We carry out a critical analysis of the so-called “knowledge society” in order to show in what way the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE) constitutes the paradoxical culmination of this society. The “knowledge society” begins to solidify when the technologies, progressively specialized and separated from the possible basic scientific control of their consequences, begin to make possible a process of economic optimization between the investment and the productive profitability that is in turn feedbacked for a consumption increasingly unstoppable. (...) This process requires in principle to promote the sociological map that provides the educational support for a labor market in agreement with this economic-technologically optimized and full of consumerism society. But due to the increasingly unstoppable dynamics of consumerism which is the axis of rotation of all this process, the relationships between supply and demand within the consumption market, and with them the requirements of the labor market, will begin foreseeably to become random or unforeseeable, which will requires the creation of the corresponding educational support that generates a new type of maximum and indefinitely versatile professional. This one would be the necessity to which the project of the ESHE seeks basically to respond, but this project will thus be wrapped in the paradoxical task of. (shrink)

By pitting John Cage against Andy Warhol, Arthur Danto shows how the arts themselves were gripped by a progressive logic that aimed at only one goal: to overcome the gap between art and life. The non‐tautological reading preserves a fundamental, philosophical difference between commonplace and art objects. The semantical space accounts for the aboutness of the work and is thus the necessary condition for something to be an artwork. Together with other Pop artists, Rauschenberg transformed the Artworld, while Cage aimed (...) at a re‐enfranchisement of the commonplace. Danto writes that his Buddhist phase came to an end when he, as a philosopher, felt the need for theories. The works of Fluxus and Cage, in the end, accepted asylum within the sanctuary of the Artworld, where they became less radical, and perhaps less radical than Pop. (shrink)

Islam is often associated with anti-consumerism. This study, suggests that a new elite with explicitly Islamist dispositions is being constructed in Turkey and aims to provide evidence that these elites build their identity through consumption that reflects its newfound status which leads to impulsive buying. This paper investigates the relationship of materialism to impulsive buying and the mediating role of status consumption on this association. To analyse whether the new elites differ from the general public in their (...) class='Hi'>consumption preferences, two sets of data were collected from a judgmental sample of 267 individuals with explicit Islamist dispositions and a stratified random sample of 413. The results provide empirical evidence to suggest that motivated by materialistic values, the explicitly Islamist individuals with high status consumption tendencies are likely to buy products/services impulsively. (shrink)

Belgium, and Europe in general, has seen a strong increase in the number of refugees arriving over the past three years. At the same time we also note an increasing polarization of Belgian public opinion on this subject. Among the main actors to shape this public opinion are news media, as they contribute to or combat stereotyping of (sub)groups in the population. The purpose of the current study is to analyze to which extent media consumption and trust have an (...) impact on public opinion on two minority groups – immigrants and refugees – in a representative sample of the Belgian adult population (n = 1500). We gathered data on Belgian news media consumption and trust, and attitudes on immigrants and refugees through an online questionnaire. The results indicate that Belgian adults hold more positive attitudes on immigrants than on refugees. The reading of quality online newspapers as well as high levels of trust in television and radio are correlated with a positive attitude towards both groups, whereas the consumption of commercial television and popular newspapers go along with a negative attitude. Fear of terrorism (negative relation) and a negative evaluation of media coverage of refugees (positive relation) also have a sizeable influence. In terms of regional differences within Belgium, we find that citizens in the Brussels Capital Region hold more positive attitudes towards both groups than those in Flanders and Wallonia. (shrink)

What is the exact nature of the consumption function? Can this term be defined so that it will be consistent with empirical evidence and a valid instrument in the hands of future economic researchers and policy makers? In this volume a distinguished American economist presents a new theory of the consumption function, tests it against extensive statistical J material and suggests some of its significant implications.Central to the new theory is its sharp distinction between two concepts of income, (...) measured income, or that which is recorded for a particular period, and permanent income, a longer-period concept in terms of which consumers decide how much to spend and how much to save. Milton Friedman suggests that the total amount spent on consumption is on the average the same fraction of permanent income, regardless of the size of permanent income. The magnitude of the fraction depends on variables such as interest rate, degree of uncertainty relating to occupation, ratio of wealth to income, family size, and so on.The hypothesis is shown to be consistent with budget studies and time series data, and some of its far-reaching implications are explored in the final chapter. (shrink)

Experience marketing plays an important role in improving the quality and upgrading tourism services in cultural tourism cities and helps guide the planning and development, commodity design, and business management of cultural tourism products. However, the urgent problems that need to be solved are as follows: How does experiential marketing in cultural tourism cities affect tourists' consumption behavior? How to adjust consumption emotion in tourist experience and revisit intention? Starting from the experience needs of tourists, this study selected (...) Jinan city, represented by “Qilu culture,” as the research object; discussed the relationship between experiential marketing, consumption emotion, and revisit intention; and used a structural equation model to verify the relationship between the three. This study divided the perception of experiential marketing into four dimensions—sensory experience, action experience, emotional experience, and thinking experience, and divided tourists' revisit intention into two dimensions— “revisit” and “recommendation”. Totally, 305 tourists were randomly selected to participate in the questionnaire survey, and they came from 34 provinces in China. The results showed that cultural tourism cities can enhance tourists' positive consumption emotion through experiential marketing over time, and high-quality tourist consumption experience directly motivates tourists to revisit intention and then promotes tourists to go to cultural tourism cities for secondary consumption. These results suggest that cultural tourism cities should start from Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, pay attention to the needs of tourists at different levels, and adopt effective experiential marketing strategies from tourism experience to improve the quality of tourists' travel experience and promote tourists' revisit intention. (shrink)

Currently, there are many advocacy interventions aimed at reducing animal consumption. We report results from a lab (N = 267) and a field experiment (N = 208) exploring whether, and to what extent, some of those educational interventions are effective at shifting attitudes and behavior related to animal consumption. In the lab experiment, participants were randomly assigned to read a philosophical ethics paper, watch an animal advocacy video, read an advocacy pamphlet, or watch a control video. In the (...) field experiment, we measured the impact of college classes with animal ethics content versus college classes without animal ethics content. Using a pretest, post-test matched control group design, humane educational interventions generally made people more knowledgeable about animals used as food and reduced justifications and speciesist attitudes supporting animal consumption. None of the interventions in either experiment had a direct, measurable impact on self-reported animal consumption. These results suggest that while some educational interventions can change beliefs and attitudes about animal consumption, those same interventions have small impacts on animal consumption. (shrink)

The hybridization of two or more energy sources into a single power station is one of the widely discussed solutions to address the demand and supply havoc generated by renewable production, heating power, and cooling power) and its energy storage issues. Hybrid energy sources work based on the complementary existence of renewable sources. The combined cooling, heating, and power is one of the significant systems and shows a profit from its low environmental impact, high energy efficiency, low economic investment, and (...) sustainability in the industry. This paper presents an economic model of a microgrid system containing the CCHP system and energy storage considering the energy coupling and conversion characteristics, the effective characteristics of each microsource, and energy storage unit is proposed. The random forest regression model was optimized by the gravitational search algorithm. The test results show that the GSA-RFR model improves prediction accuracy and reduces the generalization error. The detail of the MG network and the energy storage architecture connected to the other renewable energy sources is discussed. The mathematical formulation of energy coupling and energy flow of the MG network including wind turbines, photovoltaic, CCHP system, fuel cell, and energy storage devices are presented. The testing system has been analysed under load peak cutting and valley filling of energy utilization index, energy utilization rate, the heat pump, the natural gas consumption of the microgas turbine, and the energy storage unit. The energy efficiency costs were observed as 88.2% and 86.9% with heat pump and energy storage operation comparing with GSA-RFR-based operation costs as 93.2% and 93% in summer and winter season, respectively. The simulation results extended the rationality and economy of the proposed model. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

