Meena Srinivasan began teaching in order to touch lives, but with the demands of covering her curriculum she all but forgot her aspiration. During a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, Meena learned for the first time about mindfulness. In Teach, Breathe, Learn, Srinivasan highlights how mindfulness can be an effective tool in the classroom. What makes this book truly unique is Srinivasan's perspective as a classroom teacher, wrestling daily with the conditions about which she writes. Each chapter (...) begins with a personal narrative concerning a challenge Srinivasan faced during the school day and how a specific mindfulness practice helped. Testimonials from students, colleagues, and parents appear in each chapter, along with a mindfulness practice. Part 1 helps teachers develop compassion and shift from "reacting" to "responding" to demands. Part 2 offers techniques for cultivating loving-kindness and seeing students, colleagues, and parents as oneself. The author shares what research says about the effects of mindfulness practice on academic, social, and emotional learning. The last section of the book introduces the complete curriculum teachers can use to incorporate mindfulness into their classroom, replete with lesson plans, PowerPoint diagrams, handouts, and homework assignments. (shrink)

How realistic is it to adopt a quantum random walk model to account for decisions involving two choices? Here, we discuss the neural plausibility and the effect of initial state and boundary thresholds on such a model and contrast it with various features of the classical random walk model of decision making.

This article presents a novel challenge to epistemic internalism. The challenge rests on a set of cases which feature subjects forming beliefs under conditions of “bad ideology”—that is, conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining, and are sustained by, systems of social oppression. In such cases, the article suggests, the externalistic view that justification is in part a matter of worldly relations, rather than the internalistic view that justification is solely a matter of how things stand (...) from the agent’s individual perspective, becomes the more intuitively attractive theory. But these “bad ideology” cases do not merely yield intuitive verdicts that favor externalism over internalism. These cases are, moreover, analogous to precisely those canonical cases widely taken to be counterexamples to externalism: cases featuring brains-in-vats, clairvoyants, and dogmatists. That is, such “bad ideology” cases are, in all relevant respects, just like cases that are thought to count against externalism—except that they intuitively favor externalism. This, the author argues, is a serious worry for internalism. What is more, it bears on the debate over whether externalism is a genuinely “normative” epistemology. (shrink)

Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin-for-error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin-for-error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (...) assumptions. In this paper I bolster the margin-for-error premise against these attacks by recasting Williamson's own two-part defence, the first part intended to work on the assumption that there is no constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic, and the second intended to work without this assumption. Pace various luminists, I argue that the appeals to safety needed for Williamson's two-part defence are plausible. I also argue that all that is needed to generate the margin-for-error premise from these safety conditions is an empirical assumption about the kinds of creatures we are: that is, creatures whose beliefs are structured by certain dispositions. By recasting the anti-luminosity argument in this way, we can understand what is really at stake in the debate about luminosity: that is, whether we are luminous. (shrink)

We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that (...) this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them. (shrink)

Current EEG research emphasizes gamma band coherence as a signature of functional integration, that is, the solution to the binding problem. We note that spatial patterns of coherent neural activity are also observed at other EEG frequencies. If these oscillations reflect Nunez's resonant modes, they offer a solution to the binding problem that emerges naturally from the architecture of cortical connections.

Computational models of semantic memory exploit information about co-occurrences of words in naturally occurring text to extract information about the meaning of the words that are present in the language. Such models implicitly specify a representation of temporal context. Depending on the model, words are said to have occurred in the same context if they are presented within a moving window, within the same sentence, or within the same document. The temporal context model (TCM), which specifies a particular definition of (...) temporal context, has proved useful in the study of episodic memory. The predictive temporal context model (pTCM) uses the same definition of temporal context to generate semantic memory representations. Taken together pTCM and TCM may prove to be part of a general model of declarative memory. (shrink)

