Zentrale Denkfiguren der von Wolfgang Klafki begründeten kritisch-konstruktiven Erziehungswissenschaft werden in diesem Buch aufgegriffen und in ihrem Innovationswert für die wissenschaftliche Pädagogik reflektiert. Namhafte Autorinnen und Autoren unterschiedlicher Subdisziplinen und Generationen vertiefen Klafkis Ansatz theoretisch wie methodisch und öffnen Problemstellungen, die bisher nicht bearbeitet worden sind.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

A clear and provocative introduction to the ethics of COVID-19, suitable for university-level students, academics, and policymakers, as well as the general reader. It is also an original contribution to the emerging literature on this important topic. The author has made it available Open Access, so that it can be downloaded and read for free by all those who are interested in these issues. Key features include: -/- A neat organisation of the ethical issues raised by the pandemic. An exploration (...) of the many complex interconnections between these issues. A succinct case for a continued lockdown until we develop a vaccine. An original account of the Deep Moral Problem of the Pandemic, and a Revolutionary Argument for how we should change society post-pandemic. References to, and engagement with, many of the best writings on the pandemic so far (both in popular media and academic journals). -/- ISBN: 978-0-6489016-0-0. (shrink)

As with many other countries, Malaysia is also developing and promoting biomedical research to increase the understanding of human diseases and possible interventions. To facilitate this development, there is a significant growth of biobanks in the country to ensure continuous collection of biological samples for future research, which contain extremely important personal information and health data of the participants involved. Given the vast amount of samples and data accumulated by biobanks, they can be considered as reservoirs of precious biomedical big (...) data. It is therefore imperative for biobanks to have in place regulatory measures to ensure ethical use of the biomedical big data. Malaysia has yet to introduce specific legislation for the field of biobanking. However, it can be argued that its existing Personal Data Protection Act 2010 has laid down legal principles that can be enforced to protect biomedical big data generated by the biobanks. Consent is a mechanism to enable data subjects to exercise their autonomy by determining how their data can be used and ensure compliance with legal principles. However, there are two main concerns surrounding the current practice of consent in biomedical big data in Malaysia. First, it is uncertain that the current practice would be able to respect the underlying notion of autonomy, and second, it is not in accordance with the legal principles of the PDPA. Scholars have deliberated on different strategies of informed consent, and a more interactive approach has recently been introduced: dynamic consent. It is argued that a dynamic consent approach would be able to address these concerns. (shrink)

Our study considers the governance, ethics and operational challenges associated with the acquisition, manipulation and commodification of ‘big data’ in the financial services sector. To the best of our knowledge, there are no published studies describing empirical research undertaken within companies in this sector to understand how they are responding to such challenges: our field-based research is a significant initial contribution in this respect. We describe the results of a micro-ethnographic study undertaken in a small-to-medium-sized company developing disruptive, technology-related platforms (...) and services in the banking and retail sectors based on big data and associated analytics: these are used to derive commercially valuable insights from personal customer data in exchange for cash back and targeted rewards. The company was found to employ a multi-level innovation governance approach, underpinned by an ethical strategy based on a principle of mutual benefit. Opt-in and informed consent for using data for specific purposes was supported by principles of data minimisation and anonymisation, with unrestricted use of secondary, anonymised and aggregated data to develop insights. Governance, which included contextual data protection legislation, payment-card industry data usage standards and internal corporate controls, presented as bespoke organisational practices relating to data security and privacy. These in total set the governance and ethics frame for big data innovation at the company within which it has had to be both adaptive and responsive under conditions of normative and regulatory uncertainty. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Developing a Dialogical Platform for Disseminating Research through Design” by Abigail C. Durrant, John Vines, Jayne Wallace & Joyce Yee. Upshot: The Research Through Design conferences represent important steps towards more meaningful academic practices, not only within the field of research through design but potentially for many related academic fields. In order to realize this potential, I would like to take a step back and look at the RTD community in the context of a (...) larger academic landscape. (shrink)

