Heuristic Guides Research Articles

Science Literacy: a More Fundamental Meaning.

Over a century of attention to "science literacy for all" has not produced a public that can appreciate a common body of core science facts, concepts, and methods; nor have many acquired from their years in K-12 education the ability to apply science learning to everyday problems or to the scientific issues that concern a democracy. Some have called the endeavor impossible and moved on to lesser goals of science appreciation and heuristic guides to choosing trusted experts. However, a route to science literacy may yet be possible, if we redefine the goal as achieving literacy within a community. The tools for that end are different from what is generally offered in the classroom. What will be more helpful is a set of core values that underlie the generation of science concepts and facts, that inform the methods of science, and most importantly, that enable the social interchange that is the essence of the scientific endeavor. These values-the ethos of science-should be offered to elementary school students as a culture that forms through inquiry into questions students bring with them from their own experiences. Suggestions are offered as to how this might come about, with the central role occupied by the teacher as model and with the culture nurtured by the teacher, by a practitioner from the world of science, and eventually by the energy and contributions of the students themselves.

Conceptual Art, Theology, and Re-Presentation

Within the vast and varied scholarship of contemporary art, the relations between conceptual art and religion generally have not received careful investigation. There are, however, potentially quite subtle and complicated interrelations in play here that warrant closer study. This article develops and expands such study, first, by clarifying how procedural and re-presentational ways of thinking function in conceptual art, and, second, by showing how these help us to identify six general “logics” within which the interrelations of conceptual art and religion might be reexamined in the histories of contemporary art, both critically and constructively. These six categories are helpful heuristic guides, but each must be substantiated through fine-grained investigations of particular artists and artworks, and each involves “religion” in ways that open into and require particular theological modes of questioning. Therefore, third, this article then turns to a case study of contemporary Belgian artist Kris Martin, focusing especially on For Whom (2012), a work featuring a readymade two-ton church bell that swings on the hour but without a clapper (and thus without sound). Martin’s work consistently re-presents Christian forms and artifacts in compromised states—vacant altarpieces, broken statuary, etc.—invoking histories of European secularization while also retrieving and reactivating theological questions and grammars within those histories. By clarifying these various points of reference, particularly in dialogue with John Donne (from whom Martin borrows his title), this study attends to one instance of a significant interfacing of conceptual art, religion, and theology.

The Book of Proverbs and Virtue Ethics: Integrating the Biblical and Philosophical Traditions. By Arthur Jan Keefer

While the resources of the virtue tradition inform explorations of Proverbs’ moral vision, recent ethical investigations of Proverbs suggest that virtue ethics alone cannot deliver the ‘goods’ of adequate moral understanding of the document. Socratic and Aristotelian brands of virtue ethics may serve as valuable heuristic guides that reveal aspects of Proverbs’ moral vision. The document’s complex moral discourse, however, cannot be reduced to either species of the virtue tradition. Arthur Keefer’s monograph clarifies why this is the case. Moving beyond general comparisons between Proverbs and different streams of the virtue tradition, Keefer attends to historical, conceptual, and theological factors that framed and funded the moral visions articulated by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Proverbs. Attention to these contextual factors illuminates the ethical concepts and aims of each, facilitating a constructive dialogue. And this dialogue reveals that, while Proverbs participates in and contributes to the virtue tradition, it represents a tradition of virtue ethics in its own right.

Reframing Early Psychiatric Crises: a Capabilities-Informed Approach

Spurred by a working conference convened in the fall of 2009 by the Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts and INTAR (the International Network Towards Alternatives and Recovery), this paper first develops a serviceable version of Sen’s capabilities approach for use in public mental health and then explores how its conceptual toolkit might aid us in rethinking about we approach “first breaks” and early crises. This will be exploratory labor.2 Provisional efforts have been made to use the capabilities approach to rethink recovery and social integration as outcomes, to support self-determination, and to make a case for peer participation in research. This paper shifts the focus from the remedial work of treatment and social re-entry to the preventive work of crisis management and biographical continuity. After sorting through Sen’s approach for grounding principles and heuristic guides – which is here compiled into a sort of primer or toolkit, distilled into 8 key ideas and an anthropological coda on adolescent trial/error – I go on to identify three alternative ways that a capabilities approach might usefully reframe disability and impairment. That done, I make the case for applying the third (or radical) version to the social reception of early crises and try to envision what that might look like in practice.

"Resuscitate and Push": End-of-Life Care Experiences of Healthcare Staff in the Emergency Department - A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study.

