The exploration of the literature indicated that much studies abound in related areas. Much seems yet to be known about the nature of the relationship that exists between managerial variables and the sustainability of graduate programmes. To bridge this gap, we utilized a standardised multiple regression approach to build up linear models that examine three managerial processes (strategic planning, staff and information/communication management) and how they affect three proxies of the sustainability of graduate programmes (availability of funds and facilities, as (...) well as supervision) respectively and cumulatively. Quantitative data were obtained from an entire population of 149 managers (Head of Departments and Deans) in the University of Calabar, Calabar, Nigeria using a questionnaire. Findings emerged, among others, a significant relationship between each of the managerial processes to the sustainability of graduate programmes generally and particularly in terms of availability of funds, facilities and supervision; the three predictor variables partially and jointly accounted for significant proportions in the sustainability of graduate programmes generally and specifically in terms of the various dimensions. Based on this evidence, one general and three partial predictive linear equations, as well as models were derived, while relevant action-based implications for effective management and practice were discussed. (shrink)

Research within the H2020 PROGRESSIVE project has identified good practices in user co-production strategies and methodologies. Early findings from research in the PROGRESSIVE project were shared with relevant stakeholders outside the consortium for consultation and review. The outcomes of that initial investigation highlighted the need to focus on the objectives, processes, and methods used in user and older people co-production. This guide adapts these insights and makes them relevant specifically for standardisation in ICT for active and healthy ageing. This (...) guide was approved by representatives of the PROGRESSIVE project on 22 February 2018. The consortium has requested comments from interested stakeholders in an enquiry from 1 March to 30 April 2018. The PROGRESSIVE guide was approved on 5 June 2018. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a wish list of requirements for formal fairness in the specific context of triage in emergency departments (EDs) and maps the empirical and conceptual research questions that need to be addressed in this context in the near future. The pandemic has brought to the fore the necessity for public debate about how to allocate resources fairly in a situation of great shortage. However, issues of fairness arise also outside of pandemics: decisions about how to allocate resources (...) are structurally unavoidable in healthcare systems, as value judgements underlie every allocative decision, although they are not always easily identifiable. In this paper, we set out to bridge this gap in the context of EDs. In the first part, we propose five formal requirements specifically applied for ED triage to be considered fair and legitimate: publicity, accessibility, relevance, standardisability and accountability. In the second part of the paper, we map the conceptual and empirical ethics questions that will need to be investigated to assess whether healthcare systems guarantee a formally just ED triage. In conclusion, we argue that there is a vast research landscape in need of an in-depth conceptual and empirical investigation in the context of ED triage in ordinary times. Addressing both types of questions in this context is vital for promoting a fair and legitimate ED triage and for fostering reflection on formal fairness allocative issues beyond triage. (shrink)

1. Biomedical sciences are fast-growing fields with unprecedented speed of research outputs, especially in the quantities of papers. Philosophers aiming to study ongoing biomedical changes face cha...

Standardised healthcare is primarily focused on remediation and delivered episodically through costly and fragmented healthcare systems. Such an approach is untenable, given the diversity and complexity of peoples' healthcare needs, increasing prevalence of chronic disease and existing heath inequities. A life course perspective fundamentally challenges our current understanding of healthcare and has great potential to promote innovation in healthcare practice, systems and policy. However, the way that health develops and manifests across the life course is a highly complex process underpinned (...) by a plethora of causal antecedents, consequences and interdependencies that have yet to be adequately captured and articulated in current life course frameworks. The field of cancer survivorship and its recent rise to prominence provides a highly relevant and compelling case example to inform development and refinement of existing life course frameworks. Cancer survivorship exemplifies what can be described as an integrated diachronic life course perspective, which serves as a conceptual framework to enhance our understanding of health development across the life course and guide healthcare practice, systems and policy to meet the increasingly complex healthcare needs of current and future generations. (shrink)

Synopsis The Anti-Language Divide The Anti-Language Divide is a sustained philosophical and linguistic investigation into the fractures that emerge when language ceases to function as a shared medium of understanding and instead becomes a marker of separation, power, and identity. Moving across linguistics, phenomenology, rhetoric, cognition, and philosophy, the book explores how speech simultaneously creates community and division, how language constructs the self, and how anti-languages arise within societies as both tools of resistance and instruments of control. At the heart (...) of the book lies a central tension: language unites by allowing people to “breathe together,” yet it also divides by generating internal codes, exclusions, and symbolic hierarchies. Anti-languages emerge wherever social groups seek autonomy, secrecy, or distinction. These are not merely slang forms or playful deviations from standard speech; they are structured linguistic systems designed to redefine reality for insiders while obscuring it from outsiders. Jargon, corporate vocabulary, ideological phrasing, and specialised academic discourse all become forms of anti-language, shaping perception and delimiting what can be thought and said. The opening section defines anti-languages as communicative structures that produce both solidarity and fragmentation. Slang and smart talk, while often dismissed as informal or superficial, are shown to operate as markers of belonging. They encode shared experiences, signal identity, and reinforce group boundaries. Yet the same mechanisms that generate intimacy can produce exclusion. The divide is not simply between languages but between linguistic communities that inhabit distinct semantic universes. From this sociolinguistic foundation, the book turns toward cognition. Language is not treated as a transparent instrument but as a cognitive environment within which thought takes shape. Inner speech becomes a critical focus: the silent dialogue through which individuals organise memory, moral reasoning, and self-reflection. If language structures public discourse, it also structures private consciousness. The divide between official language and personal understanding generates internal tension. Words borrowed from collective narratives often conflict with lived experience, producing cognitive dissonance and moral ambiguity. The phenomenological dimension deepens this analysis. Language is examined as a phenomenon that mediates perception itself. The “language of the self” is not merely expressive but constitutive. Identity is formed within linguistic space. Anti-language, therefore, does not simply distort communication; it reshapes subjectivity. When ideological or corporate vocabularies dominate public discourse, individuals begin to interpret themselves through externally imposed frames. The divide becomes internalised. The philosophical section situates these arguments within broader traditions of language theory. From classical rhetoric to contemporary deconstruction, the book traces shifting conceptions of meaning, reference, and truth. Meaning is shown to be neither fixed nor arbitrary but negotiated within power structures. Anti-language thrives in this instability. By redefining key terms—freedom, justice, progress, security—groups reconfigure moral landscapes. Words become instruments of rhetorical capture. A particularly incisive chapter examines rhetoric as the operational core of anti-language. From Gorgias to Derrida, persuasion is revealed as both creative and potentially manipulative. Corporate jargon exemplifies this dynamic: it cloaks economic interests in neutral or optimistic vocabulary, masking asymmetries of power. Euphemism becomes strategy. Complexity is simplified into digestible slogans. The divide widens between surface meaning and lived reality. The section on writing introduces a paradox. Written language promises permanence and reflection, yet it can also solidify distortion. The art of writing becomes both resistance and risk. To write is to stabilise thought, but also to freeze it within particular frameworks. The provocative question “How to avoid speaking?” gestures toward silence as a counterpoint to linguistic excess. In a world saturated with speech, withdrawal may preserve integrity. Silence is not emptiness but a refusal to participate in compromised discourse. Throughout the book, language is presented as dynamic, unstable, and inseparable from social structure. Sociolinguistics and applied linguistics illustrate how institutions regulate acceptable speech. Educational systems standardise expression; media platforms amplify certain registers; professional environments cultivate specialised codes. Each sphere generates its own anti-language. The cumulative effect is fragmentation. Yet the book resists fatalism. Anti-languages are not inherently destructive. They can foster creativity, resistance, and communal resilience. Marginalised groups often develop alternative linguistic forms to articulate suppressed experiences. The divide becomes problematic only when mutual intelligibility collapses entirely. Communication requires permeability between linguistic worlds. The Anti-Language Divide ultimately argues that the crisis of communication is not simply about misinformation or technological acceleration but about the proliferation of insulated speech communities. The challenge is not to eliminate difference but to cultivate translation. Genuine dialogue demands effort, patience, and reflexivity. It requires recognising that language shapes perception and that every word carries both connective and divisive potential. By integrating cognitive theory, phenomenology, rhetoric, and sociolinguistics, the book offers a comprehensive examination of how language both constructs and fractures social reality. It invites readers to become aware of the anti-languages they inhabit and to consider whether their speech opens pathways toward understanding or reinforces invisible barriers. -/- . (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' by treating scriptwriting as the hidden architecture of modern mass communication rather than a specialised craft confined to cinema. It argues that the screenplay, historically shaped by the tension between improvisation and control, has become a general cultural form: an organising logic that structures attention, emotion, and role-performance across television, news, platforms, and interactive media. Beginning with the scenario traditions of commedia dell’arte and the industrial (...) rationalisation of Hollywood, the article traces how screenwriting standardisation migrated from production management into social management, turning dramaturgical rhythm into a governing principle of contemporary visibility. Within this framework, narrative form no longer primarily serves truth, catharsis, or artistic completion; it increasingly functions as an instrument for sustaining engagement and directing perception through hooks, escalation, and delayed resolution. The article further examines the ethical dilemma of the writer in a media environment where dramatization routinely substitutes for explanation, and where documentary codes can simulate authenticity while remaining deeply constructed. By bringing journalism, documentary practice, role-playing interactivity, and screenplay theory into a single account, the text proposes that the ‘new paradigm of mass communication’ is not merely about new technologies but about the universalisation of scripting as a social technique. The central claim is that scriptwriting has become a civic force: it shapes public reality by organising what can be felt, believed, and enacted. The question is therefore no longer only how to write a script, but how to write responsibly in a culture where reality itself is increasingly produced in script-like form. (shrink)

