Several psychosocial models have been proposed to explain the etiology of eating disorders and obesity separately despite research suggesting they should be conceptualized within a shared theoretical framework. The objective of the current study was to test an integrated comprehensive model consisting of a host of common risk and protective factors expected to explain both eating and weight disorders simultaneously in a large school-based sample of adolescents. Data were collected from 3,043 youth from 41 schools in the Ottawa region, Canada. (...) Working with interested school staff, validated self-report scales in the form of a questionnaire booklet were administered to participating students to assess several understood risk and protective factors common to both eating disorders and obesity. Anthropometric measurements of weight and height were taken at the end of the questionnaire administration period by trained research staff. Structural equation modeling with cross-validation was used to test the hypothesized model. Findings demonstrated that dysregulated eating was associated with both eating disorder and weight status with diet culture and emotion dysregulation directly associated with some of these disordered eating patterns. It equally pointed to how lifestyle made up of high sedentary behaviors, low vigorous exercise and varied eating patterns contributed to both emotion dysregulation and poor body image which subsequently affected eating issues and weight status simultaneously, signaling the complex interplay of psychosocial factors that underlie these concerns. This study provides evidence for an integrated psychosocial model consisting of socio-environmental, psychological, and behavioral factors may best explain the complex interplay of risk and protective factors influencing eating disorders and obesity. It equally highlights understanding the direct and indirect effects of some of the most salient risk factors involved in eating and weight-related concerns, including the strong effects of diet culture and stressors such as weight-based teasing, providing interventionalists evidence of important risk factors to consider targeting in eating disorder and weight-based prevention efforts. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

We examined whether positive and negative affect motivates verbal and spatial working memory processes, respectively, which have implications for the expenditure of mental effort. We argue that when emotion promotes cognitive tendencies that are goal incompatible with task demands, greater cognitive effort is required to perform well. We sought to investigate whether this increase in cognitive effort impairs behavioural control over a broad domain of self-control tasks. Moreover, we predicted that individuals with higher behavioural inhibition system (BIS) sensitivities would report (...) more negative affect within the goal incompatible conditions because such individuals report higher negative affect during cognitive challenge. Positive or negative affective states were induced followed by completing a verbal or spatial 2-back working memory task. All participants then completed one of three self-control tasks. Overall, we observed that conditions of emotion and working memory incompatibility (positive/spatial and negative/verbal) performed worse on the self-control tasks, and within the incompatible conditions individuals with higher BIS sensitivities reported more negative affect at the end of the study. The combination of findings suggests that emotion and working memory compatibility reduces cognitive effort and impairs behavioural control. (shrink)

Der Band setzt sich mit den Bedingungen und Möglichkeiten internationalen oder globalen Regierens in einer sozialen Umwelt (Weltgesellschaft) unter drei Perspektiven auseinander: der Perspektive von Theorien globaler Ordnung, der Perspektive spezifischer Formen globaler Ordnungsbildung und der Perspektive die Normativität globaler Ordnung. Die Beiträge des Bandes besetzen Schnittstellen in einer Reihe von Diskussionen, die in den Internationalen Beziehungen zu Ordnung und Ordnungsbildung in der internationalen Politik, zum Regieren jenseits des Nationalstaates, sowie zur Stellung internationaler Politik in der Weltgesellschaft geführt werden.

Cet article retrace les changements intervenus au sein du militantisme féministe chinois dans un climat de détérioration politique deux décennies après la Quatrième Conférence mondiale sur les femmes (QCMF) en 1995. Il met en lumière les actions novatrices menées par les jeunes féministes, de même que l’intense surveillance qu’exerce, sur le militantisme organisé, un État totalitaire qui craint de perdre son pouvoir. Bien que la sphère publique et le cyber espace ne laissent guère beaucoup de place à l’activisme, les féministes (...) chinoises se sont mobilisées pour continuer d’expérimenter de nouvelles façons d’exiger l’égalité de genre et de poursuivre des transformations sociales et culturelles. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Digital contact tracing, in combination with widespread testing, has been a focal point for many plans to “reopen” economies while containing the spread of Covid‐19. Most digital contact tracing projects in the United States and Europe have prioritized privacy protections in the form of local storage of data on smartphones and the deidentification of information. However, in the prioritization of privacy in this narrow form, there is not sufficient attention given to weighing ethical trade‐offs within the context of a public (...) health pandemic or to the need to evaluate safety and effectiveness of software‐based technology applied to public health. (shrink)

