Genetically modified cassava is currently being developed to address problems of diseases that threaten the food security of farmers in developing countries. The technologies are aimed at smallholder farmers, in hopes of reducing the vulnerability of cassava production to these diseases. In this paper we examine barriers to farmers’ voice in the development of GM cassava. We also examine the role of a translational research process to enhance farmers’ voice, to understand the sources of vulnerability farmers in a group in (...) Kenya’s Coast face, and to determine if their concerns are consistent with those of the scientists in agriculture addressing farmers’ needs. A two-way communication participatory process provided insights into the complex vulnerability context of farmers, their primary concerns with processing and markets of cassava in order to improve livelihoods, the lack of networks with two way communication flows, and the lack of information on GM technologies. The translational research engaged farmers and scientists in an iterative process where scientists are learning what farmers need, and farmers are learning about the potential benefits and risks from GM technologies, while at the same time expressing their concerns. (shrink)

Rising numbers of ageing prisoners and goals on implementing equivalent health care in prison raise issues surrounding end-of-life care for prisoners. The paucity of research on this topic in Europe means that the needs of older prisoners contemplating death in prison have not been established. To investigate elderly prisoners’ attitudes towards death and dying, 35 qualitative interviews with inmates aged 51 to 71 years were conducted in 12 Swiss prisons. About half of the prisoners reported having thought about dying in (...) prison, with some mentioning it in relation with suicidal thoughts and others to disease and old age. Themes identified during data analysis included general thoughts about death and dying, accounts of other prisoners’ deaths, availability of end-of-life services, contact with social relations, and wishes to die outside of prison. Study findings are discussed using Allmark’s concept of “death without indignities,” bringing forth two ethical issues: fostering autonomy and removing barriers. Attributing the identified themes to these two ethical actions clarifies the current needs of ageing prisoners in Switzerland and could be a first step towards the implementation of end-of-life services in correctional systems. (shrink)

This research presents findings from a study of gender-based differences in an ethical decision situation. The study focuses on gender as it relates to situational factors and accounting experience. The primary element of interest is how the gender of the actor (the person described in each vignette) influences the evaluation/assessment of the ethical/unethical decisions. While previous research has provided evidence of ethical differences relating to the gender of the responding subjects, limited evidence has been presented relating to situational issues that (...) may influence assessments of ethical decisions.This research uses four accounting environment vignettes to survey the responses of accountants and accounting students to the ethical/unethical nature of the actions that are taken. In addition, how likely the accountants believe they are to take the same actions is also surveyed. The subjects are a representative sample of practicing accountants in the U.S. and senior/graduate accounting majors at a state university in the southwestern United States. (shrink)

Direct-to-consumer television advertisements for Lyrica in the United States create narratives of gendered domestic normalcy to which women with fibromyalgia are encouraged to aspire through pharmaceutical intervention. This paper unpacks images and narratives within these advertisements to demonstrate that they rely on metaphors that represent gendered expectations in order to evoke guilt and provoke a desire for what Joseph Dumit calls “health as risk reduction,” and what I argue is an attempt to show disability being erased. Following Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding (...) model of communication, viewers play a role in constructing societal expectations for women with chronic pain and for themselves. (shrink)

Shelley Tremain's book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, considers how disability has been incorrectly contained by medical ethics or ignored entirely by mainstream philosophy. She argues for an antifoundational approach to disability that accounts for the historical and material conditions of people while also attending to the conditions of disabled philosophers themselves. This important contribution to the fields of philosophy, gender studies, and disability studies explicitly addresses how ableism has impacted academic discourses in philosophy, harming disabled philosophers, disabled people, (...) and the production of knowledge in these areas. This interrogation of ableism in academia comes as a... (shrink)

By integrating conservation of resources and social comparison perspectives, we seek to investigate how employees’ own i-deals, independently from and jointly with their coworker’s i-deals, determine their emotional exhaustion and subsequent deviant behaviors. We conducted a field study focusing on task i-deals, and used Actor–Partner Interdependence Model and polynomial regression to test the hypotheses. We found that emotional exhaustion not only mediated the negative relationship between employees’ own task i-deals and deviant behaviors, but also mediated the positive relationship between upward (...) social comparison of task i-deals and deviant behaviors. These results demonstrated the intra- and interpersonal implications of task i-deals for emotional exhaustion and subsequent deviant behaviors. The current research not only shifts the attention from a predominantly positive view on i-deals to a more balanced and nuanced view on i-deals’ implications, but also sheds light on the interpersonal nature of i-deals and the emotional exhaustion implication of upward social comparison. (shrink)

