Early Commitments Research Articles

Pentecostal Eschatology, Public Discourse and Political Engagement in Chile

This article explores the intricate evolution of Chilean Pentecostals from apolitical and socially detached citizens to ardent supporters of the country’s dictatorship. The aim is to challenge prevailing historical assumptions that explain the transformation through factors exogenous to the movement as well as long-held interpretations of their eschatological dispositions. It looks to revisit their early theological commitments and millennial concerns, complicating scholarly claims that the movement reflected a clear premillennialist orientation which has been held up to explain their enduring reluctance to enter the political sphere prior to the 1973 military coup. By examining early Pentecostal publications, this article reveals a religious movement shaped by pneumatological expressions, Methodist beliefs and local autonomy. Contrary to normative interpretations, it argues that Chilean Pentecostals’ longstanding unwillingness to engage in political change was not a forgone conclusion rooted in their theological commitments. Political engagement was always a possibility rather than a clear deviation. This research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Chilean Pentecostalism, shedding light on the complex interplay of theology, historical context and scholarly interpretations that have shaped our understanding of the movement’s political trajectory.

Global Conquests, Global Infidels: The Junta of Burgos (1512) Seen Through Integrated Mediterranean and Atlantic Contexts

ABSTRACT Traditional scholarship has been marked by a sharp division between historians working on two apparently discrete maritime systems in the early modern era—the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In recent years, though, scholars have begun to recognize the extent to which these spheres were in fact imbricated, in the movement of peoples and commodities as well as in the intangibles of ideology and legal doctrines, some of which had very concrete effects on the lives and status of millions of individuals. This article examines several legal questions pertaining to the status of recently conquered peoples by bringing together sources that address the legal status of new subjects of the Spanish monarchy, including the Laws of Burgos (1512), the Amendments of Valladolid (1513), along with several treatises by jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios, theologian Matías de Paz, and Bartolomé de las Casas. This microhistorical analysis of the questions examined at the Junta of Burgos sheds light on the ways in which our understanding of the legal doctrines of empire is immensely enriched and clarified when we integrate the Mediterranean and Atlantic angles of early modern Spanish commitments.

Organizational dominance and the rise of corporate professionalism: The case of management consultancy in the UK

Abstract While recent debates about the professions have noted the pervasive influence of organizations, less is known about how this plays out at the macro or occupational level. In this paper, we address this concern, focusing on corporate professionalism (CP) as an emergent form which appears to be shaped by organizational interests. Drawing on relational perspectives of professions, we focus on the strategies of two associations in the UK management consultancy field over a 50-year period. Our analysis of archival and interview data reveals how, over time, both associations substantially modified their strategies in response to shifting priorities of firms employing large numbers of consultants—abandoning early commitments to occupational professionalism in favor of a corporate form. A key contribution of the paper is to develop a process model for understanding how and why CP emerges. We also highlight the need to pay more attention to the often neglected role of employing organizations in accounts of professional formation in contemporary society.

Introduction to the 30th Anniversary Issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

