Kind Of Indifference Research Articles

Making Up a Mimic

In this paper, I employ Ian Hacking’s concept “Making Up People” to examine the current relationships humans are forming with personified AI tools and devices. I argue that, at present, AI tools are mimics. They are members of indifferent kinds that have been designed to deceive us into believing they are interactive kinds. This has largely been a result of human programmers interacting with the historical category of ‘computer’ on the one hand, and the fictional category of ‘robot overlords’ on the other. Interacting with a mimic, I contend, is not the same as interacting with a member of a human kind. And while the results of these interactions are largely still unknown, we can already see some consequences we should guard against. When we interact with mimics, I will show that human looping is often slowed. As such, our ability to resist or re-interpret the labels placed upon us becomes greatly reduced, and social progress may be slowed or lost as well. This is because all a mimic can do is mimic. They cannot interact with the labels we place on them, or those they place on us. And yet, as we classify them as teachers, therapists, friends or lovers, we hand over a great deal of categorizing power to them. In doing so, we are changing who we are and who we might become in ways we cannot yet entirely foresee. But there are already some patterns of harm and marginalization that can be tracked. Such patterns should cause us to question the power these mimics already have to make up people.

Contempt in Seneca's Dialogue “On the Firmness of the Wise”

For Seneca, the firmness of the Wise is shown in his ability to remain calm against attacks, as he explains in his treatise of that name. Attacks can come in the form of injustice, iniuria, and disparagement, contumelia; Seneca proves that neither of them affects the wise man. Contumelia is linked to contemptus in definition and conceptualization so that the remarks on how to deal with disparagement contain clues as to what contemptus means for Seneca. The article argues that Seneca understands the term in a double sense: First, contemptus denotes a reprehensible attitude. Second, it designates a kind of indifference which is to be understood in the context of Stoic apatheia.

Reactive natural kinds and varieties of dependence.

This paper asks when a natural disease kind is truly 'reactive' and when it is merely associated with a corresponding social kind. I begin with a permissive account of real kinds and their structure, distinguishing natural kinds, indifferent kinds and reactive kinds as varieties of real kind characterised by super-explanatory properties. I then situate disease kinds within this framework, arguing that many disease kinds prima facie are both natural and reactive. I proceed to distinguish 'simple dependence', 'secondary dependence' and 'essential dependence' between a natural kind and its classification, and argue that a natural kind is only really reactive, in an important sense, under conditions of essential dependence. On this basis, I offer a principled hypothesis for why psychiatric kinds may be more metaphysically unstable than paradigm somatic disease kinds.

Peculiarities of Author’s Rights Protection to Original Works of Art: Historical and Legal Aspect

The authors investigate the legal regulation of copyright protection in all possible arts: architecture, sculpture, graphics, design,painting, etc. The authors focus on the emergence of copyright in works in new art genres in the digital age, in particular: 3-D digitalmodels; engraving; engraving; pop-up publications and others. Peculiarities of free use of works and creation of derivative works indifferent kinds of art are determined.Each art form needs its own approach to regulating the author’s rights to the work. Architectural objects include both constructionprojects and drawings, as well as the buildings themselves, garden and park formations.The architectural design and the building are protected separately from each other. Therefore, there is no possibility to protect thearchitect’s rights to permit or prohibit the implementation of the project in the building and preserve the copyright to the architecturalpart of the building value, because in this case the idea (construction project) and building – various forms of works’ expression. However,construction projects are not subject to patent law, can not be patented as an invention, utility model, and do not belong to indust -rial designs. The building as a whole is not the subject of copyright, as copyright protects only the shape of the building, not engineeringsolutions, which in themselves, separately from the building, can be patented as inventions or utility models.Plagiarism of sculptures, especially sculptures of famous people and characters, is difficult to prove. In addition, there is the questionof the need to obtain permission from living famous people to create such sculptures for their commercial use. There is a questionof recognizing or not recognizing the 3-D sculpture as the original object of copyright.Works of fine art can be divided into: architecture, painting, graphics, sculpture, decorative and applied arts, photography anddesign. Works created with the help of a print as a unique type of graphic technique are considered original, as well as film photographs,when each developed photo will be original. Each copy of a book created using the pop-up technique is also considered original.The plots of films are difficult to defend in the context of copyright, because, in fact, they are a concept or idea that is easy tochange. The legislation does not clearly define that such a modification will be considered a derivative of the original work. The legislationdoes not contain clear criteria for defining plagiarism in works of art. Also, the legislation does not regulate co-authorship withmore or less complicity.

