Reichenbach’s ‘principle of the common cause’ is a foundational assumption of some important recent contributions to quantitative social science methodology but no similar principle appears in econometrics. Angrist et al. has argued that the principle is necessary for instrumental variables methods in econometrics, and Angrist Krueger builds a framework using it that he proposes as a means of resolving an important methodological dispute among econometricians. Through analysis of instrumental variables methods and the issue of multicollinearity, we aim to show that (...) the relationship of the principle to econometric methods is more nuanced than implied by previous work but nevertheless may make a valuable contribution to the coherence and validity of existing methods. (shrink)

Mirdamad, a prominent philosopher of the Late Medieval Period active in the Islamic world, regards existence as nothing in reality. In this paper, I employ methods devised by contemporary analytic...

The ultimate utility of science is widely agreed upon: the comprehension of reality. But there is much controversy about what scientific understanding actually means, and how we should proceed in order to gain new scientific understanding. Is there a method for acquiring new scientific knowledge? Is this method unique and universal? There has been no shortage of proposals, but neither has there been a shortage of skeptics about these proposals. This article proffers for discussion a potential scientific (...) class='Hi'>method that aspires to be unique and universal and is rooted in the recent and ancient history of scientific thinking. Curiously, conclusions can be inferred from this scientific method that also concern education and the transmission of science to others. (shrink)

This paper is a review of the book "Existence: Essays in Ontology" by Peter Van Inwagen.

. Epochs present in the voiced speech are defined as time instants of significant excitation of the vocal tract system during the production of speech. Nonstationary nature of excitation source and vocal tract system makes accurate identification of epochs a difficult task. Most of the existing methods for epoch detection require prior knowledge of voiced regions and a rough estimation of pitch frequency. In this paper, we propose a novel method that relies on time-order representation based on short-time (...) Fourier–Bessel series expansion which can be employed on entire speech signal to detect epochs without any prior information. The proposed method automatically detects voiced regions in the speech signal by computing the marginal energy density with respect to time in the low frequency range from the energy distribution in the time-frequency plane. An estimate of pitch frequency for each detected voiced region is then obtained by computing the marginal energy density with respect to frequency in the LFR from the energy distribution in the time-frequency plane. Epochs are located for each detected voiced region as peaks in the derivative of the low pass filtered signal corresponding to falling edges of peak negative cycles in the LPF signal synthesized from TOR coefficients corresponding to LFR. Experimental results obtained by the proposed method on speech signals taken from the CMU-Arctic database are found to be promising. The proposed method detects epochs with high accuracy and reliability. (shrink)

We give a general method for producing various effective Null and Positivstellensätze, and getting new Positivstellensätze in algebraically closed valued fields and ordered groups. These various effective Nullstellensätze produce algebraic identities certifying that some geometric conditions cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We produce also constructive versions of abstract classical results of algebra based on Zorn's lemma in several cases where such constructive version did not exist. For example, the fact that a real field can be totally ordered, or the fact (...) that a field can be embedded in an algebraically closed field. Our results are based on the concepts we develop of dynamical proofs and simultaneous collapse. (shrink)

I argue that thinking of existence questions as deep questions to be resolved by a distinctively philosophical discipline of ontology is misguided. I begin by examining how to understand the truth-conditions of existence claims, by way of understanding the rules of use for ‘exists’ and for general noun terms. This yields a straightforward method for resolving existence questions by a combination of conceptual analysis and empirical enquiry. It also provides a blueprint for arguing against most common proposals for uniform (...) substantive ‘criteria of existence’, whether they involve mind-independence, possession of causal powers, observability, etc., and thus for showing that many arguments for denying entities (numbers, ordinary objects, fictional characters, propositions…) on grounds of their failure to meet one or more of these proposed existence criteria are mistaken. (shrink)

Existing methods for evaluating manufacturing process chain complexity consider the number of machines, state of machines, number of parts, operation time, and processing sequence of parts. However, such evaluation methods ignore human factors. To consider human factors, human cognitive decision-making process factors are considered in the complexity evaluation of production processes. Accordingly, a new objective evaluation method of the human factor complexity is proposed. In the proposed method, sewing operations are taken as an example, and the human (...) factor complexity is classified into perceived and cognitive complexity. Information entropy is used to measure cognitive complexity according to the type and quantity of sewing workers’ cognitive activities. The results show that various methods have significant differences in the evaluation of the complexity level of the production process chain. Specifically, the calculation results of the proposed evaluation method are much greater than those of other methods. This indicates that human cognitive and perceived complexities account for a large proportion. Therefore, human factor complexity cannot be omitted. (shrink)

