This article systematically reviews studies investigating the effect of three operationalizations of complexity in emotion experience on situat...

Negative emotion differentiation has been suggested to be important for adaptive emotion regulation. However, knowledge concerning how ED may impact specific ER strategy choice remains surprisingly sparse. We therefore investigated if person-level negative ED was associated with habitual use of individual ER strategies, how person-level negative ED was associated with daily use of individual ER strategies, and finally how within-person daily fluctuations in negative ED were associated with daily use of individual ER strategies. During a 10-day experience sampling study, 90 (...) healthy participants rated their momentary emotions and their ER efforts in response to those emotions. ER strategies included four putatively adaptive strategies and four putatively maladaptive strategies. Results revealed that negative ED at the person level was neither associated with habitual nor daily ER strategy endorsement when controlling for negative emotions. Likewise, associations between within-individual daily variation in negative ED and daily ER did not remain statistically significant after controlling for negative emotions. The results thus point to no or weak associations between negative ED and ER choice above and beyond negative emotions. Future experimental studies addressing ED at the momentary level and teasing out the ED–ER causal timeline are needed to further evaluate ED–ER associations. Findings from such research may represent an important step toward refining psychotherapeutic interventions aimed at improving emotional problems. (shrink)

Returning genomic research results to family members raises complex questions. Genomic research on life-limiting conditions such as cancer, and research involving storage and reanalysis of data and specimens long into the future, makes these questions pressing. This author group, funded by an NIH grant, published consensus recommendations presenting a framework. This follow-up paper offers concrete guidance and tools for implementation. The group collected and analyzed relevant documents and guidance, including tools from the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium. The authors then (...) negotiated a consensus toolkit of processes and documents. That toolkit offers sample consent and notification documents plus decision flow-charts to address return of results to family of living and deceased participants, in adult and pediatric research. Core concerns are eliciting participant preferences on sharing results with family and on choice of a representative to make decisions about sharing after participant death. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary field of neurorobotics looks to neuroscience to overcome the limitations of modern robotics technology, to robotics to advance our understanding of the neural system’s inner workings, and to information technology to develop tools that support those complementary endeavours. The development of these technologies is still at an early stage, which makes them an ideal candidate for proactive and anticipatory ethical reflection. This article explains the current state of neurorobotics development within the Human Brain Project, originating from a close (...) collaboration between the scientific and technical experts who drive neurorobotics innovation, and the humanities and social sciences scholars who provide contextualising and reflective capabilities. This article discusses some of the ethical issues which can reasonably be expected. On this basis, the article explores possible gaps identified within this collaborative, ethical reflection that calls for attention to ensure that the development of neurorobotics is ethically sound and socially acceptable and desirable. (shrink)

Initial responses to questionnaires used to assess participants' understanding of informed consent for malaria vaccine trials conducted in the United States and Mali were tallied. Total scores were analyzed by age, sex, literacy (if known), and location. Ninety-two percent (92%) of answers by United States participants and 85% of answers by Malian participants were correct. Questions more likely to be answered incorrectly in Mali related to risk, and to the type of vaccine. For adult participants, independent predictors of higher scores (...) were younger age and female sex in the United States, and male sex in Mali. Scores in the United States were higher than in Mali (P = 0.005). Despite this difference participants at both sites were well informed overall. Although interpretation must be qualified because questionnaires were not intended as research tools and were not standardized among sites, these results do not support concerns about systematic low understanding among research participants in developing versus developed countries. (shrink)

PurposeTo use the power of knowledge acquisition and machine learning in the development of a collaborative computer classification system based on the features of age-related macular degeneration (AMD).MethodsA vocabulary was acquired from four AMD experts who examined 100 ophthalmoscopic images. The vocabulary was analyzed, hierarchically structured, and incorporated into a collaborative computer classification system called IDOCS. Using this system, three of the experts examined images from a second set of digital images compiled from more than 1000 patients with AMD. Images (...) were annotated, and features were identified and defined. Decision trees, a machine learning method, were trained on the data collected and used to extract patterns. Interrelationships between the data from the different clinicians were investigated.ResultsSix drusen classes in the structured vocabulary were largely sufficient to describe all the identified features. The decision trees classified the data with 76.86% to 88.5% accuracy and distilled patterns in the form of hierarchical trees composed of 5 to 15 nodes. Experts were largely consistent in their characterization of soft, and to a lesser extent, hard drusen, but diverge in definition of other drusen. Size and crystalline morphology were the main determinants of drusen type across all experts.ConclusionsMachine learning is a powerful tool for the characterization of disease phenotypes. The creation of a defined feature set for AMD will facilitate the development of an IDOCS-based classification system. (shrink)

