Recent ucr_chass_music items

Interspecial Signal

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Plants and humans interact with the world through profoundly different systems. While plants are known to sense their environment, whether they perceive it remains an open scientific question (Ferretti et al., 2025). Interspecial Signal makes audible the electrical life of a living plant, placing that open question in the listener. A pothos plant is connected to Biotron, a consumer-grade controller that converts changes in the plant's bioelectrical conductivity into MIDI data in real time. That data drives bell-like tones, a radiating visual field, and Somax2, an AI improvisation system trained on a corpus of the author’s own voice, which shadows the plant's signal like an invisible vocalist. Audiences are invited to approach, gesture, and listen, and their proximity shapes what they hear and see. In that shared capacity for sensing, the work offers a point of entry into empathy with a form of life that can otherwise feel wholly alien. This paper documents the work's development...

Material Synthesis Composition: Transduction, Corpus, and Withholding in Did Sun Ra Fear Cryosleep?

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An instrument decides what part of the world is permitted to become sound. Each transducer, threshold, and sensor mapping isolates some property of a material and discards the remainder, according to choices made by whoever built the device. Material Synthesis Composition (MSC), the method outlined in this paper, anchors the work in those exact choices: I map the behavior of a material substrate onto compositional structure, and a human performer and a machine listener work within those dynamics. MSC grows out of Speculocultural Technopoiesis (ST), my doctoral framework, which examines how Black speculative traditions and sonic ways of knowing can direct the modification of audio tools. Writing as an experimental media artist, I take composition to include selecting materials, modifying instruments and algorithms, fixing the mappings, and conducting the session. The case is Did Sun Ra Fear Cryosleep?, the water movement of the interactive triptych Organic Memory, in which an earthen...

Co-Creativity in Music, Sound, and AI: Improvisation, Interaction, Composition: Introduction to the Conference Proceedings

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Co-Creativity in Music, Sound, and AI: Improvisation, Interaction, Composition: Introduction to the Conference Proceedings

Embodied Calligraphy: Collective Agency, and Co-Creation in AI-Mediated Performance

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Embodied Calligraphy integrates guided and improvised movement, Chinese calligraphic animation, sonification, and AI-mediated interaction through computer vision-based motion tracking and real-time audiovisual feedback. The project explores co-creation among three interconnected agencies: the artist-designer, participants, and interactive technologies. Drawing on intersemiotic translation, multimodal social semiotics, and somaesthetics, the research shows how calligraphic strokes are transformed into bodily gestures and audiovisual expressions, while meaning is distributed through collective interaction. Reciprocal exchanges among dancers, participants, and interactive technologies encourage imitation, improvisation, shared authorship, bodily awareness, and self-fashioning. Based on a participatory workshop at the University of California, Riverside, the study explores how programmed interactions and dancers' guidance influence participants' creative choices and collective engagement....

Navigating the Convergence of Artificial Intelligence and Music Composition: Labor and Attribution

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Generative AI music systems enter a production environment in which composers are already asked to work quickly, respond to temp tracks and stylistic references, deliver modular revisions, and produce music whose commercial value may depend on functional similarity. This paper examines AI music through the linked problems of labor, attribution, and platform governance. It argues that generative systems are especially disruptive where musical work has already been standardized around speed, style replication, and low-cost synchronization. The analysis distinguishes human influence from model training, separates attribution from copyright ownership, and treats human authorship as a gradient of documented expressive contribution. It then examines the movement from post-hoc AI detection toward provenance-by-design: licensed-source metadata, generation logs, content credentials, watermarking, labeling, and royalty routing. Developments in 2025–2026—including licensing settlements,...

