I want to thank Paul Lieberman, Nancy Nyquist Potter, and Marilyn Nissim-Sabat for their very thoughtful and stimulating commentaries on my paper (Lieberman 2007; Potter 2007; Nissim-Sabat 2007). Each offers an interesting and distinct challenge to my work and I am happy for the opportunity to reply to the insights they bring to it. In this short response, I focus on what I take to be the most serious objections from each commentator, with the hopes of both clearing up some (...) ambiguities and loose ends present in my paper as well as elaborating some of my ideas in more detail. (shrink)

Background: Direct–to–consumer genetic testing (DTCGT) offers risk estimates for a variety of complex diseases and conditions, yet little is known about its impact on actual users, including their decisions about sharing the information gleaned from testing. Ethical considerations include the impact of unsolicited genetic information with variable validity and clinical utility on relatives, and the possible burden to the health care system if revealed to physicians. Aims: The qualitative study explored primary care patients’ views, attitudes, and decision making considerations regarding (...) DTCGT. This article focuses on the disclosure decisions participants made regarding participation, testing, and results of DTCGT, a topic which arose as a secondary aim of the study. Methods: Through four longitudinal interviews (pre–test, results, 3 and 12 months post–test) we examined twenty primary care patients’ decisions, expressed intentions, and actions regarding disclosure to immediate and extended family, friends and coworkers, and physicians about participation in and results of DTCGT. Individual interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis and a summative approach to describe the global themes. Results: Most participants disclosed to some immediate family; less than half disclosed to extended family; approximately half talked to friends. Most participants stated they would or might disclose to physicians about DTCGT and a few did. Conceptual themes that emerged from the data analysis include ambivalence about disclosure, consistency between intention and actual disclosure behavior and decisions, and conditional information sharing. Conclusions: Participants’ intentional and actual disclosure patterns offer insight into how they view DTCGT, weigh results, and the potential impact of DTCGT. (shrink)

Do you want a life you live on your own terms and not one that feels like it happens to you? Nanci Danison found out how to create a happier life in the most dramatic way possible. She died! During the most extensive afterlife visit ever reported, the author was shown and told that we souls consciously and unconsciously create our own physical reality during human life through an incredible spiritual power called manifesting. Create a New RealityMove Beyond Law (...) of Attraction Theory introduces you to the power of manifesting and leads you step-by-step through how to create more opportunities to better your life, to replace old beliefs that hold you back from creating a happier life, and to heal yourself of physical and emotional wounds. Learn why and how you have the amazing ability to literally change the physical world you experience, as it was explained to the author by God/Source. It is far more powerful than anything you may have read about law of attraction theories. (shrink)

This is an edited collection that is intended both as a primer for core concepts and principles in research ethics and as an in-depth exploration of the contextualisation of these principles in practice across key disciplines.

For a while now, there has been much conceptual discussion about the respective natures of knowledge-that and knowledge-how, along with the intellectualist idea that knowledge-how is really a kind of knowledge-that. Gilbert Ryle put in place most of the terms that have so far been distinctive of that debate, when he argued for knowledge-how's conceptual distinctness from knowledge-that. But maybe those terms should be supplemented, expanding the debate. In that spirit, the conceptual option of practicalism has recently entered the fray. (...) Practicalism conceives anew the nature of knowledge-that, as being a kind of knowledge-how. In this paper we enlarge upon this conceptual suggestion. We draw from an ancient Chinese text, the Analects of Confucius, explaining how it lends some support to practicalism. (shrink)

Exemplarism – the view that exemplary people, whom we admire, are the bearers of our moral concepts – presents considerable challenges to the (widely-assumed) place of moral theory in how we learn to be moral. Exemplarism has been garnered by Amy Olberding to articulate a Confucian approach to moral learning. This paper extends Exemplarism by considering how it may be put into practice, based on a seminal Confucian text, the Analects of Confucius. To date, the majority of discussions on Confucian (...) ethics that have brought Confucian philosophy to the attention of Anglophone scholars tend to focus on conceptually-based matters. There remain questions regarding how these values may be inculcated and embodied in our moral lives. Central to our proposal is the practice of reflective observation (guan 觀), comprised by three integrated components: observation, evaluation, and emulation. Observing, reflectively, is important not only for an individual’s acculturation to existing norms and practices but also for how they may subsequently exercise some latitude over their moral practices. Our reflections offer a practical approach to Confucian moral learning. In doing so, we demystify moral learning in Confucianism and open up avenues for future cross-tradition dialogues on moral education. (shrink)

