This article examines the implications of the transition to online or blended learning for first generation scholars (FGS) brought about by Covid-19. We present the findings of a mixed methods project that draws data from both in-depth qualitative interviews and a large quantitative survey of students at Durham University. We offer a comparative analysis of how FGS contrast to the general student body in relation to a range of key challenges that Covid-19 and the consequent ‘online pivot’ posed to university (...) life including technological, social and resource based issues. Our findings demonstrate that FGS were particularly affected by this shift to online or blended learning. The final substantive section discusses a range of potential mitigation strategies adopted by the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, with the assumption that some, at least, of these, and our data, will be of wider relevance in the sector. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

There is a substantial literature on evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) in metaethics. According to these arguments, evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs pose a significant problem for moral realism, specifically by committing the realist to an unattractive pessimism about the prospects of our having moral knowledge. In this paper, I argue that EDAs exploit an equivocation between two distinct readings of their central claim. One is plausibly true but has no epistemic relevance, and the other would have epistemic consequences for (...) realism, but is false. If I'm right, this undermines attempts to use evolutionary explanations to debunk belief in other domains too. (shrink)

Local food systems can have economic and social benefits by providing income for producers and improving community connections. Ongoing global climate change and the acute COVID-19 pandemic crisis have shown the importance of building equity and resilience in local food systems. We interviewed ten stakeholders from organizations and institutions in a U.S. midwestern city exploring views on past, current, and future conditions to address the following two objectives: 1) Assess how local food system equity and resilience were impacted by the (...) COVID-19 pandemic, and 2) Examine how policy and behavior changes could support greater equity and resilience within urban local food systems. We used the Community Capitals Framework to organize interviewees’ responses for qualitative analyses of equity and resilience. Four types of community capital were emphasized by stakeholders: cultural and social, natural, and political capital. Participants stated that the local food system in this city is small; more weaknesses in food access, land access, and governance were described than were strengths in both pre- and post-pandemic conditions. Stakeholder responses also reflected lack of equity and resilience in the local food system, which was most pronounced for cultural and social, natural and political capitals. However, local producers’ resilience during the pandemic, which we categorized as human capital, was a notable strength. An improved future food system could incorporate changes in infrastructure (e.g., food processing), markets (e.g., values-based markets) and cultural values (e.g., valuing local food through connections between local producers and consumers). These insights could inform policy and enhance community initiatives and behavior changes to build more equitable and resilient local food systems in urban areas throughout the U.S. Midwest. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of a national study of the beliefs and perceptions of small business professionals concerning ethics within their company and business in general. The study examined their views on the relationship between success and ethical conduct as well as the extent and nature of ethical conflicts experienced by the respondents. Some comparisons are made with similar studies that have been conducted in the past. Respondents have the most ethical conflicts with customers and employees, and with regard (...) to honesty in contracts/agreements. Most also believe that ethical standards are lower than they were 10 and 20 years ago, primarily because society's moral standards are lower. Additionally, they believe that the behavior of top management has the most influence on decisions in ethical situations. Finally, consistent with prior studies, they believe that they have the most responsibility to customers, ahead of employees and stockholders. (shrink)

Among scientific realists and anti-realists, there is a well-known, perennial dispute about the reality and knowability of unobservable objects. This dispute is also present among structural realists, who all agree that science gives us genuine knowledge of structure at the unobservable level (however that structure may be understood). Ontic structural realists reduce or eliminate the ontological role of objects, while epistemic structural realists argue that objects do or might exist but are unknowable. In part because ontic structural realism has some (...) evidence from quantum mechanics and the consequent underdetermination of the metaphysics of objects in its favor, the majority of contemporary structural realists adopt that view. In contrast, I argue that epistemic structural realism is a highly compelling view, particularly in the form that remains agnostic about unobservable objects. This view can remain consistent with the empirical data from quantum mechanics, can give a satisfactory account of the metaphysics of structure, and can distinguish itself from other extant versions of realism. I provide two arguments in favor of agnosticism about objects, the first of which argues that suspending belief is consistent with the impetus of naturalized metaphysics, and the second of which argues that agnosticism about objects is a rational response to reflection on the limits and aims of science. Thus, I show that agnostic epistemic structural realism is a defensible and compelling view in the philosophy of science that demands more attention in the literature. (shrink)

Marketing communication executives are continuously confronted with dilemmas requiring moral deliberation. To better understand morality, media ethicists have applied moral psychology theory to und...

