Have you noticed that kids drop everything when T.V. commercials come on? Action ceases, conversations subside; I have even seen food fall from kids' immobilized lips. Isn't it interesting how kids can forget what we taught them yesterday, but months or even years later can remember "Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun" or how to spell relief? Wouldn't it be great if they would pay teachers the attention they give commercials?

"OLD TESTS ARE BEST FORGOTTEN!" Ay least that is what most students believe. "You finish your test, your teacher 'gives' you your grade and you'll never have to remember that stuff again!" It's too bad that students regard tests to narrowly. But aren't such attitudes cultivated by the popular treatment of tests as ends in themselves? For example, when is the last time you studied the traffic safety rules for your state? Probably it was thefirst time you studied them in (...) preparation for your driver's license exam. When you passed the test, did you seek out the correct answers to the ones you missed? Probably not; it would have seemed unnecessary, since you "passed." Ever wonder about the questions that surgeons or airplane pilots missed, but failed to inquire about afterwards? (shrink)

It is easy to create classroom discipline problems. By following the ten simple rules listed below you should be able to substantially improve your skill at this popular teacher pastime.

There are no national recommendations for routine screening for sickle cell trait, nor is there guidance on whether or how to notify donors that they might be tested or identified as having sickle cell trait. As a result, the organizations that collect blood have implemented variable policies about whether and how to inform prospective donors of the possible screening and discovery of this noncommunicable condition. The question of what they should do is related to the broader question of how to (...) handle incidental and secondary findings. In a recent report, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues outline a framework for handling such findings in the clinical, research, and direct‐to‐consumer contexts. While the commission's report did not directly address incidental and secondary findings in the public health context of blood donation, it made several overarching recommendations that apply in all contexts where such findings might arise. This essay outlines the special issues raised by discovering sickle cell trait in blood donation and considers the implications of the commission's framework for that problem. (shrink)

Ontology has been proposed as a solution to the 'Tower of Babel' problem that threatens the semantic interoperability of information systems constructed independently for the same domain. In information systems research and applications, ontologies are often implemented by formalizing the meanings of words from natural languages. However, words in different natural languages sometimes subdivide the same domain of reality in terms of different conceptual categories. If the words and their associated concepts in two natural languages, or even in two terminological (...) traditions within the same language, do not have common referents in the real world, an ontology based on word meanings will inherit the 'Tower of Babel' problem from the languages involved, rather than solve it. In this paper we present evidence from a preliminary comparison of landscape terms in English with those in the Yindjibarndi language of northwestern Australia demonstrating that this problem is not just hypothetical. Some possible solutions are suggested. (shrink)

The shape of the Earth's surface, its topography, is a fundamental dimension of the environment, shaping or mediating many other environmental flows or functions. But there is a major divergence in the way that topography is conceptualized in different domains. Topographic cartographers, information scientists, geomorphologists and environmental modelers typically conceptualize topographic variability as a continuous field of elevations or as some discrete approximation to such a field. Pilots, explorers, anthropologists, ecologists, hikers, and archeologists, on the other hand, typically conceptualize this (...) same variability in terms of hills and valleys, mountains and plains, barrows and trenches, that is, as (special sorts of) objects, with locations, shapes, and often names of their own. In this chapter, we sketch an approach to bridging this fundamental gap in geographic information infrastructure. (shrink)

Despite the prevalence of beliefs across religions regarding repentance and divine forgiveness and their recognition in theoretical and religious studies, these constructs are relatively understudied phenomena in the social sciences. Furthermore, in recent years, multiple scholars have argued for the need for research to systematically study and highlight the experience and processes of repentance and divine forgiveness. Subsequently, this study explored processes of repentance, antecedents and motivations of repentance, resources to aid in repentance, and outcomes of repentance that should be (...) further examined. This analysis was done using in-depth qualitative interviews with 15 emerging adult religious exemplars identifying with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The authors used NVivo 12 and team-based qualitative coding processes to identify themes. Repentance processes included personal change, took various lengths of time, were a part of participants’ religious identity, were recurrent processes, and were influenced by participants’ view of God. Antecedents and motivations included religious practices and rituals, emotions, interpersonal interactions, and their relationship with God. Resources that aided in repentance included religious practices and rituals, interpersonal relationships, and a relationship with God. Finally, participants reported experiencing personal changes in their behavior and character, positive emotions (including feelings of divine forgiveness), improved interpersonal relationships, and a better relationship with God. These processes align with some previously discovered and theorized findings on repentance, contribute a number of novel findings, and offer future direction regarding the motivations, resources, and transformative experiences that participants reported in their personal repentance and experience of forgiveness. (shrink)

