This report examines the role of 1890 land-grant institutions and Tuskegee University in international research and curriculum development. It discusses the need for internationalizing curricula and the benefits and costs for 1890 institutions. Two particular strategies for infusing global perspectives using a small land-grant university as a case-study are presented. Two international projects served as a vehicle for enhancing faculty teaching, research and service capabilities.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether United States -style regulatory intervention to encourage whistle-blowing can be immediately effective if transplanted into another country with a distinctly different historical cultural background and institutional system. A total of 98 U.S. and 84 German accountants participated in a laboratory experiment relating to a case of financial statement fraud. The provision of anti-retaliation protection and monetary rewards for whistle-blowing were manipulated and participants were asked to assume the role of an internal (...) auditor. We hypothesize and find that the provision of anti-retaliation protection and monetary rewards encourage U.S. accountants to blow the whistle. In contrast, among German accountants, where their country features a historical fear and distrust of whistle-blowers, U.S.-style regulatory interventions are less effective. Together, our findings provide strong support for the theory of path-dependence, suggesting that whistle-blowing regulation should not be uniformly transplanted without due consideration of the unique history and culture of a country. (shrink)

Much has been published about the ethical issues encountered by clinicians in genetics/genomics, but those experienced by clinical laboratory scientists are less well described. Clinical laboratory scientists now frequently face navigating ethical problems in their work, but how they should be best supported to do this is underexplored. This lack of attention is also reflected in the ethics tools available to clinical laboratory scientists such as guidance and deliberative ethics forums, developed primarily to manage issues arising within the clinic.We explore (...) what ethical issues are being experienced by clinical scientists, how they think such issues could be best analysed and managed, and whether their practice might be enhanced by more situated approaches to ethics deliberation and practice such as ethical preparedness. From thematic analysis of cases presented by clinical scientists at a specially convened meeting of the UK Genethics Forum, we derived three main ethical themes: (1) the redistribution of labour and responsibilities resulting from the practice of genomic medicine; (2) the interpretation and certainty of results and (3) the proposal that better standardisation and consistency of ethical approaches (for example, more guidelines and policy) could resolve some of the challenges arising.We argue that although standardisation is important for promoting shared understandings of good (including ethical) practice, supplementary approaches to enhance and sustain ethical preparedness will be important to help clinical scientists and others in the recently expanded genetic/genomic medicine environment foster quality ethical thinking. (shrink)

This research examines the relationships among the types of self-serving political messages sent in organizations, the channels through which they are sent, and the targets to whom they are sent. Two theoretical streams converge in this study: Communication as Political Behavior and Media Usage Theory. A review and synthesis of these two bodies of literature yielded three hypotheses, each of which received strong statistical support. The data suggest that the process of encoding and transmitting self-serving messages is strongly related to (...) the specific target to whom they are sent (boss, subordinate, or peer) and the channel through which they are sent (face-to-face, telephone, memo, or e-mail). (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between income concentration and policy outputs that determine the generosity of two major state-level safety net programs: unemployment insurance and cash social assistance. Using a difference in differences framework, it tests the degree to which the top 1 percent share is associated with benefit replacement rates for these programs during the period 1978–2010. The results suggest that higher state income inequality lowers those states’ welfare benefits significantly in ways consistent with a “plutocracy” hypothesis that has (...) been suggested in work by scholars such as Bartels, Bonica, Gilens, and Page. The results are robust to controls for several alternative explanations for benefit generosity, including citizen ideology, party control of government, fiscal pressure on programs, state racial heterogeneity, and public opinion liberalism. The results thus support the notion that growing income concentration at the very top undermines social protection policies. (shrink)

Henrich et al. reject the within a narrowly-defined economic model, and are premature in claiming that they have demonstrated cross-cultural variability in as defined in broader evolutionary theory. We also question whether a key experimental condition, anonymity, can be maintained in the small, cohesive, social groupings employed in the study.

Henrich et al. reject the “selfishness axiom” within a narrowly-defined economic model, and are premature in claiming that they have demonstrated cross-cultural variability in “selfishness” as defined in broader evolutionary theory. We also question whether a key experimental condition, anonymity, can be maintained in the small, cohesive, social groupings employed in the study.

