We report on rapid perceptual learning of intonation contour categories in adults and 9- to 11-year-old children. Intonation contours are temporally extended patterns, whose perception requires temporal integration and therefore poses significant working memory challenges. Both children and adults form relatively abstract representations of intonation contours: Previously encountered and novel exemplars are categorized together equally often, as long as distance from the prototype is controlled. However, age-related differences in categorization performance also exist. Given the same experience, adults form narrower categories (...) than children. In addition, adults pay more attention to the end of the contour, while children appear to pay equal attention to the beginning and the end. The age range we examine appears to capture the tail-end of the developmental trajectory for learning intonation contour categories: There is a continuous effect of age on category breadth within the child group, but the oldest children are adult-like. (shrink)

Introduction -- Prologue -- Book one -- Book two -- Book three -- Book four.

Humans’ indigenous microbes strongly influence organ functions in an age‐ and diet‐dependent manner, adding an important dimension to aging biology that remains poorly understood. Although age‐related differences in the gut microbiota composition correlate with age‐related loss of organ function and diseases, including inflammation and frailty, variation exists among the elderly, especially centenarians and people living in areas of extreme longevity. Studies using short‐lived as well as nonsenescent model organisms provide surprising functional insights into factors affecting aging and implicate attenuating effects (...) of microbes as well as a crucial role for certain transcription factors like forkhead box O. The unexpected beneficial effects of microbes on aged animals imply an even more complex interplay between the gut microbiome and the host. The microbiome constitutes the major interface between humans and the environment, is influenced by biosocial stressors and behaviors, and mediates effects on health and aging processes, while being moderated by sex and developmental stages. (shrink)

There is widespread and growing concern among U.S. consumers about the treatment of farmed animals, and consumers are consequently paying attention to food product labels that indicate humane production practices. However, labels vary in their standards for animal welfare, and prior research suggests that consumers are confused by welfare-related labels: many shoppers cannot differentiate between labels that indicate changes in the way animals are raised and those that do not. We administered a survey to 1,000 American grocery shoppers to better (...) understand the extent to which consumers purchase and pay more for food with certain labels based on an assumption of welfare improvement. Results showed that 86% of shoppers reported purchasing at least one product with the following labels in the last year: “cage or crate-free”, “free-range”, “pasture-raised”, “natural”, “organic”, “no hormone”, “no antibiotic”, “no rBST”, “humane”, “vegetarian-fed”, “grass-fed”, “farm-raised”. Of those who purchased one of the aforementioned labels, 89% did so because they thought the label indicated higher-welfare production practices, and 79% consciously paid more for the product with the label because they thought that the label indicated better-than-standard animal welfare. However, many of these labels lack uniform standards for the production practices they represent, and some labels represent production practices that do not influence animal welfare, thus the degree of the animal welfare impact of a given label is highly variable. These results indicate that labels need to clearly and accurately specify their animal welfare benefits to improve the consumers’ ability to purchase products that align with their expectations. (shrink)

IntroductionAnorexia nervosa promotes psychological distress in caregivers who adopt different coping strategies. Dysfunctional caregiving styles exacerbate further distress in the patient promoting the maintenance of the illness. We aimed to assess the possible contribution of personality traits of caregivers to the adoption of different coping strategies to deal with the affected relative.MethodsAbout 87 adolescents with AN were recruited. Their parents completed the Family Coping Questionnaire for Eating Disorders and the Temperament and Character Inventory-Revised. Differences between mothers and fathers were assessed (...) through the independent sample t-test. Multivariate regression analyses were run to assess if personality traits, the occurrence of psychiatry conditions in the parents, the marital status, and the duration of the illness predicted parental coping strategies.ResultsThe group of mothers showed higher levels of avoidance and seeking for information coping strategies than the sample of fathers. Lower illness duration predicted higher collusion with the illness in both parents. Harm avoidance, cooperativeness, and self-directedness positively predicted parental coercion, collusion, and seeking for information strategies with some differences between mothers and fathers.DiscussionIllness duration and personality traits of parents affect the type of parental coping strategies developed to face AN in adolescents. These variables should be considered in the assessment of families of adolescents with AN and may be addressed to promote more fine-tuned clinical interventions for caregivers. (shrink)

