We test people's ability to optimize performance across two concurrent tasks. Participants performed a number entry task while controlling a randomly moving cursor with a joystick. Participants received explicit feedback on their performance on these tasks in the form of a single combined score. This payoff function was varied between conditions to change the value of one task relative to the other. We found that participants adapted their strategy for interleaving the two tasks, by varying how long they spent on (...) one task before switching to the other, in order to achieve the near maximum payoff available in each condition. In a second experiment, we show that this behavior is learned quickly and remained stable for as long as the payoff function did not change. The results of this work show that people are adaptive and flexible in how they prioritize and allocate attention in a dual-task setting. However, it also demonstrates some of the limits regarding people's ability to optimize payoff functions. (shrink)

Le projet de Georges Duby sur l’histoire des femmes au Moyen Âge repose dans une large mesure sur l’anthropologie structurale de Claude Lévi Strauss et le marxisme structuraliste de Louis Althusser : les femmes de l’aristocratie médiévale, selon Duby, étaient des gages dans un système de parenté contrôlé par et pour les hommes ; elles formaient leurs subjectivités propres à partir de l’idéologie dominante que façonnaient les hommes. Les sources, pour Duby, ne révèlent jamais de voix féminines indépendantes. Les historien(ne)s (...) féministes américain(e)s s’accordent bien souvent avec l’opinion de Duby sur les contraintes du système patriarcal qui pesaient sur les femmes au Moyen Âge. Toutefois, à la différence de Duby, leurs recherches ont mis l’accent sur la résistance qu’expriment les voix féminines. Cette insistance de la recherche féministe, outre-Atlantique, est symptomatique du très large intérêt que porte la recherche américaine aux résistances des groupes dominés. De même, le peu d’intérêt porté par Duby aux actions des femmes semble symptomatique de tendances plus larges de la recherche française. (shrink)

Le projet de Georges Duby sur l’histoire des femmes au Moyen Âge repose dans une large mesure sur l’anthropologie structurale de Claude Lévi Strauss et le marxisme structuraliste de Louis Althusser : les femmes de l’aristocratie médiévale, selon Duby, étaient des gages dans un système de parenté contrôlé par et pour les hommes ; elles formaient leurs subjectivités propres à partir de l’idéologie dominante que façonnaient les hommes. Les sources, pour Duby, ne révèlent jamais de voix féminines indépendantes. Les historien(ne)s (...) féministes américain(e)s s’accordent bien souvent avec l’opinion de Duby sur les contraintes du système patriarcal qui pesaient sur les femmes au Moyen Âge. Toutefois, à la différence de Duby, leurs recherches ont mis l’accent sur la résistance qu’expriment les voix féminines. Cette insistance de la recherche féministe, outre-Atlantique, est symptomatique du très large intérêt que porte la recherche américaine aux résistances des groupes dominés. De même, le peu d’intérêt porté par Duby aux actions des femmes semble symptomatique de tendances plus larges de la recherche française. (shrink)

An Introduction to Business Ethics explores the issues of individual and corporate responsibility in business, and integrates many contemporary and classic ...

For fifty years, Willard Van Orman Quine's books and articles have stimulated intense debate in the fields of logic and the philosophy of language. Many scholars in fact, regard Quine as the greatest living English-speaking philosopher; yet his views remain widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. This book provides the first major explication and defense of Quine's systematic philosophy and is ideally suited for use as a required or supplementary text in a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy and (...) linguistics.The book explores the far-reaching implications of Quine's views on language for contemporary analytic philosophy. It is unique in providing a lucid and rich description and reconstruction of the historical context from which Quine's work grew, focusing in particular on the role that Russell and Wittgenstein played in shaping the problems inherited by Quine. It presents Quine's difficult later views in an accessible fashion, bringing out as no other study has the very radical nature of his position. One of the book's highlights is its careful examination and assessment of Tarski's theory of truth as it relates to the traditions of Russell and Wittgenstein and to Quine's own philosophy.George D. Romanos took his Ph.D. in philosophy under George D. W. Berry and Paul T. Sagal at Boston University. This book grew out of his dissertation with the active criticism and support of Quine himself. (shrink)