Ensuring confidentiality is the cornerstone of trust within the doctor–patient relationship. However, health care providers have an obligation to serve not only their patient’s interests but also those of potential victims and society, resulting in circumstances where confidentiality must be breached. This article describes the attitudes of mental health professionals when patients disclose past crimes unknown to the justice system. Twenty-four MHPs working in Swiss prisons were interviewed. They shared their experiences concerning confidentiality practices and attitudes towards breaching confidentiality in (...) prison. Qualitative analysis revealed that MHPs study different factors before deciding whether a past crime should be disclosed, including: the type of therapy the prisoner-patient was seeking, the type of crime that is revealed, and the danger posed by the prisoner-patient. Based on this study’s findings, risk assessment of dangerousness was one of the most important factors determining disclosures of past crimes, taking into consideration both the type of therapy and the crime involved. Attitudes of MHPs varied with regard to confidentiality rules and when to breach confidentiality, and there was thus a lack of consensus as to when and whether past crimes should be reported. Hence, legal and ethical requirements concerning confidentiality breaches must be made clear and known to physicians in order to guide them with difficult cases. (shrink)

Abstract The leadership of the black community is concerned with welfare, with equality, with unemployment, with discrimination, with racism, with the pay gap, and with dozens of other such traditional issues. Oh, yes, they are also apprehensive about the use of addictive drugs. But, as we speak, young male members of this community are being incarcerated at frightful rates, and, even worse, are killing each other to boot. One would think that this latter issue would occupy the interest of black (...) leaders front and center. After all, there are few worse problems than being jailed or killed. The present paper is dedicated to making the case that the black leadership has its priorities all wrong; that if they were to exercise true leadership, they would see the jailing and murder of young black men as perhaps the greatest threat to their community; and, if so, they would fervently support the legalization of all drugs. (shrink)

Nurses have moral obligations incurred by membership in the profession to participate knowingly in health policy advocacy. Many barriers have historically hindered nurses from realizing their potential to advance health policy. The contemporary political context sets additional challenges to policy work due to polarization and conflict. Nursing education can help nurses recognize their role in advancing health through political advocacy in a manner that is consistent with disciplinary knowledge and ethical responsibilities. In this paper, the authors describe an exemplar of (...) Elizabeth Barrett's “Power as Knowing Participation in Change” theory as a disciplinary lens within a doctoral nursing health policy course. Barrett (radically) emphasizes “power as freedom” instead of “power as control.” This approach is congruent with nursing disciplinary values and enhances awareness of personal freedom and building collaborative relationships in the policy process. The theory was used in concert with other traditional policy content and frameworks from nursing and other disciplines. We discuss the role of nursing ethics viewed as professional responsibility for policy action, an overview of Barrett's theory, and the design of the course. Four student reflections on how the course influenced their thinking about policy advocacy are included. While not specific to policymaking, Barrett's theory provides a disciplinary grounding to increase students' awareness of freedom and choices in political advocacy participation. Our experience suggests that Barrett's work can be fruitful for enhancing nurses' awareness of choices to participate in change across settings. (shrink)

This study presents the manifestations of irrational practices in recent Romanian politics. Providing a short history of the mystical and the occult in Romanian politics, this research uses as a case study the alleged use of the occult “violet flame” in the presidential campaign of 2009. By showing how public religiousness and the daily mystical practices are changing, the author is describing the transformations of the national political communication under the pressure of the news media, which are becoming more (...) and more pervasive to the occult discourses and the magical thinking. The author describes these transformations as part of the general transformations of the political imaginary inRomania. The Romanian public psyche belongs more and more to the culture of infotainment, a culture based on cultivating superficiality, where mystical and simplistic thinking have replaced the traditional processes of public exchange of reasonable ideas. Thus a main trait of this video-pathology in which the Romanian media is engulfed, is the substitution of the rational discourses with the superficial understanding of the world and supernatural explanations about the universe. One of the conclusions is that the manifestations and functions of the irrational in the Romanian political sphere have become more innocuously connected with a deep mysticism already in place, and are profoundly changing the society as a whole. (shrink)

Servius was surely not the first to show discomfort with Vergil's choice of the word violaverit. Observing that the simile in lines 67–8 derives from Homer , he seems to be apologizing for Vergil when he explains that the poet's violaverit translates Homer's νινη. And discomfort there should be. The notion of ‘tainting, spoiling, damaging, defiling’ that violare should carry seems out of place both for the ivory-image and for the picture of the beautiful girl. Modern commentators have been no (...) less troubled than Servius. Unwilling, however, to see Vergil as blindly enslaved to Homer, they have offered another explanation: violare here is tied to the violentia of her lover Turnus. ‘Vergil connects the violentia of Turnus with the staining of the ivory in the simile used to describe Lavinia's blush.’ should like to add a third explanation for Vergil's choice of violare. (shrink)

