Ensemble perception—the encoding of objects by their group properties—is known to be resistant to outlier noise. However, this resistance is somewhat paradoxical: how can the visual system determine which stimuli are outliers without already having derived statistical properties of the ensemble? A simple solution would be that ensemble perception is not a simple, one-step process; instead, outliers are detected through iterative computations that identify items with high deviance from the mean and reduce their weight in the representation over time. Here (...) we tested this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, we found evidence that outliers are discounted from mean orientation judgments, extending previous results from ensemble face perception. In Experiment 2, we tested the timing of outlier rejection by having participants perform speeded judgments of sets with or without outliers. We observed significant increases in reaction time (RT) when outliers were present, but a decrease compared to no-outlier sets of matched range suggesting that range alone did not drive RTs. In Experiment 3 we tested the timing by which outlier noise reduces over time. We presented sets for variable exposure durations and found that noise decreases linearly over time. Altogether these results suggest that ensemble representations are optimized through iterative computations aimed at reducing noise. The finding that ensemble perception is an iterative process provides a useful framework for understanding contextual effects on ensemble perception. (shrink)

Orphaned in her early teens and shuttled between abusive foster homes, Tatiana Forero Puerta found herself in her early twenties in New York City, haunted by the memories of her tumultuous youth and suicidal. Following emergency hospitalization, she was advised by her doctor to take up yoga. Over days, weeks, months, and then years, she embraced yoga's honesty and discipline--delving more deeply into its wisdom, literature, and, vitally, its practice. In so doing, yoga healed her scars, opened her soul (...) to forgiveness, and allowed her to reconcile herself with a past that had threatened to snuff out her life. Yoga for the Wounded Heart is an unsparingly honest memoir of a childhood lost and of courage and resilience gained. It's also an exploration of the fundamentals of yoga: as a technology that focuses our awareness; as a practical application of mindfulness and attention to what is really going on in our lives and bodies; and as a vehicle for the body to guide the mind and heart toward healing. (shrink)

The new industrial paradigm Industry 4.0, or smart industry, is at the core of contemporary debates. The public debate on Industry 4.0 typically offers two main perspectives: the technological one and the one about industrial policies. On the contrary, the discussion on the social and organizational effects of the new paradigm is still underdeveloped. The article specifically examines this aspect, and analyzes the change that workers are subject to, along with the work organization, smart digital factories. The study originates from (...) an empirical survey conducted by the author together with a multidisciplinary research group between 2014 and 2015 in some of the largest Italian factories.In particular, the article analyzes the links between digital society, digital culture and Industry 4.0, focusing on the issue of people’s participation in the process of change, within a specific case study from the railway sector.Many elements of the Industry 4.0 paradigm are widespread outside the factory, in society; they are not only technological elements but also cultural. One of the key aspects of the analysis is the question of participation and the “person-centered” culture. The subject is addressed critically by presenting both the RE-personalization processes and the new processes of DE personalization caused by digital automation. (shrink)

Modern individuals grapple with a paradoxical reality: their lives are characterized by a strong feeling of independence as well as by an intense social interconnection. This article argues that despite an increased discussion of dependence in contemporary social and political philosophy, current ways of theorizing it have disregarded the concrete form that our social dependence takes under capitalist relations. I maintain that without integrating the critique of political economy, we risk offering a defense of dependence that remains unaware of important (...) axes of domination. In particular, I suggest recuperating Marx’s notion of objective dependence, which has been insufficiently discussed in the existing literature. Finally, drawing on recent developments in critical theory, I put forward a normative critique of dependence. I contend that the issue with modern societies is that they promote alienated and reified relations of dependence, transforming the basis of our social freedom into an objective form of domination. -/- . (shrink)

