It is usually the case that scientists examine either ecological systems or social systems, yet the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of environmental management and sustainable development is becoming increasingly obvious. Developed under the auspices of the Beijer Institute in Stockholm, this new book analyses social and ecological linkages in selected ecosystems using an international and interdisciplinary case study approach. The chapters provide detailed information on a variety of management practices for dealing with environmental change. Taken as (...) a whole, the book will contribute to the greater understanding of essential social responses to changes in ecosystems, including the generation, accumulation and transmission of ecological knowledge, structure and dynamics of institutions, and the cultural values underlying these responses. A set of new (or rediscovered) principles for sustainable ecosystem management is also presented. Linking Social and Ecological Systems will be of value to natural and social scientists interested in sustainability. (shrink)

In what ways is students’ participation in school related to their participation and becoming subjects across the school context and other contexts in which they participate? This is the question analyzed in this paper, based on observations of, and narratives and perspectives provided by, three 15-year-old ethnic minority boys and their teachers at a school in Denmark. Drawing upon Davies’ concept of teaching-as-usual, I explore exclusions and marginalization inside school before exploring how these can be seen as connected to, and (...) seemingly having an impact on, the lives the students lead outside school, with an understanding of this connection rooted in Holzkamp’s concept of conduct of everyday life. In this regard, I make use of concepts of recognition ) and viable life in order to point to how a lack of such within the school tends to drive the students away from the school context, while simultaneously driving them towards other contexts outside school, with gang related street communities being a particularly potential one. (shrink)

Hot-cold empathy gaps are a pervasive phenomena wherein one’s predictions about others tend to skew ‘in the direction’ of one’s own current visceral states. For instance, when one predicts how hungry someone else is, one’s prediction will tend to reflect one’s own current hunger state. These gaps also obtain intrapersonally, when one attempts to predict what one oneself would do at a different time. In this paper, we do three things: We draw on empirical evidence to argue that so-called hot-cold (...) empathy gaps arise when one projects one’s own current state into a simulation about another. Second, we argue that this process does not typically confer knowledge, even when the predictions it produces happen to be accurate. Third, we suggest that these results can be used to develop a challenge for L.A. Paul's view that authentic action sometimes requires subjective knowledge of one’s own values and how these values relate to relevant outcomes. We then sketch an alternative view of the epistemic grounds of authenticity, one on which authenticity requires a kind of understanding. The relevant form of understanding can be achieved by subjective knowledge but can also be achieved elsewise, such as through testimony from a close friend about what one values. (shrink)

The Cold Moon occurs in late December, auguring the arrival of the winter sol stice. Approaching the winter solstice of his own life, Roger Rosenblatt offers a book dedicated to the three most important lessons he has learned over his many years: an appreciation of being alive, a recognition of the gift and power of love, and the necessity of excercising responsibility toward one another. Rosenblatt's poetic reflections on these vital life lessons offer a tonic for these perilous and fearful (...) times, and attest to the value of our very existence. Cold Moon: a book to offer purpose, to focus the attention on life's essentials, and to lift the spirit. (shrink)

In September 1950, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) dedicated its annual meeting to a "Golden Jubilee of Genetics" that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the rediscovery of Mendel's work. This program, originally intended as a small ceremony attached to the coattails of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) meeting, turned into a publicity juggernaut that generated coverage on Mendel and the accomplishments of Western genetics in countless newspapers and radio broadcasts. The Golden Jubilee merits historical attention as both (...) an intriguing instance of scientific commemoration and as an early example of Cold War political theatre. Instead of condemning either Lysenko or Soviet genetics, the Golden Jubilee would celebrate Mendel – and, not coincidentally, the practical achievements in plant and animal breeding his work had made possible. The American geneticists' focus on the achievements of Western genetics as both practical and theoretical, international, and, above all, non-ideological and non-controversial, was fully intended to demonstrate the success of the Western model of science to both the American public and scientists abroad at a key transition point in the Cold War. An implicit part of this article's argument, therefore, is the pervasive impact of the Cold War in unanticipated corners of postwar scientific culture. (shrink)

