Not One, Not Two: Toward an Ontology of Pregnancy

Basic understandings of subjectivity are derived from the principles of masculine embodiment such as temporal stability and singularity. But pregnancy challenges such understandings because it represents a sort of splitting of the body. In the pregnant situation, a subject may experience herself as both herself and an other, as well as neither herself nor an other. This is logically untenable—an impossibility. If our discourse depends on singular, fixed referents, then what paradigms of identity are available to the pregnant subject? What could be the pregnant subject's ontology? Eric Bapteste and John Dupré offer the idea that organisms are processual beings. In their view, the ecological interrelationships between the objects of biology are defining, and render them dynamic processes, rather than stable things. Does Bapteste and Dupré’s processual ontological account accommodate pregnant organisms, including pregnant people? Here, I analyze the processual account and determine whether it can accommodate the phenomenon of pregnancy. I find that a processual ontology captures a great deal about pregnant embodiment and is a significant improvement over Cartesian and anti-metaphysical accounts. However, in order to accommodate pregnancy, what we still need from an ontology is the inclusion of subjectivity

Evaluating conjunction disambiguation on English-to-German and French-to-German WMT 2019 translation hypotheses

We present a test set for evaluating an MT system’s capability to translate ambiguous conjunctions depending on the sentence structure. We concentrate on the English conjunction ”but” and its French equivalent ”mais” which can be translated into two different German conjunctions. We evaluate all English-to-German and French-to-German submissions to the WMT 2019 shared translation task. The evaluation is done mainly automatically, with additional fast manual inspection of unclear cases. All systems almost perfectly recognise the ta-get conjunction ”aber”, whereas accuracies fo rthe other target conjunction ”sondern” range from 78% to 97%, and the errors are mostly caused by replacing it with the alternative cojjunction ”aber”. The best performing system for both language pairs is a multilingual Transformer TartuNLP system trained on all WMT2019 language pairs which use the Latin script, indicating that the multilingual approach is beneficial for conjunction disambiguation. As for other system features, such as using synthetic back-translated data, context-aware, hybrid, etc., no particular (dis)advantages can be observed. Qualitative manual inspection of translation hypotheses shown that highly ranked systems generally produce translations with high adequacy and fluency, meaning that these systems are not only capable of capturing the right conjunction whereas the rest of the translation hypothesis is poor. On the other hand, the low ranked systems generally exhibit lower fluency and poor adequacy

Consciousness, introspection, and subjective measures

This chapter discusses the main types of so-called ’subjective measures of consciousness’ used in current-day science of consciousness. After explaining the key worry about such measures, namely the problem of an ever-present response bias, I discuss the question of whether subjective measures of consciousness are introspective. I show that there is no clear answer to this question, as proponents of subjective measures do not employ a worked-out notion of subjective access. In turn, this makes the problem of response bias less tractable than it might otherwise be

Phonaesthetic Phonological Iconicity in Literary Analysis Illustrated by Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”

The article offers a phonosemantic analysis of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” The phonosemantic investigation has been based on the corpus of nineteen relevant sound-related descriptions of the sea. Although most excerpts identified contain aural metaphors and are not phonologically iconic per se, there seem to exist at least three fragments which are particularly interesting from a phonosemantic point of view. Most notably, phonaesthemes /gl/, /l/, /r/ have been found to carry substantial meaning contributing to the overall interpretation of the story in question. Accounting for the inevitable subjectivity concerning iconicity, and in this case phonological iconicity, a few theories are presented in order to support the author’s reading of each phonaestheme’s contextual significance. The paper briefly reviews the chronological development of the field of phonosemantics and then combines the aural images theory (proposed by Richard Rhodes) with the “aural semiotic process” theory (the term coined by the author). Each analysis is further supplemented with scholarly views on respective phonaesthemes. On the whole, the paper does not aim to polemicize with the well-established definition of a phoneme and its generally accepted arbitrariness. Nevertheless, it has been observed that a speculative phonosemantic analysis of a literary work may yield noteworthy results

Latest results from the NA61/SHINE beam energy scan with p+p and Be+Be collisions

The NA61/SHINE experiment aims to discover the critical point of strongly interacting matter and study the properties of the onset of deconfinement by measurements of hadron production properties in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus interactions in the CERN SPS energy range. This contribution presents results on the energy dependence of hadron spectra and yields as well as on fluctuations and two-particle correlations in p+p and centrality selected Be+Be collisions. In particular, the energy dependence of the signal of deconfinement, the "horn", observed in central Pb+Pb collisions is compared with the corresponding results from p+p interactions. Also string-hadronic models are tested using hadron spectra and fluctuations measured in p+p interactions. Results on fluctuations (multiplicity and transverse momentum) are presented as a function of the collision energy for Be+Be and p+p collisions in search for the critical point of strongly interacting matter.Comment: HEP2015 proceeding

Education: A More Powerful Weapon Than War?

In this paper, I analyze the impact of education on civil war onset, utilizing variables measuring length of compulsory education and number of internal armed conflicts in a given country per year. Using data from the Quality of Government Institute’s Quality of Government Standard Time Series data set, I test this hypothesis and find that an increase in compulsory education length decreases the expected number of internal armed conflicts. The results suggest further importance of education as a great equalizer among individuals as well as nations

Lobbying the European Parliament: a necessary evil. CEPS Policy Brief No. 242, May 2011

While the European Parliament is in many ways more transparent and more accessible than many of the EU’s national parliaments, the code of conduct for lobbyists and the Parliament’s own Rules of Procedure are rather vague. As a result of the ‘cash for laws’ scandal, the EP President, Jerzy Buzek, has established a working group to draw up a new set of rules to govern the access and behaviour of lobbyists and to formulate a code of conduct for MEPs