Information Supply and Demand: Resolving Sterelny’s Paradox of Cultural Accumulation

Gene-Culture Coevolution (GCC) theory is an intriguing new entry in the quest to understand human culture. Nonetheless, it has received relatively little philosophical attention. One notable exception is Kim Sterelny’s (2006) critique which raises three primary objections against the GCC account. Most importantly, he argues that GCC theory, as it stands, is unable to resolve “the paradox of cultural accumulation” (151); that while social learning should generally be prohibitively expensive for the pupils, it nonetheless occurs as the principle means of disseminating novel information through a culture. Sterelny holds that this is best explained by supplementing the GCC models with strong cultural group selection pressures. I argue that this is not needed. To show this I elaborate upon Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White’s (2001) information goods theory, developing it in terms of the market pressures that one would expect to find in an information economy. I indicate how such pressures contribute to an individual-level explanation of cultural accumulation that answers Sterelny’s concerns

Review of The Politics of War: Canada’s Afghanistan Mission, 2001-14 by Jean-Christophe Boucher and Kim Richard Nossal

Review of The Politics of War: Canada’s Afghanistan Mission, 2001-14 by Jean-Christophe Boucher and Kim Richard Nossal

Rachael Schlosberg, violin and Jayoung Kim, piano, March 30, 2017

This is the concert program of the Rachael Schlosberg, violin and Jayoung Kim, piano performance on Thursday, March 30, 2017 at 6:00 p.m., at the Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

No anomalous scaling in electrostatic calibrations for Casimir force measurements

In a recent paper (Phys.Rev.A78, 020101(R) (2008)), Kim at al. have reported a large anomaly in the scaling law of the electrostatic interaction between a sphere and a plate, which was observed during the calibration of their Casimir force set-up. Here we experimentally demonstrate that in proper electrostatic calibrations the scaling law follows the behavior expected from elementary electrostatic arguments, even when the electrostatic voltage that one must apply to minimize the force (typically ascribed to contact potentials) depends on the separation between the surfaces.Comment: Final versio

Physician-prescribed Asthma Treatment Regimen does not differ Between Smoking and Non-smoking Patients With Asthma in Seoul and Gyunggi province of Korea

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors thank Lauren Weisenfluh and Melissa Stauffer, PhD, in collaboration with SCRIBCO, for medical writing assistance. Funding for this research was provided by Merck & Co., Inc. The authors also wish to thank Eric Maiese and Sharlette Everett for their contributions to the design and implementation of the study and the analytic plan. The authors would also like to thank the study investigators who contributed to patient enrollment and data collection: Drs. Young Il Hwang (Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital), Young Min Ye (Ajou University Medical Center), Joo Hee Kim (Ajou University Medical Center), Heung Woo Park (Seoul National University Hospital), Tae Wan Kim (Seoul National University Hospital), Jae Jeong Shim (Korea University Guro Hospital), Gyu Young Hur (Korea University Guro Hospital), Soo Taek Uh (SoonChunHyang University Hospital), Sang Ha Kim (Wonju Christian Hospital), Myoung Kyu Lee (Wonju Christian Hospital), Soo Keol Lee (Dong-A Medical Center), Jin Hong Chung (Yeungnam University Medical Center), Kyu Jin Kim (Yeungnam University Medical Center), Young Koo Jee (Dankook University Hospital), Kyung Mook Kim (Dankook University Hospital), Young Il Koh (Chonnam National University Hospital), Cheol Woo Kim (Inha university Hospital), You Sook Cho (Seoul Asan Medical Center), Tae Bum Kim (Seoul Asan Medical Center), Jae Myung Lee (Myeong Internal Medicine), Young Mok Lee (Good Friends Internal Medicine), Bong Chun Lee (Namsan Hospital), So Yoen Park (A&A Clinic).Peer reviewedPublisher PD