Studies have demonstrated that parents often exhibit a still face while silently reading their cell phones when responding to texts. Such disruptions to parent-child interactions have been observed during parental media use such as texting and these disruptions have been termed technoference. In the present study, we explored changes to mother-child interactions that occur before, during and after interruptions due to texting using an adapted naturalistic still face paradigm. Specifically, we examined the effect of an interruption due to either maternal (...) smartphone use or use of an analog medium on maternal interaction quality with their 20- to 22-month-old children. Mother-child interactions during free play were interrupted for 2 min by asking the mothers to fill out a questionnaire either by typing on the smartphone or on paper with a pen. Interactional quality was compared between free-play and interruption phases and to a no-interruption control group. Mixed ANOVA across phase and condition indicated that maternal responsiveness and pedagogical behavior decreased during the interruption phase for both the interruption groups but not for the no-interruption group. Children also increased their positive bids for attention during the paper-and-pencil and the smartphone conditions relative to the no-interruption control. These findings are consistent with a large body of research on the still-face paradigm and with a recent study demonstrating that smartphone interruptions decreased parenting quality. The present study, however, connects these lines of research showing the many everyday disruptions to parent-child interactions are likely to decrease parenting quality and that toddlers are likely to detect and attempt to repair such interruptions. (shrink)

Recently, there has been much research into conceptual engineering in connection with feminist inquiry and activism, most notably involving gender issues, but also sexism and misogyny. Our paper contributes to this research by explicating, in a principled manner, a series of other concepts important for feminist research and activism, to wit, feminist political identity terms. More specifically, we show how the popular Conceptual Spaces Framework (CSF) can be used to identify and regiment concepts that are central to feminist research, focusing (...) especially on feminism in France. According to the CSF, concepts can be represented geometrically, as regions in similarity spaces. A particular strength of the CSF framework is its empirically-focused methodology, which allows researchers to infer the boundaries of concepts from empirical data, thus eliminating the need to strongly rely on intuitions about meanings. This is shown to be especially valuable for the explication of concepts relating to feminist political identity, given that the intuitions of feminist scholars and activists about what would appear to be core concepts in the area tend to be poorly aligned or even conflicting. We report the results from an empirical categorization study conducted among French feminists and show how they support the view that the CSF can contribute to both the conceptual engineering project and our understanding of the structure of social reality. (shrink)

Objective: To investigate the relationship between psychological empowerment, psychological capital, job involvement, and the retention intention of kindergarten teachers in mainland China and the internal mechanism of action.Methods: A total of 554 kindergarten teachers were investigated by scales for psychological empowerment, psychological capital, job involvement, and retention intention.Results: Psychological empowerment was positively correlated with psychological capital and job involvement. Psychological capital was positively correlated with job involvement. Psychological empowerment, psychological capital, and job involvement were significantly and positively correlated with retention (...) intention. Psychological empowerment influences kindergarten teachers' retention intention mainly through three indirect effects: the single intermediary effects of psychological capital and job involvement and the chain intermediary effect of psychological capital → job involvement.Conclusion: Psychological empowerment can not only indirectly predict the retention intention of kindergarten teachers through the single intermediary effects of psychological capital and job involvement, but also indirectly predict the retention intention of kindergarten teachers through the chain intermediary effect of psychological capital and job involvement. (shrink)

