Van Belle traces the history of psychology from its roots in Greek philosophy and includes a description of the later influence of the Hebraic-Christian mindset on that history. Subsequently, he follows the journey of psychology through the Middle Ages and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Next, he describes the birth and trajectory of psychology proper during the nineteenth century and closes with a description of a number of the more contemporary schools of psychological thought. The underlying thesis (...) of the text is that the history of psychology gives evidence of both continuity and discontinuity in interaction with one another. Thus, to do justice to the actual history of psychology one must take note of both persisting themata and changing paradigms. (shrink)

Henry at Work invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard—surveying land, running his family’s pencil-making business, writing, lecturing, and building his cabin at Walden Pond—and thought intensely about work in its many dimensions. And (...) his ideas about work have much to teach us in an age of remote work and automation, when many people are reconsidering what kind of working lives they want to have. -/- Through Thoreau, readers will discover a philosophy of work in the office, factory, lumber mill, and grocery store, and reflect on the rhythms of the workday, the joys and risks of resigning oneself to work, the dubious promises of labor-saving technology, and that most vital and eternal of philosophical questions, “How much do I get paid?” In ten chapters, including “Manual Work,” “Machine Work,” and “Meaningless Work,” this personal, urgent, practical, and compassionate book introduces readers to their new favorite coworker: Henry David Thoreau. (shrink)

The inventive, argumentative and stylistic possibilities generated by figures in general and the figure antithesis in particular are explored by Jeanne Fahnestock in the field of science. These ideas on the possibilities of antithesis are developed in the analysis of some cases of this figure in the media. This paper explores how antithesis can consist of textual and visual elements, and how various sorts and degrees of opposition are constructed in the figure.

This study explores the role that news coverage plays in the allocation of Japanese development aid. Conceptually, it is expected that democratic foreign policy officials, including those working in bureaucratic governmental structures will try to match the magnitude of their actions with what they expect is the public's perception of the importance of the recipient. News media salience serves an easily accessible indicator of that domestic political importance and, in the case of foreign aid, this suggests that higher levels of (...) news coverage of a less-developed country will lead to higher aid commitments. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the level of news coverage is a statistically significant factor in Japanese aid distributions. More significantly, the analysis demonstrates that separating grant aid from other forms of aid is critical for the empirical examination of the determinants of Japanese aid. (shrink)

An experimental study is reported which investigates the differences in interpretation between content conditionals (of various pragmatic types) and inferential conditionals. In a content conditional, the antecedent represents a requirement for the consequent to become true. In an inferential conditional, the antecedent functions as a premise and the consequent as the inferred conclusion from that premise. The linguistic difference between content and inferential conditionals is often neglected in reasoning experiments. This turns out to be unjustified, since we adduced evidence on (...) the basis of a quantitative and a qualitative analysis that this difference has a manifest psychological relevance. For the inferential conditionals, participants appear to retrieve the order of events of the original content conditional on which it was based, before they start reasoning with it. The implications of this finding for reasoning research and linguistics will be discussed. (shrink)

Today’s students are accustomed to a world where information is available on-demand, anywhere and anytime. They bring this expectation to their academic world where they want to work cooperatively and flexibly, using the modern information processing tools and access with which they are familiar. New hardware platforms such as e-Readers and tablet computers have made substantial inroads in the consumer market. E-Readers are becoming more prevalent in universities – replacing the need for physical textbooks, lecturing notes and other academic documents. (...) Many universities are now running pilot programs, while some are already using e-Readers. Tablet computers, apart from their ability to read, edit or create various types of information documents, also offer additional features such as collaborative and social networking services. This empirical research project investigated student perspectives on the educational use of e-Readers and tablets within the University of Cape Town. A questionnaire was distributed to a significant portion of the student population and stratified according to seniority and faculty. Quantitative data was gathered and analysed on themes ranging from awareness to preferences to facilitating conditions around e-Readers within the academic environment. The students sent a clear signal: that they are keen to embrace these new technologies and the advantages they offer. E-Books can be updated automatically and downloaded to e-Readers instantly from almost anywhere in the world. Students feel they would benefit greatly through the use of e-Readers and many believe they are set to replace books completely. Having access to a portable library of information in their backpacks would benefit both students and the environment. However, there are a number of barriers to the comprehensive introduction of these technologies, including the cost of the devices; cost, rights and file format of e-books; the need for a critical mass of textbooks available in digital format and device characteristics such as battery life, and ubiquitous Wi-Fi access. (shrink)

Considered together, Butler and Whitehead draw from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. The contributors of this volume offer a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts.

