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

The White Coats for Black Lives and #ShutDownSTEM movements have galvanised biomedical practitioners and researchers to eliminate institutional and systematic racism, including barriers faced by Black researchers in biomedicine and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In our study on Black–White funding gaps for National Institutes of Health Research Project grants, we found that the overall award rate for Black applicants is 55% of that for white applicants. How can systems for allocating research grant funding be made more fair while improving (...) their efficiency? (shrink)

Eating locally continues to be promoted as an alternative to growing concerns related to industrialized, global, corporate agriculture. Buying from local famers and producers is seen as a way to promote a healthier diet, reduce environmental impacts, and sustain communities. The promotion of the local food movement presents the question: is it possible to feed a community primarily from the foods produced locally? We conducted a systematic analysis comparing the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) recommended dietary requirements for the (...) estimated 2008 population with annual local agricultural production for the years 2004–2008 within the counties of the Willamette Valley growing region. Our results indicate that current agricultural production in this highly fertile region does not meet the dietary needs of the local inhabitants for any of the USDA’s six food groups: grains, vegetables, fruits, dairy, meat and beans, and oils. In the most recent year of our analysis, 2008, Willamette Valley agriculture production met 67% of annual required grains, 10% of vegetable needs, 24% of fruits, 59% of dairy, 58% of meat and beans, and 0% of dietary oil requirements. Over the past 5 years there have been significant fluctuations in crop production, particularly in 2006 when grain yields dropped to 29% of needs met. Additionally, many of these commodities are exported as cash crops, thus not contributing to meeting local food needs. We discuss these results as well as areas of potential for increasing production of edible crops for local consumption in the region. (shrink)

Previous research has found that funding disparities are driven by applications’ final impact scores and that only a portion of the black/white funding gap can be explained by bibliometrics and topic choice. Using National Institutes of Health R01 applications for council years 2014–2016, we examine assigned reviewers’ preliminary overall impact and criterion scores to evaluate whether racial disparities in impact scores can be explained by application and applicant characteristics. We hypothesize that differences in commensuration—the process of combining criterion scores into (...) overall impact scores—disadvantage black applicants. Using multilevel models and matching on key variables including career stage, gender, and area of science, we find little evidence for racial disparities emerging in the process of combining preliminary criterion scores into preliminary overall impact scores. Instead, preliminary criterion scores fully account for racial disparities—yet do not explain all of the variability—in preliminary overall impact scores. (shrink)

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

In a recent article in Philosophy of Science Janet Travis [13] seeks to refute the argument for evolutionary progressivism which is based on a series of dominant life forms on the grounds that there is no rigorous definition of that concept. In particular she claims that the definitions formulated by Sir Julian Huxley and George Gaylord Simpson fail adequately to exclude any group of organisms. The concept of dominance is therefore alleged to be meaningless and the argument for progress invalid.

This article discusses a number of metaphors about the nature of science, in connection with three types of metaphysical realism: minimal, moderate and essentialistic realism. From the beginning, Kuipers accepts the first and rejects the third type of realism, but it is only later on that he endorses the second type. It is argued that this makes his remarks on essentialistic realism somewhat misleading; and his moderate realism is compared with some realist positions taken by other philosophers. It is further (...) argued that the metaphors of the mirror, the net and the map correspond to essentialistic, minimal and moderate realism, respectively. This explains why the map metaphor is by far the most suitable one in the context of Kuipers' theory of science. This does not imply, however, that it is the (only) true one and that the others are false. (shrink)

Disrupting Journalism Ethics sets out to disrupt and change how we think about journalism and its ethics. The book contends that long-established ways of thinking, which have come down to us from the history of journalism, need radical conceptual reform, with alternate conceptions of the role of journalism and fresh principles to evaluate practice. Through a series of disruptions, the book undermines the traditional principles of journalistic neutrality and "just the facts" reporting. It proposes an alternate philosophy of journalism as (...) engagement for democracy. The aim is a journalism ethic better suited to an age of digital and global media. As a philosophical pragmatist, Stephen J. A. Ward critiques traditional conceptions of accuracy, neutrality, detachment and patriotism, evaluating their capacity to respond to ethical dilemmas for journalists in the 21st century. The book proposes a holistic mindset for doing journalism ethics, a theory of journalism as advocacy for egalitarian democracy, and a global redefinition of basic journalistic norms. The book concludes by outlining the shape of a future journalism ethics, employing these alternative notions. Disrupting Journalism Ethics is an important intervention into the role of journalism today. It asks: what new role journalists should play in today's digital media world? And what new mind-set, new aims, and new standards ought jounalists to embrace? The book aims to persuade--and provoke--ethicists, journalists, students, and members of the public to disrupt and invent. (shrink)

Because the evolution of speech production is beyond our expertise (and perhaps beyond everyone's expertise) we restrict our comments to areas in which data actually exist. We provide articulatory evidence consistent with the claims made about syllable structure in adult speech and infant babbling, but we also voice some disagreement about speech errors and the typing data.

