The home learning environment includes what parents do to stimulate children’s literacy and numeracy skills at home and their overall beliefs and attitudes about children’s learning. The home literacy and numeracy environments are two of the most widely discussed aspects of the home learning environment, and past studies have identified how socioeconomic status and parents’ own abilities and interest in these domains also play a part in shaping children’s learning experiences. However, these studies are mostly from the West, and there (...) has been little focus on the situation of homes in Asia, which captures a large geographical area and a wide diversity of social, ethnic, and linguistic groups. Therefore, this paper aims to review extant studies on the home literacy and numeracy environments that have been conducted in different parts of Asia, such as China, the Philippines, India, Iran, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Specifically, we explore how parents in these places perceive their roles in children’s early literacy and numeracy development, the methods they regard as effective for promoting young children’s literacy and numeracy learning, and the frequency with which they engage their young children in different types of home literacy and numeracy activities. We also examine studies on the relationship of the home literacy and numeracy environment with young children’s developmental outcomes, and the effectiveness of parent training programs to improve the home literacy and numeracy environments in these contexts. By examining potential trends in findings obtained in different geographical areas, we can initially determine whether there are characteristics that are potentially unique to contexts in Asia. We propose future research directions that acknowledge the role of cultural values and social factors in shaping the home learning environment, and, by extension, in facilitating children’s early literacy and numeracy development. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe examine Marx's critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and ‘cultural political economy’. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (...) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a ‘poetry’ of the future. We then consider the misleading ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx's work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy. (shrink)

According to Thomas Kuhn, the entrenchment of a paradigm, especially in the critical stages when facing anomalies, requires the further suppression of competing ideas. This essay addresses the unconscious entrenchment of European modernist aesthetics in the everyday, especially in the American suburbs of the 1950s, and its popular and cultural manifestations. Taking Levittown as a starting point, modernist architectural principles have since its construction radiated into the mass-housing market and materialized in housing development projects that have led to the rise (...) of suburbia and, more recently, the New Urbanism. Despite the conventional separations of modernism from the more criticized mass-housing development, the same principles of security, shelter, community, and utopia are present in each. Presented by some architects as a postmodernist aesthetic, the central tenets of modernism are still pursued and reimagined as timeless principles in the building of new housing communities, recycled and reconstituted to meet the dreams and desires of the public—a utopia that is both avant-garde and kitsch. (shrink)

Many are calling for concrete mechanisms of oversight for health research involving artificial intelligence (AI). In response, institutional review boards (IRBs) are being turned to as a familiar model of governance. Here, we examine the IRB model as a form of ethics oversight for health research that uses AI. We consider the model's origins, analyze the challenges IRBs are facing in the contexts of both industry and academia, and offer concrete recommendations for how these committees might be adapted in order (...) to provide an effective mechanism of oversight for health‐related AI research. (shrink)

Physical literacy has received considerable attention in the field of physical education and physical activity worldwide. According to recent studies, the level of physical fitness among Chinese university students is gradually decreasing. This study aims to examine the impact of the PF level on PA and PL, as well as the relationships among PF, PA, and PL, in Chinese university students. Participants comprised 798 university students in Chongqing, China. Participants completed the tests of vital capacity, cardiorespiratory fitness, muscular strength, and (...) flexibility, according to the National Physical Fitness Measurement Standards Manual, as well as questionnaires on PA and PL. The independent t-tests were conducted to examine sex differences in the evaluated variables, and the Pearson’s correlation between each PF test and PL attributes and PA was calculated according to sex. In addition, the independent t-tests were conducted to determine whether the PF level had an effect on PL attributes and PA at various intensities. Significant sex differences were found in the PF domains of vital capacity, muscular strength, and aerobic fitness, with higher scores in men than in women, but not in the PF domain of flexibility and total PL score. Furthermore, the PF domains of muscular strength and aerobic fitness were significantly and positively correlated with the PL attributes of confidence and physical competence in both men and women, while the PF domains of vital capacity and aerobic fitness were significantly and positively correlated with the PL attribute of motivation in men. In addition, PL was significantly and positively associated with cardiorespiratory fitness, vital capacity, muscular strength, and flexibility among participants in the fit group. These findings support advocating for increased participation in PA in university students and using PL as a tool to improve PF components. (shrink)

