In the wake of modernity, women's sexuality was positioned in a way that created a beauty/narcissism double bind that is still with us today. My concern in this article is that the subject position of “fashion model” serves as a constant reminder of this split, which is directed at all women and weakens the generalized woman's political agency. Fashion models themselves experience harassment and humiliation as well as pleasure and desire in their work as fashion models. However, the small (...) portion of feminist work that has engaged explicitly with the fashion-model business sees it mainly as an enterprise that is alienating and hostile to women. Although I do not entirely disagree with this analysis, it neglects the meaning of beauty and what beauty does to us with regard to creativity and pleasure. I wish to explore how some of the work experience of fashion models intersects with and challenges the beauty/narcissism double bind. I suggest that rather than grounding our understanding of the subject position “fashion model” and the fashion business solely in their reinforcement of the beauty/narcissism double bind, we should pay attention to the importance of what beauty and aspects of narcissism may mean. (shrink)

The potential of ChatGPT looms large for the practice of medicine, as both boon and bane. The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in platforms such as ChatGPT raises critical ethical questions of w...

Levins and Lewontin have contributed significantly to our philosophical understanding of the structures, processes, and purposes of biological mathematical theorizing and modeling. Here I explore their separate and joint pleas to avoid making abstract and ideal scientific models ontologically independent by confusing or conflating our scientific models and the world. I differentiate two views of theorizing and modeling, orthodox and dialectical, in order to examine Levins and Lewontin’s, among others, advocacy of the latter view. I compare the positions of these (...) two views with respect to four points regarding ontological assumptions: (1) the origin of ontological assumptions, (2) the relation of such assumptions to the formal models of the same theory, (3) their use in integrating and negotiating different formal models of distinct theories, and (4) their employment in explanatory activity. Dialectical is here used in both its Hegelian–Marxist sense of opposition and tension between alternative positions and in its Platonic sense of dialogue between advocates of distinct theories. I investigate three case studies, from Levins and Lewontin as well as from a recent paper of mine, that show the relevance and power of the dialectical understanding of theorizing and modeling. (shrink)

From climate change forecasts and pandemic maps to Lego sets and Ancestry algorithms, models encompass our world and our lives. In her thought-provoking new book, Annabel Wharton begins with a definition drawn from the quantitative sciences and the philosophy of science but holds that history and critical cultural theory are essential to a fuller understanding of modeling. Considering changes in the medical body model and the architectural model, from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, Wharton demonstrates the (...) ways in which all models are historical and political.0Examining how cadavers have been described, exhibited, and visually rendered, she highlights the historical dimension of the modified body and its depictions. Analyzing the varied reworkings of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem-including by monumental commanderies of the Knights Templar, Alberti's Rucellai Tomb in Florence, Franciscans' olive wood replicas, and video game renderings-she foregrounds the political force of architectural representations. And considering black boxes-instruments whose inputs we control and whose outputs we interpret, but whose inner workings are beyond our comprehension-she surveys the threats posed by such opaque computational models, warning of the dangers that models pose when humans lose control of the means by which they are generated and understood. Engaging and wide-ranging, 'Models and World Making' conjures new ways of seeing and critically evaluating how we make and remake the world in which we live. (shrink)

Criticism of orthodox models of prejudice reduction is particularly relevant for lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, particularly when considering stage models of coming-out. If social change is to be effected regarding endemic homonegativity and heterosexism, then it is argued that a radical rethink is needed to the understandable but misinformed desire to get us to like each other more.

When Bayesian estimation is used to analyze Structural Equation Models, prior distributions need to be specified for all parameters in the model. Many popular software programs offer default prior distributions, which is helpful for novel users and makes Bayesian SEM accessible for a broad audience. However, when the sample size is small, those prior distributions are not always suitable and can lead to untrustworthy results. In this tutorial, we provide a non-technical discussion of the risks associated with the use (...) of default priors in small sample contexts. We discuss how default priors can unintentionally behave as highly informative priors when samples are small. Also, we demonstrate an online educational Shiny app, in which users can explore the impact of varying prior distributions and sample sizes on model results. We discuss how the Shiny app can be used in teaching; provide a reading list with literature on how to specify suitable prior distributions; and discuss guidelines on how to recognize behaving priors. It is our hope that this tutorial helps to spread awareness of the importance of specifying suitable priors when Bayesian SEM is used with small samples. (shrink)

What is the epistemological structure of situations where many small risks amount to a large one? Lottery and preface paradoxes and puzzles about quantum-mechanical blips threaten the idea that competent deduction is a way of extending our knowledge. Seemingly, everyday knowledge involves small risks, and competently deducing the conjunction of many such truths from them yields a conclusion too risky to constitute knowledge. But the dilemma between scepticism and abandoning MPC is false. In extreme cases, objectively improbable truths are known. (...) Safety is modal, not probabilistic, in structure, with closure and factiveness conditions. It is modelled using closeness of worlds. Safety is analogous to knowledge. It suggests an interpretation of possible worlds semantics for epistemic logic. To avoid logical omniscience, a relation of epistemic counterparthood between formulas is introduced. This supports a safety conception of knowledge and formalizes how extending knowledge by deduction depends on logical competence. (shrink)