Objective: Care in the emergency department focuses significantly on delivering lifesaving/ life-sustaining clinical actions, often with limited attention to health-related suffering even at the end-of-life. How healthcare staff experience and navigate through the end-of-life phase remains minimally explored. Thus, this study aimed to uncover the lived experiences of emergency department staff at the end-of-life. Methods: van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used. Nineteen healthcare staff were purposively recruited and interviewed. Interviews were audio-taped, transcribed verbatim, and thematic categories formulated. The existential lifeworld themes (corporeality, relationality, spatiality, and temporality) were used as heuristic guides for reflecting and organizing the lived experiences of participants. Results: The overarching category, 'resuscitate and push', was captured as corporeality (resisting death and dying); relationality (connectedness to the body of the patient; and lacking support for family and self); spatiality (navigating through a liminal space and lack of privacy for patients); and temporality (having limited to no time for end-of-life care and grieving). The end-of-life space was unpleasant. Although participants experienced helplessness and feelings of failure, support systems to help them to navigate through these emotions were lacking. Grief was experienced covertly and concealed by the entry of a new patient. Conclusion: End-of-life in the emergency department is poorly defined. In addition to shifting from the traditional emergency care model to support the streamlining of palliative care in the department, staff will require support with navigating through the liminal space, managing their grief, and developing a better working relationship with patients/ families.

Re/Un/Discover: An Embodied Heuristic for Uncertainties in Social Work Practice

ABSTRACT Social workers have always worked with and within uncertainties in practice, but the COVID-19 pandemic is amplifying the frequency and degree of uncertainty across ecological levels. Social workers need enhanced capacity to work with these uncertainties and the impact on individual and collective wellbeing. The RE/UN/DIScover heuristic guides social workers’ responses to the wide range of practice uncertainties experienced in the moment and over time. Drawing on understandings of embodied wellbeing from interpersonal neurobiology and the power relations manifest in intersectional positionality, RE/UN/DIScover offers embodied, iterative practices to access the wealth of capabilities within self and others. IMPLICATIONS Disruptions and uncertainties connected with pandemics, economic recessions, continued systemic injustices and other human-made problems can challenge social workers and impact the wellbeing of individuals and communities. Heuristics are guides that sort, order, and inform decisions and actions. The RE/UN/DIScover heuristic uses knowledge about embodied wellbeing and various forms of power to guide social workers. RE/UN/DIScover offers social workers practices to use with uncertainties both in the moment and over time.

템플스테이 참여자의 체험 본질과 진정성 고찰

This study was to explore the templestay experience from the hermeneutic phenomenological perspective invented by van Manen (1990). Also, four fundamental lifeworld themes (or existentials) were used as heuristic guides for reflecting on the experience of templestays: lived body, lived space, lived human relation, and lived time. From the four heuristic guides, four central themes were developed and a total of fifteen sub-themes emerged to fully explicate the tourist experience from the interviews and participant observation. Next, the templestay participants’ perception of authenticity was discussed. The study suggested a Templestay Authentic Experience Design Wheel model to understand experience and authenticity. This study applied the naturalistic inquiry method, which has been neglected in the field of tourism, through hermeneutic phenomenological gaze to find meaningful and essential phenomena of the templestay experience.

Learning Feasibility for Task and Motion Planning in Tabletop Environments.

Task and motion planning (TMP) combines discrete search and continuous motion planning. Earlier work has shown that to efficiently find a task-motion plan, the discrete search can leverage information about the continuous geometry. However, incorporating continuous elements into discrete planners presents challenges. We improve the scalability of TMP algorithms in tabletop scenarios with a fixed robot by introducing geometric knowledge into a constraint-based task planner in a robust way. The key idea is to learn a classifier for feasible motions and to use this classifier as a heuristic to order the search for a task-motion plan. The learned heuristic guides the search towards feasible motions and thus reduces the total number of motion planning attempts. A critical property of our approach is allowing robust planning in diverse scenes. We train the classifier on minimal exemplar scenes and then use principled approximations to apply the classifier to complex scenarios in a way that minimizes the effect of errors. By combining learning with planning, our heuristic yields order-of-magnitude run time improvements in diverse tabletop scenarios. Even when classification errors are present, properly biasing our heuristic ensures we will have little computational penalty.

