After acquiring knowledge of the neuroscience of learning, memory, stress and emotions, teachers incorporate more cognitive engagement and student-centered practices into their lessons. However, the role understanding neuroscience plays in teachers own affective and motivational competencies has not yet been investigated. The goal of this study was to investigate how learning neuroscience effected teachers’ self-efficacy, beliefs in their ability to teach effectively, self-responsibility and other components of teacher motivation. A pilot training-of-trainers program was designed and delivered in Liberia combining basic (...) neuroscience with information on social, emotional, behavioral and mental health issues faced by students. Tier I of the professional development was a 2 weeks workshop led by a visiting neuroscientist. A subset of the 24 Tier I secondary science teachers formed a Leadership Team who adapted the content to the Liberian context and subsequently led additional workshops and follow-up sessions for the Tier II secondary science teachers. Science teachers in both tiers completed the affective-motivational scales from the internationally vetted, multiscale Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning Teacher Knowledge Survey from the OECD. Tier II teachers completed the survey in a pre-post-delayed post design. Tier I teachers completed the survey after the workshop with their attitudes at that time and separately with retrospective projections of their pre-workshop attitudes. Ten of the 92 Tier II teachers participated in structured interviews at follow-up. Statistical analysis of survey data demonstrated improved teacher self-efficacy, self-responsibility for student outcomes, and motivation to teach. Qualitatively, teachers expressed more confidence in their ability to motivate students, engage them through active learning, and manage the class through positive rather than negative reinforcement. Teachers’ own self-regulation improved as they made efforts to build supporting relationships with students. Together, these results demonstrated that (i) teacher affective-motivational attitudes can be altered with professional development, (ii) basic neuroscience, as knowledge of how students learn, can improve teacher competency, and (iii) a training-of-trainers model can be effective in a low and middle income country for disseminating neuroscience knowledge, increasing teachers’ knowledge of students’ social and emotional needs, and promoting educational improvement. (shrink)

This provocative book paved the way for nursing research informed by f eminist scholarship, critical theory, and post-modern thought. Controv ersial then, relevant today.

Perhaps more controversial than whether physicalism is true is what exactly would have to be true for physicalism to be true. Everyone agrees that, intuitively at least, physicalism is the thesis that there is nothing over and above the physical. The disagreements arise in how to get beyond this intuitive formulation. Until about ten years ago, participants in this debate were concerned primarily with answering two questions. First, what is it for a property, kind, relation, or individual to be a (...) physical one? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THOMISTIC METAETIDCS AND A PRESENT CONTROVERSY XOOD STARTING point for understanding the recent controversy regarding the Grisez-Finnis interpretaition oi St. Thomas Aquinas's ethical theory is Finnis's claim that "by a 'Simple act of non-inferential understanding one grasps that the objeot of the [natural] inclination which one experiences is an instance of a general form of good, for oneself (and others like one)." 1 For here Finnis is denying an (...) inferential process by which one moves from a theoretical understanding (" understanding this nature from the outside, as it were" 2) of what inclinations humans,as humans have to the conclusion that the object oi the particular inclination in question is ·a human good. Instead, he is asserting that it is in a practical context that one understands an object of an inclination to be a human good, and thus generates, via the practical reason, ·a practical, prescriptive principle. An example of such a principle is " Knowledge is something good to have " which, for Finnis, is the same logically as " Knowledge is a good to be pursued " 3 which, in turn, is equivalent to "Knowledge ought to be pursued ",4 which is a prescriptive ("normative") rather than descriptive (factual) utterance.5 1Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; hereafter NLNR), p. 34. Cf. Fundamentals of Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1983; hereafter FE), pp. 20-22. 2NLNR p. 34. s Ibid., p. 63. 4lbid., p. 42, note 56; "The Basic Principles of Natural Law: A Reply to Ralph Mclnerny," John Finnis and Germain Grisez, American Journal of Jurisprudence 26 (1981), pp. 21-31 (hereafter Reply to Mcinerny), pp. 23-24. See also Germain Grisez's well-known article "The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa theologiae, 1-2, Question 94, Article 2," Natural Law Forum 10 (1965), pp. 168-201 (hereafter FPPR), p. 194. 5 See, e.g., NLNR, pp. 44-45; Reply to Mcinerny, p. 23. Grisez and Finnis attempt to distinguish imperatives and prescriptions, which I argue against in 40 THOMISTIC METAETHICS AND A PRESENT CONTROVERSY 41 Finnis and Grisez, then, argue that practical principles, which encompass value-judgments about human goods, are arrived at through the practical reason and thus are prescriptive ("normative ") utterances, as opposed to descriptive or theoretical truths "of metaphysical anthropology ".6 Hence these principles cannot be derived from metaphysical claims.7 To argue for such,a derivation would he to hold that prescriptivity or normativity can emerge from pure descriptivity. Such a derivation, of course, would not account for the appearance of the prescriptive or action-guiding element. An alternative position, to be returned to below, is that value-judgments about human goods are descriptive in themselves. At the same time, owing to the natural inclination to do what we understand to be morally or humanly good, human beings could prescribe to themselves the pursuit of such human goods, once they are understood to be human goods. It should be noted that for Grisez and Finnis the basic practical principles are not moral but pre-moraL8 Still, Grisez and Finnis consider that they direct to ends completive of human nature. Hence, although these authors reserve the characterization of "' moraily right choices " to those that are not simply harmonious with one or another basic human good but rather to those that also do not run counter to any other human good,9 my paper "Is-Ought: Prescribing and a P1·esent Controversy," The Thomist 49, l (January, 1985), pp. 1-23 (hereafter Schultz), esp. pp. 10-Hl. s Reply to Mcinerny, pp. 23-24. 7 Ibid.; see note 13 below. In the paper mentioned in note 5 above I point out that Finnis seems to allow for the possibility of arriving at value-judgments through theoretical reasoning, since he says "I assert that judgments [about man's natural goods, about what man should be] are primarily (though perhaps not exclitsively) judgments of practical reason...." ("Natural Law and 'Is'-'Ought' Question: An Invitation to Professor Veatch," Catholic Lawyer 26, 4, 1981, p. 272, my emphasis. This article is subsequently referred to as Response to Veatch.) But he doesn't explain this, and in Reply to... (shrink)

