These are challenging times for leaders who believe schools must teach history honestly, be laboratories of democracy, and honor differences while finding common cause. This book, grounded in two decades of work in diverse school settings, provides guidance to help us remain steadfast in the work. -Racial justice: Beyond proclamations, how can school leaders reallocate resources to support substantive anti-racist school reforms? -Democratic practice: How can school leaders who have significant authority in a hierarchical system wield their power in support (...) of democracy? -Restorative justice: With time in short supply, how can schools truly embrace restorative practice, which calls for slowing down to repair and prevent harm? -Student activism: How can school leaders uphold rules while also supporting students who disrupt in the name of justice? -Counter-extremism: White supremacist threats are a danger to our communities. How can school leaders carefully confront the extremism of these troubled times? Compelling stories drawn from contemporary school contexts help illuminate each of these questions in fine detail. Each chapter concludes with a list of concrete actions every school leader can take in pursuit of answers. Administrators, teacher leaders, and those who support school reform with justice in mind will find both practical guidance and inspiration. (shrink)

Drawing from the dual process model of morality and life history theory, the present research examined the role of cognitive and emotional processes as bridges between basic environmental challenges and other-centered moral orientation. In two survey studies, cognitive and emotional processes represented by future-oriented planning and emotional attachment, respectively, or by perspective taking and empathic concern, respectively, positively predicted other-centeredness in prosocial moral reasoning and moral judgment dilemmas based on rationality or intuition. Cognitive processes were more closely related to rational (...) aspects of other-centeredness, whereas the emotional processes were more closely related to the intuitive aspects of other-centeredness. Finally, the cognitive and emotional processes also mediated negative effects of unpredictability, as well as positive effects of individual-level, contest competition on other-centeredness. Overall, these findings support the view that cognitive and emotional processes do not necessarily contradict each other. Rather, they might work in concert to promote other-centeredness in various circumstances and might be attributed to humans’ developmental flexibility in the face of environmental challenges. (shrink)

Many research fields concerned with the processing of information contained in human faces would benefit from face stimulus sets in which specific facial characteristics are systematically varied while other important picture characteristics are kept constant. Specifically, a face database in which displayed expressions, gaze direction, and head orientation are parametrically varied in a complete factorial design would be highly useful in many research domains. Furthermore, these stimuli should be standardised in several important, technical aspects. The present article presents the freely (...) available Radboud Faces Database offering such a stimulus set, containing both Caucasian adult and children images. This face database is described both procedurally and in terms of content, and a validation study concerning its most important characteristics is presented. In the validation study, all frontal images were rated with respect to the shown facial expression, intensity of expression, clarity of expression, genuineness of expression, attractiveness, and valence. The results show very high recognition of the intended facial expressions. (shrink)

Nietzsche did his philosophizing while he was coming apart at the seams. His writing is hard for readers to find their way around because he was all over the place when he produced it. But it's philosophy of coming apart at the seams and being all over the place, and also philosophy as a way of coping with that predicament-which makes it both fascinating and important. Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together? has three main tasks on its agenda. Nietzsche (...) is hard to make sense of; this is a guide, a book that shows you how to read him for yourself. Second, Nietzsche coped with his disintegrating self by philosophizing, and so this is a work that takes up disunified agency through Nietzsche's own engagement with the topic. Third and finally, Nietzsche managed his fragmenting personality by inventing one after another meaning of life for himself; examining those inventions and the job they did for him is an occasion to ask what a meaning of life is for. (shrink)

Moral distress is now being recognized as a frequent experience for many health care providers, and there's good evidence that it has a negative impact on the health care work environment. However, contemporary discussions of moral distress have several problems. First, they tend to rely on inadequate characterizations of moral distress. As a result, subsequent investigations regarding the frequency and consequences of moral distress often proceed without a clear understanding of the phenomenon being discussed, and thereby risk substantially misrepresenting the (...) nature, frequency, and possible consequences of moral distress. These discussions also minimize the intrinsically harmful aspects of moral distress. This is a serious omission. Moral distress doesn't just have a negative impact on the health care work environment; it also directly harms the one who experiences it. In this paper, I claim that these problems can be addressed by first clarifying our understanding of moral distress, and then identifying what makes moral distress intrinsically harmful. I begin by identifying three common mistakes that characterizations of moral distress tend to make, and explaining why these mistakes are problematic. Next, I offer an account of moral distress that avoids these mistakes. Then, I defend the claim that moral distress is intrinsically harmful to the subject who experiences it. I conclude by explaining how acknowledging this aspect of moral distress should reshape our discussions about how best to deal with this phenomenon. (shrink)

