Within the sporting landscape much has changed from the proliferation and integration of new technologies, for example, the practice of mixed martial arts (MMA) has developed on the fringes of modern sport. It combines several martial arts, is practised in a cage, and allows ground strikes. MMA is presented here within a framework inspired by Norbert Elias’s theory of civilizing of aggressive impulses through sport. We reviewed more than 20 years of literature, with 785 international references and a triple analysis (...) of the discipline, those being physical violence, symbolism, the play impulse. (shrink)

Arthur Diamond comments that "it is not clear how a donor distributes money through Hanson's market". Let me try again to be clear. Imagine David Levy were to seek funding for the regression he suggests in his comments, on the relative impact of sports versus science spending on aggregate productivity. Consider what might happen under three different funding institutions.

Hypertext publishing, the integration of a large body (perhaps billions) of public writings into a unified hypertext environment, will require the simultaneous solution of problems involving very wide database distribution, royalties, freedom of speech, and privacy. This paper describes these problems and presents, for criticism and discussion, an abstract design which seems to solve many of them. This design, called LinkText, is presented both as a specification and as design approaches grouped around various levels of electronic publishing.

This explains how to smoothly integrate booked orders with a combinatorial market maker, all for the general case of bets on E[x|A] for arbitrary random variables x and sets A.

Future Forms in English. A look at "will" and the futurates. Pretty basic stuff, but some people might find it useful. Register in Academic Writing . This is where I get Hallidayan for a change: an analysis of two different academic genres, with some comments about the teaching of academic writing (this is the paper I would have given at the Reading University conference on writing if I'd been able to afford the air fare!).

Humans have slowly built more productive societies by slowly acquiring various kinds of capital, and by carefully matching them to each other. Because disruptions can disturb this careful matching, and discourage social coordination, large disruptions can cause a “social collapse,” i.e., a reduction in productivity out of proportion to the disruption. For many types of disasters, severity seems to follow a power law distribution. For some of types, such as wars and earthquakes, most of the expected harm is predicted to (...) occur in extreme events, which kill most people on Earth. So if we are willing to worry about any war or earthquake, we should worry especially about extreme versions. If individuals varied little in their resistance to such disruptions, events a little stronger than extreme ones would eliminate humanity, and our only hope would be to prevent such events. If individuals vary a lot in their resistance, however, then it may pay to increase the variance in such resistance, such as by creating special sanctuaries from which the few remaining humans could rebuild society. (shrink)

Theorizing about human character to understand what it is to be a morally good person and how being morally good relates to acting rightly and living well has always been a central concern of moral philosophy. Traditional virtue theory, however, neglects two significant matters. The first is the sociopolitical dimensions of character: how character is shaped by, supports, and resists domination and subordination. While feminist ethics has begun to theorize virtue in relation to oppression, it shares with traditional virtue theory (...) a second problematic inattention to something of equal importance for understanding character and moral life, namely, bad character or vice. I argue that rich accounts of vice are needed to achieve the aims not only of traditional and feminist ethical theory but also of every moral agent facing the central moral task of trying to become a morally good person leading a morally worthy life. This paper explicates a substantive reorientation in moral theory in general and feminist ethics in particular, arguing for two changes. The first is a move to “critical character theory,” which seeks to understand moral character as both a site and source of domination and subordination, as a center of resistance both to oppression and to change, and as both subject and object of liberatory struggle. The second change is more serious and sustained attention to theorizing vice both as damage inflicted by domination, subordination, and by struggles both to maintain and to resist and overthrow them, and as a mechanism through which domination persists and emancipation is thwarted. (shrink)

The original book chapter does not have an abstract. However, I have written an abstract for this repository: Religious life encompasses a wide diversity of situations for which the emotional tone is on a continuum from extreme euphoria to extreme dysphoria. In this book chapter, we propose the novel hypothesis that euphoria and dysphoria have distinctly separate functional consequences for religious evolution and survivability. This is due to the differential cognitive states that are created in euphoric and dysphoric situations. Based (...) on readings from religious studies and cognitive psychology, we propose that euphoria in religion is conducive to social bonding and situations needing lateral thinking and creativity; whereas dysphoria in religion is conducive to situations where precision and analogical reasoning are necessary. (shrink)

What is agnosticism? Is it a belief, or just the absence of belief? What is the 'agnostic' principle? Robin Le Poidevin takes a philosophical approach to the issue of agnosticism, challenging some of the common assumptions, arguing in favour of the agnostic attitude, and considering its place in society and education.

