Scholars have long pointed to the power of music as a primary source in instruction for bringing past actors into sharper view and engender deeper connections with the past. By employing Dimitri Shostakovich's 7th Symphony, composed amidst the Nazi siege of Leningrad during the Second World War, we sought to explore, more precisely, the nature of how music, as a primary source, enhances the study of history among students. Through the formulation, execution, and assessment of a two-day lesson with students (...) in five secondary history classes, three of which listened to the symphony and two of which did not, we found that the incorporation of the symphony resulted in students’ enhanced empathetic understanding of the past. Implications include details regarding profound opportunities for, as well as challenges to, cultivating historical empathy through the use of music as a primary source. (shrink)

The evolution of the equation of mass conservation in fluid mechanics is studied. Following early hydraulic approximations, and progress by Daniel and Johann Bernoulli, its first expression as a partial differential equation was achieved by d’Alembert, and soon given definitive form by Euler. Later reworkings by Lagrange, Laplace, Poisson and others advanced the subject, but all based their derivations on the conserved mass of a moving fluid particle. Later, Duhamel and Thomson gave a simpler derivation, by considering mass flow into (...) and out of a fixed portion of space. The later propagation of these derivations in nineteenth-century British textbooks and treatises is also examined, including Maxwell’s on the kinetic theory of gases. (shrink)

La complejidad del mundo actual demanda de nuevas formas de pensar, diferentes a las convencionales. La educación exige cambios acelerados en la formación de los seres humanos. Cambios impredecibles que toman por sorpresa, quizá se está frente a una transformación en contextos geográficos, comunicación, convivencia con los ‘otros’; todo ello afectado por las transformaciones constantes. A la par de estas transformaciones, las grandes problemáticas sociales, ambientales, políticas, económicas continúan creciendo, no se logra alcanzar una sostenibilidad en el estilo de vida (...) de las sociedades. Es cierto que estamos en un mundo globalizado gracias a la Internet y a las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC), por consecuente la información está al alcance de la mayoría de los seres humanos. Si el planeta está al frente de una globalización tecnológica, la educación también debe globalizarse, sin perder la identidad local. De ahí nace el desafío de reinventar los procesos de formación, direccionarlos hacia la transformación social, y al desarrollo de competencias profesionales básicas como el ‘aprender a vivir juntos’ bajo los cánones éticos que como civilización históricamente se practica. (shrink)

Circumcision is often claimed to be simpler, safer and more cost-effective when performed in the neonatal period as opposed to later in life, with a greater benefit-to-risk ratio. In the first part of this paper, we critically examine the evidence base for these claims, and find that it is not as robust as is commonly assumed. In the second part, we demonstrate that, even if one simply grants these claims for the sake of argument, it still does not follow that (...) neonatal circumcision is ethically permissible absent urgent medical necessity. Based on a careful consideration of the relevant evidence, arguments and counterarguments, we conclude that medically unnecessary penile circumcision—like other medically unnecessary genital procedures, such as ‘cosmetic’ labiaplasty—should not be performed on individuals who are too young (or otherwise unable) to provide meaningful consent to the procedure. (shrink)

Contingencies of the early nuclear arms race Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-23 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9495-z Authors S. S. Schweber, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Alex Wellerstein, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Ethan Pollock, Department of History, Box N, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA Barton J. Bernstein, History Department, Building 200, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2024, USA Michael D. Gordin, (...) History Department, 305 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

Media exposure can shape audience perceptions surrounding novel innovations, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and could influence whether they share information about AI with others online. This study examines the indirect association between exposure to AI in the media and information sharing about AI online. We surveyed 567 US citizens aged 18 and older in November 2020, several months after the release of Open AI’s transformative GPT-3 model. Results suggest that AI media exposure was related to online information sharing through (...) psychological proximity to the impacts of AI and positive AI performance expectancy in serial mediation. This positive indirect association became stronger the more an individual perceived society to be changing due to new technology. Results imply that public exposure to AI in the media could significantly impact public understanding of AI, and prompt further information sharing online. (shrink)

