Teachers’ job satisfaction has been the subject of many studies that tried to identify its main sources. Based on the social cognitive career theory, the present study aimed to investigate the relationships between personality traits, goals orientation, and teachers’ job satisfaction. A total of 321 Romanian teachers completed an online questionnaire. The results demonstrated new insights regarding the relationships between psychological variables and teachers’ job satisfaction. Cognitive rigidity, as a mechanism to resistance to change, mediates between conscientiousness and teachers’ job (...) satisfaction. Moreover, the moderation role of learning goals orientation manifests in the relation between conscientiousness and job satisfaction. These findings emphasize that school management needs to offer teachers information and explain the change’s benefits if they want to prevent individual resistance to change and decrease satisfaction related to their work. (shrink)

Objective: Theory and research suggest that the pursuit of personal goals that do not fit a person's affect-based implicit motives results in impaired emotional well-being, including increased symptoms of depression. The aim of this study was to evaluate an intervention designed to enhance motive-goal congruence and study its impact on well-being. Method: Seventy-four German students (mean age = 22.91, SD = 3.68; 64.9% female) without current psychopathology, randomly allocated to 3 groups: motivational feedback (FB; n = 25; participants learned about (...) the fit between their implicit motives and explicit goals), FB + congruence-enhancement training (CET; n = 22; participants also engaged in exercises to increase the fit between their implicit motives and goals), and a no-intervention control group (n = 27), were administered measures of implicit motives, personal goal commitments, happiness, depressive symptoms, and life satisfaction 3 weeks before (T1) and 6 weeks after (T2) treatment. Results: On two types of congruence measures derived from motive and goal assessments, treated participants showed increases in agentic (power and achievement) congruence, with improvements being most consistent in the FB+CET group. Treated participants also showed a trend-level depressive symptom reduction, but no changes on other well-being measures. Although increases in overall and agentic motivational congruence were associated with increases in affective well-being, treatment-based reduction of depressive symptoms was not mediated by treatment-based agentic congruence changes. Conclusion: These findings document that motivational congruence can be effectively enhanced, that changes in motivational congruence are associated with changes in affective well-being, and they suggest that individuals’ implicit motives should be considered when personal goals are discussed in the therapeutic process. (shrink)

Inconsistent information between an organization’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments and perceived CSR (in-)action is a big challenge for organizations because this is typically associated with perceptions of corporate hypocrisy and related negative stakeholder reactions. However, in contrast to the prevailing corporate hypocrisy literature we argue that inconsistent CSR information does not always correspond to perceptions of corporate hypocrisy; rather, responses depend on individual predispositions in processing CSR-related information. In this study, we investigate how an individual’s moral identity shapes reactions (...) to inconsistent CSR information. The results of our three studies show that individuals who symbolize—i.e., display—their moral identity to the public more than they internalize moral values react less negatively to inconsistent CSR information. We also show that this weakens their anger and willingness to change company behavior. Furthermore, we find that this effect is amplified for extraverted but weakened for neurotic individuals. Our findings underline the importance of individual predispositions in processing CSR information. (shrink)

There are certain character strengths that can more than make up for various obstacles to learning and success in life. Grit is one of these character strengths. Manifesting itself as persistence, undaunted courage, determination, steadfastness, and a refusal to back down in the face of adversity, grit is a character strength that can lead to success no matter how high the obstacles. Readers learn how to acquire and demonstrate grit in their daily lives. Real-life role models--both everyday teens and celebrities--help (...) illustrate the journey to and the rich rewards of approaching life with an unshakable spirit of grit. This text lends itself well to certain of the reading and analysis standards of the Common Core Curriculum for informational texts, affording readers the opportunity to summarize text, determine central ideas and identify supporting details, trace and evaluate an argument and its details, analyze how ideas and claims are developed, and determine an author's point of view and purpose. (shrink)

The question of why Plato censored poetry in his Republic has bedeviled scholars for centuries. In Exiling the Poets, Ramona A. Naddaff offers a strikingly original interpretation of this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy.

