Life Sustains Life 1. Value: Social and Ecological

I would like to address the question of social and ecological value by bringing two approaches to this question into conversation with one another and show their connections. The two approaches are those of Jonathan Schell and Akeel Bilgrami. The connection between the two approaches is their shared interest in the ‘conditions that sustain life’ on earth. The answer to the question of what are the conditions that sustain life is, in my opinion, ‘life sustains life’: that is, living ecological systems sustain themselves and the living systems with which they interact (symbiosis)

Communication Networks, Hegemony, and Communicative Action

Communicative action now commonly takes place in electronically mediated global networks and the networks are a powerful form of social ordering. This article analyzes the different forms of power that operate in communicative networks and how these alter communicative action. It suggests that the more optimistic literature on global and network governance, arguing and bargaining, and soft norm generation has not taken these new modes of hegemony fully into account. An analysis of the possible forms of communicative freedom in networks rounds off the article.sovereignty; identity; multilevel governance; Europeanization

Life Sustains Life 2. The ways of re-engagement with the living earth

This article argues that we need to learn from the living earth how living systems sustain themselves and use this knowledge to transform our unsustainable and destructive social systems into sustainable and symbiotic systems within systems. I first set out what I take to be four central features of sustainable living systems according to the life and earth sciences. Secondly, I set out what I take to be the main features of our unsustainable social system that cause damage to the ecosphere on the one hand and give rise to the illusion of independence from it on the other hand. I then turn to several ways of responding to the sustainability crisis that are informed by this way of thinking about our interdependent relationship in and with ecosocial systems. These are ways of dis-engaging from our unsustainable practices, beginning to engage in practices of re-engaging and reconnecting socially and ecologically, and thus beginning to bring into being unalienated and sustainable ways of life on earth. If the symbiotic interdependency thesis of the first section is true, then participants in these connecting practices should be empowered in reciprocity by the interdependent relationships they connect with, and thus initiate expanding virtuous cycles. This reciprocal empowerment is discussed in the final section

A New Kind of Europe? Democratic Integration in the European Union

The most urgent problem facing the European Union is to develop the best approach to conflicts over integration in the fields of culture, economics and foreign policy. The paper argues that a particular form of democratic integration is better than the two predominant approaches. This approach draws on the actual practices of the democratic negotiation of integration that citizens engage in on a daily basis but which tend to be overlooked and overridden in the dominant approaches.economics; democracy; law; diversity/homogeneity

La conception républicaine de la citoyenneté dans les sociétés multiculturelles et multinationales

Les notions républicaines de liberté des citoyens et de liberté des peuples sont d’une aide précieuse pour qui veut comprendre les luttes contemporaines pour la reconnaissance. Ces luttes visent à modifier les normes, jugées trop contraignantes, qui régissent la participation des citoyens. La solution n’est pas, comme le croient les auteurs libéraux, de définir une fois pour toutes les normes régissant la participation dans les milieux multiculturels, puisque les différences identitaires chères aux citoyens changent avec le temps. Il s’agit plutôt d’instituer une forme de démocratie constitutionnelle dont les normes publiques de reconnaissance des citoyens ne sont pas fixes mais souples et au sein de laquelle les citoyens seraient libres de contester, de négocier et de modifier les normes dominantes de la participation. La réponse ne réside pas dans une théorie de la justice, mais dans des pratiques républicaines de liberté renouvelées.The republican notions of freedom of citizens and of peoples enable us to better understand contemporary struggles for recognition. These struggles seek to modify the prevailing norms governing citizen participation on the ground that they unnecessarily constrain the ways in which citizens are able to participate. The solution is not to try to determine the just norms of participation in conditions of cultural diversity once and for all, as liberal theorists assume, for the identity-related differences that matter to citizens change over time. Rather, the solution is to develop a form of constitutional democracy in which the norms of public recognition of citizens are not fixed but flexible and in which the citizens themselves are always free to challenge, negotiate and modify the prevailing norms governing participation. The solution is not to be found in a theory of justice but in modified republican practices of freedom

Large-Scale Simulations of Plastic Neural Networks on Neuromorphic Hardware

SpiNNaker is a digital, neuromorphic architecture designed for simulating large-scale spiking neural networks at speeds close to biological real-time. Rather than using bespoke analog or digital hardware, the basic computational unit of a SpiNNaker system is a general-purpose ARM processor, allowing it to be programmed to simulate a wide variety of neuron and synapse models. This flexibility is particularly valuable in the study of biological plasticity phenomena. A recently proposed learning rule based on the Bayesian Confidence Propagation Neural Network (BCPNN) paradigm offers a generic framework for modeling the interaction of different plasticity mechanisms using spiking neurons. However, it can be computationally expensive to simulate large networks with BCPNN learning since it requires multiple state variables for each synapse, each of which needs to be updated every simulation time-step. We discuss the trade-offs in efficiency and accuracy involved in developing an event-based BCPNN implementation for SpiNNaker based on an analytical solution to the BCPNN equations, and detail the steps taken to fit this within the limited computational and memory resources of the SpiNNaker architecture. We demonstrate this learning rule by learning temporal sequences of neural activity within a recurrent attractor network which we simulate at scales of up to 20000 neurons and 51200000 plastic synapses: the largest plastic neural network ever to be simulated on neuromorphic hardware. We also run a comparable simulation on a Cray XC-30 supercomputer system and find that, if it is to match the run-time of our SpiNNaker simulation, the super computer system uses approximately more power. This suggests that cheaper, more power efficient neuromorphic systems are becoming useful discovery tools in the study of plasticity in large-scale brain models

Quinoline synthesis: scope and regiochemistry of photocyclisation of substituted benzylidenecyclopentanone O-alkyl and O-acetyloximes

Irradiation of substituted 2-benzylidenecyclopentanone O-alkyl and O-acetyloximes in methanol provides a convenient synthesis of alkyl, alkoxy, hydroxy, acetoxy, amino, dimethylamino and benzo substituted annulated quinolines. para-Substituents yield 6-substituted-2,3-dihydro-1H-cyclopenta[b]quinolines with 8-substituted products being obtained from ortho-substituted starting materials. Reactions of meta-substituted precursors are highly regioselective, with alkyl substituents leading to 5-substituted 2,3-dihydro-1H-cyclopenta[b]quinolines and more strongly electron-donating substituents generally resulting in 7-substituted products. 2-Furylmethylene and 2-thienylmethylene analogues yield annulated furo- and thieno-[2,3e]pyridines respectively. Sequential E- to Z-benzylidene group isomerisation and six [pi]-electron cyclisation steps result in formation of a short-lived dihydroquinoline intermediate which spontaneously aromatises by elimination of an alcohol or acetic acid. For 2-benzylidenecyclopentanone O-allyloxime, singlet excited states are involved in both steps

Broadening of Spectral Lines due to Dynamic Multiple Scattering and the Tully-Fisher Relation

The frequency shift of spectral lines is most often explained by the Doppler Effect in terms of relative motion, whereas the Doppler broadening of a particular line mainly depends on the absolute temperature. The Wolf effect on the other hand deals with the correlation induced spectral change and explains both the broadening and shift of the spectral lines. In this framework a relation between the width of the spectral line is related to the redshift z for the line and hence with the distance. For smaller values of z a relation similar to the Tully-Fisher relation can be obtained and for larger values of z a more general relation can be constructed. The derivation of this kind of relation based on dynamic multiple scattering theory may play a significant role in explaining the overall spectra of quasi stellar objects. We emphasize that this mechanism is not applicable for nearby galaxies, $z \leq 1$.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, revised Version has been submitted to Physical Review A. (2nd author's affiliation corrected