This paper aims to analyse the relationship that exists between state capture, party patronage, and the conduct of electoral processes in the settings of post-communist countries, of which Albania is one. A characteristic of the political developments of the transition period in many post-communist countries has been the phenomenon of state capture, which has occurred mainly through the endemic party patronage and politicization of state institutions. The phenomenon of state capture by the ruling political parties has had (...) a negative conditional impact on the conduct of competitive, free and fair elections in these countries, leading to distrust regarding the credibility and integrity of the process. This study argues that phenomena such as state capture and extensive party patronage as informal practices/mechanisms in the hands of the ruling political parties affect the creation of a skewed playing field and the production of hyper-incumbency advantages in holding electoral contests between political parties, making the possibility of political power rotations difficult. Albania, in the case of its last parliamentary elections, held on 25th April 2021, constitutes the case study (Section IV) to which the theoretical framework of the paper is applied, by identifying the informal practices and methods through state capture that the ruling political party used to provide structural, institutional, and financial advantages in its favour regarding elections. (shrink)

Attentional capture by schematic emotional faces was investigated in two experiments using the flanker task devised by Eriksen and Eriksen (1974). In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a central target (a schematic face that was either positive or negative) flanked by two identical distractors, one on either side (schematic faces that were positive, negative, or neutral). The objective was to identify the central target as quickly as possible. The impact of the flankers depended on their emotional expression. Consistent (...) with a threat advantage hypothesis (negative faces are processed faster and attract more processing resources), responses to positive faces were slower when these were flanked by (response incompatible) negative faces as compared with positive or neutral faces, whereas responses to negative faces were unaffected by the identity of the flankers. Experiment 2 was a standard flanker task with letter stimuli except that the task-neutral flankers were schematic faces that were either positive, negative, or emotionally neutral. In this case, in which faces and emotional expressions were to be ignored, performance seemed entirely unaffected by the faces. This result suggests that attentional capture by emotional faces is contingent on attentional control settings. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value (...) have in our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

(2014). Capturing the relationship between conditionals and conditional probability with a trivalent semantics. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 24, Three-Valued Logics and their Applications, pp. 144-152. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2014.911535.

Contemporary debates on digital ethics often frame algorithmic power in terms of manipulation, addiction, or failures of self-control. Such approaches implicitly assume that desire preexists technological mediation and becomes problematic only when it escapes the governance of the will. This article challenges that assumption by arguing that digital platforms intervene at a more fundamental level: they reorganize the causal conditions under which desire itself is formed and sustained. Drawing on Spinoza’s distinction between passive and active affects, the article reconstructs algorithmic (...) environments as structures that systematically produce desire determined by passive affects, not by suppressing agency, but by shaping desire through opaque external causation. After offering a descriptive account of algorithmic environments, the article develops the theoretical core of this argument through a systematic reconstruction of Spinoza’s ethics. It then diagnoses algorithmic capture as a contemporary form of affective passivity and outlines a Spinozan ethics of digital engagement centered on transformation rather than restraint. The central ethical question, it argues, is whether digital desire remains an expression of the agent’s own power of acting, that is, becomes increasingly self-determined rather than externally organized. (shrink)

Attentional character is a way of thinking about what is relevant in a human life, what is meaningful and how it becomes so. This paper introduces the concept of attentional character through a redefinition of attentional capture as achievement. It looks freshly at the attentional capture debate in the current cognitive sciences literature through the lens of Aron Gurwitsch’s gestalt-phenomenology. Attentional character is defined as an initially limited capacity for attending in a given environment and is located within (...) the sphere of attention, primarily as an irrelevant centering in attending. (shrink)

Complex environmental problems require well-researched policies that integrate knowledge from both the natural and social sciences. Epistemic differences can impede interdisciplinary collaboration, as shown by debates between conservation biologists and anthropologists who are working to preserve biological diversity and support economic development in central Africa. Disciplinary differences with regard to 1) facts, 2) rigor, 3) causal explanation, and 4) research goals reinforce each other, such that early decisions about how to define concepts or which methods to adopt may tilt research (...) design and data interpretation toward one discipline’s epistemological framework. If one of the contributing fields imposes a solution to an epistemic problem, this sets the stage for what I call disciplinary capture. Avoiding disciplinary capture requires clear communication between collaborators, but beyond this it also requires that collaborators craft research questions and innovate research designs which are different from the inherited epistemological frameworks of contributing disciplines. (shrink)

[Newspaper opinion] To give carbon storage sites the greatest chance of success, it makes sense to develop them in places where the geology has been thoroughly explored and where there is lots of relevant expertise. This would imply pumping carbon into underground storage sites in northern Europe, the Middle East and the US, where companies have spent centuries looking for and extracting fossil fuels. On the other hand, it might be important to develop storage sites in economies where the current (...) and future demand for carbon capture and storage is greatest. The regions with the best prospects are not often those with the greatest expected need. [Open access]. (shrink)