Do all clinical research publications show strong application of ethics principles and respect for biomedical law? We examined, for the year 2009, the ethics requirements displayed on the website of 30 leading medical journals with an impact factor (IF) >10, and 30 others with an IF <10. We carried out a short study looking at the relationship between the IF of a journal and the ethics requirements in its instructions to authors. We show that the IF of a biomedical journal (...) bears a direct relationship to its ethics requirements. Such results should improve the ethics requirements of all biomedical journals, especially those with low IF, so that they are internationally standardised to the higher standard required by journals with higher IF. (shrink)

Emily Butler, a psychologist and Professor of Family Studies and Human Development (FSHD) at the University of Arizona, passed away on January 31, 2023. Dr. Butler was born on October 3, 1963 in Wi...

To promote ethical practices, healthcare managers must understand the ethical challenges encountered by key stakeholders. To characterize ethical challenges in Veterans Administration facilities from the perspectives of managers, clinicians, patients, and ethics consultants. We conducted focus groups with patients and managers ; semi-structured interviews with managers, clinicians, and ethics committee chairpersons. Data were analyzed using content analysis. Managers reported that the greatest ethical challenge was fairly distributing resources across programs and services, whereas clinicians identified the effect of resource constraints on (...) patient care. Ethics committee chairpersons identified end-of-life care as the greatest ethical challenge, whereas patients identified obtaining fair, respectful, and caring treatment. Perspectives on ethical challenges varied depending on the respondent's role. Understanding these differences can help managers take practical steps to address these challenges. Further, ethics committees seemingly, are not addressing the range of ethical challenges within their institutions. (shrink)

Esta investigación determinó áreas críticas de interés en programas de ingeniería industrial para la incorporación de la gamificación en tres universidades de Colombia desde la percepción de estudiantes y docentes. Se evaluó la actualidad de los programas participantes y sus planes de estudio, lo que permitió identificar temas comunes entre las instituciones de educación mencionadas. Se aplicaron 125 encuestas, 109 a estudiantes (87,2%) y 16 a docentes (12,8%). Los docentes consideran de mayor complejidad temas del área de Investigación de Operaciones, (...) mientras que para los estudiantes corresponde principalmente a Producción. No se encontraron correlaciones significativas entre las tres universidades. (shrink)

This book examines the U.S economy from 1967 to 2011 and utilizes a new method to predict the future of the economy as far ahead as 2030. Projections using estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Census are used to further project personal income, personal income annual change, and disposable personal income to 2030.

My life during those three months looks a lot like the public mental health system. Local Community Mental Health agencies (CMHs) are required, on a daily basis, to meet the needs of people with mental illness in a system that everyone knows is tragically under funded. The system does what it can with the resources it has and looks towards the next fiscal year, with fingers crossed, hoping for some relief. Some in the system have given up hope, and consider (...) it a "success" if their funding isn�t cut or eliminated. (shrink)

A well-known relativistic action at a distance interaction of two unequal masses is altered so as to yield purely Newtonian radial forces with fixed particle rest masses in the system center-of-momentum inertial frame. Although particle masses experience no kinematic mass increase in this frame, speeds are naturally restricted to less than the speed of light. We derive a relation between the center-of-momentum frame total Newtonian energy and the composite rest mass. In a new proper time quantum formalism, we obtain an (...) L2(R4 ⊗ R4, C) Hilbert space by varying individual particle rest masses. We propose the use of density operators, recognizing that the auxiliary proper time parameter is not an observable. The quantum formalism is applied to our altered version of the relativistic harmonic oscillator. Our generalized coherent states yield four-dimensional wave packets which follow the correct classical world lines. Appendices contain reviews of classical Hamiltonian reparametrization (incorporating our notion of manifest covariance), and a comparison of this work with the literature. (shrink)

