Responsible leadership is rare. It is not that most leaders are irresponsible, but responsibility in leadership is frequently defined so that an important connotation of responsible leadership is ignored. This article equates responsible leadership with virtuousness. Using this connotation implies that responsible leadership is based on three assumptions—eudaemonism, inherent value, and amplification. Secondarily, this connotation produces two important outcomes—a fixed point for coping with change, and benefits for constituencies who may never be affected otherwise. The meaning and advantages of responsible (...) leadership as virtuous leadership are discussed. (shrink)

Virtuousness refers to the pursuit of the highest aspirations in the human condition. It is characterized by human impact, moral goodness, and unconditional societal betterment. Several writers have recently argued that corporations, in addition to being concerned with ethics, should also emphasize an ethos of virtuousness in corporate action. Virtuousness emphasizes actions that go beyond the “do no harm” assumption embedded in most ethical codes of conduct. Instead, it emphasizes the highest and best of the human condition. This research empirically (...) examines the buffering and amplifying effects of virtuousness in organizations. The study hypothesizes that virtuousness has a positive effect on organizations because amplifying dynamics make subsequent virtuous action more likely, and buffering dynamics reduce the harmful effects of downsizing. The study reveals that two types of virtuousness – tonic and phasic – are associated with these effects. (shrink)

This Korean study replicated a previously published American study. The conceptual framework and method combined ethical enquiry and phenomenology. The research questions were: (1) What is nursing students’ experience of ethical problems involving nursing practice? and, (2) What is nursing students’ experience of using an ethical decision-making model? The participants were 97 senior baccalaureate nursing students, each of whom described one ethical problem and chose to use one of five ethical decision-making models. From 97 ethical problems, five content categories emerged, (...) the largest being health professionals (69%). The basic nature of the ethical problems was the students’ experience of conflict, resolution and rationale. Using an ethical decision-making model helped 94% of the students. A comparison of the Korean and American results yields important implications for nursing ethics education, practice and research. (shrink)

Logical and moral arguments have been made for the organizational importance of ethos or virtuousness, in addition to ethics and responsibility. Research evidence is beginning to provide, empirical support for such normative claims. This paper considers the relationship between ethics and ethos in contemporary organizations by summarizing emerging findings that link virtuousness and performance. The effect of virtue in organizations derives from its buffering and amplifying effects, both of which are described.

Helpful, easy-to-follow guide for new digital photographers over the age of 50 Digital photography is a fun and exciting hobby, but digital cameras can be overwhelming and daunting to a newcomer. If you're entering the digital photography world as an older adult—and wondering about which digital camera will meet your needs—this straightforward, helpful book is for you. Written in full colour with lots of screenshots and clear, easy-to-read type, this friendly guide assumes no previous experience in digital photography and walks (...) you through the subject of digital photography from start to finish: selecting which type of digital camera is right for you, understanding the seemingly endless jargon, benefiting from valuable photograph tips, and much more. Provides guidance for purchasing your digital camera and deciphers the common jargon that is used in the field Walks you through all the features and functions of a digital camera Reveals top photography tips Explains how to retouch, enhance, and print your photos Demonstrates easy ways to share photos with friends and family Prepare properly, enjoy the freedom, and maybe even show the family a thing or two with this fun and practical guide! (shrink)

In this essay, I provide a forward-looking naturalized theory of mental content designed to accommodate predictive processing approaches to the mind, which are growing in popularity in philosophy and cognitive science. The view is introduced by relating it to one of the most popular backward-looking teleosemantic theories of mental content, Fred Dretske’s informational teleosemantics. It is argued that such backward-looking views (which locate the grounds of mental content in the agent’s evolutionary or learning history) face a persistent tension between ascribing (...) determinate contents and allowing for the possibility of misrepresentation. A way to address this tension is proposed by grounding content attributions in the agent’s own ability to detect when it has represented the world incorrectly through the assessment of prediction errors—which in turn allows the organism to more successfully represent those contents in the future. This opens up space for misrepresentation, but that space is constrained by the forward-directed epistemic capacities that the agent uses to evaluate and shape its own representational strategies. The payoff of the theory is illustrated by showing how it can be applied to interpretive disagreements over content ascriptions amongst scientists in comparative psychology and ethology. This theory thus provides a framework in which to make content attributions to representations posited by an exciting new family of predictive approaches to cognition, and in so doing addresses persistent tensions with the previous generation of naturalized theories of content. (shrink)

