Background: Altering components of ecological momentary assessment measures to better suit the purposes of individual studies is a common and oftentimes necessary step. Though the inherent flexibility in EMA has its benefits, no resource exists to provide an overview of the variability in how convergent constructs and symptoms have been assessed in the past. The present study fills that gap by examining EMA measurement design for mood and anxiety symptomatology.Methods: Various search engines were used to identify 234 relevant studies. Items (...) administered, data collection schedules, response scales, data collection platforms, and psychometric properties were extracted.Results: Study designs varied greatly in all aspects across the identified papers. Over 4,600 extracted items were qualitatively analyzed, resulting in the identification of 12 themes. The most EMA items focused on affect, with categories such as “happiness” and “tension” appearing most frequently. We provide all of our data extraction in the format of an open-source database.Limitations: Despite our best attempts to include as much of the relevant literature as possible, this review and the accompanying database are not exhaustive, but can easily be built upon to include other, newer studies.Conclusions: The fact that the affect theme featured both positive and negative emotional constructs highlights the dichotomous focus on valence and affect within the literature surrounding anxious and depressive symptomatology. We hope that our database will act as a helpful design decision-making resource for researchers studying this kind of symptomatology in the future.Systematic Review Registration: PROSPERO. (shrink)

The present study sought to examine the extent to which the cultural portrayal of online gamers, often in comical, caricatured, or sensational forms, has become transformed into sets of cognitive associations between the category and traits. A total of 342 participants completed an online survey in which they rated how applicable each of a list of traits was to the group of online gamers. Ratings were made for both personal beliefs (how participants themselves see gamers) and stereotypical beliefs (how most (...) others see gamers). While these beliefs were highly consensual as stereotypes, personal beliefs varied, suggesting that the cultural portrayal of online gamers is beginning to shift into cognitive associations. The role of stereotypes in negotiating a group’s social position are discussed arguing that these stereotypes currently position online gamers as low in social status and socially peripheral. The function of the media in generating stereotypical representations of social groups and convincing the public of their validity is also discussed. (shrink)

The death of Socrates is often taken as the starting point for reflection on the relationship between the philosopher and established power. In the Apology, Plato gives an account of Socrates’s own...

This book is an accessible text that explores what it means to be human. It is designed for an introductory course in Philosophy of the Human Being. This book contains an abundance of current examples, with embedded quotations from philosophers and selections from contemporary writers following the chapters.

Las distinciones conceptuales propuestas por Thomas Hobbes reflejan el problema político de considerar lo múltiple en la unidad o la convergencia de innumerables cuerpos, deseos y pasiones en la consolidación de una voluntad soberana unitaria. Ejemplo de ello son las nociones de potentiae (potencias) y potestas (poder), junto a otras como multitud y pueblo o súbditos y soberano. Todas ellas reflejan el problema de la estabilidad del Estado y su legitimidad institucional: la necesidad de generar, de manera continua, un poder (...) común. Con la intención de formular una lectura democrática, el propósito de este artículo es relacionar una lectura iconográfica del frontispicio del Leviatán con la presencia/ausencia de un cuerpo indómito. El trabajo concluye que un rasgo esencial de la teoría política hobbesiana es el sentido de lo democrático fundamentado en la presencia ineludible de cuerpos colectivos que deben ser representados. (shrink)

The crystal δ‐endotoxins of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) are a family of insecticidal proteins which have been known for some time to kill insects by lysing their gut epithelial cells, but the precise molecular mechanism of toxicity has remained elusive. The recent publication of the crystal structure of a Bt δ‐endotoxin has made it possible for us to model the molecular events that occur as the toxin binds to its receptor and inserts into the membrane to form a pore. Using our (...) knowledge of insect gut physiology, we can also predict the effect on the insect of the formation of a toxic pore. We present a new model to explain the events that occur in the insect gut during toxin action. (shrink)

