Romantic Love and Knowledge: Refuting the Claim of Egoism

Romantic love and its predecessor eros have both been characterized as forms of egoistic love. Part of this claim is concerned specifically with the relation between love and knowledge. Real love, it is claimed, is prior to knowledge and is not motivated by it. Romantic love and eros according to this view are egoistic in that they are motivated by a desire for knowledge. Agapic love characterized by bestowal represents a true form of love unmotivated by selfish desires. I argue that such an emphasis on bestowal at the expense of knowledge or appraisal of the beloved is problematic. The knowledge dimension of romantic love, rather than contributing to selfishness, can be a means of freeing us from egoism when we understand identity in its relational or social form

The Representative Other: Confronting Otherness in Kierkegaard, Levinas and Ricour

In this paper I present the notion of a ‘representative other,’ an equivocal concept of otherness, which I wish to free from any substantial theological grounding. I arrive at this notion, however, through a survey of the concept of otherness in the work of three religious writers: Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur. I argue that all three of these thinkers provide resources to help me liberate the concept of otherness from the concept of Go.d My motive for doing so is fuelled by the recognition of the role that otherness plays in the constitution of selfhood and in ethical understanding. I wish to understand this role independent of theological considerations

THE AMERICAN AG·RICULTURE MOVEMENT: MANIFEST AND LATENT PARTICIPANT ATTRACTIONS IN A SOCIAL MOVEMENT

This paper will focus on the recently organized American Agriculture Movement (AAM) in the context of a social movement. Upon approaching the AAM as a topic of research) one is immediately confronted by the paucity ofliterature in theprofessional sociology. and agricultural economics journals. This is not to suggest that the AAM has been rejected as an area worthy of research, but is probably due to research lag. Indeed, the 1978 Wisconsin Farmer Survey conducted by the University of Wisconsin's Department of Rural Sociology t among other data collection, solicits information .addressiJlg support of the AAM (Wilkening, 1978:7). Of necessity then, most of the data addressing the AAM have been drawn from news periodicals, newspapers, and various agriculturaland farm journals

Ongoing Development and Evaluation of an Engineering Service Course

George Fox University has a service-learning course required of all engineering program graduates. The course began in 2010 as a one-credit per semester, four-semester sequence starting in the spring of the sophomore year. This structure provided an overlap of students in their first and second year in the course. All student teams met concurrently one evening per week to work on faculty-provided projects. Each faculty member was responsible for approximately four teams. Faculty and students began each year of the program with excitement, but over time, a number of significant challenges emerged, among these the explosive growth of the George Fox University engineering program and its potential effect on the sustainability of the program. Therefore, in this paper we follow-up on our published review of the first few years of the program. Here we discuss the mechanics of these changes and their continuing effect on the overall program. An increasing number of students necessarily required an increasing number of projects. Faculty had already expressed difficulty in managing four projects and in finding clients with appropriate engineering challenges. Faculty had also recognized that some students lacked motivation to participate in some of the provided projects, especially during their second year of the course. To meet these challenges, the course was restructured as a two-credit per semester, two semester sequence in the junior year. This cut the number of students (and therefore projects) in half. Faculty were generally assigned to oversee one team. Finally, the task of finding projects was given to the incoming juniors who became responsible to propose and present projects for instructor approval. In addition to describing the evolution of the program, statistical analyses of student perceptions of the design process and the influence of service experiences will be presented. These longitudinal data are used in the evaluation of the program as well as the overall presentation of the design process in the engineering curriculum. The details of this paper will provide information to other programs in their development of similar courses. Through the discussion of ongoing areas of concern, those implementing similar programs will gain exposure to issues that are sure to arise