Bio-ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analyzing the rapidly growing pool of plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide structured vocabularies to support consistent aggregation of data and a semantic framework for automated analyses and reasoning. They are a key component of the Semantic Web. This paper provides background on what bio-ontologies are, why they are relevant to botany, and the principles of ontology development. It includes an overview of ontologies and related resources that are relevant to plant science, (...) with a detailed description of the Plant Ontology (PO). We discuss the challenges of building an ontology that covers all green plants (Viridiplantae). Key results: Ontologies can advance plant science in four keys areas: 1. comparative genetics, genomics, phenomics, and development, 2. taxonomy and systematics, 3. semantic applications and 4. education. Conclusions: Bio-ontologies offer a flexible framework for comparative plant biology, based on common botanical understanding. As genomic and phenomic data become available for more species, we anticipate that the annotation of data with ontology terms will become less centralized, while at the same time, the need for cross-species queries will become more common, causing more researchers in plant science to turn to ontologies. (shrink)

By 2050, global livestock production is expected to double—growing faster than any other agricultural sub-sector—with most of this increase taking place in the developing world. As the United Nation’s four-hundred-page report, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options , documents, livestock production is now one of three most significant contributors to environmental problems, leading to increased greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, water pollution, and increased health problems. The paper draws on the UN report as well as a flurry of other (...) recently published studies in order to demonstrate the effect of intensive livestock production on global warming and on people’s health. The paper’s goal is to outline the problems caused by intensive livestock farming and analyze a number of possible solutions, including legislative changes and stricter regulations, community mobilizing, and consumers choosing to decrease their demand for animal products. (shrink)

The scientific paradigm which I rely upon in the framework of this article is quantum mechanics, whose “cognitive revolution” consisted of replacing the classical principle of separability with the principle of nonseparability or global intercorrelation. According to this intercorrelation, highlighted at the subatomic level, the part cannot be separated from the whole, because every part has a global and instantaneous connection with the whole universe. For this reason the foundation of the world cannot be the part, but the whole, which (...) is therefore logically and ontologically prior to the part, i.e., self-consistent. Consequently, the principle of global intercorrelation elucidates and validates some of the oldest philosophical problems and intuitions about the unity or self-consistency of the world. An example in this sense is the bootstrap theory of American physicist Geoffrey Chew, which presents such striking similarities to the metaphysical system of Leibniz's Monadology that the two intertwine and mirror each other, like twin souls, to the extent that it could be stated that if Chew’s bootstrap theory represents the explanatory physical level of Leibniz’s metaphysics, then, analogously, Leibniz’s Monadology represents the explanatory metaphysical level of Chew’s physics. (shrink)

Processuality as refusal to “freeze,” “eternize,” and fragment reality is an attempt to deconstruct the I’s main mechanism, which is, as it was named in psychoanalysis, the compulsion of repetition. Through this deceit and illusion fabrication mechanism, the knowing I tries to “freeze”, to “fixate” and to fragment reality, through “catching” it in different images, formulae, dogmas, theories, ideologies, symbols and systems which become just as many “icons” or graven images of reality. This attempt of deconstruction is made from the (...) perspective of a philosophy/vision of process, quite sporadic in the Western space, bringing arguments from the perspective of Henri Bergson and Emil Cioran’s intuitionist philosophy, as well as from that of the new scientific paradigm of quantum mechanics. All these philosophies could be seen as philosophies of process, demanding as it were an understanding of reality in terms of process, and not of result. This understanding of process takes place with the help of intuition, the only one which can grasp, beyond the static, rigid and artificial concepts or categories of the intellect, the movement, “verb” or interior pulsation of things within the framework of an integration process which reveals the unity, non-separability, intercorrelation and mutual interconnectivity of things. (shrink)

The study of biodiversity spans many disciplines and includes data pertaining to species distributions and abundances, genetic sequences, trait measurements, and ecological niches, complemented by information on collection and measurement protocols. A review of the current landscape of metadata standards and ontologies in biodiversity science suggests that existing standards such as the Darwin Core terminology are inadequate for describing biodiversity data in a semantically meaningful and computationally useful way. Existing ontologies, such as the Gene Ontology and others in the Open (...) Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry library, provide a semantic structure but lack many of the necessary terms to describe biodiversity data in all its dimensions. In this paper, we describe the motivation for and ongoing development of a new Biological Collections Ontology, the Environment Ontology, and the Population and Community Ontology. These ontologies share the aim of improving data aggregation and integration across the biodiversity domain and can be used to describe physical samples and sampling processes (for example, collection, extraction, and preservation techniques), as well as biodiversity observations that involve no physical sampling. Together they encompass studies of: 1) individual organisms, including voucher specimens from ecological studies and museum specimens, 2) bulk or environmental samples (e.g., gut contents, soil, water) that include DNA, other molecules, and potentially many organisms, especially microbes, and 3) survey-based ecological observations. We discuss how these ontologies can be applied to biodiversity use cases that span genetic, organismal, and ecosystem levels of organization. We argue that if adopted as a standard and rigorously applied and enriched by the biodiversity community, these ontologies would significantly reduce barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange among biodiversity resources and researchers. (shrink)

