Using a Solomon four-group design, we investigate the effect of a case-based critical thinking intervention on students’ critical thinking skills. We randomly assign 31 sessions of business classes to four groups and collect data from three sources: in-class performance, university records, and Internet surveys. Our 2 × 2 ANOVA results showed no significant between-subjects differences. Contrary to our expectations, students improve their critical thinking skills, with or without the intervention. Female and Caucasian students improve their critical thinking skills, but males (...) and non-Caucasian do not. Positive performance goals and negative mastery goals enhance and decrease improvements of their CTA scores, respectively. ACT and age are related to pre- and post-test. Gender is related to pre-test. GPA is related to post-test. Results shed light on the Pygmalion effect, the Galatea effect, ability, motivation, and opportunity as signals for human capital, and business ethics. (shrink)

Good listening is an essential element in the provision of quality healthcare (Attree 2001). Good listening also supports accurate diagnosis, patient adherence to medical recommendations, and stron...

McCoy and colleagues (2023) offer a reflective framework for data ethics and governance with several historical bioethics principles as a foundation. Their framework is one among a plethora of othe...

I argue that, because God is the author of history and has a purpose for his creation, evolution has a plot and can be analyzed with tools drawn from literary criticism. This necessitates engagement with the “epic of evolution” genre of scientific literature. I survey several prominent versions of the epic and distinguish between a purely naturalistic epic of evolution and a goal‐oriented Christian epic of evolution (CEE). In dealing with CEE, I use the thought of J. R. R. Tolkien, (...) along with Kevin Vanhoozer and Dorothy Sayers, to discuss the ways in which we can theologically legitimate speaking of God as the “author” of evolutionary history. (shrink)

My title links together kings, war, and the economy, and the linkage is deliberate. I do not of course wish to suggest that Hellenistic kings did nothing but fight wars, that they were responsible for all the wars in the period, that royal wars were nothing but a form of economic activity, or that the economy of the kings was dependent purely on the fruits of military success, though there would be an element of truth in all these propositions. But (...) I wish to react against the frequent tendency to separate topics that are related, the tendency to treat notions relating to what kings were or should be as something distinct from what they actually did, and the tendency to treat political and military history on the one hand as something separate from economic and social history on the other.A number of provisos should be made at the outset. The title promises more than the paper can deliver; in particular, more will be said about kings and war than about kings and the economy. The subject is handled at a probably excessive level of generalization and abstraction. I talk about Hellenistic kings in general, but in practice it would obviously be necessary to draw distinctions between different dynasties, different times and places, and individual rulers, and some of those distinctions I shall indicate. Conclusions are provisional and subject to modification and considerable expansion in detail. Finally, two points of terminology. I use the word ‘Hellenistic’ for no better reason than out of the force of acquired habit, but of course the word and the concept are modern inventions that were unknown to the ancient world. (shrink)

The word ‘tyrant’ was not originally Greek, but borrowed from some eastern language, perhaps in western Asia Minor. On the other hand, tyranny as it developed in the Greek cities in the archaic age would seem to have been initially an indigenous growth, independent of any intervention by foreign powers. It then became a constantly recurring phenomenon of Greek political and social life, so long as the Greeks enjoyed an independent history.

Rape myth acceptance, perceived barriers, and self-efficacy were examined as predictors of likelihood to report different types of rape to law enforcement among 409 undergraduates. Participants had lower likelihood to report incapacitated compared to physically forced rape. Men had lower reporting likelihood than women for rape perpetrated by the same and opposite sex and were more likely to perceive several barriers. RMA and perceived barriers predicted a lower likelihood to report several types of rape. Among men, higher self-efficacy predicted increased (...) reporting likelihood. Targeting RMA and decreasing perceived barriers is imperative to increase college students’ likelihood to report rape to local and campus law enforcement. (shrink)

Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination analyzes theological, religious, and philosophical themes in classical Christian fantasy, contemporary “post-Christian” fantasy, and fantasy at play in table top games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: the Gathering.

Volume 25, Issue 2, February 2025, Page 87-90.

We appreciate Chapman and colleagues’ (2025) advocacy for revising the Common Rule to address the downstream effects of data-centric research, particularly the potential for group harms such as sti...

Introduction: Schools have become a primary setting for providing mental health care to youths in the U.S. School-based interventions have proliferated, but their effects on mental health and academic outcomes remain understudied. In this study we will implement and evaluate the effects of a flexible multidiagnostic treatment called Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, or Conduct Problems on students' mental health and academic outcomes.Methods and Analysis: This is an assessor-blind randomized controlled effectiveness trial conducted across five (...) school districts. School clinicians are randomized to either MATCH or usual care treatment conditions. The target sample includes 168 youths referred for mental health services and presenting with elevated symptoms of anxiety, depression, trauma, and/or conduct problems. Clinicians randomly assigned to MATCH or UC treat the youths who are assigned to them through normal school referral procedures. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of MATCH compared to UC on youths' mental health and school related outcomes and assess whether changes in school outcomes are mediated by changes in youth mental health.Ethics and Dissemination: This study was approved by the Harvard University Institutional Review Board. We plan to publish the findings in peer-reviewed journals and present them at academic conferences.Clinical Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02877875. Registered on August 24, 2016. (shrink)

