Positive Psychology has turned its attention to the study of emotions in a scientific and rigorous way. Particularly, to how emotions influence people’s health, performance, or their overall life satisfaction. Within this trend, Flow theory has established a theoretical framework that helps to promote the Flow experience. Flow state, or optimal experience, is a mental state of high concentration and enjoyment that, due to its characteristics, has been considered desirable for the development of the performing activity of performing musicians. Musicians (...) are a population prone to health problems, both psychological and physical, owing to different stressors of their training and professional activity. One of the most common problems is Musical Performance Anxiety. In this investigation, an electronic intervention program was carried out for the development of psychological self-regulation skills whose main objective was to trigger the Flow response in performing musicians and the coping mechanism for Musical Performance Anxiety. A quasi-experimental design was used with a control group in which pre- and post-measures of Flow State, Musical Performance Anxiety and, also, Social Skills were taken. Sixty-two performing musicians from different music colleges in Spain participated in the program. Results indicated that the intervention significantly improved Flow State, and Sense of Control, and decreased Music Performance Anxiety, and self-consciousness of the participants in the EG but not CG. The changes in the EG after the program showed the inverse relationship between Flow and Anxiety. Two important theoretical factors of both variables, such as worry and the feeling of lack of control, could be involved. The results are under discussion and future lines of research are proposed. (shrink)

Depletion of mitochondrial endo/exonuclease G‐like (EXOG) in cultured neonatal cardiomyocytes stimulates mitochondrial oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and induces hypertrophy via reactive oxygen species (ROS). Here, we show that neurohormonal stress triggers cell death in endo/exonuclease G‐like‐depleted cells, and this is marked by a decrease in mitochondrial reserve capacity. Neurohormonal stimulation with phenylephrine (PE) did not have an additive effect on the hypertrophic response induced by endo/exonuclease G‐like depletion. Interestingly, PE‐induced atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) gene expression was completely abolished in (...) endo/exonuclease G‐like‐depleted cells, suggesting a reverse signaling function of endo/exonuclease G‐like. Endo/exonuclease G‐like depletion initially resulted in increased mitochondrial OCR, but this declined upon PE stimulation. In particular, the reserve capacity of the mitochondrial respiratory chain and maximal respiration were the first indicators of perturbations in mitochondrial respiration, and these marked the subsequent decline in mitochondrial function. Although pathological stimulation accelerated these processes, prolonged EXOG depletion also resulted in a decline in mitochondrial function. At early stages of endo/exonuclease G‐like depletion, mitochondrial ROS production was increased, but this did not affect mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) integrity. After prolonged depletion, ROS levels returned to control values, despite hyperpolarization of the mitochondrial membrane. The mitochondrial dysfunction finally resulted in cell death, which appears to be mainly a form of necrosis. In conclusion, endo/exonuclease G‐like plays an essential role in cardiomyocyte physiology. Loss of endo/exonuclease G‐like results in diminished adaptation to pathological stress. The decline in maximal respiration and reserve capacity is the first sign of mitochondrial dysfunction that determines subsequent cell death. (shrink)

This paper analyses the role of foreign and local companies in shaping Brazilian positions on global sustainability. It deals with an empirical investigation of CSR practices of firms from the electronics, food, and personal care sectors in response to pressures of 'market' and 'non-market' stakeholders. The results demonstrate that CSR decisions by foreign and local firms are triggered by organisational considerations and anticipated economic gains. The degree of implementation of CSR activities by foreign firms is more advanced than that of (...) local firms. The survey also confirms the hypothesis that market stakeholders exert pressure on companies and positively influence CSR. Non-market stakeholders seem to have a minor effect on corporate social responsibility decisions. We conclude that the institutional environment is a critical determinant of the extent to which the dialogue between stakeholders and companies leads to the attainment of sustainable development. (shrink)

Fertilization triggers cytoplasmic movements in the frog egg that lead in mysterious ways to the stabilization of β‐catenin on the dorsal side of the embryo. The novel Huluwa (Hwa) transmembrane protein, identified in China, is translated specifically in the dorsal side, acting as an egg cytoplasmic determinant essential for β‐catenin stabilization. The Wnt signaling pathway requires macropinocytosis and the sequestration inside multivesicular bodies (MVBs, the precursors of endolysosomes) of Axin1 and Glycogen Synthase Kinase 3 (GSK3) that normally destroy β‐catenin. (...) In Xenopus, the Wnt‐like activity of GSK3 inhibitors and of Hwa mRNA can be blocked by brief treatment with inhibitors of membrane trafficking or lysosomes at the 32‐cell stage. In dorsal blastomeres, lysosomal cathepsin is activated and intriguing MVBs surrounded by electron dense vesicles are formed at the 64‐cell stage. We conclude that membrane trafficking and lysosomal activity are critically important for the earliest asymmetries in vertebrate embryonic development. (shrink)

Resonance can trigger of a series of quantum events and therefore induce several changes related to consciousness at micro as well as macro level within a living system. Therapeutic effects have been observed in several religious meditative and healing practices, which use resonance in the form of chanting and prayers. A living system may have many resonant frequencies due to their degrees of freedom, where each can vibrate as a harmonic oscillator supporting the progression of vibrations as waves that moves (...) as a ripple within the whole system. A cell as an organism or cells in multicellular organisms act as resonating bodies that trigger of oscillation of oscillatory proteins of the cytoskeletal network. The resulting protein conformational changes generate a conscious moment that is regulated via electron tunneling, delocalization and superposition in space time geometry. Consciousness or sentience are phenomenal characteristics of every cell and even though we don’t know the “why” we surely can predict and hypothesize the “how” of consciousness to be quantum computed, which enables the cell to understand and judge perceptions giving it a prospect to behave as per will. (shrink)

Foucault’s disciplinary society and his notion of panopticism are often invoked in discussions regarding electronic surveillance. Against this use of Foucault, I argue that contemporary trends in surveillance technology abstract human bodies from their territorial settings, separating them into a series of discrete flows through what Deleuze will term, the surveillant assemblage. The surveillant assemblage and its product, the socially sorted body, aim less at molding, punishing and controlling the body and more at triggering events of in- and ex-clusion (...) from life opportunities. The meaning of the body as monitored by latest generation vision technologies formed from machine only surveillance has been transformed. Such a body is no longer disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense. It is a virtual/flesh interface broken into discrete data flows whose comparison and breakage generate bodies as both legible and eligible (or illegible). (shrink)