£ The existence of a model for a logic program is generally established by lattice-theoretic arguments. We present three examples to show that metric methods can often be used instead, generally in a direct, straightforward way. One example is a game program, which is not stratified or locally stratified, but which has a unique supported model whose existence is easily established using metric methods. The second example is a program without a unique supported model, but having a part that is (...) ‘well-behaved.’ The third example is a program in which one part depends on another, illustrating how modularity might be treated metrically. Finally we use ideas from this third example to prove a general result from [3]. The intention in presenting these examples and the theorem is to stimulate interest in.. (shrink)

Despite some discomfort with this grandly philosophical topic, I do in fact hope to address a venerable pair of philosophical chestnuts: mathematical truth and existence. My plan is to set out three possible stands on these issues, for an exercise in compare and contrast.' A word of warning, though, to philosophical purists (and perhaps of comfort to more mathematical readers): I will explore these philosophical positions with an eye to their interconnections with some concrete issues of set theoretic method.

The purpose of the study is to propose a mechanism for assessing the competitiveness of an enterprise. The article deals with modern methods of assessing the competitiveness of an enterprise, the existing methods are classified into economic and managerial. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that this paper attempts to form a mechanism for assessing the competitiveness of an enterprise based on the systematization of methods for assessing the competitiveness of an enterprise and the formulated (...) algorithm for their effective application. As a result, it is revealed that with the help of the proposed algorithm, a step-by-step methodological assessment of the competitiveness of the enterprise is carried out and its alternative competitiveness is evaluated. The algorithm allows you to identify the weaknesses of the operation of the enterprise, their causes and ways to eliminate them. (shrink)

Mon propos est d'explorer les voies ouvertes à la philosophie contemporaine par ce qu'on pourrait appeler la greffe du problème herméneutique sur la méthode phénoménologique. Je me bornerai à un bref rappel historique, avant d'entreprendre l'investigation proprement dite, laquelle devrait, à son terme au moins, donner un sens acceptable à la notion d'existence,—un sens où s'exprimerait précisément le renouvellement de la phénoménologie par l'herméneutique.

“Experience” is a thoroughly political category, a social and historical product not authored by any individual. At the same time, “the personal is political,” and one's own lived experience is an important epistemic resource. In _Anaesthetics of Existence_ Cressida J. Heyes reconciles these two positions, drawing on examples of things that happen to us but are nonetheless excluded from experience. If for Foucault an “aesthetics of existence” was a project of making one's life a work of art, Heyes's “anaesthetics of (...) existence” describes antiprojects that are tacitly excluded from life—but should be brought back in. Drawing on critical phenomenology, genealogy, and feminist theory, Heyes shows how and why experience has edges, and she analyzes phenomena that press against those edges. Essays on sexual violence against unconscious victims, the temporality of drug use, and childbirth as a limit-experience build a politics of experience while showcasing Heyes's much-needed new philosophical method. (shrink)

Transformer-based Pre-Trained Language Models currently dominate the field of Natural Language Inference (NLI). We first survey existing NLI datasets, and we systematize them according to the different kinds of logical inferences that are being distinguished. This shows two gaps in the current dataset landscape, which we propose to address with one dataset that has been developed in argumentative writing research as well as a new one building on syllogistic logic. Throughout, we also explore the promises of ChatGPT. Our results (...) show that our new datasets do pose a challenge to existing methods and models, including ChatGPT, and that tackling this challenge via fine-tuning yields only partly satisfactory results. (shrink)

The existence of social learning has been confirmed in diverse taxa, from apes to guppies. In order to advance our understanding of the consequences of social transmission and evolution of behavior, however, we require statistical tools that can distinguish among diverse social learning strategies. In this paper, we advance two main ideas. First, social learning is diverse, in the sense that individuals can take advantage of different kinds of information and combine them in different ways. Examining learning strategies for different (...) information conditions illuminates the more detailed design of social learning. We construct and analyze an evolutionary model of diverse social learning heuristics, in order to generate predictions and illustrate the impact of design differences on an organism’s fitness. Second, in order to eventually escape the laboratory and apply social learning models to natural behavior, we require statistical methods that do not depend upon tight experimental control. Therefore we examine strategic social learning in an experimental setting.. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

