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Empirisme, Filsafat Ilmu, Positivisme
Empiricism and Positivism in Science
In this chapter we will discuss the main outlines of the empiricist account of natural science, and then go on to consider why and how the positivist tradition has tried to apply it to social scientific explanation.
Empiricism and the Theory of Knowledge
As we mentioned in Chapter 1, the history of modern science and the history of theories of knowledge have been closely bound up with each other. Sciences such as physics and chemistry, which rely a great deal on observation and experiment, have tended to justify their methods and knowledge-claims in terms of the empiricist view of knowledge. Empiricist philosophers have tended to return the compliment, by treating science as the highest form of genuine knowledge, or often even the only one. In the twentieth century, empiricist philosophers (particularly those, such as R. Carnap (1966), and the British philosopher A. J. Ayer (1946), who are known as the 'logical positiv-ists') have been especially concerned to draw a clear dividing line between science, as genuine knowledge, and various belief-systems such as religion, metaphysics, psychoanalysis and Marxism. In the empiricist view, these belief-systems, which sometimes present themselves as scientific, can be shown to be 'pseudo-sciences' (though it is a bit more complicated than this – one of the leading logical positivists, Otto Neurath, was also a Marxist). One of the diffi-culties they have encountered in trying to do this is that a very strict criterion of scientific status, which is adequate to the job of keeping out Marxism, psychoanalysis and the rest, generally also rules out a great deal of established science!
Although empiricist philosophy is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge in general, our concern is more narrowly with its account of natural science. We will also be working with an 'ideal-typical' construct of empiricist
philosophy, which does not take much notice of the many different versions of empiricism. Anyone who wants to take these debates further will need to read more widely to get an idea of the more sophisticated variants of empiricism. For our purposes, the empiricist view of science can be characterized in terms of seven basic doctrines:
1. The individual human mind starts out as a 'blank sheet'. We acquire our knowledge from our sensory experience of the world and our interaction with it.
2. Any genuine knowledge-claim is testable by experience (observation or experiment).
3. This rules out knowledge-claims about beings or entities which cannot be observed.
4. Scientific laws are statements about general, recurring patterns of experience.
5. To explain a phenomenon scientifically is to show that it is an instance of a scientific law. This is sometimes referred to as the 'covering law' model of scientific explanation.
6. If explaining a phenomenon is a matter of showing that it is an example or 'instance' of a general law, then knowing the law should enable us to predict future occurrences of phenomena of that type. The logic of predic-tion and explanation is the same. This is sometimes known as the thesis of the 'symmetry of explanation and prediction'.
7. Scientific objectivity rests on a clear separation of (testable) factual statements from (subjective) value judgements.
We can now put some flesh on these bare bones. The first doctrine of empir-icism is associated with it historically, but it is not essential. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, empiricists tended to accept some version of the association of ideas as their theory of how the mind works, and how learning takes place. This governed their view of how individuals acquire their knowl-edge (that is, from experience, and not from the inheritance of innate ideas, or instinct). Today's empiricists are not bound to accept this, and they generally make an important distinction between the process of gaining or acquiring knowledge (a matter for psychology) and the process of testing whether beliefs or hypotheses (however we acquired them) are true. In the terminology of Karl Popper, this is the distinction between the 'context of discovery' and the 'context of justification'.
The second doctrine of empiricism is at the core of this philosophical approach. The basic point the empiricists are making is that if you want us to accept any claim as true, you should be able to state what the evidence for it is. If you can go on claiming it is true whatever evidence turns up, then you are not making a factual statement at all. If the manufacturer of a food additive claims that it is safe for human consumption, but cannot give evidence that anyone has yet consumed it, we would expect the official body concerned with food safety standards to refuse to accept their assurances. If they then provide results of tests on animal and subsequently human consumers of the product which show unexpected instances of symptoms of food-poisoning, but continue to insist the product is safe, we might start to suspect that they are not interested in the truth, but solely in selling the product. Thus far, this doctrine of empiricism accords very closely with widely held (and very reasonable!) intuitions.
It is important to note that our statement of the second doctrine of empiricism could be misleading. For empiricism, a statement can be accepted in this sense as genuine knowledge, or as scientific, without being true. The important point is that statements must be capable of being shown to be true or false, by referring to actual or possible sources of evidence. On this criterion, 'The moon is made of green cheese' is acceptable, because it can be made clear what evidence of the senses will count for it, and what evidence will count against it. A statement such as 'God will reward the faithful' is ruled out because it cannot be made clear what evidence would count for or against it, or because believers continue to believe in it whatever evidence turns up. This lat-ter possibility is significant, since for some empiricists the testability of a state-ment is not so much a matter of the properties of the statement as of the way believers in it respond to experiences which appear to count against it.
But once we recognize that there might be a choice about whether to give up our beliefs when we face evidence which seems to count against them, this raises problems about what it is to test a belief, or knowledge-claim. In a recently reported case, it was claimed by a group of researchers that rates of recovery of patients suffering from a potentially fatal disease who were under-going additional treatment at a complementary clinic were actually worse than those of patients not undergoing this treatment. This appeared to be strong evidence that the treatment was ineffective, if not actually harmful. Would it have been right for the clinic to have accepted these findings, and to have closed down forthwith? In the event, subsequent analysis of the data suggested that patients selected for the additional treatment had, on average, poorer prog-noses than those who were not. They were, in any case, less likely to recover, so that the research did not, after all, show the treatment to be ineffective or even harmful. Even had advocates of the 'complementary' treatment not been able to show this weakness in the research design, they might well have argued that a more prolonged investigation, or one which included the results of a number of different clinics offering the same sort of treatment, might have come up with more favourable evidence.
In this case, a potentially beneficial treatment might have been abandoned if its advocates had been too ready to accept apparent evidence against it. On the other hand, to keep hanging on to a belief against repeated failure of test-expectations starts to look suspicious. However, because tests rarely, if ever, provide conclusive proof or disproof of a knowledge-claim, judgement is generally involved in deciding how to weigh the significance of new evidence.
In practice it can be very difficult to see where to draw the line between someone who is being reasonably cautious in not abandoning their beliefs, and someone who is dogmatically hanging on to them come what may.
This is a big problem for the empiricist philosophers of science who want a sharp dividing line between science and pseudo-science, and want to base it on the criterion of 'testability' by observation or experiment. To preserve the distinctive status of scientific knowledge-claims they need to reduce the scope for legitimate disagreement about how to weigh evidence for or against a hypothesis. There are two obvious ways of doing this. One is to be very strict about what can count as a hypothesis, or scientific statement, so that the knowledge-claims it makes are very closely tied to the evidence for or against it. A general statement which just summarizes descriptions of direct observations might satisfy this requirement. A standard textbook example is 'All swans are white.' This is supported by every observation of a white swan, and actually disproved by any single observation of a non-white swan.
This example can also be used to illustrate the second way of tightening up on testability. If we consider the implications of the claim that all swans are white, it is clear that it is about an indefinitely large class of possible obser-vations. Someone interested in testing it could go out and observe large num-bers of swans of different species, in different habitats and in different countries. The more swans observed without encountering a non-white one, the more confidence the researcher is likely to have that the universal statement is true: each successive observation will tend to add to this confidence, and be counted as confirmation. This seems to be common sense, but, as we will see, there are serious problems with it. However, for empiricist philosophers of science, the issue is seen as one of finding a set of rules which will enable us to measure the degree of confidence we are entitled to have in the truth of a knowledge-claim (the degree of confirmation it has) on the basis of any given finite set of observations. A great deal of ingenuity has gone into applying mathematical probability theory to this problem.
The third doctrine of empiricism was initially meant to rule out as unscientific appeals to God's intentions, or nature's purposes, as explanatory principles. Darwin's explanation of the adaptive character of many features of living organisms in terms of differential reproduction rates of random individ-ual variations over many generations made it possible to explain the appear-ance of design in nature without reference to God, the designer. But in many scientific, or would-be scientific, disciplines, researchers appeal to entities or forces which are not observable. Newton's famous law of universal gravitation, for example, has been used to explain the rotation of the earth around the sun, the orbit of the moon, the motion of the tides, the path of projectiles, the acceleration of freely falling bodies near the earth's surface and many other things. However, no one has ever seen gravity. It has been similar with the theory that matter is made up of minute particles, or atoms. This theory was accepted as scientific long before instruments were developed to detect atomic- and molecular-level processes. And even now that such instruments have been developed, the interpretation of observations and measurements made with them depends on theoretical assumptions – including the assumption that the atomic view of matter is true!
Other appeals to unobservable entities and forces have not been accepted. These include the view, widely held among biologists until the middle of the last century, that there were fundamental differences between living and non-living things. Living things displayed 'spontaneity', in the sense that they did not behave predictably in response to external influences, and they also showed something like 'purposiveness' in the way individuals develop from single cells to adult organisms. These distinctive features of living things were attributed, by 'vitalist' biologists, to an additional force, the 'vital force'. The opponents of this view had several different criticisms of it. Some were philosophical materialists in their ontology, and were committed to finding explanations in terms of the chemistry of living things. But the vitalists were also criticized in empiricist terms for believing in unobservable forces and 'essences'. More recently, the empiricists have directed their attention to psychoanalysis as a pseudo-science which postulates unobservable entities such as the unconscious, the superego and so on (Cioffi 1970; Craib 1989).
The fourth doctrine of empiricism is its account of the nature of scientific laws. It is acknowledged that a very large part of the achievement of modern science is its accumulation of general statements about regularities in nature. These are termed 'scientific laws', or 'laws of nature'. We have already men-tioned Newton's law of gravitation. Put simply, this states that all bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is proportional to their masses, but also gets weaker the further they are apart. Not all laws are obviously universal in this way. For example, some naturally occurring materials are unstable and give off radiation. The elements concerned (such as uranium, radium and plu-tonium) exist in more than one form. The unstable form (or 'isotope') tends to emit radiation as its atoms 'decay'. Depending on the isotope concerned, a constant proportion of its atoms will decay over a given time period. The law governing radioactive decay for each isotope is therefore statistical, or prob-abilistic, like a lot of the generalizations that are familiar in the social sciences. A common way of representing this is to state the time period over which, for each isotope, half of its atoms undergo decay. So, the half-life of uranium-235 is 700 million years, that of radon-220 a mere 52 seconds. Of course, this can also be represented as a universal law in the sense that each and every sam-ple of radon-220 will show the same statistical pattern.
In biology, it is harder to find generalizations which can count as universal in the same way. One of the best-known examples is provided by the work of the nineteenth-century Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel. He was interested in explaining how the characteristics of organisms get passed on from generation to generation. He did breeding experiments on different varieties of pea plants, using pairs of contrasting characteristics, or 'traits', such as round- versus
