The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered the education sector. Rather than the impact of COVID-19, many higher education institutions are on the verge of insolvency due to a lack of digital transformation readiness and poor business models. The bleak financial future many HEIs will face while others may be forced to close their doors completely will erode HEIs’ ability to fulfil their societal responsibilities. However, HEIs that have survived and maintained their operations anticipate the transition to online learning or the (...) effects of any economic crisis, including university closures in the short, medium, or long term. The entire educational ecosystem was forced to transform its operations quickly and entirely to an online teaching-learning scenario in just a few weeks. Notably, HEIs that have long offered online courses worldwide can easily transition to digital teaching and learning when necessary. The second roundtable session’s result of the International Higher Education Conference, organized by INTI International University on March 31 2022, was used to organize a Delphi method to identify further factors that positively impact HEIs by COVID-19. The importance of these factors was then determined using Kendall’s coefficient of concordance. Recommendations on how HEIs should move towards institutional sustainability during the endemic phase are presented accordingly. (shrink)

Academic misconduct is a problem of growing concern across the tertiary education sector. While plagiarism has been the most common form of academic misconduct, the advent of software programs to detect plagiarism has seen the problem of misconduct simply mutate. As universities attempt to function in an increasingly complex environment, the factors that contribute to academic misconduct are unlikely to be easily mitigated. A multiple case study approach examined how academic misconduct is perceived in universities in in Australia, New Zealand (...) and the United Kingdom via interviews with academics and administrators. The findings show that academic misconduct is a systemic problem that manifests in various ways and requires similarly diverse approaches to management. Greater consistency in policies and procedures, including a focus on preventative education for both staff and students, is key to managing the mutations of academic misconduct that continue to plague the higher education sector globally. (shrink)

ion is one of the important processes in scientific modeling. It has always been implied that abstraction is an agent-centric activity that involves the cognitive processes of scientists in model building. I contend that there is an autonomous aspect of abstraction in many modeling activities. I argue that the autonomous process of abstraction is continuous with the agent-centric abstraction but capable of evolving independently from the modeler’s abstraction activity.

We propose a theoretical framework that highlights the most important consequences of complexity for the form and evolution of projects and use it to develop a typology of project complexity. This framework also enables us to deepen the understanding of how knowledge production and flexibility strategies enable project participants to address complexity. Based on this understanding, we advance a number of propositions regarding the strategies that can be most effective for different categories of complexity. These results contribute to the integration (...) of various strands in the research on project complexity and provide a roadmap for further research on the strategies for addressing it. (shrink)

The debate about genetic modification (GM) can be seen as characteristic of our time. Environmental groups, in challenging GM, are also challenging modernist faith in progress, and science and technology. In this paper we use the case of New Zealand's Royal Commission on Genetic Modification to explore the application of science discourses as used by environmental groups. We do this by situating the debate in the framework of modernity, discussing the use of science by environmental groups, and deconstructing the science (...) discourses evident within environmental groups' submissions to the Commission. We find science being called into question by the very movement that has relied on it to fight environmental issues for many years. The environmental groups are challenging the traditional boundaries of science, for although they use science they also present it as a culturally embedded activity with no greater epistemological authority than other knowledge systems. Their discourses, like that of the other main actors in the GM debate, are thus part of the constant re-negotiation of the cultural construct of 'science'. (shrink)

Pictorial representations such as diagrams and figures are widely used in scientific literature for explanatory and descriptive purposes. The intuitive nature of pictorial representations coupled with texts foster a better understanding of the objects of study. Biological mechanisms and processes can be clearly illustrated and grasped in pictures. I argue that pictorial representations describe biological phenomena by telling stories. I elaborate on the role of narrative structures of pictures in the frontier research using a case study in immunology. I articulate (...) that pictures with an inherent narrative structure are crucial in biological sciences. (shrink)

Mechanisms consist of component parts and processes organized in a specific way to produce changes that may give rise to one or more phenomena. I aim to examine the generative mechanism of generative material models in the production of new material models. A generative material model in biology is a living material model that is capable of generating new material models. I contend that generative mechanisms of a generative material model are not to be conflated with biological mechanisms: the former (...) is a mechanism manipulated and altered by the modeler while the latter is a naturally occurring mechanism. I examine the ways in which idealization may contribute to the generative mechanism in generating new model organisms. I articulate that the component parts and activities in a generative mechanism are to a large extent shaped by idealization in generative material modeling. Although biological mechanisms do have a role to play in the generation of model organisms, I propose that we shall view the generative mechanism as a hybrid of biological mechanisms and modeling activities. I shall argue that the notion of generative mechanisms as hybrid mechanisms is different from the extant conceptions of mechanisms in various aspects. (shrink)

