Sewards and Sewards argue that while computations necessary for object recognition occur throughout the ventral visual stream, object recognition awareness involves the anterior temporal lobe and the medial orbital prefrontal cortex. The present paper suggests, however, that the medial orbital prefrontal cortex has a unique contribution, namely that of producing a basic experience of a perceptual object. It is further argued that the mechanisms that produce this experience also result in making the object more important than its subparts and features. (...) Finally, it is argued that a reduction in this importance may account for some perceptual difficulties in high-functioning autism. This view is consistent with evidence for early selective abnormalities in other systems involving the medial prefrontal cortex in autism. (shrink)

Smart communities have recently gained much attention. Researchers have been trying to tackle a number of challenges faced by smart communities. Interoperability is one key challenge that occurs due to different systems using different knowledge representations. To solve interoperability problems, ontologies are seen as a promising solution as they provide a commonly agreed vocabulary for representing data that are understandable by stakeholders of smart communities. Smart communities make use of Internet of Things (IoT) and ubiquitous networks to support communication among (...) objects and devices in such environments. Smart campuses are examples of smart communities. Recently, many articles related to ontologies focusing on smart communities and smart campuses in IoT environments, have been published. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review that has been conducted using Google Scholar. 18 ontologies for smart communities/smart campuses have been identified and analyzed out of 341 articles from year 2010 to 2019. The review classifies the ontologies in terms of domain, ontologies being reused, availability online, limitations, language adopted and coverage. It additionally discusses on the standards, the level of expressiveness, the ontology development approaches and methodologies adopted by the identified ontologies. Our analysis shows that the identified ontologies have been developed based on different ontological commitments. None of them have come up with a core semantic model that models different collaborating domains in a smart campus such as smart learning, smart management, smart governance, smart room, smart health, smart library and smart parking among others and that enhances cross-domain interoperability in a such an environment. Further details on our findings are presented and discussed in the paper. (shrink)

ḥeleḳ 1. Musar ʻatsot ṿe-hanhagot -- ḥeleḳ 2. Musre haśkel ba-Torah -- ḥeleḳ 3. Ḥidushim u-veʼurim ba-Shas.

Objectives To conduct an independent evaluation of the first phase of the Health Foundation’s Safer Patients Initiative (SPI), and to identify the net additional effect of SPI and any differences in changes in participating and non-participating NHS hospitals. Design Mixed method evaluation involving five substudies, before and after design. Setting NHS hospitals in the United Kingdom. Participants Four hospitals (one in each country in the UK) participating in the first phase of the SPI (SPI1); 18 control hospitals. Intervention The SPI1 (...) was a compound (multi-component) organisational intervention delivered over 18 months that focused on improving the reliability of specific frontline care processes in designated clinical specialties and promoting organisational and cultural change. Results Senior staff members were knowledgeable and enthusiastic about SPI1. There was a small (0.08 points on a 5 point scale) but significant (P<0.01) effect in favour of the SPI1 hospitals in one of 11 dimensions of the staff questionnaire (organisational climate). Qualitative evidence showed only modest penetration of SPI1 at medical ward level. Although SPI1 was designed to engage staff from the bottom up, it did not usually feel like this to those working on the wards, and questions about legitimacy of some aspects of SPI1 were raised. Of the five components to identify patients at risk of deterioration—monitoring of vital signs (14 items); routine tests (three items); evidence based standards specific to certain diseases (three items); prescribing errors (multiple items from the British National Formulary); and medical history taking (11 items)—there was little net difference between control and SPI1 hospitals, except in relation to quality of monitoring of acute medical patients, which improved on average over time across all hospitals. Recording of respiratory rate increased to a greater degree in SPI1 than in control hospitals; in the second six hours after admission recording increased from 40% (93) to 69% (165) in control hospitals and from 37% (141) to 78% (296) in SPI1 hospitals (odds ratio for “difference in difference” 2.1, 99% confidence interval 1.0 to 4.3; P=0.008). Use of a formal scoring system for patients with pneumonia also increased over time (from 2% (102) to 23% (111) in control hospitals and from 2% (170) to 9% (189) in SPI1 hospitals), which favoured controls and was not significant (0.3, 0.02 to 3.4; P=0.173). There were no improvements in the proportion of prescription errors and no effects that could be attributed to SPI1 in non-targeted generic areas (such as enhanced safety culture). On some measures, the lack of effect could be because compliance was already high at baseline (such as use of steroids in over 85% of cases where indicated), but even when there was more room for improvement (such as in quality of medical history taking), there was no significant additional net effect of SPI1. There were no changes over time or between control and SPI1 hospitals in errors or rates of adverse events in patients in medical wards. Mortality increased from 11% (27) to 16% (39) among controls and decreased from 17% (63) to 13% (49) among SPI1 hospitals, but the risk adjusted difference was not significant (0.5, 0.2 to 1.4; P=0.085). Poor care was a contributing factor in four of the 178 deaths identified by review of case notes. The survey of patients showed no significant differences apart from an increase in perception of cleanliness in favour of SPI1 hospitals. Conclusions The introduction of SPI1 was associated with improvements in one of the types of clinical process studied (monitoring of vital signs) and one measure of staff perceptions of organisational climate. There was no additional effect of SPI1 on other targeted issues nor on other measures of generic organisational strengthening. (shrink)

