The economic impacts of the Green Revolution have been studied widely, but not its social-cultural effects on different farming communities. The adoption of high yielding varieties (HYVs) of rice changed the nature of rice farming in the two West Bengal villages of Padulara and Naigachi. The villages present an interesting contrast of socio-economic and cultural change due to the differences in the level of adoption of agricultural technologies. This study documents the social and cultural impacts of agricultural (...) technology adoption, specifically the effect on rituals which guided the stages of traditional rice farming and communal life. Agricultural rituals are being modified to suit the processes of modern rice farming, while family rituals are holding strong. The study also shows the evolving nature of rituals as it reflects new found wealth, gender roles, and economic class in these villages. (shrink)

High‐throughput DNA analyses are increasingly being used to detect rare mutations in moderately sized genomes. These methods have yielded genome mutation rates that are markedly higher than those obtained using pre‐genomic strategies. Recent work in a variety of organisms has shown that mutation rate is strongly affected by sequence context and genome position. These observations suggest that high‐throughput DNA analyses will ultimately allow researchers to identify trans‐acting factors and cis sequences that underlie mutation rate variation. Such work should (...) provide insights on how mutation rate variability can impact genome organization and disease progression. (shrink)

Assess to quality diets is a basic human right. Geographical challenges and cultural traditions have contributed to the widespread malnutrition present among ethnic minorities of mountainous areas in Northwest Vietnam. Home gardens can play a role in increased diet diversity and micronutrient intakes. However, low production yields and plant diversity in ethnic home gardens have limited their contributions to household food security and nutrition. The pilot study tested a home garden intervention in weekly vegetable harvests and increasing household production and (...) consumption of diverse vegetables year-round. Food ethics issues encountered included limited access to quality food by resource-poor groups, conflicts arising from low preference and value given to some nutritious foods, limited access to information and technology for food production and consumption, each of which were addressed in the study design. The intervention includes: (1) nutrition-focused home garden training and (2) locally-adapted home garden packages consisting of garden planning, technical assistance, and high-yielding seed varieties. Twenty households from two ethnic villages in Son La province participated in the study and were randomly assigned into two groups (intervention and non-intervention). The total vegetable supply from weekly harvests of home garden produce was significantly higher in the intervention households (226 kg) compared to the non-intervention households (39 kg). The intervention group yielded 5.8 and 1.7 times more vegetables by weight and weight per area than those without the intervention. The vegetables were mainly consumed at home for both groups, but the intervention households gave more vegetables as gifts to neighbors. The intervention group cultivated a higher diversity of vegetables with a total of 42 different vegetables compared to 24 in the non-intervention group, which is reflected in an overall higher nutritional yield of vitamin A, iron, other micronutrients and phytochemicals. The home garden training significantly improved the amount, diversity and continuity of household food and nutrient supply. The home garden model is effective and could be scaled up to improve household vegetable supply and consumption, particularly in Northwest Vietnam. (shrink)

Awjila Berber is a highly endangered Berber variety spoken in eastern Libya. The minimal material available on it reveals that the language is in some respects very archaic and in others grammatically unique, and as such is of particular comparative and historical interest. Fieldwork has been impossible for decades due to the political situation. Recently, however, several inhabitants of Awjila have set up a Facebook group Ašal=ənnax (“our village”), posting largely in Awjili. Analysis of this partly conversational corpus makes it (...) possible to extend our knowledge of the language, yielding unattested words and constructions. Examination of its grammatical features also reveals that these posters’ usage is heavily influenced by Arabic, showing language attrition absent from earlier data; even subject-verb agreement has been extensively reworked. In both respects, this study casts light upon the uses and limits of social media as a source of linguistic material. (shrink)

Contextualists offer "high-low standards" practical cases to show that a variety of knowledge standards are in play in different ordinary contexts. These cases show nothing of the sort, I maintain. However Keith DeRose gives an ingenious argument that standards for knowledge do go up in high-stakes cases. According to the knowledge account of assertion (Kn), only knowledge warrants assertion. Kn combined with the context sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge. But is Kn correct? I offer a rival (...) account of warranted assertion and argue that it beats Kn as a response to the "knowledge" version of Moore's Paradox. (shrink)

People generally develop some degree of competence in general informal reasoning and argument skills, but how do they go beyond this to attain higher expertise? Ericsson has proposed that high-level expertise in a variety of domains is cultivated through a specific type of practice, referred to as ‘deliberate practice’. Applying this framework yields the empirical hypothesis that high-level expertise in informal reasoning is the outcome of extensive deliberate practice. This paper reports results from two studies evaluating the hypothesis. (...) University student participants completed 12 weeks of deliberate practice in informal reasoning. Quantity of practice was recorded by computer, and additionally assessed via self report. The hypothesis was supported: students in both studies showed a large improvement, and practice as measured by computer, was related to amount of improvement in informal reasoning. These findings support adopting a deliberate practice approach when attempting to teach or learn expertise in informal reasoning. (shrink)

Perception of temporal patterns is fundamental to normal hearing, speech, motor control, and music. Certain types of pattern understanding are unique to humans, such as musical rhythm. Although human responses to musical rhythm are universal, there is much we do not understand about how rhythm is processed in the brain. Here, I consider findings from research into basic timing mechanisms and models through to the neuroscience of rhythm and meter. A network of neural areas, including motor regions, is regularly implicated (...) in basic timing as well as processing of musical rhythm. However, fractionating the specific roles of individual areas in this network has remained a challenge. Distinctions in activity patterns appear between "automatic" and "cognitively controlled" timing processes, but the perception of musical rhythm requires features of both automatic and controlled processes. In addition, many experimental manipulations rely on participants directing their attention toward or away from certain stimulus features, and measuring corresponding differences in neural activity. Many temporal features, however, are implicitly processed whether attended to or not, making it difficult to create controlled baseline conditions for experimental comparisons. The variety of stimuli, paradigms, and definitions can further complicate comparisons across domains or methodologies. Despite these challenges, the high level of interest and multitude of methodological approaches from different cognitive domains (including music, language, and motor learning) have yielded new insights and hold promise for future progress. (shrink)

