A psychometric measure of working memory capacity for configured body movement.

Working memory (WM) models have traditionally assumed at least two domain-specific storage systems for verbal and visuo-spatial information. We review data that suggest the existence of an additional slave system devoted to the temporary storage of body movements, and present a novel instrument for its assessment: the movement span task. The movement span task assesses individuals' ability to remember and reproduce meaningless configurations of the body. During the encoding phase of a trial, participants watch short videos of meaningless movements presented in sets varying in size from one to five items. Immediately after encoding, they are prompted to reenact as many items as possible. The movement span task was administered to 90 participants along with standard tests of verbal WM, visuo-spatial WM, and a gesture classification test in which participants judged whether a speaker's gestures were congruent or incongruent with his accompanying speech. Performance on the gesture classification task was not related to standard measures of verbal or visuo-spatial working memory capacity, but was predicted by scores on the movement span task. Results suggest the movement span task can serve as an assessment of individual differences in WM capacity for body-centric information

The Political Morality of Nudges in Healthcare

A common critique of nudges is that they reduce someone's of choices or elicit behavior through means other than rational persuasion. In this paper, I argue against this form of critique. I argue that, if there is anything distinctively worrisome about nudges from the standpoint of morality, it is their tendency to hide the amount of social control that they embody, undermining democratic governance by making it more difficult for members of a political community to detect the social architect’s pulling of the strings. This concern is particularly salient as to choices where it is important for people to directly engage with a certain set of values, “big personal decisions” (to use a simplifying phrase). Many healthcare decisions are exactly these kinds of choices

To Perform or Pay Damages

In The Myth of Efficient Breach: New Defenses of the Expectation Interest, Daniel Markovits and Alan Schwartz argue that contractual promises between sophisticated parties are best interpreted as disjunctive promises to perform or pay damages. They further argue that this dual performance hypothesis answers moral critics of the expectation remedy. This comment makes three claims about Markovits and Schwartz\u27s argument. First, although the dual performance hypothesis is supported by Markovits and Schwartz\u27s instrumentalist model, they do not have a good argument that it is empirically correct -- that it is the best interpretation of what sophisticated parties actually intend. Such an argument is necessary to fully answer the moral critics. Second, the dual performance hypothesis is still worth taking seriously, as it casts new light on the implications of the theory of efficient breach and the economic model that stands behind it. In particular, the hypothesis helps explain why punitive damages can make sense when breaching parties attempt to evade their obligation to pay damages. Finally, the dual performance hypothesis is not the best answer to moral critics of expectation damages. Rather than reinterpreting the content of contractual promises, we should reject the premise that parties\u27 moral obligations are best understood on the model of promises. We should also reject the assumption that contract law serves morality only if it enforces parties\u27 first-order moral obligations. A contract law might serve morality instead by serving corrective justice or by supporting the social practice of entering into and keeping agreements

Clarence Schreane v. Seana

USDC for the Middle District of Pennsylvani

The Rules of the Game and the Morality of Efficient Breach

Moralists have long criticized the theory of efficient breach for its advocacy of promise breaking. But a fully developed theory of efficient breach has an internal morality of its own. It argues that sophisticated parties contract for efficient breach, which in the long run maximizes everyone’s welfare. And the theory marks some breaches—those that are opportunistic, obstructive, or otherwise inefficient—as wrongs that the law should deter, as transgressions that should not be priced but punished. That internal morality, however, does not excuse the theory from moral scrutiny. An extended comparison to Jean Renoir’s 1939 film, La Règle du Jeu (“The Rules of the Game”), illustrates what more sophisticated moral criticisms of the theory might look like. Renoir’s film depicts a society in which marital infidelity is a transgression that is tolerated, but only when done according to society’s rules. Renoir’s attitude toward that society suggests that moral critics of the efficient breach theory should focus not on its celebration of efficient breach, but on the value of the sort of moral community it imagines and on the theory’s effect on parties who are not playing the efficient breach game, whether because they do not understand its rules or because they seek a different type of obligation. The comparison to the film also highlights the theory’s own narrative elements, which both add to its persuasive power and, once identified, mark out its limits

