Reproductive autonomy is central to women’s welfare both because childbearing takes place in women’s bodies and because they are generally expected to take primary responsibility for child rearing. In 2005, the factors that influence their autonomy most strongly are poverty and belief systems that devalue such autonomy. Unfortunately, such autonomy is a low priority for most societies, or is anathema to their belief systems altogether. This situation is doubly sad because women’s reproductive autonomy is intrinsically valuable for women and also (...) instrumentally valuable for the welfare of humankind. This paper takes for granted the moral and practical necessity of such autonomy and digs deeper into the question of what such a commitment might entail, focusing on the mid-level policy making that, at least in the US and Canada, plays a significant role in shaping women’s options. This paper examines a large teaching hospital’s policy on reduction of multifetal pregnancies. The policy permits reduction of triplets to twins, but not twins to a singleton. As there is no morally relevant difference between these two types of reduction, it is evident that inappropriate medicalisation can still limit women’s autonomy in undesirable ways. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

David Hume's writings on history, politics and philosophy have shaped thought to this day. His bold scepticism ranged from common notions of the 'self' to criticism of standard theistic proofs. He insisted on grounding understandings of popular religious beliefs in human psychology rather than divine revelation, and he aimed to disentangle philosophy from religion in order to allow the former to pursue its own ends. In this book, Professors David W Purdie and Peter S Fosl decipher some of Hume's most (...) challenging texts for the modern reader, while preserving the sharp intellect and undaunted nerve for which Hume is famous. Hume's spirit is brought alive for contemporary times and his writing is made accessible for its intended audience: the general public."-- Back cover. (shrink)

From the author of "For Common Things" comes a provocative look at the meaning of American freedom. Purdy works from the stories of individuals: Frederick Douglass urging Americans to extend freedom to slaves, Ralph Waldo Emerson arguing for self-fulfillment, and others.

A discussion of updating teaching strategies to reflect changes in an increasingly technology-centered world includes an exploration of the process of learning to learn and advocates for expanding the connection between school and the adult world.

This article uses diary data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey to compare by gender total child care time calculated in the measurements of main activity, main or secondary activity, and total time spent in the company of children. It also offers an innovative gender comparison of relative time spent in the activities that constitute child care, child care as double activity, and time with children in sole charge. These measures give a fuller picture of (...) total time commitment to children and how men and women spend that time than has been available in previous time use analyses. The results indicate that compared to fathering, mothering involves not only more overall time commitment but more multitasking, more physical labor, a more rigid timetable, more time alone with children, and more overall responsibility for managing care. These gender differences in the quantity and nature of care apply even when women work full-time. (shrink)

This paper draws on data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) (over 4,000 randomly selected households) to tease out the dimensions of the ‘second shift’. Predictions that as women entered the paid workforce men would contribute more to household labour have largely failed to eventuate. This underpins the view that women are working a second shift because they are shouldering a dual burden of paid and unpaid work. However, time use research seems to (...) show that when both paid and unpaid work is counted, male and female workloads are in total very similar. This has led to suggestions that a literal second shift is a myth; that it exists in the sense that women do more domestic work than men, but not in the sense that they work longer hours in total. Using a more accurate and telling measure of workload than previous research (paid and unpaid labour including multitasked activities), this paper explores the second shift and how it relates to family configuration, ethnicity and indicators of class and socioeconomic standing. It finds a clear disparity between the total workloads of mothers and fathers, much of which consists of simultaneous (secondary) activity, and some demographic differences in female (but not male) total workloads. It concludes that the view that the second shift is a myth is only sustainable by averaging social groups very broadly and by excluding multitasking from the measurement of total work activity. (shrink)

Science is revolutionizing human reproduction. New techniques are already with us, such as artificial insemination, the freezing of sperm, in vitro fertilization and the use of surrogate mothers. Artificial wombs are clearly on the horizon.

You can use the power that roams your nocturnal mind to improve your daily life. Learn what dream work is and how it has been practiced from ancient times to the present, for healing, for self-development, and as a means of contacting the creative inner self. Dream-work techniques, like remembering and recording, incubation, gestalt, guided visualization, working with symbols, and a host of others, will help you reach your goals. Understand what each dream symbol means to you, in essence piecing (...) together an unconscious story of your experiences. (shrink)

Speakers often answer a question with what appears to be merely a phrase, a fragment of a sentence, rather than with a full sentence. Merchant (2004) offers an analysis of fragment answers in which the new information/answer is fronted to a clause-peripheral position and the remainder of the sentence is not pronounced. Two written acceptability judgment experiments are reported that tested predictions of this analysis. The first, in English, tested the prediction that clausal fragment answers should only be fully acceptable (...) when the clausal answer is introduced by an overt complementizer (What did May deny? That Josh left.). This is because clauses may front only when an overt complementizer is present (That Josh left, May denied, but not *Josh left, May denied). The second study was conducted in German, a language that does not permit prepositions to be stranded, left behind, when a noun phrase is moved in overt syntactic structures such as questions or topicalizations. Consequently, when the object of a preposition is questioned, only a prepositional phrase fragment answer, not a noun phrase fragment answer, is predicted to be fully acceptable. Both predictions were confirmed. The results support the claim that syntactic structure is present in unpronounced constituents, and tells against theories of syntax that eschew such structures. (shrink)

