Things Look Research Articles

When not to have another baby: An evolutionary approach to low fertility

AbstractBACKGROUNDIn this paper, I explain the theoretical foundations of fertility from the perspective of evolutionary demography and evolutionary anthropology.OBJECTIVEMy goal in this paper is to provide examples of how evolutionary demography is generating and testing new hypotheses about human fertility and parental behaviour.METHODSTo illustrate the paradigm of low fertility, I present several evolutionary explanations for reduced fertility, or no fertility at all. The explanations I cite are drawn from studies on child maltreatment, homosexual preference, post-demographic transition low fertility, and late-life low fertility (menopause), as these are phenomena that appear to challenge evolutionary approaches.CONCLUSIONSI find that the sophisticated tools of behavioural ecology and evolutionary anthropology and demography can do more than simply explain high fertility, and are currently being used to generate and test new hypotheses about fertility, including hypotheses that address the issue of low fertility.1. An introduction to evolutionary demographyEvolutionary demography (or the application of evolutionary theory to human demographic behaviour) rests on the assumption that all organisms are designed by natural selection. As evolutionary theory is an overarching theory that explains how all living things look, develop, and behave, it is not surprising that it is relevant to understanding human fertility. Natural selection is assumed to act on physiological and decision-making processes in such a way that these processes maximise inclusive fitness in the environment in which they evolved. Inclusive fitness is a measure of the number of relatives an individual produces, weighted according to how closely related they are to the individual by direct descent (Hamilton 1964).In this paper, I outline some recent developments in the application of evolutionary theory to human demography. Rather than reviewing the entire field, which is very large, I will illustrate this approach by tackling what might be considered the most challenging question raised in the discipline: namely, what is the evolutionary basis for the failure of some people to reproduce? A simplistic analysis might suggest that humans (and indeed any species) should, subject to constraints, be evolved try to reproduce at the maximum possible rate. I will examine how evolutionary demographers and biologists have explained three contexts in which humans either do not reproduce, or do so far less than is theoretically possible: homosexuality, menopause, and the demographic transition. I will conclude by responding to some of the theoretical issues the other contributors to this volume are also addressing.Biologists generally define evolutionary demography as the application of life history theory to population processes. Having worked in both the biological and the social sciences, I often switch between the two different vocabularies of the social and biological sciences. One difference between these scientific disciplines is that the phenomenon that demographers call fertility (the number of births, which is the definition I use), biologists call fecundity. The two fields are similar in many respects. Life history theory is a well-developed sub-discipline of evolutionary ecology which is explicitly concerned with the timing of life history events (growth, reproduction, maintenance, and death) under natural selection. The timing and the scheduling of births in order to maximise fitness (in the Darwinian sense) can in theory be calculated for any given environment and any given set of environmental constraints. In examining the timing of births, researchers often try to understand both the behavioural and the physiological determinants of fertility (e.g., menopause). Parental investment is viewed as a life history trait that is determined in part by considerations regarding the quantity versus the quality of offspring. …

The function of central bank's communication: From dogma to argumentation in the virtual times

Communication is one of the important instruments for conducting a central bank's policy. The recent financial crisis and the development of communication technology have made central banks face some new challenges: communication with the market versus communication with political stakeholders; transferring the message versus participating in the public discourse; and balancing between short-term and long-term focus. The significance of a consistent message has remained the same, but the context in which a message is sent and received has drastically changed, having resulted in non-homogenous target groups, versatile communication genres, and the public discourse media unused so far. Today, a central bank communicates beyond the narrow circle of economic experts, and against the constant attempts at simplification and exaggeration for the purpose of making things look spectacular. The fact that communication takes place in a multi-lingual context adds to the complexity of communication. The debate on essential issues has to be anticipated; arguments and key messages have to be conveyed in a clear, consistent and responsible manner, resorting to the new potential granted by modern means of communication.

