The cerebellum has been hypothesized to play a role in a variety of movement timing tasks that involve the processing of temporal information on a variety of timescales. Braitenberg, Heck & Sultan propose a new theory of cerebellar function that is able to account for movement timing on the order of a couple of hundred milliseconds. However, this theory does not account for the rôle the cerebellum plays in the acquisition and retention of adaptively timed discrete movements that are on (...) the order of 200 to 1000 milliseconds, and therefore does not account for the entire temporal range of cerebellar dependent processing. (shrink)

The latest volume in an internationally recognized annual lecture series (since 1978) devoted to increased awareness and understanding of the complex issues surrounding our basic value systems. Comprises seven lectures on: the Constitution; randomization in individual and social decisions; Greek ethics and moral theory; reform and revolt in current S. Africa; bureaucratic, technological imperatives and medicine; prisons; and travel (a piece by the Soviet born poet Joseph Brodsky). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Although there has been a vast amount of research about suicide, very few studies focus on the inner world of the suicidal patient. A secondary analysis of two exemplar narrative interviews with Norwegian patients reveals a glimpse of the inner world of suicidal patients’ longing for consolation. The results of a phenomenological hermeneutic study inspired by Ricoeur’s philosophy reveal five themes and one main theme. The themes are: ‘longing for closeness’, ‘desiring connectedness’, ‘struggling to open up inner dialogue’, ‘breaking into (...) outer dialogue’, and ‘liberating inner and outer dialogue’. The main theme is ‘struggling to become ready for consolation’. These results describe a process of becoming ready for consolation, which, when interpreted in the light of the model of consolation by Norberg et al., reveals that the end of the process of becoming ready for consolation is consolation itself as praxis. (shrink)

This book studies the major characteristics of the social pedagogical approach to early childhood education and care. It does so by investigating the distinctive elements of the Nordic approach and tradition. The cultural, educational, and ideological structures and values within the Nordic tradition indicate a strong "social pedagogical" rather than "early education" emphasis. The Nordic tradition applies a social learning approach that emphasizes play, relationships and outdoor life, and presumes that learning takes place through children's participation in social interaction and (...) processes. Set against this background, the book examines the characteristics of the pedagogue and the important features that develop through the Nordic approach. It compares children educated in the Nordic tradition with those educated in the French-English and Anglo-American tradition. It explores quality in relation to how children can enjoy childhood, and at the same time become able to actively participate in society and develop the social and cognitive skills and competences that individuals require to do well in society. (shrink)

This paper argues that the notion of value has been overly simplified and narrowed to focus on economic returns. Stakeholder theory provides an appropriate lens for considering a more complex perspective of the value that stakeholders seek as well as new ways to measure it. We develop a four-factor perspective for defining value that includes, but extends beyond, the economic value stakeholders seek. To highlight its distinctiveness, we compare this perspective to three other popular performance perspectives. Recommendations are made regarding (...) performance measurement for both academic researchers and practitioners. The stakeholder perspective on value offered in this paper draws attention to those factors that are most closely associated with building more value for stakeholders, and in so doing, allows academics to better measure it and enhances managerial ability to create it. (shrink)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had extraordinary successes in classifying photographic images of objects and are often described as the best models of biological vision. This conclusion is largely based on three sets of findings: (1) DNNs are more accurate than any other model in classifying images taken from various datasets, (2) DNNs do the best job in predicting the pattern of human errors in classifying objects taken from various behavioral datasets, and (3) DNNs do the best job in predicting (...) brain signals in response to images taken from various brain datasets (e.g., single cell responses or fMRI data). However, these behavioral and brain datasets do not test hypotheses regarding what features are contributing to good predictions and we show that the predictions may be mediated by DNNs that share little overlap with biological vision. More problematically, we show that DNNs account for almost no results from psychological research. This contradicts the common claim that DNNs are good, let alone the best, models of human object recognition. We argue that theorists interested in developing biologically plausible models of human vision need to direct their attention to explaining psychological findings. More generally, theorists need to build models that explain the results of experiments that manipulate independent variables designed to test hypotheses rather than compete on making the best predictions. We conclude by briefly summarizing various promising modeling approaches that focus on psychological data. (shrink)

