Autistic difficulties with social interaction have primarily been understood as expressions of underlying impairment of the ability to ‘mindread.’ Although this understanding of autism and social interaction has raised controversy in the phenomenological community for decades, the phenomenological criticism remains largely on a philosophical level. This article helps fill this gap by discussing how phenomenology can contribute to empirical methodologies for studying social interaction in autism. By drawing on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and qualitative data from an ongoing study (...) on social interaction in autism, I discuss how qualitative interviews and participant observation can yield phenomenologically salient data on social interaction. Both, I argue, enjoy their phenomenological promise through facilitating attention to the social-spatial-material fields in and through which social interactions and experiences arise. By developing phenomenologically sound approaches to studying social interaction, this article helps resolve the deficiency of knowledge concerning experiential dimensions of social interaction in autism. (shrink)

This article proposes a unified theory of the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP). The theory provides a framework for rationalizing the various and contradictory findings in past empirical research. The theory is based on the parallels between the business and CSR domains, and thus draws on models from economics.

In Ecowomanism at the Panamá Canal: Black Women, Labor, and Environmental Ethics, Sofía Betancourt constructs environmental ethics at the intersection of the global North and global South. Betancourt explores transnational environmental justice through the lived experience of women from the African Diaspora who migrated to Panamá to work on the Canal.

Abstract:Since the birth of autism as a psychiatric category, autistic individuals have been described as preoccupied with the world of objects and detached from the world of subjects, thus marking a distinction between the “social” and the “non-social” still prevalent in autism research and diagnostic criteria. The aim of this article is to question this distinction by examining the role of things in autistic forms of social interaction. Drawing on qualitative data from an ongoing qualitative and phenomenological study on social (...) interaction among youth with autism, I argue that material things enjoy a sustaining and facilitating role in autistic social interaction for two reasons: First, by being sensible things open to tactile, auditory, and visual engagement, and second, by being things that incorporate normative practices. This relation between the material and the social in which the latter is mediated by the former, is beneficial to individuals with autism because it exploits a particular relation to materiality to consolidate a shaky attunement to the social world. I propose a materially mediated mode of interaction guided by the approaches to perception, embodiment, and materiality developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson. This account puts pressure on the phenomenological emphasis on the face-to-face encounter and brings intersubjectivity into view as a many-faceted phenomenon realizable not only through interbodily dynamics but also through the material landscapes situating social encounters. (shrink)

Existing explanations of political intolerance and partisanship highlight how individuals’ ideological commitments and the homogeneity of their political environments foster intolerance toward other political groups. This article argues that cultural, interactional conditions play a crucial role in how personal and environmental factors work – or do not work – in local groups. Based on a four-year ethnographic study and 12 focus group discussions with two culturally distinct civic associations of American libertarians, I show how groups’ varying patterns of interaction, or (...) “styles,” establish distinct cultural settings, in which different attitudes and behaviors seem sensible and appropriate, particularly regarding other political groups. Thus, when libertarian groups established a “community style” of interaction, viewing the relationship among members in terms of friendship and community bonds, they also opened their social activities to non-libertarians, collaborated with them in political projects, and viewed politics as a matter of advancing shared interests with people from other political groups. Comparisons across and within field sites show how this relationship between style and political tolerance works in different libertarian groups and different social environments. These findings highlight the role of local factors in explaining variations in groups’ levels of political tolerance and present a key mechanism—centered on interaction patterns—to supplement existing analyses of the relationship between political intolerance and changing forms of civic organizing in the US. (shrink)

This study seeks to provide a new resolution to an old controversy regarding Wilhelm Dilthey's methodological writings, written from 1880 to 1911. This controversy concentrates on the relations of Dilthey's early psychology and his late hermeneutics. On one side of this controversy stand interpreters who claim that the appearance of the late hermeneutics marks a dramatic change in Dilthey's thought, and even creates an internal paradox in his thinking. On the other side, stand interpreters who view his thought as a (...) unified whole, by claiming that these methods were meant to work in tandem and complement each other. I largely agree with the latter group of interpreters regarding the unity of Dilthey's writings; however, instead of basing my view on the methodological level of Dilthey’s writings, I will concentrate on the object of these two methods. According to my new answer to the question of the continuity of Dilthey’s thought, Dilthey did intend to replace his early psychology with his late hermeneutics; even so, his thought should still be viewed as consistent and stable because he continued to apply both different methods to the same object: inner-universal content, that is, the inner psychological source of outer human reality. In this way, I will try show that the consistency of Dilthey's thought is derived from the stable destination he aspired to reach with the help of the different methods. (shrink)