Although the color violet is now used in a wide variety of everyday products, ranging from toys to clothing to cars, and although it now appears commonly in artistic works, violet was rarely used in fine art before the early 1860s. The color violet only became an integral part of modern culture and life with the rise of the French Impressionists. I investigated the use of violet in over 130,000 artworks prior to 1863 and found that (...) it appeared in about.06 percent of the paintings. Violet was used substantially more frequently in Impressionist works, and remains popular in fine art and in popular culture today. I examine several explanations for the explosion of the use of violet in the art world during the Impressionist era, and conclude that a cognitive-perceptual explanation, based on the heightened sensitivity of the Impressionists to short wavelengths, may account for it. The findings fit with a new understanding about evolutionary changes in planetary light and human adaptation to light. (shrink)

The Evolution of Complexity is addressed to a broad audience of academics and researchers from different disciplines, who are interested in the picture of our world emerging from the new sciences of complexity. This book reviews the new concepts proposed by the diverse theories of evolution, self-organisation, general systems, cybernetics, and the `complex adaptive systems' approach pioneered by the Santa Fe institute. The thread which holds everything together is the growth of complexity during the history of the universe: from elementary (...) particles, via atoms, molecules, living cells, multicellular organisms, plants, and animals to human beings, and societies. The different sections of the book discuss the foundations and philosophy of complexity evolution, its mathematical and computer models, its explanation of self-organising and living systems, the insights it provides into the origin of mind, language and culture, and its practical applications in areas such as management and system design. (shrink)

The notion of affective memory was first introduced by Théodule Ribot (1894), giving rise to a debate about its existence at the beginning of the 20th century. Although Vernon Lee did not directly take part in this discussion, she conceptualized this notion in a quite precise way, mainly in her book Music and Its Lovers (1932), clarifying the sometimes obscure formulations made by previous authors. In this short encyclopedic entry, I present Lee's characterization of affective memory.

The relationship between music and memory is mainly developed in Music and Its Lovers (1932), a book where Lee presents interesting psychological and philosophical insights from the analysis of the responses made by 150 people to a questionnaire about the “expressive and emotional powers of music”. In this short encyclopedic entry, I present Lee's analysis of the many different ways in which musical experience depends on memory.

The medieval motet arose around 1200 with the addition of texts to clausulae, which were polyphonic pieces of two or three parts constructed upon tenors drawn from the melismas of liturgical chants. The upper voices of three-part motets were usually given different texts. According to the traditional account, religious motets with Latin texts came first, followed soon by secular motets with French texts and bilingual double motets, but this chronological sequence has recently been called into question. There is no clear (...) evidence that French motets arose later than Latin ones, and much to suggest that French motets flourished from the beginning. In the Latin motets the texts of the upper part or parts are almost always tropes of the chant tenors. They often incorporate words from the original chants and elaborate on their meaning, just as tropes of Kyries, Alleluias, and other monophonic chants had done. The French texts, on the other hand, are pastourelles, courtly love poems, or other genres of secular poetry similar to those found in the troubadour and trouvère repertory. French motets are thus thought to be unrelated to the chant tenors upon which they are based. The fragment of chant that serves as the tenor of a French motet is seen as merely a compositional device. Its origin as part of a larger melody and text and its connection with the liturgy are irrelevant. (shrink)

1. The “puzzle” Physical objects are coloured: roses are red, violets are blue, and so forth. In particular, physical objects have fine-grained shades of colour: a certain chip, we can suppose, is true blue (unique, or pure blue). The following sort of scenario is commonplace. The chip looks true blue to John; in the same (ordinary) viewing conditions it looks (slightly) greenish-blue to Jane. Both John and Jane are “normal” perceivers. Now, nothing can be both true blue and greenish-blue; since (...) the chip is true blue, it is not greenish-blue. Hence Jane, unlike John, is misperceiving the chip. Generalizing, the conclusion is that there is widespread misperception of fine-grained shades. According to Tye (2006), and Cohen, Hardin, and McLaughlin (2006), the previous paragraph amounts to a paradox: an apparently unacceptable conclusion has been drawn from apparently acceptable premises via apparently acceptable reasoning. (See also Hawthorne and Kovakovich 2006, 180-1.) Tye swallows the conclusion, aided by a dose of evolutionary speculation. Hardin (1988), on the other hand, rejects the first premise, and denies that physical objects are coloured. Cohen (2004) and McLaughlin (2003) claim that both Jane and John have the colour of the chip right. Our opening paragraph concealed a crucial parameter. In fact, the chip looks greenish-blue-relative-to- circumstances-C to Jane, and true-blue-relative-to-circumstances-C* to John, and the chip has both these relativized colours.1 All this ingenious philosophizing would be in vain, of course, if the conclusion of the opening paragraph were not puzzling or problematic. So, why is it supposed to be? According to Tye, the conclusion is puzzling because John and Jane are both “normal perceivers” (xx). He seems to think that it is (prima facie) plausible to assume.. (shrink)

