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Technical conferences as a technique of Internationalism
Get PDFThis paper looks at a genre of meetings that, while neither purely ‘scientific’ nor ‘diplomatic’, drew on elements from both professional spheres and gained prominence in the interwar decades and during the Second World War. It proposes to make sense of ‘technical conferences’ as a phenomenon that was made by and through scientific experts and politicians championing the organizing power of rationality, science and liberal internationalism. Against the background of swelling ranks of state-employed scientists, this paper documents the emergence of technical conferences as the for- ums where they got down to work. To make this case the paper traces the influence of a new way of thinking about the function and organization of conferences, originating in the time around the First World War, on one international organization in particular: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), as a new hub of scientists and technicians
Let there be a “We”: introducing an ethics of collective academic care
Get PDFPurpose: We aim to think critically about collaborative working through the practical
application of an ethics of care approach. We address the following research questions: How
can we embed an ethics of care into academic collaboration? What are the benefits and
challenges of this kind of collaborative approach? Our contextual focus also incorporates a
collective sensemaking of academic identities over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Design/methodology/approach: We focus on the activities of the ‘Consumer Research with
Impact for Society’ (CRIS) Collective at and around the 2021 Academy of Marketing
conference. We draw on the insights and labour of the group in terms of individual and
collaborative reflexivity, workshops, and the development of a collaborative poem.
Findings: First, we present our ‘web of words’ as our adopted approach to collaborative
writing. Second, we consider the broader takeaways that have emerged from our
collaboration in relation to blurring of boundaries, care in collaboration and transformations.
Originality: The overarching contribution of our paper is to introduce an Ethics of Collective
Academic Care. We discuss three further contributions that emerged as central in its
operationalization: arts-based research, tensions and conflicts, and structural issues. Our
application of the ‘web of words’ approach also offers a template for an alternative means of
engaging with, and representing, those involved in our research
Static analysis of graph database transformations
Get PDFWe investigate graph transformations, defined using Datalog-like rules based on acyclic conjunctive two-way regular path queries (acyclic C2RPQs), and we study two fundamental static analysis problems: type checking and equivalence of transformations in the presence of graph schemas. Additionally, we investigate the problem of target schema elicitation, which aims to construct a schema that closely captures all outputs of a transformation over graphs conforming to the input schema. We show all these problems are in EXPTIME by reducing them to C2RPQ containment modulo schema; we also provide matching lower bounds. We use cycle reversing to reduce query containment to the problem of unrestricted (finite or infinite) satisfiability of C2RPQs modulo a theory expressed in a description logic
Letters from an invalid philosopher: the fallibility of mind and body in Seneca’s Epistulae morales
No full textAnyone who wishes to make progress towards Stoic wisdom must cultivate a heightened awareness of their own fallibility, their susceptibility to the error of failing to appreciate that only virtue is truly good. Seneca’s letters, the main focus of my discussion, regularly exhort his addressee Lucilius to scrutinise his (Lucilius’) faults. In doing so, they also showcase the failings of their author; Seneca often confesses his own flaws. He describes himself disturbed by a range of emotions all of which ultimately derive from attributing value to circumstances a true Stoic should regard as indifferent. Stoic discipline focuses on the identification and cure of the particular weaknesses impairing one’s mental and spiritual disposition, failings of the animus. Physical deficiencies might seem irrelevant to this quest for mental perfection; the capacity of the Stoic wise person for virtue is in no way compromised by illness, Seneca insists, or the loss of a limb. At the same time, Seneca regularly presents the therapy offered by philosophy as a cure for mental ills which is analogous in important respects to that offered by medicine in relation to physical ones. The place of this analogy in Stoic thinking was long established. I want to look more closely, however, at the significance of bodily failings in Seneca’s letters and their complex relation to fallibility of the animus. In the end, I shall argue, the differences are more important than the parallels. Failings of the mind require therapeutic attention, but they are never to be welcomed. Failings of the body, by contrast, while they may sometimes be an impediment or distraction, can also offer the opportunity to hone crucial facets of Stoic virtue, such as fortitude and endurance
Humor strategies in the foreign language class
Get PDFHumor can provide a multitude of benefits for language learners, including improvement of classroom atmosphere (Dewaele et al., 2018) and a reduction of anxiety (Tarone, 2000). Moreover, the integration of humor into language lessons has been strongly endorsed by both students and instructors (Askildson, 2005; Azizinezhad & Hashemi, 2011). What is less clear is which types of humor strategies are seen to be most effective, as well as the degree to which learner characteristics affect their responses to humor. This study examines the influence of L2 proficiency, foreign language enjoyment (FLE), and attitudes about humor language learning on L2 learners' (N=243) reactions to a variety of humor strategies used in the language classroom. Regression analysis revealed that proficiency had little bearing on learner preferences, whereas FLE, and especially attitude towards in-class humor, had a much greater influence on preferred strategies. Overall, spontaneous humor, memes and cartoons were the most strongly endorsed strategies
Psychotherapists’ experience of the transition to Telepsychotherapy amidst COVID-19 in India
Get PDFObjective: Since the onset of COVID-19, the provision of psychotherapy services has shifted
online. Thus, telepsychotherapy has been the focus of much research to document therapists'
experiences; however, it has been mainly quantitative. In the Indian context, no known
empirical research has focused on the implications of this transition on psychotherapists.