Viewed from an evolutionary standpoint, emotions can be understood as situation-specific patterns of energy consumption related to behaviors that have been selected by evolution for their survival value, such as environmental exploration, flight or fight, and socialization. In the present article, the energy linked with emotions is investigated by a strictly energy-based simulation of the evolution of simple autonomous agents provided with random cognitive and motor capacities and operating among food and predators. Emotions are translated into evolving patterns of (...) energy consumption related to situation-specific behaviors. As a result, a variety of behaviors resembling emotions emerge, each with a specific pattern of energy consumption. There is little difference between emotion-like behaviors on individual and collective levels. The fact that these patterns evolve under a strictly energetic selection regime indicates the interesting role and adaptive advantage of emotions as situation-specific energy savers. Although gained through an approach characterized by a highly reduced complexity, these findings support a quantitative understanding of emotions that may improve the existing qualitative approaches and could have far-reaching implications for further research on and conceptualization of emotions and their interactions with cognition. (shrink)

This research paper aims to investigate. the impact of inflation. on financial sector performance in Western. Balkan. countries. The topic was chosen considering the financial sector’s fundamental role and its. impact on sustainable economic growth. This impact is measured through the effect that macroeconomic determinants of financial. performance such. as inflation, GDP. growth, general government final consumption expenditure, trade, and the lending interest rate have on credit to private sector as a share of GDP and broad definition of money (...) as a ratio of GDP, which were used to proxy financial sector development. The data are provided by the World Bank as well as the Central. Banks. of the respective countries, for the period 2002–2021. The research methodology consists of different panel regression models such as OLS, OLS robust, Fixed effects, Random effects, and Generalized method of moments (GMM). Findings indicate that domestic credit to the private sector and inflation are positively correlated, whereas broad money and inflation are negatively correlated. (shrink)