A blindfolded clairvoyant walks into a room and immediately knows how it is arranged. You walk in and immediately see how it is arranged. Though both of you represent the room as being arranged in the same way, you have different experiences. Your experience doesn’t just represent that the room is arranged a certain way; it also visually presents the very items in the room that make that representation true. Call the felt aspect of your experience made salient by this (...) contrast its presentational phenomenology. Many philosophers have observed that perceptual experiences have presentational phenomenology. In this paper I explore its nature, scope, and significance. I argue that in addition to perceptual experiences, presentational phenomenology can be found in intuitive, introspective, imaginative, and recollective experiences. I also argue that presentational phenomenology is epistemologically significant: it plays a central role in explaining why the experiences that have it justify beliefs and give us knowledge. (shrink)

Experiences justify beliefs about our environment. Sometimes the justification is immediate: seeing a red light immediately justifies believing there is a red light. Other times the justification is mediate: seeing a red light justifies believing one should brake in a way that is mediated by background knowledge of traffic signals. How does this distinction map onto the distinction between what is and what isn't part of the content of experience? Epistemic egalitarians think that experiences immediately justify whatever is part of (...) their content. Epistemic elitists deny this and think that there is some further constraint the contents of experience must satisfy to be immediately justified. Here I defend epistemic elitism, propose a phenomenological account of what the further constraint is, and explore the resulting view's consequences for our knowledge of other minds, and in particular for perceptual theories of this knowledge. (shrink)

What does ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ is equivalent to ‘it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining’ or ‘Smith doesn’t know that it isn’t raining’. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can (...) be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting form of assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features. In appendices, I compare the proposed system to Beddor and Goldstein’s ‘safety semantics’ and discuss its analysis of a modal Gettier case due to Moss. (shrink)

There is a felt difference between following an argument to its conclusion and keeping up with an argument in your judgments while failing to see how its conclusion follows from its premises. In the first case there’s what I’m calling an inferential seeming, in the second case there isn’t. Inferential seemings exhibit a cluster of functional and normative characteristics whose integration in one mental state is puzzling. Several recent accounts of inferring suggest inferential seemings play a significant role in the (...) process, but none provides a fully satisfactory understanding of inferential seemings themselves. In this paper I critically examine theoretical options on offer in the existing literature, then develop an alternative view. I discuss implications for recent debates about general principles governing inference, such as Fumerton’s Principle of Inferential Justification and Boghossian’s Taking Condition. (shrink)

Sometime ago, I found myself using the diagnosis of a student’s depression as a critical tool of interpretation, searching for signs of mental illness in her essay that explored order and disorder in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I realised that my reading had become a creative act, combining poem, poet, student essay and author to create, in a sense, one readable text. The present paper is a reflection upon the processes of order and disorder located in a diagnosis (...) of “madness” and the readings of writer and text this diagnosis initiated. I look to deconstruct acts of reading and diagnosis. (shrink)

We examine a prominent naturalistic line on the method of cases, exemplified by Timothy Williamson and Edouard Machery: MoC is given a fallibilist and non-exceptionalist treatment, accommodating moderate modal skepticism. But Gettier cases are in dispute: Williamson takes them to induce substantive philosophical knowledge; Machery claims that the ambitious use of MoC should be abandoned entirely. We defend an intermediate position. We offer an internal critique of Macherian pessimism about Gettier cases. Most crucially, we argue that Gettier cases needn’t exhibit (...) ‘disturbing characteristics’ that Machery posits to explain why philosophical cases induce dubious judgments. It follows, we show, that Machery’s central argument for the effective abandonment of MoC is undermined. Nevertheless, we engineer a restricted variant of the argument—in harmony with Williamsonian ideology–that survives our critique, potentially limiting philosophy’s scope for establishing especially ambitious modal theses, despite traditional MoC’s utility being partially preserved. (shrink)

The claim that "'is' does not entail 'ought"' is so closely associated with Hume that it has been called 'Hume's Law'. 1 The interpretation of the passage in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature that is the locus classicus of the claim is controversial. But the passage is preceded by three main bodies of argument, and, on the working assumption that the passage in question is closely connected to the argumentation that leads up to it, I will here examine the third (...) of these, running from T 463:7 to.. (shrink)