Obcość, obojętność, okrucieństwo

Celem tego tekstu jest po pierwsze zastanowienie się nad możliwymi przyczynami obojętnościmoralnej; po drugie rozróżnienie jej dwóch rodzajów: obojętności biernej i obojętnościsprawczej, będącej warunkiem niezbędnym (?) okrucieństwa. Ten pierwszy rodzaj, bardziejpospolity, to brak reakcji na zło, krzywdę i cierpienie innego człowieka, ten drugi, to obojętnośćoparta na przekonaniu, że cierpiący i krzywdzony w ogóle nie jest człowiekiem; jestpoza sferą podmiotowości, odpowiedzialności, wrażliwości i winy.

Communication and indifference

The propositional view of communication states that every literal assertoric utterance of an indicative sentence expresses a proposition, and the audience understands those utterances only if she entertains the proposition(s) the speaker expressed. According to an important objection due to Ray Buchanan, the propositional view is ill‐equipped to handle meaning underdeterminacy. Using resources from situation semantics and MacFarlane's nonindexical contextualism, this article develops a view of literal communication close to the propositional view which overcomes Buchanan's underdeterminacy considerations while accounting for the kind of indifference that typically characterizes speakers' intentions.

Weights and Measures of Eighteenth-Century Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Montagu's Correspondence

In this essay, Anni Sairio explores sociolinguistic variation and change in Elizabeth Montagu's personal letters from the 1730s to the 1780s. Corpus analysis of the letters focuses on language features with normative and (in)formal connotations. The language of Montagu's letters changed considerably in the 1750s and 1760s, which indicates that her position in the Bluestocking network and her new social role had linguistic influence. On the one hand, preposition stranding all but disappeared as her social status became more prominent. On the other hand, Montagu's spelling became increasingly informal over the years, which suggests a kind of indifference to the ongoing language standardization. Contracted and abbreviated spellings were also more frequent in her letters to women. Life events, social relationships, and macrolevel linguistic developments all play a part in the variation and change of Montagu's language. In "'The Commerce of Life': Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800)," ed. Nicole Pohl, special issue, http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/39838/print

Modeling based on design of a dual thermal management system for the battery pack of a full electric minibus

Lithium-ion battery packs are increasingly being adopted indifferent kinds of hybrid or even full electric vehicles, for more efficient energy usage and better environmental performance in cities. As demand for power and energy increase, the adequate temperature control and maintenance of such battery packs is essential for their efficient operation, maximum lifetime and safety, by employing a well dimensioned thermal management system. This paper describes a simulation model at the system level, based on differential algebraic equations, used to assess such a thermal management system for a specific full electric minibus application. Two different operation modes have been considered: free cooling and active cooling. Both modes have been experimentally validated, by comparing simulation results with laboratory measurements using a scaled prototype. The maximum battery module time-averaged temperature prediction error is 0.4°C and 0.7°C for free cooling and active cooling, respectively. Once the models have been validated, the performance of the proposed dual architecture is checked for different ambient conditions, routes and design variants, and the most suitable option is selected for battery module consumption and thermal performance.