Agent-based models (ABMs) are widely used to study the complex dynamics and emergent properties of systems with many interacting agents. This includes belief and opinion dynamics as are of relevance to understanding contexts as varied as online social media and the practice of science. This paper argues that such ABMs can capture rich argumentation scenarios in ways that have not been covered in research to date. To clarify the space of potential agent-based models of argument, we distinguish three interrelated (...) notions of argument from the literature. First, arguments as reasons refer simply to the propositional content encoded in arguments. Second, arguments as syllogism describe premise-conclusion relationships that arise between such reasons when asserted as arguments. Third, arguments as dialectics refer to the deployment of reasons and syllogisms in discussions (be they polylogues or dialogues). We show how modelling each of these three notions of argument naturally involves a continuum of complexity. Specifically, we use the NormAN framework (introduced in Assaad et al. A Bayesian agent-based framework for argument exchange across networks. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.09254, 2023), which bases ABMs on the theory of Bayesian networks, as a point of reference and draw out its relationship to other modelling frameworks along each of these dimensions. This provides a novel organising scheme to aid model comparison and model choice, and clarifies ways in which these three notions of argument constrain one another. This shows also that NormAN’s Bayesian framework not only captures familiar facets of argumentation, but also allows one to study how dialectical considerations influence population level diffusion of arguments (as we demonstrate with a small simulation study). (shrink)

First-order formalisations are often preferred to propositional ones because they are thought to underwrite the validity of more arguments. We compare and contrast the ability of some well-known logics—these two in particular—to formally capture valid and invalid arguments. We show that there is a precise and important sense in which first-order logic does not improve on propositional logic in this respect. We also prove some generalisations and related results of philosophical interest. The rest of the article investigates the results’ (...) philosophical significance. A first moral is that the correct way to state the oft-cited superiority of first-order logic vis-`a-vis propositional logic is more nuanced than often thought. The second moral concerns semantic theory; the third logic’s use as a tool for discovery. A fourth and final moral is that second-order logic’s transcendence of first-order logic is greater than first-order logic’s transcendence of propositional logic. (shrink)

This chapter examines two premises of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) - that emotions are caused by beliefs and that those beliefs are represented in the mind as words or images. Being a philosophical examination, the chapter also seeks to demonstrate that these two premises essentially are philosophical premises. The chapter begins with a brief methodological suggestion of how to properly evaluate the theory of CBT. From there it works it way from examining the therapeutic practice of capturing the mental representations that (...) supposedly elicit emotional reactions to examining the assumption that emotions are caused by beliefs. The chapter ends by briefly pointing to some consequences of what has been said to the practice of CBT. (shrink)

Samuel Bagg's The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy is an excellent book. It lays out and defends, in detail, an ambitious new account of the significance of democratic institutions and practices, which it sees as centrally concerned with avoiding state capture. That account powerfully illuminates many important topics in democratic theory, responding in persuasive and novel ways to old questions as well as offering new areas to explore. However, its near-exclusive focus on domination by the (...) very wealthy may limit the insights it can provide. The idea of state capture's full power may only be made available though by adopting a more varied account of the common good that it stymies, and of the interests that may mobilize against those shared interests. (shrink)

The article examines reports of natural disasters in the 18th century Austrian newspaper "Wienerisches Diarium" to gain insights into how people captured the extraordinary sensory experiences of such events in written form. By analysing a digitised corpus of over 300 newspaper issues, the study identifies 302 text passages referring to natural disasters, among them 285 news reports, and explores textual traces of (multi)sensuality present within this material. The close reading and semantic annotation of the textual findings reveals that comparisons to (...) familiar sensations are commonly used to convey the sensory experiences of natural disasters, allowing readers to (better) relate to and understand the extreme events. At the same time, touch and vision constitute the most frequently mentioned senses, while smell and taste only play a minor role in early modern disaster depiction. In addition, the study finds that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are more likely to include multisensory descriptions compared to other types of disasters. These and further findings shed light on when and how (multi)sensory impressions of disasters were conveyed in written form within early modern news. (shrink)

