Among the abilities people fear they will lose as they age, the most frequently reported is "staying sharp". The fear of being afflicted with Alzheimer's disease and other dementing disorders, which will clinically impact 10 to 12% of the population between the age of 65 and death, is the major concern. Despite the fear of losing their minds, most persons will not develop Alzheimer's disease. So why does the fear of losing mental acuity top the AARP list?One reason is that (...) older adults in general cannot distinguish the usual changes with aging from neurocognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. We also live in a society that has been labeled, among other things... (shrink)

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.Are the smartest people also the wisest? Not necessarily. While traditional intellectual reasoning and procedural knowledge have helped build the communities we live in, there is a growing scientific understanding that we need emotionally balanced and better-fitting prosocial frameworks for coping with the uncertainties and complexities of life and addressing new challenges of the modern world. We are now poised on the edge of a new science of wisdom.The concept of wisdom, long (...) considered the “pinnacle of insight into the human condition”, has been that of an intangible, subjective, culturally specific entity—an unscientific... (shrink)

The first of its kind to thoroughly cover language technology at all levels and with all modern technologies this book takes an empirical approach to the ...

Most research on student plagiarism defines the concept very narrowly or with much ambiguity. Many studies focus on plagiarism involving large swaths of text copied and pasted from unattributed sources, a type of plagiarism that the overwhelming majority of students seem to have little trouble identifying. Other studies rely on ambiguous definitions, assuming students understand what the term means and requesting that they self-report how well they understand the concept. This study attempts to avoid these problems by examining student perceptions (...) of more complex citation issues. We presented 240 students with a series of examples, asked them to indicate whether or not each should be considered plagiarism, and followed up with a series of demographic and attitudinal questions. The examples fell within the spectrum of inadequate citation, patchwriting, and the reuse of other people’s ideas. Half were excerpted from publicized cases of academic plagiarism, and half were modified from other sources. Our findings indicated that students shared a very strong agreement that near verbatim copy and paste and patchwriting should be considered plagiarism, but that they were much more conflicted regarding the reuse of ideas. Additionally, this study found significant correlation between self-reported confidence in their understanding and the identification of more complex cases as plagiarism, but this study found little correlation between academic class status or exposure to plagiarism detection software and perceptions of plagiarism. The latter finding goes against a prevailing sentiment in the academic literature that the ability to recognize plagiarism is inherently linked to academic literacy. Overall, our findings indicate that more pedagogical emphasis may need to be placed on complex forms of plagiarism. (shrink)

This commentary uses the dynamic of identity-protective cognition to pose a friendly challenge to Jussim (2012). Like other forms of information processing, this one is too readily characterized as a bias. It is no mistake, however, to view identity-protective cognition as generating inaccurate perceptions. The “bounded rationality” paradigm incorrectly equates rationality with forming accurate beliefs. But so does Jussim's critique.

Careerism refers to an individual’s propensity to achieve their personal and career goals through nonperformance-based activities. We investigated the role of several dispositional predictors of careerism, including Five-factor model personality traits, primary psychopathy, and exchange ideology. Based on data from 131 respondents, as expected, we observed that emotional stability was negatively correlated with careerism. Primary psychopathy and exchange ideology explained additional variance in careerism after accounting for FFM traits. Relative importance analyses indicated that psychopathy and exchange ideology were equally important (...) in predicting careerism. We highlight the need for future research efforts investigating the combined effects of contextual factors—particularly, human resource practices—and individual differences to understand careerism in the workplace. (shrink)

This article references the following linked citations. If you are trying to access articles from an off-campus location, you may be required to first logon via your library web site to access JSTOR. Please visit your library's website or contact a librarian to learn about options for remote access to JSTOR.

