Marketing and web analytic companies have implemented sophisticated algorithms to observe, analyze, and identify users through large surveillance networks online. These computer algorithms have the capacity to infer categories of identity upon users based largely on their web-surfing habits. In this article I will first discuss the conceptual and theoretical work around code, outlining its use in an analysis of online categorization practices. The article will then approach the function of code at the level of the category, arguing that an (...) analysis of coded computer algorithms enables a supplement to Foucauldian thinking around biopolitics and biopower, of what I call soft biopower and soft biopolitics. These new conceptual devices allow us to better understand the workings of biopower at the level of the category, of using computer code, statistics and surveillance to construct categories within populations according to users’ surveilled internet history. Finally, the article will think through the nuanced ways that algorithmic inference works as a mode of control, of processes of identification that structure and regulate our lives online within the context of online marketing and algorithmic categorization. (shrink)

Darwin proposed that evolutionary novelties are environmentally induced in organisms “constitutionally” sensitive to environmental change, with selection effective owing to the inheritance of constitutional responses. A molecular theory of inheritance, pangenesis , explained the cross‐generational transmission of environmentally induced traits, as required for evolution by natural selection. The twentieth‐century evolutionary synthesis featured mutation as the source of novelty, neglecting the role of environmental induction. But current knowledge of environmentally sensitive gene expression, combined with the idea of genetic accommodation of mutationally (...) and environmentally induced change, supports a revival of Darwin's original theory that is consistent with modern molecular and population genetics. †To contact the author, please write to: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, c/o Escuela de Biología, Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

A trusted guide into the inner realm where our spirits find strength to master life and live for God. It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Innerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. It absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life--from World War I, when he published the first chapter under the title War: A Call to Inwardness, to 1935, the last year of his life. Packed in metal boxes and buried at (...) night for safekeeping from the Nazis, who raided the author_s study a year before his death (and again a year after it), Innerland was not openly critical of Hitler_s regime. Nevertheless, it attacked the spirits that animated German society: its murderous strains of racism and bigotry, its heady nationalistic fervor, its mindless mass hysteria, and its vulgar materialism. In this sense Innerland stands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author_s. At a glance, the focus of Innerland seems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life as an end in itself. Nothing could be more misleading. In fact, to Eberhard Arnold the very thought of encouraging the sort of selfish solitude whereby people seek their own private peace by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. He writes in The Inner Life:_These are times of distress. We cannot retreat, willfully blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks pressing on society. We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer isolation...The only justification for withdrawing into the inner self to escape today's confusing, hectic whirl would be that fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within, through unity with eternal powers, a strength of character ready to be tested in the stream of the world._ Innerland, then, calls us not to passivity, but to action. It invites us to discover the abundance of a life lived for God. It opens our eyes to the possibilities of that _inner land of the invisible where our spirit can find the roots of its strength and thus enable us to press on to the mastery of life we are called to by God._ Only there, says Eberhard Arnold, can our life be placed under the illuminating light of the eternal and seen for what it is. Only there will we find the clarity of vision we need to win the daily battle that is life, and the inner anchor without which we will lose our moorings. (shrink)

Ethische Fragen der Psychiatrie -- Angst als psychiatrisches Problem.

In 1675, Leibniz elaborated his longest mathematical treatise he everwrote, the treatise ``On the arithmetical quadrature of the circle, theellipse, and the hyperbola. A corollary is a trigonometry withouttables''. It was unpublished until 1993, and represents a comprehensive discussion of infinitesimalgeometry. In this treatise, Leibniz laid the rigorous foundation of thetheory of infinitely small and infinite quantities or, in other words,of the theory of quantified indivisibles. In modern terms Leibnizintroduced `Riemannian sums' in order to demonstrate the integrabilityof continuous functions. The (...) article deals with this demonstration,with Leibniz's handling of infinitely small and infinite quantities,and with a general theorem regarding hyperboloids. (shrink)

In the 1920s, Leo Lowenthal mustered the courage and the nonchalance to point literary studies in a direction which, had die discipline in Germany at diat time taken heed, would have spared it a great deal of repetition forty years later. In looking at his career, we must consider how diese early efforts were subject to a consolidation and historical elaboration dirough Lowendial's involvement with the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt and dien in New York. We ought to consider (...) mat mere is today a need for a social historian who understands diat literature contains the history of bourgeois society — including all of its sufferings, shortcomings and hopes — better than the traditional sources of political history. (shrink)

Zunächst Pfarrer in Berlin-Charlottenburg, dann Professor für Philosophie in Halle, repräsentiert Eberhard die nachwolffianische deutsche Popularphilosophie, der an praktisch und pädagogisch wirksamer Aufklärung im Zusammenspiel mit den fortschrittlichen politischen und religiösen Kräften lag. In diesen Lehrbüchern repräsentiert Eberhard sich als Aufklärer auf dem philosophischen Niveau der ästhetischen, hermeneutischen und historischen Modifikation des Wolffschen Systems und der neuerlichen Rezeption der Philosophie Leibniz’, zumal der Erkenntnistheorie der 1765 erschienenen „Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain“. Eberhard wurde aufgrund seiner Theorie des (...) Denkens und Empfindens als Schüler Leibniz’ bezeichnet; und er verfasste denn auch eine Leibniz-Biographie. Er hielt zeitlebens an den wolffianischen Standards von Rationalität fest und widersetzte sich nicht nur dem normativen Rekurs auf „Empfindsamkeit“ in Literatur und Religion, sondern auch der sog. Glaubensphilosophie Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis, erst recht der zeitgenössischen Wiederkehr von Okkultismus und Esoterik. Johann August Eberhard, professor of philosophy in Halle, is one of the foremost exponents of the Popularphilosophie of the German Enlightenment. He was a major contributor to Friedrich Nicolai’s "Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek", and advanced unorthodox opinions on religious and political issues. (shrink)