False Division Research Articles

Open optimism as an "embodied-health" ethic for the information era.

This article forms part of a series on "openness," "non-linearity," and "embodied-health" in the post-physical, informational (virtual) era of society. This is vital given that the threats posed by advances in artificial intelligence call for a holistic, embodied approach. Typically, health is separated into different categories, for example, (psycho)mental health, biological/bodily health, genetic health, environmental health, or reproductive health. However, this separation only serves to undermine health; there can be no separation of health into subgroups (psychosomatics, for example). Embodied health contains no false divisions and relies on "optimism" as the key framing value. Optimism is only achieved through the mechanism/enabling condition of openness. Openness is vital to secure the embodied health for individuals and societies. Optimism demands that persons become active participants within their own lives and are not mere blank slates, painted in the colors of physical determinism (thus a move away from nihilism-which is the annihilation of freedom/autonomy/quality). To build an account of embodied health, the following themes/aims are analyzed, built, and validated: (1) a modern re-interpretation and validation of German idealism (the crux of many legal-ethical systems) and Freud; (2) ascertaining the bounded rationality and conceptual semantics of openness (which underlies thermodynamics, psychosocial relations, individual autonomy, ethics, and as being a central constitutional governmental value for many regulatory systems); (3) the link between openness and societal/individual embodied health, freedom, and autonomy; (4) securing the role of individualism/subjectivity in constituting openness; (5) the vital role of nonlinear dynamics in securing optimism and embodied health; (6) validation of arguments using the methodological scientific value of invariance (generalization value) by drawing evidence from (i) information and computer sciences, (ii) quantum theory, and (iii) bio-genetic evolutionary evidence; and (7) a validation and promotion of the inalienable role of theoretic philosophy in constituting embodied health, and how modern society denigrates embodied health, by misconstruing and undermining theoretics. Thus, this paper provides and defends an up-to-date non-physical account of embodied health by creating a psycho-physical-biological-computational-philosophical construction. Thus, this paper also brings invaluable coherence to legal and ethical debates on points of technicality from the empirical sciences, demonstrating that each field is saying the same thing.

“This is the Psychology we Need”: Maya immigrant views on mental health treatment

displaced Maya communities. To pursue knowledge about the communities’ visions for thriving in the United States, I worked with Maya leaders in Ohio to coordinate a series of dialogues utilizing a Participatory Action Research paradigm. Participants exposed ways in which Western institutions (including hospitals, mental health providers, and schools) reenact elements of colonialism and fail to offer culturally sensitive care. The participants emphasized a key missing element in their well-being: renewing the relationship with the Earth that they lost through colonization and forced migration. To separate physical/mental health from these elements would deny the current ecological realities at the heart of the migrants’ existence. It would also recreate Eurocentric false division among mind, body, soul, and spirit. Maya focus group participants claimed that a decolonial approach to healing could be initiated by returning land to the communities, which they could use for cultivation, community gathering, food sovereignty, and sacred practices. Praxis participants offered critical guidance in re-imagining health and healing in community with each other and with the Earth, which they identified as the sources of flourishing, identity, cultural history, belonging, and spiritual connection.

Magic and Spells in <em>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</em> (1997-2003)

Magic and Spells in <em>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</em> (1997-2003)