Human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) advocates for the integration of social aspects into AI explanations. Central to the HCXAI discourse is the Social Transparency (ST) framework, which aims to make the socio-organizational context of AI systems accessible to their users. In this work, we suggest extending the ST framework to address the risks of social misattributions in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in sensitive areas like mental health. In fact LLMs, which are remarkably capable of simulating roles and personas, may lead (...) to mismatches between designers' intentions and users' perceptions of social attributes, risking to promote emotional manipulation and dangerous behaviors, cases of epistemic injustice, and unwarranted trust. To address these issues, we propose enhancing the ST framework with a fifth 'W-question' to clarify the specific social attributions assigned to LLMs by its designers and users. This addition aims to bridge the gap between LLM capabilities and user perceptions, promoting the ethically responsible development and use of LLM-based technology. (shrink)

_Critical Models_ combines into a single volume two of Adorno's most important postwar works -- _Interventions: Nine Critical Models_ and _Catchwords: Critical Models II_. Written after his return to Germany in 1949, the articles, essays, and radio talks included in this volume speak to the pressing political, cultural, and philosophical concerns of the postwar era. The pieces in _Critical Models_ reflect the intellectually provocative as well as the practical Adorno as he addresses such issues as the dangers of ideological conformity, (...) the fragility of democracy, educational reform, the influence of television and radio, and the aftermath of fascism. This new edition includes an introduction by Lydia Goehr, a renowned scholar in philosophy, aesthetic theory, and musicology. Goehr illuminates Adorno's ideas as well as the intellectual, historical, and critical contexts that shaped his postwar thinking. (shrink)

The conflict over the classic problem of philosophical anthropology, i. e., what man actually is, is not only a conflict about what – X – determines something to be human. It also requires clarification of the manner in which something is determined to be human by the X in question. There being different options for the latter, the classic anthropological conflict concerns not only definitions of being human, but also models of being human. The present paper investigates four such models: (...) the addition model, the interior model, the privation model, and the transformation model. While the first will serve as a baseline for comparison, the three other models will, in order to escape the danger of making too formal an argument, be discussed exemplarily, i. e. by focusing in each case on a certain proponent of the respective model. Those proponents will be Martin Heidegger for the interior model, Arnold Gehlen for the privation model, and Helmuth Plessner for the transformation model. (shrink)

One of the main challenges for computational legal research is drawing up innovative heuristics to derive actionable knowledge from legal documents. While a large part of the research has been so far devoted to the extraction of purely legal information, less attention has been paid to seeking out in the texts the clues of more complex entities: legally relevant facts whose detection requires to link and interpret, as a unified whole, legal information and results of empirical analyses. This paper presents (...) an ongoing research that points in this direction, trying to devise new ways to support public prosecutors in assessing the dangerousness of individuals and groups under investigation, an activity that precisely relies on the cross-sectional evaluation of legal and empirical data. A knowledge mining strategy will be outlined that lines up, into a single metaheuristic model, information extraction, network-based inference, machine learning and visual analytics. We will focus, in particular, on the integration of graph-based inference and machine learning methods used both to support classification tasks and to explore new forms of man-machine cooperation. Experiments made involving public prosecutors from the Italian Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate and using data from real investigations have not only shown the potentialities of our approach but also offered an opportunity to reflect on the role we could assign to AI when thinking about the future of legal science and practice. (shrink)

Effective human–robot teaming increasingly requires humans to work with intelligent, autonomous machines. However, novel features of intelligent autonomous systems such as social agency and incomprehensibility may influence the human’s trust in the machine. The human operator’s mental model for machine functioning is critical for trust. People may consider an intelligent machine partner as either an advanced tool or as a human-like teammate. This article reports a study that explored the role of individual differences in the mental model in (...) a simulated environment. Multiple dispositional factors that may influence the dominant mental model were assessed. These included the Robot Threat Assessment, which measures the person’s propensity to apply tool and teammate models in security contexts. Participants were paired with an intelligent robot tasked with making threat assessments in an urban setting. A transparency manipulation was used to influence the dominant mental model. For half of the participants, threat assessment was described as physics-based ; the remainder received transparency information that described psychological cues. We expected that the physics-based transparency messages would guide the participant toward treating the robot as an advanced machine, while psychological messaging would encourage perceptions of the robot as acting like a human partner. We also manipulated situational danger cues present in the simulated environment. Participants rated their trust in the robot’s decision as well as threat and anxiety, for each of 24 urban scenes. They also completed the RoTA and additional individual-difference measures. Findings showed that trust assessments reflected the degree of congruence between the robot’s decision and situational danger cues, consistent with participants acting as Bayesian decision makers. Several scales, including the RoTA, were more predictive of trust when the robot was making psychology-based decisions, implying that trust reflected individual differences in the mental model of the robot as a teammate. These findings suggest scope for designing training that uncovers and mitigates the individual’s biases toward intelligent machines. (shrink)

We discuss potential biorisks from large language models (LLMs). AI assistants based on LLMs such as ChatGPT have been shown to significantly reduce barriers to entry for actors wishing to synthesize dangerous, potentially novel pathogens and chemical weapons. The harms from deploying such bioagents could be further magnified by AI-assisted misinformation. We endorse several policy responses to these dangers, including prerelease evaluations of biomedical AIs by subject-matter experts, enhanced surveillance and lab screening procedures, restrictions on AI training data, and access (...) controls on biomedical AI. We conclude with a suggestion about future research directions in bioethics. (shrink)

