We live in a world of breaking news, where at almost any moment our everyday routine can be interrupted by a faraway event. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life. Even life’s inevitable moments—birth, death, love, and war—are almost always a surprise. Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, (...) and how they then move across time and landscape. What Is an Event? ranges across several disciplines, systematically analyzing the ways that events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism for understanding eventful forms and flows, from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks, and financial crises. Wagner-Pacifici takes a close look at a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live on. What is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events, Wagner-Pacifici argues, are identities, loyalties, social relationships, and our very experiences of time and space. What Is an Event? provides a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting upon them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of the events that mark and shape our lives. (shrink)

We describe some of the ways that the field of content analysis is being transformed in an Era of Big Data. We argue that content analysis, from its beginning, has been concerned with extracting the main meanings of a text and mapping those meanings onto the space of a textual corpus. In contrast, we suggest that the emergence of new styles of text mining tools is creating an opportunity to develop a different kind of content analysis that we describe as (...) a computational hermeneutics. Here the goal is to go beyond a mapping of the main meaning of a text to mimic the kinds of questions and concerns that have traditionally been the focus of a hermeneutically grounded close reading, a reading that focuses on what Kenneth Burke described as the poetic meanings of a text. We illustrate this approach by referring to our own work concerning the rhetorical character of US National Security Strategy documents. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur” is the introduction to its fourth installment. The piece elaborates a new approach, termed “political semiosis,” to tracking event emergence, event formation, and event deformation. This approach enables event analysts to capture the formation and flow of events as they move, take shape, intersect, and form eddies of undecidability. Taking seriously the need to calibrate the dynamic between interpretation and action in event development, political semiosis seeks (...) to construct tools able to assess the capacities of diverse genres to carry events forward or to block events in the paths of their development. (shrink)

The book also provides insight into overlooked discourses about public sex education by analyzing a previously understudied campaign targeted at African American men in the 1920s, offering theoretical categorizations of discursive ...

Fisher recognized that the evolution of social insect colonies needed explaining, a point which Charles Darwin had avoided discussing in detail. Fisher, in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, outlined in detail how eusociality could evolve, and developed a verbal model by connecting selection on fecundity with the sterility of workers. Fisher saw social insect colonies as harmonious units, in contrast to human societies that exhibit intra-communal conflict. Fisher’s development of the model was strongly influenced by his (...) correspondence with Leonard Darwin, and so I call it the Fisher-Darwin model. However, Fisher was not influenced by Lamarckian views on the evolution of social insects that were common at that time. The Fisher-Darwin model presages almost exactly the mathematical model recently proposed by Nowak and colleagues. (shrink)

This paper analyses Quentin Meillassoux’s criticism of Kantian philosophy. The objective of the paper is to delineate the connection Meillassoux asserts between the problem of induction and Kant’s account of finitude. After examining Meillassoux’s elucidations on the connection between the two, I argue that Meillassoux’s characterization of Kantian philosophy as ‘weak correlationism’ is not only inaccurate but also undermines the novelty of Kantian philosophy, especially Kant’s (critical) response to the problem of induction. The paper concludes with the claim that Meillassoux’s (...) criticism of modern philosophy, especially Kantian critical philosophy, does not convince us to abandon the problem of finitude but points to the need for a more accurate understanding of finitude. (shrink)

This study addressed the lack of implicit measures of religiosity in German research by developing a German Single Category Implicit Association Test for measuring the associative religious self-concept. The SC-IAT was applied to a sample consisting of 389 German students with different subjects of study and internally consistent. To estimate the psychometric criteria of construct validity, SC-IAT scores were correlated to the Centrality of Religiosity Scale, whose construct psychological approach can be theoretically linked to the concept of associative representations in (...) the research on IATs. Corresponding to the average relationship between implicit and explicit measures in literature, the correlation was moderately. Group comparisons relating to religious affiliation and subject of study provided initial evidence for criterion validity. There were complications with the attribute category “non-religious,” especially by participants without a religious affiliation, however, the SC-IAT could also provide a method to investigate this issue. (shrink)

Authors and printers together created the New Book of Nature—the printed literature of science—in early modern Europe. Careful attention has been given in recent years to the development of literary and rhetorical techniques in science. This article proposes that these developments were linked to printing technology and the typographic culture that produced the early printed book of science. We focus on several cases in which the roles of author and printer-publisher were joined and thereby highlight connections between knowledge production and (...) reproduction during the Scientific Revolution. Examples include Regiomontanus, Tycho Brake, Galileo, William Leybourn, Joseph Moxon, and the collective practices and privileges of the Royal Society of London and the Paris Academy of Sciences. (shrink)

The powerful combination of genetic, developmental and molecular approaches possible with the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has led to a profound understanding of the genetic control of early developmental events. However, Drosophila is a highly specialized long germ insect, and the mechanisms controlling its early development may not be typical of insects or Arthropods in general. The beetle, Tribolium castaneum, offers a similar opportunity to integrate high resolution genetic analysis with the developmental/molecular approaches currently used in other organisms. Early results (...) document significant differences between insect orders in the functions of genes responsible for establishing developmental commitments. (shrink)

