Sex reversal, a mismatch between phenotypic and genetic sex, can be induced by chemical and thermal insults in ectotherms. Therefore, climate change and environmental pollution may increase sex‐reversal frequency in wild populations, with wide‐ranging implications for sex ratios, population dynamics, and the evolution of sex determination. We propose that reconsidering the half‐century old theory “Witschi's rule” should facilitate understanding the differences between species in sex‐reversal propensity and thereby predicting their vulnerability to anthropogenic environmental change. The idea is that sex reversal (...) should be asymmetrical: more likely to occur in the homogametic sex, assuming that sex‐reversed heterogametic individuals would produce new genotypes with reduced fitness. A review of the existing evidence shows that while sex reversal can be induced in both homogametic and heterogametic individuals, the latter seem to require stronger stimuli in several cases. We provide guidelines for future studies on sex reversal to facilitate data comparability and reliability. (shrink)

Contract cheating is currently one of the most serious academic integrity issues around the globe. Numerous studies have been conducted, mostly in English speaking countries. So far, no such research has been conducted in Czechia, and consequently there have been no specific data available on Czech students’ fraudulent behaviour. For this study, we created a questionnaire to obtain primary data on student usage of essay mills and their self-reported exposure to contract cheating. The questionnaire focused on students and graduates of (...) Czech universities and collected a total of 1016. Of that number, 8% of respondents admit having engaged in contract cheating. The questionnaire responses yielded useful information and insight into students’ attitudes regarding contract cheating and the extent of this phenomenon in Czechia. We now know more about their reasons for contract cheating and have insight into their thoughts regarding possible discovery. (shrink)

An overview and assessment of the current state of research on individual consumption of Fair Trade (FT) products is given on the basis of 51 journal publications. Arranging this field of ethical consumption research according to key research objectives, theoretical approaches, methods, and study population, the review suggests that most studies apply social psychological approaches focusing mainly on consumer attitudes. Fewer studies draw on economic approaches focusing on consumers’ willingness to pay ethical premia for FT products or sociological approaches relying (...) on the concept of consumer identity. Experimental, qualitative and conventional survey methods are used approximately equally often. Almost all studies draw on convenience or purposive samples and most studies are conducted in the USA or the United Kingdom. Several problems in current research are identified: amongst others, studies’ rather narrow theoretical focus, potential hypothetical and social desirability bias of conventional survey data, and a lack of generalizability of empirical findings. In turn, we suggest that research would benefit from both a multiple-motives and a multiple-methods perspective. Considering competing theories can help to single out key behavioral determinants of individual FT consumption. The combination of different methods such as conventional surveys and field experiments contributes to uncovering respondents’ truthful answers and improves generalizability of results. Scholars in the field of ethical consumption research should use experiments to detect causal relations proposed by theories and conduct cross-country surveys to gather insights as to how differences in market structures, cultural traits, and other path dependencies affect patterns of individual FT consumption. (shrink)

Balancing speed and quality during crises pose challenges for ensuring the value and utility of data in social science research. The COVID-19 pandemic in particular underscores the need for high-quality data and rapid dissemination. Given the importance of behavioural measures and compliance with measures to contain the pandemic, social science research has played a key role in policymaking during this global crisis. This study addresses two key research questions: How FAIR ( findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) are social science data (...) on the COVID-19 pandemic? Which study features are related to the level of FAIRness scores of datasets? We assess the FAIRness of n = 1131 articles, retrieved through a keyword search in the Web of Science database, employing both automated and manual coding methods. Our study inclusion criteria encompass empirical studies on the COVID-19 pandemic published between 2019 and 2023 with a social science focus and explicit reference to the underlying dataset(s). Our analysis of n = 45 datasets reveals substantial differences in FAIRness for different types of research on the COVID-19 pandemic. The overall FAIRness of data is acceptable, although particularly Reusability scores fall short, in both the manual and the automatic assessment. Further, articles explicitly linked to the Social Science concept in the OpenAlex database exhibit a higher mean overall FAIRness value. Based on these results, we derive recommendations for balancing ethical obligations and the potential tradeoff between speed and data (sharing) quality in social-scientific crisis research. (shrink)

This article analyses and systematises the repertoires of action and reaction within conflicts between corporations and adversarial campaigns. Particular attention is paid to the parameters that turn conflicts between corporations and their critics into productive or destructive exchanges. Are protest campaigns able to fulfil a function that goes beyond serving as a seismograph for civil society’s concern and discontent? Which are the circumstances that enable conflicts between protest campaigns and corporations to unfold their potential for correcting social deficiencies? The analysis (...) starts by outlining several typologies of confrontational and cooperative repertoires of action. Based on this starting point, a comprehensive analysis of more than 100 campaigns is presented, which systematises the dynamics of conflict between protest campaigns and corporations. An exemplary comparison of two particular conflicts completes the article in order to elaborate on the interplay between confrontation and cooperation. (shrink)