Lisciandra poses a challenge for robustness analysis as applied to economic models. She argues that substituting tractability assumptions risks altering the main mathematical structure of the model, thereby preventing the possibility of meaningfully evaluating the same model under different assumptions. In such cases RA is argued to be inapplicable. However, Lisciandra is mistaken to take the goal of RA as keeping the mathematical properties of tractability assumptions intact. Instead, RA really aims to keep the modeling component while varying (...) the corresponding mathematical formulation. Thus, her argument concerning whether the associated mathematical properties of certain assumptions can be kept intact is irrelevant to the success of RA. Furthermore, we explicate and develop Lloyd’s account of “model robustness” to provide solutions to Lisciandra’s challenges. Our solutions are, namely, error analysis and independent empirical support. We conclude that although complex economic models do face potential dangers, there are solutions and robustness analysis need not be given up.. (shrink)

George Lakoff (in his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things(1987) and the paper "Cognitive semantics" (1988)) champions some radical foundational views. Strikingly, Lakoff opposes realism as a metaphysical position, favoring instead some supposedly mild form of idealism such as that recently espoused by Hilary Putnam, going under the name "internal realism." For what he takes to be connected reasons, Lakoff also rejects truth conditional model-theoretic semantics for natural language. This paper examines an argument, given by Lakoff, against realism and (...) MTS. We claim that Lakoff's argument has very little, if any, impact for linguistic semantics. (shrink)

Archaeology is currently bound to a series of metaphysical principles, one of which claims that reality is composed of a series of discrete objects. These discrete objects are fundamental metaphysical entities in archaeological science and posthumanist/new Materialist approaches and can be posited, assembled, counted, and consequently included in quantitative models (e.g. Big Data, Bayesian models) or network models (e.g. Actor-Network Theory). The work by Sørensen and Marila shows that archaeological reality is not that discrete, that some objects cannot be easily (...) identified, and that perhaps reality is not always necessarily composed of discrete objects. The aim of this article is to take Sørensen and Marila’s arguments to their ultimate logical consequences: most archaeological theory today operates under the illusion of a general metaphysics. This illusion dictates not only that all of reality is composed of discrete objects, but that since reality manifests in a certain way, there has to be a methodology that accurately represents that reality. A brief discussion on the notion of “conjecture,” as conceived in certain historical theories, is also presented. (shrink)

A fact of life for farmers, hunter-gatherers, and fishermen in the rural parts of the world are that crops fail, wild resources become scarce, and winds discourage fishing. In this article we approach subsistence risk from the perspective of "coexistence thinking," the simultaneous application of natural and supernatural causal models to explain subsistence success and failure. In southwestern Madagascar, the ecological world is characterized by extreme variability and unpredictability, and the cosmological world is characterized by anxiety about supernatural dangers. Ecological (...) and cosmological causes seem to point to different risk minimizing strategies: to avoid losses from drought, flood, or heavy winds, one should diversify activities and be flexible; but to avoid losses caused by disrespected spirits one should narrow one's range of behaviors to follow the code of taboos and offerings. We address this paradox by investigating whether southwestern Malagasy understand natural and supernatural causes as occupying separate, contradictory explanatory systems (target dependence), whether they make no categorical distinction between natural and supernatural forces and combine them within a single explanatory system (synthetic thinking), or whether they have separate natural and supernatural categories of causes that are integrated into one explanatory system so that supernatural forces drive natural forces (integrative thinking). Results from three field studies suggest that (a) informants explain why crops, prey, and market activities succeed or fail with reference to natural causal forces like rainfall and pests, (b) they explain why individual persons experience success or failure primarily with supernatural factors like God and ancestors, and (c) they understand supernatural forces as driving natural forces, so that ecology and cosmology represent distinct sets of causes within a single explanatory framework. We expect that future cross-cultural analyses may find that this form of "integrative thinking" is common in unpredictable environments and is a cognitive strategy that accompanies economic diversification. (shrink)

Leadership which lacks ethical conduct can be dangerous, destructive, and even toxic. Ethical leadership, though well discussed in the literature, has been tested empirically as a construct in very few studies. An empirical investigation of ethical leadership in Singapore's construction industry is reported. It is found that ethical leadership is positively and significantly associated with transformational leadership, transformational culture of organization, contingent reward dimension of transactional leadership, leader effectiveness, employee willingness to put in extra effort, and employee satisfaction with the (...) leader. However, it is also found that ethical leadership bears no correlations with transactional leadership. Also, it is negatively correlated with laissez-faire leadership and transactional culture of the organization. The findings also reveal that ethical leadership plays a mediating role in the relationship between employee outcomes and organizational culture. Practical implications of these findings are discussed. Directions for future research are also suggested. (shrink)

In this article, I explain Aquinas' approach to philosophy and theology. I then discuss how Aquinas thought the universe having a beginning is a matter of faith, not reason. I then argue that Aquinas' position is still correct despite the cosmological model of the big bang. Men of faith, I argue, ought to have a notion of God that is based on metaphysics, not a physical model, which at best brings us to a Deistic God.