This paper makes a conceptual inquiry into the notion of ‘publics’, and forwards an understanding of this notion that allows more responsible forms of decision-making with regards to technologies that have localized impacts, such as wind parks, hydrogen stations or flood barriers. The outcome of this inquiry is that the acceptability of a decision is to be assessed by a plurality of ‘publics’, including that of a local community. Even though a plurality of ‘publics’ might create competing normative demands, its (...) acknowledgment is necessary to withstand the monopolization of the process of technology appraisal. The paper presents four ways in which such an appropriation of publicness takes place. The creation of dedicated ‘local publics’, in contrast, helps to overcome these problems and allows for more responsible forms of decision-making. We describe ‘local publics’ as those in which stakeholders from the different publics that are related to the process of technology implementation are brought together, and in which concerns and issues from these publics are deliberated upon. The paper will present eight conditions for increasing the effectiveness of such ‘local publics’. (shrink)

In this chapter, we focus on the simple sounding question: What is it to have sex? On the assumption that having sex is what you do with all and only your sexual part-ners, this offers a way of focusing the question: What would it take for a sex robot to be a sex partner? In order to understand the significance of the development of robots with whom (or which) we can have sex, we need to know what it is to (...) have sex with a robot. And in order to know this, we have to know what it is to have sex, period. In the bulk of the chapter, we develop an account of shared sexual agency we think is a plausible precondition of genuinely having sex. In the final section, we remark briefly on the issue of what it would take to form a sexual we (as we call it) with a robot. For if we can do this, we can probably have sex with robots; but if we can’t, we can’t. (shrink)

The study of human-human communication and the development of computational models for human-agent communication have diverged significantly throughout the last decade. Yet, despite frequently made claims of “super-human performance” in, e.g., speech recognition or image processing, so far, no system is able to lead a half-decent coherent conversation with a human. In this paper, we argue that we must start to re-consider the hallmarks of cooperative communication and the core capabilities that we have developed for it, and which conversational agents (...) need to be equipped with: incremental joint co-construction and mentalizing. We base our argument on a vast body of work on human-human communication and its psychological processes that we reason to be relevant and necessary to take into account when modeling human-agent communication. We contrast those with current conceptualizations of human-agent interaction and formulate suggestions for the development of future systems. (shrink)

This unique volume introduces and discusses the methods of validating computer simulations in scientific research. The core concepts, strategies, and techniques of validation are explained by an international team of pre-eminent authorities, drawing on expertise from various fields ranging from engineering and the physical sciences to the social sciences and history. The work also offers new and original philosophical perspectives on the validation of simulations. Topics and features: introduces the fundamental concepts and principles related to the validation of computer simulations, (...) and examines philosophical frameworks for thinking about validation; provides an overview of the various strategies and techniques available for validating simulations, as well as the preparatory steps that have to be taken prior to validation; describes commonly used reference points and mathematical frameworks applicable to simulation validation; reviews the legal prescriptions, and the administrative and procedural activities related to simulation validation; presents examples of best practice that demonstrate how methods of validation are applied in various disciplines and with different types of simulation models; covers important practical challenges faced by simulation scientists when applying validation methods and techniques; offers a selection of general philosophical reflections that explore the significance of validation from a broader perspective. This truly interdisciplinary handbook will appeal to a broad audience, from professional scientists spanning all natural and social sciences, to young scholars new to research with computer simulations. Philosophers of science, and methodologists seeking to increase their understanding of simulation validation, will also find much to benefit from in the text. (shrink)