This book presents the case for belief in both creation and evolution at the same time as rejecting creationism. Issues of meaning supply the context of inquiry; the book defends the meaningfulness of language about God, and also relates belief in both creation and evolution to the meaning of life. Meaning, it claims, can be found in consciously adopting the role of steward of the planetary biosphere, and thus of the fruits of creation. Distinctive features include a sustained case for (...) a realist understanding of language about God; a contemporary defence of some of the arguments for belief in God and in creation; a sifting of different versions of Darwinism and their implications for religious belief; a Darwinian account of the relation of predation and other apparent evils to creation; a new presentation of the argument, from the world's value to the purposiveness of evolution; and discussions of whether or not meaning itself evolves, and of religious and secular bases for belief in stewardship. (shrink)

Through an analysis of two highly routinized interactive service jobs, fast food service and insurance sales, this article explores the interrelationship of work, gender, and identity. While notions of proper gender behavior are quite flexible, gender-segregated service jobs reinforce the conception of gender differences as natural. The illusion that gender-typed interaction is an expression of workers' inherent natures is sustained, even in situations in which workers' appearances, attitudes, and demeanors are closely controlled by their employers. Gender-typed work has different meanings (...) for women and men, however, because of differences in the cultural valuation of behavior considered appropriate to each gender. (shrink)

A formal system for Ł ${}_{\infty}$ , based on a "game-theoretic" analysis of the Łukasiewicz propositional connectives, is defined and proved to be complete. An "Herbrand theorem" for the Ł ${}_{\infty}$ predicate calculus (a variant of some work of Mostowski) and some corollaries relating to its axiomatizability are proved. The predicate calculus with equality is also considered.

While the cultivation of genetically modified organisms (GMO) and the spread of genetically engineered (GE) foods has gone largely unnoticed by the majority of Americans, a growing number of vocal civil society groups are opposing the technology and with it the entire conventional system of food provision. As with other alternative food movements, non-GMO activists focus on changing individual consumption habits as the best means of altering the practices of food manufacturers and thereby what and how food is produced. In (...) this paper I argue that the increasing use of consumerist tactics reflect the neoliberalization of food activism in the United States – a process that rather than heralding sustainable agricultural and economic futures may reinforce the status quo. Using the emerging non-GMO movement, and the associated market for non-GMO products, I challenge the assumptions that consumer sovereignty and freedom of choice will bring about the small-scale, localized alternatives espoused by activists and scholars in the field. Specifically, I explore three critical limitations of contemporary alternative food politics. First, the neoliberalization of activism shifts the responsibility for social reforms from the state and manufactures to individual consumers, bringing with it important social justice implications. Second, focusing on choice opens new spaces for the profit without seriously threatening contemporary market structures or agro-ecological practices. Third, contemporary consumerist politics focus on eating right not less and thereby provide few alternatives to the current trends towards convenience and processed foods. (shrink)

We present a new class of models of players’ reasoning in non-cooperative games, inspired by David Lewis's account of common knowledge. We argue that the models in this class formalize common knowledge of rationality in a way that is distinctive, in virtue of modelling steps of reasoning; and attractive, in virtue of being able to represent coherently common knowledge of any consistent standard of individual decision-theoretic rationality. We contrast our approach with that of Robert Aumann, arguing that the former avoids (...) and diagnoses certain paradoxes to which the latter may give rise when extended in particular ways. (shrink)

In this exploratory, correlational study, several psychophysiological measures were assessed and the relation between these measures and an experimental self-report questionnaire to measure the seven implicit beliefs of sexual offenders ) was established in a sample of Dutch participants recruited from the healthy population using correlational analyses. After analyzing task performance, electroencephalogram data and electrocardiogram data, the psychophysiological variables were correlated with the experimental QITSO subscales. The subscale “children as sexual beings” correlated positively with the P300 amplitude at electrode Pz. (...) The subscale “women are unknowable” correlated positively with resting-state beta activity during eyes closed and eyes open, and with alpha activity during eyes open. Additionally, the subscale “entitlement’ correlated positively with low frequency heart rate variability power during eyes closed and eyes open, and with high frequency power during eyes closed. This study is a first exploratory step towards establishing a psychophysiological profile underlying the self-report questionnaire QITSO. (shrink)

