Are extreme beliefs constitutive of echo chambers, or only typically caused by them? Or are many echo chambers unproblematic, amplifying relatively benign beliefs? This paper details the conceptual relations between echo chambers and extreme beliefs, showing how different conceptual choice-points in how we understand both echo chambers and extreme beliefs affects how we should evaluate, study, and engage with echo chambering groups. We also explore how our theories of extreme beliefs and echo chambers shape social scientific research and contribute in (...) a practical way when treating these phenomena, focusing on examples of climate change scepticism. (shrink)

This Commentary critiques an extremely relational view of robot moral status, drawing out its practical implications for ethics and law. It also suggests next steps for AI ethics if extremely relational reasoning is compelling. Section I introduces the topic, distinguishing an ‘extremely relational’ view from more moderate relational views. Section II illustrates extremely relational views using the example of embodiment. Section III explores practical implications of extremely relational views for ethics and law. Section IV offers possible responses to extreme relationism. (...) Section V concludes by suggesting next steps for AI ethics. (shrink)

We consider so‐called extremal numberings that form the greatest or minimal degrees under the reducibility of all A‐computable numberings of a given family of subsets of, where A is an arbitrary oracle. Such numberings are very common in the literature and they are called universal and minimal A‐computable numberings, respectively. The main question of this paper is when a universal or a minimal A‐computable numbering satisfies the Recursion Theorem (with parameters). First we prove that the Turing degree of a set (...) A is hyperimmune if and only if every universal A‐computable numbering satisfies the Recursion Theorem. Next we prove that any universal A‐computable numbering satisfies the Recursion Theorem with parameters if A computes a non‐computable c.e. set. We also consider the property of precompleteness of universal numberings, which in turn is closely related to the Recursion Theorem. Ershov proved that a numbering is precomplete if and only if it satisfies the Recursion Theorem with parameters for partial computable functions. In this paper, we show that for a given A‐computable numbering, in the general case, the Recursion Theorem with parameters for total computable functions is not equivalent to the precompleteness of the numbering, even if it is universal. Finally we prove that if A is high, then any infinite A‐computable family has a minimal A‐computable numbering that satisfies the Recursion Theorem. (shrink)

Some theorists hold that there is no serious, significant issue concerning cosmopolitanism. They hold that cosmopolitanism is either the anodyne doctrine that we have some duties to distant strangers merely on the ground of shared humanity or the absurd doctrine that we have no special moral duties based on special-ties such as those of friendship, family, and national community. This essay argues against this deflationary position by defending (1) a very extreme cosmopolitan doctrine that denies special-tie moral duties altogether and (...) (2) a slightly milder but still extreme form of cosmopolitanism that allows that there might be special-tie moral duties to intimate associates such as friends and family members but denies that broader social group associations such as those of subjection to a national state or national or ethnic community memberships ever constitute special ties that ground special moral duties. The defense proceeds by rebutting bad arguments leveled against extreme cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)

Pendant et juste après l’explosion de 1968, l’extrême droite, au moins dans ses publications, a réussi à reconvertir son obsession algérienne – de la « trahison » de l’Algérie français à la description des hommes Algériens comme une menace pour la France d’alors – dans l’élaboration de grilles d’analyse reposant sur un registre sexué et sexuel permettant de comprendre « Mai » : c’est-à-dire à la fois les événements eux-mêmes et la crise générale qui minait la France.

Extreme Learning Machine is widely used in various fields because of its fast training and high accuracy. However, it does not primarily work well for Domain Adaptation in which there are many annotated data from auxiliary domain and few even no annotated data in target domain. In this paper, we propose a new variant of ELM called Discriminative Extreme Learning Machine with Cross-Domain Mean Approximation for unsupervised domain adaptation. It introduces Cross-Domain Mean Approximation into the hidden layer of ELM to (...) reduce distribution discrepancy between domains for domain bias elimination, which is conducive to train a high accuracy ELM on annotated data from auxiliary domains for target tasks. Linear Discriminative Analysis is also adopted to improve the discrimination of learned model and obtain higher accuracy. Moreover, we further provide a Discriminative Kernel Extreme Learning Machine with Cross-Domain Mean Approximation as the kernelization extension of DELM-CDMA. Some experiments are performed to investigate the proposed approach, and the result shows that DELM-CDMA and DKELM-CDMA could effectively extend ELM suitable for domain adaptation and outperform ELM and many other domain adaptation approaches. (shrink)

Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see (...) how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive. (shrink)

