The ubiquitin proteasome system is a potent regulatory mechanism used to control protein stability in numerous cellular processes, including neural development. Many neurodegenerative diseases are featured by the accumulation of UPS‐associated proteins, suggesting the UPS dysfunction may be crucial for pathogenesis. Recent experiments have highlighted the UPS as a key player during synaptic development. Here we summarize recent discoveries centered on the role of the UPS in synapse remodeling and draw attention to the potential link between the synaptic UPS dysfunction (...) and the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases. BioEssays 30:1075–1083, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Death and bereavement are human experiences that new media helps facilitate alongside creating new social grief practices that occur online. This study investigated how people’s postings and tweets facilitated the communication of grief after pop music icon Michael Jackson died. Drawing on past grief research, religion, and new media studies, a thematic analysis of 1,046 messages was conducted on three mediated sites (Twitter, TMZ.com, and Facebook). Results suggested that social media served as grieving spaces for people to accept Jackson’s death (...) rather than denying it or expressing anger over his passing. The findings also illustrate how interactive exchanges online helped recycle news and “resurrected” the life of Jackson. Additionally, as fans of deceased celebrities create and disseminate web-based memorials, new social media practices such as “Michael Mondays” synchronize tweets within everyday life rhythms and foster practices to hasten the grieving process. (shrink)

This book offers a defence of mathematical fictionalism, according to which we have no reason to believe that there are any mathematical objects. Perhaps the most pressing challenge to mathematical fictionalism is the indispensability argument for the truth of our mathematical theories (and therefore for the existence of the mathematical objects posited by those theories). According to this argument, if we have reason to believe anything, we have reason to believe that the claims of our best empirical theories are (at (...) least approximately) true. But since claims whose truth would require the existence of mathematical objects are indispensable in formulating our best empirical theories, it follows that we have good reason to believe in the mathematical objects posited by those mathematical theories used in empirical science, and therefore to believe that the mathematical theories utilized in empirical science are true. Previous responses to the indispensability argument have focused on arguing that mathematical assumptions can be dispensed with in formulating our empirical theories. This book, by contrast, offers an account of the role of mathematics in empirical science according to which the successful use of mathematics in formulating our empirical theories need not rely on the truth of the mathematics utilized. (shrink)

There is a clear and controlling philosophical concern that governs Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays: freedom from limitation and self-reliance from external authority. What makes it difficult to understand his essays, however, is his style, which is characterized by disconnection, paradox, and negation. These rhetorical techniques make the meaning of his writings elusive and slippery. Though many scholars have analyzed Emerson’s style, none have approached it through the writings of Laozi, an ancient Chinese philosopher. There are two reasons I compare Emerson (...) and Laozi. First, in spite of their differences, there are important parallel themes and stylistic innovations in their writings. Second, attentiveness to a key figure in the Eastern philosophical tradition can help to explain how Emerson’s thoughts disappoint Western readers, precisely because they employ techniques beyond the method of habitual intellect in the Western frame. This essay tries to approach several features in Emerson’s writing style from a Daoist perspective to show that both philosophers purposefully use linguistic strategies such as disconnection, paradox, and negation to provoke readers into participating in understanding truth, instead of telling them directly what truth is. (shrink)

