Achieving space situational awareness requires, at a minimum, the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Leveraging the resultant space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and conjunction assessment presents major challenges. This is in part because in characterizing space objects we reference a variety of identifiers, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, operational processes, operational statuses, and so forth, which tend to be defined in highly heterogeneous and sometimes inconsistent (...) ways. The Space Domain Ontologies are designed to provide a consensus-based realist framework for formulating such characterizations in a way that is both consistent and computable. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in a suite of ontologies built around the existing Space Object Ontology. They are stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space situational awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators and analysts. This paper provides an overview of the Space Domain Ontologies and their development and use. It presents the motivation for and advantages of the Space Domain Ontologies, including the benefits they provide for enhancing and maintaining long-term space situational awareness. (shrink)

Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology provides a consensus-based realist framework (...) for formulating such characterizations in a computable fashion. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in the Space Object Ontology and stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space domain awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators. This paper presents the core of the Space Object Ontology, discusses its advantages over other approaches to space object classification, and demonstrates its ability to combine diverse sets of data from multiple sources within an expandable framework. Finally, we show how the ontology provides benefits for enhancing and maintaining longterm space domain awareness. (shrink)

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, reminders of death are particularly salient. Although much terror management theory research demonstrates that people engage in defensive tactics to manage mortality awareness, other work shows that existential concerns can motivate growth-oriented actions to improve health. The present study explored the associative link between coronavirus anxieties, fear of death, and participants' well-being. Results, using structural equation modeling, found that increased mortality concerns stemming from COVID-19 were associated with heightened benefit finding from the pandemic. Increased benefit (...) finding, in turn, was related to higher life satisfaction, meaning in life, self-esteem, resilience, and vitality while also correlating negatively with depression and stress scores. There was no evidence for reverse mediation in that fear of mortality did not predict well-being through coronavirus worries. Overall, although many persons have experienced mental health concerns as a function of the COVID-19 pandemic, our findings demonstrate positive benefits that paradoxically follow in terms of an increased appreciation of life, improved relationships, and better health. (shrink)

In what constitutes the only English-language collection of essays ever dedicated to the analysis of Montesquieu's contributions to political science, the contributors review some of the most vexing controversies that have arisen in the interpretation of Montesquieu's thought. By paying careful attention to the historical, political, and philosophical contexts of Montesquieu's ideas, the contributors provide fresh readings of The Spirit of Laws, clarify the goals and ambitions of its author, and point out the pertinence of his thinking to the problems (...) of our world today. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious research has demonstrated that anxious individuals attend to negative emotional information at the expense of other information. This is commonly referred to as attentional bias. The field has historically conceived of this process as relatively static; however, research by [Zvielli, A., Bernstein, A., & Koster, E. H. W.. Dynamics of attentional bias to threat in anxious adults: Bias towards and/or away? PLoS ONE, 9, e104025; Zvielli, A., Bernstein, A., & Koster, E. H. W.. Temporal dynamics of attentional bias. Clinical (...) Psychological Science, 3, 772–788.], and others, challenges this assumption by demonstrating considerable temporal variability in attentional bias amongst anxious individuals. Still, the mechanisms driving these temporal dynamics are less well known. Using a modified dot-probe task, the present study examined the impact of two relevant contextual variables- affective valence and trial repetition. Affective context was instantiated by the presentation of... (shrink)

Combining anthropological descriptions with historical criticism, Cox situates the Zen arts within contemporary critical discourses.

Gestures and speech are clearly synchronized in many ways. However, previous studies have shown that the semantic similarity between gestures and speech breaks down as people approach transitions in understanding. Explanations for these gesture–speech mismatches, which focus on gestures and speech expressing different cognitive strategies, have been criticized for disregarding gestures’ and speech's integration and synchronization. In the current study, we applied three different perspectives to investigate gesture–speech synchronization in an easy and a difficult task: temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and (...) complexity matching. Participants engaged in a simple cognitive task and were assigned to either an easy or a difficult condition. We automatically measured pointing gestures, and we coded participant's speech, to determine the temporal alignment and semantic similarity between gestures and speech. Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis was used to determine the extent of complexity matching between gestures and speech. We found that task difficulty indeed influenced gesture–speech synchronization in all three domains. We thereby extended the phenomenon of gesture–speech mismatches to difficult tasks in general. Furthermore, we investigated how temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching were related in each condition, and how they predicted participants’ task performance. Our study illustrates how combining multiple perspectives, originating from different research areas (i.e., coordination dynamics, complexity science, cognitive psychology), provides novel understanding about cognitive concepts in general and about gesture–speech synchronization and task difficulty in particular. (shrink)

