This paper is one of four interrelated papers resulting from the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control convened in June 2008 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Society of Law, Medicine, Ethics. Each of the papers deals with one of the four core elements of legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities for public health practitioners; legal competencies public health practitioners and legal and policy decision makers (...) need for use of these laws and authorities; crossdisciplinary and cross-jurisdiction coordination of law-based public health actions; and information on public health law best practices. Collectively, they are referenced as the “white papers.”Our purpose is to offer action options that will help to improve the legal competencies of public health practitioners and policy decision makers with respect to drafting, interpreting. (shrink)

The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms to correct the literature, much time and money is wasted on research based on a crumbling foundation. These guidelines serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record. Delineating these complementary roles and proposing solutions for common (...) barriers provide a foundation for best practices. (shrink)

The ultimate causes of sex differences in human aggressive behavior can lie mainly in evolved, inherited mechanisms that differ by sex or mainly in the differing placement of women and men in the social structure. The present commentary contrasts Campbell's evolutionary interpretation of aggression sex differences with a social structural interpretation that encompasses a wider range of phenomena.

Contemporary epidemiological methods testing the associations between green space and psychological well-being treat all vegetation cover as equal. However, there is very good reason to expect that variations in ecological "quality" (number of species, integrity of ecological processes) may influence the link between access to green space and benefits to human health and well-being. We test the relationship between green space quality and restorative benefit in an inner city urban population in Bradford, UK. We selected 12 urban parks for study (...) where we carried out botanical and faunal surveys to quantify biodiversity and assessed the site facilities of the green space (cleanliness, provision of amenities). We also conducted 128 surveys with park users to quantify psychological restoration based on four self-reported measure of general restoration, attention-grabbing distractions, being away from everyday life, and site preference. We present three key results. First, there is a positive association between site facilities and biodiversity. Second, restorative benefit is predicted by biodiversity, which explained 43% of the variance in restorative benefit across the parks, with minimal input from other variables. Third, the benefits accrued through access to green space were unrelated to age, gender, and ethnic background. The results add to a small but growing body of evidence that emphasise the role of nature in contributing to the well-being of urban populations and, hence, the need to consider biodiversity in the design of landscapes that enhance multiple ecosystem services. (shrink)

Our social role/biosocial theory provides a more adequate account of aggression sex differences than does Archer's sexual selection theory. In our theory, these sex differences arise flexibly from sociocultural and ecological forces in interaction with humans' biology, as defined by female and male physical attributes and reproductive activities. Our comments elaborate our theory's explanations for the varied phenomena that Archer presents.

Schmitt's findings provide little evidence that sex differences in sociosexuality are explained by evolved dispositions. These sex differences are better explained by an evolutionary account that treats the psychological attributes of women and men as emergent, given the biological attributes of the sexes, especially female reproductive capacity, and the economic and social structural aspects of societies.

Communicative Understandings of Women's Leadership Development: From Ceilings of Glass to Labyrinth Paths, edited by Elesha L. Ruminski and Annette M. Holba, weaves the disciplines of communication studies, leadership studies, and women's studies to offer theoretical and practical reflection about women's leadership development in academic, organizational, and political contexts. This work claims a space for women's leadership studies and acknowledges the paradigmatic shift from discussing women's leadership using the glass ceiling to what Eagly and Carli identify as the labyrinth of (...) leadership. (shrink)

Salient landmarks enhance route learning. We hypothesised that semantically salient nostalgic landmarks would improve route learning compared to non-nostalgic landmarks. In two experiments, participants learned a route through a computer-generated maze using directional arrows and wall-mounted pictures. On the test trial, the arrows were removed, and participants completed the maze using only the pictures. In the nostalgia condition, pictures were of popular music artists and TV characters from 5 to 10 years ago. In the control condition, they were recent pictures (...) of these same artists and characters. In Experiment 1, in the test trial, participants in the nostalgia condition completed the maze faster than controls. Experiment 2 conceptually replicated these findings and extended them by exploring boundary conditions. Participants had to learn two mazes sequentially. In Maze 1, we placed nostalgic/control landmarks only at non-decision points (whereas we placed them at decision points in Experiment 1). In Maze 2, we placed nostalgic/control landmarks at decision points during acquisition but removed them in the test trial (whereas they were present in the test trial in Experiment 1). In both mazes, participants in the nostalgia (compared to control) condition completed the test trial faster. (shrink)

