Previous work showed that the beginning of a sound is more important for the perception of loudness than later parts. When a short silent gap of sufficient duration is inserted into a sound, this primacy effect reoccurs in the second sound part after the gap. The present study investigates whether this temporal weighting occurs independently for different frequency bands. Sounds consisting of two bandpass noises were presented in four different conditions: a simultaneous gap in both bands, a gap in only (...) the lower frequency band, a gap in only the higher frequency band, or no gap. In all conditions, the temporal loudness weights showed a primacy effect at sound onset. For the frequency bands without a gap, the temporal weights decreased gradually across time, regardless of whether the other frequency band did or did not contain a gap. When a frequency band contained a gap, the weight at the onset of this band after the gap was increased. This reoccurrence of the primacy effect following the gap was again largely independent of whether or not the other band contained a gap. Thus, the results indicate that the temporal loudness weights are frequency specific. (shrink)

In the course of an immune response, antibodies undergo affinity maturation in order to increase their efficiency in neutralizing foreign invaders. Affinity maturation occurs by the introduction of multiple point mutations in the variable region gene that encodes the antigen binding site. This somatic hypermutation is restricted to immunoglobulin genes and occurs at very high rates. The precise molecular basis of this process remains obscure. However, recent studies using a variety of in vivo and in vitro systems have revealed important (...) regulatory regions, base motifs that are preferred targets of mutation and evidence that transcription may play an active role in hypermutation. BioEssays 20:227–234, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Crime and gentrification are among the most hotly-contested urban issues in American cities. In Us versus Them, Jan Doering examines both, showing how residents, activists, and politicians clashed over these issues and especially over how race factored into both. The book draws on extensive fieldwork to produce a comprehensive and vivid portrait of community conflict in two racially-diverse Chicago neighborhoods. In doing so, it provides new insights into how residents use the criminal justice system to fight crime but advance gentrification (...) in the process. (shrink)

Robert Boyle (1627-91) was at the centre of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth cventury. While most of us were first introduced to Boyle as an historical figure in chemistry, he was first and foremost a philosopher committed to experimentalism in natural philosophy. He was a forward thinker, anticipating the direction of human philosophical and scientific endeavours. He was thinking about issues that are currently hot topics in philosophy and social policy, e.g. the importance of science in benefitting humanity, the (...) need to make the recipes for medicines publicly available, the connections between science and ethics, the tensions between science and religion, just to name a few. Moreover, Boyle was providing important philosophical guidance on each of these topics. He is not merely a relic of the past whose only claims to fame are his ideal gas law and an improved vacuum pump; he is a leader in experimental philosophy whose interests span nearly the whole range of philosophical topics, including morality, philosophy of religion, natural kinds, causation, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Boyle was not only the most prolific English author in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, he was arguably the most influential natural philosopher of the period. His impact on chemistry and experimental science is important and well documented, but other aspects of Boyle’s philosophical thought are less widely known, and yet clearly influenced the natural philosophy, natural theology and philosophy (broadly speaking) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To conclude, as many scholars do, that he was an important influence in the formation of the experimentalist and empiricist traditions and a vital source for understanding subsequent philosophical developments, would be true but it would also be selling him short. -/- There are two main aims of this volume. First, to give students and researchers of Boyle ready access to the wide array of philosophical topics that Boyle addressed and thereby present a more complete and systematic picture of both Robert Boyle and his philosophical contributions. Second, to present in one place the best current research on the philosophy of Robert Boyle that takes into account the last thirty years of scholarship and points us toward the next thirty years. These two aims also inform the choices of chapter topics. (shrink)

Against the background of the current European competitive media landscape, the media are more and more compelled to legitimize their activities in their own national context as well as at a European level. Meanwhile, the nature of the media diversity in The Netherlands has changed tremendously; from a society divided along political and religious lines, it has evolved towards a multi-ethnic society. Hence, both the conceptualizing and operationalizing of media diversity from an academic as well as a media practical perspective (...) prove to be hot topics. An expert meeting was held at the Department of Communication at Radboud University Nijmegen in December 2004 in which the contours of media diversity in general and in The Netherlands in particular were explored. Institutional performance as well as program-related aspects linked to the notion of media diversity were discussed. Media diversity was explored from the angle of media economics as well as from the perspective of the program/format level. In addition, the audience reception perspective as well as methodologically problematic aspects one encounters when measuring media diversity were assessed. What follows here is a selection of several most pertinent views on this complex topic. We welcome each critical insight from other geographical contexts which might stimulate the debate on measures of open and reflective diversity in the media. (shrink)

The paper deals with selected philosophical and methodological problems concerning the building of the quantum theory of gravitation, which is expected to unify general relativity and the quantum field theory into a single consistent and comprehensive theory. It outlines the basic ontological characteristics of such a theory, its structure and the limitations set upon it by the general relativity and the quantum field theory. Models of such a theory are described as well.

