Volume 24, Issue 12, December 2024, Page 32-34.

Now I know why so many stories have been written with the theme: “everything changed in one moment.” More than 1,000 days have come and gone, and I still remember one Sunday morning and still follow and feel the effects of one decision.

Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence: A Case Study Using the Integrated Readiness Matrix builds on the 2015 text, Integrating Pedagogy and Technology: Improving Teaching and Learning in Higher Education with a focus on teaching in higher education. Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence is premised on our contention in the first book that, while individual faculty members can independently begin to use the IRM to improve their pedagogical and technological skills in their content areas, an organizational structure is needed (...) to sustain ongoing improvement. In addition, while the first book provided a primer on learning theory as it relates to pedagogy, Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence plumbs this topic more deeply from the perspective of the college instructor. Further, the second book is dedicated to demonstrating how the IRM can be institutionalized as the foundation for providing the structure and support to faculty and how they can help shape centers for teaching excellence by becoming more familiar with relevant learning theories and related pedagogical and technological approaches. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 2, February 2025, Page 61-64.

This paper explores some of the reasons why we, as a business ethics center housed at a state university, are transitioning from being a largely neutral platform on business ethics topics to becoming an advocate for specific perspectives. Comprising the topics of interest are issues such as climate change, capitalism, and certain medical and public health controversies. Presented here are four main reasons behind this move: pluralistic arguments, moral “switching,” existential crises, and combating disinformation. Two examples regarding capitalism and vaccine (...) mandates are used to demonstrate advocacy in practice. (shrink)

Vādanyāya is one of the representative works of Dharmakīrti. It is concerned with debate logic and deals with win-or-lose reasoning rules in the broad sense of logic. In this paper, we will concentrate our discussion on Dharmakīrti’s theory of nigrahasthāna (fault) in his debate logic, a key issue in Vādanyāya. First, we point out that the justification of three logical reasons as proof conditions of debate constitutes the rational point of departure for Dharmakīrti’s debate logic. Second, we analyze the differences (...) between Dharmakīrti’s and the Naiyāyika’s notion of debate and point out that Dharmakīrti’s ‘debate’ involves two parties (the disputant and the opponent) attempting to rationally refute the other’s opinion to persuade the other to change their wrong ideas. Last, based on the discussion of Dharmakīrti’s concept of debate logic, we identify seven types of nigrahasthāna in Vādanyāya with regard to the two parties of a debate (the disputant and the opponent). (shrink)

Die Hauptrichtung der französischen Soziologie ist heute noch die Durkheimsche Schule, die C. Bouglé in seinem Buch „Bilan de la Sociologie française contemporaine“ in den Vordergrund stellt. Diese Schule hat weniger im Sinne einer Einzelwissenschaft gewirkt als durch den Einfluss, den sie auf fast alle sozialen Wissenschaften ausgeübt hat. Deswegen sind die verschiedenen Kapitel des Bougléschen Buches den besonderen Disziplinen : Psychologie, Ethnographie, Geschichte, Jura, Nationalökonomie gewidmet, um die Wechselwirkung zwischen ihnen und der Soziologie, die Verbreitung der soziologischen Methode, des (...) soziologischen Gesichtspunkts zu würdigen. Anschliessend an Bouglé versucht Koyré diese Würdigung zusammenzufassen und kritisch zu beleuchten. Trotz ihrer verschiedenen theoretischen Einstellung kommen diese Disziplinen praktisch zu einer fruchtbaren Zusammenarbeit. Schliesslich macht Koyré zwei wichtige Bemerkungen : 1. über die Tendenz der soziologischen Moral, für welche die soziale Kohärenz der höchste Wert wäre, und 2. über die Wiederentdeckung einer besonderen Schicht der Wirklichkeit durch Dürkheim, nämlich die Kollektivvorstellung, die wie der „objektive Geist“ jedem Individuum innerlich und zugleich äusserlich und für alle verpflichtend ist.The dominant tendency in French sociology is still represented by the school of Durkheim, which receives prominent treatment by C. Bouglé in his book,,, Bilan de la Sociologie française contemporaine“. This school has penetrated nearly all the different social sciences and its influence has not been confined to the boundaries of a separate discipline. The different chapters of Bouglé's book, therefore, deal with psychology, anthropology, history, law, and political economy, in order to analyze the interaction between these separate disciplines and the sociological method.The author attempts to develop further the viewpoint advanced by Bouglé and to throw critical light upon it. He makes his observations along two main lines of thought, namely : first, that the focal conception which represents the supreme value for any sociology and its scientific unity is the conception of social coherence ; and second, that there is a particular area of reality rediscovered by Durkheim, namely the collective idea which, like the „objective mind“, represents for each and every individual a bond internal as well as external. (shrink)

