We describe research carried out as part of a text summarisation project for the legal domain for which we use a new XML corpus of judgments of the UK House of Lords. These judgments represent a particularly important part of public discourse due to the role that precedents play in English law. We present experimental results using a range of features and machine learning techniques for the task of predicting the rhetorical status of sentences and for the task of selecting (...) the most summary-worthy sentences from a document. Results for these components are encouraging as they achieve state-of-the-art accuracy using robust, automatically generated cue phrase information. Sample output from the system illustrates the potential of summarisation technology for legal information management systems and highlights the utility of our rhetorical annotation scheme as a model of legal discourse, which provides a clear means for structuring summaries and tailoring them to different types of users. (shrink)

BackgroundImplementation science research, especially when using participatory and co-design approaches, raises unique challenges for research ethics committees. Such challenges may be poorly addressed by approval and governance mechanisms that were developed for more traditional research approaches such as randomised controlled trials.DiscussionImplementation science commonly involves the partnership of researchers and stakeholders, attempting to understand and encourage uptake of completed or piloted research. A co-creation approach involves collaboration between researchers and end users from the onset, in question framing, research design and delivery, (...) and influencing strategy, with implementation and broader dissemination strategies part of its design from gestation. A defining feature of co-creation is its emergent and adaptive nature, making detailed pre-specification of interventions and outcome measures impossible. This methodology sits oddly with ethics committee protocols that require precise pre-definition of interventions, mode of delivery, outcome measurements, and the role of study participants. But the strict requirements of ethics committees were developed for a purpose – to protect participants from harm and help ensure the rigour and transparency of studies. We propose some guiding principles to help square this circle. First, ethics committees should acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of research approaches, both formally and informally ; without active support, their members may not understand or value participatory designs. Second, ground rules should be established for co-design applications and communicated to committee members and stakeholders. Third, the benefits of power-sharing should be recognised and credit given to measures likely to support this important goal, especially in research with vulnerable communities. Co-design is considered best practice, for example, in research involving indigenous peoples in New Zealand, Australia and Canada. (shrink)

In this new and original book, Claire Armon-Jones examines the concept of affect and various philosophical positions which attempt to define and characterize it: the standard view, the neo-cognitivist view, and the objectual thesis. She contends that these views radically distort our understanding of affect by disregarding modes of affect which fail to conform to the accounts they each employ. Against the standard and neo-cognitivist views she argues that the notions they use to characterize affect are neither necessary nor (...) sufficient; and against the objectual thesis she further argues that affective states exhibit degrees of independence from the concept of an object. She develops a new theory of the varieties of affect that explains their cognitive nature, their felt aspect, their special logic and the relationship between their objectless and object-directed forms. Armon-Jones concludes by suggesting that her arguments call into question certain assumptions about the rationality and moral status of affect and require a revision of the conception of the good in affect. (shrink)

Recent theorizing about the nature of the cognitive impairment in autism suggests that autistic individuals display abnormally weak central coherence, the capacity to integrate information in order to make sense of one’s environment. Our article shows the relevance of computational models of coherence to the understanding of weak central coherence. Using a theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction, we show how weak coherence can be simulated ina a connectionist network that has unusually high inhibition compared to excitation. This connectionist model (...) simulates autistic behaviour on both the false belief task and the homograph task. (shrink)

Two aspects of dynamic systems approaches that are pertinent to developmental models of reading are the emergence of a system with self-organizing characteristics, and its evolution over time to a stable state that is not easily modified or perturbed. The effects of dynamic stability may be seen in the differences obtained in the processing of print by beginner readers taught by different approaches to reading (phonics and text-centered), and more long-term effects on adults, consistent with these differences. However, there is (...) little direct evidence collected over time for the same participants. In this study, lexicalized (implicit) phonological processing, and explicit phonological and letter-sound skills are further examined in a precocious reader whose early development at 3 and 5 years has been extensively described (Cognition, 2000, 2004). At ages 10 and 14 years, comparisons were made with these earlier reports and skilled adult readers, using the same tasks for evidence of changes in reading processes. The results showed that along with an increase of reading accuracy and speed, her pattern of lexicalized phonological responses for reading did not change over time. Neither did her pattern of explicit phonological and letter-sound skills, aspects of which were inferior to her lexicalized phonological processing, and word reading. These results suggest dynamic stability of the word reading system. The early emergence of this system with minimal explicit skill development calls into question developmental reading theories that require such skills for learning to read. Currently, only the Knowledge Sources theory of reading acquisition can account for such findings. Consideration of these aspects of dynamic systems raise theoretical issues that could result in a paradigm shift with regard to best practice and intervention. (shrink)