In the early 1980s, U.S. universities began regulating sexual relationships between professors and students. Such regulations are routinely justified by a rationale drawn from sexual-harassment law in the employment context: the power differential between professor and student precludes the possibility of genuine consent on the student’s part. This rationale is problematic, as feminists in the 1980s first observed, for its protectionist and infantilizing attitude toward (generally) women students. But it is also problematic in that it fails to register what is (...) truly ethically troubling about consensual professor-student sex. A professor’s having sex with his student constitutes a pedagogical failure: that is, a failure to satisfy the duties that arise from the practice of teaching. What is more, much consensual professor-student sex constitutes a patriarchal failure: such relationships often feed on, and reinforce, women’s second-class standing in higher education. As such, these relationships can thwart the legal right of women students, under Title IX, to exist in the university on equal terms with their male counterparts. Whether or not we should ultimately favor such an interpretation of Title IX—whether or not, that is, it would render campuses ultimately more equal for women and other marginalized people—it is clear that university professors need to attend more carefully to the sexual ethics of their own practice. (shrink)

The role of holistic or parts-based processing in face identification has been explored mostly with neutral faces. In the current study, we investigated the nature of processing (holistic vs. parts) in recognition memory for faces with emotional expressions. There were two phases in this experiment: learning phase and test phase. In the learning phase participants learned face–name associations of happy, neutral, and sad faces. The test phase consisted of a two-choice recognition test (whole face, eyes, or mouth) given either immediately (...) or after a 24-hour delay. Results indicate that emotional faces were remembered better than neutral faces and performance was better with whole faces as compared to isolated parts. The performance in immediate and delayed recognition interacted with emotional information. Sad eyes and happy mouth were remembered better in the delayed recognition condition. These results suggest that in addition to holistic processing, specific parts–emotion combinations play a critical role in delayed recognition memory. (shrink)

Many traditions in the East have proposed that consciousness without content is possible and could be achieved with mental training. However, it is not clear whether such a state is possible given that intentionality is a critical property of mentality and consciousness in many theories of consciousness. A prominent recent attempt to account for such states of “minimal phenomenal experience” is the ascending reticular arousal system (ARAS) model, which proposes a specific type of non-conceptual representational content to address such a (...) state. Consciousness without content can also be understood by studying related or similar states of minimal phenomenal experience and this paper discusses such findings from such states including dreamless sleep experience and their implications. One way to argue for the need for proposing consciousness without content is to locate a property of consciousness that would necessitate postulating it. A continuous state of consciousness without content may be needed to understand continuity of conscious experience. Finally, I discuss the implications of consciousness without content for current theories of consciousness. (shrink)

What is it for an analytic philosopher to do ideology critique? Just how useful are the proprietary tools of analytic philosophy when it comes to thinking about ideology, and in what sense ‘useful’, and to whom? And to what end might analytic philosophers pursue ideology critique? Here I attempt to say something about these questions by commenting on a recent contribution to analytic ideology critique, Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works.¿Qué significa para un filósofo analítico hacer crítica de la ideología? ¿En (...) qué medida son útiles las herramientas propias de la filosofía analítica cuando se trata de pensar sobre la ideología, y en qué sentido de ‘útiles’, y para quién? Y ¿con qué fin podrían emprender los filósofos analíticos la crítica de la ideología? Aquí pretendo decir algo acerca de estas cuestiones comentando una reciente contribución a la crítica analítica de la idelogía, la obra de Jason Stanley How Propaganda Works. (shrink)

This article attempts to understand the state of teaching, training and research in business ethics in the South and South East Asian region. The countries surveyed are Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. The diversity across countries in the region is high in terms of economic development, political structuring and human development. The degree of privatization and globalization is varied across countries since each of them is in a different phase of transition. (...) In an earlier survey on Business Ethics, published in 1997, India was the only country from this region that was represented. In the current survey, 12 countries from the South and South East Asia are represented. While Business Ethics in academia is widely present, Corporate Social Responsibility, Governance and Sustainability though relatively new appear to be growing rapidly. Business Ethics courses tend to focus on functional ethics, managerial ethics and implementing codes of ethical conduct. Across the 12 countries, Business Ethics is taught either as an elective or a core course in most institutions. Training emphasis across countries is varied. While training institutions in India appear to be high, the presence of multinational consultants in Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka is significant. The research focus across countries in the region is weak. The high convergence on the top issues in Business Ethics, across respondents in different countries, is worthy of mention. (shrink)

Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre‐existing perceptual and cognitive abilities. The present studies explored whether the abacus—a descendent of the first human computing devices—may have evolved to exploit general biases in human visual attention, or whether developing expertise with (...) the abacus requires learning special strategies for allocating visual attention to the abacus. To address this question, we administered a series of visual search tasks to abacus experts and subjects who had little to no abacus experience, in which search targets and distractors were overlaid atop abacus “beads.” Across three studies, we found that both experts and naïve subjects were faster to detect targets in semantically relevant components of the abacus, suggesting that abacus training is not required to exhibit attentional biases toward these components of the abacus. This finding suggests that the attentional biases that scaffold numerical processing of the abacus may emerge from general properties of visual attention that are exploited by the design of the abacus itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:We extend the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) poverty-alleviation approach by recognizing the poor as valuable suppliers—specifically of intellectual property. Although the poor possess huge reserves of intellectual property, they are unable to participate in global knowledge networks owing to their illiteracy and poverty. This is a crippling form of social exclusion in today’s growing knowledge economy because it adversely affects their capabilities for advancement at several levels. Providing the poor access to global knowledge networks as rightful participants—as suppliers of (...) intellectual property—leads to poverty alleviation as a result of their increased social inclusion, not only through economic benefits, but also through the poor’s improved well-being as a result of their increased self-esteem and dignity. Using concepts from social network theory, we develop a poverty-alleviation approach to harness and integrate the intellectual property of the poor into global knowledge networks through trust-based partnerships among the poor, non-governmental organizations, and multinational corporations. (shrink)

Perceptual load plays a critical role in identification and awareness of stimuli. Given the differences in emotion–attention interactions, we investigated the perception of distractor emotional faces in two different load conditions under divided attention with a task based on the inattentional blindness paradigm. Participants performed a low- or high-load task with a string of letters presented against a happy, sad or neutral face (in a circular form) as the background. Participants were asked to identify the face that appeared in the (...) critical trial. Results indicate an interaction between emotion and load. First, identification of faces with happy expression was better than chance and unaffected by load. Second, performance was worse than chance for faces with sad expression in the high-load condition, indicating inhibition of unattended sad distractor faces in the critical trial. This indicates that inhibitory processes during a difficult attentional task under divided attention influence subsequent perception of distractor stimuli especially sad faces. The results have implications for the theories of selective attention as well as the role of emotions in conscious perception. (shrink)

Mindfulness can be understood as the mental ability to focus on the direct and immediate perception or monitoring of the present moment with a state of open and nonjudgmental awareness. Descriptions of mindfulness and methods for cultivating it originated in eastern spiritual traditions. These suggest that mindfulness can be developed through meditation practice to increase positive qualities such as awareness, insight, wisdom, and compassion. In this article we focus on the relationships between mindfulness, with associated meditation practices, and the cognitive (...) neuroscience of attention and awareness. Mindful awareness is related to distributed attention, phenomenal consciousness, and momentary self-awareness, as characterized by recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience as well as in influential consciousness models. Finally, we outline an integrated neurocognitive model of mindfulness, attention, and awareness, with a key role of prefrontal cortex. (shrink)

Donald Michie was many things; a computing pioneer in machine intelligence, a cryptographer who made key breakthroughs at Bletchley Park, and a geneticist. Tragically, two years ago he died in a car crash. Here, Ashwin Srinivasan presents an engaging collection of lively essays from Michie's writings, on thinking computers, mice, and much more.

