Engineers fine-tune the design of robot bodies for control purposes, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent, and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is lagging behind the development of controllers. This has become even more prominent with the advent of compliant, deformable or ”soft” bodies. These carry substantial potential regarding their exploitation for control—sometimes referred to as ”morphological computation”. In this article, we briefly review different notions of computation by physical systems (...) and propose the dynamical systems framework as the most useful in the context of describing and eventually designing the interactions of controllers and bodies. Then, we look at the pros and cons of simple vs. complex bodies, critically reviewing the attractive notion of ”soft” bodies automatically taking over control tasks. We address another key dimension of the design space—whether model-based control should be used and to what extent it is feasible to develop faithful models for different morphologies. (shrink)

Motivated by exploitation concerns, we argue for the importance of participant engagement in basic human intracranial electrophysiology research. This research takes advantage of unique neurosurgical opportunities to better understand complex systems of the human brain, but it also exposes participants to additional risks without immediate therapeutic intent. We argue that understanding participant values and incorporating their perspectives into the research process may help determine whether and to what extent research practices and the resulting distributions of risks and benefits constitute (...) exploitation and contribute to building a brain research paradigm that is genuinely responsive to participant values. More broadly, we highlight the importance of paying attention to participant interests in non-therapeutic brain research. (shrink)

Various authors, for instance Elizabeth Anderson, Rosemary Tong, Mary Warnock and Margaret Brazier have argued that commercial surrogate motherhood is exploitative and that it should be prohibited. Their arguments are unconvincing. Exploitation is a more complex notion than it is usually presented as being. Unequal bargaining power can be a cause of exploitation but the exercise of unequal bargaining power is not inevitably or inherently exploitative. Exploitation concerns unfair and/or unjust strategies - rather than the exercise of (...) power as such. Commercial surrogate motherhood is not necessarily exploitative. Furthermore, not all transactions which are exploitative should be made illegal. (shrink)

An increasing number of users have been attracted by location-based social networks in recent years. Meanwhile, user-generated content in online LBSNs like spatial, temporal, and social information provides an ever-increasing chance to study the human behavior movement from their spatiotemporal mobility patterns and spawns a large number of location-based applications. For instance, one of such applications is to produce personalized point of interest recommendations that users are interested in. Different from traditional recommendation methods, the recommendations in LBSNs come with two (...) vital dimensions, namely, geographical and temporal. However, previously proposed methods do not adequately explore geographical influence and temporal influence. Therefore, fusing geographical and temporal influences for better recommendation accuracy in LBSNs remains potential. In this work, our aim is to generate a top recommendation list of POIs for a target user. Specially, we explore how to produce the POI recommendation by leveraging spatiotemporal information. In order to exploit both geographical and temporal influences, we first design a probabilistic method to initially detect users’ spatial orientation by analyzing visibility weights of POIs which are visited by them. Second, we perform collaborative filtering by detecting users’ temporal preferences. At last, for making the POI recommendation, we combine the aforementioned two approaches, that is, integrating the spatial and temporal influences, to construct a unified framework. Our experimental results on two real-world datasets indicate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art POI recommendation approaches. (shrink)

Biomedical research on human subjects involves exposing individuals to risks and burdens for the benefit of others, and therefore raises concerns about exploitation. While the concept of exploitation has received significant attention in recent research ethical literature, its relevance and implications in this area remain unclear and contested. This chapter explains how this concept is nonetheless important for understanding the ethical complexities of human subject research and the proper design of subject protections. The chapter provides an overview of (...) research practices often thought to raise exploitation concerns and introduces philosophical exploitation theory, focusing on aspects relevant to research ethics. Against this background, the obligations of non-exploitation held by researchers, sponsors, and third parties such as ethics committees and regulators are outlined. The chapter ends by considering how exploitative research in the past can be retroactively remediated. (shrink)

Beyond the observation that both speakers and listeners rapidly inspect the visual targets of referring expressions, it has been argued that such gaze may constitute part of the communicative signal. In this study, we investigate whether a speaker may, in principle, exploit listener gaze to improve communicative success. In the context of a virtual environment where listeners follow computer-generated instructions, we provide two kinds of support for this claim. First, we show that listener gaze provides a reliable real-time index of (...) understanding even in dynamic and complex environments, and on a per-utterance basis. Second, we show that a language generation system that uses listener gaze to provide rapid feedback improves overall task performance in comparison with two systems that do not use gaze. Aside from demonstrating the utility of listener gaze in situated communication, our findings open the door to new methods for developing and evaluating multi-modal models of situated interaction. (shrink)

