Nonverbal signals color the meanings of interpersonal relationships. Humans rely on facial, head, postural, and vocal signals to express relational messages along continua. Three of relevance are dominance-submission, composure-nervousness and trust-distrust. Machine learning and new automated analysis tools are making possible a deeper understanding of the dynamics of relational communication. These are explored in the context of group interactions during a game entailing deception. The “messiness” of studying communication under naturalistic conditions creates many measurement and design obstacles that are discussed (...) here. Possibilities for their mitigation are considered. (shrink)

We propose a notion of a sub-model for each agent at each state in the Heifetz et al. model of interactive unawareness. Presuming that each agent is fully cognizant of his sub-model causes no difficulty and fully describes his knowledge and his beliefs about the knowledge and awareness of others. We use sub-models to motivate the HMS conditions on possibility correspondences.

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

This paper is a review of the book: John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018). Mearsheimer observes that in the aftermath of the Cold War, the U.S. adopted a profoundly liberal foreign policy dedicated to turning as many countries as possible into liberal democracies. Mearsheimer concludes that the liberal hegemony of the past twenty-five years does not work: it has left a legacy of futile wars, failed diplomacy, and diminished (...) prestige for the United States. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Report on the Tenth European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies Conference:History as a Challenge to Buddhism and ChristianityJohn O’Grady, Elizabeth J. Harris, and Jonathan A. SeitzThe Tenth Conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies (ENBCS) brought together between sixty and seventy people at the Oude Abdij, Drongen, Belgium, between 27 June and 1 July 2013, to examine the theme “History as a Challenge to Buddhism and Christianity.” It was (...) a collaborative effort between the ENBCS and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The 2011 ENBCS conference had focused on whether hope was a relevant concept for Buddhists and Christians. The choice of history as a theme complemented this. It also resonated with a research concern of both KU Leuven and the Network.Five key themes were chosen for examination: the traditional Christian and Buddhist conceptions of history; Jesus and the Buddha: fact and fiction; Buddhist and Christian historiography; dangerous memory in Christianity and Buddhism; and permitting historical consciousness in Buddhism and Christianity. Each was approached from a Buddhist and a Christian perspective. An opening lecture addressed the theme “Modern Historical Consciousness and the Challenge to Religion.” In addition, eighteen research papers on Buddhist-Christian relations were given in parallel sessions on Friday evening and Saturday morning. These covered topics as various as the writings of Edmund Pezet (Pierre Gillet), Paul Knitter’s understanding of Buddhist-Christian double belonging (Achim Riggert), Keiji Nishitani and the death of God (Jonatan Navarro Estrada), the encounter of Zen Buddhism and Christianity in the works of D. T. Suzuki (Mariusz Rucki), Buddhist-Christian encounters by Han Yong Woon (Seung Chul Kim), and “Liberating the Conflict from ‘History’ in Sri Lanka” (Jude Lal Fernando).Perry Schmidt-Leukel (Münster, Germany), in the opening lecture, discussed [End Page 189] seven challenges that modern historical consciousness was posing to religion: the challenge of falsification (when historical evidence, for example, showed some doctrines cherished by believers were not taught by the founder), the challenge of uncertainty or methodological doubt, the challenge of methodological naturalism (should a natural explanation be considered more probable than a supernatural one?), the challenge of the distance between past and present, the challenge of change (religions are not static), the challenge of demystification, and the challenge of relativity (the writing of history is perspectival, conditioned by context). He stressed that it would be a blessing to religion if these challenges were faced and, throughout the conference, encouraged other speakers to face them.The first theme was tackled by Mark Blum (Berkeley, USA) from a Buddhist perspective and Jan-Olav Henriksen (Norwegian School of Theology) from a Christian perspective. In a magisterial historical and geographical survey of the Buddhist tradition, Blum first noted that no one had unearthed a traditional notion of Buddhist history in the early texts. The theme of decline and reformation had been taken from Indian cosmology, but with a Buddhist twist and the conviction that it was pointless to talk about beginnings. And in