This research addresses the question of whether men and women in sales differ in their ethical attitudes and decision making. The study asked 209 subjects to respond to 20 ethical scenarios, half of which were "relational" and half "non-relational." The study concludes (1) that there are significant ethical differences between the sexes in situations that involve relational issues, but not in non-relational situations, and (2) that gender-based ethical differences change with age and years of experience. The implications of these finding (...) for sales organizations are discussed. (shrink)

Social signaling models predict that subtle variation in climatic temperature induces systematic changes in expressed cognition. An experiment showed that perceived room temperature was associated with variability in self-descriptions, social reactions of others, and desiring differing types of social networks. The findings reflect the tendency to inflate capacity demonstrations in warmer climates as a result of the social networking opportunities they enable.

Chaotic itinerancy is useful for illustrating transitions in attractor dynamics seen in the olfactory system. Cantor coding is a good model for information processing, but so far it lacks perceptual proof. The theories presented provide a large step toward bridging the use of chaos as an interpretive tool and hard examination of chaotic neural activity during perception.

Colorado has consistently had one of the highest rates of suicide in the United States, and El Paso County has the highest number of suicide and firearm-related suicide deaths within the state. Community-based solutions like those of the Suicide Prevention Collaborative of El Paso County may be more effective in preventing suicide as they are specific to local issues, sensitive to local culture, and informed by local data, community members, and stakeholders.

Cells express many proteins that bind to laminin, the major adhesive component of basement membranes. Some of these, specifically integrins, function as transmembrane receptors that ‘signal’ the presence of laminin on the cell surface to the cytoplasm. Lectins constitute a second class of laminin binding proteins that may augment integrin function by interacting with laminin carbohydrate. Caution must be used in ascribing functions to other laminin binding proteins, especially cytosolic proteins.

Despite having international and national legislative frameworks and policies that guarantee children’s rights and encourage their participation in matters affecting them, consulting children has received scant scholarly attention in the African context. Notwithstanding this state of affairs, it is important to ask whether, in keeping with growing progressive practices, having children as active researchers is a feasible goal to achieve and, if so, how might this be possible. Drawing on Swartz and Nyamnjoh’s framework of research existing along an emancipatory (...) continuum, we argue for practical, methodological interventions to bridge the researcher–researched divide. We show, using four case studies, how giving children a voice – a key feature of emancipatory research – as participants in educational research has the potential to afford them space to co-enact the research and develop their sense of agency. The four case studies were drawn from investigations of lived experiences of orphaned children and conceptions of education quality in South Africa; consulting children about sex and HIV/AIDS education in South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya; a study of a community-based peer education programme in South Africa and language and mathematics skills assessments in a large-scale study. Within each case, we evaluate the extent to which the research methods used aims for and achieves children’s participation and emancipation and offer ways to overcome challenges for adopting emancipatory approaches in the schooling sector from ethical, policy and political perspectives. The article concludes with recommendations for implementing emancipatory methodologies in educational research involving children. (shrink)

In team-based tasks, successful communication and mutual understanding are essential to facilitate team coordination and performance. It is well-established that an important component of human conversation is the maintenance of common ground. Maintaining common ground has a number of associated processes in which conversational participants engage. Many of these processes are lacking in current synthetic teammates, and it is unknown to what extent this lack of capabilities affects their ability to contribute during team-based tasks. We focused our research on how (...) teams package information within a conversation, by which we mean specifically whether information is explicitly mentioned or implied, and how multiple pieces of information are ordered both within single communications and across multiple communications. We re-analyzed data collected from a simulated remotely-piloted aerial system task in which team members had to specify speed, altitude, and radius restrictions. The data came from three experiments: the “speech” experiment, the “text” experiment, and the “evaluation” experiment. We asked first whether teams settled on a specific routine for communicating the speed, altitude, and radius restrictions, and whether this process was different if the teams communicated in speech compared to text. We then asked how receiving special communication instructions in the evaluation experiment impacted the way the human teammates package information. We found that teams communicating in either speech or text tended to use a particular order for mentioning the speed, altitude, and radius. Different teams also chose different orders from one another. The teams in the evaluation experiment, however, showed unnaturally little variability in their information ordering and were also more likely to explicitly mention all restrictions even when they did not apply. Teams in the speech and text experiments were more likely to leave unnecessary restrictions unmentioned, and were also more likely to convey the restrictions across multiple communications. The option to converge on different packaging routines may have contributed to improved performance in the text experiment compared some of the conditions in the evaluation experiment. (shrink)