Multiway join queries incur high-cost I/Os operations over large-scale data. Exploiting sharing join opportunities among multiple multiway joins could be beneficial to reduce query execution time and shuffled intermediate data. Although multiway join optimization has been carried out in MapReduce, different design principles are not considered. To bridge the gap of not considering the optimization of Big Data platforms, an end-to-end multiway join over Flink, which is called Join-MOTH system, is proposed to exploit sharing data granularity, sharing join granularity, and (...) sharing implicit sorts within multiple join queries. For sharing data, our previous work, Multiquery Optimization using Tuple Size and Histogram system, has been introduced to consider the granularity of sharing data opportunities among multiple queries. For sharing sort, our previous work, Sort-Based Optimizer for Big Data Multiquery, has been introduced to consider the implicit sorts among join queries. For sharing join, additional modules have been tailored to the J-MOTH optimizer to optimize sharing work by exploiting shared pipelined multiway join among multiple multiway join queries. The experimental evaluation has demonstrated that the J-MOTH system outperforms the naive and the state-of-the-art techniques by 44% for query execution time using TPC-H queries. Also, the proposed J-MOTH system introduces maximal intermediate data size reduction by 30% in average over Hadoop-like infrastructures. (shrink)

The general problem of visual search can be shown to be computationally intractable in a formal, complexity-theoretic sense, yet visual search is extensively involved in everyday perception, and biological systems manage to perform it remarkably well. Complexity level analysis may resolve this contradiction. Visual search can be reshaped into tractability through approximations and by optimizing the resources devoted to visual processing. Architectural constraints can be derived using the minimum cost principle to rule out a large class of potential (...) solutions. The evidence speaks strongly against bottom-up approaches to vision. In particular, the constraints suggest an attentional mechanism that exploits knowledge of the specific problem being solved. This analysis of visual search performance in terms of attentional influences on visual information processing and complexity satisfaction allows a large body of neurophysiological and psychological evidence to be tied together. (shrink)

Philosophical inquiry into exploitation has two major deficiencies to date: it assumes that exploitation is wrong by definition; and it pays too much attention to the Marxian account of exploitation. Two senses of exploitation should be distinguished: the 'moral' or pejorative sense and the 'non-moral' or 'non-prejudicial' sense. By demonstrating the conceptual inadequacy of exploitation as defined in the first sense, and by defining exploitation adequately in the latter sense, we seek to demonstrate the (...) moral complexity of exploitation. We contend, moreover, that moral evaluation of exploitation is only possible once we abandon a strictly Marxian framework and attempt, in the long run, to develop an integral ethic along Godwinian lines. (shrink)

For Marx, capitalism depends upon and perpetuates a system of relationships whereby members of one class of persons, capitalists, enjoys extensive and pervasive social and economic advantages over others. But on Marx’s analysis, this system of being-taken-advantage-of—this system of economic exploitation—is not to be understood by appeal to discrete incidents of fraud, bad deals, theft, or under-remuneration. Rather, the central contention of Marx’s analysis, the contention analyzed, developed, and evaluated here, is that economic exploitation is class exploitation, (...) a phenomenon that occurs only within and because of the complex system of capitalist production. And it is because this system presupposes a set of oppressive social and economic ownership relations that are not freely chosen and yet govern the terms of participation in the economy and polity that it can be appropriately described as wrong or unjust. (shrink)

This thesis aims to determine whether international gestational surrogacy contracts are exploitative, and whether they should be prohibited. I chose a group of women working as surrogates at Kaival Maternity Home and Surgical Hospital, in Anand, Gujarat, India as a study group. After examining their life circumstances, I argue that these women live in unjust circumstances caused by institutional sexism and poverty. I critically assess arguments launched against surrogacy, organ trade, and prostitution and find that none of these are sufficient (...) for demonstrating that contracts involving the sale of the body are necessarily exploitative. I find that surrogacy is exploitative because of a complex set of social conditions. Further, the contracts are beneficial to both the woman acting as surrogate and to the couple hiring her. I conclude that international gestational surrogacy is exploitative yet mutually beneficial, and prohibiting surrogacy would be harmful unless accompanied by drastic social change. (shrink)

The number of scientific publications is growing exponentially. Research articles cite other work for various reasons and, therefore, have been studied extensively to associate documents. It is argued that not all references carry the same level of importance. It is essential to understand the reason for citation, called citation intent or function. Text information can contribute well if new natural language processing techniques are applied to capture the context of text data. In this paper, we have used contextualized word embedding (...) to find the numerical representation of text features. We further investigated the performance of various machine-learning techniques on the numerical representation of text. The performance of each of the classifiers was evaluated on two state-of-the-art datasets containing the text features. In the case of the unbalanced dataset, we observed that the linear Support Vector Machine achieved 86% accuracy for the “background” class, where the training was extensive. For the rest of the classes, including “motivation,” “extension,” and “future,” the machine was trained on less than 100 records; therefore, the accuracy was only 57 to 64%. In the case of a balanced dataset, each of the classes has the same accuracy as trained on the same size of training data. Overall, SVM performed best on both of the datasets, followed by the stochastic gradient descent classifier; therefore, SVM can produce good results as text classification on top of contextual word embedding. (shrink)

