In this paper I offer the term “potato ethics” to describe a particular professional rural health sensibility. I contrast this attitude with the sensibility behind urban professional ethics, which often focus on the narrow doctor–patient treatment relationship. The phrase appropriates a Swedish metaphor, the image of the potato as a humble side dish: plain, useful, versatile, and compatible with any main course. Potato ethics involves making oneself useful, being pragmatic, choosing to be like an invisible elf who prevents discontinuity rather (...) than a more visible observer of formal rules and assigned tasks. It also includes actively taking part in everyday disaster-prevention and fully recognizing the rural context as a vulnerable space. This intersectional argument, which emphasizes the ongoing, holistic responsibility of those involved in rural communities, draws on work from the domains of care ethics, relational ethics, pragmatic psychology, feminist ethics of embodiment, social location theory, and reflections on geographical narcissism. (shrink)

Creativity is the hallmark of human intelligence. Roli et al. (Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 9:806283, 2022) state that algorithms cannot achieve human creativity. This paper analyzes cooperation between humans and intelligent algorithmic tools to compensate for algorithms’ limited creativity. The intelligent tools have functionality from the neocortex, the brain’s center for learning, reasoning, planning, and language. The analysis provides four key insights about human-tool cooperation to solve challenging problems. First, no neocortex-based tool without feelings can achieve human creativity. Second, (...) an interactive tool exploring users’ feeling-guided creativity enhances the ability to solve complex problems. Third, user-led abductive reasoning incorporating human creativity is essential to human-tool cooperative problem-solving. Fourth, although stakeholders must take moral responsibility for the adverse impact of tool answers, it is still essential to teach tools moral values to generate trustworthy answers. The analysis concludes that the scientific community should create neocortex-based tools to augment human creativity and enhance problem-solving rather than creating autonomous algorithmic entities with independent but less creative problem-solving. (shrink)

The intellectual relationship between Carl Schmitt and Max Weber has been a point of controversy for at least half a century. At the 1964 convention of the German Sociological Association, in honor of Weber's centenary, Schmitt was famously referred to as Weber's ?legitimate student.? This article uses the chapter Schmitt specifically wrote for an edited volume in Weber's memory, published in 1923, as the starting point for juxtaposing the two scholars, and then expands the analysis to encompass a range of (...) sources and commentaries. The comparison focuses on the approach of each of the two scholars to methodology and didactics, theory and conceptual use, as well as to the society/social science nexus. The article concludes by arguing that Schmitt performed a double rhetorical move: while styling himself as Weber's student, he then drew on that authority to assault Weber's liberalism and concept of scientific integrity. (shrink)

This study investigated the effects of internal and demographic variables on civic development in late adolescence using the construct civic purpose. We conducted surveys on civic engagement with 480 high school seniors, and surveyed them again two years later. Using multivariate regression and linear mixed models, we tested the main effects of civic purpose dimensions (beyond-the-self motivation, future civic intention), ethnicity, and education on civic development from Time 1 to Time 2. Results showed that while there is an overall decrease (...) in civic engagement in the transition out of high school, both internal and social factors protected participants from steep civic decline. Interaction effects varied. Ethnicity and education interacted in different ways with the dimensions of civic purpose to predict change in traditional and expressive political engagement, and community service engagement. (shrink)

This meta-analysis of 31 studies over 20 years advances our understanding of the gender gap in entrepreneurial bank finance. Findings from previous research on the relationship between entrepreneurs’ gender and bank financing are mixed, which suggests the need to pay particular attention to entrepreneurs’ social context. In this study, we develop a model of how social gender norms explain variation in women entrepreneurs’ (vis-à-vis men entrepreneurs’) access to bank finance. Specifically, we theorize how women’s formal (their nations’ political ideologies) and (...) informal (women’s empowerment) social standing within their societies influence gender discrimination in entrepreneurial bank financing. Consistent with most previous studies, our baseline results show that women entrepreneurs’ business loan applications are rejected to a greater extent than men entrepreneurs’ loan applications. Women entrepreneurs also pay higher interest rates on loans than men entrepreneurs. Further, in societies dominated by a conservative (rather than a liberal) political ideology, the positive relationship between women entrepreneurs and loan interest rates is more positive. Interestingly, gender discrimination in loan rejection and interest rates is magnified in societies with greater women’s empowerment. Taking a social gender-norm perspective, our analysis establishes a gender gap in entrepreneurial bank finance, and we outline an agenda for further research. (shrink)

