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In “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger juxtaposes the notion of homelessness (Heimlosigkeit) with home-coming (Heimholung), i.e. the reawakening to our original relationship to Being. This focus on dwelling in Being represents an interesting modification from his earlier study of “incipience” (Anfang), which emphasizes departure. We follow the critique of this shift in thinking in Hannah Arendt’s work, beginning with a short allegory titled “Heidegger the Fox” (1953). We suggest that reading this allegory in the light of Arendt’s decades-long debate with Heidegger illuminates the tense relationship between dwelling and incipience (or in her terms, “natality”). Though we do not attempt a complete analysis of Heidegger and Arendt’s works here, we aim to draw out specific movements of their thinking. We suggest that Arendt’s concept of natality, which, though partly influenced by Heidegger, ultimately challenges the authenticity of Heidegger’s solitary, silent thinker who dwells in the House of Being. In the back and forth between their thinking an unresolvable tension between dwelling and departure arises as the existential fissure.

The understandability of process models has been subject to extensive research in which eye-tracking has demonstrated great capability to deliver meaningful insights. However, the full potential of this technology is not fully exploited due to the complexity of using dynamic stimuli in experiments (i.e., large and interactive process models) and the common use of static stimuli (i.e., small non-interactive models) as a cheap alternative limiting the ecological validity of the used experimental setting and the generalizability of the results. This paper presents EyeMind, a solution to overcome this limitation by supporting the whole experimental workflow using dynamic stimuli and offering a comprehensive analysis toolkit of eye-tracking data. All these features facilitate experiments on large and interactive process models as well as the extraction of meaningful insights.

The increasing number of IoT devices equipped with sensors and actuators pervading every domain of everyday life allows for improved automated monitoring and analysis of processes executed in IoT-enabled environments. While sophisticated analysis methods exist to detect specific types of activities from low-level IoT data, a general approach for detecting activity executions that are part of more complex business processes does not exist. Moreover, dedicated information systems to orchestrate or monitor process executions are not available in typical IoT environments. As a consequence, the large corpus of existing process analysis and mining techniques to check and improve process executions cannot be applied. In this work, we develop an interactive method guiding the analysis of low-level IoT data with the goal of detecting higher-level process activity executions. The method is derived following the exploratory data analysis of an IoT data set from a smart factory. We propose analysis steps, sensor-actuator-activity patterns, and the novel concept of activity signatures that are applicable in many IoT domains. The method shows to be valuable for the early stages of IoT data analyses to build a ground truth based on domain knowledge and decisions of the process analyst, which can be used for automated activity detection in later stages.

Research on racial and ethnic influence on breast cancer mortality is stymied by a lack of genomic studies in diverse populations. Here, the authors genomically interrogate 194 Nigerian breast cancers, unveiling molecular features that could explain the high mortality rate from breast cancer in an indigenous African population.

Philosophy for Children (P4C) hopes to cultivate democratic dialogue as well as critical, creative, and caring thinking; the latter of which has been associated with students' social and emotional competencies (SECs) like empathy and perspective-taking. Yet, empirical, randomized studies on the effectiveness of P4C on students' SECs and sense of autonomy are scant. This paper reports findings from a pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) assessing preliminary outcomes of the impact of an P4C approach on middle school students' SECs and their feelings of autonomy and classroom supportiveness. Ten classrooms of 6th to 8th grade students (N = 233) were randomly assigned to either receive the intervention or serve as controls. The P4C sessions were facilitated by two experienced P4C educators for one 90-minute session once a week for 8 weeks. Outcome analyses revealed no significant differences between P4C and control students on self-reported classroom supportiveness, empathy, perspective-taking, or altruism, however, P4C students were significantly lower on classroom autonomy and teacher-rated SECs at post-test, compared to controls. Person-centered analyses revealed higher post-test empathy among P4C students who were rated by teachers as having higher SECs as compared to students rated low on SECs at pre-test. Taken together, these findings provide preliminary evidence of the impacts of this type of program for early adolescent students.