Extreme Permissivism is the view that a body of evidence could rationally permit both the attitude of belief and disbelief towards a proposition. This paper puts forward a new argument against Extreme Permissivism, which improves on a similar style of argument due to Roger White (2005, 2014). White’s argument is built around the principle that the support relation between evidence and a hypothesis is objective: so that if evidence E makes it rational for an agent to believe a hypothesis H, (...) then E makes it rational to believe H, for all agents. In this paper, I construct a new argument against Extreme Permissivism that appeals to a logically weaker, less demanding view about evidential support, Relational Objectivity: whether a body of evidence E is more likely if H is true than if H is false is an objective matter and does not depend on how any agent interprets the relationship between E and H. Relational Objectivity is solely concerned with the conditional probabilities called likelihoods and does not put substantive constraints on an agent’s prior and posterior credences. For this reason, the presented argument avoids the standard permissivist criticism levelled against White’s argument. (shrink)

Extreme monetary policies successfully prevented the “Great Recession” of 2007–2009 from turning into a global depression. However, they did not address the underlying problems in global capitalism. In recent years prominent “insiders” of global capitalism have proposed reforms designed to remedy these defects. I argue that these proposals are inadequate, due in great part to a failure to acknowledge a profound change in the “deep structure” of capitalism. Technological change, which in the past has contributed so much to the dynamism (...) of capitalism development, no longer does so. The need for extreme monetary policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007–2009, the failure of these policies, and the lack of plausible alternatives to them, are all symptoms of an underlying disease beyond cure. A path towards a democratic form of socialism must be forged for the simple yet compelling reason Rosa Luxemburg articulated: it is a matter of socialism or barbarism. (shrink)

The extreme skepticism that Hume’s dangerous dilemma introduces at the end of the first Book of the Treatise is deeply unsettling, in part because it seems to undermine Hume’s commitments to common life and philosophy, but also because Hume seems not to take its sweeping doubts seriously. He refuses to abandon his daily activities and philosophical pursuits, and he offers no clear account of what entitles him to sustain them. This paper explores a variety of tactics for addressing these opposing (...) elements of his thought. The most radical approach has Hume endorse nothing whatsoever in the Treatise, a maneuver that prevents any conflict between his doubts and his commitments from arising, though at a tremendous cost. A more charitable strategy allows Hume to speak with one consistent voice throughout the text by rejecting, repurposing, or restricting either his doubts or his commitments in a way that resolves the tension between them. Yet a third approach takes Hume to advance incompatible and irreconcilable positions but holds that the inconsistency in his thinking is not as destructive as it initially appears. None of the most promising ways of developing these proposals eliminates or satisfactorily eases the conflict in Hume’s work, and the enormous obstacles that they face give us little reason to hope for something better. (shrink)

Effective vaccines for COVID‐19 are already available to humankind. In Peru, 86 million doses were administered to cover the demand for 33 million Peruvian people. Hence, vaccination has been prioritized in groups: health personnel, subjects with pre‐existing health conditions and those over 65 years of age. However, given the social problems and the public health situation in Peru, this work defends that the priority of vaccination should be focused on the population living in extreme poverty. The method used was an (...) ethical argumentation on the distribution of scarce antiSARS‐CoV2 vaccine in Peru. This argument is based on the analysis of the Peruvian population living in extreme poverty, which presents different layers of vulnerability, and that, in the face of an eventual SARS‐CoV2 infection, these would be exacerbated one after the other, through a cascade effect. This scenario would give rise to new vulnerabilities to those already existing, causing greater damage. Vaccination efforts on this key population would give them the opportunity to continue to find ways to bring food to their homes, significantly reducing the risk of contagion in their environment and mitigating the devastating effect of the local diseases to which they are already exposed. Four objections related to this argument are raised with their corresponding responses. Priority access to the vaccine would significantly reduce the humanitarian harm to people living in extreme poverty, prevailing the principles of justice and equity. (shrink)

The Cratylus’ main concern is to outline and evaluate the competing views of language held by two characters, Hermogenes and Cratylus, who disagree about whether convention or nature (respectively) are the source of onomastic correctness. Hermogenes has been thought to hold two radically different views by different scholars, one extreme conventionalism whereby all names are correct relative to their speakers, and another modest conventionalism according to which distinct naming actions – establishment and employment – explain why some names are correct (...) and others are not, depending on the speaker. In this paper I argue that, though Hermogenes ultimately endorses a conventionalism of the latter kind, it is a mistake to assign him this position from the outset. Rather, to understand the structure of the conversation about conventionalism, we must view Hermogenes’ position, and Socrates’ understanding of it, as developing instead of settled. For it is only by discussing the matter that Hermogenes comes to express a moderate conventionalist view and Socrates comes to appreciate the position Hermogenes actually holds. (shrink)

Extreme formalism is a radical and important position in the aesthetics of inorganic nature. Zangwill offers a new formulation of what formal aesthetic properties are, according to which a formal aesthetic property of a thing is an aesthetic property that is determined merely by its appearance properties. An appearance property of a thing is the way it seems if perceived under certain conditions. With the notion of formal aesthetic properties formulated as such, extreme formalism, the claim that all aesthetic properties (...) of inorganic things are formal, says that all aesthetic properties of inorganic things are determined merely by their appearance properties. Recently, Zangwill defends extreme formalism by deflecting the famous counter-example of the cumulonimbus cloud given by Budd, and argues for extreme formalism by arguing against the idea of the existence of non-formal beauty in inorganic nature. In this paper, we argue that both his defense and positive arguments are not successful. If our arguments are right, the burden of proof is still on Zangwill’s side. (shrink)

