Corporate management is torn between either focusing solely on the interests of stockholders or taking into account the interests of a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Of course, there need be no conflict where taking the wider view is also consistent with maximising stockholder wealth. In this paper, we examine the extent to which a conflict actually exists by examining the relationship between a company's positive and negative corporate social responsibility activities and equity performance. In general, we find little evidence to (...) suggest that managers taking a wider stakeholder perspective will jeopardise the interest of its stockholders. However, our findings do suggest that the market is not only influenced by the independent CSR activities, but also the totality of these activities and that the facets that they value do vary over time. It seems that most recently, the market has valued most firms that satisfied minimum requirements in the areas of diversity and environmental protection but were most proactive in the area of employee-relations. (shrink)

Nostalgia is a fond longing for the past that has been shown to increase feelings of meaning, social connectedness, and self-continuity. Although nostalgia for personal memories provides intra- and interpersonal benefits, there may be negative consequences of group-based nostalgia on the perception and acceptance of others. The presented research examined national nostalgia, and its effects on group identification and political attitudes in the United States. In a sample of US voters, tendencies to feel personal and national nostalgia are associated with (...) markedly different emotional and attitudinal profiles. Higher levels of national nostalgia predicted both positive attitudes toward President Trump and racial prejudice, though there was no evidence of such relationships with personal nostalgia. National nostalgia most strongly predicted positive attitudes toward president Trump among those high in racial prejudice. Furthermore, nostalgia's positive relationship with racial prejudice was partially mediated by perceived outgroup threat. Results from this study will help us better understand how the experience of national nostalgia can influence attitudes and motivate political behavior. (shrink)

This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with professional boundary (...) issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change. (shrink)

A medical student's ability to present a case history is a critical skill that is difficult to teach. Case histories presented without theatrical engagement may fail to catch the attention of their intended recipients. More engaging presentations incorporate ‘stage presence’, eye contact, vocal inflection, interesting detail and succinct, well organised performances. They convey stories effectively without wasting time. To address the didactic challenge for instructing future doctors in how to ‘act’, the Mayo Medical School and The Mayo Clinic Center for (...) Humanities in Medicine partnered with the Guthrie Theater to pilot the programme ‘Telling the Patient's Story’. Guthrie teaching artists taught storytelling skills to medical students through improvisation, writing, movement and acting exercises. Mayo Clinic doctors participated and provided students with feedback on presentations and stories from their own experiences in patient care. The course's primary objective was to build students' confidence and expertise in storytelling. These skills were then applied to presenting cases and communicating with patients in a fresher, more engaging way. This paper outlines the instructional activities as aligned with course objectives. Progress was tracked by comparing pre-course and post-course surveys from the seven participating students. All agreed that the theatrical techniques were effective teaching methods. Moreover, this project can serve as an innovative model for how arts and humanities professionals can be incorporated for teaching and professional development initiatives at all levels of medical education. (shrink)

Changes in healthcare financing increasingly rely upon patient cost-sharing to control escalating healthcare expenditures. These changes raise new challenges for physicians that are different from those that arose either under managed care or traditional indemnity insurance. Historically, there have been two distinct bases for arguing that physicians should not consider costs in their clinical decisions—an “aspirational ethic” that exhorts physicians to treat all patients the same regardless of their ability to pay, and an “agency ethic” that calls on physicians to (...) be trustworthy advisors to their patients. In the setting of greater patient cost-sharing, physicians' aspiration and agency roles increasingly conflict. Satisfactorily navigating the new terrain of consumer-driven healthcare requires physicians to consider these two roles and how they can best be reconciled so as to maximize quality of care while respecting the heterogeneity of patients' financial resources and willingness to pay. (shrink)

From March 1841 until the end of 1845, W. R. Grove held the post of Professor of Experimental Philosophy at the London Institution. No previous study of the Institution has dealt in detail with the period of Grove's tenure of this, the first professorship. Here, by reference to the various manuscripts and publications of the Institution, and to Grove's papers and correspondence, it is possible to describe the background to Grove's appointment and the achievements of his term of office.

