At the End of the World there is blackness doing the (im)possible. This essay considers the (im)possibility of debate in our contemporary crisis through an examination of the domestication of potentiality in rhetorical dialectic. Debate, in its presupposition of stasis, parallels sovereignty's ontologizing operations of antiblack racial terror that suspend contingency. Meanwhile, blackness was already getting it done. The U.S. Civil War serves as a privileged example for thinking through blackness as the groundless constitutive outside to the possible that yet (...) gestures toward other generative moments found in refusal of the disappointing options that pass for politics offered to us today. (shrink)

Gender and Sexuality in Critical Animal Studies explores nonhuman animals' experiences of gender, physiological sex, and sexuality while in nature and captivity. Each chapter applies disciplines like literary theory, disability studies, queer studies, ecocriticism, and more to investigate media that shape perceptions and treatment of nonhumans.

By promoting total liberation, this volume challenges the reader to think about new approaches to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. The contributors examine and disrupt many of the exclusionary assumptions and behaviors by those working toward justice and liberation, encouraging the reader to reflect on their own thoughts and actions.

This book is designed to make the various hardships encountered by many students more personal in order to give teachers insight into the very real needs of today’s students.

Intersectionality of Critical Animal Studies: A Historical Collection represents the very best that the Journal for Critical Animal Studies (JCAS) has published in terms of articles that are written by activists and for activists.

In this essay I ask the reader to consider the “end of life” as a life stage, rather than as a health state. At one end of the life course is childhood and at the other end is elderhood. The basic inter-generational social compact in most societies is that working adults take care of their children and their parents, and count on their children to do the same for them. In developed countries, these obligations are met in part through government (...) programs, with taxpayers funding significant portions of education, health care, and income support. (shrink)

Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation pushes critical animal studies forward and outward by making new connections to movements and ideas that have been little engaged with in publication to the present. This book challenges critical animal studies adherents to expand their efforts of solidarity, mutual aid, and activism. Contributors to this volume extend invitations to those not familiar with critical animal studies to welcome them in with gestures of solidarity towards total liberation. Expanding (...) the Critical Animal Studies Imagination does not shy away from controversial topics but critically engages with them using care and tact. This is not controversy for the sake of being provocative, but not being afraid to target root causes of oppression. This book works toward coalition building to resist the current violence and build peaceful communities. (shrink)

Background: Relatively little is known about neonatologists' roles in helping families navigate the difficult decision to attempt or withhold resuscitation for a neonate delivering at the threshold...

Researchers have evaluated how broad categories of emotion influence judgments of learning relative to neutral items. Specifically, JOLs are typically higher for emotional relative to neutral items. The novel goal of the present research was to evaluate JOLs for fine-grained categories of emotion. Participants studied faces with afraid, angry, sad, or neutral expressions and with afraid, angry, or sad expressions. Participants identified the expressed emotion, made a JOL for each, and completed a recognition test. JOLs were higher for the emotional (...) relative to neutral expressions. However, JOLs were insensitive to the categories of negative emotion. Using a survey design in Experiment 3, participants demonstrated idiosyncratic beliefs about emotion. Some people believed the fine-grained emotions were equally memorable, whereas others believed a specific emotion was most memorable. Thus, beliefs about emotion are nuanced, which has important implications for JOL theory. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty, including cheating and plagiarism, is on the rise in colleges, particularly among engineering students. While students decide to engage in these behaviors for many different reasons, academic integrity training can help improve their understanding of ethical decision making. The two studies outlined in this paper assess the effectiveness of an online module in increasing academic integrity among first semester engineering students. Study 1 tested the effectiveness of an academic honesty tutorial by using a between groups design with a (...) Time 1- and Time 2-test. An academic honesty quiz assessed participants’ knowledge at both time points. Study 2, which incorporated an improved version of the module and quiz, utilized a between groups design with three assessment time points. The additional Time 3-test allowed researchers to test for retention of information. Results were analyzed using ANCOVA and t tests. In Study 1, the experimental group exhibited significant improvement on the plagiarism items, but not the total score. However, at Time 2 there was no significant difference between groups after controlling for Time 1 scores. In Study 2, between- and within-group analyses suggest there was a significant improvement in total scores, but not plagiarism scores, after exposure to the tutorial. Overall, the academic integrity module impacted participants as evidenced by changes in total score and on specific plagiarism items. Although future implementation of the tutorial and quiz would benefit from modifications to reduce ceiling effects and improve assessment of knowledge, the results suggest such tutorial may be one valuable element in a systems approach to improving the academic integrity of engineering students. (shrink)

