Certain Amount Of Freedom Research Articles

Autonomiaa vai kontrollia?

Autonomy or control? A case study in an organization striving to increase self-management In many organizations increasing self-management is a new way of working. The case organization of this study is a Finnish financial services organization with about 100 employees. We use qualitative interview data to explore the commonalities and contradictions in the interpretations of employees and management in an organization that is in a process of adopting a more self-managed way of working. We also examine the implementation of the basic assumptions of Self-Determination Theory in today's organizational environment. We approach the issue from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Our analysis shows that self-management in the target organization is initiated and controlled by management, which sets strict limits but allows only a certain amount of freedom. Our case study provides both theoretical and practical insights into the discussion of the process of increasing self-management.

District nurses’ experiences of advanced medical technology in home care: A qualitative interview study

The escalation in the number of medical devices in home care increases the demands on district nurses’ knowledge and skills. This qualitative interview study with 13 district nurses from Sweden aimed to describe their experiences of advanced medical technology in home care. The COREQ checklist for qualitative studies was applied. The results showed two categories: district nurses’ experiences of collaborating in teams and district nurses’ experiences of performing safe care. The safe use of advanced medical technology in home care required good collaboration between all the parties involved. This resulted in a certain amount of freedom and increased quality of life for the patients. District nurses needed time, continuity, practical training, and repeated education to be able to provide safe care. Distinct leadership was important at all organizational levels. The results can generate a safe and sustainable work environment for district nurses, almost independent of their technical background.

The Significance of Ontic-Cultural Layer for Personal Safety. The Prospect of Being and Having by Gabriel Marcel

Focusing on trading capital is giving up a certain amount of freedom. What is external, added, and managed, engages the subject in terms of itself, and thus limits him/her. In this way, what is owned, in the process of managing it, somehow uses the one who has it. Reducing human life to manage one resource or another is a soft contemporary form of violence that is growing with the proliferation of computerization, mediatization, and medicalization. This, first of all, causes a threat to personal safety. The article presents a personalist point of view on personal safety, based on a precise analysis by Gabriel Marcel work concerning the relation of the holder to the possessed entity.

Making History the UCW Way

Making History the UCW Way

Wieloznaczność pojęcia "kultura" w placówce szkolnej

This article describes the ambiguity of the concept of “culture” and its understanding in a broad and narrow sense in the area of school activities. Teachers in a school institution should educate students also in relation to themselves, to others, to teachers, parents, but they face many problems in this area, because quite often students define and understand the concept of culture, personal culture and behavior towards others diffrently. In response to the demands of the school and the pressure expressed in the school law, it is quite common for counter-cultural actions to be taken by the wards, which are usually not accepted by both the school authorities and some parents. The institution should be a place of freedom to the extent that all the actors in it respect certain established norms, but at the same time give a certain amount of freedom to the pupils to be different, individualistic (e.g. in dress, behaviour, preaching, artistic activity), as long as they do not harm their relatives or impose their views. In my research, it can be seen that this is not the case. The message from the organization is: “you can be different, but we will show you who we would like you to be”, which effectively inhibits mutual communication in this respect.

The Establishment and Activities of a Banking Syndicate: The “Red Cross” Stock Exchange

This article considers the activity of the syndicate also known as the “Red Cross” stock exchange. The authors study a unique case in Russia’s economic life where the State Bank established a syndicate based on the leading credit facilities of the empire in order to regulate the stock market. The study refers to archival materials form the Russian State Historical Archive, more particularly, business documents of the central office of the State Bank, the St Petersburg branch of the Bank, and the special Credit Chancellery. The authors employ traditional research methods, providing an objective systematic analysis of certain historical processes in the Russian economy and society. According to the government and St Petersburg bankers, the syndicate that appeared at the very start of the economic crisis of 1890 and 1903 was supposed to mitigate the negative consequences of the crisis for certain industrial enterprises and banks. The paper considers the first period of its existence from 1899 to 1911. Established at the initiative of Minister of Finance S. Yu. Witte and made up of the largest banks and banking houses, the syndicate was directly controlled by the State Bank, which provided it with resources for operations on the capital stock exchange. Operated by the country’s main bank, the syndicate enjoyed a certain amount of freedom, which allowed it buy dividend bonds. It is noteworthy that allocating the necessary funds for these exchange operations, the State Bank secured itself against potential losses, as all potential risks were to be managed by the banking union. Obviously, it was these conditions between the State Bank and the syndicate that enabled the latter to operate with some independence, pursuing its own commercial interests. The authors conclude that its operations at the exchange were conditioned by its own idea of the importance of certain dividend bonds for the stock exchange, which was reflected in the securities it bought. The syndicate’s operations on the St Petersburg Stock Exchange were contradictory, as its decisions were not always successful. However, it managed to avoid considerable losses and finished its operations with a profit in 1911.

