The boston bio-bang: The emergence of a “Regional system of innovation”

In this article we will describe the emergence of a great number of small, regionally concentrated, innovative biotech companies. We see these organizations as “hosts” of concepts and ideas, greatly influencing their spreading over the sector. We have chosen an evolutionary perspective following individual companies in their struggle for survival, describing it as “obtaining food” and “fooling predators.” This struggle gives insight in the behavior of the biotech companies and related institutions as a “system of innovation.” One of our findings is that the variety of biotech companies is conditioned by their selection environment, but that this selection environment allows great variety and even encourage variety by keeping the companies small. Haiko Van der Voort is a research associate who lectures and publishes in a wide range of issues including precess management and system innovations. Martin De Jong is associate professor of public management.     

The Philosophy of "Naturalness" in the Laozi and Its Value For Contemporary Society

This article aims to show that the concept of "naturalness" in the Laozi is able to provide cultural guidance concerning values for contemporary social development.Specifically,the Laozi's concept of "naturalness"—manifested in the text's exhortation to "honor the dao and exalt the de" and its statement that "the dao models itself on naturalness"—has profound ontological,political and social implications concerning "naturalness" that are strongly expressed through a variety of propositions including "achieving all through non-action" and "downsizing the state and simplifying the people." With respect to the question about individuals living a life of appropriateness and establishing their destiny,the Laozi emphasizes such cultivation methods as "sticking to simplicity and authenticity" and "watching in quietude and observing in depth,"which are also infused with the conception of "naturalness," which stresses the notion that understanding the harmony between man and nature can provide useful lessons for the development of contemporary human society.     

Basic emotions, relations among emotions, and emotion-cognition relations.

From the cognitive theory perspective that emotions are cognition dependent and contain cognitive components, Ortony and Turner (1990) questioned the validity of the concept of basic emotions. They argued that the so-called basic emotions were neither psychologically or biologically "primitive" nor "irreducible building blocks" for generating the "great variety of emotional experiences." In the biosocial theory tradition, researchers have identified multiple noncognitive activators of emotion and demonstrated the usefulness of defining the essential components of emotion as phenomena that do not require cognitive mediators or constituents. In this framework, emotions are seen as basic because their biological and social functions are essential in evolution and adaptation. Particular emotions are called basic because they are assumed to have innate neural substrates, innate and universal expressions, and unique feeling-motivational states. The great variety of emotional experiences is explained as a function of emotion-cognition interactions that result in affective-cognitive structures.     

Prostitution wishes and rescue fantasies--flight from the father. Sketches from the life of a woman ("Anna O."--"P. Berthold"--Bertha Pappenheim)

Bertha Pappenheim, Breuer's famous patient "Anna O.," was a socially engaged, successful, Jewish women's rights advocate. The details of her biography presented here are not as well known--especially the subsequent course of her illness and treatment and her struggle against prostitution and the white slave trade, the latter carried on with special fascination. All of these show that "Anna O." left Breuer's treatment far from cured and that Bertha was entangled in a lifelong daughter-father conflict.     

Selective preservation of naming from description and the "restricted preverbal message"

We report the case of a patient, LEW, who presents with modality-specific naming deficits. He is seriously impaired in naming pictures of both objects and actions. His naming to auditory verbal definitions and of actions carried out by the experimenter is, however, relatively well preserved. He has no visual perceptual deficits and his access to the semantics of pictures is as good as that to the semantics of spoken words. While LEW is not an optic aphasic patient, his pattern of performance is relevant to the debate that has taken place of the organization of the semantic system. We discuss his case from this perspective and argue that LEW's selective deficits support the multiple semantics position. We also argue that the "preverbal message" level in the speech production model of Levelt (1989) is the equivalent of "verbal semantics." We provide additional constraints and principles to the concept of the preverbal message and we term the system so constrained the "restricted preverbal message." Copyright 2000 Academic Press.     

Virtual morality: emotion and action in a simulated three-dimensional "trolley problem"

Experimentally investigating the relationship between moral judgment and action is difficult when the action of interest entails harming others. We adopt a new approach to this problem by placing subjects in an immersive, virtual reality environment that simulates the classic "trolley problem." In this moral dilemma, the majority of research participants behaved as "moral utilitarians," either (a) acting to cause the death of one individual in order to save the lives of five others, or (b) abstaining from action, when that action would have caused five deaths versus one. Confirming the emotional distinction between moral actions and omissions, autonomic arousal was greater when the utilitarian outcome required action, and increased arousal was associated with a decreased likelihood of utilitarian-biased behavior. This pattern of results held across individuals of different gender, age, and race.     

