Invariances

Casting cultural controversies in a whole new light, an eminent philosopher presents bold, new theories that take into account scientific advances in physics, evolutionary biology, economics, and cognitive neurosience.

Invariances in Human Information Processing examines and identifies processing universals and how they are implemented in elementary judgemental processes. This edited collection offers evidence that these universals can be extracted and identified from observing law-like principles in perception, cognition, and action. Addressing memory operations, development, and conceptual learning, this book considers basic and complex meso- and makro-stages of information processing. Chapter authors provide theoretical accounts of cognitive processing that may offer tools for identification of functional components in brain activity in cognitive neuroscience

In this book, Winton Bastes discusses the relationships between freedom, progress, and human flourishing. Bates asserts that freedom enables individuals to flourish in different ways without colliding, fosters progress, allows for a growth of opportunities, and supports personal development by enabling individuals to exercise self-direction.

We planned this book as a Festschrift for Smitty Stevens because we thought he might be retiring around 1974, although we knew very well that only death or deep illness would stop Smitty from doing science. Death came suddenly, unexpectedly - after a full day of skiing at Vail, Colorado on the annual trip with wife Didi to the Winter Conference on Brain Research. Smitty liked winter conferences near ski resorts and often tried to get us other psychophysicists to organize one. Every person is unique. Smitty would have said it's mainly because each of us has so many genes that two combinations just alike would be well-nigh impossible. But most of us strive in many ways to be like others, and to abide by the norms (some smaller number try even harder to be unlike other people); as a result many persons seem to lose their uniqueness, their individuality. Not Smitty. He tried neither to be like others nor to be different. He took himself as he found himself, and ascribed peculiarities, strengths, and weaknesses to his pioneering Utah forebears, in whom he took much pride. His was the true and right nonconformity. He approached each task, each problem, ready to grapple with the facts and set them into meaningful order. And if the answer he came up with was different from everyone else's, well that was too bad.

How do scientists approach science? Scientists, sociologists and philosophers were asked to write on this intriguing problem and to display their results at the International Congress `Einstein Meets Magritte'. The outcome of their effort can be found in this rather unique book, presenting all kinds of different views on science. Quantum mechanics is a discipline which deserves and receives special attention in this book, mainly because it is fascinating and, hence, appeals to the general public. This book not only contains articles on the introductory level, it also provides new insights and bold, even provocative proposals. That way, the reader gets acquainted with `science in the making', sitting in the front row. The contributions have been written for a broad interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students.

Property Testing is the study of super-fast (randomized) algorithms for approximate decision making. These algorithms are given direct access to items of a huge data set, and determine, whether this data set has some predetermined (global) property or is far from having this property. Remarkably, this approximate decision is made by accessing a small portion of the data set. This state-of-the-art survey presents a collection of extended abstracts and surveys of leading researchers in property testing and related areas; it reflects the program of a mini-workshop on property testing that took place in January 2010 at the Institute for Computer Science (ITCS), Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. The volume contains two editor's introductions, 10 survey papers and 18 extended abstracts.

The developmental psychology text covers such topics as Darwinian dichotomies and their dissolution, dynamic systems theories, the creation and origins of knowledge, and coupled primal and plastic interactions in humans.