Kierkegaard's mirrors: Interest, self, and moral vision

What is it to see the world, other people, and imagined situations not just as morally compelling, but as making personal demands of us? What is it to experience stories as speaking to us individually and directly? Kierkegaard's Mirrors explores Kierkegaard's unique and challenging answers to these questions. Beginning with the structural account of consciousness offered in Johannes Climacus, this book develops a new phenomenological interpretation of what Kierkegaard calls 'interest': a self-reflexive mode of thought, vision and imagination that plays a central role in moral experience. Tracing this concept across Kierkegaard's work takes us through topics such as consciousness, the ontology of selfhood, ethical imagination, admiration and imitation, seeing the other, metaphors of self-recognition and mirroring, our need for transcendent meaning, and the relationship between scholarship and subjective knowledge. 'Interest' equips us with a new understanding of Kierkegaard's highly original normative, teleological account of moral vision.

‘Interest’ in Kierkegaard’s structure of consciousness

Kierkegaard’s identification of “consciousness” with “interest” (interesse) in his unfinished work Johannes Climacus adds a distinctive dimension to his phenomenology of subjectivity. Commentators, however, have largely identified interesse with lidenskab (“passion”), a conflation I argue to be mistaken, or have otherwise failed to note the structural implications of interesse for Kierkegaard’s account of cognition. I draw out these implications and argue that the Climacan account of interest as the experience of finding ourselves in-between ideality and reality implies, in the context of Kierkegaard’s trichotomous ontology of consciousness, a form of non-thetic self-referentiality built into cognition itself. This self-referentiality also has the intriguing implication of making consciousness itself inherently teleological.

Structural equation modeling for evaluating the user perceptions of E-learning effectiveness in higher education

A crucial prerequisite for sustainable e-learning is the understanding of learners’ preferences for various pedagogical strategies, technologies, and the management of learning resources. This paper presents an empirical study aiming to empirically test the theoretical (pedagogies, technologies and management) (PTM) model on the preference of learners and on the perceived impact of the effectiveness of e-learning. This study uses structural equation modelling (SEM) to identify the critical dimensions in the PTM model for augmenting the effectiveness of e-learning. This leads to the development of a PTM model with the path coefficients showing weak to strong relationships ranging from 0.15 to 0.42 with acceptable significance levels. The results support the hypothesis that management, technology, resources and metadata ontology dimensions affect the effectiveness of elearning both directly and indirectly through enhancing the management effectiveness of learning resources. However, the result does not support positive influence of pedagogical strategy per se on e-learning effectiveness. The implications of this study indicate the criticality of effective management of learning resources to enhance e-learning effectiveness.

Deleuze's neo-leibnizianism, events and the logic of sense's 'static ontological genesis'

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze effectively argues that two types of relation between events govern their ‘evental’ or ‘ideal play’, and ultimately underlie determined substances, that is, worldly individuals and persons. Leibniz calls these relations ‘compossibility’ and ‘incompossibility’. Deleuze calls them ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’. This paper explores how Deleuze appropriates and extends a number of Leibnizian concepts in order to ground the idea that events have ontological priority over substances ‘all the way down’.

PGSW-OS: a novel approach for resource management in a semantic web operating system based on a P2P grid architecture

A web operating system is an operating system that users can access from any hardware at any location. A peer-to-peer (P2P) grid uses P2P communication for resource management and communication between nodes in a grid and manages resources locally in each cluster, and this provides a proper architecture for a web operating system. Use of semantic technology in web operating systems is an emerging field that improves the management and discovery of resources and services. In this paper, we propose PGSW-OS (P2P grid semantic Web OS), a model based on a P2P grid architecture and semantic technology to improve resource management in a web operating system through resource discovery with the aid of semantic features. Our approach integrates distributed hash tables (DHTs) and semantic overlay networks to enable semantic-based resource management by advertising resources in the DHT based upon their annotations to enable semantic-based resource matchmaking. Our model includes ontologies and virtual organizations. Our technique decreases the computational complexity of searching in a web operating system environment. We perform a simulation study using the Gridsim simulator, and our experiments show that our model provides enhanced utilization of resources, better search expressiveness, scalability, and precision. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York.

