Plagiarism and other transgressions of the norms of academic integrity appear to be a persistent problem among upper secondary students. Numerous surveys have revealed high levels of infringement of what appear to be clearly stated rules. Less attention has been given to students’ understanding of academic integrity, and to the potential misconceptions and false beliefs that may make it difficult for them to comply with existing rules and handle complex real-life situations.In this paper we report findings from a survey of (...) European upper secondary students’ views on issues relating to academic integrity. We relate these findings to the students’ training about academic integrity, self-reported level of questionable behavior and country of study.A total of 1654 students at 51 institutions located in 6 European countries participated in the study. The participants generally believed they had a good understanding of the rules applying to them and knew how to behave in compliance with norms of academic integrity. The results indicate, however, that often, in practice, this belief was mistaken. Many students had an inadequate understanding of core elements of academic integrity. They were uncertain about how to act, and they struggled in the handling of complex situations that require context-sensitive judgement. While some differences between countries were identified, they were modest and exhibited no clear pattern. Our results also suggest that reducing students’ level of uncertainty and, to a lesser degree, improving their level of knowledge could lead them to engage less in certain types of questionable behaviours. Surprisingly, the effect of academic training is modest and ambiguous. The study also confirms that perception of peer behaviour has the strongest association with student engagement in questionable behaviours. Thus, academic integrity at the upper secondary level cannot be explained simply in terms of individual ethics or knowledge. (shrink)

While slowness of movement is an obligatory characteristic of Parkinson’s disease (PD), there are conditions in which patients move uncharacteristically fast, attributed to deficient motor inhibition. Here we investigate deficient inhibition in an optimal sensory-motor integration framework, using a game in which subjects used a paddle to catch a virtual ball. Display of the ball was extinguished as soon as the catching movement started, segregating the task into a sensing and acting phase. We analyzed the behavior of 9 PD patients (...) (ON medication) and 10 age-matched controls (HC). The switching times (between sensing and acting phase) were compared to the predicted optimal switching time, based on the individual estimates of sensory and motor uncertainties. The comparison showed that deviation from predicted optimal switching times were similar between groups. However, PD patients showed a weaker correlation between variability in switching time and sensory-motor uncertainty, indicating a reduced propensity to generate exploratory behavior for optimizing goal-directed movements. Analysis of the movement kinematics revealed that PD patients, compared to controls, used a lower peak velocity of the paddle and intercepted the ball with greater velocity. Adjusting the trial duration to the time for the paddle to stop moving, we found that PD patients spent a smaller proportion of the trial duration for observing the ball. Altogether, the results do not show the premature movement initiation and truncated sensory processing that we predicted to ensue from deficient inhibition in PD. (shrink)

Good academic practice is more than the avoidance of clear-cut cheating. It also involves navigation of the gray zones between cheating and good practice. The existing literature has left students’ understanding of gray zone practices largely unexplored. To begin filling in this gap, we present results from a questionnaire study involving N = 1639 undergraduate students from seven European countries representing all major disciplines. We show that large numbers of these students are unable to identify gray area issues and lack (...) sensitivity to the context dependence of these. We also show that a considerable proportion of students have a poor understanding of concepts like plagiarism and falsification, not only in gray zone scenarios, but also in cases of relatively clear-cut cheating. Our results are similar across the faculties and countries of study, and even for students who have attended academic integrity training. We discuss the implications of this for academic integrity training. (shrink)

Dans son nouveau livre, Marie-Paule Ha bouleverse les idées reçues sur le rôle des Françaises dans les colonies. Se concentrant sur l’Indochine, Ha affirme que les femmes françaises n’ont pas tracé une ligne de démarcation stricte entre les colonisateurs et les colonisés. Elles ont bien plutôt inventé des façons diverses de vivre aux colonies, en fonction de leur position sociale, de leur privilèges de « race » et de leur accès à l’administration coloniale. Dans l’introduction, M.-P. Ha situe...

The Past Masters Søren Kierkegaard : Samlede Vårker database is based on the third edition of Kierkegaard's complete works in Danish, and has been edited by Professor Alistair McKinnon of McGill University.

