It is uncontroversial that our engagement with artworks is constrained by obligations; most commonly, these consist in obligations to other persons, such as artists, audiences, and owners of artworks. A more controversial claim is that we have genuine obligations to artworks themselves. I defend a qualified version of this claim. However, I argue that such obligations do not derive from the supposed moral rights of artworks – for no such rights exist. Rather, I argue that these obligations are instances of (...) duties of love: obligations that one incurs in virtue of loving some object, be it a person or, in this case, an artwork. (shrink)

This article analyzes the complex relation of phenomenology and literature in the work of Husserl and Derrida. In the first part, I show that the limited ideality of the literary object necessarily situates it in a derivative region of phenomenology. In the second part, however, I problematize the regional status of literature by elaborating a brief but important footnote in which Husserl broadens the concept of literature to embrace all cultural products whatsoever. Yet, because even this broadened concept of literature (...) ultimately remains secondary for the phenomenologist, it only redoubles and ratifies the submission of literature to the more ideal objectivities of mathematical disciplines like geometry. The third part, finally, mobilizes Derrida’s notion of “dissemination,” prepared in and unintelligible apart from his early engagement with Husserlian phenomenology, in order to broach a notion of literature that the phenomenologist can neither circumscribe nor describe. (shrink)

Hysteresis means literally “that which comes later,” being derived from the Greek verb ύστερέω. Thus, hysteresis effects, generally defined, are those that persist after the initial causes giving rise to the effects are removed. During the course of the 1980s, it became increasingly fashionable to invoke hysteresis effects to explain economic phenomena. Two of the main areas of application were to unemployment and international trade. In the case of unemployment, distinctive features of labor markets, such as social norms that rule (...) out wage-cutting in the face of rising unemployment, imply that “increases in unemployment have a direct impact on the ‘natural’ rate of unemployment”. The implication for macroeconomic systems is that “temporary shocks can have a permanent effect on the level of employment”. In the case of international trade, hysteresis effects arise from the industrial economics of sunk costs: “the argument is that firms must incur sunk costs to enter new markets, and cannot recoup these costs if they exit.… thus foreign firms that entered the U.S. market when the dollar was high do not abandon their sunk cost investments when the dollar falls.” The implication for trade flows is “an effect which persists after the cause that brought it about has been removed”. (shrink)

I investigate the consequences of interpreting Lehrer's account of system-relative justification as a theory of inductive inference. I discuss which assumptions about coherence would be sufficient to make the account of inductive inference derived from Lehrer's theory conform to a series of widely discussed general principles, including those constitutive of cumulative reasoning. I then discuss the epistemological significance of the resulting theory of inductive inference.

This paper orchestrates various moments in which Derrida makes recourse to the notion of anachrony – in analyses of khōra and demiurgic creation in the Timaeus and of the trace in Husserl – in order to describe a structural law according to which philosophy attempts to determine some ‘thing’ with the very categories that it makes possible and that are therefore structurally derivative, both too early and too late, in a word, anachronous.

This essay corrects an error in the presentation of the Paradox of the Knowledge-Plus Knower, which is the variant of Kaplan and Montague’s Knower Paradox presented in C. Cross 2001: ‘The Paradox of the Knower without Epistemic Closure,’ MIND, 110, pp. 319–33. The correction adds a universally quantified transitivity principle for derivability as an additional assumption leading to paradox. This correction does not affect the status of the Knowledge-Plus paradox as a rebuttal to an argument against epistemic closure, since (...) the quantified transitivity principle is true in the standard model of arithmetic and therefore innocuous. (shrink)

Food turns out to be not only the nutrient supplier for our body but also a carrier of regulatory information. Interestingly, a recent study made the discovery that some plant/food‐derived microRNAs (miRNAs) accumulate in the serum of humans or plant‐feeding animals, and regulate mammalian gene expression in a sequence‐specific manner. The authors provided striking evidence that miRNAs could function as active signaling molecules to transport information across distinct species or even kingdoms. Although the mechanism of how miRNAs are shuttled between (...) different organisms is still not well characterized, initial results point to the involvement of microvesicles and specific RNA‐transporter‐like proteins. These findings raise both speculation about the potential impact that plants may have on animal physiology at the molecular level, and an appealing possibility that food‐derived miRNAs may offer us another means to deliver necessary nutrients or therapeutics to our bodies. (shrink)

A cross‐national study of differences in the identities of nursing in England and Australia and how this has affected nurses’ capacity to respond to hospital reform This paper examines similarities and differences in the identity of nursing in England and Australia. In doing this we examine how in each country nursing has developed different ideologies and strategies. Our analysis draws on data derived from a cross‐national study of hospital staff in England and Australia. We demonstrate how differences in (...) the occupational identity of nursing in each country are registered in their values, attitudes and beliefs. We suggest that these differences reflect the interplay of factors such as the strategic stances of nursing professional and industrial organisations and how nurses in each country have positioned themselves in responding to recent changes in health policy. (shrink)

Cross-term conservation relationships for electromagnetic energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum are derived and discussed here. When two or more sources of electromagnetic fields are present, these relationships connect the cross terms that appear in the traditional expressions for the electromagnetic (1) energy, (2) linear momentum, and (3) angular momentum, over to, respectively, (1) the sum of the rates of work, (2) the sum of the forces, and (3) the sum of the torques, that are due to the (...) fields of each charge or current source acting upon the other charge and current sources. These relationships, although not new, appear to be rarely recognized and used in the physics literature. As shown here, they can be extremely helpful for solving and gaining a deeper physical understanding into a rather diverse range of interesting problems in electrodynamics, including (1) aspects of Poynting's theorem when applied to charged point particles, (2) the detailed physical basis of electrostatic analysis, (3) understanding the connection between different techniques used in the past for solving Casimir force problems, and (4) reconciling the invalidity of Newton's third law in electrodynamics. (shrink)

One major problem many hypotheses regarding the neural correlate of consciousness, face is what we might call “the why question”: why would this particular neural feature, rather than another, correlate with consciousness? The purpose of the present paper is to develop an NCC hypothesis that answers this question. The proposed hypothesis is inspired by the cross-order integration theory of consciousness, according to which consciousness arises from the functional integration of a first-order representation of an external stimulus and a second-order (...) representation of that first-order representation. The proposal comes in two steps. The first step concerns the “general shape” of the NCC and can be directly derived from COI theory. The second step is a concrete hypothesis that can be arrived at by combining the general shape with empirical considerations. (shrink)

