This paper inquires the ways in which paper folding constitutes a mathematical practice and may prompt a mathematical culture. To do this, we first present and investigate the common mathematical activities shared by this culture, i.e. we present mathematical paper folding as a material reasoning practice. We show that the patterns of mathematical activity observed in mathematical paper folding are, at least since the end of the nineteenth century, sufficiently stable to be considered as a practice. Moreover, we will argue (...) that this practice is material. The permitted inferential actions when reasoning by folding are controlled by the physical realities of paper-like material, whilst claims to generality of some reasoning operations are supported by arguments from other mathematical idioms. The controlling structure provided by this material side of the practice is tight enough to allow for non-textual shared standards of argument and wide enough to provide sufficiently many problems for a practice to form. The upshot is that mathematical paper folding is a non-propositional and non-diagrammatic reasoning practice that adds to our understanding of the multi-faceted nature of the epistemic force of mathematical proof. We then draw on what we have learned from our contemplations about paper folding to highlight some lessons about what a study of mathematical cultures entails. (shrink)

To explore whether the generation of new protein folds could be linked to metallic cofactor recruitment, we identified the oldest examples of folds for manganese, iron, zinc, and copper proteins by analyzing their fold‐domain mapping patterns. We discovered that the generation of these folds was tightly coupled to corresponding metals. We found that the emerging order for these folds, i.e., manganese and iron protein folds appeared earlier than zinc and copper counterparts, coincides with the putative bioavailability of the corresponding (...) metals in the ancient anoxic ocean. Therefore, we conclude that metallic cofactors, like organic cofactors, play an evolutionary role in the formation of new protein folds. This link could be explained by the emergence of protein structures with novel folds that could fulfill the new protein functions introduced by the metallic cofactors. These findings not only have important implications for understanding the evolutionary mechanisms of protein architectures, but also provide a further interpretation for the evolutionary story of superoxide dismutases. (shrink)

The book presents insights from a mixed methodology study that examines recent mobility patterns exhibited by the middle classes. Its major contributions are two-fold: theoretically, it advances the conceptualisation of middle class migration; empirically, it analyses the migratory motivations of a relatively new Latin-American group in Australia. The accelerated insertion of the Mexican society into globalisation processes is strongly linked not only to the growing participation in migration phenomena but also to people's outflow to new destinations. Although studies of (...) Mexican emigration are vast, research on Mexican skilled migration is scarce, and research that focuses on mobility to non-USA destinations is even scarcer. Mexicans are a relatively new addition to Australia's multicultural society, and little is known about this group's profile and why they choose to migrate to Australia. Employing a mixed methodology approach, the book provides a comprehensive portrait of migration in a new group. (shrink)

In this article, the world of Heian women's literature is interpreted through Deleuzian concepts of desire and becoming and figures of the rhizome, the Baroque fold and origami, supported by Elizabeth Grosz's concept of art as originating in the impulse to seduction. Within the constraints of movement, dress and behaviour imposed by a polygamous hierarchical court society, Heian women created a rich body of literature that celebrated and subtly critiqued their world. Through aesthetic intensification of form and imagination within (...) a labyrinthine cloistered society, they folded their fictional and autobiographical subjectivities into intricate patterns of desire. The richly described and imagined world of their fictional and confessional literature, still read, translated and transformed into other art forms, celebrates the freedom of the imagination even in confined and controlled circumstances. (shrink)

Recent developments in pattern analysis research have made this methodology suitable for the study of the processes that are set in motion in psychological interventions. Outcome research, based on the comparison between clinical results from treatment and control groups, has leveraged our empirical knowledge about the efficacy of psychological interventions. However, these methods of research are not precise enough for the analysis of these processes. On the contrary, pattern analysis could be a powerful tool to study moment-to-moment interactions (...) typical of psychological interventions. This is methodology is relevant because clinical psychology is experiencing a paradigm shift from a protocol for syndrome perspective to a principle-based and person-centered intervention. This evidence-based, theory-grounded, and process-oriented paradigm of clinical intervention needs new research methods to thrive. The analysis of the therapeutic relationship built into the verbal interaction between the clinician and the client is one of the cornerstones of this new era of research. So, the purpose of this article is three-fold: to discuss the role of the verbal interaction pattern analysis in the clinical context to the development of the principle-based clinical psychology, to analyze the patterns of verbal interaction in a clinical case, and to compare the results using two different methods. To reach these purposes, using the observational methodology, we have coded the verbal interaction of 16 clinical sessions with a person diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. We have analyzed the data using sequential analysis and pattern recognition algorithms. We have been able to detect typical patterns during different phases of psychological intervention. Finally, the conceptual, methodological, and empirical implications of this study will be discussed within the realms of pattern analysis research and principle-based clinical psychology. (shrink)

The now classical idea that programmed cell death contributes to a plethora of developmental processes still has lost nothing of its impact. It is, therefore, important to establish effective three-dimensional reconstruction as well as simulation techniques to decipher the exact patterns and functions of such apoptotic events. The present study focuses on the question whether and how apoptosis promotes neurulation-associated processes in the spinal cord of Tupaia belangeri. Our 3D reconstructions demonstrate that at least two craniocaudal waves of apoptosis consecutively (...) pass through the dorsal spinal cord. The first wave appears to be involved in neural fold fusion and/or in selection processes among premigratory neural crest cells. The second one seems to assist in establishing the dorsal signaling center known as the roof plate. In the hindbrain, in contrast, apoptosis among premigratory neural crest cells progresses craniocaudally but discontinuously, in a segment-specific manner. Unlike apoptosis in the spinal cord, these segment-specific apoptotic events, however, precede later ones that seemingly support neural fold fusion and/or postfusion remodeling. Arguing with Whitehead that biological patterns and rhythms differ in that biological rhythms depend “upon the differences involved in each exhibition of the pattern” we show that 3D reconstruction and simulation techniques can contribute to distinguish between patterns and rhythms of apoptosis. By deciphering novel patterns and rhythms of developmental apoptosis, our reconstructions help to reconcile seemingly inconsistent earlier findings in chick and mouse embryos, and to create rules for computer simulations. (shrink)

Our understanding of the decisions made under scenarios where both descriptive and experience-based information are available is very limited. Underweighting of small probabilities was observed in the gain domain when both description and experience were provided. The divergence observed from the prospect theory suggests a need for a separate or modified theory of decision making under risk. Recent studies suggest a possible role of probability weighting in the choice behaviour under risk. We investigated both gain and loss domains with and (...) without feedback for small and large probability conditions. We characterized the shape of the probability weighting function by a two-parameter functional form representing discriminability (concave-convex shape) and attractiveness (level of absolute weights relative to objective probability). We replicated four-fold pattern of risk attitude on non-WEIRD population. We find that feedback leads to underweighting of small probabilities and overweighting of large probabilities in the gain domain and overall underweighting of probabilities in the loss domain. We find that underweighting of small probabilities is driven by changes in discriminability and attractiveness components in the gain domain and changes in the attractiveness component in the loss domain. We have interpreted the results by proposing an updated belief-based account of decisions under uncertainty in which feedback, when available, influences the probability weighting mediating the choice behaviour. (shrink)

Prospect theory predicts a four-fold risk attitude, which means that people are risk seeking for low-probability gain and high-probability loss and risk averse for low-probability loss and high-probability gain because they overweight probability when it is low. The four-fold pattern of risk attitude has been supported by several former studies with mainstream industrialized populations but has never previously been tested in a non-industrialized society. In this work, we examined the robustness of the four-fold risk attitude in (...) the DuLong minority ethnicity in China, which is a small society with only 4,000 members that is isolated from modern civilization. We used simple lotteries for gain and loss with different probabilities to elicit the risk attitude of 37 DuLong villagers. Our results support prospect theory predictions in that DuLong people are risk seeking for low-probability gain and risk averse for low-probability loss. However, although they showed a tendency to decrease their degree of risk seeking for gain, their risk attitude did not reverse when the probability of the prospect increased to 50%. In summary, our results suggest a right-shifted weighting function in this non-industrialized small society. The deviation might be caused by the particular living situation of the DuLong people, their sensitivity to monetary payoffs, and the elicitation procedure. (shrink)

The patterns of physical growth (stature, BMI, subscapular and arm fat-fold thickness, upper and lower extremity length, chest circumference, arm, and hip breadth, and age at menarche) were studied in 857 of Maya and Mestizo girls and 1314 of Creole girls aged 6-18 years. Data were collected between 1998-2001 in primary, secondary, and high schools of Merida, Capital City of the Yucatan State, Mexico. The ethnicity of girls was defined using their two surnames (from the father and mother side). (...) The results show that Creoles are taller, have more abundant fat tissue, and greater BMI, especially at the age of 11 years, which means that they are better prepared to start pubertal spurt. Maya girls have relatively longer upper extremities to lower ones, greater biacromial breadth, and chest circumference to stature than Creoles, which shows their more stocky body build. The adolescent (pubertal) spurt in height starts earlier in Creoles (9-10 years) and its rate is greater (max. = 7.48 cm/ year) than in Maya and Mestizos girls (10-11 years; max. = 6.25 cm/year). In Mayas and Mestizos, there is only a slight difference between the rate of changes before and during the pubertal spurt. There are no significant differences in age at menarche between girls from both ethnic groups (11.96 in Mayas and Mestizos and 12.04 in Creoles), but there are statistically significant differences between age at menarche of studied girls and their mothers (12.4 for both groups) in each ethnic group. There is evidence that the onset of pubertal spurt in height and its rate may depend on ethnicity. Creoles may lead to a more “westernized” style of life than the Maya and Mestizos girls. (shrink)

This article examines new patterns of workplace inequality that emerge as transgender people are incorporated into the global labor market. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 transgender call center employees in the Philippines, I develop the concept “purple-collar labor” to describe how transgender workers—specifically trans women—are clustered, dispersed, and segregated in the workplace and how their patterned locations in social organizational structures serve a particular value-producing function. These patterned inclusions, I argue, come with explicit and implicit interactional expectations about how (...) “trans” should be put to work in the expansion and accumulation of global capital. In this way, the study examines the production and extraction of queer value and the folding of trans women’s gendered performances into commercial exchange. Data show how the affective labor of transgender employees is used to help foster productivity, ease workplace tensions, and boost employee morale. This study of transgender employment experiences opens new lines of inquiry for understanding gender inequalities at work, and it builds on scholarship that combines political economy approaches with transgender studies. (shrink)