AI Music Futures

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Artificial intelligence (AI) in music has a long history extending at least to the early experiments of Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson in the 1950s. In the 2020s the combination of powerful GPUs, large datasets, and pre-trained transformer models has produced a dramatic expansion of AI-based musical practice. This paper explores promising trajectories for AI-based musical co-creativity considering two conflicting realities. First, the ethical and technical challenges of musical AI are not entirely novel. They mirror issues embedded in early digital and pre-computational algorithmic systems. Second, musical AI research and development has undergone a shift in its center of gravity to the private sector as seen in companies like Suno, and Google’s Magenta project, due in part to greater corporate computational resources and gigantic datasets that may not always be fully compliant with copyright law. Given the disparity in computational and data resource levels between academia...

Circulation in and for Artificial Life: Identity at the Zenith of Audiovisual Collapse

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Circulation in and for Artificial Life is an audiovisual work that investigates the emergence and persistence of identity within a computational environment that never reaches a stable state. Multiple artificial-life entities exist within an abstract ray-marched world whose visual parameters are continuously rewritten by scripts. Each frame is further transformed through a process of UV collapse driven by the electroacoustic sound composition. In particular, high-frequency cello material, especially during moments of increasing intensity toward the electroacoustic climax, activates a turbulence-based transformation that violently tears and displaces the UV coordinates of the rendered image. The artificial entities analyze the final rendered result of every frame, including the effects of UV collapse, and modify their scale, color, and shape through a genetic-algorithm-based process in an attempt to maintain visual identity. However, during the most intense moments of UV collapse,...

Ecosystemic Music: Building systems for improvisation and musical performance using algorithmic composition and AI

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ecosystemic music is a framing of musical systems based on natural ecosystems. Just as energy moves through ecosystems, so too does sound and data move through musical systems. By making this connection between musical systems and ecosystems explicit, I examine how the study of ecosystems can inform the creative and technical choices in the design of these systems. The role of AI in ecosystemic works is twofold: first to enable data and sound processing at a larger scale than has been possible, and second to provide a method of decision making that is distinct from human interpretation. These systems fundamentally propose a method of improvising or performing with AI systems. I examine these dynamics through two approaches to developing systems for co-creativity using algorithmic composition and AI. The first approach is the use of algorithmic systems for recording analysis and playback that respond to real-time inputs such as performer audio or listener presence. The second is...

AI in the Music Workplace

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Central to questions of co-creativity and “AI”–which we define as both generative and assistive AI models built from machine learning and other computational systems–are the ways in which different types of artificial intelligence programs impact the music workplace. The following assembles highlights from a roundtable held during the conference that explores how AI music tools reshape the creative process as well as how labor operates in these spaces. Who creates AI tools for musical applications, who controls their operations, and who gets to use them? What are the costs and consequences of AI usage, from environmental destruction to power imbalances in the music industry? We came to this panel in order to discuss these crucial questions. This discussion draws on the expertise of five professionals located across popular music: scholars who study music production, producer-scholars, and professionals whose primary work is in production.

Maintained by Omission

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Maintained by Omission is an audiovisual composition that explores the tension between habitual human perception and machine-assisted perception. Rooted in Vilém Flusser’s media philosophy, the project approaches artificial intelligence not as a conscious entity, but as an interactive processing mirror within a cybernetic, dialogic feedback loop. Grounded in the premise that human cognition routinely filters out environmental noise to maintain perceptual stability and social balance, keeping us from being overwhelmed by the world's constant, unfiltered saturation, this paper takes the reader on an inward journey through the project's creative process—mirroring how the composition itself turns inward toward the hidden layers of human perception and daily life. Through an interactive dialogue across language models (ChatGPT, Gemini), audio architectures (Max/MSP Somax 2), generative video models (RunwayML), and AI audio generators (Suno), raw human observations—captured via environmental...

Short Concert for the Last 74s of Topsy: Audiovisual Composition and Human-Machine Asymmetries

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Short Concert for the Last 74s of Topsy is a generative audiovisual work that departs from the case of Topsy, an elephant electrocuted in Coney Island in 1903 and filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company, in order to interrogate the relation between technique, memory, and the asymmetry of power. In this essay, I take the original footage as the perceptual field of a system developed in Max/MSP/Jitter, which translates the pixels of the archive into sound through the technique of sonification, within a paradigm of symbolic AI made of explicit rules and without machine learning. I discuss the idea of a music latent in the image, revealed by a non-human intelligence indifferent to affect: the mapping rules are authorial, and the algorithmic testimony is produced, not discovered. To opt for the legibility of these rules, against the opacity of the black box, is a deliberately ethical and political position, enunciated from the Global South, because it makes inspectable who decides...