Scholars exploring the logic of Rousseau's voting rules have typically turned to the connection between Rousseau and the Marquis de Condorcet. Though Condorcet could not have had a direct influence on Rousseau's arguments about the choice of decision rules in "Social Contract," the possibility of a connection has encouraged the view that Rousseau's selection of voting rules was based on epistemic reasons. By turning to alternative sources of influence on Rousseau--the work of Hugo Grotius and particularly that of Samuel Pufendorf--a (...) moral, and not purely epistemic, logic of rules governing collective decision making emerges. For Rousseau, as for Pufendorf, the proper choice of voting rule can elicit the appropriate attitude of an individual with respect to the decision of the whole, and can support the morally significant activity of acknowledging error upon discovering that one has voted against the general will. (shrink)

Cet article analyse le genre de la citoyenneté et des droits dans la Tchécoslovaquie entre 1918 et 1945. En 1918 la nouvelle République démocratique a proclamé l’égalité, y compris l’égalité entre hommes et femmes. Aux femmes étaient accordés toute une série de nouveaux droits, le plus important étant le vote ; elles sont devenues, en principe, des citoyennes égales aux citoyens. Néanmoins, il est rapidement devenu évident que cette égalité citoyenne n’était appliquée que dans le domaine politique ; le genre (...) est resté un facteur important dans la détermination des droits civils des femmes. Ainsi, elles étaient « des femmes » d’abord, et leurs droits dépendaient des rôles considerés comme acceptables pour le sexe féminin. Cela est devenu très clair en 1939, quand le droit des femmes à la participation politique a été retiré parce que la vie politique est devenue « trop dangereuse » pour les femmes. (shrink)

A collection of letters portraying the life and times of this great medieval scholar, the devoted secretary of Archbishop Theobald, and the faithful friend and counsellor of Becket. Volume 1 of his correspondence, 'The Early Letters,' long out of print, is available on microfiche.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Competition among scientists for funding, positions and prestige, among other things, is often seen as a salutary driving force in U.S. science. Its effects on scientists, their work and their relationships are seldom considered. Focus-group discussions with 51 mid- and early-career scientists, on which this study is based, reveal a dark side of competition in science. According to these scientists, competition contributes to strategic game-playing in science, a decline in free and open sharing of information and methods, sabotage of others’ (...) ability to use one’s work, interference with peer-review processes, deformation of relationships, and careless or questionable research conduct. When competition is pervasive, such effects may jeopardize the progress, efficiency and integrity of science. (shrink)

The development of empirical research methods in both the social and the natural sciences has had a deep impact on the self-conception of philosophy. Jürgen Habermas aims to strike a balance between two ways of understanding the relationship between philosophy and the sciences: between a conception of philosophy as an Archimedean point from which to view the human condition and a conception of philosophy as a mere artefact of Western culturally embedded assumptions. Against the first, Habermas aims to integrate the (...) resources and methods of the social sciences into philosophy and to deny that philosophy can proceed outside of historical and social contexts. On his view, philosophical knowledge is produced communicatively, through socially embedded dialogue. Against the second, Habermas claims fundamental questions about the human condition cannot be answered by purely social or natural scientific approaches. His “postmetaphysical” methodology aims to integrate empirical resources into philosophy without losing sight of what is unique to philosophy: namely, its ability to step back from the empirical data in order to reconstruct in a systematic way underlying universal truths about us, our societies and our place in the world. (shrink)