This paper critically reviews and discusses the concept of organizational virtuousness as presented in positive organizational scholarship. It identifies Kim S. Cameron, David S. Bright, and Arran Caza as the most influential researchers within this field and portrays commonalities, differences, and inconsistencies among the various notions of organizational virtuousness offered in positive organizational literature throughout the last 15 years. While the commonalities refer to attributes, levels of analyses, outcomes, and methodology, the variances concern the locus of residence, the priority (...) of outcomes, indicators, supporting features and the virtues included in positive organizational virtuousness. The analysis further discusses the strengths and weaknesses of these differences and stresses the challenges which the POS movement needs to face in order to clarify its definition of organizational virtuousness and, maybe, converge on one unified meaning. Finally, these challenges are summarized and linked to future research proposals which offer potential ideas on how to further develop the concept of positive organizational virtuousness. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to analyze the response of John Duns Scotus to Godfrey of Fontaines’s argument against Henry of Ghent’s theory of the will’s self-motion. Godfrey’s argument is that, if the object is assumed to be causa sine qua non and the efficient causality is totally attributed to the will in the act of volition, it would also follow that not only the will’s motion but every motion in nature, such as, for example, the igniting of wood, (...) is a self-motion. In this paper, I will explain that Scotus’s refutation of this argument in Reportatio II, d. 25 is based on his reflection upon the general possibility of self-motion as well as upon the indeterminacy of the will’s act. In doing so, I will show that the development of Scotus’s theory of the will’s motion is closely related to his universalized theory of self-motion. (shrink)

This 1988 book presents a historical investigation of the theoretical development of contemporary Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory. The author examines the central features of the EBCT by tracing both the history of business cycle theory and the history of econometrics. These historical analyses make clear two central principles of the EBCT: its optimization foundation and its economic strategy. Following along these lines, the author argues that the EBCT succeeds the tradition of the Austrian cycle theory that attempted to incorporate the (...) cycle with classical equilibrium doctrine. He further argues that the EBCT's econometric strategy is only a child of the Cowles commission method. Investigating interwar macroeconomics in very readable style, this book brings the period back into the heart of macroeconomic thinking. (shrink)

To ensure their survival in natural habitats, plants must recognize and respond to a wide variety of insect herbivores. Aphids and other Hemiptera pose a particular challenge, because they cause relatively little direct tissue damage when inserting their slender stylets intercellularly to feed from the phloem sieve elements. Plant responses to this unusual feeding strategy almost certainly include recognition of aphid salivary components and the induction of phloem‐specific defenses. Due to the excellent genetic and genomic resources that are available for (...) Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), this plant was chosen as a model system to study the metabolic and transcriptional responses to infestation by two aphids, Myzus persicae (green peach aphid, a broad generalist) and Brevicoryne brassicae (cabbage aphid, a crucifer‐feeding specialist). Future research on Arabidopsis–aphid interactions will lead to the identification of aphid‐specific elicitors, components of the defense‐signaling pathway, and additional metabolic responses that are induced by aphid infestation. BioEssays 29:871–883, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The development of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant scientific events of the twentieth century. This revised and updated 3rd edition explores the challenges that faced the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project. It gives a clear introduction to fission weapons at the level of an upper-year undergraduate physics student by examining the details of nuclear reactions, their energy release, analytic and numerical models of the fission process, how critical masses can be estimated, (...) how fissile materials are produced, and what factors complicate bomb design. An extensive list of references and a number of exercises for self-study are included. Links are given to several freely-available spreadsheets which users can use to run many of the calculations for themselves. (shrink)

The central premise of this thesis is that translation has acquired a new meaning in so-­called postcolonial times and that this transformation calls forth a renewal of the philosophical conceptualisation of translation. I begin by distinguising between two different philosophical genealogies of translation in modern European philosophy. The first is a Romantic and hermeneutic lineage, in which translation is closely bound to the movement of culture, and conceived of as an ‘experience of the foreign’. The second is a relational genealogy (...) of translation, in which translation is a transformation without teleology, yet systematically-­oriented. The thesis reconstructs this alternative concept through a parallel reading of Walter Benjamin’s and Michel Serres’ works on translation, contending that Leibniz’s relational metaphysics proved a crucial resource for both of them. Albeit reflecting on different objects, these two authors converge in thinking translation as a relation and a method, associating translation with their critique of epistemology. By drawing on a generalised metaphysics of language, they both reflect on translation as a transformation in the objective domain, hence as a form of historicity. The thesis is composed of three autonomous yet convergent parts. The first part operates as a backdrop to the whole by expounding the need for locating the philosophy of translation outside of the ethics of alterity. It contends that the link made between linguistic difference and difference ‘as such’ is often insufficiently mediated. The second part examines Serres’ early works, explicating his philosophy of translation in close connexion with the evolution of his structuralism, from his doctoral work on Leibniz to the last of the Hermès series: Le passage du Nord-­Ouest. The third part investigates Benjamin’s philosophy of translation in light of his metaphysics of language, following his concepts of the ‘afterlife’ as a thread through his early and later works. Finally, the conclusion propounds the intrinsic connexion that holds between the translation problem, Leibnizianism and ‘decentered epistemologies’. (shrink)

