Ideal Life Research Articles

A Daoist response to climate change

Climate change is now a global problem that can no longer be ignored. As climate change signals a civilization failure, the emerging reality will spur cultures everywhere to re-examine their traditions and rediscover the ecological wisdom of the ancients. Daoism will be no exception. This paper tries to explain the Daoist response to climate change by focusing on the manifestation of Dao, the responsibility of humankind and the ideal life. It shows that in its tenets and practices, Daoism articulates ideas that emphasize conservation, envision a post-consumerist existence and inform a climate ethics, which can help with the cultural adaptations that are now necessary for a sustainable future.

Suits, Autotelicity, Temporal Reallocations, Game Resources and Defining ‘play’

Bernard Suits bequeathed a rich legacy of philosophical insights contributing to our developing a deeper understanding of sport-related issues, and his work has attracted much attention and stimulated valuable controversy over many years. However, the interest it has stimulated appears uneven. In this context and with reference to the former claims above, I focus on a part of his work that has received relatively less commentary, in the hope that it too will yield work of value. Given the imaginative quality of Suits's writing, it is pessimistic to assume that attention to a relatively neglected part of his work will fail to bear fruit, if not as a result of my labours here, then perhaps of someone else's in further discussion. My concern is his account of ‘play’, by which he meant to toy, fiddle or trifle with something or other, written over 30 years ago, and it stems from reflection on one recent effort to examine this part of Suits's work, namely Morgan's discussion of ‘play’. My article attempts an analysis of the definition Suits gave and an evaluation of efforts he made to defend his understanding, alongside brief exploration of Morgan's work. Both of these tasks are undertaken against a background of Suits's broader concerns with the place of games in an ideal life. The conclusions I reach are that Suits's account embodies too many issues to be acceptable; that Morgan's attempt to rescue him from one of them is misdirected; but that even if my criticisms are damaging to the account of ‘play’ I examine, they leave Suits's main work on playing games seriously as sports unscathed.

Relationships between ideal and real of dietary habits and health behavior among male high-school students.

The purpose of this study is to examine the difference between ideal and real on dietary habits and the relationships between actual dietary habits and usual health behavior. In this study, male high-school students (N=267) zcompleted questionnaires regarding their present dietary habits, ideal dietary habits, and usual health behavior. The major findings were as follows: Life style of “whole family eating together” was positively associated with all factors of health behaviors. Overall, it was thus inferred that the custom of “whole family eating together” had a effect on a maintaining students′ health. There was a tangible difference between the actual life style of eating and ideal life style of eating except “whole family eating together”.Key words; actual life style of eating, ideal life style of eating, health behavior, male high school students.assess the ability of food and meals corresponding to their environment.

Optimizing in vivo Assessment of Nano/bio Interactions to Guide Safer Material Design

ABSTRACTThe rapid rate of discovery and development in the nanotechnology field will undoubtedly increase both human and environmental exposures to engineered nanomaterials. Whether these exposures pose a significant risk remains uncertain. Despite recent collective progress there remain gaps in our understanding of the nanomaterials physiochemical properties that drive or dictate biological responses. The development and implementation of rapid relevant and efficient testing strategies to assess these emerging materials prior to large-scale exposures could help advance this exciting field. I present a powerful approach that utilizes a dynamic in vivo zebrafish embryonic assay to rapidly define the biological responses to nanomaterial exposures. Early developmental life stages are often uniquely sensitive to environmental insults, due in part to the enormous changes in cellular differentiation, proliferation and migration required to form the required cell types, tissues and organs. Molecular signaling underlies all of these processes. Most toxic responses result from disruption of proper molecular signaling, thus, early developmental life stages are perhaps the ideal life stage to determine if nanomaterials perturb normal biological pathways. Through automation and rapid throughput approaches, a systematic and iterative strategy has been deployed to help elucidate the nanomaterials properties that drive biological responses.

The Value of Sex in Procreative Reasons

We can learn about people's conceptions of the ideal life by looking at what they imagine heaven to be like. Although voluptuous and gendered (and even sexist) accounts of the afterlife are familiar, more reflective views grow ever more distant from our actual human form of life—many Christians believe that in heaven there will be no marriage, sexual intercourse, or procreation. For those of us who think of the human frame not as the creation of a divine designer but as a contingent product of blind natural selection, it is simply a truism that our biology falls far short of perfection. If we were to engineer ex nihilo a new form of intelligent life that would be maximally flourishing, it would bear little resemblance to actual human beings. Nor is it likely to be divided into male and female, or to engage in sexual intercourse for reproductive purposes-sexual dimorphism was after all not selected because it reflects some deep intrinsic value, but for familiar evolutionary reasons. Awareness that we are mere products of blind chance, that there is no special necessity that intelligent beings would be divided into male and female, or walk on two legs, or enjoy music or dance, might be disturbing to some. But we mustn't confuse pressure in the gut with a reductio.