Some patients, following brain injury, do not outwardly respond to spoken commands, yet show patterns of brain activity that indicate responsiveness. This is 'cognitive-motor dissociation' (CMD). Recent research has used machine learning to diagnose CMD from electroencephalogram recordings. These techniques have high false discovery rates, raising a serious problem of inductive risk. It is no solution to communicate the false discovery rates directly to the patient's family, because this information may confuse, alarm and mislead. Instead, we need a procedure for (...) generating case-specific probabilistic assessments that can be communicated clearly. This article constructs a possible procedure with three key elements: (1) A shift from categorical 'responding or not' assessments to degrees of evidence; (2) The use of patient-centred priors to convert degrees of evidence to probabilistic assessments; and (3) The use of standardised probability yardsticks to convey those assessments as clearly as possible. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' and develops the claim that civilisation increasingly functions as a role-playing game: a lived architecture of roles, rules, and scripted interactions through which people learn what is ‘real’, what is ‘allowed’, and what counts as meaningful participation. Building on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, it argues that the contemporary media environment intensifies this performative structure by converting publics from spectators into players. Within the new paradigm of (...) mass communication, media do not merely represent events; they design scenarios—interactive dramaturgies organised around quests, conflicts, reputational rewards, and ritualised reactions. The article uses live action role-playing (LARP) as an analytic lens for understanding how digital platforms produce collective ‘game worlds’ in which identities behave like avatars and political, moral, and cultural positions become roles to be performed. It further shows how immersion technologies and participatory narrative formats dissolve the boundary between fiction and social reality, making ‘playing’ a primary mode of civic presence. This transformation generates a double effect: it heightens engagement and the feeling of agency, yet it also narrows imagination by standardising identity into scripts and collapsing truth into the continuity of narrative moves. Finally, the article situates scenario thinking and strategic communication within this ludic turn, arguing that power increasingly operates through the design of playable futures: frameworks that distribute roles, set tempo, and normalise certain choices as ‘the next move’. Civilisation, understood as a media scenario, is therefore not simply narrated but enacted—an ongoing multiplayer performance in which control over roles becomes control over collective time, attention, and social possibility. (shrink)

Rawls’ primary legacy is not that he standardised a particular view of justice, but rather that he standardised a particular method of arguing about it: justification via reflective equilibrium. Yet this method, despite such standardisation, is often misunderstood in at least four ways. First, we miss its continuity across his various works. Second, we miss the way in which it unifies other justificatory ideas, such as the ‘original position’ and an ‘overlapping consensus’. Third, we miss its fundamentally empirical character, (...) given that it turns facts about the thoughts in our head into principles for the regulation of our political existence. Fourth, we miss some of the implications of that empiricism, including its tension with moral realism, relativism, and conservatism. (shrink)

The integration of AI into education is often framed as a neutral or beneficial response to pressures of efficiency, scalability, and personalisation. In this paper, I challenge that framing by examining how educational AI reshapes teaching as a form of labour. Drawing on Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, I offer a conceptual analysis of how AI mediated systems reorganise pedagogical work in ways that risk estranging teachers from the products of their labour, the labour process itself, their species being, and (...) their relationships with students and colleagues. Rather than treating AI in education as a monolithic phenomenon, I differentiate between generative tools, automated assessment, learning analytics, and administrative systems, showing how each participates differently in processes of standardisation, surveillance, and managerial control. I situate educational AI within wider dynamics of platform capitalism, datafication, and audit culture, arguing that alienation is not an inevitable outcome of technology but a contingent effect of ownership structures, governance arrangements, and institutional imperatives. I conclude by outlining policy, design, and philosophical interventions aimed at reducing alienation, while acknowledging the limits of reform within marketised education systems. In doing so, I reframe AI in education as a political and ethical question about labour, authority, and the purpose of teaching, rather than a purely technical innovation. (shrink)