Manipulations that draw attention to extensional or set-based considerations are neither sufficient nor necessary for enhanced use of base rates in intuitive judgments. Frequency formats are only one part of the puzzle of base-rate use and neglect. The conditions under which these and other manipulations promote base-rate use may be more parsimoniously organized under the broader notion of case-based judgment.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophistical Wisdom:Politikê Aretê and “Logosophia”Christopher Lyle JohnstoneThe pursuit of Wisdom is at the center of the Western intellectual tradition, its attainment the literal ideal and end of all philosophical inquiry. It is recognized by various religions and belief systems as the key to a meaningful, fulfilling, happy life. Yet for all this, its nature remains unclear and the means of its attainment uncertain. Is it one thing, or are (...) there different kinds of wisdom? How is it acquired? Can it be taught or communicated to others? How, if at all, do speech and language figure in the attainment and dissemination of wisdom?The relationship between wisdom and utterance, reflected in the connection between philosophy and rhetoric, has been a focus of intellectual interest in the West since at least the time of Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 500 BCE): Parmenides, Empedocles, Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Bacon, Vico—all have been concerned, either directly or indirectly, with the interrelation of speech or eloquence and what they view as the highest form of knowledge. Recent scholarship has pursued this relationship along several related lines of inquiry, albeit sometimes obliquely. Some investigators have examined the role of speech in the creation of all human knowledge.1 Others have concentrated more particularly on the role of rhetoric in the creation or exercise of wisdom.2 In an effort to illuminate the ancient foundations of these connections, several scholars have lately studied the link between language and thought in Greek philosophy and rhetoric.3My present interest centers on the linkages between wisdom and speech—between sophia and logos—in the teachings of those pivotal thinkers of the fifth-century Greek "Enlightenment," the Older Sophists. Although the doctrines of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Archelaus, and the Atomists took up moral and political topics, presocratic thinkers generally had concentrated on the origins and mechanical workings of the physical world in which human beings live. As contemporaries of Protagoras and Gorgias, the Atomists—Leucippus and Democritus—are particularly noteworthy for having initiated inquiry into [End Page 265] the relationship between custom or law (nomos) and nature or objective reality (physis), which became a central concern for many of the Older Sophists.4 Such moral and political themes were taken up in earnest by the thinkers and teachers who resided in or were drawn to Athens in the fifth century BCE. Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Antiphon, and others raised questions that were fundamentally political and moral: How should one live one's life? What are the values that should guide one's conduct? By what moral standards should our actions be judged, and how are these standards to be discovered? What legitimizes the laws that govern society? Are law and morality rooted in the nature of things, or are they merely matters of custom and convention? Such questions mark a shift in intellectual inquiry away from the sorts of naturalistic, metaphysical, and ontological problems that preoccupied presocratic thinkers and toward a primary concern with matters of praxis, politics, and morality.My aims in this essay are, first, to illuminate the conceptions of wisdom that can be reconstructed from our evidence for the teachings of the Older Sophists, and then to discern the role of speech in the attainment and exercise of this wisdom. The past half-century or so has witnessed a growing interest in the Sophists of fifth-century Athens. This interest is particularly noteworthy because it involves a determination to consider the Sophists on their own terms rather than through Plato's eyes, as had been customary in most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sophistical studies. Though an early precedent was set by Grote's (1846) effort to challenge the Platonist bias in historical treatments of the Sophists, it was such scholars as Untersteiner (1949, 1954), Cornford (1950), Kerferd (1950, 1981), and Guthrie (1968, 1971) who inspired more recent revisionist histories of sophistical ideas.5 More recent studies have sought to illuminate the philosophical foundations of such ideas and their implications for the theory and practice of rhetoric. J. Poulakos (1983a, 1983b, 1984, 1990, 1995), Schiappa (1990, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999), de Romilly (1992), Consigny (2001), McComisky (2002), Gagarin (2002... (shrink)

An outgrowth of Ryle’s three week visit at Rice in the spring of 1972, this collection of critical essays bears some resemblance to the collection edited by Oscar P. Wood and George Pitcher in the Anchor series. The principle differences are: 1) the range of topics treated here and the detail of treatment is considerably less extensive than in the Wood collection, and 2) this volume contains two new essays by Ryle himself: "Thinking and Self-Teaching" and "Thinking and Saying." Four (...) papers by members of the philosophy staff at Rice form a group. Each of them discusses Ryle’s contribution to a problem in which the author is interested, carefully delineating Ryle’s analysis and treatment of the problem. Generally Ryle is regarded as having said some important things about the topic, having said some things which are questionable, and having at least advanced the topic in an important way. Subjects dealt with in roughly this fashion are "Reference and Existence" by Lyle Angene, "Sensations, Feelings, and Expression" by Richard J. Sclafani, "Dispositions and Hypotheticals" by Robert W. Burch, and "Why Virtue Cannot be Taught" by Thomas McElvain. As surveys of Ryle’s position and as assessments of his views, the essays are consistently good. (shrink)

