This is the first book to offer the best essays, articles, and speeches on ethics and intelligence that demonstrate the complex moral dilemmas in intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Some are recently declassified and never before published, and all are written by authors whose backgrounds are as varied as their insights, including Robert M. Gates, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; John P. Langan, the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Professor of Catholic Social Thought at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown (...) University; and Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia and recipient of the Owens Award for contributions to the understanding of U.S. intelligence activities. Creating the foundation for the study of ethics and intelligence by filling in the gap between warfare and philosophy, this is a valuable collection of literature for building an ethical code that is not dependent on any specific agency, department, or country. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

While supporting the claim for culture in cetaceans, I suggest that Rendell and Whitehead's argument is potentially incomplete if based solely on ethnographic evidence. The notion of cetacean culture can also be explored experimentally. I hope to complement the authors' assertion by discussing dolphin brain and behavioural research findings, thus contributing to a more holistic argument for culture in dolphins.

In disproof of the materialist principle, that common things exist unperceived, and in defence of the New Principle, Philonous here objects that it is inconceivable that a common thing should do so. Hylas replies that, on the contrary, we can and do think of, e.g., a tree standing alone as opposed to a tree being perceived by an observer. But Philonous counter-objects to this reply that it contains a contradiction, since it asserts that we can think of something which is (...) not thought of. (shrink)

According to Berkeley, then, the unconscious process of inference of the scientist goes as follows. He notices that, when he does not have his house within visual range, he cannot see it just by wishing to; and that, when he does have it within visual range and his eyes open, he cannot prevent himself from seeing it just by wishing not to. He therefore infers that he is not the efficient cause of these sensations. But, since he holds that they (...) must have some efficient cause, he concludes that this is a congeries of "material substances," which are numerically distinct and partly dissimilar from the sensations, and which exist even when unperceived, or "externally to the mind." As a psychological theory, this seems to be at any rate plausible. (shrink)

Both these developments would have surprised Berkeley. He would have found it paradoxical that the vulgar should have rejected his vulgar immaterialism as paradoxical, since he of course believed himself to be on their side in the matter, and characterised his own philosophy as a.