AI Stem-Splitting, Film Editing, and Exposure Sheets as Creative Tools in Patrick Gibson’s Charade (1963): Alternate Edit Film Score for Chamber Orchestra [2026]

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Charade (1963): Alternate Edit Film Score for Chamber Orchestra (2026) is a new film score for the eponymous classic 1963 film starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, directed by Stanley Donen. It was commissioned by the Unequal Fifths Composer Collective, of which I am a founding member, and composed for my chamber orchestra, the Martians. This paper employs both technological and analytical methodologies to describe the creative process that went into the composition of Charade: Alternate Edit Film Score. I discuss my use of AI Stem-Splitting technology to isolate the film dialogue from the monaural audio containing the original Henry Mancini score, as well as the more expansive use of various other narrative and technical tools to edit the film, each of which helped to drive my creative process. Charade: Alternate Edit Film Score demonstrates the inherent creative fecundity of the transformation of original video elements from a given film in the public domain, in this case...

From Vocal Body to Vocal Network: AI and the Reconfiguration of Musical Co-Creativity

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Within the Euro-American art-music tradition, creativity has largely been framed through humanist paradigms privileging individual authorship, intentionality, and stylistic innovation. The growing presence of generative AI and machine learning (ML) in composition and performance unsettles these assumptions and calls for a rethinking of creative agency. This paper asks how the integration of artificial neural networks into live vocal improvisation reshapes musicological concepts of authorship, performance, and agency. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s situated, hybrid subjectivities, Rosi Braidotti’s relational posthuman subject, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblage, and Dominic Pettman’s account of sonic intimacy, it develops a posthumanist framework that is tested against two case studies: Tomomibot, by Tomomi Adachi, Andreas Dzialocha, and Marcello Lussana, and ULTRACHUNK, by Jennifer Walshe and Memo Akten. Combining philosophical inquiry with musicological analysis of vocal...

“Duo Squared” and “Mirage”: Reflections on playing with AI versions of ourselves

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article reflects on “Duo Squared” and “Mirage,” two improvisational works that pair human musicians with AI-generated versions of themselves. Both works use Somax2, an interactive music system that recombines analyzed slices of audio corpora in response to live performers. Their bespoke corpora are drawn from the H2H Music Improv Dataset, specifically recordings of the participating musicians improvising together. Consequently, the systems reproduce not only each performer’s characteristic sounds and gestures, but also musical responses originally created in dialogue with a particular partner. Through practice-based reflection, the authors examine whether musical AI should resemble human collaborators, generate unfamiliar behavior, or operate as a reflective tool through which improvisers can interrogate their own creative practices. Performance experiences reveal moments in which distinctions between human and AI partners become difficult to hear, complicating perceived...

Prompt and Consequence: AI-Generated Music as 21st-Century Propaganda

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines AI-generated music as a twenty-first-century form of propaganda, analyzing how synthetic songs shape collective identity and political belonging without top-down institutional control. Focusing on the viral AI-generated song “We Are Charlie Kirk” and its accompanying YouTube video, I trace how AI tools construct an in-group world of Christian nationalist imagery, drawing on ethnomusicological and media theory frameworks alongside historical precedents in fascist radio broadcasting, Nazi martyrdom songs, and Cold War-era country music and Hollywood film. Using reverse-prompt research on the commercial platform Suno, I show how a simple prompt can generate a fully realized martyrdom ballad, revealing the racialized and class-coded assumptions embedded in AI music generation. I further show how ironic remixes and covers of the Kirk song, rather than subverting its message, extend its circulation and reinforce in-group and out-group dynamics. A comparative case...

