Announcements, Journal Preprints

Call for Articles, Probes, and Reviews for the Next Issue of NExJ (Vol 4 No 1)

Posted by Blog Staff
Bob Logan, editor New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication 3 (2) Deadline for Submissions: April 15, 2024 Submit articles to the editor Bob Logan at logan@physics.utoronto.ca  NExJ Vol 2 No 3 Bob Logan, editor New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication has set the deadline for submissions to NExJ 3 (2) to come out in late 2023
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Journal Preprints

A Born Classic to which One Cannot Remain Indifferent: On B.W. Powe’s Ladders Made of Water (Stream Elsewhere Press, 2024)

Posted by Jose Luiz Rangel
By Jose Luiz Rangel joseluizrangel@icloud.com York University Ladders Made of Water, by Canadian writer, poet, philosopher and scholar BW Powe, is a genuine “work in progress” that obviously forms part of a trilogy that began with the amazing Blakean book, The Charge in Global Membrane (2019), and will be completed, as announced in some sections
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Journal Preprints

The Value of Media Ecology for Enabling Human Rights Defenders to Advocate for the Protection of the Right to Mental Health in the Context of Deploying Artificial Intelligence Technology as part of the Decision-making Process

Posted by Tanya Krupiy
Tetyana (Tanya) Krupiy — Newcastle University — tanya.krupiy@newcastle.ac.uk Abstract: Traditionally, human rights activists gathered evidence about violations of particular individuals’ human rights to demand that states change their conduct and adopt measures to prevent further violations. Deploying artificial intelligence as part of the decision-making process creates challenges for activists to detect all sources of harm
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Journal Preprints

Review: David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 2023).

Posted by Thomas J Farrell
Thomas J. Farrell University of Minnesota Duluth. tfarrell@d.umn.edu The American journalist and op-ed columnist for the New York Times David Brooks (born in 1961 in Toronto; B. A., University of Chicago, 1983) once mentioned my favorite scholar the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong’s most widely read, and most widely translated, 1982 book Orality and Literacy:
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Journal Preprints

Review: Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress (Regnery, 2023).

Posted by Thomas J Farrell
Thomas J. Farrell University of Minnesota Duluth. tfarrell@d.umn.edu After Time magazine named the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift (born in 1989) Person of the Year 2023, on December 6, 2023, I read the 44-year-old Oxford-educated British author Mary Harrington’s short provocatively titled online article “The dark truth about Taylor Swift: Too many young women yearn for
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Journal Preprints

Review: Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011)

Posted by Thomas J Farrell
Thomas J. Farrell University of Minnesota Duluth. tfarrell@d.umn.edu Berkeley’s distinguished sociologist of religion Robert N. Bellah’s 775-p. magnum opus Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011) constructs an evolutionary Big History account in which to situate Karl Jasper’s account of the ancient axial age (roughly, the first millennium BCE) in
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Journal Preprints

Review: John Dear, The Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence (Orbis Books, 2024).

Posted by Thomas J Farrell
Thomas J. Farrell University of Minnesota Duluth. tfarrell@d.umn.edu I usually do not review reference books, because they are designed to be dipped into and consulted for specific targeted information, not read straight through. For example, biblical commentaries are usually designed to be used as reference books to be consulted for information about specific biblical passages,
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Journal Preprints

Eleven Kinds of Orality: A Probe

Posted by Bob Logan
Robert K. Logan Department of Physics and St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto logan@physics.utoronto.ca Abstract: Ong’s notion of secondary orality that emerged with the written word is expanded to include the way orality changed with the emergence of the alphabet, the printing press, telegraph, radio, television, computing, the Internet, social media and AI. Orality is
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Journal Preprints

Thoughts About the Fear of AI Spontaneously Controlling Us Humans: Much Ado About Nothing

Posted by Bob Logan
Robert K. Logan logan@physics.utoronto.ca Abstract: The notion that an AI device could spontaneously take control of its programmer/creators and then enslave or annihilate humankind is shown to be something that could never happen given that a computer cannot have any desires or a will of its own. A review of human, non-human animal, plant, fungi,
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