Spatial skills predict important life outcomes, such as mathematical achievement or entrance into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines. Children significantly vary in their spatial performance even before they enter formal schooling. One correlate of children's spatial performance is the spatial language they produce and hear from others, such as their parents. Because the emphasis has been on spatial language, less is known about the role of hand gestures in children's spatial development. Some children are more likely to fall behind (...) in their spatial skills than others. Children born premature constitute such a risk group. Here, we compared performance of term and preterm-born children on two non-verbal spatial tasks—mental transformation and block design. We also examined relations of children's performance on these tasks to parental spatial language and gesture input and their own production of spatial language and gesture during an independent puzzle play interaction. We found that while term and preterm-born children as a group did not differ in the mental transformation or block design performance, children varied widely in their performance within each group. The variability in mental transformation scores was predicted by both a subset of spatial words and all spatial gestures children produced. Children's spatial language and gesture were in turn related to their parents' spatial language and gesture. Parental spatial language and gesture had an indirect relation on children's mental transformation, but not block design, scores via children's spatial language, and gesture use. Overall, results highlight the unique contributions of speech and gesture in communicating spatial information and predicting children's spatial performance. (shrink)

The assumption in current U.S. mainstream medicine is that birthing requires hospitalization. In fact, while the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists supports the right of every birthing person to make a medically informed decision about their delivery, they do not recommend home birth owing to data indicating greater neonatal morbidity and mortality. In this article, we examine the evidence surrounding home birth in the United States and its current limitations, as well as the ethical considerations around birth setting.

This comprehensive Gandhi reader provides an essential new reference for scholars and students of his life and thought. It is the only text available that presents Gandhi's own writings, including excerpts from three of his books—An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Satyagraha in South Africa, Hind Swaraj —a major pamphlet, Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place, and many journal articles and letters, along with a biographical sketch of his life in historical context and recent essays by highly (...) regarded scholars. (shrink)

In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often‐ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science—including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes—can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and potential benefits. They conclude with a discussion of responsible behavior in the context of SBG research. (...) SBG research that compares individuals within a group according to a “sensitive” phenotype requires extra attention to responsible conduct and to responsible communication about the research and its findings. SBG research (1) on sensitive phenotypes that (2) compares two or more groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) requires a compelling justification to be conducted, funded, or published. All authors agree that this justification at least requires a convincing argument that a study's design could yield scientifically valid results; some authors would additionally require the study to have a socially favorable risk‐benefit profile. (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.

High school students are at risk for increased sedentary behavior due in part to a decrease in physical activity throughout adolescence and to required sedentary behavior during much of the school day. The purpose of the current study is to examine the impact of using activity workstations in a high school English class for struggling readers. Twenty high school students participated in the study. The participants completed a 16-week study where each participant used an activity workstation for 8 weeks and (...) a traditional desk for 8 weeks in a crossover design for a 40-min period during normal class. They responded to a series of subjective questions about reading and schoolwork at the beginning and end of each 8-week session and followed the READ 180 program designed to help struggling readers during the study. The results indicated that academic performance increased in both desk conditions during the study and from the beginning to the end of the study. In addition, there was a significant improvement in items in the subjective survey related to reading, motivation, and schoolwork in both desk conditions across the study. The current results suggest that using an activity workstation in the classroom did not negatively affect academic performance or students’ perceptions of working on academic assignments compared to the traditional desk condition. These results indicate that activity workstations could be implemented in classrooms to provide students with a non-sedentary option during the school day thus increasing physical activity in students. (shrink)

Despite its effectiveness, limited research has examined the provision of telemental health and how practices may vary according to treatment paradigm. We surveyed 276 community mental health providers registered with a commercial telemedicine platform. Most providers reported primarily offering TMH services to adults with anxiety, depression, and trauma-and stressor-related disorders in individual therapy formats. Approximately 82% of TMH providers reported endorsing the use of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in their remote practice. The most commonly used in-session and between-session exercises included coping (...) and emotion regulation, problem solving, mindfulness, interpersonal skills, relaxation, and modifying and addressing core beliefs. CBT TMH providers had a higher odds of using in-session and homework exercises and assigning them through postal mail, email or fax methods, as compared to non-CBT TMH providers. TMH providers, regardless of treatment paradigm, felt that assigning homework was neither easy nor difficult and they believed their patients were somewhat-to-moderately compliant to their assigned exercises. CBT TMH providers also collected clinical information from their patients more often than non-CBT TMH providers. They reported being less satisfied with their method, which was identified most often as paper-based surveys and forms. Overall, TMH providers employ evidence-based treatments to their patients remotely, with CBT TMH providers most likely to do so. Findings highlight the need for innovative solutions to improve how TMH providers that endorse following the CBT treatment paradigm remotely assign homework and collect clinical data to increase their satisfaction via telemedicine. (shrink)