Beyond AI-Generated Music: Rethinking Artificial Intelligence as a Co-Creative Partner in the Composer’s Workflow

Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Current discussions of artificial intelligence in music often focus on AI-generated artifacts and whether machines can compose autonomously. This paper shifts attention from finished outputs to the broader creative workflow, asking how generative AI can participate in audiovisual composition without directly generating the final score. Through two practice-based case studies, this paper examines AI across conceptual development, prompt mediation, material generation, research, evaluation, and reflection. In the first case, conversational AI supported concept and prompt development, while an image-to-video system produced visual material that required substantial human editing before independently composed music was added. The second case examines a Dunhuang-inspired dance film in which AI supported cultural research, theoretical inquiry, and audiovisual ideation, while verification, composition, orchestration, synchronization, and aesthetic judgment remained human-directed. Drawing...

Climate variability introduces uncertainty into future emissions pathways

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Uncertainty in long-term climate outcomes arises not only from physical processes but also from societal responses to climate variability and change. Here we embed a range of temperature anomalies into an empirically-informed, coupled climate–social model to investigate how natural temperature variability, through its influence on societal decision-making, shapes global emissions trajectories. Using Monte Carlo ensembles spanning social, political, and technological parameters, we find that anomalous mid-century warmth strengthens public support for mitigation and accelerates the timing of net-zero emissions by several years, whereas anomalous cooling delays net-zero achievement. The response scales with the magnitude and persistence of variability with stronger and longer-lasting temperature anomalies producing larger shifts in mitigation timing. Across ensembles, high-variability climates are associated with higher emissions pathways and a greater likelihood of failing to reach...

Sound signature as paradigm: ecology, apparatus, and electroacoustic creation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Este artigo propõe o conceito de assinatura sonora como um paradigma para repensar a composição eletroacústica contemporânea na interseção entre ecologia, filosofia e mediação tecnológica. Indo além do paradigma inicial do estúdio, centrado no objeto sonoro autônomo, o estudo argumenta que as práticas atuais – caracterizadas por eletrônica em tempo real, espacialização imersiva, integração audiovisual e sistemas orientados por inteligência artificial – privilegiam a organização relacional em vez de materiais sonoros isolados. A partir da teoria das paisagens sonoras ecológicas de Bernie Krause e do conceito de assinatura de Giorgio Agamben como operador paradigmático, o artigo reconceitua a composição como a construção e a revelação de campos sonoros relacionais. As assinaturas sonoras ecológicas emergem da distribuição dinâmica de nichos acústicos em sistemas vivos; de modo análogo, obras eletroacústicas geram ambientes estruturados nos quais a agência é distribuída entre...

Collaborative Dynamics in Electroacoustic Music Creativity: Telematic Dialogues Across Apparatuses

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates the dynamics of electroacoustic music collaboration within complex techno- logical, social, and philosophical frameworks. Emphasizing the interplay between human creativity and technical apparatuses, it draws on theoretical concepts such as Vilém Flusser’s telematic dialogue, Jacques Attali’s notion of composition as resistance, Martin Heidegger’s ontology of art and technology, and Niklas Luhmann’s systemstheory. Through historical examples—including the WDR Electronic Music Studio—and recent works by composer Paulo C. Chagas and flutist Cássia Carrascoza, particularly Sound Imaginations: Telematic Immersion , the paper examines how electroacoustic practices generate new forms of authorship, co-presence, and symbolic ritual. These practices challenge conventional boundaries between composer, performer, audience, and machine, proposing a participatory model of creative exchange instead. Ultimately, the study argues that electroacoustic collaboration...

