Being moved by a way the world is not

At the end of Lecture 3 of The Empirical Stance, Bas van Fraassen suggests that we see the change of view involved in scientific revolutions as being, at least in part, emotional. In this paper, I explore one plausible way of cashing out this suggestion. Someone’s emotional approval of a description of the world, I argue, thereby shows that she takes herself to have reason to take that description seriously. This is true even if she is convinced—as a scientific community is when it considers alternative theories—that this description is false, that it is not the way the world is

The Making of Social Theory

This article analyzes the practice of making social theory in terms of the changing styles manifested in writing social theory texts. It is claimed that, taken generally, "writing" social theory has not moved beyond its most widespread form of being an exercise in the systematic treatment of the phenomena under study rather than being a genuine problem-solving activity. As demonstrated on selected historical examples of "writing" social theory, it seems evident that there is no standard form or style of "making" social theory apart from commentary. And that social theory, unlike related styles of academic writing, uses "commentary" not as a part of the argument being elaborated, but as a standard and routine way of making knowledge claims. It is argued here that commentary is not the basic method only in the contemporary and largely educational and instructive forms of social theory, but also in the supposedly original achievements of the field's leading figures. The argument elaborated here suggests that the inability to arrive at a standard form of "making" social theory may be a consequence of individual, authentic, original, creative thinking drawing its inspiration from sources that are heavily derivative and sometimes permeated by very chaotic and strenuous efforts to demonstrate the coherence of the thinking that it some way refers to the social world

Primetime War on Drugs & Terror

At the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, we've produced research demonstrating the profound impact that televised entertainment can have on audiences. Whether we like it or not, people are moved by entertainment content and, if the depictions seem realistic, there is a good chance they will apply what they see on the screen to their lives.This is one reason that we decided to develop a research project with the American Civil Liberties Union that would help us understand what Americans (and the rest of the world) might be learning about the War on Terror and the War on Drugs from the most popular shows on U.S. television (which are watched by billions of people around the world). With the assistance of Princeton Survey Research Associates International, we conducted a very detailed analysis of 49 recent episodes of popular primetime dramas (Fig. 2).We selected episodes that addressed the War on Terror or the War on Drugs from ten highly-rated one hour network dramas: 24, CSI, CSI: Miami, The Good Wife, House, Law & Order, Law & Order: Los Angeles, Law & Order: SVU, NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles. All of the episodes aired during 2010, except for eight shows which aired in late 2009 as part of the network 2009-10 season. The aim was to analyze how terror or drugrelated plots were portrayed rather than to assess how frequently these plots appeared. We subjected each episode to a codebook with 145 variables and over 800 sub-variables (see the Methodology section on page 27 for more details). In an effort to contextualize this research and how it might come into dialogue with other conversations about the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, we include recent public opinion survey data about these wars as well as data about how the government and the justice system, in particular, are conducting them. We think viewing these three types of data together -- that is, depictions on television, public opinion and statistics about real world practices -- is the best way to begin an informed conversation about how these wars are being carried out and understood in America

MACE: connecting architectural content repositories to enable new educational experiences inside a collective external memory

In the practice and learning of Architecture and Civil Engineering, it is fundamental to access a big amount of learning material. A considerable part of the knowledge which once was written in books is now being moved to digital media. Today, most of the contents are produced and presented in digital format only. Spread around the world, digital content repositories containing a big amount of notions exist, but are oftentimes unknown and disjointed. As a consequence, they are not very efficient resources for learning at the moment. The European research project MACE (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe) aims at connecting digital architectural repositories by harvesting their metadata and enriching it through the integration of content and domain, context, competence and process, and usage and social metadata. The network created will allow for federated access and search over all connected repositories, allowing a new way of exploring notions and knowledge in the architectural domain, using the web as a "collective external memory

Living in virtual communities : an ethnography of life online

This thesis examines some of the issues involved in the development of human relationships in cyberspace. Set within the wider context of the Internet and society it investigates how geographically distant individuals are coming together on the Internet to inhabit new kinds of social spaces or virtual communities. People 'live in' and 'construct' these new spaces in such a way as to suggest that the Internet is not a placeless cyberspace that is distinct and separate from the real world. Building on the work of other cyberethnographers, I combine original ethnographic research in Cybertown (http: /www. cybertown. com), a Virtual Community, with face-to-face meetings to illustrate how, for many people, cyberspace is just another place to meet. Secondly I suggest that people in Cybertown are investing as much effort in maintaining relationships in cyberspace as in other social spaces. By extending traditional human relationships into Cybertown, they are widening their webs of relationships, not weakening them. Human relationships in cyberspace are formed and maintained in similar ways to those in wider society. Rather than being exotic and removed from real life, they are actually being assimilated into everyday life. Furthermore they are often moved into other social settings, just as they are in offline life