In this article, network science is discussed from a methodological perspective, and two central theses are defended. The first is that network science exploits the very properties that make a system complex. Rather than using idealization techniques to strip those properties away, as is standard practice in other areas of science, network science brings them to the fore, and uses them to furnish new forms of explanation. The second thesis is that network representations are particularly helpful in explaining the properties (...) of non-decomposable systems. Where part-whole decomposition is not possible, network science provides a much-needed alternative method of compressing information about the behavior of complex systems, and does so without succumbing to problems associated with combinatorial explosion. The article concludes with a comparison between the uses of network representation analyzed in the main discussion, and an entirely distinct use of network representation that has recently been discussed in connection with mechanistic modeling. (shrink)

We describe a first experiment on whether product complexity affects competition and consumers in retail markets. We are unable to detect a significant effect of product complexity on prices, except insofar as the demand elasticity for complex products is higher. However, there is qualified evidence that complex products have the potential to induce consumers to buy more than they would otherwise. In this sense, consumer exploitability in quantities cannot be ruled out. We also find evidence for shaping effects: (...) consumers’ preferences are shaped by past experience with prices, and firms may in principle exploit this to sell more. (shrink)

The general problem of visual search can be shown to be computationally intractable in a formal, complexity-theoretic sense, yet visual search is extensively involved in everyday perception, and biological systems manage to perform it remarkably well. Complexity level analysis may resolve this contradiction. Visual search can be reshaped into tractability through approximations and by optimizing the resources devoted to visual processing. Architectural constraints can be derived using the minimum cost principle to rule out a large class of potential (...) solutions. The evidence speaks strongly against bottom-up approaches to vision. In particular, the constraints suggest an attentional mechanism that exploits knowledge of the specific problem being solved. This analysis of visual search performance in terms of attentional influences on visual information processing and complexity satisfaction allows a large body of neurophysiological and psychological evidence to be tied together. (shrink)

It is often claimed that one cannot locate a notion of causation in fundamental physical theories. The reason most commonly given is that the dynamics of those theories do not support any distinction between the past and the future, and this vitiates any attempt to locate a notion of causal asymmetry—and thus of causation—in fundamental physical theories. I argue that this is incorrect: the ubiquitous generation of entanglement between quantum systems grounds a relevant asymmetry in the dynamical evolution of quantum (...) systems. I show that by exploiting a connection between the amount of entanglement in a quantum state and the algorithmic complexity of that state, one can use recently developed tools for causal inference to identify a causal asymmetry—and a notion of causation—in the dynamical evolution of quantum systems. (shrink)

Summary This essay contributes to a recent strain of research that questions clear-cut dichotomies between ‘scientists’ and ‘artisans’ in the early modern period. With a focus on the exploitation of agrarian resources, it argues for the appreciation of a more complex panorama of intersecting knowledge systems spanning from botany as part of natural history, over administrational and teaching expertise, to various sorts of practical experience in agriculture. With this aim, the essay investigates the careers of two protagonists of the (...) ‘economic enlightenment’ in Southern Germany in the late eighteenth century, Friedrich Casimir Medicus and Franz von Paula Schrank. Financed mostly by territorial powers to which they remained closely related throughout their lives, their careers were characterized by ‘scientific’ investigations as well as by engaging in higher education and extensive publication for diverse audiences. According to the argument set forth here, the panorama of the activities of these two figures can best be understood when seen in the light of early modern cultures of innovation aiming to stimulate economic growth by collecting, testing and distributing advanced technical knowledge. Against a position advocated for most recently in a monograph by Andre Wakefield on German cameralism, the final section argues for a long-term perspective on this development with regard to the emergence of technical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as more appropriate than a focus on the ‘failure’ of such actors to turn their aims immediately into practice. (shrink)

We give an overview of the practice of developing and using complex climate models, as seen from experiences in a major climate modelling center and through participation in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. We discuss the construction and calibration of models; their evaluation, especially through use of out-of-sample tests; and their exploitation in multi-model ensembles to identify biases and make predictions. We stress that adequacy or utility of climate models is best assessed via their skill against more naïve predictions. (...) The framework we use for making inferences about reality using simulations is naturally Bayesian, and has many points of contact with more familiar examples of scientific epistemology. While the use of complex simulations in science is a development that changes much in how science is done in practice, we argue that the concepts being applied fit very much into traditional practices of the scientific method, albeit those more often associated with laboratory work. (shrink)