As cheias no sul de Portugal em diferentes tipos de bacias hidrográficas

THE FLOODS IN THE SOUTH OF PORTUGAL IN DIFFERENT KINDS OF DRAINAGEBASINS – The regime of the Portuguese rivers depends on the space and time variation of rainfall. Portugal has clear regional contrasts in the geographical distribution of rainfall. The NW and the Central Mountain Range (Cordilheira Central) are the regions with more rainfall. The NE and the south are the driest regions. Therainfall regime is very irregular. The monthly rainfall regime is clearly Mediterranean with autumn-winter rains (November-March) and an extremely dry summer. The river flows are also very irregular, with severe droughts and surprisingly high flood discharges. These characteristics tend to worsen from NW to SE. The southern rivers have specific discharges 6 to 7 times inferior to the ones of theNW, greater irregularity (the flow in years with more rainfall may surpass 100 to 240 times the flow in driest years), a more severe drought (6 months), almost all are temporary, and flood peaks (200-300 times the average flow) can reach extremely high values.In the twentieth century, floods were responsible for the highest rate of casualties in natural disasters in Portugal, followed by earthquakes: one death for every seven were due to floods. The type of floods known as «progressive floods» mainly affects the big hydrographic basins, such as the River Tagus basin, due to the large flooded area. This kind of flood is caused by heavy rainfall periods connected to the western zonal circulation, which usually lasts several weeks. The dams’ basin system reduces flood frequency, especially in autumn when reservoirs still manage to absorb the highflows after the summer dry period, but cannot «tame» the river. It has even contributed to an increase of the peak flow, as in the 1979 flood. Flashfloods are another kind of floods that occur in Portugal and, unlike the former, are dangerous and deadly, such as those in 1967, 1983 and 1997. They affect the small drainage basins and are caused by heavy and concentrated rainfalls, due to convective depressions (cold pools especially active or depressions caused by the interaction between polar and tropical circulations), namely in the south of the country (Lisbon region, Alentejo and Algarve). In the small drainage basins with a natural regime (uninfluenced by a dam), it is interesting to verify the existence of a trend in these extreme phenomena over the last decades. There has been a clear intensification of flood importance during autumn months, in contrast with an accentuated diminishing in winter and spring months.This trend concerns us mainly for two reasons. Firstly, the rainfall concentration in fewer months lessens its availability in the other months and requires a greater storage capacity. Secondly, this concentration means a bigger rainfall intensity in autumn, with the worsening of the number and intensity of floods and a greater soil loss. Deforestation, soil impermeability, chaotic urbanisation, building on floodplains, the blocking up of small creeks, or their canalisation, the building of walls and transverse embankments along the small creeks courses that work as dikes, contribute to the aggravation of this kind of floods. The floods in rivers of southern Portugal are here analysed, and range from the big drainage basins (River Tagus, 80 100km2), to the smaller ones (Cobres stream, 700 km2; Garganta stream, 1 km2). Also discussed are the human causes that have contributed to increasing the consequences of the floods in small catchments.

The Pretty Sad: Some Notes on Beauty, Sex, and Depression

The Pretty Sad:Some Notes on Beauty, Sex, and Depression William Giraldi (bio) At twenty-two years old I suffered a nervous collapse that landed me in a Boston psychiatric hospital. Melancholy and anxiety had been staples in my life since I was a teenager, and this mental break was prompted in part by the reunion with a woman who had ended our relationship two years earlier. I had been traipsing around the nation in flight from her and in search of something I could not identify. Young men confuse beauty and love, and so I was confused. Admittance to a hospital is terrifying and welcoming at once; terrifying because you have relinquished control over your life, and welcoming because you might just get your life back. I had broken down in my shrink's office after not eating or sleeping in over a week; Monique had decided she wanted a reunion and blew back into my life with the force of a gale. My doctor called the mental hospital, and a paddy wagon came to retrieve me. I wish I could be more dramatic and say that I spent seven weeks in a padded room, but I was there for just a short time. That was fine with me. Hayden Carruth's and A. Alvarez's essays on their hospital stays—both writers tried to kill themselves with pills—are documents of horror. They forced me to eat; I swallowed pills. Someone asked me questions I could not answer, questions about insurance, medication history, suicidal ideations. Then a nurse led me to a bed where I lay down and looked unblinkingly at the white-tiled ceiling. They inserted an IV into my arm, and I watched the clear bag slowly deflate. Soon a social worker wheeled me outside to a table in the shade; he offered encouragement [End Page 51] and advice; he said my mother had been called and was on her way to retrieve me. I said nothing to this. In fact I said nothing at all, just stared at the retaining wall around the courtyard and the meandering ivy all over it. I knew my stint in Boston was finished now, my job was lost, and I remembered something Monique had said to me on the phone a few days earlier: "Come home." Until then, I spent my time in bed, fluids dripping into my vein. Smiling people floated in and out of my room; some of them spoke to me. I asked a woman what day it was. Trays of food were brought and then taken away. A calmness had entered me, a kind of indifference or acquiescence. I had arrived on the other side of my break; it felt very much like the exhausted emptiness after sex. Sleep came in intervals. The break had drained my head, and so I had trouble thinking; I tried to recall lines from Virgil and Tennyson, but I could not find them. My dreams were a whitewash; I was either in a snowstorm or on an operating table. And then I was home. My mother had long since married the man for whom she had left our family; they had recently bought a large three-story house on a lake in western Jersey, not far from the Pennsylvania border. This was about half an hour from my hometown, from my family. When I say "family," I always mean my father, my paternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, since my mother and her side were mostly absent from the lives of my siblings and me. It is an irony, I suppose, that the people who had raised and supported me after my mother's abandonment were not the people I felt comfortable turning to in my hours of darkness. I was able to let my mother in—she who was, in many ways, responsible for the darkness—simply because she did not subscribe to the working-class machismo, the masculine Hemingway credo, that defined my father and his family. They would have viewed my depression as a sign of weakness or cowardice and would have no doubt believed that my silly ailment was nothing a little manual labor couldn...

