Slim Futures and the Fat Pill: Civic Imaginations of Innovation and Governance in an Engagement Setting

Innovation politics is seen as an ever more central area of public policy, and as a key means for shaping societal futures. Particularly in Europe, with its history of controversial public debates about innovations, the idea that scientific progress is automatically equated with societal progress seems hard to sustain. Broader public participation within techno-scientific governance seems necessary; though who is to participate in which form often remains unclear. Increasingly, when the innovation process is discussed in both policy and academia, the question of when public engagement should take place in the innovation process is addressed using common models such as ‘upstream engagement’. However, these discussions about public engagement often assume a top-down approach, and pay little attention to citizens' perspectives. To address this gap in the literature, this article will ask the following questions: what tacit understandings of techno-scientific innovation and governance do citizens have; and how do they relate their understandings of the form, structure and dynamics of these innovation processes to their visions of governance and participation? How do specific cultural forms of conceptualising innovation open up or close down particular possibilities of governance and public participation, hence privileging the involvement of certain actors and not others? To address these questions, we analyse the discussions in a long-term public engagement setting involving both genome scientists and citizens in Austria.     

Exploration of Predictors of Teaching Effectiveness: The Professor’s Perspective

This research is an exploratory investigation of what attributions college professors place upon the cause of teaching effectiveness and success. Student evaluations of teaching are used as a proxy for teaching effectiveness. The study is supported by Attribution Theory in that perceptions and attributions of causality affect motivation and success. The research evaluates data that supported Attribution Theory. The data was collected using Qualtrics through a web-based survey. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the survey data, with interesting conclusions. The most interesting difference was that between the perceptions of causal attribution of tenured and non-tenured professors. The data show that tenured professors attribute teaching effectiveness to factors outside their control such as characteristics of the students and the institution, while non-tenured professors do not attribute teaching effectiveness to external factors. The implications of this study are support for Attribution Theory in the college teaching context, and may be useful for university administration in motivating professors for effective teaching. Future research includes deductive study to further explore the scope and boundary conditions of Attribution Theory in college teaching.     

Perceptual control models of pursuit manual tracking demonstrate individual specificity and parameter consistency

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Computational models that simulate individuals’ movements in pursuit-tracking tasks have been used to elucidate mechanisms of human motor control....     

Naturalist Semantics and the Appeal to Structure

We need not accommodate facts about meaning if Quine is right about the indeterminacy of subsentential expressions; there can be no such facts to accommodate. Evans argued that Quine's approach overlooks the ways speakers use predication to endow their use of subsentential expressions with the necessary determinacy. This paper offers a critical assessment of the debate in relation to current arguments about naturalism and shows how Evans's response depends on a basic claim that turns out to be false.     

Human Decisions in Moral Dilemmas are Largely Described by Utilitarianism: Virtual Car Driving Study Provides Guidelines for Autonomous Driving Vehicles

Science and Engineering Ethics - Ethical thought experiments such as the trolley dilemma have been investigated extensively in the past, showing that humans act in utilitarian ways, trying to cause...     

Bewältigung des unerfüllten Kinderwunsches

The article reviews current research in relation to two aspects of involuntary childlessness; firstly, the extent to which involuntary childlessness can be considered a critical life-event and secondly, the short-term effects of childlessness on life-satisfaction and well-being. A study is reported in which 68 middle-aged women (45 to 65 years) who are long term childless because of infertility, are investigated. The study focuses on the extent to which unfilled desire for a child has long term effects on well-being and life-satisfaction. The control group comprised 68 women who did not suffer from fertility problems and became pregnant spontaneously. Life-satisfaction and well-being were assessed using the life-satisfaction questionaire (FLZ; Fahrenberg et al. 2000) and the SCL-90-R (Symptome-Checklist, Derogatis, the German version of Franke 1995). The study shows clearly that psychological well-being is significantly lower in childless middle-aged women compared to women of the same mean age, who have a child. No significant differences were found in social well-being and health. The results support the view that unwanted childlessness may become a chronic stressor. Unintentionally childless middle-aged women do not constitute a clinical group whose need for psychotherapy is urgent. However, the development of specific counselling for women who fail to conceive and those who remain childless in the long term is recommended.     

Corporeal Objects and the Interdependence of Perception and Action

This paper is about how action and perception are related in self–awareness. The main positive claim is that bodily awareness may consist in perceptual experiences that are sufficient to provide corporeal objects with introspective self–awareness. The short–term goal is to examine the grounds and motivations for strong versions of the claim that the self–awareness of corporeal objects is dependent on the exercise of their agency. As examples of 'patient perceivers' show, we should not underestimate the resources that perceptual experience alone offers to corporeal selves.