Previous research has found that funding disparities are driven by applications’ final impact scores and that only a portion of the black/white funding gap can be explained by bibliometrics and topic choice. Using National Institutes of Health R01 applications for council years 2014–2016, we examine assigned reviewers’ preliminary overall impact and criterion scores to evaluate whether racial disparities in impact scores can be explained by application and applicant characteristics. We hypothesize that differences in commensuration—the process of combining criterion scores into (...) overall impact scores—disadvantage black applicants. Using multilevel models and matching on key variables including career stage, gender, and area of science, we find little evidence for racial disparities emerging in the process of combining preliminary criterion scores into preliminary overall impact scores. Instead, preliminary criterion scores fully account for racial disparities—yet do not explain all of the variability—in preliminary overall impact scores. (shrink)

The White Coats for Black Lives and #ShutDownSTEM movements have galvanised biomedical practitioners and researchers to eliminate institutional and systematic racism, including barriers faced by Black researchers in biomedicine and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In our study on Black–White funding gaps for National Institutes of Health Research Project grants, we found that the overall award rate for Black applicants is 55% of that for white applicants. How can systems for allocating research grant funding be made more fair while improving (...) their efficiency? (shrink)

We study decision under uncertainty in an Anscombe–Aumann framework. Two binary relations characterize a decision-maker: one incomplete relation, reflecting her objective rationality, and a second complete relation, reflecting her subjective rationality. We require the latter to be an extension of the former. Our key axiom is a dominance condition. Our main theorem provides a representation of the two relations. The objectively rational relation has a Bewley-style multiple prior representation. Using this set of priors, we fully characterize the subjectively rational relation (...) in terms of the most optimistic and most pessimistic expected utilities. (shrink)

In the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a brief flourishing of practical and group phenomenological work, spurred by a renewed intention towards the things themselves. Despite a growing turn to phenomenology across the Humanities since the 1990’s, there is still much more written about phenomenology than phenomenology performed. This essay sketches a brief history of group phenomenological methods which have sought to remedy this situation and outlines a project nearing completion at the Department of Performance Studies at the University of (...) Sydney, Australia, using a small group of trained phenomenological researchers to study the phenomenon of being in audiences. (shrink)

This article examines recent developments in cognitivist theories of the emotions, and seeks to develop an original theory within that approach. The article specifically considers the criticism that such theories over-intellectualise emotions by reducing them to attitudes towards propositions and by excluding feelings. I argue that few cognitivists have ever held the former position, and that it is possible to claim that emotions are partly-constituted by feelings and remain within the parameters of a cognitivist theory. This is possible in virtue (...) of the fact that cognitivists take emotions to be composed of intentional states. If we define a feeling as a perception of the state of one’s body, then a feeling can be counted as one of the intentional states, alongside, say, a belief of a judgement, which partly constitute any emotion. I call this position ‘complex cognitivism’. (shrink)

Grant and Quiggin suggest that agents employ heuristics to constrain the set of acts under consideration before applying standard decision theory, based on their restricted model of the world to the remaining acts. The aim of this paper is to provide an axiomatic foundation, and an associated representation theorem, for the preference model proposed by Grant and Quiggin. The unawareness of the agent is encoded both in the specification of the states and in an elaboration of the set of consequences. (...) We illustrate how the representation can be applied to rationalize two notions of the precautionary principle that were proposed and discussed in Grant and Quiggin. (shrink)

We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a dynamically consistent agent always to prefer more informative signals (in single-agent problems). These conditions do not imply recursivity, reduction or independence. We provide a simple definition of dynamically consistent behavior, and we discuss whether an intrinsic information lover (say, an anxious person) is likely to be dynamically consistent.

The pursuit of social goals and ethics in business creates challenges. Sustained efforts to address poverty, environmental degradation or health/wellbeing require meaningful and transformative responses that impact across multiple levels—individual, community and the global collective. Shifting predominant paradigms to facilitate change entails a renegotiation of business strategy—between organizations, their purpose(s), individual and collective stakeholders and ultimately with society at large. Hybrid organizations such as social enterprises are positioned to affect such change. However, in balancing divergent goals such organizations encounter tensions (...) and paradox, creating a duality of ethics. Utilizing in-depth interviews to develop a case within the sustainable fashion industry, we identify tensions and paradox within women-oriented hybrid organizations. Significantly, managing these tensions and paradox results in multiple dualities of ethics, often with a wider impact on organizational founders/managers. We find three interrelated ethical dualities: business strategy and personal values; financial sustainability and holistic sustainability; and business, employee, societal wellbeing, and personal wellbeing. This insight is noteworthy when looked at within the broader context of sustainability and highlights the importance of sustainability in women-oriented hybrid organizations. (shrink)

We propose a new metric for evaluating the informativeness of a set of ratings from a single rater on a given scale. Such evaluations are of interest when raters rate numerous comparable items on the same scale, as occurs in hiring, college admissions, and peer review. Our exposition takes the context of peer review, which involves univariate and multivariate cardinal ratings. We draw on this context to motivate an information-theoretic measure of the refinement of a set of ratings – entropic (...) refinement – as well as two secondary measures. A mathematical analysis of the three measures reveals that only the first, which captures the information content of the ratings, possesses properties appropriate to a refinement metric. Finally, we analyse refinement in real-world grant-review data, finding evidence that overall merit scores are more refined than criterion scores. (shrink)