John of Salisbury (c. 1115-1180) was the foremost political theorist of his age. He was trained in scholastic theology and philosophy at Paris, and his writings are invaluable for summarizing many of the metaphysical speculations of his time. The Policraticus is his main work, and is regarded as the first complete work of political theory to be written in the Latin Middle Ages. Cary Nederman's new edition and translation, currently the only version available in English, is primarily aimed at (...) undergraduate students of the history of political thought and medieval history. His new translation shows how important this text is in understanding the mores, forms of conduct and beliefs of the most powerful and learned segments of twelfth century Western Europe. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores and reevaluates the place of Plato in the history of liberty. In the first half, reevaluating the view that he invents a concept of ‘positive liberty’ in the Republic, I argue for two claims: that he does not do so, insofar as this is not the way that virtuous psychological self-mastery in the Republic is understood, and that the Republic works primarily with the inverse concept of slavery, relying on entrenched Greek ideas about the badness of the (...) status of being a slave and the actions and dispositions associated with it. Turning in the second half to seek Platonic innovation not in the domain of ‘positive liberty’ but in reflection on liberty as a political value, understood as the liberty of action of citizens within the laws, I argue for two further claims: that as such a political value, liberty is limited and reshaped in both the Republic and the Laws to be compatible with obedience to rule / willingness to be ruled, ideally willing obedience; and that for this limited and reshaped value to be secured, such obedience must be manifested not only in regard to a constitution’s laws, but also to the magistrates who hold office within it. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that brain death is death because, despite the appearance of genuine integration, the brain-dead body does not in fact possess the unity that is proper to a human organism. A brain-dead body is not a single entity, but a multitude of organs and tissues functioning in a coordinated manner with the help of artificial life support. In order to support this claim, I first lay out Hoffmann and Rosenkrantz’s ontological account of the requirements for organismal (...) unity and summarize an earlier paper in which I apply this account to the brain death debate. I then further support this ontological argument by developing an analogy between the requirements for the unity of an organism and the requirements for the unity of an orchestra. To do so, I begin by examining the role that a conductor plays in unifying a traditional orchestra, and then go on to show that the human organism functions like a traditional orchestra that relies upon a conductor for its unity. Next, I consider the conditions required to achieve orchestral unity in conductorless orchestras and show that, in contrast to simpler organisms like plants, the postnatal human organism lacks those conditions. I argue, in other words, that although conductorless orchestras do exist, the human organism is not one of them. Like a traditional orchestra without a conductor, the brain-dead body is not a unified whole. (shrink)

On a version of consent theory that tempts many, predatory sexual relations involving significant power imbalances (e.g. between professors and students, adults and teenagers, or employers and employees) are wrong because they violate consent-centric norms. In particular, the wronged party is said to have been incapable of consenting to the predation, and the sexual wrong is located in the encounter’s nonconsensuality. Although we agree that these are sexual wrongs, we resist the idea that they are always nonconsensual. We argue instead (...) that it is possible for students, teenagers, employees, etc. to fully consent to sexually predatory encounters; denying as much renders survivors of predation vulnerable to compounding harms. Survivors face a dilemma: give up either their understanding of their experience as wrong, or their self-conception as an agent capable of consenting. We call the latter phenomenon agential demotion. (shrink)

Berkeley writes in his ThreeDialogues Between Hylas and Philonous that he “acknowledge[s] a twofold state of things, the one ectypal or natural, the other archetypal and eternal[.] The former was created in time; the latter existed from everlasting in the mind of God”. On a straightforward reading of this passage, it looks as though Berkeley is an indirect perception theorist, who thinks that our sensory ideas are copies or resemblances of archetypal divine ideas. But this is problematic because Berkeley’s rejection (...) of scepticism seems partly to rest on a rejection of indirect perception. In this paper, I consider, and reject, three different approaches to solving this problem: that Berkeley’s remarks on archetypes are unrepresentative; that Berkeley is indeed committed to divine archetypal ideas ; and that Berkeley thinks divine archetypal ideas are identical to human ideas. I finally settle on a fourth strategy, which involves reading Berkeley’s archetypes as divine powers to produce ideas. I claim that this reading is consistent with the texts, that it has an etymological basis and philosophical precedent, and that it resolves the problems associated with the other three approaches to archetypes. (shrink)