This essay articulates the contribution that the Zhuangzi can make to contemporary epistemological discussions of wisdom. It suggests that wisdom in the Zhuangzi involves, in part, correctly distinguishing the "heavenly" (or the naturally given) from human artifice. It is important for humanity to understand naturally given conditions (e.g., seasons, climate, forces, mortality) to grasp what is within, and what beyond, our initiatives. To enable this, we need to be openly engaged with the world, rather than approach it with rigid convictions (...) about outcomes or goals. We characterize such openness and readiness to engage as an attitude, that of "epistemic humility." In building up our position, we assess two themes in analytic philosophical debates on wisdom: the epistemic component of wisdom and the domain of wisdom. This helps establish what we believe is an important contribution of the Zhuangzi to the discussion on wisdom, that is, the wise person's epistemic humility. (shrink)

Alcohol use and abuse play a major role in both crime and negative health outcomes in Scotland. This paper provides a description and ethical and legal analyses of a novel remote alcohol monitoring scheme for offenders which seeks to reduce alcohol-related harm to both the criminal and the public. It emerges that the prospective benefits of this scheme to health and public order vastly outweigh any potential harms.

This paper documents the types and amounts of aid exchanged between adults and their non-coresidential parents. Data for the study are drawn from a representative national sample survey of Americans age 19 and older conducted in 1987–1988. Exchanges of monetary and material resources, childcare, household assistance, and companionship and advice are considered.Patterns of intergenerational exchange are found to differ by gender, family structure, age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic situation. Differences in exchange between males and females and between whites and Mexican-Americans are (...) related to other life-course characteristics, and to the availability and proximity of kin. Blacks and persons living in poverty are shown to be less involved than other groups in intergenerational exchanges. Finally, patterns of prior assistance and the available needs and resources of the respondents and their parents are found to influence current patterns of exchange. (shrink)

This article explores the consequences for music of its entry into the machine-age of sound, which involves, among other things, the de-instrumentalization of the ears and the possibility of an analytical listening ushering in the invention of digital tools that allow for a new graphic projection of musical time. Referring to important texts, notably by Bartók and Adorno, on the consequences of analogue sound reproduction for listening habits, musical analysis and even for the concept of writing, it looks at the (...) ways the science of music in general has been and will be transformed by its digitalization, and notably, by a new epoch of musicality. (shrink)

Over the past quarter of a century the work of few philosophers has exerted such powerful influence, or been the centre of such vigorous debate, as that of Alasdair MacIntyre. And although MacIntyre has not often formally addressed educational issues, the thrust of his writing has seemed to bear more clearly on education than that of most philosophers. His assault on central tenets of the Enlightenment in After Virtue already contained an implicit critique of public education in the modern era. (...) That critique was extended and made more explicit in later writings such as his Richard Peters Lecture ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’ (1987), the concluding chapters of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), the final chapter of Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), and the essay ‘Aquinas’s Critique of Education: Against his Age, Against Ours’ (1998). With less polemical intensity he furnished some further arguments on education and upbringing in his book Dependent Rational Animals (1999a). And his most recent comments on the subject are presented in the dialogue published in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (MacIntyre and Dunne, 2002). Moreover, even in his most critical writing MacIntyre has also developed an affirmative vision that has seemed to offer resources for a fruitful reconceptualisation of education: his steady concern with human flourishing, strongly linked to his own distinctive conceptions of virtue and of practice, as well as to his ideas of the biographical unity of a life and the encompassing power of traditions, flows easily into discourse about the aims of education and the kind of undertaking engaged in by teachers. (shrink)

Today's clinical AIDS research is in trouble. Principal investigators are confronted with young and frequently highly knowledgeable patients. Many of these people with AIDS are often unwilling to adhere to the trial protocols. These PWAs believe they are ethically justified in breaching trial protocols because they do not consider themselves true volunteers in such trials. PWAs argue that they do not really volunteer because existing legislation prevents them from buying and using experimental drugs or from testing alternative treatment strategies. Their (...) only access to such agents is participation in clinical trials. (shrink)