Short-term limb immobilization results in skeletal muscle decline, but the underlying mechanisms are incompletely understood. This study aimed to determine the neurophysiologic basis of immobilization-induced skeletal muscle decline, and whether repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation could prevent any decline. Twenty-four healthy young males underwent unilateral limb immobilization for 72 h. Subjects were randomized between daily rTMS using six 20 Hz pulse trains of 1.5 s duration with a 60 s inter-train-interval delivered at 90% resting Motor Threshold, or Sham rTMS throughout immobilization. (...) Maximal grip strength, EMG activity, arm volume, and composition were determined at 0 and 72 h. Motor Evoked Potentials were determined daily throughout immobilization to index motor excitability. Immobilization induced a significant reduction in motor excitability across time. The rTMS intervention increased motor excitability at 0 h. Despite daily rTMS treatment, there was still a significant reduction in motor excitability, loss in EMG activity, and a loss of maximal grip strength after immobilization. Interestingly, the increase in biceps and posterior forearm skinfold thickness with immobilization in Sham treatment was not observed following rTMS treatment. Reduced MEPs drive the loss of strength with immobilization. Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation cannot prevent this loss of strength but further investigation and optimization of neuroplasticity protocols may have therapeutic benefit. (shrink)

Should there be a female age limit on public funding for assisted reproductive technology (ART)? The question bears significant economic and sociopolitical implications and has been contentious in many countries. We conceptualise the question as one of justice in resource allocation, using three much-debated substantive principles of justice—the capacity to benefit, personal responsibility, and need—to structure and then explore a complex of arguments. Capacity-to-benefit arguments are not decisive: There are no clear cost-effectiveness grounds to restrict funding to those older women (...) who still bear some capacity to benefit from ART. Personal responsibility arguments are challenged by structural determinants of delayed motherhood. Nor are need arguments decisive: They can speak either for or against a female age limit, depending on the conception of need used. We demonstrate how these principles can differ not only in content but also in the relative importance they are accorded by governments. Wide variation in ART public funding policy might be better understood in this light. We conclude with some inter-country comparison. New Zealand and Swedish policies are uncommonly transparent and thus demonstrate particularly well how the arguments we explore have been put into practice. (shrink)

Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with low TPs (LTPs). Such findings could mean that only the HTP sequences have a word‐like status, and they are more readily mapped to a referent for that reason. But these findings could (...) also suggest that HTP sequences are easier to encode, just like any other predictable sequence. Here we aimed to distinguish between these explanations. To do so, we built on findings that infants become resistant to learning labels that are not typical of their native language as they approach 2 years of age and add words to their lexicons. If tracking TPs in speech results in identifying candidate words, at this age TPs may have reduced power to confer lexical status when they yield a unit that is very dissimilar to word forms that are typical of infants’ native language. Indeed, we found that at 20 months, English‐learning infants with relatively small vocabularies learned HTP Italian words (but not LTP words) as object labels, while infants with larger vocabularies resisted learning HTP Italian words. These findings suggest that the HTP sequences may be represented as candidate words, and more broadly, that TP statistics are relevant to word learning. (shrink)

Perceptual filling-in for vision is the insertion of visual properties (e.g., color, contour, luminance, or motion) into one’s visual field, when those properties have no corresponding retinal input. This paper introduces and provides preliminary empirical support for filled/non-filled pairs, pairs of images that appear identical, yet differ by amount of filling-in. It is argued that such image pairs are important to the experimental testing of theories of consciousness. We review recent experimental research and conclude that filling-in involves brain activity with (...) relatively high integrated information (Phi) compared to veridical visual perceptions. We then present filled/non-filled pairs as an empirical challenge to the integrated information theory of consciousness, which predicts that phenomenologically identical experiences depend on brain processes with identical Phi. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that we can identify, e.g., a weather expert by checking if she has a track record of making accurate weather predictions but that there isn’t an analogous way for laypeople to verify the judgement of a putative moral expert. The weather is an independent check for weather expertise but there is no independent check for moral expertise, and the only way for laypeople to identify moral experts is to engage in first-order moral reasoning of one’s own. But (...) if one can do that, one would not need to rely on a moral expert in the first place. This paper provides an account of Feedback as an independent check for moral expertise in the form of certain positive and negative changes in the lives of advisees after they started acting in accordance with an advisor’s advice whilst nothing else of significance changed in their lives in that period. Given our folk background theories, and some specific information about the advisee’s situation, Feedback suggests that the advisor’s advice was correct. Laypeople would identify moral experts by inferring that the best explanation of the correctness of the advisor’s advice in a high proportion of cases in which she dispensed advice is that the advisor had moral knowledge. Identifying moral experts in this way involves the use of some moral reasoning of one’s own but it is too elementary to make moral experts redundant. (shrink)

