Concluding Remarks

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-128
Author(s):  
Susan D. Healy

In this chapter, I conclude that ecology has been shown to explain variation in the size of brain regions in multiple species, which is not the case for any of the other hypotheses. I go on to suggest the steps that need to be taken to collect the requisite data: collecting data on size of brain regions with identifiable function, choosing the appropriate cognitive test and collecting data from appropriate species, better quantification of ecological factors along with data collected from individuals that differ in age, sex, and geographical location, and demonstration that better cognition confers fitness benefits. Each of these is in both principle and practice feasible, if challenging to assemble for one hypothesis/taxonomic group. With these data, we may eventually be able to shed light on what has caused human brains to become relatively large.

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 1259-1271
Author(s):  
Nikolay A. Samoylov ◽  
◽  
Dmitriy I. Mayatskiy ◽  

This article explores the Chinese historical and ethnographic work of the second half of the 18th century “Illustrated tributaries of the Qing Empire” (“Huangqing zhigongtu”). This book provides rich material for a systematic analysis of the views of the Chinese about European countries during the reign of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). Twenty eight images and descriptions of a number of European nations — Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Swedes, the English, the Dutch, etc. — which were found in the book, have been identified, classified, and analyzed. A range of issues and problems related to the content of the descriptions has been established and compared with the illustrations from the book. The article pays particular attention to identifying and explaining the anthropological and socio-cultural stereotypes that shaped the image of Europeans in China. The authors of this paper have found out that due to Catholic missionaries the Chinese compilers of “Huangqing zhigongtu” must have had enough information about Europe in the first part of the Qing period. Nevertheless, they made a large number of mistakes when describing the geographical location of several nations and relations between some of them. They also misunderstood some habits, traditions or anthropological features of their inhabitants. On the other hand, the compilers were more accurate and precise with regard to political and trade activities of the Europeans in China or near its frontier. Studying the “Huangqing zhigongtu” can shed light not only on important factors that formed the general picture of the Chinese worldview, but also contribute to a better understanding of motives that determined the foreign policy of the Qing Empire.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman

In studying the first graders’ spellings, it is reasonable to begin at the simplest possible level of analysis. The most basic way to look at the children's spellings is at the level of whole words. At this level, the simplest possible question is whether a word is spelled correctly or incorrectly. Once children’s spellings are classified as correct or incorrect, a number of questions arise. Are some words easier for children to spell correctly than others? If so, what kinds of words are easy to spell and what kinds of words are hard to spell? The answers to these questions should shed light on the difficulties that children face in learning the English writing system. For example, if children have more trouble on irregular words than on regular words, one could suggest that the irregularity of the English system is one source of difficulty in learning to spell. If children often misspell inflected and derived words, one could suggest that the morphological basis of the English writing system is a problem for first graders. Such issues are addressed in the first section of this chapter. Although it is easy to classify children’s spellings of whole words as correct or incorrect, this simple classification may obscure potentially important information. For example, although KARE is the wrong spelling of care, this error is a plausible rendition of the word's spoken form. The letter k is a reasonable rendering of the phoneme /k/; /k/ is spelled as k in words like kite and king. In the terms introduced in Chapter 1, KARE is a legal misspelling of care. On the other hand, CA is an illegal spelling of care. It contains no representation of the /r/. In this chapter, I take a first step beyond the correct/incorrect distinction by classifying errors on whole words as legal or illegal. I ask whether some kinds of words give rise to more legal errors than other words and why. Legal errors are not all alike. They differ from one another in a number of ways, one of which is how easy they are to decipher.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 498-517
Author(s):  
Yuk Hui ◽  
Louis Morelle

This article aims to clarify the question of speed and intensity in the thoughts of Simondon and Deleuze, in order to shed light on the recent debates regarding accelerationism and its politics. Instead of starting with speed, we propose to look into the notion of intensity and how it serves as a new ontological ground in Simondon's and Deleuze's philosophy and politics. Simondon mobilises the concept of intensity to criticise hylomorphism and substantialism; Deleuze, taking up Simondon's conceptual framework, repurposes it for his ontology of difference, elevating intensity to the rank of generic concept of being, thus bypassing notions of negativity and individuals as base, in favour of the productive and universal character of difference. In Deleuze, the correlation between intensity and speed is fraught with ambiguities, with each term threatening to subsume the other; this rampant tension becomes explicitly antagonistic when taken up by the diverse strands of contemporary accelerationism, resulting in two extreme cases in the posthuman discourse: either a pure becoming, achieved through destruction, or through abstraction that does away with intensity altogether; or an intensity without movement or speed, that remains a pure jouissance. Both cases appear to stumble over the problem of individuation, if not disindividuation. Hence, we wish to raise the following question: in what way can one think of an accelerationist politics with intensity, or an intensive politics without the fetishisation of speed? We consider this question central to the interrogation of the limits of acceleration and posthuman discourse, thus requiring a new philosophical thought on intensity and speed.