Probabilism is committed to two theses: 1) Opinion comes in degrees—call them degrees of belief, or credences. 2) The degrees of belief of a rational agent obey the probability calculus. Correspondingly, a natural way to argue for probabilism is: i) to give an account of what degrees of belief are, and then ii) to show that those things should be probabilities, on pain of irrationality. Most of the action in the literature concerns stage ii). Assuming that stage i) has been (...) adequately discharged, various authors move on to stage ii) with varied and ingenious arguments. But an unsatisfactory response at stage i) clearly undermines any gains that might be accrued at stage ii) as far as probabilism is concerned: if those things are not degrees of belief, then it is irrelevant to probabilism whether they should be probabilities or not. In this paper we scrutinize the state of play regarding stage i). We critically examine several of the leading accounts of degrees of belief: reducing them to corresponding betting behavior (de Finetti); measuring them by that behavior (Jeffrey); and analyzing them in terms of preferences and their role in decision-making more generally (Ramsey, Lewis, Maher). We argue that the accounts fail, and so they are unfit to subserve arguments for probabilism. We conclude more positively: ‘degree of belief’ should be taken as a primitive concept that forms the basis of our best theory of rational belief and decision: probabilism. (shrink)

Everettian quantum mechanics faces the challenge of how to make sense of probability and probabilistic reasoning in a setting where there is typically no unique outcome of measurements. Wallace has built on a proof by Deutsch to argue that a notion of probability can be recovered in the many worlds setting. In particular, Wallace argues that a rational agent has to assign probabilities in accordance with the Born rule. This argument relies on a rationality constraint that Wallace calls state supervenience. (...) I argue that state supervenience is not defensible as a rationality constraint for Everettian agents unless we already invoke probabilistic notions. (shrink)

Objectification is a notion central to contemporary feminist theory. It has famously been associated with the work of anti-pornography feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and more recently with the work of Martha Nussbaum. However, objectification is a notion that has not yet been adequately defined. It has been used rather vaguely to refer to a broad range of cases involving, in some way or another, the treatment of a person as an object. My purpose in this paper is to (...) offer a plausible understanding of objectification. I do that by focusing on the work of four prominent thinkers: Immanuel Kant, and contemporary feminists Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum. Through drawing on these thinkers' conceptions of objectification, I am finally led to a more complete and coherent understanding of this notion. (shrink)

Kant has famously argued that monogamous marriage is the only relationship where sexual use can take place "without degrading humanity and breaking the moral laws." Kantian marriage, however, has been the target of fierce criticisms by contemporary things: it has been regarded as flawed and paradoncal, as being deeply at odds with feminism, and, at best, as plainly uninteresting. In this paper, I argue that Kantian marriage can indeed survive these criticisms. Finally, the paper advances the discussion beyond marriage. Drawing (...) on Kant 's conception of friendship, I suggest that he might have overlooked the possibility of sex being morally permissible in yet another context. (shrink)

The most recent major contribution to the literature on justice as mutual advantage is Peter Vanderschraaf’s book Strategic Justice. In this book, he develops a theory of justice as convention, where justice is those principles that rational, self-interested agents would choose to solve problems of partially conflicting interest. His theory is thus a kind of theory of justice as mutual advantage. A common criticism of theories of justice as mutual advantage is the Vulnerability Objection: if the principles of justice require (...) that resources are only shared with those that are net-contributors to a cooperative surplus, then those that are not net-contributors to that cooperative surplus (so-called vulnerable people) have no claim of justice to any share of the resources. But, the objection states, surely justice cannot exclude people simply because they are vulnerable. Vanderschraaf argues that his theory of justice as convention successfully answers the Vulnerability Objection. However, in this paper, I argue that although Vanderschraaf’s theory successfully demonstrates that it can be to the mutual advantage of rational, self-interested people to agree to share equally even when some people contribute more than others, the problem remains of why such people would share with those that can never contribute more to the cooperative surplus than what they would withdraw from it. Vanderschraaf’s solution is to weaken the requirement that people actually contribute. But that, I argue, undermines the claim that his theory is a theory of justice as mutual advantage. (shrink)

Sex/gender is a continuous variable that researchers frequently treat as dichotomous. This practice can mask continuous underlying adaptive traits and yield spurious dichotomous “sex differences.” As such, many sex differences in self-protection may be evolutionary by-products of underlying adaptations rather than adaptations themselves. Binary analysis of continuous sex/gender is ill-considered science that can contribute to inequality and counterproductive public policy.