A Phenomenological Study on the Lived Experience of Train Operators Exposed to Person under Train (PUT)

Purpose: To understand the meaning of the lived experience with Person under train (PUT) for train or subway operators. Methods: The study was built on hermeneutic phenomenological themes from individual interviews of present-day train or subway operators in South Korea. Eight participants were selected to participate in the study. All qualitative data were analyzed using the heuristic guides of Van Manen. Results: Four fundamental lifeworld themes and eight sub themes emerged in the findings. The first theme of spatiality had`the place pressed by the darkness` and `the train drags me there`. The second theme, corporeality had `a foreboding fear`, and `debris of death that gets stuck in the whole body`. The temporality theme had`distorted time in chaos`, and `memory trapped in time`. Finally the last existential theme of relationality had `intrapersonal encounter` and `resentment and guilt`. Conclusion: The four existential lifeworld themes provided a framework for in-depth investigation of the operator`s “lived experience.” This leads to clear understanding of effects of PUT experience on related individuals. The findings imply that specific active nursing intervention strategies are necessary in order to treat affected train operators, and to prevent further issues in their work and private life.

Mobile Communication in the Public Mind: Insights from Free Associations Related to Mobile Phone Base Stations

ABSTRACT The number of people using mobile phones has dramatically increased. At the same time, many people are unsettled about the potential health effects from the electromagnetic fields generated by mobile phone base stations. Research indicates that the risks associated with base stations are perceived differently by experts, laypeople, and base station opponents. Using a free association method, we analyzed these differences in more detail. In our first study, we found no difference between experts and laypeople but a marked distinction in the associations of opponents as opposed to the first two groups. The prevalence of free associations in a large random sample from the general population was explored via correspondence analysis in the second study. People who assign high risks to mobile communication had different, more negative associations in mind (e.g., “senselessness,” “hazard”) compared to people with low risk-perception (e.g., “mast,” “acceptance”). Our research is in line with the assumption that the affect heuristic guides risk and benefit assessments, and highlights the role of affect in risk perception and communication.

Evolução conceitual de professores sobre o movimento diário da esfera celeste

Este é um estudo sobre a elaboração do conceito de movimento diário da esfera celeste por um grupo de professores de Ciências e Geografia de 5ª a 8ª séries, participantes de um curso de Astronomia. Os resultados baseiam-se, sobretudo, na análise de suas respostas às perguntas das avaliações e em registros de aulas do curso. Discutem-se: a relação entre as respostas dos participantes, seus relatos sobre suas observações, e o desenvolvimento de conteúdos referentes ao movimento de constelações. Apresentam-se as elaborações de sequências da evolução conceitual do grupo e sua relação com a prática e a teoria trabalhadas no curso. Tais elaborações revelam os princípios relacionados à observação do céu: relação da altura do polo celeste com a latitude geográfica, obliquidade, continuidade do movimento, circularidade, tridimensionalidade e ciclicidade. O estudo sugere que esses princípios, usados como guias heurísticos, seriam úteis para o ensino da observação do céu.

Taking the Relational Turn: Biosemiotics and Some New Trends in Biology

A cluster of similar trends emerging in separate fields of science and philosophy points to new opportunities to apply biosemiotic ideas as tools for conceptual integration in theoretical biology. I characterize these developments as the outcome of a “relational turn” in these disciplines. They signal a shift of attention away from objects and things and towards relational structures and processes. Increasingly sophisticated research technologies of molecular biology have generated an enormous quantity of experimental data, sparking a need for relational approaches that could help to find recurrent patterns in the mass of data. Earlier conceptions of relational biology and cybernetics, once deemed too abstract and speculative, are now resurrected and applied by means of new computational and simulation tools. I think this receptivity should be extended to incorporate nets of semiotic relations as heuristic guides for discerning global patterns of interactions in living systems. In this article I review aspects of systems biology and new directions in evolutionary theory, focusing on the role of circular and downward causation in relational structures and dynamical networks. I also indicate promising avenues of integration of some ideas of biosemiotics with those emerging from these new currents in biology. Relational developments in biology bear a telling similarity to a parallel relational turn presently manifest in the philosophy of science, rooted in the philosophy of physics and mathematics and in different varieties of structural and informational realism. The recognition of the relational nature of reality within these disciplines entails a tacit repudiation of nominalistic biases in science that have hindered the reception of semitiotic conceptions in biology. In previous investigations I explored connections between two kinds of relational structures: the networks of self-referential circular loops that appear pervasively in living systems, and the triadic relational structures that Peircean semiotics places at the basis of all semiotic transactions. Current relational views in the sciences seem oblivious to the difference between dyadic and triadic relations. Incorporating this essential distinction from biosemiotics into other fields could be a first step in seizing the opportunities opened by the relational turn for a renewal of biology and of natural philosophy in general, across disciplinary boundaries.