While the story of Stanislav Petrov – the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who likely saved the world from nuclear holocaust in 1983 – is often trotted out to advocate for the view that human beings ought to be kept “in the loop” of automated weapons’ responses, I argue that the episode in fact belies this reading. By attending more closely to the features of this event – to Petrov’s professional background, to his familiarity with the warning system, and to his decisions (...) to defy his protocol – it becomes clear that Petrov was not seamlessly working “in his loop,” but reassessing it entirely. I claim that this exhibits a paradox intrinsic to all automated loops: namely, that their optimum function in fact rests on unforeseen human interventions that cannot be reliably codified ex ante, that is, that good judgment cannot simply be “programmed into” their protocols. This dependence, moreover, reveals automation’s ineluctable need for virtue ethics – not in the usual sense (whereby ethics deliberates about, say, possible damages and loss of life), but in the sense that ethical judgment, rightly understood, entails the reassessment of all of the conditions surrounding a decision, including whether a protocol should be followed at all. (shrink)

(I) Aristotle of Stagira (384-322 BC) 0) A closed geocentric spherical cosmology. (Adopted from the great mathematician, Eudoxus, c. 400 to 347 BC; via Calippus; but Aristotle unifies their separate schemes for different heavenly bodies). (Aristotle cites mathematicians as estimating radius of earth: in fact 200% of correct figure. Eratosthenes ca. 250 BC estimates radius of earth as 120% of correct).

Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 101-103.

The following article is a response to the position paper of the Hastings Center, “Ethical Challenges of Chronic Illness”, a product of their three year project on Ethics and Chronic Care. The authors of this paper, three prominent bioethicists, Daniel Callahan, Arthur Caplan, and Bruce Jennings, argue that there should be a different ethic for acute and chronic care. In pressing this distinction they provide philosophical grounds for limiting medical care for the elderly and chronically ill. We give a critical (...) survey of their position and reject it as well as any attempt to characterize the physician-patient relationship as a commercial contract. We emphasize, as central features of good medical practice, a commitment to be the patient's agent and a determination to acquire and be guided by knowledge. These commitments may sometimes conflict with efforts to have the physician serve as an instrument of social and economic policies limiting medical care. (shrink)

Contemporary architecture is increasingly grounded in science and mathematics. Architectural discourse has shifted radically from the sometimes disorienting Derridean deconstruction, to engaging scientific terms such as fractals, chaos, complexity, nonlinearity, and evolving systems. That's where the architectural action is -- at least for cutting-edge architects and thinkers -- and every practicing architect and student needs to become conversant with these terms and know what they mean. Unfortunately, the vast majority of architecture faculty are unprepared to explain them to students, not (...) having had a scientific education themselves. Here is an architecture book by an architect/scientist, just in time to help architects in the new millennium. Alexander discusses many of the scientific terms arising in cutting-edge architecture, and explains them to those who don't have scientific training or advanced mathematical knowledge. We find discussions of the evolution of forms; the importance of process in design; iteration; genetic algorithms; sequences of transformations; different levels of scale (i.e. fractals); etc. They are explained here by an architect who is also a scientist, because he wants to change the way architects think and build. Alexander is not merely popularizing other scientists' results and making them accessible to architects: he is in fact presenting new and original scientific work that ties many of these concepts together in a way that will be useful to architects. (shrink)

Haptic-based vibrotactile biofeedback (BF) is a promising technique to improve rehabilitation of balance in stroke patients. However, the extent to which BF training changes temporal structure of the center of pressure (CoP) trajectories remains unknown. This study aimed to investigate the effect of vibrotactile BF training on the temporal structure of CoP during quiet stance in chronic stroke patients using detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). Nine chronic stroke patients (age; 81.56±44 months post-stroke) received a balance training regimen using a vibrotactile BF (...) system twice a week over four weeks. A Wii Balance board was used to record five 30 s trials of quiet stance pre- and post-training at 50 Hz. DFA revealed presence of two linear scaling regions in CoP indicating presence of fast- and slow-scale fluctuations. Averaged across all trials, fast-scale fluctuations showed persistent dynamics ( = 1.05 ±.08 for ML and  = 0.99 ±.17 for AP) and slow-scale fluctuations were anti-persistent ( = 0.35 ±.05 for ML and  = 0.32 ±.05 for AP). The slow-scale dynamics of ML CoP in stroke patients decreased from pre-training to post-BF training ( = 0.40 ±.13 vs. 0.31 ±.09). These results suggest that the vibrotactile BF training affects postural control strategy used by chronic stroke patients in the ML direction. Results of the DFA are further discussed in the context of balance training using vibrotactile BF and interpreted from the perspective of intermittent control of upright stance. (shrink)

In 1932 the US Public Health Service (USPHS) initiated an experiment in Macon County, Alabama, to determine the natural course of untreated, latent syphilis in black males. The test comprised 400 syphilitic men, as well as 200 unin- fected men who served as controls. ..