Given common priors, no agent can publicly estimate a non-zero sign for the difference between his estimate and another agent’s future estimate. Thus rational agents cannot publicly anticipate the direction in which other agents will disagree with them.  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Although the use of possible worlds in semantics has been very fruitful and is now widely accepted, there is a puzzle about the standard definition of validity in possible-worlds semantics that has received little notice and virtually no comment. A sentence of an intensional language is typically said to be valid just in case it is true at every world under every model on every model structure of the language. Each model structure contains a set of possible worlds, and models (...) are defined relative to model structures, assigning truth-values to sentences at each world countenanced by the model structure. The puzzle is why more than one model structure is used in the definition of validity. There is presumably just one class of all possible worlds and just one model structure defined on this class that does correctly the things that model structures are supposed to do. (These include, but need not be limited to, specifying the set of individuals in each world as well as various accessibility relations between worlds.) Why not define validity simply as truth at every world under every model on this one model structure? What is the point of bringing in more model structures than just this one?

We investigate these questions in some detail and conclude that for many intensional languages the puzzle points to a genuine difficulty: the standard definition of validity is insufficiently motivated. We begin (Section 1) by showing that a plausible and natural account of validity for intensional languages can be based on a single model structure, and that validity so defined is analogous in important respects to the standard account of validity for extensional languages. We call this notion of validity "validity!", and in Section 2 we contrast it with the standard notion, which we call "validity2". Several attempts are made to discover a rationale for the almost universal acceptance of validity2, but in most of these attempts we come up empty-handed. So in Section 3 we investigate validity! for some intensional languages. Our investigation includes providing axiomatizations for several propositional and predicate logics, most of which are provably complete. The completeness proofs are given in the Appendix, which also contains a sketch of a compactness proof for one of the predicate logics. (shrink)

Complaining about humanitarian refugees is rarely an unequivocal activity for society members. Their talk appears dilemmatic: ‘sympathy talk’, comprising rhetorical displays of ‘care’, tolerance and aesthetic evaluations, is woven together with more pejorative messages. In this article we investigate how ‘sympathy talk’ functions as a discursive resource in talk-in-interaction when people give accounts of minority group individuals. A ‘synthetic’ discursive psychological approach was employed to analyse a corpus of 12 talkback radio calls to an evening ‘shock jock’ radio personality in (...) Adelaide, Australia, after the stabbing death of a Sudanese-Australian refugee. Analysis shows how host and callers dialogically negotiate and orientate to various sympathetic and humanitarian descriptions/evaluations. We contend that sympathetic talk advances the activity of conversation, softening complaints that could be made accountable as prejudiced. Sympathy talk also functions as a counter-argument to perceived punitive or ‘racist’ complaints. Moreover, this article proposes that such rhetoric shares an ideological thread that potentially undermines Sudanese refugees’ social positioning. Dialogue that deploys sympathetic formulations may be an element in the increasingly varied and subtle activity of ‘new racism’. We discuss how sympathetic accounts contain, within their semantic structure, their own antithesis for their deployment in anti-racist practice; for the development of counter discourses fundamental to the disruption of pervasive ideological representations and the construction of alternative refugee identities. (shrink)

In their article, ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox’, Sandberg et al. try to explain the Fermi paradox by claiming that Landauer’s principle implies that a civilization can in principle perform far more times more) irreversible logical operations if it conserves its resources until the distant future when the cosmic background temperature is very low. So perhaps aliens are out there, but quietly waiting. Sandberg et al. implicitly assume, however, that computer-generated (...) entropy can only be disposed of by transferring it to the cosmological background. In fact, while this assumption may apply in the distant future, our universe today contains vast reservoirs and other physical systems in non-maximal entropy states, and computer-generated entropy can be transferred to them at the adiabatic conversion rate of one bit of negentropy to erase one bit of error. This can be done at any time, and is not improved by waiting for a low cosmic background temperature. Thus aliens need not wait to be active. As Sandberg et al. do not provide a concrete model of the effect they assert, we construct one and show where their informal argument goes wrong. (shrink)

Organizational demands for loyalty often profit from a certain vagueness. This profit is probably a product of both nature and design.