In this paper, we present a probabilistic-based method to predict malaria disease at an early stage. Malaria is a very dangerous disease that creates a lot of health problems. Therefore, there is a need for a system that helps us to recognize this disease at early stages through the visual symptoms and from the environmental data. In this paper, we proposed a Bayesian network model to predict the occurrences of malaria disease. The proposed BN model is built on (...) different attributes of the patient’s symptoms and environmental data which are divided into training and testing parts. Our proposed BN model when evaluated on the collected dataset found promising results with an accuracy of 81%. One the other hand, F1 score is also a good evaluation of these probabilistic models because there is a huge variation in class data. The complexity of these models is very high due to the increase of parent nodes in the given influence diagram, and the conditional probability table also becomes more complex. (shrink)

After more than 15 years of study, the 1/f noise or complex-systems approach to cognitive science has delivered promises of progress, colorful verbiage, and statistical analyses of phenomena whose relevance for cognition remains unclear. What the complex-systems approach has arguably failed to deliver are concrete insights about how people perceive, think, decide, and act. Without formal models that implement the proposed abstract concepts, the complex-systems approach to cognitive science runs the danger of becoming a philosophical exercise in futility. The (...) complex-systems approach can be informative and innovative, but only if it is implemented as a formal model that allows concrete prediction, falsification, and comparison against more traditional approaches. (shrink)

George Lakoff (in his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987) and the paper "Cognitive semantics" (1988)) champions some radical foundational views. Strikingly, Lakoff opposes realism as a metaphysical position, favoring instead some supposedly mild form of idealism such as that recently espoused by Hilary Putnam, going under the name internal realism." For what he takes to be connected reasons, Lakoff also rejects truth conditional model-theoretic semantics for natural language.

In this paper, I first consider three possible explanations for why celebrities typically apologise publicly and sometimes also include their fans among the targets of their apology. I then identify three moral dangers of celebrity apologies, the third of which arises specifically for fan-targeted apologies, and each of which teaches us important lessons about the practice of celebrity apologies. From these individual lessons, I draw more general lessons about apologies from those with elevated social positions and the powers they are (...) associated with. (shrink)

Cultivation research suggests that media use, particularly TV, is associated with a wide range of politically relevant views and attitudes, including perceptions of the world as a mean and dangerous place, authoritarianism, and perceived meritocracy. However, little attempt has been made to understand how these effects relate to one another and to broader models of political psychology. We present a new Cultivation–Political Psychology Interface Model, which uses Duckitt’s Dual Process Model of political psychology as a lens to understand (...) cultivation research. Many seemingly distinct cultivation effects related to political attitudes can thus be reduced to two overall dimensions: dangerous and competitive worldviews. We identify evidence gaps, particularly in terms of competitive-worldview effects and related political attitudes. Our model generates a landscape of attitudes and beliefs, whereby some attitudes are hypothesized to be more upstream than others, leading to testable hypotheses for future research. (shrink)

The concept of the method based on the behavioural approach as the method minimizing hazardous behaviours of employees has been discussed in this article. The main focus has been laid upon one of the largest economic sectors, i.e. is the construction industry. Thereby, risks arising from an improper behaviour of construction workers, and also a factor contributing to it, have been described here. The influence of employee’s age and day time have been analysed in terms of accident rates. The attention (...) was also paid to alcohol consumed by workers during and after their work and to the influence that it has on dangerous behaviours. Different ways of approaches to the worker to improve safety and hygiene at work, as well as the manner in which the approach to employee should change depending on the situation, have been presented too. (shrink)

Models provide scientists with knowledge about target systems. An important group of models are those that are called general. However, what exactly is meant by generality in this context is somewhat unclear. The aim of this paper is to draw out a distinction between two notions of generality that has implications for scientific practice. Some models are general in the sense that they apply to many systems in the world and have many particular targets. Another sense is captured by models (...) that are aimed at understanding the fundamental or underlying dynamics of a phenomenon, as opposed to how it manifests in each particular case. They have non-specific, i.e. generic targets. While both notions of generality and genericness are legitimate and correspond to different aspects of scientific practice, they must be distinguished. Failing to do so obscures the danger of overgeneralisation faced by general models and facilitates the illegitimate use of generic models as general models. This can lead to a reduction of the explanatory and predictive power of both. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sexual Difference as Model: An Ethics for the Global FutureGail SchwabIn Éthique de la différence sexuelle (1984), Luce Irigaray targeted language and love—for her, inseparable from each other—as the two areas of focus for the elaboration of an ethics of sexual difference. The heterosexual couple seemed to have taken on a new, and somehow inappropriately central, importance in Irigaray’s thought in the early eighties; however, the projected mutations (...) in language and love theorized in Éthique did not exclusively concern the heterosexual relationship, even though many readers of Irigaray expressed just such reservations about the book. Éthique foregrounded the couple in the love relationship in order to rethink the philosophical basis of ethics in general, to develop new paradigms, beyond or outside of Western totalizing phallo- and logocentrism, for human relations—not only relations between women and men, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, relations among women and relations among men. Irigaray carried on this project in subsequent works, in Sexes et parentés (1987), which as the title explicitly indicates, opens up the ethical debate to familial and genealogical issues and broadens her focus to include children and the ethical basis of their relationships to parents and more generally to adults of both sexes, and in Sexes et genres à travers les langues (1990), a cross-cultural report on her empirical studies of gender differences in language usage, which sheds new light on the linguistic and communicational issues she had presented in Éthique and even before, in several seldom read and even more rarely analyzed works of the late seventies and early eighties. J’aime à toi (I Love to You) (1992) returns specifically to the more traditionally philosophical approach to the problems of language and love and their intertwining, and carries on the work projected in Éthique, but it goes much further in both the theoretical and the practical development of the concept of sexual difference as the foundation for a new ethics, a new culture of universal validity. J’aime à toi can be read as a follow-up to Éthique and as a founding text for the construction of an ethics of difference modeled on sexual difference, an ethics for the future of humanity in all of its diversity.Western Feminism and the Global FutureIrigaray is very much aware of the limits of the various Western political and academic feminisms, of the need to broaden their scope, both horizontally across cultures and vertically within specific cultures, before they can serve as the basis for a new ethics. Irigaray expresses the concern that Western feminists, rather than represent the exploited women of the world, may exploit them ideologically for their own personal or political purposes, at the risk of preventing them from coming to a feminism of their own making, appropriate to their own cultures and historical moments. “Certain women do implement power strategies—including the power of the media—but not solely for the benefit of the exploited women they use as an alibi. They thus run the risk of clouding the issues and [End Page 76] preventing their consciousness from being raised” [Irigaray, J’aime à toi 15]. 1 Irigaray calls this “egological” feminism (Dare I invent a new term here? Now we have “egofeminists” as well as “ecofeminists”...) and demonstrates its totally undemocratic orientation, despite its representative claims.Certain militants..., practicing direct democracy or an egological feminism, based on their own real, or imagined, needs and desires, rather than on those of all women, leave women subject to existing legislation. Indifferent to the rights necessary for all women—including the little girls of the present and the future, and the women of other cultures—they make decisions that perpetuate, and even aggravate, through unnecessary misunderstandings, the injustices done the female gender.[J’aime à toi 13]As a feminist, in general, it always pains me to read criticisms of feminism, even cogent and theoretically valid criticisms, and I am even now painfully aware of the political dangers of criticizing feminism myself in a public forum such as this one. However, if I have managed to learn anything from the works of Western feminists of color and from Third World feminists, it is... (shrink)