Delimiting Religion

Delimiting Religion

Resurgence from Crisis Through Awareness of Natural Inclusion

For millennia, the Western mindset has been predisposed to the inherited custom to split mind and matter, emotion and cognition, art and science, the spiritual and the intellectual, the inner and outer, contemplation and objective inquiry. Our contemporary sense of dislocation from nature has arisen from this objectivistic perception. The current societal, economic and environmental crises urge us to break down the pervasive conceptual boundaries and binary distinctions and rethink what science is or what it can become. Covid 19 has exposed the iniquities and deep fault lines in the political and economic structure of globalized modern society founded on false division or unification of individual from or with group. We see Natural Inclusionality as the path to begin to resurrect and cultivate a new normal of co-creative community from the wreckage of the old normal of cultural tyranny (Rayner, 2020). The most ground-breaking dimension of the NI perception lies in its rejection of both extremes of dualism: the narrow objectivistic view of the world as dividable into discrete entities and the equally limiting monistic view of the world as some sort of uniform oneness. We propose to unpack these insights through dialogue: an ongoing professional dialogue between two authors, between two philosophical orientations, between natural and social sciences and between science and art. Our intentions are to show Natural Inclusional awareness as humanity’s ultimate resource for a resurgence from crisis—breaching the Great Lie that isolates individual from common good. In particular, we discuss the significance of these considerations in the context of educational science and practice.

Social sciences, social reality and the false division between theory and method: some implications for social research

It is important for social sciences such as sociology, economics, criminology, psychology and anthropology, committed as they are to teaching research methods (and dependent on them for the reliable delivery of research data), to rectify basic problems which inhibit the genuine integration and accumulation of knowledge. First, the false distinction between theory and method should be abandoned, in order that authentic, problem-driven research can be installed at the heart of social scientific research. A second deficiency concerns the persistent neglect of issues around the nature of social reality, particularly their absence in (text book) discussions of research methods, and in routine research practices. Remedying these would strengthen data gathering and sampling techniques, the construction of research designs, aims and objectives, as well as the analysis of findings drawn from evidence. There is also a need for more theory-generation in social sciences, but without any neglect of theory-testing, falsification and verification. Modifications of this kind would aid the genuine accumulation of empirical and theoretical knowledge in social sciences. It is naive to assume that this can be achieved via the stock-piling of empirical data sets in terms of similarity of ‘topic’ or ‘substantive area’. Genuine integration and accumulation can only be attained via appropriate research strategies designed to establish deep links between local properties of research data and the global properties of social reality. As such, social policy considerations and decisions would be based on firmer, more robustly integrated analyses of empirical evidence.

Increasing Precision of Division Property

In this paper we propose new techniques related to division property. We describe for the first time a practical algorithm for computing the propagation tables of 16-bit Super-Sboxes, increasing the precision of the division property by removing a lot of false division trails. We also improve the complexity of the procedure introduced by Lambin et al. (Design, Codes and Cryptography, 2020) to extend a cipher with linear mappings and show how to decrease the number of transitions to look for. While search procedures for integral distinguishers most often rely on MILP or SAT solvers for their ease of programming the propagation constraints, such generic solvers can only handle small 4/8-bit Sboxes. Thus we developed an ad-hoc tool handling larger Sboxes and all the improvements described in the paper. As a result, we found new integral distinguishers on SKINNY-64, HIGHT and Midori-64.

Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War by Mark Connelly (review)

