This article investigates how Causal Contextualism applies in a medical context. It is shown how the correct interpretation of some medical causal claims depends on relevant alternatives and then argued that these relevant alternatives are determined by standards of practice and practical limitations (of equipment, personnel, expertise, cost), amongst other factors. Causal Contextualism has recently been defended by a number of philosophers; however details of the relevant factors determining content in different contexts have been lacking. It seems to me that (...) establishing such details of Causal Contextualism goes a long way towards making the view plausible, and is also necessary for discovering some important consequences of Causal Contextualism. (shrink)

Conversational contextualism states that the truth-conditions expressed by knowledge-attributing sentences vary relative to the context of utterance. This context is determined partly by different standards the person involved must meet in order to make the sentence true. I am concerned with the question of how these standards can be raised or lowered, and especially what happens to the standards and the conversational score when parties in a discussion push the conversational scores in different directions. None of the available options (...) for an answer seems satisfying. I argue that this results from a misunderstanding of the characteristics of the situation at hand. (shrink)

I would strike you, were I not angry1Love and generosity are by their nature boundless, free from calculation. However, much of human interaction and particularly relations of justice are based on...

Although seldom examined and not explained by Robert Brandom himself, the concept of responsibility is as important as the concept of inference for Brandom’s account of discursivity. Whereas ‘inference’ makes explicit the propositional content of concepts as the inferentially structured totality of their relations of material incompatibility, ‘responsibility’ makes explicit the normative force of these relations. ‘Responsibility’ thus becomes the paradigm of understanding normativity’s binding force – and my critical reading demonstrates that it fosters a moralizing, juridifying and economizing understanding (...) of normativity’s binding force. Furthermore, a diagnostic interpretation of Nietzsche’s genealogy of ‘responsibility’ reveals that Brandom’s concept of ‘responsibility’ is not an exception but exemplary for how ‘responsibility’ is used in philosophy. (shrink)

Recent findings in neuroscience and psychology indicate that “the body keeps the score” of PTSD. Concurrently, trauma-informed theology to date has deployed pneumatology to explain how God experiences trauma in the Christian narrative of salvation. Yet, in Christian theology the divine person of the Holy Spirit has no assumed human body. This raises an important question as to whether a body is needed for God to keep the score of posttraumatic stress in a manner consistent with neuroscience and (...) how this might shape one’s account of trauma in Christian soteriology. In this article, I take an analytic science-engaged approach to assess the viability of dominant proposals in trauma-informed theology which deploy trauma theory to assert God’s experience of trauma and explain this experience with exclusive reference to pneumatology. After reviewing clinical and scientific research on the neuroscience of PTSD which has been neglected in these approaches, I argue that Christology is a more obviously fitting locus for suggesting God’s experience of trauma within Christian soteriology than the person of the Holy Spirit. I conclude that since the body keeps the score of trauma from a scientific perspective, Christ’s body keeps the score of trauma from a science-engaged theology perspective. (shrink)

This essay attempts to specify just what one would need to show in order to draw any substantive conclusion about religion’s consequential value. It is focused on three central questions: (1) What exactly is being evaluated? (2) What benefits and harms are relevant? (3) How are the relevant benefits and harms to be assessed? Each of these questions gives rise to a range of thorny philosophical and empirical issues, and any thesis about religion’s ultimate consequential value will therefore be contingent (...) on a range of rationally contestable assumptions and stipulations. Consequently, one should not take it as “obvious” that religion is a harmful social force, or that the world would be better off without it. Such claims require much more empirical research and philosophical reflection than they have received thus far. Thus, while we can point to a few clear cases of religiously-produced harm and benefit, we do not yet know what religion’s ultimate consequential value is, as counter-intuitive as that may seem. (shrink)

Both Brandom and Wittgenstein see meaning and content as emerging from normative social practices. Wittgenstein says little about the constitution of such norms, other than that they are exhibited in practitioners’ judgements of correctness. In addition, they appear already to be content involving, since the moves whose correctness is in question are moves such as asserting that such and such. In contrast, Brandom says a good deal about the constitution of the norms and promises a reductive programme. The norms are (...) essentially inferential and are instituted in the social practice of attributing commitments and entitlements. In particular, we are urged to see the norm-bound move of assertion as capable of being understood in terms of the normative statuses of commitments and entitlements. Jeremy Wanderer calls this Brandom’s bold conjecture. In this paper I use Wittgenstein’s thinking about normativity to reflect on the defensibility of Brandom’s bold conjecture. (shrink)

In the present world order unbridled forces of free market capitalism are frequently cited for much of the social injustice, inequity, and disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor. Although history''s verdict in favor of the free markets could hardly be harsher or clearer, it is clear that after the initial wave of triumph, the free market paradigm has developed some cracks in its façade. What marks the trail of such sustained and pronounced move toward free markets in (...) terms of ethics, morality, social welfare and social justice? How does one keep a social score in this seemingly relentless and irreversible move all over the world toward free market capitalism?In this paper we shall attempt to address these and related questions. Drawing on concepts from organization theory and social philosophy and using publicly available financial information, we shall illustrate how, amidst the myriad and mixed noises, some sense of order and signal can be discerned in addressing issues of equity and social justice. Toward this end, first, we provide a broad contrast between two models of financial markets: the command model and the free market model and proceed to examine publicly available financial information and analyze the trends and patterns with graphical representations using publicly available data from Handbook of International Economic Statistics. Next, we explore the implications of financial performance measures for social welfare and social justice and discuss the social perils of free markets using the Mexican and Asian Financial crises as the focal points. Finally, we present a set of recommendations for smoother structural transition. (shrink)

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet it will (...) give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. (shrink)

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet it will (...) give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. (shrink)

In response to Morningstar’s release of carbon risk (CR) scores in May 2018, (environmentally) sustainable mutual funds in the U.S. showed a greater reduction in their portfolio CR relative to conventional funds. The observed causal impact of this third-party disclosure is consistent with the funds’ primary investment objectives. Differences in fund names, potentially driven by marketing considerations, appear irrelevant to the behavior of sustainable funds. Conventional funds that are signatories to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) or those with (...) secondary sustainability mandates behave more like other conventional funds rather than sustainable funds. These funds appear relatively insensitive to disclosures as their sustainability considerations are superseded by other primary investment criteria. Fiduciary and legal bonding influences fund managers’ response to sustainability disclosures. Sustainable funds lower their CR score by reducing exposure to fossil fuels, not by increasing exposure to renewables. (shrink)

The paper develops a score-keeping model of illocutionary games and uses it to account for mechanisms responsible for creating institutional facts construed as rights and commitments of participants in a dialogue. After introducing the idea of Austinian games—understood as abstract entities representing different levels of the functioning of discourse—the paper defines the main categories of the proposed model: interactional negotiation, illocutionary score, appropriateness rules and kinematics rules. Finally, it discusses the phenomenon of accommodation as it occurs in (...) illocutionary games and argues that the proposed model presupposes an externalist account of illocutionary practice. (shrink)

In Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman presents a framework to quantify the epistemic effects that various policies, procedures, and behaviors can have on a group of agents. In this essay, I show that the framework requires some modifications when applied to agents with credences. The required modifications carry with them an interesting consequence, namely, that any group whose members disagree can become more accurate by forming a consensus through averaging their credences. I sketch a way that this result (...) can be used to show that individual norms of rationality and group norms of rationality can dictate conflicting behaviors for the members of some groups. I conclude by discussing how some of the assumptions used to generate the consensus result might be loosened.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.WE OUGHT TO AGREE: A CONSEQUENCE OF REPAIRING GOLDMAN'S GROUP SCORING RULEVolume 9, Issue 2Matthew KopecDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.3Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. WE OUGHT TO AGREE: A CONSEQUENCE OF REPAIRING GOLDMAN'S GROUP SCORING RULEVolume 9, Issue 2Matthew KopecDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.3Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. WE OUGHT TO AGREE: A CONSEQUENCE OF REPAIRING GOLDMAN'S GROUP SCORING RULEVolume 9, Issue 2Matthew KopecDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.3Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Through the personal stories of managers running global business, this book takes an inside look into the dilemmas of managers who are asked to make profits ethically according to the dictates of their company's ethics code. It examines what companies `think" they are doing to help managers in those situations and how those managers are actually affected. Thanks to the boost from the 1991 Sentencing Guidelines which minimizes penalties for companies with ethics codes caught in ethical wrongdoing, more than 85% (...) of US companies and two thirds of all Canadian companies and half of all European companies now have Codes of Ethics. Yet, over and over, we hear of stories of personal dilemmas and conflicts experienced by individual managers navigating those business waters in other cultures. "Eileen Morgan does an excellent job of mapping the course for navigating the previously uncharted global ethical waters. By identifying best practices, she leads the reader on a journey from Surviving, to Understanding to Knowing the ethical issues that frequently confront international business people. This is a must read for anyone who wants to successfully compete in world markets." -Michael J. Litwin, Executive Vice President, Chief Credit Officer, Heller Financial, Inc. "Eileen Morgan has combined the pragmatic concerns of the individual manager with the moral concerns that come from personal-life history, cultural roots, and corporate ethical culture …This book focuses on the constructive task of formulating and using an "ethical map," and is sure to be a tonic to conscientious managers who want to navigate cross-cultural commerce with integrity. It has done a superb job of creating order out of the complexity of cross-cultural moral experience by insisting that the complexity must be honored and appropriated rather than ignored or suppressed." -Dr. Richard Beauchamp, Professor of Ethics, Christopher Newport University "In this groundbreaking book, Eileen Morgan has provided scores of real-life examples and developed a framework for approaching ethical leadership in international business. This is mandatory reading for anyone involved in global management today...This is an important book on an important subject." -Stephen H. Rhinesmith, Ph.D. Author, A Manager's Guide to Globalization "Eileen Morgan provides us with a much needed roadmap for how to walk the path of ethical leadership with practical feet. She reminds us that ethical decision-making is a critical aspect of every day leadership, and that we can all choose to be 'ethical pioneers' in our companies and our communities. Every leader engaged in global business can benefit from the lessons and stories included in this book." -Christi A. Olson, Ph.D. Chair, Telecommunications Management Department, Golden Gate University "Eileen Morgan's thoughtful analysis of 'ethical capital' should be read by anyone who does business in a global environment…Morgan's book presents the issue clearly, comprehensively and compellingly, demonstrating that ethics is an indispensable aspect of individual leadership and organizational credibility. …It provides a clear roadmap for business leaders who need to communicate their commitment to integrity and accountability to their employees, their partners, and their customer, making their 'ethical capital' one of their most valuable assets." -Nell Minnow, Principal, Lens, The Corporate Governance Investors "Eileen Morgan gives excellent insight into ethical practices. She focuses on business but her insights have general application. This book also describes differences in ethical interpretation that can arise between diverse cultures. Ms. Morgan has made an excellent contribution to understanding the benefit of positive ethical practices." -David C. Lincoln, Sponsor, Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, College of Business, Arizona State University President, Arizona Oxides, LLC · First in-depth look at how managers in global companies actually bridge the gap between their organizations and their daily decisions · Explains the need for internal and external ethical operations¦and how organizations often create confusion rather than clarity with the label of "ethics". (shrink)

The appropriate understanding and fast processing of lengthy legal documents are computationally challenging problems. Designing efficient automatic summarization techniques can potentially be the key to deal with such issues. Extractive summarization is one of the most popular approaches for forming summaries out of such lengthy documents, via the process of summary-relevant sentence selection. An efficient application of this approach involves appropriate scoring of sentences, which helps in the identification of more informative and essential sentences from the document. In this work, (...) a novel sentence scoring approach DCESumm is proposed which consists of supervised sentence-level summary relevance prediction, as well as unsupervised clustering-based document-level score enhancement. Experimental results on two legal document summarization datasets, BillSum and Forum of Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), reveal that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art approaches. More specifically it achieves ROUGE metric F1-score improvements of (1−6)% and (6−12)% for the BillSum and FIRE test sets respectively. Such impressive summarization results suggest the usefulness of the proposed approach in finding the gist of a lengthy legal document, thereby providing crucial assistance to legal practitioners. (shrink)

In this volume based on her 2014 Locke Lectures, Martha C. Nussbaum provides a bracing new view that strips the notion of forgiveness down to its Judeo-Christian roots, where it was structured by the moral relationship between a score-keeping God and penitent, self-abasing, and erring mortals.

Pippin, Pinkard and Brandom are rightly seen as representatives of a distinct approach in contemporary Hegel scholarship. Still, their interpretations diverge due to different definitions and uses of conceptions of discursive practice. We focus on three ways in which such definitions and uses bear on their interpretations. First, while Lumsden has recently criticized Pinkard and Brandom for ‘discursive bias’ in their accounts of the contestation and upheaval of normative authority in Hegel’s Phenomenology, we note that Pinkard distinguishes between various modes (...) of reason-giving, and we argue that a further qualification of interdependencies between these modes may support his interpretation against such criticism. Second, Pinkard and Pippin have recently criticized Brandom’s conception of discursive score-keeping practice, and Pippin in particular has argued that the latter rests on an individualistic reductionism about content foreign to Hegel. However, we find that the real issue is that the modes of methodological abstraction and idealization assumed for Brandom’s conception of discursive practice leave out of account the historical alteration as well as the institutional embodiment of normative authority as emphasized by Pippin and Pinkard. Third, while Pippin and Pinkard both make Hegel’s notion of modern ethical life bear on a conception of practical rationality, their uses of a conception of discursive practice in such an undertaking betray divergent conceptions of the sociality of rational agents. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a speech-act based account of presumptions. Using a score-keeping model of illocutionary games, I argue that presumptions construed as speech acts can be grouped into three illocutionary act types defined by reference to how they affect the state of a conversation. The paper is organized into two parts. In the first one, I present the score-keeping model of speech act dynamics; in particular, I distinguish between two types of mechanisms—the direct mechanism (...) of illocution and the indirect one of accommodation—that underlie the functioning of illocutionary acts. In the second part, I use the presented model to distinguish between the unilateral act of individual presumption, the point of which is to shift the burden of proof by making the hearer committed to justifying his refusal to endorse the proposition communicated by the speaker, whenever he refuses to endorse it, the bilateral act of joint presumption—‘bilateral’ in that it is performed jointly by at least two conversing agents—the function of which is to confer on the proposition endorsed by the speaker the normative status of jointly recognized though tentative acceptability, and the indirect or back-door act of collective presumption, the purpose of which is to sustain rules and practices to which the conversing agents defer the felicity of their conversational moves. (shrink)

Robert B. Brandom’s semantic inferentialism is an important and new theory of meaning in the contemporary, analytical philosophy of language. This theory is presented in an extensive way in the monograph entitled Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. The theory is pragmatic, normative, holistic and discursive. On the one hand, Brandom’s standpoint is glorified and on the other hand, it is controversial. This is why a metaphilosophical question arises: How to evaluate the impact of this theory into the (...) philosophy of language? Inferentialism emphasises a material inference, de re ascription and the usage of demonstratives. Such categories are “vertical” and they accent „connection” with reality. Nevertheless, Brandom also emphasises an anaphoric concept of reference and truth. It makes his standpoint valuable because anaphoric understanding of reference and truth delivers an additional explication of the usage of words “refer to” or “is true.” But such categories are “horizontal.” Brandom grasps the problem of acquiring empirical meaning by expressions which initiate anaphoric chains. This is why he proposes — as an attempt of solving the problem — a modification of semantic inferentialism by adding revisionary and fallibilistic epistemology. In addition, Brandom enforces his theory by normative pragmatics which applies categories of assertion, entitlement, various commitments and a “score-keeping.” However, it seems that what is still missing is a notion of truth stronger than the one proposed in the anaphoric conception. What is requested is a notion of truth expressed in terms of the relation of the correspondence between a language and a reality. The disadvantage of the idea of correspondence is that it is difficult to define in a satisfactory way. But an important advantage is that it is “a language-reality” relation and not only “a language-language” relation. The objection does not demolish inferentialism. It expresses only a general epistemological difficulty of defining truth. However, the importance of inferentialism is that it tries to unite various elements. The theory attempts to explicate — in a more adequate way — what a meaning is and to explain how it is acquired by expressions. (shrink)