Contemporary privacy debates regarding new technologies often define privacy in terms of control over personal information such that the privacy “problem” is a lack of control and the privacy “solution” is increased control. This article questions the control-paradigm by pointing to its parallels with earlier debates in the philosophy of technology regarding technology that was out-of-control. What first-generation philosophers of technology understood was that at the root of the questioning of technology lay a need to question the modern self itself. (...) Legal debates regarding privacy renew the importance of this question, for the control-paradigm perpetuates a view of the self as an individual with an inner core transparent to itself on solitary introspection and revealed to others through self-conscious acts of disclosure. Increasingly, this model fails to account for the challenges raised by new technologies and calls for rethinking. (shrink)

Alan Westin’s work Privacy and Freedom remains foundational to the field of privacy, and Westin is frequently cited for his definition of privacy as control over personal information. However, Westin’s full definition of privacy is much more complex than this statement, describing four states of privacy (solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve) that one achieves through physical or psychological means. The “claim” of privacy involves negotiating a balance between a desire for disclosure and social participation and a desire for withdrawal into (...) one of the “states” of privacy. Influencing this adjustment process are social norms (and surveillance to enforce social norms), environmental conditions, and the curiosity of others. In this Article, I draw upon this complexity in order to reread Westin’s definition of privacy as a claim of control over personal information and use this rereading to understand how the law should protect and promote privacy in the twenty-first century. I argue that the law should focus on securing meaningful privacy choices rather than on individual control over personal information. Meaningful choice requires that our informational infrastructure, and the social practices that it enables, make states of privacy available for choice along with the means of attaining them. To enable such meaningful individual choice, we need to shift our attention from a focus on individuals to a more systemic focus on our public norms and built infrastructure. Otherwise we risk protecting a narrow understanding of individual control, while ignoring a more general and systematic erosion of privacy. (shrink)

In this article, I draw on my fieldwork creating protein models of hepatitis B at a biotech laboratory to think through how to approach the body and disease from ontological and phenomenological perspectives. I subsequently draw on Mariella Pandolfi’s work on how bodies can be made to suffer history and Paul Farmer’s work on global tuberculosis disparities to explore ways of analysing embodied activity as a means of identifying and clinically addressing enactments of social inequality and disease. I also introduce (...) Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of ‘flesh’ as a conceptual heuristic that allows us to understand the meaningful structuring of ontological worlds beyond our own. As I argue, bringing these perspectives together not only allows us to re-envision what an effective disease treatment should be in diverse medical contexts, but also how to better understand health disparities and the nature of disease itself. (shrink)

In this Article I argue that the emerging public/private nexus of surveillance involves the augmentation of state power and calls for new models of constitutional constraint. The key phenomenon is the role played by communications intermediaries in collecting the information that the state subsequently accesses. These intermediaries are not just powerful companies engaged in collecting and analyzing the information of users and the information they hold are not just business records. The key feature of these companies is that, through their (...) information practices and architecture, they mediate other relationships. I argue that this mediating function, and its underlying technological form, interacts with legal and social norms in ways that can lead to the erosion of constraints on state power. This Article maps two stories of erosion, rooted in two kinds of community displacement. The first involves the displacement of community participation in law enforcement and the emergence of “technological tattletales” where intermediaries cooperate with the state. Unlike citizen cooperation, this practice augments state power and undermines more traditional informal modes of constraint on state power. The second involves the displacement of national legal and political community. Communications intermediaries are often large multinational companies that operate in multiple jurisdictions and move their data to various datacenters across the world even as the individual data subject remains in one geographical location. Laws that treat nonresident aliens differently from residents and citizens can create “constitutional black holes” where the communications data of an individual is not protected by any constitutional constraints. (shrink)

In _Law’s Rule_, Gerald Postema provides a robust theoretical framework of the rule of law that technology scholars can use to analyze power in the digital world. He articulates how the rule of law can be concerned with private power, and not just public power. His emphasis on the ethos of fidelity allows us to see how the rule of law of law may be degraded in the digital era through the erosion of the informal institutions and practices needed to (...) sustain the rule of law. In addition to outlining these contributions, this paper argues that Postema’s account of digital power needs to focus more on digital power structures rather than digital power wielding, that digital power structures erode many informal constraints on power, and that addressing sociotechnical systems might require rethinking law’s distinctive instrumentalities in order to embrace the use of digital technologies to increase transparency and compliance. (shrink)

A survey of the work of the Majorcan lay theologian and philosopher Ramon Llull (1232-1316), along with examples of its wide influence in late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe and in colonial Spanish America.

The purpose of this study was to examine individual and organizational antecedents and consequences of safety-related moral disengagement. Using Conservation of Resources theory, social exchange theory, and psychological contract breach as a theoretical foundation, this study tested the proposition that higher job insecurity is associated with greater levels of subsequent safety-related moral disengagement, which in turn is related to reduced safety performance. Moreover, we examined whether perceived organizational and supervisor support buffered or intensified the impact of job insecurity on moral (...) disengagement. Using a two-wave lagged design, anonymous survey data collected from N = 389 working adults in the U.S. supported the hypothesized moderated mediation model. Specifically, the conditional indirect effects of job insecurity on safety performance via moral disengagement were intensified as levels of perceived organizational and supervisor support increased. These results suggest that the threat of job insecurity may prompt employee moral disengagement; this effect is even stronger among employees who perceived higher levels of organizational and supervisor support. We interpret these counterintuitive findings in light of increasingly insecure contemporary work arrangements and how these may give rise to potentially unethical safety-related decision making and behavior. (shrink)

The rule of law is widely perceived to be a public law doctrine, concerned with the way governmental authority conforms to dictates of law. This book explores the idea that the rule of law instead concerns the conditions under which any relationship - that among citizens as well as that between citizens and the state - becomes subject to law.