We discuss the astronomical underpinning of the improved calendar of 1700. Starting from the astronomical motivation of the Gregorian calendar of 1582 and the rejection of this reform in Protestant states in Europe, we describe how the astronomical Easter reckoning based on Kepler’s Rudolphine tables led to the foundation of Berlin Observatory and enabled the founding of the Electoral Brandenburg Society of Sciences, which had to finance itself through a calendar monopoly.

Galen Strawson and Saul Smilansky have offered a well-known argument that free will does not exist because the control involved is so robust that it would require influence over an infinite series of prior decisions. (Strawson 1986, 1994, 2002, Smilansky 2000, 2002) Unfortunately, while this metaphysical argument has attracted widespread attention, it has garnered few adherents. Thus, in order to improve the metaphysical argument against free will, I offer a new interpretation of the argument, its fundamental principle, and its relationship (...) to incompatibilism. I demonstrate that the central principle of the argument is just as defensible as the central principle of one of the major arguments for incompatibilism (namely, Robert Kane's argument from ‘ultimate responsibility' in Kane 1996). Therefore, the metaphysical argument against free will deserves much more respect than it currently receives. (shrink)

Shifts in funding and a worldwide trend towards marketising higher education have led to a new emphasis on the quality of the student experience. In the UK this trend finds its strongest expression in recent policy proposals to simultaneously increase student fees and student choice so that students themselves become the drivers of higher education. We trace the policy developments of this shift over recent years and rehearse some of the criticisms against it. Accepting that there is good reason to (...) support improving the student experience, we then consider ways in which this might be achieved that foreground the relation of university teachers with their subject matter and students' engagement in this. A higher education, we argue, should expose its students to disciplines whose standards are rightly contested and to a form of learning that intensifies or unsettles desires rather than simply aspiring to satisfy them. (shrink)

Food security is one of the major concerns in the Philippines. Although livestock and poultry production accounts for a significant proportion of the country’s agricultural output, smallholder households are still vulnerable to food insecurity. The current study aims to examine how livestock production and selling difficulties affect smallholder households’ food-insecure conditions. For this objective, Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was employed on a dataset of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Data in Emergencies Monitoring (DIEM) system. We found that production and (...) selling difficulties significantly adversely affect food insecurity in the Philippines. However, their effects vary according to the severity of food insecurity. In particular, production and selling difficulties affect the households’ likelihood of eating less healthy and nutritious food equally. However, the production difficulties have more negligible impacts on the possibility of skipping meals and even ambiguous impacts on the likelihood of not eating for a whole day compared to the effects of selling difficulties. Moreover, we also found that the market plays a crucial role in facilitating not only livestock trading but also livestock production (e.g., purchase of feed and medicines). Based on these findings, we suggest that the livestock market needs to be expanded and regulated to maintain the balancing prices between livestock products and products and services used for livestock production, and facilitate the product-exchanging mechanism. (shrink)

The graph edit distance (GED) measures the dissimilarity between two graphs as the minimal cost of a sequence of elementary operations transforming one graph into another. This measure is fundamental in many areas such as structural pattern recognition or classification. However, exactly computing GED is NP-hard. Among different classes of heuristic algorithms that were proposed to compute approximate solutions, local search based algorithms provide the tightest upper bounds for GED. In this paper, we present K-REFINE and RANDPOST. K-REFINE generalizes and (...) improves an existing local search algorithm and performs particularly well on small graphs. RANDPOST is a general warm start framework that stochastically generates promising initial solutions to be used by any local search based GED algorithm. It is particularly efficient on large graphs. An extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that both K-REFINE and RANDPOST perform excellently in practice. (shrink)

