Joint attention has been extensively studied in the developmental literature because of overwhelming evidence that the ability to socially coordinate visual attention to an object is essential to healthy developmental outcomes, including language learning. The goal of this study was to understand the complex system of sensory-motor behaviors that may underlie the establishment of joint attention between parents and toddlers. In an experimental task, parents and toddlers played together with multiple toys. We objectively measured joint attention—and the sensory-motor behaviors that (...) underlie it—using a dual head-mounted eye-tracking system and frame-by-frame coding of manual actions. By tracking the momentary visual fixations and hand actions of each participant, we precisely determined just how often they fixated on the same object at the same time, the visual behaviors that preceded joint attention and manual behaviors that preceded and co-occurred with joint attention. We found that multiple sequential sensory-motor patterns lead to joint attention. In addition, there are developmental changes in this multi-pathway system evidenced as variations in strength among multiple routes. We propose that coordinated visual attention between parents and toddlers is primarily a sensory-motor behavior. Skill in achieving coordinated visual attention in social settings—like skills in other sensory-motor domains—emerges from multiple pathways to the same functional end. (shrink)

This essay is a critical response to Loren Lomasky's essay in this volume: The essay argues that Lomasky both overestimates the value of eating meat and underestimates the harms to animals of practices surrounding meat eating. While Lomasky takes the fact that an animal would not have lived at all if it were not being raised for food to constitute a benefit for animals being so raised, this essay argues that it would be better for animals raised on factory farms (...) to have never been born. It also contends that Lomasky overstates his case regarding the benefits of meat eating for human well-being. While gastronomic experiences can enrich our lives, it would be a mistake to think that meat eating is indispensable to the enrichment of our lives; one canexperience the flourishing of eating well without eating animals. (shrink)

Why was Ivan Pavlevich Pavlov so widely celebrated in the decades after 1900? As his story of the 'freedom reflex' illustrates, Pavlov often overstated his observations. By calling all innate behaviour a reflex and all learned behaviour a conditional reflex, he meant to eliminate consciousness and volition from science. Pavlov's universal reflex explanation became the prototype for behaviourism.

Law (Philosophical concept); methodology.

There is a curious reluctance in many quarters to try to apply to the philosophical questions the ordinary person in the street is continually raising, the technique and results of recent logical and philosophical analysis. Ordinary persons like Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary persist in asking questions about the meaning of the Universe and the destiny of the individual. Yet, on the whole, the only answers that are offered come from those quarters that find themselves to-day increasingly out of tune (...) with the temper and idiom of the times and more and more out-manoeuvred by the “talkie” and the gossip columnist of the gutter press. This situation has certain unfortunate results, and consequently imposes on philosophical analysis a special function at the present time. (shrink)