In recent work Mary Kate McGowan presents an account of oppressive speech inspired by David Lewis's analysis of conversational kinematics. Speech can effect identity-based oppression, she argues, by altering 'the conversational score', which is to say, roughly, that it can introduce presuppositions and expectations into a conversation, and thus determine what sort of subsequent conversational 'moves' are apt, correct, felicitous, etc., in a manner that oppresses members of a certain group (e.g. because the suppositions and expectations derogate or demean (...) members of that group). In keeping with the Lewisian picture, McGowan stresses the asymmetric pliability of conversational scores. She argues that it is easier to introduce (for example) sexist presuppositions and expectations into a conversation than it is to remove them. Responding to a sexist remark, she thus suggests, is like trying to "unring a bell". I begin by situating McGowan's work in the wider literature on speech and social hierarchy, and explaining how her account of oppressive speech improves upon the work of others in its explication of the relationship between individuals' verbal conduct and structurally oppressive social arrangements. I then propose an explanation and supportive elaboration of McGowan's claims about the asymmetric pliability of conversations involving identity-oppressive speech. Rather than regarding such asymmetry as a sui generis phenomenon, I show how we can understand it as a consequence of a more general asymmetry between making things salient and un-salient in speech, and I show how this asymmetry also operates in various cases that interested Lewis. (shrink)

This study explores ethnic variations in animal companion attachment among 133 students enrolled in a school of veterinary medicine. The 57 White and 76 African American participants completed surveys that included background information, several questions about their animal companions, and a pet attachment questionnaire .White students had significantly higher PAQ scores than did African American students . White students also had significantly more pets and more kinds of pets and were more likely to allow pets to sleep on their beds (...) . Although keeping pets is a universal cultural phenomenon, how that attachment is expressed may vary from culture-to-culture. This study explores possible explanations and implications for these variations. (shrink)

The effects of utterances such as cue phrases, keep-turn markers, and grounding signals cannot be characterized as changes to a shared record of the propositions under discussed: the simplest (and arguably most natural) way of characterizing the meaning of these utterances is in terms of a theory in which the conversational score is seen as a record of the discourse situation, or at least of the speech acts that have been performed. The problem then becomes to explain how discourse (...) entities are accessible. We consider three hypotheses about the dynamics of a speech act-based theory of the conversational score, and argue that they could be implemented with relatively minor modifications to the technical tools already introduced in theories such as Compositional DRT. (shrink)

The emotion of disgust is suggested to be an adaptation that evolved to keep us away from sources of infection. Therefore, individuals from populations with greater pathogen stress should have a greater disgust sensitivity. However, current evidence for a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and the intensity of infectious diseases in the environment is limited. We tested whether disgust and contamination sensitivity changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Disgust was assessed in 984 women in 2017 and 633 women in (...) 2020 by a set of photographs depicting sources of infection and Pathogen and Moral of Three-Domain Disgust Scale. Further, contamination sensitivity among participants in two waves was measured by Contamination Obsessions and Washing Compulsions Subscale of Padua Inventory. State anxiety was measured with the Polish adaptation of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory only during the second wave of data collection. Women from the COVID-19 pandemic group assessed the photographs depicting sources of infection as more disgusting, scoring higher on Padua Inventory, but lower on Moral Disgust Domain as compared to women from before the pandemic. In addition, anxiety levels during pandemic positively correlated with scores from Pathogen Disgust Domain, Padua Inventory, and the ratings of the photographs. The participants of the study scored higher in state anxiety than the norms determined for the Polish population. Summarizing, we present evidence for differences in individual levels of disgust sensitivity in relation to pathogen stress, supporting the idea that disgust evolved to serve as protection from pathogens. (shrink)

We investigate the implications of using different indicators to assess the sustainability performance of investment funds. In particular, we look into the environmental performance of Dutch government bond funds. We find that it does matter a lot which particular indicator is used. This suggests that funds should be very transparent and straightforward about their non-financial performance. We argue that basically they have three options. First, the industry comes up with a benchmark against which the responsibility of their investments is measured (...) and reported by all funds. Second, the funds make very clear and transparent which particular aspects of sustainability they specifically target and how they keep score. Third, the dashboard approach where the funds report their performance on a well-defined set of indicators. (shrink)

Robert Brandom’s inferentialism notoriously entails meaning holism, which has often been seen as unacceptable because it seems to make communication impossible. This paper aims to improve Brandom’s conception of communication as “navigation-across-perspectives” to reconcile meaning holism and the possibility of communication. The conception proposed here entails keeping track of speakers’ own and the other’s scores of commitments and entitlements. I argue that the whole of commonly endorsed inferences in each practice should determine the contents of utterances and those of (...) the commitments of the participants. The local norm defined by such inferences is holistic and can make sense of each other’s commitments. Contents or meaning can be primarily determined at the level of each practice, not that of an individual, the whole community, or the objective world. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * ‘Kraftledningarna / spända i köldens rike / norr om all musik.’ TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER Attention! You are not dreaming, you are drifting into sleep. You are feeling veeeerrry sleepy now. The curvature of the earth is causing you to shift away from the pinpoint that you circled yesterday on a map, your eyes hazed. That was also a today, in a novel fashion—the today of days long gone, of clouds long transformed into rain, or else snow drifts. That’s okay, you know this: in cathedrals of bone we find arcs that keep us warm. In drift- wood we find the puzzles that madden us all night, Tetris dreaming. In from our past, deriving steam, straight lines, axes, branches, kindling. Attention! Does anyone here speak Spanish? Si? Bueno! Dream with me. Cry out in your sleep. Step fearfully out onto the ice and drift awhile, inside a massive Perspex speech-bubble dream. A massive bubble longing to become detergent. The louvres of a ribcage snapping shut. Awe. Curvature of the earth is a con job: ask a dervish. Hail an imaginary cab in a hail-struck avenue and wait for the popcorn to drop. Stop, drifter! In the pharmacies and in the alleys, popping rocks while money men drift by in stockings, purling and unfurling their ways, their means. Attention, people!ion hurts. Reading too much into things I know nothing about, the niceness of the void or else a philosopher’s mouth sewn shut. I know about that, at least: the madness of seeking asylum in antipodean dreams, drifting for weeks at a time on a boat more abstract than surreal. Oh, fuck Life of Pi! Heaven basks like a warm, square meal but I can’t get there from here. There is no shark travelling at speed X while I zoom at speed Y in the opposite direction. I can’t use a lasso. I no longer have fits. I am no, mad. Too bad. Attention! Ambient doom slash moon. Over! The curvature of a yawn, a dream sewn shut. This skin, that knows my dreams, forgets me. Fruit tingles, wet on the tongue: get me some analogue hits, expressways to frozen, lakeside moon-dream voiceovers. The narrator’s cues infuse the afternoon, the canoes, with nostalgia. Somewhere, out there, we become driftories. We lie down in atoms and the clinamina bore. We fight against our own handwritten lies, type marching letters into files and save. Awe. Fidelity is a kind of surveillance. Current A. Attention! It was never my intention to score cheap points at the expense of polar bears, of driftwood, shores. The cockatoos roar. Their explosive chatter could strip a pine tree raw. Implant in me some destructive grace, to drift. Planetoid lamps all along the turnpike’s busy arcs. Extreme emissions of things. Drift-rings. The target of my gaze, sewn shut. Your eyes rising slower than a star from what you read, condensed into steam, here, north of all music. Driftories, signal fires, smoke: disappear. Go back to sleep now. No, we were never here. (shrink)