This paper focuses on local constructions of ‘nature’ in governance processes, and the importance of historical and institutional contexts for their genesis and functioning. Through extensive field study in the Romanian Danube Delta, it is demonstrated that the origin and distribution of certain concepts can be credited to a history of conflicts over land and resource use. Considering the implications for participatory natural resource governance, we argue that this capacity of the governance context to produce and transform concepts of nature, (...) poses real challenges. To these challenges can be added legacies of disempowerment and marginalisation, evident in local inhabitants’ images and concepts of nature, which we seek to understand by developing a theory of traumatic nature. (shrink)

In the study of women in academia, the focus is often particularly on women’s stark underrepresentation in the math-intensive fields of natural sciences, technology, and economics. In the non-math-intensive of fields life, social and behavioral sciences, gender issues are seemingly less at stake because, on average, women are well-represented. However, in the current study, we demonstrate that equal gender representation in LSB disciplines does not guarantee women’s equal opportunity to advance to full professorship—to the contrary. With a cross-sectional survey among (...) N = 2,109 academics at mid-level careers in the Netherlands, we test the hypothesis that in LSB, female academics perceive to hit a “thicker” glass ceiling—that is, they see a sharper contrast between the high representation of women at the lower compared to the top levels. We test whether this predicts female academics’ lower estimated chances to reach full professorship relative to men in LSB. We introduce a novel perceived glass ceiling index, calculated based on academics’ perceptions of the share of women and men in their direct work environment minus their perceptions of gender ratio among full professors in their field. Results confirm that the perceived glass ceiling is thicker in the non-math-intensive LSB compared to math-intensive NTE fields. Furthermore, only in LSB, women perceived a thicker glass ceiling than men. Moreover, only among female academics, the thicker the perceived glass ceiling, the lower their estimated chances to become full professor 1 day. Combined, a moderated mediation showed that for women only, a thicker perceived glass ceiling in LSB compared to NTE disciplines predicted their lower estimated chances to advance to full professor level. No such mediation occurred for men. We conclude that women’s higher numerical representation in LSB disciplines does not negate a male-dominant normative standard about academic leadership and success. Paradoxically, the perceived odds for female academics to reach the top of their field are lower in fields where they are relatively highly represented, and this may pose unique barriers to women’s perceived opportunities for career success. (shrink)

There is growing evidence that couples in non-traditional relationships in which the woman attains higher status than her male partner experience more negative relationship outcomes than traditional couples. A possible reason is that non-traditional couples violate persisting gender stereotypes that prescribe men to be breadwinners and women to be caregivers of the family. In the current study, we investigated whether a country’s gender-stereotypical culture predicts non-traditional men and women’s relationship and life outcomes. We used the European Sustainable Workforce Survey, which (...) is conducted in nine European countries. Two indicators of countries’ gender-stereotypical culture are used: Gender Empowerment Measure and implicit gender stereotypes. We found that women’s income and -to a lesser extent- education degree relative to their male partner affected outcomes such as relationship quality, negative emotions, and experienced time pressure. Furthermore, men and women living in countries with a traditional gender-stereotypical culture reported lower relationship quality when women earned more than their partners. Relative income differences did not affect the relationship quality of participants living in egalitarian countries. Also, couples in which the woman is more highly educated than the man reported higher relationship quality in egalitarian countries, but not in traditional countries. Our findings suggest that dominant beliefs and ideologies in society can hinder or facilitate couples in non-traditional relationships. (shrink)

De technowetenschappen zetten een vraagteken bij vele verworvenheden van de westerse cultuur. ~Ons joods-christelijk tijdsbesef, vele morele en ethische ideeën en filosofische uitgangspunten komen op losse schroeven te staan.