Author(s):  
Trude Fonneland
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  

In this chapter, I explore shamans’ relationships with the nature of the high north. How is nature included in their practices and how does the use of nature relate to the legitimizing of modern Sámi shamanism? I base the discussion on the view that landscapes are constituted as meaningful entities through events. However, different experiences, interests, and agendas make the same landscape evolve with different meanings. To shed light on these issues, I start by putting in context some of the background for the interest in nature and landscape that is expressed by the shamans I have interviewed and that can be related to the interest in nature among modern Pagans as well as within the New Age spiritualties.


Author(s):  
Elena Lombardi

The literature of the Italian Due- and Trecento frequently calls into play the figure of a woman reader. From Guittone d’Arezzo’s piercing critic, the ‘villainous woman’, to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante’s female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio’s overtly female audience, this particular sort of interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority in these times. The aim of this book is to shed light on this figure by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions (in particular Occitan and French) imagined her. Its argument is that these figures of women readers are not mere veneers between a male author and a ‘real’ male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.


Author(s):  
Amos Golan

In this chapter I provide additional rationalization for using the info-metrics framework. This time the justifications are in terms of the statistical, mathematical, and information-theoretic properties of the formalism. Specifically, in this chapter I discuss optimality, statistical and computational efficiency, sufficiency, the concentration theorem, the conditional limit theorem, and the concept of information compression. These properties, together with the other properties and measures developed in earlier chapters, provide logical, mathematical, and statistical justifications for employing the info-metrics framework.


Author(s):  
Scott Jukes

Abstract This paper proposes some possibilities for thinking with a landscape as a pedagogical concept, inspired by posthuman theory. The idea of thinking with a landscape is enacted in the Australian Alps (AA), concentrating on the contentious environmental dilemma involving introduced horses and their management in this bio-geographical location. The topic of horses is of pedagogical relevance for place-responsive outdoor environmental educators as both a location-specific problem and an example of a troubling issue. The paper has two objectives for employing posthuman thinking. Firstly, it experiments with the alternative methodological possibilities that posthuman theory affords for outdoor environmental education, including new ways of conducting educational research. Secondly, it explores how thinking with a landscape as a pedagogical concept may help open ways of considering the dilemma that horses pose. The pedagogical concept is enacted through some empirical events which sketch human–horse encounters from the AA. These sketches depict some of the pedagogical conversations and discursive pathways that encounters can provoke. Such encounters and conversations are ways of constructing knowledge of the landscape, covering multiple species, perspectives and discursive opportunities. For these reasons, this paper may be of relevance for outdoor environmental educators, those interested in the AA or posthuman theorists.


2021 ◽  
pp. 109634802098727
Author(s):  
Josip Mikulić ◽  
Damir Krešić ◽  
Maja Šerić

The current study intends to contribute to a better understanding of the medical tourism experience. In particular, this study uses data from a survey-based study conducted on a sample of 1,209 medical tourists in Croatia. On the one hand, this study aims to explore and shed light on the decision-making process of medical tourists, and, on the other hand, to reveal which elements of both the medical institution and the destination where it is located, have largest potentials to drive medical tourist delight and/or frustration, in accordance with the three-factor theory of customer satisfaction.


Author(s):  
Juan P. Martínez ◽  
Inmaculada Méndez ◽  
Esther Secanilla ◽  
Ana Benavente ◽  
Julia García Sevilla

Starting from previous studies in professional caregivers of people with dementia and other diseases in institutionalized centers of different regions, the aim of this study was to compare burnout levels that workers present depending on the center, to create a caregiver profile with high professional accomplishment and to describe the quality of life that residents perceive Murcia and Barcelona. The instruments used were the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the Professional Caregiver Survey developed ad hoc and the Brief Questionnaire of Quality of Life (CUBRECAVI in Spanish) on residents. The results show, on the one hand, that levels of professional accomplishment may be paradoxically higher in the case of catastrophe and, on the other hand, the 98.2% of users are satisfied with the residence in which is located and 81.8% with the manner in which occupy the time. The conclusions that are extrapolated from the study shed light on the current situation of workers and residents and the influence that an earthquake can have on them.


1987 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Watson

Hedley Bull's contribution to the theory of international relations is considerable; and nowhere more acute than in the distinction which he made between the concept of a system of states and that of an international society. His definitive formulation is set out in Chapter I of The Anarchical Society. ‘Where states are in regular contact with one another, and where in addition there is interaction between them sufficient to make the behaviour of each a necessary element in the calculations of the other, then we may speak of their forming a system.’ ‘A society of states (or international society) exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.’


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