In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and were (...) then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches. (shrink)

Radio Free Europe used balloons to drop leaflets in an attempt to supplement radio with printed words in the 1950s—a historical moment when closing borders, censoring the press, jamming foreign radios, tapping telephone lines, and tracking letters from abroad created an almost hermetically sealed space without many means for exchanging information across the Iron Curtain. This article traces how distorted and limited information shaped Cold War propaganda and practices of information-gathering. The article further examines unpredictable environmental factors that were transformed (...) into persuasive political rhetoric. A comparative analysis of communist media shows similarities of imagination in a visual propaganda campaign across five communist countries. Fantasies evolved into an object of public interest when propaganda strategies embraced a language of facts. (shrink)

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed (...) liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism."--Dust jacket. (shrink)

This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political projects. (...) In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies. (shrink)

In the December 2015 Issue of the Police Journal Sam Poyser and Rebecca Milne addressed the subject of miscarriages of justice. Cold case investigations can address some of these wrongs. The salient points for attention are those just before his sudden death: Milligan was appointed Private Secretary to Jonathan Aitken, the then Minister of Arms in the Conservative government in 1994. The known facts are as follows: 1. Stephen David Wyatt Milligan was found deceased on Tuesday 8th February 1994 at (...) his Chiswick, West London house where he lived alone. His body was found by his secretary Vera Taggart who was told by Julie Kirkbride where a spare key to his London house was kept and who decided to go to his house that day because he was not answering his telephone. Police said he had made one last telephone call on Saturday evening at 9.00pm. 2. Stephen David Wyatt Milligan had been the elected Member of Parliament (‘MP’) for Eastleigh in Hampshire since 1992. 3. The important topics this MP was addressing in 1994 at the time of his death included: (i) rail privatization plans and the impact through job losses on communities, especially his own constituency of Eastleigh; (ii) arms dealings with Saudi Arabia, especially with his previous intelligence gathered as an economics journalist for esteemed publications; (iii) the UK military industry; (iv) homosexuality among senior government Ministers, as revealed by British footballer Fasanu; (v) personal relationship and planned marriage to his fiancée (Julie Kirkbride) who at the time was a political journalist. 4. Stephen Milligan was also appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Jonathan Aitken, Arms Minister and this position must have required that he came ‘up to speed’ on international arms trade and indeed its relation to bribery and corruption across jurisdictions. Milligan’s experience and knowledge as a former high-level political and economics journalist must have been of huge benefit to government minister Jonathan Aitken who was later imprisoned for perjury. 5. Regarding Stephen Milligan’s death in 1994, the Guardian newspaper in their immediate obituary said that ‘The death of one of the government's most outspoken and loyal supporters will pose a stiff electoral test for the Tories to surmount. He was on the left of the Tory party - he had even had a brief flirtation with the SDP when it was formed - and was a noted Euro-enthusiast… the death of one of the government's most outspoken and loyal supporters will pose a stiff electoral test for the Tories to surmount. Regarding Stephen Milligan’s sudden and unexpected death in 1994, MP David Willetts (Conservative, Havant) said in March 2015, in his address in the House of Commons. ‘…The inevitable ups and downs and triumphs and disasters of politics are among the great features of this place. There are colleagues in all parts of the House who are tolerant and understanding. There are friendships that keep the downs as well as the ups of politics in perspective. Having entered the House in 1992, I think particularly of two good friends, Judith Chaplin and Stephen Milligan, who both died within two years of being elected; that loss stayed with me for a long time...’ 6. On 28 February 2000, in the House of Commons, at Column 106, Mr Mike Hancock (Portsmouth) said, on the deaths of Michael Colvin and of Stephen Milligan MP: ‘I knew Michael Colvin for nearly 30 years, from when he was first elected to Hampshire county council. During my time as leader of that council, he and the late former Member of Parliament for Eastleigh, Stephen Milligan, were usually the only Members of Parliament who readily supported the council when necessary. Michael Colvin supported many ventures in the county of Hampshire. He will be missed here, in his constituency, and in Europe, and I stress that Hampshire has lost a staunch supporter. I am sure that the county will at some stage want to record its regret at his death and its deepest appreciation of the part that he played in its life....’ -/- Mike Hancock had, like Stephen Milligan, served on the Select Committee on Defence. It is interesting that he mentioned Stephen Milligan’s support as MP for Eastleigh when Milligan had only been so appointed a couple of years before his sudden death, as compared to 30 years of support from Mike Colvin. 7. Mr Andrew Robathan (for Blaby) said in the House of Commons Hansard Debates on 27 January1997, (Column 62) (on the registering of sex offenders): ‘I remember the death of my honourable friend Stephen Milligan, who represented Eastleigh. The press reports of the time stated that each Metropolitan police station had a police officer in the pay of newspapers. I do not know whether that is true, but I am aware that the police are not renowned for being entirely secure with their information…’ This statement is mischievous and it has been demonstrated time and time again, as being untrue, especially during the recent press inquiry leading to the four-volume Leveson Report, published in November 2012, into phone hacking and the ethics and culture of the UK media, pursuant to section 26 of the Inquiries Act 2005, and ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 29 November 2012, ISBN: 9780102981063, by the Stationery Office Limited on behalf of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. In Volume 4 of the 2012 Leveson Report, chapter 4 concluded on the Press Complaints Commission (‘PCC’) and its effectiveness and revealed that the PCC does not initiate its own investigations other than those ‘needed to head off criticism of the press or self-regulation- or to accept complaints from third parties across the board and on a transparent basis… and the report states that ‘the resources of the police are limited’ in terms of being able to fully inspect the Press and media reports. (shrink)