Many healthcare goods, such as surgical instruments, textiles and gloves, are manufactured in unregulated factories and sweatshops where, amongst other labour rights violations, workers are subject to considerable occupational health risks. In this paper we undertake an ethical analysis of the supply of sweatshop-produced surgical goods to healthcare providers, with a specific focus on the National Health Service of the United Kingdom. We contend that while labour abuses and occupational health deficiencies are morally unacceptable in the production of any commodity, (...) an additional wrong is incurred when the health of certain populations is secured in ways that endanger the health and well-being of people working and living elsewhere. While some measures have been taken to better regulate the supply chain to healthcare providers in the UK, further action is needed to ensure that surgical goods are sourced from suppliers who protect the labour and occupational health rights of their workers. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence systems based on transformers, including both text-generators like GPT-4 and image generators like DALL-E 3, have recently entered the popular consciousness. These tools, while impressive, are liable to reproduce, exacerbate, and reinforce extant human social biases, such as gender and racial biases. In this paper, we systematically review the extent to which DALL-E Mini suffers from this problem. In line with the Model Card published alongside DALL-E Mini by its creators, we find that the images it produces (...) tend to represent dozens of different occupations as populated either solely by men (e.g., pilot, builder, plumber) or solely by women (e.g., hairdresser, receptionist, dietitian). In addition, the images DALL-E Mini produces tend to represent most occupations as populated primarily or solely by White people (e.g., farmer, painter, prison officer, software engineer) and very few by non-White people (e.g., pastor, rapper). These findings suggest that exciting new AI technologies should be critically scrutinized and perhaps regulated before they are unleashed on society. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty is an insidious problem that besets most tertiary institutions, where considerable resources are expended to prevent and manage students' dishonest actions within academia. Using a mixed retrospective and prospective design this research investigated Gottfredson and Hirschi's self-control theory as a possible explanation for academic dishonesty in 264 university students. The relationship between academic dishonesty and general criminality was also examined. A significant but small to moderate relationship between academic dishonesty and general criminality was present, including correlations with general (...) dishonesty, violent crime and drug offending subcategories. These findings suggested that a general criminological theory may be of use in explaining academic dishonesty, but the overall ability of self-control variables to explain academic dishonesty was not strong. Controlled logistic regressions indicated that a significant positive association with academic dishonesty was only present for one of 6 self-control subscales (self-centeredness), and even this association was only present in the prospective study component. A strong relationship between past and future academic dishonesty was present. Implications of the study for institutions are discussed. (shrink)

This paper reports part of a longitudinal research project, which sought to capture students’ conceptualization of caring practice as they progressed to different levels of study in a nursing diploma programme in Hong Kong. Model emulation was found to be an effective means of focusing students’ learning processes on the moral aspects of nursing practice. The theory of model emulation from a Chinese perspective and how it is applied to create a learning context to allow students to acquire a moral (...) sense of nursing are discussed. The participating students are invited to be sincere enquirers in the pursuit of the good embedded in practice through introspective self-examination and dialogue. They are asked to describe and share their experience of positive and negative examples of nursing in written accounts. Van Kaam’s phenomenological method was adopted to explicate the good and bad constituents of nursing from these examples, with the students assuming an active role in the explication process. The explication reveals that the students were able to articulate the good and bad practices in a variety of patient care situations. (shrink)

The dominant position of e-commerce is especially being articulated in the retailing industry once again due to several constraints that the world faces in the COVID-19 pandemic era. In this regard, this study explores the significant role of trust transfer and the moderating effect of consumers’ neurotic traits in the framework of trust-satisfaction-repurchase intention in the e-commerce context based on a survey with 406 Korean e-commerce consumers. Moreover, a prediction-oriented segmentation technique combined with structural equation models was utilized to reveal (...) consumers’ probable hidden heterogeneous characteristics. The outcomes of the global model SEM analysis indicate that offline-online trust transference occurs in e-commerce, and the conveyed trust significantly influences satisfaction and consumers’ repeat purchase intention through satisfaction. Neuroticism also has significant positive effects on trust transfer in the global model. However, results in three subgroups generated by POS show heterogeneous characteristics that considerably differed from the global model test results. The implications from this study will be beneficial to field practitioners in the e-commerce industry in addressing the importance of trust transfer, negative neurotic traits as well as heterogeneous aspects of consumers. (shrink)

Are there genuine mathematical explanations of physical phenomena, and if so, how can mathematical theories, which are typically thought to concern abstract mathematical objects, explain contingent empirical matters? The answer, I argue, is in seeing an important range of mathematical explanations as structural explanations, where structural explanations explain a phenomenon by showing it to have been an inevitable consequence of the structural features instantiated in the physical system under consideration. Such explanations are best cast as deductive arguments which, by virtue (...) of their form, establish that, given the mathematical structure instantiated in the physical system under consideration, the explanandum had to occur. Against the claims of platonists such as Alan Baker and Mark Colyvan, I argue that formulating mathematical explanations as structural explanations in this way shows that we can accept that mathematics can play an indispensable explanatory role in empirical science without committing to the existence of any abstract mathematical objects. (shrink)