In this study, we investigated whether differences in the experience of regret may be a potential explanation for damaging behaviours associated with psychopathy and criminal offending. Participants were incarcerated offenders (n = 60) and non-incarcerated controls (n = 20). Psychopathic traits were characterised with the Psychopathic Checklist: Screening Version. Regret was assessed by responses to outcomes on a simulated gambling task. Incarcerated offenders experienced a reduced sense of regret as compared to non-incarcerated controls. We obtained some evidence that specific psychopathic (...) factors and facets could differentially relate to the experience and use of emotions. Our data provide initial evidence of important associations between negative emotions and decision behaviour in the context of criminal offending. (shrink)

This essay seeks a philosophical understanding of the nature of kairos that, in turn, discloses the nature of philosophizing. This essay claims that the kairos of philosophy is dialogue, and that dialogue is kairological in two ways: (1) Dialogue is not just a phenomenon that occurs in chronological time but, rather, imposes its own time in order to see how life (or being) itself is disclosed to us; (2) dialogue is kairological because it denotes a moment in which we are (...) pushed into the open, which demands our receptivity and response. Section I explains kairos as “circumstance” in Aristotle, as a required point of view in Heidegger, and as related to the beginning of creation in Schelling. Section II understands dialogue, as the kairos of philosophy, as a crisis—a breaking away from an ordinary understanding of and experience in the world. This destabilizing experience resonates with the untimeliness of philosophizing. (shrink)

Simple text and full color photographs describe how to be responsible, not a bully.

This article suggests that the enterprise of Mark Bevir's book (The Logic of the History of Ideas, Cambridge, 1999), is the reverse of what his title implies. Bevir seeks not to delineate the peculiar logic of a specialised subfield of history called the ‘history of ideas’, but rather the logic which underlies historical pursuit considered in general as the ‘explanation of belief’. If this is so, then the relationship between belief, meaning, and speech act in intellectual texts, and the task (...) and method of the intellectual historian, must be reinterpreted along lines closer to those of Quentin Skinner than Bevir would allow. Indeed, Bevir's criticism of Skinner, which hinges on his own account of malapropism, is shown here to fail. The article concludes with brief reflections on the purpose and nature of studying the ‘history of ideas’. (shrink)

This paper discusses ways in which empirical research investigating sexual networks can further understanding of the transmission of HIV in London, using information from a 24-month period of participant observation and 53 open-ended, in-depth interviews with eighteen men and one woman who have direct and indirect sexual links with each other. These interviews enabled the identification of a wider sexual network between 154 participants and contacts during the year August 1994-July 1995. The linked network data help to identify pathways of (...) transmission between individuals who are HIV+ and those who are HIVolderyounger’ men, and with male prostitutes. There appears to be considerable on-going transmission of HIV in London. The majority of participants reported having had unprotected anal and/or vaginal sex within a variety of relationships. The implications of these findings for policies designed to prevent the transmission of HIV are discussed. (shrink)

While historical cultural materials inform users of the past, they may also contain language that perpetuates long-entrenched patterns of discrimination. In organizing and providing access to such materials, cultural heritage institutions must negotiate historical language and context with the comprehension and perspectives of modern audiences. Excerpted from a larger project exploring representation and access around historical terminology and personal identity, the present work offers insight into how knowl­edge organization systems may be used to help modern users confront and make sense (...) of past, discriminatory language in the archive. Using keywords drawn from the titles of 19th and 20th sideshow performer photographs, this work details the construction of a mapping dictionary that brings together corresponding terminology from several vocabulary sources along with annotations designed to explain historical terms to modern audiences. The development of this dictionary revealed several major types of problematic and potentially discriminatory language including historical euphemisms, misnomers, outdated terms, and sensationalist monikers. The finished dictionary offers opportunities to address these through explanatory annotations and to provide a richer, multi-perspective approach to subject analysis for these and other historical materials. (shrink)