The new wilderness: A practice-led model for arts based enquiry

The New Wilderness is a practice-led, multidisciplinary arts project first piloted by artists, writers, teachers and academics from Geelong, Deakin University and Courthouse ARTS Centre in 2013. In a series of workshops run by artists, and working to specific themes, the project provided a platform for participants to explore and respond creatively to change in the community; it culminated in a large-scale installation at Courthouse ARTS Centre’s main gallery. Our paper positions the project as a able to cut across convention, empowering young artists to respond to ‘big questions’ of relevance to the changing material, spatial and social relations within their communities. In questioning and seeking to transform communities into sustainable media, economic, environmental and social ecologies, this emergent model begins with a localised focus, which is designed to travel across time and place, and pedagogical frameworks. The paper positions Geelong as a community under radical transformation in its economic foundations and demographics. As artists and academics living and working in the region we see it as an experimental ground for investigations into a series of provocations that mirror the shape of the paper we intend to give. The provocations, as outlined in the workshops, might also be envisaged as new relations to:Object – From consumable to unusable to play. In revisiting the first iteration of The New wilderness in 2013 we discuss the ‘superfictional’ (Hill, 2000) enquiry that participants were asked to engage with. Its premise described Geelong as an abandoned, post-apocalyptic site. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as a group of future explorers and excavate objects from the city’s old tip. In unearthing their choices and re-presenting the objects in the gallery the participant was prompted to analyse site, situation, object and process as phenomena for ‘being’ or ‘telling stories’, providing insights into wider realms of cultural experience (Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 2010). Parallel to this ‘autoethnographic’ reflection our paper uses the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of consumer and material culture. He traces the subject’s relation to objects from use-value, to exchange-value and in the era of extreme capitalism, to pure exhibition-value. He searches for ways that the objects produced in our material culture can be ‘profaned’ (Agamben, 2007). Space – From the material to the spatial to the situation. We are interested in how objects and the practices they elicit can be ‘profaned’ by their situation (Agamben, 2007; Wark, 2103). To profane, according to Agamben, is to open up the possibility that the object loses its exhibition-value to ‘a special form of negligence’ (Agamben). He uses the example of the child’s ability to insinuate any object into a new logic of play (Agamben). Like the objects excavated for The New Wilderness they could be from a variety of spheres – business, household, industry, health etc… The child, like the artist, reconstitutes, reorders and assembles new relations between things. In reflecting on the first New Wilderness project the paper correlates the creative response of the participant (student, child, artist) with the occupier. The Occupy Movement, which took up residence in many of the world’s cities’ financial districts in 2011, used a number of strategies commensurate with both Agamben’s notion of profanation and McKenzie Wark’s reading of the Situationist International’s use of détournement - as a strategy that releases objects and subjects back into the field of play (Wark, 2013). The field was taken by the occupy movement to be the space in which they occupied – capitalism, its logic and its practices, were, for a short time, redundant in the occupied field. The New Wilderness conceptualises the city as a localised field, from which its discarded objects can be ‘profaned’ or, repurposed, to reflect on shared histories, responsibilities, pedagogies and future action. Subject: self/other– As much as we propose New Wilderness to be a pedagogical initiative we see it as personal, critical and political. In the themed workshops, designed to elicit personal responses to the object and the site, which culminated in a multi-disciplinary installation, performance and/or text based work, participants were encouraged to think critically, and importantly, collectively. Through the four workshops run in the first iteration of the project participants were asked to re-consider their material value-systems, much as the occupy movement was trying to do, and like the occupiers, participants were empowered to be agents of change. Our paper reflects on the practical outcomes and the conceptual, political and pedagogical strategies embedded in The New Wilderness project. The paper affords us the additional opportunity to imagine a life for it in other geographical, socio-economic and educational situations. Merinda Kelly and Cameron Bishop, 2013Bio: Merinda Kelly is a sculptor and installation artist, educator and PhD student at Deakin University. Her research interests include Visual Culture, Practice Led Research, the Ontology of Art, and Autoethnography. Her most recent work includes the Pop Archaeology' and the Globo-Touro Projects.Bio: Dr Cameron Bishop is an artist and academic working in Visual Arts at Deakin University. He exhibits regularly and has written a number of journal articles and book chapters. His research has focused on the philosophical and postcolonial dimensions of space and subjectivity and more recently has evolved into an active interest in strategic interventions into space and practice.

The contours of employee voice in SMEs: the importance of context

This article develops a context-sensitive approach to analyse how and why voice operates in small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), an area that remains under-theorised and under-researched. By building on a priori frameworks with proven ability to unpack complexity and take account of the wider context of SMEs, this article explores how resources (human and social capital) and constraints (product market, labour market and strategic orientation) interact to shape voice practices. The article finds significant differences between 'reported' compared with 'actual' practices in situ, and identifies different types of firms ('strategic market regulation', 'strategic market-led' and 'non-strategic market-led') along with the factors that influence the form and practice of voice. Overall, the article argues that researchers should further pursue research that appreciates the layered nature of ontology and the role played by firm context to explain complex organisational phenomena, if we are to advance our understanding of voice practices in SMEs and beyond.