Reinterpreting Sartre’s main methodologies and removing Hegelian dialectics from his notion of violence, this book demolishes the supposed hostile intersubjective relations that characterizes all concrete relations. Furthering this stance, it reconstructs an interpretation of the "violent Sartre" and crafts an alternative response: one that rejects terrorist tactics, preemptive war and Western hegemony through democratization. Based on the latest debate on Sartre’s works on ethics and politics, this project examines the relevancy and new importance they hold for contemporary concerns -- the (...) reactionary nature of terrorism, the extremity of counter-violence, and limitations of democratization efforts -- all claiming to be justified in the name of "freedom" and "liberation." While it is the concern over the "terrorist’" nature of his writings that dominates the current debate, this project starts from the premise that it is as important to ask why violence is unjustified when it can put an end to a situation that disparages humanity. In arguing for the need for moral limitations to all violent struggles, and the need for seeing others as ends-for-themselves, it proceeds to outline a response based on existential humanist ethics that can reaffirm our moral compass. (shrink)

Debunking arguments against both moral and mathematical realism have been pressed, based on the claim that our moral and mathematical beliefs are insensitive to the moral/mathematical facts. In the mathematical case, I argue that the role of Hume’s Principle as a conceptual truth speaks against the debunkers’ claim that it is intelligible to imagine the facts about numbers being otherwise while our evolved responses remain the same. Analogously, I argue, the conceptual supervenience of the moral on the natural speaks presents (...) a difficulty for the debunker’s claim that, had the moral facts been otherwise, our evolved moral beliefs would have remained the same. (shrink)

The historiography of sexology is young. It is also expanding at a remarkable pace, both in terms of the volume of publications and, more notably, in terms of its geographical, disciplinary, and intersectional reach. This special issue takes stock of these new directions, while offering new research contributions that expand our understanding of the interdisciplinary and transnational formation of this field from the late 19th through to the mid 20th century. The five articles that make up this special issue stage (...) historiographical interventions by challenging the tendency within sexological history to focus on the medical, the homosexual, the human, and the Western European at the expense of other disciplines, diagnoses, non-human subjects, and geographical locations. A particular strength of these contributions is their focus on mapping conversations among and between sexologists on both sides of the Atlantic in the early to mid 20th century – particularly in Germany, Britain, and the US – and between East and West in the early Cold War era. (shrink)

Whether due to simplicity or hypocrisy, the question of access to patient data for biomedical research is widely seen in the public discourse only from the angle of patient privacy. At the same time, the desire to live and to live without disability is of much higher value to the patients. This goal can only be achieved by extracting research insight from patient data in addition to working on model organisms, something that is well understood by many patients. Yet, most (...) biomedical researchers working outside of clinics and hospitals are denied access to patient records when, at the same time, clinicians who guard the patient data are not optimally prepared for the data’s analysis. Medical data collection is a time- and cost-intensive process that is most of all tedious, with few elements of intellectual and emotional satisfaction on its own. In this process, clinicians and bioinformaticians, each group with their own interests, have to join forces with the goal to generate medical data sets both from clinical trials and from routinely collected electronic health records that are, as much as possible, free from errors and obvious inconsistencies. The data cleansing effort as we have learned during curation of Singaporean clinical trial data is not a trivial task. The introduction of omics and sophisticated imaging modalities into clinical practice that are only partially interpreted in terms of diagnosis and therapy with today’s level of knowledge warrant the creation of clinical databases with full patient history. This opens up opportunities for re-analyses and cross-trial studies at future time points with more sophisticated analyses of the same data, the collection of which is very expensive. (shrink)

