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This document discusses the use of computational simulation in crisis and disaster management. It highlights the advantages of simulation models in examining alternative strategies and predicting the effects of changes in real-world systems. The document also acknowledges the challenges in incorporating realistic human behavior, increasing acceptability of simulation models, and creating multi-scale models. The special issue focuses on current real-world problems and includes papers on topics such as epidemics, seismic crises, population sheltering management, and mass evacuation. Two companion papers on airport evacuation and the Syrian refugee crisis are also mentioned. [Extracted from the article]

There is a lack of research that focuses on the lived experiences of British Yemeni young people in the UK as they pertain to their learning and development. This paper aims to bridge the gap by exploring the case of Nuha, an 18-year-old British Yemeni young woman, as she navigates the conduct of her everyday life. The paper presents a developed conceptual model and associated methodological approach for exploring Nuha. It does so by first reviewing what might be viewed as dominant approaches to the study of ethnic young people's experiences that advocate a social identity theory. A critique of such thinking is developed that takes issue with much of this writing that has the potential for an essentialised abstracted approach. The paper instead advocates the use of a subjectively focused, practice orientated and yet culturally sensitive approach to exploring human behaviour in the context of the conduct of everyday life. Based on an analytical matrix that is developed from such thinking, I examine Nuha's life experiences using Dreier's theory of a person. In doing so, I recognise the additional importance of personhood in practice that provide a reference point for exploring more deeply the learning and development of Nuha. The research is generated through a case study narrative that is analysed dialectically through theory, recognising how theory is simultaneously driven by the data. The paper concludes with arguments made about the centrality of an extended and developed sense of the conduct of everyday life to get at the nuanced evolving sense of being and doing for British Yemeni young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online hate is a serious problem affecting a range of minoritised people. Existing theories suggest that poor behaviour online is due to anonymity but fail to explore how such discussions unfold. This is where a discursive and rhetorical psychological approach is appropriate as it offers a micro-level analysis. In this research paper, a discursive/rhetorical approach is applied to an online debate about a controversial refugee policy in the UK containing 586 comments, to address the question: How are arguably hateful arguments, or those challenging hateful arguments, supported and challenged in the context of an internet discussion about a controversial refugee policy? Analysis demonstrated that support for posts is shown to come in the form of additional points to bolster existing ones. Opposition to posts took the form of simple rejections and counterpoints, sometimes taking a three-part structure of (a) simple rejection, (b) counterpoint and (c) upgrade, but also included insults, ridiculing and name calling. Discursive and rhetorical analyses have been shown to have potential to understand online behaviour offering more detail than relying on anonymity to explain controversial and hateful speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the challenges for agent-based modeling is being able to incorporate human behavior. Human behavior is a multifaceted phenomenon, with strategic coalition formation being one form. A hybrid agent-based modeling approach, called ABMSCORE, has been derived to emulate strategic group formation. In this paper, we describe a simulation experiment to compare the ABMSCORE with actual human behavior. The comparison criterion is the respective rates of finding an ideal coalition. In our experimental design, we go to great lengths to ensure the similarity of the scenarios in the two trial types: trials with computerized agents only and trials involving human participants when one of the computerized agents is replaced by an actual human. We did this to limit the number of possible extraneous variables introduced into the experimental system. The scenario considered is the glove game, a standard cooperative game that has been previously used in human experiments. Our results indicate that the ABMSCORE model produces similar rates of finding the ideal coalition as the human players; however, there are some limitations. This research provides evidence for using the ABMSCORE modeling approach to model human strategic coalition formation in agent-based models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the cultural popularity of 'ambient music' playlists on digital streaming platforms as a paradigm of the technical fabrication of atmospheres and the modulation of affect in some of the media environments of contemporary capitalism. Ambient music names a style of non-intrusive, gentle background music designed to assist the listener in relaxing or focussing on work. At the centre of the paper is the argument that ambient music demonstrates how the intimate tonalities of human behaviour are increasingly shaped through media technologies in ways that hold significant implications for how we feel and perceive our senses of being in the world today. Developing this argument, the paper advances two claims. First, drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, that ambient music exemplifies the 'immunological' character of atmospheric envelopment. Second, that ambient music points towards the role of digital technologies capable of supporting new atmospheric envelopments as facilitating what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call 'investments of desire', new conjunctions between flows of information, behaviours, value and affects that are central to the processes of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the paper speculates on ambient music in its relation to the atmospheric conditions of life in contemporary capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the article "Group Psychotherapy with Immigrants from Turkey," by Raymond Battegay and Ali Tarik Yilmaz, published in the June 1, 1997 issue of "Group Analysis: The Journal of Group Analytic Psychotherapy." The authors refer to studies that corroborate the fact that more than a third of Turkish immigrants develop massive depressive and psychosomatic symptoms in the first eighteen months after their arrival in Western Europe. The important factors that were ignored or not fully developed by the authors are discussed.