Accommodation needs for carers of and adults with intellectual disability in regional Australia: their hopes for and perceptions of the future

This article provides an in-depth investigation of the accommodation circumstances of a population of aging adults with intellectual disability living at home with parents or in supported accommodation in an Australian regional centre. Given the ageing of both the carer and adult population with intellectual disability our research explored the accommodation needs and perceptions of future lifestyle issues from the perspective of both the carers and the adults with intellectual disability. This study aimed to describe these accommodation circumstances related to a regional/rural location and did not make direct comparisons with urban/metropolitan situations. A mixed methods approach, specifically an explanatory design, participant selection model was utilised for the overall study. This article reports on the qualitative study consisting of data from both free response open-ended survey questions and semi-structured interviews with selected adults with intellectual disability and their carers. This study explored and described participants' experiences and perceptions regarding their accommodation needs and future lifestyle issues. A purposive sampling technique was used to identify a representative sample of participants for interviews. The interview questions were guided by the results of the quantitative first study phase. Data were analysed by content analysis for major themes emerging from the interview and free response survey data. A total of 146 carers (mean age 61.5 years; range 40-91 years) and 156 adults with intellectual disability (mean age 37.2 years; range 18-79 years) participated in the study. Data saturation was reached after 10 interviews were undertaken with carers (mean age 60 years) and 10 with adults with intellectual disability (no age criteria applied). Six major themes were identified: ageing, family issues, living at home, living away from home, government support and funding, and future needs. The perceptions and views of both adults with intellectual disability and their carers around these major themes are reported and discussed. This study indicates that there is a lack of suitable, available, supported accommodation for people aged 18 years and older with intellectual disability in this Australian regional centre. Consequently, aging parents caring at home have little choice but to continue in their caring role. For those caring away from home, existing services are decreasingly seen as fitting the ideal life they want for the person with intellectual disability for whom they care. The told experiences, perceptions and views of older carers of and adults with intellectual disability have highlighted their increasing vulnerability to the 'disability system'. The findings suggest that government and disability services must acknowledge the changing needs of people with intellectual disability in connection with their advancing age and the urgency of increasing care needs due to the advancing age of their carer's. The overwhelming feeling is that the carer's voice will only be heard when the situation reaches crisis point. For many carers and their families this has already occurred.

A CHARIOT FOR THE SHEKHINAH: Identity and the Ideal Life in Sixteenth‐Century Kabbalah

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I seek to present the range of issues involved in the efforts of sixteenth‐century kabbalists to understand the nature of selfhood, and the paths prescribed for the formation of an ideal life. I reflect on the mystical writings of Moshe Cordovero, Eliyahu de Vidas, and ayyim Vital—probing their conceptions of core identity, the polarity between body and soul, and the ethical guidance for a life well lived. In so doing, I consider the following additional themes, and their relation to the matrix of self‐formation and religious identity: reincarnation and rebirth; the virtue of humility and self‐effacement; the cultivation of wisdom; ideals of piety and prophetic experience; asceticism; and the spiritual transcendence of desire. In presenting this wide range of constituent themes, I argue that sixteenth‐century kabbalists understood the soul to be the ultimate marker of personal identity (nuanced and complicated by the doctrine of reincarnation), and that they formulated a vision of an ideal ethics in which the human being functions as an earthly vessel for the divine presence. What is more, the preparation of that vessel required a degree of humility so extreme that the attainment of ideal personhood ultimately involved the effacement of that very identity.

The Paper World of Bernard Suits

Here I consider the utopian claim of Bernard Suits, that the ideal life consists in playing games. I argue that his claim has no meaning. Just as it makes no sense to maintain that everything is an illusion, since we would have no sense then of the correlative ‘reality’, so too it makes no sense to speak of a world consisting entire of playing. Also I examine Suits’ definition of play, which he takes to describe the forms of play that we actually have. I show how it fails to describe them. I end by showing how the Utopia of the Grasshopper self-destructs into postmodern babble—which is perhaps what Suits [should have] intended all along. Once upon a time Oets, a fellow from Nebraska, wrote about Descartes’ problem of universal skepticism in Meditation 1. Could the Evil Genius deceive us about everything? Could she deceive us into believing that the entire world was as we believe it to be, while in reality it was made out of paper? Following his roshi (master) Wittgenstein, Oets argued that it turns out that the Evil Genius herself was being deceived. Despite her best efforts, she had created a less flimsy world of three-dimensional objects and creatures. Instead, in creating, she was giving herself the delusion that she had created a two-dimensional paper world and was fooling all those creatures. (3: pp. 95–7) I submit that Bernard Suits has gotten himself, or his insect, into a similar position in his utopia, The Grasshopper. Suits does ask for himself to be considered an evil genius. He has his arthropod puppeteer say:

Psychological Emptiness in the Zhuāngzǐ

Three views of psychological emptiness, or xū, can be found in the Zhuāngzĭ. The instrumental view values xū primarily as a means of efficacious action. The moderate view assigns it intrinsic value as an element of one Zhuangist vision of the good life. The radical view also takes it to be an element of the ideal life, but in this case the form of life advocated is that of the Daoist sage, who transcends mundane human concerns to merge with nature or the Dào. The instrumental and moderate views articulate a relatively commonsensical position, on which the agent continues to pursue at least some characteristically human projects. On the radical view, by contrast, the agent ceases to exercise agency and lives a life hardly recognizable as human. The three views thus signal a tension in Zhuangist ethics, and the unattractiveness of the radical view poses a potential obstacle to the application of Daoist ideas in contemporary ethical discourse. The paper argues that there are principled grounds within Zhuangist thought for detaching the instrumental and moderate views from the radical view and rejecting the latter.

A Magnetic Transport Middle Eastern Positron Beam

A magnetically guided slow positron beam is being constructed at Qatar University and is currently being optimised for regular operation. This is the first positron beam in the Middle East, as well as being the first Arabic positron beam. Novel features in the design include a purely magnetic in-line deflector, working in the solenoid guiding field, to eliminate un-moderated positrons and block the direct line of sight to the source. The impact of this all-magnetic transport on the Larmor radius and resultant beam characteristics are studied by SIMION simulations for both ideal and real life magnetic field variations. These results are discussed in light of the coupled effect arising from electrostatic beam extraction.

Values and Significance: A case study uncovering the search for meaning among young people in Central and Eastern Europe

This paper will present a few of the results of qualitative, case study research conducted among students in six cities in Central and Eastern Europe. It will describe the use of images in interviews and how this enabled digging beyond cultural, customary religious belief to uncover a search for ultimate meaning and spirituality. A summary of the findings regarding the emerging values of the young people and their descriptions of what is significant to them in life will be related to Savage, Collins-Mayo and Mayo's research conducted in the UK, specifically to their theories of formative and transformative spirituality and the happy midi-narrative. The tension between a young person's actual situation and their dream about their ideal life will be discussed in terms of the research findings regarding the students' use of celebrity images in their living space. The young people's values, as they emerged from the research, will be contrasted with the values and practices of churches in this region, as seen through the young people's perceptions of traditional church and as articulated by local church leaders. The paper will include a short analysis of the current religious situation in former Soviet countries in light of the finding of the research..

The Reinvention of Devotion in the British Reformations

The ideal Protestant life was built around two critical events: conversion and death. At the first, the believer received justification and the assurance of salvation; at the second, the promise once received came into its fullness. This pattern was implicit from the earliest days of the Reformation, and when the English Puritans of William Perkins’ school mapped out a schematic for the Protestant life they made it explicit. Theologically, this pattern made a great deal of sense. However, it created a practical problem. Many believers had to endure a tediously long interval between these two high points. How was the good Protestant supposed to pass the time?

From the Bodies of Bees: Classical and Christian Echoes in <i> Surat al-Nahl</i>

Within Surat al-Nahl, the bee, like the very earth and God’s most privileged human hierophants, receives a direct revelation from the Lord. This revelation consists of a series of injunctions: go to your homes, eat of the earth’s fruits and “follow the trodden paths of the Lord.” These key elements of the Sura’s meditation upon the bee resonate very strongly with Classical and Christian ideas about the nature and habit of bees. Just as the Sura privileges the bee to communicate directly with God and to live an ideal life, throughout Graeco- Roman Antiquity the bee was similarly thought to be a creature particularly endowed with a divine nature and entrusted with divine revelation. And like their perfectly obedient Muslim counterparts, the Classical bee offered a paradigm for life and how to live it. And yet, Muslim exegetes both Sunni and Shi'i are hardly satisfied to merely import a pre-fabricated trope into their discourse as their rich interpretive tradition elaborates the bee’s rhetorical valence and symbolic power to make the insect wholly their own.