Eugene 'Gene' Vernier worked as a fashion photographer for British Vogue from 1954 to 1967, during one of the most exciting periods in fashion history. Shooting of-the-moment looks from the likes of Christian Dior and Emilio Pucci and top models including Celia Hammond, Jean Shrimpton, and current Vogue creative director Grace Coddington, Vernier worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. Yet he was relatively unconcerned with celebrity. Interested only in bringing out the very best in each frame, (...) Vernier was a true craftsman in the fashion photography trade. Featuring more than one hundred of Vernier's own favorite photographs drawn from Vogue's extensive photo archive, this lavishly illustrated volume reveals remarkable innovation in the use of props, backdrops, and location. Whether he was photographing his subjects by the sea, with a canine companion, or perfectly positioned atop a pale pink convertible, Vernier's careful composition enhanced the essence of his subject. Vernier shot mostly in black-and-white, and his trademark “look” is one of classic femininity. He sought to capture models when they were relaxed, enjoying the clothing, and confident that their photographer would show both only at their best. Providing commentary on the photographs are fashion history expert Becky Conekin and Vogue historian Robin Muir. This is first book to focus on Vernier's work at Vogue and it allows readers a rare glimpse of his inimitable blend of technical excellence and an eye for experimentation. (shrink)

Comparative ethics raises theoretical and methodological problems important for all ethical studies. Five essays in this focus section provide introductions to the ethics of specific indigenous cultures and suggest implications for further comparative studies. In this introduction, we review these findings and discuss their relevance to the concept of ethical naturalism which we have previously offered as a basis for comparative work.

In this introductory essay, the authors develop implications for ethical theory which relate to the three studies of cosmogony and ethics in the Focus articles by Guberman, Campany, and Read. They suggest that the dialogue between theory and description which Green and C. Reynolds urge in their Focus article should be understood as a search for adequate forms of ethical theory that must go on in both ethics and comparative studies, as well as in interdisciplinary conversations between them. In considering (...) the descriptive studies in this focus section, and in the collection "Cosmogony and Ethical Order," the authors conclude that the type of ethical theory which will prove most useful for further studies in comparative ethics will be a form of ethical naturalism. (shrink)

Kenneth C. Schaffner's paper is an important contribution to the literature on behavioral genetics and on genetics in general. Schaffner has a long record of injecting real molecular biology into philosophical discussions of genetics. His treatments of the reduction of Mendelian to molecular genetics first drew philosophical attention to the problems of detail that have fuelled both anti-reductionism and more sophisticated models of theory reduction. An injection of molecular detail into discussions of genetics is particularly necessary at the present time, (...) when so many philosophers seem happy to discuss the philosophical and ethical implications of molecular biology using gene concepts derived from evolutionary biology ). Schaffner has long advocated the view that the philosophy of biology should be more than the philosophy of evolution. This paper shows how radically a picture of gene action derived from molecular biology undercuts the popular picture associated with a more evolutionary view of genes as units of heredity or as ‘difference-makers’ mediated by the ‘black box’ of development. (shrink)

This study represents an improvement in the ethics scales inventory published in a 1988 Journal of Business Ethics article. The article presents the distillation and validation process whereby the original 33 item inventory was reduced to eight items. These eight items comprise the following ethical dimensions: a moral equity dimension, a relativism dimension, and a contractualism dimension. The multidimensional ethics scale demonstrates significant predictive ability.

The use of social media as a recruitment tool for research with humans is increasing, and likely to continue to grow. Despite this, to date there has been no specific regulatory guidance and there has been little in the bioethics literature to guide investigators and institutional review boards faced with navigating the ethical issues such use raises. We begin to fill this gap by first defending a nonexceptionalist methodology for assessing social media recruitment; second, examining respect for privacy and investigator (...) transparency as key norms governing social media recruitment; and, finally, analyzing three relatively novel aspects of social media recruitment: the ethical significance of compliance with website “terms of use”; the ethics of recruiting from the online networks of research participants; and the ethical implications of online communication from and between participants. Two checklists aimed at guiding investigators and IRBs through the ethical issues are included as appendices. (shrink)

SECRETS OF THE TEMPLE : HOW THE FEDERAL RESERVE RUNS THE COUNTRY by William Greider New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 798 pp., $24.95 Greider pursues the theme that the Federal Reserve System promotes the interests of Wall Street?banks and bondholders?over those of Main Street?the rest of society. The wealth of fascinating observations he makes are, unfortunately, organized by a 1950s?style Keynesianism and a faith in unlimited, majoritarian democracy. Neither of these beliefs are at all adequate for remedying the deficiencies (...) of political control of the money supply, which is the real problem Greider has uncovered. (shrink)

Members of the serine/arginine (SR)‐rich protein family of splicing factors play versatile roles in RNA processing steps and are often essential for normal development. Dynamic changes in RNA processing and turnover allow fast cellular adaptions to a changing microenvironment and thereby closely cooperate with transcription factor networks that establish cell identity within tissues. SR proteins play fundamental roles in the processing of pre‐mRNAs by regulating constitutive and alternative splicing. More recently, SR proteins have also been implicated in other aspects of (...) RNA metabolism such as mRNA stability, transport and translation. The‐ emerging noncanonical functions highlight the multifaceted functions of these SR proteins and identify them as important coordinators of gene expression programmes. Accordingly, most SR proteins are essential for normal cell function and their misregulation contributes to human diseases such as cancer. (shrink)