This research examines the structure and development of the organic sesame network from Burkina Faso to explain the declining trend in organic sesame export. The paper addresses particularly the question whether the organic sesame network is structurally (re)shaped as a conventional mainstream market or whether it still presents a real alternative to conventional sesame production and trade. It is found that over the last decade organic sesame is increasingly incorporated into mainstream market channels. But contrary to the well-known case of (...) conventionalization in California, where organic agriculture grew into mainstream agro-food arrangements, this study illustrates a case where organic sesame agriculture shrank into mainstream agro-food arrangements. The weak coherence between the production and marketing nodes in the organic sesame chain resulted in failures to vertically mediate information, balance power relationships in and across sesame chains, build trust, and limit price volatility and speculation, resulting in a shrinking organic sesame market. For developing a viable alternative to conventional sesame trading, relations between production and trading nodes in the organic networks need to be strengthened through public–private partnerships, combined with other public and legal reinforcement. (shrink)

Psychologists' emerging interest in spirituality and religion as well as the relevance of each phenomenon to issues of psychological importance requires an understanding of the fundamental characteristics of each construct. On the basis of both historical considerations and a limited but growing empirical literature, we caution against viewing spirituality and religiousness as incompatible and suggest that the common tendency to polarize the terms simply as individual vs. institutional or ′good′ vs. ′bad′ is not fruitful for future research. Also cautioning against (...) the use of restrictive, narrow definitions or overly broad definitions that can rob either construct of its distinctive characteristics, we propose a set of criteria that recognizes the constructs' conceptual similarities and dissimilarities. Rather than trying to force new and likely unsuccessful definitions, we offer these criteria as benchmarks for judging the value of existing definitions. (shrink)

A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published (...) research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated. (shrink)

Adults and infants display a robust ability to perceive the unity of a center-occluded object when the visible ends of the object undergo common motion (e.g. Kellman, P.J., Spelke, E.S., 1983. Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy. Cognitive Psychology 15, 483±524). Ecologically oriented accounts of this ability focus on the primacy of motion in the perception of segregated objects, but Gestalt theory suggests a broader possibility: observers may perceive object unity by detecting patterns of synchronous change, of which common (...) motion is a special case. We investigated this possibility with observations of adults and 4-month-old infants. Participants viewed a center-occluded object whose visible surfaces were either misaligned or aligned, stationary or moving, and unchanging or synchronously changing in color or bright- ness in various temporal patterns (e.g. ¯ashing). Both alignment and common motion con- tributed to adults' perception of object unity, but synchronous color changes did not. For infants, motion was an important determinant of object unity, but other synchronous changes and edge alignment were not. When a stationary object with aligned edges underwent syn- chronous changes in color or brightness, infants showed high levels of attention to the object, but their perception of its unity appeared to be indeterminate. An inherent preference for fast over slow ¯ash rates, and a novelty preference elicited by a change in rate, both indicated that infants detected the synchronous changes, although they failed to use them as information for object unity. These ®ndings favor ecologically oriented accounts of object perception in which surface motion plays a privileged role. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of the work of Eugenio Garin, one of the foremost modern historians of the Italian Renaissance. The present text, translated so intelligently, is based on the revised Italian edition of 1958.. Garin treats the growth of Italian humanism from Petrarch in the fourteenth century to its point of radical transformation with Tommaso Campanella at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The commentary on Giordano Bruno is especially clear, concise, and penetrating. For Garin, the elements (...) of Renaissance humanism are multiple. It sought its own rhetoric and shrank from the dry syllogistic reasoning of scholastic philosophy. It used philology as an essential tool and basis of a revolutionary historiography. As well, Renaissance humanism was engage in civic life. In seeing Renaissance humanism as the link with the modern world, Garin opposes those historians of science who posit medieval science and philosophy as the vital bridge. Garin minimizes the importance of Aristotelianism and finds Renaissance humanism severely hostile to scholasticism. Nevertheless, the book is a rich mine of facts, summarization, and syntheses of texts; the very index of the book, restricted to Italian Renaissance figures, occupies five pages of double columns. In addition, Peter Munz has written an introduction which is a full-blown critique—P. J. M. (shrink)

Perspectives on recent business scandals and the current debate.