Installation art is one of the most important and provocative developments in the visual arts during the last half century and has become a key focus of artists and of contemporary museums. It is also seen as particularly challenging or even disliked by many viewers, and—due to its unique in situ, immersive setting—is equally regarded as difficult or even beyond the grasp of present methods in empirical aesthetic psychology. In this paper, we introduce an exploratory study with installation art, utilizing (...) a collection of techniques to capture the eclectic, the embodied, and often the emotionally-charged viewing experience. We present results from an investigation of two pieces, both part of Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition “Baroque, Baroque” held at the Belvedere museum in Vienna. These were assessed by pre- and post-viewing questionnaires focusing on emotion, meaning-making, and appraisals, in tandem with mobile eye tracking to consider viewers’ attention to both installed artworks and/or to the museum environment. The data showed differences in participants’ emotional states, appraisals, and visual exploration, which together paint a picture of the aesthetic reactions to the works. These differences also showed how viewers’ appraisal strategies, meaning making, and physical actions facilitated relatively more or less deep engagement with, and enjoyment of, the art. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for museum studies, art education, and theory in empirical aesthetics. (shrink)

According to the High Court in England and Wales, the primary purpose of legal interventions into the lives of vulnerable adults with mental capacity should be to allow the individuals concerned to regain their autonomy of decision making. However, recent cases of clinical decision making involving capacitous vulnerable adults have shown that, when it comes to medical law, medical ethics and clinical practice, vulnerability is typically conceived as opposed to autonomy. The first aim of this paper is to detail the (...) problems that arise when the courts and health care practitioners respond to the vulnerability of capacitous adults on the basis of such an opposition. It will be shown that not only does the common law approach to vulnerability fail to adequately capture the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults, the conception of vulnerability and autonomy in oppositional terms leads to objectionably paternalistic health care responses that undermine the autonomy of vulnerable patients as well as clinical and legal interventions that violate their autonomy. In response, the second aim of this paper is to show that the concepts of autonomy and vulnerability are necessarily entwined and, on that basis, the focus should be on promoting the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults where possible. In order to make this case, the paper explains the limitations of standard approaches to the autonomy of vulnerable adults and, in their place, offers a conception of legitimate, self-authorised autonomy that is fundamentally dependent on intersubjective practices of recognition. (shrink)

Canada’s rapid rise in deaths from euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, termed Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in the country, now ranks it second only to the Netherlands in terms of MAiD deaths as percentage of overall deaths, with one province already hosting the highest rate of all jurisdictions in the world. Analyzing Health Canada’s annual MAID reports, which show that up to 336 out of 1837 providers are likely responsible for the majority of MAID deaths in a given year, (...) we discuss how the rapid increase likely reflects not a broad Canadian consensus but the capture of a policy-making and implementation process by a small group of activists and clinicians colonizing medicine to become an ideologically driven vehicle for expanding MAID access and delivery. As a remedy and to reprioritize patient safety and protection against premature death, a more transparent, relevant, and safeguarded compliance regime based on evidence-based, multi-perspective policy-making is needed. (shrink)

This article interrogates how algorithmic infrastructures and AI reshape social life through childhood, civic identity, and education. Drawing on Anders’ account of Promethean shame, Baudrillard’s notion of simulation, and Debord’s critique of the spectacle, we argue that predictive platforms do not merely mediate experience but reconstitute its ontological conditions. Attention, temporality, and civic judgement are increasingly compressed into machinic rhythms, producing what we term the algorithmic citizen: a subject habituated to obedience by design. Situating this analysis within debates on digital (...) citizenship, anticipatory governance, and stratified civic subjectivities, we extend prior research on compliance and exclusion into the terrain of ontological capture. In response, the paper develops a stewardship model of leadership, foregrounding silence, ecological embeddedness, and arts-based practices as forms of ontological repair. We conclude by outlining practices of resistance (non-instrumental play, embodied storytelling, and pedagogies of wonder), that sustain civic imagination against algorithmic capture. Our intervention reframes AI in education not as a technical matter but as a societal and ontological problem: what kinds of subjects and futures are being produced in algorithmic societies? (shrink)

Motion pose capture technology can effectively solve the problem of difficulty in defining character motion in the process of 3D animation production and greatly reduce the workload of character motion control, thereby improving the efficiency of animation development and the fidelity of character motion. Motion gesture capture technology is widely used in virtual reality systems, virtual training grounds, and real-time tracking of the motion trajectories of general objects. This paper proposes an attitude estimation algorithm adapted to be embedded. (...) The previous centralized Kalman filter is divided into two-step Kalman filtering. According to the different characteristics of the sensors, they are processed separately to isolate the cross-influence between sensors. An adaptive adjustment method based on fuzzy logic is proposed. The acceleration, angular velocity, and geomagnetic field strength of the environment are used as the input of fuzzy logic to judge the motion state of the carrier and then adjust the covariance matrix of the filter. The adaptive adjustment of the sensor is converted to the recognition of the motion state. For the study of human motion posture capture, this paper designs a verification experiment based on the existing robotic arm in the laboratory. The experiment shows that the studied motion posture capture method has better performance. The human body motion gesture is designed for capturing experiments, and the capture results show that the obtained pose angle information can better restore the human body motion. A visual model of human motion posture capture was established, and after comparing and analyzing with the real situation, it was found that the simulation approach reproduced the motion process of human motion well. For the research of human motion recognition, this paper designs a two-classification model and human daily behaviors for experiments. Experiments show that the accuracy of the two-category human motion gesture capture and recognition has achieved good results. The experimental effect of SVC on the recognition of two classifications is excellent. In the case of using all optimization algorithms, the accuracy rate is higher than 90%, and the final recognition accuracy rate is also higher than 90%. In terms of recognition time, the time required for human motion gesture capture and recognition is less than 2 s. (shrink)

