Broad Reasons Research Articles

For the Good of the Globe: Moral Reasons for States to Mitigate Global Catastrophic Biological Risks.

Actions to prepare for and prevent pandemics are a common topic for bioethical analysis. However, little attention has been paid to global catastrophic biological risks more broadly, including pandemics with artificial origins, the creation of agents for biological warfare, and harmful outcomes of human genome editing. What's more, international policy discussions often focus on economic arguments for state action, ignoring a key potential set of reasons for states to mitigate global catastrophic biological risks: moral reasons. In this paper, I frame the mitigation of such risks as a global public good, and I explore three possible categories of moral reasons that might motivate states to provide this global public good: nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and interstate obligations. Whilst there are strong objections to moral nationalism as a reason for states to act, moral cosmopolitanism may provide a broad reason which is further supplemented for individual states through the elaboration of interstate moral obligations. The obligations I consider are moral leadership, fairness, and reciprocity. Moral reasons for individual states action may more effectively or more appropriately motivate states to mitigate global catastrophic biological risks.

Reconstructing Philosophical Genealogy from the Ground Up: What Truly Is Philosophical Genealogy and What Purpose Does It Serve?

What is philosophical genealogy? What is its purpose? How does genealogy achieve this purpose? These are the three essential questions to ask when thinking about philosophical genealogy. Although there has been an upswell of articles in the secondary literature exploring these questions in the last decade or two, the answers provided are unsatisfactory. Why do replies to these questions leave scholars wanting? Why is the question, “What is philosophical genealogy?” still being asked? There are two broad reasons, I think. First, on the substantive side, the problem is that genealogical models will get certain features of the method right but ignore others. The models proffered to answer the first question are too restrictive. The second reason is that the three essential questions to ask regarding the nature of genealogy are run together when they should be treated separately. In the following paper, I address these problems by attempting to reconstruct genealogy from the ground up. I provide what I hope is an ecumenical position on genealogy that will accommodate a wide variety of genealogical thinkers, from Hobbes to Nietzsche, rather than a select few. Therefore, I examine two of the three questions above: What is philosophical genealogy and its purpose? I argue there are seven main features of genealogy and that these features may be used as a yardstick to compare how one genealogist stacks up to another along the seven aspects I outline in the paper.

Diversification in resource-rich Africa, 1999–2019

We survey the performance of Sub-Saharan Africa's resource-dependent economies from 1999 to 2019, a period covering the commodity price supercycle, which generated enormous rents for natural resource producers. We show that despite high overall growth rates, these states failed to convert their windfalls into broader forms of development: their economies diversified more slowly than resource-poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa; their economies became less complex; their low institutional quality regressed further; and they achieved slower progress on human development than their resource-poor counterparts. Case studies of the top three diversifiers—Botswana, Zambia, and Nigeria—underscore the challenges of diversification. We suggest two broad reasons for these patterns. First, economic diversification, especially export diversification, is intrinsically difficult for low-and-middle income resource-dependent countries, due to both Dutch Disease effects and the isolated product spaces of the oil, gas, and minerals sectors. Second, diversification in resource-dependent states is sensitive to institutional quality, yet institutional quality is sticky and typically constrained by political interests that are hostile to reforms. This implies that the development challenges of oil, gas, and mineral dependent states over the coming decades will be significant and difficult to surmount. We suggest a more modest set of goals focused on diversifying into related activities in the extractives value chain and unrelated sectors in the domestic economy, as well as narrowly-focused efforts to boost non-resource export industries.

Do International Investment Agreements attract Foreign Direct Investment inflows? Revisiting the literature

Empirical research assessing the effects of International Investment Agreements (IIAs) on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows proliferated since the late 1990s, largely coinciding with an acceleration in the signing of such investment treaties between the developed countries and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). This paper offers a comprehensive survey of the literature on the impact of IIAs on FDI flows, with a specific focus on EMDEs. The main goal of the review is to highlight the important themes that emerge from the literature and how each of those themes have been addressed by the existing studies. Despite the proliferation of studies on this topic, the literature remains highly inconclusive as to whether IIAs matter when it comes to attracting FDI flows. A substantive part of the empirical ambiguity arises for two broad reasons. First, there have been methodological constraints in disentangling co-movements from causal effects when it comes to estimating the impact of IIAs on FDI flows. Second, studies have suffered from the general paucity of granular data on IIAs which allow for a systematic unpacking of various IIA provisions on FDI inflows.

