This volume explains why older methods like ecological regression so often fail, and it gives the most comprehensive treatment available of the promising new techniques for cross-level inference.

This article provides a framework by way of introduction to the special section, ‘The Urban Problematic II’. It introduces a new selection of papers contributing to the continuing project of interrogating concepts, processes and practices associated with contemporary forms of urban life. The article focuses in particular on the problem of infrastructure in relation to questions of urban politics and especially remarks on the emergence of a kind of thinking in which the separation of notions of material infrastructure from those (...) of the social or cultural sphere can no longer be usefully maintained. The essays in the section cumulatively address the issue of an emergent hybridity of urban elements: the virtual and the material, the social and the technical, the political and the instrumental, the vertical and the horizontal. The spectacle of contemporary political activism and dissent emerges in the transformation of social and urban space. (shrink)

I argue that Taylor’s engagement with secularity demonstrates his deep concern for preserving key humanist insights, an abiding commitment to moral pluralism, and the sincerity of his religious faith. Taylor insists on transcendence as the best hope for securing the continued commitment to the moral legacy of humanism in the west, but while he personally advocates a renewed Christian humanism, his notion of transcendence is amenable to other interpretations, including non-religious options, and so allows for a potential overlapping consensus on (...) humanism from what Taylor calls the “transformation perspective.”. (shrink)

This article attempts a foray into the linguistic study of vocalization traditions in Christian Arabic by examining the patterns of 3rd person pronominal suffix harmonization in some vocalized Christian Arabic gospel manuscripts. In normative Classical Arabic, the 3rd person suffixes harmonized with a preceding -i, -ī, or -ay. However, early grammarians documented a much greater diversity of patterns. I document the patterns of nine vocalized Christian Gospel manuscripts, and show that several patterns are attested, including the normative Classical Arabic pattern, (...) that parallel those attested in the early grammarian and Quran reading traditions. I argue that Christians were clearly aware of, and participants in, a range of performative linguistic traditions, and retain them when elsewhere they were marginalized or lost. I conclude by pushing both for more vigorous study of this vocalized layer of Christian Arabic tradition and reframing the context within which the study of Christian Arabic is undertaken. (shrink)

Do noncombatants in warfare receive immunity because of their subjective or objective characteristics? Can a noncombatant be ‘weaponized’, and if so, how does this weaponization change the noncombatant's moral status as protected from direct attack? The purpose of this article is to analyze the moral issues that arise when noncombatants are made into weapons, specifically as delivery systems for biological weaponry. Examining such a tactic, I go on to explore how the problems that arise from ‘weaponized’ noncombatants illustrate deeper problems (...) in the theorization of noncombatant status. (shrink)

The additional data, perspectives, questions, and criticisms contributed by the commentaries strengthen our view that local cortical processors coordinate their activity with the context in which it occurs using contextual fields and synchronized population codes. We therefore predict that whereas the specialization of function has been the keynote of this century the coordination of function will be the keynote of the next.

This article considers the Undercover Surrealism exhibition curated at London’s Hayward Gallery and reflects on the practices of documentation, archiving and exhibition when the topic of the exhibition, as in this case, is a journal that in its most radical intention was set up to critique the practices of exhibition and documentation. The short and controversial life of Georges Bataille’s Documents unfolds as an often deliberately confusing juxtaposition of images and articles. The exhibition aims to represent both the sometimes incompatible (...) interests of the journal’s collaborators and the public dispute between Bataille and Breton over the aims of Surrealism. The article explores the intentions, risks, and possible effects of the exhibition in the context of Bataille’s own philosophy and his own peculiar part in the publication of Documents, which in its time was a contemporary review of diverse cultural phenomena interspersed with subversive dictionary entries. The article thus raises the question of what happens to the subversive intentions of a project like Documents in the scholarly historicist environment of public exhibition space. (shrink)

The inculcation of academic integrity among post-graduate students is an ongoing concern for universities across the world. While various researchers have focused on causal relations between forms of instruction, student characteristics, and possession of academic integrity, there is need for an increased examination of the role of supervisors in shaping student perceptions of academic integrity. Unlike the undergraduate level, where student interaction with professors is often limited, post-graduate students have an ongoing relationship with their supervisors, whether at the Masters or (...) Doctorate level. In some ways like masters over apprentices, rather than teachers over students, supervisors engage in continued interaction with post-graduate students, shaping these students views not only on the substance of their research, but also in how researchers “should” act. As part of a larger project in examining post-graduate student opinions on academic integrity and research ethics, we conducted surveys to investigate the relationship between student perceptions of their supervisors and student perceptions of academic integrity. We use survey data from a population of post-graduate students at a comprehensive research university in Hong Kong to analyze student perceptions of academic integrity and how students might be influenced by their supervisors’ service as mentors and/or ethic exemplars. (shrink)

