Whatever happened to meaning? Commentary on Millikan: A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds

Even in infancy, concept formation has to do with creating meaning, not with tracking substances. Preverbal infants can identify a substance such as a dog, but their first concept of this substance is not dog but animal. It is difficult to account for such global concepts by the perceptual processes involved in object identification, yet these concepts are the foundation on which later concepts are built

Triangular patches within a geometric continuous patch complex

Triangular patches are constructed to fill in, with arbitrary order of continuity, a triangular hole within a complex of patches joining with geometric continuity. Explicit formulas are given for the special case that the hole is surrounded by rectangular patches joining with parametric continuity. Modifications and handles to control the shape of the patches are described

Drawing the line: balancing the spatial requirements of customer and contractor in occupied refurbishment

In planning the refurbishment of railway stations the spatial needs of the contractor and ofthe ongoing business stakeholders have to be balanced. A particular concern is thedisruptive effect of construction works upon pedestrian movement.RaCMIT (Refurbishment and Customer Movement Integration Tool) is a research projectaimed at addressing this problem through combining the knowledge of the client projectmanager, the construction planner and the pedestrian modelling expert.The objective of the research is to develop a decision protocol (based on problemsencountered in two case studies) facilitating optimisation of overall project value to theclient?s business.Research observations as well as current literature suggest that:? for overall decision-making, opportunities may be lost (under current practice) forminimising joint project cost/revenue disruption and? for spatial decision-making, temporary station configuration during construction(and not just overall pedestrian capacity) is a significant variable for both businessand safety outcomes. In planning the refurbishment of railway stations the spatial needs of the contractor and ofthe ongoing business stakeholders have to be balanced. A particular concern is thedisruptive effect of construction works upon pedestrian movement.RaCMIT (Refurbishment and Customer Movement Integration Tool) is a research projectaimed at addressing this problem through combining the knowledge of the client projectmanager, the construction planner and the pedestrian modelling expert.The objective of the research is to develop a decision protocol (based on problemsencountered in two case studies) facilitating optimisation of overall project value to theclient?s business.Research observations as well as current literature suggest that:? for overall decision-making, opportunities may be lost (under current practice) forminimising joint project cost/revenue disruption and? for spatial decision-making, temporary station configuration during construction(and not just overall pedestrian capacity) is a significant variable for both businessand safety outcomes

The homogeneity theorem for supergravity backgrounds

We prove the strong homogeneity conjecture for eleven- and ten-dimensional (Poincar\'e) supergravity backgrounds. In other words, we show that any backgrounds of 11-dimensional, type I/heterotic or type II supergravity theories preserving a fraction greater than one half of the supersymmetry of the underlying theory are necessarily locally homogeneous. Moreover we show that the homogeneity is due precisely to the supersymmetry, so that at every point of the spacetime one can find a frame for the tangent space made out of Killing vectors constructed out of the Killing spinors.Comment: 8 page

Festival publicity helped change fishing policy.

In the late 1990s, I saw chunks of coral reef being trawled up off the UK at a time when the fishing industry was moving into deeper waters along the European Continental Shelf edge. As a trained marine biologist I was flabbergasted, since the text books said that coral reefs were restricted to warm tropical waters. It turned out that corals were amongst the first life forms discovered during pioneering deep-sea surveys off southwest Ireland in 1869. In fact, at least as many coral species are described from the deep sea as from shallow waters and large, reef-forming corals have been known to occur in the cold waters off Scandanavia since the times of Linnaeus. However, it is only in the past few years that advances in acoustic survey and digital underwater filming technology have allowed us to film and study these deep-water habitats in detail, rather than relying on remote sampling such as with grabs