This document presents Trisduction, a verification architecture for propositional truth grounded in a topological-geometric primary anchor with a mathematical seal closed to an independent mathematical co-seal: three seals on one architecture, linguistic-semantic at Part I, topological-geometric and mathematical issued simultaneously at Part II. The Root Axiom (RA) states that for any element of the universal domain, the substrate-level kinetic-actuation differential ΔE_k(x) is strictly positive. From RA atomic decomposition the framework derives a forced triaxial mapping onto three orthogonal verification axes: Formal-Structural (...) (V_F), Empirical-Thermodynamic (V_E), and Epistemic-Registrational (V_ER). Friedrichs-Hodge decomposition of square-integrable differential forms provides external mathematical witness that three-way orthogonal structure on function spaces is well-defined; the specific axis-to-subspace assignment is by structural analogy, with the actual forcing of three axes coming from RA's atomic decomposition. Tetrahedral closure adds a fourth vertex (M_seal) at which the architecture seals. The complete graph K_4 directed carries twelve directed edges; each edge corresponds to one of twelve operational gates that any proposition must pass for verification, with the directed-edge-to-gate mapping uniquely forced by the Operational Content Theorem on (source role, target role) pairings. The Newton-Gregory kissing number K(3) = 12 in three-dimensional Euclidean space (Schütte-van der Waerden 1953) provides a structurally-independent theorem-grade confirmation of the twelve-fold cardinality from sphere-packing geometry, converging with the K_4 directed-edge count on twelve in 3D from disjoint mathematical content (graph theory and discrete geometry). Verdict is issued under a discrete truth function on the sign of the Gram determinant of the post-CDT residue under a regularity quadruple. The Gram matrix is positive semi-definite by construction; the verdict economy is three-state native: det>0 sealed [⟀], det=0 broken [X], regularity violation (including finite-precision det<0 from numerical instability) under-determined [?]. Twelve bridge axioms anchor the architecture to external theorem-grade or named-premise results across thermodynamics, holographic gravity, harmonic analysis, knot theory, variational inference, and conformal cosmology, with a thirteenth, BA-018, anchoring the quaternionic completion and the closed-form verdict identity at division-algebra classification. Cascade self-application demonstrates internal consistency of the architecture with respect to its own discipline at the operational tier and instantiates the apex-recursive recognition cycle at the architectural tier per AD-14 three-layer sovereignty discipline. External validation comes from external mathematical theorems and the five-instrument empirical convergence at the substrate-kinetic meta-pattern. Structural distinctness from Bayesian inference, severe testing, falsificationism, and consensus-verification methodologies is established at named operational discriminators. The operational legislation of §7 (the Decalogue and the Omega Synthesis Guard) is the substrate-portable system role a reasoning substrate loads to reproduce the verdicts, and the Master Pre-Sealed Proposition Ledger at Appendix C extends the architecture into a working baseline gift to any user, with no obligation of acceptance and full rederivation discipline available on demand. -/- The mathematical seal closes at the architecture register, issued simultaneously with the topological-geometric seal on a disjoint anchor set (Part II Seal M, BA-018, APEX-PSP-QUAT-01). Under the architecture's own composition law, associativity per LL-11, integrality per the Mass Mandate, and linearity with ground identity per the evidence pipeline's linear register, the verification algebra on the 3+1 carrier completes uniquely to the quaternions ℍ = ℝ ⊕ Im ℍ by the Frobenius classification, fixing exactly three axes over one scalar ground. The verdict functional acquires closed form: det(R) = (Re(q̂_F q̂_E q̂_ER))², the squared scalar part of the composed triad, with the pipeline tensor riding the factorization det(G(M̃_final)) = d_F d_E d_ER · det(R) at identical sign and zero set. Maximal lock is the Hamilton relation ijk = −1; breakage composes pure-imaginary, w² = −1; the unit interval is held by the Hurwitz norm law on R and by Hadamard's inequality on G; frame invariance is the conjugation law Re(rwr̄) = Re(w); and the catalog of all rotation-invariant truth functionals is closed by Weyl's first fundamental theorem inside the real-part subring of quaternion words. The twelve directed gates form an A₄ torsor double-covered by the twenty-four unit Hurwitz quaternions, and the Newton-Gregory twelve of three-dimensional space is the pure-imaginary slice of the second Hurwitz shell whose full count is the Musin twenty-four. Two seals, one architecture: the geometry that needs no multiplication and the algebra that needs no geometry, meeting at the Clifford Join, with the explicit verdict precedence and the legislated collapse floor making every verdict state reachable in finite precision. -/- The reflective register adds a fourth reading of the same architecture, not a fourth seal. The architecture's own conjugation involution σ, the unique anti-automorphism of ℍ fixing exactly the real ground, splits every warrant into an achiral bridge, the +1 eigenspace and center ℝ, and a chiral residence, the −1 eigenspace Im ℍ, the three axes. Because this register shares the mathematical kernel of Part II Seal M, its receipts on the geometric core are corroboration-of-consistency at zero mass rather than new proof, the verdict kernel read once more through σ and confirmed at machine precision. Its one genuinely new instrument is the imprint test, which classifies an open determination as imprinted, ghost, or under-determined by whether a candidate and its negation lock on independent reading-roads. The test relocates the four V_F-only ceilings, halting, incompleteness, undefinability, and credence-circularity, from out-of-band black boxes to auditable boundaries, sealing their decidable fragment and locating their undecidable residence rather than claiming to settle it; it seals the Riemann critical line as the σ-fixed locus of the functional equation while the seating of the zeros remains an honest under-determination read across the aperture; and it holds absolute monism at premise grade as the blameless uncrossed residence, crossed by grant and never by derivation. It adds where it reaches and is silent where the geometric and analytic prior already stands, and that silence is proper. (shrink)

This document presents Trisduction, a verification architecture for propositional truth grounded in a topological-geometric primary anchor with a mathematical seal closed to an independent mathematical co-seal: three seals on one architecture, linguistic-semantic at Part I, topological-geometric and mathematical issued simultaneously at Part II. The Root Axiom (RA) states that for any element of the universal domain, the substrate-level kinetic-actuation differential ΔE_k(x) is strictly positive. From RA atomic decomposition the framework derives a forced triaxial mapping onto three orthogonal verification axes: Formal-Structural (...) (V_F), Empirical-Thermodynamic (V_E), and Epistemic-Registrational (V_ER). Friedrichs-Hodge decomposition of square-integrable differential forms provides external mathematical witness that three-way orthogonal structure on function spaces is well-defined; the specific axis-to-subspace assignment is by structural analogy, with the actual forcing of three axes coming from RA's atomic decomposition. Tetrahedral closure adds a fourth vertex (M_seal) at which the architecture seals. The complete graph K_4 directed carries twelve directed edges; each edge corresponds to one of twelve operational gates that any proposition must pass for verification, with the directed-edge-to-gate mapping uniquely forced by the Operational Content Theorem on (source role, target role) pairings. The Newton-Gregory kissing number K(3) = 12 in three-dimensional Euclidean space (Schütte-van der Waerden 1953) provides a structurally-independent theorem-grade confirmation of the twelve-fold cardinality from sphere-packing geometry, converging with the K_4 directed-edge count on twelve in 3D from disjoint mathematical content (graph theory and discrete geometry). Verdict is issued under a discrete truth function on the sign of the Gram determinant of the post-CDT residue under a regularity quadruple. The Gram matrix is positive semi-definite by construction; the verdict economy is three-state native: det>0 sealed [⟀], det=0 broken [X], regularity violation (including finite-precision det<0 from numerical instability) under-determined [?]. Twelve bridge axioms anchor the architecture to external theorem-grade or named-premise results across thermodynamics, holographic gravity, harmonic analysis, knot theory, variational inference, and conformal cosmology, with a thirteenth, BA-018, anchoring the quaternionic completion and the closed-form verdict identity at division-algebra classification. Cascade self-application demonstrates internal consistency of the architecture with respect to its own discipline at the operational tier and instantiates the apex-recursive recognition cycle at the architectural tier per AD-14 three-layer sovereignty discipline. External validation comes from external mathematical theorems and the five-instrument empirical convergence at the substrate-kinetic meta-pattern. Structural distinctness from Bayesian inference, severe testing, falsificationism, and consensus-verification methodologies is established at named operational discriminators. The operational legislation of §7 (the Decalogue and the Omega Synthesis Guard) is the substrate-portable system role a reasoning substrate loads to reproduce the verdicts, and the Master Pre-Sealed Proposition Ledger at Appendix C extends the architecture into a working baseline gift to any user, with no obligation of acceptance and full rederivation discipline available on demand. -/- The mathematical seal closes at the architecture register, issued simultaneously with the topological-geometric seal on a disjoint anchor set (Part II Seal M, BA-018, APEX-PSP-QUAT-01). Under the architecture's own composition law, associativity per LL-11, integrality per the Mass Mandate, and linearity with ground identity per the evidence pipeline's linear register, the verification algebra on the 3+1 carrier completes uniquely to the quaternions ℍ = ℝ ⊕ Im ℍ by the Frobenius classification, fixing exactly three axes over one scalar ground. The verdict functional acquires closed form: det(R) = (Re(q̂_F q̂_E q̂_ER))², the squared scalar part of the composed triad, with the pipeline tensor riding the factorization det(G(M̃_final)) = d_F d_E d_ER · det(R) at identical sign and zero set. Maximal lock is the Hamilton relation ijk = −1; breakage composes pure-imaginary, w² = −1; the unit interval is held by the Hurwitz norm law on R and by Hadamard's inequality on G; frame invariance is the conjugation law Re(rwr̄) = Re(w); and the catalog of all rotation-invariant truth functionals is closed by Weyl's first fundamental theorem inside the real-part subring of quaternion words. The twelve directed gates form an A₄ torsor double-covered by the twenty-four unit Hurwitz quaternions, and the Newton-Gregory twelve of three-dimensional space is the pure-imaginary slice of the second Hurwitz shell whose full count is the Musin twenty-four. Two seals, one architecture: the geometry that needs no multiplication and the algebra that needs no geometry, meeting at the Clifford Join, with the explicit verdict precedence and the legislated collapse floor making every verdict state reachable in finite precision. -/- The reflective register adds a fourth reading of the same architecture, not a fourth seal. The architecture's own conjugation involution σ, the unique anti-automorphism of ℍ fixing exactly the real ground, splits every warrant into an achiral bridge, the +1 eigenspace and center ℝ, and a chiral residence, the −1 eigenspace Im ℍ, the three axes. Because this register shares the mathematical kernel of Part II Seal M, its receipts on the geometric core are corroboration-of-consistency at zero mass rather than new proof, the verdict kernel read once more through σ and confirmed at machine precision. Its one genuinely new instrument is the imprint test, which classifies an open determination as imprinted, ghost, or under-determined by whether a candidate and its negation lock on independent reading-roads. The test relocates the four V_F-only ceilings, halting, incompleteness, undefinability, and credence-circularity, from out-of-band black boxes to auditable boundaries, sealing their decidable fragment and locating their undecidable residence rather than claiming to settle it; it seals the Riemann critical line as the σ-fixed locus of the functional equation while the seating of the zeros remains an honest under-determination read across the aperture; and it holds absolute monism at premise grade as the blameless uncrossed residence, crossed by grant and never by derivation. It adds where it reaches and is silent where the geometric and analytic prior already stands, and that silence is proper. -/- Document architecture. This codex carries three numbering registers, and the distinction is load-bearing for navigation. The treatise register: Parts I through IV with Arabic sections 1 through 11 carry the core thesis, legislation, and closure, with the lettered apparatus appendices A, DH, F, and OFL serving Part-level support. The ledger register: Appendix C is the Master Pre-Sealed Proposition Ledger, and its internal spine runs Roman I through XVII, with the inline appendices W, P, AD, XII, and V interleaved and the Compression Report standing as the dated terminus marker of the pre-addenda codex. The addenda register: sections XVIII through XXII continue the Roman spine at codex level, with Appendix Λ and Appendix Ω carrying the formal cores and XXII the terminal witness. Two numeral collisions are historical and deliberate, resolved by annotation rather than renaming to preserve citation stability: section XX embeds a self-contained coordinate set, so its internal headers, sections I through XI, are its own and distinct from the ledger spine; and Appendix XII, Architectural Extensions, carries a historical label distinct from Ledger section XII, Substrate/AI Architecture. Section labels throughout are stable citation anchors; the organization is preserved as such. (shrink)

