13,975 research outputs found
Characteristics of the agricultural sector of the 21st Century
The objective of this paper is to identify some of the salient characteristics of agriculture in the new millennium. The driving force behind economic change is technology and information, and information and knowledge will replace land, labour and capital as the sources of wealth in agriculture. The resultant cognitive-technical complex in farm production will lead to the true industrialisation of farming and thus placing the traditional family farmer at a distinct disadvantage. Technology developments combined with inverse population growth and ageing population, will not only negate Malthusian visions, but also lead to downward pressure on farm commodity prices, and thus increase the adoption rates of new technology. However, in reaction to the increasingly complex nature of modern society a demand is developing for terroir-based products. This range of products may not only significantly change some characteristics of agriculture, but also provide a new set of opportunities for farmers. Agricultural policy and development strategies should also be reconsidered in the light of this new environment.Agricultural and Food Policy,
Eugenic Ideology and Historical Osmosis
Issues of inequity in education are plentiful, but too little attention has been paid to the origins of this inequity which is more tangible than has been acknowledged. This paper traces the early twentieth-century formation of our modern system of education by eminent psychologists and statisticians who were enacting their allegiance to the dominant belief system about intelligence and ability as connected to race and class as expressed and formulated by the eugenics movement. Specifically, this paper explicates the role of eugenic ideology in creating a system designed to sort and classify students according to preconceived notions about their ability and worth to society resulting in a system of education that has served to fortify inequity ever since
Practopoiesis: Or how life fosters a mind
The mind is a biological phenomenon. Thus, biological principles of
organization should also be the principles underlying mental operations.
Practopoiesis states that the key for achieving intelligence through adaptation
is an arrangement in which mechanisms laying a lower level of organization, by
their operations and interaction with the environment, enable creation of
mechanisms lying at a higher level of organization. When such an organizational
advance of a system occurs, it is called a traverse. A case of traverse is when
plasticity mechanisms (at a lower level of organization), by their operations,
create a neural network anatomy (at a higher level of organization). Another
case is the actual production of behavior by that network, whereby the
mechanisms of neuronal activity operate to create motor actions. Practopoietic
theory explains why the adaptability of a system increases with each increase
in the number of traverses. With a larger number of traverses, a system can be
relatively small and yet, produce a higher degree of adaptive/intelligent
behavior than a system with a lower number of traverses. The present analyses
indicate that the two well-known traverses-neural plasticity and neural
activity-are not sufficient to explain human mental capabilities. At least one
additional traverse is needed, which is named anapoiesis for its contribution
in reconstructing knowledge e.g., from long-term memory into working memory.
The conclusions bear implications for brain theory, the mind-body explanatory
gap, and developments of artificial intelligence technologies.Comment: Revised version in response to reviewer comment
Human neuromaturation, juvenile extreme energy liability, and adult cognition/cooperation
Human childhood and adolescence is the period in which adult cognitive competences (including those that create the unique cooperativeness of humans) are acquired. It is also a period when neural development puts a juvenile’s survival at risk due to the high vulnerability of their brain to energy shortage. The brain of a 4 year-old human uses ≈50% of its total energy expenditure (TEE) (cf. adult ≈12%). This brain expensiveness is due to (1) the brain making up ≈6% of a 4 year-old body compared to 2% in an adult, and (2) increased energy metabolism that is ≈100% greater in the gray matter of a child than in an adult (a result of the extra costs of synaptic neuromaturation). The high absolute number of neurons in the human brain requires as part of learning a prolonged neurodevelopment. This refines inter- and intraarea neural networks so they become structured with economical “small world” connectivity attributes (such as hub organization and high cross-brain differentiation/integration). Once acquired, this connectivity enables highly complex adult cognitive capacities. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers. Contemporary hunter-gatherers (and it is also likely Middle Paleolithic ones) pool high energy foods in an egalitarian manner that reliably supported mothers and juveniles with high energy intake. This type of sharing unique to humans protects against energy shortage happening to the immature brain. This cooperation that protects neuromaturation arises from adults having the capacity to communicate and evaluate social reputation, cognitive skills that exist as a result of extended neuromaturation. Human biology is therefore characterized by a presently overlooked bioenergetic-cognition loop (called here the “HEBE ring”) by which extended neuromaturation creates the cooperative abilities in adults that support juveniles through the potentially vulnerable period of the neurodevelopment needed to become such adults
Consciousness as information system of the human body
Starting from the observation of the binary character YES/NOT of our decisions in
relation to the information received from the environment, determining both our life and specie
evolution by adaptation, it is defined the info-creational field and thought as an information
operator on this field, allowing to describe the individual EGO as a receiver and producer
information system, based on an operational and a programmed informational subsystem.