Mīmāṁsā, an Indian hermeneutics provides an exhaustive methodology to interpret Vedic statements. A formalism namely, Mīmāṁsā Inspired Representation of Actions has already been proposed in a preliminary manner. This paper expands the formalism logically and includes Syntax and Semantics covering Soundness and Completeness. Here, several interpretation techniques from Mīmāṁsā have been considered for formalising the statements. Based on these, instructions that denote actions are categorized into positive and prohibitive unconditional imperatives and conditional imperatives that enjoin reason, temporal action and goal. (...) These instructions are evaluated to three values S, V and N. If the instruction is executed with the intention of goal, then it acquires the value of S; if the intention of goal is present and the instruction is not executed, then it assumes the value of V; and if there is no intention of goal, then the instruction is evaluated to N. This formalism has also been applied in different computational settings such as AI planning, Robotics, task analysis and classification of natural language instructions. An outline of these applications and the comparison of this formalism with other relevant theories are also presented in this paper. (shrink)

This year marks the 60th year anniversary of the publication of Niko Tinbergen’s “On aims and methods of ethology” which remains influential among today’s biologists and social scientists for its introduction of four questions for a complete explanation for animal behaviors. In this paper we argue that a large part of the lasting appeal to Tinbergen’s four questions was (and still is) the methodological commitment to treating organisms as objects as opposed to purposive agents. Tinbergen’s approach reinvigorated the discipline of (...) ethology, allowing it to shed its teleological and anthropomorphic associations and to better cohere with a philosophy of science that favors inductive procedures, causal and mechanistic analytic techniques, and an emphasis on Darwinian explanations. While Tinbergen’s approach is still prized among today’s biological social scientists, it ignores an important feature of many social organisms, that they are not merely objects, they are also purposive agents. We explore the implications that a shift from treating organisms as objects to treating them as agents has on both how we should interpret and answer Tinbergen’s four questions. Updating Tinbergen’s four questions with agency in mind not only makes them more applicable to the biological investigation of animal behavior, but also strengthens the value and applicability of biology-oriented research programs in the social sciences. (shrink)

An astonishingly diverse biomolecular circuitry orchestrates the functioning machinery underlying every living cell. These biomolecules and their circuits have been engineered not only for various industrial applications but also to perform other atypical functions that they were not evolved for—including computation. Various kinds of computational challenges, such as solving NP‐complete problems with many variables, logical computation, neural network operations, and cryptography, have all been attempted through this unconventional computing paradigm. In this review, we highlight key experiments across three different ‘‘eras’’ (...) of molecular computation, beginning with molecular solutions, transitioning to logic circuits and ultimately, more complex molecular networks. We also discuss a variety of applications of molecular computation, from solving NP‐hard problems to self‐assembled nanostructures for delivering molecules, and provide a glimpse into the exciting potential that molecular computing holds for the future. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/9Mw0K0vCSQw. (shrink)

Text document classification and clustering is an important learning task which fits to both data mining and machine learning areas. The learning task throws several challenges when it is required to process high dimensional text documents. Word distribution in text documents plays a very key role in learning process. Research related to high dimensional text document classification and clustering is usually limited to application of traditional distance functions and most of the research contributions in the existing literature did not consider (...) the word distribution in documents. In this research, we propose a novel similarity function for feature pattern clustering and high dimensional text classification. The similarity function proposed is used to carry supervised learning based dimensionality reduction. The important feature of this work is that the word distribution before and after dimensionality reduction is the same. Experiment results prove the proposed approach achieves dimensionality reduction, retains the word distribution and obtained better classification accuracies compared to other measures. (shrink)

Business is a representative institution of our times; it represents the spirit of our age. Modern business in general has displaced a remarkable ability to change. But the change yet to come will be something unprecedented. What is the nature of this change? What is the type of vision and sirategy that will help business as a social institution, and the organizations that are part of it, to navigate this evolutionary transition successfully? Or, in other words, what is the nature (...) of the paradigm shift needed to manage future change? These are the main questions business leaders and managers will be facing in the future. This article examines these questions in the light of Sri Aurobindo's vision. (shrink)