There is no unproblematic way to study things as “African”, yet an epistemologically situated approach based on concrete technological projects situated in Africa and their social and political implications offers an important account of the intersection of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and African Studies. We explore this perspective through the notion of “indiscipline” using the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project (SKA) based in South Africa as a case study through which to observe “indiscipline” as a methodological approach to technoscience (...) at work. Indiscipline helps frame the socio-technical (by)products of astrophysics and engineering, and we present the production of ventilators for COVID-19 patients as an example of how the design of mega-science projects can become entangled with the dynamic concerns of society. Our conclusion elaborates on the politics of large technological systems, opening up a conversation on the intersection of science and society in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in African settings, using the template of experiences with the SKA and the National Ventilator Project in South Africa. (shrink)

Access to investigational drugs is a concern to patients and regulatory agencies. In order to determine potential trial participants’ views on access to investigational drugs, we surveyed one hundred people who had been referred to a phase I clinical trial. Most respondents indicated that patients had a right to investigational drugs, that the drugs should be offered only in the context of research, that getting access to these drugs is too hard, and that knowing the right people and being persistent (...) increased the likelihood of gaining access. Respondents did not think that investigational drugs should be given to anyone who wanted them, or that physicians were aware of the latest investigational agents. They most frequently recommended two allocation criteria: offering investigational drugs to those who would benefit most or were most needy; and allocating them to maximize scientific advancement. Respondents who understood the purpose of the trial were more likely to choose the second criterion. (shrink)

Robustness properties of three equality of variances tests, the jackknife procedure, the k-sample Box-Andersen test, and Levene’s z test, were investigated and compared in a Monte Carlo study employing small samples from underlying gamma distributions and gamma mixtures. Overall, the jackknife test yielded rejection proportions usually closer to nominal levels under departures from normality, but the Box-Andersen test performed relatively well when departures from normality were not extreme. Four recommendations regarding testing variances were offered.

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare systemic inequities shaped by social determinants of health (SDoH). Public health agencies, legislators, health systems, and community organizations took notice, and there is currently unprecedented interest in identifying and implementing programs to address SDoH. This special issue focuses on the role of medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) in addressing SDoH and racial and social inequities, as well as the need to support these efforts with evidence-based research, data, and meaningful partnerships and funding.

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is a key node in the human salience network. It has been ascribed motor, pain-processing and affective functions. However, the dynamics of information flow in this complex region and how it responds to inputs remain unclear and are difficult to study using non-invasive electrophysiology. The area is targeted by neurosurgery to treat neuropathic pain. During deep brain stimulation surgery, we recorded local field potentials from this region in humans during a decision-making task requiring motor output. (...) We investigated the spatial and temporal distribution of information flow within the dACC. We demonstrate the existence of a distributed network within the anterior cingulate cortex where discrete nodes demonstrate directed communication following inputs. We show that this network anticipates and responds to the valence of feedback to actions. We further show that these network dynamics adapt following learning. Our results provide evidence for the integration of learning and the response to feedback in a key cognitive region. (shrink)

This reference contains more than 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on utopian thought and experimentation that span the centuries from ancient times to the present.

For each of the N-values 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and 1,024, 50,000 samples of size N were drawn from an L-shaped population, and for each sample the Z and t statistics were calculated. The resulting distributions of 50,000 Z or t values at each sample size were then used to study the robustness of left-tailed, right-tailed, and two-tailed Z and t tests at α levels of.05,.01, and.001 (and, for Z only,.0001). The actually obtained proportion, ρ, (...) of Type I errors was often far greater or far smaller than the nominal proportion, α. Furthermore, although α is the expected value of ρ at infinite N, no N-value below 512 ever brought the deviation of p from α to within 10% of α for any t tests or one-tailed Z tests. (shrink)

