What Can We Do You For? Naive Conceptions of the Value of Indigenous Culture and Communities

In a community which enacts laws to protect things of value,we need to be very specific about what conceptions of value we attach to the things protected. This articles argues that current laws and protocols which exist to preserve and protect Indigenous cultures and communities are usually based on an inadequate construction of intrinsic value

Souvenirs, salvage and storied things : remembering community.

What I am talking about comes from a much larger set of projects with a number of collaborators so I will be ventriloquising along the way today. What effect does it have if we take that supply chain and value chain and take it even further, into the after life of things. And I am thinking about the Tales of Things of Electronic Memory. Lets extend the social biographies. Lets look at the movement in and out of the commodity phase. Not just ending as commodities and having use-value, but becoming commodities again then stopping being commodities again and so on. So this is a story that is also about circulation from stocks of objects. Things that we hold idling in our house, our wardrobes and things which are held in hiding by the state that we will come on to and many things that are circulated and how they made to circulate. A large part of the story is about things and about changing things in order to rekindle value. How do you take something which has no value let in it, no worth if you want to put it in those terms, and rekindle that, recreate worth from it? So this is dealing with consumption, not just consumption in terms of using, as context as Irene would says, but also as using up, consuming in that sense, finishing it. So I want to tell some stories about remainder objects; the things which are left over, or actually remainders of objects. What happens when the object themselves have got used up during consumption? And find their story map of object destruction, about actually using things until they have gone, until they have broken. So to continue that cheery theme of death and destruction, I thought I would just illustrate this in a few quotes in terms of things and objects. I will start with Robert Smithson’s take on this. The conceptual artist of the 1960s and 70s in the United States, with his comments: ‘separate forms, objects, shapes are mere convenient fictions. There is only an uncertain disintegrating order that transcends the limits of rational separations.” Now he does not acknowledge it, but basically he lifted that from Henri Bergson, who was summarsied by Bertrand Russell as being about being as flow: “separate things, beginnings and endings are mere convenient fictions: imaginary congealings of the stream” and of course we can take this back further to Heraclitus or Lucretius or if we want back to someone like Gautama Buddha's final words: “It came as if in all composite things, everything ends up breaking, everything ends up being destroyed.

The Priority of Respect: How Our Common Humanity Can Ground Our Individual Dignity

In this essay, we notice that the priority of persons, the unbridgeable political gap between persons and mere things, corresponds to a special sort of moral and legal treatment for persons, namely, as irreplaceable individuals. Normative language that conflates the category of person with fungible kinds of being can thus appear to justify destroying and replacing human beings, just as we do with things. Lethal consequences may result, for example, from a common but improper extension of the word “value” to persons. The attitude and act called “respect” brings forth much more adequately than “value” the distinctively individual priority of persons, allowing our common humanity to be a reason for each person’s separate significance. Unless we focus on the respect-worthiness of human life rather than on its value, we will not be able to argue coherently against those who think its destruction permissible

Evaluative Beliefs First

Many philosophers think that it is only because we happen to want or care about things that we think some things of value. We start off caring about things, and then project these desires onto the external world. In this chapter, I make a preliminary case for the opposite view, that it is our evaluative thinking that is prior or comes first. On this view, it is only because we think some things of value that we care about or want anything at all. This view is highly explanatory. In particular, it explains (i) the special role that pleasure and pain play in our motivational systems, (ii) why phenomenal consciousness evolved, and (iii) how the two main competing theories of normative reasons for action—i.e., objectivism and subjectivism—can be reconciled. After explaining why this is so, I respond to the most serious objections to this view, including that it cannot account for temptation and willpower, or for the existence and appropriateness of the reactive attitudes

The Simplest Evaluation Measures for XML Information Retrieval that Could Possibly Work

This paper reviews several evaluation measures developed for evaluating XML information retrieval (IR) systems. We argue that these measures, some of which are currently in use by the INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX), are complicated, hard to understand, and hard to explain to users of XML IR systems. To show the value of keeping things simple, we report alternative evaluation results of official evaluation runs submitted to INEX 2004 using simple metrics, and show its value for INEX

Cyber-Human Partnerships – Towards a resilient ecosystem in Smart Cities

In this talk I will explore one of the most relevant challenges for a decade to come: How to integrate the Internet of Things with software, people, and processes, considering modern Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) with Big Data. I will present a fresh look at this problem, and examine how to integrate people, software services, and things with their data, into one novel resilient ecosystem, which can be modeled, programmed, and deployed on a large scale in an elastic way. This novel paradigm has major consequences on how we view, build, design, and deploy ultra-large scale distributed systems and establishes a novel foundation for an “architecure of value” driven Smart City.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

High-resolution mass models of dwarf galaxies from LITTLE THINGS

We present high-resolution rotation curves and mass models of 26 dwarf galaxies from LITTLE THINGS. LITTLE THINGS is a high-resolution Very Large Array HI survey for nearby dwarf galaxies in the local volume within 11 Mpc. The rotation curves of the sample galaxies derived in a homogeneous and consistent manner are combined with Spitzer archival 3.6 micron and ancillary optical U, B, and V images to construct mass models of the galaxies. We decompose the rotation curves in terms of the dynamical contributions by baryons and dark matter halos, and compare the latter with those of dwarf galaxies from THINGS as well as Lambda CDM SPH simulations in which the effect of baryonic feedback processes is included. Being generally consistent with THINGS and simulated dwarf galaxies, most of the LITTLE THINGS sample galaxies show a linear increase of the rotation curve in their inner regions, which gives shallower logarithmic inner slopes alpha of their dark matter density profiles. The mean value of the slopes of the 26 LITTLE THINGS dwarf galaxies is alpha =-0.32 +/- 0.24 which is in accordance with the previous results found for low surface brightness galaxies (alpha = -0.2 +/- 0.2) as well as the seven THINGS dwarf galaxies (alpha =-0.29 +/- 0.07). However, this significantly deviates from the cusp-like dark matter distribution predicted by dark-matter-only Lambda CDM simulations. Instead our results are more in line with the shallower slopes found in the Lambda CDM SPH simulations of dwarf galaxies in which the effect of baryonic feedback processes is included. In addition, we discuss the central dark matter distribution of DDO 210 whose stellar mass is relatively low in our sample to examine the scenario of inefficient supernova feedback in low mass dwarf galaxies predicted from recent Lambda SPH simulations of dwarf galaxies where central cusps still remain.Peer reviewe

The Case for Clear and Convincing Evidence: Do our Laws Value Property over Children?

Our laws reflect our values. What we value, we make laws to protect. In this article, Tricia Martland describes the child custody statute in North Dakota, which is the only state to use “clear and convincing” standard of evidence. This means that children will not be placed with parents with a history of domestic violence unless there is clear and convincing evidence of their rehabilitation. Other states deem the clear and convincing standard too stringent. Yet this standard is often used with regard to property title. Do our laws indicate that we value things over children? Changing policy to apply the same degree of protection to children that we do for property requires using the clear and convincing evidence standard

Vigilance and control

We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control explain culpability for unwitting omissions