This case study extends the findings of Pickering et al. 2009 to the domain of conversational humor. We find that, as was the case in humorous narratives, conversational humor is not marked by higher pitch or volume, increased speech rate, or significant pauses. Unlike narrative humor, conversational humor is not produced at a lower pitch and slower rate than non-humorous parts of the text. We find that smiling and laughter tend to occur with humor.

We consider three accepted truths about iris biometrics, involving pupil dilation, contact lenses and template aging. We also consider a relatively ignored issue that may arise in system interoperability. Experimental results from our laboratory demonstrate that the three accepted truths are not entirely true, and also that interoperability can involve subtle performance degradation. All four of these problems affect primarily the stability of the match, or authentic, distribution of template comparison scores rather than the non-match, or imposter, distribution of scores. (...) In this sense, these results confirm the security of iris biometrics in an identity verification scenario. We consider how these problems affect the usability and security of iris biometrics in large-scale applications, and suggest possible remedies. (shrink)

Objective: There is a demonstrated link between the mental health and substance use comorbidities experienced by young adults, however the vast majority of psychological interventions are disorder specific. Novel psychological approaches that adequately acknowledge the psychosocial complexity and transdiagnostic needs of vulnerable young people are urgently needed. A modular skills-based program for emotion regulation and impulse control addresses this gap. The current one armed open trial was designed to evaluate the impact that 12 weeks exposure to ERIC alongside usual care (...) had on young people's ability to regulate emotions, as well as examine potential moderating mechanisms.Methods: Seventy nine young people were enrolled to the 12 week intervention period. Twenty one practitioners from youth and community health services delivered relevant ERIC modules adjunct to usual care. Linear mixed effects regression was used to examine change over time across the primary outcome of emotion dysregulation and secondary outcomes of depression, anxiety, stress, experiential avoidance and mindfulness. Moderation analyses were conducted to test whether the magnitude of change in emotion dysregulation moderated change over time in secondary outcomes.Results: Analyses revealed significant improvement in the primary outcome of emotion dysregulation with a moderate effect size, in addition to decreases in the secondary outcomes of depression, anxiety, stress and experiential avoidance. No improvements in mindfulness were reported. Moderation analyses revealed that the residualised change over time in emotion dysregulation moderated the change over time in symptoms of distress, depression, anxiety, stress, experiential avoidance, and mindfulness.Conclusion: Reductions in the severity of emotion dysregulation, depression, anxiety, stress and experiential avoidance are promising, and were evident despite the complexity of the participants and the diversity of the service setting. The improvements found in each outcome were only observed for those young people whose emotion regulation also improved, providing preliminary evidence for the role of emotion regulation as a key treatment target in this population. (shrink)

We discuss a recent attempt by Chris Daly and Simon Langford to do away with mathematical explanations of physical phenomena. Daly and Langford suggest that mathematics merely indexes parts of the physical world, and on this understanding of the role of mathematics in science, there is no need to countenance mathematical explanation of physical facts. We argue that their strategy is at best a sketch and only looks plausible in simple cases. We also draw attention to how frequently Daly and (...) Langford find themselves in conflict with mathematical and scientific practice. (shrink)

Clinical trials for acute conditions such as myocardial infarction and stroke pose challenges related to informed consent due to time limitations, stress, and severe illness. Consent processes shou...

The aim of this article is to show that human persons belong, ontologically, in social ontology. After setting out my views on ontology, I turn to persons and argue that they have first-person perspectives in two stages (rudimentary and robust) essentially. Then I argue that the robust stage of the first-person persective is social, in that it requires a language, and languages require linguistic communities. Then I extend the argument to cover the rudimentary stage of the first-person perspective as well. (...) I conclude by enumerating ways in which human persons differ from nonhuman animals. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to open a new front in the debate between platonism and nominalism by arguing that the degree of explanatory entanglement of mathematics in science is much more extensive than has been hitherto acknowledged. Even standard examples, such as the prime life cycles of periodical cicadas, involve a penumbra of mathematical features whose presence can only be explained using relatively sophisticated mathematics. I introduce the term ‘mathematical spandrel’ to describe these penumbral properties, and focus on (...) the property that cicada period lengths are expressible as the sum of two perfect squares. I argue that mathematical spandrels pose a particular problem for nominalism because of the way in which they are entangled with scientific explanations. (shrink)

