Prominent author and cultural critic Wendell Berry is well known for his contributions to agrarianism and environmentalism, but his commentary on education has received comparatively little attention. Berry has been eloquently unmasking America's cultural obsession with restless mobility for decades, arguing that it causes damage to both the land and the character of our communities. Education, he maintains, plays a central role in this obsession, inculcating in students' minds the American dream of moving up and moving on. Drawing on Berry's (...) essays, fiction, and poetry, Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro illuminate the influential thinker's vision for higher education in this pathbreaking study. Each chapter begins with an examination of one of Berry's fictional narratives and then goes on to consider how the passage inspires new ways of thinking about the university's mission. Throughout, Baker and Bilbro argue that instead of training students to live in their careers, universities should educate students to inhabit and serve their places. The authors also offer practical suggestions for how students, teachers, and administrators might begin implementing these ideas. Baker and Bilbro conclude that institutions guided by Berry's vision might cultivate citizens who can begin the work of healing their communities -- graduates who have been educated for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity. (shrink)

The piRNA class of small RNAs are distinct from other small RNAs by their ∼26–31 nucleotide size, single‐strandedness and strand‐specificity as well as by the clustered arrangement of their origins. Here, we highlight how these features are reminiscent of the mechanisms of DNA replication, and then present three models suggesting that the origin of piRNAs may be mechanistically similar to key processes in DNA replication. BioEssays 29:382–385, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Most "art and science" books focus on the science of perspective or the psychology of perception. Hidden Harmony does not. Instead, the book addresses the surprising common ground between physics and art from a novel and personal perspective. Viewing the two disciplines as creative processes, J. R. Leibowitz supplements existing and original research with illustrations to demonstrate that physics and art share guiding aesthetics and compositional demands and to show how each speaks meaningfully to the other. Leibowitz widens our experience (...) and understanding of both domains by exploring how concepts such as balance and re-balance, coherence and unity, and symmetry and "broken" symmetry affect and are affected by artistic vision and scientific principle. He reveals shared themes and understandings in each field and adroitly illustrates the parallels between the dabs of color and layers of images in a work of art and the particles of matter and packets of energy that compose the observable, physical world. Featuring examples of art images and complementary examples of physics concepts, this contemplative work helps us see art and physics as artists and physicists do. (shrink)

Based on 10 months of mixed ethnographic and archival research, this study is concerned with ways in which contemporary agro-environmental subjectivities and practices in a southwestern Oklahoma farming community are rooted in the massive state-level interventions of the New Deal era and their successors. We are likewise concerned with how those interventions have become interdigitated with moral discourses and community ethics, as simultaneous expressions of both farmers’ identities and the systems of power in which they practice farming. Through historic and (...) ethnographic evidence, we demonstrate the ways in which the localization of American agricultural conservation and the attendant, edificatory role of resource bureaucracies have shaped contemporary practices and ideologies of natural resource stewardship among conventional farmers and ranchers. (shrink)

Psalm 23 speaks to the Christian about life's final passage; but it also speaks about other passages, passages which can be negotiated through the whole of life because help comes from the Divine Shepherd.

Photographs and interviews document the history of deaf culture in the United States.

This conceptual paper explores the role that wisdom plays in social work. In the literature, this topic is primarily discussed in terms of ‘Practice Wisdom’, a kind of implicit and intuitive-based body of knowledge that is acquired through practice experience. After reviewing some formulations of it, we argue that practice wisdom faces a number of difficulties and is a misguided approach. To replace it, we propose a novel framework called ‘Practitioner Wisdom’, which emphasises that the proper subject of wisdom is (...) not some sub-personal construct like a body of knowledge or a set of skills but the social work practitioner. Drawing from virtue theory in philosophy, we theorise that being a wise practitioner is a matter of acquiring and cultivating a character that is constituted by the relevant social work virtues and values. We conclude by discussing some benefits of practitioner wisdom, including how it can be taught to social work students and entrants, and suggest some future areas of research. (shrink)

Last year marked the 20th anniversary of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977. The FCPA is the first and only statute prohibiting bribery and other corrupt business practices by U.S. citizens and companies conducting business overseas. This paper provides an overview of the FCPA during the two decades of its existence. More specifically, the objectives of this paper are four-fold. First, the paper provides background information about the FCPA of 1977 and subsequent amendments in 1988. Second, the paper (...) discusses the enforcement of the FCPA since its passage by examining the number of cases prosecuted under the FCPA and the respective penalties imposed. Third, the paper discusses the economic impact of the FCPA by addressing whether the FCPA places U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage. Fourth, the paper provides public policy recommendations to expand the reach and scope of the FCPA. It covers efforts to criminalize bribery through multilateral organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization of American States (OAS). It also covers bilateral arrangements and efforts by non-governmental organizations such as Transparency International. (shrink)

We question the usefulness of Pylyshyn's dichotomy between cognitively penetrable and cognitively impenetrable mechanisms as the basis for his distinction between cognition and early vision. This dichotomy is comparable to others that have been proposed in psychology prompting disputes that by their very nature could not be resolved. This fate is inevitable for Pylyshyn's thesis because of its reliance on internal representations and their interpretation. What is more fruitful in relation to this issue is not a difficult dichotomy, but a (...) different look at perception such as proposed by Gibson (1979). (shrink)

Any instance (i.e., event, behavior, trait) belongs to infinitely many reference classes, hence there are infinitely many base rates from which to choose. People clearly do not entertain all possible reference classes, however, so something must be limiting the search space. We suggest some possible mechanisms that determine which reference class is evoked for the purpose of judgment and decision.

The potential for the occurrence of multiple-role relationships is increased when professors also consult with athletic teams on their campuses. Such multiple-role relationships have potential ethical implications that are unclear and largely unexplored, and consultants may find multiple-role relationships both difficult to deal with and unavoidable. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the nature of teacher-practitioner multiple-role relationships. Participants (N=35) were recruited from Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) certified consultants (CCs) who were also (...) affiliated with a university (N=68). All participants completed a 28-item survey exploring the incidence and relevant issues pertaining to multiple-role relationships. Chi-square analyses revealed that licensed mental health practitioners (i.e., psychologists and counselors) were more likely than nonlicensed AAASP CCs to believe that multiple-role relationships were never appropriate in sport psychology, ?²(1,N= 30) = 12.80, p <.001, and to have never taken part in a multiple-role relationship, ?²(1, N= 33) = 12.44, p<.001. Independent samples t tests revealed that mental health practitioners also reported that they would have higher levels of concern for both the practitioner, r(30) = -2.77, p = .009, and the client, f(30) = -2.50, p = .018, in such a relationship. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)