Child's Play: Hillel Bavli's "Mrs. Woods" and Indian Representation in American Hebrew Literature

Americans are cognizant of references to Native Americans in their culture. Some are even familiar with a few loanwords from Indian languages in English. Bearing references to Native Americans are sports teams, train lines, and place names. In these, no actual Indians need be found. The impression left in minds of some is that Native Americans are missing from continent. Such was impression conveyed in works of some Hebraists who dwelled on fate of Native Americans in their critique of imagined ideal life in New World. In them, they saw reflected their own selves-either as Hebraists or as Jews-as in danger of being at precipice of extinction in America. The term the last of Mohicans, borrowed from James Fennimore Cooper's famous novel, has become a figure of speech in their reference to themselves, and has even penetrated today's Israeli Hebrew. The lingering references to this expression, a phrase coined as part and parcel of language today, underscored overwhelming threat posed by White America's culture to annihilate and assimilate all minor cultures, absorbing them even as it grew larger on their ruin.1 Despite continued survival of over five hundred Indian tribes recognized officially by Federal government, a considerable segment of citizenry of United States, among them also Hebrew writers, considered Native Americans as close to physical extinction. To be sure, net number of Native Americans is estimated to have decreased precipitously in early centuries of European conquest of New World. According to some, their population declined to an estimated two million.2 Nonetheless, it seems that numerical increase of Native Americans in last century bodes well for their continued persistence, though it is now quality of life that remains a concern in case of many. The prospect of a nearly total eradication of Indians figures centrally in imagination of Hebrew writers who pondered fate

Quality of Life and its Components’ Measurement

The objective of this paper is to define the quality of life (QOL) and the quality of working life (QOWL) con-ceptions and their components, to establish the quality of life evaluation and to report the results of the employee’s quality of working life research. Quality of life is influenced by an individual’s physi-cal and mental health, the degree of independency, the social relationship with the environment and other fac-tors. Quality of life could be defined as an individual’s satisfaction with his or her life dimensions comparing with his or her ideal life. Evaluation of the quality of life depends on one’s value system. The quality of working life could be defined as work place strategies, processes and environment combination, which stimulates employee’s job satisfaction. It also de-pends on work conditions and organization’s efficiency. The quality of life model includes seven factors and indicators to represent these factors. This model was used in the study. The objective of the study was to evalu-ate the quality of life and the quality of working life value of the particular organization’s employees. 26 men and 15 women working in the middle-sized industrial organization were surveyed. They were asked to evaluate seven domains of QOL and QOWL: physical state, material state, emotional state, social relationship, education and self-improvement, self-expression and lei-sure, safety and environment. The study enabled to find out that the employees are more satisfied with quality of life (3.47 points) than qual-ity of working life (3.45 points). The respondents are least satisfied with their material state. Quality of life directly correlates with quality of working life (r  0.76). Employees quality of working life value and their seven factors have a moderately correlation (r  0.55-0.66). While quality of life highly correlates with physical state (r  0.84), material state (r  0.71). Social – demo-graphic elements have less influence on quality of life and quality of working life estimation. The research findings show that studied organization has possibilities to increase its employees’ quality of life and loyalty by improving working conditions and envi-ronment. High value of the quality of working life directly influences higher quality of life.