Prior literature has demonstrated that religiosity is associated with a reduced acceptance of unethical business practices and financial reporting irregularities. On this premise, we examine whether religiosity, conceptualized as the degree of adherence to religious norms in the geographical area where a firm’s headquarters is located, has an impact on audit firms’ pricing decisions in the US. We measure the intensity of religiosity by the number of adherents relative to the total population in a county and demonstrate that increased religious (...) adherence operates as an institutionalized monitoring mechanism that decreases audit risk and audit costs, which is, in turn, reflected in reduced audit pricing. Additional tests suggest that the impact of religiosity on auditors’ pricing decisions is not differentiated by levels of auditor expertise but that audit fees are determined by an auditor’s relative location in a market sector and religious adherence. We conclude that religious adherence reduces the need for shareholders to bear the costs of monitoring agents, a finding which could be of importance for market participants and regulators. (shrink)

The book explores the forbidden feelings of beauty, admiration, or satisfaction before instances of terror and human pain from eighteenth-century natural disasters to twenty-first-century terrorist destruction. It explores the fascination felt by the subject witnessing major disasters directly or in a mediated fashion. Emmanouil Aretoulakis' makes the challenging proposition that there is, paradoxically, an ethics in the aesthetic appraisal of terror.

Psicanálise e necropolítica no Brasil é o fruto que Tatiana Siqueira Ribeiro foi capaz de produzir desde o solo maltratado dos últimos anos de nossa República. É certo que, desde abril de 2016 até o final de 2022, nosso país viu sua jovem democracia ser posta a perigo. Direitos adquiridos foram revogados, discursos de ódio impulsionaram identificações e laços sociais estruturados a partir disso multiplicaram-se. Esse fatos já escancaravam o risco de morte que grande parte de nossa população – (...) ainda que insistentemente chamada de minoria – corria. Tatiana encontrou sua maneira de lidar coma crueldade que saltava aos olhos daqueles que consideram todo o ser humano digno de direitos. Da dor de encontrar-se com o indizível ela fez palavras. Sorte nossa! (shrink)

In an age of disseminated fear and globalized anxiety about the accelerated rhythms of modern life, should literary studies and criticism strive for the altogether “new”? I am interested in whether the intensive search for the “new” or “next” in contemporary culture is of any importance for literary studies. I argue that too much intellectual risk is involved in persistently calling for the new in the appraisal of a literary, or other, text. The scientific and “civilized” quest for a new (...) theory to replace theories that are supposedly outdated may end up degenerating into a positivistic, market-oriented venture into the world of excessive global consumption. The original or new in literature will probably derive from a less “civilized” and rather unconscious effort—a sudden flash of imagination or creativity, for instance. Such an “uncivil” stance regarding interpretation can be fruitfully linked with a form of literary ecology. (shrink)

In his De ortu et obitu Patrum, Isidore of Seville elaborates a collection of stories that engage the reader in living the experiences of the characters presented and encourage him to identify with them and imitate them. Following the ways of the biblical heroes, the Sevillian comes to know the One who has called all of them into existence as beings created for coexistence and pro-existence, i.e. to live with and for others. Isidore does not write a history of sinners, (...) but of saints, who become friends of God by building a community with other humans and filling the world with his praise. According to him, both his heroes and his readers are relational beings, open to God and to other creatures, in need of them to achieve their fullness. (shrink)

In this paper, we attempt to de-naturalize the prevailing economistic imaginary of work that Max Weber and later commentators described as ‘protestant work ethic,’ epitomized in the figure of homo economicus. We do so by contrasting it with the imaginary of skillful work that can be found in vignettes about artisans in the Zhuangzi. We argue that there are interesting contrasts between these views concerning 1) direct goal achievement vs. indirect goal achievement through the cultivation of skills; 2) the hierarchization (...) of mental versus physical dimensions of work; 3) the crafting of non-dominating relationships between the working subject, their object, and their instruments of work, which leads to questions about the sustainability of these relationships; and 4) the relationship between work and well-being, which the Daoist texts conceptualize in a much more holistic, but also more presentist way than Western economic rationality. We conclude by pointing out the relevance of these differences for several contemporary debates about work, by denaturalizing a dominant imaginary of work, by distinguishing different forms of work, by suggesting a different relation between work and nature, and by raising questions about the desirability of the automation of work. (shrink)

