“Dumpster diving” is a term generally used for obtaining items, in this case food for consumption, from dumpsters. This study evaluates the prevalence of dumpster diving in two low-income urban communities in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Additionally, attitudes and beliefs of adults who engage in this behavior are reported. Surveys (n=396) were used to collect data including individual dumpster diving behavior, food security, health, and demographic data. Nearly one-fifth of those surveyed had used dumpster diving as a means to obtain food. Focus (...) groups (n=17) were conducted to further evaluate dumpster divers’ attitudes and beliefs about dumpster diving, use of food assistance programs including benefits and barriers, and other strategies used to obtain food such as stealing. Focus group participants were primarily homeless and most were high school educated. Ways to improve delivery of food assistance are suggested. In conclusion, more research on the use of dumpsters as a source of food is needed. Utilizing more of the 96 billion pounds of food wasted each year in the US through food recovery and donation programs could help to provide socially acceptable means for low-income urban dwellers to obtain food. (shrink)

Although there is much interest in the development of prosocial behaviour in young children, and many interventions that attempt to cultivate kindness in children, there is a paucity of research exploring children’s lived experiences of kindness and including their voices. In this study, children’s understanding of kindness is approached through qualitative interviews using puppets. Interviews were conducted with 33 children aged 5-6 years in 3 schools in the United Kingdom. Through thematic analysis, 4 themes were developed: doing things for others, (...) relating with others, rules and values, and kindness affects us. These themes are examined in light of current thinking on prosocial and sociomoral development, and several key insights are highlighted, including types of prosocial behaviour, social connection, kindness-by-omission and defending, in-group bias, universal kindness versus personal safety, self-image, and a desire to improve the condition of society. These findings have implications for future research on prosocial development and for the design of kindness-based interventions, as well as providing an ecologically valid method of inquiry for use with young children. (shrink)

The mining and energy industries present unique challenges to engineers, who must navigate sometimes competing responsibilities and codes of conduct, such as personal senses of right and wrong, professional ethics codes, and their employers’ corporate social responsibility policies. Corporate social responsibility is the current dominant framework used by industry to conceptualize firms’ responsibilities to their stakeholders, yet has it plays a relatively minor role in engineering ethics education. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary pedagogical intervention in a petroleum (...) engineering seminar that sought to better prepare engineering undergraduate students to critically appraise the strengths and limitations of CSR as an approach to reconciling the interests of industry and communities. We find that as a result of the curricular interventions, engineering students were able to expand their knowledge of the social, rather than simply environmental and economic dimensions of CSR. They remained hesitant, however, in identifying the links between those social aspects of CSR and their actual engineering work. The study suggests that CSR may be a fruitful arena from which to illustrate the profoundly sociotechnical dimensions of the engineering challenges relevant to students’ future careers. (shrink)

The goal of this study was to determine if the level of preservice teachers’ economic literacy might serve as a gatekeeper to teaching economics competencies. The participants ( n=84) were teacher candidates in an elementary education program in their final methods courses prior to their teacher internship. The findings supported the intuitive belief that elementary teachers lack the economic literacy and confidence needed to teach economics concepts in the elementary curriculum. This deficit can serve as a gatekeeper to teaching economics (...) competencies leading to curricular disjuncture between the established curriculum and actual practice in the classroom. (shrink)

Engineering ethics calls the attention of engineers to professional codes of ethical responsibility and personal values, but the practice of ethics in corporate settings can be more complex than either of these. Corporations too have cultures that often include corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and policies, but few discussions of engineering ethics make any explicit reference to CSR. This article proposes critical attention to CSR and role ethics as an opportunity to help prepare engineers to think through the ethics of (...) their professional practice. After a brief overview of the evolution of social responsibility within engineering ethics in the United States, this article shares empirical research with practicing engineers in the mining and energy industries to explore how their formal ethics training did and did not prepare them to grapple with the ethical dimensions of their professional practice. It then illustrates the ways in which these dilemmas and the strategies employed for navigating them are framed within CSR policies and practices and resonate more strongly with role ethics rather than ethical theory as currently taught in most US engineering programs. The article concludes that engineering ethics teaching and learning would benefit from explicitly incorporating critical discussions of role ethics and CSR. (shrink)