According to Karl Popper, science cannot verify its theories empirically, but it can falsify them, and that suffices to account for scientific progress. For Popper, a law or theory remains a pure conjecture, probability equal to zero, however massively corroborated empirically it may be. But it does just seem to be the case that science does verify empirically laws and theories. We trust our lives to such verifications when we fly in aeroplanes, cross bridges and take modern medicines. We can (...) do some justice to this apparent capacity of science to verify if we make a number of improvements to Popper’s philosophy of science. The key step is to recognize that physics, in accepting unified theories only, thereby makes a big metaphysical assumption about the nature of the universe. The outcome is a conception of scientific method which facilitates the criticism and improvement of metaphysical assumptions of physics. This view provides, not verification, but a perfect simulacrum of verification indistinguishable from the real thing. (shrink)

This book deals with the ethics of technology and addresses specific ethical problems related to some emerging technologies, mainly in the field of computer science (from machine learning models to extracting value from data to human–robot interaction). The contributions are authored mainly by scholars in ICT and other engineering fields who reflect on ethical and societal issues emerging from their own research activity. Thus, rather uniquely, the work overcomes the traditional divide between pure ethical theory that disregards what practitioners do (...) and mere R&D practice that ignores what theorists conceptualize. Conversely, the reader is enabled to understand what ethics means when it is actually put into work by engineering researchers. The book arises from a joint program between MIT and Politecnico di Milano aimed at training early career researchers in addressing the ethical issues of technology and critically reflecting on the social impacts of the emerging, and even disruptive, technologies they are currently developing through their novel research. Overall, it aims at spreading the task of developing technologies that, from the beginning, are designed to be responsible for human life, society, and nature. (shrink)

Mikhalevich & Powell (2020) argue that it is wrong, both scientifically and morally, to dismiss the evidence for sentience in invertebrates. They do not offer any examples, however, of how their welfare should be considered or improved. We draw on animal welfare science to suggest some ways that would not be excessively demanding.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

We are obsessed with self-improvement; it’s a billion-dollar industry. But apps, workshops, speakers, retreats, and life hacks have not made us happier. Obsessed with the endless task of perfecting ourselves, we have become restless, anxious, and desperate. We are improving ourselves to death. The culture of self-improvement stems from philosophical classics, perfectionist religions, and a ruthless strain of capitalism—but today, new technologies shape what it means to improve the self. The old humanist culture has given way to artificial (...) intelligence, social media, and big data: powerful tools that do not only inform us but also measure, compare, and perhaps change us forever. This book shows how self-improvement culture became so toxic—and why we need both a new concept of the self and a mission of social change in order to escape it. Mark Coeckelbergh delves into the history of the ideas that shaped this culture, critically analyzes the role of technology, and explores surprising paths out of the self-improvement trap. Digital detox is no longer a viable option and advice based on ancient wisdom sounds like yet more self-help memes: The only way out is to transform our social and technological environment. Coeckelbergh advocates new “narrative technologies” that help us tell different and better stories about ourselves. However, he cautions, there is no shortcut that avoids the ancient philosophical quest to know yourself, or the obligation to cultivate the good life and the good society. (shrink)

Patients and physicians often perceive the current health care system to be unfair, in part because of the ways in which coverage decisions appear to be made. To address this problem the Ethical Force Program, a collaborative effort to create quality improvement tools for ethics in health care, has developed five content areas specifying ethical criteria for fair health care benefits design and administration. Each content area includes concrete recommendations and measurable expectations for performance improvement, which can be (...) used by those organizations involved in the design and administration of health benefits packages, such as purchasers, health plans, benefits consultants, and practitioner groups. (shrink)

William Rowe has argued that if there is an infinite sequence of improving worlds then an essentially perfectly good being must actualize some world in the sequence and must not actualize any world in the sequence. Since that is impossible, there exist no perfectly good beings. I show that Rowe's argument assumes that the concept of a maximally great being is incoherent. Since we are given no reason to believe that the concept of a maximally great being is incoherent we (...) have no reason to believe Rowe's Argument from Improvability is sound. (shrink)