No research thus far has attempted to examine ethical decision- making in corporate entrepreneurial organizations. Results of such study would provide management executives with insights on what action, if any, is essential for achieving business ethics and corporate entrepreneurship simultaneously. This paper argues, theoretically, that the work characteristics, organizational characteristics, and some individual characteristics in a corporate entrepreneurial organization are conducive to ethical decisions. These characteristics help mitigate the adverse impact of the turbulent environments on ethical decision- making behavior. Based (...) on these arguments, a tentative model of ethical decison-making in corporate entrepreneurial organization is constructed. (shrink)

Aims: To examine the extent of social stigma toward diabetes among Singapore's multi-ethnic general population and determine whether this differs across socio-demographic sub-groups.Methods: Data for this study came from a nationwide cross-sectional study. A diabetes stigma questionnaire comprising Social Distance Scale and Negative Attitudes and Stereotyping Scale was administered to those respondents who had not been diagnosed with diabetes. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to determine the dimensionality of the instruments and validated using confirmatory factor analysis. Multiple linear regression analysis (...) was conducted to examine associations between socio-demographic factors and measures of diabetes stigma.Results: In all, 2,895 participants were recruited from the general population giving a response rate of 66.2%. Factor analyses found that a one-factor model resulted in an acceptable fit for both stigma scales, which measured social distance and negative attitudes and stereotyping, respectively. Multiple linear regression analyses identified Indian ethnicity, higher personal income and having close friends or family members who had been diagnosed with diabetes to be significantly associated with lower social distance scores while those aged 50–64 years and those with secondary and vocational education were significantly associated with higher social distance scores. Those with a personal income of SG$2,000–3,999 and SGD $6,000 and above, and those with close friends or family members diagnosed with diabetes were significantly associated with lower negative attitudes and stereotyping scores. In contrast those aged 35 years and above, those with primary education and below, and those of Malay ethnicity were significantly associated with higher negative attitudes and stereotyping scores.Conclusions: The study found a relatively low level of stigma toward diabetes in the general population of Singapore, although some stigmatizing beliefs emerged. While greater knowledge of diabetes could reduce stigma, anti-stigma messaging should be incorporated into the “War on Diabetes” programme in Singapore. (shrink)

The essay discusses the presumption of one's singularity, the uniqueness of one's time, the picturesqueness of one actions, and the capacity of human beings, whether corporately or individually, to begin everything or indeed anything again from scratch. Such presumptions are indeed present in some varieties of contemporary fanaticism, but, more to the point, it is suggested that the feeling of doing something for the first time is the oldest feeling in the world.

Is well-being the kind of thing that can be summed across individuals? This paper takes a measurement-theoretic approach to answering this question. To make sense of adding well-being, we would need to identify some natural "concatenation" operation on the bearers of well-being that satisfies the axioms of extensive measurement and can therefore be represented by the arithmetic operation of addition. I explore various proposals along these lines, involving the concatenation of segments within lives over time, of entire lives led alongside (...) one another or in sequence, and of evaluatively basic propositions via conjunction. All of these proposals turn out to carry highly controversial commitments about the good. I do not claim that these commitments are unacceptable. But they suggest that we cannot simply take for granted, as many philosophers do, that there is any such thing as the sum of well-being. (shrink)

Contemporary population ethics is dominated by views that aggregate by summing, whether of well-being or of some construct based on well-being. In contrast, average well-being is generally considered axiologically irrelevant. To many of us, however, the number of future people does not seem important, as long as it is sufficient to enable rich and varied life experiences, and as long as the population continues throughout time. It therefore seems relatively plausible to aggregate future well-being by averaging. In particular, it seems (...) plausible to value high average well-being at any particular time, and to do so for all future times. I present a time-sensitive version of the Average View that underpins such axiological intuitions. I also address a series of issues and objections that confront such a view. (shrink)

Mereological entities often seem to violate ‘ordinary’ ideas of what a concrete object can be like, behaving more like sets than like Aristotelian substances. However, the mereological notions of ‘part’, ‘composition’, and ‘sum’ or ‘fusion’ appear to find concrete realisation in the actual semantics of mass nouns. Quine notes that ‘any sum of parts which are water is water’; and the wine from a single barrel can be distributed around the globe without affecting its identity. Is there here, as some (...) have claimed, a ‘natural’ or ‘innocent’ form of mereology? The claim rests on the assumption that what a mass noun such as ‘wine’ denotes — the wine from a single barrel, for example — is indeed a unit of a special type, the sum or fusion of its many ‘parts’. The assumption is, however, open to question on semantic grounds. (shrink)

