An informed consent and voluntary assent in biomedical research with adolescents is contingent on a variety of factors, including adolescent and parent perceptions of research risk, benefit, and decision-making autonomy. Thirty-seven adolescents with asthma and their parents evaluated a high or low aversion form of a pediatric asthma research vignette and provided an enrollment decision; their perceptions of family influence over the participation decision; and evaluations of risk, aversion, benefit, and burden of study procedures. Adolescents and their parents agreed on (...) research participation decisions 74% of the time, yet both claimed ultimate responsibility for the participation decision. Both rated most study procedures as significantly more aversive than risky. Parents were more likely to rate aspects of the hypothetical study as beneficial and to provide higher risk ratings for procedures. Disagreements concerning research participation decisions and decision-making autonomy have implications for the exercise of voluntary assent in biomedical research. (shrink)

In 1998, the Labour government introduced legislation broadening British sentencing powers in relation to crimes aggravated by the offender's hostility towards the victim's actual or perceived race, religion, sexual orientation or disability. Gender is a notable omission from this list. Through a survey of eighty-eight stakeholders working in the violence against women sector, this paper explores both the potential benefits and possible disadvantages of adding a gender-based category concerned with VAW to British hate crime legislation. The majority of participants believed (...) that a hate crime approach would offer significant benefits, especially in terms of the symbolic power of the law to send a message to society that VAW is unacceptable. However, most also recognised that the addition of a VAW category to current legislation would involve major practical and conceptual difficulties, not least those resulting from problematic assumptions about the nature of hate crimes versus VAW, and a general unwillingness on the part of policy-makers to address the socio-cultural inequalities that underpin VAW. Overall, the fact that the majority of participants favoured inclusion, on the basis that the possible symbolic benefits were likely to outweigh the potential practical disadvantages, is significant: it speaks to the power of hate crime legislation to challenge many forms of inequality and discrimination still endemic in British society. (shrink)

Annotation. There has never been a writer quite like Christopher Pearson. A BETTER CLASS OF SUNSET brings together Pearson's enduring columns and essays, chronicling the twists and turns of Australian cultural life over three intriguing decades. From climate change to homosexuality and the welfare of Indigenous Australians, Pearson was an unflagging champion of unfashionable causes, a conscientious objector to political correctness and a skilled dissector of muddle-headed arguments. They reveal a true man of letters with a rare (...) literary voice; passionate, moving and often very funny, Pearson's thinking seldom strays from his abiding principles. For all those who aspire to be members of what Pearson called Club Sensible, A BETTER CLASS OF SUNSET is an indispensible addition to the bookshelf. (shrink)

In _Wild Blue Media_, Melody Jue destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our perception of the world by considering the ocean itself as a media environment—a place where the weight and opacity of seawater transforms how information is created, stored, transmitted, and perceived. By recentering media theory on and under the sea, Jue calls attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. In doing so, she provides media studies (...) with alternatives to familiar theoretical frameworks, thereby challenging scholars to navigate unfamiliar oceanic conditions of orientation, materiality, and saturation. Jue not only examines media about the ocean—science fiction narratives, documentary films, ocean data visualizations, animal communication methods, and underwater art—but reexamines media _through_ the ocean, submerging media theory underwater to estrange it from terrestrial habits of perception while reframing our understanding of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor. (shrink)

In recent issues of this journal, Roger Scruton and Malcolm Budd have debated the question whether hearing a melody in a sequence of sounds necessarily involves an ‘unasserted thought’ about spatial movement. According to Scruton, the answer is ‘yes’; according to Budd, the answer is ‘no’. The conclusion of this paper is that, while Budd may have underestimated the viability of Scruton's thesis in one of its possible interpretations, there is no good reason to assume that the thesis is (...) true. Very briefly, the argument for the second part of the conclusion is that we can account for all the data adduced by Scruton in favour of his hypothesis by means of hypotheses that are far less daring. (shrink)