1980년 언론기본법에 대한 헌법적 평가

The Basic Act on Press of 1980 is widely regarded as the most repressive law of the 5th Republic of Korea, and this is unsurprising since it was enacted by the new military government that seized power though a coup. However, upon closer examination of the Basic Press Act's detrimental impact, the assessment becomes less straightforward. The clause on registration cancellation is the key factor leading to its classification as highly repressive, as granting the government the power to cancel media organizations' registration for overly broad reasons is inherently unconstitutional. Nevertheless, apart from this provision, it becomes difficult to label the remaining aspects of the Basic Press Act as entirely repressive.
 From the perspective of press freedom, the evaluation of the Basic Press Act is as follows: Firstly, the Basic Press Act makes a distinction between “freedom of expression,” which applies to individuals, and “freedom of the press,” which pertains to media entities. It is based on the theory that the state has an obligation to establish a system that grants privileges and responsibilities to mass media to safeguard press freedom. This theory was known as “the public function theory of the press” or “the institutional guarantee of free speech” at that time. Secondly, the Basic Press Act recognizes the growing influence of broadcasting as a major medium for achieving press freedom and institutionalizes the public broadcasting system. Thirdly, the Basic Press Act formally recognizes the right to know, which is a relatively new and highly commendable addition.
 A significant part of the Basic Press Act's framework still exists today. The functions of the Press Arbitration Commission and the Broadcasting Commission were even strengthened in the new laws that replaced the Basic Press Act in 1987 when the authoritarian government was collapsing. This indicates that the Basic Press Act deserved positive evaluations with respect to its content. The press freedom theory adopted by the Act bears the most similarity to the Newspaper Law and Press Arbitration Law enacted during the Roh Moo-hyun administration. The Basic Press Act's pursuit of the public function theory of the press found realization through the Newspaper Law, while the Basic Press Act's provisions for addressing media damage were implemented through the Press Arbitration Law. However, due to advancements in information and communication technology, the media landscape has undergone significant changes, rendering the inheritance of the Basic Press Act by the Newspaper Law outdated. It is commendable that the Newspaper Law was amended in 2010 to guarantee freedom of the press after the Constitutional Court ruled basic clauses of the Newspaper Law unconstitutional.
 The public function theory of the Basic Press Act was carried over to the Broadcasting Law. Considering the level of broadcasting and communication technology at the time of the 1987 replacement legislation, it was reasonable to incorporate the public function theory into the Broadcasting Law. However, despite technological advancements eliminating the unique characteristics of broadcasting, such as frequency limitations, it is also anachronistic that the Broadcasting Law still adheres to the public function theory. In today's media environment, where anyone can disseminate their thoughts, there should be no distinction between an individual's freedom of expression and the media's freedom of the press. It is time to bid farewell to the theoretical foundation of the Basic Press Act, the public function theory of the press.

Lateral and vertical evolution of the compositional and morphological profiles in nanostructured photocatalytic titania thin films

Thin films of nanostructured titania comprising different levels of lateral and vertical microstructural order and surface chemistry were prepared via the anodization of titanium. We segmented and demystified the contributions that lead to nanostructured titania and affected its photocatalytic behaviour to: (1) specific compositional (less dominant) and (2) specific (surface) morphological differences (substantial), in the as-achieved films. To shed more light on the contributions, we partitioned these films by chemically and morphologically distinctive constituents; (1) top porous non-stoichiometric titania, (2) mid tubular nanoformations, and (3) bottom dense titania.Morphology of the films was described using electron microscopy, and synchrotron grazing incidence X-ray scattering/diffraction. Narrow range of synthetic conditions allowed preparing of ordered, macroscopically homogeneous nanotubes for photovoltaics. Interestingly, somewhat different, distorted tubular nanoformations were better suited for the photo-degradation of salicylic acid (fit by pseudo-second order). In this case, rutile traces in anatase tubular formations were commonly observed, synergistically boosting photodegradation. Broad characterisations reasons the photodegradation in order of importance to: (1) controlling the evolution of type of porosity and presence of defects in the films, (2) controlling the ratio and vertical profile of anatase-to-rutile, and (3) observing the surface chemistry changes, i.e. the presence of substoichiometric titania.