The Moral Habitat, by Barbara Herman

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Moral Habitat, by Barbara Herman

Finding Her Beat ed. by Dawn Mikkelson and Keri Pickett (review)

Mon, 7 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Finding Her Beat ed. by Dawn Mikkelson and Keri Pickett (review)

Drumming Through Princess of China: Intercultural Encounters in a Hollywood Music Video

Mon, 7 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Drumming Through Princess of China: Intercultural Encounters in a Hollywood Music Video

The Funeral of King Rama IX: Mourning and the Thai State

Mon, 7 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Funeral of King Rama IX: Mourning and the Thai State

Does the Heart Revolt at Evil? The Case of Racial Atrocities

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Does the Heart Revolt at Evil? The Case of Racial Atrocities

Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes versus Extending Your Concern: Empirical & Ethical Differences

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: According to the Golden Rule, you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Similarly, people are often exhorted to “imagine themselves in another's shoes.” A related but contrasting approach to moral expansion traces back to the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi, who urges us to “extend” our concern for those nearby to more distant people. Other approaches to moral expansion involve attending to the good consequences for oneself of caring for others, expanding one's sense of self, expanding one's sense of community, attending to others’ morally relevant properties, and learning by doing. About all such approaches, we can ask three questions: To what extent do people in fact (for instance, developmentally) broaden and deepen their care for others by these different methods? To what extent do these different methods differ in ethical merit? And how effectively do these different methods produce appropriate care?

Let's hope we're not living in a simulation

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: In Reality+, David Chalmers suggests that it wouldn't be too bad if we lived in a computer simulation. I argue on the contrary that if we live in a simulation, we ought to attach a significant conditional credence to its being a small or brief simulation. Our existence and the existence of many of the people and things we care about would then unfortunately depend on contingencies difficult to assess and beyond our control. Furthermore, all the badness of the world would appear to reflect the gods’ intentional cruelty or callous disregard. A large, stable rock is a more dependable and less axiologically troubling fundamental ground for reality.

LAP 50 th Anniversary Reflection

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

LAP 50 th Anniversary Reflection

The Ethics of Life as It Could Be: Do We Have Moral Obligations to Artificial Life?

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The field of Artificial Life studies the nature of the living state by modeling and synthesizing living systems. Such systems, under certain conditions, may come to deserve moral consideration similar to that given to nonhuman vertebrates or even human beings. The fact that these systems are nonhuman and evolve in a potentially radically different substrate should not be seen as an insurmountable obstacle to their potentially having rights, if they are sufficiently sophisticated in other respects. Nor should the fact that they owe their existence to us be seen as reducing their status as targets of moral concern. On the contrary, creators of Artificial Life may have special obligations to their creations, resembling those of an owner to their pet or a parent to their child. For a field that aims to create artificial life-forms with increasing levels of sophistication, it is crucial to consider the possible ethical implications of our activities, with an eye toward assessing potential...

Dehumanizing the Cognitively Disabled: Commentary on Smith’s Making Monsters

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Dehumanizing the Cognitively Disabled: Commentary on Smith’s Making Monsters

Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete Persons

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a possible 'ancillary mind' modelled on a system envisioned in Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between a communicating group of individuals and a single, spatially distributed mind. It occupies a grey zone with respect to personal identity and subject individuation, neither determinately one person or subject nor determinately many persons or subjects, and thus some of its processes might be neither determinately introspection within a mind nor determinately communication between minds. If ancillary minds defy discrete countability, the same might be true for some actual minds on Earth. Kammerer and Frankish's research programme can be extended to include not only the study of possible forms of introspection, but also the study of possible mental activity intermediate...

Music-Evoked Nostalgia and Charitable Giving: A Cross-Cultural Study in the United States and Mexico

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Music-Evoked Nostalgia and Charitable Giving: A Cross-Cultural Study in the United States and Mexico

AI systems must not confuse users about their sentience or moral status

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One relatively neglected challenge in ethical artificial intelligence (AI) design is ensuring that AI systems invite a degree of emotional and moral concern appropriate to their moral standing. Although experts generally agree that current AI chatbots are not sentient to any meaningful degree, these systems can already provoke substantial attachment and sometimes intense emotional responses in users. Furthermore, rapid advances in AI technology could soon create AIs of plausibly debatable sentience and moral standing, at least by some relevant definitions. Morally confusing AI systems create unfortunate ethical dilemmas for the owners and users of those systems, since it is unclear how those systems ethically should be treated. I argue here that, to the extent possible, we should avoid creating AI systems whose sentience or moral standing is unclear and that AI systems should be designed so as to invite appropriate emotional responses in ordinary users.