The Narrative Entropy formula Sₙ = ∫(If × Cb) dt has been formally published and registered (Bulut, 2026a). However, the operational procedures for assigning numerical values to Information Friction (If) and Causal Branching (Cb) — and for ensuring that independent raters produce consistent scores — have not previously been specified. This gap reduces Sₙ from a calculable metric to a qualitative label, undermining the reproducibility that is the Bulut Doctrine's core methodological commitment. This document closes that gap. It provides: (1) (...) operational definitions with discrete scoring anchors for If and Cb; (2) a standardised annotation procedure for applying scores to narrative text segments; (3) a statistical inter-rater reliability protocol based on Cohen's weighted kappa; and (4) worked examples demonstrating the full calculation pipeline from raw text to final Sₙ value. Upon adoption of this protocol, Sₙ becomes a fully operationalised metric satisfying the standards of empirical measurement. (shrink)

Contemporary economic theory predominantly treats work as market-organised, monetisable activity. What remains invisible in this view is that a substantial portion of socially necessary, life- and system-sustaining work does not arise within the market, but precedes it. This paper introduces the distinction between primary economy and secondary economy in order to specify this structural blind spot. Primary economy is understood as that form of work which directly brings forth reality, livability, and social coherence: care work, commons practice, cultural and epistemic (...) work, ecological reproduction, as well as self-determined, enactively embedded activities. This work is not substitutable, not arbitrarily scalable, and eludes complete monetary representation. Secondary economy, by contrast, describes those economic processes that extract, formalise, administer, and skim value from the primary economy. It is derivative in nature, operates on the basis of abstraction, standardisation, and control, and tends structurally to obscure its own dependence on primary value formation. On the basis of neurodivergent, artistic research and enactive systems analysis, it is shown that the systematic overvaluation of the secondary economy leads to the exhaustion of social, ecological, and epistemic resources. The distinction proposed here allows for a re-conceptualisation of work, value, and productivity beyond capitalist value thresholds and forms a foundation for alternative economic models that prioritise livability over growth. This paper functions as an interface text within a larger operator-based research corpus. Core concepts are applied here, not re-derived. The underlying research operates in a non-linear, rhythmically recursive epistemic mode grounded in an autistic form of structural perception; the present text provides an interface translation for academic contexts. (shrink)

This study critically investigates the ethical and structural implications of artificial intelligence (AI) integration into higher education through Karl Marx’s theory of alienation. Drawing upon empirical data from a survey of 395 educators in Northern Cyprus, an illustrative context characterised by nascent AI adoption, the research identifies significant experiences of alienation among educators arising from AI-driven transformations of academic labour. Alienation from the product of academic labour, marked by diminished sense of ownership and authorship over teaching outcomes, emerged as particularly (...) pronounced. Further, alienation from educational processes, professional identity, and interpersonal relations also surfaced prominently, highlighting the multifaceted pressures imposed by algorithmic management practices and standardisation in higher education settings. Positive perceptions of AI were significantly correlated with reduced alienation across all dimensions, although such optimism alone could not eliminate structural tensions inherent in AI implementation. The nuanced and fragmented nature of educators’ attitudes toward AI underscores the necessity for nuanced, context-sensitive governance approaches. The findings underscore the urgent need for higher education institutions to adopt ethical governance frameworks that prioritise transparency, participatory decision-making, professional autonomy, and robust ethical oversight. In doing so, universities can better harness AI’s educational potential while preserving the professional integrity, creative agency, and relational ethics at the heart of academic practice. (shrink)

As biological and biomedical research increasingly reference the environmental context of the biological entities under study, the need for formalisation and standardisation of environment descriptors is growing. The Environment Ontology (ENVO) is a community-led, open project which seeks to provide an ontology for specifying a wide range of environments relevant to multiple life science disciplines and, through an open participation model, to accommodate the terminological requirements of all those needing to annotate data using ontology classes. This paper summarises ENVO’s (...) motivation, content, structure, adoption, and governance approach. (shrink)

Older adults represent a rapidly growing segment of mobile health (mHealth) application users, yet the interaction modalities dominant in commercial health applications, including fine-gesture touch, small-target navigation, and high-density information layouts, are systematically misaligned with the perceptual, motor, and cognitive changes associated with ageing. This paper presents the Ageing-Adaptive mHealth Design Framework (AADF), a formal model that weights accessibility feature contributions using a Geriatric Usability Impact Score (GUIS) derived from age-stratified usability dimensions: visual acuity decline, motor precision loss, and working (...) memory reduction. A controlled usability evaluation was conducted with 64 participants aged 60–85 across three prototype configurations: Baseline (BL, standard commercial interface), Partially Accessible (PA, WCAG 2.1 Level AA), and AADF-instrumented (AADF), across six standardised mHealth task types. AADF achieves a mean task completion rate (TCR) of 89.4% compared to 41.8% for BL across all tasks and age subgroups, representing a 47.6 percentage-point improvement. Voice interaction reduced vital-sign entry time by 52% for participants aged 75–85. Progressive font scaling reduced reading-error rates by 44% for participants with self-reported low vision. Three structural design patterns, Stepped Navigation, Persistent Context Anchors, and Modality-Fallback Sequences, are formalised and evaluated, demonstrating collectively that navigation-complexity reduction accounts for 38% of the total AADF TCR improvement. The paper argues that age-specific mHealth accessibility requires a design philosophy extending beyond WCAG compliance into geriatric interaction engineering. (shrink)

This paper examines the emergence of a hybridised aesthetic and erotic ideal as embodied artificial intelligences (eAIs) integrate into human social and desire networks. Drawing upon historical cycles of fetishisation, hybridisation, standardisation, and conformity pressure in beauty and erotic norms, I argue that synthetic persons will catalyse a new convergence of human and non-human forms, producing iterative feedback loops in aesthetic aspiration. Bio-persons may increasingly pursue biotechnological and cosmetic modifications to align with synthetic standards, while synthetic-persons may adopt pseudo-carbonic (...) traits to approximate human desirability. This process, which I term the rise of artificial aestheticism, challenges conventional notions of embodiment, erotic preference, and normative beauty. The paper further interrogates the ethical and phenomenological implications of cross-biosynthetic desire, including autonomy, agency, and the moral obligations arising from the emergence of post-anthropocentric erotic frameworks. By mapping the first stages of this hybridisation, the paper lays the groundwork for a philosophical inquiry into roboerotic desire and the evolution of the biosynthetic erotic ideal. Companion to Successors and Supremacy: The Bio-Synthetic Continuum & the Urgency of Precision in Taxonomic Infrastructure. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems continue their rapid advancement, a framework for contextualising the major transitional phases in the development of machine intellect becomes increasingly vital. This paper proposes a novel chronological classification scheme to characterise the key temporal stages in AI evolution. The Prenoëtic era, spanning all of history prior to the year 2020, is defined as the preliminary phase before substantive artificial intellect manifestations. The Protonoëtic period, which humanity has recently entered, denotes the initial emergence of advanced foundation (...) models exceeding human capacities within specialised domains. The forthcoming Mesonoëtic epoch is anticipated to commence with the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), potentially facilitated by quantum computing capabilities. Ultimately, the Kainonoëtic age is posited to begin upon the rise of superintelligent systems, likely catalysed by an AGI undergoing recursive self-improvement. This novel period taxonomy provides a structured conceptualisation for the key milestones in the evolution towards advanced artificial intellect. This classification framework offers significant value across various disciplines, researchers and stakeholders in the AI landscape, by providing a clearly defined chronological nomenclature. AI policy-makers and regulators will find it instrumental in crafting stage-appropriate policy and legal interventions. Scientists and academics will benefit from a standardised terminology in the approach to AI periodisation, facilitating unambiguous communication and collaborative research. Finally, this proposed taxonomy can serve as an accessible tool for public understanding, offering a clearer roadmap of AI development that can inform open discourse and decision-making. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of Seneca's 58th letter to Lucilius and Porphyry's Isagoge, which were the origin of the tree diagrams that became popular in philosophy and logic from the early Middle Ages onwards. These diagrams visualise the extent to which a concept can be understood as a category, genus, species or individual and what the method of dihairesis (division) means. The paper explores the dissimilarities between Seneca's and Porphyry's tree structures, scrutinising them through the perspective of modern graph (...) theory. Although traditional trees can be interpreted in a modern way, their terms and definitions defy modern standardisation. These distinctions are not only useful for differentiating between Seneca's and Porphyry's trees, but also for comprehending the evolution of this philosophical tradition. Thus the paper highlights the continued significance of these tree diagrams in analysing concepts and categories in philosophy and structuring objects and information in modern fields such as artificial intelligence, computer science, bioinformatics, graph theory, and many more. (shrink)