This article is concerned with Extreme Case Formulations in multiple-party TV programmes in two different languages: Spanish and English. I examine the role of ECFs in Spanish pre-electoral debates and in English panel interviews. English data is 77 minutes and 58 seconds long and comprises nine different panel interviews of political, socio-political and social issues and Spanish data is 78 minutes long and includes four political pre-electoral debates. The results will disclose that the number of ECFs found in the Spanish (...) and in the English corpora differs considerably. And in relation to the type of recording, the data will reveal that interviewers and interviewees deployed many more ECFs in political recordings than in socio-political or social recordings ; and politicians used more ECFs than any other type of interviewees. (shrink)

Despite its prevalence, the term ‘extreme’ has received little critical attention. ‘Extremity’ is routinely employed in ways that imply its meanings are self-evident. However, the adjective itself offers no such clarity. This article focuses on one particular use of the term – ‘extreme porn’ – in order to illustrate a broader set of concerns about the pitfalls of labelling. The label ‘extreme’ is typically employed as a substitute for engaging with the term’s supposed referents (here, pornographic content). In its (...) contemporary usage, ‘extreme’ primarily refers to a set of context-dependent judgements rather than absolute standards or any specific properties the ‘extreme’ item is alleged to have. Concurrently then, the label ‘extreme’ carries a host of implicit values, and the presumption that the term’s meanings are ‘obvious’ obfuscates those values. In the case of ‘extreme porn’, this obfuscation is significant because it has facilitated the cultural and legal suppression of pornography. (shrink)

This essay addresses the questions of whether and how much responsibility for extreme poverty should be assigned to global and domestic institutional orders. The main focus is on whether the global order brings about the existing levels of extreme poverty or merely allows them. By examining Thomas Pogge's recent contribution on this topic, I argue that although he builds a plausible case for the claim that the global order brings about, and not merely fails to prevent, extreme poverty, the moral (...) and empirical complexity of the situation leaves room for doubting his conclusions. I conclude, however, that it is enough that there be a reasonable chance—though not conclusive evidence—that the global order brings about the existing extreme poverty to reduce considerably the moral weight of its privileged participants' appeal to cost when justifying their not taking steps to alleviate extreme poverty. (shrink)

It is plausible that being an evil person is a matter of having a particularly morally depraved character. I argue that suffering from extreme moral vices—and not consistently lacking moral vices, for example—suffices for being evil. Alternatively, I defend an extremity account concerning evil personhood against consistency accounts of evil personhood. After clarifying what it is for vices to be extreme, I note that the extremity thesis I defend allows that a person could suffer from both extremely vicious (...) character traits while possessing some modest virtue as well. By contrast, consistency theses rule out this possibility by definition. This result does not suggest that extremity accounts are flawed, however, since, as I argue, the thesis that evil people must lack moral virtue altogether effectively defines evil people out of existence and prematurely privileges skepticism about evil personhood. Ultimately, I contend that an extremity account is most consistent with common intuitions about putative evil persons as well as plausible assumptions about aretaic evaluations of character quite generally. (shrink)

In a recent debate, Rosenberg claims that only the methods of natural science can deliver genuine knowledge, while Williamson rejects Rosenberg’s extreme methodological naturalism and insists that we have genuine philosophical and humanistic knowledge not achievable by hard-scientific methods alone. This paper responds to the debate. I will argue that physicalism, together with contemporary neurocognitive and evolutionary knowledge, implies that some of our intuitions and mental simulations used in the humanities and philosophy are justified methods for achieving knowledge but are (...) practically irreplaceable with hard-scientific methods. That is, extreme methodological naturalism is in conflict with physicalism. The argument also shows that some moderate version of methodological naturalism can be consistent with physicalism. Physicalism is the strong version of ontological naturalism and is supposed to be accepted by strongly committed naturalists like Rosenberg. Therefore, to be self-consistent, these naturalists should adopt physicalism plus a moderate version of methodological naturalism, rather than Rosenberg’s extreme version. (shrink)

