Mind-Body-Technology: ‘Nosce te Ipsum’ and a theory of prosthetic ‘trialism’

This chapter will discuss a profound and fundamental interrelationship between mind, body and technology in terms of what it means to be ‘human’, or, what ‘being’ human might mean. One historical, yet enduring, theory of the human subject is René Descartes’s philosophy of the mind distinct from the body – this is termed ‘Cartesian dualism’. Whilst this is a classical, if outmoded, model of conceiving of a philosophy of the subject, it also provides a useful conceptual framework through which to critique, and arrive at, a different concept of how the terms ‘mind’ and ‘body’ might operate. For example, the mind/body binary distinction can be interrogated and deconstructed to accommodate the role of technology as having an ontologically embedded position within the very definition of ‘humanity’. Indeed, ‘anthropogenesis’ – the very becoming of humanity – might instead incorporate the role of technological prosthesis to any mind/body dualism in defining the ‘human subject’. We will propose that this ‘dualism’ should be reconsidered for a fundamentally entangled mind-body-technology ‘trialism’ in the emergence of a distinct human being. However, at the same time, this interconnected relationship is also the object of power and control

Numerical verification of universality for the Anderson transition

We analyze the scaling behavior of the higher Lyapunov exponents at the Anderson transition. We estimate the critical exponent and verify its universality and that of the critical conductance distribution for box, Gaussian and Lorentzian distributions of the random potential

Is There a "New Economy" in Ireland?

This paper reviews the sources of economic growth in Ireland between 1962 and 2000. The purpose of this analysis is to assess if there is a “new economy” in Ireland. The “new economy” phenomenon is reflected in higher productivity growth as a result of technical progress in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector. The consequences of a “new economy” include, among other things, a higher potential output growth rate, higher productivity growth, lower unemployment and improved living standards. At the aggregate level, productivity growth increased from 2.5 per cent per annum between 1990 and 1995 to approximately 4.0 per cent per annum between 1996 and 2000. This step-up in productivity growth would suggest a new era in the Irish economy. A sub-sectoral analysis was undertaken to assess which sectors were significant in accounting for this increase in productivity growth. Productivity growth in the industrial sector averaged 2.7 per cent per annum between 1996 and 2000. Within the industrial sector, the manufacturing sector was a significant contributor to productivity growth. Productivity growth in the manufacturing sector averaged 6.3 per cent per annum between 1995 and 1999. The performance of this sector was primarily driven by the high-tech sector, where productivity growth averaged 5.7 per cent per annum between 1995 and 1999. The results suggest that although there has been a significant step-up in the overall productivity growth rate of the economy, this was primarily related to the high-tech sector, particularly the chemicals sector. The large values of net output per worker in this sector may be the result of transfer pricing and/or high returns to research and development. Thus while there has been a structural change of the economy in recent years, this may represent a sectoral shift of resources from more traditional sectors to high-tech sectors rather than a “new economy” effect.

Factorisations of distributive laws

Recently, Böhm and Ştefan constructed duplicial (paracyclic) objects from distributive laws between (co)monads. Here we define the category of factorisations of a distributive law, show that it acts on this construction, and give some explicit examples

Effect of electron-electron interaction near the metal-insulator transition in doped semiconductors studied within the local density approximation

We report a numerical analysis of Anderson localization in a model of a doped semiconductor. The model incorporates the disorder arising from the random spatial distribution of the donor impurities and takes account of the electron-electron interactions between the carriers using density functional theory in the local density approximation. Preliminary results suggest that the model exhibits a metal-insulator transition.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure; Preprint of an article submitted for consideration in [International Journal of Modern Physics: Conference Series] \copyright [2012] [copyright World Scientific Publishing Company] [http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpcs.html

Repository case history: University of Strathclyde Strathprints

Case history from the managers of an established repository, to be collected by the conference for sharing among the community of repository managers