Preparing Engineers for Service

George Fox University has a strong service mentality. As the result of the university’s “Serve Day” at the Oregon School for the Blind, faculty members developed a passion to connect engineering students with service opportunities that require a technical solution. In the spring of 2010, the engineering department initiated a course sequence required for all engineering students. The program affiliated with the EPICS program (started at Purdue University) and utilized much of their course material for documenting the design process. Students’ initial excitement for the course waned as they began to feel burdened by the large documentation requirements; the instructors agreed with their assessment. In this servicelearning context, the intention was to emphasize service, however academic demands dominated. Because of the hands-on design-and-build curriculum, the instructors felt that students could perform effectively as engineers without additional “academic” material overhead. Thus, much of the documentation requirements were curtailed. When the requirements eased, student passion returned; yet, the instructors soon discovered that with this excitement came reduced project performance. Though the faculty was teaching the design process and engaged students with multiple projects throughout the curriculum, students had not effectively learned how to develop project requirements and specifications. Therefore, the instructors revamped the approach and implemented a detailed design-cycle template with a weekly assessment form using Google Apps. The students were not enthusiastic about the added documentation requirements, but they recognized that these processes enabled them to achieve their goal of providing service to others. In this paper the authors detail the development of a service-learning course, recounting the various changes in the approach. They suggest that this learning is a prerequisite for effective engineering service and emphasize that if students are to serve, they must first learn

UA62/7 Archaeological Survey of Proposed Realignment of Highway 119, Harlan & Letcher Counties, Kentucky

Archaeological Survey Report No. 4 created by WKU Sociology & Anthropology prior to realignment of Highway 119

Class act

This site contains a large amount of information intended to improve existing teaching practice regarding “access” to learning for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in postsecondary classrooms. To do that we have clustered the information in a series of links; you’ll find these links on the right and at the bottom of most pages

Oligonucleotide sequences forming short self-complimentary hairpins can expedite the down-regulation of Coprinopsis cinerea genes

Gene silencing in fungi is often induced by dsRNA hairpin forming constructs the preparation of which can require multiple cloning steps. To simplify gene silencing in the filamentous fungi we have evaluated a high throughput cloning method for target sequences using the homobasidiomycete Coprinopsis cinerea, the GFP reporter and a commercially available vector system. The pSUPER RNAi System™, which was developed for mammalian experiments, exploits the human H1 Polymerase III (Pol III) RNA gene promoter and expedites cloning/expression of specific user-defined oligonucleotide sequences to form short self-complimentary hairpins. Transformation of C. cinerea with pSUPER constructs harboring specific oligonucleotides (19 nt stem length) enabled recovery of transformants with reduced transcripts of the GFP transgene, that were less fluorescent in protein assays and microscopic phenotypes. This technological advance should expedite functional genomic studies in C. cinerea and has wider potential for utility in other homobasidiomycete and filamentous fungi

Natural products from filamentous fungi and production by heterologous expression

Filamentous fungi represent an incredibly rich and rather overlooked reservoir of natural products, which often show potent bioactivity and find applications in different fields. Increasing the naturally low yields of bioactive metabolites within their host producers can be problematic, and yield improvement is further hampered by such fungi often being genetic intractable or having demanding culturing conditions. Additionally, total synthesis does not always represent a cost-effective approach for producing bioactive fungal-inspired metabolites, especially when pursuing assembly of compounds with complex chemistry. This review aims at providing insights into heterologous production of secondary metabolites from filamentous fungi, which has been established as a potent system for the biosynthesis of bioactive compounds. Numerous advantages are associated with this technique, such as the availability of tools that allow enhanced production yields and directing biosynthesis towards analogues of the naturally occurring metabolite. Furthermore, a choice of hosts is available for heterologous expression, going from model unicellular organisms to well-characterised filamentous fungi, which has also been shown to allow the study of biosynthesis of complex secondary metabolites. Looking to the future, fungi are likely to continue to play a substantial role as sources of new pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals—either as producers of novel natural products or indeed as platforms to generate new compounds through synthetic biology

Employer Health Benefits 2016 Annual Survey

This annual survey of employers provides a detailed look at trends in employer-sponsored health coverage including premiums, employee contributions, cost-sharing provisions, and employer opinions. The 2016 survey included almost 1,900 interviews with non-federal public and private firms.Annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage reached $18,142 this year, up 3 percent from last year, with workers on average paying$5,277 towards the cost of their coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Education Trust 2016 Employer Health Benefits Survey. The 2016 survey includes information on the use of incentives for employer wellness programs, plan cost-sharing as well as firm offer rate. Survey results are released here in a variety of ways, including a full report with downloadable tables on a variety of topics, summary of findings, and an article published in the journal Health Affairs