While the Internet has emerged as a significant resource for women negotiating the questions and circumstances that arise during conception, pregnancy and childbirth, it remains unclear what role the Internet plays in challenging the current biomedical paradigm and empowering women to make meaningful choices. This article explores how women use the Internet to manage their pregnancies and mediate their doctor–patient relationships, particularly examining the role of social class and personal health history in shaping such Internet use. Drawing from in-depth interviews (...) with white middle-class mothers, the findings show that rather than using technology to resist the dominant biomedical paradigm, most women turned to online resources that affirmed mainstream medical authority and continued to rely on their doctors. By providing the means to confirm normalcy and take control in their reproductive experiences, the Internet enables socially privileged women to more fully perform the informed patient role in order to demonstrate their competence as mothers. (shrink)

Access to fruits and vegetables by low-income residents living in selected urban and rural Minnesotan communities was investigated. Communities were selected based on higher than state average poverty rates, limited access to grocery stores, and urban influence codes (USDA ERS codes). Four communities, two urban and two rural, were selected. Data were gathered from focus group discussions (n = 41), responses to a consumer survey (n = 396 in urban neighborhoods and n = 400 in rural communities), and an inventory (...) of foodstuffs available at stores located in all the communities and at large grocery stores in neighborhoods adjacent to the urban communities. In the two urban neighborhoods, a significant number of foods (26% and 52%) were significantly more expensive than the Thrifty Food Plan’s (TFP) market basket price (MBP). Additionally, a significant number of foods in the two rural communities were more expensive (11% and 26%). In focus groups, participants identified major barriers to shopping in their community to be cost, quality of food, and food choice limitations. Results of the food inventory show that foods within the communities were costly, of fair or poor quality, and limited in number and type available, supporting complaints verbalized by focus group participants. Through focus groups and surveys, participants expressed concern that healthy food choices were not affordable within their communities and believed that people in their community suffered from food insecurity. The absence of quality, affordable food for low-income residents in these four Minnesota communities prevents or diminishes their ability to choose foods that help maintain a healthy lifestyle. (shrink)

Access to fruits and vegetables by low-income residents living in selected urban and rural Minnesotan communities was investigated. Communities were selected based on higher than state average poverty rates, limited access to grocery stores, and urban influence codes (USDA ERS codes). Four communities, two urban and two rural, were selected. Data were gathered from focus group discussions (n = 41), responses to a consumer survey (n = 396 in urban neighborhoods and n = 400 in rural communities), and an inventory (...) of foodstuffs available at stores located in all the communities and at large grocery stores in neighborhoods adjacent to the urban communities. In the two urban neighborhoods, a significant number of foods (26% and 52%) were significantly more expensive than the Thrifty Food Plan’s (TFP) market basket price (MBP). Additionally, a significant number of foods in the two rural communities were more expensive (11% and 26%). In focus groups, participants identified major barriers to shopping in their community to be cost, quality of food, and food choice limitations. Results of the food inventory show that foods within the communities were costly, of fair or poor quality, and limited in number and type available, supporting complaints verbalized by focus group participants. Through focus groups and surveys, participants expressed concern that healthy food choices were not affordable within their communities and believed that people in their community suffered from food insecurity. The absence of quality, affordable food for low-income residents in these four Minnesota communities prevents or diminishes their ability to choose foods that help maintain a healthy lifestyle. (shrink)

This book explores policy innovation for same-sex couples throughout the Americas and includes same-sex marriage legislation, civil unions, and other new developments for same-sex couples throughout the Americas at both national and sub-national levels. This scholarship is innovative because though much has been written regarding developments in North America, there is very little work dealing with recent developments in the rest of the Americas.

This paper offers a novel, qualitative approach to evaluating the outcomes of integrating humanities and ethics into a newly revised pre-clerkship medical education curriculum. The authors set out to evaluate medical students’ perceptions, learning outcomes, and growth in identity development. Led by a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this qualitative project examines multiple sources of student experience and perception data, including student essays, end-of-year surveys, and semi-structured interviews with students. Data were analyzed using deductive and inductive processes to identify key categories (...) and recurring themes. Results suggest that students not only engaged with the curricular content and met the stated learning objectives but also acknowledged their experience in the humanities and ethics curriculum as an opportunity to reflect, expand their perceptions of medicine (and what it means to be “in” medicine), connect with their classmates, and further cultivate their personal and professional identities. Results of this qualitative study show how and in what ways the ethics and humanities curriculum motivates students past surface-level memorization of factual knowledge and encourages thoughtful analysis and evaluation about how the course material relates to and influences their thinking and how they see themselves as future doctors. The comprehensive qualitative approach reflects a holistic model for evaluating the integration of humanities and ethics into the pre-clerkship medical education curriculum. Future research should examine if this approach provides a protective factor against the demonstrated ethical erosion and empathy decrease during clinical training. (shrink)

