More than three centuries after Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his legacy remains contentious. Born in 1632, Spinoza is one of the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment and arguably the paradigm of the secular Jew, having left Orthodoxy without converting to another faith. One of the most provocative critiques of Spinoza comes from an unexpected source, the influential twentieth-century political philosopher, Leo Strauss. Though Strauss was not an Orthodox Jew, in a well-known essay that prefaced (...) his study of Spinoza, he critically examines modern philosophy's challenge to traditional religion. There he argues that while the Enlightenment had failed to decisively refute Orthodoxy, at the same time, Orthodoxy could only claim to believe its core tenets were true but could not claim to know they were true. Strauss leaves the question at an impasse; both the Enlightenment and Orthodoxy rest on axioms that neither side can fully prove or fully refute. Curiously, Strauss never asks Orthodox Jewish thinkers if his approach to defending Judaism against the claims of the Enlightenment is the same as theirs. This volume poses the question to a group of serious Orthodox Jewish thinkers in an attempt to find out if Orthodoxy has a better answer to the questions raised by Strauss than the one Strauss advanced on its behalf. The seventeen essays in this volume use a variety of approaches, drawing on traditional primary Jewish sources like Scripture, Talmud, and Midrash; medieval rationalists like Maimonides; Enlightenment-era Orthodox sources; Jewish mystical writings like Kabbalah and Chasidut; modern philosophical movements including postmodernism and analytic philosophy; and contemporary Jewish Bible interpretation. While the answers differ, what unites these essays is the willingness to take Strauss' question seriously and to provide "inside" answers, that is, answers given by Orthodox Jews. Much of modern thought tries to square the circle of how to live in a world without belief. The better question is whether it is possible to recover authentic religious belief in the modern world. This volume is an Orthodox Jewish attempt to answer that question, one that no serious person can approach with indifference. (shrink)

Postural instability marks a prevalent symptom of Parkinson’s disease. It often manifests in increased body sway, which is commonly assessed by tracking the Center of Pressure. Yet, in terms of postural control, the body’s Center of Mass, and not CoP is what is regulated in a gravitational field. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of early- to mid-stage PD on these measures of postural control in response to unpredictable visual perturbations. We investigated three cohorts: 18 patients (...) with early to mid-stage PD [Hoehn & Yahr stage ; 1.94 ± 0.70]; a group of 15 age-matched controls ; and a group of 12 young healthy adults. Participants stood on a force plate to track their CoP, while the movement of their entire body was recorded with a video-based motion tracking system to monitor their CoM. A moving room paradigm was applied through a head-mounted virtual reality headset. The stimulus consisted of a virtual tunnel that stretched in the anterior-posterior direction which either remained static or moved back and forth in an unpredictable fashion.We found differences in mean sway amplitude and mean velocities of CoP and CoM between the groups under both conditions, with higher MSA of CoP and CoM for PD and higher mean velocities of both variables for PD and ECT when compared with YCT. Visual perturbation increased mean CoP velocity in all groups but did not have effects on mean CoM velocity or MSA. While being significantly lower for the young adults, the net effect of visual perturbation on mean CoP velocity was similar between patients with PD and age-matched controls. There was no effect of the visual perturbation on mean CoM velocity for any of the groups.Our simultaneous assessment of CoP and CoM revealed that postural control is reflected differently in CoM and CoP. As the motion of CoM remained mostly unaffected, all groups successfully counteracted the perturbation and maintained their balance. Higher CoP velocity for PD and ECT revealed increased corrective motion needed to achieve this, which however was similar in both groups. Thus, our results suggest increased effort, expressed in CoP velocity, to be an effect of age rather than disease in earlier stages of PD. (shrink)

I am an M.D/Ph.D. student and work as a research assistant for the director of a division of the school of medicine who is an M.D. He assigned me to research a certain topic and gave me no guidelines or guidance as to how to do it. Nevertheless, I did the research and wrote it up. My supervisor liked the report and said that he thought it was so good that “I would like to offer you the opportunity to publish (...) it and list you as the primary author.” Some bells went off when he so grandly offered to let me author the report for which I had done 100% of research and writing. I consulted some other people in the field and they said that, as long as I was the primary author, it was legitimate for him to list himself as secondary author if he did some editing later. After editing the abstract only, he e-mailed his revisions to me and in a note at the bottom he asked me what I thought of his revised author order. His name was first, mine second, and the name of his girlfriend was third. I was shocked by what seemed to be a case of unethical author attribution and confronted him asking why he changed the order when we had agreed that I was primary author. He said that he had put in several hours of work. (shrink)

Despite the urgency of this issue, AI still struggles to represent social life. This article presents a comprehensive agent-based model that investigates status-power dynamics in groups. Kemper’s sociological status–power theory of social relationships, and a literature review on school children in middle youth, is its basis. The model allows us to investigate causation of the near-ubiquitous phenomenon that females have lower social status on average than males. Possible causes included in the model are children’s dispositional traits (kindness, beauty, and physical (...) power), schoolyard culture (social acceptability of fighting), behavioural strategy (amount of rough-and-tumble play) and the balance between public and dyadic sources of status. An agent-based model of a virtual schoolyard was created in which the children assemble in changing groups and mutually confer status. The status conferred upon a child modifies the status it holds. Rough-and-tumble is modelled as ambiguous: it is intended as a status conferral, but may be perceived as a power move. Running many trials of the model we found that in time, depending on the parameter settings, a gender-based status gap emerged. Rough-and-tumble play had more impact on emergent status differences than did physical power differences. Social acceptability of fighting also strongly moderated the resulting status gap. Placing more weight on dyadic relationship could alleviate status loss. All these model behaviours are in line with empirical findings of child behaviour studies at schools. They have face validity for social status issues in the adult world. We conclude from this that this kind of agent-based model merits use in studying the status–power dynamics of other issues in child behaviour, or indeed in social behaviour in general. (shrink)