In this article I argue for rule-based, non-monotonic theories of common law judicial reasoning and improve upon one such theory offered by Horty and Bench-Capon. The improvements reveal some of the interconnections between formal theories of judicial reasoning and traditional issues within jurisprudence regarding the notions of the ratio decidendi and obiter dicta. Though I do not purport to resolve the long-standing jurisprudential issues here, it is beneficial for theorists both of legal philosophy and formalizing legal reasoning to see where (...) the two projects interact. (shrink)

In Ori 2014 I claimed that switching from a motorcar to a motorcycle when traveling alone is a moral improvement. Hansson 2014 replied that switching is not an improvement because we need better road and motor vehicle protection, not less. In this response I will show why the lack of protection is not a decisive objection to motorcycling and I will stress the point that motorcycling is a moral improvement, at least according to prevalent normative ethical views.

Since time immemorial, the phenomenon of leadership and its understanding has attracted the attention of the business world because of its important role in human groups. Nevertheless, for years efforts to understand this concept have only been centred on people in leadership roles, thus overlooking an important aspect in its understanding: the necessary moral dimension which is implicit in the relationship between leader and follower. As an illustrative example of the importance of considering good morality in leadership, an empirical study (...) is conducted in which a good performance of the "leader-follower" relationship is reflected when individuals perceive ethical leadership in higher hierarchical managerial levels. To be precise, findings of this study demonstrate that follower job response is improved through an ethics trickle-down partial effect from the Top Manager to the immediate supervisor, and also reveal both key aspects and managerial level on which the practice of ethical leadership should rest upon to have a stronger effect on the follower positive job response. Practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are finally presented. (shrink)

School improvement is much sought and often claimed. However, it is questionable whether overall achievement in countries such as the USA or England has improved by any significant amount over thirly years. Several school improvement programmes have been claimed as successful, but evaluations, even where they exist, are generally poor: based on the perceptions of participants, lacking any counterfactual or reporting selectively. Accounts of improvement in individual schools are numerous, but are inevitably selective; the attribution of causality (...) is problematic and knowledge of the conditions under which such phenomena are likely to be replicated is limited. School effectiveness research also has yet to identify specific strategies with clear causal effects. In short, many claims of school improvement are illusory. Nevertheless, there are some improvement strategies that are well-defined, feasible and robustly shown to be effective. In future, we need greater clarity and agreement about what constitutes success. Evaluation must be taken more seriously, and its results treated more critically. (shrink)

The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software ap-plication purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of phi-losophical insight and methodology into application domains yields a variety of improvements. L&C’s LinKBase® (...) is one of the world’s largest medical domain ontologies. Its current primary use pertains to natural language processing ap-plications, but it also supports intelligent navigation through a range of struc-tured medical and bioinformatics information resources, such as SNOMED-CT, Swiss-Prot, and the Gene Ontology (GO). In this report we discuss how and why philosophical methods improve both the internal coherence of LinKBase®, and its capacity to serve as a translation hub, improving the interoperability of the ontologies through which it navigates. (shrink)

One of the great achievements of Pierre Hadot has been to chart how philosophy's self‐conception has shifted over time, first as the culture of the classical world gave way to that of medieval Christianity, and then again through the long and gradual emergence of the modern age. Hadot himself suggests that the crucial shift came in the middle ages, as a result of the growing dominance of Christianity. The chapter argues that philosophy in both its classical and medieval incarnations has (...) consistently involved systematic logical inquiry of an abstract. Descartes’ philosophy is Janus‐faced, affording us frequent glances back to the tradition he grew out of, but also allowing glimpses forward to the modern age that his ideas helped to launch. (shrink)