Cross-cultural differences in argumentation may be explained by the use of different norms of reasoning. However, some norms derive from, presumably universal, mathematical laws. This inconsistency can be resolved, by considering that some norms of argumentation, like Bayes theorem, are mathematical functions. Systematic variation in the inputs may produce culture-dependent inductive biases although the function remains invariant. This hypothesis was tested by fitting a Bayesian model to data on informal argumentation from Turkish and English cultures, which linguistically mark evidence (...) quality differently. The experiment varied evidential marking and informant reliability in argumentative dialogues and revealed cross-cultural differences for both independent variables. The Bayesian model fitted the data from both cultures well but there were differences in the parameters consistent with culture-specific inductive biases. These findings are related to current controversies over the universality of the norms of reasoning and the role of normative theories in the psychology of reasoning. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that the capacity to think of one’s perceptions as cross-modally integrated is incompatible with a reductionist account of the self. In §2 I distinguish three versions of the argument from cross-modality. According to the ‘unification’ version of the argument, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity to identify an object touched as the same as an object simultaneously seen. According to the ‘recognition’ version, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity, (...) having once seen an object, to reidentify that same object by touch alone. According to the ‘objectivity’ version, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity to think of one’s perceptions in different modalities as perceptions of one and the same object. The third version seems to establish that one must conceive of oneself substantially, as the numerically identical owner of one’s experiences, a conclusion in agreement with recent work in developmental psychology claiming to show that an infant’s cross-modal capacities are essentially implicated in their development of a sense of self. There is further work to be done if this is to be tumed into an argument against reductionism: there is no swift route from the epistemology of self-consciousness to the metaphysics of the self. In the §3, I will claim that there is, nevertheless, an argument linking the two. What I propose is an argument derived, not from the token-reflexive rule for the first-person, but resting on its anaphoric behaviour spanning intensional operators. (shrink)

Contemporary Christian witness about the death of Jesus moves in a culture already saturated with an aesthetic or intuitive ethic of the crucifixion. That aesthetic has many features acquired though Christianity’s long social dominance. This essay focuses on one aspect, authentically derived from the distinctive understanding Christian faith attributed to the crucifixion. First, I describe the Roman context, and the natural “reading” of the image of a crucified person there, as the background to considering the absence of that image in (...) early Christianity. This leads to exploration of the ways that early Christianity used a variety of typological images to weave a new frame of meaning around the crucifixion of Christ. Then, using Tom Holland’s recent historical synopsis of Christianity, I indicate how this new aesthetic of the cross lodged itself in shared cultural assumptions and perceptions. Finally, I consider the crucial American case of lynching, in which White Christian churches betrayed this distinctive meaning of the crucifixion, Black churches affirmed it, and the cultural aesthetic of crucifixion proved itself a key medium for resistance to lynching. Finally, I suggest some implications for church preaching and teaching in relation to the surrounding culture today. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between expressivism and disagreement. More in particular, the aim is to defend that one of the desiderata that can be derived from the study of disagreement, the explanation of ‘crossed disagreements’, can only be accommodated within a semantic theory that respects, at the meta-semantic level, certain expressivistic restrictions. We will compare contemporary dynamic expressivism with three different varieties of contextualist strategies to accommodate the specificities of evaluative language –indexical contextualism – (...) truth-conditional pragmatics –, pragmatic strategies using implicatures, and presuppositional accounts. Our conclusion will be that certain assumptions of expressivism are necessary in order to provide a semantic account of evaluative uses of language that can allow us to detect and prevent crossed disagreements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cross and Creation: A Theological Introduction to Origen of Alexandria by Mark E. TherrienJean-Paul JugeCross and Creation: A Theological Introduction to Origen of Alexandria by Mark E. Therrien (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022), xxii + 303 pp.Although Origen of Alexandria has been misrepresented and maligned since his own lifetime, allies have always arisen to defend him in his stead. Especially after the French Catholic (...) reappraisal of Origen's theology in the twentieth century, the once-dominant interpretation of Origen as a Platonist dressed in Christian garb no longer holds sway among most scholars. As Mark Therrien notes, however, traces of a "metaphysical reductionist" interpretation of Origen, propounded most notably by Adolf [End Page 295] von Harnack, still influences Origenian scholarship (89). Therrien's book vigorously opposes this line of interpretation and provides a rereading of crucial passages in Origen's On First Principles (Peri archōn) and his Commentary on John. In addition to presenting a fresh interpretation of these texts, Therrien also offers an introduction for those who are encountering Origen's theology for the first time. Rather than prefacing with biographical remarks, this book dives straight into Origen's major theological texts, allowing the reader, as Henri de Lubac put it, "to see Origen at work."Therrien operates under the principle that Origen is above all a biblical theologian whose speculation is driven primarily by his commitment to exegesis rather than Platonic presuppositions. Thus, his reading of various controversial excerpts of Origen, particularly from the Peri archōn, pays close attention to the biblical verses that Origen cites, which operate not as mere ornamentation but as the indispensable mechanics of his theology.This book is divided into eight chapters, each of which presents a "fundamental pillar" of Origen's thought: God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, eschatology the soul, the world, the Cross, and deification. Drawing attention to the first two cycles that comprise Origen's Peri archōn, Therrien treats the first cycle as authoritative to Origen's system, since it is here that Origen presents the Church's teaching in a more dogmatic form prior to the zetetic approach of the second cycle. Chapter 1 highlights the anti-Valentinian polemic that contextualizes Origen's account of divine incorporeality and the possibility of genuine knowledge of God. Following the insights of Cyril O'Regan, Therrien notes that an extreme apophaticism led the Valentinian Gnostics to "assimilat[e] God to creaturely categories," as seen in their account of various deities emanating from God as if by a material transfer of substance (36). For Origen, only the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are absolutely incorporeal, and it is their absolute incorporeality that separates the Trinity from all creatures. Despite this fundamental distinction between the Trinity and creation, Origen affirms that a limited knowledge of God is possible for rational creatures with the caveat that, whenever God is likened analogically to a created reality, the dissimilarity is always greater (38). Therrien contends that, unlike the Gnostics, Origen envisions the material world as the positive and even necessary means for creatures to derive knowledge of God.Chapter 2 focuses on Origen's Christology, especially the primacy of Christ's title "Wisdom," which the author accounts for by explaining the logic behind Origen's exegesis of John's Prologue and Prov 8:22. Long before the Arian controversy of the fourth century, Origen insisted that God is eternally Father and thus generates the Son from all eternity. Origen has often been characterized, however, as arguing that God's eternal status as Creator [End Page 296] necessarily entails the existence of creation ab aeterno. Therrien points out that such a reading conflates Origen's two distinct notions of creation: the foreknown existence of creatures as "sketched and prefigured" in Wisdom from all eternity and the concrete, substantial existence of creatures that begins in time (60). The investigation of Origen's pneumatology in chapter 3 shows how Ps 103 (in the Septuagint) informs Origen's notion of the Holy Spirit as Creator. For Origen, creation is not simply a past event, but is instead a dynamic process: "Created beings must, so to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 575 Geneviève Pagé Gender at the Crossing: Ideological Travelings of US and French Thought in Montreal Feminism This article recounts a story about Montreal feminism using the narrative thread of its conceptual language. It is a story of language as a political choice that guides our actions, but also language as a political issue, a barrier, a tool (...) that structures our thinking and that reflects and reproduces relations of power in knowledge production and dissemination. Gender is the central character in this story—its role representing the way US, French, and Quebec theoretical traditions are deeply in dialogue with each other; yet this dialogue is arbitrary and filled with long silences. In reviewing the dialogue, this article identifies a few elements that play a significant role in favoring or impeding the traveling of ideas and concepts, focusing, in the case of Quebec, on how part of the feminist movement, comprised of radical or “revolutionary” feminists, engages with and constructs theory. The article begins by briefly tracing the evolving meanings of gender in the United States from the 1920s to the twenty-first century. Then, turning to France, a second section identifies elements limiting the traveling of US understandings of gender in French feminist theory, especially the predominance of specific traditions of thought, namely existentialism and Marxism, leading to different ways of thinking about oppression, patriarchy, sexism, and the idea of womanhood. In a third section, I shift the focus to Quebec, particularly Francophone Montreal, to survey its feminist thought, political traditions, and 576 Geneviève Pagé translation. Its history, its people, and its geographic location put it at the convergence of US and French influences, but with a distinct added local imperative: the struggle for national liberation. The specific ways in which Quebec nationalism has foregrounded power and politics around language has had a major impact on how Quebec feminists have negotiated relations with their southern feminist neighbors. In this sense, Quebec feminism presents an excellent case study of language operating as an axis of power. Furthermore, in the context of globalization and resistances to globalizing processes, Montreal provides a perfect example by which to highlight both transnational influences and local specificities. Montreal, as a classic example of Mary Louise Pratt’s cultural and linguistic “contact zone”—the space where communities of practices interact—is a city in which one can clearly identify “the intellectual and linguistic points of contact between cultures, and make visible the political pressure that activates them.”1 I treat translations that occur in this context as the process of connecting and communicating between communities. As queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez has noted in another context, “the process of translation involves more than merely translating languages; it involves translating cultures, values, and institutions of power.”2 Similarly, translation here involves an exchange between symbolic and semiotic structures of both the original and the new communities. Zooming out of Montreal, I then address the politics of translation on a more global scale, pointing out the particular ways the production and dissemination of knowledge is especially beholden to market relations. All these reflections help us understand the traveling of ideas, concepts, and ideologies across linguistic barriers. I conclude that it is in the interest of feminists to pay particular attention to what knowledge is produced from different standpoints and in different languages and what it can teach us. 1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 36. 2. Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 19. Geneviève Pagé  577 Gender in the United States It is among US feminists that the conceptualization of the gender/sex dichotomy first developed. However, gender—the word—ironically comes to English from the French genre and shares with that word its derivation from the Latin genus, meaning “kind,” “sort,” or “type.” The derivation is most visible in the borrowing in English of the French genre, for example, in literary forms such as fiction or poetry. Similarly, both the English... (shrink)