Like Alice following the white rabbit into a topsy-turvy world where the laws of logic don't apply, subversive thinking unearths the mysteries behind the mundane. Tracking the White Rabbit is a fascinating, original work that invites us to use depth psychology to challenge our deepest assumptions about world politics, theology, social norms, everyday speech, and usual ideas of sex and emotion. Raised in an environment of McCarthyism and rock-and-roll, Jungian analyst Lyn Cowan shows readers-through provocative essays on memory and homosexuality, (...) music and the art of cursing-that we can flip our ingrained attitudes on their heads and achieve a better understanding of our cultural landscape. America has been plagued by a flattening of its psychic life, Cowan argues, exhibited in the escalating need for external stimulation and the distrust of intense emotion. With humor and insight, she confronts the "isms" that entrap our imaginations (capitalism, fundamentalism, feminism, sexism, antisemitism, communism) in order to unearth a more soul-serving culture. Encouraging us to mine the creativity of spontaneous imagination, this psychology brings dramatic new ideas and themes into focus, breaking down barriers and yielding fresh perspectives on some of the more pressing individual dilemmas of our time: abortion, gender, language, homosexuality, and victimization. (shrink)

The women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s were two major examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction which caused a critical furore in their day. Both genres, with their shocking, `fast' heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the `proper feminine' ideal to which nineteenth-century women and fictional heroines were supposed to aspire. By exploring in impressive depth and breadth the material and discursive (...) conditions in which these novels were produced, The `Improper' Feminine draws attention to key gendered interrelationships within the literary and wider cultures of the mid-Victorian and fin-de-diècle periods. (shrink)

VP ellipsis generally requires a syntactically matching antecedent. However, many documented examples exist where the antecedent is not appropriate. Kehler, 533–575. 2002, Coherence, Reference and the Theory of Grammer, CSLI Publications. Stanford.) proposed an elegant theory which predicts a syntactic antecedent for an elided VP is required only for a certain discourse coherence relation, not for cause-effect relations. Most of the data Kehler used to motivate his theory come from corpus studies and thus do not consist of true minimal pairs. (...) We report five experiments testing predictions of the coherence theory, using standard minimal pair materials. The results raise questions about the empirical basis for coherence theory because a syntactically-matching antecedent is preferred for all coherence relations, not just resemblance relations. Further, strict identity readings, which should not be available when a syntactic antecedent is required, are influenced by parallelism per se, holding the discourse coherence relation constant. This draws into question the causal role of coherence relations in processing VP ellipsis. (shrink)

CITATION: Horn, L. M. 2015. Promoting responsible research conduct in a developing world academic context. South African Journal of Bioethics and Law, 6:21-24, doi:10.7196/SAJBL.256.

Carminati (2002) shows that the existence of both phonetically full and phonetically null pronouns (pro) in Italian reflects a division of labor with respect to anaphora resolution. Pro prefers to link to prominent antecedents more than its phonetically overt counterpart does (where prominence is determined by syntactic position in intrasentential anaphora cases).

Presents the latest research on how reasoning with analogies, metaphors, metonymies, and images can facilitate mathematical understanding. For math education, educational psychology, and cognitive science scholars.

In this paper, I utilise key postcolonial perspectives on multiculturalism and boundaries to reconsider some of science education's scholarship on cultural diversity in order to extend the discourses and methodologies of science education. I begin with a brief overview of postcolonialism that argues its ability to offer theoretical insights to help revise science education's philosophical frameworks in the face of the newly intercivilisational encounters of contemporaneity. I then describe the constructs of multiculturalism, and borders and ‘border thinking’ that become useful (...) to develop postcolonial readings as an active methodology of critique able to intervene and develops more revealing interpretations of some of science education's scholarship and differentiated experiences. As the focus of these interventions, I have selected to discuss Cobern and Loving's ‘Defining “Science” in a Multicultural World: Implications for science education’ and Siegel's ‘Multiculturalism, Universalism and Science Education: In search of common ground’ from the ongoing discussion on multiculturalism and cultural diversity within the journal Science Education. Finally, I conclude this paper with some general comments regarding postcolonialism and the science education scholarship on cultural diversity. (shrink)

In this paper, I utilise key postcolonial perspectives on multiculturalism and boundaries to reconsider some of science education's scholarship on cultural diversity in order to extend the discourses and methodologies of science education. I begin with a brief overview of postcolonialism that argues its ability to offer theoretical insights to help revise science education's philosophical frameworks in the face of the newly intercivilisational encounters of contemporaneity. I then describe the constructs of multiculturalism, and borders and ‘border thinking’ (after ) that (...) become useful to develop postcolonial readings as an active methodology of critique able to intervene and develops more revealing interpretations of some of science education's scholarship and differentiated experiences. As the focus of these interventions, I have selected ) ‘Defining “Science” in a Multicultural World: Implications for science education’ and ) ‘Multiculturalism, Universalism and Science Education: In search of common ground’ from the ongoing discussion on multiculturalism and cultural diversity within the journal Science Education. Finally, I conclude this paper with some general comments regarding postcolonialism and the science education scholarship on cultural diversity. (shrink)

Allison, Lyn; Cannold, Leslie It is great to see such a good turnout for this important occasion and I congratulate the Humanist Society again on this award. It really makes a difference to people's lives: when they get the award, when they know about it, when there is publicity for the person concerned. It is an all-round good thing to do and I congratulate you for it.