text:
In pictures: Syrian refugees left in the cold
Residents of the Domiz refugee camp in Iraq's Kurdistan region prepare for winter.
by Khaled Hasan
Sat Nov 30 2013 08:15:43 GMT+0000
The youngest children in the Domiz refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan are not aware of the conflict in Syria. To them, the camp is their home.
The number of Syrian refugees in Iraq's Kurdistan region has reached 200,000. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) expects that the number may exceed 500,000 by the end of 2013.
There are about 80,000 refugees currently living in the Domiz camp, 20km southeast of Dohuk city and about 60km from the Syria-Iraq border.
Local authorities established the camp in April 2012. The Kurdish security police ensure security there and in the surrounding areas.
The authorities are keeping the borders open for Syrians of Kurdish origin. Refugees walk the three-mile dirt road snaking through no-man's land to the Kurdish region of Iraq. The Sahela border crossing is the main escape route for Syrians of Kurdish origin.
"When a country is physically destroyed, its people dying and fleeing and a state and its services collapsing, the most important thing a neighbour can do is to keep the borders open. The Kurdistan region is an anchor of peace and stability in a very troubled part of the world," António Guterres, UNHCR chief, said.
Guterres called the Syria conflict the "worst threat to global peace and security since the last century. We are witnessing death and destruction, the collapse of the state and the enormous suffering of the people".
He noted that all relief agencies are dramatically underfunded at a time when millions of Syrians are in need of humanitarian assistance inside Syria and the number of refugees is fast approaching two million.
Winter has come. Syrian people are waiting to collect blankets and heaters to save them from the cold.
In the Domiz refugee camp, the UNHCR supports all Syrian refugee families who enter its gates.
Child refugees are seen playing outside on the ground and with sand.
Bayan Naeef Abd Al Rahman, 19, lives with her family in the Domiz camp. After arriving in Kurdistan she left school and is now taking a short course in English. Her dream is to go to Europe.
Inside the camp, people who have enough money are building new houses. But there is apparently no discrimination between the rich and poor.
A mother takes her children for a walk inside the camp.
Refugees in the camp say that, at first, the conflicts in Syria started between locals and then slowly spread to the rest of the country.
Life in the camp is good but the future does not seem too bright for its youngest members.


text:
Dagger Doom
Dagger Doom can be found in
By Anthony Field
Author of "Dealing Death," "Murder at Ballston Spa," etc.
With a Knife at His Throat, Old Silas Mercer Had to Agree to Give Up His
Precious Formula—and Then . . .
OLD SILAS MERCER'S crude log cabin sat, dim, dark and foreboding, in a small clearing at the edge of the woods six miles from Ladville.
The sole means of approach was a narrow, winding mountain trail which could only be traveled afoot.
It was too narrow and steep even for horses.
Old Silas was a character. No one in Ladville knew much about him. Old, halting, reticent, with a queer, faraway look in his deep-set eyes, he talked very little with anyone. And then never about himself.
All the townspeople knew that he lived alone in his cabin on the mountainside, with only an aged cat for companionship. Though the mountains about Ladville were rich with mineral streaks, it was a known fact that Old Silas never busied himself with pick or shovel, neither did he work with a pan washing for gold.
Yet, he had money.
Once every month he came into the post office at Ladville with a small package neatly lettered and sealed with wax, which he properly registered and sent to an address on Maiden Lane in New York City. The package was always the same size, always the same weight, and always took identically the same fee—thirty-seven cents.
Ten days later he would come into Ladville again, and ask for his mail at the General Delivery window. He always received a letter, and it was the same kind of a letter which he had been receiving every month since Clem Hawker had become postmaster, more years ago than he could remember.
WHEN the postmaster handed him the letter, he would invariably hold it up carefully to the light, shake the contents down to one end, then rip open the other end of the envelope.
The letter always contained a money order, but unlike the letter or the package, he had mailed previously, the amount varied. It varied from $187.50, which was the smallest amount the postmaster could remember, to $234.35, which was the largest.
Old Silas had always endorsed and cashed these money orders as soon as he received them.
"Could you...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
define(
({
	"clearFilterDialogTitle": "Brisanje filtera",
	"filterDefDialogTitle": "Filter",
	"ruleTitleTemplate": "Pravilo ${0}",

	"conditionEqual": "jednako",
	"conditionNotEqual": "nije jednako",
	"conditionLess": "je manje od",
	"conditionLessEqual": "manje ili jednako",
	"conditionLarger": "je veće od",
	"conditionLargerEqual": "veće ili jednako",
	"conditionContains": "sadrži",
	"conditionIs": "je",
	"conditionStartsWith": "počinje sa",
	"conditionEndWith": "završava sa",
	"conditionNotContain": "ne sadrži",
	"conditionIsNot": "nije",
	"conditionNotStartWith": "ne počinje sa",
	"conditionNotEndWith": "ne završava sa",
	"conditionBefore": "prije",
	"conditionAfter": "poslije",
	"conditionRange": "raspon",
	"conditionIsEmpty": "je prazan",

	"all": "svi",
	"any": "bilo koji",
	"relationAll": "sva pravila",
	"waiRelAll": "Usporedi sva sljedeća pravila:",
	"relationAny": "bilo koja pravila",
	"waiRelAny": "Usporedi bilo koje od sljedećih pravila:",
	"relationMsgFront": "Usporedi:",
	"relationMsgTail": "",
	"and": "i",
	"or": "ili",

	"addRuleButton": "Bilo koje pravilo",
	"waiAddRuleButton": "Dodaj novo pravilo",
	"removeRuleButton": "Ukloni pravilo",
	"waiRemoveRuleButtonTemplate": "Ukloni pravilo ${0}",

	"cancelButton": "Opoziv",
	"waiCancelButton": "Opoziv ovog dijaloga",
	"clearButton": "Obriši",
	"waiClearButton": "Obriši filter",
	"filterButton": "Filter",
	"waiFilterButton": "Predaj filter",

	"columnSelectLabel": "Stupac",
	"waiColumnSelectTemplate": "Stupac za pravilo ${0}",
	"conditionSelectLabel": "Uvjet",
	"waiConditionSelectTemplate": "Uvjet za pravilo ${0}",
	"valueBoxLabel": "Vrijednost",
	"waiValueBoxTemplate": "Unesite vrijednost filtera za pravilo ${0}",

	"rangeTo": "do",
	"rangeTemplate": "od ${0} do ${1}",

	"statusTipHeaderColumn": "Stupac",
	"statusTipHeaderCondition": "Pravila",
	"statusTipTitle": "Traka filtera",
	"statusTipMsg": "Kliknite traku filtera za filtriranje po vrijednostima u ${0}.",
	"anycolumn": "bilo koji stupac",
	"statusTipTitleNoFilter": "Traka filtera",
	"statusTipTitleHasFilter": "Filter",
	"statusTipRelAny": "Usporedi bilo koja pravila.",
	"statusTipRelAll": "Usporedi sva pravila.",

	"defaultItemsName": "stavke",
	"filterBarMsgHasFilterTemplate": "${0} od ${1} ${2} prikazano.",
	"filterBarMsgNoFilterTemplate": "Filter nije primijenjen",

	"filterBarDefButton": "Definiraj filter",
	"waiFilterBarDefButton": "Filtriraj tablicu",
	"a11yFilterBarDefButton": "Filtriraj...",
	"filterBarClearButton": "Obriši filter",
	"waiFilterBarClearButton": "Obriši filter",
	"closeFilterBarBtn": "Zatvori traku filtera",

	"clearFilterMsg": "Ovo uklanja filter i prikazuje sve raspoložive slogove.",
	"anyColumnOption": "Bilo koji stupac",

	"trueLabel": "Istinito",
	"falseLabel": "Lažno"
})
);

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Turkish police have arrested 20 people suspected of links to the Islamic State group in Antalya a week before the city hosts a G20 summit, reports say. US President Barack Obama will be among the world leaders arriving in city on Turkey's southern coast for the summit on 15-16 November.
Two of the suspects arrested on Friday are said to be Russian. Turkey has stepped up operations against IS militants following a string of deadly bombings. Anti-terror police carried out simultaneous raids in three districts of Antalya early on Friday, local media said.
Officers reportedly seized "digital materials" during the operation. Violence has escalated in Turkey since a suicide bombing in July by suspected IS militants.
The attack near the border with Syria killed more than 30 Kurds. The IS group was also blamed for twin blasts that killed more than 100 people in Ankara last month.
Dabota Lawson Aku Shows Off Her Luxury Garage..


SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The judge overseeing the Biomet M2a Magnum hip multidistrict litigation has suggested that 12 cases be remanded to their transferor jurisdictions, explaining that they will no longer benefit from centralized proceedings.
In the March 28 orders, Judge Robert L. Miller Jr. explained that the remaining case-specific issues in the actions are best left to the transferor courts to decide. He added that no plaintiff has consented to trial of cases in the MDL court. The actions at issue are Draude, Eanes, Whitten, Johnson, Brewer, Burnett, Cottrell, Francis, Honeycutt, Lyon, Summers and McLevis.


text:
× January (11)
× October (2)
× Health policy (11)
Invited reviews (1)
× January 2019
× October 2019
× Health policy
Non-UK graduates less likely to be appointed to consultant posts, survey finds
Paediatricians who qualified from medical school in a non-UK country are less likely to be offered a consultant post than their UK-trained peers, according to survey of 155 doctors by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH).
RCPCH responds to impact of social media and screen-use report
Today, the Science and Technology Committee releases its latest report, Impact of social media and screen-use on young people's health. Dr Max Davie, RCPCH Officer for Health Promotion, responds.
Vice President election results announced
The RCPCH is pleased to announce the results of the recent Vice Presidential elections. Dr Simon Clark has been elected Vice President for Health Policy and Professor Nick Bishop has been elected Vice President for Science and Research. They will take up their posts on 6 March 2019.
Scoring change in 2019
Its only 25 days into the New Year (happy new year by the way) and it feels like 25 months have passed. We've seen the launch of the NHS Long Term Plan (England), launched our own screen time guidance and hosted a roundtable with three CMOs on social media use, launched our State of Child Health 201...
Children and young people voice
Child health high on the agenda, but political uncertainty and public health cuts pose risk to progress, warns RCPCH President
The RCPCH has published State of Child Health: Two Years On, which highlights progress made against the policy recommendations in our landmark State of Child Health 2017 report.
Turn policy to action and make the year of the young person a true success, says Scotland's lead paediatrician
Two years on from the launch of 'State of Child Health: Scotland,' the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) reviews policy progress.
Risk of derailment to excellent progress in child health, reveals new report
Welsh Government continues to prioritise child health but 'policies have to be delivered and enforced to reap the health benefits' says Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) in 'State of Child Health Wales: Two years on' report.
Welsh Government unveils proposals to tackle obesity
RCPCH's Officer for Wales welcomes the focus the proposals place on children and the early years but calls on the Government to move quickly to support children who need weight management support now.
RCPCH responds to launch of Government consultation on promotions of unhealthy food and drink
As part of its childhood obesity plan, Government has launched a consultation on restricting promotions of food and drink that is high in fat, sugar and salt.


