Schrödinger's approach was analytical, but it is equivalent to an algebraic treatment. We review the evolution of group theory as a physical tool and its application to the Hilbert space of Schrödinger's eigenstates. Special emphasis is put on recent results relating to the relativistic quantized string.

This paper describes PluriVox, a user-friendly program aimed to improve group process and dynamics and to promote the health of undeserved population. PluriVox is grounded in psychoeducation, and it can be used in public health efforts to encourage service consumers (“patients”) to become more active in realizing their own health-related needs through participation in health promotion groups. We suggest PluriVox as a strategy to help service providers (e.g., physicians, nurses, community health workers) and consumers to work as co-producers of (...) health. PluriVox contains five competencies to help group facilitators: (1) observation protocol; (2) strategies to support group facilitation; and (3) group facilitator training. Training uses participatory methods that take only 15 hours. Herein we provide a description of how PluriVox was developed using group work theories. A preliminary evaluation suggests that PluriVox has potential to improve health professionals' capacity to facilitate health promotion groups in a Unified Health System. (shrink)

Most donated organs in the United States come from brain dead donors, while a small percentage come from patients who die in “controlled,” or expected, circumstances, typically after the family or surrogate makes a decision to withdraw life support. The number of organs available for transplant could be substantially if donations were permitted in “uncontrolled” circumstances–that is, from people who die unexpectedly, often outside the hospital. According to projections from the Institute of Medicine, establishing programs permitting “uncontrolled donation after (...) circulatory determination of death,” or uDCDD, throughout the United States has the potential to provide 22,000 more donation opportunities annually. In contrast, U.S. controlled donation after circulatory determination of death, or cDCDD, cases have increased progressively over the past decade from 87 to 848 donors, but currently account for only 10.6 percent of all deceased donors. Following the IOM recommendations, several projects exploring the feasibility of uDCDD were funded by the federal government, including a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that supported a pilot project in New York City in which the authors of this article participated.A key feature of our protocol, and indeed of many uDCDD protocols, is the initiation of preservation methods such as chest compressions and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation shortly after death in order to perfuse and preserve the donor's organs. Critics of uDCDD argue that the means of determining death deviates from generally ascribed principles. They assert that reinstituting circulation in order to preserve organs has the effect of “undoing” the prior determination of death. The result is that cDCDD is widely accepted and practiced routinely even though it only marginally increases the number of organs available for transplantation, and uDCDD is widely considered unacceptable despite being ethically embraced and proven to significantly increase organ donation opportunities in other countries. This article explores the evolution of this counterintuitive state of affairs and calls for a policy that, in line with the IOM report, allows for both cDCDD and uDCDD protocols. (shrink)

Python language has become the most popular computer language. Python is widely adopted in computer courses. However, Python language’s effects on the college and university students’ learning performance, motivations, computer programming self-efficacy, and maladaptive cognition have still not been widely examined. The main objective of this study is to explore the effects of learning Python on students’ programming learning. The junior students of two classes in a college are the research participants. One class was taught Java language and the other (...) class was taught Python language. The learning performance, motivations, and maladaptive cognition in the two classes were compared to evaluate the differences. The results showed that the motivations, computer programming self-efficacy, and maladaptive cognition on the learning performance were significant in the Python class. The results and findings of this study can be used in Python course arrangement and development. (shrink)

Targeting high-risk populations for public health interventions is a classic tool of public health promotion programs. This practice becomes thornier when racial groups are identified as the at-risk populations. I present the particular ethical and epistemic challenges that arise when there are low-risk subpopulations within racial groups that have been identified as high-risk for a particular health concern. I focus on two examples. The black immigrant population does not have the same hypertension risk as US-born African Americans. Similarly, Finnish (...) descendants have a far lower rate of cystic fibrosis than other Caucasians. In both cases the exceptional nature of these subpopulations has been largely ignored by the designers of important public health efforts, including the recent US government dietary recommendations. I argue that amending the publicly-disseminated risk information to acknowledge these exceptions would be desirable for several reasons. First, recognizing low-risk subpopulations would allow more efficient use of limited resources. Communicating this valuable information to the subpopulations would also promote truth-telling. Finally, presenting a more nuanced empirically-supported representation of which groups are at known risk of diseases (not focusing on mere racial categories) would combat harmful biological race essentialist views held by the public. (shrink)