the growth of the Mahāyāna tradition, a dehistoricization of the Buddha had occurred in the belief that the Buddha’s dharma-body was his only “real” body.Henriksen argued that Christian salvation history had its origin in the narrative of the Fall, an event for which there was no historical evidence, and developed into a history of God’s call (election) to all people that they should be brought together in community. It was a history that was linked with the divine logos, a force that Christian theology has seen as deeply interwoven into creation from the beginning of time and that was made human in Jesus.Terrence Merrigan (KU Leuven, Belgium), giving a Christian perspective on the second theme, distinguished three quests or attempts to reach the historical Jesus. The first, from 1774 to 1906, sought to uncover the Jesus that had been obscured by dogma. It imploded with the realization that separating “core” from “myth” was impossible, and conditioned a reactive “no-quest” in the first half of the twentieth century. A “new quest” arose in the 1950s, initiated by Käsemann’s reaction to the theologies of Barth and Bultmann. A further quest that appealed to archaeology and the... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Objective: To identify perceived barriers to capacity building for local research ethics oversight in El Salvador, and to set an agenda for international collaborative capacity building. Methods: Focus groups were formed in El Salvador which included 17 local clinical investigators and members of newly formed research ethics committees. Information about the proposed research was presented to participants during an international bioethics colloquium sponsored and organized by the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in collaboration with the National Ethics Committee (...) of El Salvador and the University of El Salvador. Interviews with the focus group participants were qualitatively analyzed. Results: Participants expressed the need to tailor the informed consent process and documentation to the local culture; for example, allowing family members to participate in decision‐making, and employing shorter consent forms. Participants indicated that economic barriers often impede efforts in local capacity building. Participants valued international collaboration for mutual capacity building in research ethics oversight. Conclusions: Research ethics committees in El Salvador possess a basic knowledge of locally relevant ethical principles, though they need more training to optimize the application of bioethical principles and models to their particular contexts. Challenges increase the value of collaborative exchanges with ethics committee members in the United States. Further research on facilitating communication between host country and sponsor country ethics committees can maximize local research ethics expertise, and thus raise the standard of protecting human participants involved in international research. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Ned Block argues that the higher-order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (xxx).1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block’s notion of what-it’s-like-ness. After doing so, I will argue that the HO approach accounts (...) for the sense of what-it’s-like-ness that matters in a theory of consciousness. I will also argue that the only incoherence present in the HO theory is that generated by embracing Block’s controversial notion of what-it’s-like-ness, something no theorist of any stripe ought to do. Block is famous for (among other things) having introduced the notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ into contemporary philosophy of mind (Block 1995). This term is widely employed in the philosophical literature and it even appears in the empirical literature. But wide-speared usage has brought about divergent interpretations of the term. We can distinguish a ‘moderate’ and a ‘zealous’ reading of ‘phenomenal consciousness’. On the moderate reading, ‘phenomenal consciousness’ just means ‘experience’. Many people have embraced this sense of the term and use it to roughly pick out conscious experience involving sensory quality (states like conscious visual experiences or conscious pains, for example).2 On the zealous reading, however, phenomenal consciousness is held to be ‘distinct from any cognitive, intentional, or functional property’ (Block 1995: 234). That is, any explanation of phenomenal consciousness in exclusively cognitive, intentional, or functional terms will fail to capture, without remainder, what is really distinctive about phenomenal consciousness. Block, of course, is fully clear about embracing the zealous reading; indeed, his initial introduction of the notion is in those terms. The same ambiguity occurs with the much-used (and abused) idea of ‘what-it’s-like-ness’.. (shrink)

How holographic patterns of information underlie our physical reality.

