everybody doing what everybody else is doing

The title is drawn from economist Abjihit V. Bannerjee’s 1992 study ‘A Simple Model of Herd Behaviour’, in which he notes ‘There are innumerable social and economic situations in which we are influenced in our decision making by what others around us are doing. Perhaps the commonest examples are from everyday life: we often decide on what stores and restaurants to patronize or what schools to attend on the basis of how popular they seem to be. … We set up a model in which paying heed to what everyone else is doing is rational because their decisions may reflect information that they have and we do not.’ Such herd behaviour may arise through an information cascade which, as David Easley and Jon Kleinberg note in their book Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World, ‘has the potential to occur when people make decisions sequentially, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, and from these actions inferring something about what the earlier people know.’ In everyone doing what everyone else is doing, players make selections from a series of actions, judging what to do in response to choices made by others around them. First performed: Plus Minus Ensemble, Material, City University Experimental Music Group, Performance Space, City University, London, 08.04.14

The graduate law degree holders in the legal education market

Given that the law is helpful, essential and non-separable with our lives, we surely would like to know the people that make laws and who practice in the legal profession. This query is the recent theme we have pursued in this and other related projects. The investigation has revealed a knowledge economy (savoir-faire) that has entwined law and the actions of law people, which growingly became edged to explain their behavior and moral and professional conduct. The expectation has been that graduate law classes are for foreign lawyers who would return to their home country to work as international lawyers or as professors. That has long been deemed as a given; but the precise reality has not been previously unraveled. With this backdrop, the current paper purports to survey the status and performance of graduate law degree holders in US law school, to rank global law schools, and explore the implications and findings concerning the processes and outcomes of their missions

In the Truman show: generating dynamic scenarios in a driving simulator

All the devices, animals, and people make their decisions based on what you're doing, but you don't know it or even notice it. Your world is that of Truman Burbank, from the 1998 movie The Truman Show. With this idea in mind, we've taken the movie metaphor to implement a prototype simulation system where the user steps into Truman's shoes. The set of our "movie" is a driving simulator, and the user is learning to drive a car. During the driving lessons, users drive in a virtual world that lets them experience all kinds of traffic scenarios. The system generates the scenarios with the student as the focal point, and the other traffic entities respond to the student's behavior, without the student noticing. To control the traffic scenarios and make them more effective, our prototype employs an agent-based framework. In this framework, each entity in the simulator is an actor agent playing a role. The prototype also includes a hierarchy of directors that directs the main action and the behind-the-scenes activity. The advantage of the movie metaphor is that it helps separate scenario description from scenario playing. The agents can read their required information from a script and perform their actions based on that information. Using this framework lets us build software that's extensible, maintainable, and easy to understan

Proprioception of Thinking and Emotional Intelligence are Central to Doing Philosophy with Children

Philosophy with children often focuses on abstract reasoning skills, but as David Bohm points out the “entire process of mind” consists of our abstract thought as well as our “tacit, concrete process of thought.” Philosophy with children should address the “entire process of mind.” Our tacit, concrete process of thought refers to the process of thought that involves our actions such as the process of thought that goes into riding a bicycle. Bohm contends that we need to develop an awareness or proprioception of thinking as well. When Socrates enters into dialogue with his interlocutors, he shows the limitations of purely abstract thought by leading them to admit that they really “don’t know.” But, of course, they know. We know what bravery is or what love is, even though we can never “explain” these concepts in abstract terms. Life has taught us through experience what these concepts mean and we have developed an understanding of them. We can recognize when a person acts bravely. This is where I see the link between our tacit, concrete process of thought and emotional intelligence. We need emotional intelligence to learn how to be brave, to learn how to love, and be just in the way we act in the world. Knowing what justice is abstractly does not make us act justly. We have to develop awareness of our actions in order to develop the skills necessary to act the part. This is also where emotional intelligence comes in. In the bulletin of the play Romeo and Juliet, director Barry Edelstein wrote the following: “To perform Romeo and Juliet, actors need a series of skills… they must have the emotional and psychological awareness and openness of uncommon depth; they must listen with acuteness, they must possess an imagination of real suppleness and subtlety…” An abstract portrayal would not bring these characters to life. We can surely agree – abstractly – that racism is destructive, but still act racist, without being even slightly aware of it. My contention is that while our abstract sense of racism has evolved, our tacit, concrete knowledge has not, which explains that racism is for the most part still rampant, even though we know abstractly that it is wrong. So how do we educate and develop the awareness of the tacit, concrete knowledge that informs our actions, and develop the emotional intelligence to give a depth of understanding to what we know and believe abstractly

