The methodological underpinnings of studies into early specialization have recently been critiqued. Previous researchers have commented on the variety of, and over-simplified, methods used to capture early specialization. This exploratory study, therefore, suggests a new direction for how early specialization can be conceptualised and measured. We aim to create an index approach whereby early specialization is measured as a continuous variable, in line with commonly used definitions. The continuous variable for degrees of early specialization is calculated from a questionnaire which (...) captures the four key components of early specialization; 1) intensity, 2) year-round training, 3) single sport, and 4) commencing age 12 or younger. The proposed index approach is illustrated in a sample of 290 Swedish aesthetic performers aged 12-20 years (M = 15.88), whose descriptive statistics are used to discuss the suitability and usability of the measure. The proposed index approach functions as a guideline to future researchers. We hope that introducing a new index approach we will encourage further discussion around the measurement of early specialization. Additionally, we hope to pave the way for future research to explore more complex research questions. (shrink)

Conceptualized within the framework of self-determination theory, the aim of the current study was to investigate the relation between perfectionistic concerns and (a) controlled (non-self-determined) motivation and (b) performance anxiety through basic psychological need frustration (frustration of competence, autonomy, and realtedness), and if these relations would be moderated by controlling teaching/coaching conditions. We used a cross-sectional moderated mediation design and purposefully selected Norwegian elite junior performers (N = 171; Mage = 17.3; SDage= 0.94) from talent development schools, who completed an (...) online questionnaire to report their perceptions of the study variables. Associations were examined using structural equation modeling. The results showed that perfectionistic concerns were positively associated with controlling conditions, basic needs frustration, controlled motivation, and performance anxiety. Reported controlling teaching/coaching conditions moderated the positive indirect relationship between perfectionistic concerns and (a) controlled motivation and (b) performance anxiety through competence need frustration. Specifically, these indirect associations were evident for performers reporting moderate or high levels of controlling teaching/coaching conditions. In contrast, there were no indirect associations via competence need frustration for those performers who reported low levels of controlling conditions. In conclusion, the results indicate that perfectionistic concerns appear to be a vulnerability factor that exposes elite junior performers to higher risks of entering a debilitative motivational process. This seems especially likely when exposed to controlling teaching/coaching conditions. Coaches and teachers working with elite junior performers should avoid using controlling mechanisms and instead foster autonomous functioning. (shrink)

Building on the modified theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study examined the underlying psychological motives for academic dishonesty in a sample of 250 undergraduates drawn from three selected Malaysian public universities. The results yielded additional supports for usefulness of modified TPB model in predicting academic misconduct. All components of the model exerted statistically significant effects on intention towards academic misconduct, and intention itself exerted a statistically significant impact on academic dishonesty. This suggests that students’ academic misconducts could be addressed (...) effectively if proper attention is given to the underpinning factors. Further, the findings revealed that the hypothesized relationships among variables of the modified model were all statistically significant. The uniqueness of this study lies in the large amount of variance (69 % and 75 %) explained by components of the model (in the prediction of intention and academic dishonesty respectively). These variances have rarely been accounted for in the previous studies. Implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions advanced for future studies. (shrink)

Many generativist accounts argue for very early knowledge of inflection on the basis of very low rates of person/number marking errors in young children's speech. However, studies of Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese have revealed that these low overall error rates actually hide important differences across the verb paradigm. The present study investigated children's production of person/number marked verbs by eliciting present tense verb forms from 82 native Finnish-speaking children aged 2;2–4;8 years. Four main findings were observed: Rates of person/number marking (...) errors were higher in low-frequency person/number contexts, even excluding children who showed no evidence of having learned the relevant morpheme, most errors involved the use of higher frequency forms in lower frequency person/number contexts, error rates were predicted not only by the frequency of person/number contexts but also by the frequency of individual “ready-inflected” lexical target forms, and for low-frequency verbs, lower error rates were observed for verbs with high phonological neighborhood density. It is concluded that any successful account of the development of verb inflection will need to incorporate both rote-storage and retrieval of individual inflected forms and phonological analogy across them. (shrink)