The dangers presented by antibiotic resistance have now established themselves as a global health security issue. From an international policy perspective, three key pillars have been established: responsible access, conservation, and innovation. These pillars are intrinsically linked, meaning that any attempt to address one must take into account the implications for the other two.An urgent need exists to address the innovation failure in ABR. In the field of anti-bacterials, the pipeline remains anemic in terms of therapeutics with novel mechanisms of (...) action, new drug classes and strategies involving radically different, innovative approaches. The key reasons for this failure have already been well established. The slow development of new antibiotics is the result of a poor and uncertain commercial market and scientific challenges in research and development. (shrink)

AbstractWhat explains followers’ attraction to tyrannical leaders? They systematically coerce, belittle, and manipulate, often at the expense of subordinates’ mental and physical well-being and their organization’s long-term interests. To help address the question, we examine the tendencies of people who view the tyrannical leader prototype (characterized by domineering, pushy, manipulative, loud, conceited, and selfish traits) as a component of effective leadership (Epitropaki and Martin in J Appl Psychol 89:293–310, 2004; Foti et al. in Leadersh Q 23:702–717, 2012). Specifically, we apply (...) moral and evolutionary psychology to propose and empirically test a mediation model in which belief in a dangerous world (Altemeyer in Enemies of freedom: understanding right-wing authoritarianism. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1988) links positively with endorsement of the tyrannical leader traits, as mediated through the binding components (loyalty, authority, and sanctity) of moral foundations theory (Graham et al. J Pers Soc Psychol 101:366–385, 2011). Regarding gender, our model proposes that the link between the binding foundations and tyrannical leadership endorsement is stronger among males than females. Our overall model was supported across two independent samples of working adults; we also anticipated and found a direct negative association between the individualizing moral foundations (care and harm) and endorsement of the tyrannical prototype. These findings provide insights into the circumstances under which tyrannical traits are viewed as part of effective leadership. (shrink)

This paper is intended to be a consideration of the role of multi-level modelling in educational research. It is not a guide on how to design or perform such an analysis. There are several references in the text to sources that teach the practicalities perfectly well, and the technique is anyway similar to other forms of regression and to analysis of variance. Rather, the paper describes what multi-level modelling is, why it is used, and what its limitations are. It does (...) so in the hope that some readers will be enthused sufficiently to become appropriately critical 'consumers' of research using this approach, so building research capacity, and easing pressures on 'specialist' reviewers. Anyone who can read or perform standard multivariate analyses can understand, referee, or conduct a multi-level model. Additionally, the paper makes three key points. The generally small sample size in each cluster at the lowest level of any multi-level model means that there is a danger of a greater bias in the results than in standard analyses that pool the data from all clusters. Even where there are genuine gains through the use of multi-level models these have to be set against a loss in simple intuitive grasp of the results, especially amongst policy-makers and practitioners. Therefore, long term, we are probably better advised to improve our research designs and the quality of the data we collect than to focus on more and more complex forms of analysis to overcome deficiencies in the datasets we already have. (shrink)