This study examines the sources of human divergence as arise from Wilhelm Dilthey’s writings. While Dilthey assigns a central role to the human subject, he never synthesizes his major ideas on subjectivity into a unified theory of subjective uniqueness. I will show that such a theory can be derived from his writings through the combination of three ideas that appear in them. These ideas are: (1) the thesis that human understanding is possible because of psychological content that is shared by (...) both the creator and the interpreter; (2) the belief that this shared content is the only content that exists within human beings, meaning that there is no unique psychological content; and (3) the perception of this inner universal content as an accumulation of life-possibilities. When joined together, these ideas create an inspiring theory of human divergence, according to which the uniqueness of an individual is determined through partial realization of universal possibilities. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper discusses how the notion of clock time was introduced in the Greek world. On the basis of an analysis of the earliest (potential) references to hours and clocks in texts from the late fifth to the early third century BC in their historical context, and with reference to the earliest archaeologically attested clocks, it proposes a scenario for the conception and development of this conventional system. It offers a new interpretation of the problematic passage Herodotus 2.109 and argues (...) that an hour-like unit was developed by late fifth century astronomers, under Babylonian influence, to denote the time in which a celestial body moves through a section of its diurnal circle. When this astronomical concept moved to the civic sphere in the second half of the fourth century, it changed from a scientific unit of duration to a civic unit for measuring the time of day. This shift probably took place in Athens, where the first references to hours appear in this period together with multiple experiments in clock making, as well as humorous reactions to the newfound sense of temporal precision. The paper will also show, however, that these first clocks did not yet tell seasonal hours – the type of hours that would eventually define Greco-Roman clock time – and still measured the lapse of time rather than enabling the location of moments in time. Greco-Roman clock time was only fully formed when it incorporated Egyptian notions of the hour in the Ptolemaic kingdom of the early third century BC. (shrink)

Autism research has recently witnessed an embodied turn. In response to the cognitivist approaches dominating the field, phenomenological scholars have suggested a reconceptualization of autism as a disorder of embodied intersubjectivity. Part of this interest in autistic embodiment concerns the role of sensory differences, which have recently been added to the diagnostic criteria of autism. While research suggests that sensory differences are implicated in a wide array of autistic social difficulties, it has not yet been explored how sensory and social (...) experience in autism relate on a phenomenological level. Given the importance of the sensory dimension of social encounters in phenomenological analyses of autism, this question must be considered crucial. This article investigates the role played by sensory differences in autistic social experience. Through a phenomenological analysis informed primarily by the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with particular emphasis on the relation between intersubjectivity and perception, I argue that sensory differences affect the way other people appear in autistic experience on a pre-reflective level. By drawing on autistic young adults’ experiential descriptions of social encounters, this article identifies three aspects of how sensory differences affect social experiences in autism. First, social encounters manifested as sensorially disturbing, chaotic, and unpredictable events. Second, the embodied expressions of others appeared unfamiliar, threatening, and promoted a sense of detachment from the social world. Third, deliberate practices were employed to actively seek perceptual and social meaning in these disorienting social encounters. This analysis stresses the importance of understanding embodied intersubjectivity through its sensory dimensions. In addition, it indicates an important avenue for future research in exploring the potential role of practice in maintaining an intuitive grip on social meaning. By approaching social encounters as sensory and perceptual events, I emphasize how social difficulties in autism are inherently world-involving phenomena rather than a cognitive deficit reducible to the autistic person. (shrink)