Data science, and the related field of big data, is an emerging discipline involving the analysis of data to solve problems and develop insights. This rapidly growing domain promises many benefits to both consumers and businesses. However, the use of big data analytics can also introduce many ethical concerns, stemming from, for example, the possible loss of privacy or the harming of a sub-category of the population via a classification algorithm. To help address these potential ethical challenges, this paper maps (...) and describes the main ethical themes that were identified via systematic literature review. It then identifies a possible structure to integrate these themes within a data science project, thus helping to provide some structure in the on-going debate with respect to the possible ethical situations that can arise when using data science analytics. (shrink)

A fundamental claim associated with parallel distributed processing theories of cognition is that knowledge is coded in a distributed manner in mind and brain. This approach rejects the claim that knowledge is coded in a localist fashion, with words, objects, and simple concepts, that is, coded with their own dedicated representations. One of the putative advantages of this approach is that the theories are biologically plausible. Indeed, advocates of the PDP approach often highlight the close parallels between distributed representations learned (...) in connectionist models and neural coding in brain and often dismiss localist theories as biologically implausible. The author reviews a range a data that strongly challenge this claim and shows that localist models provide a better account of single-cell recording studies. The author also contrast local and alternative distributed coding schemes and argues that common rejection of grandmother cell theories in neuroscience is due to a misunderstanding about how localist models behave. The author concludes that the localist representations embedded in theories of perception and cognition are consistent with neuroscience; biology only calls into question the distributed representations often learned in PDP models. (shrink)

The stakeholder perspective has provided a rich forum for a variety of debates at the intersection of business and society. Scholars gathered for two consecutive years, first in North America, and then in Europe, to discuss the major issues surrounding what has come to be known as stakeholder theory, to attempt to find common ground, and to uncover areas in need of further inquiry. Those meetings led to a list of “tensions” and a call for papers for this special issue (...) to help address them. In this article, we introduce the resulting articles and provide some brief commentary on their importance. We end with a few of our own observations about the stakeholder perspective and stakeholder research. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory focuses on how more value is created if stakeholder relationships are governed by ethical principles such as integrity, respect, fairness, generosity and inclusiveness. However, it has not adequately addressed strategies that stakeholders perceive as harmful to their interests and how this perception can even lead some stakeholders to view the firm’s strategies as unethical. To fill the void, this paper directly addresses strategies that stakeholders perceive as harmful to their interests, or what we refer to as harmful stakeholder (...) strategies. Specifically, it identifies factors associated with stakeholder perceptions of harm that are likely to cause them to consider a strategy unethical, examines the negative implications for firms that pursue such strategies in terms of likely stakeholder responses and damage to stakeholder relationships, and provides theory to help explain how firms are likely to respond to stakeholder claims that a strategy is unethical, based on factors such as the strategic importance of the claim to the firm, how long the strategy has been in use, the costs of remediation, the risk of stakeholder mobilization or new regulation, and whether firms can reasonably rationalize their actions. Assessing harm allows a firm to make a more accurate estimate of the costs of a strategy and can assist managers in allocating resources intended to reduce or remediate harm. (shrink)

Recent perspectives on community investments suggest that they are opportunities for firms to create value for shareholders and other stakeholders. However, many corporate managers are still influenced by a widely held belief that such investments erode profits and are therefore unjustifiable from an agency perspective. In this paper, we refine and test theory regarding countervailing forces that influence community-based firm performance. We hypothesize that high levels of available slack will be associated with higher community-based performance, but that this relationship will (...) be moderated by three important governance variables: board independence, investment fund ownership, and CEO ownership. We find support for our hypotheses in longitudinal study of a large sample of U.S. corporations. (shrink)