The article describes the founding principles, work program, and accomplishments of a Reference Group with both expert and layperson stakeholders for the corrosion of copper canisters in a proposed deep repository in Sweden for spent nuclear fuel. The article sets the Reference Group as a participatory effort within a broader context of stakeholder and public participation. It is argued that for the future it will be necessary to more precisely define the roles of different approaches to public participation in relation (...) to the actual societal decision-making procedures, and the issue is raised whether an increasing level of their institutionalization is required. In particular, the focus is set on the safe-space approach to stakeholder participation designed to suit situations where independence and autonomy are crucial elements for the participants. To illustrate this we compare experiences from Sweden and the Czech Republic. (shrink)

Though grassroots organizations have mobilized against US environmental injustices since; the 1980s, academic definitions of environmental justice (EJ) remain limited in important ways, including: a tendency to privilege cases where activists achieve a successful, ‘tidy’ outcome; inattention to roles natural resource dependence and free market systems play in structuring environmental inequality; and a tendency to under-analyze alternative notions of EJ that result, utilized by activists who prioritize local autonomy and procedural justice in land-use decision making. Here, I argue that these (...) alternative notions of EJ help mobilize divergent forms of EJ activism-‘sites of resistance’ to industrial production systems and their risks, and ‘sites of acceptance’ to those same practices. To illustrate, I explore extensive mixed method data in the context of energy development and sites of acceptance related to uranium production in the southwestern United States. I show how alternative notions of EJ are shaped by identification with uranium production, persistent poverty and economic insecurity, and faith that increased uranium production will fuel US nuclear power production and help combat global climate change. (shrink)

When information activated in memory involves emotional associations, the ability to shift attention away from an emotional cue is impaired compared to an emotionally neutral cue. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how emotional stimuli modulate attentional processes, and how this is reflected in localised brain electrical activity. Eight emotion and eight neutral words served as cues in a covert attention spatial orienting task. The cues were either valid or invalid indicators of which hemifield the target would (...) be presented to. In the remaining trials, no cue was presented prior to the target. Twenty subjects were instructed to manually respond to the target as fast as possible. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed an enhanced P3 component to the emotion words. The ERPs to the target showed enhanced P1 and P3 components on invalid trials, with emotional cues. There were faster reaction times (RTs) to validly cued targets, but only when the emotion words served as cues. The results demonstrated that the emotional cues elicited sustained focused attention, facilitating an engage mechanism of spatial orienting. (shrink)

_In _Teaching for Purpose_, Heather Malin explores the idea of purpose as the purpose of education and shows how educators can prepare youth to live intentional, fulfilling lives._ The book highlights the important role that purpose—defined as “a future-directed goal that is personally meaningful and aimed at contributing to something larger than the self”—plays in optimal youth development and in motivating students to promote the cognitive and noncognitive skills that teachers want to instill. Based on a decade of research (...) conducted at the Stanford University Center on Adolescence, the book explores how educators and schools can promote purpose through attention to school culture, curriculum, project learning, service learning, and other opportunities. Malin argues for expansive thinking on the direction schools should take, especially in terms of educating students to be creative, innovative, and self-directed critical thinkers. The book includes profiles of six organizations working in schools across the US that have made purpose development a priority. Infused with the engaging voices of purposeful youth, _Teaching for Purpose_ offers a fresh, inspirational guide for educators who are looking for new ways to support students to succeed not only in school, but in life. (shrink)