The crossing property is perhaps the most subtle aspect of the particle-field relation. Although it is not difficult to state its content in terms of certain analytic properties relating different matrixelements of the S-matrix or formfactors, its relation to the localization- and positive energy spectral principles requires a level of insight into the inner workings of QFT which goes beyond anything which can be found in typical textbooks on QFT. This paper presents a recent account based on new ideas derived (...) from “modular localization” including a mathematic appendix on this subject. Its main achievement is the proof of the crossing property from a two-algebra generalization of the KMS condition.The main content is an in-depth criticism of the dual model and its string theoretic extension. The conceptual flaws of these models are closely related to misunderstandings of crossing. The correct interpretation of string theory is that of a dynamic infinite component one particle space where “dynamic” means that, unlike a mere collection of independent free fields, the formalism contains also operators which communicate between the different irreducible Poincaré representations and set the mass/spin spectrum. Whereas in pre-string times there were unsuccessful attempts to achieve this in analogy to the O(4,2) hydrogen spectrum by the use of higher noncompact groups, the superstring in d=9+1, which uses instead (bosonic/fermionic) oscillators obtained from multicomponent chiral currents, is the only known solution of the dynamical infinite component pointlike field (or pointlike generated wave function) project. (shrink)

Terrence Deacon's views about the origin of language are based on a particular notion of a symbol. While the notion is derived from Peirce's semiotics, it diverges from that source and needs to be investigated on its own terms in order to evaluate the idea that the human species has crossed the symbolic threshold. Deacon's view is defended from the view that symbols in the animal world are widespread and from the extreme connectionist view that they are not even to (...) be found in humans. Deacon's treatment of symbols involves a form of holism, as a symbol needs to be part of a system of symbols. He also appears to take a realist view of symbols. That combination of holism and realism makes the threshold a sharp threshold, which makes it hard to explain how the threshold was crossed. This difficulty is overcome if we take a mild realist position towards symbols, in the style of Dennett. Mild realism allows intermediate stages in the crossing but does not undermine Deacon's claim that the threshold is difficult to cross or the claim that it needs to be crossed quickly. (shrink)

This article discusses the ethical responsibilities that psychology faculty have when psychological information is seriously misrepresented or psychological techniques are misued by nonpsychology faculty. General values derived from the American Psychological Association's (APA) ethical principles are identified and reviewed. The APA ethical code recommends that psychologists limit the misrepresentation of psychological information and protect students from the misuse of psychological techniques. Examples from my experience are presented to illustrate these ethical principles and responsibilities.

Clahsen's compelling evidence for the dual-mechanism model of the lexicon derives in part from the use of cross-linguistic data in psycholinguistic research. This approach reflects a growing (and positive) trend toward incorporating data from several languages when analyzing and modeling human language behavior. This perspective should be expanded to include data from typologically distinct languages to develop more explanatory models of language.