This paper addresses the criticism recently directed at Internet companies who have chosen to do business in China. Currently, in order to conduct business in China, companies must agree to the Chinese government’s rule of self-censoring any information the government deems inappropriate. We start by explaining how some of these companies have violated the human rights of Chinese citizens to freely trade information. We then analyze whether the justifications and excuses offered by these companies are sufficient to absolve them of (...) moral responsibility. We argue that both justifications and excuses offered are insufficient. Wilfully abiding by unjust laws, albeit necessary to do business in China, should not trump moral actions that protect rights. (shrink)

Nietzsche thought at one point that predication originated through the misapplication of names for particulars to further particulars. I doubt myself that this is where the device came from, although one does occasionally encounter usage – such as ‘another Vietnam’ – that evidently does arise in this manner. However, his account of predication is a useful model for a more sophisticated device which we in fact deploy, namely, the intentional misdescription of one circumstance or another in the interests of expedited (...) inference, often via the misapplication of a predicate. I don’t believe that ‘… is a leaf’ is a systematic reapplication of the name of some ur-leaf, but just the other day, I told my gardener that the leaves were off the tree, and that she could come in and work on my pond. I was triggering an inference rule we both accept: that you schedule fall cleanup once the leaves are off the tree. Rather than describe the actual state of the tree , and then renegotiate the rule to match, it was simpler to work with the misdescriptions. My respondents recall that devices such as predication are flexible anyway; they conclude that there is no need to misapply them. Let me try to get you to think twice about the assumption that flexibility pre-empts misapplication. But as I proceed, bear in mind that my illustrations are not intended as an argument. Any given illustration can be read either as a misapplication of a description, or alternatively as a correct application of a predicate, whose use in context is controlled by, perhaps, the sort of techniques discussed by David Lewis …. (shrink)

Hawking particles emitted by a black hole are usually found to have thermal spectra, if not exactly, then by a very good approximation. Here, we argue differently. It was discovered that spherical partial waves of in-going and out-going matter can be described by unitary evolution operators independently, which allows for studies of space-time properties that were not possible before. Unitarity dictates space-time, as seen by a distant observer, to be topologically non-trivial. Consequently, Hawking particles are only locally thermal, but globally (...) not: we explain why Hawking particles emerging from one hemisphere of a black hole must be 100 % entangled with the Hawking particles emerging from the other hemisphere. This produces exclusively pure quantum states evolving in a unitary manner, and removes the interior region for the outside observer, while it still completely agrees locally with the laws of general relativity. Unitarity is a starting point; no other assumptions are made. Region I and the diametrically opposite region II of the Penrose diagram represent antipodal points in a PT or CPT relation, as was suggested before. On the horizon itself, antipodal points are identified. A candidate instanton is proposed to describe the formation and evaporation of virtual black holes of the type described here. (shrink)

A promising strategy for better understanding space and time at the Planck scale, is outlined and further pursued. It is explained in detail, how black hole unitarity demands the existence of transformations that can remove firewalls. This must then be combined with a continuity condition on the horizon, with antipodal identification as an inevitable consequence. The antipodal identification comes with a \ inversion. We claim to have arrived at ‘new physics’, but rather than string theory, our ‘new physics’ concerns new (...) constraints on the topology and the boundary conditions of general coordinate transformations. The resulting theory is conceptually quite non trivial, and more analysis is needed. A strong entanglement between Hawking particles at opposite sides of the black hole is suspected, but questions remain. A few misconceptions concerning black holes, originating from older investigations, are discussed. (shrink)

A wide range of ecological and evolutionary models predict variety in phenotype or behavior when a population is at equilibrium. This heterogeneity can be realized in different ways. For example, it can be realized through a complex population of individuals exhibiting different simple behaviors, or through a simple population of individuals exhibiting complex, varying behaviors. In some theoretical frameworks these different realizations are treated as equivalent, but natural selection distinguishes between these two alternatives in subtle ways. By investigating an increasingly (...) complex series of models, from a simple fluctuating selection model up to a finite population hawk/dove game, we explore the selective pressures which discriminate between pure strategists, mixed at the population level, and individual mixed strategists. Our analysis reveals some important limitations to the ESS framework often employed to investigate the evolution of complex behavior. (shrink)

