Some factors affecting marital distances have been studied in two Outer Hebridean islands, Harris (843 marriages) and Barra (444 marriages), over the period 1855-1990. In each island marital distances fell before 1900, but then rose to their greatest values after the 1950s. Fishermen generally married at the shortest distances and men in land-based occupations at the longest. The depression in the fishing industry during the 1880s and early 1890s was associated with reductions in marital distances, especially among fishermen. In the (...) different regions of Harris, marital distances were least in the south-east, where settlement was most dense, and greatest in the south-west where it was most sparse. (shrink)

Every healthcare organisation enacts a multitude of policies, but there has been no discussion as to what procedural and substantive requirements a policy writing process should meet in order to achieve good outcomes and to possess sufficient authority for those who are asked to follow it.Using, as an example, the controversy about patient’s refusal of blood transfusions, I argue that a hospital wide policy is preferable to individual decision making, because it ensures autonomy, quality, fairness, and efficiency.Policy writing for morally (...) controversial medical practices needs additional justification compared to policies on standard medical practices and secures legitimate authority for HCO members by meeting five requirements: all parties directed by the policy are represented; the deliberative process encompasses all of the HCO’s obligations; the rationales for the policy are made available; there is a mechanism for criticising, and for evaluating the policy. (shrink)

The quantitative problem of old evidence is the problem of how to measure the degree to which e confirms h for agent A at time t when A regards e as justified at t. Existing attempts to solve this problem have applied the e-difference approach, which compares A's probability for h at t with what probability A would assign h if A did not regard e as justified at t. The quantitative problem has been widely regarded as unsolvable primarily on (...) the grounds that the e-difference approach suffers from intractable problems. Various philosophers have proposed that 'Bayesianism' should be rejected as a research strategy in confirmation theory in part because of the unsolvability of this problem. I develop a version of the e-difference approach which overcomes these problems and possesses various advantages (but also certain limitations). I develop an alternative 'theistic' approach which handles many cases that my development of the e-difference approach does not handle. I conclude with an assessment of the significance of the quantitative problem for Bayesianism and argue that this problem is misunderstood in so far as it is regarded as unsolvable, and in so far as it is regarded as a problem only for Bayesians. (shrink)

Most authors who work with moral status automatically dismiss the possibility that plants are the kinds of entities that have moral status. This dismissal coheres with our intuitions about common-sense morality: if plants do not have moral status then we do not have any direct moral obligations to plant life. An implication of such a view is that any suggestion otherwise commits one to be in favour of an absurd conclusion. However, given the recent literature and empirical evidence on plant (...) minds, there are reasons to accept a different perspective that finds the absurd conclusion plausible. (shrink)

In R. C. Flickinger's (3rd ed. second impression 1929) we read on pp. 171In the iambic trimeters written by Aeschylus a trisyllabic substitution (tribrach, anapaest or dactyl) for the pure disyllabic iambus occurs only once in about twenty-five verses.Tragic Drama of the Greekstrimeters’ lines like.

We consider the problem of whether there are deterministic theories describing the evolution of an individual physical system in terms of the definite trajectories of its constituent particles and which stay in the same relation to quantum mechanics as Bohmian mechanics but which differ from the latter for what concerns the trajectories followed by the particles. Obviously, one has to impose on the hypothetical alternative theory precise physical requirements. We analyze various such constraints and we show step by step how (...) to meet them. This way of attacking the problem turns out to be useful also from a pedagogical point of view since it allows one to recall and focus on some relevant features of Bohm's theory. One of the central requirements we impose on the models we are going to analyze has to do with their transformation properties under the transformation of the extended Galilei group. In a context like the one we are interested in, one can put forward various requests that we refer to as physical and genuine covariance and invariance. Other fundamental requests are that the theory allows the description of isolated physical systems as well as that it leads to a solution (in the same sense as Bohmian mechanics) of the measurement problem. We show that, even when all the above conditions are taken into account, there are infinitely many inequivalent (from the point of view of the trajectories) bohmian-like theories reproducing the predictions of quantum mechanics. This raises some interesting questions about the meaning of Bohmian mechanics. (shrink)

David Ricardo was a hugely influential British political economist and stock trader. This volume, first published in 1923, contains five important pamphlets published by him, edited and with an overarching introductory essay by E. C. K. Gonner. Each essay relates either to monetary and financial subjects - including the high price of Bullion, monetary theory and the position of the Bank of England - or to the agricultural conditions of Britain and proposed solutions to the problems discussed. This is a (...) fascinating and detailed work, which will be of great value to those with an interest in Ricardo’s theories and British economic history. (shrink)