A Strategic Model for Technical Talent Management: A Model Based on a Qualitative Case Study

One critical challenge for organizations today is building and sustaining a strong talent pipeline through effective management of human assets. Talent management focuses on developing talent that is strategically important for an organization's future. Research in talent management typically focuses on managerial or leadership talents, yet there are other important career tracks within an organization. Although preparing employees for promotion into management remains critically important, technical expertise such as engineering is often the key competitive advantage in the global knowledge economy. Research has repeatedly emphasized that technical workers look for different things. But most of the studies concerning technical talent management focus on the management of technical professionals and experts in isolation. This study was undertaken to address unique problems in attracting, developing, retaining, and transferring the knowledge of engineers, whose abilities are critical in a knowledge or innovation economy. Through in-depth interviews with selected best practice companies on how they operate their technical talent management system and programs, the study examined shared characteristics of selected organizations with programs geared to engineers. The results are summarized in a systematic model that describes common elements of effective technical talent management programs.

“Top-Down” Effects Where None Should Be Found

A tidal wave of recent research purports to have discovered that higher-level states such as moods, action capabilities, and categorical knowledge can literally and directly affect how things look. Are these truly effects on perception, or might some instead reflect influences on judgment, memory, or response bias? Here, we exploited an infamous art-historical reasoning error (the so-called “El Greco fallacy”) to demonstrate that multiple alleged top-down effects (including effects of morality on lightness perception and effects of action capabilities on spatial perception) cannot truly be effects on perception. We suggest that this error may also contaminate several other varieties of top-down effects and that this discovery has implications for debates over the continuity (or lack thereof) of perception and cognition.

The affective atmospheres of surveillance

The spaces that surveillance produces can be thought of as ambiguous, entailing elements that are ethereal yet material, geographical yet trans-geographical. Contemporary surveillance systems form numerous connections that involve multiple times, spaces, and bodies. Owing to their ubiquity, normalization, and yet clandestine characteristics, they seem to produce an almost unnoticed aspect of everyday life. The impacts, then, of contemporary surveillance systems appear to be particularly experienced on the margins of consciousness. Thus we find that an empirical analysis of this realm of experience is possible but requires one to look for such things as disruption, disfluency, and hesitation in the text of speech acts rather than clear representation. Through empirical analysis of narratives concerning everyday experiences of living with contemporary surveillance systems, this paper focuses on their possible affective impacts. In turn, we find it more fitting to think about the so-called “surveillance society” in terms of producing “atmospheres” rather than “cultures or assemblages,” and “affects” rather than “emotions.”

Appearances are not skin deep

This paper investigates the functions of a previously neglected collocation, the nominalizer 的 de and the noun 樣子 yàngzi ‘appearance’ (DYZ) in colloquial Mandarin discourse. DYZ is shown to be either denotational or non-denotational. In the denotational use, yàngzi denotes various entity concepts, including bodily appearances, behavioral demeanor, and visual percepts of an event. In the non-denotational use, however, yàngzi does not denote, but instead, in tandem with the nominalizer de, functions as an inferential marker, meaning a grammatical device that indicates inference or assumption on the part of the speaker while at the same time signaling the speaker’s medium epistemic certainty about a statement. The underlying mechanism of recruiting the noun for “appearance” to mark inferentials may be attributable to the widespread conceptualization of basing the epistemology of perception on “how things look” (Lyons 2005).

Book Review: Sublime Images from Hubble, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime

SUBLIME IMAGES FROM HUBBLE Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime. Elizabeth A. Kessler (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012). Pp. viii + 279. $30 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-8166-7957-7.In 1998, the Hubble Heritage Team was preparing to release a new image of the planetary nebula NGC 3132. Hubble Heritage images appear not just in research papers but on calendars, coffee mugs, and the walls of art galleries. They literally shape how many citizens and scientists around the world see the universe. When describing how a balance between aesthetic inclinations and scientific veracity was found for the NGC 3132 picture, one team member explained, We tend to look for things that 'look right.' And what exactly looks right is maybe a little hard to quantify (p. 162).This quote, found toward the end of Elizabeth A. Kessler's excellent and thought-provoking new book, captures a great deal of the tension inherent in making and viewing contemporary images. Such scientific images have an inherent aesthetic and artistic quality. As Kessler's book reveals, they do all sorts of work besides merely conveying scientific information.As the book's title suggests, the astronomical is central to Kessler's analysis of Hubble images. Primarily focusing on the work of the Hubble Heritage Project, she expands on the sublime's characteristic features (astonishment, the infinite, and even terror) and extends it beyond its origins with eighteenth-century scholars like Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke. Kessler convincingly shows how contemporary Hubble images not only reflect qualities of the sublime but also resemble earlier traditions in Western art. In particular, she compares Hubble images to famous nineteenth-century landscape paintings by artists such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt. The famous 1995 Pillars of Creation image - a view of the Eagle Nebula has parallels to, for example, the towering cloud and rock formations found in Romantic scenes of the American West.Nineteenth-century scenes of the American frontier once conveyed natural splendour to parlour-bound citizens, and tempted scientists with their geological mysteries. They also communicated the ideology of Manifest Destiny and the transformative power of the frontier as Frederick Jackson Turner famously noted. In similar fashion, images from Hubble reflect their own historical moment by stimulating public interest and continued funding for NASA's exploration of the cosmic frontier. In the early 1990s, when the telescope's initial spherical aberration threatened to undermine public and political support altogether, images from Hubble proved especially critical. They convinced scientists, politicians and taxpayers that a hobbled Hubble could still produce good science and a repaired telescope even more so.The strength of Kessler's argument lies in her skilful blending of the histories of art and astronomy with oral history interviews and observations from contemporary astronomers at work. She also engages with the work of other scholars who have considered the nature and use of images. This book, for example, finds common ground with Samuel Edgerton and Michael Lynch's earlier work on digital image processing while critiquing the sceptical view of the art historian James Elkins. …

'Top-down' effects where none should be found: The El Greco fallacy in perception research

A tidal wave of recent research purports to have discovered that higher-level states such as moods, action capabilities, and categorical knowledge can literally and directly affect how things look. Are these truly effects on perception, or might some instead reflect influences on judgment, memory, or response bias? Here, we exploited an infamous art-historical reasoning error (the so-called “El Greco fallacy”) to demonstrate that multiple alleged top-down effects (including effects of morality on lightness perception and effects of action capabilities on spatial perception) cannot truly be effects on perception. We suggest that this error may also contaminate several other varieties of top-down effects and that this discovery has implications for debates over the continuity (or lack thereof) of perception and cognition.

Legitimate frameworks for studying how things look

Legitimate frameworks for studying how things look

The stories we need: anthropology, philosophy, narrative and higher education research

As higher education research is largely practised by those immersed within the university, the questions we ask, and the stories we tell, over time co-create the university itself. Using Bruner's concept of the ‘narrative mode’, we argue for a revaluing of narrative and storytelling within higher education research. We ground our discussion in examples of research challenges where traditional quantitative methodologies leave certain things unsayable and look to our two disciplines – anthropology and philosophy – for solutions to these challenges. Anthropology's intimate and complex historical relationship with narrative offers us a range of narrative devices – unusual plots for research accounts, rich data, an ability to tell individual stories in micro-time and wider group narratives. Philosophy offers us a new view of imagination in epistemology and allows us to extend the boundaries of sight beyond individuals, considering the possibility of examining the university itself as a character, a reflexive subject. We argue that our disciplines’ capacities to tell these rare tales – oddly shaped personal narratives, group narratives, narratives with unusual characters, quests, reversals and tricksters, and stories that ultimately morph back into questions – allow us to find again some of the ‘forgotten things’ of higher education research.