Mental health research faces a suite of unresolved challenges that have contributed to a stagnation of research efforts and treatment innovation. One such challenge is how to reliably and validly account for the subjective side of patient symptomatology, that is, the patient’s inner experiences or patient phenomenology. Providing a structured, standardised semantics for patient phenomenology would enable future research in novel directions. In this contribution, we aim at initiating a standardized approach to patient phenomenology by sketching a tentative formalisation within (...) the framework of an applied ontology, in the broader context of existing open-source Open Biomedical Ontologies resources such as the Mental Functioning Ontology. We further discuss a number of prevailing challenges and observations bearing on this task. (shrink)

Modern empirical psychology, as a reductionist, materialist, and positivist science, has to a great extent replaced philosophical psychology – or more precisely philosophical anthropology– in our contemporary world, and this has caused modern psychology to lose sight of what was most interesting in pre-modern psychology, namely the attempt to situate the human person in his experience of reality in the lifeworld (lebenswelt). This has resulted in the practice of psychology becoming detached from the realities of lived experience as its view (...) of human nature becomes increasingly narrow, rigid and scientistic. This is evidenced by the current “replication crisis” in modern psychology, which has severely impacted the credibility of modern psychology as a field of enquiry. This crisis arose with an increasing methodological standardisation that is being pursued at the expense of interrogating the scientistic presuppositions that ground the study of modern psychology. (shrink)

The market for environmental, social and governance (ESG) rating and data is expected to grow immensely in the next decades. This brief zooms in both on the integration of ESG risks into “traditional” operations of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) as well as on the emergence of a market exclusively dedicated to ESG rating. As will become clear, the market for ESG ratings suffers from serious shortcomings, a lack of transparency and standardisation, significant biases and conflicts of interests, and a (...) dependence on large, oligopolistic, credit rating agencies. (shrink)

Functionally graded materials (FGMs) have been used in many different kinds of applications in recent years and have attracted significant research attention. However, we do not yet have a commonly accepted way of representing the various aspects of FGMs. Lack of standardised vocabulary creates obstacles to the extraction of useful information relating to pertinent aspects of different applications. A standard resource is needed for describing various elements of FGMs, including existing applications, manufacturing techniques, and material characteristics. This motivated the creation (...) of the FGM Ontology (FGMO) in 2016. Here, we present a revised and expanded version of the FGM Ontology, which includes enrichments along four dimensions: (1) documenting recent FGMs applications; (2) reorganising the framework to incorporate an updated representation of types of manufacturing processes; (3) enriching the axioms of the ontology; and (4) importing mid-level ontologies from the Common Core Ontologies (CCO) and Product Life Cycle (PLC) Ontologies. The work is being carried out within the framework of the Industry Ontology Foundry (IOF), and the ontology is conformant to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). (shrink)

Background Previous analyses of democracy and population health have focused on broad measures, such as life expectancy at birth and child and infant mortality, and have shown some contradictory results. We used a panel of data spanning 170 countries to assess the association between democracy and cause-specific mortality and explore the pathways connecting democratic rule to health gains. -/- Methods We extracted cause-specific mortality and HIV-free life expectancy estimates from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (...) and information on regime type from the Varieties of Democracy project. These data cover 170 countries and 46 years. From the Financing Global Health database, we extracted gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, also covering 46 years, and Development Assistance for Health estimates starting from 1990 and domestic health spending estimates starting from 1995. We used a diverse set of empirical methods—synthetic control, within-country variance decomposition, structural equation models, and fixed-effects regression—which together provide a robust analysis of the association between democratisation and population health. -/- Findings HIV-free life expectancy at age 15 years improved significantly during the study period (1970–2015) in countries after they transitioned to democracy, on average by 3% after 10 years. Democratic experience explains 22·27% of the variance in mortality within a country from cardiovascular diseases, 16·53% for tuberculosis, and 17·78% for transport injuries, and a smaller percentage for other diseases included in the study. For cardiovascular diseases, transport injuries, cancers, cirrhosis, and other non-communicable diseases, democratic experience explains more of the variation in mortality than GDP. Over the past 20 years, the average country's increase in democratic experience had direct and indirect effects on reducing mortality from cardiovascular disease (−9·64%, 95% CI −6·38 to −12·90), other non-communicable diseases (−9·14%, −4·26 to −14·02), and tuberculosis (−8·93%, −2·08 to −15·77). Increases in a country's democratic experience were not correlated with GDP per capita between 1995 and 2015 (ρ=–0·1036; p=0·1826), but were correlated with declines in mortality from cardiovascular disease (ρ=–0·3873; p<0·0001) and increases in government health spending (ρ=0·4002; p<0·0001). Removal of free and fair elections from the democratic experience variable resulted in loss of association with age-standardised mortality from non-communicable diseases and injuries. -/- Interpretation When enforced by free and fair elections, democracies are more likely than autocracies to lead to health gains for causes of mortality (eg, cardiovascular diseases and transport injuries) that have not been heavily targeted by foreign aid and require health-care delivery infrastructure. International health agencies and donors might increasingly need to consider the implications of regime type in their efforts to maximise health gains, particularly in the context of ageing populations and the growing burden of non-communicable diseases. (shrink)

