Adam Smith and the Stages of Moral Development

The writer explores Adam Smith\u27s Theory of Moral Sentiments, where Smith presents a rich and provocative account of morality. The writer offers an explication of Smith\u27s moral psychology as a stage theory of moral development, with the intention of generating critical points on both mattes of detail and larger implications

Sharing emotions at scale: The Vent dataset

The continuous and increasing use of social media has enabled the expression of human thoughts, opinions, and everyday actions publicly at an unprecedented scale. We present the Vent dataset, the largest annotated dataset of text, emotions, and social connections to date. It comprises more than 33 millions of posts by nearly a million of users together with their social connections. Each post has an associated emotion. There are 705 different emotions, organized in 63 "emotion categories", forming a two-level taxonomy of affects. Our initial statistical analysis describes the global patterns of activity in the Vent platform, revealing large heterogenities and certain remarkable regularities regarding the use of the different emotions. We focus on the aggregated use of emotions, the temporal activity, and the social network of users, and outline possible methods to infer emotion networks based on the user activity. We also analyze the text and describe the affective landscape of Vent, finding agreements with existing (small scale) annotated corpus in terms of emotion categories and positive/negative valences. Finally, we discuss possible research questions that can be addressed from this unique dataset.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables. Accepted at the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2019

Brexit: Modes of Uncertainty and Futures in an Impasse

Alongside the emergence of various populisms, Brexit and other contemporary geopolitical events have been presented as symptomatic of a generalizing and intensifying sense of uncertainty in the midst of a crisis of (neo)liberalism. In this paper we describe what kind of event Brexit is becoming in the impasse between the UK’s EU referendum in 2016 and its anticipated exit from the EU in 2019. Based on 108 interviews with people in the North‐East of England, we trace how Brexit is variously enacted and felt as an end, advent, a harbinger of worse to come, non‐event, disaster, and betrayed promise. By following how these incommensurate versions of Brexit take form and co‐exist we supplement explanatory and predictive approaches to the geographies of Brexit and exemplify an approach that traces what such geopolitical events become. Specifically, we use the concept of ‘modes of uncertainty’ as a way of discerning patterns in how present uncertainties are lived. A ‘mode of uncertainty’ is a shared set of practices animated by a distinctive mood through which futures are made present and felt. Rather than treat uncertainty as a static, explanatory context, we thus follow how different versions of Brexit are constituted through specific ‘modes of (un)certainty’ – negative hope, national optimisms, apprehensive hopefulness and fantasies of action ‐ that differentiate within a seemingly singular, shared sense of uncertainty

Affective Societies: Key Concepts

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts engender insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Each chapters provides historical orientation; detailed explication of the concept in question, clear-cut research examples, and an outlook toward future research

Brain-Inspired Computing

This open access book constitutes revised selected papers from the 4th International Workshop on Brain-Inspired Computing, BrainComp 2019, held in Cetraro, Italy, in July 2019. The 11 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. They deal with research on brain atlasing, multi-scale models and simulation, HPC and data infra-structures for neuroscience as well as artificial and natural neural architectures