This book presents the first English translation of the original French treatise “La Physique d’Einstein” written by the young Georges Lemaître in 1922, only six years after the publication of Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. It includes an historical introduction and a critical edition of the original treatise in French supplemented by the author’s own later additions and corrections. -/- Monsignor Georges Lemaître can be considered the founder of the “Big Bang Theory” and a visionary architect of modern Cosmology. (...) The scientific community is only beginning to grasp the full extent of the legacy of this towering figure of 20th century physics. Against the best advice of the greatest names of his time, the young Lemaître was convinced, solely through the study of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, that space and time must have had a beginning with a tremendous “Big Bang” from a “quantum primeval atom” resulting in an ever-expanding Universe with a positive cosmological constant. -/- But how did the young Lemaître, essentially on his own, come to grips with the physics of Einstein? A year before his ordination as a diocesan priest, he submitted the audacious treatise, published in this book, that was to earn him Fellowships to study at Cambridge, MIT and Harvard, and launched him on a scientific path of ground-breaking discoveries. Almost a century after Lemaître’s seminal publications of 1927 and 1931, this highly pedagogical treatise is still of timely interest to young minds and remains of great value from a history of science perspective. (shrink)

A dazzling insight into what gives meaning to our life and to us as a species. What makes us human? From Professor Brian Cox on the particles of dust that make us, to Caitlin Moran on the joy of Friday nights, and A C Grayling on how we express ourselves through culture: this illuminating book shares over 100 mind-expanding answers to that question. We all want to understand our place in the universe and find a sense of purpose in the (...) life. This book will help the reader navigate that journey with the help of leading names from the worlds of literature, history, philosophy, politics, sport, comedy and popular culture. Originally broadcast as a popular feature on the Jeremy Vine Show, What Makes Us Human? includes short essays from: Andrew Marr, Carlo Rovelli, Justin Welby, Marian Keyes, Alain de Botton, Robert Webb, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, and many more"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

The edition of the Nachlass from the early thirties by Michael Nedo and the completion of the "Bergen Electronic Edition" (BEE) have provided Wittgenstein scholars with all the material required to investigate the author's philosophical development starting with his auto-criticism of the "Tractatus" and leading to his later views. Wittgenstein's strategy of dictating from his notebooks and cutting up the typescripts to rearrange paragraphs into sequences of remarks is well documented in Nedo's edition and the BEE provides convenient facsimile access (...) to every page Wittgenstein wrote or edited throughout the process. Some researchers have begun to revise received opinions that were based upon the "books" previously published by the trustees. (Hrachovec 2002, 2004, Kientzler 1997, Nyiri 2002, Pichler 2004, Stern 2002) Yet, the scientific community has barely begun to discover the richness and density of the philosophical endeavor manifesting itself in this material. There has, understandably, been an interest to trace the origin of remarks, well-known from the "Philosophical Investigations", providing some background to Wittgenstein's most popular ideas. Various doctrines of what is becoming known as the "middle Wittgenstein" have been noticed, but they have themselves been perceived as more or less consolidated theories. Wittgenstein's editorial activity has been recognized as a hypertextual undertaking avant la lettre, yet there has been insufficient attention to the philosophical impact of these hypertextual strategies themselves. It is all too easy to be caught by someprovisional result captured on a printed page and to overlook the fact that some of its philosophical significance can only be recognized by considering its genesis. (shrink)

Rev. and expanded ed. of: How to build a habitable planet / Wallace S. Broecker. 1985.

Explores philosophy and notable philosophers, discussing "thought experiments," and how to explain a complex idea through a story.

In this paper, we discuss several problems with current Big data practices which, we claim, seriously erode the role of informed consent as it pertains to the use of personal information. To illustrate these problems, we consider how the notion of informed consent has been understood and operationalised in the ethical regulation of biomedical research (and medical practices, more broadly) and compare this with current Big data practices. We do so by first discussing three types of problems that can impede (...) informed consent with respect to Big data use. First, we discuss the transparency (or explanation) problem. Second, we discuss the re-repurposed data problem. Third, we discuss the meaningful alternatives problem. In the final section of the paper, we suggest some solutions to these problems. In particular, we propose that the use of personal data for commercial and administrative objectives could be subject to a ‘soft governance’ ethical regulation, akin to the way that all projects involving human participants (e.g., social science projects, human medical data and tissue use) are regulated in Australia through the Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs). We also consider alternatives to the standard consent forms, and privacy policies, that could make use of some of the latest research focussed on the usability of pictorial legal contracts. (shrink)

