In this paper, we argue that engineering ethics education does have moral implications. More specifically, practices in engineering ethics education can lead to negative moral consequences if not conducted appropriately. Engineering ethics educators are often passionate about teaching students ways to examine the ethical implications of engineering and technology. However, ethics educators may overlook the moral significance of their instructional classroom practices. In this paper, we discuss two issues: First, we discuss the moral impacts of ethics curriculum and pedagogies on (...) students’ learning experiences. Then we discuss the professional responsibilities of educators who are involved in designing ethics learning experiences for engineering students. The reflections presented in this paper will serve as catalysts for more comprehensive discussions regarding the impact of engineering ethics education on the ethical development of engineering students. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on problem solving talk in the business meeting event. We zoom in on the processes of formulating, negotiating and ratifying an issue as a problem, and we argue that individuals negotiate their stances in relation to their perceived/projected professional roles. The processes of problem-solving are, simultaneously, processes of self/other positioning. We take an Interactional Sociolinguistic perspective and draw on audio-recorded meeting talk collected in a multinational corporate workplace. Our analysis shows that interactants draw on issues (...) of accountability, perceived/projected responsibilities and expertise in pursuit of their own interactional agenda in the problem-solving meeting. We close the article with directions for further research. (shrink)

This study investigates the role of language in cross‐sector collaboration between mental health hospitals and municipalities, focusing on the challenges of maintaining continuity of care and integrating patient‐centered approaches. Using Fairclough's framework for critical discourse analysis, we examined focus group interviews with 21 healthcare professionals, including nurses, social workers, and psychiatrists, to identify key themes and patterns in how cross‐sector collaboration is discussed. The analysis revealed a dominant medicalized discourse in hospital settings, which often emphasized structured care processes like treatment (...) plans and medication management, overshadowing more flexible, patient‐centered approaches common in community‐based services. Power dynamics were evident, with hospital professionals frequently positioned as active agents, while patients and community‐based workers were portrayed in more passive roles. Although efforts to involve patients in decision‐making were noted, these were often controlled by professionals, reflecting a mediated approach to patient empowerment. The findings highlight the cultural and structural divides between hospital and community services and suggest the need for improved communication strategies, integrated care pathways, and a shift toward more inclusive, patient‐centered care models. Addressing these discursive barriers is crucial for achieving more effective, integrated, and patient‐centered care, ultimately improving outcomes for patients. (shrink)

This paper discusses how we understand and use a concept or the meaningof a general term to identify the objects falling under the term. There aretwo distinct approaches to research on the problems of concepts and meaningthe psychological approach and the formal (or logical) approach. My majorconcern is to consider the possibility of reconciling these two differentapproaches, and for this I propose to build a psychologically plausibleformal system of conceptualization. That is, I will develop a theory-basedaccount of concepts and propose (...) an explanation of how an agent activates aperspective (which consists of theories) in response to a situation in whichreasoning using a concept is called for. Theories are represented as sets offacts and rules, both strict and defeasible. Each theory is organized in acoherent perspective which stands for an agent's mental state or an agent'smodel of another agent's perspective. Perspectives are organized intohierarchies and the theory for a concept in one perspective may defeat thetheory for the same concept in another perspective. Which perspective issuperior is context-dependent. (shrink)

The present moment in human history is marked by the ever-accelerating movement across the world of materials, peoples, and information, creating various problems but also opportunities as well –especially for the movement of people. Such demographic movement makes multiculturalism a major issue for many societies. Differences between immigrants and the society receiving them tend to create conflict, as another culture encroaching upon one’s own culture is often felt as a threatening challenge to one’s identity. Within any society, identity is constructed (...) in the subjective process of culture. But where two or more cultures come into close contact, a dominance–subordination struggle frequently develops between their respective subjectivities. One solution to such conflict might be found in the legal provision of equality of rights for all members of society, including cultural minorities. But if the legal solution alone is considered, the resources accumulated in cultures as enabling agents for amenable social coexistence would go unused, and tension and conflict will frequently persist. As an intermediate position, cultural subjectivities, whether personal or collective, could be induced to constitute a complex system of federated subjectivities within the general society. Even such a system may not, however, be completely effective. The adoption by all parties of an ethic universally conceived on the minimal basis could meet the urgent need to prevent escalation of conflict, but its ultimate goal would be to prepare a common ground for the development of a global culture incorporating multiple cultures as historically inherited resources for the enrichment of human life. Ethical awareness is what reveals the otherness of the other and also the ontological ground of human life on earth; as ethics and epistemology coincide, a human reason would emerge as the ground of a new global culture, and the world would hopefully become a single Lebensraum for the whole of humanity. (shrink)

Many innate immune response proteins recognize foreign nucleic acids from invading pathogens to initiate antiviral signaling. These proteins mostly rely on structural characteristics of the nucleic acids rather than their specific sequences to distinguish self and nonself. One feature utilized by RNA sensors is the extended stretch of double‐stranded RNA (dsRNA) base pairs. However, the criteria for recognizing nonself dsRNAs are rather lenient, and hairpin structure of self‐RNAs can also trigger an immune response. Consequently, aberrant activation of RNA sensors has (...) been reported in numerous human diseases. Yet, in most cases, the activating antigens remain unknown. Recent studies have developed sequencing techniques tailored to specifically capture dsRNAs and identified that various noncoding elements in the nuclear and the mitochondrial genome can generate dsRNAs. Here, the identity of endogenous dsRNAs, their recognition by dsRNA sensors, and their implications in the pathogenesis of human diseases ranging from inflammatory to degenerative are presented. (shrink)

