Children’s literature provides a critical method of socialization and familiarization with gender roles, providing examples, boundaries, and limitations for gender identity construction. While extensive research has been done on how children’s literature depicts both traditional and non-traditional gender roles, very little research has been published on the cultural differences between literary representations. The aim of the present paper is to describe the representations of social roles of men and women in American, Czech, and Spanish children’s books published between 2010 (...) and 2020. Three best-selling children’s picture books from each year from each respective culture were selected and analyzed, culminating in a thematic analysis of ninety-nine books. Using inductive thematic analysis, the study found all three cultures to be conservative in their depictions of gender roles, with Czech books as the most likely to feature traditional gender roles. Spanish books are more, and American books are the most subversive in their depiction of gender roles, containing an increasing number of non-traditional elements over an examined time period. (shrink)

Prosodic patterning is known to affect the impression that speakers make on their listeners. This study explores prosodic phrasing in good public speakers of American English and Czech. Czech is a West Slavic language whose intonation is reported to be flatter and prosodic phrases longer than in English. We analyzed prosodic characteristics of 10 speakers of Czech and American English who appeared in TED Talks, assuming such appearance to be a mark of a “good speaker.” Our objective (...) was to see whether prosodic phrasing will be more similar in these public speeches between the two languages. We measured the length of prosodic phrases, speech rate in each phrase, and pitch range and melodic variability in the entire phrase, as well as in its pre-nuclear and nuclear portion. The number of syllables per phrase was higher in Czech than in English, although phrases were generally very short in both languages. The melodic indicators confirm smaller melodic variability in Czech even in publicly performed TED Talks. Overall, our results show that there are differences between Czech and English prosodic phrasing in good public speakers but that the genre also affects phrasing. Prosodic rendition—especially prosodic phrase length and melodic variability—is therefore a vital, albeit somewhat language-specific aspect of speech performance which public speakers should pay close attention to, both in their native language and in foreign languages. (shrink)

This paper explores the integration of machine learning into economics and social sciences, assessing its potential impact and limitations. It introduces fundamental machine learning concepts and principles, highlighting the differences between the two disciplines, particularly the focus on causal inference in economics and prediction in machine learning. The paper discusses diverse applications of machine learning, from extracting insights from unstructured data to creating novel indicators and improving predictive accuracy, while also addressing challenges related to data quality, computational efficiency, and data (...) ownership. It emphasizes the importance of standardization, transparency, and ethical considerations in prediction tasks, recognizing that machine learning is a powerful tool but cannot replace economic theory. Ultimately, researchers remain optimistic about the transformative potential of machine learning in re-shaping research methodologies and generating new insights in economics and social sciences. (shrink)