Entropy and information are both emerging as currencies of interdisciplinary dialogue, most recently in evolutionary theory. If this dialogue is to be fruitful, there must be general agreement about the meaning of these terms. That this is not presently the case owes principally to the supposition of many information theorists that information theory has succeeded in generalizing the entropy concept. The present paper will consider the merits of the generalization thesis, and make some suggestions for restricting both entropy and information (...) to specific arenas of discourse. (shrink)

Do firms respond to changes in economic growth by altering their corporate social responsibility programs? If they do respond, are their responses simply neglect of areas associated with corporate social performance or do they also cut back on positive programs such as profit sharing, public/private housing programs, or charitable contributions? In this paper, we argue that because CSP-related actions and programs tend to be discretionary, they are likely to receive less attention during tough economic times, a result of cost-cutting efforts. (...) However, the various CSP performance areas vary in terms of their resource requirements and their influence on financial performance, which suggests that firms may respond differently depending on area. Consequently, in addition to examining CSP concerns separately from positive actions and programs, we also examine the influence of economic growth across the five areas of diversity, employee relations, the environment, product quality/safety, and the community. Based on data from 837 firms over 15 years, our results suggest that firms neglect some areas associated with CSP during economic downturns, resulting in increased concerns about community and employee relations, product safety/quality, and the environment. However, this relationship does not apply to positive actions and programs. Instead, firms tend to increase their positive CSP programs in areas such as diversity, employee relations, and the environment during periods of slow economic growth and reduce them when the economy picks up. We offer potential explanations for our findings and discuss their importance to research on CSP. (shrink)

This paper considers the problem of causal explanation in classical and statistical thermodynamics. It is argued that the irreversibility of macroscopic processes is explained in both formulations of thermodynamics in a teleological way that appeals to entropic or probabilistic consequences rather than to efficient-causal, antecedental conditions. This explanatory structure of thermodynamics is not taken to imply a teleological orientation to macroscopic processes themselves, but to reflect simply the epistemological limitations of this science, wherein consequences of heat-work asymmetries are either macroscopically (...) measurable (entropy) or calculable (probabilities), while efficient-causal relationships are obscure or indeterminable. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of the Machamer, Darden, and Craver (2000) mechanism approach to gaining an understanding of explanation in cognitive neuroscience. We argue that although the mechanism approach can capture many aspects of explanation in cognitive neuroscience, it cannot capture everything. In particular, it cannot completely capture all aspects of the content and significance of mental representations or the evaluative features constitutive of psychopathology.

© The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Philosophy of law was until recently dominated by abstract investigation into the nature of law, a pursuit known as ‘general jurisprudence’. In this way, it resembled a branch of metaphysics or mid-twentieth century philosophy of mind, seeking to uncover the essential properties (...) of a general and multiply realizable phenomenon. Today, philosophers study law with a sharper focus, and with a more specialized lens – that of ethicists, for example, or epistemologists, or philosophers of action.That is not to say there has been a drop in groundbreaking work in general jurisprudence (see, for... (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 85-87.

Margaret Gilbert’s ‘Three Dogmas about Promising’ is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the literature, not only for its account of promissory obligation based on joint commitment, but for its equally important focus on two properties of such obligation, which her account uniquely and elegantly captures: first, that the duty to keep a promise is necessary—the obligation stands regardless of the content or morality of the promise—and, second, that it is directed, with the promisee having unique standing to demand performance. A related (...) point, implied by Gilbert’s argument, is that moral requirements, alone, can never have those properties. Here I challenge that point, arguing that moral requirements, under the right circumstances, can give rise to necessary and directed obligations, after all, and I propose one such moral obligation of which the duty to keep a promise may well be an instance. Nevertheless, I conclude, it may not provide as plausible a basis of promissory obligation as joint commitment. (shrink)

