The argumentum of contr. 2. 4 reads as follows : Abdicavit quidam filium. Abdicatus se contulit ad meretricem. Ex ilia sustulit filium. Aeger ad patrem misit; cum venisset, commendavit ei filium suum et decessit. Adoptavit puerum . Ab altero [pater] filio accusatur dementiae.

The argumentum of contr. 2. 4 reads as follows :Abdicavit quidam filium. Abdicatus se contulit ad meretricem. Ex ilia sustulit filium. Aeger ad patrem misit; cum venisset, commendavit ei filium suum et decessit. Adoptavit puerum. Ab altero [pater] filio accusatur dementiae.

Provides answers to several questions about God such as what does He look like?

This research compares the importance of moral values for corporations' managements, as reported by 97 knowledgeable employees in eight corporations. Does an employee consensus emerge within corporations and does it differ between corporations? To answer this question, an analysis of covariance technique was used to compare the importance of moral values between corporations versus within corporations. Results corroborate the hypothesis that closely matched corporations do differ significantly from one another in the importance of prevailing moral values. Evidence also suggests that (...) the importance of prevailing moral values may be inversely related with company size. Implications for future research and for the practice of management are delineated. (shrink)

A large number of Swedish public authorities produce ‘platform of values’ texts that present core values. This article presents a study of how such texts and practices, including the core values they revolve around, are legitimized. Using Van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework, three different data sets are analysed: 47 ‘platform of values’ texts, a focus group discussion with seven senior HR officers, and a quantitative questionnaire study answered by civil servants at three public authorities. The analysis shows how the existence of (...) ‘platform of values’ texts and practices is legitimized through rationalizations, above all by describing the texts as concrete means for reaching specific ends and, with regard to the choice of core values, through a custom-conformity type of authority. Thus, this article addresses discursive transformations of contemporary organizations with a particular focus on available discursive space for critical thinking in the wake of New Public Management and related developments. (shrink)

Nystrom and Puckett's pamphlet gives us the most comprehensive picture available of Richard Rorty's political views. This is Rorty being avuncular, cranky, and straightforward: his arguments on patriotism, the political left, and philosophy—as usual, unusual—are worth pondering. This pamphlet will appeal to all those interested in Rorty's distinct brand of pragmatism and leftist politics in the United States.

Upon starvation and growth arrest, Escherichia coli cells gradually lose their ability to reproduce. These apparently sterile/nonculturable cells initially remain intact and metabolically active and the underlying molecular mechanism behind this sterility is something of an enigma in bacteriology. Three different models have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The first theory suggests that starving cells become nonculturable due to cellular deterioration, are moribund, and show some of the same signs of senescence as aging organisms. The two other theories suggest (...) that genetically programmed pathways, rather than stochastic deterioration, trigger nonculturability. One “program” theory suggests that nonculturability is the culmination of an adaptive pathway generating dormant survival forms, similar to spore formation in differentiating bacteria. The other “program” theory states that starved cells lose viability due to activation of genetic modules mediating programmed cell death. The different models will be reviewed and evaluated in light of recent data on the physiology and molecular biology of growth‐arrested E. coli cells. BioEssays 25:204–211, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This review article presents and summarises my doctoral dissertation ‘Reading Romans, Constructing Paul(s): A Conversation between Messianic Jews in Jerusalem and Paul within Judaism Scholars’, defended on 24 September 2021 at Lund University. It is a highly interdisciplinary study between New Testament studies and the anthropology of Christianity. It focuses on Paul and readings of Romans 11, where the Messianic Jewish readings originate from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Jerusalem through so-called Bible-reading interviews. This article summarises each chapter, provides examples from (...) the empirical chapters ‘Identity and Torah’, ‘Relations and Yeshua’ and ‘Time and Land’, and finishes by pointing out three major conclusions followed by three additional key contributions that the study makes. (shrink)

How humans efficiently operate in a world with massive amounts of data that need to be processed, stored, and recalled has long been an unsettled question. Our physical and social environment needs to be represented in a structured way, which could be achieved by reducing input to latent variables in the form of probability distributions, as proposed by influential, probabilistic accounts of cognition and perception. However, few studies have investigated the neural processes underlying the brain’s potential ability to represent a (...) probability distribution’s complex, global features. Here, we presented participants with a sequence of tones that formed a normal or a bimodal distribution. Using a novel, single-trial EEG analysis, we demonstrate a neural response that indexes the likelihood of an item, given previously presented items, and corresponds to the experienced tones’ distribution. Our results indicate that the adult human brain can build a representation of the complex, global pattern of a probability distribution and offer a novel tool for an in-depth understanding of related neural mechanics. (shrink)

Traditional theories of moral development emphasize the role of controlled cognition in mature moral judgment, while a more recent trend emphasizes intuitive and emotional processes. Here we test a dual-process theory synthesizing these perspectives. More specifically, our theory associates utilitarian moral judgment (approving of harmful actions that maximize good consequences) with controlled cognitive processes and associates non-utilitarian moral judgment with automatic emotional responses. Consistent with this theory, we find that a cognitive load manipulation selectively interferes with utilitarian judgment. This interference (...) effect provides direct evidence for the influence of controlled cognitive processes in moral judgment, and utilitarian moral judgment more specifically. (shrink)