ContextThe recent development of “serious games” has produced encouraging results in maintaining adherence to health-related interventions. In alcohol research, several studies have shown that computerized training on attentional bias decreases alcohol consumption bias among students. However, these highly controlled experimental situations, do not allow for direct large-scale dissemination. Our objective is to evaluate an attentional bias remediation program using a gamified smartphone training procedure.MethodsFifty students from Clermont-Ferrand University were invited to participate in the study. After a cognitive assessment in (...) the laboratory, the smartphone application was installed on each Student’s smartphone. Participants were randomly assigned to either the alcohol attentional training group or the control group Each student had to complete the 2-min program at least once a day for 15 days. After 15 days, a new cognitive assessment of attention bias was conducted in the laboratory. Forty-seven students were included in the study.ResultsOur analyses did not show any effect of the cognitive remediation program on attentional bias reduction between the two group [F < 1, p = 0.87], attentional performance [F = 1.63, p = 0.20] or inhibitory abilities [F < 1, p = 0.73]. These results were confirmed by Bayesian analyses.DiscussionDespite the absence of group effects, both the alcohol and control version of this program appeared to reduce attentional bias and increase inhibition capacities in the subset of participants who had attentional bias for alcohol at baseline This pilot study identifies areas for improvement in smartphone applications for future developments. Attentional bias remediation programs remain an interesting way to explore. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising mainly (...) the Orthodox Church Fathers and the ancient classics. Later on in his life he sold the library for money, only to buy a little more time before he went broke again: “I carry sorrow like a cage/ I got no birds/ as I come back from her hair/ I see the profit emptied/ cool from terror.” (1993, Ι, 101) Nowadays—and ridiculously recently—we are more than apt to speak of a certain insouciance pertaining to the Greek form of expenditure: expenditure without any type of investment, sometimes not (even) symbolic. In the vaults of the European unconscious, this imprudent stance still conjures a “capital punishment” in the form of de-capitation, reflecting back the fear of excess and the terror of its consequences.1 Thus the Greek way of living is very close to what a stranger could have termed as “the Greek way of dying.” Yet, what is not often understood is that the Greek esprit , the same one that invented the maxim μηδ?ν ?γαν (“nothing in excess”), does not experience death solely as an imminent fear of bankruptcy. For it miraculously combines its unconditional acceptance with the promise of a resurrection that is always there in the scents of Spring, from Dionysus to the orthodox Christ: “Everyone resurrects himself through dying [….] Resurrection is the switching of mortalities.” (2002, 94) Hence, if an entire library was imprudently traded for a plate with seven olives, a sliced tomato and some fresh goat cheese, let us not be fooled: this is not the meal of the pauper, but that of “an aristocrat from God” (1993, II, 491) feeding his eloquent loudmouth, ridiculously cut open in an otherwise rock-solid caput . *** To speak of the Greek experience is to speak about a half-dead language that still utters in life what is seemingly excluded from it and thus forbidden to be talked about: death. Death as anything that is out of this world, as something that will never return . Still, along with an experience of death that recently waned as a worn-out academic fashion, the Greek experience is dead too. Nearly 2300 years of written words separating Homer from the fall of Byzantium equal 500 books on a library traded for money: “I am with the killed. Hence my deepest solitude. I do not feel this tremendous macho society, beyond from the fact that it is a ruthlessly consuming one. It is me who pays all the time .” (2002, 57) Let us do the math and see how much this dealing with the Greek experience is costing the poet and how much dealing with the Greek experience might cost us today. *** “I do not guarantee a single word.” (Karouzos, 1993, II, 454) Through its various dialects and forms, the Greek language speaks through an incessant historical dissemination. Anyone who is aware of this terrifying polymorphy and still calls himself a poet, must stand against a white sheet of paper, pen-in-hand, with a very particular duty: to be as fully inconsistent as possible. In the formally ironic uniqueness of the poem, the poet functions as “a band-aid for lesser and greater antinomies.” (1993, I, 251) Of course these antinomies are not exhausted in language—they are historical, political and, alas, existential. Yet, beyond appearances , it is language that ruthlessly encodes them through history, submitting the poet to the temptation of placing them one next to the other on a single white sheet. The closer their neighboring, the greater the scattering of the writer in the ironic uniqueness of the paper. In a work where poetic license is described as a “freedom-impasse” (2002, 51), this task is undertaken in full conscience of its personal consequences: “what I am interested in is to escape my individuality (envisioning the non-ego) […] Nevertheless, my dissociations never achieve duration.” (2002, 74-75) Hence, though poetry is the “deserted direction of will,” (1998, 62) the stance of the poet is not that of a Nietzschean “great man.”2 Whereas drunkenness provides a thread between the poem and the excess it both presupposes and infuses (“Poetry always enlarges. ‘Drunkenness’ is nothing more than that,” (2002, 85)), whereas language flashes in loudmouth spurts of déraison (“When I am alone I do something else. I utter words. For example, while having my ouzo and listening to music I am most likely capable of randomly shouting ‘Electricity!’” (2002, 138)), the poet never gives in to the double affirmation that would eventually risk the “element of pleasure in discourse.” (2002, 80)” It is exactly because the gap of the antinomies is so vast that poetry is not meant to be written with a hammer. Neither does writing consist in a reevaluation of those elements. In short, poetry is not an affirmation of difference, but the surprising beauty of chiming antinomies. We might never transcend them, but it is up to us to put them together. Yet again, this voisinage is not to be identified with the necessity of chance as an eternal return.4 On the contrary it is a return from that very return : Let us treat Yes as a No to No and No as a Yes […] And let us not forget that this pissed affirmation crumbled down Nietzsche’s intellect in the dark paths of this world. (2002, 88) This return from the “vicious circle” should in no way be taken as a form of artistic prudence. Rather it can be seen as a dribble of demonic inconsistency as Dionysus transforms himself into a Christ that is in turn de-theologized: “Who can forbid that? Every man is capable of his own theology, nothing can stop him.” (2002, 73-74) This is a turn towards an existential vision of the world, historically coinciding with a particular political defeat of the Left, to which the poet devoted all his life: after the defeat of the popular front I raised the question “why do we exist?” while others were asking “why we failed.” (2002, 57)5 But most of all it is a return to poetry that exceeds the existential question itself, going beyond the issue of faith. Poetry comes in as a question of return after a defeat that is confessed in full profanity. Though it accepts the necessity of the defeat, it does not affirm it. Though it negates it, the negation is not in the name of a promise to be delivered in the kingdom of heavens. Following a historical and existential defeat, poetry is born post mortem . It signals a return to Christ as “groundless religiousness in the surprise of the real as such” (2002, 72) which is at once a return to the refuge of childhood. It is not a question of endurance towards an eternal return. Rather it is a question on the possibility of an existential return. Returning in a world as someone who cannot enjoy any returns exactly because he is averse to guarantees. A return without returns. *** PHOTOCOPY OF HAPPINESS When I was young I used to pin down cicadas and step on ant nests. I used to stand there silent for hours. With threads I decapitated bees. Now I am a dead man breathing. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 336.) The return to the “paradise of childhood” (2002, 68) constitutes the devouring refuge of its own memory when defeat becomes the synonym of adulthood. The political struggles of a young communist in a country torn up by a civil war right after World War II fraught with incarcerations and exiles. Historically they resulted in the defeat of the communist movement in Greece and opened up a long turbulent road that would peak in the dictatorship of 1967. Existentially they led to a series of disillusionments: mental breakdown, divorce, abandonment of studies in law school. To the question “why do we exist” the answer was poetry. Still this exposé should not be read as a sweeping chronography of a man. For it actually happens to coincide with the historical fate of a nation that after its modern constitution never stopped dreaming of the glories of its past youth, in a present that was (and is) sweepingly disappointing. But isn’t this return to youth finally a way of compensating for a loss of youth that necessarily results in a losing adulthood? Will Greeks, the eternal children of Plato and Nietzsche, ever learn? How to return without dying, how to remember without wasting time? WE ARE IN THE OPEN MEANING Living the coldest mauve night right across Parthenon I went to take a piss on some foliage and I was enjoying the foliage as it was steaming. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 340) Beyond the historical tragedies of modern Greece and away from any personal disappointments, the relation that this land holds with language and history is mediated through the Greek light—whose omnipresence is the very condition of its transcendence. All historical contradictions from Dionysus to Christ took place under this light; all those disseminated dialects were spoken beneath its warmth. To paraphrase Lévinas,6 light is both the condition of the world and of our withdrawal from it—a withdrawal towards the invisibility of God, of the dead, of meta-physics, resulting from the temptation that all is still here, behind this light the visibility of which they once evaded: “birds, the allurement of God.” (1993, I, 17) Under that luminous sky, if Greeks can do anything at all, it is to envision a return that will never come. All they can do is write poetry—which is doing nothing; other than lending an ear to a disseminated language whispering a unity that cannot be promised, as an adulthood in defeat is ready to recognize. Trying “to trap the invisible in visibility” (1993, II, 483) they forget that they have grown up and one day they die—with the promise of return. Hence an additional meaning must be given to this return to childhood. It does not signal salvation but rather its promise. To the ears of an aged continent it means that the return to/of poetry is a losing game, a return without returns. “Europe, Europe… you are nothing more than the continuation of Barabbas.” (1993, I, 295) *** “Life is not there to verify theories.”7 The records show that Karouzos was finally given a second-class pension from the Greek government, at the time when he was being recognized by the literary press as one of Greece’s major contemporary poets. Being neither a bourgeois nor a nobelist, he proclaimed himself to be an anarcho-communist, unconditionally faithful to the utopia of a classless society. He also drank, heavily. “Capitalism made an animal out of man/ Marxism made an animal out of truth/ Shut up.” (1993, II, 369) Perhaps one of the most scandalous divides of our times has been the one between the living and the dead, the latent prohibition that the living should not be concerned with the dead based on the mere impossibility of the dead to be concerned with the living in the first place. What adds to this scandal is that this divide abuses anything that cannot return to us by subsuming it under the same futility. Hence death is no longer “loss” in the usual sense. It no more refers to the things we lost but to our “loss” (of time, money and well-being) as we insist to dwell on them. Death is a waste —of time. It is this waste that we find in the insouciance of Greek expenditure; the waste in dealing with a language that most of its historical part is no longer spoken (a dead language); the waste in translating a poet who is ex definitio untranslatable; the waste of his vision, his money, his life. The waste of dealing with anything that cannot return