Resumo: O presente artigo versa sobre o problema político-filosófico do fascismo. O conceito tem mostrado crescente relevância no cenário público nacional e mundial, figurando cada vez mais no debate leigo e especializado. O termo fascismo, hoje, é amplamente empregado, tanto na qualificação de movimentos políticos de diversos espectros quanto na grande mídia e revistas científicas. O objetivo deste artigo é utilizar o conceito de transindividual na compreensão do fascismo, a partir da teorização, ela mesma transindividual, do fenômeno, realizada por Deleuze (...) e Guattari, através da sua compreensão do desejo. O transindividual caracteriza um movimento filosófico de dupla rejeição em que se nega, simultaneamente, uma abordagem holista e individualista do campo social, procurando pensar o indivíduo e coletivo como coextensivos a um processo genético que produz a ambos, sem primado de um sobre o outro. Tal conceito vem se revelando uma ferramenta analítica de crescente uso e repercussão, no debate acadêmico contemporâneo. Nesse sentido, a utilização do transindividual, enquanto matriz teórica, na compreensão do fenômeno fascista ainda não foi realizada de forma esquemática e, desse modo, recorrendo à compreensão transindividual do fascismo de Deleuze e Guattari, pretende-se contribuir para o alargamento desse horizonte teórico.: This paper is directed towards the political and philosophical problem of fascism. This concept is manifesting increasingly relevance in the national and global public scenario, widely appearing in the specialized and lay debate. The term ‘’fascism”, today, is largely used in the qualification of movements from diverse shades of the political spectrum and in the mainstream media and scientific journals. The goal of this paper is the application of the concept of the transindividual to the fascist phenomena through Deleuze and Guattar theory of the fascist desire, in itself, a transindividual one. The transindividual marks a philosophical movement of a double rejection against an holistic approach to the social dimension as well as and individualist one, aiming to think both dimensions as coextensive to a genetic process that produces both of them, without any priority regarding any dimension in relation to the other. This concept has been revealing itself as an increasingly useful analytical tool in the contemporary academic debate. In this sense, the use of the concept of transindividuality as the theoretical framework in the philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of fascism has not been yet realized in a schematic way. Applying the concept of fascism of Deleuze and Guatttari in a transindividual framework, we intend to contribute to the development of this theoretical approach. (shrink)

Measuring neuronal activity with electrophysiological methods may be useful in detecting neurological dysfunctions, such as mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). This approach may be particularly valuable for rapid detection in at-risk populations including military service members and athletes. Electrophysiological methods, such as quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) and recording event-related potentials (ERPs) may be promising; however, the field is nascent and significant controversy exists on the efficacy and accuracy of the approaches as diagnostic tools. For example, the specific measures derived from an (...) electroencephalogram (EEG) that are most suitable as markers of dysfunction have not been clearly established. A study was conducted to summarize and evaluate the statistical rigor of evidence on the overall utility of qEEG as an mTBI detection tool. The analysis evaluated qEEG measures/parameters that may be most suitable as fieldable diagnostic tools, identified other types of EEG measures and analysis methods of promise, recommended specific measures and analysis methods for further development as mTBI detection tools, identified research gaps in the field, and recommended future research and development thrust areas. The qEEG study group formed the following conclusions: 1. Individual qEEG measures provide limited diagnostic utility for mTBI. However, many measures can be important features of qEEG discriminant functions, which do show significant promise as mTBI detection tools. 2. ERPs offer utility in mTBI detection. In fact, evidence indicates that ERPs can identify abnormalities in cases where EEGs alone are nondisclosing. 3. The standard mathematical procedures used in the characterization of mTBI EEGs should be expanded to incorporate newer methods of analysis including nonlinear dynamical analysis, complexity measures, analysis of causal interactions, graph theory and information dynamics. 4. and 5. are too long to include here. (shrink)