Abstract:Through dismantling the territorial integrity of the modern nation-state, Indigenous sovereignty threatens state imposed hegemonic systems. While these systems exist at the threshold spatially—borders and boundaries—they are the ideological epicenter for controlling human and non-human life, rendering them manageable by the state. These borders are also perpetually liminal spaces, and it is in this liminality that artists intervene through poetics, confronting state rhetorics and exercising sovereignty to address colonial wounds. In 2015 and 2017, two land-based ephemeral art projects were created (...) to challenge the terms by which territory is instrumentalized in order to justify the commodification of both land and humans. In 2015, the artist collective, Post-commodity, set up a land-based art installation, Repellent Fence, intersecting the US/Mexico border in an effort to “stitch” the Americas together again. The gesture of stitching is also employed in Maureen Gruben's Stitching My Landscape from 2017 in which Gruben stitched a segment of ocean ice with vibrant red broad cloth near her home in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories alongside the Ibyuk Pingo, a national landmark administered by Parks Canada. Both of these projects provide entry points into the various methods by which land is abstracted into an oppressive and singular form. They push back against the rigidity of prescribed borders, instead investigating more fluid entanglements with land.This paper provides a comparative analysis of these projects, examining the ways in which counterpoints are central to them as artistic interventions. Crossing diagonally to the borders that the nation-state has institutionalized produces a moment of reprise to a highly specific end: to heal. Pivotal to these anti-colonial critiques are rejection, dismissal and a refusal to translate. A symbolic reorientation of the ways humans interact with land arises, evoked through a performative gesture of stitching across fragmentations and divides. (shrink)

This paper pertains to research works aiming at linking ethics and automated reasoning in autonomous machines. It focuses on a formal approach that is intended to be the basis of an artificial agent’s reasoning that could be considered by a human observer as an ethical reasoning. The approach includes some formal tools to describe a situation and models of ethical principles that are designed to automatically compute a judgement on possible decisions that can be made in a given situation and (...) explain why a given decision is ethically acceptable or not. It is illustrated on three ethical frameworks—utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics and the Doctrine of Double effect whose formal models are tested on ethical dilemmas so as to examine how they respond to those dilemmas and to highlight the issues at stake when a formal approach to ethical concepts is considered. The whole approach is instantiated on the drone dilemma, a thought experiment we have designed; this allows the discrepancies that exist between the judgements of the various ethical frameworks to be shown. The final discussion allows us to highlight the different sources of subjectivity of the approach, despite the fact that concepts are expressed in a more rigorous way than in natural language: indeed, the formal approach enables subjectivity to be identified and located more precisely. (shrink)

The necessity of reconsidering and rethinking the aesthetics of a literary genre is not a novelty. Now that the traditional distinction between argumentative theory patterns and narrative styles of thinking has blurred, the relationship between philosophy and literature raises a principal question: the definition of philosophy itself and of philosophical activity. Modern literature, and in particular the novel of the last century, embodies a polyphonic, complex cognitive enterprise which includes both original uses of language and sophisticated patterns of moral reflection. (...) Modern literature thus represents a new model of paradigmatic thinking for philosophical activity, and both philosophy and literature can be.. (shrink)

Dans cette étude, qui procède d’une thèse de doctorat défendue à l’Université Lyon 3 en 2008, Flore Kimmel-Clauzet interroge la survie des grands poètes grecs dans l’imaginaire religieux, politique et culturel de l’Antiquité. C’est bel et bien de survie qu’il est question, puisque la présence des poètes dans la société grecque continue de se faire sentir longtemps après leur mort. En effet, les performances répétées de leur poésie les gardent au centre des préoccupations culturelles des cités...