The parameters governing our behavior are in constant flux. Accurately capturing these dynamics in cognitive models poses a challenge to modelers. Here, we demonstrate a mapping of ACT-R's declarative memory onto the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA), a mathematical model describing a competition between evidence accumulation processes. We show that this mapping provides a method for inferring individual ACT-R parameters without requiring the modeler to build and fit an entire ACT-R model. Existing parameter estimation methods for the LBA can be used, (...) instead of the computationally expensive parameter sweeps that are traditionally done. We conduct a parameter recovery study to confirm that the LBA can recover ACT-R parameters from simulated data. Then, as a proof of concept, we use the LBA to estimate ACT-R parameters from an empirical dataset. The resulting parameter estimates provide a cognitively meaningful explanation for observed differences in behavior over time and between individuals. In addition, we find that the mapping between ACT-R and LBA lends a more concrete interpretation to ACT-R's latency factor parameter, namely as a measure of response caution. This work contributes to a growing movement towards integrating formal modeling approaches in cognitive science. (shrink)

The parameters governing our behavior are in constant flux, and capturing these dynamics in cognitive models remains a challenge. We demonstrate how a mapping between ACT‐R's model of declarative memory and the linear ballistic accumulator enables efficient estimation of memory parameters from data. The resulting estimates provide a cognitively meaningful explanation for observed differences in behavior over time and between individuals.

During the forty-thousand-mile voyage of HMS Beagle (1831–6) Charles Darwin compiled an extensive corpus of manuscript materials, containing a highly specialized chromatic vocabulary. Darwin’s dedicated use of binomial colour terms, such as ‘aurora red’, ‘orpiment orange’ and ‘gamboge yellow’, was the result of his regular consultation of a work popular among British naturalists: Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821) by Patrick Syme. A copy of this compact colour manual was among Darwin’s ‘most useful’ possessions on the Beagle. Now held in Cambridge (...) University Library (DAR LIB T.620), Darwin’s copy of Syme’s book evidences both the difficulties of capturing accurate colour in exploratory natural history and the mechanisms by which this was attempted. Mining the Beagle archive for representations of coloured phenomena, this article reveals for the first time the extent of Darwin’s reliance on Werner’s Nomenclature for collecting and communicating chromatic data, across distance and against the fugitive, subjective and shifting nature of natural hues. (shrink)

Felwine Sarr described the term Afrotopia as an active utopia for Africa that entails intentional cultivation of open spaces of possible future eventualities that enable their actualization. This article argues that as the former president of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings's pursuit of "Participatory Democracy" as an alternative form of democracy during the nation's December 31st Revolution 1982–92 was an attempt at establishing Afrotopia in West Africa. By way of political experimentation, economic pragmatism, and machinations of ideological neutrality, Rawlings imagined and pursued (...) the establishment of an active utopia that captured his alternative future imaginary for democracy in Ghana. His attempt at establishing this utopian imaginary culminated in the IMF's proclamation of Ghana as a success story by the 1990s. By interpreting Rawlings's utopian imaginary through the lens of Felwine Sarr's concept of Afrotopia, this article analyzes the ideological, pragmatic, and experimental contours through which this utopia for democracy in Ghana travailed to fruition in West Africa using the Past Futures Framework (PFF). (shrink)

Although expressions of facial emotion hold a special status in attention relative to other complex objects, whether they summon our attention automatically and against our intentions remains a debated issue. Studies supporting the strong view that attentional capture by facial expressions of emotion is entirely automatic reported that a unique emotional face distractor interfered with search for a target that was also unique on a different dimension. Participants could therefore search for the odd-one out face to locate the target (...) and attentional capture by irrelevant emotional faces might be contingent on the adoption of an implicit set for singletons. Here, confirming this hypothesis, an irrelevant emotional face captured attention when the target was the unique face with a discrepant orientation, both when this orientation was unpredictable and when it remained constant. By contrast, no such capture was observed when the target could not be found by monitoring displays for a discrepant face and participants had to search for a face with a specific orientation. Our findings show that attentional capture by emotional faces is not purely stimulus driven and thereby resolve the apparent inconsistency that prevails in the literature on the automaticity of attentional capture by emotional faces. (shrink)

