A system of description, identification and classification of factors determining driving style is proposed in the article; stable and variable factors determining driving style are studied. Driving style is analyzed within the framework of structural approach. The variable factor are: specifications and technical condition of the vehicle, class of the car, its prestige, training of the driver, social regulators, features of the road environment, psychophysiological condition of the driver. The stable factors are: individual-typological properties, (...) the level of suitability for driver”s activities, personal features of a driver and sources of activity. Five main characteristics of driving style are selected and presented: safety-risk, confidence with parking, relation to the means of security; planning-impulsivity; driving culture. There are results of empirical research directed on discovery of relationship between styles of driving activities as one characteristic of driving style, emotions typical for driver while driving and accidents. Increase of safety as a result of planning style of activities is shown. The paper offers direction of work for optimizing driving style: the formation of compensating planning style of activities, psychotherapeutic work, modeling training, psychological selection, training and education work in driving schools. (shrink)

This paper proposes that autonomous vehicles should be designed to reduce light pollution. In support of this specific proposal, a moral assessment of autonomous vehicles more comprehensive than the dilemmatic life-and-death questions of trolley problem-style situations is presented. The paper therefore consists of two interrelated arguments. The first is that autonomous vehicles are currently still a technology in development, and not one that has acquired its definitive shape, meaning the design of both the vehicles and the surrounding infrastructure is (...) open-ended. Design for values is utilized to articulate a path forward, by which engineering ethics should strive to incorporate values into a technology during its development phase. Second, it is argued that nighttime lighting—a critical supporting infrastructure—should be a prima facie consideration for autonomous vehicles during their development phase. It is shown that a reduction in light pollution, and more boldly a better balance of lighting and darkness, can be achieved via the design of future autonomous vehicles. Two case studies are examined through which autonomous vehicles may be designed for “driving in the dark.” Nighttime lighting issues are thus inserted into a broader ethics of autonomous vehicles, while simultaneously introducing questions of autonomous vehicles into debates about light pollution. (shrink)

The first few years of driving is a critical period when driving skills develop and the driving style is established. While the actual driving skills improve during the first few years of driving, a novice driver’s view of himself/herself as a safe and/or skilful driver also develops rapidly. The aim of this study was to investigate self-evaluated driver safety and perceptual-motor skills among different age groups of young drivers, along with the relationships between self-evaluated (...) skills and driving behaviour. The sample consisted of a stratified random sample of 18–25-year-old drivers from the Finnish driving licence register. The questionnaires, which included the Driver Skill Inventory, Driver Behaviour Questionnaire and background information, were completed and returned by a total of 1,058 participants. While female drivers assessed their safety skills to be higher than their perceptual-motor skills, the opposite was true for males. In both sexes, perceptual-motor skills increased, and safety skills decreased with experience. Perceptual-motor skills correlated negatively with safety skills, lapses and errors, but positively with aggressive and ordinary violations. Safety skills correlated negatively with all DBQ variables. Safety orientation seems to be most clearly reflected in deliberate aberrant driving behaviours. Sex differences were observed in the development of behaviours and skills, perceptual-motor skills only increased with age among males, while safety skills decreased through experience among both men and women. Results showed that driving experience was strongly related to both driving style and the drivers’ view of their skills, highlighting the importance of the first few years of driving. (shrink)

Summary I outline an approach to the phenomenology of improvised music which takes typification and the development of multi‐ordered phenomenological structures as central. My approach here is firmly in line with classical Husserlian phenomenology, taking the discussion of types in Experience and Judgment (Husserl, 1973) and Brudzińska (2015) as guide. I provide a phenomenological analysis of musical types as they are found in improvisational contexts, focusing on jazz in the 20th century. Styles are higher‐order musical types. Musical types are structures (...) that are temporally “thick,” relying on sedimented typification and knowledge, driving expectations as definitional. In most forms of music (including improvised music), musical styles involve maintaining a balance between confirming expectations and flouting expectations. I show that improvised music has a phenomenal structure which is enriched by the communicative and “ real‐time” nature of improvised music. Improvised music can be seen as an exploration of a possibility space rendered by the juxtaposition of the musical types afforded by a performance environment (instrumentation, harmonic and melodic traditions, etc.). I show that improvisation in music is a multi‐vectoral form of communication. The communication is founded in what Dieter Lohmar calls “non‐linguistic thinking.” The expression is constituted in the results of active and synthesis. The culmination of improvisational exploration of possibility spaces is the precisification and enrichment of styles‐as‐types, while in some cases developing new styles in the process. (shrink)