Background This study introduces an empirical approach for studying the role of prudence in physician treatment of end-of-life (EOL) decision making.Methods A mixed-methods analysis of transcripts from 88 simulated patient encounters in a multicenter study on EOL decision making. Physicians in internal medicine, emergency medicine, and critical care medicine were asked to evaluate a decompensating, end-stage cancer patient. Transcripts of the encounters were coded for actor, action, and content to capture the concept of Aristotelian prudence, and then quantitatively and qualitatively (...) analyzed to identify actions associated with preference-concordant treatment.Results Focusing on codes that describe characteristics of physician-patient interaction, the code for physicians restating patient preferences was associated with avoiding intubation. Multiple codes were associated with secondary measures of preference-concordant treatment.Conclusions Prudent actions can be identified empirically, and research focused on the virtue of prudence may provide a new avenue for assessment and training in EOL care. (shrink)

The basic purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of intellectual capital on corporate financial performance. This study is conducted on pharmaceutical sector listed in Pakistan Stock Exchange. Data for this study was collected from audited annual financial statements of selected business organizations over period of ten year i.e. from 2005-2014. Value Added Intellectual Coefficient methodology is employed, in order to measure IC and its different components. The firm’s financial performance is measured by using profitability measures including ROE (...) and ROA, market to book value and asset turnover. In order to analyze the collected data, the Partial Least Square, a SEM technique. These approaches are used to assess the measurement and structural models. The results of analysis have supported the proposed hypothesis i.e. there is significant positive impact of intellectual capital on firm’s financial performance among pharmaceutical industries of Pakistan. (shrink)

In 2011, Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic novel by British author E.L. James, took the publishing world by storm. This article examines the lack of a feminist backlash to the book by comparing it to The Story of O (1954) and the backlash that that book engendered. In addition to parsing the terms of the existentialism that underlies The Story of O, this article unpacks the neoliberal logic of Fifty Shades of Grey.

In the present study, we tested whether civic identity consisting of moral and political identity via the bifactor model of civic identity with the Stanford Civic Purpose dataset. Previous research in youth development proposed that civic identity consists of two closely related identity constructs, i.e., moral and political identity. Given the bifactor model in factor analysis assumes the presence of both the general and specific factors, we hypothesized that the bifactor model would better fit the data than conventional alternative models. (...) Thus, we compared the candidate models, including the bifactor model, with confirmatory factor analysis. To address the concern about the potential overfitting of the bifactor model, we additionally conducted cross-validation and measurement invariance tests across different gender groups and time points. The analysis results supported our hypothesis that the bifactor model better fitted the data. Both the cross-validation and measurement invariance test results suggested that the overfitting issue was not a significant concern. In the present study, we empirically demonstrated that the bifactor model of civic identity consisting of moral and political identity, which was supposed to be more consistent with the theoretical and conceptual framework of civic identity, better fitted the data than conventional alternative models. (shrink)

In a nationwide study of state legislative Web sites, Narro, Mayo, and Miller found that the communication tools (i.e., weblogs, electronic newsletters, online polling) that state legislators offer vary more from state to state than legislator to legislator. Taking their information into account, this article addresses regulations put on legislators’ home pages.The author interviewed Webmasters in 44 states and found that having less limitations and allowing legislators freedom to manipulate their home pages encourage them to use these home pages for (...) active communication. Although most states do not allow state legislators to use home pages as a campaign tool, some allow free flow of communication between legislators and constituents. The researcher found that legislators would use their home pages more as a communication tool if given the freedom. However, change begins with legislators, who are the policy makers. Whether they have freedom is their own choice. (shrink)