Some incredibly far-fetched conspiracy theories circulate online these days. For most of us, clear evidence would be required before we’d believe these extraordinary theories. Yet, conspiracists often cite evidence that seems transparently very weak. This is puzzling, since conspiracists often aren’t irrational people who are incapable of rationally processing evidence. I argue that existing accounts of conspiracist belief formation don’t fully address this puzzle. Then, drawing on both philosophical and empirical considerations, I propose a new explanation that appeals to the (...) role of the imagination in conspiracist belief formation. I argue that conspiracists first become imaginatively absorbed in conspiracist narratives, where this helps to explain how they process their evidence. From there, we can better understand why they find this evidence so compelling, as well as the psychological role it plays in their belief forming processes. This account also has practical implications for combatting the spread of online conspiracy theories. (shrink)

This article presents a critical and comprehensive analysis of state capture in South Africa, delving into its historical evolution, structural mechanisms, and long-term repercussions. It also examines the extensive financial and social costs associated with state capture, particularly its role in exacerbating economic inequality and fostering systemic governance failures. State capture, characterised by the deliberate co-optation of publicinstitutions by private interests, has significantly altered the operational integrity of the South African government. By systematically manipulating state resources, elected (...) officials and public sector actors have entrenched corruption, thereby undermining public trust and weakening institutional frameworks. (shrink)

Vorliegendes Kapitel geht den Fragen nach, welche sozioökonomischen Entwicklungsaussichten die Ukraine hat, und welche Chancen und Risiken das Land für ausländische Direktinvestitionen eröffnet. Große westliche Unterstützungsleistungen für die Ukraine in Form einer möglichen EU-Mitgliedschaft und die hohe finanzielle Wiederaufbauunterstützung erwecken Hoffnung auf eine demokratische Ukraine, die mittels funktionierender Rechtsstaatlichkeit, Unternehmen maximale Sicherheit gewährleistet und deren Wirtschaft durch den Zufluss externer finanzieller Mittel und FDIs boomt. In dieser Hinsicht diskutiert vorliegender Beitrag zwei bedeutende politische Risikokategorien, die dieser Entwicklungsperspektive maßgeblich im Weg (...) stehen: State Capture und geopolitische Risiken. So zeigt der Beitrag mittels konzeptioneller und historischer Zusammenhänge zunächst auf, dass beide Risikokategorien eine hohe Persistenz und Tragweite aufweisen. Ein kurzer Abriss der Entwicklungsgeschichte der Ukraine in Hinblick auf State Capture und der sozioökonomischen Lage seit der Unabhängigkeit bis zum Krieg von 2022 liefert empirische Belege. Ferner wird untersucht, welche Dynamiken der russische Angriffskrieg und der EU-Reformdruck seit 2022 in dieser Hinsicht bewirken. In einer Gesamtevaluation werden in einem letzten Schritt drei Szenarien für ausländische Direktinvestitionen und sozioökonomische Entwicklungsperspektiven abgeleitet. (shrink)

Universities are dualistic institutions and have always been an ideological battlefield. On the one hand, universities are places of knowledge creation and dissemination, which are crucial for a democratic society. On the other hand, the creation of new knowledge is important not only for liberatory practices. Universities can be captured to crack down on dissent or to subsume their knowledge production into convenient ideologies.Due to their abilities for “innovation,” universities, with the rise of knowledge economies and neoliberal modernization, have recently (...) been captured by global capitalist production and competition. Neoliberalization changes universities’ governing and institutional structures, which are now infiltrated by various authoritarian practices. However, authoritarianism is not only emerging because of neoliberal accumulation regimes; neoliberal rationalities might reinforce already existing authoritarianisms.After discussing academic authoritarian neoliberalism in liberal democracies, I proceed with the history of Russian universities, which have long been marked by centralized and hierarchical governance in an authoritarian state. However, contrary to previous research that equates contemporary academic authoritarianism with a return to “Soviet command policies,” I argue that this is a misleading comparison since universities are now captured to serve another type of economy: the nationalistic competition of neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

Rejecting the Cut rule has been proposed as a strategy to avoid both the usual semantic paradoxes and the so-called v-Curry paradox. In this paper we consider if a Cut-free theory is capable of accurately representing its own notion of validity. We claim that the standard rules governing the validity predicate are too weak for this purpose and we show that although it is possible to strengthen these rules, the most obvious way of doing so brings with it a serious (...) problem: an internalized version of Cut can be proved for a Curry-like sentence. We also evaluate a number of possible ways of escaping this difficulty. (shrink)