We extend the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) for ethics in the workplace. Using a path modeling methodology, we find evidence that, for ethics, moral disengagement is an antecedent to the TPB predictors of attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control (PBC). We show that the TPB predictors mediate the influence moral disengagement has on ethical behavioral intentions. Thus, to improve ethical behavior, reducing moral disengagement is critical. We find support for including both types of PBC (self-efficacy and locus of (...) control) when modeling ethical behavior. We use four ethics scenarios and international data to test this model. We also evaluate potential positive influences on ethics in the workplace and find that recency of ethics training interacts with religiosity and activates it to reduce moral disengagement. We also find that principles-based ethics training enhances professionals’ self-efficacy to behave ethically. Experience, including time as a member in a professional accounting organization, increases both locus of control and self-efficacy to behave ethically. These variables—recency of ethical training, religiosity, principles-based professional ethics training, and experience—influence parts of the core TPB model, which in turn lead to improved ethical behavioral intentions. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel improved firefly algorithm (IFA) to deal the problem of the optimal operation of thermal generating units (OOTGU) with the purpose of reducing the total electricity generation fuel cost. The proposed IFA is developed based on combining three improvements. The first is to be based on the radius between two solutions, the second is updated step size for each considered solution based on different new equations, and the third is to slightly modify a formula producing new (...) solutions by using normally distributed random numbers and canceling uniform random numbers of conventional firefly algorithm (FA). The effect of each proposed improvement on IFA is investigated by executing five benchmark functions and two different systems. The performance of IFA is investigated on six other study cases consisting of different types of objective function and complex level of constraints. The objective function considers single fuel with quadratic form and nonconvex form, and multifuels with the sum of several quadratic and nonconvex functions while a set of constraints taken into account are power loss, prohibited zone, ramp rate limit, spinning reserve, and all constraints in transmission power networks. The obtained results indicate the proposed improvements in terms of high optimal solution quality, stabilization of search ability, and fast convergence compared with FA. In addition, the comparisons with other methods also lead to a conclusion that the proposed method is a very promising optimization tool for systems with quadratic fuel cost function and with complicated constraints. (shrink)

Developing countries need to reform legislation to ensure the global supply firms in ready-made garment industry is adequately addressing obligations of social responsibility. Literature typically focuses on strategies for raising responsible standards in global buying firms within the RMG industry, but fails to focus on implementing strategies for suppliers in developing countries. This article addresses this gap by specifically focusing on the RMG industry in Bangladesh, the home of the third largest RMG supplier in the world. It concentrates on analysing (...) how and to what extent the law can assist in developing social responsibility performance of the RMG manufacturing firms in developing countries. It ultimately concludes that a new governance approach in laws can effectively increase the social responsibility practice standards of an industry where global buying firms are profit-driven and governmental agencies are either inadequate or corrupt. (shrink)

Is there any moral obligation to improve oneself, to foster and develop various capacities in oneself? From a broadly Kantian point of view, Self-Improvement defends the view that there is such an obligation and that it is an obligation that each person owes to him or herself. The defence addresses a range of arguments philosophers have mobilized against this idea, including the argument that it is impossible to owe anything to yourself, and the view that an obligation to improve (...) onself is overly 'moralistic'. Robert N. Johnson argues against Kantian universalization arguments for the duty of self-improvement, as well as arguments that bottom out in a supposed value humanity has. At the same time, he defends a position based on the notion that self- and other-respecting agents would, under the right circumstances, accept the principle of self-improvement and would leave it up to each to be the person to whom this duty is owed. (shrink)

The exponential growth of social data both in volume and complexity has increasingly exposed many of the shortcomings of the conventional frequentist approach to statistics. The scientific community has called for careful usage of the approach and its inference. Meanwhile, the alternative method, Bayesian statistics, still faces considerable barriers toward a more widespread application. The bayesvl R package is an open program, designed for implementing Bayesian modeling and analysis using the Stan language’s no-U-turn (NUTS) sampler. The package combines the ability (...) to construct Bayesian network models using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation technique, and the graphic capability of the ggplot2 package. As a result, it can improve the user experience and intuitive understanding when constructing and analyzing Bayesian network models. A case example is offered to illustrate the usefulness of the package for Big Data analytics and cognitive computing. (shrink)

