This paper describes the design of a control and management network (orderwire) for a mobile wireless Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network. This mobile wireless ATM network is part of the Rapidly Deployable Radio Network (RDRN). The orderwire system consists of a packet radio network which overlays the mobile wireless ATM network, each network element in this network uses Global Positioning System (GPS) information to control a beamforming antenna subsystem which provides for spatial reuse. This paper also proposes a novel Virtual (...) Network Configuration (VNC) algorithm for predictive network configuration. A mobile ATM Private Network-Network Interface (PNNI) based on VNC is also discussed. Finally, as a prelude to the system implementation, results of a Maisie simulation of the orderwire system are discussed. (shrink)

This paper extends a stochastic theory for buffer fill distribution for multiple “on‘ and “off‘ sources to a mobile environment. Queue fill distribution is described by a set of differential equations assuming sources alternate asynchronously between exponentially distributed periods in “on‘ and “off‘ states. This paper includes the probabilities that mobile sources have links to a given queue. The sources represent mobile user nodes, and the queue represents the capacity of a switch. This paper presents a method of analysis which (...) uses mobile parameters such as speed, call rates per unit area, cell area, and call duration and determines queue fill distribution at the ATM cell level. The analytic results are compared with simulation results. (shrink)

In the last decade, reading research has seen a paradigmatic shift. A new wave of computational models of orthographic processing that offer various forms of noisy position or context-sensitive coding have revolutionized the field of visual word recognition. The influx of such models stems mainly from consistent findings, coming mostly from European languages, regarding an apparent insensitivity of skilled readers to letter order. Underlying the current revolution is the theoretical assumption that the insensitivity of readers to letter order reflects the (...) special way in which the human brain encodes the position of letters in printed words. The present article discusses the theoretical shortcomings and misconceptions of this approach to visual word recognition. A systematic review of data obtained from a variety of languages demonstrates that letter-order insensitivity is neither a general property of the cognitive system nor a property of the brain in encoding letters. Rather, it is a variant and idiosyncratic characteristic of some languages, mostly European, reflecting a strategy of optimizing encoding resources, given the specific structure of words. Since the main goal of reading research is to develop theories that describe the fundamental and invariant phenomena of reading across orthographies, an alternative approach to model visual word recognition is offered. The dimensions of a possible universal model of reading, which outlines the common cognitive operations involved in orthographic processing in all writing systems, are discussed. (shrink)

There is a trend toward the use of predictive systems in communications networks. At the systems and network management level predictive capabilities are focused on anticipating network faults and performance degradation. Simultaneously, mobile communication networks are being developed with predictive location and tracking mechanisms. The interactions and synergies between these systems present a new set of problems. A new predictive network management framework is developed and examined. The interaction between a predictive mobile network and the proposed network management system is (...) discussed. The Rapidly Deployable Radio Network is used as a specific example to illustrate these interactions. (shrink)

Recent studies have provided evidence of associations between neurochemistry and reading (dis)ability (Pugh et al., 2014). Based on a long history of studies indicating that fluent reading entails the automatic convergence of the written and spoken forms of language and our recently proposed Neural Noise Hypothesis (Hancock et al., 2017), we hypothesized that individual differences in cross-modal integration would mediate, at least partially, the relationship between neurochemical concentrations and reading. Cross-modal integration was measured in 231 children using a two-alternative forced (...) choice cross-modal matching task with three language conditions (letters, words, and pseudowords) and two levels of difficulty within each language condition. Neurometabolite concentrations of Choline (Cho), Glutamate (Glu), gamma-Aminobutyric (GABA), and N- acetyl-aspartate (NAA) were then measured in a subset of this sample (n = 70) with Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS). A structural equation mediation model revealed that the effect of cross-modal word matching mediated the relationship between increased Glu (which has been proposed to be an index of neural noise) and poorer reading ability. In addition, the effect of cross-modal word matching fully mediated a relationship between increased Cho and poorer reading ability. Multilevel mixed effects models confirmed that lower Cho predicted faster cross-modal matching reaction time, specifically in the hard word condition. These Cho... (shrink)