Medical and public health research includes surveys, interviews, and biospecimens — techniques that do not present substantial risks to subjects. Consequently, this research is exempt from regulation under the Federal Common Rule. Nevertheless, at many institutions, exempt research is frequently subject to the same regulatory process that is required for non-exempt research, requiring the consumption of time and resources for review by Institutional Review Board members or staff. The federal government has indicated an intention to reform and centralize this system, (...) but has not yet specified the form that it will use instead. By examining the policies of the top 50 research institutions, this article assesses institutional practices surrounding exempt research, quantifies the extent of exempt-research review requirements, documents a problem of “over-compliance,” and makes recommendations for reform. (shrink)

Social scientists have not integrated relevant knowledge from the biological sciences into their explanations of human behavior. This failure is due to a longstanding antireductionistic bias against the natural sciences, which follows on a commitment to the view that social facts must be explained by social laws. This belief has led many social scientists into the error of reifying abstract analytical constructs into entities that possess powers of agency. It has also led to a false nature-culture dichotomy that effectively undermines (...) the place of biology in social scientific explanation. Following the principles of methodological individualism, we show how behavioral explanations supported by data and theory from the neurosciences can be used to correct the errors of reificationist thinking in the social sciences. We outline a mechanistic approach to the explanation of human behavior with the hope that the biological sciences will begin to find greater acceptance among social scientists. (shrink)

Research has repeatedly confirmed that farmer field schools can serve as a bridge between science and farm practice, enhancing simultaneously rural social energy. However, even though social capital is a burgeoning topic in FFS research, it is not clear whether and how it mediates FFS performance. In this mixed-methods study, using data from two FFS projects conducted in Greece, we examined if social capital among trainees facilitates the co-creation of knowledge and the co-development of agricultural innovations by farmers. A thematic (...) analysis was performed to analyse qualitative data, whereas regression models were employed for the quantitative strand of analysis. Results revealed that social capital evolves progressively during FFS, enabling the achievement of the project’s aims by enhancing in-group communication, establishing affective ties, instilling a sense of community, and triggering motivational contagion among participants. Statistical analyses confirmed that the “softest” sides of social capital significantly contribute to knowledge and innovation co-production. Although this work was based on data derived only from two FFS projects that took place in Greece, our findings underline the importance of social capital for the success of any FFS project and emphasise the need for identifying routes to nurture social capital within FFS. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has forced a difficult trade-off between limiting the health impacts of the virus and maintaining economic activity. Welfare economics offers tools to conceptualize this trade-off so that policy-makers and the public can see clearly what is at stake. We review four such tools: the Value of Statistical Life (VSL); the Value of Statistical Life Years (VSLYs); Quality-Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs); and social welfare analysis, and argue that the latter are superior. We also discuss how to choose policies that (...) differentially affect people’s wellbeing. We argue in favor of evaluating policies using a Social Welfare Function (SWF), which evaluates the possible distributions of wellbeing across individuals that may result from a policy. Such a function, we argue, should regard increases in the wellbeing of the less well-off as especially valuable. We then use a model to illustrate how such a framework can help evaluate two broad policy types in response to the pandemic: eradication of the virus, and more lenient control of the spread. Our model reveals how such evaluations depend on many empirical facts but also on key value judgments about the relative importance of health and on the extent of special concern for the worse off. The purpose of this brief is not to make precise recommendations, as conditions vary widely across countries and over time, but to provide a methodology. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 2 Seiten: 734-737.

Two prevailing paradigms explain the diversity of sex-determining modes in reptiles. Many researchers, particularly those who study reptiles, consider genetic and environmental sex-determining mechanisms to be fundamentally different, and that one can be demonstrated experimentally to the exclusion of the other. Other researchers, principally those who take a broader taxonomic perspective, argue that no clear boundaries exist between them. Indeed, we argue that genetic and environmental sex determination in reptiles should be seen as a continuum of states represented by species (...) whose sex is determined primarily by genotype, species where genetic and environmental mechanisms coexist and interact in lesser or greater measure to bring about sex phenotypes, and species where sex is determined primarily by environment. To do otherwise limits the scope of investigations into the transition between the two and reduces opportunities to use studies of reptiles to advance understanding of vertebrate sex determination generally. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Control measures, such as “lockdowns”, have been widely used to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic. Under some conditions, they prevent illness and save lives. But they also exact an economic toll. How should we balance the impact of such policies on individual lives and livelihoods (and other dimensions of concern) to determine which is best? A widely used method of policy evaluation, benefit–cost analysis (BCA), answers these questions by converting all the effects of a policy into monetary equivalents and then summing (...) them up. A different method, social welfare analysis, proceeds by determining the effects of a policy on individual wellbeing and then applying an aggregation formula to them to evaluate the overall effects of a policy. In this chapter, we survey these methods and argue that social welfare analysis has important advantages. One crucial advantage is that it enables ethical considerations relating to the impact of policies on individual wellbeing and its distribution to be incorporated into policy assessments in a transparent way. We illustrate this with a simple numerical model for evaluating pandemic policies that vary in terms of the stringency of the controls that they impose on individual behaviour, showing how the evaluation depends on the ethical significance accorded to their impact on the wellbeing of different age and income groups. (shrink)