Protecting consumers' rights set higher standards on the rights of security compared with other participants of civil turnover, so the concept of consumer acquires not only theoretical but also practical significance. Definition of consumer must be sufficiently clear and precise as the proper subject of classification depends on what rules will apply to legal relationships arising. To this purpose, the concept of consumer is formulated as the concept of both the European Union and national legislation. Both presented the concept of (...) consumer that is defined in accordance with the formal characteristics and prejudices that individuals are the weaker party without the actual value of that person experiences and knowledge and so on. (shrink)

This paper examines the relations between stubbornness and weakness of will, adopting Holton’s definition of weakness of will as an over-readiness to revise one’s resolutions. It posits that both stubbornness and weakness of will are responses to pessimism – the negative perception of a task or its outcome. Contrary to naive judgement, stubbornness is not merely the opposite of weakness; rather, it serves as a preventive behaviour stemming from a fear of weakness of will. Weakness of will and stubbornness can (...) be viewed as two facets of the same phenomenon, both influenced by pessimism. The paper explores the implications of this unified account, particularly at the therapeutic level, suggesting that enhancing self and other trust could reduce both weak and stubborn behaviours. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently suggested that some abstract, plausibly non-causal and/or mathematical, explanations explain in a way that is radically dif- ferent from the way causal explanation explain. Namely, while causal explanations explain by providing information about causal dependence, allegedly some abstract explanations explain in a way tied to the independence of the explanandum from the microdetails, or causal laws, for example. We oppose this recent trend to regard abstractions as explanatory in some sui generis way, and argue (...) that a prominent ac- count of causal explanation can be naturally extended to capture explanations that radically abstract away from microphysical and causal-nomological details. To this end, we distinguish di erent senses in which an explanation can be more or less abstract, and analyse the connection between explanations’ abstractness and their explanatory power. According to our analysis abstract explanations have much in common with counterfactual causal explanations. (shrink)

The problem of explanatory non-symmetries provides the strongest reason to abandon the view that laws can figure in explanations without causal underpinnings. I argue that this problem can be overcome. The solution that I propose starts from noticing the importance of conditions of application when laws do explanatory work, and I go on to develop a notion of nomological dependence that can tackle the non-symmetry problem. The strategy is to show how a strong notion of counterfactual dependence as guaranteed by (...) the laws is a plausible account of what we aim towards when we give law-based explanations. The aim of this project is not to deny that causal relations can do explanatory work but to restore laws of nature as capable of being explanatory even in the absence of any knowledge of causal underpinnings. (shrink)

A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the implications of that argument by shedding light on the construction of TEV, through respondents’ perspective. It illuminates the deficiencies of willingness to pay (WTP) as a measure of value presented as three aggregated themes considering respondents’ (...) unintentionality, their retraction once they understood that their WTP could be decisive in cost-benefit analysis and the inherent incompleteness of WTP. We discuss why the TEV discourse persists, how it conceals rather than reveals broader notions of value and in what ways our results support the development of alternative approaches that truly endorse plurality in environmental valuation and decision-making. (shrink)

This paper examines how a standardized question is launched and received in a corpus of performance appraisal interviews, with a focus on how pre-­formulated questions are translated into interaction. Using conversation analysis, we demonstrate that the same question becomes many different actions in practice. Prefaces as well as prosodic and lexical alterations make relevant different responses, and as such, the question can be recruited to initiate diverse interactional projects such as assessments and other socially delicate activities. As a consequence, goals (...) of uniformity and standardization may be subverted. The interactional adaptations further evidence the strength of recipient design as reformulations also result in more fitted and personalized answers. Our study contributes to the understanding of standardization versus interactionalization, and points to the strong interrelationship between question design and the fitting of response options. (shrink)