Questions of what a self-driving car ought to do if it encounters a situation analogous to the ‘trolley problem’ have dominated recent discussion of the ethics of self-driving cars. This paper argues that this interest is misplaced. If a trolley-style dilemma situation actually occurs, given the limits on what information will be available to the car, the dynamics of braking and tyre traction determine that, irrespective of outcome, it is always least risky for the car to brake (...) in a straight line rather than swerve. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Men Becoming Gods in "Style"Gioia and Girard on Divinized DesireJoshua Hren (bio)In our secular age we hear seekers of the sacred and religious devotees alike decry the soul-deadening, spirit-dumbing consequences of materialism. René Girard contends that—on the contrary—in the "leveled," horizontal world of a purportedly materialistic modernity this transcendent authority is deviated and distorted but it does not disappear. In his first major work, Deceit, Desire, and the (...) Novel, he argues that "the passion that drives men to seize or gain more possessions is not materialistic; it is the triumph of the mediator, the god with the human face."1 In a materialistic age, the gods are "pulled down from the heaven, the sacred flows over the earth" and men become "gods for each other."2Dana Gioia, former businessman and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is no stranger to the economy of divinized desire. The stakes of our passions—whether we are wrecked by dubious wants or able to shed our infernal imitations—pierce his poetry. Gioia cites Girard as a significant influence alongside St. Augustine and Kierkegaard, though he does not indicate whether his own poetic investigations of mimesis are a direct yield of [End Page 149] his encounter with Girard or the independent discovery of attentive artistic intuition.3The refuge of lies so central to Girard is particularly palpable in Gioia's long narrative poem "Style."4 Charlie, the self-deprecating narrator, divinizes his college friend Tom, a business mogul who "prospered like one chosen by the gods."5 Tom uses his easy money to purchase gaudy metamorphoses, hosting magnificent events with his "flawless" wife Eden. An antihero of the unremarkable variety, Charlie attends all Tom's parties until he stops receiving invitations. When he discovers his deity's disappearance is tied to a terminal illness, he descends into the infernal "slums" of Tom's new hideout, and he finds his former hero hell-bent, ready to commit an arson that will erase his own existence in style. Charlie is confronted with a difficult decision that any coward would waver before. He has the chance to become an atheist—at least with respect to his dying god. After painting a portrait of man-made gods, the poem probes the question of whether and how we can cut short our penchant for great deceits.Charlie opens this narrative poem with an invective directed against himself.Just look at me. Isn't it obvious?I have no style. I'm just a human blur.On me expensive clothes look second-hand.They droop or sag. The color's never right.I wear the wrong apparel to the party.I pick the dullest item on the menu.Each haircut brings some new humiliation.6Crucially, we never receive an audit of this dour self-consciousness. By poem's end, no one has corrected or confirmed Charlie's condemnations. He may be right; his might be the antinomy of Midas's modus operandi. His hyperbolic portrait of Tom's greatness suggests that he is less than just to himself. His preoccupation with something as small as a menu item betrays a brutal obsessiveness. He employs the ascetical word "humiliation" in conjunction with a "haircut"—further revealing his unforgiving inner harshness. Charlie "always loved to visit Tom" precisely because he himself is Pathetic, Inc.7Were René Girard Charlie's older brother, he might sit the sad sap down on a comfortable couch and spell out the difficult truth as follows: The anti-hero "dreams of absorbing and assimilating his mediator's being."8 This highfalutin description of "the Other implies an insuperable revulsion for one's own substance."9 We ought not to take seriously the excuses these types give for their [End Page 150] failings and their fawning, for they "hate themselves on a more essential level than that of 'qualities.'"10 When Charlie disparages his badly cut bangs or his mismatched outfits, he's really incriminating his very being."The desire," Girard argues, "is aimed at the mediator's being."11 Charlie evinces this dynamic when he insists that Tom's "success was existential: / It wasn't what... (shrink)

