Maran ha-g. R. A. Y. L. Shṭinman z. ts. ṿe-ḳ.l. -- Rabotenu meʼore ha-dor -- Ḳiyum ha-ʻolam ʻa. y. Torah be-mishnat rabotenu -- Maran Rabi Gedalyah Aizman z. ts. ṿe-ḳ.l.

Access to legal information is fundamental to access to justice. Yet accessibility refers not only to making legal documents available to the public, but also rendering legal information comprehensible to them. A vexing problem in bringing legal information to the public is how to turn formal legal documents such as legislation and judgments, which are often highly technical, to easily navigable and comprehensible knowledge to those without legal education. In this study, we formulate a three-step approach for bringing legal knowledge (...) to laypersons, tackling the issues of navigability and comprehensibility. First, we translate selected sections of the law into snippets (called CLIC-pages), each being a small piece of article that focuses on explaining certain technical legal concept in layperson’s terms. Second, we construct a _Legal Question Bank_, which is a collection of legal questions whose answers can be found in the CLIC-pages. Third, we design an interactive _CLIC Recommender_. Given a user’s verbal description of a legal situation that requires a legal solution, CRec interprets the user’s input and shortlists questions from the question bank that are most likely relevant to the given legal situation and recommends their corresponding CLIC pages where relevant legal knowledge can be found. In this paper we focus on the technical aspects of creating an LQB. We show how large-scale pre-trained language models, such as GPT-3, can be used to generate legal questions. We compare machine-generated questions against human-composed questions and find that MGQs are more scalable, cost-effective, and more diversified, while HCQs are more precise. We also show a prototype of CRec and illustrate through an example how our 3-step approach effectively brings relevant legal knowledge to the public. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty has serious consequences for human lives, social values, and economy. The main aim of the study was to explore a model of relations between personal and cultural variables and academic dishonesty. The participants in the study were N = 2,586 individuals from nine countries (Pakistan, Israel, Italy, India, the USA, Peru, Romania, Ghana, and Poland). The authors administered the Academic Dishonesty Scale to measure academic dishonesty, the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale to measure distress, the Almost Perfect Scale – (...) Revised to measure perfectionism, the Brief Self-Control Scale to measure self-control, and the Singelis Scale to measure independent self-construal. The results showed that the theoretical model was well fitted to the dataset in six countries: Pakistan, the United States, Romania, Ghana, Israel, and Poland. However, it was not well fitted in Italy, India, and Peru. Our results also showed that perfectionism significantly predicted academic dishonesty, but not in all countries. Self-control significantly predicted cheating, falsification, and plagiarism in the USA. Moreover, we found that distress was related to cheating o0nly in Ghana. Finally, independent self-construal predicted academic dishonesty. Our findings provide a cross-cultural contribution to the debate on academic dishonesty by highlighting its significant predictors and may inform interventions aimed at eliminating it. Our results can be used in preventing and curbing academic dishonesty. Knowledge on cross-cultural differences can be useful in international education for example, as an indicator accepting or relaxing attitude toward academic dishonesty in students from different countries. (shrink)

Theoretical methods for empirical state determination of entangled two-level systems are analyzed in relation to information theory. We show that hidden variable theories would lead to a Shannon index of correlation between the entangled subsystems which is larger than that predicted by quantum mechanics. Canonical representations which have maximal correlations are treated by the use of Schmidt and Hilbert-Schmidt decomposition of the entangled states, including especially the Bohm singlet state and the GHZ entangled states. We show that quantum mechanics does (...) not violate locality, but does violate realism. (shrink)

Takanat ha-shavim, Magen ṿa-shemesh. Ṿa-yaged Moshesh, hosafot ṿe-heʻarot ʻal sefer Takanat ha-shavim.

This book explores the emergence of the fundamental political concepts of medieval Jewish thought, arguing that alongside the well known theocratic elements of the Bible there exists a vital tradition that conceives of politics as a necessary and legitimate domain of worldly activity that preceded religious law in the ordering of society. Since the Enlightenment, the separation of religion and state has been a central theme in Western political history and thought, a separation that upholds the freedom of conscience of (...) the individual. In medieval political thought, however, the doctrine of the separation of religion and state played a much different role. On the one hand, it served to maintain the integrity of religious law versus the monarch, whether canon law, Islamic law, or Jewish law. On the other hand, it upheld the autonomy of the monarch and the autonomy of human political agency against theocratic claims of divine sovereignty and clerical authority. Postulating the realm of secular politics leads the author to construct a theory of the precedence of politics over religious law in the organization of social life. He argues that the attempts of medieval philosophers to understand religion and the polity provide new perspectives on the viability of an accommodation between revelation and legislation, the holy and the profane, the divine and the temporal. The book shows that in spite of the long exile of the Jewish people, there is, unquestionably, a tradition of Jewish political discourse based on the canonical sources of Jewish law. In addition to providing a fresh analysis of Maimonides, it analyzes works of Nahmanides, Solomon ibn Adret, and Nissim Gerondi that are largely unknown to the English-speaking reader. Finally, it suggests that the historical corpus of Jewish political writing remains vital today, with much to contribute to the ongoing debates over church-state relations and theocratic societies. (shrink)