An ICU and Palliative Care specialist featured in the Netflix documentary Extremis offers a framework for a better way to exit life that will change our medical culture at the deepest level In medical school, no one teaches you how to let a patient die. Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care--to become an ICU physician--and imagined herself swooping in to rescue patients from the brink of death. But (...) then during her first code she found herself cracking the ribs of a patient so old and frail it was unimaginable he would ever come back to life. She began to question her choice. Extreme Measures charts Zitter's journey from wanting to be one kind of hero to becoming another--a doctor who prioritizes the patient's values and preferences in an environment where the default choice is the extreme use of technology. In our current medical culture, the old and the ill are put on what she terms the End-of-Life Conveyor belt. They are intubated, catheterized, and even shelved away in care facilities to suffer their final days alone, confused, and often in pain. In her work Zitter has learned what patients fear more than death itself : the prospect of dying badly. She builds bridges between patients and caregivers, formulates plans to allay patients' pain and anxiety, and enlists the support of loved ones so that life can end well, even beautifully. Filled with rich patient stories that make a compelling medical narrative, Extreme Measures enlarges the national conversation as it thoughtfully and compassionately examines an experience that defines being human. (shrink)

The claim that listening to extreme music causes anger, and expressions of anger such as aggression and delinquency have yet to be substantiated using controlled experimental methods. In this study, 39 extreme music listeners aged 18–34 years were subjected to an anger induction, followed by random assignment to 10 min of listening to extreme music from their own playlist, or 10 min silence (control). Measures of emotion included heart rate and subjective ratings on the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS). (...) Results showed that ratings of PANAS hostility, irritability, and stress increased during the anger induction, and decreased after the music or silence. Heart rate increased during the anger induction and was sustained (not increased) in the music condition, and decreased in the silence condition. PANAS active and inspired ratings increased during music listening, an effect that was not seen in controls. The findings indicate that extreme music did not make angry participants angrier; rather, it appeared to match their physiological arousal and result in an increase in positive emotions. Listening to extreme music may represent a healthy way of processing anger for these listeners. (shrink)

For the safe and economical construction of embankment dams, the mechanical behaviour of the rockfill materials used in the dam’s shell must be analyzed. The characterization of rockfill materials with specified shear strength is difficult and expensive due to the presence of particles greater than 500 mm in diameter. This work investigates the feasibility of using an extreme gradient boosting computing paradigm to estimate the shear strength of rockfill materials. To train and validate the proposed XGBoost model, a total of (...) 165 databases obtained from the literature are chosen. The XGBoost model was compared against support vector machine, adaptive boosting, random forest, and K-nearest neighbor models described in the literature. XGBoost beats SVM, RF, AdaBoost, and KNN models in terms of performance evaluation metrics such as coefficient of determination, Nash–Sutcliffe coefficient, and error in the root mean square ratio to the standard deviation of the measured data. The results demonstrated that the XGBoost model has the highest prediction performance with, followed by the SVM model with, RF, the AdaBoost model with and the KNN model with. A sensitivity analysis has been conducted to ascertain the impact of each investigated input parameter. This study demonstrates that the established XGBoost model for estimating the shear strength of rockfill materials is reliable. (shrink)

Studies with sacrificial moral dilemmas capture human variation in moral attitudes towards an extreme case of moral conflict between utilitarian and deontological principles. In this moral task, th...

Creativity is a valuable commodity. Research has revealed some identifying characteristics of creative people and some of the emotional states that can bring out the most creativity in all of us. It has also been shown that the long-term experience of different cultures and lifestyles that is the result of travel and immigration can also enhance creativity. However, the role of one-off, extreme, or unusual experiences on creativity has not been directly observed before. In part, that may be because, by (...) their very nature, such experiences are very difficult to bring into the laboratory. Here, we brought the tools and empirical methods of the laboratory into the wild, measuring the psychological effects of a unique multisensory experience: an underwater nightclub. We showed – with fully randomized and experimentally controlled conditions – that such an experience boosted measures of divergent thinking in participants. This demonstrates that one element of creativity can be directly enhanced by unusual situations, and that experimental tools of psychology can be used to investigate a range of consumer experiences. (shrink)

Understanding the motivations behind those who partake in extreme sports can be difficult for some. If the popular conception holds that the incentive behind extreme sports participation is entirely to do with risking one's life, then this confusion will continue to exist. However, an in-depth examination of the phenomenology of the extreme sport experience yields a much more complex picture. This book revisits the definition of extreme sports as those activities where a mismanaged mistake or accident would most likely result (...) in death. Extreme sports are not necessarily synonymous with risk and participation may not be about risk-taking. Participants report deep inner transformations that influence world views and meaningfulness, feelings of coming home and authentic integration as well as a freedom beyond the everyday. Phenomenologically, these experiences have been interpreted as transcendent of time, other, space and body. Extreme sport participation therefore points to a more potent, life-enhancing endeavour worthy of further investigation. This book adopts a broad hermeneutic phenomenological approach to critique the assumed relationship to risk-taking, the death wish and the concept of "No Fear" in extreme sports, and repositions the experience in a previously unexplored manner. This is valuable reading for students and academics interested in Sports Psychology, Social Psychology, Health Psychology, Tourism, Leisure Studies and the practical applications of phenomenology. (shrink)