wrinkled-seed shapes, and yellow versus green colour. He showed that the off-spring of cross-breedings did not, as might be expected, show blending of these characters. On the contrary, the offspring in successive generations showed definite statistical patterns of occurrence of each of the parental traits. These statistical patterns are Mendel's laws, and Mendel is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern genetics.
However, Mendel did not stop at simply making these statistical general-izations. He reasoned back from them to their implications for the nature of the process of biological inheritance itself. His results showed that some factor in the reproductive cells of the pea plants is responsible for each of the traits, that this factor remains constant through the generations, and that when two dif-ferent factors are present in the same cell (as must be the case for at least some of the offspring of cross-breeding), only one of them is active in producing the observed trait. Subsequently, it became conventional to refer to these factors as 'genes', and to distinguish between 'dominant' and 'recessive' genes according to which trait was produced when the genes for both were present together. This way of thinking also led to an important distinction between two different ways of describing the nature of an organism: in terms of its observable charac-teristics or traits (the phenotype), and in terms of its genetic constitution (the genotype).
With these examples of scientific generalizations in mind, we can see how well or badly the empiricist view fits them. As we saw above, empiricists are committed to accepting as scientific only those statements which are testable by observation or experiment. The most straightforward way to meet this requirement, we saw, was to limit scientific generalizations to mere summaries of observations. But it would be hard to represent Newton's law of universal gravitation in this way. For one thing, the rotation of the earth and planets around the sun is affected to some degree by the gravitational forces of bodies outside the solar system. These forces have to be treated as constant, or for practical purposes as irrelevant, if the pattern of motions within the solar sys-tem is to be analyzed as the outcome of gravitational attractions operating between the sun and the planets, and among the planets themselves. The law of universal gravitation is therefore not a summary of observations, but the outcome of quite complex calculations on the basis of both empirical obser-vations and theoretical assumptions. Moreover, it could be arrived at only by virtue of the fact that the solar system exists as a naturally occurring closed system, in the sense that the gravitational forces operating between the sun and planets are very large compared with external influences.
But Newton's law cannot be treated as a mere summary of observations for another reason, namely that it applies to the relationship between any bodies in the universe. The scope of the law, and so the range of possible observations required to conclusively establish its truth, is indefinitely large. No matter how many observations have been made, it is always possible that the next one will show that the law is false. It is, of course, also the case that we cannot go back in time to carry out the necessary measurements to find out if the law held throughout the past history of the universe. Nor will we ever know whether it holds in parts of the universe beyond the reach of measuring instruments. In fact, subsequent scientific developments have modified the status of Newton's law to an approximation with restricted scope. However, it is arguable that if the law had not made a claim to universality, then the subsequent progress of science in testing its limitations and so revising it could not have taken place.
This suggests that it is in the nature of scientific laws that they make claims which go beyond the necessarily limited set of observations or experimental results upon which they are based. Having established that the half-life of radon is 52 seconds from a small number of samples, scientists simply assume that this will be true of any other sample. As we will see, this has been regarded as a fundamental flaw in scientific reasoning. It simply does not follow logi-cally, from the fact that some regularity has been observed repeatedly and without exception so far, that it will continue into the future. The leap that scientific laws make from the observation of a finite number of examples to a universal claim that 'always' this will happen cannot be justified by logic. This problem was made famous by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and it is known as the problem of 'induction'. A common illustration (not unconnected with Newton's law) is that we all expect the sun to rise tomorrow because it has always been observed to do so in the past, but we have no logical justification for expecting the future to be like the past. In fact, our past observations are simply a limited series, and so the logic is the same as if we were to say 'It has been sunny every day this week, so it will be sunny tomorrow,' or 'Stock markets have risen constantly for the last ten years, so they will carry on doing so.'
As we saw above, a possible response to this problem for empiricists is to resort to a relatively weak criterion of testability, such that statements can be accepted as testable if they can be confirmed to a greater or lesser degree by accumulated observations. Intuitively, it seems that the more observations we have which support a universal law, without encountering any disconfirming instances, the more likely it is that the law is true. Unfortunately, this does not affect the logic of the problem of induction. No matter how many confirming instances we have, they remain an infinitesimally small proportion of the indef-initely large set of possible observations implied by a universal claim. So, in the terms allowed by empiricism, it seems that we are faced with a dilemma: either scientific laws must be excluded as unscientific, or it has to be accepted that science rests on an untestable and metaphysical faith in the uniformity and reg-ularity of nature.
This brings us to the empiricist account of what it is to explain something scientifically. Let us take a biological example. Some species of dragonfly emerge early in the spring. Unlike later-emerging species, they generally exhibit what is called 'synchronized emergence'. The immature stages or 'nymphs' live underwater, but when they are ready to emerge they climb out of the water and shed their outer 'skin' to become air-breathing, flying, adult dragonflies. In these species, local populations will emerge together over a few days, even in some cases in one night. How can this be explained? The current view is that larval development ceases over the winter (a phenomenon known as 'diapause'), leaving only the final stage of metamorphosis to be completed in the spring. A combination of increasing day length and reaching a certain temperature threshold switches on metamorphosis so that each individual emerges at more or less the same time. To explain why a particular population of a particular species emerged on a particular night would involve a pattern of reasoning somewhat like this:
Emergence is determined by day length d plus, combined with temperature t.
On 17 April, population p was exposed to temperature t, and day length d had already been passed.
Therefore: population p emerged on 17 April.
This could fairly easily be stated more formally as a logically valid argument, in which the premisses include the statement of a general law linking tempera-ture and day length with emergence and particular statements specifying actual day lengths and temperatures. The conclusion is the statement describing the emergence of the dragonflies – the event we are trying to explain. The 'cover-ing law', combined with the particular conditions, shows that the event to be explained was to be expected.
This analysis of the logic of scientific explanation also enables us to see why there is a close connection between scientific explanation and prediction. If we know an event has happened (for example, the dragonflies emerged on 17 April), then the law plus the statement of the particular circumstances (day length and temperature in this case) explains it. If, on the other hand, the emergence has not yet happened, we can use our knowledge of the law to predict that it will happen when the appropriate 'initial conditions' are satisfied. Knowledge of a scientific law can also be used to justify what are called 'counterfactual' statements. For example, we can say that the dragonflies would not have emerged if the temperature had not reached the threshold, or if they had been kept under artificial conditions with day length kept constant below d. And these counterfactuals can then be used in experimental tests of the law.
Again, what is clear from these examples is that a scientific law makes claims which go beyond the mere summary of past observations. If the event to be explained was already part of the observational evidence upon which the law was based, then the 'explanation' of the event would add nothing to what was already known. Similarly, if the law were treated simply as a summary of past observations, it would not provide us with any grounds for prediction. This point can be made clear by distinguishing between scientific laws, on the one hand, and mere 'contingent' or 'accidental' generalizations, on the other. The standard example, 'All swans are white,' is just such a 'contingent generaliza-tion'. It just so happened that until Western observers encountered Australian swans they had only seen white ones. There was no scientific reason – only habit or prejudice – for expecting swans in another part of the world to be white. To call a generalization a law is to say that it encapsulates a regularity which is more than just coincidence: exceptions are ruled out as impossible, events 'must' obey the law and so on.
As we have seen, this presents problems for a thoroughgoing empiricist, since claims as strong and as wide in scope as those made by scientific laws can-not be conclusively tested by observation and experiment. One way out of this was recognized by the philosopher Karl Popper, and it formed the basis for a quite different approach to the nature of science (see Popper 1963, 1968). Popper pointed out the fundamental difference between confirming, or prov-ing, the truth of a scientific law, on the one hand, and disproving or 'falsifying' it, on the other. Any number of observations of dragonfly emergence which were consistent with the law would still not prove it to be true, but a single case of dragonflies emerging at lower temperatures, or during shorter day lengths, would be enough to conclusively disprove the law. On this basis, Popper argued that we should not see science as an attempt to establish the truth of laws, since this can never be done. Instead, we should see science as a process whereby researchers use their creative imaginations to suggest explanations – the more implausible the better – and then set out system-atically to prove them false. The best that can be said of current scientific beliefs is that they have so far not been falsified. So, for Popper, the testability of a statement is a matter of whether it is open to falsification.
Unfortunately, as Popper himself acknowledged, this doesn't solve all the problems. As we saw above, evidence which appears to count against a belief or even to disprove it may itself be open to question. Countless experiments con-ducted in school science labs 'disprove' basic laws of electricity, magnetism, chemistry and so on, but scientists don't see this as a reason for abandoning them. The assumption is that there were technical defects in the way the experiments were set up, instruments were misread or results were wrongly interpreted. Whether we view testability as a matter of verification or falsifi-cation, it cannot be avoided that judgements have to be made about whether any particular piece of evidence justifies abandonment or retention of existing beliefs. For this reason, Popper argued that in the end the distinguishing feature of science was not so much a matter of the logical relation between hypotheses and evidence as one of the normative commitment of researchers to the fallibility of their own knowledge-claims.
The empiricist aim of establishing the distinctive character and status of science implies separating out types of statements which can be scientific from those which cannot. We already saw that this means excluding statements which look like factual statements, but in the empiricist view are not, because they are not testable by experience (for example, statements of religious belief, utopian political programmes and so on). Moral or ethical judgements pose special problems for empiricists. They are not obviously factual, but when someone says that torture is evil, for example, they do seem to be making a substantive statement about something in the world.
Empiricists have tended to adopt one or another of two alternative approaches to moral judgements. One is to accept them as a special kind of factual judgement, by defining moral concepts in terms of observable proper-ties. Utilitarian moral theory is the best-known example. In its classical form, utilitarianism defines 'good' in terms of 'happiness', which is defined, in turn, in terms of the favourable balance of pleasure over pain. So, an action (or rule) is morally right if it (tends) to optimize the balance of pleasure over pain across all sentient beings.
However, in more recent empiricist philosophy of science it has been much more common to adopt the alternative approach to moral judgements. This is to say that they get their rhetorical or persuasive force from having a grammat-ical form which makes us think they are saying something factual. However, this is misleading, as all we are really doing when we make a moral judgement is expressing our subjective attitude to it, or feelings about it. This, interest-ingly, implies that there are no generally obligatory moral principles, and so leads to the position referred to in Chapter 1 as moral relativism.
Positivism and Sociology
The nineteenth-century French philosopher Auguste Comte is generally credited with inventing both of the terms 'positivism' and 'sociology' (see Andreski 1974; Keat and Urry 1975; Benton 1977; Halfpenny 1982). Comte was very much influenced in his early days by the utopian socialist Saint Simon, and he went on to develop his own view of history as governed by a progressive shift from one type of knowledge, or belief-system, to another. There are three basic stages in this developmental process. The initial, theological stage gives way to the metaphysical, in which events are explained in terms of abstract entities. This, in turn, is surpassed by the scientific stage, in which knowledge is based on observation and experiment. Writing in the wake of the French Rev-olution, and desiring the return of normality and social stability, Comte was inclined to explain continuing conflict and disorder in terms of the persistence of outdated metaphysical principles such as the rights of man. Such concepts and principles were effective for the 'negative' task of criticizing and opposing the old order of society, but in the post-revolutionary period what was needed was 'positive' knowledge for rebuilding social harmony.