Although compassion in healthcare differs in important ways from compassion in everyday life, it provides a key, applied microcosm in which the science of compassion can be applied. Compassion is among the most important virtues in medicine, expected from medical professionals and anticipated by patients. Yet, despite evidence of its centrality to effective clinical care, research has focused on compassion fatigue or barriers to compassion and neglected to study the fact that most healthcare professionals maintain compassion for their patients. In (...) contributing to this understudied area, the present report provides an exploratory investigation into how healthcare professionals report trying to maintain compassion. In the study, 151 professionals were asked questions about how they maintained compassion for their patients. Text responses were coded, with a complex mixture of internal vs. external, self vs. patient, and immediate vs. general strategies being reported. Exploratory analyses revealed reliable individual differences in the tendency to report strategies of particular types but no consistent age-related differences between older and younger practitioners emerged. Overall, these data suggest that while a range of compassion-maintaining strategies were reported, strategies were typically concentrated in particular areas and most professionals seek to maintain care using internal strategies. A preliminary typology of compassion maintaining strategies is proposed, study limitations and future directions are discussed, and implications for the study of how compassion is maintained are considered. (shrink)

Research has shown the importance of engaging in networking behaviors for employees’ career success. Networking behaviors can be seen as a proactive way of creating access to career-related social resources and we argue that this type of proactive career behaviors might be particularly relevant for freelancers who cannot depend on an organizational career system supporting their further development, yet whose careers are characterized by high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability. To date, however, our understanding of how freelancers, being a category (...) of workers that are deprived of an organizational context of support for career development, can safeguard their employability, is limited. Therefore, this study addresses this gap and investigates whether freelancers’ networking behaviors are positively associated with career outcomes, through the mediating role of the need for relatedness fulfillment and employability-enhancing competencies. Hypotheses are tested via Structural Equation Modelling using a sample of 1,874 freelancers from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The results generally support our hypotheses, providing evidence for a significant association between networking behaviors and need for relatedness fulfillment, and between networking behaviors and employability-enhancing competencies. Moreover, we found a significant association between need for relatedness fulfillment and employability-enhancing competencies, being the mediators in our research model and the outcomes of career satisfaction and future career opportunities. Implications for career development in the contemporary workplace are discussed, with particular attention for need for relatedness fulfillment, employability, and sustainable careers of freelance workers. (shrink)

Dit jaarboek van het Studium Generale van de Hogeschool Gent bevat essays van de sprekers die tijdens het academiejaar 2013-2014 een lezing hebben gehouden over het jaarthema "Tijd? Altijd!". In deze bundel wordt stilgestaan bij de vraag hoe allerlei vormen van en opvattingen over tijd aan de orde zijn in de maatschappij, in de kunsten en in het wetenschappelijk onderzoek.0Deze lezingenreeks werd samengesteld en georganiseerd door Sofie Vandamme i.s.m. Jeroen Cluckers. Het boek bevat bijdragen van Sofie Vandamme, Benno Barnard, Mark (...) Fisher, Pedro De Bruyckere, Els Stuyven, Joke J. Hermsen, Marli Huijer, Dieter Ceustermans, Carl Devos, Petra Van Brabandt en Lisaboa Houbrechts"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Barons's target article approaches errors in decision-making by defining three kinds of models: normative, descriptive, and prescriptive. Baron's prescriptive model is at the center of this commentary. From a theoretical perspective, is Baron's prescriptive model a set of rules through which one can move from the descriptive to the normative? Or is it a practical goal one can achieve as opposed to a normative unachievable theoretical ideal? Delineating an efficient prescriptive account for decision making necessarily depends on a very specific (...) normative model. However, Baron's normative consequentialism model is too general to enable adequate prescriptive accounts. (shrink)

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the advent of widespread pet ownership was accompanied by claims of heightened animal abilities. Psychical researchers investigated many of these claims, including animal telepathy and ghostly apparitions. By the beginning of the twentieth century, news of horses and dogs with the ability to read and calculate fascinated the French public and scientists alike. Amidst questions about the justification of animal cruelty in laboratory experiments, wonder animals came to represent some extraordinary possibilities associated (...) with their kind. Psychologists speculated on the feats of wonder animals. They considered the possibility that these animals shared consciousness and intelligence with humans, and that—if confirmed—their alleged amazing abilities could lead to a new understanding of cognition for all animals. This article focuses on the few years during which claims of wonder animals occupied a significant place in French psychology and psychical research. It argues that as explanations involving deception or unconscious cues gained increased acceptance, the interest in wonder animals soon led to a backlash in comparative psychology that had repercussions for all animals, particularly those used in experimentation, in that it contributed to the decline of research addressing cognitive abilities in non-human species. (shrink)