Two hundred and sixty-three subjects each gave examples for one of five geographic categories: geographic features, geographic objects, geographic concepts, something geographic, and something that could be portrayed on a map. The frequencies of various responses were significantly different, indicating that the basic ontological terms feature, object, etc., are not interchangeable but carry different meanings when combined with adjectives indicating geographic or mappable. For all of the test phrases involving geographic, responses were predominantly natural features such as mountain, river, lake, (...) ocean, hill. Artificial geographic features such as town and city were listed hardly at all for geographic categories, an outcome that contrasts sharply with the disciplinary self-understanding of academic geography. However, geographic artifacts and fiat objects, such as roads, cities, boundaries, countries, and states, were frequently listed by the subjects responding to the phrase something that could be portrayed on a map. In this paper, we present the results of these experiments in visual form, and provide interpretations and implications for further research. (shrink)

In the clinical setting, questions of medical ethics raise a host of perplexing problems, often complicated by conflicting perspectives and the need to make immediate decisions. In this volume, bioethicists and physicians provide a nuanced, in-depth approach to the difficult issues involved in bioethics consultation. Addressing the needs of researchers, clinicians, and other health professionals on the front lines of bioethics practice, the contributors focus primarily on practical concerns -- whether ethics consultation is best done by individuals, teams, or committees (...) how an ethics consult service should be structured the need for institutional support and techniques and programs for educating and training staff -- without neglecting more theoretical considerations, such as the importance of character or the viability of organizational ethics. (shrink)

When Ken Malone investigates a case of something causing mental static across the United States, he is teleported to a world that doesn't exist.

It has been argued in the conservation literature that giving conservation absolute priority over competing interests would best protect the environment. Attributing infinite value to the environment or claiming it is ‘priceless’ are two ways of ensuring this priority (e.g. Hargrove 1989; Bulte and van Kooten 2000; Ackerman and Heinzerling 2002; McCauley 2006; Halsing and Moore 2008). But such proposals would paralyse conservation efforts. We describe the serious problems with these proposals and what they mean for practical applications, and we (...) diagnose and resolve some conceptual confusions permeating the literature on this topic. (shrink)

In “Bioethics and the Whole: Pluralism, Consensus, and the Transmutation of Bioethical Methods into Gold,” Patricia Martin identifies themes common to three emerging approaches to clinical bioethics--clinical pragmatism, ethics facilitation, and mediation-in order to develop an “ethical consensus method” that can serve as a “practical, step-by-step guide” for decision making She is to be applauded both for her identification of themes common to these three approaches and for her contribution to what we hope will be a growing literature on practical (...) methods for problem solving in clinical bioethics that take seriously the ideal of consensus. After a few preliminary remarks concerning Martin's working model, we focus the majority of our commentary on the notion of “consensus,” which is at the heart of her “ethical consensus method,” and the three approaches from which it is drawn. (shrink)

In “Bioethics and the Whole: Pluralism, Consensus, and the Transmutation of Bioethical Methods into Gold,” Patricia Martin identifies themes common to three emerging approaches to clinical bioethics--clinical pragmatism, ethics facilitation, and mediation-in order to develop an “ethical consensus method” that can serve as a “practical, step-by-step guide” for decision making She is to be applauded both for her identification of themes common to these three approaches and for her contribution to what we hope will be a growing literature on practical (...) methods for problem solving in clinical bioethics that take seriously the ideal of consensus. After a few preliminary remarks concerning Martin's working model, we focus the majority of our commentary on the notion of “consensus,” which is at the heart of her “ethical consensus method,” and the three approaches from which it is drawn. (shrink)

