Moral Communities in Anti-Doping Policy: A Response to Bowers and Paternoster

This article argues that Bowers and Paternoster’s emphasis on a moral community marks an important step towards a more ethical and effective approach to anti-doping. However, it also argues that the authors’ proposed strategies undermine their stated goal of effectively engaging athletes as partners in anti-doping efforts and raise ethical concerns. Their proposed emphasis on exploiting shaming as a punishment and their general view of athletes as adversaries fosters mistrust between athletes and those who enforce the anti-doping rules. Instead, this article describes a model for empowering athletes as stakeholders in anti-doping policy as a means to provide anti-doping rules with increased moral legitimacy among athletes.     

Racism in the Hands of an Angry God: How Image of God Impacts Cultural Racism in Relation to Police Treatment of African Americans

Previous research suggests an angry God image is a narrative schema predicting support for more punitive forms of criminal justice. However, this research has not explored the possibility that racialization may impact one's God image. We perform logistic regression on Wave V of the Baylor Religion Survey to examine the correlation between an angry God image and the belief that police shoot Blacks more often because Blacks are more violent than Whites (a context-specific form of cultural racism). Engaging critical insights from intersectionality theory, we also interact angry God image with both racialized identity and racialized religious tradition. Results suggest that the angry God schema is associated with this form of cultural racism for White people generally as well as White Evangelicals, yet for Black Protestants, belief in an angry God is associated with resistance against this type of cultural racism.     

The Basic Courses for the Study of Religions at the University of Southern Denmark

This essay is part of a collection of short essays solicited from authors around the globe who teach religion courses at the college level (not for professional religious training). They are published together with an introduction in Teaching Theology and Religion 18:3 (July 2015). The authors were asked to provide a brief overview of the curriculum, student learning goals, and pedagogical techniques employed in their courses.     

P300 amplitude variations,prior probabilities,and likelihoods: A Bayesian ERP study

The capability of the human brain for Bayesian inference was assessed by manipulating probabilistic contingencies in an urn-ball task. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in response to stimuli that differed in their relative frequency of occurrence (.18 to .82). A veraged ERPs with sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (relative frequency of occurrence > .5) were used for further analysis. Research hypotheses about relationships between probabilistic contingencies and ERP amplitude variations were formalized as (in-)equality constrained hypotheses. Conducting Bayesian model comparisons, we found that manipulations of prior probabilities and likelihoods were associated with separately modifiable and distinct ERP responses. P3a amplitudes were sensitive to the degree of prior certainty such that higher prior probabilities were related to larger frontally distributed P3a waves. P3b amplitudes were sensitive to the degree of likelihood certainty such that lower likelihoods were associated with larger parietally distributed P3b waves. These ERP data suggest that these antecedents of Bayesian inference (prior probabilities and likelihoods) are coded by the human brain.     

Individual,Housing, and Neighborhood Predictors of Psychological Integration Among Vulnerably Housed and Homeless Individuals

The current longitudinal study evaluated the individual, housing, and neighborhood characteristics predictive of feeling psychologically integrated within one's neighborhood among a population of homeless and vulnerably housed individuals. Participants were recruited at homeless shelters, meal programs, and rooming houses in Ottawa, Canada and participated in three in‐person interviews, each approximately 1 year apart. Prospective and cross‐sectional predictors of psychological integration at Follow‐up 1 and Follow‐up 2 were examined. There were 397 participants at baseline, 341 at Follow‐up 1 and 320 at Follow‐up 2. A hierarchical multiple regression uncovered several significant predictors of psychological integration. The most salient and common predictors were being older, having greater social support, living in high quality housing, and residing in a neighborhood with a positive impact. Implications for service provision and policy advancements are discussed.     

Ideas of justice and reconstructions of Confucian justice

Confucianism tends to play only a marginal role in current theorizing about justice, which is a global pursuit dominated by Western theory and its strong tendency to assume that justice refers to some substantive conception of distributive, socioeconomic justice. This article examines and compares reconstructions of Confucian justice by Joseph Chan, May Sim, and Fan Ruiping. Each reconstruction makes reference to both classical and modern Western justice theory and thus each involves a comparative approach; indeed, each reconstruction seeks ultimately, in its own distinctive fashion, to present a version of Confucian justice that is comparable with modern Western justice theory. In this article we assess, critically and comparatively, the tertium comparationis and the arguments in each reconstruction. While our analysis does not wholly endorse any of the reconstructions, it shows that there is a richness and vitality to Confucian justice theory that merits proper consideration in justice theory conceived as a truly global and cosmopolitan discipline.     

Challenges and Opportunities of Lifelog Technologies: A Literature Review and Critical Analysis

In a lifelog, data from various sources are combined to form a record from which one can retrieve information about oneself and the environment in which one is situated. It could be considered similar to an automated biography. Lifelog technology is still at an early stage of development. However, the history of lifelogs so far shows a clear academic, corporate and governmental interest. Therefore, a thorough inquiry into the ethical aspects of lifelogs could prove beneficial to the responsible development of this field. This article maps the main ethically relevant challenges and opportunities associated with the further development of lifelog technologies as discussed in the scholarly literature. By identifying challenges and opportunities in the current debate, we were able to identify other challenges and opportunities left unmentioned. Some of these challenges are partly explained by a blind spot in the current debate. Whilst the current debate focuses mainly on lifelogs held by individuals, lifelogs held by governmental institutions and corporations pose idiosyncratic ethical concerns as well. We have provided a brief taxonomy of lifelog technology to show the variety in uses for lifelogs. In addition, we provided a general approach to alleviate the ethical challenges identified in the critical analysis.     

Behandlung von Epilepsie bei Menschen mit Intelligenzminderung

People with intellectual disability frequently suffer from epilepsy. Management of epilepsy in this population is particularly challenging because of the different ways of communicating, cognitive impairment, changes in behavior which can be disruptive, the severity of the epilepsy syndrome, the seizure types, and the seizure frequency. Treatment of epilepsy is complicated due to the interaction of the intellectual disability and the behavior as well as behavioral changes caused by the antiepileptic drugs or the change of seizure types or frequency. This article provides the reader with a guidance for managing epilepsy in this particular population and raises important open questions.     

On Some Properties of Humanly Known and Humanly Knowable Mathematics

We argue that the set of humanly known mathematical truths (at any given moment in human history) is finite and so recursive. But if so, then given various fundamental results in mathematical logic and the theory of computation (such as Craig’s in J Symb Log 18(1): 30–32(1953) theorem), the set of humanly known mathematical truths is axiomatizable. Furthermore, given Godel’s (Monash Math Phys 38: 173–198, 1931) First Incompleteness Theorem, then (at any given moment in human history) humanly known mathematics must be either inconsistent or incomplete. Moreover, since humanly known mathematics is axiomatizable, it can be the output of a Turing machine. We then argue that any given mathematical claim that we could possibly know could be the output of a Turing machine, at least in principle. So the Lucas-Penrose (Lucas in Philosophy 36:112–127, 1961; Penrose, in The Emperor’s new mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1994)) argument cannot be sound.