I’m sick of being treated like a dumb Mum who doesn’t understand the science. As far as I’m concerned, my family’s health is just too important. … If the government can’t protect the safety of my family, then I will.Recent Greenpeace activism in Australia resulted in the destruction of a field trial of a line of wheat “designed” to improve human nutrition. This incident demonstrates that, while there is significant ongoing public and private investment in genetically modified crop research and (...) development in Australia, many people continue to oppose GM foods strongly. We noted with interest that Greenpeace described this activism with language that explicitly connected the actions to the gender.. (shrink)

At the request of the Midwest Bioethics Center (MBC), we surveyed nurses' and physicians' attitudes and needs regarding Hospital Ethics Committees (HECs). The primary objective of this research project was to inform the practices and policies of the Ethics Committee Consortium of the Bioethics Center.Four thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine surveys were distributed to the medical and nursing staff of eight Kansas City metropolitan area hospitals. One thousand and fifty-five surveys were returned, representing a response rate of 21%.

Recent history makes clear that the quantum leaps being made in technology are the leading edge of a groundswell of paradigm shifts taking place in science, politics, economics, social institutions, and the expression of cultural values. Indeed it is the simultaneity and interdependence of these changes occurring in every dimension of human experience and endeavor that makes the present so historically distinctive. The essays gathered here give voice to perspectives on the always improvised relationship between technology and cultural values from (...) Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Pacific. Contributors: Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, Roger T. Ames,Yoko Arisaka, Carl Becker, Francesca Bray, James Buchanan, Arindam Chakrabarti, Frank W. Derringh, Rolf Elberfeld, Charles Ess, Andrew Feenberg, Susantha Goonatilake, H. Jiuan Heng, Peter Hershock, Thomas P. Kasulis, George Khushf, David Farrell Krell, Joel J. Kupperman, William R. LaFleur, Lois Ann Lorentzen, David Loy, Joseph Margolis, Hans-Georg Möller, Robert Cummings Neville, Peimin Ni, Monica Atieno Opole, Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ, Helen Petrovsky, Ramon Sentmartí, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Vasanthi Srinivasan, Marietta Stepaniants, Vyacheslav S. Stiopin, Henk ten Have, Paul B.Thompson, Mary Tiles, David B.Wong. (shrink)

This essay is devoted to an examination of the relationship between truth and laughter in the works of Nietzsche. My central text shall be the much malignedbook four of Zarathustra, with special attention paid to the braying of the ass. Laughter has been traditionally considered irrelevent to serious philosophical content and, at best, a stylistic quirk. I argue that this stems from a basic predjudice that is constitutive of a large part of the Western tradition, namely, the confusion of working (...) hard (a sine qua non for philosophy) with taking oneself seriously. I then analyze laughter in Nietzsche’s works as the voice of truth itself. Laughter is the affirmation of a register of truth as the other beginning that has been lost in every thing that begins. Such an analysis involves a discussion of the nature of both truth and laughter. In so doing, I also distinguish Nietzschean laughter from three representative and seminal accounts of laughter provided by Hobbes, Bergson, and Kant. (shrink)

This essay is devoted to an examination of the relationship between truth and laughter in the works of Nietzsche. My central text shall be the much malignedbook four of Zarathustra, with special attention paid to the braying of the ass. Laughter has been traditionally considered irrelevent to serious philosophical content and, at best, a stylistic quirk. I argue that this stems from a basic predjudice that is constitutive of a large part of the Western tradition, namely, the confusion of working (...) hard (a sine qua non for philosophy) with taking oneself seriously. I then analyze laughter in Nietzsche’s works as the voice of truth itself. Laughter is the affirmation of a register of truth as the other beginning that has been lost in every thing that begins. Such an analysis involves a discussion of the nature of both truth and laughter. In so doing, I also distinguish Nietzschean laughter from three representative and seminal accounts of laughter provided by Hobbes, Bergson, and Kant. (shrink)

On the ethics and character of Prophet Muḥammad d. 632.

On the ethics and character of Prophet Muḥammad d. 632.

On the eminence and dignity of parents; in the light of Koran and Hadith (Islamic traditions), also Muslim ethics.

Memory is the least studied dimension of Augustine's psychological trinity of memory-intellect-will. This book explores the theme of 'memory' in Augustine's works, tracing its philosophical and theological significance. The first part explores the philosophical history of memory in Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. The second part shows how Augustine inherits this theme and treats it in his early writings. The third and final part seeks to show how Augustine's theological understanding of Christ draws on and resolves tensions in the theme of (...) memory. The place of memory in the theological anthropology of Augustine has its roots in the Platonic epistemological tradition. Augustine actively engages with this tradition in his early writings in a manner that is both philosophically sophisticated and doctrinally consistent with his later, more overtly theological writings. From the Cassiacum dialogues through De musica, Augustine points to the central importance of memory: he examines the power of the soul as something that mediates sense perception and understanding, while explicitly deferring a more profound treatment of it until Confessions and De trinitate. In these two texts, memory is the foundation for the location of the Imago Dei in the mind. It becomes the basis for the spiritual experience of the embodied creature, and a source of the profound anxiety that results from the sensed opposition of human time and divine time (aeterna ratio). This tension is contained and resolved, to a limited extent, in Augustine's Christology, in the ability of a paradoxical incarnation to unify the temporal and the eternal (in Confessions 11 and 12), and the life of faith (scientia) with the promised contemplation of the divine (sapientia, in De trinitate 12-14). (shrink)