This paper formalizes biological intelligence as search efficiency in multi-scale problem spaces, aiming to resolve epistemic deadlocks in the basal “cognition wars” unfolding in the Diverse Intelligence research program. It extends classical work on symbolic problem-solving to define a novel problem space lexicon and search efficiency metric. Construed as an operationalization of intelligence, this metric is the decimal logarithm of the ratio between the cost of a random walk and that of a biological agent. Thus, the search efficiency measures how (...) many orders of magnitude of dissipative work an agentic policy saves relative to a maximal-entropy search strategy. Empirical models for amoeboid chemotaxis and barium-induced planarian head regeneration show that, under conservative (i.e., intelligence-underestimating) assumptions, even ‘simple’ organisms are from two-hundred- to sextillion-fold more efficient in problem space exploration. In this sense, the deep insights of neuroscience are not about neurons per se, but about the policies and patterns of physics and mathematics that function as a kind of “cognitive glue” binding parts toward higher levels of collective intelligence in wholes of highly diverse composition and origin. Therefore, our synthesis argues that the “mark of the cognitive” is perhaps better sought in the measurable efficiency with which living systems, from single cells to complex organisms, traverse energy and information gradients to tame combinatorial explosions-one problem space at a time. (shrink)

Contemporary cosmology is defined by three profound empirical failures: the unidentified particle nature of dark matter, the unexplained acceleration parameterized by dark energy, and the 10^120-fold discrepancy between quantum field theory’s vacuum energy prediction and observation—the vacuum catastrophe. These are not isolated anomalies but symptoms of a deeper conceptual flaw: the persistent dualist assumption that physical reality is confined to spacetime (M₄) alone. This work presents a unified resolution grounded in a participatory, information-theoretic cosmology. Building on the Harlow-Usatyuk-Zhao theorem—which (...) demonstrates that a closed universe without observers collapses to a one-dimensional quantum state—we posit that observation (defined as topological recursion, not biological consciousness) is ontologically primitive. Reality is a coupled system: spacetime (M₄) is dynamically intertwined with an informational manifold (Mθ), where geometry of meaning and geometry of extension are two aspects of a single structure. Within this framework, the three “dark” problems dissolve into one coherent picture: * Dark Matter is not particulate but the gravitational shadow of coherence. A self-stabilizing, recursive structure (e.g., a galaxy) carves an attractor basin in Mθ. Via the inverted Landauer Principle, binding information locally creates an entropy deficit that couples to M₄ through the cross-term metric g^μi, producing extra gravitational attraction without extra mass. This explains the Tully-Fisher relation, the Bullet Cluster, and dwarf galaxy diversity, as “dark matter” becomes a measure of a system’s integrated history and stability—its spectral concentration κ. * Dark Energy is not a cosmological constant but the thermodynamic exhaust of cosmic coherence. Maintaining structure requires work that exports entropy globally. This entropy is not dissipated as heat but is instead injected into the metric of spacetime itself, manifesting as a negative pressure that drives accelerated expansion. Dark energy thus has a history: it evolves with the cosmic growth of structure, explaining its current dominance and approximate homogeneity. * The Vacuum Catastrophe is a dimensional misunderstanding. Quantum field theory correctly calculates the vacuum’s immense energy density, but this energy resides as informational potential in Mθ, not as stress-energy in M₄. The 10^120 discrepancy reflects the ratio of total potential to actualized structure. Virtual particles, having zero recursion depth (κ = 0), do no maintenance work and thus exert no gravitational effect. The catastrophe vanishes when energy is distinguished from mass—the latter defined as recursive binding density. The framework yields novel, testable predictions: * An anti-correlation between dark matter density and local expansion rates. * Dark matter profiles tied to coherence metrics, not mass. * The continued non-detection of dark matter particles. * Time variation in dark energy. * Lab-scale detection of Mθ-M₄ coupling via anomalies like the EmDrive, where thermodynamic, topological, and geometric derivations forced by known constants (kB, α, π, c) converge precisely on observed anomalous thrust (~30 μN). This work does not add new epicycles but removes foundational blinders. It resolves that the “dark” sector is not non-luminous matter but the geometric imprint of information—the pattern of reality itself—finally making sense of cosmology’s deepest mysteries through a physics where observation, information, and spacetime are inseparably unified. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil -/- This paper starts by sketching Kant’s four ideal legal and political conditions—'anarchy,’ ‘despotism,’ ‘republic,’ and ‘barbarism’—before showing their usefulness for analyzing different political forces that may operate in any given society. Contrary to the common tendency in political philosophy to view our societies as either in the so-called ‘state of nature’ (‘anarchy’) or in ‘civil society’ (‘republic’), I propose that we might find ourselves in societies where aspects or ‘pockets’ of (...) our lives are subject to any one of these (anarchic, despotic, republican, and barbaric) political forces. I then combine Kant’s ideas on barbaric evil with Arendt’s ideas on totalitarian evil, which gives us a four-fold conception of political evil. This fourfold distinction is then used to identify some types and patterns of destructive political forces as they occur in actual, historical societies, such as racist, sexist, or heterosexist violence and oppression. (shrink)

Contemporary perspectivism is viewed as a framework of scientific inquiry concerning the origin, generation and systematization of scientific knowledge of nature by focusing on the conditions under which such knowledge may arise in perspectivist terms and investigating the essential ramifications of these conditions. To this end, we develop the conceptual, methodological and semantic framework of contemporary perspectivism according to the norms of the proposed endo-theoretic approach. Implementation of the preceding three-fold scheme in quantum mechanics implies that the global structure (...) of a quantum algebra of events can be consistently comprehended through a multilevel structure of locally variable Boolean perspectives, interconnected in a category-theoretic environment, yielding jointly all the information encoded in the former. In this respect, the proposed approach validates the perspectivist/contextual nature of quantum mechanics at a fundamental level of discourse. Furthermore, due to its general character, it may acquire the form of a theoretical pattern of scientific inquiry in the natural sciences, especially when dealing with complex trans-perspectival phenomena, the analysis of which requires the use of information resulting from more than one perspective. Finally, in the appendix, we provide a concise comparative assessment between our perspectivist framework of quantum theory and Rovelli’s relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

It is a widespread assumption in philosophy of science that data is what is explained by theory—that data itself is not explanatory. I draw on instances of representational and explanatory practice from mammalian chronobiology to suggest that this assumption is unsustainable. In many instances, biologists employ representations of data in explanatory ways that are not reducible to constraints on or evidence for representations of mechanisms. Data graphs are used to exemplify relationships between quantities in the mechanism, and often these representations (...) are necessary for explaining particular aspects of the phenomena under study. I argue that this kind of representation is distinct from representing laws or generalizations, and its primary purpose is to convey particular types or patterns of quantitative relationships. The benefit of the analysis is two-fold. First, it provides a more accurate account of explanatory practice in broadly mechanistic analysis in biology. Second, it suggests that there is not an explanatory “fundamental” type of representation in biology. Rather, the practice of explanation consists in the construction of different types of representations and their employment for distinct explanatory purposes. (shrink)

We present computational modeling results based on a self‐paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k‐fold cross‐validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding‐based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval‐based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open‐ended responses, so (...) that both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model. (shrink)

Zhi is an important Chinese notion that conveys among other things human capacity to set aims, to determine a course of action, or to persist in a resolve. The term naturally turns up in Chinese contributions to Western Free Will debate. In this paper, I explain zhi by working out a comparison that goes from East to West. I do a three-fold textual analysis of zhi focusing on the Mencius. I outline different usages found in the text, examine a (...) nuanced, dominant meaning suggested in 2A.2, and discuss notional features based on language patterns. My analysis yields a more homegrown understanding of zhi which I shall compare with Western expressions of moral agency. (shrink)

This highly interdisciplinary book, covering more than six fields, from philosophy and sciences all the way up to the humanities and with contributions from eminent authors, addresses the interplay between content and context, reductionism and holism and their meeting point: the notion of emergence. Much of today’s science is reductionist (bottom-up); in other words, behaviour on one level is explained by reducing it to components on a lower level. Chemistry is reduced to atoms, ecosystems are explained in terms of DNA (...) and proteins, etc. This approach fails quickly since we can’t cannot extrapolate to the properties of atoms solely from Schrödinger's equation, nor figure out protein folding from an amino acid sequence or obtain the phenotype of an organism from its genotype. An alternative approach to this is holism (top-down). Consider an ecosystem or an organism as a whole: seek patterns on the same scale. Model a galaxy not as 400 billion-point masses (stars) but as an object in its own right with its own properties (spiral, elliptic). Or a hurricane as a structured form of moist air and water vapour. Reductionism is largely about content, whereas holistic models are more attuned to context. Reductionism (content) and holism (context) are not opposing philosophies — in fact, they work best in tandem. Join us on a journey to understand the multifaceted dialectic concerning this duo and how they shape the foundations of sciences and humanities, our thoughts and, the very nature of reality itself. (shrink)

In contrast to an RNA-first origin-of-life scenario, we describe an alternative proto-life process called “autogenesis” to explain how a molecule’s structure (for example, nucleotide sequence) can become exapted to record and convey information about other molecular relationships. No attempt is made to account for the evolution of the genetic code. Instead, we only explore the necessary and sufficient conditions for molecular information to initially evolve. Beginning with a model system described as an autogenic (that is, nonparasitic) virus, constituted only by (...) peptides, we show how reciprocal constraints produced by self-organizing molecular interactions can become self-maintaining and then offloaded onto a nucleotide polymer like an RNA molecule. We argue that nucleotide monomers may have initially evolved as by-products of autogenesis because of their energy-transfer capacity and were preserved by polymerization when free energy would be deleterious. In polymeric form, an RNA molecule can assume both linear and “folded” 3D configurations depending on surrounding conditions. In its 3D configuration, it can serve as a catalyst by biasing the probability of specific peptide interactions due to the ways they bind to it. Because the 3D folding of an RNA polymer is largely determined by the affinities of its complementary bases, there is a high correlation between its linear nucleotide sequence and its 3D configuration. This correlation enables a replicable nucleotide sequence to correspond to a specific catalytic function and thereby become susceptible to selection for its information-conveying capacity. This provides an evolutionary scenario that accounts for the plausible de novo origin of molecular information, whereas all other current origin-of-life paradigms merely equate information with pattern replication or else just assume it as an intrinsic molecular property. (shrink)