In historiography there is a tendency to see the Great War as marking the end of scientific optimism and the period that followed the war as a time of discord. Connecting to current (inter)national historiographical debate on the question of whether the First World War meant a disruption from the pre-war period or not, this article strives to prove that faith in scientific progress still prevailed in the 1920s. This is shown through the use of Belgium as a case study, (...) which suggests that the generally adopted cultural pessimism in the post-war years did not apply to the public rhetoric of science in this country. Diverse actors—scientists, industrialists, politicians, the public opinion and the military staff—declared a confidence in science, enhanced by wartime results. Furthermore, belief in science in Belgium was not affected by public outcry over the use of mustard gas, unlike in the former belligerent countries where the gas became an unpleasant reminder of how science was used during the war. Even German science with its industrial applications remained the norm after 1918. In fact, the faith in science exhibited during the pre-war years continued to exist, at least until the 1920s, despite anti-German sentiments being voiced by many sections of Belgian society in the immediate aftermath of the war. (shrink)

Dit jaarboek van het 'Studium Generale' van de Hogeschool Gent bevat essays van de sprekers die tijdens het academiejaar 2012-2013 een lezing hebben gehouden over het jaarthema ‘Normaal!? Waar is de norm?’. In deze bundel wordt stilgestaan bij de vraag hoe de tweedeling normaal/abnormaal aan de orde is in de maatschappij, in de kunsten en in de (medische) wetenschappen.0Deze lezingenreeks werd samengesteld door Sofie Vandamme en georganiseerd i.s.m. Jeroen Cluckers. Het boek bevat bijdragen van Sofie Vandamme, Charlotte Mutsaers, Peter Hinssen, (...) Dirk De Wachter, Maartje Schermer, Piet Hoebeke, Kristien Hemmerechts, Patrick Allegaert en Bart Marius, Stijn Vanheule, Paul De Grauwe, Hilde Van den Bulck, Jens Franssen en Dieter Ceustermans. Ook de beste paper van de deelnemende studenten werd mee opgenomen. (shrink)

Indoor radon is a natural radioactive gas that enters homes through cracks in the foundations. It is one of the leading causes of lung cancer. Although radon can be detected with an indoor radon test and can be mitigated by means of either ventilation or professional measures, testing and mitigating rates of the at-risk population remain insufficient. The objective of this study is to systematically review the current level of evidence regarding the design and effectiveness of mass media campaigns to (...) address the health risks of indoor radon to homeowners. The results show that informative tone of voices prevailed, other components, such as emotional or social components, were often not included. Furthermore, the focus was mostly on intention and less on behavior itself, and on testing instead of mitigation. Further research is needed to test effective and innovative communication strategies to increase protective behavior concerning indoor radon. (shrink)

ArgumentThroughout the nineteenth century, French alienists reflected on the nature of idiocy, on its causes and possible treatments. Central to this reflection was the question of education. Was it possible to teach a child idiot to develop physically, intellectually, and morally? Schools were established, wards were rearranged, and educational methods were suggested. The extent to which all of this succeeded is hard to assess. The optimistic tone of educational treatises was never reflected in the life in the asylum. By the (...) end of the century, the dichotomy between theoretical ideals and practical reality came to a halt as both methodological treatises on education and pleas for funding ceased. Soon, idiots left the wards and their schools for new classes within the common school system. While the former practice had proved successful in improving the patients' abilities, it was claimed that it had failed to bring about the social integration for which alienists had once hoped. This final period marked a rupture in the treatment of idiocy, both in terms of space and organization from asylums to schools and from alienists to psychologists. (shrink)

This paper explores trans poetics as a way of doing trans philosophy. I begin by giving an overview of the current state of trans philosophy. I then give examples of other literatures wherein poetics is taken to be philosophically robust. After giving a brief history of trans poetics, I turn to the poetics statements and poetry of three trans poets—D'Lo, Ching-In Chen, and micha cárdenas—featured in the 2013 anthology Troubling the Line. I show how poetry is often uniquely able to (...) capture the ambiguity of the WTF of trans experience in ways that differ from philosophical argumentation. I conclude by suggesting that poetics might move us away from a potential politics of suffering in trans philosophy to a politics of liberation. (shrink)