There was more than one response to the nuclear age. Countering well-documented attitudes of protest and pessimism, Muriel Howorth (1886–1971) models a less examined strain of atomic enthusiasm in British nuclear culture. Believing that the same power within the atomic bomb could be harnessed to make the world a ‘smiling garden of Eden’, she utilized traditionally feminine domains of kitchen and garden in her efforts to educate the public about the potential of the atom and to ‘safeguard’ it on their (...) behalf. Boldly entering an overtly masculine arena in which, as a woman and a layperson, she was doubly an ‘other’, Howorth used a variety of publications, organizations and staged events to interpret atomic science and specifically to address women. Her efforts, dating roughly from 1948 to 1962, preceded but had broad overlaps with official Atoms for Peace programmes, and culminated in the formation of the Atomic Gardening Society in 1960 to promote the cultivation of gamma-irradiated seeds by British gardeners. (shrink)

In 1942 Robert K. Merton tried to demonstrate the structure of the normative system of science by specifying the norms that characterized it. The norms were assigned the abbreviation CUDOs: Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized skepticism. Using the results of an on-line survey of climate scientists concerning the norms of science, this paper explores the climate scientists’ subscription to these norms. The data suggests that while Merton’s CUDOs remain the overall guiding moral principles, they are not fully endorsed or present (...) in the conduct of climate scientists: there is a tendency to withhold results until publication, there is the intention of maintaining property rights, there is external influence defining research and the tendency to assign the significance of authored work according to the status of the author rather than content of the paper. These are contrary to the norms of science as proposed by Robert K. Merton. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

Over the past few decades criminal law scholarship has been dominated by moralistic conceptions of the criminal law but recent years have seen the emergence of the so-called ‘political turn’ in criminal law theorizing. In this article I analyze the theory proffered by Vincent Chiao, one of the most persuasive proponents of the political or ‘public law’ trend, in contradistinction to the moralistic theory of criminalization defended by Anthony Duff. I demonstrate that the differences between the two theories are more (...) nuanced and more complex than first appears. In fact, because of how it concerns itself only with moral wrongdoing of a certain kind – namely, public wrongdoing – it turns out that Duff’s theory is best analyzed as a version of the public law account of criminal law. I argue that taking on Chiao’s public law approach, but allowing it to be informed by the principles of Duff’s (rather than Chiao’s) political philosophy, holds out the most promise for reaching a satisfactory conception of criminal law. I finish by considering this conclusion in light of the fact that hybrid theories are nothing new in the debate between retributivism and instrumentalism, a dividing line along which Chiao’s and Duff’s theories fall. I argue that the particular hybrid theory I defend holds important advantages over other such theories. (shrink)

Though the invocation to be “reflexive” is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to “turn back” and resituate our work—about how to engage with research subjects’ visions of the world and with our own theoretical models. Rather than a superficial rehearsal of researcher and interlocutor standpoints, I argue that “reflexivity” should help researchers theorize the social world in relational ways. To make this claim, I draw together the insights of feminist standpoint theory and Bourdieu’s reflexive (...) sociology to lay the foundation for a renewed reflexive project that centers epistemic privilege, the idea that positions of structural exclusion provide the best resources for theorizing social power. Reflexive sociology should consider interlocutors’ experiences of exclusion and contradiction, engaging with sites of alternative knowledge and incorporating them into the object of study. This type of reflexivity provides improved resources for relational theory building. I offer support for these theoretical arguments with a historical analysis of knowledge production in the feminist anti-violence movement. (shrink)

Patient data is used to drive an ecosystem of advanced digital tools in health care, like predictive models or artificial intelligence‐based decision support. Patients themselves, however, receive little information about these technologies or how they affect their care. This raises important questions about patient trust and continued engagement in a health care system that extracts their data but does not treat them as key stakeholders. This essay explores these tensions and provides steps forward for health systems as they design advanced (...) health information‐technology (IT) policies and practices. It centers patients, their concerns, and the ways they perceive trustworthiness to reframe advanced health IT in service of patient interests. (shrink)

Building on the work of philosopher John Dewey, Bray develops an approach to transnational democracy called "pragmatic cosmopolitanism." He argues for an ideal of representative democracy that emphasizes the role of democratic leadership and the development of critical intelligence.