The purpose of this article is to examine the process of deterritorialization of legal concepts embedded in international commercial contracts. Typically written in English, these contracts often incorporate concepts derived from common law jurisdictions, given that English is the language of expression for the common law tradition. This underscores the intrinsic interconnection between language and underlying legal concepts. While parties involved in contract drafting may sometimes mitigate this connection by using terms and clauses that do not immediately evoke common law (...) associations, the use of English as the medium for conveying concepts in international commercial contracts does not necessarily facilitate this process. Consequently, legal concepts rooted in specific traditions adapt to new contexts shaped by the linguistic, cognitive, cultural, and legal backgrounds of the contracting parties, those tasked with interpreting the contracts, and the law governing the agreements. This paper illustrates the dynamics of this process through examples drawn from international commercial contracts, focusing on both individual terms and entire contractual clauses. These examples highlight how legal concepts, as expressed in these contracts, evolve within new environments shaped by diverse linguistic, cognitive, cultural, and legal determinants. (shrink)

The present paper compares the ethical perceptions of Americans and Greeks using conjoint analysis. The two samples were presented with 2 scenarios manipulating three factors: gender of the transgressor, organizational status of the transgressor, and the magnitude of the transgression. For each scenario, conventional mean comparisons and conjoint analyses were performed on five ethical measurements. The matrix of means and the relative importances of the American sample were compared with that of the Greek sample. The results showed that Greeks paid (...) more attention to the dollar amount involved and less attention on the organizational status of the transgressor than Americans did. The gender of the transgressor was the least important factor for both samples. The use of relative importance measures derived from conjoint analysis is shown to provide a new dimension in cross-cultural comparisons. (shrink)

Description logics and other formal devices are frequently used as means for preventing or detecting mistakes in ontologies. Some of these devices are also capable of inferring the existence of inter-concept relationships that have not been explicitly entered into an ontology. A prerequisite, however, is that this information can be derived from those formal definitions of concepts and relationships which are included within the ontology. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that is able to suggest relationships among existing (...) concepts in a formal ontology that are not derivable from such formal definitions. The algorithm exploits cross-lingual information that is implicitly present in the collection of terms used in various languages to denote the concepts and relationships at issue. By using a specific experimental design, we are able to quantify the impact of cross-lingual information in coping with underspecification in formal ontologies. (shrink)

An increasing body of institutional research has examined organizations’ response to conflicting institutional logics, but few studies have looked into how cross-sector organizational actors experiencing institutional complexity strategize their response mechanisms to create value in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We conduct a comparative case study of nine social partnerships between multinational companies (MNCs) and nonprofits in China. We identify a partnership logic among the value-creating partnerships where partners guided by an either/and mindset take joint ownership of (...) the social or sustainability issue/cause and integrate it into their core set of activities and goals. By contrast, the less successful partnerships guided by an either/or mindset pursue a substitution logic in which the issue and project are kept separate and marginalized from core activities and goals. We contribute to an understanding of the value creation of cross-sector social partnerships by revealing the institutional embeddedness of such partnerships and deriving a process model of collaborative value creation through institutional works in social partnerships. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that Ibn Sīnā’s theory of experience (taǧriba) requires a cross-reference between logic and psychology. Following the Basran linguistic tradition, he paraphrases derived names (ism muštaqq) into the li-x y formula: for example, ʿālim (“knowing”) is paraphrased into lahu ʿilm (“an act of knowing belongs to him”). His theory of experience employs this formula for arranging observed phenomena into a certain form of a syllogism and describing functions of the brain’s inner senses. Ibn Sīnā arranges observed phenomenon (...) into the li-x y formula or the proposition of which a predicate is a derived name of y. Meanwhile, he holds that the sense of recollection is involved in the process of experience. Recollection is an inner sense of the brain, which preserves maʿnā perceived by the sense of estimation. Estimation means to perceive maʿnā (y) that inheres in a subject (x), and to make a judgment about x based on y. Thus, in this process, the analysis of derived names arranges observed phenomena into a rational order, and the inner sense establishes the causation between apprehension and logical assertion. The article concludes by discussing the relation of this philosophy to medicine. (shrink)

Filial piety is a Confucian concept derived from Chinese culture, which advocates a set of moral norms, values, and practices of respect and caring for one’s parents. According to the dual-factor model of filial piety, reciprocal and authoritarian filial piety are two dimensions of filial piety. Reciprocal filial piety is concerned with sincere affection toward one’s parent and a longstanding positive parent-child relationship, while authoritarian filial piety is about obedience to social obligations to one’s parent, often by suppressing one’s own (...) wishes to conform the demands of the parent. The primary aim of this study is to investigate the moderating effect of culture on the relationships between filial piety and palliative care knowledge. The secondary aim is to investigate whether filial piety is a universal construct across Singaporean and Australian cultures. A total of 508 participants living in Singapore and Australia were surveyed between May and October 2020. The final sample comprised of 406 participants, with 224 Singaporeans and 182 Australians. There were 289 females, 115 males, and two unspecified gender in the sample, with an average age of 27.27 years. Results indicated a significant effect of culture on authoritarian filial piety and palliative care knowledge. Singaporeans showed higher authoritarian filial piety and higher palliative care knowledge than Australians. However, no effect of culture was found on reciprocal filial piety. Overall, no significant correlation existed between palliative care knowledge and reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety. For Singaporeans, a weak negative correlation was found between palliative care knowledge and authoritarian filial piety. In contrast, Australians and Singaporeans indicated a positive, moderate correlation between reciprocal and authoritarian filial piety. Further, culture moderated the relationship between authoritarian filial piety and palliative care knowledge. High authoritarian filial piety was associated with increased palliative care knowledge among Australians, while high authoritarian filial piety was associated with decreased palliative care knowledge among Singaporeans. The results support the conceptualization of filial piety as a possible psychological universal construct. In addition, the results point out an important implication that public health programs should target the appropriate filial piety types to enhance palliative care knowledge among Singaporeans and Australians. (shrink)

The charge that anthropomorphizing nonhuman animals is a fallacy is itself largely misguided and mythic. Anthropomorphism in the study of animal behavior is placed in its original, theological context. Having set the historical stage, I then discuss its relationship to a number of other, related issues: the role of anecdotal evidence, the taxonomy of related anthropomorphic claims, its relationship to the attribution of psychological states in general, and the nature of the charge of anthropomorphism as a categorical claim. I then (...) argue that the categorical reading of anthropomorphism cannot work and that it misrepresents what is being claimed when one claims that traits are shared between humans and nonhumans. We should think of such claims not as anthropomorphic per se– because that implies the trait is intrinsically human and only derivatively nonhuman. Instead, traits shared with mammals are mammalomorphic, for example, or primatomorphic when shared by primates. (shrink)

Religions “in the wild” are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them. I present a general model to account for the cross-cultural recurrence of these particular themes. The model is based on features of human psychology—namely, epistemic vigilance, (...) the set of systems whereby we evaluate the quality of information and of sources of information, and threat-detection psychology, the set of evolved systems geared at detecting potential danger in the environment. Given these two sets of systems, the dynamics of communication will favor particular types of messages about misfortune. This makes it possible to predict recurrent features of religious systems, such as the focus on nonphysical agents, the focus on particular cases rather than general aspects of misfortune, and the emergence of specialists. The model could illuminate not just why such representations are culturally successful, but also why people are motivated to formulate them in the first place. (shrink)