Education, Religion and Society celebrates the career of Professor John Hull of the University of Birmingham, UK, the internationally renowned religious educationist who has also achieved worldwide fame for his brilliant writings on his experience, mid-career, of total blindness. In his outstanding career he has been a leading figure in the transformation of religious education in English and Welsh state schools from Christian instruction to multi-faith religious education and was the co-founder of the International Seminar on Religious Education and values. (...) John Hull has also made major contributions to the theology of disability and the theological critique of the "money culture." This volume brings together leading international scholars to honour John Hull's contribution, with a focus on furthering scholarship in the areas where he has been active as a thinker. The book offers a critical appreciation of his contribution to religious education and practical theology, and goes on to explore the continuing debate about the role of religious education in promoting international understanding, intercultural education and human rights education. A possible basis for integrating Islamic education into Western education is suggested and the contribution of the philosophy of religion to pluralistic religious education is outlined. The contributors also deal with issues relating to indoctrination, racism and relationship in Christian religious aspects, and examines aspects of the the theology of social exclusion and disability. (shrink)

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (TSE) has shaped African Americans’ views of the American health care system, contributing to a reluctance to participate in biomedical research and a suspicion of the medical system. This essay examines public discourses surrounding President Clinton’s attempt to restore African Americans’ trust by apologizing for the TSE. Through a narrative reading, we illustrate the failure of this text as an attempt to reconcile the United States Public Health Service and the African American public. We conclude by (...) noting the limitations of rhetoric when equal prominence is not given to policy proposals in national apologies. (shrink)

Resumen En el presente estudio se aborda la descripción de la semántica de los marcadores evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que en el marco de la teoría de la relevancia (TR). Tomando como punto de partida el análisis que Albelda, M. (2018). ¿Atenuación del compromiso del hablante?: El caso de los evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que. Rilce, 34.3, 1179–1214. traza de ambos evidenciales en un corpus oral, se realizó un estudio tanto cuantitativo como cualitativo de (...) los patrones y el rango de interpretaciones de cada expresión en una muestra de géneros escritos formales procedentes del Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). Los resultados cuantitativos mostraron algunas diferencias con respecto a los obtenidos por Albelda, M. (2018). ¿Atenuación del compromiso del hablante?: El caso de los evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que. Rilce, 34.3, 1179–1214: por lo visto es principalmente inferencial y, en menor medida, reportativo en la escritura formal. En contraste con los géneros orales, tiende a introducir inferencias genéricas, y en ocasiones también precede conjeturas. Se alinea con el parámetro de la objetividad, permitiendo al emisor mostrar una menor implicación hacia la evidencia, así como un mayor compromiso epistémico hacia la fiabilidad de la información. Se ve que, por el contrario, es generalmente un marcador inferencial, tanto en géneros escritos como orales. Se emplea, principalmente, para encabezar inferencias conjeturales. Con se ve que, el emisor muestra una mayor implicación y subjetivización, y un menor compromiso epistémico hacia la evidencia que se introduce en el discurso. Los diferentes patrones de comportamiento discursivo exhibidos por ambos evidenciales pueden explicarse en el marco de la teoría argumentativa del razonamiento (Mercier, H. y Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34.2, 57–74; Mercier H. y Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.). Por lo visto y se ve que tienden a introducir, respectivamente, conclusiones intuitivas y reflexivas que deben ser verificadas y aceptadas por la audiencia. Se ve que apunta, generalmente, a la activación de los mecanismos cognitivos de vigilancia epistémica y lectura de la mente, mientras que por lo visto tiende a desencadenar los procesos de vigilancia epistémica y de razonamiento. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that a false assumption drives the attraction of philosophers to a divine command theory of morality. Specifically, I suggest the idea that anything not created by God is independent of God is a misconception. The idea misleads us into thinking that our only choice in offering a theistic ground for morality is between making God bow to a standard independent of his will or God creating morality in revealing his will. Yet what is God (...) is hardly independent of him, and in coupling a perfect being theology with the doctrine of divine simplicity we discover that God’s “reason” is God. Accordingly, obeying the truths of goodness that we humans speak of as contained in the divine wisdom hardly impugns the divine sovereignty. By modifying divine command ethics to give primacy to God’s love or justice, thinkers such as Robert M. Adams, Philip L. Quinn, and Edward J. Wierenga admit the repugnance of this picture in spite of their verbal allegiance to divine command ethics. Accordingly, they implicitly concede that basing morality on God’s sheer power should not be the preferred option for the Christian theist. (shrink)