Degrees of freedom

Human freedom is in tension with nomological determinism and with statistical determinism. The goal of this paper is to answer both challenges. Four contributions are made to the free-will debate. First, we propose a classification of scientific theories based on how much freedom they allow. We take into account that indeterminism comes in different degrees and that both the laws and the auxiliary conditions can place constraints. A scientific worldview pulls towards one end of this classification, while libertarianism pulls towards the other end of the spectrum. Second, inspired by Hoefer, we argue that an interval of auxiliary conditions corresponds to a region in phase space, and to a bundle of possible block universes. We thus make room for a form of non-nomological indeterminism. Third, we combine crucial elements from the works of Hoefer and List; we attempt to give a libertarian reading of this combination. On our proposal, throughout spacetime, there is a certain amount of freedom (equivalent to setting the initial, intermediate, or final conditions) that can be interpreted as the result of agential choices. Fourth, we focus on the principle of alternative possibilities throughout and propose three ways of strengthening it.

Helstrom measurement: A nondestructive implementation

We discuss an implementation of the minimum error state discrimination measurement, originally introduced by Helstrom [Quantum Detection and Estimation Theory (Academic Press, New York, 1976)]. In this implementation, instead of performing the optimal projective measurement directly on the system, it is first entangled to an ancillary system and the measurement is performed on the ancilla. We show that, by an appropriate choice of the entanglement transformation, the Helstrom bound can be attained. The advantage of this approach is twofold. First, it provides an implementation when the optimal projective measurement cannot be directly performed. For example, in the case of continuous variable states (binary and $N$ phase-shifted coherent signals), the available detection methods, photon counting and homodyning, are insufficient to perform the required cat-state projection. In the case of symmetric states, the square-root measurement is optimal, but it is not easy to perform directly for more than two states. Our approach provides a feasible alternative in both cases. Second, the measurement is nondestructive from the point of view of the original system and one has a certain amount of freedom in designing the post-measurement state, which can then be processed further.

OJEBETA “THE SELF AWAKENED” IN BUCHI EMECHETA’S THE SLAVE GIRL

The novel “The Slave Girl” by Buchi Emecheta exposes the plights of African women and portrayal of their struggle as slaves and ultimately how they come up the problem and becomes a self-awakened. In this paper, one can see Ojebeta starting her life as a slave and finally becomes an owner of a house by passing so many phases of life as a slave. In the beginning, she is sold into domestic slavery by her own brother. She has become the victim to her brother’s traits. She has become a scapegoat to the plans of African patriarchy. The intention of Buchi Emecheta is to recreate the image of women through feminism. Emecheta’s fiction is blended with reality representing socio historical elements of the prevailing society and its environment besides questioning the pathetic conditions of the people in general and women in particular. One can observe the narration of innocence of childhood grown into adulthood by attaining certain amount of freedom with the Christian education which she has received with which she has attained a small degree of self-awareness.

Deep Brain Stimulation, Authenticity and Value.

