16,703 research outputs found
The natural kingdom of God in Hobbesâs political thought
ABSTRACTIn Leviathan, Hobbes outlines the concept of the âKingdome of God by Natureâ or âNaturall Kingdome of Godâ, terms rarely found in English texts at the time. This article traces the concept back to the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which sets forth a threefold understanding of Godâs kingdom â the kingdoms of nature, grace, and glory â none of which refer to civil commonwealths on earth. Hobbes abandons this Catholic typology and transforms the concept of the natural kingdom of God to advance a claim often missed by his interpreters: Leviathan-states are the manifestation of a real, not metaphorical, kingdom of God. This argument plays a key role in Leviathan, which identifies the kingdom of God as the Christian doctrine most subject to abuse. Hobbes harshly criticizes Catholic and Presbyterian clergy for claiming to represent Godâs kingdom. This claim, he argues, comes with the subversive implication that the church possesses spiritual and temporal authority, and caused great turmoil during the English Civil War. As an alternative, Hobbes points to civil commonwealths as the manifestation of Godâs natural kingdom, which is the only form his kingdom currently takes
Political Activism and Research Ethics
Those who care about and engage in politics frequently fall victim to cognitive bias. Concerns that such bias impacts scholarship recently have prompted debatesânotably, in philosophy and psychologyâon the proper relationship between research and politics. One proposal emerging from these debates is that researchers studying politics have a professional duty to avoid political activism because it risks biasing their work. While sympathetic to the motivations behind this proposal, I suggest several reasons to reject a blanket duty to avoid activism: (1) even if it reduced bias, this duty would make unreasonable demands on researchers; (2) this duty could hinder research by limiting viewpoint diversity; (3) this duty wrongly implies that academia offers a relative haven from bias compared to politics; and (4) not all forms of political activism pose an equal risk of bias. None of these points suggest that researchers should ignore the risk of bias. Rather, researchers should focus on stronger evidence-based strategies for reducing bias than a blanket recommendation to avoid politics
Drones and Dirty Hands
The period known as the âWar on Terrorâ has prompted a revival of interest in the idea of moral dilemmas and the problem of âdirty handsâ in public life. Some contend that a policy of targeted killing of terrorist actors is (under specified but not uncommon circumstances) an instance of a dirty-handed moral dilemma â morally required yet morally forbidden, the least evil choice available in the circumstances, but one that nevertheless leaves an indelible moral stain on the character of the person who makes the choice. In this chapter we argue that, while dirty hands situations do exist as a persistent problem of political life, it is generally a mistake to classify policies of target killing (such as the current US policy) as examples of dirty hands. Instead, we maintain, such policies, if justified at all, must ordinarily be justified under the more exacting standards of just war theory and its provisions for justified killing â in particular the requirement that (with limited and defined exceptions) non-combatants be immune from intentional violence. Understanding this distinction both clarifies the significance of dirty hands as a moral phenomenon and also forestalls a set of predictable and all-too-easy appropriations of the concept to domains it was never intended to address
The G Dwarf Problem Exists in Other Galaxies
Stellar population models with abundance distributions determined from the
analytic Simple model of chemical evolution fail to match observations of the
nuclei of bulge-dominated galaxies in three respects. First, the spectral
energy distribution in the mid-ultraviolet range 2000 < lam < 2400 exceeds
observation by ~ 0.6 mag. Most of that excess is due to metal-poor main
sequence stars. Second, the models do not reproduce metal-sensitive optical
absorption features that arise mainly from red giant stars. Third, the strength
of a Ca II index sensitive to hot stars does not jibe with the predicted number
of A-type horizontal branch stars. The number of metal poor stars in galaxies
is at least a factor of two less than predicted by the Simple model, exactly
similar to the ``G Dwarf problem'' in the solar cylinder. Observations at
larger radii in local group galaxies indicate that the paucity of metal poor
stars applies globally, rather than only in the nuclei. Because of the
dominance of metal rich stars, primordial galaxies will have a plentiful dust
supply early in their star formation history, and thus will probably have weak
Lyman-alpha emission, as is apparently observed. We confirm that early-type
galaxies cannot have been formed exclusively from mergers of small all-stellar
subsystems, a result already established by dynamical simulations. The
constraint of peaked abundance distributions will limit future chemical
evolution models. It will also make age estimates for the stellar populations
in early type galaxies and bulges more secure.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX includes 3 postscript figures. Uses AAS LaTeX v 4.0
and times.sty. Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.
Postscript available at http://shemesh.gsfc.nasa.gov/~dorman/Ben.htm
Highly comparative feature-based time-series classification
A highly comparative, feature-based approach to time series classification is
introduced that uses an extensive database of algorithms to extract thousands
of interpretable features from time series. These features are derived from
across the scientific time-series analysis literature, and include summaries of
time series in terms of their correlation structure, distribution, entropy,
stationarity, scaling properties, and fits to a range of time-series models.
After computing thousands of features for each time series in a training set,
those that are most informative of the class structure are selected using
greedy forward feature selection with a linear classifier. The resulting
feature-based classifiers automatically learn the differences between classes
using a reduced number of time-series properties, and circumvent the need to
calculate distances between time series. Representing time series in this way
results in orders of magnitude of dimensionality reduction, allowing the method
to perform well on very large datasets containing long time series or time
series of different lengths. For many of the datasets studied, classification
performance exceeded that of conventional instance-based classifiers, including
one nearest neighbor classifiers using Euclidean distances and dynamic time
warping and, most importantly, the features selected provide an understanding
of the properties of the dataset, insight that can guide further scientific
investigation
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Practice And Tournament Volumes Of Young Golfers In Regional And National Squads
Practice plays a part in determining skill development, expertise (Ericsson & Pool, 2016; Baker et al., 2003), levels of creativity (Memmert et al., 2010) psychological preparation, increases in novice golfersâ gray matter (Bezzola et al., 2011), and decision making (Baker et al., 2003). Currently there is little empirical research demonstrating the amount of practice golfers conduct on a session to session, weekly, monthly, seasonal or annual basis and the impact this can have on their handicap. Previous research has suggested that deliberate practice can explain some of the variance in performance levels (Macnamara et al., 2016). However, with a paucity of golf specific research in this area, it is important to establish the volumes being undertaken and the impact of those volumes on the golferâs ability. This initial study aimed to establish the practice and tournament volumes of young golfers involved in a national governing bodyâs development programme and investigate how practice volumes influence handicap
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