In Europe, telecare is the use of remote monitoring technology to enable vulnerable people to live independently in their own homes. The technology includes electronic tags and sensors that transmit information about the user's location and patterns of behavior in the user's home to an external hub, where it can trigger an intervention in an emergency. Telecare users in the United Kingdom sometimes report their unease about being monitored by a ?Big Brother,? and the same kind of electronic (...) tags that alert telecare hubs to the movements of someone with dementia who is ?wandering? are worn by terrorist suspects who have been placed under house arrest. For these and other reasons, such as ordinary privacy concerns, telecare is sometimes regarded as an objectionable extension of a ?surveillance state.? In this article, we defend the use of telecare against the charge that it is Orwellian. In the United States, the conception of telecare primarily as telemedicine, and the fact that it is not typically a government responsibility, make a supposed connection with a surveillance state even more doubtful than in Europe. The main objection, we argue, to telecare is not its intrusiveness, but the danger of its deepening the isolation of those who use it. There are ways of organizing telecare so that the independence and privacy of users are enhanced, but personal isolation may be harder to address. As telecare is a means of reducing the cost of publicly provided social and health care, and the need to reduce public spending is growing, the correlative problem of isolation must be addressed alongside the goal of promoting independence. (shrink)

Technological products such as computer, communication, and consumer electronic products, apps, smart wearables, and streaming services have become inseparable from people’s lives. In technological fields of practice, imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship may influence one another. A vivid imagination can generate creativity and trigger the entrepreneurial intention to “bring new things to the market.” This study aims to understand the formation of internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products. Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study explores and empirically tests (...) how technology product imagination disposition and social support impact internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products. Drawing from self-determination theory, this study proposes and examines the mediating role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the relationship between technology product imagination disposition and internet entrepreneurial intention, as well as the relationship between social support and internet entrepreneurial intention. We conducted a survey of 568 adults in Taiwan and used partial least squares to test our hypotheses. The results show the following: Technology product imagination disposition is positively associated with challenge, enjoyment, compensation, and outward motivation. Social support is positively associated with challenge, enjoyment, compensation, and outward motivation. Challenge, enjoyment, and outward motivation are positively associated with internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products. Technology product imagination disposition intensifies internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products by strengthening challenge, enjoyment, and outward motivation. Social support intensifies internet entrepreneurial intention by increasing challenge, enjoyment, and outward motivation. The partial mediation model represents a significant improvement in the total effect over the direct effect. We discuss the implications of these results for research and internet entrepreneurship practices. (shrink)

Childhood self-control is currently receiving great scientific and public attention because it could predict much of adult’s life success and well-being. Specialized interventions based on findings in social psychology and neuroscience potentially enhance children’s capacity to exercise self-control. This perspective triggers hopes that self-control enhancement allows us to say good-bye for good to potentially unsafe psychopharmacological agents and electronic brain stimulants. This chapter provides an in-depth ethical analysis of pediatric self-control enhancement and points toward a series of serious (...) conceptual and ethical concerns. First, it gives an overview of current psychological as well as neuroscientific research on self-control, and it presents longitudinal studies that emphasize the importance of childhood self-control for adult life success. Second, it critically discusses the concept of self-control presupposed in these approaches and points to crucial limitations. Going beyond an understanding of self-control as a sophisticated means of goal-achievement, I will argue for a comprehensive understanding that takes the inherent normativity of self-controlled behavior seriously. In that context, self-control enhancement appears as not necessarily desirable and occasionally even detrimental. Finally, this chapter questions the notion of childhood implicit in current research and how values typically put on this phase of life could get affected by self-control enhancement. I finish with an exploration of the conditions under which pediatric self-control enhancement is either impermissible, permissible, or maybe obligatory. (shrink)

According to the BSM- Supergravitation Unified Theory (BSM-SG), the energy is indispensable feature of matter, while the matter possesses hierarchical levels of organization from a simple to complex forms, with appearance of fields at some levels. Therefore, the energy also follows these levels. At the fundamental level, where the primary energy source exists, the matter is in its primordial form, where two super-dense fundamental particles (FP) exist in a classical pure empty space (not a physical vacuum). They are associated with (...) the Planck scale parameters of frequency and distance and interact by Supergravitational forces. These forces are inverse proportional to the cube of distance at pure empty space and they are based on frequency interactions. Since the two FPs have different intrinsic frequencies, the SG forces appear different for interactions between the like and unlike FPs and may change the sign. This primordial form of matter exists in the super-heavy black holes located in the center of each well formed galaxy. The next upper level of matter organization includes the underlying structure of the physical vacuum, called a Cosmic Lattice, and the structure of elementary particles. They have common substructure elements obtained by specific crystallization process preceding the formation of the observable galaxies. The Cosmic Lattice, forming a space known as a physical vacuum, is responsible for the existence and propagation of the physical fields: electrical, magnetic, Newtonian gravity and inertia. The energy of physical vacuum is in two forms: Static (enormous) and Dynamic (weak). The Static energy is directly related to the Newtonian mass by the Einstein equation E = mc^2 and it is a primary source of the nuclear energy. The Dynamic energy is responsible for the existence of the electric and magnetic fields, the constant speed of light and the quantum mechanical properties of the physical vacuum. The next upper energy level is the dynamical energy of excited atoms and molecules. At this level a hidden energy wells exit, such as the internal energy of the electron and the internal energy of atoms with more than one electron. The next upper energy level is at some organic molecules and particularly in the biomolecules that contain ring atomic structures. In such a structure, some quantum states are not emitted immediately, but rotating in the ring. While in organic molecules the energy stored in such a ring is released by a chemical process, in the long chain molecule of proteins in the living organism the stored energy can be released simultaneously by triggering. A huge number of atomic rings are contained in the DNA strands. The release of the energy stored in DNA, for example, is an avalanche process that causes an emission of entangled photons possessing a strong penetrating capability. A sequence of entangled photons emitted by DNA should carry the genetic information encoded by the cordons. This mechanism, predicted in BSM-SG theory, is very important for intercommunication between the cells of the living organism. The next upper level of energy organization may exist in the brain. The brain is an organ of a most abundant number of atomic rings, while its tissue environment might permit complex energy interactions. The human brain contains billions of atomic rings. The next hypothetical upper level of energy organization is an information field, physically existed outside, but connected with the living brain. It corresponds to a specific field known as aura, while the possibility of its existence is still not accepted by the main stream science. The problem is that this field could not be detected by the currently existing technical means used for EM communications. The BSM-SG predicts that this field might differ from the EM field we use for communication, but it is a subject of a further theoretical development that must be supported by experiments using specifically designed technical means. According to the BSM-SG theory, the energy conversion from the primary energy source to the complex levels of matter and field organization is a permanent syntropic process based on complex resonance interactions. (shrink)