In a broad brush, biological models are often constructed in two general types: as a concrete model; as an abstract model. A concrete model is a material model such as model organisms, while an abstract model is a mathematical or computational model consists of equations or algorithms. Though there are types of biological models that cannot be strictly categorized as either concrete or abstract, they are falling somewhere in between this spectrum. In view of the fact that biological phenomena are (...) sui generis and distinct from physical phenomena in many respects, using the concepts in standard modeling fails to account for the differences between biological sciences and physical sciences. Drawing from the resources of a credible-world account of models in economic modeling, I propose to reinterpret abstract models and concrete models in the light of the credible world account of models. (shrink)

The idea of conducting upstream public engagement over emerging technologies has been gaining popularity in Europe and North America, with nanotechnologies seen as a test case for this. For many of its advocates, upstream engagement is about a re-conceptualisation of the science–society relationship in which a variety of ‘publics’ are brought together with stakeholders and scientists early in the Research and Development process to co-develop technological trajectories. However, the concept, aims and processes of upstream engagement remain ill-defined, are often misunderstood, (...) and have undergone little critical analysis. This special issue of NanoEthics, entitled ‘Engaging with Nanotechnologies–Engaging Differently?’ takes a multi-nation, multi-case approach to explore this idea, drawing on work represented by four articles from the US and Europe, from ethnographic work in the nanotechnology lab through to analysis of a Citizens’ Jury and other attempts to move public debate ‘upstream’. An overall message from the papers is that without adequate critique ‘upstream engagement’ might end up re-producing out-dated forms of science communication or being rejected as a failed concept before it has even matured. (shrink)

Conceptual constructive models are a type of scientific model that can be used to construct or reshape the target phenomenon conceptually. Though it has received scant attention from the philosophers, it raises an intriguing issue of how a conceptual constructive model can construct the target phenomenon in a conceptual way. Proponents of the conception of conceptual constructive models are not being explicit about the application of the constructive force of a model in the target construction. It is far from clear (...) that how a conceptual constructive model exerts its constructive force on the constructed phenomenon of interest. Consequently, the function and the epistemic status of a conceptual constructive model are dubious at best. Making use of the conception of abstraction-as-aggregation, I argue that a conceptual constructive model can be used to construct the phenomenon of interest conceptually via a two-step process of abstraction: (1) abstracting away the lower-level details; and (2) aggregating the relevant information into a higher-level composite element. I contend that this process of abstraction, which is not playing the representational role as in a typical representational model, confers the constructive force on a model. (shrink)

Computational modeling is one of the primary approaches to constructing protein–protein interfaces in the laboratory. The algorithm-driven computational protein design has been successfully applied to the construction of functional proteins with improved binding affinity and increased thermostability. It is intriguing how a computational protein modeling approach can construct and shape the reality of new functional proteins from scratch. I articulate an account of abstraction and exploration-driven strategies in this computational endeavor. I aim to show that how a computational modelling approach, (...) which is laden with mathematics and algorithms, can have a constructive force on the target protein. (shrink)

Scientific models consist of fictitious elements and assumptions. Various attempts have been made to answer the question of how a model, which is sometimes viewed as a fiction, can explain or predict the target phenomenon adequately. I examine two accounts of models-as-fictions which are aiming at disentangling the myth of representing the reality by fictional models. I argue that both views have their own weaknesses in spite of many virtues. I propose to re-evaluate the problems of representation from a novel (...) perspective in which some of the model representations can be regarded as fictional representations. I argue that this type of model representation is credible despite being a fictional representation of the reality. (shrink)

Generative models have been proposed as a new type of non-representational scientific models recently. A generative model is characterized with the capacity of producing new models on the basis of the existing one. The current accounts do not explain sufficiently the mechanism of the generative capacity of a generative model. I attempt to accomplish this task in this paper. I outline two antecedent accounts of generative models. I point out that both types of generative models function to generate new homogenous (...) models in the sense that the latter is a straightforward derivative of the former, both of which share many similar features. Unfortunately, both accounts are implicit about the generative capacity of generative models. Using a case study, I articulate that a two-staged process of abstraction and idealization in modeling may contribute to the generative capacity of a scientific model. I also demonstrate that this two-staged process may go beyond the capacity of generating new homogenous models to generating new heterogeneous models. (shrink)