In a crisis, societal needs take precedence over a patient’s best interests. Triage guidelines, however, differ on whether limited resources should focus on maximizing lives or life-years. Choosing between these two approaches has implications for neonatology. Neonatal units have ventilators, some adaptable for adults. This raises the question of whether, in crisis conditions, guidelines for treating extremely premature babies should be altered to free-up ventilators. Some adults who need ventilators will have a survival rate higher than some extremely premature babies. (...) But surviving babies will likely live longer, maximizing life-years. Empiric evidence demonstrates that these babies can derive significant survival benefits from ventilation when compared to adults. When “triaging” or choosing between patients, justice demands fair guidelines. Premature babies do not deserve special consideration; they deserve equal consideration. Solidarity is crucial but must consider needs specific to patient populations and avoid biases against people with disabilities and extremely premature babies. (shrink)

Pendant et juste après l’explosion de 1968, l’extrême droite, au moins dans ses publications, a réussi à reconvertir son obsession algérienne – de la « trahison » de l’Algérie français à la description des hommes Algériens comme une menace pour la France d’alors – dans l’élaboration de grilles d’analyse reposant sur un registre sexué et sexuel permettant de comprendre « Mai » : c’est-à-dire à la fois les événements eux-mêmes et la crise générale qui minait la France.

This article examines the ethical validity of using viability as the cutoff point for abortion in the Netherlands, in view of potential changes to the Dutch perinatal care guideline. According to the Dutch Penal Code, abortion is permitted until viability: the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb with technological assistance. Since the law was enacted in 1984, viability has been set at 24 weeks gestational age. Currently, in the Netherlands, the treatment limit for extreme prematurity is (...) also set at 24 weeks. The potential revision of the guideline could lower this threshold. Such a change could have implications for abortion in the Netherlands. We critically evaluate the use of viability within the Dutch context and offer recommendations for modifying the legal framework concerning abortion. We conclude that relying on any interpretation of viability is morally problematic for abortion regulation, as it is too indeterminate a concept to establish a threshold in a morally relevant way. (shrink)

: In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Despite this revival, however, certain aspects of Murdoch's views remain poorly understood, including her account of a concept that she famously described as ‘central’ to moral philosophy—i.e., love. In this paper, I argue that the concept of love is essential to any adequate understanding of Murdoch's work but that recent attempts by Kieran Setiya and David Velleman to assimilate Murdoch's account of (...) love to neo-Aristotelian or neo-Kantian theories of moral agency are misconceived. We will not understand what Murdoch is trying to do unless we understand her position as a radical alternative to such theories. Here, I present a reading of Murdoch's account of love as a form of Platonic eros directed toward two objects: the Good and the particular individual. It is in navigating the tension between these two objects that we find ourselves facing what Murdoch famously described as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’. When properly understood, Murdoch's account of love opens up conceptual space for an alternative approach to some of the central questions in contemporary moral theory. (shrink)

Marya Schechtman has raised a series of worries for the Psychological Continuity Theory of personal identity (PCT) stemming out of what Derek Parfit called the ‘Extreme Claim’. This is roughly the claim that theories like it are unable to explain the importance we attach to personal identity. In her recent Staying Alive (2014), she presents further arguments related to this and sets out a new narrative theory, the Person Life View (PLV), which she sees as solving the problems as well (...) as bringing other advantages over the PCT. I look over some of her earlier arguments and responses to them as a way in to the new issues and theory. I argue that the problems for the PCT and advantages that the PLV brings are all merely apparent, and present no reason for giving up the former for the latter. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

It is often thought that bets on the truth of known propositions become irrational if the losing costs are high enough. This is typically taken to count against the view that knowledge involves assigning credence 1. I argue that the irrationality of such extreme bets can be explained by considering the interactions between the agent and the bookmaker. More specifically, the agent’s epistemic perspective is altered by the fact that the bookmaker proposes that unusual type of bet. Among other things, (...) being willing to offer a bet with unnecessarily harmful losing costs is likely to undermine the baseline level of trustworthiness required for it to be rational to engage in betting exchanges. This sort of explanation does not require granting either that we assign credence lower than 1 to known propositions or that knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes. Moreover, I show that, in our ordinary lives, we frequently perform actions that we know would be disastrous if certain conditions did not obtain. This behaviour can be seen as a form of implicit extreme betting and, nevertheless, it is often rational. (shrink)

Not so long ago, being reasonably trustworthy was good enough. But soon only the extremely trustworthy will thrive. In the age of smartphones and social networks, every action an organization takes can be exposed and critiqued in real time. Nothing is local or secret anymore. If you treat one customer unfairly, produce one shoddy product, or try to gouge one price, the whole world may find out in hours, if not minutes. The users of Twitter, Yelp, and similar outlets show (...) little mercy for bad behavior. The bar for trustworthiness is higher than ever and continues to rise. Bestselling authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., argue that the only sane response to these rising levels of transparency is to protect the interests of customers proactively—even if that requires spending extra money in the short run to preserve your brand reputation in the long run. The payoff of generating extreme trust will be worth it. With a wealth of fascinating research as well as practical applications, this book will show you how to earn—and keep—the extreme trust of everyone your company interacts with. (shrink)

The structure of covariant observables—normalized positive operator measures (POMs)—is studied in the case of a type I symmetry group. Such measures are completely determined by kernels which are measurable fields of positive semidefinite sesquilinear forms. We produce the minimal Kolmogorov decompositions for the kernels and determine those which correspond to the extreme covariant observables. Illustrative examples of the extremals in the case of the Abelian symmetry group are given.

