Gambling, luck and superstition: a brief psychological overview

For what is generally accepted as almost endemic to many a gamblers' disposition - the ideas, practices and responses that combine gambling, luck and superstition - there has been surprisingly little scientific research in this field. As an indication of what can be undertaken subsequently, an intriguing picture emerges of how this affects players' character and motivations as gamblers according to the type of gambling engaged, including its relationship to chance and skill

Everyday gambling in New Zealand

There is a sizeable body of statistics on gambling in New Zealand which points albeit unintentionally - to the everyday status of this activity. Max Abbott and Rachel Volberg, two leading figures in the rapidly growing discipline of gambling studies, note that in 15 short years there have been no less than seven surveys on gambling in New Zealand (not including a large number of university theses). These include three assessments of people's participation in gambling by the Department of Internal Affairs, plus two surveys funded by the department focusing on problem gambling. To these can be added one conducted by a regional health authority, North Health, under contract to the Committee on Problem Gambling Management and one conducted on behalf of the Casino Control Authority. This much research on gambling should suggest to the reader that there is something about gambling that piques the interest of government bureaucrats and agencies. Here the frequency of the phrase `problem gambling' is the giveaway. In this section we will review some of the findings of this research and cover its more pathological rationale later

Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Question of Enlightenment

Originally published in Journal of the History of Ideas, http://journals.pennpress.org/strands/jhi/home.htm. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

William Godwin and Catholicism

This essay traces Godwin‘s changing attitude to Catholicism by exploring a variety of texts generally considered marginal to his oeuvre and a hitherto unexamined selection of his unpublished manuscripts

2. Deism and Materialism

The deification of Nature, including man and his science, established itself in the religious ideas of the Enlightenment. The concepts of the Enlightenment - science as the road to truth; an orderly, rational nature that included man; the moral and intellectual dignity of man; usefulness and reasonableness as the standards to which every belief and institution had to submit - forced men to reexamine their religious ideas and promoted the development of the religion of reason or deism. [excerpt

Wesley’s invisible world: witchcraft and the temperature of preternatural belief

Owen Davies,'Wesley’s invisible world: witchcraft and the temperature of preternatural belief', in Robert Webster, ed., Perfecting Perfection: Essays in honor of Henry D. Rack (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), ISBN: 978-1-61097-849-1.Non peer reviewe

Predicting Auction Price of Vehicle License Plate with Deep Residual Learning

Due to superstition, license plates with desirable combinations of characters are highly sought after in China, fetching prices that can reach into the millions in government-held auctions. Despite the high stakes involved, there has been essentially no attempt to provide price estimates for license plates. We present an end-to-end neural network model that simultaneously predict the auction price, gives the distribution of prices and produces latent feature vectors. While both types of neural network architectures we consider outperform simpler machine learning methods, convolutional networks outperform recurrent networks for comparable training time or model complexity. The resulting model powers our online price estimator and search engine

Culture and carelessness: Constituting disability in South India

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Professional and lay explanations of disability, collected via interviews and participant-observation during fieldwork in Hyderabad, South India, identify “carelessness” and “superstition” as major impediments to good health among the general population, and education as the key solution. In that such findings suggest a valorization of personal responsibility for self-care, the Foucauldian concept of biopower appeared a salient framework for analysis. Although illuminating, however, biopower was ultimately inadequate for explaining what emerged, on closer analysis, as significant discrepancies between assumptions about how disabled people engaged with healthcare services and their actual beliefs and practices; and between the moral interpretations different stakeholders made of “carelessness” in describing perceived causes of disability. My data also suggested that education was not in itself a key determinant in people's healthcare decisions. This article explores these differences between official and demotic discourses concerning the causes of disability and attempts to account for them ethnographically.The British Academ

Review of I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (2007) (review revised 2019)

Latest Sermon from the Church of Fundamentalist Naturalism by Pastor Hofstadter. Like his much more famous (or infamous for its relentless philosophical errors) work Godel, Escher, Bach, it has a superficial plausibility but if one understands that this is rampant scientism which mixes real scientific issues with philosophical ones (i.e., the only real issues are what language games we ought to play) then almost all its interest disappears. I provide a framework for analysis based in evolutionary psychology and the work of Wittgenstein (since updated in my more recent writings). Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019

Toward a genealogy of modernism: Herder, Nietzsche, history

The full text is available at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/13050