This paper examines the origins and influences of the introduction of longitudinal student data-sets as a way of gaining insight into the operation of American schools and as a tool for policy-makers. The paper argues that the creation of this new form of data in the 1960s and 1970s represented a relatively new way of thinking about American schools that allowed policy-makers to view the American education system as relatively uniform and the goal of policy to optimize its function. The (...) use of data in this way produced, somewhat paradoxically, a higher precision and more distorted view of the American schooling. The detailed picture provided by these data-sets offered policy-makers new and important insights into the pathways through schooling of individual students while at the same time presented scholars and policy-makers with an increasingly abstract and decontextualized view of the American education system as a whole. That is to say, to view the system uniform and national terms. The upshot... (shrink)

_In _Absent from School_, Gottfried and Hutt offer a comprehensive and timely resource for educators and policy makers seeking to understand the scope, impact, and causes of chronic student absenteeism._ The editors present a series of studies by leading researchers from a variety of disciplines that address which students are missing school and why, what roles schools themselves play in contributing to or offsetting patterns of absenteeism, and ways to assess student attendance for purposes of school accountability. The contributors examine (...) school-based initiatives that focus on a range of issues, including transportation, student health, discipline policies, and protections for immigrant students, as well as interventions intended to improve student attendance. Only in the past two or three years has chronic absenteeism become the focus of attention among policy makers, civil rights advocates, and educators. _Absent from School_ provides the first critical, systematic look at research that can inform and guide those who are working to ensure that every child is in school and learning every day. (shrink)

The education of students and professionals in business ethics is an increasingly important goal on the agenda of business schools and corporations. The present study provides a meta-analysis of 25 previously conducted business ethics instructional programs. The role of criteria, study design, participant characteristics, quality of instruction, instructional content, instructional program characteristics, and characteristics of instructional methods as moderators of the effectiveness of business ethics instruction were examined. Overall, results indicate that business ethics instructional programs have a minimal␣impact on increasing (...) outcomes related to ethical perceptions, behavior, or awareness. However, specific criteria, content, and methodological moderators of effectiveness shed light on potential recommendations for␣improving business ethics instruction. Implications for␣future research and practice in business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

RAID-II is a high-bandwidth, network-attached storage server designed and implemented at the University of California at Berkeley. In this paper, we measure the performance of RAID-II and evaluate various architectural decisions made during the design process. We first measure the end-to-end performance of the system to be approximately 20 MB/s for both disk array reads and writes. We then perform a bottleneck analysis by examining the performance of each individual subsystem and conclude that the disk subsystem limits performance. By adding (...) a custom interconnect board with a high-speed memory and bus system and parity engine, we are able to achieve a performance speedup of 8 to 15 over a comparative system using only off-the-shelf hardware. (shrink)

Differences across fields and experience levels are frequently considered in discussions of ethical decision making and ethical behavior. In the present study, doctoral students in the health, biological, and social sciences completed measures of ethical decision making. The effects of field and level of experience with respect to ethical decision making, metacognitive reasoning strategies, social-behavioral responses, and exposure to unethical events were examined. Social and biological scientists performed better than health scientists with respect to ethical decision making. Furthermore, the ethical (...) decision making of health science students decreased as experience increased. Moreover, these effects appeared to be linked to the specific strategies underlying participants' ethical decision making. The implications of these findings for ethical decision making are discussed. (shrink)

