By 2050, global livestock production is expected to double—growing faster than any other agricultural sub-sector—with most of this increase taking place in the developing world. As the United Nation’s four-hundred-page report, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options , documents, livestock production is now one of three most significant contributors to environmental problems, leading to increased greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, water pollution, and increased health problems. The paper draws on the UN report as well as a flurry of other (...) recently published studies in order to demonstrate the effect of intensive livestock production on global warming and on people’s health. The paper’s goal is to outline the problems caused by intensive livestock farming and analyze a number of possible solutions, including legislative changes and stricter regulations, community mobilizing, and consumers choosing to decrease their demand for animal products. (shrink)

The question of why Plato censored poetry in his Republic has bedeviled scholars for centuries. In Exiling the Poets, Ramona A. Naddaff offers a strikingly original interpretation of this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy.

Bio-ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analyzing the rapidly growing pool of plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide structured vocabularies to support consistent aggregation of data and a semantic framework for automated analyses and reasoning. They are a key component of the Semantic Web. This paper provides background on what bio-ontologies are, why they are relevant to botany, and the principles of ontology development. It includes an overview of ontologies and related resources that are relevant to plant science, (...) with a detailed description of the Plant Ontology (PO). We discuss the challenges of building an ontology that covers all green plants (Viridiplantae). Key results: Ontologies can advance plant science in four keys areas: 1. comparative genetics, genomics, phenomics, and development, 2. taxonomy and systematics, 3. semantic applications and 4. education. Conclusions: Bio-ontologies offer a flexible framework for comparative plant biology, based on common botanical understanding. As genomic and phenomic data become available for more species, we anticipate that the annotation of data with ontology terms will become less centralized, while at the same time, the need for cross-species queries will become more common, causing more researchers in plant science to turn to ontologies. (shrink)

Written for a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this contribution describes an undergraduate course on ancient rhetoric at Berkeley, in which Professor Ramona Naddaff was accused by a male student of demeaning women during a lecture and of causing him trauma in the process. He threatened to bring charges against her to campus authorities, claiming the support of fellow students. In her lecture, she had discussed the classical figuration of rhetoric—persuasive speech—as violence and sometimes rape. (...) In a discussion the following week, some students requested the use of “trigger warnings” before the utterance of words like rape. The instructor and her teaching assistant Katharine Wallerstein individually give their views of this disconcerting experience and comment on the difficulties of teaching critical thinking in the current political and cultural climate. They conclude that the language of personal rights and the demand for self-protection tend to come at the expense of teaching and learning alike. (shrink)

Differentiation of the forms and functions of different smiles is needed, but they should be based on the empirical data on distinctions that senders and receivers make and on the physical cues that are employed. Such data would allow for a test of whether smiles can be differentiated using perceptual cues alone or whether mimicry or simulation are necessary.

Review of Pr. Ioan Chirilă, Scara cuvântului. Eseuri omiletice [ The Ladder of the Word. Homiletic Essays ],.

Review of Joseph Kim, Reformed Epistemology and the Problem of Religious Diversity.

Teachers’ job satisfaction has been the subject of many studies that tried to identify its main sources. Based on the social cognitive career theory, the present study aimed to investigate the relationships between personality traits, goals orientation, and teachers’ job satisfaction. A total of 321 Romanian teachers completed an online questionnaire. The results demonstrated new insights regarding the relationships between psychological variables and teachers’ job satisfaction. Cognitive rigidity, as a mechanism to resistance to change, mediates between conscientiousness and teachers’ job (...) satisfaction. Moreover, the moderation role of learning goals orientation manifests in the relation between conscientiousness and job satisfaction. These findings emphasize that school management needs to offer teachers information and explain the change’s benefits if they want to prevent individual resistance to change and decrease satisfaction related to their work. (shrink)

