Digital piracy is costly to creative economies across the world. Studies indicate that anti-piracy messages can cause people to pirate more rather than less, suggesting the presence of psychological reactance. A gender gap in piracy behavior and attitudes towards piracy has been reported in the literature. By contrast, gender differences in message reactance and the moderating impact of attitudes have not been explored. This paper uses evolutionary psychology as a theoretical framework to examine whether messages based on real-world anti-piracy campaigns (...) cause reactance and whether this effect is explained by gender and pre-existing attitudes. An experiment compares one prosocial and two threatening messages against a control group to analyze changes in piracy intention from past behavior for digital TV/film. Results indicate that the prosocial message has no significant effect, whereas the threatening messages have significantly opposing effects on men and women. One threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50% and men to increase it by 18%. We find that gender effects are moderated by pre-existing attitudes, as men and women who report the most favorable attitudes towards piracy tend to demonstrate the most polarized changes in piracy intentions. The practical implications of the results are that men and women process threatening messages differently, therefore behavioral change messages should be carefully targeted to each gender. Explicitly, threatening messages may be effective on women, but may have the reverse effect on men with strong favorable attitudes towards the target behavior. (shrink)

This book sorts out the confusion created by the use of the term "postmodern" in relation to widely divergent theological positions. Four different types of postmodern theology are distinguished in the preface: constructive, deconstructive, liberationist, and conservative. Two forms of each type are discussed in the book. Writing from a constructive, postmodern perspective, the authors enter into dialogue with the deconstructive postmodernism of Mark C. Taylor and Jean-François Lyotard, with the liberationist postmodernism of Harvey Cox and Cornel West, and with (...) the conservative postmodernism of George William Rutler and John Paul II. (shrink)

After some general remarks about the interrelation between philosophical and statistical thinking, the discussion centres largely on significance tests. These are defined as the calculation of p-values rather than as formal procedures for ‘acceptance‘ and ‘rejection‘. A number of types of null hypothesis are described and a principle for evidential interpretation set out governing the implications of p- values in the specific circumstances of each application, as contrasted with a long-run interpretation. A number of more complicated situ- ations are discussed (...) in which modification of the simple p-value may be essential. (shrink)

Progress in addiction science is hampered by disagreements and ambiguity around its core construct: addiction. Addiction Ontology (AddictO) offers a path to a solution of the kind that has addressed similar problems in other areas of science: a set of clearly and uniquely defined entities to which terms such as ‘addiction’, addictive disorder’ and ‘substance dependence ’can be applied for ease of reference while recognizing that it is the construct definitions and their unique IDs that are central, not the terms.

Guidelines for Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) or research ethics committees exist at national and international levels. These guidelines are based on ethical principles and establish an internationally acceptable standard for the review and conduct of medical research. Having attained a multinational consensus about what these fundamental guidelines should be, IRBs are left to interpret the guidelines and devise their own means of implementing them. Individual and community values bear on the interpretation of the guidelines so different IRBs attain different levels (...) of effectiveness. In the Caribbean and Pan American regions there are few IRBs. Obstacles to the establishment and function of IRBs are exacerbated in developing regions like these by differences in language, literacy, and local value systems; education, administrative expertise, facilities, and access to information are also limited. A regional IRB network might facilitate more uniform ethical review in developing countries, and simplify IRB procedures. (shrink)

Both Kant and James claim to limit the role of knowledge in order to make room for faith. In this paper, we argue that despite some similarities, their attempts to do this come apart. Our main claim is that, although both Kant and James justify our adopting religious beliefs on practical grounds, James believes that we can—and should—subsequently assess such beliefs on the basis of evidence. We offer our own account of this evidence and discuss what this difference means for (...) their accounts of religious belief. (shrink)

