This book invites a conversation among stakeholders of public education and conveys the need for a common vision for America’s public schools. Amy Fast argues that we have never had a clear purpose for our schools and that now, more than ever, educators in America ache for a more inspiring purpose than simply improving results on standardized assessments.

This trans-disciplinary, socio-spatial study analyzes the history of decolonial existentialist and phenomenological theory in the work of figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Wright, Franz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Wynter, and Jamaica Kincaid to decolonize dominant discourses on femininity, Blackness, and Black peoples.

This book explores the intersections between Herbert Marcuse's critical theory and Africana and Caribbean theory, revealing the potential for a dynamic interplay of ideas to understand and address contemporary social, political, and ecological challenges amid material, historical realities.

In this paper, we examine the practicalities of nurse managers’ work. We expose how managers’ commitments to transformational leadership are undermined by the rationing practices and informatics of hospital reform underpinned by the ideas of new public management. Using institutional ethnography, we gathered data in a Canadian hospital. We began by interviewing and observing frontline leaders, nurse managers, and expanded our inquiry to include interviews with other nurses, staffing clerks, and administrators whose work intersected with that of nurse managers. We (...) learned how nurse managers’ responsibility for staffing is accomplished within tightening budgets and a burgeoning suite of technologies that direct decisions about whether or not there are enough nurses. Our inquiry explicates how technologies organize nurse managers to put aside their professional knowledge. We describe professionally committed nurse leaders attempting to activate transformational leadership and show how their intentions are subsumed within information systems. Seen in light of our analysis, transformational leadership is an idealized concept within which managers’ responsibilities are shaped to conform to institutional purposes. (shrink)

In _Selving: A Relational Theory of Self Organization_, Irene Fast invokes the basic distinction between the self as "me" and the self as "I" in order to develop a contemporary theory of the self as subject. In a return to Freud's clinical finding that all psychological processes are personally motivated, she elaborates a notion of the "I-self" that is intrinsically dynamic and relational. Within this conception, our perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting are not what our self does; rather, they (...) are what our self is. According to Fast, the basic unit of the dynamic I-self --of selving --is a scheme of personally motivated interaction between self and nonself. This notion, which comprehends development as a product of integration and differentiation among discrete I-schemes, provides a radically new framework for understanding those dynamic phenomena that Freud included within his structural model of the mind and that contemporary theorists have addressed within object relational perspectives. Via the notion of selving, Fast likewise brings fresh insight to a host of issues that have engaged psychoanalysts and developmental psychologists in recent years. These topics include the place of bodily experience in a relational model of mind, the organization of self as simultaneously individual and relational, the formulation of a constructivist model of psychic structure, among others. _Selving_ is not only a lucid demonstration of how a relational theory of self can reorder clinical observations in conceptually and therapeutically illuminating ways. It is also a convincing demonstration of how a constructivist model emphasizing the interactive nature of meaning-making provides bridges to Piagetian theory, developmental research, and observational infancy studies. (shrink)

Companies often benefit from others’ attributions of moral conviction for prosocial behavior, for example, attributions that a company has a sincere moral desire to improve the environment when behaving sustainably. Across four studies, we explored how organizations’ changing resource positions influenced people’s attributions for the motivations underlying prosocial organizational behaviors. Observers attributed less moral conviction following prosocial behavior when they believed an organization was losing economic resources. This effect was primarily a “penalty” assessed against organizations that were losing resources, as (...) opposed to a “reward” given to organizations gaining resources. Finally, we found that this effect occurred because people perceive organizations that are losing resources as more situationally constrained, leading them to attribute less dispositional moral conviction. We discuss theoretical and practical implications stemming from how changes in resource access can lead people to be more skeptical of organizations’ motivations following prosocial behavior. (shrink)