In this comment we critically review an argument against the existence of objective physical outcomes, recently proposed by Healey [1]. We show that his gedankenexperiment, based on a combination of “Wigner’s friend” scenarios and Bell’s inequalities, suffers from the main criticism, that the computed correlation functions entering the Bell’s inequality are in principle experimentally inaccessible, and hence the author’s claim is in principle not testable. We discuss perspectives for fixing that by adapting the proposed protocol and show that this, however, (...) makes Healey’s argument virtually equivalent to other previous, similar proposals that he explicitly criticises. (shrink)

In this article I analyse prominent textbooks, encyclopedias and journals in the field of women’s and gender studies and ask where the authors and concepts presented in these texts and sites of publication come from in terms of geographic location. This is inspired by the question: to what extent can gender studies be described as a ‘multi-centered’ field (Connell, 2011) and can gender studies take into account feminist concepts of knowledge production which favour the involvement of the greatest possible diversity (...) of authors (Longino, 1990; Harding, 1991)? The analyses presented here show that being located at a North American or Western European institution still seems to be a crucial factor in authors being published and referred to – both in Western academic centres and in other regions. It seems that there is still a long way to go before various local gender studies communities can communicate on a more egalitarian footing. (shrink)

New York may be most easily recognized by its trademark skyscrapers and brick tenement buildings, but the truth is that the city is actually teeming with luxurious roof gardens and private courtyard oases. Creative gardeners and architects have risen to meet the unique challenges of the urban landscape, designing spaces that celebrate the city while providing a restful escape. New York City Gardens presents New York’s evolving tradition of garden culture through images and discussions of thirty of its most outstanding (...) gardens, from world-famous botanical gardens to richly re-cultivated public urban spaces, luxurious penthouse terraces, and innovative art gardens without soil or plants. Many of the gardens are set against vistas of the quintessential New York—Central Park, the Empire State Building, skyscrapers of Midtown, and the sensational skyline of Lower Manhattan. Other gardens reveal surprising and exotic intimate retreats from the bustle of the city. While most were designed by noted landscape architects, including Dan Kiley, Hideo Sasaki, Ken Smith, and Halsted Wells, many others were created over decades by talented homeowners themselves. As more and more city dwellers in New York and beyond look to cultivate their own kitchen and container gardens and individual outdoor sanctuaries, this book provides hundreds of inspiring images as well as historical background and insight into the practical and imaginative solutions of city garden designers. (shrink)

This article analyzes the features of the intellectual and cultural environment in which the ideas of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century liberalism developed. Based on the assumption of l...

For a long time, the dominant approach to studying decision making under risk has been to use psychoeconomic functions to account for how behavior deviates from the normative prescriptions of expected value maximization. While this neo-Bernoullian tradition has advanced the field in various ways—such as identifying seminal phenomena of risky choice —it contains a major shortcoming: Psychoeconomic curves are mute with regard to the cognitive mechanisms underlying risky choice. This neglect of the mechanisms both limits the explanatory value of neo-Bernoullian (...) models and fails to provide guidance for designing effective interventions to improve decision making. Here we showcase a recent “attentional turn” in research on risk choice that elaborates how deviations from normative prescriptions can result from imbalances in attention allocation and that thus promises to overcome the challenges of the neo-Bernoullian tradition. We argue that a comprehensive understanding of preference formation in risky choice must provide an account on a mechanistic level, and we delineate directions in which existing theories that rely on attentional processes may be extended to achieve this objective. (shrink)

Images are at the heart of strategies of persuasion. They render certain aspects visible and leave others unrepresented; and they may shape processes of scientific reasoning and imagination. By tracing diagrammatic images in the anthropological sciences throughout the 20th century, the contributions to this special issue highlight some dominant pictorial traditions for rendering human evolution and diversity visible. This article aims to provide an overview of and an introduction to the special issue ‘Visibility Matters’.

