Good Excuse Research Articles

Closing the Gender Gap in Our Field [President’s Corner

Apple chief executive Tim Cook says there are “not enough women at the table” at technology firms, including Apple. In a recent interview, Cook said that technology “will not achieve nearly what it could achieve” without a more diverse workforce. He also said that there were “no good excuses” for the lack of women in the tech sector.

Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob and His Treatise

The treatise of the German philosopher Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob (1759-1827), Examination of Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours, or All Speculative Proofs for the Existence of God provides researchers with a good excuse to address captivating subjects related to issues of biographical and historical-philosophical dimension. Of particular interest in this context is the introductory article by I. Kant, which he sent to L.H. von Jakob before the publication of the treatise. The central idea of Jacob’s treatise was to defend Kant’s critical philosophy against the also critical M. Mendelssohn’s position. In the treatise, von Jakob sought to defend Kant’s concept against Mendelssohn’s similar methodological attitude of criticality in his treatment of philosophy. On this basis, Jacob’s treatise contains a serious critique of Mendelssohn’s concept. The treatise indicates an interesting picture of a certain competition between the authors of philosophical concepts of the German Enlightenment. The sides of the “Russian” period in L.H. von Jakob’s biography are also revealed. The treatise scrutinizes Mendelssohn’s methodological positions, as well as an analytical examination of his axioms. To reproduce this analysis accurately, an attempt is made to compare von Jakob’s philosophical ideas with some of Kant’s ideas. L.H. von Jakob’s philosophy can be defined as critical, with some reservations, in the general history of the German Enlightenment. It contributes substantially to comprehending the essence of the philosophical positions of both Kant and Mendelssohn and also clarifies the nature of the difference between the critiques of these two German thinkers.

Young children judge defection less negatively when there’s a good justification

Morality includes a common ground ranking of values, of which a central theme is that prosocial actions are more justifiable than selfish ones. Learning to distinguish between good versus bad justifications for actions based on a common ground ranking of values is a key aspect of moral development. The current study assessed this type of understanding in young children. In a within-participants design, young children ( N = 64) saw puppets who promised to show them a cool toy, failed to fulfill their promise, and then gave either a good (prosocial), bad (selfish), or no justification for their defection. Children’s judgments about defection following good justifications were less negative than their judgments about defection following bad or no justifications, which did not differ. When asked to justify their judgments, 5-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) made more normative or promise-referencing statements when reasoning about puppets who gave good justifications as opposed to bad or no justifications. Children’s rates of tattling on, liking, and inviting puppets to play did not vary by the type of justification that a puppet gave. Overall, the findings suggest that the capacity to reference a common ground ranking of values, a key component of human cooperation and morality, is present in young children. • Young children recognize the common ground ranking of values underlying morality. • A within-participants design examined children at 3.5 and 5.5 years of age. • Puppets gave good (prosocial), bad (selfish), or no excuses for breaking a promise. • Children’ judgments were less negative following good (vs. bad or no) excuses. • Children’s justifications for their judgments changed with age.

The Past Web: Exploring Web Archives

The Past Web: Exploring Web Archives

From religious tourism to nostalgic pilgrimages. Reflections from Mexico

ABSTRACT By exploring the origin, motivation, and behaviour of visitors to the Saint Francis celebration in Real de Catorce (Mexico), this article exposes the link between religious tourism and nostalgic tourism in the case of regional migrants. The methodology was designed to use triangulation of three methods: questionnaires, informal conversational interviews, and direct observation. The results reveal that the celebration has strong family-tradition content. In this pilgrimage, religious faith coexists with longing and the search for identity. Religious tourism blends with nostalgic tourism. This becomes evident in the responses about travel motives and also in the origin of the journey, the frequency of the visits, and the kind of activities in which visitors engage. The visitors tend to come from the main destinations of past migrants from Real de Catorce. For them, a religious festival is a good excuse to embark on a recreational tour legitimated by the idea of family union and devotional obligations. By travelling to the festival, devotees comply with religious obligations, connect with family origins and enjoy recreation. This innovative study of religious and return tourism on a relatively regional scale shows that nostalgia is not associated exclusively with international migration.

