The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality is about research design, specifically concerning research that uses observational data to make a causal inference. It is separated into two halves, each with different approaches to that subject. The first half goes through the concepts of causality, with very little in the way of estimation. It introduces the concept of identification thoroughly and clearly and discusses it as a process of trying to isolate variation that has a causal interpretation. Subjects (...) include heavy emphasis on data-generating processes and causal diagrams. Concepts are demonstrated with a heavy emphasis on graphical intuition and the question of what we do to data. When we "add a control variable" what does that actually do? (shrink)

In her re-analysis of the evidence presented in Klein and Nichols (2012) to support their argument that patient R.B. temporarily lost possessory custody of consciously apprehended objects (in this case, objects that normally would be non-inferentially taken as episodic memory), Professor Roache concludes Klein and Nichols's claims are untenable. I argue that Professor Roache is incorrect in her re-interpretation, and that this is due, in part, to lack of sufficient familiarity with psychological theory on memory as well as (...) clinical literature on felt loss of ownership of one’s intentional objects. (shrink)

We agree that external validity of social psychological experiments is a concern, we disagree these models are useless. Experiments, reconsidered from a situated cognition perspective and non-linearly combined with other methods allow grasping decision dynamics beyond bias outcomes. Dynamic insights regarding these processes are key to understand missing forces and bias in real-world social groups.

This book investigates several dimensions of the concept of cosmopolitanism since Kant. The first of these dimensions is a world vision that considers the construction of a 'cosmopolitan self' as a question of justice. The second is the idea that a local political-legal order is fully democratic only if it respects the environment and the human rights of all people of the world, regardless of their citizenship. The third dimension concerns the practice of crossborder associations between individuals, institutionalized or not (...) (cosmopolitics, as Balibar called it). The fourth considers individuals as subjects of international law, as in the case of individual petitions concerning human rights through the European Court of Human Rights and individual responsibility in international criminal law. Finally, the fifth dimension is a form of ecological consciousness based on the relationship between the self and the cosmos, which would imply a profound revision of modern anthropocentric concepts."--Publisher. (shrink)

Beyond Interdisciplinarity examines the broadening meaning of core concept across academic disciplines and other forms of knowledge. In this book, Associate Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity and internationally recognized scholar Julie Thompson Klein depicts the heterogeneity and boundary work of inter- and trans-disciplinarity in a conceptual framework based on an ecology of spatializing practices in transaction spaces, including trading zones and communities of practice. The book includes both "crossdisciplinary" work (encompassing multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary forms) as well (...) as "cross-sector" work (spanning disciplines, fields, professions, government and industry, and communities). The first section of the book defines and explains boundary work, discourses of interdisciplinarity, and the nature of interdisciplinary fields. In the second section, Klein examines dynamics of working across disciplines, including communication, collaboration, and learning with concrete examples and lessons from research projects and programs that transcend traditional fields. The closing chapter examines reasons for failure and success then presents gateways to literature and other resources. Throughout the book, Klein emphasizes the roles of contextualization and historical change while factoring in the shifting relationship of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, ascendancy of transdisciplinarity, and intersections with other constructs including Mode 2 knowledge production, convergence, team science, and postdisciplinarity. The conceptual framework she provides also includes the role of boundary objects, agents, and organizations in brokering differences and creating for platforms for change. Klein further explains why translation, interlanguage, and a communication boundary space are vital to achieving intersubjectivity and collective identity. They foster not only pragmatics of negotiation and integration but also reflexivity, transactivity, and co-production of knowledge with stakeholders beyond the academy. Rhetorics of holism and synthesis compete with instrumentalities of problem solving and transgressive critiques. However, typical warrants today include complexity, contextualization, collaboration, and socially-robust knowledge. Crossing boundaries remains complex, but this book guides readers through the density of pertinent literature while expanding understandings of crossdisciplinary and cross-sector work. (shrink)

Be Who You Are is one of the earliest published books of dialogues with Jean Klein. Written in the lucid and eloquent style which characterises his work, each chapter is composed of an introductory discourse followed by questions and answers. "The 'eternal present', our theme in these meetings, lies within the depth of ourselves. It is the eternal awareness of the Self. Seen from the Ultimate, the world projected by the mind appears and disappears, in other words, it "becomes". (...) When we talk of time and space, it must be thoroughly understood that their reality is relative, it is a reality in the world of becoming. But beyond space-time is that stillness which knows no becoming." This much sought after book, by one of the most important exponents of Advaita in recent years, is now available again from Non-Duality Press. (shrink)

What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self--a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience--she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and (...) public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us--and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror. Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now--and an intellectual adventure story for our times. (shrink)