The commentators provide a wealth of additional neurobiological data that ought to be integrated in a comprehensive model. This response article, however, focuses on clarification of conceptual queries, thereby outlining the proposed theory of hallucinations more sharply, discussing its relationship with schizophrenia, and explaining why underconstrained thalamocortical activation may well be a candidate mechanism responsible for acute schizophrenic symptoms other than hallucinations.

Posthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent "turns" toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Questioning the nature and limits of life in the natural sciences, the essays in this volume examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life. They explore the possibility of theorizing life without assuming it to be either a (...) simple substrate or an always-mediated effect of culture and difference. Posthumous Life provides new ways of thinking about animals, plants, humans, difference, sexuality, race, gender, identity, the earth, and the future. (shrink)

In this paper, we reflect on our experience as science and technology studies researchers who were members of the working group that produced A Synthetic Biology Roadmap for the UK in 2012. We explore how this initiative sought to govern an uncertain future and describe how it was successfully used to mobilize public funds for synthetic biology from the UK government. We discuss our attempts to incorporate the insights and sensibilities of STS into the policy process and why we chose (...) to use the concept of responsible research and innovation to do so. We analyze how the roadmapping process, and the final report, narrowed and transformed our contributions to the roadmap. We show how difficult it is for STS researchers to influence policy when our ideas challenge deeply entrenched pervasive assumptions, framings, and narratives about how technological innovation necessarily leads to economic progress, about public reticence as a roadblock to that progress, and about the supposed separation between science and society. We end by reflecting on the constraints under which we were operating from the outset and on the challenges for STS in policy. (shrink)

This paper investigates the ethical implications of research at the interface between biodiversity and both human and animal health. Health and sanitary crises often lead to ethical debates, especially when it comes to disruptive interventions such as forced vaccinations, quarantine, or mass culling of domestic or wild animals. In such debates, the emergence of a “Planetary health ethics” can be highlighted. Ethics and accountability principles apply to all aspects of scientific research including its technological and engineering applications, regardless of whether (...) they are considered “hard sciences”, such as state-of-the-art technology in the fields of medicine, veterinary medicine, agronomy, or environment, or “soft”, such as local or global governance, health, socio-ecosystems, and the environment. Ethical reflection in the interdisciplinary field of biodiversity and health requires the examination of relevant scientific domains, such as biology, ecology, evolution, human medicine, animal medicine, anthropology, and law, and their epistemology and representation as well as scientific pluralism, which is crucial to establish genuine interdisciplinarity. Navigating the ethics-scape necessitates going beyond the hierarchy of science by recognising that scientific knowledge has implications for both scientific and non-scientific perspectives on the study of nature. The example of a Nipah virus outbreak is used to illustrate how the so-called “modern epidemiological” approach often focuses on risk factors associated with individual behavioural characteristics or collective practices, whereas the so-called “eco-social” approach focuses on global, socio-economic, and environmental factors that are the contextual causes of the health problem affecting the community. “Modern epidemiologists” aim to “correct” individual or practice factors using a “minimal set” of ethics, whereas “eco-social” scientists have to act systemically, which requires integrated research that acknowledges scientific pluralism, avoids the hierarchy of sciences, but accepts the pluralism of ethics and values. (shrink)

Interpersonal coordination is a key factor in team performance. In interactive team sports, the limited predictability of a constantly changing context makes coordination challenging. Approaches that highlight the support provided by environmental information and theories of shared mental models provide potential explanations of how interpersonal coordination can nonetheless be established. In this article, we first outline the main assumptions of these approaches and consider criticisms that have been raised with regard to each. The aim of this article is to define (...) a theoretical perspective that integrates the coordination mechanisms of the two approaches. In doing so, we borrow from a theoretical outline of group action. According to this outline, group action based on a priori shared mental models is an example of how interpersonal coordination is established from the top down. Interpersonal coordination in reaction to the perception of affordances represents the bottom-up component of group action. Both components are inextricably involved in the coordination of interactive sports teams. We further elaborate on the theoretical outline to integrate a third, constructivist approach. Integrating this third approach helps to explain interpersonal coordination in game situations for which no shared mental models are established and game situations that remain ambiguous in terms of perceived affordances. The article describes how hierarchical, sequential and complex dimensions of action organization are important aspects of this constructivist perspective and how mental models may be involved. A basketball example is used to illustrate how top-down, bottom-up and constructivist processes may be simultaneously involved in enabling interpersonal coordination. Finally, we present the implications for research and practice. (shrink)