Purpose The manner in which people, businesses and governments perform is changing because of the spread of technology. Digitalization of governments can be considered a necessity as we are now entering the era of the Internet-of-Things. The advantages and disadvantages of electronic governments have been examined in several research studies. This study aims to examine the attitudes of decision-makers towards e-government. The research aims are as follows: to determine the problems related with e-government usage, to establish the factors which (...) decrease the usage of e-government services and to propose recommendations for the effective application of e-government practices. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative research has been used for the study. Participants were chosen by the snowball sampling method, and face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with all decision-makers. In-depth interviews are more efficient and enable the acquisition of better qualitative information, in-depth knowledge and statistics, as the distance between the interviewer and interviewee is reduced. Questions asked can be categorized under two sections, where the questions in the first section are related to the decision-maker’s management style/managerial proposition, and in the second section, technological questions are asked in terms of the preferred communication method and the decision-makers’ attitudes towards e-government practices. Findings Decision-makers perceive electronic government to be important, while the level of importance is observed to be different among the decision-makers. Chronic problems exist in many countries, such as nepotism, where the decision-makers have conflicting arguments about e-government and the resulting effect on nepotism. Furthermore, the study also indicates that decision-makers are aware of the importance of mobile government, although they acknowledge that more time is required, as their country is still developing. Electronic voting is also perceived to be important, although the decision-makers believe that security and privacy issues need to be solved before related projects can be initiated. Originality/value This research can be a benchmark study for the decision-makers of small island developing states by means of e-government. The impediments preventing the effective application of e-government practices are also discussed in the study. This study will be useful to highlight the triggers and obstacles for e-government development in the context of a developing country. Internet penetration has increased significantly since the 2000s, and therefore, decision-makers need to consider the shift in citizens’ behaviour, such as the high usage of smartphones and the emergence of the Internet-of-Things. (shrink)