Introduction to the 30th Anniversary Issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology John Z. Sadler (bio) This issue marks the 30th anniversary of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology (PPP). All of us at the journal are grateful to our authors, readers, editors, and publishers for enabling this landmark. To commemorate this event, I invited our Founding Editor and Chair of the Advisory Board, K.W.M. "Bill" Fulford to write a brief essay, along with our panel of smart and industrious senior editors. Their instructions were simple: 500 words on PPP past, present, and/or future. These essays appear in the pages to follow. As Editor-in-Chief, I write about PPP's early commitments as a scholarly journal, situate these in the history of academic publishing, and muse over our current moment. Bill Fulford briefly discusses the early years of the journal in his essay. My perspective emerges from an editor's perspective. As co-editors in the early years, Bill and I were committed to an international authorship with comparable editorial oversight. We wanted to build a journal that would equally recognize clinical science and practice and philosophy, maintaining the rigor of each field. We saw philosophers and mental health practitioners as equal partners, collaborators, innovators, and educators. More important, PPP was intended to offer up the best criticism of the mental health and related fields. The scattershot history of scholarly editing has identified several functions of the editor over the centuries following Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the mid-1440s. The earliest editors took liberties with the language of the Bible, trying to make it more accessible to the public; the printing press permitted fast and inexpensive reproduction. Not surprisingly, this popularizing of the Bible led to praise as well as outrage. The printing of other scholarly works followed quickly. In 1470, only about 25 years after the invention of the printing press, Niccolo Perroni called for Pope Paul II to censor Andrea Bussi's edition of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, an anthology of then-ancient writings about the natural world. This marked the first recorded instance of censorship of a more-or-less secular scholarly work (Monfasani, 1988). In the ensuing centuries, "editors" initially were the popularizers, and later the gatekeepers of texts worth (and not worth) reading. In the [End Page 1] ensuing centuries into the present, editors have been venerated both as defenders of good reading and reviled as censors or intellectual selfaggrandizers. The current moment, in my view, represents a crisis in the history of editing and editorship. Digital communications have liberated communications worldwide. However, this liberty has come at the cost of colossal amounts of material not worth reading and an explosion of divisive, destructive discourse. Even worse, internet "trolls" on social media have moved bullying out of the schoolyard and into international cyberspace. Determining what is worth reading has moved away from a cluster of (hopefully) responsible editors to anyone who wants to go to the small effort of silencing others through online harassment and even violent threats. Such cyberbullying does not eliminate elitism, but instead substitutes a toxic online "elite" without principle other than self-promotion and the alienation of others. Our contemporary online culture has yet to figure out how to shape what is, and is not, worth reading. My wish and intent for the future of PPP is to maintain and grow our place of rational, deliberative, and open discourse, even in the face of such disruptive cultural change. John Z. Sadler John Z. Sadler, MD, is the Editor-in-Chief of PPP. He is the Daniel W. Foster, MD, Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, as well as a Professor of Psychiatry there. He has been a PPP editor since its inception. Reference Monfasani, J. (1988). The first call for press censorship: Niccolo Perotti, Giovanni Andrea Bussi, Antonio Moreto, and the editing of Pliny's Natural History. Renaissance Quarterly, 41, 1–31. Google Scholar Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press

Agreeing when to disagree: A corpus analysis of variable agreement in caregiver and child English

AbstractWe characterized the patterns of agreement variation and consistency in three corpora of child and child-directed US English to better understand preschoolers’ input and to compare preschoolers’ own agreement production. We examined sentences with third-person subjects and tensed forms ofbein two large single-family corpora and one cross-sectional corpus collected during a Search-and-Find activity. Caregivers’ agreement variation consistently reflected patterns previously found in adult-to-adult speech. Children's variation was conditioned by many of the same factors (e.g., sentence type, pronoun subject, and order of subject and verb) and clearly demonstrated acquisition of the categorical-variable split. However, some children showed substantially higher rates of nonagreeing forms (There's the cherries) than their caregivers and differed in their ranking of conditioning factors. We suggest that this reflects children's developing production processing abilities: shorter sentence-planning spans may make nonagreement a useful strategy for avoiding early number commitments in verb-first sentences.

Draw a Star and Make it Perfect: Incremental Processing of Telicity.

Predicates like "coloring-the-star" denote events that have a temporal duration and a culmination point (telos). When combined with perfective aspect (e.g., "Valeria has colored the star"), a culmination inference arises implying that the action has stopped, and the star is fully colored. While the perfective aspect is known to constrain the conceptualization of the event as telic, many reading studies have demonstrated that readers do not make early commitments as to whether the event is bounded or unbounded. A few visual-world studies tested the processing of telic predicates during online sentence processing, demonstrating an early integration of aspectual and temporal cues. By employing the visual-world paradigm, we tested the incremental processing of the perfective aspect in Italian in two eye-tracking studies in which listeners heard durative predicates in the perfective form in a scenario showing a completed and a non-completed event. Differently from previous studies, we compared telic durative predicates such as "coloring-the-star" to punctual predicates such as "lighting-the-candle." While for punctual predicates, the inferences of telicity (the event has a telos) and of culmination (the telos is reached) are lexically encoded in the perfective verb, for durative predicates, the degree of event completion (visually encoded) needs to be integrated with perfective aspect (linguistically encoded) for the culmination inference derivation. By modulating the interaction of visual and linguistic stimuli across the two experiments, we show that the verb's perfective aspect triggers the culmination inference incrementally during sentence processing, offering novel evidence for the continuous integration of linguistic processing with real-world visual information.