Active inference offers a unified theory of perception, learning, and decision-making at computational and neural levels of description. In this article, we address the worry that active inference may be in tension with the belief–desire–intention model within folk psychology because it does not include terms for desires at the mathematical level of description. To resolve this concern, we first provide a brief review of the historical progression from predictive coding to active inference, enabling us to distinguish between active inference formulations (...) of motor control and active inference formulations of decision processes. We then show that, despite a superficial tension when viewed at the mathematical level of description, the active inference formalism contains terms that are readily identifiable as encoding both the objects of desire and the strength of desire at the psychological level of description. We demonstrate this with simple simulations of an active inference agent motivated to leave a dark room for different reasons. Despite their consistency, we further show how active inference may increase the granularity of folk-psychological descriptions by highlighting distinctions between drives to seek information versus reward—and how it may also offer more precise, quantitative folk-psychological predictions. Finally, we consider how the implicitly conative components of active inference may have partial analogues in other systems describable by the broader free energy principle to which it conforms. (shrink)

Ship design needs to respond to and attract an ever more design conscious society. However, little research has been conducted into perceptions of beauty and pleasure and how such perceptions can be usefully absorbed into ship design. Aesthetic consideration, is seen as a distraction from the bespoke nature of the ship design process and is often avoided, second guessed or left for external consultancy. The ship design discipline requires the nurturing of its own aesthetic methods, for future development, and to (...) adapt some of the aesthetic ideals found in architecture, art and design. This paper argues that philosophy can be effective in interpreting what the passenger finds attractive and pleasurable. To illustrate the philosophical approach proposed, the `Elbe SWATH’ and the `Oasis of the Seas’ are investigated and compared using theoretical resources from the culturally focused philosophy of `Functional Beauty’. Conclusions suggest that the interpretation of the end users most valued appreciations can lead to design directives that deliver subjective qualities of beauty - beauty similar to those seen in the pure aims of the Elbe SWATH’s purposeful work craft, or comparable to nature’s beauty and purity in aim. (shrink)

The publication of the first Report of the International Panel on Social Progress is a significant intellectual event, both because of its hugely ambitious aim – of uniting the world's leading researchers from social sciences and the humanities to develop research-based, multi-disciplinary, non-partisan, action-guiding solutions to the central challenges of our time – and because it represents the completion of a mammoth effort in the service of this aim by a diverse set of 269 authors. In its attempt to synthesize (...) and render accessible to social actors a broad range of the latest social scientific knowledge, as well as in its confidence that knowledge can empower those actors to make progress, it recalls D'Alembert and Diderot's famous Encyclopédie. Indeed, one can say that the Report is a quintessential Enlightenment project. For example, in his famous Outlines of a Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, Condorcet asserts the possibility of an accumulation of empirical and theoretical knowledge and the concomitant expansion in our capacities to alleviate social and natural evils. And Condorcet and many of his contemporaries were motivated to propose political institutions that would enable such an indefinite increase in knowledge so as to bring about the attendant improvement to people's lives. (shrink)