As the world struggles through the COVID‐19 pandemic, we should also be asking what systems‐level measures will be needed to prevent this or even worse disasters from happening in the future. We argue that the pandemic is merely one of potentially myriad and pleiomorphic future global disasters generated by the same underlying dynamical system. We explain that there are four broad but easily identifiable systemic, pathologically networked conditions that are hurtling civilization toward potential self‐destruction. As long as these conditions are (...) not resolved, we should consider catastrophe as an inevitable emergent endpoint from the dynamics. All four conditions can be reversed with collective action to begin creating an enduring and thriving post‐ COVID‐19 world. This will require maximal application of the precautionary principle. (shrink)

Calls for complementing, modifying and ‘decolonising’ the conceptualisation and implementation of Diversity Education (e.g. multicultural, intercultural, and/or social justice education) are currently being heard in the ‘West’. This paper explores some of the characteristics and benefits of Chinese Minzu Education as a potential addition to the field. Our starting point is that Chinese education is often misrepresented and that knowledge about diversity in China (which includes, amongst others, minority groups and Han people), and especially about how people are educated for (...) and through it, is scarce and negatively evaluated in the ‘West’. Taking a university specialising in Minzu studies as a case study (which should not be generalized to other Minzu institutions), we problematise formal and informal aspects of Minzu education that could be inspiring to, e.g. interculturalists and multiculturalists in ‘Western’ education. Fieldwork notes, student interviews about Minzu education and models of Minzu Diversity Learning co-constructed by Minzu students, illustrate the characteristics of Minzu education in higher education. The paper ends on a call for exploring other ‘unknown’ perspectives on diversity in education emerging from the so-called peripheries of the ‘West’. (shrink)

One of the success stories of formal semantics is explicating responsive moves like answers to questions. There is, however, a significant lacune concerning the characterization of _initiating utterances_, which are strongly tied to the conversational activity [language game (Wittgenstein), speech genre (Bakhtin)], or—our terminology—_conversational type_, one is engaged in. To date there has been no systematic proposal trying to account for the range of possible _language games_/_speech genres_/_conversational types_ and their global structure. In particular, concerning the range of subject matter (...) that can and needs to be discussed and by whom—ultimately a semantic analogue of Laplace’s demon. We suggest that the subject matter problem for conversational types is a central task for any semantic theory for conversation. This paper develops a theory of conversational types, which embedded in the theory of conversational interaction KoS, enables this problem to be tackled for a wide range of conversational types drawn from the British National Corpus classification of conversational domains. The theory we develop treats conversational types as first class, not metatheoretical entities, in contrast to explications of corresponding notions in game theoretic approaches. We demonstrate that this allows us to explicate the possibilities interlocutors have to refer to and seek clarification about the types of conversations they are engaged in. (shrink)

Purpose The widespread use of information and communication technologies enables consumers to obtain and share information whenever they feel the urge. With the advent of review websites and forums, companies and business owners may find themselves victims of consumer cyber aggression, which can hurt a company badly. This study aims to explore why consumers would engage in cyber aggression against companies, and to that end, it examines consumers’ ethical orientation and other possible drivers of cyber aggression. Design/methodology/approach To examine how (...) ethical orientation affects consumers’ intention to engage in cyber aggression, a scenario-based 2 × 2 between-subject experimental design is used. Moreover, 26 possible drivers in related literature are identified and included in a questionnaire administered to 226 college students. Findings The results show that adult consumers’ deontological and teleological evaluations significantly affect their ethical judgment about engaging in cyber aggression, which further impacts their intention to perpetrate an act of cyber aggression. Moreover, the study identifies six factors contributing to cyber aggression engagement as follows: personal aggressiveness, ease of perpetration, internet negativity, personal gains, helping the company and recreation. Originality/value Cyber aggression is generally viewed as interpersonal violence among adolescents. This study views cyber aggression from a different perspective and it is one of the few studies to look at adult consumers’ motivations to engage in cyber aggression against companies. The findings of this study can help firms understand why their customers attack them online, and understanding that will enable businesses to formulate more effective responses to attacks. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractRecent waves of controversies surrounding genetic engineering have spilled into popular science in Twitter battles between reputable scientists and their followers. Here, a cautionary perspective on the possible blind spots and risks of CRISPR and related biotechnologies is presented, focusing in particular on the stochastic nature of cellular control processes.