Beyond the major-minor tonality that characterizes classical and contemporary Western musical genres, Turkish classical and folk music offer experimental psychologists a rich modal system in which cognition, development, and enculturation can be studied. Here, we present a cross-cultural experiment concerning implicit knowledge of musical scales. Five groups of participants—American musicians and nonmusicians, Turkish musicians and nonmusicians, and Turkish classical and folk music listeners—were asked to listen to brief melodies composed using the member tones of either the major scale or the (...) rast makam, a microtonal mode found within Turkish classical and folk genres with no equivalent in Western music. Following each melody, participants were asked to identify whether a probe tone had been presented in the melody, providing confidence ratings on a six-point scale. In general, participants’ short-term memory was influenced by implicit knowledge of musical scales, with the major scale eclipsing the rast makam even in listeners experienced with Turkish genres. Prior work and future directions in cross-cultural music cognition research are discussed. (shrink)

Karl Pearson is a figure of interest to historians of many areas. The historian of mathematical statistics knows the inventor of the product-moment correlation coefficient and the chi square test; the historian of philosophy knows the author of the Grammar of science; the historian of genetics knows the opponent of Mendelism; the political historian knows the ‘social-imperialist’ political thinker; the historian of feminism knows the early supporter of the women's movement and friend of Olive Schreiner; and, of course, the (...) historian of eugenics knows the first occupant of the only chair of eugenics in a British university. This paper does not attempt a biography of Pearson, but simply raises and tries to answer one question. To what extent can the sociology of knowledge throw light on Pearson's varied and many-sided thought? It concludes that there is a good case for seeing this thought as reflecting with exceptional clarity the social interests of the professional middle class to which he belonged. (shrink)

Quentin Gailhac Dans cet article, l’auteur se penche sur les développements de Husserl sur la perception du tempo-objet spécifique qu’est la mélodie, à partir des lectures critiques qui les déterminent. En réfutant tout à la fois la saisie instantanée de Brentano, le temps de présence de Stern et la conscience d’après-coup de Meinong, Husserl se donne les moyens d’une résolution proprement phénoménologique du problème de l’unité mélodique dans la conscience. L’insatisfaction en regard des positions discutées conduira en effet Husserl à (...) un élargissement du champ de l’intuition, qui le mènera, notamment dans les Manuscrits de Bernau de 1917-1918, à penser l’originaire comme mouvement dynamique, comme procès. (shrink)

. A structured awareness of time lies at the core of the law's distinctive normativity. Melody is offered as a rough model of this mindfulness of time, since some important features of this awareness are also present in a hearer's grasp of melody. The model of melody is used, first, to identify some temporal dimensions of intentional action and then to highlight law's mindfulness of time. Its role in the structure of legal thinking, and especially in precedent‐sensitive (...) legal reasoning, is explored. This article argues further that melody‐modeled mindfulness of time is evident also at a deeper and more pervasive level, giving structure to the distinctive mode of law's normative guidance. The article draws one important theoretical consequence from this exploration, namely, that the normative coherence of momentary legal systems depends conceptually on their coherence over time. (shrink)

We show that if among the tested hypotheses the number of true hypotheses is not equal to the number of false hypotheses, then Neyman-Pearson theory of testing hypotheses does not warrant minimal epistemic reliability. We also argue that N-P does not protect from the possible negative effects of the pragmatic value-laden unequal setting of error probabilities on N-P’s epistemic reliability. Most importantly, we argue that in the case of a negative impact no methodological adjustment is available to neutralize it, (...) so in such cases the discussed pragmatic-value-ladenness of N-P inevitably compromises the goal of attaining truth. (shrink)

In recent years, alternative teacher preparation programmes are globally emerging to address teacher quality in ‘hard-to-staff’ schools. These programmes commonly attract graduates from prestigious...

I document some of the main evidence showing that E. S. Pearson rejected the key features of the behavioral-decision philosophy that became associated with the Neyman-Pearson Theory of statistics (NPT). I argue that NPT principles arose not out of behavioral aims, where the concern is solely with behaving correctly sufficiently often in some long run, but out of the epistemological aim of learning about causes of experimental results (e.g., distinguishing genuine from spurious effects). The view Pearson did (...) hold gives a deeper understanding of NPT tests than their typical formulation as accept-reject routines, against which criticisms of NPT are really directed. The Pearsonian view that emerges suggests how NPT tests may avoid these criticisms while still retaining what is central to these methods: the control of error probabilities. (shrink)

