The latest Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has itself created a novel situation—bringing attention to the topic of healthcare rationing among hospitalized pediatric patients. This may be the first time that many pediatricians, nurses, parents, and public health officials have been compelled to engage in uncomfortable discussions about the allocation of medical care/resources. Simply put, finite budgets, resources, and a dwindling healthcare workforce do not permit all patients to receive unlimited medical care. Triage and bedside rationing decisions are happening (...) in a range of difficult everyday circumstances both implicitly and explicitly, but in ways not recognized by even the best ethically framed intentions. Clinicians and hospital administrators have largely been left on their own “to flatten the rationing curve” in hopes that resources never have to be explicitly rationed at their facility. Unfortunately, the downstream result is a misinformed and distrustful public (i.e. parents, guardians, and caregivers) filled with people who are already burdened with inflammatory pseudoscience narratives and deficits in health literacy. This paper aims to elevate a more thoughtful conversation about healthcare rationing by analyzing some existing ethical principles/framework developed for rationing decision making during previous emergency responses and drawing from the day-to-day clinical perspectives of a frontline pediatric acute care/hospitalist. (shrink)

Electroencephalogram plays an essential role in analysing and recognizing brain-related diseases. EEG has been increasingly used as a new type of biometrics in person identification and verification systems. These EEG-based systems are important components in applications for both police and civilian works, and both areas process a huge amount of EEG data. Storing and transmitting these huge amounts of data are significant challenges for data compression techniques. Lossy compression is used for EEG data as it provides a higher compression ratio (...) than lossless compression techniques. However, lossy compression can negatively influence the performance of EEG-based person identification and verification systems via the loss of information in the reconstructed data. To address this, we propose introducing performance measures as additional features in evaluating lossy compression techniques for EEG data. Our research explores if a common value of CR exists for different systems using datasets with lossy compression that could provide almost the same system performance with those using datasets without lossy compression. We performed experiments on EEG-based person identification and verification systems using two large EEG datasets, CHB MIT Scalp and Alcoholism, to investigate the relationship between standard lossy compression measures and our proposed system performance measures with the two lossy compression techniques, discrete wavelet transform—adaptive arithmetic coding and discrete wavelet transform—set partitioning in hierarchical trees. Our experimental results showed a common value of CR exists for different systems, specifically, 70 for person identification systems and 50 for person verification systems. (shrink)

Hoarding disorder is a psychiatric condition characterized by difficulty discarding items and accumulation of clutter. Although studies have established the negative impact of HD and compulsive hoarding behavior, fewer have examined the impact on quality of life of hoarding behavior independent of obsessive–compulsive disorder. Moreover, specific aspects of QoL such as success in work/academics or satisfaction with interpersonal relationships have not been well-investigated. In this study, we examined, in a sample of 2100 adult participants obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk, the (...) relationships between hoarding, OCD, and depression symptomatology and four QoL domains derived from a factor analysis of the Quality of Life Inventory. We performed linear regressions to examine associations between psychiatric symptomatology and QoL domains and then conducted mediation analyses to investigate the role of depressive symptomatology in the identified relationships. We found that while hoarding and obsessive–compulsive symptoms were both negatively associated with QoL, they were associated with different domains [hoarding was significantly associated, and was less strongly associated with success or enrichment. Mediation analyses confirmed the role of depression as a complete mediator of hoarding’s effect on total, environment, and family QoL, and as a partial mediator of hoarding’s effect on success and enrichment QoL. Further examination of the relationship between hoarding symptoms and QoL in those with mild, moderate, and severe depression indicated that in those with more severe depression, hoarding was associated with improved QoL, indicating a possible buffering or compensatory effect. The findings suggest a differential impact of hoarding and obsessive–compulsive symptoms on QoL and emphasize the importance of considering co-morbid depressive symptoms in designing more targeted interventions. Future studies should continue to investigate these complex relationships, given the high co-morbidity of hoarding and depression. (shrink)