New technologies with military applications may demand new modes of governance. In this article, we develop a taxonomy of technology governance forms, outline their strengths, and red-team their weaknesses. In particular, we consider the challenges and opportunities posed by advancing artificial intelligence, which is likely to have substantial dual-use properties. We conclude that subnational governance, though prevalent and mitigating some risks, is insufficient when the individual rewards from societally harmful actions outweigh normative sanctions, as is likely to be the case (...) with AI. Nationally enforced standards are promising ways to govern AI deployment, but they are less viable in the “race-to-the-bottom” environments that are becoming common. When it comes to powerful technologies with military implications, there is only one multilateral option with a strong historical precedent: a non-proliferation plus norms-of-use regime, which we call NPT+. We believe that a non-proliferation regime may, therefore, be the necessary foundation for AI governance. However, AI may exhibit characteristics that would make a non-proliferation regime less effective than it has proven for nuclear weapons. As an alternative, verification-backed restrictions on AI development and use would address more risks, but they face challenges in the case of advanced AI, and we show how these challenges may not have technical solutions. Perhaps more importantly, we show that there is no clear example of major powers restricting the development of a powerful military technology when that technology lacks a ready substitute. We, therefore, turn to a final alternative, International Monopoly, which was the preferred solution of many scholars and policymakers in the early nuclear era. It should be considered again for governing AI: a monopoly would require less-invasive monitoring, though at the possible cost of eroding national sovereignty. Ultimately, we conclude that it is too soon to tell whether a non-proliferation regime, a verification-based regime, or an International Monopoly is most feasible for governing AI. Nonetheless, a variety of policies would yield a high return across all three scenarios, and we conclude by identifying some of these steps that could be taken today. (shrink)

This study assesses the extent to which job application forms violate the New Zealand Human Rights Act. The sample for the study includes 229 job application forms, collected from a variety of large and small, public- and private-sector organizations that together employ approximately 200,000 workers. Two hundred and four or 88% of the job application forms contain at least one violation of the Act. One hundred and sixty five or 72% contain two or more and 140 or 61% contain three (...) or more violations. The most common violations concern age, gender, nationality, and disability. The least common concern political opinion, ethical belief, religious belief, and sexual orientation. Despite widespread violations, many forms do have non-discriminatory questions that yield the same kind of useful information as discriminatory questions. Employers could incorporate these into their job application forms to bring themselves into compliance with the law. The same lessons also generally apply to North American employers, given the high degree of comparability between American, Canadian, and New Zealand anti-discrimination laws. (shrink)

In previous work we gave a mathematical foundation, referred to as DisCoCat, for how words interact in a sentence in order to produce the meaning of that sentence. To do so, we exploited the perfect structural match of grammar and categories of meaning spaces. Here, we give a mathematical foundation, referred to as DisCoCirc, for how sentences interact in texts in order to produce the meaning of that text. First we revisit DisCoCat. While in DisCoCat all meanings are fixed as (...) states, in DisCoCirc word meanings correspond to a type, or system, and the states of this system can evolve. Sentences are gates within a circuit which update the variable meanings of those words. Like in DisCoCat, word meanings can live in a variety of spaces e.g. propositional, vectorial, or cognitive. The compositional structure are string diagrams representing information flows, and an entire text yields a single string diagram in which word meanings lift to the meaning of the entire text. While the developments in this paper are independent of a physical embodiment, both the compositional formalism and suggested meaning model are highly quantum-inspired, and implementation on a quantum computer would come with a range of benefits. We also praise Jim Lambek for his role in mathematical linguistics in general, and the development of the DisCo program more specifically. (shrink)

The Hurvich-Jameson (H-J) opponent-process network offers a familiar account of the empirical structure of the phenomenological color space for humans, an account with a number of predictive and explanatory virtues. Its successes form the bulk of the existing reasons for suggesting a strict identity between our various color sensations on the one hand, and our various coding vectors across the color-opponent neurons in our primary visual pathways on the other. But anti-reductionists standardly complain that the systematic parallels discovered by the (...) H-J network are just empirical correspondences, constructed post facto, with no predictive or explanatory purchase on the intrinsic characters of qualia proper. The present paper disputes that complaint, by illustrating that the H-J model yields some novel and unappreciated predictions, and some novel and unappreciated explanations, concerning the qualitative characters of a considerable variety of color sensations possible for human experience, color sensations that normal people have almost certainly never had before, color sensations whose accurate descriptions in ordinary language appear semantically ill-formed or even self-contradictory. Specifically, these "impossible" color sensations are activation-vectors (across our opponent-process neurons) that lie inside the space of neuronally possible activation-vectors, but outside the central 'color spindle' that confines the familiar range of sensations for possible objective colors. These extra-spindle chimerical-color sensations correspond to no reflective color that you will ever see objectively displayed on a physical object. But the H-J model both predicts their existence and explains their highly anomalous qualitative characters in some detail. It also suggests how to produce these rogue sensations by a simple procedure made available in the latter half of this paper. The relevant color plates will allow you to savor these sensations for yourself. (shrink)

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large-scale picture-naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance cost. In particular, we focused on the contributions of lexical frequency and phonological similarity across translations. The naming performance of Spanish-Catalan bilinguals speaking in their dominant and non-dominant language was compared (...) to that of Spanish monolinguals. Single trial naming latencies were analyzed by means of linear mixed models accounting for individual effects at the participant and item level. While decreasing lexical frequency was shown to increase naming latencies in all groups, this variable by itself did not account for the bilingual cost. In turn, our results showed that the bilingual cost disappeared when naming words with high phonological similarity across translations. In short, our results show that frequency of use can play a role in the emergence of the bilingual cost, but that phonological similarity across translations should be regarded as one of the most important variables that determine the bilingual cost in speech production. Low phonological similarity across translations yields worse performance in bilinguals and promotes the bilingual cost in naming performance. The implications of our results for the effect of phonological similarity across translations within the bilingual speech production system are discussed. (shrink)