This new selection of Thoreau’s essays traces his trajectory as a writer for the outlets of his day—the periodical press, newspapers, and compendiums—and as a frequent presenter on the local lecture circuit. By arranging the writings chronologically, the volume re-creates the experience of Thoreau’s readers as they followed his developing ideas over time. Jeffrey S. Cramer, award-winning editor of six previous volumes of works by Thoreau, offers the most accurate text available for each essay and provides convenient on-page annotations. (...) He establishes context and guides the reader through unfamiliar allusions and references, plumbing the depths of Thoreau’s writings with unprecedented insight. Among the essays in this book: · The Last Days of John Brown · Resistance to Civil Government [Civil Disobedience] · Thomas Carlyle and His Works · Natural History of Massachusetts · and many more. (shrink)

Sibley et al. (2008) report a recurrent neural network model designed to learn wordform representations suitable for written and spoken word identification. The authors claim that their sequence encoder network overcomes a key limitation associated with models that code letters by position (e.g., CAT might be coded as C‐in‐position‐1, A‐in‐position‐2, T‐in‐position‐3). The problem with coding letters by position (slot‐coding) is that it is difficult to generalize knowledge across positions; for example, the overlap between CAT and TOMCAT is lost. Although we (...) agree this is a critical problem with many slot‐coding schemes, we question whether the sequence encoder model addresses this limitation, and we highlight another deficiency of the model. We conclude that alternative theories are more promising. (shrink)

Short-term performance increases that are sometimes observed after CEO successions may be evidence of self-interested behavior. New CEOs may cut allocations to long-term investment areas such as research and development (R&D), capital equipment and pension funds in an effort to drive up short-term profits and secure their positions. However, such actions have unfavorable consequences for some stakeholders. This study provides evidence that both R&D and pension funding are reduced subsequent to a succession, even after accounting for industry trends. The expected (...) short-term profitability increases are also observed.A major implication of these results is that boards of directors and other interested parties should carefully monitor the actions of new CEOs with regard to their treatment of R&D and pension funding if they would like to prevent such actions from occurring. This study also highlights the need to investigate other potential self-interested behaviors of new CEOs. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard claims that an agent is less than fully rational if she allows some attitude to inform her deliberation even though she cannot justify doing so. I argue that there is a middle way, which Korsgaard misses, between the claim that our attitudes neither need nor admit of rational assessment, on the one hand, and Korsgaard's claim that the attitudes which inform our deliberation always require justification, on the other: an agent needs reasons to opt out of her concerns (...) – not reasons to opt into them or to stay in. As long as an agent has no good reason to abandon some concern of hers, she is reasonable to harbour it, and to allow it to inform her view of what reasons she has. A rational agent must therefore have the capacity to form higher-order attitudes toward her concerns; but rationality only requires that she exercise that capacity when she has some good reason to do so. (shrink)

The Securities and Exchange Commission requires publicly held US corporations to disclose all information, whether it is positive or negative, that might be relevant to an investor's decision to buy, sell, or hold a company's securities. The decisions made by corporate managers to disclose such information can significantly affect the judgments and decisions of investors. This paper examines academic accounting research on corporate managers' voluntary disclosures of earnings forecasts and non-GAAP earnings measures. Much of the evidence from this research indicates (...) that some managers engage in opportunistic disclosure behavior that often benefits one group (managers and shareholders) at the expense of other groups (often other investors). The paper concludes by discussing the ethical implications of this behavior. (shrink)

Forgiving wrongdoers who neither apologized, nor sought to make amends in any way, is controversial. Even defenders of the practice agree with critics that such “unilateral” forgiveness involves giving up on the meaningful redress that victims otherwise justifiably demand from their wrongdoers: apology, reparations, repentance, and so on. Against that view, I argue here that when a victim of wrongdoing sets out to grant forgiveness to her offender, and he in turn accepts her forgiveness, he thereby serves some important ends (...) of apology and reparation, no matter what else he did—or did not do—by way of repair. Although much overlooked, the simple act of accepting forgiveness joins victim and offender in affirming and acting upon some important shared background assumptions, including many of those expressed in standard apologies. Perhaps more surprisingly, I argue that accepting forgiveness also fulfills the duty to counteract any concrete harm wrongfully inflicted. The argument helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of forgiveness, including that a victim can change her offender’s normative status, making him a less fitting target of the resentment, indignation and shunning of others, and even his own guilt pangs, simply by forgiving him. (shrink)