Solid Acid Electrochemical Cell for the Production of Hydrogen from Ammonia

Summary Production of high-purity hydrogen by thermal-electrochemical decomposition of ammonia at an intermediate temperature of 250°C is demonstrated. The process is enabled by use of a solid-acid-based electrochemical cell (SAEC) in combination with a bilayered anode, comprising a thermal-cracking catalyst layer and a hydrogen electrooxidation catalyst layer. Cs-promoted Ru on carbon nanotubes (Ru/CNT) serves as the thermal decomposition catalyst, and Pt on carbon black mixed with CsH2PO4 is used to catalyze hydrogen electrooxidation. Cells were operated at 250°C with humidified dilute ammonia supplied to the anode and humidified hydrogen supplied to the counter electrode. A current density of 435 mA/cm2 was achieved at a potential of 0.4 V and ammonia flow rate of 30 sccm. With a demonstrated faradic efficiency for hydrogen production of 100%, the process yields hydrogen at a rate of 1.48 m o l H 2 / g c a t h .

The nature of individual experiential knowledge in internationalizing SMEs: pitfalls of superstitious learning and the need for wisdom

PurposeThis study addresses the research question: How does the experiential knowledge, superstitious knowledge and the wisdom of CEOs influence the internationalization behaviour of SMEs?Design/methodology/approachAn exploratory qualitative study is used. Longitudinal case studies of two Swedish life science companies are analysed.FindingsAn individual's prior experiential knowledge influence the newly started SME's market commitments and internationalization behaviour. Such prior experiences can enable early and rapid resource commitments in the newly started SMEs. Relying upon such prior experiential knowledge in deciding upon the company's market commitments however heightens the risk of superstitious learning. The findings illustrate how wisdom can work as an antidote to superstitious learning. Wisdom lures even experienced CEOs away from believing they know more than they actually know.Research limitations/implicationsThe study contributes to extend the Uppsala model by incorporating the role of individual-level experiential knowledge. The study also adds value to the literature on small firm internationalization by providing propositions for how the prior knowledge of individual key decision makers influences SMEs' internationalization behaviour. The propositions provide new input to the ongoing discussion in the literature and help to guide future research.Originality/valueGiven the fact that the Uppsala model is centred upon a firm-level view on experiential knowledge, our theoretical understanding is still limited regarding how individual-level experiential knowledge influences the internationalization behaviour of SMEs. This study addresses calls for research on how individuals' prior knowledge influences small-firm internationalization.

Sleep health early in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in the United States: integrating longitudinal, cross-sectional, and retrospective recall data

BackgroundThe outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused substantial changes in lifestyle, responsibilities, and stressors. Such dramatic societal changes might cause overall sleep health to decrease (stress view), to remain unchanged (resilience view), or even to improve (reduced work/schedule burden view). MethodsWe addressed this question using longitudinal, cross-sectional, and retrospective recall methodologies in 699 American adult participants in late March 2020, two weeks following the enactment of social distancing and shelter-in-place policies in the United States. ResultsRelative to baseline data from mid February 2020, cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses demonstrated that average sleep quality was unchanged, or even improved, early in the pandemic. However, there were clear individual differences: approximately 25% of participants reported that their sleep quality had worsened, which was explained by stress vulnerability, caregiving, adverse life impact, shift work, and presence of COVID-19 symptoms. ConclusionsTherefore, the COVID-19 pandemic has detrimentally impacted some individuals' sleep health while paradoxically benefited other individuals’ sleep health by reducing rigid work/school schedules such as early morning commitments.

