This study investigated how gender shapes the relationships between classroom environment, achievement goals and maths performance. Seventh-grade students (N?=?498) from five urban secondary schools filled in achievement goal orientations and classroom environment scales at the beginning of the second semester. Maths performance was assessed as an average grade four months later. The results indicated gender differences in the perception of teacher and peers support, achievement goals and maths performance. The effects of goal orientations, teacher and peers support on achievement were (...) moderated by gender. Furthermore, the interaction between classroom environment and performance goals on maths grades varied with gender. In the boys? sample, performance-avoidance goals interacted with teacher support, while in the girls? sample, performance-approach goals interacted with peers support in predicting maths grades. The educational implications of these gender differences are discussed. (shrink)

This study evaluated how gender is related to children’s intelligence beliefs, goal orientations and academic achievement and whether there are gender differences in how intelligence beliefs and goal orientations are related to academic achievement. The participants, 362 seventh grade students, completed measures regarding their intelligence beliefs and goal orientations at the beginning of the second semester and the grades were collected at the end of the semester. Girls reported higher scores on incremental belief, mastery goal and higher achievement but lower (...) levels of performance avoidance compared to boys. The relations between intelligence beliefs and academic achievement were fully mediated by both performance goals. Further, there were no gender differences in the associations among intelligence beliefs, goal orientations and achievement. The findings reveal that goal orientations are a mechanism that might explain why intelligence beliefs are l... (shrink)

Background: Nurses and nursing students appear vulnerable to moral distress when faced with ethical dilemmas or decision-making in clinical practice. As a result, they may experience professional dissatisfaction and their relationships with patients, families, and colleagues may be compromised. The impact of moral distress may manifest as anger, feelings of guilt and frustration, a desire to give up the profession, loss of self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. Objectives: The purpose of this review was to describe how dilemmas and environmental, relational, and (...) organizational factors contribute to moral distress in undergraduate student nurses during their clinical experience and professional education. Research design: The research design was a systematic literature review. Method: The search produced a total of 157 articles published between 2004 and 2014. These were screened with the assessment sheet designed by Hawker and colleagues. Four articles matched the search criteria (one quantitative study and three qualitative), and these were separately read and analyzed by the researchers. The process of review and analysis of the data was supervised by a colleague experienced in moral distress who provided an independent quality check. Ethical consideration: Since this was a systematic review, no ethical approval was required. Findings: From the analysis, it emerged that inequalities and healthcare disparities, the relationship with the mentor, and students’ individual characteristics can all impact negatively on the decisions taken and the nursing care provided, generating moral distress. All these factors condition both the clinical experience and learning process, in addition to the professional development and the possible care choices of future nurses. Conclusion: Few studies dealt with moral distress in the setting of nurse education, and there is a knowledge gap related to this phenomenon. The results of this review underline the need for further research regarding interventions that can minimize moral distress in undergraduate nursing students. (shrink)

Whitehead, in his famous book "Process and Reality", proposed a definition of point assuming the concepts of “region” and “connection relation” as primitive. Several years after and independently Grzegorczyk, in a brief but very interesting paper proposed another definition of point in a system in which the inclusion relation and the relation of being separated were assumed as primitive. In this paper we compare their definitions and we show that, under rather natural assumptions, they coincide.

Whitehead, in his famous book Process and Reality, proposed a definition of point assuming the concepts of "region" and "connection relation" as primitive. Several years after and independently Grzegorczyk, in a brief but very interesting paper, proposed another definition of point in a system in which the inclusion relation and the relation of being separated were assumed as primitive. In this paper we compare their definitions and we show that, under rather natural assumptions, they coincide.

A main identifying factor of professions is professionals' willingness to comply with ethical and professional standards, often defined in a code of ethics and conduct. In a period of intense nursing mobility, if the public are aware that health professionals have committed themselves to the drawing up of a code of ethics and conduct, they will have more trust in the health professional they choose, especially if this person comes from another European Member State. The Code of Ethics and Conduct (...) for European Nursing is a programmatic document for the nursing profession constructed by the FEPI (European Federation of Nursing Regulators) according to Directive 2005/36/EC On recognition of professional qualifications , and Directive 2006/123/EC On services in the internal market, set out by the European Commission. This article describes the construction of the Code and gives an overview of some specific areas of importance. The main text of the Code is reproduced in Appendix 1. (shrink)

The present essay focuses on political torture during the twentieth century. It takes a multidisciplinary approach, because it entails insights from history, politics, ideology, anthropology, psychology and literature. The aim of the present essay is to discuss the relation between "Classical" torture (in the past centuries) and "Modern" torture (in the twentieth century), analyzing the phenomena in a comparative perspective and paying attention to the hidden and unconscious motives behind historical facts. What I am interested in is the mechanism by (...) which, in the twentieth century, torture has been reintroduced particularly for political prisoners - that means torture for ideas and conscience, torture as a technique of power and not merely as a technique of punishment. What torture destroys first is the dignity and privacy of the victim; only then does it destroy the victim's freedom and integrity. For this reason, every torture is an act of rape, even a symbolic one. I mean this in psychological terms, not as a demonstration of feminist vocabulary. Every touching of the victim's body is rape, emphasizing the "virility" of the torturer. First of all, the torturer wants to become a master of his victim's body, and only later, a master of the tortured person's mind. I include imagination in the concept of torture, imagination being one of the tools of the act of torturing. In torture, imagination becomes, in my demonstration, a never-ending weapon. (shrink)

