Deflationary tactics with the archive of life: contemporary Jewish art and popular culture

This paper discusses art works by Suzanne Treister, Deborah Kass and Doug Fishbone. It considers the importance of their work for contemporary Jewish identity within the terms of wider conceptual questions that preoccupy contemporary art. These concerns are challenging the perceived structures of power, the “performance” of subjectivity and the questioning of authenticity. A deflationary aesthetic is central to the critique of these structures of thinking fuelled by an interest in the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and popular culture that underpins all of these art works. I argue that popular culture plays a key role as a constituting factor in the production of contemporary Anglophone subjectivity. I use the case studies to develop the argument in the three artists’ specificities and the way they all question the idea of authenticity as a stable source of self-understanding. Suzanne Treister questions history and our relationship with historical events, specifically the Holocaust. She also explores questions of the relationship between structures of power and narratives of history. Debora Kass considers the representation of Jewish women, power and iconicity. Doug Fishbone, a younger artist, takes on self-hate as a transformative tool and as a motif that destabilizes Jewishness as a category, especially in an age of the accelerated post-internet-derived subjectivity

Calculating probabilities from imagined possibilities: Limitations in 4-year-olds

Adults can calculate probabilities by running simulations and calculating proportions of each outcome. How does this ability develop? We developed a method that lets us bring computational modeling to bear on this question. A study of 40 adults and 31 4-year-olds indicates that unlike adults, many 4-year-olds use a single simulation to estimate probability distributions over simulated possibilities. We also implemented the 3-cups task, an established test of children's sensitivity to possibilities, in a novel format. We replicate existing 3-cups results. Moreover, children who our model categorized as running a single simulation on our novel task show a signature of running a single simulation in the 3-cups task. This signature is not observed in children who were categorized as running multiple simulations. This validates our model and adds to the evidence that about half of 4-year-olds don't evaluate multiple candidates for reality in parallel

Vacuum Contributions in a Chiral Effective Lagrangian for Nuclei

A relativistic hadronic model for nuclear matter and finite nuclei, which incorporates nonlinear chiral symmetry and broken scale invariance, is presented and applied at the one-baryon-loop level to finite nuclei. The model contains an effective light scalar field that is responsible for the mid-range nucleon--nucleon attraction and which has anomalous scaling behavior. One-loop vacuum contributions in this background scalar field at finite density are constrained by low-energy theorems that reflect the broken scale invariance of quantum chromodynamics. A mean-field energy functional for nuclear matter and nuclei is derived that contains small powers of the fields and their derivatives, and the validity of this truncation is discussed. Good fits to the bulk properties of finite nuclei and single-particle spectra are obtained.Comment: 24 pages, RevTex, 5 figures, uuencoded compressed postscrip

FallingDroppingUnmoderated

This is an attempt at an unmoderated online conceptual replication of a previous study evaluating children's ability to calculate probabilities from imagined possibilities. We created digital "plinko" boxes, where one or two balls fall through a series of obstacles into bins at the bottom of the screen. Children have two "cushions" that can be placed in the bins. They are trained, in deterministic situations, that when there is one place for balls to go (because there is one ball following a deterministic path) they should put both cushions in that bin. When there are two places for balls to go (because there are two balls following deterministic paths to two different bins), they should put one cushion in each place. At test, these two trial types are repeated 3 times; a third trial type is added: trials where there is one ball that can go either of two places, each with 50% probability. The research question is: do children stack their cushions up, as though there is only one place for the ball to go? Or do they spread them out, as though there are two place for the ball to go? This is the fourth study in this line of studies. Earlier studies showed that 4-year-olds tend to stack their cushions in one possible bin. In this study we add age, testing children from age 4;0 to 8;11 to see when children start taking both possibilities into account when placing their cushions