The work of the lay Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain continues to provoke and inspire readers to engage in a Thomistic approach to many of the questions facing the world today. Maritain’s wide-ranging thought touched on many fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, educational theory, moral philosophy, and ethics, as well as Thomism and its relationship to other philosophical stances._ In _Being in the World: A Quotable Maritain Reader_, Mario O. D’Souza, C.S.B., has selected seven hundred and fifty of the most salient quotations (...) found in the English translations of fifty-four works by Jacques Maritain. Organized into forty thematic chapters, ordered alphabetically, the book serves as an overview of the areas that Maritain's writings addressed. By referring to entries in _Being in the World_, readers can quickly locate key passages in Maritain’s writing on a given topic and then turn elsewhere to the full texts for more in-depth study. Complete with a detailed index of key terms, the _Reader _will be an essential reference tool for the study of Maritain in English. "Fr. Mario O. D'Souza's careful selection from the works of Jacques Maritain provides the reader with an invaluable sampling of Maritain's extensive philosophical work. In it, we find examples of Maritain's almost lyrical gift of expression as well as of his trenchant wit. More than a scholarly contribution, the volume also ably serves as an introduction and entrance into Maritain's corpus." — William Sweet, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada_. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 69 in pre-Socratic scholarship. But he does not do justice to the religious mood which pervades the whole poem (a mood which is set by the prologue which casts the whole work into the form of some kind of religious revelation). The prologue is considerably more than a mere literary device, and the poem is more than logic. Generally, Jaeger9 and Guthrie are surely correct in (...) their judgment that any adequate interpretation of Parmenides' work (as well as that of the other early Greek thinkers) must be willing to take into account its essentially theological character and religious inspirationl~ not always grasped through strict analysis and exegesis. g Theolooy of the Early C-reekPhilosophers, trans. Edward S. Robinson (Oxford, 1947), p. lff, 90ft. agCf. Guthrie's excellent statement: "...Parmenides was at one with Heraclitus in claiming a prophetic or apocalyptic authority for his teaching." And again, the Greeks believed in "an inspiration whereby-the poet is granted deeper insight into the truth than other men" (p. 6). ED. L. MILLER University of Colorado AN UNKNOWN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH TRANSLATION OF SEXTUS EMPIRICUS* I. Introduction Included in a collection of manuscripts and early printed books recently acquired by the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, from the Paris bookdealer Paul Jammes ~ are three manuscripts attributed to a certain Nicolas de la Toison, Baron de Bussy. Two of the three volumes contain extensive Latin commentaries on the major writings of Aristotle.2 The third is a miscellaneous volume written in three different hands, which contains, among other things, a complete French translation of the extant writings of Sextus Empiricus (c. A.D. 160-210).3 I * I would like to express my thanks to Mr. Richard O'Brien, Western European Bibliographer of the UCLA Library, for his help in numerous ways, who made it possible for me to consult this material during my sojourn in Los Angeles, even before it had been officially catalogued by the Library. I would also like to thank Professors Donald Kalish and Robert Yost of the UCLA Department of Philosophy for their support in making it possible for the collection to be purchased. 1For a brief description of the collection as a whole see Charles B. Schmitt, "Acquisition of Early French Books and Manuscripts", UCLA Librarian, XIX (1966)~25. 2These two manuscripts are bound m red leather with gold tooling. Thear present shelf mark is Collection 968, Box 2. On the spines is written: (1) PHILOSOPHIA.TO.I, and (2) METAPHYSIC ET PHYSICA TO.2. They measure approximately 10 X 14 cm. and each contains about 600fois. At the beginning of Vol. I, in a later hand (19th century?), we read: "Nicolas de la Thoison, baron de Bussy, qui 6crivit ces m6moires, 6tait conseiller laic au Parlement de Bourgogne. Il fur pourru par la r6signation de Pierre Catherine le IV Ddcembre M.DC.XLV et regu le XXIX janvier M.DC.XLVI. I1portait: de queueles dune bands d'or charges en coeur d'une quints feuiUe d'azur--ainsi qu'on le volt dans le Parlement de Bourgogne [Dijon, 1649]de Pierre PaiUot, p. 326." There is also a drawing of the coat-of-arms which has been described. That the de la Toison coat-of-arms is a quintefeuille is verified by Theodore de Renesse, Dictionnaire des figures h$raldiques (Brussels, 1894-1903) III, 461. The passage cited above from the manuscript is directly quoted from Pierre Paillot, Le Parlement de Bouroongne [I], son origins, son $tablissemerit, et son progr~s (Dijon, 1649), p. 326. s A description of this manuscript will be found in the Appendix. 70 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY shall here only give a preliminary survey of this third manuscript, pointing out some of the more interesting features and mentioning some problems connected with it which should be investigated further in more detail. As is now well-known the writings of Sextus Empiricus, which form the major extant compendium of ancient skeptical philosophy, had quite a significant impact on sixteenth and seventeenth-eentury thought, after their reintroduction in the sixteenth century. ~ Sextus' works were available in printed Latin editions after 15695 and the Greek text was printed in... (shrink)