Clinical diseases with thrombotic risk and their pharmacologycal treatment: how they change the therapeutic attitude in dental treatments

The new antiplatelets and anticoagulant drugs have been recently introduced in the daily medical practices for the control of thromboembolism associated with different diseases. The dental assistance of these patients forces us to know these drugs, understand their action mechanisms and try to decrease the risks that entail ours actions in these patients, making a thorough analysis of the risk of bleeding that is going to be related to our medical intervention, as well as the use of all the control measures of the hemorrhage from our knowledge with these patients, and to be prudent. The communication with the medical specialist that supervises these patients must be maxim, being necessary to make clinic trials for establishing protocols or guides of the handling with these patients during the odontological treatment

Paesi Arabi - Islamici

The study starts from the idea that the Arab countries are protagonists of a story that involves and shares us about their successes and their defeats. The Arab immigration toward Europe and the last revolutions in North Africa and Middle East show us how close to Arab people Italy is both with its geography and its culture. At the same time these events make us aware of how much we have to do in order to understand the new Arab Muslim culture developing in modern world. Understanding how to put us toward the modern Arab populations is to know totally their story because modern Arab societies have inside them the signs, the contradictions, and the attraction of a past which made them always original and mysterious to Europe eyes. The study of present Arab world is to remember the actions, the protagonists, the ideas of the past that come back in a new way in the life, in the policy, in the conscience of today Arab people.Arab-Islamic Countries; Arab-Islamic Culture; Society; Past and Present; Cultural Economics; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology

Agency and Reflection: Toward an Empirically Adequate Account of Practical Reason

Recent research in social psychology suggests that our attitudes and actions don’t typically issue from our reflective capacities. Instead, it appears that they often issue from what psychologists refer to as “automatic” processes, understood as psychological processes that operate quickly, efficiently, and outside of our conscious awareness and control. Much of this same research also suggests that when we do exercises our reflective capacities (rare as it may be), it’s usually not to question our attitudes and actions but rather to rationalize them (that is, to come up with reasons to do, think, and feel things that we want to do, think, and feel anyway). In light of these findings, a number of people have recently argued that we aren’t the kind of rational, reflective creatures that philosophers have traditionally thought we are. My aim in this dissertation is to respond to their worries. In the first half, I focus on questions related to our ability to do things for reasons. Common sense suggest that we often do things for reasons, but if our attitudes and actions typically issue from automatic processes, to what extent is this true? I argue that the best way to make good on the idea that we often do things for reasons is to accept both that our ability to do things for reasons doesn’t depend on our reflective capacities and that many of the processes that actually guide our attitudes and actions, though perhaps “automatic,” are nevertheless quite responsive to reasons. In the second half of the dissertation, I focus on whether we can rely on our reflective capacities to improve our agency. Although I deny that we need these capacities to do things for reasons, the reasons for which we do things aren’t always good reasons, and it’s only natural to think that we can rely on our reflective capacities to monitor and control their influences on us. However, this sort of view faces to main empirical challenges. First, it appears that we often don’t know what the causes of our attitudes and actions are, so how can we be expected to monitor and control their influences on us? Second, even if we do know what the causes of our attitudes and actions are, why should we think that we’re inclined to use reflection to question them? Isn’t it much more likely that we’ll use it to rationalize them instead? In response to the first challenge, I argue that once we recognize that reflection doesn’t require us to have introspective access to its objects, it becomes more plausible to think that we’re often in a good position to reflect on the causes of our attitudes and actions. In response to the second challenge, I argue that as long as we focus on the ways in which other people improve our reflection, the idea that we’ll often be inclined to use reflection to question our attitudes and actions becomes more plausible as well

Self-compassion and its relevance to the academic performance and achievement

Many of us know how to be there for others, how to comfort when someone is going through a hard period of their life when they need our actions, warm words, or just our presence. But what is stopping us to be that to ourselves? Being compassionate towards oneself may bring a big change in how we see ourselves as well as the world and other people in it. A way of growth is by accepting what we are facing right now and doing our best at the moment to solve the possible problem. Even unsolved problems do not mean that we are stuck for the rest of our lives. In the school environment, self-compassion may be one of the crucial aspects of self-perception, not necessarily related to achievement, but for sure related to not giving up and not losing hope that one can make it with hard work, and that results do not need to be present now to feel that we are on the right path of overall success