RESUMO Este estudo constitui um recorte de pesquisa doutoral que teve por objetivo compreender, na dimensão verbo-visual da revista cuiabana A Violeta, como se constitui discursivamente o entrecruzamento de vozes. Tomamos o enunciado Chronica, da edição de 31 de dezembro de 1937, a fim de desvelar as tensões discursivo-ideológicas por meio da análise de estratégias linguístico-discursivas e de mobilização do plano de expressão verbo-visual. Baseamo-nos na teoria de Bakhtin e o Círculo, quanto às questões que envolvem as relações dialógicas entre (...) os enunciados, e em Brait, para discutir os aspectos relacionados à verbo-visualidade. Constatamos, pela análise, a presença de um entrecruzamento de vozes: uma voz que acata o discurso vigente, reproduzindo seus temas, como o nacionalismo e o patriotismo, e uma outra voz, perceptível na mobilização da dimensão verbo-visual, crítica à situação política da época. ABSTRACT This study is part of a doctoral research in the field of Bakhtinian studies, which aimed to understand, in the verbal-visual dimension of a magazine from Cuiaba, A Violeta [The Violet], how the intersection of voices is discursively constituted. We focus on the utterance Chronica, published on December 31, 1937, in order to unveil discursive-ideological tensions through the analysis of linguistic-discursive strategies and the mobilization of the verbal-visual plane of expression. This study is based on Bakhtin and the Circle’s theory related to issues involving the dialogical relations between utterances, and on Brait’s discussion about aspects related to verbal-visuality. The analysis showed the presence of an intersection of voices: one voice that complies with the current discourse, reproducing its themes as nationalism and patriotism, and another voice, perceptible in the mobilization of the verbal-visual dimension, that is critical to the political situation of the time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Open Letter to the Enemy:Jean Genet's Holy WarSteven Miller (bio)J.G. seeks, or is searching for, or would like to discover, never to uncover him, the delicious enemy, quite disarmed, whose equilibrium is unstable, profile uncertain, face inadmissible, the enemy broken by a breath of air, the already humiliated slave, ready to throw himself out the window at the least sign, the defeated enemy: blind, deaf, mute. With no arms, (...) no legs, no stomach, no heart, no sex, no head, all told a complete enemy, already bearing all the marks of my bestiality that now need never be used (too lazy anyway). I want the total enemy, with immeasurable and spontaneous hatred for me, but also the subjugated enemy, defeated by me before he even knows me. Not to be reconciled with me, in any case. No friends. Above all, no friends: a declared enemy, but not a tortured one. Clean, faultless. What are his colors? From a green as tender as a cherry to an effervescent violet. His size? Between the two of us, he presents himself to me man to man. No friends. I seek an inadequate enemy, one who comes to capitulate. I will come at him with all that I can muster: whacks, slaps, kicks, I will feed him to starving foxes, make him eat English food, attend the House of Lords, be received at Buckingham Palace, fuck Prince Phillip, and be fucked by him, live for a month in London, dress like me, sleep in place of me, live in place of me: I seek the declared enemy.This brief text was not published until 1991. It was almost published in 1975 in a book of homages to William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and was to have been preceded with the following explanation of its origins, written by Gysin:In Tangiers in 1970, Jean Genet asked me what ever happened to the English underground newspaper The International Times. When I responded that the editors were having trouble with the law in England because of the newspaper's ads for "special friendships" [amitiés particulières], he exclaimed: "Why friends? Personally, I am looking for a suitable enemy [un ennemi à ma taille]." He then wrote the following text...[qtd. in Genet, ED 9]Hence the anecdotal reason for the form of the personal advertisement. In 1991 the text was published—according to Genet's wishes—as the first page of the posthumous collection of his political writings and interviews, L'ennemi déclaré.1 Such a placement demands more than an anecdotal explanation. What is a personal ad doing as the preface to a collection of political writings? Albert Dichy, the editor of the collection, notes that this text has the status of an exception: "the text that opens the collection does not belong to the group of writings that make up the book as a whole" [ED 331]. Each of the other texts emerges from Genet's involvement in specific political events (the [End Page 85] 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention, the Chatila massacre) or with named political figures and groups (the Palestinians, the Black Panthers, the Baader-Meinhof group, George Jackson, Angela Davis), whereas the form of the ad that he wrote for Gysin seems to number it among his literary works. Nonetheless, this eccentric text remains the first in the collection—"en tête de l'ouvrage," is Dichy's phrase—and gives the book its title. Rather than serving as an introduction to the other texts, this text, by virtue of its exceptional form, is a challenge addressed directly to the public. Dichy himself is the first to accept this challenge. His editorial notice passes quickly from anecdote to interpretation:The fact that Genet wished to see the publication of his political articles preceded by this precise text has an unavoidable impact, not only on the identity of the author, now partially assimilable to a fictional character ("J.G. cherche, ou recherche..."), but also on the way in which we read the different texts in the collection, now that we have been given the general tone and the note of secrecy.[ED 331]These suggestions are apt enough... (shrink)

