Do the leaders of minority communities in divided cities influence group members’ expressed willingness to engage politically with rival groups? Studies typically link group members’ willingness to engage with rival groups to direct contact between individuals from opposing groups. However, such contact is problematic in divided cities, wherein opportunities to interact are scarce and frowned upon. Focusing on the contested urban space of Jerusalem, we find indications that the diverse nature of community leadership in East Jerusalem can influence Palestinian residents’ attitudes toward political engagement with Israeli Authorities via The ‘middlemen’ role can explain the influence that have in divided cities. They their constituents and the other group’s members or institutions. Our analysis employs original data from a public of East Jerusalem immediately prior to the Jerusalem 2018 It has ramifications regarding urban governance for other divided cities.
Over the past decade, rapid technological advancements and budget constraints have increased the demand for online education (Martin et al., 2020). Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has vastly accelerated this trend, compelling almost all education providers to migrate their courses to online learning platforms (Theelen & Van Breukelen, 2022). In view of other profound crises that affect mobility, such as climate change, political instabilities and future pandemics, it is safe to assume that online learning will remain in demand, even in a post-pandemic world ) (Bayne et al., 2020). In this context, while educational research has made significant progress in establishing design principles that ensure effective online teaching and learning, the main focus of this scholarly work is on the acquisition of declarative knowledge and cognitive skills. Moreover, since very little is known about the online teaching and distance learning of psychomotor skills (Kouhia et al., 2021; Lehtiniemi et al., 2023), this paper and exhibition explore how eye-tracking technology (ETT) creates unique opportunities to improve craft education in hybrid and distant learning settings.
How is the electoral behavior of minorities shaped by past violence? Recent studies found that displacement increases hostility between perpetrators and displaced individuals, but there has been paltry research on members of surviving communities. We argue that the latter exhibit the opposite pattern because of their different condition. Violence will cause cross-generational vulnerability, fear and risk-aversion— leading the surviving communities to seek protection and avoid conflict by signalling loyalty and rejecting nationalist movements. In their situation as an excluded minority in the perpetrators’ state, they will be more likely to vote for out-group parties. Exploiting exogenous battlefield dynamics that created inter-regional variation in the Palestinian exodus (1947-1949), microlevel measurements that capture the damage of violence, and an original longitudinal data set, we show that Palestinian villages in Israel more severely impacted by the 1948 war have a much higher vote share to Jewish parties even seventy years later. Survey evidence further supports our theory, revealing that this pattern exists only for members of the surviving communities, and not among displaced individuals. The findings shed new light on the complex social relations that guide political decision-making in post-war settings and divided societies that suffer from protracted conflicts.
In recent decades, the discipline of bioethics has grown rapidly, as has the practice of ethical consultation. Interestingly, this new recognition of the relevance of moral philosophy to our daily life has been accompanied by skepticism among philosophers regarding the existence of moral expertise or the benefits of philosophical training. In his recent article in Bioethics, William R. Smith suggested that this skepticism is rooted in philosophers' belief that moral expertise is inconsistent with liberal-democratic values, when in fact they are compatible. In this paper, we provide a unique opportunity to empirically examine Smith's observation by utilizing and extending global data on philosophers’ beliefs about moral expertise, involving 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. Our findings support Smith's theoretical observation and show that societal levels of support for liberal-democratic values are associated with greater skepticism about moral expertise. We suggest that these findings might be explained by the cognitive process of motivated reasoning and an invalid inference of “is” from “ought”. Consequently, the potential tension between moral expertise and liberal-democratic values is invalidly used for rejecting the existence of moral expertise, while its main and valid implication is for how moral expertise should be applied in liberal-democratic settings.
Spheroids are one of the least understood lithic items yet are one of the most enduring, spanning from the Oldowan to the Middle Palaeolithic. Why and how they were made remains relatively unknown. Here we seek to address whether they were the unintentional by-product of a percussive task or were intentionally knapped, and if so, were there any goals to their manufacture? We apply novel 3D analysis methods, including spherical harmonics and surface curvature, on 150 limestone spheroids from ‘Ubeidiya to bring a new perspective to these enigmatic artefacts. We reconstruct the spheroid reduction sequence based on trends in their scars and geometry. We find that the spheroid makers at ‘Ubeidiya followed what appears to be a premeditated and formal reduction strategy. During this reduction, the spheroids do not become smoother, but they become markedly more spherical. They approach an ideal sphere, a feat that likely required a mental template and skilful knapping. Acheulean bifaces are currently thought to represent the earliest evidence of hominins imposing a premeditated, symmetrical shape on stone. With evidence of spheroids occurring before the Acheulean, the intentional production of a sphere-like object represents earlier evidence of hominins desiring and achieving intentional geometry and symmetry.