Night eating syndrome is currently classified as an Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder under the Diagnostic Statistical Manual−5. This systematic review aims to consolidate the studies that describe the sociodemographic, clinical and psychological features of NES in a population of patients with eating disorders, obesity, or those undergoing bariatric surgery, and were published after the publication of the DSM-5. A further aim was to compare, where possible, NES with BED on the aforementioned variables. Lastly, we aimed to appraise the (...) quality of the studies being included in the review. We conducted a systematic search on three databases which resulted in the selection of 22 studies for the review. We included the articles that studied patients with NES and their sociodemographic, clinical and psychological features in a clinical population, through a quantitative study design. Articles were excluded if the NES patients included in the study had a comorbid psychological disorder, and/or the sample was collected from a university/non-clinical population, and/or the study design was qualitative, and/or NES features were compared with any other disorder, except BED. Our study found that no conclusions about the link between any sociodemographic feature and an NES diagnosis could be made. Further, NES patients presented with elevated ED pathology and higher occurrence of depressive symptoms than controls. Contrary to the literature suggesting that NES and Binge Eating Disorder patients often report overlapping features, questioning the validity of NES as an ED diagnosis, we found that BED can be differentiated from NES by the higher occurrence of emotional eating, body related concerns and abnormal eating episodes. The review also suggested an overlap between NES and Sleep-Related Eating Disorder. We recommend that it is essential to study NES as an independent disorder to further develop its diagnostic criteria and treatment options, thereby, increasing the quality of life of the patients suffering from this syndrome. (shrink)

Unification in description logics has been proposed as a novel inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. The inexpressive description logic EL is of particular interest in this context since, on the one hand, several large biomedical ontologies are defined using EL. On the other hand, unification in EL has been shown to be NP-complete and, thus, of considerably lower complexity than unification in other description logics of similarly restricted expressive power. However, EL allows (...) the use of the top concept, which represents the whole interpretation domain, whereas the large medical ontology SNOMED CT makes no use of this feature. Surprisingly, removing the top concept from EL makes the unification problem considerably harder. More precisely, we will show that unification in EL without the top concept is PSPACE-complete. In addition to the decision problem, we also consider the problem of actually computing EL−⊤-unifiers. (shrink)

Interactional functions of story-opening in everyday conversations across different languages have been widely examined in Conversation Analysis. However, there is a paucity in research on story-openings in institutional talk. This paper addresses this research gap by examining how story-opening contributes to advice-giving in doctoral research supervision. It draws on a data corpus of 57 storytelling sequences produced by six supervisors during 25 hours of video-recorded supervision meetings at an Australian university. The analysis shows that story-opening supports the on-going advice-giving activity (...) in two ways. First, it invokes the supervisor’s knowledge and experience, which functions to strengthen the advice under way. Second, it works toward building a joint understanding with the student, thereby serving the supervisor’s pursuit of the student’s acceptance of advice. These findings have significant implications for research on storytelling in institutional interaction, advice and supervision practices. (shrink)

AimHealthcare workers have directly provided care for COVID-19 patients, and have faced many additional sources leading to poor mental health. The study aimed to investigate the mental health problems and related factors among healthcare staff in Vietnam.MethodsA descriptive cross-sectional mixed methods study, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, was performed among 400 healthcare workers working at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases and Ninh Binh General Hospital from the first day of treatment for COVID-19 patients to May 01, 2020.ResultsThe (...) results showed that 8.0% of participants had stress, 17.5% of participants had anxiety, and 14.8% of participants had depression. Approximately 50% of participants reported that they had at least one of these symptoms. The findings illustrated that stress, anxiety, and depression were associated with the position in a hospital, health status during the COVID-19 pandemic, family members/relatives infected with COVID-19, physical and mental support from friends, family, and community, department, years of working, and the average work hours per day of healthcare workers exposed to COVID-19.ConclusionDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers who worked in the hospital providing treatment and care for COVID-19 patients dealt with mental health problems such as stress, anxiety, and depression. It is necessary to promote mental health among healthcare workers, to contribute to the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak in Vietnam. (shrink)

This anthology is based on a symposium in the series "Young Philosophy of Religion," jointly organized by the Catholic Academy in Berlin and the Research Institute for Philosophy Hanover. German text.