Child sexual exploitation and abuse has grave implications for the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people. It has been linked to a wide range of difficulties which may extend into adulthood. School-based prevention programs that aim to raise awareness are popular, however, have historically lacked robust and consistent evaluation. The purpose of the present study was therefore to explore young people’s experiences of attending a school-based theater-in-education program, and the impact this had on their awareness and understanding (...) of CSEA. Four focus groups of between four to six participants each were conducted with young people from two co-educational State schools in the United Kingdom. The approach of Template Analysis was used to analyze the data, and revealed a number of themes related to the superordinate themes of “Information and Detail Delivered” and “Format and Timing.” The results suggest that participants gained new awareness and understanding of aspects related to CSEA, including other forms of exploitation, as well as how to avoid harm and what to do “if bad things happen.” Participants further reported that the theater performance/live element of the program was particularly impactful, feeling that this was delivered to them at the right time, but suggesting that younger people would also benefit from the important messages. In addition, areas for improvement were identified in terms of the delivery of the program, and the issue of victim blaming. Findings are discussed with a view to practical implications and directions for future research. (shrink)

International law enforcement have noted a rise in the use of the Dark Web to facilitate and commit sexual offenses against children, both prior to and since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study presented here therefore aimed to investigate the characteristics and behaviors of anonymous users of Dark Web platforms who were suspected of engaging in the sexual abuse of children. Naturally-occurring data on 53 anonymous suspects, who were active on the Dark Web and had come to police (...) attention in the United Kingdom (UK), were sampled. Analysis of the data yielded 462 features that could be coded reliably. Analysis of these features provided novel insights into suspects’ characteristics, their motivations for using the Dark Web, the nature of the offending behavior they reported engaging in, their technical and security precautions, sexual interests, and the content of their interactions with one another. Findings are discussed in relation to theoretical and practical implications, as well as directions for future research. (shrink)

Actin plays several essential roles in cellular processes and is a vital component in the contractile apparatus. To accomplish its many cellular tasks, actin must interact with a wide range of other proteins in addition to self‐assembling into filaments. Characterization of these functional domains and localized binding regions on the actin monomer is therefore an important undertaking. Strategies for elucidating the many interaction sites include X‐ray diffraction, NMR and fluorescence spectroscopy, chemical modification, chemical cross‐linking, protein cleavage, and the study of (...) sequence homologies between the many isotypes of actin. Based on these varied data, we discuss the possible spatial relationships between the interaction sites. (shrink)

As a first approximation, it may be said that the central issue in the correspondence concerns whether semantical statements are essentially, albeit implicitly, mentalistic or psychological in character. In the language of the protagonists themselves, it concerns whether statements of the form.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the ideas about commercial society among Spanish and Spanish American intellectuals from the second half of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the following century. Special attention is paid to some relevant concepts like “amor propio” or “interés”. We are also specially interested in the knowledge of political economy and its moral implications for the idea of commercial society. My proposal is to consider the possibilities of a Catholic enlightenment as (...) the expression of the combination of some intrinsic principles of the enlightened thought with Catholic confessionalism. This is significant not only for the understanding of the enlightenment in the Spanish World but also for a correct interpretation of the first constitutionalism. (shrink)

Fairness is central to the ethical and responsible development and use of AI systems, with a large number of frameworks and formal notions of algorithmic fairness being available. However, many of the fairness solutions proposed revolve around technical considerations and not the needs of and consequences for the most impacted communities. We therefore want to take the focus away from definitions and allow for the inclusion of societal and relational aspects to represent how the effects of AI systems impact and (...) are experienced by individuals and social groups. In this paper, we do this by means of proposing the ACROCPoLis framework to represent allocation processes with a modeling emphasis on fairness aspects. The framework provides a shared vocabulary in which the factors relevant to fairness assessments for different situations and procedures are made explicit, as well as their interrelations. This enables us to compare analogous situations, to highlight the differences in dissimilar situations, and to capture differing interpretations of the same situation by different stakeholders. (shrink)

