Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 120-121.

Nineteenth-century optical toys that showcase illusions of motion such as the phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and praxinoscope, have enjoyed active “afterlives” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contemporary incarnations of the zoetrope are frequently found in the realms of fine art and advertising, and they are often much larger than their nineteenth-century counterparts. This article argues that modern-day optical toys are able to conjure feelings of wonder and spectacle equivalent to their nineteenth-century antecedents because of their adjustment in scale. Exploring a range (...) of contemporary philosophical toys found in arts, entertainment, and advertising contexts, the article discusses various technical adjustments made to successfully “scale up” optical toys, including the replacement of hand-spun mechanisms with larger sources of motion and the use of various means such as architectural features and stroboscopic lights to replace traditional shutter mechanisms such as the zoetrope’s dark slots. Critical consideration of scale as a central feature of these installations reconfigures the relationship between audience and device. Large-scale adaptations of optical toys revise the traditional conception of the user, who is able to tactilely manipulate and interact with the apparatus, instead positing a viewer who has less control over the illusion’s operation and is instead a captive audience surrounded by the animation. It is primarily through their adaptation of scale that contemporary zoetropes successfully elicit wonder as scientific spectacles from their audiences today. (shrink)

With an estimated 12.1% of children aged 2–5 years already obese, prevention efforts must target our youngest children. One of the best places to reach young children for such efforts is the early care and education setting. More than 11 million U.S. children spend an average of 30 hours per week in ECE facilities. Increased attention at the national, state, and community level on the ECE setting for early obesity prevention efforts has sparked a range of innovative efforts. To assist (...) these efforts, CDC developed a technical assistance and training framework – the Spectrum of Opportunities for Obesity Prevention in the ECE setting – which also served as the organizing framework for the Weight of the Nation ECE track. Participants highlighted their efforts at national, state, and local levels pursuing opportunities on the Spectrum, the standards and best practices that had been the emphasis of their efforts, and common steps for developing, implementing, and evaluating initiatives. Strong leadership and collaboration among a broad group of stakeholders; systematic assessment of needs, opportunities and resources; funding sources; and training and professional development were reported to be integral for successful implementation of standards and best practices, and sustainability. (shrink)

Book review in this Article The Ethos of the Bible. By Birger Gerhardsson. The Prophets, Vol. 1: The Assyrian Period. By Klaus Koch. The Gospel according to Saint John, Vol. 3. By Rudolf Schnackenburg. The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity. By Gerd Theissen. Jewish and Christian Self‐Definition, Vol. 3: Self‐Definition in the Craeco‐Roman World. Edited by Ben F. Meyer and E.P. Sanders. The Church and Healing. Edited by W.J. Sheils. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000 to (...) 1215. By Benedicta Ward. The Luminous Vision; Six Medieval Mystics and their Teaching. By Anne Bancroft. Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life. By Eugenio Garin. Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg 1480–1599. By M.U. Umgang mil Luther. By Gerhard Ebeling. The Reformation and the English People. By J.J. Scarisbrick. Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Jean‐Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva. By Michael Heyd. Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age. By R.V. Young. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. By Lucien Febvre, translated by Beatrice Gottlieb. History of Christianity in India, Vol. II: From the Middle of the 16th to the End of the 17th Century. By Joseph Thekkedath. The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965. By Gerald P. Fogarty. Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914. By Michael Sutton. George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition. By Ellen Leonard. The Testing of the Churches 1932–1982: A Symposium. Edited by Rupert Davies. The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage. By B.A. Gerrish. An Introduction to Protestant Theology. By Helmut Gollwitzer. Dialogues on Morality and Religion. By Jakob Friedrich Fries. American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth‐Century Approaches. By Charles E. Curran. Ethical Issues in Reproductive Medicine. Edited by Maurice Reidy. Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression. By Charles C. Lemert and Garth Gillan. Last Writingson the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. I. By Ludwig Wittgenstein. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. By Michael J. Sandel. Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry. By Frederick Schauer. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. By Walter J. Ong. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. By James W. Fernandez. Selfless Persons. By Steven Collins. Understanding Jewish Mysticism: A Source Reader Edited by David R. Blumenthal. The Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Active Intellect, by Ibn Rushd, with the Commentary of Moses Narboni. Edited and translated by Kalman P. Bland. (shrink)

Research within psychology and other disciplines has shown that exposure to natural environments holds extensive physiological and psychological benefits. Adding to the health and cognitive benefits of natural environments, evidence suggests that exposure to nature also promotes healthy human decision-making. Unhealthy decision-making (e.g., smoking, non-medical prescription opioid misuse) and disorders associated with lack of impulse control [e.g., tobacco use, opioid use disorder (OUD)], contribute to millions of preventable deaths annually (i.e., 6 million people die each year of tobacco-related illness worldwide, (...) deaths from opioids from 2002 to 2017 have more than quadrupled in the United States alone). Impulsive and unhealthy decision-making also contributes to many pressing environmental issues such as climate change. We recently demonstrated a causal link between visual exposure to nature (e.g., forests) and improved self-control (i.e., decreased impulsivity) in a laboratory setting, as well as the extent to which nearby nature and green space exposure improves self-control and health decisions in daily life outside of the experimental laboratory. Determining the benefits of nearby nature for self-controlled decision-making holds theoretical and applied implications for the design of our surrounding environments. In this article, we synergize the overarching results of recent research endeavors in three domains including the effects of nature exposure on (1) general health-related decision-making, (2) health and decision-making relevant for application to addiction related processes (e.g., OUD), and (3) environmentally relevant decision-making. We also discuss key future directions and conclusions. (shrink)

