The increase in drop-out rates, especially among older people, in longitudinal studies is a matter for concern if the results are to be valid. The research reported here contains a number of pieces of evidence that might help address the problem. These include a literature review, a survey of some longitudinal studies, secondary analysis of the data from a longitudinal study of civil servants, and new data from focus groups and telephone interviews with participants from this current study. The findings (...) relate to reasons why older people continue to take part in such studies, why they drop out and what might encourage them to continue participating. The main reasons for drop out relate to being older, having cognitive impairment and poor functioning, living alone, being a woman and being less educated. There were also a range of practical reasons including the study being too time-consuming and problems with transport. (shrink)

This book explores a fundamental tension in Aristotle's metaphysics: how can an entity such as a living organisma composite generated through the imposition of form on preexisting matterhave the conceptual unity that Aristotle demands of ...

In our everyday moral deliberations, we attend to two central types of considerations – outcomes and moral rules. How these considerations interrelate is central to the long-standing debate between deontologists and utilitarians. Is the weight we attach to moral rules reducible to their conduciveness to good outcomes (as many utilitarians claim)? Or do we take moral rules to be absolute constraints on action that normatively trump outcomes (as many deontologists claim)? Arguments over these issues characteristically appeal to commonsense intuitions about (...) various cases. As a result, an important portion of the debate involves empirically tractable questions — questions that can be investigated by probing for people’s judgments in cases in which the two types of considerations come into conflict with one another. (shrink)

In recent decades the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy has been a focal point for debate about the distinctiveness of analysis as a particular kind of therapeutic enterprise. In _Interpretation and Interaction_, Jerome Oremland invokes the interventions of "interpretation" and "interaction," rooted in the values of understanding and amelioration, respectively, as a conceptual basis for reappraising these important issues. In place of the commonly accepted triadic division among psychoanalysis, exploratory psychotherapy, and supportive psychotherapy, he proposes a new triad: psychoanalysis, psychoanalytically-oriented (...) psychotherapy, and interactive psychotherapy. Anchoring his classification in what he terms the "orientation of the therapy" rather than the "orientation of the therapist," Oremland submits that analysis and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy strive systematically to _interpret_ the therapeutic interaction as expressed in the transference. Interactive psychotherapy, on the other hand, uses the transference selectively to ameliorate psychic stress. _Interpretation and Interaction_ is enriched by a concluding chapter from Merton Gill, a preeminent authority on the therapeutic process. Gill's critical appreciation of Oremland's proposals amounts to an illuminating refinement of his own position on the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Scholarly in conception, thoughtful in tone, and pragmatic in yield, _Interpretation and Interaction_ is a clarifying addition to the psychoanalytic theory of psychotherapy. It will have the practical consequence, in Gill's words, of "aiding clinicians in retaining their analytic identities and their analytic orientation across the spectrum of their therapeutic work.". (shrink)

"Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Plato's retelling of the discourses between Socrates and his friends on such subjects (...) as love and desire, truth and illusion, spiritual transcendence and the qualities of a good ruler, profoundly affected the ways in which we view human relationships, society and leadership - and shaped the whole tradition of Western philosophy."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

In the mid-20th century, descriptive meta-ethics addressed a number of central questions, such as whether there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation, whether moral reasons are absolute or relative, and whether moral judgments express attitudes or describe states of affairs. I maintain that much of this work in mid-20th century meta-ethics proceeded on an assumption that there is good reason to question. The assumption was that our ordinary discourse is uniform and determinate enough to vindicate one side (...) or the other of these meta-ethical debates. I suggest that ordinary moral discourse may be much less uniform and determinate than 20th century meta-ethics assumed. (shrink)

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's investigation (...) of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