This positive knowledge was, of course, science. However, the problem as Comte saw it was that each branch of knowledge goes through the three stages, but that they don't all reach scientific maturity at the same time.
Astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology had all, Comte argued, arrived at the scientific stage, but accounts of human mental and social life were still languishing in the pre-scientific, metaphysical stage. The time was now ripe for setting the study of human social life on scientific foundations, and Comte set out to establish 'social physics', or 'sociology', as a scientific discipline. Since Comte's day the term 'positivism' has been used extensively to charac-terize (often with derogatory connotations) approaches to social science which have made use of large data sets, quantitative measurement and statistical methods of analysis. We will try to use the term in a more precise and narrow sense than this, to describe those approaches which share the following four features:
1. The empiricist account of the natural sciences is accepted.
2. Science is valued as the highest or even the only genuine form of knowledge (since this is the view of most modern empiricists, it could conveniently be included under 1).
3. Scientific method, as represented by the empiricists, can and should be extended to the study of human mental and social life, to establish these disciplines as social sciences.
4. Once reliable social scientific knowledge has been established, it will be possible to apply it to control, or regulate the behaviour of individuals or groups in society. Social problems and conflicts can be identified and resolved one by one on the basis of expert knowledge offered by social scientists, in much the same way as natural scientific expertise is involved in solving practical problems in engineering and technology. This approach to the role of social science in projects for social reform is sometimes called 'social engineering'.
There are several reasons why positivists might want to use the natural sciences as the model for work in the social sciences. The most obvious one is the enormous cultural authority possessed by the natural sciences. Governments routinely take advice on difficult matters of technical policy-making, from food safety to animal welfare and building standards, from committees largely composed of scientific experts. In public debate (until quite recently – see Beck 1992) scientists have had a largely unchallenged role in media discussions of such issues. Social scientists might well want to present their disciplines as sufficiently well established for them to be accorded this sort of authority. Not unconnected with this is the still controversial status of the social sciences within academic institutions. Strong claims made by social scientists about the reliability, objectivity and usefulness of the knowledge they have to offer may be used to support their claim to be well represented in university staffing and research council funding for their research. This was, of course, of particular significance in the nineteenth-century heyday of positivism when the newly emerging social sciences were still struggling for recognition.
That positivists should have accepted the empiricist account of science is not surprising, given the pre-eminence of this view of science until relatively recent times, and given its clear justification for science's superiority over other forms of belief-system. However, the positivist commitment to extending scientific method to the human sciences is more obviously contestable. In later chapters (particularly 5, 6 and 7) we will consider in detail some of the most powerful arguments against this positivist doctrine, but for now we will just consider the case for it. We will use some of the work of Durkheim as our example here, but it is important to note that we are not claiming that Durkheim was himself a positivist (see Lukes 1973; Pearce 1989; Craib 1997). For our purposes in this book, he shares some important features in common with positivists, and this is what we will focus on.
In his classic work on suicide (Durkheim 1896, 1952), Durkheim drew on a vast array of statistical sources to show that there were consistent patterns in suicide rates. He showed that these patterns could not be accounted for in terms of a series of non-social factors, such as race, heredity, psychological disorder, climate, season and so on. He then went on to show that they could be accounted for in terms of variations in religious faith, marital status, employment in civilian or military occupations, sudden changes in income (in either direction) and so on. Table 1 shows the pattern for religious faith.
Although there are variations in suicide rates over time in each country, comparison between countries shows remarkable constancy – some countries having consistently higher or lower rates than others. Similarly with religious confession: though absolute rates vary a great deal for the same faith in differ-ent countries, there is constancy in that in each country Protestants have higher rates than Catholics, and Catholics higher rates than Jews. Durkheim argues that this pattern cannot be explained in terms of doctrinal differences between the religions, but, rather, is a consequence of the different ways the churches relate to individual followers:
If religion protects a man from the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him . . . but because it is a society. What constitutes this society is the existence of a certain number of beliefs and practices common to all the faithful, traditional and thus obligatory. The more numerous and strong these collective states of mind are, the stronger the integration of the religious community, and also the greater its preservative value. The details of dogmas and rites are second-ary. The essential thing is that they be capable of supporting a sufficiently intense collective life. And because the Protestant church has less consistency than the others it has less moderating effect upon suicide. (Durkheim 1952:170)
In his book on suicide, and his methodological classic The Rules of Sociological Method (1895, 1982), Durkheim uses a series of arguments to establish that society is a reality in its own right. The facts, 'social facts', of which this reality is made up exist independently of each individual, and exert what he calls a 'coercive power' over us. For example, each individual is born into a society whose institutions and practices are already in existence. Each of us, if we are to participate in our society, communicate with others and so on, must learn the necessary skills, including those involved in speaking and understanding the local language. In this sense, as well as in more obvious respects, we are coerced into following the established rules of our 'social environment', or 'milieu'. There is a particularly powerful statement of this towards the end of Suicide:
[I]t is not true that society is made up only of individuals; it also includes material things, which play an essential role in the common life. The social fact is sometimes so far materialized as to become an element of the external world. For instance, a definite type of architecture is a social phenomenon; but it is partially embodied in houses and buildings of all sorts which, once constructed, become autonomous realities, independent of individuals. It is the same with avenues of communication and transportation, with instruments and machines used in industry or private life which express the state of technology at any moment in history, of written language, and so on. Social life, which is thus crystallized, as it were, and fixed on material supports, is by just so much externalized, and acts upon us from without. Avenues of communication which have been constructed before our time give a definite direction to our activities. (Durkheim 1952: 314)
This is enough for Durkheim to show that there is an order of facts, social facts, which are distinct from facts about individual people and their mental states, or biological characteristics. This class of facts, most obviously detected through the analysis of statistical patterns, justifies the existence of a distinct science – sociology – which takes it for its subject-matter. This science, having its own distinct subject-matter, will not be reducible to biology, or to psychology.
However, a further step in the argument is required. As practising partici-pants in social life, it could be argued that all of us possess knowledge of it – this seems to be implied in Durkheim's own argument. If this is so, why do we need a specialist science to tell us what we already know? In answer to this Durkheim could point out that his analysis of statistical patterns in the occur-rence of suicide had come up with results which most people would find sur-prising. This apparently most individual and lonely of acts, when studied sociologically, turns out to be determined by variable features of the social environment. In the Rules of Sociological Method he offers us a more general argument. As the facts of social life exist prior to each individual, are indepen-dent of their will, and exert a coercive power, they resemble facts of nature. We all interact with natural materials and objects, and we do so through 'lay' or common-sense understandings of their properties, but just because of this we would not generally claim that there was no need for natural science. The history of the natural sciences shows innumerable instances of common-sense beliefs being corrected in the face of new scientific evidence and theory. So why should we assume that common-sense assumptions and prejudices give us reliable knowledge of the social world? If, in general, science progresses by increasingly distancing itself from common-sense assumptions, and gaining deeper understanding of its subject-matter, we should expect this to be true of the social sciences too.
Finally, some brief comments are due on the fourth doctrine of positivism – the proposal to apply social scientific knowledge in social policy-making. This view of the public role of social science has continued to be very widely held, and it provides yet another justification for extending the methods of the natu-ral sciences into the study of society. Only on the basis of the sorts of claims to quantitative reliability, objectivity and general applicability already made by the natural sciences could the social sciences expect to be taken seriously by policy-makers. Today in most countries official statistics are collected on virtually all aspects of social and economic life – on patterns of ill-health and death, on marriage and divorce, on unemployment, income differentials, attitudes and values, consumption patterns and so on – and social scientists are employed to collect and interpret these, as well as to give advice on policy implications (in the UK, such publications as Social Trends and British Social Attitudes contain selections from such statistical surveys).
The logical form of a scientific explanation as represented in the empiricist 'covering law' model shows how the link between such knowledge and policy might be made. To oversimplify considerably, the statistics might show that criminal behaviour by juveniles was more common among the children of divorced parents. This is not a universal law, but a statistical generalization (though the required element of universality might be present, if it is held that this statistical generalization holds across different cultures and historical periods). However, the basic structure of a scientific explanation can be maintained:
If there are high divorce rates then there will be high rates of juvenile crime.
Divorce rates are high.
Therefore: There are high rates of juvenile crime.
If policy-makers are convinced by public opinion that high rates of juvenile crime are a bad thing, and are charged with coming up with policies to reduce them, then this piece of scientific explanation will yield the policy recommen-dation to take action to reduce divorce rates. Of course, there are some obvi-ous complications here. One is that a mere statistical association between divorce rates and juvenile crime does not show that one causes the other. It could be that some third social fact, such as unemployment rates, causes both high rates of divorce and juvenile crime. A policy of dealing with unemploy-ment therefore might be more effective than trying to do something about divorce. But there might be more subtle problems with the statistical associa-tion. It might, for example, be that the association of juvenile crime with divorce holds only where divorce is stigmatized by prevailing values. If this were so, then the appropriate policy might be to work for a cultural shift in favour of more liberal social values. However, none of this counts against the positivist notion of 'social engineering' as such. Each of these possibilities can in principle be addressed by more exact data-gathering, and more sophisti-cated analytical methods. There are, however, other lines of criticism, which we will explore in the next chapter.
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ATTENTION those training for this year's track and field events! Please check the Phys-ed board for available practice times. Also, if interested, please sign up with Mr. Backus for a pre-CWOSSA meet at Pauline Johnson school in Brantford. The meet will be on Wednesday, April 24th and the cost to sign up is $10. This will be a valuable meet to assess your abilities and to work on your competitive edge. The last day to sign up for this pre-CWOSSA meet is Thursday, April 18th (before Easter weekend). Please see either Mr. Backus or Mrs. Sullivan for details.
Great news! The culture and cuisine in southern Italy trip is now open to all students! Come and join us in Rome for a cooking class, Capua to visit grazing buffaloes and explore a working buffalo mozzarella farm, sample chocolates in Benevento as well as focaccia, taralli and olive oil in Bari. Not to mention all of the historical sites and sounds to see and explore!! Please see Chef for more information. Buon appetito!!! This trip is pending board approval.
A quick message from the cafeteria. Come into the caf and enjoy our delicious Chicken Potato Bowl Special. Thank you and we appreciate your business.