There is growing evidence that dopamine replacement therapy (DRT) used to treat Parkinson’s Disease can cause compulsive behaviours and impulse control disorders (ICDs), such as pathological gambling, compulsive buying and hypersexuality. Like more familiar drug-based forms of addiction, these iatrogenic disorders can cause significant harm and distress for sufferers and their families. In some cases, people treated with DRT have lost their homes and businesses, or have been prosecuted for criminal sexual behaviours. In this article we first examine the evidence (...) that these disorders are caused by DRT. If it is accepted that DRT cause compulsive or addictive behaviours in a significant minority of individuals, then the following ethical and clinical questions arise: Under what circumstances is it ethical to prescribe a medication that may induce harmful compulsive behaviours? Are individuals treated with DRT morally responsible and hence culpable for harmful or criminal behaviour related to their medication? We conclude with some observations of the relevance of DRT-induced ICDs for our understanding of addiction and identify some promising directions for future research and ethical analysis. (shrink)

How can the development of ideas in a scientific field be studied over time? We apply unsupervised topic modeling to the ACL Anthology to analyze historical trends in the field of Computational Linguistics from 1978 to 2006. We induce topic clusters using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and examine the strength of each topic over time. Our methods find trends in the field including the rise of probabilistic methods starting in 1988, a steady increase in applications, and a sharp decline of research (...) in semantics and understanding between 1978 and 2001, possibly rising again after 2001. We also introduce a model of the diversity of ideas, topic entropy, using it to show that COLING is a more diverse conference than ACL, but that both conferences as well as EMNLP are becoming broader over time. Finally, we apply Jensen-Shannon divergence of topic distributions to show that all three conferences are converging in the topics they cover. (shrink)

Abstract:There is evidence that children learn both proper names and count nouns from the outset of lexical development. Furthermore, children's first proper names are typically words for people, whereas their first count nouns are commonly terms for other objects, including artifacts. I argue that these facts represent a challenge for two well‐known theoretical accounts of object word learning. I defend an alternative account, which credits young children with conceptual resources to acquire words for both individual objects and object categories, and (...) conceptual biases to construe some objects (notably people) as individuals in their own right and most other objects as instances of their category. (shrink)

There is evidence that children learn both proper names and count nouns from the outset of lexical development. Furthermore, children's first proper names are typically words for people, whereas their first count nouns are commonly terms for other objects, including artifacts. I argue that these facts represent a challenge for two well-known theoretical accounts of object word learning. I defend an alternative account, which credits young children with conceptual resources to acquire words for both individual objects and object categories, and (...) conceptual biases to construe some objects (notably people) as individuals in their own right and most other objects as instances of their category. (shrink)

A significant portion of the world’s text is tagged by readers on social bookmarking websites. Credit attribution is an inherent problem in these corpora because most pages have multiple tags, but the tags do not always apply with equal specificity across the whole document. Solving the credit attribution problem requires associating each word in a document with the most appropriate tags and vice versa. This paper introduces Labeled LDA, a topic model that constrains Latent Dirichlet Allocation by defining a one-to-one (...) correspondence between LDA’s latent topics and user tags. This allows Labeled LDA to directly learn word-tag correspondences. We demonstrate Labeled LDA’s improved expressiveness over traditional LDA with visualizations of a corpus of tagged web pages from del.icio.us. Labeled LDA outperforms SVMs by more than 3 to 1 when extracting tag-specific document snippets. As a multi-label text classifier, our model is competitive with a discriminative baseline on a variety of datasets. (shrink)

The celebrity effect is the well-documented phenomenon in which people ascribe an enhanced worth to artefacts owned by famous individuals. This effect has been attributed to a belief in psychological contagion, the transmission of a person’s essence to an object via contact. We examined people’s judgments of the persisting worth of celebrity-owned artefacts following transformations of their parts/material and found that the celebrity effect was evident only for post-transformation artefacts that were composed of parts/material that had direct physical contact with (...) the celebrity. Insofar as the celebrity effect arises from psychological contagion, the findings suggest that the essence imparted to a celebrity-owned artefact is conceived as akin to a residue deposited in/on the object rather than a germ capable of spreading in an indirect manner to new parts/material added to the object. The results illuminate the nature of psychological contagion and offer insight into how best to preserve the value of historically important artefacts. (shrink)

This essay explicates a structural theory of the historical evolution of world-systems. Rather than using societies as the unit of analysis the authors use intersocietal interaction networks (world-systems). This enables them to take theoretical account of the systemic development processes that are regional and inter-regional in scope and to formulate a more powerful theory that explains how thousands of egalitarian small-scale world-systems evolved, expanded and merged to become the hierarchical and global world-system of today.