Health care reforms, in particular the expansion of public and/or private health care benefit coverage to some or all population groups, is becoming an increasingly hot topic for discussion—and in some cases for action—at all levels of government. With almost 16% of Americans estimated to be uninsured for at least part of the year, opinion polls show health care near the top of the general public’s list of concerns. Little wonder that presidential candidates for the 2008 election are incorporating ‘‘universal (...) health care coverage’’ proposals in their campaign platforms. Will ‘‘cradle-to-grave’’ coverage for all become a reality or will they just experience cradle-to-grave debates over this issue? That is essentially one of the questions posed in the following discussion on the role of nonprofit health care organizations in promoting, and operating under, universal health care coverage. (shrink)

Gestures and speech are clearly synchronized in many ways. However, previous studies have shown that the semantic similarity between gestures and speech breaks down as people approach transitions in understanding. Explanations for these gesture–speech mismatches, which focus on gestures and speech expressing different cognitive strategies, have been criticized for disregarding gestures’ and speech's integration and synchronization. In the current study, we applied three different perspectives to investigate gesture–speech synchronization in an easy and a difficult task: temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and (...) complexity matching. Participants engaged in a simple cognitive task and were assigned to either an easy or a difficult condition. We automatically measured pointing gestures, and we coded participant's speech, to determine the temporal alignment and semantic similarity between gestures and speech. Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis was used to determine the extent of complexity matching between gestures and speech. We found that task difficulty indeed influenced gesture–speech synchronization in all three domains. We thereby extended the phenomenon of gesture–speech mismatches to difficult tasks in general. Furthermore, we investigated how temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching were related in each condition, and how they predicted participants’ task performance. Our study illustrates how combining multiple perspectives, originating from different research areas (i.e., coordination dynamics, complexity science, cognitive psychology), provides novel understanding about cognitive concepts in general and about gesture–speech synchronization and task difficulty in particular. (shrink)

Content and substance (Gehalt) in music is the difficult theme of this volume. The central questions are: in what manner is music more than immanence, structure and autonomous meaning, and to what degree do "extramusical" ideas and conceptions shape the work so that more appears to be in it than music alone. This theme is above all relevant for contemporary music of the 21st century, as ever more composers are interested both in cultural discourse and in a content-orientation for their (...) music. This volume presents essays by twelve composers who were invited to ponder the relationship between musical structure and the substance of music in light of their own musical practices. (shrink)

In _The Moral Austerity of Environmental Decision Making_ a group of prominent environmental ethicists, policy analysts, political theorists, and legal experts challenges the dominating influence of market principles and assumptions on the formulation of environmental policy. Emphasizing the concept of sustainability and the centrality of moral deliberation to democracy, they examine the possibilities for a wider variety of moral principles to play an active role in defining “good” environmental decisions. If environmental policy is to be responsible to humanity and to (...) nature in the twenty-first century, they argue, it is imperative that the discourse acknowledge and integrate additional normative assumptions and principles other than those endorsed by the market paradigm. The contributors search for these assumptions and principles in short arguments and debates over the role of science, social justice, instrumental value, and intrinsic value in contemporary environmental policy. In their discussion of moral alternatives to enrich environmental decision making and in their search for a less austere and more robust role for normative discourse in practical policy making, they analyze a series of original case studies that deal with environmental sustainability and natural resources policy including pollution, land use, environmental law, globalism, and public lands. The unique structure of the book—which features the core contributors responding in a discourse format to the central chapters’ essays and debates—helps to highlight the role personal and public values play in democratic decision making generally and in the field of environmental politics specifically. _Contributors._ Joe Bowersox, David Brower, Susan Buck, Celia Campbell-Mohn, John Martin Gillroy, Joel Kassiola, Jan Laitos, William Lowry, Bryan Norton, Robert Paehlke, Barry G. Rabe, Mark Sagoff, Anna K. Schwab, Bob Pepperman Taylor, Jonathan Wiener. (shrink)

Translators’ abstract: This article considers the concept of originary dissension in Reiner Schürmann’s. The ultimate conditions of experience are natality and mortality, which universalize and singularize respectively. These conditions are in originary dissension with one another in the sense that they cannot be resolved into a unified whole. But natality institutes the universal precisely by denying the mortal singular. Recognizing and sustaining the originary dissension therefore requires prioritizing mortality over natality.