The consequences of foreign direct investment (FDI) for human rights protection are poorly understood. We propose that the impact of FDI varies across industries. In particular, extractive firms in the oil and mining industries go where the resources are located and are bound to such investment, which creates a status quo bias among them when it comes to supporting repressive rulers (“location-bound effect”). The same is not true for nonextractive multinational corporations (MNCs) in manufacturing or services, which can, in comparison, (...) exit problematic countries more easily. We also propose that strong democratic institutions can alleviate negative impacts of extractive FDI on human rights (“democratic safeguard effect”). Using U.S. FDI broken up into extractive and nonextractive industries in 157 host countries (1999–2015), we find support for these propositions.1 Extractive FDI is associated with more human rights abuse, but nonextractive FDI is associated with less abuse, after controlling for other factors, including concerns about endogeneity. We find also that the negative human rights impact of extractive FDI vanishes in countries where democratic institutions are stronger. Our results are robust to a range of alternative estimation techniques. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the literature on conceptual change by engaging in direct theoretical and empirical comparison of contrasting views. We take up the question of whether naïve physical ideas are coherent or fragmented, building specifically on recent work supporting claims of coherence with respect to the concept of force by Ioannides and Vosniadou [Ioannides, C., & Vosniadou, C. (2002). The changing meanings of force. Cognitive Science Quarterly 2, 5–61]. We first engage in a theoretical inquiry on the (...) nature of coherence and fragmentation, concluding that these terms are not well‐defined, and proposing a set of issues that may be better specified. The issues have to do with contextuality, which concerns the range of contexts in which a concept (meaning, model, theory) applies, and relational structure, which is how elements of a concept (meaning, model, or theory) relate to one another. We further propose an enhanced theoretical and empirical accountability for what and how much one needs to say in order to have specified a concept. Vague specification of the meaning of a concept can lead to many kinds of difficulties.Empirically, we conducted two studies. A study patterned closely on Ioannides and Vosniadou's work (which we call a quasi‐replication) failed to confirm their operationalizations of “coherent.” An extension study, based on a more encompassing specification of the concept of force, showed three kinds of results: (1) Subjects attend to more features than mentioned by Ioannides and Vosniadou, and they changed answers systematically based on these features; (2)We found substantial differences in the way subjects thought about the new contexts we asked about, which undermined claims for homogeneity within even the category of subjects (having one particular meaning associated with “force”) that best survived our quasi‐replication; (3) We found much reasoning of subjects about forces that cannot be accounted for by the meanings specified by Ioannides and Vosniadou. All in all, we argue that, with a greater attention to contextuality and with an appropriately broad specification of the meaning of a concept like force, Ioannides and Vosniadou's claims to have demonstrated coherence seem strongly undermined. Students' ideas are not random and chaotic; but neither are they simply described and strongly systematic. (shrink)

Little consensus exists about the effectiveness of transnational private governance in domains such as labor, the environment, or human rights. The paper builds on recent scholarship on labor standards to emphasize the role of labor agency in transnational private governance. It argues that the relationship between transnational private regulatory initiatives and labor agency depends on three competences: first, the ability of workers’ organizations to gain access to processes of employment regulation, implementation, and monitoring; second, their ability to insist on the (...) inclusion of employers and state agencies within such processes; and third, the ability of workers to effectively exercise leverage in pursuit of particular goals. The paper develops a framework, called hybrid production regime, for examining how workers’ capacity to act at the local level depends on how these three collective competences are addressed in the institutionalization of capital–labor relations between the transnational and national levels. (shrink)

The translational research community, in general, and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) community, in particular, share the vision of repurposing EHRs for research that will improve the quality of clinical practice. Many members of these communities are also aware that electronic health records (EHRs) suffer limitations of data becoming poorly structured, biased, and unusable out of original context. This creates obstacles to the continuity of care, utility, quality improvement, and translational research. Analogous limitations to sharing objective data in (...) other areas of the natural sciences have been successfully overcome by developing and using common ontologies. This White Paper presents the authors’ rationale for the use of ontologies with computable semantics for the improvement of clinical data quality and EHR usability formulated for researchers with a stake in clinical and translational science and who are advocates for the use of information technology in medicine but at the same time are concerned by current major shortfalls. This White Paper outlines pitfalls, opportunities, and solutions and recommends increased investment in research and development of ontologies with computable semantics for a new generation of EHRs. (shrink)