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The Vikings do not get as much love as players may first expect from online slots manufacturers, but Playtech has helpfully filled that void in the market with their Viking Mania slot. While the graphics are something of a throwback to their older games, they suit the theme perfectly and besides, the focus here is on features and bonuses so no matter what players think of the reel icons themselves, they won't have to put up with them for long! First up, the reels themselves are fully enhanced by the wild card symbol which can be one of two different Vikings. They appear on any of the three middle reels and can also come in a stacked format during the free spins round. That round starts with players having ten free spins to try their luck, with a three times multiplier on all prizes. However, the great part of the round is that there is absolutely no upper limit on the number of spins that can be retriggered, so it can become one of the most lucrative bonuses around. Finally, there is the Viking Playtime game, where players throw hammers in an effort to win a multiple of their stake. All in all, VikingMania is feature packed and fun, and perfect for players of any level. Try it out yourself absolutely free and with no signup or registration required here at Mr Gamez.


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Austria's Latest Step Toward Going Green Is a $3.50 Per Day, Go-Anywhere Travel Card
Photo: Johann Groder (Getty Images)
Austria's Klimaticket, the nation's $3.50 per day, go-anywhere pass to combat climate change, went live this week, CNN reports. The ticket is valid for all publicly and privately operated rail, metro, and bus networks throughout the nation, and with a price tag of $1,265 (€1,095) for an annual pass, the cost works out to roughly $24 (€21) per week or $3.50 per day.
Nationwide travel passes have already been adopted across some parts of Europe, with Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany among the countries offering discount programs and other incentives to encourage public transit use. But Austria's Klimaticket (literally "climate ticket") is the most affordable option yet, and it marks a major step toward the nation's goal of becoming climate neutral by 2040 — one of the most ambitious green agendas to date. The federal government has committed $277 million (€240 million) to support the new initiative, with ongoing annual costs estimated to be around $173 million (€150 million), CNN reports.
Austria's Green Party "super minister" Leonore Gewessler, who helms the nation's transportation, environment, and energy sector, expressed excitement for the initiative in a press conference announcing it last month. And she's not the only one: Demand for discounted early bird tickets for the pass initially crashed the Klimaticket booking site.
"I think you can see how happy I am. This is a big day for the climate and for transport. If this summer has shown us anything, it is that the climate crisis has already arrived with us," Gewessler said via the Financial Times.
As part of its 2030 Mobility Master Plan, the Austrian government means to cut private car use nationwide by about 16% by 2040, reducing it from 70% of total annual kilometers traveled to 54%. At the same time, authorities aim to increase public transportation from 27% to 40% of total annual kilometers traveled while also doubling active travel, such as walking and cycling, from 3% to 6%.
"One of the things I like about Klimaticket is that it is valid on all modes of public transport, a concept that should be replicated elsewhere as it removes the hassle of having to find and buy multiple tickets," European rail travel expert Andy Brabin told CNN. "It is potentially revolutionary, removing some of the barriers to using public transport and making spontaneous trips much easier as you don't have to worry about buying tickets, which can often be expensive at short notice for longer journeys."
If Klimaticket proves successful, it could become a blueprint for other nations to roll out their own affordable options for convenient, nationwide travel. Austria is a relatively small country, so scaling this kind of initiative may prove difficult. Bureaucratic hurdles, too, have the potential to throw a wrench in the works. The Klimaticket's development has been at the center of fierce negotiations over the past two years, with Austria's more rural regions, in particular, pushing back against tax dollars being used to subsidize public transit that doesn't see as high of a demand in their area, CNN reports.
"I think there is an appetite for something like Klimaticket in Germany," Keith Barrow, editor of UK magazine Today's Railways Europe, told the outlet. "The Greens' success in the recent federal election might spur them to emulate their counterparts in Austria and push for a national annual public transport pass."

