"Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is stressed that artificial algorithms attempt to mimic only the conscious function of parts of the cerebral cortex, ignoring the fact that, not only every conscious experience is preceded by an unconscious process but also that the passage from the unconscious to consciousness is accompanied by loss of information."
📖 2023's second issue of #HoST — Journal of History of Science is now online. The theme is "Social History of Science and Historiography: Where are We in Brazil?".
"This article seeks to understand mercantilism not as an elite philosophy, but as a process of interaction between private interests that stretched beyond London across England and the wider world, in which contribution to the public interest was asserted primarily by the capacity of a trade to support domestic employment in an increasingly global economy."
"I argue that inclusion of Occam's razor is an essential factor that distinguishes science from superstition and pseudoscience. I also describe how the razor is embedded in Bayesian inference and argue that science is primarily the means to discover the simplest descriptions of our world."
"Why is the US far right finding its savior in Spanish dictator Francisco Franco?" by Jason Wilson (#TheGuardian)
"Some US far-right figures have made renewed attempts to rehabilitate the 20th century Spanish dictator Gen Francisco Franco in recent months, praising him as an avatar of religious authoritarianism, and praising his actions during and after the Spanish civil war as a model for confronting the left in the US."
"The critics of this flurry of neo-Francoism say that the real target of this revisionism is domestic attitudes to US democracy."
"For Faber, parts of the the American right are captured by “the dream of order, where social order is more important than democracy, and democracy is a threat to social order”."
A very interesting article on the "re-emergence" of Franco in Spain: "Francisco Franco Is Back: The Contested Reemergence of a Fascist Moral Exemplar" by Francisco Ferrándiz (#OpenAccess, 2021).
"Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous"
"This Element examines some of their concerns. It uses evidence that critics of peer review sometimes cite to show its failures, as well as empirical literature on the reception of bullshit, to advance positive claims about how the assessment of scholarly work is appropriately influenced by features of the context in which it appears: for example, by readers' knowledge of authorship or of publication venue."
"Our project is revealing a new perspective on how these sites, contrary to previous assumptions, seem to have played a significant role in the configuration and evolution of trading networks throughout the Roman period."
"The findings gave a unique understanding of life and death in this early Christian Viking community and indicated that it was common to suffer from dental caries, tooth loss, infections of dental origin and tooth pain. These Vikings also manipulated their teeth through filing, tooth picking and other occupational behaviors."
'The Resistance Mapping website functions as a living, digital archive that documents the history of racist housing and other place-based policies in Rochester and the surrounding region. The materials explore how Rochester’s current segregation emerges from that history and confronts these realities through stories of past and present activism, along with creative imagined possibilities for our community’s future.'
"This article outlines a chronology for understanding the cultural importance in Britain of this voyage, from the New England chroniclers to the postcolonial critiques of historians today. In between, it offers a thematic analysis of the different groups which could use the story in their construction of morality and identity, from Romanticists and abolitionists to Anglo-American diplomats and civic boosters."
"In his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein claims, puzzlingly, that ‘the proof creates a new concept’ (RFM III-41). This paper aims to contribute to clarifying this idea, and to showing how it marks a major break with the traditional conception of proof."
"The authors present new archaeological discoveries from western and northern Mongolia, dating to the fourth and fifth centuries AD, including a wooden frame saddle with horse hide components from Urd Ulaan Uneet and an iron stirrup from Khukh Nuur. Together, these finds suggest that Mongolian groups were early adopters of stirrups and saddles, facilitating the expansion of nomadic hegemony across Eurasia and shaping the conduct of medieval mounted warfare."
"To address questions about the real appearance of St Anthony, we applied body mass estimation equations to the osteometric measurements taken in 1981, during the public recognition of the Saint’s skeletal remains. Both the biomechanical and the morphometric approach were employed to solve some intrinsic limitations in the equations for body mass estimation from skeletal remains. The estimated body mass was used to assess the physique of the Saint with the body mass index."
"Medieval hospitals were founded to provide charity, but poverty and infirmity were broad and socially determined categories and little is known about the residents of these institutions and the pathways that led them there. Combining skeletal, isotopic and genetic data, the authors weave a collective biography of individuals buried at the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge."
The tacit approval in conclusion of the need to therefore then return to a closed ecosystem, and further excluding the public from science, is a hard capitalist spin pulling the publisher's cart.
The problem always has been advocacy, i.e. academics talking the talk but not walking the walk.
The take on #LLM is also stale, CC BY isn't CC0. Widespread violation by companies of the BY needs a legal answer.
"In this study, we developed a soft robotic model of the right heart that accurately mimics RV biomechanics and hemodynamics, including free wall, septal and valve motion."
"The present study has highlighted the gene-culture co-migration with the demographic movements that occurred during the past two millennia in Central and East Asia. Additionally, this work contributes to a better understanding of the distribution of immunogenic erythrocyte polymorphisms with a view to improve transfusion safety."
"Experts have been selected to create a multidisciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, bi-, and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume."
"Experts have been selected to create a multidisciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, bi-, and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume."
"Experts have been selected to create a multidisciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, bi-, and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume."
"This interdisciplinary study analyses the connections between literary Modernism and right-wing ideology. Moreover, it is the first academic study to explore the reception of these Modernist authors by today's far right, seeking to understand in what ways they use strategic readings of Modernist texts to legitimise right-wing ideology."