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How should IOs engage with the private actors in global climate and energy governance?
Get PDFThis chapter highlights that international organsations (IOs) play a crucial role in supporting the private sector’s engagement in global climate and energy governance, while also addressing the perceived risks that have, until now, restrained IOs from further engagement with the private sector. Collaboration between IOs and the private sector can bring about several benefits, including risk mitigation, crisis management, Research and Development (‘R&D’) promotion, and compliance with standards. These benefits can enhance the private sector’s competitiveness, resilience, and sustainability, thereby contributing to the global transition towards a low-carbon economy and the tackling of climate challenges. Yet the growth of the private sector’s participation in the global climate governance also raises some significant concerns due to the absence of legitimacy and accountability among private actors
A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to the Logic of Scientific Discovery
No full textScientific discovery is a neglected topic in the philosophy of science (Langley and Arvay 2019). Since around the middle of the last century, the received view has been that discovery is not governed by logic or, more generally, by rationality, but is a largely elusive and inscrutable process (Popper [1935]1959). Thankfully, not everyone has been persuaded by this mystical view (Langley et al. 1987; Cellucci 2013). Given the recent cascade of developments in automation and AI, this means that now more than ever we need to carefully re-evaluate our attitude towards this view. This paper aims to do precisely that by exploring how such developments are reinvigorating the search for a logic of scientific discovery. Neuro-symbolic approaches to AI, it will be argued, offer hope in the reinstatement of the rationalist model, and the automation, of scientific discovery. A neuro-symbolic system is proposed that seeks to integrate several identified desiderata like the ability to detect patterns and to reason. On this proposal, both neural and symbolic methods are employed in the service of automating scientific discovery, but the former are conceived of as subservient to the latter. The rationale for this subservience relation is that any discoveries made need to be integrated into an accessible body of knowledge, and that can more easily be achieved with symbolic methods at the helm
Evidence of social learning across symbolic cultural barriers in sperm whales
Get PDFWe provide quantitative evidence suggesting social learning in sperm whales across sociocultural boundaries, using acoustic data from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Traditionally, sperm whale populations are categorized into clans based on their vocal repertoire: the rhythmically patterned click sequences (codas) that they use. Among these codas, identity codas function as symbolic markers for each clan, accounting for 35-60% of codas they produce. We introduce a computational method to model whale speech, which encodes rhythmic microvariations within codas, capturing their vocal style. We find that vocal style-clans closely align with repertoire-clans. However, contrary to vocal repertoire, we show that sympatry increases vocal style similarity between clans for non-identity codas, i.e. most codas, suggesting social learning across cultural boundaries. More broadly, this subcoda structure model offers a framework for comparing communication systems in other species, with potential implications for deeper understanding of vocal and cultural transmission within animal societies
Curating activist journalism to defy China’s “mainstream” narrative on X (Twitter)
Get PDFThis article foregrounds the great translation movement (GTM), initially mobilised on X (formerly Twitter) in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as an example of activist journalism countering China's 'mainstream' narrative of the war and its broader implications. Using Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach, adapted to the specifics of social media communication, we examine GTM postings throughout the first calendar year of the war, highlighting how the GTM evolves into a broader activist-journalistic initiative that challenges the party-state beyond its involvement in the war. This paradigm of intervention unfolds as GTM activists report on evidential events within China that bear the potential to spark public contention outside of the party-state’s censorship reach. By examining the dialectical relations between reportage and advocacy, this analysis demonstrates how activist journalism constitutes an emerging cross-border civic engagement, challenging a Southern authoritarian regime from the outside. A critical evaluation of activist journalism and its broader societal impacts is also provided, highlighting its progressive potential and future development in the Chinese context and beyond
Differences and similarities in psychological characteristics between cultural groups circum Mediterranean
Get PDFWe examined differences and similarities between groups sampled from the Mediterranean region in social orientation, cognitive style, self-construal, and honor, face, dignity values and concerns using a large battery of tasks and measures. We did this by conducting secondary data set analyses focusing on comparisons between nine pairs of samples recruited from the Mediterranean region (Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus [Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities], Lebanon [Muslim Lebanese and Christian Lebanese], Egypt) that have overlapping and divergent features in terms of religious, ethnic, national, and linguistic factors as well as various physical and socio-ecological characteristics. Across 38 different psychological characteristics, comparisons between Turkish and Turkish Cypriot samples and between Christian and Muslim samples from Lebanon revealed that they were most similar to each other. In contrast, Greek and Turkish samples were the least similar. Our analyses of intercorrelations between variables, variability and size of differences provide additional insights into the within-region variation in social orientation, cognitive style, self-construal indicators, as well as honor, face, and dignity values and concerns. Our research contributes to the growing literature on regional variation of psychological processes while raising important pointers for the role of background and socio-ecological characteristics in cultural group similarities and differences
An Extended Pattern Based Comprehensive Stemmer for the Urdu Language
Get PDFThe Urdu language is used by approximately 200 million people for spoken and written communications on a daily basis. There is a substantial amount of unstructured Urdu textual data that is available worldwide. Data mining techniques can be used to extract meaningful knowledge from such a large, potentially informative source of data. There are many text processing systems available to process unstructured textual data. However, these systems are mostly language specific and developed for a variety of languages such as English, Spanish, Chinese, etc. Unfortunately, there are not as many language processing resources available for Urdu. Stemming is one of the most important preprocessing steps in the text mining process and its goal is to reduce grammatical words form, e.g., parts of speech, gender, tense, and so on, to their root form. In this work, we have extended the stemming capabilities of our existing pattern-based comprehensive stemming system for Urdu text. In addition to the existing stemming rules in previous work, we introduce novel stemming rules for prefix, and infix stemming. We also optimize the existing suffix removal rules and extend the add character lists for word normalization. These stemming rules are generic and have the ability to generate the stem of Urdu words as well as loan words (words belonging to other languages i.e. Arabic, Persian, Turkish, etc). In the experimental evaluation, we have observed a significant improvement in the overall stemming accuracy of our proposed pattern-based Urud stemmer, which demonstrates the adoptability of the proposed stemming approach for a variety of text-processing applications
What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost
No full textA dynamic reappraisal of Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, exploring its radical origins in the seventeenth century and its revolutionary impact on our culture ever since.
Drawing on his own experiences of teaching literature in prisons, Orlando Reade focuses on twelve unexpected readers of Milton – from Malcolm X to Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt to Thomas Jefferson – whose lives and works have shaped our world. He shows the many different, surprising and often contradictory ways in which Milton’s poem has been read across centuries and continents.
Boldly original, lively and far-reaching, What in Me Is Dark is the story of how a work of literature born in the ashes of a failed revolution became an indelible part of the modern imagination. Reade guides us through the epic, exploring how Milton came to write its dark and dazzling poetry, and offering a new account of its radical, ever-evolving legacy