Recently, infrared human action recognition has attracted increasing attention for it has many advantages over visible light, that is, being robust to illumination change and shadows. However, the infrared action data is limited until now, which degrades the performance of infrared action recognition. Motivated by the idea of transfer learning, an infrared human action recognition framework using auxiliary data from visible light is proposed to solve the problem of limited infrared action data. In the proposed framework, we first construct a (...) novel Cross-Dataset Feature Alignment and Generalization framework to map the infrared data and visible light data into a common feature space, where Kernel Manifold Alignment and a dual aligned-to-generalized encoders model are employed to represent the feature. Then, a support vector machine is trained, using both the infrared data and visible light data, and can classify the features derived from infrared data. The proposed method is evaluated on InfAR, which is a publicly available infrared human action dataset. To build up auxiliary data, we set up a novel visible light action dataset XD145. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance compared with several transfer learning and domain adaptation methods. (shrink)

Appendix to lecture notes on "Nominal (re)centering: From Kalaallisut to UC1". Day 2 of advanced course on "Cross-linguistic compositional semantics" at LSA Summer Institute 2009 at UC Berkeley.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Did Diodorus Siculus take over Cross–References from His Sources?Catherine RubincamA systematic answer to the question posed in the title of this article requires, first, a careful analysis of the implications of various different formulations of the question and, second, a thorough discussion of the evidence relating to all the cross–references in the Bibliotheca. No such systematic approach has ever been attempted, to my knowledge. It will emerge (...) that different formulations of the question produce different answers on the basis of the evidence surveyed.The "slavish dependence" of Diodorus on his sources has been a theme repeated relentlessly for more than a hundred years by practitioners of Diodoran source criticism.1 A frequent component of the traditional opinion has been the argument that in composing his Bibliotheca Historica Diodorus reproduced from the more detailed histories which he was condensing not only the narrative of events but also material which was patently inappropriate to his own work, such as references to the earlier writer's own experience or lifetime, or cross–references between different parts of the earlier work. This assertion was not based, however, on a thorough general investigation of this alleged aspect of Diodorus' practice. Rather, the argument that this contemporary reference or that cross–reference was taken over by Diodorus from his source of the moment tended to be invoked in particular cases, usually in support of a particular hypothesis concerning the source(s) used by Diodorus for a certain part of his Bibliotheca.2 Sporadic challenges have [End Page 67] been mounted to particular aspects of this general attitude, more frequently in recent years. The most thoroughgoing, so far, has been Kenneth Sacks's attempt to treat Diodorus as a serious writer in the context of his own era. Sacks devoted a chapter to a vigorous but summary re-examination of the allegedly derivative nature of three important aspects of Diodoran historiography: "organizational and chronological markers, speeches, and polemics."3 To judge from the reviews, by no means all readers were totally convinced by Sacks's energetic defense of Diodorus' independence of his sources in these respects.4 I think, therefore, that the question deserves a more systematic and explicitly methodological discussion. The results will show that although Diodorus cannot be proven to be entirely independent of his sources in all his cross–references, there is good reason, nevertheless, to defend him from the charge of mindlessness.The groundwork for such a systematic answer to the question whether Diodorus took over cross–references from his sources was laid by two articles published a few years ago,5 which collected all the cross–reference passages in the whole work, analyzed their style, their degree of fulfillment,6 and the way they function, and compared Diodorus' use of cross–references with that of some other ancient authors. Before embarking on the discussion of these detailed data, it is important to consider the implications of different formulations of the question. The formulation "Did Diodorus copy out cross–references from his sources?" suggests a wholesale mindless transfer of references from the sources into the Bibliotheca. "Did the cross–references in the Bibliotheca originate with Diodorus?" focuses more specifically on the opposite possibility. I have preferred in my title a third formulation—"Did Diodorus [End Page 68] take over some or all of the cross–references in the Bibliotheca from his sources?"—which neither states nor implies any judgment about how consciously this might have been done. A further variable that needs to be made explicit is whether Diodorus must necessarily have behaved always in the same way. Too often it seems to have been assumed that if one Diodoran cross–reference could be shown to be in some sense derived from a source, then they all must be.7 Yet this need not necessarily be so: some inconsistency of practice would be both possible and understandable in an author who spent thirty years compiling a comprehensive digest of all the history he thought worth reporting, from the creation of the world to his own lifetime.It seems to me, therefore, that the processes that may underlie the cross–references in the Bibliotheca are more complicated than is generally... (shrink)

This photo-essay analyzes the politics of dwelling of the inhabitants of ‘outcast’ Calcutta - the city that is the nightmare of urban planners and whose squalor, filth and poverty are taken to be indexes of the failure of the postcolonial urbanism as such. The city that turned itself into a barricade during the street-fighting years of the 1960s is now about to turn its back on its own subalterns (migrants from poorer areas), participating in urban cleansing drives that derive from (...) neo-liberal dictates. Showing that the squatters also dwell and forge solidarities underpinned by an ethic of survival, this essay draws attention to non-state political formations emerging out of the negotiations of the City Form with the non-civic but enabling life-forms prevalent in subaltern Calcutta. (shrink)

Items were generated to explore the factorial structure of a construct of fundamentalism worded appropriately for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Results suggested three underlying dimensions: (a) External versus Internal Authority, (b) Fixed versus Malleable Religion, and (c) Worldly Rejection versus Worldly Affirmation. The three dimensions indicate that religious fundamentalism is a personal orientation that asserts a supra-human locus of moral authority, context unbound truth, and the appreciation of the sacred over the worldly components of experience. The 15-item, 3-dimension solution was (...) evaluated across Mexican ( n = 455) and American ( n = 449) samples. Fit indexes point out the viability of the new inventory across these two samples henceforward referred to as the Multi-Dimensional Fundamentalism Inventory (MDFI). Additional validity tests supported that the new inventory was negatively correlated with participants’ integrative complexity in a religious domain–specific way. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study examined how lifestyle factors and gender affect kidney allocation to transplant patients by 99 British and Singaporean participants. Thirty hypothetical patients were generated from a combination of six factors and randomly paired four times. Participants saw 60 patient pairings and, in each pair, chose which patient would receive treatment priority. A Bradley-Terry model was used to derive coefficients for each factor per participant. A mean factor score was then calculated across all participants for each factor. Participants gave (...) lower priority to patients who drank more, were overweight, smoked more and exercised less. A patient’s diet and gender had no significant effect on allocation. There were no significant cross-cultural differences. There were moderate correlations between participants’ self-reported pre- and post-experiment ordering of decision criteria, and these measures and factor coefficients, suggesting a modest level of decision-making consistency. Between participants, moderate levels of concordance with respect to factor importance were observed for self-reported orderings of factors, and weaker agreement for model-derived coefficients. Very similar results were obtained for both British and Singaporean participants, and the implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

