It is a popular view thatpractical deliberation excludes foreknowledge of one's choice. Wolfgang Spohn and Isaac Levi have argued that not even a purely probabilistic self-predictionis available to thedeliberator, if one takes subjective probabilities to be conceptually linked to betting rates. It makes no sense to have a betting rate for an option, for one's willingness to bet on the option depends on the net gain from the bet, in combination with the option's antecedent utility, rather than on the offered (...) odds. And even apart from this consideration, assigning probabilities to the options among which one is choosing is futile since such probabilities could be of no possible use in choice. The paper subjects these arguments to critical examination and suggests that, appearances notwithstanding, practical deliberation need not crowd outself-prediction. (shrink)

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (French: Psychologie des Foules; literally: Psychology of Crowds) is a book authored by Gustave Le Bon that was first published in 1895. In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others. Le Bon claimed that "an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds (...) himself - either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant - in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer. (shrink)

Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theater, and cinema, as well as the rise of communism and fascism and experiments in radical democracy. Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as "the mass" during a critical period in European history. It follows its evolution into the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists, the ideal slogan (...) for politicians, and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval. This volume is the second installment in Stefan Jonsson's epic study of the crowd and the mass in modern Europe, building on his work in _A Brief History of the Masses_, which focused on monumental artworks produced in 1789, 1889, and 1989. (shrink)

In this essay, I first describe Kierkegaard’s understanding of free and responsible selfhood. I then describe one of Kierkegaard’s unique contributions to freedom and responsibility – his perceptual theory of the emotions. Kierkegaard understands emotions as perceptions that are related to beliefs and concerns, and thus the self can—to some extent—freely participate in the cultivation of various emotions. In other words, one of the ways that self takes responsibility for itself is by taking responsibility for its emotions. In the final (...) section, I turn to Kierkegaard’s understanding of social comparison and the role that the “crowd” plays in shaping the self’s beliefs, desires, and emotions. Kierkegaard is clear that envy and social comparison are detrimental to becoming a self, yet envy and social comparison are pervasive social practices. I conclude that Kierkegaard understands both the value and the difficulty of cultivating social courage: the crowd is untruth due to the difficulty of holding fast to one’s values when confronted by crowd. (shrink)

Contrary to Block's assertion, “identity-crowding” does not provide an interesting instance of object-seeing without object-attention. The successful judgments and unusual phenomenology of identity-crowding are better explained by unconscious perception and non-perceptual phenomenology associated with cognitive states. In identity-crowding, as in other cases of crowding, subjects see jumbled textures and cannot individuate the items contributing to those textures in the absence of attention. Block presents an attenuated sense in which identity-crowded items are seen, but this is irrelevant to the debate about (...) phenomenal experience of an object in the absence of object-attention. Finally, even unconscious object perception in identity-crowding likely involves an attention-like selective process. (shrink)

One of the most important topics in current work on consciousness is what relationship it has to attention. Recently, one of the focuses of this debate has been on the phenomenon of identity crowding. Ned Block has claimed that identity crowding involves conscious perception of an object that we are unable to pay attention to. In this article, we draw upon a range of empirical findings to argue against Block's interpretation of the data. We also argue that current empirical evidence (...) strongly supports an interpretation of the data that emphasises cognitive inference over conscious perception. (shrink)

‘Crowded places’ have recently been problematized as objects of terrorist attacks. Following this redefinition of terrorism, crowds have been reactivated at the heart of a security continuum of counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing. How does the crowd referent recalibrate security governance, and with what political effects? This article argues that several subtle reconfigurations take place. First, counter-terrorism governance derives the knowledge of crowds from ‘generic events’ as unexpected, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. This move activates 19th-century knowledge about (...) class='Hi'>crowds as pathological, while the spatial referent of ‘crowded places’ reconfigures workplaces as crowded places and workers as crowds. Second, new guidance for emergency planning and policing deploys a more rational approach to crowds, put forward in recent psychosocial approaches. These modes of knowledge derive ‘generic crowds’ from normal social relations rather than extraordinary events. Generic events and generic crowds effectively depoliticize crowds, as they exclude a more radical generic politics, in which crowds are not derivable, but negate determination. (shrink)