KBRE: a framework for knowledge-based requirements engineering

Detecting inconsistencies is a critical part of requirements engineering (RE) and has been a topic of interest for several decades. Domain knowledge and semantics of requirements not only play important roles in elaborating requirements but are also a crucial way to detect conflicts among them. In this paper, we present a novel knowledge-based RE framework (KBRE) in which domain knowledge and semantics of requirements are central to elaboration, structuring, and management of captured requirements. Moreover, we also show how they facilitate the identification of requirements inconsistencies and other-related problems. In our KBRE model, description logic (DL) is used as the fundamental logical system for requirements analysis and reasoning. In addition, the application of DL in the form of Manchester OWL Syntax brings simplicity to the formalization of requirements while preserving sufficient expressive power. A tool has been developed and applied to an industrial use case to validate our approach.

De novo assembly and characterization of the invasive Northern Pacific Seastar transcriptome

Invasive species are a major threat to global biodiversity but can also serve as valuable model systems to examine important evolutionary processes. While the ecological aspects of invasions have been well documented, the genetic basis of adaptive change during the invasion process has been hampered by a lack of genomic resources for the majority of invasive species. Here we report the first larval transcriptomic resource for the Northern Pacific Seastar, Asterias amurensis, an invasive marine predator in Australia. Approximately 117.5 million 100 base-pair (bp) paired-end reads were sequenced from a single RNA-Seq library from a pooled set of full-sibling A. amurensis bipinnaria larvae. We evaluated the efficacy of a pre-assembly error correction pipeline on subsequent de novo assembly. Error correction resulted in small but important improvements to the final assembly in terms of mapping statistics and core eukaryotic genes representation. The error-corrected de novo assembly resulted in 115,654 contigs after redundancy clustering. 41,667 assembled contigs were homologous to sequences from NCBI's non-redundant protein and UniProt databases. We assigned Gene Ontology, KEGG Orthology, Pfam protein domain terms and predicted protein-coding sequences to > 36,000 contigs. The final transcriptome dataset generated here provides functional information for 18,319 unique proteins, comprising at least 11,355 expressed genes. Furthermore, we identified 9,739 orthologs to P. miniata proteins, evaluated our annotation pipeline and generated a list of 150 candidate genes for responses to several environmental stressors that may be important for adaptation of A. amurensis in the invasive range. Our study has produced a large set of A. amurensis RNA contigs with functional annotations that can serve as a resource for future comparisons to other echinoderm transcriptomes and gene expression studies. Our data can be used to study the genetic basis of adaptive change and other important evolutionary processes during a successful invasion.

A Harmonized Vocabulary For Water Quality

Interoperability of water quality data depends on the use of common models, schemas and vocabularies. However, terms are usually collected during different activities and projects in isolation of one another, resulting in vocabularies that have the same scope being represented with different terms, using different formats and formalisms, and published in various access methods. Significantly, most water quality vocabularies conflate multiple concepts in a single term, e.g. quantity kind, units of measure, substance or taxon, medium and procedure. This bundles information associated with separate elements from the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) model into a single slot. We have developed a water quality vocabulary, formalized using RDF, and published as Linked Data. The terms were extracted from existing water quality vocabularies. The observable property model is inspired by O&M but aligned with existing ontologies. The core is an OWL ontology that extends the QUDT ontology for Unit and QuantityKind definitions. We add classes to generalize the QuantityKind model, and properties for explicit description of the conflated concepts. The key elements are defined to be sub-classes or sub-properties of SKOS elements, which enables a SKOS view to be published through standard vocabulary APIs, alongside the full view. QUDT terms are re-used where possible, supplemented with additional Unit and QuantityKind entries required for water quality. Along with items from separate vocabularies developed for objects, media, and procedures, these are linked into definitions in the actual observable property vocabulary. Definitions of objects related to chemical substances are linked to items from the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) ontology. Mappings to other vocabularies, such as DBPedia, are in separately maintained files. By formalizing the model for observable properties, and clearly labelling the separate concerns, water quality observations from different sources may be more easily merged and also transformed to O&M for cross-domain applications.