This paper, co-authored by undergraduate students and their instructor part of an educational psychology seminar, describes a participatory curriculum design approach for preservice teacher education that focuses on the use of the principles of second-order cybernetics to teach about teaching and learning. Using elements of an Open Source Educational Processes framework, our Spring ESEPSY2309 section created project-based collective hive minds of preservice teachers, relying on a cybernetic approach at the crossroads of Gregory Bateson and Gordon Pask's theories. The classroom community (...) used four innovative tool-mediated pillars to guide collaborative activity: 1) Live-chatting using the Reddit social media platform, 2) observation of the lives, strategies, and practices used by teachers and students in their own social networks through Soundcloud podcasting to expand their own perceptions of pedagogies and best practices that they could employ in their careers, 3) open-ended paper writing, exploring sources beyond the object language provided by the textbook through extensive dyadic conversations with the instructor, and 4) training in the use of the Alice 3 game creation tool for block programming enabling the accumulation of competence in designing classroom systems that may treat students these undergraduates would soon teach as active historical agents in learning environments, combining skills from varied subjects into transdisciplinary educational experiences. We showcase outcomes of our class projects using a narrative inquiry to describe podcast episodes, a topic network analysis to illustrate the expansive nature of Open Source writing activity, and a visual depiction of our class Alice 3 games. (shrink)

In Alice Walker’s vignette “The Flowers,” a young black girl’s walk in the woods is interrupted when she treads “smack” into the skull of a lynched man. As her name predicates, Myop’s age and innocence obstruct her from seeing deeply into the full implications of the scene, while the more worldly reader is jarred and confronted with a whole history of racial violence and slavery. The skeleton, its teeth cracked and broken, is a temporal irruption, a Gothic “smack” that (...) shatters the transience of the pastoral scene with the intrusion of a deeper past from which dead matter/material de-composes the story’s present with the violent matter/issue of racism. Walker’s story is representative of an important trope in fiction, where the pastoral dead speak through the details of their remains, and the temporal fabric of text is disrupted by the very substance of death. Against the backdrops of Terry Gifford’s post-pastoral and Fred Botting’s Gothic understanding of the literary corpse as “negative[ly] sublime,” this essay explores the fictional dead as matter unfettered by genre, consistently signifying beyond their own inanimate silences, revealing suppressed and unpalatable themes of racial and sexual violence, child abuse and cannibalistic consumerism. Along with Walker’s story, this study considers these ideas through new readings of Stephen King’s novella The Body, Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While these writers may form an unlikely grouping in terms of style, each uses pastoral remains as significant material, deploying the dead as Gothic entities that force the reader to confront America’s darkest social and historical matters. (shrink)

Neal Wood, Reflections on Political Theory: A Voice of Reason from the Past , x + 178 pp., ?35.00, ISBN 0 333 96880 8. Reviewed by Christopher Brooke. James Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics: The Political Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood , ix + 336 pp., ?25.00/$40.00, ISBN 0 907845 312. Reviewed by Andrew Lockyer. Ekbert Faas, The Genealogy of Aesthetics , xiv + 439 pp., ?47.50, ISBN 0 521 81182 1. Reviewed by John Hope Mason. Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as (...) Author: Consecrating One’s Life to the Truth , ix + 209 pp., ?13.50/$19.00, ISBN 0 226 43024 3 . Reviewed by Timothy O’Hagan. Douglas R. Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth- Century Japan , xvi + 292 pp., $27.95, ISBN 0 8248 2462 8. Reviewed by Michael Mosher. Articulating America: Fashioning a National Political Culture in Early America, Essays in Honor of J.R. Pole, ed. Rebecca Starr , xi + 276 pp., ?31.00/$40.00, ISBN 0 7425 2076 5. Reviewed by Paul Carrese. Alberto Spektorowski, The Origins of Argentina’s Revolution of the Right , x + 269 pp., $30.00, ISBN 0 268 02011 6. Reviewed by David Rock. Joan Cocks, Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question , xi + 220 pp., $16.95, ISBN 0 691 07468 2. Reviewed by David Miller. Samuel Pufendorf, Eris Scandica und andere polemische Schriften über das Naturrecht, ed. Fiammetta Palladini, Vol. 5 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann , xxi + 489 pp., 14 illustrations, –158.00, ISBN 3 05 003605 2. Reviewed by Michael J. Seidler. Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France , ix + 228 pp., $37.50/?26.50, ISBN 0 226 77736 7. Reviewed by Steven C. Hause. (shrink)

"[This book is] an... examination of how we can respond to suffering, live our fullest lives, and remain open to the full spectrum of our human experience"--Amazon.com.