This paper seeks to lay down the theoretical groundwork for the emergence of holistic cross-cultural philosophical investigations of personal identity ¾ investigations that approach the theoretical, phenomenological, psychological, and practical-ethical dimensions of selfhood as indissociable. My strategy is to discuss three closely connected conceptual distinctions that the Buddhist approach to personal identity urges us to draw, and a lucid understanding of which is essential for the emergence of appropriately comprehensive and thus genuinely cosmopolitan discussions at the cross-road between (...) Western and Buddhist philosophical traditions. The first, primary distinction is that between the “visceral sense of self” and the “substance view of self”. This in turn gives rise to two derivative distinctions, namely between “harbouring VSS” and “believing SVS”, and between “overcoming VSS” and “rejecting SVS”. After discussing these distinctions, I consider and respond to three philosophical objections to features of Buddhist approach to selfhood that are thrown into sharper relief when attention is paid to these three distinctions. I then discuss some of the ways the foregoing may inform research in cross-cultural philosophy of personal identity. This discussion focuses on: the primacy of the first-person stance in matters of personal identity; the relationship between numerical identity and narrative identity; interdisciplinarity in the study of selfhood; and personal identity and egoism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deification through the Cross:Reflections from an Implied Ideal WorshiperAndrew J. SummersonKhaled Anatolios's most recent book, Deification through the Cross,1 develops a definition of salvation out of his experience of the Byzantine liturgy. This experience of worship offers an immersion in what he calls "doxological contrition." By this, Anatolios means that Christ saves us by offering us the ability to participate in the mutual glorification of the persons (...) of the Holy Trinity by vicariously repenting for our sins. For Anatolios, this objective content is subjectively appropriated in Byzantine Christian worship. To explore this theme, Anatolios develops a working account of "doxological contrition" through a synthetic discussion of the Lenten Triodion and Pentecostarion, books of liturgical hymnography that govern the Byzantine worship from Lent to Pentecost. Anatolios derives his approach from the adaption of reader response theory, which aims to expose the effect a text should have on the "implied ideal reader." As such, his account speaks from the perspective of the "implied ideal worshiper"—presumably a theologically educated congregant who can seize these themes that evaporate into the ether as quickly as incense swung throughout the church during the services.Let me say from the outset, I heartily recommend Anatolios's book. It is both an ambitious work and a rewarding read. Ambitious because Anatolios's approach makes otherwise fragmented theological disciplines—liturgical [End Page 1089] studies, Scripture, historical theology, and systematics—fruitful dialogue partners in his exposition of a working account of the Christian experience of salvation. Rewarding because the reader can explore in depth the touchstones of the Christian tradition through Anatolios's deep retrieval of a more coherent soteriology. Deification of the Cross demonstrates the perennial value of historical theology to correctly account for the "half-forgotten, half misunderstood" details of the Christian tradition in the face of caricatures that at best misrepresent and at worst present an idolatrous, counterfeit Christianity.Eastern Christian Liturgy and RevelationPerhaps I am not Anatolios's ideal audience; I may be too close to the source material and lack objectivity. That aside, the bulk of my reflections on this book comes from the perspective of an "implied ideal worshiper." I do share some of Anatolios starting points. Like Anatolios, I am a convert, scholar, and Eastern Catholic priest. Furthermore, I also share the discontent with which Anatolios begins his book, though perhaps for different reasons. He bemoans a loss of the experience of salvation. My own vocation as priest and scholar comes out of a frustrated wonder. As a college student, I set out to learn about this Church and its Tradition. I learned about the Sunday experience I was supposed be having. It was in university when I read for the first time John Paul II's 1995 apostolic letter Orientale Lumen, written to acquaint the wider Catholic Church with the riches of the Christian East. John Paul II dedicated much reflection to the "genius of Eastern liturgy," emphasizing its power to envelop all our human senses into the fullness of the mystery of God. It is worth quoting in full:Within this framework, liturgical prayer in the East shows a great aptitude for involving the human person in his or her totality: the mystery is sung in the loftiness of its content, but also in the warmth of the sentiments it awakens in the heart of redeemed humanity. In the sacred act, even bodiliness is summoned to praise, and beauty, which in the East is one of the best loved names expressing the divine harmony and the model of humanity transfigured, appears everywhere: in the shape of the church, in the sounds, in the colors, in the lights, in the scents. The lengthy duration of the celebrations, the repeated invocations, everything expresses gradual identification with the mystery celebrated with one's whole person. Thus the prayer of the Church already becomes participation in the heavenly liturgy, an anticipation of the final beatitude.(§11) [End Page 1090]The experience of this liturgy has been quite potent throughout history. It led to the baptism of the entire kingdom of Rus' in 988 AD. As the story goes, its ruler, Vladimir the Great, sent emissaries to find a... (shrink)

This dissertation engages the following question: how, in the absence of an uncontroversial source of moral guidance, can liberals make political and moral claims across cultural divides? While committed to toleration, liberals cannot escape the compulsion to apply basic standards of equal individual human rights and liberties universally. Under postmetaphysical conditions, however, they no longer find credible arguments that assure them of the sources of these standards in "natural law," "human nature," or "practical reason." Aware that individual rights have their (...) provenance in modern "Western" history, liberals fear being intolerant when they apply these standards universally, and experience as a result a problem of cross-cultural judgement. ;In this project I engage in a sympathetic critique of Richard Rorty's, Jurgen Habermas's and John Rawls's attempts at addressing this problem and provide a fourth alternative that cannot be absorbed by any of their frameworks. Rorty offers liberals the comforts of ethnocentrism. He assures them that political and moral judgements are always made by someone from somewhere. For this comfort, however, he extracts the exorbitant ethical price of other-disregard. Habermas derives individual rights from the universal practice of argumentation. By relying on the overly exacting standard of "rational consensus," however, he limits the applicability of his answer to liberal secular contexts. In his free-standing answer, Rawls offers the promising standard of an "overlapping consensus." His overly static use of this concept, however, drains it of its promise. ;Drawing on each of these attempts as well as on Aristotle's Rhetoric, I offer the alternative of a political project of moral persuasion. Instead of seeking to address the problem of cross-cultural judgement by coup de plume, liberals' best hope is to obviate it in practice, by forging a global, minimally liberal, overlapping consensus. As moral persuaders liberals would intrude actively in nonliberal debates and would seek to convince nonliberals from within their various lights, of the worthiness of the commitment to the freedom and equality of persons. (shrink)

