The siren call of individualism is compelling. And although we have recognized its dangerous allure in the realm of adult decision-making, it has had profound and yet unnoticed dangerous effects in pediatric decision-making as well. Liberal individualism as instantiated in the best interest standard conceptualizes the child as independent and unencumbered and the goal of child rearing as rational autonomous adulthood, a characterization that is both ontologically false and normatively dangerous. Although a notion of the individuated child might have a (...) place in establishing a threshold of care obligated and enforced by the state, beyond this context we should turn our attention more explicitly to the relational interests of children. (shrink)

There is no doubt that custard apple diseases are among the important reasons that destroy the Custard Apple plant and its agricultural crops. This leads to obvious damage to these plants and they become inedible. Discovering these diseases is a good step to provide the appropriate and correct treatment. Determining the treatment with high accuracy depends on the method used to correctly diagnose the disease, expert systems can greatly help in avoiding damage to these plants. The expert system correctly diagnoses (...) Custard Apple disease to make it easier for farmers to find the right treatment based on the appropriate diagnosis. Objectives: A specialized syllable language system was established for the diagnosis of Custard Apple plant disease. (shrink)

Context: The idea for this article sprang from a desire to revive a conversation with the late Ernst von Glasersfeld on the heuristic function - and epistemological status - of forms of ideations that resist linguistic or empirical scrutiny. A close look into the uses of humor seemed a thread worth pursuing, albeit tenuous, to further explore some of the controversies surrounding the evocative power of the imaginal and other oblique forms of knowing characteristic of creative individuals. Problem: People generally (...) respond to humor, i.e., they are inclined to smile at things they find funny. People like to crack jokes, make puns, and, starting at age two, human infants engage in pretense or fantasy play. Research on creativity, on the other hand, has mostly scorned the trickster within. Cognitivists in particular are quick to relegate wit, whimsy, and even playfulness to the ranks of artful or poetic frivolities. Method: We use the emblems of the craftsman, the trickster, and the poet to highlight some of the oblique ways of knowing by which creative thinkers bring forth new insights. Each epitomizes dimensions intrinsic to the art of “possibilizing.” Taken together, they help us better understand what it means to be playful beyond curious, rigorous beyond reasonable, and why this should matter, even to constructivists! Results: The musings characteristic of creative individuals speak to intelligent beings’ ability to use glitches intentionally or serendipitously as a means to open up possibilities; to hold on to a thought before spelling it out; and to resist treating words or images as conventional and arbitrary signs regardless of their evocative power. To fall into nominalism, Bachelard insisted, is a poet’s nightmare! Implications: Psyche is image, said Jung, and when we feel alive we rely on the imaginal to guide our reason. Note that image is not here to be understood as a picture in the head or a photographic snapshot of the world. The imaginal does not represent, it brings forth what we understand beyond words. It does not lock us into a single mode. Instead, it is a call to be mindful, in Ellen Langer’s sense: in the present, mentally alert, and on the outlook for our psyche’s own surprising wisdom (sagacity. Constructivist content: Debates on the heuristic function and epistemological status of oblique ways of knowing have long occupied constructivist scholars. I can only guess whether my uses of Jung’s imaginal or Bachelard’s anti-nominalism would have amused or exasperated Ernst! I do know that, on occasion, Ernst the connoisseur, bricoleur, and translator allowed the rationalist-within to include the poet’s power to evoke as a legitimate form of rationality. He himself has written about oblique knowing as legit! (shrink)

Bowra , referring to the image of the , and to the striking impression , states ‘Pindar seems to fuse two unusually disparate images into a single result… While the sheddingof leaves implies that he would have grown old without winning any wide renown, the cock means that such renown as he would have got would have beenof little account in the Greek world at large.’ Gildersleeve's comment ad loc, ‘The thus becomes a flower’, implies a similar assumption, that the (...) secondimage is entirely unconnected with the first. (shrink)

Human Papillomavirus (HPV) types are sexually transmitted infections that cause a number of human cancers. According to the competitive exclusion principle in ecology, HPV types that have lower transmission probabilities and shorter durations of infection should be outcompeted by more virulent types. This, however, is not the case, as numerous HPV types co-exist, some which are less transmissible and more easily cleared than others. This paper examines whether this exception to the competitive exclusion principle can be explained by the aggregation (...) of infection with HPV types, which results in patchy spatial distributions of infection, and what implications this has for the effect of vaccination on multiple HPV types. A deterministic transmission model is presented that models the patchy distribution of infected individuals using Lloyd’s mean crowding. It is first shown that higher aggregation can result in a reduced capacity for onward transmission and reduce the required efficacy of vaccination. It is shown that greater patchiness in the distribution of lower prevalence HPV types permits co-existence. This affirms the hypothesis that the aggregation of HPV types provides an explanation for the violation of the competitive exclusion principle. Greater aggregation of lower prevalence types has important implications where type-specific HPV vaccines also offer cross-protection against non-target types. It is demonstrated that the degree of cross-protection can be less than the degree of vaccine protection conferred against directly targeted types and still result in the elimination of non-target types when these non-target types are patchily distributed. (shrink)

