Symmetries as Humean Metalaws

Symmetry principles are a central part of contemporary physics, yet there has been surprisingly little metaphysical work done on them. This paper develops the Wignerian treatment of symmetries as higher-order laws – metalaws – within a Humean framework of lawhood. Lange has raised two obstacles to Humean metalaws, and the paper shows that the account has the resources available to respond to both. It is argued that this framework for Humean metalaws stands as an example of naturalistic metaphysics, able to bring Humeanism into contact with the practice of actual science without giving up on the central denial of necessary connections.

“Its Bite and Its Feeling”

This chapter positions the quadroon balls of nineteenth-century New Orleans as a critical generative source of, and productive metaphor for, the complex of miscegenation fantasies that mark jazz as both seductive enough to excite our collective sense of subversion and quintessentially American enough to serve as the nation’s “classical music.” Building upon Emily Clark’s work on quadroon balls’ imbrication within a feedback loop between romanticized narrative and lived experience, which she terms the “plaçage complex,” the chapter demonstrates that the romanticization of New Orleans as jazz’s ostensible birthplace is rooted in discursive moves that long predate jazz itself. As such, this chapter draws a through-line from the early nineteenth-century genesis of quadroon balls through their mid-century boom and the fantastical white-authored travel narratives that made them tourist destinations and the ways they subsequently informed both New Orleans’ Storyville district and representations of antebellum plantation life in New York City stage revues. Through this analysis, the chapter draws uncomfortable yet necessary connections between jazz historical discourse, and especially its romanticization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Orleans, and the discursive engines that maintained white supremacist structures during the nineteenth century and that remain active, if obfuscated, in the present.

Does general relativity highlight necessary connections in nature?

The dynamics of general relativity is encoded in a set of ten differential equations, the so-called Einstein field equations. It is usually believed that Einstein’s equations represent a physical law describing the coupling of spacetime with material fields. However, just six of these equations actually describe the coupling mechanism: the remaining four represent a set of differential relations known as Bianchi identities. The paper discusses the physical role that the Bianchi identities play in general relativity, and investigates whether these identities—qua part of a physical law—highlight some kind of a posteriori necessity in a Kripkean sense. The inquiry shows that general relativistic physics has an interesting bearing on the debate about the metaphysics of the laws of nature.

Intel Cycle for Private Professionals

This work focused on the method of analysis, to be understood in general terms and following the intelligence cycle as developed by various international realities, with possible variations. This method was exposed, also graphically, before going further into the details of the different phases or the acquisition, processing of data, and news for subsequent dissemination. These procedures have been described in practical terms and from a distinctly private perspective, also providing the necessary connections with the figures responsible for their development up to the description and requirements that the information product must satisfy, also in this case from a customer's perspective.

How Humean is Bohumianism?

An important part of the influential Humean doctrine in philosophy is the supervenience principle (sometimes referred to as the principle of separability). This principle asserts that the complete state of the world supervenes on the intrinsic properties of its most fundamental components and their spatiotemporal relations (the so-called Humean mosaic). There are well-known arguments in the literature purporting to show that in quantum mechanics the Humean supervenience principle is violated, due to the existence of entangled states. Recently, however, arguments have been presented to the effect that the supervenience principle can be defended in Bohmian mechanics. The key element of this strategy lies in the observation that according to Bohmian mechanics the fundamental facts about particles are facts about their spatial locations, and moreover, for any proper subsystem of the world its state may non-trivially depend on the spatial configuration of the rest of the universe. Thus quantum-mechanical states of subsystems do not represent their intrinsic properties but rather characterize their relations with the environment. In this paper we point out the worry that this Bohmian strategy—known as Bohumianism—saves the letter but not the spirit of the Humean doctrine of supervenience, since it prima facie violates another seemingly important Humean principle, which we call Strong Supervenience and whose denial implies the existence of necessary connections among distinct individuals. We argue that the best defense for Bohumians is to question the fundamental existence of complex physical systems and their states by treating any reference to them as a convenient description of the underlying collection of Bohmian particles. We consider several pros and cons of this strategy.

Cartoons in Romanian humorous news

Studying cartoons in Romanian humorous news is a great way to underline the diversity of humour’s mechanisms and construction. The common topic of cartoons in Romanian media is politics, but there are also a great number of cartoons exploring subjects such as art, science, society or famous people. Unlike verbal humour, wherein incongruities are text-based, in cartoons, incongruities can emerge through the interaction of image and text, between two elements in the image, or even between the texts in the balloons (Hempelmann & Samson 2008). The present study aims at analysing how humour emerges differently, depending on their topic, in cartoons created by the Romanian humorous media websites Times New Roman and Academia Catavencu, as these have been the two of the most controversial humorous news websites for quite some time. I intend to argue that, when it comes to political cartoons, the methods of humour are quite complex, equally relying on the image and the text, using polysemy, paronymy or syllepsis to create humour, while cartoons about society or gossip are usually based on implicitness and exaggeration, mostly found in images and symbols, as the targeted topics or people do not require such a complex background in order to make readers laugh. I have also observed that cartoons that rely less on text have more powerful symbols, which are full of various significations that help the readers make all the necessary connections to correctly interpret the image.

