Although virtually all comparative research about risk perception focuses on which hazards are of concern to people in different culture groups, much can be gained by focusing on predictors of levels of risk perception in various countries and places. In this case, we examine standard and novel predictors of risk perception in seven sites among communities affected by a flood in Mexico (one site) and volcanic eruptions in Mexico (one site) and Ecuador (five sites). We conducted more than 450 interviews (...) with questions about how people feel at the time (after the disaster) regarding what happened in the past, their current concerns, and their expectations for the future. We explore how aspects of the context in which people live have an effect on how strongly people perceive natural hazards in relationship with demographic, well-being, and social network factors. Generally, our research indicates that levels of risk perception for past, present, and future aspects of a specific hazard are similar across these two countries and seven sites. However, these contexts produced different predictors of risk perception—in other words, there was little overlap between sites in the variables that predicted the past, present, or future aspects of risk perception in each site. Generally, current stress was related to perception of past danger of an event in the Mexican sites, but not in Ecuador; network variables were mainly important for perception of past danger (rather than future or present danger), although specific network correlates varied from site to site across the countries. (shrink)

Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products, implantable medical devices, and combination products that are designed to function in the body in ways unachievable at larger scales. (...) Nanotherapeutics andin vivonanodiagnostics incorporate materials that are engineered at the nanoscale to express novel properties that are medicinally useful. These nanomedicine applications can also contain nanomaterials that are biologically active, producing interactions that depend on biological triggers. Examples include nanoscale formulations of insoluble drugs to improve bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, drugs encapsulated in hollow nanoparticles with the ability to target and cross cellular and tissue membranes and to release their payload at a specific time or location, imaging agents that demonstrate novel optical properties to aid in locating micrometastases, and antimicrobial and drug-eluting components or coatings of implantable medical devices such as stents. (shrink)

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

This paper sets out to capture the emergence between 1760 and 1840 of a recognizable science of agriculture in Europe. The first attempts to explain and to theorize husbandry as practiced on the farm emanated from economists and agronomists employing the ‘encyclopedic’ approach of the Enlightenment generation. Despite significant additions to chemical knowledge in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries the task of applying this knowledge to agriculture initially appeared insurmountable. Only in the 1820s and the 1830s were (...) the obstacles gradually removed. A more rigorous approach to experimentation and to quantification evolved, and it was combined with investment in institutions seeking to educate landowners and farmers. As a result of these developments chemists secured pride-of-place above all other professionals in the management of agriculture as the primary food-producing sector of the economy. (shrink)

In this article, we explore two related questions. First, under what conditions, if any, can a Black person trust a white person to be a reliable ally in the context of a society founded on racial slavery? Second, under what conditions, if any, can a Black person trust a white person to be a reliable ally in the context of a white supremacist society? We follow Karen Jones and Nancy Nyquist Potter in arguing that allies must not only be (...) competent, conscientious, and accurately self-assess their epistemic capacities, but they must also signal their trustworthiness in advance to those who would trust them. Furthermore, we argue based on our readings of the slave narratives of Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass that allies must display social awareness of the social context that they share with those who would trust them and the power dynamics involved in that social context. (shrink)

Increasing the “truth per dollar” of money spent on science is one legitimate long-run goal of the economics of science. But before this goal can be achieved, we need to increase our knowledge of the successes and failures of past and current reward structures of science. This essay reviews what economists have learned about the behavior of scientists and the reward structure of science. One important use of such knowledge will be to help policy-makers create a reward structure that is (...) more efficient in the future. (shrink)

Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic (...) unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage. (shrink)

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world (...) in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011 ). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives. (shrink)

If all differences in behavior are explainable in terms of universal values pursued under variable constraints, then much ethical theorizing is pointless. A strong presumption in favor of universal values can be established by showing that differences in behavior that were previously thought to be explainable only in terms of differences in values, can in fact be explained in terms of differences in constraints. Eleven such cases are briefly discussed, including cases of differences among racial, religious and other groups in (...) crime, culinary practices and the acceptance of innovation. (shrink)

The prospect of “curing” spinal cord injury using stem cell therapy is one of the significant goals of many stem cell researchers. In this communication we consider some of the physiological implications of successful in vivo spinal cord repair and the ethical issues this potential revolutionary therapy will raise.

In his review, Walter (2012) links conceptual perspectives on empathy with crucial results of neurocognitive and genetic studies and presents a descriptive neurocognitive model that identifies neuronal key structures and links them with both cognitive and affective empathy via a high and a low road. After discussion of this model, the remainder of this comment deals more generally with the possibilities and limitations of current neurocognitive models, considering ways to develop process models allowing specific quantitative predictions.