This paper discusses how an interactive artwork, the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency, can contribute to discussions of Big Data intelligence analytics. The CSIA is a publicly accessible Open Source Intelligence system that was constructed using information gathered from technical manuals, research reports, academic papers, leaked documents, and Freedom of Information Act files. Using a visceral heuristic, the CSIA demonstrates how the statistical correlations made by automated classification systems are different from human judgment and can produce false-positives, as well as how the (...) display of information through an interface can affect the judgment of an intelligence agent. The public has the right to ask questions about how a computer program determines if they are a threat to national security and to question the practicality of using statistical pattern recognition algorithms in place of human judgment. Currently, the public’s lack of access to both Big Data and the actual datasets intelligence agencies use to train their classification algorithms keeps the possibility of performing effective sous-dataveillance out of reach. Without this data, the results returned by the CSIA will not be identical to those of intelligence agencies. Because we have replicated how OSINT is processed, however, our results will resemble the type of results and mistakes made by OSINT systems. The CSIA takes some initial steps toward contributing to an informed public debate about large-scale monitoring of open source, social media data and provides a prototype for counterveillance and sousveillance tools for citizens. (shrink)

Memes have been proposed to explain wide swathes of human culture and language use. I argue that what is really doing the explanatory work in many of these cases is a basic mechanism of information...

The purpose of crowd counting is to estimate the number of pedestrians in crowd images. Crowd counting or density estimation is an extremely challenging task in computer vision, due to large scale variations and dense scene. Current methods solve these issues by compounding multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network with different receptive fields. In this paper, a novel end-to-end architecture based on Multi-Scale Adversarial Convolutional Neural Network (MSA-CNN) is proposed to generate crowd density and estimate the amount of crowd. Firstly, a multi-scale (...) network is used to extract the globally relevant features in the crowd image, and then fractionally-strided convolutional layers are designed for up-sampling the output to recover the loss of crucial details caused by the earlier max pooling layers. An adversarial loss is directly employed to shrink the estimated value into the realistic subspace to reduce the blurring effect of density estimation. Joint training is performed in an end-to-end fashion using a combination of Adversarial loss and Euclidean loss. The two losses are integrated via a joint training scheme to improve density estimation performance.We conduct some extensive experiments on available datasets to show the significant improvements and supremacy of the proposed approach over the available state-of-the-art approaches. (shrink)

This article explores the remaking of classical liberal rights in digital spaces, with a focus on property rights in artificial intelligence (AI) crowds. The rise of crowds in digital and technological spaces has created new opportunities for users, but their accumulated contributions create added value for the platforms and manufacturers that manage the crowd, leading to a curtailment of individual autonomy. The article identifies two parallel processes that characterize individuals’ involvement in digital crowds: manufacturers construct the property (...) rights of individual users as crowd-based rights, while also working to de-crowd users in other contexts. The article compares crowd-based rights to potential group rights and individual rights in non-digital spheres, exposing the weakness of manufacturer-constituted crowd-based rights. The article concludes by discussing possible legal conceptions of the crowd and its governance. (shrink)

Formal and empirical work on the Wisdom of Crowds has extolled the virtue of diverse and independent judgment as essential to the maintenance of ‘wise crowds’. In other words, com-munication and imitation among members of a group may have the negative effect of decreasing the aggregate wisdom of the group. In contrast, it is demonstrable that certain meta-inductive methods provide optimal means for predicting unknown events. Such meta-inductive methods are essentially imitative, where the predictions of other agents are (...) imitated to the extent that those agents have proven successful in the past. Despite the (self-serving) optimality of meta-inductive methods, their imitative nature may undermine the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, since these methods recommend that agents imitate the predictions of other agents. In this paper, I present a replication of selected results of Thorn and Schurz, illustrating the effect on a group’s performance that may result from having members of a group adopt meta-inductive methods. I then expand on the work of Thorn and Schurz by considering three simple measures by which meta-inductive prediction methods may improve their own performance, while simultaneously mitigating their negative impact on group performance. The effects of adopting these maneuvers are investigated using computer simulations. (shrink)