Big Data’s calculative ontology relies on and reproduces a form of hyperindividualism in which the ontological unit of analysis is the discrete data point, the meaning and identity of which inheres in itself, preceding, separate, and independent from its context or relation to any other data point. The practice of Big Data governed by an ontology of hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through practices of governance and, from there, throughout myriad dimensions of everyday life. (...) In this paper, I explicate Big Data’s ontology of hyperindividualism by contrasting it to a coconstitutive ontology that prioritizes relationality, context, and interdependence. I then situate the ontology of hyperindividualism in its genealogical context, drawing from Patrick Joyce’s history of liberalism and John Dewey’s pragmatist account of individualism, liberalism, and social action. True to its genealogical provenance, Big Data’s ontological politics of hyperindividualism reduces governance to the management of atomistic behavior, undermines the contribution of urban complexity as a resource for governance, erodes the potential for urban democracy, and eviscerates the possibility of collective resistance. (shrink)

Commercial success of big data has led to speculation that big-data-like reasoning could partly replace theory-based approaches in science. Big data typically has been applied to ‘small problems’, which are well-structured cases characterized by repeated evaluation of predictions. Here, we show that in climate research, intermediate categories exist between classical domain science and big data, and that big-data elements have also been applied without the possibility of repeated evaluation. Big-data elements can be useful for climate research beyond small problems if (...) combined with more traditional approaches based on domain-specific knowledge. The biggest potential for big-data elements, we argue, lies in socioeconomic climate research. (shrink)

Este artículo se centra en el análisis del uso de la industria del big data en la política. Se examina de forma pormenorizada el caso de la empresa Cambridge Analytica y se profundiza en los efectos del uso de la tecnología del big data en el referéndum de permanencia de Reino Unido en la Unión Europea y en las elecciones presidenciales estadounidenses de 2016. El objetivo es exponer los efectos nocivos que tiene el uso de la tecnología del big data (...) en los procesos electorales y los daños que esta tecnología puede producir en los sistemas democráticos. (shrink)

The big bang idea is not only a dominant idea in cosmology but also a very successfully idea out of cosmology. Although sometimes just in metaphorical sense, the big bang idea is present, since some decades, in a variety of domains such as natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, arts, and it also has a great acceptance by the general public. Furthermore, the term Big Bang has become increasingly popular and currently it is often used with very different purposes, including commercial (...) purposes, in contexts that have nothing to do with science, such as music, television, cinema, circus, house decoration, food, and other unexpected domains. Proposed by Gerald Holton, thematic analysis is a useful tool for studying cases like this, because it identifies and describes elements that cross and connect all areas of knowledge and culture in general and thus can help to understand the reception, appropriation and use of certain ideas in different but contemporary disciplinary and cultural contexts, which may be involved in intellectual fashions and in styles of thought of one particular time. (shrink)

In Big Gods, Norenzayan (2013) presents the most comprehensive treatment yet of the Big Gods question. The book is a commendable attempt to synthesize the rapidly growing body of survey and experimental research on prosocial effects of religious primes together with cross-cultural data on the distribution of Big Gods. There are, however, a number of problems with the current cross-cultural evidence that weaken support for a causal link between big societies and certain types of Big Gods. Here we attempt to (...) clarify these problems and, in so doing, correct any potential misinterpretation of the cross-cultural findings, provide new insight into the processes generating the patterns observed, and flag directions for future research. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to identify and analyze a set of challenges that are likely to be encountered when one embarks on fieldwork in linguistic communities that feature small, young, and/or non-standard languages with a goal to elicit big sets of rich data. For each challenge, we (i) explain its nature and implications, (ii) offer one or more examples of how it is manifested in actual linguistic communities, and (iii) where possible, offer recommendations for addressing it effectively. Our (...) list of challenges involves static characteristics (e.g., absence of orthographic conventions and how it affects data collection), dynamic processes (e.g., speed of language change in small languages and how it affects longitudinal collection of big amounts of data), and interactive relations between non-dynamic features that are nevertheless subject to potentially rapid change (e.g., absence of standardized assessment tools or estimates for psycholinguistic variables). The identified challenges represent the domains of data collection and handling, participant recruitment, and experimental design. Among other issues, we discuss population limits and degree of power, inter- and intraspeaker variation, absence of metalanguage and its implications for the process of eliciting acceptability judgments, and challenges that arise from absence of local funding, conflicting regulations in relation to privacy issues, and exporting large samples of data across countries. Finally, the ten experimental challenges presented cover a broad typological spectrum, encompassing both spoken and sign, extant and nearly extinct languages. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Technological advances introduce the possibility that, in the future, firms will be able to use big-data analysis to discover and offer consumers their individual reservation price. This can generate some interesting benefits, such as a better state of affairs in terms of equality of both welfare and resources, as well as increased social welfare. However, these benefits are countered by considerations of relational equality. This article takes up the market-failures approach as its basis to demonstrate what is wrong with using (...) big data to personalize prices. The article offers an improvement to the market-failures approach and argues that what is wrong with using big data to personalize prices is that it unfairly undermines consumers’ ability to benefit from the market, which is the very point of having a market. (shrink)