This article reviews, compares and contrasts the film "Black Hawk Down" by Ridley Scott, with the book by Marc Bowman. The book has a third of its contents devoted to the Somali experience of, and perspective on, the "Day of the Rangers," that is, the day that US troops were militarily involved in Mogadishu, Somalia (October 3, 1993). However, the film almost entirely conveys the U.S. servicemen's experience, with hardly any sympathetic Somali characters. I argue that many of Bowman's original (...) points are lost by not being portrayed in the film. While the film's director Ridley Scott says he intended his film to be an anti-war film, the impression of viewers, and the use of the film by the larger media (and the film's release timed during the US War in Afghanistan in 2002), seems to come to a different conclusion, not only about history (and the "inevitability" of war), but about the current US war on terrorism: support our troops, and don't question a war's intent or methods. (shrink)

A proper understanding of black hole complementarity as a response to the information loss paradox requires recognizing the essential role played by arguments for the applicability and limitations of effective semiclassical theories. I argue that this perspective sheds important light on the arguments advanced by Susskind, Thorlacius, and Uglum—although ultimately I argue that their position is unsatisfactory. I also consider the argument offered by ’t Hooft for the breakdown of microcausality around black holes, and conclude that it relies on a (...) mistaken treatment of measurement collapse. There is, however, a legitimate argumentative role for black hole complementarity, exemplified by the position of Kiem, Verlinde, and Verlinde, that calls for a more subtle analysis of the limitations facing our effective theories. (shrink)

The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don’t matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars (in all their enormity) cannot think, human beings can. Through an exploration of some features of (...) awe and its positive effects on us, I offer a novel way of answering the second question: even if we don’t matter, we, unlike the stars, naturally benefit from observing our own smallness. I explore implications for accounts of the absurdity of human life. Life might be absurd. But I give reasons to think that life isn’t absurd in the ways some such as Nagel and Camus suggest. Finally, I connect non-symmetric awe with Buddhist insights to strengthen a recent and more positive account of how to find meaning in life. (shrink)

The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don’t matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars cannot think, human beings can. Through an exploration of some features of awe and its positive (...) effects on us, I offer a novel way of answering the second question: even if we don’t matter, we, unlike the stars, naturally benefit from observing our own smallness. I explore implications for accounts of the absurdity of human life. Life might be absurd. But I give reasons to think that life isn’t absurd in the ways some such as Nagel and Camus suggest. Finally, I connect non-symmetric awe with Buddhist insights to strengthen a recent and more positive account of how to find meaning in life. (shrink)

This collection of eleven papers by Elijah Millgram (nine of which have been previously published) is ostensibly united by the thesis that the best way to go about assessing moral theories is to identify the view of practical reasoning that each such theory rests upon, and evaluate the adequacy of these respective theories of practical reasoning. The correct moral theory, Millgram assures us, will be the one that is paired with the best theory of practical reasoning. He outlines this (...) methodology in a substantial (32 pp.) introduction. Why should we adopt Millgram’s method? A host of concerns immediately leap to mind. If two or more different moral theories rest on the same theory of practical reasoning, then how would discovering the latter to be the correct theory of practical reasoning help us decide among the moral theories? What if a given moral theory is consistent with two or more different theories of practical reasoning? What if we cannot evaluate theories of practical reasoning independently of having adopted a moral perspective? Millgram doesn’t address these natural questions head on, but rather proposes that the essays of the volume collectively constitute a “feasibility demonstration” (p. 3) of the method. In other words, the only way that we will be persuaded that the pairings between moral theories and practical reasoning theories are tight enough to support this grand project is to get our hands dirty in detailed discussion of particular moral theories, particular theories of practical reasoning, and the relations between them. It is through seeing the method at work that we will become convinced, Millgram hopes, of several interlocking theses: (1) that each of the major moral theories of the past has had a distinctive take on practical reasoning; (2) that pivotal structural elements of these theories are due to the underlying theory of practical reasoning; (3) that problems in a moral theory can often be traced to problems in the underlying theory of practical reasoning; (4) that theories of practical reasoning are “engines” (p.. (shrink)