In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of (...) pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them - Masoch and Sade - lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles a part.Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch's novels was written in 1870 and belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found here - fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldness - these do not eclipse the singular power of Masoch's eroticism. (shrink)

This article begins by addressing a critique of my book Immaterialism by the archaeologists Þóra Pétursdóttirr and Bjørnar Olsen in their 2018 article “Theory Adrift.” As they see it, I restrict myself in Immaterialism to available historical documentation on the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and they wonder how my account might have changed if I had discussed more typical archaeological examples instead: wrecked and sunken ships, released ballast, deserted harbors, distributed goods, and derelict fortresses. In response, I argue that (...) my account was not therefore non-archaeological, since ruins are the topic of archaeology only by accident: the real subject of the discipline is what Marshall McLuhan describes as “cold media,” in the sense that they are low in information. McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cold media is shown to be surprisingly analogous to Aristotle’s difference between continua and discrete substances, and some consequences are drawn from this analogy. (shrink)

Includes "Coldness and Cruelty," by Gilles Deleuze, a study of masochism and sadism, as well as "Venus in Furs," the original novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

Recent research on moral decision-making has suggested that many common moral judgments are based on immediate intuitions. However, some individuals arrive at highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions about when it is permissible to harm other individuals. Such utilitarian judgments have been attributed to effortful reasoning that has overcome our natural emotional aversion to harming others. Recent studies, however, suggest that such utilitarian judgments might also result from a decreased aversion to harming others, due to a deficit in empathic concern and social (...) emotion. The present study investigated the neural basis of such indifference to harming using functional neuroimaging during engagement in moral dilemmas. A tendency to counterintuitive utilitarian judgment was associated both with ‘psychoticism’, a trait associated with a lack of empathic concern and antisocial tendencies, and with ‘need for cognition’, a trait reflecting preference for effortful cognition. Importantly, only psychoticism was also negatively correlated with activation in the subgenual cingulate cortex (SCC), a brain area implicated in empathic concern and social emotions such as guilt, during counterintuitive utilitarian judgments. Our findings suggest that when individuals reach highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions, this need not reflect greater engagement in explicit moral deliberation. It may rather reflect a lack of empathic concern, and diminished aversion to harming others. (shrink)

A climate that is too cold to grow crops for part of the year demands foresight and self-control skills. To the extent that a culture has developed intertemporal bargaining, its members will have more autonomy, but pay the cost of being more compulsive, than members of societies that have not. Monetary resources will be a consequence but will also be fed back as a cause.