Programmed cell death (PCD) in unicellular organisms is in some instances an altruistic trait. When the beneficiaries are clones or close kin, kin selection theory may be used to explain the evolution of the trait, and when the trait evolves in groups of distantly related individuals, group or multilevel selection theory is invoked. In mixed microbial communities, the benefits are also available to unrelated taxa. But the evolutionary ecology of PCD in communities is poorly understood. Few hypotheses have been (...) offered concerning the community role of PCD despite its far-reaching effects. The hypothesis we consider here is that PCD is a black queen. The Black Queen Hypothesis (BQH) outlines how public goods arising from a leaky function are exploited by other taxa in the community. Black Queen (BQ) traits are essential for community survival, but only some members bear the cost of possessing them, while others lose the trait In addition, BQ traits have been defined in terms of adaptive gene loss, and it is unknown whether this has occurred for PCD. Our conclusion is that PCD fulfils the two most important criteria of a BQ (leakiness and costliness), but that more empirical data are needed for assessing the remaining two criteria. In addition, we hold that for viewing PCD as a BQ, the original BQH needs to include social traits. Thus, despite some empirical and conceptual shortcomings, the BQH provides a helpful avenue for investigating PCD in microbial communities. (shrink)

IntroductionThe present study aimed to evaluate the effects of the Active Communication Education program on the social/emotional impacts of hearing loss in a group of older adults with a cochlear implant.DesignProspective cohort study design, with a “within-subject” control procedure.Study SampleTwenty adults over-65 post-lingually deafened CI users. All subjects were required to be native Italian speakers, to have normal cognitive level, have no significant psychiatric conditions and/or diagnosed incident dementia, and used CI for at least 9 months.Materials and MethodsTwenty participants (...) were assessed using the Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly, the Geriatric Depression Scale, and the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale before, during, and after ACE program, with a one and 6-month follow up. The cognitive and audiological evaluation was carried out before commencing the ACE program.ResultsThe ACE program had a positive impact by reducing HL’s social/emotional effects. Participants benefited from a rehabilitative approach by improving multilevel skills: comprehension of audiological and hearing dimensions, acquisition of communicative, pragmatic and problem-solving strategies, and interaction and sharing of experiences with peers.ConclusionAlthough targeting the older adults with moderate HL, the ACE program also seemed to benefit older adult CI users. An improvement in social and emotional adaptation to hearing difficulties can, in turn, significantly promote optimal use of CI in the older adults, thereby possibly reducing the risk of losing motivation and engagement in device use and in rehabilitation protocols. (shrink)

The problem of violence in schools causes considerable concern in many countries of the world and in our country as well because of the enormous psychological and physical consequences it brings to children and young people. In literature, research can be found even forty years ago, when this phenomenon was defined as aggressive, deliberate, and persistent action carried out by a group or individual against a victim who cannot be easily defended. More recently, violence is not only considered to (...) be physical, but also violence can also be experiences through social networks, which gives us an additional incentive for its further study, all in order to stand in the way of violence and reduce it as much as possible. This paper studies the theoretical and empirical knowledge about some significant factors that contribute to the occurrence of peer violence, such as: family, school environment and personality characteristics of the bully and the victim. At the end, an overview of effective violence prevention programs from different countries in the world is given. (shrink)

University program dropout is a problem that has important consequences not only for the student that leaves but also for the institution in which the withdrawal occurs. Therefore, higher education institutions must study the problem in greater depth to establish appropriate prevention measures in the future. However, most research papers currently focus primarily on the characteristics of students who leave university, rather than on those who choose to pursue alternative courses of study and therefore fail to take into account the (...) different kinds of abandonment. The aim of this paper is to identify the different types of dropout to define their characteristics and propose some recommendations. Thus, an ex post facto study was carried out on a sample of 1311 freshmen from a university in the north of Spain using data gathered using an ad-hoc designed questionnaire, applied by telephone or an online survey, and completed with data available in the university data warehouse. A descriptive analysis was performed to characterize the sample and identify five different groups, including 1. Students persisting in their initiated degree 2. Students who change of program (within the same university) 3. Students transferring to a different university 4. Students enrolling in non-higher-education studies 5. Students that quit studying. Also, data mining techniques (decision trees) were applied to classify the cases and generate predictive models to aid in the design of differentiated intervention strategies for each of the corresponding groups. (shrink)

This collection of current research on logic programming languages presents results from a three-year, ESPRIT-funded effort to explore the integration of the foundational issues of functional, logic, and object-oriented programming. It offers valuable insights into the fast-developing extensions of logic programming with functions, constraints, concurrency, and objects. Chapters are grouped according to the unifying themes of functional programming, constraint, logic programming, and object-oriented programming.

Despite clear overlap between the study of extended minds and the study of group minds, these research programs have largely been carried out independently. Moreover, whereas proponents of the extended mind thesis straightforwardly advocate the view that there are, literally, extended mental states, proponents of the group mind thesis tend to be more circumspect. Even those who advocate for some version of the thesis that groups are the subjects of mental states often concede that this thesis is (...) true only in some loose or metaphorical sense. I argue that this imbalance is a mistake. A literal interpretation of the group mind thesis is no less plausible than the extended mind thesis, because group minds are particularly defensible instances of extended minds. However, the extended mind thesis, and the view that group minds are extended minds, are defensible only following a revision of the extended mind thesis. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to define some new operation laws for the trapezoidal linguistic cubic fuzzy number and Hamming distance. Furthermore, we define and use the trapezoidal linguistic cubic fuzzy TOPSIS method to solve the multi criteria decision making (MCDM) method. The new ranking method for trapezoidal linguistic cubic fuzzy numbers (TrLCFNs) are used to rank the alternatives. Finally, an illustrative example is given to verify and prove the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method.

