We explore the match of a computational information foraging model to participant data on multi-page web search tasks and find its correlation on several important metrics to be too low to be used with confidence in the evaluation of user-interface designs. We examine the points of mismatch to inspire changes to the model in how it calculates information scent scores and how it assesses the utility of backing up from a lower-level page to a higher-level page. The outcome is a (...) new model that qualitatively matches participant behavior better than the original model, has utility equations more appealing to “common sense” than the original equations, and significantly improves the correlation between model and participant data on our metrics. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by (...) a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. Long recognized as one of the main branches of political science, political theory has in recent years burgeoned in many different directions. Close textual analysis of historical texts sits alongside more analytical work on the nature and normative grounds of political values. Continental and post-modern influences jostle with ones from economics, history, sociology, and the law. Feminist concerns with embodiment make us look at old problems in new ways, and challenges of new technologies open whole new vistas for political theory. This Handbook provides comprehensive and critical coverage of the lively and contested field of political theory, and will help set the agenda for the field for years to come. Forty-five chapters by distinguished political theorists look at the state of the field, where it has been in the recent past, and where it is likely to go in future. They examine political theory's edges as well as its core, the globalizing context of the field, and the challenges presented by social, economic, and technological changes. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Involvement of industry in academic research is widespread and associated with favorable outcomes for industry. The objective of this study was to review empirical data on the attitudes of researchers toward industry involvement and financial ties in research. A review of the literature for quantitative data from surveys on the attitudes of researchers to financial ties in research, reported in English, resulted in the 17 studies included. Review of these studies revealed that investigators are concerned about the impact of financial (...) ties on choice of research topic, research conduct and publication, but this concern is less among investigators already involved with industry. Researchers approve of industry collaboration and financial ties when the ties are indirectly related to the research, disclosure is upfront, and results and ideas are freely publicized. However, their trust in disclosure as a way to manage conflicts may reveal a lack of awareness of the actual impact of financial incentives on themselves and other researchers. (shrink)

How far does a researcher’s responsibility extend when an incidental finding is identified? Balancing pertinent ethical principles such as beneficence, respect for persons, and duty to rescue is not always straightforward, particularly in neuroimaging research where empirical data that might help guide decision making are lacking. We conducted a systematic survey of perceptions and preferences of 396 investigators, research participants, and Institutional Review Board members at our institution. Using the partial entrustment model as described by Richardson, we argue that our (...) data supports universal reading by a neuroradiologist of all research MRI scans for incidental findings and providing full disclosure to all participants. (shrink)

As a work of a scholarship it seems to me to compare favourably with the best books on the subject, including those by Marcus Singer and Onora Nell.' Prof.

It is the purpose of this study to identify the most-referenced authors, works, periodicals and publishers in business ethics. A computer analysis was made of over eight hundred references taken from fifty-seven recent articles. The result is a special type of bibliography designed to conserve time for readers in this field. The two most-cited authors were Milton Friedman and Christopher Stone; while the most-referenced works were Where the Law Ends by Stone, Is the Ethics of Business Changing? by Brenner and (...) Molander, and Ethical Theory and Business edited by Beauchamp and Bowie. (shrink)

Environmentalism is usually thought to be a liberal political position, but the two primary schools of thought within the conservative intellectual movement support environmentalism as well. The free market perspective has received considerable attention for its potential contributions to environmental protection, but the traditionalist perspective has not. In this essay, I consider several important principles of traditionalist conservatism. The traditionalists are not materialists and are highly critical of our consumer culture. They reject ideology and stress piety toward nature, the intergenerational (...) character of society, and prudence in political and social action. These basic principles are a solid foundation for environmentalism. (shrink)

Peirce promised but never delivered a theoretical system called "speculative rhetoric," therefore explication is synthesized from throughout his writings. bypassing nearly everything akin to standard rhetorical theory, he thinks of it as the "power of appealing to a mind" defined strictly in terms of logical processes. these "formal conditions of symbolic force" fall into two operations: "methodeutic" is an alternating inductive/deductive process beginning with imagined ideational relationships and ending with a specific claim or idea; "assertiveness" is a conjoining of images (...) ("icons") which, when directed upon the attention ("indexed"), provides compulsiveness to the idea. (shrink)

