Background:Suicide remains an important cause of premature deaths and draws much media attention. However, unsafe reporting and portrayal of suicides by the media have been associated with increased risk of suicidal behavior. Current evidence suggests that media capacity-building could potentially prevent suicide. However, there are still knowledge gaps in terms of a lack of data on effective strategies for improving awareness and safe reporting of suicide-related media content. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a workshop conducted with members (...) of the media community on the safe reporting of suicide-related content.Methods:An interventional single-arm pre and post pilot study was conducted on a sample of the Malaysian media community recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. The media safe reporting workshop was conducted by a suicide prevention expert with a media industry background. Thirty participants completed a self-reported evaluation questionnaire on their awareness and knowledge of reporting on suicide-related media content; before and after the interventional workshop.Results:There was a significant difference between the total scores before and after the intervention, with a large effect size. Post-intervention scores were significantly improved in 8 items, namely those related to the reporting of: (i) the content of any suicide note; (ii) headlines with methods of suicide; (iii) headlines with the location of suicide; (iv) cases of suspected suicide despite the unconfirmed cause of death; (v) suicide news to cater to readers’ interests; (vi) cause of suicide; (vii) details of the location of suicide; and (viii) the negative impact to media community when reporting suicide stories. In particular, there was an improvement in the majority of items for people from the media community with no lived experience of suicidal behavior.Conclusion:The media safe reporting workshop is a potentially effective intervention for improving awareness and knowledge measures relating to safe reporting on suicide among the media community, with a more pronounced effect in those without lived experience of suicidal behavior. Limitations in the sample size, generalizability, short-term evaluation, and lack of a control group warrant future larger, longer-term controlled, and more representative studies. (shrink)

Low-wage migrant workers in Singapore are legally entitled to healthcare provided by their employers and supported by private insurance, separate from the national UHC (universal health coverage) system. In practice, they face multiple barriers to access. In this article, we describe this policy-practice gap from the perspective of HealthServe, a non-profit organisation that assists low-wage migrant workers. We outline the healthcare financing system for migrant workers, describe commonly encountered barriers, and comment on their implications for the global UHC movement’s key (...) ethical concepts of fairness, equity, and solidarity. (shrink)

The major dilemma of defining Chinese folk religion was that it could be defined neither by its belief contents nor characteristics, as these might also be found in other religious traditions. The fact that it did not involve any authoritative doctrine, scripture or institution has also made treating it as a religion problematic. To solve the problem, I survey the major theories proposed by both Western and Chinese scholars concerned with the methodological issues of defining this nameless religion, and develop (...) an alternative approach that can distinguish Chinese folk religion from any other existing religious tradition. Basically, this approach eliminates the limitations of two existing models by defining Chinese folk religion on two aspects simultaneously. I also conclude that Chinese folk religion, based on the sociological perspective, can be seen as a religion, and should be taken into consideration while developing certain theological models. (shrink)