Extreme Curriculum Makeover: A Hands-On Guide for a Learner-Centered Pedagogy explores how to develop a learner-centered pedagogy through specific strategies that can be implemented in any classroom, at any grade level, and that can transform the traditional learning environment into one where the students themselves acquire the tools, the skills, and, more importantly, the motivation to become lifelong learners.

The precautionary principle has often been described as an extreme principle that neglects science and stifles innovation. However, such an interpretation has no support in the official definitions of the principle that have been adopted by the European Union and by the signatories of international treaties on environmental protection. In these documents, the precautionary principle is a guideline specifying how to deal with certain types of scientific uncertainty. In this contribution, this approach to the precautionary principle is explicated with the (...) help of concepts from the philosophy of science and comparisons with general notions of practical rationality. Three major problems in its application are discussed, and it is concluded that to serve its purpose, the precautionary principle has to (1) be combined with other decision principles in cases with competing top priorities, (2) be based on the current state of science, which requires procedures for scientific updates, and (3) exclude potential dangers whose plausibility is too low to trigger meaningful precautionary action. (shrink)

이 논문은 에티엔 발리바르의 폭력론을 극단적 폭력과 시민다움 개념을 중심으로 재구성하고, 그것의 이론적 의의와 과제를 검토하는 것을 목표로 한다. 발리바르는 1990년대 이후 현대 폭력의 문제를 극단적 폭력(내지 잔혹성)과 시민다움이라는 두 가지 개념의 관계에 입각하여 이론화하려고 시도해왔다. 그는 극단적 폭력을 정치의 가능성의 조건을 잠식하는 폭력으로 규정하면서, 이를 일상적인 폭력 및 구조적 폭력과 구별되는 개념으로 제시한다. 극단적 폭력은 초객체적 폭력과 초주체적 폭력이라는 두 가지 하위 범주로 구별되는데, 전자는 인간을 사물화하는 폭력이며, 후자는 개별적인 인간들을 민족이나 인종 같은 초주체의 의지에 종속시키는 폭력이다. 이러한 극단적 (...) 폭력에 맞서는 정치를 그는 반(反)폭력의 정치 내지 시민다움의 정치라고 부르면서 시민다움의 세 가지 전략을 각각 헤게모니의 전략, 소수자 전략, 다수자 전략으로 제시하고 있다. 발리바르의 폭력론은 비폭력과 대항폭력으로 분류되는 기존의 폭력 이론, 특히 대항 폭력을 중심으로 한 반국가적, 반제도적 폭력이론에 비해 현대 사회의 폭력 현상들을 더 세심하고 정교하게 분석한다는 장점을 지니고 있다. 또한 정치의 개념을 해방, 변혁, 시민다움으로 구분할 뿐만 아니라 시민다움의 정치 역시 세가지 전략으로 분류함으로써, 잘 알려진 다른 폭력이론에 비해 구체적인 정치전략을 모색할 수 있는 길을 제시해준다. 다만 구조적 폭력과 극단적 폭력의 관계에 대해 더 분명한 탐색이 필요해보이며, 일상적인 삶 속에서 작용하는 극단적 폭력의 유형화에서도 더 섬세한 분석이 요구된다는 것이 이 글의 결론이다. (shrink)

Moral values in healthcare range widely between interest groups and are principally subjective. Disagreements diminish dialogue and marginalize alternative viewpoints. Extremely premature births exemplify how discord becomes unproductive when conflicts of interest, cultural misunderstanding, constrained evidence review, and peculiar hierarchy compete without the balance of objective standards of reason. Accepting uncertainty, distributing risk fairly, and humbly acknowledging therapeutic limits are honorable traits, not relativism, and especially crucial in our world of constrained resources. We think dialogics engender a mutual understanding that: (...) i) transitions beliefs beyond bias, ii) moves conflict toward pragmatism (i.e., the truth of any position is verified by subsequent experience), and iii) recognizes value pluralism (i.e., human values are irreducibly diverse, conflicting, and ultimately incommensurable). This article provides a clear and useful Point-Counterpoint of extreme prematurity controversies, an objective neurodevelopmental outcomes table, and a dialogics exemplar to cultivate shared empathetic comprehension, not to create sides from which to choose. It is our goal to bridge the understanding gap within and between physicians and bioethicists. Dialogics accept competing relational interests as human nature, recognizing that ultimate solutions satisfactory to all are illusory, because every choice has downside. Nurturing a collective consciousness via dialogics and pragmatism is congenial to integrating objective evidence review and subjective moral-cultural sentiments, and is that rarest of ethical constructs, a means and an end. (shrink)