During the Third Reich, state‐sponsored violence was linked to scientific research on many levels. Prisoners were used as involuntary subjects for medical experiments, and body parts from victims were used in anatomy and neuropathology on a massive scale. In many cases, such specimens remained in scientific collections and were used until long after the war. International bioethics, for a long time, had little to say on the issue. Since the late 1980s, with a renewed interest in the Holocaust and other (...) Nazi crimes, a consensus has increasingly taken hold that research on human tissues and body parts from the Nazi era is inadmissible, and that such specimens should be removed from scientific collections and buried. The question of what to do with scientific data obtained from these sources has not received adequate attention, however, and remains unsolved. This paper traces the history of debates about the ethical implications of using human tissue or body parts from the Nazi period for scientific purposes, primarily in the fields of anatomy and neuropathology. It also examines how this issue, from after the war until today, influenced the establishment of legal and bioethical norms on the use of human remains from morally tainted sources, with a particular emphasis on Germany and Austria. It is argued that the use of such specimens and of data derived from them is unethical not only because of potential harms to posthumous rights of the victims, but also because such use constitutes a moral harm to society at large. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to show that rhetoric plays an important role in economics as a science and in economy as a social system. Our task is rather demonstrative, but it aims at stripping away the illusion that economics has acquired a status equal to the natural sciences, in which there is no place for subjectivism and ambiguity. Economics belongs, after all, to the realm of the social sciences and as such it is subject to the limitations of human (...) cognition and understanding. We show that economics as a science is not free from employing sophisticated methods of persuasion and rhetoric. Next, we also try to demonstrate that rhetoric can be a useful tool in creating economic reality. It does not have influence on economic processes per se, but it is helpful in constructing an institutional architecture of the economy by influencing public opinion and decision makers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 70-87 [Access article in PDF] Overhearing Hollander's Hyphens Poet-Critic, American-Jew Andrew Bush in memory of Maria TorokJohn Hollander. The Work Of Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Hyphens Mordecai Kaplan's grand quest romance, Judaism as a Civilization (1934), finds its nadir midway through his argument. He had set out not from Judaism in search of, say, God, but from America in search of Judaism, an altogether (...) less auspicious quest. But having slain his rivals--gashed and gory Reformists, Orthodox and Conservatives Right and Left--he stops to survey the field in the section "Implications of the Proposed Version of Judaism." It is a dismal sight.Kaplan reached that perch by his unswerving loyalty to a reality principle that dictated a revised conceptualization of the "other-worldly." First, he called for a franker acknowledgment that Jewish civilization since the destruction of the second Temple was governed by "other-worldly sanctions" (primarily, reward beyond death for mitzvoth performed in this life): "the only plausible excuse for failing to recognize the predominance of other-worldliness in Judaism," writes Kaplan in a typically feisty moment, "is that it fills Judaism like an atmosphere, and is so ubiquitous as to escape notice" [213]. The proposition does not seem, on the face of it, to require a sharpened polemical edge. But Kaplan was arguing that the "other-worldly stage" of Jewish history was at an end. His position is not an outright rejection of the reality of the other-worldly, but rather an acceptance of the reality of a faith so diminished amongst the majority of modern Jews that otherworldly sanctions had ceased to function as an effective means of binding the community. If the future of Judaism was to be more than an illusion, he asserted, then a new form of coherence was necessary. Hence, the quest.The same reality principle operated with respect to the whole religious language of Judaism. Modernity had stripped "chosen-ness," "revelation," and even the "God-term" of their literal referents, leaving the central tenets of Judaism accessible to Kaplan's contemporaries only as metaphors. Kaplan's "proposed version of Judaism," which would of course become the platform for Reconstructionism, includes a powerful reading of those metaphors for modern Jews. No deconstructionist avant la lettre, for Kaplan the vitality of those metaphors depends upon some literal grounding, for which he offers the reconstructed literalism of the kehilla. Often a designation for congregations, thus closely associated with worship, and so a term vitiated by lapsed practice and intra-Jewish [End Page 70] strife, Kaplan's fundamental proposal is the establishment of the kehilla--which he translates as "community"--as a literal dwelling together in the neighborhood of a multipurpose "community center." 1 The proposal to build a voluntary ghetto without walls, to make community life binding again by giving it more than a virtual space, looks well beyond the subsequent realization in the form of America's numerous JCCs; but it presupposed a form of political organization at odds with American life, as Kaplan indicated through his mapping of Jewish political geography of the post-World War I era with respect to relative autonomy.The first zone on such a map was Palestine, "where the Jews are to be given the opportunity to develop their own civilization on the same terms as any other nation," which is to say, "if [a Jew] so chooses, to live entirely within his people's civilization" [215]. A second zone included those countries that admitted political identity to ethnic minorities, including Jews, where cultural autonomy was sufficient to allow for the "survival of the civilization of the Jew on a basis co-ordinate with the native civilization" [216]. In those cases, the Jew may live not only as a Jew, dwelling within a Jewish community, but may live a life no less Jewish than Czech, for instance. But in America, even for the Jew within walking distance of the proposed community center, that degree of autonomy does not exist; and with this realization, in a book directed specifically "toward a reconstruction of... (shrink)

Title: Good-bye Samizdat: Twenty Years of Czechoslovak Underground WritingPublisher: Northwestern University PressISBN: 0810110105Author: Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz Title: Traditions and Present Problems of Czech Political Culture: Czech Philosophical Studies IPublisher: Paideia PressISBN: 1565180569Author: Miloslav Bednar and Michal Vejrazka.

