Questioning in an organizational context is a challenging event in multiple senses. Questioning may be used to criticize the leaders of an organization. For the criticisms to be heard as legitimate, however, the questioner must operate within contextual constraints. The main purpose of this article is to examine how questioning functions to construct a university's crisis. Discourse within two faculty senate meetings is analyzed. Three faculty questioning strategies are described: appealing to another organizational entity, requesting either/or information; and metacommunicative commentary. (...) Administration and senate leadership responded to questions using the strategies of appealing to a process and metacommunicative commentary. Faculty questioning functioned to challenge a current course of action while operating from within the organizational guidelines of discourse. Alternatively, leadership responses deferred any substantive change in the course of action. The strategies are related to issues of power, social action, and models of educational governance. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a typology of auditors’ virtues through in-depth interviews with nine exemplars of the audit community.We compare this typology with prescribed auditors’ virtues as represented in the applicable Code of Professional Conduct. Ourcomparison shows that the Code places a primary emphasis on mandatory virtues including the virtues of “independent,” “objective,”and “principled.” While the non-mandatory virtues, which involve “going beyond the minimum” and “putting the public interest foremost,” were identified by our exemplars as essential to the auditor’s (...) role, they received little or no emphasis in the Rules of Professional Conduct. We find this particularly alarming, given that the exemplars interviewed for this study viewed these virtues are essential to the auditors’ role. If the audit profession wishes to uphold public confidence by encouraging the possession of non-mandatory auditors’ virtues, our research suggests that non-mandatory auditors’ virtues should be explicitly described and included in rules of professional conduct. (shrink)

Este artículo reseña: Harold BERTOT TRIANA, Estudios sobre jurisprudencia de la Corte Interamericana de derechos humanos. Cavilaciones al hilo de temas actuales del sistema interamericano de derechos humanos.

En este este estudio presentamos una investigación sobre la genealogía de la razón de Estado y del golpe de Estado, según Michel Foucault. La genealogía de la razón gubernamental se desarrolló paralelamente a la comprensión científica del mundo, en los siglos XVI e XVII, como una realidad gobernada por leyes propias de la naturaleza. La genealogía de la razón de Estado incorporó los elementos “científicos” de la razón gubernamental como técnicas utilitarias para gobernar convenientemente un Estado, más allá del voluntarismo (...) del arbitrio del poder soberano. Foucault muestra en sus análisis genealógicos que el golpe de Estado fue concebido, ya en el siglo XVII, como una técnica gubernamental conveniente con la razón de Estado, cuyas tres principales características son: la necesidad, la violencia y la teatralidad. Palabras clave: Razón gubernamental. Razón de Estado. Golpe de Estado. Michel Foucault. (shrink)

The companion piece to this article, “Situating Moral Justification,” challenges the idea that moral epistemology's mission is to establish a single, all-purpose reasoning strategy for moral justification because no reasoning practice can be expected to deliver authoritative moral conclusions in all social contexts. The present article argues that rethinking the mission of moral epistemology requires rethinking its method as well. Philosophers cannot learn which reasoning practices are suitable to use in particular contexts exclusively by exploring logical relations among concepts. Instead, (...) in order to understand which reasoning practices are capable of justifying moral claims in different types of contexts, we need to study empirically the relationships between reasoning practices and the contexts in which they are used. The article proposes that philosophers investigate case studies of real-world moral disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social power. It motivates and explains the proposed case study method and illustrates the philosophical value of this method through a case study. (shrink)

AI for social good is a thriving research topic and a frequently declared goal of AI strategies and regulation. This article investigates the requirements necessary in order for AI to actually serve a public interest, and hence be socially good. The authors propose shifting the focus of the discourse towards democratic governance processes when developing and deploying AI systems. The article draws from the rich history of public interest theory in political philosophy and law, and develops a framework for ‘public (...) interest AI’. The framework consists of (1) public justification for the AI system, (2) an emphasis on equality, (3) deliberation/ co-design process, (4) technical safeguards, and (5) openness to validation. This framework is then applied to two case studies, namely SyRI, the Dutch welfare fraud detection project, and UNICEF’s Project Connect, that maps schools worldwide. Through the analysis of these cases, the authors conclude that public interest is a helpful and practical guide for the development and governance of AI for the people. (shrink)

