This paper provides new insights into the food security performance of long and short food chains, through an analysis of the resilience of such chains during the severe weather events that occurred in the Australian State of Queensland in early 2011. Widespread flooding cut roads and highways, isolated towns, and resulted in the deaths of people and animals. Farmlands were inundated and there were food shortages in many towns. We found clear evidence that the supermarket-based food chain delivery system experienced (...) significant difficulties in supplying food to flood-affected towns. In contrast, more localized food supply chains—which relied upon supply from growers in peri-urban areas and community-based food initiatives—remained largely intact, and provided food at a time when the supermarkets were limited in their ability to respond to consumer demand. However, on closer examination of food distribution during flooding in the regional city of Rockhampton and in the State capital, Brisbane, the demarcation of success between “long” and “short” food chains became blurred. Both types of food supply chains shared some key resilience characteristics in responding to crisis but diverged in other important ways. We argue that conceptualizing food chains in terms of key elements of resilience—scale, diversity, flexibility and cohesion—may be more fruitful than the short-long dichotomy alone. This approach is particularly useful when prioritizing food security as the basis for evaluating food system sustainability in a context of predicted increases in extreme weather events and future climate change. (shrink)

We present a population density and moment-based description of the stochastic dynamics of domain $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ -mediated inactivation of L-type $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ channels. Our approach accounts for the effect of heterogeneity of local $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ signals on whole cell $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ currents; however, in contrast with prior work, e.g., Sherman et al. :985–995, 1990), we do not assume that $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ domain formation and collapse are fast compared to channel gating. We demonstrate the population density and moment-based modeling approaches using a 12-state Markov chain model (...) of an L-type $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ channel introduced by Greenstein and Winslow :2918–2945, 2002). Simulated whole cell voltage clamp responses yield an inactivation function for the whole cell $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ current that agrees with the traditional approach when domain dynamics are fast. We analyze the voltage-dependence of $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ inactivation that may occur via slow heterogeneous domain [ $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ ]. Next, we find that when channel permeability is held constant, $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ -mediated inactivation of L-type channels increases as the domain time constant increases, because a slow domain collapse rate leads to increased mean domain [ $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ ] near open channels; conversely, when the maximum domain [ $${\text{Ca}}^{2+}$$ ] is held constant, inactivation decreases as the domain time constant increases. Comparison of simulation results using population densities and moment equations confirms the computational efficiency of the moment-based approach, and enables the validation of two distinct methods of truncating and closing the open system of moment equations. In general, a slow domain time constant requires higher order moment truncation for agreement between moment-based and population density simulations. (shrink)

Photographer Smith allows a rare and intimate glimpse of the unique region of Southern Apalachia. Smith's images evoke a range of emotions and reveal the reality behind the stereotypes of rural Southern life.

1Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305‐2155, USAThe Evolution of Agency and Other Essays Kim Sterelny Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2001 xvi + 310 Hardback£42.50, $60.00 Paperback£15.95, $22.00.

With the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) to healthcare, there is also a need for professional guidance to support its use. New (2022) reports from National Health Service AI Lab & Health Education England focus on healthcare workers’ understanding and confidence in AI clinical decision support systems (AI-CDDSs), and are concerned with developing trust in, and the trustworthiness of these systems. While they offer guidance to aid developers and purchasers of such systems, they offer little specific guidance for the clinical (...) users who will be required to use them in patient care. This paper argues that clinical, professional and reputational safety will be risked if this deficit of professional guidance for clinical users of AI-CDDSs is not redressed. We argue it is not enough to develop training for clinical users without first establishing professional guidance regarding the rights and expectations of clinical users. We conclude with a call to action for clinical regulators: to unite to draft guidance for users of AI-CDDS that helps manage clinical, professional and reputational risks. We further suggest that this exercise offers an opportunity to address fundamental issues in the use of AI-CDDSs; regarding, for example, the fair burden of responsibility for outcomes. (shrink)

Modern interpreters have often regarded Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics as a mystery, or even a bit of an embarrassment. In his treatises on natural science and ethics, Aristotle is constantly concerned to review the opinions of his predecessors and of people in general; where appropriate, he also takes note of experiential observations, some of them highly specialized. However, the traditional view of the Posterior Analytics is that it advances an almost Cartesian picture of sciences as deductive systems founded on intuitively evident (...) first premises. How are these to be reconciled? (shrink)

M̀atter Matters is a work of genius. The work exhibits a breathtaking spread of erudition from antiquity to the present, mobilized to elucidate the early modern significance of the concept of matter. The slight play of words in the title expresses the principal thesis of the work, that mathematics is intelligible for Descartes if and only if matter exists as its object. Smith understands, better than anyone, how Descartes could claim, literally, that "my physics is nothing but geometry." Many (...) will be convinced, some dismayed, and all will be dazzled by this book.'---Thomas M. Lennon, The University of Western Ontario". (shrink)

Nicholas D. Smith considers an original interpretation of the Republic, presenting it as a work about knowledge and education. Smith pays particular attention to Plato's use of images as representations of higher realities in education, as well as the power of knowledge in the Republic.