This article traces a debate on Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s Germanization of the Bible. The trigger of the debate was Siegfried Kracauer’s infamous critique entitled “Die Bibel auf Deutsch”, published in April 1926 in the Frankfurter Zeitung. In his harsh review of the first volume of the translation, Kracauer regards the use of the German language by Buber and Rosenzweig as an archaization. Relying in part on unpublished letters, this paper presents and explores the different perceptions of the translation, (...) which embody the depths these fault lines penetrated both in general public discourse and, more specifically, in German-Jewish circles. This article also points towards the change of the German language in the 19th century that is embedded in the historical semantics of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible. (shrink)

This paper is an inquiry into Edward Schillebeeckx’ concept of resurrection, though it is fairly different from a thorough analysis of the meaning of resurrection per se. The difference comes from the fact that we will not simply view his take on the concept as a peculiar experiment, but the question of the importance of resurrection today receives special attention. This does not mean that certain attempts at defining and elaborating on the significance of Schillebeeckx’s concept of resurrection have been (...) overlooked. Still, the main purpose of this study is to literally put this concept to the test and see the tradition associated with it over the years. A final purpose is to determine Schillebeeckx’s place at the end of this experiment, as he is associated with the two poignant interpretations of resurrection today, namely the radical and liberal positions. The aim of this experiment is to decide whether we still need to talk about resurrection today and how critical it is to ask serious questions about it in this human history facing its end. This paper explores the concept of resurrection based on its impact on the humanum or the potential of human history always with an eye to its future, where in Schillebeeckx’s thought the perfect human state will be attained. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of Edward Schillebeeckx’s insights on different perceptions of revelation as related to concepts like salvation, God, church, human experience and creation in the work Jesus in Our Western Culture. The incentive of Schillebeeckx’s hermeneutical method in nowadays Western phenomenology, upon which God “breathed his breath of life”, triggered our interest in meanings which Schillebeeckx ascribes to human history as the realm of God’s work for the benefit of men and women. This meaning is suggested in (...) the very beginning of the book by its original Dutch title If Politics is not Everything. As stated in this work’s introduction, Schillebeeckx’s main theme is the origin of salvation in the humanum, from the Abba experience to nowadays revelatory events. Our attempt is to see how Schillebeeckx’s humanum, which is the embodiment of human experience of consciousness, becomes relevant for the Christian doctrines and why Schillebeeckx reckons that bringing them together would impact both his worldview and Western culture. (shrink)

The study of biodiversity spans many disciplines and includes data pertaining to species distributions and abundances, genetic sequences, trait measurements, and ecological niches, complemented by information on collection and measurement protocols. A review of the current landscape of metadata standards and ontologies in biodiversity science suggests that existing standards such as the Darwin Core terminology are inadequate for describing biodiversity data in a semantically meaningful and computationally useful way. Existing ontologies, such as the Gene Ontology and others in the Open (...) Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry library, provide a semantic structure but lack many of the necessary terms to describe biodiversity data in all its dimensions. In this paper, we describe the motivation for and ongoing development of a new Biological Collections Ontology, the Environment Ontology, and the Population and Community Ontology. These ontologies share the aim of improving data aggregation and integration across the biodiversity domain and can be used to describe physical samples and sampling processes (for example, collection, extraction, and preservation techniques), as well as biodiversity observations that involve no physical sampling. Together they encompass studies of: 1) individual organisms, including voucher specimens from ecological studies and museum specimens, 2) bulk or environmental samples (e.g., gut contents, soil, water) that include DNA, other molecules, and potentially many organisms, especially microbes, and 3) survey-based ecological observations. We discuss how these ontologies can be applied to biodiversity use cases that span genetic, organismal, and ecosystem levels of organization. We argue that if adopted as a standard and rigorously applied and enriched by the biodiversity community, these ontologies would significantly reduce barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange among biodiversity resources and researchers. (shrink)