The article deals with the influence of organizational ethics program components on managerial ethical behavior. The main aim was to establish which EP components are perceived as valuable and useful to foster the ethical behavior of managers. Moreover, we also aimed to investigate the role of ethics training in this context and to explore whether it can potentially increase managers’ trust in EP components as effective tools for the promotion of ethical behavior. The article advances the EP theory in several (...) ways. It offers novel insights into both business ethics and EP development in the specific cultural and social circumstances of a former socialist country in the Central and Eastern European region, Slovakia. It shows that codes of ethics and related reporting and control mechanisms are perceived as the most effective EP components to shape managerial ethical behavior. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence, and to some extent contrary to prior theory, the article unveils three EP functions, namely the ‘compliance with group norms,’ the ‘ethics education through collective discussion,’ and the ‘counselling and resolving of ethical issues’ at workplace. In addition, the article shows that ethics trainings can help to boost the trust of managers toward EP components and might be conceptualized as a precursor for an effectively functioning EP. (shrink)

Group dynamics play an important role in the social interactions of both children and adults. A large amount of research has shown that merely being allocated to arbitrarily defined groups can evoke disproportionately positive attitudes toward one’s in-group and negative attitudes toward out-groups, and that these biases emerge in early childhood. This prompts important empirical questions with far-reaching theoretical and applied significance. How robust are these inter-group biases? Can biases be mitigated by behaviors known to bond individuals (...) and groups together? How can bonds be forged across existing group divides? To explore these questions, we examined the bonding effects of interpersonal synchrony on minimally constructed groups in a controlled experiment. In-group and out-group bonding were assessed using questionnaires administered before and after a task in which groups performed movements either synchronously or non-synchronously in a between-participants design. We also developed an implicit behavioral measure, the Island Game, in which physical proximity was used as an indirect measure of interpersonal closeness. Self-report and behavioral measures showed increased bonding between groups after synchronous movement. Bonding with the out-group was significantly higher in the condition in which movements were performed synchronously than when movements were performed non-synchronously between groups. The findings are discussed in terms of their importance for the developmental social psychology of group dynamics as well as their implications for applied intervention programs. (shrink)

Cancer viewed as a programmed, evolutionarily conserved life‐form, rather than just a random series of disease‐causing mutations, answers the rarely asked question of what the cancer cell is for, provides meaning for its otherwise mysterious suite of attributes, and encourages a different type of thinking about treatment. The broad but consistent spectrum of traits, well‐recognized in all aggressive cancers, group naturally into three categories: taxonomy (“phylogenation”), atavism (“re‐primitivization”) and robustness (“adaptive resilience”). The parsimonious explanation is not convergent evolution, but (...) the release of an highly conserved survival program, honed by the exigencies of the Pre‐Cambrian, to which the cancer cell seems better adapted; and which is recreated within, and at great cost to, its host. Central to this program is the Warburg Effect, whose malign influence permeates well beyond aerobic glycolysis to include biomass interconversion and genomic heuristics. Warburg‐type metabolism and genomic instability are targets whose therapeutic disablement is a major priority. (shrink)

Since the later decades of the 20 th century, Brazilian psychologists have been questioning a theoretical and interventional model in educational contexts, which consider psychological phenomena apart from their cultural contexts, in order to develop an approach based on a contextualized viewpoint. Despite progress having been made in educational psychology, as a result of this critical paradigm, this area still has problems to overcome: Psychologists are becoming increasingly separate from schools, and it is now common to find psychologists who are (...) professionally unprepared to perform in this context and furthermore, school principals do not always understand the role of psychologists in educational settings. However, educational demands exist in psychologists’ daily work in a range of contexts, indicating the relevance of this field and the urgency to improve psychologists' qualifications. Considering that Brazilian professional development programs for educators and psychologists are usually restricted to technical learning, often ignoring professionals’ real needs and claims, this research aimed to develop a special type of professional development program looking at the group as a source of development, in order to rethink professional development process from within a collaborative perspective. Research data was generated from a professional development program offered for psychologists and professionals who work within educational settings. This programme involved collaborative group work and was organized and conducted in such a way as to create conditions for change. Concepts of cultural-historical theory – social situation of development, crisis and perezhivanie – were used as analytic tools for data analysis. Analysis indicated the importance of the group as a source of development through dialogue and the co-construction of new ideas and possibilities. (shrink)

