Connecting Personal History and Organizational Context: Suggestions for Developing Educational Programs for Youth Soccer Coaches

Literature underscores the complex role of coaches in sport organizations, especially in youth sectors. Their need for support, not only on the technical level, is emerging. In recent years an interesting international debate has evolved regarding what education is most suitable to support coach development. The article intends to enter this debate by proposing an educational model for youth soccer coaches. This educational proposal is the outcome of reflection that originated from various experiences with about 110 Italian youth soccer coaches over the past six years. The first part is dedicated to a review of the literature on coaching education, and the second to the educational model presented (e.g., theoretical background, characteristics, setting, outcomes, and considerations regarding the management of this educational process). The strength of this model was precisely to have put some recurrent issues in dialogue with the specific organizational contexts in which the educational programs were implemented.     

Research Misconduct in the Age of Open Science: The Case of STAP Stem Cells

In early 2014, Dr Haruko Obokata and her co-authors caused a global media storm by publishing two scientific papers in Nature on stem cells. The papers proposed a surprisingly simple new method called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) to generate pluripotent stem cells for research purposes in a fast and inexpensive way. To the dismay of many, both papers were retracted within six months of their release due to data fabrication and falsification. The rise and fall of the STAP research illustrates the impacts of open science practices of quality control and validation on new scientific claims. In the STAP case, collective action generated through two online forums—the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog and PubPeer—exposed not only data manipulation in the two papers but also the irreproducibility of the purported new cellular reprogramming method. The case brings to the fore the tentative possibilities as well as potential pitfalls of ‘accelerated virtual witnessing’ through crowdsourced post-publication peer reviews that value accessibility and inclusiveness. Indeed, it calls for empirically grounded discussion on the ongoing reconfiguration of the shared system of values and norms or the moral economy of science.     

Methods for Practising Ethics in Research and Innovation: A Literature Review,Critical Analysis and Recommendations

This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation (R&I). Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: (1) ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, (2) intra methods, dealing with technology design, and (3) ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I.     

Psychosocial health mediates the gratitude-physical health link

There is now a growing body of research demonstrating the physical health benefits of being grateful. However, research has only just began to explore the mechanisms accounting for this gratitude-health relationship. This study examines the relationship between dispositional gratitude and self-reported physical health symptoms, and explores whether this relationship is explained through reduced levels of perceived loneliness and stress. This study employed a cross-sectional design with a sample of 607 healthy adults. Serial mediation analysis revealed that the positive effect of gratitude on physical health was significantly mediated by lower reported levels of perceived loneliness and stress. These findings are important given evidence that gratitude can be cultivated, and may serve to buffer against stress and loneliness and improve somatic health symptoms in the general population.     

The touch of King Midas: Collingwood on why actions are not events

It is the ambition of natural science to provide complete explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that science can only explain events, not actions. The latter is the distinctive subject matter of history and can be described as actions only if they are explained historically. This paper explains Collingwood’s claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure because science explains events, not actions. It argues that Collingwood’s defence of the methodological autonomy of history vis-à-vis natural science is not based on a commitment to human exceptionalism, i.e. the exclusion of human beings and their doings from the rest of nature, but on the view that explanations which appeal to norms are different in kind from explanations which appeal to empirical regularities. Given the close relationship between the method and the subject matter of a form of inquiry, actions elude any attempt to explain them through the scientific method because the application of this method entails that what is thus explained is not an action but an event.     

Performing the imago Dei: human enhancement,artificial intelligence and optative image-bearing

If the imago Dei is not a taxonomic definition but rather something that is performed in context, what are the implications for questions of human enhancement and the development of artificial intelligence (AI)? The author considers Alistair McFadyen’s performative vision of the imago Dei, one that actively seeks humanity in concrete situations, in the context of human enhancement and AI, asking the questions, ‘Does becoming cyborg through human enhancement make us less bearers of the divine image?’ And, ‘Can AI ever be considered to be in the image of God?’ Briefly tracing the shift in perspectives on the imago Dei, before considering what a performance of the image might look like, the author proposes three performances that have significant implications for questions about what it means to be human. To be an image-bearer is not dependent upon human DNA or species membership, but on an optative performance of the imago Dei.     

Going backstage: a psychoanalytically informed study with amateur musicians in adult mental health services

Many mental health service users engage in potentially therapeutic amateur music practice, though the role of this in the maintenance of mental health is largely unexplored. The application of psychoanalytic ideas to music-playing gives suggestions for how this activity could helpfully sublimate distress. For this study, six men who attend adult mental health services and play a musical instrument took part in three unstructured hour-long interviews. The material was analysed with a psychoanalytically informed method. Four inter-related themes emerged: ‘Left on the outside’; ‘Playing and linking’; ‘A beautiful gift to myself’; and ‘Frustrating play’. In the lives of these amateur musicians, music’s role as a transitional object and means of containing distress is explored. There is discussion of the narcissistic function of music and the dynamics around music as an exhibitionistic act. The value of paying attention to music in the life of a patient is considered.