Students Eat Less Meat After Studying Meat Ethics

Fri, 4 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the first controlled, non-self-report studies to show an influence of university-level ethical instruction on everyday behavior, Schwitzgebel et al. (2020) and Jalil et al. (2020) found that students purchase less meat after exposure to material on the ethics of eating meat. We sought to extend and conceptually replicate this research. Seven hundred thirty students in three large philosophy classes read James Rachels’ (2004) “Basic Argument for Vegetarianism”, followed by 50-min small-group discussions. Half also viewed a vegetarianism advocacy video containing factory farm footage. A few days after instruction, 54% of students agreed that “eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical”, compared to 37% before instruction, with no difference between the film and non-film conditions. Also, 39% of students anonymously pledged to avoid eating factory farmed meat for 24 h, again with no statistically detectable difference between conditions. Finally, we obtained 2828...

Timescales of developmental toxicity impacting on research and needs for intervention

Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Much progress has happened in understanding developmental vulnerability to preventable environmental hazards. Along with the improved insight, the perspective has widened, and developmental toxicity now involves latent effects that can result in delayed adverse effects in adults or at old age and additional effects that can be transgenerationally transferred to future generations. Although epidemiology and toxicology to an increasing degree are exploring the adverse effects from developmental exposures in human beings, the improved documentation has resulted in little progress in protection, and few environmental chemicals are currently regulated to protect against developmental toxicity, whether it be neurotoxicity, endocrine disruption or other adverse outcome. The desire to obtain a high degree of certainty and verification of the evidence used for decision-making must be weighed against the costs and necessary duration of research, as well as the long-term costs to human health...

What is Unique About Kindness? Exploring the Proximal Experience of Prosocial Acts Relative to Other Positive Behaviors

Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Previous research has identified a robust connection between prosociality and happiness, suggesting that kindness has both hedonic and eudaimonic benefits—in the short term and in the long term. By contrast, our experiment aimed to examine people’s momentary eudaimonic feelings while engaging in kind acts for others. To that end, we randomly assigned participants to one of four positively valenced conditions that varied in their inclusion of potential “active ingredients” of prosocial behavior. Namely, engaging in kind acts for others was compared to engaging in kind acts for oneself (social element removed), extraverted behavior (kindness element removed), and open-minded behavior (both social and kindness elements removed). Participants were assessed five times over 2 weeks, each time reporting on how they felt during their assigned activities. Multilevel models revealed that relative to all other conditions, participants assigned to do kind acts for others reported a greater...

A science-based agenda for health-protective chemical assessments and decisions: overview and consensus statement

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The manufacture and production of industrial chemicals continues to increase, with hundreds of thousands of chemicals and chemical mixtures used worldwide, leading to widespread population exposures and resultant health impacts. Low-wealth communities and communities of color often bear disproportionate burdens of exposure and impact; all compounded by regulatory delays to the detriment of public health. Multiple authoritative bodies and scientific consensus groups have called for actions to prevent harmful exposures via improved policy approaches. We worked across multiple disciplines to develop consensus recommendations for health-protective, scientific approaches to reduce harmful chemical exposures, which can be applied to current US policies governing industrial chemicals and environmental pollutants. This consensus identifies five principles and scientific recommendations for improving how agencies like the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approach and conduct...