Biased cognition during high arousal states is a relevant phenomenon in a variety of topics: from the development of post-traumatic stress disorders or stress-triggered addictive behaviors to forensic considerations regarding crimes of passion. Recent evidence indicates that arousal modulates the engagement of a hippocampus-based “cognitive” system in favor of a striatum-based “habit” system in learning and memory, promoting a switch from flexible, contextualized to more rigid, reflexive responses. Existing findings appear inconsistent, therefore it is unclear whether and which type of context processing is disrupted by enhanced arousal. In this behavioral study, we investigated such arousal-triggered cognitive-state shifts in human subjects. We validated an arousal induction procedure (three experimental conditions: violent scene, erotic scene, neutral control scene) using pupillometry (Preliminary Experiment, n = 13) and randomly administered this method to healthy young adults to examine whether high arousal states affect performance in two core domains of contextual processing, the acquisition of spatial (spatial discrimination paradigm; Experiment 1, n = 66) and sequence information (learned irrelevance paradigm; Experiment 2, n = 84). In both paradigms, spatial location and sequences were encoded incidentally and both displacements when retrieving spatial position as well as the predictability of the target by a cue in sequence learning changed stepwise. Results showed that both implicit spatial and sequence learning were disrupted during high arousal states, regardless of valence. Compared to the control group, participants in the arousal conditions showed impaired discrimination of spatial positions and abolished learning of associative sequences. Furthermore, Bayesian analyses revealed evidence against the null models. In line with recent models of stress effects on cognition, both experiments provide evidence for decreased engagement of flexible, cognitive systems supporting encoding of context information in active cognition during acute arousal, promoting reduced sensitivity for contextual details. We argue that arousal fosters cognitive adaptation towards less demanding, more present-oriented information processing, which prioritizes a current behavioral response set at the cost of contextual cues. This transient state of behavioral perseverance might reduce reliance on context information in unpredictable environments and thus represent an adaptive response in certain situations.

The original version of this Article contained an error in the author affiliations. The affiliation of Kevin P. White with Tempus Labs, Inc. Chicago, IL, USA was inadvertently omitted. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

?Philosophizing with children? is not an entirely new concept: for example Plato already initiates his philosophical dialogues with young people. And even Kant in his essay What is Orientation in Thinking? (Kant 1991) calls for the early encouragement of reason.

Humans are mainly rational beings and children seem to be “defective creatures”. In contrast to that popular and reduced concept of childhood, thinkers like Kant, Arendt and Lévinas explored the more complex anthropological concept of child in its Otherness. They regard childhood as a necessary aspect of the society. Kant in his essay What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? calls for the early encouragement of reason.

Promoting philosophical and ethical education in schools requires academic education of teacher candidates who are able to apply professional methods. In schools, information pills in contrast to the academy, advice philosophy and ethics need to be taught in a practical and interactive way. ?Learning-by-doing?, more about as distinguished from philosophy according to the ?scholastic concept?. Philosophy according to the ?universal concept? deals with questions generally asked not only by philosophers, but by all thinking people

Epigenetic changes are widely considered to play an important role in aging, but experimental evidence to support this hypothesis has been scarce. We have used array-based analysis to determine genome-scale DNA methylation patterns from human skin samples and to investigate the effects of aging, chronic sun exposure, and tissue variation. Our results reveal a high degree of tissue specificity in the methylation patterns and also showed very little interindividual variation within tissues. Data stratification by age revealed that DNA from older individuals was characterized by a specific hypermethylation pattern affecting less than 1% of the markers analyzed. Interestingly, stratification by sun exposure produced a fundamentally different pattern with a significant trend towards hypomethylation. Our results thus identify defined age-related DNA methylation changes and suggest that these alterations might contribute to the phenotypic changes associated with skin aging.