Introduction: Expressions of dignity as a clinical phenomenon in nursing homes as expressed by caregivers were investigated. A coherence could be detected between the concepts and phenomena of existence and dignity in relationships and caring culture as a context. A caring culture is interpreted by caregivers as the meaning-making of what is accepted or not in the ward culture. Background: The rationale for the connection between existence and dignity in relationships and caring culture is that suffering is a part of (...) existence, as well as compassion in relieving suffering, and ontological interdependency. Aim: To describe different expressions of dignity in relationships and existence in context of caring cultures from the perspective of the caregivers. Research design: The methodology and method are hermeneutic. The method used was to merge the theoretical preunderstanding as one horizon of understanding with empirical data. Participants and research context: Focus group interviews with caregivers in nursing homes. Ethical considerations: The principles of the Helsinki Declaration have been followed to, for example, preserve self-determination, integrity, dignity, confidentiality and privacy of the research persons. Findings: Data interpretation resulted in four themes: Encountering existential needs that promote dignity in a caring culture; To amplify dignity in relationships by the creative art of caring in a caring culture; Violation of dignity by ignorance or neglect in a non-caring culture and The ethic of words and appropriated ground values in a caring culture. Discussion: Dignity-promoting acts of caring, or dignity-depriving acts of non-caring are adequate to see from the perspective of dignity in relationships and existence and the caring culture. Conclusions: Dignity in relationships seems to touch the innermost existential life, as the existential life is dependent on confirmation from others. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation. Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that (...) present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, intra methods, dealing with technology design, and ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I. (shrink)

In 1900 David Hilbert announced his famous list of then-opened mathematical problems; the problem number 6 in this list is axiomatization of physical theories. Since then a lot of systematic efforts have been invested into solving this problem. However the results of these efforts turned to be less successful than the early enthusiasts of axiomatic method expected. The existing axiomatizations of physical and biological theories provide a valuable logical analysis of these theories but they do not constitute anything (...) like their standard presentation,which can be used for transmission, evaluation, and justification of physical and biological knowledge. This state of theart in the axiomatization of physics is strong evidence that the standard notion of axiomatic theory stemming from Hilbert and Tarski is not appropriate for thet ask. However in the recent years in mathematics there emerged a new axiomatic approach best represented by the Homotopy Type theory (HoTT). We argue that the constructive axiomatic architecture used in HoTT has better chances to be successfully applied in physics as well as in computer science and engineering. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to mount a challenge to gesture-first hypotheses about the evolution of language by identifying constraints on the emergence of symbol use. Current debates focus on a range of pre-conditions for the emergence of language, including co-operation and related mentalising capacities, imitation and tool use, episodic memory, and vocal physiology, but little specifically on the ability to learn and understand symbols. It is argued here that such a focus raises new questions about the plausibility of (...) gesture-first hypotheses, and so about the evolution of language in general. After a brief review of the methodology used in the article, it is argued that existing uses of gesture in hominid communities may have prohibited the emergence of symbol use, rather than ‘bootstrapped’ symbolic capacities as is usually assumed, and that the vocal channel offers other advantages in both learning and using language. In this case, the vocal channel offers a more promising platform for the evolution of language than is often assumed. (shrink)

Accurate measurement of livestock weight is a primary indicator in the meat industry to increase the economic gain. In lambs, the weight of a live animal is still usually estimated manually using traditional scales, resulting in a tedious process for the experienced assessor and stressful for the animal. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem using computer vision techniques; thus, the proposed procedure estimates the weight of a lamb by analysing its zenithal image without interacting with the (...) animal, which speeds up the process and reduces weighing costs. It is based on a data-driven decision support system that uses RGB-D machine vision techniques and regression models. Unlike existing methods, it does not require walk-over-weighing platforms or special and expensive infrastructures. The proposed method includes a decision support system that automatically rejects those images that are not appropriate to estimate the lamb weight. After determining the body contour of the lamb, we compute several features that feed different regression models. Best results were achieved with Extra Tree Regression ($R^{2}$=91.94%), outperforming the existing techniques. Using only an image, the proposed approach can identify with a minimum error the optimal weight of a lamb to be slaughtered, so as to maximise the economic profit. (shrink)

The dispute between Legal Positivists (eg, Hart) and Natural Lawyers (e.g., Finnis) concerns the existence or otherwise of a necessary (conceptual) connection between law and morality. Legal Positivists such as Hart deny this connection and assert the merely contingent relationship of law and morals. However, it can be demonstrated that implicit in the valid sociological method of concept formation of post‐Austinian Positivists are interpretative or ideal‐typical models of the practical rationality of the legal enterprise which are not, and cannot (...) possibly be, value‐neutral. With particular attention to the work of John Finnis and his incorporation of Weberian and Aristotelian methodological principles, this paper exposes, if not the truth of Natural Law Theory, the impossibility of Legal Positivism. (shrink)