Model organisms are a living form of scientific models. Despite the widespread use of model organisms in scientific research, the actual representational relationship between model organisms and their target species is often poorly characterized in the context of cross-species research. Many model organisms do not represent the target species adequately, let alone accurately. This is partly due to the complex and emergent life phenomena in the organism, and partly due to the fact that a model organism is always taken to (...) represent a broad range of diverse organisms. More often than not, model organisms are taken as a reference point for an extrapolation to be made to the unknown characteristics of other species. I propose to view model organisms as analogue simulators which represent the emergent phenomenon in the context of cross-species research. A model organism represents a wide range of species by simulating their molecular microstates which underlie various emergent phenomena. I show that although model organisms represent the target species inadequately at many levels of complexity, they have epistemic values as a simulator in virtue of which the emergent phenomenon can be modeled dynamically, a virtue that is hardly attainable by non-dynamic models. (shrink)

[full article, abstract in English; only abstract in Lithuanian] Walton’s thesis of transparency of photographs has spurred much dispute among critics. One of the popular objections is spatial agnosticism, an argument that concerns the inertia of egocentric spatial information vis-a-vis a photograph. In this paper, I argue that spatial agnosticism fails. Spatial agnostics claim, for a wrong reason, that a photographic image cannot carry egocentric spatial information. I argue that it is the disjuncture of the photographic world in which the (...) depicted object situated from the space in which the viewer of the photograph resides that renders the photograph spatially agnostic. It is the timeless photographic world rather than the photographic object that renders egocentric spatial information inert. With this new formulation of spatial agnosticism, I propose that spatial agnosticism needs to be coupled with the temporal dimension in the efforts to refute the thesis of transparency of photographs. (shrink)

It is assumed that scientific models contain no superfluous model elements in scientific representation. A representational model is constructed with all the model elements serving the representational purpose. The received view has it that there are no redundant model elements which are non-representational. Contrary to this received view, I argue that there exist some non-representational model elements which are essential in scientific representation. I call them representation-supporting model elements in virtue of the fact that they play the role to support (...) the representational role of representational model elements. Representation-supporting model elements, which have a characteristic of dependability, are not to be eliminated in the process of modeling although they are playing second fiddle to representational model elements in scientific representation. (shrink)

Scientific models are used to predict and understand the target phenomena in the reality. The kind of epistemic relationship between the model and the reality is always regarded by most of the philosophers as a representational one. I argue that, complementary to this representational role, some of the scientific models have a constructive role to play in altering and reconstructing the reality in a physical way. I hold that the idealized model assumptions and elements bestow the constructive force of a (...) model on the reality. By recognizing the physical constructive force of some scientific models, the merit of these models could be judged by how successful they are in the reality construction, rather than by the traditional criterion of model-world representation. (shrink)

Noise in behavior is often viewed as a nuisance: while the mind aims to take the best possible action, it is let down by unreliability in the sensory and response systems. How researchers study cognition reflects this viewpoint – averaging over trials and participants to discover the deterministic relationships between experimental manipulations and their behavioral consequences, with noise represented as additive, often Gaussian, and independent. Yet a careful look at behavioral noise reveals rich structure that defies easy explanation. First, both (...) perceptual and preferential judgments show that sensory and response noise may potentially only play minor roles, with most noise arising in the cognitive computations. Second, the functional form of the noise is both non-Gaussian and non-independent, with the distribution of noise being better characterized as heavy-tailed and as having substantial long-range autocorrelations. It is possible that this structure results from brains that are, for some reason, bedeviled by a fundamental design flaw, albeit one with intriguingly distinctive characteristics. Alternatively, noise might not be a bug but a feature: indeed, we suggest that noise is fundamental to how cognition works. Specifically, we propose that the brain approximates probabilistic inference with a local sampling algorithm, one that uses randomness to drive its exploration of alternative hypotheses. Reframing cognition in this way explains the rich structure of noise and leads to a surprising conclusion: that noise is not a symptom of cognitive malfunction but plays a central role in underpinning human intelligence. (shrink)

Theories of natural language syntax often characterize grammatical knowledge as a form of abstract computation. This paper argues that such a characterization is correct, and that fundamental properties of grammar can and should be understood in terms of restrictions on the complexity of possible grammatical computation, when defined in terms of generative capacity. More specifically, the paper demonstrates that the computational restrictiveness imposed by Tree Adjoining Grammar provides important insights into the nature of human grammatical knowledge.