This paper examines the notion of tolerance in education. In general, tolerance is perceived as a means to resist hostility, raise awareness of cultural differences, mitigate violence, and maintain liberal and democratic values. In education, there are various initiatives, such as the International Day for Tolerance (UNESCO in Declaration of principles on tolerance, 1995), that aim to build resilience against different forms of hate and cultivate openness and acceptance of the other. Yet the idea of tolerance includes different understandings and (...) interpretations. This paper argues that cultivating an embodied sense of tolerance among students, in particular in divisive communities, requires us to move beyond deliberative interpretations of tolerance and to advance a pragmatic understanding of tolerance through an agonistic lens. This paper starts with a review of several dominant interpretations of tolerance. The heart of the paper focuses on interpreting Dewey’s pragmatism as a theoretical basis for advancing tolerance. The final part of the paper explores how pragmatism through an agonistic lens can support a more flexible and humane approach to dealing with political conflicts. (shrink)

In this chapter, we focus on the debate over publicly maintained racist monuments as it manifests in the mid-2010s Anglosphere, primarily in the United States and South Africa. After pointing to some representative examples of racist monuments, we discuss ways a monument can be thought racist and neutrally categorize removalist and preservationist arguments heard in the monument debate. We suggest that both extremist and moderate removalist goals are likely to be self-defeating and that when concerns of civic sustainability are put (...) on moral par with those of fairness and justice, something like a Mandela-era preservationist policy is best: one which removes the most offensive of the minor racist monuments, but which focuses on closing the monumentary gap between peoples and reframing existing racist monuments. (shrink)

Some medical services have long generated deep moral controversy within the medical profession as well as in broader society and have led to conscientious refusals by some physicians to provide those services to their patients. More recently, pharmacists in a number of states have refused on grounds of conscience to fill legal prescriptions for their customers. This paper assesses these controversies. First, I offer a brief account of the basis and limits of the claim to be free to act on (...) one’s conscience. Second, I sketch an account of the basis of the medical and pharmacy professions’ responsibilities and the process by which they are specified and change over time. Third, I then set out and defend what I call the “conventional compromise” as a reasonable accommodation to conflicts between these professions’ responsibilities and the moral integrity of their individual members. Finally, I take up and reject the complicity objection to the conventional compromise. Put together, this provides my answer to the question posed in the title of my paper: “Conscientious refusal by physicians and pharmacists: who is obligated to do what, and why?”. (shrink)

The Human Genome Project will produce information permitting increasing opportunities to prevent genetically transmitted harms, most of which will be compatible with a life worth living, through avoiding conception or terminating a pregnancy. Failure to prevent these harms when it is possible for parents to do so without substantial burdens or costs to themselves or others are what J call “wrongful handicaps”. Derek Parfit has developed a systematic difficulty for any such cases being wrongs — when the harm could be (...) prevented only by preventing the existence of the individual who would have a worthwhile life even with the handicap, then bringing him into existence with the handicap does not make him worse off and so does not wrong him. I argue that a non “person‐affecting” principle requiring the avoidance of suffering and limited opportunity correctly accounts for cases of wrongful handicaps without requiring that the individuals with the handicap have been made worse off and therefore wronged. It is an advantage, not a difficulty, of this account that it does not imply that the person with the handicap has been wronged or is a victim with a special moral complaint. (shrink)

Faced with the choice between supporting industrial plant agriculture and hunting, Tom Regan’s rights view can be plausibly developed in a way that permits a form of hunting we call “dignitarian.” To motivate this claim, we begin by showing how the empirical literature on animal deaths in plant agriculture suggests that a non-trivial amount of hunting would not add to animal harm. We discuss how Tom Regan’s miniride principle appears to morally permit hunting in that case, and we address recent (...) objections by Jason Hanna to environmentally-based culling that may be seen to speak against this conclusion. We then turn to dignity, which is especially salient in scenarios where harm is necessary or justifiable. We situate “dignitarian” hunting within a larger framework of adversarial ethics, and argue that dignitarian hunting gives animals a more dignified death than the alternatives endemic to large-scale plant agriculture, and so is permissible based on the kinds of principles that Regan endorses. Indeed, dignitarian hunting may actually fit better with Regan’s widely endorsed animal rights framework than the practice of many vegans, and should only be rejected if we’re just as willing to condemn supporting conventional plant agriculture. (shrink)

We integrate information from distinct domains, especially in metaphor. What sort of cognitive architecture underlies this kind of integration? Fodor (1983) argued that it involves nonmodular mechanisms. He also contended that the nonmodular mechanisms evolved from modular ones through a process of demodularization, a position elaborated by Mithen (1996). In this article, I defend Fodor and Mithen from criticisms offered by Sperber (1994). Sperber suggested that nonmodular mechanisms are unlikely to have evolved because an increasingly large database would incapacitate the (...) cognitive system due to combinatorial explosion and the frame problem. Moreover, he argued that nonmodular mechanisms are not required to explain our ability to integrate information. I argue that proponents of demodularization can respond to Sperber's criticisms by assuming that either an expanding database co-evolved with increasingly sophisticated search mechanisms or the cognitive system evolved along connectionist lines. Moreover, I argue that Sperber's modular account of conceptual integration fails to satisfy the criteria for modularity-namely, information encapsulation. (shrink)

We define a structure which is much simpler than a morass, but whose existence is equivalent to the existence of a morass.