Dans le Traité de la réforme de l’entendement, le jeune Spinoza réconcilie sans les confondre les deux principales composantes de la vera Methodus et, dans une certaine mesure, unifie Méthode réflexive et Philosophie. Or, ces deux démarches apportent un éclairage sur la Méthode d’interprétation de l’Écriture conçue au chapitre VII du Traité théologico-politique. En effet, il existe une cohérence trop négligée dans les études spinozistes entre la vera Methodus et ce qu’est devenue la Philosophie ultérieure de Spinoza lorsqu’il formule les (...) règles de l’interprétation de l’Écriture. Cette cohérence s’exprime sur deux plans. Primo, l’interprétation spinozienne des Lettres sacrées implique dans un autre registre l’histoire de l’entendement fondée par le jeune Spinoza sur la connaissance réflexive de l’idée vraie donnée et l’expérimentation. Secundo, l’impossibilité d’une « science vraie » de l’Écriture et l'emploi d'outils intellectuels innés placent le Traité théologico-politique et le Traité de la réforme de l’entendement dans un horizon commun : celui d’un usage spécifique de l’entendement et d’une alternative à la connaissance causale déployée dans l’Éthique. (shrink)

Transportation cyber-physical systems are constrained by spatiality and real-time because of their high level of heterogeneity. Therefore, applications like traffic control generally manage moving objects in a single-machine multithreaded manner, whereas suffering from frequent locking operations. To address this problem and improve the throughput of moving object databases, we propose a GPU-accelerated indexing method, based on a grid data structure, combined with quad-trees. We count object movements and decide whether a particular node should be split or be merged on (...) the GPU. In this case, bottlenecked nodes can be translated to quad-tree without interfering with the CPU. Hence, waiting time of other threads caused by locking operations raised by object data updating can be reduced. The method is simple while more adaptive to scenarios where the distribution of moving objects is skewed. It also avoids shortcomings of existing methods with performance bottleneck on the hot area or spending plenty of calculation resources on structure balancing. Experiments suggest that our method shows higher throughput and lower response time than the existing indexing methods. The advantage is even more significant under the skewed distribution of moving objects. (shrink)

Business and society researchers, as well as practitioners, have been critiqued for ignoring those with less voice and power often referred to as “fringe stakeholders.” Existing methods used in B&S research often fail to address issues of meaningful participation, voice and power, especially in developing countries. In this article, we stress the utility of visual participatory research methods in B&S research to fill this gap. Through a case study on engaging Ghanaian cocoa farmers on gender inequality issues, we explore (...) how VPR methods may be used by researchers to achieve more inclusive, and thus more credible, stakeholder research that can improve decision making within businesses. Furthermore, we argue that ingrained social and environmental problems tackled by B&S research and the unique context in which they occur may open up new opportunities to develop participatory visual methods for social change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman by M. S. LaneFrancisco J. GonzalezM. S. Lane. Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii + 229. Cloth, $59.95.This rewarding book not only is another sign of growing interest in the Statesman, but also does much to justify this interest. The reasons for the dialogue’s relative neglect until recently are easily stated: readers have (...) been puzzled by the amount of space devoted to method in a dialogue ostensibly about politics; furthermore, they have found both the method and the politics highly unsatisfactory. Lane addresses each of these concerns. She continually draws our attention to the unity of method and politics in the dialogue: the limitations of the Stranger’s initial divisions are shown to be equally methodological and political (44–5); the cosmic story is shown to be flawed by a political prejudice (the traditional model of king as shepherd), which turns into a methodological prejudice (the telling of a story too long to be profitably used as an example; 9–10, 121–3); the capacities ultimately shown to be necessary for a successful inquiry (division, exemplification, and finding the mean) also prove to be essential requirements of political knowledge (143–4, 202).Lane’s major contribution to our understanding of the dialogue’s method is her demonstration of the central role played by example (paradeigma). Lane expresses a common objection to the method of division: “But how to choose just which apparently similar things or names to investigate? Similarities are ubiquitous; there is some respect in which everything is similar to everything else. What is more, it is usually on the basis of prejudice and preconceived ideas … that similarities are distinguished” (75–6). Lane sees example as the solution, since it is precisely the task of an example to fix on those similarities relevant to the aim of the inquiry (76, 86–7).This is a very appealing solution, but one must wonder if it does not simply postpone the problem. To choose the right example, must we not make assumptions about which similarities are relevant to defining the object of inquiry and therefore about the nature of this object? And may not these assumptions be no more than prejudices or preconceived ideas? While the Stranger indeed develops his own example of weaving to an extent unparalleled in other dialogues (93), that there are essential similarities between statecraft and weaving appears to be more assumed than demonstrated by the example.With regard to politics, Lane provides a very illuminating account of the dialogue’s characterization of political expertise as certain knowledge of the good in a temporal context, or the kairos. She shows in what way this “knowledge of timing” (142) both is distinct from, and rules over, other contenders for the title of statecraft (such as rhetoric and strategy).Since, however, the existence of a statesman possessing such political expertise is, from the dialogue’s perspective, “a logical but unlikely possibility” (111) and, “from a [End Page 159] modern perspective,” seemingly impossible (4–5), the practical value of the Stranger’s political theory depends on his claim that the regimes which do exist can ‘imitate’ this ideal (300e11–301a3). But how? Even the second-best regimes are characterized by strict adherence to laws based on nothing more than persuasion, experiment and majority consensus (300b1–6), while in the ideal regime a knowledgeable statesman creates laws only as “memoranda” which he is entitled to revise or revoke at any time. According to Lane there is nevertheless one similarity that allows the second-best regimes to be called “second-order imitations” (see 109–111) of the ideal: both will not change laws without expert advice (158–9). This assumes that the second-best regimes acknowledge the authority of a political expert to change the laws, should one appear, an assumption that Lane reiterates throughout the book (11, 111, 114, 139, 147).Yet it is precisely this assumption that appears to be refuted by the thought-experiment at 298a–299e. The Stranger describes a city in which the practice of medicine, navigation and the other technai must adhere strictly to laws... (shrink)