The article develops a methodological and empirical approach for gauging the ways Big Data can be collected and distributed through mobile apps. This approach focuses on the infrastructural components that condition the disclosure of smartphone users’ data – namely the permissions that apps request and the third-party corporations they work with. We explore the surveillance ecology of mobile apps and thereby the privacy implications of everyday smartphone use through three analytical perspectives: The first focuses on the ‘appscapes’ of individual smartphone (...) users and investigates the consequences of which and how many mobile apps users download on their phones; the second compares different types of apps in order to study the app ecology and the relationships between app and third-party service providers; and the third focuses on a particular app category and discusses the functional as well as the commercial incentives for permissions and third-party collaborations. Thereby, the article advances an interdisciplinary dialogue between critical data studies, political economy and app studies, and pushes an empirical and critical perspective on mobile communication, app ecologies and data economies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What, Exactly, Does the Madperson Lack?Sofie Jeppsson, PhD (bio)Justin garson has already received well-earned recognition for his Madness: A philosophical exploration (2022), in which he distinguishes the view of madness as a dysfunction from madness as a strategy—a distinction that cuts across traditional distinctions between, for example, biological/neurological and psychological/social views. On the dysfunction view, going mad might be comparable to something like having an asthma attack or, more (...) long-term, developing type 1 diabetes. If the trachea closes up and prevents air from passing through, that is a dysfunction in the breathing apparatus. If the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas cease to produce insulin, making the person dependent on insulin shots to stay alive, that is a dysfunction. On the strategy view, going mad is rather like getting a fever when already infected with some pathogen. Given that you have the pathogen reproducing inside you, a rising body temperature provides a strategy (although not, of course, something the ill person chose) to keep the reproduction rate down, thus giving the immune system a better chance at vanquishing the infection. That does not mean that fevers are harmless—if a fever becomes high enough, it might itself do damage to the body. Still, it is a strategy, not a mere dysfunction. Analogously, on the Madness as strategy view, going mad might help a person deal with old traumas or an ongoing terrible situation, even as the madness may also be damaging in itself.In this paper, Garson introduces us to another interesting distinction: between seeing madness as a lack of reason, or as a perversion of or difference in reason. Garson writes that present-day psychiatry tends to see madness as a lack, whereas the late modern thinkers conceived of it as a perversion of reason. The late moderns clearly saw madness as something negative, but if we retain something like their basic view, merely change our evaluation from the negative perversion to the more neutral difference, we have a better basis for regarding Madness as a complicated and problematic but still cherished identity, and for Mad Pride.This is another interesting distinction well worth calling attention to. I’m uncertain how well the J.C.A. Heinroth example works—the text cited seems to show that he had a Madness as strategy view, but is it a Madness as a different kind of reason view?—but the other examples work better. Nevertheless, I want to push back a little against the claim that present-day psychiatry and philosophy of psychiatry tend to regard madness as a lack of something whereas the early moderns saw it as a difference. (Just a friendly little push, mind you, but still.)Arthur Wigan’s description of two brains, one functional and one dysfunctional, still seems to posit a lack of proper function in one of them. Sure, he does not say that the madperson lacks as much as the [End Page 313] idiot, who has two dysfunctional brains whereas the madperson has one functional and one dysfunctional. Still, there’s a lack. This two-brain picture also has its modern analogues: It brings to mind (albeit in a less biologically concrete and reified form) much psycho-educational material on, for example, how to live with bipolar disorder, according to which a supposed sane and rational part of the psychiatric patient’s mind should learn to handle and control the other, mad part (e.g., Miklowitz, 2012).According to John Locke, madpeople reason just fine, but they start from false premises. Is not this, too, something that madpeople are supposed to lack? Correct and realistic premises to start from? Locke writes that madpeople have “taken their fancies for realities,” but “make right deductions from them.” Moreover, Locke’s theory is reminiscent of modern bottom-up theories like Brendan Maher’s (1999)—madpeople have bizarre experiences on the basis of which they form bizarre beliefs, but we need not postulate that they suffer from any problems with, for example, reasoning and drawing inferences to explain why they believe what they do. Theorists who instead argue for a top-down or two-factor account of why madpeople stick... (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, his main work of theoretical philosophy, frequently uses metaphors from law. In this first book-length study in English of Kant's legal metaphors and their role in the first Critique, Sofie Møller shows that they are central to Kant's account of reason. Through an analysis of the legal metaphors in their entirety, she demonstrates that Kant conceives of reason as having a structure mirroring that of a legal system in a natural right framework. Her study shows (...) that Kant's aim is to make cognisers become similar to authorized judges within such a system, by proving the legitimacy of the laws and the conditions under which valid judgments can be pronounced. These elements consolidate her conclusion that reason's systematicity is legal systematicity. (shrink)