Recently, Australia became the second jurisdiction worldwide to legalize the use of mitochondrial donation technology. The Mitochondrial Donation Law Reform (Maeve’s Law) Bill 2021 allows individuals with a family history of mitochondrial disease to access assisted reproductive techniques that prevent the inheritance of mitochondrial disease. Using inductive content analysis, we assessed submissions sent to the Senate Committee as part of a programme of scientific inquiry and public consultation that informed drafting of the Bill. These submissions discussed a range of bioethical (...) and legal considerations of central importance to the political debate. Significantly, submissions from those with a first-hand experience of mitochondrial disease, including clinicians and those with a family history of mitochondrial disease, were in strong support of this legislation. Those in support of the Bill commended the two-staged approach and rigorous licencing requirements as part of the Bill’s implementation strategy. Submissions which outlined arguments against the legislation either opposed the use of these techniques in general or opposed aspects of the implementation strategy in Australia. These findings offer a window into the ethical arguments and perspectives that matter most to those Australians who took part in the Senate inquiry into mitochondrial donation. The insights garnered from these submissions may be used to help refine policy and guidelines as the field progresses. (shrink)

The present study contains an affect-based intervention intended to support exercise trainers in positively influencing their course participants’ affective responses to their exercise courses. We argue that positive affective responses are associated with habit formation, thereby being a promising approach for avoiding high drop-out rates in exercise courses. First, the present study aimed to investigate whether the intervention for exercise trainers could increase affective attitudes, and exercise instigation habit strength, and influence the development of weekly measured affective responses and automaticity (...) among adult participants of exercise courses. Second, it examined the relationship between the development of affective responses and exercise instigation habit strength. Ten exercise trainers of weekly sports and exercise courses at a German university received either an affect-based intervention or a control intervention. 132 of their course participants answered the Self-Report Habit Index for exercise instigation habit strength and items to measure affective attitude in the initial and final assessment. Moreover, they were assessed for a duration of 10 weeks during which, each time after attending the course, they reported their affective response to exercise as well as their automaticity in arriving at the decision to exercise. In the repeated measures ANOVA, there was a significant main effect of time for exercise instigation habit strength. Overall, habit strength was higher in the final than in the initial assessment. However, there were no significant differences between the two conditions in all study variables. In the latent growth curve model, the trajectory of the latent growth curve of valence was a significant predictor of the final exercise instigation habit strength. While the applied affect-based intervention was not successful in enhancing positive affective responses to exercise, the results indicate that positive affective responses may contribute to strengthening exercise instigation habits. Future studies should examine the effectiveness of interventions in long-term study designs. (shrink)

The exponential rise in transgender self-identification invites consideration of what constitutes an ethical response to transgender individuals’ claims about how best to promote their well-being. In this paper, we argue that ‘accepting’ a claim to medical transitioning in order to promote well-being would be in the person’s best interests iff at the point of request the individual is correct in their self-diagnosis as transgender (i.e., the distress felt to reside in the body does not result from another psychological and/or societal (...) problem) such that the medical interventions they are seeking will help them to realise their preferences. If we cannot assume this—and we suggest that we have reasonable grounds to question an unqualified acceptance in some cases—then ‘acceptance’ potentially works against best interests. We propose a distinction between ‘acceptance’ and respectful, in-depth exploration of an individual’s claims about what promotes their well-being. We discuss the ethical relevance of the unconscious mind to considerations of autonomy and consent in working with transgender individuals. An inquisitive stance, we suggest, supports autonomous choice about how to realise an embodied form that sustains well-being by allowing the individual to consider both conscious and unconscious factors shaping wishes and values, hence choices. (shrink)

The ability of science to operate effectively within society is dependant on a number of factors. Science is totally reliant on the law for its regulation and control, while the boundaries in which science can operate are governed by legal constraints. These boundaries are strongly influenced by society which dictates acceptable levels of morals and ethics in which science can operate. Economic factors must be considered as industry requires reward in order to recoup its research and development investments and continue (...) competing in a competitive and growing market place. Thus the law must reconcile the different tensions raised by science, economics, politics, society and the law itself. This paper looks how this may be achieved at the international, regional and national level. (shrink)