In this study, I examine the online discourse of the European refugee crisis on the micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Specifically, I analyze 100 tweets that include #refugeesnotwelcome, and explore how this hashtag is used to express negative feelings, beliefs and ideologies toward refugees and migrants in Europe. Guided by critical discourse studies, I focus on Twitter users’ discursive strategies as well as form and function of semiotic resources and multimodality. Twitter users who include this particular hashtag use a rhetoric of inclusion (...) and exclusion to depict refugees as unwanted, criminal outsiders. These tendencies align with current trends in Europe where nationalist-conservative and xenophobic right-wing groups gain power and establish a socially accepted discourse of racism. (shrink)

The purpose of this article was to gain a deeper understanding of Arendt’s educational philosophy, her perspective of political involvement as a kind of political education, and natality as the fundamental nature of education. The current study has extended past research by elucidating Arendt’s view of participatory democratic politics, her analysis of citizenship education programs, and her assessment of the crisis of education. The findings of this study have implications for Arendt’s idea of pedagogical authority, the specific character of Arendt’s (...) contribution to political theory, and her grasp on the link between citizenship and education. (shrink)

The framers of the U.S. Constitution believed that intellectual property rights were crucial to scientific advancement. Yet, the framers also recognized the need to balance innovation, privatization, and public use. The courts’ expansion of patent protection for biotechnology innovations in the last 30 years raises the question whether the patent system effectively balances these concerns. While the question is not new, only through a thorough and thoughtful examination of these issues can the current system be evaluated. It is then a (...) policy decision for Congress if any change is necessary. (shrink)

The presence of agriculture is diminishing in today’s society: it provides only a small percentage of jobs, and the number of visible farms that can provide exposure to agricultural processes is continuously decreasing. We hypothesize that the direct involvement with farm activities or interaction with farmers and visual appreciation of agricultural processes of all kinds, influences rural inhabitants’ relationship to agriculture. We assume that the latter plays a role in how far inhabitants are attached to their place, and more specifically, (...) perceive rural place. In this paper, we aim to initiate a discussion on this complex social relationship and suggest a model to capture fine interactions between relationship to agriculture and rural place attachment. We examine the direct and indirect effects from the density of resident farmers on these interactions. We set up a model using data from empirical research in Germany conducted in 2016. We surveyed rural inhabitants and interviewed farmers in villages purposefully sampled based on high and low density of resident farmers. To reveal underlying relationships among the latent constructs and more directly measurable indicators, as well as the indirect effect of farm presence on place attachment through its effect on forming perceptions about agriculture, we operationalized our analysis using a structural equation model. Besides a good model fit, our initial results indicate that rural inhabitants form stronger relationship to agriculture when the density of resident farmers is higher. Further, farm presence and attachment to rural place are positively related, but needs to be better captured. (shrink)

The Plant Ontology (PO) is a community resource consisting of standardized terms, definitions, and logical relations describing plant structures and development stages, augmented by a large database of annotations from genomic and phenomic studies. This paper describes the structure of the ontology and the design principles we used in constructing PO terms for plant development stages. It also provides details of the methodology and rationale behind our revision and expansion of the PO to cover development stages for all plants, particularly (...) the land plants (bryophytes through angiosperms). As a case study to illustrate the general approach, we examine variation in gene expression across embryo development stages in Arabidopsis and maize, demonstrating how the PO can be used to compare patterns of expression across stages and in developmentally different species. Although many genes appear to be active throughout embryo development, we identified a small set of uniquely expressed genes for each stage of embryo development and also between the two species. Evaluating the different sets of genes expressed during embryo development in Arabidopsis or maize may inform future studies of the divergent developmental pathways observed in monocotyledonous versus dicotyledonous species. The PO and its annotation databasemake plant data for any species more discoverable and accessible through common formats, thus providing support for applications in plant pathology, image analysis, and comparative development and evolution. (shrink)

Written for a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this contribution describes an undergraduate course on ancient rhetoric at Berkeley, in which Professor Ramona Naddaff was accused by a male student of demeaning women during a lecture and of causing him trauma in the process. He threatened to bring charges against her to campus authorities, claiming the support of fellow students. In her lecture, she had discussed the classical figuration of rhetoric—persuasive speech—as violence and sometimes rape. (...) In a discussion the following week, some students requested the use of “trigger warnings” before the utterance of words like rape. The instructor and her teaching assistant Katharine Wallerstein individually give their views of this disconcerting experience and comment on the difficulties of teaching critical thinking in the current political and cultural climate. They conclude that the language of personal rights and the demand for self-protection tend to come at the expense of teaching and learning alike. (shrink)

This interactive book is designed to help readers deepen their relationship with the Divine by connecting to the vibrancy of life. This cosmic message of hope is meant to be read without hurry, while taking time to ponder and absorb the wisdom of these great mystics.

