Soo Kim

The assumption that the justifiability of scientific belief depends exclusively on the relevant facts is a widely accepted orthodoxy both inside and outside of the scientific establishment. Drawing on the pragmatic and moral encroachment thesis in epistemology, this article challenges that assumption by showing that practical and moral considerations affect the justifiability of our beliefs regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. In particular, I show that a proper consideration of the practical and moral costs of committing to the belief that COVID-19 vaccines are safe enough for a general vaccine mandate requires COVID-19 vaccines to meet a higher-than-current evidentiary standard of safety. Furthermore, I show that a reassessment of existing COVID-19 vaccines against a higher evidentiary standard of safety would entail a wider scope of medical exemptions and remedial duties. Beyond the case of COVID-19 vaccines, this argument has important general implications for how scientific beliefs should be assessed.

© 2016, Nature Publishing Group. All rights reserved.The interaction between two different materials can present novel phenomena that are quite different from the physical properties observed when each material stands alone. Strong electronic correlations, such as magnetism and superconductivity, can be produced as the result of enhanced Coulomb interactions between electrons. Two-dimensional materials are powerful candidates to search for the novel phenomena because of the easiness of arranging them and modifying their properties accordingly. In this work, we report magnetic effects in graphene, a prototypical non-magnetic two-dimensional semi-metal, in the proximity with sulfur, a diamagnetic insulator. In contrast to the well-defined metallic behaviour of clean graphene, an energy gap develops at the Fermi energy for the graphene/sulfur compound with decreasing temperature. This is accompanied by a steep increase of the resistance, a sign change of the slope in the magneto-resistance between high and low fields, and magnetic hysteresis. A possible origin of the observed electronic and magnetic responses is discussed in terms of the onset of low-temperature magnetic ordering. These results provide intriguing insights on the search for novel quantum phases in graphene-based compounds.

© Author 2014.We use a 3-D regional atmospheric chemistry transport model to examine ozone dry deposition in East Asia, which is an important but uncertain research area because of insufficient observation and numerical studies focusing on East Asia. Here we compare two widely used dry deposition parameterization schemes, the Wesely and M3DRY schemes, which are used in the WRF-Chem and Community Multiscale Air Quality models, respectively. Simulated ozone dry deposition velocities with the two schemes under identical meteorological conditions show considerable differences owing to surface resistance parameterization discrepancies. Resulting ozone concentrations differ by up to 10 ppbv for a monthly mean in May when the peak ozone typically occurs in East Asia. An evaluation of the simulated dry deposition velocities shows that the Wesely scheme calculates values with more pronounced diurnal variation than the M3DRY and results in a good agreement with the observations. However, we find significant changes in simulated ozone concentrations using the Wesely scheme but with different surface type data sets, indicating the high sensitivity of ozone deposition calculations to the input data. The need is high for observations to constrain the dry deposition parameterization and its input data to improve the use of air quality models for East Asia.

Discovering the underlying mathematical expressions describing a dataset is a core challenge for artificial intelligence. This is the problem of symbolic regression. Despite recent advances in training neural networks to solve complex tasks, deep learning approaches to symbolic regression are underexplored. We propose a framework that leverages deep learning for symbolic regression via a simple idea: use a large model to search the space of small models. Specifically, we use a recurrent neural network to emit a distribution over tractable mathematical expressions and employ a novel risk-seeking policy gradient to train the network to generate better-fitting expressions. Our algorithm outperforms several baseline methods (including Eureqa, the gold standard for symbolic regression) in its ability to exactly recover symbolic expressions on a series of benchmark problems, both with and without added noise. More broadly, our contributions include a framework that can be applied to optimize hierarchical, variable-length objects under a blackbox performance metric, with the ability to incorporate constraints in situ, and a risk-seeking policy gradient formulation that optimizes for best-case performance instead of expected performance.

According to T.M. Scanlon, the core idea of contractualism consists in the claim that what we are morally required to do is conceptually grounded in the value of living in “relations of mutual recognition” with others. Specifically, Scanlon's contractualist idea of “living in relations of mutual recognition with others” requires that one act only in ways that cannot be reasonably rejected by all of those affected, according to the results of a hypothetical reflection conducted within one's own mind. I claim, however, that Scanlon is mistaken to rely on a single individual's hypothetical reflection (monological reflection) to determine what no one affected could reasonably reject. Instead, following Jürgen Habermas, I claim that we must engage in actual dialogue with all who stand to be affected, in order to live in relations of mutual recognition with others.

The problem of the “shift” in Lotmanian thought in his last period (the so-called Lotmanian explosion) still remains a subject of controversy for those who are interested in the scholarly heritage of Lotman. Besides explanations pointing out the “circumstantial” factors (for example, the historical context or influence from other thinkers) which brought about changes in Lotman’s views, it is important to identify a dimension of substantial “internal” changes which took place in the theoretical system itself. Regarding the essential changes relating to the concept of explosion as a movement from a ‘spatial’, more specifically ‘centre-periphery’ model to a ‘temporal’, namely ‘dislocated time’ model, the present article will focus on revealing the theoretical implication of this movement. The concept of explosion as an exceptional moment of ‘time out of joint’ was an active alternative to a theoretical breakthrough which was introduced in the process of overcoming the limitations of a previous ‘spatial’ model.