There are several well-established theories of criminal punishment and of its justification. The quarantine model (advocated by Pereboom and Caruso) has recently emerged as one of the most prominent theories in the field, by denying the very idea of criminal justice. This theory claims that no one ought to be criminally punished because fundamentally people do not deserve any kind of punishment. On these grounds, the quarantine model proposes forms of incapacitation based on public safety considerations. In this (...) article, we briefly review a series of objections raised against the quarantine model and propose some new or revised arguments, which are aimed at showing its inconsistencies and weaknesses. These arguments are related to (a) the lack of a reliable way of determining who is dangerous and the consequent need to make judgments about confinement based on probabilities, and (b) the prospect that the quarantine model may encourage certain crimes. Given the arguments we present in this paper, the quarantine model proves to be less solid, humane, and desirable than its proponents claim. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a general framework for thought about human information processing. It is intended to avoid some of the problems of pipeline or stage models of function. At the same time it avoids the snare of supposing a welter of indefinitely many separate processes. The approach is not particularly original, but rather represents the common elements or presuppositions in a number of modern theories. These presuppositions are not usually explicit, however, and making them so reduces the danger (...) of slipping back into earlier modes of thought.The key point is to distinguish between persisting representations and the processes that translate one representation into another. Various classes or groups of persisting representations can be distinguished by the experimental treatments that interfere with them. In particular, there now seem to be several kinds of short-term or temporary storage, different from each other as well as from longterm memory; the translating processes also have several different modes or kinds. A particularly important aspect of the current position is that a model of this general type no longer requires some external agent to direct and control long sequences of behaviour. (shrink)

Fifty years ago, two Princeton professors established game theory as an important new branch of applied mathematics. Gametheory has become a celebrated discipline in its own right, and it now plays a prestigious role in many disciplines, including ethics,due in particular to the neo-Hobbesian thinking of David Gauthier and others. Now it is perched at the edge of business ethics. I believethat it is dangerous and demeaning. It makes us look the wrong way at business, reinforcing a destructive obsession with (...) measurableoutcomes and a false sense of competition. It falsely characterizes or insidiously advocates a style of human behavior that is utterlyunacceptable. To put the matter quite crudely, a person who actually practiced the form of "rationality" advocated by game theory wouldbe something of a monster. (shrink)

We are engineers, and our view of consciousness is shaped by an engineering ambition: we would like to build a conscious machine. We begin by acknowledging that we may be a little disadvantaged, in that consciousness studies do not form part of the engineering curriculum, and so we may be starting from a position of considerable ignorance as regards the study of consciousness itself. In practice, however, this may not set us back very far; almost a decade ago, Crick wrote: (...) 'Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness. It is better to avoid a precise definition of consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition. Until the problem is understood much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both'. This seems to be as true now as it was then, although the identification of different aspects of consciousness by Block has certainly brought a degree of clarification. On the other hand, there is little doubt that consciousness does seem to be something to do with the operation of a sophisticated control system, and we can claim more familiarity with control systems than can most philosophers, so perhaps we can make up some ground there. (shrink)

Actual AI research began auspiciously around 1955 with Allen Newell and Herbert Simon's work at the RAND Corporation. Newell and Simon proved that computers could do more than calculate. They demonstrated that computers were physical symbol systems whose symbols could be made to stand for anything, including features of the real world, and whose programs could be used as rules for relating these features. In this way computers could be used to simulate certain important aspects intelligence. Thus the information-processing (...) class='Hi'>model of the mind was born. But, looking back over these fifty years, it seems that theoretical AI with its promise of a robot like HAL appears to be a perfect example of what Imre Lakatos has called a "degenerating research program". (shrink)

We are engineers, and our view of consciousness is shaped by an engineering ambition: we would like to build a conscious machine. We begin by acknowledging that we may be a little disadvantaged, in that consciousness studies do not form part of the engineering curriculum, and so we may be starting from a position of considerable ignorance as regards the study of consciousness itself. In practice, however, this may not set us back very far; almost a decade ago, Crick wrote: (...) 'Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness. It is better to avoid a precise definition of consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition. Until the problem is understood much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both'. This seems to be as true now as it was then, although the identification of different aspects of consciousness by Block has certainly brought a degree of clarification. On the other hand, there is little doubt that consciousness does seem to be something to do with the operation of a sophisticated control system, and we can claim more familiarity with control systems than can most philosophers, so perhaps we can make up some ground there. (shrink)

Development is concerned with the fulfillment of people's needs and wants. Most governments, corporations and international organizations use an economic model of development to make decisions about the fulfillment of people's needs and wants. As world problems mount in severity and the carrying capacity of the earth is approached, the costs, consequences and dangers of using the economic model of development are great. A new model of development is required to tackle problems as difficult and demanding as (...) the environmental crisis, rapid consumption of the world's renewable and non?renewable resources, the gap between rich and poor nations and rich and poor people, and the potential collapse of the global eco?system. The model that is proposed is the cultural model of development. Based on a holistic and equitable rather than dualistic and partisan approach to development, the cultural model makes it possible to take the natural environment fully and forcefully into account in all developmental planning and decision?making, as well as to focus attention on the whole rather than a part of the whole. This necessitates new understandings and measurements of production, productivity, living standards and indicators of developmental performance. It also necessitates significant changes in the policies and practices of international organizations, governments, corporations and citizens. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a general framework for thought about human information processing. It is intended to avoid some of the problems of pipeline or stage models of function. At the same time it avoids the snare of supposing a welter of indefinitely many separate processes. The approach is not particularly original, but rather represents the common elements or presuppositions in a number of modern theories. These presuppositions are not usually explicit, however, and making them so reduces the danger (...) of slipping back into earlier modes of thought.The key point is to distinguish between persisting representations and the processes that translate one representation into another. Various classes or groups of persisting representations can be distinguished by the experimental treatments that interfere with them. In particular, there now seem to be several kinds of short-term or temporary storage, different from each other as well as from longterm memory; the translating processes also have several different modes or kinds. A particularly important aspect of the current position is that a model of this general type no longer requires some external agent to direct and control long sequences of behaviour. (shrink)