In this article, we engage in dialogue with Jonathan Pugh, Hannah Maslen, and Julian Savulescu about how to best interpret the potential impacts of deep brain stimulation on the self. We consider whether ordinary peoples' convictions about the true self should be interpreted in essentialist or existentialist ways. Like Pugh, Maslen, and Savulescu, we argue that it is useful to understand the notion of the true self as having both essentialist and existentialist components. We also consider two ideas from existentialist philosophy-Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's ideas about "bad faith" and "ambiguity"-to argue that there can be value to patients in regarding themselves as having a certain amount of freedom to choose what aspects of themselves should be considered representative of their true selves. Lastly, we consider the case of an anorexia nervosa patient who shifts between conflicting mind-sets. We argue that mind-sets in which it is easier for the patient and his or her family to share values can plausibly be considered to be more representative of the patient's true self, if this promotes a well-functioning relationship between the patient and the family. However, we also argue that families are well advised to give patients room to determine what such shared values mean to them, as it can be alienating for patients if they feel that others try to impose values on them from the outside.

Harmony Korine’s <em>Trash Humpers</em>: From Alternative to Hipster

Harmony Korine’s <em>Trash Humpers</em>: From Alternative to Hipster

On the b-quark running mass in QCD and the SM

We consider electroweak corrections to the relation between the running MS‾ mass mb of the b quark in the five-flavor QCD×QED effective theory and its counterpart in the Standard Model (SM). As a bridge between the two parameters, we use the pole mass Mb of the b quark, which can be calculated in both models. The running mass is not a fundamental parameter of the SM Lagrangian, but the product of the running Yukawa coupling yb and the Higgs vacuum expectation value. Since there exist different prescriptions to define the latter, the relations considered in the paper involve a certain amount of freedom. All the definitions can be related to each other in perturbation theory. Nevertheless, we argue in favour of a certain gauge-independent prescription and provide a relation which can be directly used to deduce the value of the Yukawa coupling of the b quark at the electroweak scale from its effective QCD running mass. This approach allows one to resum large logarithms ln⁡(mb/Mt) systematically. Numerical analysis shows that, indeed, the corrections to the proposed relation are much smaller than those between yb and Mb.

PROSUMERYZM AND CUSTOMER MIGRATION STRATEGY TO ONLINE CHANNEL – DO THEY HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON?

The aim of the article is to evaluate the possibilities of using prosumerism assumptions within the disadvantageous for clients variants of E-channel migration strategy. The author has attempted to demonstrate that the practice of respecting customers by leaving them at least a certain amount of freedom to decide and the possible involvement in certain areas of the service business can help to reduce the negative effects of E-channel migration strategy. The article presents the essence of prosumerism and one of its manifestations – price participation. The rest of article has pointed out the practical possibilities to adapt the theoretical assumptions for the increasingly popular strategy of e-channel migration strategy (strategy based on punishments and forced strategy).

Board 285 - Program Innovations Abstract Using professional actors in simulation teaching of communication skills

Introduction/Background The teaching of communication skills of nurses in the Czech Republic is mostly carried out by theoretical teaching. It became evident that the application of this knowledge is difficult to apply to practice. Simulation teaching offers a more effective alternative in the field of communication skills of nurses. Simulation enables, besides other things, a link between theory and practice and an immediate feedback to students. The most realistic simulations are achieved with actors, who represent real patients, so called standardized patients. The professional actors performing standardized patients have not been involved in simulated education in the Czech Republic yet. The aim of our project was to develop methodology of creating simulation courses for nurses based on scenarios with professional actors respecting culture environment of the Czech Republic. Methods The development of methodology was challenging: we had to choose the type of scenarios, how to control the actors, to determine the size of group and the structure of individual blocks. The scenarios were prepared by psychologist and scriptwriter. As the optimal solution we have chosen semi-structured scenarios giving a certain amount of freedom to the actor during performance, while at the same time the psychologist wirelessly prompt the actor. In the roles of standardized patients we have cast professional actors from Brno’s Theaters. Eight to ten students experienced the simulated situations with the given type of patient in one block. Blocks of simulation teaching started with a general introduction into the given subject. The simulation itself took from 5 to 10 minutes. The teaching took place in three adjacent rooms with an audio visual link (a simulated hospital room; a room to follow the course of simulation and for debriefing; a room for teachers and visitors). The simulation was played out according to the following general scheme: A student entered the simulated hospital room where an actor acting a patient had already been waiting. A psychologist and other students were watching the situation on a monitor screen in the next room. If needed, the psychologist could adjust the development of the situation or stop it at all. The debriefing under the guidance of psychologist immediately followed. When required, the particular student could repeat the simulated situation again. At the end of a block, the whole block was evaluated. Results: Conclusion In cooperation with psychologists we have created a simulation training of communication skills for nurses. For the first time in the Czech Republic, we have used standardized patients represented by professional actors. We have created semi-structured scenarios for training appropriate communication simulating jovial, depressive and aggressive patients. There have been 12 blocks of simulation teaching carried out, attended by 83 students of affiliated nursing schools during three months. It follows from a survey (58 returned questionnaires) that 69% of students reevaluated their attitude towards communication with patients, 83% students would like to have simulation teaching added to the curriculum, and 85% of students wish to participate in simulation teaching again. Based on the evaluation, 93% of students perceive the simulation teaching very positively. In the following two years we plan to spend 180 hours of simulation teaching of communication skills for nursing schools students and 160 hours for nursing schools teachers. Based on our methodology we are preparing other scenarios, such as communication with family of deceased person or a handicapped patient. The simulations are not intended for students only but also for professional and general public interested in communication skills. Disclosures None.

