Written by leading experts in the field, Stellar Spectral Classification is the only book to comprehensively discuss both the foundations and most up-to-date techniques of MK and other spectral classification systems. Definitive and encyclopedic, the book introduces the astrophysics of spectroscopy, reviews the entire field of stellar astronomy, and shows how the well-tested methods of spectral classification are a powerful discovery tool for graduate students and researchers working in astronomy and astrophysics. The book begins with a historical survey, followed by (...) chapters discussing the entire range of stellar phenomena, from brown dwarfs to supernovae. The authors account for advances in the field, including the addition of the L and T dwarf classes; the revision of the carbon star, Wolf-Rayet, and white dwarf classification schemes; and the application of neural nets to spectral classification. Copious figures illustrate the morphology of stellar spectra, and the book incorporates recent discoveries from earth-based and satellite data. Many examples of spectra are given in the red, ultraviolet, and infrared regions, as well as in the traditional blue-violet optical region, all of which are useful for researchers identifying stellar and galactic spectra. This essential reference includes a glossary, handy appendixes and tables, an index, and a Web-based resource of spectra. In addition to the authors, the contributors are Adam J. Burgasser, Margaret M. Hanson, J. Davy Kirkpatrick, and Nolan R. Walborn. (shrink)

This book provides ways of thinking about information and the new responsibilities engendered by its acquisition, processing, storing, dissemination and use. It offers a set of concepts, methods, arguments and illustrations designed to sharpen the reader's ethical focus. Organized into three sections, the first provides a conceptual background for the book as a whole. The second part focuses on fundamental concepts about ethics and includes descriptions of the process of ethical thinking and a range of theories and principles that can (...) be used in ethical situations. In the final part, the concepts of information and the need for ethics and ethical thinking are applied to the various levels of the social system to which they. (shrink)

This work proposes a coevolutionary theory of aesthetics that encompasses both biotic and human arts. Anthropocentric perspectives in aesthetics prevent the recognition of the ontological complexity of the aesthetics of nature, and the aesthetic agency of many non-human organisms. The process of evaluative coevolution is shared by all biotic advertisements. I propose that art consists of a form of communication that coevolves with its own evaluation. Art and art history are population phenomena. I expand Arthur Danto’s Artworld concept to any (...) aesthetic population of producers and evaluators. Current concepts of art cannot exclusively circumscribe the human arts from many forms of non-human biotic art. Without assuming an arbitrarily anthropocentric perspective, any concept of art will need to engage with biodiversity, and either recognize many instances of biotic advertisements as art, or exclude some instances of human art. Coevolutionary aesthetic theory provides a heuristic account of aesthetic change in both human and biotic artworlds, including the coevolutionary origin of aesthetic properties and aesthetic value within artworlds. Restructuring aesthetics, art criticism, and art history without human beings at the organizing centers of these disciplines stimulate new progress in our understanding of art, and the unique human contributions to aesthetics and aesthetic diversity. (shrink)

It has sometimes been said that it is useless to try to prevent wars since man has an ineradicable combative instinct. The term instinct is very ambiguous in its application to humans, and it may be interesting to see what occurs amongst the insects, many of whose species show the highest development of instinctive behaviour.Many insect species are predatory, but if they depend on other distinct species, the relation is analogous to hunting or to a crude form of agriculture. Aggressive (...) behaviour to be comparable with war must concern the different members of one species. There are many laboratory experiments which illustrate the effects of competition when a population begins to exceed the capacity of its food supply. In Flour beetles, for instance, the adult beetles and the larvae eat any egg or pupae which they happen to meet in their ceaseless burrowing through the flour. There is thus a fixed population density at which eggs are eaten as fast as they are laid. In Grain weevils, the effect of crowding is to reduce the rate at which eggs are laid by the females who appear to suffer from overstimulation when crowded. Other effects, usually harmful, may be produced by the accumulation of the products of respiration or of digestion. Finally, if the food supply is too small, there will be death from starvation. If, for instance, too many blowfly eggs are added to a piece of meat, the flies produced will either be small, weak, and infertile or, if the excess has been too great, the larvae may all starve when half grown. Thus, a piece of meat which could have produced 100 normal flies may produce none at all if a tenfold excess of eggs is laid on it. (shrink)

. History of the concept of economic efficiency . INTRODUCTION James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize by proving that the process by which elected officials ...

