The role of metalinguistic ability in L2 development is seriously underestimated. It may be seen both (1) as a means of initiating or boosting the flow of primary linguistic data and (2) as a generator of substitute knowledge (derived, but epistemologically distinct from domain-specific knowledge) that may compete with or compensate for perceived gaps in the learners current underlying competence. It cannot serve as a simple means of distinguishing the rival theoretical positions.

Science educators and policy makers have long justified science education and science literacy on the basis of its utility/usefulness in daily life outside the classroom. The purpose of this article is to analyze utility justifications for science education in general and evolution understanding in particular, focusing on whether or not situations that require science/evolution understanding are common in everyday life and how likely citizens are to apply their classroom-acquired knowledge to the problem at hand. In response to this analysis, I (...) maintain that efforts to convince students of the practical utility of evolution in their daily lives are often misguided and largely irrelevant to individual students. I propose a small set of justifications that might be more relevant, interesting, and convincing to young people, then close with some educational implications of my position. This chapter is meant to initiate a wider conversation among evolution educators about what student-centered justifications for evolution education might be, including expansion and criticism of the list presented here. (shrink)

There are widely held premises that suicide is almost exclusively the result of mental illness and there is “strong evidence for successfully detecting and managing suicidality in healthcare”. In this context, ‘zero-suicide’ policies have emerged, and suicide risk assessment tools have become a normative component of psychiatric practice. This essay discusses how suicide evolved from a moral to a medical problem and how, in an effort to reduce suicide, a paternalistic healthcare response emerged to predict those at high risk. The (...) evidence for the premises is critiqued and shown to be problematic; and it is found that strong paternalistic interventions are being used more often than acknowledged. Using a Principles approach, the ethics of overriding autonomy in suicide prevention is considered. Ethical concerns are identified with the current approach which are potentially amplified by the use of these risk assessments. Furthermore, it is identified that the widespread use of risk assessments in health settings is equivalent to screening without regard to the ethical principles of screening. The essay concludes that this is unethical; that we should abandon the use of standardized suicide risk assessments and ‘zero-suicide’ policy; and that this may improve outcomes. (shrink)

Photographer Smith allows a rare and intimate glimpse of the unique region of Southern Apalachia. Smith's images evoke a range of emotions and reveal the reality behind the stereotypes of rural Southern life.

The issue of the proper goals of science education and science teacher education have been a focus of the science education and philosophy of science communities in recent years. More particularly, the issue of whether belief/acceptance of evolution and/or understanding are the appropriate goals for evolution educators and the issue of the precise nature of the distinctions among the terms knowledge, understanding, belief, and acceptance have received increasing attention in the 12 years since we first published our views on these (...) subjects. During that time, our own views about these issues have evolved, and this article presents a reconsideration of both these distinctions and the propriety of these goals. In particular, the present paper continues our discussion of the nature of belief as it relates to science education, and more specifically to evolution education. We extend that work to consider the import of the distinction between belief and acceptance. (shrink)

In the business world, one of the key challenges is how to survive in ever changing business environments and outperforming the competitors, while keeping the operational cost at minimum and profits at maximum level. In other words, this can be described as the problem of improving operational efficiency and reducing cost. Over the past few years due to global financial challenges, it has become even more important to improve the operational efficiency and reduce costs to survive through these tough conditions. (...) Like other successful implementations of Lean philosophy, especially in automobile, aerospace, steel and healthcare, it can be applied in cable manufacturing to achieve competitive, sustainable and profitable processes. The main focus of Lean philosophy is to create value for the stakeholders and end customers by reducing the non-value added activities or waste, and laying a strong foundation towards sustainable growth, by focusing on continuous process improvement. The overall philosophy provides a focused approach for continuous process improvement and the targeting of a variety of tools and methods to bring improvements. This paper presents case studies for Lean scheduling of manufacturing processes and exemplify how Lean scheduling processes allow organisations to maintain the continuous improvement philosophy. This paper also addresses the key elements of rescheduling processes i.e. how to schedule and when to schedule. Further, the paper will exemplify key benefits of Lean scheduling and how the Cable industry could benefit from the proposed approach. (shrink)

Lockheed Martin Corp. has funded research to generate a framework and methodology for developing semantic reasoning applications to support the discipline oflntelligence Analysis. This chapter outlines that framework, discusses how it may be used to advance the information sharing and integrated analytic needs of the Intelligence Community, and suggests a system I software architecture for such applications.