The development of new theory is often spurred by novel techniques that provide better answers to existing questions, or that allow asking new ones. In the field of strategy and organization science, models of complex adaptive systems have renewed theoretical work on a fundamental question: how organizations can adapt effectively to their environments. This article has three objectives: to highlight some areas where models of organizations as complex adaptive systems have made substantial contributions: the search for solutions to sets of (...) interdependent choices, the challenge of balancing processes of exploration and exploitation, and the organization of imperfect decision makers; to point to several challenges and tradeoffs which can limit the explanatory power and eventual impact of the modeling enterprise; and to sketch out possible future directions of research that would do further justice to the notion of organizations as complex adaptive systems. (shrink)

Continuous environmental concerns regarding construction industry have been driving general constructors of mega infrastructure projects to incorporate green contractors. Although conventional multiple attributes decision-making methodologies have provided feasible ways to select contractor, high complexity in scenarios of megaprojects still challenges existing MADM methods in concurrently accommodating three key issues of decision hesitancy, attributes interdependency, and group attitudinal character. To elicit decision-makers’ hesitant fuzzy assessments more objectively and comprehensively, we define an expression tool called interval-valued dual hesitant fuzzy uncertain unbalanced (...) linguistic set and develop aggregation operators through its operations. To exploit attributes interdependency, we establish a synthesized attributes’ weighting model to fuse an attributes interdependency-based weighting vector and an argument-dependent weighting vector, which are, respectively, derived through Decision-Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory technique and maximizing deviation method. To effectively utilize decision-makers’ group attitudinal characters, we also develop a TOPSIS-based method to rationally transform group ideal attitudes into order-inducing vectors. On the strength of the above methods, an integrated MADM approach is then constructed. Finally, illustrative case study and experiments are conducted to validate our approach. (shrink)

We introduce a reciprocity criterion for coalition formation among goal-directed agents, which we call the indecomposable do-ut-des property. It refines an older reciprocity property, called the do-ut-des or give-to-get property by considering the fact that agents prefer to form coalitions whose components cannot be formed independently. A formal description of this property is provided as well as an analysis of algorithms and their complexity. We provide an algorithm to decide whether a coalition has the desired property, and we show (...) that the problem to verify whether a single coalition satisfies the property is tractable. Moreover, we provide an algorithm to search all the sub-coalitions of a given coalition satisfying the new property. Even if this problem is not computationally tractable, we show that in several cases, also the complexity of this problem may decrease considerably. (shrink)

As technologies of ocean exploitation emerged during the late 1960s, science policy and diplomacy were formed in response to anticipated capabilities that did not match the realities of extracting deep-sea minerals and of resource exploitation in the deep ocean at the time. Promoters of ocean exploitation in the late 1960s envisaged wonders such as rare mineral extraction and the stationing of divers in underwater habitats from which they would operate seabed machinery not connected to the turbulent surface (...) waters. Their promises coincided with others' fears that nuclear weaponry would be placed on the seabed. Those who lacked the technological capability to extract minerals from the seabed also had concerns that other nations would exploit their resources. Scientific imaginaries caused uncertainty in the international community—especially in the “Global South.” The UN called the “Law of the Sea” conferences to mediate emerging geopolitical tensions caused by these imaginaries of exploitation of ocean resources. These conferences became a site where lawmakers projected futures rather than merely responding to past or present dilemmas. Diplomats' negotiations, with their basis in anticipation of the future uses of science and technology, reveal the role of scientific imaginaries within complex negotiations. Here, we see the impact of the distinction (or blurring) of the real and the imagined on the balance of relations between Global North and South increasing global imbalances of resources and power. This article's analysis of such scientific diplomacy provides a valuable example of the power of scientific imaginaries to have a global impact. (shrink)

This article explores the controversial practice of transnational gestational surrogacy and poses a provocative question: Does it have to be exploitative? Various existing models of exploitation are considered and a novel exploitation-evaluation heuristic is introduced to assist in the analysis of the potentially exploitative dimensions/elements of complex health-related practices. On the basis of application of the heuristic, I conclude that transnational gestational surrogacy, as currently practiced in low-income country settings , is exploitative of surrogate women. Arising out of (...) consideration of the heuristic's exploitation conditions, a set of public education and enabled choice, enhanced protections, and empowerment reforms to transnational gestational surrogacy practice is proposed that, if incorporated into a national regulatory framework and actualized within a low income country, could possibly render such practice nonexploitative. (shrink)

This paper analyses the Marxian theory of exploitation. The axiomatic approach standard in social choice theory is adopted in order to study the concept of exploitation—what it is and how it should be captured empirically. Two properties are presented that capture some fundamental Marxian insights. It is shown that, contrary to the received view, there exists a nonempty class of definitions of exploitation that preserve the relation between exploitation and profits—called Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle—in general economies (...) with heterogeneous agents, complex class structures, and production technologies with heterogeneous labour inputs. However, among the main approaches, only the so-called ‘New Interpretation’ satisfies the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle in general. (shrink)