Media guidelines on safe suicide-related reporting are within the suicide prevention armamentarium. However, implementation issues beleaguer real-world practice. This study evaluated the perspectives of the Malaysian media community, persons with lived experience of suicidal behavior, and mental health professionals on suicide-related reporting in terms of the impact, strategies, challenges, and the implementation of guidelines on safe reporting. Three focus group discussions of purposively sampled Malaysian media practitioners, PLE, and MHP were audio-recorded, transcribed, coded and thematically analyzed. Inclusion criteria were: English (...) fluency, no clinical depression or suicidal ideation, no recent previous suicide attempts or suicide bereavement. Three major themes emerged: Unsafe Reporting; Impact; and Safe Reporting. Most described current reporting as unsafe by being potentially triggering to media users and may contribute to contagion effect. Positive impacts identified included raised awareness toward suicide and its prevention. Unsafe reporting was attributed to inadequate awareness, knowledge, and guidance, lack of empathy and accountability, job-related factors, popularity-seeking, lack of monitoring and governance, and information source with unsafe content. Majority agreed on how suicide stories should be framed to produce a safe report. The media community diverged on how detailed a suicide story should be. Safe reporting challenges included difficulties in balancing beneficial versus harmful details, social media ubiquity and its citizen reporters. Participants suggested these safe reporting strategies: stakeholder engagement, educational approaches, improving governance and surveillance, and guidelines revision. Most acknowledged the relevance of guidelines but were unaware of the existence of local guidelines. Implementation challenges included the dilemma in balancing media industry needs vis-à-vis safe reporting requirements, stakeholder engagement difficulties and social media regulation. There is poor awareness regarding safe suicide-related reporting across all groups. PLE and MHP were negatively impacted by current unsafe messaging which aggravated trauma and grief reactions. Postvention support gaps for mental health professionals were highlighted. Safe reporting promotion strategies should include stakeholder engagement to increase awareness on minimizing Werther and maximizing Papageno effects. Strategic re-examination and dissemination of local media guidelines to address new media issues, and effective surveillance mechanisms, are crucial in sustainable improvement of safe reporting practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Language, Truth, and Literary Interpretation: A Cross-cultural ExaminationYanfang TangReflections on the philosophy of language in China and the West suggest that philosophers’ critiques of language center on two issues: its inadequacy and its metaphoricity. The former indicates the inability of the signifier to capture the multiplicity of the signified, whereas the latter reflects the semantic surplus of the signifier over its referent. While modern Western philosophers focus on the (...) metaphoricity, frequently referred to as the “play,” of the sign, philosophers in traditional China targeted what they believed to be the inherent inadequacies of words in their discussions. 1 Both aspects of language are considered the cause of equivocal or ineffective speech, and thus of impediment to correct understanding, and yet philosophers of the two cultural traditions have come to different conclusions about reading or literary study.To Western philosophers and literary critics, the metaphoricity of language incurs a serious problem for reading. Because the sign, in its incessant play, always points to more than is needed to the point that its real reference is blurred or covered up, correct reading of a literary text becomes impossible. Such phrases, frequently appearing in contemporary critical writings as “the tyranny of words,” “the indeterminacy of meaning,” and “the unreadable text,” testify to the widespread concern about the problems of language in the West. On the other hand, despite their acute awareness of the intrinsic deficiency of words, Chinese philosophers and poets never gave up their hope in the efficacy [End Page 1] of writing and literary understanding. Indeed, the enterprise of creative writing and literary criticism boomed in China at the time when the philosophical aphorism that “words do not exhaust meaning” (yan bu jin yi) was brought home to almost every poet and critic flourishing between the third and fourth centuries. For the following one and a half millennia the question of the objectivity of meaning, the crux of Western post-structuralist discourse and quarrels, has never been raised in Chinese philosophical or literary discussions. This wide contrast of outlooks on reading informed by the same disillusionment with language is rather intriguing. To account for this phenomenon this article attempts to look at the differences in the way language is perceived and practiced in China and the West. It shall also probe into the concepts of truth underlying the two cultural traditions because such an inquiry sheds some important light on the different perceptions people in the two parts of the world hold concerning language and literary practice.Metaphoricity: The Way In or Out of the Dilemma?It is interesting to say that while twentieth-century discoveries about the metaphoricity of language have made some Western critics conclude that “all reading is misreading” and that “there is no such a thing as an objective meaning,” this same awareness—that language is essentially metaphorical in nature, that it always says more than what it appears to—posed a solution for Chinese philosophers and poets to get out of the linguistic dilemma in which they found themselves. But before we enter the topic, let us first look at the dominant views of language in each cultural tradition. First, as Yip Wai-lim and others have demonstrated, the Chinese philosophical tradition began with a rejection of language as a reliable means for cognition and expression. 2 Philosophers in ancient China viewed language, or in their own terminology, words, as an instrument for expressing ideas in the mind or describing objects in the world, but they considered them inherently limited and thus unable to carry out their tasks effectively. The earliest statement of this conception is recorded in the ancient classic the Book of Changes, where it says: “Writing does not exhaust words, and words do not exhaust meaning.” 3 Attributed to Confucius and thus also representing Confucian ideas, 4 this statement was elaborated, amplified, and developed into a systematic argument by Daoist (Taoist) philosophers Lao [End Page 2] Zi and Zhuang Zi (369?-286? bc). Approaching the issue from the perspective of Dao (Tao), these founders of Daoist school viewed language as intrinsically limited in its function of representing Dao. This is because Dao, the cosmic principle or pattern, is dynamic in... (shrink)