Each annual Ontology Summit initiative makes a statement appropriate to each Summit’s theme as part of our general advocacy designed to bring ontology science and engineering into the mainstream. The theme this year is "Towards an Open Ontology Repository". This communiqué represents the joint position of those who were engaged in the year's summit discourse on an Open Ontology Repository (OOR) and of those who endorse below. In this discussion, we have agreed that an "ontology repository is a facility where (...) ontologies and related information artifacts can be stored, retrieved and managed." -/- We believe in the promise of semantic technologies based on logic, databases and the Semantic Web, a Web of exposed data and of interpretations of that data (i.e., of semantics), using common standards. Such technologies enable distinguishable, computable, reusable, and sharable meaning of Web and other artifacts, including data, documents, and services. We also believe that making that vision a reality requires additional supporting resources and these resources should be open, extensible, and provide common services over the ontologies. (shrink)

_The Other Adam Smith_ represents the next wave of critical thinking about the still under-examined work of this paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker. Not simply another book about Adam Smith, it allows and even necessitates his inclusion in the realm of theory in the broadest sense. Moving beyond his usual economic and moral philosophical texts, Mike Hill and Warren Montag take seriously Smith's entire corpus, his writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy, as constituting a comprehensive—though (...) highly contestable—system of thought. We meet not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (shrink)

The Other Adam Smith represents the next wave of critical thinking about the still under-examined work of this paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker. Not simply another book about Adam Smith, it allows and even necessitates his inclusion in the realm of theory in the broadest sense. Moving beyond his usual economic and moral philosophical texts, Mike Hill and Warren Montag take seriously Smith's entire corpus, his writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy, as constituting a (...) comprehensive—though highly contestable—system of thought. We meet not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (shrink)

Alison Smith _Agnes Varda_ Manchester University Press, 1998 ISBN: 0 7190 5061 213 pp.

This book explores the influence of Foucault's later writings on basic theoretical and research concerns in the social sciences. The introduction contextualizes the development of Foucault's writings within a biographical frame and leads into Foucault's College de France lecture, Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution which, along with Colin Gordon's commentary, raises the issues crucial to Foucault's latter project - the relationship between reason and liberty. The answer suggested - involving a reformulation of the relationship between the subject and power - (...) connects with the issues raised in subsequent chapters, including Pasquino's focus on the relationship between the governmentality of the modern state and the self-governing individual and Meuret's analysis of the link between Adam Smith's novel conception of political economy and the emergent political structures of modern capitalist states. The following four chapters all extend Foucault's insights into new domains of social analysis, namely the role of language in constructing and governing the econmomy (Miller and Rose), and the shifting relations between sovereignty and responsibility in the welfare state (Donzelot). (shrink)

Foucault announced that his lectures of 1977—78 would be on `biopolitics'; in the end, they were on governmentality: from the pastoral of souls to the raison d'état. He announced his lectures of 1978—79 would also be on `biopolitics', but then presented lectures based on textual analysis, examining the way Smith and Ferguson invented a distinctive conception of civil society from that of Hobbes, Rousseau or Montesquieu, one that opened a site of civil society. These latter lectures continued by examining (...) the birth of neo-liberalism in the very specific conjuncture of Germany at the end of the 1930s; it subsequently migrated, in a further mutation of `anarchocapitalism', to Chicago. Foucault adopted radically opposed methods in these two lecture courses. (shrink)

_Philosophy Through Science Fiction_ offers a fun, challenging, and accessible way in to the issues of philosophy through the genre of science fiction. Tackling problems such as the possibility of time travel, or what makes someone the same person over time, the authors take a four-pronged approach to each issue, providing · a clear and concise introduction to each subject · a science fiction story that exemplifies a feature of the philosophical discussion · historical and contemporary philosophical texts that investigate (...) the issue with rigor, and · glossary, plot profiles of pertinent science fiction stories and films, and questions for further reflection. _Philosophy Through Science Fiction_ includes stories from contemporary science fiction writers including Greg Egan and Mike Resnick, as well as from classic authors like Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein. Philosophy readings include historical pieces by René Descartes and David Hume, and contemporary pieces by John Searle and Mary Midgley. (shrink)