In The Face of Emotions, which was Carroll Izard’s first major attempt at elaborating his differential emotions theory (DET), he stated that the book “presents a theoretical framework for the study of emotions and their role in personality and interpersonal processes.” Yet, over the years, his contribution to personality theory has generally been overshadowed by the attention focused on his views on facial expressions and the structure of emotions. This article will begin with a brief overview of the DET perspective (...) on personality development. Then, it will examine how the DET framework can be used to organize recent findings from three lines of research on adult personality. It will conclude with suggestions for future research as well as some personal recollections. (shrink)

Anachronistic values A value becomes anachronistic when it no longer fits current historical conditions (institutions, technology, culture, etc.). From an ‘idealist’ perspective, this fact does not tell against the old value (accepted as true), but rather against the new conditions. However, from a ‘naturalist’ perspective which takes values to be the product of human interests and (therefore) as interconnected with a given historical context, such a conflict seems to make a value obsolete. But this is neither an empirical law nor (...) a normative rule. A defence of anachronistic values might still be perfectly reasonable. It is argued that such reasonableness depends mainly on three criteria: (un)certainty, scope and weight. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 529-534 [Access article in PDF] Colin Adams and Ray Laurence, eds. Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. x + 202 pp. 48 black-and-white figures. Cloth, $75. Five of the six contributions to this varied and valuable collection of essays originated as papers delivered at the 1999 Roman Archaeology Conference in Durham, England. The sixth and longest (...) piece, by Benet Salway, was then added, together with an introduction by one co-editor (Adams) and an afterword by the [End Page 529] other (Laurence). Notes follow each contribution, with a consolidated bibliography and index at the end. Although in black and white only, the range of photos, figures, and maps is appropriately extensive.The volume stems from due recognition that geographical knowledge and travel in the Roman world are topics at last attracting the serious attention they deserve. Between them, the contributions amply demonstrate how even some of the aspects most fundamental to our understanding stir deep controversy and how incomplete the exploitation of much of the diverse source material has been to date. Happily, the emergence of exciting new discoveries is prompting fresh examination of testimony long known and neglected.Useful, though limited in scope, is Anne Kolb's "Transport and Communication in the Roman State: The cursus publicus" (95-105), which mainly confines itself to identifying those categories of imperial officials and other individuals entitled to use the service (more properly referred to as vehiculatio during the Principate). By contrast, the support Kolb offers for the doubtful claim that transport of freight—other than baggage accompanying officials—was a "relatively unimportant" aspect of the service, even in the Late Empire (102), remains inadequate. Throughout, changes to the service over such a long span seem underappreciated (not least, for example, Nerva's removal of the burden from Italy).Adams modestly characterizes his contribution "'There and Back Again': Getting around in Roman Egypt" (138-66) as descriptive rather than analytical. His aim is to demonstrate the scope and value of the testimony preserved on papyri, and he does this engagingly, with unfailing regard for the impact of Egypt's unique geography and topography on travel there. Even though its publication dates back to 1952, few readers are likely to be familiar with the extensive archive preserving an itinerary and accounts for Theophanes' return journey from Antinoopolis to Antioch around 320 (160-62). Even fewer will be aware of the record of travelers and animals accommodated overnight, and rations issued to them, kept by the two large, busy mansiones in the Oxyrhynchite nome during the mid-fourth century and only published in 1994 (142-44). Vivid illustration of the multiple hazards awaiting travelers by road from causes both natural and human (154-56) can serve as a sobering counterbalance to the ideal conditions evoked by Aelius Aristides and quoted earlier by Adams (as eulogy) in the Introduction (1-2). One manifestation of "recreational" travel, which seems strangely absent from the discussion, on page 157 in particular, is pilgrimage (note, in general, Der Neue Pauly, s.v. Pilgerschaft 1).Jon Coulston's "Transport and Travel on the Column of Trajan" (106-37) is another predominantly descriptive contribution but one well geared to substantiate its conclusion: "The conflict is not simply between Romans and Dacians, Trajan and Decebalus. It is also a contest between Romans and barbarians, disciplina and perturbatio, labor and inertia, imperial virtues and enemy perfidy, civilisation and untamed nature, urbanisation and wilderness" (129-30). Description, moreover, is justified here when no other piece of Roman propaganda art, [End Page 530] before or after, depicts armies on the move—tents (for which soldiers were charged! [Tacitus Annals 1.17.4]), carts, pack animals, equipment, provisions, along roads, over bridges—with such amazing fullness and detail. We possess no more forceful illustration of the huge "train" that had to accompany every legion (118-19; the comparison made with Ottoman armies on campaign in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is instructive). Coulston's acute observation, lucid presentation, and reluctance to overinterpret... (shrink)

We believe that the task goal in voluntary movements provides meaning to existing information sources in the environment and determines, in a dynamic way, the use and relative importance of these different sources. This task-centered meaning bridges the apparent controversy between what information is available in principle (i.e., specification), and what information is perceived.

Basado enteramente en pruebas internas, este estudio se propone mostrar que el manuscrito único del Dīwān de Ibn Quzmān, publicado en edición facsímil por David de Gunzburg en 1896, es una copia dictada. Se indica también que el copista, a quien con frecuencia se ha culpado de introducir en el texto popular andaluz correcciones o clasicismos, no estaba bien equipado para desempeñar tal papel. Si bien era un calígrafo de primera categoría, se aducen pruebas de que su conocimiento del árabe (...) no estaba a la altura de la calidad de su caligrafía. El estudio muestra que él fue el responsable de una amplia gama de problemas textuales que ha dejado perplejos a sucesivos editores del Dīwān. En marcado contraste, se muestra que Ibn Quzmān poseía un dominio magistral de la lengua árabe y de las tradiciones-árabes clásicas. Al parecer también había adquirido un alto grado de 'aculturación' en la lengua romance. Además de ofrecer las pruebas en que se basan estos asertos, el estudio constituye un ejemplo ilustrativo de cómo estas pruebas pueden ayudar a una mejor lectura e interpretación del Dīwān de Ibn Quzmān. (shrink)