The Tannhäuser Gate. Architecture in science fiction films of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century as a component of utopian and dystopian projections of the future. -/- The films of science fiction genre from the second half of the 20th and early 21st century contained many visions of the future, which were at the same time a reflection on the achievements and deficiencies of modern times. In 1960s, cinematographic works were dominated by optimism (...) and faith in the possibility of never-ending progress. The disappearance of political divisions between the blocs of states and the joint exploration of the cosmos was foreseen. The designers undertook cooperation with scientists, which manifested itself in showing cosmic constructions far exceeding the real technical capabilities. Starting from the 1970s, pessimism and the belief that the future will bring, above all, the intensification of negative phenomena of the present began to grow in films. Fears of the future were connected with indicating various possible defects and insoluble contradictions between them. When, therefore, some dystopian visions illustrated the threat of increase in crime, others depicted the future as saturated with state control mechanisms and the prevalence of surveillance. The fears shown on the screens were also aroused by the growth of large corporations, especially by their gaining political influence or staying outside the system of democracy. The authors of the films also presented their suspicions related to the creation of new types of weapons by corporations, the use of which might breach the current legal norms. Particular objections concerned research on biological weapons and the possible spread of lethal viruses. The development of robotics and research into artificial intelligence, which must have resulted in the appearance of androids and inevitable tensions in their relations with humans, also triggered fear. Another problem for film-makers has become hybrids that are a combination of people and electronic parts. Scriptwriters and directors likewise considered the development of genetic engineering, which led to the creation of mutant human beings. A number of film dystopias contemplated the possibility of the collapse of democratic systems and the development of authoritarian regimes in their place, often based on broad public support. This kind of dystopia also includes films presenting the consequences of contemporary hedonism and consumerism. The problem is, however, that works critical of these phenomena were themselves advertisements for attractive products. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 125-128. What is the nature of sound? What is the nature of volume? William James, in attempting to address these simple questions wrote, “ The voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little relation to the size of the ocean that yields it . The ear and eye are comparatively minute organs, yet they give us feelings of great volume” (203-­4, itals. original). This subtle extensivity of sensation finds its peer in the subtle yet significant influence (...) of habituated action upon our lives. This expansive quality of habit­making is what Craig Dongoski's bodies of work enable us to appreciate. Nearly ten years ago Dongoski had a habit of turning on his audio recorder every day at three o'clock for three minutes. No matter what the setting, what the activity, Dongoski recorded the ambient sounds in his environment at that moment. As it happened, one day he was teaching a drawing class and he recorded the sounds of their pencils scratching across their respective surfaces. This was a critical moment for him. Later he would place a contact mic onto a drawing surface and record the sound of his signature. Signatures change over time, they respond to the conditions in which they are performed. Signatures speak volumes about the author, but a practice of attunement is required for the volume to be audible. To hear all that a signature can tell about its author, the listener must tune into the frequency at which this information is being broadcast. Dongoski's drawings and video works draw­out the peculiar artifact that habit makes of living: habits establish a tempo of living and it seems that one's habitus is the signature of habitual living. I sat down with Craig in an attempt to sound­out some of the depths of thought in his practice. What follows is selected from our conversation. Paul Boshears (PB): Clearly your work is dealing with time: from the painstaking action of rendering the drawing to the free­form approach of launching a microphone into a body of water and waiting to see what's recorded. Craig Dongoski (CD): Are we talking about the films or the drawings? PB: Well, it's a bit of both in my mind. I know the drawings on first glance seem to be these flows of lines without concern but I realize that there is this painstaking action involved. CD: I'm interested in time because I'm interested in forms outside of control, outside of politics, and outside of economics. I think that art, when it's alive, does go beyond those. I'm interested in duality and paradox—a stream of contradiction, I suppose. For instance, scale and size. There is a tendency to think that these are the same thing. But really you can have something small that has a lot of scale—look at Goya's drawings, Los Caprichos , they're very small but they have a lot of scale. Likewise things that are spontaneous don't necessarily mean that they take only two or three seconds to do. This latter distinction is what I'm most interested in. Having that appearance of spontaneity. The image has rhythm, you can latch onto it; but the reality is that it took many hours—and many months in some cases—to arrive at. And this is in keeping with geological time. I like to insert this series of thoughts into my work sometimes as an attempt to make some of this stuff comprehensible. There are all these distractions inundating us throughout our days now. Time gets tweaked by all these technologies that we interact with daily. There's more than just digital time or the mechanical time of your watch. There's biological time, that time in which you're growing. PB: I'm reminded of McLuhan here: he made his career by making that strong claim that the humans of today are not the same humans of three generations ago because technology has fundamentally changed us. Are we not the same human beings as a hundred years ago? CD: I mean, I don't think we're the same human beings that we were when he was around! It's my understanding that before painting a flower, monks would meditate for hours on that flower and then they would complete the painting of that flower in less than a minute. That's what I want to point out about our world today, we have all this information, but how much of it are we metabolizing? PB: Is there a message you're looking for? Or that you're trying to share? CD: These drawings set­up the circumstances for me to continue them forever. I'm only about six years into it, but with more time, things can unfold. You know? If you take this cup of coffee and vow to restrict your work to only this material and medium for seven years—you'll make interesting work. The problem is that most people can't hold on to things or they give up or they get distracted. They don't trust that anything is possible; anything is potential material. Staying with this cup of coffee example, we can get enveloped in the history of the recycling logo, or the process for harvesting coffee and so on. The same is true for my work as it has lead me into places like graphical music scores. I had, of course, known about John Cage's notations and I'd always been interested in sound itself, but this drawing practice made it feasible to explore the intersections in a meaningful way. I think that if you trust your instincts and your curiosities and your abilities, then the bus drives itself. Look at Roman Opalka, he's kind of the patron saint of time painting. The claim is that no one can count to a billion in a lifetime so he's set­out to paint to seven sevens (7,777,777). He began with white numbers on a black field but over the years he has gradually reduced the black field to ever­lightening grays. His plan is to paint these seven sevens on what ostensibly will be white on white. PB: It occurs to me that I've never thought of the actual, literal, meaning of “microphone” in relation to “microscope.” The mic has made everything loud, the world's not allowed to be quiet anymore. Maybe we should call them “macrophones” since telephone's already taken... CD: Well, a microscope is a lens. What got me interested in sound was that a microphone acts like a lens. There are wide angle lenses, or a lens that gets your eye up close to something far away, or at a tiny level. The same is true of the microphone. You can use a parabolic mic to hear what the coach is saying on a sports field or a mic that picks­up the sound from the entire cathedral. There's this whole gamut... I'm kind of playing with the words here. I'm into the minuteness of the sound, but I'm interested in the minuteness of the mark itself. PB: I guess it's a Deluezean, generative, statement, then? It's not a metaphor, it's an actual thing with which we can work. CD : That's right. PB: While doing some background work on you I found myself at interesting places on the internet. For example, Konstantin Raudive and a brief jog into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP); perhaps this was just synchronicity. But, it's a happy coincidence nonetheless because the them of this issue of continent. is “the moraine” and one of the nuances of this term is “what remains.” Is there a metaphysical or epistemological problem that you're sorting­out here? CD: Think about fossils: fossils are the first recording device, you know? It's the first, natural, recording device. It's in this way that I think my works are fossilized time. Artifacts of that process. Van Gogh is a strong source for me in this regard: it's not what he's painting it's how. You're seeing his nervous system at work. The what is so incidental, the chairs, the flowers, etc. It's funny: when I first started doing this, before I started drawing voices, I was doing these things in cemeteries. I was doing automatic drawings. And when I took this experiment to its maximum I was taking hydrophones and burying them in abandoned graves. I was thinking about the mic rig as the south coordinate and I'd use a shortwave radio as the north coordinate. Usually it was just white noise, but on the east and west I'd station a writer and a drawer. So I'd have these things going on simultaneously and I'd be mixing them at the same time. PB: How'd it come out? CD: Well, just like you'd expect. It was a lot of white noise. But I think that Raudive was on to something. Burroughs used to say something similar when he'd talk about being in a foreign country where he didn't know the language and then he'd start to hear things. At the base, what I'm doing is pattern recognition. I do have a writing component to the drawings. I haven't exploited it in a while but... I use a vocoder, which was developed to encrypt spy signals during one of the World Wars. The mechanism takes two channels, one being the spy's signal combined with noise and then the other channel is a sine wave so that the intended recipient can pick out the words. So I did something like this with Beowulf. I tried combining the spoken word with other television and radio sources, but that didn't work because a book on tape is usually read in a very steady clip and the result was too garbled. So the second try, instead of drawing I was writing, trying to articulate the sounds that I could hear in this garbled transmission of Beowulf. You start to think you hear something, so you start to write what you think you're hearing. But what you're hearing is just being triggered by this articulating action. When the sound of the drawing lines up with the sound of the word you get something. But it's not ever what you're really hearing. You start writing and you're trying to keep up with what you think you're hearing and it is truly, in the most true sense of the phrase, automatic writing. You can contrive and go into a “spirit trance” or whatever, but... PB: It's uninteresting to you? CD: Well, it's unbelievable. It's just listening to sounds and following along. The magic is out there, there are no tricks or anything. You do this exercise with twenty people and you will get twenty totally different writings. But, you're creating the sound and you're creating the writing as an interpretation. That's the thing with EVP, it's homophonic translation. PB: Do you trust a straight line? I know you start with these meticulous lines at the beginning of the drawings but they do change over time. CD: I'm trying to show that there are these imperfections in structures and that over the reiterations of these structures these imperfections become amplified. But you can see them in tree formation as well. The rings alter their shape as the trees grow. PB: Is that your transmission then? You're not just receiving these sounds but you're broadcasting this message as well? CD: Things exist because of their opposites. These drawings are really about nothing. It's the first body of work I've had where people project so much of stuff onto the works. So there you go, things existing because of their opposites. It's kind of like with Mike Kelley: the work was about a critique of commodity culture and commodifying emotions. Using toys this was a critique of production. But then suddenly people were saying it was about abuse and the abuse that Mike Kelley had suffered. And it wasn't but he heard that and said, “I'll go with it,” and so he did. I think that's the nature of communication: I send this but you receive that instead and this makes me think about what I sent in a different way. (shrink)