Co-creating Science Commercialization Opportunities for Blue Biotechnologies: The FucoSan Project

We report the experience of the FucoSan InterReg project that had the ambition to generate commercialization opportunities for biotechnology research in a marine environment. Fucoidan, a promising biomarine polysaccharide extracted from seaweed, offers a broad array of potential applications; however, the supporting innovation value chain is still under development. We explore how the use of business modelling tools can contribute to building a shared understanding of commercialization opportunities across a diverse range of research and development actors. We analyze data (interviews, workshops, and surveys) from a German-Danish network of actors involved in the FucoSan InterReg project to identify how the tools contribute to setting up a base to support future activities across a potential innovation value chain. The results point towards the direct and indirect positive effects of engaging in the co-creation of a shared understanding of the functionality and possibilities of promising biomarine products. The findings support the idea that interdisciplinary and multilateral interactions help actors to identify the necessary connections and interdependencies to build a sustainability-driven innovation value chain.

Bodies in Late Romanticism: Two Perspectives

One of the major themes of discussion in the art and especially the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries was the body rather than the soul. In the beginning this seemed to be the case mostly because of the natural processes related to the transforming events of maturation and death of the human body and mind. However, towards the end of the 18th century and well into the 19th century, a certain shift took place from the common perspective on the body to a rather scientific literary approach. Our attempt is to notice and make the necessary connections between the concepts of nature (both human and external/physical nature) and the innovative technologies implemented in the then society, with a later reference to the new accidental and commercial facets of death felt as destruction of nature especially in the work of the American Romantic writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Being aware that they are highly spoken of in view of their transcendentalism as a particular philosophy dealing with the bond between man and nature, we will slowly come to terms with this type of concerns and connect them to the conflicting reality of industrialization as a sudden and repressive phenomenon within the society of men. Finally our point is that this very phenomenon caused the two writers to make a historical detour and use their formation as naturalist thinkers in order to make sense of their century’s deaths and diseases. This is to say that even from a Romantic perspective, the concern for the body is surprisingly concrete, while these writers’ transcendentalist concerns for the soul are prolix though without substance.

Gamification

Gamification has been applied in diverse areas to encourage participation, improve engagement, and even modify behaviors. However, many gamified applications have failed to meet their objectives, and poor gamification design has been pointed out as a recurrent problem, despite a growing number of gamification frameworks and their valuable guidelines. Model-driven engineering approaches have been proposed as possible solutions to the deficient, and incoherent, inclusion of several dynamics and mechanics. They allow achieving a formalism that can avoid many errors and inconsistencies in the process. Moreover, these efforts are necessary to achieve a conceptualization of gamification that facilitates its inclusion in applications. Three proposals are analyzed, all based on domain-specific languages (DSL), which allows users to design complex gamification strategies without requiring programming skills. The MDE approach can be used to enrich gamification design by providing a platform that involves various concepts and the necessary connections between them to ensure harmonious designs.

Assessing LOAC Compliance and Discourse as New Technologies Emerge

This chapter explores the consequences for effective discourse about the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) compliance of new technologies that intentionally or effectively mask the effects of an attack, the location or identify of the attackers, or even the very existence of an attack during armed conflict. The emergence of new weapons technologies that hinder or eliminate our ability to see the effects of attacks, to make the necessary connections between cause and effect, or to even identify the existence of an attack, may well erode the current trend towards the use of effects-driven, outcome-based analysis, which, although incorrect as a matter of law, nonetheless has captured attention. Examining how legal compliance can or would be assessed in such situations of new technologies is therefore useful to help enhance both implementation and analysis of the law. The chapter first frames the problem that new technologies may pose for assessing LOAC compliance, highlighting what may be, in essence, a new “effects problem.” These problems include situations where the effects of an attack are unclear or cannot be seen at all, where the connection between the weapon or attacker and the effects cannot be identified, and where a harm may occur but it is unclear or impossible to tell that there was an attack. The chapter then addresses the consequences of this potential new “effects problem,” examining the challenges of legal analysis in the absence of externally identifiable information about what happened, who suffered what effects, or who launched what type of weapon or attack. In addition, the chapter seeks to identify pressure points for LOAC analysis in the context of new technologies that place stressors on the traditional tools and touchstones of legal analysis.