Berlin & Kay hue-related basic color categories are compared with the ISCC-NBS system of object color categorization. Though independently derived, categories of the former form a small subset of the latter. A conjecture is proposed that explains the absence of yellow-green and blue-green basic hue categories and the potential for a violet category as the result of constraints on primitive hue category formation due to considerable variation in stimuli selected by color-normal observers as representing for them unique hues.

Does this Bonnes-Mares really have notes of chocolate, truffle, violets, and merde de cheval? Can wines really be feminine, profound, pretentious, or cheeky? Can they express emotion or terroir? Do the judgements of 'experts' have any objective validity? Is a great wine a work of art? Questions like these will have been entertained by anyone who has ever puzzled over the tasting notes of a wine writer, or been baffled by the response of a sommelier to an innocent question. Only (...) recently, however, have they received the serious philosophical attention they deserve. Touching on issues in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and aesthetics, this book provides a clear and engaging discussion of the philosophical significance of wine that will be accessible to all wine lovers, specialists and non-specialists alike. The author offers throughout a sustained defence of the objectivity of wine judgements, a demystification of the nature of expertise, and a theory of the aesthetic value of wine and its appreciation. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Dans «Objectivism and the Evolutionary Value of Colour Vision», Don Dedrick suggère qu'une conception raffinée de la valeur adaptative en matière de vision des couleurs conduit à une explication non objectiviste de la couleur. Le raffinement, en l'occurrence, consiste à prendre en considération le rôle que jouent les processus perceptuels internes, contraints par les exigences de l'adaptation, dans la répartition des couleurs selon les catégories familières de rouge, violet, bleu, etc. L'objectivisme, par contraste, est présenté par Dedrick comme (...) la position selon laquelle les catégories de couleur sont proprement déterminées par des facteurs externes à l'esprit — une thèse qu'il attribue à Mohan Matthen. Mon objectif dans cet article est de souligner que les éléments internalistes de l'explication de Dedrick, qui sont rappelés à la section 1, sont parfaitement compatibles avec l'objectivisme chromatique. Cet objectivisme, cependant, n'est pas la thèse que Dedrick entend mettre en cause. Je distingue, dans la section 2, la version critiquée par Dedrick, que j'appelle «l'objectivisme fort», de «l'objectivisme modéré», qui est la thèse selon laquelle la couleur elle-même est indépendante de l'esprit bien que les catégories de couleur soient déterminées par des facteurs internes. La doctrine principale de l'objectivisme même, selon ce que je soutiens, demeure neutre eu égard aux versions fortes ou modérées. Dans la section 3, cette notion centrale d'objectivisme est réconciliée avec une explication de la vision des couleurs qui fait référence à la valeur adaptative en contexte évolutionnaire. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the concept of truth in terms of an account of Fregean sense as cognitive value. The account highlights the importance of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference for the individuation of senses. Explicit truth attributions, like ‘that I smell the scent of violets is true’ involve an inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in the that-clause concepts of thoughts that they employ: one cannot understand the that-clause concept of the thought in the truth attribution without understanding the thought (...) the that-clause concept is a concept of. This is not a redundancy that eliminates or deflates cognitive value, but an exploitation, by the concept of truth, of the inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in critical reflective thinking. The cognitive value of the concept of truth is to combine semantically with explicit ways of thinking of thoughts to make critical reflective thinking possible. This account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth assigns cognitive value not by construing the concept of truth as a way of thinking about some thing, but by articulating its broader cognitive role. (shrink)