Oklahoma City University

About: Oklahoma City University is a education organization based out in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supreme court & Comparative law. The organization has 240 authors who have published 421 publications receiving 6923 citations.

A heuristic N-jobs/M-machines scheduling algorithm

Abstract: This paper presents a heuristic algorithm to minimize the makespan of the N-job/M-machine job-shop scheduling problem. The algorithm is based on the assumption that the (different) technological ordering of machines for each job is deterministic and that the problem is static. Hauristic priority rules are used to determine the job with the highest priority at each (scheduling) stage. The illustrative example demonstrates the systematic iteration to accomplish the scheduling.

The effect of risk on the value of lost international business profits

Abstract: The primary goal for providing damages for loss of business profits to a plaintiff, is to make the plaintiff whole with regards to monetary losses suffered. When the loss of profits results from international operations, the determination of the loss is more complex than from domestic operations, since political and currency risk need to be considered in addition to business risk. When lost profits occur in the future, these need to be discounted to present value. The discount rate used to discount these profits should be adjusted to acount for the risk associated with these future lost profits.

All the Freedom You Can Want: The Purported Collapse of the Problem of Free Will

Abstract: Reflections on free choice and determinism constitute a recurring, if rarified, sphere of legal reasoning. Controversy, of course, swirls around the perennially vexing question of the propriety of punishing human persons for conduct that they are unable to avoid. Drawing upon conditions similar, if not identical, to those traditionally associated with attribution of moral fault, persons subject to such necessitating causal constraints generally are not considered responsible in the requisite sense for their conduct; and, thus, they are not held culpable for its consequences. The standard argument against free choice asserts that free choice cannot exist because determinism, as a property of laws governing the cosmos, excludes such a possibility. This contingent factual claim, however, has always proven problematic. Contemporary discussions - no doubt aware of this disputed factual premise - draw upon a more novel, and arguably more devastating critique: free will must be rejected because its very conception is incoherent. Rather than assuming the existence of determinism and attempting to show its incompatibility with free will, this argument begins with consideration of the idea of free choice and concludes that, if it is to have any sense at all, it must be compatible with determinism. Obviously, no single treatment of the free will problem could address all its nuances. This Article more modestly offers one possible approach to the question. Part I elaborates in more detail the view that the traditional conception of free choice is incoherent and, thus, inevitably undermines the very responsibility it is asserted to constitute; Part II considers the resulting effort to develop a model of human freedom compatible with determinism; and Part III, drawing upon the prior discussions, describes - in terms of classical action theory - a conception of free choice justifying personal moral and legal responsibility that avoids both the incoherence of "uncaused freedom" as well as the shortcomings of determinism.

The effects of overtraining and delay on reversal and nonreversal shifts in kindergarten children

Abstract: Kindergarten children were randomly assigned to one of eight treatment conditions in a 2 by 2 by 2 factorial design involving reversal and nonreversal shifts, criterion and overtraining, and immediate and delayed shifts. The problems were composed of a two-choice discrimination involving shape or brightness. A reversal shift consisted of shifting from the positive to the negative cue within a dimension, and a non-reversal shift consisted of shifting to a different dimension. The only significant finding was that the 24-h delay between training and transfer trials improved performance in the other conditions. Possible explanations for these findings were offered.

What Does It Mean To Be Critical? On Literary and Social Critique in Walter Benjamin

Abstract: If critical theory is to claim its place in philosophy as not merely an attitude or a set of alliances, but also as a coherent philosophy, then what is necessary most of all is to specify the nature of what it means to be critical in a manner that is both methodically concrete and original to this movement. This chapter proposes turning to the early and middle writings of Walter Benjamin in order to give such a formulation. The concept of critique or criticism (Kritik) points toward the inner core of early critical theory’s development because it cuts across two of the central concerns of the first generation of critical theory: art criticism and social critique. Walter Benjamin’s work has an especially strong significance in helping us understand the entwinement between these two dimensions of the concept of critique. This is because, the author argues, critique is ultimately for Benjamin an epistemological category that cuts across both the reception of art and the participation in political life.