The R.A.I.N.E. Method

The imagination-in-service of empathy also creates a context for measuring children’s social, linguistic, comprehension, and organizational skills through the clinical observation of pretend play (Hendler-Lederer,2002). Both sociological insights carry heavy implications for the use and impact of imagination for both adults and children as well as individuals and clinicians. On the educational field, there is a wide academic debate about the disuse of imagination in the current educational system. Finally, in authentic movement, there is a strong link between imagination and affect where, not only is the clinician imagining the emotions that accompany the affect being moved by the individual but can also use the universal meanings of affects to touch root issues in the imagination (Roberts, 2016) . This thesis sought to develop a method and therefore, the R.A.I.N.E. method is built around creating engagement through the individual’s imaginative process. I chose option 1 because I want to provide a road-map of my process to finding the way in with difficult individuals that may benefit other clinicians. The substance of the method is establishing a path for clinicians to gain access to the individuals’ internal world, become an ally of that world, and expand upon and operate within that world to achieve treatment goals. The R.A.I.N.E. method was used with three individuals, ages five to twelve and this thesis will present and discuss their responses to treatment through the method

The Montessori philosophy is a good foundation to education of new generation

The purpose of the paper is to present the philosophy of reform of education in Albania during the post-communist transition.Reforming education is a priority, but has been neglected by governments over the last 25 years.Over the last five years, the new curriculum and the new textbook system are being implemented according to the European standards. The core of reform is "have human beings learnt" (E. Ultarur, 2012).The constructivist philosophy of learning is a sure foundation that guarantees the new quality of the educational process.The Montessori's philosophy guarantees high quality and safety for the future because:First, this philosophy serves as a theoretical basis and serves as a method. Montessori has discovered the stages of natural development of the thinking human beings from childhood to adolescence, basing on scientific evidence, from childhood to adolescence.Secondly, Montessori’s constructivism moved the knowledge from the product into the process.Montessori illuminates the way of building human values during educational teaching process at school and in the community by the falling down of the classic wall that separates school from the community (public).Our research is based on the study of curricular experiences and on data from consultations with students, parents and specialists. The search method is holistic. By the holistic education the children need not only to develop academically, but to develop the ability as well in order to survive in the real world. The real world in our era is in front of the virtual world. In this contexts, we must teach children to learn not what?, but how? (How does it work/learn?). The teacher must learn his/her students how they construct the values by their immediate relationships with their friends and family as well as social development, health, and intellectual development

The impact and penetration of location-based services

Since the invention of digital technology, its development has followed an entrenched path ofminiaturisation and decentralisation with increasing focus on individual and niche applications. Computerhardware has moved from remote centres to desktop and hand held devices whilst being embedded invarious material infrastructures. Software has followed the same course. The entire process has convergedon a path where various analogue devices have become digital and are increasingly being embedded inmachines at the smallest scale. In a parallel but essential development, there has been a convergence ofcomputers with communications ensuring that the delivery and interaction mechanisms for computersoftware is now focused on networks of individuals, not simply through the desktop, but in mobilecontexts. Various inert media such as fixed television is becoming more flexible as computers and visualmedia are becoming one.With such massive convergence and miniaturisation, new software and new applications define the cuttingedge. As computers are being increasingly tailored to individual niches, then new digital services areemerging, many of which represent applications which hitherto did not exist or at best were rarely focusedon a mass market. Location based services form one such application and in this paper, we will bothspeculate on and make some initial predictions of the geographical extent to which such services willpenetrate different markets. We define such services in detail below but suffice it to say at this stage thatsuch functions involve the delivery of traditional services using digital media and telecommunications.High profile applications are now being focused on hand held devices, typically involving information onproduct location and entertainment but wider applications involve fixed installations on the desktop whereservices are delivered through traditional fixed infrastructure. Both wire and wireless applications definethis domain. The market for such services is inevitably volatile and unpredictable at this early stage but wewill attempt here to provide some rudimentary estimates of what might happen in the next five to tenyears.The ?network society? which has developed through this convergence, is, according to Castells (1989,2000) changing and re-structuring the material basis of society such that information has come todominate wealth creation in a way that information is both a raw material of production and an outcome ofproduction as a tradable commodity. This has been fuelled by the way technology has expanded followingMoore?s Law and by fundamental changes in the way telecommunications, finance, insurance, utilitiesand so on is being regulated. Location based services are becoming an integral part of this fabric and thesereflect yet another convergence between geographic information systems, global positioning systems, andsatellite remote sensing. The first geographical information system, CGIS, was developed as part of theCanada Land Inventory in 1965 and the acronym ?GIS? was introduced in 1970. 1971 saw the firstcommercial satellite, LANDSAT-1. The 1970s also saw prototypes of ISDN and mobile telephone and theintroduction of TCP/IP as the dominant network protocol. The 1980s saw the IBM XT (1982) and thebeginning of de-regulation in the US, Europe and Japan of key sectors within the economy. Finally in the 1990s, we saw the introduction of the World Wide Web and the ubiquitous pervasion of business andrecreation of networked PC?s, the Internet, mobile communications and the growing use of GPS forlocational positioning and GIS for the organisation and visualisation of spatial data. By the end of the 20thcentury, the number of mobile telephone users had reached 700 million worldwide. The increasingmobility of individuals, the anticipated availability of broadband communications for mobile devices andthe growing volumes of location specific information available in databases will inevitably lead to thedemand for services that will deliver location related information to individuals on the move. Suchlocation based services (LBS) although in a very early stage of development, are likely to play anincreasingly important part in the development of social structures and business in the coming decades.In this paper we begin by defining location based services within the context we have just sketched. Wethen develop a simple model of the market for location-based services developing the standard non-linearsaturation model of market penetration. We illustrate this for mobile devices, namely mobile phones in thefollowing sections and then we develop an analysis of different geographical regimes which arecharacterised by different growth rates and income levels worldwide. This leads us to speculate on theextent to which location based services are beginning to take off and penetrate the market. We concludewith scenarios for future growth through the analogy of GIS and mobile penetration