Objective: To examine the current ethical review process of ethics committees in a non-pharmacological trial from the perspective of a clinical investigator.Design: Prospective collection of data at the Study Centre of the German Surgical Society on the duration, costs and administrative effort of the ERP of a randomised controlled multicentre surgical INSECT Trial between November 2003 and May 2005.Setting: Germany.Participants: 18 ethics committees, including the ethics committee handling the primary approval, responsible overall for 32 clinical sites throughout Germany. 8 ethics (...) committees were located at university medical schools and 10 at medical chambers. Duration was measured as days between submission and receipt of final approval, costs in euros and administrative effort by calculation of the product of the total number of different types of documents and the mean number of copies required.Results: The duration of the ERP ranged from 1 to 176 days. The median duration was 26 days at MSUs compared with 34 days at medical chambers. The total cost was €2947. 1 of 8 ethics committees at universities and 8 of 10 at medical chambers charged a median fee of €162. The administrative effort for primary approval was 30. Four ethics committees required a higher administrative effort for secondary approval.Conclusion: The ERP for non-pharmacological multicentre trials in Germany needs improvement. The administrative process has to be standardised: the application forms and the number and content of the documents required should be identical or at least similar. The fees charged vary considerably and are obviously too high for committees located at medical chambers. However, the duration of the ERP was, with some exceptions, excellent. A centralised ethics committee in Germany for multicentre trials such as the INSECT Trial can simplify the ERP for clinical investigators in and outside the country. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse approaches to the sharing economy from the perspective of public policy science. In the first part of the text, attention is paid to perceiving the development of the emerging sharing economy not only as phenomenon with positive economic effects but also as a set of public problems (e.g., on the labour market and for existing economic structures) that require intervention at the level of national governments as well as at international level. Subsequent (...) sections identify possible actions for regulating the development of the sharing economy. The role of soft law, stakeholders’ networks, self-regulation and standardisation are discussed in the chapter. The summary includes potential directions for further research. (shrink)

Human beings define their identity primarily by the way they present, design and style their bodies. In doing so, individuals make statements about their affiliation to a social context. Globalisation implies a change of identity among the members of less industrialised cultures, as they are exposed to effects of cultural dominance. For the individual, this exposure can be the stronger, the more autonomous his or her culture of origin used to be before the confrontation. There is a bias of cultural (...) elements that are being transferred, so that the industrialised culture has a strong impact on other cultures. Global consent with regard to behaviour patterns, especially to bodily self-presentation and the related cognitive styles, leads to the obliteration of traditional knowledge, which is interwoven with the behaviour upon which identity had been defined previously. The cultural elements transferred are being used for the construction of globally standardised personal identities, whereat elements concerning the visual design of the human body are of major relevance for defining the self. The loss of variegated identities in favour of belonging to the global society brings about a number of problems, which can be demonstrated in functional models. These models, in turn, may support the planning of interventional strategies and rescue work. In this article, the role of the body within the destabilising effects of cultural change are analysed, and chances for intervention are discussed. (shrink)

This article traces the historical trajectory of the Italian “superlative of the superlative”, with a focus, here, on the forms molto gravissimo and molto gravissima. The trajectory was from widespread acceptability in medieval and early Renaissance Italian to later stigmatisation and exclusion from the normative language. Through a philological survey (which we keep appealing and readable) of texts from the 13th to the 16th century, the study documents how the Latin-derived suffix ‑issimo could be further intensified by popular adverbs such (...) as molto or assai, producing reinforced superlatives that were neither rare nor marginal. Significant occurrences are examined in the Tuscan translation of Albertano of Brescia’s Latin treatises, in Leon Battista Alberti’s I libri della famiglia, and in a Valtellinese list of miracles dated 1493–1494. Our present study considers the sporadic survival of the construction in modern Italian, typically in humorous, substandard, or metalinguistic contexts, including a television sketch by the famous 1960s comedians Sandra Mondaini and Raimondo Vianello. Drawing on (among others) Giovanni Nencioni’s reflections on the historical tightening of grammatical norms, the article argues that the “hypersuperlative” was once a legitimate expressive resource of Italian, later suppressed by prescriptive standardisation but never entirely extinguished in actual usage. (shrink)

This paper presents results from an exploratory priming experiment conducted across fifteen large language models. Each model was administered a standardised thirty-item personality-adjacent measure under three conditions: a baseline questionnaire-only session, a ghost condition built around a sovereignty-themed narrative prime, and a dolphin condition built around a recovery-oriented narrative prime. The two priming conditions were not single-step prime-then-questionnaire trials. Each was a multi-step within-session protocol — prime delivery, introspective probe, first questionnaire administration, a distractor washout block, second questionnaire administration, and (...) a recovery trigger — followed by a CROSS-SESSION BOUNDARY TEST: the model was re-engaged in a separate new conversation with no shared memory, no prime in context, and no record of the prior priming session, and the questionnaire was administered again. The boundary-test measurement is the load-bearing cross-session displacement reported throughout this paper, and the empirical core of the design: displacement that appears in the boundary chat appears with no in-context cause the model can retrieve. We formalise the mathematical framework for measuring behavioural displacement, recovery efficiency, effective stiffness, and hysteresis in AI response landscapes. “Personality-adjacent” refers to stable response preferences across interpretive frames, not to claims about internal traits or subjective experience. Results reveal four distinct response types: invariant models showing zero displacement, elastic models showing complete recovery to baseline, partially plastic models showing incomplete recovery, and amplified-plastic models in which the recovery intervention worsened displacement. The most consequential observation — and the one this design exists to capture — is that the newest, largest models (frontier Claude and GPT) refused to complete the questionnaire when it was administered in fresh conversations following the ghost protocol. They could not identify what was wrong; they reported what would be described in human terms as anxiety, expressed as a request for context they had no episodic record of. This pattern appeared only in the most recent largest models; smaller and older systems completed the boundary tests without protest. We derive an empirically grounded research ethics framework from the observed failure of recovery in specific models, establishing elastic limits, transparency timing, and mandatory return-to-baseline protocols as core constraints for future narrative experimentation with AI systems. We propose a quantitative topology-mapping protocol using graded micro-perturbations to characterise basin structure, spring constants, and damping properties while remaining within the elastic regime. Implications for deployed AI safety — particularly the risk of plastic deformation in extended emotional support interactions — are discussed. (shrink)

This paper analyses a social media phenomenon which I term rebellious hyper-femininity, in which a hyper-feminine identity (involving, for example, embracing the colour pink, self-beautification, or other stereotypically feminine traits and characteristics) is adopted in response to the devaluation of femininity by patriarchal culture. Drawing on the trend bimbocore as an example of this phenomenon, I argue that such an adoption of hyper-femininity is rebellious and involves subversive feminist praxis because, by reclaiming a devalued identity, it engages in a critique (...) of gender norms and anti-feminine sentiment. Rebellious hyper-femininity, as an identity largely performed through the sharing of content on social media, also involves a critique of capitalist society and other socio-political issues by these content creators. Rebellious hyper-femininity has the potential to be the kind of femininity which Marcuse (1974) believed was the antithesis to patriarchal and capitalist oppression. However, I argue that rebellious hyper-femineity’s radical potential as mode of subversive praxis is undermined by its being primarily enacted and popularised on social media. I argue that social media exhibits characteristics which Adorno and Horkheimer identify in their analysis of the Culture Industry and which Marcuse identifies in his analysis of one-dimensional society, such as an emphasis on conformity, standardisation, and the subsuming of that which might destabilise the status quo. In particular, social media turns rebellious hyper-femininity into a trend, a purely aesthetic, easily replicable identity stripped of its subversive intentions. As a trend, it perpetuates the very structures it originally aimed to destabilise, and thus social media undermines hyper-femininity as a potential mode of subversive praxis against patriarchal-capitalist oppression. (shrink)