This article focuses on Kant’s central belief that an individual’s humanity, her rational personhood, ought never be treated merely as a means. I focus on two paradigmatic cases of such treatment, for Kant, namely suicide and prostitution. In the case of suicide, the individual treats his own humanity merely as a means in completely eliminating it to escape from his miserable life. The case of prostitution is more complicated. It is not obvious how the prostitute’s rational personhood is compromised. An (...) analysis of Kant’s views on prostitution and sexuality enables us to understand Kant’s concern that the prostitute is treated merely as a means. However, his more extreme position that the prostitute is reduced to the status of a thing for use is not supported by arguments. A woman’s use as a mere means, I explain, is insufficient to define her status as an object. (shrink)

Since 2004, Nanyan Cao and some other scholars have implicitly or explicitly claimed that engineering ethics in China is importantly different from engineering ethics in the United States. The evidence for that claim relies on examination of official documents or certain large features of Chinese society. Though neither is an uncommon approach to studying engineering ethics in China, neither actually studies engineering practice in China. This article does—or at least gets much closer. The authors have asked almost two hundred Chinese (...) engineers about what they do and why they do it. The responses suggest that Chinese engineers, or at least those surveyed, think about engineering ethics much as American engineers do. The responses also suggest that much more empirical work needs to be done before we can claim to understand either the similarities or differences between engineering ethics in China and engineering ethics in “the West.”. (shrink)

The article analyzes one of the fundamental rights – the right to maintenance, which proper implementation ensures normal development of the child. This right matches with the duty of parents to maintain their minor children. Paragraph 6 of Article 38 of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania states that parents have a duty to educate their children to be honest people and loyal citizens, supporting them until adulthood. The obligation to maintain children is established in the first 3.192 Article (...) paragraph of the Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania, and the responsibility for avoiding to maintain a child is provided in Article 164 of the Criminal Code. The article discusses the fact that the analysis of criminal law rate is not precise enough. Article 164 of the Criminal Code does not match with the child maintenance methods specified in the CC Article 3.196 paragraph 1. Since criminal liability is only for judgment in default in civil cases, a person shall only be liable for breaking the right to maintain a child, provided in the CC 3.196 paragraph 1. This article deeply analyzes the problematic qualification aspects of the avoidance to maintain a child. Some alternative ways of child maintenance are mentioned, as can be chosen from other law instruments (bailiffs, Guarantee child support fund) and it leads to the ultima ratio principle. On the other hand, it is not required to seek alternative remedies for affected interests, and it is possible to initiate a pre-trial investigation. Therefore, this article seeks to identify specific civil and criminal law rules delimitation. Avoidance of child maintenance is an ongoing crime. The main problem in legal practice is to determine an end of this ongoing criminal conduct. The practice of the Supreme Court of Lithuania is not unanimous. In some cases, the end of this ongoing conduct is considered to be a moment when the past judgment has entered into force, in other cases – the moment of indictment. These positions are criticized by many authors and it is suggested to follow the Supreme Court’s practice, according to which the moment when a judgment of conviction for the criminal act is passed should be considered as an end of an ongoing criminal conduct. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 2 Seiten: 246-252.

abstract ‘Time is money’, Benjamin Franklin's ‘Poor Richard’ tells us. But instead of converting time expenditures into monetary equivalents, it makes more sense in many cases to convert money into temporal equivalents. The difficulty in putting a monetary value on time in unpaid household labour, when adjusting the National Accounts, points to the problems of the first approach. The advantages of the latter approach are illustrated by the Swedish system of specifying criminal fines in terms of the number of days (...) the offender would have to work to pay them off. (shrink)

PROJETO DE IRRIGAÇÃO SANTA CRUZ DO APODI SOB A PERSPECTIVA DA VIOLAÇÃO AO DIREITO INTERNACIONAL DOS DIREITOS HUMANOS.