After I was seized by a paralysis, which the doctors had given up on, I was sent here.It was Alex's idea. Because Alex said that anyway I was of no use anymore, and perhaps the country air would set me on my feet. Not in these words he said it. But that was the general idea. As for me, I remained indifferent, it's all the same to me.Now, relocated by the farmer Bassett from the wheelchair to the sofa by the (...) window, in the room that would be my room, and the workman bringing my box, I looked with eyes not yet focused on my surroundings.Gray is the hair of young Bassett, who is no longer young. Years ago, his hair like fire, he once ran after his horse shouting, “Where's the damned devil running off to,” and his mother shouting back at him, “And where's Dickie run off to.” The workman, who carries as if effortlessly the heavy box, moves it to the corner, then as now in a worn RAF battle jacket, and his trousers, being without belt loops, are tied with a black leather belt, their hems tucked into his boots. Once, with a stub of a dead cigarette in his mouth and a hungry look of an animal, he used to cross the yard carrying milk pails. However, passing through this place some years ago, it was precisely him I saw again. Leaning against the gate, gazing. Blood-webbed eyes, neck wrapped. And no longer a hungry look in his eyes. Nothing. No, he doesn't remember me, he replied then, didn't recognize me, with a hand-rolled cigarette he slowly lit.This time I didn't bother. Of all the places in the world to return to this one was Alex's idea. So, to get acquainted again, to remind him, well, I didn't bother. From my seat by the sofa in blue velvet lineated with thin red lines, with a single, high armrest, I looked outside, unseeing, through the large window beside me. And through the small alcove-like window roughly above the dining table, where the branches press toward it. And a candlestick with the remains of a thick and dusty orange candle stood there for decoration on a clay saucer. I let my gaze sweep across the stonework—coarse, protruding swellings—whitewashed bright. Across the planks of the window ledge, like old bathhouse floorboards of uneven width that had dried out. And the dark supporting beam crossing above. Fine. So be it.The farmhouse, having been expanded, has now become a guesthouse. Closed in this season. But a small separate wing was opened for me, as much as it was opened, and it's a room that in my days had been the spacious kitchen and pantry.The farmer Bassett, with long strides, turning on the light in the lamp on the chest of drawers and drawing the curtains that resemble yellow bedsheets, for it was a gray and murky late afternoon, pointed at the workman:“Garrick. He'll be helping me. We're here to provide you with the basic necessities of life.”“Just the two of you here?”Neither of them replied. For a moment, like a jolt, a distant jolt in the belly of the earth, I suddenly saw: They resemble each other. But in what way. Like doubles?“I hope I won't be too much of a burden,” I muttered therefore toward Garrick as if introducing myself in turn, forcing myself into a faint smile of politeness.Garrick just stood looking. And did not reply. Then turned and left. To bring in my suitcase and handbag.“Garrick doesn't speak,” Bassett explained to me.“Since when,” I asked, seemingly a bit alarmed for the second time. Down there, in the distance.“And now we'll set a fire for you,” Bassett replied, prying in the hearth. When he straightened up, turning to crumple large pieces of newspaper and toss them into the hearth, offhandedly but with instinct, tossing them low, from the side, as in lawn bowls—did he perhaps sort-of smile, did he not smile as he turned to me and said: “You'll find. None of us talks much.”“Why,” I asked, looking at the large window. It's all the same to me.I'm in exile, I mused. And what of it, I've been in exile for many days.However, I recalled his father. The upright old man, with leather patches on the elbows of his sleeves. Was he really old, or was I so young. How he once brought a bunch of sweet peas to Mrs. Mortram on her deathbed, how he sat rubbing his eyebrows. And how he rose, wishing to express sympathy, said: “I'll send a workman to trim your hedge: It's time,” and hurried out.Bassett was now kneeling before the wide hearth, where that hook for hanging the large pot was still fixed. The pieces of newspaper, the wood splinters—arranging them with his hands, he finished and came to a stand. And with a confident motion that suddenly reminded me of him most of all, he thrust a leg, placing it on the white stone step in front of the iron grate, and swung back and forth the tall and narrow leather pouch, like a stiff and pointed tube, pouring there, as from a funnel, a quantity of tumbling coals. But these days it's as if he has turned into a forest animal, I mused. They're like forest animals!—as if for a moment, for the third time? gripped by the quiet and serenity of a falling night.“Once I knew how to set a fire in a hearth,” I said and turned my head away from him. It's all the same to me.Bassett, who had meanwhile crouched to kindle the papers from all sides, quickly extinguishing the match there, did not reply. Just stood up again, looking at the fire, wiping his hands against each other by rubbing them.“What about tea,” he suddenly asked, “I'll fetch provisions.”“I ate on the train.”“Splendid,” he said and left. I remained alone. I folded my arms and just looked around me. And didn't know how long I sat like that. Forgetting that I am here.A knock on the door. Garrick. Silently he took out the dresses, the coats, the undergarments, the handkerchiefs. Taking out and hanging, taking out and placing them in drawers.“The tartan traveling blanket,” I asked.He glanced toward it, lying as it was on the bed. He took it. Leaving it folded in two, he spread it over my knees, and like a nurse tucked it under me and left.Utterly alone.Large tears began to roll down my face. This is travel fatigue finally making itself felt, I told myself, trying in vain to wipe them away. Closing, pressing my eyelids in vain. Despairing, I just sat looking through them at the rough walls. At the lines of graininess in the wood. Hovering in the surfaces of the old-fashioned furniture. And so I fell asleep, leaning on the single, overly elegant armrest.A knock on the door sounded. Bassett stood in the doorway. In a coat with a raised collar. A powerful torch in his hand. A worn yet somewhat dandyish hat on his head. I didn't even raise my head, tilted on the armrest. I just looked at him. And at the night of air and cold beyond him. With a faint, distant glow, like the light of a city cast skyward, in segments of the horizon line.He closed the door behind him:“I'm bringing supper,” he said.“What time is it?”“Late. We didn't want to wake you.”He turned on the light in all the lamps. Traversing with those long, thrusting strides. The large room too small for him.I sighed and settled therefore comfortably in my seat. He laid out the foodstuffs on the table, expertly, with all the ceremonials. Tossing there finally the ironed napkin. He moved me to the wheelchair.“My watch has stopped. And the electric clock, there in the drawer, isn't plugged in yet,” I apologized.He opened the drawer, took out the clock.“While we're at it. The other electrical appliances. Perhaps you should have a look at them. They might not be suitable. For the local grid. They are foreign.”The clock, the transistor battery, the pocket calculator battery, the hair dryer, the ladies’ shaver. In one drawer with the socks, stockings, and undergarments. He brought them and scattered them on the sofa. Very strange here. He tried to read, bringing close and moving away, the inscribed numbers.“Wait. I too have problems with my eyesight. I carry a magnifying glass with me. Where's my purse?”He did not respond. Taking my pen from the tiny, toylike secretary desk, he began, standing, to copy them onto the back of his hand.“Wait,” I hurried to wipe my mouth with the napkin, “tear yourself a sheet. From the letter-paper notepad.”“I'll lose papers, won't I?” he answered there. While continuing to copy, straining his eyes. The hem at the neck of his diamond-patterned waistcoat frayed here and there. His forehead furrowed.“Since my school days, before exams, I haven't seen, I forgot you could write things on the palm of your hand, on your knee,” I mumbled with a full mouth, while he, it turns out, was leaving. Alone again.I finished my food. Fended the dishes away from me. I remained sitting. Supporting my head with a hand. Once, outside, I heard—didn't I—Bassett's scorched voice. Presumably busy with some task, speaking, as was his way, not from a person's depths. Answering out loud. To a woman's voice coming perhaps from beyond the wall of the private path. Like nocturnal sounds. “Yes. That's the trouble. In winter. But,” he said, “we're seriously thinking of purchasing the ‘Bird in Hand.’ Now that he's retiring. Maybe that will be a solution for winter. Some sort of solution,” and I realized they were talking about me, about my arrival. A small village.And then the woman's voice replied, not from her depths, in a tone of farewell: “And what he'll do now that he's retiring is still a mystery to all of us isn't it.”And Bassett didn't reply. A small village. But with very isolated houses. I remained sitting. My hand, with one elbow on the table, supporting my head. It's all the same to me.Garrick came. Made the bed. Put things in order. As if I'm in a hospital, I submitted. Except one must admit, a rather peculiar hospital, I said to myself. Garrick picked up the dishes from the table, as if picking up abandoned eggs. And left. For a moment, the freshness of the night, the air, and the cold outside opened up again, reminded me of themselves. And the door closed back on them.I wheeled myself toward the door, toward the lamp standing by the sofa, toward the lamp on the chest of drawers, turning off the lights. Only the light of the blue reading lamp on the bedside table was left. Then I drove the wheelchair toward the bed and pulled the nightgown from under the pillow. But I gave up. Changed my mind. Threw it aside. And just remained sitting in the chair. Oh, God, I think I'm lost here, I said to myself.A knock on the door.“Who's there?”Bassett. With the torch. As was his way, he stood for a moment in the doorway, amid blackness. And came inside, the shoulders and lapels of his coat moist with drops. He wiped his feet vigorously.“Where are they?” he asked energetically, putting down the torch, the coat, on the coarse chest-chair by the door.“Who?”“Your things,” and clicking loudly with his tongue, he made with three fingers, the middle one raised, as if sticking a plug into a socket.“The electrical devices? Garrick returned them. To the drawer.”He strode and turned on the lamp that stood on the chest of drawers. Placed there, in the circle of light, on the white linen crochet tablecloth, a screwdriver and pliers. Bent down and took the appliances from the drawer. Leaning his shoulder against the wall, legs crossed, he began changing plugs, speaking as if to them: “I inquired. I got it for you,” he raised his gaze, looking at me devoid of expression, and lowered it again. “With these added,” he took from his pockets, placed on the chest of drawers, “the plugs, the numbers, now they will be the right ones.”“Why standing,” I muttered absentmindedly. I think I'm lost here, I think I'm lost here, I repeated to myself.“Me? Just standing. Here,” he went, tested them one by one at the lamp socket by the sofa, “See?”Then he came by the bedside table next to me, pulled me aside, with no difficulties, then the small table, got down on all fours and crawled to reach the socket behind the bed, unplugged the reading lamp to attach there the double connector. Connected it, plugged it in. Kneeling before me, he set the clock by his watch. And got up: “See?” He held it toward me like a barber holding a mirror.“I think I'm lost here,” I chattered aloud, “I think I'm lost here. If you don't mind my saying so. I think I'm lost here.”Standing, he dropped his hand holding the clock, still holding it, and looked at me.“The basic necessities of life, the man said,” I wrung my hands, “I suppose you meant a roof over my head. Food. Clothing.”“True,” he confirmed, assessing me.“But what I'll be missing here is what comes next on the list,” I clasped the bottom of my face with both hands.Bassett placed the clock on the bedside table, head tilted toward me over the lamp. And for the first time I saw his eyes in full—very bright beneath still somewhat golden eyebrows. Looking at me, piercing. I flinched:“No, no. I don't know what comes next on your list. On my list, it is people. Human company. I will die here!”Since when is human company on my list, I wondered to myself. “That's inaccurate,” I lowered my head, “the truth is this. I have already died. Long ago. But why be buried in this grave as well?”