Current practice and recommendations for advancing how human variability and susceptibility are considered in chemical risk assessment

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A key element of risk assessment is accounting for the full range of variability in response to environmental exposures. Default dose-response methods typically assume a 10-fold difference in response to chemical exposures between average (healthy) and susceptible humans, despite evidence of wider variability. Experts and authoritative bodies support using advanced techniques to better account for human variability due to factors such as in utero or early life exposure and exposure to multiple environmental, social, and economic stressors.This review describes: 1) sources of human variability and susceptibility in dose-response assessment, 2) existing US frameworks for addressing response variability in risk assessment; 3) key scientific inadequacies necessitating updated methods; 4) improved approaches and opportunities for better use of science; and 5) specific and quantitative recommendations to address evidence and policy needs.Current default adjustment factors do not sufficiently...

Kantian Constructivism and Kantian Constitutivism: Some Reflections

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: Is moral constructivism an account of the basis of the content of morality or of its authority? In fact, different writers have understood constructivism to be addressing different issues. In this paper I argue that Kant should be understood as a constructivist about the content of morality – or better about a limited set of general substantive principles – and as a constititutivist about its authority. After some general remarks in Section 1 about contemporary discussions of constructivism, in Section 2 I discuss Rawls’s understanding of Kant’s constructivism; Rawls takes Kantian constructivism to be a view about the content of morality. In Section 3, I give an overview of Kant’s moral conception as constructivist about the content of morality and as constitutivist about its authority. In Section 4 I address a worry whether certain features of Kant’s constitutivism rest his constructivism on a realist foundation, arguing that they do not.

Autonomy and the Idea of Freedom: Some Reflections on Groundwork III

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

AbstractThis article explores a set of questions about the ‘idea of freedom’ that Kant introduces in the fourth paragraph ofGroundworkIII. I develop a reading that supports treating it as a normative notion and brings out its normative content in some detail. I argue that we should understand the idea as follows: that it is a general feature of reasoning and judgement that it understands itself to be a correct or sound application of the normative standards of the relevant domain of cognition, not influenced by irrelevant or external factors. Reasoning and judgement are thus normatively committed to these standards of correctness. A second and related concern is to explore connections between the idea of freedom and Kant’s conception of autonomy and to identify different points at which autonomy plays a role in the argument ofGroundworkIII. In the final section, I mine the idea of freedom for a set of normative commitments specific to rational agency that play a foundational role...

Intertemporal Arbitrage of Water and Long‐Term Agricultural Investments: Drought, Groundwater Banking, and Perennial Cropping Decisions in California

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In arid areas, irrigation water is an essential input into agricultural production. However, rainfall and, correspondingly, surface water supplies are often highly variable, creating uncertainty over the value of long‐term, water‐dependent investments in these cropping systems. Moreover, climate change is expected to increase both crop water requirements and the variability of seasonal rainfall, meaning the constraints imposed by variable water supplies are likely to grow in cost as climate change progresses. In this setting, storing water in wet years for use in dry years is valuable. In particular, it would be expected to increase the value of perennial crops, which require large up‐front investments that pay off gradually over the life of the tree. We first show, in a simple theoretical model, that given the timing of returns to investments in perennial crops, there is always some level of drought risk above which annual crops will be preferred to perennials. We then demonstrate...

Do ethics classes influence student behavior? Case study: Teaching the ethics of eating meat

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Do university ethics classes influence students' real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy article on their assigned topic and optionally viewed a related video, then met with teaching assistants for 50-minute group discussion sections. They expressed their opinions about meat ethics and charitable giving in a follow-up questionnaire (1032 respondents after exclusions). We obtained 13,642 food purchase receipts from campus restaurants for 495 of the students, before and after the intervention. Purchase of meat products declined in the experimental group (52% of purchases of at least...

New science of climate change impacts on agriculture implies higher social cost of carbon

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Despite substantial advances in climate change impact research in recent years, the scientific basis for damage functions in economic models used to calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC) is either undocumented, difficult to trace, or based on a small number of dated studies. Here we present new damage functions based on the current scientific literature and introduce these into an integrated assessment model (IAM) in order to estimate a new SCC. We focus on the agricultural sector, use two methods for determining the yield impacts of warming, and the GTAP CGE model to calculate the economic consequences of yield shocks. These new damage functions reveal far more adverse agricultural impacts than currently represented in IAMs. Impacts in the agriculture increase from net benefits of $2.7 ton−1 CO2 to net costs of $8.5 ton−1, leading the total SCC to more than double.

