This study examines playgrounds as lenses on urban transitions to explain the link between urban transformations and changes in the discourse of play and childhood. Specifically, it compares Soviet public playgrounds and post-Soviet privatized playscapes in the city of Yekaterinburg, Russia, through primary observation and secondary data analysis. Using the framework of social reproduction developed by Cindy Katz and Saskia Sassen to explain how the local forces affect cities, my analysis shows that the shift in the discourse of play and (...) childhood in the post-Soviet period is hinged on global influences combined with local transformations, from the abandonment of Soviet ideals of communal play spaces to the embracement of today’s consumerist play places. Whereas the old Soviet playgrounds have uncertain purposes, in contemporary Yekaterinburg private playgrounds offer a narrative of play in terms of leisure, love, and convenience for parents. Children turn into consumers of private play, leaving most of the Soviet playgrounds as idle spaces in the city. This article argues that Yekaterinburg’s shift toward participating in the globalized economy combined with its transition from the Soviet ideals maintains social relations and reproduces social inequalities in childhood, as this condition favors consumerist narratives of play. I conclude that the playgrounds in Yekaterinburg are bystanders of new global ecologies whereby social, political, and economic transformations become an impetus to reproduce new ways of seeing the social importance and meaning of play and playgrounds. (shrink)

In an earlier issue, I argue (2014) that psychology and epistemology should distinguish religious credence from factual belief. These are distinct cognitive attitudes. Levy (2017) rejects this distinction, arguing that both religious and factual “beliefs” are subject to “shifting” on the basis of fluency and “intuitiveness.” Levy’s theory, however, (1) is out of keeping with much research in cognitive science of religion and (2) misrepresents the notion of factual belief employed in my theory. So his claims don’t undermine my distinction. (...) I conclude by suggesting some approaches to empirically testing our views. (shrink)

In this contribution to the symposium on Quill Kukla's _City Living_, I argue that the "objective properties" invisibly built into playgrounds can limit children's development of their agency. Playgrounds may seem insignificant because play may seem insignificant. However, playgrounds are where children develop as agents: it is through play that they learn to make decisions about their own bodies, express their own values, and negotiate with others. Yet at the playground, there is co-dependence between social practice and material object: (...) the latent surveillance by adults enforces and reinforces the rules that have been built into equipment like slides. Social and spatial inequalities can constitute self-amplifying feedback loops that sustain oppressive systems. Playgrounds do not merely reflect the social fact that children’s autonomy is not always taken seriously, they also condition and constitute this social fact. (shrink)

I’m at the playground with my baby, and a smiling adult inquires, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Scientific studies show that if I say X, they will see my baby as doing A, being A, feeling A—versus if I say Y.1 They’ll likely make different assumptions about whether my baby is able to climb up the playground structures and sit without support, and they’ll encourage my baby to engage in different activities.2 And of course, they’ll respond (...) to them differently depending on whether they think the baby is a boy or a girl. What do I do if I don’t want that to happen? One way to respond to the question is not to reveal the gender, or rather, to reject the assumption that my baby already has a gender, which is arguably a weird move, breaking out of a smoothly functioning, well-oiled social exchange. Here I want to talk about this weird move: How weird it is? What are some of the reasons to make the move anyway, and what are some of the concerns? (shrink)

Meritocracy claims to reward the meritorious with more resources, thereby achieving social efficiency and justice in a level playground. This article argues that the rise of meritocracy in a society is the institutional consequence of adopting progressive humanism, an ideal-type worldview that advocates the harmonious co-realization of individual achievement and social contribution. However, meritocracy is a self-defeating illusion because, even in a level playground, it only rewards conspicuous and wasteful display of ‘merit’ rather than genuine contributions to society. (...) Similar to the promise of an afterlife to Catholicism, the illusion of meritocracy constitutes an indispensable theodicy to progressive humanism. For societies holding such worldviews, meritocracy is a necessary illusion that cannot be dispelled by institutional reforms or political movements. (shrink)