text:
Technology can help when severe weather strikes
KNOXVILLE -- Last year, there were more than 1,200 tornadoes in the United States. When a tornado or severe thunderstorm approaches an area, a cell phone is an important tool during times of emergency.
"When severe weather strikes, our engineers work tirelessly to ensure that our high-speed nationwide network continues to run smoothly. We want to help our customers stay connected to the people and information that's important to them," said Jack Brundige, director of sales for U.S. Cellular in Tennessee. U.S. Cellular has the highest call quality and network satisfaction of nay national carrier.*
U.S. Cellular offers tips on how your cell phone can be a great tool during severe weather:
Stay charged up. Phones should be charged daily so that individuals have sufficient battery life when they need it. If driving, keep a car charger nearby to re-charge when you are on-the-go. If a battery starts to run out, U.S. Cellular customers can switch out their dead or dying battery for free at any U.S. Cellular store through the industry-leading Battery Swap program.
Have important numbers handy and back them up. Keep all the numbers for local emergency contacts and immediate family stored in a cell phone for easy access in an emergency. With the free My Contacts Backup application, U.S. Cellular customers can safely store valuable contact information online for easy retrieval, even if the phone is lost or damaged beyond repair.
Store "ICE" (In Case of Emergency) contacts in your phone. Simply program "ICE" in front of a person's name or title, such as "ICE Mom" or "ICE Dave," to help first responders quickly contact these important people. Make sure the ICE contact knows about any medical conditions that could affect emergency treatment for an individual, such as allergies or current medication.
Break through with texting. If phone service is disrupted by a high volume of calls during a storm, try sending a text message. Text messages take up less bandwidth than calls and often work when phone service is disrupted.
Rely on your phone to access websites and applications. When dealing with severe weather, staying up-to-date with forecasts is critical. Cell phones can instantly connect users to the Internet. Applications, such as The Weather Channel, can be downloaded for immediate access to weather information, as well as radar and satellite maps for more than 44,000 U.S. locations. There also are applications that can turn an Android-powered device, BlackBerry or Windows smartphone into useful tools such as a flashlight or a compass.
U.S. Cellular rewards its customers with the unmatched benefits of The Belief Project, an array of industry-leading innovations designed to elevate the customer experience. The Belief Project, named Frost & Sullivan's Customer Value Enhancement of the Year, complements the Chicago-based carrier's growing catalog of cutting-edge phones that are all backed by its high-speed nationwide network. U.S. Cellular was recently named a J.D. Power and Associates 2011 Customer Service Champion and was also named one of Forbes Magazine's 2010 "Most Trustworthy Companies." To learn more about U.S. Cellular, visit one of its retail stores or uscellular.com. You can also check out U.S. Cellular on Facebook.
*"Source: The Nielsen Company estimation based on an independent survey of 8,324 mobile phone users across U.S. Cellular's footprint between October 1, 2010 and December 31, 2010. Copyright 2010 The Nielsen Company."


