Driven by the use cases of PubChemRDF and SCAIView, we have developed a first community-based clinical trial ontology (CTO) by following the OBO Foundry principles. CTO uses the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the top level ontology and reuses many terms from existing ontologies. CTO has also defined many clinical trial-specific terms. The general CTO design pattern is based on the PICO framework together with two applications. First, the PubChemRDF use case demonstrates how a drug Gleevec is linked to multiple (...) clinical trials investigating Gleevec’s related chemical compounds. Second, the SCAIView text mining engine shows how the use of CTO terms in its search algorithm can identify publications referring to COVID-19-related clinical trials. Future opportunities and challenges are discussed. (shrink)

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called (...) Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up. (shrink)

This book is the first to outline the history of the tactic of 'no platforming' at British universities since the 1970s, looking at more than four decades of student protest against racist and fascist figures on campus. The tactic of 'no platforming' has been used at British universities and colleges since the National Union of Students adopted the policy in the mid-1970s. The author traces the origins of the tactic from the militant anti-fascism of the 1930s-1940s and looks at how (...) it has developed since the 1970s, being applied to various targets over the last 40 years, including sexists, homophobes, right-wing politicians and Islamic fundamentalists. This book provides a historical intervention in the current debates over the alleged free speech 'crisis' perceived to be plaguing universities in Britain, as well as North America and Australasia. No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech is for academics and students, as well as the general reader, interested in modern British history, politics and higher education. Readers interested in contemporary debates over freedom of speech and academic freedom will also have much to discover in this book. (shrink)

In this roundtable discussion, early-career researchers working in the field of law, gender, and sexuality discuss international and trans-national developments to legal gender. ‘The Future of Legal Gender’ research project focused on the legislative framework of England and Wales to develop a prototype for decertification. The domestic legislation, however, was situated within a wider international context throughout the project. This roundtable discussion, therefore, provided an opportunity for reflection on the transnational issues raised by decertification, with a particular focus on developments (...) arising in the jurisdiction(s) studied by the early career researchers. The roundtable began with a brief outline of these recent developments before moving to an open discussion on key themes including the value of reform on wider society, changes on-the-ground by non-state actors, and alternative processes for tackling gender inequalities without certifying legal gender. The online conversation took place on 28 June 2021 and has been transcribed and edited for continuity, clarity, and referencing. (shrink)

This qualitative study was positioned within an emerging scientific field concerned with the interaction between biblical text and the psychological profile of the preacher. The theoretical framework was provided by the sensing, intuition, feeling and thinking approach to biblical hermeneutics, an approach rooted in reader-perspective hermeneutical theory and in Jungian psychological type theory that explores the distinctive readings of sensing perception and intuitive perception, and the distinctive readings of thinking evaluation and feeling evaluation. The empirical methodology was provided by developing (...) a research tradition concerned with applying the SIFT approach to biblical text. In the present study, a group of 17 Anglican clergy were invited to work in psychological type-alike groups to explore two of the biblical passages identified by Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary for the Feast of Christ the King. Dividing into three workshops, according to their preferences for sensing and intuition, the clergy explored Psalm 93. Dividing into three workshops, according to their preferences for thinking and feeling, the clergy explored John 18:33–37. The rich data gathered from these workshops supported the hypothesis that biblical interpretation and preaching may be shaped by the reader’s psychological type preference and suggested that the passages of scripture proposed for the Feast of Christ the King may be a joy for intuitive thinking types, but a nightmare for sensing feeling types.Contribution: Situated within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, the SIFT method is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type of the reader in shaping the interpretation of text. Employing this method, the present study contributes to the fields of homiletics and hermeneutics by demonstrating how some readers may struggle more than others to interpret the scripture readings proposed by the lectionary for the Feast of Christ the King. (shrink)