This article builds upon existing scholarship concerning the relationship between improvisation and composition. Sections 1 to 3 comprise an exploration into and analysis of both the traditional understanding of improvisation and composition as opposing categories, as well as the more modern, nuanced view of their interpenetrating natures. I conclude that the former view should be replaced by the latter. Sections 4 and 5 present and subsequently negate two potential failings of my argument. First, I confront the problem posed by (...) Goehr’s work-concept, whose essence is opposed to the spirit of improvisation, but argue that recording allows for the solidification of these improvisations into works. Secondly, I undermine the view that composition is creation ex nihilo whilst improvisation is the mere reworking of old material. I uncover the originality of improvisation and formulae of composition to restore their compatibility and reinforce improvisation’s status as a method of broad- and narrow-sense composition. (shrink)

In this study, the authors utilize mountain pass lemma, variational methods, regularization technique, and the Lyapunov function method to derive the unique existence of the positive classical stationary solution of a single-species ecosystem. Particularly, the geometric characteristic of saddle point in the mountain pass lemma guarantees that the equilibrium point is the ground state stationary solution of the ecosystem. Based on the obtained uniqueness result, the authors use the Lyapunov function method to derive the globally exponential stability criterion, (...) which illuminates that under some suitable conditions, a certain internal competition is conducive to the global stability of the population, and a certain amount of family planning is conducive to the overall stability of the population. Most notably, the regularity technique of weak stationary solution employed in this study can also be applied to some existing literature related with time-delays reaction-diffusion systems for the purpose of regularization of weak solutions. Finally, an illuminative numerical example shows the effectiveness of the proposed methods. (shrink)

Medical ethics has been described as a thread woven into the fabric of the Nottingham curriculum. There exist a wide variety of relevant learning experiences, occurring at intervals throughout each of the five years of the course. The introduction of the students to clinical method from the start creates the need for early consideration of ethical aspects of professional behaviour and this in turn stimulates spontaneous discussion and inquiry amongst the students. The school has chosen to rely on having (...) a sufficient number of medical teachers from various disciplines willing to discuss in all the necessary detail their own clinical decisions. (shrink)

Knearest neighbor search is an important problem in location-based services and has been well studied on static road networks. However, in real world, road networks are often time-dependent; i.e., the time for traveling through a road always changes over time. Most existing methods forkNN query build various indexes maintaining the shortest distances for some pairs of vertices on static road networks. Unfortunately, these methods cannot be used for the time-dependent road networks because the shortest distances always change over time. (...) To address the problem ofkNN query on time-dependent road networks, we propose a novel voronoi-based index in this paper. Furthermore, we propose a novel balanced tree, namedV-tree, which is a secondary level index on voronoi-based index to make our querying algorithm more efficient. Moreover, we propose an algorithm for preprocessing time-dependent road networks such that the waiting time is not necessary to be considered. We confirm the efficiency of our method through experiments on real-life datasets. (shrink)