The Tibetan Plateau’s Permafrost is melting at an alarming rate. Six of the world’s major rivers are sourced in the Tibetan Himalayas that are warming at a faster rate than the rest of the earth. If the temperature of the region continues to increase, the rivers will dry up and the earth will warm at an even faster rate. Buddha Yeshe Tsogyal, long considered the Mother of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, was the consort of Padmasambhava. She reached “complete liberation” or Nirvana (...) in a single lifetime. Her stories are preserved in rman thar. Her life was an exemplary practice of compassion, responsible care, and non-violence toward all sentient beings and the world. Can we follow her proto-eco-feminist example? Can we build responsible care for our planet and humanity across disciplines and faith traditions? What does compassionate, non-violent Buddhist thought and Roman Catholic pastoral care bring to eco-feminism? Can an eco-feminist epistemology informed by Buddhist EcoDharma construct programs of sustainability into humanity’s excessive habits integrating science’s ability to quantify, with Buddha nature? Can Catholicism’s pastoral ability to show dependence on God, the peaceful, compassionate Creator of all allow us to see our dependence on God and our earth? Many women have already begun this work around the globe. In 2002, Rosemary Radford Ruether brought 16 women together from around the globe in Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion to tell us how they are doing it and succeeding. Each is highlighted here for their visions on how to heal the planet at the grassroots level. From their insights, this article explores their contributions as being still relevant today and adding new concerns about the dangers arising on the Tibetan Plateau. The article emphasizes their ideas, provides a warning and other ideas that collective activation might inspire to address climate change. (shrink)

This paper shows how, according to st. thomas aquinas, basic descriptive moral principles can be both substantive and necessarily true. aquinas's position on reference (the function of the subject term) is similar to that of the contemporary logician, saul kripke, who argues for necessary informative propositions. such propositions in aquinas (which are analyzed in detail in the paper) include definitions-e.g., "human beings, or men, are rational animals"-and property statements. the latter encompass those concerned with natural inclinations. from this foundation the (...) necessity of fundamental moral principles is explained. still, moral principles can be refined as we discover more about human nature; "if" true, such statements will be necessarily true. the paper ends with an explanation of how basic moral principles can be considered to be not simply "per se", but also "per se nota". (shrink)

This paper begins by isolating the reductive component of Brandom's inferentialism. In order to assess to what extent that reductive component is supported by the considerations Brandom marshals in its defense, I assess the comparative degree of support those considerations provide a non-reductive counterpart of Brandom's original, reductive theory. One of the central claims here is that once the reductive and non-reductive theories are placed side-by-side, it is clear that, save one, all of the considerations Brandom marshals in defense of (...) inferentialism equally well support its non-reductive counterpart. This shows that those considerations offer no support for the reductions at inferentialism's heart. -/- What the considerations raised here ultimately show is that Brandom's defense of the reductive core of his theory ultimately rests on the simple fact that it has a certain feature, namely, that it is reductive in the sense reserved here. I close with a brief discussion of some advantages that some reductive theories have over non-reductive ones, but show how none of these advantages are had by Brandom's theory in particular. (shrink)