Introductions to the theory of knowledge are plentiful, but none introduce students to the most recent debates that exercise contemporary philosophers. Ian Evans and Nicholas D. Smith aim to change that. Their book guides the reader through the standard theories of knowledge while simultaneously using these as a springboard to introduce current debates. Each chapter concludes with a “Current Trends” section pointing the reader to the best literature dominating current philosophical discussion. These include: the puzzle of reasonable disagreement; the (...) so-called “problem of easy knowledge”; the intellectual virtues; and new theories in the philosophy of language relating to knowledge. Chapters include discussions of skepticism, the truth condition, belief and acceptance, justification, internalism versus externalism, epistemic evaluation, and epistemic contextualism. Evans and Smith do not merely offer a review of existing theories and debates; they also offer a novel theory that takes seriously the claim that knowledge is not unique to humans. Surveying current scientific literature in animal ethology, they discover surprising sophistication and diversity in non-human cognition. In their final analysis the authors provide a unified account of knowledge that manages to respect and explain this diversity. They argue that animals know when they make appropriate use of the cognitive processes available to animals of that kind, in environments within which those processes are veridically well-adapted. _Knowledge_ is a lively and accessible volume, ideal for undergraduate and post-graduate students. It is also set to spark debate among scholars for its novel approaches to traditional topics and its thoroughgoing commitment to naturalism. (shrink)

Past experience with video games and cognitive abilities have been hypothesized to independently facilitate a greater ability to learn new video games and other complex tasks. The present study was conducted to examine this “learning to learn” hypothesis. We examined the predictive effects of gaming habits and cognitive abilities on learning of two novel video games in 107 participants. One video game was from the action genre, and the other was from the strategy genre. Hours spent gaming per week and (...) working memory were found to specifically predict learning of the novel strategy video game, after controlling for the effects of age, gender, and action game learning. In contrast, self-identification as a “gamer” was the only specific significant predictor of action game learning, after controlling for the effects of age, gender, and strategy game learning. Age of the participant negatively impacted learning of both games; however, the pattern of the predictive relationships on both action and strategy game learning was not moderated by age. Importantly, a preference for the action versus the strategy game genre had no differential effects on learning of the two novel games, nor were there any gender differences in identification as a gamer or genre preference. Findings from this study suggest that while past gaming experience and cognition do appear to influence the learning of novel video games, these effects are selective to the game genre studied and are not as broad as the “learning to learn” model suggests. (shrink)

Despite its prominence in traditional societies and its apparent commonsense appeal, the moral tradition of Role Ethics has been largely neglected in mainstream normative theory. Role Ethics is the view that the duties and/or virtues of social life are determined largely by the social roles we incur in the communities we inhabit. This essay aims to address two of the main challenges that hinder Role Ethics from garnering more serious consideration as a legitimate normative theory, namely that it is ill-suited (...) to support a theory of right action that can enhance moral reasoning, and that it countenances certain unjust roles such as that of slave or slave-owner. Taking inspiration from contemporary social science, we argue that proponents of Role Ethics can adopt a view that reduces the apparent diversity of role obligations to four prototypical types of role duties. We propose a contemporary version of Role Ethics that coheres with human moral psychology, and which lends itself to a relatively pragmatic theory of right action that precludes the possibility of unjust roles. (shrink)

The Communist Party of Great Britain, as the largest organization to the left of the Labour Party and an influential body within the trade union movement, occupied an important position in the anti-racist and anti-colonial movements in Britain from the 1920s until the 1970s. As black immigration from the Commonwealth flowed into Britain between the late 1940s and early 1960s, the CPGB was involved in campaigns against racism and for colonial independence. However it continually encountered the difficult task of situating (...) its anti-racist activities within the wider class struggle. At the same time, the Party's traditional Marxist understanding of the issues of racism and colonialism were altered significantly by the decolonization process and the rise of new social movements. The CPGB viewed the issues of "race" and racism, within a Marxist framework, and this had implications for the practical issues in the struggle against racism. At the core of this problem was overcoming the traditional view on the white left of black workers as still "colonials" or "outsiders," whose problems had been subsumed within the wider class struggle. (shrink)

Ben Segal, our fiction curator, presents interviews with Maggie Nelson and Evan Lavender-Smith as well as "outtakes" from their books Bluets and From Old Notebooks. The authors discuss working with fragments, taxonomy, and narratology.