This paper explores whether people recognise inconsistency in their own and others’ judgments when they are explicitly prompted to review them. It reports two pre-registered experimental online studies with samples broadly representative of the UK population (N = 814 and N = 1,623). In Study 1, people are more likely to recognise inconsistency in others’ moral (and non-moral) judgments than in their own (positive OTHER-OWN difference). Study 2 replicates this finding and test three explanations of the observed effect offered by (...) previous literature: motivated reasoning, selective cognitive effort, and limited insight into others’ reasoning. It finds that the effect is not moderated by social accountability, which implies that if there is motivated reasoning at play, it must operate outside of a person’s awareness. While a small part of the effect is mediated by the time spent on the consistency assessment task (a proxy for cognitive effort), the study finds no support for the limited insight hypothesis. The core finding that people are better at recognizing inconsistency in others’ moral judgments aligns with interactionist accounts of reasoning; more research is needed to fully uncover the cognitive mechanisms behind this effect. (shrink)

The article is an overview of the VI Scientific and Practical Conference «Internet beyond 2020» (April 22-24, 2021) organized by the online school of Internet research with the support of the Higher School of Economics. The conference program included workshop reports and round tables on the role of the global network, the evolution of art and education during the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference brought together representatives of social sciences and humanities (sociologists, cultural scientists, linguists), artists, designers, and specialists in the (...) field of Internet studies. The organizers and participants of the conference tried to answer various questions, including the following. Is a modern person witnessing the emergence of fundamentally new anthropological practices? Is it possible to obtain a comprehensive picture of digital realities from single events of Internet studies, as well as predict the emergence and development of yet unknown social and anthropological transformations? Is it possible for a post-pandemic narrative conceptualizing the heterogeneous eventuality of our time to emerge? (shrink)

Was meinen wir, wenn wir sagen, dass etwas ist oder existiert? Und in welchem Sinn lässt sich von Gott sagen, dass er sei, existiere oder wirklich sei? Die Frage nach der Wirklichkeit Gottes wird in der aktuellen Debatte tendenziell verdeckt durch die in der Nähe liegende, aber doch auch mit ihr nicht identische Frage nach der erkenntnistheoretischen Zugänglichkeit der Wirklichkeit Gottes. Beiträge aus verschiedenen Fächern und theoretischen Zugängen innerhalb der Theologie und der Philosophie leuchten dieses Forschungsfeld aus und machen es (...) unter anderem fruchtbar für die aktuelle Diskussion um das Gott-Welt-Verhältnis, für die die Frage nach dem Wirklichkeitsverständnis von erheblicher Bedeutung ist. (shrink)

KARLSSON V, LINDAHL B and BERGBOM I. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 247–258 Patients’ statements and experiences concerning receiving mechanical ventilation: a prospective video‐recorded studyProspective studies using video‐recordings of patients during mechanical ventilator treatment (MVT) while conscious have not previously been published. The aim was to describe patients’ statements, communication and facial expressions during a video‐recorded interview while undergoing MVT. Content analysis and hermeneutics inspired by the philosophy of Gadamer were used. The patients experienced almost constant difficulties in breathing and lost (...) their voice. The most common types of communication techniques patients used were nodding or shaking the head. Their expressions were interpreted as stiffened facial expression, tense body position and feelings of sadness and sorrow. Nursing care for patients’ conscious during MVT is challenging as it creates new demands regarding the content of the care provided. In caring for patients undergoing MVT while conscious, establishing a caring relationship, making patients feel safe and helping them to communicate seem to be most important for alleviating discomfort and instilling hope. (shrink)

The “smart village” flourishes – at least in policy papers that envision the revitalization of rural areas through the civic deployment of networked media and telecommunications. Yet, while such aspirations are widespread, little is known about the views of those tasked with supervising and supporting digitally driven public participation for rural progress. To address the lack of insight into what these intermediary administrators conceive as catalysts and challenges for the realization of smart village conceptions, we surveyed representatives of regions in (...) Germany who oversee rural development schemes, most notably within the European LEADER framework. For these key actors, digital participation does not mainly hinge on broadband access and IT availability. Instead, they emphasize the importance of human and administrative resources as well as multi-actor collaboration, which we discuss in terms of digital readiness, digital willingness, and digital activity. Building the smart village, we conclude, seems not so much a matter of technological infrastructure, but rather of sociotechnical infrastructuring. (shrink)

Given the prevalence of misconduct in research and among students in higher education, there is a need to create solutions for how best to prevent such behaviour in academia. This paper proceeds on the assumption that one way forward is to prepare students in higher education at an early stage and to encourage a smoother transition from academic integrity to research integrity by incorporating academic integrity training as an ongoing part of the curriculum. To this end, this paper presents three (...) checklists developed as part of the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project _Bridging Integrity in Higher Education, Business and Society_ (BRIDGE, 2020-1-SE01-KA203-077973). The aim of the checklists is to help students and their supervisors to bridge academic integrity and research integrity in research training. The checklists target master students, doctoral students, and their supervisors. This paper presents the theoretical background of the checklists, how they were developed, their content, and how they may be used in supervising thesis/dissertation work to promote a transition from academic integrity to research integrity. (shrink)