Gary Cox explores Sartre's infamous maxim 'Hell is other people!' in this in-depth existential account of the human condition, the nature of the self, and the intricate ways in which that nature shapes the interpersonal dynamics of our relationships with others.

The purpose of this qualitative research is to conceptualize the factors that influence human flourishing. Data has been gathered through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with thirty global heads of Human Resources of manufacturing companies in India and South Asia. Data from these interviews are analyzed using grounded theory methodology to categorize concepts and create a conceptual model of the main themes which contribute to human flourishing. This study highlights three such themes: (1) opportunities for advancement; (2) personal capability; and (3) leading (...) people inclusively. This article provides implications for a more complete model for entrepreneurs, policy makers, and HR heads to understand the conditions necessary for human flourishing, filling a literature gap in the study of human flourishing from the perspective of an employer. (shrink)

Claims about the distinctness or non-distinctness of introspective beliefs from the mental states they are about have played a central role in the philosophy of introspection in the past fifty years or so. In A Materialist Theory of the Mind and work leading up to it, David Armstrong famously argued against infallibilist theories of introspection, and in defence of his own self-scanning theory of introspection, on the ground that introspective beliefs are distinct from the mental states they are about. Sydney (...) Shoemaker, one of Armstrong’s most ardent critics, famously argued against Armstrong’s self-scanning theory of introspection, and in favour of his own constitutive theory of introspection, on the ground that introspective beliefs are not distinct from the mental states they are about. Yet the relevant sense or senses of distinctness involved here, and the role such claims about distinctness plays in such arguments, is notoriously hard to pin down. This essay explores some of the issues concerning distinctness and non-distinctness in the philosophy of introspection and in the dispute between Armstrong and Shoemaker and offers a reassessment of some of the central arguments offered in that dispute. (shrink)

We obtain lower bounds for the consistency strength of fully nonregular ultrafilters on ω₂.

This paper documents for the first time tournament incentives of pension fund managers and their preferences for social and environmental security characteristics. Using a comprehensive data set on pension fund security holdings, differences in manager tournaments are distinguished by sorting pension funds into portfolios based on the number of concurrent managers each pension fund employs. Results indicate that the way pension schemes structure portfolio manager tournament incentives is important in explaining the social and environmental portfolio firm characteristics of pension fund (...) held stock. (shrink)

Mysticism and the mystical experience seemingly play little or no part in our Western tradition. Certainly there is no mystical tradition in the West such as Zen Buddhism, nor is there any great understanding of or influence from the writings of Heraclitus, Spinoza, or the mystical passages in the early work of Wittgenstein. Mysticism has been generally misunderstood in the West, and it has even evoked the attacks of philosophers and theologians. 1 Mysticism to many conjures up images of monks (...) meditating in caves; it is generally pictured as esoteric, otherworldly, irrational, and at best irrelevant to the daily lives of human beings. If what we say below is correct, it will be seen that mysticism is none of these but is rather a singular human experience that lies at the foundations of civilization. (shrink)

Arrivé à un stade de ma vie qui m'engage à prendre du recul, je voudrais témoigner dans ce livre d'un certain sentiment de spiritualité, qui a émergé de mes recherches pour comprendre l'ordre caché des choses et le sens secret de la nature. Ce sentiment est né d'un émerveillement et d'une révélation sur la simplicité des codes naturels qui conduisent au jaillissement, dans l'espace et dans le temps, de formes d'une extrême diversité et d'une grande beauté. Une morphogenèse qui a (...) passionné des penseurs comme Pythagore, Benoît Mandelbrot ou Alan Turing, et qui se poursuit par le travail et l'oeuvre des hommes. Ce travail est désormais mis en cause par les extensions du corps et du cerveau humains que représentent l'intelligence artificielle et les robots... Aujourd'hui, il devient plus difficile de prédire les évolutions exponentielles auxquelles nous sommes confrontés dans les domaines scientifique, technologique, économique et politique. Mon message vise à alerter les prospectivistes, les politiques, les économistes, les scientifiques, non seulement sur la vitesse de ces évolutions, mais surtout sur les interdépendances émergentes entre intelligence artificielle, robotique, travail humain et modifications de l'" ADN " d'Internet. Mal comprises, ces évolutions peuvent engendrer des mouvements tels que le transhumanisme. Mieux intégrées à nos réflexions, elles peuvent en revanche mener à une nouvelle étape de l'évolution de l'humanité... (shrink)