Promise, Agreement, Contract

It is natural to wonder about contract law’s relationship to the morality of promises and agreements. This Chapter distinguishes two ways to conceive of that relationship. First, parties’ agreement-based moral obligations might figure into the explanation of contract law—into an account of its functions or justifications. Contract law might serve to enforce parties’ first-order performance obligations, to enforce second-order remedial obligations, to support the culture of making and keeping agreements more generally, or at least to do no harm to that culture or to people’s ability to act morally. Second, contract can be understood as the legal analog to promise. Both contract and promise enable people to undertake new obligations to one another when they wish. Each is a type of normative power, the one legal, the other moral. The Chapter concludes by arguing that these two ways of thinking about contract law are not mutually exclusive. Contract law both imposes on parties to exchange agreements a legal obligation to perform for reasons independent of the parties’ possible contractual intent, and confers on them the power to undertake that legal obligation when they so intend because they so intend

Determination of Samarium and Dysprosium Solubility

In recent years, the use of Rare Earth Elements (REE) has rapidly increased, resulting in numerous potential anthropogenic inputs to the environment. As a result, these metals are emerging as microcontaminants and pose a potential threat to aquatic life. However, the toxicity of REE are largely unknown due, in part, to the limited information on their chemical speciation. The purpose of this project was to gain an understanding of REE precipitate formation and solubility as the foundation for the development of the chemical equilibrium component of toxicity prediction models. Solubility experiments were conducted with Samarium, (Sm), a light REE, and Dysprosium, (Dy), a heavy REE and measured using an Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometer (ICP-OES). Water chemistries of varying pH (6, 7, 8 and 9), total metal (1 mM, 10 mM and 100 mM) and total carbonate (atmospheric CO2, 1 mM and 10 mM) were used to study the kinetics of precipitate formation over a 120-h period. Experimental results indicate that data obtained at atmospheric CO2 and low total metal concentrations was unreliable, likely due to the difficulty in measuring solubility limits near the ICP-OES detection limit. Furthermore, most of the water chemistries explored appeared to achieve steady-state conditions within 24-h for both Sm and Dy, indicating the suitability of 24-h renewal processes used in acute toxicity tests. However, measured dissolved metal concentrations did not approach the predicted equilibrium concentrations, indicating that while steady-state conditions were achieved, equilibrium was not reached. For Sm, geochemical models over predicted the amount of precipitation for most water chemistries, with the exception of at low pH where no precipitation was predicted. The opposite trend was predicted for Dy, with over predicted precipitation at pH 8 and 9. Very little precipitation was observed under atmospheric conditions, while data for 1 mM and 10 mM total carbonate concentrations agreed strongly with one another for all total Sm and Dy concentrations. This was an indication that the Sm or Dy available for complexation, and therefore precipitation, was in much lower concentration than carbonate. This was especially true at high pH values. All metal precipitated at pH 9 for most water chemistries. Under these conditions, the system was saturated with both hydroxides and carbonates, which provided a greater opportunity for precipitation. Future work is required to investigate the formation of multi-ligand precipitates with Sm and Dy, as well as the investigation of the role that DOM plays in precipitate formation

