Understanding death as the cessation of intentional action: A cross-cultural developmental study

Determining whether or not an entity is capable of acting intentionally is a fundamental cognitive skill that emerges in the first year of infancy, and the inability to act is a key aspect distinguishing dead from living things. Though young children’s understanding of death is generally thought to be poor, an understanding of death as the permanent cessation of agency might develop early in childhood. This study tested the cessation-of-agency hypothesis cross-culturally, by examining the differences between children’s judgments about sleeping and dead animals. The results showed that children understand that death entails the permanent cessation of the ability to act by age 4 in two different cultures. This is consistent with a view that those distinctions that are most crucial for adaptive decision-making are the ones that develop earliest

What does it mean to be smart: Black male perspectives on school and academic achievement

This dissertation uses both critical race theory and Afrocentricity to examine Black male students’ understanding of what it means to be “smart.” Through the use of individual interviews, focus groups and class observations, the researcher interviewed and observed a total of 14 10th-grade Black males over the course of 4 months. Five research questions guided this work: (1) How do Black males understand what it means to be smart? (2) How do Black males’ views and assessment of their own intelligence affect their engagement in the classroom? (3) How do Black males understand what it means to “act white or “act Black”? (4) What impact, if any, do their understandings of “acting white” and “acting Black” have on their academic performance? (5) How do Black males understand the stereotypes associated with Black males? The students’ discussion of what it means to be smart suggests that the need exists for ongoing conversations about how whiteness and negative stereotypes about Black males impact Black male students’ understanding of “smartness” and academic identity

Celebrity chefs as brand and their cookbooks as marketing communication

This paper aims to illuminate how consumers engage with celebrity chefs as marketing objects and their cookbooks as marketing communications. Based upon narrative analysis of qualitative data it suggest that celebrity chefs are acting as brands, that consumers clearly understand and engage with them on that basis and have clear understanding of their values and benefits leading to loyalty and trust in these chef brands. It further suggests that the level engagement which these chef brands can achieve is unmatched by the consumer goods brands and retailers within food marketing. It argues that while the cookbooks under these brands clearly act as product and merchandise that they should also be considered as part of the brand's marketing communication toolkit: that they play a role in driving consumer loyalty to the brand by effectively communicating its brand values and attributes. It concludes that traditional consumer goods and retailers within the grocery sector need to re-evaluate the range of marketing communications tools available to respond to the brand dominance of the celebrity chef and rethink traditional models of endorsement as they may be doing more to build the celebrity brand than associated consumer goods. Consumption, marketing communications, branding

Beyond the Whorfs of Dover: A Study of Balinese Interpretive Practices

Scholars generally assume that current Euro-American theory is both necessary and sufficient to understand other societies. Analyzing the presuppositions of linguistic and anthropological models indicates however that they are fatally flawed. Examining Balinese practices of speaking and understanding others shows they work with a consistently pragmatic approach with coherent modes of interrogating situated utterances. Close study of examples highlights how far existing theories from truth-conditional semantics to speech act theory not only fail to appreciate what is said and done, but insulate themselves from realizing this. So the many studies of Balinese ‘symbolism’ are only possible by failing to listen to what people say. According to Balinese, speech is inseparable from other acts, so meaning can only be judged from its consequences. If other people have diverse ways of speaking, acting and understanding, should we not finally lay aside our comfortable hegemony and inquire critically what is going on

Upaya Meningkatkan Pemahaman Disiplin Siswa Melalui Layanan Bimbingan Klasikal Menggunakan Media Audio Visual pada Siswa Kelas IX di SMP Negeri 9 Palembang

This study aims to improve understanding of students through classical guidance services using audio visual media in class IX 10 students of SMP Negeri 9 Palembang. This research uses the guidance and counseling action research method (PTBK), with the research subjects being 30 students, consisting of 13 men and 17 women. Planning, acting, observing and reflecting. Data collection instruments using the method of observation and questionnaires. The analysis technique is done by using quantitative descriptive. The results of this study indicate that classical guidance services using audio visual media provide an improvement in understanding student coordination. Before the action there were no students in the high category. After being given an act of students who are relatively in the high category. By using video media, let students be interested in participating in the learning process and also provide students to understand service material

Sexual dimorphism in bite performance drives morphological variation in chameleons