Whilst certain verbs may appear in both the intransitive inchoative and the transitive causative constructions (The ball rolled/The man rolled the ball), others may appear in only the former (The man laughed/*The joke laughed the man). Some accounts argue that children acquire these restrictions using only (or mainly) statistical learning mechanisms such as entrenchment and pre-emption. Others have argued that verb semantics are also important. To test these competing accounts, adults (Experiment 1) and children aged 5–6 and 9–10 (Experiment 2) (...) were taught novel verbs designed to be construed — on the basis of their semantics — as either intransitive-only or alternating. In support of the latter claim, participants' grammaticality judgments revealed that even the youngest group respected these semantic constraints. Frequency (entrenchment) effects were observed for familiar, but not novel, verbs (Experiment 1). We interpret these findings in the light of a new theoretical account designed to yield effects of both verb semantics and entrenchment/pre-emption. (shrink)

In its recent statement 'Sex Selection and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis', the Ethics Committee of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine concluded that preimplantation genetic diagnosis for sex selection for non-medical reasons should be discouraged because it poses a risk of unwarranted gender bias, social harm, and results in the diversion of medical resources from genuine medical need. We critically examine the arguments presented against sex selection using preimplantation genetic diagnosis. We argue that sex selection should be available, at least within (...) privately funded health care. (shrink)

Human-wildlife conflicts involving protected predators are a major social and environmental problem worldwide. A critical aspect in such conflicts is the role of state institutions regarding predators' conservation, and how this is construed by affected local populations. These interpretations are frequently embodied in conspiratorial rumours, sharing some common traits related to wild and domestic categories, spatial ordering and power relations. In southern Chile, a one-year, multi-sited ethnographic study of human-animal relations in and adjacent to protected areas was undertaken, foregrounding conspiratorial (...) rumours concerning protected predators. Through an analysis of this study and related international cases, this article argues that the uncritical dismissal of rumours and the categories used to interpret such conflicts have detrimental impacts on the conservation of wild predators. Such rumours should be understood as significant comment devices within human-animal relations and the power dynamics that frame human groups affected by them. (shrink)

Human cognitive performance has crucial significance for legal process, often creating the difference between fair and unfair imprisonment. Lawyers, judges, and jurors need to follow long and complex arguments. They need to understand technical language. Jurors need to remember what happens during a long trial. The demands imposed on jurors in particular are sizeable and the cognitive challenges are discussed in this chapter. Jurors are often subjected to both tremendous decision complexity and tremendous evidence complexity. Some of these problems could (...) be ameliorated if we can somehow enhance the cognitive capacities, including attention and memory, of various players in trials. There are multiple ways in which cognition can be improved either by external tools or by an increasing number of biomedical interventions that act directly on the brain. The article surveys a range of beneficial and detrimental effects that substances can have on cognition. (shrink)

Our ordinary conception of time has it that there are temporal particulars: not only do people do things, but there are particular doings by people; not only are we born, but the birth of each one of us was a particular event, and each of us will have our own particular death. Temporal particulars in this sense are individuated, fundamentally, by their temporal locations or relations, rather than by their intrinsic or qualitative characteristics. In this respect they are unrepeatable, not (...) just de facto, but as a matter of their very nature. However, there is a tradition in philosophy that seriously downplays this aspect of our thinking about time. According to this tradition, the fundamental unit of temporal representation is _tensed truth_; the notion of an unrepeatable particular, individuated by its temporal location, is at best an abstraction from a complex of tensed truths. The aims of this paper are, first, to argue that the representation of temporal particulars is deeply implicated in our ordinary conception of the past as fixed and unalterable; and, secondly, to argue that the theorist of tensed truth is able to provide only a pale imitation of this aspect of our thinking. I will then reflect on the consequences of this for debates about the metaphysics of tense. (shrink)