The paper presents and discusses measurements of gravitational redshift made between 1959 and 1971 by Pound and Rebka, Schiffer and Marshall, Brault, Blamont and Roddier, and finally by Snider. It emphasizes the importance of new measurement techniques such as wavelength modulation, electronic amplification, and scattering of atomic beams to the emergence of new tests of Einstein's GRS prediction, which were perceived by the scientific community as the first ‘clean’ verifications of GRS. In particular, the race to be the first (...) to apply the Mössbauer effect to the GRS problem is described. As soon as the Mössbauer effect was stabilized, it was transformed into a measurement technology that in turn triggered new types of experimental tests of GRS. (shrink)

The ability to distinguish between an individual's own actions and those of another person is a requirement for successful joint action, particularly in domains such as group music making where precise interpersonal coordination ensures perceptual overlap in the effects of co-performers' actions. We tested the hypothesis that such coordination benefits from simultaneous integration and segregation of information about ‘self’ and ‘other’ in an experiment using a musical joint action paradigm. Sixteen pairs of individuals with little or no musical training performed (...) a dyadic synchronization task on a pair of electronic music boxes. The relationship between pitches produced by paired participants (same vs. different) and the relationship between movement frequencies required to trigger synchronous tones (congruent vs. incongruent) were varied in a repeated measures design. The results indicate that interpersonal coordination was most accurate when sounds were different in pitch but movement frequency was congruent. Under other conditions, participants often drifted apart, resulting in poor coordination, especially with same sounds and incongruent movements across co-performers. These findings suggest that interpersonal coordination was facilitated when simultaneous self-other integration and segregation occurred across sensory modalities in an asymmetrical manner where pitch relations favoured segregation via auditory streaming while movement congruence favoured integration via visuo-motor coupling. Such self-other representational balance may enable co-performers to maintain autonomous control while attending, anticipating, and adapting to each other's timing when joint action requires precise temporal coordination. (shrink)

Marketing scholars have extensively examined the role of altruistic and ecological personal values and pro-environmental identity in ethical consumption decisions. Conversely, the role of egoistic personal values and other identities has received scant attention from researchers. This research examines the role of altruistic, egoistic, and ecological personal values in triggering two types of identities: pro-environmental and car-authority. The effects of values and identities on personal norms and attitudes toward electric cars were also examined. A sample of Egyptian consumers responded to (...) an electronic survey, and collected data were analyzed using SEM. The findings generally support the VIP framework, where biospheric values significantly affect pro-environmental identity, and pro-environmental identity affects personal norms. Furthermore, personal norms affected attitudes positively. A different path was obtained which starts with biospheric and altruistic values affecting car authority positively and negatively, respectively. Car authority identity was found to affect attitudes directly, although this is accepted at lower confidence levels. A discussion of research findings, implications, and research limitations were also presented. (shrink)

This proposes a new theory of Quantum measurement; a state reduction theory in which reduction is to the elements of the number operator basis of a system, triggered by the occurrence of annihilation or creation (or lowering or raising) operators in the time evolution of a system. It is from these operator types that the acronym ‘LARC’ is derived. Reduction does not occur immediately after the trigger event; it occurs at some later time with probability P t per unit time, (...) where P t is very small. Localisation of macroscopic objects occurs in the natural way: photons from an illumination field are reflected off a body and later absorbed by another body. Each possible absorption of a photon by a molecule in the second body generates annihilation and raising operators, which in turn trigger a probability per unit time P t of a state reduction into the number operator basis for the photon field and the number operator basis of the electron orbitals of the molecule. Since all photons in the illumination field have come from the location of the first body, wherever that is, a single reduction leads to a reduction of the position state of the first body relative to the second, with a total probability of mP t , where m is the number of photon absorption events. Unusually for a reduction theory, the larc theory is naturally relativistic. (shrink)

This article discusses the work of George Seddon as a significant Australian intellectual whose writing on postcolonial settler-descendant relations with land and nature is a major contribution to academic and public life. Seddon’s originality lies partly in his bridging knowledge and expertise in both the humanities and sciences. However, while there is a reliance upon factual data drawn from geology, botany and zoology, Seddon’s analyses of language and culture can appear idiosyncratic and unsystematic in terms of social science methods. Based (...) on introspection, the work might be considered ‘autoethnography’, though Seddon seeks to do more than tell stories about himself. In acknowledging both the brilliance and shortcomings of Seddon’s work, I present some examples of how it has stimulated my own research on the cultural implications of naming species and places in Australia. (shrink)

Social network sites are a new communication channel to convey CSR information. They are interactive channels that let users participate, spread content and generate positive and negative electronic word-of-mouth about companies that can dramatically affect their reputation and future business. To identify the factors behind this behaviour, we designed a causal model to explain the intention to both comment on and share a negative corporate social responsibility news posted on Facebook. We included the following as explanatory variables: social consciousness, (...) environmental consciousness, information usefulness, corporate image and attitude towards sharing and commenting on CSR news. We surveyed 208 Facebook users who evaluated a fictitious news item about an environmental issue. We observed that social and environmental consciousness influences the usefulness of information and the attitude towards behaviour, which may explain the eWOM intention of the specific news. However, corporate image can cause people to refrain from generating eWOM and spreading the news on their friend social network. (shrink)