Individuality and collectivity are central concepts in sociological inquiry. Incorporating cultural history, social theory, urban and economic sociology, Borch proposes an innovative rethinking of these key terms and their interconnections via the concept of the social avalanche. Drawing on classical sociology, he argues that while individuality embodies a tension between the collective and individual autonomy, certain situations, such as crowds and other moments of group behaviour, can subsume the individual entirely within the collective. These events, or social avalanches, produce (...) an experience of being swept away suddenly and losing one's sense of self. Cities are often on the verge of social avalanches, their urban inhabitants torn between de-individualising external pressure and autonomous self-presentation. Similarly, Borch argues that present-day financial markets, dominated by computerised trading, abound with social avalanches and the tensional interplay of mimesis and autonomous decision-making. Borch argues that it is no longer humans but fully automated algorithms that avalanche in these markets. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"The Crowd Is Untruth": A Comparison of Kierkegaard and Girard Charles K. Bellinger University of Virginia The purpose ofthis essay is to provide an introductory comparison of the writings of Soren Kierkegaard and René Girard. To my knowledge, a substantial secondary article or book has not been written on this subject.1 Girard's writings themselves contain only a handful of references to Kierkegaard.2 This deficiency is unfortunate, since, as I (...) hope to show in the following pages, these two authors do share common insights into the psychology ofviolence. Girard's writings usually take the form of a scientific analysis of historical data. He is attempting to frame a theory of culture which takes into account all of the data which he has encountered. It would seem that Kierkegaard's mode of thought is very different, since he is primarily concerned with the meaning of personal existence before God. But 1 Eugene Webb's Philosophers of Consciousness and The Self Between contain discussions ofKierkegaard and Girard, but they are basically parallel sections which do not include a focused comparison of the two authors. David McCracken's The Scandal ofthe Gospels makes reference to Girard and contains a chapter on Kierkegaard, but it also lacks an extended comparison. 2 See Girard 1984, 58; 1986, 173; 1988, 26-7. In his Foreword to Robert HamertonKelly (xi), Girard says, "Mimetic theory is too realistic and commonsensical to be confused with one more nihilistic stepchild ofGerman idealism. And yet, unlike the positivistic social sciences, it is not blind to paradox; it can articulate the intricacies of human relations just as effectively as a Kierkegaard or a Dostoievsky." 104Charles K Bellinger Kierkegaard was in his own way and in his own time a kind of social scientist. He engaged in an extended "anthropological contemplation" (1967-1978, 1:37), in which he attempted to map out the territory of the human spirit. Girard's thought, for its part, occasionally steps outside ofthe methodological atheism of the scientific guild to speak in theological terms. Thus in both realms, the scientific and the theological, there is the possibility of fruitful dialogue between these two authors. I am assuming that the readers ofthis essay are more familiar with the writings of Girard than with the writings of Kierkegaard. My procedure will therefore involve listing certain key concepts in Girard's thought, such as mimetic desire, envy, the social crisis, etc., followed by a search for parallel ideas in Kierkegaard. IfGirard were claiming complete originality for his interpretation of culture, my findings would show that he was in many respects foreshadowed by Kierkegaard. But, of course, he is not claiming this. He claims only to be restating and organizing insights which have already been achieved by great novelists and the Bible. I would argue that Kierkegaard is rightly seen as one of the great "novelists" who sees human culture clearly and penetratingly. It is not a coincidence that Kierkegaard's thought, like Girard's, is rooted in an interpretation ofthe Bible. After this initial survey ofsimilarities between Kierkegaard and Girard, I will outline a few possible differences between their approaches. This will lead to comments on the way in which Kierkegaard's thought can be used as a basis for understanding the motives which underlie political violence. Consequently Kierkegaard's thought can be coordinated with Girard's in such a way that the thought ofeach author is strengthened by the contribution of the other. Mimetic desire Mimetic desire is the main starting point for Girard's theory of personality and culture. Human beings have a basic feeling ofexistential lack that leads them to look to a model who seems to possess a greater fullness of being. The desires of the model are imitated in the hope of acquiring a similar fullness ofbeing. In Girard's words: When modem theorists envisage man as a being who knows what he wants, or who at least possesses an "unconscious" that knows for him, they may simply have failed to perceive the domain in which human uncertainty is most extreme. Once his Kierkegaard and Girard105 basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not... (shrink)

