This study examined whether having attended a public, private or religious affiliated grade and/or high school influenced a college student’s ethical decision making process. We also examined whether having taken an ethics course in college influences a student’s ethical decision making process. Our sample included 508 accounting students (237 men and 271 women) from Albania, Ecuador, Ireland and the United States. Our analyses indicated no differences in ethical decision making that associated with either grade-or-high-school education. While our data showed no (...) difference in the reported attitudes between students from Ecuador and the United States after controlling for social desirability response bias, we found significant differences between the attitudes students from the United States and students from both Albania and Ireland. While gender was also significant for six of our seven scenarios, social desirability response bias was significant in all of our scenarios. (shrink)

In Science of the Soul in Ibn Sina's Pointers and Reminders, Michael A. Rapoport provides a philological and interpretive guide for critically reading and interpreting Ibn Sina's (Avicenna, d. 1037) most challenging and influential text. Rapoport argues that chapters VII-X of the Pointers present scientific explanations for phenomena related to the human soul - from intellection to divination, magic, and marvels - within the framework of Ibn Sina's Metaphysics of the Rational Soul. This book dispels widespread notions that (...) the Pointers represents Ibn Sina's mystical or Sufi philosophy and therefore stands apart from the rest of his corpus. (shrink)

We present the unification of Riemann–Cartan–Weyl (RCW) space-time geometries and random generalized Brownian motions. These are metric compatible connections (albeit the metric can be trivially euclidean) which have a propagating trace-torsion 1-form, whose metric conjugate describes the average motion interaction term. Thus, the universality of torsion fields is proved through the universality of Brownian motions. We extend this approach to give a random symplectic theory on phase-space. We present as a case study of this approach, the invariant Navier–Stokes equations for (...) viscous fluids, and the kinematic dynamo equation of magnetohydrodynamics. We give analytical random representations for these equations. We discuss briefly the relation between them and the Reynolds approach to turbulence. We discuss the role of the Cartan classical development method and the random extension of it as the method to generate these generalized Brownian motions, as well as the key to construct finite-dimensional almost everywhere smooth approximations of the random representations of these equations, the random symplectic theory, and the random Poincaré–Cartan invariants associated to it. We discuss the role of autoparallels of the RCW connections as providing polygonal smooth almost everywhere realizations of the random representations. (shrink)

Recent controversy surrounding the Surfactant Positive Airway Pressure and Pulse Oximetry Trial and the Office for Human Resource Protection’s judgment that its informed consent procedures were inadequate has unmasked considerable confusion about OHRP’s definition of research risks. The controversy concerns application of that definition to trials comparing multiple treatments within the existing standard of care. Some have argued that it is impossible for such trials to pose research risks on the grounds that all risks associated with a standard-of-care treatment should (...) instead be considered risks of treatment. However, analysis of OHRP’s definition demonstrates that some risks in such trials can be research risks. (shrink)

The appearance of nuclear weapons suddenly made the extinction of humanity a distinct possibility. In view of this obverse side of scientific progress, attitudes toward science in the general population became ambivalent, at times bordering on hostility. It is argued that to a great extent the scientists themselves are responsible for the tarnished image of science. Accordingly they should restore science to its role of furthering human welfare and, above all, as a source of enlightenment. In our age enlightenment entails (...) emancipating humanity from superstitions generated by the cooptation of science in the service of power. (shrink)

We review the relation between spacetime geometries with trace-torsion fields, the so-called Riemann–Cartan–Weyl (RCW) geometries, and their associated Brownian motions. In this setting, the drift vector field is the metric conjugate of the trace-torsion one-form, and the laplacian defined by the RCW connection is the differential generator of the Brownian motions. We extend this to the state-space of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and discuss the relation between a non-canonical quantum RCW geometry in state-space associated with the gradient of the quantum-mechanical expectation (...) value of a self-adjoint operator given by the generalized laplacian operator defined by a RCW geometry. We discuss the reduction of the wave function in terms of a RCW quantum geometry in state-space. We characterize the Schroedinger equation in terms of the RCW geometries and Brownian motions. Thus, in this work, the Schroedinger field is a torsion generating field, both for the linear and non-linear cases. We discuss the problem of the many times variables and the relation with dissipative processes, and the role of time as an active field, following Kozyrev and a recent experiment in non-relativistic quantum systems. We associate the Hodge dual of the drift vector field with a possible angular-momentum source for the phenomenae observed by Kozyrev. (shrink)

In this paper we evaluate how to effectively use the crowdsourcing service, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), to content analyze textual data for use in psychological research. MTurk is a marketplace for discrete tasks completed by workers, typically for small amounts of money. MTurk has been used to aid psychological research in general, and content analysis in particular. In the current study, MTurk workers content analyzed personally-written textual data using coding categories previously developed and validated in psychological research. These codes were (...) evaluated for reliability, accuracy, completion time, and cost. Results indicate that MTurk workers categorized textual data with comparable reliability and accuracy to both previously published studies and expert raters. Further, the coding tasks were performed quickly and cheaply. These data suggest that crowdsourced content analysis can help advance psychological research. (shrink)

This is the story of the clattering of elevated subways and the cacophony of crowded neighborhoods, the heady optimism of industrial progress and the despair of economic recession, and the vibrancy of ethnic cultures and the resilience of ...