This paper describes a framework for educating future evaluators and users of evaluation through community-engaged, experiential learning courses and offers practical guidance about how such a class can be structured. This approach is illustrated via a reflective case narrative describing how an introductory, undergraduate class at a mid-size, public university in the northwest partnered with a community agency. In the class, students learned and practiced evaluation principles in the context of a Parents as Teachers home visiting program, actively engaged in course assignments designed to support the program's evaluation needs, and presented meta-evaluative findings and recommendations for future evaluation work to the community partner to conclude the semester. This community-engaged approach to teaching evaluation anchors student learning in an applied context, promotes social engagement, and enables students to contribute to knowledge about effective human action, as outlined in the American Evaluation Association's Mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) was an important member of Early and Mid-Holocene landscapes and animal communities in Northern Europe. Previous zooarchaeological research has established the alimentary roles of beavers for Mesolithic societies and their importance for fur procurement. In this paper, we develop an integrated biocultural approach to human-beaver interactions, examining the position of humans and beavers in Mesolithic and Early Neolithic multispecies systems. We contextualize beaver landscape agency in hydroactive environments with human behaviour, synthesizing currently available data on mammalian assemblages, ichtyofauna and beaver-related material culture across Northern Europe. This cross-cultural, diachronic analysis reveals previously overlooked facilitations of human behaviour by beaver practices and ecological legacies. We show that long-term trajectories of human-beaver cohabitation differed between northern European regions. While in Southern Scandinavia, human-beaver intersections witnessed major re-organizations during the Mid-Holocene, beavers retained a key role for human societies across Northeastern Europe throughout much of the Holocene and played an important part at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Dutch wetlands. Divergent pathways are also evidenced by Mesolithic beaver-related material culture, highlighting the cultural keystone status of Castor fiber in higher latitude European landscapes. We argue that this keystone status is grounded in the supply of human hunting, fishing, and gathering affordances by the animals, pointing to the generative commensality between Mesolithic foragers and their beaver neighbours. Taken together, our findings demonstrate the importance of the beaver in the making of Early and Mid-Holocene forager societies in Northern Europe and illustrate the fruitfulness of deploying an integrated multispecies approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how ‘policing’, in its widest sense, seeks to maintain public safety and security in the places where people gather to view events. The paper begins by clarifying its setting in public assembly facilities and conceiving of ‘policing’ as ‘almost anything done by anyone who controls other people’ (Waddington, 2007). The paper goes on to show how the long history of disasters and disorder in such facilities means that they have to be ‘policed’ and outlines the various bodies involved in ‘policing’ them. The paper then discusses the concepts of ‘safety’ and ‘security’. ‘Safety’ starts with structural design and maintenance to prevent fire or collapse. It manages capacities, ingress and egress in complex space. It also deals with aspects of human behaviours, emergencies and evacuations. ‘Security’, on the other hand, addresses the prevention and detection of crime, the terrorist threat and the maintenance of public tranquillity. The paper seeks to differentiate the terms ‘safety’ and ‘security’ with reference to four alternative models. Two forms of the integrated whole in which ‘security’ is conceived as a subset of ‘safety’, or vice versa, are outlined and commended as best practice. However, the historical practice and current policy reasons why ‘safety’ and ‘security’ have been treated as either separate or overlapping concepts are also explored. The discussion refers to various facility disasters to illustrate the serious consequences when policing policy and practice overlooks ‘safety’ or allows ‘security’ and ‘safety’ to get out of balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected not only the health of populations but also their everyday social practices, transformed by orienting to risks of contagion and to health prevention discourses. This paper emanates from a project investigating the impact of Covid-19 on human sociality and more particularly the situated and embodied organization of social interactions. It discusses how Covid-19 impacts the design of ordinary actions in social interaction, how this is made publicly accountable by the participants orienting to the pandemic in formatting their actions and in responding to the actions of others. Adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, the analyses focus on a particular social activity: paying. The organization of payments in shops and services has been affected by the pandemic, not only by official regulations, favoring some modes of payment over others, but also in how sellers and customers situatedly adapt their practices to imperatives of prevention. On the basis of a rich corpus of video-recorded data, which spans from the pandemic's prodromes to and after its peak, we show how money transfer is methodically achieved – imposed, negotiated, and readjusted – while variously taking into account possible risks of contagion. Thus, we show not only how pandemics affect social interaction, and how prevention is incarnated in social actions, but also how, in turn, situated solutions implemented by people during the pandemic reveal fundamental features of human action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early data from several countries regarding the gendered implications of COVID-19 suggest that men are more likely to die as an effect of infection. This has been explained by biological factors but also by behavioral and life-style issues characteristic mostly for men. What has not been widely discussed, however, is the analysis of the relationships between men's responses to the crisis, their (lack of) care activities, and certain models of masculinity that persist in many societies. In this paper, I use a three dimensional model of care – a) self-care, b) care for others, and c) care for one's society – in order to analyze how certain masculine behaviors, rooted in socially constructed gender performances, resonate with the COVID-19 pandemic. The data used in this paper are of secondary character and will serve to analyze the most common responses of men within the three dimensions of care mentioned above. The theoretical framework utilizes the notion of caring masculinity supported by an emerging theory of protective masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representing causal social science knowledge in models is difficult: much of the best knowledge is qualitative and ambiguously conditional, unlike the knowledge in ‘‘physics models.’’ This paper describes a stream of RAND research that began with qualitative models providing a structured depiction of casual factors creating effects. That has subsequently been extended to an unusual kind of uncertainty sensitive computational modeling that enables exploratory reasoning and analysis. We illustrate the approach with applications to counterterrorism, detection of terrorists, and nuclear crises. We believe that the approach will complement other approaches that can reflect social science phenomena [see other papers in this special issue of JDMS] and that the approach has broad potential within and beyond the national security domain. We also believe that it has the potential to inform empirical work—encouraging a transition from the step-by-step empirical testing of simple discrete hypotheses to the testing and refinement of more comprehensive causal models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic theory propagates a model of the human being commonly known as homoeconomicus; an individual with a rational orientation directed towards maximizing his/her preferences. However, our everyday lives involve many altruistic acts. These can range from small gestures of kindness such as holding a door open for another person, to heroic feats such as risking one's life to save a child from drowning. During our lives we also meet certain people that instantly induce our kindness. Our nicety in these moments is not based on a pursuit to optimize our material desires. Rather, we allow our feelings and intuitions to guide the course of our actions. How do we reconcile these experiences against the economic conception of human nature as inherently selfish? Addressing this contradiction, the paper will deconstruct the economic view and repositioning it as the product of an epistemological stance that distorts our view of altruism. An alternative model on altruism will then be developed by merging anthropological theories on value with insights from cultural psychology and grounded cognition. Through this process, a passage will be shown from static and universalizing perspective towards an emergent and dynamic theory on altruism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Escalation is a key characteristic of many consumption behaviors that has not received theoretical attention. This paper aims to propose both a definition and a theoretical treatment of escalation in consumption. We define escalation as a subject's attempt to obtain "more" or engage in consumption behaviors that are "more intense" on a measurable, quantitative or qualitative, objective or subjective, scale (more difficult ski slopes, stronger drugs, harder sex, better restaurants etc.), even if the subject preferred less intense consumption behaviors in the past. Further, this evolution in behavior also occurs if the budget constraint does not change. We will find endogenous and exogenous theoretical microfoundations for escalation in models of hedonic adaptation, desire for novelty, acquisition of consumption skills, rising aspirations, positional effects, and envy. However, we will also discuss the possibility that the tendency to escalate is a specific innate behavior inherent to human nature. Finally, we will propose a preliminary theoretical formalization of such behavior and indicate the possible implications of taking escalation into adequate consideration. JEL codes: B52, D11, D90, D91, I31 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses some issues of the debate on happiness in economics. In particular it deals with the relationship between happiness and sociality. In fact, in contemporary ‘economics and happiness’ literature there is a new interest in interpersonal relationships thanks to the huge empirical evidence that genuine sociality is one of the heaviest components of self-reported happiness. At the same time, mainstream economics is badly equipped for studying genuine sociality, because it treats interpersonal interactions as elements to be taken into account in terms of externalities. The intuition originating the paper is the conviction that if research on happiness aims at taking into account non-instrumental interpersonal relations, i.e. ‘relational goods’, scholars will profit by a reconsideration or retrieving of the Aristotelian tradition of happiness as eudaimonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his article 'Origins of the Problem of Health-related Behaviours: A Genealogical Study', David Armstrong claims that the idea about' changeable behaviour is a relatively recent phenomenon'. In this paper it is argued that this conclusion is not valid. One concern is whether his sources sufficiently document the ideas. Another concern is whether David Armstrong overlooked the focus on health-promoting and health-damaging behaviours by including an insufficient number of words or terms in his search criteria. In this paper it is demonstrated that health-related behaviours have been a concern for doctors throughout history. It is not new as David Armstrong and proponents of the New Public Health claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I am trying to present a view whereby development is seen as cultural and transpersonal `tracks of development' within which individuals have to find their direction. Three different approaches to the analysis of life-tracks are indicated. There are crucial decision points in a person's development, and a person's decision-making process at these points is analyzed from the point of view of his or her perception of his or her `opportunity situation'—what are the alternatives that are psychologically plausible and available for him or her? (Hundeide, 2003b). This raises the question of positioning and acquiring the critical access skills that give entrance to different life-careers. A major point in this paper is that skills and competencies are contextually contained within what I have described as `lifestyle packages'. Certain identity- and style-markings may be important access skills or criteria for getting entrance into certain communities, which again invite and direct the novice into certain life-tracks—which may be more or less irreversible. This point is further explored with regard to creating a basis for understanding the attraction of new Nazi movements to marginalized unsuccessful youngsters, with regard to life careers in a slum community, and with regard to intervention, in the sense of how marginalized youngsters in a situation of school failure, unemployment and delinquency can be `untracked' into more positive life-tracks or careers. The conditions for development and personal change are briefly discussed at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the process of the emergence of new social representation among abusive men vis-à-vis their own behavior. The discussion focuses on a group of 65 men who were sent to a closed hostel (Beit Noam) for intensive therapy for habitual violence. The paper argues that there was no possibility of the existence of such a representation at the beginning of therapy because there was no relevant group to create the discourse necessary for the structuring of social representations. The creation of the group and the ensuing discourse helped the men construct a social representation of their own violence. Such a representation enabled them to complete therapy successfully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a paper updating the paper I wrote on