Many factors determine whether and when a class of therapeutic agents will be successfully developed and brought to market, and historians of science, entrepreneurs, drug developers, and clinicians should be interested in accounts of both successes and failures. Successes induce many participants and observers to document them, whereas failed efforts are often lost to history, in part because involved parties are typically unmotivated to document their failures. The GLP-1 class of drugs for diabetes and obesity have emerged over the past (...) decade as clinical and financial blockbusters, perhaps soon becoming the highest single source of revenue for the pharmaceutical industry (Berk 2023). In that context, it is instructive to tell the story of the first commercial effort to develop this class of drugs for metabolic disease, and how, despite remarkable early success, the work was abandoned in 1990. Told by a key participant in the effort, this story documents history that would otherwise be lost and suggests a number of lessons about drug development that remain relevant today. (shrink)

This article examines not only how events are verbally reported in everyday and institutional storytelling episodes, but also how the actions witnessed are enacted by participants. This is particularly important to not only the believability of what occurred and is being discussed, but also how ordinary audience members react to stories and how they believe the truthfulness of them. As is seen in data analyzed from multiple sources, the way in which something is both reported and enacted has major implications (...) for not only the telling of stories, but what we know about the world around us. Questions about the idea of ‘direct reported actions’ are also considered. (shrink)

We contribute to the literature on moral disengagement and task socialization by demonstrating how working with a tolerance standard (i.e., a margin for error) socializes workers to view small errors as inconsequential. This creates a “tolerance mindset” that spills over and facilitates moral disengagement when making ethical decisions. We provide complementary evidence of a tolerance spillover effect across three studies. Our first two studies were lab experiments where participants took on the role of quality controllers, and we manipulated whether they (...) worked with (vs. without) a tolerance standard. Across both experiments, we observed evidence of increased moral disengagement and unethical behavior when participants worked with a tolerance standard. Our third study focused on professional auditors who work regularly with a tolerance standard. We found that auditors were less honest when their work identity was primed versus not. We also observed that other professional accountants, who do not work with a tolerance standard, did not significantly differ in their honesty when their work identity was primed versus not. These findings have important implications for understanding moral disengagement and the spillover of mindsets from one’s work into the moral domain. (shrink)

This paper views such distinctions as creation and degeneration or good and evil in the Eastern sense of unity in polarity rather than in the Western sense of dual, antagonistic principles. Hence it considers the thermodynamic forces of evolution as processes of creation driven by entropy dissipation and explores the analogies this conception bears to the Hindu image of nature as the changing mist of a universal breath. Using this image, the paper examines the sense in which the second law (...) of thermodynamics connects chance and teleology in the operations of nature and provides for a causal hierarchy in which decision and volitional behavior co‐participate with the laws of nature to determine the course of evolution. (shrink)

This study modelled associations between gender, ruminative cognitive style, alcohol use, and the time course of negative affect over the course of 43,111 random assessments in the natural environment. Participants completed 49 days of experience sampling over 1.3 years. The data indicated that rumination at baseline was positively associated with alcohol dependence symptoms at baseline as well as higher negative affect over the course of the study. Consistent with negative reinforcement models, drinking served to decrease the persistence of negative affect (...) from moment to moment. However, this ameliorative effect of drinking was evident only among women, suggesting an increased risk for negative reinforcement driven drinking behaviour. In addition, rumination appeared to counteract the desired effects of alcohol on mood among women. This suggests that women who ruminate more may be motivated to consume larger amounts of alcohol to achieve the desired effects. Overall, the results indicate that ruminative cognitive style and the persistence of negative affect from moment to moment may reflect an individual vulnerability for the development of alcohol use disorder especially among women. (shrink)