Tom Smithson Dead in His Garret

November–December 2013 • 15 PC: What are the stages of the eternal Mexico you mention : indigenous, colonial Spanish, followed by what? AE: Modern Mexico, I suppose, the one of the War of Independence and the revolution, the industrialized Mexico, the democratic Mexico—something like that. But I must stress that this is not what I believe, it’s an ideological discourse that is embedded in the school system, and one that dominates the self-perception of Mexicans. PC: Dalkey Archive Press has just brought out the English version of your novel Hypothermia in a translation by Brendan Riley. AE: It’s my first book to appear in English, and particularly important to me because it helped me make the most difficult step for someone who writes in Spanish: from being a Mexican writer to becoming a Latin American writer. PC: Why is that a difficult step? AE: It’s the book in which I learned to write with absolute freedom. I was thirty-three—Dante’s age when he descended into the inferno—and I took Dante’s example seriously: I am in the middle of the road of life, a Hispanic who now lives in the United States, and this is how things look behind me and ahead of me. Hypothermia is my most personal book—it is frank and personal, though not autobiographical —and curiously it is my one book that speaks to the widest readership in the Spanish-speaking world. It is read all over Latin America, and not just in Mexico and Spain. Hypothermia put my work in the perspective in which Latin American writing, in opposition to national writing, is discussed. August 2013 Peter Constantine’s recent translations include The Essential Writings of Rousseau, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays, and works by Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Voltaire. He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories, by Thomas Mann, and a National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. Tom Smithson Dead in His Garret José Manuel Cardona to Carlos Germán Belli You left through the smoke spirals of your famished fingers. You arose above the burning tide of Long Island perhaps to better dream from the depth of your equestrian eyelids of tasty morsels that your hungry clown palate could only imagine. It is false to say you died, that they vomited you forever as if a useless thing. Your sleep must be as light as the plumage of the California whores as graceful as one of those Manhattan elevators. They fear seeing you wake at some unearthly hour to go toward Wall Street and tell the sausage makers that it is beautiful to dictate commercial letters to the blond typists, but even more beautiful to wander the banks of the Hudson. Like that January day, that sunrise of young lips and sheer breasts when you directed your dreams toward the pastry shop, so astonished, so deeply surprised to discover God amidst the cream tarts and feel his weight on your stomach’s livid walls. Now only a flutter of ashes remains, and your name voiced by the newspaper boy. Translation from the Spanish By Hélène Cardona Editorial note: From El bosque de Birnam: Antología poética (Consell Insular d’Eivissa, 2007). José Manuel Cardona (b. 1928) is a poet from Ibiza, Spain. He is the author of El Vendimiador (1953) and Poemas a Circe (1959). He was co-editor of several literary journals and wrote for many publications. He participated in the II Congreso de Poesía in Salamanca. The Franco regime forced him into exile in France. He is an attorney and holds PhDs in literature and humanities. He worked for the UN most of his life. Hélène Cardona is the author of Dreaming My Animal Selves and The Astonished Universe. She holds an MA from the Sorbonne and has taught at Hamilton College and LMU, translated for the NEA and the Canadian Embassy, and received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. ...

Categorical Perception for Emotional Faces.

Categorical perception (CP) refers to how similar things look different depending on whether they are classified as the same category. Many studies demonstrate that adult humans show CP for human emotional faces. It is widely debated whether the effect can be accounted for solely by perceptual differences (structural differences among emotional faces) or whether additional perceiver-based conceptual knowledge is required. In this review, I discuss the phenomenon of CP and key studies showing CP for emotional faces. I then discuss a new model of emotion which highlights how perceptual and conceptual knowledge interact to explain how people see discrete emotions in others' faces. In doing so, I discuss how language (emotion words included in the paradigm) contribute to CP.

Do things look the way they feel?

Do things look the way they feel?