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Q: Manipulating data using JSON parse/stringify I have a question about manipulating JSON data using Javascript and stringify/parse. In the below example, I create a JSON string, then use parse to convert it back into an object. After doing that, what I want to do is delete an item with a certain ID, and the only way I can find to do it is to loop through the entire array and delete the element from the array once I find a match. This doesn't seem very efficient. Is there a better way to do this?
var employees = [];

//build the array
for (var i=0; i < 10; i++) {
    var player = { "id": i, "salary": i*1000000 };
    employees.push(player);
}

json_employees = JSON.stringify({employees: employees}); //convert to json string
alert(json_employees); //display the new string

var obj = JSON.parse(json_employees); //convert back to a Javascript object

for (var j=0; j < obj.employees.length; j++) { // loop through the array
    if (obj.employees[j].id === 5) // is it the employee with id 5?
        obj.employees.splice(j, 1); // remove the fifth item
}

json_modified_employees = JSON.stringify({employees: obj.employees}); //convert back to json string
alert(json_modified_employees); //display the new string

A: You could store the employees in an object, with a key of their id, something like this:
// create a store object
var employees = {};

//build the array
for (var i=0; i < 10; i++) {
    var player = { "id": i, "salary": i*1000000 };
    // add item to store object with a key of 'pk' + i
    employees['pk' + i] = player;
}

json_employees = JSON.stringify({employees: employees}); //convert to json string
alert(json_employees); //display the new string

var obj = JSON.parse(json_employees); //convert back to a Javascript object

// remove the required item (in this case number 5)
delete obj.employees['pk' + 5];

json_modified_employees = JSON.stringify({employees: obj.employees}); //convert back to json string
alert(json_modified_employees); //display the new string

If you then wanted to iterate over your employees, you would
for (var key in employees) {
    if (employees.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
        alert(employees[key].id)
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Manchester Curry Mile: the top seven places to eat at city's famous curry spot according to Google reviews
Manchester Ship Canal. Credit: Priestley & Sons Egremont/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
16 unique photos of Salford Quays showing how it's changed – from construction to the present day
These archives pictures show Salford Quays has changed enormously over the last century or so.
2nd Dec 2022, 3:03pm
Salford Quays today is a hive of activity. It has bars, restaurants, a shopping centre, a theatre, a museum, a watersports centre, residential buildings, a gig venue, a football stadium and it's even home to the BBC.
But it wasn't always like this. Opened by Queen Victoria in 1894, Salford Docks – as they were then known – helped Manchester trailblaze its way into the Industrial Revolution, connecting the city's industry to the rest of the world. Then, after the docks' closure in the eighties and years of dereliction, it became one of the largest urban regeneration projects the UK has ever seen.
Its evolution continues today, with more and more businesses and people moving in, and new developments taking shape. There is so much demand for Salford that this area is growing faster than anywhere else in the North West, according to ONS data.
Here's a look back at Salford Quays through the ages, from the birth of the Manchester ship canal all the way to the present day and MediaCityUK.
1. Circa 1890
Construction of the Manchester ship canal. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Cars lined up at the quays waiting to be transported via ship down the Manchester Ship Canal. Credit: Central Press/Getty Images
Men work on a fire brigade ship in Salford. Credit: Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The men's 50km walking race during the 2002 Commonwealth Games hosted by Manchester. Credit: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images
ManchesterBBCNorth WestONS


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Homepage » Member News » Another Epic Season of Epic Trails Set to Hit US Airwaves June 4th
Another Epic Season of Epic Trails Set to Hit US Airwaves June 4th
Season 2 of the highly anticipated television series, Epic Trails, is set to premiere on FOX Sports Network on Tuesday, June 4th at 5:30pm. Following close behind the launch on FOX Sports Network, Season 2 of Epic Trails will begin airing on Outside TV.
The season kicks off with host, Eric Hanson, putting his physical and mental strength to the test on what is humbly known as one of the most challenging hikes in the world – Papa New Guinea's Kokoda Track. As Eric puts it, "The Kokoda Track is known as one of the world's most difficult trails. It's steep. It's hot. It's muddy. And it's bloody amazing." Between hikes, Eric experiences first-hand the diverse cultures of the region's indigenous people and is moved by their customs and the incredible hospitality they show towards him.
Beginning with Papa New Guinea, Season 2 of Epic Trails will feature one awe-inspiring destination after another, including: Canada's Sunshine Coast, British Columbia; England's Peak District & Derbyshire; Juneau, Alaska; Jämtland, Sweden; Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada; Wales; New South Wales, Australia; California; and Poland. There will plenty of opportunity to catch the show this season as the premiere episode alone is scheduled to air 26 times in the month of June. Those curious to see what all the buzz is about can check out the Season 2 teaser here.
Between airings, Epic Trails fans can access inspiring content on the Epic Trail's Facebook page, Instagram account and blog (www.erichanson.tv). Subscribers to the show's YouTube Channel, BackpackingTV, will enjoy a steady release of new content including behind-the-scene VLOGS from Epic Trails film shoots, backpacking tips, answers to subscriber questions, and episodes of Trackin' Dirt – an exciting new digital series being released in conjunction with Epic Trails.
With 10 incredible destinations showcased in this season, and adventures ranging from mountain biking through the Rockies to coasteering in Wales; exploring Alaska's ice caves to rock climbing the iconic El Capitan; reindeer herding with the Sámi people in northern Sweden to scallop diving in the Atlantic Ocean; and spending the night in majestic medieval castles to camping under awe-inspiring Northern Lights, this season of Epic Trails promises to be just that – epic.
Contributing members are responsible for the accuracy of content contributed to the Member News section of AdventureTravelNews.
Red Rocks Initiatives Receive UNWTO Award
Deeper Africa Named to List of Top 10 Safari Outfitters in Travel + Leisure Magazine's World's Best Awards 2019
Oceanwide Expeditions: Hondius Sister Ship M/V Janssonius Ordered for 2021


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Q: How to sort column data in alpha-numeric order in pivot? the following link generates a pivot jqgrid that will load some sales information about cars enter link description here
it has about 11 car sales objects. it has a custom sort order that i have given and the purpose of the custom sort order to display data in custom order when data loads to the grid and it works but the issue is when user clicks the column name 'model' it should be sorting car names by name in the alphabetical order but instead its sorts using my custom order. But it should not use custom order to sort columns when user clicks on the header, it should use its default sort order sorting by alphabetical order.
How do i still keep the custom order that i have given and at the same time let the columns gets sorted in the alphabetical order if user clicks a column?
secondly,
Different browser shows different ways. when i load the grid with a large dataset it behaves differently in two of the following operations
In chrome:
1. When user selects 'All' (show all records) from the navbar at the bottom the custom order that i have given as the sort order for grid load breaks and some gets positioned in different places
but in IE browser, this won't happen

*In both IE and chrome, after loading data when user clicks the column name Model column data gets sorted using custom sort order and not by alphabetical order.