Harmonization Of Vocabularies For Water Data

Observational data encodes values of properties associated with a feature of interest, estimated by a specified procedure. For water the properties are physical parameters like level, volume, flow and pressure, and concentrations and counts of chemicals, substances and organisms. Water property vocabularies have been assembled at project, agency and jurisdictional level. Organizations such as EPA, USGS, CEH, GA and BoM maintain vocabularies for internal use, and may make them available externally as text files. BODC and MMI have harvested many water vocabularies alongside others of interest in their domain, formalized the content using SKOS, and published them through web interfaces. Scope is highly variable both within and between vocabularies. Individual items may conflate multiple concerns (e.g. property, instrument, statistical procedure, units). There is significant duplication between vocabularies. Semantic web technologies provide the opportunity both to publish vocabularies more effectively, and achieve harmonization to support greater interoperability between datasets. - Models for vocabulary items (property, substance/taxon, process, unit-of-measure, etc) may be formalized OWL ontologies, supporting semantic relations between items in related vocabularies; - By specializing the ontology elements from SKOS concepts and properties, diverse vocabularies may be published through a common interface; - Properties from standard vocabularies (e.g. OWL, SKOS, PROV-O and VAEM) support mappings between vocabularies having a similar scope - Existing items from various sources may be assembled into new virtual vocabularies However, there are a number of challenges: - use of standard properties such as sameAs/exactMatch/equivalentClass require reasoning support; - items have been conceptualised as both classes and individuals, complicating the mapping mechanics; - re-use of items across vocabularies may conflict with expectations concerning URI patterns; - versioning complicates cross-references and re-use. This presentation will discuss ways to harness semantic web technologies to publish harmonized vocabularies, and will summarise how many of the challenges may be addressed.

Ontologia para moelos de negócios de redes sociais na internet: um ensaio teórico-exploratório

Atualmente, uma profusão de soluções chamadas de Web 2.0 e redes sociais está causando um grande impacto no desenvolvimento da Internet, comparando-se à era “ponto-com” em termos de crescimento, investimentos e empolgação. Estas iniciativas possuem em comum um elevado grau de formação de comunidades, e de criação e compartilhamento de conteúdo por parte do usuário, dentre outras características. Acredita-se que as redes sociais possuam um grande potencial inovador e disruptivo tanto para a sociedade quanto para o mundo empresarial. Entretanto, como transformar as redes sociais e aplicações Web 2.0 em modelos de negócios auto-sustentáveis ainda é um desafio para o mercado. Esta dissertação objetiva auxiliar a compreensão e abordagem deste tema propondo uma ontologia específica para modelos de negócios de redes sociais na internet. Isto se realiza por meio do desenvolvimento de um ensaio teórico de viés exploratório, baseado em extensa, porém não exaustiva, revisão de literatura abordando modelos de negócios, redes sociais e demais temas relacionados. A ontologia criada é então aplicada na representação de modelos de negócio de redes sociais na internet. Este trabalho também fornece uma visão geral do fenômeno Web 2.0, abordando algumas de suas principais características tecnológicas e socioeconômicas.