Emotions, Retribution, and Punishment

abstract I examine emotional reactions to wrongdoing to determine whether they offer support for retributivism. It is often thought that victims desire to see their victimizer suffer and that this reaction offers support for retributivism. After rejecting several attempts to use different theories of emotion and different approaches to using emotions to justify retributivism, I find that, assuming a cognitive theory of emotion is correct, emotions can be used as heuristic guides much as suggested by Michael Moore. Applying this method to the actual emotional reactions of victims’ relatives, however, does not find support for retributivism. Instead, it suggests punishment should be understood as part of a process of recovery with a complex set of demands. Retributive concerns can play a role in the process, but they don't have the priority that retributivism requires.

Determining who owns what: Do children infer ownership from first possession?

A basic problem of daily life is determining who owns what. One way that people may solve this problem is by relying on a ‘first possession’ heuristic, according to which the first person who possesses an object is its owner, even if others subsequently possess the object. We investigated preschoolers’ use of this heuristic in five experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, 3- and 4-year-olds inferred that an object was owned by the character who possessed it first, even though another character subsequently possessed it. Two-year-olds also showed this bias, but only when the object was placed between the characters when children were asked about ownership. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that children’s bias to select the first possessor results from a tendency to select the character first associated with the object. Experiment 4 showed that 3- and 4-year-olds have difficulty disregarding the first possession heuristic, even when provided with evidence that the character who first possessed an object is not its owner. But Experiment 5 found that children can disregard the heuristic in at least some situations. These five experiments suggest that the first possession heuristic guides children’s ownership inferences. The findings provide the first evidence that preschoolers can infer who owns what, when not explicitly told, and when not reasoning about objects with which they are personally acquainted.

Predictive Efficacy of Chiropractic College Assessment Test Scores in Basic Science Chiropractic Education

To evaluate the ability of Chiropractic College Assessment Test (CCAT) to explain academic success within a chiropractic basic science curriculum. The CCAT examination was administered to 202 subjects from 1 chiropractic college on the first day of classes. Zero-order Pearson correlations were used to examine for associations between the prechiropractic grade point average (GPA), CCAT scores, and basic science GPA. Multiple regression techniques were applied to determine the predictive efficacy of CCAT scores on basic science GPA. Study results indicate a correlation between prechiropractic GPA, CCAT scores (r = 0.348, P < .001), and basic science GPA (r = 0.559, P < .001). Correlation was also noted between CCAT scores and basic science GPA (r = 0.537, P < .001). Using multiple regression, together the variables (age, postsecondary education, prechiropractic GPA, and CCAT scores) accounted for a significant portion (R2 = 0.483, P < .001) of the total variance in basic science GPA. Furthermore, the CCAT scores accounted for significant unique explanation (change R2 = 0.081, P < .001) beyond that offered by the traditionally used prechiropractic GPA. The CCAT examination provides a valuable a priori indicator of success within the basic science curriculum of this particular chiropractic program. Consideration should be given to adopting the CCAT examination as one of a number of heuristic guides students and college officials use in making enrollment decisions.

Princípios nas ciências empíricas e o seu tratamento em livros didáticos

Neste artigo, analisamos o papel desempenhado pelos princípios na produção e no ensino de conteúdos científicos. Nós constatamos que nas ciências empíricas princípios são guias heurísticos genéricos na produção científica. E exercendo essa função, um princípio é capaz de limitar consideravelmente as possíveis arbitrariedades dentro de um sistema teórico. No ensino, focalizamos o tratamento do princípio de conservação de energia em livros didáticos de física. Nós concluímos que existe uma frágil relação entre teorias/modelos e objetos/eventos nos livros didáticos; disso decorre que o tratamento dos princípios assume apenas o papel de técnica adicional para a resolução de problemas fechados, um estatuto epistemológico reduzido e diferente daquele das ciências empíricas. Nós sugerimos que tratar os princípios nos livros didáticos aproximando-os de sua função teórica exige incentivar a atividade de criação dos estudantes na construção de significados balizada na validade dos princípios. Isto se daria por meio da apresentação de situações físicas não modelizadas, não idealizadas e abstraídas. Assim, a riqueza heurística do princípio estaria sendo explorada, e não somente aspectos operacionais.