Reviewed by: Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War by Mark Connelly Martin Stollery Mark Connelly. Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War University of Exeter Press, 2016. Hbk, 339 pp, ISBN 9780859899987; pdf, 339 pages, ISBN 9780859890526; epub, 339 p, ISBN 9780859890823. Books about British Second World War cinema and British film representations of that war have for a long time been more prominent, and produced in larger numbers, than their equivalents relating to the First World War. No doubt this relates to the firmly established popular memory of the Second World War, and the cinema associated with it, as Britain's 'finest hour', compared to more negative ingrained assumptions about the 1914-18 war. The centenary of the First World War, however, has further encouraged emerging new scholarship on British production of cinema during the war and subsequent British film representations of it. Mark Connelly's Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War, which focuses in detail on a cycle of war reconstruction films produced by British Instructional Films (BIF) during the 1920s, therefore usefully expands upon the work recently published in this field by film historians such as Michael Hammond and Lawrence Napper. BIF became a key player within the British film industry of the 1920s as a result of the success of its cycle of war reconstruction films, endorsed and supported by various branches of the military, and promoted on this basis, as well as in terms of their meticulous research and authenticity. These films mixed archival footage with re-enactments of key moments in various campaigns, as well as maps and models providing strategic overviews. Connelly devotes a chapter to one or two of each of the films within this cycle: The Battle of Jutland (1921), Armageddon (1923), Zeebrugge (1924), Ypres (1925), Mons (1926), The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927). A key part of his argument is that cultural historians of the decade after the First World War should refocus their attention away from a selective emphasis upon a relatively narrow range of canonical literary texts, such as Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That (1929), and from 'a false division between what might be labelled heralds of realistic horror and pedlars of romantic myths about war' (10). For Connelly, the BIF war reconstruction films, often released to coincide with Armistice Day or the anniversaries of the battles they represented, belong in the sizeable cultural space between these polarities. They performed an important memorial function, framing the war as meaningful, celebrating valour and endurance, while also embracing pacifism and being lauded by supportive critics for eschewing what they perceived as the facile, vainglorious heroics of American war films. Celluloid War Memorials is the first book solely devoted to BIF's war reconstruction film cycle. As such, and given Connelly's expertise as a military historian, the book analyses how specific films were positioned within the contests around the remembrance of key campaigns and battles that took place during the 1920s. For example, Connelly explores how Ypres' representation of the resilience and humour of ordinary soldiers differs from more negative assessments of these battles, epitomised in Siegfried Sassoon's now much quoted lines from 1920: 'I died in hell - (They called it Passchendaele)'. Rather than tracking sentiments within the literary elite, Connelly is more interested in how the BIF war reconstruction film cycle resonated with the many veterans and their families, serving as celluloid monuments to struggles and sacrifices of which they wished to be proud. The book's opening chapter sets out the usual caveats about too easily assuming that published sources, such as publicity material and newspaper reviews, reflect the feelings and views of broader audiences who left few written traces of their responses. Within these acknowledged limitations, Connelly surveys critical responses to the films from around the British empire, arguing with ample evidence that they typically buttressed a 'supra-identity' of imperial belonging—which contained 'room for moments of local pride' (142)—in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, at least as far as memorialising the First World War...

Inter-laboratory agreement on embryo classification and clinical decision: Conventional morphological assessment vs. time lapse.

The aim of this study is to determine inter-laboratory variability on embryo assessment using time-lapse platform and conventional morphological assessment. This study compares the data obtained from a pilot study of external quality control (EQC) of time lapse, performed in 2014, with the classical EQC of the Spanish Society for the Study of Reproductive Biology (ASEBIR) performed in 2013 and 2014. In total, 24 laboratories (8 using EmbryoScope™, 15 using Primo Vision™ and one with both platforms) took part in the pilot study. The clinics that used EmbryoScope™ analysed 31 embryos and those using Primo Vision™ analysed 35. The classical EQC was implemented by 39 clinics, based on an analysis of 25 embryos per year. Both groups were required to evaluate various qualitative morphological variables (cell fragmentation, the presence of vacuoles, blastomere asymmetry and multinucleation), to classify the embryos in accordance with ASEBIR criteria and to stipulate the clinical decision taken. In the EQC time-lapse pilot study, the groups were asked to determine, as well as the above characteristics, the embryo development times, the number, opposition and size of pronuclei, the direct division of 1 into 3 cells and/or of 3 into 5 cells and false divisions. The degree of agreement was determined by calculating the intra-class correlation coefficients and the coefficient of variation for the quantitative variables and the Gwet index for the qualitative variables. For both EmbryoScope™ and Primo Vision™, two periods of greater inter-laboratory variability were observed in the times of embryo development events. One peak of variability was recorded among the laboratories addressing the first embryo events (extrusion of the second polar body and the appearance of pronuclei); the second peak took place between the times corresponding to the 8-cell and morula stages. In most of the qualitative variables analysed regarding embryo development, there was almost-perfect inter-laboratory agreement among conventional morphological assessment (CMA), EmbryoScope™ and Primo Vision™, except for false divisions, vacuoles and asymmetry (users of all methods) and multinucleation (users of Primo Vision™), where the degree of agreement was lower. The inter-laboratory agreement on embryo classification according to the ASEBIR criteria was moderate-substantial (Gwet 0.41–0.80) for the laboratories using CMA and EmbryoScope™, and fair-moderate (Gwet 0.21–0.60) for those using Primo Vision™. The inter-laboratory agreement for clinical decision was moderate (Gwet 0.41–0.60) on day 5 for CMA users and almost perfect (Gwet 0.81–1) for time-lapse users. In conclusion, time-lapse technology does not improve inter-laboratory agreement on embryo classification or the analysis of each morphological variable. Moreover, depending on the time-lapse platform used, inter-laboratory agreement may be lower than that obtained by CMA. However, inter-laboratory agreement on clinical decisions is improved with the use of time lapse, regardless of the platform used.

