As most engineering design proceeds by modifying past designs and reusing and adapting existing components and solution principles, a significant part of the knowledge engineers employ in design is encapsulated in the past designs they are familiar with. References to past designs, as well as encounters with them, serve to invoke the knowledge associated with them and constructed from them. This chapter argues that much of this knowledge is tacit consisting in and/or made available by the perceptual recognition of features (...) and situations, using a discussion of design margins to illustrate how engineers use tacit knowledge in reasoning about the properties of new designs. (shrink)

Heterogenous flows across system boundaries continue to pose significant problems for efficient resource allocation especially with respect to long term strategic planning and immediate problems about allocation to address particular resource shortages. The approach taken here to modelling such flows is an engineering change prediction one. This enables margin modelling by producing system models in dependency matrices with different linkage types. Change prediction approaches from engineering design can analyse where these bottlenecks in integrated systems would be so that resources can (...) be deployed flexibility to avoid them and address them when they occur. Current state of the art of margin research can be furthered by identifying margins on multiple levels of system composition. It can usefully be complemented by a category theory based approach which allows representation of variable and constant properties of models under changing conditions, and the identification of flows within models. Category theory is useful for formalising such explanatory frameworks as it can both structure systems and permit analysis of their applications in a complementary way. (shrink)

Since its discovery in 1912, X-ray crystallography has become a most useful tool in physics, chemistry, material science, mineralogy, metallurgy, and even in the biological sciences. In 1914, Max von Laue was awarded the Nobel Prize “for the discovery of X-ray diffraction by crystals,” followed by the 1915 Nobel Prize to William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg “for their services in analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays.” And these early Nobel prizes marked only the beginning of X-ray (...) crystallography as one of the most fruitful methods in the history of modern science. A 100 years after Laue’s Nobel Prize and 50 years after another Nobel Prize to Dorothy Hodgkin “for her determination by X-ray technique of the structures of important biochemical substances,” the UN proclaimed 2014 the International Year of Crystallography. “In all, 45 scientists have been awarded over the past century for work that is either directly or indirectly related to crystallo .. (shrink)

This is an important book. Its author, Roslyn Weiss, contends that the Socratic Paradox, "No one does wrong willingly," and related Socratic views about the virtues have been seriously misinterpreted. Socrates is not the moral intellectualist, ethical/psychological egoist, and eudaimonist generations of scholars have believed him to be. The arguments in which Socrates articulates versions of the Socratic Paradox must be examined with respect to their overall agonistic contexts. The Socratic Paradox, when it appears, operates as a rhetorical weapon against (...) a specific class of interlocutor enemies—the Sophists.The significance of Weiss's thesis cannot be underestimated. If her view is correct, the delineation between early "Socratic" dialogues, marked by problematic Socratic doctrines like "No one does wrong willingly," and later "Platonic" dialogues, is significantly eroded. Perhaps other, thematic and/or methodological features mark distinctions between groups of dialogues, yet the overall effect of dispensing with this particular doctrine is spectacular. A saner Platonic Socrates emerges along with improved coherence across Plato's dialogues. Weiss builds her case in careful detail. (shrink)

This paper describes and defends the view that minimal chemical life essentially involves the chemical integration of three chemical functionalities: containment, metabolism, and program (Rasmussen et al. in Protocells: bridging nonliving and living matter, 2009a ). This view is illustrated and explained with the help of CMP and Rasmussen diagrams (Rasmussen et al. In: Rasmussen et al. (eds.) in Protocells: bridging nonliving and living matter, 71–100, 2009b ), both of which represent the key chemical functional dependencies among containment, metabolism, and (...) program. The CMP model of minimal chemical life gains some support from the broad view of life as open-ended evolution, which I have defended elsewhere (Bedau in The philosophy of artificial life, 1996 ; Bedau in Artificial Life, 4:125–140, 1998 ). Further support comes from the natural way the CMP model resolves the puzzle about whether life is a matter of degree. (shrink)

For fifty years Hubert Dreyfus has done pioneering work which brings phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. This is a selection of his most influential essays, developing his critique of the representational model of the mind in analytical philosophy of mind and mainstream cognitive science.