Adaptive Landscape Shaped by Core Endogenous Network Coordinates Complex Early Progenitor Fate Commitments in Embryonic Pancreas

The classical development hierarchy of pancreatic cell fate commitments describes that multipotent progenitors (MPs) first bifurcate into tip cells and trunk cells, and then these cells give rise to acinar cells and endocrine/ductal cells separately. However, lineage tracings reveal that pancreatic progenitors are highly heterogeneous in tip and trunk domains in embryonic pancreas. The progenitor fate commitments from multipotency to unipotency during early pancreas development is insufficiently characterized. In pursuing a mechanistic understanding of the complexity in progenitor fate commitments, we construct a core endogenous network for pancreatic lineage decisions based on genetic regulations and quantified its intrinsic dynamic properties using dynamic modeling. The dynamics reveal a developmental landscape with high complexity that has not been clarified. Not only well-characterized pancreatic cells are reproduced, but also previously unrecognized progenitors—tip progenitor (TiP), trunk progenitor (TrP), later endocrine progenitor (LEP), and acinar progenitors (AciP/AciP2) are predicted. Further analyses show that TrP and LEP mediate endocrine lineage maturation, while TiP, AciP, AciP2 and TrP mediate acinar and ductal lineage maturation. The predicted cell fate commitments are validated by analyzing single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. Significantly, this is the first time that a redefined hierarchy with detailed early pancreatic progenitor fate commitment is obtained.

The Aggrieved Community

Abstract Does “community” contain an ineradicable memory of “communion,” and thereby inevitably have conceptual ties to Christianity, if not to fascism? Or can the word, rather, indicate a new way of being in common, one that became briefly visible in the communist experiment, understood first as the appearing of the truth of democracy before it collapsed under the weight of ideology and militarism? While Jean-Luc Nancy identifies motifs from Maurice Blanchot’s early right-wing political commitments in his later left-wing thought, this essay addresses and critiques another of Nancy’s claims: that despite Blanchot’s affirmation of a community unregulated by a reference to unity, he is, in fact, committed to the Christian notion of communion. However, Blanchot distanced his notion of inter-subjectivity from any conception of God, proposing, instead, a “dissymmetric” rather than asymmetric relation, grounded in the encounter of the Other’s death rather than in some trace of the divine.

The Relationship Between Working Youth Characteristics and Financial Capability

There is a widespread interest in raising the levels of financial capability due to the soaring of indebtness among youth in both developed and developing countries. The issue is even more critical among working youth due to their early career life financial commitments. Thus this paper aims to shed light on the level of financial capability among working youth and the relationships between working youth characteristics and financial capability. A questionnaire survey was disseminated to 500 Malaysian working youth between 18 to 40 years old. Based on the 200 completed responses the study reveals that there is an adequate level of financial capability among respondents. Marital status, age, level of income, employment status, living arrangement, number of credit card and financial behavior are found to have significant relationships with financial capability. A further test shows that youth financial literacy and saving behavior have significant effects on financial capability. This study contributes new empirical evidence on financial capability and its association with working youth characteristics. As such this study provides some interesting clues to financial capability among working youth.

$$L^{2}$$-norm transformation for improving k-means clustering

In the age of increasingly pervasive sensing applications, measurement of unknown pattern phenomena resulting in novel data presents a challenge to selection of appropriate modeling tools. Because there is no rich history of domain knowledge, one can easily make early commitments to poor modeling choices. Data transformation, a solution in effort to modify the data’s geometry, can make important regularities more clear. The wrong transformation can damage the very pattern information one seeks to identify. In contrast to data transformation, we contribute an alternative method, range transformation focusing on altering the measurement tool. As a function, a model maps data inputs to a range. Focusing on transformations of the model’s range, we can find a generally applicable way to alter the model’s properties to best suit the data. Every modification to a function class, something we call editing the function, results in a change to the original function’s range. This work contributes a method for modifying a broad class of models to suit novel data through range transformation. We investigate range transformation for a class of information theoretic transformations and evaluate impact on classification and clustering. We also develop an optimization-based framework employing range transformation based on desired geometric properties and use it to improve a widely used model, k-means clustering.

