The roots of moral autonomy

Human cooperation and group living are based on societies in which individuals not only care about their own interests but share common norms and values – such as morality and prosocial behavior. As early as the 18th century, Immanuel Kant postulated autonomy as the key to human morality. Kant explained that a rational agent with a free will would necessarily make moral – not immoral – decisions. However, the fundamental question of how moral behavior acquires normative weight remains unresolved until the present day, especially when moral behavior entails personal costs for the individual. This dissertation builds on Kant’s thesis and aims to investigate important building blocks of moral autonomy at preschool age. Therefore, children’s own prosocial decisions as well as their normative and descriptive expectations about others’ prosocial actions are assessed and linked to fundamental underlying mechanisms such as cultural learning and collective intentionality. Study 1 assessed whether preschoolers enforce agreed-upon prosocial ver-sus selfish sharing norms in a group dictator game. Three- and 5-year-old children and two hand puppets had the opportunity to agree on how to distribute re-sources between themselves and a group of passive recipients. The findings sug-gest that preschoolers understand prosocial, but not selfish, agreements as binding even though prosocial sharing norms are associated with personal costs. Study Set 2 assessed in two experiments whether observed choice increases the children’s own prosocial sharing behavior. In Experiment 1, children observed an adult model who was provided with costly choice (i.e., sharing instead of keeping an item), (b) non-costly choice (i.e., sharing instead of watching an item be thrown away), or (c) no choice (i.e., being instructed to share an item). As a next step, children were given the opportunity to decide how many stickers (out of three) they would like to share with a sad animal puppet. Experiment 2 aimed to investigate possible age effects. The study design was reduced to condition (a) and (c), a second test trial was added. Taken together, the results of Study Set 2 suggest that 5-year-old’s (but not 4-year old’s) prosocial sharing behavior increases when previously having observed someone who intentionally acts prosocially at a personal cost. Study 3 investigated preschoolers’ descriptive expectations about the causal agent of prosocial and selfish actions, based on agents’ prior history of voluntary versus involuntary prosocial behavior. The results show that children at the age of 5.5 years use information about the circumstances and intentions of previous actions to generate descriptive expectations about other’s future prosocial behavior. From 4 years of age, children distinguish between an agent who shares voluntarily and an agent who shares only involuntarily. Taken together, this dissertation shows that preschool aged children infer and enforce prosocial – but not selfish – sharing norms. They engage in prosocial sharing which is affected by observed choice and they form descriptive expectations about others tendency to behave prosocial or selfish on the base of knowledge about the agents prosocial versus selfish intentions

Stuck in the Past? The Moderation Effect of Personal Nostalgia on the Attitude Behavior Relationship in IS Adoption Contexts

Even though evidence shows that emotions influence individuals’ information processing and decision making, emotions have been merely an afterthought in IS. Indeed, few studies have investigated their influence on behavior, and those that have considered only a handful of different emotions (e.g., anxiety, enjoyment, satisfaction, or pleasure). Until recently, researchers have investigated only simple and uniformly positive (e.g., pleasure) or negative emotions (e.g., anxiety). More complex emotions such as nostalgia can be valuable additions to our understanding of technology choice because they offer a window into short-term decisions, which are subject to change in one way or another. In particular, the coping function of nostalgia can help one to understand behavior in the context of IT because some users perceive changes to their familiar environment and routine as a threat and as a stressful event. As such, we investigate the impact of nostalgia on users’ choices between two different technologies to accomplish one particular goal or task. Our study is the first to provide evidence of nostalgia’s influence on technology usage and suggests that nostalgia can provide reassurance to some users when faced with overcoming big challenges

Context-based Normalization of Histological Stains using Deep Convolutional Features

While human observers are able to cope with variations in color and appearance of histological stains, digital pathology algorithms commonly require a well-normalized setting to achieve peak performance, especially when a limited amount of labeled data is available. This work provides a fully automated, end-to-end learning-based setup for normalizing histological stains, which considers the texture context of the tissue. We introduce Feature Aware Normalization, which extends the framework of batch normalization in combination with gating elements from Long Short-Term Memory units for normalization among different spatial regions of interest. By incorporating a pretrained deep neural network as a feature extractor steering a pixelwise processing pipeline, we achieve excellent normalization results and ensure a consistent representation of color and texture. The evaluation comprises a comparison of color histogram deviations, structural similarity and measures the color volume obtained by the different methods.Comment: In: 3rd Workshop on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis (DLMIA 2017

Frankfurt's Forum for Teaching and Medical Education : implementation of a comittee to coordinate medical education improvement projects