Nietzsche sometimes praises the drive to order—to simplify, organize, and draw clear boundaries—as expressive of a vital "classical" style, or an Apollonian artistic drive to calmly contemplate forms displaying "epic definiteness and clarity." But he also sometimes harshly criticizes order, as in the pathological dialectics or "logical schematism" that he associates paradigmatically with Socrates. I challenge a tradition that interprets Socratism as an especially one-sided expression of, or restricted form of attention to, the Apollonian: they are more radically disparate. (...) Beyond strengthening the case for this basic point, I develop a distinctive account of what, exactly, distinguishes the Apollonian-classical and Socratic forms of order. To this end, I advance interrelated interpretations of Apollonian-classical simplicity and the "cold" calm that it elicits, by contrast to superficially similar Socratic phenomena. This illuminates Nietzsche's broader ambivalence toward science, in part by clarifying the nature and value of an idealized Apollonian science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article reappraises some aspects of Alexander Nehamas's Nietzsche: Life as Literature. It recognizes as strengths of the book Nehamas's emphasis on Nietzsche's mode of writing and his idea that unified selfhood is an exceptional state that is achieved rather than given. However, it takes issue with the claim that Nietzsche holds a superessentialist view of the self. That view is not clearly supported by textual evidence, does not follow from Nietzsche's regarding the self as simply a sequence of (...) experiences and actions, and is not required in order to explain the “all-or-nothing” requirement of the eternal recurrence. The article argues further that unified selfhood cannot be accounted for solely on the model of literary character, given what is now generally recognized as Nietzsche's naturalistic psychology of drives. However, the Nietzschean self need not be viewed as immutable and is amenable to the influence of culture and consciousness in ways that may encourage a positive account of becoming a unified self. (shrink)

BackgroundHumor is a main ingredient of interpersonal relationships. Two sets of psychopathological traits known for their devastating impact on interpersonal relationships are psychopathy and narcissism. The current study was developed to provide a fine-grained analysis of the relationship between four humor styles and both psychopathic and narcissistic traits. Specifically, it addresses how humor styles relate to the three psychopathy subfactors and four subfactors of grandiose narcissism.MethodSelf-report measures in a non-clinical male sample N = 177.ResultsMultiple regression analyses revealed psychopathic and narcissistic (...) traits’ relation to using both benign and injurious humor. Subfactor analyses showed that aggressive and self-defeating humor were mostly associated with impulsivity and entitlement, while dominance levels actuated the use of humor to cope with stress. The cold-heartedness component of psychopathy proved to be particularly humorless, setting it aside as a distinctively disturbing psychopathic subfactor.Conclusions and implicationsHumor strongly colors the interpersonal style of both psychopathic and narcissistic personalities. Differential components of both personality types inform on the possible underlying motivations that drive the use of distinct styles of humor. This implies that psychopathic and narcissistic traits could potentially be lowered through the alternation of humor styles. (shrink)

The overriding theme of the conference honoring Bob Cooter and his work is the question whether law and policy can change people’s preferences. The conventional “law and economics” answer is “no.” People have preferences that are fixed. What changes in law and policy do is to change how people behave by altering the costs and benefits people face in pursuit of their preferences. Put simply, the assumption of the “law and economics” model is that people respond to financial incentives by (...) changing how they act, not what they want. So, to take a simple example, imagine two people at the same starting point, both wanting to drive separately to visit a mutual friend. Their preference to get there promptly and safely is common to both of them, but how they act in pursuit of that goal may well differ. Moreover, government can alter how they drive to their friend’s by making changes such as putting in a freeway, or adding a new lane to the road, or installing lots of new traffic signals or stop signs along one route. The two people may have driven different routes previously, and they may alter their driving strategy in response to the policy changes government has adopted and may still decide that different routes are better for them. But they do not change their desire to see their friend in a prompt and safe manner. In this Article I offer a counterexample — an instance in which changes in law and policy can not only alter the behavior of some with fixed preferences, but also can impact the preferences of others. My example is about changes in society that can alter parenting style (of those parents with a fixed preference to have their children succeed) and can also change the underlying preferences that those children have as to how their lives should play out. (shrink)