We have begun work on two separate but related ontologies for the study of neurological diseases. The first, the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND), is intended to provide a set of controlled, logically connected classes to describe the range of neurological diseases and their associated signs and symptoms, assessments, diagnoses, and interventions that are encountered in the course of clinical practice. ND is built as an extension of the Ontology for General Medical Sciences — a high-level candidate OBO Foundry ontology that (...) provides a set of general classes that can be used to describe general aspects of medical science. ND is being built with classes utilizing both textual and axiomatized definitions that describe and formalize the relations between instances of other classes within the ontology itself as well as to external ontologies such as the Gene Ontology, Cell Ontology, Protein Ontology, and Chemical Entities of Biological Interest. In addition, references to similar or associated terms in external ontologies, vocabularies and terminologies are included when possible. Initial work on ND is focused on the areas of Alzheimer’s and other diseases associated with dementia, multiple sclerosis, and stroke and cerebrovascular disease. Extensions to additional groups of neurological diseases are planned. The second ontology, the Neuro-Psychological Testing Ontology (NPT), is intended to provide a set of classes for the annotation of neuropsychological testing data. The intention of this ontology is to allow for the integration of results from a variety of neuropsychological tests that assay similar measures of cognitive functioning. Neuro-psychological testing is an important component in developing the clinical picture used in the diagnosis of patients with a range of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis, and following stroke or traumatic brain injury. NPT is being developed as an extension to the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations. (shrink)

Human beings have a tendency to transform geographical spaces into dwelling places which assume significance in terms of their social, cultural and personal identities. The authors describe the ways in which this occurs, how it is disrupted by a natural disaster - an Australian bushfire - and how the reciprocal relationship between place and person can contribute to personal and communal healing. The discussion draws on a doctoral thesis conducted by the principal author, and is illuminated by excerpts from narratives (...) provided by those who experienced the bushfire. The discussion is informed by insights from phenomenological geography and ecological philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople often use metaphors to discuss their financial prospects – for example, finding a fortune or searching for wealth. The purpose of the present research was to utilize conceptual metap...

Contour adaptation is a recently described paradigm that renders otherwise salient visual stimuli temporarily perceptually invisible. Here we investigate whether this illusion can be exploited to study visual awareness. We found that CA can induce seconds of sustained invisibility following similarly long periods of uninterrupted adaptation. Furthermore, even fragmented adaptors are capable of producing CA, with the strength of CA increasing monotonically as the adaptors encompass a greater fraction of the stimulus outline. However, different types of adaptor patterns, such as (...) distinctive shapes or illusory contours, produce equivalent levels of CA suggesting that the main determinants of CA are low-level stimulus characteristics, with minimal modulation by higher-order visual processes. Taken together, our results indicate that CA has desirable properties for studying visual awareness, including the production of prolonged periods of perceptual dissociation from stimulation as well as parametric dependencies of that dissociation on a host of stimulus parameters. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore utilitarian conceptions of personhood which for a long time have been employed as part of a rational moral justification for the termination of pregnancy. Michael Tooley's desires-based rights approach to personhood presented in his work Abortion and Infanticide is considered and, it is argued, is found wanting when one considers unconscious adults and their ability to desire life. This article will offer that unconscious sleeping individuals only have the potential to regain the capacity to value (...) their own life and, as such, under Tooley's formula for personhood, temporarily lose their status as a person. Following this, John Harris's utilitarian views on the status of the sleeping adult will be considered and deconstructed to show that, like Tooley, his ascription for personhood falls down at the sleeping adult. This article illustrates that utilitarian conceptions of personhood leave the sleeping adult human devoid of the rights of a person and hence render the value of this consquentialist theory, with regard to the idea of personhood, in severe doubt. The paper argues that utilitarian conceptions of personhood do little more than obstruct the worthy debate over the morality of abortion. (shrink)