As an instrument of preserving the cultural memory of a community, the literary canon is usually a highly stable structure in its core elements. However, with the advent of the Communist regime after the Second World War, the Romanian literary canon underwent a drastic process of reconstruction. As early as the 1940s, what was euphemistically dubbed “revisiting our cultural heritage” actually equated to a radical revision—a purge of the literary canon through the fi lter of Marxism-Leninism. Not only writers of (...) literature, but literary critics themselves were subjected to this process. In this paper, I aim to discuss the role played by literary critics active during Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime in rehabilitating their predecessors. My focus will be on the press debate surrounding Titu Maiorescu’s rehabilitation in 1963. (shrink)

Review of Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation,.

This article analyses the intersecting emotive expressions of nationalism, Euroscepticism, and Europeanness in Britain and Ireland during the European Union's 50th birthday festivities in March 2007. Such discursive manifestations in the Irish and British national press were occasioned by the display and public consumption of fifty-four national cakes at the Berlin Volkfest. The public, ritualistic, and convivial eating of national foods, represented a departure from the usual stale recipe of political summits, and was supposed to excite feelings of identity with (...) the European Union project. Yet the event occasioned press, politicians, and public to delve into backward looking nationalist projections, the result of which was a media event riddled by fragmentation and diverging readings, which have to be interpreted via the multifarious relationships between globalization, national dishes and national identity. (shrink)

During the communist era, Radio Free Europe (RFE) was Romania's favorite radio station. This paper analyzes the role of RFE in everyday life in the strictly controlled Romanian communist state by looking at the broadcasts of RFE's Romanian Department, their audience, and their impact. Drawing largely on the RFE archives at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) and the former secret police files at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), it investigates how (...) radio waves mediated and channeled information while preparing people to embrace political and cultural change. The paper focuses on the circulation of knowledge, media confluences, and human agency. The rituals that developed around the secrecy which governed the listening process, the personal requests, attitudes, and opinions expressed in letters to RFE, and oral and written testimonies, coupled with the disproportionate and, at times, extreme reactions of the communist state, together reveal the carving out of individual spaces that allowed for the preservation of the “self” during Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship. At such critical historical moments, the connection became visible. Through an analysis of recent media representations in which RFE figures, such as Cold Waves, this study also looks at how RFE shaped personal memories of communist times. (shrink)

This paper is about a special version of PDL, proposed by Marcus Kracht, for reasoning about sibling ordered trees. It has four basic programs corresponding to the child, parent, left- and right-sibling relations in such trees. The original motivation for this language is rooted in the field of model-theoretic syntax. Motivated by recent developments in the area of semi-structured data, and, especially, in the field of query languages for XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents, we revisit the language. This renewed interest (...) comes with a special focus on complexity and expressivity aspects of the language, aspects that have so far largely been ignored. We survey and derive complexity results, and spend most of the paper on the most important open question concerning the language: what is its expressive power? We approach this question from two angles: Which first-order properties can be expressed? And which second-order properties? While we are still some way from definitive answers to these questions, we discuss two first-order fragments of the PDL language for ordered trees, and show how the language can be used to express some typical (second-order) problems, like the boolean circuit and the frontier problem. (shrink)

The present study is an ideography applied to the work and intellectual activity of the Romanian-born Jewish scholar Leon Volovici. A careful analysis of his writings reveals a series of essential directions - landmarks and recurrent themes of his work - that Volovici himself followed without hesitation throughout his intellectual becoming. Succinctly, the case of Leon Volovici represents a remarkable model of practicing cultural dialogue and achieving intellectual histories from several perspectives. In addition to brief introductory considerations and concluding remarks, (...) this study focuses upon the following dimensions of his writings: i) the role of intellectual dialogue and the meaning of dialogic culture in Volovici's view; ii) the systematic presentation of the dimensions of Romanian antisemitism in the period between 1850 and 1940; iii) the presentation of the historical and sociological dimensions of the idea of writer in Romanian culture and iv) the remembrance of Volovici's identity in the context of his wanderings through distinct geographic spaces. Our conclusion is that all these dimensions are coherent with one another, making up the general image of Leon Volovici's work. (shrink)

La base conceptual de lo que sería más tarde desarrollado por las vanguardias artísticas fue colonizada por alemanes de pensamiento romántico e idealista, cuya dimensión utópica puede ser fácilmente reconocida en el «antiguo programa del idealismo alemán» (1796), un texto que consagró un pensamiento idealista, que clamó por una nueva racionalidad o una mitología de la razón de Hegel, la intuición intelectual de Schelling y la Humanidad de Schiller. Aunque este proyecto de emancipación desarrollado más tarde por la vanguardia ha (...) perdido su credibilidad para nosotros, todavía tenemos que investigar en qué medida el arte de hoy puede mantener una función social. Este artículo señala algunos conceptos idealistas a la luz de una filosofía del arte, y fue creado siguiendo las líneas esbozadas en la Crítica del juicio de Kant, que han contribuido a la historia de la «avanzada» del arte. (shrink)