ON DECEMBER 10, 1991 Charles Shonubi, a Nigerian citizen but a resident of the USA, was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport for the importation of heroin into the United States.1 Shonubi's modus operandi was ``balloon swallowing.'' That is, heroin was mixed with another substance to form a paste and this paste was sealed in balloons which were then swallowed. The idea was that once the illegal substance was safely inside the USA, the smuggler would pass the balloons and (...) recover the heroin. On the date of his arrest, Shonubi was found to have swallowed 103 balloons containing a total of 427.4 grams of heroin. There was little doubt about Shonubi's guilt. In fact, there was considerable evidence that he had made at least seven prior heroin-smuggling trips to the USA (although he was not tried for these). In October 1992 Shonubi was convicted in a United States District Court for possessing and importing heroin. Although the conviction was only for crimes associated with Shonubi's arrest date of December 10, 1991, the sentencing judge, Jack B. Weinstein, also made a ®nding that Shonubi had indeed made seven prior drug-smuggling trips to the USA. The interesting part of this case was in the sentencing. According to the federal sentencing guidelines, the sentence in cases such as this should depend on the total quantity of heroin involved. This instruction was interpreted rather broadly.. (shrink)

Proposed models of closed timelike curves have been shown to enable powerful information-processing protocols. We examine the simulation of models of CTCs both by other models of CTCs and by physical systems without access to CTCs. We prove that the recently proposed transition probability CTCs are physically equivalent to postselection CTCs, in the sense that one model can simulate the other with reasonable overhead. As a consequence, their information-processing capabilities are equivalent. We also describe a method for quantum computers to (...) simulate Deutschian CTCs. In cases for which the overhead is reasonable, it might be possible to perform the simulation in a table-top experiment. This approach has the benefit of resolving some ambiguities associated with the equivalent circuit model of Ralph et al. Furthermore, we provide an explicit form for the state of the CTC system such that it is a maximum-entropy state, as prescribed by Deutsch. (shrink)

In Book II of the Republic, Socrates briefly depicts a city where each inhabitant contributes to the welfare of all by performing the role for which he or she is naturally suited. Socrates calls this city the `true city ' and the `healthy one'. Nearly all commentators have argued that Socrates' praise of the city cannot be taken at face value, claiming that it does not represent Socrates' preferred community. The point of this paper is to argue otherwise. The claim (...) is that Socrates genuinely believes the city is a healthy and desirable city, and that he believes that the First City is in fact superior to the Kallipolis. (shrink)

Since it is only five years since the publication of our paper, "Geographical categories: An ontological investigation" (Smith and Mark 2001), it seems somewhat strange to be making retrospective comments on the piece. Nevertheless, the field is moving quickly, and much has happened since the article appeared. A large number of papers have already cited the work, which suggests that there is a seam here that people find worthy of being mined. In this short essay, we first review the (...) paper and attempt to assess its significance from the perspective of our current work. We then put the paper in the context of our individual and joint works, which led up to it, and summarize our research trajectories since the paper appeared, pointing out what some of this reveals about spatial ontology in general. We conclude with some remarks on the future of ontological research in geographical information science. (shrink)

Baggs and Chemero (2018) propose that certain tensions between enaction and ecological psychology arise due different interpretations about what is meant by the “environment.” In the enactive approach the emphasis is on the umwelt, which describes the environment as the “meaningful, lived surroundings of a given individual.” The ecological approach, on the other hand, emphasises what they refer to as the habitat “the environment as a set of resources for a typical, or ideal, member of a species.” By making this (...) distinction, these authors claim they are able to retain the best of both the ecological and the enactive approaches. Herein I propose an account of the individuation of habits that straddles this distinction, what I call a compatabilist account. This is done in two parts. The first part teases out a host of compatibilities that exist between the enactive account as developed by Di Paolo et al. (2017) and the skilled intentionality framework as developed by Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) and Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014). In part two these compatibilities are brought together with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to develop the notion of enhabiting. Enhabiting describes a set of ongoing processes by which an umwelt emerges from and is reproduced within the relationship between an embodied subject and their habitat. Thus, enhabiting points toward a point of intersection between enaction and ecological psychology. To enhabit is bring forth (to enact), within (to inhabit). (shrink)