In many animals, early development of the embryo is characterized by synchronous, biphasic cell divisions. These cell divisions are controlled by maternally inherited proteins and RNAs. A critical question in developmental biology is how the embryo transitions to a later pattern of asynchronous cell divisions and transfers the prior maternal control of development to the zygotic genome. The most‐common model regarding how this transition from maternal to zygotic control is regulated posits that this is a consequence of the limitation of (...) maternal gene products, due to their titration during early cell divisions. Here we discuss a recent article by Crest et al.1 that instead proposes that the balance of Cyclin‐dependent Kinase 1 and Cyclin B (Cdk1‐CycB) activity relative to that of the Drosophila checkpoint kinase Chk1 determines when asynchronous divisions begin. BioEssays 29:949–952, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Scholars have proposed a number of courses and programs intended to improve the ethical behavior of scientists in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the scientific enterprise. In the present study, we conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on 26 previous ethics program evaluation efforts, and the results showed that the overall effectiveness of ethics instruction was modest. The effects of ethics instruction, however, were related to a number of instructional program factors, such as course content and delivery methods, in (...) addition to factors of the evaluation study itself, such as the field of investigator and criterion measure utilized. An examination of the characteristics contributing to the relative effectiveness of instructional programs revealed that more successful programs were conducted as seminars separate from the standard curricula rather than being embedded in existing courses. Furthermore, more successful programs were case based and interactive, and they allowed participants to learn and practice the application of real-world ethical decision-making skills. The implications of these findings for future course development and evaluation are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre-post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

An implicit goal of many interventions intended to enhance integrity is to minimize peoples' exposure to unethical events. The intent of the present effort was to examine if exposure to unethical practices in the course of one's work is related to ethical decision making. Accordingly, 248 doctoral students in the biological, health, and social sciences were asked to complete a field appropriate measure of ethical decision making. In addition, they were asked to complete measures examining the perceived acceptability of unethical (...) events and a measure examining perceptions of ethical climate. When these criterion measures were correlated with a measure examining the frequency with which they had been exposed to unethical events in their day-to-day work, it was found that event exposure was strongly related to ethical decision making but less strongly related to climate perceptions and perceptions of event acceptability. However, these relationships were moderated by level of experience. The implications of these findings for practices intended to improve ethics are discussed. (shrink)

Moral leadership matters. As world politics enters a new and dangerous era, judgment, constancy, moral purpose, and a willingness to overcome partisan politicking are essential for America's leaders. Tempered Strength finds the alternative standard of leadership that Americans are seeking in the classical philosophy of prudence. Ethan Fishman's new work brings together leading American political scientists—including Ronald Beiner, Kenneth L. Deutsch, and George Anastaplo—to discuss the evolution of a standard of prudential leadership both reasonable in nature and practical in (...) scope. Section One studies the meaning of prudence and its evolution in the history of political science from Aristotelian phronesis to Xenophon, Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott. Section Two demonstrates how the theory of prudential leadership can be applied to practical political issues. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Setting specific, challenging goals motivates employees to exert greater effort in their jobs. However, goal-setting may have unintended consequences of also motivating unethical behavior. The present study explores these consequences in the context of other features of goal-setting in organizations, how goals are framed and rewarded, to determine the tradeoff between performance and ethical behavior. Undergraduate students were incentivized to complete math problems using different outcome frames and incentive structures and were also provided an opportunity to cheat. Findings demonstrate (...) that when goals rewarded with piece-rate incentives are framed as a loss, performance increased, though cheating behavior increased as well. (shrink)

n a 25-year career as a successful public intellectual, Stephen Jay Gould has accrued nearly all the trappings of celebrity: a new loft in SoHo, tenure at Harvard, a gig at NYU, book sales totaling in the millions (his twentieth title, The Lying Stones of Marrak ech, comes out next month), not to mention a schedule that takes him to London, Paris, or L.A. almost weekly. Not bad for a college professor. But recently, he's picked up one of the less (...) desirable accoutrements of fame. The graying, 58-year-old Queens native has become the first paleontologist in history with his own stalker—albeit an intellectual one. (shrink)

