Employing the National Institute of Mental Health-funded Prevention of Suicide in Primary Care Elderly Collaborative Trial as a case study, we discuss 2 sets of ethical issues: obtaining informed consent for a clinic-based intervention study and using treatment as usual (TAU) as the control condition. We then address these ethical issues in the context of the debate about the quality improvement efforts of health care organizations. Our analysis reveals the tension between ethics and scientific integrity involved with using TAU as (...) a control condition and the difficulty in designing high-quality research in a community-based setting. (shrink)

To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

It was probably Rousseau who first thought of dreams as ennobling experiences. Anyone who has ever read Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire must be struck by the dreamlike quality of Rousseau's meditations. This dreamlike quality is still with us, and those who experience it find themselves ennobled by it. Witness Martin Luther King's famous "1 have a dream. " Dreaming and inspiration raise the artist to the top rung in the ladder ofhuman relations. That is probably the prevailing view among educated (...) people of our time. Rousseau made that view respectable and predominant. Yet in another sense, the problem is much older. It is the problem of political philosophy and poetry, the problem of Socrates and Aristophanes, of Plato and Homer. Yet, while antiquity usually gives the crown to philosophy, since Rous seau, the alternative view tends to prevail. The distinction is not, however, a formal one. Sir Philip Sidney enlisted Plato on the side of poetry. The true distinction is between imagination and reason. If reason is to rule, as Aristotle points out,l the most architectonic of the sciences, that is political science, should rule. It is political philosophy which must determine the nature of the arts which will help or which will hinder the good of the city or the polity. That does not mean that a mere professor should stand in judgment of Shake speare, Bacon, and Rembrandt. It means that ifhe studies these three great artists, he is not over-stepping disciplinary limits. (shrink)

D. Dieks has proposed a semantical rule which he claims yields a realistic interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics without the projection postulate. I argue that his proposal is unacceptable because it violates a natural requirement of psychophysical parallelism. His "semantical rule" is not an acceptable interpretive rule because it does not identify structures in the theory with structures in our experience, but postulates a merely probabilistic relationship between the two. Dieks' interpretation is contrasted with Everett's relative state interpretation, (...) which attempts the same task but respects psychophysical parallelism. (shrink)

We investigate the connection between interference and computational power within the operationally defined framework of generalised probabilistic theories. To compare the computational abilities of different theories within this framework we show that any theory satisfying four natural physical principles possess a well-defined oracle model. Indeed, we prove a subroutine theorem for oracles in such theories which is a necessary condition for the oracle model to be well-defined. The four principles are: causality, purification, strong symmetry, and informationally consistent composition. Sorkin has (...) defined a hierarchy of conceivable interference behaviours, where the order in the hierarchy corresponds to the number of paths that have an irreducible interaction in a multi-slit experiment. Given our oracle model, we show that if a classical computer requires at least n queries to solve a learning problem, because fewer queries provide no information about the solution, then the corresponding “no-information” lower bound in theories lying at the kth level of Sorkin’s hierarchy is \. This lower bound leaves open the possibility that quantum oracles are less powerful than general probabilistic oracles, although it is not known whether the lower bound is achievable in general. Hence searches for higher-order interference are not only foundationally motivated, but constitute a search for a computational resource that might have power beyond that offered by quantum computation. (shrink)

Ainslie's Breakdown of Will contains important insights into real world self-control problems, but it loses testability to the extent that it internalizes concepts whose meaning lies in overt behavior and its consequences.

Although many scholars have recognized the pivotal importance that the notion of conscience plays in Hegel’s thought, much of the scholarship surrounding this notion has remained piecemeal. Dean Moyar’s book Hegel’s Conscience breaks new ground on this subject in offering a comprehensive analysis of the indispensable role that conscience plays in Hegel’s philosophy, demonstrating not only its foundational place for Hegel’s approach to ethics, but also the contemporary relevancy of Hegel’s account for understanding the performative character of practical reason. Despite (...) the novelty and intellectual rigor of Moyar’s position, my essay “Translating Convictions into a Clear Conscience” argues that in confining his approach to a “cognitivist” interpretation of conscience, Moyar ends up neglecting the richness and existential depth of Hegel’s discussion. And so although Moyar’s interpretation is clear, succinct, and plausible, it accomplishes this by overlooking much of Hegel’s original phenomenological fidelity to the actual experience of conscience. (shrink)

A developmental study of free-classification behavior within the age range of 3-1/2 to 19 years indicates that categorical responses, which are characteristic of adult behavior, increase with age while overgeneralized responses, classifications including noncategorical instances, decrease with age. Overdiscriminated responses which are incomplete categorical classifications increase from 3-1/2 to 6 years and then decrease to 19 years of age. These results are discussed within a two-stage theory of conceptual development (Kendler, 1971).

In this paper I provide an interpretative reading Spencer and Gillen. What is read depends in part on what one is looking for, on the purposes for which it is being read, and, what is there to be read depends partly on the audiences that the author has in. I provide a critique of social Darwinist and post-colonial readings of their work. I employ the concept of a motivating theme, which can be applied to segments of the text, which share (...) a common purpose. The themes reflect the ways in which different scholars — historians and anthropologists — have read into the text. I will consider three categories of motivating themes: general contextualisations, ethnographic descriptions, and explanations of data. My discussion of their explanatory approach is centred on their analysis of ritual performances. The accounts of the rituals are not just unanalysed ethnography but are ordered by relating ritual event to social organisation. The centrality of ritual to Aboriginal society has contributed to the lasting impact of their work. (shrink)

_Basic principles and practical strategies to promote learning in any setting!_ From K-12 to corporate training settings––the Third Edition of Patricia Smith and Tillman Ragan’s thorough, research-based text equips you with the solid foundation you need to design instruction and environments that really facilitate learning. Now updated to reflect the latest thinking in the field, this new edition offers not only extensive procedural assistance but also emphasizes the basic principles upon which most of the models and procedures in the (...) instructional design field are built. The text presents a comprehensive treatment of the instructional design process, including analysis, strategy design, assessment, and evaluation. (shrink)

Rational actions reflect beliefs and preferences in certain orderly ways. The problem of theory is to explain which beliefs and preferences are relevant to the rationality of particular actions, and exactly how they are relevant. One distinction of interest here is between an agent's beliefs and preferences just before an action's time, and his beliefs and preferences at its time. Theorists do not agree about the times of beliefs and desires that are relevant to the rationality of action. Another distinction (...) is between actions that would, in one sense or another, maximize expected utilities given relevant beliefs and desires, and actions, decisions for which would, in one sense or another, be stable. There is disagreement about the relevance of these things to the rationality of actions. Here, in the first part below, several possible positions on these issues are explained and compared. In the second part, I contrast perspectives on these issues, and comment on arguments that might be brought against the position I favor. In the third part, I restate and elaborate on this position. (shrink)