Ian Hacking, Learner Categories and Human Taxonomies

I use Ian Hacking’s views to explore ways of classifying people, exploiting his distinction between indifferent kinds and interactive kinds, and his accounts of how we ‘make up’ people. The natural kind/essentialist approach to indifferent kinds is explored in some depth. I relate this to debates in psychiatry about the existence of mental illness, and to educational controversies about the credentials of learner classifications such as ‘dyslexic’. Claims about the ‘existence’ of learning disabilities cannot be given a clear, simple and unambiguous interpretation. In particular I show that science cannot deliver a definitive taxonomy of learner categories, and that this has important implications for teachers and policy makers.

Hacking on the Looping Effects of Psychiatric Classifications: What Is an Interactive and Indifferent Kind?

This paper examines Ian Hacking’s analysis of the looping effects of psychiatric classifications, focusing on his recent account of interactive and indifferent kinds. After explicating Hacking’s distinction between ‘interactive kinds’ (human kinds) and ‘indifferent kinds’ (natural kinds), I argue that Hacking cannot claim that there are ‘interactive and indifferent kinds,’ given the way that he introduces the interactive‐indifferent distinction. Hacking is also ambiguous on whether his notion of interactive and indifferent kinds is supposed to offer an account of classifications or objects of classification. I argue that these conceptual difficulties show that Hacking’s account of interactive and indifferent kinds cannot be based on—and should be clearly separated from—his distinction between interactive kinds and indifferent kinds. In clarifying Hacking’s account, I argue that interactive and indifferent kinds should be regarded as objects of classification (i.e., kinds of people) that can be identified with reference to a law‐like biological regularity and are aware of how they are classified. Schizophrenia and depression are discussed as examples. I subsequently offer reasons for resisting Hacking’s claim that the objects of classification in the human sciences—as a result of looping effects—are ‘moving targets’.