The development of the CRISPR gene editing technique has been hyped as a technique that could fundamentally change scientific research and its clinical application. Unrecognized is the fact that it joins other technologies that have tried and failed under the same discourse of scientific hype. These technologies, like gene therapy and stem cell research, have moved quickly passed basic research into clinical application with dire consequences. Before hastily moving to clinical applications, it is necessary to consider basic research and determine (...) how CRISPR/Cas systems should be applied. In the case of single gene diseases, that application is expected to have positive impacts, but as we shift to more complex diseases, the impact could be unintentionally negative. In the context of common disabilities, the level of genetic complexity may render this technology useless but potentially toxic, aggravating a social discourse that devalues those with disabilities. This paper intends to define the issues related to disability that are associated with using the CRIPSR/Cas system in basic research. It also aims to provide a decision tree to help determine whether the technology should be utilized or if alternative approaches beyond scientific research could lead to a better use of limited funding resources. (shrink)

Max Schelers Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsches Kritik an der christlichen bzw. christlich inspirierten Moral ist Gegenstand dieser Untersuchung. Darin lasst sich Schelers phanomenologisches Verstandnis der Liebe erschliessen, das einerseits Nietzsches Kritik apologetisch zwingend beantwortet und andererseits das Gedankengut Nietzsches aufgreift. Schelers Anlehnung an Nietzsche zeigt sich deutlich in seinem Kampf gegen den modernen Altruismus, gegen den Scheler mit ausserster Scharfe das christliche Verstandnis der Liebe abgrenzt. Daruber hinaus entwickelt der Autor in seinem Buch Schelers Verstandnis der Liebe weiter in Hinsicht auf (...) die christliche Soteriologie, die dadurch erheblich bereichert werden kann.". (shrink)

Using the Lascar inequalities, we show that any finite rank δ-closed subset of a quasiprojective variety is definably isomorphic to an affine δ-closed set. Moreover, we show that if X is a finite rank subset of the projective space P n and a is a generic point of P n , then the projection from a is injective on X. Finally we prove that if RM = RC in DCF 0 , then RM = RU.

The paper presents an exploratory attempt to analyse self‐reported leniency toward software piracy systematically, using an approach based on empirical factors, rather than ethical factors. The empirical factors studied were: social acceptance of software piracy; the cost of original software; urgency of the subject's need for software; availability of original software; knowledge of computer software copyright law; gender; monthly household income; and education level. It provides new insights to software companies and government officials who are developing programmes to promote the (...) concept of anti‐piracy among software consumers. This is also the first exploratory research to study the interaction effects among factors influencing the reported leniency towards software piracy, at the individual level. (shrink)

The paper presents an exploratory attempt to analyse self‐reported leniency toward software piracy systematically, using an approach based on empirical factors, rather than ethical factors. The empirical factors studied were: (i) social acceptance of software piracy; (ii) the cost of original software; (iii) urgency of the subject's need for software; (iv) availability of original software; (v) knowledge of computer software copyright law; (vi) gender; (vii) monthly household income; and (viii) education level. It provides new insights to software companies and government (...) officials who are developing programmes to promote the concept of anti‐piracy among software consumers. This is also the first exploratory research to study the interaction effects among factors influencing the reported leniency towards software piracy, at the individual level. (shrink)

According to the perceptual theory of emotions, emotions are perceptions of evaluative properties. The account has recently faced a barrage of criticism recently by critics who point out varies disanalogies between emotion and paradigmatic perceptual experiences. What many theorists fail to note however, is that many of the disanalogies that have been raised to exclude emotions from being perceptual states that represent evaluative properties have also been used to exclude high-level properties from appearing in the content of perception. This suggests (...) that emotions are perceptions of high level properties and perceptual theorists can marshal the arguments used by proponents of high-level perception to defend the perceptual theory. This paper therefore defends an account of emotion as high-level perception. (shrink)

Ryan Darby, Judith Edersheim, and Bruce Price (DEP) argue that patients with Behavioral-Variant Frontotemporal Dementia have intact moral knowledge. In effect, they assume a motivational externalist understanding of moral knowledge. We question this by probing the cases they present as evidence for their position.