This study investigates why successful companies have pursued creating shared value (CSV) during the COVID-19 pandemic and the immediately ensuing post-COVID-19 era. The paper aims to achieve a better understanding of the triggers that induce companies to pursue CSV initiatives. A qualitative thematic analysis of cases of CSV involving 54 companies honored by Fortune magazine within its 2022 Change the World list was investigated and systematically reviewed. Based on the analysis, we identified and classified the motivators of CSV projects (...) according to various internal and external triggers. The qualitative results revealed seven types of internal triggers for CSV initiatives. These are: (1) following founder/leader philosophy or experience, (2) foreseeing customer growth and profit potential, (3) enhancing employee loyalty and commitment, (4) developing a future talent pool, (5) improving operational efficiency and cutting costs, (6) building differentiation weapons, and (7) becoming an industry pioneer. Seven types of external triggers for CSV initiatives were also identified. These comprise (1) economic benefits, (2) environmental protection, (3) human rights, (4) public health, (5) social justice, (6) partnership availability, and (7) government stimuli. This study contributes to the CSV literature by providing analyses of the motivators that have induced CSV initiatives during the COVID-19 era. We conclude by discussing the implications for business academics and practitioners. (shrink)

System Requirements System requirements Minimum 80486, 66MHz IBM PC or full compatible ; Minimum 16MB RAM 177MB hard disk space to store and run the Nachlass, an extra 12MB in addition to this should be available during installation. SVGA monitor set to 800x600 pixels, 16-bit colour, or higher setting recommended to use and display the transcription text and facsimiles; Quad-speed CD-ROM drive or higher; Windows 3.1, 3.11; Windows 95/98; Windows NT 4.0; Windows 2000. Microsoft mouse or compatible Network versions Windows (...) NT 4, and Novell networks. Customers with Wide Area Networks should ring Customer Services to discuss specific requirements. Customer Service Contact: Customer Services, Electronic Publishing Tel: +44 1865 267979 Fax: +44 1865 267990 Email: [email protected]. (shrink)

This paper formalizes part of a well-known psychological model of emotions. In particular, the logical structure underlying the conditions that trigger emotions are studied and then hierarchically organized. The insights gained therefrom are used to guide a formalization of emotion triggers, which proceeds in three stages. The first stage captures the conditions that trigger emotions in a semiformal way, i.e., without committing to an underlying formalism and semantics. The second stage captures the main psychological notions used in the emotion (...) model in dynamic doxastic logic. The third stage introduces a BDI-based framework (belief–desire–intention) with achievement goals, which is used to firmly ground the preceding stages. The result is a formalization of emotion triggers for BDI agents with achievement goals. The idea of proceeding in these stages is to provide different levels of commitment to formalisms, so that it remains relatively easy to extend or replace the used formalisms without having to start from scratch. Finally, we show that the formalization renders properties of emotions that are in line with the psychological model on which it is based. (shrink)

Positive frequency dependent selection is a natural selection regime where the fitness of a phenotype increases with its frequency in the population. Examples can be typically found in the spread of disease tolerance strategies in a population. A characterizing feature of PFDS is that the focal allele may experience favorable selection only when it becomes more frequent in the population, while being selected against when it is rare. In this paper, by applying a solution concept from evolutionary game theory, we (...) hypothesize that the process of emergence of such alleles triggers selection for silence, where the emergence of alleles that can stay unexpressed for a period of time will be favored by selection forces. We illustrate our hypothesis using a mathematical model of a population of single locus diploid organisms with two alleles where a single mutant of an allele that experiences positive frequency dependent selection appears in a population where the other allele is a dominant. The model results show that the longer the silence interval of the new mutant before its expression, the better its chances of getting fixed in the population. However, this effect will be observable only to a certain limit after which further increase in the interval will not have an effect on the expected fixation rate. Two divergences from the simple scenario are also investigated: the nonsynchronous expression of the focal allele and its emergence in a spatial grid limited by a migration bottleneck. In all cases, it is shown that there is an evolutionary pressure inherent in the dynamics of positive frequency dependent selection on the genes to have a delayed expression. It is hypothesized that the regulation systems of such traits will be under selection for either internal silencing mechanisms or to be triggered by an external environmental condition. (shrink)

Understanding how emotions emerge is difficult without determining what characteristic of the trigger actually triggers them. Knowing whether emotional experiences self-stabilize is difficult without remembering what other processes are set in play as the emotion emerges. It is not clear either that positive feedback is required for the emergence of emotion or that an attractor model captures well what is happening when an emotion arises.

Substantial evidence implicates fast axonal transport (FAT) defects in neurodegeneration. In Alzheimer's disease (AD), it is controversial whether transport defects cause or arise from amyloid‐β (Aβ)‐induced toxicity. Using a novel, unbiased genetic screen, Morihara et al. identified kinesin light chain‐1 splice variant E (KLC1vE) as a modifier of Aβ accumulation. Here, we propose three mechanisms to explain this causal role. First, KLC1vE reduces APP transport, leading to Aβ accumulation. Second, reduced transport of APP by KLC1vE triggers an ER stress (...) response that activates the amyloidogenic pathway. Third, KLC1vE impairs transport of other KLC1 cargos that regulate amyloidogenesis, promoting Aβ retention within the secretory pathway. Collectively, KLC1vE perpetuates a vicious cycle of Aβ generation, kinase dysregulation, and global FAT impairment that inevitably leads to cellular toxicity. These concepts implicate alternative splicing of KLC1 in AD and suggest that the reciprocal influence of transport mechanisms on disease states contributes to neurodegeneration. (shrink)

In 1965, John A. Pope presented a paper entitled 'Two-Dimensional Chart of Quantum Chemistry' to illustrate the inverse relationship between the sophistication of computational methods and the size of molecules under study. This chart, later called the 'hyperbola of quantum chemistry', succinctly summarized the growing tension between the proponents of two different approaches to computation–the ab initio method and semiempirical method–in the early years of electronic digital computers. Examining the development of quantum chemistry after World War II, I focus (...) on the role of computers in shaping disciplinary identity. The availability of high-speed computers in the early 1950s attracted much attention from quantum chemists, and their community took shape through a series of conferences and personal networking. However, this emerging community soon encountered the problem of communication between groups that differed in the degree of reliance they placed on computers. I show the complexity of interactions between computing technology and a scientific discipline, in terms of both forming and splitting the community of quantum chemistry. (shrink)

