Raising Awareness: A Hippocratic Oath for Life Sciences

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Can Fictionalists Have Faith?

This article has been published in a revised form in Religioius Studies, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412517000063. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © 2016 Cambridge University Press.According to non-doxastic theories of propositional faith, belief that p is not necessary for faith that p. Rather, propositional faith merely requires a 'positive cognitive attitude'. This broad condition, however, can be satisfied by several pragmatic approaches to a domain, including fictionalism. This article shows precisely how fictionalists can have faith given non-doxastic theory, and explains why this is problematic. It then explores one means of separating the two theories, in virtue of the fact that the truth of the propositions in a discourse is of little consequence for fictionalists, whereas their truth matters deeply for the faithful. Although promising, this approach incurs several theoretical costs, hence providing a compelling reason to favour a purely doxastic account of faith.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

A fractally fractionated spacecraft

The advantages of decentralised multi-spacecraft architectures for many space applications are well understood. Distributed antennas represent popularly envisaged applications of such an architecture; these are composed of, typically, receiving elements carried on-board multiple spacecraft in precise formation. In this paper decentralised control, based on artificial potential functions, together with a fractal-like connection network, is used to produce autonomous and verifiable deployment and formation control of a swarm of spacecraft into a fractal-like pattern. The effect of using fractal-like routing of control data within the spacecraft generates complex formation shape patterns, while simultaneously reducing the amount of control information required to form such complex formation shapes. Furthermore, the techniques used ensures against swarm fragmentation, which can otherwise be a consequence of the non-uniform connectivity of the communication graph. In particular, the superposition of potential functions operating at multiple levels (single agents, subgroups of agents, groups of agents) according to a self-similar adjacency matrix produces a fractal-like final deployment with the same stability property on each scale. Results from the investigations carried out indicate the approach is feasible, whilst outlining its robustness characteristics, and versatility in formation deployment and control. Considering future high-precision formation flying and control capabilities, this paper considers, for the first time and as an example of a fractally fractionated spacecraft, a decentralised multi-spacecraft fractal shaped antenna. Furthermore, multi-spacecraft architecture exploiting fractal-like formations can be considered to investigate multi-scale phenomena in areas such as cosmic radiation and space plasma physics. Both numerical simulations and analytic treatment are presented, demonstrating the feasibility of deploying and controlling a fractionated fractal antenna in space through autonomous decentralised means. This work frames the problem of architecture and tackles the one of control, whilst not neglecting actuation

Enhancing self-similar patterns by asymmetric artificial potential functions in partially connected swarms

The control of mobile robotic agents is required to be highly reliable. Artificial potential function (APF) methods have previously been assessed in the literature for providing stable and verifiable control, whilst maintaining a high degree of nonlinearity. Further, these methods can, in theory, be characterised by a full analytic treatment. Many examples are available in the literature of the employment of these methods for controlling large ensembles of agents that evolve into minimum energy configurations corresponding in many cases to regular lattices [1-2]. Although regular lattices can present naturally centric symmetry and self-similarity characteristics, more complex formations can also be achieved by several other means. In [3] the equilibrium configuration undergoes bifurcation by changing a parameter belonging to the part of artificial potential that couples the agents to the reference frame. In this work it is shown how the formation shape produced can be controlled in two further ways, resulting in more articulated patterns. Specifically the control applied is to alter the symmetry of interactions amongst agents, and/or by selectively rewiring interagent connections. In the first case, the network of connections remains the same, and may be fully connected

Brexit London: the past, present and future of racism in the capital

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The colonial representation of Jihadi John: matters of life and death in the 'war on terror'

Malcolm James analyses the ways that the reception of the ‘Jihadi John’ videos reinforces the idea of a civilised ‘us’ confronting a barbaric ‘them’: this was mobilised to suggest that the civilised world are fighting an enemy that is savage and inhuman - a setting up of civilisational oppositions that is happily embraced on the other side by Isis. He shows how the videos tap into anxieties about the enemy within, and are used to reinforce a view of all British Muslims as potentially dangerous - an almost inevitable consequence of the crude civilisational oppositions that circulate in mainstream discourse. The symbiotic relationships between the internet and broadcast news exponentially multiplied the numbers of viewers of the videos; and at the same time internet viewing made the experience more intimate, more immediate and more frightening, while the absence of context allowed for the creation of a wide range of meanings and interpretations both in the mainstream media and on the internet. In contrast to the use of the videos as propaganda - by both ‘sides’ - the article makes a case for the valuing all human life and against the kinds of colonial representation that work to dehumanise some people so that their death (or oppression) becomes possible

Kernel-based high-dimensional histogram estimation for visual tracking

©2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or distribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.Presented at the 15th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, October 12–15, 2008, San Diego, California, U.S.A.DOI: 10.1109/ICIP.2008.4711862We propose an approach for non-rigid tracking that represents objects by their set of distribution parameters. Compared to joint histogram representations, a set of parameters such as mixed moments provides a significantly reduced size representation. The discriminating power is comparable to that of the corresponding full high dimensional histogram yet at far less spatial and computational complexity. The proposed method is robust in the presence of noise and illumination changes, and provides a natural extension to the use of mixture models. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms both full color mean-shift and global covariance searches

Diaspora as an ethnographic method: decolonial reflections on researching urban multiculture in outer East London

This paper reflects on diaspora as an ethnographic method. Grounded in a decolonial critique of colonial methodologies (including an evaluation of transnational scholarship), it discusses how diaspora provides intellectual and practical tools for ethnography; tools grounded in the appreciation for the relational, dialogical and poetic qualities of social and cultural life and invested in decolonial approaches to knowledge and power. This paper is not another call for a one-size-fits-all approach to ethnographic methods, but instead reflects on the knots of ethnographic enquiry around three outer East London youth clubs, between 2008 and 2012. In so doing, it highlights a number of debates pertinent to this Special Issue: how to think and do ethnography with young people in a changing migratory and racialised landscape; how to engage transformations in youth culture; and how to address digital technologies