Brede moraal en brede rede

Broad Morals and Broad Reason: Reconciling inclusive ethics with psychological realism Many of today’s problems revolve around distance and proximity. Progressives argue that a universalist, inclusive ethics requires us to bridge distances in identity, space, and time. Conservatives object that such bridging is psychologically unrealistic: people of flesh and blood can only care about whom/what is close-by. Evolutionary and psychological research seems to corroborate this sobering view. Many researchers confirm that our intuitions (‘System 1’) are groupish and short-sighted, and largely deaf to the appeal of rational universalism (‘System 2’). But not all agree. We distinguish four ‘evo-progressive’ attempts to reconcile evolution and psychology with a universalist, inclusive ethics. Singer and Pinker (1), Buchanan and Powell (2), and Sunstein (3) contend that a reason-based, inclusive ethics is psychologically feasible, but that such an ethics has to be thin, solely focusing on rights and no-harm. By contrast, Haidt (4) argues that an inclusive ethics should be ‘broad’, also encompassing moral domains like sacrality, loyalty and authority. This implies for him that it cannot be reason-based. We argue that a broad form of inclusive ethics can and should be reason-based, but that this requires a rethinking of ‘reason’. We show that the evo-progressives’ conviction that a rational ethics is by definition thin, results from their theoreticistic conception of reason. But reason can also have more mimetic-embodied or mythical-narrative forms. These do allow for a broad, rational, inclusive ethics that can motivate real people to include stakeholders that are distant in identity, place, and time.

Broad pattern and reason of sheep rearing: A study on sheep farming in Kashmir

Broad pattern and reason of sheep rearing: A study on sheep farming in Kashmir

Large qualitative sample and thematic analysis to redefine student dropout and retention strategy in open online education

AbstractOpen online education experiences persistently high dropout rates, and the efficacy of dropout interventions has been questioned. Despite considerable research, dropout reasons are not fully understood, and further in‐depth investigation has been called for. Prior qualitative retention studies have frequently relied on smaller samples that are unable to generate deeper appreciation of dropout reasons. Over 200 in‐depth interviews were therefore conducted with students that had dropped out of open online education. The probability‐based qualitative sample facilitated capture of subthemes down to a 5% incidence level or frequency of occurrence. Thematic analysis revealed 41 subthemes within 10 broad dropout reasons. While the broad dropout themes have been identified previously, the subthemes are new and provide richer understanding. This study also captured students' suggestions for what might have prevented their dropout. Thematic analysis identified 19 subthemes within 5 broad intervention themes that respond to the root dropout causes. Many intervention subthemes address personal and learner context dropout factors that have often been considered uncontrollable and unavoidable. This paper therefore redefines dropout in open online education and offers new insights for improving retention. It also provides a strategic framework for evaluating dropouts and prioritising student‐informed interventions that respond to the main dropout causes.Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topicPersistently high open online education dropout suggests existing interventions are ineffective.Prior qualitative retention studies identified the main dropout reasons, but small sample sizes failed to generate deeper insights and more in‐depth investigation has been called for.What this paper addsA probability‐based qualitative sample of 226 participants captured dropout subthemes down to a 5% level of incidence or frequency of occurrence.Thematic analysis identified 41 subthemes, within 10 broad dropout reasons. These subthemes are new and offer richer understanding.Thematic analysis also identified 19 subthemes within 5 broad dropout intervention areas that students suggested could have prevented their dropout. These include new insights for addressing dropout causes that have often previously been considered unavoidable.Implications for practice and/or policyThe strategic framework provides a retention management approach that prioritises responding to the main dropout causes with student‐informed interventions.This approach and the deeper understanding afforded by robust qualitative investigation should help reduce persistently high dropout rates.

Managerial Optimism and Debt Covenants

ABSTRACTThis paper studies the effects of managerial optimism on the optimal design of debt covenants. We find that managers who are more optimistic about the future success of their investment ideas provide lenders with greater control rights via tighter covenants. This is optimal for optimistic managers even though they understand that tighter covenants increase the probability of covenant violations and lead to excessive lender intervention. The broad reason for this result is that optimists wish to write contracts that repay lenders more frequently in bad states rather than in good states, and the only way to achieve this is by granting lenders more control rights. Our model generates new predictions and offers a novel explanation for the empirical evidence that covenants in debt contracts are set very tightly and are often violated.

Pre-service Science and Mathematics teachers’ reasoning: a think-aloud study

ABSTRACT Teacher education programmes struggle to attract, develop, and retain potential teachers in Science and Mathematics. The development of both academic and non-academic attributes (e.g. adaptability, empathy) during a programme can influence not only retention but the profession-readiness of graduates. This is especially important in underserved schools where high attrition rates are more likely with Science and Mathematics teachers in their first few years of teaching. Yet most programmes lack intentional opportunities for non-academic development. Using a qualitative case study approach with an established think-aloud protocol, nine pre-service teachers (Science or Mathematics) were presented with situational judgment test items. A three-step analytical strategy revealed participants’ reasoning with a range of motivational beliefs and values. Results point to four broad reasoning profiles (solution, consequence, student, and value-focused). By exploring the implicit and explicit beliefs and values that contribute to prospective teachers’ reasoning processes, we offer implications for professional development and future research.

