This article examines stakeholder involvement and influence as part of voluntary environmental agreements between regulatory agencies and companies. Ten pilot projects that were part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Project XL were examined to evaluate process goals and outcome goals. The ten case studies encompass a range of businesses, locations, and ideas for regulatory “reinvention” projects, and they span a spectrum of stakeholder participation processes and outcomes. Although results point to numerous problems in implementation, they also indicate that in (...) several cases, stake holder groups significantly affected the final project agreement and enforceable permit. The evidence suggests that companies can work collaboratively and constructively with residents of local communities, members of national environmental organizations and other interest groups, and government regulatory officials to craft voluntary environmental agreements that are cooperative and environmentally beneficial. (shrink)

In her 2004 book Carol Gould addresses the fundamental issue of democratizing globalization, that is to say of finding ways to open transnational institutions and communities to democratic participation by those widely affected by their decisions. The book develops a framework for expanding participation in crossborder decisions, arguing for a broader understanding of human rights and introducing a new role for the ideas of care and solidarity at a distance. Reinterpreting the idea of universality to accommodate a multiplicity of (...) cultural perspectives, the author takes up a number of applied issues, including the persistence of racism, cultural rights, women's human rights, the democratic management of firms, the use of the Internet to enhance political participation, and the importance of empathy and genuine democracy in understanding terrorism and responding to it. Accessibly written with a minimum of technical jargon this is a major contribution to political philosophy. (shrink)

In earlier work ( Cleland [2001] , [2002]), I sketched an account of the structure and justification of ‘prototypical’ historical natural science that distinguishes it from ‘classical’ experimental science. This article expands upon this work, focusing upon the close connection between explanation and justification in the historical natural sciences. I argue that confirmation and disconfirmation in these fields depends primarily upon the explanatory (versus predictive or retrodictive) success or failure of hypotheses vis-à-vis empirical evidence. The account of historical explanation that (...) I develop is a version of common cause explanation. Common cause explanation has long been vindicated by appealing to the principle of the common cause. Many philosophers of science (e.g., Sober and Tucker) find this principle problematic, however, because they believe that it is either purely methodological or strictly metaphysical. I defend a third possibility: the principle of the common cause derives its justification from a physically pervasive time asymmetry of causation (a.k.a. the asymmetry of overdetermination). I argue that explicating the principle of the common cause in terms of the asymmetry of overdetermination illuminates some otherwise puzzling features of the practices of historical natural scientists. (shrink)

No descriptive material is available for this title.

The development of the internet and other communications technologies over the past decade have seen a corresponding growth in the development and use of technologically-based research methodologies. This paper explores issues arising from the new technology which impact on ethics committees and how these might be addressed. Whilst some ethical issues are comparable in both online and offline worlds there are some elements of the techno-research which require extra consideration. Although ethics guidelines can be found on the worldwide web the (...) onus remains upon techno-researchers and ethics committee members to collaborate in deciding upon the ethical dilemmas and the rigour of proposed techno-research solutions. (shrink)

The boundaries between medicine, religion, nursing and domestic service were fluid in mid‐nineteenth‐century England. The traditional religious understanding of illness conflicted with the newer understanding of anatomically based disease, the Anglican sisters were drawing a line between professional nursing and the traditional role of nurses as domestic servants who looked after sick people as one of their many duties, and doctors were looking for more knowledgeable nurses who could carry out their orders competently. This prosopographical study of the over 200 (...) women who served as government nurses during the Crimean War 1854–56 describes the status of nursing and provides a picture of the religious and social structure of Britain in the 1850s. It also illustrates how religious, political and social factors affected the development of the new nursing. The Crimean War nurses can be divided into four major groups: volunteer secular ladies, Roman Catholic nuns, Anglican sisters and working‐class hospital nurses. Of these four groups I conclude that it was the experienced working‐class nurses who had the greatest influence on the organization of the new nursing. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to identify certain consonances between contemporary liberalism and classical pragmatism. I identify four of the most trenchant criticisms of classical liberalism presented by pragmatist figures such as James, Peirce, Dewey, Addams, and Hocking: that liberalism overemphasizes negative liberty, that it is overly individualistic, that its pluralism is suspect, that it is overly abstract. I then argue that these deficits of liberalism in its historical incarnations are being addressed by contemporary liberals. Contemporary liberals, I show, have (...) taken on board a surprising number of classical pragmatist insights and have responded to a surprising number of classical pragmatist criticisms. I thus argue that both contemporary pragmatism and contemporary liberalism have much to gain by joining forces. (shrink)

_Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education_ provides a range of powerful theoretical and innovative methodological examples to illuminate how new material feminism can be put to work in education to open up new avenues of research design and practice. It poses challenging questions about the nature of knowledge production, the role of the researcher, and the critical endeavour arising from inter- and post-disciplinarity. Working with diffractive methodologies and new materialist ecological epistemologies, the book offers resources for hope which widen the (...) scope for how educational problems are interrogated, and provides a political counter-movement to neo-positivist, outcomes-based approaches within education. Inspired by writers such as Barad, Bennett, and Deleuze and Guattari, the book makes a radical break with cognitive, dualist, and universal conceptions of human subjectivity and intelligence in education. By taking its starting point as the co-consitutiveness of discourse, materiality, corporeality, and place, the book foregrounds educational practices as material enactments of multiple, non-linear, entangled, affective, and relational forces. It offers new insights into how gender, class, and ethnicity are constituted in, and by, material assemblages that are often submerged or ‘unseen’. This book is an essential starting place for those intrigued by what new theoretical accounts of materiality, posthumanism, and affect can offer educational research. Diffractive methodologies challenge readers to take a fuller range of actors into account than in ‘objective’ humanist methodologies, and in so doing to pay closer attention to what data is. It invites researchers to engage with long-standing feminist concerns about power and knowledge production in research processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Gender and Education. _. (shrink)

: This response to the preceding article by Gastmans, Dierckx de Casterle, and Schotsmans challenges the notion of "good care" as the ultimate goal of nursing practice, explores further the possible goals of nursing and how they may be identified, and presents six elements of professional caring along with their related virtues and moral obligations.

Previous research on warfare in a worldwide sample of societies by Ember and Ember (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 36, 242–262, 1992a) found a strong relationship between resource unpredictability (particularly food scarcity caused by natural disasters) in nonstate, nonpacified societies and overall warfare frequency. Focusing on eastern Africa, a region frequently plagued with subsistence uncertainty as well as violence, this paper explores the relationships between resource problems, including resource unpredictability, chronic scarcity, and warfare frequencies. It also examines whether resource scarcity predicts (...) more resource-taking in land, movable property, and people, as well as the commission of atrocities. Results support previous worldwide results regarding the relationship between resource unpredictability and warfare frequency. Results regarding resource-taking and atrocities are more nuanced and complex. In almost all findings, relationships are generally in opposite directions in nonstate and state societies. In post-hoc analyses, atrocities are significantly more likely to be committed in states than in nonstates. (shrink)

When naming certain hand-held, man-made tools, American Sign Language signers exhibit either of two iconic strategies: a handling strategy, where the hands show holding or grasping an imagined object in action, or an instrument strategy, where the hands represent the shape or a dimension of the object in a typical action. The same strategies are also observed in the gestures of hearing nonsigners identifying pictures of the same set of tools. In this paper, we compare spontaneously created gestures from hearing (...) nonsigning participants to commonly used lexical signs in ASL. Signers and gesturers were asked to respond to pictures of tools and to video vignettes of actions involving the same tools. Nonsigning gesturers overwhelmingly prefer the handling strategy for both the Picture and Video conditions. Nevertheless, they use more instrument forms when identifying tools in pictures, and more handling forms when identifying actions with tools. We found that ASL signers generally favor the instrument strategy when naming tools, but when describing tools being used by an actor, they are significantly more likely to use more handling forms. The finding that both gesturers and signers are more likely to alternate strategies when the stimuli are pictures or video suggests a common cognitive basis for differentiating objects from actions. Furthermore, the presence of a systematic handling/instrument iconic pattern in a sign language demonstrates that a conventionalized sign language exploits the distinction for grammatical purpose, to distinguish nouns and verbs related to tool use. (shrink)

Background and PurposeMany critically ill patients in intensive care units (ICUs) are unable to communicate their wishes about goals of care, particularly about the use of life-sustaining treatments. Surrogates and clinicians struggle with medical decisions because of a lack of clarity regarding patients’ preferences, leading to prolonged hospitalizations and increased costs. This project focused on the development and implementation of a tool to facilitate a better communication process by (1) assuring the early identification of a surrogate if indicated on admission (...) and (2) clarifying the decision-making standards that the surrogate was to use when participating in decision making. Before introducing the tool into the admissions routine, the staff were educated about its use and value to the decision-making process.Project and MethodsThe study was to determine if early use of a simple method of identifying a patient’s surrogate and treatment preferences might impact length of stay (LOS) and total hospital charges. A pre- and post-intervention study design was used. Nurses completed the surrogacy information tool for all patients upon admission to the neuroscience ICU. Subjects (total N=203) were critically ill patients who had been on a mechanical ventilator for 96 hours or longer, or in the ICU for seven days or longer. The project included staff education on biomedical ethics, critical communication skills, early identification of families and staff in crisis, and use of a simple tool to document patients’ surrogates and previously expressed care wishes. Data on hospital LOS and hospital charges were collected through a retrospective review of medical records for similar four-month time frames pre- and post-implementation of the assessment tool.ResultsSignificant differences were found between pre- and post-groups in terms of hospital LOS (F=6.39, p=.01) and total hospital charges (F=7.03, p=.009).ConclusionsProject findings indicate that the use of a simple admission assessment tool, supported by staff education about its completion, use, and available resources, can decrease LOS and lower total hospital charges. The reasons for the difference between the pre- and post-intervention groups remain unclear. Further research is needed to evaluate if the quality of communications between patients, their legally authorized representatives, and clinicians—as suggested in the literature—may have played a role in decreasing LOS and total hospital charges. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between the political thought of Plato and Xenophon, by positioning both as post-Socratic political theorists. It seeks to show that Xenophon and Plato examine similar themes and participate in a shared discourse in their later political thought, and in particular, that Plato is responding to Xenophon, with the Statesman exploring similar themes to Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, which itself responds to sections of Plato’s Republic. Both writers explore the themes of the shepherd king and the kairos as (...) attributes of the excellent leader, and both use temporality and political ontology to do so. (shrink)

