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Despite intensive work by human rights organizations to garner global condemnation of torture, in the years since the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were exposed, support in the United States for the use of torture has increased, and torture also attracts significant support in many other countries. This paper seeks to understand the affective work that the 'ticking time bomb scenario' and its imagined dramatization does in shaping how torture is understood. The literature is replete with debates over whether the scenario distorts or accurately describes the actual circumstances in which decisions about torture occur, and the moral criteria that ought to be brought to the decision-making process. In describing the scenario as a "thought experiment," however, these analyses obscure the work that this imagined scene does in shaping how people evaluate the use of torture – work that takes place at the affective and somatic levels. Induced into a process of racially inflected and affectively laden identifications and aversions, the paper suggests that the "subjects" of this thought experiment do very little thinking and thus fact-based or logical counter-arguments are of little use in shifting evaluations of torture. Rather, we need to understand the affective work that somatically grounded stories do in normalizing and inducing subjects to embrace torture. The paper is particularly interested in how imagined scenarios can be used to institute affects that freeze and immobilize, and how we might construct other narratives to encourage more dynamic and fluid forms of affective experience and identification. Exploring the link between narratives and more dynamic affects may offer more productive strategies for encouraging people to shift positions as they confront new evidence and encounter other experiences and bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transportation infrastructure tremendously affects the quality of life for urban residents, influences public and mental health, and shapes social relations. Historically, the topic is rich with social and political controversy and the resultant transit systems in the United States cause problems for minority residents and issues for the public. Environmental justice frameworks provide a means to identify and address harms that affect marginalized groups, but environmental justice has limits that cannot account for the mainstream population. To account for this condition, I employ a complex moral assessment measure that provides a way to talk about harms that affect the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on artificial intelligence (AI), pattern-matching algorithms, and artificial meanings that are produced by entities other than individual natural persons as of March 2014. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 of The Chinese Intersection thought experiment, which involve the legal rules for regulating transportation systems, are examined. Legal communication, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, and the Shanghai Artificially Intelligent Traffic Authority are examined.

This paper proposes a novel thought-experiment, the ‘Turing litigation game’ – or ‘Turing game’ for short. Specifically, we propose replacing the existing arcane and archaic systems of civil and criminal procedure with a simple and probabilistic litigation game resembling the Turing Test from the world of computer science. The paper is divided into six sections. Section 1 provides a brief introduction. Section 2 provides some background by describing the original Turing Test and explaining how the Turing Test resembles the process of adjudication. Section 3 then describes our proposed Turing litigation game and identifies the conditions for implementing this alternative approach to litigation, while Section 4 introduces the possibility of probabilistic verdicts (as opposed to the traditional system of binary verdicts). Section 5 reviews (and refutes) several philosophical objections against our Turing-game concept. Section 6 concludes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

"Luck and the Principle of Relativity'' is the first piece in a series of short stories which describe the experiences of a nameless girl in a post-apocalyptic America. This story is intended primarily as a thought experiment: although confronted with fantastic circumstances, the narrator is not focused on the existence of the ''Sleepwalkers,'' i.e. the zombies that people the background of her world, but rather on her own physical and emotional survival in a time of chaos, where the real danger is found in the economic and psychological climate of the new reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: As a high-status, omnipresent Black exemplar, Barack Obama and his rise to the presidency of the United States may have induced a cultural shift in implicit racial attitudes, much like controlled exposures to positive Black and negative White exemplars have done in the laboratory (). With a very large, heterogeneous sample collected daily for 2.5years prior to, during and after the 2008 election season (N =479,405), we observed very little evidence of systematic change in implicit and explicit racial attitudes overall, within subgroups, or for particular notable dates. Malleability of racial attitudes – implicit or explicit – may be conditional on more features than the mere presence of high-status counter-stereotypic exemplars. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

An essay is presented on thought experiments concerning the U.S. Supreme Court case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharm Inc. The author highlights two thought experiments that arose in cases he tried before junk science became a widely used label and before Daubert was decided. He also explains the importance of focusing on application rather than abstraction, and a willingness to embrace complication rather than insisting upon stark, abstract and neat solutions to problems in this area.

Biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emissions were studied using vegetation enclosure experiments. Particular emphasis was given to sesquiterpene compounds (SQT), although monoterpenes(MT)were also characterized. SQT were detected in emissions from seven (out of eight) pine species that were examined. Thirteen SQT compounds were identified; the most abundant ones were β-caryophyllene, α-bergamotene, β-farnesene, and α-farnesene, with emission rates increasing exponentially with temperature. Regression analysis yielded exponential dependencies of both MT and SQT emissions on temperature of the form E = E0 × exp(×(T - T0)). This resulted in SQT basal emission rates (E0 defined at T0 = 30 °C) ranging between <4 and 620 ng (carbon) gdw-1 h-1 (gdw = gram dry weight). The average value of the exponential temperature response factor × for SQT emissions,taken from all experiments, was 0.17 °C-1, whereas the value for monoterpenes was 0.11 °C-1. The average, total SQT emissions from pines were estimated to be 9, 16, and 29% of the MT emissions at 20, 30, and 40°C respectively. The emission factors and β-factors determined from these measurements were used to estimate pine tree MT and SQT emission distributions for the contiguous United States using MEGAN (model of emissions of gases and aerosols from nature, Guenther et al., 2006). SQT fluxes reaching 10-40 mg m-2 for the month of July were estimated for extensive areas of most western and southern U.S. states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reluctance to report bad news about a project and its status is a known problem in software project management that can contribute to project failure. The reluctance to report bad news is heightened when it bears personal risks. Oftentimes, those who report bad news end up losing face. In extreme cases, they not only lose face, but may end up on the unemployment line. The need to preserve face is a powerful influence on social behaviour. While universal, it manifests itself differently in different cultures. To date, there have been no empirical studies of the extent to which culturally constituted views of face-saving affect reporting of bad news on software projects. This is a particularly important topic given the increased prevalence of global, dispersed software development teams and offshore outsourcing of software development. In this study, we conducted a role-playing experiment in the USA and in South Korea, to investigate the effect of culturally constituted views of face-saving on the willingness to report bad news regarding a software development project. A blame-shifting opportunity was chosen as the means to operationalize face-saving in a culturally sensitive fashion. The two countries were chosen because they differ markedly in their views of face-saving and the relative importance ascribed to two important aspects of face: lian and mianzi. Results reveal that the presence of a blame-shifting opportunity had a significant effect on US subjects’ willingness to report bad news, but the effect on Korean subjects was not found to be statistically significant. In the absence of a blame-shifting opportunity, we did not observe any significant differences between US and Korean subjects in willingness to report bad news. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the investigation on the normal development of the power of thought in the average school child in the U.S. All grades in grammar schools beginning with the fifth and each class in the high school have been required to write the Lord's Prayer. Results of the investigation show that the subjects have not assimilated the thought of the Lord's Prayer as to the way it is composed.

The article describes several experiments in science education in the United States. One experiment involves the pinching of the nose to prevent any sense of smell, while smelling different substances that have been placed on the tongue. Another experiment involves plunging a finger into mercury, and explaining the sensation which one experience upon the withdrawal of the finger. Another is about an experiment with light weights.