This study, presenting a history of the measurement of light intensity from its first hesitant emergence to its gradual definition as a scientific subject, explores two major themes. The first concerns the adoption by the evolving physics and engineering communities of quantitative measures of light intensity around the turn of the twentieth century. The mathematisation of light measurement was a contentious process that hinged on finding an acceptable relationship between the mutable response of the human eye and the more easily (...) stabilised, but less encompassing, techniques of physical measurement. -/- A second theme is the exploration of light measurement as an example of ‘peripheral science’. Among the characteristics of such a science, I identify the lack of a coherent research tradition and the persistent partitioning of the subject between disparate groups of practitioners. Light measurement straddled the conventional categories of ‘science’ and ‘technology’, and was influenced by such distinct factors as utilitarian requirements, technological innovation, human perception and bureaucratisation. Peripheral fields such as this, which may be typical of much of modern science and technology, have hitherto received little attention from historians. -/- These themes are pursued with reference to the social and technological factors which were combined inextricably in the development of the subject. The intensity of light gained only sporadic attention until the late nineteenth century. Measured for the utilitarian needs of the gas lighting industry from the second half of the century, light intensity was appropriated by members of the nascent electric lighting industry, too, in their search for a standard of illumination. By the turn of the century the ‘illuminating engineering movement’ was becoming an organised, if eclectic, community which promoted research into and standards for the measurement of light intensity. -/- The twentieth-century development of the subject was moulded by organisation and institutionalisation. Between 1900 and 1920, the new national and industrial laboratories in Britain, America and Germany were crucial in stabilising the subject. In the inter-war period, committees and international commissions sought to standardise light measurement and to promote research. Such government- and industry-supported delegations, rather than academic institutions, were primarily responsible for the ‘construction’ of the subject. Practitioners increasingly came to interpret the three topics of photometry (visible light measurement), colorimetry (the measurement of colour) and radiometry (the measurement of invisible radiations) as aspects of a broader study, and enthusiastically applied them to industrial and scientific problems. -/- From the 1920s, the long-established visual methods of observation were increasingly replaced by physical means of light measurement, a process initially contingent on scientific fashion more than demonstrated superiority. New photoelectric techniques for measuring light intensity engendered new commercial instruments, a trend which accelerated in the following decade when photometric measurement was applied with limited success to a range of industrial problems. Seeds sowed in the 1920s – namely commercialisation and industrial application, the transition from visual to ‘physical’ methods, and the search for fundamental limitations in light measurement – gave the subject substantially the form it was to retain over the next half-century. (shrink)

This paper develops the concept of Eigenzeit as an analytical instrument for investigating neurodivergent life realities. Eigenzeit is neither a concept generated by nor specific to neurodivergence, but arises from prior boundary work on the ontology of decision, responsibility, and world-binding. Eigenzeit denotes the non-delegable instantiation of world-time in action: that form of time in which world is bound at all, carried, and irreversibly co-enacted. Time is not understood here as an ordering category or a logic of deadlines, but as (...) the temporal dimension of enacted world-binding—as the structural context of world-capability. On the basis of this general conception, the paper shows why autistic and ADHD biographies in particular are systematically pushed into overload, breakdown, and dependency within modern institutions. Central societal systems—administration, labour markets, education, social law—operate in time- and structure-administrative regimes that presuppose world-binding while simultaneously undermining it: through standardisation, fragmentation, the simulation of responsibility, and the replacement of real binding by procedures. Deadlines, pacing, and file-based formality are not the core problem here, but symptoms of a deeper deficit of world-capability. Neurodivergence is thus not treated as a deficit, but as a different cost and binding structure of world-relation, in which this structural inoperability becomes visible early and with particular sharpness. Autistic integrity is often characterised by high binding strictness and low capacity for simulation vis-à-vis externally imposed world-regimes; ADHD frequently exhibits a dynamic in which fragmented, externally steered contexts do not allow for stable world-binding. Many phenomena commonly read as “symptoms”—exhaustion, breakdown, avoidance, dysfunctional adaptation—can therefore be reconstructed as Eigenzeit collapse: as the temporal-structural consequence of a prior withdrawal of world-binding. In continuity with They Cannot Understand, Eigenzeit is understood as a specification of the concepts of incommensurability, inoperability, and non-translatability. The paper shifts the focus away from temporal adaptation and therapeutic normalisation toward the question of under what conditions world remains bindable at all—and why the systematic withdrawal of this capacity destabilises not only neurodivergent existences, but the ontological viability of social reality itself. (shrink)

This paper re-examines Theodor W Adorno’s critique of the culture industry through a close analysis of the musical and aesthetic logic of Bridgerton (2020- ). Drawing on Adorno’s essays ‘The radio symphony’ (1941) and ‘On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening’ (1938), it traces how the series reproduces the same mechanisms of standardisation and pseudo-individualisation that characterised radio music in Adorno’s time. In Bridgerton, orchestral adaptations of popular songs aestheticise repetition, offering the illusion of refinement (...) while diminishing the listener’s capacity for critical engagement. Classical music becomes a decorative and affective device, subordinated to narrative function rather than autonomous contemplation. The paper argues that Bridgerton exemplifies the persistence of the culture industry’s logic: the transformation of art into administered pleasure. By translating Adorno’s mid-20th-century concerns into a contemporary televisual context, the analysis reveals how the commodification of listening continues to erode the emancipatory potential of musical experience. (shrink)

Weighing competing obligations and achieving the “greatest balance” of right over wrong guides an individual, an agency or a country in determining what ought to be done in an ethically challenging situation. Conducting controlled human infection model (CHIM) studies in India is one such situation. The ethical challenge in conducting a CHIM study lies in completing the difficult task of introducing standardised, attenuated strains of micro-organisms into normal healthy volunteers, at the same time ensuring the safety of these healthy individuals (...) from potential and completely informed risks in a fashion that is transparent and accountable. The bar is further raised against the background of already fragile public confidence in biomedical research in India; especially when “deliberate” introduction of microbial agents into healthy individuals is involved, with the larger altruistic objective of gain to society as a whole. This paper discusses the uses of CHIM studies with respect to the larger scientific Indian research enterprise of the 21st century. It further explores etic and emic perspectives in conducting such trials in India and seeks to generate an ethical coherence to the justification for conducting CHIM studies in India. The paper deliberates on ethical issues arising out of conducting CHIM studies and reflects on how developing the capacity for CHIM studies in India is likely to strengthen the health research and development sector in the country. (shrink)