this topic for BSERT in issue 1 volume 1 in 1980. The original paper set out the causes of failure in building design as being due to various issues such as an inadequate brief, lack of data, poor communication, inadequate analysis or synthesis, quirks of human behaviour which could all contribute. Systematic appraisal – now referred to as post-occupancy evaluation – of buildings in use provides feedback which helps us to understand why theory and practice do not always agree and also gives evidence for improved building economics. It concluded that we have to involve users more in the design of buildings, and for the next generations, we need a much broader based education of building designers. This paper continues the theme by considering the latest methods of measurement and assessment which provide feedback data for sustainability but focusing more on health and wellbeing rating assessments.Practical application: Our professions need more interaction across sectors and to foster a transdisciplinary approach. This means more communication with other professional kinsmen from the health and wellbeing sectors in order to make valuable interventions in the building design process. This paper updates the 1980 paper from the first edition of BSER&T that sets out the causes of failure in building design as being due to various issues such as an inadequate brief, lack of data, poor communication, inadequate analysis or synthesis, quirks of human behaviour which could all contribute. The paper determines that the need for feedback in order to improve building performance and provide data to develop existing guidelines, codes and standards is as valid now as it was in 1980 but the way we do this has changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolution’s ability to find innovative phenotypes is an important ingredient in the emergence of complexity in nature. A key factor in this capability is evolvability, or the propensity towards phenotypic variation. Numerous explanations for the origins of evolvability have been proposed, often differing in the role that they attribute to adaptive processes. To provide a new perspective on these explanations, experiments in this paper simulate evolution in gene regulatory networks, revealing that the type of evolvability in question significantly impacts the dynamics that follow. In particular, while adaptive processes result in evolvable individuals, processes that are either neutral or that explicitly encourage divergence result in evolvable populations. Furthermore, evolvability at the population level proves the most critical factor in the production of evolutionary innovations, suggesting that nonadaptive mechanisms are the most promising avenue for investigating and understanding evolvability. These results reconcile a large body of work across biology and inform attempts to reproduce evolvability in artificial settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to introduce the idea of an Open Source theory of human behavior; a theory emerging out of the capabilities and possibilities offered to humans through activities on the Internet. The Internet offers new types of connections and links between distributed human thinking that can transcend traditional boundaries and hierarchies. Open Source activities began in limited hacker/programming communities, the most famous of which is the Linux development project. These communities began to develop activity trajectories and ethical perspectives that stretched beyond programming—including the importance of sharing information early and often and inviting participants to be co-owners in the developing project. Open Source theory has the potential to play a role in our understanding of the evolution of the human mind as a separate, uniquely human phenomenon, acting as a counterweight to the more biologically oriented explanations offered by much of evolutionary psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With point of departure in a phenomenological analysis of the body as it is described and conceptualized in the diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, this paper argues that the diagnosed behavior associated with bodily movement exposes an often-neglected expressive aspect of the body. Beyond the pre-reflective dimension of the experiential body, it is argued that the expressive dimension of the body is associated with movement as a utopian or an incorporeal aspect immanent to the body. In this perspective, the phenomenological notion of the body is critically connected to a fundamental question of the materiality of sensation, which calls for a rethinking of the Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder-diagnosed body that gives privilege to the aesthetic and expressive aspects of sensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gambler’s probing of luck in games of chance cannot be reduced to rational calculation. The art of gambling flourishes at the margins of societies and undermines the correlation of effort and entitlement. This paper interprets the peculiar thrill of gambling in modern times by drawing on social systems theory and critical theory. It argues that gambling is a specific mode of agency that consists in a playful engagement with risk and contingency. The gambler reveals a highly aroused and yet passive consciousness. Success in gambling depends on the art of proper timing as well as a preconscious awareness of fortune. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent agents provide simulations a means to add lifelike behavior in place of manned entities. When implemented, typically a single intelligent agent model (or approach to defining decision making), such as rule-based, behavior trees, neural networks, etc., is selected. This choice introduces restrictions into what behaviors agents can manifest, and can require significant testing in edge cases. This paper presents the incorporation and application of the Unified Behavior Framework (UBF) into the Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration, and Modeling environment. The UBF provides the flexibility to implement any and all behavior-based systems, allowing the developer to rapidly assemble a decision making agent that leverages multiple paradigms or approaches. The UBF achieves this by leveraging several key software engineering principles: modular design, scalability through reduced code complexity, simplified development and testing through abstraction, and the promotion of code reuse. The use of UBF to define intelligent agents within a 2v2 Integrated Air Defense System is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls for a rethinking of critical sociology. Representing classical critical sociology, the Bourdieusian paradigm illustrated domination, but its negative foundation removed actors' power, privileging sociological knowledge as capable of identifying (social) transcendental categories of thought. Latour's constructivism challenged this privilege, giving actors the political power of aggregating collectives around their common concerns at the cost of emphasizing domination and critique. We propose a critical approach that evades a transcendental perspective reliant on pure negation, producing a more positive critical