Recent studies based on next‐generation DNA sequencing have revealed that the female inactive X chromosome is replicated in a rapid, unorganized manner, and undergoes increased rates of mutation. These observations link the organization of DNA replication timing to gene regulation on one hand, and to the generation of mutations on the other hand. More generally, the exceptional biology of the inactive X chromosome highlights general principles of genome replication. Cells may control replication timing by a combination of intrinsic replication origin (...) properties, local chromatin states and global levels of replication factors, leading to a functional separation between the activity of genes and their mutation. (shrink)

This is a book about aesthetics that is both a memoir and design critique. Among questions it addresses are: What inspires an aesthetic adventure? What is the best way to respond to ugliness? Is beauty always "good"? What is the crux of an artist's job? Why is "making nothing" beautiful? And what is a "beautiful human being"? The illustrator is Marco Koren, a young Californian artist with a passion for drawing.

Who doesn't wish they hopped out of bed each feeling energized and ready to tackle whatever challenges lie ahead? In Morning Rituals, author Leslie Koren is here to help, with practices that will have readers kicking their day off right! This tidy volume offers dozens of invigorating, empowering exercises for the body and spirit: Set an intention for the day. Drink a glass of lemon water. Write morning pages. Do a set of push-ups, or a series of energizing yoga (...) poses. Pull a tarot card. Take a moment to be still, over a cup of tea or a book of poetry. Whatever rituals speak to you, do them with intention and do them regularly, and you'll find that your morning sets the tone for a brighter, calmer, more productive day. Each prompt includes straightforward instructions as well as ways to personalize and improvise the idea. This beautifully photographed book will make for a thoughtful, loving gift-perfect for Mom, a recent graduate, or someone in need of a pick-me-up, or as a way to treat yourself. (shrink)

Akým druhom činnosti filozofia je, aký má zmysel, aké otázky si má klásť, a akým spôsobom ich má uchopiť? Mojím cieľom v článku nie je priamo odpovedať na tieto otázky, na ktoré nie je žiadna jednoduchá odpoveď. Chcem skôr kriticky preskúmať stále populárne poňatie filozofie: filozofia ako skúmanie usilujúce o pravdu či poznanie pravdy. O výroky v tomto duchu nie je vo filozofickej tradícii núdza. Otázka znie: hovoria nám tieto metafory niečo podstatné o filozofii?

Les valeurs faisant sens pour le locuteur jouent un rôle central dans la justification des décisions. Le jugement de valeur est cependant suspect d'être prescriptif et inique. Sa réhabilitation est l'objet de cet ouvrage. On y démontre que rhétorique et rationalité axiologique sont indissociables.

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment offers authoritative, jargon-free essays and critical commentaries on accelerating technological progress and the notion of technological singularity. It focuses on conjectures about the intelligence explosion, transhumanism, and whole brain emulation. Recent years have seen a plethora of forecasts about the profound, disruptive impact that is likely to result from further progress in these areas. Many commentators however doubt the scientific rigor of these forecasts, rejecting them as speculative and unfounded. We therefore invited prominent (...) computer scientists, physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists and other thinkers to assess the singularity hypotheses. Their contributions go beyond speculation, providing deep insights into the main issues and a balanced picture of the debate. (shrink)

In recent years, artificial intelligence has been deployed by online platforms to prevent the upload of allegedly illegal content or to remove unwarranted expressions. These systems are trained to spot objectionable content and to remove it, block it, or filter it out before it is even uploaded. Artificial intelligence filters offer a robust approach to content moderation which is shaping the public sphere. This dramatic shift in norm setting and law enforcement is potentially game-changing for democracy. Artificial intelligence filters carry (...) censorial power, which could bypass traditional checks and balances secured by law. Their opaque and dynamic nature creates barriers to oversight, and conceals critical value choices and tradeoffs. Currently, we lack adequate tools to hold them accountable. This paper seeks to address this gap by introducing an adversarial procedure— – Contesting Algorithms. It proposes to deliberately introduce friction into the dominant removal systems governed by artificial intelligence. Algorithmic content moderation often seeks to optimize a single goal, such as removing copyright-infringing materials or blocking hate speech, while other values in the public interest, such as fair use or free speech, are often neglected. Contesting algorithms introduce an adversarial design which reflects conflicting values, and thereby may offer a check on dominant removal systems. Facilitating an adversarial intervention may promote democratic principles by keeping society in the loop. An adversarial public artificial intelligence system could enhance dynamic transparency, facilitate an alternative public articulation of social values using machine learning systems, and restore societal power to deliberate and determine social tradeoffs. (shrink)