Regulating behaviours on the European Union internet, the case of spam versus cookies

ABSTRACTThis article examines the soft-law politics of regulating behaviours on the internet in the European Union (EU) context. It shows the struggles behind internet standards, and delegation of power to commercial actors, while looking at spam and web-cookies as a case study. This article argues that by creating a false division between private and public spaces on the internet, it was possible to legitimize certain practices over others, despite being similar. In this way, spam was categorized as unsolicited communication associated with private space, whereas web-cookies were categorized as wanted communication in public space. By influencing and lobbying EU legislation and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) technical standards, the advertising industry and tech companies simultaneously authorize and institutionalize their own practices and illegalize people’s ‘problematic’ behaviour and other advertising companies. In this way, EU legislation and internet standards create a naturalized discourse that institutionalizes the roles of different actors in the online market, while emphasizing the central role of commercial actors in creating, defining, managing and enforcing the online market. Thus, spam operates as a regulatory tool applied to any type of behaviour that can interfere with the functioning of the EU e-commerce.

Rhizomatic Writing in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

This paper tackles with a question of what Lessing is doing with the complex and unconventional form of The Golden Notebook by drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of rhizome. Lessing’s concern with form as a literary, personal, political, ideological, and historical problem in the novel reflects her striving for a new form or order after the disillusionment with the old orders of phallogocentrism throughout the two world wars and beyond. The pursuit of a new form necessarily involves a collapse of the established order that Lessing defines as “a weeding-out system” which operates by the principle of “false dichotomies and division.” Lessing’s endeavor to move beyond the dominant mold and to construct a new order free from the oppressive binary thinking of phallogocentrism in the The Golden Notebook is resonant with and is a literary articulation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome that they elaborate as a new image of thought alternative to a hierarchical tree-system of thought. The Golden Notebook is a rhizome which is an assemblage of heterogeneous elements without a centralizing unity, and this new form is related to a new concept of the subject as a complex assemblage of different selves. Specifically, I examine what motivates the pursuit of a new form, how the heterogeneous elements of the novel are connected to comprise a nonhierarchical and nonlinear assemblage which is not subordinated to homogeneous unity, and then how its form reflects a new concept of subjectivity as a multiplicity which is composed of differences in terms of the principles of rhizome.

Assessing Faculty Attitudes toward Faculty Unions: A Survey of Four Primarily Undergraduate Universities

This study examines the views of full‐time unionized university faculty at four primarily undergraduate universities in Ontario, Canada, on a broad range of issues related to postsecondary education, faculty associations, and the labor movement. The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to better understand the views of unionized professors regarding the role and effectiveness of their faculty unions and of labor unions more generally, and second to explore what impact such views might have on shaping the strategic orientation and political priorities of faculty associations in a context of unprecedented austerity measures and neoliberal restructuring in Ontario's postsecondary education sector. Based on the findings of a mixed‐methods survey, we found that university professors were relatively satisfied union members with a healthy degree of union—as opposed to class—consciousness, but had little appetite for engaging in political activities beyond the narrow scope of postsecondary education. This finding, we argue, reinforces the false division between the “economic” and the “political” in the realm of labor strategy, thus potentially undermining the capacity of unionized faculty associations to effectively resist neoliberal restructuring both on campus and in society more broadly.

