The effect of gender, ethnicity, and income on college students' use of communication technologies

Because campus officials are relying on personal communication technologies to communicate with students, a question arises about access and usage. Although communication technologies are popular among college students, some evidence suggests that differences exist in ownership and use. We examined patterns of student ownership and use of cell phones and use of instant messaging, focusing on three predictors of digital inequality: gender, ethnicity, and income. Logistic and hierarchical linear regression analyses were used to analyze results from 4,491 students. The odds that female and white students owned cell phones were more than twice as high as for men and African-American students. Students in the $100,000-$149,000 per year income bracket were more than three times as likely to own a cell phone than those from the median bracket. However, being female, African-American, and/or from the highest income brackets was positively predictive of the number of text messages sent and the amount of time spent talking on a cell phone per week. We found no differences between students on the use of instant messaging. Implications of these results, as well as areas for further research, are provided.     

Fundamentalism and the masculine body: The case of Jewish Ultra-Orthodox men in Israel

The predominant model in the literature on fundamentalism focuses on the tense relationship between contemporary radical religious movements and their environment. The characteristic violence that has made fundamentalism notorious is conventionally explained in terms of defensive or offensive reactions to the challenge of the modern secular society. In light of recent developments in the fundamentalist world, we propose to employ a novel analytic framework to update and revise the current conceptualization. Our argumentation is based on extensive fieldwork in a particular case of Jewish fundamentalism. We introduce into the agenda of fundamentalism research a category conspicuously absent thus far: the body. Results of ethnographic study of Ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel throw light on the very existence of fundamentalist body, and emphasize its implications for better understanding the fundamentalist predicament. The body poses a major problem to fundamentalists and plays a key role in their typical behavior and particularly in their violence. Discussing fundamentalism in terms of the body allows us to see its militancy as a solution to intra-fundamentalist problems that emerge in advanced stages of the movements' life, on the one hand, and paradoxically as a means towards reconciliation with the movements' environment normally regarded as its enemy, on the other hand. In the case presented here the fundamentalist violence is manifested in various hitherto unexplored ways including an enthusiastic service in the military of the nation-state. Such peculiar violence indicates present-day fundamentalist experimentation in an attempt to establish new possibilities of coming to terms with ever changing social and political reality, while at the same time to pursue revolutionary options of radical religious experience.     

Noncognitivism and agent-centered norms

Philosophical Studies - This paper takes up a neglected problem for metaethical noncognitivism: the characterization of the acceptance states for agent-centered normative theories like Rational...     

MIGHT KANTIAN CONTRACTUALISM BE THE SUPREME PRINCIPLE OF MORALITY?

According to Parfit, the best version of Kantian ethics takes as its central principle Kantian Contractualism: the thesis that everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will. This paper examines that thesis, identifies a class of annoying counterexamples, and suggests that when Kantian Contractualism is modified in response to these examples, the resulting principle is too complex and ad hoc to serve as the 'supreme principle of morality'.     

Personality factors and cervical premalignancy

The purpose of the study was to attempt a discrimination between stages of cervical premalignancy in terms of the four Eysenckian dimensions. It consisted of a quasi-prospective design applied to the presumed continuum of cervical premalignancy. The Ss were 88 women addressed by a physician or self-addressed for Pap smear examinations. Prior to the Pap smear they completed a demographic questionnaire and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire providing scores of extraversion (E), neuroticism (N), psychoticism (P) and lie (L). By the Pap smear results there were four groups of women: healthy, suffering from vaginal or cervical inflammations, suffering from human papillomaviruses (HPV), and suffering from dysplasias or cervical intraepithelial neoplasms (CIN). ANOVA and discriminant analyses showed that the Eysenckian dimensions discriminated correctly with above chance significance between the groups, mainly between the healthy and inflammatory, on the one hand, and the HPV and CIN, on the other hand (on the basis of N and E scores), and less well between the healthy and inflammatory (on the basis of L scores), and least between the HPV and CIN (on the basis of P scores). As expected, in the healthy and inflammatory groups as compared with the HPV and CIN groups, N and P scores were higher whereas E and L scores were lower. The results indicate the correspondence between physiological and psychological characteristics and suggest especially the alternating relation between neuroticism and physical pathology.     

Maintaining recency despite a stimulus suffix

Two processes of information retrieval were considered in the context of the logogen model. The aim was to establish whether information about the final items of an auditory short-term memory list is held exclusively in precategorical acoustic storage at presentation or whether these items are automatically registered in a cognitive store as well. Error data for a final heterogeneous item in alphanumeric lists showed significantly better recall, despite the addition of a stimulus suffix. Although these results demonstrated that coding had proceeded further than a precategorical stage, which maintains only physical features, the possibility remained that the effect was due to a bias in focal attention and selective coding at list presentation. A second experiment increased the difficulty of the retrieval task, and effectively precluded the possibility of a bias in attention. The results confirmed the findings in the first experiment. It was concluded that information about the final item(s) is registered automatically in the cognitive system, and that responses are made available from this source when information about physical features of the item is degraded by a stimulus suffix.     

Evidence for a time constant in rate of speech under delayed auditory feedback

This experiment investigates an apparent discrepancy in experimental measurements of the effect of texture predictability upon reading disruption under delayed auditory feedback (DAF). By measuring relative DAF decrement in three different ways, it is shown that the previous findings can be related; Fillenbaum's hypothesis of increased disruption by DAF with an increase in predictability of the material is rejected, less disruption being obtained after practice on a particular passage. Almost identical ratios of DAF rate divided by normal rate are found irrespective of the type of reading material and stage in practice. This has not been reported previously and suggests that behaviour under DAF may be related to behaviour under normal conditions by a multiplicative constant. These results are also consistent with the notion of limited channel capacity and the partitioning of attention between two sources of information.     

Electrophysiological correlates of encoding processes in a full-report visual working memory paradigm

Why are some visual stimuli remembered, whereas others are forgotten? A limitation of recognition paradigms is that they measure aggregate behavioral performance and/or neural responses to all stimuli presented in a visual working memory (VWM) array. To address this limitation, we paired an electroencephalography (EEG) frequency-tagging technique with two full-report VWM paradigms. This permitted the tracking of individual stimuli as well as the aggregate response. We recorded high-density EEG (256 channel) while participants viewed four shape stimuli, each flickering at a different frequency. At retrieval, participants either recalled the location of all stimuli in any order (simultaneous full report) or were cued to report the item in a particular location over multiple screen displays (sequential full report). The individual frequency tag amplitudes evoked for correctly recalled items were significantly larger than the amplitudes of subsequently forgotten stimuli, regardless of retrieval task. An induced-power analysis examined the aggregate neural correlates of VWM encoding as a function of items correctly recalled. We found increased induced power across a large number of electrodes in the theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands when more items were successfully recalled. This effect was more robust for sequential full report, suggesting that retrieval demands can influence encoding processes. These data are consistent with a model in which encoding-related resources are directed to a subset of items, rather than a model in which resources are allocated evenly across the array. These data extend previous work using recognition paradigms and stress the importance of encoding in determining later VWM retrieval success.