We examine the philosophical disputes among computer scientists concerning methodological, ontological, and epistemological questions: Is computer science a branch of mathematics, an engineering discipline, or a natural science? Should knowledge about the behaviour of programs proceed deductively or empirically? Are computer programs on a par with mathematical objects, with mere data, or with mental processes? We conclude that distinct positions taken in regard to these questions emanate from distinct sets of received beliefs or paradigms within the discipline: – The rationalist (...) paradigm, which was common among theoretical computer scientists, defines computer science as a branch of mathematics, treats programs on a par with mathematical objects, and seeks certain, a priori knowledge about their ‘correctness’ by means of deductive reasoning. – The technocratic paradigm, promulgated mainly by software engineers and has come to dominate much of the discipline, defines computer science as an engineering discipline, treats programs as mere data, and seeks probable, a posteriori knowledge about their reliability empirically using testing suites. – The scientific paradigm, prevalent in the branches of artificial intelligence, defines computer science as a natural (empirical) science, takes programs to be entities on a par with mental processes, and seeks a priori and a posteriori knowledge about them by combining formal deduction and scientific experimentation. We demonstrate evidence corroborating the tenets of the scientific paradigm, in particular the claim that program-processes are on a par with mental processes. We conclude with a discussion in the influence that the technocratic paradigm has been having over computer science. (shrink)

Research studies on Corporate Social Responsibility often focus on revealing corporate leaders’ attitudes toward various issues of CSR. The position of the present paper is that to understand CSR, we must grasp the collaborative perspective of CSR, and discern the attitudes of community leaders as well as corporate leaders. To this end, the study compares attitudes of community leaders with those of corporate leaders in three localities in Israel. The study examines various issues of CSR, highlighting the benefits to both (...) community and corporation of reciprocal relations. Results from t‐tests confirmed significant differences between the groups. Some important implications for CSR particularly in terms of collaboration between community and corporation are discussed. (shrink)

Property law plays a crucial role in the ability of groups, especially ones composed of geographically-adjacent members, to establish and maintain significant forms of "community" around a shared social, economic, or ideological interest. Property may also, however, have the opposite effect of undermining or even destroying communities, particularly those that rely on fragile modes of cooperation. This Article identifies three major types of territorial communities: Intentional Communities—close-knit groups that initially organize around a consolidating non-instrumental idea and employ sweeping internal norms (...) to validate their communality. Planned Communities — comprised mostly of residential developments of homeowners associations, which rely on a formal set of conditions, covenants, and restrictions incorporated in the association’s governing documents. Spontaneous Communities — clusters of initially unorganized neighbors who succeed in cooperating and coordinating over time. The evolvement of such organizations may be essential to the creation of an interpersonal "social capital" and to a physical and functional improvement of the community’s surroundings. For each one of these types of communities, property law plays a very different role. Thus, while Intentional Communities do not strictly hinge upon the existence of a supportive property system to flourish, Planned Communities cannot be conceived without the security of an overt, formal, state-backed regime, and Spontaneous Communities may often need property law’s affirmative backing to thrive and enjoy the social and economic benefits of sustainable collective action. (shrink)

The Construction of Property identifies the structural and institutional foundations of property, and explains how these features can accommodate various normative agendas. Offering rich and cutting-edge analysis, the book studies the spectrum of property regimes including private, common and public property as well as innovative forms of property hybrids such as US-style residential community associations, the British Private Finance Initiative, the Israeli Renewing Kibbutz, community land trusts and grassroots phenomena of property ordering in publicly-owned open spaces. It also investigates the (...) protagonists of property beyond the individual and the state, identifying the key role that community organisations and business corporations play for both the private and public aspects of property. The book then addresses property's greatest challenge: the move from a largely domestic legal construct into one that accommodates the increasing social and economic forces of globalisation. (shrink)

The prevalence of social production and the increase in User Generated Content destabilize some of the fundamental premises of our current copyright law. Copyright law is primarily designed to regulate the relationships of a single owner with other non-owners and is focused on the sovereignty of the author/owner. Social production, by contrast, requires us to articulate a matrix of relationships between the individual, the facilitating platform and the communities and crowds involved in social production. The transition from industrial production to (...) social production transforms the social relations associated with the production of content and therefore requires adjustment of the institutions that design such relations. This Article closely examines the social dimension of content production and analyzes the consequences for the governance of content in the social web. The Article proceeds as follows: Part I describes social production and analyzes the implications for the stakeholders involved. I focus on three key features of social production which affect why we create, how we create, and what assets are generated by the process of creation. Part II explains why social production might be incompatible with the current copyright regime. In particular, I argue that copyright law mainly defines rights against strangers and fails to provide a framework for managing the rights and interests within a gigantic group of collaborators. Furthermore, the exclusivity offered by copyright law may undermine social motivation and collaborative production. Finally, in Part III, I outline some of the challenges for legal policy. (shrink)