In educational measurement, exploring the method of generating multiple high-quality parallel tests has become a research hotspot. One purpose of this research is to construct parallel forms item by item according to a seed test, using two proposed item selection heuristic methods [minimum parameters–information–distance method and minimum information–parameters–distance method ]. Moreover, previous research addressing test assembly issues has been limited mainly to situations in which the information curve of the item pool or seed test has a normal (...) or skewed distribution. However, in practice, the distributions of information curves for tests are diverse. These include multimodal distributions, the most common type of which is the bimodal distribution. Therefore, another main aim of this article is to extend the information curves of unimodal distributions to bimodal distributions. Thus, this study adopts simulation research to compare the results of two item, response, theory -based item matching methods using different information curve distributions for item pools or seed tests. The results show that the MPID and MIPD methods yield rather good performance in terms of both two statistical targets when the information curve has a unimodal distribution, and two new methods yield better performance than two existing methods in terms of test information functions target when the information curve has a bimodal distribution. (shrink)

Self-transcendence has been characterized as a decrease in self-saliency (ego disillusionment) and increased connection, and has been growing in research interest in the past decade. Several measures have been developed and published with some degree of psychometric validity and reliability. However, to date, there has been no review systematically describing, contrasting, and evaluating the different methodological approaches toward measuring self-transcendence including questionnaires, neurological and physiological measures, and qualitative methods. To address this gap, we conducted a review to describe existing (...) methods of measuring self-transcendence, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, and discuss research avenues to advance assessment of self-transcendence, including recommendations for suitability of methods given research contexts. (shrink)

If there is an essential difference as suggested in a preceding article, between the natural sciences on the one hand and the social studies on the other, in the sense that man has the power to change, and has repeatedly changed, existing social organizations, whereas he has no such power over natural phenomena, the meaning of social science must in this respect at least differ substantially from that of natural science. Elsewhere the present writer has designated society an “artificial (...) creation,” much as the automobile or a steel mill is, i.e. made by the artifice of man. The artificial automobile or steel mill is of course fabricated in the light of the natural laws of physical science. Its construction would be impossible without a knowledge of these laws. There are also certain natural laws and tendencies in human nature and animal behavior which must serve as a foundation for any scientifically fabricated society, i.e. constructed on the basis of observation and verification of these tendencies on the one hand and a rigorous use of theory and analysis on the other. In short, despite any essential difference, as suggested, between natural and social science, the scientific method is apparently just as applicable in the one field as in the other. There is still much confusion on this score. But before pursuing further the significance of the distinction, artificial versus natural, it will be well to have before us more of what opposing schools of methodological thought in the social studies have to offer. (shrink)

Management decision-making is a daily task that managers of various levels solve in every organization. Degree of difficulty of this process depends on the scope of authority, responsibility level, manager’s position in organizational hierarchy; on the changes in the environment, unpredictability of which causes emergence of significant amounts of alternatives. For this reason, managers do not rely only on intuition or personal experience (which limited with selective perception, cognitive ability, ability to withstand stress and/or the presence of bias), but use (...) tools (methods) that have stood the test of time and practice; are based at the analysis of a significant amount of primary and secondary information; involve team-building to find the optimal option or to generate ideas. A significant amount of research papers are devoted to such methods, however, the author forms a synergetic approach which contains a detailed analysis of their correlation with the key factors of the competitiveness of enterprise, such as organizational culture and leadership. Existing decision-making practices, problems and style of management at the tourism enterprises are revealed from conducted survey (the first half of 2014) in tourism firms of Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, in which 729 tourism managers took part. The most popular decision-making practices in tourism branch were specified, among them are modeling and monitoring of previous results. The study proved the hypothesis of the author concerning strong connection of decision-making management and type of organizational culture. Moreover, 63% of managers were dissatisfied with low attention to organizational culture at their companies. The basis for future research and the synergetic matrix for decision-making management were worked out in the article which give preconditions for further studies and improvements in tourism management of Ukrainian enterprises. (shrink)

