3,466 research outputs found

    Rethinking Readiness and Resilience: An Exploration of the Spiritual Domain on the Other Comprehensive Airman Fitness Framework Domains for Active-Duty Airmen Serving on Air National Guard Installations – A Qualitative Case Study

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    The purpose of this qualitative descriptive case study was to fill critical gaps in literature by understanding an Airman’s view of spiritual fitness, how spiritual fitness contributes to overall fitness, resilience and readiness, and what steps could be taken to improve Air Force spiritual fitness programming. To ensure equitability, Airmen were split into two different tenure-based groups: Active-duty Low Tenure (ADlt) and Active-duty high tenure (ADht). ADlt had an average age of 27.9 years old (SD=3.2), were 90% male, 60% White/Caucasian, and 30% Catholic/30% Christian. ADht had an average age of 34.7 years old (SD=2.0), were 100% male, 80% White/Caucasian, and 50% Christian. Spiritual fitness was reported by the following percentages of Airmen as contributing to the other three CAF domains: Physical domain – 70%, Mental domain – 100%, and Social domain – 95%. Readiness (95%) and resilience (90%) were also outlined as heavily impacted by an Airman’s spiritual fitness. Spirituality encouraged Airmen’s physical fitness through the idea that a healthy body is part of a spiritual discipline, the idea that it is part of Air Force requirements, and the idea of treating the body as a temple. Spirituality contributes to mental fitness through trusting in God\u27s promises, providing perspective to reassess situations, and providing a focal point to maintain positivity. Spirituality contributes to social fitness by serving as a source of people who provide a team mentality, support and accountability. Spirituality contributes to readiness by providing strength/excellence in Christ, inner purpose to motivate to action, and living by the Word. Spirituality contributes to resilience by individual perspective and finding strength in God’s word. Airmen suggested four areas to strengthen core values, which were truly embracing and inhabiting the Air Force core values, holding a stronger faith in God, and reinforcing the need to live up to personal core values. Airmen noted that cognitive reframing and prioritization, and doing good for others as methods to aid in strengthen a healthy perspective. In strengthening perseverance, Airmen outline four key areas, which were intentional self-reflective moments, greater religious accommodation/more chaplain interaction, greater devotion to developing spiritual fitness, and inspiring a stronger reliance on others/accountability. Recommendations to strengthen purpose were loving other people and creating shared values and goals, bringing a unique perspective to everyday situations, and continually working on one’s spirituality. Lastly, four key areas were uncovered in strengthening spiritual fitness, which will also impact an Airman’s ability to meet the demand of their assigned missions. Those areas were: Listening to and understanding other Airmen and their plights, educating the force more on spiritual fitness and the spiritual domain of CAF, spending more time in working on self-development in spiritual fitness, and authenticity. This study directly contributes to the understanding of spiritual fitness within the United States Air Force. Contributions to the field of Industrial and Organizational Psychology can be seen in this study through real-world experiences of Airmen and how spiritual fitness guides their readiness, resilience, physical fitness, mental fitness, and social fitness. This study also contributes to faith-based interventions and spiritual applications for non-military organizations

    Plant Ontology, The Amazonian Yachag and the Artist in Trance

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    The commonalities that plants, shamans and artists share may not be evident at first glance, nevertheless, if we search for uncomfortable entanglements and difficult questions, we may find that for centuries the voice with which plants speak has been the Amazonian yachag and the chamana or healer. Furthermore, who has invariably accompanied different plateaus along humanity’s convoluted becomings, has been what I have called the artist in trance. This artist is a concoction born from Walter Benjamin’s notion of ecstatic trance and Nietzche’s tragic artist. In this research I have investigated the being of plants or plant ontology and how they may be others who we may learn from in order to relate to Earth in a better way. The artist-yachag or artist philosopher as we may call her, is the one who bridges disparate conocimientos or knowledge, those of plants and those of shamans and translates them into our own words and worlds. What for? To learn to inhabit this planet in a softermood, in a weak mood as Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala would say, stemming from other visions and other perspectives. The interconnectivity that plants generate, as well as the idea of them being a world in themselves allied with the yachag or shaman and the artist, may lead humanity towards the understanding of a world to come. Applyingand expanding the notion first posited by Levi-Strauss and then contested by Viveiros de Castro that the relation between nature and culture is one of“metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric resemblance”, I argue that the same kind of contiguity exists between plants,the Amazonian yachag and the artist in trance. The trope ofmetonymic contiguity serves to connect in a continuum these three entities one after the other in a nature-culture effervescent symbiosis. ‍https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1047/thumbnail.jp

    Untying the Mother Tongue

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    Untying the Mother Tongue explores what it might mean today to speak of someone’s attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of ‘mother tongue’, rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions

    A philosophical discussion of the implications and limitations of using Virtual Reality Technology (VR) as an “Empathy Machine”

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    This thesis engages in a philosophical discussion on “empathy”, “virtuality”, and the use of virtual reality (VR) technology as an “empathy machine”. Here, I define empathy as the intentional activity (or skill) of recreating aspects of another subject’s emotional experience in one’s imagination to reflectively and “experientially” understand what another is feeling. As opposed to isomorphically appropriating another’s feelings to oneself, I identify empathy as third-personally “feeling with” others. After exploring the narrow and pluralistic approaches to understanding empathy, I argue that there are compelling pragmatic reasons for adopting the pluralistic approach, the proponents of which prefer to highlight varieties of empathy instead of a sole conceptualisation of “empathy proper”. As for virtuality, I subscribe to a third view that can be located between “virtual realism” and “virtual irrealism”, in that I understand virtuality as a sui generis mode of technological actualisation, where psychophysiological illusions, of virtual presence and embodiment, coexist with veridical elements, such as virtual social objects, without causing a defect in users’ rational judgment. My main contention in this research is that VR’s multisensory affordances can be instrumentally utilised as a complementary extension (but never as a replacement) for offsetting some of the limitations in attaining interpersonal empathy through imaginative perspective-taking alone. After discussing this contention in more depth, I then attempt to address some of the recurrent challenges and criticism raised against VR’s use as an empathy machine. Finally, I highlight some of the limitations in VR technology’s capability to capture and transmit a full representation of others’ lived experiences