This paper aims to test whether business schools are teaching business students about corporate social responsibility, human rights and corruption. The purpose is to understand if a business school environment facilitates or impedes the learning experience of business ethics. Grounded in constructivist learning theory, we hypothesize that business schools are ineffective learning environments for teaching human rights. A questionnaire was then disseminated to 2,852business teachers at the top 20 Financial Times Global MBA ranked business schools concerning human rights and corruption. (...) Findings suggest that the majority of the 343 respondents hold a narrow understanding of human rights and corruption. In fact, educators are contributing to a learning environment that struggles to incorporate any meaningful or explicit study of human rights and corruption. We conclude that without a greater commitment to teaching the ethics behind human rights and corruption in business school, graduates will continuously fail to understand how their business decisions could negatively impact the communities in which they work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dr. Jacques L. and Martin Hide-a-Guerre: The Subject of New HistoricismStephen Bretzius (bio)Joel Fineman. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. [SW]Stephen Greenblatt. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1990.Stephen Greenblatt. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.The word ‘theory’ stems from (...) the Greek verb theorein. The noun belonging to it is theoria. Peculiar to these words is a lofty and mysterious meaning. The verb theorein grew out of the coalescing of two root words, thea and horao. Thea (cf. theater) is the outward look, the aspect, in which something shows itself.... The second root word in theorein, horao, means: to look at something attentively, to look it over, to view it closely. Thus it follows that theorein is thean horan, to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences becomes visible and, through such sight—seeing—to linger with it.—Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reflection”Hamlet: ‘Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out. A flourish.Guildenstern: There are the players.—Hamlet 2.2.366–681In setting forth Shakespeare’s unique role within an important institutional appropriation of the early modern theater by the postmodern university, together with a corresponding postmodern theory already shaping the early modern theater, a highly stylized early play like Romeo and Juliet is a good place to begin. For here, and from the beginning, the play unfolds outside (and therefore inside) the “deconstructed” binarisms characteristic of a certain poststructural literary theory generally—womb-tomb, light-dark, female-male, Capulet-Montague, waking-sleeping, all-nothing, lark-nightingale, love-hate, late-early, vice-virtue, poison-remedy, mercy-murder, wedding-funeral, dove-raven, fiend-angel, wolf-lamb, miss-mend, stand-stir, haste-destiny, and so on. 1 Here the nonbinary language [End Page 73] of the theater anticipates the “unlimited semiosis” of postmodern literary and cultural theory precisely by extending that nonbinary language to the opposition theater-theory, which the play also undermines. To cite only one particularly central example, literary criticism’s ongoing concerns with the cultural and ritualistic origins of tragedy are not just explored but explained—theorized—by the play’s self-conscious identification of Juliet as both “dove” (“So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows” [1.5.48]) and “lamb” (“Juliet! Fast, I warrant her, she. / Why, lamb! Why, lady!” [4.5.1–2]). The theatrical experience of the play’s “poor sacrifices” [5.3.318] is further related to the Catholic mass, out of which Shakespeare’s own tragic theater significantly evolves, by “Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen” [1.3.17] (Lammas [hlammas] hlaf ‘loaf, bread,’ maesse ‘mass’) and “God’s bread, it makes me mad!” [3.5.176]. 2 Redoubling this Christian context for sacrifice, a seasonal parallel in the myth of Persephone stolen away by Pluto shows through “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field” [4.5.28–29] and “O son, the night before thy wedding-day / Hath Death lain with thy wife” [35–36]. Within the same ongoing theorization of the play’s own theater, the “pomegranate tree” in Juliet’s “It was the nightingale, and not the lark... / Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree” [3.5.2–4] further joins Juliet to Persephone, Lady Capulet to Ceres, and “love-devouring death” [2.6.7] to Hades.From the play to the theory, then, influential critiques of performative discourse and its ritualistic origins in postsubjective (post-Lacanian) sacrifice are generated not only by the postmodern university, but also, in Romeo and Juliet, by the early modern theater. For the play, and not simply the theory, is already about the play—and autobiographical, from Montague’s “Away from light steals home my heavy son, / And private in his chamber pens himself” [1.1.137–38] through Juliet’s “Was ever book containing such vile matter / So fairly bound” [3.2.83–84] to Romeo’s frantic “get me ink and paper... (shrink)

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

By effective thinkers I mean not people who think effectively, but people who understand “how it’s done,” i.e., people not paralyzed by the philosophical problem of epiphenomenalism. I argue that mental causes are not preempted by either neural or narrow content states, and that extrinsically individuated mental states are not out of proportion with their putative effects. I give three examples/models of how an extrinsic cause might be more proportional to an effect than the competition.

