An important measure of the validity and utility of basic behavioral research is the extent to which it can be applied in real life. Basic research on behavioral momentum and the model unifying choice and resistance to change (Nevin & Grace 1999) has stimulated the development of behavioral technologies aimed at increasing the persistence of adaptive behavior and decreasing maladaptive choices.

Interview with Max Oelschlaeger, a college professor, concerning the development of the Women's Studies Program at the University of North Texas. Early interest in women's issues; views concerning environmental ethics, eco-philosophy, and eco-feminism; ideas concerning the components for a quality women's studies program.

The new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on the Use of a Single Institutional Review Board (sIRB) for Multi-Site Research was adopted primarily to simplify and speed the review of complex multisite clinical trials. However, speeding review requires overcoming a number of obstacles. Perhaps the most substantial obstacle is the time and effort needed to develop reliance agreements among the participating sites. We conducted 102 semistructured interviews with sIRB personnel, including directors, chairs, reviewers, and staff, from 20 IRBs that (...) acted as sIRBs for multisite research, including 6 commercial/independent sIRBs, and 10 university-based academic and 4 federal sIRBs. Almost without exception, the interviewees agreed that reliance agreements were complex, difficult to develop, and time-consuming. A major problem for relying sites was that different agreements specified different responsibilities for the relying sites. Attitudes differed about whether these problems will be resolved as IRB staff and managers become more experienced with sIRBs. However it is clear that the process of developing reliance agreements must be simplified. Federal assistance in standardizing at least some sections of reliance agreements might reduce the difficulties involved. (shrink)

Natural law theories affirm that it belongs to the nature of law to be apt to promote the common good or do something similar. I defend a weak version of this thesis according to which part of what constitutes something as a nondefective central case of a posited law is that it is apt to promote the common good. Just as the rules of Pictionary require the drawing player to design her drawing to reveal the word in play, the rules (...) of a central case of a legal system require lawmakers to design laws to promote the common good. Therefore, just as a Pictionary drawing that is inapt to reveal the word in play is defective, a central case of a posited law that is inapt to promote the common good is defective. (shrink)

The museum of the colonial moment fused the expansion of knowledge and global contact of North Atlantic powers with the aggressive nationalist pride of their hegemonic positions, building national, cultural, and racial identity through framing. How does Black Panther use the museum scene to illustrate a fear of Black museums and the problems of existence observed through the philosophies of Black existentialism and Africana phenomenology? Killmonger's questioning of Wakanda reveals the truth and effect of Wakanda's isolationist history. Yet, Wakanda is (...) nevertheless shown as a representation of African history, not just in the tribal nature of Wakanda's social structure or in the clothing and physical adornments and jewelry, but also in the rituals and spirituality. (shrink)

This article concerns the prescriptive function of decision analysis. Consider an agent who must choose an action yielding welfare that varies with an unknown state of nature. It is often asserted that such an agent should adhere to consistency axioms which imply that behavior can be represented as maximization of expected utility. However, our agent is not concerned the consistency of his behavior across hypothetical choice sets. He only wants to make a reasonable choice from the choice set that he (...) actually faces. Hence, I reason that prescriptions for decision making should respect actuality. That is, they should promote welfare maximization in the choice problem the agent actually faces. Any choice respecting weak and stochastic dominance is rational from the actualist perspective. (shrink)

In a survey of information theory and some of its implications, Warren Weaver has proposed a distinction between engineering noise and semantic noise. Ordinary Spanish usage reflects this distinction quite neatly. If A speaks to B and B responds with no entiendo, it means ‘I have not heard your words, because of interfering sound or lack of attention; please transmit the same message again’; if he responds with no comprendo, it means ‘I heard you all right, but what I heard (...) doesn't make sense; please paraphrase or explain.’ Channel noise, thus, is the responsible factor when that which leaves a transmitter is not that which reaches the receiver; semantic noise is a discrepancy between the codes used by transmitter and receiver. (shrink)

This book interrogates the nature and state of African American citizenship through the prism of Social Contract Theory. Challenging the United States’ commitment to African American citizenship, this book explores the idea of Social Nullification, the decision to reject, revoke and re-define the social contract with a state and society. Charles F. Peterson surveys the history of Social Contract Theory, examines Nullification as political and legal theory, argues public policy as a measure of the state’s commitment to the contractarian (...) relationship and frames the writings and activism of Martin R. Delany, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the African American Reparations Movement as examples of Social Nullification and challenges to the terms of Black life in America. (shrink)

This essay reviews three recently published books on the intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance. In his survey of Italian humanism in the “long fifteenth century” (c. 1350–c. 1525) The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance, Christopher Celenza argues that the intellectual project of the humanists was centred on questions regarding language, philosophy, and the stance of the intellectual toward institutions. Celenza traces the fortunes and mutations of the humanist project into the modern era in The Italian Renaissance and the (...) Origins of the Humanities, and expresses concern that in today's universities the balance struck by the humanists between “openness” and “boundary-generating habits” unduly favours the latter. Humanism, according to James Hankins's Virtue Politics, was primarily about repairing politics by first reforming the moral character of Italy's ruling elites. The language and literature of Roman and Greek antiquity provided the models for this education in virtue. Hankins believes the humanists' educational and cultural programme offers a salutary corrective to our misplaced, post-Machiavellian trust in legal constraints and constitutional guardrails to regulate contemporary political life. (shrink)

The recruitment and socialization (enculturation) of spirit mediums in the United States is investigated through ethnographic interviews, participant observation and library biographies in Lily Dale, New York. Spirit mediumship, alleged transfer of information from departed souls to the living through another living human (the medium) is a deviant way of knowing in this society. Most children with signs of mediumistic ability are discouraged by family and community. Moving into the role requires positive definitions and social support, such as in Spiritualist (...) Church classes. Given general scepticism about intuition in Western society, even mediums themselves look for "confirmations" to validate their nonrational communications. Thus, the dominance of scientific rationality is accepted to an important degree even by this group that practices an alternate way of knowing. (shrink)

" -- Dr. Daniel Gardner, Cornell University Medical College Charles Stevens, a prominent neurobiologist who originally trained as a biophysicist (with George Uhlenbeck and Mark Kac), wrote this book almost by accident.

As time passed, I discovered with surprise that the important role I assigned to literature was not recognized by everyone.iThis essay constitutes one aspect of an overall project to spell out the implications for the literary arts of Wittgenstein's systematic distinction between acts of description that carry truth values and acts of expression that display states of mind and feeling but do not describe them. My full case will require a book. That is good news for me but bad news (...) for the present reader, since I feel I have to offer a painfully brief version of my overall theoretical position as a backdrop for what I will say about appreciation. Expressions elicit or solicit attunement rather than propose .. (shrink)