This book traces rabbinic thought on the near-universal phenomenon of legal circumventions, finding licit ways to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. Rabbinic literature does not fully reject or accept loopholing, but instead determine acceptability based on whether their outcome and their process maintain the values and the integrity of the law.

College students struggle with the switch from thinking of mathematics as a calculation based subject to a problem solving based subject. This book describes how the introduction to proofs course can be taught in a way that gently introduces students to this new way of thinking. This introduction utilizes recent research in neuroscience regarding how the brain learns best. Rather than jumping right into proofs, students are first taught how to change their mindset about learning, how to persevere through difficult (...) problems, how to work successfully in a group, and how to reflect on their learning. With these tools in place, students then learn logic and problem solving as a further foundation. Next various proof techniques such as direct proofs, proof by contraposition, proof by contradiction, and mathematical induction are introduced. These proof techniques are introduced using the context of number theory. The last chapter uses Calculus as a way for students to apply the proof techniques they have learned. (shrink)

Resenha do livro: ALMEIDA, Rute Salviano; PINHEIRO, Jaqueline Sousa. _Reformadoras: Mulheres que influenciaram a reforma e ajudaram a mudar a igreja e o mundo. _Rio de Janeiro: Godbooks, 2021, 240 p.

The boundaries of the ethical have traditionally coincided with the boundaries of humanity. This, however, is no longer the case. Scientific developments, such as genetic engineering, stem-cell research, cloning, the Human Genome Project, new paleontological evidence, and the rise of neuropsychology call into question the very notion of human being and thus require a new conceptual map for ethical judgment. The contours of this map may be seen to emerge in works of science fiction (SF), which not only vividly dramatize (...) the implications and consequences of new technologies and discoveries, but also exert a powerful influence on culture, creating a feedback loop of images and ideas. This essay focuses on three SF topoi: the human/animal evolutionary boundary; non-biological subjectivity (AI); and the human/alien interaction. It explores each of these topoi in a selection of SF texts, including novels by H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Stanislaw Lem and others, showing how the boundaries of humanity are expanded and then exploded through the radical subversion of the tenets of liberal humanism. (shrink)

This article deals with the representation of identical twins in the films Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway and Dead Ringers by David Cronenberg. It situates the films in a cultural and political context of the 20th-century controversies surrounding the issues of evolution, reproduction and cloning. The article claims that twinship represents the corporeal economy of the Same, whose ideological meanings have been shaped by the history of eugenics and social Darwinism. Identical twinship inscribes a utopia of the perfect, (...) unchanging and self-identical body, opposed to the unpredictability, confusion and contingency of sexual reproduction and evolutionary history. The films under discussion critique the utopian ideology of twinship and its imaginary cancellation of difference as narcissistic and deadly. (shrink)

By confronting variable use, the variationist method can reveal patterns of subjectification of grammatical morphemes. Applying this method to the analysis of salir(se) ‘go out’ variation in Mexican Spanish oral data, we conclude that subjectification is manifested structurally in the tendency for middle-marked salirse to co-occur with first-person singular or referents close to the speaker, positive polarity and the past tense. Further comparative dialectal and diachronic data indicate the origins of the se -marked form in physical spatial deviation. Usage of (...) the form then extends to situations that denote deviation from social norms. We thus propose that the locus of subjectification of this counter-expectation marker is an increasingly speaker-based construal of expectation. This semantic change appears to proceed via absorption of contextual meaning in the frequently occurring + de ‘from’ construction. (shrink)

Analisar as relações sociais e econômicas efetuadas numa dada sociedade é de vital importância para sua compreensão. Neste artigo o objetivo estará voltado para compreender as estratégias de sobrevivência utilizadas pela família de Antônio Augusto Bicalho Canêdo, o maior proprietário de escravos da freguesia de São Paulo do Muriahé. As fontes utilizadas serão os registros de batismos, casamentos e o inventário post-mortem relacionadas ao nosso personagem.