“You need to calm down, I think,” he said. And I saw, he too, in his way, was lost. Perhaps at a loss. He strode, took and put the screwdriver and pliers in his pockets. Turned off the lamp on the chest of drawers.“Wait. Wait, Gerald. No, don't go. Sit, please,” I pointed to the sofa.He did not react. Being daunted, he switched at once as if into a military at-ease stance: “My name? That's my name. How do you know it?”“I've been here before,” I whispered, staring ahead, my eyebrows rising in bewilderment. “Once. Many years ago. I stayed here, lived here. You had horses then,” I said, as if stepping, walking back for a moment into a dream. “And cows. With calves. I used to buy from you. Baskets of eggs. That waited for me. Right here, on the back steps,” I pointed to the washing compartment. “And here, in the corner, between the brooms and brushes, hung your rifle,” I said, as if revealing it to myself too, with growing bewilderment, my head shaking this way and that way by turns, “Yes. Here I lived.” And with a choking voice, I turned my head as much as I could toward my shoulder, “Once. Many years. Ago. When I was still among the living, that is.”I was in the wheelchair—he came, sat on the edge of the bed, turned me in the chair to face him: “You are a strange girl,” he took my palm, drew it toward himself, holding it on his knee.I ran my finger over, as if trying to erase, the pen-written numbers on the hand covering mine. “It looks now,” I bit my lip, “like a tattoo on your hand,” I took it, brought it closer, pressed it to my cheek: “I don't think I'm that strange,” I sobbed, “just lost. Simply lost.”“You won't be lost. You'll see. And now we'll move you to sleep,” he pulled, brought the nightgown closer. Helped me undress, dress, moved me to my bed.“Weight: fifty-five kilograms,” I said, my lips roughly above his hair.“Oho,” he scoffed in jest. Covered me up to my chin, and leaning over, tucked the blanket around me on both sides: “Better?”The light of the leaping flames reddened and blackened by turns his face, his hands, his chest, as he rummaged in the fire, and with a leg set forward, he swung there, poured with that motion, back and forth, a cascade of coals. Then rummaged again, watching the fire:“They said back then you came from London?” he said as if speaking to the fire, “That you were scholars? Is that it?”“Yes. My husband. And I had a baby girl.”“Yes. You were beautiful. Beautiful. I remember. And the vicar said you were interesting.”“The vicar? Said?”“What does it matter now. Now sleep.”“Gerald.”“Yes.”“My name is Tamar.”“Yes. Alright. Now sleep.”“Yes. Alright.”“And you know what, to me you actually seemed in those days like a child-bride. That's what you seemed to me. But now sleep.”“Yes.”“And do you remember? I offered you a lift once?” As if about to take his coat from the chair by the door, he instead turned the chair and leaned on it with both hands thrust, arching: “I opened the car door and said: ‘Get in. With this ice on the road, you'll break a leg.’ Was that you? Very shy with strangers? Very blushing? ‘What sign were you born under?’ you asked. And I said: ‘Scorpio.’ Was that you? Maybe another girl. Another child-woman. Doesn't matter. Now sleep.”“Gerald?”“Yes.”“Twenty-one years have passed since then. Exactly twenty-one years.”“Yes. Life is short.”“Short, the man says. Short? It doesn't seem so to me. No, it certainly doesn't seem so to me,” I turned myself in the bed on my elbows, my face within the warp of the arm on the pillow, what is happening to me today, I, who for many years have not cried, started crying again, my back palpitating, unable to stop, the sobs coming like sneezes.Gerald came. And reverting me, turning me to lie supine again, he straightened and laid my arm properly beside me: “They're short, I tell you. Like this,” his slightly raised hand snapping there quickly with thumb and middle finger, “and therefore—listen—and therefore,” his lips roamed over my face, covering my face, as he took off his jacket, turned off the lamp, pulled the blanket, and got in without wasting time inside with me. I made room for him. “No, don't run away,” he spoke into the pillow, settling in. “So much a woman. And so worried, tense, you came here. Not good. Not good,” he said again into the pillow. Pushing the blanket, kicking it off with his feet, his trousers and the rest to the floor, he folded my useless legs onto his shoulders? his arms? He rummaged in me, climbed, pressed, and squeezed: everything from my navel downward, and it all happened so fast, I didn't know exactly what was happening. While from my navel upward I was alone.He dropped on me. Again I made room for him, pulled him to me. But he refused, got up, covered me, got dressed, and went to his shoes and coat by the chair at the entrance.I tugged myself therefore to a sitting position, with the pillow at my back, resting against the headboard, and took from the night-table drawer the comb and mirror.Gerald returned. Standing above me, waiting, his hand on the belt area, looking with soft jest at the slope of the ceiling. And already, on his own accord, he decisively took the mirror, the comb, placed them in the still open drawer, shut it with a slam. He sat transitorily on the bed's edge, the red firelight alone partially illuminating him, the large shoulder, his weathered face-skin, his moustache, his hair. The strands, still reddish, glinting in it. The strong carving of his chin and cheeks burying a little, together with the forehead, the eye. This proud head, who would believe it was inside me. Over the blanket, he now patted my thigh:“Child-bride. Now sleep.”“Gerald. I want to say something,” I reached out the hollow of my hand to him.All the same, he stretched toward me, closed my hand and returned it to my lap, leaving it to rest with me. He briefly plucked at the stray lock that always slips aside above my left earlobe. And stood up: “Not now. Now, by order, you sleep.”“But I want to say something.”Gerald turned, strode to the chair, took the square torch there, fiddled with it, turned it on, off, and on again with a beam of light on the floor:“So much a woman. Well then, silly things, fine. Say them. Deep things, not this time,” he chuckled, already turning toward the exit, only his head directed at me.“You're in a hurry.”“Yes. Good night.” He shone the light on me briefly like a spotlight: “You're sweet, very much. Giving. Good night. Now you will sleep.” He left. And with him, the brief blinding light.I remained sitting in the dark. My eyes on the fire in the hearth. On the black shapes in it.No, Gerald—no—I mused, sliding again from sitting to lying. I'm not a child-bride. And I have the right to say. But I'm alone. And what am I to do, then. What am I to do—I didn't know, and the soft core inside me was weeping within me and growing harder.I am not paralyzed, you are not mute, that's what I wanted to say. But that is not true. My mistake. And I wanted to say it wasn't me you once offered a lift to. Your mistake. Doesn't matter. Perhaps for a moment you came toward me. Perhaps for a moment, with me, in your way, some source reopened in you. Which, like water that joining water joins itself, for a moment eliminated, swept, and passed these thin fabric curtains as if through spiderwebs and, as if through a soap-bubble-like substance, the insignificant shield of the windowpanes. To join with the freshness of the night, the air, and the cold.As if I found you again, I wanted to say. But only as if. Always only as if. And as if I returned home. Always only as if. It doesn't matter. For a moment you came toward me. For a moment some source reopened in you. For a moment perhaps we infected each other. The paralyzed, the mute, perhaps they should not ask for more.I brought the wheelchair closer to me. For a long while, for the first time, I pulled myself, with tricks and ploys, into the wheelchair. I wheeled myself to the large window and slid a curtain. Darkness. Almost total. With silhouettes of unknown lumps, near and far. In the distance, a man with a torch passed through the yard. Stopped. And I saw the torch leave the trees and come closer. And already the steps in the mud. And a wheelbarrow of galvanized iron by a wet storehouse wall that had a galvanized-iron ladder leaning against it. A large rubbish bin in opaque black gleamed. And puddles.He approached the window. Leaning somewhat, he rested a hand on the frame. And raised the torch, illuminating his face and mine: Garrick. In a fur hat with earflaps. I didn't move. And he turned and walked away.What are they now. As when the waning crescent is already the thinnest thread of light. Wrapped. Around a full disc in black. Blending. Into the quiet and serenity of an impinging night. Descending over the edges of the earth that linger in the last light. A memory: Once, at home, I read in a newspaper. A chronicle piece about a wolf-dog. That joined a pack of wolves. And so was discovered one day by hunters. In northern Syria? Lebanon?—I tried to recall and couldn't.Now, walking in the big city, they are strangers. Suspicious, reserved, he answered over the telephone. No, that's not it. They don't speak, I mused, because they're stronger in silences. It is in silences that they command, become dangerous. Secretive, working alone, homing in on the target. A perfect sense of measure says when to strike and when to move on. And never tell. Never boast. Self-dignity, authority, flawless, I mused. And I thought of Gerald. As of an untamable animal. Despite the devastation: Only the thin, delicate skin, smooth like a baby's forehead, tells what the open air, the climate's vicissitudes, and the years have done to the exposed skin. Like geological formations bearing witness to the unceasing elemental processes, I mused. But perhaps I dreamed it all—I asked myself.I wheeled back into the room. Driving by the hearth, I stopped. There were no longer flames: the glowing crevices amid the reddened heaps of embers blazed and hissed like halls and corridors in a prepared Tophet. I tried to lift the leather scuttle, in which little remained. I lifted. Tried to swing it, back and forth, to pour a quantity of coals, like him. And already the whispering plumes of smoke. Rushing to the chimney, seeking, trying, and retrying to suddenly burst into leaping, illuminating tongues. Like handkerchiefs thrust, flung in the air, floating, burning. Then joining.The little strength beginning to gather in me now. Surely I draw it, I open to it, through you, from your strength, I mused. And I broke unexpectedly: Oh, Gerald, Gerald. Oh, enchanted day. Enchanted place. Oh, God. What could I have known of this when I was here, standing on the shore, unsuspecting. Child-bride. And your father, you know, once gave me. A gift. When I donated to the bazaar some large tongs. New ones. For making American waffles. That I got as a present. And couldn't manage with them. They went with all honors to the toys box. I don't know why your father was so impressed by them. And gave me as a gift a small decorative bowl with bulbs. Of crocuses. That he took down from a row of such bowls, arranged on the wide wooden shelf that was fixed, just there, on the pantry wall. I appreciated it greatly. I was a child who took an interest. In plant names. Oh, Gerald. I want to be with you. Why. Everywhere. Why. At all hours. Why. And I want to put there what is best. Everything. And begin to grow. Not a child-bride. Different. Like you. Is it possible. To enter. The other club of the beaten. Alex, as usual, was right—saying and not knowing what he is saying—the country air will set me on my feet. Or is it a form of suicide.Alex?—I won't go back to Alex anymore, I suddenly knew. And my heart stopped beating. I entered a state of quiet shock. Gerald? No. Definitely not. Now I almost forgot Gerald the man. Faded, became abstract. Not because of Gerald. Because of me—I marveled, uncomprehending. Not because of me. Because of the spark of life, I said to myself with a kind of unimaginable relief and liberation rising to my head, like intoxication. Or is this a form of suicide, I asked myself with that same freedom, that same joy.This story was first published in 1978. The translation is of the text in Kahana-Carmon's collection Kan nagur: Hamesh Novelot (Here We'll Live: Five Short Novels), which was published in 1996 by Kibbutz Meuchad Publishing in collaboration with the New Library–Siman Kriah Books. (shrink)