Hintergrund: Am Fachbereich Medizin der Universität Frankfurt werden jedes Jahr zwischen 15 und 20 neue Projekte zur Verbesserung der Lehre durch den Studienausschuss gefördert. Portfolios zur Skizzierung der Projekte werden von den Zentren und Instituten eingereicht. Diese Projekte haben u.a. die Neustrukturierung von Kursen und Praktika, die Implementierung und Evaluation von Prüfungen (z. B. objective structured clinical evaluation), die Förderung der didaktischen Aus- und Weiterbildung von Dozenten und Tutoren oder die curriculare Einbindung von elektronischen Medien in die Lehre zum Inhalt. Um diese Projekte untereinander zu koordinieren, wurde im Juni 2006 das Frankfurter Ideenforum für Lehre und Unterricht – kurz FILU – geschaffen. Ziele des Frankfurter Ideenforums für Lehre und Unterricht 1. Das Forum FILU bietet eine Informationsplattform für die Projektleiter der Lehrverbesserungsprojekte. 2. Das Forum übernimmt die Funktion eines Kondensators für thematisches und informationelles Vernetzungspotential der Projekte untereinander. 3. Übersteigt der Arbeits- und Koordinationsbedarf die Möglichkeiten des Forums, initiiert das FILU neue interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgruppen. 4. Der "Journal Club" innerhalb der Treffen des FILU läßt alle Teilnehmer an der aktuellen Studienlage in Ausbildungsforschung teilhaben. 5. Das Forum FILU engagiert sich dafür, die Aktivitäten zur Lehre innerhalb des Fachbereiches Medizin und darüber hinaus bekannt zu machen. Methode: Koordination und Organisation des Forums übernimmt eine ärztliche wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin. Die Treffen finden in 4-Wochenrhythmen à 2 Stunden statt. Pflichtmitglieder sind die Initiatoren und Leiter der Lehrverbesserungsprojekte; weitere interessierte Akteure des Fachbereiches nehmen ebenfalls teil. Pro Termin werden maximal zwei Lehrverbesserungsprojekte vorgestellt und diskutiert. In einem Journal Club wird eine aktuelle und für den Fachbereich relevante Studie aus den einschlägigen Journalen der Ausbildungsforschung und Medizindidaktik vorgestellt. Nach jedem Treffen erfolgt eine freiwillige Befragung der Mitglieder hinsichtlich Zielvorstellungen, Veranstaltungsankündigungen und Vortragswünschen. Halbjährig erfolgt ein Bericht an den Studienausschuss. [Ein Organigramm stellt bildhaft die Strukturen dar.] Ergebnisse: Insgesamt haben bisher bei 9 Terminen 202 Personen teilgenommen. Aus der Befragung der Mitglieder initiierten sich ein interdisziplinäres Promotions- und Studienkolleg für Ausbildungsforschung und ein Lehrverbesserungsprojekt zur zentrumsübergreifenden Koordination von Simulationspatienten in OSCE. Innerhalb des Forums entstand die Planung zur Präsentation der Lehre-Aktivitäten auf einer Veranstaltung der Frankfurter Medizinischen Gesellschaft. Der Fachbereich verfügt durch Anregung aus dem Gremium inzwischen über ein eigenes Online-Portal, einen virtuellen "Treffpunkt Lehre". [Teilnehmerzahlen, Herkunftszentren der Teilnehmer, Themen der LV-Projekte über die letzten zwei Jahre] Schlussfolgerung: Das "Frankfurter Ideenforum für Lehre und Unterricht", FILU, bietet seit seiner Implementierung eine lebendige Austausch- und Kommunikationsplattform für die Leiter der Lehrverbesserungsprojekte am Fachbereich. Über das Forum wird eine gemeinsame Nutzung der vorhandenen Ressourcen in der Lehre möglich. Die interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbeit der Akteure wird maßgeblich gefördert und bietet die Möglichkeit, sinnvolle thematische und personelle Synergien zu finden

Wegweiser für Ansiedler im Territorium Kansas Selections: Guide for Settlers in Kansas Territory

This is the published version, made available with permission of the editor

Food accessibility related to the Double Your Dollar Program

The Double Your Dollar (DYD) Program is a program that gives Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) beneficiaries and Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP) participants match dollars to spend at local farmers markets. The DYD’s goal is to incentivize healthy eating among individuals of low income and promote spending at farmers markets. Food insecurity affects over 60,000 individuals in Washington and Benton counties in Arkansas. The aim of this study was to assess how the DYD program impacted users’ food accessibility and how the program could be improved for the future. A survey was used to address basic demographics, type, frequency, and change of food purchases, and customer shopping patterns. Eighty DYD users were surveyed at farmers markets in Washington and Benton counties. The results indicated that the vast majority of current DYD users had increased purchases of fresh fruits and vegetables, which is a marker for improved nutritional status. The main motivations for shopping at the farmers market included the ability to buy fresh, healthy, and quality foods. This study indicates that food assistance programs such as DYD could be replicated throughout the country to improve local food accessibility and, as a result, potentially improve nutritional status among individuals of low income. Future studies should assess the awareness of the program within the community since this study only assessed those already participating

Simulation of X-ray Bursts and Superbursts

Regular bursts have been observed in binary systems containing a neutron star with an accretion flow of matter from the companion star. These bursts are so-called type I X-ray bursts and occur due to thermonuclear explosions in the accreted shell of the neutron stars. Observations have shown that after thousands of X-ray bursts a rare superburst event may take place. These superbursts are thought to be triggered by unstable carbon ignition from the accumulated ashes of the previous X-ray bursts. One of our aims is to produce a self-consistent superburst, for which the amount of the remaining 12C in the ashes is a crucial factor. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of the crustal heating on the behaviour of X-ray bursts and on the composition of their ashes