Confronting the Ideology Behind the Post-Truth Phenomenon: Outlining a Public Theology of Ultimate Concern

The neologism ‘post-truth’ was declared to be ‘the word of the year’ in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary. It came to prominence in the presidential election of that year in the United States and during the Brexit referendum. It represents the eclipse of a sense of shared objective truths and has become associated with terms like ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ – and, with reference to Covid-19, conspiracy theories. The purpose of this article is to provide a theological engagement with this phenomenon; it does so by making a distinction between two types of response in the extant literature. Moreover, it offers a critique on the basis of theories of ideology and politics and draws upon the theology of Paul Tillich to offer a constructive proposal.

Ripensare l’insegnamento delle lingue straniere a partire dall’esperienza della didattica a distanza: introduzione al numero speciale

IT La didattica a distanza emergenziale determinata dalla pandemia da Covid-19 ha posto insegnanti e studenti di fronte a sfide inedite, forzando un cambiamento senza precedenti in termini di entità e rapidità. Questo numero speciale raccoglie contributi sulla didattica delle lingue, accomunati dalla volontà di trarre vantaggio dalle problematicità legate all’insegnamento a distanza per innescare riflessioni e cambiamenti necessari e duraturi, capaci di prescindere dalla situazione emergenziale che li ha generati. Questa introduzione descrive il contesto in cui insegnanti e studenti si sono trovati a operare, sottolineandone le implicazioni glottodidattiche in termini di gestione dell’input, dell’output, dell’interazione e della valutazione delle competenze. Offriamo una sintesi dei contributi inclusi nel numero speciale, seguita da una riflessione sulle possibili conclusioni trasversali all’intero volume. Parole chiave: DAD, DIDATTICA DIGITALE INTEGRATA/DDI, DIDATTICA DELLE LINGUE, COVID-19, APPRENDIMENTO DELLE L2/LS EN The emergency remote teaching necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic has confronted teachers and students with unknown challenges, forcing truly rapid and significant changes that are without precedent. The current special issue offers contributions, in Italian and English, that are focused on language pedagogy. Their shared objective is to gain meaningful knowledge from new issues related to remote teaching that can lead to reflection and necessary, long-lasting changes beyond the context of the emergency that created them. This introductory article describes the context in which teachers and students have found themselves working, highlighting the implications for language teaching in terms of managing input, output, interaction, and assessment. We then offer a summary of the contributions and the reviews included in this special issue, followed by a reflection on its possible conclusions. Key words: DISTANCE LEARNING, INTEGRATED DIGITAL PEDAGOGY, LANGUAGE TEACHING, COVID-19, LEARNING OF L2/SECOND LANGUAGE ES La enseñanza remota de emergencia determinada por la pandemia COVID-19 ha situado a docentes y a estudiantes ante desafíos desconocidos, forzando cambios rápidos y significativos sin precedentes. El presente número especial reúne contribuciones en italiano y en inglés, centradas en la enseñanza de lenguas, cuyo objetivo común es extraer conocimiento de las problemáticas relacionadas con la enseñanza remota que pueda provocar reflexiones y cambios necesarios y duraderos más allá de la situación de emergencia que las generó. Este artículo introductorio describe el contexto en el que se han encontrado trabajando el profesorado y el alumnado, destacando las implicaciones para la enseñanza de idiomas en términos de gestión del input, del output, de las interacciones y de la evaluación de las competencias. Tras ello, ofrecemos una síntesis de las contribuciones y de las reseñas incluidas en este número especial, seguida de una reflexión sobre las posibles conclusiones trasversales al número entero. Palabras clave: DIDÁCTICA A DISTANCIA, DIDÁCTICA DIGITAL INTEGRADA, DIDÁCTICA DE LENGUAS, COVID-19, APRENDIZAJE DE SEGUNDAS LENGUAS

Sustaining Cross-Sector Collaborations: Managing Conflicts in Large-Scale Urban Event Collaborations

Public-private collaborations can easily be disrupted when nascent conflicts are not addressed. These intersectoral conflicts may be associated with the resource exchanges necessary to achieve a shared objective, may be the result of goal divergence, or may involve both. This research utilizes a complementary theoretical approach to examine conflict management in two large-scale event collaborations, motorcycle rallies, that have been in operation for nineteen years. Framed by resource dependence, goal congruence, and conflict management theories the research examines the patterns of conflict and conflict management perceived by participants in these collaborations. The theoretical framework allowed us to address the complexities of aligning collaboration goals around the resource dependencies that lead to the formation of the collaborations. Our findings, which support quasi-formal conflict management, link this body of theories to the management of conflicts between collaborating organizations in a manner that, to our knowledge, has not been previously attempted.

