Tragedy on Ptarmigan Peak

Aristophanes on Tragedy

Fifty years before Aristotle wrote his Poetics, Aristophanes had devoted two comedies, Thesmophoriazusae (411) and Frogs (405), to the subject of tragedy. In both plays the plot shows the education of the main character in the nature of tragedy. Euripides learns in Thesmophoriazusae that he must present noble and not base women in his dramas. His depiction of perverse women in the theatre had m...

Pediatric Tragedy

On Averting the Tragedy of the Commons

STEPHEN KAPLAN Department of Psychology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Michigan 3418 Mason Hall Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1027, USA ABSTRACT / One of the enduring facts of the human condition is that the earth's resources are finite and its environment fragile. It is also evident that human behavior is rarely based on an appreciation of these facts. While the outl...

Recurrent Human Tragedy During Hajj

Hajj, a unique yearly mass gathering pilgrimage of more than 2 million Muslims from around the world, presents enormous challenges to the Saudian Arabia government.1 The potential for deadly epidemic outbreaks of bacterial and viral diseases leading to upper respiratory infection and meningitis and human stampedes call for prompt attention from both pilgrims and the ministry of healt...

On the Tragedy of Personnel Evaluation

In social-dilemma situations (public-good games) people may pursue their local, egoistic interests and thereby lower the global, overall payoff of their group and, paradoxically, even their own resulting payoff. One may also speak of intraindividual dilemmas, where people pursue local goals at the expense of their overall utility. Our current experiments transfer this idea to the context of per...