Eric T. Olson has argued that any view of personal identity in terms of psychological continuity has a consequence that he considers untenable---namely, that he was never an early-term fetus. I have several replies. First, the psychological-continuity view of personal identity does not entail the putative consequence; the appearance to the contrary depends on not distinguishing between de re and de dicto theses. Second, the putative consequence is not untenable anyway; the appearance to the contrary depends on not taking seriously (...) an idea that underlies a plausible view of persons that I call ‘the Constitution View.’ Finally, Olson’s own “Biological View of personal identity” has liabilities of its own. (shrink)

As a way of comparing qualitative and quantitative approaches to critical discourse analysis, two analysts independently examined similar datasets of newspaper articles in order to address the research question ‘How are different types of men represented in the British press?’. One analyst used a 41.5 million word corpus of articles, while the other focused on a down-sampled set of 51 articles from the same corpus. The two ensuing research reports were then critically compared in order to elicit shared and unique (...) findings and to highlight strengths and weaknesses between the two approaches. This article concludes that an effective form of CDA would be one where different forms of researcher expertise are carried out as separate components of a larger project, then combined as a way of triangulation. (shrink)

Philosophy textbooks typically treat bioethics as a form of "applied ethics"-i.e., an attempt to apply a moral theory, like utilitarianism, to controversial ethical issues in biology and medicine. Historians, however, can find virtually no cases in which applied philosophical moral theory influenced ethical practice in biology or medicine. In light of the absence of historical evidence, the authors of this paper advance an alternative model of the historical relationship between philosophical ethics and medical ethics, the appropriation model. They offer two (...) historical case studies to illustrate the ways in which physicians have "appropriated" concepts and theory fragments from philosophers, and demonstrate how appropriated moral philosophy profoundly influenced the way medical morality was conceived and practiced. (shrink)

This issue’s “Legal Briefing” column covers recent legal developments involving voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED). Over the past decade, clinicians and bioethicists have increasingly recognized VSED as a medically and ethically appropriate means to hasten death. Most recently, in September 2013, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) called on its 2,000 member hospices to develop policies and guidelines addressing VSED. And VSED is getting more attention not only in healthcare communities, but also in the general public. For (...) example, VSED was recently highlighted on the front page of the New York Times and in other national and local media. Nevertheless, despite the growing interest in VSED, there remains little onpoint legal authority and only sparse bioethics literature analyzing its legality. This article aims to fill this gap. Specifically, we focus on new legislative, regulatory, and judicial acts that clarify the permissibility of VSED. We categorize these legal developments into the following seven categories: 1. Definition of VSED2. Uncertainty Whether Oral Nutrition and Hydration Are Medical Treatment3. Uncertainty Regarding Providers’ Obligations to Patients Who Choose VSED4. Judicial Guidance from Australia5. Judicial Guidance from the United Kingdom6. Judicial Guidance from Canada7. Case of Margot Bentley. (shrink)

Human vision supports social perception by efficiently detecting agents and extracting rich information about their actions, goals, and intentions. Here, we explore the cognitive architecture of perceived animacy by constructing Bayesian models that integrate domain‐specific hypotheses of social agency with domain‐general cognitive constraints on sensory, memory, and attentional processing. Our model posits that perceived animacy combines a bottom–up, feature‐based, parallel search for goal‐directed movements with a top–down selection process for intent inference. The interaction of these architecturally distinct processes makes perceived (...) animacy fast, flexible, and yet cognitively efficient. In the context of chasing, in which a predator (the “wolf”) pursues a prey (the “sheep”), our model addresses the computational challenge of identifying target agents among varying numbers of distractor objects, despite a quadratic increase in the number of possible interactions as more objects appear in a scene. By comparing modeling results with human psychophysics in several studies, we show that the effectiveness and efficiency of human perceived animacy can be explained by a Bayesian ideal observer model with realistic cognitive constraints. These results provide an understanding of perceived animacy at the algorithmic level—how it is achieved by cognitive mechanisms such as attention and working memory, and how it can be integrated with higher‐level reasoning about social agency. (shrink)

The British National Health Service (BNHS) was founded, to quote Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, to ‘universalise the best’. Over time, however, financial constraints forced the BNHS to turn to incrementalist budgeting, to rationalise care and to ask its practitioners to act as gatekeepers. Seeking a way to ration scarce tertiary care resources, BNHS gatekeepers began to use chronological age as a rationing criterion. Age-rationing became the ‘done thing’ without explicit policy directives and in a manner largely invisible to patients, (...) to Parliament, and to the public. The invisibility of the practice, however, violates the publicity principle that John Rawls and other philosophers believe essential to fairness. BNHS invisible age-rationing practices are thus a test case of the principle that fairness presupposes publicity; they raise the question: is it possible to preserve equitability in a system that uses non-public criteria to allocate scarce resources? To seek an answer, published data on access to end-stage renal disease (ESRD) treatment in Britain and the European Community (EC) are analysed. Among the findings are: that BNHS age-rationing acts as an excuse for denying care to those most likely to need ESRD treatment; and is, moreover, arbitrary and inequitable. It is further argued that no age-rationing policy can sustain visibility, and that, if the BNHS is to be fair to its patients, it must reform its present age-rationing practices, replacing them by a publicly visible, outcome-based rationing policy that rations either in terms of QALYs or triage categories. (shrink)