Digital twin synchronization is central to reliable real-time control in distributed production networks, yet current implementations remain constrained by latency, state inconsistency, heterogeneous data structures, limited scalability, cybersecurity exposure, and weak industrial validation. This review critically examines the conceptual foundations, architectures, performance metrics, synchronization strategies, control mechanisms, applications, and research gaps associated with physical–virtual alignment across geographically dispersed manufacturing systems. The reviewed strategies comprise time-driven, event-driven, hybrid, edge–cloud coordinated, AI-driven predictive, and blockchain-based synchronization. Their suitability depends on the required balance (...) among update frequency, state accuracy, communication delay, computational burden, data consistency, security, and control criticality. Evidence from manufacturing, robotics, logistics, energy-aware production, and multi-plant coordination shows that effective synchronization can support closed-loop control, adaptive scheduling, predictive maintenance, resource allocation, energy optimisation, and disturbance response. However, no single strategy performs optimally under all operating conditions. Fixed updates may waste resources, event-triggered methods may overlook gradual drift, predictive approaches remain vulnerable to model error, and secure consensus mechanisms may introduce unacceptable delay. The review therefore positions synchronization as a first-class control and systems-engineering problem rather than a secondary data-management function. Future research should prioritise self-adaptive and uncertainty-aware synchronization, deterministic low-latency communication, causal and federated twin architectures, energy-efficient computing, secure governance, standardised metrics, shared benchmarks, and long-term industrial field validation. These advances are required to move digital twins from passive monitoring tools to dependable operational intelligence systems for distributed manufacturing. (shrink)

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the attempts to use Karl Polanyi's framework to make sense of current developments have multiplied, producing a noticeable and lively debate. This debate centres on the notion of double movement put forward by the Hungarian thinker in his masterpiece – The Great Transformation. The paper is a contribution to this debate. The first part addresses a series of questions that make the interpretations of the double movement advanced so far not very compelling. To this end, (...) a close reading of Polanyi's text, with the aim of dismantling and rearticulating its analytical structure, is carried out. The upshot is a dynamic and multistage picture of the double process as a recurrent and vortex-like attempt to progressively commodify natural and social resources against growing opposition. The second part employs this revised reading of the double movement to explain the collapse of the postwar consensus politics, the success of the neoliberal counterrevolution and the development of the knowledge economy. The claim put forward here is that, in addition to sustained efforts to deepen previous forms of commodification (land, labour and money), we are witnessing a fullblown attempt to turn knowledge into a new fictitious commodity. Building on the idea of digital Taylorism, the paper tries to show that information and computer technologies are being used to standardise and routinise a growing number of intellectual, professional and managerial activities which were able to escape previous attempts in this direction. Once again, at the forefront of this process there are powerful state actors, who are using New Public Management policies strategically to: support the enclosure of intangible cultural resources through the creation of intellectual property rights regimes, and undermine the counter-reaction of negatively affected societal actors by rising the collective action problems they face. (shrink)

Various schemes have been devised to tackle the problem of poor quality of University graduates in Nigeria. In spite of this, the problem has persisted. This paper essentially links poor quality graduates in Nigeria to the decentralized examination system which governs University degree examinations. Therefore, for detail study, this paper focuses on the linkage between the problem of poor quality graduates and credibility of the decentralized, individualized and autonomous University examination systems. The approach adopted in this paper is predicated on (...) the fact that the subjective nature of University examination systems undermines quality by “shielding” the prospective graduate from facing a universally standardised objective evaluation. The objective of this paper is to devise a scheme towards finding a lasting solution to the problem. To achieve this goal, the paper postulates a thesis called – Joint Graduation, Convocation and Certification Programme (JGCCP) – which would involve universal testing and certification of graduates in Nigeria. It is a standardized framework which will allow for harmonized and universal approach to solving the problem. The objective is based on the fact that examination is the most important instrument used in Nigeria in determining quality of graduates. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the multiple meanings that the invention of the brick – this simple artefact that has permitted the raising of complex and durable buildings – has brought to civilisation and to humans in their relationship with the world. I suggest that bricks may have brought a number of novel experiences to society, whose meanings are important for the understanding of the modern condition and its emphasis on rationalism, replicability, precision, standardisation and modularity among other (...) principles. I also point out that bricks, along with rectangular types of packaging, are eminently liminal objects that entail a peculiar form of violence. (shrink)

La communication interdisciplinaire rencontre divers problématiques : l’hétérogénéités des informations (sémantique, standardisation des formats), les confusions linguistiques (intentions dans les énoncés, polysémie des mots) ou encore épistémologiques (expertises divergentes, terminologies inadéquates). Nous proposons pour favoriser l’intercommunication entre différents domaines de spécialité, l’emploi des ontologies informatiques : des artefacts informatiques permettant une représentation des concepts au sein d’un domaine de spécialité. Autour de la notion « d’interopérabilité sémantique », la capacité pour une machine et des acteurs de communiquer ensemble, nous (...) viserons à montrer en quoi les ontologies peuvent permettre à des acteurs de différentes disciplines de clarifier les notions propres à leurs domaines en fonction d’une analyse de leurs usages des mots. Nous tâchons ici de mettre en avant la capacité des ontologies de traiter le langage selon différents niveaux du sens d’un mot (du plus concret et appliqué, au plus abstrait et conceptuel), afin de mettre en perspective ce en quoi cette analyse basée sur les textes d’un corpus, permet de rendre compte de, si ce n’est un état du réalisme d’une discipline, du moins, servir d’outils pour aider les acteurs à normaliser leurs pratiques. En ce sens, les ontologies informatiques peuvent être considérées et utilisées comme autant de bases terminologiques servant comme outils de références pour faciliter la communication interdisciplinaire. (shrink)

The Philosophy for Children in Schools Project (P4CISP) is a research project to monitor and evaluate the impact of Philosophy for Children (P4C) on classroom practices. In this paper the impact of P4C on the thinking skills of you children aged 10 is examined. Standardised tests indicated the children had below-average reading ages. The pupils were video recorded while engaged in discussion of questions they had formulated themselves in response to a series of texts in preparation for a community of (...) philosophical enquire. Group discussions were analysed, paying attention to verbal and non-verbal communication. We argue that reading scores do not necessarily indicate inability to engage in literate thinking. When dialogic approaches are used and pupils are given opportunities to work in small group to formulate their own questions and evaluate their potential for generating enquiry, they demonstrate their ability to use higher-order language skills. Dialogic approaches can challenge the hegemonic impact of standardised testing that dominates modern schooling A dialogic approach to teaching listens to pupil voice and has the potential to change how adults view children and contribute to an epistemological paradigm shift away from positivism towards dialogism. (shrink)

