Difficult Questions Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction

Improving Mathematics Learning Outcomes Through Cooperative Learning Model Assisted by Media Dakota FPB and KPK

This research was conducted with the aim of improving learning outcomes in mathematics on the subject of FPB and KPK, in class IV students of MI Ma'arif Nu Kedungrandu for the 2022/2023 academic year using the STAD cooperative learning model assisted by dakota media. This type of research is classroom action research using the Kemmis and Mc Taggart model. The research subjects were all fourth grade students at MI Ma'arif Nu Kedungrandu in 2022/2023, consisting of 11 students, 8 boys and 3 girls. The object of this research is the results of learning mathematics on the subject of FPB and KPK on students. Data collection was obtained by the observation method and the test method to measure learning outcomes. The results showed that the class average score in cycle I was 82.6 with a weight of easy questions and a percentage of completeness of 80%, in cycle II the class average was 71 with a weight of difficult questions and a percentage of learning completeness of 80%. This research was said to be successful because 8 out of 10 students who took part in the action got a higher score equal to the specified KKM score. So it can be concluded that the STAD cooperative learning model assisted by dakota media can improve learning outcomes in mathematics on the subject of FPB and KPK in class IV students of MI Ma'arif Nu Kedungrandu in 2022/2023.

형사사건의 선결문제에서 수소법원(受訴法院)의 심사범위와 그 한계

In the preliminaries of criminal cases, it is still a difficult question whether the criminal court can examine the illegality or effectiveness of administrative dispositions related to the elements of the crime. In a criminal case, it is reasonable to assume that the court of a lawsuit can examine and judge the violation of the administrative disposition, which has become a matter for a prior decision, in a limited way. If the illegality of the administrative disposition, which became a matter of pre-determined, is objectively clear and it is not necessary to punish the accused, etc. the criminal court may recognize the illegality of the administrative disposition. This is the case when the competent administrative agency clearly violates an essential procedural requirement stipulated by the statute or when the precedent for the illegality of the administrative dispositions is firm. However, when the violation of the Administrative Procedure Act or procedural error in administrative dispositions is disputed in interpretation, it is not desirable for the criminal court, not the administrative court, to actively review the illegality of the administrative disposition. In addition, the criminal court needs to be more careful when examining the substantive illegality of the administrative disposition, which is a preliminary question. It is the jurisdiction of the administrative court as a specialized court to examine the substantive illegality of an administrative disposition through the discretionary or balancing theory, the general principles of administrative law. In an investigation process, the prosecutor cannot closely examine the substantive and procedural illegality of the administrative disposition, which is a component of the crime. The Constitutional Court of Korea directly should not cancel an administrative act on the ground of procedural illegality in the constitutional complaint adjudication on suspension of the indictment. It may violate the jurisdiction of the specialized court. Procedural errors in administrative dispositions are not subject to adjudication in constitutional complaints, and judgments on their violations fall within the competence of the administrative court. This is not a question of constitutional interpretation but statutory interpretation.

Persia and the Enlightenment. Edited by Cyrus Masroori, Whitney Mannies, and John Christian Laursen