Problematic substance use (PSU) among nurses has wide‐ranging adverse implications. A critical integrative literature review was conducted with an emphasis on building knowledge regarding the influence of structural factors within nurses' professional environments on nurses with PSU. Five thematic categories emerged: (i) access, (ii) stress, and (iii) attitudes as contributory factors, (iv) treatment policies for nurses with PSU, and (v) the culture of the nursing profession. Conclusions were that an overemphasis on individual culpability and failing predominates in the literature and (...) that crucial knowledge gaps exist regarding the influence of structural factors on driving and shaping nurses' substance use. (shrink)

Recent studies reveal some of the neurophysiological mechanisms involved in drug addiction. This prompts some theorists to claim that drug addiction diminishes responsibility. Stephen Morse however rejects this claim. Morse argues that these studies show that drug addiction involves neither compulsion, coercion, nor irrationality. He also adds that addicted people are responsible for becoming addicted and for failing to take measures to manage their addiction. After summarizing relevant neuroscience of addiction literature, this chapter engages critically with Morse to argue that (...) a subgroup of addicted people does meet plausible criteria for compulsion, coercion, or irrationality; that few addicted people are fully responsible for becoming addicted; and that some addicted people can be at least partly excused for failing to manage their addiction. Pickard and Lacey’s “responsibility without blame” approach is also suggested as a fruitful basis for future work in this field. (shrink)

The color of the book’s cover alludes to the time and context in which this critical volume originated: the 3rd Interdisciplinary Conference Celebrating International Women’s Day at the New School for Social Research in New York City. At that time, ‘orange alerts’ were issued by the United States to create a climate of fear and thereby stifle any critical debate of its foreign and domestic policy. The feminist thinkers presented in this volume are alert that such a critique is needed. (...) They draw on the various languages of their fields to address wide-ranging topics and key questions in feminist politics, theory, and philosophy. They confront the state of the urgency of women in all classes of society and all research fields. This unique collection ranges across disciplines; as such, the four major topics – aesthetics and female representation, love and psychoanalysis, care and ethics, the different understandings of ‘women’ – represent current topics of cross-disciplinary interest for Women’s and Gender Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science. (shrink)

Résumé L’Utopie de Thomas More est composée de deux livres : Le Livre Premier, vite escamoté par les rêveurs d’avenir que l’histoire ennuie, nous parle de l’Europe de 1515 à l’aube d’une révolution de tous les savoirs, dominée par un pouvoir politique qui utilise la religion, la peur et l’ ignorance afin de satisfaire un appétit hégémonique insatiable, infiniment corrompu mais parlant haut valeurs morales et familiales. Le Livre Second nous fait miroiter un avenir à l’échelle de l’humanité qui utiliserait (...) les nouvelles techniques, la raison et la bonne gestion de ses ressources pour concilier bien commun et plaisir individuel. Ce Livre est le texte fondateur de notre modernité. C’est la Bible païenne adoptée par les Lumières et que nous avons inscrite dans la charte des institutions de notre temps. Cinq cents ans plus tard et les livres se réécrivent en miroir : le grand rêve humain initié par le Livre Second de 1516 s’englue dans la réalité de 2005. Les nouvelles promesses de l’économisme du libre choix de 2005 ne sont qu’un hallucinant retour en arrière, aux postulats du Livre Premier. (shrink)

This paper explores the phenomenon of being ill (in cases of serious, chronic and terminal illnesses) both in its subjective and intersubjective dimensions. My main contention is that the philosophical tools of phenomenology uncover the framework for understanding the lived experience of the ill person as they privilege the first-person account of illness. It is through this that the essence of things and phenomena surrounding the body-in-illness are unveiled, as opposed to the medical world’s perspective, a third-person account of diseases. (...) A phenomenology of illness underscores that illness is a substantial parcel of human existence that alters the ill person’s experience of the body, intersubjective relations with the other, and relation with the world entirely. This essay is constituted of four major sections dabbling with a phenomenological account of the experience of the lived body, the body-in-illness, the intersubjective dimension of the body-in-illness, and a note on health. (shrink)

Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on meta-linguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension side and a precise conversational goal. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, both when the quantifier occurs in unembedded and embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task (...) from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game-theoretic design, thereby including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context. Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles that describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient than a strategy based on literal descriptions. (shrink)