Food insecurity, and its extreme form, hunger, occur whenever the accessibility to an adequate supply of nutritional and safe foods becomes restricted or unpredictable. They are recurring problems in certain regions of the US, as well as in many parts of the world. According to nation-wide surveys conducted by the US Bureau of the Census, between 1996 and 1998 an estimated 9.7% of US households were classified as food insecure (6.2% being food insecure without evidence of hunger, and 3.5% being (...) food insecure with moderate to severe hunger). This means that approximately 10 million households each year did not always have access to enough food to meet basic needs. A potential tool in the fight against food insecurity and hunger is information technology (IT), since its use and range of application continue to grow at astonishing rates. The study presented here examined the question of how information technology, particularly the Internet, can be used to promote food security. The study used an action science research approach, and a case study strategy, with the food security system of Oktibbeha County, Mississippi selected as the case for study. The research design was a two-phase process. Phase one consisted of a needs assessment among food assistance organizations in Oktibbeha County, and included interviews of key food assistance personnel. Phase one also included a survey of IT subject matter experts to seek their opinions about the current state of Web-based information technology. Phase two involved an analysis of various IT implementation issues, as well as the development of a Web-based food security information system prototype tool. The needs assessment results indicated that (a) certain food security system and information needs existed among the food assistance organizations in Oktibbeha County, and (b) appropriate information technologies existed that could be applied to these needs. The food security needs related to better communication and coordination of information, such as program information, food site inventory information, client history information, food donation information, and nutrition education information. In regard to technology development, a variety of scenarios were examined. These included client-side approaches, server-side approaches, simple e-mail-based systems, Java-based systems, systems based on the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and commercial database systems. In applying the needs assessment and survey results, the researcher developed a prototype Web site (including a series of online database tools) that could be used to promote food security in counties such as Oktibbeha County. The results of this research show that appropriate, Internet-based, IT holds promise for the reduction of certain social problems, such as food insecurity and hunger. (shrink)

Since the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word ‘know’ and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Even today, many epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists are concerned with the truth conditions of “S knows that p,” or the proposition it expresses. In all of this literature, the method of cases is used, where a situation is described in English, and then philosophers judge whether it is true that (...) S knows that p, or whether saying “S knows that p” is false, deviant, etc. in that situation. However, English is just one of over 6000 languages spoken around the world, and is the native language of less than 6% of the world’s population. When Western epistemology first emerged, in ancient Greece, English did not even exist. So why should we think that facts about the English word “know,” the concept it expresses, or subtle semantic properties of “S knows that p” have important implications for epistemology? Are the properties of the English word “know” and the English sentence ‘S knows that p’ shared by their translations in most or all languages? If that turned out to be true, it would be a remarkable fact that cries out for an explanation. But if it turned out to be false, what are the implications for epistemology? Should epistemologists study knowledge attributions in languages other than English with the same diligence they have shown for the study of English knowledge attributions? If not, why not? In what ways do the concepts expressed by ‘know’ and its counterparts in different languages differ? And what should epistemologists make of all this? (shrink)

Harry Collins is a science studies scholar no other description fits without qualification who has contributed enormously to the discussion of tacit knowledge. Collins says that he is providing an account for the ontologically bashful, meaning, presumably, that it does not carry the burdens of Durkheim's notion of the collective consciousness. Polanyi says that 'a wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable'. Collins wants to translate this into 'strings must be interpreted before they are meaningful'. Somatic limits are the source of the (...) mystery element of tacit knowledge. In fact, machines can be programmed to do the things it involves, although they will do it in a different way. In Social Cartesianism, the individual is not the unit of analysis: the individual merely shares the collectivity's knowledge. Collins point in these contexts is that functional substitutability implies nothing about similarity in underlying causal structure. (shrink)

This paper chronicles my introduction to and subsequent investigation of the Felix Experimental Group (FEG) and its exhibitions of classical physical mediumship. It’s been nearly a century since investigators have had the opportunity to carefully study standard spiritistic phenomena, including the extruding of ectoplasm, and the FEG is the only current physical mediumistic circle permitting any serious controls. The paper details a progressively stringent, personally supervised series of séances, culminating in some well-controlled experiments with video documentation in a secure and (...) private location belonging to one of the investigators. Regrettably, recent indications of fraud (explored also by Michael Nahm in this issue) have tarnished the case as a whole. However, it remains unclear how extensive the fraud has been. Accordingly, this paper evaluates the arguments both for and against the paranormality of the phenomena displayed under the author’s supervision. (shrink)

Actor Paul Giamatti and philosopher Stephen Asma collaborate to describe the imagination (phantasia) as a form of embodied cognition. They explore the actor's ability to replicate embodied affective states and communicate those to audiences that are capable of catching (via emotional contagion) those affective states. The role of social affordances in imaginative work is explored. Finally, the role of imagination in political conspiracy thinking is considered.

Exploring an extension to Dick's "intelligence principle" Revisiting Dick’s “Intelligence Principle” in the light of recent technological developments, I present an argument for why one might consider a slight extension to the Principle and I explore some of the implications of the suggested modification.