The various aspects of Christian Liberty and of the life of the Christian in the world are linked in a singular way in Paul’s pronouncements on marriage, as is found in 1 Cor 7:1–7 ff. Our choice of St. Augustine in the numerous contemporary scholarly attempted hermeneutics of 1 Cor 7:1–7 is that he adopts and elaborated an already existing tradition on sex and marriage. Moreover, this text in the New Testament is the only one that speaks explicitly of the (...) significance of conjugal intercourse. The interpretation of this text or passage has to an extent determined the development of the church’s tradition. Thus, the importance of the passage has to be considered. In Cor 7:1, Paul starts answering the questions the Corinthians put to him. Verse 1 reads: “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote”. The first of these questions concerns marriage. According to the superscription of this work, Augustine’s interpretation of 1 Cor 7:1–7 has implications for Christians in the contemporary world. In as much as it raises numerous problems to our contemporary understanding of marriage and sexuality, the problem of sexuality characterized our society today. (shrink)

Publication date: 11 June 2018 Source: Author: Jude Nwafor Eze, Umar Aliyu, Abdulmalik Alhaji-Baba, Muhammad Alfa This research evaluates the farmers’ vulnerability to climate change in Niger State. Strategies for reducing the effect of climate change have regularly been made without experimental foundations and adequate information on farmers’ vulnerability to climate change in the study area. Thus, integrated farmers’ vulnerability assessment approach was employed by classifying socioeconomic and biophysical indicators of vulnerability into adaptive capacity, sensitivity and exposure to determine (...) the farmers’ vulnerability to climate change. This is based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s definition of vulnerability. The study adopted a survey design and the method utilized for the study was questionnaire administered to 400 households in the study area. The results indicate that the farmers’ vulnerability was low in zone A with a mean index of 2.86, very low in zone B with a mean index of 3.74, and high in zone C with a mean index of 1.95. It is recommended that measures should be taken to integrate climate change adaptation into Niger State development process. These measures should include improvement in adoption of good agricultural practices. (shrink)

Structural Injustice has become a hugely important concept in the field of political theory with the work of Iris Marion Young central to debates on what it is, what motivates it and how it should be addressed. In this article, I focus on a particular thread in Young’s account of structural injustice which I argue is all too often overlooked - the untraceability of structural injustice. This is not only a constant theme in Young’s account of structural injustice, it is, (...) in fact, a defining feature. By ‘untraceable’, Young means that structural injustice is distinct from other sorts of injustices for which there is a traceable agent at fault – these sorts of faut-based injustices fall under what Young calls the ‘liability model of injustice’. For the purposes of exploring the concept of structural injustice, I follow the logic of the claim that structural injustice is untraceable to see where it takes us in conversation with Young’s critics. I conclude that Young’s account is not only defensible with some clarification and development but vital politically. That said, I also find Young’s account of political responsibility for structural injustice wanting and accordingly I propose a way of understanding what I see as a dynamic transition from structural to fault-based injustices which I argue Young’s more ‘static’ account fails to accommodate. This is important, I suggest, for thinking about the ways in which responsibility for different forms of injustice operate and change. _Contemporary Political Theory_ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00634-4. (shrink)

The system GLS, which is a modal sequent calculus system for the provability logic GL, was introduced by G. Sambin and S. Valentini in Journal of Philosophical Logic, 11, 311–342,, and in 12, 471–476,, the second author presented a syntactic cut-elimination proof for GLS. In this paper, we will use regress trees in order to present a simpler and more intuitive syntactic cut derivability proof for GLS1, which is a variant of GLS without the cut rule.