Electronic gambling machines are among the most harmful forms of gambling. The structural characteristics of EGMs prolong and reinforce gambling similarly to other habit-forming technologies. In Finland, the wide availability of EGMs in non-casino locations is likely to further reinforce the habit-creating nature of gambling offer by incorporating EGMs into everyday practices. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the landscape of gambling in Finland. The most visible change was the closure of land-based EGMs in non-casino environments, arcades, and the casino in (...) March 2020. Since then, the status of EGMs has varied depending on the pandemic situation. The current qualitative study focuses on how Finnish past-year gamblers experience prolonged EGM closures and occasional re-openings 1 year into the pandemic. The data consist of responses to an online questionnaire eliciting experiences as well as interviews. To aid our analysis, we employ the sociological pragmatist theory of the concept of “habit.” The analysis focuses on gambler experiences on EGM shutdowns and re-openings, and views on whether closures have contributed to abstaining from gambling or to shifting to other gambling products. Policy implications of the results are discussed. (shrink)

The importance of providing a positive employee experience has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. However, peak experience, as a highly positive experience, has been studied and applied in the field of human resource management only to a very limited extent. We still know little about how employees’ peak experience happens and what the impact will be. Therefore, based on the affective events theory and the two-factor theory, our research conducted an in-depth exploration of EPE through three studies. (...) In Study 1, we constructed a theoretical model centered on EPE based on and interview data. In Study 2, we developed and validated a scale for measuring triggers of EPE, which is a four-dimensional scale with 16 items. In Study 3, we adopted structural equation modeling to examine the relationship between EPE and its triggers as well as its impacts using data from 424 valid questionnaires. Our research shows that elevation, insight, pride, and connection can trigger EPE; employees are more likely to have proactive behavior and word-of-mouth referrals after they have PE; and the more job-relevant the triggers are, the stronger the association between PE and PB is. Our research provides a reliable and effective measurement tool for scholars to study EPE, broadens the findings of PE and EX, and points out feasible measures for organizations to create EPE. (shrink)

A Research Guide to the Ancient World: Print and Electronic Sources is a partially annotated bibliography that covers the study of the ancient world, and closes the traditional subject gap between the humanities and the social sciences in this area of study. This book is the only bibliographic resource available for such holistic coverage.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) required healthcare providers in the United States to adopt and demonstrate meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) by January 1, 2014. In many ways, EHRs mark a notable improvement over paper medical records as they are more easily accessible and allow for electronic searching and sharing of medical history. However, as EHRs have become mandated by ARRA, many nurses now rely upon computers far more heavily during nurse–patient interactions, (...) thereby decreasing the level of direct interpersonal communication between the two. There is evidence that eye contact between nurses and patients positively affects patient satisfaction. Above and beyond the issue of patient satisfaction is the more basic ethical issue of respecting the patient as a person. The author argues that the templates used in electronic health systems have the possibility of eroding the respect for humanity that is the hallmark of nurse–patient relationships, as signalled by the American Nurses Association’s first principle in their Code of Ethics. Using concepts from philosophers Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, the author provides guidance as to what an ethical interaction between nurse and patient should look like in an age of EHRs. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition is the only CD-ROM to give you instant facsimile and text access to the 20,000 pages of the philosopher's Nachlass as catalogued by Professor von Wright in his 1982 publication The Wittgenstein Papers. -/- The result of 10 years of academic research and editorial work by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen this electronic edition is the first scholarly resource to apply a uniform, well-documented, consistent set of editorial principles to (...) the writings. The CD-ROM is a joint publication between Oxford University Press and the Wittgenstein Archives and is published in Text & Facsimile and Text Only formats. (shrink)

As a transitional economy, Vietnam has undergone tremendous changes over recent decades within a ‘fusion’ context that blends both traditional and modern values from its complex history. However, few studies have explored how contemporary issues in the context of Vietnam have brought both obstacles and skillful initiatives to managerial approaches to doing business. We draw on the concepts of social trust and institutional theory to explore how informal institutions such as religious forces can contribute to the development of individual trust (...) and whether individuals are willing to extend trust beyond familial networks. We contribute to the notion of a moral conception of trust by exploring how Buddhism in particular has initiated distinctive managerial approaches in the context of Vietnam, in response to dilemmas of social trust. Our findings highlight that as an informal institution, engaged Buddhism yields significant impact on the formation of social trust. We carried out in-depth interviews in Vietnam with 33 organizational leaders who were Buddhist practitioners, using thematic analysis to elucidate our findings and arguments. The study reveals how the incorporation of Buddhist principles has fostered context-sensitive, non-extreme, and reflexive managerial approaches to enhance morality as a response to social trust issues. (shrink)

The concept of vulnerability is widely used in bioethics, particularly in research ethics and public health ethics. The traditional approach construes vulnerability as inherent in individuals or the groups to which they belong and views vulnerability as requiring special protections. Florencia Luna and other bioethicists continue to challenge traditional ways of conceptualizing and applying the term. Luna began proposing a layered approach to this concept and recently extended this proposal to offer two new concepts to analyze the concept of vulnerability, (...) namely understanding external conditions that trigger vulnerability and layers of vulnerability with cascading effects. Luna's conception of vulnerability is useful, which we demonstrate by applying her layered view and the new analyses in multiple contexts. We begin by outlining Luna's view and we use vignettes from healthcare involving transgender patients, the care of patients in psychiatric contexts, and research involving prisoners to illustrate how each part of Luna's concept elucidates important moral issues. (shrink)