This is the first dictionary dedicated to the work of Jean Baudrillard. It explains and contextualises more than a hundred key concepts, terms, influences and topics within his thought. An essential reference for students and scholars of Baudrillard, it also serves as an authoritative overview of how his ideas have shaped a broad range of disciplines, from art, architecture, film and photography to sociology, philosophy, human geography, media studies and cultural studies. The entries are written by 35 leading Baudrillard specialists (...) from around the world, including Rex Butler, Mike Gane, Gary Genosko, Victoria Grace, Diane Rubenstein and Andrew Wernick. (shrink)

Notwithstanding its obvious educational importance, the idea of an ethics of belief has been little explored by educational philosophers. The notion turns out to be more complex and to involve more difficulties than is usually supposed. Exploring these complexities and difficulties opens up many avenues of philosophical and educational inquiry. These in turn can enrich our reflections on contemporary educational developments and on ethical aspects of teaching. In particular they alert us to the need for educational theorists to give overdue (...) attention to the intellectual virtues. (shrink)

The unknown southern continent is perhaps one of the most puzzling aspects of Gerardus Mercator's otherwise strikingly modern cartography. This paper is an attempt to reconsider it in view of Renaissance cosmology and to outline two factors that led Mercator to engage with the mythical terra australis over decades: his socio-professional status as an artisan and the desire to be a philosopher, on the one hand, and the harsh business of mapmaking in the Low Countries on the other. The resulting (...) unknown southern continent was intimately connected to the classical tradition and geocentric cosmology but also to the specific social niche Mercator was trying to establish for himself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Drawing a framework from strategic stakeholder theory and using 1999 to 2010 panel data from the United Kingdom’s (UK) non-life insurance industry, we examine the effect of reinsurance on the decisions to donate to charities, and the amount given. We find that reinsurance substitutes for charitable giving as it optimizes the interests of multiple stakeholders. We further note that corporate giving is directly related to the size and age of insurers, proportion of female directorships and insider ownership, but generally inhibited (...) by chief executive officer (CEO) bonus plans, dominant shareholders, and financial experts on the board. Interestingly, when reinsurance interacts with board-level variables we find that the donations decision is positively related to CEO bonus plans, and negatively linked with inside ownership and the proportion of female board members. Our research results could have important implications for stakeholders. (shrink)

According to Paul Draper and Ryan Nichols the practice of philosophy of religion—and especially its theistically committed practitioners—regularly violate norms of rationality, objectivity, and impartiality in the review, assessment, and weighing of evidence. (Draper and Nichols, 2013). We consider the charge of epistemic partisanship and show that the observational data does not illustrate a norm-violating form of inquiry. The major oversight in the charge of epistemic partiality is the epistemically central role of prior probabilities in determining the significance of incongruent (...) evidence. We argue that reasonably divergent views on the likelihood of theism on incongruent evidence can also account for differences in significance. We conclude that it is an epistemic requirement that committed theists regard incongruent evils as much less significant evidence against theism than do lukewarm theists, agnostics, or atheists. Differences in the significance of evidence quite properly reflect differences in commitments to theism. (shrink)

According to Brentano's theory of boundaries, no boundary can exist without being connected with a continuum. But there is no specifiable part of the continuum, and no point, which is such that we may say that it is the existence of that part or of that point which conditions the boundary. - An adequate theory of the continuum must now recognize that boundaries be boundaries only in certain directions and not in others. This leads to consequences in other areas, too.

ONE Introduction The history of psychology in the twentieth century is a story of the divorce and remarriage of psychology and philosophy. ...

