This work summarizes an already comprehensive field of criticisms of received economics and advanced new ones, particularly with respect to free trade and the industrialisation of economic systems. If global economic and ecological catastrophe is to be avoided, nations and communities must move towards greater self-reliance within the framework of a much less resource-wasteful existence. But to do this will require not merely a cosmetic change in the present socio-economic system, but a change of such magnitude that it dwarfs previous (...) social transformations in human history. This great transformation must occur by conscious human activity and it must occur quickly if human civilizations, and indeed human life itself, is to continue. (shrink)

This book provides a postmodernist critique of philosophy through ecological limitationism and common-sense realism. The authors demonstrate the reality of life, the world and the primacy of practice in relation to the failings of Anglo-American analytic philosophy to meet the challenges of the age.

Debates over adaptationism can be clarified and partially resolved by careful consideration of the ‘grain’ at which evolutionary processes are described. The framework of ‘adaptive landscapes’ can be used to illustrate and facilitate this investigation. We argue that natural selection may have special status at an intermediate grain of analysis of evolutionary processes. The cases of sickle-cell disease and genomic imprinting are used as case studies.

This commentary questions the applicability of the Newell Test for evaluating the utility of connectionism. Rather than being a specific theory of cognition (because connectionism can be used to model nativist, behaviorist, or constructivist theories), connectionism, we argue, offers researchers a collection of computational and conceptual tools that are particularly useful for investigating and rendering specific fundamental issues of human development. These benefits of connectionism are not well captured by evaluating it against Newell's criteria for a unified theory of cognition.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a process for managing construction project information in such a way as to provide a basis for enhanced decision-making and for collaboration in a construction supply chain. One impediment to the uptake of BIM is the limited interoperability of different BIM systems. To overcome this problem, a set of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) has been proposed as a standard for the construction industry. Building on IFC, the ifcOWL ontology was developed in order to facilitate representation (...) of building data in a consistent fashion across the Web by using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This study presents a critical analysis of the ifcOWL ontology and of the associated interoperability issues. It shows how these issues can be resolved by using Basic Formal Ontology (ISO/IEC 21838-2) as top-level architecture. A set of competency questions is used as the basis for comparison of the original ifcOWL with the enhanced ontology, and the latter is used to align with a second ontology – the ontology for building intelligent environments (DOGONT) – in order to demonstrate the added value derived from BFO by showing how querying the enhanced ifcOWL yields useful additional information. (shrink)

1 Cognitive Architectures 2 Multilayer Perceptrons 3 Relations between Variables 4 Structured Representations 5 Individuals 6 Where does the Machinery of Symbol Manipulation Come From? 7 Conclusions.

Prior research suggests that voluntary environmental governance mechanisms operate to enhance a firm’s environmental legitimacy as opposed to being a driver of proactive environmental performance activities. To understand how these mechanisms contribute to the firm’s environmental legitimacy, we investigate whether environmental corporate governance characteristics are associated with voluntary environmental disclosure. We examine an increasingly important attribute of a firm’s disclosure setting, namely the disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) information. GHG information represents proprietary non-financial information about the firm’s exposure to environmental (...) concerns and is related to the firm’s operations and future profitability. Thus, we expect governance participants would view such information as a potentially important strategic device for managing stakeholders’ demands for information concerning environmental risks. We find that the presence of an environmental committee and a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) is positively associated with the likelihood of GHG disclosure and that CSOs are associated with disclosure transparency. Further analysis reveals that the likelihood of disclosure is associated with committee size, number of committee meetings, expertise of committee members and CSO, and overlap between the environmental committee and audit committee. Only expertise of the environmental committee members and the CSO are associated with GHG disclosure transparency, while larger committees tend to be associated with lower transparency. Our results are particularly important to those with interests in evaluating the potential role that corporate governance mechanisms play in responding to stakeholder concerns about environmental risks. Directors and officers who are considering appointment to similar governance positions, may wish to consider what attributes would make such governance positions more influential. (shrink)

This article explores the enterprising act of socially constructing fatness, or overweight and obesity, as an individual and collective problem. We argue that this process is complex and hence draw liberally on and extend an eclectic range of scholarship (e.g. the sociology of the body, moral panic theory, critical weight studies) when presenting a typology of obesity epidemic entrepreneurs, that is, those who actively make fatness into a correctable health problem. Using a variety of data, we consider six main ideal (...) typical entrepreneurs: creators, amplifiers/moralizers, legitimators, supporters, enforcers/administrators and the entrepreneurial self. We conclude with a critique of obesity epidemic entrepreneurship and underscore the broader salience of our work for the sociology of the body/embodiment. The relevance of social studies of the body for the obesity debate and critical weight studies is also highlighted. (shrink)

The creation of a specialized executive position that oversees sustainability activities represents a distinct shift in the structure of top management teams and their approach for addressing sustainability concerns. However, little is known about these management team members, namely the corporate sustainability officers or CSOs. We examine CSO appointments and their association with subsequent sustainability performance. Our results indicate that the creation of a CSO position may represent more of a symbolic versus substantive governance mechanism. Further tests suggest that CSO (...) expertise and the firm’s existing sustainability performance affect the association between the CSO and post-appointment sustainability performance. We find no association between CSO appointments and subsequent sustainability performance for firms that were already poor performers, while firms possessing relatively higher levels of prior sustainability performance appointing a CSO begin to experience significant improvements to performance after 3 years. We further find that CSOs with prior sustainability expertise are associated with increases in sustainability performance in firms that were already strong performers, but not in firms with poor sustainability performance. Non-expert CSOs, on the other hand, are associated with initial decreases in performance for poor performing firms, whereas better performing firms hiring non-expert CSOs are able to rely on other sustainability attributes of the firm and benefit from improvements in performance in the long term. We discuss the potential importance of these positions as it relates to symbolic versus substantive governance mechanisms through the lens of top management team literature streams. (shrink)

Features four case studies that include 'Scripted Teaching', 'Accountability and Merit', 'What is the Value of Caring Relationships?' and 'School Funding'. Using these and other realistic case studies, this book explores the strengths and weaknesses of each approach so that teachers can assess their own philosophical positions on teaching.

