This new edition of Baran and Davis's successful text provides a comprehensive, historically based, introduction to mass communication theory. Clearly written with examples, graphics, and other materials to illustrate key theories, this edition traces the emergence of two main bodies of mass communication theory: social, behavioral and critical, cultural. The authors emphasize that media theories are human creations that typically are intended to address specific problems or issues.

Importance: Given the importance of apathy for stroke, we felt it was time to scrutinize the psychometric properties of the commonly used Starkstein Apathy Scale for this purpose.Objectives: The objectives were to: estimate the extent to which the SAS items fit a hierarchical continuum of the Rasch Model; and estimate the strength of the relationships between the Rasch analyzed SAS and converging constructs related to stroke outcomes.Methods: Data was from a clinical trial of a community-based intervention targeting participation. A total (...) of 857 SAS questionnaires were completed by 238 people with stroke from up to 5 time points. SAS has 14 items, rated on a 4-point scale with higher values indicating more apathy. Psychometric properties were tested using Rasch partial-credit model, correlation, and regression. Items were rescored so higher scores are interpreted as lower apathy levels.Results: Rasch analysis indicated that the response options were disordered for 8/14 items, pointing to unreliability in the interpretation of the response options; they were consequently reduced from 4 to 3. Only 9/14 items fit the Rasch model and therefore suitable for creating a total score. The new rSAS was deemed unidimensional. Apathy was correlated weakly with anxiety/depression and uncorrelated with physical capacity. Regression showed that the effect of apathy on participation and health perception was similar for rSAS/SAS versions: R2 participation measures ranged from 0.11 to 0.29; R2 for health perception was ∼0.25. When placed on the same scale, rSAS value was 6.5 units lower than SAS value with minimal floor/ceiling effects. Estimated change over time was identical which was not substantial but greater than expected assuming no change.Conclusion: The retained items of the rSAS targeted domains of behaviors more than beliefs and results support the rSAS as a robust measure of apathy in people with chronic stroke. (shrink)

Episodic memory is a major area of research in psychology. Initially viewed as a distinct store of information derived from experienced episodes, episodic memory is understood today as a form of mental "time travel" into the personal past. Recent research has revealed striking similarities between episodic memory - past-oriented mental time travel - and future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT). Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel brings together leading contributors in both empirical and theoretical disciplines to present (...) the first interdisciplinary look at the human to imagine future scenarios. Chapters focus on the challenging conceptual and theoretical questions raised by FMTT, covering themes such as: varieties of future-oriented cognition; relationships between FMTT and episodic memory; subjective temporality in FMTT; the self in FMTT; and functional, evolutionary and comparative, developmental, and clinical perspectives on FMTT. With its focus on the conceptual issues at the heart of fast-developing research on FMTT, this edited volume will serve graduate students to senior scholars working on or interested in FMTT and related areas as a synthesis of current theoretical thinking and a source of questions for future FMTT research. (shrink)

This introductory chapter reviews research on future-oriented mental time travel to date (the past), provides an overview of the contents of the book (the present), and enumerates some possible research directions suggested by the latter (the future).

In his landmark monograph, "The Politics of Jesus", John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially "Preface to Theology", in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and "The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited", Yoder's (...) proposal for a renewed Jewish-Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics. (shrink)

Ethics review of research involving humans has become something of an institution in recent years. It is intended to protect participants from harm and, to that end, follows rigorous standards. Giv...

The shortage of organs for transplantation by its nature prompts ethical dilemmas. For example, although there is an imperative to save human life and reduce suffering by maximising the supply of vital organs, there is an equally important obligation to ensure that the process by which we increase the supply respects the rights of all stakeholders. In a relatively unexamined practice in the USA, organs are procured from unrepresented decedents without their express consent. Unrepresented decedents have no known healthcare wishes (...) or advance care planning document; they also lack a surrogate. The Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 2006 sends a mixed message about the procurement of organs from this patient population and there are hospitals that authorise donation. In addition, in adopting the RUAGA, some states included provisions that clearly allow organ procurement from unrepresented decedents. An important unanswered question is whether this practice meets the canons of ethical permissibility. The current Brief Report presents two principled approaches to the topic as a way of highlighting some of the complexities involved. Concluding remarks offer suggestions for future research and discussion. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law and medicine, (...) truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)

Having just read through John Hollander's brilliant and moving response to my book, my first response in turn is one of gratitude, for the generosity of his taking of my intentions, allowing them room to extend themselves; and of admiration, at the writing of a writer who has original and useful things to say about the relations of poetry and philosophy, of fable and argument, of trope and example, relations at the heart of what my book is about. . . (...) . I am reminded of W. H. Auden's foreword to his A Certain World: A Commonplace Book in which he recognizes that his compilation amounts to a sort of autobiography. He calls it, responding to a passage from G. K. Chesterton, "a map of my planet." The passage Auden quotes from Chesterton contains these sentences: "The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about." I would like to accept the idea that I have revealed a secret planet in revealing myself, a certain errant wholeness, with the proviso that no one's planet contains anything anyone else's may not contain, or does not contain, or does not have the equivalent of; and that their contents are commonplaces, including an aspiration toward the better possibility, which I might call the life of philosophy. Philosophy, at any rate, must ask no less. Stanley Cavell's other works include Must We Mean What We Say?, The World Viewed, and The Senses of Walden. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "On Makavejev On Bergman" and "North by Northwest". (shrink)