Recent reports suggest that the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae caspase‐related metacaspase, Mca1, is required for cell‐autonomous cytoprotective functions that slow cellular aging. Because the Mca1 protease has previously been suggested to be responsible for programmed cell death (PCD) upon stress and aging, these reports raise the question of how the opposing roles of Mca1 as a protector and executioner are regulated. One reconciling perspective could be that executioner activation may be restricted to situations where the death of part of the population (...) would be beneficial, for example during colony growth or adaptation into specialized survival forms. Another possibility is that metacaspases primarily harbor beneficial functions and that the increased survival observed upon metacaspase removal is due to compensatory responses. Herein, we summarize data on the role of Mca1 in cell death and survival and approach the question of how a metacaspase involved in protein quality control may act as killer protein. -/- . (shrink)

Esports are a rapidly growing phenomenon and understanding of factors underlying game performance are therefore of great interest. The present study investigated the influence of satisfaction of basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy, and relatedness), type of motivation (amotivation, external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, integrated regulation, and intrinsic motivation), and number of matches played (time on task) on individuals’ performance on a matchmaking rating (MMR) in the video game Defence of the Ancients 2 (Dota 2). Collected data from 315 participants (...) was included in the analyses. A web-based questionnaire was used to collect data and structural equation modelling (SEM) was performed to analyze the data. The results show that perceived competence and autonomy were the only significant predictors of MMR performance beyond matches played. Fulfillment of relatedness, as well as motivational factors, were not found to be predictors of MMR scores. The strong effect of matches played, used as proxy of time on task, emphasize the effect of time and practice as a critical aspect of video-game expertise. (shrink)

In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person’s life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent’s intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-effect) and (2) whether the agent harms the victim in a manner that is relatively “direct” or (...) “personal”. Here we integrate these two classes of findings. Two experiments examine a novel personalness/directness factor that we call personal force, present when the force that directly impacts the victim is generated by the agent’s muscles (e.g., in pushing). Experiments 1a and b demonstrate the influence of personal force on moral judgment, distinguishing it from physical contact and spatial proximity. Experiments 2a and b demonstrate an interaction between personal force and intention, whereby the effect of personal force depends entirely on intention. These studies also introduce a method for controlling for people’s real-world expectations in decisions involving potentially unrealistic hypothetical dilemmas. (shrink)

Although a distinction between moral-personal and moral-impersonal dilemmas (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001 Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M. and Cohen, J. D. 2001. An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgement. Science, 293: 2105–2108. doi:10.1126/science.1062872.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) has been widely accepted as an explanation for a difference between the trolley and footbridge dilemmas (Thomson, 1985 Thomson, J. J. 1985. “The trolley problem”. In Ethics: (...) Problems and principles, Edited by: Fischer, J. M. and Ravizza, M. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [Google Scholar]), its psychometric properties remain a mystery. In this study 219 participants completed 62 moral dilemma tasks used in Greene et al. (2001 Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M. and Cohen, J. D. 2001. An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgement. Science, 293: 2105–2108. doi:10.1126/science.1062872.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]), and the correlation structure among the dilemmas was analysed through factor analysis and structural equation modelling. Findings suggest that, first, moral-personal dilemmas are composed of one factor, indicating that the assumption in Greene et al. (2001 Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M. and Cohen, J. D. 2001. An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgement. Science, 293: 2105–2108. doi:10.1126/science.1062872.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) was supported. Second, moral-impersonal dilemmas are explained by two factors that reflect procedural and consequential aspects of decision making. Third, the trolley and footbridge dilemmas fall under the same factor category; therefore the difference between the two dilemmas cannot be attributed to emotional involvement. Additionally, the results of the structural equation modelling suggest that they differ in the engagement of rational processing. (shrink)

Book Review by Prevan Moodley: Reflective Lifeworld Research Dahlberg, K., Dahlberg, H., & Nyström, M. (2008). Reflective Lifeworld Research (2nd ed.). Lund, Sweden: Studentlitteratur. Soft Cover (370 pages) ISBN: 978-91-44-04925-0.

The problem this article is concerned with is the failure ofmany large organizations in formerly socialist countries and inpublic sectors of market economies to make effective, peaceful,and ethical transformation from command to market responsiveorganization and privatization. There are at least threeimportant behavioral causes of this problem. First, organizationtransformation is blocked because the organization tries tochange "all at once" before the organization has learned how toact successfully in a new for the organization environment as amarket responsive instead of a command organization (...) (Churchman,1971; Quinn, 1980; Nystrom and Starbuck, 1984; Mintzberg andWaters, 1985; Mintzberg, 1994; Goldman, 1994). Second,organization transformation is blocked because "all at oncechange" stimulates so much fear and political opposition thatchange is politically not possible (Argyris and Schon, 1974;Argyris, 1990; Goldman, 1994; Sachs, 1992). Third, organizationtransformation is blocked because the "guardian" ethics syndromeof command organization is less appropriate for market responsiveorganization than a "commercial" ethics syndrome (Jacobs, 1992;Harris, 1995). Gradual intrapreneurship (Burgelman, 1983; Nielsenet al., 1985) can serve as a peaceful and ethical transitionstrategy. Intrapreneurship can help bridge some of thecontradictions between "commercial" vs. "guardian" ethicssyndromes (Jacobs, 1992; Nielsen, 1996). (shrink)