Parrondo's paradox, in which losing strategies can be combined to produce winning outcomes, has received much attention in mathematics and the physical sciences; a plethora of exciting applications has also been found in biology at an astounding pace. In this review paper, the authors examine a large range of recent developments of Parrondo's paradox in biology, across ecology and evolution, genetics, social and behavioral systems, cellular processes, and disease. Intriguing connections between numerous works are identified and analyzed, culminating in an (...) emergent pattern of nested recurrent mechanics that appear to span the entire biological gamut, from the smallest of spatial and temporal scales to the largest—from the subcellular to the complete biosphere. In analyzing the macro perspective, the pivotal role that the paradox plays in the shaping of biological life becomes apparent, and its identity as a potential universal principle underlying biological diversity and persistence is uncovered. Directions for future research are also discussed in light of this new perspective. (shrink)

This paper responds to John Burgess's ‘Mathematics and _Bleak House_’. While Burgess's rejection of hermeneutic fictionalism is accepted, it is argued that his two main attacks on revolutionary fictionalism fail to meet their target. Firstly, ‘philosophical modesty’ should not prevent philosophers from questioning the truth of claims made within successful practices, provided that the utility of those practices as they stand can be explained. Secondly, Carnapian scepticism concerning the meaningfulness of _metaphysical_ existence claims has no force against a _naturalized_ version (...) of fictionalism, according to which our ordinary standards of scientific evidence may show that we have no reason to believe the mathematical existence claims made within the context of our mathematical and scientific theories. (shrink)

For many philosophers not automatically inclined to Platonism, the indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical objectshas provided the best (and perhaps only) evidence for mathematicalrealism. Recently, however, this argument has been subject to attack, most notably by Penelope Maddy (1992, 1997),on the grounds that its conclusions do not sit well with mathematical practice. I offer a diagnosis of what has gone wrong with the indispensability argument (I claim that mathematics is indispensable in the wrong way), and, taking my cue (...) from Mark Colyvan''s (1998) attempt to provide a Quinean account of unapplied mathematics as `recreational'', suggest that, if one approaches the problem from a Quinean naturalist starting point, one must conclude that all mathematics is recreational in this way. (shrink)

Defends an account of mathematical knowledge in which mathematical knowledge is a kind of modal knowledge. Leng argues that nominalists should take mathematical knowledge to consist in knowledge of the consistency of mathematical axiomatic systems, and knowledge of what necessarily follows from those axioms. She defends this view against objections that modal knowledge requires knowledge of abstract objects, and argues that we should understand possibility and necessity in a primative way.

What is the nature of mathematical knowledge? Is it anything like scientific knowledge or is it sui generis? How do we acquire it? Should we believe what mathematicians themselves tell us about it? Are mathematical concepts innate or acquired? Eight new essays offer answers to these and many other questions.

The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...) an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network. (shrink)

Given that there is no recent research on decomposition for global inequality, the aim of this study is to fill the gap in the literature by investigating global inequality with decomposition technique. The data of this study were compiled from the World Bank and decomposition by subgroups was conducted to evaluate the driving forces behind the evolution of inequality. Almost all the countries in the world were included in this study, and the study period spans from 2000 to 2017. The (...) analysis was carried out in several stages to evaluate the issue of North–South divide, as well as the impacts of regional and income subgroups. There are several salient findings derived from this study. First, the results show that there was a gradual decline of international inequality within the study period. Second, there was still a large disparity between the developed and developing countries, and the inequality within the developing countries has aggravated further. Third, geographical location has exerted great impacts on global inequality and East Asia contributed about 40% to the overall decline in international inequality. Fourth, decline in inequality amongst the upper-middle-income countries also contributed substantially to the fall in international inequality. The results derived from this paper can provide pertinent information for the formulation of a comprehensive and coherent strategy in coordinating international efforts and managing inequality while promoting human development under the framework of the newly established Sustainable Development Goals. (shrink)