How does an emerging community of faith develop its identity in the context of a semi-hostile and increasingly nationalistic culture? The story of the early years of Lithuanian-speaking Baptists provides an interesting and informative case study. This article focusses on the formative stage of the Lithuanian-speaking Baptist movement during the interwar period of the independent Republic of Lithuania. It considers four main factors which contributed to the formation of Lithuanian-speaking Baptist identity: different ethnic and cultural groupings amongst Baptists in Lithuania; (...) the role of the global Baptist family in providing both material and ideological support; the community’s relationship with the Lithuanian state; and their stance towards the dominant religious context, i.e. the Lithuanian Catholic Church. Out of this dynamic emerges a picture of the particular ways in which these congregations, and especially their leadership, navigated their understanding of loyalty to the Kingdom of God in relation to their belonging to a particular national grouping. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 32-33.

ABSTRACT Our aim in this article is to offer a new justification for preferring theories that are more quantitatively parsimonious than their rivals. We discuss cases where it seems clear that those involved opted for more quantitatively parsimonious theories. We extend previous work on quantitative parsimony by offering an independent probabilistic justification for preferring the more quantitatively parsimonious theories in particular episodes of theory choice. Our strategy allows us to avoid worries that other considerations, such as pragmatic factors of computational (...) tractability and so on, could be the driving ones in the historical cases under consideration. _1_ Introduction _2_ Three Desiderata _2.1_ Limiting _2.2_ Robustness _2.3_ Breadth _2.3.1_ A limited success for Baker _2.3.2_ Rejecting Baker’s analysis _2.4_ The proposal _3_ Probabilistically Additive Hypotheses and a Bayesian Account: The Limpid Rationale Relativized and Reconsidered _3.1_ Neutrinos and beta decay _3.2_ Avogadro’s hypothesis _3.3_ Postulation of Neptune _4_ Conclusion. (shrink)

For Schopenhauer, life is pain, and we are in need of a release from it. Death offers this release and should therefore be considered as a good thing, something desirable, a friend. He is well aware, however, that it is far from easy to reconcile ourselves with the idea of death. The purpose of this paper is to navigate the path towards the possibility of consolation in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Quite remarkably, Schopenhauer is not only successful in consoling us for death; (...) he also offers an equally important consolation for life. (shrink)

This research aims to determine which dimensions of online convenience influence generation z consumers’ cognitive and affective attitudes and online impulsive buying behavior. The moderating effect of social media celebrity is also investigated to examine the attitude-behavior gap. A total of 348 responses from Chinese users who followed digital celebrities were received using purposive sampling. Data analysis and hypothesis testing were carried out using SmartPLS, version 3. The results indicated that relationship convenience, possession convenience, post possession conveniences, transaction convenience, and (...) evaluation convenience have a crucial impact on cognitive and affective attitudes. Similarly, cognitive and affective attitudes are significant and positive predictors of generation z consumers’ online impulsive buying behavior. Moreover, empirical results supported the moderating role of social media celebrities that aid marketers in selecting a product endorser. The implications for marketers and policymakers are discussed based on the above research findings. Moreover, future research directions are suggested. (shrink)

RNA modifications have recently emerged as an important regulatory layer of gene expression. The most prevalent and reversible modification on messenger RNA (mRNA), N6‐methyladenosine, regulates most steps of RNA metabolism and its dysregulation has been associated with numerous diseases. Other modifications such as 5‐methylcytosine and N1‐methyladenosine have also been detected on mRNA but their abundance is lower and still debated. Adenosine to inosine RNA editing is widespread on coding and non‐coding RNA and can alter mRNA decoding as well as protect (...) against autoimmune diseases. 2′‐O‐methylation of the ribose and pseudouridine are widespread on ribosomal and transfer RNA and contribute to proper RNA folding and stability. While the understanding of the individual role of RNA modifications has now reached an unprecedented stage, still little is known about their interplay in the control of gene expression. In this review we discuss the examples where such interplay has been observed and speculate that with the progress of mapping technologies more of those will rapidly accumulate. (shrink)