Background: The ethics of cold calling—visiting subjects at home without prior appointment agreed—in follow up research studies has received little attention although it is perceived to be quite common. We examined the ethical implications of cold calling in a study of subjects with defined neurotic disorders followed up 12 years after initial assessment carried out to determine outcome in terms of symptoms, social functioning, and contact with health services. The patients concerned were asked at original assessment if they would agree (...) to be followed up subsequently and although they agreed no time limit was put on this.Objectives: To decide if cold calling was ethically justifiable and, if so, to set guidelines for researchers.Design: The study was a cohort study of patients with neurotic disorder treated initially for 10 weeks in a randomised controlled trial.Findings: At follow up by a research medical practitioner 18 of the 210 patients had died and of the remaining 192 patients 186 were seen or had a telephone interview. Four patients refused and two others did not have interviews but agreed to some data being obtained. However, only 104 patients responded to letters inviting them to make an appointment or to refuse contact and the remainder were followed up by cold calling, with most patients agreeing readily to the research interview. The findings illustrate the dilemma of the need to get the maximum possible data from such studies to achieve scientific validity and the protection of subjects’ privacy and autonomy.Conclusions: More attention needs to be paid to consent procedures if cold calling is to be defended on ethical grounds but it is unreasonable to expect this to be obtained at the beginning of a research study in a way that satisfies the requirements for informed consent. A suggested way forward is to obtain written consent for the research at the time that cold calling takes place before beginning the research. (shrink)

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up by (...) therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: In Cold Bold: The Moral Psychology of Fictional Serial Killers I Think I'll Eat Your Heart: The Lack‐of‐Empathy Explanation Dexter and the Extreme Lack of Understanding The Hot‐Blooded Reality: Sex, Rage, Fame My Evil Just Happened to Come Out: Empathy Inhibits? Serial Killing Because They Care? “Angels of Death” “I didn't want to hurt them, I only wanted to kill them”: Empathic Dissonance The Serial Killer Next Door?

Faster R-CNN architecture is used to solve the problems of moving path uncertainty, changeable coverage, and high complexity in cold-air induced large-scale intensive temperature-reduction detection and classification, since those problems usually lead to path identification biases as well as low accuracy and generalization ability of recognition algorithm. In this paper, an improved recognition method of national ITR path in China based on faster R-CNN in complicated meteorological systems is proposed. Firstly, quality control of the original dataset of strong cooling processes (...) is carried out by means of data filtering. Then, according to the NITR standard and the characteristics of NITR, the NITR dataset in China is established by the intensive temperature-reduction areas located through spatial transformation. Meanwhile, considering that the selection of regularization parameters of Softmax classification method will cause the problem of probability calculation, support vector machine is used for path classification to enhance the confidence of classification. Finally, the improved faster R-CNN model is used to identify, classify, and locate the path of NITR events. The experimental results show that, compared to other models, the improved faster R-CNN algorithm greatly improves the performance of NITR’s path recognition, especially for the mixed NITR paths and single NITR paths. Therefore, the improved faster R-CNN model has fast calculation speed, high recognition accuracy, good robustness, and generalization ability of NITR path recognition. (shrink)

Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov's a Universal History of Arts and Ernst Gombrich's the Story of Art This article deals with the "afterlife" of a methodological disagreement in the Vienna School of Art History between the positions of Alois Riegl and Julius von Schlosser in Mikhail Alpatov's and Ernst Gombrich's art history survey texts published during the Cold War on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Though these surveys are methodological antipodes, the difference itself, I argue, is possible only within the (...) framework of the larger art historical discourse they share. In addition, I will draw on the radical ideological critique of Alpatov's survey inside the Soviet Union and the case of the Stalinist survey meant to replace it, in order to address the ideological commonality between Alpatov's and Gombrich's surveys. (shrink)

This book discusses how rational choice theory grew out of RAND's work for the US Air Force. It concentrates on the work of William J. Riker, Kenneth J. Arrow, James M. Buchanan, Russel Hardin, and John Rawls. It argues that within the context of the US Cold War with its intensive anti-communist and anti-collectivist sentiment, the foundations of capitalist democracy were grounded in the hyper individualist theory of non-cooperative games.

