Why not bring back corporal punishment? That's a question raised by Blair's macho talk about overhauling the criminal justice system. Corporal punishment has obvious advantages. It's cheap. And it would satisfy the public's desire to see independent financial adviser criminals punished. Sure, it wouldn't take criminals off the streets, so it's an alternative to non-custodial sentences rather than to jail. Would it be an effective deterrent? This is an empirical question which could be tested in pilot studies in different areas: how would the stocks, flogging or the pillory fare against tagging or community service? If the government is serious about evidence-based policy-making, it would want to find out. There are two objections to corporal punishment that aren't good enough. One is that it's illiberal. I just don't see this. Are a few public floggings really a lesser exercise of state power than a full therapeutic-managerialist approach to trying to change criminals' characters? And remember - corporal punishment is consistent with the due legal process that Blair is trying to undermine . Who's being anti-liberal? Another misplaced objection is that corporal punishment is barbaric. New Labour cannot use this objection - not when it wants to spend billions on the means of burning millions of innocent people to death. What's more, good deterrents are necessarily barbaric.

Why not bring back corporal punishment? That's a question raised by Blair's macho talk about overhauling the criminal justice system. Corporal punishment has obvious advantages. It's cheap. And it would satisfy the public's desire to see criminals punished. Sure, it wouldn't take criminals off the streets, so it's an alternative to non-custodial sentences rather than to jail. Would it be an effective deterrent? This is an empirical question which could be copy hard drive tested in pilot studies in different areas: how would the stocks, flogging or the pillory fare against tagging or community service? If the government is serious about evidence-based policy-making, it would want to find out. There are two objections to corporal punishment that aren't good enough. One is that it's illiberal. I just don't see this. Are a few public floggings really a lesser exercise of state power than a full therapeutic-managerialist approach to trying to change criminals' characters? And remember - corporal punishment is consistent with the due legal process that Blair is trying to undermine . Who's being anti-liberal? Another misplaced objection is that corporal punishment is barbaric. New Labour cannot use this objection - not when it wants to spend billions on the means of burning millions of innocent people to death. What's more, good deterrents are necessarily barbaric.

I’ve recently been thinking a little bit (and only a little bit!) about the relation between intention and intentional action. Presumably, an intention is a mental state. And an intentional action is an action with a certain property, namely, the property of being intentional. According to the simple view of intentional action, intentional action requires the corresponding intention—that is, SVI: x intentionally A-s only if x intends to A. Nearly everyone thinks that this principle is just obvious the first time they see or hear it. But most philosophers of action reject it; they believe, instead, that it is a necessary condition for intentional action only that the actor has some intention or other. The standard way to argue against SVI is to offer putative counterexamples, such as variants on Harman’s sniper case (in crown molding install which a sniper, in knowingly firing his gun within earshot of his enemy, is said to intentionally alert the enemy to his presence, though he does not intend to do so; rather, he simply intends to shoot his target) or Knobe’s harm case (in which a businessman, in implementing a program that he knows will harm the environment, is said to intentionally harm the environment, though he does not intend to do so; rather, he simply intends to make a profit). One (in my opinion) very good philosopher sympathetic to SVI (who shall remain nameless) has responded to these not uncontroversial cases in conversation in an interesting manner.

I’ve recently been thinking a little bit (and only a little bit!) about the relation between intention and intentional action. Presumably, an intention is a mental state. And an intentional action is an action with a certain property, namely, the property of being intentional. According to the simple view of intentional action, intentional action requires the corresponding intention—that is, SVI: x intentionally A-s only if x intends to A. Nearly everyone thinks that this principle is just obvious the first wachovia online login time they see or hear it. But most philosophers of action reject it; they believe, instead, that it is a necessary condition for intentional action only that the actor has some intention or other. The standard way to argue against SVI is to offer putative counterexamples, such as variants on Harman’s sniper case (in which a sniper, in knowingly firing his gun within earshot of his enemy, is said to intentionally alert the enemy to his presence, though he does not intend to do so; rather, he simply intends to shoot his target) or Knobe’s harm case (in which a businessman, in implementing a program that he knows will harm the environment, is said to intentionally harm the environment, though he does not intend to do so; rather, he simply intends to make a profit). One (in my opinion) very good philosopher sympathetic to SVI (who shall remain nameless) has responded to these not uncontroversial cases in conversation in an interesting manner.

Fermilab and SLAC put out the symmetry Magazine. This magazine is aimed at the general (non-HEP) scientist and general public. It covers a wide range of topics and is put together quite professionally -- unlike most particle physics publications it looks good. In their shorts section they had an article titled Don't cite anyone over 30? -- which discusses the most productive age for a physicist. I'm past 30 now -- will be 40 in 6 months. So I must admit that I bristle a bit at the suggestion my most productive years are past. I certainly feel like I'm doing a lot. At least, I'm answering a lot of email. Doesn't that count for anything? Which is probably the key to that plot. The older I get the more different responsibilities I take on. Not only do I have various DZERO responsibilities, but now departmental as well. And on top of all that I want to produce physics. When I was a graduate student and post-doc I spent much more of my time on research and less on things like, well,... email. I also spend much more of my time advising others than I used to. I don't really get credit for that -- it isn't as if I've really done any work. The people I advise do all the work; so they should be getting all the credit. By extension, of course, I do get some credit, but it isn't the same as if I'd done the work myself. I conclude it is both true and false that your best years are when you are 30 or younger. Yes, you do more direct research and probably produce boat ramp the most new science.

Yesterday in Phoenix, Go Crazy Marketing organized and presented a workshop for real estate professionals, sponsored by 1st Class Funding . The winner of the door prize drawing was to get a blog setup at the workshop by Dave Barnhart of Business Blogging Pros , but alas... the timing of the workshop at precisely the moment of the power outage in San Francisco kept Dave from setting up the blog during the workshop as intended. Rochelle Kosanovich, Branch alka slim Manager of J. Roberts & Company won the drawing and Dave will be working with her directly to set up the account. Dave and I s poke afterwards and if during the workshop contingency planning any of us had said "well, what if Typepad goes down?", we would have been derided and scoffed at... hmmm. Nonetheless about a dozen real estate agents attended and by and large, I think they all walked away recognizing that social media and blogging are important strategies for the real estate agent of the future - the Agent2.0 ™ . As we arrived, setup for the event was underway with the Jobing.com crew here in Phoenix and for reasons unknown, the Typepad.com domain was completely unavailable - the technical party thought that perhaps Jobing.com had banned the Typepad domain - not true of course, but it was not a realization that we could comprehend until we saw a screen from Typepad indicating the outage.