BackgroundIn most Anglophone nations, policy and law increasingly foster an autonomy-based model, raising issues for large numbers of people who fail to fit the paradigm, and indicating problems in translating practical and theoretical understandings of ‘good death’ to policy. Three exemplar populations are frail older people, people with dementia and people with severe traumatic brain injury. We hypothesise that these groups face some over-lapping challenges in securing good end-of-life care linked to their limited agency. To better understand these challenges, we (...) conducted a scoping review and thematic synthesis.MethodsTo capture a range of literature, we followed established scoping review methods. We then used thematic synthesis to describe the broad themes emerging from this literature.ResultsInitial searches generated 22,375 references, and screening yielded 49, highly heterogeneous, studies that met inclusion criteria, encompassing 12 countries and a variety of settings. The thematic synthesis identified three themes: the first concerned the processes of end-of-life decision-making, highlighting the ambiguity of the dominant shared decision-making process, wherein decisions are determined by families or doctors, sometimes explicitly marginalising the antecedent decisions of patients. Despite this marginalisation, however, the patient does play a role both as a social presence and as an active agent, by whose actions the decisions of those with authority are influenced. The second theme examined the tension between predominant notions of a good death as ‘natural’ and the drive to medicalise death through the lens of the experiences and actions of those faced with the actuality of death. The final theme considered the concept of antecedent end-of-life decision-making, its influence on policy and decision-making, and some caveats that arise from the studies.ConclusionsTogether these three themes indicate a number of directions for future research, which are likely to be applicable to other conditions that result in reduced agency. Above all, this review emphasises the need for new concepts and fresh approaches to end of life decision-making that address the needs of the growing population of frail older people, people with dementia and those with severe traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

Multiple team membership is a form of work organization extensively used nowadays to flexibly deploy human resources across multiple simultaneous projects. Individual members bring in their cognitive resources in these multiple teams and at the same time use the resources and competencies developed while working together. We test in an experimental study whether working in MTM as compared to a single team yields more individual performance benefits in estimation tasks. Our results fully support the group-to-individual transfer of learning, yet the (...) hypothesized benefits of knowledge variety and broader access to meta-knowledge relevant to the task in MTM as compared to single teams were not supported. In addition, we show that individual estimates improve only when members are part of groups with low or average collective estimation errors, while confidence in individual estimates significantly increases only when the collective confidence in the group estimates is average or high. The study opens valuable venues for using the dynamic model of G-I transfer of learning to explore individual learning in MTM. (shrink)

The paper considers the problems involved in getting neural networks to learn about highly structured task domains. A central problem concerns the tendency of networks to learn only a set of shallow (non-generalizable) representations for the task, i.e., to miss the deep organizing features of the domain. Various solutions are examined, including task specific network configuration and incremental learning. The latter strategy is the more attractive, since it holds out the promise of a task-independent solution to the problem. Once we (...) see exactly how the solution works, however, it becomes clear that it is limited to a special class of cases in which (1) statistically driven undersampling is (luckily) equivalent to task decomposition, and (2) the dangers of unlearning are somehow being minimized. The technique is suggestive nonetheless, for a variety of developmental factors may yield the functional equivalent of both statistical AND informed undersampling in early learning. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern EuropeNoah J. EfronAlmost a quarter-century ago Benjamin Nelson published his famous plea for what he called a “differential” and “comparative historical sociology of ‘science’ in civilizational perspective.” 1 Like Max Weber, Robert Merton, and Joseph Needham, Nelson believed that the growth of western science could be better understood when compared to the ways “science” fared in other cultures with other intellectual (...) and institutional and economic sensibilities and structures. A particularly propitious case study for such a differential and comparative historical study of science, as Hillel Levine observed in his 1983 essay about Jewish reactions to heliocentrism, are the Jews of early modern Europe, who constituted “a society geographically and culturally contiguous with those who framed and advanced occidental ‘science.’” 2Since about the time of Nelson’s plea, David B. Ruderman has been writing the history of Jewish attitudes towards, and engagements with, science during the period in which modern western science was constituting itself. It is no exaggeration to say that he established this as a field of study, producing a steady stream of historical studies, initially of Italian Jews who read and wrote about nature and its study, but continually expanding his compass. 3 The field [End Page 719] Ruderman established and the studies he produced have been “repercussive” (to borrow his own adjective) in many directions—shedding light on Jewish-Christian relations, on early-modern Jewish intellectual history, on the deployments of Kabbalah and magic in early modern times, and so on. One of Ruderman’s achievements—perhaps not the most important in his view (for he considers himself a historian of Jewish thought and culture and not a historian of science) but of great importance nonetheless—has been to begin to lay the groundwork for a comparative history of Jewish and Christian attitudes towards and participation in the “new sciences.”Ruderman’s newest book is a big step towards Nelson’s desideratum, using Jewish attitudes as the comparative case. It is a collection of twelve linked essays (five of which have appeared elsewhere in one form or another) framed by a synthetic introduction and epilogue. The essays are individual or group portraits of Jews who evinced interest in natural philosophy or medicine, in a variety of settings and for a variety of reasons, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Ruderman describes his subject as “three distinct but interrelated groups among early modern Jews”: (1) “converso physicians and other university-trained intellectuals who fled Spain and Portugal in the seventeenth century and settled in Holland, Italy, Germany, England, and even eastern Europe, serving as doctors and purveyors of scientific learning throughout the Jewish communities of Europe, while yielding considerable political and economic power,” (2) “certain circles of Jewish scholars in central and eastern Europe [who] pursued scientific learning, especially astronomy, in more informal settings as a desirable supplement to rabbinic study,” and (3) “the hundreds of Jews who attended Italian medical schools, primarily the University of Padua, from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.” 4In fact Ruderman covers even more ground than this. As background, he includes a brief essay on the attitudes of tenth- to fifteenth-century Jews towards nature and its study, surely the best survey of the sort available. Of the thirty or so early modern Jews that he describes in the remainder of the book, about twenty fit in at least one of the three camps upon which he focuses. 5 Nine [End Page 720] emerged from different circumstances (though these too were often highly influenced by one or more of the focus populations). This fact does nothing to impugn Ruderman’s typology—the groups he described were, in fact, of particular importance, and his identification of them as the principle populations contemplating and promulgating natural philosophy among Jews is in itself an advance of some moment. But the fact that a third of the cases Ruderman described do not fit into his own typology is testimony both to the complexity of his subject, and to his agility in addressing it.By anthologizing a dozen depictions of different thinkers in different milieus, Ruderman affords what might be called a “hawk... (shrink)