Won't somebody please think of the children? Or, South Park fanfic and the political realm

Comedy Central’s South Park has proved a bone of contention for traditional guardians of youth culture. From the denunciations of pressure groups on one hand, to academics attempting to claim South Park for various political positions on the other, it is ironic that a show addressing the failure of official pedagogy has had so little attention paid to its young fans. Academics argue over the ‘message’ of South Park, in a socio-political sense, or denounce it for irresponsibly embracing post-political cynicism. Yet as Mendes et al. have argued, to draw a false division between youth entertainment and some pre-conceived notion of the political realm is a fallacy: young people’s engagement with and meaning-making practices derived from popular culture are political in themselves. This paper uses a politically informed conception of discourse analysis developed from Laclau and Mouffe to code the top-rated South Park fanfics from Fanfiction.net, a site whose primary demographic is teenagers, in pursuit of the messages young people perceive and make of the show. This project prefers concrete data over impressionistic views of ‘young people’, and attends to what teenage fans make of and do with the text, rather than imagining them as passive consumers absorbing inherent messages.

The Digital: A False Division?

In the September, 2012 50th Anniversary edition of Artforum, Claire Bishop wrote an article entitled “The Digital Divide”1 in which her first sentence was “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART?” This e...

Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern EnglandMemory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

<i>Jennifer Summit</i>, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England<i>Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England</i>. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon (review)

Reviewed by: Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon Nonia Wiliams Nick Turner . Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon. London: Continuum, 2010. vi + 195 pp. I opened Nick Turner's Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon with eager anticipation. Not only does the title announce a subject matter close to my own heart, but the book's attempt to interrogate why some writers remain undervalued provides, it seems to me, a highly pertinent and much needed assessment of a literary problem. Turner's introduction ends: "The novel is alive and well, and is still the bright book of life; some of its purveyors have been forced into the shade, however, and this book, as well as asking why, hopes to bring them into the light: the 'brilliant women' novelists of our age" (10). This sentence captures both the strengths and problems of the book. Here, the enthusiasm and passion of the author's [End Page 420] main concern is clear, as is the book's scope, but the prose aims at a rhetorical tenor and level of persuasion it does not quite reach. The book opens with engaging questions that are culturally and theoretically important. Turner interrogates the choices and value-judgements behind decisions about literary merit, with a particular focus on the question of why and how literary prizes are decided. As he soon points out, which writers win (and are subsequently widely read) is too often determined by commercial markets, academic curricula, the influence of literary fashion, and the cult of celebrity. These thoughts are persuasively developed in "Theories of the Canon," which charts and interrogates ideas from the first literary application of the term in 1885 to more recent scholarship interrogating the scope and veracity of various later concepts of the canon(s). The extent of the discussion here is necessarily broad and the net of theoretical reading cast wide. One key—and for Turner, false—division has been in terms of separating out so called high and low, or popular and literary, canons. In response, the evidence given here deliberately treads ground between the popular and academic to consider what factors contribute to a book/author's survival. But while the resulting discussion of markets, MLA ratings, and an appendix charting Google ratings provides current statistical evidence, it is not always clear what such information tells us. Further, as I suggested above, the tension between popular and literary fiction is not only played out by the method of this book, it also presents its main problem. Turner treads a difficult line in terms of tone and persuasion: he neither wants to be too dry and academic, nor too casual and popular. One result, as both citation and blurb on the back of the book rightly identify, is that the prose is straightforward, clear, and readable. Further, as the author himself points out: "I have used deliberately evaluate language. . . . I believe strongly that this kind of evaluation is lacking in much contemporary criticism" (5). "What is needed," he later claims, "is an honest acknowledgement of the truth in Kermode's belief in literary pleasure" so as to stop texts from "disappearing behind critical discourses" (60). However, the problem with this move away from critical discourse in favor of a supposedly more honest writing is that it can result in overly self-conscious prose. There is too much signposting of the "I have moved beyond matters of comedy and style here, to pinpoint . . ." kind (60). After providing its overview of the theories of the canon, the book moves to four case studies: Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner, Ruth Rendell and Emma Tennant. As Turner admits, here he is "creating a personal canon, as open to debate as any other list" (8). This overt admission of personality is again given for the admirable reasons of clarity and honesty. Unfortunately, it also, to some extent, undermines [End Page 421] the reader's sense of the wider validity of the choices made. But what of the case studies themselves? The first, Iris Murdoch, provides a useful bridge between the broader first chapter and the move to a case study format. Turner makes the argument that Murdoch is...