When ethical decisions have to be taken in critical, complex medical situations, they often involve decisions that set the course for or against life-sustaining treatments. Therefore the decisions have far-reaching consequences for the patients, their relatives, and often for the clinical staff. Although the rich psychology literature provides evidence that reasoning may be affected by undesired influences that may undermine the quality of the decision outcome, not much attention has been given to this phenomenon in health care or ethics consultation. (...) In this paper, we aim to contribute to the sensitization of the problem of systematic reasoning biases by showing how exemplary individual and group biases can affect the quality of decision-making on an individual and group level. We are addressing clinical ethicists as well as clinicians who guide complex decision-making processes of ethical significance. Knowledge regarding exemplary group psychological biases (e.g. conformity bias), and individual biases (e.g. stereotypes), will be taken from the disciplines of social psychology and cognitive decision science and considered in the field of ethical decision-making. Finally we discuss the influence of intuitive versus analytical (systematical) reasoning on the validity of ethical decision-making. (shrink)

Disciplinary boundaries become increasingly unclear when grappling with “wicked problems,” which present a complex set of policy, cultural, technological, and scientific dimensions. “T-shaped” professionals, i.e. individuals with a depth and breadth of expertise, are being called upon to play a critical role in complex problem-solving. This paper unpacks the notion of the “T-shaped expert” and seeks to situate it within the broader academic literature on expertise, integration, and developmental learning. A component of this project includes an exploratory study, which is (...) aimed at evaluating the emergent attributes of T-shaped expertise in two different educational programs completed between January and May in 2015. The two programs build disciplinary knowledge in science, technology engineering, and mathematics fields at the core, while expanding the students’ awareness and comprehension of other expertise. The courses introduced science and engineering students to case study topics focusing around complex human-technological-ecological systems in a nanotechnology and society course; and the governance of genetically modified organisms in a science, technology, and society course. We analyze pre- and post-test data from this pilot project before presenting findings that pertain to student learning, as well as variants in the methodology and reflect on the utility of the selected methodology for evaluating expertise as it evolves over time. The paper closes with a discussion of a theory of acquisition with implications for delineating early attributes and characteristics of T-shaped expertise. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss how phenomenology might cogently express the way painful experiences are layered with complex intersubjective meaning. In particular, we propose a critical conception of pain as an intricate multi-levelled phenomenon, deeply ingrained in the constitution of one’s sense of bodily self and emerging from a web of intercorporeal, social, cultural, and political relations. In the first section, we review and critique some conceptual accounts of pain. Then, we explore how pain is involved in complex ways with (...) modalities of pleasure and displeasure, enacted personal meaning, and contexts of empathy or shame. We aim to show why a phenomenology of pain must acknowledge the richness and diversity of peculiar painful experiences. The second section then weaves these critical insights into Husserlian phenomenology of embodiment, sensation, and localisation. We introduce the distinction between Body-Object and Lived-Body to show how pain presents intersubjectively. Furthermore, we stress that, while pain seems to take a marginal position in Husserl’s whole corpus, its role is central in the transcendental constitution of the Lived-Body, interacting with the personal, interpersonal, and intersubjective levels of experiential constitution. Taking a critical-phenomenological perspective, we then concretely explore how some people may experience structural conditions which may make their experiences more or less painful. (shrink)

Rule is commonly conceptualized with reference to the compliance it invokes. In this article, we propose a conception of rule via the practice of resistance instead. In contrast to liberal approaches, we stress the possibility of illegitimate rule, and, as opposed to critical approaches, the possibility of legitimate authority. In the international realm, forms of rule and the changes they undergo can thus be reconstructed in terms of the resistance they provoke. To this end, we distinguish between two types of (...) resistance—opposition and dissidence—in order to demonstrate how resistance and rule imply each other. We draw on two case studies of resistance in and to international institutions to illustrate the relationship between rule and resistance and close with a discussion of the normative implications of such a conceptualization. (shrink)