Inspired by three monographs of Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet, my presentation traces the rise of the new science of psychiatry in Revolutionary France, with Philippe Pinel and his student J.-E. Esquirol. As the directors of the division of the aliénés in the Hôpital Bicêtre (Paris), Pinel and Esquirol pioneered a therapeutic programme that spread out between their “traitement moral” (reasoning with the passions) and an “energetic repression,” wherever necessary. The discipline they created sought to gain autonomy from medicine (...) treating diseases of the body, much as pathology would do in regard to physiology, some fifty years later. Using Canguilhem, Foucault’s teacher and significant influence, I show how the unfolding of a science of disorders (for Canguilhem, this was pathology) poses questions of taxonomy and runs the inevitable ‘risk’ of extensive fragmentation. This is what happens in France after Pinel. However, Pinel, above all, will have made one contribution that—by Swain and Gauchet’s argument—stands in stark contrast to the theses of the young Foucault. Rather than sequestering and excluding the fou by forcing him or her into exaggerated, discursive revelations or silence, Pinel and Esquirol “discover” the sense, or sens , at the heart of madness, notably in what Pinel called “manie intermittente.” Esquirol takes this discovery one step further, to discern in various attacks, a certain rationality. This rather modern conception of madness exerts a considerable influence on literature, criticism, philosophy, and medicine in their time. Hegel’s understanding of madness will come directly from Pinel, and it will see in folie the internal division of subjective Reason. From this characterization comes a therapeutics based on the conviction that one could often reintegrate the mad into society, and avoid prolonged sequestration and exclusion. Thus the presentation focuses on Swain and Gauchet’s question to Foucault ( Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique , notably), using the work of Pinel and Hegel to illustrate their claim. (shrink)

The representation theorems of expected utility theory show that having certain types of preferences is both necessary and sufficient for being representable as having subjective probabilities. However, unless the expected utility framework is simply assumed, such preferences are also consistent with being representable as having degrees of belief that do not obey the laws of probability. This fact shows that being representable as having subjective probabilities is not necessarily the same as having subjective probabilities. Probabilism can be defended on the (...) basis of the representation theorems only if attributions of degrees of belief are understood either antirealistically or purely qualitatively, or if the representation theorems are supplemented by arguments based on other considerations (simplicity, consilience, and so on) that single out the representation of a person as having subjective probabilities as the only true representation of the mental state of any person whose preferences conform to the axioms of expected utility theory. (shrink)

Probabilistic coherence is not an absolute requirement of rationality; nevertheless, it is an ideal of rationality with substantive normative import. An idealized rational agent who avoided making implicit logical errors in forming his preferences would be coherent. In response to the challenge, recently made by epistemologists such as Foley and Plantinga, that appeals to ideal rationality render probabilism either irrelevant or implausible, I argue that idealized requirements can be normatively relevant even when the ideals are unattainable, so long as they (...) define a structure that links imperfect and perfect rationality in a way that enables us to make sense of the notion of better approximations to the ideal. I then analyze the notion of approximation to the ideal of coherence by developing a generalized theory of belief functions that allows for incoherence, and showing how such belief functions can be ordered with regard to greater or lesser coherence. (shrink)

Australia's Coalition Against Duck Shooting sees duck-shooting as a social problem and as an injustice with moral, legal and environmental consequences. The small animal liberationist group has succeeded in dramatically reducing the numbers of duck shooters in Victoria, which is the home of duck-shooting in Australia. The Coalition's framing work with the public via the electronic media involves three parts: a diagnosis , a prognosis and a motivational frame , all of which construct hunting as a cruel, antisocial blood sport (...) that ought to be banned. In this article, television news bulletins and feature stories from the 1993 and 1994 campaigns are analyzed to show how CADS makes and sustains its claims. In addition to 90 pages of transcripts of news commentaries and descriptive accounts of the visuals, the data include tape-recorded interviews with some of the duck liberationists involved in the campaign. (shrink)

Within the context of the study of the genetics of language, Chomskian laws of grammar, such as theStructure-dependence Condition and theA over A Condition, may be usefully regarded to have a status similar to that of Mendelian Laws in classical genetics. In both the case of Chomsky's Laws and Mendel's Laws, formal genetic principles are postulated which abstract away from the physical mechanisms involved and in both cases certain apparent counterexamples mirror a more complex underlying genetic organisation.