Ḳitsur Ḥovat ha-levavot me-Rabenu Asher mi-Lunil -- Ḳitsur Ḥovat ha-levavot mi-sefer Tsedah la-derekh -- Ḳitsur Ḥovat ha-levavot ʻAśarah hilulim -- Ḳitsur Ḥovat ha-levavot Margaliyot ṭovot.

Mentoring Away the Glass Ceiling in Academia: A Cultured Critique describes how women of diverse backgrounds perceive their mentoring experiences or the lack of mentoring experiences in the academy. This book provides a space for envisioning strategies and practices to improve mentoring practices and the collegiate environment.

Probability weighting is a marked feature of decision-making under risk. For poor people in rural areas of developing countries, how probabilities are evaluated matters for livelihoods decisions, especially the probabilities associated with losses. Previous studies of risky choice among poor people in developing countries seldom consider losses and do not offer a refined tracking of the probability-weighting function. We investigate probability weighting among smallholder farmers in Uganda, separately for losses and for gains, using a method that allows refined tracking of (...) the PWF for a population with low levels of literacy. For losses, we find marked probability weighting near zero, which is in line with evidence found in Western labs. For gains, the absence of probability weighting is remarkable, particularly its absence near 100%. We also find marked differences in probability weighting for traditional farmers which are in line with the observed livelihoods strategies in the study area. (shrink)

Joseph Ben-David (1920-1986) fut un des sociologues des sciences les plus innovateurs et les plus en vue des années soixante et soixante-dix. Travaillant dans le cadre des théories sociologiques de Max Weber, Talcott Parsons et Robert Kmerton, il élabora dans ses ouvrages et nombreux articles une théorie sociologique originale du développement scientifique. Par sa démarche diachronique, il se démarque des sociologues des sciences de l'école fonctionnaliste ; par sa perspective sociologique, il définit des nouvelles problématiques qui viennent s'ajouter à celles (...) des historiens des sciences travaillant dans une optique " internaliste ". Dans le présent ouvrage ont été réunis et traduits les articles les plus importants de Ben-David, qui, ensemble, dessinent les contours d'une sociologie historique des sciences. Par son pouvoir explicatif, cette théorie est à même d'enrichir la pratique de l'historien des sciences, tandis que, par sa réaffirmation des vertus éthiques des rôles sociaux du savant et de l'Université, elle est d'une grande actualité pour les débats sur l'enseignement supérieur en France. (shrink)

(2013). ‘Damn'd to Sythes and Spades’: Labour and Wealth Creation in the Writing of Bernard Mandeville. Intellectual History Review: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 187-205. doi: 10.1080/17496977.2012.731142.

En croisant l’interprétation d’enregistrements cardiovasculaires avec le recueil de l’expérience émotionnelle, au lieu de chercher les oscillations cérébrales corrélatives des illusions perceptives, on remédie à la différence d’échelle qui hypothéquait la méthode des contraintes mutuelles de Varela. La cardiophénoménologie propose un modèle dynamique de la surprise associant les variations d’indices physiologiques à une analyse husserlienne des phases du vécu. Une expérimentation avec des patientes dépressives soumises à une tâche émotionnelle combinée à l’entretien d’explicitation semble devoir valider une hypothèse d’hyporéactivité de (...) la dépression en réaction à la surprise. (shrink)