This article, which introduces the special section on The Urban Problematic, takes as its starting point the ways in which categories associated with the ‘urban’ have broken down, such that the once singular and coherent concept ‘city’ has disintegrated in certain ways: the notion has been demythologized, so that representations of the city must now be regarded as partial and invested; and cities themselves have become opaque and unpredictable both to urban scholars and to governments, planners and various kinds of (...) welfare organizations. The indications of crisis, captured for instance by concerns about the slums, favelas and shanty towns of the world’s megacities, also indicate that much of what counts in modern urban life is in some way connected with the marginal, the unofficial, and the supplemental. The article takes a supplemental view of the current state of urban dwelling. This involves at the same time a longer, more patient, historical view in its attempt to understand the current state of the city as part of a shift in the play of heterogeneous forces. With reference to the articles contained in The Urban Problematic, this introductory article finally draws attention to some of the urgent and critical issues of contemporary urbanism. (shrink)

This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard’s career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard’s sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. The consistency of Baudrillard’s arguments belies the many superficial judgements made about them, which were anyway often knowingly encouraged (...) by Baudrillard’s rhetorical strategies. (shrink)

The article examines the distinction between the state of emergency and the normal state and an inherent undecidability at the base of the distinction. We argue that states of emergency arise from strategic sovereign decisions to divide visible from invisible, enemy from ally, underground economy from above-ground, illegitimate war from legitimate war. The capacity to so divide is manifested, for instance, in the technology of air raid sirens in a way that indicates the momentum of the technicity that covertly underlies (...) sovereign power. The article, furthermore, shows how the distinction between the visible and the invisible can serve as a mystification, perpetuating the state of emergency by disguising the intrinsic connection between the two domains. (shrink)

This introduction to the special section ‘The Half-Life of the Avant-Garde: 50 Years On from 50 Years On’ explains why the section is conceived to look back at the century since the First World War. It is designed to offer ways of rethinking the concept and the role of the anniversary, where the First World War constitutes the memorialized event. The organization of the section follows the movement between often hidden or submerged forms of continuity. It attempts to think some (...) of the aesthetic and technological legacies and inheritances of the First World War in its durational 100th anniversary through a specific temporal strategy most succinctly captured in the phrase ‘50 years on from 50 years on’. The entry point is the middle of the 20th century, allowing contributors to work backward and forward by examining links between the three separate temporal frames. The consistency but also the strangeness of critical practices, as world history passes with its violent climaxes and depressions, has unique contours in each frame, with Dada providing an exemplary through-line. (shrink)

Violence is spoken of in several senses but its most basic definition, as a force exerted by one thing on another, harbors serious problems, especially when it comes to a consideration of its source or cause. We begin this article by identifying some of the aporias of violence with reference to philosophical and religious discourses and then we go on to analyze how violence problematizes concepts of law and justice in world historical contexts. We examine several traditions including Indo-European mythology, (...) as well as Hindu, Taoist, and ancient Greek philosophy, before addressing the concept of violence in modern thought, as a revision of Christianity. We conclude with some discussion of epistemological violence and its critics. (shrink)

In their 2010 article ‘Research Integrity in China: Problems and Prospects’, Zeng and Resnik challenge others to engage in empirical research on research integrity in China. Here we respond to that call in three ways: first, we provide updates to their analysis of regulations and allegations of scientific misconduct; second, we report on two surveys conducted in Hong Kong that provide empirical backing to describe ways in which problems and prospects that Zeng and Resnik identify are being explored; and third, (...) we continue the discussion started by Zeng and Resnik, pointing to ways in which China's high-profile participation in international academic research presents concerns about research integrity. According to our research, based upon searches of both English and Chinese language literature and policies, and two surveys conducted in Hong Kong, academic faculty and research post-graduate students in Hong Kong are aware of and have a positive attitude towards responsible conduct of research. Although Hong Kong is but one small part of China, we present this research as a response to concerns Zeng and Resnik introduce and as a call for a continued conversation. (shrink)

Does responsible conduct of research (RCR) training improve levels of trust between researchers? Using data gathered as part of a survey on the attitudes of master's and doctoral-level students toward RCR, we found that RCR training correlated with a weakened beliefs of students toward their supervisors' ethicality but a stronger belief in the ethicality of their peers. We believe that these findings point to new avenues of research on trust in the academic setting and to needs for curriculum changes in (...) RCR training. (shrink)

In this article we outline the ways in which questions of language have both revealed problems with conceptions of knowledge and suggested constructive ways of addressing those problems. Having examined the limitations of instrumental notions of language, we outline some alternatives, especially those developed from the middle of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. We locate forceful and influential philosophical interventions in the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger and foundational revisions in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and his (...) structuralist inheritors. We also chart the parallel path of literary theory from Mallarmé through Blanchot and poststructuralism to deconstruction. We conclude, after making some observations about the politicization of language in the works of feminist and postcolonial theorists, with some remarks about how the question of language helps to problematize global knowledge. (shrink)