The massive growth in global health research in past decades has posed many challenges for its effective ethical oversight, not least of which is how best to provide effective protection of research participants. The extent of the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa in particular makes research into prevention technologies for HIV, including HIV vaccine research, a global priority. However, the need for vaccine research must be considered in conjunction with the individual's right to informed consent, which is based on the (...) principle of respect for autonomy. One of the primary human rights violations likely to occur in the context of HIV vaccine research is that potential research participants may not fully understand what participation in research studies entails. People who elect to enrol in HIV vaccine trials are required to understand both the potential negative effects of participation (eg, discrimination) as well as complex scientific concepts such as randomisation and prophylaxis in order to be ethically enrolled. In this study, two vignettes are presented to illustrate two core issues in conducting phase III HIV vaccine trials in low-income countries—namely, (1) from the perspective of participants, the extent to which understanding is a prerequisite for consenting to participate in a trial, and (2) from the perspective of trial investigators, whether it is appropriate to persuade eligible people to enrol in a trial, even though their initial reaction is to decline to participate. These vignettes are used to analyse these issues through the prisms of research ethics and human rights in order to identify helpful synergies. It is argued that the human rights perspective provides a helpful lens on ethical issues. (shrink)

Number concepts must support arithmetic inference. Using this principle, it can be argued that the integer concept of exactly ONE is a necessary part of the psychological foundations of number, as is the notion of the exact equality - that is, perfect substitutability. The inability to support reasoning involving exact equality is a shortcoming in current theories about the development of numerical reasoning. A simple innate basis for the natural number concepts can be proposed that embodies the arithmetic principle, supports (...) exact equality and also enables computational compatibility with real- or rational-valued mental magnitudes. (shrink)

In a diverse and complex world, the notion of ‘cultural competence’ is offered by some as an ethical solution to health care work which is culturally naïve or inappropriate. Notions of cultural competence, however, may obscure the fact that many clinicians, regardless of background, may feel ill equipped to deal with difference in their daily work. Drawing largely on South African examples, I suggest that issues of cultural incompetence, linked both to personal anxieties and to the ways in which health (...) care systems are structured, may be important to explore — personally, professionally, and politically. Through examining the difficulties of our own work and recognizing these, we may learn more only by learning a set of skills about the ‘other’. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers have recently been exploring whether the mechanisms which underlie the acquisition of ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) are best charac- terized as cognitive modules or as developing theories. In this paper, we attempt to clarify what a modular account of ToM entails, and why it is an attractive type of explanation. Intuitions and arguments in this debate often turn on the role of develop- ment: traditional research on ToM focuses on various developmental sequences, whereas cognitive modules are thought (...) to be static and ‘anti-developmental’. We suggest that this mistaken view relies on an overly limited notion of modularity, and we explore how ToM might be grounded in a cognitive module and yet still afford development. Modules must ‘come on-line’, and even fully developed modules may still develop internally, based on their constrained input. We make these points con- crete by focusing on a recent proposal to capture the development of ToM in a module via parameterization. (shrink)

The question 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number (...) of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, at least as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

Researchers now commonly collect biospecimens for genomic analysis together with information from mobile devices and electronic health records. This rich combination of data creates new opportunities for understanding and addressing important health issues, but also intensifies challenges to privacy and confidentiality. Here, we elucidate the “web” of legal protections for precision medicine research by integrating findings from qualitative interviews with structured legal research and applying them to realistic research scenarios involving various privacy threats.

Answering important public health questions often requires collection of sensitive information about individuals. For example, our understanding of how HIV is transmitted and how to prevent it only came about with people's willingness to share information about their sexual and drug-using behaviors. Given the scientific need for sensitive, personal information, researchers have a corresponding ethical and legal obligation to maintain the confidentiality of data they collect and typically promise in consent forms to restrict access to it and not to publish (...) identifying data.The interests of others, however, can threaten researchers' promises of confidentiality when legal demands are made to access research data. In some cases, the subject of the litigation is tightly connected to the research questions, and litigants' interest in the data is not surprising. Researchers conducting studies on tobacco or occupational or other chemical exposures, for example, are relatively frequent targets of subpoenas. (shrink)

Accidents involving large trucks result in significant economic and social costs. As technological solutions have improved, behavioral factors contributing to accidents have risen in importance. The purpose of this research is to investigate how norms, consequences, and personal attitudes influence safety-related ethical judgments and behavioral intentions. The Hunt–Vitell’s theory of ethical decision-making is adapted to test how these factors influence truck drivers’ decisions containing ethical content. Professional truck drivers evaluated decisions presented in two scenarios that included the situation, the decision, (...) and the results. The research found that drivers rely heavily on evaluations of safety norms when forming ethical judgments and behavioral intentions. Further, drivers’ attitudes toward compliance and the effectiveness of safety regulations also influenced decision-making to an extent. Overall, evidence of a refutation of the assumption that a tradeoff exists between operational productivity and safety was discovered. Drivers in this study intended to behave in a certain manner irrespective of time or money pressures. The perceived ethical component of the decision outweighed regulatory and economic consequences under a range of parameters. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn (...) investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

In the last few years, off-line simulation has become an increasingly important alternative to standard explanations in cognitive science. The contemporary debate began with Gordon (1986) and Goldman's (1989) off-line simulation account of our capacity to predict behavior. On their view, in predicting people's behavior we take our own decision making system `off line' and supply it with the `pretend' beliefs and desires of the person whose behavior we are trying to predict; we then let the decision maker reach a (...) decision on the basis of these pretend inputs. Figure 1 offers a `boxological' version of the off-line simulation theory of behavior prediction.(1). (shrink)