This article defends as correct and as faithful to Aquinas’s thought the tenets of “descriptivism” (sometimes called “naturalism”) in the context of criticisms that Patrick Lee has made in “Is Thomas’s Natural Law Theory Naturalist?” (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71:4 [1997]: 567–87). “Revisiting Aquinas” argues that evaluative utterances are descriptive; so even if human goods were immediately known by practical reason (a position nonetheless rejected), their understanding would be a descriptive one, which moral objectivity requires. The arising of the prescriptivity (...) of precepts in relation to practical reason is then treated. The descriptivism articulated in this paper supports Lee’s emphasis on the primacy of love and choice; it further stresses that submission to an understood order of objective goods is essential to willing well. (shrink)

This volume contains essays on an array of topics originally presented orally by a master teacher and scholar. With characteristic rhetorical elegance, Msgr. Synan, late professor at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto, delivered these papers in a variety of settings on issues relating to his specialty of mediaeval Christian philosophy and to his interest in Jewish-Christian dialogue, on the theology of sanctity and of death, and on morally significant historical events. Medieval figures represented here include Aquinas, Augustine, Abelard, and Godfrey (...) of St. Victor; some topics treated are war and peace, philosophical innovations, ecclesiology, evil, goliardic verse, law and abortion, Church councils and Jews in the Middle Ages, and convictions uniting Jews and Christians. This book also contains representative sermons–including a Month’s Mind for Etienne Gilson, an introduction detailing Synan’s background and professional contributions, an updated bibliography of his published works, and an extensive index. Especially appealing to those who knew Synan are three posthumous tributes and thirteen photographs from throughout his life. The selections in this volume are scholarly but non-technical, intended for anyone moved to seek elucidation of the topics discussed. (shrink)

