The Worse than Nothing Account of Harm and the Preemption Problem

Because harm is an important notion in ethics, it’s worth investigating what it amounts to. The counterfactual comparative account of harm, commonly thought to be the most promising account of harm, analyzes harm by comparing what actually happened with what would have happened in some counterfactual situation. But it faces the preemption problem, a problem so serious that it has driven some to suggest we abandon the counterfactual comparative account and maybe even abandon the notion of harm altogether. This paper defends a version of the counterfactual comparative account that solves the preemption problem, a version called the “worse than nothing account.” It says that you harm someone just in case you leave them worse off than if you’d done nothing at all.

Hegemonic Formation in Post-Javanese Indonesian Society

In society, there are various structured power relations that connect individuals who share certain interests and objectives. In these power relations, hegemony plays a significant role. Hegemony is the most important notion in the Marxist tradition, especially as it is conceptualized by Gramsci. This paper tries to re-read the issue of hegemony in the context of ideological contestation in Javanese society in Indonesia. The problem will be examined based on post-Marxist theory, especially as it relates to the demolition of the strong order of capitalism. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that hegemony forms itself in layers. The layers influence each other so that there is one area of hegemonic intersection. In Javanese society these days, there is a “competition,” especially in Yogyakarta, to return, feel, and become more Javanese than others. The implication is that there are parties who feel more Javanese than others. This case in this study is referred to as the post-Javanese society. However, in the intersection area, there are all-powerful puppeteers.

In defence of constitutive rules

Although the notion of constitutive rule has played an important role in the metaphysical debate in social and legal philosophy, several authors perceive it as somewhat mysterious and ambiguous: the idea of a specific kind of rules that are supposed to be “magically” constitutive of reality seems suspicious, more a rationalistic fiction than a genuine explanation. For these reasons, reductionist approaches have been put forward to deflate the explanatory role of this notion. In this paper, I will instead try to defend constitutive rules. My thesis is that the notion of constitutive rule is explanatorily helpful because it gives a complete account of an important phenomenon in the social and legal domain, namely, that of artifactual entities endowed with statuses that can have emergent normative properties. Conceiving of these entities as rule-constituted artifacts is an important part of what H. L. A. Hart called “the internal point of view” toward law, and for this reason constitutive rules should be included in an explanation of that point of view as an integral part of the life of institutions. The structure of my argument will be as follows. First, I will provide an example of an important phenomenon in the internal point of view, namely, the fact that individuals can have normative reactions not about the specific regulation of an institution but about its underlying purpose and rationale—what in the legal domain is called the ratio of a norm. Then I will identify two reductionistic approaches on constitutive rules. The first approach is exemplified by Brian Epstein’s idea that the phenomena explained by constitutive rules are better explained in terms of metaphysical (grounding/anchoring) relations. The second kind of reductionism is instead exemplified by the idea (held by several authors, among whom Alf Ross, Riccardo Guastini, Frank Hindriks, and Francesco Guala) that the phenomena explained by constitutive rules can be accounted for in terms of regulative rules plus a certain terminology. I will try to show that neither of these approaches can explain normative reactions to the ratio of an institution from an internal point of view: While the first cannot explain the fact that the reaction is strongly normative, the second cannot explain the fact that the reaction is about the ratio of a normative entity. Constitutive rules can instead explain both things and should be preserved as an important notion for the analysis of institutional ontology. By way of constitutive rules we create something: immaterial, rule-based institutional artifacts that can have emergent normative properties.

Efficient identity-based encryption with Hierarchical key-insulation from HIBE

Hierarchical key-insulated identity-based encryption (HKIBE) is identity-based encryption (IBE) that allows users to update their secret keys to achieve (hierarchical) key-exposure resilience, which is an important notion in practice. However, existing HKIBE constructions have limitations in efficiency: sizes of ciphertexts and secret keys depend on the hierarchical depth. In this paper, we first triumph over the barrier by proposing simple but effective design methodologies to construct efficient HKIBE schemes. First, we show a generic construction from any hierarchical IBE (HIBE) scheme that satisfies a special requirement, called MSK evaluatability introduced by Emura et al. (Des. Codes Cryptography 89(7):1535–1574, 2021). It provides several new and efficient instantiations since most pairing-based HIBE schemes satisfy the requirement. It is worth noting that it preserves all parameters’ sizes of the underlying HIBE scheme, and hence we obtain several efficient HKIBE schemes under the k-linear assumption in the standard model. Since MSK evaluatability is dedicated to pairing-based HIBE schemes, the first construction restricts pairing-based instantiations. To realize efficient instantiation from various assumptions, we next propose a generic construction of an HKIBE scheme from any plain HIBE scheme. It is based on Hanaoka et al.’s HKIBE scheme (Asiacrypt 2005), and does not need any special properties. Therefore, we obtain new efficient instantiations from various assumptions other than pairing-oriented ones. Though the sizes of secret keys and ciphertexts are larger than those of the first construction, it is more efficient than Hanaoka et al.’s scheme in the sense of the sizes of master public/secret keys.

On a Chomskyan postulation in conceptual metaphor theory

This paper is an attempt to make a comparison between Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory and Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar, and to demonstrate a Chomskyan postulation in the former. Although Lakoff and Johnson regard Chomsky’s linguistics as a modern representative of traditional Western philosophies of language that tend to highlight the a priori assumptions rather than empirical findings, the cognitive theory of metaphor contains a Chomskyan metaphysical assumption as its most important notion, i.e. the assumption of conceptual metaphors. Thus, what the present paper wants to argue with ample evidence is that Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory resembles Chomsky’s logic and that their notion of conceptual metaphors is very much a Chomskyan postulation. What the present study tries to further demonstrate is that the abovementioned two theories actually have many points in common, which also implies that Lakoff and Johnson have failed to avoid the paradigm that they believe is conflicting with their own.