Background and Objectives: Stress is a ubiquitous aspect of modern life that affects both mental and physical health. Clinical care settings can be particularly stressful for both patients and providers. Kindness and compassion are buffers for the negative effects of stress, likely through strengthening positive interpersonal connection. In previous laboratory-based studies, simply watching kindness media uplifts viewers, increases altruism, and promotes connection to others. The objective of the present study is to examine whether kindness media can affect viewers in a (...) real-world, pediatric healthcare setting.Methods: Parents and staff in a pediatric dental clinic were studied. Study days were randomized for viewers to watch either original kindness media or the standard televised children’s programming that the clinic shows. Participants scored self-rated pre-media emotions in a survey, watched either media type for 8 min, and then completed the survey. All participants were informed that they would receive a gift card for their participation. After completion of the survey, participants were asked if they wanted to keep the card or donate it to a family in need.Results: Fifty participants completed the study; 28 were parents and 22 were staff. In comparison to viewers of children’s programming, participants who watched kindness media had significant increases in feeling happy, calmer, more grateful, and less irritated, with trends observed in feeling more optimistic and less anxious. Kindness media caused marked increases in viewers’ reports of feeling inspired, moved, or touched. No change was observed in self-reported compassion, although baseline levels were self-rated as very high. People who watched kindness media were also more generous, with 85% donating their honoraria compared to 54% of Standard viewers.Conclusions: Kindness media can increase positive emotions and promote generosity in a healthcare setting. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 125-128. What is the nature of sound? What is the nature of volume? William James, in attempting to address these simple questions wrote, “ The voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little relation to the size of the ocean that yields it . The ear and eye are comparatively minute organs, yet they give us feelings of great volume” (203-­4, itals. original). This subtle extensivity of sensation finds its peer in the subtle yet significant influence (...) of habituated action upon our lives. This expansive quality of habit­making is what Craig Dongoski's bodies of work enable us to appreciate. Nearly ten years ago Dongoski had a habit of turning on his audio recorder every day at three o'clock for three minutes. No matter what the setting, what the activity, Dongoski recorded the ambient sounds in his environment at that moment. As it happened, one day he was teaching a drawing class and he recorded the sounds of their pencils scratching across their respective surfaces. This was a critical moment for him. Later he would place a contact mic onto a drawing surface and record the sound of his signature. Signatures change over time, they respond to the conditions in which they are performed. Signatures speak volumes about the author, but a practice of attunement is required for the volume to be audible. To hear all that a signature can tell about its author, the listener must tune into the frequency at which this information is being broadcast. Dongoski's drawings and video works draw­out the peculiar artifact that habit makes of living: habits establish a tempo of living and it seems that one's habitus is the signature of habitual living. I sat down with Craig in an attempt to sound­out some of the depths of thought in his practice. What follows is selected from our conversation. Paul Boshears (PB): Clearly your work is dealing with time: from the painstaking action of rendering the drawing to the free­form approach of launching a microphone into a body of water and waiting to see what's recorded. Craig Dongoski (CD): Are we talking about the films or the drawings? PB: Well, it's a bit of both in my mind. I know the drawings on first glance seem to be these flows of lines without concern but I realize that there is this painstaking action involved. CD: I'm interested in time because I'm interested in forms outside of control, outside of politics, and outside of economics. I think that art, when it's alive, does go beyond those. I'm interested in duality and paradox—a stream of contradiction, I suppose. For instance, scale and size. There is a tendency to think that these are the same thing. But really you can have something small that has a lot of scale—look at Goya's drawings, Los Caprichos , they're very small but they have a lot of scale. Likewise things that are spontaneous don't necessarily mean that they take only two or three seconds to do. This latter distinction is what I'm most interested in. Having that appearance of spontaneity. The image has rhythm, you can latch onto it; but the reality is that it took many hours—and many months in some cases—to arrive at. And this is in keeping with geological time. I like to insert this series of thoughts into my work sometimes as an attempt to make some of this stuff comprehensible. There are all these distractions inundating us throughout our days now. Time gets tweaked by all these technologies that we interact with daily. There's more than just digital time or the mechanical time of your watch. There's biological time, that time in which you're growing. PB: I'm reminded of McLuhan here: he made his career by making that strong claim that the humans of today are not the same humans of three generations ago because technology has fundamentally changed us. Are we not the same human beings as a hundred years ago? CD: I mean, I don't think we're the same human beings that we were when he was around! It's my understanding that before painting a flower, monks would meditate for hours on that flower and then they would complete the painting of that flower in less than a minute. That's what I want to point out about our world today, we have all this information, but how much of it are we metabolizing? PB: Is there a message you're looking for? Or that you're trying to share? CD: These drawings set­up the circumstances for me to continue them forever. I'm only about six years into it, but with more time, things can unfold. You know? If you take this cup of coffee and vow to restrict your work to only this material and medium for seven years—you'll make interesting work. The problem is that most people can't hold on to things or they give up or they get distracted. They don't trust that anything is possible; anything is potential material. Staying with this cup of coffee example, we can get enveloped in the history of the recycling logo, or the process for harvesting coffee and so on. The same is true for my work as it has lead me into places like graphical music scores. I had, of course, known about John Cage's notations and I'd always been interested in sound itself, but this drawing practice made it feasible to explore the intersections in a meaningful way. I think that if you trust your instincts and your curiosities and your abilities, then the bus drives itself. Look at Roman Opalka, he's kind of the patron saint of time painting. The claim is that no one can count to a billion in a lifetime so he's set­out to paint to seven sevens (7,777,777). He began with white numbers on a black field but over the years he has gradually reduced the black field to ever­lightening grays. His plan is to paint these seven sevens on what ostensibly will be white on white. PB: It occurs to me that I've never thought of the actual, literal, meaning of “microphone” in relation to “microscope.” The mic has made everything loud, the world's not allowed to be quiet anymore. Maybe we should call them “macrophones” since telephone's already taken... CD: Well, a microscope is a lens. What got me interested in sound was that a microphone acts like a lens. There are wide angle lenses, or a lens that gets your eye up close to something far away, or at a tiny level. The same is true of the microphone. You can use a parabolic mic to hear what the coach is saying on a sports field or a mic that picks­up the sound from the entire cathedral. There's this whole gamut... I'm kind of playing with the words here. I'm into the minuteness of the sound, but I'm interested in the minuteness of the mark itself. PB: I guess it's a Deluezean, generative, statement, then? It's not a metaphor, it's an actual thing with which we can work. CD : That's right. PB: While doing some background work on you I found myself at interesting places on the internet. For example, Konstantin Raudive and a brief jog into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP); perhaps this was just synchronicity. But, it's a happy coincidence nonetheless because the them of this issue of continent. is “the moraine” and one of the nuances of this term is “what remains.” Is there a metaphysical or epistemological problem that you're sorting­out here? CD: Think about fossils: fossils are the first recording device, you know? It's the first, natural, recording device. It's in this way that I think my works are fossilized time. Artifacts of that process. Van Gogh is a strong source for me in this regard: it's not what he's painting it's how. You're seeing his nervous system at work. The what is so incidental, the chairs, the flowers, etc. It's funny: when I first started doing this, before I started drawing voices, I was doing these things in cemeteries. I was doing automatic drawings. And when I took this experiment to its maximum I was taking hydrophones and burying them in abandoned graves. I was thinking about the mic rig as the south coordinate and I'd use a shortwave radio as the north coordinate. Usually it was just white noise, but on the east and west I'd station a writer and a drawer. So I'd have these things going on simultaneously and I'd be mixing them at the same time. PB: How'd it come out? CD: Well, just like you'd expect. It was a lot of white noise. But I think that Raudive was on to something. Burroughs used to say something similar when he'd talk about being in a foreign country where he didn't know the language and then he'd start to hear things. At the base, what I'm doing is pattern recognition. I do have a writing component to the drawings. I haven't exploited it in a while but... I use a vocoder, which was developed to encrypt spy signals during one of the World Wars. The mechanism takes two channels, one being the spy's signal combined with noise and then the other channel is a sine wave so that the intended recipient can pick out the words. So I did something like this with Beowulf. I tried combining the spoken word with other television and radio sources, but that didn't work because a book on tape is usually read in a very steady clip and the result was too garbled. So the second try, instead of drawing I was writing, trying to articulate the sounds that I could hear in this garbled transmission of Beowulf. You start to think you hear something, so you start to write what you think you're hearing. But what you're hearing is just being triggered by this articulating action. When the sound of the drawing lines up with the sound of the word you get something. But it's not ever what you're really hearing. You start writing and you're trying to keep up with what you think you're hearing and it is truly, in the most true sense of the phrase, automatic writing. You can contrive and go into a “spirit trance” or whatever, but... PB: It's uninteresting to you? CD: Well, it's unbelievable. It's just listening to sounds and following along. The magic is out there, there are no tricks or anything. You do this exercise with twenty people and you will get twenty totally different writings. But, you're creating the sound and you're creating the writing as an interpretation. That's the thing with EVP, it's homophonic translation. PB: Do you trust a straight line? I know you start with these meticulous lines at the beginning of the drawings but they do change over time. CD: I'm trying to show that there are these imperfections in structures and that over the reiterations of these structures these imperfections become amplified. But you can see them in tree formation as well. The rings alter their shape as the trees grow. PB: Is that your transmission then? You're not just receiving these sounds but you're broadcasting this message as well? CD: Things exist because of their opposites. These drawings are really about nothing. It's the first body of work I've had where people project so much of stuff onto the works. So there you go, things existing because of their opposites. It's kind of like with Mike Kelley: the work was about a critique of commodity culture and commodifying emotions. Using toys this was a critique of production. But then suddenly people were saying it was about abuse and the abuse that Mike Kelley had suffered. And it wasn't but he heard that and said, “I'll go with it,” and so he did. I think that's the nature of communication: I send this but you receive that instead and this makes me think about what I sent in a different way. (shrink)