In this article, the authors take up the historical figure of Dr Betty Paërl, who has surprisingly turned up in very different kinds of specialised archives. The white mathematics professor was located in IHLIA LGBT+ Heritage, the largest queer heritage collection in Europe, as a notable SM sexpert and spokesperson on transgender politics, and also found during archival research into the anti-(neo)colonial struggles of Suriname against the Dutch. Upon closer inspection of the materials, the authors find the recurrent image/item of (...) the whip that presses them to carefully think through how the archive of Dr Paërl casts light on a history that Katherine McKittrick calls being ‘in the shadow of the whip’. The article aims to combine an analysis of these versions of the whip in different visual and discursive registers to detect the liberatory politics underlying her activisms. To do so, the authors develop the intersectional model of the kaleidoscope employed by Dutch Black, migrant and refugee (BMR) feminist theorists to grasp the shifting patterns of power that Paërl battled and embodied as an activist of the anticolonial struggle, for sex workers’ rights, for kinky sex and for transgender people. This is all the more important in the historical study of transgender visual materials that most often arrive in archives via medical and police photography or pornographic materials. The historical researcher, the article argues, should be wary of (re)producing a static vision that would reduce transgender figures to sex and gender politics, or eclipse a vision of trans politics that dilates beyond sexuality. (shrink)

Although political pluralism can have an ethical justification, it does not need one. Political pluralism can be justified on the basis of an epistemological argument about what we can claim to know, one which has a normative conclusion about how strongly we ought to believe. This is important because for pluralism to command wide assent, it needs something other than an ethical justification, since many simply will not accept that justification. Thus understood, we can see that current threats to pluralism (...) come not just from authoritarian movements but from populism, which has already infected mainstream politics. (shrink)

Church's thesis, that all reasonable definitions of “computability” are equivalent, is not usually thought of in terms of computability by acontinuouscomputer, of which the general-purpose analog computer (GPAC) is a prototype. Here we prove, under a hypothesis of determinism, that the analytic outputs of aC∞GPAC are computable by a digital computer.In [POE, Theorems 5, 6, 7, and 8], Pour-El obtained some related results. (The proof there of Theorem 7 depends on her Theorem 2, for which the proof in [POE] is (...) incorrect, but for which a correct proof is given in [LIR]. Also, the proof in [POE] of Theorem 8 depends on the unproved assertion that a solution of an algebraic differential equation must be analytic on an open subset of its domain. However, this assertion was later proved in [BRR].) As in [POE], we reduce the problem to a problem about solutions of certain systems of algebraic differential equations (ADE's). If such a system is nonsingular (i.e. if the “separant” does not vanish along the given solution), then the argument is very easy (see [VSD] for an even simpler situation), so that the essential difficulties arise fromsingularsystems. Our main tools in handling these difficulties are drawn from the excellent (and difficult) paper [DEL] by Denef and Lipshitz. The author especially wants to thank Leonard Lipshitz for his kind help in the preparation of the present paper.We emphasize here that our proof of the simulation result applies only to the GPAC as described below. The GPAC's form a natural subclass of the class of all analog computers, and are based on certain idealized components (“black boxes”), mostly associated with the technology of past decades. One can easily envisage other kinds of black boxes of an input-output character that would lead to different kinds of analog computers. (For example, one could incorporate delays, or spatial integrators in addition to the present temporal integrators, etc.) Whether digital simulation is possible for these “extended” analog computers poses a rich and challenging set of research questions. (shrink)

As a political philosopher he’s very important as a kind of default position: everybody else takes up political philosophy where he leaves off and tries to brighten it up a bit in one way or another.

As a political philosopher he’s very important as a kind of default position: everybody else takes up political philosophy where he leaves off and tries to brighten it up a bit in one way or another.