This book illustrates the program of Logical-Informational Dynamics. Rational agents exploit the information available in the world in delicate ways, adopt a wide range of epistemic attitudes, and in that process, constantly change the world itself. Logical-Informational Dynamics is about logical systems putting such activities at center stage, focusing on the events by which we acquire information and change attitudes. Its contributions show many current logics of information and change at work, often in multi-agent settings where social behavior is essential, (...) and often stressing Johan van Benthem's pioneering work in establishing this program. However, this is not a Festschrift, but a rich tapestry for a field with a wealth of strands of its own. The reader will see the state of the art in such topics as information update, belief change, preference, learning over time, and strategic interaction in games. Moreover, no tight boundary has been enforced, and some chapters add more general mathematical or philosophical foundations or links to current trends in computer science. (shrink)

After a contrast of the the prima facie complexity of the causality of the rational agent with the received scientific doctrine of causality, it is noticed that the prima facie causal authority of rational action belongs to a macroscopic domain in which all science and philosophy takes place and in which the formal/telic nature of that causality must be taken for granted. Any philosophical justification or philosophical criticism of the status of that macroscopic arena must therefore take place within (...) that same arena. It is then argued that a justification of the ontological status of that arena is possible by an exploitation of the reflexive resource of the rational awareness we exercise within that arena. It is claimed that this resource can be fairly described as the justification of our direct knowing of real beings/entities other than the knower and that such realistic knowing is at the same time an exemplary mode of causality having a complexity that is both formal/telic and hierarchical . In short, the rational agent is also a direct knower, and direct knowing requires a sense of "cause' more complex than the received scientific doctrine of causality provides. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The cultural element is the minimum unit of a cultural system. The systematic categorizing, organizing, and retrieval of the traditional Chinese cultural elements are essential prerequisites for the realization of effective extracting and rational utilization, as well as the prerequisite for exploiting the contemporary value of the traditional Chinese culture. To build an objective, integrated, and reliable classification method and a system of traditional Chinese cultural elements, this study takes the text of Taiping Imperial Encyclopedia in Northern Song Dynasty as (...) the primary data source. The unsupervised word segmentation methods are used to detect Out-of-Vocabulary, and then the segmentation results by the THULAC tool with and without custom dictionary are compared. The TF-IDF algorithm is applied to extract the keywords of cultural elements and the Ochiia coefficient is introduced to create complex networks of traditional Chinese cultural elements. After analyzing the topological characteristics of the network, the community detection algorithm is used to identify the topics of cultural elements. Finally, a “Means-Ends” two-dimensional orthogonal classification system is established to categorize the topics. The results showed that the degree distribution in the complex network of Chinese traditional cultural elements is a scale-free network with γ = 2.28. The network shows a structure of community and hierarchy features. The top 12 communities have taken up to 91.77% of the scale of the networks. Those 12 topics of the traditional Chinese cultural elements are circularly distributed in the orthogonal system of cultural elements’ categorization. (shrink)

The development of technology is unbelievably rapid. From limited local networks to high speed Internet, from crude computing machines to powerful semi-conductors, the world had changed drastically compared to just a few decades ago. In the constantly renewing process of adapting to such an unnaturally high-entropy setting, innovations as well as entirely new concepts, were often born. In the business world, one such phenomenon was the creation of a new type of entrepreneurship. This paper proposes a new academic discipline of (...) computational entrepreneurship, which centers on: (i) an exponentially growing (and less expensive) computing power, to the extent that almost everybody in a modern society can own and use that; (ii) omnipresent high-speed Internet connectivity, wired or wireless, representing our modern day’s economic connectomics; (iii) growing concern of exploiting “serendipity” for a strategic commercial advantage; and (iv) growing capabilities of lay people in performing calculations for their informed decisions in taking fast-moving entrepreneurial opportunities. Computational entrepreneurship has slowly become a new mode of operation for business ventures and will likely bring the academic discipline of entrepreneurship back to mainstream economics. (shrink)

John Roemer and G.A. Cohen made seminal contributions to the reconstruction of the Marxian theory of exploitation. However, both came to doubt the importance of the Marxian theory of exploitation for the socialist project. This paper defends the Marxian theory of exploitation against their skeptical conclusions. In so doing, it explicates Marxian exploitation’s distributive and relational dimensions, normative and explanatory roles, and complex normative and causal structure.