Consciousness appears thus be an integrated information system which allows the adaptation to
the environment and survival of specie, supported by informed matter (physical body) to
maintain functionality of the whole. On this basis, there were identified two main informational
circuits of the human body controlled by the consciousness: (i) the attitude as a short-time
reaction circuit allowing the immediate adaptation to the environment; (ii) the informational
genetic transmission as a large-time process assuring both the evolution by the transference of
the new adaptation characteristics to the next generations and the survival of the specie.
Observing the anti-entropic nature of the information activity mobilized to support the living
structure, there were identified the anti-entropic, antigravitational and reverse temporal arrow
features that the thought could access under special focusing conditions, similar to those of
antimatter, explaining the paranormal capacities like premonition, psychotherapy, telekinesis
and levitation, particularly the cloud dissipation, induced/supported by the mind power
Measurement in Economics and Social Science
The paper discusses measurement, primarily in economics, from both analytical and historical perspectives. The historical section traces the commitment to ordinalism on the part of economic theorists from the doctrinal disputes between classical economics and marginalism, through the struggle of orthodox economics against socialism down to the cold-war alliance between mathematical social science and anti-communist ideology. In economics the commitment to ordinalism led to the separation of theory from the quantitative measures that are computed in practice: price and quantity indexes, consumer surplus and real national product. The commitment to ordinality entered political science, via Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’, effectively merging it with economics, and ensuring its sterility. How can a field that has as its central result the impossibility of democracy contribute to the design of democratic institutions?
The analytical part of the paper deals with the quantitative measures mentioned above. I begin with the conceptual clarification that what these measures try to achieve is a restoration of the money metric that is lost when prices are variable. I conclude that there is only one measure that can be embedded in a satisfactory economic theory, free from unreasonable restrictions. It is the Törnqvist index as an approximation to its theoretical counterpart the Divisia index.
The statistical agencies have at various times produced different measures for real national product and its components, as well as related concepts. I argue that all of these are flawed and that a single deflator should be used for the aggregate and the components. Ideally this should be a chained Törnqvist price index defined on aggregate consumption.
The social sciences are split. The economic approach is abstract, focused on the assumption of rational and informed behavior, and tends to the political right. The sociological approach is empirical, stresses the non-rational aspects of human behavior and tends to the political left. I argue that the split is due to the fact that the empirical and theoretical traditions were never joined in the social sciences as they were in the natural sciences. I also argue that measurement can potentially help in healing this split
The Body as Object of Historical Research: Bibliographic Review
This study aimed at describing, by means of a literature review, some possible meanings of the body through history. This study was conducted by collected bibliographic data of published books in Portuguese in the last 10 years, from known authors, mentioned in articles of anthropology, sociology and psychology. The articles found were organized as research and review articles and later categorized according to the theme. We discussed the possible understanding the meaning of body according with time, looking for its modification and impact
Corporate Security Responsibility: Towards a Conceptual Framework for a Comparative Research Agenda
The political debate about the role of business in armed conflicts has increasingly raised expectations as to governance contributions by private corporations in the fields of conflict prevention, peace-keeping and postconflict peace-building. This political agenda seems far ahead of the research agenda, in which the negative image of business in conflicts, seen as fuelling, prolonging and taking commercial advantage of violent conflicts,still prevails. So far the scientific community has been reluctant to extend the scope of research on ‘corporate social responsibility’ to the area of security in general and to intra-state armed conflicts in particular. As a consequence, there is no basis from which systematic knowledge can be generated about the conditions and the extent to which private corporations can fulfil the role expected of them in the political discourse. The research on positive contributions of private corporations to security amounts to unconnected in-depth case studies of specific corporations in specific conflict settings. Given this state of research, we develop a framework for a comparative research agenda to address the question: Under which circumstances and to what extent can private corporations be expected to contribute to public security
BODY CHANGES AND GREEN CONSUMPTION. EMBODYING AND PERFORMING A VEGAN LIFESTYLE
Veganism is usually addressed in studies on medical benefits or eating disorders as well as food
identities that are able to shape and influence society. Through this article, the author aims to add a
new interpretation of veganism by linking the anthropological topic of body changes to green
consumption and dietary choices. Notably, the present analysis aims to explore the ideas of a lifestyle
free of animal products and their embodied political significance using the ethnographic
methodology. The approach used allows us to present veganism as a meaningful strategy that employs
personal values as a response to wider world issues related to environmental degradation and animal
safeguard. Therefore, in this dissertation, the implicit and explicit body modification and vegan
expressions are crucial to understanding how veganism is concretized in the Italian contex
- …