The Catholic Tradition requires the faithful to form and follow their conscience. This is the case even with the recognition that consciences can be malformed and one can make errors in practical judgments. Water Shaping Stone examines various aspects of this tradition regarding conscience by using, among other sources, twentieth-century magisterial documents, theologians' works, and Scripture. Kathryn Lilla Cox argues that while the Magisterium retains teaching authority, and a responsibility to help form consciences through its teaching, focusing only on the (...) Magisterium leads to incomplete formation. A more holistic vision of conscience formation means considering the formation of the moral agent to be a multifaceted process that draws on, for example, teaching, prayer, rituals, Scripture, practices, and virtues, along with relationships with the Triune God and communities of accountability. This vision of conscience formation retains the magisterial teaching authority while acknowledging discipleship as the theological basis for making and assessing practical judgments of conscience. (shrink)

As Douglas Adams points out, if there is no final answer to question, 'What is the meaning of life?', '42' is as good or bad an answer as any other. Indeed, 42 quotes might be even better! Gary Cox guides us through 42 of the most misunderstood, misquoted, provocative and significant quotes in the history of philosophy providing a witty and compelling commentary along the way. This entertaining and illuminating collection of quotes doesn't merely list who said what and when. (...) Gary Cox claims that each quote is a philosophical thesis in itself. By exploring who a particular philosopher is and what he or she really meant when they said what they said, this book looks for the philosophy within the quote. Using the writings of everyone from Douglas Adams to A.J. Ayer and Thomas Aquinas to Karl Marx, Gary Cox takes us on a philosophical journey through history, culture and writing to bring us to a deeper understanding of why we think the way we do. (shrink)

This paper explores the grounds upon which moral judgment of a person's beliefs is properly made. The beliefs in question are non-moral beliefs and the objects of moral judgment are individual instances of believing. We argue that instances of believing may be morally wrong on any of three distinct grounds: (i) by constituting a moral hazard, (ii) by being the result of immoral inquiry, or (iii) by arising from vicious inner processes of belief formation. On this way of articulating the (...) basis of moral judgment of belief it becomes clear that rational and epistemic norms do not exhaust the kinds of normative judgment properly made of a person's state of believing. We argue that there are instances of believing that are both rational and true and yet morally wrong. (shrink)

SummaryComparison of some longitudinal data on infant weight in two samples of Australian Aborigines indicates changes in infant growth between 1966 and 1976 which suggest that at the time when the child comes off the breast, weight gain slows. This faltering of weight gain is often followed by a partial catch-up, but the resultant weight for age at 1 year corresponds with a lower British centile than the child was at just before weaning.

The temporal structure of behavior contains a rich source of information about its dynamic organization, origins, and development. Today, advances in sensing and data storage allow researchers to collect multiple dimensions of behavioral data at a fine temporal scale both in and out of the laboratory, leading to the curation of massive multimodal corpora of behavior. However, along with these new opportunities come new challenges. Theories are often underspecified as to the exact nature of these unfolding interactions, and psychologists have (...) limited ready-to-use methods and training for quantifying structures and patterns in behavioral time series. In this paper, we will introduce four techniques to interpret and analyze high-density multi-modal behavior data, namely, to: (1) visualize the raw time series, (2) describe the overall distributional structure of temporal events (Burstiness calculation), (3) characterize the nonlinear dynamics over multiple timescales with Chromatic and Anisotropic Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA), (4) and quantify the directional relations among a set of interdependent multimodal behavioral variables with Granger Causality. Each technique is introduced in a module with conceptual background, sample data drawn from empirical studies and ready-to-use Matlab scripts. The code modules showcase each technique’s application with detailed documentation to allow more advanced users to adapt them to their own datasets. Additionally, to make our modules more accessible to beginner programmers, we provide a “Programming Basics” module that introduces common functions for working with behavioral timeseries data in Matlab. Together, the materials provide a practical introduction to a range of analyses that psychologists can use to discover temporal structure in high-density behavioral data. (shrink)

A concise and accessible dictionary of the key terms used in Sartre's philosophy, his major works and philosophical influences.

What's wrong with high executive pay? Beyond envy, is some issue of justice or fairness at stake? And what can anyone do about it? (A lot, as it turns out.).

