Peer interaction has been found to be conducive to learning in many settings. Knowledge co-construction has been proposed as one explanatory mechanism. However, KCC is a theoretical construct that is too abstract to guide the development of instructional software that can support peer interaction. In this study, we present an extensive analysis of a corpus of peer dialogs that we collected in the domain of introductory Computer Science. We show that the notion of task initiative shifts correlates with both KCC (...) and learning. Speakers take task initiative when they contribute new content that advances problem solving and that is not invited by their partner; if initiative shifts between the partners, it indicates they both contribute to problem solving. We found that task initiative shifts occur more frequently within KCC episodes than outside. In addition, task initiative shifts within KCC episodes correlate with learning for low pre-testers, and total task initiative shifts correlate with learning for high pre-testers. As recognizing task initiative shifts does not require as much deep knowledge as recognizing KCC, task initiative shifts as an indicator of productive collaboration are potentially easier to model in instructional software that simulates a peer. (shrink)

The results of the investigation were aligned with the objective of determining the influence of the program in the strengthening of social skills in university students of Medical Technology of the National University of Jaén. It is an applied, explanatory, longitudinal research, with a quantitative approach and quasi-experimental design, with pre-test and post-test in experimental and control groups. The hypothetical-deductive method was used, with a population of 289 students and 80 for the sample. The Observation Form and the Social Skills (...) Evaluation Scale were used. The results showed a good to excellent level of social skills in all the participants of the experimental group of the II and VI cycle. The means per academic cycle increased by 32 and 35.75 respectively. By dimensions according to academic cycle, the first social skills increased by 6.2 and 5.4, advanced social skills by 5.05 and 4.85, skills related to feelings by 5.45 and 5.1, alternative social skills to aggression by 3.95 and 6.7, social skills to cope with stress by 7.4 and 8.45, and finally social planning skills by 3.95 and 5.25 respectively. In conclusion, the program has a significant influence on strengthening social skills in university students, with a greater influence in the experimental group of the VI cycle (35.75 percentage points). (shrink)

Tobacco mosaic virus has served as a model organism for pathbreaking work in plant pathology, virology, biochemistry and applied genetics for more than a century. We were intrigued by a photograph published in Phytopathology in 1934 showing that Tabasco pepper plants responded to TMV infection with localized necrotic lesions, followed by abscission of the inoculated leaves. This dramatic outcome of a biological response to infection observed by Francis O. Holmes, a virologist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, was used (...) to score plants for resistance to TMV infection. Our objective was to gain a better understanding of early to mid-twentieth century ideas of genetic resistance to viruses in crop plants. We investigated Holmes’ observation as a practical exercise in reworking an experiment, having been inspired by Pamela Smith’s innovative Making and Knowing Project. We had a great deal of difficulty replicating Holmes’ experiment, finding that biological materials and experimental customs change over time, in ways that ideas do not. Using complementary tools plus careful study and interpretation of the original text and figures, we were able to rework, yet only partially replicate, this experiment. Reading peer-reviewed manuscripts that cited Holmes’ 1934 report provided an additional level of insight into the interpretation and replication of this work in the decades that followed. From this, we touch on how experimental reworking can inform our strategies to address the reproducibility “crisis” in twenty-first century science. (shrink)

The US National Institute of Health’s Human Microbiome Project aims to use genomic techniques to understand the microbial communities that live on the human body. The emergent field of microbiome science brought together diverse disciplinary perspectives and technologies, thus facilitating the negotiation of differing values. Here, we describe how values are conceptualized and negotiated within microbiome research. Analyzing discussions from a series of interdisciplinary workshops conducted with microbiome researchers, we argue that negotiations of epistemic, social, and institutional values were inextricable (...) from the reflective and strategic category work that defined and organized the microbiome as an object of study and a potential future site of biomedical intervention. Negotiating the divergence or tension between emerging scientific and regulatory classifications also activated “values levers” and opened up reflective discussions of how classifications embody values and how these values might differ across domains. These data suggest that scholars at the intersections of science and technology studies, ethics, and policy could leverage such openings to identify and intervene in the ways that ethical/regulatory and scientific/technical practices are coproduced within unfolding research. (shrink)

Originally published 1974. Thousands of elementary schools for the children of the poor were founded during the nineteenth century, yet there is scarcely a published history of a single one of them. This volume is precisely such a history and the authors trace its story against the background of local and national change in education and society. On the basis of a unique collection of records the authors have pieced together a picture of the social composition of the school, its (...) curriculum and teaching methods, and its administration and finance. They relate the history of the school to that of London and the church, to that of educational authorities and educational policy. (shrink)

Children ranging from 3 to 5 years were introduced to two anthropomorphic robots that provided them with information about unfamiliar animals. Children treated the robots as interlocutors. They supplied information to the robots and retained what the robots told them. Children also treated the robots as informants from whom they could seek information. Consistent with studies of children's early sensitivity to an interlocutor's non-verbal signals, children were especially attentive and receptive to whichever robot displayed the greater non-verbal contingency. Such selective (...) information seeking is consistent with recent findings showing that although young children learn from others, they are selective with respect to the informants that they question or endorse. (shrink)

Epistemological interest in trust concentrates mainly on whether and how it is a proper resource for responsible knowers. However, trust is important and valuable to epistemic agents for reasons that do not depend on its being knowledge-conducive, or knowledge enhancing. Being trusted is essential for full participation in an epistemic community. The story of Cassandra illustrates these dimensions of trust's value.