Almost everyone has an intuitive notion of what a random number is. For example, consider these two series of binary digits: 01010101010101010101 01101100110111100010 The first is obviously constructed according to a simple rule; it consists of the number 01 repeated ten times. If one were asked to speculate on how the series might continue, one could predict with considerable confidence that the next two digits would be 0 and 1. Inspection of the second series of digits yields no such comprehensive (...) pattern. There is no obvious rule governing the formation of the number, and there is no rational way to guess the succeeding digits. The arrangement seems haphazard; in other words, the sequence appears to be a random assortment of 0's and 1's. (shrink)

For the purposes of this monograph, "by a degree" is meant a degree of recursive unsolvability. A degree [script bold]m is said to be minimal if 0 is the unique degree less than [script bold]m. Each of the six chapters of this self-contained monograph is devoted to the proof of an existence theorem for minimal degrees.

What could be more certain than the fact that 2 plus 2 equals 4? Since the time of the ancient Greeks mathematicians have believed there is little---if anything---as unequivocal as a proved theorem. In fact, mathematical statements that can be proved true have often been regarded as a more solid foundation for a system of thought than any maxim about morals or even physical objects. The 17th-century German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz even envisioned a ``calculus'' of reasoning such (...) that all disputes could one day be settled with the words ``Gentlemen, let us compute!'' By the beginning of this century symbolic logic had progressed to such an extent that the German mathematician David Hilbert declared that all mathematical questions are in principle decidable, and he confidently set out to codify once and for all the methods of mathematical reasoning. (shrink)

One enduring legacy of the twentieth century will be the slow, certain transformation of the world from insular civilizations to interactive societies enmeshed in global systems of electronic communication, economics, and politics. Financial news from Thailand or Brazil is often more important globally than political events in the old centers of power. Some bemoan the uncertainty and flux of all this. However, the mutual definition of the world’s societies presents an extraordinary opportunity to humanize a situation that all too quickly (...) could degenerate into a Weberian ‘iron cage’ of truly global proportions. What contribution can the world’s great philosophical traditions make toward humanity’s common task of civilizing the rise of globalization? Here the ancient concept of paideia walks upon the stage of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

One enduring legacy of the twentieth century will be the slow, certain transformation of the world from insular civilizations to interactive societies enmeshed in global systems of electronic communication, economics, and politics. Financial news from Thailand or Brazil is often more important globally than political events in the old centers of power. Some bemoan the uncertainty and flux of all this. However, the mutual definition of the world’s societies presents an extraordinary opportunity to humanize a situation that all too quickly (...) could degenerate into a Weberian ‘iron cage’ of truly global proportions. What contribution can the world’s great philosophical traditions make toward humanity’s common task of civilizing the rise of globalization? Here the ancient concept of paideia walks upon the stage of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

One enduring legacy of the twentieth century will be the slow, certain transformation of the world from insular civilizations to interactive societies enmeshed in global systems of electronic communication, economics, and politics. Financial news from Thailand or Brazil is often more important globally than political events in the old centers of power. Some bemoan the uncertainty and flux of all this. However, the mutual definition of the world’s societies presents an extraordinary opportunity to humanize a situation that all too quickly (...) could degenerate into a Weberian ‘iron cage’ of truly global proportions. What contribution can the world’s great philosophical traditions make toward humanity’s common task of civilizing the rise of globalization? Here the ancient concept of paideia walks upon the stage of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Human beings are strange animals. Although evolutionary theory has brilliantly accounted for the features we share with other creatures—from the genetic code that directs the construction of our bodies to the details of how our muscles and neurons work—we still stand out in countless ways. Our brains are exceptionally large, we alone have truly grammatical language, and we alone compose symphonies, drive cars, eat spaghetti with a fork and wonder about the origins of the universe.

*The views expressed are the author's own. This article should not be construed as representing policies of the American Medical Association.

*Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author's and should not be ascribed to the American Medical Association.

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider (...) the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

Accompanying an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, this book is the most comprehensive catalogue on the work of this internationally recognized architectural firm.