New foreword written by HeritageMom, Amber O'Neal Johnston. "During a time when the United States needed to be reminded of the contributions Black people have made to its democracy, freedom, music, literature, and more, W.E.B. Du Bois took on the task of enumerating the gifts that we've provided to our country. "When I began reading The Gift of Black Folk...the story that unfolded was one that I had never anticipated. We the People of the United States, all of us, (...) have left our indelible mark on America the Beautiful." -Amber O'Neal Johnston In 1924, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868-1963) penned The Gift of Black Folk in response to systemic racism in the United States, showing that "...the American spirit is a new and interesting result of diverse threads of thought and feeling coming not only from America but from Europe and Asia and indeed from Africa." Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and later became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. In 1909 he co-founded the NAACP. Du Bois was a lifelong leader and proponent of civil rights. Amber O'Neal Johnston is a writer, speaker, and home educator who blends life-giving books with a culturally-rich environment for her four children and others. She's the author of A Place to Belong, a guide for families of all backgrounds to celebrate cultural heritage and embrace inclusivity in the home and beyond, and she's known for sharing literary "mirrors and windows" on HeritageMom.com. (shrink)

Education for Total Liberation is a collection of essays from leaders in the field of critical animal pedagogy (CAP). CAP emerges from activist educators teaching critical animal studies and is rooted in critical theory as well as the animal advocacy movement. Critical animal studies (CAS) argues for an interdisciplinary approach to understanding our relationships with nonhuman animals. CAS challenges two specific fields of theory: (1) animal studies, rooted in vivisection and testing on animals in the hard sciences and (2) human-animal (...) studies, which reinforces a socially constructed binary between humans and animals and adopts abstract theoretical approaches. In contrast, CAS takes a progressive and committed approach to scholarship and sees the exploitation of nonhuman animals as interrelated with oppression of humans based on class, gender, race, ability, sexuality, age, and citizenship. CAS promotes the liberation of all animals and challenges all systems of domination. Education for Total Liberation is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate level readers (and beyond) who wish to learn from examples of radical pedagogical projects shaped by CAS and critical pedagogy. Contributing to this collection are Anne C. Bell, Anita de Melo, Carolyn Drew, Amber E. George, Karin Gunnarsson Dinker, Sinem Ketenci, John Lupinacci, Anthony J. Nocella II, Sean Parson, Helena Pedersen, Ian Purdy, Constance L. Russell, J.L. Schatz, Meneka Repka, William E. Shanahan III, and Richard J, White. (shrink)

Against the background of some positions taken up in a recent document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the article studies Raymond Brown’s attempt to combine mainstream historical‐critical exegesis of the Bible with a Roman Catholic theological pre‐understanding. Particular reference is made to his handling of issues connected with the virginal conception of Jesus. Some of his religious presuppositions such as those concerning the relation between faith and reason, and the development of doctrine, are presented. Biblical criticism in Brown’s understanding is (...) an essentially historical discipline which has as its principal object the literal sense of the text, that is, what the text meant when it was written. His religious presuppositions make the practice of the discipline ineliminable in an integral hermeneutic. From an analysis of his treatment of the virginal conception, it is argued that Catholic pre‐understanding and historical criticism, when combined, inevitably result in a two‐stage hermeneutic. In a first stage appeal is made to presuppostions common to all practitioners of historical criticism. In a second stage religious presuppostions come into play. The distinction between these two stages is seen as more fundamental than Brown’s better known distinction between the literal and more‐than‐literal senses of the text. It is argued that the relation between the two stages is to be understood in chalcedonian terms as exemplifying the dialectic of faith and reason: they must be distinguished, but cannot be separated. Brown’s grasp of an incarnational economy of salvation is presented in terms of David H. Kelsy’s concept of a discrimen, and emerges as fundamental for an ecclesial hermeneutic of the Bible. Questions about the place of the historical‐critical method, the promise of alternative approaches and the role of hermeneutical theory can only be adequately addressed in terms of it. (shrink)

