Atsakomybės subjekto steigtis technikos amžiuje: Hansas Jonas ir Bruno Latouras

This article opposes the attempts to marginalize ethical issues and defend the thesis of technosphere as an autonomous phenomenon in the Anthropocene. The author points out that by evading the question of ethical perspective and responsibility, the technological activity and its trace are naturalised, and any ethical decision is therefore turned into a technical decision. The comparison of the positions of two philosophers of technology (Hans Jonas and Bruno Latour) enables us to reflect on how technology mediates the constitution of the subject of responsibility in the tension of global and local perspectives. The article shows that Jonas’ “heuristics of fear” leads to the conscious practice of asceticism and the collective control of technical power, while Latour leaves open a possibility of talking about the shared action of a multitude of hybrid actors, in which both the ethical solution is already “contaminated” with the technical and the technical solution retains the trace of the ethical. By using the example of the reverse vending machine, it is shown how ethical motivation is inscribed into technical media, which uses the technological accumulation to link global and local perspectives for environmental purposes.

A Collective Control Scheme to Solve Time-varying Formation Control Problem of Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles with Time Delay

Due to the limitation of complexity and uncertainty of the underwater environment, the related technologies of autonomous underwater vehicles(AUVs) develop slowly. Therefore, an ingenious solution characterized by low cost, convenient operation, and low individual intelligence is urgently required. Inspired from these collective behaviours of gregarious creatures in nature, the coordination control problem of multiple AUVs is endowed with new research significance to complete complex underwater operational tasks. This paper aims to propose a general control scheme to solve the time-varying formation control problem of multiple AUVs that take into account the communication time delay. Firstly, a complete six-degrees-of-freedom dynamical model is applied instead of the real AUVs in the following theoretical analysis and simulation verification. Then, a metric-based nearest neighbour interacted rule is introduced to build the communication network of the system. Periodic sampling technology and zero-order hold loop are adopted to simplify the communication problem of time delay. Based on the above dynamical model and communication mechanism, a distributed collective control protocol is proposed to enable these AUVs asymptotically converge to a desired geometrical configuration on the condition that the initial communication network is undirected and connected. During the evolutionary process, no collision happens between any two AUVs. The formation configuration can be maintained until a simple switching controller works for the configuration transformation tasks. Finally, the simulation results proved the effectiveness of the above collective control scheme and visually exhibited the three-dimensional dynamical evolutionary process.

Of Sovereignty and Saints

The chapter considers what kinds of goods and services a democratic polity should furnish via donation. Donations are a well-known solution to the problem of “public goods,” goods with characteristics that prevent efficient market provision. But are all such goods equally appropriate objects of philanthropy? Common arguments fail to appreciate that part of democracy’s value lies in reserving certain decisions for collective control. Democracy, the chapter argues, makes citizens sovereign over the legislation and administration of matters of basic justice. Citizens’ interests in democratic sovereignty supply a strong reason to maintain public control over public goods that are intimately linked to fundamental rights, duties, and opportunities. The argument helps to justify and explain discomfort that many share about privately sponsored social assistance and private funding of public schools. It also indicates that philanthropy for goods more distant from basic justice—such as the arts, research, sport, and religion—may be easier to justify in democratic terms.

The Demsetz’s Evolutionary Theory of Property Rights as Applied to Rural Land of China: A Supplement

The main objective of this article is to contribute to the literature on land issues, especially with regard to the evolutionary theory of China’s rural land property rights. This article applies the Demsetz’s evolutionary theory of property rights as a framework into an analysis of the evolutionary process of property rights in rural land of China. It is found that externality, compactness, productivity, and organizational complexity—four principles in Demsetz’s framework—are at the core of understanding the evolution of property rights from collective control of land to family based control of land in China. However, the framework is incomplete due to being unlikely to notice the role of land titling so that a property rights game is developed in this article to extend the evolutionary theory of property rights. Importantly, it suggests the necessity of “split-rights” from family based control land to private control land in China. To sum up, this paper refreshes the dominant framework of analysis on the evolution of property rights in mainstream economics, and makes it discern when collective ownership does not evolve into pure privatization, finally, instead of into private control of land, as is currently applied to rural area in China.