La Cnil est confrontée à une évolution technologique incessante et considérable face à laquelle elle doit rester vigilante. La question des usages se pose au regard des menaces vis-à-vis de l'exercice des libertés. Un double traçage dans le temps et dans l'espace se produit, cristallisant les discours et la personnalité d'un individu de manière indélébile. La protection des données personnelles est appliquée de manière très inégale dans le monde tandis que le G29 fait respecter la législation de l'Union européenne sur (...) son territoire. Alors que la Cnil est amenée à assurer de plus en plus de contrôles, elle manque de moyens qu'il faudrait lui procurer en demandant des contributions aux collectivités territoriales et aux entreprises.To exercise the vigilance required of it, the CNIL - the French Data Protection Authority - has to deal with a continuous stream of technological development, which is often of major significance. The issue of data use needs to be addressed because it raises potential threats to civil liberties. Data leave traces both in space and time, generating indelible snapshots of individual discourses and personalities. Personal data protection is unevenly applied around the world, while the G29 enforces European data protection legislation within Europe. The CNIL is required to apply ever more controls, but lacks the financial resources do to so. These should be provided by contributions from territorial authorities and private companies. (shrink)

Anything is similar to anything, provided the respects of similarity are allowed to be gerrymandered or gruesome, as Goodman observed.2 But similarity in non-gruesome or—as I shall say—genuine respects is much less ecumenical. Colors, it seems, provide a compelling illustration of the distinction as applied to similarities among properties.3 For instance, in innumerable gruesome respects, blue is more similar to yellow than to purple. But in a genuine respect, blue is more similar to purple than to yellow (genuinely more similar, (...) as I shall sometimes put it). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXIV, Number 2, November 1998, pp. 335-354 "An Unaccountable Pleasure": Hume on Tragedy and the Passions ALEX NEILL Hume begins his essay "Of Tragedy" with a description of what he calls "a singular phaenomenon": It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are (...) touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end.... They are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, and cries to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swoln with the tenderest sympathy and compassion. The few critics who have had some tincture of philosophy, have remarked this singular phaenomenon, and have endeavoured to account for it.1 The account of the audience's experience of tragedy that Hume goes on to offer in "Of Tragedy" has been the target of criticism since the essay was published. My purpose in what follows is to show that some of what may appear to be the most damaging of that criticism is based on a misinterpretation of the thesis that Hume develops in the essay. I shall not attempt to argue that Hume's thesis is persuasive; indeed, I believe and have argued Alex Neill is at the Department of Philosophy, University of Southampton, Hants Sl 7 IBJ ENGLAND. 336 Alex Neill elsewhere that it is not.2 My project here is almost entirely interpretive: it is an attempt to get clear about what Hume's thesis concerning our experience of tragedy really is. To that end, it should be noted that the apparently "unaccountable" pleasure Hume describes at the beginning of "Of Tragedy" is something that he has remarked on before. In Book I of the Treatise, he notes that in matters of religion men take a pleasure in being terrify'd, and that no preachers are so popular, as those who excite the most dismal and gloomy passions. In the common affairs of life, where we feel and are penetrated with the solidity of the subject, nothing can be more disagreeable than fear and terror; and 'tis only in dramatic performances and in religious discourses, that they ever give pleasure? The phenomenon that Hume finds so remarkable in these passages from "Of Tragedy" and the Treatise is thus, at a minimum, that in certain circumstances, such as when we are at the theatre, we may find agreeable the experience of "the most dismal and gloomy passions." The explanation he gives of this phenomenon in the Treatise is as follows: In these latter cases the imagination reposes itself indolently on the idea; and the passion, being soften'd by the want of belief in the subject, has no more than the agreeable effect of enlivening the mind, and fixing the attention. (T 115) Hume's explanation of how the experience of "uneasy" passions can be enjoyed when we are in church and at the theatre thus has two components. First, because we do not believe the stories we are told in church4 and at the theatre, the uneasy passions we experience are not so very uneasy; as he puts it later in the Treatise, in such circumstances the passion in question "lies not with that weight upon us: It feels less firm and solid" (T 631). Second, a weakly disagreeable passion of this sort agreeably "enlivens" the mind and "fixes" (or as he says later, "rouzes") our attention. By the time he wrote "Of Tragedy," however, Hume had come to regard this explanation of his "singular phaenomenon" as inadequate. With regard to the idea that the passions, even if "uneasy," have the pleasurable effect of "enlivening" the mind (an idea which in "Of Tragedy" he attributes to Dubos), Hume objects that having one's mind "enlivened," one's attention "fixed" or "rouzed," need not be pleasurable: "the same object of distress, which pleases in a tragedy, were it really set before us, would give the most unfeigned uneasiness; though it... (shrink)