Typically, public discussions of questions of social import exhibit two important properties: they are influenced by conformity bias, and the influence of conformity is expressed via social networks. We examine how social learning on networks proceeds under the influence of conformity bias. In our model, heterogeneous agents express public opinions where those expressions are driven by the competing priorities of accuracy and of conformity to one’s peers. Agents learn, by Bayesian conditionalization, from private evidence from nature, and from the public (...) declarations of other agents. Our key findings are that networks that produce configurations of social relationships that sustain a diversity of opinions empower honest communication and reliable acquisition of true beliefs, and that the networks that do this best turn out to be those which are both less centralized and less connected. (shrink)

Sense of agency refers to the ability to influence one’s functioning and environment, relating to self-efficacy and wellbeing. In youth, agency may be challenged by external demands or redefinition of self-image. Music, having heightened relevance for the young, has been argued to provide feelings of self-agency for them. Yet, there is little empirical research on how music impacts adolescents’ daily sense of agency. The current study investigated whether music listening influences adolescents’ perceived agency in everyday life and which individual and (...) contextual determinants would explain such an influence. Participants were 44 adolescents (48% female, 36% with training in music, mean age 14), recruited through local schools. The mobile Experience Sampling app MuPsych was used to collect brief self-reports of personal music listening experiences during daily life. This method assessed the change in the listener’s perceived control over both their emotional states (Internal Agency), and their external environment (External Agency), over five minutes of music listening. Also measured were changes in mood states, and contextual variables (social situation, concurrent activity, and reason for listening). The impact of music on the sense of agency was analyzed using multilevel structural equation modelling. There was no general increase of agency across all music episodes, but agency fluctuations were determined by specific individual and contextual factors. Music training predicted increases in both internal and external agency during music listening, and external agency increased more for male participants. Certain context features such as listening alone, paying attention to music, and listening for enjoyment were related to greater increases in agency. Increases in agency significantly correlated with increases in mood valence. Our findings confirmed the plasticity and situational embeddedness of the sense of agency. Music indeed can support agency, but the impact is dependent on specific individual and contextual factors. Sense of agency can be seen as a health resource and significant part of youth development, and current findings provide new insight into when and by whom such affordance is likely to be employed. (shrink)

There has been considerable debate in the literature about the relative merits of information processing versus dynamical approaches to understanding cognitive processes. In this article, we explore the relationship between these two styles of explanation using a model agent evolved to solve a relational categorization task. Specifically, we separately analyze the operation of this agent using the mathematical tools of information theory and dynamical systems theory. Information-theoretic analysis reveals how task-relevant information flows through the system to be combined into a (...) categorization decision. Dynamical analysis reveals the key geometrical and temporal interrelationships underlying the categorization decision. Finally, we propose a framework for directly relating these two different styles of explanation and discuss the possible implications of our analysis for some of the ongoing debates in cognitive science. (shrink)

Global issues rarely suggest conversations about aesthetics, as they conjure thinking about massive problems such as global warming, famine, and war rather than beautiful thoughts such as grace, love, and compassion. Students may engage in study of global issues in any number of venues, perhaps through a world geography class, within world literature, or as part of a course in Earth science. They would likely be exposed to readings, Web sites, and videos about the nature and extent of problems. Teachers (...) might engage them in small and large group discussions of problems, and, ideally, there would be some consideration of what they might do as citizens. Such processes, their outcomes, and subsequent civic directions .. (shrink)