and that cannot bring in any returns . But it is also the waste of life that poetry itself presupposes, the waste of dealing with invisibility, with anything that is out of this world and thus invokes the fear of death that is in turn—and surprisingly— nowhere to be found. Instead of death, what is there, beyond the light, is the being without us (to recall the Lévinasian il y a ), the mumble of our own nothingness which constitutes the price to be paid for writing poetry under an evergreek light. To understand this to-and-fro, is to realize that poetry is something out of this world that nevertheless takes place in this world, by virtue of this world. But to ridiculously equate this to-and-fro with death as non-existence, is to exile poetry along with its own possibility from this same old world: I do not believe that poetry will ever disappear from this world. […] But I am also sure that it does not have many chances of playing, as you say, a redemptive role in our vertiginous technological future. Without being endangered as a creative need, it will be placed on the side of history. (2002, 32) It is mainly there that we would like to locate the meaning of Nikos Karouzos’s poetry today. If we are willing to include the Greek original it is because we consider that it will be both a waste of time for us to do so (since most of you cannot read Greek) and because it might induce you to the even larger waste of learning it. We would additionally be glad if this small introduction served as an equally wasteful, academically useless piece of reading, gesturing towards a taboo of investing in anything Greek—that is in anything dead among the living, in anything that will never come back and maybe was never here in the first place. This is the only way to reserve for ourselves the possibility of poetry and preserve the light of its promise. “To return: that is the miracle.” (1993, I, 17) Athens, Greece July 10, 2011 NOTES 1 “ Capitale (a Late Latin word based on caput “head”) emerged in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in the sense of funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.[…] The word and the reality it stood for appear in the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ‘… quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi quam communiter capitale vocamus ’, ‘that prolific cause of wealth that we commonly call capital’” (Braudel, 1992, 232-233). 2 “A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? First : there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, ‘divinest’ things in the world.” (Nietzsche, 1968, 505, §962) 3 Cf. Deleuze, 1986, 186-9. 4 “Return is the being of becoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance: the being of difference as such or the eternal return.” (Deleuze, 189)5 In this 1982 interview Karouzos refers to the defeat of the communist movement in Greece after the civil war of 1946-1949 between the Governmental Army and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military division of the Greek communist party. Karouzos’s father was a member of the communist National Liberation front (EAM) members of which formed the mainl resistance movement (ELAS) in Greece during WWII. The poet was a member of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), which was a youth division of EAM. After the end of the war, ELAS was called to disarmament in view of the formation of a National Army. The members of EAM resigned from the government of national unity and a series of protests led to a 3 year civil war between ELAS and the Government Army. After the defeat of ELAS the Communist party was outlawed and many communists were exiled in deserted Greek islands. Karouzos, who took action in the Greek resistance and was active during the Greek civil war, was exiled in Icaria on 1947 and in Makronisos on 1953 where he was called two years earlier to do his military service. 6 “Existence in the world qua light, which makes desire possible, is then, in the midst of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from being. To enter into being is to link up with objects; it is in effect a bond that is already tainted with nullity. It is already to escape anonymity. In this world where everything seems to affirm our solidarity with the totality of existence, where we are caught up in the gears of a universal mechanism, our first feeling, our ineradicable illusion, is a feeling or illusion of freedom. To be in the world is this hesitation, this interval in existing, which we have seen in the analyses of fatigue and the present.” (Lévinas, 1988,43-4) 7from a TV interview. THE POETRY OF NIKOS KAROUZOS From Redwriter [ Ερυθρογρ?φος ], in Collected Works, Vol . II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 463-4. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 9-10.] JESUS ANTI-OEDIPUS* Why were we once saving till the fifth day the Paschal lamb? The scriptures say: with this victim’s meat we ought to cleanse all of our senses. To give life to the whitest wave miraculous odors in the extension of the chest. Ideals to death. For us to witness the illustrious dawns of Absinthe and for the soul to be a deeply carved ornament on the fore we named will. Then many deer running amidst the evergreen growth with watery hymns, then, the unintended angels descending with heights spiraling in their momentum offer themselves to the luminous Adventure. Whence the need for speech and our sufferings covered with flags like the glorified dead. An incorporeal finger pointing at the flamboyant and fragrant holocausts within the tired horizons and the exhausted breadths with joys of the mistletoe on fire and shivering all of the green-leaved love. Something would have chirped again had we not driven it away— maybe the ewe’s grass. Something would have called us to the eternal resurrection— maybe the grace of spring. But now our heart is fiercely blinded, withdrawn to the appearances of Hades. Silence and ice incessantly cover the Infant Spirit in thatched times. While the cherry trees are dreaming faintly glowing in absolute darkness there’s nothing the Babylonians can contemplate in labs with automatic colored lights. How to rejoice now in the fifth day of the lamb? We have forked the stars. We’ve gradually become supposedly sublime with plucked chimeras in our hands. Avenged relentlessly by science. *Though the poem appears in a 1990 collection, it was actually written in 1968. Hence the reader must be aware in not associating Karouzos’ Anti-Oedipus with the famous 1972 work of Deleuze and Guattari, given that the former precedes the latter. ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙ-ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ Γιατ? κρατο?σαμε κ?ποτε ?ς την π?μπτη μ?ρα το πασχαλιν? πρ?βατο; Τα κε?μενα λ?νε: μ’ αυτο? του θ?ματος το κρ?ας ?πρεπε να καθαρ?σουμε ?λες τις αισθ?σεις. Για να δ?σουμε κ?μα στη ζω? λευκ?τατο θαυμ?σιες ευωδι?ς στην ?κταση του στ?θους. Ιδανικ? στο χ?ρο. Για να βλ?πουμε τα λαμπρ? χαρ?ματα του ?ψινθου και να ’ναι η ψυχ? στ?λισμα βαθυχ?ρακτο της πλ?ρης που την ε?παμε θ?ληση. Τ?τε πολλ?ς δορκ?δες τρ?χοντας αν?μεσα στην καταπρ?σινη φ?ση με τους υδ?τινους ?μνους, τ?τε, κατεβα?νοντας οι αθ?λητοι ?γγελοι με κυλινδο?μενο το ?ψος στην ορμ? τους χαρ?ζονται της αστραφτερ?ς Περιπ?τειας. ?θεν η μιλι? γι’ αυτ? χρει?ζεται και τα δειν? σκεπ?ζονται ωσ?ν τους τιμημ?νους νεκρο?ς με σημα?ες. Ασ?ματο δ?χτυλο δε?χνει τα φλογ?δη και μοσχοβ?λα ολοκαυτ?ματα στους κουρασμ?νους ορ?ζοντες στα εξουθενωμ?να πλ?τη καθ?ς αν?βουν οι χαρ?ς του νερα?δ?ξυλου και τρ?μει ολ?κληρη η πρασιν?φυλλη αγ?πη. Κ?τι θα κελαηδο?σε π?λι αν δεν το δι?χναμε— μπορε? της προβατ?νας το χορτ?ρι. Κ?τι θα μας καλο?σε στην απ?ραντη αν?σταση— μπορε? του ?αρος η χ?ρη. Μα η καρδι? μας ?γρια τυφλ?θηκε π?ρασε στα φαιν?μενα του ?δη. Σιγ? και π?γος αδι?κοπα σκεπ?ζει στους αχυρ?νιους καιρο?ς το Ν?πιο Πνε?μα. Την ?ρα που ονειρε?ονται οι βυσσινι?ς και λ?μπουν αμυδρ? μεσ’ στο απλ?τατο σκοτ?δι τ?ποτα δε στοχ?ζονται οι βαβυλ?νιοι στα εργαστ?ρια με τ’ αυτ?ματα χρωματιστ? φ?τα. Π?ς να χαρο?με πια την π?μπτη μ?ρα του προβ?του; Φουρκ?σαμε τ’ αστ?ρια. Γ?ναμε σιγ?-σιγ? δ?θεν υπ?ροχοι με μαδημ?νες χ?μαιρες στα χ?ρια. Μας ν?μεται σκληρ? η επιστ?μη. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], in Collected Works, Vol. II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 472. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18.] DIALECTΙCS OF SPRING Christ the straight angle; Christ the Pythagorean theorem. Christ the infinitesimal calculus from above the blessed Sets Christ. Christ the tessellation of massive particles Christ the zero mass. Hence we spray numbers and fields of lust. We are carabineers of diseased logic plus something— Observed means observer and Hekate The darkness luminous and light in the dark Astarte banqueters demons from today. ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΑΡΟΣ Χριστ?ς η ορθ? γων?α· Χριστ?ς το πυθαγ?ριο θε?ρημα. Χριστ?ς ο απειροστικ?ς λογισμ?ς ?νωθεν ?λβια Χριστ?ς τα Σ?νολα. Χριστ?ς η ψηφιδογραφ?α στα μαζικ? σωμ?τια Χριστ?ς η μ?ζα μηδ?ν. ?ρα ψεκ?ζουμε αριθμο?ς και πεδ?α λαγνε?ας. Ε?μαστε τυφεκιοφ?ροι νοσο?σης λογικ?ς και κ?τι-- παρατηρο?μενο σημα?νει παρατηρητ?ς και Εκ?τη σκ?τος το π?μφωτο και φως εν τ? σκοτ?? η Αστ?ρτη συνδαιτημ?νες δα?μονες απ’ ?ρτι. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18. [1993, II, 472]. CREDO (as we are used to say in Latin) Α I believe in one Poet expelled from heavens / fugitive from the god and vagabond, Empedocles / and here on earth / exile on the earth etc. of Baudelaire /. Β I believe in one Computer inside thunder and through matter. Γ Suffering undefiled / substantive / the Poet uplifts himself slow-burning suicidal implying lengthy sleeps. Δ Cutting down on prospective mistakes. Ε Of all things visible and invisible officiating the onion-peelings. Ζ The Poet has nothing / see the departed /. Η I believe in one Poet that says: madness I enjoy; he ridicules existence; let me light up from my mana. Θ Syntax he doesn’t care about when musicality commands him. Along with still more licenses, and Ts are played according to the concept sound anywhere. E.g. the winters here, he winters there; it will not come—I will not rest, etc. etc. Ι The Poet exercises thought until it’s stripped down. Κ And if he’s Greek he must always study the fineness of Attica, in light, mountains, fields and sea. For this fineness teaches language. Λ And if he’s deeply destined the Poet expresses the unexplainable of the explained; he happens to be a rightful heir to the scientist and his predecessor. Μ On the froth he does not last; the Poet blusters at the bottom of the pot. Ν Flamebred and never redeemed. Ξ The Poet must sometimes say: what a consumption of presence — be a bit lonely for a change! Ο The Poet is twilit. Π He is susceptible of deaths and resurrections. Ρ He looks from the corner of his eye and exists in a glance. Σ He follows behind the mother. Τ Eveningless when it comes to age. Υ I believe in one Poet who says: let the purities coincide. Until the Corinth of the Universe or even further. Φ In a higher despair. Χ In a brighter quintessence. Ψ In one sensation that lifts off. Ω Forgiving everyone. CREDO (ως ε?θισται να λ?με λατινιστ?) Α Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν εκτ?ς ουρανο? / φυγ?ς θε?θεν και αλ?της, Εμπεδοκλ?ς / και επ? της γης / εξ?ριστος π?νω στη γη κ.λπ. του Βωδελα?ρου /. Β Πιστε?ω εις ?να Υπολογιστ?ν εντ?ς κεραυνο? και δια της ?λης. Γ Υποφ?ροντας ?χραντα / ουσιαστικ?ν / ο Ποιητ?ς ανατε?νεται βραδυφλεγ?ς αυτ?χειρας εξυπακο?οντας πολ?ωρους ?πνους. Δ Τα υποψ?φια λ?θη λιγοστε?οντας. Ε Ορατ?ν τε π?ντων και αορ?των ιερουργ?ντας την αποκρομμ?ωση. Ζ Ο Ποιτ?ς ?χει τ?ποτα / βλ?πε τους αναχωρ?σαντες /. Η Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: η τρ?λα μ’ αρ?σει· γελοιοποιε? την ?παρξη· ας αν?ψω απ’ τη μ?να μου. Θ Συνταχτικ? δεν το γνοι?ζεται στην προσταγ? της μουσικ?τητας. Μαζ? και μ’ ?λλες ακ?μη λευτερι?ς, και τα νυ πα?ζονται κατ? την ?ννοια ?χος οπουδ?ποτε. Π.χ. τον χειμ?να εδ?, το χειμ?να εκε?· δε θ? ’ρθει – δεν θα καταλαγι?σουμε, κ. λπ. κ.λπ. Ι Ο Ποιητ?ς γυμν?ζει τη σκ?ψη σε απογ?μνωση. Κ Κι αν ε?ναι ?λληνας οφε?λει να σπουδ?ζει π?ντοτε της Αττικ?ς τη λεπτ?τητα, σε φως, βουν?, χωρ?φια και θ?λασσα. Διδ?σκει γλ?σσα η λεπτ?τητα το?τη. Λ Κι αν ε?ναι βαθι? πεπρωμ?νος ο Ποιητ?ς εκφρ?ζει το ανεξ?γητο του εξηγητο?· τυγχ?νει ν?μιμος δι?δοχος του επιστ?μονα και προκ?τοχ?ς του. Μ Στον αφρ? δεν ?χει δι?ρκεια· στο πατοκ?ζανο μα?νεται ο Ποιητ?ς. Ν Φλογοδ?αιτος και ποτ? ξελυτρωμ?νος. Ξ Ο Ποιητ?ς κ?ποτε πρ?πει να λ?ει: μεγ?λη καταν?λωση παρουσ?ας – γενε?τε και λ?γο μοναξι?ρηδες! Ο Ο Ποιητ?ς ε?ναι αμφ?φλοξ. Π Επιδ?χεται θαν?τους και αναστ?σεις. Ρ Ακροθωρ?ζει και υπ?ρχει σε ξαφνοκο?ταγμα. Σ Ε?ναι ουραγ?ς της μητ?ρας. Τ Αν?σπερος απ? ηλικ?α. Υ Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: να συμπ?σουν οι αγν?τητες. Μ?χρι την Κ?ρινθο του Σ?μπαντος ? μακρ?τερα. Φ Σε αν?τερη απελπισ?α. Χ Σε φαειν?τερη πεμπτουσ?α. Ψ Σε μια α?σθηση που πτηνο?ται. Ω Συγχωρ?ντας τους π?ντες. From Large Sized Logic [ Λογικ? μεγ?λου σχ?ματος ], Athens: Erato, 1989, n.p. [1993, II, 521-3]. (shrink)

