Rethinking free, libre and open source software

This special issue includes seven articles that make significant contribution to the literature pertaining to knowledge and public policy around Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Focusing on questions in two themes (i) motivation and organization and (ii) public policy, the articles in this volume develop new analytic models and report on new empirical findings, as an important step in bridging the wide gap that exists in public policy literature around FLOSS. Warning against rhetorical pitfalls that have been prevalent in FLOSS research, this introduction starts with a short history of FLOSS development, continues with a brief thematic literature review and review of the misconceptions surrounding FLOSS, and concludes with a first introduction of the articles that follow. He is part of the Dutch Institute of Government (NIG), the research school for public administration and political science. His research focuses on the organization of open source communities. He received two grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for research related to open source communities. The first grant was to study the interplay between intellectual property rights and open source communities. The results are published in Governing the Virtual Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He has written numerous articles on open source, which have appeared in journals like Electronic Markets; Knowledge, Technology and Policy; and the International Journal of IT Standards & Standardisation Research. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of York (UK) in 2004. Her Ph.D. research investigated the heterogeneity and contingency in the Free, Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) social worlds, which is based on a constellation of hacking practices, from the sociological perspective. Her principal research interests center on FLOSS studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), virtual communities and knowledge-sharing. Shay is also a fellow at The Information Society Project at the Yale Law School. Shay holds a B.Sc. in computer science and a B.A. in philosophy, magna cum laude, from Tel-Aviv University, and an M.A. from New York University where his interdisciplinary research thesis focused on the political economy of free and open source software and file sharing networks. Shay is an entrepreneur that co-founded two software start-up companies, and was involved for several years in cutting edge software research, combining open source and proprietary software.     

Toward a developmental psychology of Sehnsucht (life longings): the optimal (utopian) life

The topic of an optimal or utopian life has received much attention across the humanities and the arts but not in psychology. The German concept of Sehnsucht captures individual and collective thoughts and feelings about one's optimal or utopian life. Sehnsucht (life longings; LLs) is defined as an intense desire for alternative states and realizations of life. Presenting a first effort at capturing this phenomenon, the authors conceptualize LLs as composed of 6 interrelated core characteristics: (a) utopian conceptions of ideal development; (b) sense of incompleteness and imperfection of life; (c) conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future; (d) ambivalent (bittersweet) emotions; (e) reflection and evaluation of one's life; and (f) symbolic richness. Self-report data from 299 adults (19-81 years) support the postulated structure and support predictions regarding the functional role of Sehnsucht. Having LLs was evaluated as providing direction to development and helping to manage life's incompleteness. At the same time, the frequent and intense experience of LLs was associated with lower well-being. When LLs were perceived as controllable, however, this negative association disappeared.     

Multidisciplinary Engagement with Nanoethics Through Education—The Nanobio-RAISE Advanced Courses as a Case Study and Model

This paper presents and evaluates two advanced courses organised in Oxford as part of the European project Nanobio-RAISE and suggests using their format to encourage multidisciplinary engagement between nanoscientists and nanoethicists. Several nanoethicists have recently identified the need for ‘better’ ethics of emerging technologies, arguing that ethical reflection should become part and parcel of the research and development (R&D) process itself. Such new forms of ethical deliberation, it is argued, transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and require the active engagement and involvement of both nanoethicists and nanoscientists with the broader issues surrounding technological developments. Whereas significant research efforts into multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations during R&D processes are now emerging, opportunities for encouraging multidisciplinary engagement through education have remained relatively underexplored. This paper argues that educational programmes could be a natural extension of ongoing collaborative research efforts ‘in the lab’ and analyses how the Nanobio-RAISE courses could be used as a model for course development. In addition to exploring how the elements that were conducive to multidisciplinary engagement in this course could be preserved in future courses, this paper suggests shifting the emphasis from public communication towards ethical deliberation. Further course work could thus build capacity among both nanoscientists and nanoethicists for doing ‘better’ nanoethics.     

Priming the ant or the grasshopper in people's mind: How regulatory mode affects inter‐temporal choices

The present study examined the influence of two regulatory mode concerns—a locomotion concern with movement from state to state and an assessment concern with making comparisons—on choices between immediate and delayed (from 2 to 6 weeks) money rewards. Regulatory mode orientation was induced by means of a priming procedure. We predicted that the choices in the assessment condition would be less impulsive and more far‐sighted than those in the locomotion condition. After taking into account the effects of amount of early reward, length of delay and increase in delayed reward—all of which were in the direction of previous studies—this regulatory mode prediction was supported. Our findings suggest that it might be possible to induce more far‐sighted (or economically rational) inter‐temporal choices by means of instructions that induce an assessment orientation independent of stable inter‐individual differences in discount rate. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The morphosyntactic decomposition and semantic composition of German compound words investigated by ERPs

In two experiments, we investigated the morphosyntactic decomposition and semantic composition of acoustically presented German compound words. A left-anterior negativity (LAN) was found in the ERP for gender incongruent, initial compound constituents although these constituents are syntactically irrelevant in German. This LAN provides online evidence for morphosyntactic decomposition. Experiment 1 showed also preliminary evidence for semantic composition, which was further investigated in Experiment 2 by comparing semantically transparent and opaque compounds. Transparent compounds elicited an increased negativity with a centroparietal maximum that occurred during the presentation of the head constituent. This negativity is suggested to reflect the semantic integration of compound constituents that is necessary after the constituents have been accessed separately.     