LO! THE STIMULUS SPEAKS: THE INSIDER'S VIEW ON WHYTE AND LATHAM'S "THE FUTILITY OF UTILITY ANALYSIS"

The Whyte and Latham (1996) study presents results showing that presentation of a positive utility analysis reduced support for implementing a valid selection procedure, even though the merits of utility analysis were described by an "expert." In this paper, the aforementioned expert responds to the Whyte and Latham study and its conclusions. He contends that their experimental study actually tested a persuasional hypothesis, not the informational one put forward by the authors. In otherwords, the effect of the presentation of utility information as the independent variable, and its advocacy by the expert, was perceived by subjects as an attempt to persuade managers to invest in a personnel intervention rather than as a neutral message intended to inform them of the merits of the intervention. Consequently, Whyte and Latham's conclusions about the "futility of utility analysis" will most likely generalize to a situation where personnel psychologists are trying to sell an intervention such as a selection program to a client, but not necessarily to a situation where the psychologist is perceived to use utility analysis in an arms length relationship to assist in making investment decisions. The Whyte and Latham findings represent a real and substantial effect that has important implications for psychologists using utility analysis, but more research is required to establish the boundary conditions around it.     

Secular humanism and "scientific psychiatry"

The Council for Secular Humanism identifies Secular Humanism as a "way of thinking and living" committed to rejecting authoritarian beliefs and embracing "individual freedom and responsibility ... and cooperation." The paradigmatic practices of psychiatry are civil commitment and insanity defense, that is, depriving innocent persons of liberty and excusing guilty persons of their crimes: the consequences of both are confinement in institutions ostensibly devoted to the treatment of mental diseases. Black's Law Dictionary states: "Every confinement of the person is an 'imprisonment,' whether it be in a common prison, or in private house, or in the stocks, or even by forcibly detaining one in the public streets." Accordingly, I maintain that Secular Humanism is incompatible with the principles and practices of psychiatry.     

The "process" of running away: a redefinition

Unlike much of the research on runaway behavior in the last half decade, the present effort does not use legal definitions or individual motives to define a runaway. Rather, it views the designation as a "social process." The concept of "career" is central to this effort in that it allows for an identification of where in the overall process young persons see themselves. In general, becoming a runaway is conceived as a process of action and reaction, which unfolds over time. Becoming a runaway is the end product of a person's actions, reason, and symbols.     

Effecting science, affecting medicine: homosexuality, the Kinsey reports, and the contested boundaries of psychopathology in the United States, 1948-1965

Despite the well-documented intensive battle between Alfred Kinsey and American psychiatrists around the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that Kinsey's work, in fact, played a significant role in transforming mental health experts' view of homosexuality starting as far back as the late 1940s and extending all the way through the mid-1960s. After analyzing the way in which Kinsey's work pushed American psychiatrists to re-evaluate their understanding of homosexuality indirectly through the effort of clinical psychologists, I then focus to a greater extent on examples that illustrate how the Kinsey reports directly influenced members of the psychiatric community. In the conclusion, using a Foucauldian conception of "discourse," I propose that in order to approach the struggle around the pathological status of homosexuality in the 1950s and the 1960s, thinking in terms of a "politics of knowledge" is more promising than simply in terms of a "politics of diagnosis." Central to the struggle was not merely the matter of medical diagnosis, but larger issues regarding the production of knowledge at an intersection of science and medicine where the parameters of psychopathology were disputed in the context of mid-twentieth-century United States.     

Exploring the mental space of autonomous intentional agents

The ability to infer the intentions of other agents on the basis of their motion is a critical psychological faculty. In the present study, we examine a key question underlying this process, namely: What are the psychologically natural categories of intentional agents and actions? To investigate this question empirically, we use displays containing a number of autonomous, independently programmed agents moving about a two-dimensional environment and interacting with one another. Each agent behaves according to its own simple program, controlled by a small number of parameters that define its "personality." We probe participants' impressions of the similarities among the behaviors of the various agents, and then use multidimensional scaling in an attempt to recover the subjective mental space of agent types. An important variable underlying this space turns out to be a parameter that determines how the agent reacts to a nearby agent at one critical distance. A follow-up experiment suggests that variation along this parameter ultimately contributes to modulating a more fundamental perceptual dimension that reflects how "hostile" or "friendly" the agents appear to be.     