Coming Up With Good Excuses: What to do When no Plan Can be Found

When using a planner-based agent architecture, many things can go wrong. First and foremost, an agent might fail to execute one of the planned actions for some reasons. Even more annoying, however, is a situation where the agent is incompetent, i.e., unable to come up with a plan. This might be due to the fact that there are principal reasons that prohibit a successful plan or simply because the task's description is incomplete or incorrect. In either case, an explanation for such a failure would be very helpful. We will address this problem and provide a formalization of coming up with excuses for not being able to find a plan. Based on that, we will present an algorithm that is able to find excuses and demonstrate that such excuses can be found in practical settings in reasonable time.

Bulgaria and Hungary in the First World War: A View from the 21st Century

Bulgaria and Hungary in the First World War: A View from the 21st Century

Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution. Ian Duncan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii+290.

<i>Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution</i>. Ian Duncan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii+290.

Excuses and Alternatives

AbstractA version of the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) claims that one is only blameworthy for actions which one was able to avoid. Much of the discussion about PAP concerns Frankfurt’s counterexamples to it. After fifty years of refined debates, progress might seem hopeless. Yet, we can make headway by asking: “what’s our reason for believing PAP?” The best answer is this: lacking eligible alternatives—alternatives whose cost is not too high to reasonably opt for—is a good excuse. Yet, this principle is subject to straightforward counterexamples, unless it is given an epistemicised reading. And in this latter case, it does not support PAP. So, PAP is unsupported, at least for now.

Effect of Alcohol Combined With High Fat Diet: Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right but They Could Make a Good Excuse.

Effect of Alcohol Combined With High Fat Diet: Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right but They Could Make a Good Excuse.

Dreaming of Yesterday: Fashioning Liminal Spaces in 1950s Nostalgia

Dreaming of Yesterday: Fashioning Liminal Spaces in 1950s Nostalgia

Constants and Variables in the Reconstruction Process of National History: Mutual Analysis of Ottoman Image in pre and post-independence Period of Azerbaijan History (within the framework of history textbooks)

Tarih yazıcılığının gelişimini önemli ölçüde etkileyen alanlardan biri olarak millî tarih yazıcılığı ulusların siyasal, sosyal ve kültürel hayatının önemli olaylarının kayda alınmasının ötesinde, özellikle son iki yüzyılda siyasal varoluşun ve kültürel kimlik oluşturmanın en etkin aracı olmuştur. Azerbaycan’da milli tarih yazıcılığı son yüzyılda ideolojik, politik ve kültürel değerleri bir-birinden farklı Azerbaycan Demokratik Cumhuriyeti (1918-1920), Azerbaycan Sovyet Sosyalist Respublikası (1920-1991) ve Azerbaycan Respublikası (1991- ) dönemlerini yaşamıştır. Azerbaycan’ın 71 senelik sovyet ve 25 yıllık bağımsızlık dönemi araştırmanın dönemsel sınırlarını oluşturacaktır. Bütün uluslar gibi Azerbaycan Türkleri’nin de tarihi diğer uluslarla askeri, politik, ekonomik, sosyal ve kültürel etkileşime bağlı olarak gelişmiştir. Bu bağlamda Azerbaycan’ın millî tarih yazıcılığı açısından Türkiye, diğer devletlerle kıyaslanamayacak kadar önemli tarihi figür olmuştur. Selçuklu ve Türkiye Cumhuriyeti gibi öncesi ve sonrası da önem arzetmekle birlikte, Osmanlı döneminde Türkiye, Azerbaycan tarihinin bizzat içinde rol almıştır. Araştırmanın başlıca amacı Azerbaycan tarihçiliğinde Osmanlı imajının tespit edilerek millî tarih yazıcılığında dönemlerarası süreklilik ve değişikliğin karşılıklı analiz edilmesidir. Gerek sovyet, gerekse bağımsızlık dönemi Azerbaycan’da okullarda Eğitim Bakanlığı’nca tek tip ve zorunlu olarak okutulan tarih ders kitapları araştırmanın başlıca kaynaklarını oluşturacaktır. Azerbaycan tarihçiliğinin bağımsızlık öncesi ve sonrası dönemlerinde Osmanlı algısı, bazen siyasi ve derslik yazarlarının kimliği gibi bireysel faktörlere bağlı olarak kendi içinde homojenlik arzetmediği için her dönemin kendi içindeki değişikliğin iz sürümü de sovyet ve post-sovyet dönemlerin farklı senelerinde yayınlanmış ders kitaplarından tespit edilecektir. Ders kitaplarının yanısıra, Azerbaycan tarihçiliğinin her iki dönemle ilgili belli-başlı eserlerinden bütünlüğün sağlanması ve karşılaştırma amacıyla yararlanılacaktır.