While many authors have theorized about the ability of the humanities to enhance business ethics education, scant empirical work exists to support this speculation. We therefore conduct a study to measure the impact of a live theatre performance on ethical reasoning. We asked students to analyze an ethically-laden historical disaster scenario both before and after attending a performance featuring related narrative themes. Our hypothesis is that attending a live performance would cause students to take a more ethical view of an (...) industrial disaster case study. Results show support for the notion that live theatre may impact individuals’ ethical decision-making as applied to a representative business case. Specifically, we found a significant difference in what parties students hold responsible, what actions students think should have been taken, and how cultural norms affect students’ perceptions of ethical obligations. We therefore suggest that live theatre may be a novel pedagogical tool in business ethics education. (shrink)

E. E. Constance Jones, a regular contributor to Mind and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and the author of several textbooks and a monograph, worked in both philosophical l...

In this book, leading Christian political thinkers and practitioners critique the Rawlsian concepts of “justice as fairness” and “public reason” from the perspective of Christian political theory and practice. It provides a new level of analysis from Christian perspectives, including implications for such hot topics as the culture war.

We run into instances of material constitution everywhere we turn. Material constitution is the relation that obtains between an octagonal piece of metal and a Stop sign, between strands of DNA molecules and genes, between pieces of paper and dollar bills, between stones and monuments, between lumps of clay and statues, between human persons and their bodies—the list is endless. Although there has been a great deal of controversy recently about the nature of material constitution, I want to enter the (...) fray by setting out and defending an explicit definition of what it is for an object x to constitute an object y at time t. (shrink)

Bransen takes the first question to pose ―the problem of man‘s uniqueness,‖ and his ultimate aim is to dissolve that problem. His method of dissolving it is by way of a detailed answer to the second question, which is the most fundamental. I want to show that Bransen‘s answer to the second question actually provides an answer to each of the other questions, and that instead of dissolving the problem of man‘s uniqueness (posed by question #1), what he offers is (...) really a straightforward solution—albeit a partly normative one. To see this, we must look beyond Bransen‘s answer to the metaphysical presuppositions on which, I believe, it rests. normative. (shrink)

Será que o conhecimento pode ser transmitido de forma representacional, por meio de uma explicação, sem que aquele que aprende faça uma experiência por si só daquilo que aprende? Este artigo, amparando-se no pensamento de Hume, Deleuze, Rancière e Gallo, pretende mostrar que somente a experiência com o objeto pode promover a aprendizagem efetiva, violentando o pensamento para que este busque por si só seu sentido e forme sua própria apreensão.

Social justice is a concept we take for granted. We assume that it means using state structures to ensure equality and fairness. But is that true? Or, do state structures of social order actually inhibit creativity, freedom, social welfare, and belonging? This collection broadens the boundaries of the ways we think about what constitutes criminality and interrogates issues of social justice and power in new, innovative and critical ways. The essays examine a wide variety of themes, including the deconstruction of (...) concepts of freedom and equality, notions of criminality and deviance, state regulation of social order, and various aspects of feminist criminology. (shrink)

Durante o período colonial, milhares de artefatos culturais foram levados do continente africano pelos europeus. Nos últimos anos, a restituição de bens culturais tem chamado atenção de teóricos, governos, órgãos internacionais e regulamentações jurídicas. Contudo, há pouca informação sobre a forma como essa realidade se apresenta e é discutida. Este ensaio é uma proposta de investigação sobre a restituição dos bens culturais retirados no contexto do colonialismo, considerando a relação de países europeus com países africanos. Trata-se de analisar a constituição (...) do regime internacional de proteção e restituição do patrimônio cultural, seus princípios, limites e possibilidades, tendo em vista alguns casos de processos restitutivos realizados a partir da década de 1990 e suas narrativas. Em meio aos debates acerca da descolonização das relações entre ex-metrópoles e ex-colônias e os efeitos ainda presentes do colonialismo, este trabalho põe em marcha uma proposta teórico-metodológica que aposta no papel da memória e sua potência no que toca ao direito humano à cultura e à identidade. Palavras-chave: Bens Culturais. Decolonialidade. Restituição. (shrink)

After centuries of reflection, the issue of human freedom remains vital largely because of its connection to moral responsibility. When I ask—What is human freedom?—I mean to be asking what kind of freedom is required for moral responsibility? Questions about moral responsibility are intimately connected to questions about social policy and justice; so, the issue of moral responsibility—of desert, of whether or not anyone is ever really praiseworthy or blameworthy—has practical as well as theoretical significance.