Autism is a highly heterogeneous phenomenon. Not only is it difficult to understand the various and diverse aspects of autism, their relation to each other is also complex and still poorly understood. In my article, “Material encounters. A phenomenological account of social interaction in autism,” I have addressed this heterogeneity by presenting an understanding of how social features of autism relate to behavioral features. Straddling this divide between the social and the non-social that still pervades much thinking in philosophy, psychiatry, (...) and psychology is crucial for understanding the diverse experiences of autistic persons and... (shrink)

Increasingly, corporations are championing the cause of gender equality and women’s empowerment in the Global South. Tapping into notions about women’s role as caregivers, empowerment promotion is simultaneously meant to lead to family and community development, profitability for those who invest in women and girls and economic growth. While emerging feminist scholarship on this kind of ‘transnational business feminism’ (TBF) (Roberts, 2012, 2015) has largely scrutinised gender governance based on visual and textual materials produced by corporations themselves, this article expands (...) the methodological engagement with TBF by reflecting on how we translated the concept into two distinct field-based research projects. The article compares and contrasts our situated fieldwork experiences, focusing in particular on accessing corporate elites and development partners and the epistemological rifts that emerged in conversations with them. It documents how our experiences of blockages, hostile relations and miscommunications have shaped our critical feminist research, and points to some of the power relations at work within TBF. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between conspiracy theories and antisemitism by posing the question of whether conspiracism is an inseparable and integrated part of national socialist antisemitism or a marginalised, extremist position even within such settings. An analysis of two Danish national-socialist journals, _Kamptegnet_ and _National-Socialisten_, demonstrates how the introduction of _stigmatised knowledge_ in the form of anti-Masonic conspiracy theories and the myth of ritual murder led to an antisemitic escalation process in _Kamptegnet_, imbuing antisemitism with a redemptive character during (...) the Second World War. Antisemitic conspiracy theories, on the other hand, played a relatively marginal role in _National-Socialisten_, where aspects that enjoyed promotion in Germany were downplayed for tactical reasons. While antisemitism in _National-Socialisten_ primarily played a role in caricatures and as a bizarre form of entertainment, an escalation can also be observed here as a consequence of the progression of the war and the intensified German propaganda effort. (shrink)

This paper challenges the role individual autonomy has played in debates on moral neuroenhancement (MN). It shows how John Hyman’s analysis of agency as consisting of functionally integrated dimensions allows us to reassess the impact of MN on practical agency. I discuss how MN affects what Hyman terms the four dimensions of agency: psychological, ethical, intellectual, and physical. Once we separate the different dimensions of agency, it becomes clear that many authors in the debate conflate the different dimensions in the (...) concept they call ‘autonomous agents’. They contend that, for example, reason-giving and previous autonomous acts are relevant to agency as such, when in fact they capture only one aspect of functionally integrated agency. This paper reconsiders MN in light of the functional integration of reason and emotions in practical agency. To illustrate the impact of MN on different aspects of agency, I consider examples from legal practice, which show that autonomy cannot be our sole focus when evaluating the moral implications of MN. (shrink)