Eating disorders and obesity during the holiday season: A family matter

For many of us — young and old alike — the holidays are a time to celebrate. Maybe a bit too much, with every shelf in the pantry full of different goodies, the stores overflowing with temptations, and important family, social, and even religious occasions revolving around food. For overeaters, it's almost impossible to survive the season without putting on more pounds. For children with anorexia nervosa, it seems like a good excuse to shut down the gates completely — no food at all.

Was Ahab Truly “Lord of the Level Loadstone”?

Herman Melville’s bicentennial provides a good excuse to examine how well the Pequod’s monomaniacal mariner knew his geomagnetic magic.

Incognito przez kraj przyjaciół. Nielegalni wspinacze z NRD w Związku Radzieckim

Incognito through a country of friends: Illegal climbers from the GDR in the Soviet UnionAlthough the GDR did not have its own high mountains, it did have an informal community of climbers, of about 1,000 enthusiasts, who despite numerous obstacles managed to go on expeditions to high mountains of the Eastern Bloc. They could not count on any support of the state, because mountaineering is not a kind of sport in which international success can be achieved all the time and because the GDR, unlike e.g. the Soviet Union, could not expect any military benefits from it. The climbers found it especially hard to obtain permission to travel, to go to the mountains on their own, to acquire appropriate equipment and train in preparation for the difficulties awaiting them in high mountains. Only thanks to their extraordinary enthusiasm, organisational creativity and technical skills were they able to overcome obstacles like obtaining invitations from the Soviet Union, casual jobs and making their own equipment in order to be able to reach high mountains. From the late 1970s the climbing community began to experience a revival thanks to a new “hippie generation”. Young people reached the USSR thanks to the so-called “transit visas”, which is why they were described as “transit travellers”. Often they would then travel for weeks or even months “unrecognised through their beloved country”. During these “incognito travels” they had to avoid police patrols and when they were stopped, they had to have good excuses. Despite their illegality, the transit travellers were able to travel across the entire USSR. Their extraordinarily modest way of travelling, often hitch-hiking or walking, meant that they had closer contact with people living in the Soviet Union than was provided for in the German–Soviet friendship, used for propaganda purposes, and could formulate their own opinion on the reality of the “Big Brother”.Through their experiences the climbers managed to distance themselves from the official socialist discourse in the GDR. With their views crossing state borders the climbers could be treated as the vanguard of mass escapes through Eastern European third countries, like e.g. Hungary, which began the collapse of the GDR in 1989.

“An Education in Educational Psychology” or “A Good Excuse to Catch Up With an Old Friend”

“An Education in Educational Psychology” or “A Good Excuse to Catch Up With an Old Friend”

Notes from the Pier No. 1: On Route to “A Global Renaissance”: An f : Fabric in the “BRI: One Belt One Road”