Fifty years ago, two Princeton professors established game theory as an important new branch of applied mathematics. Game theory has become a celebrated discipline in its own right, and it npw plays a prestigues role in many disciplines, including ethics, due in particular to the neo-Hobbesian thinking of David Gauthier and others. Now it is perched at the edge of business ethics. I believe that it is dangerous and demeaning. It makes us look the wrong way at business, reinforcing a (...) destructive obsession with measurable outcomes and a false sense of competition. It falsely characterizes or insidiously advocates a style of human behavior that is utterly unacceptable. To put the matter quite crudely, a person who actually practiced the form of "rationality" advocated by game theory would be something of a monster. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to understand the allure and danger of fake news in social media environments and propose a theoretical model of the phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative research study used the uses and gratifications theory approach to analyze how and why people used social media during the 2016 US presidential election. Findings The thematic analysis revealed people were gratified after using social media to connect with friends and family and to gather and share information and after using (...) it as a vehicle of expression. Participants found a significant number of fake news stories on social media during the 2016 US presidential election. Participants tried to differentiate between fake news and real news using fact-checking websites and news sources and interacted with the social media users who posted fake news and became part of the echo chamber. Behaviors like these emerged in the analysis that could not be completely explained by UGT and required further exploration which resulted in a model that became the core of this study. Research limitations/implications This is a small-scale exploratory study with eight diverse participants, findings should not be generalized to larger populations. Time-specific self-reporting of information from social media and fake news during the 2016 US presidential election. Upgrading public policies related to social media is recommended in the study, contributing to burgeoning policy discussions and provides recommendations for both purveyors of social media and public policymakers. Practical implications Upgrade in public policies related to social media is recommended in the study and contributes to burgeoning policy discussions and provides recommendations for both purveyors of social media and public policymakers. Social implications Social media users are spending increased time on their preferred platforms. This study increases the understanding of the nature, function and transformation of virtual social media environments and their effects on real individuals, cultures and societies.What is original/of value about the paper?This exploratory study establishes the foundation on which to expand research in the area of social media use and fake news. Originality/value This exploratory study establishes the foundation to expand research in the area of social media use and fake news. (shrink)

Persons who are dangerous and legally responsible, but who have not yet committed any currently recognised criminal offence, fall within the gap left between the domains of criminal justice and civil commitment. Many jurisdictions operate legal regimes that permit the detention of such persons in order to prevent the occurrence of anticipated criminal harms. These regimes often either fail to respect the principle of proportionality or contradictorily treat a dangerous offender as both legally responsible and not responsible at the same (...) time. In response to these problems, a number of preventive detention models have been proposed. Retributivist models seek to prevent the occurrence of anticipated criminal harms by requiring blame on the dangerous person’s part in order to warrant detention. However, these models are ill-equipped to deal with the problem of coextensiveness; i.e., they struggle to comprehensively reconcile proportionality in punitive sentencing with the period over which dangerous persons remain dangerous and during which one might therefore want them to be incapacitated. In order to achieve comprehensive incapacitation of dangerous persons for the duration of their dangerousness, retributivist models are forced to abandon their fidelity to proportionality in punitive sentencing, thereby losing themselves in the process. Accordingly, if the practice of preventive detention can be justified at all, such justification will not be of a retributivist character. (shrink)

The quarantine model, recently proposed by Pereboom and Caruso, is one of the most influential models developed to date in the context of criminal justice. The quarantine model challenges the very idea of criminal punishment and asserts that nobody deserves punishment on a fundamental level. Instead, in order to deal with offenders, it proposes a series of incapacitation measures based on public safety concerns. In this article, we examine several objections to the quarantine model that demonstrate how, (...) in our view, it can be improved. These mainly pertain to (2.1) the difficulty of reliably identifying dangerous individuals and consequently the need to base confinement decisions on probability, and (2.2) the potential for the quarantine model not to properly deter certain crimes. Three additional objections are raised with respect to (3.1) the rights that are potentially suppressed in the quarantine model; (3.2) the role of “genetic justice”; and (3.3) the difficulty it faces accommodating reasons-responsiveness. Whereas these objections do not constitute knock-down arguments against the quarantine model, they highlight issues that invite closer scrutiny, at least if it is to be considered as a credible framework for the development of viable policies in criminal justice. (shrink)

The ability to create and perceive art has long been understood as an exceptional human trait, which should differentiate us from the rest of the organisms or robots. However, with the uprising of cognitive sciences and information stemming from them, as well as the evolutionary biology, even the human being began to be understood as an organism following the evolutionarily and culturally obtained algorithms and evaluation processes. Even fragile and multidimensional phenomena like beauty, aesthetic experience or the good have lately (...) been analyzed using computational aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, and neuroethics, suggesting that the entire aesthetics, art or ethics can be understood as a result of a certain algorithmic data analysis. In the following article, I will attempt to think about the concept of computational aesthetics and the possibilities, benefits and shortcomings of artificial intelligence in the creation, as well as in perception and evaluation of artworks. I will introduce multiple models of artistic work based on AI, quality/originality evaluating computer programs, as well as mechanisms of its perception. In the end, I will attempt to present the basic aesthetic problems stemming from the development of AI and its usage in the field of art. (shrink)

