Partial Loss of Territory Due to Anthropogenic Climate Change: A Theory of Compensating for Losses in Political Self‐determination

The unique problem of lost territory poses one of the most important and complex challenges of compensating for loss and damage due to anthropogenic climate change. Anthropogenic climate change will cause a significant increase in the sea level for centuries to come. A rising sea level endangers many low‐lying coastal areas but also entire states. However, the inundation of an entire state will remain a rare event. Partial loss of territory will be far more pervasive. As measured by the number of states, the area of land, and, in particular, the number of people affected, the phenomenon of partial territorial loss is much more significant. I address this from the perspective of compensatory justice. In particular, I offer (i) background on basic concepts, (ii) an overview and critique of existing accounts, and propose (iii) a novel interpretation of territory as well as (iv) a corresponding criterion of a duty to compensate before (v) I flesh out the overall theory, (vi) take into consideration implications and details of application, and (vii) respond to potential objections.     

PUTTING FEMINIST PEDAGOGY TO THE TEST

Critics of women's studies (WS) have charged that WS teaching overemphasizes students'personal experience and is overly politicized. They claim further that WS classes discourage critical, independent thinking and stifle open, participatory learning, causing student dissatisfaction. This study provides empirical evidence of the process of WS teaching from the perspective of 111 teachers and 789 of their students from 32 campuses in the United States. Contrary to WS critics, WS faculty and students reported strong emphases on critical thinking/open-mindedness and participatory learning and relatively weaker emphases on personal experience and political understanding/activism. In addition, student ratings of positive class impact were higher for WS than non-WS classes. The results support the pedagogic distinctiveness of women's studies.     

The influence of response-effect compatibility in a serial reaction time task

Participants performed a serial reaction time task, responding to either asterisks presented at varying screen locations or centrally presented letters. Stimulus presentation followed a fixed second-order conditional sequence. Each keypress in the experimental groups produced a contingent, key-specific tone effect. The critical variation concerned the mapping of tones to keys. In Experiment 1, keypresses in one control condition produced noncontingent tone effects, while in another control condition there were no tone effects. In Experiment 2, three different key-tone mappings were compared to a control condition without tone effects. The results show that tone effects improve serial learning when they are mapped to the response keys contingently and in a highly compatible manner. The results are discussed with reference to an ideomotor mechanism of motor sequence acquisition.