O sindicalismo e a administração publica

A dissertação aqui apresentada versa sobre uma temática nova, quer vista sob a ótica do nascimento do fato sociológico analisado - O Sindicalismo e a Administração Pública quer se considere a quase inexistência de fontes nas quais se possa abeberar, para que fosse possível estabelecer o fio condutor no desenvolvimento do tema. A temática foi analisada em dois planos: primeiro, fêz-se uma apreciação crítica da história do associativismo no Brasil, em sua simbiose com o aspecto social, com o lado econômico e com o lastro jurídico, ao ser analisado o caminho percorrido desde o primeiro clarão do Brasil até os dias presentes. Em segundo estágio, perquiriu-se a questão sindical, no que diz respeito à sua etiologia, o seu despertar mais consciente na década de 80 do nosso século, perpassando pela criação das Centrais Sindicais, ao serem detectados os desvios ideológicos, as contradições, a sua fisiologia em função de sua organização, ideário e ação na direção do que se propõem em nome de seus afiliados. Com efeito, o núcleo do trabalho se cinge à arregimentação do corpo de funcionários públicos com vistas a um eficaz - hoje, ainda muito incipiente - congraçamento, ao se deparar com uma forte resistência institucional, de vez que só a partir da Constituição de 1988, é que se abriu caminho para o direito de associação sindical a esse estamento dos agentes públicos. As disfunções são, aí, analisadas em relação ao despreparo dos Recursos Humanos no exercício de liderança e em confronto com a estrutura institucional anacrônica e de feitio autoritário, para fazer valer, de forma eficaz e efetiva, um bom desempenho da ação sindical, que se deseja genuína, autônoma e autógena, em função dos interesses de classe e a ter em vista a excelência dos serviços públicos; o fenômeno estudado, inversamente, mostra o processamento de uma luta sindical radicada em estrutura antidemocrática, em que o Estado financia os sindicatos e todo o aparelhamento sindical vertical, via contribuição sindical e a considerar que esse lastro sustentador da luta sindical é decalque de uma época de predominância de valores chauvinistas, exaltados no Brasil - e em outros países -, nas décadas de 30 e 40. Ainda foi feito um estudo comparativo com três modelos de sindicalismo, quais sejam: o francês, o alemão e o português. Os dois primeiros por razões de se constituirem em paradigmas de países centrais, tendo em vista que: (1) a França é modelo inspirador das instituições ocidentais, em sede político-jurídico-social, haja vista a sua História prenhe de fatos solapadores do statu quo ante; e (2) a Alemanha, por ter uma classe eficazmente institucionalizada de agentes públicos, tendo tradição araigada desde a burocracia prussiana, o que dá o toque de elevado profissionalismo a esses agentes públicos, os quais contam com uma agremiação sindical que guarda independência com relação ao movimento sindical do trabalhador privado, este, também consolidado em poderosa organização sindical naquele país. Portugal aparece no trabalho como o ascendente cultural do Brasil, o que implica em ser mostrado o nascedouro sindical desse país, dentro do clima cultural em que viveu e vive a península lusitana, e com isso se tenta elucidar o estágio de seu sindicalismo, as suas disfunções e auto funções , as suas semelhanças com o modelo brasileiro, as suas inclinações e natureza. As conclusões aferidas registram alguns aspectos relevantes: 1º) o Brasil nasceu de uma Administração centralizadora, marcada por uma máquina administrativa ineficaz, ineficiente, com a marca do Estato-império e sem a presença da construção concomitante de uma nação que é retardatária no assentar a viga da cidadania, o que levou a delongar a formação dos anseios e do espírito genuinamente autóctones. A repressão ao desenvolvimento das letras foi um entrave à criação de um espírito de povo, com a variante de ser uma maioria inculta, massacrantemente iletrada, em meio a uma pirâmide social em que se registrava apenas uma base desmesurada e um vértice acanhado, sem ter de permeio outras classes sociais que pudessem ser ou vir a ser estratificadas. Na esteira desses elementos, concluiu-se que: 2º) o movimento associativo é uma realidade incipiente e adormecido durante séculos, o que desbordou em uma apatia que só hoje começa a ser sacudida, através dos movimentos associativistas e sindical, este último nascido no meio das fábricas e estendido a algumas capitais de maior relevância política ou de maior peso econômico. o aspecto de maior magnitude para o trabalho foi a sinalização aberta aos servidores públicos para que se sindicalizassem, do que decorreu a conclusão de que essa ação precisa ser tangenciada e carreada a ser um movimento mais autenticamente ligado aos interesses da classe, pois por desvirtuamento contingencial em face da iniciante pouca expressão e inexperiência desse estamento, a ação sindical desses servidores sempre esteve à ilharga do movimento sindical do trabalhador privado, o qual tem outra linha de ação direcionada a interesses mais ligados ao conflito trabalho vs. capital, interesses esses que não se coadunam e nem se identificam com as aspirações e necessidades do funcionalismo público, mesmo que, muitas vezes, a questão do conflito desses agentes tenha uma interface no conjunto da pauta de reivindicação dos trabalhadores privados, ou seja, a questão salarial. O imperativo maior - e esta é a base da recomendação mais substancial - é conduzir a ação dos agentes públicos de forma heterodoxa na direção de se independentizar o movimento sindical desses agentes, a ser impulsionado pelas suas peculiaridades e por sua essencialidade ditada pela sua ontologia de servidores da coisa pública e tendo o público como sua clientela. Este é, em síntese, o caminho aqui trilhado.

OpenWordNet-PT: an open brazilian wordnet for reasoning

Brazilian Portuguese needs a Wordnet that is open access, downloadable and changeable, so that it can be improved by the community interested in using it for knowledge representation and automated deduction. This kind of resource is also very valuable to linguists and computer scientists interested in extracting and representing knowledge obtained from texts. We discuss briefly the reasons for a Brazilian Portuguese Wordnet and the process we used to get a preliminary version of such a resource. Then we discuss possible steps to improving our preliminary version.

Supply chain turbulence: the impact of a mid-range event in multi-tier, multi-dimension supply chains

Nota: A autora agradece à Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) pela concessão de bolsa de estudos para o desenvolvimento deste projeto de pesquisa.