The overall nature of a world congress is a combination of the perennial features of its structure and the particular character given by its host. This was the first congress to be heldin Asia in the gathering’s 108 year history, and in the grand auditorium of Seoul National University, it was as though we were being welcomed to South Korea first, and the congress second.

Free Will is constituted by a desire to act that is based on practical reasons. Being guided by reasons constitutes human agency. The reasons account, which I will develop in this paper, is libertarian, as it implies that human agency is naturalistically underdetermined. Naturalistic descriptions, referring exclusively to natural causes, are not able to fully describe and explain human agency. On the other hand, there are no scientific arguments for the assumption that the causal impact of reasons interferes with the (...) laws of physics. The physical world can - in principle - be described and explained within the conceptual frame of the natural sciences. The causal impact of reasons does not interfere with the laws of physics. Therefore, my reasons account of Free Will is also compatibilist. (shrink)

On 26 January 2021, while announcing that the country had reached the mark of 100,000 deaths within 28 days of COVID-19, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that he took “full responsibility for everything that the Government has done” as part of British efforts to tackle the pandemic. The force of this statement was undermined, however, by what followed: -/- What I can tell you is that we truly did everything we could, and continue to do everything that we can, (...) to minimise loss of life and to minimise suffering... -/- Taking these sentiments together, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the government took responsibility only for doing everything right. Such an admission of responsibility, accommodating no admission of error or wrongdoing, is not really about responsibility at all. Indeed, the UK’s pandemic response has been marked from its earliest days by a shifting of focus from institutional responsibility to personal responsibility for individual UK residents. -/- This paper explores the relationship between these two sites of responsibility—the institutional and the personal—in the context of the sort of pandemic that is ongoing as we write. Section 2 offers some initial definitions and discussions of key terms. Section 3 outlines how these two ideas interact in principle during such emergencies. Section 4 turns to the ‘non-ideal’ implications for personal responsibility of failures of institutional responsibility. While our focus is on the specific context with which we are most familiar, the UK governmental approach, where appropriate we also include examples from other states. (shrink)

There’s not only indifference, there’s actually a huge sense of sneering superiority. The need for intercultural understanding and global dialogue between different philosophical traditions and philosophical countries is so important. It’s just crazy to think that in your own monoglot culture you’ve got all the essential tools that you need to do philosophy.

I’m not trying to be strategic. I’m not a politician. I’m a physicist, an academic, and, if you want, an amateur philosopher. I’m trying to say what I think is true as clearly and unemotionally as I can, and leave it to people to judge if my arguments are right or wrong.

The whole purpose of the UN is to bring nations together. In an era of globalisation and short term economic goals and values, we need to go back to reflect on the purposes of UNESCO as a place for foresight, a laboratory of ideas, exploring people’s identity and helping shape this. And I also hope that we can introduce these ideas backto the mainstream European and North American traditions, which tend to dominate, so that people can see there are different (...) traditions and cultures and there’s not only one way to see the world. (shrink)

“Whilst philosophical counsellors recognise that philosophy is a potentially practical and useful discipline, this isn’t how many of general public or counselling service providers perceive it. Philosophy has still got a lot of persuading to do about its practical relevance and efficacy.”.

It’s quite unlike anything else. One just gets the sense of a breadth and variety of philosophy that’s going on. I’m making a point of going on the whole to sessions in areas which aren’t close to my specialised scholarly interests and hearing people from countries I don’t normally encounter. One could stick to mainstream Anglo-American analytic philosophy – there’s enough of that going on here – but why come all this way for that?

Philosophy has become more and more abstracted from people’s daily lives, so in a way, philosophers are a kind of joke in Britain. The only time they appearis in comedy and it seems to me really important to do something about this.

“Socrates spent many of his prime years fighting the most vicious, pitiless wars. I think that has a huge impact. I wonder if his central interest in the good is because actually he saw a lot that was very bad all around him.”.

Presents an additional one hundred philosophical puzzles that encourage readers to seek their own conclusions about a broad spectrum of moral, social, and personal issues.