This article defends the classical liberal view of human interactions that gives strong protection to associational freedom except in cases that involve the use of force or fraud or the exercise of monopoly power. That conception is at war with the modern antidiscrimination or human rights laws that operate in competitive markets in such vital areas as employment and housing, with respect to matters of race, sex, age, and increasingly, disability. The article further argues that using the “human rights” label (...) to boost the moral case for antidiscrimination laws gets matters exactly backwards, given that any program of forced association on one side of a status relationship (employer, not employee; landlord, not tenant) is inconsistent with any universal norm governing all individuals regardless of role in all associative arrangements. The articled also discusses the tensions that arise under current Supreme Court law, which protects associational freedom arising out of expressive activities (as in cases involving the NAACP or the Boy Scouts), but refuses to extend that protection to other forms of association, such as those involving persons with disabilities. The great vice of all these arrangements is that they cannot guarantee the stability of mandated win/lose relationships. The article further argues that a strong social consensus against discrimination is insufficient reason to coerce dissenters, given that holders of the dominant position can run their operations as they see fit even if others do otherwise. It closes with a short model human rights statute drafted in the classical liberal tradition that avoids the awkward line drawing and balancing that give rise to modern bureaucracies to enforce modern antidiscrimination laws. (shrink)

The relevance of the study lies in the fact that the information and computer revolution has made it possible to create and include in the system of social circulation such information flows, which are currently sufficient to ensure the most rational use of nature, demographic, economic, industrial, agricultural and spiritual and cultural development of mankind. The phenomenon of the information revolution is the result of two parallel processes that can develop throughout history: an increase in the role and volume of (...) information necessary to ensure the full existence of society, and improvement in the technology of information accumulation and dissemination. Information technology has been integrated into the current social and economic space. The use of computers and telecommunications has influenced an unprecedented intensity of communicative interactions. These processes affect the stages of social development. The article analyzes the current understanding of the fourth and fifth information revolution. The problems of economics, management and post-industrial society are considered. An attempt is made to synthesize the models of foreign and domestic researchers. The article considers the existing theoretical approaches to the explication of political security, highlighted such its component as information and political security, and this author's interpretation of the latter. The limits of the information-political security, allowing to separate it from other types of security, depending on the information are established. The influence of information on the formation of information and political threats affecting the information and political security of the country is considered. (shrink)

James Bohman’s Democracy across borders aims to conceptualize transnational democracy. But it is more than that: Bohman begins to articulate a paradigm shift in how we conceive democracy in complex, pluralized, globalized contexts comprised of multiple, overlapping constituencies which often have broad extension in space and time. The paradigm shift is not Bohman’s alone: it has been some time in the making*two decades at least*and has multiple sources in contemporary theories of power, inclusion and exclusion, pluralism, deliberation, as well as (...) in theories of social and system complexity. The importance of Bohman’s book is that it consolidates many of these elements into an important statement that breaks with those kinds of theory that conceptualize democracy as a way of organizing relatively simple, territorial, state-organized units of political organization. My comments highlight those elements of Bohman’s argument that add up to a paradigm shift; they are critical only in the sense that there is a danger that this contribution could be overshadowed by the book’s primary focus democracy across borders, important though this is. Most of my comments aim at extracting and reconstructing the paradigm shift within Bohman’s text. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 47-54. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4853. (shrink)

Cet article vise à définir précisément la forme que prend l’action quand elle fait l’objet d’une mise en intrigue par un récit, de manière à éviter certaines dérives dans l’interprétation du phénoméne de la narrativité et de sa fonction anthropologique. Deux formes de dérives ou de réductionnisme sont d’abord envisagées : d’une part, la narratologie structuraliste a eu tendance à analyser de manière autonome les structures actionnelles formant la ‘fable’ des récits, ce qui l’a amenée à perdre de vue la (...) fonction que remplissaient ces actions au niveau de l’interaction narrative et à généraliser la théorie de l’action ainsi dégagée ; d’autre part, les travaux d’orientation cognitiviste, bien qu’ils aient ‘décloisonné’ l’analyse des structures narratives, ont eu tendance à se fonder sur un modèle schématique de l’action planifiée à la fois trop général et trop simpliste pour parvenir à cerner la fonction proprement narrative que remplissent les actions narrées. L’auteur propose de mettre en évidence, au niveau de l’interaction discursive, la fonction que remplissent certaines formes d’action narrées dans la mise en intrigue, notamment par le biais des effets de suspense et de curiosité qu’elles contribuent à produire. La mise en évidence du rôle fondamental que jouent les actions polémiques dans la dynamique du récit permet de conclure en opposant deux points de vue complémentaires sur l’action : alors que les approches ‘narratives’ mettent en évidence la singularité de l’événement narré, son caractère inédit, surprenant ou sous-déterminé, d’autres formes d’analyse ou de textualisation de l’action cherchent au contraire à cerner la règle ou la régularité derrière l’apparente ‘nouveauté’ de l’événement. (shrink)