In Hard Truths Elijah Millgram argues that ‘partial truth’ is pervasive and for that reason bivalence 1 may rarely be assumed. As classical logic assumes bivalence, and inferences from partial truths to partial truths are central to our thinking, classical logic rarely has application, the argument continues. And so we must develop an account of inference from partial truths to partial truths; as well, our metaphysics must be revised. While the novel positions of Hard Truths 2 raise many interesting (...) challenges, my focus is limited to offering an alternative to Millgram’s account of predication and to exploring some issues raised by his appeal to ‘fit’ in his definitions of truth and partial truth. 1. Introduction to partial truth Millgram defines truth and partial truth in terms of fit, as follows: Advancing a claim as fully true demands complete fit; assessing a claim as partially true allows for slack … but only so much of it. Claims are said to completely fit, slackly fit or not fit, the world, in §6.3. But, the word ‘fit’ is first introduced in §1.2, and it is experience or proto-experience, that fits into moulds provided by claims, thoughts, sentences and predicates. I won’t dwell on which fits what, 3 but on the notion of a ‘complete fit’ and the contrast with a ‘slack fit’; this discussion leads me to ponder the clarity and implications of appealing to these notions in definitions like the above. Millgram’s explanation of fit comes in the context of his account of predication, according to which, most predicates do not quite apply. It’s this that is primarily responsible for his promotion of partial truth. I sketch an alternative account of language whereby predicates do apply because language has come to life as a constituent of the things we do: …. (shrink)

The Bible ridicules idolaters for bowing down to sticks and stones. Since idolaters worship what the sticks and stones stand for, not the sticks and stones themselves, isn’t the biblical position confused? At the basis of the Bible’s consistent refusal to observe the preceding distinction are found the conceptual underpinnings of its critique of idolatry. Men and women alone among creatures are inspired with God’s breath. Men and women alone among creatures, that is, are like God. They alone among creatures (...) are persons. Since mere pieces of nature cannot understand prayers, entreaties, etc., and hence cannot respond in the personal way, idolatrous practices are incoherent. But while it is true that (sub-person) elements of nature cannot enter into inter-personal relations, idolatry has a sequel: the scientific interrogation of nature, an interrogation which has been magnificently effective in eliciting responses. Elijah’s dramatic confrontation with the Baalites is a stylized version of the clash between the biblical view of men and women as in an irreducible respect non-natural, and the naturalizing scientific view. On the Carmel, the prophets of the Baal are soundly defeated. Must those who inherit from them lose too? That is a live question. Read closely, the story of Elijah implies that those behind the Bible would defend the view of human distinctiveness against the renascent idolatry. (shrink)

The Bible ridicules idolaters for bowing down to sticks and stones. Since idolaters worship what the sticks and stones stand for, not the sticks and stones themselves, isn’t the biblical position confused? At the basis of the Bible’s consistent refusal to observe the preceding distinction are found the conceptual underpinnings of its critique of idolatry. Men and women alone among creatures are inspired with God’s breath. Men and women alone among creatures, that is, are like God. They alone among creatures (...) are persons. Since mere pieces of nature cannot understand prayers, entreaties, etc., and hence cannot respond in the personal way, idolatrous practices are incoherent. But while it is true that (sub-person) elements of nature cannot enter into inter-personal relations, idolatry has a sequel: the scientific interrogation of nature, an interrogation which has been magnificently effective in eliciting responses. Elijah’s dramatic confrontation with the Baalites is a stylized version of the clash between the biblical view of men and women as in an irreducible respect non-natural, and the naturalizing scientific view. On the Carmel, the prophets of the Baal are soundly defeated. Must those who inherit from them lose too? That is a live question. Read closely, the story of Elijah implies that those behind the Bible would defend the view of human distinctiveness against the renascent idolatry. (shrink)

The Buddhist Jātaka tells the tale of a hare lounging under a palm tree who becomes convinced the Earth is coming to an end when a ripe bael fruit falls on its head. Soon all the hares are running; other animals join them, forming a stampede of deer, boar, elk, buffalo, wild oxen, rhinoceros, tigers and elephants, loudly proclaiming the earth is ending.1 In the American retelling, the hare is ‘chicken little,’ and the exaggerated fear is that the sky is (...) falling. The story offers a cautionary tale for considering the trend towards calamity thinking in artificial intelligence (AI). A growing chorus of tech leaders has warned that AI poses existential risk (X-Risk) that could result in the extinction of the human species, the collapse of civilisation, or a colossal decline in human potential and culture. In 2014, Hawking told the Washington Post that AI, ‘could spell the end of the human race’.2 Musk has repeatedly warned about AI’s perils, calling AI, ‘more dangerous than nukes’, recommending colonising Mars to ensure ‘a bolt-hole if AI goes rogue and turns on humanity’,3 and donating 10 million dollars to the Future of Life Institute to jumpstart research on AI’s X-Risk. Gates has stated, ‘I am in the camp…concerned about super intelligence…I agree with … Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned’.4 Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has fretted that technologies OpenAI was building could endanger humanity—‘even destroying the world as we know it’.5 This paper offers a critical appraisal of the rise of calamity thinking in the scholarly AI ethics literature. It cautions against viewing X-Risk in isolation and highlights ethical considerations sidelined when X-Risk takes centre stage. Section I introduces a working definition of X-Risk, considers its likelihood and …. (shrink)