This paper investigates frequency effects in the L2 acquisition of the catenative verb construction by German learners of English from a usage-based perspective by presenting findings from two experimental studies and a complementary corpus study. It was examined if and to what extent the frequency of the verb in the catenative verb construction affects the choice of the target-like complement type and if the catenative verb construction with a to-infinitive complement, which is highly frequent in English, is more accurately acquired (...) and entrenched than the less frequent variant with an -ing complement. In all three studies, the more frequent construction with a to-infinitive yielded higher numbers of target-like complement choices. Furthermore, it was shown that the verb’s faithfulness to the construction made a significant prediction of a target-like complement preference. It is argued that a higher faithfulness promotes a target-like entrenchment of the construction and motivates a taxonomic generalisation across related exemplars. Furthermore, the results provide support for the idea that the mental representation of language is comprised of item-specific as well as more abstract schema knowledge, where frequency determines the specificity with which the construction is entrenched. (shrink)

Electroencephalography and functional near-infrared spectroscopy have potentially complementary characteristics that reflect the electrical and hemodynamic characteristics of neural responses, so EEG-fNIRS-based hybrid brain-computer interface is the research hotspots in recent years. However, current studies lack a comprehensive systematic approach to properly fuse EEG and fNIRS data and exploit their complementary potential, which is critical for improving BCI performance. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel multimodal fusion framework based on multi-level progressive learning with multi-domain features. The framework consists (...) of a multi-domain feature extraction process for EEG and fNIRS, a feature selection process based on atomic search optimization, and a multi-domain feature fusion process based on multi-level progressive machine learning. The proposed method was validated on EEG-fNIRS-based motor imagery and mental arithmetic tasks involving 29 subjects, and the experimental results show that multi-domain features provide better classification performance than single-domain features, and multi-modality provides better classification performance than single-modality. Furthermore, the experimental results and comparison with other methods demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in EEG and fNIRS information fusion, it can achieve an average classification accuracy of 96.74% in the MI task and 98.42% in the MA task. Our proposed method may provide a general framework for future fusion processing of multimodal brain signals based on EEG-fNIRS. (shrink)

The paper’s target is the historically influential betting interpretation of subjective probabilities due to Ramsey and de Finetti. While there are several classical and well-known objections to this interpretation, the paper focuses on just one fundamental problem: There is a sense in which degrees of belief cannot be interpreted as betting rates. The reasons differ in different cases, but there’s one crucial feature that all these cases have in common: The agent’s degree of belief in a proposition A does not (...) coincide with her degree of belief in a conditional that A would be the case if she were to bet on A, where the belief in this conditional itself is conditioned on the supposition that the agent will have an opportunity to make such a bet. Even though the two degrees of belief sometimes can coincide (they will coincide in those cases when the bet has no expected causal bearings on the proposition A and the opportunity to bet have no evidential bearings on that proposition), it is the latter belief rather than the former that guides the agent’s rational betting behaviour. The reason is that this latter belief takes into consideration potential interferences that bet opportunities and betting itself might create with regard to the proposition to be betted on. It is because of this interference problem that the agent’s degree of belief in A cannot be interpreted as her betting rate for A. (shrink)

Es celebre la definición que hiciera James de la experiencia mística a partir de cuatro rasgos: la inefabilidad, la cualidad noética, la pasividad y la transitoriedad. Por su parte la fenomenología de la mística contemporánea ha señalado la necesidad de distinguir las experiencias místicas de otros tipos de experiencia de trascendencia, y para ello autores como Juan Martín Velasco han rescatado la relevancia de un rasgo que para James era secundario, a saber, la pasividad. A partir de este aporte, es (...) posible entablar un diálogo entre ciencia y mística y lograr así una definición naturalizada de la experiencia mística que revele la importancia tanto de la pasividad mística como de las técnicas para lograrla, de modo que se considere la experiencia mística en su calidad de vía mística. (shrink)