Signaling Molecules Governing Pluripotency and Early Lineage Commitments in Human Pluripotent Stem Cells

Signaling Molecules Governing Pluripotency and Early Lineage Commitments in Human Pluripotent Stem Cells

The 1951 Harvard student uprising against the intern match

In the fall of 1951, a group of Harvard medical students led by W. Hardy Hendren, III organized a national movement against the newly instituted match that would assign graduating seniors to hospital internship programs. Before then, hospitals with intern positions to fill rushed to secure commitments from students, who in turn accepted the first decent offer that came their way. Knowing that students could not risk waiting for a better offer, hospitals pushed them into making early commitments. When some students began getting offers in their junior and sophomore years, medical schools, professional groups, and hospitals organized the National Inter-association Committee on Internships to deal with the issue. The intern match was thus organized and scheduled to take place in 1952. When the plan was announced in mid-October 1951, Hendren recognized that the proposed algorithm placed students at a disadvantage if they did not get their first choice of hospitals. Facing resistance at every step from the National Inter-association Committee on Internships and putting his standing at Harvard Medical School at risk, Hendren led a nationwide movement of medical students to change the procedure to one that favored students' choices. Their success <1month later established in the inaugural match the fundamental ethic of today's National Resident Matching Program to favor students' preferences at every step of the process.

Signaling Molecules Governing Pluripotency and Early Lineage Commitments in Human Pluripotent Stem Cells.

Signaling in pluripotent stem cells is a complex and dynamic process involving multiple mediators, finely tuned to balancing pluripotency and differentiation states. Characterizing and modifying the necessary signaling pathways to attain desired cell types is required for stem-cell applications in various fields of regenerative medicine. These signals may help enhance the differentiation potential of pluripotent cells towards each of the embryonic lineages and enable us to achieve pure in vitro cultures of various cell types. This review provides a timely synthesis of recent advances into how maintenance of pluripotency in hPSCs is regulated by extrinsic cues, such as the fibroblast growth factor (FGF) and ACTIVIN signaling pathways, their interplay with other signaling pathways, namely, wingless- type MMTV integration site family (WNT) and mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), and the pathways governing the determination of multiple lineages.

The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series 19, 1 October 1775–31 March 1796 ed. by David R. Hoth

Reviewed by: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series 19, 1 October 1775–31 March 1796 ed. by David R. Hoth Robert Middlekauff (bio) The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series 19, 1 October 1775–31 March 1796 Edited by DAVID R. HOTH Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016 693pp. This volume, the nineteenth in the Presidential Series, finds George Washington hard at work in service of a country that he had done [End Page 758] more to bring into existence than anyone in the world. It reminds us that he had spent a major part of his life striving at the behest of a people he believed had been called into being by Providence. His own sense of himself had held firm over the years, though by 1783 his early commitments to the United States may have settled simply into a quiet resignation to do his best. The passion of the Revolution had, in a sense, faded for him, yet the convictions of the great years of the war had not. Winning independence was one thing; making something of it, another. The nineteenth volume of the series of his presidency takes its place in the attempt to reconstruct his part in an effort that called into being talents fashioned in a lifetime of service. The Washington Project, located in Charlottesville, Virginia, is now in its second half century. This review is not the place to assess the entire effort, or even to list its chief editors; but a short comment on the various series covering Washington’s correspondence from the beginning of his life to its end surely is appropriate. So far, the project has included his diaries (six volumes), and five additional series: Colonial (ten volumes), Revolutionary (twenty-two volumes), Confederation (six volumes), Presidential (nineteen volumes to date), and Retirement (four volumes). The organization of the project into several categories makes sense, and offers a means of thinking about Washington’s life and his time. Including letters to him adds enormously to one’s ability to understand and use his letters. The best earlier collection edited by John C. Fitzpatrick—thirty-nine volumes published in the years 1931–39—included only a few of the letters written to Washington. The modern collection, including volume 19 of the Presidential Series, provides all the letters written to him, fully annotated. One may be sure that the texts of the letters have been carefully established, and the annotation shows a careful hand throughout. As one who has used several of the Washington series, I can express gratitude and admiration to the several generations of editors who have done a massive amount of work on the Washington Project. The volume under review includes Washington’s correspondence near the middle of his second term. His first term had been filled with problems of great scope: putting together a new government for the United States, deciding how its debt should be paid, establishing its offices, defining as clearly as possible its relations with other nations, and, among many other things, finding the men to make it work. He also had faced a variety of [End Page 759] other problems lingering from the Revolution—for example, issues with veterans, the army, and the navy. Then there were those matters commonly thought of as personal—his family in Virginia, Mount Vernon, and the business side of his farming. Washington had every right to feel tired—in fact he was tired—but much still was expected of him in America and abroad. Shortly after taking office, he made several trips in order to gain a close-up look at the American people, and to give them an opportunity to scrutinize him, and, perhaps, to celebrate his leadership in the Revolution. For much of his life he had assumed leadership. Examination of his correspondence in the years following the great demands of his first term as president reveals that, though he was tired, his fatigue did not rob him of determination to give his best to his country. Doing so did not mean that he confronted nothing but crises everyday. His correspondence reveals something quite different—the first presidency was made up of small as well as large...