Is it harder to acquire knowledge about things that really matter to us than it is to acquire knowledge about things we don't much care about? Jason Stanley 2005 argues that whether or not the relational predicate 'knows that' holds between an agent and a proposition can depend on the practical interests of the agent: the more it matters to a person whether p is the case, the more justification is required before she counts as knowing that p. The (...) evidence for Stanley's thesis includes a number of intuitive judgments about examples. In this paper we provide parallel examples for which Stanley's thesis requires unwelcome knowledge-attributions, and argue that this is possible because his thesis conflicts with familiar and plausible principles about knowledge. (shrink)

Eric Gregory's Politics and the Order of Love takes up an audacious project: enlisting Saint Augustine in order to "help imagine a better liberalism." This article first provides a summary of Gregory's argument, focusing on his emphasis on love as a "motivation" for neighborly care, and hence democratic participation. This involves tracing the theme of motivation in the book, which is tied to his articulation of liberal perfectionism and an emphasis on civic virtue. In conclusion I raise the question of (...) whether his project has ignored a key aspect of Augustine's account of love, namely, the role of the Holy Spirit, thereby demarcating the limits of Gregory's "rational reconstruction" of Augustine. (shrink)

When the Radical Reformers demanded the separation of church and state, it was not to privatize their convictions or depoliticize the church, but rather an attempt to recognize Jesus as Lord over all. The theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy is currently rethinking theology's influence by secular modernity, thereby making a bold critique of contemporary Christianity. It should not be surprising that Anabaptist theologians have found theological kinship with Radical Orthodoxy. Taking their cuesfrom John Howard Yoder, Henri de Lubac, Jacques (...) Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Stanley Hauerwas, and others, writers in this volume engage Radical Orthodoxy on topics such as ecclesiology, martyrdom, worship, oath-taking, peace and violence. (Amazon). (shrink)

In 1958, economist A. W. Phillips published an article describing what he observed to be the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment; subsequently, the "Phillips curve" became a central concept in macroeconomic analysis and policymaking. But today's Phillips curve is not the same as the original one from fifty years ago; the economy, our understanding of price setting behavior, the determinants of inflation, and the role of monetary policy have evolved significantly since then. In this book, some of the top (...) economists working today reexamine the theoretical and empirical validity of the Phillips curve in its more recent specifications. The contributors consider such questions as what economists have learned about price and wage setting and inflation expectations that would improve the way we use and formulate the Phillips curve, what the Phillips curve approach can teach us about inflation dynamics, and how these lessons can be applied to improving the conduct of monetary policy. ContributorsLawrence Ball, Ben Bernanke, Oliver Blanchard, V. V. Chari, William T. Dickens, Stanley Fischer, Jeff Fuhrer, Jordi Gali, Michael T. Kiley, Robert G. King, Donald L. Kohn, Yolanda K. Kodrzycki, Jane Sneddon Little, Bartisz Mackowiak, N. Gregory Mankiw, Virgiliu Midrigan, Giovanni P. Olivei, Athanasios Orphanides, Adrian R. Pagan, Christopher A. Pissarides, Lucrezia Reichlin, Paul A. Samuelson, Christopher A. Sims, Frank R. Smets, Robert M. Solow, Jürgen Stark, James H. Stock, Lars E. O. Svensson, John B. Taylor, Mark W. Watson. (shrink)

In response to calls for research to improve human-machine teaming, we present a “perspective” paper that explores techniques from computer science that can enhance machine agents for human-machine teams. As part of this paper, we summarize the state of the science on critical team competencies identified for effective HMT, discuss technological gaps preventing machines from fully realizing these competencies, and identify ways that emerging artificial intelligence capabilities may address these gaps and enhance performance in HMT. We extend beyond extant literature (...) by incorporating recent technologies and techniques and describing their potential for contributing to the advancement of HMT. (shrink)

"In describing Hauerwas' work as Christian ethics, one can allow that phrase its full scope of meaning. It is the work of an ethician who is thoroughly conversant with that branch of philosophy and comes to grips with its major issues. He is also firmly committed to the view that, in modifying the substantive 'ethics' with the adjective 'Christian, ' one is designating a distinct reality. . . . Hauerwas invites us to share an understanding of ethics in general and (...) of Christian ethics in particular that is a great deal subtler and more complicated than most currently popular versions of those subjects. For contemporary Christian ethics to accept his invitation will mean letting itself in for some very rigorous and versatile thinking." --America. (shrink)

Jason Stanley's "Knowledge and Practical Interests" is a brilliant book, combining insights about knowledge with a careful examination of how recent views in epistemology fit with the best of recent linguistic semantics. Although I am largely convinced by Stanley's objections to epistemic contextualism, I will try in what follows to formulate a version that might have some prospect of escaping his powerful critique.