Therefore, the present paper presents an in-depth idiographic study exploring
psychotherapists' experiences in India, who had to transition to telepsychotherapy rapidly.
Method: Ten novice psychotherapists providing clinical services virtually were individually
interviewed. The transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis.
Results: The main themes that emerged from the analysis were: negative impact on
therapeutic process, detrimental effect on personal and professional self, positive impact of
telepsychotherapy for therapist and, strategies for helping the adjustment to
telepsychotherapy practice.
Conclusion: The idiographic and psychological focus enabled a detailed exploration of the
profound impact the sudden transition had on novice psychotherapists’ work with clients and
their self-efficacy. Despite contextual constraints faced by the psychotherapy profession in
India, the participants demonstrated creative ways of working around the challenges
encountered during telepsychotherapy. Nonetheless, their experiences highlight the need to
initiate training programs in telepsychotherapy. The findings are considered in relation to
extant literature and provide fertile ground for novice practitioners to engage in thinking
about their own telepsychotherapy use
Insecurity and support for female leadership in conflict states: evidence from Afghanistan
Get PDFWhile women’s political inclusion is central to international conflict resolution efforts, public attitudes in conflict states towards women’s political inclusion remain underexplored. We expect insecurity to depress support for female political leadership in conflicts where women’s political inclusion is violently contested. Citizens wanting security through force prefer male leaders because of stereotypes privileging men’s military prowess. Citizens wanting security through reconciliation, however, also favour men for fear that female leadership would provoke more violence. We assess these expectations with experimental and observational data from the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. In the survey experiment, priming respondents to think about insecurity decreases support for female leadership – but only among women. In observational data, insecurity correlates with more polarized attitudes towards women’s political representation in some regions, and greater support for female leaders in others. Insecurity’s impact on public support for female leadership in conflict states may be highly heterogeneous
Expectations about precision bias metacognition and awareness.
Get PDFBayesian models of the mind suggest that we estimate the reliability or “precision” of incoming sensory signals to guide perceptual inference and to construct feelings of confidence or uncertainty about what we are perceiving. However, accurately estimating precision is likely to be challenging for bounded systems like the brain. One way observers could overcome this challenge is to form expectations about the precision of their perceptions and use these to guide metacognition and awareness. Here we test this possibility. Participants made perceptual decisions about visual motion stimuli, while providing confidence ratings (Experiments 1 and 2) or ratings of subjective visibility (Experiment 3). In each experiment, participants acquired probabilistic expectations about the likely strength of upcoming signals. We found these expectations about precision altered metacognition and awareness—with participants feeling more confident and stimuli appearing more vivid when stronger sensory signals were expected, without concomitant changes in objective perceptual performance. Computational modeling revealed that this effect could be well explained by a predictive learning model that infers the precision (strength) of current signals as a weighted combination of incoming evidence and top-down expectation. These results support an influential but untested tenet of Bayesian models of cognition, suggesting that agents do not only “read out” the reliability of information arriving at their senses, but also take into account prior knowledge about how reliable or “precise” different sources of information are likely to be. This reveals that expectations about precision influence how the sensory world appears and how much we trust our senses
Confinement effect on hydrolysis in small lipid vesicles
Get PDFIn living organisms most chemical reactions take place within the confines of lipid-membrane bound compartments, while confinement within the bounds of a lipid membrane is thought to be a key step in abiogenesis. In previous work we demonstrated that confinement in the aqueous cavity of a lipid vesicle affords protection against hydrolysis, a phenomenon that we term here confinement effect (Ce) and that we attributed to the interaction with the lipid membrane. Here, we show that both the size and the shape of the cavity of the vesicle modulate the Ce. We link this observation to the packing of the lipid following changes on membrane curvature, and formulate a mathematical model that relates the Ce with the radius of a spherical vesicle and the packing parameter of the lipids. These results suggest that the shape of the compartment where a molecule is located plays a major role in controlling chemical reactivity of non-enzymatic reactions. Moreover, the mathematical treatment we propose offers a useful tool for the design of vesicles with predictable reaction rates of the confined molecules, e.g., drug delivery vesicles with confined prodrugs. The results also show that a crude form of signal transduction, devoid of complex biological machinery, can be achieved by any external stimuli that drastically changes the structure of the membrane, like the osmotic shocks used in the present work
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