This book engages in cross-tradition scholarship, investigating the processes associated with cultivating or nurturing the self in order to live good lives. Both Ancient Chinese and Greek philosophers provide accounts of the life lived well: a Confucian junzi, a Daoist sage and a Greek phronimos. By focusing on the processes rather than the aims of cultivating a good life, an international team of scholars investigate how a person develops and practices a way of life especially in these two traditions. They (...) look at what is involved in developing practical wisdom, exercising reason, cultivating equanimity and fostering reliability. Drawing on the insights of thinkers including Plato, Confucius, Han Fei and Marcus Aurelius, they examine themes of harmony, balance and beauty, highlight the different concerns of scepticism across both traditions, and discuss action as an indispensable method of learning and, indeed, as constitutive of self. The result is a valuable collection opening up new lines of inquiry in ethics, demonstrating the importance of philosophical ideas from across cultural traditions. (shrink)

Pro-anorexia is an Internet-based movement that provides advice and support for the development/maintenance of an eating disorder. The movement is sometimes framed as a religion, with rituals, psalms, creeds and the invocation of a deity who personifies the ED. The latter aspect is likely to influence identities and behaviours as well as providing emotional support and motivation for community members. However, there is little sustained empirical analysis of how members themselves orient to and self-position within the religious discourse. Here, we (...) apply the concept of interdiscursivity to examine the construction of Ana as god. Drawing on a body of online interactions from one pro-ana website over a 47-day period, we discursively analyse members’ constructions of Ana and their relationship with her. With reference to biblical texts, we consider how these constructions directly reference concepts of Christian religion and faith. Implications for understanding pro-ana and interdiscursivity are discussed. (shrink)

Manila is one of the world’s most fragmented, privatized and un-public of cities. Why is this so? This paper contemplates the seemingly immutable privacy of the city of Manila, and the paradoxical character of its publicity. Manila is our prime exemplar of the 21st-century mega-city whose apparent disorder discloses a coherent order which we here call ‘neo-patrimonial urbanism’. Manila is a city where poor and rich alike have their own government, infrastructure, and armies, the shopping malls are the simulacra of (...) public congregations once found in cathedrals and plazas, and where household order is matched by streetside chaos, and personal cleanliness wars with public dirt. We nominate the key characteristics of this uncanny approximation of chaotic and discordant order – a polyphonous and polyrhythmic social order but one lacking harmony – and offer a historical sociology, a genealogy that traces an emblematic pattern across the colonizing periods of its emergent urban forms into the contemporary impositions of gated zones and territories. The enduring legacy of patrimonial power to Manila is to be found in the households and on the streets that undermine and devalue public forms of social power in favour of the patriarch and his householders (now relabelled as ‘shareholders’ in ‘public companies’) at the cost of harmonious, peaceable and just public order. Such a state of affairs is not only destructive of the historic built environment of the city, especially its public parks and plazas and heritage districts, its streets, footpaths, public transport and utilities, but is directly injurious of its citizens. To address the question of Manila’s private order and public chaos is to reopen the quest for the good city as the just polis. It is also to take us beyond arguments of indigenous versus colonial forms of urbanism that are mired in nationalist and modernization ideologies respectively, and it is to reject the reductive logics of globalization arguments that Asian mega-cities are but variations of American logics of urbanism. (shrink)

The Movement for Black Lives has gained worldwide visibility as a grassroots social justice movement distinguished by a decentralized, non-hierarchal mode of organization. MBL rose to prominence in part thanks to its protests against police brutality and misconduct directed at black Americans. However, its animating concerns are far broader, calling for a wide range of economic, political, legal, and cultural measures to address what it terms a “war against Black people,” as well as the “shared struggle with all oppressed people.” (...) Despite the significance of the social, political, and economic goals of MBL, as well as the innovative organizational leadership strategies it employs, MBL has received little sustained philosophical attention. The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives brings philosophical analysis to bear on the aims, strategies, policy positions, and intellectual-historical context of MBL. Leading scholars address the following themes: “Black Lives Matter” as a political speech act, MBL’s conception of the value of black lives, the gender dynamics of the Movement, the relation of MBL to other black liberation movements and transitional justice movements, the Movement’s new forms of leadership and organization, and the impact of racism on the normative assessment of the criminal justice system. Accordingly, the volume broaches a wide range of pressing issues in the philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of gender, and the philosophy of punishment. It is important reading for students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences interested in race, inequality, and social justice movements. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. This is a story in turn of increasing size, complexity, diversity, and sophistication, before its ultimate decline into the 21st century. This story has not been told in full previously and this article is a first step to make good this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record (...) labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. In Part One (published in Thesis Eleven 109, 2012: 71–88) we chronicled the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. In Part Two we narrate the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of rock music industry. In particular we focus on four aspects: 1) technological change: the dominance of the vinyl album in the 1970s but its eventual usurpation by cassettes and then compact discs before the ultimate decline of all formats in the rise of the internet and the i-pod; 2) infrastructure: the development of the recording industry as a system of recording studios and record factories; as a system of impresarios and musician management; and also as a system that integrates performance circuits, radio, television, film, and eventually computer, product placement, advertising, and promotion through the cultivation and manipulation of taste markets in consumer culture etc.; 3) business logistics and markets: the tracking of the record labels, their struggles for markets and copyright control, local and global; and 4) musical production and repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 can now more clearly be seen as the rise and fall of rock music and its major technological form, the vinyl record. This is why we call it ‘the vinyl age’. (shrink)