Discover the truth about sex in the city (and the country). Mapping Desire explores the places and spaces of sexuality from body to community, from the "cottage" to the Barrio, from Boston to Jakarta, from home to cyberspace. Mapping Desire is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desires presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring how (...) the heterosexed body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. Editors David Bell and Gill Valentine have brought together contributors with a wealth of approaches to ways in which the spaces of sex and the sexes of space are being mapped out across contemporary culture. Among the many sexual geographies covered are: Lesbians at home and on the streets; gay men on fantasy islands; bisexual identities; The heterosexualization of the workplace; bachelor farmers and spinsters; surveillance and sexuality; prostitution; queer politics; sexual citizenship, and the transformation of intimacy. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualized spaces: global/local; sexualized spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature. Mapping Desire will be a valuable and accessible travelogue of information for anyone interested in social, cultural and political geography, lesbian and gay studies, cultural studies, or simply those who want to find out more about the sexual landscape of contemporary society. Contents: Part I: Cartographies/Identities; Resolving Riddles: The Sexed Body, Julia Cream ; Locating Bisexual Identities: Discourses of Bisexuality and Contemporary Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings; Of Moffies, Kaffiers and Perverts: Male Homosexuality and the Discourse of Moral Order in the Apartheid State, Glen Elder; Femme on the Streets, Butch in the Sheets (a Play on Whores), Alison Murray; Body Work: The Performance of Gendered and (Hetero)Sexualized Identities in City Workplaces, Linda McDowell; Part II: Sexualized Spaces: Global/Local; Whenever I Lay My Girlfriend That's My Home: The Performance and Surveillance of Lesbian Identities in Domestic Environments, Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine; The Lesbian Flaneur, Sally Munt; Fantasy Islands: Popular Topographies of Marooned Masculinities, Gregory Woods; Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis, Lawrence Knopp; Part III: Sexualized Spaces: Local/Global; "And She Told Two Friends...": Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space, Tamar Rothenberg; Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality and the Production of Queer Space, Jon Binnie; Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota, Jerry Lee Kramer; (Re)Constructing a Spanish Redlight District: Prostitution, Space and Power, Angie Hart; Part IV: Sites of Resistance; "Surveilliant Gays": HIV, Space and the Construction of Identities, David Woodhead; Sex, Scale and the "New Urban Politics": HIV-Prevention Strategies from Yaletown, Vancouver, Michael Brown; "Boom, Bye, Bye": Jamaican Ragga and Gay Resistance, Tracey Skelton; The Diversity of Queer Politics and the Redefinition of Sexual Identity and Community in Urban Space, Tim Davis; Perverse Dynamics, Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation of Intimacy, David Bell; Guide to Further Reading; Bibliography. (shrink)

The ethical dilemma of whether autonomous vehicles should protect the passengers or pedestrians when harm is unavoidable has been widely researched and debated. Several behavioral scientists have sought public opinion on this issue, based on the premise that EDs are critical to resolve for AV adoption. However, many scholars and industry participants have downplayed the importance of these edge cases. Policy makers also advocate a focus on higher level ethical principles rather than on a specific solution to EDs. But conspicuously (...) absent from this debate is the view of the consumers or potential adopters, who will be instrumental to the success of AVs. The current research investigated this issue both from a theoretical standpoint and through empirical research. The literature on innovation adoption and risk perception suggests that EDs will be heavily weighted by potential adopters of AVs. Two studies conducted with a broad sample of consumers verified this assertion. The results from these studies showed that people associated EDs with the highest risk and considered EDs as the most important issue to address as compared to the other technical, legal and ethical issues facing AVs. As such, EDs need to be addressed to ensure robustness in the design of AVs and to assure consumers of the safety of this promising technology. Some preliminary evidence is provided about interventions to resolve the social dilemma in EDs and about the ethical preferences of prospective early adopters of AVs. (shrink)

This paper presents a model for the structure of universal frameworks in logic, mathematics, and physics that are closed to logical conclusion by the mechanism of paradox across a dualism of elements. The prohibition takes different forms defined by the framework of observation inherent to the structure. Forms include either prohibition to conclusion on the logical relationship of internal elements or prohibition to conclusion based on the existence of an element not included in the framework of a first element. The (...) model is applied to logical arguments in philosophy, mathematics, and physics and is initially a geometrical analysis of quantum theory and its application in experiment. Conclusion from the analysis is extended to give insight into the complexity of infinities above the two-dimensional boundary of the model. (shrink)

This article reviews three recent books that enhance our understanding of the work of French feminist Luce Irigaray: Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Irigaray Reader, and Philosophy in the Feminine, a commentary on Irigaray's work by Margaret Whitford. The author emphasizes a dynamic reading of Irigaray's philosophy and integrates theoretical concepts with poetic/utopian passages from the works.