We tested the plausibility of a cognitive-emotional model to understand the effects of messages framed in terms of gain, non-loss, non-gain, and loss, and related to the health consequences of red/processed meat consumption. A total of 544 Italian participants reported their attitude toward reduced red/processed meat consumption and intention to eat red/processed meat. One week later, participants were randomly assigned to four different message conditions: gain messages focused on the positive health outcomes associated with low meat consumption; (...) non-loss messages focused on the avoided negative health outcomes associated with low meat consumption; non-gain messages focused on the missed positive health outcomes associated with high meat consumption; loss messages focused on the negative health outcomes associated with high meat consumption. After reading the messages, participants answered a series of questions regarding their emotional and cognitive reactions to the messages, their evaluation of the messages, and again their attitude and intention toward red/processed meat consumption. Comparing different multivariate linear models under the Bayesian approach, we selected the model with the highest plausibility conditioned to observed data. In this model, message-induced fear influenced systematic processing, which in turn positively influenced message evaluation and attitude, leading to reduced intention to consume red/processed meat. Vice versa, message-induced anger reduced systematic processing, which in turn negatively influenced message evaluation, and led to no effect on attitude and intention. The comparison among message conditions showed that gain and non-loss messages activated integrated emotional and cognitive processing of the health recommendation, while loss and non-gain messages mainly activated emotional shortcuts toward attitude and intention. Overall, these results advance our comprehension of the effects of message framing on receivers' attitudes and intentions. (shrink)