Food security is one of the major concerns in the Philippines. Although livestock and poultry production accounts for a significant proportion of the country’s agricultural output, smallholder households are still vulnerable to food insecurity. The current study aims to examine how livestock production and selling difficulties affect smallholder households’ food-insecure conditions. For this objective, Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was employed on a dataset of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Data in Emergencies Monitoring (DIEM) system. We found that production and (...) selling difficulties significantly adversely affect food insecurity in the Philippines. However, their effects vary according to the severity of food insecurity. In particular, production and selling difficulties affect the households’ likelihood of eating less healthy and nutritious food equally. However, the production difficulties have more negligible impacts on the possibility of skipping meals and even ambiguous impacts on the likelihood of not eating for a whole day compared to the effects of selling difficulties. Moreover, we also found that the market plays a crucial role in facilitating not only livestock trading but also livestock production (e.g., purchase of feed and medicines). Based on these findings, we suggest that the livestock market needs to be expanded and regulated to maintain the balancing prices between livestock products and products and services used for livestock production, and facilitate the product-exchanging mechanism. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

In this collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, award-winning filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha offers new challenges to Western regimes of knowledge. Bringing to her subjects an acute sense of the many meanings of the marginal, Trinh examines Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology. In one essay, taking off from ideas raised earlier by Zora Neale Hurston, Trinh considers with astonishment the (...) search by Western "experts" for the hidden values of a person or culture, a process of legitimized voyeurism that, she argues, ultimately equates psychological conflicts with depth , while inner experience is reduced to mere personal feeling. When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. Feminist struggle is heterogeneous. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to "beat the master at his own game.". (shrink)

Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and attention. But hostile forces can always game the gap between the heuristic and the ideal. (...) Second, we need to trust others, and trust makes us vulnerable. In particular, we need to trust experts whose expertise lies beyond our individual ability to vet. So we must rely on various imperfect signals and proxies, like institutional affiliation, to manage our trust. We are forced to use these imperfect and exploitable forms of reasoning, in order to cope with a cognitively overwhelming world. I present the hostile epistemology framework as a counterbalance to vice epistemology, which tends to locate responsibility for bad beliefs in the character of the believer. I draw two conclusions from my analysis. First: suppose we accept that that only communities and institutions can know about the world. This deeply social approach doesn’t solve the problem of expert identification. The individual still faces a problem: given their incomplete understanding, how should the individual pick which group to trust? Second: we might have hoped to get some kind of static picture of the right principles of reasoning — but hostile epistemology presents a different picture. We have to use risky heuristics and shortcuts, which hostile forces can game and exploit. We can respond by shifting to a different set of heuristics, but this simply shifts the location of our vulnerabilities. These new heuristics are also exploitable. There is no end to this, only a constant struggle to adapt. Limited beings in a hostile epistemic environment are locked in an unending epistemic arms race. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to ascertain the impact of data collecting awareness on perceived information security concerns and information-sharing behavior on social networking sites. Design/methodology/approach Based on communication privacy management theory, the study forecasted the relationship between information-sharing behavior and awareness of data collecting purposes, data collection tactics and perceived security risk using structural equation modeling analysis and one-way ANOVA. The sample size of 521 young social media users in Vietnam, ages 18 to 34, was made up of 26.7% men (...) and 73.3% women. When constructing the questionnaire survey method with lone source respondents, the individual’s unique awareness and experiences with using online social networks (OSNs) were taken into account. Findings The results of the investigation demonstrate a significant relationship between information-sharing and awareness of data collecting, perceptions of information security threats and behavior. Social media users have used OSN privacy settings and paid attention to the sharing restriction because they are concerned about data harvesting. Research limitations/implications This study was conducted among young Vietnamese social media users, reflecting specific characteristics prevalent in the Vietnamese environment, and hence may be invalid in other nations’ circumstances. Practical implications Social media platform providers should improve user connectivity by implementing transparent privacy policies that allow users to choose how their data are used; have clear privacy statements and specific policies governing the use of social media users’ data that respect users’ consent to use their data; and thoroughly communicate how they collect and use user data while promptly detecting any potential vulnerabilities within their systems. Originality/value The authors ascertain that the material presented in this manuscript will not infringe upon any statutory copyright and that the manuscript will not be submitted elsewhere while under Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society review. (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