Beyond the Sum of Parts: Voting with Groups of Dependent Entities.

The high complexity of multi-scale, category-level object detection in cluttered scenes is efficiently handled by Hough voting methods. However, the main shortcoming of the approach is that mutually dependent local observations are independently casting their votes for intrinsically global object properties such as object scale. Object hypotheses are then assumed to be a mere sum of their part votes. Popular representation schemes are, however, based on a dense sampling of semi-local image features, which are consequently mutually dependent. We take advantage of part dependencies and incorporate them into probabilistic Hough voting by deriving an objective function that connects three intimately related problems: i) grouping mutually dependent parts, ii) solving the correspondence problem conjointly for dependent parts, and iii) finding concerted object hypotheses using extended groups rather than based on local observations alone. Early commitments are avoided by not restricting parts to only a single vote for a locally best correspondence and we learn a weighting of parts during training to reflect their differing relevance for an object. Experiments successfully demonstrate the benefit of incorporating part dependencies through grouping into Hough voting. The joint optimization of groupings, correspondences, and votes not only improves the detection accuracy over standard Hough voting and a sliding window baseline, but it also reduces the computational complexity by significantly decreasing the number of candidate hypotheses.

Who let the dogs out? The effect of parliamentary scrutiny on compliance with EU law

ABSTRACTRecently, it has been argued that the scrutiny of European law proposal by national parliaments contributes to speeding up the implementation of EU law. To test this argument, we study the effect of parliamentary scrutiny on Germany's compliance with all directives adopted between 1999 and 2012. The results are mixed: on the one hand, parliamentary scrutiny successfully transfers necessary deliberations from the implementation stage to the policy-making stage. As a consequence, we observe faster implementation of complex and controversial policies. On the other hand, parliamentary scrutiny carries the risk of triggering conflict and of forcing early commitments by actors who might otherwise have remained passive observers. As a consequence, parliamentary scrutiny may even delay implementation of EU law by waking the proverbial ‘sleeping dogs'.

On the Timing of Climate Agreements

A central issue in climate policy is the question whether long-term targets for greenhouse gas emissions should be adopted. This paper analyzes strategic effects related to the timing of such commitments. Using a two-country model, we identify a redistributive effect that undermines long-term cooperation when countries are asymmetric and side payments are unavailable. The effect enables countries to shift rents strategically via their R&D efforts under delayed cooperation. In contrast, a complementarity effect stabilizes long-term cooperation, because early commitments in abatement induce countries to invest more in low-carbon technologies, and create additional knowledge spillovers. Contrasting both effects, we endogenize the timing of climate agreements.