We claim that the Universe’s fundamental structure is not discoverable through rationalism. The various frameworks studied are logic, mathematics, their application through theories in physics, and finally, the pivotally separate application of logic to historical evidence in formal religious belief. The basis of the prohibition is that rational structure has a limit for consistency that falls short of completeness in absolute terms. The limit of observability reaches only a framework in which correlated elements are formed paradoxically within a parent structure. (...) Apart from our advanced ability in human reasoning, we have the same fundamental sentience possessed by other living creatures. Beyond that limit of awareness, the Universe in its native form is immaculately nonordered. We examine the dimensional relationship between quantum and classical frameworks to justify the theory. Mathematics requires operational consistency across its elements. In contrast, the Universe incorporates a feature of inconsistency in its native form. The companion paper to this document examines in detail how complexity develops from a null condition across dimensional levels. The argument’s foundation applies a general framework of stationary action and self-organization principles to the theory and experimental data on Hardy’s paradox. The complementary format to the dichotomy of paradoxical elements is its sliding scale of uncertainty between their extremes. The argument extends that the root source of societal biases, conflicts, and bigotries is the fundamental and systemic mechanism of paradox. (shrink)

Erving Goffman’s “Asylums” is a key text in the development of contemporary, community-orientated mental health practice. It has survived as a trenchant critique of the asylum as total institution, and its publication in 1961 in book form marked a further stage in the discrediting of the asylum model of mental health care. In this paper, some responses from a range of disciplines to this text, 50 years on, are presented. A consultant psychiatrist with a special interest in cultural psychiatry and (...) mental health legislation, two collaborating psychotherapists in adult and forensic mental health, a philosopher, and a recent medical graduate, present their varying responses to the text. The editors present these with the hope of encouraging further dialogue and debate from service users, carers, clinicians, and academics and researchers across a range of disciplines. (shrink)

The intention of this article is to continue the discussion on the tension in the relations between joy and commitment of employees on the one side and type of organization on the other. Earlier empirical studies of disciplinary practices among teachers and warders were developed with the help of hedonism as a psychological concept, attribution theories, theories on motivation and theories on the conflict between the individual and the organization. From these standpoints, a typology on coping strategies in work contexts (...) was developed, where four possible ‘ideal’ roles an individual can take were described. Most studies on disciplining, hedonism, and so, focus on the painful side of coping. Few studies focus on what people do in order to feel well, which is in focus for this article. The frame of reference here is discussed and developed in relation to work places where risks are at stake. The tensions between individual commitment and organizational demands might be most strengthened in such organizations. (shrink)

Moral cognitivists hold that in ordinary thought and language moral terms are used to make factual claims and express propositions. Moral non-cognitivists hold that in ordinary thought and language moral terms are not used to make factual claims or express propositions. What cognitivists and non-cognitivists seem to agree about, however, is that there is something in ordinary thought and language that can vindicate one side of their debate or the other. Don Loeb raises the possibility — which I will call (...) “the variability thesis” — that ordinary moral thought and language contains both cognitivist and non-cognitivist elements, and that there is no principled reason for thinking that either the cognitivist or non-cognitivist elements are conceptually more primary or aberrant than the other. According to the variability thesis, cognitivists accurately capture some aspects of what we think and say when we use moral terms and non-cognitivists capture other aspects, but neither side provides a correct analysis of ordinary moral thought and language as a whole. (shrink)

This paper comments on some of the different senses of the notion of discourse in the various relevant literatures and then overviews the basic features of a coherent discourse analytic programme in Psychology. Parker's approach is criticised for (a) its tendency to reify discourses as objects; (b) its undeveloped notion of analytic practice; (c) its vulnerability to common sense assumptions. It ends by exploring the virtues of 'interpretative repertoires' over 'discourses' as an analytic/theoretical notion.

ABSTRACTThis paper explicates Shaftesbury’s idea that we ought to live our lives as though they are works of art. I show that this idea is central to many of Shaftesbury’s most important claims, and that an understanding of this idea enables us to answer some of the most contested questions in the scholarship on Characteristics.