This book highlights some of the principles which should be considered by planners, legislative drafters, and policy-makers as they work to develop legal frameworks on access to genetic resources in their countries. Contextual information on the Convention on Biological Diversity and examples of how countries have approached the issue to date are provided.

Background Caring is a core function of nurses and it confers upon them ethical obligations as ethical agents. Failure to carry out such ethical obligations raises ethical concerns. This study was not intended to explore ethical concerns, but the reported findings reveal problems which have ethical implications. This paper aims to elucidate the ethical issues inherent in the findings and propose strategies to mitigate them. Research design and methods An exploratory-descriptive qualitative design was used within a larger Action Research Study. (...) Data were collected through focus group discussions with nurse/midwives, and through exit interviews which were conducted with the women who participated in the study on their day of discharge. Six focus group discussions and thirty exit interviews were conducted, and data were analysed through thematic analysis. Participants and research context The study took place at selected maternal and child healthcare settings in Lilongwe, Malawi. The participants were nurse/midwives and women who were admitted in maternal and child healthcare settings and were purposively sampled. Ethical considerations Ethical approval was obtained from the relevant ethics committee and all ethical guidelines were followed in the conduct of the study. Findings The findings are presented under three themes which emerged from the data. The findings reveal effects of staff shortages on patient outcomes, problems experienced in low resource clinical settings and disrespectful nurse/patient communication. Conclusion The findings reveal that institutional factors constrain moral agency and patient safety is severely compromised in some of the clinical settings in Malawi which raises serious ethical concerns. (shrink)

This article reports findings of a hermeneutic phenomenological study that explored the clinical learning experience for Malawian undergraduate student nurses. The study revealed issues that touch on both nursing education and practice, but the article mainly reports the practice issues. The findings reveal the emotions that healthcare workers in Malawi encounter as a consequence of practising in resource-poor settings. Furthermore, there is severe nursing shortage in most clinical settings in Malawi, and this adversely affects the performance of nurses because of (...) the excess workload it imposes on them. The results of the study also illustrate loss of professional pride among some of the nurses, and the article argues that such a demeanour is a consequence of burnout. However, despite these problems, the study also reveals that there are some nurses who have maintained their passion to care. (shrink)

This article examines the role of culture in the metaphorical/metonymic conceptualizations of fear, a primary emotion, in two languages—Akan (a West African, Kwa language) and English. The article adopts the general framework of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) to compare and contrast the differences and/or similarities in the conceptualizations as well as the language-specific construals or elaborations of shared conceptual metaphors of fear in the two languages. The analysis of the language-specific realizations of the shared metaphorical/metonymic conceptualizations of the emotion concept (...) reveals both similarities and differences in the two languages, showing support for the cultural embodied cognition thesis, namely, the similarities in the conceptualization of emotions across cultures may be explained in terms of universal embodied cognition from which general metaphorical principles derive. However, the differences in language-specific elaborations may be explained in terms of cultural filtering of the general universal conceptualizations to reflect human experiences that are more salient to a particular sociocultural group. This analysis also shows a metaphor–metonymy interaction in the conceptualization of emotions across cultures. (shrink)

This article addresses a countermovement to the animal liberation movement and its campaigns against vivisection, factory farming, and recreational hunting in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. As moderate welfarists, pragmatic animal liberationists , and radical abolitionists who advocate animal rights, animal protectionists campaign for animals. The countermovement defends acts that animal protectionists decry. Meanwhile, sociologists accord little study to interplay between the movements . In Buechler's and Cylke's collection of 34 papers on social movements , only one (...) paper focused on countermovements, describing the connection between social movement and countermovement as "a continuous dialect of social change" . Although extensive writings exist on the main campaigns of the animal liberation movement, little scholarly material exists on the defenses mounted by the countermovement. This article examines key elements of a values war, a struggle over moral capital waged by animal protectionists and their countermovement opponents. (shrink)

The simulation hypothesis claims that the whole observable universe, including us, is a computer simulation implemented by technologically advanced beings for an unknown purpose. The simulation argument (as I reconstruct it) is an argument for this hypothesis with moderately plausible premises. I develop two lines of objection to the simulation argument. The first takes the form of a structurally similar argument for a conflicting conclusion, the claim that I am a so-called freak observer, formed spontaneously in a quantum or thermodynamic (...) fluctuation rather than through ordinary processes of evolution and growth. The second rejects the basic line of reasoning of both arguments: the sort of evidence they cite is not capable of supporting either the claim that I am a simulant or the claim that I am a freak observer. The evidence that simulants or freak observers exist is not a reason to think that I am one of them. (shrink)