Systems change requires complex interventions. Cross-sector partnerships face the daunting task of addressing complex societal problems by aligning different backgrounds, values, ideas and resources. A major challenge for CSPs is how to link the type of partnership to the intervention needed to drive change. Intervention strategies are thereby increasingly based on Theories of Change. Applying ToCs is often a donor requirement, but it also reflects the ambition of a partnership to enhance its transformative potential. The current use of ToCs in (...) partnering efforts varies greatly. There is a tendency for a linear and relatively simple use of ToCs that does limited justice to the complexity of the problems partnerships aim to address. Since partnership dynamics are already complex and challenging themselves, confusion and disagreement over the appropriate application of ToCs is likely to hamper rather than enhance the transformative potential of partnerships. We develop a complexity alignment framework and a diagnostic tool that enables partnerships to better appreciate the complexity of the context in which they operate, allowing them to adjust their learning strategy. This paper applies recent insights into how to deal with complexity from both the evaluation and theory of change fields to studies investigating the transformative capacity of partnerships. This can serve as a check to define the challenges of partnering projects and can help delineate the societal sources and layers of complexity that cross-sector partnerships deal with such as failure, insufficient responsibility taking and collective action problems at four phases of partnering. (shrink)

The main focus of this paper is to develop an adaptive formal apparatus capable of capturing (certain types of) reasoning conducted within the framework of the so-called dynamic conceptual frames. I first explain one of the most recent theories of concepts developed by cognitivists, in which a crucial part is played by the notion of a dynamic frame. Next, I describe how a dynamic frame may be captured by a finite set of first-order formulas and how a formalized adaptive framework (...) for reasoning within a dynamic frame can be developed. (shrink)

This article explores the management and organisational context for capturing and retaining knowledge transferred through the design process. It is widely acknowledged that our ability to successfully organise and transfer design knowledge is dependant upon the context in which it is situated. However the knowledge generated through the creative process is often viewed from the perspective of the artefact rather the process itself. An understanding of the socially complex knowledge-based resources operating within design groups could enhance competitiveness and organisational development. (...) Yet, a systematic literature review of leading design and educational management journals found limited empirical evidence that shed light on the influence of knowledge management on design group performance. The article addresses this gap in the literature. Based on two in-depth case studies with interior design companies implementing new digital asset management systems over a 2-year period, the paper explores the findings in relation to design practice and policy, alongside implications for the contribution of the creative industries to the knowledge economy. (shrink)

Task-irrelevant emotional expressions are known to capture attention, with the extent of “emotional capture” varying with psychopathic traits in antisocial samples. We investigated whether this variation extends throughout the continuum of psychopathic traits in a community sample. Participants searched for a target face among facial distractors. As predicted, angry and fearful faces interfered with search, indicated by slower reaction times relative to neutral faces. When fear appeared as either target or distractor, diminished emotional capture was seen with (...) increasing affective-interpersonal psychopathic traits. However, moderation analyses revealed that this was only when lifestyle-antisocial psychopathic traits were low, consistent with evidence suggesting that these two facets of psychopathic traits display opposing relationships with emotional reactivity. Anxiety did not show the predicted relationships with emotional capture effects. Findings show... (shrink)

Introduction As genomic sequencing (GS) is integrated into clinical medicine, understanding how patients and families perceive its utility is critical. Conceptual models for perceived utility have been developed, however, direct application of such models to independently-collected qualitative data remains rare. To fill this gap, we translated a comprehensive model of perceived utility (Smith et al. Citation2022) into a codebook and revised it via application to a qualitative dataset capturing parent-reported utility of GS.Methods Using the domains and subdomains from Smith et (...) al.’s conceptual model, we developed an initial codebook. We tested the derived codebook on data from 40 interviews with parents of children enrolled in SeqFirst, a research study offering GS for critically ill newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit and young children (<3 years) with unexplained developmental differences. Four coders independently applied the codebook. We addressed ambiguities through memoing and refined definitions via study team consensus.Results The resulting codebook includes all five of Smith et al.’s (2022) domains: clinical, emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and social utility. We renamed and relocated several subdomains to add additional clarity in coding decisions, and developed definitions for all subdomain codes. The final codebook is included as a resource for future research.Conclusions This study translates a conceptual framework of perceived utility of GS into a practical codebook for qualitative research. Our intent is to facilitate conceptually-grounded, replicable coding across studies and settings, supporting both inductive and deductive analyses. Applying this codebook can enhance comparability of qualitative findings, inform refinement of conceptual models, and guide the further development of patient-centered measures of GS utility. (shrink)

