This article reports research in three Nottingham schools, concerned with (1) 'The school as fertile ground: how the ethos of a school enables everyone in it to benefit from the presence of artists in class'; (2) 'Children on the edge: how the arts reach those children who otherwise exclude themselves from class activities, for any reason' and (3) 'Children's voices and choices: how even very young children can learn to express their wishes, and then have them realised through arts projects'. (...) The research methodology was rooted in two modes of inquiry, philosophical investigation and action research. The article draws on this research to argue that arts-based work in school has helped disadvantaged and/or disaffected children to engage in activities (both arts-based and others), and to be able to lay the groundwork for exercising voice and agency as they did so. If social justice is to flourish there is a need for particular kinds of public spaces and a need to create conditions such that children can learn to participate in those spaces, whether or not they are comfortable with the usual settings for 'rational argument' or 'deliberative democracy'. It is suggested that arts-based education, in some forms, is one good way of creating these conditions. (shrink)

The objective of Working Group 4 of the COST Action NET4Age-Friendly is to examine existing policies, advocacy, and funding opportunities and to build up relations with policy makers and funding organisations. Also, to synthesize and improve existing knowledge and models to develop from effective business and evaluation models, as well as to guarantee quality and education, proper dissemination and ensure the future of the Action. The Working Group further aims to enable capacity building to improve interdisciplinary participation, to promote knowledge (...) exchange and to foster a cross-European interdisciplinary research capacity, to improve cooperation and co-creation with cross-sectors stakeholders and to introduce and educate students SHAFE implementation and sustainability. To enable the achievement of the objectives of Working Group 4, the Leader of the Working Group, the Chair and Vice-Chair, in close cooperation with the Science Communication Coordinator, developed a template to map the current state of SHAFE policies, funding opportunities and networking in the COST member countries of the Action. On invitation, the Working Group lead received contributions from 37 countries, in a total of 85 Action members. The contributions provide an overview of the diversity of SHAFE policies and opportunities in Europe and beyond. These were not edited or revised and are a result of the main areas of expertise and knowledge of the contributors; thus, gaps in areas or content are possible and these shall be further explored in the following works and reports of this WG. But this preliminary mapping is of huge importance to proceed with the WG activities. In the following chapters, an introduction on the need of SHAFE policies is presented, followed by a summary of the main approaches to be pursued for the next period of work. The deliverable finishes with the opportunities of capacity building, networking and funding that will be relevant to undertake within the frame of Working Group 4 and the total COST Action. The total of country contributions is presented in the annex of this deliverable. (shrink)

Involuntary autobiographical memories are spontaneously arising memories of personal events, whereas voluntary memories are retrieved strategically. Voluntary remembering has been studied in numerous experiments while involuntary remembering has been largely ignored. It is generally assumed that voluntary recall is the standard way of remembering, whereas involuntary recall is the exception. However, little is known about the actual frequency of these two types of remembering in daily life. Here, 48 Danish undergraduates recorded their involuntary versus voluntary autobiographical memories during a day (...) using a mechanical counter. Involuntary memories were reported three times as frequently as voluntary memories. Compared to voluntary memories, they were associated less with problem solving and social sharing and more with day dreaming, periods of boredom, no reasons for remembering and predominantly came to mind during unfocused attention. The findings suggest that involuntary recall is a typical way of accessing the personal past. (shrink)

This article analyzes the experiences of ecologists who used data they did not collect themselves. Specifically, the author examines the processes by which ecologists understand and assess the quality of the data they reuse, and investigates the role that standard methods of data collection play in these processes. Standardization is one means by which scientific knowledge is transported from local to public spheres. While standards can be helpful, the results show that knowledge of the local context is critical to ecologists' (...) reuse of data. Yet, this information is often left behind as data move from the private to the public world. The knowledge that ecologists acquire through fieldwork enables them to recover the local details that are so critical to their comprehension of data collected by others. Social processes also play a role in ecologists' efforts to judge the quality of data they reuse. (shrink)

The controversy between hunting apologists and their anti-hunting antagonists continues to escalate. Numerous attempts to settle the issue have failed in part because the participants have often not distinguished and treated separately the various activities labeled “hunting.” Those who participate in hunting fall into one of two categories: shooters or sport hunters. Shooters are those whose ultimate goals do not depend on hunting but can be met in other ways; sport hunters are those who take immense pleasure in the hunt (...) itself and who kill in order to have had an authentic hunting experience. Discussion of the morality of hunting (as opposed to its prudence) is properly restricted to the moral evaluation of the desire of sport hunters to kill for pleasure. This desire can be explained by biological/evolutionary concepts and defended as morally neutral. Neither the animal protectionists nor the utilitarian apologists recognize that violent death is part of nature and that man’s desire to participate in it can be both natural and culturally valuable. Though well-intentioned, utilitarianism is an impotent ethical defense of hunting because it can judge only the prudence, not the morality, of hunting. (shrink)