The use of robotic technology in healthcare is increasing. The aim was to explore attitudes toward the use of humanoid robots in healthcare among patients, relatives, care professionals, school actors and other relevant actors in healthcare and to analyze the associations between participants’ background variables and attitudes. The data were collected through a cross-sectional survey (N = 264) in 2018 where participants met a humanoid robot. The survey was comprised of background variables and items from a modified Robot Attitude Scale. (...) Multiple linear regression analysis and Spearman’s Rho correlation were used to analyze associations between variables. Most of the participants were positive toward the use of humanoid robots in healthcare and only a few were negative. Attitudes toward the use of humanoid robots were more positive among other relevant actors, such as service personnel and politicians in healthcare, participants with a higher educational level and older adults. More research is needed on the reasons underlying negative attitudes because these might affect the introduction of humanoid robots in healthcare. A careful evaluation of appropriate first target groups as well as which tasks are appropriate for humanoid robots to perform in healthcare are needed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.3 (2002) 285-286 [Access article in PDF] Depersonalization and Feelings of Unreality:Significant Symptoms With a Variety of Meanings Kjell Modigh Evaluations and diagnostic procedures in clinical psychiatry depend mainly on how the patient communicates his or her subjective experiences and on the psychiatrist's ability to understand that message. This is critical not only for understanding and offering proper treatment, but also for developing diagnostic (...) classifications. Hence the paper by Radovic and Radovic deals with an important topic, aiming to clarify the variety of meanings of the closely related terms unreality and depersonalization. The latter occurs as a symptom in connection to some psychiatric disorder and also constitutes a separate syndromeI agree with the authors that the rather intense renewing of the diagnostic criteria is seldom balanced by corresponding ambitions to analyze and improve the distinctness of the words for the experiences and symptoms which define the diagnoses.It is indeed a difficult task to demarcate what should be included in the concepts feelings of unreality and depersonalization and even to decide whether they are synonyms or distinguishable. There is at least one clear agreement in the different diagnostic systems: psychotic, delusional experiences are excluded. The border between unreality feelings with largely intact reality-testing ability and psychotic disorders with grossly disturbed reality-testing is, however, not absolute and patients with psychotic disorders may of course experience feelings of unreality or depersonalizationThe authors present a useful scheme by which different meanings of derealization are separated and that also points out the differences between depersonalization and derealization, although they are mutually dependant. Category (a), which come closest to depersonalization, includes experiences related to the self, whereas category (c) refers to impressions that the external world is unreal. Category (b), in their scheme, refers to altered bodily sensations: "the body part of the self" (Are there any body parts of the self? Perhaps all psychoanalysts would not agree).In my view, this scheme is useful and corresponds to clinical realities. Symptoms belonging to category (a) can, for instance, occur in affective disorders of almost psychotic depth, due to a [End Page 285] pathologically changed self-esteem. Symptoms belonging to category (b)—experiences of having moved outside one's own body—mainly belong to the diagnostic category dissociative disorders and can be understood as defense reactions to earlier traumatic experiences. The self escaped from the body during repeated experiences of sexual abuse. The diagnosis of depersonalization disorder consequentlybelongs to the group of dissociative disorders. Conditions where the outer world seems unreal (category [c]) can occur when the amount of internal stimuli is increased beyond what is possible to handle and therefore the capacity to recognize the environment is limited. So is the case in severe panic anxiety. Feelings of unreality as part of grief reactions may also belong, at least partly, to category (c): when dramatic and emotionally unacceptable events occur in the environment. As the authors point out, expressions of unreality feelings during grief more often can be understood as metaphors or existential reflections. In conclusion, categories -(a) and (c) can serve to separate depersonalization experiences with different psychopathologic origin, although they are closely related.As a second step, the authors examine how the terms unreal and feels unreal can be understood. Two interpretations of unreal, "nonexistent" and "artificial," have high psychiatric relevance; a third meaning, relating to "quality," mainly has linguistic connections to the experiences on unreality and depersonalization. The word feels communicates the experience of something that appears unreal although the subject has an intact ability of reality testing.The authors propose an additional interpretation, which they describe as a quasisensory experience. They give the example that dreams with unrealistic contents in some meaning, probably related to their intensity, appear "real." A further connection to dreams is that a situation, when awake, may have dreamlike qualities because of intensity or similarities to fragments of dreams. Events that occur in an unusual sequences, for example, corresponding to ones aims and wishes ("to good to be true") perhaps have similarities to dreamlike experiences. One may... (shrink)