We investigate the initial segment complexity of random reals. Let K denote prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity. A natural measure of the relative randomness of two reals α and β is to compare complexity K and K. It is well-known that a real α is 1-random iff there is a constant c such that for all n, Kn−c. We ask the question, what else can be said about the initial segment complexity of random reals. Thus, we study the (...) fine behaviour of K for random α. Following work of Downey, Hirschfeldt and LaForte, we say that αK β iff there is a constant such that for all n, . We call the equivalence classes under this measure of relative randomness K-degrees. We give proofs that there is a random real α so that lim supn K−K=∞ where Ω is Chaitin's random real. One is based upon work of Solovay, and the other exploits a new idea. Further, based on this new idea, we prove there are uncountably many K-degrees of random reals by proving that μ=0. As a corollary to the proof we can prove there is no largest K-degree. Finally we prove that if n ≠ m then the initial segment complexities of the natural n- and m-random sets and Ω︀) are different. The techniques introduced in this paper have already found a number of other applications. (shrink)

This article explores the controversial practice of transnational gestational surrogacy and poses a provocative question: Does it have to be exploitative? Various existing models of exploitation are considered and a novel exploitation-evaluation heuristic is introduced to assist in the analysis of the potentially exploitative dimensions/elements of complex health-related practices. On the basis of application of the heuristic, I conclude that transnational gestational surrogacy, as currently practiced in low-income country settings, is exploitative of surrogate women. Arising out of consideration (...) of the heuristic's exploitation conditions, a set of public education and enabled choice, enhanced protections, and empowerment reforms to transnational gestational surrogacy practice is proposed that, if incorporated into a national regulatory framework and actualized within a low income country, could possibly render such practice nonexploitative. (shrink)

A complex conjuncture of ideological constructions obscured and rationalized the systematic exploitation of farm women. First, farming and homemaking, to which people cling in an attempt to avert the alienation of wage labor, provide a basis for evaluating one's labor in terms that, ironically, makes them vulnerable to super-exploitation. Second, agrarian ideologies, with their strongly patriarchal bias, did not allow women to understand themselves as public actors. Modernizing elite ideologies, specifically the equation of entrepreneurial individualism and efficiency with (...) “progress” and affluence, and the “cult of domesticity” with its redefinition of men's and women's roles, promised women greater equality within the family; however, these normative codes simultaneously opened the farm and home to greater dependence on capitalist markets. The ideology of entrepreneurial individualism also provided templates through which farm men and women (mis)understood their relative poverty as being the result of private, individual choices. In addition, virtually all media assumed a sector differentiated only by commodity, rendering size, class, or other distinctions invisible. Finally, the ideology of separate spheres, as it developed in the nineteenth century, created a segmented and discriminatory labor market for women. The period focused on, the late 1940s and the 1950s, was crucial in establishing the terms of the post-War order. (shrink)

The new science of Complexity explains that limited knowledge prevents societies from predicting and controlling their developments. But Complexity further suggests that nature uses the limits of knowledge to evolve, which turns an apparent obstacle into an opportunity to reevaluate governmental institutions. As in nature, the limits of knowledge lead social systems to evolve by individuating, liberating, and empowering their members. Societies individuate and liberate their members to probe environments and exploit opportunities. Societies empower individuals to globalize their (...) findings which requires constitutionally constraining governmental powers. Societies that respect human rights thus gain selective advantage. Showing that what nature is models what societies ought to be, Complexity may finesse the "naturalistic fallacy" of Hume and Moore. (shrink)

Animal Suffering and Public Relations conducts an ethical assessment of public relations, mainly persuasive communication and lobbying, as deployed by some of the main businesses involved in the animal industrial complex - the industries participating in the systematic and institutionalized exploitation of animals. Society has been experiencing a growing ethical concern regarding humans' (ab)use of other animals. This is a trend first promoted by the development of animal ethics - which claims any sentient being, because of sentience, deserves moral (...) consideration - and more recently by other approaches from the social sciences, including critical animal studies. In this volume, we aim to start an entirely unaddressed discussion within the field of public relations: the need to problematize the ethics of persuasion when nonhuman animal suffering is involved, particularly the impact of persuasion and lobbying on compassion towards other animals in the cases of food, experimentation, entertainment and environment management. The books provides an interdisciplinary, theoretical discussion illustrated with international case studies from experts in strategic communication, public relations, lobbying and advocacy, animal ethics, philosophy of law, political philosophy and social psychology. This unique book merges the fields of critical public relations, animal ethics and critical animal studies and will be of direct appeal to a wide range of researchers, academics and doctoral students across related fields. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been heightened concern regarding the marketing of potentially harmful products (PHPs) to disadvantaged markets. Three issues which commonly dominate discussions in this controversy are: (1) the potential for exploitation of vulnerable markets, (2) the tradeoff between protection of disadvantaged consumers and their rights to make informed choices and (3) the appropriateness of using the commercial speech doctrine to settle the issue of targeting minority markets with PHPs. This paper examines the arguments raised in this (...) debate so that interested parties will better appreciate the ethical complexity of marketing PHPs to minority segments. (shrink)