Objective Standards of care regarding obstetric management of life-threatening anomalies are not defined. It is hypothesised that physicians' management of these pregnancies is variable and influenced by demographic factors. Design A questionnaire was mailed to members of the Society of Maternal–Fetal Medicine with valid US addresses assessing obstetric management of both ‘uniformly lethal’ (eg, anencephaly, renal agenesis) and ‘uniformly severe, commonly lethal’ (eg, trisomy 13 and 18) anomalies. Respondents were asked to answer as if not limited by state/institutional restrictions. Fisher's (...) exact or χ2 tests were used as appropriate and correction made for multiple comparisons in analyses that were not prespecified. Results The response rate was 36% (732/2038). Nearly 100% of respondents discuss termination for both uniformly and commonly lethal anomalies. In continuing pregnancies, with patient request for obstetric non-intervention 99% of providers would comply for either uniformly or commonly lethal anomalies. The majority ‘encourage’ such management, but some were non-directive or discouraged this management. In continuing pregnancies, with patient request for full obstetric intervention the majority of respondents was willing to comply for both uniformly (71%) and commonly (82%) lethal anomalies. While most practitioners ‘discouraged’ full intervention, some were non-directive or encouraged this management. Demographics and severity of anomaly influenced counselling. Conclusion Discrepancies exist regarding the management of life-threatening fetal anomalies. Patients may be offered different options based on practitioner demographics. The majority of physicians comply with patient wishes. Differences were noted when comparing the management of lethal with that of severe commonly lethal anomalies, suggesting that practitioners make a distinction when counselling patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:530 BOOK REVIEWS Reason and Right. By GARTH HALLETT. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Pp. x + 189. $16.95 cloth; $8.95 paperback. Teacher's Guide $5.00. This book is clearly intended to be used as a textbook in introductory ethics courses. This fact almost certainly accounts for four of its most attractive features: its area of focus, its lucid structure and exposition, its relative brevity, and (...) its large number of discussions of current moral issues. Professor Hallett contends that an introductory course in moral philosophy should do three main things: discuss specific moral problems, arquaint with background theory, and train in moral reasoning. The last equips students to deal maturely with problems they will encounter throughout life. Yet this area is neglected, if not omitted, in most ethics text books. Hence the focus of Reason ancl Right. Other topics are approached through their relation to such reasoning. For example, Professor Hallett uses the case of Kitty Genovese (who was murdered while thirtyeight witnesses remained passive) to arrive at a discussion of the nature of moral reasoning, as distinguished from "thoughts" and reasoning in general. In this context he injects a treatment of areas that might be thought to belong to background theory: psychological egoism, ethical egoism, psychological altruism, ethical altruism. Before commenting further on the book's method of exposition, I should like to mention another consideration which, although not examined at length by the author, brackets his entire discussion and is not without implications for ethical questions passed over in this work. Early on, Professor Hallett suggests that one reason for teaching moral philosophy is to encourage in students a concern for moral issues. Using the Genovese case, he says: Doubtless we too might be more open than we are, more perceptive of others and their needs, more alive to the appeals, muted or screamed, that reach us, more or less frequently, more or less clearly, according as we are tuned to receive them. That is one function of an ethics course. Through examples and discussion it jogs the moral imagination (p. 7). The author ties the desire to aet ethically with his discussion of moral reasoning by noting that rationalization is often inferior reasoning insofar as the merely self-coneerned agent may deliberately ignore pertinent facts. On the other hand, one who genuinely wants solutions to ethical problems will seek to reason well, which requires practice in identifying effective reasoning. In a " Retrospect " redolent of these points, Professor Hallett explicitly raises the Socratic question of the relation between knowledge BOOK REVIEWS 531 and living well. He ends with an invitation to examine this issue, suggesting its importance for the course as a whole. Indeed, without demeaning the motives of students, the ethics professor who concurs with the classical attitude toward the goal of the study of moral philosophy must take seriously this role of jogging the moral impulse. As St. Aquinas (who held that despite original sin the human orientation toward acting morally well remains intact) recognized, genuinely moral action requires free choice, and systematically morally good behavior must be preceded by commitment. Clever is Professor Hallett's approach to exposing logical shortcoming (in arguments proffered for a variety of reasons) that may result from the lack of such commitment. Who wants to admit being deliberately defective in logic? At least such a consideration may jog one to reflect upon the humanly deficient state of one generally unconcerned about ethics. The subject of moral motivation provides a bridge to the more theoretical debate, not taken up in this book, about the nature of value-judgments. If descriptive, they can be true or false. If prescriptive, they are inherently action-guiding but are not statements of fact, and hence not true or false. Prescriptivists emphasize the logical impossibility of one's adhering to a value-judgment while not acting according to it in the relevant circumstances. For all value-judgments are said to be both prescriptive and universalizable; an attempt to exclude oneself from an apparently embraced universal directive, provided one is physically and psychologically capable of acting according to it, reveals insincerity. Sin, then, becomes impossible. Much has been said about this... (shrink)

Qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) provides temporal understanding of the human response to health, illness, and the life course. However, little guidance is available for conducting QLR in the nursing literature. The purpose of this review is to describe the methodological status of QLR in nursing. With the assistance of a medical librarian, we conducted a thorough search circumscribed to qualitative, longitudinal nursing studies of patients’ and care‐givers’ experiences published between 2006 and 2016. The methodological quality of the 74 reviewed studies (...) varied tremendously; many reports lacked sufficient detail in reporting on sampling and attrition, retention strategies, and data collection and analysis, making it difficult for readers to evaluate the credibility and transferability of study findings. Based on the strengths and limitations of the studies reviewed and findings in the literature, we provide recommendations for enhancing the reporting of the research process as a supplement to the standards for qualitative research more broadly. These recommendations are offered in the spirit of encouraging dialogue among colleagues and assisting journal reviewers and editors in their evaluation of QLR. (shrink)

POHLMAN S, CIBULKA NJ, PALMER JL, LORENZ RA and SMITHBATTLE L. Nursing Inquiry 2013; 20: 71–81 The placebo puzzle: examining the discordant space between biomedical science and illness/healingThe placebo response presents an enigma to biomedical science: how can ‘inert’ or ‘sham’ procedures reduce symptoms and produce physiological changes that are comparable to prescribed treatments? In this study, we examine this puzzle by explicating the discordant space between the prevailing biomedical paradigm, which focuses on a technical understanding of diagnosis and treatment, (...) and a broader understanding of illness and healing as relational and embodied. Although biomedical achievements are impressive, the knowledge resulting from this paradigm is limited by its ontological and epistemological assumptions. When the body and world are objectified, illness meanings, therapeutic relationships, and healing practices are dismissed or distorted. In spite of a robust critique of the tenets of biomedicine for guiding practice, the biomedical paradigm retains a tenacious hold on evidence-based medicine and nursing, downplaying our clinical understanding of the sentient body, patients’ life-worlds, and illness and healing. In reality, skilled nurses rely on multiple forms of knowledge in providing high-quality care to particular patients. Clinically wise nurses integrate their experience and knowledge of patients’ priorities, fears, and illness trajectories along with biomedical findings to make astute judgments and promote health and healing. (shrink)