I present an analysis of Free Choice Items (FCIs), based on Scandinavian, where FCIs are complex and distinct from polarity sensitive items. Scandinavian FCIs are argued to have two components. One is a universal quantifying into modal contexts. The other is an operator mapping a type (s,t) expression onto itself, adjoining to the closest type t or (s,t) expression. Thus invoking Intensional Functional Application, this operator requires the presence of a modal in the scope of the universal quantifier. Facts concerning (...) ‘essential connections’ and ‘existential import’ are accounted for by assuming that the FC determiner has the option of acting like a quantifier. (shrink)

Nature of science has for a long time been regarded as a key component in science teaching. Much research has focused on students’ and teachers’ views of NOS, while less attention has been paid to teachers’ perspectives on NOS teaching. This article focuses on in-service science teachers’ ways of talking about NOS and NOS teaching, e.g. what they talk about as possible and valuable to address in the science classroom, in Swedish compulsory school. These teachers are, according to the national (...) curriculum, expected to teach NOS, but have no specific NOS training. The analytical framework described in this article consists of five themes that include multiple perspectives on NOS. The results show that teachers have less to say when they talk about NOS teaching than when they talk about NOS in general. This difference is most obvious for issues related to different sociocultural aspects of science. Difficulties in—and advantages of—NOS teaching, as put forth by the teachers, are discussed in relation to traditional science teaching, and in relation to teachers’ perspectives on for which students science teaching will be perceived as meaningful and comprehensible. The results add to understanding teachers’ reasoning when confronted with the idea that NOS should be part of science teaching. This in turn provides useful information that can support the development of NOS courses for teachers. (shrink)

This article analyzes rent seeking with multiple additive efforts for each of two players. Impact on rent seeking occurs even when a player exerts only one effort. This contrasts with models of multiplicative efforts with impact on rent seeking only when a player exerts all its available efforts. An analytical solution is developed when the contest intensities are below one, and equal to one for one effort. Then, additional efforts causing interior solutions give players higher expected utilities and lower rent (...) dissipation, which contrasts with earlier findings for multiplicative efforts. Players cut back on the effort with contest intensity equal to one, and exert alternative efforts instead. Accounting for solutions which have to be determined numerically, a Nash equilibrium selection method is provided. For illustration, an example with maximum two efforts for each player is provided. Equilibria are shown where both players choose both efforts, or one player withdraws from its most costly effort. Both players may collectively prefer to exclude one of their efforts, though in equilibrium, they may prefer both efforts. When all contest intensities are equal to one or larger than one, only the one most cost-effective effort is exerted, due to the logic of linear or convex production. Rent dissipation increases in the contest intensity, and is maximum when the players are equally advantaged determined by unit effort cost divided by impact. (shrink)

The sociology of research and knowledge use, argue the authors, could be a way of linking important parts of sociology, such as organization studies, the sociology of science to each other. In the article, they discuss the idea that organizational responses to environments are related to research utilization. Based upon an empirical investigation of city welfare departments, four empirical “utilization strategies” are presented and shown to be related to power and control patterns. While negative utilization strategies are hostile to uncontrolled (...) research utilization and enhance the formation of bureaucratic expertise, conflict-oriented strategies are discursively productive and reinforce research use and alliance formation with social scientists to control the environment. (shrink)

In the pursuit of a dramaturgy of telematics as a compositional practice, the author builds a position on technology as externalized technique, develops a dramaturgic strategy with notions of an extended theatre practice and reports on a realized telematized performance where a practical implementation was explored. The theatrical site is viewed as a construct of attention, generated by the performers through the performance composition. The composition determines the audience experience, orchestrated by how the construction of the site manages their perspectives, (...) and how the performers are situated in the consciousness site of the audience. In the performed event the performers articulate as a collective extended entity, incorporating the transformation of the performance site via the articulation strategies implemented in the staging. Telematics is argued to be a technology facilitating specific modes of thinking, generating specific modes of actions and presence, which enable new performance sites and new modes of situating performance. (shrink)