Dieser Aufsatz analysiert Leibniz' Begriff der Expression. Er ist eine Vorstudie zu einer umfassenden Untersuchung der Lehre, daß jede einfache Substanz das ganze Weltall ausdrückt. Leibnizens Beispiele und Definitionen von Expression werden besprochen, und dann wird die Analyse des Begriffs in zwei Stufen entwickelt.

We demonstrate a method for optimizing desired functionality in real complex chemical systems, using a genetic algorithm. The chemical systems studied here are mixtures of amphiphiles, which spontaneously exhibit a complex variety of self-assembled molecular aggregations, and the property optimized is turbidity. We also experimentally resolve the fitness landscape in some hyper-planes through the space of possible amphiphile formulations, in order to assess the practicality of our optimization method. Our method shows clear and significant progress after testing only 1 % (...) of the possible amphiphile formulations. (shrink)

Anthropology is a significant matter within the church. A person's doctrine of humanity will inevitably shape the way a person thinks about the church, salvation, and in part, God. This dissertation is written out of concern for the potential harm that a faulty anthropology may do to the church. This study is concerned with exposing an approach to leadership within the church that is based on a faulty anthropology. Servant leadership has been hailed as the answer to the leadership crisis (...) that has plagued businesses, political offices, and churches. It is said that the authoritarian, monarchical style of leadership in the twentieth century no longer meets the needs of the current setting. In 1970 Robert K. Greenleaf---the chief advocate of servant leadership---proposed servant leadership as the emerging style that was prepared to address the social unrest of the 1960's and 1970's. He argued that the current leadership style must change---adapt to the emerging needs of the people. Greenleaf developed his ideas on servant leadership in the context of his reading of Hermann Hesse and Albert Camus. The repercussions of Robert K. Greenleaf's anthropology are evident in his view of human transformation. ;This study exposes the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Greenleaf's work on servant leadership as a distortion of the nature of humanity to the point that it leaves the doctrines of sin and salvation bereft of Christian significance. Since many within the church have used Greenleaf in their search for a biblical leadership paradigm, a Christian theological response to Greenleaf's assessment of humanity and human transformation will conclude this study. (shrink)

Weak emergence has been offered as an explication of the ubiquitous notion of emergence used in complexity science (Bedau 1997). After outlining the problem of emergence and comparing weak emergence with the two other main objectivist approaches to emergence, this paper explains a version of weak emergence and illustrates it with cellular automata. Then it explains the sort of downward causation and explanatory autonomy involved in weak emergence.

This book is a must-read for researchers interested in taking a high-level, non-mechanistic approach to answering age-old fundamental questions in the brain ...

Prompted by the development of the Theory of Challenge and Threat States in Athletes (Jones et al, 2009), recent years has witnessed a considerable increase in research examining challenge and threat in sport. This manuscript provides a critical review of the literature examining challenge and threat in sport, tracing its historical development and some of the current empirical ambiguities. In an attempt to reconcile some of these ambiguities, and utilising neurobiological evidence associated with approach- and avoidance-motivation (cf. Elliot & Covington, (...) 2001), this paper draws upon the Evaluative Space Model (ESM: Cacioppo et al., 1997) and considers the implications for understanding challenge and threat in sport. For example, rather than see challenge and threat as opposite ends of a single bipolar continuum, the ESM implies that individuals could be (1) challenged, (2) threatened, (3) challenged and threatened, or (4) neither challenged or threatened by a particular stimulus. From this perspective it could be argued that the appraisal of some sport situations as both challenging and threatening could be advantageous, whereas the current literature seems to imply that the appraisal of stress as a threat is maladaptive for performance. In drawing upon the ESM, we outline the Evaluative Space Approach to Challenge and Threat and provide several testable hypotheses for advancing understanding of challenge and threat (in sport). We also outline a number of cardiovascular and experiential measures that can be used to examine these hypotheses. In sum, this paper provides a significant theoretical, empirical and practical contribution to our understanding of challenge and threat (in sport). (shrink)