Social media has become a basis for helping us maintain human contact, especially as our alienation from our phenomenological experiences of ‘being human’ is becoming apparent due to the pandemic. I argue for how existentialist philosophy is crucial, more than ever, to interrogate our social media usage, which is a ‘necessary evil’ in our daily lives. Firstly, Kierkegaard’s critiques of the crowd and of the press are equally applicable to social media, which plays both roles: enabling an anonymous mass of (...) public opinion and doubling-up as an information source, reducing responsibility on the individual. Secondly, social media leads to an intrinsic pressure to objectify one's self (as portrayed) due to the possibility of an omnipresent Other, based on the technological design of networks. I will link my arguments on social media to other existential ideals and will conclude by suggesting changes that may promote existential ideals in one’s social media portrayal and engagement. (shrink)

This discussion note responds to Mark Colyvan’s claim that there is no easy road to nominalism. While Colyvan is right to note that the existence of mathematical explanations presents a more serious challenge to nominalists than is often thought, it is argued that nominalist accounts do have the resources to account for the existence of mathematical explanations whose explanatory role resides elsewhere than in their nominalistic content.

Vehicular ad hoc network is a multihop mobile wireless communication network that can realize many vehicle-related applications through multitop communication. In the open wireless communication environment, security and privacy protection are important contents of VANET research. The most basic method of VANET privacy protection is anonymous authentication. Even through, there are many existing schemes to provide anonymous authentication for VANETs. Many existing schemes suffer from high computational cost by using bilinear pairing operation or need the assistance of the trust authorities (...) during the authentication process or rely on an ideal tamper-proof device, which requires very strong security assumption. In this study, an anonymous authentication and key negotiation scheme by using private key and group key is proposed, which is based on pseudonym using the nonsingular elliptic curve. In this scheme, there is no third party trust center to participate in the authentication, there is no need to query the database, and there is no need of the local database to save the identity information of many vehicles, which reduce the storage space and the authentication time compared with other schemes. The proposed scheme only needs realistic TPDs. In the proposed scheme, TPDs do not need to preinstall the system key as many other schemes do; hence, the failure of a single TPD does not affect the security of the entire system. The security of the scheme is proved under the random oracle model. Compared with the related schemes using bilinear pairings, the computational cost and communication cost of the proposed scheme are reduced by 82% and 50%, respectively. (shrink)

The construal of the self is related to individuals' cognition, emotion and behavior. The aim of this study was to investigate shame in the context of interdependent-self and independent-self culture. 163 Chinese and 196 American college undergraduates completed a questionnaire about their reaction to 3 different scenarios about shameful events involving 5 different persons including self, mother, boy/girl friend, best friend and classmate. The participants reported the intensity of shame they felt in each of the situation and how close they (...) were related to other people in the scenarios. The results demonstrated that there is a significant difference between Chinese and American participants on the levels of shame across all the scenarios, as well as for the persons involved in the scenario. It was also found that the intensity of shame was reduced as the relationship between the participants and the persons involved in the shameful events becomes remote in social distance. A significant correlation was found between closeness of relationship and intensity of shame felt. Implications for understanding cultural differences to emotions and future studies are discussed. (shrink)

Most studies evaluating companion effects on medical triadic interaction focus on the doctors' part, e.g., how the companion's presence diverts doctors' attention away from the patient. In contrast to this mainstream approach, the current research proposes an alternative framework by focusing on the patient parties—especially on how companion participation reshapes the discourse sequences where patient parties provide information, and how it affects patient full turns and priority in providing complete first-hand information to doctors. By examining fifteen geriatric triadic conversations collected (...) in a teaching hospital in southern Taiwan, this proposed framework concludes that in the companion's presence, the information providing sequences are restructured into eight patterns, among which sole information provider is preferred to joint providers. Furthermore, the more companions participate in providing information, the less patients by themselves volunteer information or respond to doctors' questions prior to companions' verbal involvement. A more striking companion effect shows that even in the triads with a low-participation companion, whenever the companion does participate, the patient rarely has a full turn or priority to complete an information unit. The patient's turns are either taken, are simultaneous with, or cut-off by the companion's participation. (shrink)

