Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one what you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

Two classic learning situations are critically reviewed and interpreted from a synergetic point of view: human learning of complex skills, and animal discrimination learning. Both show typical characteristics of nonlinear phase transitions: instability, fluctuations, critical slowing down and reorganisation. Plateaus in the acquisition curves of complex skills can be viewed as phases of arrested progress in which a reorganisation of simple skills is necessary before their integration into complex units is possible. Fluctuations and critical slowing down are expressed in instances (...) of "vicarious trial-and-error," which describe the oscillating behavior of rats at a choice point that is shown only just before discrimination learning is completed. It is concluded that education might pay more attention to the role of individual learning rhythms. (shrink)

In today's complex business world, the question of business ethics is increasingly gaining importance as managers and employees face numerous ethical dilemmas in their jobs. The ethical climate in the Turkish business environment is also at a critical stage, and the business community as a whole is troubled by ethical problems. This study attempts to determine the effect of individual, managerial and organizational factors on the ethical judgments of Turkish managers, and to evaluate the ethical perceptions of these managers. The (...) findings of this study reveal that the ethics score, the measure of ethical judgment, of Turkish managers differs significantly only with respect to gender and that female managers have higher ethics score than male managers. Other individual, managerial and organizational factors considered in this study do not have any significant effect on the ethical judgments of the managers. A comparative analysis between female and male managers in terms of their ranking of the eleven ethical business scenarios, ranking of the sixteen unethical acts, ranking of the factors influencing managers to engage in unethical practices, and ranking of the various parties to whom a company is socially responsible enables the researchers to enlighten the subject of business ethics in Turkey. (shrink)

This study presents an empirical investigation of the ethical perceptions of the future managers - Turkish university students majoring in the Business Administration and Industrial Engineering departments of selected public and private Turkish universities - with a special emphasis on gender. The perceptions of the university students pertaining to the business world, the behaviors of employees, and the factors leading to unethical behavior are analyzed. The statistically significant differences reveal that female students have more ethical perceptions about the Turkish business (...) climate, behavior of employees, and the ethicalness of the behavior of the employees in comparison with their male counterparts. (shrink)

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to (...) me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

Withdrawal of active treatment is common in medical practice, especially in critical care medicine. Usually, however, it involves patients who are unable to take part in the decision making process. As the case of Ms B shows, doctors are sometimes reluctant to withdraw active treatment when the patient is awake and requesting such a course of action. In theory, having a competent patient should facilitate clinical decision making, so where does the problem arise? It is argued that latent medical paternalism (...) may come to the surface when doctors are asked by patients to follow a course of action which is in conflict with their own perspective. (shrink)

Do we directly perceive physical objects? What is the significance of the qualification ‘directly’ here? Austin famously denied that there was a unique interpretation by which we could make sense of the traditional debate in the philosophy of perception. I look here at Thompson Clarke’s discussion of G. E. Moore and surface perception to answer Austin’s scepticism.

Facing increased competition, universities are driven to project a positive image to their internal and external stakeholders. Therefore some of these institutions have begun to develop and implement corporate identity programs as part of their corporate strategies. This study describes a Turkish higher education institution’s social responsibility initiatives. Along with this example, the study also analyzes a specific case using concepts from the Corporate Identity and Corporate Social Responsibility literature. The motives leading the university to manage its corporate identity, the (...) social responsibility initiatives in the local and national communities, and the possible benefits of these initiatives for the parties involved are all identified. The major finding is that philanthropy is one of the main elements of Istanbul Bilgi University’s corporate identity program and that the university has altruistic motives for its social responsibility initiatives. (shrink)