The neural basis of developmental changes in transitive reasoning in parietal regions was examined, using voxel-based morphometry. Young adolescents and adults performed a transitive reasoning task, subsequent to undergoing anatomical magnetic resonance imaging brain scans. Behaviorally, adults reasoned more accurately than did the young adolescents. Neural results showed less grey matter density in superior parietal cortex in the adults than in the young adolescents, possibly due to a developmental period of synaptic pruning; improved performance in the reasoning task was negatively (...) correlated with grey matter density in superior parietal cortex in the adolescents, but not in the adult group; and the latter results were driven by the more difficult trials, requiring greater spatial manipulation. Taken together, the results support the idea that during development, regions in superior parietal cortex are fine-tuned, to support more robust spatial manipulation, resulting in gre... (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉOn pense souvent qu'un changement significatif de notre caractère évaluatif pourrait saper notre responsabilité par rapport à nos méfaits passés. Dans cet article, j'explore cette intuition en analysant les concepts de responsabilité et de l'obligation de rendre des comptes, tels que présentés par Angela Smith. J'introduis une distinction entre « modification » et « remplacement » pour définir les limites de la responsabilité au fil du temps. Ces limites sont ensuite précisées en s'inspirant des travaux de Delia Graff sur (...) les arguments Sorites pour soutenir qu'une personne est responsable d'actes répréhensibles passés si elle demeure « manifestement similaire » à certains égards. (shrink)

In this article, I examine two competing republican ideals of a free society of equals in the eighteenth century. I claim that while the value of nondependency was central to the economic outlooks of both Adam Smith and Richard Price, their evaluations of free-market practices were dramatically distinct. In doing so, I introduce a new interpretation of the typologies of republicanism in the eighteenth century.

“Ghosting”, the act of ceasing all communication with someone with whom you have been romantically involved, is now a normal part of modern dating. The common moral judgment of ghosting is negative, that it is a bad behavior that treats people disrespectfully, and trains up a lack of empathy and accountability in those who engage in it (Abad-Santos 2017; Guilluame 2016; G 2017; Smith 2017). These behaviors and traits are at least morally undesirable if not outright wrong, and so, (...) consequently, it isn’t permissible for anyone to ghost. But is this the whole story to be told about ghosting? In this paper, I offer quite different responses to these two questions about ghosting. Focusing here on gender identity, I claim that it is permissible for women to ghost men. This is because, I contend, women’s practices of ghosting are a justified response to men’s practices of misogyny within the context of heterosexual dating. As such, I argue that contrary to the common perception that ghosting is rude or disrespectful, it rather serves a self-protective function for women and can at times qualify as an act of resistance against women’s oppression. In this way, not only is ghosting done by women minimally permissible, it might even be considered laudable. (shrink)

This study considers three noblewomen – Lady Amelia Hume, Jane Barrington, and Mary Watson-Wentworth, Marchioness of Rockingham – whose contributions to plant studies were so important that Linnean Society President James Edward Smith dedicated three books to them. Their skills in cultivating newly imported exotic plants rivaled those of elite nurserymen, and taxonomists of the highest caliber came to depend on them to unlock information encoded within flowers to enable classification and publication. Eventually, the women played strategic roles within (...) national scientific studies of the world’s plants orchestrated by Smith, Joseph Banks, and William Roxburgh. The stories of Hume, Barrington, and Rockingham complicate our understandings of the gendered, professional, and disciplinary hierarchies of knowledge that constituted British science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They also resituate the domestic hothouse as a publicly engaged laboratory and museum. (shrink)

En este trabajo proponemos una lectura de la filosofía política de Smith, a partir de su teoría de la obligación política, en tanto crítica del contractualismo. El autor rechaza la hipótesis del estado de naturaleza y el consentimiento de los individuos, proponiendo, en cambio, una teoría basada en la opinión, pero, sobre todo, en la ilusión de que la sociedad comercial nos conducirá a la felicidad. Rastrearemos estas ideas en tres de sus textos más importantes: La teoría de los (...) sentimientos morales, La riqueza de las naciones y Lecciones de jurisprudencia. (shrink)