Theological language has always faced a fundamental dilemma: it seeks to put the divine reality into limited human language. While this dilemma can obfuscate our theological pathways, it can also generate a new awareness of the task and possibilities of the discipline. New testimonials, or uniquely accented human experiential utterances, have emerged in theological discourse in the past decades, greatly increasing our vision of the expansiveness of theology. The tools for integration into systematic or discursive development are still, however, lacking. (...) This article suggests that an extension of the innovative methodology of Thomas Aquinas, beginning and ending with ‘what seems’ to be the case, putting testimony into discursive forms, and testing for a fittingness with the mysterious and excessive mystery of the divine reality, offers a promising path for discerning common and trustworthy theological language. (shrink)

The analysis offered by Dixon et al. fails to acknowledge that the attitudes that drive prejudice are attitudes that are constructed in particular contexts. These attitudes can diverge strongly from attitudes toward the group in general. Social change is thus best achieved through challenging the requirements of roles and by changing group stereotypes.

Nonsense‐mediated RNA decay (NMD) represents an established quality control checkpoint for gene expression that protects cells from consequences of gene mutations and errors during RNA biogenesis that lead to premature termination during translation. Characterization of NMD‐sensitive transcriptomes has revealed, however, that NMD targets not only aberrant transcripts but also a broad array of mRNA isoforms expressed from many endogenous genes. NMD is thus emerging as a master regulator that drives both fine and coarse adjustments in steady‐state RNA levels in the (...) cell. Importantly, while NMD activity is subject to autoregulation as a means to maintain homeostasis, modulation of the pathway by external cues provides a means to reprogram gene expression and drive important biological processes. Finally, the unanticipated observation that transcripts predicted to lack protein‐coding capacity are also sensitive to this translation‐dependent surveillance mechanism implicates NMD in regulating RNA function in new and diverse ways. (shrink)

Women’s capacity to reproduce varies over the life span, and developmental goals such as family formation are age-graded and shaped by social norms about the appropriate age for completing specific developmental tasks. Thus, a woman’s age may be linked to her ideas about what an ideal partner should be like. With the goals of replicating and extending prior research, in this study we examined the role of age in women’s partner preferences across the globe. We investigated associations of age with (...) ideal long-term partner preferences in a cross-cultural sample of 17,254 single (i.e., unpartnered) heterosexual women, ages 18 to 67, from 147 countries. Data were collected via an online questionnaire, the Ideal Partner Survey. Confirming our preregistered hypotheses, we found no or only negligible age effects on preferences for kindness-supportiveness, attractiveness, financial security-successfulness, or education-intelligence. Age was, however, positively associated with preferences for confidence-assertiveness. Consistent with family formation goals, age was associated with an ideal partner’s parenting intentions (high until approximately age 30, then decreasing afterward). Age range deemed acceptable (and in particular, the discrepancy between one’s own age and the minimum ideal age of a partner) increased with age. This latter pattern also replicated in exploratory analyses based on subsamples of lesbian and bisexual women. In summary, age has a limited impact on partner preferences. Of the attributes investigated, only preference for confidence-assertiveness was linked with age. However, age range deemed acceptable and an ideal partner’s parenting intention, a dimension mostly neglected in earlier research, substantially vary with age. (shrink)

Despite an increase in research examining maternal and infant touch, and documenting its public health impact, this mode of interaction has historically been omitted from related fields of developmental research in human and non‐human primates. The broad aim of this review is to examine to what extent mother–infant touch has been included in relational paradigms and research. We argue that although theoretical and empirical scholarship on attachment and maternal sensitivity conceptualizes touch as fundamental to caregiver–infant interactions and child development more (...) broadly, touch is rarely operationalized or measured in caregiver–infant interaction paradigms or clinical interventions. Data from primarily human, but also non‐human, primates are reviewed to document the importance of touch, and clinical research is reviewed to document the formal use of touch in human attachment and sensitivity research and intervention. The review closes with recommended directions for future research and related implications. (shrink)