The disembodiment of cognitive science has resulted in curricula with disembodied concepts and practice. The emergence of the embodied cognitive science provoked public reflections on the nature of the curriculum. This has elevated the body from the ‘peripheral’ position to the ‘central’ position, acting as the subject in action and becoming the bridge to experience transformations. Meanwhile, the nurturing role of the environment for the mind is attracting increasingly more attention, and the environment, the body, and the mind jointly constitute (...) a dynamic system that prompts the transformation and restructuring of learners’ experience. The reshaping of the relationship between the body and education and the integration of physical experience and mind-building have led us to examine curriculum from a completely new perspective, and curriculum construction is thus transformed to the dynamic generation of interaction among the body, the mind, and the environment based on group experiences. To be precise, there are three basic dimensions in the construction of an embodied curriculum: returning to the life-world and promoting the integration of the curriculum narrative framework and the student’s learning trajectory; introducing the embodied experience and realizing the continuous interactions among the learner’s body, mind, and environment; and integrating the functions of technologies to provide a powerful mediating tool for the construction of embodied curriculum. (shrink)

Drawing upon career construction theory, we examined the mediating effect of deliberate practice on career adaptability and the effects of learning goal orientation and supervisor incompetence accusations as well as career development training on DP. Using data collected from 204 Chinese PhD students in three waves over a period of 2 months, we found that individuals who were inclined to learn new skills and obtain new knowledge were more likely to deliberately practice professional activities in their fields. When a PhD (...) student’s professional competence was questioned by his or her supervisor, the student was more prone to negative emotions and would reduce his or her effort in the development of expertise. CDT – contrary to expectations – negatively predicted DP of professional activities. One possible reason is that the participants in this study have strong autonomy so that those who really struggling are participating in training and seeking help and those who with strong professional abilities are not accessing training programs. Moreover, results showed that DP of professional activities significantly promoted PhD students to adapt to their academic circumstances. Implications for career-related practice within the academic domain are provided. (shrink)

The rise of social-media-mediated celebrity culture raises several philosophical concerns. Therefore, it is not uncommon to see, for example, Hollywood actors being placed in the same bracket as YouTube artists and Instagram influencers. The increased perceived ‘connectivity’ afforded by social media allows online celebrities to reach more fans and increases the perceived engagement or intimacy in the fan-celebrity relationship. In this paper I argue that this online relationship, which is beneficial to celebrities (for brand development) and social media companies (in (...) profiting from the high engagement), has the potential to cause harm to both the celebrities as well as their fanbases (and sometimes innocent third parties). Firstly, I argue that celebrities’ attempts to be more intimate or authentic with their fanbase can turn out to be – more often than not – acts of Sartrean bad faith. Celebrities who tend to project a certain self-styled ‘online authenticity’, given the context of social media’s attention economy, can run the risk of treating a fan as a means-to-an-end, rather than an autonomous for-itself. Secondly, I argue that this phenomenon can catalyse real-world harms, by drawing upon network theory and social psychology. I argue that the connectedness of social media, ‘blending into the crowd’, and social media technologies’ ethos of optimising-for-engagement, leads to real harms to human well-being when fans do not engage critically and mindfully with online celebrities. Examples include Trump-esque celebrity politicians trying to drum up populist influence; celebrities feuding online encouraging fans’ conduct of harmful trolling and harassment; and vilification of those who do not subscribe to the same perceived worldview of a celebrity’s fandom. Following my arguments within, I shall outline an online celebrity’s ethical duties in their social media engagement, with emphasis on the duties that celebrity status comes with, particularly in preventing harms that transcend the online into the offline. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘expressionist’ accounts of applied mathematics seek to avoid the apparent Platonistic commitments of our scientific theories by holding that we ought only to believe their mathematics-free nominalistic content. The notion of ‘nominalistic content’ is, however, notoriously slippery. Yablo's account of non-catastrophic presupposition failure offers a way of pinning down this notion. However, I argue, its reliance on possible worlds machinery begs key questions against Platonism. I propose instead that abstract expressionists follow Geoffrey Hellman's lead in taking the assertoric content of (...) empirical science to be irreducibly modal, using the ‘non-interference’ of mathematical objects as justification for detaching nominalistic consequences. (shrink)