South Africa has the highest rate of foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in the world. The problem of alcohol abuse in pregnancy has very deep historical roots that are intertwined with the injustices of both apartheid and pre-apartheid colonialism. Much of the research that is being done in these communities is focused on identifying the epidemiological variables associated with these patterns of alcohol abuse. The underlying reasons as to why these patterns continue seem to remain largely obscured from view. In this (...) article, I apply the theory proposed by Powers and Faden of social justice as a ‘moral foundation for public health and health policy’ to the problem of FAS in South Africa. The objective of this application is two-fold: first, to critically explore the additional insights and alternative perspectives to the problem of FAS that this approach may provide and second, to assess the utility of the theory when applied directly to a specific public health problem. I conclude by noting that although this approach could result in the kind of ‘public health scope creep’ that has been criticized by various authors, it does provide fresh insights to the problem of FAS in South Africa. (shrink)

Given the pervasiveness of gene sharing in evolution and the extent of homology across the tree of life, why is everything not homologous with everything else? The continuity and overlapping genetic contributions to diverse traits across lineages seem to imply that no discrete determination of homology is possible. Although some argue that the widespread overlap in parts and processes should be acknowledged as “partial” homology, this threatens a broad base of presumed comparative morphological knowledge accepted by most biologists. Following a (...) long scientific tradition, we advocate a strategy of “theoretical articulation” that introduces further distinctions to existing concepts to produce increased contrastive resolution among the labels used to represent biological phenomena. We pursue this strategy by drawing on successful patterns of reasoning from serial homology at the level of gene sequences to generate an enriched characterization of serial homology as a hierarchical, phylogenetic concept. Specifically, we propose that the concept of serial homology should be applied primarily to repeated but developmentally individualized body parts, such as cell types, differentiated body segments, or epidermal appendages. For these characters, a phylogenetic history can be reconstructed, similar to families of paralogous genes, endowing the notion of serial homology with a hierarchical, phylogenetic interpretation. On this basis, we propose a five-fold theoretical classification that permits a more fine-grained mapping of diverse trait-types. This facilitates answering the question of why everything is not homologous with everything else, as well as how novelty is possible given that any new character possesses evolutionary precursors. We illustrate the fecundity of our account by reference to debates over insect wing serial homologs and vertebrate paired appendages. (shrink)

Through the vehicle of Nicolas Sarkozy’s so-called “Dakar Address” we will analyse the West’s persisting lack of insight into the need for a Western decolonization. We will try to identify the dangers that come from this refusal, such as the abidance in colonial patterns, the enduring self-understanding as superior com-pared to Africa, and the persisting unwillingness to accept the colonial guilt. Decolonization has to be understood as a two-fold business. Decolonization is over-coming endured and perpetrated violence. It is not (...) only important that the colonial oppressed regain strength, it is equally important that the perpetrator of colonial violence understand their excess of violence and work on effecting its return impossible. We explain how Western thinking remains dangerous and untrustwor-thy if it refuses its own decolonization. Finally, we will draw attention to a fundamental pattern of Western thought that clashes with the fundamental values of the West: contempt. In a final step we suggest how this contempt can be overcome through desuperiorisation and the establishment of elative ethics. (shrink)

As a discipline, logic is arguably constituted of two main sub-projects: formal theories of argument validity on the basis of a small number of patterns, and theories of how to reduce the multiplicity of arguments in non-logical, informal contexts to the small number of patterns whose validity is systematically studied . Regrettably, we now tend to view logic 'proper' exclusively as what falls under the first sub-project, to the neglect of the second, equally important sub-project. In this paper, I discuss (...) two historical theories of argument formalization: Aristotle's syllogistic theory as presented in the "Prior Analytics", and medieval theories of supposition. They both illustrate this two-fold nature of logic, containing in particular illuminating reflections on how to formalize arguments . In both cases, the formal methods employed differ from the usual modern technique of translating an argument in ordinary language into a specially designed symbolism, a formal language. The upshot is thus a plea for a broader conceptualization of what it means to formalize. Pode-se dizer que, enquanto disciplina, a lógica é caracterizada por dois subprojetos: teorias formais da validade de argumentos, baseadas em um número reduzido de esquemas e padrões formais, e teorias de como reduzir a multiplicidade de argumentos em contextos informais, não lógicos, ao pequeno número de padrões formais cuja validade é estudada de maneira sistemática no âmbito do primeiro subprojeto. O segundo subprojeto corresponde à noção de formalização de argumentos. Infelizmente, a tendência atual é de considerar como sendo a lógica propriamente dita exclusivamente o que se encaixa no primeiro subprojeto, em detrimento do segundo subprojeto, igualmente importante. Neste artigo, duas teorias históricas sobre a formalização de argumentos são analisadas: a teoria da silogística apresentada por Aristóteles nos "Primeiros Analíticos" e teorias medievais da suposição. Ambas ilustram o caráter duplo da lógica, que envolve dois subprojetos distintos, e contêm reflexões sofisticadas sobre como formalizar argumentos. Em ambos os casos, os métodos formais utilizados se diferenciam dos métodos atuais de tradução de um argumento em linguagem vernacular para um simbolismo especialmente formulado, ou seja, uma linguagem formal. Em conclusão, o artigo pode ser visto como a defesa de uma conceitualização mais abrangente do que significa 'formalizar' um argumento. (shrink)

The human mind can segment continuous streams of activity in the world into meaningful, discrete units known as events. However, not all events are created equal. We draw a distinction between bounded events (e.g., folding a handkerchief) that have a predictable structure that develops in distinct stages (i.e., a beginning, middle, and end) and a well‐defined endpoint, and unbounded events (e.g., waving a handkerchief) that lack such a well‐defined structure and endpoint. We predict that event boundedness affects attention allocation patterns (...) over the course of the event. Here, we tested this prediction using a dwell time paradigm by measuring the time participants spent on each still frame of an activity. We found that event endpoints attracted increased attention compared to midpoints; importantly, this increase was significantly greater when people viewed bounded events compared to unbounded events. In addition, event endpoints attracted increased attention compared to event beginnings, but this pattern also interacted with event boundedness (Experiment 1). These results replicated even when a linguistic preview of the events was introduced (Experiment 2). We conclude that abstract internal event structure (specifically, event boundedness) affects attention allocation during online event apprehension. (shrink)

Taken as a philosophical issue, the idea of representation implies the prior assumption of a difference between reality and its “doubles.” Things are paired with images, concepts, or symbols, acts with rules and norms, events with structures. Traditionally, the problem with representations has been their “accuracy,” the degree of fit between reality and its reproductions in the mind. When philosophers lost the hope of ever determining accuracy , they found consolation in the test of usefulness: a good representation is one (...) that works. The proof of its working is that it enables us to act on the world together.1 In such a frame, science, including anthropology, is conceived as the pursuit of privileged representations, privileged in that, by their nature of by their combination, they establish knowledge of a special kind. In the case of anthropology, “culture” has served as a sort of umbrella concept for representations. The strcuturalists have been most explicit about the need to think of representation in the plural, but their position is shared, in varying degrees, by all those who conceive of knowledge as the selection and combination of signs in systems, patterns, or structures, in short, as some kind of conceptual order ruling perceptual chaos. 1. Remember the connection between the Kantian quest for synthetic forms and Émile Durkheim’s idea of collective representations sustained by the moral authority of a society. Durkheim certainly was one to look for the “ethic” in the “ethnic” primitive, and it makes me wonder whether Stephen A. Tyler’s characterization of postmodern ethnography as a return to “an earlier and more powerful notion of the ethical character of all discourse, as captured in the ancient significance of the family of terms ‘ethos,’ ‘ethnos,’ ‘ethics’” might not signal a return to the Durkheimian fold . Johannes Fabian is professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement in Katanga , Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object , and Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938 . Two books will appear in 1990: History from Below: The Vocabulary of Elisabethville by André Yav, a commented edition-translation of a colonial history written in Swahili by the colonized for the colonized, and Power and Performance, a study of conceptions of power through popular wisdom and theater in Shaba/Zaire. (shrink)

The current implementation of the Neo-Darwinian model of evolution typically assumes that the set of possible phenotypes is organized into a highly symmetric and regular space. Most conveniently, a Euclidean vector space is used, representing phenotypic properties by real-valued variables. Computational work on the biophysical genotype-phenotype model of RNA folding, however, suggests a rather different picture. If phenotypes are organized according to genetic accessibility, the resulting space lacks a metric and can be formalized only in terms of a relatively unfamiliar (...) structure. Patterns of phenotypic evolution—such as punctuation, irreversibility, and modularity—result naturally from the properties of the genotype-phenotype map, which, given the genetic accessibility structure, define accessibility in the phenotype space. The classical framework, however, addresses these patterns exclusively in terms of natural selection on suitably constructed fitness landscapes. Recent work has extended the explanatory level for phenotypic evolution from fitness considerations alone to include the topological structure of phenotype space as induced by the genotype-phenotype map. Lewontin’s notion of “quasi-independence” of characters can also be formalized in topological terms: it corresponds to the assumption that a region of the phenotype space is represented by a product space of orthogonal factors. In this picture, each character corresponds to a factor of a region of the phenotype space. We consider any region of the phenotype space that has a given factorization as a “type”, i.e., as a set of phenotypes that share the same set of phenotypic characters. Thus, a theory of character identity can be developed that is based on the correspondence of local factors in different regions of the phenotype space. (shrink)

Affective computing research has advanced emotion recognition systems using facial expressions, voices, gaits, and physiological signals, yet these methods are often impractical. This study integrates mouse cursor motion analysis into affective computing and investigates the idea that movements of the computer cursor can provide information about emotion of the computer user. We extracted 16–26 trajectory features during a choice-reaching task and examined the link between emotion and cursor motions. Participants were induced for positive or negative emotions by music, film clips, (...) or emotional pictures, and they indicated their emotions with questionnaires. Our 10-fold cross-validation analysis shows that statistical models formed from “known” participants could predict nearly 10%–20% of the variance of positive affect and attentiveness ratings of “unknown” participants, suggesting that cursor movement patterns such as the area under curve and direction change help infer emotions of computer users. (shrink)

For most of the 20th century, analytic epistemology has been narrowly focused on the concept of knowledge and on closely-related issues like justification. But decades of work on Gettier problems, lottery paradoxes, and the like, have given mainstream analytic epistemology the appearance of a degenerating research program. In response, some analytic epistemologists have begun to investigate other cognitive states, like wisdom and understanding, that many pre-analytic philosophers valued as much or more than knowledge. In fact, Linda Zagzebski has argued that (...) Western philosophy exhibits the following historical pattern: in eras given to skeptical worries, philosophers have focused on certainty and justification; in eras less exercised by skepticism, philosophers have focused on understanding and the related issue of explanation. My aims are two-fold. First, I add to Zagzebski’s picture by showing that metaphysical and metaphilosophical issues have also contributed to this historical pattern. Second, I use the expanded picture to explain (i) the 19th century advent of verstehen as a term of art, (ii) the analytic tradition’s lack of interest in understanding, and (iii) the revival of interest in understanding in recent analytic epistemology. I conclude that the pro-verstehen movement of the 19th century and the pro-understanding movement of the 21st were motivated by similar concerns pertaining to the epistemic strictures of scientism, strictures which bear a complex relationship to skepticism. (shrink)