Eco-driving is a style of driving that minimizes energy consumption, while gamification refers to the use of game techniques to motivate user engagement in non-game contexts. This paper comprises a literature review assessing applying gamification to encourage eco-driving. The Web of Science Core Collection and EBSCO Host platforms were searched in February 2022. Qualifying sources included peer review journal articles, conference proceedings papers, academic book chapters and dissertation reports. The final sample comprised 39 unique publications, of (...) which 34 described gamification adjunct systems used during driving. Most were designed as smartphone apps, but some ran on bespoke in-car feedback displays. Alternatively, using game-based learning, 5 studies described videogames designed to encourage eco-driving. Popular gamification elements were: an eco-driving score; self-comparisons or comparisons with others via leader boards; rewards; challenges, missions or levels; and emotive feedback. One system aimed to discourage driving at busy times. While 13 studies assessed the efficacy of the various systems, these were generally of poor quality. This developing literature contains many good ideas for applying gamification to promote eco-driving. However, evidence for efficacy is largely absent and researchers are encouraged to continue to evaluate a wide range of gamification approaches to promote eco-driving. (shrink)

In her early work on Modernist poetry and avant-garde poetics, Julia Kristeva proposed a bifurcated view of the poetic text as simultaneously constituted by both a “genotext” and a “phenotext.” Reading the “genotext” of any given poem might start by “pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices and melodic devices ”; and, in her words, it would also need to take into consideration “the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic (...) and logical features.” This essay seeks to demonstrate how Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge might be analyzed at the level of its genotext, taking as its primary example the first of the book’s eighty poems to illustrate how a straightforwardly genotextual analysis might proceed. The essay contends that, by closely observing the genotext of Mullen’s poetry in Muse & Drudge, one may eventually arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the “polyvocal” and “polymorphous” nature of the language and poetic design of the poems in this enigmatic collection. (shrink)

PREFACE. THE Author of this very practical treatise on Scotch Loch - Fishing desires clearly that it may be of use to all who had it. He does not pretend to have written anything new, but to have attempted to put what he has to say in as readable a form as possible. Everything in the way of the history and habits of fish has been studiously avoided, and technicalities have been used as sparingly as possible. The writing of this (...) book has afforded him pleasure in his leisure moments, and that pleasure would be much increased if he knew that the perusal of it would create any bond of sympathy between himself and the angling community in general. This section is interleaved with blank shects for the readers notes. The Author need hardly say that any suggestions addressed to the case of the publishers, will meet with consideration in a future edition. We do not pretend to write or enlarge upon a new subject. Much has been said and written-and well said and written too on the art of fishing but loch-fishing has been rather looked upon as a second-rate performance, and to dispel this idea is one of the objects for which this present treatise has been written. Far be it from us to say anything against fishing, lawfully practised in any form but many pent up in our large towns will bear us out when me say that, on the whole, a days loch-fishing is the most convenient. One great matter is, that the loch-fisher is depend- ent on nothing but enough wind to curl the water, -and on a large loch it is very seldom that a dead calm prevails all day, -and can make his arrangements for a day, weeks beforehand whereas the stream- fisher is dependent for a good take on the state of the water and however pleasant and easy it may be for one living near the banks of a good trout stream or river, it is quite another matter to arrange for a days river-fishing, if one is looking forward to a holiday at a date some weeks ahead. Providence may favour the expectant angler with a good day, and the water in order but experience has taught most of us that the good days are in the minority, and that, as is the case with our rapid running streams, -such as many of our northern streams are, -the water is either too large or too small, unless, as previously remarked, you live near at hand, and can catch it at its best. A common belief in regard to loch-fishing is, that the tyro and the experienced angler have nearly the same chance in fishing, -the one from the stern and the other from the bow of the same boat. Of all the absurd beliefs as to loch-fishing, this is one of the most absurd. Try it. Give the tyro either end of the boat he likes give him a cast of ally flies he may fancy, or even a cast similar to those which a crack may be using and if he catches one for every three the other has, he may consider himself very lucky. Of course there are lochs where the fish are not abundant, and a beginner may come across as many as an older fisher but we speak of lochs where there are fish to be caught, and where each has a fair chance. Again, it is said that the boatman has as much to do with catching trout in a loch as the angler. Well, we dont deny that. In an untried loch it is necessary to have the guidance of a good boatman but the same argument holds good as to stream-fishing... (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

In their article, “The Rise of Citizen Science in Health and Biomedical Research,” Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) discuss the rising role of a variety of traditional and newer citizen science models i...