The authors suggest that social movements research should recognize more the potential of the protesting body as an agent of social and political change. This contention is based on studying the relations among the body, gender, and knowledge in social protest by comparing two Israeli-Jewish leftist protest movements, a woman-only movement and a mixed-gender one, which protested against the Israeli Occupation in the early 1990s. The comparison reveals reversed patterns of body/knowledge relations, each connoting a different meaning and outcome of (...) the social protest. In the mixed movement, the body served as an instrument in carrying out the political knowledge and thus was left unmarked. In Women in Black, on the other hand, the body was the message, as it produced and articulated political ideology, simultaneously challenging the national security legacy and the gender order in Israel. (shrink)

In relating the problem of comparison to that of conceptualization, Dr. Sjoberg brings into focus a central methodological problem of social science. For to compare is to discover unity in diversity and differences among similarities, that is, to uncover structure. The first act in this process is to name the parts and the relations among them, and naming, of course, both stems from and induces conceptualizations.

Let us begin by proposing a sort of common denominator of the various conceptions of rationality, some feature that underlies practically all its definitions.

Almost anyone seriously interested in decision theory will name John von Neumann's (1928) Minimax Theorem as its foundation, whereas Utility and Rationality are imagined to be the twin towers on which the theory rests. Yet, experimental results and real-life observations seldom support that expectation. Over two centuries ago, Hume (1739–40/1978) put his finger on the discrepancy. “Reason,” he wrote “is, and ought to be the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey (...) them.” In other words, effective means to reach specific goals can be prescribed, but not the goals. A wide range of experimental results and daily life behavior support this dictum. (shrink)

The sources to which one has to turn for information about the lives of Hasidic masters belong to the hagiographical tradition. During its first stage of compilation in the early nineteenth century, this tradition preserved much authentic historical and biographical material, in spite of the explicit disavowal of any historiographical intent by its editors. They were apologetic about the publication of "mere tales and histories" whose value lay not in the preservation of historical records but rather in their capacity for (...) moral and religious edification. Up until then, this material had been circulating orally but, in contrast to speculative-homiletical works, was not recognized as a legitimate and useful tool for the propagation of Hasidism. However, from the second half of the nineteenth century, in response to the challenges of Jewish Enlightenment, secularization, and most directly in response to the scornful critique of Hasidism and its hagiography which was emanating from the new school of modern Jewish historiography, Hasidic authors, like the exponents of other nineteenth-century ideologies, were beginning to appeal to history for validation. They were adopting the scholarly mannerisms if not quite the historical methodology of their critics. Since the hagiographical tales, and the chain of oral transmission which had traditionally preserved and authenticated them, were both losing their credibility in the new atmosphere of rationalistic skepticism and scientific rigor, Hasidic hagiographers were now eager to present their morally edifying oral traditions as reliable historical records by anchoring them in concrete documentary evidence. The forgeries of the Kherson Genizah supplied what appeared to be incontestable "archival" verification of the tales. The Admor Joseph Isaac Schneersohn exploited the Kherson "documents" in his extensive histories of early Hasidism which reveal his anachronistic, typological thinking and are often incompatible with the facts. As a leader of HaBaD Hasidism at a time of crisis, he saw it as his duty to harness the powerful historiographical idiom to the tasks of rehabilitating the HaBaD movement and of campaigning for the preservation of Orthodox Jewish life in conditions of unprecedented adversity. (shrink)

The writings of the medieval Islamic scholar Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya are used today by radical groups, such as al-Qaeda, to justify acts of terrorism. In order to explain this modern influence, this volume offers a fresh perspective on Ibn Taymiyya's life, thought and legacy. Contrary to his current image as an anti-rationalist puritan, it argues that Ibn Taymiyya is one of the most intellectually complex, rigorous and interesting figures in Islamic intellectual history.

It remains to summarize the contributions which each of the three disciplines discussed here is making toward the development of a science of man. "Significs" makes a study of the effects on human behavior of the linguistic aspects of the evaluative process, the most distinctly human aspect of the behavior of the human organism. "Mathematical Biophysics" seeks to describe the events associated with evaluative processes in physico-mathematical terms. "Cybernetics" is discovering important invariants common to these processes and others, particularly those (...) observed in man-made machines and in situations which lend themselves to description in thermo-dynamic or statistical (order -- chaos) terms. (shrink)