Over the history of the study of visual perception there has been great success at discovering countless visual illusions. There has been less success in organizing the overwhelming variety of illusions into empirical generalizations (much less explaining them all via a unifying theory). Here, this article shows that it is possible to systematically organize more than 50 kinds of illusion into a 7 × 4 matrix of 28 classes. In particular, this article demonstrates that (1) smaller sizes, (2) slower speeds, (...) (3) greater luminance contrast, (4) farther distance, (5) lower eccentricity, (6) greater proximity to the vanishing point, and (7) greater proximity to the focus of expansion all tend to have similar perceptual effects, namely, to (A) increase perceived size, (B) increase perceived speed, (C) decrease perceived luminance contrast, and (D) decrease perceived distance. The detection of these empirical regularities was motivated by a hypothesis, called “perceiving the present,” that the visual system possesses mechanisms for compensating neural delay during forward motion. This article shows how this hypothesis predicts the empirical regularity. (shrink)

National decline is typically blamed on special interests from the demand side of politics corrupting a country's institutions. The usual demand-side suspects include crony capitalists, consumer activists, economic elites, and labor unions. Less attention is given to government insiders on the supply side of politics - rulers, elected officials, bureaucrats, and public employees. In autocracies and democracies, government insiders have the motive, means, and opportunity to co-opt political power for their benefit and at the expense of national well-being. Many storied (...) empires have succumbed to such inside jobs. Today, they imperil countries as different as China and the United States. Democracy - government by the people - does not ensure government for the people. Understanding how government insiders use their power to subvert the public interest - and how these negative consequences can be mitigated - is the topic of this book by Mark A. Zupan. (shrink)

This paper describes and defends the view that minimal chemical life essentially involves the chemical integration of three chemical functionalities: containment, metabolism, and program. This view is illustrated and explained with the help of CMP and Rasmussen diagrams in Protocells: bridging nonliving and living matter, 71–100, 2009b), both of which represent the key chemical functional dependencies among containment, metabolism, and program. The CMP model of minimal chemical life gains some support from the broad view of life as open-ended evolution, which (...) I have defended elsewhere. Further support comes from the natural way the CMP model resolves the puzzle about whether life is a matter of degree. (shrink)

In 2018, the remarkable rescue of twelve young boys and their football coach trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand captured worldwide attention. The rescue required the boys to be dived out of the cave system while fully anaesthetized which presented unique practical and ethical challenges for the rescue team. Major departures from normal anaesthetic practice were required. Taking anaesthetized children underwater was unprecedented, complex, and dangerous. To do this underground in a flooded cave meant the risks were extreme. Using (...) a principlist approach, this essay will outline the rescue plan highlighting the ethical dilemmas faced by the rescue team. Informed consent and full disclosure of information are justifiably waived in emergency disaster scenarios. Beneficence as a guiding principle becomes a major challenge when all rescue options appear destined to cause likely fatalities of healthy young boys. Importantly, virtues and virtue ethics also have a vital role to play when confronting and dealing with ethical challenges in disaster scenarios—this will be discussed with particular reference to the cave rescue. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Phenomenology Existentialism The Organization of the Book.

Child soldiers are generally perceived as faultless, passive victims. This ignores that the roles of child soldiers vary, from innocent abductee to wilful perpetrator. This book argues that child soldiers should be judged on their actions and that treating them like a homogenous group prevents them from taking responsibility for their acts.