Fission of cellular membranes is ubiquitous and essential for life. Complex protein machineries, such as the dynamin and ESCRT spirals, have evolved to mediate membrane fission during diverse cellular processes, for example, vesicle budding. A new study suggests that non-specialized membrane-bound proteins can induce membrane fission through mass action due to protein crowding. Because up to 2/3 of the mass of cellular membranes is contributed by proteins, membrane protein crowding is an important physiological parameter. Considering the complexity of membrane shape (...) transitions during a fission reaction, spatial and temporal variability in protein distribution, and the abundance of intrinsically disordered regions in proteins on an invaginating membrane, protein crowding can have diverse consequences for fission in the cell. The question is, how and to what extent this mechanism combines with the action of dedicated fission machineries. Membrane fission, which is required for formation of vesicles or cytokinesis, can be carried out by specialized proteins like dynamin and the ESCRT complex. Recent work suggests that fission of cellular membranes, which are densely packed with proteins, can also be induced by protein crowding due to high entropic tension. (shrink)

This paper discusses the implications for public participation in science opened by the sharing of information via electronic media. The ethical dimensions of information flow and control are linked to questions of autonomy, authority and appropriate exploitation of knowledge. It argues that, by lowering the boundaries that limit access and participation by wider active audiences, both scientific identity and practice are challenged in favor of extra-disciplinary and avocational communities such as scientific enthusiasts and lay experts. Reconfigurations of hierarchy, mediated by (...) new channels of information flow, are increasingly visible at the interface between professional and non-professional practice. Setting the scene by surveying the role of the media in defining twentieth-century contexts of lay science, the paper illustrates the appropriation and recuperation of scientific authority being played out in two contemporary models of active public engagement: so-called “citizen science” and varieties of “crowd-sourced science”. Both participatory models are increasingly reliant on information exchange via social media, but may be implemented to support distinctly different societal goals and beneficiaries. (shrink)

Plato's antipathy to crowds is a commonplace that reinforces a prevailing portrait of the Socratic method as a practice that centers on individuals, to the exclusion of crowds and the many. This canonical view, however, comes into tension with the tendency of Plato's Socrates to conduct his dialogues in the presence of collective audiences. I argue that Plato's position on crowds is at once more complex and more ambivalent than has been commonly accepted. I distinguish between two (...) distinct lines of critique that Plato develops against crowds: the argument that the incentive structures that move crowds are unconducive to philosophy; and a more ambiguous argument that crowds tend not to be as amenable to control as their portrayal in the Athenian democratic imaginary seems to promise. Plato's depiction of Socratic practice can be understood as an effort to explore an alternative vision of crowd control. (shrink)