The apparent very close similarity between the learning of the past tense by Adam and the Plunkett and Marchman model is exaggerated by several misleading comparisons--including arbitrary, unexplained changes in how graphs were plotted. The model's development differs from Adam's in three important ways: Children show a U-shaped sequence of development which does not depend on abrupt changes in input; U-shaped development in the simulation occurs only after an abrupt change in training regimen. Children overregularize vowel-change verbs more than no-change (...) verbs; the simulation overregularizes vowel-change verbs less often than no-change verbs. Children, including Adam, overregularize more than they irregularize; the simulation overregularized less than it irregularized. Interestingly, the RM model--widely criticized as being inadequate--does somewhat better, correctly overregularizing vowel-change verbs more often than no-change verbs, and overregularizing more often than it irregularizes. Although Plunkett and Marchman's (1993) state of the art model incorporated hidden layers and back-propagation, used a more realistic phonological coding scheme, and explored a broader range of parameters than Rumelhart and McClelland's model, their results are farther from psychological reality. It is unknown whether any connectionist model can mimic a child's performance without resorting to unrealistic exogenous changes in the training or input, but it is clear that adding a hidden-layer and back-propagation does not ensure a solution. (shrink)

Is the human tendency toward musicality better thought of as the product of a specific, evolved instinct or an acquired skill? Developmental and evolutionary arguments are considered, along with issues of domain‐specificity. The article also considers the question of why humans might be consistently and intensely drawn to music if musicality is not in fact the product of a specifically evolved instinct.

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. This thought-provoking book argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerfulcomputers. Using a wide (...) range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community. (shrink)

Rogers & McClelland's (R&M's) précis represents an important effort to address key issues in concepts and categorization, but few of the simulations deliver what is promised. We argue that the models are seriously underconstrained, importantly incomplete, and psychologically implausible; more broadly, R&M dwell too heavily on the apparent successes without comparable concern for limitations already noted in the literature.

Wie entstehen Wissen und Glauben, nach welchen Regeln verbreiten und wandeln sie sich? Durch welche Gedächtnisformen werden sie tradiert? Gegenwärtig verliert die Schriftform ihre seit der Erfindung des Buchdruckes erworbene Autorität. Neue Überlieferungsstrategien, die visuell dominiert sind, gewinnen an Bedeutung. Angesichts dieses Einschnitts ist es an der Zeit, die herkömmlichen Weisen der Wissenserzeugung und der Wahrheitsfindung im Zusammenspiel mit den Formen ihrer vielfältigen Vermittlung zu reflektieren. Die hier versammelten Beiträge erforschen die Motive und Figuren der Wissenserzeugung und -vermittlung daher auch (...) im Medium der Kunst, der Oralität und hybrider Textformen. Sie verstehen sich als Vorarbeiten zu einer Archäologie der Textualität im allgemeinen und der kollektiven Imagination. (shrink)

Cultural influences are pervasive throughout human behaviour, and as human–robot interactions become more common, roboticists are increasingly focusing attention on how to build robots that are culturally competent and culturally sustainable. The current treatment of culture in robotics, however, is largely limited to the definition of culture as national culture. This is problematic for three reasons: it ignores subcultures, it loses specificity and hides the nuances in cultures, and it excludes refugees and stateless persons. We propose to shift the focus (...) of cultural robotics to redefine culture as an emergent phenomenon. We make use of three research programmes in the social and cognitive sciences to justify this definition. Consequently, cultural behaviour cannot be explicitly programmed into a robot, rather, a robot must be designed with the capability to participate in the interactions that lead to the arising of cultural behaviour. In the final part of the paper, we explore which capacities and abilities are the most salient for a robot to do this. (shrink)

In The Tragedy of the Self, Gary F. Greif attributes social violence and individual isolation to a contemporary neglect of a fundamental human need for support that only human culture and interaction can promote and reinforce. Greif bases this interpretation on the works of Heinz Kohut, a psychoanalyst who by degrees transformed Freud's theory of the instincts into a theory of the self. Kohut maintains that every individual fundamentally requires continual human support in order to live with confidence and (...) hope. Greif introduces Kohut's understanding of the nature, development, and disintegration of the self, analyzes modern and contemporary assumptions regarding the individualistic, anti-social nature of humans, and concludes that contemporary societal assumptions regarding the acceptance of individualism reflect and perpetuate a tragic human condition. Greif argues that the inability of the self to experience a human, fulfilling life is a tragedy intensified by a century of economic and cultural forces promoting social antagonism. A unique and stimulating book, The Tragedy of the Self will appeal to professionals in psychoanalytic psychology, self-psychology, and philosophy as well as academics and students in the Humanities and Social Sciences. (shrink)

After yeast cells commit to the cell cycle in a process called START, genes required for DNA synthesis are expressed in late G1. Periodicity is mediated by a hexameric sequence, known as a MCB element, present in all DNA synthesis gene promoters. A complex that specifically binds MCBs has been identified. One polypeptide in the MCB complex is Swi6, a transcription factor that together with Swi4 also binds G1 cyclin promoters and participates in a positive feedback loop at START. The (...) finding that Swi6 is directly involved in both START and DNA synthesis gene control suggest a model in which Swi6, activated through its participation in START, serves as the central transcription factor in coordinating late G1 gene expression. The mechanism may be conserved in all eukaryotic cells. (shrink)