Base pair mismatches in DNA arise from errors in DNA replication, recombination, and biochemical modification of bases. Mismatches are inherently transient. They are resolved passively by DNA replication, or actively by enzymatic removal and resynthesis of one of the bases. The first step in removal is recognition of strand discontinuity by one of the MutS proteins. Mismatches arising from errors in DNA replication are repaired in favor of the base on the template strand, but other mismatches trigger base excision or (...) nucleotide excision repair (NER), or non‐repair pathways such as hypermutation, cell cycle arrest, or apoptosis. We argue that MutL homologues play a key role in determining biologic outcome by recruiting and/or activating effector proteins in response to lesion recognition by MutS. We suggest that the process is regulated by conformational changes in MutL caused by cycles of ATP binding and hydrolysis, and by physiologic changes which influence effector availability. (shrink)

Morally supererogatory acts are those that go above and beyond the call of duty. More specifically: they are acts that, on any individual occasion, are good to do and also both permissible to do and permissible to refrain from doing. We challenge the way in which discussions of supererogation typically consider our choices and actions in isolation. Instead we consider sequences of supererogatory acts and omissions and show that some such sequences are themselves problematic. This gives rise to the following (...) puzzle: what problem can we have with a sequences of actions if each individual act or omission is itself permissible? In this paper, we develop a response to this question, by exploring whether solutions analogous to those proposed in the rational choice literature are available in the case of supererogatory sequences. Our investigation leads us to the view that making sense of the supererogatory requires accepting that there are global moral norms that apply to sequences of acts alongside the local moral norms that apply to individual acts. (shrink)

In this paper back-and-forth structures are applied to the semantics of natural language. Back-and-forth structures consist of an event structure and an interval structure communicating via a relational link; transitions in the one structure correspond to transitions in the other. Such entities enable us to view temporal constructions (such as tense, aspect, and temporal connectives) as methods of moving systematically between information sources. We illustrate this with a treatment of the English present perfect, and progressive aspect, that draws on ideas (...) developed in Moens & Steedman (1988), and discuss the role of rich ontologies in formal semantics. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented and highly threatening, constrained, and confusing social and educational environment, we decided to expand the traditional focus of the extraneous load in Cognitive Load Theory acknowledging the psychological environment in which learning occurs. We therefore adapted and implemented principles of the CLT to reduce extraneous load for our students by facilitating their educational activities. Given previous empirical support for the principles of CLT, it was expected that the adoption of these principles might enable our (...) students to cultivate attitudes and skills across multiple domains such as online learning and presentation technologies, implementing and maintaining a “classroom atmosphere” in a virtual environment, participating in discussions among large online groups of students, facilitating group work, providing virtual office hours for students, and proactively planning for upcoming semesters. (shrink)

Clinical research is a necessity if effective and safe treatments are to be developed. However, this may well include the need for research that is best described as ‘invasive’ in that it may be associated with some discomfort or inconvenience. Limitations in the undertaking of invasive research involving people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are perhaps related to anxieties within the academic community and among ethics committees; however, the consequence of this neglect is that innovative treatments specific to people with ID (...) may not be developed. Such concerns are likely to continue while there is limited published knowledge regarding the actual experiences of people with ID who have participated in invasive clinical research. As part of a pilot study trialling the novel use of a surgically inserted device to curb overeating in people with Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS) we have investigated the experience of research through semistructured qualitative interviews involving three participants and their carers. Thematic analysis revealed that the adults with PWS and their family carers rated their participation positively, seeing it as a rewarding and enriching experience. This brief report discusses findings from our interview data in order to highlight strategies which may ensure that research is acceptable to participants, meets the necessary ethical standards and is able to achieve the aims set out by the researchers. To our knowledge, this is the first study to record experiences directly from people with PWS and their carers regarding their involvement in invasive clinical research. (shrink)