Although the term "Bioethics" literally means "Life Ethics," there is a frequent differentiation of Christian bioethicists into those focusing on medical issues versus those focusing on environmental issues. Yet, many challenges to human and environmental health are interdependent, suggesting the need for greater collaboration. After exploring the historical trajectories that have led to these two distinct foci in Christian ethics, this essay will argue for a greater collaboration between the two specializations and make some suggestions concerning how collaboration may be (...) facilitated. As an illustration of this thesis, I examine avian influenza as a case study. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Santa, Genealogy, and History Power/Knowledge: The Gift That Keeps on Giving “He sees you when you're sleeping”: Foucault's Theory of Panopticism “He's making a list, he's checking it twice” Naughty or Nice: The True Meaning of Discipline The Archeology of Christmas.

_ Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader_, 9/e, is a comprehensive compilation of original readings representing all of the major 'isms'.It offers students a generous sampling of key thinkers in different ideological traditions and places them in their historical and political contexts. Used on its own or with _Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal_, the title accounts for the different ways people use ideology and conveys the ongoing importance of ideas in politics.

This book discovers freedom in the colonial idea of African primitiveness. As human transcendence, freedom escapes the drawbacks of otherness, as defended by ethnophilosophy, while exposing the idiosyncratic inspiration of Eurocentric universalism. Decolonization calls for the reconnection with freedom, that is, with myth-making understood as the inaugural act of cultural pluralism. The cultural condition of modernization emerges when the return to the past deploys the future.

Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called “music scrambling” with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more “musical” on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment were concealed from (...) subjects, and stimulus presentation order was randomized within and between taxa. Two recordings of human music were included as a control for attentiveness. Participants varied in their assessments of individual species musicality, but overall they were significantly more likely to rate bird songs with original temporal sequence as more musical than those with randomized temporal sequence. We discuss alternative hypotheses for the origins of avian musicality, including honest signaling, perceptual bias, and arbitrary aesthetic coevolution. (shrink)

Life history theory is often invoked to make universal predictions about phenotypic evolution. For example, it is conventional wisdom that organisms should evolve older ages at first reproduction if they have longer lifespans. We clarify that life history theory does not currently provide such universal predictions about phenotypic diversity. Using the classic Euler–Lotka model of adaptive life history evolution, we demonstrate how predictions about optimal age at first reproduction depend on rarely acknowledged, prior theoretical assumptions (i.e., axioms) about organismal development. (...) These developmental axioms include the rates, forms, and tradeoffs that relate to growth or differentiation. Developmental innovations transform the biology underlying these axioms. Consequently, Euler–Lotka and related life history models do not make coherent predictions at macroevolutionary scales, where developmental innovations occur (e.g., across mammals, birds, or insects). By focusing on historical innovations instead of universal rules, life history theory can reconnect with flourishing research in evolutionary developmental biology. (shrink)

Aim To ascertain the quantity and nature of gifts and items provided by the pharmaceutical industry in Australia to medical specialists and to consider whether these are appropriate in terms of justifiable ethical standards, empirical research and views expressed in the literature.

Through the use of Bayesian probability theory and Communication theory, a formal mathematical model of a Churchmanian Dialectical Inquirer is developed. The Dialectical Inquirer is based on Professor C. West Churchman's novel interpretation and application of Hegelian dialectics to decision theory. The result is not only the empirical application of dialectical inquiry but also its empirical (i.e., scientific) investigation. The Dialectical Inquirer is seen as especially suited to problems in strategic policy formation and in decision theory. Finally, specific application of (...) the inquirer is made to Popper's notions for ‘The Test of Severity’ of a scientific theory. (shrink)