Academic freedom has become the enemy of the individual professors working in colleges and universities across the United States. Despite its historical (and maybe even essential) roots in the First Amendment, contemporary case law has consistently shown that professors, unlike most members of society, have no rights to free speech on their respective campuses. (Ironically, this is especially true on our State campuses.) Outlined is the dramatic change in the history of the courts from recognizing “academic freedom” as a construct (...) needed to protect professors from the status quo, to the abuse of “academic freedom” appropriated to protect the institution from “undesirable” professorial actions such as politically incorrect speech or research. Klein warns all those in the academy to become familiar with this pernicious 180-degree turn in the use of the “academic freedom” construct. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Artikel skizziert die Grundlagen einer neuen Subdisziplin innerhalb der Religionswissenschaft, der Religionsethologie. Religionsethologie lässt sich letztlich auf Charles Darwin selbst zurückführen, der bereits in seinem Buch The expression of the emotions in man and animals belegen konnte, dass jede Form von Verhalten für das Überleben der Art genau so wichtig ist wie die Adaptation des Phänotypus. In den Geisteswissenschaften wurde der Darwinsche Ansatz sofort aufgegriffen und von bedeutenden Forschern wie Karl Meuli, Aby Warburg und in jüngerer Zeit von Roy (...) Rappaport, Marvin Harris und anderen aufgegriffen und fruchtbar gemacht, indem sie einerseits religiöse Universalien herausarbeiten, andererseits aber auch die Grundzüge einer religiösen Evolution darstellen konnten. Religion ist demnach tief in der Biologie des Menschen verwurzelt und kann demzufolge auch unter biologischen Gesichtspunkten erforscht werden. (shrink)

The unconscious-thought effect occurs when distraction improves complex decision making. Recent studies suggest that this effect is more likely to occur with low- than high-demanding distraction tasks. We discuss implications of these findings for Newell & Shanks' (N&S's) claim that evidence is lacking for the intervention of unconscious processes in complex decision making.

Structural Causal Modeling (SCM) is an approach to causal inference closely associated with Judea Pearl and given an accessible instroduction in [Pearl, J., & Mackenzie, D. (2018). The book of why: The new science of cause and effect. Basic Books]. It is highly popular outside of economics, but has seen relatively little application within it. This paper briefly introduces the main concepts of SCM through the lens of whether applied economists are likely to find marginal benefit in these methods beyond (...) standard economic approaches to causal inference. The most promising areas are those where SCM's causal diagrams alone offer significant value: covariate selection, the development of placebo tests, causal discovery, and identification in complex models. (shrink)

Kann man das ewige Leben auf technischem Weg realisieren? Lässt sich der Geist eines Menschen als dynamische Datenstruktur abspeichern und jenseits des vergänglichen Körpers als funktionsfähige Einheit erhalten? Solche technischen Utopien sind mittlerweile nicht nur spielerisches Motiv in Literatur und Film, sondern auch ernsthaftes Ziel von Informatikern und Tech-Start-ups. Ist dieses Vorhaben durchführbar? Welche Auswirkungen hätte eine erfolgreiche Implementierung des Mind-Uploads für unsere Vorstellungen von menschlicher Individualität und personaler Identität? Wie ist das Projekt ethisch zu bewerten und wie verhält es (...) sich zur christlichen Hoffnung auf eine Auferstehung und ein sich daran anschliessendes ewiges Leben? Der Band beleuchtet diese Fragen aus philosophischer, theologischer und sozialethischer Perspektive"-- Back cover. (shrink)

In Soul of the Documentary, Ilona Hongisto stirs current thinking about documentary cinema by suggesting that the work of documentary films is not reducible to representing what already exists. By close-reading a diverse body of films - from The Last Bolshevik to Grey Gardens - Hongisto shows how documentary cinema intervenes in the real by framing it and creatively contributes to its perpetual unfolding. The emphasis on framing brings new urgency to the doumentary tradition and its objectives, and provokes (...) significant novel possibilities for thinking about the documentary's ethical and political potentials in the contemporary world. -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In January 2010 the Director General of the World Health Organization called for an “informal consultation on the future of financing for WHO” and in her opening remarks expressed the need to make the WHO fit for purpose given the unique health challenges of the 21st century.Margaret Chan referred to the constitutional role that WHO has to “act as the directing and co-ordinating authority on international health work” and stated clearly that global health leadership today and for the future must (...) be earned through strategic and selective engagement. She said, “WHO can no longer aim to direct and coordinate all of the activities and policies in multiple sectors that influence public health today.” This is a clear challenge that she has put to the global health community in recognition that WHO’s role must be clarified in the face of major change. (shrink)