This chapter proposes that the cognitive mechanisms of joint attention (defined as a combination of attention following skills with attention contact skills) are not metarepresentational in nature, but based upon the coordination of two different types of intentional understanding — third-person and second-person intentions — that are represented at the level of a sensorimotor notion of others as subjects. This proposal is developed and analyzed from a comparative perspective through a review of findings concerning apes, typically developing children, and children (...) with autism. It is argued that each of these populations illustrates a different type of joint attention system based upon different notions of the other as a subject. (shrink)

In the last three decades, considerable theoretical and empirical research has been undertaken on the topic of moral distress among health professionals. Understood as a psychological and emotional response to the experience of moral wrongdoing, there is evidence to suggest that—if unaddressed—it contributes to staff demoralization, desensitization and burnout and, ultimately, to lower standards of patient safety and quality of care. However, more recently, the concept of moral distress has been subjected to important criticisms. Specifically, some authors argue that the (...) standard account of moral distress elucidated by Jameton :542–551, 1984) does not refer to a discrete phenomenon and/or that it is not sufficiently broad and that this makes measuring its prevalence among health professionals, and other groups of workers, difficult if not impossible. In this paper, we defend the standard account of moral distress. We understand it as a concept that draws attention to the social, political and contextual determinants of moral agency and brings the emotional landscape of the moral realm to the fore. Given the increasing pressure on health professionals worldwide to meet efficiency, financial and corporate targets and reported adverse effects of these for the quality and safety of patient care, we believe that further empirical research that deploys the standard account moral distress is timely and important. (shrink)

John Ziman, like most other scientists, learnt about the social nature of science by becoming a scientist. He travelled through the various stages of passing examinations, having articles that he had written reviewed by peers, and applying for academic posts. Better still he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society because of the problems he had solved-- at least for the time being-- in several landmark papers. There was little written about the social nature of science at this time (...) so when he was asked to give a talk on the radio in 1960 he chose the title 'Science is Social' and began as follows: I am going to try to justify the following proposition 'A scientific truth is statement that has been publicly accepted by the experts'. (shrink)

Partiendo de una reflexión sobre las limitaciones que enfrenta la democracia en el contexto de la globalización actual, el autor analiza las posibilidades de una nueva relación entre las personas, los colectivos y las instituciones del Estado. Los desafíos que enfrenta la humanidad, a escala mundial, no pueden seguir siendo enfrentados con las formas sociales y políticas propias del marco del Estado-Nación territorial. La democracia continuaría siendo la mejor alternativa a esta crisis epocal, pero aquella que surja de una profunda (...) transformación de la relación entre gobernados y gobernantes, y que de cuenta de las nuevas formas de participación que exigen los diversos actores sociales sin necesidad de retornar al rígido centralismo estatista. (shrink)

La cuestión que se quiere resolver en este artículo es si, pese a que la política queda fuera del sistema filosófico que plantea Descartes, hay espacio aún para ella en la reflexión filosófica derivada de dicho sistema. Para ello, se analizarán los siguientes textos cartesianos: la carta-prefacio de la edición francesa de Los principios de la filosofía, con el fin de aclarar la estructuración y la finalidad del sistema; Las pasiones del alma, para elucidar en qué consiste la moral que (...) ocupa el lugar más alto en el árbol de la filosofía, y plantear en consecuencia la dimensión social de la moral; la correspondencia con Elisabeth de Bohemia permitirá analizar la posición de Descartes hacia la política. La conclusión pasa por considerar una doble dimensión del fenómeno político, una ligada a la vida social y otra a la estructuración del poder político y a las acciones de los gobernantes. (shrink)

Following an extensive review of the moral intensity literature, this article reports the findings of two studies (one between-subjects, the other within-subject) that examined the effect of manipulated and perceived moral intensity on ethical judgment. In the between-subjects study participants judged actions taken in manipulated high moral intensity scenarios to be more unethical than the same actions taken in manipulated low moral intensity scenarios. Findings were mixed for the effect of perceived moral intensity. Both probable magnitude of consequences (a factor (...) consisting of magnitude of consequences, probability of effect, and temporal immediacy) and social consensus had a significant effect; proximity did not. In the within-subject study manipulated moral intensity had a significant effect on ethical judgment, but perceived moral intensity did not. Regression of ethical judgment on age, gender, major, and the three perceived moral intensity factors was significant between-subjects, but not within-subject. Ethical judgment was found to be a more robust predictor of intention than perceived moral intensity using a within-subject design. (shrink)