Promoting Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) aims to increase the productive capacities of farmer households. Under FMNR, farmers select and manage natural regeneration on farmlands and keep them under production. While FMNR contributes to the wealth of farming communities, its contribution to household food security has rarely been researched. We, therefore, used a mixed-methods approach to address the research gap by measuring FMNR’s contribution to food security among farmer households in the Talensi district of Ghana. We adopted the Household Dietary (...) Diversity Score (HDDS) and Food Consumption Score (FCS) to estimate food security status among 243 FMNR farmer households and 243 non-FMNR farmer households. Also, we performed a Chi-square test of independence to compare the frequency of each food group (present vs not present) between FMNR adopters and non-FMNR adopters to establish the relationship between adopting FMNR and consuming the FCS and HDDS food groups. Our results reveal that FMNR farmer households are more food secure than non-FMNR farmer households. The HHDS of the FMNR farmer households was 9.6, which is higher than the target value of 9.1. Conversely, the HHDS of the non-FMNR farmer households was 4.3, which is lower than the target value of 9.1. Up to 86% and 37% of the FMNR farmer households and non-FMNR farmer households fell within acceptable FCS; 15% and 17% of FMNR farmer households and non-FMNR farmer households fell within borderline FCS. While none of the FMNR farmer households fell within poor FCS, 46% of non-FMNR farmer households fell within poor FCS. Adopting FMNR is significantly related to consuming all food groups promoted and benefiting from FMNR practices. The paper recommends enabling farmers in semi-arid environments to practice and invest in FMNR for long-term returns to food security. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Concepts, Communication, and the Relevance of Philosophy to Human Rights:A Response to Randall PeerenboomStephen C. AngleRandy Peerenboom has paid me the enormous compliment of thinking it worthwhile to engage in sustained, critical dialogue with my book. In this response to his review essay, I attempt to return the compliment. I focus on issues surrounding concepts and communication, since that is where Peerenboom puts his emphasis. Near the end, I (...) look at what is at stake in our discussions of Raz, touch on the question of judgments and objectivity, and close with some thoughts about the relevance of history to my goals in the book. [End Page 320]At the heart of Peerenboom's critique of my account of concepts and communication are two concerns. First, he worries that I do not "provide a satisfactory answer to the questions of how to determine whether we are dealing with a single concept or discourse or multiple concepts or discourses." Second, he suggests that my entire discussion of concepts, "while interesting academically, at least for those with a taste for philosophy, diverts attention from the real issues." I will begin with the first. A valuable result of Peerenboom's essay is that it helps me to see where I have not made myself as clear as I would have liked to. At various points in the book, I raise the issue of the normative nature of questions like those Peerenboom has posed (see, e.g., pp. 27 and 32), but this is clearly something that needs more emphasis. Asking what a word means, or whether two people share a concept, or, for that matter, where the boundaries of a discourse lie are never simple, descriptive questions. These are normative questions, which always receive normative answers. By "normative," I mean that the questions and their answers are prescriptive for those in my shared community. When someone says "we mean such-and-such by that word," the "we" is crucial: it is saying that people like us, in some respect, ought to talk this way. Thinking about language in normative terms permeates Brandom's approach. He writes, for example: "When the prosecutor at Oscar Wilde's trial asked him to say under oath whether a particular passage in one of his works did or did not constitute blasphemy, Wilde replied 'Blasphemy is not one of my words.'"1 Wilde recognized, that is, that using the word "blasphemy" brought with it certain commitments that he—and other like-minded individuals—ought to reject, even if he were to deny that a particular passage was blasphemous.So far so good. But Peerenboom sees a tension between what looks like a community-based definition of concepts—perhaps all Chinese ought therefore to share the same commitments?—and my endorsement of a holistic approach to meaning, according to which our individual webs of commitments always vary from one to another. This latter idea leads him to be puzzled about when two people can ever be said to share the same concept. He searches for a criterion for a sufficiently similar concept, wonders whether my talk of "keeping score" can provide such a criterion, and in the end decides that the choice of where to draw these lines is, in many cases, arbitrary. There is indeed a tension, and some arbitrariness, too, although not exactly where Peerenboom sees it. But none of this is problematic, I think, and in any case it emerges from the very complexity of our linguistic practice. Communities do not impose norms on us: we authorize the norms through the ways we speak, act, and react to others. "Authorize" is apt because it combines the ideas of creation and legitimation. Our perpetual roles as authorizers of a community's linguistic (and other) norms give us a certain amount of autonomy with respect to the norms, as well as explaining some variance, as we (consciously or unconsciously) push boundaries in one direction or another. At the same time, no one is a member of only one community. We interact with different groups at different times and in different ways, which puts the notion that we could be bound by the norms of a single... (shrink)

As kendo continues to gain in international popularity, there are hopes for its adoption in the Olympic Games as an international competitive event, even while moves to further this aim have not necessarily occurred in Japan or elsewhere. One reason for the efforts to achieve a form of globalization of kendo different from Judo is the attempt to adhere to and preserve the unique concepts kendo, the sport embodies by remaining true to the forms of traditional Japanese culture. This is (...) epitomized by the importance given to zanshin (the combination of posture and fighting spirit after striking), one of the key concepts that constitute yuko-datotsu in kendo. Our purpose in this study is to discuss the intersubjective nature of the decisions regarding the conditions for point-scoring in competitive sports. In particular, we will focus on the aesthetics required for zanshin in kendo, focusing on the theory behind yuko-datotsu (point score), which will also considerably influence its international dissemination. Kendo is characterized from the perspective of western rationalism as an appreciation of form and rules of behavior referred to as formalism and, in this respect, it has unique characteristics differing from those of modern sports that are disseminated internationally. In martial arts, besides refinement and proficiency in the rules of behavior by rigidly adhering to form and rules of behavior and repetition, the aim is to transcend said form and the rules of behavior and embody the spiritual nature dwelling in the background. Kendo should remain traditional path and keep zanshin in the value of point (yuko-datotsu) for its virtue. Kendo has not yet developed into an international competitive sport, but it is in the process of traversing that Geido path as a Do for the purpose of character building through it. Throughout life, one should try to devote oneself to kendo with thought for the value of transcending form and the rules of behaviour, and embodying the spiritual nature of the sport that inheres in its background. That is why one may perceive an evident hesitation or indeed negativity regarding the possible internationalization or development as an Olympic event. (shrink)

