Looking back and ahead: lessons from the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

Hyun Bang Shin looks back at the Beijing Olympics to derive some indication of the what the legacy of the London Games might be. He warns that diversion of national resources may pose additional development opportunities for host cities, but constraints for others in the country in terms of resource redistribution

Looking back and ahead: Edmond Sacré, Armand Heins and the transformation of Ghent

Between 1870 and the First World War the city centre of Ghent (Belgium) underwent thorough changes. Medieval buildings were cleared from the surrounding urban tissue, creating space for trough-city traffic. New viewpoints and restored monuments satisfied the needs of the modern tourist and offered an easily legible image of the city centre. Edmond Sacré (1851-1921, photographer) and Armand Heins (1856-1938, historian/artist) both documented the transformation of the city. For the Commission of Monuments and Sites, Sacré visualized all stages of the transformation process. Heins’ birds eye views of the future city centre familiarized the inhabitants of Ghent with the plans of the city council. At the same time, he produced albums filled with nostalgic drawings of the old corners of Ghent. The photographs of Sacré are characterized by a similar double view: apart from the modern city he documents slumbering alleys and age-old houses on the verge of disappearance. The media of photography and drawing allowed to look back and ahead simultaneously. The images of Sacré and Heins stimulate reflection on the meaning of historiography and historical awareness at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1897, Heins initiated a systematic inventory of Ghent’s pre-1830 heritage, for which Sacré provided some photographs. The inventory represented the city as a collection of images which could be reassembled in future situations. It was used for example on the occasion of the 1913 World Fair, when constructions in the city centre and on the fairgrounds were dressed up in a medieval architectural style. The paper argues that different attitudes towards history were simultaneously at stake – attitudes that seem contradictory from a current-day perspective: a well-informed historiography with scientific aspirations; an eclectic cut-and-paste strategy and a longing for the sensory, ‘organic’ experience of the city of the past

Understanding Moral Judgments: The Role of the Agent’s Characteristics in Moral Evaluations

Traditional studies have shown that the moral judgments are influenced by many biasing factors, like the consequences of a behavior, certain characteristics of the agent who commits the act, or the words chosen to describe the behavior. In the present study we investigated a new factor that could bias the evaluation of morally relevant human behavior: the perceived similarity between the participants and the agent described in the moral scenario. The participants read a story about a driver who illegally overtook another car and hit a pedestrian who was crossing the street. The latter was taken to the hospital with a broken leg. The driver was described either as being similar to the participant (a student, 21 years old, the same gender as th­e participant) or dissimilar (a retired person, 69 years old, different gender as the participant). The results show that the participants from the increased similarity group expressed more lenient evaluations of the immorality of the driver’s behavior compared to the participants from the decreased similarity group. The results are discussed within a framework which puts emphasis on motivational and protective reasons

A Deformation Quantization Theory for Non-Commutative Quantum Mechanics

We show that the deformation quantization of non-commutative quantum mechanics previously considered by Dias and Prata can be expressed as a Weyl calculus on a double phase space. We study the properties of the star-product thus defined, and prove a spectral theorem for the star-genvalue equation using an extension of the methods recently initiated by de Gosson and Luef.Comment: Submitted for publicatio