Drawing on Protestant scholasticism, Puritan "precisionism," and virtue ethics, "Virtue Reformed" offers a comprehensive rereading of the ethical position of ...

Davidson’s remark is fairly conventional stuff in contemporary philosophy, but the argument that informs it is elusive. Is this a kind of unformulated transcendental argument, which amounts to the claim that the ‘sharing’ of ‘language,’ in some unspecified sense of these terms, is a condition of the possibility of ‘communication’ in some unspecified sense of this term? Or is it a kind of inference to the best explanation in which there are no real alternativesan inference, so to speak, to the (...) only explanation? There are good reasons to be suspicious of arguments of this form. Yet this general picture, of some sort of shared stuff at the basis of language, is highly appealing, and so is its extension to practices generally. The claim that there is some class of things that could not happen, were it not for the existence of some sort of shared practices, is a commonplace, despite, and perhaps because of its vagueness. (shrink)

Stephen Law follows THE PHILOSOPHY FILES with a second book of philosophical conundrums for teenagers. This time he asks such questions as Do Miracles Happen? Why Do These Words Mean Something? and Do I Know the Sun will Rise Tomorrow? You can dip into the arguments that interest you, in eight chapters where the themes are set up in witty scenarios and then debated. There are wacky thought experiments to work out and a variety of characters appear - some (...) of them Martians. As in THE PHILOSOPHY FILES, there are hundreds of lively cartoons running through the book. Stephen Law is a brilliant communicator with a passion to make young people think for themselves. As the GUARDIAN said: 'It's philosophy in action rather than philosophy in aspic... a real philosophy book for kids - which students and adults could enjoy too - finally exists'. (shrink)

Although less observable than the overt actions of fighting and assault, covert antisocial behaviors such as stealing and property destruction comprise an important subclass of externalizing behavior patterns, displaying considerable predictive power toward delinquency in adolescence. I discuss a laboratory paradigm for objective observation of such behaviors in children that has shown impressive concurrent and predictive validity among samples of boys with and without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Addressed herein are crucial questions regarding the ethics of tempting children to steal (...) objects and small amounts of money and to deface property as well as the types of informed consent and debriefing procedures utilized in research with this paradigm. Weighing ethical considerations alongside the ability to predict delinquent behavior presents provocative issues for those interested in understanding the development of antisocial behavior. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. He argues that, despite the criticism of President Obama’s seemingly excessive exercise of executive power to further an ideologically leftist secularist agenda, the strong and maybe unprecedented use of presidential power after him may be the most certain way to try to restore weakened American constitutional principles and traditional liberties (...) and to begin to reverse our serious cultural decay. (shrink)

"It's the animal in us," we often hear when we've been bad. But why not when we're good? Primates and Philosophers tackles this question by exploring the biological foundations of one of humanity's most valued traits: morality. In this provocative book, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that modern-day evolutionary biology takes far too dim a view of the natural world, emphasizing our "selfish" genes. Science has thus exacerbated our reciprocal habits of blaming nature when we act badly and labeling the (...) good things we do as "humane." Seeking the origin of human morality not in evolution but in human culture, science insists that we are moral by choice, not by nature. Citing remarkable evidence based on his extensive research of primate behavior, de Waal attacks "Veneer Theory," which posits morality as a thin overlay on an otherwise nasty nature. He explains how we evolved from a long line of animals that care for the weak and build cooperation with reciprocal transactions. Drawing on both Darwin and recent scientific advances, de Waal demonstrates a strong continuity between human and animal behavior. In the process, he also probes issues such as anthropomorphism and human responsibilities toward animals. Based on the Tanner Lectures de Waal delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2004, Primates and Philosophers includes responses by the philosophers Peter Singer, Christine M. Korsgaard, and Philip Kitcher and the science writer Robert Wright. They press de Waal to clarify the differences between humans and other animals, yielding a lively debate that will fascinate all those who wonder about the origins and reach of human goodness. (shrink)

Lately I've been giving a great deal of thought to the nature of human (and other organic) abilities. In part, this is connected to my recent research into multiple personality and the need to explain, not only the partitioning of abilities and skills among alternate personalities, but also the enhanced levels of functioning that some of them exhibit (and for that matter, the exceptional performances of "nonmultiples" in hypnotic and other sorts of dissociative states). My interest in this topic is (...) also connected to my ongoing study of savants and prodigies, who apparently have much to teach us about the limits (and perhaps also the latency) of human abilities. At bottom, I suppose, it connects with my general and longstanding concern with problems of psychological explanation, particularly in light of the gross inadequacies of trendy computational theories of the mind. (shrink)