From dialectic to organization: Bogdanov’s contribution to social theory

This paper situates Bogdanov in the context of social theory generally and socialist theory in particular. It outlines briefly the principal characteristics of his mature system, and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of his approach to the fundamental problems of social thought. The paper devotes particular attention to the problem of just how systems develop from less complex to more complex forms of organization, and evaluates Bogdanov’s solution to this problem against the background of populist, social democratic, and Leninist alternatives.     

How Otto did not extend his mind,but might have: Dynamic systems theory and social-cultural group selection

Proponents of cognitive Situationism argue that the human mind is embodied, embedded in both natural and social-cultural environments and extended creating both extended and distributed cognition. Anti-situationists reject all or some of these claims. I argue that four major objections to extended cognition: (1) the mark of the cognitive, (2) the function-identity fallacy, (3) cognitive bloat, and (4) scientific irrelevance lose much of their sting in the case of distributed cognition, the extension of cognitive agency to a group of cognitive agents, such as a scientific research team. However, I claim that a crucial fifth challenge, that advocates of the extended mind commit the causal-constitution fallacy, has yet to be satisfactorily addressed. I focus on Spyridon Palermos’ use of dynamic systems theory to refute this charge and I argue that his appeal to dynamic systems theory as a way of understanding system-constitution fails. Instead, I suggest a social-cultural group selection hypothesis for understanding system-constitution. But, I leave it for another day to elaborate that hypothesis’ empirical plausibility.     

It's a great big universe: Astrobiology and future trends for an astrotheology

Despite the awe and wonder that discoveries related to astrobiology inspire, the sheer volume and diversity of new discoveries related to space science can become overwhelming without meaningful frames of reference by which to organize our understanding of these phenomena. I suggest that a critical feature of the future of “astrotheology” relates to how it serves as an organizing correlate to astrobiology and space research. Considering that the prefix astro‐ has an amplicative and abductive effect on the fields of study to which it is applied, I contend that astrotheology implies a creative and constructive shift in how we conceptualize meaningful human being for theology that parallels how astrobiology effects a creative and constructive shift in how we conceptualize living systems.     

The choice of constraints in correspondence analysis

A discussion of alternative constraint systems has been lacking in the literature on correspondence analysis and related techniques. This paper reiterates earlier results that an explicit choice of constraints has to be made which can have important effects on the resulting scores. The paper also presents new results on dealing with missing data and probabilistic category assignment.I am most grateful to the following for their helpful comments. Arto Demirjian, Michael Greenacre, Michael Healy, Shizuhiko Nishisato, Roderick Mcdonald, and several anonymous referees.     

Learning as Leaving Home: Fear,Empathy, and Hospitality in the Theology and Religion Classroom

The article is a response to this journal's call for papers on metaphors for teaching, and also draws from a previous publication in which Kent Eilers developed a methodology for teaching global theologies. In this methodology, the ultimate goal was the development of “hermeneutical dispositions of empathy, hospitality, and receptivity toward culturally diverse voices” (2014, 165). This article considers the goals of Eilers' methodology, and others like his, and how it is that the metaphors of “leaving home” and “communal imagination” highlight the importance of the ambient and interpersonal features of a classroom and their effect on the attainment of the above goals. In so doing, it extends the conversation beyond content and methodology in teaching theology and religion into the realms of philosophy of education, as well as the fields of moral and values education. It is contended that the metaphors informed by these areas of study facilitate the attainment of such goals, and similar ones, by demonstrating that the cultivation of an ambience of care, trust, and compassion within the classroom constitutes an essential foundation for learning in which students “leave home” and cultivate “communal imagination.” The article finishes with practical suggestions for educators in theology and religion.     

Pluralism and values in education in Hungary – changes between 1990 and 2012

Value transmission is a fundamental task of schools. However, the question arises as to how far prevailing political and social conditions shape the functioning of a country or a region’s school system. In other words: what effect do they have on the choice of values to be transmitted at schools? Are there any fundamental social values that are shared by different cultures at different times? Are there values that exist independently of social and political systems? These questions have a special relevance in Eastern and Central European countries like Hungary where political and social changes in the twentieth century had a crucial effect on the set of values that were transmitted by the school system. The aim of this study is to describe how the value transmitting role of the Hungarian school system has changed as a consequence of political transformations in recent decades.     

抗抑郁药应用选择的思考

目前市场上可供选择的抗抑郁药越来越多.从系统方法论、医学模式转变和矛盾重点论的角度来阐述临床上应该如何选择用药,才能使治疗效果和医疗费用更符合个体的情况,达到比较和谐的状态.     

Evidence for spontaneous level-2 perspective taking in adults

Social interactions are fostered by humans’ propensity to compute their partner’s perspective online. However, due to the mindreading system’s limited capacity perspective taking (PT) was argued to occur spontaneously only for level-1, but not level-2 perspectives. We propose that level-2 perspectives (containing aspectual information) can also be computed spontaneously if participants have reason to assume that the partner is indeed aware of the objects’ aspectual properties. Pairs of adult participants took part in the modified version of Surtees, Butterfill, and Apperly’s (2012) number verification paradigm. Participants had prior information on their partner’s task, which either called for processing aspectual properties or did not. The partner’s inconsistent perspective was found to interfere with RT-s providing evidence for spontaneous level-2 PT. However, such interference only occurred when the partner’s task involved processing the perspective dependent object feature, suggesting that PT was sensitive to the other’s awareness of the to be represented information.     

Formal assessment of reliability specifications in embedded cyber-physical systems

Reliability has become an integral component of the design intent of embedded cyber-physical systems. Safety-critical embedded systems are designed with specific reliability targets, and design practices include the appropriate allocation of both spatial and temporal redundancies in the implementation to meet such requirements. With increasing complexity of such systems and considering the large number of components in such systems, redundancy allocation requires a formal scientific basis. In this work, we profess the analysis of the redundancy requirement upfront with the objective of making it an integral part of the specification. The underlying problem is one of synthesizing a formal specification with built-in redundancy artifacts, from the formal properties of the error-free system, the error probabilities of the control components, and the reliability target. We believe that upfront formal analysis of redundancy requirements is important in budgeting the resource requirements from a cost versus reliability perspective. Several case-studies from the automotive domain highlight the efficacy of our proposal.     

Anxiety Influences the Perceptual-Motor Calibration of Visually Guided Braking to Avoid Collisions

We investigated whether anxiety influences perceptual-motor calibration in a braking to avoid a collision task. Participants performed either a discrete braking task (Experiment 1) or a continuous braking task (Experiment 2), with the goal of stopping before colliding with a stop sign. Half of participants performed the braking task after an anxiety induction. We investigated whether anxiety reduced the frequency of crashing and if it influenced the calibration of perception (visual information) and action (brake pressure) dynamically between-trials in Experiment 1 and within-trials in Experiment 2. In the discrete braking task, anxious participants crashed less often and made larger corrective adjustments trial-to-trial after crashing, suggesting that the influence of anxiety on behavior did not occur uniformly, but rather dynamically with anxiety amplifying the reaction to previous crashes. However, when performing continuous braking, anxious participants crashed more often, and their within-trial adjustments of deceleration were less related to visual information compared to controls. Taken together, these findings suggest that the timescale and nature of the task mediates the influence of anxiety on the performance of goal-directed actions.