The Developmental Perspective in Integral Counseling

The process of making meaning is a core determinant of human experience. Understanding this process, developmentally, is a vital part of integral counseling. In this article, the authors introduce the concept of ego development stages as increasingly complex and flexible systems of meaning making. An understanding of ego development stages can help counselors to assist clients in a way that recognizes that people not only come in different “types” but also differ significantly in the level of their meaning‐making capacity.     

The Effects of Nonverbal Immediacy and Verbal Person Centeredness in the Emotional Support Process

This study explores the combined influence of nonverbal immediacy and verbal person centeredness in the emotional support process. Three complementary models were tested in an experiment with 216 participants who disclosed an emotionally upsetting event to a confederate trained to display different levels of nonverbal immediacy and person centeredness. Participants subsequently completed a set of instruments measuring the perceived comforting quality of the confederate. Results suggested that nonverbal immediacy and person centeredness influence perceptions of what makes for good comforting. The data supported 2 of the advanced models but failed to provide support for a nonverbal primacy effect on perceived comforting quality.     

Perceived Risk of AIDS: Assessing the Behavioral and Psychosocial Consequences in a Cohort of Gay Men1

Longitudinal analyses reported here explored the relationship between a perceived sense of being at risk for AIDS and a variety of behavioral, social, and psychological consequences. Data were obtained from a cohort of 637 homosexual men living in Chicago, who are participating in a psychosocial study and have completed two waves of data collection. Their perceptions of risk were quantified using both an absolute and a comparative measure; these were combined into a risk index, scored from one to nine (x?= 3.91; SD= 1.64). Univariate analyses demonstrated that level of risk was related to several measures of subsequent behavioral risk reduction. However, after adjustment for sociodemographic variables, initial behavior, and other components of a model predicting behavior change, this was no longer true. Of the 12 behavioral outcomes assessed, only one was related to risk after appropriate adjustment, and this relationship was negative. Other longitudinal analyses examined the impact of a sense of risk on measures of psychosocial functioning which have been theoretically linked to health behaviors and to measures of psychological/ social distress. These demonstrated a range of potentially adverse consequences for those who perceived themselves to be at greater risk for AIDS, including increased barriers to behavioral change, obsessive/compulsive behavior, social role impairment, and more intrusive worries and concerns about AIDS. Taken together, these results suggest that there is little or no observable benefit to an increased sense of risk, but that such a sense subsequently leads to distress and dysfunction in a variety of realms. The implications of these findings for development of policy concerning antibody testing of at-risk populations is discussed.     

Clinician-Guided Assessment of Personality Using the Structural Interview and the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO)

This article demonstrates the utility of a theory-guided psychodynamic approach to the assessment of personality and personality pathology based on the object relations model developed by Kernberg (1984). We describe a clinical interview, the Structural Interview (SI; Kernberg, 1984), and also a semistructured approach, the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO; Clarkin, Caligor, Stern, & Kernberg, 2004) based on this theoretical model. Both interviews focus on the assessment of consolidated identity versus identity disturbance, the use of adaptive versus lower level defensive operations, and intact versus loss of reality testing. In the context of a more clinically oriented assessment, the SI makes use of tactful confrontation of discrepancies and contradictions in the patient's narrative, and also takes into account transference and countertransference phenomena, whereas the more structured approach of the STIPO incorporates clinical judgment informed by clinical theory into a well-guided interaction with the patient. Both interviews have good interrater reliability and are coherent with the alternative model for personality disorder diagnosis proposed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.), Section III. Finally, they provide the clinician with specific implications for prognosis and treatment planning and can rationally guide clinical decision making.     

The communality-bonus effect for male transformational leaders – leadership style,gender, and promotability

Women have made considerable inroads into the workforce but remain underrepresented in leadership positions. Even though studies show that men and women hardly differ in their leadership behaviours, we argue that male and female leaders are evaluated differentially contingent on the gender-congruence of their leadership style. Drawing arguments from expectancy violation theory, we investigate evaluations of men and women who show transformational leadership (a style consisting of communal behaviours in line with stereotypes about women) and autocratic leadership (a style consisting of agentic behaviours in line with stereotypes about men). We employed a three-study research design combining two experimental studies and a two-wave field study with business leaders (overall N = 344). Overall transformational leadership resulted in higher evaluations of promotability due to higher perceptions of leaders’ communality and leadership effectiveness. Importantly, these effects were stronger for men, and men showing transformational leadership were evaluated to be more promotable than women. This implies a communality-bonus effect for male transformational leaders. There was no difference in promotability evaluations for women versus men showing autocratic leadership. This effect was mediated by agency and effectiveness perceptions for women but not for men. Implications are discussed.