The Ecology of Religious Knowledges

Different religious traditions, beliefs, and experiences claim to have epistemic contact with the ultimate source of reality. However, this epistemic claim has encountered one of its most significant obstacles in the initial incompatibility of its multiple accounts. I argue that from the ecology of knowledges, the idea that intentions, body, and physical and social environments are constitutive elements of our experience and knowledge, we can understand both the veridical, as embodied and extended, and pluralistic, as essentially limited, nature of religious experiences and knowledges. I characterize the mystical religious experience as a state of consciousness that (allegedly) allows direct epistemic contact with the supreme reality, articulating its essentially non-ordinary nature on the basis of the radical otherness of the sacred realm, namely, its character of being eternal, infinite, and with supreme ontological, ethical, and aesthetic value. According to this proposal, the different religious perspectives are understood as different epistemic approaches dealing with these numinous features in a gradual continuum from their most impersonal to their most personal specifications. I conclude that the cognitive relevance of any religious knowledge implies explanations and interventions that, although compatible with, go beyond those of both other religious knowledges and the knowledges of the non-sacred domains.

Combating money laundering with machine learning – applicability of supervised-learning algorithms at cryptocurrency exchanges

Purpose This study aims to explore how to deanonymize cryptocurrency money launderers with the help of machine learning (ML). Money is laundered through cryptocurrencies by distributing funds to multiple accounts and then reexchanging the crypto back. This process of exchanging currencies is done through cryptocurrency exchanges. Current preventive efforts are outdated, and ML may provide novel ways to identify illicit currency movements. Hence, this study investigates ML applicability for combatting money laundering activities using cryptocurrency. Design/methodology/approach Four supervised-learning algorithms were compared using the Bitcoin Elliptic Dataset. The method covered a quantitative analysis of the algorithmic performance, capturing differences in three key evaluation metrics of F1-scores, precision and recall. Two complementary qualitative interviews were performed at cryptocurrency exchanges to identify fit and applicability of the algorithms. Findings The study results show that the current implemented ML tools for preventing money laundering at cryptocurrency exchanges are all too slow and need to be optimized for the task. The results also show that while not one single algorithm is most suitable for detecting transactions related to money-laundering, the specific applicability of the decision tree algorithm is most suitable for adoption by cryptocurrency exchanges. Originality/value Given the growth of cryptocurrency use, this study explores the newly developed field of algorithmic tools to combat illicit currency movement, in particular in the growing arena of cryptocurrencies. The study results provide new insights into the applicability of ML as a tool to combat money laundering using cryptocurrency exchanges.

EXPRESS: Minimum Payments Alter Debt Repayment Strategies across Multiple Cards

US Households currently hold $770 billion in credit card debt, often managing repayments across multiple accounts. We investigate how minimum payments (i.e., the requirement to allocate at least some money to each account with a balance) alter consumers’ allocation strategies across multiple accounts. Across four experiments, we find that minimum payment requirements cause consumers to increase dispersion (i.e., spread their repayments more evenly) across accounts. We term this change in strategy the dispersion effect of minimum payments and provide evidence that it can be costly for consumers. We find that the effect is partially driven by the tendency for consumers to interpret minimum payment requirements as recommendations to pay more than the minimum amount. While the presence of the minimum payment requirement is unlikely to change, we propose that marketers and policymakers can influence the effects of minimum payments on dispersion by altering the way that information is displayed to consumers. Specifically, we investigate five distinct information displays and find that choice of display can either exaggerate or minimize dispersion and corresponding costs. We discuss implications for consumers, policy makers, and firms, with a particular focus on ways to improve consumer financial well-being.

Novel methods to probe exoplanet atmospheres using ground-based spectrophotometry

<p>Ground-based spectrophotometric observations of transiting exoplanet atmospheres conventionally rely on correcting for instrumental and telluric systematics in the light curves by using reference stars that are simultaneously observed. However, this approach often leads to sub-optimal corrections due to multiple accounts on which the target and reference star spectra can be affected by systematics differently through the night, ultimately limiting the achievable precision and accuracy on the measurement of planetary atmospheric signatures. We introduce a new method based on Gaussian Processes regression to address this challenge by extracting the transmission or emission spectrum without relying explicitly on the reference stars. Our new method overcomes the necessity of using reference stars and opens up the doors to ground-based atmospheric observations of exoplanets orbiting bright host stars (e.g. those discovered by TESS) that intrinsically lack proper reference stars. We present results from the application of our method to a broad sample of exoplanets observed in the optical and near-infrared using Gemini/GMOS and Keck/MOSFIRE. We also discuss the challenges and possible solutions arising from stellar variability towards combining high precision ground-based low-resolution spectroscopy observations in complementarity with future infrared observations from HST and JWST.</p>

Transgender identity management across social media platforms

Transgender people use social media for identity work, which takes place over time and across platforms. In this study, we interviewed 20 transgender social media users to examine transgender identity management across the social media ecosystem. We found that transgender social media users curate their social media experiences to fit their needs through creating accounts on different platforms, maintaining multiple accounts on individual platforms, and making active decisions about content they post, networks they are connected to, and content they interact with. In this way, transgender people’s social media curation is not limited to their own identity presentations, but also involves curating the content they see from others and whom they include in their networks. Together, these two types of online curation enable transgender social media users to craft social media worlds that meet their social and self-presentational needs.