Mobile devices with health apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, crowd-sourced information, and other data sources have enabled research by new classes of researchers. Independent researchers, citizen scientists, patient-directed researchers, self-experimenters, and others are not covered by federal research regulations because they are not recipients of federal financial assistance or conducting research in anticipation of a submission to the FDA for approval of a new drug or medical device. This article addresses the difficult policy challenge of promoting the welfare and interests of (...) research participants, as well as the public, in the absence of regulatory requirements and without discouraging independent, innovative scientific inquiry. The article recommends a series of measures, including education, consultation, transparency, self-governance, and regulation to strike the appropriate balance. (shrink)

Alienation and Connection addresses social constructs that perpetuate alienation through suffering. The contributors discuss how alienation through suffering in a variety of contexts can be transformed into connection and reconnection: human relationship with the environment, economic and social systems that disconnect and reconnect, cultural constructs that divide or can heal, encountered difference that brings opportunity, and various manifestations of personal pain that can be survived and even overcome.

This volume brings together a set of critical essays on the thought of Professor Doctor H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr., Co-Founding Editor of the Philosophy and Medicine book series. Amongst the founders of bioethics, Professor Engelhardt, looms large. Many of his books and articles have appeared in multiple languages, including Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese. The essays in this book focus critically on a wide swath of his work, in the process elucidating, critiquing, and/or commending the rigor and reach of (...) his thought. This volume compasses analyses of many different aspects of Engelhardt's work, including social and political philosophy, biopolitics, the philosophy of medicine, and bioethics. It brings together internationally known scholars to assess key elements of Engelhardt's work. (shrink)

The essay deals with the issue of how a non-summativist account of collective epistemic traits can be properly justified. We trace the roots of this issue in virtue epistemology and collective epistemology and then critically examine certain views advanced to justify non-summativism. We focus on those considered by Fricker, including Gilbert’s concept of plural subjects, which she endorses. We find her analysis of these views problematic for either going beyond the parameters of the summativism-nonsummativism debate or contradicting common intuitions about (...) epistemic trait ascriptions. As an alternative, we advance the idea that collective epistemic traits are system properties; or that epistemic traits act as system properties when attributed to collectives taken in their own right. Working as a system, the individual members of a collective perform their designated roles or tasks in coordination and cooperation with each other to achieve theirjoint intentions. Being attributes exclusive to systems, collective epistemic traits cannot, therefore, be attributed in the same respect to the individuals comprising these systems, thereby blocking any summative account of these traits. This model also easily sidesteps the problems besetting Fricker’s preferred one. (shrink)

Much indirect evidence supports the hypothesis that transformations of mental images are at least in part guided by motor processes, even in the case of images of abstract objects rather than of body parts. For example, rotation may be guided by processes that also prime one to see results of a specific motor action. We directly test the hypothesis by means of a dual-task paradigm in which subjects perform the Cooper-Shepard mental rotation task while executing an unseen motor rotation in (...) a given direction and at a previously learned speed. Four results support the inference that mental rotation relies on motor processes. First, motor rotation that is compatible with mental rotation results in faster times and fewer errors in the imagery task than when the two rotations are incompatible. Second, the angle through which subjects rotate their mental images, and the angle through which they rotate a joystick handle are correlated, but only if the directions of the two rotations are compatible. Third, motor rotation modifies the classical inverted V-shaped mental rotation response time function, favoring the direction of the motor rotation; indeed, in some cases motor rotation even shifts the location of the minimum of this curve in the direction of the motor rotation. Fourth, the preceding effect is sensitive not only to the direction of the motor rotation, but also to the motor speed. A change in the speed of motor rotation can correspondingly slow down or speed up the mental rotation. (shrink)

Wright’s “adaptive landscape” has been influential in evolutionary thinking but controversial, especially because the landscape that organisms encounter is altered by the evolutionary process itsel...

In “Bioethics and the Whole: Pluralism, Consensus, and the Transmutation of Bioethical Methods into Gold,” Patricia Martin identifies themes common to three emerging approaches to clinical bioethics--clinical pragmatism, ethics facilitation, and mediation-in order to develop an “ethical consensus method” that can serve as a “practical, step-by-step guide” for decision making She is to be applauded both for her identification of themes common to these three approaches and for her contribution to what we hope will be a growing literature on practical (...) methods for problem solving in clinical bioethics that take seriously the ideal of consensus. After a few preliminary remarks concerning Martin's working model, we focus the majority of our commentary on the notion of “consensus,” which is at the heart of her “ethical consensus method,” and the three approaches from which it is drawn. (shrink)