As I will use the term, an object is a mereological sum of some things just in case those things compose it simply in virtue of existing. In the first half of this paper, I argue that there are no sums. The key premise for this conclusion relies on a constraint on what, in certain cases, it takes for something to ground, or metaphysically explain, something else. In the second half, I argue that in light of my argument against sums, (...) Universalism, which is perhaps the most widely accepted answer to the Special Composition Question, is false. (shrink)

Systems biologists often distance themselves from reductionist approaches and formulate their aim as understanding living systems “as a whole.” Yet, it is often unclear what kind of reductionism they have in mind, and in what sense their methodologies would offer a superior approach. To address these questions, we distinguish between two types of reductionism which we call “modular reductionism” and “bottom-up reductionism.” Much knowledge in molecular biology has been gained by decomposing living systems into functional modules or through detailed studies (...) of molecular processes. We ask whether systems biology provides novel ways to recompose these findings in the context of the system as a whole via computational simulations. As an example of computational integration of modules, we analyze the first whole-cell model of the bacterium M. genitalium. Secondly, we examine the attempt to recompose processes across different spatial scales via multi-scale cardiac models. Although these models rely on a number of idealizations and simplifying assumptions as well, we argue that they provide insight into the limitations of reductionist approaches. Whole-cell models can be used to discover properties arising at the interfaces of dynamically coupled processes within a biological system, thereby making more apparent what is lost through decomposition. Similarly, multi-scale modeling highlights the relevance of macroscale parameters and models and challenges the view that living systems can be understood “bottom-up.” Specifically, we point out that system-level properties constrain lower-scale processes. Thus, large-scale modeling reveals how living systems at the same time are more and less than the sum of the parts. (shrink)

The relative merits of standard mereology have received quite a bit of attention in recent years from metaphysicians concerned with the part/whole properties of material objects. A question that has not been pursued to the same degree, however, is what sort of semantic repercussions a commitment to mereological sums in the standard sense might have in particular on the predicted behavior of singular terms and our practices of using such terms to refer to objects. The apparent mismatch between our actual (...) referential practices and the persistence conditions attributed to material objects by the supporters of standard mereology puts these philosophers, other things being equal, at a disadvantage compared to those whose ontology matches more closely the observed behavior of singular terms, as they are commonly used in ordinary discourse. To alleviate this problem, David Lewis leans heavily on his distinction between natural and non-natural properties. I argue in this paper that Lewis’ already heavily burdened natural/non-natural distinction among properties is not enough to avoid Quinean indeterminacy for singular terms. Those who are in the business of giving an analysis of constructions involving full-fledged predication, as opposed to the mere spatial overlap of denotations, will thus want to go in for an ontology that places more stringent structural constraints on the referents of singular terms than would be supplied by standard mereology. (shrink)

Ego Sum proposes a provocative and unprecedented reading of Descartes. By paying attention to mode of presentation of Descartes's philosophy, Nancy challenges our common understanding of the Cogito and shows how Descartes's ego is not the self-certain, self-transparent Subject of metaphysics but a mouth that opens to utter: ego sum.

This paper investigates the topological construction of Wedge Sum, with the aim of showing that it can be done mathematically, via a quotient construction, or logically, via Merge. Consistent and Inconsistent versions are given, while noting that the natural outcome of Merging is an inconsistent theory. Finally it is observed that algebraic constructions can also be treated via Merge, where the extra functionality makes for various triviality and non-triviality results.

Simon Kochen and Ernst Specker's well-known argument against hidden variable theories for quantum mechanics is also an argument against the possibility of quantum systems having, simultaneously, precise values for all of the dynamical quantities associated with such systems. Devices for defeating the argument were in the literature even before its publication, but recently Arthur Fine has raised a new difficulty. Fine points out that Kochen and Specker's argument requires the following principles:Sum Rule: At all times, in all states, the value (...) of the quantity with operator A + B is the sum of the values of the quantity with operator A and the quantity with operator B, provided A, B commute.Product Rule: At all times, in all states, the value of the quantity with operator AB is the product of the values of the quantities with operators A and B, provided A, B commute. (shrink)

If one player’s gain is exactly equivalent to another’s loss, the game is said to be zero-sum. For example, football: every improvement of position for one team is an exactly corresponding deterioration for the other team. On the other hand, a buyer and a supplier haggling over a price is not a zero-sum game, since the parties hope to mutually gain.