Objective: Theory and research suggest that the pursuit of personal goals that do not fit a person's affect-based implicit motives results in impaired emotional well-being, including increased symptoms of depression. The aim of this study was to evaluate an intervention designed to enhance motive-goal congruence and study its impact on well-being. Method: Seventy-four German students (mean age = 22.91, SD = 3.68; 64.9% female) without current psychopathology, randomly allocated to 3 groups: motivational feedback (FB; n = 25; participants learned about (...) the fit between their implicit motives and explicit goals), FB + congruence-enhancement training (CET; n = 22; participants also engaged in exercises to increase the fit between their implicit motives and goals), and a no-intervention control group (n = 27), were administered measures of implicit motives, personal goal commitments, happiness, depressive symptoms, and life satisfaction 3 weeks before (T1) and 6 weeks after (T2) treatment. Results: On two types of congruence measures derived from motive and goal assessments, treated participants showed increases in agentic (power and achievement) congruence, with improvements being most consistent in the FB+CET group. Treated participants also showed a trend-level depressive symptom reduction, but no changes on other well-being measures. Although increases in overall and agentic motivational congruence were associated with increases in affective well-being, treatment-based reduction of depressive symptoms was not mediated by treatment-based agentic congruence changes. Conclusion: These findings document that motivational congruence can be effectively enhanced, that changes in motivational congruence are associated with changes in affective well-being, and they suggest that individuals’ implicit motives should be considered when personal goals are discussed in the therapeutic process. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess Martha Nussbaum's application of the capabilities approach to non-human animals for both its philosophical merits and its potential to affect public policy. I argue that there are currently three main philosophical problems with the theory that need further attention. After discussing these problems, I show how focusing on factory farming would enable Nussbaum to demonstrate the philosophical merits of the capabilities approach as well as to suggest more powerful and effectives changes in our public policies.

ABSTRACTPosed stimuli dominate the study of nonverbal communication of emotion, but concerns have been raised that the use of posed stimuli may inflate recognition accuracy relative to spontaneous expressions. Here, we compare recognition of emotions from spontaneous expressions with that of matched posed stimuli. Participants made forced-choice judgments about the expressed emotion and whether the expression was spontaneous, and rated expressions on intensity and prototypicality. Listeners were able to accurately infer emotions from both posed and spontaneous expressions, from auditory, visual, (...) and audiovisual cues. Furthermore, perceived intensity and prototypicality were found to play a role in the accurate recognition of emotion, particularly from spontaneous expressions. Our findings demonstrate that perceivers can reliably recognise emotions from spontaneous expressions, and that depending on the comparison set, recognition levels can even be equivalent to that o... (shrink)

Inconsistent information between an organization’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments and perceived CSR (in-)action is a big challenge for organizations because this is typically associated with perceptions of corporate hypocrisy and related negative stakeholder reactions. However, in contrast to the prevailing corporate hypocrisy literature we argue that inconsistent CSR information does not always correspond to perceptions of corporate hypocrisy; rather, responses depend on individual predispositions in processing CSR-related information. In this study, we investigate how an individual’s moral identity shapes reactions (...) to inconsistent CSR information. The results of our three studies show that individuals who symbolize—i.e., display—their moral identity to the public more than they internalize moral values react less negatively to inconsistent CSR information. We also show that this weakens their anger and willingness to change company behavior. Furthermore, we find that this effect is amplified for extraverted but weakened for neurotic individuals. Our findings underline the importance of individual predispositions in processing CSR information. (shrink)

Processuality as refusal to “freeze,” “eternize,” and fragment reality is an attempt to deconstruct the I’s main mechanism, which is, as it was named in psychoanalysis, the compulsion of repetition. Through this deceit and illusion fabrication mechanism, the knowing I tries to “freeze”, to “fixate” and to fragment reality, through “catching” it in different images, formulae, dogmas, theories, ideologies, symbols and systems which become just as many “icons” or graven images of reality. This attempt of deconstruction is made from the (...) perspective of a philosophy/vision of process, quite sporadic in the Western space, bringing arguments from the perspective of Henri Bergson and Emil Cioran’s intuitionist philosophy, as well as from that of the new scientific paradigm of quantum mechanics. All these philosophies could be seen as philosophies of process, demanding as it were an understanding of reality in terms of process, and not of result. This understanding of process takes place with the help of intuition, the only one which can grasp, beyond the static, rigid and artificial concepts or categories of the intellect, the movement, “verb” or interior pulsation of things within the framework of an integration process which reveals the unity, non-separability, intercorrelation and mutual interconnectivity of things. (shrink)