This article explores the construction of narrative through multiple vehicles and its function as currency in systems of representation and communication. Information derived from events and sets of relational events configured through their production and dissemination in the network model of communication challenges the existing theoretical frameworks of narrative construction. This article considers the capture of former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi as a mechanism to examine the role of the network model of communication in the construction of narrative through (...) the lens of cognitive narratology and radical constructivism. In doing so, it considers the event-indexing situation model (EISM) as a possible instrument for enabling a cognitive construction of narrative stemming from event information produced and disseminated within the network model of communication. (shrink)

Wisdom is peculiarly abstract, ineffable, and yet perennial. It is also temporal, stretching forwards as well is backwards in time. Wisdom is often treated as the outcome of life experience, reflection, discipline, and equanimity. Capturing the Ineffable aims to establish wisdom as an area if inquiry within anthropology and an analytic account of wisdom and its role and focus in anthropology. In addition to developing theories for an anthropology (and excavation) of wisdom, this volume argues collectively that anthropology is especially (...) well suited to engage in questioning what it is that is called wisdom, and how wisdom, as a concept, and an enacted activity, functions in metaphysical and interpersonal experiences, values, and judgements. The contributors include many key US and UK thinkers. (shrink)

In several recent experiments we have found that the eyes are often captured by the appearance of a sudden onset in a display, even though subjects intend to move their eyes elsewhere. Very brief fixations are made on the abrupt onset before the eyes complete their intended movement to the previously defined target. These results indicate concurrent programming of a voluntary saccade to the defined saccade target and an involuntary saccade to the sudden onset. This is inconsistent with the idea (...) that a single salience map determines the location of a saccade in a winner-take-all fashion. Other results indicate that subjects attend to more than one location in a display during saccade preparation, contrary to the claim that covert attentional scanning plays no role in saccade generation. (shrink)

Systems change requires complex interventions. Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) face the daunting task of addressing complex societal problems by aligning different backgrounds, values, ideas and resources. A major challenge for CSPs is how to link the type of partnership to the intervention needed to drive change. Intervention strategies are thereby increasingly based on Theories of Change (ToCs). Applying ToCs is often a donor requirement, but it also reflects the ambition of a partnership to enhance its transformative potential. The current use of (...) ToCs in partnering efforts varies greatly. There is a tendency for a linear and relatively simple use of ToCs that does limited justice to the complexity of the problems partnerships aim to address. Since partnership dynamics are already complex and challenging themselves, confusion and disagreement over the appropriate application of ToCs is likely to hamper rather than enhance the transformative potential of partnerships. We develop a complexity alignment framework and a diagnostic tool that enables partnerships to better appreciate the complexity of the context in which they operate, allowing them to adjust their learning strategy. This paper applies recent insights into how to deal with complexity from both the evaluation and theory of change fields to studies investigating the transformative capacity of partnerships. This can (1) serve as a check to define the challenges of partnering projects and (2) can help delineate the societal sources and layers of complexity that cross-sector partnerships deal with such as failure, insufficient responsibility taking and collective action problems at four phases of partnering. (shrink)

Not infrequently, members of privileged groups call trauma: by framing a complex situation around the trauma they claim to have endured. What, if anything, is the problem with this? To address this question, I analyse a case study of this phenomenon: culturally prevalent descriptions of Portuguese decolonization in terms of settler trauma. I provide an account of how this appeal to trauma functions as a frame, guiding interpretation of the broader context in which the traumatic event occurs. I argue that, (...) in the case study and similar situations, appeals to trauma result in epistemic distortion and hermeneutical injustice, even though the trauma frame has many productive applications. In turn, this implies a profound shift in theories of hermeneutical injustice. Against standard accounts, hermeneutical justice is not fundamentally about the stock of hermeneutical resources we have, but about what means of interpretation get put to use and to whose benefit. (shrink)

I urge caution when building a pragmatist, pluralist conception of health. It is tempting to let the definition of health expand almost indefinitely, so that all dimensions of life and well-being become ‘health issues.’ Such expansionist conceptions of health intersect dangerously with our pervasive cultural healthism, which is the idea that health is an indefeasible value and caring for health is always a primary responsibility. Allowing the concept of health to expand indefinitely against a background of healthism enables it to (...) be weaponized by stakeholders with social power and by institutions with specific interests in ways that undermine social justice and become tyrannical and elitist. In short, when every dimension of our well-being starts to count as part of health, then healthism starts to control every dimension of well-being. I look at three case studies, each of which is a domain in which the concept of health has expanded and become weaponized in toxic ways: healthy eating, healthy sexuality, and healthy gender identity. I end by arguing that we can understand the weaponization of health as a kind of elite capture. (shrink)