– This paper attempts to recognize the informational needs of women who suffer from intimate partner violence (IPV). It then presents a model of a web site that may answer to these needs., – First, the paper defines the phases women suffering from IPV go through. This is done by surveying the literature that describes the stages these women experience. In order to clarify the proposed model, the paper then describe our own set of phases based on the above literature. (...) Once the phases mentioned above are understood, the needs of these women become evident, thus allowing us to define and specify them. The model of the web site is then described and the paper shows how it relates to the various aforementioned needs., – The web site would offer a variety of information, such as: names of organizations that offer support, chats, and forums that provide emotional support and advice from women who experienced abuse in the past as well as from professionals., – Security issues of this model need to be researched before applying it to use, as they are beyond the scope of this paper. Such issues should include techniques for erasing the user's traces and for keeping out “unwelcome visitors.”, – This model, if applied, may greatly aid women suffering from IPV, as it would provide them with the emotional support and technical information they need in order to make important decisions regarding their situation. Information, if utilized, may give these women the ability to control their fate and actively improve their quality of life. (shrink)

In 1980 grey-headed flying-foxes, a species now listed as "vulnerable to extinction," made camp at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne (RBGM). In May 2000 the RBGM started to kill bats. The killing was halted when Humane Society International (HSI) filed for the bats’ protection under federal and state conservation laws. Over the next 13 months, conservationists, garden officials and scientists, politicians, animal activists, and others all played a part in a chain of events that demonstrates the tangled web of scientific (...) involvement in politics and how different views within the scientific community may lead to conflicting positions on conservation strategies. (shrink)

This article studies the adoption of the nickname Malleolus by members of the gens Publicia in mid-republican Rome to illustrate the importance of grounding cultural history in the lives of seemingly minor political players and the mundane objects with which they came to be associated. After reviewing the occupational significance of hammers during the First Punic War, I scrutinize the ritual and cultic intersignifications of hammers in fourth- and third-century BCE central Italy in order to set up a comprehensive reconstruction (...) of the social and semiotic networks that structured and mediated the dedication of a temple to the goddess Flora by the brothers Publicii Malleoli at a time of internal political crisis and external conflict. Central to the political and intercultural contests of mid-republican Rome was the generative force of the polyvalent and object-centered cognomen in establishing and promoting individual and collective identities. (shrink)

This article reinterprets an incident that Livy (8.18.4–11) and derivative later sources place in the year 331 BCE: a wave of poisonings whose perpetrators are brought to light after an enslaved woman contacts a Roman magistrate. Its main objectives are to show that the incident is best understood in connection with the transmission of novel—or perceived as novel—pharmacological knowledge, and in conjunction with shifts in the institution of slavery at Rome that were set in motion by the Republic’s expansion; that (...) a key figure in the mythological encoding of this transmission was the legendary Circe; and that moving away from previous scholarship’s concern with the matronae alleged to have carried out the poisonings and focusing instead on “la servant délatrice” (Jean-Marie Pailler) opens up new corridors into the cultural history of this period. (shrink)

This article proposes a new interpretation of slave religious experience in mid-republican Rome. Select passages from Plautine comedy and Cato the Elder's De agri cultura are paired with material culture as well as comparative evidence—mostly from studies of Black Atlantic slave religions—to reconstruct select aspects of a specific and distinctive slave “religiosity” in the era of large-scale enslavements. I work towards this reconstruction first by considering the subordination of slaves as religious agents before turning to slaves’ practice of certain forms (...) of religious expertise in the teeth of subordination and policing. After transitioning to an assessment of slave religiosity's role in the pursuit of freedom, I conclude with a set of methodological justifications for this paper's line of inquiry. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that prioritizing health care resources by their relative cost-effectiveness can result in lower priority for the treatment of disabled persons than otherwise similar non-disabled persons. I distinguish six different ways in which this discrimination against the disabled can occur. I then spell out and evaluate the following moral objections to this discrimination, most of which capture an aspect of its unethical character: it implies that disabled persons' lives are of lesser value than those of non-disabled persons; (...) it constitutes “double jeopardy” or violates Frances Kamm's non-linkage principle; it conflicts with equality of opportunity; it conflicts with fairness, which requires ignoring (some/most) differential impacts of treatment; it wrongly gives lower priority to disabled persons for equally effective treatment; it conflicts with giving all persons an equal chance to reach their full potential; and, it is in conflict with giving priority to the worse off. (shrink)

