Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) exemplify a dual-use neurotechnology with significant potential in both civilian and military contexts. While BCIs hold promise for treating neurological conditions such as spinal cord injuries and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in the future, military decisionmakers in countries such as the United States and China also see their potential to enhance combat capabilities. Some predict that U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) will be early adopters of BCI enhancements. This article argues for a shift in focus: the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) should pursue translational research of medical BCIs for treating severely injured or ill SOF personnel. After two decades of continuous military engagement and on-going high-risk operations, SOF personnel face unique injury patterns, both physical and psychological, which BCI technology could help address. The article identifies six key medical applications of BCIs that could benefit wounded SOF members and discusses the ethical implications of involving SOF personnel in translational research related to these applications. Ultimately, the article challenges the traditional civilian-military divide in neurotechnology, arguing that by collaborating more closely with military stakeholders, scientists can not only help individuals with medical needs, including servicemembers, but also play a role in shaping the future military applications of BCI technology.

There is scientific consensus that an earthquake of a magnitude of at least 7 will soon occur on the North Anatolian Fault, which runs south of İstanbul. This earthquake would render one-fifth of İstanbul’s buildings uninhabitable, which means that approximately 200,000 buildings would be expected to suffer moderate or severe damage. As a part of preparedness for the anticipated earthquake, people in İstanbul are invited to have their buildings risk tested. This article, pivoting on cultural anthropology and science and technology studies, investigates how earthquake-proneness of buildings in İstanbul is technically and legally examined and determined. It ethnographically analyzes the risk assessments and demonstrates that the risk is enacted differently through distinctive engineering practices and legal regulations in different networks. When the two different risk assessment processes are examined in İstanbul, a building that is categorized as risky due to its earthquake vulnerability could be regarded as sturdy in the other assessment.

İstanbul was the only one of the capital cities of the defeated Central Powers to suffer a military occupation for almost five years between 1918 and 1923. The question posed in this Postscript is whether occupied Istanbul resembled cities within the orbit of the British and French empires of the time? The tentative answer we propose is that Istanbul was a cosmopolitan city turned into a colonial outpost of the British and French empires. Within this context, aspects of the cultural life of Istanbul took on a number of political colourations, examined by the authors whose essays precede the Postscript.

In 2005, Enzo Traverso argued that a very problematic trend was affecting German memory culture and scholarship about Nazism. Echoing an alarm raised earlier by Timothy Mason, the scholar contended that at least since the 1980s there had been a progressive ‘disparition de la notion de “fascism” du champ historiographique’ (disappearance of the concept of ‘fascism’ from historiography) (p.94). The phenomenon observed by Traverso has found concrete materialisation in the EU's politics of memory developed throughout the twenty-first century. As Filippo Focardi argues in his work Nel cantiere della memoria (2020), the EU memory discourse has been shaped around a totalitarian paradigm centred on the memorialisation of Nazi and Communist crimes, in which the notion of a general form of fascism finds little space, and Italian Fascism only exists as a marginal epiphenomenon. This situation has begun to change in recent years as the growing success of far-right movements across the globe has brought international attention to the concept of fascism. Many Italian scholars, who have never ceased to study fascism, are now directing their efforts towards the international arena to contribute to a discussion that seems to have acquired particular significance for the understanding of our time.

This article discusses illusions of ‘three hands’ in the circle of Joachim and the Mendelssohns, arguing that manifestations of ‘three hands’ at play created an aesthetic both in dialogue with the Golden Age of Virtuosity, and going beyond it. Though techniques alluding to three hands or multiple performing bodies diminished sharply in popularity after 1830–50, violin and piano music from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries remained highly virtuosic and often ‘unplayable’ in other ways. The difference between before and after the half-century mark is that later examples tended not to celebrate so overtly such special effects, because doing so would revive the no-longer-tenable principle of ‘virtuosity as a reward in itself’. Rather, double-stop harmonics, left-hand pizzicato, three-hand techniques and their related sleights of hand were largely escorted off the stage into a pedagogical realm. As this article shows, Joachim helped to exorcise the spectre of Paganini, and to sweep effectively out the door the residual confetti of the Golden Age of Virtuosity. Following in the footsteps of Mendelssohn, Joachim did so with Clara Schumann, viewing himself, Clara Schumann (and, we might add, Brahms) as a cohort of artists seeking to reverse the tawdry display of virtuosity. It was precisely Joachim's acute historicist perception, solidified during the 1850s, that allowed his musical aesthetics to turn so sharply from his openness to, tolerance and acceptance of dazzling violinistic tricks in the 1840s, to their absolute rejection in his later career.

Uterus transplants (UTx) provide women without a uterus the possibility of experiencing gestational motherhood. This paper delineates the complex bioethical landscape surrounding UTx, focusing on the critical aspects of informed consent, risk–benefit analysis, justice considerations, and the distinct challenges encountered by both donors and recipients. While not discussing UTx directly, John Harris’ seminal work, The Value of Life: An Introduction to Medical Ethics (1985) in its advocacy for reproductive freedom and informed consent provides an informative starting point for the discussion.

As an example, UTx is analyzed within the socio-political context of Mexico. The impact of the Mexican healthcare and legal systems on UTx procedures is discussed and the regulatory measures necessary to ensure that UTx is conducted ethically and equitably are outlined.