The Alkylating Agent Methyl Methanesulfonate Triggers Lipid Alterations at the Inner Nuclear Membrane That Are Independent from Its DNA-Damaging Ability

In order to tackle the study of DNA repair pathways, the physical and chemical agents creating DNA damage, the genotoxins, are frequently employed. Despite their utility, their effects are rarely restricted to DNA, and therefore simultaneously harm other cell biomolecules. Methyl methanesulfonate (MMS) is an alkylating agent that acts on DNA by preferentially methylating guanine and adenine bases. It is broadly used both in basic genome stability research and as a model for mechanistic studies to understand how alkylating agents work, such as those used in chemotherapy. Nevertheless, MMS exerts additional actions, such as oxidation and acetylation of proteins. In this work, we introduce the important notion that MMS also triggers a lipid stress that stems from and affects the inner nuclear membrane. The inner nuclear membrane plays an essential role in virtually all genome stability maintenance pathways. Thus, we want to raise awareness that the relative contribution of lipid and genotoxic stresses when using MMS may be difficult to dissect and will matter in the conclusions drawn from those studies.

The Problem of Contextualizing a Prestigious Yet Non-Divine Jesus of Islamic Tradition: Theorizing a Radical Transition in the Course of Christology from the New Testament to the Qur’an

This article addresses the question of the messianic motif of Christianity making its way into the Qur’an without wearing a badge of high New Testament Christology. It attempts to explore and understand a potentially underlying connection among the Islamic ‘Isā, the New Testament Jesus, and the Jewish messiah in a quest for the configuration of a historical Christ through the ideological and historical minefields that exist between the Islamic and the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The person of Jesus is, therefore, understood to be historical in the article without positing a response to the fundamental questions raised by the historical Jesus skepticism. What I will try to avoid in the following pages, on the contrary, is to treat and brand the Qur’anic portrayal of Jesus as a “stand-alone” concept—indifferent to the historical context of the Bible—hanging in a theological balance, as some critics would be inclined to call it. The article is linearly structured according to the major Qur’anic precepts and concepts developed around the person of Jesus through its text, which originally do not follow a particular sequence. A comparative study of Islamic Jesus against a two-pronged history of the concept is carried out for a critical analysis of the characterization of Islamic Jesus and the received concept of messiah. Such an analysis is important particularly on two fronts: comparison with the Judeo-Christian Bible and comparison with the orthodox Islamic position in certain aspects that fall outside the Qur’anic provenance. The life and ministry of Jesus pictured in the present article is, for the most part, a reconstruction of the important notion of Christology from within the Qur’an without breaking it down to a form of reductionism capitalizing on rudimentary borrowing from an external source.

Fluctuation spectra of large random dynamical systems reveal hidden structure in ecological networks

Understanding the relationship between complexity and stability in large dynamical systems—such as ecosystems—remains a key open question in complexity theory which has inspired a rich body of work developed over more than fifty years. The vast majority of this theory addresses asymptotic linear stability around equilibrium points, but the idea of ‘stability’ in fact has other uses in the empirical ecological literature. The important notion of ‘temporal stability’ describes the character of fluctuations in population dynamics, driven by intrinsic or extrinsic noise. Here we apply tools from random matrix theory to the problem of temporal stability, deriving analytical predictions for the fluctuation spectra of complex ecological networks. We show that different network structures leave distinct signatures in the spectrum of fluctuations, and demonstrate the application of our theory to the analysis of ecological time-series data of plankton abundances.

A survey on artificial intelligence assurance

Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms are increasingly providing decision making and operational support across multiple domains. AI includes a wide (and growing) library of algorithms that could be applied for different problems. One important notion for the adoption of AI algorithms into operational decision processes is the concept of assurance. The literature on assurance, unfortunately, conceals its outcomes within a tangled landscape of conflicting approaches, driven by contradicting motivations, assumptions, and intuitions. Accordingly, albeit a rising and novel area, this manuscript provides a systematic review of research works that are relevant to AI assurance, between years 1985 and 2021, and aims to provide a structured alternative to the landscape. A new AI assurance definition is adopted and presented, and assurance methods are contrasted and tabulated. Additionally, a ten-metric scoring system is developed and introduced to evaluate and compare existing methods. Lastly, in this manuscript, we provide foundational insights, discussions, future directions, a roadmap, and applicable recommendations for the development and deployment of AI assurance.

Diasporic Pariah: A Study of Bessie Head’s Maru

Home is a very important notion in human life which helps people establish emotional, social and intellectual belonging and identifications so that they can hold on to life. When the sense of home is contested, the sense of identity is impaired too. Those people who are characterized by the sense of disconnectedness and desire to re-establish their home are known as diasporic people. The protagonist of Maru (1971), Margaret is one of those diasporic people who long for home and attachments to people. This article is an attempt to examine the struggle of Margaret against a ruthless and cruel society. In her status as a diasporic individual, Margaret is seen as a nonhuman being due to her race, as a Masarwa, living in Botswana. She is alienated, and treated as a pariah, because she does not belong to a superior race defined by the colonial British forces which ruled Botswana. The article tries to view the protagonist’s estrangement and her experience as a diasporic pariah through the lenses of some of the famous postcolonial critics and writers. It also tries to explore the origins and aspects of this kind of treatment.