Climate adaptation by crop migration

Sat, 16 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Many studies have estimated the adverse effects of climate change on crop yields, however, this literature almost universally assumes a constant geographic distribution of crops in the future. Movement of growing areas to limit exposure to adverse climate conditions has been discussed as a theoretical adaptive response but has not previously been quantified or demonstrated at a global scale. Here, we assess how changes in rainfed crop area have already mediated growing season temperature trends for rainfed maize, wheat, rice, and soybean using spatially-explicit climate and crop area data from 1973 to 2012. Our results suggest that the most damaging impacts of warming on rainfed maize, wheat, and rice have been substantially moderated by the migration of these crops over time and the expansion of irrigation. However, continued migration may incur substantial environmental costs and will depend on socio-economic and political factors in addition to land suitability and climate.

Kenny Endo and a Dream FROM INTERZONES TO SOLIDARITIES

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Kenny Endo and a Dream FROM INTERZONES TO SOLIDARITIES

A New Measure of Life Satisfaction: The Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale

Tue, 22 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) has been the dominant measure of life satisfaction since its creation more than 30 years ago. We sought to develop an improved measure that includes indirect indicators of life satisfaction (e.g., wishing to change one's life) to increase the bandwidth of the measure and account for acquiescence bias. In 3 studies, we developed a 6-item measure of life satisfaction, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale, and obtained reliability and validity evidence. Importantly, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale retained the high internal consistency, test-retest stability, and unidimensionality of the Satisfaction With Life Scale. In addition, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale correlated with other well-being measures, Big Five personality traits, values, and demographic information in expected ways. Although the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale correlated highly with the Satisfaction With Life Scale,...

Economic impacts of climate change on agriculture: a comparison of process-based and statistical yield models

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A large number of studies have been published examining the implications of climate change for agricultural productivity that, broadly speaking, can be divided into process-based modeling and statistical approaches. Despite a general perception that results from these methods differ substantially, there have been few direct comparisons. Here we use a data-base of yield impact studies compiled for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (Porter et al 2014) to systematically compare results from process-based and empirical studies. Controlling for differences in representation of CO2 fertilization between the two methods, we find little evidence for differences in the yield response to warming. The magnitude of CO2 fertilization is instead a much larger source of uncertainty. Based on this set of impact results, we find a very limited potential for on-farm adaptation to reduce yield impacts. We use the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) global economic model to estimate welfare consequences...

The Graying of the Immigrant Dream The Sounds of Latinidad: Immigrants Making Music and Creating Culture in a Southern City . (Social Transformations in American Anthropology). By Samuel K. Byrd. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Graying of the Immigrant Dream The Sounds of Latinidad: Immigrants Making Music and Creating Culture in a Southern City . (Social Transformations in American Anthropology). By Samuel K. Byrd. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Sound, Silence, Music: Power

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract One afternoon in the mid-1990s, I walked past a bookstore in Berkeley, California and stopped to look at the window display. It featured a group of at least twenty books with wildly divergent subjects that were clearly meant to be viewed together, and I stared, puzzled, until I suddenly saw that each book title had the word "power" in it. They bore titles like Power and Accountability, Power and Beauty, Power and Civil Society, Power and Community, Power and Difference, Power and Empowerment, Power and Everyday Life, Power and Gender, and so on. Power was everywhere: Foucault had gone off like a bomb in the humanities and the social sciences.

Ethnomusicology without Erotics

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ethnomusicology without Erotics

“Autonomy, Taking One’s Choices to be Good, and Practical Law: Replies to Critics”

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

“Autonomy, Taking One’s Choices to be Good, and Practical Law: Replies to Critics”