The Russian people are struggling to learn how to create a democracy and a market economy. This paper reviews the results of reform efforts to date and what the Russian people are learning as indicated by changes in answers to public opinion surveys. As a way to continue the social learning process in Russia we suggest the widespread use of process improvement methods in organizations. This paper describes some Russian experiences in using process improvement methods and proposes a strategy for (...) spreading the use of these methods through universities and then through businesses and government agencies. As people use process improvement methods, they gain confidence in their ability to improve the functioning of organizations and society. (shrink)

Normative case studies are designed to offer richly detailed “worlds of possibility” that invite complex reflection and discussion about authentic ethical dilemmas in education. In this essay, Tatiana Geron and Meira Levinson argue that authors' choices of what details to include in a case are themselves ethical decisions that require significant ethical responsibility. Case details can shape which avenues of ethical inquiry are open to readers, whether and how institutional and structural conditions get considered, whose perspectives are included and (...) legitimized, and what political issues are understood as “open” or “closed.” At its best, case “world-building” can help readers understand the full complexity of ethical decision-making in education. However, for this to occur, case authors must seek out expert and dissenting perspectives, field test the case with diverse audiences, and remain reflexive about their own perspectives and how these shape their world-building decisions. (shrink)

The Hyperuniverse Program is a new approach to set-theoretic truth which is based on justifiable principles and leads to the resolution of many questions independent from ZFC. The purpose of this paper is to present this program, to illustrate its mathematical content and implications, and to discuss its philosophical assumptions.

This article examines public communication about atomic energy as an important vector in the political, institutional, and technological transformations of Ukraine's nuclear industry since the breakup of the USSR. It explores the ongoing effort to make the atom more domestic, familiar, human, and accessible against the not-so-distant backdrop of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. The central focus of this article is the analysis of children's drawings of nuclear power stations produced for art contests organized by local nuclear information centers. (...) These contests and other activities of the centers have contributed to the increased visibility of nuclear power in Ukraine. The drawings reveal the inscription of the atom into complex representations about the Ukrainian nation, its past, present, traditions, and modernity. The analysis of these drawings as well as government and nuclear power station (NPP) documents, press articles, and interviews indicates that the notion of the “domestication” of the atom is a particularly appropriate way to describe the banalization of nuclear technologies in Ukraine. (shrink)

This paper argues that the impact of individual higher education institutions’ strategies on system diversity should be explored. By looking at how universities respond strategically to governmental policies as well as to the actions of other (competing) institutions, our understanding of determinants of diversity can be enriched. A conceptual framework focusing on institutional positioning is explained using the dimensions deliberateness of organizational actions versus environmental influence, on the one hand, and differentiation versus compliance, on the other. We posit institutional positioning (...) as the mechanism through which organizational and environmental levels are linked. Our model features multiple dimensions and relations reflecting how higher education institutions locate themselves in specific niches, i.e. positions where they are able to gather the necessary resources for their core activities. The implications for research on diversity and for policymaking are discussed. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview and a qualitative analysis of such syntactic characteristics as length and structure of sentences and noun phrases. The analysis is viewed in the broader context of genre characteristics of court forms, their role within legal proceedings, and their function for eliciting narratives from court users. The findings show that while the elicitation strategies are not always coherently aligned with the guidance sections, the guidance itself condenses legal and (...) procedural information into overly complex and verbose syntactic constructions. Comprehensibility barriers are thus created through breaks in information flow, ambiguous syntactic constructions, missing information and misalignment between questions and guidance. Such comprehension challenges have a negative impact on the potential of court users to effectively engage with legal proceedings. (shrink)