This article endeavours to analyse an important and concerning phenomenon: women killed by their adult sons. It focuses on parricide (killing of parents or close relatives), with special attention on killing of mothers (matricide), while the term ‘homicide’ is used as an overarching term for killing human beings. The article gives an overview of statistics on reported cases of matricide over a five-year period. Employing qualitative analysis, it refers to four court judgments in instances of matricide committed by adult offspring (...) in Lithuania between 2021 and 2023. Based on the analysis of recent international studies, crime statistics and court decisions, the aim of this study is to highlight deeper social problems, which predispose mothers to susceptibility to matricide. Therefore, the article contributes new knowledge to the discourse within the field of gender-based violence against women. Moreover, this study provides professionals in the field of domestic abuse with enriched comprehension of the matricide phenomenon and enhances institutional cooperation seeking prevention of violent behaviour and adequate protection of victims. (shrink)

The Catholic Church – though in popular opinion it is sometimes treated as a stronghold of conservatism, traditionalism, suspicion of progress and novelty, it changed significantly in the second half of the 20th century and continues to change its attitudes, especially in terms of the use of social communication and attitude to the media mass. The Church’s growing openness to media relations and the use of a rich instrumentation of social communication has become one of the reasons for the growing (...) popularity of market orientation among the clergy and active believers, which opens opportunities for the development of the concept of a specific sectoral marketing formula of church marketing. In this article the authors search for the causes of the progressive phenomenon of the marketization of religion, present examples of the activities of the Polish Catholic church, inscribed in the church marketing trend, as well as define the negative consequences resulting from its dissemination. The applied research method is based on the literature analysis and case studies analysis. (shrink)

This volume brings the theories and methods of a range of disciplines to bear on the imaginative workings of the human mind. The distinguished contributors demonstrate their own imaginative flair in a fascinating and varied collection of essays about this most elusive and special human capacity.

This article outlines a conception of emotions as mediopassive processes based on an understanding of the affective as situated felt-body phenomena. On these grounds, in the second part of the text, a form of emotional ability is introduced. It is described as the subject’s ability to mindfully feel and perceive her emotions in such a way that it allows her to both attend and subtly conduct the unfolding of the emotions’ dynamic gestalt. A philosophical grasp of this ability can illuminate (...) the vast middle ground between affect suppression and being overwhelmed by emotions, foregrounding a balance between mindfully controlling and surrendering to emotions. (shrink)

When people make decisions, they act in a way that is either automatic (“rote”), or more thoughtful (“reflective”). But do people notice when others are behaving in a rote way, and do they care? We examine the detection of rote behavior and its consequences in U.S. adults, focusing specifically on pedagogy and learning. We establish repetitiveness as a cue for rote behavior (Experiment 1), and find that rote people are seen as worse teachers (Experiment 2). We also find that the (...) more a person's feedback seems similar across groups (indicating greater rote-ness), the more negatively their teaching is evaluated (Experiment 3). A word-embedding analysis of an open-response task shows people naturally cluster rote and reflective teachers into different semantic categories (Experiment 4). We also show that repetitiveness can be decoupled from perceptions of rote-ness given contextual explanation (Experiment 5). Finally, we establish two additional cues to rote behavior that can be tied to quality of teaching (Experiment 6). These results empirically show that people detect and care about scripted behaviors in pedagogy, and suggest an important extension to formal frameworks of social reasoning. (shrink)

Liberation Unleashedintroduces you to the process of unraveling the false sense of a separate self at the center of your existence. With insightful metaphors, personal stories, and guided dialogues, this book points directly to our lack of separation and helps you move toward a new, more open reality of selfless bliss. Using the seven clear and focused steps presented, you'll find liberation in realizing there is no individuated "I" and marvel at the true nature of things. Author Ilona Ciunaite's (...) search for the truth began when she first "experienced silence of the thinking mind, a sweet sense of being, contentment, peace," and "feeling at home." Driven by a desire to reach that state of oneness once more, her path led her through spiritual writings to the process of deconstruction and non-dual self-inquiry and finally to a peaceful emptiness of not knowing, but of simply being. It's from that place that Ciunaite cocreated the popular Liberation Unleashed forum--a global Internet-based community helping people see through the illusion of a separate self--and it's just that sense of unknowing peace she wishes to impart with this book. Liberation Unleashedis a lively, fresh, and moving account of the author's own searching, liberation, and transformation, woven together with the stories of fellow seekers and a clear exposition of the simple, focused tools you can use to go through the "gateless gate." With its conversational tone, provocative questions, and the presentation of the seven steps--"Clearing the path--meeting the fear," "Strip away ALL expectations," "Get in touch with the real," "'I' is a thought," "There is no separate self," "How does it feel to see this?" and "Falling"--this book serves as an introductory how-to guide, demonstrating how to use the process of self-inquiry to get free from the falseness of the separate self and realize a blissful oneness. So many of us go through life feeling isolated, searching for ourselves, or seeking a more authentic reality through religion, spirituality, or other, more unconventional means of expanding consciousness. Now, with this book and its guiding principles, you'll learn how to look deeply into the nature of self and existence; combat the anxieties, fears, mental blocks, and reservations that can arise in self-inquiry; and see the simple beauty of the everyday moment. (shrink)