We introduce the large-cardinal notions of ξ-greatly-Mahlo and ξ-reflection cardinals and prove (1) in the constructible universe, L, the first ξ-reflection cardinal, for ξ a successor ordinal, is strictly between the first ξ-greatly-Mahlo and the first Π1ξ-indescribable cardinals, (2) assuming the existence of a ξ-reflection cardinal κ in L, ξ a successor ordinal, there exists a forcing notion in L that preserves cardinals and forces that κ is (ξ+1)-stationary, which implies that the consistency strength of the existence of a (ξ+1)-stationary (...) cardinal is strictly below a Π1ξ-indescribable cardinal. These results generalize to all successor ordinals ξ the original same result of Mekler–Shelah [A. Mekler and S. Shelah, The consistency strength of every stationary set reflects, Israel J. Math.67(3) (1989) 353–365] about a 2-stationary cardinal, i.e. a cardinal that reflects all its stationary sets. (shrink)

Lakoff (1993) argued that basic level conceptual metaphors are grounded in human experience, and are therefore likely to be found widely across different languages and cultures. However, other mappings may not be shared. It is well documented that many metaphorical expressions vary across languages, and a number of researchers have argued cultural motivations for this. Possible reasons for cross-linguistic differences in metaphor are that different cultures hold different attitudes to metaphor vehicles, or that the source domain entities and events are (...) more salient in one culture than another. However, the corpus data discussed here suggest that rather than being a synchronic reflection of culture, metaphorical expressions are to some extent a cultural reliquary, and an incomplete one. (shrink)

El decisionismo schmittiano es uno de los tópicos principales de la filosofía política contemporánea. Es a menudo recurrido entre quienes critican el liberalismo político, sea en su forma parlamentaria o mecanicista. El objetivo de este artículo es explicitar los cimientos, las implicaciones y las tesis más problemáticas de este decisionismo desde un planteamiento alternativo al de la fe. Se intenta mostrar tanto la presencia de Kierkegaard como el rechazo de Hegel en el reto que Schmitt presenta a la filosofía política, (...) así como reinterpretar sus concepciones del mito y la soberanía en un marco crítico con el pensamiento liberal. Concluyo sosteniendo que los sesgos conceptuales de Schmitt comportan un absolutismo político no menos criticable. (shrink)

Este artigo se divide em duas partes. Na primeira seção, após a introdução, mapeamos as diversas ocorrências de “phýsis” ao longo das Hipotiposes Pirrônicas de Sexto Empírico, dividindo-as em 5 categorias: “natureza” como o real, em posição à “aparência”; o “natural” como aquilo que parece próprio, pertencente a algo ou alguém; a “Natureza”, como uma dimensão criadora e regente; o “natural” em oposição ao “antinatural”; a “natureza dos homens”. A forma como esses diversos usos aparecem na obra é invariavelmente crítica, (...) como elementos da argumentação contra os dogmáticos, especialmente os estoicos. Na segunda parte do trabalho, entretanto, mostramos como a “phýsis” aparece também de maneira positiva no início das Hipotiposes com a função de guia para a vida, como parte da resposta à célebre objeção da apraxía. Além disso, defendemos a hipótese de que a “natureza”, da perspectiva de Sexto, não se opõe nem ultrapassa as convenções e os costumes; pelo contrário, a natureza é o que é reconhecido por todos e é mesmo determinada pelas convenções e pelos costumes. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that the methods and results of science have no place among the data to which our semantics of vague predicates must answer. This despite the fact that it is well known that such prototypical vague predicates as ‘is bald’ play a central role in scientific research (e.g. the research that established Rogaine as a treatment for baldness). I argue here that the assumption is false and costly: in particular, I argue one cannot accept either supervaluationist semantics, (...) or the criticism of that semantics offered by Fodor and Lepore, without having to abandon accepted, and unexceptionable, scientific methodology. (shrink)

Twenty-one IABS colleagues held a roundtable discussion of the challenges of teaching a fully-wired generation of students. Collectively they presented some solutions to commonly experienced problems and some ideas for experimenting with new media and new ways of teaching and learning.