Bullot & Reber (B&R) provide compelling evidence that sensitivity to context, history, and design stance are crucial to theories of art appreciation. We ask how these ideas relate to broader aspects of human cognition. Further open questions concern how psychological essentialism contributes to art appreciation and how essentialism regarding created artifacts (such as art) differs from essentialism in other domains.

Intellectual property in biotechnology invention provides important incentives for research and development leading to advances in genetic tests and treatments. However, there have been numerous concerns raised regarding the negative effect patents on gene sequences and their practical applications may have on clinical research and the availability of new medical tests and procedures. One concern is that licensing policies attempting to capture for the benefit of the licensor valuable rights to downstream research results and products may increase the financial risks (...) and cliniinish potential payoffs of — and therefore motivation for — performing downstream research and development. In addition, very broad patent claims allowed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the sheer growth in patents claiming genetic sequences, and threats of overlapping patents create a veritable minefield for researchers in both academia and industry. The concern is that research may be stifled because of the high cost and hassle of negotiating access. (shrink)

There are clear associations between the overall quantity of input children are exposed to and their vocabulary acquisition. However, by uncovering specific features of the input that matter, we can better understand the mechanisms involved in vocabulary learning. We examine whether exposure to wh-questions, a challenging quality of the communicative input, is associated with toddlers' vocabulary and later verbal reasoning skills in a sample of low-income, African-American fathers and their 24-month-old children. Dyads were videotaped in free play sessions at home. (...) Videotapes were transcribed and reliably coded for sheer quantity of fathers' input as well as the number of wh-questions fathers produce. Children's productive vocabulary was measured at 24 months using the McArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory MCDI, and children's verbal reasoning skills were measured 1 year later using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Results indicate that the overall quantity of father talk did not relate to children's vocabulary or reasoning skills. However, fathers' use of wh-questions related to both vocabulary and reasoning outcomes. Children's responses to wh-questions were more frequent and more syntactically complex, measured using the mean length of utterance, than their responses to other questions. Thus, posing wh-questions to 2-year-olds is a challenging type of input, which elicits a verbal response from the child that likely helps build vocabulary and foster verbal reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a pig's heart (...) would act more pig-like but denying that the recipient would become a pig). This finding runs counter to predictions from the strongest version of the “minimalist” position (Strevens,2000), an alternative to essentialism. Finally, studies asking about a broader range of donor-to-recipient transfers indicated that Indians essentialized more types of transfers than Americans, but neither sample essentialized monetary transfer. This suggests that results from bodily transplant conditions reflect genuine essentialism rather than broader magical thinking. (shrink)

Changes in the understanding of the relationship between business and society have led to increased interest in and discussion of the notion of corporate social responsibility.This paper offers an empirical analysis of the perceptions of top executives in the West Midlands, U.K., and in Delhi, District Ghaziabad, India, of the notion of corporate social responsibility. Organisational changes and involvement in social action programmes, and problems of implementing and monitoring Social Responsibility in two cultures, India and Britain, were explored.

Psychological essentialism is a folk theory characterized by the belief that a causal internal essence or force gives rise to the common outward behaviors or attributes of a category's members. In two studies, we investigated whether 4- to 7-year-old children evidenced essentialist reasoning about heart transplants by asking them to predict whether trading hearts with an individual would cause them to take on the donor's attributes. Control conditions asked children to consider the effects of trading money with an individual. Results (...) indicated that children reasoned according to essentialism, predicting more transfer of attributes in the transplant condition versus the non-bodily money control. Children also endorsed essentialist transfer of attributes even when they did not believe that a transplant would change the recipient's category membership. This finding runs counter to predictions from a strong interpretation of the “minimalist” position, an alternative to essentialism. (shrink)

We propose, following Clark, that generative models also play a central role in the perception and interpretation of linguistic signals. The data explanation approach provides a rationale for the role of prediction in language processing and unifies a number of phenomena, including multiple-cue integration, adaptation effects, and cortical responses to violations of linguistic expectations.