American physicians are increasingly concerned that they are losing professional control. Other analysts of medical power argue that physicians have too much power. This essay argues that current analyses are grounded in a structuralist reading of power. Deploying Michel Foucault's "care of the self" and rhetorician Raymie McKerrow's "critical rhetoric," this essay claims that medical power is better understood as a way that medical actors take on power through rhetoric rather than a force that has power over medical actors. Through (...) a close reading of an essay by Senator Bill Frist, this paper argues that physicians experience a process of "subjection" wherein they are both agents of and objects of medical power as it is combined with state and corporate power in the American "war on terror." This alternative mode of analyzing medical power has implications for our collective understanding of its operations and the means by which we propose alternative enactments of medical power. (shrink)

Through photographs and translations of Friedrich Nietzsche's evocative writings on his work sites, David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates explore the cities and landscapes in which Nietzsche lived and worked. "A brilliant juxtaposition of life and thought.... The sympathy of this pictorial biography is rivaled by few books on Nietzsche."—Charles M. Stang, _Boston Book Review_ "[A] distinguished addition to the Nietzsche-friendly corpus."—Alain de Botton, _Los Angeles Times Book Review_ "An odd and oddly endearing record of Nietzsche's travels."—John Banville, (...) _New York Review of Books_. (shrink)

This paper discusses the notion of ecopoetics in relation to the work of Martin Heidegger and his concept of dwelling. Our aim, broadly stated, is to respond to the question: "What frame of mind could bring about sustainability - and how might we develop it?" In the first part of the paper, we comment on Jonathan Bate's notion of ecopoetics and his discussion of Heidegger. Crucial here is the question of whether we can ever approach Nature in an non-ideological way (...) or are all attempts to capture Nature, theoretically or poetically or narratively, nothing more than our own peculiar appropriation of it? Ecopoetics might be conceived as a response to this question, although we dispute Bate's view. In the second part of the paper, following Micheal Haar's perceptive reading, we elaborate the four senses that Heidegger gives to Nature, and in the third section, we make some concluding comments about the notion of sustainability that might be explicated in relation to Heidegger's four senses of Nature. (shrink)

Social media is a prominent communication platform. Its active usage permeates all generations and it is imperative that the platform be fully optimized for knowledge transfer and innovation diffusion. However, there are several considerations regarding platform usage, including media affordances. Social media affordances enable users to interact with the world around them through features of modality, agency, interactivity, and navigation. Previous studies have indicated that social media affordances significantly influence user behavior and usage. However, research exploring the effect of social (...) media affordances on knowledge acquisition and the reduction of decision-making complexities is limited. Therefore, focusing on 179 paddy farmers in Malaysia, this study examined the effect of social media affordances on information quality, knowledge acquisition, and complexity reduction regarding innovation adoption decisions using a quantitative approach. This study’s findings reveal that social media affordances have a significant effect on perceived information quality, knowledge acquisition, and complexity reduction. (shrink)

Background:Moral courage is defined as courage to act according to one’s own ethical values and principles even at the risk of negative consequences for the individual. In a complex nursing practice, ethical considerations are integral. Moral courage is needed throughout nurses’ career.Aim:To analyse graduating nursing students’ moral courage and the factors associated with it in six European countries.Research design:A cross-sectional design, using a structured questionnaire, as part of a larger international ProCompNurse study. In the questionnaire, moral courage was assessed with (...) a single question (visual analogue scale 0–100), the questionnaire also covered several background variables.Participants and research context:The sample comprised graduating nursing students (n = 1796) from all participating countries. To get a comprehensive view about graduating nursing students’ moral courage, the views of nurse managers (n = 538) and patients (n = 1327) from the same units in which the graduating nursing students practised were also explored, with parallel questionnaires.Ethical considerations:Ethical approvals and research permissions were obtained according to national standards in every country and all participants gave their informed consent.Results:The mean of graduating nursing students’ self-assessed moral courage was 77.8 (standard deviation 17.0; on a 0–100 scale), with statistically significant differences between countries. Higher moral courage was associated with many factors, especially the level of professional competence. The managers assessed the graduating nursing students’ moral courage lower (66.5; standard deviation 18.4) and the patients slightly higher (80.6; standard deviation 19.4) than the graduating nursing students themselves.Discussion and conclusions:In all countries, the graduating nursing students’ moral courage was assessed as rather high, with differences between countries and populations. These differences and associations between moral courage and ethics education require further research. (shrink)

Contextualist accounts of aesthetic predicates have difficulties explaining why we feel that speakers are disagreeing when they make true and compatible but superficially contradictory aesthetic judgments. One possible way to account for the disagreement is hybrid expressivism, which holds that the disagreement happens at the level of pragmatically conveyed, clashing contents about the speakers’ conative states. Marques defends such a strategy, combining dispositionalism about value, contextualism, and hybrid expressivism. This paper critically evaluates the plausibility of the suggested pragmatic mechanisms in (...) conveying the kind of contents Marques takes to explain disagreements. The positive part suggests an alternative account of how aesthetic judgments are sources of information about speakers’ conative aesthetic states. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

One problematic aspect of the rationality of medical practice concerns the relation between expert knowledge and non-expert knowledge. In medical practice it is important to match medical knowledge with the self-knowledge of the individual patient. This paper tries to study the problem of such matching by describing a model for technological paradigms and comparing it with an ideal of technological rationality. The professionalised experts tend to base their decisions and actions mostly on medical knowledge while the rationality of medicine also (...) involves just as important elements of the personal evaluation and knowledge of the patients. Since both types of knowledge are necessary for rational decisions, the gap between the expert and the non-expert has to be bridged in some way. A solution to the problem is suggested in terms of pluralism, with the patient as ultimate decision-maker. (shrink)

Protecting human subjects from being exploited is one of the main ethical challenges for clinical research. However, there is also a responsibility to protect and respect the communities who are hosting the research. Recently, attention has focused on the most efficient way of carrying out clinical research, so that it benefits society by providing valuable research while simultaneously protecting and respecting the human subjects and the communities where the research is conducted. Collaboration between partners plays an important role and that (...) is why we carried out a study to describe how collaborative partnership and social value are emerging in clinical research. A supra-analysis design for qualitative descriptive secondary analysis was employed to consider a novel research question that pertained to nurse leaders’ perceptions of ethical recruitment in clinical research and the ethics-related aspects of clinical research from the perspective of administrative staff. The data consisted of two separate pre-existing datasets, comprising 451 pages from 41 interviews, and we considered the research question by using deductive-inductive content analysis with NVivo software. A deductive analysis matrix was generated on the basis of two requirements, namely collaborative partnership and social value, as presented in An Ethical Framework for Biomedical Research by Emanuel et al. The findings showed that collaborative partnership was a cornerstone for ethical clinical research and ways to foster inter-partner collaboration were indicated, such as supporting mutual respect and equality, shared goals and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. In addition, the social value of clinical research was an important precondition for ethical clinical research and its realisation required the research partners to demonstrate collaboration and shared responsibility during the research process. However, concerns emerged that the multidimensional meaning of clinical research for society was not fully recognised. Achieving greater social value for clinical research required greater transparency, setting research priorities, shared responsibility for the dissemination and use of the findings and stronger community awareness of the ethics-related aspects of clinical research. Collaborative partnership and social values are essential for protecting the human subjects and communities involved in clinical research. (shrink)

Glitch composition is a meta-discursive practice: rather than writing new music inspired by older recordings, it constructs new music inspired by the technological conditions and limitations in which those recordings emerged. For those listeners who aren’t particularly interested in technology theories, such music is particularly alienating—an in-joke that one doesn’t get. When glitch becomes pop, it loses its theoretical savvy, replacing the “synth pad” in a contemporary pop song. Glitch’s subversion of the bad value judgment placed on damaged media is (...) only a partial one—as scratched CDs (whether they be glitch ones or not) remain economically worthless commodities. (shrink)

Aeschylus’ Oresteia supports Aristotle’s claim about the naturalness of the city and the city’s role in shaping justice for humans. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus shows how the city’s justice is the only way to control the wrath of the Furies. Aeschylus shows that the city and its justice tames the Furies and provides for the only way by which the husband-wife relation, which is not a blood tie but provides the basis for which the family is even possible, can be (...) preserved and be secure from the passions the Furies release in their quest for revenge. The Furies and their desire for vengeance for the violation of the blood bond, threaten to undermine the very basis on which the family is founded: the husband-wife bond. Thus Aeschylus gives support and aids Aristotle’s position that the husband-wife bond is a political bond and rests within the realm of the city and the political. (shrink)

How Moderate Relativists Should Explain the Appearance of Disagreements About Taste Moderate relativists such as Kölbel and Lasersohn have motivated the semantic framework by arguing that unlike contextualism, it can explain why there appear to be disagreements of taste. The solution relies on the relativist notion of a proposition whose truth depends on a judge parameter. This notion coupled with the view that contradicting propositions create an appearance of disagreement allegedly enables them to secure the right predictions. This paper questions (...) the argumentative strategy by showing that there are no basis to infer pragmatic data from formal semantics. I then present a way to understand the relativist framework from the point of view of mental representation. The view put forward explains the missing relation between the semantic framework and pragmatics, and predicts why there is an appearance of disagreements about taste. (shrink)

Although Judith Butler's theorization of violence has begun to receive growing scholarly attention, the feminist theoretical background of her notion of violence remains unexplored. In order to fill this lacuna, this article explicates the feminist genealogy of Butler's notion of violence. I argue that Butler's theorization of violence can be traced back to Gender Trouble, to her discussion of Monique Wittig's argument that the binary categorization of sex can be conceived as a form of discursive violence. I contend, first, that (...) Butler starts to develop her notion of “gender violence” on the basis of her reading of Wittig, and second, that Butler's more recent writings on military violence and the ethics of nonviolence build on her early interpretation of Wittig. On the basis of my reading, I suggest, in contrast to recent criticism, that Butler's later critique of violence is not at odds with but rather expands upon her prior work on violence. (shrink)

Meri Genetz was a Finnish painter, esotericist, and a spiritual seeker. Around 1925, she began truly dedicating herself to spiritual seeking and started to make notes of her studies in black notebooks. This article will go through four of those notebooks which today offer a vivid picture of Genetz’s seeking between the years 1925 and 1943. In the beginning, Genetz acquainted herself with Gnosticism, Theosophy, and Kabbalah, as well as the works of Christian mystics, such as Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob (...) Böhme, the writings of, for example, Paracelsus, and texts attributed to the mythic figure Hermes Trismegistus. Gradually Genetz started to outline her own views, ideas, and theories regarding higher truth and spiritual wisdom. In the beginning of the 1930s her main quest came to be to find her ‘other half’ and become whole. She started attending Spiritualist séances, where she would ask about her other half and discuss the state of her soul, the souls of others, her art and marriage, and the books she had read. In time, Genetz’s quest for true wisdom and self-fulfilment became more and more restless and impatient. When she died in 1943, she was still seeking. (shrink)

New and complex technologies are exceedingly present and in widespread use in contemporary cities globally. The urban lifeworld is saturated with various applications of information and computing technologies, but also more rudimentary forms of technology construct and create the urban everyday life as we know it. Many forms of urban technologies are perceived first through their everyday aesthetic qualities: how they look, feel, sound, or are otherwise encountered within the streetscape. Philosophical aesthetics, however, has tended to overlook everyday technologies as (...) a topic, often due to unquestioned ideas of how a city should ideally look and feel. Thus, a more realistic approach to contemporary cities is needed, in which the deep-seated role of technologies is recognized and the experiences related to their entangled uses become acknowledged. This paper brings together recent developments in urban aesthetics with some of the core ideas of postphenomenological approaches to new urban technologies. (shrink)