The present study investigated whether lexical access is affected by a regular phonological variation in connected speech: voice assimilation in French. Two associative priming experiments were conducted to determine whether strongly assimilated, potentially ambiguous word forms activate the conceptual representation of the underlying word. Would the ambiguous word form [sud] (either assimilated soute 'hold' or soude 'soda') facilitate 'bagage' 'luggage', which is semantically related to soute but not to soude? In Experiment 1, words in either canonical or strongly assimilated form (...) were presented as primes. Both forms primed their related target to the same extent. Potential lexical ambiguity did not modulate priming effects. In Experiment 2, the primes such as assimilated soute pronounced [sud] used in Experiment 1 were replaced with primes such as soude canonically pronounced [sud]. No semantic priming effect was obtained with these primes. Therefore, the effect observed for assimilated forms in Experiment 1 cannot be due to overall phonological proximity between canonical and assimilated forms. We propose that listeners must recover the intended words behind the assimilated forms through the exploitation of the remaining traces of the underlying form, however subtle these traces may be. (shrink)

The history of the book is everywhere, so widely diffused that it merits comparison with the famously elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, whose pursuers sought him without success. Like that figure, book history passes among us in disguise, reluctant to reveal its presence even as it gains ever-greater recognition. In some quarters, it lurks within the domain of bibliography, a field of scholarship dedicated to describing the histories of printed texts and, in the service of this enterprise, concerned with the details of (...) book-making. Elsewhere, book history installs itself within descriptions of libraries and education, sharing, with the first of these, a concern for how old books were accumulated and classified and, with the second, for the many ramifications of literacy and the fashioning of schoolbooks. Together with the history of journalism it studies how news was disseminated and ponders the significance of periodicals, be these newspapers or magazines. Political history has been another convenient site of disguise in the wake of efforts to connect the public sphere and concepts of nation with the emergence of print culture. And, of course, book history has enjoyed a long and fruitful kinship with literary history, a relationship freshly energized in recent decades as literary historians turned to describing the rise and remaking of a canon and to emphasizing the mediations that all texts undergosociology of texts,” to borrow a phrase made famous by D. F. McKenzie. To this list we can add the version of intellectual history that reconstructs the reading of a person or group and employs this data to generalize about the coming of the Enlightenment and similar formations. (shrink)

Unlike the memory of the querulous and time-bending White Queen inThrough the Looking Glass, mine befits her complaint, inclined as I am to thinking backwards when asked to contemplate the state of our field. Backwards, then, I go in the first section of this essay, after a few opening comments on the situation of our field at the present moment. Thereafter, I describe the emergence of cultural history and summarize some of its strengths and weaknesses, to the end of reflecting (...) on its implications for intellectual history. (shrink)

Ethics and professional conduct are vital to civil engineering undergraduate curricula. Many programs struggle to ensure that students are given an adequate exposure to and appreciation of ethical and professional conduct issues. This paper describes a two-part ethics/professionalism project used in a senior-level course taught at the University of Arkansas. Initially, students scruitinize ethical canons and standards of professional conduct published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), and prepare an essay (...) concerning the applicability of these standards. The second part of the project builds on the first: based on the opinion(s) generated in Part 1, students are asked to develop a set of canons or standards targeted specifically to the undergraduate student, and suggest processes for implementing those standards within the department. Project objectives include: (1) exposure to nationally-recognized ethical canons and standards of professional conduct; (2) personal formulation of ethical and professional standards; (3) skill enhancement for non-technical written communications. Feedback by students prior to and after the project indicates success in meeting all objectives. The feedback also indicates that for some students, definitions and applications of ethics and professionalism are being broadened to include more than academic honesty issues. (shrink)