The alleged robustness of Z, t, and F tests against nonnormality and, when sample sizes are equal, of t and F tests against heterogeneity as well was investigated in a large-scale sampling study under conditions realistic to experimentation and testing in the behavioral sciences. Factors varied were: population shape (L or bell), σ1/σ2 (1/2, 1, or 2), size N of smallest sample (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, or 1,024), N1/N2 (1/3,1/2,1, 2, or 3), α (.05,.01, or.001), (...) and test tailedness (left, right, or two). In about 25% of the situations investigated, the test failed to meet a very lax criterion for robustness at every examined N value less than 100, and in 8% at every value less than 1,000; no test met the criterion in all of the situations studied before N=512. Robustness was strongly influenced by all of the factors investigated, and interactions among the influencing factors were often strong and complex. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Evolution of the Society for the Advancement of American PhilosophyJames Campbelldespite my increasingly decrepit appearance, I can lay no claim to being one of the founders of SAAP. When I joined the Society in the mid-1970s, it was already a well-functioning organization—if a much smaller one than today. After a few years of attending meetings, I began to submit papers, and I first appeared on the program at (...) our sixth annual meeting at John Carroll University in 1979. (See Fig. 1, the complete program, below.) While I was not one of the founders of SAAP, I did know them all. Presiding at the early meetings were, in the order of their presidencies, such elders as John Lachs, John J. McDermott, Darnell Rucker, James Gouinlock, Beth J. Singer, Peter H. Hare, Sandra B. Rosenthal, Thelma Z. Lavine, Joseph Betz, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Andrew J. Reck. Serving in the background at the same time were such patron saints as Justus Buchler, Douglas Greenlee, Abraham Edel, Max Harold Fisch, Elizabeth Flower, Edward H. Madden, David L. Miller, Frank M. Oppenheim, Evelyn Shirk, John E. Smith, and H. S. Thayer. It was a good time to be coming to American Philosophy, under the guidance of a Society that respected the fundamentals of pluralism and "fallibilism."1IThe brief discussion of the evolution of SAAP that I offer here initially emphasizes what the Society has meant to me over nearly five decades.2 As I was entering graduate school in 1974, I was drawn by the American philosophical tradition. It was, as William James writes, my "dumb conviction" that the best answers were to be found in this philosophical direction and not in the others, and that my job was to pursue these answers.3 What I found in this tradition was a refuge from both the analytic style of philosophy then dominant in America, with what I saw as its obsession with truth4 and its [End Page 1] confusion of cleverness with wisdom, and the alternatives of the various continental traditions that, although they pursued wisdom, seemed to me to rely too strongly on the mysterious or the untranslatable. My own sense of the American philosophical tradition at the time was an amalgam of Puritanism, Deism, Transcendentalism, Pragmatism in its various forms, and a large dose of Columbia Naturalism. Through further study and especially through my interactions at SAAP meetings, I became more grounded in these approaches and more open to other strands within the tradition.5 For me, cooperative interaction with others was essential to further understanding. Just as for Josiah Royce, the secret was "the community."6Among the lessons that I drew from the American philosophical tradition were the following. I knew that it was necessary to resist the human tendency to believe that what works for me will work for everyone else. As George Santayana reminds us, all philosophy is "personal."7 Thus, certain thinkers and certain thoughts will benefit from their initial plausibility to us, and other thoughts and thinkers will be initially suspect. To counter this personal prejudice, we need to partake in careful, long-term study. On a related point, Ralph Waldo Emerson urges us to seek insight from others, to accept what he calls "provocation" while not accepting their answers.8 At the same time, we live among these other individuals, marry them, teach their children, and benefit from their contributions to our social existence. In other words, American Philosophy teaches us that people are social creatures—a point which both Emerson and James were wary of, but not blind to—and that our thinking should focus on the world of shared experience. As Benjamin Franklin writes, our efforts in "Philosophy" make sense only when our pursuit of wisdom is related to human well-being.9 This point is so important that we need to wonder how our efforts were ever allowed to narrow and separate from a broad sense of human welfare to focus upon supposedly more important minutiae. With John Dewey, I saw the job of philosophers to be helping individuals to understand and deal with their philosophical "problems" of living.10 And, perhaps more... (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