Although evidence of teaching behaviour has been identified in some nonhuman species, human teaching appears to be unique in terms of both the breadth of contexts within which it is observed, and in its responsiveness to needs of the learner. Similarly, cultural evolution is observable in other species, but human cultural evolution appears strikingly distinct. This has led to speculation that the evolutionary origins of these capacities may be causally linked. Here we provide an overview of contrasting perspectives on the (...) relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans, and briefly review previous research which suggests that cumulative culture can occur without teaching. We then report the results of a novel experimental study in which we investigated how the benefits of teaching may depend on the complexity of the skill to be acquired. Participants were asked to tie knots of varying complexity. In our Teaching condition, opportunities to interact with an experienced partner aided transmission of the most complex knots, but not simpler equivalents, relative to exposure to completed products alone, and also relative to information about the process of completion. We conclude by considering the plausibility of various accounts of the evolutionary relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans. (shrink)

Many human cultural traits become increasingly beneficial as they are repeatedly transmitted, thanks to an accumulation of modifications made by successive generations. But how do later generations typically avoid modifications which revert traits to less beneficial forms already sampled and rejected by earlier generations? And how can later generations do so without direct exposure to their predecessors' behavior? One possibility is that learners are sensitive to cues of non‐random production in others' behavior, and that particular variants (e.g., those containing structural (...) regularities unlikely to occur spontaneously) have been produced deliberately and with some effort. If this non‐random behavior is attributed to an informed strategy, then the learner may infer that apparent avoidance of certain possibilities indicates that these have already been sampled and rejected. This could potentially prevent performance plateaus resulting from learners modifying inherited behaviors randomly. We test this hypothesis in four experiments in which participants, either individually or in interacting dyads, attempt to locate rewards in a search grid, guided by partial information about another individual's experience of the task. We find that in some contexts, valid inferences about another's behavior can be made from partial information, and these inferences can be used in a way which facilitates trait adaptation. However, the benefit of these inferences appears to be limited, and in many contexts—including some which have the potential to make inferring the experience of another individual easier—there appears to be no benefit at all. We suggest that inferring previous behavior from partial social information plays a minimal role in the adaptation of cultural traits. (shrink)

There is probably no student of modern philosophy, and certainly no listener to the Third Programme, who has never received the warning that he must on no account deduce an “ought” from an “is.” This prohibition, it is claimed, is securely based in established and unchallengeable principles of logic. Professor Flew was speaking for many others when he said, in the course of a broadcast entitled “Problems of Perspectives”, “I think it is very important indeed to make as clear as (...) we can and to underline with all possible emphasis that this is a point of inexorable logic”. And Professor Popper, to take but one other example, has expressed himself no less trenchantly: “Perhaps the simplest and most important point about ethics is purely logical, I mean the impossibility to derive nontautological ethical rules—imperatives, principles of policy, aims or however we may describe them—from statements of fact”—a view that is fully endorsed by Mr. Hare in his Language of Morals. (shrink)

Then Wendy began to see that one didn't stay at two for the rest of one's life. Indeed two is the beginning of the end. The end is being grown-up. Once you get to twenty one or so, you can never be ungrown-up again. But Mrs. Darling did not tell this to Wendy. Between two and twenty one, there was lots of time for her to find out.

There is growing interest in tissue procurement for cancer research through autopsy. Establishing an autopsy/tissue donation programme for breast cancer research within an academic medical centre i...

Data Transfer Service (DTS) is an open-source project that is developing a document-centric message model for describing a bulk data transfer activity, with an accompanying set of loosely coupled and platform-independent components for brokering the transfer of data between a wide range of (potentially incompatible) storage resources as scheduled, fault-tolerant batch jobs. The architecture scales from small embedded deployments on a single computer to large distributed deployments through an expandable ‘worker-node pool’ controlled through message-orientated middleware. Data access and transfer efficiency (...) are maximized through the strategic placement of worker nodes at or between particular data sources/sinks. The design is inherently asynchronous, and, when third-party transfer is not available, it side-steps the bandwidth, concurrency and scalability limitations associated with buffering bytes directly through intermediary client applications. It aims to address geographical–topological deployment concerns by allowing service hosting to be either centralized (as part of a shared service) or confined to a single institution or domain. Established design patterns and open-source components are coupled with a proposal for a document-centric and open-standards-based messaging protocol. As part of the development of the message protocol, a bulk data copy activity document is proposed for the first time. (shrink)

_Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning_ offers a provocative re-reading of Wittgenstein's later writings on language and mind, and explores the tensions between Wittgenstein's ideas and contemporary cognitivist conceptions of the mental. This book addresses both Wittgenstein's later works as well as contemporary issues in philosophy of mind. It provides fresh insight into the later Wittgenstein and raises vital questions about the foundations of cognitivism and its wider implications for psychology and cognitive science.

As is well known, implication is transitive but probabilistic support is not. Eells and Sober, followed by Shogenji, showed that screening off is a sufficient constraint for the transitivity of probabilistic support. Moreover, this screening off condition can be weakened without sacrificing transitivity, as was demonstrated by Suppes and later by Roche. In this paper we introduce an even weaker sufficient condition for the transitivity of probabilistic support, in fact one that can be made as weak as one wishes. We (...) explain that this condition has an interesting property: it shows that transitivity is retained even though the Simpson paradox reigns. We further show that by adding a certain restriction the condition can be turned into one that is both sufficient and necessary for transitivity. (shrink)