In this editorial essay I explore the possibilities of ‘improvement scholarship’ in order to set the scene for the theme of, and the other papers in, this issue. I contrast a narrow conception of quality improvement research with a much broader and more inclusive conception, arguing that we should greatly extend the existing dialogue between ‘problem-solving’ and ‘critical’ currents in improvement research. I have in mind the potential for building a much larger conversation between those people in (...) ‘improvement science’ who are expressly concerned with tackling the problems facing healthcare and the wider group of colleagues who are engaged in health-related scholarship but who do not see themselves as particularly interested in quality improvement, indeed who may be critical of the language or concerns of QI. As one contribution to that conversation I suggest that that the increasing emphasis on theory and rigour in improvement research should include more focus on normative theory and rigour. The remaining papers in the issue are introduced including the various ways in which they handle the ‘implicit normativity’ of QI research and practice, and the linked theme of combining relatively ‘tidy’ and potentially ‘unruly’ forms of knowledge. (shrink)

Environmental problems often outstrip the abilities of any single scientist to understand, much less address them. As a result, collaborations within, across, and beyond the environmental sciences are an increasingly important part of the environmental science landscape. Here, we explore an insufficiently recognized and particularly challenging barrier to collaborative environmental science: value pluralism, the presence of non-trivial differences in the values that collaborators bring to bear on project decisions. We argue that resolving the obstacles posed by value pluralism to collaborative (...) environmental science requires detecting and coordinating the underlying problematic value differences. We identify five ways that a team might coordinate their problematic value differences and argue that, whichever mode is adopted, it ought to be governed by participatory virtues, pragmatic resolve, and moral concern. Relying on our experiences with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, as well as with other dialogical approaches that support team inquiry, we defend the claim that philosophical dialogue among collaborators can go a long way towards helping teams of environmental scientists and fellow travelers detect their problematic value differences. Where dialogical approaches fare less well is in helping teams coordinate these differences. We close by describing several principles for augmenting philosophical dialogue with other methods, and we list several of these methods in an appendix with brief descriptions and links for further learning. Overall, the article makes three main contributions to the research collaboration and values in science literatures: It deepens our understanding of problematic value pluralism in team science; It provides actionable guidance and methods for improving values-oriented philosophical dialogue interventions; and It demonstrates one way of doing engaged philosophy. (shrink)

Much of the recent work on epistemology of inquiry defends two related theses. First, inquiry into a question rationally prohibits believing an answer to that question. Second, knowledge is the aim of inquiry. I develop a series of cases which indicate that inquiry is not as narrow as these views suggest. These cases can be accommodated if we take a broader approach and understand inquiry as aiming at epistemic improvement, described more generally. This approach captures a wider range of (...) inquiring phenomena because it accounts for forms of epistemic improvement that fall short of, or go beyond, coming to know the answer to a question. (shrink)

For valid informed consent, it is crucial that patients or research participants fully understand all that their consent entails. Testing and revising informed consent documents with the assistance of their addressees can improve their understandability. In this study we aimed at further developing a method for testing and improving informed consent documents with regard to readability and test-readers’ understanding and reactions. We tested, revised, and retested template informed consent documents for biobank research by means of 11 focus group interviews with (...) members from the documents’ target population. For the analysis of focus group excerpts we used qualitative content analysis. Revisions were made based on focus group feedback in an iterative process. Focus group participants gave substantial feedback on the original and on the revised version of the tested documents. Revisions included adding and clarifying explanations, including an info-box summarizing the main points of the text and an illustrative graphic. Our results indicate positive effects on the tested and revised informed consent documents in regard to general readability and test-readers’ understanding and reactions. Participatory methods for improving informed consent should be more often applied and further evaluated for both, medical interventions and clinical research. Particular conceptual and methodological challenges need to be addressed in the future. (shrink)