Summary Long-standing claims have been made for nearly the entire twentieth century that the biometrician, Karl Pearson, and his colleague, W. F. R. Weldon, rejected Mendelism as a theory of inheritance. It is shown that at the end of the nineteenth century Pearson considered various theories of inheritance (including Francis Galton's law of ancestral heredity for characters underpinned by continuous variation), and by 1904 he ?accepted the fundamental idea of Mendel? as a theory of inheritance for discontinuous variation. (...) Moreover, in 1909, he suggested a synthesis of biometry and Mendelism. Despite the many attempts made by a number of geneticists (including R. A. Fisher in 1936) to use Pearson's chi-square (X 2, P) goodness-of-fit test on Mendel's data, which produced results that were ?too good to be true?, Weldon reached the same conclusion in 1902, but his results were never acknowledged. The geneticist and arch-rival of the biometricians, Williams Bateson, was instead exceptionally critical of this work and interpreted this as Weldon's rejection of Mendelism. Whilst scholarship on Mendel, by historians of science in the last 18 years, has led to a balanced perspective of Mendel, it is suggested that a better balanced and more rounded view of the hereditarian-statistical work of Pearson, Weldon, and the biometricians is long overdue. (shrink)

Much of what we know and love about music is based on implicitly acquired mental representations of musical pitches and the relationships between them. While previous studies have shown that these mental representations of music can be acquired rapidly and can influence preference, it is still unclear which aspects of music influence learning and preference formation. This article reports two experiments that use an artificial musical system to examine two questions: (1) which aspects of music matter most for learning, and (...) (2) which aspects of music matter most for preference formation. Two aspects of music are tested: melody and harmony. In Experiment 1 we tested the learning and liking of a new musical system that is manipulated melodically so that only some of the possible conditional probabilities between successive notes are presented. In Experiment 2 we administered the same tests for learning and liking, but we used a musical system that is manipulated harmonically to eliminate the property of harmonic whole-integer ratios between pitches. Results show that disrupting melody (Experiment 1) disabled the learning of music without disrupting preference formation, whereas disrupting harmony (Experiment 2) does not affect learning and memory but disrupts preference formation. Results point to a possible dissociation between learning and preference in musical knowledge. (shrink)

Background Continued advances in human microbiome research and technologies raise a number of ethical, legal, and social challenges. These challenges are associated not only with the conduct of the research, but also with broader implications, such as the production and distribution of commercial products promising maintenance or restoration of good physical health and disease prevention. In this article, we document several ethical, legal, and social challenges associated with the commercialization of human microbiome research, focusing particularly on how this research is (...) mobilized within economic markets for new public health uses. Methods We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews (2009–2010) with 63 scientists, researchers, and National Institutes of Health project leaders (“investigators”) involved with human microbiome research. Interviews explored a range of ethical, legal, and social dimensions of human microbiome research, including investigators’ perspectives on commercialization. Using thematic content analysis, we identified and analyzed emergent themes and patterns. Results Investigators discussed the commercialization of human microbiome research in terms of (1) commercialization, probiotics, and issues of safety, (2) public awareness of the benefits and risks of dietary supplements, and (3) regulation. Conclusion The prevailing theme of ethical, legal, social concern focused on the need to find a balance between the marketplace, scientific research, and the public’s health. The themes we identified are intended to serve as points for discussions about the relationship between scientific research and the manufacture and distribution of over-the-counter dietary supplements in the United States. (shrink)

This study investigates the procedural learning, retention, and reactivation of temporal sensorimotor sequences in children with and without developmental coordination disorder. Twenty typically-developing children and 12 children with DCD took part in this study. The children were required to tap on a keyboard, synchronizing with auditory or visual stimuli presented as an isochronous temporal sequence, and practice non-isochronous temporal sequences to memorize them. Immediate and delayed retention of the audio-motor and visuo-motor non-isochronous sequences were tested by removing auditory or visual (...) stimuli immediately after practice and after a delay of 2 h. A reactivation test involved reintroducing the auditory and visual stimuli after the delayed recall. Data were computed via circular analyses to obtain asynchrony, the stability of synchronization and errors. Firstly, an overall deficit in synchronization with both auditory and visual isochronous stimuli was observed in DCD children compared to TD children. During practice, further improvements were found for the audio-motor non-isochronous sequence compared to the visuo-motor non-isochronous sequence in both TD children and children with DCD. However, a drastic increase in errors occurred in children with DCD during immediate retention as soon as the auditory stimuli were removed. Reintroducing auditory stimuli decreased errors in the audio-motor sequence for children with DCD. Such changes were not seen for the visuo-motor non-isochronous sequence, which was equally learned, retained and reactivated in DCD and TD children. All these results suggest that TD children benefit from both auditory and visual stimuli to memorize the sequence, whereas children with DCD seem to present a deficit in integrating an audio-motor sequence in their memory. The immediate effect of reactivation suggests a specific dependency on auditory information in DCD. Contrary to the audio-motor sequence, the visuo-motor sequence was both learned and retained in children with DCD. This suggests that visual stimuli could be the best information for memorizing a temporal sequence in DCD. All these results are discussed in terms of a specific audio-motor coupling deficit in DCD. (shrink)

