Cognitive Relatives and Moral Relations

The close kinship between humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans is a central theme among participants in the debate about human treatment of the other apes. Empathy is probably the single most important determinant of actual human moral behavior, including the treatment of nonhuman animals. Given the applied nature of questions about the treatment of captive apes, it is entirely appropriate that the close relationship between us should be highlighted. But the role that relatedness should play in ethical theory is less clear. To the extent that legal and regulatory challenges to keeping apes in captivity are likely to be based on principles of theory, it is important to understand what roles evolutionary theory can play in deriving such principles. The development of ethically correct policies for captivity of animals will depend on taking into account both species-specific and individual differences in the ways that individuals perceive and conceptualize the spaces in which they live, and the choices with which they are presented. A fully evolutionary approach to cognition, a cognitive ethology, that is not just limited to the great apes or to primates is the best hope we have for understanding such perceptions and conceptions

Fish Cognition and Consciousness

Questions about fish consciousness and cognition are receiving increasing attention. In this paper, I explain why one must be careful to avoid drawing conclusions too hastily about this hugely diverse set of species

Subsonic sting interference on the aerodynamic characteristics of a family of slanted-base ogive-cylinders

Support interference free drag, lift, and pitching moment measurements on a range of slanted base ogive cylinders were made using the NASA Langley 13 inch magnetic suspension and balance system. Typical test Mach numbers were in the range 0.04 to 0.2. Drag results are shown to be in broad agreement with previous tests with this configuration. Measurements were repeated with a dummy sting support installed in the wind tunnel. Significant support interferences were found at all test conditions and are quantified. Further comparison is made between interference free base pressures, obtained using remote telemetry, and sting cavity pressures

Is the 'Bogeyman' Real? Shifting cultivation and the forests, Papua New Guinea

A ‘bogeyman’ is an imaginary creature used to evoke fear and anxiety. The question we address here arises from a recent claim by Shearman et al (2008), that shifting cultivation is a real threat to Papua New Guinea (PNG)’s forests, and hence to global warming. We ask: is this threat real, or is it imaginary? We explore the evidence for this allegation by examining research on shifting cultivation in PNG and arguments about its impact on forests from the 1920s to the present day. We argue that the 2008 findings contradict most previous findings and have probably resulted from an incorrect classification of tall secondary-forest fallows as primary forest. Nevertheless, we find that the changes revealed in these forest fallows by the 2008 study are a serious cause for concern for the long-term food security and welfare of about five million people in PNG who depend upon shifting cultivation to feed themselves

Wise machines?

Purpose – In spite of highly publicized competitions where computers have prevailed over humans, the intelligence of computer systems still remains quite limited in comparison to that of humans. Present day computers provide plenty of information but lack wisdom. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether reliance on computers with limited intelligence might undermine the quality of the education students receive. Design/methodology/approach – Using a conceptual approach, the authors take the performance of IBMʼs Watson computer against human quiz competitors as a starting point to explore how society, and especially education, might change in the future when everyone has access to desktop technology to access information. They explore the issue of placing excessive trust in such machines without the capacity to evaluate the quality and reliability of the information provided. Findings – The authors find that the day when computing machines surpass human intelligence is much further in the future than predicted by some forecasters. Addressing the problem of dependency on information technology, they envisage a technical solution - wiser machines which not only return the search results, but also help make them comprehensible - but find that although it is relatively simple to engineer knowledge distribution and access, it is more difficult to engineer wisdom. Practical implications – Creating computers that are wise will be difficult, but educating students to be wise in the age of computers may also be quite difficult. For the future, one might explore the development of computer tools that demonstrate sensitivity to alternative answers to difficult questions, different courses of action, and their own limitations. For the present, one will need to train students to appreciate the limitations inherent in the technologies on which they have become dependent. Originality/value – Critical thinking, innovation, and wisdom require skills beyond the kinds of answers computers give now or are likely to provide in the coming decade

LDA Topic Modeling: Contexts for the History & Philosophy of Science

In this paper we discuss the application of LDA topic modeling to questions that interest historians & philosophers of science, which we illustrate primarily through our own work on modeling Charles Darwin's reading and writing behavior. We discuss the need to go beyond simplistic presentations of topic models that tend to give scholars the idea that the algorithms produce results that are superficial and perhaps unreliable. The ways in which topic models are often misrepresented and misunderstood frame our attempt to convince readers that, despite appearances, topic modeling provides a lot more of value to HPS research than merely providing for enhanced search and information retrieval from large sets of documents. Rather than "topics" we prefer to think of these topic models as revealing contexts for individual reading and wrote, leading us to ask questions about the individual exploration and exploitation of the materials to which a scientist such as Darwin had access. We discuss the use of topic models as tools for identifying influence and measuring creativity within those contexts and conclude that the interplay between human intelligence and sophisticated algorithms will expand the range of questions about science that HPS scholars will ask, and can answer

So you want to be part of it? CAL Resources for New York’s Lower East Side

First paragraph: This article reviews a number of computer-assisted learning (CAL) resources intended for use in teaching American social history of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth centuries: first, a tutorial package on the socially sensitive photography of the progressive reformer, Jacob Riis; second, an impressive, self-contained dataset, based on the 1900 census, relating to the composition and nature of immigrant communities on New York's Lower Eastside; and third, a range of websites that provide public access to hypertext materials on urban life. Similar such reviews have appeared in previous issues of Craft and our objectives remain straightforward and functional. Our initial purpose was to assess these resources on their own terms, as teaching aids, and, as with any textual source, assess their contribution to the study of U.S. social history. But there were more practical considerations, however: whether any of these resources could be integrated into existing courses in American history at Stirling University, either with or without some modification to the curricula and teaching methods. Inevitably, the exercise raised some wider pedagogic issues, including whether cognitive problems pertaining to the use of visual images generally are too readily ignored by teachers and lecturers

LODE: Linking Digital Humanities Content to the Web of Data

Numerous digital humanities projects maintain their data collections in the form of text, images, and metadata. While data may be stored in many formats, from plain text to XML to relational databases, the use of the resource description framework (RDF) as a standardized representation has gained considerable traction during the last five years. Almost every digital humanities meeting has at least one session concerned with the topic of digital humanities, RDF, and linked data. While most existing work in linked data has focused on improving algorithms for entity matching, the aim of the LinkedHumanities project is to build digital humanities tools that work "out of the box," enabling their use by humanities scholars, computer scientists, librarians, and information scientists alike. With this paper, we report on the Linked Open Data Enhancer (LODE) framework developed as part of the LinkedHumanities project. With LODE we support non-technical users to enrich a local RDF repository with high-quality data from the Linked Open Data cloud. LODE links and enhances the local RDF repository without compromising the quality of the data. In particular, LODE supports the user in the enhancement and linking process by providing intuitive user-interfaces and by suggesting high-quality linking candidates using tailored matching algorithms. We hope that the LODE framework will be useful to digital humanities scholars complementing other digital humanities tools

Concept Attribution in Nonhuman Animals: Theoretical and Methodological Problems in Ascribing Complex Mental Processes

The demise of behaviorism has made ethologists more willing to ascribe mental states to animals. However, a methodology that can avoid the charge of excessive anthropomorphism is needed. We describe a series of experiments that could help determine whether the behavior of nonhuman animals towards dead conspecifics is concept mediated. These experiments form the basis of a general point. The behavior of some animals is clearly guided by complex mental processes. The techniques developed by comparative psychologists and behavioral ecologists are able to provide us with the tools to critically evaluate hypotheses concerning the continuity between human minds and animal minds.Psycholog