Abstract When the history of raw silk is traced by following the thread of commodity formation and trade, our capacity to fully grasp the interactions among the insects, plants, and humans responsible for silk-making can become limited. The enormous economic significance of export-bound raw silk manufactured and directly traded from Japan mainly to US American […]
Abstract In many scientific fields, post-publication surveys of the literature find that peer reviewers routinely overlook methodological flaws and statistical errors, avoid reporting suspected instances of fraud, and commonly reach a level of agreement barely exceeding what would be expected by chance. Other studies expose the extent of gender bias in peer review, and questionable […]
Abstract: What if, at the 1927 Solvay conference, the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics had received a more sympathetic hearing? What if Charles Darwin had died on the Beagle voyage and so had never lived to write On the Origin of Species? What if the Oxford biologist W. F. R. Weldon hadn’t died of pneumonia […]
Abstract: Quantitative measurement in the human sciences remains both widespread and controversial. Are depression scales, intelligence tests, etc. valid measurement instruments? Do they deliver quantitative or merely ordinal information? I discuss two approaches for understanding practices of quantitative measurement of theoretical attributes in the early stages of research. One uses causal notions to characterize dispositional […]
Human beings are social and dependent creatures. We rely on friends, romantic partners, family, communities, therapists, and other confidantes for support, insight, and understanding. And yet, we have recently entered an era in which many now seek support from artificial agents powered by generative AI. These AI agents are increasingly used — by design or […]
Bio: Uncle Rob Cooley is a saltwater man with connections to Gamay-Botany Bay and the NSW South Coast. Currently, Uncle Rob is Senior Ranger and Leader of the Gamay Rangers, a group of Indigenous Rangers who undertake natural and cultural resource management activities on cultural areas within Gamay and on conservation land owned by the La […]
Abstract For more than ten years, concern about the impacts on human health of degradation of the earth’s life-support systems has been expressed in terms of ‘planetary health’. The current and future effects of climate change on health and well-being thus come under the rubric of planetary health. We realise now that the health of all […]
Abstract: “Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South” documents the impact of racial segregation and the fight for medical civil rights in the state psychiatric hospitals in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi between 1948 and 1972. Drawing on extensive archival and legal records, as well as first-hand accounts, Kylie Smith explores the […]
Abstract: In the 1950s an alarming response to technocratic medicine emerged: patients were suffering severe, often fatal gut infections as a result of antibiotic treatment. This talk describes how in the 1960s-1970s, research into the problem revealed that the indigenous microbial flora of the gut play a major role in protection from disease, and thus established one […]
Abstract: There is a growing recognition in the twenty-first century of our dependence on microbes for virtually every aspect of the way we live, including how we grow our food, heal our bodies, and sustain our environment. Yet, microbes are different from other targets of conservation, such as butterflies and elephants: We feel differently about […]
Abstract: ‘Pleonexia’ is an ancient Greek term that means taking or wanting to take more than is one’s due, or avoiding or wanting to avoid contributing what one justly owes. It is often translated as ‘greed,’ though it is more complex than an idea of greed like uncontrolled appetites, gluttony, or avarice. It is also […]
Effie Karageorgos Abstract: In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association published the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), which introduced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new psychiatric category applicable to both civilian and veteran trauma. PTSD differed from previous DSM classifications such as ‘gross stress reaction’ in DSM-I of 1952 […]