It is suggested how one can imaginatively use a design strategy utilizing performers as tools in the creation of augmented, performative artwork. In order to establish meaningful constructions of performative and augmentative technology, one can use the formal methodologies of advanced formal body language as a tool in the creation process, and thereby have ‘the actual experience’ present in the process as a monitor and a constructive tool. To use a human being as a design tool is a method that (...) uses the skilled performer as a ‘super-’ or ‘extra-’ human tool to investigate through action and analysis. It is a way to test how realities occur under fluid and dynamic conditions within a controlled environment of time and space. This ‘technical’ use of the body as an extra-human behavioural entity, involves the total complex spectrum of intellect, emotions, desires, memory, actions, etc. as a formalized ‘machine’. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to use an anaphoric notion of presupposition for solving the problem of zero argument anaphora. Since Shopen (1973) it has been known that many missing arguments have an anaphoric interpretation, but it has not been known how this interpretation arises. I argue that these arguments are involved in presuppositions. On an anaphoric account of presuppositions as in van der Sandt (1992) or Kamp and Roßdeutscher (1992), it can be shown that the zero arguments acquire (...) an anaphoric interpretation through the presuppositions. The analysis rests on the principle that the Discourse Representation Structure for the presupposition is proper, so that the discourse referents for the zero arguments are in its universe and must be anchored to discourse referents in the context. (shrink)

Recensie van: Geert Jan Blanken, Kierkegaard. Een inleiding in zijn leven en werk (Amsterdam: Ambo, 2012).

This article aims to analyze how science is discursively attached to certain parts of the world and certain “kinds of people,” i.e., how scientific knowledge is culturally connected to the West and to whiteness. In focus is how the power technology of coloniality organizes scientific content in textbooks as well as how science students are met in the classroom. The empirical data consist of Swedish science textbooks. The analysis is guided by three questions: if and how the colonial history of (...) science is described in Swedish textbooks; how history of science is described; how the global South is represented. The analysis focuses on both what is said and what is unsaid, recurrent narratives, and cultural silences. To discuss how coloniality is organizing the idea of science eduation in terms of the science learner, previous studies are considered. The concepts of power/knowledge, epistemic violence, and coloniality are used to analyze how notions of scientific rationality and modernity are deeply entangled with a colonial way of seeing the world. The analysis shows that the colonial legacy of science and technology is not present in the textbooks. More evident is the talk about science as development. I claim that discourses on scientific development block out stories problematizing the violence done in the name of science. Furthermore, drawing on earlier classroom studies, I examine how the power of coloniality organize how students of color are met and taught, e.g., they are seen as in need of moral fostering rather than as scientific literate persons. (shrink)

Résumé Depuis 1974, le débat de l’entre-deux-tours affrontant les “finalistes” avant le second tour des élections présidentielles est devenu une “institution” en France. Après avoir mené plusieurs études linguistico-discursives sur ce même corpus − en particulier sur les modes de questionnement, la réfutation et les formes de discours rapporté −, les auteures s’intéressent ici aux termes d’adresses utilisés par les deux candidats en face-à-face dans les six débats susnommés. Les études de l’ouvrage dirigé par Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni, S’adresser à autrui. Les (...) formes nominales d’adresse en français, ont bien a montré que les usages appellatifs varient considérablement d’un genre interactionnel à l’autre. Il semble ainsi justifier de mener une étude approfondie, à la fois quantitative et qualitative, de l’évolution de ces usages appellatifs au sein du genre discursif des débats politiques télévisés de l’entre-deux-tours, ceux-ci couvrant une période d’une quarantaine d’années. Les auteures s’interrogent sur les formes des termes d’adresse et sur la fréquence avec laquelle ils sont utilisés au fil des décennies. L’analyse porte également sur l’emploi de ces formes en allocution et / ou en délocution et sur les fonctions pragmatiques que jouent ces unités dans les débats de l’entre-deux-tours. (shrink)