ON LOSS AND MELANCHOLY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

One of the dominant motifs by social scientists dealing with issues of loss assumes an upsetting of balance or equilibrium as central to the experience - an upsetting that is in need of "restoration." This article challenges that motif both theoretically and experientially, drawing on autobiographical narrative to navigate the complex terrain of irrevocable loss. Our story tells of the lives of our two children, Aristéa and Kade, and of Kade's death in the depths of a Romanian orphanage. We offer the concept of "melancholy" to suggest that the incongruity or pain that we feel, as a result of Kade's death and our simultaneous struggle to "save" Aristéa, can never be alleviated.     

ARE THE 100 BEST BETTER? AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BEING A “GREAT PLACE TO WORK” AND FIRM PERFORMANCE

We argue that positive employee relations effectively serves as an intangible and enduring asset, and may, therefore, be a source of sustained competitive advantage at the firm level. We survey a number of measures of firm-level performance and conceptualize how each measure is likely to be affected by highly positive firm-level employee relations. We then empirically investigate whether positive employee relations is related to firm performance, focusing on publicly traded firms included in the "100 Best Companies to Work for in America." The relative performance of these "Best Companies" is examined via comparisons to both companies in the broad market and a group of matched firms. Our analyses suggest that companies on the 100 Best list enjoy not only stable and highly positive workforce attitudes, but also performance advantages over the broad market, and in some cases, over the matched group.     

National Identity,Instrumental Identifications,and the Caribbean's Culture of "Play"

The ability of West Indians to have multiple identifications, "to play the field" yet sustain a strong personal, participatory national identity shows that in their own way they have achieved freedom of the human condition. And, not trivially, this freedom is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it reverts to their personal benefits and through that to real benefits to their islands. Evidence of such benefits are the steady flow of remittances and the money-spending tourism to the "home" country. On the negative side is the continued insularity and parochialism that prevents broader alliances of an enduring political type. Although good at coalescing for specific tactical and strategic ends, each island remains a "nation." The hope for a "West Indian nation" is as remote as it ever was.     

Remembering "what" brings along "where" in visual working memory

Does a behavioral and anatomical division exist between spatial and object working memory? In this article, we explore this question by testing human participants in simple visual working memory tasks. We compared a condition in which there was no location change with conditions in which absolute location change and absolute plus relative location change were manipulated. The results showed that object memory was influenced by memory for relative but not for absolute location information. Furthermore, we demonstrated that relative space can be specified by a salient surrounding box or by distractor objects with no touching surfaces. Verbal memory was not influenced by any type of spatial information. Taken together, these results indicate that memory for "where" influences memory for "what." We propose that there is an asymmetry in memory according to which object memory always contains location information.     

Freud's ego ideals: a study of admired modern historical and political personages

It is appropriate to conclude this study with a statement that characterizes Freud and his search for particular models, and this is: "A genius chooses his family from among heroes." His historical heroes were Cromwell, Napoleon, Masséna, Garibaldi, Bismarck, Adler, Lasalle, Lasker, and Wilson. Of course, toward many of these figures, Freud was also ambivalent. Yet these leaders have certain common denominators. In various degrees, they may be characterized as progressive, secular, and anti-Catholic. Moreover, they all had spectacular careers, stood up against great odds, and in many instances had serious conflicts with their fathers or men in authority. These leaders had a special significance for Freud, and their selection is representative not only of his own personal dynamics, but also of his historical milieu. His ego ideals demonstrate that Freud was ambitious and had partisan political feelings and concerns. In some cases the choice of the ego ideals stemmed from his ambivalent feelings toward his father and his particular resolution of the oedipal situation. Also very significant is the fact of Freud's Jewish heritage and the anti-Semitism he experienced as a citizen of the Hapsburg Empire. Moreover, Freud was always sensitive about the power and the influence of the Catholic church. Still another reason for his selection of widely scattered figures with whom to identify is the broadening influence of his classical education. In addition, being gifted linguistically, he was able to transcend a parochial environment. In general then, Freud's ego ideals reveal that he was informed politically and historically and that he regarded these men as promoting policies that were liberating.     