In the last decade, the financial underground markets evolved in a surprisingly way, around the world. Eastern Europe is a significant region, where illegal activities associated with the shadow economy became a real problem that affects the governments stability, the economical, political and social status. Due to the influence of old regimes and the current tolerance of the Eastern European nations, this underground corridors emphasize the risk of interfering with the financing platforms of international terrorism or organized crime.

Background: Prisons are contexts where nurses are required to have specific skills to ensure that, in a setting designed for the expiation of crime, prisoners receive the same type of care as anyone else. But this is not always the case, giving rise to ethical issues. Research questions: ‘How do correctional nurses describe their working experience in prisons? What issues emerged?’ Methodology: This is a qualitative descriptive study. Following purposive sampling, we conducted five focus groups. Thematic analysis was used to (...) analyse the data. Participants and research context: Our sample included 31 correctional nurses in seven prisons in Northern Italy. Ethical considerations: The scientific merit of this study was recognized by the Academic Board of the University of Genoa. Approval to conduct the study was obtained from the Liguria Regional Government that funded this study and from the Local Health Authority that was the prison nurses’ employer. Formal consent was obtained from all the nurses who volunteered to participate in this study. Findings: Five themes emerged from the focus groups: (1) prisoners’ healthcare needs, (2) negotiation between custody and care, (3) satisfaction of working in prisons, (4) obstacles to quality care and (5) safety. ‘Manipulation’ was a transversal theme that emerged from all the focus groups. Discussion: The problems generated by the clash between prison security and nursing care priorities did not enable nurses to practice autonomously and provide the best possible to care prisoners, giving rise to ethical issues and moral distress. This in turn causes high nursing turnover rates that negatively impact continuum of care. Conclusion: In Italy, correctional nurses urgently require specific education interventions with the participation of all those who work in prisons. Interventions based on the post-modern concept of restorative nursing could offer prison nurses the opportunity to both resolve ethical issues and reduce moral distress. (shrink)

It is shown the complete equivalence between the theory of continuous (enumeration) fuzzy closure operators and the theory of (effective) fuzzy deduction systems in Hilbert style. Moreover, it is proven that any truth-functional semantics whose connectives are interpreted in [0,1] by continuous functions is axiomatizable by a fuzzy deduction system (but not by an effective fuzzy deduction system, in general).

The ongoing conflict between the economic imperative of stimulating consumption as part of the proliferation of neoliberal ideals of consumer supremacy and growing concern to increase environmental protection presents an opportunity to focus on consumption with respect to ethical behavior. Ethical concerns regarding purchasing and consumption behavior are addressed here in relation to the adoption of principles associated with temperance as applied to self-restraint in food purchase and consumption. The paper outlines theological links to the concept of temperance as applied (...) to environmental and health concerns. Employing a virtue ethics perspective, it examines people’s proactive attitudes that value the environment by adopting waste reduction behaviors. Within the context of normative ethics, it is asked: “Is temperance able to fulfill the role of a lever in consumers’ hands and thereby contribute to minimizing negative environmental impacts associated with food waste?” The research bears witness to the role that consumer behavior may play in promotion and application of temperance in daily life. Study results from a survey conducted in Romania extend the scant information on people’s food waste behavior in relation to religion, underscoring the relationship between religion, temperance-oriented behavior and environmental concerns. (shrink)

IntroductionPalliative care is an emotionally and spiritually high-demanding setting of care. The literature reports on the main issues in order to implement self-care, but there are no models for the organization of the training course. We described the structure of training on self-care and its effects for a Hospital Palliative Care Unit.MethodWe used action-research training experience based mostly on qualitative data. Thematic analysis of data on open-ended questions, researcher’s field notes, oral and written feedback from the trainer and the participants (...) on training outcomes and satisfaction questionnaires were used.ResultsFour major themes emerged: “Professional role and personal feelings”; “Inside and outside the team”; “Do I listen to my emotions in the care relationship?”; “Death: theirs vs. mine.” According to participants’ point of view and researchers’ observations, the training course resulted in ameliorative adjustments of the program; improved skills in self-awareness of own’s emotions and sharing of perceived emotional burden; practicing “compassionate presence” with patients; shared language to address previously uncharted aspects of coping; allowing for continuity of the skills learned; translation of the language learned into daily clinical practices through specific facilitation; a structured staff’s support system for emotional experiences.DiscussionSelf-care is an important enabler for the care of others. The core of our intervention was to encourage a meta-perspective in which the trainees developed greater perspicacity pertaining to their professional role in the working alliance and also recognizing the contribution of their personal emotions to impasse experienced with patients. (shrink)