Are you fascinated by some basic questions about science, technology, and our future? Questions like: Is cryonics technically feasible? When will nano‐assemblers be feasible and how quickly will resulting changes come? Does a larger population help or hinder the world environment and economy? Will uploading be possible, and if so when? When can I live in space? Where will I be able to live free from tyranny? When will AIs be bucking for my job? Is there intelligent life beyond earth? (...) If you are like most Extropy readers, such questions matter to you. (shrink)

An anxious resident paged ethics at 2:00 a.m. His patient, Mr. M, a twenty‐nine‐year‐old man with a history of multiple substance abuse, was in the hospital after cardiac arrest and lack of cerebral perfusion. Sadly, the young man probably met the criteria for brain death, but the final apnea test to confirm the diagnosis could not be done for another forty‐eight to seventy‐two hours because the Klonopin in his system might confound the results. The resident's concern, however, addressed a request (...) made by the patient's mother for a sperm harvest. The patient's mother maintained that her son had said he wanted to give her grandchildren. She wished to harvest sperm from him for a future use with an as‐yet‐to‐be‐determined surrogate mother. (shrink)

Providing theoretical and applied analyses of Michel Henry's practical philosophy in light of his guiding idea of Life, this is the first sustained exploration of Henry's practical thought in anglophone literature, reaffirming his centrality to contemporary continental thought. This book ranges from the tension between his methodological insistence on life as non-intentional and worldly activities to Henry's engagement with the practical philosophy of intellectuals such as Marx, Freud, and Kandisky to topics of application such as labor, abstract art, education, political (...) liberalism, and spiritual life. An international team of leading Henry scholars examine a vital dimension of Henry's thinking that has remained under-explored for too long. (shrink)

This paper describes a Bayesian method for constructing a super-resolved surface model by combining information from a set of images of the given surface. We develop the theory and algorithms in detail for the 2-D reconstruction problem, appropriate for the case where all images are taken from roughly the same direction and under similar lighting conditions. We show the results of this 2-D reconstruction on Viking Martian data. These results show dramatic improvements in both spatial and gray-scale resolution. The Bayesian (...) approach uses a neighbor correlation model as well as pixel data from the image set. Some extensions of this method are discussed, including 3-D surface reconstruction and the resolution of diffraction blurred images. (shrink)

Recent social theory has departed from methodological individualism’s explanation of action according to the motives and dispositions of human individuals in favor of explanation in terms of broader agencies consisting of both human and nonhuman elements described as cyborgs, actor-networks, extended agencies, or distributed cognition. This paper proposes that moral responsibility for action also be vested in extended agencies. It advances a consequentialist view of responsibility that takes moral responsibility to be a species of causal responsibility, and it answers objections (...) that might be raised on the basis of intentions and deserts. (shrink)

This article explores how research helps construct a certain type of ‘gender’ knowledge that arises from, informs and reinforces ‘instrumentalist’ gendered policy perspectives on development of the Global South. It uses a case study of research funded under the ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation which awarded 122 grants amounting to £66.2 million between 2005 and 2015. From a systematic review of the awards a typology of gender inclusion and exclusion was constructed that found 60% of all awards mentioned gender (...) or included some level of gender analysis. The subsequent synthesis of the evidence suggested that in only 30% of all awards was the gendered knowledge produced central to the study and/or focused on better understanding gender roles, relations and identities. Applying a Feminist Institutionalist lens, the study highlights how institutional ideas around gender are reflected in the funding call specifications, and in turn influence how researchers ‘engendered’ their research, and the type of gendered knowledge produced. It finds much of the new gendered knowledge produced out of the Joint Fund emerged from non-gender focused research often produced by non-gender specialists. It suggests that as gender becomes mainstreamed into research, and as more researchers ‘do gender’, so research may become, conversely, less ‘gendered’. The ‘new’ gender knowledge produced may then merely evidence existing institutional policy positions rather than advance the policy agenda. (shrink)

We examined attitudes as one potential influence on the behavioral intentions of three stakeholder groups commonly in conflict. Business managers (n = 97), government environmental regulators (n = 69), and active members of pro-environmental groups (n = 49) were surveyed to assess the differences among these groups in their attitudes toward property rights, environmental regulation, and technology. We compared the influence of these attitudes and stakeholder group affiliation on intentions to engage in pro-environmental behavior. The attitudes measures explained a significant (...) amount of the variance in behavioral intention, even after group membership was controlled. Theoretical implications of these findings for stakeholder theory are discussed along with some practical applications of these findings for stakeholder negotiations and management practices. (shrink)

Hume’s moral philosophy is a sentiment-based view. Moral judgment is a matter of the passions; certain traits of character count as virtues or vices because of the approval or disapproval they evoke in us, feelings that express concern we have about the social effects of these traits. A sentiment-based approach is attractive, since morality seems fundamentally to involve caring for other people. Sentiment-based views, however, face a real challenge. It is clear that our affections are often particular; we favor certain (...) persons over others. This poses a problem when it comes to determining the proper content of morality. The ties of sentiment would seem to be in tension with the aspirations of morality toward impartiality and universality. (shrink)

Encourages Christian teenage girls to explore and discover Truth.