The robustness of the classical tests on means (Z, t, and F) and variances (chi square and F) was investigated by obtaining 30,000 (or, sometimes, 10,000 or 150,000) values of the test statistic under assumption-violating conditions and comparing the actual proportion of Type I errors with the proportion expected when all assumptions are met. The sampling and testing conditions investigated were: population shape (L-shape or bell-shape), relative population variance (1 or 4), sample size (8, 16, or 24), nominal significance level (...) (.05,.01, or.001), and location of rejection region (left-tailed, right-tailed, or two-tailed). All tests on means were nonrobust under most of the investigated conditions, and one was nonrobust under all of them. Both tests on variances were extremely nonrobust under virtually all conditions. The worst nonrobustness of the one- and two-independent-sample Z and t tests rivaled or exceeded that of the notoriously nonrobust chi-square and F tests on variances. (shrink)

Anthropology is a complex, wide-ranging, and ever-changing field. This clear, coherent, and well-crafted book is a revised version of a very successful text first published in 1986, designed to supplement standard textbooks and monographs. It covers the central concepts, distinctive methodologies, and philosophical as well as practical issues of cultural anthropology, and it is accessible to the anthropological novice, and of value to the professional. The updated version covers current issues in cultural anthropology, and includes topics such as globalization, gender, (...) post-modernism and public issues, and reflects changes in perspective and language. (shrink)

Banded geckos (Coleonyx variegatus) were trained, at the rate of five daily trials, on eight intradimensional spatial shifts to a criterion of 80% correct per reversal. In contrast to several previously reported failures to obtain reversal learning, Coleonyx demonstrated significant improvement on both errors and trials to criterion. Their reversal performance compares favorably with that of birds and mammals and a common index of reversal ability, the mean total error, did not differentiate between taxa.

The introduction by Merold Westphal sets the scene: "Two books, two visions of philosophy, two friends and sometimes colleagues...". Modernity and Its Discontents is a debate between Caputo and Marsh in which each upheld their opposing philosphical positions by critical modernism and post-modernism. The book opens with a critique of each debater of the other's previous work. With its passionate point-counterpoint form, the book recalls the philosphical dialogues of classical times, but the writing style remains lucid and uncluttered. Taking the (...) failure of Englightenment ideals as their common ground, the debaters challenge each other's ideas on the nature of post-foundationalist critique. At the core of the argument lies the timely question of the role that each person can play in creating a truly humane society. (shrink)

Routledge is proud to reissue these nine pivotal titles from the acclaimed series Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion. Including key works by Ahern, Beardsmore, Pike, and others, these books are essential for all serious collections. Available as single volumes or as a nine-volume set, the titles in this collection were originally published between 1950-1960 by Routledge and Kegan Paul: Volume 1: The Problem of Evil M.B. Ahern Hb: 0-415-31841-6 Volume 2: Moral Reasoning R.W. Beardsmore Hb:0-415-31842-4 Volume 3: (...) Theology and Intelligibility Michael Durrant Hb: 0-415-31843-2 Volume 4: Humanism and Ideology James R. Flynn Hb: 0-415-31844-0 Volume 5: The Five Ways: St.Thomas Aquinas' Proofs of God's Existence Anthony Kenny Hb: 0-415-31845-9 Volume 6: Moral Practices D.Z. Phillips Hb: 0-415-31846-7 Volume 7: God and Timelessness Nelson Pike Hb: 0-415-31847-5 Volume 8: Without Answers Rush Rhees Hb: 0-415-31848-3 Volume 9: Morality and Purpose J.L. Stocks Hb: 0-415-31849-1. (shrink)

Andrews et al. criticize Gould and colleagues for (1) failing to provide evidentiary criteria for accepting exaptationist alternatives to adaptationist explanations, and (2) seeing exaptations and spandrels as being far more frequent than adaptations in the evolutionary history of modern humans. I argue that the first of these criticisms is wrong, and the second reflects a bias for the classical version of Darwinian evolutionary theory, which Gould was trying to expand by proposing concepts like exaptation and spandrels.