Developing a Metropolitan-Wide Urban Forest Strategy for a Large, Expanding and Densifying Capital City: Lessons from Melbourne, Australia

Urban forests provide many ecosystem services, such as reducing heat, improving air quality, treatment of stormwater, carbon sequestration, as well as biodiversity benefits. These benefits have resulted in increasing demand for urban forests and strategies to maintain and enhance this natural infrastructure. In response to a broader resilience strategy for Melbourne, Australia, we outline how a metropolitan-wide urban forest strategy (Living Melbourne) was developed, encompassing multiple jurisdictions and all land tenures. To this end, we mapped tree cover within the Melbourne metropolitan area, modelled potential habitat for some bird species, and investigated the role of tree cover for urban heat island mitigation. We outline the consultation and governance frameworks used to develop the strategy, the vision, goals and actions recommended, including canopy and shrub cover targets for different parts of the metropolitan area. The metropolitan-wide urban forest strategy acts as an overarching framework to guide local government authorities and various stakeholders towards a shared objective of increasing tree cover in Melbourne and we discuss the outcomes and lessons from this approach.

Collective preference learning in the best-of-n problem

Decentralised autonomous systems rely on distributed learning to make decisions and to collaborate in pursuit of a shared objective. For example, in swarm robotics the best-of-n problem is a well-known collective decision-making problem in which agents attempt to learn the best option out of n possible alternatives based on local feedback from the environment. This typically involves gathering information about all n alternatives while then systematically discarding information about all but the best option. However, for applications such as search and rescue in which learning the ranking of options is useful or crucial, best-of-n decision-making can be wasteful and costly. Instead, we investigate a more general distributed learning process in which agents learn a preference ordering over all of the n options. More specifically, we introduce a distributed rank learning algorithm based on three-valued logic. We then use agent-based simulation experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of this model. In this context, we show that a population of agents are able to learn a total ordering over the n options and furthermore the learning process is robust to evidential noise. To demonstrate the practicality of our model, we restrict the communication bandwidth between the agents and show that this model is also robust to limited communications whilst outperforming a comparable probabilistic model under the same communication conditions.

Human–Autonomy Teaming: A Review and Analysis of the Empirical Literature

Objective We define human–autonomy teaming and offer a synthesis of the existing empirical research on the topic. Specifically, we identify the research environments, dependent variables, themes representing the key findings, and critical future research directions. Background Whereas a burgeoning literature on high-performance teamwork identifies the factors critical to success, much less is known about how human–autonomy teams (HATs) achieve success. Human–autonomy teamwork involves humans working interdependently toward a common goal along with autonomous agents. Autonomous agents involve a degree of self-government and self-directed behavior (agency), and autonomous agents take on a unique role or set of tasks and work interdependently with human team members to achieve a shared objective. Method We searched the literature on human–autonomy teaming. To meet our criteria for inclusion, the paper needed to involve empirical research and meet our definition of human–autonomy teaming. We found 76 articles that met our criteria for inclusion. Results We report on research environments and we find that the key independent variables involve autonomous agent characteristics, team composition, task characteristics, human individual differences, training, and communication. We identify themes for each of these and discuss the future research needs. Conclusion There are areas where research findings are clear and consistent, but there are many opportunities for future research. Particularly important will be research that identifies mechanisms linking team input to team output variables.

How do we fight COVID-19? Military medical actions in the war against the COVID-19 pandemic in France

‘We are at war’, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an address to the nation on 16 March 2020. As part of this national effort, the French Military Medical Service (FMMS) is committed to the fight against COVID-19. This original report aimed to describe and detail actions that the FMMS has carried out in the nationwide fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in France, as well as overseas. Experts in the field reported major actions conducted by the FMMS during the COVID-19 pandemic in France. In just few weeks, the FMMS developed ad hoc medical capabilities to support national health authorities. It additionally developed adaptive, collective en route care via aeromedical and naval units and deployed a military intensive care field hospital. A COVID-19 crisis cell coordinated the French Armed Forces health management. The French Military Centre for Epidemiology and Public Health provided all information needed to guide the decision-making process. Medical centres of the French Armed Forces organised the primary care for military patients, with the widespread use of telemedicine. The Paris Fire Brigade and the Marseille Navy Fire Battalion emergency departments ensured prehospital management of patients with COVID-19. The eight French military training hospitals cooperated with civilian regional health agencies. The French military medical supply chain supported all military medical treatment facilities in France as well as overseas, coping with a growing shortage of medical equipment. The French Armed Forces Biomedical Research Institute performed diagnostics, engaged in multiple research projects, updated the review of the scientific literature on COVID-19 daily and provided expert recommendations on biosafety. Finally, even students of the French military medical academy volunteered to participate in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In conclusion, in an unprecedented medical crisis, the FMMS engaged multiple innovative and adaptive actions, which are still ongoing, in the fight against COVID-19. The collaboration between military and civilian healthcare systems reinforced the shared objective to achieve the goal of ‘saving the greatest number’.