PurposeContinuous patient-reported outcomes to identify and address patients’ needs represent an important addition to current routine care. The aim of this study was to identify and determine important dimensions of health-related quality of life in routine oncological care.MethodsIn a cross-sectional qualitative study, interviews and focus groups were carried out and recorded. The interviewees were asked for their evaluation on HrQoL in general and specifically regarding cancer treatment. The material was transcribed and analyzed using qualitative content analysis based on Mayring. The (...) results were reviewed in an expert discussion.ResultsInterviews with patients and clinicians, as well as five focus groups with clinicians were conducted. Initially, nine deductive and two inductive categories on HrQoL were built. Four categories were excluded following the qualitative content analysis because they were hardly or not at all mentioned by participants. Following on from the analysis of the expert discussion, one dimension was added, and two further categories were excluded. The resulting system consisted of six dimensions: emotional health, physical ailments, autonomy, social functionality, dignity, and resources.ConclusionThe identified dimensions of HrQoL in routine oncological care were found to differ from those used in existing HrQoL measurements for patients. Further research is needed to test and evaluate the presented structure in a larger sample of cancer patients to further assess its psychometric properties. (shrink)

School principals world-wide report high levels of strain and attrition resulting in a shortage of qualified principals. It is thus, crucial to identify psychosocial risk factors that reflect principals’ occupational wellbeing. For this purpose, we used the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ-II), a widely used self-report measure covering multiple psychosocial factors identified by leading occupational stress theories. We evaluated the COPSOQ-II regarding factor structure and longitudinal, discriminant, and convergent validity using latent structural equation modeling in a large sample of Australian school (...) principals (N = 2,049). Results reveal that confirmatory factor analysis produced marginally acceptable model fit. A novel approach we call set exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM-set), where cross-loadings were only allowed within a priori defined sets of factors, fit well, and was more parsimonious than a full ESEM. Further multitrait-multimethod models based on the set-ESEM confirm the importance of a principal’s psychosocial risk factors; Stressors and depression were related to demands and ill-being, while confidence and autonomy were related to wellbeing. We also show that working in the private sector was beneficial for showing a low psychosocial risk, while other demographics have little effects. Finally, we identify five latent risk profiles (high risk to no risk) of school principals based on all psychosocial factors. Overall the research presented here closes the theory application gap of a strong multi-dimensional measure of psychosocial risk-factors. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism is an invitation to think differently about knowledge and educational relationality between humans and the more-than-human. This philosophical and political shift in subjectivity builds on, and is entangled with, poststructuralism and phenomenology. In this paper we read diffractively through one another the theories of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and feminist posthumanists Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. We explore the implications of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ for early childhood education. With its emphasis on a moving away from the dominant (...) role of human vision in educational research we show how videoing and photographing works as an apparatus in an analysis of data from an inner-city school in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are struck by children’s seeing with the ‘eyes of their skin’ and ‘seeing’ with/in the world, as their obvious distress is felt when a small tree sapling has been mowed down in a nearby park. We analyse the event with the help of a variation on Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming-child’: ‘becoming-little’, and Anna Tsing’s ‘the arts of noticing’. ‘Becoming-little’ as a methodology disrupts the adult/child binary that positions ‘little’, younger humans as inferior to their ‘bigger’ fully human counterparts. We exemplify ‘becoming-little’ through 4 and 5 year-olds’ learning with the little tree and adopt Barad’s temporal diffraction to ‘see’ what is in/visible in the park: the extractive, exploitative, colonising mining practices of White settlers. These are still part of the land on which the park was created but are in/visible beneath the ‘skin’ of the earth. (shrink)

In the highly contentious abortion arena, the new oral abortifacient technology RU486 is one among many actors. This article offers an arena analysis of the heterogeneous constructions of RU486 by various actors, including scientists, pharmaceutical compa nies, medical groups, antiabortion groups, women's health movement groups, and others who have produced situated knowledges. Conceptually, we find not only that the identity of the nonhuman actor-RU486 -is unstable and multiple but also that, in practice, there are other implicated actors—the downstream users and (...) consumers of the technology. If we try to follow all the actors, we find a fuller and more historicized arena, and, ironically, we too can be construed as implicated actors in it. (shrink)