The paper addresses the question of whether authenticity is a conceptual possibility for Dasein given Heidegger’s insistence in Being and Time that Dasein is necessarily fallen into its mode of everydayness and that fallenness is necessarily inauthentic. By exploring the relationship between Dasein and existentials, I reveal a structure of possibility in allexistentials that provides the seeming paradox a resolution. I use the concept of “logical existentialism” to explore what Heidegger may have meant when he talks of existentials and I (...) look at some passages from The History of the Concept of Time to read propensity as the substance of falling. In the process, l address and discard the only two real attempts in the secondary literature to cope with the paradox: that of Hubert Dreyfus and Rudi Visker.L’article se penche sur la question de savoir si l’authenticité est une possibilité conceptuelle du Dasein, étant donnée I’insistance de Heidegger dans Être et Temps à I’effet que le Dasein est nécessairement déchu dans ses modes de quotidienneté, et que la déchéance est nécessairement inauthentique. À travers I’exploration de la relation entre le Dasein et les existantiaux, je révèle une structure de possibilité dans tous les existantiaux qui permet une résolution du paradoxe apparent. J’utilise le concept d’ «existentialisme logique»pour explorer ce que Heidegger voulait sans doute dire par les existantiaux, et je considère certains passages des The History of the Concept of Time pour interpréter la propension comme substance de la déchéance. Ce faisant, j’aborde et rejette les deux seules tentatives de résolution du paradoxe dans la littérature secondaire: celle de Hubert Dreyfus et de Rudi Visker. (shrink)

The paper addresses the question of whether authenticity is a conceptual possibility for Dasein given Heidegger’s insistence in Being and Time that Dasein is necessarily fallen into its mode of everydayness and that fallenness is necessarily inauthentic. By exploring the relationship between Dasein and existentials, I reveal a structure of possibility in allexistentials that provides the seeming paradox a resolution. I use the concept of “logical existentialism” to explore what Heidegger may have meant when he talks of existentials and I (...) look at some passages from The History of the Concept of Time to read propensity as the substance of falling. In the process, l address and discard the only two real attempts in the secondary literature to cope with the paradox: that of Hubert Dreyfus and Rudi Visker.L’article se penche sur la question de savoir si l’authenticité est une possibilité conceptuelle du Dasein, étant donnée I’insistance de Heidegger dans Être et Temps à I’effet que le Dasein est nécessairement déchu dans ses modes de quotidienneté, et que la déchéance est nécessairement inauthentique. À travers I’exploration de la relation entre le Dasein et les existantiaux, je révèle une structure de possibilité dans tous les existantiaux qui permet une résolution du paradoxe apparent. J’utilise le concept d’ «existentialisme logique»pour explorer ce que Heidegger voulait sans doute dire par les existantiaux, et je considère certains passages des The History of the Concept of Time pour interpréter la propension comme substance de la déchéance. Ce faisant, j’aborde et rejette les deux seules tentatives de résolution du paradoxe dans la littérature secondaire: celle de Hubert Dreyfus et de Rudi Visker. (shrink)

"All life upon the stage"; the Theatrum Mundi. In this volume, a seventeenth century metaphor is revisited and is seen as applying to all art in all times. In the "magic mirror of art" the human being discerns the hidden spheres of human life and commemorates and celebrates its glorious victories and mourns its ignominious defeats. Let us rediscover Art as a witness to the human predicament as well as a celebrant of humanity's most sublime moments. This is the invitation (...) of this collection of studies by A-T. Tymieniecka, Hanna Scolnicov, Muella Erkilic, Matt Landrus, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Monika Bakke, David Brubaker, Tammy Knipp, Howard Pearce, Ellen J. Burns, G. Backhaus, Ethan J. Leib, Lawrence Kimmel, Ingrid Scheibler, Gottfried Scholz, L.F. Werth, A. Carillo, M. Statkiewicz, K. O'Rourke, B. Meyler, H. Meltzer, Jiuan Heng, W.V. Davies. Art as mirror of life, human life as participating in a stage play, corresponds to the fervent search human being of the causes, reasons, puzzles of our existence which elude us in the concrete life. This XVII c. conception of Theatrum Mundi opens as this volume shows a fascinating field of investigation for our times. (shrink)

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from (...) individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration. (shrink)

Lars Løvlie, Paul Standish; Introduction: Bildung and the idea of a liberal education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 36, Issue 3, 16 December 2002.