Alan Robinson This set of essays pays tribute to Bob Kowalski on his 60th birthday, an anniversary which gives his friends and colleagues an excuse to celebrate his career as an original thinker, a charismatic communicator, and a forceful intellectual leader. The logic programming community hereby and herein conveys its respect and thanks to him for his pivotal role in creating and fostering the conceptual paradigm which is its raison d’Œtre. The diversity of interests covered here reflects the variety of (...) Bob’s concerns. Read on. It is an intellectual feast. Before you begin, permit me to send him a brief personal, but public, message: Bob, how right you were, and how wrong I was. I should explain. When Bob arrived in Edinburgh in 1967 resolution was as yet fairly new, having taken several years to become at all widely known. Research groups to investigate various aspects of resolution sprang up at several institutions, the one organized by Bernard Meltzer at Edinburgh University being among the first. For the half-dozen years that Bob was a leading member of Bernard’s group, I was a frequent visitor to it, and I saw a lot of him. We had many discussions about logic, computation, and language. (shrink)

To address complexity information fusion problems involving fuzzy and grey uncertainty information, we develop prioritized averaging aggregation operator and Bonferroni mean aggregation operator with grey linguistic 2-tuple variables and apply them to design a new decision-making scheme. First, the grey linguistic 2-tuple prioritized averaging operator is developed to characterize the prioritization relationship among experts and employed to fuse experts’ information into an overall opinion. Second, we establish dual generalized grey linguistic 2-tuple weighted Bonferroni mean operator to capture the interrelationship among (...) any attribute subsets, which can be reduced to some conventional operators by adjusting parameter vector. On that basis, a flexible group decision-making approach with fuzzy and grey information is designed and applied to an evaluation problem, in which grey relationship analysis method and a linear programming model are combined to extract attribute weights from partially known attribute information. Furthermore, an illustrative example is employed to illustrate the practicality and flexibility of the designed method by conducting the related comparative studies. (shrink)

We construct logical languages which allow one to represent a variety of possible types of changes affecting the information states of agents in a multi-agent setting. We formalize these changes by defining a notion of epistemic program. The languages are two-sorted sets that contain not only sentences but also actions or programs. This is as in dynamic logic, and indeed our languages are not significantly more complicated than dynamic logics. But the semantics is more complicated. In general, the semantics (...) of an epistemic program is what we call aprogram model. This is a Kripke model of ‘actions’,representing the agents' uncertainty about the current action in a similar way that Kripke models of ‘states’ are commonly used in epistemic logic to represent the agents' uncertainty about the current state of the system. Program models induce changes affecting agents' information, which we represent as changes of the state model, called epistemic updates. Formally, an update consists of two operations: the first is called the update map, and it takes every state model to another state model, called the updated model; the second gives, for each input state model, a transition relation between the states of that model and the states of the updated model. Each variety of epistemic actions, such as public announcements or completely private announcements to groups, gives what we call an action signature, and then each family of action signatures gives a logical language. The construction of these languages is the main topic of this paper. We also mention the systems that capture the valid sentences of our logics. But we defer to a separate paper the completeness proof. (shrink)

Felix Klein classified geometries by their group structure. It is pointed out that a similar program has been in place for particle physics and canonical quantum mechanics.

The objectives of the present study were to adapt a grief intervention program to family caregivers of patients with dementia, and assess its effectiveness in improving the symptoms of grief and other health-related variables. The intervention was based on Shear and Bloom's grief intervention program, with the necessary adaptations for use in the grieving process for a family member's illness. A total of 52 family caregivers of individuals with dementia participated. They were evaluated using a battery of self-report measures assessing (...) grief, overload, resilience, post-traumatic growth, experiential avoidance, health-related quality of life, and benefits of care. The results suggest that the program is effective in improving grief symptoms, caregiver burden, resilience, post-traumatic growth, and quality of life of family caregivers. It is necessary to create and implement interventions targeting caregivers' feelings and manifestations of ambiguous grief, because there is a lack of programs providing an efficient solution for the mental and physical health of caregivers, and because of the human and socioeconomic cost involved in neglecting this group. (shrink)

Coexistence in schools inevitably carries a higher risk of conflicts among peers. This fact can be detrimental to the well-being and academic achievement of the students. In many developed countries, about 90% of the pupils in compulsory secondary education report witnessing assaults among peers. In this regard, recognizing, controlling and managing emotions is key to ensure a healthy and effective interaction with others. Negative emotions, such as anger, can trigger conflicts or even episodes of violence if not regulated properly. Interactive (...) tools, such as specialised software’s, have shown high rates of efficacy for the training of different kinds of competences like the regulation of emotions. The aim of the present work is to describe the Happy Emotional Education Program and its effects over a sample of secondary school students. This software focuses in the training of emotional competences of the students with the objective of solving conflicts in a more assertive way. The design employed in the present work was a quasiexperimental design with pretest and posttest with a control group. Results show that Happy Emotional Education Program contributes to the management of emotions and well-being in a significant way. Additionally, the constant use of this interactive tool enhances motivation and the learning process of students. Results also indicate the importance of assessing the effects of the program in the long term. This would enable researchers to further assess the effects of the program over those emotional competences that are more resistant to change given its stable nature. (shrink)

How and Why Groups Polarize Polarization and Democracy Deliberative Trouble Notes.