Vaak wordt gesteld dat ongelijkheid een individuele verantwoordelijkheid is. Om sociale ongelijkheid te verkleinen zoekt men dan de oplossingen in het ondersteunen van individuen. Maar daarbij wordt meestal voorbijgegaan aan de morele dimensies van ongelijkheid, en aan het belang van de groep of de netwerken waarin mensen wonen, werken en leven. De essays in dit boek, gebaseerd op de nieuwste wetenschappelijke inzichten, tonen aan dat juist die groepsdimensie een zeer belangrijk perspectief is, waaraan in beleidsoplossingen te vaak voorbij wordt gegaan. (...) 0Als je leven niet loopt zoals je dat voor ogen hebt, is dat dan je eigen schuld of hangt dat wellicht met meer zaken samen? Iedereen weet dat omgevingsfactoren een belangrijke rol spelen: Waar ben je geboren? Welk netwerk heb je tot je beschikking? Toch worden bij pogingen om de ongelijkheid in de wereld te reduceren in de eerste plaats individuele oplossingen aangedragen. Dit boek laat voor de verschillende domeinen in de samenleving als de zorg, het onderwijs, werk, migratie en milieu zien hoe dat (niet) werkt. (shrink)

Background Outbreaks of infectious disease cause serious and costly health and social problems. Two new technologies – pathogen whole genome sequencing and Big Data analytics – promise to improve our capacity to detect and control outbreaks earlier, saving lives and resources. However, routinely using these technologies to capture more detailed and specific personal information could be perceived as intrusive and a threat to privacy. Method Four community juries were convened in two demographically different Sydney municipalities and two regional cities in (...) New South Wales, Australia to elicit the views of well-informed community members on the acceptability and legitimacy of: making pathogen WGS and linked administrative data available for public health researchusing this information in concert with data linkage and machine learning to enhance communicable disease surveillance systems Fifty participants of diverse backgrounds, mixed genders and ages were recruited by random-digit-dialling and topic-blinded social-media advertising. Each jury was presented with balanced factual evidence supporting different expert perspectives on the potential benefits and costs of technologically enhanced public health research and communicable disease surveillance and given the opportunity to question experts. Results Almost all jurors supported data linkage and WGS on routinely collected patient isolates for the purposes of public health research, provided standard de-identification practices were applied. However, allowing this information to be operationalised as a syndromic surveillance system was highly contentious with three juries voting in favour, and one against by narrow margins. For those in favour, support depended on several conditions related to system oversight and security being met. Those against were concerned about loss of privacy and did not trust Australian governments to run secure and effective systems. Conclusions Participants across all four events strongly supported the introduction of data linkage and pathogenomics to public health research under current research governance structures. Combining pathogen WGS with event-based data surveillance systems, however, is likely to be controversial because of a lack of public trust, even when the potential public health benefits are clear. Any suggestion of private sector involvement or commercialisation of WGS or surveillance data was unanimously rejected. (shrink)

The demonstration of a loophole-free violation of Bell's inequality by Hensen et al. (2015) leads to the inescapable conclusion that timelessness and abstractness exist alongside space-time. This finding is in full agreement with the triple-aspect monism of reality, with mathematical Platonism, free will and the eventual emergence of a scientific morality.

Robert Coles' sentiment characterizes well the moral tenor of medical education today. Indeed, medical educators are frequently “seized by spasms of genuine moral awareness,” as they try to cope with the massive social and economic problems that face medical schools and teaching hospitals. The perception among educators that we currently fail to adequately teach several core aspects of doctoring, including professional values and behavior, constitutes one such spasm. In this case, the proposed remedy has generated considerable enthusiasm, but whether the (...) “core competencies” curriculum will make a difference, or simply “accommodate to the prevailing rhythms of the world we inhabit,” remains to be seen. (shrink)