Folklore and Literacy: A View from Nova Scotia

This article describes a pilot project in museum based literacy learning that took place in Windsor, Nova Scotia in the autumn of 1999. The author coordinated the project in close consultation with a local literacy practitioner. The Windsor study was part of a national project undertaken by the Canadian Museums Association and funded by a SSHRC Strategic Research Grant Initiative. The project attracted four female participants, although one left before completing her research for personal reasons. The women chose objects as topics for study, and were given assistance with research and documentation techniques. As a discourse involving traditions of expressive behaviour and worldview, folklore plays an important role in literacy education. Specifically, this discussion examines the interactions between the participants, their chosen topics, and the museum environments, and underscores the need for an understanding of value, class, gender and contexts of use in an appreciation of literacy. A review of relevant literature is included, focusing on ethnographic studies of literacy with particular emphasis on recent work in Atlantic Canada. Outcomes of the study and future directions for this kind of community based, qualitative research are also discussed.Cet article décrit un projet-pilote en alphabétisation, basé dans un musée, qui s’est déroulé à Windsor, en Nouvelle-Écosse, durant l’automne 1999. L’auteure a coordonné ce projet en collaboration étroite avec un praticien local de l’alphabétisation. L’étude de Windsor faisait partie d’un projet national entrepris par l’Association des musées canadiens, financé par une bourse d’initiative en recherche stratégique du CRSHC. Le projet a attiré quatre participantes, bien que l’une d’elles l’ait quitté, pour des raisons personnelles, avant d’avoir fini sa recherche. Ces femmes ont choisi des objets comme sujets d’étude et ont reçu de l’aide pour les techniques de recherche et de documentation. En tant que discours impliquant des traditions d’expression comportementale et de vision du monde, le folklore joue un rôle important dans l’alphabétisation. Cet article examine de manière spécifique les interactions entre les participantes, leurs choix de sujets, l’environnement muséal, et signale le besoin d’une compréhension des notions de valeur, classe, genre et contextes d’utilisation dans l’évaluation de l’alphabétisation. L’article passe en revue la littérature sur le sujet, plus particulièrement les études ethnographiques sur l’alphabétisation, en mettant l’accent sur les travaux récents dans les régions atlantiques du Canada. Il discute également des aboutissements de cette étude et des orientations futures de ce type de recherche qualitative basée dans une communauté

Educating the Youth to Develop Life Purpose: An Eco-systemic Approach

Life purpose is an internal representation of a personally meaningful, prosocial contribution the person intends to engage with over their life span. Individuals’ purposes interact within a social-cultural eco-system by directing individuals’ perceptions toward situational resources (including others’ purposes) that can help enact their purpose. Education can encourage students to explore their purposes within and beyond the classroom. This paper describes a case study of a class offered six times using three different ecological “niches”: (1) conceptual understanding eco-niche focused on learning the concept and its relationships to other concepts; (2) resources-application eco-niche focused on reconceiving aspects of the concept as intellectual instruments to apply to real-life cases, including students themselves; (3) iterative practice eco-niche focused on implementing purposes within various contexts and interpreting feedback from those contexts. Using a feedback loop model to interpret how each eco-niche favours a different starting point and development trajectory through Damon’s (2008) four dimensions of purpose, this eco-niche comparison (a) emphasizes how “high impact” educational experiences focus not on the students’ improvements but rather on the improvements of communities as a result of students' enacting their purpose through their contributions, and (b) offers insights for teachers to infuse purpose development opportunities in their classes.     El propósito de vida es una representación interna de una contribución prosocial significativa que la persona intenta realizar a lo largo de su vida. Los propósitos de los individuos interactúan dentro de un ecosistema sociocultural al dirigir las percepciones de los individuos hacia los recursos situacionales que pueden ayudar a cumplir su propósito. La educación puede animar a los estudiantes a explorar sus propósitos dentro y fuera del aula. Este artículo describe un estudio de caso de una clase ofrecida seis veces usando tres “nichos” ecológicos diferentes: (1) comprensión conceptual enfocado en aprender el concepto y sus relaciones con otros conceptos; (2) aplicación de herramientas enfocadas en reconcebir aspectos del concepto para aplicar a casos reales, incluyendo a los propios estudiantes; (3) práctica iterativa enfocada en implementar propósitos dentro de varios contextos e interpretar la retroalimentación de esos contextos. Usando un modelo de bucle de retroalimentación para interpretar cómo cada nicho ecológico privilegia un punto de partida diferente y una trayectoria de desarrollo a través de las cuatro dimensiones de propósito de Damon (2008), esta comparación de nicho ecológico (a) enfatiza cómo las experiencias educativas de "alto impacto" no se enfocan en las mejoras en los estudiantes, sino más bien en las mejoras a las comunidades a través de las contribuciones de los estudiantes, y (b) ofrece ideas para que los maestros infundan oportunidades de desarrollo de propósito en sus clases.