Theories of ethical leadership provide important insights about the effect of leader’s ethics on the relationship between leaders and followers. However, there is an increasing demand for addressing key constructs that enhance the capacity to explain theoretical aspects of ethical leadership. The purpose of this study is to expand the theoretical framework of ethical leadership based on Korean traditional leadership by focusing on personal cultivation, morality, and social responsibility. Using a framework of intrapersonal process as leadership and core value and (...) competence as components of leadership, this study examines the ethical aspects of Korean traditional leadership and provides the implications to further develop the theory of ethical leadership. It is found that ethical integrity ensued from sugi is an essential precondition to develop leadership, and the core value of ethical leadership includes Zhixin-Chijing and the competence co.. (shrink)

This study examined the role of religion in xenophobic responses to the threat of Ebola. Religious communities often offer members strong social ties and social support, which may help members cope with psychological and physical threat, including global threats like Ebola. Our analysis of a nationally representative sample in the U.S. found that overall, the more vulnerable to Ebola people felt, the more they exhibited xenophobic responses, but this relationship was moderated by importance of religion. Those who perceived religion as (...) more important in their lives exhibited weaker xenophobic reactions than those who perceived religion as less important. Furthermore, social connectedness measured by collectivism explained the moderating role of religion, suggesting that higher collectivism associated with religion served as a psychological buffer. Religious people showed attenuated threat responses because they had a stronger social system that may offer resources for its members to cope with psychological and physical threats. The current research highlights that different cultural groups react to increased threats in divergent ways. (shrink)

The present study examined the attitudes of Filipino middle school students toward physical education and the associations between PE attitude and various personal and external correlates of PE. In total, 659 middle school students, aged between 12 and 19 years, participated in the study. The Physical Education Attitude Scale was used to measure affective, cognitive, and motivational/behavioral attitudes of adolescent students toward PE. Results showed that middle school students had moderate general attitudes toward PE. Female students had more favorable attitudes (...) toward PE when their teacher was male than female. When the teacher was female, male students were more satisfied with the PE curriculum than female students. When the teacher was male, female students were more comfortable with the PE curriculum than male students. Finally, students' PE attitude did not decrease as they got older, regardless of student sex. The findings provide a different perspective for the field and underscore the importance of not only the PE curriculum but also the student–teacher relationship. To prevent the decline in students' positive attitude and encourage positive behaviors toward PE and activities, teachers should be very considerate about their interactions with students of the same sex; school administrators, meanwhile, should focus at providing PE teachers with special training courses to enhance both their teaching and communication capabilities. (shrink)

Recent times have seen increasing interest in conversational assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa) designed to help users in their daily tasks. In military settings, it is critical to design assistants that are, simultaneously, helpful and able to minimize the user’s cognitive load. Here we show that embodiment plays a key role in achieving that goal. We present an experiment where participants engaged in the desert survival task in augmented reality. Participants were paired with a voice assistant, an embodied assistant, or no (...) assistant. The assistants made suggestions verbally throughout the task, whereas the embodied assistant further used gestures and emotion to communicate with the user. Our results indicate that both assistant conditions led to higher performance over the no assistant condition, but the embodied assistant achieved this with less cognitive burden on the decision maker than the non-embodied assistant. We discuss implications for the design of intelligent collaborative systems for the warfighter. (shrink)

Women’s voices are widely expressed in current movements of rejuvenation of Jewish traditions. These moves raise tensions within the religious world and the civil legal realm. In focus here is a much-debated instance: the nearly thirty-year effort by Jewish women to pray in a group in song and read from the Bible at the holy site of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The group is called the Women of the Wall (WoW). In addition to the women's rights of speech, discussion (...) here highlights the need to recognize duties of respect for the women’s voices. Moral analysis of the Jewish and democratic values which constitutionally define Israel founds the legal basis for this duty of respect. Both Jewish thought and Kantian analysis are seen to conceptualize the essence of freedom as obligation, from which arise duties of respect for the other. Duties of respect indeed are owed to WoW by the other worshippers at the Western Wall, as well as by the rabbinic authorities in control of forms of prayer at the site. That both Jewish and democratic values deem obligation as the essence of freedom lends support to seeing coherence between the two sets of values defining the State of Israel. (shrink)

Through imaginative engagement readers of fiction become, to an extraordinary extent, the narrator’s ‘children’: they often submit themselves to the narrator’s authority without reserve. But precisely because of that, readers are deeply at a loss when their trust is betrayed. This underscores a core function of fiction, namely to evoke emotional response in the reader. In this paper, we hypothesize how a reader’s imaginative engagement can be subjected to narrative frustration due to processing or moral complexity. The types of narrative (...) frustration we consider differ in terms of their sources, and their emotional and behavioral impacts on the reader. Here, we break down these frustrations into their component parts, in an effort to better characterize the different classes of frustrations. We propose that frustrations arise from different combinations of local uncertainty, moral clash and global uncertainty. These sources of frustration in turn explain the reader’s emotional response and their consequent reading behavior as they imaginatively engage with fiction. (shrink)