Scholars of classical philosophy have long disputed whether Aristotle was a dialectical thinker. Most agree that Aristotle contrasts dialectical reasoning with demonstrative reasoning, where the former reasons from generally accepted opinions and the latter reasons from the true and primary. Starting with a grasp on truth, demonstration never relinquishes it. Starting with opinion, how could dialectical reasoning ever reach truth, much less the truth about first principles? Is dialectic then an exercise that reiterates the prejudices of one's times and at (...) best allows one to persuade others by appealing to these prejudices, or is it the royal road to first principles and philosophical wisdom? In From Puzzles to Principles? May Sim gathers experts to argue both these positions and offer a variety of interpretive possibilities. The contributors' thoughtful reflections on the nature and limits of dialectic should play a crucial role in Aristotelian scholarship. (shrink)

Broadening access to both computational and educational resources is crit- ical to diffusing machine learning (ML) innovation. However, today, most ML resources and experts are siloed in a few countries and organizations. In this article, we describe our pedagogical approach to increasing access to applied ML through a massive open online course (MOOC) on Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML). We suggest that TinyML, applied ML on resource-constrained embedded devices, is an attractive means to widen access because TinyML leverages low-cost and globally (...) accessible hardware and encourages the development of complete, self-contained applications, from data collection to deployment. To this end, a collaboration between academia and industry produced a four part MOOC that provides application-oriented instruction on how to develop solutions using TinyML. The series is openly available on the edX MOOC platform, has no prerequisites beyond basic programming, and is designed for global learners from a variety of backgrounds. It introduces real-world applications, ML algorithms, data-set engineering, and the ethi- cal considerations of these technologies through hands-on programming and deployment of TinyML applications in both the cloud and on their own microcontrollers. To facili- tate continued learning, community building, and collaboration beyond the courses, we launched a standalone website, a forum, a chat, and an optional course-project com- petition. We also open-sourced the course materials, hoping they will inspire the next generation of ML practitioners and educators and further broaden access to cutting-edge ML technologies. (shrink)

We propose a domain-level ontology of plays for the facilitation of play-based collaborative autonomy among unmanned and manned-unmanned aircraft teams in the Army’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) mission domain. We define a play as a type of plan that prescribes some pattern of intentional acts that are intended to reliably result in some goal in some competitive context, and which specifies one or more roles that are realized by those prescribed intentional acts. The ontology is well suited to be extended (...) to other types of military and nonmilitary unmanned vehicle operations. (shrink)

Applied ontologies have been used more and more frequently to enhance systems engineering. In this paper, we argue that adopting principles of ontological realism can increase the benefits that ontologies have already been shown to provide to the systems engineering process. Moreover, adopting Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), an ISO standard for top-level ontologies from which more domain specific ontologies are constructed, can lead to benefits in four distinct areas of systems engineering: (1) interoperability, (2) standardization, (3) testing, and (4) data (...) exploitation. Reaping these benefits in a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) context requires utilizing an ontology’s vocabulary when modeling systems and entities within those systems. If the chosen ontology abides by the principles of ontological realism, a semantic standard capable of uniting distinct domains, using BFO as a hub, can be leveraged to promote greater interoperability among systems. As interoperability and standardization increase, so does the ability to collect data during the testing and implementation of systems. These data can then be reasoned over by computational reasoners using the logical axioms within the ontology. This, in turn, generates new data that would have been impossible or too inefficient to generate without the aid of computational reasoners. (shrink)

? We gratefully acknowledge the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson, which provided a grant for the support of this work. E.T. is also supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences. 1 See David Woodruff Smith.

Taking up the significance of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death in an Iranian street protest and novelist Zadie Smith’s analysis of President Obama, I offer an account of society as a “multivoiced body.” This body consists of “voices” that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. Viewing society in this manner implies the simultaneous valorization of solidarity, diversity, and the creation of new voices as well as the kind of “hearing others” that makes these three (...) political virtues possible. It also encourages resistance to the always present countertendency of raising a particular voice to the level of the “one true God,” “pure race,” “Capital,” or any other “oracle” that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. (shrink)

Taking up the significance of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death in an Iranian street protest and novelist Zadie Smith’s analysis of President Obama, I offer an account of society as a “multivoiced body.” This body consists of “voices” that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. Viewing society in this manner implies the simultaneous valorization of solidarity, diversity, and the creation of new voices as well as the kind of “hearing others” that makes these three (...) political virtues possible. It also encourages resistance to the always present countertendency of raising a particular voice to the level of the “one true God,” “pure race,” “Capital,” or any other “oracle” that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. (shrink)

