Scientific observation has led to the discovery of recurring patterns in nature. Symmetry is the property of an object showing regularity in parts on a plane or around an axis. There are several types of symmetries observed in the natural world and the most common are mirror symmetry, radial symmetry, and translational symmetry. Symmetries can be continuous or discrete. A discrete symmetry is a symmetry that describes non-continuous changes in an object. A continuous symmetry is a repetition of an object (...) an infinite number of times. A consequence of continuous symmetry is the existence of conservation laws. A natural system with discrete and continuous symmetries displays several physical properties, such as the existence of long-range order. Geometric shapes exhibit symmetry as mirror reflections of each other. Symmetry in nature has been a model of beauty since the beginning of civilization. Since the earliest times, nature itself has manifestly been a model, evincing regularity in sundry forms and occurrences–from minerals and plants to the anatomy of living beings, to the regularly recurring stellar constellations. For Ancient Greek philosophers, proportion, symmetry, and harmony, were the basics to determine whether something is beautiful or not. Ancient Greek philosophers were known for bringing logic and rational thinking to phenomena that were previously explained by mythology and Gods. They observed the natural world around them and used their knowledge to answer questions about the proportion in observable objects and the origin of Earth. The Greek words _summetria_ and _summetros_ appear frequently in the Timaeus, defined as parts with each other and with the whole. Plato has a very rough concept of symmetry, and when he uses “beauty” to characterize the so-called Platonic Solids in the Timaeus, he seems to be emphasizing their regularity and indirectly their symmetry. Plato believes the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) have been constructed by the Demiurge, or a divine craftsman who appoints order in an otherwise chaotic universe. Minerals are representative examples of beauty, order, and symmetry in inorganic materials. Well-formed minerals (crystals) are a collection of equivalent faces related by symmetry. The goal of this paper is to relate the perspective of symmetry in ancient Greek philosophy with the modern scientific evidence of the geometric description of crystal structures. The five Platonic solids are ideal models of geometrical patterns that occur throughout the world of minerals. In this paper, minerals serve as a model of connecting the symmetry theory in Plato’s philosophy and modern advances in mineralogy. (shrink)

Статтю присвячено аналізу розуміння ієрархії у православній філософській та богословській думці, та визначенню того, як це розуміння впливає на православний світогляд. Мета статті досягається за допомогою застосування авторами методології, розробленої представниками філософської школи інтегрального традиціоналізму, оскільки остання являє собою продукт глибокого вивчення та зіставлення досвіду різних релігійних традицій, а також виявляє критерії традиціоналістського світогляду як такого, спільні для різних традицій. Зокрема, автори використовують висновки французького філософа-традиціоналіста Рене Генона про сакральну та ініціатичну природу ієрархії у традиційних суспільствах для пошуку відповідників у (...) православній релігійній традиції. Такі відповідники автори знаходять у працях отців церкви, які вважаються канонічними для православної релігійної традиції та являють собою «становий хребет» її філософського світогляду. За підсумками проведеного дослідження, автори даної публікації виявили, що православний релігійний світогляд є ієрархічним за своєю суттю. (shrink)

When quality in an organisational context includes more employee-oriented arrangements and systems, the introduction of a new relationship pattern between employers and employees can rightly be considered a quality program. In this article we describe the shifting roles of HRM and 'people management' in general within a changing environmental and organisational context. We present an original 'FIT' organisational model, in which the role of HRM as 'partner-champion' is highlighted, and which was implemented during the 1990s in a multinational company. More (...) specifically, we describe the company background, the motives for this new approach, the basic principles and the main phases of implementation of this new 'social contract'. (shrink)

Studie over het verschijnsel helderziendheid waarbij de verschillende in de loop der tijden ontwikkelde theorieën en verklaringen in een logisch verband behandeld worden.

How Classification Works attempts to bridge the gap between philosophy and the social sciences using as a focus some of the work of Nelson Goodman. Throughout his long career Goodman has addressed the question: are some ways of conceptualizing more natural than others? This book looks at the rightness of categories, assessing Goodman's role in modern philosophy and explaining some of his ideas on the relation between aesthetics and cognitive theory. Two papers by Nelson Goodman are (...) included in the collection and there are analyses of his work by seven leading academics in anthropology, philosophy, sociology and musicology. (shrink)