text:
Time in Chinese
Last night I read Jo-Wang Lin's very interesting piece "Time in a Language Without Tense: the Case of Chinese" (from Journal of Semantics 23, 2005). As Lin points out, Chinese is well-known for not having any tense morphology. Here are some examples (from Lin):
John zuotian qu ni jia
John yesterday go you house
John hen mang
John very busy
John dai wo qu D.C.
John take me go D.C.
But how significant are the tense morphological differences between English and Chinese? Well, English has tense morphology. For instance, it has past tense morphology, as in 'John once bought a bike' or 'it once was the case that John bought a bike' (the second past tense inflection is vacuous or stylistic). Does English have present tense morphology? Well, there is a lot of disagreement about that. Of course, English has a progressive form, as in 'I am writing a blog post'. But Murvet Enc--a linguist famous for her work on tense--has recently told me that she thinks (and is going to argue) that there is no such thing as present tense morphology or operator (incidentally, I am thrilled to hear that, since Authur Prior--one of my heros--argued for that thesis many years ago). And we know that there is no future tense morphology in English. 'Will' and 'would' do not count as a future tense morphology. So the main difference between English and Chinese is that unlike Chinese, English has past tense morphology.
So how do Chinese speakers manage to indicate PAST vs PRESENT? It has sometimes been suggested that Chinese has unpronounced semantic tense features. But Lin argues that this is not so. Rather, Chinese makes use of (among other things) temporal adverbs (e.g. 'yesterday' and 'the year of 1996'), aspectual particles/markers, modal verbs ('will' and 'should'), and pragmatic background assumptions.
Here is just one example.
Mary he-guo jiu
Mary drink-ASPECT wine
'Mary drank wine before'
The aspectual marker 'guo' translates roughly as 'before'. 'Guo' indicates that the whole event (that of drinking wine) must have taken place before the time of speech.
Labels: Language
Tense, Scope, and Relative Clauses
The following sort of sentence, due to Kusumoto 1999, is fun to think about:
(1) Every faculty member failed to talk to a prospective student who (later) decided to go to Umass
(1) has two later-than-matrix interpretations where the time introduced by the past tense of the relative clause is later than the time introduced by the past tense of the matrix clause.
Prior-fans might try to account for these readings via Quantifier Raising. For example, it might be thought that, by Quantifier Raising, the noun phrase and the relative clause move out of the scope of the matrix clause as follows:
(1a) [a prospective student who (later) decided to go to UMass]i every faculty member failed to talk to ti
(1a) is ambiguous between: there is a prospective student who later decided to go to UMass (e.g. Amy) that no faculty member talked to, and for each faculty member there is a (possibly different) prospective student who later decided to go to UMass that s/he didn't talk to.
The problem is that (1) has a further reading which (1a) does not have, namely: no faculty member talked to any prospective student who later decided to go to UMass. (1a) does not have this reading because the bracketed material is outside the scope of the non-bracketed material. So Kusumoto suspects that the movement hypothesis is false.
However, it seems to me that the problem goes away on the plausible assumption that the noun phrase and relative clause can take narrow scope with respect to negation but wide scope with respect to the rest of the sentence.
Kusumoto, K. 1999. Tense in Embedded Contexts, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Shots from Copenhagen
Joe also took a couple of shots at the Copenhagen workshop.
Labels: Pictures
The Lemmings Suicide Myth
Did you think that Lemmings deliberately run over cliffs "in their millions, to be dashed to their deaths on the rocks below" or did you think that Lemmings are "crowds of [philosophers] who foolishly follow each other, lemming-like, regardless of the consequences"? Well, think again.
Revealed: What Really Went on in Stirling
Joe Salerno reveals: what really went on at the Epistemic Value conference in Stirling last week.
Labels: Conferences, Epistemology, Pictures
Riggs vs Pritchard on Luck
At the Stirling Epistemic Value conference Wayne Riggs presented a nice alternative to Duncan Pritchard's modal account of luck. One of the core cases Wayne wanted his account to handle was the following (I do not remember the details but do by all means go read Wayne's very interesting paper).
Indiana Jones and Missouri Smith are captured by natives who are going to kill them. Suddenly there is a total solar eclipse and the natives believe the gods want them to set Jones and Smith free. Smith says "we were really lucky that that eclipse occurred", to which Jones replies "lucky? Are you out of your mind? I knew well in advance that it would occur and would never have allowed them to capture us if it didn't". It seems that the occurrence of the eclipse was lucky for Smith but not for Jones.
But how can that be? Well, according to Wayne, even if one has no control over a given event, an event can be lucky if one exploited one's knowledge of the occurrence of the event in particular ways. On Wayne's account, an event is lucky for x iff x has no control over its occurrence, and x did not exploit its occurrence for particular purposes (Wayne's analysis contains a third condition which I will leave out here).
I like the account. However, one issue which came up at the conference is that if one takes the control and exploitation conditions to be necesary and sufficient for luck, then control but lack of exploitation would be sufficient for non-luck. But that seems wrong. Suppose, for instance, that John would win the race if only Mary didn't participate. It is within John's control to break Mary's leg, but he doesn't want to do that. So he fails to exploit his control. However suppose, by sheer coincidence, that Mary breaks her leg and that John wins. In that event we would want to say that John's victory is lucky and that Mary's breaking her leg is unlucky. So maybe we should simply get rid of the control condition and make do with the exploitation condition.
Labels: Conferences, Epistemology
The Analytic/Continental Distinction
Jason Stanley has an interesting post about the Analytic/Continental Distinction over at the Leiter Reports. According to Jason, though it is difficult to say who is analytic and who is not (he certainly wouldn't classify Shoemaker as analytic and Husserl as continental), he thinks that there is a distinction to be drawn between the two. As far as Jason is concerned, the main difference between analytic and continental philosophy is that continental philosophy, unlike analytic philosophy, is interested in giving historical and cultural explanations of the phenomena in question. For example, where an analytic philosopher might seek to identify the semantic contribution an expression makes to the semantic content of sentences in which it occurs, a continental philosopher might prefer to identify the historical and cultural reasons for its use.
I think there is much to be said for this way of looking at the distinction. In particular I do not think it is the subject matter in question that distinguishes analytic philosophy from continental (assuming that a distinction can be drawn). If anything it is the method used. Analytic philosophers like to look at the details, give "localized" arguments, and solve paradoxes. Continental philosophers like to look at the big picture, give global explanations, and identify paradoxes and tensions. But, to be honest, the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy never made any sense to me. What about drawing a new distinction between influential/non-influential articles/books or convincing/non-convincing articles/books. Any of those distinctions would clearly cut across any potential distinction between analytic and continental philosophy.
Labels: Resources for Students
Would-Be Native Speaker of English
The Danish political party the Radical Lefts have proposed that Denmark should introduce English as an official second language.
Klemens Kappel is less than optimistic about the Radical Lefts' influence on political decision-making in Denmark. He sent me this link (in Danish) which informs us that the right-wing parties won't go for the proposal. But it doesn't matter. Danes already treat English as an official second language, at least in the philosophy world.
NB: For the record: the Radical Lefts are neither very radical nor very much to the left, unfortunately.
Greco in St. Louis
John Greco has started his new job in St. Louis. I really look forward to having him here and to have the opportunity to learn from him.
Labels: Epistemology
Philosophers' Carnival # 34
As everyone else probably already noticed, Philosophers' Carnival # 34 is here.
Nussbaum vs. Mansfield on Manliness
Colleen Keating brought this discussion of Nussbaum's review of Mansfield's book Manliness to my attention.
Nussbaum's review is available here.
The following excerp from Nussbaum's review nicely illustrates the nature of Mansfield's claims:
"...Mansfield's assertions (I cannot quite call them arguments) seem to be as follows. Manliness, the quality of which John Wayne (says Mansfield) is the quintessential embodiment, is a characteristic that societies rightly value. But modern feminism wants a society that has effaced all distinctions of gender, a society in which men and women have the same traits. This is a dangerous mistake, because manly aggression, though not altogether reliable, supplies something without which we cannot have a good or stable society. (Mansfield connects manliness not only to military performance but also to the ability to govern a nation, and, as we have seen, he denies that women who are not Mrs. Thatcher have this trait.) Since women are only rarely capable of manliness, a society in which both sexes have the same traits will have to be lacking in manliness. We should reject this aim, and, with it, modern feminism".
"The second half of the book contains, as Mansfield has warned his reader, a more complex set of assertions, though they all lead to the same bottom line. Taking Theodore Roosevelt as his more complex icon of manliness, Mansfield notes that traditional John Wayne-style manliness is not necessarily combined with virtue. Indeed, traditional manliness is often linked to a Nietzschean sort of 'nihilism,' which accepts no restraints and desires to soar 'beyond good and evil.' (This reading of Nietzsche, like so many readings in the book, is not defended by any close look at an actual text. Is this the Nietzsche who prizes the disciplined virtue of the dancer, who teaches that laisser aller, the absence of restraint, is incompatible with any great achievement of any sort?) Theodore Roosevelt, though, did combine traditional manliness with virtue, thus showing that it is both possible and valuable to do so".
"On the whole, however, men will allow the constraints of virtue to drag down their manly flights only if women insist on virtue as a condition of sex. So women's non-manly inclinations hold men in check. This old saw, which one encounters over and over again in the writings of Leo Strauss's followers, seems to derive not from a realistic look at life but from an opportunistic reading of Rousseau's Emile, minus all Rousseau's complexity and nuance. Rousseau shows clearly that the difference between Emile and Sophie is produced by a coercive regime that curbs Sophie's intelligence and even her physical prowess - she would have beaten Emile in the race had she not had to run in those absurd clothes. He also demonstrated, in his unpublished conclusion to the Emile-Sophie story, that a marriage so contracted would be a dismal failure, since parties so utterly distinct in moral upbringing would be totally unable to understand one another".
"But back to feminism. Feminism (exemplified in Mansfield's book by a few carefully selected bits of early 1970s authors) wants women to reject virtue and to seek sexual satisfaction promiscuously. In effect, it teaches women to be as 'nihilistic' as men. But women are doomed to dismal failure at this task, because their manliness is puny. Meanwhile, they will lose the hold they once had on men through modesty and virtue. They will therefore be more endangered: Mansfield actually asserts that a woman can resist rape only with the aid of 'a certain ladylike modesty enabling her to take offense at unwanted encroachment'! (How does he handle the well-known fact that a large proportion of rapes are committed by men with whom the victim has already had an intimate relationship, or with whom she currently has one?) Society, meanwhile, will come to grief. So, once again, the lesson is that we ought to rid ourselves of feminism ..."
Nussbaum goes on to show in a rigorous fashion that Mansfield's claims are simply outrageous and false. Feminists do not want to "eradicate" gender distinctions; they are concerned with justice. Some feminists fight for pregnancy benefits from insurance companies, others fight for rape victims, and so on. As Nussbaum points out, feminists "have not typically sought a society in which there are no gender distinctions. They have challenged imposed and unchosen gender norms that interfere with women's freedom and functioning ... what feminists have sought above all is a society in which there are no sex-based hierarchies, in which the sheer luck of being born a female does not slot one into an inferior category for the purposes of basic political and social functioning".
Labels: Women and Race
Leiter on Journal Refereeing
Brian Leiter has posted an interesting post on In-house journal refereeing policies over at the Leiter Reports. What triggered the post was a letter by Dennett and Churchland that calls the refereeing practices of Journal of Philosophy and the Philosophical Review into question. The problem is that many of the papers submitted to these journals are not sent out to external referees but are refereed by department members who know the author's identity. This is indeed a problem, because one could imagine that certain groups of philosophers might be discriminated against due to these practices.
Then again, the philosophy world is very small and probably not very fair. Supervisors drop email notes to editors of book series or to old friends who are chairs of hiring committees, you run into people at conferences who think your choice of Scotch was so excellent that they would like you to send them your next book manuscript, your department chair likes your new hair cut, or your new blog for that matter, and gives you an early promotion. The list goes on and on. And then there is pedigree. A Princeton affiliation does seem better than a Never-Heard-of-Community-College affiliation, even if the person from Never-Heard-of-Community-College wrote a better article. The world is not fair. The philosophy world is not fair. I am not saying we should get over it. We definitely shouldn't. But we probably shouldn't put all the blame on the In-house journals. The problem is much deeper than refereeing practices.
Labels: Journals, Resources for Students
Time Adverbials in the Indonesian Language
Adam Arico has posted an interesting post over at Aspiring Lemming on time adverbials in the Indonesian language. According to Adam's informant, there are no basic tenses in the Indonesian language. A proper translation of 'I turned off the stove this morning' would amount to something like 'I turn off the stove this morning' or maybe 'I am turning off the stove this morning'. Interestingly, we do sometimes speak this way in English. Consider, for instance:
I am giving a talk in Aberdeen in July
I am in Stirling in August
Carrie is visiting ANU in the fall, etc.
Adam considers the possibility that the time adverbials in the Indonesian language function as Priorean tense operators. I suspect they don't. Or at least, if the time adverbials in the Indonesian language function in the same way as the time adverbials in English, then I would be prepared to argue that they do not function as sentential operators. But then again, I don't know the Indonesian language. Does anyone know of any studies on this?
Kraut Sparks Emotions
My earlier Philosophy of ... post and Robert Kraut's claim that music does not express emotions have initiated some debate over at Bean's Philosophy Blog War and the Dreaming Track.
Transatlantic Flights in the Post-Liquid Era
I finally returned from my trip to Europe. I was only gone for 2 weeks but it feels like ages, maybe because my department went from "barely alive" to its usual new school year activity levels. The conferences I went to (in Stirling and Copenhagen) turned out to be fantastic. I met a number of new people and learned a lot, and I am grateful to Duncan Pritchard, Lars Bo Gundersen and Klemens Kappel for organizing the events.
So what about the flights? They weren't too bad. Some of the conference participants left before they lifted the "no hand bag" restriction for flights to the UK. But laptops are apparently more resistant than one would have thought.
The airlines haven't yet adjusted to the "no liquid" restrictions. I went with Continental. They ran out of bottled water after 4 hours (half-way). The passengers were thirsty. The flight attendants assured us that it was safe to drink the water in the rest rooms. I could have sworn that there was a sign in the rest room above the sink saying "do not drink the tap water". But if it was ever there, it had been removed. So I drank it, and I was fine. It was only later that I read that 25% of the tap water on flights contains excessive amounts of coli bateria. I wonder whether the many infants on the plane whose mothers had to mix the rest room water with baby formula were feeling equally great about this.
On the way back I made sure to drink plenty of water in the "sterile area" at the gate before boarding. I brought my own EMPTY water bottle. They removed the cap at the screening point. Why? Because otherwise I could fill it at the water fountains in the sterile area and hide it in my hand luggage. But in the sterile area you could buy bottled water with caps and hide it in your hand luggage. They never checked again. So the cap removal policy at the screening point was apparently "all show".
There were a couple of other surprises on the trip. Joe Salerno, my fellow traveller, got detained on his way into Scotland. The problem was a little inconsistency. They asked me whether we "worked together". I said "no, we are going to a conference". Joe said "define 'working together' ". Then the officer wanted a detailed account of the conference we were allegedly going to. Joe thought she was just small-talking. She was not! But half an hour later he got off the hook and we could continue our trip to Stirling.
Copenhagen had lifted the "no liquid, no gel, no cream" restrictions, except for flights to Heathrow. But, to my surprise, they had added a new restriction. A "taste anything liquid, creamy, or gel-y" restriction. Try tasting hair gel or night cream. Yuk!
Danish Epistemology Workshop (Salerno)
[crossposted from knowability]
The Danish Epistemology Network, Namicona, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen hosted an epistemology workshop on August 22. Speakers included Lars Gundersen (Aarhus), Jesper Kallestrup (Edinburgh), Berit Brogaard and yours truly.
Gundersen developed an account of why neither disjunctivism nor contextualism has the resources for dealing adequately with "abominable conjunctions". The natural way for these theories to deal with such conjunctions leaves them vulnerable when we reformulate the conjunctions in terms of claimability/assertibility: (1) it is claimable that I know that p (where p is some ordinary proposition); (2) if it's claimable that p and claimable that p entails q, then it is claimable that q; and (3) it is not claimable that I know that q (where q is the negation of the skeptical hypothesis).
Kallestrup's paper, "Reliabilist Justification: Basic, Easy and Brute" a way of blocking track-record versions of the easy knowledge objection. The key is to motivate a Wrightian restriction on the transmission of justification across valid deduction. Doing so blocks the very first inferential step in the track-record/bootstrapping arguments.
Brogaard in her presentation "In Defense of a Perspectival Semantics for 'Knows'" first defends relativism against objections (including Stanley's objections that it cannot accommodate the factivity of 'knows' and that it entails that circumstances of evaluation have features that cannot be shifted by any intensional operator), but then shows that a perspectivalist semantics can do all the same work without relativizing sentence truth to contexts of assessment.
I presented "Knowability Noir: 1945-1963", which evaluates an unpublished debate between Fitch and Church in 1945. Their debate was primarily over the effectiveness of the proof we today call the "knowability paradox". My primary concern was to offer an account of what Fitch perceived to be the significance of the proof in his 1963 paper. I argued that the significance was to draw general and special lessons about how to avoid conditional fallacies in philosophical analysis.
Posted by Joe Salerno at 11:02 AM 0 comments
Labels: Conferences
Epistemic Value: Day 2 (Salerno)
The final day of the epistemic value conference included a paper by Ward Jones. He developed some ideas about the nature of doxastic goods in his attempt to say what it is that makes knowledge valuable. Pascal Engel's position was that none of the arguments for pragmatic encroachment on truth, evidence, justification or knowledge work. Christian Piller argued that our interest in truth is not captured by the idea that we desire to believe all and only truths. In particular, he argued, that we do not wish to believe only truths. And Martin Kusch developed an account of the social value of knowledge partially in terms of a very interesting fictional geneology of a proto-concept of knowledge.
[cross posted from Knowability]
Highlights from a full day of interesting talks at the epistemic value conference:
Wayne Riggs developed a conception of epistemic luck to compliment his credit approach to the value problem. Much use was made of Jennifer Lackey's published criticisms of the credit approach and her criticisms of Pritchard's theory of luck.
Matt Weiner explained that knowledge is like a Swiss army knife. Its value is derivative of the value of its components. Moreover, knowledge is not more valuable that any of its proper parts. Matt's positions hinged on the connections between knowledge and practical rationality.
Berit Brogaard argued that a perspectivalist semantics supports epistemic value monism better than does contextualism or relativism. Along the way she denies that there are any genuinely relative truths.
Mark Kaplan came to terms with human fallibility by arguing that a determination of one's confidence that p does not determine her opinion regarding p; "being confident" is different from "being willing to say". Without paradox I can take it to be highly likely, say, that there are errors in my book, even though I endorse all of the claims therein.