In August 2021, Froese et al. published survey data collected from 2,543 respondents on their subjective experiences living under imposed social distancing measures during COVID-19 (1). The questionnaire was issued to respondents in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. By combining the authors’ expertise in phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology, and enactive cognitive science, the questions were carefully phrased to prompt reports that would be useful to phenomenological investigation and theorizing (2–4). These questions reflected the various author’s research interests (e.g., technology, grief, (...) time). Between April 7th and July 31st, 2021, a second questionnaire with the same question set was issued to respondents of the original who had agreed to do a follow-up. This was intended to capture subjective reports of life under social distancing measures a year after the initial survey. By this time–depending on their country of residence and health status–respondents had potentially lived with repeated and prolonged lockdowns and a variety of other restrictions on their social lives. When taken together, Survey I and Survey II provide a cross-cultural and longitudinal dataset that allows for analysis of longer-term impacts of imposed social distancing measures on people’s experiences. For researchers working in diverse disciplines, this dataset offers a rich resource that reflects people’s reactions to the imposition of different social restrictions in different countries and over different time periods. (shrink)

Dr. David K. Naugle is widely regarded as a leading thinker in the area of Christian worldview formation. As Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Dallas Baptist University, he has drawn accolades and admiration. -/- This collection in his honor demonstrates that intellectual pursuits are inherently spiritual, that no area of life is separate from the lordship of Christ, and that true Christian faith is in fact the deep fulfillment of the human experience. On topics ranging from linguistics to gardening and (...) everything in between, these essays represent the depth and breadth of the idea that all goodness is God's goodness, all truth is God's truth, and all beauty is God's beauty. (shrink)

Aan de hand van het werk van de Duitse romancier W.G. Sebald breekt Mark Anderson een lans voor een herwaardering van de melancholie, als enig mogelijke houding om de last van het verleden die we moeten dragen, te kunnen torsen. De kunsten zijn het aangewezen instrument voor deze ‘daad van verzet’ ‘tegen de krachten van vernietiging en vergeten in het menselijk leven’. Het werk van Sebald, achtervolgd door de ‘postmemory’ aan het Duitse oorlogsgeweld dat hij zelf alleen indirect had (...) meegemaakt, is hiervan een veelzeggende illustratie. (shrink)

The vast majority of extant empirical research examining the relationship between corporate social performance and financial performance selects samples of only those firms which are observed engaging in CSP. In this study, the authors assert that firms’ efforts to pursue CSP and subsequently their appearance in social-choice investment advisory firms’ ranking databases are non-random. Studying the CSP–FP link using selected samples of only those firms whose social performance is ranked by SIA firms introduces a sample-selection bias which limits generalization of (...) results to a population of all firms, and at worst provides alternate explanations for observed relationships. The authors test these assertions on a large sample of public corporations in the United States over 6 years and find a sample-selection bias. Upon correction of this bias, this study confirms the positive impact of CSP on FP. (shrink)

It has been suggested that type I adenylyl cyclase may play a unique role in long-term potentiation, due to both unique regulatory properties as well as a specialized distribution within the mammalian brain. This would allow an integration of the signals wrought by increased intracellular calcium with those conveyed into the cellular milieu via increased cAMP. These results are discussed in the context of changes in cellular structure, because of changing interactions between G proteins and cytoskeletal components, which might be (...) expected to accompany chronic synaptic activation. (shrink)

Anderson beschrijft het kosmopolitisme als een omstreden kwestie in 'de culturele oorlogen van het hedendaagse Amerika' en gaat in op het 'niet-hegemonistische' begrip van het kosmopolitisme.

In het verwerkingsproces van de nazi-tijd heeft de samenwerking tussen Duitse en Amerikaanse germanisten een belangrijke rol gespeeld. De revival van de Exil-schrijvers is erdoor bevorderd, maar tegelijkertijd is hierdoor in beide landen een vertekening in de beeldvorming ontstaan.

We show that the N₀-categorical structures produced by Hrushovski's predimension construction with a control function fit neatly into Shelah's $SOP_n $ hierarchy: if they are not simple, then they have SOP₃ and NSOP₄. We also show that structures produced without using a control function can be undecidable and have SOP.