Standard statistical measures of strength of association, although pioneered by Pearson deliberately to be acausal, nowadays are routinely used to measure causal efficacy. But their acausal origins have left them ill suited to this latter purpose. I distinguish between two different conceptions of causal efficacy, and argue that: 1) Both conceptions can be useful 2) The statistical measures only attempt to capture the first of them 3) They are not fully successful even at this 4) An alternative definition more (...) squarely based on causal thinking not only captures the second conception, it can also capture the first one better too. (shrink)

The stormy development of vocal production during the first postnatal weeks is generally underestimated. Our longitudinal studies revealed an amazingly fast unfolding and combinatorial complexification of pre-speech melodies. We argue that relying on “melody” could provide for the immature brain a kind of filter to extract life-relevant information from the complex speech stream.

A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One long-standing puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye, Milin, Futrell, and Ramscar enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender confers. Yet this raises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial to processing, what does this mean for languages that make (...) do without them? Here, we compare the communicative function of gender marking in German to that of prenominal adjectives in English, finding that despite their differences, both systems act to efficiently smooth information over discourse, making nouns more equally predictable in context. We examine why evolutionary pressures may favor one system over another and discuss the implications for compositional accounts of meaning and Gricean principles of communication. (shrink)

If the laws of nature are deterministic, then it seems possible that a Laplacean intelligence that knows the initial conditions and the laws would be able to accurately predict everything that will ever happen. However, it would be easy to construct a counterpredictive device that falsifies any revealed prediction about its future behavior. What would then occur if a Laplacean intelligence encountered a counterpredictive device? This is the paradox of predictability. A number of philosophers have proposed solutions to it, though (...) part of my aim here is to argue that the paradox is more pernicious than has thus far been appreciated, and therefore that extant solutions are inadequate. My broader aim is to argue that the paradox motivates Humeanism about laws of nature. (shrink)

In Plato’s Symposium Eryximachus provides a metaphysical theory based on the attraction of basic elements which he applies to a variety of domains, including music. In the text of his speech there is a variation in the manuscripts at 187d2 between two readings, “μέλεσί τε καὶ μέτροις” and “μέλεσί τε καὶ ῥυθμοῖς”. Though the former is almost universally followed, I argue that the latter is the correct reading, based on three sources of evidence: (1) the manuscript tradition, (2) Plato’s style (...) and diction, and (3) the logic of the passage. In all three cases ῥυθμοῖς is the preferable reading. (shrink)

Music has been seen since the Romantic era as the quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. The Melody of Time explores the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of time, spanning the dynamic century between Beethoven and Elgar.

This paper examines the phenomenon of music in relation to time and time-consciousness based on the philosophies of Augustine, Brentano and Husserl. They analyzed music, or more precisely, the melody of tones and rhythm in their theories of time and time-consciousness, because the process of perceiving music uncloaks the phenomenon of time-understanding.

Candide is the most famous of Voltaire's 'philosophical tales', in which he combined witty improbabilities with the sanest of good sense. This edition includes four other prose tales - Micromegas, Zadig, The Ingnu, and The White Bull - and a verse tale based on Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale,: What Pleases the Ladies.