The Issue of Abortion in America is an interactive multi-media CD-ROM created by the award winning Carnegie Mellon team that brought us A Right to Die?: The Dax Cowart Case. In this ground breaking CD-ROM, The Issue of Abortion in America gives users an opportunity to see and hear women and couples speak of the emotional struggles and moral dilemmas they face in their consideration of continuing or terminating a pregnancy. It also places the issue of abortion in the larger (...) social context of medical, legal, philosophical, and religious considerations. The information on the CD is presented in three student friendly sections: * Introduction: offers an introduction to the project as well as an overview of the program. * Case Histories: a set of interactive multimedia modules present situations in which women and couples describe their decisions to continue or terminate a pregnancy. * Resources: Reviews the background context that informs the discussion of the issue of abortion in America along with a summary section of the case histories. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a series of IAT (...) studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception. (shrink)

Contrary to the assumption of arbitrariness in modern linguistics, sound symbolism, which is the non-arbitrary relationship between sounds and meanings, exists. Sound symbolism, including the “Bouba–Kiki” effect, implies the universality of such relationships; individuals from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds can similarly relate sound-symbolic words to referents, although the extent of these similarities remains to be fully understood. Here, we examined if subjects from different countries could similarly infer the surface texture properties from words that sound-symbolically represent hardness in Japanese. (...) We prepared Japanese sound-symbolic words of which novelty was manipulated by a genetic algorithm. Japanese speakers in Japan and English speakers in both Singapore and the United States rated these words based on surface texture properties, as well as familiarity. The results show that hardness-related words were rated as harder and rougher than softness-related words, regardless of novelty and countries. Multivariate analyses of the ratings classified the hardness-related words along the hardness-softness dimension at over 80% accuracy, regardless of country. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the number of speech sounds /g/ and /k/ predicted the ratings of the surface texture properties in non-Japanese countries, suggesting a systematic relationship between phonetic features of a word and perceptual quality represented by the word across culturally and linguistically diverse samples. (shrink)

As vehicles become more autonomous, the task of designing guiding systems that make morally acceptable decisions is getting more urgent. It is sometimes assumed that one solution will be acceptable across various cultures. In this paper we argue for the importance of intercultural perspectives; in particular, we explore possible insights derived from Buddhist philosophy, taking avail of the virtue of compassion (karuṇā). We suggest that autonomous vehicles should first learn in supervised situations so that they reach a level of decision-making (...) ability that human experts within a given culture deem morally good. How will they be evaluated? In some debates it is assumed that there is a one-fit-all answer to be found based on an agreed-upon moral theory. Apart from problems of ethical pluralism within a given culture, there are also problems due to different moral preferences and driving styles across cultures. One way the problem might be addressed is to introduce a machine-learning training curriculum that would provide autonomous vehicles with a process comparable to a novice human driver learning to drive and passing her own driving license test. (shrink)

Insurance markets have always relied on large amounts of data to assess risks and price their products. New data-driven technologies, including wearable health trackers, smartphone sensors, predictive modelling and Big Data analytics, are challenging these established practices. In tracking insurance clients’ behaviour, these innovations promise the reduction of insurance costs and more accurate pricing through the personalisation of premiums and products. Building on insights from the sociology of markets and Science and Technology Studies, this article investigates the role of economic (...) experimentation in the making of data-driven personalisation markets in insurance. We document a case study of a car insurance experiment, launched by a Belgian direct insurance company in 2016 to set up an experiment of tracking driving style behavioural data of over 5000 participants over a one-year period. Based on interviews and document analysis, we outline how this in vivo experiment was set-up, which interventions and manipulations were imposed to make the experiment successful, and how the study was evaluated by the actors. Using JL Austin’s distinction between happy and unhappy statements, we argue how the experiment, despite its failure not to provide the desired evidence, could be considered a ‘happy’ event. We conclude by highlighting the role of economic experiments ‘in the wild’ for the making of future markets of data-driven personalisation. (shrink)