The project in this essay will be to chart a naturalist theory of content for perceptual states, where the content is constituted by that state of the world picked out by a proposition telling us what it is that is believed, desired, etc. We will focus on the perceptual states of desire and vision, and only on contents involving physical objects. ;We will begin by doing an overview of some recent attempts to define function. We will consider a treatment by (...) Peter Godfrey-Smith, who looks at the "recent history" of an organism to determine the functions of its parts. We will end the section with a definition of function upon which we will base what follows. ;Then we investigate the nature of need, in order to get an eventual handle on desire. Desire states function to dispose behavior that fulfills unmet needs. We will pick out the state change which meets the need and extinguishes the desire as the proper object of the desire state D in question. ;Then we turn to the problems of determining content in visual states. We will look for how the visual system provides information which allows an organism to locate and re-locate an object in space over time. We will use David Marr's theory of vision as a basis for understanding the function of the visual system. We will pay particular attention to how the visual sytem's modules transform two-dimensional information into information about the relative depths and locations of objects in the world. ;Finally, material from Gareth Evans will help us investigate the role of the behavioral system in determining the content of perceptual states. What makes Marr's information information "about" depth and placement depends crucially upon how it is used in patterns of behavior to enhance fitness. This gives us a method of cashing out what it is to locate and re-locate an object without relying on an unexplained ability to represent. (shrink)

Russell's Principle states that in order to think about an object I must know which thing it is, in the sense of being able to distinguish it from all other things. I show that, contra Strawson, Evans and Cassam, Russell's Principle cannot be applied to first-person thought so as to yield necessary conditions of self-consciousness. Footnotes1 Thanks to Naomi Eilan, Keith Hossack, Lucy O'Brien and Ann Whittle for helpful comments.

The Body Claim states that a transcendental condition of self-consciousness is that one experience oneself as embodied. The contention of this thesis is that popular arguments in support of the Body Claim are unconvincing. Understanding the Body Claim requires us to have a clear understanding of both self-consciousness and embodied experience. In the first chapter I lay out two different conceptions of self-consciousness, arguing that the proponent of the Body Claim should think of self-consciousness as first-person thought. I point out (...) that since arguments for the Body Claim tend to proceed by stating putative transcendental conditions on self-reference, the proponent of the Body Claim must maintain that there is a conceptual connection between self-consciousness and self-reference. In the second chapter I argue against views, originating from Wittgenstein and Anscombe, which reject this connection between self-consciousness and self-reference. In chapter three I show that a well known principle governing the ascription of content, that which Evans calls ‘Russell’s Principle’, occupies an ambiguous position with regards to the Body Claim. I argue that Russell’s Principle should be rejected. Chapter four distinguishes between two conceptions of embodied experience: bodily-awareness and bodily self-awareness. I argue that there is no such thing as bodily self-awareness and so it cannot be a transcendental condition of self-consciousness. Chapter five looks at, and finds wanting, arguments for the Body Claim that can be found in the work of Strawson. Chapter six argues that it is a transcendental condition of self-consciousness that one enjoy spatial experience. Chapters seven and eight assess two influential arguments that attempt to complete a defence of the Body Claim: the solidity argument and the action argument. I argue that neither argument is convincing. Although the conclusions are primarily negative, much is learned along the way about the nature of both self-consciousness and embodied experience. (shrink)

‘Virtue signaling’ is the practice of using moral talk in order to enhance one’s moral reputation. Many find this kind of behavior irritating. However, some philosophers have gone further, arguing that virtue signaling actively undermines the proper functioning of public moral discourse and impedes moral progress. Against this view, I argue that widespread virtue signaling is not a social ill, and that it can actually serve as an invaluable instrument for moral change, especially in cases where moral argument alone does (...) not suffice. Specifically, virtue signaling can change the broader public’s social expectations, which can in turn motivate the adoption of new, positive social norms. I also argue that the reputation-seeking motives underlying virtue signaling impose important constraints on virtue signalers’ behavior, which serve to keep the worst excesses of virtue signaling in check. (shrink)

In this paper, I reinterpret Kant’s Transcendental Analytic as a description of a cognitive architecture. I describe a computer implementation of this architecture, and show how it has been applied to two unsupervised learning tasks. The resulting program is very data efficient, able to learn from a tiny handful of examples. I show how the program achieves data-efficiency: the constraints described in the Analytic of Principles are reinterpreted as strong prior knowledge, constraining the set of possible solutions.

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

Critically engages the work of the philosopher Don Ihde.