LISROP (Land of Israel Study and Research Online Platform) is an online, bilingual, English-Hebrew, integrative platform (under construction) aiming to allow scholars and interested non-academics to review a vast amount of archaeological and historical data from the land of Israel, explore it and dissect in various ways, and then analyze it using sophisticated GIS tools, some of which were specifically developed for the platform. The platform can be used for various types of studies and can be expanded thematically and spatially beyond its current limits by incorporating additional databases and applications and providing information on nature, culture, and heritage, furthering study and research into these areas. The paper briefly presents the project’s background, history, development, and current aims. It then describes the platform and its components, including the geographical foundations on which the data is studied, the archaeological and historical data it incorporates, and the various GIS components it includes. The paper then outlines the platform’s potential, capacity to advance research on several levels, and expected relevance for non-academics. Toward the end, the paper briefly describes some of the major challenges we encountered in our work and potential avenues for expanding the platform.
Histiocytoses are inflammatory myeloid neoplasms often driven by somatic activating mutations in mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade genes. H syndrome is an inflammatory genetic disorder caused by germ line loss-of-function mutations in SLC29A3, encoding the lysosomal equilibrative nucleoside transporter 3 (ENT3). Patients with H syndrome are predisposed to develop histiocytosis, yet the mechanism is unclear. Here, through phenotypic, molecular, and functional analysis of primary cells from a cohort of patients with H syndrome, we reveal the molecular pathway leading to histiocytosis and inflammation in this genetic disorder. We show that loss of function of ENT3 activates nucleoside-sensing toll-like receptors (TLR) and downstream MAPK signaling, inducing cytokine secretion and inflammation. Importantly, MEK inhibitor therapy led to resolution of histiocytosis and inflammation in a patient with H syndrome. These results demonstrate a yet-unrecognized link between a defect in a lysosomal transporter and pathological activation of MAPK signaling, establishing a novel pathway leading to histiocytosis and inflammation.
Drawing on Scheler and Merleau-Ponty among others, I develop a framework for interpreting certain themes in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. This philosophical novel explores the way love shapes our comportment towards the world of others, and raises the question of whether love is blind or potentially truth-disclosing. Using this literary example, I argue that without the dispositional affects of love, care, or concern — the emotional a priori — nothing in the world around us would be more conspicuous than anything else. In this case we would be faced with a flat, neutral mass of information, without a sense that any of it matters. Thus, for a comprehensively unloving human being, everything would seem empty of meaning. It does not follow, however, that the affective constitution of the world is best viewed as a kind of distortion.
September 2022: Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College, where he has taught for over fifteen years. His most recent books are Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience (2018, paperback 2020) and The Sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke (2022).
The oceanic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) plays a key role in the climate system, and monitoring its evolution is a scientific priority. Monitoring arrays have been established at several latitudes in the Atlantic Ocean, but other latitudes and oceans remain unmonitored for logistical reasons. This study explores the possibility of inferring the MOC from globally-available satellite measurements via machine learning (ML) tecchniques, using the ECCOV4 state estimate as a test bed. The methodological advantages of the present approach include the use purely of available satellite data, its applicability to multiple basins within a single ML framework, and the ML model simplicity (a feed-forward fully connected neural network with small number of neurons). The ML model exhibits high skill in MOC reconstruction in the Atlantic, Indo-Pacific, and Southern Oceans. The approach achieves a higher skill in predicting the model Southern Ocean abyssal MOC than has previously been achieved via a dynamically-based approach. The skill of the model is quantified as a function of latitude in each ocean basin, as well as a function of the time scale of MOC variability. We find that ocean bottom pressure generally has the highest reconstruction skill potential, followed by zonal wind stress. We addition ally test which combinations of variables are optimal. Furthermore, ML interpretabil ity techniques are used to show that high reconstruction skill in the Southern Ocean is mainly due to (NN processing of) bottom pressure variability at a few prominent bathy metric ridges. Finally, the potential for reconstructing MOC strength estimates from real satellite measurements is discussed.