The difficulties of relativistic particle theories formulated by means of canonical quantization, such as those of Klein–Gordon and Dirac, ultimately led theoretical physicists to turn to quantum field theory to model elementary particle physics. In order to overcome these difficulties, the theories of the present approach are developed deductively from the physical principles that specify the system, without making use of canonical quantization. For a free particle these starting assumptions are invariance of the theory and covariance of position with respect (...) to Poincaré transformations. In pursuing the approach, the effectiveness of group theoretical methods is exploited. The coherent development of our program has shown that robust classes of representations of the Poincaré group, discarded by the known particle theories, can in fact be taken as bases for perfectly consistent theories. For massive spin zero particles, six inequivalent theories have been determined, two of which do not correspond to any of the current ones; all of these theories overcome the difficulties of Klein–Gordon one. The present lack of the explicit transformation properties of position with respect to boosts prevents the complete determination of non zero spin particle theories. In the past a particular form of these transformation properties was adopted by Jordan and Mukunda. We check its consistency within the present approach and find that for spin \ particles there is only one consistent theory, which is unitarily related to Dirac’s; yet, once again, it requires classes of irreducible representations previously discarded. (shrink)

We critically discuss the impact of sustainable development initiatives in Kerala, India, on biodiversity and on women farmers in the matrilineal Adivasi community of the Kurichya-tribe in Wayanad. By contextualizing development programs regarding the specifically gendered access to land, division of labor, distribution of knowledge and decision-making power, we situate our analysis within the theoretical framework of feminist political ecology. We first outline women’s gaining of social and political space in local self-government institutions and then critically discuss the impacts (...) of women’s farming groups. Decentralization and development programs have aimed at empowering women and reducing poverty through improved food security. However, little success has materialized, as patriarchal power structures concerning decision-making processes as well as control over the most valuable resources and traditional knowledge have been maintained. Whereas women’s self-help groups in Kerala have enhanced their position, women’s farming groups, by contrast, have brought little betterment. In some cases they have even downsized women’s management and knowledge of resources related to agriculture and do not integrate or enhance Kurichya women’s knowledge. As some women are now introducing high-yielding rice seeds and fertilizer and as it is impossible for them to control land and get access to traditional rice seeds—the domain of men—we contest the notion of women being considered the preservers of agrobiodiversity. We argue, rather, that the construction and transformation of ecological traditional knowledge is highly dependent on the gendered multi-scaled power structures of state and community. (shrink)

Understand the challenges faced by university based EAPs and the strategies to effectively meet needs&#;and discover what works and what does not Academia is a diverse workplace unlike any other, and subsequently, employee assistance program issues are unique. Employee Assistance Programs in Higher Education focuses on the unique challenges of employee assistance service delivery in a university setting. This handy resource discusses the evolution, development, and strategies in managing an EAP in academia while comparing the substantial differences in program (...) application between academic settings and corporate settings. Discussions include outsourcing, support groups, implementation of services, and effective model frameworks. Employee Assistance Programs in Higher Education explores in depth how the difference of being an academic institution influences the administration of an EAP. Reducing costs, assessing the value of an EAP, faculty resistance to accessing EAPs, organizational and interpersonal problems, manager support groups to reduce stress, developing ’soft skills’, and addressing the deaths of faculty, staff, and students are examined in detail. This unique resource is extensively referenced and includes tables to clearly present data. Topics in Employee Assistance Programs in Higher Education include: the evolution of the IAEAPE university EAP response to traumas on campus enhancing faculty access university EAPs and outsourcing creating a specialized EAP program comparison between academic and corporate cultures case study of the University of Saskatchewan EAP _and more! _ Employee Assistance Programs in Higher Education is a comprehensive resource for academic administrators; benefit plan managers; university based EAP managers and directors; EAP, work/life, and wellness professionals; members of International Association of Employee Assistance Professionals in Education; Employee Assistance Professionals Association; Employee Assistance Society of North America; Association of Work Life Professionals; Society for Human Resource Management Schools of Social Work; educators in schools of social work, psychology, counseling education, and business. (shrink)

