New immigrants have already changed Philadelphia's cultural scene—particularly in urban neighborhoods. This brief uses three types of evidence— a small-area database of cultural participation, a survey of residents of North Philadelphia and Camden, NJ, and a survey of artists living or working in the metropolitan area—to explore migrant cultural engagement. Taken together, SIAP’s evidence on ar...

A Chinese Auction is one of the most popular mechanisms at charity or other fundraising events. In a Chinese Auction, bidders buy lottery tickets, which are essentially chances to win items. Bidders may buy as many tickets as they like, and bid them on any item(s) they want by placing them in a basket or other container in front of the item(s) they are trying to win. At the conclusion of biddin...

Unconditional generosity in humans is a puzzle. One possibility is that individuals benefit from being seen as generous if there is competition for access to partners and if generosity is a costly-and therefore reliable-signal of partner quality [1-3]. The "competitive helping" hypothesis predicts that people will compete to be the most generous, particularly in the presence of attractive poten...

Recently, a number of neuroimaging studies have been conducted, aimed at detecting signs of consciousness in patients with a diagnosis of vegetative or minimally conscious state. The contributions appeared during an ongoing international ethical and socio-legal debate, on the admissibility of decisions to withdraw artificial nutrition from vegetative patients, thereby allowing them to die. We a...

As James Madison would not hesitate to tell us, the scale of a polity or jurisdiction is one of the most basic factors organizing political life. By scale, I refer to the number of inhabitants (or, alternately, constituents or voters) in a political unit, although geographic size may also shape political behavior. Large jurisdictional scale implies that candidates for office must campaign in la...

To discern what characteristics a hybrid architecture should have to achieve the full range of human cognitive tasks, it might be helpful to explain the relationships between consciousness, memory and attention as accepted basic mechanisms. Consciousness would be a subjective awareness of momentary experience and also have the characteristics of an operating system performing control and consol...

During development, the brain creates multilevel feedback loops critical for the generation and maintenance of consciousness. The thalamus has a central role in these circuits. Thalamic core nuclei are part of sensory circuits that give rise to contents of experience; diffuse thalamic matrix nuclei are part of arousal circuits that modulate levels of wakefulness. While core and matrix circuits ...

Some vegetative state patients show fMRI responses similar to those of healthy controls when instructed to perform mental imagery tasks. Many authors have argued that this provides evidence that such patients are in fact conscious, as response to commands requires intentional agency. I argue for an alternative reading, on which responsive patients have a deficit similar to that seen in severe f...

It is generally accepted that machines can replicate cognitive tasks performed by conscious agents as long as they are not based on the capacity of awareness. We consider several views on the nature of subjective awareness, which is fundamental for selfreflection and review, and present reasons why this property is not computable. We argue that consciousness is more than an epiphenomenon and as...