Using cognitive theory to explain entrepreneurial risk-taking: Challenging conventional wisdom

Though it occupies the center of most definitions of entrepreneurship, the concept of risk-taking and its linkages with other constructs (most notably personal traits) have been difficult to capture. As a result, it has been difficult to explain why entrepreneurs rush in to take advantage of opportunities that others fail to see or act upon. However, research on social cognition may shed new light on these challenging issues (Shaver and Scott 1991), providing useful frameworks that differentiate entrepreneurs from others while predicting differences in risk-taking behavior. Within the strategic management literature, Dutton and Jackson (1987) adopted categorization theory as a conceptual framework to explain how decision-makers evoke alternate strategic decision frames. They argue that the attributes of a particular issue cause the decision-maker to categorize that strategic issue in different ways, and this heuristic guides the meaning of a stimulus by directing attention toward some of its elements and away from others. Building upon this work and the knowledge structure literature, Gooding (1989) developed decision frames concerning perceptions of strengths/weaknesses and opportunities/threats. Using distinctive and equivocal data in scenarios, he found that distinctive data tended to evoke the same decision frame in all subjects, whereas equivocal data led to different decision frames among subjects. In other words, in the absence of a particular stimulus (i.e., a scenario is equivocal in nature), individuals tend to resort to a chronic frame of reference when interpreting those data. This research produced some revealing results, but these studies were not constructed to investigate the unique responses of entrepreneurs when faced with common circumstances. To extend this area of inquiry, we designed our study using a scenario approach to determine if entrepreneurs exhibit evidence of unique cognitive categorization processes when they are presented with equivocal data. Our findings proved interesting. As predicted, entrepreneurs did not vary significantly in their responses to a risk propensity scale, meaning that they did not perceive themselves as being any more predisposed to taking risks than nonentrepreneurs. This is consistent with previous findings. However, multivariate tests revealed that entrepreneurs categorized equivocal business scenarios significantly more positively than did other subjects, and univariate tests demonstrated that these perceptual differences were consistent and significant (i.e., entrepreneurs perceived more strengths versus weaknesses, opportunities versus threats, and potential for performance improvement versus deterioration). These results have implications for self-report risk propensity scales. Entrepreneurs may not think of themselves as being any more likely to take risks than nonentrepreneurs, but they are nonetheless predisposed to cognitively categorize business situations more positively. This interpretation leads entrepreneurs to view some situations as “opportunities,” even though others perceive them to have little potential (i.e., the latter view these situations as risky ventures that offer disproportionately low returns relative to their associated risks). These results offer hope to those who aspire to identify and exploit business opportunities, even when they are distracted by the perceived high risk of these ventures. Unlike personal traits, cognitive processes can be changed. That is, if certain aspects of cognition are different for entrepreneurs, or more successful entrepreneurs, these processes can be learned or mastered through programs such as “frame of reference” training. This approach has successfully increased the assessment accuracy of individuals charged with various assignments, including performance rating (cf. Sulsky and Day 1992). These efforts may be adapted for training in opportunity evaluation, allowing those predisposed to negative framing to increase the frequency of correct categorizations. Our results also offer the potential to develop a taxonomy that may help to identify entrepreneurs, a tool that would be useful to firms interested in assessing individuals' natural potential for entrepreneurial behavior. At the same time, systematic differences in cognitive processes may permit the differentiation of entrepreneurs from small business owners, which would be useful since these groups often cannot be determined from the size of an enterprise (i.e., both tend to be associated with smaller ventures). Finally, such a taxonomy would provide the impetus for future research that may further define characteristics of risk-taking and, indeed, the nature of entrepreneurship itself.

Features of One-Boson-Exchange Potential Models

We examine a number of features and questions related to realistic one-boson-exchange-potential models for the $N\ensuremath{-}N$ interaction, mainly from a phenomenological viewpoint. They include (i) the validity of the one-pion-exchange region concept and the classical impact-parameter formula, (ii) the effect of a discrete versus continuous mass for the $I=0$, $J=0$ meson field used to simulate the $2\ensuremath{\pi}$ continuum, (iii) the effect of an unconstrained versus constrained vector-meson field, (iv) the influence of "double regularization" upon phase shifts, and (v) the extension of effective-range theory to velocity-dependent interactions. The objectives are to obtain a physical understanding of the $N\ensuremath{-}N$ interaction and to provide heuristic guides to the further development of a quantitative theory of the fundamental nuclear force.

Design of piecewise-linear switching functions for relay control systems

The design of piecewise-linear switching functions is investigated for linear, constant, lumped systems with a single ideal relay controller with respect to a transient response (minimum-time) performance criterion. A design method is presented which consists of a series of steps leading finally to the optimization of parameters by a gradient or other search technique suitable for computer implementation. The preliminary steps are devoted to reducing the dimensionality of the parameter space which must be searched, defining the criterion function so as to yield a surface which is reasonably smooth and free of relative minima, and insuring that the search is started with a feasible parameter set. It is concluded that easily implemented piecewise-linear switching functions can be designed so as to yield improved performance, both in terms of settling times and region of stability in the state space, over that attainable with linear switching functions. The complexities of the performance surface are such, however, that it is felt that frequently the determination of a switching function by the heuristic guides described, constitutes an adequate design without the refinement of parameter optimization.