We have a variety of different ways of dividing up, classifying, mapping, sorting and listing the objects in reality. The theory of granular partitions presented here seeks to provide a general and unified basis for understanding such phenomena in formal terms that is more realistic than existing alternatives. Our theory has two orthogonal parts: the first is a theory of classification; it provides an account of partitions as cells and subcells; the second is a theory of reference or intentionality; it (...) provides an account of how cells and subcells relate to objects in reality. We define a notion of well-formedness for partitions, and we give an account of what it means for a partition to project onto objects in reality. We continue by classifying partitions along three axes: (a) in terms of the degree of correspondence between partition cells and objects in reality; (b) in terms of the degree to which a partition represents the mereological structure of the domain it is projected onto; and (c) in terms of the degree of completeness with which a partition represents this domain. (shrink)

Google Trends reveals that at the time we were writing our article on ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ in 2007 almost nobody was searching the internet for ‘Big Data’. It was only towards the very end of 2010 that the term began to register, just ahead of an explosion of interest from 2011 onwards. In this commentary we take the opportunity to reflect back on the claims we made in that original paper in light of more recent discussions about (...) the social scientific implications of the inundation of digital data. Did our paper, with its emphasis on the emergence of, what we termed, ‘social transactional data’ and ‘digital byproduct data’ prefigure contemporary debates that now form the basis and rationale for this excellent new journal? Or was the paper more concerned with broader methodological, theoretical and political debates that have somehow been lost in all of the loud babble that has come to surround Big Data. Using recent work on the BBC Great British Class Survey as an example this brief paper offers a reflexive and critical reflection on what has become – much to the surprise of its authors – one of the most cited papers in the discipline of sociology in the last decade. (shrink)

One of the central debates in current analytic philosophy of time is whether time consists only of relations of simultaneity, earlier and later (B-relations), or whether it also consists of properties of futurity, presentness and pastness (A-properties). If time consists only of B-relations, then all temporal determinations are permanent; if at anyone time it is the case that birth is later than Homer's birth, then it is ever after the case that Dante's birth is later than Homer's. The temporal position (...) of Dante's birth vis a vis Homer's is permanently fixed. Moreover, if B-relations are the only temporal determinations possessed by events, then each event, regardless of when it occurs, is equally as real as each other event. Each event sustains B-relations to other events, and thus in respect of its temporal determinations is ontologically undistinguished from each other event. Why should Dante's birth be "more real" than Homer's just because it is later than it? But if time also consists of A-properties, then some events are ontologically distinguished by virtue of their temporal determinations; the events that are or exist in the tensed sense, the events that possess the A-property of present- ness, have a reality not possessed by other events. All other events are no longer (are past) or are not yet (are future), and in this respect are deprived of the being, the presentness, possessed by the events that are. The A-properties possessed by events are impermanent temporal determinations; if an event possesses a certain A-property at one time, then there is another time at which the event will not have that A-property but some other A-property instead. First an event is future, then it is present, and finally it is past. This shows that the issue between the defenders of the B-theory and the defenders of the A-theory is of fundamental ontological importance. But analytic philosophers discuss this issue ,almost exclusively in terms of the language we use to describe the temporal determinations of events. They engage in what Quine calls "semantic ascent", i.e., redirecting their concern from the "things themselves" to the words we use to describe things. Defenders of the A-theory argue that tensed sentences and their tokens, sentences containing tensed copulas like "is", "was" and "will be" and adverbs like "now" and "at present", are untranslatable or unanalyzable into tenseless sentences about B- related events, and therefore that the tensed copulas and ad- verbs refer to A-properties of events. Defenders of the B-theory argue that tensed sentences or their tokens are translatable or analyzable into tenseless sentences about B-related events, and hence that the tensed sentences or tokens refer only to B-related events. While this semantic ascent is not without its advantages, it seems to me that additional light can be thrown on this subject if it is approached from a nonlinguistic phenomenological perspective. This approach is all the more needed since this particular issue in the philosophy of time has not been explicitly addressed by any of the practitioners of "phenomenology" (in the wide sense), such as Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty .Indeed, phenomenologists have generally seemed to be unaware of the debate between the A-theorists and B-theorists. This issue has been a concern exclusively of analytic philosophers (with the exception perhaps of the early 20th century British Idealist John McTaggart.) In this paper, I will point to a number of phenomenological facts that are pertinent to the debate. These facts all favor the A-theory. I shall make the case that the basic phenomenological truths about time simply cannot be accounted for by the B-theory . (shrink)