Reading is not only “cold” information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such “hot” reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies (...) demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence ) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness ), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article we investigate structural differences between “literary” metaphors created by renowned poets and “nonliterary” ones imagined by non-professional authors from Katz et al.’s 1988 corpus. We provide data from quantitative narrative analyses of the altogether 464 metaphors on over 70 variables, including surface features like metaphor length, phonological features like sonority score, or syntactic-semantic features like sentence similarity. In a first computational study using machine learning tools we show that Katz et al.’s literary metaphors can be successfully discriminated (...) from their nonliterary ones on the basis of response measures, in particular the ratings for familiarity, ease of interpretation, semantic relatedness, and comprehensibility. A second computational study then shows that the classifier can reliably detect and predict between-group differences on the basis of five QNA features generalizing from a... (shrink)

Two main goals of the emerging field of neurocognitive poetics are the use of more natural and ecologically valid stimuli, tasks and contexts and providing methods and models allowing to quantify distinctive features of verbal materials used in such tasks and contexts and their effects on readers responses. A natural key element of poetic language, metaphor, still is understudied insofar as relatively little empirical research looked at literary or poetic metaphors. An exception is Katz et al.’s corpus of 204 literary (...) metaphors by authors such as Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas, for which various rating data are available. We reanalyzed their corpus using a combination of quantitative narrative analysis, latent semantic analysis, and machine learning in order to identify relevant features of the metaphors that influenced the ratings. The combined application of computational tools sheds light on surface and affective-semantic features that co-determine the reception of poetic metaphors and successfully predicted the period of origin, authorship and goodness ratings of the metaphors. The present results can be used for generating quantitative hypotheses or selecting and matching verbal stimuli in empirical studies of literature and neurocognitive poetics. (shrink)

Ballard et al. claim that fixations bind variables to cognitive pointers. I comment on three aspects of this claim: (1) its contribution to the interpretation of indexical language; (2) empirical support for the use of very few deictic pointers; (3) nonetheless, abstract pointers cannot be taken as prototypical cognitive representations.

Philosophy Between the Lines is the first comprehensive, book-length study of the history and theoretical basis of philosophical esotericism, and it provides a crucial guide to how many major writings—philosophical, but also theological, ...

Language comprehension requires a simulation that uses neural systems involved in perception, action, and emotion. A review of recent literature as well as new experiments support five predictions derived from this framework. 1. Being in an emotional state congruent with sentence content facilitates sentence comprehension. 2. Because women are more reactive to sad events and men are more reactive to angry events, women understand sentences about sad events with greater facility than men, and men understand sentences about angry events with (...) greater facility than women. 3. Because it takes time to shift from one emotion to another, reading a sad sentence slows the reading of a happy sentence more for women than men, whereas reading an angry sentence slows the reading of a happy sentence more for men than for women. 4. Because sad states motivate affiliative actions and angry states motivate aggressive action, gender and emotional content of sentences interact with the response mode. 5. Because emotion simulation requires particular action systems, adapting those action systems will affect comprehension of sentences with emotional content congruent with the adapted action system. These results have implications for the study of language, emotion, and gender differences. (shrink)

Levelt et al. attempt to “model their theory” with WEAVER ++. Modeling theories requires a model theory. The time is ripe for a methodology for building, testing, and evaluating computational models. We propose a tentative, five-step framework for tackling this problem, within which we discuss the potential strengths and weaknesses of Levelt et al.'s modeling approach.

Building on an earlier argument that isolationism may well be America's natural state, Schlesinger explains how the apparent rejection of isolationism during the long standoff with the Soviet Union during the Cold War was nothing more than a reaction to what was perceived as a direct and urgent threat to the security of the United States. In the wake of the Cold War's end, the incompatibility between collective international action and conceptions of national interest has highlighted the difficulties of democracies (...) in sending their armies to war, especially those that do not directly threaten national security. While much more can and should be done to enhance the effectiveness of global organizations already in place, what is needed, Schlesinger argues, is both a reexamination of the Wilsonian doctrine of collective security and a greater concentration on preventive diplomacy. (shrink)

