The Case for a Contemplative Philosophy of Education

I argue for the use of contemplative practices, such as meditation, journaling, reflection, etc., as an adjunct or alternative form of pedagogy that can help enrich student engagement, facilitate the creation of a philosophical mind state, and engender intrinsic curiosity and related psychological and/or motivational qualities that are supportive of educational ideals. I report on my own scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research performed in my philosophy classes, as a case study in point. I found that the more times students in my different philosophy courses meditated, the more their subjective responses changed on surveys about their philosophical attitudes and beliefs

Jay L. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy

Book review of Jay Garfield's Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy

Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists

Book review of Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists, Pitchstone Publishing, 2013, 280pp., $14.95, ISBN 978-1939578099 (paperback). Foreword by Michael Shermer. Science, Religion & Culture 1:2 (August 2014), 93-9

Earlier Buddhist Theories of Free Will: Compatibilism

A critical review of the first wave of publications on Buddhism and free will between the 1960s and 1980s

What Do Buddhists Think about Free Will?

A critical overview to the bulk of extant Buddhist theories of free will

Polca SARA - Full polarization, direction-dependent calibration and sparse imaging for radio interferometry

New generation of radio interferometers are envisaged to produce high quality, high dynamic range Stokes images of the observed sky from the corresponding under-sampled Fourier domain measurements. In practice, these measurements are contaminated by the instrumental and atmospheric effects that are well represented by Jones matrices, and are most often varying with observation direction and time. These effects, usually unknown, act as a limiting factor in achieving the required imaging performance and thus, their calibration is crucial. To address this issue, we develop a global algorithm, named Polca SARA, aiming to perform full polarization, direction-dependent calibration and sparse imaging by employing a non-convex optimization technique. In contrast with the existing approaches, the proposed method offers global convergence guarantees and flexibility to incorporate sophisticated priors to regularize the imaging as well as the calibration problem. Thus, we adapt a polarimetric imaging specific method, enforcing the physical polarization constraint along with a sparsity prior for the sought images. We perform extensive simulation studies of the proposed algorithm. While indicating the superior performance of polarization constraint based imaging, the obtained results also highlight the importance of calibrating for direction-dependent effects as well as for off-diagonal terms (denoting polarization leakage) in the associated Jones matrices, without inclusion of which the imaging quality deteriorates