Fuller geographies and the care-ful co-production of transgressive pedagogies, or 'Who Cares?'

No abstract available

Towards a style-specific basis for computational beat tracking

Outlined in this paper are a number of sources of evidence, from psychological, ethnomusicological and engineering grounds, to suggest that current approaches to computational beat tracking are incomplete. It is contended that the degree to which cultural knowledge, that is, the specifics of style and associated learnt representational schema, underlie the human faculty of beat tracking has been severely underestimated. Difficulties in building general beat tracking solutions, which can provide both period and phase locking across a large corpus of styles, are highlighted. It is probable that no universal beat tracking model exists which does not utilise a switching model to recognise style and context prior to application

A Modern Natural Theology?

The author examines two different traditions of nineteenth-century natural theology and their reappearance in a modern work. Michael Denton\'s Nature\'s Destiny is used as an example of modern natural theology, showing how current writers attempt to resurrect the classical arguments of William Paley and William Whewell. The stance taken here is that, due to the heavily historical character of Foley\'s and Whewell\'s work, it is inappropriate to use their traditions uncritically as windows into religious understandings of science

The Advocate

Public Interest Resource Center Holds First Annual Dinner; FSSF Auction Proceeds Matched by Dean; Coffee and Bias Talk at the South African Consulatehttps://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/student_the_advocate/1098/thumbnail.jp

Detecting the Hate Code on Social Media

Social media has become an indispensable part of the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. It provides a platform for expressing opinions and beliefs, communicated to a massive audience. However, this ease with which people can express themselves has also allowed for the large scale spread of propaganda and hate speech. To prevent violating the abuse policies of social media platforms and also to avoid detection by automatic systems like Google's Conversation AI, racists have begun to use a code (a movement termed Operation Google). This involves substituting references to communities by benign words that seem out of context, in hate filled posts or Tweets. For example, users have used the words Googles and Bings to represent the African-American and Asian communities, respectively. By generating the list of users who post such content, we move a step forward from classifying tweets by allowing us to study the usage pattern of these concentrated set of users

Book Review: Inter-Faith Dialogue and World Community

A review of Inter-Faith Dialogue and World Community edited by Ch. Sreenivasa Rao

Hau

The article presents reflections on some issues encountered when combining traditional Maori and Western concert music. These issues include tradition and repertoire versus innovation, control versus freedom, collaboration versus appropriation, and the overlapping roles of creator and performer. Focal to the article is "Hau," a Maori word meaning breath or wind. The author also presents a comparison of Western music with traditional Maori instrumental music

Mechanistic artefact explanation

One thing about technical artefacts that needs to be explained is how their physical make-up, or structure, enables them to fulfil the behaviour associated with their function, or, more colloquially, how they work. In this paper I develop an account of such explanations based on the familiar notion of mechanistic explanation. To accomplish this, I outline two explanatory strategies that provide two different types of insight into an artefact’s functioning, and show how human action inevitably plays a role in artefact explanation. I then use my own account to criticize other recent work on mechanistic explanation and conclude with some general implications for the philosophy of explanation.Keywords: Artefact; Technical function; Explanation; Levels of explanation; Mechanisms

Phenomenology as an instrument of critique

The present paper aims at showing that the phenomenological method is a crucial methodological element of every research that is based on the interpretation of utterances or texts based on experiences, like religious studies. Following the neophenomenological school, the notion of “phenomenon” is understood in a radically relative way: “A phenomenon for a person at a given point of time is a state of affairs for which this person cannot — in spite of trying to vary the presuppositions she makes as much as possible — withdraw the belief that it is a fact” (Schmitz, 2003: 1). Starting from this notion, phenomenology may fruitfully criticise two common strategies: reduction and construction. The first one tries to reduce experiences to allegedly more fundamental processes like electrical impulses in neural nets. Here the phenomenologist must object that in doing so without preceding phenomenological analysis the reductionist will lose large parts of potentially important information. As to the second strategy, constructions — in the sense of presuppositions, ready-made concepts etc. — are present in all texts that are meant to express an experience. In order to describe the underlying experience more adequately, the phenomenological researcher has to remove as many constructions as possible. In this way she does not only produce a description that is ”closer” to the experience (though she can never hope to fully grasp it), but she also paves the way for comparison and dialogue across religions and cultures