sociology founded on processualist phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives, principally Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. Actors and researchers can collectively ruminate on their perspectives and concerns to challenge power structures and transform their worlds. At the center of this is the social-mien, a creative reimagination of habitus. A brief discussion of the protests and scholarship surrounding the Notre-Dame-des-Landes activists' practice of democracy highlights the utility of the approach and serves as a model for future application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Stuart Hall's reading of Louis Althusser's main theoretical works. Since the early 1970s, Hall has undertaken a critical confrontation with Althusser's 'structural Marxism', rescuing those useful concepts to think cultural difference and identity, without failing to criticize his 'superstructuralist' interpretation of Marx. However, what Hall will retain as Althusser's most important contribution is, above all, his theory of ideology. In this context, I follow an idea formulated by Hall that could be read as summarizing the theoretical and political scope of Althusser's contribution to Cultural Studies: 'he enabled me to live in and with difference'. By complicating classical interpretations schemes in the Marxist tradition, Hall's Althusser may be read as a 'thinker of difference' who opens up a whole research program to reconsider class conflicts as traversed (or 'overdetermined') by gender, racial or colonial conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the place of the child in the metaphysics and imaginary of Western colonization, racialization, and decolonization. In the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, children appear not only as victims but also as a problem for which Fanon struggles to account as a theorist of decolonization as much as a psychiatric practitioner. Through a reading of one of the cases, this article interrogates the ways in which colonization attempts to infantilize colonized populations while erasing childhood, and the ways in which decolonization meets colonization by regarding childhood in the end as a misfortune. The work of decolonization, to proceed, thus would demand us to rethink childhood, and in doing so break free of Western metaphysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows that Habermas's modernism and Lyotard's postmodernism are not as antithetical as they are often taken to be. First, we argue that Habermas is not a strong foundationalist concerned with identifying universal rules for language, as postmodern critiques have often interpreted him. Instead, he develops a social pragmatics in which the communicative use of language is the fundamental presupposition of any meaningful interaction. Second, we argue that Lyotard is not a relativist who denies any universal linguistic structure. Instead, he claims that language involves a universal element of dissensus that cannot be subordinated to consensus. Third, we show that neither does Habermas defend a new version of the kind of philosophy of history characteristic of the Enlightenment, nor is Lyotard a historical relativist, but instead they both seek alternatives to these positions. The conclusion calls for more nuance in the interpretation of both perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earthquake simulations at the urban scale usually focus on estimating the damages to the built environment and the consequent losses without fully taking into account human behavior in crisis. Yet, human behavior is a key element for improving crisis disaster management; therefore, it is important to include it in seismic crisis simulations. In this study, an agent-based model for the simulation of pedestrian evacuation during earthquakes at the city scale is developed following an interdisciplinary approach. The model recreates the urban conditions using Geographic Information System (GIS) and a synthetic population, in addition to the earthquake consequences on the urban fabric. Moreover, the model integrates realistic human behaviors calibrated using quantitative survey results. We simulate pedestrian outdoor mobility with the different constraints that affect it such as the topography and the presence of debris. The simulator is applied to the case of Beirut, Lebanon. A what-if approach is adopted to analyze the population's safety in case of earthquakes in Beirut, particularly the open spaces' capacity to provide shelters and the effect of debris and realistic human behaviors on people's safety. The simulation results show that less than 40% of the population is able to arrive at an open space within 15 min after an earthquake. This number is further reduced when some open spaces are locked. Debris and realistic human behaviors significantly delay the arrivals to safe areas and, therefore, should not be neglected in earthquake simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People do not live in fixed, immutable contexts; neither are their life-trajectories uniform. On the contrary, people experience discontinuities, breaks and transitions at various points in their lives, including their professional lives. The fundamental requirement for a transition is a social and cultural relocation, accompanied by the challenging, reworking or abandoning of former valid identities, routines and representations of reality. The construct of transition can be usefully applied to the study of professional trajectories, by offering a perspective that takes into account the dynamicity and uncertainty imposed by the change in professional practices, not just on the activities that take place in professional contexts, but also on the definition/redefinition/negotiation of individual professional identity. This paper suggests an intrinsic “dual uncertainty” of both the context and the individual during the change processes of professional trajectories. The paper provides a complementary outlook to the points raised in Daniels’ (2011) article on the mutual shaping of human action and institutional settings. Taking Daniels’ approach as a basis, it is possible to broaden the analysis of professional trajectories within rapidly-changing occupational settings, by adopting a perspective that takes into account the inherent open-ended nature of socio-cultural phenomena, the fluidity of living contexts, the permeability of the boundaries within which transitions take place and trajectories evolve, as well as the impact of these aspects on professional identity and on its role in processes of change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Herbert McCabe uses football (soccer) as an analogy for Christian ethics, the sports game being an illuminating abstraction from the concreteness of moral life. This paper explores three authorities in the life-abstraction that is sport: the referee, the coach, and the exemplary player. (1) The referee bears practical epistemic authority: he declares what counts as a play within the rules, and what shall be excluded as an invalid (non-rule-following) play. There are interesting authority-problems that arise when referees err. In ethics, epistemic authority is found in casuistry. (2) The coach bears social authority: she works to make her team function as a team, and at the same time to draw each player to her own excellence. Christian ethics values social authority in every truly human dimension. (3) The exemplary player is a personal authority. He demonstrates excellence of play, which goes beyond conformance to the rules and also goes beyond coaching. A complexification here is the relation of deliberate rule-breaking to excellence of performance. In Christian ethics, exemplary authority is held by the saint living in koinonia. The paper closes with the disanalogy that Christian ethics hopes for excellence in every person. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Freedom of choice is often defended with reference to its positive influence on the satisfaction of preferences. The more choice options there are, the greater the level of utility one derives from choosing one of the options. Moreover, it is assumed that the satisfaction of preferences will not decrease if the size of the choice set increases, in particular in parametric situations. This paper opposes this conclusion by showing that choosing option a from a one-element choice set {a} may not be identical with choosing option a from a two-element choice set {a,b}. The character and the consequences of choosing option a may change considerably with the addition of another option b. Therefore, the level of utility derived from option a changes as well, possibly even in a negative way. Hence, an increase in freedom of choice may diminish one's preference satisfaction, also in parametric situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing interest in cultural geography in the potential of moving imagery and moving image methodologies for grasping the more-than-human and non-representational dimensions of life. This paper explores this potential to develop moving image methodologies for witnessing and evoking human-nonhuman interactions. Drawing on recent work in film theory, anthropology and ethology, it develops both a practical methodology and a critical, affirmative vocabulary for unpacking the work done by circulating imagery and engaging with its micropolitical power and promise. This analysis is illustrated through a focus on elephants and images of their behaviours, ecologies and interactions with diverse humans. It outlines how video techniques can be used to witness and make sense of elephant encounters. It then maps and compares four of the many affective logics according to which elephants are evoked in popular moving imagery. It reflects on the techniques and the micropolitics of such evocations, before examining what they offer for new ways of engaging with nonhuman difference. Elephants provide an accessible, popular and telegenic nonhuman case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I comment on the paper by Gillespie and Zittoun (2009). I argue that the metaphor of culture as a set of resources entails that there be an agent with a certain purpose, whose action converts something into an instrument. In this sense, the metaphor is cryptointentionalist. This arises from the fact that every use of a cultural resource is an action, that is, something done with intention. I also argue that being aware of this intention is part of the basic condition for understanding human action. I analyze the problems of cultural psychology in adopting intentionalist terminology, showing that this rests on the inclusion of a dyadic conception of meaning for a considerable part of the field. In contrast, the adoption of a triadic conception of meaning—e.g., C.S. Peirce's semiotics—avoids the difficulties of integrating social meaning with personal intentionality. I question Vygotsky's inherited sign/tool distinction, arguing that it poses a problem for the analysis offered by Gillespie and Zittoun. Finally, I recommend making an explicit connection between phenomenological descriptions of human action and the culture-psychological concepts concerning the internalization of cultural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years a number of public health, prevention and disease management strategies have emerged that depend on changing health-related behaviours. The definition of those behaviours, indeed of the very idea of behaviour, remains unchallenged in these initiatives, as behaviour is a taken-for-granted concept. Yet the idea of a changeable behaviour is a relatively recent phenomenon and the aim of this paper is to map its emergence and transformation over the last century. Its origins are shown to lie in the first half of the 20th century when it was derived from the ideas of conduct and movement. From mid-century onwards, it has been increasingly construed as being underpinned by a sense of agency and as a legitimate target for healthcare interventions. Finally, in the 21st century it has become stabilized as a core dimension of health and illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of psychology commonly maintain that early American functional and behaviorist psychology was based upon two materialist achievements of the 19th century: the neurophysiological location of psychological faculties and the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet early American functional and behaviorist psychology was based less upon these achievements than upon the principle of strong psychological continuity associated with them, according to which the psychology and behavior of humans and animals differ only in degree but not kind. This paper charts the historical development of the association between materialism and principles of strong continuity, noting that the neurophysiological location of psychological faculties and the theory of evolution by natural selection did not provide especially good reasons for preferring theories committed to strong psychological continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 'Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object' Michael Lynch (1988) explores how the animal body is transformed into a scientific object in the laboratory. How did the laboratory become a (relatively) closed space in which scientists, the experts, were delegated the task of negotiating and transforming the interpretative sense of the animal - from sentient beings to analytic objects - as tools in a scientific machinery? By exploring a parliamentary controversy on experimental medicine at the turn of the 20th century I argue that this depended on a reworking of the status of the animal body, as well as the status of the laboratory. Crucial to this was social theory; specifically, utilitarian reasoning. Thus, what we need to study - this paper argues - is not simply the ways in which the practices of annual experimentation were met with opposition and critiques, but also how these practices came to be culturally and politically accepted, and what this implied for science - society relations. In analysing this controversy, the author attends to recent turn to politics in STS and argue for the significance of studying conventional political sites such as 'Parliament' and the role that social theory plays in renegotiating and remaking sites and objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although freedom has been of