Du, Shanshan. CHOPSTICKS ONLY WORK IN PAIRS: GENDER UNITY AND GENDER EQUALITY AMONG THE LAHU OF SOUTHWEST CHINA

Du,Shanshan. CHOKTTICKS ONLY WORK IN PAIRS: GENDER UNITY AND GENDER EQUALITY AMONG THE LAHU OF SOUTHWEST CHINA. Columbia University Press, 2002. $26.00.Genuine gender equality has been the holy grail for feminist anthropologists. They have traveled throughout the world for almost a century in quest of a society that does not place men above women. Margaret Mead attempted to show that there was absolute variation in three adjacent-by societies, the Mundugumor, Arapesh, and Tchambuli of Papua New Guinea (Mead 1963 [1935]). Anthropologists combed the globe, always tempted by the notion that around the bend is a more genuinely egalitarian society. By 1974, Sherry Ortner had concluded that this quest was in vain; she attempted, sadly, to explain why all societies regarded men more highly than women. (It is because women are equated with nature, and men with culture, and culture is superior.) But there were still some cases that provided hope: The matrilineal societies of Native America-Navajo, Northwest Coast groups, etc.-seemed to suggest that male dominance was not ubiquitous and unchallenged (Klein and Ackerman 1995). Peggy Sanday has labored to show that the Minangkabau of Indonesia are genuinely matriarchal (2002). In China, an Amazonian kingdom of matriarchy was alleged to exist among the Mosuo (Shin in press). Chinese and foreign ethnologists have flocked to Mugu Lake in Yunnan province to study these marriage-free, strong women, though they can be analyzed in various ways that do not support claims of Mosuo matriarchy.But now meet the Lahu. This is a primitive group (according to Han Chinese classification) in Yunnan province in southwest China (but also in Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand), who demonstrate genuine gender equality. Shanshan Du has been regaling us in articles with information about these unusual people for quite some time now. Her book is a welcome longer treatment of the topic.Using information from folk sayings, creation myths (cross-sex twin gods Xeul and Sha are virtually indistinguishable), weddings and other rituals, Du demonstrates what she calls the Lahu's dyadic view of gender. Just as one cannot have just one chopstick and make it function, and ritual candles are made by dipping both ends of string into wax, so one cannot value one gender without the other. Her claim is essentially that there are gender-equal societies, but that they have not been identified as such by scholars because of certain preconceptions about what such societies would look like.Du defines societies as those whose dominant ideology, institutions, and social practices value its male and female members equally, regardless of the roles they play (p. 9). She then provides evidence from a wide variety of domains, including proverbs, rituals, postmarriage residence and labor obligation to parents, division of labor in the family, ideals of personhood, the ideal life cycle, traditional leadership, ideas of dyads that permeate many institutions, definitions of relations and obligations to affines, labor exchange, and even those exceptions to the ideal of monogamy that nonetheless operate according to gender-egalitarian notions. …

The Persistence of the Standardized Life Cycle

This article investigates to what degree the standardized life cycle has been replaced by an individualized life course, characterized by the absence of a strict sequence and timing of life's transitions. In order to measure the normative position of people, rather than the external conditions to which they are subject, the test is based on the ideal life course or life cycle as described by a purely random sample of 4666 inhabitants of Belgium, aged 18 to 36. The available evidence overwhelmingly points towards the persistence of a standardized ideal life cycle, characterized by a strict sequence and timing of the important transitions.

Representation of living forms

The living forms represented in this paper are sets of parts that spontaneously increase in organization. Their organizations are measured by an information-theoretic function derived from the work of Boltzmann and Shannon. We briefly review its derivation in the context of the troubled role of mathematics in biology, and then define the function. We illustrate its nature by measuring the 22 different organizations of a set of eight things; and we facilitate its use by defining the parameters that determine an amount of organization. The measure is then applied to show that the organization of limb pairs on free-living arthropods, based on data given by Cisne, confirms a pattern of increasing organization in their evolution from the Cambrian era to the present. Further applications measure the changes in organizations of ideal (theoretical) life forms, and contrasting changes in inanimate systems. Our main results represent the reproduction of unicellular organisms, and the formation of hierarchies, as processes of increasing organization.

Visualizing Marriage in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT In this article, I propose using bridal photography and wedding video-recording to gain a better understanding of the meanings of romance and the ideal life among young generations and to consider how relevant images of getting married shed light on the changing social life in Hong Kong. Bridal photography and wedding videorecording not only play the role of documentation but also reflect the social change and values among new married couples in the society. By examining packaged bridal photography and the process of wedding video-shooting, I propose to state how visualization brings subtle influences into the new dynamism of marriage as a ritual and reflects the changing social contexts in today's Hong Kong everyday life.

Plato, Thomas and the Daring Ethics of Friendship

Fergus Kerr observed that Thomas Aquinas inaugurates a new way of doing Christian ethics focused on human flourishing. It is based on a daring model of Christian friendship that has, though, found little success. Why? Because it stems from Aristotle's model of friendship which is, in turn, based upon self-love and exclusivity. Augustine, in particular, is a figure who portrays such friendship as antithetical to God's selfless and universal love: friendship, for him, needs to be ‘triangulated’ in divine love. However, Thomas suggests charity as friendship because he recognizes that friendship is the best ‘school of love’ for human beings: within the ambivalences of friendship, Christians can practise the habits of divine love so that it becomes an overarching principle in their lives. But, there is an irony in Thomas turning to Aristotle for a model of love that embraces rather than transcends human experience, since Aristotle too cannot quite shake off a vision of the ideal life that is uneasy with friendship. For that, we must turn to the work of Plato on friendship, in his dialogue the Lysis, which not only offers a model of friendship wholly committed to it as a school of love, philosophy and the good life, but does so recognizing the ‘in between’ status of human beings similar to that with which Thomas was concerned.