During the Cold War, political thinkers in the West debated the balance between the requirements of liberal democracy and national security. This debate is relevant to East Asia and especially to Korea, where an ideological-military standoff between a democracy and a totalitarian system persists. The thinkers often identified as "Cold War liberals"--Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Friedrich Hayek, and Michael Oakeshott--are worth revisiting in this context. Of these, Oakeshott is the least well understood in East Asia and therefore particularly (...) deserving of attention. His ideas about the limits of rationalism in politics, the irrelevance of conventional views of liberalism and conservatism, how constitutional democracy should be defined, and how it can be defended against various forms of anti-liberal politics are especially valuable. In this book, leading Oakeshott scholars from around the world explore these ideas and their implications for East Asia in ten illuminating and readable essays. (shrink)

Research has consistently shown that people consider harmful side effects of an action more intentional than helpful side effects. This phenomenon is known as the side- effect effect (SEE), which refers to the influence of moral considerations in judgments of intentionality and other non-moral concepts. There is an ongoing debate about how to explain this asymmetric pattern of judgment and the psychological factors involved in it. It has been posited that affective reactions to agents that bring about harmful side- effects (...) could bias intentionality attributions in these cases, explaining the asymmetric pattern of intentionality judgments that we observe in the SEE. We call this the affective bias hypothesis (ABH). Evidence for the ABH is mixed, with some findings suggesting a role for affective processes, while others suggesting that affective processes play no role in the SEE. A possible explanation for these apparently contradictory results points to affective processes involved in the SEE being confined to anger. In a series of empirical studies, we systematically measured and manipulated participants’ anger in order to test this possibility. Our findings suggest that anger play no role in intentionality judgments in SEE cases, while providing support for a non-emotional motivation to blame as a factor underlying the SEE. (shrink)

When Adorno refers to the concept of maturity (Mündigkeit), he generally means having the courage and the ability to use one’s own understanding independently of dominant heteronomous patterns of thought. This Kantian-sounding claim is essentially an exhortation: maturity demands self-liberation from heteronomy, i.e. autonomy. The problem, however, is that in spite of Adorno’s general endorsement of Kant’s definition of maturity, he ultimately rejects the corresponding Kantian definition of autonomy. Yet Adorno does not simply discard the Kantian concept of autonomy. On (...) the contrary, he will try to correct it by returning to it what it lacks, namely, intimacy or ‘live contact with the warmth of things’. In this gesture, he aims to restore to autonomy its ethical substance or lived ethical context, not as a mere supplement to the purity of duty, but rather as necessary to the very process of becoming mature. This article examines Adorno’s concept of maturity in the context of the dialectical relationship between autonomy and intimacy. (shrink)

BackgroundCognitive impairments are prevalent in patients with unipolar and bipolar depressive disorder. Considering the fact assessing cognitive functions is increasingly feasible for clinicians and researchers, targeting these problems in treatment and using them at baseline as predictors of response to treatment can be very informative.MethodIn a naturalistic, retrospective study, data from 120 patients with UDD and BDD were analyzed. Patients received 20 sessions of bilateral rTMS and were assessed regarding their depressive symptoms, sustained attention, working memory, and executive functions, using (...) the Beck Depression Inventory and Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery Cambridge, at baseline and after the end of rTMS treatment course. Generalized estimating equations and logistic regression were used as the main statistical methods to test the hypotheses.ResultsFifty-three percentage of all patients responded to treatment. In particular, 53.1% of UDD patients and 46.9% of BDD patients responded to treatment. Bilateral rTMS improved all cognitive functions except for visual memory and resulted in more modulations in the working memory of UDD compared to BDD patients. More improvements in working memory were observed in responded patients and visual memory, age, and sex were determined as treatment response predictors. Working memory, visual memory, and age were identified as treatment response predictors in BDD and UDD patients, respectively.ConclusionBilateral rTMS improved cold cognition and depressive symptoms in UDD and BDD patients, possibly by altering cognitive control mechanisms, and processing negative emotional bias. (shrink)

