fuel cell was connected to a continuous gas flow tube bioreactor. We developed a software interface, designed to read light intensity, temperature and power generation by the bioreactor and the connected fuel cell, respectively. Thus, this bioreactor is specially aimed at integrative teaching in natural science and computer technology at middle and high school level.

Quasiperiodic Motions in the Planar Three-Body Problem

In the direct product of the phase and parameter spaces, we define the perturbing region, where the Hamiltonian of the planar three-body problem is C k -close to the dynamically degenerate Hamiltonian of two uncoupled two-body problems. In this region, the secular systems are the normal forms that one gets by trying to eliminate the mean anomalies from the perturbing function. They are Pöschel-integrable on a transversally Cantor set. This construction is the starting point for proving the existence of and describing several new families of periodic or quasiperiodic orbits: short periodic orbits associated to some secular singularities, which generalize Poincaré's periodic orbits of the second kind (“Les Méthodes Nouvelles de la Mécanique Céleste,” Vol. 1, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1892–1899); quasiperiodic motions with three (resp. two) frequencies in a rotating frame of reference, which generalize Arnold's solutions ( Russian Math. Surveys 18 (1963), 85–191) (resp. Lieberman's solutions; Celestial Mech. 3 (1971), 408–426); and three-frequency quasiperiodic motions along which the two inner bodies get arbitrarily close to one another an infinite number of times, generalizing the Chenciner–Llibre's invariant “punctured tori” ( Ergodic Theory Dynam. Systems 8 (1988), 63–72). The proof relies on a sophisticated version of KAM theorem, which itself is proved using a normal form theorem of Herman (“Démonstration d'un Théorème de V.I. Arnold,” Séminaire de Systèmes Dynamiques and Manuscripts, 1998).

Four applications of the TIGRIS model in the Netherlands

This paper presents the land-use transportation interaction model TIGRIS for the Netherlands. Four studies have been conducted in the past few years using increasingly sophisticated versions of the model. The paper places the model applications in their geographical context, provides an overview of the main interactions in the model, and discusses its validation (a particular problem in land-use transportation interaction models). Finally the four applications are presented, one of which (the proposed Randstadrail light-rail system) is dealt with at length.

Technology and Globalization

Derek Hrynyshyn takes on the postulated necessity underlying the current wave of economic globalization. He critically dissects the sophisticated version of this argument developed by Manuel Castells in the impressive trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, Culture. For Hrynyshyn, a more nuanced approach to the connection between capitalism and paths of technological change can be found in Raymond William's conception of determination. This approach invites us to think about the ways capitalist social and political relations set limits and exert pressures upon the trajectories of technological change. Taking the example of the internet, Hrynyshyn illustrates the way such pressures have (thusfar) operated to preclude its democratic and liberatory promise.

Teaching Games for Understanding and Situated Learning: Rethinking the Bunker-Thorpe Model

Bunker and Thorpe first proposed Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) in 1982 as an alternative to traditional, technique-led approaches to games teaching and learning. Despite interest from teachers and researchers, there has been no attempt to review the TGfU model. This is an oversight, given the important advances in educational learning theory and ecological approaches to motor control since the early 1980s. The purpose of this paper is to present a new version of the TGfU model that draws on a situated learning perspective. The paper describes the TGfU approach, overviews recent research on TGfU, and outlines a situated learning perspective. This perspective is then applied to rethinking the TGfU model. The intended outcome of the paper is the provision a more robust and sophisticated version of the TGfU model that can inform future directions in the practice of and research on TGfU.

Expressivism and Language Learning

Expressivists hold that when we make normative claims about actions, agents, feelings, and so on, we are not making descriptive claims about those things—claims that can be true or false. Rather, they hold that when we make a claim such as “killing is wrong” we are expressing a certain sort of attitude toward killing, or toward norms that prohibit killing. And this attitude, whatever it is, is not one of belief. For beliefs can be true or false. If normative claims expressed the attitude of belief, then such claims could themselves be true or false also. The attitudes expressed by normative claims are therefore pro and con attitudes such as desire, approval, disgust, or more sophisticated versions of such things. The inability of normative claims to be true or false—at least in the representational way in which naturalistic claims are true and false—is not an accidental feature of expressivism. Rather, one of the attractions of expressivism is precisely that it avoids the messy problem of explaining what sorts of things our normative claims could be about, such that they could be true or false. That is, it avoids the problems of