Biobanks are precariously situated at the intersection of science, genetics, genomics, society, ethics, the law and politics. This multi-disciplinarity has given rise to a new discourse in health research involving diverse stakeholders. Each stakeholder is embedded in a unique context and articulates his/her biobanking activities differently. To researchers, biobanks carry enormous transformative potential in terms of advancing scientific discovery and knowledge. However, in the context of power asymmetries in Africa and a distrust in science born out of historical exploitation, (...) researchers must balance the scientific imperative of collecting, storing and sharing high quality biological samples with obligations to donors/participants, communities, international collaborators, regulatory and ethics authorities. To date, researcher perspectives on biobanking in South Africa have not been explored and documented. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 21 researchers – 8 in the Western Cape, 3 in Gauteng and 10 in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Interviews lasted approximately 40–60 min and were audiotaped with consent. Thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews was conducted by the co-authors. Researchers articulated serious concerns over standardised regulatory approaches that failed to consider the heterogeneity of biobanks. Given that biobanks differ considerably, guidelines and RECs need to stratify risk accordingly and governance processes and structures must be flexible. While RECs were regarded as an important component of the governance structure researchers expressed concern about their expertise in biobanking. Operational management of biobanks was regarded as an ethical imperative and a pre-requisite to building trust during consent processes. While broad general consent was preferred, tiered consent was thought to be more consistent with respect for autonomy and building trust. Material Transfer Agreements were often lacking when biosamples were exported and this was perceived to impact negatively on trust. On the other hand, researchers believed that authentic community engagement would help to build trust. Building trust will best be achieved via a system of governance structures and processes that precede the establishment of a biobank and monitor progress from the point of sample collection through to future use, including export. Such governance structures must be robust and must include comprehensive national legislation, policy and contextualised guidelines. Currently such governance infrastructure appears to be lacking in many African countries including South Africa. Capacity development of all stakeholders including REC members will enhance expeditious and efficient review of biobanking protocols which in turn will reinforce trust in the researcher-donor relationship. Science translation and community engagement in biobanking is integral to the success of biobanking in South Africa. (shrink)

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in the population of women prisoners in Europe, North America and Australasia, accompanied by a boom in prison construction. This article argues that this new pattern of women's incarceration has been forged by three overlapping phenomena. The first is the fundamental shift in the role of the state that has occurred as a result of the neo-liberal globalization. The second and related phenomenon is the emergence and subsequent global expansion of what has (...) been labeled a ‘prison industrial complex’ made up of a intricate web of relations between state penal institutions, politicians and profit-driven prison corporations. The third is the emergence of a US-led global war on drugs which is symbiotically related and mutually constituted by the transnational trade in criminalized drugs. These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I argue, build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-exploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex. The article calls for a new anti-racist feminist analysis that explores how the complex matrix of race, class, gender and nationality meshes with contemporary globalized geo-political and economic realities. The prison industrial complex plays a critical role in sustaining the viability of the new global economy and black women are increasingly becoming the raw material that fuels its expansion and profitability. The article seeks to reveal the profitable synergies between drug enforcement, the prison industry, international financial institutions, media and politicians that are sending women to prison in ever increasing numbers. (shrink)

The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed an explosion in the population of women prisoners in Europe, North America and Australasia, accompanied by a boom in prison construction. This article argues that this new pattern of women's incarceration has been forged by three overlapping phenomena. The first is the fundamental shift in the role of the state that has occurred as a result of neo-liberal globalization. The second and related phenomenon is the emergence and subsequent global expansion of what has been (...) labelled a ‘prison industrial complex’ made up of an intricate web of relations between state penal institutions, politicians and profit-driven prison corporations. The third is the emergence of a US-led global war on drugs which is symbiotically related and mutually constituted by the transnational trade in criminalized drugs. These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I argue, build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-exploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex. The article calls for a new anti-racist feminist analysis that explores how the complex matrix of race, class, gender and nationality meshes with contemporary globalized geo-political and economic realities. The prison industrial complex plays a critical role in sustaining the viability of the new global economy and black women are increasingly becoming the raw material that fuels its expansion and profitability. The article seeks to reveal the profitable synergies between drug enforcement, the prison industry, international financial institutions, media and politicians that are sending women to prison in ever increasing numbers. (shrink)

The host actin nucleation machinery is subverted by many bacterial pathogens to facilitate their entry, motility, replication, and survival. The majority of research conducted in the past primarily focused on exploitation of a host actin nucleator, the Arp2/3 complex, by bacterial pathogens. Recently, new studies have begun to explore the role of formins, another family of host actin nucleators, in bacterial pathogenesis. This review provides an overview of recent advances in the study of the exploitation of the Arp2/3 (...) complex and formins by bacterial pathogens. Secreted bacterial effector proteins seem to manipulate the regulation of these actin nucleators or functionally mimic them to drive bacterial entry, motility and survival within host cells. An enhanced understanding of how formins are exploited will provide us with greater insight into how a fundamental eurkaryotic cellular process is utilized by bacteria and will also advance our knowledge of host‐pathogen interactions. (shrink)