I argue that it is a main theme of Davidson's theory of interpretation that interpretive charity implies the impossibility of massive disagreement. There is clear textual support for that. I then argue that from the first-person point of view of a full-blooded interpreter, the theme must be accepted; and that is precisely why Davidson accepts it. If massive disagreement between speaker and interpreter seems to us easy to imagine, it is only because the imagination involved is third-personal and not full-blooded.

In “Punishing Intentions and Neurointerventions”, Birks and Buyx (2018) provide a novel argument on why the use of mandatory neurointerventions on convicted criminals is morally objectionable “in a...

We commonly appeal to emotions to explain human behaviour: we seek comfort out of grief, we threaten someone in anger and we hide in fear. According to the standard Humean analysis, intentional action is always explained with reference to a belief-desire pair. According to recent consensus, however, emotions have independent motivating force apart from beliefs and desires, and supplant them when explaining emotional action. In this paper I provide a systematic framework for thinking about the motivational structure of emotion and (...) show how it is consistent with the Humean analysis. On this picture, emotions are not reducible to beliefs and desires, instead their primary motivational force comes from their role as modulators of desires—they control the strength of our occurrent desires. Emotions therefore motivate actions through the belief-desire system instead of overriding it. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the impacts of index inclusions and exclusions on corporate sustainable firms by studying a sample of US stocks that are added to or deleted from the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index over the period 2002-2008. The impacts are measured in terms of stock return, risk and liquidity. We cannot find any strong evidence that announcement per se has any significant impact on stock return and risk. However, on the day of change, index inclusion (exclusion) stocks experience a (...) significant but temporary increase (decrease) in stock return. Liquidity deteriorates after the announcement day and bounces back significantly near the day of change. Systematic risk shows little change after announcements. But, idiosyncratic risk is higher after announcements. The overall results support Harris and Eitan's (The Journal of Finance 41(4), 815-829, 1986) price pressure hypothesis, which posits that event announcement does not carry information and any shift in demand (and hence the corresponding price change and liquidity change) is temporary. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

Why would God make us ask for some good He might supply, and why would it be right for God to withhold that good unless and until we asked for it? We explain why present defences of petitionary prayer are insufficient, but argue that a world in which God makes us ask for some goods and then supplies them in response to our petitions adds value to the world that would not be available in worlds in which God simply supplied (...) such goods without our asking for them. This added value, we argue, is what we call ‘partnership with God’. (shrink)

This paper brings the intellectual tools of cognitive science to bear on resolving the “paradox of the active user” [Interfacing Thought: Cognitive Aspects of Human–Computer Interaction, Cambridge, MIT Press, MA, USA]—the persistent use of inefficient procedures in interactive tasks by experienced or even expert users when demonstrably more efficient procedures exist. The goal of this paper is to understand the roots of this paradox by finding regularities in these inefficient procedures. We examine three very different data sets. For each data (...) set, we first satisfy ourselves that the preferred procedures used by some subjects are indeed less efficient than the recommended procedures. We then amass evidence, for each set, and conclude that when a preferred procedure is used instead of a more efficient, recommended procedure, the preferred procedure tends to have two major characteristics: (1) the preferred procedure is a well‐practiced, generic procedure that is applicable either within the same task environment in different contexts or across different task environments, and (2) the preferred procedure is composed of interactive components that bring fast, incremental feedback on the external problem states. The support amassed for these characteristics leads to a new understanding of the paradox. In interactive tasks, people are biased towards the use of general procedures that start with interactive actions. These actions require much less cognitive effort as each action results in an immediate change to the external display that, in turn, cues the next action. Unfortunately for the users, the bias to use interactive unit tasks leads to a path that requires more effort in the long run. Our data suggest that interactive behavior is composed of a series of distributed choices; that is, people seldom make a once‐and‐for‐all decision on procedures. This series of biased selection of interactive unit tasks often leads to a stable suboptimal level of performance. (shrink)

This paper presents the critical role of corporate responsibility in the sustainability of health care programs in lower income communities mostly located in the rural areas. The Leaders for Health Program (LHP)—a tri-partite partnership between the Philippine Department of Health, the Health Unit of the Ateneo de Manila University Graduate School of Business, and Pfizer Philippines, Inc.—is an innovative approach focusing on health promotion and education as the cornerstone for community development. LHP adopts a systemic and comprehensive approach that takes (...) into consideration all the major stakeholders in health, especially in rural communities. This paper aims to support the viability of education as the main catalyst for community empowerment and self-sufficiency. (shrink)