A serious difficulty for theories of consciousness is to go beyond mere correlation between physical processes and experience. Currently, neural workspace and sensorimotor contingency theories are two of the most promising approaches to make any headway here. This paper explores the relation between these two sets of theories. Workspace theories build on large-scale activity within the brain. Sensorimotor theories include external processes in their explanations, stressing the sensorimotor contingencies that arise from our interaction with the environment. Despite the basic differences, (...) we argue that workspace- and sensorimotor theories are complementary rather than competitive. By combining these theories, a number of problems that hamper them individually may be overcome and their strengths combined: Workspace theories have more to offer for explaining how there can be consciousness in the first place, while sensorimotor theories are strong in making sense of the specific phenomenal character of experiences. (shrink)

Hilbert's axiomatization program of physical theories met an interesting challenge when it confronted the rise of quantum mechanics in the mid-twenties. The novelty of the mathematical apparatus of the then newly born theory was to be matched only by its substantial lack of any definite physical interpretation. The early attempts at axiomatization, which are described here, reflect all the difficulty of the task faced by Jordan, Hilbert, von Neumann and others. The role of von Neumann is examined in considerable detail (...) as he can be viewed here as the most outstanding of Hilbert's heirs. Von Neumann, especially in his work devoted to the proof of the impossibility of hidden variables, not only continued Hilbert's program but pushed it to its very limits, blending axiomatic rigor and interpretative commitment. (shrink)

What I call the active mind approach revolves around the claim that what is “on” a person’s mind is in an important sense brought on and held on to through the agent’s self-conscious rational activ...

Existing accounts of hypothetico-deductive confirmation are able to circumvent the classical objections, but the confirmation of conjunctions of hypotheses brings them into trouble. Therefore this paper develops a new, falsificationist account of qualitative confirmation by means of Ken Gemes ' theory of content parts. The new approach combines the hypothetico-deductive view with falsificationist and instance confirmation principles. It is considerably simpler than the previous suggestions and gives a better treatment of conjunctive hypotheses while solving the tacking problems equally well.

Software systems play an ever more important role in our lives and software engineers and their companies find themselves in a position where they are held responsible for ethical issues that may arise. In this paper, we try to disentangle ethical considerations that can be performed at the level of the software engineer from those that belong in the wider domain of business ethics. The handling of ethical problems that fall into the responsibility of the engineer has traditionally been addressed (...) by the publication of Codes of Ethics and Conduct. We argue that these Codes are barely able to provide normative orientation in software development. The main contribution of this paper is, thus, to analyze the normative features of Codes of Ethics in software engineering and to explicate how their value-based approach might prevent their usefulness from a normative perspective. Codes of Conduct cannot replace ethical deliberation because they do not and cannot offer guidance because of their underdetermined nature. This lack of orientation, we argue, triggers reactive behavior such as “cherry-picking,” “risk of indifference,” “ex-post orientation,” and the “desire to rely on gut feeling.” In the light of this, we propose to implement ethical deliberation within software development teams as a way out. (shrink)

Notes on the life of Adolf Lindenbaum, a complete bibliography of his published works, and selected references to his unpublished results.

The author proposes a formalization of Hilary Putnam's proof of the thesis that time does not pass. This enables one to eliminate difficulties connected with the original formulation.

身のまわりの卑近な事柄を根本から考え直してみたい。そんな欲求が人々の心をとらえている。看護する自分に、哲学はそのための力を与えてくれるだろうか。知識・科学・心・モラルといった主題にそって看護の主要な問 題をとりあげ、哲学ならではの思索の道筋を示す。「考える看護」の面白さが実感できる「ナースのための哲学入門」。.

Extensionalist theories of the specious present suggest that every perceptual experience is extended in time for a short while, such that they are co-extensive in time with the time experienced in them. Thus, there can be no experience of time, unless the experience itself is extended in time. Accordingly, there must be something that unites the temporal parts of a perceptual experience into temporally extended wholes. I call this the “glue-problem for extensionalism”. In this paper I suggest three desiderata that (...) an extensionalist theory should meet in order to solve the glue-problem. I also distinguish between different versions of extensionalism, and argue that none of them can solve the glue-problem without violating at least one desideratum. (shrink)

Wprowadzenie -- Roman ingarden -- Antoni kępiński -- Karol wojtyła -- Władysław stróżewski -- Józef tischner.

In this encyclopedia entry I canvass the current interpretations of John Locke's concept of Real Essence and the role it plays in his philosophy.

Due to the intense selection pressure against inbreeding, humans are expected to possess psychological adaptations that regulate mate choice and avoid inbreeding. From a gene’s-eye perspective, there is little difference in the evolutionary costs between situations where an individual him/herself is participating in inbreeding and inbreeding among other close relatives. The difference is merely quantitative, as fitness can be compromised via both routes. The question is whether humans are sensitive to the direct as well as indirect costs of inbreeding. Using (...) responses from a large population-based sample (27,364 responses from 2,353 participants), we found that human motivations to avoid inbreeding closely track the theoretical costs of inbreeding as predicted by inclusive-fitness theory. Participants were asked to select in a forced choice paradigm, which of two acts of inbreeding with actual family members they would want to avoid most. We found that the estimated fitness costs explained 83.6% of participant choices. Importantly, fitness costs explained choices also when the self was not involved. We conclude that humans intuit the indirect fitness costs of mating decisions made by close family members and that psychological inbreeding avoidance mechanisms extend beyond self-regulation. (shrink)

The main thesis of this monograph, and its novelty, is the attempt to read Newman's work not only as a defence of the author's life, but as a defence of individual life in general. This reading is done against the background of his profound personalism based on two foundations: truth and responsibility.