In “Avoiding a Death Panel Redux,” Nicole Piemonte and Laura Hermer make the argument that the advance care planning consultation provision during the health care reform debate collapsed both because the language in the provision was deliberately misread and because some features of the language could in fact be misleading. We agree on both counts. We add that the cost‐effectiveness provisions of the bill make us face difficult decisions we as a nation would rather avoid, but can and must (...) face squarely and together. It is time for an honest national conversation about at least two issues concerning medical care near the end of life. First, talking about or planning a good death with your doctor or nurse will not make death happen sooner. The data show that better planning for a well‐managed terminal illness leads to longer life as well as better symptom control and less distress. Second, we need to quickly and directly confront the cost of end of life care in the United State, recognize the political consequences, and work with the broad middle to advance the common good. (shrink)

Cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body. Drawing on Foucault's theories about disciplining the public body, this article examines the changing public perception of Anna Nicole Smith from an ideal beauty to a white trash stereotype. This analysis argues that Smith's very public weight gains, her outrageous behaviour and her legal battle for her late husband's fortune is presented in the media as an example of inappropriate conduct for (...) a white beauty ideal and thus is repositioned as white trash culture. Central to this repositioning is the constant tabloid depiction of Smith as an ‘out of control’ grotesque. This article argues that contrary to the optimistic understanding of female grotesques as effective agents of cultural criticism and social change, Smith represents the female grotesque as an agent of cultural control that instructs middle-class women on how to avoid committing classed, racial and gendered transgressions. The article concludes that the case of Anna Nicole Smith functions as a cautionary tale that reinforces cultural standards of normalization. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice, as a species of epistemic injustice, is when members of marginalized groups are unable to make their experiences communicatively intelligible due to a deficiency in collective hermeneutical resources, where this deficiency is traditionally interpreted as a lack of concepts. Against this understanding, this paper argues that even if adequate concepts that describe marginalized groups’ experiences are available within the collective hermeneutical resources, hermeneutical injustice can persist. This paper offers an analysis of how this can happen by introducing the (...) notion of hermeneutical excess: the introduction of additional concepts into collective hermeneutical resources that function to obscure agents’ understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized groups. The injustice of hermeneutical excesses happens not due to hermeneutical marginalization (the exclusion of members of marginalized groups from the construction of hermeneutical resources), but rather hermeneutical domination: when members of dominant groups have been inappropriately included in the construction of hermeneutical resources. By taking as exemplary cases the concepts of “reverse racism” and “non-consensual sex” this paper shows how such excesses are introduced as a kind of defensive strategy used by dominant ideologies precisely when progress with social justice is made. (shrink)

The Descartes Dictionary is an accessible guide to the world of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences, and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Descartes' thought. The introduction provides a biographical sketch, a brief account of Descartes' philosophical works, and a summary of the current state of Cartesian studies, discussing trends in research over the past four decades. The A-Z entries include clear (...) definitions of the key terms used in Descartes' writings and detailed synopses of his works. Also included are entries noting philosophical influences, of both figures that influenced Descartes and those that he in turn influenced. For anyone reading or studying Descartes, rationalism, or modern philosophy more generally, this original resource provides a wealth of useful information, analysis, and criticism. Including clear explanations of often complex terminology, The Descartes Dictionary covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Descartes' philosophy. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book (...) is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

This title presents a comprehensive guide to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) which is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry taught to undergraduate and postgraduate students today.

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the (...) idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea. (shrink)

WE must first state the subject of our inquiry and the faculty to which it belongs: its subject is demonstration and the faculty that carries it out demonstrative science.

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite (...) the vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

A clearly written, authoritative introduction to Taylor's work.

In mainstream analytic epistemology, Reformed theology has made its presence prominently felt in Reformed epistemology, the view of religious belief according to which religious beliefs can be properly basic and warranted when formed by the proper functioning of the sensus divinitatis, an inborn capacity or faculty for belief in God that can be prompted to generate certain religious beliefs when presented with things (e.g., certain majestic aspects of creation). A major competitor to Reformed epistemology is Wittgensteinian quasi-fideism, a position drawn (...) from the epistemology of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, according to which some foundational religious commitments are not properly basic beliefs but some kind of apodictic, unshakeable certainties that form part of the structure of one’s rationality and worldview. I argue that the Reformed tradition has contained elements of quasi-fideism at least as far back as Calvin’s account of faith from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chapter 2. (shrink)