This paper is a study about Philadelphia’s comprehensive user engagement sites (CUESs) as the authors address and examine issues related to the upcoming implementation of a CUES while seeking solutions for its disputed questions and plans. Beginning with the federal drug schedules, the authors visit some of the medical and public health issues vis-à-vis safe injection facilities (SIFs). Insite, a successful Canadian SIF, has been thoroughly researched as it represents a paradigm for which a Philadelphia CUES can expand upon. Also, (...) the existing criticisms against SIFs are revisited while critically unpackaged and responded to in favor of the establishment. In the main section, the authors propose the layout and services of the upcoming CUES, much of which would be in congruent to Vancouver’s Insite. On the other hand, the CUES would be distinct from Insite, as the authors emphasize, in that it will offer an information center run by individuals in recovery and place additional emphasis on early education for young healthcare professionals by providing them a platform to work at the site. The paper will also briefly investigate the implementation of a CUES site under an ethical scope of the Harm Reduction Theory. Lastly, the authors recommend some strategic plans that the Philadelphia City government may consider employing at this crucial stage. (shrink)

Physiological concentrations of retinoic acid can induce acute alterations in the expression of the enzyme tissue transglutaminase in cultured macrophages. The induction of this enzyme offers a probe to study the mechanism of retinoid action in both normal and leukemic cells.

We discuss the impact of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) on phylogenetic reconstruction and taxonomy. We review the power of HGT as a creative force in assembling new metabolic pathways, and we discuss the impact that HGT has on phylogenetic reconstruction. On one hand, shared derived characters are created through transferred genes that persist in the recipient lineage, either because they were adaptive in the recipient lineage or because they resulted in a functional replacement. On the other hand, taxonomic patterns in (...) microbial phylogenies might also be created through biased gene transfer. The agreement between different molecular phylogenies has encouraged interpretation of the consensus signal as reflecting organismal history or as the tree of cell divisions; however, to date the extent to which the consensus reflects shared organismal ancestry and to which it reflects highways of gene sharing and biased gene transfer remains an open question. Preferential patterns of gene exchange act as a homogenizing force in creating and maintaining microbial groups, generating taxonomic patterns that are indistinguishable to those created by shared ancestry. To understand the evolution of higher bacterial taxonomic units, concepts usually applied in population genetics need to be applied. (shrink)

The medium surrounding cells either in culture or in tissues contains a chemical mix varying with cell state. As solutes move in and out of the cytoplasmic compartment they set up characteristic signatures in the cellular boundary layers. These layers are complex physical and chemical environments the profiles of which reflect cell physiology and provide conduits for intercellular messaging. Here we review some of the most relevant characteristics of the extracellular/intercellular space. Our initial focus is primarily on cultured cells but (...) we extend our consideration to the far more complex environment of tissues, and discuss how chemical signatures in the boundary layer can or may affect cell function. Critical to the entire essay are the methods used, or being developed, to monitor chemical profiles in the boundary layers. We review recent developments in ultramicro electrochemical sensors and tailored optical reporters suitable for the task in hand. (shrink)

This volume explores the many dimensions of the work of Joseph P. Fell. Drawing from continental sources such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as North American thinkers such as John William Miller, Fell has secured a place as an enduring and important thinker within the tradition of phenomenological thought. Fell’s critical development of these strands of philosophy has resulted in a provocative and original challenge to complacent dualism and persistent problems of skepticism, alienation, and nihilism.

We present evidence that smiling is positively associated with positive affect in women and negatively associated with negative affect in men. In line with Vigil's model, we propose that, in women, smiling signals warmth (trustworthiness cues), which attracts fewer and more intimate relationships, whereas in men, smiling signals confidence and lack of self-doubt (capacity cues), which attracts numerous, less-intimate relationships.