In The Monstrosity of Christ, Slavoj Žižek cites the twins Claus and Lucas, from Agota Kristof’s The Notebook, as exemplars of the simultaneously naive and reflexive stance, which he considers to be crucial to a materialist ethics. This article argues, however, that the twins’ stance suffers from a ‘blindness’ as to the ethicality of their acts, shared by Žižek’s own ethics. It proposes that, by situating their actions within the trilogy to which The Notebook belongs, a richer three-fold ethics of (...) reflexive subjectivization emerges, in which reflexivity becomes the paradoxical condition of naivety, enabling Žižek to address this problem. Naive acts are granted consistency and significance by the construction of a new point de capiton, and a related interpretative framework, . However, insofar as this construction fails, acts are opened to the judgment of what is ‘other’ , constituting what in Žižek’s Beckettian terms may be called an ethics of ‘failing again, failing better’. The deeper significance of this proposal is demonstrated by uncovering a similar, but more problematically-realized three-fold reflexive-subjective relation to act within St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, with an appeal to authority taking the place of Kristof’s appeal to concrete historical judgment. It is further argued that insofar as Žižek largely does not attend to these dynamics, he tends to repeat this problematic Pauline solution in his own work. The article concludes that Kristof’s ethics of failure enables Žižek to avoid these problems, without compromising his distinctive ethical stance. (shrink)

Richard Löwenthal’s response to the challenges of ‘1968’ was more complex than that of most of his liberal colleagues. He did not simply remain beholden to the interpretative patterns of a German ‘special path’ (Sonderweg). He also, and increasingly so, drew on the conceptual framework of ‘Western civilization’ to make sense of and cope with the socio-cultural transformations of his times. What many like-minded intellectuals perceived solely as a ‘deviation from the West’, he also viewed as a ‘crisis of the (...) West’. This article argues that this transnationally ‘Western’ stance was part and parcel of Löwenthal’s intellectual profile as ‘cold war liberal’. This was a relatively rare species in Cold War Germany, and Löwenthal was rather exceptional in his sustained engagement with the topic of ‘Western civilization’. Compared with luminaries such as Carl Joachim Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel or Karl Loewenstein, Richard Löwenthal may be lesser known in English-speaking scholarship, but he makes for a particularly instructive case when discussing ‘cold war liberalism’ in West Germany. With its focus on the spatialization of political thought, and ‘the West’ as a spatial imaginary, this article also seeks to contribute to the growing discussion of how to ‘spatialize’ intellectual history. (shrink)

Physiologically accurate mouse models of cancer are critical in the pre‐clinical development of novel cancer therapies. However, current standardized animal‐housing temperatures elicit chronic cold‐associated stress in mice, which is further increased in the presence of tumor. This cold‐stress significantly impacts experimental outcomes. Data from our lab and others suggest standard housing fundamentally alters murine physiology, and this can produce altered immune baselines in tumor and other disease models. Researchers may thus underestimate the efficacy of therapies that are benefitted by immune (...) responses. A potential mediator, norepinephrine, also underlies stress pathways common in mice and humans. Therefore, research into mechanisms connecting cold‐stress and norepinephrine signaling with immune depression in mice could highlight new combination therapies for humans to simultaneously target stress while stimulating anti‐tumor immunity. (shrink)

