In this article, we argue that dominant norms of demographic data are insufficient for accounting for the complexities that characterize many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer lives. Here, we draw from the responses of 178 people who identified as non-heterosexual or non-cisgender to demographic questions we developed regarding gender and sexual orientation. Demographic data commonly imagines identity as fixed, singular, and discrete. However, our findings suggest that, for LGBTQ people, gender and sexual identities are often multiple and in flux. (...) An overwhelming majority of our respondents reported shifting in their understandings of their sexual identities over time. In addition, for many of our respondents, gender identity was made up of overlapping factors, including the relationship between gender and transgender identities. These findings challenge researchers to reconsider how identity is understood as and through data. Drawing from critical data studies, feminist and queer digital media studies, and social justice initiatives like Data for Black Lives, we call for a reimagining of identity-based data as “queer data” or “data for queer lives.” We offer also recommendations for researchers to develop more inclusive survey questions. At the same time, we address the ways that queer perspectives destabilize the underlying logics of data by resisting classification and “capture.” For marginalized people, the stakes of this work extend beyond academia, especially in the era of algorithms and big data when the issue of who is or is not “counted” profoundly affects visibility, access, and power in the digital realm. (shrink)

Herbert Spencer was regarded by the Victorians as the foremost philosopher of the age, the prophet of evolution at a time when the idea had gripped the popular imagination. Until recently Spencer's posthumous reputation rested almost excusively on his social and political thought, which has itself frequently been subject to serious misrepresentation. But historians of ideas now recognise that an acquaintance with Spencer's thought is essential for the proper understanding of many aspects of Victorian intellectual life, and (...) the present selection is designed to answer this need. It provides a cross-section of Spencer's works from his more popular and approachable essays to a number of the volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy itself. (shrink)

Randomized controlled trial trial designs exist on an explanatory-pragmatic spectrum, depending on the degree to which a study aims to address a question of efficacy or effectiveness. As conceptualized by Schwartz and Lellouch in 1967, an explanatory approach to trial design emphasizes hypothesis testing about the mechanisms of action of treatments under ideal conditions, whereas a pragmatic approach emphasizes testing effectiveness of two or more available treatments in real-world conditions. Interest in, and the number of, pragmatic trials has grown substantially (...) in recent years, with increased recognition by funders and stakeholders worldwide of the need for credible evidence to inform clinical decision-making. This increase has been accompanied by the onset of learning healthcare systems, as well as an increasing focus on patient-oriented research. However, pragmatic trials have ethical challenges that have not yet been identified or adequately characterized. The present study aims to explore the views of key stakeholders with respect to ethical issues raised by the design and conduct of pragmatic trials. It is embedded within a large, four-year project that seeks to develop guidance for the ethical design and conduct of pragmatic trials. As a first step, this study will address important gaps in the current empirical literature with respect to identifying a comprehensive range of ethical issues arising from the design and conduct of pragmatic trials. By opening up a broad range of topics for consideration within our parallel ethical analysis, we will extend the current debate, which has largely emphasized issues of consent, to the range of ethical considerations that may flow from specific design choices. Semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, across multiple jurisdictions, identified based on their known experience and/or expertise with pragmatic trials. We expect that the study outputs will be of interest to a wide range of knowledge users including trialists, ethicists, research ethics committees, journal editors, regulators, healthcare policymakers, research funders and patient groups. All publications will adhere to the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications. (shrink)

In a reflective and richly entertaining piece from 1979, Doug Hofstadter playfully imagined a conversation between ‘Achilles’ and an anthill (the eponymous ‘Aunt Hillary’), in which he famously explored many ideas and themes related to cognition and consciousness. For Hofstadter, the anthill is able to carry on a conversation because the ants that compose it play roughly the same role that neurons play in human languaging; unfortunately, Hofstadter’s work is notably short on detail suggesting how this magic might be achieved1. (...) Conversely in this paper - finally reifying Hofstadter’s imagination - we demonstrate how populations of simple ant-like creatures can be organised to solve complex problems; problems that involve the use of forward planning and strategy. Specifically we will demonstrate that populations of such creatures can be configured to play a strategically strong - though tactically weak - game of HeX (a complex strategic game).We subsequently demonstrate how tactical play can be improved by introducing a form of forward planning instantiated via multiple populations of agents; a technique that can be compared to the dynamics of interacting populations of social insects via the concept of meta-population. In this way although, pace Hofstadter, we do not establish that a meta-population of ants could actually hold a conversation with Achilles, we do successfully introduce Aunt Hillary to the complex, seductive charms of HeX. (shrink)

The ideas upon which public education was founded in the last half of the nineteenth century were wrong. And despite their continued dominance in educational thinking for a century and a half, these ideas are no more right today. So argues one of the most original and highly regarded educational theorists of our time in 'Getting It Wrong from the Beginning'. Kieran Egan explains how we have come to take mistaken concepts about education for granted and why this dooms our (...) attempts at educational reform. (shrink)

: A virtually unknown philosopher of the twentieth century, Spencer Heath was nevertheless well-known as a pioneer in the early development of commercial aviation. He retired from business in 1931 to devote the last thirty years of his life to his long-time interest in the philosophy of science and human social organization. He developed ….