Cyrus Masroori, Whitney Mannies, and John Christian Laursen — all three scholars of political science — have brought together contributors from the United States, France, Spain, Italy, and Brazil to address a subject that has been drawing attention at least since Paul Hazard discussed Montesquieu’s Persians in La Crise de la conscience européenne (1680–1715) (Paris: Boivin, 1935). In the Introduction, Masroori and Mannies present theoretical diversity as the best approach to the multiplicity of connections between Persia and Enlightenment, also distancing themselves from Edward Said’s Orientalism. At the same time, drawing on the legacy of Foucault’s thinking, they suggest that the ‘significance of Persia to the Enlightenment may help us better understand the Enlightenment and modernity’ and define Enlightenment as an ‘effort to generate a new narrative of identity for Europe’ (pp. 9, 10). The volume thus argues for the primacy of representation and contributes to the study of how and why Europeans drew upon their perceptions of Persia to fight their many battles. Within this frame, the editors’ approach has been effective. Breadth of subject and methodology allow for some tours de force on well-known topics and on sources which will prove useful to the uninitiated reader: John Marshall’s essay on Persian tolerance; the article by Masroori and Laursen on European knowledge of Persia before the Enlightenment; Mannies’s discussion of Persia in the Encyclopédie; and Myrtille Méricam-Bourdet’s article on Voltaire and Persia. The book also makes space for excellent empirical research on little-known materials, as is the case with Rolando Minuti’s essay on European perceptions of Nādir Shāh, Masroori’s study of George Lyttelton’s Letters from a Persian (1735), and Erica J. Mannucci’s analysis of late-eighteenth-century French uses of Zoroastrians. Some of the interpretive perspectives also contribute to the revitalization of the research field. Minuti brings into play Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of Sattelzeit when analysing how shifting concepts of patriotism impacted on European political judgements about Nādir Shāh; Masroori and Mannucci show the potential of a balanced study of political circumstances and long-term intellectual developments; Mannucci and Mannies draw attention to the transition from allegorical, polemical, or satirical representations of Persia to the country’s embedding into historical narratives, although history itself is not neutral, as they acknowledge. However, the editors’ approach is also conducive to some weaknesses. Methodological diversity can give way to impressionism, as we find in Antônio Carlos dos Santos’s essay on the connections between travelling and tolerance. In the case of the otherwise masterly article by Marta García-Alonso on Pierre Bayle’s use of ‘Persian theology’, the Persian element is so elusive that the reader is left wondering whether specific reasons drew Enlightened Europe towards Persia, or whether Persia was just another manifestation of the exotic. Despite this, however, the volume is worth reading — especially by students of the French Enlightenment — since it offers a wealth of old and new material on how Enlightened Europe shaped itself by engaging with Persia, but also because it constitutes a step towards answering the difficult question of the specific value of Persia vis-à-vis other extra-European polities.

“The Cloven Hoof under the Cassock”: Sacrifice Hidden in the Hebrew Bible and Roger Scruton

A typology of sacrifice is applied to the study of Roger Scruton’s religious philosophy, in order to contemplate the ways in which dissidence against totalitarianism can become a positive form of self-giving. The mimetic theory of René Girard can help us to see how totalitarianism creates a sacrificial crisis by demanding, on the one hand, that individuals sacrifice themselves for the regime, and yet, on the other hand, empties such sacrifices of the type of self-giving that makes a sacrifice not just efficacious but also nonviolent. The deprivations that a regime inflicts on its subjects, for example with respect to education and careers, are enforced forms of sacrifice. With respect to the self-giving enacted in visible dissidence, there is a performative dimension to such self-giving that brings both sacrifices and rewards of a public nature. In his novel, Notes from Underground, Scruton explores the private, underground world of people who are excluded even from such careers of public dissidence. The difficult question Scruton confronts is how any regenerative self-giving is possible among people who in their isolation and powerlessness have nothing to give. While Girard’s mimetic theory helps account for the systematic desecration at work in totalitarian cultures, the biblical typology of sacrifice offered by Moshe Halbertal in his disagreement with Girard offers improvements to such a theoretical framework. Halbertal’s typology of sacrifice better accounts for the instances of spiritual transcendence considered by Scruton in his novel, and also in Scruton’s posthumous final work, Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption.

Harnessing fast and slow thinking to ensure sustainability of general practice and functional universal health coverage in Australia.

Harnessing fast and slow thinking to ensure sustainability of general practice and functional universal health coverage in Australia.

On a parametric family of distance measures that includes the Hellinger and the Bures distances

In this paper we define a parametric family of certain two-variable maps on positive cones of C⁎-algebras. The square roots of the values of those maps under a faithful tracial positive linear functional (in the cases where the square roots are well defined, i.e., those values are non-negative real numbers on the whole cones) as two-variable numerical functions can be considered as a family of potential distance measures which includes the well known Hellinger and Bures metrics. We study that family from various points of view. The main questions concern the mentioned problem of well-definedness and, whenever we have an affirmative answer to that question, the problem whether those distance measures are true metrics. Besides, we obtain some related trace characterizations. Our study is not complete, we formulate a few probably quite difficult open questions.

Conjoined Twins in Medieval Imagery

Abstract Notwithstanding their rarity, conjoined twins have often been remarked and represented throughout human history. The medieval visual record includes two depictions of historical twins, some exotic two-headed monsters, the ancient god Janus, and many instances of the zodiac Gemini as conjoined. Comparing the imagery with physiological fact, it is clear that artists were familiar with various forms of natural corporeal fusion, although they were also prone to misunderstandings. The representations reflect conflicting conceptions of the phenomenon debated among Western theologians and philosophers, that they were one person or two. Conjoined twins are found in both European and Islamic art. The conjoined Gemini, in particular, began to appear regularly in both cultures at roughly the same time toward the beginning of the thirteenth century, with possible earlier hints in the West. This parallel iconographical development raises difficult questions of genealogy and dissemination.