Project citizenship behavior has an important positive impact on project success. Researching how to promote PCB is an important issue in project management. Based on social learning theory and social cognitive theory, this paper adopted the method of questionnaire survey and hierarchical linear model to analyze the collected data derived from the sample of Chinese construction enterprises and verified this hypothesis. The results show that responsible leadership has a significant positive effect on PCB, moral identity mediates this relationship, and collective (...) moral sensitivity positively moderates this mediating effect. The findings of the study systematically and deeply reveal the intrinsic mechanism of the cross-level influence of responsible leadership on PCB, and provide new enlightenment for the practice of project management. (shrink)

Background:In sports psychology research, the Stroop test and its derivations are commonly used to investigate the benefits of exercise on cognitive function. The measures of the Stroop test and the computed interference often have different interclass correlation coefficients (ICC). However, the ICC is never reported in cross-over designs involving multiple variances associated with individual differences.Objective:We investigated the ICC of the Stroop neutral and incongruent tests and interference (neutral test—incongruent test), and reverse Stroop task using the linear mixed model.Methods:Forty-eight young (...) adults participated in a cross-over design experiment composed of 2 factors: exercise mode (walking, resistance exercise, badminton, and seated rest as control) and time (pre- and post-tests). Before and after each intervention, participants completed the Stroop neutral and incongruent, and the reverse-Stroop neutral and incongruent tests. We analyzed for each test performance and interference and calculated ICC using the linear mixed model.Results:The linear mixed model found a significant interaction of exercise mode and time for both the Stroop and reverse-Stroop tasks, suggesting that exercise mode influences the effect of acute exercise on inhibitory function. On the other hand, there was no significant effect of exercise mode for both the Stroop and reverse-Stroop interference. The results also revealed that calculating both the Stroop and reverse-Stroop interference resulted in smaller ICCs than the ICCs of the neutral and incongruent tests for both the Stroop and reverse-Stroop tasks.Conclusion:The Stroop and reverse-Stroop interferences are known as valid measures of the inhibitory function for cross-sectional research design. However, to understand the benefits of acute exercise on inhibitory function comprehensively by cross-over design, comparing the incongruent test with the neutral test also seems superior because these tests have high reliability and statistical power. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Western-European concept of libertarian rights-based autonomy, which advocates respect for individual rights, may conflict with African cultural values and norms. African communitarian ethics focuses on the interests of the collective whole or community, rather than rugged individualism. Hence collective decision-making processes take precedence over individual autonomy or consent. This apparent conflict may impact informed consent practice during biomedical research in African communities and may hinder ethical principlism in African bioethics. This study explored African biomedical researchers' perspectives regarding informed consent (...) and potential limitations to the principle of respect for autonomy in African communities.MethodsWe conducted a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 12 biomedical researchers, five females and seven males aged 34 to 74 years, currently working at an African university. Interviews lasted 35–40 min each and involved semi-structured open-ended interviews, which allowed participants to offer information about their perceptions and feelings regarding respect for autonomy and informed consent as practised in Africa. Empirical data from the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using thematic content analysis, together with an interrogation of relevant scientific literature about African communitarian ethics, making evaluations and drawing inferences consistent with the empirical bioethics approach.ResultsBased on these interviews and analysis of relevant literature, we found that informed consent is difficult to apply in an African context because it derives from a Western conception of libertarian rights-based autonomy. Most respondents pointed out that it was challenging to implement informed consent in the African setting. Furthermore, communalism, customary beliefs, spirituality, and relational autonomy are predominant in most African communities, as exemplified by the African moral philosophies of Ubuntu/botho and Ukama, which emphasize communitarianism over individual rights. We also found that language, education, poverty, and cultural beliefs are barriers to obtaining proper informed consent in African communities.ConclusionsWe conclude that there are limitations to applying the principle of respect for autonomy and informed consent in African communities, especially in the context of human biomedical research. We recommend using a more relational approach, such as Ross’s prima facie duties, to implement informed consent in African communities. (shrink)

Superlative modifiers (SMs) are known to demonstrate an ambiguity between an epistemic reading (EPI) conveying speaker ignorance and a concessive reading (CON) conveying speaker concession. Such EPI-CON ambiguity has often been taken, implicitly or explicitly, to be a lexical coincidence. While there may be some justification for such a position when a single language is considered, we argue for an intrinsic connection between the two readings based on cross-linguistic considerations. This paper focuses on English _at least_ and Mandarin _zhi-shao_ (...) as representative of superlative modifiers across a wide range of languages to propose a unified account of the two readings. The proposal builds on Biezma (2013) in relying on the role of focus and scalarity in developing a unified semantics for the two readings, but differs in capitalizing on the fact that cross-linguistically superlative modifiers use the same morphological formants as quantity superlatives. It also follows Biezma (2013) in taking pragmatic factors as crucial in deriving the variation between EPI and CON readings. Elaborating on her account, it offers a more nuanced picture of the ways in which EPI is sensitive to the question of informativity while CON relates to issues of evaluativity. The paper shows how the proposed semantics and pragmatics account for several well-known properties of superlative modifiers. It ends by noting several open issues in the literature on this topic that the current proposal sheds new light on. (shrink)

Differences in language use and structures between signed and spoken languages have often been attributed to so-called language “modality.” Indeed, this is derived from the conception that spoken languages resort to both the oral-aural channel of speech and the visual-kinesic channel of visible bodily action whereas signed languages only resort to the latter. This paper addresses the use of enactment, a depictive communicative strategy whereby language users imitate referents in signed and spoken languages. Reviewing comparative research on enactment, this paper (...) highlights theoretical and methodological shortcomings in prior works. First, a broader set of causal explanations needs to be taken into account when interpreting differences between signing and speaking communities. A more comprehensive conceptual toolbox ensures that differences are not automatically attributed to modality. In particular, less-studied factors of language diversity, like sociolinguistic and cultural ecologies, and how they interact with other factors should be considered. Second, diversity in enactment across signed and spoken languages is shown to be inadequately and insufficiently documented. It is argued that by comparing enactment across more diverse signing and speaking communities and using large, directly comparable corpora, solid analyses can be carried out, enabling a better understanding of how and why different communities use enactment in similar or different ways. (shrink)