Has the rise of data-intensive science, or ‘big data’, revolutionized our ability to predict? Does it imply a new priority for prediction over causal understanding, and a diminished role for theory and human experts? I examine four important cases where prediction is desirable: political elections, the weather, GDP, and the results of interventions suggested by economic experiments. These cases suggest caution. Although big data methods are indeed very useful sometimes, in this paper’s cases they improve predictions either limitedly or not (...) at all, and their prospects of doing so in the future are limited too. (shrink)

Reclaiming ‘Big Nurse’: a feminist critique of Ken Kesey's portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Nurse Ratched or ‘Big Nurse’ in Ken Kesey's counter‐culture novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of popular culture's most arresting and memorable images of the nurse. She is, however, deemed to be remarkable primarily for her malice and authoritarianism. This paper argues that such a purely realist reading fails to fully appreciate the significance of the character of (...) Nurse Ratched. A feminist critique of the novel contends that die importance of ‘Big Nurse’ is less related to how realistic/unrealistic or good/bad she is as a nurse. Nurse Ratched is important because she exemplifies all diat traditional masculinity abhors in women, and particularly in strong women in positions of power and influence. This paper explores the stereotype of ‘Big Nurse’ and argues that Kesey's vision of her ultimate ‘conquest’ is not a progressive allegory of ‘individual freedom’, but a reactionary misogyny which would deny women any function other than that of sexual trophy. (shrink)

Big data increasingly enables prediction of the behaviour and characteristics of individuals. This is ethically concerning on privacy grounds. However, this article discusses other reasons for concern. These predictions usually rely on generalisations about what certain sorts of people tend to do. Generalisations of this sort are often under scrutiny in legal cases, where, for example, lawyers argue that people with prior convictions are more likely to be guilty of the crime they are currently on trial for. This article applies (...) criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable generalisations in legal cases to a number of big data examples. It argues that these criteria are helpful, and highlights three issues that should be taken into account when deciding whether predictions about individuals are ethical. (shrink)

Between 2006 and 2011, humanity accumulated 1,600 EB of data. As a result of this growth, there is now more data produced than available storage. This article explores the problem of “Big Data,” arguing for an epistemological approach as a possible solution to this ever-increasing challenge.

A comprehensive introduction to current research on the psychology of concept formation and use.

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 2, pp 306 - 326 In recent years David Christian and others have promoted “Big History” as an innovative approach to the study of the past. The present paper juxtaposes to Big History an old Big History, namely, the tradition of “universal history” that flourished in Europe from the mid-sixteenth century until well into the nineteenth century. The claim to universality of works in that tradition depended on the assumed truth of Christianity, a fact that (...) was fully acknowledged by the tradition’s adherents. The claim of the new Big History to universality likewise depends on prior assumptions. Simply stated, in its various manifestations the “new” Big History is rooted either in a continuing theology, or in a form of materialism that is assumed to be determinative of human history, or in a somewhat contradictory amalgam of the two. The present paper suggests that “largest-scale history” as exemplified in the old and new Big Histories is less a contribution to historical knowledge than it is a narrativization of one or another worldview. Distinguishing between largest-scale history and history that is “merely” large-scale, the paper also suggests that a better approach to meeting the desire for large scale in historical writing is through more modest endeavors, such as large-scale comparative history, network and exchange history, thematic history, and history of modernization. (shrink)