The main section of this volume of essays addresses the topic of 'Performativity in Literature and Music', a subject of high contemporary relevance since a substantial part of recent reflections in the humanities are concerned with the performance aspect of cultural activities, particularly in the arts. This decisive reorientation of scholarly interests in the arts, trendily called the 'performative turn', has yielded significant contributions to an increasingly refined understanding of artistic processes from an up-to-date perspective, and specifically what has (...) been called the 'crisis of the work concept' has sharpened our awareness of the need of finding the 'proper' object of such scholarly investigations, which, as in most traditional studies, cannot be exclusively the written documents of our cultural heritage, but additionally, and essentially so, their actualizations in performance situations. This volume for the first time offers a set of careful case studies from a wide range of artistic genres (narrative fiction, poetry, opera, instrumental music, songs, jazz) and historical phases (from Elizabethan verse to 21st-century HD opera performances) which give detailed insight into consequences of addressing issues of performativity in the field of word and music studies. Closely examined examples range, in music, from the romantic reception of Bach and the opera singer Maria Malibran through Mahler and Schoenberg to Brigitte Fassbaender, Philip Glass and Charles Mingus, and, in literature, from Sidney through Yeats and Celan to Katherine Mansfield, Alejo Carpentier and Toni Morrison. In addition, the volume contains a smaller section on 'Surveying the Field' of word and music studies which includes an essay of general reflection on interart relationships and an attempt at identifying new features of the 'musicalization of fiction'. This collection of essays will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: performance studies, intermediality studies, art theory, musicology, voice studies, literary criticism, and philosophy. (shrink)

What is secularity? Might it yield or define a distinctive form of reasoning? If so, would that form of reasoning belong essentially to our modern age, or would it instead have a considerably older lineage? And what might be the relation of that form of reasoning, whatever its lineage, to the Christian thinking that is often said to oppose it? In the present volume, these and related questions are addressed by a distinguished group of scholars working primarily within the Roman (...) Catholic theological tradition and from the perspectives of Continental philosophy. As a whole, the volume constitutes a conversation among thinkers who agree in their concerns but not necessarily their conclusions. Taken individually, each essay concentrates on a range of historical developments with close attention to their intellectual and sometimes pedagogical implications. Secular reason, they argue, is neither the antipode of Christian thought nor a stable and well-resolved component of it. Christian thinking may engage with secular reason as the site of profound difficulties, but on occasion will also learn from it as a source of new insight. _Christianity and Secular Reason_ contributes to the contemporary discussion of secularity prompted especially by Charles Taylor’s book _A Secular Age_. Unlike Taylor's work, however, this collection concentrates specifically on secular _reason_ and explicitly on its relation to Christianity. In this sense, it is closer to Michael J. Buckley’s _At the Origins of Modern Atheism_ or, to a lesser degree, Louis Dupré’s _Passage to Modernity_, which concern themselves with broad cultural developments. "This volume offers a variety of perspectives, some historical, some normative/constructive, on the questions of the relations between politics/culture/religion and the relations between selfhood/humanity/world. The essays are, without exception, of high quality in both scholarly-exegetical terms, and constructive-normative ones. The writers are learned, sometimes witty, and often interesting." —_Paul Griffiths, Duke Divinity School _ "This is no other volume I know of that covers just this ground. There is a substantial literature on, for example, the Habermas/Ratzinger exhange, and on Kant's view of the relation between philosophy and religion, and on the twelfth century background for thirteenth century reflection on this relation. The merit of _Christianity and Secular Reason_ is that it holds these threads together, and others besides, in a new and fruitful way." —_John E. Hare, Yale University_. (shrink)

Differences in perceptions and knowledge of crop diseases constitute a major obstacle in farmer–researcher cooperation, which is necessary for sustainable disease management. Farmers’ perceptions and management of crop diseases in the northern Ethiopian Regional State of Tigrai were investigated in order to harness their knowledge in the participatory development of integrated disease management (IDM) strategies. Knowledge of disease etiology and epidemiology, cultivar resistance, and reasons for the cultivation of susceptible cultivars were investigated in a total of 12 tabias (towns) in (...) ten weredas (districts). Perception of diseases involved both scientific and spiritual conceptual frameworks. Of the more than 30 crop diseases recorded on the major crops in the region, only rusts and powdery mildews (locally called humodia) and a few root rots were considered by farmers to be important. Farmers’ awareness of other diseases was extremely low; some highly damaging but less conspicuous diseases, such as faba bean chocolate spot and chickpea ascochyta blight (also called humodia), were not regarded by farmers as disease but as problems caused primarily by excessive soil moisture. Considering that some of these “unrecognized” diseases can cause complete yield loss and genetic erosion in epiphytotic years, there is an urgent need for bringing together farmers’ and scientists’ knowledge to complement each other. Even when farmers had access to disease-resistant or disease-tolerant cultivars, they grew susceptible local varieties because of multiple criteria including earliness, good yield in years with low humodia severity, suitability for home consumption, market demand/quality, and low soil fertility and land management requirements. Farmer innovation and knowledge were evident in their use of diverse disease control measures, but these were a mixture of the “useful and the useless.” Our findings stress the necessity for extension workers and researchers to understand and improve farmers’ knowledge of crop diseases, and farmers’ ability to observe and experiment, through the Farmer Field School or a similar experiential learning approach. These insights about farmers’ knowledge of crop diseases provide a basis for further collaborative maintenance of crop genetic diversity, development of germplasm, and IPM-related research in Africa. (shrink)