This study is an attempt to construct a quantitative link for international regimes with global leadership. The country's willingness to lead in solving global issues as the first mover in the formation of an international regime is measured and characterized by analyzing their ratification behavior in multilateral conventions deposited to the United Nations which shape of the global community. For this purpose, a set of quantitative indicators, the Index of Global Leadership Willingness and the Global Support Index, was defined and (...) calculated for each country based on its actual ratification year data for 120 multilateral conventions covering global issues such as peace and security, environment, commerce, communication, intellectual property protection, human rights, and labor. By proposing a framework of global leadership analysis, the study seeks to provide an empirical testing of the transformation of global governance towards cooperation without hegemony paradigm. The paper analyses changes in the leadership willingness indices of selected country groups, such as the G3, G7/8, and G20, over the century and finds that the will to drive the international agenda of these groups of leaders is in decline. Moreover, our study provides evidence to argue that our current world is actually without consistent global leadership across domains of the world affairs. Although several countries still show visible leadership in specific policy domains, such as environment and intellectual property, neither the G7/8 nor the G20 was playing a comparable role to those performed by the G3 a hundred years ago. (shrink)

Cet article se présente comme un questionnement sur l'attitude à prendre, de la part d'un pays francophone tel que le Vietnam, « lourd » de son passé colonial, et attentif à « rattraper » le train en marche de l'humanité entière, après tant de péripéties et de retard connus durant et à cause de ses temps de guerre. Attitude à adopter envers soi-même, envers l'Autre et l'autre culture. Pour ce, il s'appuie sur les quelques notions de l'interculturel, analyse la façon (...) dont le Vietnam a su gérer ses rapports à soi et à l'Autre, d'hier à aujourd'hui, et propose une attitude à adopter pour chaque pays, dans l'espace francophone et face à la mondialisation. Ce questionnement se veut d'être une voix parmi d'autres et non la seule voix représentative du VietnamThis article’s aim is to ask questions about the attitude that should be adopted by Vietnam, a French-speaking country bearing its "heavy" colonial past. After so many events and delays caused by the war, the country is now interested in catching up with the train represented by the rest of mankind which is moving forward. The question is thus to define the attitude Vietnam could adopt towards itself, towards the Other and the other culture. Thus, this article has made use of certain notions of interculturality, analyzed the way in which Vietnam has managed relations with itself and with the Other, and proposes an attitude for each country to adopt in the French-speaking Community and in reaction to globalization. The author wishes to be a voice among others and not the only voice representing Vietnam. (shrink)

A work of contemporary Christian political thought, this volume addresses the crisis of modern democracy evident in the decline of the institutions of civil society and their theoretical justification. Drawing upon a rich store of social and political reflection found in the Catholic and Neo-Calvinist traditions, the essays mount a robust defense of the irreducible identity and value of the social institutions_family, neighborhood, church, civic association_that serve as the connective tissue of a political community.

Dans le cadre de ce travail, nous présentons une expérimentation menée auprès d’un public allophone inscrit à une formation universitaire. Ce travail a pour objectif de relever, d’une part, les spécificités dans les productions orales de ce public, et d’autre part, de démontrer l’intérêt d’un apprentissage sur corpus afin de construire un exposé structuré. Cette étude permet de s’ouvrir à d’autres perspectives didactiques en partant d’un corpus d’apprenants.

Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency. (...) Game-playing, then, illuminates a distinctive human capacity. We can take on ends temporarily for the sake of the experience of pursuing them. Game play shows that our agency is significantly more modular and more fluid than we might have thought. It also demonstrates our capacity to take on an inverted motivational structure. Sometimes we can take on an end for the sake of the activity of pursuing that end. (shrink)

Games occupy a unique and valuable place in our lives. Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be. Thus: games are the art form of agency. By working in the artistic medium of agency, games can offer a distinctive aesthetic value. They support aesthetic experiences of deciding and doing. -/- And the fact that we play games shows something remarkable about us. (...) Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency. Games turn out to be a vessel for communicating different modes of agency, for writing them down and storing them. Games create an archive of agencies. And playing games is how we familiarize ourselves with different modes of agency, which helps us develop our capacity to fluidly change our own style of agency. (shrink)

Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game-goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values (...) shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication, to the narrower quest for popularity and virality. Twitter’s gamification bears some resemblance with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these phenomena, we are instrumentalizing our ends for hedonistic reasons. We have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure. (shrink)

With growing global concerns about water scarcity and environmental sustainability, understanding the factors influencing individual water conservation behaviors is crucial. This study utilizes the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics to investigate the relationship between concerns of local issues and water conservation behaviors in a sample of 1831 residents in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. New Mexico is an arid region of which 90% faced severe drought driven by the most significant wildfire in state history and some of the driest months ever (...) recorded in 2022. The results show a positive association between the drought or water scarcity concern and the number of water conservation behaviors adopted. Likewise, the positive association between the concern about population growth and development and water conservation behaviors is also observed. However, further examination is needed due to the weak reliability of this relationship. In contrast, negative associations between concerns about water quality and water bills with water conservation behaviors are also identified. Based on these findings, the study discusses the potential of building the eco-surplus culture by improving information dissemination of water-saving methods and existing water-related issues in the local areas. (shrink)

In this note, we consider a Merton model for default risk, where the firm’s value is driven by a Brownian motion and a compound Poisson process.

Education reforms worldwide, in both developed and developing countries, address the content of education programmes and/or changes education systems. There are different paths, and different socio...

Today, many people have realized that the climate change and biodiversity loss issues lie in how and to what extent humans consume products for their lives in the Anthropocene era. Consumerism has pushed natural resource exploitation to its peak, and the depletion of resources is becoming increasingly prevalent. The beauty and personal care industry has a large market and high profits, especially in the high-income segment. However, this advantage also carries the risk of facing scrutiny, investigations, and criticism from civil (...) society organizations, environmental activists, and consumers. More than anyone else, the industry is vulnerable to the perils of unfavourable societal assessments, particularly the repercussions of consumer-led boycott actions. In this discourse, we suggest that, given the current circumstances, it is imperative for multinational beauty corporations to take a proactive role in allocating resources towards the development of sustainable agriculture practices. This entails not only advocating for the widespread adoption of environmentally conscious production methods but also dedicating efforts towards conducting research and innovation in the area of nature-friendly manufacturing techniques. Doing so will help demonstrate their commitment to the environment and actively provide convincing evidence to consumers of their social responsibility through emission reduction and biodiversity conservation activities. (shrink)

In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency – that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. (...) I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non-experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to non-experts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual’s capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise. (shrink)

The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they (...) can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early — before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let’s first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its disparate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categorizations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies. (shrink)

At the heart of the model minority myth—often associated with Asian Americans—is the concept of civility. In this groundbreaking book, Picturing Model Citizens, Thy Phu exposes the complex links between civility and citizenship, and argues that civility plays a crucial role in constructing Asian American citizenship. Featuring works by Arnold Genthe, Carl Iwasaki, Toyo Miyatake, Nick Ut, and others, Picturing Model Citizens traces the trope of civility from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Through an examination of photographs of Chinese (...) immigrants, Japanese internment camps, the Hiroshima Maidens project, napalm victims, and the SARS epidemic, Phu explores civility's unexpected appearance in images that draw on discourses of intimacy, cultivation, apology, and hygiene. She reveals how Asian American visual culture illustrates not only cultural ideas of civility, but also contests the contradictions of state-defined citizenship. (shrink)

Multiple accounts of how theories of human psychology and of image-making influenced each other in a decisive period in the history of philosophy and art.