How do i fix these issues

A: You should just remove sorttype from the second (model) column if you want to sort the column by by alphabetical order. See https://jsfiddle.net/OlegKi/dk7uth40/3/
By the way free jqGrid support the option
threeStateSort: true

which implements 3-state sorting. You can see the results on the demo https://jsfiddle.net/OlegKi/dk7uth40/4/. The user sees the data in original order initially. By first click on the model column the data will be sorted in alphabetical order (in ascending order). By second click the data will be sorted in the descending alphabetical order. The third click on the column header will return the order in the initial sorting order.


Is there a way to win or lose in a roleplaying game? Are you in competition with other players, NPCs, or the GM? What are the rewards for winning or the penalties for losing? Do you feel like your characters have to �win� to enjoy a game?
Well, there clearly are for some games. Rune, for example, is actually a competitive game, with the GM and players both limited by the rules and fighting over Victory Points. But that's an exception. The big difference between most RPGs and most other games is that RPGs aren't "zero sum" or "winner-takes-all"; some or all participants can win, and no one needs to lose.
Some people focus on character power-gathering as victory, or on changing the world in their desired way, and if they achieve their goals, they consider it a "win", so good for them!
But IMO, the object is to tell a good and genre appropriate story (either at the character or the overall level). That can end with failure if the genre is Cthulhu or or if it's Toon and you picked the Coyote as your role model (in fact, the humor in Toon is pretty much always based around failure, which is the major way it differs from the other animation-based humor game, Teenagers From Outer Space, which bases its humor on excessive success). Failure is, in fact, an appropriate story in many genre. For some character concepts (evil masterminds such as Brand-as-painted-by-Corwin, for example) it's almost the only genre-appropriate story from the very beginning (since some genre don't allow for the bad guys winning the day).
One "wins" an RPG if, in the end, your character has achieved a genre appropriate, satisfying ending, be it to an episode or to their full story. Thus, some players can win while others lose, though in most situations all the players, including the GM, are working together to achieve a mutual win. You "lose" if the ending you achieve is not genre appropriate (the bad guys win after the heroes give up instead of fighting on even though facing only slight resistance, for example, is almost never genre appropriate) or if you never achieve closure (the game falls apart without wrapping up anything, as happens all too often).
Now, many (perhaps most) games establish a genre (or, I suppose, actually a sub-genre within their setting as genre) that is "character vs. universe conflict", where the only appropriate ending is success against all odds, and this tends to create false player vs. GM conflict, as the GM provides the "all odds" you need to succeed against. But it is a false conflict; the GM's goal is the players' success just as much as the players' is. Which tends to make for the odd situation where the GM "wins" by the NPCs under the GM's control losing.
As some readers here know, I'm a pretty serious fan of board and card games as well as RPGs, so I thought I'd start a series here of micro-reviews of favorite games, just to help spread the word a bit.
I have no idea how long this will go on, but I have a lot of favorite games, so it might be quite a while. Except several swings to the land of Cheapass Games and more than a few mentions of the name Reiner Knizia.
I'll start with the favorite, a game I'm rarely without just in case I have 15 minutes and someone interested in playing. En Garde is a Knizia classic, a card game of fencing that, despite its simple and highly mathematical mechanics, achieves a very good feel in play. It's easy to learn, as the rules teach the game in three levels, starting extremely simple and slowly adding the more complex parry and advance-and-attack rules. It's a small game (just a couple dozen cards) with only a few "bits" (cards you lay out to create a board and dice printed with fencer silouettes to use as place-markers), but it packs a lot of fun into a small package.
Settlers of Catan is also an easy choice. Players are in the role of tribal leaders on an island trying to build up from a couple villages to a thriving urbanized culture more quickly than do the other tribes on the island, building with a set of 5 resources developed at random each turn. Trading between players is all but required, as another player will likely be the only easy way to get the resource you need. Some people dislike its high "luck" element (resources are produced at random and if your numbers don't come up, you lose out), some people make it take forever by playing too seriously (the style of game really calls for quick, light play), but if you can avoid taking it too seriously, it's a great way to pass some time. Almost anyone, even non-gamers, can quickly come to understand its goals and methods and become a reasonably good by their third or fourth game. And, if you keep the game quick, it plays fast enough that you can get through several games in an evening. The expansions are more for the pure gamer crowd (particularly Cities and Knights set), as they add complexities and length for strategic options that casual players aren't likely to appreciate, but the basic game is pure gold.
Well, if the general RPG market isn't ready for diceless, we're about to find out through a high-profile failure.
It's fairly easy to figure out that I lean toward the side of diceless RPGs. After all, there's links to the AmberCons website here on the Staircase, including AmberCon North for which I currently serve as Treasurer after three years as Con Chair. I'm by no means a purist, though, as anyone looking at my list of current game plans or active games will see (and I did just run a diced Amber game at The Black Road). I think dicelessness works well when the assumption of success (baring active resistance) is justified, which means, in my actuarially-biased view, it fits well for high-powered characters (Amber or Nobilis, for example) and less well at more realistic ability levels (where random factors matter about as much as character ability, if not more).
Superheroes fit into my above-made category of "high-powered characters", so by that standard, a diceless mechanic could fit for superhero gaming. But, traditionally, super-hero RPGs have been dice-heavy, with highly random (high variance) mechanics trying to capture the "cinematic" nature of super-hero tales. So here's a new game that flies in the face of that convention, using the ultimate in low variance game mechanics - one with no random factor at all - to simulate the highly cinematic (as can be seen from the success of recent movie translations, such as Spider-Man and X-Men) Marvel Comics universe.
Confusing high variance dice mechanics with "cinematic" mechanics is a common mistake in the RPG world. By making the dice range huge, game designers and players seem to think, you can allow for the extremes of astounding success common in cinematic genre, and that is somewhat true. However, to get a cinematic genre feel you need to encourage the players to take risks, to ignore obvious dangers in favor of the flashier solution, and only then to succeed despite the odds. And, of course, this is exactly backwards of how reality shows people react to riskiness; in a highly uncertain situation, the best course of action is to hedge your bets, to take a conservative tack, and get a more reliable if mediocre result. Instead, the way to encourage cinematic action by players is to make success more likely and to make the price of doing things the showier way negligible or even negative (that is, it's easier to succeed if you swashbuckle). Feng Shui does this, and that's a large part of why it works so well as a cinematic RPG. Games that go the high-variance route tend to end up patching with some form of "hero points" to smooth over the times when high variance results in excessively bad results (which, with most die mechanics, it will do with exactly the same frequency as it does excessively good results).
Well, with a few missteps, Marvel Universe takes the "reduce randomness to increase cinematic feel" to its logical extreme, "eliminate randomness and perhaps maximize cinematic feel". If I know that Daredevil can always survive a leap off a 10-story building thanks to his Acrobatics skill, then as player I won't even consider the elevator. And if I know the thug's pistol isn't ever going to hurt the Hulk, then as player I'd just have ol' greenskin stomp forward ignoring the bullets.
But Marvel Universe isn't quite as simple as that. Every character has their skills and powers, but in each "panel" of the story (the game uses comic-book terms for game time, so round of actions by one character is a "panel", the full round of all active characters is a "page") every player needs to allocate energy/attention among their options (attack, defense, skill use, etc.); the rating a character has in any one power or skill tells us the maximum they can allocate to it. Allocation is done by moving small glass stones around on your character sheet. It's all pretty mechanical, feeling more like I'm playing Star Fleet Battles than an RPG, but once you get the hang of it, the idea isn't an inherently bad one. Almost all characters can use up energy far more quickly than they can recover it (usually you recover only half or one-third of your maximum reserves after every panel), so there's even some strategy to the game (lots of trying to second-guess opponents and allocate lots to attack the same round they under-allocated defense).
From a bit of toying with the system, it's very clear that standard powers (called "Actions") are nice, but powers bought up to what the game calls "Modifiers" are far better. You see, modifiers don't take any energy to use, they just kick in whenever they apply. So, for example, the Hulk gets several "stones" worth of defense because he's pretty much made of armor. Bullseye gets a handful of "stones" as a bonus to any ranged attack he makes, because he's deadly with anything. This means someone playing the Hulk only needs to allocate energy to defense against very strong attacks, and if you're fighting against Bullseye, you'd best keep a half-dozen or more points in defense every panel or you're going to get badly hurt. And if the Hulk faces off against Bullseye, the two effects pretty much cancel and we're back to the normal rules (so Bullseye best watch out, because that's really his best trick and the Hulk has several others, including the highest Strength in the game by quite a margin).