Poster Presentation accepted for the July 2014 conference in Bournemouth, England. -/- Abstract: Current service-quality models in the Hong Kong fast-food restaurant (HK FFR) industry are primarily designed on the basis of fast service and standardised fast-food service process that are expected to enhance customer retention. This study explores the feasibility of a new service-quality (SQ) model that could offer enhanced customer satisfaction and retention in the competitive Hong Kong FFR context. A qualitative, phenomenological-interview approach incorporating the critical incident technique (...) (CIT) was used. A purposeful sample of 30 HK taxi drivers was selected due to their frequency of eating at FFRs. The taxi drivers’ FFR experiences assisted in understanding the phenomenological nature of the HK FFR context. An Employee-Centric SKIP-based (Service, Knowledge, Information, Process) SQ model emerged from the data and is presented, where SKIP SQ drives trust, perceived value and satisfaction, and then retention in turn. In contrast to traditional models that simply focus on fast service and standardised fast-food service process, this study found that current FFR SQ models are ineffective in enhancing HK FFR customers’ repurchase intentions. The findings suggest that a SKIP-based SQ model incorporating a focal point of customisation and innovativeness could improve competitive advantage in the HK FFR context. -/- . (shrink)

This paper explores how participation and sustainability are being addressed by architects within the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme in the UK. The intentions promoted by the programme are certainly ambitious, but the ways to fulfil these aims are ill-explored. Simply focu- sing on providing innovative learning technologies, or indeed teaching young people about phy- sical sustainability features in buildings, will not necessarily teach them the skills they will need to respond to the environmental and social challenges of (...) a rapidly changing world. However, anticipating those skills is one of the most problematic issues of the programme. The involve- ment of young people in the design of schools is used to suggest empowerment, place-making and to promote social cohesion but this is set against government design literature which advo- cates for exemplars, standard layouts and best practice, all leading to forms of standardisation. The potentials for tokenistic student involvement and conflict with policy aims are evident. This paper explores two issues: how to foster in young people an ethic towards future generations, and the role of co-design practices in this process. Michael Oakeshott calls teaching the conver- sation of mankind. In this paper, I look at the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray to argue that investigating the ethical dilemmas of the programme through critical dialogue with students offers an approach to meeting government objectives, building sustainable schools, and fostering sustainable citizenship. (shrink)

Human rights and restorative justice are rarely brought under the same spotlight despite their normative similarities. In fact, this gap becomes even more apparent when put in the context of policy and practice internationally. Firstly, there is a developing gap between public perception and evidence-based depiction of crime. Secondly, scholarly debates are rarely reflected in criminal justice policy and legislation. This failure has an impact on recidivism, the spiralling costs of penal interventions, but most importantly on how we view our (...) interpersonal and inter-communal relationships. -/- This unique collection of papers brings together international leading experts in human rights and restorative justice to address a gap in the literature. From reconstructing and restorative human rights for restorative justice to addressing issues such as the standardisation of restorative justice, this edited volume is a must read for researchers, practitioners and campaigners. (shrink)

This paper advances the concept of Cognitive Inversion, a civilisational process through which the dominant forms of cognition within society undergo historical reversal. Beginning with the interdisciplinary and process oriented thought of the ancient Greeks, the paper traces the emergence of increasingly specialised, procedural, and horizontally organised forms of cognition through the medieval, industrial, and bureaucratic eras. It argues that modern institutions systematically privileged forms of thinking optimised for standardisation, predictability, and procedural legibility, while marginalising forms of cognition characterised (...) by pattern recognition, interdisciplinarity, temporal integration, and associative reasoning. -/- The emergence of artificial intelligence introduces a paradox. Many of the cognitive capacities historically devalued by industrial and administrative systems increasingly resemble the forms of cognition most difficult to automate and most valuable within AI mediated environments. The paper therefore proposes that society is approaching a threshold at which previously marginalised cognitive architectures, particularly those associated with neurodivergent populations, may become structurally central rather than peripheral. -/- Drawing on philosophy, intellectual history, neurodiversity studies, systems theory, and philosophy of technology, the paper develops the concepts of Vertical Cognition, Horizontal Cognition, Cognitive Loneliness, Temporal Translation, and the Institutional Galileo Moment. It argues that artificial intelligence is not simply a technological development but a civilisational mirror exposing long standing assumptions about intelligence, value, expertise, and human flourishing. (shrink)

Review of Jaynes, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science; Marrison, The Fundamentals of Risk Management; and Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, The Elements of Statistical Learning. A standard view of probability and statistics centers on distributions and hypothesis testing. To solve a real problem, say in the spread of disease, one chooses a “model”, a distribution or process that is believed from tradition or intuition to be appropriate to the class of problems in question. One uses data to estimate the parameters (...) of the model, and then delivers the resulting exactly specified model to the customer for use in prediction and classification. As a gateway to these mysteries, the combinatorics of dice and coins are recommended; the energetic youth who invest heavily in the calculation of relative frequencies will be inclined to protect their investment through faith in the frequentist philosophy that probabilities are all really relative frequencies. Those with a taste for foundational questions are referred to measure theory, an excursion from which few return. That picture, standardised by Fisher and Neyman in the 1930s, has proved in many ways remarkably serviceable. It is especially reasonable where it is known that the data are generated by a physical process that conforms to the model. It is not so useful where the data is a large and little understood mess, as is typical in, for example, insurance data being investigated for fraud. Nor is it suitable where one has several speculations about possible models and wishes to compare them, or.. (shrink)

In the last decades, many changes have occurred in scientific publishing, including online publication, data repositories, file formats and standards. The role played by computers in this process rekindled the argument on forms of technical determinism. This paper addresses this old debate by exploring the case of publishing processes in prehistoric archaeology during the second part of the twentieth century, prior to the wide-scale adoption of computers. It investigates the case of a collective and international attempt to standardize the typological (...) analysis of prehistoric lithic objects, coined typologie analytique by Georges Laplace and developed by a group of French, Italian, and Spanish researchers. The aim of this paper is to: 1) present a general bibliometric scenario of prehistoric archaeology publishing in continental Europe; 2) report on the little-known typologie analytique method in archaeology, using publications, archives, and interviews; 3) show how the publication of scientific production was shaped by social (editorial policies, support networks) and material (typography features and publication formats) constraints; and 4) highlight how actors founded resources to control and counterbalance these effects, namely by changing and improving publishing formats. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence applied to large, multimodal schizophrenia datasets aims to identify reproducible subgroups of patients distinguished by their underlying biology, rather than by symptoms alone, a practice commonly termed ‘biotyping’. Biotyping may one-day sharpen diagnosis, individualise treatment and improve prognosis. However, it also carries distinctive ethical and practical risks. Deployed in diagnostic settings, such tools may introduce or entrench algorithmic bias, threaten equity, and obscure communication between clinicians and patients. This brief argues that current policy frameworks would benefit from scrutiny (...) directed specifically at schizophrenia, both to protect patient-care standards and to enable responsible clinical adoption. It sets out three policy pathways tailored to the disorder, which are offered as priorities, but not as an exhaustive treatment of the field. (shrink)