Business students have long been noted for their differential proclivity to engage in academic misconduct. Unfortunately, the potential for misconduct has been exacerbated in recent years by rapid advances in technology, easy access to information, competitive pressures, and the proliferation of websites that provide students access to information that allows them to directly circumvent the learning process. Using a convenience sample of 631 students matriculating in various business majors at four U.S. universities and structural equations modeling procedures, this study assesses (...) the effects of psychological factors on business students’ propensities to utilize the services of homework assistance websites. Specifically, we examine how “Dark Triad” personality traits (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) interact with Fraud Diamond elements to influence student decisions to engage the services of these websites. We find that each Dark Triad trait exerts a significant influence on at least one of the Fraud Diamond elements, which in turn have a significant direct or indirect positive association with students’ reported intentions to utilize, and reported utilization of, these websites. (shrink)

Moti Mizrahi provides experimental evidence according to which subjects judge that a person ought to ? even when she cannot ?. He takes his results to constitute a falsification of the alleged intuitiveness of the ‘Ought Implies Can’ principle. We point out that in the light of the fact that (a) ‘ought’ is multiply ambiguous, that (b) only a restricted set of readings of ‘ought’ will be relevant to the principle, and that (c) he did not instruct his subjects appropriately (...) – or otherwise ensure that in their ‘ought’ judgements they applied the relevant concept(s) – Mizrahi’s conclusions appear premature. We suggest two ways in which the experimental design could be adjusted or supplemented. First, Mizrahi could instruct (or prime) subjects to read the ‘ought’ question in a particular way. Second, he could complement his experiment by asking follow-up questions aimed at uncovering the implications for blame of subjects’ judgements. Once these adjustments are applied, an experiment with a similar outcome would be more significant. (shrink)

Perspectivism: A Contribution to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences advances the philosophy of perspectivism, showing how its capacity to assess competing views of a particular concept by approaching them as different 'sides' of a multi-dimensional object supports a concept of 'adequate' rather than 'absolute' truth. Presenting four case studies - of the social scientific concepts of power, equality, crime, and sex and gender - Smith demonstrates the manner in which the perspectivist approach does not take all differing views (...) of a concept to be equally good, but views all perspectives taken together as contributing towards the best that we can know about any given concept at the present time. An exposition and analysis of the means by which perspectivism allows for truth and objectivity in the social sciences, this volume will appeal to scholars of philosophy and across the social sciences with interests in questions of epistemology and research methodology. (shrink)

where, according to Schiffer, the concept of an F is pleonastic just in case the concept itself licenses entailments of the form: S ⇒ ∃xFx. These are what he calls "somethingfrom-nothing" entailments and the various practices in which such entailments are made are what he calls "hypostatisizing practices" (p.57). The concept of a proposition is pleonastic, according to this definition, because it licenses the move from a claim like 'Fido is a dog,' a claim containing only the singular term 'Fido' (...) referring to Fido, to the claim 'It is true that Fido is a dog,' which is a claim that contains the singular term 'that Fido is a dog' referring to the proposition that Fido is a dog. (iv) Propositions are pleonastic entities, as anything that falls under a pleonastic concept is, by definition, a pleonastic entity. And (v) The nature of propositions, as pleonastic entities, is fully determined by the hypostatizing practices that are constitutive of the concept of a proposition together with those necessary a priori truths that are applicable to things of any kind. Schiffer's idea is thus that propositions are entities, but that they are entities of a particularly insubstantial kind, as they have no hidden nature waiting to be discovered by.. (shrink)

Birch, Ginsburg, and Jablonka suggest that Unlimited Associative Learning is a “transition marker” in the evolutionary process that produced consciousness, and organizes research by tying together a range of “hallmarks” of consciousness. I argue that the features they recognize as “hallmarks” are indeed important in the evolution of consciousness, but UAL may have a more limited role.

This text seeks to situate sociolegal studies in a global context.

Are countries especially entitled, if not obliged, to prioritize the interests or well-being of their own citizens during a global crisis, such as a global pandemic? We call this partiality for compatriots in times of crisis “crisis nationalism”. Vaccine nationalism is one vivid example of crisis nationalism during the COVID-19 pandemic; so is the case of the US government’s purchasing a 3-month supply of the global stock of the antiviral Remdesivir for domestic use. Is crisis nationalism justifiable at all, and, (...) if it is, what are its limits? We examine some plausible arguments for national partiality, and conclude that these arguments support crisis nationalism only within strict limits. The different arguments for partiality, as we will note, arrive at these limits for different reasons. But more generally, so we argue, any defensible crisis nationalism must not entail the violation of human rights or the worsening of people’s deprivation. Moreover, we propose that good faith crisis nationalism ought to be sensitive to the potential moral costs of national partiality during a global crisis and must take extra care to control or offset these costs. Thus, crisis nationalism in the form of vaccine nationalism or the hoarding of global supplies of therapeutics during a global pandemic exceeds the bounds of acceptable partiality. (shrink)