Revisiting status quo bias

Status quo bias refers to people’s general preference to stick to, or continue with, a previously chosen option. In two pre-registered experiments with U.S. participants recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (n1 = 311, n2 = 316), we attempted to replicate four decision scenarios (Question 1, 2, 4, and 6) from Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988), the seminal article that provided the first experimental demonstration of the status quo bias. We found strong empirical support for the status quo bias in three decision scenarios out of the four, including budget allocation (Scenario 1/Question 1 in the original article), investment portfolios (Scenario 3/Question 2), and college jobs (Scenario 4/Ques- tion 4). However, we failed to find substantial support for the status quo bias in the wagon color choice scenario (Scenario 2/Question 6). We discuss the implications of our results and possible explanations using multiple accounts put forward in the status quo bias literature.

Revision, Origin, and the Courage of Truth

Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces contain multiple accounts of the genesis of the novels and tales that the edition collected: Some anecdotes tell of how the idea for the novel came to him, while others tell of the material circumstances of the text’s composition (where he was, for example, as he wrote). More often, the prefaces tell of the disappearance of the moment of genesis: of its having been forgotten, or there being no moment when the idea wasn’t somehow present in his mind. In the unrationalized relation among these different accounts, James implicitly theorizes the relation between art and life. Linking the prefaces to the autobiography, therefore, the chapter thus considers “revision” as a practice that maintains the potentiality of inception, seeking, in rereading, to return each text to incipience. Comparing James’s account of revision to Michel Foucault’s late turn to parrhēsia (as a mode of truth-telling) and to Gilles Deleuze’s account of the “act of creation,” the chapter links this potentiality to terms of ethical exhortation with which James ends the prefaces. Turning, finally, to James’s “The Middle Years,” the chapter ends with that story’s imagining of a life lived in the potentiality of revision.

Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults

Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities in a given domain, or children cannot readily access relevant linguistic alternatives for the target count noun. We advance a new account, appealing to theoretical proposals about underspecification in nominal semantics and the role of the discourse context. Our results demonstrate that there are limits to which children allow partial objects to serve as wholes, and that under certain conditions, adult performance resembles that of children by allowing in partial objects. We propose that children's behavior is in fact licensed by the inherent context dependence of count nouns.

Introduction

The introduction to this book reviews detail the major claims put forth in RoN in 1970, and in particular, the claim that complex words, with deverbal nominals being the case at point, represent a formation that is neither predictable nor productive, and are hence lexically listed. This claim goes hand in hand, in RoN, with the claim that whatever similarities do hold between the deverbal nominal such as destruction and the verb destroy emerge from the existence of a category neutral listed form, DESTROY, which has a consistent subcategorization frame (an object in this case), which is realized identically in the syntax, in accordance with the X’-theory, and where the form DESTROY itself inherits its category from its categorial insertion context (N, V etc.). Since 1970, a rich body of studies has emerged which investigated the properties of lexical formations such as destruction and their relationship with the verb destroy, giving rise to multiple accounts of the emergence of complex words, as well as to the emergence of distinct argument structure combination in the context of nominalizations in particular, and word formation in general. Particularly influential was Grimshaw’s (1990) work, which introduced a typologically sound distinction between nominalizations with event structure (Complex Event Nominals, or Argument Structure Nominals) and nominals which lack event structure, and which may be result nominals or referential nominals or Simple Event Nominals, i.e. nouns which denote an event, but which do not have an event structure in the verbal sense (e.g. trip). More recently there has been the questioning of the partition between word formation and syntactic constituent building altogether, starting with Marantz (1997), and continuing with influential work by many of the contributors to this volume. This volume brings together a sample of contemporary approaches to nominalization, based on the historical record, but also branching into new grounds, both in terms of their syntactic approaches, and in terms of the range of languages considered.<320>

Diasporic Circularities

The experience of the Omani-Zanzibaris who were forced to migrate from Zanzibar to Oman in 1964 has received relatively little attention, particularly as seen from the arriving/returning Omani-Zanzibaris’ emic perspectives. As we will see in this chapter, Oman’s identity as a cosmopolitan empire offers a variety of pathways for understanding its present-day culture and politics, as well as its responses to the large wave of arrivals from postcolonial Zanzibar. The chapter seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the forced migrations by telling the story of this period from the theoretical stance of hybridity, which challenges the prevailing essentialism of the historical narratives of the 1964 events as an African uprising against Omani colonizers. To expound the experiences of Omani-Zanzibaris, this project gathered multiple accounts drawn from multi-sited ethnographic research carried out in the first round of fieldwork in Oman and Zanzibar together with extensive conversations held in Zanzibar and Muscat in 2016 and 2017. Life-history collections, memoirs (both published and in private family possession in Arabic, English, and Swahili), archival materials in London and Muscat, and digital sources were also researched.