Although MOOCs have not lived up to previously breathless predictions of disruption, they have had an outsized influence on university administrators who see online learning as a “savior solution” for ever-shrinking budgets. Despite lower student persistent rates, faculty skepticism, and burdensome faculty workloads, the general public and administrative embrace of online learning has been enthusiastic, which may be explained in part using Foucault’s concept of the episteme to view the convergence of the parallel tracks of educational and technological development--the idea (...) of a kind of mechanism for learning. While MOOCs once promised “best professors,” other institutions now promise the “best designed” mechanisms for learning, certified through corporatized quality assurance programs and learning management systems. While this may be appropriate for shopping educational products in a neoliberal marketplace, it seldom addresses human needs. Moreover, the temporal and human constraints that online... (shrink)

The federal government is funding a sea change in health care by investing in interventions targeting social determinants of health, which are significant contributors to illness and health inequity. This funding power has encouraged states, professional and accreditation organizations, health care entities, and providers to focus heavily on social determinants. We examine how this shift in focus affects clinical practice in the fields of oncology and emergency medicine, and highlight potential areas of reform.

En noviembre de 1976, Amnesty Internacional llegó al país a constatar denuncias sobre violaciones a los derechos humanos. Dos de sus integrantes llegaron a la ciudad de Córdoba. El Hotel Crillón, ubicado en plena city cordobesa y locación donde se alojaron los visitantes, fue el escenario de las acciones de espionaje, persecución y amedrentamiento que sufrieron los dos delegados, un varón y una mujer, que habían llegado para contactarse con posibles denunciantes. Al no poder constituirse como un refugio seguro para (...) expresar aquello que las autoridades negaban, el artículo analiza cómo se frustró esta visita en base a los informes elevados por la Policía Federal a través de un memorando reservado. En la misma se contextualiza el momento, apoyándonos en la historia de la represión local, y se procura una lectura analítica del documento resguardado en el Archivo Provincial de la Memoria de Córdoba. Asimismo, se ofrece su cotejo y contraste con otras informaciones provenientes de testimonios vertidos en diferentes momentos. ¿Cómo y por qué se frustró la visita? ¿Quiénes tuvieron contacto con los visitantes y por qué no fue posible contactar a los familiares y allegados de la/os represaliada/os? ¿Qué testimonios posteriores se conocieron de este acontecimiento frustrado? ¿Cómo habrá incidido en la costosa configuración de la cuestión de los derechos humanos en Córdoba, algo que hemos demostrado en nuestras investigaciones previas del tema? Por fin, ¿qué nos dice este evento de las características de la represión local, de los modos de informar y de las actitudes sociales en dictadura? (shrink)

Experimental research is commonly held up as the paradigm of "good" science. Although experiment plays many roles in science, its classical role is testing hypotheses in controlled laboratory settings. Historical science is sometimes held to be inferior on the grounds that its hypothesis cannot be tested by controlled laboratory experiments. Using contemporary examples from diverse scientific disciplines, this paper explores differences in practice between historical and experimental research vis-à-vis the testing of hypotheses. It rejects the claim that historical research is (...) epistemically inferior. For as I argue, scientists engage in two very different patterns of evidential reasoning and, although there is overlap, one pattern predominates in historical research and the other pattern predominates in classical experimental research. I show that these different patterns of reasoning are grounded in an objective and remarkably pervasive time asymmetry of nature. (shrink)

In earlier work ( Cleland [2001] , [2002]), I sketched an account of the structure and justification of ‘prototypical’ historical natural science that distinguishes it from ‘classical’ experimental science. This article expands upon this work, focusing upon the close connection between explanation and justification in the historical natural sciences. I argue that confirmation and disconfirmation in these fields depends primarily upon the explanatory (versus predictive or retrodictive) success or failure of hypotheses vis-à-vis empirical evidence. The account of historical explanation that (...) I develop is a version of common cause explanation. Common cause explanation has long been vindicated by appealing to the principle of the common cause. Many philosophers of science (e.g., Sober and Tucker) find this principle problematic, however, because they believe that it is either purely methodological or strictly metaphysical. I defend a third possibility: the principle of the common cause derives its justification from a physically pervasive time asymmetry of causation (a.k.a. the asymmetry of overdetermination). I argue that explicating the principle of the common cause in terms of the asymmetry of overdetermination illuminates some otherwise puzzling features of the practices of historical natural scientists. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. By Oliver Sacks.