Partindo do pressuposto de que a teoria social elaborada por Habermas em muito se assemelha àquela construída por M. Weber, procedeu-se a um estudo comparativo com a intenção de identificar as formas pelas quais Weber e Habermas elaboraram o conceito de compreensão, ao mesmo tempo em que e o elegeram, cada um a seu modo, como instrumento metodológico adequado às dificuldades da produção de conhecimento científico nas Ciências Sociais. Tanto para Weber, como para Habermas, o conhecimento nas Ciências Sociais não (...) consegue escapar das influências diretas da subjetividade do cientista, como também não é capaz de se proteger das contingências histórico-culturais aos quais inevitavelmente toda ação humana está vinculada. Por isso, fundamentados em suas próprias razões, tanto Weber quanto Habermas apontam a compreensão como a forma possível de conhecimento, o que implica a renúncia às pretensões explicativas e à produção de teorias gerais de fundamentação última, que são típicas das ciências convencionais. Assuming that the social theory developed by Habermas is very similar to that constructed by M. Weber, this article performs a comparative study with the intention of identifying the ways in which Weber and Habermas built the concept of understanding. Both authors chose this concept, each in his own way, as a methodological tool appropriate to the difficulties of the production of scientific knowledge in the social sciences. As much for Weber as for Habermas, knowledge in the social sciences cannot escape the direct influences of the subjectivity of the scientist, as it also cannot protect itself from the historical and cultural contingencies to which every human action is inevitably linked. Therefore, based on their own reasons, both Weber and Habermas point to understanding as the possible form of knowledge, which implies the renunciation of the explanatory pretensions and general theories of ultimate foundations typical of the conventional sciences. (shrink)