The Adventure of the Image Through the Conflict of Interpretations. Starting from the self-image, through the image adventure landscape seen as an ensemble of conflict of interpretation, not only from a single glance or direction, whether it is evasive or complex, we follow our decipherment and transformation, be it process or state. Through multiple hypostases, whether isolated or open, I will focus on certain details that will be addressed as a dimension by means of text or material reproduction, or through (...) the passage of the same image we face each time through the filter of our own existence. We stop the other or ourselves against the other, thus removing the observer or viewer, thus providing not only distinct perspectives on the same subject or the same situation or even the same consequences, but also giving him the opportunity to choose how to relate to the internal and external environment, thus convincing that, to a lesser extent, or greater, he is the one who drives everything. This approach is based not only on the adventure of self-image in the archive of own experiences but also from the outside, from the archive of common experiences perceived by other people. (shrink)

The presence of agriculture is diminishing in today’s society: it provides only a small percentage of jobs, and the number of visible farms that can provide exposure to agricultural processes is continuously decreasing. We hypothesize that the direct involvement with farm activities or interaction with farmers and visual appreciation of agricultural processes of all kinds, influences rural inhabitants’ relationship to agriculture. We assume that the latter plays a role in how far inhabitants are attached to their place, and more specifically, (...) perceive rural place. In this paper, we aim to initiate a discussion on this complex social relationship and suggest a model to capture fine interactions between relationship to agriculture and rural place attachment. We examine the direct and indirect effects from the density of resident farmers on these interactions. We set up a model using data from empirical research in Germany conducted in 2016. We surveyed rural inhabitants and interviewed farmers in villages purposefully sampled based on high and low density of resident farmers. To reveal underlying relationships among the latent constructs and more directly measurable indicators, as well as the indirect effect of farm presence on place attachment through its effect on forming perceptions about agriculture, we operationalized our analysis using a structural equation model. Besides a good model fit, our initial results indicate that rural inhabitants form stronger relationship to agriculture when the density of resident farmers is higher. Further, farm presence and attachment to rural place are positively related, but needs to be better captured. (shrink)

The Plant Ontology (PO) is a community resource consisting of standardized terms, definitions, and logical relations describing plant structures and development stages, augmented by a large database of annotations from genomic and phenomic studies. This paper describes the structure of the ontology and the design principles we used in constructing PO terms for plant development stages. It also provides details of the methodology and rationale behind our revision and expansion of the PO to cover development stages for all plants, particularly (...) the land plants (bryophytes through angiosperms). As a case study to illustrate the general approach, we examine variation in gene expression across embryo development stages in Arabidopsis and maize, demonstrating how the PO can be used to compare patterns of expression across stages and in developmentally different species. Although many genes appear to be active throughout embryo development, we identified a small set of uniquely expressed genes for each stage of embryo development and also between the two species. Evaluating the different sets of genes expressed during embryo development in Arabidopsis or maize may inform future studies of the divergent developmental pathways observed in monocotyledonous versus dicotyledonous species. The PO and its annotation databasemake plant data for any species more discoverable and accessible through common formats, thus providing support for applications in plant pathology, image analysis, and comparative development and evolution. (shrink)

In this study, I examine the online discourse of the European refugee crisis on the micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Specifically, I analyze 100 tweets that include #refugeesnotwelcome, and explore how this hashtag is used to express negative feelings, beliefs and ideologies toward refugees and migrants in Europe. Guided by critical discourse studies, I focus on Twitter users’ discursive strategies as well as form and function of semiotic resources and multimodality. Twitter users who include this particular hashtag use a rhetoric of inclusion (...) and exclusion to depict refugees as unwanted, criminal outsiders. These tendencies align with current trends in Europe where nationalist-conservative and xenophobic right-wing groups gain power and establish a socially accepted discourse of racism. (shrink)

