The construction of complex simulation models and the application of new computer hardware to ecological problems has resulted in the need for many ecologists to rely on computer programmers to develop their modelling software. However, this can lead to a lack of flexibility and understanding in model implementation and in resource problems for researchers. This paper presents a new programming language, Viola, based on a simple organisational concept which can be used by most researchers to develop complex simulations much more (...) easily than could be achieved with standard programming languages such as C++. The language is object oriented and implemented through a visual interface. It is specifically designed to cope with complicated individual based behavioural simulations and comes with embedded concurrency handling abilities. (shrink)

Primordial emotions are the subjective element of the instincts which are the genetically programmed behaviour patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc.There are two constituents of a primordial emotion—the specific sensation which when severe may be imperious, and the compelling intention for gratification by a consummatory act. They may dominate the stream of consciousness, and can have plenipotentiary power over behaviour.It is hypothesized that early in animal evolution (...) complex reflex mechanisms in the basal brain subserving homeostatic responses, in concert with elements of the reticular activating system subserving arousal, melded functionally with regions embodied in the progressive rostral development of the telencephalon. This included the emergent limbic and paralimbic areas, and the insula. This phylogenetically ancient organization subserved the origin of consciousness as the primordial emotion, which signalled that the organisms existence was immediately threatened. Neuroimaging confirms major activations in regions of the basal brain during primordial emotions in humans. The behaviour of decorticate humans and animals is discussed in relation to the possible existence of primitive awareness.Neuroimaging of the primordial emotions reveals that rapid gratification of intention by a consummatory act such as ingestion causes precipitate decline of both the initiating sensation and the intention. There is contemporaneous rapid disappearance of particular regions of brain activation which suggests they may be part of the jointly sufficient and severally necessary activations and deactivations which correlate with consciousness [Crick, F. & Koch, C. . A framework for consciousness. NatureNeuroscience,6, 119–126]. (shrink)

The current model of technology assessment treats ethics itself as just another problem‐solving technology. Ethics should resist this model to play a more critical role in technology assessment by better understanding the complex relationship between society, medicine, and technology—and by recasting how problems are defined.

Normal propositional modal systems This first chapter has two main aims. One is to give a general account of the propositional modal systems that we shall ...

Einstein’s razor, a corollary of Ockham’s razor, is often paraphrased as follows: make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. This rule of thumb describes the challenge that designers of a legal system face—to craft simple laws that produce desired ends, but not to pursue simplicity so far as to undermine those ends. Complexity, simplicity’s inverse, taxes cognition and increases the likelihood of suboptimal decisions. In addition, unnecessary legal complexity can drive a misallocation of human capital toward comprehending and (...) complying with legal rules and away from other productive ends. While many scholars have offered descriptive accounts or theoretical models of legal complexity, most empirical research to date has been limited to simple measures of size, such as the number of pages in a bill. No extant research rigorously applies a meaningful model to real data. As a consequence, we have no reliable means to determine whether a new bill, regulation, order, or precedent substantially effects legal complexity. In this paper, we begin to address this need by developing a proposed empirical framework for measuring relative legal complexity. This framework is based on “knowledge acquisition”, an approach at the intersection of psychology and computer science, which can take into account the structure, language, and interdependence of law. We then demonstrate the descriptive value of this framework by applying it to the U.S. Code’s Titles, scoring and ranking them by their relative complexity. We measure various features of a title including its structural size, the net flow of its intra-title citations and its linguistic entropy. Our framework is flexible, intuitive, and transparent, and we offer this approach as a first step in developing a practical methodology for assessing legal complexity. (shrink)

When people understand a counterfactual such as “if the flowers had been roses, the trees would have been orange trees,” they think about the conjecture, “there were roses and orange trees,” and they also think about its opposite, the presupposed facts. We test whether people think about the opposite by representing alternates, for example, “poppies and apple trees,” or whether models can contain symbols, for example, “no roses and no orange trees.” We report the discovery of an inference‐to‐alternates effect—a tendency (...) to make an affirmative inference that refers to an alternate even from a negative minor premise, for example, “there were no orange trees, therefore there were poppies.” Nine experiments show the inference‐to‐alternates effect occurs in a binary context, but not a multiple context, and for direct and indirect reference; it can be induced and reduced by prior experience with similar inferences, and it also occurs for indicative conditionals. The results have implications for theories of counterfactual conditionals, and of negation. (shrink)

Due to the growth of neo-liberalism with its emphasis on “market-driven courses,” the humanities, of which philosophy is a part, find themselves disparaged and under-funded. As a result, some African philosophers have yielded to the temptation to deploy the empirical methodology of the natural and social sciences in a bid to illustrate the practical value of their discipline, thereby eroding philosophy’s distinctive characteristic, namely, reflection. Consequently, drawing from the contemporary discourse on methodology in African philosophy, this article argues that in (...) order to preserve the distinctive character of their discipline, philosophers who inquire into indigenous African thought ought to treat the collection of empirical data on the subject as a preliminary step to the core task of philosophical reflection that deploys such techniques as criticism, linguistic analysis, and systematic speculation. Only then will African philosophy make its proper contribution to the interdisciplinary field of African studies. (shrink)