This paper is actually a summary of the authors series of academic research since 1970s. It focuses on interconnectivity of civilizations with a focus on major civilizations and their impact on regional development. It is very clear that in comparison to Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and modern Western Civilizations, the Imperial China and its traditional civilizations did not play a profound role outside China as judged by the Kublai Khan and Zheng Hes naval expeditions to East Asia and Indian Ocean areas. Apparently, she did not make good use of the “f-shaped” maritime road either. This “civilization-inabsentia” was probably due to traditional Chinas economy and culture which were built on unstable agricultural bases; thus conditioning its Han Chinese elites had its upper structure that evolved around paternalism and a feudal family system. Its inward-looking approach prohibited them from going outside to impose its cultural system so as to colonize the local populations along the “f-shaped maritime and land Silk Roads”. Her refusal to pursue an open policy inhibited formal international trades, thus giving the British East India Company a good excuse to conduct a so-called “Trade War” against the Qing Dynasty; and the Opium War had caused a total collapse of the Chinese Empire in 1830s. On the contrary, the Westerners have been using the “f-strategy” to impose on a broken China westernization in her search of model of modernizations. Here, the author has been trying to make good use of an “f-shaped” theory and methodology to interpret and understand Chinas historical, contemporary and future development processes. The f : fabric has proved to be an inspiring and useful model to configure Chinas shuttles between the so-called “#1.0: Pre-Western Culture” (before 1500 AD) and the “#2.0: Western Supremacy Culture” (1500–1990) and from here to move ahead for its “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” after entering the 21st century; finally, she could be a pioneer in the pursuit of a “#3.0: Post-Western and Non-Western World”. The tentative conclusion of the paper is that this newly introduced f : BRI-OBOR can be taken as a prelude to the future civilizations which are going to satisfy the human needs so as to promote the so-called “human pentagonal system” much more effectively.

A good excuse to sleep in

Sleep![Figure][1] Sleeping in on the weekend may make up for less sleep during the week. PHOTO: MLADEN MITRINOVIC/SHUTTERSTOCK Most of us don't get as much sleep as we should, which is often due to hectic weekday schedules. Akerstedt et al. reveal that all is not lost—sleeping in on the

The Labour Market Effects of Increases in Social Insurance Premium: Evidence from Japan

AbstractExploiting heterogeneous variations in labour cost increases due to Japan's 2003 social insurance premium reform as a natural experiment, we estimate the impacts of the increased social insurance premiums on employment, working hours and payroll costs. Using the difference‐in‐differences method with establishment fixed effects, we find that firms reduce the number of employees and increase average annual earnings from longer working hours in response to an exogenous increase in labour costs without productivity gains. Firms manage to pay for this increase in the average wage paid to the remaining workers by reducing the number of employees to keep total payroll costs unchanged. In contrast, since social insurance premiums are shared equally between employees and employers, firms pay the remaining half premiums that they are imposed with. Sub‐sample analyses show that firms adhering to a labour hoarding policy did fire many workers taking advantage of the 2003 reform. This may indicate that the reform provided a good excuse to cut employment in firms that had been forced to comply with a labour hoarding policy even in an over‐employment situation, which is more likely in sectors and countries where dismissals are rigorously regulated.

Los grados de la intertextualidad en "Los sinsabores del verdadero policía" de Roberto Bolaño: algunos planteamientos en torno a la ficción y el silencio literario

La obra de Roberto Bolaño es sin duda un pretexto para conciliar la intertextualidad con la teoría de los mundos posibles debido a la ruptura taxonómica en los grados de la primera. A pesar de tratarse de una obra póstuma, Los sinsabores del verdadero policía no resulta ser una obra inacabada, en realidad ésta comienza una vez que el lector se desplaza a otros textos del autor y ahí es posible resaltar la riqueza de sus grados en la intertextualidad. Este comportamiento es típico del silencio narrativo, considerado como un juego de huellas en la orientación del texto: no sólo encontramos al narrador o los narradores como los ejes principales de la selección y filiación de la información narrativa, también la apropiación de otros textos es lo que crea una expansión textual en todos los géneros, específicamente en el narrativo. El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en plantear algunas interrogantes a la luz de momentos específicos de esta novela, principalmente los de notoria presencia intratextual, como es el caso del poema de Rimbaud leído por Amalfitano.