This is an annotated reading list on the beginning elements of the theory of computable functions. It is now structured so as to complement the first eight lectures of Thomas Forster’s Part III course in Lent 2011 (see the first four chapters of his evolving handouts).

An Introduction to G¨ odel’s Theorems now exists in two versions – the original 2007 printing, and a corrected reprint in 2008. The quick way of telling these apart is to glance at the imprints page (the verso of the title page): the later version notes, halfway down that page, “Reprinted with corrections 2008”. Corrections marked with marginal side-bars as here are those that have been noted after the second printing went to press, and hence still need correction/improvement. If you (...) have the corrected reprint, then these marked corrections are the only errors you need care about! This complete list of corrections is divided, for convenience, into two sections. (shrink)

Last week, we talked a bit about the Anderson-Belnap logic of entailment, as discussed in Priest’s Introduction to Non-Classical Logic. For a quite different approach to entailment, we’ll look next week at Neil Tennant’s account. Doing things rather out of order, this week I’d like to say something more basic about the problems to which both Anderson and Belnap, on the one hand, and Tennant on the other, are responding. This will give me the chance for a bit of nostalgic (...) philosophical time-travelling, revisiting work by Casimir Lewy and Timothy Smiley from the Cambridge of fifty years ago. (shrink)

Smith begins with a comprehensive analysis of social theory, presents a defense of Jurgen Habermas' main contribution to social ethics and contrasts Habermas' rational foundation for ethics with the decisionism defended by Max Weber, and ...

Original essays by philosophers of language and philosophers of time exploring the semantics and metaphysics of tense.

Neoclassical economics remains the leading theoretical alternative to Marxian economics. In this article I shall contrast the accounts of technical change in capitalism proposed by both theories. I shall introduce five criteria relevant to a comparison of competing social theories, and argue that the Marxian perspective on technical change in capitalism is superior on all five counts.

The promise of genomic medicine lies in the opportunity to improve health outcomes via a personalized approach to management, grounded in genetic and genomic variation unique to an individual. However, disparities and inequities mar this remarkable landscape of genomic innovation. Prior efforts to understand these inequities have focused on populations for which genetic testing is relatively protocolized or where test utility varies greatly by ancestry groups, where equitable outcomes are more clearly defined. We therefore consider the current landscape of rare (...) disease genomics, in which diagnostic approaches vary widely and utility remains to be fully understood, and suggest a path forward: how ecosocial theory may be used to guide novel equity‐focused initiatives that incorporate illness narratives to improve population health. We present examples of narrative medicine in rare disease and reimagine the role this discipline may play in genomic sequencing studies, toward incorporation of the unique illness narrative into clinical genetics and genomics practice. Approaches that broaden the definitions of disease and of outcomes of interest will force the field to grapple with its racist history and begin to advance health equity and promote justice so that genomic medicine may truly deliver on its promise. (shrink)

In this book, John H. Smith investigates the influences of classical and humanistic rhetoric on Hegel's theory and practice of philosophical representation. Smith focuses on Hegel's concept of Bildung (roughly, education, development, or formation) which occupies a central position in his philosophy.

Peter Smith; On ‘The Objects of Perceptual Experience’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, Pages 191–196, https://doi.org.

The normative foundations of the environmental movement can be thought of in a range of different ways. The present paper is a commentary on very interesting papers by Thomas Dunlap, Thomas Hill and Kimberly Smith, who take up the spiritual, ethical and political perspectives respectively. Their accounts are described and evaluated.

Research into child language reveals that it takes a long time for children to learn the correct mapping of colour words. Steels & Belpaeme's (S&B's) guessing game, however, models fast learning of words. We discuss computational studies based on cross-situational learning, which yield results that are more consistent with the empirical child language data than those obtained by S&B.

Smith, Wesley J The growth in policies that force healthcare workers to participate in activities that are deemed both immoral and unprofessional as against the sanctity of human life has given rise to the need for bringing about conscience in health care. The need for fashioning proper conscience clauses and challenges faced in its implementation are highlighted.

This paper addresses the much-debated question about the fate of Kant's race theory in the 1790s by examining his use of the concepts of “germs” [Keime] and “predispositions” [Anlagen] in the Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason of 1793. Following the well-received “anthropological interpretation” of the essay on radical evil that draws productive analogies with his philosophy of history, it proposes a “new anthropological interpretation” that focuses on concepts borrowed from his philosophy of race. Against those who have argued (...) that Kant changed his mind about his race theory in the 1790s, this interpretation of Religion shows that he continued to use its main concepts well into his late period, even introducing them into his moral philosophy for the first time. (shrink)