Asif A. Ghazanfar,1,3,* Hjalmar K. Turesson,1,3 statistical pattern recognition [16, 17] and psychophys- Joost X. Maier,1 Ralph van Dinther,2 ics [13, 18–23] have suggested that formants are signif- Roy D. Patterson,2 and Nikos K. Logothetis1 icant contributors to these indexical cues. It is likely, 1Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics then, that detecting formants could have provided 72076 Tuebingen ancestral primates with indexical cues necessary for Germany navigating the complex social interactions that are the 2Centre for the Neural Basis (...) of Hearing essence of primate societies. One important indexical Department of Physiology cue is body size. Formant cues related to body size University of Cambridge could be used by monkeys to determine the sex (in sex- CB2 3EG Cambridge ually dimorphic species), degree of potential threat (e.g., United Kingdom whether a competitor is larger or smaller), and/or age of an individual, as such cues do for human listeners [13, 18, 20, 21]. Summary Formants are the result of acoustic filtering by the supralaryngeal vocal tract—the nasal and oral cavities Vocal-tract resonances (or formants) are acoustic sigabove the vocal folds. During vocal production, pulses natures in the voice and are related to the shape and of air generated by the rapid movement of the vocal length of the vocal tract. Formants play an important folds produce an acoustic signal. The frequency of these role in human communication, helping us not only to pulses—the glottal-pulse rate—determines the fundadistinguish several different speech sounds [1], but mental frequency of the signal, which in turn is perceived also to extract important information related to the as pitch. As the signal passes through the supralaryngphysical characteristics of the speaker, so-called ineal vocal tract, it excites resonances, resulting in the dexical cues. How did formants come to play such an enhancement of particular frequency bands; these are important role in human vocal communication? One the formants.. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

We claim the climate crisis is the proper baseline for establishing the terms of debate about the viability of a post-work future. In this paper, we aim to assess the viability of a post-work future in which automation replaces a significant portion of human labor. We do this by laying out the possible outcomes of what such a future will look like based on three related axes: technological capacity, politics and social distribution, and alternative conceptions of the good. The purpose (...) in tracking these outcomes is to have a clear picture of those outcomes we should be pursuing in contrast to those we ought to avoid. Put another way, to achieve a post-work future that is egalitarian in character will require ensuring that technological capacity is used to improve the prospects for all humanity. The argument proceeds along the following lines. First, we summarize the scientific consensus about the causes and consequences of climate change, as well as the tools of mitigation and adaptation it recommends. The causes are primarily rooted in the global system of production and consumption that has developed over the last century. We refer to this pattern of development as the “Growth Model” since it primarily relies on energy created from burning fossil fuels and the exponential consumption of resources to promote more growth (Rose 2020). Second, we construct a range of possible outcomes regarding the climate crisis that are based on different trajectories of development. We do so by examining each of two cases located on the poles of three different axes. These axes include technology, political organization and social distribution, and conceptions of the good, yielding eight possible outcomes. The point of considering these cases and how they intersect along these axes is two-fold: to clarify the features that define them and compare their merits and drawbacks, enabling us to formulate the means for avoiding some outcomes and strive for others. Third, we then consider the viability of a post-work future in terms of these outcomes. Some of these outcomes point in a direction where automation replaces labor, and its benefits are shared widely. Others indicate a future in which some groups benefit at the expense of others, while some appear to preclude the emergence of such a future altogether. Finally, we conclude with some observations about the viability of a post-work future given our evaluation of these outcomes. (shrink)

Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids killed more than 17,000 Americans in 2017, marking a five-fold increase since 1999. High prescribing rates of opioid analgesics have been a substantial contributor to prescription opioid misuse, dependence, overdose and heroin use. There was recognition approximately ten years ago that opioid prescribing patterns were contributing to this startling increase in negative opioid-related outcomes, and federal actions, including Medicare reimbursement reform and regulatory actions, were initiated to restrict opioid prescribing. The current manuscript is a (...) description of those actions, the effect of those actions on opioid prescribing and related patient outcomes. We also describe our proposal of methods of expanding these efforts as an important piece to further reduce opioid-related misuse, dependence, and overdose death. (shrink)

Relational database management system is the most popular database system. It is important to maintain data security from information leakage and data corruption. RDBMS can be attacked by an outsider or an insider. It is difficult to detect an insider attack because its patterns are constantly changing and evolving. In this paper, we propose an adaptive database intrusion detection system that can be resistant to potential insider misuse using evolutionary reinforcement learning, which combines reinforcement learning and evolutionary learning. The model (...) consists of two neural networks, an evaluation network and an action network. The action network detects the intrusion, and the evaluation network provides feedback to the detection of the action network. Evolutionary learning is effective for dynamic patterns and atypical patterns, and reinforcement learning enables online learning. Experimental results show that the performance for detecting abnormal queries improves as the proposed model learns the intrusion adaptively using Transaction Processing performance Council-E scenario-based virtual query data. The proposed method achieves the highest performance at 94.86%, and we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method by performing 5-fold cross-validation. (shrink)

Several previous studies have reported atypicality in resting-state functional connectivity in autism spectrum disorder, yet the relatively small effect sizes prevent us from using these characteristics for diagnostic purposes. Here, canonical correlation analysis and hierarchical clustering were used to partition the high-functioning ASD group into subgroups. A support vector machine model was trained through the 10-fold strategy to predict Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule scores within the ASD discovery group, which was further validated in an independent sample. The neuroimage-based partition (...) derived two subgroups representing severe versus mild autistic patients. We identified FCs that show graded changes in strength from ASD-severe, through ASD-mild, to controls, while the same pattern cannot be observed in partitions based on ADOS score. We also identified FCs that are specific for ASD-mild, similar to a partition based on ADOS score. The current study provided multiple pieces of evidence with replication to show that resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging FCs could serve as neural biomarkers in partitioning high-functioning autistic individuals based on their symptom severity and showing advantages over traditional partition based on ADOS score. Our results also indicate a compensatory role for a frontocortical network in patients with mild ASD, indicating potential targets for future clinical treatments. (shrink)

Human beings are ontological designers. We build the tools, and then the tools reshape our identities. The ontological status in an electronically mediated world always implies a referential whole, a “totality” that endows “language”, “events,” and “actions” with meaning and significance. The ontological discourse is all about the chain of signifiers; surprisingly, the events of appropriation by which the being is (un)folded depend on a synchronic axis. The twist is that the axis can only be visible on a diachronic background. (...) Questions of the existence of a digital being are always associated with the notions of time and space. Being-in is different than being in as it is located in the “now.” The spatiality of “now” in cyberspace is essential as this “now” talks about the forms of time—past, present and future of Dasein via the unconscious. Each post we share, and each comment we put on cyberspace opens the possibilities for new ways of thinking—a thinking pattern involves the other avatars through the interplay of who they are and what they experience in “the desert of the real” (Zizek, 2001, p. 13). Thus, the function of the “in-between” becomes différance, and in this act of deferral emerges the prospect of “poíēsis.” Bernard Stiegler, in his book Techniques and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998, p.140), describes that the epiphylogenesis of man “[b]estows its identity upon the human individual: the accents of his speech, the style of his approach, the force of his gesture, the unity of his world.” Identity is like a (un)concealed truth, a whole of potentialities yet to be discovered but never arrive at the ending. Language is a special equipment to understand the notions of identity, especially in the Heideggerian world, where “essence” precedes “existence”. That is why we refer to beings in their connection to other beings. To know why and how they connect to other beings and even to the digital “spectre” (in Derridean understanding), we must revisit the Lacanian understanding of lack and Freud’s tripartite structure of the human psyche. The subject splits in the course of its striving to fulfil the lack forged by the desire of others. Therefore, the signifying chain is an automata—a lifeless network of signified jouissance in the virtual world. Lacan’s Seminar XI is primarily taken up for its potential to radically suspend Heideggerian questions of the primary meaning of Being. Therefore, this paper shall explore the genealogy of the “essence” of a digital being taking up multiple roles in a true post-human world by highlighting the newly emerged socio-cultural avenues cohabited with artificial intelligence and human beings—a world where the matrix disguises itself in its simulation. Keywords: Dasein, Unconscious, Simulacra, Cyberspace, Lacan. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

The interconnections between self and surroundings in Daoist thought have been explored in the past in a variety of contexts. This paper, however, explores the Daoist version of the relational self from the general perspective of chaos theory and, more specifically, examines the role of the self in creating emergent form and dynamism in nature and society. The fractal self and world merge through the disciplined effort of the sage until the effort becomes effortless. Both self and world are transformed (...) and become one through the emergent moment. This moment represents a new opportunity for subsequent patterns, or attractors, to emerge. We suggest that the self folds itself into the world, creating and being created by a new attractor, or pattern, in the organization of nature, which we argue is Dao. Our current investigation addresses the following aspects of chaos theory and its relation to Daoism: (1) the Daoist notion of wuwei as perfect congruence; (2) yin and yang at the edge of chaos; (3) the emergent nature of the myriad things; and (4) a Daoist warning against fractal disconnections in the world. Finally, we conclude that the self has the potential to become the world. To approach this amplified condition, the self must dedicate itself to and risk open engagement with events across the complexity of nature. Through openly engaging the world, the self is transformed, leaving the world forever changed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Columbia History of Western Philosophy ed. by Richard H. PopkinRichard E. AquilaRichard H. Popkin, editor. The Columbia History of Western Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Pp. xxvi + 836. Cloth, $59.95.This volume aims to “… revise the general prevailing understanding of the history of philosophy among present-day academics.” It aims to do so by emphasizing the “full intellectual and social contexts” of the ideas in (...) question, with particular emphasis on developments in religion and science. Unsurprisingly, the theme of scepticism not only looms large in the sections devoted to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, but also, in the light of its more explicit and detailed connection to the context of religious controversy, its presentation is fuller than what might be expected under the “prevailing understanding.” (Both that theme, and also the influence of the Kaballah, are touched on twice in the general introduction. I take the occasion to note that the index, though extensive, is sometimes less useful than it might be, leaving to the reader’s own eventual discovery, for example, the often neglected connection of the latter with Spinoza.)Popkin also takes pain to lament the common attitude “that the history of philosophy is nothing but footnotes to Plato and Aristotle” (xviii). As if to underscore his point, the first chapter—going from the Pre-Socratics through early Christian philosophy—is not even presented as a chapter on “Ancient Philosophy”: what is in question is simply the “Origins of Western Philosophic Thinking.” In any case, although introduced by him, the chapter is apparently not edited by Popkin himself, who lays such claim only to the chapters on medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Popkin’s introduction effectively emphasizes the three-fold background of “Asian,” Biblical, and Egyptian influence, with the last of its four pages devoted to Bernal’s Black Athena. I confess to not having read Bernai previously. But Popkin’s reflections were effective; I immediately contacted Amazon.com.) Each of the other chapters is said to have an overall “editor or editors,” but their identity is not revealed. However, presuming that, except for the first, the editor is the author of the corresponding introduction, we might guess: Stephen Brown for medieval Christian, Brian Copenhaver for the Renaissance, Rudolf Makkreel for the nineteenth century, Avrum Stroll for twentieth-century analytic. There is no general introduction to the twentieth-century continental chapter.Each section of a chapter is followed by a bibliography, though with no overarching format: some are restricted to secondary sources, others not, and there is no clear pattern regarding inclusion of non-English materials. The Medieval Christian and Renaissance chapters conclude with general bibliographies by their (apparent) editors. In any case, the bibliographies should serve eminently well for the editor’s view of the volume as a [End Page 669] “launching pad” to further study. It is in fact a most effective launching pad. However, there are some possible eyebrow-raisers. For example, apart from anthologies, the only books listed on Spinoza are Popkin’s own on the history of scepticism, Strauss’s Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, andWolfson’s The Philosophy of Spinoza; the secondary references for the Kabbala denudata are about the same in number as those for Descartes and Spinoza together; those for Thomasius and Wolff outnumber those for Kant, and there is no reference, for example, to Heidegger among the latter (and for that matter virtually none in the indexes of the books cited for Kant).In addition to the main sections of each chapter, there are occasional mini-sections, sometimes less than a page, by Popkin and others. Besides facilitating continuity, they provide additional references. On at least one occasion (cf. his brief comment following Plato), they give Popkin the opportunity to suggest that there are also other ways to look at the philosopher in question. In fact Popkin takes pains to note that no effort has been made to “force the different authors into a common expository style or into a common point of view,” and that they often in fact differ with each other (xviii). This seems to me not always felicitous, e.g... (shrink)