On the first day of the class for Introduction to Philosophy, your professor tells you that if you keep perfect attendance, complete every homework satisfactorily, participate in class discussion actively, and score 100% in every examination, you will certainly get an A+ for the course. You work hard and by the end of the semester, you think you have accomplished all these things. You are pleased. Why? Because you think as follows: “I have kept perfect attendance, completed every homework (...) satisfactorily, participated in class discussion actively, and scored 100% in every exam. This means I get an A+ for the course because, as the professor said, if I keep perfect attendance, complete every homework satisfactorily, participate in class discussion actively, and score 100% in every exam, I get an A+ for the course.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Road to Understanding and Acceptance of the Late Effects of Pediatric Brain Tumors and TreatmentJeanne CarlsonWe had little warning or time to adjust to our daughter’s diagnosis. A call from her third grade teacher reporting that Sarah seemed to be having vision problems rapidly led to eye exams, an MRI, and the discovery of a Germinoma brain tumor in the suprastellar region of Sarah’s brain. We were terrified (...) but began treatment feeling optimistic about the outlook for Sarah’s recovery. Luckily, Sarah’s treatment was relatively non–invasive and quick, chemotherapy and radiation, five months start to finish. We were thrilled to have Sarah’s treatment behind us.As any parent of a child with a life–threatening illness knows, family life is seriously disrupted by the countless doctor, lab, and hospital visits, the worry, and the financial strain that are suddenly added to the demands of everyday life. We did our best to balance our focus on both of our children as Sarah is a twin and we didn’t want her brother Will to suffer as a result of his sister’s illness. It wasn’t easy but we found a way to schedule Will’s usual play dates, baseball practice, and family time. We were all happy and relieved when Sarah’s treatment was completed, yet we would later learn that we had been incredibly naïve in two ways; we thought that our brain tumor journey was over after Sarah’s treatment was completed and we thought that we’d brought Will through the process without effect. We had a lot to learn.At the time of diagnosis we knew that Sarah’s memory and ability to express emotion had already been impacted by the tumor but we didn’t yet know what that would mean to her quality of life. We were virtually unaware however that at age nine the chemotherapy and radiation treatments that Sarah received would result in profound late effects. Following treatment Sarah successfully completed 3rd grade and even received excellent STAR test scores (California state standardized tests). In 4th grade however, Sarah’s performance began to diverge from that of her peers and she found herself struggling in school and unable to make friends. We began looking for ways to help our daughter.What followed was a five year long journey through testing, evaluations, individualized education plans (IEPs), and therapies, which, in the end, left our family needing to accept the fact that although Sarah remains intelligent and artistically talented, she suffers from a constellation of late effects that will always affect her ability to function in the world. As a result of Sarah’s tumor and treatment she struggles with Auditory Processing Disorder, word finding problems, poor executive function, inability to recognize how she feels, significant difficulty making decisions, inability to read social cues, poor memory, slow processing, an emotional age of about nine, and lots of anxiety. She is also panhypopituitary, meaning that she has no remaining pituitary function and must take replacement medications by pill and injection, has hypothalamic obesity (HO), which is primarily controlled by more medication, and Raynaud’s Disease. The HO is an ongoing challenge because if Sarah does gain weight she can’t lose it again and exercise is not an easy solution because, like many pediatric brain tumor survivors, Sarah is easily fatigued. Finally, although Sarah’s vision improved after treatment her vision loss is significant enough to prevent her from driving. We pieced together this understanding of Sarah’s challenges and disabilities slowly so it wasn’t until the end of our children’s middle school years that we finally accepted the magnitude of the damage caused by the tumor and treatment. Thereafter we changed our focus from what Sarah might achieve in life to how to support [End Page 21] her in the activities at which she still excels and how to keep her active, interested in life, and feeling good about herself.It would have been a huge gift if we had been provided with information about the possible late effects that can result from treating the brain of a 9–year–old... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Home Is Somewhere Else: Autobiography in Two VoicesPatrick HenryHome Is Somewhere Else: Autobiography in Two Voices, by Desider Furst and Lilian R. Furst; xv & 235 pp. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994, $14.95 paper.Published in the “Margins of Literature” series, Home Is Somewhere Else follows a family of three who, on the margins of the Holocaust, live for nine months in Nazi occupied Vienna before escaping illegally in early (...) 1939 into Brussels and then legally to England. The narration goes on to relate both the life of that family in England until the mother’s death in 1969 ended “the symbiotic threesome” (p. 203) and the subsequent emigration of the father and daughter to the United States where, with her retired father, the daughter pursues her career as professor of comparative literature. The final chapter, “As My Father Used to Say,” records the wisdom and witticisms of her father who died in 1985 leaving her alone, in mourning and still deracinated, having become “more [herself] and thereby more other” (p. 217). “My geographical roots are shallow; only those created by the brand mark of the red ‘J’ [meaning “Jew” and stamped on the family passport in Vienna in 1938] run deep into my being” (p. 217).The technical interest of the book resides in its dual autobiographies. Desider, the father, wrote his (entitled A Superfluous Man) in the early 1970s after his retirement and emigration to the United States. Lilian, the daughter, read it in 1983 and found it organized into chapters around places where they had lived. Without rereading it, she began her autobiography in 1991, deciding to write alternative chapters that would be centered on the same places her father had written about: Vienna, Cologne, Brussels, London, Bedford, and Manchester. In addition, he writes a chapter on the Isle of Man where he was interned for four months in 1941 and she on Chertsey where she spent a year alone. She also writes a chapter about her mother’s life and one on her life with her father in America. [End Page 156]Although both autobiographies are completely retrospective accounts composed, without diaries or notes of any kind, decades after the initial events they narrate, each reflects the preoccupations of the narrator at the time of the events being narrated. Thus Lilian’s, composed as “a tribute of [her parents] for bringing [her] through to safety” (p. xiv), contains the child’s impressions of family, friends, home, relatives, and nanny as well as her fear and terror as she experiences the Nazi entry into Vienna in 1938, Crystal Night, the train ride to Cologne, and the flight to Brussels. From Desider’s, on the other hand, emanates the broader vision of the responsible adult, parent and husband, conscious of the historical scope within which his particular drama unravels. He paints in vivid colors the happy decade in Vienna (1928–38), the descent into the hell of Nazism, the struggle to escape “this gigantic prison” (p. 47), and his appreciation and admiration for the British. He underscores the complexity of the situation by populating his account with scores of individuals—unfortunate Jews, sadistic Nazis, good Austrians, profiteers of all kinds—and by frequent conflicting references to Providence, destiny, luck, and the totally gratuitous nature of survival. Written as a memorial to his wife by a man who claims never to have wanted anything more than a normal life for himself and his family, his narration fittingly ends with her death in Manchester in 1969.The power of the book, however, springs as much from what unites the narratives, as from what divides them. I am not speaking of the similarity of events but rather of the deeply held human values (responsibility, courage, sacrifice, family union, interdependence, and love) that resonate powerfully throughout both accounts. Indeed, the intertwining of the two voices is poetically and umbilically linked to the hands of father and daughter that grip each other throughout the narrative. We find a father who risks everything to keep his family together, a mother who gives up her medical career for the same reason, and a daughter, full of gratitude, love, and an intense sense... (shrink)

The traditional ideological and political education should keep pace with the times, and the physical and health education should highlight its value, and must combine the two. This study investigated on the integration path of mental health education and college students’ ideological and political education. A stratified random sampling was conducted on 2021 students of a higher vocational college. The subjects were divided into the control group and the experimental group. The experimental group was given the integrated intervention course of (...) mental health education and ideological and political education of college students, and the control group was given routine teaching. The depression score of the experimental group is significantly lower than that of the control group, and the mental health quality score is higher than that of the control group. Contribution: The integration of mental health education and college students’ Ideological and political education can effectively improve the level of college students’ mental health. This course constantly improves the students’ subjective consciousness, subjective ability and subjective personality, and fully reflects the educational effect of the ideological and political education of college students’ mental health course. This research provides data which could be utilised by academics in the field of practical theology, especially youth ministry and religious educational studies. (shrink)