ABSTRACTExperiences that contradict one's core concepts elicit intense emotions. Such schema incongruence can elicit awe, wherein experiences that are too vast...

The first volume of The Letters of William Godwin includes scores of texts newly transcribed from the original manuscripts and given scholarly annotation for the first time. They record the personal and professional interactions of an original thinker who had a lasting influence on progressive movements in Britain and Europe.

In this article I argue against the rights‐based framework defining the abortion debate, and do so by considering the views of Beth Singer, a philosopher whose work conveys a broadly pragmatist formulation of traditional rights‐based language. Although Singer's schema presents a fruitful vantage point from which to consider the abortion question through the discourse of rights, even Singer's use of the language of rights ultimately fails adequately to address the subject. I challenge Singer's view by taking up John Dewey's concept (...) of reflective morality, elucidated in his 1932 Ethics. (shrink)

Near the end of the Protagoras there is a famous argument in which Socrates appears to deny the possibility of weakness of will. The passage is part of a longer examination of whether virtue can be taught and of the unity of the virtues. Socrates and Protagoras discuss whether it makes sense to say, as people commonly do, that they sometimes choose to do things they know are not best for them because they are “overcome by pleasure.” Supposedly “the many” (...) hold that the good is pleasure, and that one chooses what is less good because it is most pleasant. Socrates takes Protagoras through a kind of elenctic examination that purports to show that the many’s claim to being overcome by pleasure in akrasia is absurd or ridiculous. They can’t really do what they claim to do, choose the less good for the more good; thus, and the claim that they do is a misdescription of what really happens. People act in these cases due to ignorance of what is truly the most good. In order to prevent people from choosing things that are not best for them, or to save them, Socrates says that what is needed is an art or science of measurement. In this paper I want to focus on the idea of such an art or science of measurement. (shrink)

To ask whether the postcolonial is postsecular demands asking for whom, where, and when? To that end, what follows is a reflection situated in two Canadian contexts, separated by time and place, but both connected to the ‘colonial secular’. Engaged in the public deliberation and storytelling of civic secularism, through which political legitimacy is achieved through comparing religions, these two contexts are twenty-first century Québec and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. More specifically, I consider two moments in which the state exerted its (...) authority in order to reshape bodily practice and stories of place: the debate over the ‘secular charter’ in Québec and the founding of the railway town of Prince Rupert on Tsimshian land. These acts of negotiation and law-making turned to religious forms of legitimation in a way that was at once ambivalent, comparative, and forgetful of the historical founding of the state’s own power. That is, in forming their ‘natural sovereignty’ over others, states often forget that their claims to power are, in part, acts of pretending. (shrink)

Richard Kennington, a professor for many years at Pennsylvania State University and the Catholic University of America, was renowned for his insight in reading and teaching early modern philosophy. Although he published articles and spoke widely, never before have his writings been collected in a book. On Modern Origins deftly shows how modern thinkers assessed the errors of the classical tradition and established in its place a philosophy that fuses a new meaning of nature and of theory with humanitarian goals. (...) This volume is an essential source for scholars seeking to understand the contemporary significance of the dawning of the modern era. (shrink)

A tradição cristã, referindo-se a Jesus e aos apóstolos, desenvolveu um ponto de vista muito restrito quanto ao lucro advindo do dinheiro. Nos séculos XIlI e XIV, os religiosos que faziam votos de pobreza não só individual, mas também coletiva, defrontaram-se com teorias antigas em uma nova situação econômico-social e em seus tratados desenvolveram teses que diferiam do legado anterior.

Roberto Grosseteste foi dos primeiros medievais a propor uma verificação científica. No presente trabalho mostra-se que o método deste pensador medieval é mais amplo que o da simples verificação empírica. Para compreender tal método em toda a amplitude, torna-se necessário fazer uma exposição sistemática da teoria da verificação, em seu conjunto.