Over the last few decades there has been a substantially higher percentage of successful organ transplants but also a significant imbalance between the demand for and the supply of organs, creating the basis for a highly profitable black market trade in human organs. Sometimes there are reports that children have been kidnapped, only to reappear later lacking one kidney, or that they simply disappear and are subsequently killed to have all their transplantable organs removed for profit. The European Union feels (...) that there is a need for action and that it has a duty to act in this field, especially for ethical reasons. There is now established close co-operation between the various European transplant organizations. The legal protection of children with regard to organ transplantation is not specifically mentioned in the existing conventions because this issue was not foreseen at the time of their preparation. However, the issue is covered in a broader sense by more general provisions. There are endless rumours surrounding this area. Members of various organizations who travel in the suspected countries say that the trafficking in children who are sold for transplantation is well known, but it is too difficult and very dangerous to catch the people involved. We have to conclude that it has been impossible to prove or disprove the rumours, but they are consistent and we all, especially in the health care professions, have an obligation to be keenly aware of how and where organs are obtained. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was as a leading figure of 1960s counter-culture and hailed as a 'Guru of the New Left'. His ideas and theories, inspired by a rich fusion of Marxian and Freudian thought, exert a strong influence on contemporary thinking about activism, emancipation and political resistance. He was also member of the Frankfurt School and a student of Heidegger in the late 1920s and engaged deeply with philosophy throughout his career. The Marcusean Mind is an outstanding survey and assessment (...) of Marcuse's thought. Beginning with a thorough introduction to Marcuse's life and work, thirty-nine chapters by an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors are organised into five clear parts: Intellectual Ecosystems of Marcuse Reason and Sensibilities Futures and Utopias Contemporary Movements Counterrevolutions, Neo-Liberalism, and Fascism. These sections each contain a short introduction, after which Marcusean ideas are brought to bear on many key contemporary debates and issues from across the humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Including a Foreword by. (shrink)

The extended reliance on media can be seen as one indicator of mediatization. But even though we can assume that the pervasive character of digital media essentially changes the way people experience everyday life, we cannot take these experiences for granted. There has recently been a formulation of three tasks for mediatization research; historicity, specificity and measurability, needed to empirically verify mediatization processes across time and space. In this article, we present a tool designed to handle these tasks, by measuring (...) the extent to which people experience that media reach into the deeper layers of daily human life. The tool was tested in an empirical study conducted in Sweden in 2017. The results show that perceived media reliance is played out in relation to three types of basic desires: (1) (re)productive desires, (2) recognition desires, and (3) civic desires, and is socially structured and structuring. We argue this tool, in diachronic analyses, can measure one important aspect of mediatization. (shrink)

Dr. Garrett Johnson received a call from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice asking if he would be interested in filling prescriptions for pentobarbital. Suddenly he faced a controversial issue - providing a drug used for the lethal injection of convicted criminals. Apparently big pharma was discontinuing the manufacture and sale of drugs used for human executions - primarily due to mounting pressure from death penalty activists and shareholders, legal appeals by inmates, media reports of botched lethal injections, etc. Texas (...) saw the solution by using small local compounding pharmacies that were less visible to the public. Should Garrett fill this lucrative order knowing how the State would use the drugs? The case presents the ethical and strategic issues that Garrett faces - having just graduated and started his own compounding pharmacy - in making this decision. (shrink)

Individual experience is subjective: We can describe experiences, but we cannot share them directly. Thus, many investigators favour threshold measures of experience , while suprathreshold methods are met with scepticism. We believe that suprathreshold measures are useful, as they reveal group differences in sensation that cannot be observed with thresholds. These differences, however, are distorted when scales are used incorrectly. Of particular interest, oral sensory intensity predicts long-term health outcomes ; these findings are validated by robust differences in oral anatomy, (...) suggesting that valid suprathreshold comparisons convey accurate and meaningful differences in experience. (shrink)