This paper explores the pragmatic foundations of unreliable narration (UN), a narrative technique highly popular in western literary texts. It sets out by giving a critique of the competing theoretic frameworks of UN, namely the seminal Boothian concept and more recent constructivist approaches. It is argued that both frameworks neglect a pragmatic perspective as the most viable way for identifying and analysing UN. Such a pragmatic model is then developed on the basis of theories of cooperation, such as the Gricean (...) maxims, relevance theory, and politeness. The emerging definition of UN treats a narrator as unreliable if he or she violates the cooperative principle without intending an implicature. This model is tested against three prototypical UNs: Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. These sample analyses yield a typology of UN: while pragmatic deviation is shown to be the intrinsic feature of the phenomenon, unreliable narrators vary according to their degree of intentionality. Finally, two recurring issues in the UN debate are briefly discussed: the existence of textual clues of UN, and the role of the reader in constructing unreliability. (shrink)

Little understood in early U.S. history, the Florida manatee suffered at the hands of people. After the manatees were listed as endangered, scientists began to study manatees and gained much knowledge about them. With education efforts, the species then went from inspiring acts of cruelty to inspiring dedication and admiration among scientists, policymakers, and the interested public. The image of the manatee underwent a transformation. The social and cultural reinvention of the Florida manatees improved their chances for protection.

This title considers whether any generalisations can be made about word order in language. The chapters, written by international scholars, draw on data from several 'disharmonic' and typologically distinct languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Basque, French, English, Hixkaryana (a Cariban language), Khalkha Mongolian, Uyghur Turkic, and Afrikaans.

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into critical domains such as healthcare holds immense promise. Nevertheless, significant challenges must be addressed to avoid harm, promote the well-being of individuals and societies, and ensure ethically sound and socially just technology development. Innovative approaches like Embedded Ethics, which refers to integrating ethics and social science into technology development based on interdisciplinary collaboration, are emerging to address issues of bias, transparency, misrepresentation, and more. This paper aims to develop this approach further to enable future projects (...) to effectively deploy it. Based on the practical experience of using ethics and social science methodology in interdisciplinary AI-related healthcare consortia, this paper presents several methods that have proven helpful for embedding ethical and social science analysis and inquiry. They include (1) stakeholder analyses, (2) literature reviews, (3) ethnographic approaches, (4) peer-to-peer interviews, (5) focus groups, (6) interviews with affected groups and external stakeholders, (7) bias analyses, (8) workshops, and (9) interdisciplinary results dissemination. We believe that applying Embedded Ethics offers a pathway to stimulate reflexivity, proactively anticipate social and ethical concerns, and foster interdisciplinary inquiry into such concerns at every stage of technology development. This approach can help shape responsible, inclusive, and ethically aware technology innovation in healthcare and beyond. (shrink)

Individuals with high levels of narcissism often ascend to leadership positions. Whereas there is evidence that narcissism is linked to unethical behavior and negative social outcomes, the effects of leader narcissism on an organization’s most important resource—its employees—have not yet been studied thoroughly. Using theoretical assumptions of the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept and social exchange theories, we examined how leaders’ narcissistic rivalry was related to follower outcomes in a sample of matched leaders and followers. Followers of leaders high in (...) narcissistic rivalry reported less perceived supervisor support, lower quality leader-member relationships, lower performance-based self-esteem, and lower job engagement. These effects were only found when follower-rated leaders’ narcissistic rivalry was used in the model but not when self-rated leaders’ narcissistic rivalry was used as a predictor. This implies that the negative effects of leaders’ narcissistic rivalry on followers are driven by the expression of narcissistic tendencies. Leader development should thus focus on changing destructive leader behavior. We propose that leaders high in narcissistic rivalry can be motivated to make such changes by showing them that by hurting their followers, they will eventually undermine their own reputation and status. Furthermore, selection and promotion practices should incorporate objective measures to weaken the effects of narcissists’ self-promotional tactics in these contexts and thus prevent people high in narcissistic rivalry from rising to leadership positions. (shrink)

A literary criticism is presented of the book "Challenging Liberalism: Feminism As Political Critique," by Lisa Schwartzman, in response to a symposium devoted to her book. The author comments on feminist theory's criticism of liberalism and the potential for feminist methodology to address the oppression of women globally. Topics include the argument for women's rights as human rights and criticism of the women's rights movement by African scholars, as well as a discussion of the Massai tribe.