There are cases of ineffable learning — i. e., cases where an agent learns something, but becomes certain of nothing that she can express — where it is rational to update by Jeffrey conditionalization. But there are likewise cases of ineffable learning where updating by Jeffrey conditionalization is irrational. In this paper, we first characterize a novel class of cases where it is irrational to update by Jeffrey conditionalization. Then we use the d-separation criterion to develop a causal understanding of (...) when and when not to Jeffrey conditionalize that bars updating by Jeffrey conditionalization in these cases. Finally, we reflect on how the possibility of so-called “unfaithful” causal systems bears on the normative force of the causal updating norm that we advocate. (shrink)

The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms to correct the literature, much time and money is wasted on research based on a crumbling foundation. These guidelines serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record. Delineating these complementary roles and proposing solutions for common (...) barriers provide a foundation for best practices. (shrink)

In most decision-making situations, there is a plethora of information potentially available to people. Deciding what information to gather and what to ignore is no small feat. How do decision makers determine in what sequence to collect information and when to stop? In two experiments, we administered a version of the German cities task developed by Gigerenzer and Goldstein (1996), in which participants had to decide which of two cities had the larger population. Decision makers were not provided with the (...) names of the cities, but they were able to collect different kinds of cues for both response alternatives (e.g., “Does this city have a university?”) before making a decision. Our experiments differed in whether participants were free to determine the number of cues they examined. We demonstrate that a novel model, using hierarchical latent mixtures and Bayesian inference (Lee & Newell, 2011) provides a more complete description of the data from both experiments than simple conventional strategies, such as the take–the–best or the Weighted Additive heuristics. (shrink)

The “Averroism” of Ibn Ṭumlūs (d. 620/1223) has already been attested to by both biographers and textual evidence. Conversely, a close reading of a section in his Kitāb al-Qiyās of his Mukhtaṣar fī al-mantiq (Compendium on Logic) reveals that this “Averroism” has a specific resonance. Unlike Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198), Ibn Ṭumlūs belongs to this group of philosophers who dedicated a special section to the examination of jurisprudential inferences, titled by him “al-Qawl fī al-maqāyīs al-fiqhiyyah”, which is a part of (...) his Kitāb al-Qiyās. In this article, first, I will introduce the text of Ibn Ṭumlūs, and present its teaching by placing it in its intellectual context, namely in the light of al-Fārābī’s, al-Ghazālī’s, and Ibn Rushd’s relevant texts. Then, I provide an English translation followed by a critical edition of the Arabic text. The purpose is to highlight the value (and limitations) of Ibn Ṭumlūs’s effort, based on al-Fārābī (d. 339/950), al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) and Ibn Rushd, to apply Aristotelian syllogistic model to the jurisprudential inferences. (shrink)

The Sphere Model of Consciousness (SMC) delineates a sphere-shaped matrix that aims to describe the phenomenology of experience using geometric coordinates. According to SMC, an experience of overcoming of the habitual self and the conditioning of memories could be placed at the center of the matrix, which can be then called the Place of Pre-Existence (PPE). The PPE is causally associated with self-determination. In this context, we suggest that silence could be considered as an intentional state enabling self-perception to be (...) focused on the “here and now,” which in turn improves perception of one’s own body in space. To investigate these hypotheses grounded in the model, the current preliminary study examined the Place of Pre-Existence Technique (PPEt), in which practitioners are guided to focus on a self-defined aim; reach a state of detachment from the habitual self; envision the future. 481 volunteers PPEt practitioners completed self-report questionnaires before and after an intensive 3-day meditative training. We analyzed the possibly relationship between subjective experiences related to physical, emotional, mental, temporal, and spatial aspects, as well as self-determination and silence, before and after training. The results indicated a shift from a prevailing influence of mental dimension on the other aspects of experience, to a prevailing influence of spatial dimension. Silence was reported more often following the training, and predominantly related to the mental and emotional experiences. The results are discussed in relation to the shift from Narrative to Minimal Self and to increased balance among the considered dimensions. (shrink)

The arts of rule cover the exercise of power by princes and popular sovereigns, but they range beyond the domain of government itself, extending to civil associations, political parties, and religious institutions. Making full use of political philosophy from a range of backgrounds, this festschrift for Harvey Mansfield recognizes that although the arts of rule are comprehensive, the best government is a limited one.