The Neurological Disease Ontology (ND) is being developed to provide a comprehensive framework for the representation of neurological diseases (Diehl et al., 2013). ND utilizes the model established by the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS) for the representation of entities in medicine and disease (Scheuermann et al., 2009). The goal of ND is to include information for each disease concerning its molecular, genetic, and environmental origins, the processes involved in its etiology and realization, as well as its clinical presentation (...) including signs and symptoms. (shrink)

There is no satisfactory account for the general phenomenon of confabulation, for the following reasons: (1) confabulation occurs in a number of pathological and non-pathological conditions; (2) impairments giving rise to confabulation are likely to have different neural bases; and (3) there is no unique theory explaining the aetiology of confabulations. An epistemic approach to defining confabulation could solve all of these issues, by focusing on the surface features of the phenomenon. However, existing epistemic accounts are unable to offer sufficient (...) conditions for confabulation and tend to emphasise only its epistemic disadvantages. In this paper, we argue that a satisfactory epistemic account of confabulation should also acknowledge those features which are (potentially) epistemically advantageous. For example, confabulation may allow subjects to exercise some control over their own cognitive life which is instrumental to the construction or preservation of their sense of self. (shrink)

Purpose: The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to determine whether Facebook use affects biological response to stress and to characterize participants’ use of Facebook during a stressful event. Methods: College students completed a modified Trier Social Stress Test including video recording. Participants were randomly assigned to the Facebook group or control group (no preparatory materials). Pulse and salivary cortisol were measured and compared using t tests. Trained coders assessed videos for 13 common Facebook actions and categorized them as purposeful (...) (tool based) or nonpurposeful (distraction); pulse was compared between groups using Fisher’s exact test. Results: Of 41 participants, 14 (36%) were male and 36 (88%) were Caucasian, mean age was 19.6 ± 1.4 years; 19 participants were randomized to the Facebook group. Comparing Time 1 and Time 3, there were no significant differences in cortisol or pulse change between the Facebook group and the control group. However, males in the control group had a mean pulse reduction of −3.5 ± 0.2 bpm between baseline and Time 3; males in the Facebook group had a mean pulse increase of 10 ± 8.6 bmp (p =.01). Overall, 58.8% of videos were categorized as primarily tool based. Participants who primarily demonstrated distracted use of Facebook had higher than average pulse rates at Time 3 (mean 85.1 vs. 73.6 bpm, p =.03). Discussion: Male Facebook users and participants who demonstrated distracted Facebook use showed increased biologic signs of stress during a stressful event. Some college students may find Facebook use detrimental to performance in stressful situations, but this may vary by gender and type of use. (shrink)

Progress in addiction science is hampered by disagreements and ambiguity around its core construct: addiction. Addiction Ontology (AddictO) offers a path to a solution of the kind that has addressed similar problems in other areas of science: a set of clearly and uniquely defined entities to which terms such as ‘addiction’, addictive disorder’ and ‘substance dependence ’can be applied for ease of reference while recognizing that it is the construct definitions and their unique IDs that are central, not the terms.

Clinical delusions are difficult to investigate in the laboratory because they co-occur with other symptoms and with intellectual impairment. Partly for these reasons, researchers have recently begun to use hypnosis with neurologically intact people in order to model clinical delusions. In this paper we describe striking analogies between the behavior of patients with a clinical delusion of mirrored self misidentification, and the behavior of highly hypnotizable subjects who receive a hypnotic suggestion to see a stranger when they look in the (...) mirror. Based on these analogies, we argue that the use of hypnosis is a reliable method to investigate the surface features of clinical delusions. But to what extent can hypnosis successfully recreate delusions? Can it also contribute to a better understanding of delusion formation? Although clinical delusions and hypnotically induced beliefs are different in etiology, some analogies can be identified in the underlying processes that characterise them, based on the two-factor theory of delusion formation. (shrink)

In attempting to debunk moral realism through an appeal to evolutionary facts, debunkers face a series of problems, which we label the problems of scope, corrosiveness, and post‐hoc justification. To overcome these problems, debunkers must assume certain metaphysical or epistemological positions, or otherwise pre‐establish them. In doing so, they must assume or pre‐establish the very conclusion they seek in advancing the argument. This means that such debunking arguments either beg the question against the moral realist or are undermined as standalone (...) metaethical arguments. (shrink)

This article presents a computational model of the learning of diagnostic knowledge, based on observations of human operators engaged in real-world troubleshooting tasks. We present a model of problem solving and learning in which the reasoner introspects about its own performance on the problem-solving task, identifies what it needs to learn to improve its performance, formulates learning goals to acquire the required knowledge, and pursues its learning goals using multiple learning strategies. The model is implemented in a computer system which (...) provides a case study based on observations of troubleshooting operators and protocol analysis of the data gathered in the test area of an operational electronics manufacturing plant. The model not only addresses issues in human learning, but, in addition, is computationally justified as a uniform, extensible framework for multistrategy learning. (shrink)