In the recent years, gesture recognition based on the surface electromyography (sEMG) signals has been extensively studied. However, the accuracy and stability of gesture recognition through traditional machine learning algorithms are still insufficient to some actual application scenarios. To enhance this situation, this paper proposed a method combining feature selection and ensemble extreme learning machine (EELM) to improve the recognition performance based on sEMG signals. First, the input sEMG signals are preprocessed and 16 features are then extracted from each channel. (...) Next, features that mostly contribute to the gesture recognition are selected from the extracted features using the recursive feature elimination (RFE) algorithm. Then, several independent ELM base classifiers are established using the selected features. Finally, the recognition results are determined by integrating the results obtained by ELM base classifiers using the majority voting method. The Ninapro DB5 dataset containing 52 different hand movements captured from 10 able-bodied subjects was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results showed that the proposed method could perform the best (overall average accuracy 77.9%) compared with decision tree (DT), ELM, and random forest (RF) methods. (shrink)

In the paper translated here, Carnap and Bachmann shows that the apparently metalinguistic ?extremal' axioms that are added to some axiom systems to the effect that the foregoing axioms are to apply as broadly, or as narrowly, as possible may be formulated directly as proper axioms. They analyze such axioms into four fundamental types, with the help of a concept of ?complete? isomorphism.

Examines extremity as a political and cultural phenomenon in the late 20th and early 21st century. It argues that we can discern a ‘continuum of extremes/extremity’ on which we may locate practices as diverse as Abu Ghraib, extreme sports, biomedical TV series and horror films.

1. On at least one usage of ‘mean’, performing an action that leads someone else to think that P, is not, on its own, sufficient for meaning that P. Nor is performing an action that is intended to get someone to think this. Instead one must make one’s intention overt. Grice’s way of developing this overtness requirement requires audience-directed intentions: for an agent, on this approach, to mean that P, she must perform a publicly accessible action with the intention of (...) producing in an addressee the belief that P, while further intending that her addressee enter that state at least in part by recognition of her intention. 11 Different types of intended cognitive state and content correspond to different illocutionary forces. Thus an imperatival utterance might be made with the aim of producing an intention to do something; and one might mean P as a conjecture rather than as an assertion by intending to produce in an addressee not a belief but some less committal cognitive state such as tentative acceptance. (shrink)

This paper sets mathematics among the sciences, despite not being empirical, because it studies relations of various sorts, like the sciences. Each empirical science studies the relations among objects, which relations determining which science. The mathematical science studies relations as such, regardless of what those relations may be or be among, how relations themselves are related. This places it at the extreme among the sciences with no objects of its own (A Subject with no Object, by J.P. Burgess and G. (...) Rosen). Examples are discussed. The historical development of written mathematics from algorithms on clay tablets to theorems with proofs is said to show that application of algorithms to specific problems and theorems to scientific objects is like allegorical interpretation. Mathematics fits into the modern scientific context because the sciences, beginning with Galileo, have been constructed in imitation of mathematics. Viewing mathematics this way does not solve any ontological problems, but it does show how mathematics avoids them. Epistemological problems, insuperable for object realism, are simplified. For example, we have access to relations among any objects that we can consider objectively, first physical objects and then mathematical objects of greater and greater abstraction. (shrink)

Extreme monetary policies successfully prevented the “Great Recession” of 2007–2009 from turning into a global depression. However, they did not address the underlying problems in global capitalism. In recent years prominent “insiders” of global capitalism have proposed reforms designed to remedy these defects. I argue that these proposals are inadequate, due in great part to a failure to acknowledge a profound change in the “deep structure” of capitalism. Technological change, which in the past has contributed so much to the dynamism (...) of capitalism development, no longer does so. The need for extreme monetary policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007–2009, the failure of these policies, and the lack of plausible alternatives to them, are all symptoms of an underlying disease beyond cure. A path towards a democratic form of socialism must be forged for the simple yet compelling reason Rosa Luxemburg articulated: it is a matter of socialism or barbarism. (shrink)

This paper presents a bioinspired lower extremity exoskeleton robot. The proposed exoskeleton robot can be adjusted in structure to meet the wearer’s height of 150–185 cm and has a good gait stability. In the gait control part, a method of identifying different locomotion modes is proposed; five common locomotion modes are considered in this paper, including sitting down, standing up, level-ground walking, ascending stairs, and descending stairs. The identification is depended on angle information of the hip, knee, and ankle (...) joints. A deep locomotion mode identification model based on long-short term memory architecture is proposed in this paper for exploiting the angle data. We conducted two experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the DLMIM is capable of learning inherent characteristics of joint angles and achieves more accurate identification than the other models. The last experiment demonstrates that the DLMIM can recognize transitions between different locomotion modes in time and the real-time performance varies with each individual. (shrink)