Tobacco mosaic virus has served as a model organism for pathbreaking work in plant pathology, virology, biochemistry and applied genetics for more than a century. We were intrigued by a photograph published in Phytopathology in 1934 showing that Tabasco pepper plants responded to TMV infection with localized necrotic lesions, followed by abscission of the inoculated leaves. This dramatic outcome of a biological response to infection observed by Francis O. Holmes, a virologist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, was used (...) to score plants for resistance to TMV infection. Our objective was to gain a better understanding of early to mid-twentieth century ideas of genetic resistance to viruses in crop plants. We investigated Holmes’ observation as a practical exercise in reworking an experiment, having been inspired by Pamela Smith’s innovative Making and Knowing Project. We had a great deal of difficulty replicating Holmes’ experiment, finding that biological materials and experimental customs change over time, in ways that ideas do not. Using complementary tools plus careful study and interpretation of the original text and figures, we were able to rework, yet only partially replicate, this experiment. Reading peer-reviewed manuscripts that cited Holmes’ 1934 report provided an additional level of insight into the interpretation and replication of this work in the decades that followed. From this, we touch on how experimental reworking can inform our strategies to address the reproducibility “crisis” in twenty-first century science. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The study is aimed at the "philosophy of translation" methodology outlining as an original philosophical texts translation tool from the point of view of culture as anthropological phenomena, namely, individuals’ participating in the text creation process providing the consistent following tasks solution: a) clarifying the text author’s role, which is the object of recipients’ perception; b) the human psyche inexhaustible potential realization for the primary text semantic content understanding by the translator to prevent its distortion; c) defining the requirements (...) for the translation process as a mean of bringing the reader closer to author’s understanding by language barrier elimination as an intuitive "obstacle" on its way. _Theoretical basis._ The author proceeds from the factual absence of the "philosophy of translation" concept unambiguous definition in the modern anthropological and philosophical space and seeks to take into account all the factors affecting the newly created text quality due to the all participants’ features reviled on every stage of the text translation process. Today, the "philosophy of translation" is a widely used phrase, though ignoring the characteristics of man as a single meaning creator of the concept under study. The article provisions are based on philosophical, translation, and psychological studies with an emphasis on classical and non-classical anthropology research (Gadamer, Khoma, Holovach, Chepeleva, Dizdar, Leonov, Lotman, Bakhtin, etc.). _Originality._ The author proposes a methodology for the original philosophical text adaptation and presents a generalized step-by-step scheme for its translation, which helps to solve the personality of the researcher and/or translator’s influence problem on the individual author’s meaning preservation during its reproduction in a reader’s convenient language. _Conclusions._ A look at the "philosophy of translation" from the philosophical anthropology point of view allows us not only to consider the process of translation from the individual characteristics of all the participants (author/philosopher-reader-researcher/translator-reader-philosopher/reader) but also to describe such translation methodology by concentrating on highlighting the author’s reasoning course, which rises new knowledge and encourages further philosophical reflection within the human nature instability problem. The translation of a philosophical text not only reproduces the semantic structure of the original message but also provides a number of possible dialogical reactions to it as an object of human phenomenology. The proposed concept takes into account any reader’s needs, fully preserving the author’s position. (shrink)

This collection of essays, all previously published, offers selections from the life work of Robert Nozick. The essays range widely both temporally, from 1969 to 1995, and topically, from an analytic study of coercion to thoughts on Socrates’ profession of ignorance, to short “philosophical fictions.” The themes and approaches will be familiar to those who know anything of Nozick’s work. More than half the book is taken up by formal, analytic studies of topics of social, political, and moral significance. Questions (...) about how we might decide between competing individual preferences, or what strategies of decision making are the most rational and/or effective, or even how we come to judge certain actions immoral, are treated with remarkable precision and the maximum amount of formal, symbolic aid. Indeed, the occasional page packed with little but probability matrices, set theory, and the like makes for slow and somewhat typographically intimidating reading. Yet in Nozick’s hands these tools are well used, and offer to the patient reader both clarity and convincingness to a degree not likely to be available in another format. In fact, I think the formal essays offer the further advantage of being relatively self-contained, and thus fully accessible to anyone with sufficient education to read them. In contrast, some of the less formal work relies on the reader having a great deal of philosophical education and experience. Here to be capable of reading the essay is not sufficient for understanding it; one must also have read a good deal of Quine, and maybe some Hilary Putnam and B. F. Skinner just to be sure. For this reason, the audience for these essays must range, too. I can imagine having great fun reading “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice” with a group of smart undergraduates, and certainly advanced students in the social sciences, with little philosophical training, could profitably work their way through “Coercion” and “Interpersonal Utility Theory,” but most of the book is clearly designed for a rather highly trained philosopher. From this perspective, the chief value of the collection is the convenience of having so much interesting work in one volume. Less book than encyclopedia, it will make a useful reference volume for the serious student of philosophy, a place to turn for guidance in unraveling some of the intricacies of codifying rational principles of choice. (shrink)

Screening of newborns for permanent congenital or early-onset hearing impairment has emerged as an essential component of neonatal care in developed countries, following favourable outcomes from early intervention in the critical period for optimal speech and language development. Progress towards a similar programme in developing countries, where most of the world’s children with hearing impairment reside, may be impeded by reservations about the available level of support services and the possible effect of the prevailing healthcare challenges. Ethical justification for the (...) systematic introduction of screening programmes for hearing in newborns based on the limitations in current primary prevention strategies, lack of credible alternative early-detection strategies and the incentives for capacity-building for the requisite support services is examined. (shrink)