The question ‘what is life?’ has long been a source of philosophical debate and in recent years has taken on increasing scientific importance. The most popular approach among both philosophers and scientists for answering this question is to provide a “definition” of life. In this article I explore a variety of different definitional approaches, both traditional and non-traditional, that have been used to “define” life. I argue that all of them are deeply flawed. It is my contention that a scientifically (...) compelling understanding of the nature of life presupposes an empirically adequate scientific theory (vs. definition) of life; as I argue, scientific theories are not the sort of thing that can be encapsulated in definitions. Unfortunately, as I also discuss, scientists are currently in no position to formulate even a tentative version of such a theory. Recent discoveries in biology and biochemistry have revealed that familiar Earth life represents a single example that may not be representative of life. If this is the case, life on Earth today provides an empirically inadequate foundation for theorizing about life considered generally. I sketch a strategy for procuring the needed additional examples of life without the guidance of a definition or theory of life, and close with an application to NASA’s fledgling search for extraterrestrial life. (shrink)

Pettit and List argue for realism about group agency, while at the same time try to retain a form of metaphysical and normative individualism on which human beings qualify as natural persons. This is an unstable and untenable combination of views. A corrective is offered here, on which realism about group agency leads us to the following related conclusions: in cases of group agency, the sort of rational unity that defines individual rational unity is realized at the level of a (...) whole group; rational unity is never a metaphysical given but always a product of effort and will; just as it can be realized within groups of human beings it can also be realized within parts of human beings, as well as within whole human lives; in cases of group agency, the rational unity that is achieved at the level of the group typically precludes rational unity at the level of its human constituents within their whole lives, though it can be realized within parts of those human lives. Along the way, a contrast is drawn between cases of genuine group agency and the cases of political agency envisaged by Rousseau and Rawls (and by Pettit and List) which leave individual human beings intact as separate agents in their own rights. (shrink)

Traditional conceptions of informed consent seem difficult or even impossible to apply to new technologies like biobanks, big data, or GMOs, where vast numbers of people are potentially affected, and where consequences and risks are indeterminate or even unforeseeable. Likewise, the principle has come under strain with the appropriation and monetisation of personal information on digital platforms. Over time, it has largely been reduced to bare assent to formalistic legal agreements. To address the current ineffectiveness of the norm of informed (...) consent, I suggest that we need a notion of structural injustice (on a distinctive interpretation, elaborated here, which takes account of unequal power and property relations). I then argue that in order to protect and enhance people's freedom, we have to go beyond traditional applied ethics and introduce perspectives from democratic theory and social philosophy. I attempt to show how applications of the ‘all‐affected principle’, together with new forms of democratic participation, deliberation, and representation can helpfully frame the narrower principle of informed consent. There is an important role for what we could call collective consent, and informed consent can only succeed in increasing individual agency if it is situated within enhanced forms of democratic decision‐making. (shrink)

In “Robots, Trust and War” Simpson claims that victory in counter-insurgency conflicts requires that military forces and their governing body win the ‘hearts and minds’ of civilians. Consequently, forces made up primarily of autonomous robots would be ineffective in these conflicts for two reasons. Firstly, because civilians cannot rationally trust them because they cannot act from a motive based on good character. If they ever did develop this capacity then the purpose of sending them to war in our stead would (...) be lost because there would be no moral saving. Secondly, because if robot forces did offer a moral saving then this would signal that the deploying government could not be trusted to be committed to the conflict. I disagree with both claims. I argue firstly that there are less demanding grounds that could allow robot forces to be trusted sufficiently to be effective whilst still achieving a moral saving over the deployment of human ones. Secondly, that this moral saving would not necessarily signal that the deploying body lacked commitment because its interpretation would be highly context-dependent. I conclude therefore, contra-Simpson, that robot forces could plausibly be effective in counter-insurgency engagements in the foreseeable future. I suggest therefore that there may be a case for developing a more finely grained understanding of the opportunities for, and challenges of, their use. (shrink)