To this day, a hundred and fifty years after Mendeleev's discovery, the overal structure of the periodic system remains unaccounted for in quantum-mechanical terms. Given this dire situation, a handful of scientists in the 1970s embarked on a quest for the symmetries that lie hidden in the periodic table. Their goal was to explain the table's structure in group-theoretical terms. We argue that this symmetry program required an important paradigm shift in the understanding of the nature of chemical elements. (...) The idea, in essence, consisted of treating the chemical elements, not as particles, but as states of a superparticle. We show that the inspiration for this came from elementary particle physics, and in particular from Heisenberg's suggestion to treat the proton and neutron as different states of the nucleon. We provide a careful study of Heisenberg's last paper on the nature of elementary particles, and explain why the Democritean picture of matter no longer applied in modern physics and a Platonic symmetry-based picture was called for instead. We show how Heisenberg's Platonic philosophy came to dominate the field of elementary particle physics, and how it found its culmination point in Gell-Mann's classification of the hadrons in the eightfold way. We argue that it was the success of Heisenberg's approach in elementary particle physics that sparked the group-theoretical approach to the periodic table. We explain how it was applied to the set of chemical elements via a critical examination of the work of the Russian mathematician Abram Ilyich Fet the Turkish-American physicist Asim Orhan Barut, before giving some final reflections. (shrink)

In the 2007–8 academic year, the Hebrew University – Hadassah Medical School established a three-year Medical Humanities program. We developed a spiral curriculum addressing three main concepts: moral reasoning, professionalism, and the social and cultural context of medicine, each of which is revisited during the entire period of studies on a higher level. The courses—encompassing topics applicable to medicine in general as well as subjects of special significance to physicians in Israel—are taught in a combination of frontal lectures, small (...) class='Hi'>group discussions, and early clinical exposure. Our interdisciplinary faculty includes physicians, nurses, social workers, psychologists, lawyers and members of the Faculty of Humanities. We believe that teaching the medical humanities enables graduating physicians to utilize the latest scientific and technological knowledge more empathetically and humanely, reminding them that medicine is not confined to mere tending to the sick, but includes an ethical philosophy common to all physicians who remain true to their art. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze the nature of groups and collective actions, focusing primarily upon those groups that do not possess either a formal organizational structure or formalized decision procedures. I argue that the unity relation for all groups is a common interest and that the existence of this common interest makes even informal groups specific and enduring entities which can act and be acted upon.In light of this discussion, I proceed to examíne the issue of affirmative action programs (...) and policies of preferential treatment. I argue that by utilizing my theory of groups the most serious objections to such policies --- viz., that they unjustly discriminate against innocent and arbitrarily selected white males in favor of undeserving and arbitrarily selected African Americans and women --- are shown not to be applicable. These objections depend upon reducing groups to their constituent individuals whereas I maintain that some groups ought to be treated as entities themselves. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze the nature of groups and collective actions, focusing primarily upon those groups that do not possess either a formal organizational structure or formalized decision procedures. I argue that the unity relation for all groups is a common interest and that the existence of this common interest makes even informal groups specific and enduring entities which can act and be acted upon.In light of this discussion, I proceed to examíne the issue of affirmative action programs (...) and policies of preferential treatment. I argue that by utilizing my theory of groups the most serious objections to such policies --- viz., that they unjustly discriminate against innocent and arbitrarily selected white males in favor of undeserving and arbitrarily selected African Americans and women --- are shown not to be applicable. These objections depend upon reducing groups to their constituent individuals whereas I maintain that some groups ought to be treated as entities themselves. (shrink)

The current study tries to verify the effectiveness of a training program in increasing Crowdfunding awareness. The sample was (50) students in CIS, who were purposively selected and distributed equally into a treatment and control group. The researchers designed the study tools (a training program to increase Crowdfunding awareness). The study findings revealed the existence of statistically significant differences between the treatment and control groups in favor of the former. Furthermore, there were statistically significant differences between the pre and (...) the post measures of the treatment group in favor of the post measures. Furthermore the current study is unique by the virtue of its nature, scope and way of implied investigation, as it is the first study for Crowdfunding training program in Arabic world. (shrink)

We critically discuss the impact of sustainable development initiatives in Kerala, India, on biodiversity and on women farmers in the matrilineal Adivasi community of the Kurichya-tribe in Wayanad. By contextualizing development programs regarding the specifically gendered access to land, division of labor, distribution of knowledge and decision-making power, we situate our analysis within the theoretical framework of feminist political ecology. We first outline women’s gaining of social and political space in local self-government institutions and then critically discuss the impacts (...) of women’s farming groups. Decentralization and development programs have aimed at empowering women and reducing poverty through improved food security. However, little success has materialized, as patriarchal power structures concerning decision-making processes as well as control over the most valuable resources and traditional knowledge have been maintained. Whereas women’s self-help groups in Kerala have enhanced their position, women’s farming groups, by contrast, have brought little betterment. In some cases they have even downsized women’s management and knowledge of resources related to agriculture and do not integrate or enhance Kurichya women’s knowledge. As some women are now introducing high-yielding rice seeds and fertilizer and as it is impossible for them to control land and get access to traditional rice seeds—the domain of men—we contest the notion of women being considered the preservers of agrobiodiversity. We argue, rather, that the construction and transformation of ecological traditional knowledge is highly dependent on the gendered multi-scaled power structures of state and community. (shrink)