Publication date: 15 October 2018 Source: Author: Jude Nwafor Eze, Coleen Vogel, Philip Audu Ibrahim Flood is known to cause devastating livelihood impacts, suffering and economic damages. To reduce the impact of floods, it is very important to identify and understand the socio-economic factors that determine people’s ability to cope with stress or change. Consequently, the study assesses the social vulnerability of the households to floods in Niger State, in order to provide the empirical evidence necessary for flood adaptation (...) policies and strategies in the state. The data for the research were obtained from the household survey and Dartmouth Flood Observatory. The data obtained were analysed using descriptive and statistical analysis. The results show that flood events in the study area were caused by heavy rainfall, compounded by the opening of the Shiroro dam gate to release the excess flood in the reservoir. Moreover, results of Student “t” test and One-Way Analysis of Variance on socio-economic characteristics show that households’ major economic activities, educational status, household size, income distribution, and membership of cooperative society were significant at p 10, do not belong to cooperative society and earn less that N21000 per month have higher mean frequency, thus, the predominant households were, therefore, farmers, illiterate, have large family size, poor, and have no access to loan. Thus, the socio-economic characteristics of the households in the study area contribute to their vulnerability to floods by reducing their coping capacity. Based on the results of the assessment, it is recommended that measures are taken to mainstream flood adaptation into the development process. (shrink)

This paper addresses the past, present and future aspects of African leadership and organizational ethics that have, are and will be key for any organization to sustain its systems and structures. Organizational ethics revolves around written and/or unwritten guidelines, ethical values, principles, rules and standards, that are drawn from the harmonious coexistence with the biosphere and it is how these elements are applied that dictates the style of leadership and the ethical thinking of the leaders. Africa has a wide range (...) of complexities which are compounded by, inter alia, tribal divisiveness, selfish leadership, wealth inequality, and massive unemployment. Africans tend to draw their leadership and ethical practices and reflections from the events in the environment with which they have interacted for many years. However, in order to fully address and understand the African perspective in leadership and organizational ethics, a broad comprehension of the African diverse and complex landscape is needed through unravelling of the three dimensional existence of the people. African ethics, developed over time, unifies organizations and leadership since it is part of life and is practised, sub-consciously or unconsciously, by the people as they transform from one practice to the other, and during intergenerational transitions. Globalization, liberalization, technological changes and advancement, and market changes are rapidly transforming the environment in which organizations operate. In such a situation, an effective and true leader cannot be rigid but should be flexible, with the ability to use different leadership styles whenever the situation calls for it. Only those leaders with a three-dimensional perspective live inspiring lives, live with a cause and adopt organizational ethics and leadership styles that will stand the test of time. Despite Africa being the cradle of humankind, leadership and organizational ethics is still in its infancy and wanting, even with the new generation of young leaders. The future outlook of African organizational ethics and leadership is to be found in the intersection of changes in technology, life style, demographics and geopolitics with new trends emerging in global polity and economy. (shrink)

Telling a patient that the outcome of his illness is not good, or even hopeless, requires sensitivity and the ability to communicate with him in the setting of a hospital which is an unnatural environment divorced from family and friends. It is a task which must be taught and learned by doctors and nurses.

Recently, significant research effort has focused on using Twitter to investigate mental health at the population-level. While there has been influential work in developing ethical guidelines for Internet discussion forum-based research in public health, there is currently limited work focused on addressing ethical problems in Twitter-based public health research, and less still that considers these issues from users’ own perspectives. In this work, we aim to investigate public attitudes towards utilizing public domain Twitter data for population-level mental health monitoring using (...) a qualitative methodology. The study explores user perspectives in a series of five, 2-h focus group interviews. Following a semi-structured protocol, 26 Twitter users with and without a diagnosed history of depression discussed general Twitter use, along with privacy expectations, and ethical issues in using social media for health monitoring, with a particular focus on mental health monitoring. Transcripts were then transcribed, redacted, and coded using a constant comparative approach. While participants expressed a wide range of opinions, there was an overall trend towards a relatively positive view of using public domain Twitter data as a resource for population level mental health monitoring, provided that results are appropriately aggregated. Results are divided into five sections: a profile of respondents’ Twitter use patterns and use variability; users’ privacy expectations, including expectations regarding data reach and permanence; attitudes towards social media based population-level health monitoring in general, and attitudes towards mental health monitoring in particular; attitudes towards individual versus population-level health monitoring; and users’ own recommendations for the appropriate regulation of population-level mental health monitoring. Focus group data reveal a wide range of attitudes towards the use of public-domain social media “big data” in population health research, from enthusiasm, through acceptance, to opposition. Study results highlight new perspectives in the discussion of ethical use of public data, particularly with respect to consent, privacy, and oversight. (shrink)