Using new techniques for controlling the categoricity spectrum of a structure, we construct a structure with degree of categoricity but infinite spectral dimension, answering a question of Bazhenov, Kalimullin and Yamaleev. Using the same techniques, we construct a computably categorical structure of non-computable Scott rank.

There is much public focus in North America today on issues of corporate governance and ethics due mainly to the malpractice of several high profile corporate leaders and the negative impact of this on their corporation's stakeholders, employees and communities. This has caused a crisis of trust in the public and lead to much discussion on ways to prevent such unethical behavior by adopting new approaches through legislation and the structure of corporations. This article is not about introducing a new (...) approach to corporate ethics and governance as there is much change already taking place. The National Quality Institute in Canada offers a demonstrated and proven way, through the application of the Excellence Frameworks, of providing for good corporate guidance and ethical leadership practices. Organizations, which adopt a strategic focus on Excellence, attain great results and become healthy organizations, as their leaders understand the dynamic relationship and the balance that exists between "employees, customers, and stakeholders". These organizations build trust by acting responsibly. NQI works with many organizations in Canada that have a strategic leadership focus on organizational excellence utilizing the criteria in the NQI Canadian Excellence Frameworks for Quality and for Healthy Workplace. Organizations that take an integrated approach to Excellence also perform well in such areas as corporate social responsibility, employee health and customer satisfaction. This article has specific references to three organizations that have achieved Canada's prime recognition the Canada Awards for Excellence. (shrink)

In voting theory, monotonicity is the axiom that an improvement in the ranking of a candidate by voters cannot cause a candidate who would otherwise win to lose. The participation axiom states that the sincere report of a voter’s preferences cannot cause an outcome that the voter regards as less attractive than the one that would result from the voter’s non-participation. This article identifies three binary distinctions in the types of circumstances in which failures of monotonicity or participation can occur. (...) Two of the three distinctions apply to monotonicity, while one of those and the third apply to participation. The distinction that is unique to monotonicity is whether the voters whose changed rankings demonstrate non-monotonicity are better off or worse off. The distinction that is unique to participation is whether the marginally participating voter causes his first choice to lose or his last choice to win. The overlapping distinction is whether the profile of voters’ rankings has a Condorcet winner or a cycle at the top. This article traces the occurrence of all of the resulting combination of characteristics in the voting methods that can exhibit failures of monotonicity. (shrink)

Accountants preparing information are in a position to manipulate the view of economic reality presented in such information to interested parties. These manipulations can be regarded as morally reprehensible because they are not fair to users, they involve in an unjust exercise of power, and they tend to weaken the authority of accounting regulators. This paper develops a model for detecting earnings manipulators using financial statements’ ratios in a sample of Spanish listed companies. Our results provide evidence that accounting data (...) can be extremely useful in detecting manipulators. This approach can be used by a large category of users of accounting information among which we can cite stock exchange supervisors or investing professionals. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has served not just to instil fear in the populace but to highlight the importance of fear as a motivating dynamic in politics. The gradual emergence of political-philosophical approaches calling for concern for ‘positive’ emotions may have made sense under non-pandemic conditions. Now, however, describing fear in the face of a deadly pandemic as ‘irrational’ or born of ‘ignorance’ seems ‘irrational’ and ‘ignorant’. In this article, we draw upon the work of John Gray and behavioural science to (...) present a defence of fear. We show how the pandemic has highlighted deficits in the work of four thinkers highly critical of fear: Martha Nussbaum, Zygmunt Bauman, Hannah Arendt and Sara Ahmed. We argue that, if such approaches are to be of value in anything other than optimal conditions, then they have to acknowledge the fundamental role of fear in helping human beings to pursue fundamental interests. (shrink)