Tons of special cases and odd effects exist, making the comparison of action value to resisting value more complicated, and usually those are good things (such as Spider-Man's ability to re-arrange his allocations after seeing everyone elses', simulating his "spidey-sense", or the Black Cat's bad luck power that makes any success by less than a given point margin into a failure). With proper expansion (the base game is only barely adequate in the range of special effects it describes), this could make for a very strategically rich conflict resolution system.
Shortcomings? Well, the game has a few. The small size of the book (128 pages) requires them to under-detail many of the rules, leading to some very confusing table entries with little or no explanation. Examples are also in short supply; there are plenty of sample characters at nearly 40 (though they aren't given with their point costs, so you can't use them as ready examples of character creation), but far too few clear examples of play. And some of the game's mechanical concepts are subtle, the sort that good examples are by far the best tool to explain. Some rules also seem to contradict the general feel of the game. For example, there's a penalty for "showing off" with your action, which seems counter to the whole cinematic feel I went on about above. But, I think, the difference here is that the game encourages the player to show off, but tries to discourage (via increased chance of failure) the character showboating. A little self-defeating, perhaps, but not hard to patch up. And the transformation rules (for characters who have two or more forms) discourage slight transformation (some changes in abilities, but most skills remain unaffected) in favor of the extremes (Hulk or Thor-like models, where the transformed form lacks almost all skills of the base self).
Also, the game is a bit pricey for its size ($25 for 128 pages of a comic-book-sized hardcover volume). But don't fall for appearances... This is a fairly meaty game, and one that, with a little GM work and time spent figuring out its workings, will probably reward you with fun play. The highly mechanical play may frustrate some people, there's some subtle strategies to point allocation that may discourage some folk who like things simpler, and the dicelessness will upset the pro-dice partisans, but I think the game stands on its own reasonably well against the strong range of super-hero games already on the market, and against the earlier attempts at a Marvel RPG. For more information, examples of play, some sample pages, and the official FAQ, check out the official MURPG page.
I know I'm working on a simple scenario to try to tempt friends into playing so we can check the whole thing out for real.
Dungeons and Dragons players probably know by now about 3.5, the errata-and-more update of the Third Edition rules due out in just over a month.
Well, for the first time since WOTC started leaking hints about this, there's one I don't like.
What don't I like? Well, it's right at the end... Somehow, Gnomes have changed their "favored class" from Illusionist to Bard.
Oh, it's probably a good change. Gnomes in 3E got shorted a bit, since being a specialist mage is a restricting choice and that was their only favored class option. And Bards are already strong on Illusion-type spells (with strong rumors that their list will get even better on 3.5), so it isn't that dramatic a change (and the +1 to Illusion spell save DCs is nifty)... But by changing the Gnome favored class to Bard, many gnome characters will need to be given house rule protection or will start eating multi-class experience penalties (and those are very unpalatable things). Also, by changing from an INT based casting class to a CHR based class (for more than just spellcasting), existing Gnome characters will have the wrong attributes for their new favored class.
And this from a design team that probably still won't make Paladin into a prestige class because it will disrupt too many long-standing D&D assumptions? Well, Gnomes being illusionists is as long-standing as the Gnome race, if memory serves. Now, suddenly, their race stereotype changes from clever trickster to charming trickster. A small but significant shift to make for an whole race, even one that was probably the least-used of D&D player races.
It's a minor grumble, compared to the improvements I've seen coming in 3.5, but this is the sort of sweeping (if subtle) change I was hoping would only be made if vital, and I don't think gnomes were critically broken as they were.
Which puts him in Boston exactly one week before my exam (which is 10/30).
Oh, I'll take the break from exam prep. But I almost certainly shouldn't.
Follow-up: Okay, reason be damned... I've got tickets to the last night in NYC (with Jeanne) and the last night in Boston (with Julia and Lou). It's Eddie! It'll be worth it!
Okay... about this blog's name.
Four years ago, I bought a house here in Concord, NH. It's an older house, though not so much so by local standards... built in 1920. Somewhen in its history, an owner decided they didn't like the original staircase upstairs (which was narrow and steep... I know because I've been in another house locally that has the same floorplan and is unmodified). And so the original staircase became a bookcase (on the ground floor) and a closet (upstairs) and a new staircase was built on the opposite side of the house.
This staircase twists around in an uncomfortable way, no two stairs are exactly the same size (as I found when I tried to put carpet bits on them to provide traction lest I trip over cats and break my fool neck), the pitch is inconsistent, the wall they run along is at an oblique angle to the side of the house (rather than the familiar and comfortable 90 degrees), the roof above the stairs has a different slope than the stairs do, and, in general, it looks dangerous and unstable. In fact, they're quite soundly built, just not aesthetically designed at all, unless the chosen aesthetic was "clumsy" or "ugly".
Well, you read the blog's title.
48? Wow... a lot of these to catch up on as time alows!
The price and availability of miniatures goes up as more companies leave the market. Wood costs lead to extended paper costs, and supplements and gaming systems are becoming a serious financial investment. Is this affecting your gaming any?
Of course, the reason "more companies leave the market" is not only because many of them are run as hobbies by people with little or no business sense.
It's also because there isn't that much margin to be made at today's prices (unless you avoid printing and distribution costs by going the PDF route, which the market really hasn't accepted yet). And really never has been. The most successful games have made a handful of people rich (the small 'r' version... no Gateses or Buffets in the gaming world), but most games just provide enough to pay a small number of people, often most of them freelancers paid well under the word rate for broader market writing. Most people writing games work another job to put food on the table.
I will admit, I don't automatically buy everything new and interesting any more, but that's more because there's too much product these days, and much of it support product for games I already know I'm not going to follow (like most everything White Wolf puts out... if only because they don't support Adventure!) or are the effluvium of the countless fly-by-night d20 lines (so many that the good products are easy to overlook!).
If you let price dictate your decisions, you don't buy wonderful things like Nobilis in favor of, say, The World of Synnibarr (which offered a LOT of pages for its price... pages of utter crap, of course, but a lot of them). That's clearly a mistake.
And I still follow a simple rule... If a movie costs $6 (matinees here in New Hampshire still do), then any game that will be enjoyable to just read has to be worth at least $18 (because it will take 3 times longer than the movie), and if it is even slight more enjoyable than a similar-length book or movie, then it adds even more value to the equation. Now, I'll admit that I think the new Talisman is overpriced at around $70... but that's because I already have the earlier editions. If I had access to no Talisman at all, I might just decide it's worth it, because it is a great light game and I know I've spent enough hours playing it to catch it up to the "movie price equivalent" easily.
Of course, I buy $45 German board games just because the bits look useful to recycle for other uses, so maybe I'm a poor judge.
In what homegrown setting have you had the most fun, and why?
With all apologies to Lou and Julia, whose original game world is home (or at least adopted home, in Gevrok's case) to several of my current characters, I have to go back a bit to give this its proper answer.
Back in the days of CompuServe's RPGames forum, I had the privilege to be part of Caroline Julian's sprawling Eollan campaign. Initially, I had no idea how deep and complicated this setting was, how rich its history and cultures, and how entangling its major NPCs' plots could become. I found out all of that as we played.
It started with the taciturn Emlyn, whose first scene was being refused as the human sacrifice for his tribe. To add to the insult, he was simultaneously chosen as champion for his people's Goddess, which he took as being rejected completely by the Hunter, whose service he has wanted to enter his whole life (he was, it turned out, completely wrong about that). Play continued with him pushed into a messy political situation he had no comprehension of, with several very different peoples. When last seen, he was in the company of a wolf gifted to him by the Hunter Himself and dealing with strange fey magics he had no hope of ever unraveling.
In the course of Emlyn's first adventure, he was sent off on a side-quest that took far less time to resolve than the activities of the rest of the PCs, and so I was offered a chance to create a second character, who turned out to be the selfish, snobbish, effete, and drug-addled bookkeeper Kusian. Oh, Kus was invaluable to completing the mission the PCs were faced with, but he really wasn't at all a nice person at all. Several people took up the goal of trying to make him a better person, or at least less of a danger to those around him, to differing degrees of success.
Next (and the only character here born for a face-to-face game) came Bernard, a crass mercenary hired to help in a rescue action who ignored some very good advice and retrieved a cursed axe that an evil priest had used to try to kill him. He came to what turned out to be years later, somehow freed from service to the axe, scarred and nearly dead with little memory of what he had done. I didn't get to find out just why anyone thought he was worth saving.