Objective: Previous research suggests a positive association between pain, depression and sleep. In this study, we investigate how sleep correlates with varying levels of pain and depression in nursing home patients with dementia.Materials and methods: Cross-sectional study with sleep-related data, derived from two multicenter studies conducted in Norway. We included NH patients with dementia according to the Mini-Mental State Examination from the COSMOS trial and the DEP.PAIN.DEM trial whose sleep was objectively measured with actigraphy. In the COSMOS trial, NH (...) patients were included if they were ≥65 years of age and with life expectancy >6 months. In the DEP.PAIN.DEM trial, patients were included if they were ≥60 years and if they had depression according to the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia. In both studies, pain was assessed with the Mobilization-Observation-Behavior-Intensity-Dementia-2 Pain Scale, and depression with CSDD. Sleep parameters were total sleep time, sleep efficiency, sleep onset latency, wake after sleep onset, early morning awakening, daytime total sleep time and time in bed. We registered use of sedatives, analgesics, opioids and antidepressants from patient health records and adjusted for these medications in the analyses.Results: Mean age was 86.2 years and 76.3% were female. Hierarchical regressions showed that pain was associated with higher TST and SE, less WASO and more DTS. More severe dementia was associated with more WASO and TiB. More severe depression was associated with less TST, less DTS and less TiB. Use of sedative medications was associated with less TiB.Conclusion: When sleep was measured with actigraphy, NH patients with dementia and pain slept more than patients without pain, in terms of higher total sleep time. Furthermore, their sleep efficiency was higher, indicating that the patients had more sleep within the time they spent in bed. Patients with more severe dementia spent more time awake during the time spent in bed. Furthermore, people with more severe depression slept less at daytime and had less total sleep time Controlling for concomitant medication use did not affect the obtained results. (shrink)

Radical ethical relativism as presented in Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture not only denies absolute values, its thesis of the incommensurability of cultural configurations precludes possibility of any agreement on values by individuals of different cultures. This fact provides the proper perspective from which to judge the current controversy between radical and “modified” ethical relativists. A double error is committed, therefore, by those who contend that there has been no reduction of the “area of indeterminacy” existing between the ethical principles (...) of different cultures since, despite the newer developments in the social sciences, there are still no absolutely valid ethical values. Not only is the term “validity” vague and in need of reinterpretation, but, in assuming the denial of absolute values to be the distinguishing characteristic of radical relativism, they actually identify this theory with modified relativism. This brief paper attempts to prove the untenability of the denial of cross cultural agreement on ends and means by treating the question first, from the point of view of C. L. Stevenson's Dewey-inspired notion of the derivation of ends from means, and, second, from that of Stevenson's more original idea, complex ethical agreement. (shrink)

Close insight into mathematical and conceptual structure of classical field theories shows serious inconsistencies in their common basis. In other words, we claim in this work to have come across two severe mathematical blunders in the very foundations of theoretical hydrodynamics. One of the defects concerns the traditional treatment of time derivatives in Eulerian hydrodynamic description. The other one resides in the conventional demonstration of the so-called Convection Theorem. Both approaches are thought to be necessary for cross-verification of (...) the standard differential form of continuity equation. Any revision of these fundamental results might have important implications for all classical field theories. Rigorous reconsideration of time derivatives in Eulerian description shows that it evokes Minkowski metric for any flow field domain without any previous postulation. Mathematical approach is developed within the framework of congruences for general four-dimensional differentiable manifold and the final result is formulated in form of a theorem. A modified version of the Convection Theorem provides a necessary cross-verification for a reconsidered differential form of continuity equation. Although the approach is developed for one-component (scalar) flow field, it can be easily generalized to any tensor field. Some possible implications for classical electrodynamics are also explored. (shrink)

The integration of economics and psychology has created a vibrant and fruitful emerging field of study. The essays in Economics and Psychology take a broad view of the interface between these two disciplines, going beyond the usual focus on "behavioral economics." As documented in this volume, the influence of psychology on economics has been responsible for a view of human behavior that calls into question the assumption of complete rationality, the acceptance of experiments as a valid method of economic research, (...) and the idea that utility or well-being can be measured.The contributors, all leading researchers in the field, offer state-of-the-art discussions of such topics as pro-social behavior and the role of conditional cooperation and trust, happiness research as an empirical tool, the potential of neuroeconomics as a way to deepen understanding of individual decision making, and procedural utility as a concept that captures the well-being people derive directly from the processes and conditions leading to outcomes. Taken together, the essays in Economics and Psychology offer an assessment of where this new interdisciplinary field stands and what directions are most promising for future research, providing a useful guide for economists, psychologists, and social scientists. (shrink)

Religious practices centered on controlled trance states, such as Siberian shamanism or North African zar, are ubiquitous, yet their characteristics vary. In particular, cross-cultural research finds that female-dominated spirit possession cults are common in stratified societies, whereas male-dominated shamanism predominates in structurally flatter cultures. Here, we present an agent-based model that explores factors, including social stratification and psychological dissociation, that may partially account for this pattern. We posit that, in more stratified societies, female agents suffer from higher levels of (...) psychosocial trauma, whereas male agents are more vulnerable in flatter societies. In societies with fewer levels of formal hierarchy, males come into informal social competition more regularly than in stratified contexts. This instability leads to a cultural feedback effect in which dissociative experiences deriving from chronic psychosocial stress become canalized into a male religious trance role. The model reproduces these patterns under plausible parameter configurations. (shrink)

This paper proposes an index of national levels of “intergenerational solidarity”, defined as “investments or sacrifices that are intended to increase or sustain the wellbeing of future generations”. This is measured by examining changes to the value and stability of various capital flows and stocks. Nine indicators are drawn from national-level statistics: forest degradation rate, share of low-carbon energy consumption, and carbon footprint in the environmental dimension; adjusted net savings, current account balance, and wealth in equality in the economic dimension; (...) and primary pupil-teacher ratio, fertility rate, and GDP-adjusted child mortality in the social dimension. This returns a comparative index score of intergenerational solidarity for 120 countries covering 92% of the world’s population. Throughout, the state of the current research on intergenerational transfers and on the individual metrics used is discussed, and suggestions are made for further improvements and work in measuring intergenerational solidarity. As it stands, the index provides the widest coverage of indicators and nations aimed at measuring any similar concept. As such, it is particularly useful for those who wish to investigate the causes of intergenerational solidarity through cross-cultural comparisons. Online Appendix. (shrink)

Despite the acknowledged importance of the meanings that people attach to places (e.g., homes, businesses, communities), the literature on cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) provides few insights into how place influences CSPs and how CSPs influence the places where they are enacted. To address this oversight, we explore the role of place using an inductive comparative study of nine CSPs, split across five rural cooperative enterprises and four urban social enterprises that have a common private-sector partner. We inductively derive a process (...) model of place renewal that occurs through CSP growth, and changes the meanings that individuals give to their places. We utilize Penrose’s theory of firm growth to explain how rural CSPs grew in different ways than urban CSPs, and the changed meanings of place that emerged. Both rural and urban CSPs overcome initial perceived restrictions of place through a process of realizing the potential for change, reconfiguring the organization through physical and process changes, and ultimately experiencing renewal that changes how they view their places. Our study contributes to the CSP literature by acknowledging the role of place in theorizing on CSPs, and by including the agency and voice of traditionally marginalized actors in the CSP process. It also contributes to the theory of firm growth by explicitly incorporating place as an outcome of the organizational growth process. (shrink)