Reason in an uncertain world: philosophers on argumentation and living well

The current geopolitical and socioeconomic landscape creates a difficult and uncertain operating environment for farming and agri-food businesses. Technological innovation has not been suggested to be a “silver bullet” but is one of the ways organizations can seek to reduce environmental impact, deliver net zero, address the rural skills and labor deficit and produce more output from fewer resources and as a result, make space for nature. But what barriers limit this promissory narrative from delivering in practice? The purpose of the paper is to firstly explore the reported social, technical and systemic barriers to agri-technology adoption in an increasingly uncertain world and then secondly identify potential research gaps that highlight areas for future research and inform key research questions. Socio-technical and infrastructural barriers have been identified within the context of the complex hollowing out and infilling of rural communities across the world. These barriers include seventeen factors that emerge, firstly those external to the farm (economic conditions, external conditions including bureaucracy, market conditions, weather uncertainty and the narratives about farmers), those internal to the farm business (farming conditions, employee relations, general finance, technology and time pressures) and then personal factors (living conditions, personal finances, physical health, role conflict, social isolation and social pressure). Adaptive resilience strategies at personal, organizational and community levels are essential to address these barriers and to navigate agri-technology adoption in an uncertain and dynamic world.

Modeling the cognitive antecedents and consequences of emotion

In this article, we develop a framework for robotic autonomy as contingent. We do so with an account of a series of online research workshops that asked people to design and test robot behaviours for a public space scenario of their choice, as a means to surface and discuss their understandings of robots. We show how, as people manipulated robots in a simulator, they came to understand the capacities and limits of robots in distinctive ways. Thinking with these virtual encounters with robots, we argue that robotic contingency can be understood as dependent on spatial context; as unfolding in encounters between people, robots, and other things, creatures and substances; and as subject to forms of accountability and responsibility that are ongoingly made in an uncertain world. Our analysis reinforces work on automated infrastructures, which understands them as made sense of and operating relationally. This is important because those infrastructures are a part of how people understand robotic technologies in an uncertain and processual world, and they shape their expectations about and imagination of automated technologies, such as robots, into the future. We conclude by speculating on implications for an open-ended robotics design that works with contingency rather than seeking to control it, and ask how a more expansive understanding of accountability might be assembled as part of this more emergent approach.

Certainty in an Uncertain World - A Clinicians' Viewpoint of Sensitivity and PrecisionClinical practice is evolving as research evolves from the bench to the bedside. Similarly, analytical technologies are improving on an annual basis. Rightly or wrongly, increased emphasis is now placed by clinicians on such investigations to the detriment of clinical history and examination. As people live longer, the prevalence of long-term conditions such as thyroid disease, cardiovascular disease and malignancies is increasing. Clinical biochemistry assays play an important part in the management (screening, diagnosis, prognosis and monitoring) of such conditions. This is reflected in the UK since 2004 by the primary care contract where over 100 of the 550 clinical points depend on clinical biochemistry assay results. Inter-assay results may differ due to bias, precision, assay specificity and assay sensitivity. To date, little emphasis has been placed on the potential clinical effect of precision. This presentation will explore the effect that assay precision can have on the management of important long-term conditions such as thyroid disease, cardiovascular disease and malignancies.

Lowland Farmland Birds III: Delivering Solutions in an Uncertain World. A report on the BOU’s Annual Conference held at the University of Leicester, 31 March–2 April 2009

Child Protection and Mental Health

The paper describes a collaborative curriculum development project implemented over 3 years at 2 universities in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The project involved a short module in which students in their fourth year of study interacted and learnt collaboratively across the boundaries of institution, discipline, race and social class, about the concepts of community, self and identity. The pedagogic approach adopted is described, as well as the responses of the students, and a brief reflection on some of the learning outcomes attained. The paper considers the learning processes which the curriculum development team experienced, and suggests that in order to facilitate learning for an ‘uncertain world’, the curriculum designers, too, need to engage in learning processes in which they make themselves vulnerable, mirroring some of the learning processes they expect the students to undergo.

Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 481 (Sept 1985), John J. Stremlau (Special Editor), Soviet Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World, Beverly Hills (CA), Sage Publications Inc., 1985, 216 p.. An article from journal Études internationales (Volume 18, Number 2, 1987, pp. 285-492), on Érudit.

Continued progress in reducing advanced economy deficits and a gradually improving external environment have lowered short-term fiscal risks, according to this issue, but global prospects nevertheless remain subdued, and many advanced economies face a lengthy, difficult, and uncertain path to fiscal sustainability. Though many advanced economies are now close to achieving primary surpluses that will allow them to stabilize their debt ratios, this is only a first step, as merely stabilizing advanced economy debt at current levels would be detrimental to medium- and longer-term economic prospects. The key elements of the required policy package are well known: foremost among them is setting out—and implementing—a clear and credible plan to bring debt ratios down over the medium term. Debt dynamics have remained relatively positive in most emerging market economies and low-income countries, and most plan to continue to allow the automatic stabilizers to operate fully, while pausing the underlying fiscal adjustment process. Those with low general government debt and deficits can afford to maintain a neutral stance in response to a weaker global outlook. But countries with relatively high or quickly increasing debt levels are exposed to sizable risks, especially once effective interest rates rise as monetary policy normalizes in the advanced economies and concessional financing from advanced economies declines. The widespread use of energy subsidies makes commodity prices an additional source of vulnerability in many emerging market and low-income economies; subsidy reform, higher consumption taxes, and broadening of tax bases would help support consolidation efforts.

The different paces of economic transformation among Asian nations have created different levels of prosperity and emerging middle classes. The Lewis Turning Point provides lucrative insights into this dynamic in a disruptive and uncertain world. Demographic trends, digitalization rates, consumer preferences, and levels of sophistication differ greatly among Asia’s nations. This creates different business opportunities. Vanity capital and the longevity and leisure economies present fresh niches to be developed. Public reform policy, technological innovation, and disruptive forces matter too. Especially in China, India, and ASEAN, governments are trying to create jobs and open up new frontiers for sustainable economic growth by pursuing Eurasian integration, state-owned enterprise restructuring, low carbon-related business, and the digital economy.

There is a broad body of literature that examines the notion of ‘uncertainty’ in education and, indeed, the themes of this 13th international conference on learning acknowledge that the world is in flux. Barnett (2004), in particular, promotes a renewed approach to education — one that he believes transcends the traditional scope of higher education. Barnett notes that higher education has focused traditionally on knowledge, but, in an uncertain world, this is no longer enough. He encourages teachers in higher education to consider reconstructing curriculum and pedagogy so that a focus on knowing and acting is retained but is complemented by a pedagogy that is designed to enhance students' being in the world. This paper focuses on the potential synergies or difficulties that arise from an analysis of the ‘education for uncertainty’ literature and the goals of education for social justice. Does education for being provide greater possibilities for the enhancement of social justice?

Book review of Visual Activism in the 21st Century: Art, Protest and Resistance in an Uncertain World by Stephanie Hartle & Darcy White, Bloomsbury Publishing Arts, 2022 'In the introduction of Visual Activism in the 21st Century, editors Stephanie Hartle and Darcy White state that the book questions the association between the visual and activism. Hartle and White wish to contribute to ‘a growing understanding of cultural and global differences concerning the nature of the relationship of art to the visual elements of activism’. By focusing on art and activism, the book attempts to add to recent discussions about the political potential of art.'

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates: Foreign Policy and Strategic Alliances in an Uncertain World, by Robert Mason. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. 320 pages. $85.00 cloth, e-book.

This article is part of a forum on Karin Fierke’s book Snapshots from Home: Mind, Action and Strategy in an Uncertain World. In it, the importance of viewing international relations from the intersection of Buddhism and quantum theory is discussed. The ontological implication of Buddhism and quantum theory is extremely important in an uncertain world, and when we accept the uncertainty, we gain a new vision of contemporary world affairs. This is precisely where the gates of ethics open to us.