In a previous work [the second and the third author, “On paraconsistent deontic logic”, Philosophia 16, 293-303 (1986)] investigated certain systems of paraconsistent deontic in order to investigate the problem of contradiction in the domain of ethics. This paper continues this line of research, studying some paraconsistent systems containing alethic and deontic modalities. This approach allows us to treat the principles of Kant (OA→ \diamond A) and Hintikka (\square A → OA) from the classical and from the paraconsistent point of (...) view, and to propose systems in which either, both, or neither of these principles is valid. (shrink)

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)

This essay introduces a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose, which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This multiauthored report offers wide‐ranging assessments of increasing polarization and partisanship in American government and politics, and it proposes constructive responses to this in the provision of objective information, institutional reforms in government and the electoral system, and a reexamination of cultural (...) and political values needed if democracy is to function well in a pluralistic and diverse society. The essays in the special report explore the norms of civic learning and institutions, social movements, and communal innovations that can revitalize civic learning in practice. This introductory essay defines and explains the notion of civic learning, which is a lynchpin connecting many of the essays in the report. Civic learning pertains to the ways in which citizens learn about collective social problems and make decisions about them that reflect the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. Such learning can occur in many social settings in everyday life, and it can also be facilitated through participation in the processes of democratic governance on many levels. Civic learning is not doctrinaire and is compatible with a range of public goals and policies. It is an activity that increases what might be called the democratic capability of a people. (shrink)

At this writing, late in 2023 and on the eve of 2024, we are approaching the seventy-fifth anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984 and its many quotable passages such as “WAR IS PEACE.” Like 1949, the...

The concept of whole‐brain death is under attack again. Scholars are arguing that the concept of brain death per se—regardless of the focus on “higher,” “stem” or “whole”—is fundamentally flawed. These scholars have identified what they believe are serious discrepancies between the definition and criterion of brain death, and have pointed out that medical professionals and lay persons remain confused about its meaning. Yet whole‐brain death remains the standard for determining death in much of the Western world and its defenders (...) believe this concept best maps onto our everyday conception of death. (shrink)

This book also examines the thinking of scholars within the Dutch, British and North American 'schools' of religious phenomenology.

To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

This paper compares the preface of Columella’s Res rustica with that of the earliest fully extant Chinese agricultural treatise, the Qimin yaoshu (‘Essential Techniques for the Common People’) of Jia Sixie. I argue that both prefaces have a similar function: to present to the reader the social world in which the author wishes his agricultural work to be understood. By drawing on authoritative literary and historical traditions, each author projects an idealized vision of farming in which the discipline acquires a (...) deep moral significance. Granting these striking similarities, the authors’ views also diverge in certain illuminating respects: these include the moral agency of agriculture, the social location of expertise, and the historical development of agriculture in relation to society. (shrink)

The definition of death is one of the oldest and most enduring problems in biophilosophy and bioethics. Serious controversies over formally defining death began with the invention of the positive-pressure mechanical ventilator in the 1950s. For the first time, physicians could maintain ventilation and, hence, circulation on patients who had sustained what had been previously lethal brain damage. Prior to the development of mechanical ventilators, brain injuries severe enough to induce apnea quickly progressed to cardiac arrest from hypoxemia. Before the (...) 1950s, the loss of spontaneous breathing and heartbeat were perfect predictors of death because the functioning of the brain and of all other organs ceased rapidly and nearly simultaneously thereafter, producing a unitary death phenomenon. In the pretechnological era, physicians and philosophers did not have to consider whether a human being who had lost certain “vital functions” but had retained others was alive, because such cases were technically impossible. (shrink)