Theoretical methods for empirical state determination of entangled two-level systems are analyzed in relation to information theory. We show that hidden variable theories would lead to a Shannon index of correlation between the entangled subsystems which is larger than that predicted by quantum mechanics. Canonical representations which have maximal correlations are treated by the use of Schmidt and Hilbert-Schmidt decomposition of the entangled states, including especially the Bohm singlet state and the GHZ entangled states. We show that quantum mechanics does (...) not violate locality, but does violate realism. (shrink)

Maran ha-g. R. A. Y. L. Shṭinman z. ts. ṿe-ḳ.l. -- Rabotenu meʼore ha-dor -- Ḳiyum ha-ʻolam ʻa. y. Torah be-mishnat rabotenu -- Maran Rabi Gedalyah Aizman z. ts. ṿe-ḳ.l.

Access to legal information is fundamental to access to justice. Yet accessibility refers not only to making legal documents available to the public, but also rendering legal information comprehensible to them. A vexing problem in bringing legal information to the public is how to turn formal legal documents such as legislation and judgments, which are often highly technical, to easily navigable and comprehensible knowledge to those without legal education. In this study, we formulate a three-step approach for bringing legal knowledge (...) to laypersons, tackling the issues of navigability and comprehensibility. First, we translate selected sections of the law into snippets (called CLIC-pages), each being a small piece of article that focuses on explaining certain technical legal concept in layperson’s terms. Second, we construct a Legal Question Bank, which is a collection of legal questions whose answers can be found in the CLIC-pages. Third, we design an interactive CLIC Recommender. Given a user’s verbal description of a legal situation that requires a legal solution, CRec interprets the user’s input and shortlists questions from the question bank that are most likely relevant to the given legal situation and recommends their corresponding CLIC pages where relevant legal knowledge can be found. In this paper we focus on the technical aspects of creating an LQB. We show how large-scale pre-trained language models, such as GPT-3, can be used to generate legal questions. We compare machine-generated questions against human-composed questions and find that MGQs are more scalable, cost-effective, and more diversified, while HCQs are more precise. We also show a prototype of CRec and illustrate through an example how our 3-step approach effectively brings relevant legal knowledge to the public. (shrink)

Takanat ha-shavim, Magen ṿa-shemesh. Ṿa-yaged Moshesh, hosafot ṿe-heʻarot ʻal sefer Takanat ha-shavim.

We propose a ‘Moral Imagination’ methodology to facilitate a culture of responsible innovation for engineering and product teams in technology companies. Our approach has been operationalized over the past two years at Google, where we have conducted over 50 workshops with teams from across the organization. We argue that our approach is a crucial complement to existing formal and informal initiatives for fostering a culture of ethical awareness, deliberation, and decision-making in technology design such as company principles, ethics and privacy (...) review procedures, and compliance controls. We characterize some distinctive benefits of our methodology for the technology sector in particular. (shrink)

PANDEMIA Y ÉTICA es una introducción clara y provocativa a los temas éticos del COVID-19, apropiada para estudiantes de nivel universitario, académicos y diseñadores de políticas públicas, así como para el público general. Es también una contribución original a la literatura emergente acerca de este importante tema. El autor ha lanzado este libro con acceso abierto para pueda ser descargado y leído en forma gratuita por todas las personas interesadas en estas cuestiones. Algunas de las características principales de este libro (...) son: - Una clara organización de los temas éticos planteados por la pandemia. - Una exploración de las múltiples y complejas interrelaciones entre estos temas. - Un argumento conciso a favor de un confinamiento continuado hasta que desarrollemos una vacuna. - Una formulación original del Profundo Problema Ético de la Pandemia, así como un Argumento Revolucionario acerca de cómo deberíamos cambiar a la sociedad después de la pandemia. - Referencias a, e interacciones con, muchos de los mejores escritos sobre la pandemia hasta ahora (tanto en medios de comunicación populares como en revistas especializadas). (shrink)

According to Uriah Kriegel’s self-representational theory of consciousness, mental state M is conscious just in case it is a complex with suitably integrated proper parts, M 1 and M 2, such that M 1 is a higher-order representation of lower-order representation M 2. Kriegel claims that M thereby “indirectly” represents itself, and he attempts to motivate this claim by appealing to what he regards as intuitive cases of indirect perceptual and pictorial representation. For example, Kriegel claims that it’s natural to (...) say that in directly perceiving the front surface of an apple one thereby perceives the apple itself. Cases such as this are supposed to provide intuitive support for the principle that if X represents Y, and Y is highly integrated into complex object Z, then X indirectly represents Z. In this paper I provide counterexamples to Kriegel’s principle of indirect representation, before going on to argue that we can explain what is going on in those cases in which the subject seems to represent a complex whole by representing one its parts without positing indirect representations anyway. I then argue that my alternative approach is superior to Kriegel’s in a number of ways, thereby rendering his theory of consciousness implausible. (shrink)

Trabajando sobre el género de ¿Historias de los Profetas¿ (Qis.as. al-Anbiya-¿) en el proceso de elaboración de mi tesis sobre Abraham en la literatura islámica, el profesor J. Sadan me envió un manuscrito que había localizado en la British Library relacionado con este género. Posteriormente encontré versiones similares de la misma composición, lo que me animó a profundizar mi investigación sobre sus orígenes. La obra está próxima a la literatura de predicación (wa¿z.), que se ocupa principalmente de la educación moral, (...) pero también incluye historias. Me planteé la posibilidad de que éste formarse un género que hubiera surgido como una ayuda, un material auxiliar concebido para entender la tradición oral y los estudios religiosos para, posteriormente, convertirse en un género independiente, más cercano a la Parénesis o al Specula Regis (Espejos de príncipes). Describiré el manuscrito para intentar alcanzar una conclusión sobre ciertas cuestiones: ¿es éste un género literario diferente?, ¿se trata de un género educativo o solamente es una versión simplificada de historias para ilustrar a niños o principiantes de la lengua árabe?, ¿buscaría el autor un nombre original para su compilación, haciendo referencia al reducido tamaño de la colección y descartando el de Qis.as. al-Anbiya-¿ por ser conocido? (shrink)

It has been proposed that natural selection occurs on a hierarchy of levels, of which the organismic level is neither the top nor the bottom. This hypothesis leads to the following practical problem: in general, how does one tell if a given phenomenon is a result of selection on level X or level Y. How does one tell what the units of selection actually are?It is convenient to assume that a unit of selection may be defined as a type of (...) entity for which there exists, among all entities on the same level as that entity, an additive component of variance for some specific component F of fitness which does not appear as an additive component of variance in any decomposition of this F among entities at any lower level. But such a definition implicitly assumes that if f(x, y) depends nonadditively on its arguments, there must be interaction between the quantities which x and y represent. This assumption is incorrect. And one cannot avoid this error by speaking of transformability to additivity instead of merely additivity. (shrink)

Haḳdamat Mesilat yesharim, śiḥah 1 -- Mesilat yesharim, śiḥah 2 -- Mesilat yesharim, śiḥah 3.