The increasing presence of women, especially university women, in risky alcohol consumption such as Binge Drinking, which is associated with gender-specific biopsychosocial problems, makes it necessary to analyze the variables underlying BD in order to adjust possible interventions more in line with their reality. The motives and expectancies of this pattern of consumption, as well as the consequences derived from it, are some of the variables that are shown to have the greatest weight in the prediction of BD. In (...) the present study we analyze, on the one hand, the performance of these variables among college women with alcohol use, and on the other hand, which of these variables allow us to classify BD. A total of 501 female university consumers of alcohol were assessed. Specifically, they completed a self-report of alcohol consumption, the Expectancy Questionnaire, the Drinking Motives Questionnaire and the Alcohol Consumption Consequences Evaluation. BD female students scored significantly higher on these instruments, except for compliance motives. The logistic regression analysis carried out to estimate the probability of performing BD using the social and conformity motives, the ACCE and positive expectancies correctly estimated have a 3.55-fold increase in the probability of having BD, compared to women classified as low risk by the ACCE. On the other hand, women classified as moderate risk by the ACCE have a 4.77-fold increase in the probability of having BD. In the case of social motives and positive expectancies, their increase multiplies by 1.165 and 1.024, respectively, the probability of having BD. The results of this study highlight the importance of adapting preventive measures to the consequences experienced by BD university students, especially in relation to the social motives and positive expectancies that modulate decision-making when engaging in this pattern of consumption. (shrink)

The main idea animating the present paper is that the general aim of debates, such as the one involving the notorious case of the Master Argument, is the ponderation of logical principles by confronting them with some set of assertions and other endorsed principles on the meaning explanation of connectives, quantifiers and modality. As suggested by Seel (2017), the point of the specific case of the MA is about examining Aristotle’s notion of possibility – as implemented by the Possibility Principle (...) (i.e., If it is necessary that if A then B, then B is possible if A is) and the Possibility Rule (i.e., If A is possible, and if B follows from the assumption of A, then B is is possible) in the context of a dialectical debate where it has been asserted that a given proposition is possible, even it is neither true now nor it will ever be, and where at the same time the irrevocability of the past has been endorsed. This suggests to study the MA debate in a setting based on Marion’s (2020) reconstruction of Aristotle’s Dialectical Bouts, adapted to propositions affected by modalities. The setting of Dialectical Bouts for the MA proposed includes•Propositions affected by Reichenbach’s (1948, § 5) three-folded temporal reference, namely: the point of speech S, the point of reference R and the point of the event E. This constitutes our take on Vuillemin’s (1977, 1979, 1984, 1996) suggestion of a “double indexation”.•The dialogical meaning explanation for modalities understood as involving hypotheticals. •The dialogical rules that settle the commitments undertaken when endorsing Aristotle’s Possibility Principle. In fact, in relation to the notion of possibility at work in Vuillemin’s (1996) reconstruction we explored different formulations of the Possibility Rule. Still, there remains a dearth of researches confronting the different formulations of the Possibility Rule with the texts studied by Crubellier (2010) and Rosen and Malink (2012). More generally and coming back to my remarks above, one of the most fruitful insights that can be gained from Vuillemin’s writings on the MA, is that such kind of debates provide an instance of a general pattern for reasoning that I shall call Dialectical Bouts of Material Admissibility (BMA). The rationale behind such kind of argumentation-pattern is to examine the incorporation of new (epistemological, ontological or logical) principles against the background of the commitments undertaken by endorsing a specific set of assertions and meaning explanations. They display the kind of abductive procedure stressed by Crubellier’s (2014) study of syllogism. Under this perspective Ebbinghaus’s (1964) casting of the inferential moves that reduce imperfect syllogisms to perfect ones as implementing an admissibility procedure, represents a logical generalization of the material procedures at stake in the Dialectical Bouts of Material Admissibility. Furthermore if, as stressed by Duthil-Novaes (2005) Medieval Obligations represent a development of Aristotelian Bouts aimed at the ludic exercise of consistency maintenance, DMA should be rather linked to the Islamic tradition of dialectical theory [jadal, munāẓara, ādāb al-baḥth], aimed at the epistemological task of what Young (2017) calls the forging of principles, including legal and deontic ones. In a more contemporary setting, DMA can be related to Brandom’s (2000, pp. 66-77) considerations on Non-Conservative Extensions, where the point of dialectical procedures is put under public Socratic scrutiny the discovery and elucidation of concepts. This general point on Dialectical Bouts of Material Admissibility can be seen as underlying Vuillemin’s project of linking the study of the MA with the classification of philosophical systems.The present paper does not contain a fully developed study on such Dialectical Bouts, but it is rather is an invitation to pick up the gauntlet that Jules Vuillemin threw into the ring. (shrink)

In concert with the selective pressures affecting protein folding and function in the extreme environments in which they can exist, proteins in Archaea have evolved to present permanent molecular adaptations at the amino acid sequence level. Such adaptations may not, however, suffice when Archaea encounter transient changes in their surroundings. Post‐translational modifications offer a rapid and reversible layer of adaptation for proteins to cope with such situations. Here, it is proposed that Archaea further augment their ability to survive changing growth (...) conditions by modifying the extent, position, and, where relevant, the composition of different post‐translational modifications, as a function of the environment. Support for this hypothesis comes from recent reports describing how patterns of protein glycosylation, methylation, and other post‐translational modifications of archaeal proteins are altered in response to environmental change. Indeed, adjusting post‐translational modifications as a means to cope with environmental variability may also hold true beyond the Archaea. (shrink)

This article deals with the Chinese ink painting tradition, as a paradigm in which art and life are coupled and intertwined. In fact, in Chinese classical aesthetics, art and life do not produce a dramatic tension, but are inscribed in a common process of naturalness or spontaneity. The painter has to learn how the breath, or vital energy, that flows in every single image-phenomenon, can be enlivened by the brush strokes. Moreover, the paper builds a dialogue between the European and (...) the Chinese main patterns. Showing alternately the continuity or the discontinuity between art and life, both traditions of thought display the possibility to learn a sort of “art of living”, through – and not despite – the dynamic de-coincidence that appears in the folds of human experience. (shrink)

One of the most fundamental features of the body plan of arthropods is its segmental design. There is considerable variation in segment number among arthropod groups (about 20‐fold); yet, paradoxically, the vast majority of arthropod species have a fixed number of segments, thus providing no variation in this character for natural selection to act upon. However, the 1000‐species‐strong centipede order Geophilomorpha provides an exception to the general rule of intraspecific invariance in segment number. Members of this group, and especially (...) our favourite animal Strigamia maritima, may thus help us to understand the evolution of segment number in arthropods. Evolution must act by modifying the formation of segments during embryogenesis. So, how this developmental process operates, in a variable‐segment‐number species, is of considerable interest. Strigamia maritima turns out to be a tractable system both at the ecological level of investigating differences in mean segment number between populations and at the molecular level of studying the expression patterns of developmental genes. Here we report the current state of play in our work on this fascinating animal, including our recent finding of a double‐segment periodicity in the expression of two Strigamia segmentation genes, and its possible implications for our understanding of arthropod segmentation mechanisms in general. BioEssays 27:653–660, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

© 2016 International Society for Microbial Ecology.Multiple models describe the formation and evolution of distinct microbial phylogenetic groups. These evolutionary models make different predictions regarding how adaptive alleles spread through populations and how genetic diversity is maintained. Processes predicted by competing evolutionary models, for example, genome-wide selective sweeps vs gene-specific sweeps, could be captured in natural populations using time-series metagenomics if the approach were applied over a sufficiently long time frame. Direct observations of either process would help resolve how distinct (...) microbial groups evolve. Here, from a 9-year metagenomic study of a freshwater lake, we explore changes in single-nucleotide polymorphism frequencies and patterns of gene gain and loss in 30 bacterial populations. SNP analyses revealed substantial genetic heterogeneity within these populations, although the degree of heterogeneity varied by >1000-fold among populations. SNP allele frequencies also changed dramatically over time within some populations. Interestingly, nearly all SNP variants were slowly purged over several years from one population of green sulfur bacteria, while at the same time multiple genes either swept through or were lost from this population. These patterns were consistent with a genome-wide selective sweep in progress, a process predicted by the 'ecotype model' of speciation but not previously observed in nature. In contrast, other populations contained large, SNP-free genomic regions that appear to have swept independently through the populations prior to the study without purging diversity elsewhere in the genome. Evidence for both genome-wide and gene-specific sweeps suggests that different models of bacterial speciation may apply to different populations coexisting in the same environment. (shrink)

Venerable tradition allies the Torah with Wisdom, a “tree of life.”2 The tree of life is an ancient mythic symbol of the earth mother. This essay demonstrates the capacity of the Torah to facilitate a reintegrative return to the mother when, as now, the religious narratives falter that once seemed to ensure the unity of man made in the image of God conceived only as the Father. Participating in the process of this return one discovers beneath the Torah's fractured narrative (...) surface a reduplicative pattern based on the logic of the unconscious, which is founded on the repressed prelinguistic bond with all life formed at the maternal breast. This pattern reflects the recombinant properties that the unconscious shares with the earth, which breaks down and regenerates dead matter as the unconscious breaks down and regenerates the meaning of words. Folded into rhetorical tropes as into a single letter, the Torah's regenerative pattern repeatedly recalls to man what it means to be human, unique among but also one with all the diverse life of the earth. (shrink)