Copyright law in recent years has undergone a process of privatization. While weakening the enforceability of conventional legislation (copyright rules), cyberspace facilitates alternative types of regulation such as contracts and technical self-help measures. Regulation by the code is significantly different from traditional types of public ordering (copyright law) and private ordering (contracts). Norms that technically regulate the use of information are not merely self-made they are also self-enforced. Furthermore, the law was recruited to uphold the superiority of such technical self-help (...) measures. The recently adopted U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) 1998 prohibits the development and use of technologies designed to circumvent copyright management systems. The underlying assumption of this legislation is that in Cyberspace, the target of regulation should become the technologies that affect users'' behavior rather than the behaviors themselves. This paper critically examines this regulatory approach and highlights its shortcomings. (shrink)

This study seeks to provide a new resolution to an old controversy regarding Wilhelm Dilthey's methodological writings, written from 1880 to 1911. This controversy concentrates on the relations of Dilthey's early psychology and his late hermeneutics. On one side of this controversy stand interpreters who claim that the appearance of the late hermeneutics marks a dramatic change in Dilthey's thought, and even creates an internal paradox in his thinking. On the other side, stand interpreters who view his thought as a (...) unified whole, by claiming that these methods were meant to work in tandem and complement each other. I largely agree with the latter group of interpreters regarding the unity of Dilthey's writings; however, instead of basing my view on the methodological level of Dilthey’s writings, I will concentrate on the object of these two methods. According to my new answer to the question of the continuity of Dilthey’s thought, Dilthey did intend to replace his early psychology with his late hermeneutics; even so, his thought should still be viewed as consistent and stable because he continued to apply both different methods to the same object: inner-universal content, that is, the inner psychological source of outer human reality. In this way, I will try show that the consistency of Dilthey's thought is derived from the stable destination he aspired to reach with the help of the different methods. (shrink)

This study examines the sources of human divergence as arise from Wilhelm Dilthey’s writings. While Dilthey assigns a central role to the human subject, he never synthesizes his major ideas on subjectivity into a unified theory of subjective uniqueness. I will show that such a theory can be derived from his writings through the combination of three ideas that appear in them. These ideas are: (1) the thesis that human understanding is possible because of psychological content that is shared by (...) both the creator and the interpreter; (2) the belief that this shared content is the only content that exists within human beings, meaning that there is no unique psychological content; and (3) the perception of this inner universal content as an accumulation of life-possibilities. When joined together, these ideas create an inspiring theory of human divergence, according to which the uniqueness of an individual is determined through partial realization of universal possibilities. (shrink)

The essays included in the special issue dedicated to the philosophy of computer science examine new philosophical questions that arise from reflection upon conceptual issues in computer science and the insights such an enquiry provides into ongoing philosophical debates.

As our knowledge of the genetic constitution of human beings expands, testing to determine an individual's disposition toward a given disease will also increase. Since genes are a family affair, to know that an individual is genetically disposed toward a specific disease is an indicator that members of this individual's family may also be so disposed.

This book offers new insights into the nature of human rational capacities by engaging inferentialism with empirical research in the cognitive sciences. Inferentialism advocates that humans' unique kind of intelligence is discursive and rooted in competencies to make, assess and justify claims. This approach provides a rich source of valuable insights into the nature of our rational capacities, but it is underdeveloped in important respects. For example, little attempt has been made to assess inferentialism considering relevant scientific research on human (...) communication, cognition or reasoning. By engaging philosophical and scientific approaches in a productive dialogue, this book shows how we can better understand human rational capacities by comparing their respective strengths and weaknesses. In this vein, the author critically revisits and constructively develops central themes from the work of Robert Brandom and other language rationalists: the nature of the assertoric practice and its connection to reasoned discourse, the linguistic constitution of the shared space of reasons, the social nature and function of reasoning, the intersubjective roots of social-normative practices and the nature of objective thought. Practices of Reason will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and philosophy of logic. (shrink)

The Principle of Double Effect has been with us since the Middle Ages and has sanctified actions that might otherwise be viewed as morally wrong. What I wish to show in this brief perspective is that an overlooked element in the discussions of this principle raises a serious question about its applicability.