Jude Edeh ABSTRACT: The challenge faced with the proliferation of various kinds of cognitivism is the difficulty of providing a straightforward characterization of moral realism and antirealism. In light of this tension, I identified a problem in Sayre-McCord’s way of specifying the criteria of moral realism. Furthermore, I provided a framework that characterized the moral ….

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are unique spaces that defy materialist interpretations of space and place. In drawing upon Edward Soja’s work of spatiality, CVEs can be considered as thirdspace, a space that has as much relevance as that typified by our physical, or ‘real,’ existence. Virtual space undermines the rigid polemic of the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ by revealing lived experience as a combination of both real and imagined experience. The virtual illuminates experience as a relativist combination of perception and interpretation (...) that inhabits both the corporeal and the virtual realms. Using the example of Second Life’s Lost Gardens of Apollo this article will illuminate the fluidity of real and imagined place through an environment of rich visual experience. Inaddition, such spaces will be discussed as places of potential social and political reconfiguration by challenging the traditional socio-cultural and historical aspects of space. (shrink)

Social relationships are constructed by and through the relational communication that people exchange. Relational messages are implicit nonverbal and verbal messages that signal how people regard one another and define their interpersonal relationships—equal or unequal, affectionate or hostile, inclusive or exclusive, similar or dissimilar, and so forth. Such signals can be measured automatically by the latest machine learning software tools and combined into meaningful factors that represent the socioemotional expressions that constitute relational messages between people. Relational messages operate continuously on (...) a parallel track with verbal communication, implicitly telling interactants the current state of their relationship and how to interpret the verbal messages being exchanged. We report an investigation that explored how group members signal these implicit messages through multimodal behaviors measured by sensor data and linked to the socioemotional cognitions interpreted as relational messages. By use of a modified Brunswikian lens model, we predicted perceived relational messages of dominance, affection, involvement, composure, similarity and trust from automatically measured kinesic, vocalic and linguistic indicators. The relational messages in turn predicted the veracity of group members. The Brunswikian Lens Model offers a way to connect objective behaviors exhibited by social actors to the emotions and cognitions being perceived by other interactants and linking those perceptions to social outcomes. This method can be used to ascertain what behaviors and/or perceptions are associated with judgments of an actor’s veracity. Computerized measurements of behaviors and perceptions can replace manual measurements, significantly expediting analysis and drilling down to micro-level measurement in a previously unavailable manner. (shrink)

This paper defends a normative basis for entrepreneurial ventures, and draws the conclusion that any enterprise, insofar as it is reasonable, has in final analysis to be a (free) gift to promote good. Building on Herbert Simon's idea of "satisficing" and developing it in line with axiological insights of the new classical natural law theory, this paper makes the argument that a choice to proceed reasonably in any entrepreneurial venture will be guided by rationality that is bounded. Bounded rationality entails (...) that the various end-values or goals of the venture will be incommensurable, and this implies that (1) the enterprise need not be locked in on promoting merely one value, such as profits, and (2) a choice to aim at one or more goals will be a personal (free) gift, which is ethically valuable. This paper has appeared in Spanish translation as El don personal en las empresas sanas: racionalidad limitada, valores incommensurables y agencia economica in Revista Empresa y Humanismo, Vol. XI no. 1 (2008), pp. 67-88, published by the Institute for Business and Humanism, University of Navarra, Spain. Permission granted to reproduce/publish the original English version here and elsewhere. (shrink)