تقومُ فكرةُ هذه الدِّراسة على الرَّبط بينَ القُدرة على اكتساب اللُّغة الثَّانية وطبيعة البيئة الَّتي تُستَخدَمُ فيها هذه اللُّغة. وينشُدُ الباحثُ تطبيقَ فكرتِهِ على نموذج تعليم العربيَّة للنَّاطقينَ بالتُّركيَّة، نظرًا لحاجة هؤلاء إلى استخدام العربيَّة في مُجتمعهم التُّركيّ. ولأنَّ تعليمَ اللُّغة العربيَّة يستدعي الوُقُوفَ على واقع استعمالِها، سواءٌ أكانَ هذا الاستعمالُ في بيئتها العربيَّة أم في بيئةٍ أخرى، فإنَّ هذه الدِّراسةَ تسعى إلى تقديم رؤيةٍ منهجيَّة لكيفيَّة بناء مُدوَّنةٍ لُغويَّةٍ مُتوازية [ثُنائيَّة اللُّغة] بينَ: التُّركيَّة والعربيَّة، ثُمَّ مُعالجة هذه الـمُدوَّنة لاستخلاص (...) المعارف الرَّئيسة من الـمُفرَدات والتَّراكيب [العربيَّة] الأكثر مُناسبَةً لبيئة الـمُتعلِّم [التُّركيَّة]، استرشادًا بمعايير الإطار الأوروبيّ المرجعيّ العامّ للُّغات (CEFR). وقد التزَمَت الدِّراسةُ المنهجَ الوصفيّ الَّذي يُعنى بدراسة الظَّواهر اللُّغويَّة والتَّعبير عنها كمًّا وكيفًا، على الصُّورة الَّتي تبدو عليها اللُّغةُ في الواقع، انطلاقًا من أدبيَّات لسانيَّات الـمُدوَّنة من ناحيةٍ واللِّسانيَّات التَّربويَّة من ناحيةٍ أخرى. وتهدفُ الدِّراسةُ إلى مُعالَجة الفجوة بينَ الـمُقرَّرات التَّعليميَّة للعربيَّة – بمُستوياتها الـمُختلفة – والبيئة [غَير العربيَّة] الَّتي يعيشُ فيها الـمُتعلِّم التُّركيّ؛ حيثُ يجدُ هذا الـمُتعلـمُ نفسَه مُضطرًّا إلى تعلُّم كثيرٍ من الـمُفرَدات والأساليب والتَّراكيب الَّتي قد تكونُ غريبةً أو نادرة الاستخدام في مُجتَمَعه، الأمر الَّذي ينعكسُ على قُدرته على مُمارسة اللُّغة والتَّمكُّن منها. وقد توصَّلَت الدِّراسةُ إلى جُملةٍ من النَّتائج، منها: تطوير مُدوَّنة لُغويَّة مُتوازية بينَ التُّركيَّة والعربيَّة ومُعالجة مادَّتها لغاية تعليم العربيَّة للنَّاطقينَ بالتُّركيَّة، وتقديم تصوُّر منهجيٍّ لكيفيَّة توظيف هذه الـمُدوَّنة في تعليم العربيَّة كلُغة ثانية، وطرح مُقاربة اقتصاديَّة تُساعدُ على الإفادة من الموارد التَّعليميَّة في توفير الوقت والجُهد الـمَبذُولَين في عمليَّتَي التَّعليم والتَّعلُّم. (shrink)

In physics, free will is debated mainly in regard to the observer-dependent effects. To eliminate them from quantum mechanics, superdeterminism postulates that the universe is a computation, and consciousness is an automaton. As a result, free will is impossible. Quantum no-go theorems tell us that the only natural phenomenon that might be able to account for every bit of freedom in the universe is quantum randomness. With randomness in Nature, the universe could not have been predetermined completely in the sense (...) that it should be impossible in principle to compute from the big bang or at any later moment whether live and conscious observers might or might not appear there. After all, superdeterminism comes to be either self-inconsistent by assuming randomness, at least, at the initial conditions of the big bang, or untestable and mysterious by pushing every bit of freedom in back to the prerequisites of the universe “designed” in the big bang. (shrink)

This article chronicles the material conditions of producing a film in the Philippine independent film scene which has experienced a marked resurgence at the turn of the century, and has been credited for having revived the ailing Filipino film industry. By way of case study, I use my own film Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (international title: The Rapture of Fe), awarded the best feature-length digital film at the 33rd Cairo Film Festival in 2009. I co-produced, wrote and directed this film. (...) I recount the different factors that helped shape the film, from scripting to film financing, and provide further evidence of the significance of the private sector, in infusing new money and in reviving the national Filipino film industry as a whole. (shrink)

Cosmology is currently a broad and rapidly developing field of knowledge.

Principled discussions of civil rights became inherently less likely as a direct result of the observation by Earl Warren, in Brown v. Board of Education, that, respecting freedmen, “Education of Negroes was almost non-existent, and practically all of the race were illiterate,” and in proportion as that observation increasingly became the foundation of common opinion on the subject. Warren's observation was not true in any meaningful or non-trivial sense. Nevertheless, it served to perpetuate the myth of a backward people needing (...) help to catch up instead of the truth of a people being held back. That is the perspective – the disadvantaged group perspective – that ultimately infected all discussion of civil rights, even after the designation of so-called “disadvantaged groups” had been extended beyond American blacks. To define civil rights, we may well begin with what all mankind would likely recognize. Thus the dictionary definition of “civil rights” stands: “the rights that belong to all individuals in a nation or community touching property, marriage, and the like.” In that definition the term “rights” may be further expanded to mean “legitimate claims,” following the definition of right as law – as “a claim or title or interest in anything whatever that is enforceable by law.” This definition applies with minimal distinction of regimes intruding and, therefore, without the host of recent complications in the United States that create the impression that civil rights have something to do with pluralism. Previously, the generic definition was thought to exhaust the meaning of the term in the United States. (shrink)