Phenotypic performance in different environments is central to understanding the evolutionary and ecological processes that drive adaptive divergence and, ultimately, speciation. Because habitat structure can affect an animal's foraging behaviour, anti-predator defences, and communication behaviour, it can influence both natural and sexual selection pressures. These selective pressures, in turn, act upon morphological traits to maximize an animal's performance. For performance traits involved in both social and ecological activities, such as bite force, natural and sexual selection often interact in complex ways, providing an opportunity to understand the adaptive significance of morphological variation with respect to habitat. Dwarf chameleons within the Bradypodion melanocephalum-Bradypodion thamnobates species complex have multiple phenotypic forms, each with a specific head morphology that could reflect its use of either open-or closed-canopy habitats. To determine whether these morphological differences represent adaptations to their habitats, we tested for differences in both absolute and relative bite performance. Only absolute differences were found between forms, with the closed-canopy forms biting harder than their open-canopy counterparts. In contrast, sexual dimorphism was found for both absolute and relative bite force, but the relative differences were limited to the closed-canopy forms. These results indicate that both natural and sexual selection are acting within both habitat types, but to varying degrees. Sexual selection seems to be the predominant force within the closed-canopy habitats, which are more protected from aerial predators, enabling chameleons to invest more in ornamentation for communication. In contrast, natural selection is likely to be the predominant force in the open-canopy habitats, inhibiting the development of conspicuous secondary sexual characteristics and, ultimately, enforcing their overall diminutive body size and constraining performance

Reasons, Blame, and Collective Harms

Collective harm cases are situations in which things will become worse if enough acts of a certain kind are performed but no single act of the relevant kind will make a difference to the outcome. The inefficacy argument says that since one such act does not make a difference to the outcome, you have no outcome-related reason to refrain from acting in this way. If this argument holds, you have no climate-change-related reason to refrain from going for a drive in a fossil fuel powered car, and no harm-to-the-victim-related reason to refrain from flipping the switch in Derek Parfit’s (1984) famous case of the harmless torturers. There are two ways in which you could understand the inefficacy argument. Either, it says that you lack a reason to act in the relevant way because one such act makes no difference at all to the outcome, or it says that you lack a reason to act in the relevant way because the outcome will occur whether or not you act in this way. Either way, the argument is unfounded. Acting in the relevant way does make a difference to the outcome. Given that there is a possibility that the outcome will occur and a possibility that it will not, acting in the relevant way makes the outcome closer to happening (or further from not happening). In technical terms: acting in the relevant way makes the outcome more secure within the relevant possibility horizon. Thus, the first suggested interpretation of the inefficacy argument is unsound. The second interpretation rests implicitly on a flawed understanding of causation according to which causes always make a difference to whether or not their outcomes occur. An improved account of causation entails that there is a causal connection between the single act and the outcome in collective harm cases. It entails, for instance, that going for just one drive in a fossil fuel powered car is a cause (one of many) of climate change, and that flipping a switch is a cause (one of many) of the victim’s pain in the case of the harmless torturers. Drawing from this account of causation, it is possible to explain when, and why, you have outcome-related reasons in collective harm cases. You have an outcome-related reason to act in a certain way when acting in this way makes a good outcome more secure within the relevant possibility horizon. This account captures the intuitive idea that you have outcome-related reasons to contribute to good outcomes, and to refrain from contributing to bad ones. It also produces intuitively correct verdicts about what outcome-related reasons you have in many different kinds of cases, including collective harm cases (with or without a threshold), pre-emption cases, switching cases, overdetermination cases, omission cases, Frankfurt-style cases, cases where we disregard irrelevant possibilities, the difficult case of the thirsty traveller, and more. Importantly, this account provides the resources to pinpoint the problem in the second variety of the inefficacy argument. You might have an outcome-related reason to refrain from acting in the relevant way in collective harm cases even if the harmful outcome will occur whether you refrain or not: you have such a reason if there is a possibility that the outcome will occur, a possibility that it will not occur, and acting in this way makes the outcome closer to happening. There is also a question of whether you could be blameworthy for the outcome in collective harm cases. An adjusted version of the inefficacy argument says that you cannot be blameworthy for the outcome in collective harm cases since what you do makes no difference to the outcome. Also this version of the argument is mistaken, and for the same reasons. Building on the mentioned account of causation, it is possible to explain when and why you are blameworthy for an action, omission or outcome. You are blameworthy for X – where X is an act, omission or outcome – if and only if a poor quality of will of yours in relation to X was a cause of X. Like the proposed account of reasons, the account of blameworthiness produces intuitively correct verdicts in a wide range of cases