The Moral Failure of the Women in John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice

John Ford (1586-1639), who was among the final tragedians of the late English Renaissance, started his career with non-dramatic works and after various dramatic collaborations with Dekker and Heywood, he created three solo tragedies- namely Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the Broken Heart and Love’s Sacrifice- all of which gave clues about the human psychology. Ford employed the themes of love, adultery, desire and death in the afore-mentioned pieces and he always struggled to give his women the freedom their society depraved them of. In Love’s Sacrifice (1633), John Ford produces five women characters all of whom can fearlessly voice their feelings. The typical sixteenth/seventeenth century woman was supposed to be silent and submissive standing only in the domestic sphere allotted to her but Ford’s female characters have been given a certain amount of freedom: the characters to be discussed never hesitate to externalize how they feel or they act in accordance with their wishes. On the one hand, the women can express their desires and Ford seems to favour them. On the other hand, however, he represents them with their defects and all of the women experience moral failure. The aim of this study, thus, is to show the ambivalent attitude of John Ford towards his women. Given the portrayal and consequences of the women’s behaviour, it will be concluded that John Ford was a man of patriarchy and although he seemed to side with his women characters, he promoted the patriarchal order through Love’s Sacrifice.

Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s "Swallowing Clouds"

Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s "Swallowing Clouds"

Computer-based Role Playing Game Environment for Analogue Electronics

An implementation of a design for a game based virtual learning environment is described. The game is developed for a course in analogue electronics, and the topic is the design of a power supply. This task can be solved in a number of different ways, with certain constraints, giving the students a certain amount of freedom, although the game is designed not to facilitate trial-and-error approach. The use of storytelling and a virtual gaming environment provides the student with the learning material in a MMORPG environment.

O sincretismo de culturas sob a ótica da arquitetura vernácula do imigrante japonês na cidade de Registro, São Paulo

O presente artigo aborda os métodos construtivos empregados pelos imigrantes japoneses que vieram, em 1918, para a cidade de Registro, na região do Vale do Ribeira do Iguape, no estado de São Paulo. A vinda dessa nova frente de imigração foi incentivada pelo Governo do Estado, com o propósito de promover o processo de colonização, bem como de estimular o desenvolvimento econômico do Vale do Ribeira do Iguape por meio da expansão da cultura do café para a região. As características dessa frente de imigração são muito diferenciadas em relação às demais, tendo em vista que os que dela faziam parte chegaram ao Brasil como proprietários de terras e com apoio financeiro e logístico oferecido por uma empresa particular japonesa, responsável por gerenciar o empreendimento. Esses imigrantes, portanto, contaram com auxílio de uma complexa infra-estrutura, cujo objetivo era viabilizar a sua missão de desenvolvimento da região. Mesmo tendo essa particularidade lhes proporcionado a liberdade de recriar sua cultura em solo brasileiro, a realidade do novo habitat forçou-os a reinterpretar seus hábitos culturais ante as novas circunstâncias físicas, econômicas e sociais encontradas. A fim de entender esse processo de adaptação, foi realizado um estudo dos métodos construtivos empregados em suas edificações, baseado nos conhecimentos desses imigrantes sobre sua arquitetura tradicional. Essa análise permitiu examinar o longo processo de sincretismo entre a cultura oriental e o conhecimento construtivo vernáculo dos habitantes do Vale do Ribeira do Iguape.

