To be held as part of the

AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012
in honour of Alan Turing

July 2nd to 6th, 2012
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

See http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/turing12

Firstly, Sheldon Cooper makes an unexpected reference to Gottlob Frege: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_TQea0aOnE(1:39)

Secondly, here is some dialogue from one scene:

Howard Wolowitz: [after everyone cheers for him and his team design going to space] It gets better! Someone has to go up with the telescope as a payload specialist, and guess who that someone is!
Sheldon Cooper: Mohammed Lee. [everyone's looking confused]
Howard Wolowitz: Who’s Mohammed Lee?
Sheldon Cooper: Mohammed is the most common first name in the world, and Lee the most common surname. As I didn’t know the answer, I thought that’d give me a mathematical edge.

For someone who is supposed to be a genius, Sheldon seems not to be familiar with basic laws of probability. I think that this scene provides a cool example of the fact that it does not necessarily follow from two things A and B each having a relatively high probability below 1 that their conjunction shares a high probability.

In fact, it can be zero. I wonder if there are any Herman Lee’s out there.

Error Message: A column has been specified more than once in the order by list. Columns in the order by list must be unique.

So basically, if you give SQL Server a query like


SELECT * FROM Example ORDER BY Example_Column1, Example_Column1


you get such a message.

I am wondering, is there any logical reason why SQL Server does not tolerate a column being specified more than once in the ORDER BY clause? I would think that ORDER BY should just obey something like idempotence, so that the above query simply reduces to:


SELECT * FROM Example ORDER BY Example_Column1


This doesn’t happen with MySQL. As well as the above example, I also tried the following in MySQL and it didn’t complain:


SELECT * FROM Example ORDER BY Example_Column1, Example_Column2, Example_Column1


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Title: The Logic of Knowledge and the Flow of Information

Abstract: In this talk I cover some work still in development which concerns the notions of information and knowledge as exemplified in Fred Dretske’s ‘Knowledge and The Flow of Information’. In particular, I cover (1) some work on the logic of information flow and (2) the issue of developing an epistemic logic which captures Dretske’s notion of knowledge as a semi-penetrating operator.