Purpose/methods: This study investigated the relationship between ethics education and training, and the use and usefulness of ethics resources, confidence in moral decisions, and moral action/activism through a survey of practicing nurses and social workers from four United States (US) census regions. Findings: The sample (n = 1215) was primarily Caucasian (83%), female (85%), well educated (57% with a master's degree). no ethics education at all was reported by 14% of study participants (8% of social workers had no ethics education, (...) versus 23% of nurses), and only 57% of participants had ethics education in their professional educational program. Those with both professional ethics education and in-service or continuing education were more confident in their moral judgments and more likely to use ethics resources and to take moral action. Social workers had more overall education, more ethics education, and higher confidence and moral action scores, and were more likely to use ethics resources than nurses. Conclusion: Ethics education has a significant positive influence on moral confidence, moral action, and use of ethics resources by nurses and social workers. (shrink)

If Bayesian Fundamentalism existed, Jones & Love's (J&L's) arguments would provide a necessary corrective. But it does not. Bayesian cognitive science is deeply concerned with characterizing algorithms and representations, and, ultimately, implementations in neural circuits; it pays close attention to environmental structure and the constraints of behavioral data, when available; and it rigorously compares multiple models, both within and across papers. J&L's recommendation of Bayesian Enlightenment corresponds to past, present, and, we hope, future practice in Bayesian cognitive science.

In many learning or inference tasks human behavior approximates that of a Bayesian ideal observer, suggesting that, at some level, cognition can be described as Bayesian inference. However, a number of findings have highlighted an intriguing mismatch between human behavior and standard assumptions about optimality: People often appear to make decisions based on just one or a few samples from the appropriate posterior probability distribution, rather than using the full distribution. Although sampling-based approximations are a common way to implement Bayesian (...) inference, the very limited numbers of samples often used by humans seem insufficient to approximate the required probability distributions very accurately. Here, we consider this discrepancy in the broader framework of statistical decision theory, and ask: If people are making decisions based on samples—but as samples are costly—how many samples should people use to optimize their total expected or worst-case reward over a large number of decisions? We find that under reasonable assumptions about the time costs of sampling, making many quick but locally suboptimal decisions based on very few samples may be the globally optimal strategy over long periods. These results help to reconcile a large body of work showing sampling-based or probability matching behavior with the hypothesis that human cognition can be understood in Bayesian terms, and they suggest promising future directions for studies of resource-constrained cognition. (shrink)

Drawing upon two independent national samples of 201 and 241 psychology graduate students, this article describes the development and psychometric evaluation of 4 Web-based student self-report scales tapping student socialization in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) with human participants. The Mentoring the Responsible Conduct of Research Scale (MRCR) is composed of 2 subscales assessing RCR instruction and modeling by research mentors. The 2 subscales of the RCR Department Climate Scale (RCR-DC) assess RCR department policies and faculty and student RCR (...) practices. The RCR Preparedness scale (RCR-P) and the RCR Field Integrity scale (RCR-FI) measure respectively students' confidence in their ability to conduct research responsibly and their belief in the RCR integrity of psychology as a discipline. Factor analysis, coefficient alphas, correlations, and multiple regression analyses demonstrated each of the scales had good internal consistency and concurrent and construct validity. (shrink)

Ce livre prend position sur les enjeux et les visées des oeuvres d'art en matière de vérité et de morale : il répond, par un retour sur l'époque des Lumières, aux questions contemporaines sur l'idée d'un perfectionnement moral de l'individu (S. Cavell, M. Nussbaum, S. Laugier). Car les Lumières ont remis au coeur de la création artistique les émotions, les affects et les sentiments, mues par la conviction de l'efficacité d'une éducation esthétique de l'homme, d'une éducation sensible par le sensible, (...) en l'occurrence par les oeuvres. La vérité a-t-elle un sens en matière artistique? Notre besoin d'art est-il lié à notre conviction qu'elles nous rendent meilleurs et nous font mieux connaître le monde? L'autonomie de l'oeuvre, la liberté du créateur, la dévaluation de tout canon au nom d'un global turn qui contraint au relativisme rendent aujourd'hui difficile l'affirmation d'une vérité. (shrink)