Marie-Anne Boivin a été en son temps une des sages-femmes françaises les plus célèbres. Son parcours professionnel et scientifique est présenté ici, illustrant l’espace laissé aux femmes dans les professions médicales. Reconnue d’abord pour ses ouvrages techniques concernant l’obstétrique, elle sort de son champ traditionnel de compétence pour aborder de façon novatrice la gynécologie naissante, à l’instar des médecins, avec son Traité pratique des maladies de l’utérus (1833), devenu un classique. Cette œuvre scientifique lui vaut un succès d’estime, mais ne (...) lui permet pas d’atteindre une véritable reconnaissance institutionnelle dans son pays. (shrink)

Behavioral weight loss interventions that promote healthy eating as a way to achieve and maintain healthy weights do not work for most people. Most participants encounter significant challenges to behavior change and do not lose weight or maintain meaningful weight loss. For some, there may be negative consequences of participating in a BWLI, including social, psychological and economic costs. The literature is largely silent on these negative unintended consequences, but they are important for both practical and ethical reasons. If efforts (...) to eat healthier have too many negative consequences for individuals and groups, then these efforts are unlikely to be effective, and promoting them may not always be ethical; this would boost the case for moving away from individual-focused efforts as part of healthy eating efforts. Alternatively, if we can make BWLI interventions more effective and more ethical by mitigating these unintended consequences, then it may be too soon to give up on individual-focused efforts. We make a case for systematic assessment and reporting of the unintended consequences of BWLI. This could contribute to more effective and ethical BWLI and inform obesity interventions and policies more broadly. (shrink)

This article examines the degree to which the appeal of the.

This chapter argues that doubts about the scientific status of the field sciences often rest on mistaken preconceptions about the nature of the evaluative relation between empirical evidence and hypothesis or theory, namely, that it is some sort of formal logical relation. It argues that there is a potentially more fruitful approach to understanding the nature of the support offered by empirical evidence to scientific hypotheses. The first part of the chapter briefly reviews the traditional philosophical take on the scientific (...) method in order to clarify its most serious problems. It shows that these problems are greatly exacerbated when science moves from the artificially controlled environment of the laboratory to the messy uncontrollable world of nature. The second part ferrets out some highly general, causal components in the methodological reasoning of nonhistorical field scientists. It argues that differences in patterns of evidential reasoning in the experimental sciences versus the field sciences, and in the historical versus nonhistorical field sciences, seem tailored to pervasive causal differences in their epistemic situations. (shrink)

Written by an acclaimed scholar to enrich and complete the vision offered by traditional Western spirituality, Women and Spirituality demonstrates that women, as women, have a valuable contribution to make to religion. This new edition is revised and updated in light of thirteen years of feminism, including new biblical role models and a new chapter on women's special relationship to time. Prodding readers to pay attention to their own experiences, Ochs challenges traditional religious concepts such as solitary struggle, otherworldliness, and (...) the spiritual journey to a distant goal, and shows how women's spirituality focuses on relationships with others, commitment to this world, and engagement with the present. (shrink)

The term “listening niche” refers to the contexts in which people listen to music including what music they are listening to, with whom, when, where, and with what media. The first experiment investigates undergraduate students’ music listening niches in the initial COVID-19 lockdown period, 4 weeks immediately after the campus shut down abruptly. The second experiment explores how returning to a hybrid semester, the “new normal,” further affected these listening habits. In both experiments, the participants provided a list of their (...) most frequently listened-to songs during the respective period of time. From these, they identified one song that seemed most associated with this period, their “signature song,” and stated why this song seemed relevant. These reasons were coded on nine underlying themes. Three clusters were found to underlie the themes: emotional responses memory associations, and discovery of new music. We identified songs and reasons for selecting them that represented the three clusters and related these to the lyrical content. Compared to before the pandemic, participants in both experiments report listening more in general and on Spotify, but there were no differences in listening between lockdown and the new normal. Whom they were listening with shifted overtime from family members to significant others and finally to other friends and roommates. These results demonstrate how students listen to and find new music that is meaningful to them during this unprecedented pandemic. (shrink)

Despite substantial evidence pointing to a looming Malthusian catastrophe, governmental measures to reduce population have been opposed both by religious conservatives and by many liberals, especially liberal feminists. Liberal critics have claimed that 'utilitarian' population policies violate a 'fundamental right of reproductive liberty'. This essay argues that reproductive liberty should not be considered a fundamental human right, or certainly not an indefeasible right. It should, instead, be strictly regulated by a global agreement designed to reduce population to a sustainable level. (...) Three major points are discussed: 1) the current state of the overpopulation problem; 2) the claim of a fundamental human right of reproductive liberty; 3) an outline of a global agreement to address overpopulation as a 'tragedy of the commons'. (shrink)