This study explores perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) in the higher education workplace through innovative use of fiction writing workshops. Twenty-three participants took part in three workshops, imagining the application of AI assistants and chatbots to their roles. Key themes were identified, including perceived benefits and challenges of AI implementation, interface design implications, and factors influencing task delegation to AI. Participants envisioned AI primarily as a tool to enhance task efficiency rather than fundamentally transform job roles. This research contributes insights (...) into the desires and concerns of educational users regarding AI adoption, highlighting potential barriers such as value alignment. (shrink)

Spekulative Theorien bedürfen laut einigen Forschern keiner experimentellen Überprüfung, um als wissenschaftlich zu gelten. Dieser Ansatz untergräbt die Wissenschaft.Im vergangenen Jahr nahm eine Debatte in der Physik eine beunruhigende Wende: Nicht alle fundamentalen Theorien lassen sich anhand von Beobachtungen überprüfen und so fordern einige Wissenschaftler, das Vorgehen in der theoretischen Physik anzupassen. Sei eine Theorie nur ausreichend elegant und aussagekräftig, so ihr Appell, müsse diese nicht experimentell überprüft werden – das bricht mit jahrhundertealter philosophischer Tradition, nach der wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis sich (...) erst durch empirische Befunde bewähren muss. Wir kritisieren den neuen Ansatz scharf, denn wie der Wissenschaftstheoretiker Karl Popper bereits feststellte: Jede wissenschaftliche Theorie muss falsifizierbar sein. (shrink)

This essay confronts police corruption historically and conceptually, isolating noble cause corruption as a neglected yet powerful motivator of corrupt police behavior. Noble cause corruption is defined in some detail and several specific suggestions are made regarding police training programs to address the issue.

I offer you some theories of intellectual obligations and rights (virtue Ethics): initially, RBT (a Right to Believe Truth, if something is true it follows one has a right to believe it), and, NDSM (one has no right to believe a contradiction, i.e., No right to commit Doxastic Self-Mutilation). Evidence for both below. Anthropology, Psychology, computer software, Sociology, and the neurosciences prove things about human beliefs, and History, Economics, and comparative law can provide evidence of value about theories of rights. (...) However, insofar as we have methods within Philosophy to help us formulate precise concepts of 'belief' and 'rights', methods that also help us to prove links (or absence thereof) amongst families of concepts of rights and belief, our discipline is in and of itself capable of sound reasoning about issues as puzzling as the following. Suppose a Jane who does not believe in God yet who believes she ought to so believe: Jane is undergoing doxastic moral regret (moral regret for lack of faith). We have all known such Janes and perhaps at one time or another even been one. Paradox: given RBT and NDSM, Jane as described not only does not exist, Jane cannot exist. Thus, to enrich the ways in which Philosophy need not get all its evidence from other academic disciplines, I present a brief introduction to what I call Neutral Universal Frames (NUFs). NUFs solve hard puzzles about interactions among modal concepts of belief and rights, concepts that occur in RBT, NDSM and the description of our Janes. NUFs for theories precisely articulated via any two or more modal concepts are a powerful and immensely general set of tools enabling us to define rich theories of truth ("models on frames") to test philosophical theories for internal consistency and to prove the existence of connections (or absence thereof) amongst alternative articulations of philosophical theories. NUFs thereby add to the constructive knowledge producing way Logics intersect with Philosophy of Religion. And we will soon see why Jane, be she named 'Jane' or known simply as you: cannot exist. Read on at your own risk. (shrink)