Maintenance of proper health and prevention of diseases of civilization are now significant public health problems. Nutrition is an important factor in the development of youth, as well as the current and future state of health. The aim of the study was to show the benefits of the application of cluster analysis to assess the dietary habits of high school students. The survey was carried out on 1,631 eighteen-year-old students in seven randomly selected secondary schools in Bialystok using a self-prepared (...) anonymous questionnaire. An evaluation of the time of day meals were eaten and the number of meals consumed was made for the surveyed students. The cluster analysis allowed distinguishing characteristic structures of dietary habits in the observed population. Four clusters were identified, which were characterized by relative internal homogeneity and substantial variation in terms of the number of meals during the day and the time of their consumption. The most important characteristics of cluster 1 were cumulated food ration in 2 or 3 meals and long intervals between meals. Cluster 2 was characterized by eating the recommended number of 4 or 5 meals a day. In the 3rd cluster, students ate 3 meals a day with large intervals between them, and in the 4th they had four meals a day while maintaining proper intervals between them. In all clusters dietary mistakes occurred, but most of them were related to clusters 1 and 3. Cluster analysis allowed for the identification of major flaws in nutrition, which may include irregular eating and skipping meals, and indicated possible connections between eating patterns and disturbances of body weight in the examined population. (shrink)

This paper claims that how economists actually treat the consumption function, both theoretically and empirically, seems to be at odds with traditional structural realism. While economics aims to find out the way the world actually is, economic theory – including theoretical staples such as the consumption Euler equation – do not always state literal truths. Yet, such methods persist. Our investigation will reveal that the Euler equation is deployed as part of a realist methodology to identify scale-dominant behaviors. (...) These analyses permit the economist to conduct counterfactual reasoning and sometimes (via policy) to intervene on the world itself; the implication is when this is successful, the economist has uncovered real structure. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This book provides a methodological perspective on understanding the essential roles of econometric models in the theory and practice. Offering a comprehensive and comparative exposition of the accounts of models in both econometrics and philosophy of science, this work shows how econometrics and philosophy of science are interconnected while exploring the methodological insight of econometric modelling that can be added to modern philosophical thought. The notion of structure is thoroughly discussed throughout the book. The studies of the consumption function (...) of Trygve Haavelmo, Richard Stone, Milton Friedman, David Hendry and Robert Lucas are taken as the case studies to investigate their methodological implications of model and structure. In addition to the semantic view of the scientific theories, various philosophical accounts concerning scientific models are used to shed light on the methodological nature of these consumption studies in economics. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of methodology of economics and econometrics as well as anyone interested in the philosophy of science in an economic context. (shrink)

In 1947 Donald Cary Williams claimed in The Ground of Induction to have solved the Humean problem of induction, by means of an adaptation of reasoning first advanced by Bernoulli in 1713. Later on David Stove defended and improved upon Williams’ argument in The Rational- ity of Induction (1986). We call this proposed solution of induction the ‘Williams-Stove sampling thesis’. There has been no lack of objections raised to the sampling thesis, and it has not been widely accepted. In our (...) opinion, though, none of these objections has the slightest force, and, moreover, the sampling thesis is undoubtedly true. What we will argue in this paper is that one particular objection that has been raised on numerous occasions is misguided. This concerns the randomness of the sample on which the inductive extrapolation is based. (shrink)

The aim is to investigate the Information Communication Technology on GDP growth in Western Balkan countries from 2000 - 2019. Different econometric techniques were used such as pooled OLS, fixed effects, random effects, and the Hausman Taylor model with instrumental variables. The findings indicate that fixed telephone subscriptions and individuals using the internet have a positive effect on GDP growth, while the fixed broadband subscriptions and mobile cellular subscriptions have a negative effect on GDP growth. The results also show general (...) government final consumption has a negative effect on GDP growth, whereas foreign direct investment has a positive effect on GDP growth, but the coefficient is statistically insignificant. The study will serve for policy makers to invest more in ICT since this will contribute to the economic growth and welfare benefits. There is no study that has been analyzed about ICT in Western Balkan countries, thus findings will be valuable to the government. (shrink)

Foucault's analysis of an aesthetics of existence is presented as an instrument to practice ethical thought without the presupposition of an autonomous subject. The implications of Foucault's aesthetics of existence for ethical thought are traced to the work of Nietzsche. In Foucault's work, experiences of oneself are not a given, but are constituted in power relations and true-and-false games. In the interplay of truths and power relations, the individual constitutes a certain relationship to him- or herself. Foucault designated the relation (...) to oneself and one's existence as the main area of ethical concern and the most important field where aesthetic values are to be applied. In his aesthetics of existence, he invited the individual to problematize the relationship with the self and by using 'self-techniques' to transform it into a work of art. The relation to intimate others, shaped as friendship, is crucial to this ethical-aesthetic approach. Key Words: aesthetics of existence • ethics • Foucault • friendship • Nietzsche • subjectivity. (shrink)

Bullying often results in negative coping in victims, including an increased consumption of alcohol. Recently, however, an increase in alcohol use has also been reported among perpetrators of bullying. The factors triggering this pattern are still unclear. We investigated the role of empathy in the interaction between bullying and alcohol use in an adolescent sample (IMAGEN) at age 13.97 (±0.53) years (baseline (BL), N = 2165, 50.9% female) and age 16.51 (±0.61) years (follow-up 1 (FU1), N = 1185, 54.9% (...) female). General empathic distress served as a significant moderator of alcohol use in perpetrators (F9, 493 = 17.978, p < 0.01), which was specific for males and FU1. Male perpetrators, who are generally less sensitive to distress, might thus be more vulnerable to alcohol abuse. (shrink)

Este trabajo profundiza en un momento importante en la historia de la comunicación como lo fue el de la difusión de la imprenta y el desarrollo de las técnicas del grabado aplicadas a la impresión. Se estudian las imágenes del libro bíblico del Apocalipsis, ilustrado por el artista alemán Alberto Durero a finales del siglo XV. Para ello se ha ahondando en el contexto histórico en el que fueron producidas, en la personalidad y circunstancias que rodearon la vida del artista (...) y en las propias imágenes xilográficas rastreando sus antecedentes y características propias. This work focuses on an important moment in the history of communication such as the diffusion of the printing press and the development of the engraving techniques applied to printing. It studies in depth the images of the biblical book of the Apocalypse illustrated by the German artist Alberto Durero by the end of the fifteenth century. This article analyzes the historical context where they were produced, the personality of the artist and the circumstances surrounding his life, and the very own xylographic images, whose antecedents and characteristics are traced. (shrink)

There is a long-standing interest in business ethics around the concept of free will, but study of its possible influence on consumer behavior is only in the nascent stage. This lack of research is particularly acute in certain consumption contexts, especially ones based on highly restricted access that appear to suggest abrogation of the will. In this paper, we offer a novel approach that involves reexamination of qualitative/ethnographic research that has chronicled consumption restrictions without consideration of potential implications (...) for free will. Using a new reanalysis method, we show that some of what is described as “vulnerability” using other theoretical paradigms is subsumed within this domain. Findings demonstrate that a complex relationship between free will and various consumption processes and outcomes exists that is acted out within and outside licit and illicit/formal and informal markets. These restrictions allow for a different vantage point to address free will and consumption, with implications for business ethicists and researchers interested in human quality treatment or human dignity-centered business frameworks. (shrink)

This paper investigates the history, color photos, and illustrations of the paper notes printed by the Military Consumption Society under the Caucasian Shooting Division for the first time in early 1924. Considering that there has not been sufficient research on this area and the uniqueness of the materials, the authors obtained new scientific findings by providing detailed notaphilic information. In the initial section, the paper presents the history of the First Iron Shooting Regiment named after 26 Baku Commissars and (...) the Third Caucasian Shooting Regiment, pertaining to the Azerbaijan Shooting Division, as well as discusses the role of the Military Consumption Society in providing financial support to the staff members of the division. It also includes photos of personalities distinguished by their activities and services. In the following sections of the paper, the issuers, denominations, characteristics, and various aspects of the main factual material of the research are covered. Materials added to these sections are the crest stamp of the First Iron Shooting Regiment Model Unit on loan checks printed in early 1924, additional stamps, and illustrations of the check of the Third Caucasian Shooting Regiment under the Azerbaijan Shooting Division. The paper catalogues, which has never been done before, the banknotes belonging to the Military Consumption Society of the Azerbaijan Shooting Division. Paper money tokens consumed by the Military Consumption Society of the Azerbaijan Shooting Division in 1924 are rare and unique facts. In modern collection circulation, such materials and copies are few, and those in complete condition are rare (especially checks of the Third Caucasian Shooting Regiment). They were in circulation for a short period of time, and at a later stage, they were taken out of use and completely destroyed. (shrink)

We discuss a recent approach to investigating cognitive control, which has the potential to deal with some of the challenges inherent in this endeavour. In a model-based approach, the researcher defines a formal, computational model that performs the task at hand and whose performance matches that of a research participant. The internal variables in such a model might then be taken as proxies for latent variables computed in the brain. We discuss the potential advantages of such an approach for the (...) study of the neural underpinnings of cognitive control and its pitfalls, and we make explicit the assumptions underlying the interpretation of data obtained using this approach. (shrink)