The dynamical patterns in mental phenomena have a characteristic suppleness&emdash;a looseness or softness that persistently resists precise formulation&emdash;which apparently underlies the frame problem of artificial intelligence. This suppleness also undermines contemporary philosophical functionalist attempts to define mental capacities. Living systems display an analogous form of supple dynamics. However, the supple dynamics of living systems have been captured in recent artificial life models, due to the emergent architecture of those models. This suggests that analogous emergent models might be able to explain (...) supple dynamics of mental phenomena. These emergent models of the supple mind, if successful, would refashion the nature of contemporary functionalism in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Kristen R. GhodseeMark A. AllisonKristen R. Ghodsee. Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. 352 pp., hardcover, $29.99. ISBN 9781982190217.Kristen R. Ghodsee has written a wide-ranging, highly readable, and commendably radical vindication of utopian thought and experimentation. Everyday (...) Utopia is aimed at the educated lay reader—itself, perhaps, a utopian projection—rather than specialists. Nevertheless, all but the most erudite and cosmopolitan of scholars will encounter unfamiliar and compelling utopiana within its pages. While her earlier book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2018), concentrated on "state-sponsored solutions" to the deprivations of capitalism and patriarchy, the present volume sets its sights squarely on the private sphere, and utopian visions "for rearranging our domestic lives" (17).Ghodsee situates this turn to the domestic in two contexts. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the frangibility of the international commitment to gender equality. "Women around the globe woke up and realized that decades of feminism had done little to reverse the social expectation that mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters should provide care for young children, elderly parents, and sick relatives, as well as perform the emotional labors that hold families together in times of crisis," she laments (xii). Everyday Utopia's second context is the spate of recent works of "popular neo-utopianism," including Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists (2017), Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), and Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (2012) (14). What Ghodsee finds wanting in this discourse is its myopic focus on the public sphere, and its unspoken presupposition that our private and domestic lives have no such need of utopian renovation. But it is just this presupposition [End Page 285] that the COVID-19 lockdown discredited, although many other indicators (runaway housing and childcare costs, the environmental crisis, the epidemic of loneliness) already suggested as much. Ghodsee rightly insists that "where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment" (14). As utopian thinkers from Plato forward have understood, moreover, it is short-sighted to suppose that sweeping economic and political transformations are possible without a concomitant rethinking of the "intimate worlds" that subtend these public domains (15).Accordingly, Everyday Utopia devotes its succeeding chapters to examining alternatives to the dominant institutions of the contemporary private sphere, including the single-family household, the monogamous couple paradigm of childrearing and mating, and the institution of private property. In each case, Ghodsee plumbs the past and limns the present to highlight utopian alternatives to contemporary norms. Among this book's greatest strengths is its consistently international range of examples and admirably sustained commitment to feature "experiments that have received relatively less attention" in the extant literature (xv).Take, for example, the chapter on communal alternatives to single-family homes. Ghodsee includes many of the usual (and eminently worthy) suspects: Buddhist and Christian cenobite monasteries, Fourierist phalansteries, Israeli kibbutzim, and the Corbusier-inspired "microdistricts" of the former Eastern bloc (47). But we also learn of less canonical phenomena, such as the Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük, "one of the first major settlements in the world," where as many as eight thousand people lived in an essentially contiguous structure, in highly egalitarian and likely non-consanguineous households (32). Or consider the Beguine nuns, a lay order founded in 1190 that survived, albeit in attenuated form, into the twentieth century. The Beguine lived communally in urban areas, enjoying liberties unthinkable not only to their cloistered counterparts, but to virtually all their female contemporaries: they brewed beer, made lace, taught school—and traversed the streets unchaperoned. The chapter concludes with a discussion of contemporary cohousing. In Denmark, roughly one percent of the population was living in co... (shrink)

In this paper I hope to demonstrate that, despite dramatic differences in approach, Analytic and Continental philosophers can be brought into a productive dialogue with one another on topics central to the philosophical agenda of both traditions. Their differences tend to obscure the fact that both traditions have as a fundamental project the critique of past accounts of language, intentionality, and mind. Moreover, writers within the two traditions are frequently in considerable agreement about the failings of past accounts. Where they (...) tend to differ is in the sorts of positive accounts they give. By exploring the important areas of disagreement against the background of agreement, however, it is possible to gain insights unavailable to those rooted in a single tradition. (shrink)

Numerous state laws and the federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) have been enacted to prevent or redress genetic discrimination in employment and health insurance, but laws protecting against genetic discrimination in life insurance have been less common and weak. Consequently, some individuals with a genetic risk of a serious illness have declined presymptomatic genetic testing, thereby decreasing their prevention and treatment options and increasing their mortality risk. In 2020, Florida became the first state to prohibit life insurance companies from (...) using the results of presymptomatic genetic tests in underwriting. Although the law was “only” intended to prevent genetic discrimination, a possible or even likely consequence of the law will be to encourage timely genetic testing by at‐rick individuals and thereby save lives. (shrink)