Theoretical Advances in the Ecology and Evolution of Mutualistic Interactions – Review of a Symposium (SYMP 14) Organized at ESA + CSEE 2022 Joint Meeting

Theoretical Advances in the Ecology and Evolution of Mutualistic Interactions – Review of a Symposium (<scp>SYMP</scp> 14) Organized at <scp>ESA</scp> + <scp>CSEE</scp> 2022 Joint Meeting

The Contingencies Associated with Certification and Licensure

The science of behavior began in the laboratory setting, focusing on the direct measurement of behavior-environment relations. The field of applied behavior analysis (ABA) is relatively new with the first publications in the flagship journal, The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, appearing in 1968. Soon the application of the science was applied to the treatment of autism and, due to its tremendous success, the number of professionals claiming to use behavioral procedures increased exponentially. It became obvious that some sort of systemic oversight needed to be created to protect both consumers and practitioners, and difficult questions had to be raised concerning licensure, certification, which was more advantageous to pursue, and with what consequences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the historical roots of behavior analysis and provide commentary and context to the movement of certification up to the current day. Current challenges within the field of ABA will also be reviewed, along with recommendations to ensure that ABA-based intervention in the future is high in quality.

On Kant’s Janus-Faced Transcendental and Empirical Conception of the Human Being

ABSTRACT There has been increased attention to the empirical and naturalistic dimensions of Kant’s philosophy in recent decades, across both his theoretical and practical philosophy. Anik Waldow’s impressively wide-ranging and carefully argued book, Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature (Waldow 2020), clearly demonstrates the fruits of this reoriented focus, not only in the case of Kant, but also in all the embodied agency-oriented conceptions of experience that she brings to light across the early modern period in the thought of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, and Kant. Here, I focus on Waldow’s analysis of the a priori and empirical dimensions of Kant’s conception of the human agent. In particular, I set that analysis within the wider context of Kant’s multi-levelled and presuppositional conception of the sciences, both theoretical and practical, and consider some of the difficult questions that arise concerning Kant’s transcendental idealist conception of our freedom within nature.

Object Analysis of Multiple Choice Writing Test to Know Students' Understanding

This study aims to determine the understanding of students on thematic subject matter grade 1 theme 1 sub theme 3. This research is a form of item analysis using the form of multiple choice written tests packaged in daily tests. This research uses descriptive research quantitative approach. The subject of this research is grade 1 Madrasah Ibtidaiyah Negeri 1 Jember. This research analyzes the items by paying attention to: 1) Analysis of Problem Difficulty Level and 2) Analysis of Learning Completeness. From the above analysis it was found that of the 10 questions that had been given there were 5 easy questions, 4 medium questions and 1 difficult question. In addition, in this study there was 74% percentage of overall learning completeness. So it can be concluded that grade 1 students of Madrasah Ibtidaiyah Negeri 1 Jember understand students quite well in thematic subjects theme 1 (myself) sub theme 3.

Daring to Dream: Contextualizing B. M. Bower’s The Eagle’s Wing with Colorado River Compact History