According to Uriah Kriegel’s self-representational theory of consciousness, mental state M is conscious just in case it is a complex with suitably integrated proper parts, M 1 and M 2, such that M 1 is a higher-order representation of lower-order representation M 2. Kriegel claims that M thereby “indirectly” represents itself, and he attempts to motivate this claim by appealing to what he regards as intuitive cases of indirect perceptual and pictorial representation. For example, Kriegel claims that it’s natural to (...) say that in directly perceiving the front surface of an apple one thereby perceives the apple itself. Cases such as this are supposed to provide intuitive support for the principle that if X represents Y, and Y is highly integrated into complex object Z, then X indirectly represents Z. In this paper I provide counterexamples to Kriegel’s principle of indirect representation, before going on to argue that we can explain what is going on in those cases in which the subject seems to represent a complex whole by representing one its parts without positing indirect representations anyway. I then argue that my alternative approach is superior to Kriegel’s in a number of ways, thereby rendering his theory of consciousness implausible. (shrink)

We propose a ‘Moral Imagination’ methodology to facilitate a culture of responsible innovation for engineering and product teams in technology companies. Our approach has been operationalized over the past two years at Google, where we have conducted over 50 workshops with teams from across the organization. We argue that our approach is a crucial complement to existing formal and informal initiatives for fostering a culture of ethical awareness, deliberation, and decision-making in technology design such as company principles, ethics and privacy (...) review procedures, and compliance controls. We characterize some distinctive benefits of our methodology for the technology sector in particular. (shrink)

PANDEMIA Y ÉTICA es una introducción clara y provocativa a los temas éticos del COVID-19, apropiada para estudiantes de nivel universitario, académicos y diseñadores de políticas públicas, así como para el público general. Es también una contribución original a la literatura emergente acerca de este importante tema. El autor ha lanzado este libro con acceso abierto para pueda ser descargado y leído en forma gratuita por todas las personas interesadas en estas cuestiones. Algunas de las características principales de este libro (...) son: - Una clara organización de los temas éticos planteados por la pandemia. - Una exploración de las múltiples y complejas interrelaciones entre estos temas. - Un argumento conciso a favor de un confinamiento continuado hasta que desarrollemos una vacuna. - Una formulación original del Profundo Problema Ético de la Pandemia, así como un Argumento Revolucionario acerca de cómo deberíamos cambiar a la sociedad después de la pandemia. - Referencias a, e interacciones con, muchos de los mejores escritos sobre la pandemia hasta ahora (tanto en medios de comunicación populares como en revistas especializadas). (shrink)

Essay review of Y. Gingras, Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue, Polity Press, 2017.

This paper is about omitting types in logic of metric structures introduced by Ben Yaacov, Berenstein, Henson and Usvyatsov. While a complete type is omissible in some model of a countable complete...

Trabajando sobre el género de ¿Historias de los Profetas¿ (Qis.as. al-Anbiya-¿) en el proceso de elaboración de mi tesis sobre Abraham en la literatura islámica, el profesor J. Sadan me envió un manuscrito que había localizado en la British Library relacionado con este género. Posteriormente encontré versiones similares de la misma composición, lo que me animó a profundizar mi investigación sobre sus orígenes. La obra está próxima a la literatura de predicación (wa¿z.), que se ocupa principalmente de la educación moral, (...) pero también incluye historias. Me planteé la posibilidad de que éste formarse un género que hubiera surgido como una ayuda, un material auxiliar concebido para entender la tradición oral y los estudios religiosos para, posteriormente, convertirse en un género independiente, más cercano a la Parénesis o al Specula Regis (Espejos de príncipes). Describiré el manuscrito para intentar alcanzar una conclusión sobre ciertas cuestiones: ¿es éste un género literario diferente?, ¿se trata de un género educativo o solamente es una versión simplificada de historias para ilustrar a niños o principiantes de la lengua árabe?, ¿buscaría el autor un nombre original para su compilación, haciendo referencia al reducido tamaño de la colección y descartando el de Qis.as. al-Anbiya-¿ por ser conocido? (shrink)