We argue that the ecological research community should develop a plan for improving the ethical consistency and moral robustness of the field. We propose a particular ethics strategy—specifically, an ongoing process of collective ethical reflection that the community of ecological researchers, with the cooperation of applied ethicists and philosophers of biology, can use to address the needs we identify. We suggest a particular set of conceptual and analytic tools that, we argue, collectively have the resources to provide an empirically grounded (...) and conceptually complete foundation for an ethics strategy for ecological research. We illustrate our argument with information gathered from a survey of ecologists conducted at the 2013 meeting of the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution. (shrink)

Lewis proved a Dutch book theorem for Conditionalization. The theorem shows that an agent who follows any credal update rule other than Conditionalization is vulnerable to bets that inflict a sure loss. Lewis’s theorem is tailored to factive formulations of Conditionalization, i.e. formulations on which the conditioning proposition is true. Yet many scientific and philosophical applications of Bayesian decision theory require a non-factive formulation, i.e. a formulation on which the conditioning proposition may be false. I prove a Dutch book theorem (...) tailored to non-factive Conditionalization. I also discuss the theorem’s significance. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch Ethics Boards, or Institutional Review Boards, protect the safety and welfare of human research participants. These bodies are responsible for providing an independent evaluation of proposed research studies, ultimately ensuring that the research does not proceed unless standards and regulations are met.Main bodyConcurrent with the growing volume of human participant research, the workload and responsibilities of Research Ethics Boards (REBs) have continued to increase. Dissatisfaction with the review process, particularly the time interval from submission to decision, is common within (...) the research community, but there has been little systematic effort to examine REB processes that may contribute to inefficiencies. We offer a model illustrating REB workflow, stakeholders, and accountabilities.ConclusionBetter understanding of the components of the research ethics review will allow performance targets to be set, problems identified, and solutions developed, ultimately improving the process. (shrink)

Although some previous studies have investigated the relationship between moral foundations and moral judgment development, the methods used have not been able to fully explore the relationship. In the present study, we used Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) in order to address the limitations in traditional regression methods that have been used previously. Results showed consistency with previous findings that binding foundations are negatively correlated with post-conventional moral reasoning and positively correlated with maintaining norms and personal interest schemas. In addition to (...) previous studies, our results showed a positive correlation for individualizing foundations and post-conventional moral reasoning. Implications are discussed as well as a detailed explanation of the novel BMA method in order to allow others in the field of moral education to be able to use it in their own studies. (shrink)

The Office of Human Research Protections was not justified in issuing findings against the SUPPORT Institutions. Our community can learn from the evolving healthcare transformation into learning health systems by thinking about the novel ethical issues about standard of care research raised by the SUPPORT with the same spirit of quality improvement. The current regulatory framework and the concept of foreseeable research risks is insufficient to advance the debate about the ethics of randomization of standard clinical interventions. This article (...) uses the example of the Wisconsin cystic fibrosis randomized clinical trial for newborn screening trial to explore the distinctions between risks of research and clinical care and waivers of informed consent for randomization. Collaborative exploration of these complex policy issues is needed and further deliberation, community engagement, and social science research will be critical to advance novel approaches for informed consent. (shrink)

The ability to analyze arguments is critical for higher-level reasoning, yet previous research suggests that standard university education provides at best modest improvements in students’ analytical reasoning abilities. What techniques are most effective for cultivating these skills? Here we investigate the effectiveness of a 12-week undergraduate seminar in which students practice a software-based technique for visualizing the logical structures implicit in argumen- tative texts. Seminar students met weekly to analyze excerpts from contemporary analytic philosophy papers, completed argument visualization problem sets, (...) and received individualized feedback on a weekly basis. We found that Seminar students improved substantially more on LSAT Logical Reasoning test forms than Control students (d = .71, p < .001), suggesting that learning how to visualize arguments in the seminar led to large generalized improvements in students’ analytical reasoning skills. Moreover, blind scoring of final essays from Seminar students and Control students, drawn from a parallel lecture course, revealed large differences in favor of seminar students (d = 0.87, p = .005). Seminar students understood the arguments better, and their essays were more accurate and effectively structured. Taken together, these findings deepen our understanding of how visualizations support logical reasoning, and provide a model for improving analytical reasoning pedagogy. (shrink)