The theory of equal opportunity as I have expounded it in Roemer uses a language comprising five words: objective, circumstance, type, effort, and policy. The objective is the kind of outcome or well-being or advantage for whose acquisition one wishes to equalize opportunities, in a given population. Circumstances are the set of environmental influences, beyond the individual’s control, that affect his or her chances of acquiring the objective. A type is the group of individuals in the population with a given (...) set of circumstances. Effort is autonomously chosen action—within the individual’s control—which, if expended in greater amounts, will increase the degree to which the individual acquires the objective. A policy is a social intervention that is used to influence the degree to which individuals acquire the objective. The equal-opportunity policy is the one from the set of feasible policies that will make it the case that the degree to which individuals acquire the objective is independent of their circumstances, and sensitive only to their effort. I propose a way of computing the equal-opportunity policy in any given situation, given the appropriate data, and a decision as to what environmental aspects should be taken to constitute circumstances. This quick summary leaves out many details, which will be focused upon in what follows. (shrink)

Public support for and interest in various fields, issues, organizations, and situations change. Public support for and interest in science and science education have been studied over a thirty-year period. Yankelovich's work related to science was enlarged to include science education. The public was very supportive of science and science education following the 1957 lauching of the Soviet Sputnik This high level of support is observed again in 1985, presumably because of the relationship of science and technology to economic security. (...) Public support for science and science education was at a low point for the 30 year period in 1975. (shrink)

This essay argues that the book of Ruth's reopening of Israel's history and national mythology functions in such a way as to redeem, as it were, the plight of the subaltern Moabite—a plight begun with the daughters of Lot in Genesis 19. A parallel is then drawn with the 1619 Project, the recent journalistic project which posits the entire historical sweep of African slavery in North America since 1619 as the defining arc of the United States' founding. As theoretical frames, (...) the essay draws on the work of literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (including her concept of “moral love”) and political philosopher Arash Abizadeh. In so doing, the essay illustrates how a “functionalist” approach to biblical ethics that balances the content of the biblical narrative with attention to how the text functions in its broader context can provide guidance for contemporary ethical application. (shrink)

This essay examines James Baldwin's conception of what he calls “black English” and its link to historical and cultural identity. I link Baldwin's defense of black English to his reflections on the sorrow songs and sound, which draws on long-standing accounts of musicality as the foundation of the African-American tradition. In order to demonstrate this relation to the tradition, the essay puts Baldwin's remarks in relation to Frederick Douglass's and W. E. B. Du Bois's description of the sorrow songs. I (...) also underscore how that relation to the African-American tradition marks an important set of tensions with mid-twentieth century black Atlantic theory, tensions which make sense of the Americanness of Baldwin's work. Across the essay, I claim that Baldwin's account of language has epistemological and ontological significance, which gives an interesting and important twist to Martin Heidegger's famous phrase that “language is the house of Being.”. (shrink)

Burt formulates her critique at a general level of abstraction that highlights the methodological deficiencies of sociogenomics without also calling attention to precisely the same deficiencies in the social science model she seeks to defend against its encroachments. What might have been a methodological bulwark against the excesses of sociogenomics is instead a one-sided critique that merely renews its charter.

The neo-Lockean justification of the highly unequal distribution of income in capitalist societies is based upon two key premises: that people are the rightful owners of their labor and talents, and that the external world was, in the state of nature, unowned, and therefore up for grabs by people, who could rightfully appropriate parts of it subject to a ‘Lockean proviso.’ The argument is presented by Nozick. Counter-proposals to Nozick’s, for the most part, have either denied the premise that people (...) should morally be viewed as the owners of their talents, or have challenged Nozick’s Lockean proviso.Rawls, and to a more limited extent Ronald Dworkin, deny self-ownership. As Rawls writes: ‘…the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset … The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.’ Behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, those who deliberate about justice are deprived of knowledge about characteristics whose distribution is morally arbitrary. In Dworkin’s proposal for resource egalitarianism, agents calculate the insurance policy they would hypothetically ask for, were they denied knowledge of what talents they will draw in the birth lottery. Compensation for unequal talents is, according to Dworkin, properly made by taxing and transferring income according to the way it would have been distributed as a consequence of such insurance. Dworkin’s veil of ignorance is thin, because agents in the appropriate posture for deliberating about income distribution know their preferences and attitudes toward risk, but not their talents. For both Rawls and Dworkin, the self-ownership premise is challenged by constructing a veil of ignorance in which people are deprived of knowledge of certain personal characteristics, knowledge of which would bias their opinions, from a moral viewpoint. (shrink)