Background Advance care planning (ACP) is a process in which adults engage in an ongoing dialogue about future medical treatment and care. Though ACP is recommended to improve the quality of end-of-life care, the details of the dialogue experience in ACP are unknown. Objective To explore participants’ experiences of dialogue in an ACP educational program that encouraged them to discuss the value of a way of life. Research design This qualitative descriptive study used the focus group interview method. Data (...) were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Participants and research context A dialogue-based ACP educational program was conducted in four regions in Japan for local citizens to discuss the value of their way of life. A total of 66 individuals (mean age = 55.5 ± 17.2 years; 50 women and 16 men) participated in focus group interviews. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the Ethical Review Committee of Tokyo Women’s Medical University (no. 4723) and Kyoto University (no. R2099). Findings Five main themes were extracted: discussing one’s thoughts with others in a considerate manner, reflecting on one’s way of life through others, feeling a sense of connection with others through storytelling, realizing the difficulties of talking about “what if” topics, and turning one’s eyes toward the future through the dialogue. These themes were interrelated and illustrated the complexity of the experience of discussing values. Conclusions The results suggest that dialogue in ACP is useful in clarifying values. They also indicated the need for dealing with the ethical challenges of discussing value and the importance of caring for the interlocutor to have a safe dialogue. In the ACP process, safety in dialogue may improve readiness in ACP, and health practitioners who support ACP need to address the ethical challenges entailing dialogue about values. (shrink)

Teaching mathematics and improving mathematics competence are pending subjects within our educational system. The PEIM (Programa Evolutivo Instruccional para Matemáticas), a constructivist intervention program for the improvement of mathematical performance, affects the different agents involved in math learning, guaranteeing a significant improvement in students’ performance. The program is based on the following pillars: (a) students become the main agents of their learning by constructing their own knowledge; (b) the teacher must be the guide to facilitate and guarantee such a construction (...) by being a great connoisseur of the fundamental aspects of the development of the child’s mathematical thinking; (c) the mathematical contents must be sequenced in terms of the complexity and significance for the student as well as contextualized at all times; and (d) the classroom must have a constructivist climate highlighting cooperative work among students. The implementation of PEIM along with the empirical evaluation conducted in several centers in Madrid and Zaragoza (Spain) confirm how students improve their mathematical competence. Both first- and second-grade students in elementary education were far more effective in solving problems, highlighting the use of more advanced strategies in their resolution and a lower incidence of conceptual errors. Moreover, it was possible to verify how the students proving greater difficulty, experienced an evolution in learning similarly to those who did not present it. The program provides customized education to allow the teacher to know at all times how he should be more influential on the students’ learning through mathematical profiles. Both teaching practice and teachers were observed, being that of the experimental group more prone to analyzing processes and allowing the construction of knowledge by students, due to their psycho-developmental training. As a result, we found several improvements through the implementation of the program that may serve, for upcoming years, as a basis for the necessary changes in the teaching of mathematics. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory and computational model of the role of emotions in group decision making. After reviewing the role of emotions in individual decision making, it describes social and psychological mechanisms by which emotional and other information is transmitted between individuals. The processes by which these mechanisms can contribute to group consensus are modeled computationally using a program, HOTCO 3, which has been used to simulate simple cases of emotion-based group decision making.

Gatekeeping, or determining membership of your group, is crucial to science: the moniker ‘scientific’ is a stamp of epistemic quality or even authority. But gatekeeping in science is fraught with dangers. Gatekeepers must exclude bad science, science fraud and pseudoscience, while including the disagreeing viewpoints on which science thrives. This is a difficult tightrope, not least because gatekeeping is a human matter and can be influenced by biases such as groupthink. After spelling out these general tensions around gatekeeping in (...) science, we shed light on them with a case study from psychology. This concerns whether academic psychologists rightly or wrongly classify the applied-psychology framework of NLP (‘neuro-linguistic programming’) as unscientific and even pseudoscientific. This example of gatekeeping is particularly instructive because both the NLP community and the psychology community, we argue, make legitimate but also illegitimate moves. This case gives rise to several general insights about gatekeeping in science more generally. (shrink)

This study develops a Science–Technology–Society (STS)-based science ethics education program for high school students majoring in or planning to major in science and engineering. Our education program includes the fields of philosophy, history, sociology and ethics of science and technology, and other STS-related theories. We expected our STS-based science ethics education program to promote students’ epistemological beliefs and moral judgment development. These psychological constructs are needed to properly solve complicated moral and social dilemmas in the fields of science and engineering. (...) We applied this program to a group of Korean high school science students gifted in science and engineering. To measure the effects of this program, we used an essay-based qualitative measurement. The results indicate that there was significant development in both epistemological beliefs and moral judgment. In closing, we briefly discuss the need to develop epistemological beliefs and moral judgment using an STS-based science ethics education program. (shrink)