    Writing Facts: Interdisciplinary Discussions of a Key Concept in Modernity

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    "Fact" is one of the most crucial inventions of modern times. Susanne Knaller discusses the functions of this powerful notion in the arts and the sciences, its impact on aesthetic models and systems of knowledge. The practice of writing provides an effective procedure to realize and to understand facts. This concerns preparatory procedures, formal choices, models of argumentation, and narrative patterns. By considering "writing facts" and "writing facts", the volume shows why and how "facts" are a result of knowledge, rules, and norms as well as of description, argumentation, and narration. This approach allows new perspectives on »fact« and its impact on modernity

    Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

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    This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

    This Year's Nobel Prize (2022) in Physics for Entanglement and Quantum Information: the New Revolution in Quantum Mechanics and Science

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    The paper discusses this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for experiments of entanglement “establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science” in a much wider, including philosophical context legitimizing by the authority of the Nobel Prize a new scientific area out of “classical” quantum mechanics relevant to Pauli’s “particle” paradigm of energy conservation and thus to the Standard model obeying it. One justifies the eventual future theory of quantum gravitation as belonging to the newly established quantum information science. Entanglement, involving non-Hermitian operators for its rigorous description, non-unitarity as well as nonlocal and superluminal physical signals “spookily” (by Einstein’s flowery epithet) synchronizing and transferring some nonzero action at a distance, can be considered to be quantum gravity so that its local counterpart to be Einstein’s gravitation according to general relativity therefore pioneering an alternative pathway to quantum gravitation different from the “secondary quantization” of the Standard model. So, the experiments of entanglement once they have been awarded by the Nobel Prize launch particularly the relevant theory of quantum gravitation grounded on “quantum information science” thus granted to be nonclassical quantum mechanics in the shared framework of the generalized quantum mechanics obeying rather quantum-information conservation than only energy conservation. The concept of “dark phase” of the universe naturally linked to the very well confirmed “dark matter” and “dark energy” and opposed to its “light phase” inherent to classical quantum mechanics and the Standard model obeys quantum-information conservation, after which reversible causality or the mutual transformation of energy and information are valid. The mythical Big Bang after which energy conservation holds universally is to be replaced by an omnipresent and omnitemporal medium of decoherence of the dark and nonlocal phase into the light and local phase. The former is only an integral image of the latter and borrowed in fact rather from religion than from science. Physical, methodological and proper philosophical conclusions follow from that paradigm shift heralded by this year’s Nobel Prize in physics. For example, the scientific theory of thinking should originate from the dark phase of the universe, as well: probably only approximately modeled by neural networks physically belonging to the light phase thoroughly. A few crucial philosophical sequences follow from the break of Pauli’s paradigm: (1) the establishment of the “dark” phase of the universe as opposed to its “light” phase, only to which the Cartesian dichotomy of “body” and “mind” is valid; (2) quantum information conservation as relevant to the dark phase, furthermore generalizing energy conservation as to its light phase, productively allowing for physical entities to appear “ex nihilo”, i.e., from the dark phase, in which energy and time are yet inseparable from each other; (3) reversible causality as inherent to the dark phase; (4) the interpretation of gravitation only mathematically: as an interpretation of the incompleteness of finiteness to infinity, for example, following the Gödel dichotomy (“either contradiction or incompleteness”) about the relation of arithmetic to set theory; (5) the restriction of the concept of hierarchy only to the light phase; (6) the commensurability of both physical extremes of a quantum and the universe as a whole in the dark phase obeying quantum information conservation and akin to Nicholas of Cusa’s philosophical and theological worldview

    The Politics of Platformization: Amsterdam Dialogues on Platform Theory

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    What is platformization and why is it a relevant category in the contemporary political landscape? How is it related to cybernetics and the history of computation? This book tries to answer such questions by engaging in multidisciplinary dialogues about the first ten years of the emerging fields of platform studies and platform theory. It deploys a narrative and playful approach that makes use of anecdotes, personal histories, etymologies, and futurable speculations to investigate both the fragmented genealogy that led to platformization and the organizational and economic trends that guide nowadays platform sociotechnical imaginaries

    Informationsströme in digitalen Kulturen

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    Wir sind umgeben von einer Vielzahl an Informationsströmen, die uns selbstverstĂ€ndlich erscheinen. Um diese digitalen Kulturen zu beschreiben, entwickeln medienwissenschaftliche Arbeiten Theorien einer Welt im Fluss. Dabei erliegen ihre Diagnosen oftmals einem Technikfetisch und vernachlĂ€ssigen gesellschaftliche Strukturen. Mathias Denecke legt eine systematische Kritik dieser Theoriebildung vor. Dazu zeichnet er die Geschichte der Rede von strömenden Informationen in der Entwicklung digitaler Computer nach und diskutiert, wie der Begriff fĂŒr Gegenwartsbeschreibungen produktiv gemacht werden kann
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