94,517 research outputs found
Finding Freedom for the Thoughts We Hate
In his dissenting opinion in United States v. Schwimmer (1929), Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously defended tolerance as an indispensable constitutional value. He wrote: â[I]f there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought â not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.â
Yet accepting that the Constitution protects the thought that we hate can be difficult, even during the best of times. And these are far from the best of times. Nuclear brinksmanship has returned. Extreme partisanship prevails. Equality and religious liberty are cast as antagonists. Overt racism and bigotry are resurgent.
In unsettled periods such as these, many see a constitutional commitment to freedom for the thought that we hate as just another means of maintaining an unacceptable status quo. Why should we tolerate offensive speech that hurts and divides â particularly within broadly inclusive spaces such as public universities? Why doesnât the constitutional promise of equality permit us to exclude from public debate views that dehumanize and seek to revive the sins of the past
Learning to Lead: The Journey to Community Leadership for Emerging Community Foundations
The James Irvine Foundation launched its Community Foundations Initiative II in 2005. This six-year effort involved a 73 million to 4 million over this period (not counting Irvine regrant dollars). And they have made important progress as leaders who initiate action to address unmet needs in their communities.This report offers insights and experiences along a spectrum of roles pursued over the life of this initiative. Included are stories revealing their individual trials and triumphs on the road to community leadership, as well as tools for use by others in the field
Changing tools to catch the beast: Why the EU studies should take policy seriously, and how this shift could help to understand integration
While the EU is still enlarging its membership and range of actions, the current stalemate of the integration project is pushing the âontologicalâ question about the nature of the common Europe again at the top of both the political and the research agendas. This paper aims to contribute the debate and display the possibilities of enhancing the comprehension of the âsupranational beastâ from a policy perspective. The focus hence is shifted on implementation and policy frameworks, and the field of analysis widened to cover the institutional transformations occurred within the administrative dimension both at the national and supranational levels in the last decades. From this perspective, previous findings are revisited to account for the new meaning of the common Europe after the Single European Act, the complexity of the current institutional architecture, and the reasons beneath the stalemate. Finally, the approach is translated into research hypotheses about integration and viable strategies for sustaining it beneath and beyond the usual âhardâ institutional re-engineering
Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms
The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent âdevicesâ, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew âcognitive devicesâ are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications
Bringing History into Evolutionary Economic Geography for a Better Understanding of Evolution
The paper tries to construct the historical methodology for evolutionary economic geography. I elevate history to the methodological foundation of evolutionary economic geography, on which concrete research methods should be based. I explore how to evolution in economic geography by placing history in historical time and historical contexts. Accordingly, the concepts of path creation and path dependence should be used together in historical study. More important, the concept of path interdependence, which stresses the importance of the circumstances under which different processes and events are likely to occur, opens a new window on the temporal aspects of the world.Organizational ecology, fashion industry, creative industries, clusters, institutional lock-in
Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video
We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations and
robotic behaviors entirely from unlabeled videos recorded from multiple
viewpoints, and study how this representation can be used in two robotic
imitation settings: imitating object interactions from videos of humans, and
imitating human poses. Imitation of human behavior requires a
viewpoint-invariant representation that captures the relationships between
end-effectors (hands or robot grippers) and the environment, object attributes,
and body pose. We train our representations using a metric learning loss, where
multiple simultaneous viewpoints of the same observation are attracted in the
embedding space, while being repelled from temporal neighbors which are often
visually similar but functionally different. In other words, the model
simultaneously learns to recognize what is common between different-looking
images, and what is different between similar-looking images. This signal
causes our model to discover attributes that do not change across viewpoint,
but do change across time, while ignoring nuisance variables such as
occlusions, motion blur, lighting and background. We demonstrate that this
representation can be used by a robot to directly mimic human poses without an
explicit correspondence, and that it can be used as a reward function within a
reinforcement learning algorithm. While representations are learned from an
unlabeled collection of task-related videos, robot behaviors such as pouring
are learned by watching a single 3rd-person demonstration by a human. Reward
functions obtained by following the human demonstrations under the learned
representation enable efficient reinforcement learning that is practical for
real-world robotic systems. Video results, open-source code and dataset are
available at https://sermanet.github.io/imitat
The False Promise of Thought Experimentation in Moral and Political Philosophy
Prof. MiĆĄÄeviÄ has long been an ardent defender of the use of thought experiments in philosophy, foremost metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind. Recently he has, in his typically sophisticated manner, extended his general account of philosophical thought-experimenting to the domain of normative politics. Not only can the history of political philosophy be better understood and appreciated, according to MiĆĄÄeviÄ, when seen as a more or less continuous, yet covert, practice of thought-experimenting, the very progress of the discipline may crucially depend on finding the right balance between the constraints of (biological, psychological, economic, political, and so on) reality and political-moral ideals when we set to design our basic political notions and institutions.
I have much less confidence in this project than prof. MiĆĄÄeviÄ does. As a subspecies of moral TE, political TE share all their problems plus exhibit some of their own. In the paper, I present and discuss two types of evidence that threaten to undermine political philosophersâ trust in thought-experiments and the ethical/political intuitions elicited by them: (i) the dismal past record of thought-experimentation in moral and political philosophy; and (ii) the variety, prevalence, and stubbornness, of bias in ordinary social/political judgment
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