Epictetus (pronounced Epic-TEE-tus) was an exponent of Stoicism who flourished in the early second century C.E. about four hundred years after the Stoic school of Zeno of Citium was established in Athens. He lived and worked, first as a student in Rome, and then as a teacher with his own school in Nicopolis in Greece. Our knowledge of his philosophy and his method as a teacher comes to us via two works composed by his student Arrian, the Discourses and the (...) Handbook. Although Epictetus based his teaching on the works of the early Stoics (none of which survives) which dealt with the three branches of Stoic thought, logic, physics and ethics, the Discourses and the Handbook concentrate almost exclusively on ethics. The role of the Stoic teacher was to encourage his students to live the philosophic life, whose end was eudaimonia (‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’), to be secured by living the life of reason, which – for Stoics – meant living virtuously and living ‘according to nature’. The eudaimonia (‘happiness’) of those who attain this ideal consists of ataraxia (imperturbability), apatheia (freedom from passion), eupatheiai (‘good feelings’), and an awareness of, and capacity to attain, what counts as living as a rational being should. The key to transforming oneself into the Stoic sophos (wise person) is to learn what is ‘in one’s power’, and this is ‘the correct use of impressions’ (phantasiai), which in outline involves not judging as good or bad anything that appears to one. For the only thing that is good is acting virtuously (that is, motivated by virtue), and the only thing that is bad is the opposite, acting viciously (that is, motivated by vice). Someone who seeks to make progress as a Stoic (a prokoptôn) understands that their power of rationality is a fragment of God whose material body – a sort of rarefied fiery air – blends with the whole of creation, intelligently forming and directing undifferentiated matter to make the world as we experience it. The task of the prokoptôn, therefore, is to ‘live according to nature’, which means (a) pursuing a course through life intelligently responding to one’s own needs and duties as a sociable human being, but also (b) wholly accepting one’s fate and the fate of the world as coming directly from the divine intelligence which makes the world the best that is possible. (shrink)

In this paper I tee off from a footnote in prichard's article, "is moral philosophy based on a mistake?" in it he contrasts living under the aegis of moral obligation and moral goodness with living under the aegis of virtue. Using prichard's terms I try to say what an ethics of virtue as versus one of duty and moral goodness would be like. Then I try to see what prichard's case against the former and for the latter would be like, (...) And to indicate my own sympathies in the matter. (shrink)

It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere (...) with well-developed rote skills, like climbing stairs, I suggest that it is typically not detrimental to the skills of expert athletes, performing artists, and other individuals who endeavor to achieve excellence. Along the way, I present a critical analysis of some philosophical theories and behavioral studies on the relationship between attention and bodily movement, an explanation of why attention may be beneficial at the highest level of performance and an error theory that explains why many have thought the contrary. Though tentative, I present my view as a challenge to the widespread starting assumption in research on highly skilled movement that at the pinnacle of skill attention to one's movement is detrimental. (shrink)

This article analyzes the results of a teaching innovation project developed during the academic year 2021-2022, whose main objective was to assess the need to in- clude a compulsory subject of mediation and collaborative conflict resolution in the degree in Social Work at UCM. To this end, an international working group has been formed in the form of an Ideas Lab that has developed a research combining quan- titative (questionnaire) and qualitative (Design Thinking) tools, whose results have allowed to develop (...) a proposal that has been submitted to the dean's office for consideration in the future modification of the degree. But undoubtedly, the most remarkable thing is that through the laboratory it has been possible to guaran-tee essential elements for the quality of the training of our university community: transversality, transdisciplinarity, internationalization and transfer of knowledge. (shrink)

Embora a logica seja, de urn modo geraJ, concebida como um ramo da filosofia, suas aplic~oes via muito alem dos limites de qualquer disciplina isoladamente considerada (SALMON, 1993). Seu papel principal e fomecer meios para determinar a rel~o de consequencia que vige entre as premissas e a conclusao de urn dado argumento. Dentre as tecnicas utilizadas que possibihtarn garantir esta rel~o destaca-se a tecnica por redu ¢oao absurdo por ser amplamente aplicada nas cienciasdesde a antiguidade. Suaideiabasics residenofatodequeumapropo si~ nio pode (...) ser verdadeira se dela deduzimos uma contradi ~o. Pretende-se, entio, apresentar a estrutura logica de tal tee niea de demonstracao a partir de urn dado sistema formal da logica classica. (shrink)