El presente artículo versa sobre Abū Zakariyyāʾ Yaḥyà al-Balansī, un discípulo fervoroso y distinguido del conocido maestro sufí Ibn Sabʿīn de Ricote. Hay poca información sobre Yaḥyà, y quizás por ello ha pasado desapercibido. En el trabajo se recogen estos datos para darlo a conocer. Yaḥyà al-Balansī (o algún antepasado suyo cercano) habría nacido en Valencia. Estuvo en Alejandría en compañía del šayḫ Abū l-Ḥasan al-Šāḏilī, quizás a partir del año 642/1244. Regresó a al-Andalus y, después, habría viajado nuevamente hacia (...) el Magreb. En Bugía, se encontró con Ibn Sabʿīn, en fecha desconocida, aunque debió de haber sido hacia el año 648/1250. Desde entonces se hizo discípulo incondicional suyo. Habría acompañado a Ibn Sabʿīn, hasta establecerse en La Meca, después de pasar por Túnez y Egipto. También estuvo en Medina y en el Líbano. Se deduce que Yaḥyà era un sufí viajero, al igual que Abū l-Ḥasan al-Šuštarī. Yaḥyà falleció en el año 665/1267 y fue enterrado en al-Balyana, en el Alto Egipto. En este trabajo se presentan los fragmentos de las pocas obras que nos han llegado, y se busca confirmar su autoría de Kitāb al-Sulūk fī ṭarīq al-qawm, la única epístola suya que se conserva completa. Al final, se traducen los fragmentos tanto de al-Wirāṯa al-muḥammadiyya, y un fragmento recogido por Ibn al-Ṭawwāḥ, como de otro fragmento que aparece al final de una Risāla de Ibn Sabʿīn. Del estudio de este acopio de datos se llega a dos conclusiones de relevancia: 1. Aunque en el encabezado de Kitāb al-Sulūk, Yaḥyà se presenta como hijo de Ibn Sabʿīn, en este trabajo se va a demostrar que no lo era. 2. Se confirma su autoría de Kitāb al-Sulūk. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, Seymour Feldman has contributed important studies on the philosophy of Levi ben Gershom, better known as Gersonides (1288-1344), as well as a highly acclaimed annotated translation of Gersonides' philosophical opus, The Wars of the Lord. Feldman now offers a succinct conspectus of Gersonides' positions on the pivotal issues of medieval Jewish philosophy and the arguments he offers in their favor: creation; God and His attributes; divine omniscience, providence, and omnipotence; prophecy; humanity; and the Torah. Feldman's (...) guiding thesis is encapsulated in the book's subtitle: Judaism within the Limits of Reason. Gersonides is fully committed to the authority of Scripture and .. (shrink)

It has been proposed that natural selection occurs on a hierarchy of levels, of which the organismic level is neither the top nor the bottom. This hypothesis leads to the following practical problem: in general, how does one tell if a given phenomenon is a result of selection on level X or level Y. How does one tell what the units of selection actually are?It is convenient to assume that a unit of selection may be defined as a type of (...) entity for which there exists, among all entities on the same level as that entity, an additive component of variance for some specific component F of fitness which does not appear as an additive component of variance in any decomposition of this F among entities at any lower level. But such a definition implicitly assumes that if f(x, y) depends nonadditively on its arguments, there must be interaction between the quantities which x and y represent. This assumption is incorrect. And one cannot avoid this error by speaking of transformability to additivity instead of merely additivity. (shrink)

Ben-Israel and Vaidman have raised objections to my arguments that there are cases where a quantum mechanical weak value can be said not to represent the system to which it pertains. They are correct in pointing out that some of my conclusions were too general. However, for weak values of projection operators my conclusions still stand.

ḥeleḳ 1. A-Ṭ -- ḥeleḳ 2. Y-S -- ḥeleḳ 3. ʻA-T.

Se aborda en este trabajo el estudio de un precioso manuscrito de la Biblioteca Nacional de París, el n.º 2849 de los fondos árabes. Se trata de un manuscrito de origen andalusí que contiene la traducción al árabe de la Materia Medica de Dioscórides, escrito en Siria a principios del siglo XIII, cuyos márgenes están repletos de glosas de naturaleza sinonímica, relativas a los nombres griegos que reciben las plantas descritas por la farmacología griega. Estas glosas son de orígen andalusí, (...) y ofrecen una gran riqueza terminológica que se inscribe en un amplio movimiento árabe, y más concretamente andalusí, de revisión y comentario de la traducción árabe de la Materia Medica. En la primera parte de este estudio se ofrece una presentación general del manuscrito, mostrando su valor para una reedición crítica de la obra, de las glosas que contiene y particularmente de las glosas botánicas andalusíes, insistiendo en su valor sinonímico y su contribución terminológica. En la segunda parte, el autor propone una edición crítica anotada de 44 glosas extraídas de la primera maqala de la obra. (shrink)