Anyone who has read or studied with McDermott knows he used the word "pedagogy" all the time. For a long while, I did not quite understand why. To me it seemed that pedagogy simply described various specific strategies and techniques employed in the formal classroom. But after all these years with McDermott, I now think I understand better. For him, the whole of his life—his writing, teaching, cajoling, loving, advising—all of it was simply varieties of pedagogy, variations on what for (...) him was the inexhaustible theme of teaching in the broadest sense. Experiments in pedagogy were one of his great projects—largely his motivation for getting up in the morning and heading off to the classroom. He found endless joy in... (shrink)

One popular test for distinguishing linked and convergent argument structures is Robert Yanal's Ordinary Summing Test. Douglas Walton, in his comprehensive survey of possible candidates for the linked/convergent distinction, advocates a particular version of Yanal's test. In a recent article, Alexander Tyaglo proposes to generalize and verifY Yanal's algorithm for convergent arguments, the basis for Yanal's Ordinary Summing Test. In this paper I will argue that Yanal's ordinary summing equation does not demarcate convergence and so his Ordinary Summing Test fails. (...) Hence, despite Walton's recommendation or Tyaglo's generalization, the Ordinary Summing Test should not be used for distinguishing linked argument structures from convergent argument structures. (shrink)

Sum rules are derived for the quantum wave functions of the Hadamard billiard in arbitrary dimensions. This billiard is a strongly chaotic (Anosov) system which consists of a point particle moving freely on a D-dimensional compact manifold (orbifold) of constant negative curvature. The sum rules express a general (two-point)correlation function of the quantum mechanical wave functions in terms of a sum over the orbits of the corresponding classical system. By taking the trace of the orbit sum rule or pre-trace formula, (...) one obtains the Selberg trace formula. The sum rules are applied in two dimensions to a compact Riemann surface of genus two, and in three dimensions to the only non-arithmetic tetrahedron existing in hyperbolic 3-space. It is shown that the quantum wave functions can be computed from classical orbits. Conversely, we demonstrate that the structure of classical orbits can be extracted from the quantum mechanical energy levels and wave functions (inverse quantum chaology). (shrink)

A context that is not expanded by the intelligence within it---that is only internally articulated by that intelligence---is a zero-sum context and is therefore not worth being in.

We study the role that the axiom of choice plays in Tychonoff's product theorem restricted to countable families of compact, as well as, Lindelöf metric spaces, and in disjoint topological unions of countably many such spaces.

Many philosophers think not. Many philosophers, in fact, seem to suppose that anyone who raises the question whether mereological sums can change their parts displays thereby a failure to grasp an essential feature of the concept “mereological sum.” It is hard to point to an indisputable example of this in print,[i] but it is a thesis I hear put forward very frequently in conversation (sometimes it is put forward in the form of an incredulous stare after I have said something (...) that implies that mereological sums can change their parts). (shrink)

This paper challenges the standard interpretation of Descartes’s view that the essence of the mind is thinking. Most commentators take the essence of the mind to be constituted by thoughts as objects of awareness. By contrast, the position defended here is that willing is as much part of the essence of the Cartesian meditating mind as awareness. Willing is not just a type of thought, but whenever thinking occurs it invariably involves both awareness and willing. To substantiate the claim that (...) Descartes could not separate willing from the one meditating, the paper examines the role of the will at all the key junctures of the Meditations: the cogito, the clarity and distinctness of some of our ideas, the arguments for God’s existence, and the propensity to believe that our ideas of sensible things comefrom those things. (shrink)

Rene Descartes is the philosophical architect of our modern world.

A famous mathematical theorem says that the sum of an infinite series of numbers can depend on the order in which those numbers occur. Suppose we interpret the numbers in such a series as representing instances of some physical quantity, such as the weights of a collection of items. The mathematics seems to lead to the result that the weight of a collection of items can depend on the order in which those items are weighed. But that is very hard (...) to believe. A puzzle then arises: How do we interpret the metaphysical significance of this mathematical theorem? I first argue that prior solutions to the puzzle lead to implausible consequences. Then I develop my own solution, where the basic idea is that the weight of a collection of items is equal to the limit of the weights of its finite subcollections contained within ever-expanding regions of space. I show how my solution is intuitively plausible and philosophically motivated, how it reveals an underexplored line of metaphysical inquiry about quantities and locations, and how it elucidates some classic puzzles concerning supertasks. (shrink)