This edited volume examines the relationship between collective intentionality and inferential theories of meaning. The book consists of three main sections. The first part contains essays demonstrating how researchers working on inferentialism and collective intentionality can learn from one another. The essays in the second part examine the dimensions along which philosophical and empirical research on human reasoning and collective intentionality can benefit from more cross-pollination. The final part consists of essays that offer a closer examination of themes from inferentialism (...) and collective intentionality that arise in the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Groups, Norms, and Practices provides a template for continuing an interdisciplinary program in philosophy and the sciences that aims to deepen our understanding of human rationality, language use, and sociality. (shrink)

This chapter examines the ways race should and should not affect the delivery of health care benefits in a system that is just. To show how race affects the distribution of health care, it highlights disquieting similarities between the infamous Tuskegee study of fifty years ago and contemporary public health efforts directed at reducing HIV infection/AIDS in the African-American community that may detract from the effectiveness of these programs. It argues that a just society’s stability may require resource allocation (...) for the purpose of demonstrating the extent of justice in the system. Furthermore, patients’ trust in their physicians is important to good health care and distrust is a disadvantage in obtaining effective health care. The chapter also proposes a series of remedies. In an illustrative postscript, it considers Michelle Obama’s initiative to reduce the incidence of obesity in U.S. children and contends that, given the history of anti-black racism in America, African Americans still have special reasons to distrust programs that would alter their eating habits and lifestyles. (shrink)

In this article we report the findings of a randomised control clinical trial that assessed the impact of a Philosophy for Children program and replicated a previous study conducted in Scotland by Topping and Trickey. A Cognitive Abilities Test was administered as a pretest and a posttest to randomly selected experimental groups and control groups. The students in the experimental group engaged in philosophy lessons in a setting of structured, collaborative inquiry in their language arts classes for one hour (...) per week for a number of weeks. The control group received the standard language arts curriculum in that one hour. The study found that the seventh grade students who had experienced the P4C program showed significant gains relative to those in the seventh grade control group at a high level of statistical significance, but the eighth grade students in the experimental group did not show such gains over the eighth grade control group. It was discovered that the seventh grade teachers started the program early in the school year and continued it for a period of 22 to 26 weeks, while the eighth grade teachers started much later and used the program for only 4 to 10 weeks. Our findings suggest that the P4C program must involve students in activities for a significant period of time before the program shows results, but that a meaningful impact on students’ cognitive abilities can be achieved in about 24 weeks of lessons, less than half the time evidenced by the study by Topping and Trickey. (shrink)

In this article we present a training program based on the empirical research conducted in the project 'argumentational integrity'. After a brief sketch of the problem dimensions concerning unfair argumentation we give an overview of the training concept and the underlying empirical research. Exemplification of the instructional design is given for the second and the fifth training dimension (standards of argumentational integrity and reactions to unfair contributions). Finally we indicate how the training is to be evaluated and present initial results (...) demonstrating that in comparison with an untrained control group participants in the training significantly improve their skills in identifying and naming argumentative rule violations. (shrink)

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs are increasingly popular corporate marketing strategies. This paper argues that CSR programs can fall along a continuum between two endpoints: Institutionalized programs and Promotional programs. This classification is based on an exploratory study examining the variance of four responses from the consumer stakeholder group toward these two categories of CSR. Institutionalized CSR programs are argued to be most effective at increasing customer loyalty, enhancing attitude toward the company, and decreasing (...) consumer skepticism. Promotional CSR programs are argued to be more effective at generating purchase intent. Ethical and managerial implications of these preliminary findings are discussed. (shrink)

We describe a recent program from the study of definable groups in certain o-minimal structures. A central notion of this program is that of a lattice. We propose a definition of a lattice in an arbitrary first-order structure. We then use it to describe, uniformly, various structure theorems for o-minimal groups, each time recovering a lattice that captures some significant invariant of the group at hand. The analysis first goes through a local level, where a pertinent notion of pregeometry (...) and generic elements is each time introduced. (shrink)

In this article we report the findings of a randomised control clinical trial that assessed the impact of a Philosophy for Children program and replicated a previous study conducted in Scotland by Topping and Trickey. A Cognitive Abilities Test was administered as a pretest and a posttest to randomly selected experimental groups and control groups. The students in the experimental group engaged in philosophy lessons in a setting of structured, collaborative inquiry in their language arts classes for one hour (...) per week for a number of weeks. The control group received the standard language arts curriculum in that one hour. The study found that the seventh grade students who had experienced the P4C program showed significant gains relative to those in the seventh grade control group at a high level of statistical significance, but the eighth grade students in the experimental group did not show such gains over the eighth grade control group. It was discovered that the seventh grade teachers started the program early in the school year and continued it for a period of 22 to 26 weeks, while the eighth grade teachers started much later and used the program for only 4 to 10 weeks. Our findings suggest that the P4C program must involve students in activities for a significant period of time before the program shows results, but that a meaningful impact on students’ cognitive abilities can be achieved in about 24 weeks of lessons, less than half the time evidenced by the study by Topping and Trickey. (shrink)