The concept of Christian Philosophy is not new in the history of philosophy. However, since the mid-twentieth century the idea of Christian Philosophy gained momentum and has become an object of explicit discussion among philosophers. The historical circumstances leading to its emergence as a distinct type of philosophy are not here discussed, and the existence of Christian Philosophy with a distinct content and purpose that sets it apart from other philosophies is here presupposed. Instead, the paper focuses on the concept (...) and methods of practising Christian Philosophy with specific reference to the methodology developed by Stanisław Kamiński. The paper argues for the suitability of his method of philosophising within the context of Christian Philosophy. Kamiński proposes a unique style that is strictly philosophical but also Christian. This methodology was based on the classical theory of being which fulfils the demand for the autonomy of philosophy but in relationship to faith. Kamiński’s doctrinal standpoints in philosophy are rational, objective, and universal. But is also most friendly and compatible with the Christian faith. In this sense, one can speak of his Christian philosophy and the suitability of his methodology for the practice of Christian philosophy. (shrink)

Is knowledge possible? If so, what can we know and how do we come to know it? What degree of certainty does our knowledge enjoy? In these two powerful works, Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher considered to be the father of modern philosophy, outlines his philosophical method and then counters the skeptics of his time by insisting that certain knowledge can be had. He goes on to address the nature and extent of human knowledge, the distinction between mind and body, (...) the existence of God, and the existence of external objects. (shrink)

Bioethicists disagree over methods, theories, decision-making guides, case analyses and public policies. Thirty years ago, the thinking of many scholars coalesced around a principlist approach to bioethics. That mid-level mode of moral reasoning is now one of many approaches to moral deliberation. Significant variation in contemporary approaches to the study of ethical issues related to medicine, biotechnology and health care raises the question of whether bioethics exists as widely shared method, theory, normative framework or mode of moral reasoning.

Method, metaphysics, metaphor: three words with a common prefix, which, for philosophy, bear an ancient pedigree. Classically, the last word, as an object of philosophical reflection, has mostly been excluded from bearing any philosophical significance; we will see how this can no longer be the case today, precisely for phenomenology. If the “method” of phenomenology is wholly determined by its goal, namely, "pure" description, and if description is paradoxically only actualized in a figurative mode through guiding metaphors, then (...) we are compelled to ask after the meaning of such a situation for metaphysics, understood as the "redundance" or "affirmation" of existence in its declaration of itself as truth— precisely, I suggest, the work done by metaphor in its strange interlacing of being and human being in the event of language. (shrink)

We expect Big Data methods to contribute to research with results that are not inferior to those attained in other ways but possibly better, or hard or impossible to generate in other ways. Those who apply these methods may also aspire to augment the arsenal of research methods, offer surrogates for existing research designs, and re-orient research. Moreover, we can critically examine the institutional, societal and political effects of the Big Data methods and the conditions for the solid institutionalization (...) of these methods in social and political research. To reach its primary objective, this article elaborates conclusions on how Big Data methods, not only by means of their ‘social life’ but also by their ‘political life’, may influence the institutionalization of social and political research. To reach its secondary objective, the article re-examines a study of budgetary legislation in 13 countries carried out by means of Big Data methods to draw conclusions concerning the augmentation of the arsenal of research methods, the surrogation of existing research designs, and the re-orientation of research. (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma challenges us to justify the moral difference between enacting virtual murder and virtual child molestation in video games. The Dilemma relies for its argumentative force on the claim that there is an intuitive moral difference between these acts, with the former intuited as morally acceptable and the latter as morally unacceptable. However, there has been no empirical investigation of these claims. To explore these issues, we developed an experimental survey study in which participants were asked to reflect (...) on imaginary video game scenarios as part of a 2 (undertake virtual murder or molestation) X 2 (against an adult or child) X 2 (in a high or low realism virtual environment) factorial design. We found that there was a significant difference between people’s views about virtual murder and virtual molestation. Whether the virtual act was performed against an adult or child was non-significant in most conditions, whereas whether it was performed in a high or low realism virtual environment was significant in most conditions. Gender did not impact these results, whereas perceived gaming experience, hours of video game play per week, and integrity did. These results provide an empirical grounding for future discussions of the Gamer's Dilemma. (shrink)

Ever since the Proslogion was first circulated , critics have been bemused by St Anselm's brazen attempt to establish a matter of fact, namely, God's existence, from the simple analysis of a term or concept. Yet every critic who has proposed to ‘write the obituary’ of the Ontological Argument has found it to be remarkably resilient . At the risk of adding to a record of failures, I want to venture a new method for attacking this durable argument. Neither (...) the common version of Anselm's argument from Chapter II of the Proslogion nor the previously unrecognized modal version uncovered by Norman Malcolm from Pros , III can possibly get under way without Anselm's celebrated assertion that God is that than which no greater can be conceived. (shrink)