Daring to DreamContextualizing B. M. Bower’s The Eagle’s Wing with Colorado River Compact History Patricia J. Rettig (bio) For the seven US states of the Colorado River Basin, 2022 was to be the year for centennial celebrations of the Colorado River Compact, the multistate legal agreement that changed the West. Instead, as low river flows threatened water supplies for homes, farms, and power production, historical reflections were overridden by discussions of the increasingly urgent environmental and management challenges the Compact caused. Indeed, calls to renegotiate the Compact demonstrate the dire circumstances. An innovative document drafted and negotiated between January and November 1922, the Colorado River Compact, crafted to achieve solutions for its time, marked a turning point for the region. Most immediately the end goal for the seven southwestern states was to agree on how to share the river and thereby resolve the interstate conflicts impeding river development. By ensuring some level of certainty, the agreement enabled construction of dams for flood control, water storage, and power supply. Engaging creatively with this “subject of national importance and interest” the very same year, popular western writer B. M. Bower crafted a novel dedicated to the idea of damming the Colorado River. With the “timely” topic being an unconventional choice for Bower, The Eagle’s Wing: A Story of the Colorado became the first novel to depict the dam-building era of Colorado River development.1 In the book Bower presents a dramatic alternative approach to dam building, shaking characters out of their complacency and confronting readers with difficult questions. Contextualizing this otherwise obscure novel with primary sources conveying the history of the Colorado River Compact—especially [End Page 47] documents of originator Delph Carpenter—reveals how perceptively Bower commented on contemporary river issues. The novel generally aligned with the times but diverged in important ways as well. Examining The Eagle’s Wing in light of Colorado River Compact history shows the dominant interest in solving river problems through innovation, creativity, and action. This essay will draw on Colorado River Compact history after it first positions The Eagle’s Wing within the broader context of B. M. Bower’s work. Then, following a review of scholarship on Bower and The Eagle’s Wing, Delph Carpenter’s compact concept will be explored, primarily using a reflective essay he wrote. The successful process that brought about the Compact will be summarized through the Colorado River Commission meeting minutes and other historical documents. These contextualizing elements will then be used to illuminate how The Eagle’s Wing aligned with and diverged from its times, and what it can show us now. B. M. Bower and The Eagle’s Wing Though unknown to the public now but recently recovered by literary scholars, B. M. Bower (1871–1940) was, according to William Bloodworth, “the only woman to become an important writer of westerns” (95). Bower, whose complete name by 1921 was Bertha Muzzy Bower Sinclair Cowan,2 published more than one hundred short stories and nearly seventy novels between 1904 and 1941. Twenty years and more than thirty novels into her career with the publication of The Eagle’s Wing: A Story of the Colorado by Little, Brown and Company in 1924, Bower had built her nationally popular reputation on formula Westerns of the type involving cowboys, cattle, and conflict, where the good guy gets the girl. Having always incorporated less violence in her stories than did male writers, such as competitors Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford, Bower became comfortable with departures from the formula as her career progressed (Arbuckle 76; Baym 185; Bloodworth 101). In May 1922, when she was likely working on The Eagle’s Wing, Bower wrote to her publisher that she desired to “avoid that killing quality of sameness” across her novels.3 Though Bower wrote more than cowboy Westerns, these have been the focus for literary scholars recently recovering her work. [End Page 48] From the first to the most recent scholarship, Bower’s Chip of the Flying U (1904) and the related “Happy Family” books (fifteen in all) have garnered the most attention.4 These novels and stories, published over the course of thirty years, featured cowboy Chip...

The physician’s fix.

I invite readers to ponder the complexities of modern medicine and the impacts of treatments on individuals, their families, and their quality of life. I want readers to challenge themselves- asking difficult questions regarding what really matters during end of life- personhood, dignity, and an acknowledgement that a person is much more than only functioning physiology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human by Maren Tova Linett

<i>Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human</i> by Maren Tova Linett

The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class by Tomila Lankina

Histories of Russia focus almost exclusively on discontinuities—the “Time of Troubles” in the sixteenth century, the Emancipation Act of 1861, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Such emphases have reinforced a general view of Russian society as perpetually lurching from crisis to crisis. There is certainly value in the study of Russian upheaval; episodes of instability can shed light on larger questions about social and political organization in the past. But, according to Lankina, the (often overlooked) continuities across ruptures can teach us at least as much, as is borne out by the findings of her ambitious new study of the Russian middle class.In this book, Lankina investigates the reproduction of Russia’s small but (as she shows) constant bourgeois stratum from the imperial era, across the turmoil and upheaval of the twentieth century, to the post-Soviet present day. She is interested in the transmission of values across generations and the implications of this phenomenon for social, political, and economic development. Can we connect those estates (socio-legal groups, or soslovii in Russian) associated with “bourgeois” values in the imperial period to the Soviet intelligentsia in the twentieth century, and further, to groups with more positive views of democratic reforms in Russia today? And can we draw any larger lessons from the Russian case?These are, as Lankina herself acknowledges, big, complicated, and difficult questions to answer; refreshingly, she approaches them as such. Instead of reducing the problem to one narrow question that she can address using data alone, she takes a truly interdisciplinary approach, consulting literatures and methodologies from a range of fields, including history, sociology, and quantitative political science. She uses both textual and quantitative evidence and formulates her hypotheses in relation to a broad range of disciplinary concepts from Weber’s notion of the Ständestaat and Bourdieu’s idea of “cultural capital” to de Vries’ “industrious revolution” and Piketty’s recent work on inequality.1Lankina moves comfortably between micro-history and statistical analysis, between a local archive filled with textual sources and large data sets. She quickly introduces us to a local community in Samara province in the nineteenth century, the fortunes of which she follows across generations. These people’s actions and words—the way in which they perceived their social identity and values and the choices that they made—provide a context for interpreting the statistical findings in later chapters. Similarly, Lankina finds interesting ways to use data to address the issue of long-run social reproduction. Connecting estate membership to professions and educational indicators in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods—along with other proxies for characteristics associated with bourgeois estates—she makes the case for much greater “intergenerational resilience” than the existing literature about Russia implies. Thus, she casts doubt on the idea that the so-called “Soviet experiment” succeeded in leveling the old estate hierarchies. In fact, she argues that the correlations between educational groups and democratic preferences that emerge from the contemporary data are surprisingly consistent with indicators for the imperial period. Hence, rather than breaking down imperial social identities, the turmoil of the Soviet years may have bolstered and reinforced them, at least among members of the middling estates studied in this book.Ever aware of the limitations of her sources and the ambitious pioneering nature of her project, Lankina places most of her emphasis on the questions raised by her findings and their significance to broader inquiries about persistent inequality and the role of human capital and social identity in creating long-run intergenerational resilience. In a world of increasingly specialized research, Lankina reminds us of the value of interdisciplinary approaches, showing how they can shed new light on our most challenging contemporary problems.

Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times curated by Paul Basu

Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times curated by Paul Basu

Three-dimensional solar active region magnetohydrostatic models and their stability using Euler potentials

Active regions (ARs) are magnetic structures typically found in the solar atmosphere. We calculated several magnetohydrostatic (MHS) equilibrium models that include the effect of a finite plasma-β and gravity and that are representative of AR structures in three dimensions. The construction of the models is based on the use of two Euler potentials, α and β, that represent the magnetic field as B = ∇α × ∇β. The ideal MHS nonlinear partial differential equations were solved numerically using finite elements in a fixed 3D rectangular domain. The boundary conditions were initially chosen to correspond to a potential magnetic field (current-free) with known analytical expressions for the corresponding Euler potentials. The distinctive feature of our model is that we incorporated the effect of shear by progressively deforming the initial potential magnetic field. This procedure is quite generic and allowed us to generate a vast variety of MHS models. The thermal structure of the ARs was incorporated through the dependence of gas pressure and temperature on the Euler potentials. Using this method, we achieved the characteristic hot and overdense plasma found in ARs, but we demonstrate that the method can also be applied to study configurations with open magnetic field lines. Furthermore, we investigated basic topologies that include neutral lines. Our focus is on the force balance of the structures, and we do not consider the energy balance in the constructed models. In addition, we addressed the difficult question of the stability of the calculated 3D models. We find that if the plasma is convectively stable, then the system is not prone, in general, to develop magnetic Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. However, when the plasma-β is increased or the density at the core of the AR is high, then the magnetic configuration becomes unstable due to magnetic buoyancy.

Suffering and the dilemmas of pediatric care: a response to Tyler Tate.

In a recent article, Tyler Tate argues that the suffering of children-especially children with severe cognitive impairments-should be regarded as the antithesis of flourishing, where flourishing is relative to one's individual characteristics and essentially involves receiving care from others. Although initially persuasive, Tate's theory is ambiguous in several ways, leading to significant conceptual problems. By identifying flourishing with receiving care, Tate raises questions about the importance of care that he does not address, giving rise to a bootstrapping problem. By making flourishing relative to an individual's circumstances, Tate is forced to confront questions about exactly how relative it can be, suggesting the possibility that, on his view, to flourish is simply to be however one is. In an attempt to surmount these problems, I offer a revision and restatement of Tate's view that defines the relationship between individualized flourishing and the more conventional, species-relative concept, and describe more clearly the role that care should play with respect to flourishing-one that is instrumental and not merely constitutive. Even this restated view, however, fails to answer difficult questions about how one should respond to the medical needs of some children, highlighting the fact that a conceptual analysis of suffering may do little, in the end, to untangle ethical dilemmas in the care of severely ill children.

Statics and dynamics of Russia’s political culture in the XX–XXI centuries (to the question of the DNA of Russia)

The article raises a very difficult question about the cultural code underlying the Russian civilization. The author analyzes the structure of political culture, singles out its “ontological” component, offers his own version of a set of constants that determine the basic foundations of national DNA. At the same time, as a result of a comparative analysis of the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet experience, their rootedness and continuity in the domestic political culture can be traced.