"The" interpretation(s) of conditionals

Recent studies indicate that a vast majority of people judge the probability of a conditional as equivalent to the conditional probability of . This means that in evaluating the applicability of a conditional people do not seem to take into account situations in which the antecedent is false. This has been taken as evidence against the model theory of Johnson-Laird and Byrne (2002). This theory, however, claims that the conditional interpretation in which false-antecedent cases are relevant is only one of many possible interpretations of "if." We present new evidence that confirms this flexibility of the interpretive system. When people are primed by thinking (1) about truth and the difference between the and or (2) are invited to judge which situations are consistent with the conditional, they are more likely to select a probability estimate that takes into account the false-antecedent cases.     

The inconstant "principle of constancy"

A review of the principle of constancy, as it appeared in Freud's writings, shows that it was inspired by his clinical observations, first with Breuer in the field of cathartic therapy and then through experiences in the early usage of psychoanalysis. The recognition that memories repressed in the unconscious created increasing tension, and that this was relieved with dischargelike phenomena when the unconscious was made conscious, was the basis for his claim to originality in this area. The two principles of "neuronic inertia" Freud expounded in the Project (1895), are found to offer the key to the ambiguous definition of the principle of constancy he was to offer in later years. The "original" principle, which sought the complete discharge of energy (or elimination of stimuli), became the forerunner of the death drive; the "extended" principle achieved balances that were relatively constant, but succumbed in the end to complete discharge. This was the predecessor of the life drives. The relation between the constancy and pleasure-unpleasure principles was maintained for twenty-five years largely on an empirical basis which invoked the concept of psychophysical parallelism between "quantity" and "quality." As the links between the two principles were weakened by clinical experiences attendant upon the growth of ego psychology, a revision of the principle of constancy was suggested, and it was renamed the Nirvana principle. Actually it was shifted from alignment with the "extended" principle of inertia to the original, so that "constancy" was incongruously identified with self-extinction. The former basis for the constancy principle, the extended principle of inertia, became identified with Eros. Only a few commentators seem aware of this radical transformation, which has been overlooked in the Standard Edition of Freud's writings. Physiological biases in the history and conception of the principle of constancy are noted in the Standard Edition. The historical antecedents of the principle of constancy, especially in relation to the teachings and influence of J. F. Herbart (1776-1841), do much to bridge the gap between psychological and neurophysiological aspects of Freud's ideas about constancy and its associated doctrine, psychic determinism. Freud's later teachings about the Nirvana principle and Eros suggest a continuum of "constancies" embodied in the structural and functional development of the mental apparatus as it evolves from primal unity with the environment (e.g., the mother-child unit) and differentiates in patterns that organize the inner and outer worlds in relation to each other.     

Stem cell research: a target article collection: Part II--what's in a name: embryos,clones, and stem cells

In 2001, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the "Human Cloning Prohibition Act" and President Bush announced his decision to allow only limited research on existing stem cell lines but not on "embryos." In contrast, the U.K. has explicitly authorized "therapeutic cloning." Much more will be said about bioethical, legal, and social implications, but subtleties of the science and careful definitions of terms have received much less consideration. Legislators and reporters struggle to discuss "cloning," "pluripotency," "stem cells," and "embryos," and whether "adult" are preferable to "embryonic" stem cells as research subjects. They profess to abhor "copying humans" or "killing embryos." Do they know what they are talking about? Do we? This paper explores the historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts that inform this heated discussion.     

Verbal and Numerical Expressions of Probability: "It's a Fifty-Fifty Chance"

When estimating risks, people may use "50" as an expression of the verbal phrase "fifty-fifty chance," without intending the associated number of 50%. The result is an excess of 50s in the response distribution. The present study examined factors determining the magnitude of such a "50 blip," using a large sample of adolescents and adults. We found that phrasing probability questions in a distributional format (asking about risks as a percentage in a population) rather than in a singular format (asking about risks to an individual) reduced the use of "50." Less numerate respondents, children, and less educated adults were more likely to say "50." Finally, events that evoked feelings of less perceived control led to more 50s. The results are discussed in terms of what they reveal about how people express epistemic uncertainty. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.