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Compassion is an evolutionary, moral force that is a necessary output of vertebrate evolution and that vertebrates, including humans, exhibit it as a result of suffering for oneself and others. It predates the Anthropocene, and is engrained in the emergent properties of the vertebrate brain, particularly through the evolution of the oxytocin pathway in the mesolimbic system. I suggest it can be cultivated and enhanced but is entrenched in our genetics and epigenetics as a response to help relieve suffering from oneself and others. Here, I present an origin story for the role of compassion across all species.

This paper argues that a variety of constructions in a variety of languages suggest a deep connection between kinds, manners, and degrees. We articulate a way of thinking about degrees on which this connection is less surprising, rooted in the idea that degrees are kinds of Davidsonian states. This enables us to provide a cross-categorial compositional semantics for a class of expressions that can serve as anaphors to kinds, manners, and degrees, or introduce clauses that further characterize them. A consequence of this is that equatives emerge as a special case of a more general cross-categorial phenomenon. The analysis is undergirded by independently motivated assumptions about free relatives and type shifting. It provides evidence for a view of degrees on which they are significantly more ontologically complex than is typically thought.

It is well documented that coordination of feeding behavior in anuran amphibians requires precise coordination of the jaw levators and depressors with the timing of the protraction of the tongue. (for review, see Nishikawa, 2000). However, the neuronal mechanism initiating and synchronizing this coordination is not well understood. In addition to the intermandibularis muscle and tongue musculature in the lower jaw, there is a small, transverse muscle at the tip of the jaw, the m. submentalis. Previous anatomical work has demonstrated the presence of muscle spindles in the submentalis, leading to the hypothesis that the activation of this muscle may provide proprioceptive information to aid in coordinating the feeding biomechanics in Rhinella marina. Here, we demonstrate that the submentalis likely acts as a ‘trigger’ to initiate the hypoglossal nerve to activate the tongue, and without feedback information from the muscle spindles of the submentalis, tongue protraction is compromised.

Truth default theory holds that people do not expect or notice deception unless they are triggered to think outside their natural tendency to believe others (Levine, 2020). It follows that people may not notice something deceptive or seemingly impossible if they are not first primed to raise suspicion. This study tests truth-default theory and triggering in the context of magic tricks. It hypothesized that people could watch two magic tricks performed without realizing they just witnessed something impossible because they were not primed to be aware of the presence of the possibility of deception. The research design is a three-group quasi-experiment with two conditions and a control. All participants (N = 408) witnessed a presentation, about 90 seconds long, about a fictious journalism club. Participants in one condition witnessed magic during the presentation without being primed while participants the second condition witnessed magic after being primed. Participants in the control were not primed and no magic occurred during that presentation. It was expected that participants who were primed would be much more likely to report they witnessed magic than those who were not primed. The results were consistent with the predictions. The percent of participants who were not primed and claimed they noticed magic was 16.3%, while 47.8% claimed they noticed magic after being primed. To the extent that there is an inherent element of deception in magic, the results support truth default theory’s assertion that a trigger event, like priming someone to the potential for magic, will change one’s cognitive state from its default truth-bias natural condition to one of suspicion. In a suspicious state of mind, people are more likely to detect deception or attempted deception including the deception involved in magic tricks.

Amidst widespread shortages of materials, capital, and expertise, individual house builders, professionals, artisans, and scientific experts in post-Independence India expanded access to pukka (permanent) housing by creating low-cost, labor-intensive substitutes for concrete, fired bricks, and other modern materials. The dissertation contends that these pervasive substitutional practices have been integral to the formation of postcolonial selfhood. From the 1930s onwards, proponents of substitution argued that the replacement of foreign materials with domestically made counterparts would lead to both individual and national economic self-reliance. Though concerns about cost and economic autonomy are now joined by growing attention to the environmental consequences of materials, producers of substitutes in present-day India continue to imagine their production as a process of self-making. By interweaving ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and oral histories, the dissertation shows how the substitution of unavailable or inaccessible building materials in housing has provided pathways to citizenship and development for populations at the margins of state-led development and neoliberal economic reforms in India.Through interviews, ethnography, and photographic documentation of housing, the dissertation examines the production of soil-based alternatives to concrete and image-based reproductions of marble in workshops, factories, training programs, and design studios in the city of Bangalore and its extended material geographies, including rural Karnataka and industrial centers in Western India. Integrating historical and anthropological methods, the dissertation tracks different forms of training, marketing, and site-based learning about substitution from the late colonial period to the present. It further contextualizes practices of substitution over a long duration by scrutinizing government reports, scientific research, architectural publications, advertisements, and films. This shows how postcolonial approaches to social redistribution are being reworked in the neoliberal present. Despite the salience of choice, value addition, and other forms of economic rationality in discourse about the material conditions of housing in India, practices of material substitution are thus shown to rub up against changing political and economic ideologies of self-reliance, environmental stewardship, and self-governance. In approaching the home as material archive, the dissertation accounts for how different actors use materials to navigate the uncertainties of house-making in situations of precarious social mobility and systemic environmental duress.

In Orlando, Mayor Buddy Dyer said city officials would make it easier for businesses to operate under social distancing restrictions by allowing retail sales and outdoor restaurant seating in parking lots under farmers market-like tents. Drive-thru testing sites were set up around the state, but capacity has outstripped demand in recent weeks – even after access was extended to any adult who thinks they may have been exposed. Associated Press reporters Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg and Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale contributed to this report

Among those are the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, Buchanan said at a news conference. The pumps are meant to slowly drain the water and divert it to Tampa Bay, which could lead to negative environmental consequences such as fish kills and algae blooms. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection says the water in the pond is primarily salt water mixed with wastewater and storm water.

In this book, an expert in the field explains why the United States is the world's largest debtor nation and how America's relationship to creditor states is of growing economic, diplomatic, and even national security concern. Foreign countries are not merely investing in U.S. corporations but are purchasing them outright: Abu Dhabi bought Citigroup securities, Kuwait purchased a large block Merrill Lynch stock, and China bought Morgan Stanley's convertible securities-and this happened before the September 2008 meltdown of Wall Street. The means by which wealthy foreign states make these purchases are sovereign wealth funds, their surplus capital that they are seeking to invest in order to generate the greatest return. Currently, the largest sovereign wealth funds are held by the United Arab Emirates (of which Abu Dhabi is part), Norway, Singapore, Kuwait, and the People's Republic of China; Qatar and Libya are also in the top ten. The United States has no such fund (although the state of Alaska does). This book takes a close look at China's and Norway's sovereign wealth funds to explain how they work. The author also uses domestic examples (Harvard's endowment, the California's state employees' retirement fund) to propose how the United States could create a sovereign wealth fund, speculating that such a fund could solve the looming Social Security funds shortfall. Most important, the book elucidates the national security aspects of not having an American sovereign wealth fund when so many other nations-both friend and foe-have them.