This article examines factors related to husbands' contribution to housework when their wives become newly impaired. Data are from a sample of 319 married couples who participated in the National Survey of Families and Households, and in which wives developed physical limitations between baseline and five-year follow-up interviews. Using ordinary least squares regression, we found that husbands who have egalitarian attitudes toward marital roles and are happy in their marriage at baseline do more housework at follow-up than husbands who are (...) traditional and/or are less happy. Given the slow rate of change in household division of labor, the lack of public policies to support people with impairment and family caregiving disproportionately burdens women. (shrink)

To extend the hypothesis that bizarre discontinuities in dreams result from the interaction of chaotic, "bottom-up" brainstem activation with "top-down" cortical synthesis, we have performed a detailed analysis of dream discontinuities using a new methodology that allows for objective characterization of this formal dream feature. Transformations of characters and objects in dream reports were found to follow definite associational rules. While there were 11 examples of character–character transformation and 7 of inanimate object–inanimate object transformation, transformations of characters into inanimate objects (...) and vice versa were never observed. Judges′ scores on a transformation-matching task further showed that the nature of the transformed character or object is highly constrained by the features of the initial character or object . We conclude that despite the threat to dream coherence posed by bizarre discontinuities, significant coherence is maintained by associational constraints, especially in the case of object and character transformations. (shrink)

This paper discusses the need to focus on the dignity of human participants as a legal and ethical basis for providing post-trial access to healthcare. Debate about post-trial benefits has mostly focused on access to products or interventions proven to be effective in clinical trials. However, such access may be modelled on a broad fair benefits framework that emphasises both collateral benefits and interventional products of research, instead of prescribed post-trial access alone. The wording of the current version of the (...) Declaration of Helsinki could in fact be interpreted to broaden the scope to include other collateral benefits by applying such a broad fair benefits framework. We argue that this possibility should be utilised by low and middle income countries’ health research ethics committees in order to ensure that research participants who enrol in clinical trials so as to receive medical care continue to access care after the trial is concluded, as befits their dignity. Although each LMIC has unique concerns, nonetheless there are common challenges based especially on emerging issues, such as post-trial access to healthcare. Accordingly, the South African perspective is used to draw lessons that can benefit other LMICs. (shrink)

The current proxy voting system in the United States has become the subject of considerable controversy. Because institutional investment managers have the authority to vote their clients’ proxies, they have a fiduciary obligation to those clients. Frequently, in an attempt to fulfill that obligation, these institutional investors employ proxy advisory services to manage the thousands of votes they must cast. However, many proxy advisory services have conflicts of interest that inhibit their utility to those seeking to discharge their fiduciary duties. (...) In this article, we describe the current proxy advisory network as an example of how current notions of conflicts of interest fall short when explaining the behavior of an interconnected set of market players whose remit is to act in the best interests of their investors. We discuss what participants in this system should do to bring transparency and accuracy to the proxy advice industry. (shrink)

What is knowledge of one's own current, consciously entertained intentional states a form of inner awareness? If so, what form? In this paper I explore the prospects for a quasi-observational account of a certain class of cases where subjects appear to have self-knowledge, namely, the so-called cogito-like cases. In section one I provide a rationale for the claim that we need an epistemology of self-knowledge, and specifically, an epistemology of the cogito-like cases. In section two I argue that contentful properties (...) in such cases have two features in common with observational properties of objects. In section three, I develop a quasi-observational account of self-knowledge for the cogito-like cases by considering various accounts of the nature of observational properties and by applying them to these cases. I conclude by addressing some important objections to the account. (shrink)

This book uses the example of informed consent guidelines for international research on human subjects to demonstrate how a philosophical analysis can assist in understanding how underlying concepts affect public policy; how and why such policies are exclusionary; and what methodology can be used to remedy injustices in public policy and practice. Epidemics, such as AIDS, have resulted in an increase in medical research in less developed countries. In an attempt to be more globally applicable, current international guidelines for research (...) on human subjects have attempted to acknowledge the importance of community. This book explains how these attempts fail to adequately acknowledge the importance community has for many people in less developed countries, and how these guidelines fail to attend to constraints to autonomy that oftentimes get magnified once community is involved in the informed consent process. The book further explains how these problems can be traced to a mistaken underlying notion of autonomy and what policymakers can do to remedy these problems . (shrink)

Pamela D. Winfield offers a fascinating juxtaposition and comparison of the thoughts of two pre-modern Japanese Buddhist masters, Kukai (774-835) and Dogen (1200-1253) on the role of imagery in the enlightenment experience.

The role of metaphor in political discourse has received significant attention in recent years. Expanding on the cognitive theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and Johnson, scholars in the fields of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis have examined politicians' use of metaphorical concepts to justify policies and define events. The metaphors examined in these studies frequently have attained the status of idioms; they consequently pass unnoticed while retaining their ability to frame perspectives. However, political discourse does not limit itself to such (...) lexicalized metaphors, but makes use of new metaphors as well. Such uses are specifically designed to attract attention, which may become problematic if the metaphor is rejected, resulting in a classic `failure to launch'. This article examines such a case. Through an analysis of the metaphors used to describe President Bush's military plan to increase US forces in Iraq, I explore the mechanisms by which the meanings of novel metaphors are negotiated in the political arena, and demonstrate that, although their vivid imagery can generate persuasive force in political language, this effect may backfire when they encounter resistance. (shrink)

This is a concise and easy-to-read account of the ethical philosophy of the Greeks, from the Sophists to the Stoics. With particular emphasis on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the author skillfully traces the themes of law and nature, virtue, knowledge and happiness, and love and friendship, giving a comprehensive account of the meanings the Greeks attached to expressions such as "justice", "voluntary action", "virtue", and "good".