Institutional review board delays may hinder the successful completion of federally funded research in the U.S. military. When this happens, time-sensitive, mission-relevant questions go unanswered. Research participants face unnecessary burdens and risks if delays squeeze recruitment timelines, resulting in inadequate sample sizes for definitive analyses. More broadly, military members are exposed to untested or undertested interventions, implemented by well-intentioned leaders who bypass the research process altogether. To illustrate, we offer two case examples. We posit that IRB delays often appear in (...) the service of managing institutional risk, rather than protecting research participants. Regulators may see more risk associated with moving quickly than risk related to delay, choosing to err on the side of bureaucracy. The authors of this article, all of whom are military-funded researchers, government stakeholders, and/or human subject protection experts, offer feasible recommendations to improv... (shrink)

The Plant Ontology (PO) (http://www.plantontology.org) (Jaiswal et al., 2005; Avraham et al., 2008) was designed to facilitate cross-database querying and to foster consistent use of plant-specific terminology in annotation. As new data are generated from the ever-expanding list of plant genome projects, the need for a consistent, cross-taxon vocabulary has grown. To meet this need, the PO is being expanded to represent all plants. This is the first ontology designed to encompass anatomical structures as well as growth and developmental stages (...) across such a broad taxonomic range. While other ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO) (The Gene Ontology Consortium, 2010) or Cell Type Ontology (CL) (Bard et al., 2005) cover all living organisms, they are confined to structures at the cellular level and below. The diversity of growth forms and life histories within plants presents a challenge, but also provides unique opportunities to study developmental and evolutionary homology across organisms. (shrink)

Our goal here is to help identify the contextualist’s most worthy competitor to relativism. Recently, some philosophers of language and linguists have argued that, while there are contextualist-friendly semantic theories of deontic modals that fit with the relativist’s challenge data, the best such theories are not Lewis-Kratzer-style semantic theories. If correct, this would be important: It would show that the theory that has for many years enjoyed the status of the default view of modals in English and other languages is (...) in need of revision. Here we defend the default view by showing how a Kratzer-style semantics is able to make available readings of the relevant utterances that fit with the pretheoretical judgments opponents purport it cannot fully capture. Having established this, we turn to considering the more theoretical grounds proponents have offered for preferring their rival contextualist views. Here the question is to what extent such grounds favor semantic over what Korta and Perry call “near-side pragmatic” explanations of our judgments. In particular, we argue that our favored readings figure in near-side pragmatic explanations of those judgments that possess the methodological and theoretical advantages of systematicity and unity at least as well as, if not to a greater extent than, those of opponents who argue for their revised semantic theories on the basis of these advantages. (shrink)

We argue that Parfit's "Triviality Objection" against some naturalistic views of normativity is not compelling. We think that once one accepts, as one should, that identity statements can be informative in virtue of their pragmatics and not only in virtue of their semantics, Parfit's case against naturalism can be overcome.

2. The Contingency and A posteriority Constraint: A formulation of the thesis must make physicalism come out contingent and a posteriori. First, physicalism is a contingent truth, if it is a truth. This means that physicalism could have been false, i.e. there are counterfactual worlds in which physicalism is false, for example, counterfactual worlds in which there are miracle -performing angels.[9] Moreover, if physicalism is true, our knowledge of its truth is a posteriori. This is to say that there are (...) ways the world could turn out to be such that physicalism is false. For example, if there are miracle -performing angels, then physicalism is false. So there are worlds considered as actual in which physicalism is false.[10] For short, call this ‘the a posteriority constraint’.[11]. (shrink)

The importance of public confidence in scientific findings and trust in scientists cannot be overstated. Thus, it becomes critical for the scientific community to focus on enhancing the strategies used to educate future scientists on ethical research behaviors. What we are lacking is knowledge on how faculty members shape and develop ethical research standards with their students. We are presenting the results of a survey with 3,500 research faculty members. We believe this is the first report on how faculty work (...) with and educate their PhD students on basic research standards. Specifically, we wanted to determine whether individual faculty members, who are advisors or mentors, differ in how they implemented components of responsible conduct of research (RCR) with their PhD students. Mentors were more likely than advisors or supervisors to report working with all of their PhDs, who graduated in the last 5 years, on the 17 recognized critical components of RCR training and research skill development. We also found about half of the faculty members believe RCR is an institutional responsibility versus a faculty responsibility. Less than a quarter have had opportunities to participate in faculty training to be a better mentor, advisor, or research teacher, and about one third of faculty did not or could not remember whether they had guidelines related to their responsibilities to PhD students. We discuss the implications of our findings and focus on ways that PhD research mentoring can be enhanced. (shrink)