It is a popular view thatpractical deliberation excludes foreknowledge of one's choice. Wolfgang Spohn and Isaac Levi have argued that not even a purely probabilistic self-predictionis available to thedeliberator, if one takes subjective probabilities to be conceptually linked to betting rates. It makes no sense to have a betting rate for an option, for one's willingness to bet on the option depends on the net gain from the bet, in combination with the option's antecedent utility, rather than on the offered (...) odds. And even apart from this consideration, assigning probabilities to the options among which one is choosing is futile since such probabilities could be of no possible use in choice. The paper subjects these arguments to critical examination and suggests that, appearances notwithstanding, practical deliberation need not crowd outself-prediction. (shrink)

Wilderness and wildness are not related isomorphically. Wildness is the broader category; all instances of wilderness express wildness while all instances of wildness do not express wilderness. There is more than a logical distinction between wildness and wilderness, and what begins as an analytic distinction ends as an ontological one. A more rhetorical representation of this confusion is captured by the notion of synecdoche, where, in this case, wilderness the narrower term is used for wildness the more expansive term. Although (...) this might seem obvious at first glance, I contend that the two concepts are often misused taken as synonyms thus equivocally, setting back the cause of conceptual clarity in environmental philosophy in general, and environmental restoration in particular. One notable outcome has been the unfortunate dichotomy between preservation and conservation resulting in policy choices that needlessly deny integrated alternatives by illicit exclusion. This paper will clarify this confusion by demonstrating instances where the two concepts have been systematically abused—conflated—and show how Henry David Thoreau saw them as importantly separable. Finally, a clearer understanding of the distinctions between the two concepts provides the basis for a viable program of restoration based on an ethics of place. (shrink)

Houellebecq’s critical reading of Huxley’s Brave New World in his novel Atomised takes Canetti’s novel Auto da Fe as its template. Houellebecq takes from Canetti the structuring contrast of antithetical brothers and shares his diagnosis of the crisis of Western individualism. Both writers identify the sickness at the heart of Western civilization that presages its coming end as the egotism of the monadic individual, enclosed in a private world of fears and desires. The role of the crowd in Canetti’s novel (...) as the Other of the fallen world of self-interest is taken in Houellebecq by the posthuman vision of social unity beyond division realized through cloning. (shrink)

Using Big Data to better understand urban questions is an exciting field with challenging methodological and theoretical problems. It is also, however, potentially troubling when Big Data is applied uncritically to urban governance via the ideas and practices of “smart cities”. This essay reviews both the historical depth of central ideas within smart city governance —particular the idea that enough data/information/knowledge can solve society problems—but also the ways that the most recent version differs. Namely, that the motivations and ideological underpinning (...) behind the goal of urban betterment is largely driven by technology advocates and neoliberalism rather than the strong social justice themes associated with earlier applications of data to cities. Geosocial media data and metrics derived from them can provide useful insight and policy direction. But one must be ever mindful that metrics don’t simply measure; in the process of deciding what is important and possible to measure, these data are simultaneously defining what cities are. (shrink)

The “wisdom of the crowd” phenomenon refers to the finding that the aggregate of a set of proposed solutions from a group of individuals performs better than the majority of individual solutions. Most often, wisdom of the crowd effects have been investigated for problems that require single numerical estimates. We investigate whether the effect can also be observed for problems where the answer requires the coordination of multiple pieces of information. We focus on combinatorial problems such as the planar Euclidean (...) traveling salesperson problem, minimum spanning tree problem, and a spanning tree memory task. We develop aggregation methods that combine common solution fragments into a global solution and demonstrate that these aggregate solutions outperform the majority of individual solutions. These case studies suggest that the wisdom of the crowd phenomenon might be broadly applicable to problem-solving and decision-making situations that go beyond the estimation of single numbers. (shrink)