grave concern to people for centuries, it has surprisingly not been a central topic in psychology. The goal of this article is to begin constructing a theoretical framework for addressing freedom issues in terms of free action, which is generally defined as doing as one sees fit without coercion or constraint. Insofar as free action is a form of human action, it is first necessary to conceptualize action. The paper begins by conceptualizing action from a systems perspective in terms of interrelated individual, social, and cultural processes. Next, free action is conceptualized as a form of action that involves particular ways of structuring individual, social, and cultural processes. The article ends with some implications of this conceptualization of free action for continued theory building and research on the psychology of free action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arocha (2021) discusses the "replication crisis," arguing for models that allow a greater complexity in the relationship between variables and processes. In this comment, we identify a more fundamental issue: the impossibility of eliminating interpretation issues with operational definitions and increased rigor in the measurements of variables and processes. Interpretation is at the core of (a) human action and (b) scientific endeavor. First, considering Vygotsky, we argue that all higher mental processes are sign mediated, influencing psychological research with humans. Second, that the understanding of research results also involves sign mediation and, therefore, it is nonneutral. We suggest two alternative approaches. There needs to be an increase in research that delivers a detailed description of psychological phenomena. Additionally, it is necessary to increase the elucidation of contextual-embeddedness research. Taking into account the two levels of meaning will underline psychology as a scientific discipline of complex phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When is the baseline for Anthropocene? The first indications of human impact on earth closely relate to early human behavior and use of resources. First agricultural societies modified the landscape with the aim of generating their own resources to satisfy the needs of an increasing population. This new system was the result of years of learning and continuous interaction with landscape. Hunter-gatherer societies had shown a vast knowledge of their surrounding environment, which allowed them to exploit and optimize the available resources. But, had these societies the capacity to modify the landscape in such a way that can be traced up until today? How far back in time can we go to find the first evidence of human impact on earth? In this paper, we will try to analyze early human behavior and the possible impact of their activities on the landscape. We will use the paleoanthropological site of Olduvai Gorge (northern Tanzania) as a case study to suggest that the baseline for Anthropocene, taking the term as human impact on earth through cognitive-behavioral strategies, can be moved back to the time when early hominins visited Olduvai. Olduvai Gorge is perfectly suited for this study since the latest scientific research and publications have yielded a detailed knowledge of the vegetation, the landscape, and of the wildlife that lived in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given their commitment to practices, science studies have bestowed considerable attention upon objects. We have the boundary object, the standardized package, the network object, the immutable mobile, the fluid object, even a fire object has entered the scene. However, these objects do not provide us with a way of understanding their historicity. They are timeless, motionless pictures rather than things that change over time, and while enacting ‘historical moments’ they do not make visible the histories they contain within them. What kind of object could embody history and make that history visible? Inspired by Michel Serres, I suggest the folded object is a way to attend to the temporality and spatiality of objects. In this article I explore this new object by unravelling the history of a DNA reference sequence. I show how, ever since it was produced in the early 1980s, attempts have been made to filter race out of the sequence. That effort has failed due to what one could call ‘political noise’. Making and remaking the sequence have left traces that cannot be erased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that spending too much time indoors and disengagement from outdoor environmental stimuli may have detrimental health effects. These negative effects are even more serious in hospitals, where patients are highly stressed and have to spend most of their time indoors. Studies show that, in these situations, patients prefer to have a window with a desirable view. Although the desire for having a room with a view among hospital patients is well established, not all views are equally desirable. The parameters which make a view "desirable" are not well understood. This paper presents results of a large-scale human factors research study using patients' qualitative assessments on thousands of "view" photos (n = 2000), in order to provide a reliable foundation for developing a robust rating system to accurately quantify the desirability quality of views in healthcare settings. The results show that "distant" and "nature-dominant" views were, by far, the most desirable. Additionally, the results showed that while "water features" was also viewed desirable, views of moving cars and industrial settings were viewed most negatively. Moreover, the study revealed that natural views are not "always" more pleasant than urban views, and the positive reaction is mostly the result of aesthetic quality of the view content. Practical application : This study provides empirical confirmation that validates previous studies regarding the association of view content and building occupants' preference, specifically within healthcare settings. It also provides a reliable foundation for developing a robust rating system to accurately classify and quantify the quality of views in healthcare settings. Furthermore, the findings of this study can be used by designers to better incorporate the needs of healthcare design community and those who aim to consider view in the design stages of new built spaces or retrofit of existing spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buyers in online markets pay higher prices to sellers who promise a high-quality product in auctions of used goods, even though they cannot assess quality until after the sale. The principal argument offered in prior work is that reputation systems render sellers' 'cheap talk' credible by allowing buyers to publicly rate sellers' past honesty and sellers to build a reputation for being honest. We test this argument using both observational data from online auctions on eBay and an internet experiment. Strikingly, in both studies we find that unverifiable promises are trusted by buyers regardless of seller reputation or the presence of a reputation system, and sellers mostly refuse to take advantage. We conclude that the prevailing conception of markets in economic sociology as made