The dynamics of political processes in the postcommunist states of Eastern Europe in the 2000s to early 2020s demonstrated a significant number of new challenges and caused many issues, including those related to the transformation of the ways and models of political behavior, civic participation, protest actions, and so on. All these elements of social and political life, in my opinion, have a gender dimension deserving a detailed analysis. In this article, based on Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian cases, I consider (...) what role women have played up to this point, and continue to play, in the public policy of the region and what ideological background serves the theoretical basis of this activity. In particular, these issues are analyzed in relation to the conflict situation—the war in Ukraine, which aggravated not only political, but also sociocultural and ideological confrontation in the studied societies. More or less commonplace is the conviction that to date none of these countries, considering all their fundamental differences, has achieved a sustainable gender balance in the highest governing institutions, and the gender approach is not sufficiently and/or effectively integrated into the policy-formulation process. At the same time, it is impossible to deny the fact that bright, charismatic persons who have appeared in the last 15 years—such as Yulia Tymoshenko, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Maria Kalesnikava, Yulia Galyamina, Yulia Navalnaya, and more—have made up a kind of collective “female face of politics” in postcommunist societies of Eastern Europe. I examine the practical consequences of these changes, and also look at those ideas and ideologies that influenced the formation of this portrait of a new sociopolitical reality. The range of these ideas is very wide and includes the legacy of the Soviet female-emancipatory project, European liberal thought, post-Soviet national projects, and other similar phenomena. (shrink)

There has been a long-standing opposition to genetically modified organisms worldwide. Some studies have tried to identify the deep-lying philosophical, conceptual as well as psychological motivations for this opposition. Philosophical essentialism, psychological essentialism, and vitalism have been proposed as possible candidates. I approach the plausibility of the claim that these notions are related to GMO opposition from a historical perspective. Vitalism and philosophical essentialism have been associated with anti-GMO stance on account of their purported hostility to species and organismic mutability. (...) I show that vitalism has often been associated to various mutabilist theories, whereas the case for philosophical essentialism as motivating GMO opposition depends on the now discredited Essentialism Story that had constructed essentialism as a predominant view in pre-Darwinian science. Further, as philosophical essentialism taken seriously is incompatible with the reality of genetic engineering, it is unlikely to be a reason for opposition. Psychological essentialism, involving an instinctive repulsion from the practice of manipulating what is thought to be the essence of living beings, is a more likely reason for resistance to transgenesis. Yet even here, historical considerations are crucial. Not only lay people tend to essentialize genes, but scientists themselves can be shown to have been complicit in essentialist tendencies. From the advent of modern genetics, the imagery of the all-powerful genes, often depicted by scientists themselves metaphorically as material counterparts of the now obsolete vitalistic agent, has permeated the language of leading scientific figures, whose influence in shaping public opinion should not be downplayed. Enthusiasm for genetic engineering and the abhorrence from it might both derive from the same unrealistic image of the essential gene, the revision of which thus holding out the hope for transcending the present impasse of the GMO controversy. (shrink)

Članak je pisan sa svrhom upoznavanja čitatelja s temeljnim sadržajem nove knjige R. Gibellinija, Teološke perspektive za XXI. stoljeće. Ta se knjiga tematski nadovezuje na njegovu prethodnu knjigu, Teologija dvadesetog stoljeća. Nakon panorame teološke misli XX. stoljeća, R. Gibellini se pita o zadaćama i perspektivama teološke misli u neposrednoj budućnosti. Budući da je knjigu koju predstavljamo njezin autor R. Gibellini zamislio kao bilancu u perspektivi budućnosti, bilancu koja se oslanja na teologiju XX. stoljeća, u prvom dijelu članka daje se prikaz (...) četiri teološka pravca XX. stoljeća. Ostala tri dijela članka prikazuju teološke perspektive XXI. stoljeća: perspektive teologije korelacije, perspektive teologije u doba mondijalizacije i perspektive teologije ekumenizma i međureligijskog dijaloga. Priloge su napisali međunarodno poznati teolozi. Oni se u razmišljanjima kreću uzduž bitnih linija promišljanja koja su izronila tijekom XX. stoljeća, napose pak u njegovim posljednjim desetljećima, i koje su otvorene daljnjem razvijanju na početku XXI. stoljeća.This article aims to introduce the readership to the basic content of R. Gibellini’s latest book en­titled Theological Perspectives for the 21st Century, which is, thematically speaking, an extensi­on of his previous book, bearing the title Theology of the 20th Century. Following the panoramaof theological thought in the 20th century, R. Gibellini turns to the tasks and perspectives oftheology and its reflections in the near future.Considering that Gibellini conceived the book here presented as a balance from the perspectiveof the future, a balance that draws on the theology of the 20th century, the first section of thearticle brings an overview of the four theological currents of the 20th century. The other threesections centre on the theological prospects of the 21st century: the prospects of the theology ofcorrelation, the prospects of theology in the era of globalisation, and the prospects of the theo­logy of ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. The book was contributed to by internationallyrenowned theologians. Their reflections follow the significant lines of thought that emergedduring the 20th century in general and its last decades in particular, and that are open to furtherdevelopment at the beginning of the 21st century. (shrink)