There were other interesting talks as well. Must get some sleep before tomorrow's marathon.
Posted by Joe Salerno at 9:20 PM 0 comments
Epistemic Value Conference: Day 0 (Salerno)
Today was the pre-conference workshop on epistemic value at the University of Stirling. Stephen Grimm set up a dilemma for epistemic value monism. Either epistemic appraisals apply only to "interesting truths" (Alston, Goldman) or they apply to all truths equally (Lynch). If the former, then absurdly epistemic appraisals such as 'is justified' do not apply to uninteresting true beliefs. If the latter, then believing that there are n blades of grass in the yard is absurdly as valuable as any other belief.
Jason Baehr argued that the guiding intuition behind the value problem does not warrant the standard formality and generality constraints on a solution. That is, the intuition that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief does not motivate the traditional thought that one or more components of knowledge must have "truth-independent" value or the thought that knowledge is always more valuable than true belief.
Jay Wood discussed a wide spectrum of epistemic values and argued against a sharp distinction between epistemic and moral value.
Posted by Joe Salerno at 11:58 PM 0 comments
Going to Europe
I am giving a couple of talks in Stirling and Copenhagen over the next couple of weeks. My talk in Stirling will be based on this paper (in progress) on relativism and the epistemic goal, and my talk in Copenhagen will be based on this paper (also in progress). Among other things, I here offer an extended reply to Jason Stanley's criticism of relativism about 'know'. Because I'll be away, blogging will be sporadic for the next couple of weeks. But I will be reporting from both conferences if I can get internet access.
Adverb-ly speaking
Lewis famously argued that 'strictly speaking' is an index-shifting operator just like 'it was the case that' and 'it is possible that'. But there are dozens of operators of the form: ADVERB + 'speaking'. Consider, for instance:
Roughly speaking
Literally speaking
Figuratively speaking
Ideally speaking
Less than ideally speaking
Relatively speaking
Seriously speaking
Graphically speaking
What role do these prefixes and the corresponding adverbs play in the semantics and/or pragmatics? Are they simply tools for indicating the speaker's intentions when the speaker's intentions are less than clear? Or do they function as index-shifting operators, as Lewis thought? My guess is that it will depend on the adverb in question. Some operators (e.g., 'literally speaking' and 'frankly speaking') and the corresponding adverbs are probably just tools for making one's assertive intentions clear to the hearer. Other operators (e.g., 'generally speaking' and 'ideally speaking') and the corresponding adverbs seem to function as index shifting operators of sorts. Consider, for instance:
(1) Ideally, all books would be water proof.
In (1), 'ideally' seems to shift the world in the index to some world where things are ideal.
But if there are two sorts of ADVERB + 'speaking' , then the question arises, was Lewis right that 'strictly speaking' is an index-shifting operator? Or should 'strictly speaking' be treated as a discourse marker of sorts?
King and Stanley on Truth-Conditional Pragmatics
Last night I read Jeffrey King and Jason Stanley's very interesting piece Semantics, Pragmatics, and the Role of Semantic Content. Jeff and Jason raise various concerns about certain forms of semantic minimalism and truth-conditional pragmatics. Let me try to re-formulate one of their concerns about one form of truth-conditional pragmatics in my own words.
Truth-conditional pragmatics distinguishes between the semantic content of a sentence relative to context and the speech act content of a sentence relative to context. The speech act content of a sentence relative to context is the content asserted by the speaker in that context. A sentence is true relative to a context c, on this account, iff the speech act content of the sentence at c is true at the index determined by c.
The worry now is this. Though the semantic content can be defined, it seems to play no significant role in the semantics. As we have just seen, it plays no role in the definition of truth-at-a-context. Admittedly, it does constrain what a sentence can be used to assert. But this feature of semantic content is pragmatic not semantic.
I think, however, that defenders of truth-conditional pragmatics may reply as follows. Consider the following analogy. One might worry that certain forms of eternalism run into similar trouble. Take, for instance:
(1) John is nice.
Given certain forms of eternalism, the semantic content of (1) relative to a context is the temporal content that John is nice (no time constituents). But the speech act content of (1) relative to a context is an eternal proposition, viz. the proposition that John is nice at t*, where t* is the time of speech. But now, one might ask, what role does the temporal content play in the semantics? Well, the eternalist will say, the temporal content does in fact play an important role in the semantics: it is the sort of content that tense operators operate on.
Perhaps defenders of truth-conditional pragmatics could reply in a similar way. Consider, for instance:
(2) France is hexagonal
Some defenders of truth-conditional pragmatics broadly defined (for instance, Soames in recent work) would say that the speech act content of (2) relative to a normal context is the proposition that France is roughly hexagonal. The semantic content of (2) is the content that France is hexagonal. Does the semantic content play a role in the semantics? Yes, it does. For 'strictly speaking' and 'loosely speaking' operate on the semantic content. As Lewis pointed out, 'Loosely speaking, France is hexagonal' is true under high standards of precision iff the semantic content of 'France is hexogonal' is true under low standards of precision.
Of course, this reply may not work in every case, but at least it is not obvious that the semantic content plays no role in the semantics just because it does not play a role in the formulation of truth-conditions for occurrences of sentences.
Stanley on the Conception of the Humanities in the United States
Stanley has an interesting post on the conception of the humanities in the U.S. Basically he is arguing that it isn't the nature of current philosophical inquiry that's responsible for the "unique American attitude" towards philosophy prevailing in America but rather people's conception of the humanities.
More on 'Many' and 'Few'
It is well-known that sentences containing 'many' and 'few' are in some way context-sensitive. Consider, for instance:
(1) Few German linguists applied
If the topic of the discourse is last year's applicants compared to this year's applicants, then we would tend to interpret (1) as meaning that few German linguists applied this year compared to last year. Here is another example:
(2) Few philosophers have a blog.
Compare: "few philosophers have a blog. The rest are doing more serious work" and "most linguists have a blog, but few philosophers have one". In the first case (2) gets read as "there are few philosophers with a blog compared to philosophers without a blog". In the second case (2) gets read as "there are few philosophers with a blog compared to linguists with a blog"
But what exactly makes sentences with 'few' and 'many' context-sensitive? Are 'few F' and 'many F' indexical in a broad sense? Are their extensions contextually variable but their contents contextually invariant? Or does the context-sensitivity simply reflect a difference in what the sentences are used to assert?
Kai on 'Must' and 'Ought'
Kai von Fintel has posted a funny cartoon that illustrates the difference between 'must' and 'ought'.
He also has a new paper on epistemic modals, co-authored with Thony Gillies.
Have you ever been gettiered?
Back in grad school in the late 90s I would usually visit Denmark in the summer. One time I came back earlier than expected. My friend Kelly called. "I knew you were back", she said, "I saw Mike with a pack of Danish cigarettes". At the time I wold usually bring back Danish cigarettes for friends. But this time around I didn't. Some other Dane had given them to Mike.
Trip to Europe
I am getting ready for a couple of conferences in Europe. The first is the Epistemic Value conference in Stirling. The second is a mini-Epistemology conference in Copenhagen, sponsored by NAMICONA. I hope to be reporting from both confrences (if I can get internet access).
Partee Sentences
Another kind of sentence that is fun to think about is the following Partee sentence:
(1) If you were king, you would cut off the head of everyone who offended you.
Partee thinks that (1) is ambiguous between a transparent interpretation where 'everyone who offended you' denotes everyone who offended you in the past in the actual world, and an opaque interpretation where it denotes everyone who offended you in a non-actual world where you are king. On Partee's proposal, we can get the transparent reading by assuming that the past tense refers to some actual past time. So Partee predicts the following two readings ([]--> is the subjunctive conditional, @ is a past time in the actual world, K is 'is king', O is 'offend', C is 'cut off the head of', and 'y' refers to you). I am ignoring the past tense on the Opaque reading:
Opaque: Ky []--> (x)(xOy --> yCx)
Transparent: Ky []--> (x)(xOy@ --> yCx)
What is special about Partee's analysis is that she takes the tenses to be similar to pronouns, and on the transparent reading the past tense refers to an actual past time. Given a Prior-style approach, on the other hand, we should probably assume that there is (optional) movement of the nominal + relative clause. So we get (P is past):
Transparent: (x)(PxOy --> (Ky []--> yCx))
The two formulations of the transparent reading differ in that the Prior-style formalization entails that for everyone in the actual world @ who offended you, you cut off their heads in the king-world w, while the Partee-style formalization entails only that for everyone in the actual world @ who offended you and who exists in w, you cut off their heads in w. As Dave has pointed out to me, these analyses are not equivalent unless the converse Barcan formula obtains (the converse Barcan formula entails that nothing in the actual world could have failed to exist).
Chappell's Book Mashup
Let's play Richard Chappell's Book Mashup game over here as well.
Chappell's Mashup Game Rules:
Make a new title by rearranging and combining the titles of two books, adding punctuation as needed.
Chappell's examples:
- Crime, Reason, and the Realm of Punishment
- From Animal Ethics to Farm Metaphysics
- Beyond Liberty: on good and evil
Here are some further suggestions:
- Either Truth and/or Objectivity
- Being Green: Eggs and Ham, and Nothingness
- Knowledge, the Conscious Mind, and its Limits
In fact, let us loosen the rules a bit:
Make a new title by rearranging and combining the titles of two or three (well-known) articles, books, or movies, adding punctuation as needed.
Around the Blogosphere
At what point does a country have enough universities? You can find Jonathan Wolff's discussion of the issue here
As Aidan points out, three metaphysicians at Leeds have recently started a new blog called Metaphysical Values.
Gillian has an interesting post about self-control over at TAR.
A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000. True or false? Read Mark Liberman's answer here.
Coming soon: mini-interview with Lindsay Beyerstein from Majikthise.
Kamp/Vlach Sentences Again
Consider the following sentences:
(1) One day, all persons alive now will be dead
(2) Once all persons alive then would be dead
Sentences like (1) and (2) can familiarly be translated using Hans Kamp's doubly indexed N operator, and Frank Vlach's doubly indexed K operator. Kamp's N operator shifts the time of evaluation for the sentence it embeds to the time of reference (which may or may not be the time of speech). Vlach's K operator is used in combination with the N operator. The K operator stores the time introduced by a past tense operator that embeds it, and the N operator is used to retrieve the stored time. (1) and (2) can be analyzed as follows (F is future, and P is past):
(1a) F(for all persons x: (N(Ax) --> Dx))
(2a) P K F (for all persons x: (N(Ax) --> Dx))
However, I think there is a simpler way to translate (1) and (2), for instance (where X is a plural variable):
(1b) For all persons X, F(the Xs do not exist).
(2b) It was the case that (for all persons X, F(the Xs do not exist)).
Danish Cartoons: Racist Provocation or Free Speech?
Ever wondered what the Danish cartoon controversy was really about? This article from Green Left Weekly gives an interesting perspective on the controversy.
Belief Reports and Enriched Indices
I am still thinking about belief reports. As mentioned earlier, I like the description theory defended by Kent Bach. On the description theory, 'that' clauses are not semantically singular terms; they do not refer to exact belief contents; they merely describe them. The description theory is committed to (i) the truth-value of 'S believes p' varies with context; or more precisely: it varies with the standards for belief description salient in the context, and (ii) 'S believes p' ascribes a dyadic relation. But (i) and (ii) are compatible with at least two different theories. On one theory, 'S believes that p' has different contents in different contexts. On another, 'S believes that p' has the same content in all contexts (unless 'p' contains indexical terms like 'I') but its extension varies across contexts. Kent says he holds the second view. But on the second view, I think that we need standards for belief description in the index. To see this, consider:
(1) Peter believes that Paderewski has musical talent
(2) Peter disbelieves that Paderewski has musical talent
Assume the second view. And assume for reductio that the index is a pair of a time and a world. On the second view, (1) and (2) can both be true in different contexts where different standards for belief description obtain (in one context we might be intending to describe the exact content Peter believes that Paderewski, the musician, has musical talent, in another context we might be intending to describe the exact content Peter disbelieves that Paderewski, the statesman, has musical talent). Moreover, since (1) and (2) do not contain any indexicals, (1) and (2) have the same contents in all contexts. So, if the index is a pair of a world and a time, then the semantic contents of (1) and (2) may both be true at one and the same index. So, the index cannot be a pair of a time and a world. Instead, it must be a triple of a world, a time, and a standard for belief description. Now, this is interesting, because if I am right, then Kent's proposal is in fact a form of MacFarlane-style non-indexical contextualism.
Epistemic Value Conference
Most of the papers for the Epistemic Value conference in Stirling later this month are now posted.
Modality and Quantifier Domain Restriction
Soames has replied to my alleged counterexample that it still holds that if I utter (1) below assertively, I make a statement that is true when evaluated at any possible circumstance of evaluation w iff (2) below is true at w, and so, even if the variable-content restriction theory also makes the right predictions in this case, my example isn't a counterexample to his theory.
(1) Everyone got an A [answering a question about Amy, Bob, Carl, ...]
(2) Every one of them got an A
He is, of course, right about that. But consider:
A: How did the students in your logic class do on the logic test?
B: Everyone got an A.
Is the content of 'everyone got an A' true at a possible world w in virtue of the fact that the students in my logic class in w (whoever they might be) got As? Or is it true at w in virtue of the fact that the students in my logic class in the actual world @ got As in w? I'd say it is the latter. But then it seems that the range of the quantifier does enter into the semantic content of the sentence.
Here is another example.
A: What did you do yesterday?
B: I met the new graduate students.
A: Do they seem smart?
B: Very much so. They all had offers from Princeton but chose to come to us instead.
(Later)
C: How does B like her new job?
A: I think she likes it a lot. The graduate students could have been at Princeton.
The content of A's remark 'the graduate students could have been at Princeton' is true at the actual world @ iff the content of 'the graduate students are at Princeton' is true at some world w. But isn't it the graduate students in B's department in the actual world @ that must be at Princeton in w? I think it is. Of course, we cannot just set aside the de re/de dicto issues here. But I think my point holds even if the definite NP takes narrow scope with respect to the possibility operator.
Final example (from Knowability, Possibility and Paradox).
Consider the Knowability Principle:
For all p, if p is true, then it is possible for someone to know that p.
And non-omniscience:
There is a truth that is not known by anyone.
When substituting 'p & it is not the case that p is known by someone' for p in the Knowability Principle, it seems that the domain of the quantifier ought to be the actual domain rather than some merely possible domain.
Worst Paper Title Ever
What is your most pathetic paper title ever? Here is mine:
"Plantinga Paradox in Wright's Peirce"
This was the working title of a co-authored paper of mine (for the record: we later changed the title to "Anti-Realism, Theism, and the Conditional Fallacy")
Quantifier Domain Restriction
I am still thinking about Soames' article The Gap Between Meaning and Assertion. Soames makes some interesting remarks about quantifier domain restriction. He considers the possibility that quantificational domains are sets, and that quantified noun phrases contain hidden domain variables that are contextually completed. On the view he has in mind, "each quantifier occurrence is assigned a contextually determined range as all, or part, of its semantic content relative to the context" (p. 16). But Soames thinks that "a fatal flaw in this approach is that althought contextually provided subsets of the domain may be relevant to the extensions of quantifiers, they are not parts of their semantic contents" (p. 16)
He offers the following example. Consider:
(1) Everyone writes a senior thesis.
(2) Everyone who is a Princeton student writes a senior thesis.
Suppose I am asserting (1) in a conversation about students at Princeton University. Then, according to Soames, "the statement I make is one that is true when evaluated at any possible circumstance of evaluation w iff something like [2] is true at w" (p. 16).
I think Soames may be right about (1), but I think that is because (1) is a kind of generic statement--a law-like generalization. But I do not think his criticism applies to all cases. Consider the following case:
You: How did Amy, Bob, Carl, Dan, and Elizabeth do on the logic exam last semester?
Me: Everyone got an A.
Here it is quite plausible that the quantifier is assigned the set containing Amy, Bob, Carl, Dan and Elizabeth as part of its content.
Double Access Readings
So-called double-access sentences, such as,
(1) John said that Mary is pregnant
pose a challenge for most theories of tense. The problem posed by double-access sentences is that they can be true only if the time the embedded content is about overlaps the time of utterance. So for (1) to be true, John must have said 'Mary is pregnant', and the time of Mary's alleged pregnancy must overlap the time at which the sentence is uttered. If we treat the tenses as quantifiers, (1) should come out as (t* is the time of utterance):
(1a) Et(t < t* & at t John says that Mary is pregnant at t)
But (1a) does not require for its truth that Mary's alleged pregnancy overlap the time of utterance. What about the following alternative analysis (based on a suggestion made by Higginbotham)?
(1b) Et(t < t* & at t John says that (Mary is pregnant at (t, t*)))
This seems fine. But if (1), upon analysis, cashes out to (1b), then we get the wrong result in cases like the following:
John said that Mary is pregnant
Peter believes everything John said
Hence, Peter believes that Mary is pregnant
On the double access reading of the first premise, its truth requires that John said that Mary's pregnancy overlaps his time of speech and the time the sentence is uttered. If we read the conclusion in a similar way, then the argument is valid, but the truth of the conclusion requires Peter to believe that Mary's alleged pregnancy overlaps the time of John's past speech. But surely the conclusion does not have such a reading. So, the argument cannot be valid if the first premise is given a double access reading.
Semantic Content and Assertoric Content
Last night I read Scott Soames' article The Gap Between Meaning and Assertion. According to Soames, the assertoric content of an utterance of a sentence is (roughly) the proposition the speaker intended to assert; and the semantic content of a sentence in context is (roughly) the semantic values of the constituents of the sentence relative to the context in question. Soames thinks that the speaker might assert the semantic content as well as the assertoric content. This is so if the semantic content is a "relevant, unmistakable, necessary and a priori consequence of the speaker's primary assertions, together with salient presuppositions of the conversational background". Let us consider an example (from Soames).
Peter doesn't realize that Paderewski, the statesman, is Paderewski, the musician.
(1) I believe that Paderewski has great musical talent (said by Peter to fellow musicians)
(2) I don't believe that Paderewski has great musical talent (said by Peter to fellow political friends).
According to Soames, here is what Peter asserted in the two cases:
(1a) I believe that Paderewski, the musician, has great musical talent.
(2a) I don't believe that Paderewski, the statesman, has great musical talent.
However, Soames says, when Peter utters (1) he is also asserting the semantic content of (1). For "it is an obvious necessary and a priori consequence of the fact that one believes of a man that he has the property of being both A and B, that one believes, of him, that he has the property of being B"
I am not sure I follow. 'S believes that x is A and B' doesn't entail 'S believes that x is B', for 'believe' is not closed under logical consequence. Is the latter a "relevant, unmistakable, necessary and a priori consequence of the former"? Well, doesn't that depend on who the speaker is, and how complicated the predicates 'A' and 'B' are?
Deep Thought: For Men Only?
Julie Van Camp has an interesting paper posted on the issue of "why women are not represented in much greater numbers in philosophy" and whether anyone cares. Click here.
Stanley on the Conception of the Humanities in the...
Danish Cartoons: Racist Provocation or Free Speech...


