431 research outputs found
Saints, heroes, sages, and villains
This essay explores the question of how to be good. My starting point is
a thesis about moral worth that Iâve defended in the past: roughly, that an action is
morally worthy if and only it is performed for the reasons why it is right. While I
think that account gets at one important sense of moral goodness, I argue here that it
fails to capture several ways of being worthy of admiration on moral grounds. Moral
goodness is more multi-faceted. My title is intended to capture that multi-facetedness:
the essay examines saintliness, heroism, and sagacity. The variety of our
common-sense moral ideals underscores the inadequacy of any one account of
moral admirableness, and I hope to illuminate the distinct roles these ideals play in
our everyday understanding of goodness. Along the way, I give an account of what
makes actions heroic, of whether such actions are supererogatory, and of what, if
anything, is wrong with moral deference. At the close of the essay, I begin to
explore the flipside of these ideals: villainy
Diagnosing students' difficulties in learning mathematics
This study considers the results of a diagnostic test of student difficulty and contrasts the difference in performance between the lower attaining quartile and the higher quartile. It illustrates a difference in qualitative thinking between those who succeed and those who fail in mathematics, illustrating a theory that those who fail are performing a more difficult type of mathematics (coordinating procedures) than those who succeed (manipulating concepts). Students who have to coordinate or reverse processes in time will encounter far greater difficulty than those who can manipulate symbols in a flexible way. The consequences of such a dichotomy and implications for remediation are then considered
Origin of molecular oxygen in Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Molecular oxygen has been detected in the coma of comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko with abundances in the 1-10% range by the ROSINA-DFMS
instrument on board the Rosetta spacecraft. Here we find that the radiolysis of
icy grains in low-density environments such as the presolar cloud may induce
the production of large amounts of molecular oxygen. We also show that
molecular oxygen can be efficiently trapped in clathrates formed in the
protosolar nebula, and that its incorporation as crystalline ice is highly
implausible because this would imply much larger abundances of Ar and N2 than
those observed in the coma. Assuming that radiolysis has been the only O2
production mechanism at work, we conclude that the formation of comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is possible in a dense and early protosolar nebula in
the framework of two extreme scenarios: (1) agglomeration from pristine
amorphous icy grains/particles formed in ISM and (2) agglomeration from
clathrates that formed during the disk's cooling. The former scenario is found
consistent with the strong correlation between O2 and H2O observed in 67P/C-G's
coma while the latter scenario requires that clathrates formed from ISM icy
grains that crystallized when entering the protosolar nebula.Comment: The Astrophysical Journal Letters, in pres
Egalitarian justice and expected value
According to all-luck egalitarianism, the differential distributive effects of both brute luck, which defines the outcome of risks which are not deliberately taken, and option luck, which defines the outcome of deliberate gambles, are unjust. Exactly how to correct the effects of option luck is, however, a complex issue. This article argues that (a) option luck should be neutralized not just by correcting luck among gamblers, but among the community as a whole, because it would be unfair for gamblers as a group to be disadvantaged relative to non-gamblers by bad option luck; (b) individuals should receive the warranted expected results of their gambles, except insofar as individuals blamelessly lacked the ability to ascertain which expectations were warranted; and (c) where societal resources are insufficient to deliver expected results to gamblers, gamblers should receive a lesser distributive share which is in proportion to the expected results. Where all-luck egalitarianism is understood in this way, it allows risk-takers to impose externalities on non-risk-takers, which seems counterintuitive. This may, however, be an advantage as it provides a luck egalitarian rationale for assisting ânegligent victimsâ
Experimental evidence of physician social preferences
Physicians' professional ethics require that they put patients' interests ahead of their own and that they should allocate limited medical resources efficiently. Understanding physicians' extent of adherence to these principles requires understanding the social preferences that lie behind them. These social preferences may be divided into two qualitatively different trade-offs: the trade-off between self and other (altruism) and the trade-off between reducing differences in payoffs (equality) and increasing total payoffs (efficiency). We experimentally measure social preferences among a nationwide sample of practicing physicians in the United States. Our design allows us to distinguish empirically between altruism and equality-efficiency orientation and to accurately measure both trade-offs at the level of the individual subject. We further compare the experimentally measured social preferences of physicians with those of a representative sample of Americans, an "elite" subsample of Americans, and a nationwide sample of medical students. We find that physicians' altruism stands out. Although most physicians place a greater weight on self than on other, the share of physicians who place a greater weight on other than on self is twice as large as for all other samples-32% as compared with 15 to 17%. Subjects in the general population are the closest to physicians in terms of altruism. The higher altruism among physicians compared with the other samples cannot be explained by income or age differences. By contrast, physicians' preferences regarding equality-efficiency orientation are not meaningfully different from those of the general sample and elite subsample and are less efficiency oriented than medical students.K01 AG066946 - NIA NIH HHSPublished versio
UNBRIDGEABLE GAP BETWEEN TRANSPORT POLICY AND PRACTICE IN HUNGARY / VENGRIJOS TRANSPORTO TOLITIKOS IR PRAKTIKOS TOTRĆȘKIS
An approach to holistically assess (dairy) farm eco-efficiency by combining Life Cycle Analysis with Data Envelopment Analysis models and methodologies
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