This article looks at Topkapı Palace as a showcase reflecting the changing cultural heritage policies of the Allies, as well as of the İstanbul and Ankara governments, during the occupation of İstanbul from 1918 to 1923. It analyzes the military, archaeological, and cultural facets of the occupation, focusing first on the military takeover of the Topkapı gardens, then on the French archaeological mission at the Seraglio, and finally on conflicts over the possession of the imperial treasures and sacred relics. Drawing on primary sources from Ottoman, Turkish, French, and British archives, memoirs, letters, newspapers, and visual material, this article explores the versatility of cultural heritage policies during the occupation and the entangled relations among various power groups, institutions, and actors. The military, strategic, cultural, and historical significance of the royal complex, together with its invaluable imperial collections, made the historic palace a place of rivalry and contestation, as well as deception and cooperation, among various agents and actors, including the Ottoman military and bureaucratic officials, local and foreign archaeologists, the dynastic family, the Interallied government, the occupation forces, and the Turkish resistance forces, ultimately reflecting the military and political empowerment of Ankara.

The introduction of algorithms in courts is currently the object of much scrutiny, attempting to find balance between increasing efficiency to the legal system and avoiding associated risks. This paper aims to explore how the judiciary organisations responsible for implementing algorithms describe the temporal demands of continuity and change, through a case-study of the Brazilian National Council of Justice (CNJ). Through its centralised, collaborative and open-access based platform, the CNJ views algorithms as a necessary step to deal with excessive case-load, and as a rationality-instituting mechanism for a currently dysfunctional situation. It attempts to deal with risks of disruption by placing itself in a supervisory role regarding all algorithms developed by courts across the country, ensuring the quality of the data and excluding the moment of judicial decision-making from automation, but this does not exclude the representation of the new technology as an instrument to implement specific doctrinal positions.

The social and political contexts in many countries are affected by dangerous trends and forces of populism. Populist hostility is most observable in connection with issues of immigration, where it functions as a pretext for scrapping legal protections in increasingly hostile immigration laws. What is particularly insidious about these developments is the claim, articulated by some theorists, that the popular resentment and backlash against immigrants and refugees are justified. That populists are hostile towards immigrants and human rights laws, the claim seems to go, is the fault of the legal norms and institutions that allow in the immigrants and protect them. This article challenges those approaches and argues that legal constraints on popular biases towards immigrants are necessary and need to be defended against popular moralism. It is also argued that although community values are important, they should not be considered as trumps against the rights of immigrants and refugees.

This paper presents an analytical mapping of institutional design possibilities for alternative ways for digital platforms to institutionalise property and corporate form. It builds on the institutional imagination catalysed by three vignettes of experimental sharing economy initiatives presented towards the start of the paper, each of which highlights the imbrication and interdependence between economic and social dimensions of the sharing economy. The paper then interrogates the vignettes through three analytical entry points to the institutional design of commons-based sharing economies: platform, care and place. By remapping the vignettes’ practices around these three entry points, the paper shows how they help constitute the incipient formalisation of commons-based approaches to the sharing economy. The prospects for carrying out a redesign of property and corporate forms more generally thereby become more visible, providing a sound foundation for more in-depth empirical and historical work on alternative trajectories of the sharing economy in the future.

A discourse-syntax interface-based approach to three types of focus – Information Focus, Corrective or Contrastive Focus, and Mirative Focus – is discussed in this paper. In my approach, I address the role of discourse/agreement features in the syntactic process of Agree in the Minimalist Program as well as their possible combination with an Edge Feature to trigger attraction of each discourse category, comparing Spanish and English. The data I examine are taken from experimental work, based on two original experiments that test the grammaticality/acceptability of sentences with fronted and in situ focus by native speakers of English and Spanish. The parametric variation detected in the two languages is accounted for by an analysis based on the availability of inheritance of discourse features in the relevant language alongside the activation of an Edge Feature, triggering movement of the relevant discourse category.

To meet the specific education needs of ethics committee members (primarily full-time healthcare professionals), the Regional Ethics Department of Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNCAL) and Washington State University’s Elson Floyd School of Medicine have partnered to create a one-academic year Medical Ethics Certificate Program. The mission-driven nature of the KPNCAL-WSU’s Certificate Program was designed to be a low-cost, high-quality option for busy full-time practitioners who may not otherwise opt to pursue additional education.

This article discusses the specific competency-focused methodologies and pedagogies adopted, as well as how the Certificate Program made permanent changes in response to the global pandemic. This article also discusses in detail one of the Program’s signature features, its Practicum—an extensive simulated clinical ethics consultation placing students in the role of ethics consultant, facilitating a conflict between family members played by paid professional actors. This article concludes with survey data responses from Program alumni gathered as part of a quality study.

After the political fragmentation of the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” period, the Northern Song consolidated much of the lands under these regional states into a larger polity in a process often described as “reunification.” But this “reunification,” judged against the domain of the Tang dynasty, was incomplete. The “Sixteen Prefectures” to the northeast were ceded to the Liao, and this became a vexing issue for Song emperors and officials. But the northeast was not the only region once under Tang rule that did not enter the Song domain. In this article, I discuss the area to the northwest of the Song, much of which was eventually governed by the Tangut Xia state. This area, roughly the modern provinces of Ningxia and Gansu, featured prominently in Northern Song political discussions, national geographical treatises, and national and regional maps. By analyzing the treatment of the northwest in these diverse genres of representation, I demonstrate a spectrum in the perceptions of the northwest. It was sometimes seen as little different from areas under Song rule; in other cases, it was treated as “beyond the sphere of civilization” (huawai). Such ambiguity is visualized in many Song cartographers who placed this area between two segments of the Great Wall. For Song emperors and officials, the northwest sat uncomfortably in their imaginations of the world, not easily dismissed and forgotten, yet irrecoverable.