Trois délires politiques mortifères hantent notre époque. Dans le premier, le délire occidental, la pléonexie (vouloir toujours plus) à l'oeuvre dans le néolibéralisme se transforme en risque de tout perdre (dislocation des subjectivités, déchirure du lien social, épuisement de la planète, destruction des bases mêmes de la vie sur terre). Le second, le délire théo fasciste de l'islamisme djihadiste prétend, contre l'égoïsme érigé en système et la démesure caractérisant l'Occident, restaurer une pureté absolue. Or, quand cette pureté originaire revendiquée se (...) réalise, elle se transforme en souillure et en horreur absolues. Le troisième, le délire identitaire néo-fasciste (qui monte aujourd'hui partout en Europe) se présente comme le seul rempart possible contre les deux premiers. Contre la mondialisation néo-libérale, il prône un retour à la patrie. Non pas une patrie fondée sur un principe universaliste (du type "liberté, égalité, fraternité"), mais une patrie refermée sur elle-même, désignant des boucs émissaires, les étrangers, pour que des acolytes réputés "amis" se regroupent et décrètent contre ces "ennemis" l'"état d'exception". Ces trois délires tendent de plus en plus à former système : on ne sort de l'un que pour entrer dans l'un des deux autres. Puisqu'aucun des garde-fous démocratiques (État, médias et université) ne fonctionne plus, il faut songer à tout refonder à partir des principes de dignité et de commune humanité, également bafoués par ces trois délires. Il se pourrait bien que le travail actuellement fourni par Les Convivialistes puisse fournir les bases de cette reconstruction probablement une des dernières possibles avant la catastrophe annoncée."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Although clinical ethics consultation is a high-stakes endeavor with an increasing prominence in health care systems, progress in developing standards for quality is challenging. In this article, we describe the results of a pilot project utilizing portfolios as an evaluation tool. We found that this approach is feasible and resulted in a reasonably wide distribution of scores among the 23 submitted portfolios that we evaluated. We discuss limitations and implications of these results, and suggest that this is a significant step (...) on the pathway to an eventual certification process for clinical ethics consultants. (shrink)

Abstract Islam displaces the ancient idea of time as an implacable enemy with the scriptural image of time as the stage of judgment, a narrow bridge of accountability stretched between creation and eternity. The stark contrast of temporal evanescence with all the immutability of eternity challenges Muslim theologians and philosophers of the classic age. The dialectical theologians of the kalam describe time and change atomisti?cally and even occasionalistically, seeking to preserve the absoluteness of the contrast and to avoid compromising the (...) purity of God's creative act and the sheer facticity of its temporal effect. The falasifa, philosophers in the Greek tradition, use Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic arguments to reconcile temporality with eternity. Stripped of argument, their emanative and archetypal schemes join the core symbolisms of Islam, but only when accommodated to the Qur'anic ideas of judgment and creation. (shrink)

Law is indispensable to the public's health. The twentieth century proved this true as law contributed to each of the century's ten great public health achievements: vaccination, healthier mothers and babies, family planning, safer and healthier foods, fluoridation of drinking water, the control of infectious diseases, the decline in death from heart disease and stroke, recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard, motor vehicle safety, and safer workplaces.The readers of this journal can give examples of the relevant types of (...) laws with ease: Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination; mandatory immunization for school admission; authorization of state prenatal care programs; mandatory fortification of foods; Title X of the Public Health Service Act; the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906; the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, and hundreds of state and local enactments regulating food; fluoridation ordinanceswater, and sanitation; the Surgeon General's warning notices on cigarette packs and restrictions on marketing tobacco; seat belt laws and mandated vehicle and highway design features; and laws like the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 that regulate working conditions. (shrink)

Law is indispensable to the public's health. The twentieth century proved this true as law contributed to each of the century's ten great public health achievements: vaccination, healthier mothers and babies, family planning, safer and healthier foods, fluoridation of drinking water, the control of infectious diseases, the decline in death from heart disease and stroke, recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard, motor vehicle safety, and safer workplaces.The readers of this journal can give examples of the relevant types of (...) laws with ease: Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination; mandatory immunization for school admission; authorization of state prenatal care programs; mandatory fortification of foods; Title X of the Public Health Service Act; the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906; the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, and hundreds of state and local enactments regulating food; fluoridation ordinanceswater, and sanitation; the Surgeon General's warning notices on cigarette packs and restrictions on marketing tobacco; seat belt laws and mandated vehicle and highway design features; and laws like the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 that regulate working conditions. (shrink)

Ample research links mothers’ postpartum depression (PPD) to adverse interactions with their infants. However, most studies relied on general population samples, whereas a substantial number of women are at elevated depression risk. The purpose of this study was to describe mothers’ interactions with their 6- and 12-month-old infants among women at elevated risk, although with a range of symptom severity. We also identified higher-order factors that best characterized the interactions and tested longitudinal consistency of these factors from 6 to 12 (...) months of infant age. We leveraged data from eight projects across the United States (n = 647), using standardized depression measures and an adaptation of the NICHD Mother-Infant Interaction Scales. Overall, these depression-vulnerable mothers showed high levels of sensitivity and positive regard and low levels of intrusiveness, detachment, and negative regard with their infants. Factor analyses of maternal behaviors identified two overarching factors—“positive engagement” and “negative intrusiveness” that were comparable at 6 and 12 months of infant age. Mothers’ ability to regulate depressed mood was a key behavior that defined “positive engagement” in factor loadings. An exceptionally strong loading of intrusiveness on the second factor suggested its central importance for women at elevated depression risk. Mothers with severe depressive symptoms had significantly more “negative intrusiveness” and less “positive engagement” with their 6-month-old infants than women with moderate or fewer depressive symptoms, suggesting a potential tipping point at which symptoms may interfere with the quality of care. Results provide the foundation for further research into predictors and moderators of women’s interactions with their infant among women at elevated risk for PPD. They also indicate a need for evidence-based interventions that can support more severely depressed women in providing optimal care. (shrink)