For the most part, the primary driver for international businesses in establishing operations in other countries is the reduction of overall operating costs. Host countries, especially developing nations, welcome multinational corporations (MNCs) because of the perceived economic benefits that international businesses can bring to their local communities. Surprisingly, one of the most understudied, under-analyzed, and sometimes even completely neglected factors when international businesses consider setting up shop in other countries is the local culture of their chosen destination country. This paper (...) substantiates the thesis that international businesses should adapt their corporate practices to the local cultures in which they operate to achieve effective and superior businessperformance. The paper goes further in identifying corporate practices that were adapted or revised by international businesses to respond to the culture of local communities in the Philippines. (shrink)

The development of commercial revenue streams allows traditional nonprofit organizations to increase financial certainty in response to the reduction of traditional funding sources and increased competition. In order to capture commercial revenue-generating opportunities, traditional nonprofit organizations need to deliberately transform themselves into social enterprises. Through the theoretical lens of institutional entrepreneurship, we explore the institutional work that supports this transformation by analyzing field interviews with 64 institutional entrepreneurs from UK-based social enterprises. We find that the route to incorporate commercial processes (...) and convert traditional nonprofit organizations into social enterprises requires six distinct kinds of institutional work at three different domains; these are—“engaging commercial revenue strategies”, “creating a professionalized organizational form”, and “legitimating a socio-commercial business model”. In elaborating on social entrepreneurship research and practice, we offer a comprehensive framework delineating the key practices contributing to the transformation from traditional nonprofit organizations to social enterprises. This extends our understanding of the ex-ante strategy of incorporating commercial processes within social organizations. Furthermore, the identification of these practices also offers an important tool for scholars in this field to examine the connection of each practice with different ethical concerns of social entrepreneurship in greater depth. (shrink)

This paper proposes that Levinas's philosophy of alterity and infinitude – based upon the ethical relation between Self and Other – is both profound and limited in its ability to account for social practice. Instead of simply accepting the common criticism of Levinas, however, that he places an intolerable ethical burden of infinitude upon human relations, this paper aims to move beyond this impasse by placing Levinas's metaphysics within a frame that privileges the dynamic between the Self and the Other (...) as a socially oriented, participative practice of teaching and learning. It is suggested that Etienne Wenger's work on the emergence of identity as a constant negotiation between the Others and the Self provides a conceptual framework for how business ethics may be owned, negotiated and learned within organizational communities without sacrificing the horizon of infinitude bestowed upon us by Levinas's ethical philosophy. Finally, the practical implications of such a comparative approach for the teaching of alterity in business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

This paper articulates the relationship between knowledge and qing 情 in the Zhuangzi. I argue that Zhuangzi has a twofold view of qing, which is structurally similar to his view of knowledge. I sta...