Zifcak, Spencer Nobody at this conference should disagree that freedom of expression is a political principle of fundamental value.

Recent studies suggest that vertebrate genetic material ingested by invertebrates (iDNA) can be used to investigate vertebrate ecology. Given the ubiquity of invertebrates that feed on vertebrates across the globe, iDNA might qualify as a very powerful tool for 21st century population and conservation biologists. Here, we identify some invertebrate characteristics that will likely influence iDNA retrieval and elaborate on the potential uses of invertebrate‐derived information. We hypothesize that beyond inventorying local faunal diversity, iDNA should allow for more profound insights (...) into wildlife population density, size, mortality, and infectious agents. Based on the similarities of iDNA with other low‐quality sources of DNA, a general technical framework for iDNA analyses is proposed. As it is likely that no such thing as a single ideal iDNA sampler exists, forthcoming research efforts should aim at cataloguing invertebrate properties relevant to iDNA retrieval so as to guide future usage of the invertebrate tool box. (shrink)

Richard Spencer-Smith; VII*—Reductionism and Emergent Properties, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 113–130, https.

From large cardinals we obtain the consistency of the existence of a singular cardinal κ of cofinality ω at which the Singular Cardinals Hypothesis fails, there is a bad scale at κ and κ ++ has the tree property. In particular this model has no special κ +-trees.

The high price of drugs is receiving due consideration from ethicists, policymakers, and legislators. However, much of this attention has focused on the difference between the cost of drug development and company profits and the possible laws and regulations that could limit a drug’s price once it reaches market. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the ethical implications of high drug prices for the research subjects whose bodies were essential to the drug’s development. Indeed, the future price of (...) a drug is routinely ignored and treated as unknowable during the ethical evaluation of the clinical trials that support its development. In this paper, I will argue that ignoring the future price of a drug during the research process is in tension with all three of the major principles of research ethics: it fails to show respect for the research participants, undermines the quality of risk/benefit judgements made by ethical review committees, and makes it impossible to judge future patient access and assess justice. (shrink)

It is argued that Adam Smith criticizes David Hume's account of the origin of and continuing adherence to the rule of law for being not sufficiently Humean. Hume explained that adherence to the rule of law originated in the self-interest to restrain self-interest. According to Smith, Hume does not pay enough attention to the passions of resentment and admiration, which have their source in the imagination. Smith's offers a more naturalistic and evolutionary account of the psychological pre-conditions of the establishment (...) and morality of justice than Hume had. Yet, Smith's account also makes room for a thin conception of Lockean natural right to property, while rejecting the contractualist and rationalistic elements in Locke. It emerges that Smith severs the intimate connection that Hobbes and Hume made between justice and property. (shrink)

This volume consists of a collection of articles published by Spencer in leading Victorian periodicals, such as The Westminster Review, The Fortnightly Review and Mind. The wide range of subjects explored includes science, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, psychology and politics.

Simply by formulating a question about the nature of ancient Greek poetry or music, any modern English speaker is already risking anachronism. In recent years especially, scholars have reminded one another that the words ‘music’ and ‘poetry’ denote concepts with no easy counterpart in Greek. μουσική in its broadest sense evokes not only innumerable kinds of structured movement and sound but also the political, psychological and cosmic order of which song, verse and dance are supposed to be perceptible manifestations. Likewise, (...) ποίησις and the ποιητικὴ τέχνη can encompass all kinds of ‘making’, from the assembly of a table to the construction of a rhetorical argument. Of course, there were specifically artistic usages of these terms—according to Plato, ‘musical and metrical production’ was the default meaning of ποίησις in everyday speech. But even in discussions which restrict themselves to the sphere of human art, we find nothing like the neat compartmentalization of harmonized rhythmic melody on the one hand, and stylized verbal composition on the other, which is often casually implied or expressly formulated in modern comparisons of ‘music’ with ‘poetry’. For many ancient theorists the City Dionysia, a dithyrambic festival and a recitation of Homer all featured different versions of one and the same form of composition, a μουσική or ποιητική to which λόγοι, γράμματα and συλλαβαί were just as essential as ἁρμονία, φθόγγοι, ῥυθμός and χρόνοι. (shrink)

In their essay, ‘When Clinical Trials Compete: Prioritizing Study Recruitment’, Gelinas et al describe a collective action problem that can arise if multiple trials at a single institution are all trying to recruit participants from the same patient population. Each trial may be addressing an important question, and each will need a certain number of participants to provide an informative answer. But because these trials are all recruiting from the same population, it is possible that there will not be enough (...) participants to go around. It may turn out, then, that none successfully achieves its target sample size and all end up being uninformative or less informative than hoped. As Gelinas et al observe, these kinds of uninformative or less-informative trials are ethically problematic, since they fail to fully redeem participant risks and burdens with adequate gains in generalisable knowledge. Such trials also represent wasteful or inefficient research activities, since each necessarily has a human and material cost, but then fails to offset these costs by providing a definitive answer to the research …. (shrink)