The return of a classic book about games and play that illuminates the relationship between the well-played game and the well-lived life. In The Well-Played Game, games guru Bernard De Koven explores the interaction of play and games, offering players—as well as game designers, educators, and scholars—a guide to how games work. De Koven's classic treatise on how human beings play together, first published in 1978, investigates many issues newly resonant in the era of video and computer games, including social (...) gameplay and player modification. The digital game industry, now moving beyond its emphasis on graphic techniques to focus on player interaction, has much to learn from The Well-Played Game. De Koven explains that when players congratulate each other on a “well-played” game, they are expressing a unique and profound synthesis that combines the concepts of play (with its associations of playfulness and fun) and game (with its associations of rule-following). This, he tells us, yields a larger concept: the experience and expression of excellence. De Koven—affectionately and appreciatively hailed by Eric Zimmerman as “our shaman of play”—explores the experience of a well-played game, how we share it, and how we can experience it again; issues of cheating, fairness, keeping score, changing old games (why not change the rules in pursuit of new ways to play?), and making up new games; playing for keeps; and winning. His book belongs on the bookshelves of players who want to find a game in which they can play well, who are looking for others with whom they can play well, and who have discovered the relationship between the well-played game and the well-lived life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Justice has become the dominant currency in which we frame our aspirations for a better world. Yet is it adequate to the task? Why not be generous to others, rather than merely just? Why be so concerned with keeping score, when part of the point of keeping score is to ensure that one does not contribute more than one's due? One response, pressed particularly by feminists, is that we should be suspicious of alternatives to justice, (...) precisely because they are by their nature less than fully just. Yet this response risks begging the question. Another possibility is that justice is the currency of a distinctive, recognizably modern social order, and the institutions and practices that embody that order. Justice makes certain goods more possible, goods that we are steeped in, out of which we have built much of our lives, in which we have couched our sense of progress. By the same token, it makes other, more organic, more communal, more opaque goods, less accessible. That is the price we pay for justice. We have reason to pay it in many cases, to accept it in others. Yet we also have reason to regret justice, even as we embrace it. (shrink)

In order for higher education to provide students with up-to-date knowledge and relevant skillsets for their continued learning, it needs to keep pace with innovative pedagogy and cognitive sciences to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all. An adequate implementation of flipped learning, which can offer undergraduates education that is appropriate in a knowledge-based society, requires moving from traditional educational models to innovative pedagogy integrated with a playful learning environment (PLE) supported by information and communications technologies (ICTs). In this (...) paper, based on the design-based research, a task-driven instructional approach in the flipped classroom (TDIAFC) was designed and implemented for two groups of participants in an undergraduate hands-on making course in a PLE. One group consisting of 81 students as the experimental group (EG) received flipped learning instruction, and another group of 79 students as the control group (CG) received lecture-centered instruction. The EG students experienced a three-round study, with results from the first round informing the customized design of the second round and the second round informing the third round. The experimental results demonstrated that students in the EG got higher scores of summative tests and final scores than those in the CG. In particular, students’ learning performance in three domains (i.e., cognitive, affective, and psychomotor) differ significantly between the two groups. (shrink)

In 1977, Terence Irwin published Plato’s Moral Theory. This book, along with the work of Gregory Vlastos, has had a greater influence on the study of Plato’s ethics than anything published since. Although the present volume, Plato’s Ethics began as a second edition of PMT, it quickly became a “new book” in which none of PMT’s text reappears. Irwin declines to keep score of the specific differences between the two works and I cannot here provide a comprehensive comparison. I (...) shall, instead, discuss in broad outline PE’s position on one of PMT’s central themes and then turn to the details of one of PE’s new arguments. (shrink)

Decisions of regulatory government bodies and courts affect many aspects of citizens’ lives. These organizations and courts are expected to provide timely and coherent decisions, although they struggle to keep up with the increasing demand. The ability of machine learning (ML) models to predict such decisions based on past cases under similar circumstances was assessed in some recent works. The dominant conclusion is that the prediction goal is achievable with high accuracy. Nevertheless, most of those works do not consider important (...) aspects for ML models that can impact performance and affect real-world usefulness, such as consistency, out-of-sample applicability, generality, and explainability preservation. To our knowledge, none considered all those aspects, and no previous study addressed the joint use of metadata and text-extracted variables to predict administrative decisions. We propose a predictive model that addresses the abovementioned concerns based on a two-stage cascade classifier. The model employs a first-stage prediction based on textual features extracted from the original documents and a second-stage classifier that includes proceedings’ metadata. The study was conducted using time-based cross-validation, built on data available before the predicted judgment. It provides predictions as soon as the decision date is scheduled and only considers the first document in each proceeding, along with the metadata recorded when the infringement is first registered. Finally, the proposed model provides local explainability by preserving visibility on the textual features and employing the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Our findings suggest that this cascade approach surpasses the standalone stages and achieves relatively high Precision and Recall when both text and metadata are available while preserving real-world usefulness. With a weighted F1 score of 0.900, the results outperform the text-only baseline by 1.24% and the metadata-only baseline by 5.63%, with better discriminative properties evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic and precision-recall curves. (shrink)

The East has seen totality in a far more consistent and systematic way than the West; and India more so than any other civilisation in the East. When the Swami Siddheswarananda came to France to lecture on Vedic philosophy, he entitled his address, Outline of a Philosophy of Totality’. The expression could have been applied to the philosophies of India as a whole. But the world of thought, coextensive with culture, is far broader than philosophy. It is no exaggeration to (...) assert that India is the land of totality par excellence. Is it not even, according to one dictum, bigger than the world …? The notion of totality, implicit or conscious, poetic or theoretical, original or final, is present throughout Indian culture, both in its religion and in its arts, both in its customs as in its language. The Mahabharata, the largest epic poem ever conceived, proclaims: everything in the Mahabharata can be found elsewhere, but what is not in the Mahabharata cannot be found anywhere. Whilst the absolute beginning of a piece of Western music is in keeping with a dramatic time analogous to that of the Creation, Indian music seems to come from the eternity of a universe without transcendence. The body takes on a cosmic meaning through dance. By performing the tandava, the cosmic dance, Shiva Nataraja (‘Lord of the dance’) endlessly creates and destroys worlds. Indian art is an art of proliferation: both the reiteration of motifs sculpted in architecture and the litanies and metaphors spun out in epic poetry are symbolic attempts to capture the totality of the world. Every single element, being, movement or thing within this continuous space and time points towards all the others. The texts describe the sky of Indra with its web of pearls arranged in such a way that when one looks into one, one sees all the others reflecting in it; in the same way, each object of this world is not merely itself but comprises every one of the others and actually is all the others. The culture of India is one of plenitude, presence and continuity. At the opposite extreme, Japan developed a culture based upon the values of emptiness, absence and the interval. When a guru speaks, Valmiki and Vyasa know that it will take them many scores of verses. A Zen master's reply to his disciple takes up a single-line anecdote, or a word, or even a silence. At the other extreme, hundreds of statues line the gopuram of the temple at Madurai: not all of the thirty-three million gods ‘recognized’ in the writings are there, of course, but at least their unbelievable abundance gives us a plausible image of them. (shrink)

I wish now to return to the elementary characterization of languagehood in section III and its rationalization in section IV and say something by way of conclusion. The account given may or may not have a large number of fascinating and important consequences, but I shall confine myself to a couple of minor points and one not so minor.Let us suppose that there are either an infinite number of extra-linguistic entities (which seems plausible) or an infinite number of possible expressions (...) (inscriptibles). Then, since the Descriptive Part of a language is just a finite mapping of expressions onto entities, there will be an infinite number of languages. The point is pretty obvious anyway. A language is presumably a linguistic structure (whatever that is) thatcould be used by intelligent creatures in exchanging information and in doing logic. There is no reason at all to suppose that the number of such structures is finite.The second minor point is derivative. There is no essential differencequa languages between the so-called natural languages and the so-called artificial languages. Consider hammers. Some hammers are actually used to drive nails. Some perish in warehouse fires before they ever have that honor. But all are equally hammers. It's the same with languages. Some are actually used, the vast majority, including the “artificial” languages defined in semantics books, are never used. But apart from differences in richness and complexity, all are equally languages.8But the major point I wished to bring out in this paper is the contrast between a language and its use, or, if you like, between a language and speech behaviour. I labored the distinction in my introductory remarks and in the body of the paper I offered a sketch of a purely semantical definition of ‘language’. Insofar as the apparatus goes any distance towards bringing order out of chaos then this circumstance vindicates the distinction. We say that Alexander is able to ride Bucephalus and is able to speak Greek. Just as in the first case we distinguish between what Alexander is able to do, namely ride Bucephalus, and what he is able to ride, namely, Bucephalus, so in the second we should distinguish between what Alexander is able todo, namely, speak Greek, and what he is able tospeak, namely, Greek. Strictly speaking, of course, we have to recognize the linguistician's commonplace distinction, within use, between the ability or competence to speak (use) a language and specific exercises of that ability, or performances9. This is the distinction between ‘He speaks English’ and ‘He is now speaking English’.Another example, closer to present concerns. We would have no trouble distinguishing between the ability to play the Bach Chaconne and performances of the Chaconne on the one hand, and on the other, the Chaconne itself; between what the violinist is able todo (viz., play the Chaconne) and what he is able to play (viz., the Chaconne). And once we accept the distinction we would expect to be able to describe the Chaconne —which is a sequence of sounds - independently of the behavior involved in playing it. An unedited score in fact does this. It is the violinteacher who talks about double stopping and so on.10 In the same way, it seems to me, if we accept the distinction between a language and its use we commit ourselves to discovering ways of giving a phonological-syntactical-semantical characterization of a languagewithout reference to behavior, without employing the word ‘uses’ - and this demand has exactly the same rationale as the demand that we keep psychology out of logic. Then in pure pragmatics, the word ‘uses’ comes into its own. (shrink)