Max Picard (1888-1965) was a Swiss-German writer, who converted to Catholicism from Judaism. A doctor and psychologist, Picard worked in Berlin but retired in the 1920s to Switzerland. He is often regarded as a "wisdom thinker," and his rich and penetrating writings continue to speak to us in the twenty-first century. The Flight from God is an incisive, profound description of many of the problems facing modern culture, and its analysis resonates with us more today than when first published in (...) 1934. Picard illustrates that modern culture is essentially in Flight, and so the individual is under pressure to make a choice; in earlier generations only an individual could be in flight because the culture itself was not in flight but in Faith. The flight does not require courage or guilt; yet it is to be found in, and is often destructive of, many facets of life including human relationships, art, economics, science, entertainment, even religion. Because of this it leaves many in anguish, from which we seek alternative avenues of structure and meaning. Yet, in every person there is a residue that will not yield itself to the flight, and this is bound up with love, which reminds us of God. Picard shows how God is always somehow present in the flight--just when we think we are arriving from the flight, we find that God is already there. Picard's identification and discussion of the roots of the distresses of modern culture, and its attempts to grapple with the spiritual dimension of human experience, along with tensions created by freedom and individuality, are clearly still of the greatest relevance for us today. (shrink)

Perceptual expertise refers to learning that is specific to a domain, that transfers to new items within the trained domain, and that leads to automatic processing in the sense that expertise effects can be measured across a variety of tasks. It can be argued that most of us possess some degree of perceptual expertise in a least one, if not several domains, thereby giving the study of perceptual expertise broad application. Some object categories may in fact be objects of perceptual (...) expertise to the majority of people: Faces appear to be one such example. Thus, the use of face stimuli, or the comparison of face and object perception, can be a powerful way to ask whether a given process is influenced by perceptual expertise. Here, we emphasize one characteristic way that face processing appears to differ from nonface processing: that is, the degree to which they recruit a “holistic” rather than a “featural” perceptual strategy. This review brings evidence that expertise influences perceptual processing together with recent findings that the capacity of visual short-term memory is greater in perceptual experts and explores the relationship between the two. (shrink)

This essay critically revisits Jiwei Ci’s prudential argument for political democracy in China from the very Tocquevillian standpoint on which Ci’s core theoretical argument is predicated. I argue that Ci’s underlying assumption and argument regarding the enabling conditions of democracy actually depart significantly from Tocqueville’s own view due to Ci’s overly positive understanding of equality of conditions as directly constitutive of a democratic society and his assumed causal connection between capitalist society and political democracy. After clarifying what Tocqueville meant by (...) equality of conditions and discussing his prudential remedy for the perils of democracy, I conclude by suggesting an alternative pragmatic and prudential justification for democracy in China that is more consistent with the Tocquevillian conception of democracy. (shrink)

This article examines several key aspects of maternity homes for ‘unwed mothers’ in order to understand the overwhelming phenomenon of single mothers giving up their babies for adoption in South Korea and its naturalization as a common practice. Drawing upon Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, this article recasts maternity homes as an institution of biopolitical welfare and highlights two features of social governance that the maternity home extends over the population of single mothers and their children. First, I argue that this (...) unique, non-governmental social service agency functions as a hub of biopolitical technologies, where multiple social, legal, economic, and political forces work in concert to curb single motherhood through the promotion of adoption via (1) containment, (2) classification, and (3) circulation. Second, attending to the intricate dynamics of maternity home practices, this article observes the ways in which a single mother relinquishes her motherhood via adoption and, in so doing, becomes a birthmother, a self-regulating and self-governable subject. (shrink)

Given the instructional challenges posed by the influx of minority-language children in North America, this article attempts to examine early childhood bi- or multilingualism in one of the fastest growing ethnic minority groups in Canada, Korean-Canadians. By drawing on a Vygotskian perspective, the article focuses on the affective and social aspects of learning for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children and their families. With an emphasis on the integration of language and thought, this article first identifies the instructional applications of (...) Vygotskian perspectives and then describes iterative phases of design-based research aimed at developing technology-mediated collaborative learning environments for trilingual Korean-Canadian children. The technology-mediated collaborative learning environment supported young CLD children's affective, social and cognitive needs and created meaning-centered collaborative learning environments. The paper concludes with a consideration of implications of this technology-mediated collaborative learning environment so as to assist teachers who might be confronted with the educational needs of the growing population of CLD children. (shrink)