Through an interdisciplinary approach, I attempt to construct a partial ethno-agronomy of the Seneca people in late pre-contact times and examine it for relevance to modern agriculture.Diohe'ko, the Three Sisters, had been cultivated for at least five hundred years prior to contact by the Seneca, an Iroquoian tribe inhabiting western New York State. The Three Sisters, corn, beans and squash (pumpkins, gourds), were planted together in hills in fields, cultivated and harvested by work parties of women.Changes of village sites and (...) patterns of village movement respond to the adoption of agriculture as well as other factors. Evaluating land use, crop yields and carrying capacity, I question the accuracy of Seneca population estimates.The Three Sisters was an important cultural complex. The Sisters are protagonists of a number of Seneca tales, myths, ceremonies and legends.As an agricultural strategy, Three Sisters embodies several efficiencies in growth patterns, nutrient, solar and water use, harvest and nutritional use. Microhabitat manipulation was practiced by the Seneca. The plants exhibit a high degree of cooperation, or commensality, in the association.Some preliminary judgments can be made about specific varieties of the Sisters in use among the Seneca prior to contact. Northern Flint Corn, Cutshort or Cornhill Beans, and Cucurbita pepo such as Crookneck Squashes are likely the eldest varieties in the area.Three Sisters agriculture demonstrates qualities of permanence and sustainability, especially as related to the Seneca cultural fabric. A conservative ethic, like Handsome Lake's teaching, it binds together people in culture and people and nurture in nature. Mary Jemison, who farmed both the colonial and Three Sisters ways, seems to have favored the latter's “leisurely” approach. (shrink)

An algebra with fuzzy equality is a set with operations on it that is equipped with similarity ≈, i.e. a fuzzy equivalence relation, such that each operation f is compatible with ≈. Described verbally, compatibility says that each f yields similar results if applied to pairwise similar arguments. On the one hand, algebras with fuzzy equalities are structures for the equational fragment of fuzzy logic. On the other hand, they are the formal counterpart to the intuitive idea of having functions (...) that are not allowed to map similar objects to dissimilar ones. In this paper, we present a generalization of the well-known Birkhoff’s variety theorem: a class of algebras with fuzzy equality is the class of all models of a fuzzy set of identities iff it is closed under suitably defined morphisms, substructures, and direct products. (shrink)

This chapter explores the possibility of weakening the criteria for causal explanation in Making Things Happen to yield various forms of non-causal explanation. These include the following: retaining the idea that explanations must answer what if things had been different questions but dropping the requirement the answers to such questions must take the form of claims about what would happen under interventions. Retaining the w- question requirement but allowing generalizations that hold for mathematical or conceptual reasons to figure in explanations. (...) Dropping the w-question requirement to accommodate the role of information about irrelevance in explanation. (shrink)

AbstarctIn the first installment of Varieties of Skeptical Invariantism, we set the scene for subsequent discussion with Unger's (1975) modern classic of global skepticism and distinguished three varieties of skeptical invariantism in recent literature: traditional skeptical invariantism, fallibilist science-based skepticism and practical skepticism. We then presented fallibilist science-based skepticism, that is, the position that relaxes the stringency of the standard of knowledge but still questions parts of our everyday knowledge on the basis of scientific reasons. In particular, we (...) presented Frances’ (2005) ‘live’ skepticism and Hannon's (forthcoming) ‘hard-hitting’ skepticism. In this second installment, we present the two other varieties of skeptical invariantism we identified: traditional skepticism (high-standard and infallibilist) that respects all three commitments (intellectualism, invariantism, stringency) and practical skepticism that questions the intellectualist commitment. (shrink)

There is another sort of ‘defense’ of relativism that I mention in conclusion. Sometimes one finds the view that one is rightly punished for a crime only if they admit committing it, and that it was a crime — something wrongly done: ‘punishment conditional on confession’ is the rule proposed. It might seem that this would give impunity to a criminal hardy enough to deny the fact, or the evil, of her deed; so it would, unless it was also understood (...) that if a person was proved by accepted standards to be the perpetrator of an action agreed to be wrong, the opportunity to admit guilt would extend from open questioning through beating to exquisite torture until confession was extracted (cf. the Chinese customs reflected in the Judge Dee stories of Robert Van Gulik). More often, one finds the view that a person is not refuted unless he admits this, and a view is not refuted — and so is not properly dismissed — unless its proponents concede defeat. A similar view is that all really telling philosophical criticism must be internal or else non-neutral (a view we discussed above).If one can in principle produce a conceptual system from a list of all propositions by following the recipe: for any proposition P include P, or else include not-P, in S, then (providing one adds no constraints concerning consistency) there will be no proposition that will appear in all conceptual systems. If what it is for a proposition to be neutral is for it to appear in all conceptual systems, then no proposition is neutral. But of course, the same recipe that produces this result produces the result that the proposition (P) Some proposition is both true and false appears in some conceptual system which (since the denial of (P) appears in less than all systems and hence is not neutral) is (allegedly) none the worse for that. And the proposition (P1) Conceptual relativism is false appears in some conceptual systems which (since the denial of (P1) appears in less than all systems and hence is not neutral) is none the worse for that. But then what remains of the claim that conceptual relativism is true?Sometimes refuted is used in a person-independent manner: Proposition P is (and always was) refuted by the fact that F uses P is refuted in such a way that it does not entail There is someone who refuted P. Sometimes, of course, it is so used that P is refuted does have that entailment. Even in the latter case, refutation is an epistemological notion, and Person S is refuted does not entail S knows that S is refuted and is compatible with S believes that S is not refuted. The recommendation that we add a psychological component of ‘admits to’ to the epistemological notion ‘being refuted’ seems to have no other ground than the arbitrary one that if we do we shall then be able better to defend relativism.While the recipe for constructing conceptual systems suggested above may seem useful to a relativist — it gives one clear content to ‘neutral proposition’ — it has what must surely seem a defect to the relativist, namely that given it (even with consistency constraints added) there will be no translational incommensurability. For if P is contained in system S, then not-P is expressible in S, and conversely. And the recipe yields the result that for any proposition P, and any system S, S contains either P or else not-P.This, of course, brings out an ambiguity in ‘contains’. In one sense, a system ‘contains (1)’ whatever can be expressed in it. In another, it ‘contains (2)’ whatever, according to it, is true. If it is a complete system without suspense of judgment it contains (1) twice the propositions it contains (2). Further, a system contains (1) lots of propositions it (or its proponent) does not regard as true, and so the fact that a proposition P appears in system S does not mean that P favors S. One often at least can state the conditions of S's falsehood in S, and even prove in S that S is false, where “in” is used in the sense of “contains (1).”Sophisticated relativism, then, seems no more plausible, no more free from inconsistency, and no less open to devastating critique than are its less cultured relatives. Relativism, at least in the varieties discussed here, seems to live up to its unsavory reputation. Since not even translation incommensurability seems to entail lack of cognitive competitiveness, it seems that it will have to be admitted that, regarding apparent disagreement on basic matters — including fundamental religious disagreement — the appearance is also the reality. People do uneliminably disagree, and short of conversion or (what will seem from within the religious perspective in question) some other ‘failure in faith’ (e.g., coming to reject all religious views) will continue to do so. Whatever can be done in terms of common understanding and common humanitarian endeavors must be done without denying the many basic disagreements that there are. And whatever notion of inter-faith dialogue is other than espitemically defective will have to face that fact; for significant dialogue based on self-deception or on falsehood seems not a terribly promising enterprise. (shrink)