Mathematical notation includes a vast array of signs. Most mathematical signs appear to be symbolic, in the sense that their meaning is arbitrarily related to their visual appearance. We explored the hypothesis that mathematical signs with iconic aspects—those which visually resemble in some way the concepts they represent—offer a cognitive advantage over those which are purely symbolic. An early formulation of this hypothesis was made by Christine Ladd in 1883 who suggested that symmetrical signs should be used to convey commutative (...) relations, because they visually resemble the mathematical concept they represent. Two controlled experiments provide the first empirical test of, and evidence for, Ladd's hypothesis. In Experiment 1 we find that participants are more likely to attribute commutativity to operations denoted by symmetric signs. In Experiment 2 we further show that using symmetric signs as notation for commutative operations can increase mathematical performance. (shrink)

Introduction. Medical trainees fear disclosing psychological distress and rarely seek help. Social sharing of difficult experiences can reduce stress and burnout. Drawing comics is one way that has been used to help trainees express themselves. The authors explore reasons why some medical trainees chose to draw comics depicting stressful situations that they had never shared with anyone before. Methods. Trainees participated in a comic drawing session on stressors in medicine. Participants were asked if they had ever shared the drawn situation (...) with anyone. Participants who had not previously shared were asked what prevented them and why they shared it now. The authors performed content analysis of the responses. Results. Of two hundred forty participants, forty-six indicated sharing an experience for the first time. Analysis of the responses revealed dedicated time and space was essential to sharing, trainee insecurity was a barrier, and comics were perceived as a safe way to communicate. Discussion. Depicting a stressful situation may be beneficial for trainees who drew an experience they had never shared before. Providing trainees with the opportunity to externalize their experience and create a community for sharing tough experiences may be one way to reduce trainee stress and burnout. (shrink)

A noção de pessoa, para Simone Weil, passa por uma certa desconstrução e releitura que a filósofa realiza a partir da categoria do impessoal. Abordaremos inicialmente os conceitos de direito e obrigação, refletindo sobre as necessidades da alma pensadas por Weil, em que a obrigação abre o ser humano para o impessoal da pessoa, que por sua vez é conexo com o sentido do eterno e do sagrado. Neste escrito pretende-se resgatar alguns traços desta reflexão e destacar a relação entre (...) o impessoal com o eterno e o sagrado, enquanto constitutivos do ser humano, estudando como a partir do impessoal emerge uma nova percepção da relação ética. (shrink)

This is a qualitative study of the role of gender and emotion in a political setting. The data are from interviews of activists and legislators, as well as from archival accounts of the debates in state legislatures about breast cancer informed consent legislation. I found that proponents for and against the legislation shared the belief that women are more emotional than men. This social belief shaped the political strategies the activists adopted and initially contributed to their effectiveness; however, their opponents (...) claimed that the women activists should be dismissed because their emotionalism made them irrational. I close by discussing Western cultural beliefs about emotions, social stereotypes regarding women, and their consequences for women activists in political arenas. (shrink)

With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.

A partir des chants de rites rada et pétro du vaudou haïtien ainsi que des chanté pwen, véhicules incontestables de l'ambiguïté, l'auteur dévoile l'institution d'une éthique individuelle et collective axée sur la volonté d'exercer un plein contrôle sur la marche des choses et de la vie.

Background: While advanced driver assistance technologies have the potential to increase safety, there is concern that driver inattention resulting from overreliance on these features may result in crashes. Driver monitoring technologies to assess a driver’s state may be one solution. The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend the research on physiological responses to common driving hazards and examine how these may differ based on driving experience.Methods: Learner and Licensed drivers viewed a Driving Hazard Perception Task while electrodermal (...) activity was measured. The task presented 30 Event and 30 Non-Event videos. A skin conductance response score was calculated for each participant based on the percentage of videos that elicited an SCR.Results: Analysis of the SCR score during Event videos revealed a medium effect of group differences, whereby Licensed drivers were more likely to have an SCR than Learner drivers. Interaction effects revealed Licensed drivers were more likely to have an SCR earlier in the Event videos compared to the end, and the Learner drivers were more likely to have an SCR earlier in the Non-Event videos compared to the end.Conclusion: Our results support the viability of using SCR during driving videos as a marker of hazard anticipation differing based on experience. The interaction effects may illustrate situational awareness in licensed drivers and deficiencies in sustained vigilance among learner drivers. The findings demand further examination if physiological measures are to be validated as a tool to inform driver potential performance in an increasingly automated driving environment. (shrink)