This study examines why and when negative workplace gossip promotes self-serving behaviors by the employees being targeted. Using conservation of resources theory, we find that targets tend to increase their political acts as a result of ego depletion triggered by negative gossip. We also show that sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment and moral disengagement moderate this process. Specifically, we demonstrate that targets with high levels of sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment are more likely to experience ego depletion, and that targets with high (...) levels of moral disengagement will find it easier to persuade themselves to engage in political acts. We conducted a three-wave time-lagged survey of 265 employees in Guangdong, China, to test our hypotheses. The results support our theoretical model and indicate that COR theory can be used to explain the impacts of negative workplace gossip. Alongside our important and timely theoretical contributions, we provide new perspectives on how managers can avoid or mitigate these political acts. (shrink)

Digitization of a health record changes its accessibility. An electronic health record (EHR) can be accessed by multiple authorized users. Health information from EHRs contributes to learning healthcare systems’ development. The objective of this systematic review is to answer a question: What are ethical issues concerning research using EHRs in the literature? We searched Medline Ovid, Embase and Scopus for publications concerning ethical issues of research use of EHRs. We employed the constant comparative method to retrieve common ethical themes. (...) We descriptively summarized empirical studies. The study reveals the breadth, depth, and complexity of ethical problems associated with research use of EHRs. The central ethical question that emerges from the review is how to manage access to EHRs. Managing accessibility consists of interconnected and overlapping issues: streamlining research access to EHRs, minimizing risk, engaging and educating patients, as well as ensuring trustworthy governance of EHR data. Most of the ethical problems concerning EHR-based research arise from rapid cultural change. The framing of concepts of privacy, as well as individual and public dimensions of beneficence, are changing. We are currently living in the middle of this transition period. Human emotions and mental habits, as well as laws, are lagging behind technological developments. In the medical tradition, individual patient’s health has always been in the center. Transformation of healthcare care, its digitalization, seems to have some impacts on our perspective of health care ethics, research ethics and public health ethics. (shrink)

Because of difficulty processing the electronic medical record data of patients with cerebrovascular disease, there is little mature recognition technology capable of identifying the named entity of cerebrovascular disease. Excellent research results have been achieved in the field of named entity recognition, but there are several problems in the pre processing of Chinese named entities that have multiple meanings, of which neglecting the combination of contextual information is one. Therefore, to extract five categories of key entity information for diseases, (...) symptoms, body parts, medical examinations, and treatment in electronic medical records, this paper proposes the use of a BERT-BiGRU-CRF named entity recognition method, which is applied to the field of cerebrovascular diseases. The BERT layer first converts the electronic medical record text into a low-dimensional vector, then uses this vector as the input to the BiGRU layer to capture contextual features, and finally uses conditional random fields to capture the dependency between adjacent tags. The experimental results show that the F1 score of the model reaches 90.38%. (shrink)

Referent Tracking (RT) advocates the use of instance unique identifiers to refer to the entities comprising the subject matter of patient health records. RT promises many benefits to those who use health record data to improve patient care. To further the adoption of the paradigm we provide an illustration of how data from an EHR application needs to be decomposed in order to make it accord with the tenets of RT. We describe the ontological principles on which this decomposition is (...) based in order to allow integration efforts to be applied in similar ways to other EHR applications. We find that an ordinary statement from an EHR contains a surprising amount of “hidden” data that are only revealed by its decomposition according to these principles. (shrink)

Next SectionObjectives To evaluate the adequacy of paediatric informed consent and its augmentation by a supplemental computer-based module in paediatric endoscopy. Methods The Consent-20 instrument was developed and piloted on 47 subjects. Subsequently, parents of 101 children undergoing first-time, diagnostic upper endoscopy performed under moderate IV sedation were prospectively and consecutively, blinded, randomised and enrolled into two groups that received either standard form-based informed consent or standard form-based informed consent plus a commercial (Emmi Solutions, Inc, Chicago, Il), sixth grade level, (...) interactive learning module (electronic assisted consent). Anonymously and electronically, the subjects' anxiety (State Trait Anxiety Inventory), satisfaction (Modified Group Health Association of America), number of questions asked, and attainment of informed consent were assessed (Consent-20). Statistics were calculated using t test, paired t test, and Mann Whitney tests. Results The ability to achieve informed consent, as measured by the new instrument, was 10% in the control form-based consent group and 33% in the electronic assisted consent group (p<0.0001). Electronically assisting form-based informed consent did not alter secondary outcome measures of subject satisfaction, anxiety or number of questions asked in a paediatric endoscopy unit. Conclusions This study demonstrates the limitations of form-based informed consent methods for paediatric endoscopy. It also shows that even when necessary information was repeated electronically in a comprehensive and standardised video, informed consent as measured by our instrument was incompletely achieved. The supplemental information did, however, significantly improve understanding in a manner that did not negatively impact workflow, subject anxiety or subject satisfaction. Additional study of informed consent is required. Clinical trial registration number ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT00899392. (shrink)

How is it possible that emotions in the community can be influenced by media? According to the paper’s concept, this is only understandable if we accept with Marshall McLuhan that media and the human body are not separable. There is no divide. The medium is the message expressed through the body/human being. This has preconditions, because the connection must be based on an analog principle that serves as the transmitter. This lies in non-discursive affectively relevant forms and an equally affectively (...) evaluative mode of perception, as empirical research now confirms. On this basis, as Daniel N. Stern shows, people operate “with vigorous goal-directedness to assure social interactions.” This points to the second premise, that every body/human being – infallibly – perceives a promise in communion with others, namely that of happiness, security, and community. This concept has far-reaching implications for how communities understand themselves, as the research of poststructuralists and frame theorists demonstrates, and as the trial and death of Socrates in ancient Athens attests. (shrink)

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is one of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's significant initiatives that aims to improve treatment outcomes and lower health care costs. This article takes CER a step further and suggests a novel clinical application for it. The article proposes the development of a national framework to enable physicians to rapidly perform, through a computerized service, medically sound personalized comparisons of the effectiveness of possible treatments for patients' conditions. A treatment comparison for a given patient (...) would be based on data from electronic health records of a cohort of clinically similar patients who received the treatments previously and whose outcomes were recorded. This framework has unique potential to simultaneously improve the quality of health care, reduce its cost, and alleviate public concerns about rationing and “one size fits all” medicine. (shrink)