Psychopathy is a personality disorder frequently associated with immoral behaviors. Previous behavioral studies on the influence of psychopathy on moral decision have yielded contradictory results, possibly because they focused either on judgment (abstract evaluation) or on choice of hypothetical action, two processes that may rely on different mechanisms. In this study, we explored the influence of the level of psychopathic traits on judgment and choice of hypothetical action during moral dilemma evaluation. A population of 102 students completed a questionnaire with (...) ten moral dilemmas and nine non-moral dilemmas. The task included questions targeting both judgment (“Is it acceptable to … in order to …?”) and choice of hypothetical action (“Would you … in order to …?”). The level of psychopathic traits of each participant was evaluated with the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy (LSRP) scale. Logistic regression fitted with the generalized estimating equations method analyses were conducted using responses to the judgment and choice tasks as the dependent variables and psychopathy scores as predictor. Results show that a high level of psychopathic traits, and more specifically those related to affective deficit, predicted a greater proportion of utilitarian responses for the choice but not for the judgment question. There was no first-order interaction between the level of psychopathic traits and other potential predictors. The relation between a high level of psychopathic traits and increased utilitarianism in choice of action but not in moral judgment may explain the contradictory results of previous studies where these two processes were not contrasted. It also gives further support to the hypothesis that choice of action endorsement and abstract judgment during moral dilemma evaluation are partially distinct neural and psychological processes. We propose that this distinction should be better taken into account in the evaluation of psychopathic behaviors. (shrink)

It is suggested, following a proposal made recently by Smolin, that the most fundamental law of the universe takes this form: Among the set of all possible universes compatible with an irreducibly minimal set of structural constraints, the actually realized universe is the one which maximizes a mathematically well-defined number (the variety) that measures the structural variety of the universe (in the totality of its history). This gives expression to Leibniz's idea that the actual universe gives “the greatest variety possible, (...) but with the greatest possible order.” Two models are proposed in which the idea can be realized and its consequences tested; both are discrete in nature and satisfy highly nonlocal laws. In such a scheme a unique (finite) universe is called into being by the fundamental requirement of maximal variety (for given definition of the variety), which it is conjectured could have such a powerful ordering effect that space, time, the currently known laws of physics, and the observed structure of the universe could all appear as emergent consequences of the single underlying law. (shrink)

Contemporary historians of logic tend to credit Bernard Bolzano with the invention of the semantic notion, of consequence, a full century before Tarski. Nevertheless, Bolzano's work played no significant rôle in the genesis of modern logical semantics. The purpose of this paper is to point out three highly original, and still quite relevant themes in Bolzano's work, being a systematic study of possible types of inference, of consistency, as well as their meta-theory. There are certain analogies with Tarski's concerns here, (...) although the main thrust seems to be different, both philosophically and technically. Thus, if only obliquely, we also provide some additional historical perspective on Tarski's achievement. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a probabilistic account of factual knowledge, based on the notion of chance, which is a function of an event given a prior history. This account has some affinity with my chance account of token causation, but it neither relies on it nor presupposes it. Here, I concentrate on the core cases of perceptual knowledge and of knowledge by memory. The analysis of knowledge presented below is externalist. The underlying intuition guiding the treatment of knowledge in (...) this paper is that knowledge boils down to high token discriminative indicativeness. Type indicativeness or type discriminability are neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge: the token aspect comes out in the strong dependence on the specific circumstances and chances of the case. The main condition of the first section, the indicativity condition, properly refined, yields pertinent indicativity as a main constituent. Very roughly, it involves the chance of the content clause p being higher given the subject's believing that p than otherwise. The discriminability condition in question captures the sense of discriminability appropriate for knowledge and yield the indicativity condition: it is an extension of the indicativity condition KI. Roughly, the subject’s ability to discriminate the object in front of her being red from its being green is captured by holding fixed, in the indicativity condition, the condition “the object in front of her is red or green.” A major element in the analysis is the so-called Contrast Class, which governs the scope of discriminability. This is the class of features that have to be taken into account in the discriminability condition, and it is characterized by two constraints. Very roughly, according to the first constraint, for a feature to be in the contrast class, it must not represent a sub-type of the predicate in the content clause. According to the second constraint, which is a central condition with many implications, the chance that the object specified in the content clause has a feature represented in the contrast class must not under the circumstances be too low. This constraint, within the framework of the discriminability condition, brings out a major constitutive aspect of knowledge: knowledge amounts to a limited vulnerability to mistakes of the belief in question under the circumstances at hand. The contrast class plays a major role in my treatment of skepticism. The second constraint on the Contrast Class together with the VHP condition below bring out precisely the way in which perceptual knowledge is fallible. (shrink)