Shun argues that the distinction made between emotions experienced from the first-person perspective and those from the third-person perspective does not capture our everyday emotional experience. My proposal is that even if we accept this claim, first- and third-person perspective taking is still crucial in the development of our emotional psychology. This is so in two respects. First, the features of intimacy and impartiality that mark adult emotional response are a product of a developmental process that involves perspective taking. Second, (...) perspective taking is a crucial part of refining and developing virtuous emotional responses. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 310—311. Writing Death . Jeremy Fernando, foreword by Avital Ronell. Den Haag: Uitgeverij. 2011 ISBN: 978-90-817091-0-1 Rite and ceremony as well as legend bound the living and the dead in a common partnership. They were esthetic but they were more than esthetic. The rites of mourning expressed more than grief; the war and harvest dance were more than a gathering of energy for tasks to be performed; magic was more than a way of commanding forces of nature (...) to do the bidding of man; feasts were more than a satisfaction of hunger. Each of these communal modes of activity united the practical, the social, and the educative in an integrated whole having esthetic form.(1) Jeremy Fernando’s Writing Death is a sensitive attempt at exploring the depths and heights to which the processes of mourning can take us. Death, as an absence, renders all gestures (for what is mourning but a gesture with many faces) surrounding it at once as a possibility and an impossibility. Fernando poses questions that often elude the mourner and the mourned—the same, and different—by raising the specter of subject and object; by compelling the examination of what it actually means to mourn; and most crucially, by considering the very status of possibility itself that the act of mourning foregrounds. Mourning, he reminds us, is premised upon memory (remembrance, recollection), the shadow of forgetting upon which is perpetually cast—the inextricability between memory and forgetting haunts the living more than it does the dead. And if grief has anything to do with it, mourning can quite easily be mistaken for an attempt to remember in order to forget; an attempt, in other words, to deny death, deny the one thing that confirms mortality. As if living has anything to do with it. What, then, of writing death? It becomes an unceasing process of locating—and addressing—possibility itself: the passing as possibility; loss as possibility; impossibility as, and of, naming this possibility. In confronting the passing on, it is possible, nay inevitable, to move on, move away from the site of loss, of grief. All the while, we forget, Fernando reminds us, that mourning has little to do with the dead, and a whole lot to do with the living, the mourning self. Here, he echoes Dewey’s consolidation of rituals and ceremonies, of the dead and of the living, all as parts of a larger unity, of a social, public gesture meant to sate a private need: In trying to “get over it,” are we trying to get over ourselves? Or more than that: are we trying to get over the fact that we can never quite get over ourselves? (Fernando, 77) As if guilt has anything to do with it. And “it” continues to be the point that he is driving at, driving towards. “It” is the possibility and impossibility, death and life, memory and forgetting, lost and cherished. “It” is what eludes mourning, eludes attempts to overcome grief. Nonetheless, move on, he must. And Fernando does this in fewer moves than a 12-step program—hardly therapeutic, but intellectually satisfying. Writing Death attends to some of the pertinent aspects of the act of mourning—both as gesture and as meditation: eulogy, distress (call), tears, and the question of how (beyond ritual, beyond sentimentality) to mourn. And what’s love got to do with it? Everything and nothing. Mourning, after all, is an articulation of love, but it is also one that forces the mourner to be selective, as with myth-making, in the recollection: Remembering only ever occurs in exception to memory—quite possibly in betrayal of a memory. In this way, each remembrance is a naming of that memory, a naming of something as memory, bringing with it an act of violence. (40) Mourning is thus not only an act of fictionalizing, it is also an act of reading, to continually be compelled to respond to another, all the while keeping vigil against a reconceptualization of the dead, without, therefore, misreading the dead. This can only be done, Fernando argues, by all the while “maintaining the otherness of the other. After all, one must try not to forget that one cannot be too close—space is needed—to touch.” (82) There is also tacit acknowledgement that doing so foregrounds the fact that the selectivity of memory becomes exclusive, and concretizes into a singularity, thus negating the multi-dimensionality of a life lived – and thus killing the already dead. Writing Death is framed by two eulogies—or the approximations of eulogies; approximation because both foreground and call into question the eulogy as a genre. The first is Avital Ronell’s foreword to the book, remembering Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; the second is Fernando’s own response to the passing of a mentor, Jean Baudrillard. Both are not merely attempts to philosophize their way out of the act of mourning. Both are in fact deeply moving pieces that remind us of the emotional possibilities that may reside within any intellectual undertaking, that the latter need not be cold and devoid of feelings. And whereas Writing Death does not attempt to make any philosophical claim for humanism, the underlying wistfulness of both pieces does suggest that there is a proper place for deep-seated human response to death. We can (and the book does) intellectualize and problematize the acts of mourning and grieving, but these do not diminish the fact that we mourn and grieve. And, framing Writing Death as the two eulogies do, Jeremy Fernando perhaps finally, and inadvertently, names “It”—it is, above everything else, Human. August, 2011 Singapore NOTES (1) Dewey, John. Art as Experience . New York: Perigee, 1934. (shrink)