49 X 49 Glass House

This project started with an analysis of the Core House or 50x50 House by Mies van der Rohe and Myron Goldsmith. Through many iterations and obstacles, we arrived at the 49x49 house. We looked into some literary influences that affected the social interpretations of glass, the most notable one being Zamyatin’s “We”. These factors influenced our main design process as we asked ourselves, what can we do with glass? When we were imagining our initial ideas for what would become of our house in the future, we took inspiration from another master’s work, New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys, which correlated to our nomadic clients and nomadic structure. And for the final fantasy part of the project, the lawless, off-the-grid Slab City was a large influence that led to our Sands of Time project seen in the year 2121. As we moved to the design phase we were hit by the question: who could voluntarily and knowingly choose to inhabit the dynamic and unsettling place that the glass house is and, even more so, embrace its spatial character and qualities? With a bit of research, we stumbled upon the concept of a modern nomadic space, formulated by Constant Nieuwenhuys, a Dutch painter, who was deeply concerned with the nomadic way of living, dreaming of a world as a global system of temporary dwellings. One of his famous quotes being: The environment is created by the activities of life, not the other way around. Following this ideology, the transparent living space of a glass house, in contact with the user of space, becomes a place for those who choose to live in transit, embracing the activities and rituals of a nomadic lifestyle. That was the point, when we came to a conclusion who could be the perfect client for a Mies\u27ian glass house

You are not alone: pre-service teachers' exploration of ethics and responsibility in a compulsory Indigenous education subject

Aunty Mary Graham, Kombu-merri elder and philosopher, says: "You are not alone in the world." We have a responsibility to each other, as well as to the land; and violence is the refusal of this relationship that binds us (Rose). In this paper, I use Emannuel Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy and epistemological violence to consider how non-Indigenous educators come to know Indigenous people. In his philosophy, Levinas presents a paradox: that to act as if one is a free being, as first philosophy, is to ignore that one is not alone in the world and that the presence of others evokes responsibility. However, to claim to know another is to bring them into one’s totality, one’s knowledge framework; an act of reducing another to who you think they are. We must find a new relationship to knowledge, one that is not based on possession. For non-Indigenous educators learning about teaching Indigenous students and perspectives in schools, much of the curricular material draws on the corpus of knowledge constructed by non-Indigenous researchers, politicians, and professionals about Indigenous people (Nakata, Cultural Interface). This material is already bound by others' interests and motivations. How can non-Indigenous educators engage with Indigenous peoples, histories and knowledges in a way that foregrounds the responsibility that our entanglement prompts? In this paper, I present data from my research into pre-service teachers undertaking a compulsory university subject in Indigenous education, where the pre-service teachers wrote weekly reflective learning journals. This data is drawn primarily from the end of the semester, where students reflected on what their learning would mean as they moved into future practice. I explore the role of responsibility in regards to the ethical violence that Levinas discusses