possible by opportunism-curtailing institutions is "undersocialized": Reputation systems may be used to identify more reliable providers of a product, but that they would be needed to prevent otherwise rampant deceit relies on a cynical assumption about human behavior that is empirically untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is morality a pure rational abstraction or is it rooted in human nature? In this paper I argue for the second option, and I do so in several steps. I first vindicate the cognitive role of emotions. For this, I rely on two contemporary theories of emotions, Martha Nussbaum’s and Antonio Damasio’s, without forgetting the evolutionary approach to emotions. Then I defend a complex model of human behaviour that goes beyond rational choice models and includes, following Gintis, other-regarding orientations and altruistic motivations. Key ingredients of such a complex model are the social emotions involved in human cooperation and reciprocal altruism. Underlying social cooperation is an emotional economy which turns out to be highly informative about the moral nature of social life. I analyse this emotional economy of cooperation and, following Aristotle, I show its moral foundations. Finally, I claim that the set of moral norms and the corresponding emotional responses involved in cooperative behaviour could be reduced to a unique moral principle. Here I draw on the general moral principle – neminem laede; imo omnes, quantum potes, juva – and follow Schopenhauer in his philosophical derivation of the principle of compassion from the emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing computing capability and high-resolution digital tracing of human behavior make large-scale computational models for individual-based realistic simulation available. Reconstructing a virtual computational environment is crucial for designing and implementing individual interactions in an artificial society as human beings behave in the real world. In this paper, we propose a methodology to recreate a virtual city by utilizing statistical data and geographic information. The synthetic population and physical environment are baseline components of the virtual city. Individual-based modeling is used to specify individuals’ demographic characteristics, and each individual is endowed with heterogeneous social attributes. Various physical environments are generated with geographic locations and mapped with individuals to support daily mobility, migration, and interaction. A series of algorithms are proposed to bridge the gap between macroscopic data and microscopic models, and guarantee equivalence between them. Based on the methodology, we reconstructed a virtual city of Beijing, and presented the statistical analysis of population structure, spatial distribution of physical environments, human travel characteristics, and spatial topologies of social networks. Our synthetic population can represent individual actors in the form of households and household members, and the synthetic population is statistically equivalent to a real population. The proposed methodology is efficient to recreate a synthetic virtual city and can serve as a base for computational experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-lethal weapons (NLWs) provide the warfighter with tools to effectively wage full spectrum operations, particularly in counterinsurgency, stability and support, and peace operations. However, it is widely recognized that evaluation of a NLW’s performance and effectiveness is problematic. The principal difficulty is that a NLW must be evaluated as both a non-lethal device (based on clinical testing methods of life science) and as a weapon (based on US Department of Defense (DoD) evaluation and testing methods of engineering and physics). This paper argues that live-virtual-constructive (LVC) methods constitute a critical component of a comprehensive research program on NLW effectiveness. In support of this contention, the article has three parts. Section 2 reviews briefly NLW effectiveness testing. This section will then present general LVC methods and the advantages they have over typical methods of evaluating NLW effects. Following this introduction, and in line with the intent of the special issue, an overview will be given on LVC methods as employed in NLW testing by the US Army’s Target Behavioral Response Laboratory (TBRL). Since its inception in 2004, the TBRL at Picatinny Arsenal has conducted comprehensive LVC studies on NLW effectiveness. These experiments examine NLW effectiveness against intended targets under controlled laboratory experimentation. A third component presents empirical quantitative results from LVC experimentation with NLW effectiveness in a crowd scenario. The article concludes with a brief summary of the use and particular benefits of LVC methods on NLW effectiveness testing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dynamical systems approach in the cognitive and behavioral sciences studies how systems made of many coupled components across brain, body, and environment self-organize to generate behavior. This approach has mostly focused on models of single actions and has not addressed how a dynamical system can engage in multiple different directed actions. In this paper, we introduce a family of artificial life models that demonstrate how dynamical agents can engage in multiple different actions and autonomously switch between them. These described agents engage in a food foraging task, and are driven by both internal, metabolic variables and external, sensory variables. The analysis of one of these agents demonstrates how different actions can arise through transient modes of sensorimotor coordination, in which a subset of the available sensors and effectors become engaged while others are ignored. Transitions between actions are analyzed and shown to correspond to rapid movements through the agent’s state space. In these transitions, some of the previously controlling sensors and effectors disengage, and new sets of sensors and effectors are engaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of schema was advanced by Frederic Bartlett to provide the basis for a radical temporal alternative to traditional spatial storage theories of memory. Bartlett took remembering out of the head and situated it at the enfolding relation between organism and environment. Through an activity of “turning around upon schemata,” humans can create ruptures in their seamless flow of activity in an environment and take active control over mind and behavior. This paper contextualizes Bartlett’s concept of schema within broader theoretical developments of his time, examines its temporal dimensions in relation to embodied action and memory “reconstruction,” shows how these temporal dynamics are later abandoned by early cognitive “schema” theories which revert to the metaphor of storage, and explores strategies by which we might fruitfully bring schema back into psychology as an embodied, dynamic, temporal, holistic, and social concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including recent advances in modeling and simulation, use of graphical modeling tools and use of microscopic traffic simulation model to describe human behavior.