Improvement in performance after the end of the training session, termed “Offline improvement,” has been shown in procedural learning tasks. We examined whether Offline improvement in learning a novel orthography depends on the type of reading instruction. Forty-eight adults received multisession training in reading nonsense words, written in an artificial script. Participants were trained in one of three conditions: alphabetical words preceded by direct letter instruction (Letter-Alph); alphabetical words with whole-word instruction (Word-Alph); and nonalphabetical (arbitrary) words with (...) whole-word instruction (Word-Arb). Offline improvement was found only for the Letter-Alph group. Moreover, correlation with a standardized measure of word reading ability showed that good readers trained in the Letter-Alph group exhibit greater Offline improvement, whereas good readers trained in the Word-Arb group showed greater Within-session improvement during training. These results suggest that different consolidation processes and learning mechanisms were involved in each group. We argue that providing a short block of direct letter instruction prior to training resulted in increased involvement of procedural learning mechanisms during training. (shrink)

This article focuses on 'improving' schools in difficult or disadvantaged contexts. It explores the contemporary policy discourse and intervention strategies aimed at improving schools in such circumstances. It argues that contemporary approaches to improvement are unlikely to succeed because the approaches adopted are not sufficiently differentiated or context specific. Drawing on two recent empirical studies, the article offers an alternative perspective on school improvement within this group of schools. It argues against standardised solutions in favour of a differentiated (...) approach to school improvement that recognises and respects the diversity, variability and complexity of schools in difficult contexts. (shrink)

Yoga is believed to have beneficial effects on cognition, attenuation of emotional intensity and stress reduction. Previous studies were mainly performed on eastern experienced practitioners or unhealthy subjects undergoing concomitant conventional therapies. Further investigation is needed on the effects of yoga per se, as well as its possible preventive benefits on healthy subjects. We investigated the effects of yoga on memory and psychophysiological parameters related to stress, comparing yoga practice and conventional physical exercises in healthy men . Memory tests, salivary (...) cortisol levels and stress, anxiety, and depression inventories were assessed before and after 6 months of practice. Yoga practitioners showed improvement of the memory performance, as well as improvements in psychophysiological parameters. The present results suggest that regular yoga practice can improve aspects of cognition and quality of life for healthy individuals. An indirect influence of emotional state on cognitive improvement promoted by yoga practice can be proposed. (shrink)

Since 2002, legislation in Spain has allowed for the creation and documentation of end-of-life decisionmaking. Over the intervening years, the actual implementation of such documents is very low. Through extensive analysis of the literature, this article explores the current status of the use of and attitudes toward advance directives in Spain and then proposes strategies for improvement in their implementation.

We compare methods of aggregating repeated decisions from a single decision maker to improve medical image decision making using metacognitive processes (confidence judgments) and representational similarity from artificial neural networks for both novice and expert participants.

This study develops a Science–Technology–Society (STS)-based science ethics education program for high school students majoring in or planning to major in science and engineering. Our education program includes the fields of philosophy, history, sociology and ethics of science and technology, and other STS-related theories. We expected our STS-based science ethics education program to promote students’ epistemological beliefs and moral judgment development. These psychological constructs are needed to properly solve complicated moral and social dilemmas in the fields of science and engineering. (...) We applied this program to a group of Korean high school science students gifted in science and engineering. To measure the effects of this program, we used an essay-based qualitative measurement. The results indicate that there was significant development in both epistemological beliefs and moral judgment. In closing, we briefly discuss the need to develop epistemological beliefs and moral judgment using an STS-based science ethics education program. (shrink)