With this introduction we aim to illuminate Western Europe's place on the map of Cold War science and, specifically, to draw attention to the differences in and the diversity of Western European Cold War science in comparison to the United States. By discussing narratives of Cold War science in small states and asking how they fit into the European condition, we suggest that the fact of being a small state affects the conditions for and the scope of Cold War science. (...) As a whole, this special issue also emphasizes the importance of the spatial dimension; that is, the significant dependence of Cold War science on geographical relations and geopolitical interests. (shrink)

This article explores the problem of the foundation of the European Molecular Biology Organization, by reconstructing a broader institutional framework, which includes other international actors – EURATOM, UNESCO and the International Laboratory of Genetics and Biophysics in Naples – and a relevant, but still neglected figure, the Italian geneticist Adriano Buzzati-Traverso. The article considers the tension between centralized and federal models of organization in the field of life sciences not just as an EMBO internal controversy, but rather as a structural (...) issue of European scientific cooperation in fundamental biology in the early 1960s. Along with EMBO, the article analyzes in particular the EURATOM Biology Division Program and the constitution of UNESCO International Cell Research Organization. Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, as founder of ILGB and scientific consultant of EURATOM and UNESCO, played a crucial role in the complex negotiation which ultimately led to the foundation of EMBO. A synchronic treatment of ILGB, EURATOM, UNESCO-ICRO and EMBO opens a window on the early 1960s institutional configuration of molecular biology in Europe, showing how it basically incorporated the “Cold Spring Harbor” decentralized model rather than reproducing the “CERN” centralized model. (shrink)

This study examines the mobilization of the Far Right in Korea and Japan in the 2000s and probes how and why the actors and political claims of East Asian extremists differ from their counterparts in Europe and North America. The Far Right forces in Korea and Japan are politically regressive in glorifying the authoritarian or colonial past and cling to unchanging ideological claims from the postwar decades in their current targeting of old-time, internal “others.” This divergence is explained by the (...) United States–led Cold War geopolitics in Asia, under which Far Right elites were fortified in postwar Japan and Korea. The Cold War that has not ended in Asia as opposed to Europe or North America further allows the institutional sustainability of the radical Right and the political resonance of its old ideology of anticommunism and colonial racism. As such, democratic politics in East Asia is predicated on Cold War undercurrents. (shrink)

Alternate View Column AV-36 Keywords: cold fusion, deuterium, electrolysis, heavy water, Pons and Fleischmann Published in the December-1989 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine; This column was written and submitted 5/5/89 and is copyrighted © 1989, John G. Cramer. All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.

Kant had a notion of our determined and freely-choosing behavior which illuminates basic assumptions of contemporary ideologies. A myopic embracement of only one or the other behavior has been superseded by a new entanglement which renders moot ordinary political classifications. Fascism had typically affirmed the radical freedom of an Uebermensch as well as a superior race and racism; Marxist communism a radical determinism as well as inevitable class warfare. But during the Cold War, especially since the 1960s, there arose in (...) open societies a virulent assimilation of the two ideologies. Understood as a species of the"New Left", the ideology has effectively combined name-calling ad hominem attacks of "racism" with"elite white classes" to politicize dialogue and to suppress objective pursuits of truth as well as to foster ethnic identity and provide an unprecedented apologetics for global conflict. (shrink)

Allegations of bias against senior judges have not been common in English courts, so the House of Lords had little material to draw on when the Pinochet case was decided. It is therefore worthwhile to compare their Lordships» approach with that of the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany. This court has been selected because: (a) it has a comparable number of judges to the House of Lords and its decisions are unappealable, and (b) its cases have a constitutional and (often) (...) political content—as did the Pinochet case. The Federal Constitutional Court case law is comparatively prolific, so this study has been limited to the last 15 years. The case law covers a wide variety of issues, for example provision of legal opinions or representation, membership of associations, holding of public offices, public statements of opinion. If the standards set in this case law were applied to Lord Hoffmann's position in the Pinochet case, there are grounds for saying that he might not have been excluded. (shrink)