THE first-century Skeptic philosopher Agrippa was said by Sextus Empiricus to have based his attack against the possibility of philosophical understanding on five "tropes" or ploys--for sophisticated Skeptics did not refer to their considerations as arguments, lest that imply the concession that there is a recognized and recognizable criterion of truth. Rather they appealed only to the plausibility of their tropes, as a means of suggesting that philosophical questions are best left unasked, since they appear to be in principle unanswerable. (...) Agrippa's tropes rested on the following considerations. (shrink)

This biography of the court scholar Xun Xu explores central areas of intellectual life in third-century China — court lyrics, music, metrology, pitch systems, archeology, and historiography. It clarifies the relevant source texts in order to reveal fierce debates. Besides solving technical puzzles about the material details of court rites, the book unfolds factional struggles that developed into scholarly ones.

"A demain le bon sexe"... disait, non sans une pointe d'ironie, Michel Foucault, au plus fort de la "révolution sexuelle", et l'on sentait que ce n'était pas gagné. Qu'est-ce que le bon sexe? J'ai écrit ce livre en neuf mois... et toute une vie... Sans doute, pour moi, une manière de réaliser une certaine façon qui fut mienne d'être femme je me revois, dans ma petite chambre mansardée, étudiante, tentant en vain de lire en son entier l'Histoire de la sexualité (...) de Michel Foucault... Que savais-je de la sexualité, que pouvais-je recevoir de cet essai, que je trouvais grandiose, lumineux et obscur? Foucault, le seul des philosophes à parler de "ces choses-là", était bien isolé. Il faudrait du temps pour que ses écrits fassent leur route et du temps pour changer les mentalités. Du temps aussi pour moi, pour pouvoir les entendre, qu'ils fassent écho en moi. "Le sexe, disait Foucault, ça s'administre, la sexualité, ça se subit ; quant à la sensualité, elle est chaque jour à inventer." J'ai voulu rouvrir le dossier, emprunter les chemins qu'il a tracés en 1976 en écrivant son Histoire de la sexualité, qui est l'histoire des discours sur la sexualité, eux-mêmes histoire des corps investis par le pouvoir. Danièle Sastre. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Marr's levels of analysis—computational, algorithmic, and implementation—have served cognitive science well over the last 30 years. But the recent increase in the popularity of the computational level raises a new challenge: How do we begin to relate models at different levels of analysis? We propose that it is possible to define levels of analysis that lie between the computational and the algorithmic, providing a way to build a bridge between computational- and algorithmic-level models. The key idea is to push the (...) notion of rationality, often used in defining computational-level models, deeper toward the algorithmic level. We offer a simple recipe for reverse-engineering the mind's cognitive strategies by deriving optimal algorithms for a series of increasingly more realistic abstract computational architectures, which we call “resource-rational analysis.”. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

Dans tous les pays et particulierement en Europe, les citoyens, les magistrats et les juristes en general deplorent la complexite normative. Comment traiter la complexite des normes a prendre en compte dans toutes les decisions fondees sur la regle de droit? Depuis une quinzaine d'annees, l'etude des systemes complexes a fait de grands progres tant du point de vue des methodes que de la modelisation. L'approche politique et l'approche scientifique semblent a priori eloignees, mais elles convergent sur l'interet de prendre (...) en compte un objet nouveau: la complexite des systemes. Ces systemes font emerger de nouvelles proprietes, non observables au niveau des elements constitutifs, par une dynamique difficilement previsible, et rendent vaine toute analyse en sous-systemes plus simples. Pour la premiere fois, des specialistes des systemes complexes, des juristes, des philosophes, des experts de l'action publique et de l'evaluation des lois conjuguent leurs reflexions pour depasser les problematiques de la simplification et proposent des concepts et des outils totalement nouveaux pour comprendre et traiter de facon simple l'inevitable complexite du droit. (shrink)