This paper explores how whiteness as the transcendental norm shapes the meaning structure of Black-being-in-the-world. If home is a place, a site, a dwelling of acceptance, where one is allowed to feel safe, to relax, to let one’s guard down, then being Black in white supremacist America is anathema to being at home for Black people. Indeed, to be Black is to be a stranger, something “strange,” “scary,” “dangerous,” an “outsider.” To be Black within white America belies what it means (...) to dwell, to reside, to rest. In other words, one’s sense of racialized Black embodiment remains on guard, unsettled, hyperalert. Phenomenologically, there is a profound sense of alienation, where one’s racialized body is ostracized and shunned. On this score, I examine, within the mundane context of an elevator, how the dynamics of intersubjectivity and sociality are strained through the dynamics of the white gaze. The white gaze, among other things, functions to police the meaning of the Black body and attempts to de-subjectify Black embodiment. In this way, the only real perspective is white. Black bodies are deemed devoid of a perspective on the world as there is no subjectivity, no sense of agential meaning making. One might say that Black people, on this view, constitute an essence, a typified mode of being. Unlike the existentialist thesis where existence precedes essence, Black people are locked into an objecthood, a fungible and fixed essence. This racial and racist myth is what, for Schutz, would collapse the importance that he places on intersubjectivity and sociality. Indeed, within this paper, I delineate the threatening, necro-political dimensions of whiteness that I experienced after writing the well-known article “Dear White America.” That experience cemented, for me, and for many other readers, what it means to occupy the residence of whiteness, an abode that can take one’s life in the blink of an eye. The experience of the racialized stranger means walking a tightrope, a precarious situation where one flirts with death, where one’s body is deemed hypersexual, inferior, frightening, and monstrous. Based upon this construction, the white body is deemed the site of virtue, safety, deliverer, protector of all things white and pure. Think here of “the white man’s burden” or the idea of “white manifest destiny.” Stain, blemish, taint, and defilement are indelible markers of the stranger. And based upon the logics of racial purity, one must extinguish the “vermin,” the “criminals,” the “rapists.” While I don’t explore this within the paper, Schutz scholars will immediately recognize the genocidal implications of what would have been at stake for Schutz had he not escaped Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic gaze and his Anschluss of Austria. My sense is that Schutz would have understood not just the horrors of white racism but would appreciate the necessity of theorizing the need to rethink home as existentially capacious and intersubjectively vibrant. I conclude this paper by thinking through the concept of “breakdown”, delineating its spatial, phenomenological, and subjectively embodied implications. Breakdown, as I use the term, upends forms of white racialized habituation, creating possible embodied psychic space for what I term un-suturing, which involves undoing the machinations of white safety in the face of alterity, where the stranger invokes wonder and self-critique. (shrink)

A senior level capstone design experience has been developed and offered with a particular emphasis on many of the professional issues raised in Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criterion IV. The course has sought to develop student awareness of the ethical foundation of the engineering profession, the global and societal framework within which engineers practice, and the environmental impact on engineering. The capstone design course also focused upon improving the technical communications skills of the graduating senior class (...) with both extensive instruction in writing and multiple workshops dealing with the art of making an effective oral presentation. The effectiveness of the design course was assessed using Kirkpatrick’s model for evaluating training programs. (shrink)

Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience. Donald W. Mitchell. Oxford University Press, New York 2002. xvi, 368 pp. £16.99 ISBN 0 19 513952 6.

Some recent discussions of corporate loyalty have found it misguided, while others see it as crucial for financial success. Thereis also disagreement over the nature of loyalty. This article analyzes the concept of loyalty, arguing that it is neither a duty nor a virtue(although it has overlaps with those categories), but a passion related to various virtues (and vices). Contrary to standard accounts ofcapitalism, loyalty does not necessarily oppose self-interest. Furthermore, corporations can and should be communities, andinsofar as they are, (...) they are proper objects for loyalty. If corporations are not communities, then loyalty to them cannot exist. (shrink)

The twenty‐six‐year‐old patient requested a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction because of an extensive family history of cancer. She reported that she had developed melanoma at twenty‐five; that her mother, sister, aunts, and a cousin all had breast cancer; that a cousin had ovarian cancer at nineteen; and that a brother was treated for esophageal cancer at fifteen. The treating team was skeptical about this history, and they could find no documentation of the patient's reported melanoma. The surgeon wrote the (...) patient's primary care physician, explaining that he had seen the patient and planned to proceed with the bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction. The primary care physician responded that he was unable to substantiate several of the patient's claims; some of his colleagues believed the family history to be fabricated. Trying to make sense of the discrepancies, the genetic counselor called a counselor colleague who had met with this patient. The colleague suggested that the in‐house genetic counselor “google” the patient. The search revealed two Facebook pages linked to the patient. In one, apparently a personal profile, the patient stated that in addition to battling stage four melanoma, she had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. She provided a link to a site where she solicited donations to attend a summit for young cancer patients. The other Facebook page featured numerous pictures of her with a bald head, as though she has been through chemotherapy. The genetic counselor showed the Facebook pages to the surgeon, who then decided not to operate. Should health care professionals “google” their patients? (shrink)

Modifications to the ABET Criterion 3 are suggested in support of the effort to promote the pursuit of peace in engineering education. The proposed modifications are the result of integrating the United Nations’ sponsored “Integral Model of Education for Peace, Democracy and Sustainable Development” into the modern engineering curriculum. The key elements of the model are being at peace with oneself, being at peace with others, and being at peace with the planet. In addition to proposing modifications, specific classroom activities (...) are described and implemented, and students’ reactions and the effectiveness of the various exercises are discussed. (shrink)

The Good Heart: His Holiness the Dalai Lama explores the heart of Christianity - and of humanity. Ed. Robert Kiely. Rider, London 1996. xiv, 211 pp. £9.99. ISBN 0 7126 7275 3.