The Church-Turing thesis makes a bold claim about the theoretical limits to computation. It is based upon independent analyses of the general notion of an effective procedure proposed by Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930''s. As originally construed, the thesis applied only to the number theoretic functions; it amounted to the claim that there were no number theoretic functions which couldn''t be computed by a Turing machine but could be computed by means of some other kind of effective (...) procedure. Since that time, however, other interpretations of the thesis have appeared in the literature. In this paper I identify three domains of application which have been claimed for the thesis: (1) the number theoretic functions; (2) all functions; (3) mental and/or physical phenomena. Subsequently, I provide an analysis of our intuitive concept of a procedure which, unlike Turing''s, is based upon ordinary, everyday procedures such as recipes, directions and methods; I call them mundane procedures. I argue that mundane procedures can be said to be effective in the same sense in which Turing machine procedures can be said to be effective. I also argue that mundane procedures differ from Turing machine procedures in a fundamental way, viz., the former, but not the latter, generate causal processes. I apply my analysis to all three of the above mentioned interpretations of the Church-Turing thesis, arguing that the thesis is (i) clearly false under interpretation (3), (ii) false in at least some possible worlds (perhaps even in the actual world) under interpretation (2), and (iii) very much open to question under interpretation (1). (shrink)

Many scientists believe that there is a uniform, interdisciplinary method for the prac- tice of good science. The paradigmatic examples, however, are drawn from classical ex- perimental science. Insofar as historical hypotheses cannot be tested in controlled labo- ratory settings, historical research is sometimes said to be inferior to experimental research. Using examples from diverse historical disciplines, this paper demonstrates that such claims are misguided. First, the reputed superiority of experimental research is based upon accounts of scientific methodology (Baconian inductivism (...) or falsificationism) that are deeply flawed, both logically and as accounts of the actual practices of scientists. Second, although there are fundamental differences in methodology between experimental scien- tists and historical scientists, they are keyed to a pervasive feature of nature, a time asymmetry of causation. As a consequence, the claim that historical science is methodo- logically inferior to experimental science cannot be sustained. (shrink)

: Despite its amazing morphological diversity, life as we know it on Earth today is remarkably similar in its basic molecular architecture and biochemistry. The assumption that all life on Earth today shares these molecular and biochemical features is part of the paradigm of modern biology. This paper examines the possibility that this assumption is false, more specifically, that the contemporary Earth contains as yet unrecognized alternative forms of microbial life. The possibility that more than one form of life arose (...) on Earth is consistent with our current understanding of conditions on the early Earth and the biochemical and molecular possibilities for life. Arguments that microbial descendents of an alternative origin of life could not co-exist with familiar life are belied by what we know of the complexity and diversity of microbial communities. Furthermore, the tools that are currently used to explore the microbial world – microscopy (with the aid of techniques such as DAPI staining and fluorescence in situ hybridization), cultivation and PCR amplification of rRNA genes – could not detect such organisms if they existed. Thus, the fact that we have not discovered any alternative life forms cannot be taken as evidence that they do not exist. (shrink)

Describes what the author sees as a suppression of the feminine in Western culture, technology, and philosophy and opens a feminist postmodern space from which fresh differences may emerge. This title explores underdeveloped themes in American and Canadian feminism. It offers a deconstruction of the phallocentric dichotomies of nature and culture.

The book reviews the theory and concepts of happiness, explaining how these concepts underpin a line of research which is both an attempt to understand the determinants of happiness and a tool for understanding the effects of a host of phenomena on human well being.

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

This paper explores the character of emotion and its value in understanding ethical dilemmas in work organisations. Specifically, we examine the emotional labour of human resource professionals. Through in-depth interviews and diary study, we uncover the emotional and ethical struggles of HRPs as they search for the ‘right thing to do’ in situated interaction. Through the lens of emotion, we chart the process of how the very framing of what is deemed ‘right’ can move from the social to the moral (...) order and vice versa. Based on our findings, we contribute to understanding the linkages between emotional and ethical dilemmas, and how expectations of multiple ‘others’ at the individual, interpersonal and organisational level shape and constrain ethical choices. (shrink)

No descriptive material is available for this title.