Demokratisierungsvorhaben sind auf Konzepte angewiesen, die Demokratieideale nicht leichtfertig preisgeben und alternative Möglichkeiten nicht grundsätzlich blockieren. Dabei sollten sie an bestehende Strukturen anknüpfen und die Entscheidungsfähigkeit politischer Gremien sowie die Zurechenbarkeit von Verantwortung erhalten können. Zugleich sollten sie die Qualität und den Einfluss öffentlicher Deliberation stärken und mobilisierbares politisches Engagement richtig einschätzen, ohne vorhandene Defizite als notwendige festzuschreiben. Auf der Grundlage einer Durchsicht von Gesellschafts-, Organisations-, Steuerungs- und Demokratietheorien skizziert Björn Thies ein solches Konzept, das an Arbeiten amerikanischer, britischer und (...) deutscher Autoren anknüpft. (shrink)

Barth, K. Ludwig Feuerbach.--Löwith, K. L. Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie.--Bloch, E. Keim und Grundlinie; zu den Elf Thesen von Marx über Feuerbach.--Lorenz, R. Zum Ursprung der Religionstheorie Ludwig Feuerbachs.--Löwith, K. Vermittlung und Unmittelbarkeit bei Hegel, Marx und Feuerbach.--Glasse, J. Barth zu Feuerbach.--Barth, H.-M. Glaube als Projektion.--Sass, H.-M. Argumentationsfiguren in der Kritik an Ludwig Feuerbachs Religions- und Metaphysikkritik.--Bayer, O. Gegen Gott für den Menschen.--Kosing, A. Ludwig Feuerbachs materialistische Erkenntnistheorie.--Finger, O. Von der anthropologisch-materialistischen Religionskritik zur historisch-materialistischen Ideologieanalyse.--Rotenstreich, N. (...) Anthropologie und Sinnlichkeit.--Arvon, H. Feuerbach und die Theologie.--Schmidt, A. Feuerbachs Stellung in der Geschichte des Materialismus.--Thies, E. Philosophie und Wirklichkeit; die Hegelkritik Ludwig Feuerbachs.--Rohrmoser, G. Warum sollen wir uns für Feuerbach interessieren? (shrink)

Games: Agency as Art By Thi NguyenC.Oxford University Press, 2020. 252 pp.

We offer an account of the generic use of the term “porn”, as seen in recent usages such as “food porn” and “real estate porn”. We offer a definition adapted from earlier accounts of sexual pornography. On our account, a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with primarily for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content. We demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of generic (...) porn by using it to isolate a new type of such porn: moral outrage porn. Moral outrage porn is representations of moral outrage, engaged with primarily for the sake of the resulting gratification, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with morally outrageous content. Moral outrage porn is dangerous because it encourages the instrumentalization of one’s empirical and moral beliefs, manipulating their content for the sake of gratification. Finally, we suggest that when using porn is wrong, it is often wrong because it instrumentalizes what ought not to be instrumentalized. (shrink)

Separation of powers is one of the ideas with profound theoretical and practical significance, especially in the field of political science. The birth of the theory of separation of powers marked the transition from the barbaric use of power in authoritarian societies to the exercise of civilized power in democratic societies. Therefore, separation of powers is considered an objective necessity in democratic states, a condition to ensure the promotion of liberal values, and a criterion for assessing the existence and development (...) of the Rule of Law where people's sovereignty plays a paramount role. On the way to perfecting political thinking, the theory of separation of powers has developed into a complete system in the main philosophy of John Locke. Within the scope of the article, the author focuses on analyzing Locke's ideology of separation of powers in terms of the nature of separation of powers, the basis and some principles of power division, and the roles of the different parts of government power and the relationship between them. (shrink)