Abstract:I examine the often-denigrated concept of the novel of ideas from its inception and critical decline to its relatively recent revival. Using a variant of the exploitation-exploration dilemma in psychology, I suggest that early usage referred to works that exploit philosophical principles—or better, enact them—by setting philosophical positions in conflict. By contrast, use of the concept for more recent works sees characters and plots exploring philosophical stances. The shift corresponds with the greater attention paid to complexity and ambiguity (...) that are hallmarks of continental philosophy and neopragmatism, and with it greater need to explore philosophical stances through fiction. (shrink)

Feminism offers three separate but equally important insights about human genetics and the new reproductive technologies. First, feminism is concerned with ways in which these new technologies have the potential to exploit women, particularly in the treatment of their reproductive tissue, while seeming to offer both sexes greater reproductive freedom. This risk has been largely ignored by much bioethics, which has concentrated on choice and autonomy at the expense of justice, giving it little to say about the concept of (...) class='Hi'>exploitation. Second, feminist scholars have developed complex and subtle analyses of how women's labour is incorporated into the global bioeconomy in a gendered manner. Although feminist perspectives vary on such issues as surrogate motherhood, they have provided important studies of how women's labour is commodified in the new reproductive technologies. Finally, feminist analysts and activists have been among the leaders in identifying and resisting the threats from commodification and commercialisation in genetic research and patenting, which often affect women disproportionately. In all three areas, feminist writers have drawn specific attention to medical, economic and political impacts on women that had not been adequately considered. (shrink)

The complexity of cognitive emulation of human diagnostic reasoning is the major challenge in the implementation of computer-based programs for diagnostic advice in medicine. We here present an epistemological model of diagnosis with the ultimate goal of defining a high-level language for cognitive and computational primitives. The diagnostic task proceeds through three different phases: hypotheses generation, hypotheses testing and hypotheses closure. Hypotheses generation has the inferential form of abduction (from findings to hypotheses) constrained under the criterion of plausibility. Hypotheses (...) testing is achieved by a deductive inference (from generated hypotheses to expected findings), followed by an eliminative induction, constrained under the criterion of covering, which matches expected findings against patient''s findings to select the best explanation. Hypotheses closure is a deductive-inductive type of inference very similar to the inferences operating in hypotheses testing. In this case induction matches the consequences of the generated hypotheses against the patient''s characteristics or preferences under the criterion of utility. By using the language exploited in this epistemological model, it is possible to describe the cognitive tasks underlying the most influential knowledge-based diagnostic systems. (shrink)

Proclus' complex arguments developed in the context of his theory of evil often seem to reflect various earlier discussions of this topic. Above all, his predecessor Iamblichus seems to be a major source for his concept of evil. This becomes plausible when we attempt to outline Iamblichus' own philosophy of evil as revealed in such works as De mysteriis or De communi mathematica scientia. Particularly the latter work has not been sufficiently exploited in this respect, although the similarities with Proclus (...) are significant. All relevant ideas with regard to Proclus' notion of papnpóstasis are prepared and prefigured in Iamblichus. This essay discusses the mode of the existence of evil, the causation of evil and its relation to being according to Iamblichus. Moreover, comparison of Iamblichus' doctrines with those of his predecessors Plotinus and Porphyry reveals the design of his concept of evil as apparently directed at Plotinus. (shrink)

The complex history of pandemics has created a diversified array of anti-epidemic responses, which have allowed structures of authority to express their power in multiple ways. In this paper, by considering theories applicable to cases ranging from Europe to Asia, from the 11th to the 18th century, we conduct a comparative analysis capable of identifying common traits and radical differences, aiming to show how such deployment of power was not always commensurate with the medical theories of the age, and with (...) the gravity of the epidemiological situation. Specifically, we analyse how Western European States, in their process of formation, employed the concept of ‘public health’ to create the grounds for an unprecedented exercise of power over the private sphere. Furthermore, we compare this attitude with the discrimination of the minority known as burakumin in Japan, which was destined to undertake any ‘dirty’ or ‘impure’ occupation, to preserve the immunity of the community. In other words, we examine how structures of power have exploited states of exception to implement control measures beyond the needs of the situation through an increasingly hypertrophic apparatus of security; and ways in which political authorities have not aligned with medical or philosophical authorities of their times, for opportunistic reasons that benefited their own social, religious, or racial group. (shrink)

The complexities of bodily experience are outlined; its spatial phenomenology is specified as the explanatory target. The mereological structure of body representation is discussed; it is claimed that global spatial representations of the body are not necessary, as structural features of the actual body can be exploited in partial internal representation. The spatial structure of bodily experience is discussed; a structural affordance theory is introduced; it is claimed that bodily experience and subpersonal representation have action-orientated content; and that egocentric terms (...) continue to make sense in application to bodily experience. (shrink)