This work investigates which conditions lead to co-driver discomfort aside from classical motion sickness, what characterizes uncomfortable situations, and why these conditions have a negative effect. The automobile is called a “passenger vehicle” as its main purpose is the transportation of people. However, passengers in the car are rarely considered in research concerning driving discomfort. The few studies in this area focus on driver discomfort, automated vehicles, or driver assistant systems. An earlier public survey indicated that discomfort is also (...) a relevant problem for co-drivers. In this paper, these results are confirmed and extended through an online questionnaire with N = 119 participants and a detailed follow-up interview study with N = 24 participants was conducted. The results of the online questionnaire show that co-driver discomfort is a widespread problem. The interviews indicate that the driving style is one factor contributing to co-driver discomfort, in particular close following or fast driving. In those situations, participants experienced a feeling of being exposed, which additionally contributed to their discomfort. Uncomfortable situations were also perceived as safety critical. A model for possible cognitive origins of discomfort in co-drivers, extending theories from the areas of stress and self-regulation, is developed based on the results. Co-driver discomfort is a common problem, highlighting the relevance of further research on supporting co-drivers. The reported correlations and the proposed model can help to explain the origin of this discomfort. The results provide a foundation for the future design of interventions like human machine interfaces aiming at reducing co-driver discomfort. (shrink)

How do people interleave attention when multitasking? One dominant account is that the completion of a subtask serves as a cue to switch tasks. But what happens if switching solely at subtask boundaries led to poor performance? We report a study in which participants manually dialed a UK-style telephone number while driving a simulated vehicle. If the driver were to exclusively return his or her attention to driving after completing a subtask (i.e., using the single break in (...) the xxxxx-xxxxxx representational structure of the number), then we would expect to see a relatively poor driving performance. In contrast, our results show that drivers choose to return attention to steering control before the natural subtask boundary. A computational modeling analysis shows that drivers had to adopt this strategy to meet the required performance objective of maintaining an acceptable lateral position in the road while dialing. Taken together these results support the idea that people can strategically control the allocation of attention in multitask settings to meet specific performance criteria. (shrink)

Direct source incompatibilism (DSI) is the conjunction of two claims: SI-F: there are genuine Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs); SI-D: there is a sound version of the direct argument (DA). Eric Yang ( 2012 ) responds to a recent criticism of DSI (Campbell 2006 ). We show that Yang misses the mark. One can accept Yang’s criticisms and get the same result: there is a deep tension between FSCs and DA, between SI-F and SI-D. Thus, DSI is untenable. In this essay, (...) we use an important yet overlooked distinction between truthmakers and determiners to help drive this point home. (shrink)

Selective permeability holds that people’s distinct capacities allow them to do different things in a space, making it unequally accessible. Though mainly applied to urban geography so far, we propose selective permeability as an affordance-based approach for understanding diversity in education. This has advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as necessarily coming from “within” students, instead locating challenges in the environment. This implies that settings (not just people) need remedial attention, also raising questions about normative judgments in disability nomenclature. (...) Second, affordances can be negotiated in numerous ways to reach a goal, analogously to how people with missing arms have learned to drive with their feet, so restrictive problem-solving methods are often counterproductive. Third, our approach illuminates how cultural factors ranging from gait styles to language and hence group coordination modulate action possibilities, so that cultural groups may encounter objectively different affordances in the same classroom. But fourth, while fit with environment allows for skill refinement, non-fit can contribute to growth situations, which suggests a degree of selective closure can be desirable. Throughout, we argue social constructs—including educational ones—are literally built or enacted barriers or openings that have reality in environments in the same way that affordances do. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial cross-national differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these policies vary with politicians’ sex: early findings indicate that, on average, female leaders seem more focused on minimizing direct human suffering caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while male leaders implement (...) riskier short-term decisions, possibly aiming to minimize economic disruptions. These sex differences are consistent with broader findings in psychology, reflecting women’s stronger empathy, higher pathogen disgust, health concern, care-taking orientation, and dislike for the suffering of other people—as well as men’s higher risk-taking, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and focus on financial indicators of success and status. This review article contextualizes sex differences in pandemic leadership in an evolutionary framework. Evolution by natural selection is the only known process in nature that organizes organisms into higher degrees of functional order, or counteracts the unavoidable disorder that would otherwise ensue, and is therefore essential for explaining the origins of human sex differences. Differential sexual selection and parental investment between males and females, together with the sexual differentiation of the mammalian brain, drive sex differences in cognition and behavioral dispositions, underlying men’s and women’s leadership styles and decision-making during a global pandemic. According to thesexually dimorphic leadership specialization hypothesis, general psychobehavioral sex differences have been exapted during human evolution to create sexually dimorphic leadership styles. They may be facultatively co-opted by societies and/or followers when facing different kinds of ecological and/or sociopolitical threats, such as disease outbreaks or intergroup aggression. Early evidence indicates that against the invisible viral foe that can bring nations to their knees, the strategic circumspection of empathic feminine health “worriers” may bring more effective and humanitarian outcomes than the devil-may-care incaution of masculine risk-taking “warriors”. (shrink)