text:
The Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth Speaker – An In-Depth Review
When we think of the true classics of Rock and Roll, certain names just naturally spring to mind – Hendrix, Clapton, Zeppelin, Floyd, and, of course, Marshall. Marshall guitar speakers, amps, and the legendary Marshall stacks were, and still are, de rigueur for any self-respecting band, whether in greasy garages or flood-lit stadiums.
So it is no surprise that Marshall's incredibly popular headphones and Bluetooth speakers sound so great with rock and roll music – we would expect nothing less. The real news, though, is that the whole line of Marshall gear sounds great with pretty much any other kind of music as well.
Here we will look more closely at one of Marshall's best and most popular Bluetooth speaker systems in this buyer's guide for the flagship Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth speaker, completely revised and re-written for 2023, and we'll try to answer some basic questions:
Does the Marshall Woburn Bluetooth speaker sound good?
Is the Marshall Woburn a good Bluetooth speaker?
Does the Woburn live up to the towering Marshall name and reputation?
Is the Marshall Woburn Bluetooth speaker really rock and roll?
Do you kids really need to play your music that loud?
Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth Speaker Review
Pros & Cons of Marshall Woburn Bluetooth Speaker
First Impressions of the Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth Speaker System
Design of the Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth Speaker System
Set-Up and Connectivity of the Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth Speaker System
Extended Listening and Detailed Review of the Marshall Woburn II Sound Quality
User Reviews of the Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth Speaker System
Blown Away by this Speaker
Totally worth the price
Best Bluetooth Speaker on the Market
Media Reviews of the Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth Speaker System
Final Verdict – Is the Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth Speaker System Worth the Money?
Watch: Marshall Woburn Bluetooth Speaker Review
Marshall Woburn II Wireless Bluetooth Speaker Black, - New
Larger than life sound - with high trebles, handles low base with ease and clear mid range
Wirelessly connect with Bluetooth 5.0 and aptX technology provides lossless wireless sound at a range of up to 30 feet while maintaining...
Customize your sound - fine-tune your music to meet your requirements. Just use the Marshall Bluetooth app or the analogue controls on your...
There are more ways to connect than just Bluetooth 5.0. Plug into the RCA or 3. 5 mm Input for an analogue listening experience
In addition to the analog control knobs, you can use the Marshall Bluetooth app to customize your listening experience or control the music...
High Power 2 Way Bluetooth Cabinet Speaker System
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Wood Cabinet for Warm Sound
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Marshall Smartphone App
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❌ Cons
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Two-Host Bluetooth
Analog (wired) inputs
The Marshall Woburn II has a sound quality that's different than anything else I've heard in a Bluetooth speaker system. There is a sharp, clear and uncompromising quality to this speaker that it a little overwhelming at first – sort of like sitting front row in front of Marshall stacks! And, like the stacks, they will play really, really loud!
The clarity and openness of the Marshall Woburn II is actually one of their best qualities. These extremely accurate and honest speakers reveal every single thing that is going on in any music track. I heard details and subtleties that I had never before noticed – even in music I'd listened to many times before. It does, at first, almost seem too much, but I soon came to realize that this is how music really should sound – even if it almost never does with other Bluetooth speaker systems.
The Woburn II looks like a classic Marshall crate – the same beautiful retro styling, quality of materials and construction, and size and weight of a classic Marshall guitar amp or stage speaker.
But this is a fully up-to-date high-tech design, with a pure class D stereo amplifier, two-host Bluetooth connectivity, and full high resolution aptX Bluetooth codex. Still, much of the technical design does hearken back to more euphonic analog days, with two different sets of analog audio inputs (both mini-headphone and RCA jacks), retro-style mechanical bass, treble and volume controls, a fine wooden cabinet and – for all of their sophisticated technology and engineering – an amplifier and speaker drivers that honor and preserve that legendary Marshall sound.
The two 1 inch tweeters extend quite high, with air and detail aplenty, the two 5 and a quarter inch woofers go remarkably deep, and the 110 watt amplifier drives them to a mind-blowing volume, much louder than I myself would ever want. Still, it's nice to have the option, and at medium to loud volumes the amount of detail and dynamic energy let you know that there are plenty (really, plenty) of reserve power still under the hood.
Except for the fact that they're pretty darn heavy, and not as easy to move around as many portable Bluetooth speakers, the Marshall Woburn II speakers couldn't have been easier to set up.
The Bluetooth connectivity worked flawlessly, with no problems at all pairing with any of my different Bluetooth sources, and I never heard any cut-out or other apparent problems with reception. The volume and tone controls work smoothly, and have a nice, high quality feel, and they make quite a difference to the sound. In different rooms, or with different music, they really helped optimize the listening experience.
The app, though, was something else. Easy and intuitive, it provides sophisticated control over tone and spatial presentation, with its graphic equalizer and ambience controls. You can switch between stereo and ambient modes, select different equalizer pre-sets, and even control the intensity of the lights on the Woburn's cabinet.
Especially nice is the ability to connect wired music sources, using a mini-headphone jack or standard stereo RCA jacks. This allows you to use your Marshall Woburn II with your stereo system, turntable (through a stereo or preamplifier, or a 'table with a built in line-level amp), cassette deck or an older pre-Bluetooth music player. I didn't ever plug my axe in, but believe you me, I was sorely tempted!
This is a larger Bluetooth speaker cabinet, but it is not large enough to explain how Marshall can get such staggeringly deep and impactful bass response from the Woburn II and its twin 5 ¼ inch woofers. Bass you not only hear, but feel, and with accurate tonal characteristics, dynamics and micro-dynamics superbly portrayed – you not only hear a bass guitar, a kick drum or a pipe organ's longest pipes, they sound like a bass guitar, or a drum, or an organ. Incredible for this type of speaker, and for this price!
The midrange and high frequencies are similarly accurate and detailed to the point of almost frightening realism. Again, a voice sounds human, a guitar has all of the bite and detail it should, and sounds like a guitar, electronic music is solid and clearly revealed in its often amazing dynamics and micro-dynamics, and unplugged strings – acoustic guitar, violins, plucked bass – sound just beautiful, and just right.
While I wouldn't say that the Marshall Woburn II has a particularly forgiving sound, I mean this as more of a compliment than a dig. Yes, many speakers in this category make their sound a little more sweet and dark, sometimes to mask some problems with amplifier distortion, poor quality components or the relatively lower quality of the MP3 files many people will play through them. But Marshall's not having it.
The Marshall Woburn II clearly has very high quality speaker drivers, amplifiers and cabinet, and all of this remarkable speaker's clarity reveals no problems or shortcomings with any other part of the system. On the other hand, if you are using low resolution music files, with limited frequency response, clipped and distorted loud passages, and overall harsh or otherwise crappy sound quality, that will come through with almost painful honesty.
Still, I would say there is something "sweet" about the sound, though, and as long as there is not extreme distortion in your MP3 files, you can use the tone controls on the cabinet, and especially the equalizer and ambience controls on the Marshall app, to make those sad and sorry music files sound pretty damned good.
And, with all its clarity and accuracy, with the superb quality of the components and with the use of aptX full lossless audiophile Bluetooth protocol, if you have good quality MP3s, lossless FLAC files or hi-res 24 bit files, or are playing from a high-quality YouTube video or any decent streaming service, the sound is breathtaking.
Ultimately somebody who listens exclusively to Classical or Acoustic Jazz may want to consider instead something like the superb Bang & Olufsen BeoLit 20 Portable Bluetooth Speaker which, for about the same price, does offer a more refined sound, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed listening to the B&O more or less than the Marshall.
I would say, though, that the Marshall Woburn II Bluetooth speaker system is more versatile, sounding very good, honest and accurate with Classical and Jazz, if a tad bit less relaxed than its Danish cousin, and significantly more exciting with electric music – Electronica, Electric Jazz and Fusion, Rap, Hip-Hop, Rhythm and Blues, Funk, and, natch, Rock and Roll. Full, rich frequency response, clarity and low distortion, detail, dynamics and musical energy, and great presence whether they're playing very soft or very, very loud.
Not an inexpensive speaker, the Marshall Woburn is consistently surprising and wonderful to listen to, and provides such an enjoyable and rewarding – and at times thrilling – listening experience that it must be considered a great value for the money.
As you would expect if you've ever heard it, the reviews from verified purchases of the Marshall Woburn II were overwhelmingly positive, with a lot of people saying they were just blown away by the sound quality, the clarity and the incredible volume. Poring through customer reviews from many different internet sites, I don't think I've ever seen the word "awesome" used so often.
Perhaps less expected, though, was how many customers claim that the Marshall Woburn II is such a good value. I mean, it is a fairly expensive Bluetooth speaker, and yet over and over again people said that it is worth every penny, that it is the best hi-fi investment they've ever made, and that they are absolutely thrilled with their purchase.
Again and again people praised the Marshall on every level – sound, ease of use, looks and styling, build quality, connectivity and overall design. Very few negative reviews were to be found, and when we filtered the reviews in a more responsible manner – sorting by date, for example, and including only verified purchasers, the negative comments became very rare indeed.
More than a few of the more established print and online review sites also think the Marshall Woburn is at least one of the best Bluetooth speakers on the market today. Some reviewers talked about the sound as a tad too bright and unforgiving, but most of the more experienced reviewers found the honesty and clarity refreshing, and the speaker overall to be highly accurate and engaging.
Among the seemingly countless "best Bluetooth speaker on the market today" or "2022 Bluetooth speaker buyer's guide" articles online, the Marshall Woburn seems to make more appearances and reach the top of lists more often than almost any other Bluetooth speaker system. I guess we're not the only ones to absolutely love this speaker!
Given the last sentence I just wrote, and the words "absolutely love this speaker," you probably know the answer to this question – yes, emphatically, the Woburn II is a very special speaker, well made, easy to use, versatile and with brilliant and beautiful sound. It plays loud and will fill even very large spaces (or very large parties) with exciting, dynamic sound, and even at very low levels that excitement and energy are still there.
A very impressive speaker, then, on pretty much every count, worthy of not just the legendary Marshall name, but of its place at the very top of their excellent and extremely popular line-up of Bluetooth speakers.