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 121-131, April 2022. The aim of this article is to explore how some aspects of Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation may contribute to outlining a posthumanist theory of emotions. According to Simondon, the relation between affection and emotion is a key case study for examining the transindividual character of psychosocial individuation. Affection and emotion appear to him not as a binary opposition, but as an example of a transductive operation. The article suggests the (...) concept of ‘transindividual affect’ as a way of challenging some key dualisms. From this perspective, Simondon can contribute to a redefinition of the human from the non-dualistic and non-anthropocentric perspective that characterises critical posthumanism. (shrink)

Neonatal brain monitoring in the neonatal intensive care units (NICU) requires a continuous review of the spontaneous cortical activity, i.e., the electroencephalograph (EEG) background activity. This needs development of bedside methods for an automated assessment of the EEG background activity. In this paper, we present development of the key components of a neonatal EEG background classifier, starting from the visual background scoring to classifier design, and finally to possible bedside visualization of the classifier results. A dataset with 13,200 5-minute EEG (...) epochs (8–16 channels) from 27 infants with birth asphyxia was used for classifier training after scoring by two independent experts. We tested three classifier designs based on 98 computational features, and their performance was assessed with respect to scoring system, pre- and post-processing of labels and outputs, choice of channels, and visualization in monitor displays. The optimal solution achieved an overall classification accuracy of 97% with a range across subjects of 81–100%. We identified a set of 23 features that make the classifier highly robust to the choice of channels and missing data due to artefact rejection. Our results showed that an automated bedside classifier of EEG background is achievable, and we publish the full classifier algorithm to allow further clinical replication and validation studies. (shrink)

Community based research is conducted by, for, and with the participation of community members, and aims to ensure that knowledge contributes to making a concrete and constructive difference in the world (The Loka Institute 2002). Yet decisions about research ethics are often controlled outside the research community itself. In this analysis we grapple with the imposition of a community confidentiality clause and the implications it had for consent, confidentiality, and capacity in a province-wide community based research project. Through untangling these (...) implications we provide recommendations for reframing how to think about research ethics and strategies for enabling research ethics’ processes to be more responsive to and respectful of community-based research. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a methodology to maximize the benefits of interdisciplinary cooperation in AI research groups. Firstly, we build the case for the importance of interdisciplinarity in research groups as the best means to tackle the social implications brought about by AI systems, against the backdrop of the EU Commission proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act. As we are an interdisciplinary group, we address the multi-faceted implications of the mass-scale diffusion of AI-driven technologies. The result of our exercise (...) lead us to postulate the necessity of a behavioural theory that standardizes the interaction process of interdisciplinary groups. In light of this, we conduct a review of the existing approaches to interdisciplinary research on AI appliances, leading to the development of methodologies like ethics-by-design and value-sensitive design, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. We then put forth an iterative process theory hinging on a narrative approach consisting of four phases: definition of the hypothesis space, building-up of a common lexicon, scenario-building, interdisciplinary self-assessment. Finally, we identify the most relevant fields of application for such a methodology and discuss possible case studies. (shrink)

With the purpose of introducing a useful tool for researches concerning foundations of quantum mechanics and applications to quantum technologies, here we address three quantumness quantifiers for bipartite optical systems: one is based on sub-shot-noise correlations, one is related to antibunching and one springs from entanglement determination. The specific cases of parametric downconversion seeded by thermal, coherent and squeezed states are discussed in detail.

L’ouvrage, publié sous la direction de Simona Feci et Laura Schettini, est le prolongement d’un colloque organisé par la Società Italiana delle Storiche (Société italienne des historiennes, association sœur de Mnémosyne) à Rome en 2015. Nos collègues italiennes souhaitaient apporter un regard historien sur les violences faites aux femmes, sujet qui connaissait alors, et en particulier autour de la notion de féminicide, une forte résonnance dans la péninsule. Le sujet n’était heureusement pas...