Extremely harsh treatment (for example, unanesthetized tooth, branding with a hot iron, violent shaking, repeated beatings, and car-battery shocks to the genitalia) is often considered unjust. On different accounts, extremely harsh treatment fails to respect persons because it infringes on an absolute right, fails to respect a person’s dignity, constitutes cruel or inhumane treatment, violates rules that rational persons would choose under fair and equal choosing conditions, or results in a person losing his agency to another. Others respond that in (...) some cases extremely harsh treatment is just because some individuals forfeit their moral rights against extremely harsh treatment or because it is the fair way to distribute a danger that was created by the person to be so treated. In this paper, I develop an argument that is designed to sidestep these criticisms. (shrink)

We describe a particular class of pairs of quantum observables which are extremal in the convex set of all pairs of compatible quantum observables. The pairs in this class are constructed as uniformly noisy versions of two mutually unbiased bases with possibly different noise intensities affecting each basis. We show that not all pairs of MUB can be used in this construction, and we provide a criterion for determining those MUB that actually do yield extremal compatible observables. We apply our (...) criterion to all pairs of Fourier conjugate MUB, and we prove that in this case extremality is achieved if and only if the quantum system Hilbert space is odd-dimensional. Remarkably, this fact is no longer true for general non-Fourier conjugate MUB, as we show in an example. Therefore, the presence or the absence of extremality is a concrete geometric manifestation of MUB inequivalence, that already materializes by comparing sets of no more than two bases at a time. (shrink)

We introduce two extreme methods to pairwisely compare ordered lists of the same length, viz. the comonotonic and the countermonotonic comparison method, and show that these methods are, respectively, related to the copula TM (the minimum operator) and the Ł ukasiewicz copula TL used to join marginal cumulative distribution functions into bivariate cumulative distribution functions. Given a collection of ordered lists of the same length, we generate by means of TM and TL two probabilistic relations QM and QL and identify (...) their type of transitivity. Finally, it is shown that any probabilistic relation with rational elements on a 3-dimensional space of alternatives which possesses one of these types of transitivity, can be generated by three ordered lists and at least one of the two extreme comparison methods. (shrink)

This paper has described three uses of Extreme Case formulationsto assert the strongest case in anticipation of non-sympathetic hearingsto propose the cause of a phenomenonto speak for the rightness (wrongness) of a practice.The interactants in the illustrations were engaged in several types of activities, among which were complaining, accusing, justifying, and defending. As concluding remarks, a few comments will be made about why participants use Extreme Case formulations in these activities.Part of the business of complaining involves portraying a situation as (...) a legitimate complainable. This may take the form of protraying the offense committed and/or the suffering endured in a way such that it would not be dismissed as minor. So as to legitimize a complaint and portray the complainable situation as worthy of the complaint, a speaker may portray the offense and/or the suffering with Extreme Case formulations. In both accusing and defending, participants ofyen present their strongest cases, including specifying Extreme Cases of their claims.Part of justifying a course of actions may involve portraying the precipitating circumstance as necessitating the action. The precipitating circumstance may be a problem circumstance which is portrayed as unfair, immoral, embarrassing, uncomfortable, or in some other way undesirable and/or intolerable. There is a shared assumption that the worse the problem, the more necessary it is to do something about it. In justifying, speakers use Extreme Case formulations to portray the circumstances that precipitated their actions as demanding their actions.A problem that participants have when engaged in, or reflecting on, conflicts, complaints, criticism, compliments, praise, etc. is to attribute the cause of the phenomenon. Who or what is responsible for the conflictual, complainable, praise-worthy state of affairs? One method that is used to determine what or who is responsible, i.e. to make an attribution, involves comparing the case in question to other similar cases. Through this procedure, persons determine that they are (are not) responsible for the state of affairsin questions. Extreme Case proportional formulations (‘everyone,’ ‘all,’ ‘every time’) are used to indicate that any individual member of that category is not responsible for the state of affairs; that responsibility is to be attributed elsewhere.The social order essentially is a moral order (Garfinkel, 1967). One of the ways of knowing what is acceptable and right is by finding out how people behave. There often is a shared assumption operating (one that is called into question on occasion): how people behave tells us what is the right way to behave. Proportional measures reporting the frequency or prevalence of practices are used to propose and substantiate the rightness and wrongness of those practices. Extreme Case formulations (‘all the time,’ ‘everybody,’ ‘no one’) propose behaviors are acceptable and right or unacceptable and wrong. (shrink)