On Kratzer’s canonical account, modal expressions (like “might” and “must”) are represented semantically as quantifiers over possibilities. Such expressions are themselves neutral; they make a single contribution to determining the propositions expressed across a wide range of uses. What modulates the modality of the proposition expressed—as bouletic, epistemic, deontic, etc.—is context.2 This ain’t the canon for nothing. Its power lies in its ability to figure in a simple and highly unified explanation of a fairly wide range of language use. Recently, (...) though, the canon’s neat story has come under attack. The challenge cases involve the epistemic use of a modal sentence for which no single resolution of the contextual parameter appears capable of accommodating all our intuitions.3 According to these revisionaries, such cases show that the canonical story needs to be amended in some way that makes multiple bodies of information relevant to the assessment of such statements. Here I show that how the right canonical, flexibly contextualist account of modals can accommodate the full range of challenge cases. The key will be to extend Kratzer’s formal semantic account with an account of how context selects values for a modal’s.. (shrink)

The paper reports the findings of a study of CPAs designed to determine whether they tend to find factors related to their professional environment (especially the guides to professional conduct of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) to be more helpful than factors related to their business environment when faced with ethics problems. Like internal auditors surveyed earlier, the CPAs tend to view a number of factors in their business environment to be even more helpful than factors related to (...) their professional environment in dealing with ethical dilemmas. Implications for CPAs as individuals and for their professional associations are discussed. (shrink)

What considerations place genuine constraints on an adequate semantics for normative and evaluative expressions? Linguists recognize facts about ordinary uses of such expressions and competent speakers’ judgments about which uses are appropriate. The contemporary literature reflects the widespread assumption that linguists don’t rely upon an additional source of data—competent speakers’ judgments about possible disagreement with hypothetical speech communities. We have several good reasons to think that such judgments are not probative for semantic theorizing. Therefore, we should accord these judgments no (...) probative value for the development of a semantics for our moral terms. Such judgments can no longer be presumed to put pressure on theories according to which our moral expressions share a semantics with ordinary, descriptive terms. Many rivals to pure, Descriptivist theories count among their advantages the ability to accommodate these judgments. If these judgments have no probative value, such theories lose an important source of support. (shrink)

For decades, presidents of the Association of American Geographers have written insightful columns in the AAG Newsletter. One of the most popular sections of the newsletter, these columns illustrate the changes and consistencies of geography over the past thirty-four years. They offer an insight into the past of the geography discipline and a broader perspective on the future. Previously inaccessible even to most professional geographers, the Presidential Columns will now be available in Presidential Musings from the Meridian: Reflections of the (...) Nature of Geography. (shrink)

Through narrative reflections of Jack?s story of inclusive recreational sport, the meaning of dignity in professional practice is explored. Jack?s story is one of respect, strong humiliation and embarrassment, and vulnerability. Through the lens of relational ethics, the aggression of a stranger illustrates how the lack of mutual respect, compassion and knowledge creates experiences of indignity. Jack?s story highlights how relationships can shape, constrain and enable lives. Understanding that which constitutes a dignified recreational sport context for instructors and participants opens (...) opportunities for authentic social relationships based upon respect of oneself, as well as others to emerge. Jack?s narrative further reinforces the need to create pedagogical spaces for discussions of various forms of dignity and ethical professional practice in inclusive recreational sport contexts. (shrink)

The Planteome project provides a suite of reference and species-specific ontologies for plants and annotations to genes and phenotypes. Ontologies serve as common standards for semantic integration of a large and growing corpus of plant genomics, phenomics and genetics data. The reference ontologies include the Plant Ontology, Plant Trait Ontology, and the Plant Experimental Conditions Ontology developed by the Planteome project, along with the Gene Ontology, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, Phenotype and Attribute Ontology, and others. The project also provides (...) access to species-specific Crop Ontologies developed by various plant breeding and research communities from around the world. We provide integrated data on plant traits, phenotypes, and gene function and expression from 95 plant taxa, annotated with reference ontology terms. (shrink)