Between 1945 and 1953, while the Soviet Union confronted postwar reconstruction and Cold War crises, its unchallenged leader Joseph Stalin carved out time to study scientific disputes and dictate academic solutions. He spearheaded a discussion of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist philosophy, edited reports on genetics and physiology, adjudicated controversies about modern physics, and wrote essays on linguistics and political economy. Historians have been tempted to dismiss all this as the megalomaniacal ravings of a dying dictator. But in Stalin and the Soviet Science (...) Wars, Ethan Pollock draws on thousands of previously unexplored archival documents to demonstrate that Stalin was in fact determined to show how scientific truth and Party doctrine reinforced one another. Socialism was supposed to be scientific, and science ideologically correct, and Stalin ostensibly embodied the perfect symbiosis between power and knowledge. Focusing on six major postwar debates in the Soviet scientific community, this elegantly written book shows that Stalin's forays into scholarship can be understood only within the context of international tensions, institutional conflicts, and the growing uncertainty about the proper relationship between scientific knowledge and Party-dictated truths. The nature of Stalin's interventions makes clear that more was at stake than high politics: these science wars were about asserting that the Party was rational and modern, and about codifying the Soviet worldview in a battle for the hearts and minds of people around the globe during the early Cold War. Ultimately, however, the effort to develop a scientific basis for Soviet ideology undermined the system's legitimacy. (shrink)

Much has been written on whether practical knowledge (knowledge-how) reduces to propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). Less attention has been paid to what we call deliberative knowledge (knowledge-to), i.e., knowledge ascriptions embedding other infinitival questions, like _where to meet_, _when to leave_, and _what to bring_. We offer an analysis of knowledge-to and argue on its basis that, regardless of whether knowledge-how reduces to knowledge-that, no such reduction of knowledge-to is forthcoming. Knowledge-to, unlike knowledge-that and knowledge-how, requires the agent to have formed (...) certain conditional intentions. We discuss the philosophical implications for knowledge-how, deliberative questions, and virtue. (shrink)

Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

This book presents three of the works of Abdu'l-Bahá, son of the founder of the Bahá'i Faith, dealing with social and political issues.00In 'The Secret of Divine Civilization' (1875) Abdu'l-Bahá supports the administrative and broader social reforms of Mirzá Hosayn Khán, but looks mainly for organic reform through the efforts of Iranian intellectuals to waken and educate the masses. In this work, Abdu'l-Bahá gives virtuous and progressive Islamic clerics a leading role among these intellectuals, indeed most of his appeals are (...) directed specifically to them. 'A Traveller's Narrative' (1889/90) is an authoritative statement of the broad lines of Bahá'i social and political thinking. 'The Art of Governance' (1892/93) was written as Iran entered a pre-revolutionary phase, and ideas that we recognise today as the precursors of political Islam were spreading. It sets out the principles underlying the ideal relationship between religion and politics and between the government and the people.00In addition to presenting the first parallel text translations of these works, the Persian texts incorporate notes on variants in the early published sources. An introduction outlines the intellectual and political landscape from which Abdu'l-Bahá wrote, and in which his expected readers lived. (shrink)

Sur la toile de fond de la theologie negative, tissee par la discussion des apories que soulevent les notions de l'ineffable et de l'un, Damascius, le dernier diadoque de l'Ecole d'Athenes, elaboreson systeme metaphysique, sans se departir de la rigueur de sa methode aporetique, qui est une critique radicale du langage a l'interieur des coordonnees fixees par le Parmenide de Platon et par les Oracles Chaldaiques. Damascius, dans une enquete unique par son ampleur et son originalite questionne tour a tour (...) Porphyre, Jamblique, Syrianus et Proclus sur les principes; il examine les problemes que pose, en derivation de l'un, la formation de la trinite; de l'un-tout (la limite), du tout-un (l'infini) et de l'unifie (le mixte ou l'etre). Lien a priori entre l'un-tout et le tout-un, l'unifie est le principe de constitution de tout ordre et de toute realite. Damascius etudie sa nature de mixte originaire et autoconstituant, d'etre exemplaire et de premier intelligible. Cette notion lui permet de pas au crible, pour la mieux fonder, la problematique neoplatonicienne de la manence, de la procession et de la conversion. Les divers niveaux d'unification de la pluralite intelligible l'amenent a construire une theorie generale des elements, des parties et des formes Au passage, de nombreux textes, capitaux du point de vue de l'ontologie et de la doctrine de la connaissance, font regretter qu'ils aient ete inconnus du Moyen Age et qu'ils le demeurent pour beaucoup de nos contemporains. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the mathematical foundations of the model for utility theory developed by Richard Jeffrey in The Logic of Decision [5]. In it I discuss the relationship of Jeffrey's to classical models, state and interpret an existence theorem for numerical utilities and subjective probabilities and restate a theorem on their uniqueness.