Sfumato De Las Imágenes De Mundo En Su Dinámica Actual. Contribuciones Humanísticas Para Una Suturación Narrativizante De La Coexistencia

This article presents an eidetic investigation that aimed at the production of a narrativizing sense of the coexistence, which is presented as a humanistic contribution to the suturing of the conjunctural emptiness of it. For this, six eidetic dimensions were brought to the front that are part of the shared objective world, and therefore are repetitive structures that make up the underlying continuity of the interruption of coexistence, aspecting the latter. Such dimensions, in the mode of eidetic succession-tension between Apollo-Dionysus, rational thought-magic thought, paranoid schizoid position-depressive position, polis-urbs, death-birth and leisure-weariness, are made up of various eidetic conjunctions-disjunctions developed in the text, and they emerge from the continuity-dispute between images of the technical and psychic-cultural world with its correlative mass society and urban tribal society.

On the Acceleration of Time from the Perspective of Technological and Cognitive Innovativeness: A Structural-Semiologic Analysis of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine

The paper provides an analysis of Herbert George Wells’s novel The Time Machine (1895), specifically, of those aspects of the novel that deal with the relationship between the phenomenon of technological and cognitive innovativeness, on the one hand, and the experience of time and its perception, on the other. The concept of the acceleration of time, which is key to this study, denotes the phenomenon manifesting itself through the prism of two types of non-synchronization of “internal” or “subjective” time and “external”, collectively shared “objective time”: in the first case, “external” time is accelerated relative to “internal” time, while in the second, conversely, “internal” time is accelerated relative to “external time”. The paper offers a contextual analysis of The Time Machine, also employing a structural-semiologic approach and method, which in this case also includes the traditional functionalist method of differentiating between manifest and latent functions. The first research question the paper seeks to answer is how the idea/invention of the fictitious novum of the time machine came about, i.e. what kind of cognitive-innovative process enabled it. The other question, related to the first, is whether it is possible to “peer into” the infrastructure of the imagination of creative people, into that part that usually remains confined to the unconscious. A structural-semiologic analysis of the nature of the creativity/innovation process, which, in this study, is related to the Victorian era as the social and economic context in which The Time Machine was written, as well as to the interconnected domains of technological and cognitive innovativeness, suggests the possibility of establishing an Anthropology of Innovativeness as a new anthropological subdiscipline.

A ferrobotic system for automated microfluidic logistics

Automated technologies that can perform massively parallelized and sequential fluidic operations at small length scales can resolve major bottlenecks encountered in various fields, including medical diagnostics, -omics, drug development, and chemical/material synthesis. Inspired by the transformational impact of automated guided vehicle systems on manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution industries, we devised a ferrobotic system that uses a network of individually addressable robots, each performing designated micro-/nanofluid manipulation-based tasks in cooperation with other robots toward a shared objective. The underlying robotic mechanism facilitating fluidic operations was realized by addressable electromagnetic actuation of miniature mobile magnets that exert localized magnetic body forces on aqueous droplets filled with biocompatible magnetic nanoparticles. The contactless and high-strength nature of the actuation mechanism inherently renders it rapid (~10 centimeters/second), repeatable (>10,000 cycles), and robust (>24 hours). The robustness and individual addressability of ferrobots provide a foundation for the deployment of a network of ferrobots to carry out cross-collaborative logistics efficiently. These traits, together with the reconfigurability of the system, were exploited to devise and integrate passive/active advanced functional components (e.g., droplet dispensing, generation, filtering, and merging), enabling versatile system-level functionalities. By applying this ferrobotic system within the framework of a microfluidic architecture, the ferrobots were tasked to work cross-collaboratively toward the quantification of active matrix metallopeptidases (a biomarker for cancer malignancy and inflammation) in human plasma, where various functionalities converged to achieve a fully automated assay.