The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...) an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze and calculate the crowd density in a tourist area utilizing video surveillance dynamic information analysis and divide the crowd counting and density estimation task into three stages. In this paper, novel scale perception module and inverse scale perception module are designed to further facilitate the mining of multiscale information by the counting model; the main function of the third stage is to generate the population distribution density map, which mainly consists of three columns of void (...) convolution with different void rates and generates the final population distribution density map using the feature maps of different branch regressions. Also, the algorithm uses jump connections between the top convolution and the bottom void convolution layers to reduce the risk of network gradient disappearance and gradient explosion and optimizes the network parameters using an intermediate supervision strategy. The hierarchical density estimator uses a hierarchical strategy to mine semantic features and multiscale information in a coarse-to-fine manner, and this is used to solve the problem of scale variation and perspective distortion. Also, considering that the background noise affects the quality of the generated density map, the soft attention mechanism is integrated into the model to stretch the distance between the foreground and background to further improve the quality of the density map. Also, inspired by multitask learning, this paper embeds an auxiliary count classifier in the count model to perform the count classification auxiliary task and to increase the model’s ability to express semantic information. Numerous experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithm in solving the problems of scale variation and perspective distortion. (shrink)

According to self-categorization theory , incidents of crowd violence can be understood as discrete forms of social action, limited by the crowd's social identity. Through an analysis of the riot at Woodstock 1999, this paper explores the uses and limitations of SCT in order to reach a more complex psychology of crowd behavior, particularly those instances that appear unmotivated, irrational, and destructive. Psychological and sociological literature are synthesized to explore the role of communication in establishing social norms within the crowd. (...) Several modifications to current crowd psychology are proposed, including a false consensus effect of motivation and the mediation of personal and social identities. (shrink)

Payment for performance is widely embraced as a key component of any well-designed executive compensation package. There is a price to be paid, however, for the heavy reliance on incentives as a way of controlling agent behavior. In particular, evidence exists demonstrating that incentives can crowd out an agent’s social preferences towards her principal. Social preferences are pro-social tendencies of people to do things for others for reasons such as fairness, reciprocity, altruism, and ethical or moral beliefs. The use of (...) incentives in compensation can result in self-interested agents. When crowding out occurs, in order to elicit the desired level of performance, principals may need to increase the level of incentive employed. Crowding out therefore provides an additional account for rising levels of executive compensation. In addition, crowding theory can provide a helpful explanation for the tension around the U.S. government’s reaction to preexisting banker incentive contracts during the 2008 financial crisis. (shrink)

Critics of the gaps in our nation’s health insurance decry the absence of a health insurance “system” and the resulting “patchwork” of private and public insurance that leaves so many Americans unprotected. There is no question that these gaps are unconscionable; but they are also no accident. They are the result of policy and political choices with substantial consequences for those who remain uncovered. In my view, the fundamental political barrier to universal coverage is that our success in insuring most (...) of the nation’s population has “crowded out” our political capacity to insure the rest. This paper will explain how we arrived at the mix of private and public insurance we now have, how that mix impedes efforts to achieve universal coverage, and how “crowd-out” affects strategy for improving coverage in the future. (shrink)

Critics of the gaps in our nation’s health insurance decry the absence of a health insurance “system” and the resulting “patchwork” of private and public insurance that leaves so many Americans unprotected. There is no question that these gaps are unconscionable; but they are also no accident. They are the result of policy and political choices with substantial consequences for those who remain uncovered. In my view, the fundamental political barrier to universal coverage is that our success in insuring most (...) of the nation’s population has “crowded out” our political capacity to insure the rest. This paper will explain how we arrived at the mix of private and public insurance we now have, how that mix impedes efforts to achieve universal coverage, and how “crowd-out” affects strategy for improving coverage in the future. (shrink)