Music performance anxiety (MPA) is a multifaceted phenomenon occurring on a continuum of severity. In this survey study, we investigated to what extent the affective (anxiety), cognitive (catastrophizing), and somatic (bodily complaints) components of MPA prior to solo performances vary as a function of age, gender, instrument group, musical experience, and practice as well as how these MPA components relate to self-rated change in performance quality from practice to public performance. The sample comprised 75 male and 111 female classical music (...) university students, aged 15–45 years. Age was positively associated with anxious feelings and bodily complaints. Compared to male students, female students reported significantly more anxious feelings and catastrophizing. Singers reported less anxious feelings and catastrophizing than instrumentalists. Breathing-, mouth- and throat-related complaints were highest among singers and wind players; hand- and arm-related complaints were highest among string players and pianists. The indices of musical experience and practice had marginal effects. An average of four bodily complaints bothered the participants strongly to very strongly. Worsening in performance quality from practice to public performance was reported by almost half of the participants and was best predicted by anxious feelings and breathing-related complaints. We conclude that age, gender and instrument play a significant role in understanding the phenomenology of MPA. Musicians should be examined according to these characteristics rather than as one homogenous population. In particular, it might be valuable to develop assessment tools for MPA that incorporate items related to the bodily complaints that are most relevant to the different instrument groups. Breathing-related complaints could add an important dimension to the investigation of MPA and music performance. Finally, the high percentage of students reporting worsening of their performance quality from practice to public performance highlights the need of professional support to help music students be able to perform at their best and thrive as artists. (shrink)

Among philosophers, the question about strategic fouls has been whether they are ethically justified in light of our best conception of sport. This paper proposes a different defense. I argue that many strategic fouls should be excused even if we regard them as unjustified. I first lay out a partial defense of the assumptions that playing to win cannot be subordinate to playing skillfully and that winning has value that cannot be accounted for in terms of the skill that produces (...) it. I then argue that the logic of competitive play structures practical reason such that it is unreasonable to require even an ethical competitor always to subordinate the aim of winning to ethical standards within the game. Some ethical failures should be excused. The argument implies limits on the excusing conditions. I discuss these limits in some detail, showing that they fit patterns in the common acceptance of strategic fouls. I then address possible objections. In conclusion I argue that the logic of excuse rather than justification explains a common reaction to strategic fouls, resolving what might otherwise appear to be a contradiction in that reaction. (shrink)

In this 1958 book, Professor Hanson turns to an equally important but comparatively neglected subject, the philosophical aspects of research and discovery.

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. The author underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion (...) that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.--. (shrink)

Tommie Shelby argues that social injustice undermines the moral standing states would have, were they just, to condemn criminal wrongdoers. He makes a good argument, but he does not go far enough to reject the blaming function of punishment. Shelby’s argument from “impure dissent,” in particular, helps to demonstrate the limits of blame in criminal justice.

The widespread use of stimulants among healthy individuals to improve cognition has received growing attention; however, public attitudes toward this practice are not well understood. We determined the effect of framing metaphors and context of use on public opinion toward cognitive enhancement. We recruited 3,727 participants from the United States to complete three surveys using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk between April and July 2017. Participants read vignettes describing an individual using cognitive enhancement, varying framing metaphors (fuel versus steroid), and context of (...) use (athletes versus students versus employees). The main outcome measure was the difference in respondent-assigned level of acceptability of the use of cognitive enhancement by others and by themselves between the contrasting vignettes. Participants were more likely to support the use of cognitive enhancement by others than by themselves and more when the use of enhancement by others was framed with a fuel metaphor than with a steroid metaphor. Metaphoric framing did not affect participants’ attitudes toward their own use. Participants supported the use of enhancement by employees more than by students or athletes. These results are discussed in relation to existing ethical and policy literature. (shrink)

We give a formalism for approximate isomorphism in continuous logic simultaneously generalizing those of two papers by Ben Yaacov [2] and by Ben Yaacov, Doucha, Nies, and Tsankov [6], which are largely incompatible. With this we explicitly exhibit Scott sentences for the perturbation systems of the former paper, such as the Banach‐Mazur distance and the Lipschitz distance between metric spaces. Our formalism is simultaneously characterized syntactically by a mild generalization of perturbation systems and semantically by certain elementary classes of two‐sorted (...) structures that witness approximate isomorphism. As an application, we show that the theory of any ‐tree or ultrametric space of finite radius is stable, improving a result of Carlisle and Henson [8]. (shrink)

There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports (...) fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are. (shrink)