This case for discussion highlights some of the ethical difficulties that may arise in the use of molecular typing techniques in the control of infectious diseases. Molecular typing techniques offer evidence (stronger than regular epidemiological exploration of sources and contacts) for claims about infection routes. Such evidence will mean that public health authorities need to think about how to respond ethically to causal responsibility for contagion. In this context, questions are raised about the use of molecular typing methods for source (...) and contact tracing in the control of infectious diseases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning in Dramatic and Virtual Worlds:What Do Students Say About Complementarity and Future Directions?John O'Toole (bio) and Julie Dunn (bio)A top financial backer has arrived to determine which team of computer interaction designers has developed the most exciting and innovative proposal for the Everest component of the Virtually Impossible Computer Company's Conquerors of the World Series. Tension is high as the presentations begin, but this tension soon turns to (...) outright conflict as some proposals suggest George Mallory as the conqueror, and the financial backer will have none of him. The backer, it seems, has her own agenda and is determined to allow for only one view of history—the one that records Sir Edmund Hillary as a New Zealand hero and the only real conqueror of the tallest mountain on earth. The designers become more and more agitated until suddenly someone bangs their hand on the table and calls out, "Hang on... just because you've got the money doesn't mean... kids need to learn about both these men... they need to learn about history." With that the drama is cut by the teacher. The deep understandings about "history's purchased page" that can be generated when drama and computers are brought together for learning have been made explicit... but could these same outcomes have been achieved using just one of these approaches?IntroductionThe research explored within this article was generated as part of the Media Station, a project funded by the Australasian Collaborative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID), with an overall mission to investigate the potential of massively multiplayer online games for learning. This particular subproject, History's Purchased Page, saw researchers from interaction design [End Page 89] and drama education come together with a group of young learners to investigate their perceptions of the complementarity of computers and live classroom drama and to brainstorm future possibilities for applying computer-based technologies to drama-based learning. We sought to discover the following:• What do young learners say about how they experience and value learning in a context involving a combination of drama and computers?• What ideas do these young learners have about how future technologies might enrich the complementarity of this combination?As the drama researchers involved in this project, we had been experimenting with this perhaps slightly unusual combination for over a decade by incorporating computers into a number of our drama units within our primary textbook Pretending to Learn.1 Our goal in these experimentations had always been to enrich the classroom drama experience by taking advantage of the information capacity of the Internet and other computer-based resources, including databases. For example, we had used The First Fleet Database2 to support a drama unit where the learners take on the role of convicts arriving in Australia in 1788. We discovered that this material, combined with other documentation and historical materials available via the Internet, greatly enhanced not only the historical accuracy of the work but also the level of engagement experienced by the learners when in role. Therefore, we were very keen to extend this work by exploring new possibilities and were especially keen to develop a better understanding of what the learners made of this interactivity.In recent years the partnering of these two quite different approaches to learning has developed quite a research following, and a number of drama teachers and researchers have become interested in the complementarity of these ways of learning.3 At the same time, researchers and designers from the field of computer-assisted learning have also noted these connections. This goes back to the work of Brenda Laurel, who first drew attention to the intriguing links between computers and theatre in her now famous text Computers as Theatre.4 With the rapid growth of interactive learning tools such as 3-D immersive worlds, blogs, and online voice and text chat spaces, the opportunities for exploration of these connections have also grown, with each of these offering exciting new possibilities when used in conjunction with the highly interactive and engaging strategies of process drama.Process drama is a way of group learning, through whole-class improvised drama, with students (and sometimes the... (shrink)

This collection brings together eighteen of the author's original papers, previously published in a variety of academic journals and edited collections over the last three decades, on the process of interpretation in literature and the visual arts in one comprehensive volume. The volume highlights the centrality of artistic texts to the study of multimodality, organized into six sections each representing a different modality or semiotic system, including literature, television, film, painting, sculpture, and architecture. A new introduction lays the foundation for (...) the theoretically based method of analysis running through each of the chapters, one that emphasizes the interplay of textual details and larger thematic purposes to create an open-ended and continuous approach to the interpretation of artistic texts, otherwise known as the "hermeneutic spiral". Showcasing Michael O'Toole's extensive contributions to the field of multimodality and in his research on interpretation in literature and the visual arts, this book is essential reading for students and scholars in multimodality, visual arts, art history, film studies, and comparative literature. (shrink)