One way of understanding the reduplicative formula "Christ is, ’qua’ God, omniscient, but ’qua’ man, limited in knowledge" is to take the occurrences of the ‘qua‘ locution as picking out different parts of Christ: a divine part and a human part. But this view of Christ as a composite being runs into paradox when combined with the orthodox understanding of the Incarnation, according to which Christ is identical to the second person of the Trinity. In response, we have to choose (...) between modifying the orthodox understanding, adopting a philosophically and theologically contentious perdurantist account of persistence through time, or rejecting altogether the idea of the composite Christ. (shrink)

Employees with self-perceived misattributed culpability or incompetence are on the receiving end of complaints, reprimands, or accusations which, from their perspective, incorrectly assume that that they have fallen short of required standards or outcomes. We analyzed an archive of 23 personal stories featuring SMCI, which had been provided by 16 Hong Kong Chinese employees. The stories indicated that the most severe impacts on employee morale had arisen from punitive and targeted feedback based on misrepresentations by superiors, who had engaged in (...) blame deflection, politicking and manipulation, conflict and retaliation, and/or prejudice and stereotyping. We also identified organizational processes, such as soliciting and accepting voice and engaging in problem solving discussions that could attenuate any adverse emotional impact. (shrink)

In this paper I address two concerns with Kelly Trogdon’s grounding mechanism view, i.e. the idea that metaphysical explanation can be modeled on causal-mechanical explanation. The first concern threatens to undermine the unity that grounding-mechanical explanations imposes on metaphysical explanation; and the second concern requires the grounding mechanic to put forth a formal condition on grounding-mechanical models. After having discussed both of these, I provide a solution to the first and argue that the second concern is unwarranted.

In a simple model of conflict, two agents fight over a fixed prize, and how hard they fight depends on what they believe about their abilities. To this model I add “preagents,” representing parents, leaders, or natural selection, who choose each agent’s confidence in his ability. Depending on the reason for such confidence, I find five different patterns in how confidence varies with ability. Agents who estimate their ability with error have under-confidence when ability is high and over-confidence when ability (...) is low, while strategic commitment incentives induce the opposite pattern. Agents who misjudge their value for the prize, relative to their cost of effort, induce an overor under-confidence that is independent of ability, while cooperating pre-agents choose extreme under-confidence. Agents who use confidence to signal ability have a relatively uniform over-confidence. (shrink)

Genie nanotech, space colonies, Turing-test A.I., a local singularity, crypto credentials, and private law are all dreams of a future where some parts of the world economy and society have an unusually low level of dependence on the rest of the world. But it is the worldwide division of labor that has made us humans rich, and I suspect we won't let it go for a long time to come.

Salop’s “Circular City” model of spatial competition is generalized to higher dimensions, and to “transportation” costs which are a power of distance. Assuming free entry, mill pricing is compared to location-based price discrimination. For dimensions above one, there is some too little entry below some cutoff power, and too much entry above it. This cutoff cost-power rises with dimension, and is larger under price discrimination. Mill pricing induces more entry for powers of four or less, and less entry for powers (...) of five or more. Overall, too much entry seems a more severe problem, which tends to price discrimination. (shrink)

Why are boards so slow to fire the chief? One reason is that they don't have enough skin in the game. They own few shares and therefore don't feel obligated to protect their investment from an out-of-touch boss. Besides, most of them owe their cushy jobs to the chief executive.

When Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, one of his main concerns was to attack the idea that subjects had rights over their sovereigns. This notion, he thought, would lead eventually to civil war of the kind he had just lived through. In his famously grim view of the State of Nature, everyone has the right to everything, and because this leads inevitably to competition, everyone is afraid of everyone else, a state he calls “diffidence”. This in turn leads to (...) a perpetual state of actual or potential war; the only alternative is for people to give up their “right of nature” to a common power, thus exchanging freedom for the security of civil society. (shrink)

Forty years after it first appeared, Sidney Shoemaker's much-read article, "Time without Change" , with its striking thought experiment, still dominates discussions of this intriguing topic. And rightly so: it is imaginative, subtle, and controversial. But times have changed, as they do, and in particular, the epistemological context in which Shoemaker was writing, overshadowed as it was by verificationism, no longer constrains our thinking as once it did. This is the age of bold and unashamedly realist metaphysical argument, in which (...) demands for evidential, as opposed to a priori, support for its theses are rarely made. (shrink)

Despised since ancient times, ugliness gains unprecedented appeal among early modern writers and painters. Subverting all norms, they value the beauty of deformity and, by extolling the paradoxical pleasure of mimesis, they helped create a new subjectivity.