Wie geartet ist das Verhältnis zwischen den zentralen Begriffen „Bewußtsein“ und „Reflexion“ in Lockes Essay? Sind diese Begriffe für Locke identisch oder voneinander verschieden? Falls sie verschieden sind, wie ist der Unterschied genau zu bestimmen? Diese Arbeit untersucht die Fragen, unter Berücksichtigung der unterschiedlichen Deutungen in der Sekundärliteratur; sie sichtet und prüft den Text des Essays sorgfältig und breitet ein breites Spektrum philosophischer Implikationen von Lockes Ausführungen über das „Bewußtsein“ und „Reflexion“ aus. Der abschließende Teil legt dar, daß Locke niemals (...) eine feste Position gegenüber dem Verhältnis zwischen den beiden Begriffen eingenommen hat, sondern daß er zwischen verschiedenen Positionen schwankte -als Resultat der starken philosophischen Kräfte, die ihn bald in die eine, bald in die andere Richtung zogen. (shrink)

Mobile devices with health apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, crowd-sourced information, and other data sources have enabled research by new classes of researchers. Independent researchers, citizen scientists, patient-directed researchers, self-experimenters, and others are not covered by federal research regulations because they are not recipients of federal financial assistance or conducting research in anticipation of a submission to the FDA for approval of a new drug or medical device. This article addresses the difficult policy challenge of promoting the welfare and interests of (...) research participants, as well as the public, in the absence of regulatory requirements and without discouraging independent, innovative scientific inquiry. The article recommends a series of measures, including education, consultation, transparency, self-governance, and regulation to strike the appropriate balance. (shrink)

It was a happy surprise when, overcoming partisan divisions and interest‐group lobbying, Congress enacted the No Surprises Act, which bans unfair out‐of‐network “balance billing.” Although this is only a modest legislative victory, key efforts by the health policy community made a real difference in a time of legislative gridlock.

Evolvability is the capacity to create new adaptations, and especially new kinds of adaptations, through the evolutionary process. Evolvability is important both as a theoretical issue in biology and as a practical issue in evolutionary computation. But it is difficult to study evolvability, in part because it is difficult to..

In the early 1970s, Congress considered enacting comprehensive privacy legislation, but it was unable to do so. In 1974, it passed the Privacy Act, applicable only to information in the possession of the federal government. In the intervening years, other information privacy laws enacted by Congress, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, have been weak and sector specific. With the explosion of information technology and the growing concerns about an absence of effective federal privacy laws, the legal (...) focus has shifted to the states. Signaling a new direction in state data privacy and consumer protection law, the California Consumer Privacy Act establishes important rights and protections for California residents with regard to the collection, use, disclosure, and sale of their personal information. The CCPA is certain to spur similar legislation and to affect national and international businesses that collect data from California's residents. Understanding the new law is important for all data‐driven industries, including health care. (shrink)

Researchers increasingly rely on large data sets of health information, often linked with biological specimens. In recent years, the argument has been made that obtaining informed consent for conducting records-based research is unduly burdensome and results in ?consent bias.? As a type of selection bias, consent bias is said to exist when the group giving researchers access to their data differs from the group denying access. Therefore, to promote socially beneficial research, it is argued that consent should be unnecessary. After (...) analyzing the biostatistics evidence and bioethics arguments, the article concludes that (1) claims about the amount of consent bias are overstated; (2) commonly used statistical methods usually can account for consent bias; and (3) any residual effects of consent bias are below an acceptable level of imprecision and constitute a reasonable social cost for conducting ethically responsible research. (shrink)

How should we understand religion, and what place should it hold, in an age in which metaphysics has come into disrepute? The metaphysical assumptions which supported traditional theologies are no longer widely accepted, but it is not clear how this 'end of metaphysics' should be understood, nor what implications it ought to have for our understanding of religion. At the same time there is renewed interest in the sacred and the divine in disciplines as varied as philosophy, psychology, literature, history, (...) anthropology, and cultural studies. In this volume, leading philosophers in the United States and Europe address the decline of metaphysics and the space which this decline has opened for non-theological understandings of religion. The contributors include Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Jean-Luc Marion, Gianni Vattimo, Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Pippin, John Caputo, Adriaan Peperzak, Leora Batnitzky, and Mark Wrathall. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the nature of social rules, including the limitations of most theories of rules which see them either as intentionally followed by, or as objectively describing the behavior of social actors. I argue that a phenomenological description of what it is like actually to be governed by a rule points the way to reconceptualizing the role of social rules in structuring our world and our experience of the world.