To develop a method for exposing and elucidating ethical issues with human cognitive enhancement. The intended use of the method is to support and facilitate open and transparent deliberation and decision making with respect to this emerging technology with great potential formative implications for individuals and society. Literature search to identify relevant approaches. Conventional content analysis of the identified papers and methods in order to assess their suitability for assessing HCE according to four selection criteria. Method development. (...) Amendment after pilot testing on smart-glasses. Based on three existing approaches in health technology assessment a method for exposing and elucidating ethical issues in the assessment of HCE technologies was developed. Based on a pilot test for smart-glasses, the method was amended. The method consists of six steps and a guiding list of 43 questions. A method for exposing and elucidating ethical issues in the assessment of HCE was developed. The method provides the ground work for context specific ethical assessment and analysis. Widespread use, amendments, and further developments of the method are encouraged. (shrink)

The concept of Christian Philosophy is not new in the history of philosophy. However, since the mid-twentieth century the idea of Christian Philosophy gained momentum and has become an object of explicit discussion among philosophers. The historical circumstances leading to its emergence as a distinct type of philosophy are not here discussed, and the existence of Christian Philosophy with a distinct content and purpose that sets it apart from other philosophies is here presupposed. Instead, the paper focuses on the concept (...) and methods of practising Christian Philosophy with specific reference to the methodology developed by Stanisław Kamiński. The paper argues for the suitability of his method of philosophising within the context of Christian Philosophy. Kamiński proposes a unique style that is strictly philosophical but also Christian. This methodology was based on the classical theory of being which fulfils the demand for the autonomy of philosophy but in relationship to faith. Kamiński’s doctrinal standpoints in philosophy are rational, objective, and universal. But is also most friendly and compatible with the Christian faith. In this sense, one can speak of his Christian philosophy and the suitability of his methodology for the practice of Christian philosophy. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno has a reputation for being adamantly opposed to empirical social science; he denounced it as, at best, a methodological fetish and, at worst, a source of reification. For the most part, scholars have implicitly followed Adorno's view, variously explaining away the impetus for or de‐emphasizing the importance of his participation in a number of varied studies in the social and human sciences between the late 1930s and mid‐1950s. This chapter begins to correct this imbalance by returning attention to (...) three of Adorno's most important empirical studies: “The Essential Value of Radio to All Types of Listeners” (1938–1941), “Anti‐Semitism among American Labor” (1944–1945), and “The Function of Anti‐Semitism in the Personality” (1944–1950). First, the chapter reconstructs Adorno's penetrating critique of existing research methods. Adorno came to see that empirical studies of individuals' preferences and opinions propagated the illusions of choice, preference, experience, and individuality that were necessary to the ideology of contemporary capitalism. But Adorno did not countenance the abandonment of these empirical techniques. Second, the chapter documents Adorno's revision and implementation of empirical techniques in the study of prejudice and authoritarianism. Adorno, it shows, used techniques ranging from social statistics to behavioral psychology. Adorno did not seek to rescue or to synthesize these approaches but instead insisted on the necessity of pursuing each empirical method until it terminated in contradiction. By so doing, he held, empirical social science could be used to illuminate the incongruities of the capitalist economy and social totality itself. (shrink)

The peculiar situation of epistemology has often been remarked upon, meaning that sort of epistemology which issued from English empiricism and whose father is taken to be John Locke. Epistemology in the general sense has existed as long as there has been scientific philosophy, and in truth it has always formed the basis and core of all scientific philosophizing.

There is a growing call for greater public involvement in establishing science and technology policy, in line with democratic ideals. A variety of public participation procedures exist that aim to consult and involve the public, ranging from the public hearing to the consensus conference. Unfortunately, a general lack of empirical consideration of the quality of these methods arises from confusion as to the appropriate benchmarks for evaluation. Given that the quality of the output of any participation exercise is difficult to (...) determine, the authors suggest the need to consider which aspects of the process are desirable and then to measure the presence or quality of these process aspects. To this end, a number of theoretical evaluation criteria that are essential for effective public participation are specified. These comprise two types: acceptance criteria, which concern features of a method that make it acceptable to the wider public, and process criteria, which concern features of the process that are liable to ensure that it takes place in an effective manner. Future research needs to develop instruments to measure these criteria more precisely and identify the contextual and environmental factors that will mediate the effectiveness of the different participation methods. (shrink)