God and Phenomenology: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste provides a starting point for scholars who seek to familiarize themselves with the work of this French phenomenologist and theologian. Thirteen international scholars comment on Lacoste's work. In conclusion the volume offers an unpublished essay by Lacoste on the topic of eschatology. / Table of Contents -- Introduction: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste by Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci / Part I: Critiques -- 1. "'Children of the World': A Note on Jean-Yves Lacoste," by (...) Kevin Hart / 2. "Lacoste on Appearing and Reduction," by Steven DeLay / 3. "Reduction Without Appearance: The Non-Phenomenality of God," by Robert C. Reed / 4. "Only Metaphysics Sustains Phenomenology," by John Milbank / Part II: Commentaries -- 5. "Canonical Texts," by Oliver O'Donovan / 6. "Reading Prayerfully Before God: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Treatment of Lectio Divina as an Instance of Existence Coram Deo," by Christina M. Gschwandtner / 7. "Affection, Mood, and Poetry: Overcoming Mentalism," by Joseph Rivera / 8. "Rejecting the Wrong Questions: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Resistance to a Philosophical-Theological Divide," by Stephanie Rumpza / Part III: Explorations -- 9. "For the Love of Revelation: Open and Relational Theology in Light of Lacoste," by Jason W. Alvis / 10. "Right Use, Right Thinking," by William C. Hackett / 11. "The Beautiful Life of Faith: A Liturgical Reading of Fear and Trembling," by Amber Bowen / 12. "In the Footsteps of Henri de Lubac and Gregory of Nyssa: Jean-Yves Lacoste on Human Becoming, Historical and Eternal," by Stephen E. Lewis / 13. "Kenosis and Transcendence: Jean-Yves Lacoste and Soren Kierkegaard on the Phenomenality of God," by Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere / In Conclusion -- 14. "The Final Word: Prolegomena to Eschatology," by Jean-Yves Lacoste. (shrink)

A Diego de Avendaño (1594-1688), jesuita autor del Thesaurus Indicus (Amberes, 1668), se le ha catalogado normalmente como el gran defensor de los esclavos negros en las colonias españolas de América, e incluso como el primer promotor de la abolición. A la vista del Thesaurus Indicus, el presente trabajo estudia hasta qué punto pueden ser verdad tales apreciaciones.

Interpretation of the classics in political theory seems to go in waves. For a while we had John Locke, the bourgeois thinker. Now we seem to be in a Locke-as-radical-democrat phase. Locke-the-bourgeois had problems of its own, but a radically democratic Locke -- not just the old Locke as liberal democrat but Locke as quasi-Leveller -- strains the interpretative imagination more than most; yet in recent years, several different kinds of argument have been advanced in support of it, both textual (...) and contextual. The most effective argument has proceeded by situating Locke in the context of radical Whig politics in the 1670s and '80s, the struggles over religious toleration and the royal succession, in particular the �Exclusion Crisis� of 1679-81. This contextual argument has been accompanied by various textual interpretations having to do with Locke's conceptions of property, consent, representation, the right of revolution and natural law. Among other things, these are supposed to show that while Locke had nothing explicit to say about the extent of the franchise, the weight of evidence suggests that he would have supported a fairly wide franchise, perhaps even something like the (almost) manhood suffrage advocated by the Levellers (at least according to some, and probably the most convincing, interpretations of their ideas). Most recently, in these pages, Martin Hughes, building on the work of James Tully and Richard Ashcraft in particular, has pushed the argument as far as it can probably go. His argument on taxation and suffrage has provided a motivation here for a wider exploration of Locke's views on representation, consent and the franchise. (shrink)

O antigo convento do Santíssimo Coração de Jesus à Estrela encerra um interessante conjunto de painéis de azulejos alusivos à vida de Santa Teresa de Jesus, cujas composições foram concebidas a partir da cópia directa de dez gravuras do álbum Vita S. Virginis Teresiae a Iesv. Série biográfica impressa pela primeira vez em Amberes em 1613, a sua concretização coube aos célebres gravadores Adriaen Collaert e Cornelis Galle. Convertidas num modelo corrente para inúmeras obras de arte ao longo dos tempos, (...) assumiram urna importância capital na fixação e desenvolvimento de parte da iconografia teresiana, constituindo-se como um eficaz veículo para a rápida difusão da sua biografia. (shrink)

What is the nature of the intellectual enterprise - general equilibrium analysis - that so many economists regard as the centerpiece of their discipline? In this book, Roy Weintraub considers both the modern history of the analysis, and the methodological puzzles that it, and mathematical economic theory in general, pose. Professor Weintraub argues that previous writings on the history and method of general equilibrium theory have been curiously biased and misleading. He provides a clear and careful presentation of the development (...) of the theory from the 1930s through to the Arrow-Debreu work of the 1950s. This historical analysis is the centre of the book: a case study which permits the author to justify the status of general equilibrium theory in economics and the activity in which economic theorists engage. He argues that previous methodological investigations have been distorted by their use of inappropriate models taken from the philosophy of science that were developed to appraise work in the physical sciences. (shrink)