This paper is one of the four interrelated action agenda papers resulting from the National Summit on Public Health Legal Preparedness convened in June 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multi-disciplinary partners. Each of the action agenda papers deals with one of the four core elements of public health legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities; competency in using those laws; coordination of law-based public health actions; and information. Options presented in this paper are for consideration by (...) policy makers and practitioners — in all jurisdictions and all relevant sectors and disciplines — with responsibilities for all-hazards emergency preparedness.Advancing and protecting the public's health depends upon the coordination of actions by many, diverse partners. For effective public health preparedness, there must be effective coordination of legal tools and law-based strategies across local, state, tribal, and federal jurisdictions, and also across sectors such as public health, health care, emergency management, education, law enforcement, community design, and academia. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is, perhaps, the most controversial philosopher of the twentieth-century. Little has been written on him or about his work and its significance for educational thought. This unique collection by a group of international scholars reexamines Heidegger's work and its legacy for educational thought.

At anaphase chromosomes move to the spindle poles (anaphase A) and the spindle poles move apart (anaphase B). In vitro studies using isolated diatom spindles demonstrate that the primary mechano‐chemical event responsible for spindle elongation is the sliding apart of half‐spindle microtubules. Further, these forces are generated within the zone of microtubule overlap in the spindle midzone.

Humans have, by biological necessity, always lived in watersheds. This article provides an overview of humans’ relationship to these watersheds as an introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven on watersheds. It describes the basic functioning of watersheds, how humans have always depended on them, and how they have slowly begun to manipulate them. Humans across the planet began by making strategic adjustments to water’s downward flow to aid the procurement of water and fish. As small states, empires, and (...) finally the Industrial Revolution unfolded, these interventions became more numerous with greater environmental impacts. The rate of riverine exploitation increased dramatically post-Second World War in line with the Great Acceleration. This, in turn, created our current worldwide ecological crisis. This crisis particularly affects the planet’s watersheds, and in turn, humans. The article ends with the assertion that studies of such a complex event are by necessity multi-disciplinary and inter-regional. It then outlines the contents of this special issue which examines watersheds in Asia, America and Australia. (shrink)

Os últimos anos foram marcados pelo crescimento notável da produção artística/poética em língua de sinais, com a presença cada vez mais efetiva de poetas slamers na cena nacional. O efeito mais direto disso é a vitrinização das interseccionalidade que atravessam as múltiplas identidades surdas, expostas tanto nas performances síncronas das apresentações nos slams, de forma presencial ou virtual, quanto na poesia.doc. A poesia Boneca Invisível utiliza elementos cinematográficos para potencializar sua narrativa e discutir os efeitos mais diretos da violência sofrida (...) por ela, vivido por tantas mulheres, negras, surdas. Fazemos observações de cunho teórico-epistêmico, do feminismo negro em direção ao feminismo negro surdo, e também de interesse prático, que ocupa-se dos meios de produções que são acessados para a composição da poesia surda, suscitando um alargamento conceitual para abarcar textualidades corporais como produções literárias legítimas, além do reconhecimento técnico das ferramentas acionadas e dominadas pela poeta para sua produção textual literária de denúncia. (shrink)

The current paper proposes the Dysexecutive Luck hypothesis; that beliefs in being unlucky are associated with deficits in executive functioning. Four studies suggest initial support for the Dysexecutive Luck hypothesis via four aspects of executive functioning. Study 1 established that self-reports of dysexecutive symptoms predicted unique variance in beliefs in being unlucky after controlling for a number of other variables previously reported to be related to beliefs around luck. Studies 2 to 4 demonstrated support for the Dysexecutive Luck hypothesis via (...) assessment of executive functioning via: two fundamental executive functions , emotional processes related to executive functioning as described by the Somatic Marker hypothesis, and higher executive functions as accessed via divergent thinking. The findings suggest that individuals’ beliefs in being unlucky are accompanied by a range of deficits in executive functioning. (shrink)

Good academic practice is more than the avoidance of clear-cut cheating. It also involves navigation of the gray zones between cheating and good practice. The existing literature has left students’ understanding of gray zone practices largely unexplored. To begin filling in this gap, we present results from a questionnaire study involving N = 1639 undergraduate students from seven European countries representing all major disciplines. We show that large numbers of these students are unable to identify gray area issues and lack (...) sensitivity to the context dependence of these. We also show that a considerable proportion of students have a poor understanding of concepts like plagiarism and falsification, not only in gray zone scenarios, but also in cases of relatively clear-cut cheating. Our results are similar across the faculties and countries of study, and even for students who have attended academic integrity training. We discuss the implications of this for academic integrity training. (shrink)

We are living in an algorithmic age where mathematics and computer science are coming together in powerful new ways to influence, shape and guide our behaviour and the governance of our societies. As these algorithmic governance structures proliferate, it is vital that we ensure their effectiveness and legitimacy. That is, we need to ensure that they are an effective means for achieving a legitimate policy goal that are also procedurally fair, open and unbiased. But how can we ensure that algorithmic (...) governance structures are both? This article shares the results of a collective intelligence workshop that addressed exactly this question. The workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to consider barriers to legitimate and effective algorithmic governance and the research methods needed to address the nature and impact of specific barriers. An interactive management workshop technique was used to harness the collective intelligence of this multidisciplinary group. This method enabled participants to produce a framework and research agenda for those who are concerned about algorithmic governance. We outline this research agenda below, providing a detailed map of key research themes, questions and methods that our workshop felt ought to be pursued. This builds upon existing work on research agendas for critical algorithm studies in a unique way through the method of collective intelligence. (shrink)

This study demonstrates the importance of social context to the study of networks vital to business success. Results from analyses of the personal and business characteristics associated with different types of networks, a topic that has been neglected in past research, show the importance of structural perspectives emphasizing that women and men in the same situations have similar networks. Yet there are some network differences even among these women and men who operate the same kinds of businesses. This suggests that (...) insights from gender construction perspectives should be integrated into network and other gender inequality studies. (shrink)

Here we present what we believe is a novel account of what languages are, along with an axiomatically rich representation of languages and language-related data that is based on this account. We propose an account of languages as aggregates of dispositions distributed across aggregates of persons, and in doing so we address linguistic competences and the processes that realize them. This paves the way for representing additional types of language-related entities. Like demographic data of other sorts, data about languages may (...) be of use to researchers in a number of areas, including biomedical research. Data on the languages used in clinical encounters are typically included in medical records, and capture an important factor in patient-provider interactions. Like many types of patient and demographic data, data on a person’s preferred and primary languages are organized in different ways by different systems. This can be a barrier to data integration. We believe that a robust framework for representing language in general and preferred and primary language in particular – which has been lacking in ontologies thus far – can promote more successful integration of language-related data from disparate data sources. (shrink)

Plagiarism and other transgressions of the norms of academic integrity appear to be a persistent problem among upper secondary students. Numerous surveys have revealed high levels of infringement of what appear to be clearly stated rules. Less attention has been given to students’ understanding of academic integrity, and to the potential misconceptions and false beliefs that may make it difficult for them to comply with existing rules and handle complex real-life situations.In this paper we report findings from a survey of (...) European upper secondary students’ views on issues relating to academic integrity. We relate these findings to the students’ training about academic integrity, self-reported level of questionable behavior and country of study.A total of 1654 students at 51 institutions located in 6 European countries participated in the study. The participants generally believed they had a good understanding of the rules applying to them and knew how to behave in compliance with norms of academic integrity. The results indicate, however, that often, in practice, this belief was mistaken. Many students had an inadequate understanding of core elements of academic integrity. They were uncertain about how to act, and they struggled in the handling of complex situations that require context-sensitive judgement. While some differences between countries were identified, they were modest and exhibited no clear pattern. Our results also suggest that reducing students’ level of uncertainty and, to a lesser degree, improving their level of knowledge could lead them to engage less in certain types of questionable behaviours. Surprisingly, the effect of academic training is modest and ambiguous. The study also confirms that perception of peer behaviour has the strongest association with student engagement in questionable behaviours. Thus, academic integrity at the upper secondary level cannot be explained simply in terms of individual ethics or knowledge. (shrink)