Initiating technology dependence to sustain a child’s life: a systematic review of reasons

BackgroundDecision-making in initiating life-sustaining health technology is complex and often conducted at time-critical junctures in clinical care. Many of these decisions have profound, often irreversible, consequences for the child and...

Rural-Urban Migration of Food Security and Nutrition: African Studies Over a Decade

The quest for improved livelihoods and better education among the broader reasons cause individuals and sometimes a whole nuclear family to migrate from rural areas to urban areas. Migration presents with its concerns including food security, nutrition and health. This paper reviews exclusively, though not exhaustive, studies conducted in Africa from 2010 to 2019. Google Scholar and PubMed Central were searched for studies on rural-urban migration and food (in) security and/or health and/or nutrition. Movement of humans is a cause of food insecurity. This food insecurity affects both rural households and urban households, but in different ways. Improvement in food security in the rural areas and urban areas should be done differently and not a one-fit-all approach. The population growth should be checked and significant improvements made in agriculture, in the urban and rural areas.

Rural-Urban Migration of Food Security and Nutrition: African Studies Over a Decade

The quest for improved livelihoods and better education among the broader reasons cause individuals and sometimes a whole nuclear family to migrate from rural areas to urban areas. Migration presents with its concerns including food security, nutrition and health. This paper reviews exclusively, though not exhaustive, studies conducted in Africa from 2010 to 2019. Google Scholar and PubMed Central were searched for studies on rural-urban migration and food (in) security and/or health and/or nutrition. Movement of humans is a cause of food insecurity. This food insecurity affects both rural households and urban households, but in different ways. Improvement in food security in the rural areas and urban areas should be done differently and not a one-fit-all approach. The population growth should be checked and significant improvements made in agriculture, in the urban and rural areas.

GaussianPath:A Bayesian Multi-Hop Reasoning Framework for Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Recently, multi-hop reasoning over incomplete Knowledge Graphs (KGs) has attracted wide attention due to its desirable interpretability for downstream tasks, such as question answer and knowledge graph completion. Multi-Hop reasoning is a typical sequential decision problem, which can be formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP). Subsequently, some reinforcement learning (RL) based approaches are proposed and proven effective to train an agent for reasoning paths sequentially until reaching the target answer. However, these approaches assume that an entity/relation representation follows a one-point distribution. In fact, different entities and relations may contain different certainties. On the other hand, since REINFORCE used for updating the policy in these approaches is a biased policy gradients method, the agent is prone to be stuck in high reward paths rather than broad reasoning paths, which leads to premature and suboptimal exploitation. In this paper, we consider a Bayesian reinforcement learning paradigm to harness uncertainty into multi-hop reasoning. By incorporating uncertainty into the representation layer, the agent trained by RL has uncertainty in a region of the state space then it should be more efficient in exploring unknown or less known part of the KG. In our approach, we build a Bayesian Q-learning architecture as a state-action value function for estimating the expected long-term reward. As initialized by Gaussian prior or pre-trained prior distribution, the representation layer drives uncertainty that allows regularizing the training. We conducted extensive experiments on multiple KGs. Experimental results show a superior performance than other baselines, especially significant improvements on the automated extracted KG.

Significado complexo e racionalidade ampla

O presente texto busca corroborar conceitualmente as noções metateóricas de significado complexo e racionalidade a partir de óticas linguístico-filosóficas. Nesse sentido, o texto organiza-se a partir de quatro seções, sendo: a) seção introdutória, caracterizando o ponto de partida para o desenvolvimento do problema de pesquisa abordado; b) apresentação de fundamentos característicos de significado complexo, buscando localizar sua instanciação em teorias linguísticas distintas, relacionando-se direta ou indiretamente com a significação linguística; c) caracterização de aspectos disciplinares tipicamente envolvidos com a racionalidade ampla, circunscrevendo-a à área da ciência linguística por meio de modelos e métodos; e d) seção de conclusão, situando os conceitos de significado complexo e racionalidade ampla a partir de uma abordagem multiforme e heteromórfica em conformidade com a proposta de Metateoria das Interfaces, seção fortemente marcada por uma análise epistemológica sobre a teoria linguística.

Why we need more research into the placebo response in psychiatry.