In Feb/March 2016, we had our summer school held in UGM, Yogja. We are fortunate to receive fund from Erasmus + to conduct another round of summer school in Berlin in the same year. The unique of the Berlin summer school is that the study of Southeast Asia as an area is conducted in a non-Southeast Asian area.
Berlin is certainly a great city to study about memory and memory making. Berlin offers not only the variety of monuments and memorial sites, there is a line-up of narratives and counter-narratives that the city engages with national history and the community of particular place.
In the first week of the summer school, the students (as well as the lecturers) are exposed to places that essentially form the history of Berlin yet are marginalised from the national history of Germany.
Below are some sites that students visited in which at later stage they were assigned to choose one site for their "fieldwork" so as to engage in a dialogue on memory making processes with the site, so to speak.


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Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk (Grove Press, 2014) is an extraordinary book, one that seamlessly fuses a number of themes. It is a memoir about grieving for her father, dead from a heart attack while working as a photojournalist. It is a book about raising and relating to another member of the animal kingdom, a hawk. And it also compares and contrasts her experiences to those of T. H. White, who in addition to The Once and Future King and The Sword in the Stone wrote The Goshawk, a searing account of how not to train a hawk.
Holding these disparate themes together is a framework derived from the quest in medieval romance. H is for Hawk concerns Helen Macdonald's quest for her rightful place in the world, a version of self-knowledge. Because she is overwhelmed by her grief from her father's unexpected death, she decides to rear and train a goshawk. Quests typically involve journeys into another world, one fraught with perils and ordeals. The hero confronts death and then returns, much changed, to the journey's point of origin.
What Macdonald does, however, is go off in the wrong direction, thereby inverting and reshaping the romance tradition. Rather than setting out on a quest for something, be it the Golden Fleece or self-knowledge, Macdonald escapes from something: To distract herself from grieving for her father, Macdonald retreats from the ordinary world of people and disciplines herself to enter the world of her goshawk, sardonically named Mabel (from amabilis) because she is anything but amiable. But the world of hawking is not only a matter of predator and prey in the here and now. No small part of its appeal is that it offers a mode of relating to a past that extends back through the Middle Ages and beyond, back into the realm of mythology and the ancient Egyptians' worship of Horus (a deity Macdonald actually prayed to as a child).
Macdonald succeeds in entering Mabel's world by becoming a non-entity, invisible, and thus ignored by her hawk. (T. H. White correctly saw this process as an ordeal, and he failed at it.) Macdonald becomes exquisitely sensitive to every nuance of Mabel's expressions, seemingly proving that she could become like Mabel, "solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life." What she didn't realize at the time was that "turning into a hawk" also involved loss, the loss of her own humanity and therefore her relationships to the human community.
Undistracted by quotidian life--she has no job, no friends, no children, no home--Macdonald is free to focus on Mabel. One outcome I found delightful: she has to discard the contemporary view that goshawks are sulky and murderous when Mabel and she engage in a game of catch with scrunched-up balls of paper. When Macdonald tosses the paper ball to Mabel, Mabel catches it with her beak and tosses it back with a flick of her head.
Hunting with Mabel, however, takes Macdonald to the very edge of being human and then past that place. That way madness lies, and indeed she comes perilously close. She could always tell a hawk from a handsaw, she comments, but sometimes she was struck by how similar they were. She is scared of people. Suffering from anxiety and depression, she drifts into states where she isn't certain who she was or what she was. Far from her worth being proved by the ordeal of her quest, she is falling apart.
It might be argued that Macdonald loses control over her material as she struggles to convey her path back to becoming human. Granted, no dramatic revelation starts her in another direction. But I would suggest that this lack of drama, this rather messy, tentative turn indicates instead that Macdonald is reshaping romance conventions. Far from a neat resolution of her ordeal, her conversion imitates life as we live it: uncertain, non-linear, proceeding by fits and starts.
Mabel also helps, albeit unknowingly, by teaching her about death. Every time Mabel kills an animal, that act pulls Macdonald back from her hawk-like mode into being human. As a human, she begins to feel accountable for these deaths. Mortality becomes real to Macdonald in ratio to her accepting responsibility for hawking with Mabel.
Another element in her conversion is attending her father's memorial service. She is intensely moved by how many people had come and how much they cared for him. She feels a sense of community at the memorial service, and that in turn leads her to a major realization: she had taken the wrong path. The wild would not, could not heal her hurt. She couldn't become a hawk; she couldn't fly though a rent in the sky, as she'd dreamed, and bring her father back. She needed instead to be in touch with people: "Human hands are for holding other hands. Human arms are for holding other people close."
The passing of time transmutes her grief for her father into love. She reestablishes human relationships. At the same time, she continues hunting with Mabel, but with a difference. Now, she begins to depart from accepted practice by letting Mabel fly free. The loss of control scares her, but both of them begin learning the landscape, creating maps of magical places where they had earlier found game, places "glowing with memory and meaning." And, wonderfully, their two maps coincide.
Grieving for the death of a beloved father; what it's like not to be a human; the relations between our species and another; the ordeal of becoming who you really are; and the emerging of love that passeth all understanding--all of these themes cohere in Helen Macdonald's brilliant reshaping of the medieval quest, H is for Hawk .
Posted by Gerard H. Cox at 6:15 AM 1 comment:
First-Rate Writing: Hutto's Illumination in the Flatwoods
Joe Hutto's Illumination in the Flatwoods: A Season Living Among the Wild Turkey was published in 1995 and in a second paper edition by Lyons Press in 2006. Almost on a whim, Hutto saved some wild turkey eggs from being destroyed by mowing operations in Florida. He got ahold of an incubator, marked them and turned them, and when the chicks hatched, he imprinted them on himself. The chicks thought he was a turkey, and he in turn did everything he could to enter their world (which, among other demands, involved being sleep deprived for two years). Hutto writes not only with insight but with love and wonder, and the result is a moving appreciation of a species entirely different from us, the wild turkey.
Hutto is more than an observer of their lives, he is a participant. Among many other things, these turkeys teach Hutto how to live in the present by teaching him about "wild turkey speed and wild turkey time."
Wild turkey speed is that speed beyond which an organism becomes stupid on a scale proportional to the relative increase. In other words, stupidity is directly proportional to the square of one's velocity. For this reason it is very difficult for me to travel at wild turkey speed. Every day is a new lesson in this discipline. Wild turkey speed allows one to utilize consciousness and sensory awareness to minimize one's expenditure of energy. A wild turkey always proceeds as if he were in the perfect place at the perfect time. All his needs may be satisfied here in this moment. These opportunities are merely waiting to be recognized--a constant condition of sustenance through inquiry and discovery. I find that it is difficult for me to avoid being goal oriented in our outings, betraying the moment for some abstraction up ahead. An absurd and ironic result of this is that the rattlesnake, which serves as a perfect metaphor, is peacefully waiting to be understood and instead winds up underfoot. There is no profit in this, and these wild turkeys constantly remind me to do better. Their experience, which I believe to be vastly richer than my own, affords them an awareness and evolutionary maturity that is far superior. I have made this natural world my devoted life's work, but they remind me that I am a clumsy pilgrim in a realm that can never truly be my own.
Wild turkey time is more difficult to explain. It seems to have something to do with a resolution of the time it takes for a grasshopper to fly and land, and the time it takes to get from the Cretaceous to the Holocene. Wild turkeys exist on a vast continuum like continents and mountain ranges but only in this moment like the wind on your face. And, as any turkey hunter knows, they exist only as a probability, a tendency to occur in a certain place at a certain time. They behave at once like a particle and like a wave, and even a physicist would call them unpredictable. A wild turkey suddenly is there like a gnat in your eye or he is an apparition that gives you occasion to doubt your senses. In either case, he can be very hard to get to know.
Labels: Illumination in the Flatwoods, Joe Hutto, wild turkeys
First-Rate Writing: Hutto's Illumination in the Fl...