David Hume is widely regarded as the greatest English thinker in the history of philosophy. His contributions to a huge range of philosophical debates are as important and influential now as they were in the eighteenth century. This book provides an introduction to the ideas of this hugely significant thinker.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aesthetic Potential of Global Issues CurriculumWilliam Gaudelli (bio) and Randall Hewitt (bio)IntroductionGlobal issues rarely suggest conversations about aesthetics, as they conjure thinking about massive problems such as global warming, famine, and war rather than beautiful thoughts such as grace, love, and compassion. Students may engage in study of global issues in any number of venues, perhaps through a world geography class, within world literature, or as part (...) of a course in Earth science. They would likely be exposed to readings, Web sites, and videos about the nature and extent of problems. Teachers might engage them in small and large group discussions of problems, and, ideally, there would be some consideration of what they might do as citizens. Such processes, their outcomes, and subsequent civic directions are generally not regarded as aesthetic acts, however. One is likely to consider the aesthetic value of a piece of art, a song or poem, movie or performance, but to speak of activities like teaching global issues being aesthetic seems discordant.Yet, this is not so within John Dewey's notion of aesthetics. He argues that aesthetics can exist outside of museums and beyond theaters, potentially in social discourse. Activities like public talk, while not as inherently pleasing as listening to music, have the potential to be experienced as aesthetic:Hence an experience of thinking has its own esthetic quality. It differs from those experiences that are acknowledged to be esthetic, but only [End Page 83] in its materials … [T]he experience itself has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses integral integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement … In short, esthetic cannot be sharply marked off from intellectual experience since the latter must bear an esthetic stamp to be itself complete.1Dewey's contention that all types of activity, from repairing an automobile to discussing species extinction, can point toward transcendence has not achieved widespread recognition among philosophers, nor has its utility been demonstrated in curriculum.2 Aesthetics and art are still largely confined to the museum, hermetically sealed off from everyday experiences in a Schillerian "ideal kingdom."3 To suggest curriculum, schools, and pedagogy as potential landscapes for artwork far removed from the museum is to render oneself a heretic in many quarters of educational discourse.Yet, there is a despondency and desperation about schools, and thereby curriculum, that too often fail to teach for and about something more than narrow, capitalist-driven, techno-rationalist ends. Constructivist orientations in teaching, for example, have contributed to shifting the manner of teaching but have done relatively little to reframe the ends of learning. Metaphorically, constructivism is a spoon of sugar to help swallow the bitter pill that is learning for and as work. What is lacking in this conceptualization, according to Parker Palmer, Nel Noddings, and Aostre Johnson, is an aesthetic and spiritual rationale for learning that honors the sanctity of students beyond their academic capacities, values the processes of learning as much as its outcomes, and seeks a space for learning that is transcendent.4What we seek in this article with Dewey, then, is an antidote for the malaise that has befallen curriculum, one that is rooted in an aesthetic way of thinking instantiated in a most unlikely candidate: teaching about global issues. We begin by briefly outlining some of Dewey's thinking related to aesthetics, particularly as it germinated in his career and biography. We then turn to the work of contemporary scholars in education who have similarly found value in Dewey's notion of aesthetics. Finally, we draw an illustration from a recent study of student focus groups engaged in reading global media. This student conversation about the potential cataclysm of global warming demonstrates the surprising capacity of such bleak policy discussions to generate aesthetic moments. The significance of this work lies in its potential to contribute to a broadened curriculum discourse that aims toward living an aesthetically resonant life in classrooms and wider social environs while augmenting and enhancing the rationalistic focus of contemporary schools and, indeed, the study of global issues.Deweyan Aesthetics and BiographyWe begin by weaving Dewey's biography with his notion of aesthetics as an internal process of... (shrink)

Originally published in 1956, this survey of the interpretations of sex by the major figures in Christian thought and in psychoanalysis made an important contribution to the re-thinking of our sexual morality at the time. The author refutes the common belief that the negative attitude toward sex and the body, which had been predominant in western civilization, originated with Christianity. He shows that such a viewpoint was widespread in the early Hellenism Age, nearly three centuries before Christ. He emphasizes the (...) essentially positive view which Biblical religion demands and shows how Christianity's attitude early became corrupted by the dualism of the Orient. He points to the need for a return to essential naturalism and the Biblical interpretation of sex. The first part of the book consists of a historical treatment in the Christian tradition, touching upon the teaching of Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and others. He analyses the classical and contemporary attitudes and ideas in both Catholic and Protestant circles and shows how Christian understanding comes into conflict with psychoanalysis. In the later portions of the book the author discusses sex and psychoanalysis and the major problems in sexual mores. He ends with a synthesis of the religious and psychoanalytic points of view and a critical reconstruction of a Christian interpretation. (shrink)

Public health preparedness must use a comprehensive approach that includes both communities and public health systems. There are three basic questions that should be asked when evaluating public health preparedness in communities of color: 1) Is the community basically healthy?; 2) Does the community have access, to necessary information, resources and services?; and 3) Are the information, resources and services available and provided to the community in a nondiscriminatory manner?Racial-based health disparities is a well documented fact for many communities of (...) color. Individuals from these communities tend to have more morbidity and higher mortality. This health disparity is race based and not just a function of social class. Similarly, access to basic goods and health care is racialized and class based. (shrink)

Public health preparedness must use a comprehensive approach that includes both communities and public health systems. There are three basic questions that should be asked when evaluating public health preparedness in communities of color: 1) Is the community basically healthy?; 2) Does the community have access, to necessary information, resources and services?; and 3) Are the information, resources and services available and provided to the community in a nondiscriminatory manner?Racial-based health disparities is a well documented fact for many communities of (...) color. Individuals from these communities tend to have more morbidity and higher mortality. This health disparity is race based and not just a function of social class. Similarly, access to basic goods and health care is racialized and class based. (shrink)

