Domestication is not an ancient moment of selection for prosociality: Insights from dogs and modern humans

Domestication is often portrayed as a long-past event, at times even in archaeological literature. The term domestication is also now applied to other processes, including human evolution. In such contexts, domestication means selection for friendliness or prosociality and the bodily results of such selective choices. Both such perspectives are misleading. Using dogs and modern humans as entry points, this paper explores why conceiving of domestication as a threshold event consisting of selection for prosociality is both incomplete and inaccurate. Domestication is an ongoing process, not a moment or an achievement. Selection in breeding, including for prosociality, is a part of many domestication histories, but it alone does not sustain this process over multiple generations. Further, much selection in domestication has little to do with human intention. Care, taming, commensalism, material things, and places are critical in carrying domestic relationships forward.

Configuration and Emplotment: Converging or Opposite Paradigms for Storytelling?

Reflecting on Paul Ricoeur's discussion of historical configuration and fictional emplotment, this article proposes to actualize his model to oppose two prototypes of narrativity, which form two poles between which narrative representations extend. Instead of basing these prototypes on narrative genres such as historiography and fiction, it compares the configuration of narratives designed to inform readers about the signification of a past event with the emplotment of narratives aiming to immerse readers in a simulated past or a fictive storyworld. While contemporary narratology has been mostly concerned with the latter case, we will see that a comparison between narratives belonging to these two poles can help us better understand the functioning of narrative texts, most of them situated between these two extremes. Drawing on stories of a plane crash found in daily newspapers and magazines, the article shows that news stories usually favor the informative function, but when an event cannot be fully told, information enters a process of serialization, leading to the emergence of a “natural” plot. This leads to the conclusion that artificial emplotment is an imitation of prefiguration rather than the triumph of concordance.

Fundamentals of environmental legal regulation of relations in petrochemical and refining complexes

The oil industry is the backbone of the modern economy. The production and transportation of oil on the current scale inevitably leads to significant negative impacts on the past event. The article analyzes the Belarusian legislation in the field of the petrochemical and oil refining industries, and draws conclusions on the work. The paper considers the concept of petrochemical and oil refining, the legal aspects of the regulation of these complexes are negative, and the impact of the complexes on the global environment is considered.

Attitudes and the (dis)continuity between memory and imagination

The current dispute between causalists and simulationists in philosophy of memory has led to opposing attempts to characterize the relationship between memory and imagination. In a recent overview of this debate, Perrin and Michaelian (2017) have suggested that the dispute over the (dis)continuity between memory and imagination boils down to the question of whether a causal connection to a past event is necessary for remembering. By developing an argument based on an analogy to perception, I argue that this dispute should instead be viewed as a dispute about the nature of the attitudes involved in remembering and imagining. The focus on attitudes, rather than on causal connections, suggests a new way of conceiving of the relationship between memory and imagination that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of memory.

Consequences of Outlier Returns for Event Studies: A Methodological Investigation and Treatment

Stock returns are decomposed into their regular and outlier components using a maximum likelihood outlier-resistant estimation method. Analytical results depicting the impact of outliers on the ordinary least square (OLS) estimated models and cumulative abnormal return (CAR) statistics are derived and validated using Monte Carlo simulations. The implications of outliers for past event studies are investigated using samples drawn randomly from the universe of stocks in the CRSP database. The OLS-CAR statistics fail to forecast about 37% of the negative-impact and 43% of the positive-impact events. These results raise serious concerns about the validity of conclusions of past event studies, especially those that rejected the hypothesis of significant-impact events.

I’ll show you what I witnessed. Children’s abilities to use non-anatomical dolls in forensic interviewing

<p>Two studies examined the effectiveness of using non-anatomical (non-AD) dolls as an interview tool, to aid children's communication about body positioning. In the first study, 49 6-8-year-old children took part in a game. Thirty minutes to an hour later, they were interviewed using the Specialist Child Witness Interview model. This was done verbally or with the opportunity to use non-AD dolls to clarify their own and others' body positioning. There was no difference in the amount of information reported nor the accuracy of children's reports when comparing both conditions. To complement the first study, the second study examined jurors' perceptions of children's abilities to use non-AD dolls. Non-AD dolls were generally thought to be helpful, but jurors identified some risks. However, jurors did not have strong beliefs about how non-AD dolls would influence the evidence that children provided. When jurors viewed a video of a child recounting a past event, their beliefs about non-AD dolls were more influential when evaluating a child's credibility than whether or not a non-AD doll was used during the interview. Overall, even when used in conjunction with evidence-based techniques, these findings do not support the use of non-AD dolls to help communicate body positioning in child forensic interviewing.</p>

I’ll show you what I witnessed. Children’s abilities to use non-anatomical dolls in forensic interviewing

<p>Two studies examined the effectiveness of using non-anatomical (non-AD) dolls as an interview tool, to aid children's communication about body positioning. In the first study, 49 6-8-year-old children took part in a game. Thirty minutes to an hour later, they were interviewed using the Specialist Child Witness Interview model. This was done verbally or with the opportunity to use non-AD dolls to clarify their own and others' body positioning. There was no difference in the amount of information reported nor the accuracy of children's reports when comparing both conditions. To complement the first study, the second study examined jurors' perceptions of children's abilities to use non-AD dolls. Non-AD dolls were generally thought to be helpful, but jurors identified some risks. However, jurors did not have strong beliefs about how non-AD dolls would influence the evidence that children provided. When jurors viewed a video of a child recounting a past event, their beliefs about non-AD dolls were more influential when evaluating a child's credibility than whether or not a non-AD doll was used during the interview. Overall, even when used in conjunction with evidence-based techniques, these findings do not support the use of non-AD dolls to help communicate body positioning in child forensic interviewing.</p>

El proclítico verbal a: el vínculo entre el Poqomchi’ y los idiomas mayas cholanos

Some missionary texts written during the Colonial period in the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, K’ichean subgroup) attest the verbal proclitic a, that is being lost in the modern language. It was added to verb forms in the completive aspect marked by the prefix x- and indicated, roughly speaking, the relevance of a past event at the moment of utterance. The same proclitic with similar meaning is also registered in two Mayan languages of the Cholan subgroup: Chontal of Tabasco and Chontal of Acalán. The Poqomchi’ people, despite their origin in the Guatemalan highlands, were neighbors of the Cholan groups for a considerable period of time. It is probable that the proclitic a was introduced to Poqomchi’ during the Postclassic period thanks to language contacts with some Cholan group, possibly the Acalá, who spoke a variety of Chontal, that is, a western Cholan language.

Aquilombar Democracy Fugitive Routes from the End of the World

This working paper approaches the current global crisis as a potential territoriality for radicalizing concepts and for learning with ongoing fugitive routes. Through nonlinear paths, I aim to examine the contours of the quilombo not only as a slavery-past event but as a continuum of anti-colonial struggle that invokes other forms of re-existence and convivial coexistence in Brazil. In doing that, this research draws attention to an Améfrica Ladina epistemology and a decolonial methodology embodied by living archives and oral histories.