Then Thonia. Ahh, Thonia. A favorite character of mine, a walking contradiction. Shy, withdrawing, and inexperienced... but, at the same time, trained in dark magic and murder, probably my only PC who considers poisoning an appropriate response to a social slight. Her relationships (particularly with a kiss-stealing 'gypsy', her mysteriously unaging mentor, and a young relative with a penchant for finding secrets) were all terribly complicated and confused, and a little bit of baby-sitting turned into her strangest journey.
And, briefly, there was Lorenzo as well, a charming young schemer who had, when last seen, gotten himself in a bit deeper than he knew how to deal with, though he was quite confident he'd manage a way. The fact that he was actively working against Thonia's interests (though the two never met... which may be why Lorenzo was still alive when I last got a look into this world) made it even more interesting.
In many ways, that was the beauty of Eollan. It was large and complex enough that you could play several characters whose paths never cross, but who leave ripples other characters do encounter, sometimes decades later. There was magic and power, there were also people and simple problems that sometimes were harder to solve than those magic and power created. It also helped that the GM and players here were of the highest quality, but a lot of it was the work Carrie had put into the world, work that showed every new corner you looked around. It was also a world with extensive histories, which almost everyone believed and which were, more often than not, almost completely false. What went on behind the scenes are always more important than what was happening on the surface.
Unfortunately, real life distractions on both sides and the collapse of CIS RPGames left all of these stories unfinished. But for all of the 90s, this was the world I most looked forward to every chance I could get to play in it.
Another extented entry, mostly just here to list what all is going on so I can keep track of it, or so that future references make some sense. Not that I have anywhere near as many PCs as I've had in my more active gaming periods, but it's still quite a few.
After the Fall is bi-weekly D&D played down in Fall River, MA with Julia as GM. Ezhno, my PC, is a centaur ranger who left his people both to keep a promise made to a wandering stranger (an NPC who appears in all the PCs' backgrounds) and because he didn't quite fit in at home. He doesn't quite fit in elsewhere, either... but he's starting to bond with the group of misfits the PCs are here. He's also pretty much the front-line fighter-type of the group, which fits his fairly straightforward manner.
Against the Tide of Darkness is a monthly D&D game, also played in Fall River but this time with Lou as the GM. Valentin is a wandering bard, only survivor of a caravan that wandered too far past safe borders (if there are even any of those left in this part of the world). He is tall, handsome, a bit overly showy, and is proving to be a terrible shot with his crossbow. I'm not completely convinced he doesn't consider himself a character in a story rather than a person in significant danger... He's also approaching a point where he'll have to make a dramatic choice and shift into a prestigue class that will significantly change him. That is, assuming D&D 3.5 doesn't mess up things.
Spook is a psychic cat I became player for in Lou's PBEM post-apocalyptic GURPS game, SBE (he started off as an NPC). Despite his NPC origins, he's the hero of the story (honest... just ask him!), and pretty soon he'll manage to convince someone to let him drive, or maybe rig a machine gun he can use now and then. Until then, he'll keep putting bad guys to sleep and watching his pal DJ's back.
Nikolao is my character in James's Passions of the Tides PBEM. He is a partially crippled veteran of the ongoing war between merfolk and the fish-men who, upon his return, became a strong anti-war voice and, thus, something of an embarrassment to his war-hero uncle. This is a young game, but has gotten off to an amazing start, including an attempt on Nikolao's life that caught me completely off guard.
Rilla and Gevrok are characters played by Julia and I, respectively, in an irregular D&D campaign Lou runs, extending from episodes started at TurkeyCon, an annual gathering of friends each Thanksgiving. Two fairly simple mercenaries find themselves chosen bodyguards of a teen Emperor whose kingdom is being invaded by fiendish horrors. Gevrok, a half-orc Barbarian-Cleric, is not really bright enough for many of the challenges he faces, but doesn't give up easily, and maybe that covers for it. Plus he's a cleric of the Fool (though he prefers to call him "The Star Child" because that other name doesn't sound properly respectful), so has a pool of dumb luck to draw on.
And that's about it right now... As with GMing, I'm a bit short on time and that keeps me from doing quite as much as I'd like to!
Well, here's as good a place as any to detail what I have cooking right now as RPG concepts. Some are nearly ready to run, some are being developed for this September's AmberCon North, and some are for face-to-face games that may or may not happen anytime soon.
Tall Tales of Shadow and Pattern is that new ACN game for this, featuring the Elders trading brags and lies. This one is almost ready to go, just needing a little more tweaking on the edges.
Dungeons & Dragons Unnamed Apprentice Adventure is a game where the PCs start off at -500 XP, with only one Apprentice level rather than the normal full first level PCs of D&D. The slightest thing is dangerous, the simplest thing is a major reward, and I think I'm managed to leverage those facts into a very tense take on the classic dungeon crawl. I have some plot seeds in here that tempt me to feed it directly into my home-brew high fantasy world (previously used for Tunnels and Trolls) and spin it into a regular campaign, which has made me a bit reluctant to run it until I find a convenient way to run such a campaign.
Feng Shui - DemonWorld is a campaign just a chapter from its end (the PCs are one confrontation from eliminating the DemonWorld of the title, if they can pull it off), but various bits of Real Life make it difficult to get more than three of the players together any one Saturday, so we've yet to run the climax chapter. I have other Feng Shui game concepts in mind, but I expect I'll put this system on hold once the current campaign wraps.
Godlike is a game I am very impressed with, and I have most of a short (2-4 episode) mini-campaign in mind. This is something I may run in Fall River in place of the Feng Shui game once that is wrapped up (or abandoned as unschedulable).
"Ghoul's Bronze Age World" is the name I used for a bronze-age fantasy setting that I briefly ran on CompuServe's RPGamers forum (the world has a name... or, rather, it has several names as the various peoples don't agree on any one, which is why the game has had a fairly generic title to date). Initially sketched out for RuneQuest play, this game is now mostly translated to the more modern Hero Wars (soon to be re-released as HeroQuest) mechanics. This is a setting of fairly low level but pervasive magic, and of cultural responses to social stress. I will likely run it as a PBEM/web message board game, quite probably as several small games sharing world and NPCs but perhaps never crossing over directly.
Amberclaw is an anthropomorphic recast of Amber that I ran this year at The Black Road to reasonably good results, and will likely work on more before trying again at this year's ACN. Sure, it's mostly just a play on the Amber Mailing List's "Corwin is a Talking Bear" jokes, but I think it can go a bit deeper than that with effort.
Nine Princes in Hong Kong is still a popular request for a re-run, and that's also on my list of things I'd very much like to do again. The premise is flexible enough that little or nothing of the original plot even has to remain. I'm not sure if the replay will be PBEM or face-to-face, local or convention-based, but all are possible.
Welcome to Hogwarts is a home-brew Harry Potter RPG run with Jeanne Thellwell at several AmberCons. Currently, this is on hold as Jeanne is quite busy with her new profession, but with any luck we'll be able to get back into this in the future.
Now, my less developed concepts... I want to do something with FVLMINATA. The diceless system fan in me wants to try out the new Marvel Universe RPG, mostly likely with an X-Men game. Buffy calls to me as well, and I've sketched out a concept on the Roll the Bones forum. And there's Nobilis that really deserves some time and attention. And I'd run more Teenagers From Outer Space at the drop of a hat.
Of course, to get to all of these, I need to get through (or give up on) my one remaining actuarial exam, which currently eats of most of my free time for three months every autumn. Still, even if I know I don't have time to do most of these, it's useful to keep a list, so here it is.
Well, this is not exactly earth-shattering after all the build up, is it?
But it's here (thanks, Jeanne!). Now the job is to make it worth looking at and reading, which will take work on my end.
But that has to wait until after the Good Eats marathon. I have priorities, after all.


Go ahead, make our day at LeeWay! Bring it on, we're busy making lemonade out of lemons and getting a charge out of it, too.
The reason so many people, for so many years, repeated: "When life hands you lemons, turn them into lemonade" is because it's true. Life is what you make of it and anything can be turned into a benefit if you remain positive and think it out.
At the last class of The Gifts of Wisdom series, everything should have worked perfectly. All was in place and appeared to be working right, but turned out wrong. Unknown to Ruth Lee, this 'live' call was having technical difficulties that affected the recording of the class.
What to do with this mess of lemons? Well, we decided to create a video of that last class on Bliss is It! We added more slides and music to the background.
The final product is ready for you to view and we think you will find it amazing—something you will use over and over again for years to come. Let us know how you like this new video feature.
In addition to creating this video, we set up a new feature you will be able to share with family and friends on social media: The LeeWay Video Library on YouTube. Bliss is It! is the first of many videos to be posted there for your viewing enjoyment and enlightenment.
As a result of a setback, we created a whole new way for you and others to enjoy and use The Teacher`s wisdom. We turned the recording snafu incurred during the final Gifts of Wisdom class into a video, thus opening LeeWay and The Scribe to a new world of opportunities. Help us help others by not accepting disappointments at face value—instead turning them into assets.
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