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect (...) of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. -/- Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of recent results on lexicographic, linear, and Bayesian models for paired comparison from a cognitive psychology perspective. Within each class, we distinguish subclasses according to the computational complexity required for parameter setting. We identify the optimal model in each class, where optimality is defined with respect to performance when fitting known data. Although not optimal when fitting data, simple models can be astonishingly accurate when generalizing to new data. A simple heuristic belonging to the class (...) of lexicographic models is Take The Best (Gigerenzer & Goldstein (1996) Psychol. Rev. 102: 684). It is more robust than other lexicographic strategies which use complex procedures to establish a cue hierarchy. In fact, it is robust due to its simplicity, not despite it. Similarly, Take The Best looks up only a fraction of the information that linear and Bayesian models require; yet it achieves performance comparable to that of models which integrate information. Due to its simplicity, frugality, and accuracy, Take The Best is a plausible candidate for a psychological model in the tradition of bounded rationality. We review empirical evidence showing the descriptive validity of fast and frugal heuristics. (shrink)

Fast moving classical variables can generate quantum mechanical behavior. We demonstrate how this can happen in a model. The key point is that in classically evolving systems one can still define a conserved quantum energy. For the fast variables, the energy levels are far separated, such that one may assume these variables to stay in their ground state. This forces them to be entangled, so that, consequently, the slow variables are entangled as well. The fast variables could (...) be the vacuum fluctuations caused by unknown super heavy particles. The emerging quantum effects in the light particles are expressed by a Hamiltonian that can have almost any form. The entire system is ontological, and yet allows one to generate interference effects in computer models. This seemed to lead to an inexplicable paradox, which is now resolved: exactly what happens in our models if we run a quantum interference experiment in a classical computer is explained. The restriction that very fast variables stay predominantly in their ground state appears to be due to smearing of the physical states in the time direction, preventing their direct detection. Discussions are added of the emergence of quantum mechanics, and the ontology of an EPR/Bell Gedanken experiment. (shrink)

50 Fast Digital Photo Techniques is an immensely useful book for anyone wanting to take advantage of photo-quality printers, digital cameras, Web technologies, Adobe's Photoshop, and other top photo editing apps. The techniques are valuable to those with artistic skills as well as those without -- they enable everyone to enjoy successful creation of fine art images and prints! The step-by-step and richly illustrated collection of awesome techniques are easily accessible and understandable to users on every level. This is (...) a new kind of Photoshop book -- one that can help both casual users and professional users create and enjoy fine art prints without having to become an expert in Photoshop. (shrink)

Much research on judgment and decision making has focussed on the adequacy of classical rationality as a description of human reasoning. But more recently it has been argued that classical rationality should also be rejected even as normative standards for human reasoning. For example, Gigerenzer and Goldstein and Gigerenzer and Todd argue that reasoning involves “fast and frugal” algorithms which are not justified by rational norms, but which succeed in the environment. They provide three lines of argument for this (...) view, based on: the importance of the environment; the existence of cognitive limitations; and the fact that an algorithm with no apparent rational basis, Take-the-Best, succeeds in an judgment task. We reconsider –, arguing that standard patterns of explanation in psychology and the social and biological sciences, use rational norms to explain why simple cognitive algorithms can succeed. We also present new computer simulations that compare Take-the-Best with other cognitive models. Although Take-the-Best still performs well, it does not perform noticeably better than the other models. We conclude that these results provide no strong reason to prefer Take-the-Best over alternative cognitive models. (shrink)

A heuristic is a rule of thumb. In psychology, heuristics are relatively simple rules for making judgments. A fast heuristic is easy to use and allows one to make judgments quickly. A frugal heuristic relies on a small fraction of the available evidence in making judgments. Typically, fast and frugal heuristics (FFHs) have, or are claimed to have, a further property: They are very reliable, yielding judgments that are about as accurate in the long run as ideal non- (...) class='Hi'>fast, non-frugal rules. This paper introduces some well-known examples of FFHs, raises some objections to the FFH program, and looks at the implications of those parts of the FFH program about which we can have some reasonable degree of confidence. (shrink)