Objective: We aimed to analyze the characteristics and psychological mechanism of depressive symptoms in elderly patients with alcohol dependence under the COVID-19 epidemic and to observe the effect of acupuncture combined with emotional therapy of Chinese medicine treatment on depressive symptoms in elderly patients with alcohol dependence.Methods: Sixty patients were randomly divided into two groups. One group was treated by a set of emotional therapy of Chinese medicine treatment for 12 weeks. One group was treated by a set of acupuncture (...) combined with emotional therapy of Chinese medicine treatment for 12 weeks. We compared the curative effect between the control group and the treatment group, the mean alcohol consumption, the SF-36 scores before and after treatment, and the scores of Hamilton Depression Scale before and after treatment of 3, 6, and 9 weeks.Results: Based on the cognitive behavior model, the characteristics and psychological mechanism of depression in elderly patients with alcohol dependence under the COVID-19 epidemic situation were summarized. The total effective rate of the control group was 60%, and that of the treatment group was 100%. After 12 weeks of treatment, there were significant differences in PF, RF, physical pain, general health status, energy, and mental health between the treatment group and the control group. Before and after treatment, there were significant differences in PF, RF, physical pain, general health, energy, emotional function, and mental health of the treatment group. The PF, energy, and mental health of the control group were significantly different before and after treatment. There was no significant difference between the treatment group and the control group in the scores of Hamilton Depression Scale before treatment. There was significant difference between the treatment group and the control group in the scores of Hamilton Depression Scale at 3, 6, and 9 weeks after treatment.Conclusion: Attention, cognition, emotion, behavior, and physical response reinforce each other, creating a vicious cycle that reinforces and sustains the depressive symptoms of elderly alcohol dependence under the COVID-19 epidemic, and acupuncture combined with emotional therapy of Chinese medicine treatment for improving the depressive symptoms of elderly alcohol dependence during the epidemic period of COVID-19 has a brilliant therapeutic effect. (shrink)

In this paper the scientific trajectory of Spanish influential biochemist Alberto Sols (1917–1989) is presented in comparative perspective. His social and academic environment, his research training under the Cori's in the US in the early 1950s and his works when coming back to Spain to develop his own scientific career are described in order to present the central argument of this paper on his path from physiological research to research on enzymatic regulation. Sols' main contributions were both scientific and academic. (...) He and his collaborators not only contributed to biological knowledge on the biochemistry of metabolic regulation but to the active reception of biochemistry in the Spanish academia and to update of Spanish medical education. -/- . (shrink)

The effective implementation of regulation in organizations is an ongoing concern for both research and practice, in order to avoid deviant behavior and its consequences. However, the way compliance with regulations is actually enacted or “performed” within organizations instead of merely executed, remains largely under-characterized. Evidence from an ethnographic study in the compliance unit of a French investment bank allows us to develop a detailed practice approach to how regulation is actually implemented in firms. We characterize the work accomplished by (...) compliance analysts who are in fact, “curving” the script of regulation within what we conceptualize as a “comfort zone”. Beyond agency, ethics appears as a key element in linking the “letter of the law”, which serves as a referential anchor to guide action, with the complex nature of specific situations. We analyze the way individuals and compliance teams cope with, interpret, struggle and in fine, perform regulation within this comfort zone. A particular interest is thus given to the work of embedded ethics in this process, as an enabler to partly recouple compliance with the regulated activity. We find that blind execution is not only impossible, but also devoid of meaning both from regulatory, risk management, and business perspectives in organizations. We highlight and characterize a hermeneutic dimension to this work, essential to effectively perform regulation in complex environments, and we suggest some directions for further research. (shrink)

Humor has been praised by philosophers and poets as a balm to soothe the sorrows that outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows cause inevitably, if not incessantly, to each and every one of us. In mundane life, having a sense of humor is seen not only as a positive trait of character, but as a social prerequisite, without which a person’s career and mating prospects are severely diminished, if not annihilated. However, humor is much more than this, and so much else. (...) In particular, humor can accompany cruelty, inform it, sustain it, and exemplify it. Therefore, in this book, we provide a comprehensive, reasoned exploration of the vast literature on the concepts of humor and cruelty, as these have been tackled in Western philosophy, humanities, and social sciences, especially psychology. Also, the apparent cacophony of extant interpretations of these two concepts is explained as the inevitable and even useful result of the polysemy inherent to all common-sense concepts, in line with the understanding of concepts developed by M. Polanyi in the 20th century. Thus, a thorough, nuanced grasp of their complex mutual relationship is established, and many platitudes affecting today's received views, and scholarship, are cast aside. (shrink)

Various processes are often classified as both deterministic and random or chaotic. The main difficulty in analysing the randomness of such processes is the apparent tension between the notions of randomness and determinism: what type of randomness could exist in a deterministic process? Ergodic theory seems to offer a particularly promising theoretical tool for tackling this problem by positing a hierarchy, the so-called ‘ergodic hierarchy’, which is commonly assumed to provide a hierarchy of increasing degrees of (...) class='Hi'>randomness. However, that notion of randomness requires clarification. The mathematical definition of EH does not make explicit appeal to randomness; nor does the usual way of presenting EH involve a specification of the notion of randomness that is supposed to underlie the hierarchy. In this paper we argue that EH is best understood as a hierarchy of random behaviour if randomness is explicated in terms of unpredictability. We then show that, contrary to common wisdom, EH is useful in characterising the behaviour of Hamiltonian dynamical systems. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the desires that play a role at the palliative stage and relate them to various approaches to patient autonomy. What attitude can physicians and other caregivers take to the desires of patients at the palliative stage? We examine this question by introducing five physicians who are consulted by Jackie, an imaginary patient with metastatic lung carcinoma. By combining the models of the physician-patient relationship developed by Emanuel and Emanuel (1992) and the Hellenistic approaches to desires (...) analyzed by Nussbaum (1994), five different ways of dealing with desires in the context of palliative care are sketched. The story of Jackie shows that desires are to a certain extent responsive to reasoning. In the palliative process, that can be a reason to devote attention to the desires of patients and caregivers and to determine which desires need to be fulfilled, which are less important, and how they are linked to emotions the patient has. (shrink)

Discussions about the impacts of marketing systems on society have been strongly encouraged in the field of macromarketing. However, these studies have focused on analyzing human and organizational actors, neglecting, to a large extent, the impacts of practices of marketing systems on other non-human stakeholders, such as those associated with or materialized in the form of a product. This article debates the material basis of the product of animal origin based on the concepts of justice, stakeholder theory, and externalities. An (...) argument was developed attributing the status of a moral agent to the animals used to make products and focusing on this debate, arguing for the establishment of a consumption pattern that morally considers animals. This was made feasible by new alternatives for food performances exemplified by the conduct of vegetarian and vegan consumers. (shrink)

Health behaviours of preschool children have a considerable impact on the shaping of habits later on in their lives. Parents’ and guardians’ role is to develop positive health patterns and represent exemplary models to be followed by children. The aim of the paper is to present the use of correspondence analysis for the assessment of the relationship between eating habits of parents and children, as well as for the determination of the most common situations in which preschool children consume fast-food (...) products and to find the relationship between the frequency of fast-food consumption and BMI values in preschool children. The tests were carried out with the use of an own survey carried out in kindergartens in Białystok among parents dropping off and picking up children. 149 correctly filled questionnaires were obtained. The statistical analysis employs the chi-squared test and correspondence analysis. Among the tested children, a statistically significant relationship between body weight and sex was obtained. In the group of children and parents consuming fast-foods, a statistically significant relationship between the frequency of children’s and parents’ consumption of the products in question was noticed. A statistically significant relationship between the age of introduction of fast-food products into the child’s diet and their BMI was found. A situation that was statistically significant as far as contribution to frequent consumption of fast-food products by children, i.e. at least once a week, were children and parents shopping together. The relationship between the frequency of fast-food consumption by parents and children was presented in the form of correspondence maps, as well as the relationship between the child’s BMI and the age when the first fast-food product is served, and the relationship between the child’s BMI and the frequency of their consumption of fast-foods. Unfortunately, despite the high awareness among parents of the harmful effects of fast-food products and the widespread health education programmes, a number of the children in kindergartens were overweight or even obese. For this reason, the quality of the educational programmes in kindergartens, as well as in various media outlets, needs to be improved, with emphasis put on their effectiveness, in order to minimise the problem of the occurrence of overweight and obesity in children. It is also important for parents rearing children to pay special attention not only to their children’s menus, but also to foods consumed in the presence of children. (shrink)