I address the commentators' calls for clarification of theoretical terms, discussion of similarities to other proposals, and extension of the ideas. In doing so, I keep the focus on the purpose of memory: enabling the organism to make sense of its environment so that it can take action appropriate to constraints resulting from the physical, personal, social, and cultural situations.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Athens from Alexander to AntonyArthur M. EcksteinChristian Habicht. Athens from Alexander to Antony. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. ix 1 369 pp. Cloth, $39.95.Among his several areas of expertise in ancient studies, Christian Habicht is one of our profession’s authorities on the history and monuments of Hellenistic Athens; and he is a writer of crystal-clear style in both German and [End Page 646] (...) English. He is thus the ideal candidate to have produced a successor to W. S. Ferguson’s magisterial narrative of post-Classical Athenian history. Ferguson’s Hellenistic Athens (London 1911) is itself a work of great learning and insight, but of course it is terribly out of date because of the vast number of archaeological discoveries at Athens (both of buildings and especially of stone inscriptions) since its publication. Those discoveries, continuing to this day, have been primarily the work of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens—which did not even begin its massive archaeological project in the Agora until some twenty years after the publication of Ferguson’s book. Habicht’s Athens from Alexander to Antony (published in German in 1995) will rank with Ferguson as a milestone in post-Classical Athenian studies. It is a synthesis of all the technical work done by archaeologists and historians (not least Habicht himself) since Ferguson’s day, and it will no doubt be the standard text on Hellenistic Athens for decades to come. Moreover, Habicht’s Athens is not only a work of careful technical expertise, useful for professional scholars; because it is written (and translated) clearly and elegantly, it will also make the newest discoveries and arguments concerning Hellenistic Athens easily accessible to the general public. All in all, it is a splendid achievement, and one could hardly ask for more. (Though in fact I will: see below.)Habicht’s theme is that the struggle of the Greek city-states for political freedom did not end with the victory of Philip II of Macedon at Chaeronea in 338 b.c. It is true that in the world of Macedonian super-states that developed in the wake of the conquests of Philip II and his son Alexander the Great, the individual poleis that had played dominant roles among the Greeks in the Classical age (including Athens) had much less political-military weight, because the scale of politics and of political units was now so much larger. But most city-states (including Athens) “remained viable and vital organisms” (366; cf. 4), capable of inspiring intense traditional patriotism in the elites necessary to run them—even when these poleis were forced to live under the hegemony of a Macedonian king. In the case of Athens specifically, Habicht continually stresses the continuity of institutions, and that this continuity existed because the institutions (Council, Assembly, courts) succeeded in regulating Athenian internal affairs “in an exemplary fashion” (2). It was a situation which the Athenians recognized, and in which they took great pride.But Athens, unlike most other poleis, also had its own imperial past, and so it naturally strove for a long time under often very difficult circumstances to assert not merely local autonomy but its true independence—including freedom of action in foreign relations. Here too one can see the powerful perseverance of the city’s tradition, and the long Athenian struggle for freedom is Habicht’s true theme. Thus he chronicles the energetic military improvements undertaken by the Athenians in the fifteen years after Chaeronea (16–17, 22–24); the serious preparations for war against Alexander the Great in 324 (!) over his decision to deprive Athens of Samos (31–32); the leading role played [End Page 647] by Athens in the Greek rebellion against Macedonian hegemony that followed Alexander’s death (the Lamian War), which ended in defeat and the eventual Macedonian-imposed dictatorship of Demetrius of Phalerum (36–41, 53–66); the successful Athenian self-defense after the city was liberated by Demetrius the Besieger in 307 (74–75); the successful rebellion against Demetrius himself in 287 by “the freedom-loving citizens of Athens” (93), achieved with heavy Athenian casualties in the Piraeus (124... (shrink)

Rousseau meende dat hypocrisie de meest wezenlijke karaktertrek van zijn tijdgenoten was. Vandaar dat hij een niuew oprechtheidsideaal propageerde. Dit ideaal hangt nauw samen met zijn opvattingen over het fundament van de menselijke natuur, het zelfbewustzijn, dat in voortdurende strijd is met het collectief.

…behind the diversity of discoveries [in molecular biology] moved a unity, a constant direction of change, the development of the concept of biological specificity.In his landmark book Evolution by Gene Duplication, geneticist Susumu Ohno pointed out that whereas most evolutionary developments represent adjustments to past challenges and mutations, two unique systems had evolved to deal with future challenges: the immune response and neural memory functions. He named these two evolutionary modes after the Titan brothers of Greek mythology: “standard” evolutionary developments (...) were named for rearward-looking Epimetheus, and “anticipatory” evolutionary mechanisms for foresighted Prometheus (Ohno 1976; Ohno et.. (shrink)

Glenberg's conception of “meaning from and for action” is too narrow. For example, it provides no satisfactory account of the “logic of Elfland,” a metaphor used by Chesterton to refer to meaning acquired by being told something. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget. G. K. Chesterton.