Business Ethics is intended for business practitioners and students of business at all levels and is written in a lively and accessible style. It redresses the balance of buisness ethics writing which, up to now, has been weighted heavily in favour of American cases. There are numerous references to real businesses - from multi-national chains to French restaurants, from manufacturing giants to driving schools. Ethically 'hot' topics such as the social chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, the new EC (...) directives, entry of the countries of the former Soviet Union into the world market economy, privatization and the 'green' environment are just some of the more general issues discussed. Companies covered in the book are: Allied Lyons, Apple Corporation, Avon, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Barlow Clowes, Benetton, Body Shop, British Airways, British Rail, Cadbury-Schweppes, Ecology Building Society, Fiat, Gateway Foodmarkets, Grand Metropolitan, Guinness, ICI, John Lewis, Kingfisher, Ladbrokes, Lloyds Bank, Management Week, Marks & Spencer, Mirror Group Newspapers, Nestle, Polly Peck, Price Waterhouse, Scott Bader, Securicor, Traidcraft, United Biscuits, Virgin, Worldwide Fund for Nature...and many more. Packed with excellent examples from many international companies Written in a lively and accessible style. (shrink)

According to the distinguished philosopher Richard Wollheim, an emotion is an extended mental episode that originates when events in the world frustrate or satisfy a pre-existing desire (Wollheim, 1999). This leads the subject to form an attitude to the world which colours their future experience, leading them to attend to one aspect of things rather than another, and to view the things they attend to in one light rather than another. The idea that emotions arise from the satisfaction or frustration (...) of desires—the ‘match-mismatch’ view of emotion aetiology—has had several earlier incarnations in the psychology of emotion. Early versions of this proposal were associated with the attempt to replace the typology of emotion found in ordinary language with a simpler theory of drives and to define new emotion types in terms of general properties such as the frustration of a drive. The match-mismatch view survived the demise of that revisionist project and is found today in theories that accept a folk-psychological-style taxonomy of emotion types based on the meaning ascribed by the subject to the stimulus situation. For example, the match-mismatch view forms part of the subtle and complex model of emotion episodes developed over many years by Nico Frijda (Frijda, 1986). According to Frijda, information about the ‘situational antecedents’ of an emotion—the stimulus in its context, including the ongoing goals of the organism—is evaluated for its relevance to the multiple concerns of the organism. Evaluation of match-mismatch—the degree of compatibility between the situation and the subject's goals—forms part of this process. (shrink)

Summary Although the changing role of high-level educational leaders has received increasing attention in recent years, few studies have targeted concerted culture change attempts by such important players. The data discussed in this article were drawn from the perceptions of one Australia state-level chief executive officer (CEO) and a group of administrators within his department during the first 18 months of his appointment. The study sought to describe briefly the leader, identify the shape of the culture he set out consciously (...) to develop, the reasons behind the change attempt, the methods utilised to lead to change and the initial impressions of change success and blockages to acceptance. The rationale driving the attempt at change stemmed from the perceived failure of devolution, negative work attitudes, the CEO's own style and a system driven by micropolitical agendas. The culture change attempts utilised cultural and bureaucratic strategies. The blockages to culture change were related to the strengths of the previous culture, personal political networks and perceived contradictions between the values, actions and politics. A number of issues relating to the findings are discussed, including an examination of the culture change process, its success to date and the confusing role of the leader in the process. (shrink)