This paper shows how solidarity is one of the founding principles in Thomas More's Utopia. In the fictional republic of Utopia described in Book II, solidarity has a political and a moral function. The principle is at the center of the communal organization of Utopian society, exemplified in a number of practices such as the sharing of farm work, the management of surplus crops, or the democratic elections of the governor and the priests. Not only does solidarity benefit the individual (...) Utopian, but it is a prerequisite to ensure the prosperity of the island of Utopia and its moral preeminence over its neighboring countries. However, a limit to this principle is drawn when the republic of Utopia faces specific social difficulties, and also deals with the rest of the world. In order for the principle of solidarity to function perfectly, it is necessary to apply it exclusively within the island or the republic would be at risk. War is not out of the question then, and compassion does not apply to all human beings. This conception of solidarity, summed up as “Utopia first!,” could be dubbed a Machiavellian strategy, devised to ensure the durability of the republic. We will show how some of the recommendations of Realpolitik made by Machiavelli in The Prince correspond to the Utopian policy enforced to protect their commonwealth. (shrink)

1. This paper contributes to the broader debate about how elite school institutions manage to remain alert and responsive to changing education market conditions, locally and globally, by explicitl...

International economic law is peculiar. It claims universal character, yet eschews engagement with many, if not all, the racialised features of the global political economy. Its scholars mostly ignore imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism; they exclude slavery, predation, and racism altogether. In the following article, we draw upon Walter Rodney’s dialectics of development to offer a racial capitalist critique of international economic law. The disciplinary boundaries and operative logic normalised by its denizens corral us in a white, Eurocentric episteme. Ahistoricism, decontextualisation, (...) and externalisation are three epistemic devices at the forefront of the exclusionary discourse of IEL. In this space, the histories and epistemologies of Black peoples are ghettoised, treated as alien to the framework. After identifying this bias, we use the Black Radical Tradition to evaluate IEL’s amenability to the racial capitalism critique. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have long been concerned with privileged women’s activism and engagement with feminist politics and how acts of resistance from privileged subjects might best be understood. In the current moment, we are seeing a reinvigoration of interest in feminist activism particularly from young women, but not necessarily focusing on young women who are positioned as privileged. Simultaneously, there is attention in the sociology of elite schooling to the question of social justice politics in privileged spaces. In this article, we (...) contribute to both of these scholarly conversations by reporting on the feminist activism of three young women attending an elite school in Australia. We argue that these young women’s activism/feminist politics need to be understood as a complex entanglement of resistance and reproduction with regard to gender, race and class, and that drawing on recent theorisations influenced by post-humanism in feminist educational research produces fresh insights into researching gender/race/class reproduction by young women in elite educational settings. (shrink)

Papers presented to various conferences, 2003-2006.

This paper examines some of the moral panics around hyperactive children, the construction of Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder, and the lure of Ritalin in turning kids identified as at risk into successful, productive individuals. Through a historicization of the child as a psychiatric subject, we try to demonstrate Ritalin's part in the uneven development of modern trends towards the pathologization of everyday life, a developing continuum between normality and abnormality, and an emphasis on the malleability of children and the importance of (...) environment in their upbringing. We conclude that Ritalin is a part of modernity's project of turning people into individuals—in this case, a kind of US transcendence fantasy—which, along with discourses and institutions, promises to transform young subjects and biocosmetically alter their futures. (shrink)

In 1991, the myotonic dystrophy gene was cloned by researchers from Cardiff, London, and elsewhere overseas. This article examines the relationships between the different research groups. It shows that the scientific collaboration on the myotonic dystrophy research was not a constant, stable feature of scientific progress but a process whereby the relationships among the scientists altered over time according to the stage of the research. This process was mediated by vested interests, by personalities, by the power differentials of the groups, (...) by the resources of the groups, by subcollaborations, and by interactions with those outside the main research network. The collaboration can be seen as a continuum, ranging from full cooperation with all parties to selected revelations to specific parties to intense competition. These cooperative and competitive relationships are seen primarily from the perspective of one research group, with whom intensive field research was conducted. (shrink)