Part-of-speech tagging, like any supervised statistical NLP task, is more difficult when test sets are very different from training sets, for example when tagging across genres or language varieties. We examined the problem of POS tagging of different varieties of Mandarin Chinese. An analytic study first showed that unknown words were a major source of difficulty in cross-variety tagging. Unknown words in English tend to be proper nouns. By contrast, we found that Mandarin unknown words were mostly common (...) nouns and verbs. We showed these results are caused by the high frequency of morphological compounding in Mandarin; in this sense Mandarin is more like German than English. Based on this analysis, we propose a variety of new morphological unknown-word features for POS tagging, extending earlier work by others on unknown-word tagging in English and German. Our features were implemented in a maximum entropy Markov model. Our system achieves state-of-the-art performance in Mandarin tagging, including improving unknown-word tagging performance on unseen varieties in Chinese Treebank 5.0 from 61% to 80% correct. (shrink)

Many philosophical disputes, most prominently disputes in ontology, have been suspected of being merely verbal and hence pointless. My goal in this paper is to offer an account of merely verbal disputes and to address the question of what is problematic with such disputes. I begin by arguing that extant accounts that focus on the semantics of the disputed statement S do not capture the full range of cases as they might arise in philosophy. Moreover, these accounts bring in heavy (...) theoretical machinery. I attempt to show that we can capture the full range of cases with an approach that is theoretically lightweight. This approach explains verbal disputes as a pragmatic phenomenon where parties use the same utterance type S with different speaker’s meaning. Moreover, it provides an answer to the crucial question Jackson’s pragmatic account leaves, at best, highly implicit. Based on my account, we can distinguish between different ways in which disputes can be verbal and different extents to which they are defective. Distinguishing between these varieties of verbalness furthermore allows us to specify what kind of substantive issues remain to be discussed once the linguistic confusion is resolved. (shrink)

My interest is in how shifting from an anti-luck epistemology to an anti-risk epistemology can enable us to make sense of some important epistemic phenomena. After rehearsing the more general arguments for preferring anti-risk epistemology over its anti-luck cousin, I argue that a further advantage of this transition lies in how it puts us in a better position to understand certain trade-offs with regard to epistemic risk. In particular, there can be ways of forming beliefs that are epistemically low risk (...) along one axis of evaluation while being epistemically high risk along another axis of evaluation. I further show how this idea plays out in terms of collaborative inquiries, where the framework provided by anti-risk epistemology enables us to understand how epistemic risk can be distributed across such a collective enterprise and thereby effectively managed. (shrink)

It was shown recently that epimorphisms need not be surjective in a variety K of Heyting algebras, but only one counter-example was exhibited in the literature until now. Here, a continuum of such examples is identified, viz. the variety generated by the Rieger-Nishimura lattice, and all of its (locally finite) subvarieties that contain the original counter-example K . It is known that, whenever a variety of Heyting algebras has finite depth, then it has surjective epimorphisms. In contrast, we show that (...) for every integer $n \geq 2$ , the variety of all Heyting algebras of width at most n has a non-surjective epimorphism. Within the so-called Kuznetsov-Gerčiu variety (i.e., the variety generated by finite linear sums of one-generated Heyting algebras), we describe exactly the subvarieties that have surjective epimorphisms. This yields new positive examples, and an alternative proof of epimorphism surjectivity for all varieties of Gödel algebras. The results settle natural questions about Beth-style definability for a range of intermediate logics. (shrink)

According to nomological accounts of causation causal connections among events or states must be mediated by contingent laws of nature. Three types of causal connection are cited and discussed in opposition to such nomological accounts: (a) material causation (as when a zygote is generated by the union of an ovum and a sperm); (b) consequentialist causation (as when an apple is chromatically colored as a result of being red); (c) inclusive causation (as when a board is on a stump in (...) consequence of its having been placed there by a carpenter). These are all source-consequence relations or result-yielding relations and they are all cases of necessitation, each with its own distinguishing features. (shrink)

Against MacIntyre’s view that capitalism is incompatible with the conduct of economic production as a genuine practice, this paper claims that capitalist economies take a number of institutionally distinct forms, and that these differ significantly in the extent to which, and the reasons for which, they are antithetical to production as a practice. Drawing on the extensive literature in comparative political economy on varieties of capitalism, it argues that while ‘Liberal’ Market Economies such as the USA and UK conform (...) quite closely to MacIntyre’s understanding of capitalism, ‘Coordinated’ Market Economies such as Germany and Japan do not. In particular, the industry-based associations of the German model are argued to be highly conducive to the internal goods and standards of excellence central to MacIntyrean practices. (shrink)

Internet plagiarism continues unabated and may even be increasing. Questions pertaining to the ethical-moral construct employed by students to justify Internet plagiarism among high school students have remained relatively untouched. Understanding not simply the prevalence of Internet plagiarism but also the variety of explanations used by students to justify their plagiarism seems crucial to curtailing its practice. In this study, I surveyed 160 high school students and endeavored to understand and describe the practices of students who use the (...) Internet for schoolwork and who engage in copy-paste plagiarism or paper-buying practices. The results indicate that students are more easily able to justify copy-paste plagiarism for a variety of reasons that mirror justifications of other forms of conventional plagiarism. Most students indicated they would never purchase a paper for reasons ranging from fear of getting caught to more principled and nuanced ethical claims. Based on these results I also offer educators suggestions for refining assignments and evaluation methods. (shrink)

This article presents a holistic framework for understanding the scienceof plant breeding, as an alternative to the common objectivist andconstructivist approaches in studies of science. It applies thisapproach to understanding disagreements about how to deal with yieldstability. Two contrasting definitions of yield stability are described,and concomitant differences in the understanding and roles ofsustainability and of selection, test, and target environments areexplored. Critical questions about plant breeding theory and practiceare posed, and answers from the viewpoint of the two contrastingdefinitions of yield (...) stability are analyzed, based on key publicationsin the field. Differences in answers to these questions appear to resultboth from the contingencies of plant breeders' experiences withparticular crop varieties and growing environments, and from differencesin social and institutional settings – plant breeding science isboth objective truth and social construction. The goal of using aholistic framework is to encourage discussion among plant breeders,farmers, social scientists, and others, of the bases for disagreementswithin plant breeding, in order to facilitate plant breeding'scontribution to a more environmentally, economically, and sociallysustainable agriculture. (shrink)

