From When to When: Evaluating Naturalness of Reaction Time via Viewing Turn around Behaviors

This paper addresses the effects of visual reaction times of a turn around behavior toward touch stimulus in the context of perceived naturalness. People essentially prefer a quick and natural reaction time to interaction partners, but appropriate reaction times will change due to the kinds of partners, e.g., humans, computers, and robots. In this study, we investigate two visual reaction times in touch interaction: the time length from the touched timing to the start of a reaction behavior, and the time length of the reaction behavior. We also investigated appropriate reaction times for different beings: three robots (Sota, Nao and Pepper) and humans (male and female). We conducted a web-survey based experiment to investigate natural reaction times for robots and humans, and the results concluded that the best combinations of both reaction times are different between each robot (i.e., among Sota, Nao and Pepper) and the humans (i.e., between male and female). We also compared the effect of using the best combinations for each robot and human to prove the importance of using each appropriate reaction timing for each being. The results suggest that an appropriate reaction time combination investigated from the male model is not ideal for robots, and the combination investigated from the female model is a better choice for robots. Our study also suggests that calibrating parameters for individual robots’ behavior design would enable better performances than using parameters of robot behaviors based on observing human-human interaction, although such an approach is a typical method of robot behavior design.

Glocalization as the dominant trend in the development of socio-political being: conflict models and constructs

Being a complex dialectical interaction process for differently directed social centrifugal and centripetal movements, glocalization leads to a significant transformation of political being and consciousness (Chumakov, 2016). Being a natural reaction to the developing unification narrative, the localization and differentiation tendencies, on the other hand, become a causal basis of the struggle for overcoming differences. Both trends symbolize, within their frameworks, the basic values of each narrative and create their political mythologies, each of which has an impact on the collective stratum of consciousness and, as a consequence, on a certain model of socio-political behavior of individuals. Political "myths of global unity" lead the core constructions of political and social being - the nation and the state - to a decrease in their authority and legitimacy level; at the same time, the "mythology of difference", while preserving the dominant political values, reorients them to local manifestations, also losing their connection with the central elements of the political matter. Thus, special conflictual forms of development are formed in contemporary society and are conditioned by both real objective preconditions and artificially generated constructs. Socio-political being, therefore, is in a state of dialectical equilibrium and develops within the conflict paradigm.

Personal Information as Symmetry Breaker in Disagreements

When involved in a disagreement, a common reaction is to tell oneself that, given that the information about one's own epistemic standing is clearly superior in both amount and quality to the information about one's opponent's epistemic standing, one is justified in one's confidence that one's view is correct. In line with this natural reaction to disagreement, some contributors to the debate on its epistemic significance have claimed that one can stick to one's guns by relying in part on information about one's first-order evidence and the functioning of one's cognitive capacities. In this article, I argue that such a manoeuvre to settle controversies encounters the problem that both disputants can make use of it, the problem that one may be wrong about one's current conscious experience, and the problem that it is a live possibility that many of one's beliefs are the product of epistemically distorting factors. I also argue that, even if we grant that personal information is reliable, when it comes to real-life rather than idealized disagreements, the extent of the unpossessed information about one's opponent's epistemic standing provides a reason for doubting that personal information can function as a symmetry breaker.

Nationalism: evolution of ideology

The article is devoted to the historical evolution of theoretical representations about nationalism and its political practice in different countries, first of all in the European states. The authors come to the conclusion that in the conditions of growing social-economic and political international relations and getting more authority by sovereign states and national institutions nationalism is growing too. This process is a natural reaction to the threat to loose their national identity and the rise of nationalism continues to be a discussion point of modern nationalists project and movements.

Natural reaction orbitals for characterizing electron transfer responsive to nuclear coordinate displacement

Natural reaction orbital (NRO) is proposed as a new concept for analyzing chemical reactions from the viewpoint of the electronic theory. The pair of the occupied and virtual NROs that...

Keep Calm and Carry On: Climate-ready Crops and the Genetic Codification of Climate Myopia

The diverse ways that extreme climate events are expressed at the local level have represented a challenge for the development of transgenic “climate-ready” (resilient to environmental stress) seeds. Based on the Argentinean “HB4” technology, this paper analyzes how ignorance and a sunflower gene are mobilized to overcome this difficulty in soy and wheat. HB4 seeds can be understood as myopic: the technology does not obstruct the capacity of soy and wheat plants to sense droughts, but it prevents their natural reaction, which would be to put a halt on crop production and redirect their energy toward survival. Plants thus become “short-sighted” to droughts. Informed by ignorance studies and by the immunological concept of tolerance, this paper analyzes HB4 myopia as a type of nonhuman ignorance: an asset that allows plant breeders to achieve varied plant responses to droughts and to encode their capitalist values (that prioritize production over survival) into plants’ DNA. Moreover, ignorance becomes a molecular commodity that can be selected, transferred between organisms, and traded in markets. HB4’s prioritization of production resonates with other technologies of climate adaptation and mitigation that do not promote structural changes to the capitalist system.

Natural Entropy and Piers Plowman

This chapter considers medieval theories that sin produces bodily sickness and suffering, and that this might, paradoxically, undermine sin itself. These theories result from the psychosomaticism of medical-stoic thought; they assume that sickness is the body’s natural reaction to being ‘abused’ by vice. These theories were developed in later medical theory, according to which the vices have their destructive impact on the body via the ‘non-naturals’ (contingent phenomena that affect health), especially the passions. Influenced by these ideas, medieval pastoral thought frequently describes sinners as suffering physiologically and the visual arts contain many striking illustrations. If the overt purpose of such texts and images is to warn people off sin, their effect is also to show sin somehow naturally consuming or destroying itself; it will be clear that such theories are at odds with intentionalist ethics. Langland explores these ideas and paradoxes in Piers Plowman, where the personified sins, and Haukyn, are undoubtedly sad vices; related ideas also underlie the poem’s apocalyptic ending, which is characterized by the coincidence of endemic sin and physical suffering. But at this point it is not clear that the suffering has any beneficial impact. However, the chapter also observes that the poem’s ending reflects a kind of entropy that may derive from experiencing, but also writing and reading about, the reiterations of sin: it suggests that the natural entropy of sin may after all still play some part here.

Enhancing a de novo enzyme activity by computationally-focused ultra-low-throughput screening

De novo enzymes capable of efficiently catalysis of a non-natural reaction are obtained through minimalist design plus computationally-focused variant library screening.