This review provides an overview of the research on nonverbal expressions of positive emotions, organised into emotion families, that is, clusters sharing common characteristics. Epistemological positive emotions are found to have distinct, recognisable displays via vocal or facial cues, while the agency-approach positive emotions appear to be associated with recognisable visual, but not auditory, cues. Evidence is less strong for the prosocial emotions in any modality other than touch, and there is little support for distinct recognisable signals of the savouring (...) positive emotions. In closing, some limitations of extant work are noted and some proposals for future research are outlined. (shrink)

In this article we attempt a phenomenological analysis of the climate crisis. We start by arguing that the climate crisis cannot appear as a regular phenomenon. Due to its over-temporality and catastrophic character it is a non-phenomenon. However, we contend, this non-phenomenon announces itself in the hyperphenomenon of heat-waves. We analyse heat as a phenomenon and then show how it becomes a hyperphenomenon in the form of heat-waves. Besides the scientific evidence for prolongued and more extreme heat waves being due (...) to the climate crisis there is a question of how they can be experienced in everyday life as connected to climate change. We argue that, if heat-waves reach extreme temperatures, go on for an unusual long time and are combined with uncommonly high temperatures in winter, we experience, bodily and structurally, a falling apart of our normal order of experience. This experience can motivate an experienced understanding of the climate crisis because it resonates with the overtemporality and catastrophic character of the climate crisis. We therefore understand it as an announcement of the crisis despite its withdrawal. (shrink)

The purpose of this article was to gain a deeper understanding of Arendt’s educational philosophy, her perspective of political involvement as a kind of political education, and natality as the fundamental nature of education. The current study has extended past research by elucidating Arendt’s view of participatory democratic politics, her analysis of citizenship education programs, and her assessment of the crisis of education. The findings of this study have implications for Arendt’s idea of pedagogical authority, the specific character of Arendt’s (...) contribution to political theory, and her grasp on the link between citizenship and education. (shrink)

Using the format of the assignment itself, we describe an assignment we have been using for the past seven years: Change Making Letter. Students are asked to pick an issue which directly affects them, identify a specific problem, think of a possible solution, as well as anticipate objections and respond to them. This letter should be about something the student genuinely cares about and has personal experience with, not a big national or international issue. While arguing for the importance of (...) the change making letter, we describe the advantages of this assignment, how the assignment is structured, and how faculty can modify it to meet a variety of classes and pedagogical goals. (shrink)

The framers of the U.S. Constitution believed that intellectual property rights were crucial to scientific advancement. Yet, the framers also recognized the need to balance innovation, privatization, and public use. The courts’ expansion of patent protection for biotechnology innovations in the last 30 years raises the question whether the patent system effectively balances these concerns. While the question is not new, only through a thorough and thoughtful examination of these issues can the current system be evaluated. It is then a (...) policy decision for Congress if any change is necessary. (shrink)

The Dimensions and the Affinities of the Game. Two people cannot be replicated. But they can have common points in life, such as social aspects or others regarding their sentimental life, their artistical one, their spiritual one and from these we can see how everything comes into place and forms their unicity. It evolves on their personal style, on the character, perceptions, visions and also in the person they aim to be. So, the game expresses, no matter what dimension we (...) are considering, that the vision is a concept which indicates both clarity and perspectives between us and our own selves. It can be deformed and transposed into something that actually exists. We are talking about dimension, game, self-being, affinity and the intangible present. (shrink)

This interactive book is designed to help readers deepen their relationship with the Divine by connecting to the vibrancy of life. This cosmic message of hope is meant to be read without hurry, while taking time to ponder and absorb the wisdom of these great mystics.