Placebos are not inert, but exert measurable biological effects. The placebo response in psychiatric illness is important and clinically relevant, but remains poorly understood. In this paper, we review current knowledge about the placebo response in psychiatric medicine and identify research directions for the future. We argue that more research is needed into the placebo response in psychiatric medicine for three broad reasons. First, awareness of factors that cause placebo response, for whom, and when, within clinical trials will allow us to better evidence efficacy of new treatments. Second, by understanding how placebo mechanisms operate in the clinic, we can take advantage of these to optimise the effects of current treatments. Finally, exploring the biological mechanisms of placebo effects might reveal tractable targets for novel treatment development.

Developing Medical Students' Broad Clinical Diagnostic Reasoning Through GP-Facilitated Teaching in Hospital Placements.

PurposeGraduating medical students need broad clinical diagnostic reasoning skills that integrate learning across clinical specialties to deal with undifferentiated patient problems. The opportunity to acquire these skills may be limited during clinical placements on increasingly specialized hospital wards. We developed an intervention of regular general practitioner (GP) facilitated teaching in hospital placements to enable students to develop broad clinical diagnostic reasoning. The intervention was piloted, refined and delivered to a whole cohort of medical students at the start of their third year. This paper examines whether students perceived opportunities to improve their broad diagnostic clinical reasoning through our intervention.MethodsGP-facilitated teaching sessions were delivered weekly in hospital placements to small groups of 6–8 students for 90 mins over 6 weeks. Students practiced clinical reasoning with real patient cases that they encountered on their placements. Evaluation of learning outcomes was conducted through a student questionnaire using Likert scales with free-text boxes for additional explanation. Focus groups were conducted to gain a more in-depth understanding of student perspectives.ResultsAs high as 87% of students agreed that their broad clinical diagnostic reasoning ability had improved. Thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed four factors supporting this improvement: practicing the hypothetico-deductive method, using real patient cases, composing student groups from different speciality placements and the breadth of the facilitators’ knowledge. Students additionally reported enhanced person-centredness in terms of understanding the patient’s perspective and journey. Students perceived that the added value of general practitioner facilitators lay in their broad knowledge base and knowledge of patient needs in the community.ConclusionOur results suggest that medical students can develop broad clinical diagnostic reasoning skills in hospital settings through regular GP-facilitated teaching. Our approach has the advantage of working within the established curricular format of hospital placements and being deliverable at scale to whole student cohorts.

Wildlife Ethics and Practice: Why We Need to Change the Way We Talk About \u2018Invasive Species\u2019

This article calls for an end to the use of the term ‘invasive species’, both in the scientific and public discourse on wildlife conservation. There are two broad reasons for this: the first problem with the invasive species narrative is that this demonisation of ‘invasives’ is morally wrong, particularly because it usually results in the unjust killing of the animals in question. Following on from this, the second problem is that the narrative is also incoherent, both from scientific and philosophical perspectives. At the heart of both of these issues is the problem that the invasive species narrative oversimplifies what are in fact very complex biological processes. As a result, the policies carried out with the stated aim of ‘controlling’ these animals are often unethical. In light of the current global species decline, this article asserts that the way we think and talk about these animals should be changed and the term ‘invasive species’ should be discontinued, in the hope that this leads to changes in practice.

The Impact of Non-normative Displays of Emotion in the Workplace: How Inappropriateness Shapes the Interpersonal Outcomes of Emotional Displays.

When it comes to evaluating emotions as either “good” or “bad,” everyday beliefs regarding emotions rely mostly on their hedonic features—does the emotion feel good to the person experiencing the emotion? However, emotions are not only felt inwardly; they are also displayed outwardly, and others’ responses to an emotional display can produce asymmetric outcomes (i.e., even emotions that feel good to the displayer can lead to negative outcomes for the displayer and others). Focusing on organizational settings, this manuscript reviews the literature on the outcomes of emotional expressions and argues that the evidence points to perceived (in)appropriateness of emotional displays as key to their consequences: emotional displays that are deemed inappropriate generate disadvantageous outcomes for the displayer, and at times also the organization. Drawing on relevant theoretical models [Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, the Dual Threshold Model of Anger, and Asymmetrical Outcomes of Emotions], the paper highlights three broad and interrelated reasons why emotion displays could be deemed unfitting and inappropriate: (1) characteristics of the displayer (e.g., status, gender); (2) characteristics of the display (e.g., intensity, mode); and (3) characteristics of the context (e.g., national or organizational culture, topic of interaction). The review focuses on three different emotions—anger, sadness, and happiness—which differ in their valence based on how they feel to the displayer, but can yield different interpersonal outcomes. In conclusion, the paper argues that inappropriateness must be judged separately from whether an emotional display is civil (i.e., polite and courteous) or uncivil (i.e., rude, discourteous, and offensive). Testable propositions are presented, as well as suggested future research directions.