This essay examines multiple iterations of anti-juridicalism in relation to shifting forms of postwar imperialism and decolonization. The anti-juridical designates a differential political praxis of rights and law grounded in conditions of subalternity and revolutionary struggle. It stands in opposition to the abstract, neutraluniversality advanced by dominant theories of liberallegalism and hegemonic conceptions of the rule of law. In contemporary modalities, anti-juridical praxis serves as a necessary, critical supplement to the articulation of constituent power in the postcolony with profound implications (...) for constructing a state of law and justice, and for building of a new internationalism of peoples. (shrink)

Considerable controversy has recently arisen regarding the patenting of medical and surgical processes in the United States. One such patent, viz. for a "chevron" incision used in ophthalmologic surgery, has especially occasioned heated response including a major, condemnatory ethics policy statement from the American Medical Association as well as federal legislation denying patent protection for most uses of a patented medical or surgical procedure. This article identifies and discusses the major legal, ethical and public policy considerations offered by proponents and (...) opponents of such patents. The existing literature divides up into those who favor such patents essentially without qualification, and those who condemn and wish to outlaw them. We advance a compromise position where administrative and legislative action is called for to provide more specific guidelines regarding the patentability of such processes by the Patent and Trademark Office. Our position, in sum, will be that too much is at stake in this complicated area for either the blanket prohibition, or wholesale, uncritical acceptance, of the patenting of medical and surgical processes or techniques. (shrink)

This is a description of an avian-shaped feature that rests below a network of cellular structures found on a mound within the Argyre Basin of Mars in Mars Global Surveyor image M14-02185, acquired on April 30, 2000, and released to the public on April 4, 2001. The area examined is located near 48.0° South, 55.1° West. The formation is approximately 2,400 meters long from the tip of its beak to the tip of its farthest tail feather. There is a minimum (...) of six different variations in appearance of the surface material over this small area. Utilizing the public targeting request form provided on the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) website, co-author Miller secured a second image of the area that was obtained on July 3, 2006, showing this feature under different conditions S20-00165. The new image was then released to the public on August 11, 2006. A third image of the formation identified as MGS S13-01480 was acquired on December 15, 2005, and although officially processed on June 20, 2006, it was not made available to the public until August 22, 2009, on NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS) website. All three of the MGS images reveal defining aspects of this avian feature, including a head, beak, body, eye, leg, foot, toes, wing, and feathers. When taken together, these components induce the visual impression of an avian-shaped formation that exhibits a unique set of proportional features. Adjoining this formation is a composite of complex cellular features that form a compartmentalized infrastructure. The three authors who are veterinarians provide a critical analysis of the avian features, and the geologist and geoscientist authors examine natural mechanisms that could contribute to the formation of this feature. An extensive search of comparable regions within and beyond the area of the Argyre Basin was conducted. A list of these sites is provided, and terrestrial comparisons are also offered. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

The generation of isometric force at the hand can be mediated by activating a few motor modules. Stroke induces alterations in motor modules underlying steady-state isometric force generation in the human upper extremity. However, how the altered motor modules impact task performance remains unclear as stroke survivors develop and converge to the three-dimensional target force. Thus, we tested whether stroke-specific motor modules would be activated from the onset of force generation and also examined how alterations in motor modules would induce (...) changes in force representation. During 3D isometric force development, electromyographic signals were recorded from eight major elbow and shoulder muscles in the paretic arm of 10 chronic hemispheric stroke survivors and both arms of six age-matched control participants. A non-negative matrix factorization algorithm identified motor modules in four different time windows: three “exploratory” force ramping phases and the stable force match phase. Motor module similarity and between-force coupling were examined by calculating the scalar product and Pearson correlation across the phases. To investigate the association between the end-point force representation and the activation of the motor modules, principal component analysis and multivariate multiple linear regression analyses were applied. In addition, the force components regressed on the activation profiles of motor modules were utilized to model the feasible force direction. Both stroke and control groups developed exploratory isometric forces with a non-linear relationship between EMG and force. During the force matching, only the stroke group showed abnormal between-force coupling in medial-lateral and backward-forward and medial-lateral and downward-upward directions. In each group, the same motor modules, including the abnormal deltoid module in stroke survivors, were expressed from the beginning of force development instead of emerging during the force exploration. The PCA and the multivariate multiple linear regression analyses showed that alterations in motor modules were associated with abnormal between-force coupling and limited feasible force direction after stroke. Overall, these results suggest that alterations in intermuscular coordination contribute to the abnormal end-point force control under isometric conditions in the UE after stroke. (shrink)