Diversity is often announced as a solution to ethical problems in artificial intelligence (AI), but what exactly is meant by diversity and how it can solve those problems is seldom spelled out. This lack of clarity is one hurdle to motivating diversity in AI. Another hurdle is that while the most common perceptions about what diversity is are too weak to do the work set out for them, stronger notions of diversity are often defended on normative grounds that fail to (...) connect to the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. However, there is a long history of research in feminist philosophy of science and a recent body of work in social epistemology that taken together provide the foundation for a notion of diversity that is both strong enough to do the work demanded of it, and can be defended on epistemic grounds that connect with the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. We clarify and defend that notion here by introducing emergent expertise as a network phenomenon wherein groups of workers with expertise of different types can gain knowledge not available to any individual alone, as long as they have ways of communicating across types of expertise. We illustrate the connected epistemic and ethical benefits of designing technology with diverse groups of workers using the examples of an infamous racist soap dispenser, and the millimeter wave scanners used in US airport security. (shrink)

Mind wandering refers to a state when attention shifts from the task at hand or current situation toward thoughts, feelings, and imaginations. This state is often accompanied by a decline in mood, and patients suffering from major depression exhibit more perseverative MW. Hence, although the directionality of the relationship between mood and MW is still under investigation, it may be useful to explore possible avenues to reduce MW. In an earlier pilot study, we investigated MW during auditory beat stimulation in (...) healthy subjects using thought-probes during a sustained attention to response task. We found evidence for reduced MW during monaural 5 Hz beats compared to silence, sine tones, and binaural 5 Hz beats. Moreover, the data tentatively suggested that this reduction was particularly pronounced in subjects with high levels of MW during silence. In the current study, we therefore asked whether MW can be reduced by monaural theta beats in subjects with high trait-levels of MW, as indicated by an online MW questionnaire. Preselected subjects performed a SART task with thought-probes assessing the propensity to mind wander, meta-awareness, and the temporal orientation of MW. Stimulation conditions comprised monaural theta beats, as well as silence, and sine tones as control conditions. Our main hypothesis stating that the propensity to mind wander during monaural theta beats is reduced compared to both control conditions was only partly confirmed. Indeed, MW was significantly diminished during exposure to the theta beats compared to sine tones. However, reduced MW during theta beats versus silence was only observed in a subgroup using stricter inclusion criteria. Considering possible reasons for this outcome, our data suggest that the preselection procedure was suboptimal and that beat effects are modulated by the individual responses to auditory stimulation in general. (shrink)

This study investigates the ethnic differentials in contraceptive use in the north-eastern Ch’orti area of Guatemala, a region dominated by the Ladino culture. Data come from a household survey and in-depth interviews with service providers carried out in 2001 in the town of Jocotán, and a survey carried out in 1994 in two nearby indigenous villages (aldeas). Descriptive analysis and logistic regression are used to explore the data. Previous DHS surveys have used dress and language to classify ethnic groups. In (...) this paper, an alternative approach based on self-identification is adopted. The results reveal significant differences in contraceptive behaviour among different ethnic groups within the same town and region. The results show that self-identified Ladino women who represented the minority of the population had contraceptive behaviour similar to their counterparts elsewhere in Latin America. The extremely low levels of contraceptive use among indigenous women from the aldeas suggest that the corresponding DHS figures in this region are probably overestimated. (shrink)

This article maps the various preventive measures 9 to 16-year-olds may take when confronted with problematic online situations, and it assesses how they differentiate preventive strategies based on online risk types. Boys and girls are compared and potential changes in preventive measures as they grow older are discussed. The reality of preventive measures is complex: Young people adopt different types of preventive measures depending on the perceived seriousness and potential harm of the risky situation at hand. Proactive problem-preventing measures are (...) favored while support seeking is clearly a less common strategy in preventing unpleasant situations online. Cognitive strategies such as planning, strategizing and reflecting are also quite common among children’s intent on avoiding risky online experiences, and they can spur them on from mere awareness to concrete preventive action. (shrink)

Six leading scholars--representing Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and secular perspectives--formulate their variant models of an ideal Jewish education for the contemporary world. This book addresses the multiple challenges of the open society to Jewish continuity by considering different versions of Jewish education appropriate for our time. It emphasizes the continuity of theory and practice, translating theory into practice as well as articulating theory embodied in practice. The book shows how all religious and ethnic communities might deepen the impact of their educational (...) programs. (shrink)