The issue of energy and its potential localizability in general relativity has challenged physicists for more than a century. Many non-invariant measures were proposed over the years but an invariant measure was never found. We discovered the invariant localized energy measure by expanding the domain of investigation from space to spacetime. We note from relativity that the finiteness of the velocity of propagation of interactions necessarily induces indefiniteness in measurements. This is because the elements of actual physical systems being measured (...) as well as their detectors are characterized by entire four-velocity fields, which necessarily leads to information from a measured system being processed by the detector in a spread of time. General relativity adds additional indefiniteness because of the variation in proper time between elements. The uncertainty is encapsulated in a generalized uncertainty principle, in parallel with that of Heisenberg, which incorporates the localized contribution of gravity to energy. This naturally leads to a generalized uncertainty principle for momentum as well. These generalized forms and the gravitational contribution to localized energy would be expected to be of particular importance in the regimes of ultra-strong gravitational fields. We contrast our invariant spacetime energy measure with the standard 3-space energy measure which is familiar from special relativity, appreciating why general relativity demands a measure in spacetime as opposed to 3-space. We illustrate the misconceptions by certain authors of our approach. (shrink)

Papers presented at the Conference of the Cardinal Newman Society, November, 2001, the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.

Arguments by Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta for evidence of a Self that is one and the same as the Great Lord Śiva are interpreted. The views of these authors are clarified and the contradictory relationship between the limited individual subject and the recognition of the true Self is shown. With the help of Utpaladeva's distinction between "seeing" and "noticing," a further interpretation is attempted. Some remarks are made concerning practical meditation and the theoretical presuppositions of this way of thinking in order (...) to find starting points for a comparison with Western philosophy. (shrink)

Publication de deux poèmes byzantins du 12ème s. attribués à Théodore Prodomos, qui fournissent un certain nombre de renseignements sur les tentes des camps d'hiver des Comnène, et en particulier sur celle de la maison d'Irène la Sevastokratorissa. Cette étude mène l'auteur à un commentaire historico-artistique des éléments décrits: il compare d'abord ceux-ci avec l'art des 11ème et et 12ème s., et particulièrement avec l'art profane, puis il s'interroge sur l'authenticité des descriptions par rapport aux figures de rhétorique employées dans (...) ces textes. (shrink)

International business organizations are regularly addressed on their corporate social responsibility (CSR). As illustrated in this paper, it is not yet clear exactly what CSR means to organizations and how to deal with it. In this paper, the authors explore how a sensemaking approach helps to understand the business challenges of CSR within an organizational context. The theories of Karl Weick are applied to the experiences of CSR in Royal Dutch Shell. The authors argue that the key to CSR in (...) international business organizations is to engage stakeholders and start a process of joint sensemaking. Three main competencies are crucial in this: the competency to engage stakeholders through listening and understanding; the creation of an organizational language so that CSR makes sense to members of the organization; and recognizing the momentum of taking action. (shrink)

Here we discuss the challenge posed by self-organization to the Darwinian conception of evolution. As we point out, natural selection can only be the major creative agency in evolution if all or most of the adaptive complexity manifest in living organisms is built up over many generations by the cumulative selection of naturally occurring small, random mutations or variants, i.e., additive, incremental steps over an extended period of time. Biological self-organization—witnessed classically in the folding of a protein, or in the (...) formation of the cell membrane—is a fundamentally different means of generating complexity. We agree that self-organizing systems may be fine-tuned by selection and that self-organization may be therefore considered a complementary mechanism to natural selection as a causal agency in the evolution of life. But we argue that if self-organization proves to be a common mechanism for the generation of adaptive order from the molecular to the organismic level, then this will greatly undermine the Darwinian claim that natural selection is the major creative agency in evolution. We also point out that although complex self-organizing systems are easy to create in the electronic realm of cellular automata, to date translating in silico simulations into real material structures that self-organize into complex forms from local interactions between their constituents has not proved easy. This suggests that self-organizing systems analogous to those utilized by biological systems are at least rare and may indeed represent, as pre-Darwinists believed, a unique ascending hierarchy of natural forms. Such a unique adaptive hierarchy would pose another major challenge to the current Darwinian view of evolution, as it would mean the basic forms of life are necessary features of the order of nature and that the major pathways of evolution are determined by physical law, or more specifically by the self-organizing properties of biomatter, rather than natural selection. (shrink)

In this note we sketch a decision procedure for S3.51 based on reduction to conjunctive normal form. Using the following theorem of S3.5: and its dual for M over a conjunction, any formula can be reduced by standard methods (as in S52) to a conjunction of disjunctions of the form where Í is (p ⊃ p), 0 is ∼(p ⊃ p) and α — λ are all PC-wffs (i.e. they contain no modal operators).