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Imagine yourself bang in the middle of the deep Amazon rainforest, stuck in a raging storm, burning with fever. No food, no water, no shelter. "What you catch is what you get". You have no choice but to fend for yourself. That's what Day 1 of my 3-day survival challenge in the Amazon looked like.
And honestly, the skills that we whipped out in the middle of that jungle would put Bear Grylls to shame.
Okay that's a gross exaggeration but yeah, we built our shelter using leaves and soggy branches, foraged for water in rivers and water-bearing plants, went on night hikes to look for giant tarantulas fished for piranhas and cooked them over a fire, ate live, wriggling termites from a rotting bark- I can see some of you visibly cringe at the thought of this, but I enjoyed every single bit of that mad adventure.
Obviously, it wasn't always like this. I was born and brought up in a small town in Orissa, Rourkela where I lived a very cocooned, protected albeit beautiful life till I was 17. Actually protected is an understatement.
At 12 I was gifted my first cycle. My dad followed me in his car while I cycled to my tuition class, waited for me to get done and followed me all the way back home just to make sure I didn't fall on my face.
So what the hell happened? How did that proper little girl turn into this absolute madcap?
At 17, I left home to do a media course in Christ College, Bangalore which was the exact opposite of what home had been. Life was fast, people were different, they were so much more exposed to everything. So I obviously struggled a lot with confidence.
But Life Goes On, Yeah?
I shifted to Bombay and joined a production house as an Assistant Director. I would work anywhere between 12-18 hours a day on shoot days. I would come back completely exhausted to a matchbox-sized one BHK. Every damn thing was a struggle, but life still went on. I had no social life, I was spending days and days working on films that weren't even mine, and more than anything I was so so unhappy.
10 days later, I quit my job, decided to move back to Bangalore and go for a one-month backpacking trip across Vietnam.
Why Vietnam? Because it was far, but not too far, pretty affordable and culturally very different from India. I decided to go alone cause I didn't want to wait for people to make time to come with me.
I had two days booked in a hostel in Hanoi and that's it. Everything else was left to chance. Of course, I was freaking out before and during the trip. I had to do everything myself, like right from booking tickets to finding hostels to figuring out my next meal- this was also struggling but it was my kind of struggle.
When you are travelling, not just full time, even otherwise, there are so many things that can possibly go wrong. You could lose your passport, get robbed, lose your bank cards, injure yourself, anything can happen cause there's no one watching your back, and yet… everyone is.
There is an inherent goodness in people. They want to help. I hate thinking this way but the thought does cross my mind, what is this person getting out of this. And more often than not the answer has been – nothing!
And that is such a beautiful feeling. To give and not wanting anything back. I wish and I hope to be that person someday. Travel might not have immediate effects but it does have the hugest impact in the long run. I began to feel more confident, more comfortable in my skin and way more aware.
While in Hanoi, I tried to cram everything into that one month. Like riding this ostrich. I didn't want to leave anything out cause I never thought I would ever be able to save that kind of money or have the kind of time to do a trip like this ever again.
When I came back, I wanted to share my experiences, I wanted to talk about what I had seen, I wanted to share more. And what was the best way to do it? Social media of course. I grew from a couple hundred followers to a couple thousand. I was still not able to travel as much as I would have liked. I had to find a way to sustain travel. It could no longer be a one-off trip, it had to become more than that. A friend of mine asked me to write to brands.
Though I was skeptical, I thought there's no harm, really in giving it a shot. So I made a ton of cold calls, wrote a ton of emails. And what a stellar response I got. Out of the 100 people I wrote to, a grand total of 3 wrote back. Gotta look at the bright side yeah? Out of a 100, these 3 erudite souls felt I had something to offer.
The biggest is dealing with constant change. You wake up in a different place every morning, your roommates change, the friends you made just yesterday have moved on to some other place and before you know it, you have to start all over again. Sometimes, it is nerve-wracking to enter a room with unfamiliar faces. Sometimes you crave for that familiarity, for just one person to KNOW you. When you don't have to introduce yourself, explain yourself over and over again.
There are days when you are excited, pumped. You can't wait to jump out of bed, make friends, generally be the chatty monkey that you are. That same breakfast room that terrified you yesterday is now the most inviting. You go in, join the friendliest faces at a table, and spend the entire day exploring the lovely town with them. And that's just how full-time travel works.
Everything! One day you feel like a loser at the table who no one wants to talk to, the next day you are the most exciting person there is. One day you want to explore the hell out of a place, the next day you don't want to do anything but binge-watch Netflix. And you know what? They are both perfectly okay. You do you. And that's definitely what I love about traveling. You are chucked at the deep end and you are stunned by the things you are capable of handling.
There is something oddly comforting about strangers. No judgments, no baggage- cause they don't know anything about you and you are probably never going to see them again. I went through a pretty rough period before I left for my 4 month trip to South America. I won't go into the specifics of it but I remember sitting with this Dutch friend of mine in this beautiful, dreamy floating hostel in the middle of the Caribbean sea.
And They Think We Travel To School On Elephants!
while I have met some incredible people in my travels, I have also met some extremely ignorant ones, who still think India is full of snakes, babas, and all things mystic. Initially, I used to get all defensive about it, which made people uncomfortable. So, I thought why not try something different?
I met a couple while traveling in Colombia. And they were very surprised at how good my English was. But it didn't stop at that, it went on to all the cliches imaginable – so I am sure you eat chilies for breakfast, your parents will marry you off to a stranger etc, and finally, they were like so you tell us about India? What is a normal day like? How did you go to school?
So I told them – "You know Colombia has the odd-even rule to combat pollution- Mon, Wed Fri cars with even number plates drive on the roads and Tues, Thurs, Sat cars with odd number plates drive, similarly in India on Mon, Wed, Fri we go to school on camels and on Tues, Thurs, Sat we go on elephants." And they actually bought it!
I found that pretty interesting and decided there was no harm in being open to the experience. So I did a small meditation that night to open myself up to its energies. And sure enough, soon as we hit the first leg of the mountain, I felt something surge through me. It was strong, relentless- It wasn't happiness, it wasn't sadness, it was raw emotion. I was shaking, bawling my eyes out for 20 mins straight!
Julian, our guide asked us to send our intention out into the mountain, to introduce ourselves to the mountain. I am not too much of a trekker and I am usually the last person in the group to make it to the top cause I am slow and I take my own time. But this time it was different. I was at the top of the pack throughout the hike. It was almost as though the mountains were lifting me to do the hike. The entire Machu Picchu was shrouded in clouds and that's what I think helped us all connect so intensely with it.
I think I want to come back home. If experiences in other countries could move me so much, imagine what my country would do to me? If Machu Picchu could move me so much, imagine what the Himalayas would do to me. Don't get me wrong, I have explored India extensively in the past, but I don't think at that point I was aware enough to travel like I do now. I wasn't aware of the energies of a place, wasn't as open to people, to experiences as I feel I am now.
I remember as a little girl, I would spend hours reading Enid Blyton and Famous Five was a special favorite. I would binge read that series and dream about having scones and tea, going on picnics, solving mysteries. My favorite book, the one that excited me the most was "Five go off in a caravan". Where the kids take a run down caravan and go on an epic adventure with a gypsy girl.
I wanted to come back to that little girl who read Enid Blyton and dreamt of driving around in a caravan. So right now I am on an epic caravan journey across India with two friends for 100 days. We are living in the caravan, exploring local cultures, soaking in nature at its best and truly exploring the underbelly of India. You can follow our journey at Caravan Chronicles.
Follow her travel encounters on her blog – Monkey Inc, and follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.