While ethics and evidence‐based medicine are often viewed as separate domains of inquiry and practice, what we know influences what we can ethically justify doing, and what we see as our moral obligations shapes the way we interpret evidence. The boundaries between the moral and epistemic spheres become particularly blurred when the health of people is at stake and even more so when no “officially” recommended medical intervention is available to help a patient in need. The treatment of major hemorrhages (...) using recombinant factor VIIa (rFVIIa), which was originally approved under orphan drug legislation to treat hemophilia, is a case in point.Following reports in the late 1990s that rFVIIa was success­fully used to stop bleeding in gunshot trauma, there was much excitement about its potential to help patients with uncontrolled bleeding in other clinical settings, leading to wide‐spread off‐label use of the drug. In recent years, new evidence has raised questions about the off‐label use of rFVIIa for severe bleeding. Nonetheless, while some clini­cians are now adamantly opposed to prescribing rFVIIa for massive bleed­ing, many remain determined to continue the practice. This raises the question: why do clinicians have such variable responses to the same body of evidence?We analyzed the debate around off‐label use of rFVIIa and character­ized its main conceptual features and tensions. We did not seek to provide a normative analysis as to whether the evidence supports the case for off‐label prescribing, nor did we try to provide a historical analysis of how attitudes and clinical practice have changed. Rather, we sought to make visible the moral and epistemic values underpinning stakeholders’ opinions and practices. On the basis of our analysis, which is described in this ar­ticle, we suggest that debates such as those surrounding rFVIIa will not be resolved simply by conducting more studies and that, therefore, there is also a need for conceptual and pro­cedural frameworks that more sys­tematically incorporate values into clinical policy‐making. (shrink)

Keeley has recently argued that the philosophical issue of how to analyse the concept of a sense can usefully be addressed by considering how scientists, and more specifically neuroethologists, classify the senses. After briefly outlining his proposal, which is based on the application of an ordered set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for modality differentiation, I argue, by way of two complementary counterexamples, that it fails to account fully for the way the senses are in fact individuated in (...) neuroethology and other relevant sciences. (shrink)

Touch is standardly taken to be a proximal sense, principally constituted by capacities to detect proximal pressure and thermal stimulation, and contrasted with the distal senses of vision and audition. It has, however, recently been argued that the scope of touch extends beyond proximal perception; touch can connect us to distal objects. Hence touch generally should be thought of as a connection sense. In this paper, I argue that whereas pressure perception is a connection sense, thermal perception is not. Thermal (...) perception is a proximal sense distinct from touch. One significant consequence of this is that it motivates an alternative explanation of how we detect the thermal properties of the things we touch and what they are. (shrink)

Pain is commonly explained in terms of the perceptual activity of a distinct sensory modality, the function of which is to enable us to perceive actual or potential damage to the body. However, the characterization of pain experience in terms of a distinct sensory modality with such content is problematic. I argue that pain is better explained as occupying a different role in relation to perception: to indicate when the stimuli that are sensed in perceiving anything by means of a (...) sensory modality exceed a significant level of intensity. Viewing the system underlying pain experience as an integral and functionally integrated feature of all the senses provides a new perspective on the diverse forms of pain, what it is like to experience pain and the contrasting natures of pain and pleasure. (shrink)

Tasks, tools, and techniques that we perform, use, and acquire, define the elements of expertise which we value as the hallmarks of goal-driven behavior. Somehow, the creation of tools enables us to define new tasks, or is it that the envisioning of new tasks drives us to invent new tools? Or maybe it is that new tools engender new techniques which then result in new tasks? This jumble of issues will be explored and discussed in this diverse collection of papers. (...) Individually, few of the papers are related to each other by topic or by techniques of analysis. Collectively, all focus on tasks performed using tools and discuss the techniques of tool use which enable differences in performance and expertise across individuals, societies, and (even) species. -/- . (shrink)

Tracking representationalism explains the negative affective character of pain, and its capacity to motivate action, by reference to the representation of the badness for us of bodily damage. I argue that there is a more fitting instantiation of the tracking relation – the badness for us of extremely intense stimuli – and use this to motivate a non-reductive approach to the negative affective character of pain. The view of pain proposed here is supported by consideration of three related topics: the (...) pain caused when the body is damaged, reparative pain, and the messenger-shooting objection to tracking representationalism. (shrink)