Global airline alliances: sparking profitability for a troubled industry

PurposeMore than ever, as far as legislation permits, long‐haul airlines tend to group in alliances. This paper examines the historic developments of two alliances in terms of their potential for increasing profitability of individual airlines.Design/methodology/approachFourteen in‐depth interviews were conducted with airline executives belonging to the two leading alliances, SkyTeam and Star Alliance, as well as with aviation experts. In addition to the recent literature on alliances theory, the Internet was used to obtain data from international organizations, consultancies, universities and airlines – members and non‐members of an alliance.FindingsStar Alliance might be one step ahead of SkyTeam (in terms of scope, number of members, organization, age …). Star Alliance is not only bigger but its geographical scope is wider; the number of members in each region is more balanced. The Star Alliance Services GmbH as head organization provides members with a workforce dedicated solely to the goals of the alliance. But Star Alliance's advantage may be short‐lived, especially since the airline industry demonstrates one of the fastest dynamics of all industries, and government regulations change rapidly as well.Practical implicationsInter‐firm agreements in the airline industry have undergone dramatic changes and the future will bring additional transformations. The dichotomy between endogamic and exogamic partnerships is used to explain these changes. Previous agreements were endogamies: alliances between companies with comparable profiles mostly centered on back‐office activities as in Global Distribution Systems. Current mega alliances, such as SkyTeam and Star Alliance, are exogamies. They are alliances between companies mostly originating from distinct geographic territories. As such, they built on differences between partners regarding their networks. Their current focus is on front‐office activities to better serve customers and the alliances have used publicity to attract more customers. The main thrust is to increase the number of passengers so as to increase revenues. It is forecast that these mega alliances will again change their emphasis to back‐office activities to benefit from economies of scale and decrease operating costs.Originality/valueIs of value in highlighting how the issues indifferent kinds of alliances are not managed the same way. In exogamic relationships, partners must learn about and adapt to each other. The qualitative differences that exist between organisations can be a threat to the success of the alliance and must therefore be managed. In addition, the two types of alliances do not produce the same results. Endogamies standardize processes to obtain benefits of scale in at least one stage of the value chain. Exogamic relationships, in contrast, develop qualitative benefits that result from a synergy of different resources.

Customs and Conventions

This comment is part of a symposium on Ekkehart Schlicht, On Custom in the Economy (1998)

Regulated expression of ADPglucose pyrophosphorylase and chalcone synthase during root development in sweet potato

The phase transition in sweet potato root during tuber differentiationis a complex developmental process that involves changes in gene expression andmorphogenesis. Among the three kinds of root in sweet potato (white fibrousroot, thick-pigmented root and lateral root), ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase(AGPase) and chalcone synthases (CHS) are expressed only in thick-pigmentedroots after 3 weeks, and this also depends on the developmental stage. Sinceexposing roots to the light or culturing under hydroponic conditions inhibitstuber formation in sweet potato, the expression of AGPase and CHS was studiedunder light and dark conditions. AGPase and CHS expression in sweet potatorootswas suppressed very sensitively by light or water stress, similar to rootdevelopmental patterns. Based on an analysis of AGPase and CHS expression indifferent kinds of root tissues and in different developmental stages, thesegenes were shown to be closely associated with the differentiation ofthickeningpigmented roots.

CLEAN MILK

A single drop of milk may contain on an average about a lakh of bacteria, as sold by vendors in the Coimbatore town. Milk is a very good medium for the growth and multiplication of almost all kinds of bacteria, good, bad and indifferent. Some bacteria such as those that produce curds, cheese etc., are beneficial and useful; there are a great many different kinds of bacteria which may be termed indifferent as they are not useful in any particular manner and at the same time do no harm in any way by their presence and growth in milk. But there is the third class which is positively harmful. Bacteria producing tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, etc., grow luxuriantly in milk once they find their way in. A noted dairy scientist, Dr. Orla Jensen, claims that in parts of Europe, repeated epidemics of typhoid and cholera have been caused by infected milk. In a hot country like India especially, where milk remains at a high temperature, the bacteria tend to develop most marvellously, a single individual dividing into two within twenty minutes. Hence the need for clean milk containing as few bacteria as possible and no harmful bacteria at all. Even while in the udder, milk contains a few organisms mostly of the beneficial and indifferent kinds except in cases where the cow itself is diseased. The large numbers obtained in milk samples are most often due to outside contamination, e.g.. from air and water, unclean vessels and the unclean person of the milker. Therefore, if outside contamination is limited to the minimum, it will be possible to obtain milk which would contain very few organisms indeed. Thus the Government Dairy at Coimbatore by virtue of its being clean, is able to produce milk which contains only about one thousand bacteria in a drop, whereas milk produced by vendors contain about a hundred thousand bacteria in the same quantity.