ObjectiveCo-morbid insomnia and sleep apnea is a common and debilitating condition that is more difficult to treat compared to insomnia or sleep apnea-alone. Emerging evidence suggests that cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is effective in patients with COMISA, however, those with more severe sleep apnea and evidence of greater objective sleep disturbance may be less responsive to CBTi. Polysomnographic sleep study data has been used to predict treatment response to CBTi in patients with insomnia-alone, but not in patients with COMISA. (...) We used randomized controlled trial data to investigate polysomnographic predictors of insomnia improvement following CBTi, versus control in participants with COMISA.MethodsOne hundred and forty five participants with insomnia and sleep apnea [apnea-hypopnea index ≥ 15] were randomized to CBTi or no-treatment control. Mixed models were used to investigate the effect of pre-treatment AHI, sleep duration, and other traditional, and novel [quantitative electroencephalography ] polysomnographic predictors of between-group changes in Insomnia Severity Index scores from pre-treatment to post-treatment.ResultsCompared to control, CBTi was associated with greater ISI improvement among participants with; higher AHI, less wake after sleep onset, and less N3 sleep. No quantitative electroencephalographic, or other traditional polysomnographic variables predicted between-group ISI change.DiscussionAmong participants with COMISA, higher OSA severity predicted a greater treatment-response to CBTi, versus control. People with COMISA should be treated with CBTi, which is effective even in the presence of severe OSA and objective sleep disturbance. (shrink)

It has been argued that dual process theories are not consistent with Oaksford and Chater’s probabilistic approach to human reasoning (Oaksford and Chater in Psychol Rev 101:608–631, 1994 , 2007 ; Oaksford et al. 2000 ), which has been characterised as a “single-level probabilistic treatment[s]” (Evans 2007 ). In this paper, it is argued that this characterisation conflates levels of computational explanation. The probabilistic approach is a computational level theory which is consistent with theories of general cognitive architecture that invoke (...) a WM system and an LTM system. That is, it is a single function dual process theory which is consistent with dual process theories like Evans’ ( 2007 ) that use probability logic (Adams 1998 ) as an account of analytic processes. This approach contrasts with dual process theories which propose an analytic system that respects standard binary truth functional logic (Heit and Rotello in J Exp Psychol Learn 36:805–812, 2010 ; Klauer et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn 36:298–323, 2010 ; Rips in Psychol Sci 12:29–134, 2001 , 2002 ; Stanovich in Behav Brain Sci 23:645–726, 2000 , 2011 ). The problems noted for this latter approach by both Evans Psychol Bull 128:978–996, ( 2002 , 2007 ) and Oaksford and Chater (Mind Lang 6:1–38, 1991 , 1998 , 2007 ) due to the defeasibility of everyday reasoning are rehearsed. Oaksford and Chater’s ( 2010 ) dual systems implementation of their probabilistic approach is then outlined and its implications discussed. In particular, the nature of cognitive decoupling operations are discussed and a Panglossian probabilistic position developed that can explain both modal and non-modal responses and correlations with IQ in reasoning tasks. It is concluded that a single function probabilistic approach is as compatible with the evidence supporting a dual systems theory. (shrink)

This true account provides a summary of a firm and its CEO caught up in the housing market frenzy that occurred in the mid to late 2000s. Although confronted with a number of economic, strategic management, human resource, ethical, and legal challenges, the owners make decisions that cause the firm to grow at an exponential rate. The case documents the eventual results of many of those decisions. Readers are challenged to identify ethics issues involved and the business decisions that precipitated (...) those ethical issues. Some issues include working with business partners who have different ethical stances from your own, whistle blowing for illegal actions, the impact of problem employees on ethical and legal issues, and being transparent and honest when informing the board of directors about business conditions. Teaching notes include lessons learned by the CEO. Ways to avoid similar mistakes in the future are provided. (shrink)