When multiple individuals interact in a conversation or as part of a large crowd, emergent structures and dynamics arise that are behavioral properties of the interacting group rather than of any individual member of that group. Recent work using traditional signal processing techniques and machine learning has demonstrated that global acoustic data recorded from a crowd at a basketball game can be used to classify emergent crowd behavior in terms of the crowd's purported emotional state. We propose that the description (...) of crowd behavior from such global acoustic data could benefit from nonlinear analysis methods derived from dynamical systems theory. Such methods have been used in recent research applying nonlinear methods to audio data extracted from music and group musical interactions. In this work, we used nonlinear analyses to extract features that are relevant to the behavioral interactions that underlie acoustic signals produced by a crowd attending a sporting event. We propose that recurrence dynamics measured from these audio signals via recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) reflect information about the behavioral dynamics of the crowd itself. We analyze these dynamics from acoustic signals recorded from crowds attending basketball games, and that were manually labeled according to the crowds' emotional state across six categories: angry noise, applause, cheer, distraction noise, positive chant, and negative chant. We show that RQA measures are useful to differentiate the emergent acoustic behavioral dynamics between these categories, and can provide insight into the recurrence patterns that underlie crowd interactions. (shrink)

Science and engineering rely on the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge to make discoveries and create new designs. Discovery-driven genome research rests on knowledge passed on via gene annotations. In response to the deluge of sequencing big data, standard annotation practice employs automated procedures that rely on majority rules. We argue this hinders progress through the generation and propagation of errors, leading investigators into blind alleys. More subtly, this inductive process discourages the discovery of novelty, which remains essential in biological (...) research and reflects the nature of biology itself. Annotation systems, rather than being repositories of facts, should be tools that support multiple modes of inference. By combining deduction, induction and abduction, investigators can generate hypotheses when accurate knowledge is extracted from model databases. A key stance is to depart from ‘the sequence tells the structure tells the function’ fallacy, placing function first. We illustrate our approach with examples of critical or unexpected pathways, using MicroScope to demonstrate how tools can be implemented following the principles we advocate. We end with a challenge to the reader. (shrink)

Wilderness and wildness are not related isomorphically. Wildness is the broader category; all instances of wilderness express wildness while all instances of wildness do not express wilderness. There is more than a logical distinction between wildness and wilderness, and what begins as an analytic distinction ends as an ontological one. A more rhetorical representation of this confusion is captured by the notion of synecdoche, where, in this case, wilderness the narrower term is used for wildness the more expansive term. Although (...) this might seem obvious at first glance, I contend that the two concepts are often misused taken as synonyms thus equivocally, setting back the cause of conceptual clarity in environmental philosophy in general, and environmental restoration in particular. One notable outcome has been the unfortunate dichotomy between preservation and conservation resulting in policy choices that needlessly deny integrated alternatives by illicit exclusion. This paper will clarify this confusion by demonstrating instances where the two concepts have been systematically abused—conflated—and show how Henry David Thoreau saw them as importantly separable. Finally, a clearer understanding of the distinctions between the two concepts provides the basis for a viable program of restoration based on an ethics of place. (shrink)

The debate on the influence of markets on virtues has focused on two opposite hypotheses: the doux commerce thesis and the self-destruction thesis. Whereas the doux commerce hypothesis assumes that capitalism polishes human manners, the self-destruction hypothesis holds that capitalism erodes the moral foundation of society. This paper will develop a more balanced position by using the virtue ethics developed by Aristotle, which distinguishes several virtues. The research will focus on the question for which virtues the doux commerce or self-destruction (...) thesis is likely to hold. An extensive literature survey shows that market competition tends to stimulate diligence, crowd out temperance, generosity, and sociability, and stimulate envy. The effect on other virtues – i.e. courage, high-spiritedness, justice, and prudence – is ambiguous. (shrink)

This paper seeks an urban poetics under the pressures of flux, polyglot babble and the rise of technoculture. In so doing it traces the intertwinements of aesthetics and politics as they manifest over the last 150 years. Charles Baudelaire’s poetry is characterised as a delirious response to the delirium of capitalist modernity, in which ‘words rise up’, as he puts it, but it is a also a barometer, which measures the degrees of entwinement of aesthetics and revolutionary politics in the (...) subsequent years, for one in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation in the 1930s and in the wild translations of the poet by Sean Bonney in 2008 in the collection ‘Baudelaire in English’. (shrink)