Finding the theoretical space where cinema and philosophy meet, Malin Wahlberg’s sophisticated approach to the experience of documentary film aligns with attempts to reconsider the premises of existential phenomenology. The configuration of time is crucial in organizing the sensory affects of film in general but, as Wahlberg adroitly demonstrates, in nonfiction films the problem of managing time is writ large by the moving image’s interaction with social memory and historical figures. Wahlberg discusses a thought-provoking corpus of classical and recent (...) experiments in film and video in which creative approaches to the time of the image and the potential archive memory of filmic representation illuminates meanings of temporality and time experience. She also offers a methodological account of film and brings Deleuze and Ricoeur into dialogue with Bazin and Mitry on the subject of cinema and phenomenology. Drawing attention to the cultural significance of the images’ imprint as a trace of the past, Documentary Time brings to bear phenomenological inquiry on nonfiction film while at the same time reconsidering the existential dimensions of time that have always puzzled humans. Malin Wahlberg is a research fellow in cinema studies at Stockholm University. (shrink)

Architectural experience and creation is studied through a selection of projects, each driven by an obsessive creator towards particular levels of architectural experience, both physical and virtual. The article investigates the processes of turning dreams into physical space, exemplified by four extraordinary creators and collectors of space, each one a pursuer of obsessive architectural activities, all haunted by transitive dreams: Baron Des Esseintes, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ fictional character in the novel À Rebours (Against Nature) from 1884; Kurt Schwitters, the dadaist painter (...) and constructor of the Merzbau created in Hannover between 1919 and 1937; Sir John Soane, the architect and collector, who arranged his home as a museum from 1790 until 1837; and the German artist Gregor Schneider, whose home in Rheydt since 1985 is slowly folding in on itself under the name Haus Ur. Whereas Des Esseintes is a fictional builder of dreams in physical form; Schwitters, Soane and Schneider are real builders of dreams in physical form - the author Huysmans is a real builder of dreams in fictional form. Three of the four selected projects introduce layers of hybrid existence into ordinary building shells, and one represents the virtual architecture of narrative space. Their creators are driving architectural space into different ontological states, providing a field of perceptional and representational problems. The architects of parallel realities are subsequently challenging our basic understanding of architectural organization, aesthetics and methods. This erratic field of subjective and obsessive architecture serves my purposes of investigating architectural imagination as the main asset of virtual space. (shrink)

Axelord’s [(1970), Conflict of Interest, Markham Publishers, Chicago] index of conflict in 2 × 2 games with two pure strategy equilibria has the property that a reduction in the cost of holding out corresponds to an increase in conflict. This article takes the opposite view, arguing that if losing becomes less costly, a player is less likely to gamble to win, which means that conflict will be less frequent. This approach leads to a new power index and a new measure (...) of stubbornness, both anchored in strategic reasoning. The win probability defined as power constitutes an equilibrium refinement which differs from Harsanyi and Selten’s [(1988), A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games, MIT Press, Cambridge] refinement. In contrast, Axelrod’s approach focuses on preferences regarding divergences from imaginary outmost rewards that cannot be obtained jointly. The player who is less powerful in an asymmetric one-shot game becomes more powerful in the repeated game, provided he or she values the future sufficiently more than the opponent. This contrasts with the view that repetition induces cooperation, but conforms with the expectation that a more patient player receives a larger share of the pie. (shrink)

Human/animal relations are potentially controversial and biotechnologically produced animals and animal-like creatures – bio-objects such as transgenics, clones, cybrids and other hybrids – have often created lively political debate since they challenge established social and moral norms. Ethical issues regarding the human/animal relations in biotechnological developments have at times been widely debated in many European countries and beyond. However, the general trend is a move away from parliamentary and public debate towards institutionalized ethics and technified expert panels. We explore by (...) using the conceptual lens of bio-objectification what effects such a move can be said to have. (shrink)

Scarcity sharpens the conflict between short term gains and long term sustainability. Psychological research documents that decision makers focus on immediate needs under scarcity and use available resources more effectively. However, decision makers also borrow too much from future resources and overall performance decreases as a consequence. Using an online experiment, we study how scarcity affects borrowing decisions in groups. We first document that scarcity affects groups in a similar way as individuals. Then, we go on to show that the (...) negative effect of scarcity is weaker for groups than for individuals. Even in a minimal design that excludes direct interaction or communication, the fact that participants know that their own behavior affects and can be partly observed by another participant disciplines their use of scarce resources. Our results thus highlight the benefit of groups as units of human organization. (shrink)