At W.D. 202–12 Hesiod relates his ανος for the edification of the recalcitrant βασιλες, who must themselves admit the truth of the fable's moral . A hawk has seized a nightingale, and crushes her cries of misery by saying that she is in the claws of one who is πολλν ρείων and who is therefore at liberty to dispense with her as he pleases: anyone who tries to resist κρείσσονες is mad, for he has no chance of winning and merely (...) adds physical pain to the shame of defeat. Just what were the βασιλες to have made of this? Hesiod's most recent editor claims that ‘Hesiod does not manage to make it [the ανος] into a lesson for them [the kings]’, and ‘can only proceed by saying “Well, don't you behave like that” ’. (shrink)

In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; (...) rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science. (shrink)

Controversy over providing financial incentives to research participants has a long history and remains an issue of contention in both current discussions about research ethics and for institutional review bodies/human research ethics committees which are charged with the responsibility of deciding whether such incentives fall within ethical guidelines. The arguments both for and against financial incentives have been well aired in the literature. A point of agreement for many is that inducement in the form of financial incentive is permissible when (...) the risk of harm to the individual is negligible in terms of degree and probability of occurrence. In the absence of harm to the individual, encouraging more people to participate in research would appear to be a good thing in so far as it will lead to statistically more robust research outcomes, which can then be translated into better healthcare and other practice. Whilst, on the face of it, this position seems highly defensible, I will explore the possibility that it is counterproductive – that is, providing individuals with financial incentives to become research participants may have the unintended outcome of reducing participation rates in some areas of research. In exploring this idea I will draw on empirical findings from the literature on crowding-out – the hypothesis that providing monetary incentives to people can backfire by overall reducing intrinsic motivation, in this instance intrinsic motivation to behave altruistically or undertake civic duties. (shrink)

A Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament, being Grimm's Wilke's Clavis Novi Testamenti. Translated, Revised and Enlarged by Joseph Henry Thayer, D.D., Bussey Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation in the Divinity School of Harvard University. Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark. 1886. 4to. pp. 726. 36s.Biblico Theological Lexicon to New Testament Greek. by Hermann Cremer, D.D., Professor of Theology in the University of Greifswald. Third English Edition. With Supplement. Translated from the latest German Edition by William Uewick, M.A. (...) Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark. 1886. 4to. pp. 943. 38s. (shrink)

The holographic principle was proposed by Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft in the 1990s and it has also been modeled by Leonard Susskind and Stephen Hawking. We’ve heard light mentioned with regard to the fundamental nature of reality for a long time; God said Let there be light, we are the light of the world, etc. But we haven’t investigated a possible role for the speed of light in our illnesses. This paper will do just that. The central premise is (...) that light’s “speed” is a reflection of the degree to which the observer is removed from its source. In its Platonic state, light’s speed is zero. It is light from which time, by degrees, emerges. The Big Bang can be envisioned as a sphere, the center of which is a point, Alpha. Via expansion, Alpha becomes a sphere, Omega, by degrees, where each degree is c. For any given Alpha, the circumference of a circle on the sphere, Omega, is a set of resonant points that represent the speed of light or “end of time.” Every radius—every line drawn from Alpha to Omega—is an arrow of time, a parallel universe. Alpha and Omega increase in tandem, maintaining the degree of separation required by special relativity, E=mc^2. The holographic sphere of points equidistant from the Big Bang on which we find ourselves is not the only sphere of points equidistant from the Big Bang. There are spheres that are smaller and larger than ours. Where an arrow of time intersects a sphere-brane of light’s speed will be treated here as a “2D hologram.” For an observer behind the hologram, reality will appear to be accelerating/expanding. For an observer in front of it, reality will appear to be decelerating/contracting. For an observer at the speed of light, time is no longer a variable. (shrink)