The concordance of results that are “robust” across multiple scientific modalities is widely considered to play a critical role in the epistemology of science. But what should we make of those cases where such multimodal evidence is discordant? Jacob Stegenga has recently argued that robustness is “worse than useless” in these cases, suggesting that “different kinds of evidence cannot be combined in a coherent way.” In this article I respond to this critique and illustrate the critical methodological role that robustness (...) plays as an aim of scientific inquiry. (shrink)

This book explores the historical dimension of David Hume's philosophy, a feature that Spencer Wertz calls 'historical empiricism.' According to Wertz, Hume sought to understand the present in terms of the past in a way that anticipates the historical constructionism of R.G. Collingwood and Herbert Butterfield. Hume's method is to tell a story about something's origin in which ideas yield impressions. These impressions eventually yield to experience that includes history as part of its structure. Arguing that Hume worked between (...) history and philosophy, Wertz demonstrates that Hume's historical empiricism consists of four key concepts. These concepts are history, human nature, experience, and nature, all of which play a role in historical narration, taste, moral judgments, and the historiography of science. Bringing new insights to the study of Hume's work, this book will be an important resource for scholars of philosophy. (shrink)

A recent article by Galitski and Roth(1) characterizes adaptive reversion of chromosomal lac− mutations in Salmonella typhimurium LT2. Using a classical genetic approach they show that adaptive reversion, as characterized by the appearance of late revertant colonies, is an exception rather than a general phenomenon for reversion of nonsense, missense, frameshift and insertion mutations. For certain mutations, however, the number of late revertants exceeds the predicted number. These excess revertants suggest that adaptive mutability is applicable to chromosomal genes as well (...) as to genetic changes involving F plasmids and lysogenic phages. (shrink)

This is a book about what becomes of the truth when it succumbs to generational memory loss and to the fictions that intervene to cause and fill the gaps. It is a book about the impossibility of writing an autobiography when there is a prepossessing cultural and familial 'we' interfering with the 'I' and an 'I' that does not know itself as a self, except metastatically — as people and characters it has played but not actually been. A highly original (...) combination of close readings and performative autobiography, this book takes performance philosophy to an alternative next step, by having its ideas read back to it by experience, and through assorted fictions. It is a philosophical thought experiment in uncertainty whose literary, theatrical, and cinematic trappings illustrate and finally become what this uncertainty is, the thought experiment having become the life that was, that came before, and that outlives the 'I am'. (shrink)

I will discuss a variety of cases such that the subject's believing truly is somewhat of an accident, but less so than in a Gettier case. In each case, this is because her reasons are not ultimately undefeated full stop, but they are ultimately undefeated with certain qualifications. For example, the subject's reasons might be ultimately defeated considered in themselves but ultimately undefeated considered as a proper part of an inference to the best explanation that is undefeated without qualification. In (...) each section of the paper, I consider different qualifications and show how in each case we get an epistemic standing I call “coach-class knowledge”. First-class knowledge requires justifying reasons that are undefeated without qualification. Coach-class knowledge only requires qualified lack of defeat. I will use this distinction to bring debates over knowledge from falsehood and fake barns to an ecumenical resolution. In both cases, the subject enjoys coach-class rather than first-class knowledge. I will also show that the defeasible reasoning tradition can better account for graded accidental truth than safety theories. (shrink)

Society, based on contract and voluntary exchange, is evolving, but remains only partly developed. Goods and services that meet the needs of individuals, such as food, clothing, and shelter, are amply produced and distributed through the market process. However, those that meet common or community needs, while distributed through the market, are produced politically through taxation and violence. These goods attach not to individuals but to a place; to enjoy them, individuals must go to the place where they are. Land (...) owners, all unknowingly, distribute such services contractually as they rent or sell sites. Rent or price is the market value of such services, net after disservices, as they affect each site. By distributing occupancies to those who can pay the highest price, land owners’ interests align with those of society. Without this, tenure would be precarious—by force or favor of politicians. The 18th-century separation of land from state, so little studied by historians, permitted the development of modern property in land. This change is perhaps “the greatest single step in the evolution of Society the world has ever seen.” When land owners realize that they market community services, they will organize to produce and administer them as well, and society will be made whole. (shrink)

The Study of Sociology, by English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist, Herbert Spencer, was originally published in 1873. Spencer was known for his contributions to evolutionary theory and for applying it outside of biology, to the fields of philosophy, psychology, and within sociology. In particular, this work is a survey of the foundations of sociology, by one of its founders. Within which he applies the idea of natural selection to the group survival and institutional structures.