:This article reexamines the “prostitution objection” to paid surrogacy, and argues that rebuttals to this objection fail to focus on surrogates as embodied persons. This failure is based on the false distinction between “selling one’s reproductive services” and “selling one’s body.” To ground the analysis of humans as embodied persons, this article uses Kant’s late ethical theory, which develops the conceptual framework for understanding human beings as embodied selves. Literature on surrogacy commonly emphasizes that all Kantian duties heed to the (...) categorical prohibition to treat persons as mere means. What this literature leaves out is that this imperative commands us more specifically to engage ourselves and others as embodied persons. This article aims to relate this point to a specific issue in assisted reproduction. It argues that a Kantian account of human beings as embodied persons prohibits paid surrogacy on exactly the same grounds as it prohibits prostitution. (shrink)

In the paper the joint Logic of Proofs and Provability is presented that incorporates both the modality □ for provability 287–304) and the proof operator tF representing the proof predicate “t is a proof of F” . The obtained system naturally includes both the modal logic of provability GL and Artemov's Logic of Proofs . The presence of the modality □ requires two new operations on proofs that together with operations of allow to realize all the invariant operations on proofs (...) admitting description in the modal propositional language. Logic is proved to be decidable and complete with the intended provability semantics. (shrink)

The authors of the article consider the main directions of the development of choral culture of the twentieth century in the context of domestic and regional socio-cultural processes through the prism of the legacy of the multifaceted creative personality of A. S. Anokhin, as well as through the analysis of the biography and creative path of the composer, based on his diaries and memoirs; presenting his views on the historical events of that time from the point of view of the (...) musician and a teacher. The figure of Afanasy Stepanovich Anokhin is one of the key figures in the musical education and enlightenment of the Altai Territory in the XX century, about his creative and educational activities. The novelty of the research lies in the reconstruction of the integral creative image of the composer in the context of the formation of musical culture in the Soviet period in the Altai Territory. In this work, for the first time, a complete list of the composer's published works is published. A. S. Anokhin's main compositional legacy is connected with mass songwriting, one of the most popular genres of the Soviet era. The article also examines the development of musical and choral culture in the Altai Territory from amateur groups to professional performance and the development of musical education throughout the twentieth century, as well as raises issues of preservation and reclamation of regional cultural heritage. (shrink)

Decision making in noisy and changing environments requires a fine balance between exploiting knowledge about good courses of action and exploring the environment in order to improve upon this knowledge. We present an experiment on a restless bandit task in which participants made repeated choices between options for which the average rewards changed over time. Comparing a number of computational models of participants’ behavior in this task, we find evidence that a substantial number of them balanced exploration and exploitation by (...) considering the probability that an option offers the maximum reward out of all the available options. (shrink)

Introduction. In the structure of the population of Russia, the proportion of older people is increasing, but the duration of the economically active working life of this age category is less than in some European countries. Many elderly Russians having an active life position want and can work. Most of them have a high level of professional education and qualifications, experience, and yet many are not in demand on the labor market, because they do not have enough digital skills. The (...) purpose of this article is to study the situation with employing elderly citizens, identify factors that determine successful mastering information and digital technologies on the bases of the results of retraining and advanced training. Methods. The authors of the article analyze the regulatory legal acts of the Russian Federation and the Russian Federation’s constituent entities (national programs and projects), study the content of the government bodies’ websites, including public employment departments, educational organizations, statistical data are used to assess the state of senior citizens’ employment and education, the authors carry out an empirical study with a survey. Scientific novelty of the study. The authors identify factors that affect the elderly citizens’ employment in industries where digital technologies are actively introduced; point out the factors that positively impact successful elderly citizens’ education. It has been proved that in order to obtain a positive learning outcome, not only the legal and organizational conditions created by the state are required, but also the presence of an educational strategy among the elderly people themselves, an element of which is the development of information and digital technologies. The results of the study make it possible to realize the main problems that hinder employment and training, as well as to predict some trends regarding the position of older people in the new realities of the digital economy. (shrink)