Exotica

Binaries simplistically reduce complex relationships to two juxtaposed categories. Although binaries are myth rather than reality, they pit people against each other in everyday life. Many articles theorize the importance of binaries, but few provide empirical evidence of their impact. This paper analyzes more than six hundred incidents of racetalk from more than three hundred subjects to explore the ways that people construct and deploy the intersecting binaries of sexuality, gender, class, and race. Through a form of racetalk that I call “exotica,” subjects perpetuated false divisions across raced, classed, and gendered lines. Exotica operated as a controlling discourse, simultaneously eroticizing racial difference and proscribing heterosexual coupling with racial “others.”

Misreading Feuerbach: Susan Sontag, Photography and the Image-World

Misreading Feuerbach: Susan Sontag, Photography and the Image-World

Deformations and the rigidity method

In [D. Rohrlich, False division towers of elliptic curves, J. Algebra 229 (1) (2000) 249–279; D. Rohrlich, A deformation of the Tate module, J. Algebra 229 (1) (2000) 280–313], Rohrlich proved rigidity for PSL 2 ( Z p 〚 T 〛 ) for p > 5 , obtained this group as a Galois group over C ( t ) using modular function fields and derived from this interesting consequences for Galois representations attached to the Tate modules of elliptic curves. Furthermore in an unpublished preprint, he established that the corresponding Galois representation G C ( t ) : = Gal ( C ( t ) alg / C ( t ) ) → PSL 2 ( Z p 〚 T 〛 ) is universal. Here we will turn things around. We first provide a general framework for rigid deformations of (projective) representations of the absolute Galois group of a function field (in one variable) over a separably closed base. Under natural, rather general hypothesis, we will determine the corresponding universal deformation ring. If the residual representation is ‘geometrically rigid,’ which happens to be the case for many surjective representation to PSL 2 ( F p ) , p > 2 , which arise from Belyi triples, then certain universal deformations will be ‘geometrically rigid,’ too. This will give new proofs for most of the results of Rohrlich. Our method also applies to Thompson tuples. We then go on to give two further applications, which are based on the example computed by Rohrlich. Over F q ( t ) , where q is a power of a prime l, we construct infinite p-adic Galois extensions which have finite ramification and whose constant field is finite. Furthermore for p > 5 and p ≡ 1 ( mod 4 ) , we obtain a family of surjective Galois representations ρ ζ : Gal ( Q alg / Q ( ζ + ζ −1 ) ) ↠ SL 2 ( Z p [ ζ + ζ −1 ] ) , where the parameter ζ runs over all p-power roots of unity. Finally, we exhibit a general class of rigid universal deformation rings which are finite flat over Z p . In particular this shows that the above examples ρ ζ of Galois representations are not a singular event, but a general phenomenon.

Working Together to Address Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Working Together to Address Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution