Conducting the first examination of animals' place in popular and scholarly thinking about nature, Anna L. Peterson builds a nature ethic that conceives of nonhuman animals as active subjects who are simultaneously parts of both nature and ...

Themes of Christian martyrdom were central to popular political mobilization in El Salvador, as in much of Latin America, during the 1970s and 1980s. The story of Christ's sacrifice provided a powerful narrative for explaining injustice and political violence, a frame for interpretation as well as action during the twelve-year Salvadoran civil war, which ended in 1992 by a negotiated settlement. In the first part of this article we trace the politics of martyrdom and sacrifice through the war. The final (...) sections of the article examine the place of narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in post-civil war El Salvador. While most Salvadorans today continue to experience high levels of inequality, poverty, and violence, the narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice that animated the revolutionary movements and liberation theology of the 1980s have lost much of their resonance. We suggest that the dispersion of both the perceived sources of, and the imagined solutions to, injustice contribute to the diminution in the importance of Christian narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in El Salvador today. (shrink)

In this study, we test a number of predictions concerning children's knowledge of the transitive Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction between two and three years on one child (Thomas) for whom we have densely collected data. The data show that the earliest SVO utterances reflect earlier use of those same verbs, and that verbs acquired before 2;7 show an earlier move towards adult-like levels of use in the SVO construction and in object argument complexity than later acquired verbs. There is not a (...) close relation with the input in the types of subject and object referents used, nor a close adherence to Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) before 2;7, but both early and late acquired verbs show a simultaneous move towards PAS patterns in selection of referent type at 2;9. The event semantics underpinning early transitive utterances do not straightforwardly fit prototype (high or inalienable) notions of transitivity, but rather may reflect sensitivity to animacy and intentionality in a way that mirrors the input. We conclude that children's knowledge of the transitive construction continues to undergo significant development between 2;0 and 3;0, reflecting the gradual abstraction and integration of the SVO and VO constructions, verb semantics, discourse pragmatics, and the interactions between these factors. These factors are considered in the context of a prototype for the transitive construction. (shrink)

Environmental ethics has been dominated by an idealist logic that limits its positive impact on the natural world about which environmental philosophers care deeply. Environmental ethicists need to alter the ways we think and talk about what we value and the relations among ideas, values, and actions. Drawing on the sociology of religion and Marxian philosophy among other sources, a new approach may increase our understanding of how ideas are lived out and how we might increase the impact of our (...) ideas about the value of nature. (shrink)

Cannabis sativa L. is grown and marketed under a large number of named strains. Strains are often associated with phenotypic traits of interest to consumers, such as aroma and cannabinoid content. Yet genetic inconsistencies have been noted within named strains. We asked whether genetically inconsistent samples of a commercial strain also display inconsistent aroma profiles. We genotyped 32 samples using variable microsatellite regions to determine a consensus strain genotype and identify genetic outliers for four strains. Results were used to select (...) 15 samples for olfactory testing. A genetic outlier sample was available for all but one strain. Aroma profiles were obtained by 55 sniff panelists using quantitative sensory evaluation of 40 odor descriptors. Within a strain, aroma descriptor frequencies for the genetic outlier were frequently at odds with those of the consensus samples. It appears that within-strain genetic differences are associated with differences in aroma profile. Because these differences were perceptible to untrained panelists, they may also be noticed by retail consumers. Our results could help the cannabis industry achieve better control of product consistency. (shrink)

This study examined patterns of auxiliary provision and omission for the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in a longitudinal data set from 11 children between the ages of two and three years. Four possible explanations for auxiliary omission—a lack of lexical knowledge, performance limitations in production, the Optional Infinitive hypothesis, and patterns of auxiliary use in the input—were examined. The data suggest that although none of these accounts provides a full explanation for the pattern of auxiliary use and nonuse observed in (...) children's early speech, integrating input-based and lexical learning-based accounts of early language acquisition within a constructivist approach appears to provide a possible framework in which to understand the patterns of auxiliary use found in the children's speech. The implications of these findings for models of children's early language acquisition are discussed. (shrink)

Productivity is a central concept in the study of language and language acquisition. As a test case for exploring the notion of productivity, we focus on the noun slots of verb frames, such as __want__, __see__, and __get__. We develop a novel combination of measures designed to assess both the flexibility and creativity of use in these slots. We do so using a rigorously controlled sample of child speech and child directed speech from three English-speaking children between the ages of (...) 2–3 years and their caregivers. We find different levels of creativity and flexibility between the adult and child samples for some measures, for some slots, and for some developmental periods. We discuss these differences in the context of verb frame semantics, conventionality versus creativity and child errors, and draw some tentative conclusions regarding developmental changes in children's early grammatical representations. (shrink)

Peterson’s book offers an appraisal of current approaches to environmental and animal ethics and deftly critiques the traditional division between the two fields. Attempts to unite the two fields, Peterson claims, have made little progress. Most have concluded that the divide between the two is irreconcilable, but Peterson argues that the divide is counterintuitive, does not reflect our current practice, and does not represent nature, nonhuman-animals, or humanity, correctly.Throughout the book Peterson attempts to demonstrate why other theories have failed, arguing (...) that the mutual exclusivity of the two fields derives from each relying on an incorrect idea of how nature, nonhumans, and humans relate to—and depend upon—each other. Our actual behaviour shows that we do not think that we must be either an environmental or an animal ethicist, but that we act as if we are both. Peterson argues that by challenging this idea of mutual exclusivity a new theory can be put forward that represen .. (shrink)

Bianchi et al. argue that for some patients with severe and enduring anorexia nervosa approaches that do not aim for complete clinical recovery are ethically warranted. We believe tha...

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance of (...) one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance of (...) one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics and construction (...) grammar that shows abstract linguistic categories can behave in similar ways to non-linguistic categories, for example, by showing graded membership of a category. Thus, the findings lend psychological validity to the existing cross-linguistic evidence for prototypical transitive semantics. Second, we discuss a possible explanation for the fact that prototypical sentences were processed differently in adults and children, namely, that children’s transitive semantic network is not as interconnected or cognitively coherent as adults’. (shrink)

School gardens and garden-based learning continue to gain great popularity in the United States, and their pedagogical potential, and ability to impact students’ fruit and vegetable consumption and activity levels have been well-documented. Less examined is their potential to be agents of food system reskilling and transformation. Though producer and consumer are inextricably linked in the food system, and deskilling of one directly influences the other, theorists often focus on production-centered and consumption-centered deskilling separately. However, in a school garden, the (...) production/consumption disconnect is erased, by virtue of the design of the site itself and how it is utilized by the actors within it. School gardens provide the critical component of education in alternative food networks, and contribute to the producer/consumer reskilling that is a necessary part of food system transformation. We conducted a case study of an established school garden program during its transition from autonomous non-profit to official, district-funded program of a rural school district in the Midwest. By participating in the full “seed to plate” life cycle of a garden crop, students in the garden were actively involved in the reconnection of producer and consumer, while educators were fostering in students an appreciation for fresh, healthy foods and actively challenging the “McDonaldization” of both students’ diets and education. Based upon these findings, we argue that school gardens in rural areas could leverage the dominant role of rural America in developing and shifting food system paradigms. (shrink)

BackgroundThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration traditionally has kept confidential significant amounts of information relevant to the approval or non-approval of specific drugs, devices, and biologics and about the regulatory status of such medical products in FDA’s pipeline.ObjectiveTo develop practical recommendations for FDA to improve its transparency to the public that FDA could implement by rulemaking or other regulatory processes without further congressional authorization. These recommendations would build on the work of FDA’s Transparency Task Force in 2010.MethodsIn 2016-2017, we convened (...) a team of academic faculty from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Yale Medical School, Yale Law School, and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to develop recommendations through an iterative process of reviewing FDA’s practices, considering the legal and policy constraints on FDA in expanding transparency, and obtaining insights from independent observers of FDA.ResultsThe team developed 18 specific recommendations for improving FDA’s transparency to the public. FDA could adopt all these recommendations without further congressional action.FundingThe development of the Blueprint for Transparency at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. (shrink)