My Experience as Artist and Adjunct

My Experience as Artist and Adjunct Dugan McGinley (bio) I was grateful to the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession for inviting me to be a part of the 2005 "Got Life?" panel, especially given that I am not a woman. Being a gay white man, I carry my own set of privileges and disadvantages in my negotiations within academia. I wanted to recognize this up front and be clear that I could not systematically deal with that aspect of my personal experience in the short paper I was presenting at the conference. More, I hoped what I had to say would provide insights for everyone to consider in light of their own situations. Of course, each panelist brought her or his own particularities to the discussion, which ultimately influenced the perspective they represented. What I focused on, and what I was invited to address for the panel, was my experience as a scholar of religion who is also a performing artist and the challenges I have encountered teaching as an adjunct professor. The essay that follows is based on that presentation. Although a few changes in my circumstances have occurred since that time, the issues I discuss remain as relevant as ever. From the time I was asked to participate in the "Got Life?" panel, I made notes to myself whenever something popped up in my life that I thought was relevant, so my thoughts in this essay represent the themes that recurred most [End Page 135] frequently in my notes and the ideas that resonated most strongly for me at the time. I organized my thoughts into three nebulous categories to provide some kind of framework: philosophical, practical, and political. You will see that all of my thoughts overlap and these categories are somewhat artificial, but I believe this point in itself is what the panel was all about: the boundaries and constraints—both real and imagined—we encounter in making a life for ourselves. Setting boundaries can be a tricky business: we make them as part of the task of maintaining balance in our lives, but sometimes these boundaries later confine us because others perceive them as limitations or deficits. So, let me start with the "philosophical": I think at the heart of my reflection is a basic question about what it means to pursue a career and what it means to build a well-rounded life. Sometimes, as my fellow panelists make clear, constraints are enforced upon us externally, so some choices feel out of our control. I could list a number of life events that have intruded on my plans and forced a rethinking. In the absence of those kinds of pressures, however, or when such constraints feel managed (and I should note that I do not have children, but I do have a partner), I feel a certain amount of freedom to pursue my "dreams," whatever that means. I have wanted to be a musician since I was young and I want to nurture that part of me as more than just a hobby. This is a challenge for anyone interested in pursuing the arts in a serious way. But I also have a number of academic interests that are not always about my art. In my liberal arts education, I internalized the message that developing an array of skills and talents is a good thing, not only because it would make me a better person but also for the practical reason that people these days change careers more often than in the past. The philosophical question then emerges of how much energy one devotes to "forging a career" versus "making a meaningful life" and how much these pursuits overlap. I believed that getting my PhD was a way of doing both, although I have always been unsure exactly what this career path would look like. Now, on the other end with my PhD in hand, it feels like a narrow focus is rewarded and other pursuits are viewed as distractions. This leads me to the "practical": as much as I internalized the message that developing an array of skills and talents is a good thing, it does not always translate...

Retrieval of aerosol properties over land surfaces: capabilities of multiple-viewing-angle intensity and polarization measurements

We investigate the capabilities of different instrument concepts for the retrieval of aerosol properties over land. It was found that, if the surface reflection properties are unknown, only multiple-viewing-angle measurements of both intensity and polarization are able to provide the relevant aerosol parameters with sufficient accuracy for climate research. Furthermore, retrieval errors are only little affected when the number of viewing angles is increased at the cost of the number of spectral sampling points and vice versa. This indicates that there is a certain amount of freedom for the instrument design of dedicated aerosol instruments. The final choice on the trade-off between the spectral sampling and the number of viewing angles should be made taking other factors into account, such as instrument complexity and the ability to obtain global coverage.