If rapid growth (rap) mutants of Escherichia coli could be obtained, these might prove a valuable contribution to fields as diverse as growth rate control, biotechnology and the regulation of the bacterial cell cycle. To obtain rap mutants, a dnaQ mutator strain was grown for four and a half days continuously in batch culture. At the end of the selection period, there was no significant change in growth rate. This result means that selecting rap mutants may require an alternative strategy (...) and a number of such alternatives are discussed. (shrink)

We investigate what distinguishes social entrepreneurial ecosystems (SEEs) from entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) through appreciation of the importance of context—the multiplex of intertwined social, spatial, temporal, historical, cultural, and political influences. Community is incorporated as a key variable and hitherto overlooked dimension of the structure and influence of SEEs. We draw on extant literature and examples of a variety of SEEs to support our propositions and demonstrate why considerations of both context and community are critical to advance understanding of SEEs. We (...) contribute to the study of SEEs by presenting a new conceptual framework and theorizing SEE as an evolving composite of interdependent actors who interact and collaborate across multiple levels to collectively generate positive externalities and drive sustainable solutions to social problems. (shrink)

Between March and June 2008, a group of fifteen Performance Studies and Communications students at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia undertook a course on comedy based on a series of six lectures by Agnes Heller in which she outlined ideas from her book, Immortal Comedy. Subsequently, the students attended a number of comedy shows and other events to perform practical group phenomenological research with an aim to activate the ground opened by Heller’s theories through description of actual comic phenomena. The (...) outcomes—theoretical, experiential and, most surprisingly, pedagogical—were remarkable in their demonstration of the efficacy of group phenomenology as a method of intertwined practice, research and learning. (shrink)

Le texte examine les recherches récentes et le développement de la théorie cognitive des émotions, et cherche à développer une théorie originale dans le cadre de cette approche. L e texte s’oriente particulièrement sur la critique qui réduit ces théories des émotions trop intellectualisées à des attitudes selon des propositions et exclue les sentiments. Je tiens que quelques cognitivistes seulement ont représenté ladite théorie, et qu’il est possible d’affirmer que les émotions sont partiellement constituées de sentiments et qu’elles restent à (...) l’intérieur des paramètres de la théorie cognitive. Cela est possible si les cognitivistes considèrent que les émotions soient constituées d’attitudes intentionnelles. Si l’on définit le sentiment comme la perception d’une attitude envers le corps de quelqu’un, alors on peut entendre le sentiment comme l’une des attitudes intentionnelles, tout comme la conviction de discernement qui constitue partiellement toute émotion. Je nomme cette position le « cognitivisme complexe ». (shrink)

Tekst propituje novija istraživanja i razvoj kognitivnih teorija emocija te nastoji razviti originalnu teoriju unutar tog pristupa. Tekst se posebno usmjerava na kriticizam koji takve teorije pre-intelektualiziranih emocija reducira na stavove prema propozicijama i isključuje osjećaje. Tvrdim da je svega nekoliko kognitivista zastupalo navedenu teoriju te da je moguće tvrditi da su emocije djelomično konstituirane od osjećaja i da ostaju unutar parametara kognitivne teorije. To je moguće ako je valjana činjenica da kognitivisti smatraju da su emocije sastavljene od intencionalnih stavova. (...) Ako definiramo osjećaj kao percepciju stava o nečijem tijelu, tada se osjećaj može razumjeti kao jedan od intencionalnih stavova uz, primjerice, uvjerenje o moći prosuđivanja koje djelomično konstituira svaku emociju. To poziciju nazivam »kompleksnim kognitivizmom«. (shrink)

Der Artikel hinterfragt neuere Entwicklungen in kognitiven Emotionstheorien und versucht von diesem Ansatz ausgehend eine originelle Theorie zu entwickeln. Es wird insbesondere der Kritizismus in Erwägung gezogen, der Theorien überintellektualisierter Emotionen reduziert auf Einstellungen zu Propositionen und Gefühle ausschließt. Ich bin der Ansicht, dass nur einige wenige Kognitionswissenschaftler die genannte Theorie vertraten, sodass man behaupten kann, dass Emotionen teilweise aus Gefühlen konstituiert sind und dabei im Rahmen der Parameter der kognitiven Theorie bleiben. Dies ist möglich aufgrund der Tatsache, dass Kognitivisten (...) die Meinung vertreten, dass Emotionen aus intentionalen Einstellungen bestehen. Wenn wir das Gefühl als Perzeption der Einstellung zu jemandes Körper definieren, dann kann das Gefühl als eine der intentionalen Einstellungen verstanden werden, neben der Überzeugung, dass die Urteilskraft teilweise jede Emotion konstituiert. Diese Position bezeichne ich als „komplexen Kognitivismus”. (shrink)

This article addresses whether contemporary feeling theories of the emotions can overcome the problems generally associated with such theories. Specifically, it considers whether they can explain the normative assessment of the emotions, their availability for introspective identification, and their intentionality. The article looks primarily at the work of Jesse Prinz, and suggests that his responses to these problems fall short as a result of a flawed account of the intentional nature of emotions. I conclude with brief comments on how theories (...) which include intentional states such as judgements within the ontology of emotion overcome the problems which are identified. (shrink)