"I think this is an outstanding book. The coverage is comprehensive, the lines of thought and exposition are clear, and the level of discussion is very high yet remarkably lively and accessible. It has an underlying intellectual seriousness and engagement which shines out through the individual chapters, and the author's unwillingness to make do with secondary analyses and received ideas gives it a strength and freshness of approach which is extremely welcome." -- Professor William Outhwaite, University of Sussex Social Theory (...) in the Twentieth Century offers an easy-to-read but provocative account of the development of social theory. Patrick Baert covers a wide range of key figures and schools of thought, including Giddens, Foucault and Habermas. Written in a lively style and avoiding jargon, this book is aimed at students who wish to understand the main debates and dilemmas driving social theory. Rather than providing a neutral summary of the different thinkers and theories, Baert challenges the conventional readings of social theory with new and original interpretations. In effect, he bridges the gap between philosophy and social theory by placing the theoretical views within wider historical traditions. Social Theory in the Twentieth Century will undoubtedly become the standard introduction to social theory for students in sociology, politics, and anthropology. (shrink)

The immensely influential work of Jacques Lacan challenges readers both for the difficulty of its style and for the wide range of intellectual references that frame its innovations. Lacan’s work is challenging too, for the way it recentres psychoanalysis on one of the most controversial points of Freud’s theory – the concept of a self-destructive drive or ‘death instinct’. Originally published in 1991, _Death and Desire_ presents in Lacanian terms a new integration of psychoanalytic theory in which the battery (...) of key Freudian concepts – from the dynamics of the Oedipus complex to the topography of ego, id, and superego – are seen to intersect in Freud’s most far-reaching and speculative formulation of a drive toward death. Boothby argues that Lacan repositioned the theme of death in psychoanalysis in relation to Freud’s main concern – the nature and fate of desire. In doing so, Lacan rediscovered Freud’s essential insights in a manner so nuanced and penetrating that prevailing assessments of the death instinct may well have to be re-examined. Although the death instinct is usually regarded as the most obscure concept in Freud’s metapsychology, and Lacan to be the most perplexing psychoanalytic theorist, Richard Boothby’s straightforward style makes both accessible. He illustrates the coherence of Lacanian thought and shows how Lacan’s work comprises a ‘return to Freud’ along new and different angles of approach. Written with an eye to the conceptual structure of psychoanalytic theory, _Death and Desire_ will appeal to psychoanalysts and philosophers alike. (shrink)

Fighting crime has historically been a field that drives technological innovation, and it can serve as an example of different governance styles in societies. Predictive policing is one of the recent innovations that covers technical trends such as machine learning, preventive crime fighting strategies, and actual policing in cities. However, it seems that a combination of exaggerated hopes produced by technology evangelists, media hype, and ignorance of the actual problems of the technology may have boosted sales of software that supports (...) policing by predicting offenders and crime areas. In this paper we analyse currently used predictive policing software packages with respect to common problems of data mining, and describe challenges that arise in the context of their socio-technical application. (shrink)

Procrastination is a chronic and widespread problem; however, emerging work raises questions regarding the strength of the relationship between self-reported procrastination and behavioral measures of task engagement. This study assessed the internal reliability, concurrent validity, predictive validity, and psychometric properties of 10 self-report procrastination assessments using responses collected from 242 students. Participants’ scores on each self-report instrument were compared to each other using correlations and cluster analysis. Lasso estimation was used to test the self-report scores’ ability to predict two behavioral (...) measures of delay. The self-report instruments exhibited strong internal reliability and moderate levels of concurrent validity. Some self-report measures were predictive of days to study completion. No self-report measures were predictive of deadline action pacing, the pacing style most commonly associated with procrastination. Many of the self-report measures of procrastination exhibited poor fit. These results suggest that researchers should exercise caution in selecting self-report measures and that further study is necessary to determine the factors that drive misalignment between self-reports and behavioral measures of delay. (shrink)