If scientists violate principles and practices of routine science to quickly develop interventions against catastrophic threats, they are engaged in what I call fast science. The magnitude, imminence, and plausibility of a threat justify engaging in and acting on fast science. Yet, that justification is incomplete. I defend two principles to assess fast science, which say: fast science should satisfy as much as possible the reliability-enhancing features of routine science, and the fast science developing an (...) intervention against a threat should not depend on the same problematic assumptions as the fast science which estimates the magnitude, imminence, and plausibility of the threat. (shrink)

In this article, we assess the generalizability of the feminist agrifood systems model developed by Sachs et al.. We ask to what extent might these findings generated from the study of Pennsylvania women farmers be generalized to other regions of the U.S. We define and situate the FAST theory to the Michigan, U.S. context in order to better understand how the shifts in agriculture and women’s roles in the U.S. based on our data, align or depart with that experienced (...) by women farmers in the northeast. We find that there are many similarities in the experiences of these two populations, but there are also some differences. Five primary differences in the two populations are articulated. Michigan women farmers appear to struggle to assert the identity of a farmer; struggle to access land via inheritance; are income dependent on males; often work in value-added production that does not challenge traditionally-coded ‘women’s work’; and perpetuate on-farm education/networks based on nostalgia which may further the distance between producers and consumers. We conclude with a brief discussion of what may account for these differences. (shrink)

Praise for 50 Fast Digital Camera Techniques "Applying the lively techniques in this book will make anyone's digital camera a more productive tool." -Al Francekevich, professional photographer, on the first edition Your digital camera is an amazing and versatile creative tool, with features and capabilities you probably haven't even explored-until now. Here are step-by-step instructions for 50 hot new techniques that take advantage of all the latest camera features, fully illustrated with stunning color photos taken by the author. No (...) matter what type of digital camera you have, this book will help you create more professional pictures. Your guide to amazing results with your digital camera * Select the right shooting mode and change critical settings in seconds * Use exposure and focal length to get sharper photos * Shoot fantastic candid, nature, and pet pictures * Learn the secrets of shooting dramatic skyscapes and urban landscapes * Plan shots for creative digital manipulation * Download and print your photos or share them on the Web * Create a photographic essay or convert color shots to artsyblack-and-white. (shrink)

We propose a fast and reliable corner detector that can detect corners under non-uniform illumination and fuzzy mineshaft images effectively. First, we presented an inner mask that used only four pixels to determine the flat and corner regions of an image, which could eliminate unnecessary computation of flat regions, thus reducing computing cost. Second, we separated the corner regions into background and foreground and computed the separate corner threshold to settle non-uniform illumination. Third, we proposed a fast corner-detection (...) algorithm to compute the nucleus continuous contributive segment based on the corner state. Finally, we proposed two effective methods to remove the false corners. Experimental results showed that our approach has a better detection quality and is less time consuming than three other algorithms on an artificial image, a noisy image, and non-uniform images and could meet the real-time requirement of mineshaft applications. (shrink)

This paper studies the fixed-time trajectory tracking control problem of robot manipulators in the presence of uncertain dynamics and external disturbances. First, a novel nonsingular fixed-time sliding mode surface is presented, which can ensure that the convergence time of the suggested surface is bounded regardless of the initial states. Subsequently, a novel fast nonsingular fixed-time sliding mode control is developed so that the closed-loop system is fixed-time convergent to the equilibrium. By applying the proposed NFNFSMC method and the adaptive (...) technique, a novel adaptive nonsingular fixed-time control scheme is proposed, which can guarantee fast fixed-time convergence of the tracking errors to small regions around the origin. With the proposed control method, the lumped disturbance is compensated by the adaptive technique, whose prior information about the upper bound is not needed. The fixed-time stability of the trajectory tracking control under the proposed controller is proved by the Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, corresponding simulations are given to illustrate the validity and superiority of the proposed control approach. (shrink)