Localism is a social movement often associated with “buy local” food initiatives or the prevention of big-box retail expansion. At its core, however, localism is also about fostering local independence by encouraging businesses to opt for local alternatives when making purchasing decisions. In this article, we develop and test hypotheses that organizations with stronger community-oriented identities are more likely to source locally and that this relationship is moderated by the importance of the focal firm’s purchasing decisions. Results support the strong (...) influence of identity but the conditional effect is unconfirmed. (shrink)

The use of computational models for understanding human face perception and recognition has a long and intriguing history that runs parallel to efforts in the engineering literature to develop algorithms for computer-based face recognition systems. This article considers the insights gained from combining computational and cognitive approaches to the study of human face recognition and discusses the ways in which computational models have informed studies of human face processing and vice versa. It explains the concept of a face space, in (...) its abstract psychological, and physical/computational forms. The study shows how adaptation as a method is beginning to reveal properties of neural representations in a way that connects with the cognitive/perceptual approach. Finally, it discusses recent progress in state-of-the-art computational models of face recognition, which offers a new perspective on the cognitive-computational dialog. (shrink)

There is a virtual consensus among commentators on Descartes that the causal principle by which he relates the objective reality of his ideas to the formal reality of their causes isindefensible. In particular, Descartes’ claim that this principle follows from the general principle which states that the cause must contain at least as much reality as the effect has been examined and rejected as logically implausible. I challenge this view by showing that there is a logically plausible derivation of the (...) causal principle of ideas from the general causal principle. This result has important implications due to the crucial role the causal principle of ideas plays in Descartes’ first a posteriori argument for the existence of God. (shrink)

There is a virtual consensus among commentators on Descartes that the causal principle by which he relates the objective reality of his ideas to the formal reality of their causes isindefensible. In particular, Descartes’ claim that this principle follows from the general principle which states that the cause must contain at least as much reality as the effect has been examined and rejected as logically implausible. I challenge this view by showing that there is a logically plausible derivation of the (...) causal principle of ideas from the general causal principle. This result has important implications due to the crucial role the causal principle of ideas plays in Descartes’ first a posteriori argument for the existence of God. (shrink)

Energy and Social Change results from the Twenty Year Forecast Project, directed by the author and conducted trhough the University of Southern California Center for Futures Research. Unlike many more gloomy predictions, this study takes a step back from pessimism. It offers instead a realistic perspective tempered with a modicum of optimism.The report's special contribution to the energy debate lies in its call for a redirection of attention to options that are realizable within the framework--and the limits--of the existing system. (...) Advocating higher energy prices and more incentives for increased competition in the domestic energy market, the author supports a resurgence of the free enterprise system. The price of energy will and should increase in order to control waste, although the rise in costs will be mitigated by the gradual pace. In the long term, however, we should strive for a "quality economy" characterized in part by its reduced inefficiency and more meaningful jobs. Three of the ways in which this might be accomplished are shifting to an electrically based economy, developing alternative forms of energy, and switching to technologies more appropriate to the future environment.Sure to generate discussion, this analysis will prove useful in considerations of energy policy and the social impact of technological change. (shrink)

OF all the things that Plato was, he was primarily a philosopher and a metaphysician. Should this statement seem merely to emphasize the obvious; then let us explain why so simple a statement should rate special mention. There have always been those who are too willing to look upon the author of the ‘Theory of Ideas’ as an artist, a mystic, a poet but not a metaphysician. In this view, Plato’s Ideas are understandable only through the analysis of the personality (...) of an artist; it is a view which interjects far too much of the subjective into what must be seen as the objective ground for his whole philosophy. The possibility of such conflicting views on Plato can be explained by the fact that nowhere does Plato present in his writings a truly definitive Theory of Ideas and a workable proof for them. Some like Stewart require the assistance of psychology to examine Plato. Fite, on a priori grounds, makes a feeble attempt to take Plato out of the realm of any metaphysics whatsoever. Grote confuses reason and myth until nothing remains of Plato but a kind of mixed-up jumble. Others, of course, are loyal to the commitments of a critic and endeavour to discover the meaning of Plato and to present it fairly and honestly. (shrink)