The stability of the power grid is concernment due to the high demand and supply to smart cities, homes, factories, and so on. Different machine learning and deep learning models can be used to tackle the problem of stability prediction for the energy grid. This study elaborates on the necessity of IoT technology to make energy grid networks smart. Different prediction models, namely, logistic regression, naïve Bayes, decision tree, support vector machine, random forest, XGBoost, k-nearest neighbor, and optimized artificial neural (...) network, have been applied on openly available smart energy grid datasets to predict their stability. The present article uses metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, and ROC curve to compare different predictive models. Data augmentation and feature scaling have been applied to the dataset to get better results. The augmented dataset provides better results as compared with the normal dataset. This study concludes that the deep learning predictive model ANN optimized with Adam optimizer provides better results than other predictive models. The ANN model provides 97.27% accuracy, 96.79% precision, 95.67% recall, and 96.22% F1 score. (shrink)

The notion that management knowledge is universal, culture-neutral, readily transferable to any country or situation, has come under mounting challenge. The Politics of Management Knowledge goes beyond such `broad-brush' assertions to explore in detail the relations between management knowledge, power and practice in a world where globalization highlights, rather than obscures, the locally specific character of many management recipes. The book recognizes the political nature of management knowledge as a discourse produced from, and reproducing, power processes within and between organizations. (...) This theme underpins discussion of the ways in which management ideas and practices `produce' managers of a particular kind. (shrink)

This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens’ digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth ‘sexting’. We develop a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen ‘sexting’ presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens’ discussions (...) of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated ‘ratings’ by possessing and exchanging images of girls’ breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘sket’). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered. (shrink)

Numerous studies argue that perceived group deprivation is a risk factor for radicalization and violent extremism. Yet, the vast majority of individuals, who experience such circumstances do not become radicalized. By utilizing models with several interacting risk and protective factors, the present analysis specifies this relationship more concretely. In a large United Kingdom nationally representative survey, we examine the effects of group-based relative deprivation on violent extremist attitudes and violent extremist intentions, and we test whether this relationship is contingent upon (...) several individual differences in personality. The results show that stronger group-based injustices lead to increased support for and intentions to engage in violent extremism. However, some of the effects are much stronger for individuals who exhibit a stronger need for uniqueness and for status and who demonstrate higher levels of trait entitlement. Conversely, several effects are lessened for those individuals high in trait forgiveness, demonstrating a strong capacity for self-control and for those who are exerting critical as well as open-minded thinking styles, thus constituting buffering protective factors, which dampen the adverse effects of perceived group injustice on violent extremism. The results highlight the importance of considering the interaction between individual dispositions and perceptions of contextual factors the conditional and cumulative effects of various risk and protective factors and the functional role of protective factors when risk factors are present. Collectively, these findings bring us one step closer to understanding who might be more vulnerable to violent extremism as well as how. Overall, the study suggests that preventing and countering violent extremism programs must take account of the constellation of multiple factors that interact with one another and which can be targeted in preventions strategies. (shrink)

We explored teachers? views and students? experiences of going beyond the syllabus in Advanced (A) level Mathematics. Questionnaires were sent to teachers and students in a sample of 200 schools and colleges. Teachers were asked about the necessity, importance and benefits of additional teaching. Students were asked about the extra activities they undertook. Forty-seven teacher questionnaires and 299 student questionnaires were completed. Over half of the students claimed to undertake at least some extra activities. Although a few teachers thought teaching (...) beyond the syllabus was unimportant and unnecessary, over 70% felt it should be undertaken if time allowed. Teaching efficacy was measured by comparing each teacher?s students? Mathematics results with those students? results in other A level subjects. Significantly more teachers with relatively high Mathematics results than with relatively low results believed teaching beyond the syllabus strengthens and expands students? existing knowledge and adds interest to the course. (shrink)

Subcreative sets, introduced by Blum, are known to coincide with the effectively speedable sets. Subcreative sets are shown to be the complete sets with respect to S-reducibility, a special case of Turing reducibility. Thus a set is effectively speedable exactly when it contains the solution to the halting problem in an easily decodable form. Several characterizations of subcreative sets are given, including the solution of an open problem of Blum, and are used to locate the subcreative sets with respect to (...) the complete sets of other reducibilities. It is shown that q-cylindrification is an order-preserving map from the r.e. T-degrees to the r.e. S-degrees. Consequently, T-complete sets are precisely the r.e. sets whose q-cylindrifications are S-complete. (shrink)