Aelivs donatvs, the note d grammarian of the fourth century of our era, wrote commentaries on Terence and Virgil. The commentary on Terence has been preserved, though in a curiously heterogeneous form which thus far has defied analysis. The most plausible supposition is that our present text is a conflation of two commentaries, one by Donatus himself, and one by Euanthius, whose work was obviously utilized for part of the introductory note on comedy. But even if this is the right (...) statement of the question, the question remains to be solved. The problem of the commentary on Virgil is, unfortunately, more simple, or at least is universally adjudged more simple. We have extant Donatus's life of Virgil, his dedicatory letter to Lucius Munatius, and his introductory remarks on Bucolic poetry. The commentary itself, save for scattered references in later grammarians, glossaries, and commentaries, has been lost. (shrink)

Cartesianer und Wittgensteinianer diskutieren über die logischen Grundlagen der Empfindungssprache. Mit einem Gedankenexperiment suggeriert der Cartesianer die Notwendigkeit, "private Objekte" anzunehmen. Der Wittgensteinianer deckt die "grammatische Täuschung" auf, der der Cartesianer dabei unterliegt. Nun sucht dieser, seinen Ansatz zu retten, indem er die Empfindungen des anderen als "theoretische Entitäten" (etwa im Rahmen der Himphysiologie) konstruiert: Neucartesianismus. Bestimmte empirische Befunde könnten ihn dabei aber in das Dilemma bringen, entweder seine Theorie oder seine "natürliche Einstellung" zum anderen Menschen aufzugeben. Allerdings bleibt auch (...) dem Wittgensteinianer ein ähnliches Dilemma letztlich nicht erspart. (shrink)

Upshot: In view of Kenny’s clinical insights, Hug’s notes on the intricacies of rational vs. a-rational “knowing” in the design sciences, and Chronaki & Kynigos’s notice of mathematics teachers’ meta-communication on experiences of change, this response reframes the heuristic power of bisociation and suspension of disbelief in the light of Kelly’s notion of “as-if-ism” (constructive alternativism. Doing as-if and playing what-if, I reiterate, are critical to mitigating intra-and inter-personal relations, or meta-communicating. Their epistemic status within the radical constructivist framework is (...) cast in the context of mutually enriching conversational techniques, or language-games, inspired by Maturana’s concepts of “objectivity in parenthesis” and the multiverse. (shrink)

This second visit to the place of Virgil's birth was made partly in actuality—for my wife and I, before taking part in the Virgilian Cruise of last summer, spent two delightful days at Pietole with our hosts, the Signori Prati, and our guest and friend Bruno Nardi—and partly in a renewed pondering of the arguments presented by my friend Professor Conway both in his earlier article and in his recent review of the question, to which, as he says, I had (...) urged him to return. I promised him at the time that if he should not speak the last word on the subject, I would still further defend the view commonly accepted until he bestowed an extraordinary publicity on Calvisano and Carpenedolo. He declares that I maintain the traditional site at Pietole, ‘though not perhaps with very great confidence.’ He further implies that I ‘do not want to accept the evidence of Probus because “I prefer” to believe a mediaeval tradition.’ Let me assure him and the reader that I do not regard a mediaeval tradition per se as better proof than the certain statement of an ancient authority. I have been led, by studies in various fields, to respect tradition in general until it is disproved, and to lay the burden of the argument on those who would disprove it. But the mere sight of something hoary and mediaeval does not prompt me to exclaim, ‘Media Aetas locuta est; causa finita est’ I relish the attempts of an iconoclast to destroy rigid error, and accept his destruction if it is accomplished. In the present case, however, I have ‘very great confidence’ that Conway's assault on the tradition has come to naught. Possibly some new and unexpected evidence may yet be discovered, showing that Virgil was born at Calvisano, or Carpenedolo, or at some other site than Pietole—but nobody has presented it yet. (shrink)

We may now consider this ancient evidence that Andes lay three miles away from Mantua in connection with Conway's remaining arguments and with Virgil's ‘own statement’ in his Bucolics.In the matter of the inscriptions, Conway's ‘impenitence’ does nothing to strengthen his case. All the points that he raises in an apparent refutation had been met by me. I had distinguished between public and private inscriptions, as Conway had not done in his earlier article, where he declared the period of the (...) two monuments to be ‘Virgil's own,’ the inscriptions being ‘cut in the style which marks the best work between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50.’ I had not, as he asserts, failed to notice the point that caps the climax of his recent article, that ‘the P. Magius who wrote the inscription of Casalpoglio … was related to Virgil's mother.’ I was inclined to date both inscriptions, with the approval of Professor Egbert, somewhere in the third quarter of the first century of our era, but ‘even allowing for them both a date as early as the end of the first century B.C.,’ which is apparently as far back as Conway means to stretch their date, I clamored for an inscription of the time of Virgil's birth if it were to serve as evidence for his birthplace. This point is not met by Conway. If Virgil was born at Pietole, his fame and his family could certainly have extended as far north as Casalpoglio and Calvisano at the time of his death in 19 B.C. Supposing that we knew on other evidence that he was born at Calvisano, the presence of an inscription with the name of Magius or Vergilius would corroborate that evidence. (shrink)