Psychosocial and Organizational Processes and Determinants of Health Care Workers’ (HCW) Health at Work in French Public EHPAD (Assisted Living Residences): A Qualitative Approach Using Grounded Theory

In a context marked by negative health indicators that make structural aspects more salient, this paper aimed at understanding and explaining the processes and determinants at work that positively and negatively interfere with the professionals’ health in the French public nursing home environment. To this purpose, the qualitative approach by grounded theory was chosen. In total, 90 semi-structured interviews were recorded and 43 were transcribed; in addition, 10 observations of 46 participations in meetings and working groups were carried out in four public service and hospital establishments. Our results indicate that the role of health workers, its definition, and its execution are fundamental to the understanding of their health at work. Two protective and constructive processes are involved in the maintenance and development of the professionals’ health in this work, with considerable confrontations with death and suffering: individual and collective control of emotional and cognitive commitment, and the development of resources for formation, information, and cooperation. Nonetheless, they are jeopardized when a lasting imbalance is generated between the work’s demands and the available resources. This leads to a loss spiral in organizational, inter-individual, and individual resources that makes it difficult to sustain work.

Community Empowerment and Health Equity

Empowerment features prominently in public health and health promotion policy and practice aimed at improving the social determinants of health that impact communities and groups that are experiencing disadvantage and discrimination. This raises two important questions. How should empowerment be understood from the perspective of health and health equity and how can public health practitioners support empowerment for greater health equity? Many contemporary definitions link empowerment to improvements in individual self-care and/or the adoption of “healthier” lifestyles. In contrast, from a health equity perspective community empowerment is understood as sociopolitical processes that engage with power dynamics and result in people bearing the brunt of social injustice exercising greater collective control over decisions and actions that impact their lives and health. There is growing evidence that increased collective control at the population level is associated with improved social determinants of health and population health outcomes. But alongside this, there is also evidence that many contemporary community interventions are not “empowering” for the people targeted and may actually be having negative impacts. To achieve more positive outcomes, existing frameworks need to be used to recenter power in the design, implementation, and evaluation of local community initiatives in the health field. In addition, health professionals and agencies must act to remove barriers to the empowerment of disadvantaged communities and groups. They can do this by taking experiential knowledge more seriously, by challenging processes that stigmatize disadvantaged groups, and by developing sustainable spaces for the authentic participation of lay communities of interest and place in decisions that have an impact on their lives.

Practical Necessity and History II

Kant argues that constraints generated by social antagonism compel individuals to submit themselves to law and state authority, and that international conflict compels states to form a global legal order. The establishment of legal and political order in turn enables human beings to exercise collective control over their conditions of life. In this way, Kant employs the concept of practical necessity in order to explain the transition to a state of affairs in which freedom and necessity are reconciled while introducing minimal assumptions about what motivates agents. It is shown, however, that although practical necessity here tracks a type of normative necessity, Kant fails to explain how the latter can become the direct object of an agent’s willing. I argue that this implies the need for a different picture of history to the one provided by Kant’s idea of universal history.

Fundamental Studies of Variable-Voltage Hybrid-Electric Powertrains

A variable-voltage hybrid-electric powertrain is constructed and tested to acquire data and understand the fundamental characteristics of the system. The powertrain is examined component by component, with over 500 test points, from the engine alone to the engine–generator, to the engine–generator with four distributed propulsors, in an instrumented test bed. The principal conclusion is that generator voltage is a key parameter that needs careful control relative to rotor speed to minimize engine-specific fuel consumption. For any operating state—defined by rotor torque and revolutions per minute (RPM)—the generator voltage should be minimized. In general, the system is influenced more by the engine–generator than electric motors. Hence greater rotor torque and lower rotor RPM is desired in general, implying the need for collective control on the rotor. The overall understanding gained from this work is that the effectiveness of a hybrid-electric powertrain for vertical take-off and landing is closely coupled with controls and aeromechanics. Reliable design and simulation will require integration with these disciplines—a powerplant designed in isolation will be suboptimal. The data reported in this paper can provide a basis to build and validate models that can be used for this purpose.