Several different kinds of measures of information are distinguished from each other. The differences between them show that our pretheoretical concept of information is multiply ambiguous. Attempts to think of the scientific enterprise in terms of information maximization lead to several legitimately different rules of scientific decision-making, depending on which kind of information one is interested in. The contrast between high information and high probability postulated by some philosophers is spurious for the same reason. It is even possible (...) to define interesting measures of information such that nontrivial deductive reasoning can increase information so defined. (shrink)

Discovering high-utility itemsets (HUIs) consists of finding sets of items that yield a high profit in customer transaction databases. An important limitation of traditional high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) is that only the utility measure is used for assessing the interestingness of patterns. This leads to finding several itemsets that have a high profit but contain items that are weakly correlated. To address this issue, this paper proposes to integrate the concept of correlation in HUIM to find (...) profitable itemsets that are highly correlated, using the all-confidence and bond measures. An efficient algorithm named FCHM (fast correlated high-utility itemset miner) is proposed to efficiently discover correlated high-utility itemsets (CHIs). Two versions of the algorithm are proposed: FCHM|$_{all\text{-}confidence}$| and FCHM|$_{bond}$|⁠, which are based on the all-confidence and bond measures, respectively. An experimental evaluation was done using four real-life benchmark datasets from the HUIM literature: mushroom, retail, kosarak and foodmart. Results show that FCHM is efficient and can prune a huge amount of weakly CHIs. (shrink)

The standard assumptions that underlie many conceptual and quantitative frameworks do not hold for many complex physical, biological, and social systems. Complex systems science clarifies when and why such assumptions fail and provides alternative frameworks for understanding the properties of complex systems. This review introduces some of the basic principles of complex systems science, including complexity profiles, the tradeoff between efficiency and adaptability, the necessity of matching the complexity of systems to that of their environments, multiscale analysis, and evolutionary processes. (...) Our focus is on the general properties of systems as opposed to the modeling of specific dynamics; rather than provide a comprehensive review, we pedagogically describe a conceptual and analytic approach for understanding and interacting with the complex systems of our world. This paper assumes only a high school mathematical and scientific background so that it may be accessible to academics in all fields, decision-makers in industry, government, and philanthropy, and anyone who is interested in systems and society. (shrink)

In the current research, we show that low-power state promotes variety-seeking. We argue that this effect occurs because consumers in low-power state desire control and variety-seeking as a way to restore sense of control. The effect of power on variety-seeking is reduced when consumer knowledge in a certain consumption domain is high because knowledge is an alternative way to retain sense of control. Three experiments provide systematic evidence for this effect across different product categories. These findings contribute to the (...) literature on how variety-seeking can be used as a way to compensate and enhance our understanding of power and consumer knowledge. (shrink)

I review proposed skepticisms in recent literature (or skeptical invariantisms, if we understand skepticism semantically), contrast their basic commitments and highlight some of their comparative theoretical attractions and problems. To help set the scene for the discussion, I start with Unger’s (1975) modern classic of global skepticism about knowledge (and justification). I then distinguish three extant categories of skepticism in the recent literature: two non‐traditional and one more traditional. On the non‐traditional side are fallibilist science‐based skepticism (which relaxes thestringencyof the (...) standard of knowledge) and practical skepticism (which questions theintellectualcharacter of the standard of knowledge) and on the traditional side high‐standard/infallibilist. I then briefly present and discuss representatives of each category. (shrink)

In “Slowing the slide down the slippery slope of Medical Assistance in Dying: Mutual Learnings for Canada and the US,” Daryl Pullman (2023) gets a variety of empirical, logical and legal things wro...

The picture of synthetic biology as a kind of engineering science has largely created the public understanding of this novel field, covering both its promises and risks. In this paper, we will argue that the actual situation is more nuanced and complex. Synthetic biology is a highly interdisciplinary field of research located at the interface of physics, chemistry, biology, and computational science. All of these fields provide concepts, metaphors, mathematical tools, and models, which are typically utilized by synthetic biologists by (...) drawing analogies between the different fields of inquiry. We will study analogical reasoning in synthetic biology through the emergence of the functional meaning of noise, which marks an important shift in how engineering concepts are employed in this field. The notion of noise serves also to highlight the differences between the two branches of synthetic biology: the basic science-oriented branch and the engineering-oriented branch, which differ from each other in the way they draw analogies to various other fields of study. Moreover, we show that fixing the mapping between a source domain and the target domain seems not to be the goal of analogical reasoning in actual scientific practice. (shrink)

There has been relatively little effort to provide a systematic overview of different forms of exploratory experimentation (EE). The present paper examines the growing subdiscipline of nanotoxicology and suggests that it illustrates at least four ways that researchers can engage in EE: searching for regularities; developing new techniques, simulation models, and instrumentation; collecting and analyzing large swaths of data using new experimental strategies (e.g., computer-based simulation and "high-throughput" instrumentation); and structuring an entire disciplinary field around exploratory research agendas. In (...) order to distinguish these and other activities more effectively, the paper proposes a taxonomy that includes three dimensions along which types of EE vary: (1) the aim of the experimental activity, (2) the role of theory in the activity, and (3) the methods or strategies employed for varying experimental parameters. (shrink)

A mental-occurrence instance is conscious if it is an object of inner consciousness; that is, if a mental-occurrence instance occurs and is conscious on that occasion, one is conscious of it on the spot without having to take notice first of something else. In contrast, Freud's preconscious and unconscious psychical processes, whenever they occur, are examples of nonconscious mental-occurrence instances, which are not objects of inner consciousness; that is, one has no consciousness of them unless one takes notice of something (...) else and infers, therefrom, their occurrence. Determining how inner consciousness transpires will soon have high priority on the scientific agendas of psychologists of consciousness. To assist in their forthcoming explanatory search, I present a straightforward survey of a number of intrinsic theories of consciousness. Intrinsic theory holds that any conscious mental-occurrence instance has itself as object, plus whatever else it may give consciousness of; it is conscious due to its own structure, not due to what happens next or later. Intrinsic theory differs from appendage theory and mental-eye theory, which both hold that a mental-occurrence instance cannot be conscious on its own, cannot give any consciousness of itself, only of something else at most. (shrink)