Who wants to live forever? Immortality,authenticity, and living forever in the present

Death is a bad thing by virtue of its ability to frustrate the subjectively valuable projects that shape our identities and render our lives meaningful. While the presumption that immortality would necessarily result in boredom worse than death proves unwarranted, if the constraint of mortality is a necessary element for virtues, relationships, and motivation to pursue our life-projects, then death might nevertheless be a necessary evil. Mortal or immortal, it’s clear that the value of one’s life depends on its subjectively determined quality, rather than its quantity. Thus, it is imperative to live forever in the present, with flourishing always in mind.     

Two faces of Thanatos: Broken flowers (2005) and Ai no corrida (1976)1

Since Freud formulated the death instinct concept, it has received widely diverse interpretations. Even Freud advanced two versions. The concomitant analyses of two films, Ai no corrida (1976) [ In the realm of the senses (1977)] and Broken flowers (2005) evince Thanatos's two faces: the cold death of decathexis of an object, in the case of Don (in Broken flowers) and the hot death of the subject‐object fusion in Sada's case ( Ai no corrida). In our analysis, we elaborate two possible vicissitudes of the death instinct: in Broken flowers, the main character finds an ‘analyst’ and is cured. In Ai no corrida, the protagonist meets a complementary object and goes mad.     

A framework for rationing by clinical judgment

Although rationing by clinical judgment is controversial, its acceptability partly depends on how it is practiced. In this paper, rationing by clinical judgment is defined in three different circumstances that represent increasingly wider circles of resource pools in which the rationing decision takes place: triage during acute shortage, comparison to other potential patients in a context of limited but not immediately strained resources, and determination of whether expected benefit of an intervention is deemed sufficient to warrant its cost by reference to published population based thresholds. Notions of procedural justice are applied along with an analytical framework of six minimal requisites in order to facilitate fair bedside rationing: (1) a closed system that offers reciprocity, (2) attention to general concerns of justice, (3) respect for individual variations, (4) application of a consistent process, (5) explicitness, and (6) review of decisions. The process could be monitored for its applicability and appropriateness.     

老年人记忆补偿的长期稳定性和变异性：来自维多利亚纵向研究的证据

两种记忆状况组来自于参与加拿大维多利亚纵向研究(VLS)的老年人原样本。一种是未受损伤的控制组(NIC), 另一种是轻度记忆损伤组(MMD)。在基线水平和纵向水平上(即5次追踪或12年)比较了他们在日常生活中对记忆补偿技术的使用。我们使用多水平模型(以年龄和教育水平为协变量)来检验基线水平的差异和长期的变化模式。基线的结果表明MMD组被试报告了近期在日常生活中使用记忆补偿策略方面有更大的增长。纵向的结果表明记忆补偿的使用在12年中具有明显的稳定性, 但是与努力相关的补偿机制存在显著组间差异。教育水平这一协变量(可认为是潜在的认知储备指标)和三种记忆补偿策略随时间的不同变化相关。     

Strategies and problem representations: Implications for models of changing cognitive structure. Commentary on “Learning new problem-solving strategies leads to changes in problem representation” by M.W. Alibali,K.M. Ockuly and A.D. Fischer

In an accompanying study, Alibali et al. [Alibali, M. W., Ockuly, K. M., Fischer, A. D. (2009) Learning new problem-solving strategies leads to changes in problem representation. Cognitive Development, 24, 89–101.] present an important experimental result: introducing a new strategy can affect conceptual aspects of children's problem representation. In this commentary, we briefly explore implications of this finding for theories of the development of mathematical cognition and of the development of cognitive structures, more generally. We argue that Alibali et al.’s results, taken in the context of previous findings, imply that children's actions during mathematical problem solving affect their subsequent understanding of the problem. We further suggest that results such as these may be best accommodated by reconceptualizing how cognitive structures achieve both stability and flexibility.     

USING MICROSOFT OFFICE EXCEL® 2007 TO CONDUCT GENERALIZED MATCHING ANALYSES

The generalized matching equation is a robust and empirically supported means of analyzing relations between reinforcement and behavior. Unfortunately, no simple task analysis is available to behavior analysts interested in using the matching equation to evaluate data in clinical or applied settings. This technical article presents a task analysis for the use of Microsoft Excel to analyze and plot the generalized matching equation. Using a data‐based case example and a step‐by‐step guide for completing the analysis, these instructions are intended to promote the use of quantitative analyses by researchers with little to no experience in quantitative analyses or the matching law.     

CONSTRUCTING AND DERIVING RECIPROCAL TRIGONOMETRIC RELATIONS: A FUNCTIONAL ANALYTIC APPROACH

Participants were pretrained and tested on mutually entailed trigonometric relations and combinatorially entailed relations as they pertained to positive and negative forms of sine, cosine, secant, and cosecant. Experiment 1 focused on training and testing transformations of these mathematical functions in terms of amplitude and frequency followed by tests of novel relations. Experiment 2 addressed training in accordance with frames of coordination (same as) and frames of opposition (reciprocal of) followed by more tests of novel relations. All assessments of derived and novel formula‐to‐graph relations, including reciprocal functions with diversified amplitude and frequency transformations, indicated that all 4 participants demonstrated substantial improvement in their ability to identify increasingly complex trigonometric formula‐to‐graph relations pertaining to same as and reciprocal of to establish mathematically complex repertoires.     

A chronometric analysis of strategy preparation in choice reactions

In this research, we investigated the process of preparing strategies for performing choice-reaction tasks. Before each choice-reaction trial, subjects were shown a cue that indicated features of the stimulus-response mapping to be used on the upcoming trial. Subjects used this cue to specify their strategy for responding to the stimulus. The time needed for specifying the strategy was measured by allowing subjects to control the cue presentation and surreptitiously recording how long they spent looking at the cue. The experiments demonstrated that the time to prepare a strategy was a function of the number and nature of the strategy features that had to be specified; simple uncertainty about the possible strategies had little direct effect. The results discon-firmed a serial model in which the time to prepare a strategy is the sum of the times to specify the individual strategy features. A mixed serial-parallel model was proposed as an alternative.