Este artículo explora la problemática del cuerpo desde una perspectiva de género. Primero, se estudia la evasión filosófica del cuerpo, así como su inadvertida asimilación a lo femenino. Segundo, se examina la negación capitalista del cuerpo y la posibilidad de entender la diferenciación entre las lógicas de explotación y de expropiación a través de una previa diferenciación entre cuerpos. Se propone finalmente hacer un análisis de la exclusión general del cuerpo como una exclusión particular de lo femenino y de lo (...) popular y se sugiere que el advenimiento de los cuerpos promulgado desde el movimiento feminista, especialmente en su vertiente latinoamericana, traen consigo un potencial democrático y emancipador. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the United States, constitutional and statutory law reinforce the right of all children to receive an education, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. In a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment and law enforcement, however, partnerships among school districts, local law enforcement, and the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security subject undocumented and unaccompanied minor students to indefensible levels of risk for detention and deportation. We identify three stances that U.S. schools may take in the face of a (...) potential ‘school-to-deportation pipeline.’ Schools that engage in intentional collaboration actively increase detention and deportation by referring students to immigration officials for criminal, non-criminal, and even non-disciplinary activity. Schools that engage in predictable complicity may not intend to subject their undocumented and unaccompanied minor students to detention or deportation, but still put students at risk by involving police in school policies. We argue that U.S. schools should instead engage in proactive protection of immigrant students and families, including actively resisting federal policies when necessary. (shrink)

Conflicts regarding family and workplace obligations often lead to frustration, dissatisfaction and lower levels of happiness. Taking into account the current low fertility rates in many European countries, the subjective well-being of women seems to be a crucial factor in population growth strategy. The rather low reproduction level underlies the analysis of women’s subjective well-being in respect to their employment and maternity status in Europe. How much do the European countries differ in terms of females’ subjective well-being? Does employment protection (...) legislation explain these differences through mothers’ employment patterns? This paper shows a significant negative association between the subjective well-being of women aged 17–54 and the rigidity of labor protection regulations. The conclusion stems from a multilevel model based on the European Value Study of 2008. The results showed that the subjective well-being of working mothers is higher in countries with liberal labor legislation while it is significantly lower in countries with strict employment protection legislation. (shrink)

Above mentioned article was funded by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF).

The two-fold image as Dostoevsky’s creative principle has been repeatedly observed and described from different perspectives in accordance with different research tasks. In this article, attention will be focused on the description of the two-fold image, its structure and functions, by Dostoevsky himself within the framework of his reflection on his creative method, as part of what can be called his own theory of creativity. In 1876, Dostoevsky describes the structure of a two-fold image from three different angles on three (...) occasions over a short period of time: from the point of view of the structure as such; from the point of view of its manifestation and revelation in a work of fiction; from the point of view of its application as a working construct in a particular case for a particular person. Dostoevsky understands the two-fold image as a profound insight about the world and man, a fundamental philosophy of personality that provides the reader with clues to a personal transformation. At the same time, he always speaks about the second component of the image absolutely transparently to himself—but covertly to the reader, assuming that it is the enigmatic nature of its deep core that compels the reader to look at and listen to the implicit concept, making the image a working, transforming tool. (shrink)

Public comments criticizing the honesty and trustworthiness of Professionals in Finance (PIFs) are commonly seen as a way to motivate them towards engaging in more socially responsible business practices. However, the link between public views of this professional group, the self-views of individual group members, and their motivation to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities has not been empirically examined. In this research, we draw on Social Identity Theory (SIT) and the Behavioral Regulation Model for social evaluation (BRM) to (...) examine how the self-views of individual group members relate to perceived characteristics of their professional group, indicating Competence and Morality. In two studies (N = 123, 191) we examined whether the self-views of high-profile and general PIFs are affected by other people's perceptions of the honesty and trustworthiness of this professional group. The results offer support for our reasoning derived from SIT and the BRM. In both studies, we first demonstrate that public concerns about the group's lack of honesty and trustworthiness impact on the moral self-views of financial professionals. Subsequently, we employ an experimental design to reveal that reinforcing moral criticism leveled at the group only reduces the motivation of individual group members to engage in CSR activities, while group-level moral affirmation enhances this motivation. The results of both studies converge to demonstrate how public critique on the moral behavior of their professional group relates to the self-views and behavioral motives of PIFs. We consider the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. (shrink)