The role of hnRNP H in the splicing response to genotoxic stress

Since early in evolutionary history, alternative RNA splicing has been an important method for metazoan organisms to regulate gene expression, allowing for a vastly expanded proteome without the need for significant genome expansion. By tightly regulating the inclusion and exclusion of parts of genes using cis-acting elements and trans-acting factors, the splicing machinery can create specific isoforms of proteins in response to changes in developmental time, spatiotemporal or environmental factors, etc. Recently, misregulation of this system has been discovered increasingly in various disease states, including many (if not most) cancers. Significantly, aberrant alternative RNA splicing has been implicated in the acquisition of chemotherapy resistance to certain drugs, including cisplatin. Understanding how the splicing machinery fails to act properly in cancer will be important for creating novel gene-based therapies in the future. In this study, I aimed to understand how an important splicing factor implicated in the regulation of cancer-related transcripts, hnRNP H, causes changes in alternative splicing in its own mRNA and of other genes. It was shown that cisplatin causes a dose-dependent decrease in two paralagous exons, HNRNPH1 Exon 4 and HNRNPH3 Exon 3. Structurally similar control compounds did not cause such changes, implying that the effect is specific to cisplatin-induced genotoxic stress. Gel shift assays confirmed the interaction of hnRNP H with its own mRNA in these autoregulatory exons, implying a pathway that allows cancer cells to modulate the levels of this important protein factor

D1 Dopamine Receptor Signaling Is Modulated by the R7 RGS Protein EAT-16 and the R7 Binding Protein RSBP-1 in Caenoerhabditis elegans Motor Neurons

Dopamine signaling modulates voluntary movement and reward-driven behaviors by acting through G protein-coupled receptors in striatal neurons, and defects in dopamine signaling underlie Parkinson's disease and drug addiction. Despite the importance of understanding how dopamine modifies the activity of striatal neurons to control basal ganglia output, the molecular mechanisms that control dopamine signaling remain largely unclear. Dopamine signaling also controls locomotion behavior in Caenorhabditis elegans. To better understand how dopamine acts in the brain we performed a large-scale dsRNA interference screen in C. elegans for genes required for endogenous dopamine signaling and identified six genes (eat-16, rsbp-1, unc-43, flp-1, grk-1, and cat-1) required for dopamine-mediated behavior. We then used a combination of mutant analysis and cell-specific transgenic rescue experiments to investigate the functional interaction between the proteins encoded by two of these genes, eat-16 and rsbp-1, within single cell types and to examine their role in the modulation of dopamine receptor signaling. We found that EAT-16 and RSBP-1 act together to modulate dopamine signaling and that while they are coexpressed with both D1-like and D2-like dopamine receptors, they do not modulate D2 receptor signaling. Instead, EAT-16 and RSBP-1 act together to selectively inhibit D1 dopamine receptor signaling in cholinergic motor neurons to modulate locomotion behavior

Risks, Goals, and Pictographs: Lawyering to the Social Entrepreneur

Scholars have argued that transactional lawyers add value by mitigating the potential for post-transaction litigation, reducing transaction costs, acting as reputational intermediaries, and lowering regulatory costs. Effective transactional attorneys understand their clients’ businesses and the industries or contexts in which those businesses operate. Applied to the start-up social enterprise context, understanding the client includes understanding the founders’ values, preferences, and proclivity for risk. The novel transactions and innovative solutions pursued by emerging social entrepreneurs may not lend themselves well to risk avoidance. For example, new corporate forms such as the benefit corporation are untested, yet appeal to many social entrepreneurs who wish to use a single entity to pursue dual missions. Novelty in a transaction or governance arrangement, as opposed to precedent, means that the risk of litigation or regulatory inquiry may rise. However, a lawyer—and particularly the student attorney without practice experience—may be prone to risk aversion. Lawyers are often described by themselves and by others as “conservative, risk-averse, precedent-bound, and wedded to a narrow, legalistic range of problem solving strategies.” On one hand, risk aversion can inhibit a lawyer’s ability to “think outside the box” and take the innovative approaches that their social enterprise clients need. On the other hand, a lawyer’s risk aversion may add value to a social enterprise to the extent that the lawyer can be a “sounding board to help clients balance risk-prone ideas.” In the Social Enterprise & Nonprofit Law Clinic at Georgetown Law, student attorneys learn to practice client-centered lawyering in their representation of social enterprise clients. In this Essay, I discuss (i) plausible risk profiles of student attorneys and their social enterprise clients; (ii) a client-centered lawyering approach that deters a student attorney from projecting her own risk aversion onto her clients and allows her to act as a “sounding board” armed with legal analysis to help her client make informed decisions; and (iii) one of the counseling tools that facilitates this client-centered approach. The counseling tool—a pictograph, or visual representation that communicates three-dimensional qualitative information—dictates that the client’s preferences take priority over the student attorney’s risk profile, but also allows the student attorney to present and frame the advantages and disadvantages of a particular decision point in relation to the client’s expressed goals