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because (...) proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

In the technical literature of computer science, the concept of an effective procedure is closely associated with the notion of an instruction that precisely specifies an action. Turing machine instructions are held up as providing paragons of instructions that "precisely describe" or "well define" the actions they prescribe. Numerical algorithms and computer programs are judged effective just insofar as they are thought to be translatable into Turing machine programs. Nontechnical procedures (e.g., recipes, methods) are summarily dismissed as ineffective on the (...) grounds that their instructions lack the requisite precision. But despite the pivotal role played by the notion of a precisely specified instruction in classifying procedures as effective and ineffective, little attention has been paid to the manner in which instructions "precisely specify" the actions they prescribe. It is the purpose of this paper to remedy this defect. The results are startling. The reputed exemplary precision of Turing machine instructions turns out to be a myth. Indeed, the most precise specifications of action are provided not by the procedures of theoretical computer science and mathematics (algorithms) but rather by the nontechnical procedures of everyday life. I close with a discussion of some of the rumifications of these conclusions for understanding and designing concrete computers and their programming languages. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Aging at work is a dynamic process. As individuals age, their motives, abilities and values change as suggested by life-span development theories (Kanfer & Ackerman, 2004; Lang & Carstensen, 2002). Their growth and extrinsic motives weaken while intrinsic motives increase (Kooij, De Lange, Jansen, Kanfer, & Dikkers, 2011), which may result in workers investing their resources in different areas accordingly. However, there is significant individual variability in aging trajectories (Hedge, Borman, & Lammlein, 2005). In addition, the changing nature of work, (...) the evolving job demands, as well as the available opportunities at work may no longer be suitable for older workers, increasing the likelihood of person-job misfit. The potential misfit may, in turn, impact how older workers perceive themselves on the job, which leads to conflicting work identities. With the traditional job redesign approach being a top-down process, it is often difficult for organizations to take individual needs and skills into consideration and tailor jobs for every employee (Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2010). Therefore, job crafting, being an individualized process initiated by employees themselves, can be a particularly valuable mechanism for older workers to realign and enhance their demands-abilities and needs-supplies fit. Through job crafting, employees can exert personal agency and make changes to the task, social and cognitive aspects of their jobs with the goal of improving their work experience (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Building on the Life Span Theory of Control (Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995), we posit that job crafting, particularly cognitive crafting, will be of increasing value as employees age. Through reframing how they think of their job and choosing to emphasize job features that are personally meaningful, older workers can optimize their resources to proactively redesign their jobs and maintain congruent, positive work identities. (shrink)

In recent decades, the governance of food safety, food quality, on-farm environmental management and animal welfare has been shifting from the realm of ‘the government’ to that of the private sector. Corporate entities, especially the large supermarkets, have responded to neoliberal forms of governance and the resultant ‘hollowed-out’ state by instituting private standards for food, backed by processes of certification and policed through systems of third party auditing. Today’s food regime is one in which supermarkets impose ‘private standards’ along the (...) food supply chain to ensure compliance with a range of food safety goals—often above and beyond those prescribed by government. By examining regulatory governance in Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom we highlight emerging trajectories of food governance. We argue that the imposition of the new private forms of monitoring and compliance continue the project of agricultural restructuring that began with government support for structural adjustment schemes in agriculture and that these are most evident in the UK and Australia where neoliberalism is an entrenched philosophy. However, despite Norway’s identity as a social democracy, we also identify neoliberal ‘creep’ into the system of food governance. Small-scale producers in all three nations are finding themselves increasingly subject to governance through private, market-based mechanisms that, to varying degrees, are dominated by major supermarket chains. The result is agricultural restructuring not through the traditional avenues of elected governments, but via non-elected market operatives. (shrink)

Abstract: The emergence of cross-border communities and transnational associations requires new ways of thinking about the norms involved in democracy in a globalized world. Given the significance of human rights fulfillment, including social and economic rights, I argue here for giving weight to the claims of political communities while also recognizing the need for input by distant others into the decisions of global governance institutions that affect them. I develop two criteria for addressing the scope of democratization in transnational contexts— (...) common activities and impact on basic human rights —and argue for their compatibility. I then consider some practical implications for institutional transformation and design, including new forms of transnational representation. (shrink)

Coming more than a decade after I first argued that people who are oppressed have an obligation to resist their oppression, this paper expands the implications of the original account and connects it up to some of the important contemporary work published in oppression studies in the interim. I then move on to respond to two critical objections to my view. The first objection charges that the typical severity of oppressive harms is not sufficiently great to ground a general obligation (...) of resistance. The second objection charges that this project would do better to conceive of resistance in political, rather than moral, terms. (shrink)