Physics first became established in Australia and Japan at the same period, during the final quarter of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century. A comparison of the processes by which this happened in these two developing countries on the Pacific rim shows that, despite the great cultural differences that existed, and that might have been expected to have been a source of major differences in national receptiveness to the new science, there were in fact many parallels (...) between the patterns of development in the two cases. Identifying these enables us to draw attention to a number of significant features of the physics discipline more generally at this period. Such differences as emerge in the early history of physics in the two countries seem to have arisen more from the different political situations that prevailed than from anything else; in particular they reflect the fact that Australia was a part of the British Empire while Japan was an independent political power. (shrink)

In 1914, the physics discipline had reached a very similar stage of development in Australia and Japan. A generation later the paths of development had considerably diverged. A systematic comparison of the evolution of physics in the two countries during these years identifies factors—political, economic and cultural—that led to this divergence, but it also uncovers a number of underlying parallels.

This article proposes an alternative approach in sustainability assessment. The conceptual framework was developed by modifying Ken Wilber's All Quadrants, All Levels (AQAL) approach, and focuses on the inter-relatedness/inter-connection of various perspectives inherent to the concept of sustainability. To look at how our framework can facilitate the practice of sustainability assessment, we apply the framework to examine the relationships between social systems and the environmental changes in the Ili River basin across the period 1900?2008. This approach enables us to investigate (...) the environmental problems of the Ili River basin in a four-quadrant framework, and combine the empirics of quadrants obtained from traditional disciplinary methodologies. The four-quadrant framework adopted in this study illustrates the interlocking relationships among various perspectives of environmental issues in the Ili River basin, namely, physical perspective, personal perspective, cultural perspective, and social perspective. In particular, the protruding development (evolution) of the lower right dimension is the fundamental cause of the environmental degradation and its related social problems in the Ili River basin. Compared to other established approaches in literature that emphasize on the tradeoffs of various perspectives of sustainability, our findings indicate the potential contributions of four-quadrant framework to sustainability assessment through its focus on the inter-relatedness/inter-connection of different perspectives. (shrink)

Recent studies have identified two important findings on infants’ capability of taking others’ perspectives and the difficulty of ignoring perspectives irrelevant to the acquired perspective. Unfortunately, there is insufficient consensus on the interpretation of these phenomena. Two important features of perspective-taking, embodiment and aging, should be considered to reach a more appropriate hypothesis. In this paper, the mechanism of perspective-taking can be redefined through the well-known process of self–other distinction, which is inherent to humans, without resorting to either the assumption (...) of controversial systems or an excessive reduction to executive functions. Therefore, it is hypothesized that the implicit mentalizing observed in infancy comes from the loosening phenomenon and lasts lifelong and that the self-representation separated from one’s own body by the detachment function is sent to other perspectives for explicit perspective-taking. This hypothesis can not only explain both the robustness of perspective-taking in the older adults and the appearance of egocentric/altercentric bias in adults but also is consistent with the findings in brain science and neuropathology. Finally, some issues to be considered are presented to improve the validity of this hypothesis. (shrink)

This article offers the results of emergy analysis used to evaluate four different soybean production systems in Brazil that were divided into two main categories: biological models (organic and ecological farms) and industrial models (green-revolution chemical farms and herbicide with no-tillage farms). The biological models show better environmental, economical, and social performance indicators; however, at the national level, discussion of transgenic soybean seed release considers only industrial models without any mention of biological models. Classic emergy analysis shows biological options are (...) the better alternatives but does not explain why decisions taken by farmers and government in Brazil were in opposition to these options. New research is proposed to identify and quantify the external forces that strongly interfere in the definition of public policy for soybean production. New parameters are proposed to enrich emergy methodology: Renewability of each input was considered in emergy calculations and negative externalities were included as additional services. (shrink)

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was one of the most original thinkers of the Renaissance. This collection examines, from several viewpoints, his speculative thought and reviews his ideas on dialogue with non- Christians in the light of his theories. The articles originated in papers presented at several conferences sponsored by the American Cusanus Society, 1981-1988. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

「論理」と「合理性」は文化が作る。日・米・仏・イランの思考表現スタイルからその原理を読み解く。.