This article explores Gerardus van der Leeuw’s view of phenomenology of religion. The phenomenological method he defended is basically a hermeneutical approach in which an observer relates personally and even existentially to the “phenomena” (s)he studies in order to determine their essence (Wesensschau). In his anthropology (that reflects on the basic structure of human beings) a similar way of relating to the world is discussed: the “primitive mentality” that is characterized by the “need to participate” (besoin de participation). Both phenomenology (...) and mentalité primitive imply a critique of modern scholarship. This fundamental criticism of the prevailing (historical) approach in the humanities including religious studies explains the growing distance between van der Leeuw and the majority of scholars of religion in the decades after his death in 1950. (shrink)

This article explores Gerardus van der Leeuw’s view of phenomenology of religion. The phenomenological method he defended is basically a hermeneutical approach in which an observer relates personally and even existentially to the “phenomena” (s)he studies in order to determine their essence (Wesensschau). In his anthropology (that reflects on the basic structure of human beings) a similar way of relating to the world is discussed: the “primitive mentality” that is characterized by the “need to participate” (besoin de participation). Both phenomenology (...) and mentalité primitive imply a critique of modern scholarship. This fundamental criticism of the prevailing (historical) approach in the humanities including religious studies explains the growing distance between van der Leeuw and the majority of scholars of religion in the decades after his death in 1950. (shrink)

Pucelle tries to show how the idea of personal liberty is central to Green's ethics. Green's criticisms of other philosophers and the historical context of his philosophy are especially well handled. --W. L. M.

In the last two decades, there has been a blossoming literature aiming to counter the neglect of plant capacities. In their recent paper, Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Paco Calvo begin by providing an overview of the literature to then question the mistaken assumptions that led to plants being immediately rejected as candidates for sentience. However, it appears that many responses to their arguments are based on the implicit conviction that because animals have far more sophisticated cognition and agency than plants, and (...) that plants should not have the same moral status as animals, plants should not have any moral status. Put in simpler terms: it is not as bad to eat plants than to eat, say, pigs. While there are still uncertainties around comparative moral and policy implications between animals and plants, given a gradualist account of quasi-sentience and partial moral status, both of which we claim are a matter of degree, we may not have to abolish our convictions by declaring that plants have no sentience or moral status at all. Indeed, we can hold two things at the same time: that animals and plants have moral status, but animals have prima facie more moral status than plants. (shrink)

The publication of the article “Recent Models of the African Iron Age and the Cattle-Related Evidence” by Hromnik in a journal sponsored by Unesco raises a number of serious issues which we, as members of the International Scientific Committee charged with the responsibility of preparing an up-to-date and scientific history of Africa purged of its mists of racist propaganda, unfounded assertions and misleading and dangerous misinterpretations, cannot ignore. These issues include the scientific accuracy or authenticity of the article.

Three of the four commentators endorse our concerns about intervention by the Roman Catholic church as anamicus curiaein civil litigation, with few reservations. One commentary rejects our arguments in toto. We deal first with the three commentaries that support our arguments; secondly, with the reservations and qualifications in those commentaries, and thirdly, with the commentary that totally rejects our arguments.