The mere presence of irrelevant external stimuli results in interference with the fidelity of details retrieved from long-term memory (LTM). Recent studies suggest that distractibility during LTM retrieval occurs when the focus of resource-limited, top-down mechanisms that guide the selection of relevant mnemonic details is disrupted by representations of external distractors. We review findings from four studies that reveal distractibility during episodic retrieval. The approach cued participants to recall previously studied visual details when their eyes were closed, or were open (...) and irrelevant visual information was present. The results showed a negative impact of the distractors on the fidelity of details retrieved from LTM. An fMRI experiment using the same paradigm replicated the behavioral results and found that diminished episodic memory was associated with the disruption of functional connectivity in whole-brain networks. Specifically, network connectivity supported recollection of details based on visual imagery when eyes were closed, but connectivity declined in the presence of visual distractors. Another experiment using auditory distractors found equivalent effects for auditory and visual distraction during cued recall, suggesting that the negative impact of distractibility is a domain-general phenomenon in LTM. Comparisons between older and younger adults revealed an aging-related increase in the negative impact of distractibility on retrieval of LTM. Finally, a new study that compared categorization abilities between younger and older adults suggests a cause underlying age-related decline of visual details in LTM. The sum of our findings suggests that cognitive control resources, although limited, have the capability to resolve interference from distractors during tasks of moderate effort, but these resources are overwhelmed when additional processes associated with episodic retrieval, or categorization of complex prototypes, are required. (shrink)

Social movements often impose nontrivial costs on others against their wills. Civil disobedience is no exception. How can social movements in general, and civil disobedience in particular, be justifiable despite this apparent wrong-making feature? We examine an intuitively plausible account—it is fair that everyone should bear the burdens of tackling injustice. We extend this fairness-based argument for civil disobedience to defend some acts of uncivil disobedience. Focusing on uncivil environmental activism—such as ecotage (sabotage with the aim of protecting the environment)—we (...) argue that some acts of uncivil disobedience can be morally superior to their civil counterparts, when and because such acts target people who are responsible for environmental threats. Indeed, insofar as some acts of uncivil disobedience can more accurately target responsible people, they can better satisfy the demands of fairness compared to their civil counterparts. In some circumstances, our argument may require activists to engage in uncivil disobedienceeven whencivil disobedience is available. (shrink)

Contextualists and Subject Sensitive Invariantists often cite the knowledge norm of assertion as part of their argument. They claim that the knowledge norms in conjunction with our intuitions about when a subject is properly asserting in low or high stakes contexts provides strong evidence that what counts as knowledge depends on practical factors. In this paper, I present new data to suggest they are mistaken in the way they think about cases involving high and low stakes and I show how (...) insensitive invariantists can explain the data. I exploit recent work done on the distinction between flouting a norm and being blamed for that violation to formulate a rigorous theory of rational expected blameworthiness that allows insensitive invariantists to explain the data cited. (shrink)

Anthropology has long been interested in human diets. The main objective of this article is to introduce the perspective of cultural anthropology about food in culture, and the way by which food embodies the relevant sociocultural significances. The case studies chosen cover the study of the Chinese in Malaysia, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as studies conducted in the Asia and Pacific Islands. The short review in this article aims to provide some ideas and case studies about the (...) interrelationship between food and culture. The anthropological perspective of food in different cultures may provide an insight into the study of Overseas Chinese and help to expand it to a wider concern on a variety of human activities. In this way, the writer believes t he study of Overseas Chinese can mark its particularity, research value and potential in world academia. (shrink)

Search can be found in almost every cognitive activity, ranging across vision, memory retrieval, problem solving, decision making, foraging, and social interaction. Because of its ubiquity, research on search has a tendency to fragment into multiple areas of cognitive science. The proposed topic aims at providing integrative discussion of the central role of search from multiple perspectives. We focus on controlled search processes, which require a goal, uncertainty about the nature, location, or acquisition method of the objects to be searched (...) for, and a method for sampling through the search environment. While this definition of search is general and applicable to different domains, the specific mechanisms in the search process will likely differ. The goal of this issue is to compare and contrast how these search processes are similar and differ in different cognitive activities, with the goal of understanding the general nature of search in terms of the three characteristics stated above. We expect that given its cross-domain nature, the topic on search will be of broad interest to cognitive scientists, including psychologists, behavioral ecologists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, linguists, and sociologists. (shrink)

The "I Ching" had an important influence on Tokugawa Shinto. First, it played a crucial role in the discussion of Confucian-Shinto relations; many Tokugawa Confucians and Shintoists used it to uphold the doctrine of the unity of Confucianism and Shinto, and Shintoists and scholars of National Learning (kokugaku) used it for its metaphysical and divinational value. Second, scholars of National Learning transformed it from a Confucian classic into a Shinto text, claiming that it was the handiwork of a Japanese deity.