Democracy in its currently dominant liberal form has proven supportive of unprecedented human flourishing. However, it also appears increasingly plagued by political polarization, strained to cope with the digitalization of the political discourse, and threatened by authoritarian backlash. A growing sense of the anthropic risks—with runaway climate change as the leading example—thus often elicits concern regarding democracy’s capability of mitigating them. Apparently, lacking a sufficient degree of the citizens’ consensus on the priority issues of the day, it can find itself (...) unable to muster the resolve and resources necessary to alter its “business as usual” path even where disasters loom ever larger in its track. Against these concerns, I argue that democracy’s potential remains far from depleted. While political irrationality needs to be considered a major obstacle to successfully managing the anthropic risks, many existing reform proposals appear capable of reining it in. My main suggestion is to seek ways to facilitate a speedier and more effective exploration of the landscape of the possible democratic mechanisms of collective choice. A virtual platform to support such an exploration—which I call ‘democracy’s digital playground’—may allow us to find innovative ways of managing anthropic risks without compromising our commitment to democratic values. (shrink)

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot. Its capability is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence or even consciousness. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider the (...) question whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: Might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We asked it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance. (shrink)

Number is a major object in mathematics. Mathematics is a discipline which studies the properties of a number. The object is expressible by mathematical language, which has been devised more rigorously than natural language. However, the language is not thoroughly free from natural language. Countability of natural number is also originated from natural language. It is necessary to understand how language leads a number into mathematics, its’ main playground.

In this paper, building on these previous works, we propose to go deeper into the understanding of crowd behavior by proposing an approach which integrates ontologi- cal models of crowd behavior and dedicated computer vision algorithms, with the aim of recognizing some targeted complex events happening in the playground from the observation of the spectator crowd behavior. In order to do that, we first propose an ontology encoding available knowledge on spectator crowd behavior, built as a spe- cialization of (...) the DOLCE foundational ontology, which allows the representation of categories belonging both to the physical and to the social realms. We then propose a simplified and tractable version of such ontology in a new temporal extension of a description logic, which is used for temporally coupling events happening on the play- ground and spectator crowd behavior. At last, computer vision algorithms provide the input information concerning what is observed on the stands and ontological reasoning delivers the output necessary to perform complex event recognition. (shrink)

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the first participatory budgeting experiment in the United States, in Chicago's 49th Ward. There are two avenues of inquiry: First, does participatory budgeting result in different budgetary priorities than standard practices? Second, do projects meet normative social justice outcomes? It is clear that allowing citizens to determine municipal budget projects results in very different outcomes than standard procedures. Importantly, citizens in the 49th Ward consistently choose projects that the research literature classifies as low (...) priority. The results are mixed, however, when it comes to social justice outcomes. While there is no clear pattern in which projects are located only in affluent sections of the ward, there is evidence of geographic clustering. Select areas are awarded projects like community gardens, dog parks, and playgrounds, while others are limited to street resurfacing, sidewalk repairs, bike racks, and bike lanes. Based on our findings, we offer suggestions for future programmatic changes. (shrink)

Urban centers are being transformed into consumer tourist playgrounds made possible by dense networks of surveillance. The safety and entertainment however, come at an unseen price. One of the historical roots of surveillance can be connected to the modern information base of tracking individuals for economic and political reasons. Though its antecedents can be traced via Foucault's account of panoptic discipline which walled in society's outcasts for rehabilitation, the following essay explores the shift to the urban panopticism of today where (...) society's outcasts are subtly filtered out of "public" view. Juxtaposing a sociological account of the concentration camp with urban Disneyization fosters a greater understanding of how surveillance creates certain categories of citizenship. In particular, how urban surveillance intensifies Walter Benjamin's description of the flâneur who often experiences the brunt of the new urban panopticon's filtering power. (shrink)

E-learning has taken it full fudged emergence with regards to Covid Scenario. Also, the lockdown of schools and playgrounds, the restriction of outdoor activities, physical and social isolation leads to the behavioural change among school children. Students are more attached to their schools, teachers and friends. But Covid 19 has changed the entire situation changed and they were held in their home itself. Students were not able to meet their friends and teachers, they especially miss their school and class environment. (...) It is to be noted that maintaining social isolation and following “Stay at Home” plays a very high impact among school students. Also, the lockdown created for families and children sit inside their homes. Which ,We cannot leave children’s education as it is. In order to continue their education, Indian Government has taken many efforts .Even schools are doing their best to bridge the gap between teachers and students by providing online education because of the absence of regular classroom education. Because of the introduction of online class by schools, on the one side students are not missing the education, on the other side students and parents faces a lot of problems (Physical and mental. It also puts them at the risk of unsupervised access to websites and other unwanted sites in internet. (shrink)