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Armani Exchange Fashion Director Allegedly Fired For Stealing Designs
Written By: Ty Alexander
Apparently fashion designer Patrick Robinson was booted from A/X Armani Exchange. Although the news is creating some serious buzz on the Internet, he was allegedly fired weeks ago, according to Page Six, because some of his designs were strikingly similar to New York-based jewelry company David Yurman.
MUST READ: Juicy Couture Closes It's U.S. Stores, But They're Plotting A Comeback For 2015
You might remember Patrick from his GAP days were he designed the popular 1969 denim line. After struggling sales, he was dismissed from his lead role after just three years with the iconic denim brand. Looks like Patrick will be updating his resume once again.
Sources say that Patrick was let go abruptly because his collection with Armani was not selling well. But others are speculating that all of this confusion is stemming from a charity bracelet that he created for the Armani Exchange's men's collection made from recycled bullets and handguns, with proceeds going to nonprofit Liberty United to fight gun violence.
Armani Exchange was allegedly notified by David Yurman that those bracelets were all too similar to Yurman's iconic cable cuff bracelets. There may have even been an official legal letter demanding Armani to stop selling the bracelets. #MESSY
Of course everyone is declining to comment on this story so we might not ever know exactly how this went down.
Patrick is a graduate of Parsons School of Design and has worked for Giorgio Armani, Perry Ellis, Anne Klein and Paco Rabanne so he shouldn't have too much of an issue getting a new gig. Plus his wife, Virginia Smith, is Vogue's market director for fashion and accessories.
SOURCE: Page Six
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Lupita Nyong'o Lands First Vogue Cover & We're Like WERK!
Armani Exchange Fashion Director Allegedly Fired For Stealing Designs was originally published on hellobeautiful.com
Armani Exchange	, patrick robinson
Also On 101.1 The Wiz:


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Stomp If You Want Electricity
By The New Republic
They really do come up with the wackiest ideas over there in Japan:
Heavy foot traffic at busy subway stations could soon be widely used to power station lighting and other electrical equipment thanks to technology currently being trialled in Tokyo.
In a small-scale experiment at Tokyo Station, one of the city's busiest subway stops, so-called hatsudenyuka floors were installed at station gates, hallways and staircases.
The technology features elements capable of generating piezoelectricity, which are embedded in 0.4mm flooring tiles and covered by a mat. The piezo elements convert the pressure and vibration of commuter footsteps into electricity, which is used to power the station's lights.
The experiment is being run by subway operator East Japan Railway Co, Tokyo's Keio University and public research body New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization.
The trial, which started in 2006, was put on hold in March to analyse data, and early indications are that the energy harvesting system could be rolled out more widely. East Railway said it now hopes to eventually use the flooring as a clean source of supplementary power for other station technologies such as automatic ticket barriers and display panels.
This idea has actually been wafting around for some time. A British firm has been noodling over a system that would employ a "matrix of hydraulic compression pads" under sidewalks and stairs to generate electricity from foot traffic—in theory you could use the energy created by pedestrians stomping around to keep nearby lights running. Some entrepreneurs have even pondered whether you could fabricate a similar system for roads, converting truck traffic into electricity. But it's unclear whether drumming up power this way is even remotely cost-effective, and it always seemed like a totally fanciful idea. Apparently, though, Japan's taking the notion quite seriously.
(Flickr photo credit: emptybits)
--Bradford Plumer
Technology, Company Location, The Vine