Past research shows that the bilingual experience may enhance cognitive executive function. In this experiment, we evaluated cognitive control in bilinguals relative to monolinguals by using a dimensional overlap model to predict performance in a task composed of Stroop and Simon stimuli. A group of 24 Spanish monolinguals and 24 bilinguals with differing first languages and all having Spanish as a second language did a picture naming task and a task composed of Stroop and Simon stimuli, where the effect of (...) different overlap conditions between stimuli and responses were examined. The tasks were performed in Spanish for both groups and performance was indexed with behavioral and electrophysiological measures. We hypothesized that the bilinguals’ daily language practice in L2 reflected overlap conditions similar to the Simon task. Both naming a picture in L2 and the Simon task would involve conflict at the response level. L2 picture naming entails interference between two potential oral responses, to name in L2 vs. L1. Similarly, incongruent stimuli in the Simon task produce interference because the irrelevant dimension overlap with an incorrect response. In contrast, the manual Stroop task involves a different type of conflict between two overlapping stimulus dimensions. We predicted for these reasons a superior performance in Simon tasks over Stroop tasks for bilinguals, while monolinguals were expected to have a similar performance in both tasks. We also expected to see a correlation between the performance on the picture naming task and the Simon task in bilinguals. However, the behavioral results did not confirm these hypotheses. In fact, both groups had similar congruency effects as measured by reaction times and error rates, and there was no correlation between the picture naming and Simon task in bilinguals. Despite this, the electrophysiological data suggested a relationship between the picture naming task and the P300 congruency effect in bilinguals. Our findings provide insights into the neurocognitive bases of language and serve as a research avenue for language behaviors in bilinguals. (shrink)

Background and objectives: Developmental coordination disorder is a neurodevelopmental motor disorder occurring in 5-6% of school-aged children. It is suggested that children with DCD show deficits in motor learning. Transcranial direct current stimulation enhances motor learning in adults and children but is unstudied in DCD. We aimed to investigate if tDCS, paired with motor skill training, facilitates motor learning in a pediatric sample with DCD.Methods: Twenty-eight children with diagnosed DCD were randomized and placed into a treatment or sham group. Anodal (...) tDCS was applied in conjunction with fine manual training over 5 consecutive days. Children's motor functioning was assessed with the Purdue Pegboard Test and Jebsen-Taylor Hand Function Test at baseline, post-intervention and 6 weeks following intervention. Group differences in rates of motor learning and skill transfer/retention were examined using linear mixed modeling and repeated measures ANOVAs, respectively.Results: There were no serious adverse events or drop-outs and procedures were well-tolerated. Independent of group, all participants demonstrated improved motor scores over the 5 training days [F, p < 0.001, 95% CI ], with no skill decay observed at retention. There was no interaction between intervention group and day [F, p = 0.086, 95% CI ].Conclusion: Children with DCD demonstrate motor learning with long-term retention of acquired skill. Motor cortex tDCS did not enhance motor learning as seen in other populations. Before conclusions of tDCS efficacy can be drawn, additional carefully designed trials with reproducible results are required.Clinical Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT03453983. (shrink)

To what extent do we pay attention to the text and images that cover our hospital walls and do we offer any critique either as professionals or service users? In the past we might have expected to see functional or helpful instructions about where to go (or not to go) and in more well-endowed buildings, perhaps we would see some works of art, sculpture, stained glass even, with the intention to encourage, distract or even forewarn us. However, it is now (...) common in UK hospitals, for wall space to be used as a portal for a range of institutional political messages, that convey information about everything from its own values, behaviours to advertisements for products and services to requirements for rule following. Michel Foucault's ideas about Heterotopic space can help us to see that hospitals tend to fall (awkwardly) between being a public and personal health care space, and this is a possible explanation for the confused material culture and messages that are shared there. This paper draws on ethnographic methods to reflect on personal experience in order to offer a critique of the contemporary political discourse which has become 'literally' written onto our hospital walls. (shrink)

Explanation and interpretation of Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

The paper addresses the question of whether heritability can be useful in establishing genetics as an explanation for an individual’s display of some trait or behavior. After reviewing the fundamental philosophical challenge to heritability—that heritability is a population level measure—an argument is presented for rethinking the role heritability occupies in both causal and explanatory claims. It is argued that heritability can be useful for genetically based explanations of individual traits, if the conditions for proper genetic explanation are modestly reconceived, and (...) the measure is seen as an evidential tool which conforms to standard methods for determining causal factors. (shrink)

In this essay, we set out to survey and critically assess various attitudes and understandings of reductionism as it appears in discussions regarding the scientific study of religion. Our objective in the essay is twofold. First, we articulate what we will refer to as three ‘meta-interpretative’ frameworks, which summarize the distinct positions one can witness in response to the explanations coming out of research within the new science of religion. Second, and more importantly, we seek to demonstrate that under no (...) sensible interpretation of the notion of ‘reduction’ do the explanations provide a basis for defending one of the meta-interpretative frameworks rather than another. (shrink)