From pets to strays to wildlife, sometimes animals need our help! Who keeps animals safe from human harm and other dangers? Community heroes do! Community heroes may work in humane societies, rescue groups, law enforcement, or many other settings. In this book, readers learn all about these real-life heroes and the important work they do. Readers also learn age-appropriate ways that they can help animals too! The high-interest material is paired with brightly colored photographs that bring the text to life, (...) communicating educational information in an appealing, easy-to-understand way. (shrink)

This paper takes a cross-linguistic look at two notorious examples of contemporary slang: American English dude and German Alter. Both have received considerable attention in the media and some initial sociolinguistic inquiry. It is shown here that both items share a number of properties, some quite obvious, others subtler and possibly less stable. This includes features from all levels of linguistic analysis and covers both formal and functional aspects. The seminal similarity between dude and Alter is of a syntactic nature: (...) while both NPs can occur within argument structure, their default is in vocative position. Based on this structural parallelism, other domains are analyzed, including semantics and bleaching effects, phonological and orthographic variation. Particular attention is given to the sociocultural and sociopragmatic potential of dude and Alter, including their role as indexicals for certain youth groups and their subsequent stereotypization. This paper tracks both the similarities and the subtle differences in the usage and function of dude and Alter. It is argued that this lexical parallelism, albeit coincidental, highlights the role of vocative forms in the discursive makeup of both English and German. (shrink)

Emotional facial expressions can inform researchers about an individual's emotional state. Recent technological advances open up new avenues to automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER). Based on machine learning, such technology can tremendously increase the amount of processed data. FER is now easily accessible and has been validated for the classification of standardized prototypical facial expressions. However, applicability to more naturalistic facial expressions still remains uncertain. Hence, we test and compare performance of three different FER systems (Azure Face API, Microsoft; Face++, (...) Megvii Technology; FaceReader, Noldus Information Technology) with human emotion recognition (A) for standardized posed facial expressions (from prototypical inventories) and (B) for non-standardized acted facial expressions (extracted from emotional movie scenes). For the standardized images, all three systems classify basic emotions accurately (FaceReader is most accurate) and they are mostly on par with human raters. For the non-standardized stimuli, performance drops remarkably for all three systems, but Azure still performs similarly to humans. In addition, all systems and humans alike tend to misclassify some of the non-standardized emotional facial expressions as neutral. In sum, emotion recognition by automated facial expression recognition can be an attractive alternative to human emotion recognition for standardized and non-standardized emotional facial expressions. However, we also found limitations in accuracy for specific facial expressions; clearly there is need for thorough empirical evaluation to guide future developments in computer vision of emotional facial expressions. (shrink)

A prerequisite for spoken language learning is segmenting continuous speech into words. Amongst many possible cues to identify word boundaries, listeners can use both transitional probabilities between syllables and various prosodic cues. However, the relative importance of these cues remains unclear, and previous experiments have not directly compared the effects of contrasting multiple prosodic cues. We used artificial language learning experiments, where native German speaking participants extracted meaningless trisyllabic “words” from a continuous speech stream, to evaluate these factors. We compared (...) a baseline condition to five test conditions, in which word-final syllables were either followed by a pause, lengthened, shortened, changed to a lower pitch, or changed to a higher pitch. To evaluate robustness and generality we used three tasks varying in difficulty. Overall, pauses and final lengthening were perceived as converging with the statistical cues and facilitated speech segmentation, with pauses helping most. Final-syllable shortening hindered baseline speech segmentation, indicating that when cues conflict, prosodic cues can override statistical cues. Surprisingly, pitch cues had little effect, suggesting that duration may be more relevant for speech segmentation than pitch in our study context. We discuss our findings with regard to the contribution to speech segmentation of language-universal boundary cues vs. language-specific stress patterns. (shrink)

This essay suggests that the accountability trends explored by Stian Øby Johansen and Gisela Hirschmann in their respective monographs should be viewed as indicating the emergence of a right to justification in global governance. Both Johansen and Hirschmann seek to advance the interdisciplinary conversation about the accountability of international organizations—Johansen by developing a normative framework assessing the quality of IO accountability mechanisms, and Hirschmann by seeking to identify the variables that shape the evolution of what she calls pluralist accountability. Building (...) upon their analyses, I put forward a set of hypotheses about the procedural and substantive dimensions of the right to justification as well as the conditions for its consolidation in global governance. (shrink)