Cet article examine les relations avec les membres de la parentèle non confinés ensemble lors de la première vague de la pandémie de Covid-19. Il s’appuie sur un questionnaire en ligne qui a recueilli 4 300 réponses pendant le printemps 2020. Nous interrogeons comment la séparation des espaces-temps due au confinement, caractérisé comme un temps d’incertitudes, de bouleversement des rythmes quotidiens et d’entrave aux relations en face à face, a influencé la fréquence des contacts. La pandémie a-t-elle resserré les liens (...) ou au contraire les a-t-elle distendus avec les parents proches et éloignés? La perturbation des rythmes quotidiens a-t-elle infléchi les contacts? Le maintien de l’attention aux autres, notamment aux plus fragiles dans une parentèle élargie souvent peu étudiée, forme l’enjeu de cette analyse, autant que les inégalités de genre et de catégories sociales exacerbées par cette période. Globalement, la fréquence des contacts a augmenté, surtout avec la famille proche, mais aussi – et c’est l’originalité de cet article – avec des apparentés de 2e et 3e degrés. Paradoxalement, l’activité pendant le confinement n’a pas d’effet sur les liens. En revanche, les femmes et la « génération pivot » ont renforcé leur investissement du fait de leur rôle central dans le réseau de parenté. Les relations à distance, via les outils numériques, ont été intensifiées par les catégories favorisées et les personnes éloignées géographiquement de leur famille qui ont investi ces moments comme une temporalité en soi. (shrink)

Thirty years after the Velvet Revolution, Slovak feminist activists look back to the 1990s and early 2000s as the time of exceptional capacity building and knowledge production which was barely sustained in later years. The last decade of feminist organizing has been marked by waning financial resources for civil society organizations, and appropriation of feminist and gender equality agenda by the state, which led to the hollowing out of its content. What is more, strong and pervasive conservative pressure with the (...) aid of ‘gender ideology’ rhetoric has been successful in delegitimizing gender equality policies and is consistently threatening sexual and reproductive rights in the country. Facing such prospects, this article examines newfound alliances and diverse forms of broadly understood feminist praxis, which go beyond institutionalized civil society, but have developed to counter neoconservative and far-right political pressure in Slovakia. (shrink)

In this paper we want to briefly illustrate the ways in which technical, ethical and political judgements of various kinds are interwoven in the processes of healthcare decision-making in the UK. Drawing upon the research for the “Choices in Health Care” project we will borrow the notion of the hidden curriculum from education to illuminate the nature of resource allocation decision processes. In particular we will indicate some of the fundamental but largely hidden political factors in play in these processes (...) and the importance of the inchoate and implicit notion of “NHS values” in shaping UK resource allocation policies. We suggest that these more diffuse, holistic and system level value judgements are both central to understanding priority setting and at the same time difficult to reduce or abstract out into lists of single values/principles. (shrink)

National human rights institutions (NHRIs) are key domestic mechanisms for promotion and protection of human rights. The institutions' broad mandate, competencies, and special status between state and nonstate actors on the one hand, and special status between the national and international levels on the other hand enable them to engage effectively in the field of business and human rights. Since 2009, NHRIs have been engaging with the international human rights system in order to increase understanding and raise awareness of their (...) role in addressing business and human rights issues. As a result, they have contributed to the development of the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework and obtained an evolving role within all pillars of the framework and in its implementation. This paper presents how these domestic institutions, bridging the national and international levels, fit into the UN legal regime for corporate responsibility for human rights and what contribution they make to the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles. (shrink)