Vector autoregression (VAR) modeling allows probing bidirectional relationships in gender/sex development and may support hypothesis testing following multi-modal data collection. We show VAR in three lights: supporting a hypothesis, rejecting a hypothesis, and opening up new questions. To illustrate these capacities of VAR, we reanalyzed longitudinal data that recorded dyadic mother-infant interactions for 15 boys and 15 girls aged 3 to 11 months of age. We examined monthly counts of 15 infant behaviors and 13 maternal behaviors (Seifert et al., 1994). (...) VAR models demonstrated that infant crawling predicted a subsequently close feedback loop from mothers of boys but a subsequently open ended, branched response from mothers of girls. A different finding showed that boys’ standing independently later predicted significant later increases of four maternal behaviors: rocking/jiggling, lifting, affectionate touching, and stimulation of infant gross-motor activity. In contrast, crawling by girls led mothers to later decrease the same maternal behaviors. Thus, VAR might allow us to identify how mothers respond differently during daily interactions depending on infant gender/sex. The present work intends mainly to showcase the VAR method in the specific context of the empirical study of gender/sex development. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Brain monitoring combined with automatic analysis of EEGs provides a clinical decision support tool that can reduce time to diagnosis and assist clinicians in real-time monitoring applications (e.g., neurological intensive care units). Clinicians have indicated that a sensitivity of 95% with specificity below 5% was the minimum requirement for clinical acceptance. In this study, a high-performance automated EEG analysis system based on principles of machine learning and big data is proposed. This hybrid architecture integrates hidden Markov models (HMMs) for sequential (...) decoding of EEG events with deep learning-based postprocessing that incorporates temporal and spatial context. These algorithms are trained and evaluated using the Temple University Hospital EEG, which is the largest publicly available corpus of clinical EEG recordings in the world. This system automatically processes EEG records and classifies three patterns of clinical interest in brain activity that might be useful in diagnosing brain disorders: (1) spike and/or sharp waves, (2) generalized periodic epileptiform discharges, (3) periodic lateralized epileptiform discharges. It also classifies three patterns used to model the background EEG activity: (1) eye movement, (2) artifacts and (3) background. Our approach delivers a sensitivity above 90% while maintaining a specificity below 5%. We also demonstrate that this system delivers a low false alarm rate, which is critical for any spike detection application. (shrink)

Outside Europe landlocked states are poor: 16 are extremely poor and another 16 very poor. The Sustainable Development Goals recognise their lack of sea-access as a major cause of their reduced chances of escaping poverty and reaching the stated goals. This paper proposes including corridors to the sea and other forms of sea-access among the SDGs. It also discusses objections to doing so that appeal to the rejection of global egalitarian arguments, to the possibility of compensating those countries for their (...) disadvantage rather than removing it, and to the territorial rights of the coastal countries. The paper concludes that none of these objections to the corridors, and a fortiori to the less ambitious remedies of the Almaty and Vienna Programmes, withstands scrutiny. (shrink)

While 90 percent of participants in a 2005 Gallup poll indicated that they would donate an organ if asked, only 40 percent of Americans have registered to do so, according to 2012 data from Donate Life America; likely even fewer have shared their donation wishes with loved ones. Undoubtedly, the single biggest reason for the discrepancy between the number of potential transplants and the number actually performed is our failure to talk with loved ones about our wishes regarding organ donation. (...) Although many resources already exist to hold these conversations, we can do more, and the emergence of social media provides an intriguing new opportunity. Two years ago, Organize.org set out to create the first nationwide organ donation registry in the United States. (shrink)

Graphical displays of simple moving geometrical figures have been repeatedly used to study the attribution of animacy in human observers. Yet little is known about the relevant movement characteristics responsible for this experience. The present study introduces a novel parametric research paradigm, which allows for the experimental control of specific motion parameters and a predictable influence on the attribution of animacy. Two experiments were conducted using 3D computer animations of one or two objects systematically introducing variations in the following aspects (...) of motion: directionality, discontinuity and responsiveness. Both experiments further varied temporal kinematics. Results showed that animacy experience increased with the time a moving object paused in the vicinity of a second object and with increasing complexity of interaction between the objects . The experience of animacy could be successfully modulated in a parametric fashion by the systematic variation of comparably simple differential movement characteristics. (shrink)