Metro driver is the prime person who is responsible for metro operation safety. The mental health of a metro driver is very important for the operation of the subway and requires the driver to keep high mental alertness to monitor the surrounding environment and also handle emergencies under uncertain or dangerous conditions. After a long-term occupational strain, a metro driver is likely to suffer from some mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression, that ultimately threaten the lives of passengers. (...) Therefore, in this study, we focus on the psychological symptoms of metro drivers from the angle of occupational strain and neuroticism. A total of 396 metro drivers from Kunming Rail Transit Operation Co., Ltd. in China were investigated through a questionnaire survey. Symptom Checklist-90, Personal Strain Questionnaire, and NEO-Five-Factor Inventory-Neuroticism Subscale were applied to evaluate the psychological symptoms, occupational strain, and neuroticism in metro drivers, respectively. The surveyed data were analyzed by SPSS software. Based on the data, a path structural equation model was established to explore the correlation among occupational strain, psychological symptoms, and neuroticism. The results show that the scores for psychological symptoms and occupational strain are higher than the Chinese adult norm among metro drivers. The occupational strain, neuroticism, and psychological symptoms are all positively correlated in the metro drivers. Occupational stress has a direct influence on the psychological symptom, while neuroticism plays a partial mediation role between occupational strain and psychological symptoms. The results of this study can be applied to optimize the employee selection system and training system for metro operation companies. (shrink)

Arrhythmias are irregular heartbeats that may be life-threatening. Proper monitoring and the right care at the right time are necessary to keep the heart healthy. Monitoring electrocardiogram patterns on continuous monitoring devices is time-consuming. An intense manual inspection by caregivers is not an option. In addition, such an inspection could result in errors and inter-variability. This article proposes an automated ECG beat classification method based on deep neural networks to aid in the detection of cardiac arrhythmias. The data collected by (...) an Internet of Things enabled ECG monitoring device are transferred to a server. They are analysed by a deep learning model, and the results are shared with the primary caregiver. The proposed model is trained using the MIT-BIH ECG arrhythmia database to classify into four classes: normal beat, left bundle branch block beat, right bundle branch block beat, and premature ventricular contraction. The received data are sampled with an overlapping sliding window and divided into an 80:20 ratio for training and testing, with tenfold cross-validation. The proposed method achieves higher accuracy with a simple model without any preprocessing when compared with previous works. For the train and test sets, we achieved accuracy rates of 99.09 and 99.03%, respectively. A precision, recall, and F1 scores of 0.99 is obtained. The proposed model achieves its goal of developing a simple and accurate ECG monitoring system with improved performance. This simple and efficient deep learning approach for heartbeat classification could be applied in real-time telehealth monitoring systems. (shrink)

Self-applied portable polysomnography is considered a promising tool to assess sleep architecture in field studies. However, no findings have been published regarding the appearance of a first-night effect within a sport-specific setting. Its absence, however, would allow for a single night sleep monitoring and hence minimize the burden on athletes while still obtaining the most important variables. For this reason, the aim of the study was to assess whether the effect appears in home-based sleep monitoring of elite athletes.The study sample (...) included eight male and 12 female German elite athletes from five different sports. Participants slept with a portable polysomnography for two nights, which they self-applied at night before going to bed. Time in bed and wake-up time in the morning were freely chosen by each individual athlete without any restrictions regarding time or sleeping environment. Participants were asked to keep the same location and time frame during the two days of monitoring and stick to their usual sleeping schedules. Sleep stages were manually scored using 30-s epochs. Sleep parameters and stages were later compared with the help of linear mixed models to investigate the factor time.Significant differences between the two nights were found for percentage of Non-REM sleep [T = −2,10, p < 0.05, d = −0.47, 95%-CI ] with small effect size, Total Wake Time [T = 2.30, p = 0.03, d = 0.51, 95%-CI ], Sleep Efficiency [T = −2.48, p = 0.02, d = −0.55, 95%-CI ], and Wake percentage [T = 2.47, p = 0.02, d = 0.55, 95%-CI ] with moderate effect sizes, and N3 Sleep Onset Latency [T = 3.37, p < 0.01, d = 0.75, 95%-CI ] with large effect size. Confidence Intervals for all other indices range from negative to positive values and hence specify, that parameters were not systematically negatively affected in the first night.Findings suggest that some individuals are more affected by the first-night effect than others. Yet, in order to keep the measurement uncertainties to a minimum, a more conservative approach with at least two monitoring nights should be used whenever possible, if no other supporting information on the athletes says otherwise. (shrink)

In this essay, I contend that Polanyi’s view of metaphor as outlined in Meaning (1975), has important heuristic implications for understanding the way metaphor functions in trauma therapy. I also contend that in his seminal book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score (2014), Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., although he rarely uses the term, relies on metaphor as a vital element in his treatment of trauma victims. Analysis of Van der Kolk’s practice further confirms and extends Polanyi’s view (...) of the bodily roots of all knowledge. Juxtaposing Polanyi’s theory and Van der Kolk’s practice demonstrates how unspeakable trauma can be overcome through the embodied metaphoric/linguistic matrix of human speech. (shrink)

The influence of attachment style—anxious and avoidant attachment—on subjective responses to socially excluded experiences termed “Need-Threat” remains inconsistent. Need-Threat is a composite score of four fundamental needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. Individuals with high AX tend to spend much effort maintaining strong connections with others, while those with high AV tend to maintain high levels of self-esteem by distancing themselves from others. Therefore, attachment style is most likely to influence the need associated with each style. In addition, (...) since individuals with high AV satisfy their needs by keeping independence from others, they would experience the Need-Threat against excessive inclusion from others. This study aimed to investigate the influence of attachment style on each Need-Threat response to various inclusionary statuses. A total of 133 undergraduate students were equally assigned to low or high groups for each attachment style. Participants played one of the three types of the cyberball task : excluded, included, or over-included situation. The high AV group felt fewer threats to self-esteem than the low AV group in the excluded situation. Furthermore, only in the over-included situation did the high AV group feel more threats to belonging and self-esteem than the low AV group. AX did not influence any situation. These findings suggest that individuals with high AV would have a restrictive alleviation effect on adverse subjective responses to socially excluded experiences but demonstrate maladaptive subjective responses to over-included experiences. (shrink)

Pet animal management is subject to varied husbandry practices and the resulting consequences often impact negatively on animal welfare. The perceptions held by someone who proposes to keep an animal regarding the ease or difficulty with which its biological needs can be provided for in captivity are key factors in whether that animal is acquired and how well or poorly it does. We propose a system to ‘score’ animals and assign them to categories indicating the ease or difficulty with (...) which they can be kept as pets in accordance with welfare and public health and safety considerations. The ‘EMODE’ (‘Easy’, ‘Moderate’, ‘Difficult’, ‘Extreme’) system has two fundamental components: animal welfare—which considers the ‘five freedoms’ principles; and public health and safety—which considers management associated with risks from disease or injury to the keeper and to others. EMODE incorporates two tiers of assessment and guidance, and may offer a reasonable guide for the majority of relevant animals. EMODE Tier 1 provides a primary and general assessment of animals by class or group, and EMODE Tier 2 provides a secondary refined assessment of animals by species or breed. EMODE offers a user-friendly and versatile foundation concept for the future development of guidance for the layperson who may be considering acquiring a pet or for certain personnel when considering assigning species to restrictive lists of suitable animals, for example, ‘positive lists’ as used by governments to control animals in trade and keeping. (shrink)