"This book contains ideas to develop interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary views on economy and society. It aims to disseminate heterodox ideas on various subjects related to economics and global society. The book is organised in six parts. Part 1 contains the key lectures of Backhaus on the concept of state sciences and of Klamer on the importance of culture for economics. Parts 2- 6 contain successively contributions in the areas of economic paradigms and theories, population and society, corporate issues, environment, and (...) international relations. Examples of the content are: - the changes of family life cycles due to the rise of non-traditional households; - subjective and objective inflation rates after the introduction of the Euro; - the economics of genetic engineering; - the contribution of foreign direct investment to the economic development of host countries; - the inaccuracy of economic models applied in places characterized by extreme income disparities; - the improvement of political and corporate governance; - evolutionary thinking and emission trading; - freedom and order in the European Union; - the reform of social policy in Europe. The book provides interesting creative multi-disciplinary ideas with respect to various topical issues concerning the contemporary global society. It is highly recommended for economists and social scientists in search of broad views on social science and society.". (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book covers the author's conception of God aside from any religion. He does not come from a religious view in order to transmit the truest conception of God that he is capable of because any religion, whatever it might be, always claims God for itself in an exclusionary fashion. In other words, you must be a follower of the chosen faith before God will accept you into his kingdom. Wells rejects this view. Any man or woman who accepts God's (...) love as one person connecting to their own creator, is fine. An intermediary, despite what they might crow from whatever pulpits they use, is not necessary. We are all God's children. We are all seeking the same God, so to be dogmatic within a certain exclusionary faith is small-minded and petty. If you want to grow up, spiritually, then this book is for you. (shrink)

For the last 25 years, since publication of his Logical Studies, Professor Von Wright has steadily explored the field of philosophical logic. The concept of negation, logical paradoxes, the puzzles connected with evidence and probability in confirmation theory, the interrelatedness of the ideas of time and change, and the clarification of the structure of temporal and spatial orderings are among the many areas he has profitably investigated.

Rapid advancements in machine learning techniques allow mass surveillance to be applied on larger scales and utilize more and more personal data. These developments demand reconsideration of the privacy-security dilemma, which describes the tradeoffs between national security interests and individual privacy concerns. By investigating mass surveillance techniques that use bulk data collection and machine learning algorithms, we show why these methods are unlikely to pinpoint terrorists in order to prevent attacks. The diverse characteristics of terrorist attacks—especially when considering lone-wolf terrorism—lead (...) to irregular and isolated footprints. The irregularity of data affects the accuracy of machine learning algorithms and the mass surveillance that depends on them which can be explained by three kinds of known problems encountered in machine learning theory: class imbalance, the curse of dimensionality, and spurious correlations. Proponents of mass surveillance often invoke the distinction between collecting data and metadata, in which the latter is understood as a lesser breach of privacy. Their arguments commonly overlook the ambiguity in the definitions of data and metadata and ignore the ability of machine learning techniques to infer the former from the latter. Given the sparsity of datasets used for machine learning in counterterrorism and the privacy risks attendant with bulk data collection, policymakers and other relevant stakeholders should critically re-evaluate the likelihood of success of the algorithms and the collection of data on which they depend. (shrink)