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of enchanted fantasy, (...) and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Farmers’ markets (FMs) represent a crucial player in urban food systems, being the interconnection of local agricultural production and consumption, and serving as spaces for both economic exchange and community building. Despite their transformative potential, there is a scarcity of research that comprehensively investigates the dynamics of FMs network structure and the influence of the actors shaping FMs. The present article delves into the network of relationships within FMs in the Italian city of Bologna. This study adopts the Social (...) Network Analysis (SNA) methodology applied with the Net-Map tool. The research objectives are to visualise the underlying network structure, map the dynamics, and identify the key actors who play pivotal roles in Bologna’s FMs and their level of influence. The research carried out interviews with ten FMs stakeholders, revealing the network of relationships between 54 actors, divided into three categories—civil society, food economy and public administration. Actors were linked by a total of 428 relationships across three types of networks: support, economic, and hindering. Findings indicate a strong support network structure characterised by varying degrees of centrality among different actors. Farmers emerge as a central node due to their pivotal role in providing fresh, local produce. Additionally, local institutions contribute significantly to FMs resilience and growth. Our research demonstrates the importance of recognising the embeddedness of FMs within the local context. By understanding the network structure and influential actors in FMs, policymakers can devise more effective policies for promoting local agriculture, and enhancing the sustainability of urban–rural exchanges. In conclusion, the present study offers valuable insights into the network dynamics of FMs, highlighting their crucial role in the sustainable development of urban and local food systems. (shrink)

Considering the recent epigenetic studies on the transgenerational transmission of trauma, this article aims to 1) explore its ethical implications for the concept and nature of moral damage, and 2) offer normative suggestions on collective responsibilities both synchronic and diachronic. To do so, I first address recent epigenetic studies’ showing the crystallization of emotional information through generations, and second, defend that a unified approach to the concept of ghost damage may be useful to categorize this phenomenon, facilitate future research on (...) this type of moral damage, and recognize its importance in the identification of hermeneutical injustice. Finally, I suggest that granting a right to transgenerational information may help avoid the perpetuation of inherited damage that jeopardize mental and physical health in the offspring. (shrink)

This paper develops and tests a new conceptual model incorporating the indirect impact of two ethical ideologies (idealism and relativism) on Chinese consumers’ ethical judgments under four ethically problematic consumption situations (active benefit, passive benefit, deceptive practice, and no/indirect harm) through two cultural values (integration and moral discipline). Data from a large-scale online consumer survey in five major Chinese cities (_N_ = 1046) support most hypotheses. The findings are consistent with the postulated global impact of ethical ideology on forming (...) an individual’s beliefs and values and highlight the importance of a thorough understanding of the significant determinants of consumer ethics to promote ethically responsible consumption behaviors. This study also uses an emic approach to conceptualize and measure Chinese cultural values by using cultural constructs and measures that are designed explicitly in the Chinese context. (shrink)

This essay argues that the practical reason approach to the study of social conventions (and social normativity more generally) fails to adequately account for the fluency of social action in environments that we experience as familiar. The practical reason approach, articulated most recently in Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions: From Language to Law (2009) does help us, though not wholly adequately, to understand how we tend to react to, and experience, unfamiliar situations or unfamiliar behaviors, that is, those situations in which (...) a certain practice becomes problematic or is problematized, or where we are obliged to, or moved to, justify or deliberate. The reason why the practical reason approach is not wholly adequate when it comes to understanding unfamiliar situations or unfamiliar behaviors is that it tends to subsume the unfamiliar under the familiar, that is, it tends to negatively evaluate anything that is deemed to be not in accordance with the rules and reasons already familiar to the observer. This excludes the possibility of the observer having to transform himself or herself, and thus change what is familiar to him or her. (shrink)

BackgroundThe evaluation of pain remains one of the most difficult challenges that healthcare practitioners face. Chronic pain appears to affect more than 35% of the population in the West, and indeed, pain is the most common reason patients seek medical care. Despite its ubiquity, studies in the last decades reveal that many patients feel their pain is dismissed by healthcare practitioners and that, as a result, they are denied proper medical care. Buchman, Ho, and Goldberg (J Bioethic Inq 14:31-42, 2017) (...) point to this phenomenon as a form of “epistemic injustice”: an unfair and harmful downgrading of credibility affecting some individuals and groups, which prevents them from receiving appropriate and beneficial medical care.MethodsBy exploring the existing literature on this downgrading of patients’ credibility written by healthcare professionals and scholars in medical humanities, I identify and examine the reasons patients are often not believed about their pain and why healthcare is too-often unhelpful or hurtful to people presenting with chronic pain. I also explore to what extent it is possible to forge an alternative epistemological model.ResultsI suggest that most of the causes of this downgrading of patient’s credibility result from either the difficulty in communicating pain or the widespread belief that pathology is always the result of objective tissue damage. I examine whether pain has to be effectively communicated and have an objective cause in order for it to be deemed credible. In the end, I argue that in the case of pain, both communication and objectivity are highly problematic.ConclusionsI conclude by suggesting that, although alternative epistemological models might be impossible to build, believing patients has both moral and clinical benefits, and this warrants further research. (shrink)

In the Eurotransplant region transplantable kidneys from cadaveric donors are allocated according to the Wujciak-Opelz algorithm. This paper shows that the algorithm as it stands fulfils certain normative standards of a more formal nature while violating others. In view of these insights, it is explored how the algorithm could perhaps be improved. Even if issues of substantial rather than formal adequacy need to be addressed separately, analyses as presented in this paper can prepare the ground for a discussion of substantive (...) normative issues. In any event, axiomatic accounts can tell us something about what we are in fact doing when using a procedure like the Wujciak-Opelz algorithm. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse the recent rapid growth of ‘binge’ drinking in the UK. This means the rapid consumption of large amounts of alcohol, especially by young people, leading to serious anti-social and criminal behaviour in urban centres. British soccer fans have often exhibited this kind of behaviour abroad, but it has become widespread amongst young people within Britain itself. Vomiting, collapsing in the street, shouting and chanting loudly, intimidating passers-by and fighting are now regular night-time features of (...) many British towns and cities. A particularly disturbing aspect is the huge rise in drunken and anti-social behaviour amongst young females. Increasingly, policy makers in the West are concerned about how not just to regulate but to alter social behaviour. Smoking and obesity are obvious examples, and in the UK ‘binge’ drinking has become a focus of acute policy concern. We show how a simple agent based model approach, combined with a limited amount of easily acquired information, can provide useful insights for policy makers in the context of behavioural regulation. We show that the hypothesis that the rise in binge drinking is a fashion-related phenomenon, with imitative behaviour spreading across social networks, is sufficient to account for the empirically observed patterns of binge drinking behaviour. The results show that a small world network, rather than a scale-free or random one, offers the best description of the data. (shrink)