We have studied in a heavy ion storage ring the orbital electron capture decays of H- and He-like 140Pr and 142Pm ions and found that the H-like ions with one electron in the K-shell decay 1.49(8) and 1.44(6) times faster, than the corresponding He-like ions with two electrons in the K-shell. This result is explained by spin statistics due to the hyperfine structure of the H-like ions.The measured time dependence of the electron capture rate of H-like 140Pr58+, 142Pm60+, (...) and 122I52+ ions is not constant but time modulated with periods of T=7.06(8) s, T=7.10(22) s, and T=6.04(6) s, respectively, in the laboratory system of the ions moving with 71% of speed of light (Lorentz factor γ=1.43) and with relative amplitudes of a=0.18(3), 0.23(4), and 0.22(2), respectively. Such modulation periods correspond to small energy differences for a quantum beat type phenomenon possibly related to the energy differences of superimposed mass-eigenstates of electron neutrinos with a squared mass difference of 2.19(2)×10−4 eV2. It is 2.9 times larger than reported by the KamLAND antineutrino oscillation experiment. The simultaneously measured β+ branch of 142Pm shows no modulation with an amplitude limit a<0.03, as is expected for the broad neutrino spectrum in the case of three-body decays. Mass corrections of the neutrinos by virtual lepton-W boson loops in the high Coulomb field of the daughter nuclei are discussed. (shrink)

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) is a promising approach for research on self-disorders, as it may enable studying how momentary changes in anomalous world experiences (AWEs) impact delusion development and maintenance. Using ESM to study AWEs requires clarification on two key issues: 1) discerning to what extent self-reports for AWEs align with clinician-based assessments; and 2) demonstrating the dynamic variability of AWEs in order to justify the use of ESM. This paper reports an exploratory ESM study (n = 7; 286 (...) total ESM observations) on these two issues. False-positive indices and agreement rates between self-reports and clinician-based assessments were calculated, and ESM data was used to observe dynamic variability in AWEs. Exploratory mixed-effects models were conducted, using the AWE Unknown/Unstatable Significance as a predictor, and paranoia as an outcome. Two models were compared on indices of fit: Model 1, using all obtained data for the predictor variable (n = 6), and Model 2 (n = 5), eliminating data suspected of containing false-positives of the predictor. Average ESM completion rate was 68%. False-positive indices and agreement rates ranged from 20–88% and 14–86%, respectively. Visual inspection of temporal profiles of AWEs showed dynamic variability. Although mixed-effects models should be interpreted with caution, we observed a threshold effect for the relationship between Unknown/Unstatable Significance and paranoia (Model 1; B = –3.90, p = 0.015; Model 2: B = –2.87, p = 0.50). Indices of fit improved in Model 2 (Model 1; AIC = 1525.76, BIC = 1559.15; Model 2; AIC = 1172.64, BIC = 1203.77). Larger-scale validation studies on AWE self-report items are warranted, as are further ESM studies that examine the role of AWEs in delusions. (shrink)

While digitization claims to provide efficiency, accessibility, expansion, speediness, and profit accumulation, it is actually colonizing every human activity. It has even become a purpose in itself. In this essay we focus on the digitization of legal practices and contents. We describe what digitization encompasses, how digitalization processes work, and to what extent they are able to replace juristic processes and produce legal outcomes. We are inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay on the influence of mechanical reproduction of the works of (...) Art. Parallel to Benjamin’s work on Art, we will analyze Law and the consequences of innovations such as mechanical mass (re)production and computerized digitization. (shrink)

A persistent puzzle throughout the cognitive and social sciences is how people manage to learn social conventions from the sparse and noisy behavioral data of diverse actors, without explicit instruction. Here, we show that the dominant theories of social learning perform poorly at capturing how individuals learn conventions in coordination experiments that task them with matching their behaviors while interacting in social networks. Across experiments, participants’ choices systematically deviate from both imitation and optimization. Instead, they follow a categorical, two-stage learning (...) process: they behave probabilistically until they acquire enough information about each other to trigger a mental threshold and then their choices stabilize. We effectively estimate this threshold using the tolerance principle (TP), a parameter-free equation developed to model how children learn rules in language. We show that threshold-based agents produce social learning that is more accurate than imitating and optimizing agents, while also providing a better model of how a critical mass of dissenters can overturn conventions. The superior performance of our model holds when comparing against a variety of optimization approaches, including Bayesian inference. Furthermore, in a preregistered dyadic experiment requiring people to infer nonlinguistic behavioral patterns amid controlled levels of noise in observed signals, TP outperforms all other models at reproducing learning rates among human participants. These findings offer compelling evidence that a simple, mathematical threshold underlies individual and social learning, from grammatical rules to behavioral conventions. (shrink)