W.S.F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion. Themes and Theories, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2009, 576 pages.

Review of Pr. Ioan Chirilă, Scara cuvântului. Eseuri omiletice [ The Ladder of the Word. Homiletic Essays ],.

Review of Joseph Kim, Reformed Epistemology and the Problem of Religious Diversity.

Plants from a handful of species provide the primary source of food for all people, yet this source is vulnerable to multiple stressors, such as disease, drought, and nutrient deficiency. With rapid population growth and climate uncertainty, the need to produce crops that can tolerate or resist plant stressors is more crucial than ever. Traditional plant breeding methods may not be sufficient to overcome this challenge, and methods such as highOthroughput sequencing and automated scoring of phenotypes can provide significant new (...) insights. Ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analysing the large quantities of data that come with these newer methods. As part of a larger project to develop ontologies that describe plant phenotypes and stresses, we are developing a plant disease extension of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDOPlant). The IDOPlant is envisioned as a reference ontology designed to cover any plant infectious disease. In addition to novel terms for infectious diseases, IDOPlant includes terms imported from other ontologies that describe plants, pathogens, and vectors, the geographic location and ecology of diseases and hosts, and molecular functions and interactions of hosts and pathogens. To encompass this range of data, we are suggesting inOhouse ontology development complemented with reuse of terms from orthogonal ontologies developed as part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. The study of plant diseases provides an example of how an ontological framework can be used to model complex biological phenomena such as plant disease, and how plant infectious diseases differ from, and are similar to, infectious diseases in other organism. (shrink)

The Plant Ontology (PO) (http://www.plantontology.org) (Jaiswal et al., 2005; Avraham et al., 2008) was designed to facilitate cross-database querying and to foster consistent use of plant-specific terminology in annotation. As new data are generated from the ever-expanding list of plant genome projects, the need for a consistent, cross-taxon vocabulary has grown. To meet this need, the PO is being expanded to represent all plants. This is the first ontology designed to encompass anatomical structures as well as growth and developmental stages (...) across such a broad taxonomic range. While other ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO) (The Gene Ontology Consortium, 2010) or Cell Type Ontology (CL) (Bard et al., 2005) cover all living organisms, they are confined to structures at the cellular level and below. The diversity of growth forms and life histories within plants presents a challenge, but also provides unique opportunities to study developmental and evolutionary homology across organisms. (shrink)

Previous attempts to elucidate the meaning of Plato's exile of the poets in Republic X fall into two groups: they either dismiss the exile of poetry as marginal to the dialogue's main argument or they understand its logic in relation to only one, among several, fundamental Platonic doctrines advanced within the dialogue. In Alien Pleasures: The Exile of the Poets in Plato's Republic, I argue that not only is Book X's exile of poetry an integral and important part of the (...) dialogue but it is also the site where all of Plato's most innovative and controversial theories are finally inextricably bound together as one complete philosophical system. Further, I explicate how Plato uses his whole philosophical system to deploy a definition of the poetic effect as essentially dangerous to and subversive of the values of the philosophical life. ;The dangers of poetry are explored in four separate chapters, each of which examines a distinct aspect of Plato's uncomfortable relation to poetic creation and experience. In Chapter One, I concentrate on Plato's definition of the metaphysical dangers of poetry, both a disguised and false imitation of divine production and of philosophical discourse. In Chapter Two, I suggest how Plato enacts an epistemological break with prior definitions of poetry so to define it as the most deceptive and dangerous speech possible. Chapter Three concentrates on the operations of the poetic image in Plato's ontology. I argue that Plato conceives the poetic image as the most dangerous kind of representation, removed as far as ontologically possible from the reality of the forms. The final chapter concentrates on Plato's conception of poetic grief and the psychological dangers poetry poses to the ethical and rational individual. I demonstrate that the pleasures of poetic passion are of a different order than those of to epithumetikon. Furthermore, unlike these desires, poetic passion cannot simply be mastered by the exercise of reason. Rather, Plato argues, spirit must first be aligned with reason and all the distinct parts of the soul harmonized in order to counter the irresistible attraction to the alien pleasures of poetic passion. (shrink)