Natural language is full of patterns that appear to fit with general linguistic rules but are ungrammatical. There has been much debate over how children acquire these “linguistic restrictions,” and whether innate language knowledge is needed. Recently, it has been shown that restrictions in language can be learned asymptotically via probabilistic inference using the minimum description length (MDL) principle. Here, we extend the MDL approach to give a simple and practical methodology for estimating how much linguistic data are required to (...) learn a particular linguistic restriction. Our method provides a new research tool, allowing arguments about natural language learnability to be made explicit and quantified for the first time. We apply this method to a range of classic puzzles in language acquisition. We find some linguistic rules appear easily statistically learnable from language experience only, whereas others appear to require additional learning mechanisms (e.g., additional cues or innate constraints). (shrink)

Identifying patterns in the world requires noticing not only unusual occurrences, but also unusual absences. We examined how people learn from absences, manipulating the extent to which an absence is expected. People can make two types of inferences from the absence of an event: either the event is possible but has not yet occurred, or the event never occurs. A rational analysis using Bayesian inference predicts that inferences from absent data should depend on how much the absence is expected to (...) occur, with less probable absences being more salient. We tested this prediction in two experiments in which we elicited people's judgments about patterns in the data as a function of absence salience. We found that people were able to decide that absences either were mere coincidences or were indicative of a significant pattern in the data in a manner that was consistent with predictions of a simple Bayesian model. (shrink)

Three female physicians were interviewed as part of a comprehensive investigation into the narratives of female and male physicians and nurses, concerning their experience of being in ethically difficult care situations in the care of elderly people. The interviewees expressed great concern for the low status of care for elderly people, and the need to fight for the specialty and for the care and rights of their patients. All the interviewees’ narratives concerned problems relating to perspectives of both action ethics (...) and relational ethics. The main focus was on problems concerning the latter perspective, expressed as profound concern and respect for the individual patient. Secondary emphasis was placed on relationships with relatives and other professionals. The most common themes in an action ethics perspective were too little treatment and the lack of health services for older patients, together with overtreatment and death with dignity. These results were discussed in the light of Løgstrup’s ethics, which emphasize that human life means expressing oneself, in the expectation of being met by others. Both Ricoeur’s concept of an ethics of memory and Aristotle’s virtue ethics are presented in the discussion of too little and too much treatment. (shrink)

Children learn their native language by exposure to their linguistic and communicative environment, but apparently without requiring that their mistakes be corrected. Such learning from “positive evidence” has been viewed as raising “logical” problems for language acquisition. In particular, without correction, how is the child to recover from conjecturing an over-general grammar, which will be consistent with any sentence that the child hears? There have been many proposals concerning how this “logical problem” can be dissolved. In this study, we review (...) recent formal results showing that the learner has sufficient data to learn successfully from positive evidence, if it favors the simplest encoding of the linguistic input. Results include the learnability of linguistic prediction, grammaticality judgments, language production, and form-meaning mappings. The simplicity approach can also be “scaled down” to analyze the learnability of specific linguistic constructions, and it is amenable to empirical testing as a framework for describing human language acquisition. (shrink)

A strength of Jablonka & Lamb's (J&L's) book lies in its accessible as well as thorough treatment of genetic and epigenetic inheritance. The authors also provide a stimulating framework integrating evolutionary research across disciplines. A weakness is its unsystematic treatment of the interaction between behavioral and symbolic inheritance, particularly in their discussion of language.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 22-24, October 2012.

Background The aim of this study was to explore the ethical challenges in surgery from the surgeons' point of view and their experience of being in ethically difficult situations. Methods Five male and five female surgeons at a university hospital in Norway were interviewed as part of a comprehensive investigation into the narratives of nurses and physicians about being in such situations. The transcribed interview texts were subjected to a phenomenological-hermeneutic interpretation. Results No differences in ethical reasoning between male and (...) female surgeons were found. They reasoned in both action and relational ethical perspectives. Surgeons focused on their relationships with patients and colleagues and their moral self in descriptions of the ethical challenges in their work. Dialogue and personal involvement were important in their relationships with patients. The surgeons emphasized the importance of open dialogue, professional recognition, and an inclusive and accepting environment between colleagues. Conclusion The surgeons are personally challenged by the existential realities of human life in their relationships with patients. They realized that ethical challenges are an inherent part of performing surgery and of life itself, and say that they have to learn to "live with" these challenges in a way that is confirmed both socially and by their inner moral self. This means accepting their personal and professional limitations, being uncertain, being fallible, and being humble. Living with the ethical challenges of surgery seems to contribute to the surgeons' confidence and vulnerability in their professional identity. (shrink)