“The Chief Glory of God [Is] in Self-Denying, Suffering Love!”: True Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe’sUncle Tom’s Cabin

argument, about the evils of slavery. In this way, they are invited into the story and asked to make a connection to the lives of slaves in all their varied and divergent experiences. LANGUAGE AND THE DARKNESS OF DOUBT Although not emphasized as often by reviewers, doubt suffuses Stowe’s novel. One example among many others is the following: George Harris, responding to Mr. Wilson’s (his former boss at a mechanical factory) exhortation to trust in God in his attempt to gain freedom, replies by saying “Is there a God to trust in? O, I’ve seen things all my life that have made me feel that there can’t be a God. You Christians [whites?] don’t know how these things look to us [slaves]. There’s a God for you, but is there any for us?” (100). For themost part, only characters who have “white blood” truly express doubt about God’s existence and goodness, and this doubt is usually about the presence and problem of sustained and unrelenting evil. This doubt surfaces on various occasions and for various reasons: doubt that God can allow such terrible things to occur. Doubt that God’s presence can be felt, sensed, or known in the midst of hardships and inexplicable evil. Doubts about the Bible: is it a proslavery book? Doubts about the Bible’s authenticity and whether its words can be rendered efficacious to a different age. Doubts that the modern, hard Anglo-Saxon can accept the softness of Christianity, as Stowe conceives it. The novel also expresses doubt about the ability of the language and nature of the Bible to bring its saving message to white Anglo-Saxons. Stowe develops this point in several ways. Most prominently, Stowe wrestles with the presence of doubt mostly among white males. Through the figure or type of Cicero, noted Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher, she generalizes doubts about the Bible’s authenticity and trustworthiness to the entire Anglo Saxon race (primarily men are in view). Stowe compares Cicero to Uncle Tom, focusing on the former’s loss of his daughter. Cicero, unlike Tom, who clings to the words of Scripture, would probably not have found hope in such simple words. He would have entertained no hope of reunion in the future with his dead daughter, and even if he had read the words of Scripture, Stowe conjectures, “ten to one he would not have believed.” Cicero would have likely filled “his head first with a thousand questions of authenticity of manuscript, and correctness of translation” (125). Authenticity of manuscript and correctness of translation are about language and interpretation. Could this ancient text reach the logical and analytical mind of the modern Anglo-Saxon? This comment about Cicero filling his head with a thousand questions follows Stowe’s description of Uncle Tom slowly and tediously reading the Bible, laboring over every verse. Tom found in the Bible “just what he needed,” something “so evidently true and divine that the possibility of a question never entered his simple head” (125). Given the hardships and difficulties Tom has encountered and, at this point in the novel, his forlorn

Gender Perception as a Habit of Moral Perception: Implications for Philosophical Methodology and Introductory Curriculum

Gender Perception as a Habit of Moral Perception: Implications for Philosophical Methodology and Introductory Curriculum

Does Mandatory IFRS Adoption Improve Information Comparability?

ABSTRACT This study examines whether the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the European Union significantly improves information comparability in 17 European countries. We employ three proxies—the similarity of accounting functions that translate economic events into accounting data, the degree of information transfer, and the similarity of the information content of earnings and of the book value of equity—to measure information comparability. Our results suggest that mandatory IFRS adoption improves cross-country information comparability by making similar things look more alike without making different things look less different. Our results also suggest that both accounting convergence and higher quality information under IFRS are the likely drivers of the comparability improvement. In addition, we find some evidence that cross-country comparability improvement is affected by firms' institutional environment. Data Availability: Data are available from commercial providers (Worldscope, DataStream, and I/B/E/S).

Editorial [Hot Topic: Genetics Dissection of Complex Traits in the Genomic Era (Guest Editor: Bernardo Ordas)

Editorial [Hot Topic: Genetics Dissection of Complex Traits in the Genomic Era (Guest Editor: Bernardo Ordas)

A Study of Trigunas and Color Preferences among Patients of Depression and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

According to the modem sciences, the universe is made up of basic physical particles that include electrons, protons, neutrons, mesons and quarks. At the spiritual level however the universe is made up of something even more basic. These basic particles are known as the three components, sattva, rajas and tamas or the Trigunas. In the word triguna, tri stands for three while guna stand for subtle components (Rajan, 2009)Hinduism contains a very ancient and a remarkable analysis of human psyche and its constituents. This concept, known as Trigunas (three characteristics) is part of Samkhya Philosophy which is a part of six orthodox systems (astika) of Hinduism, having allegiance to Vedic knowledge (Krishnaraj, 2002). According to samkhya-yoga system,one of the oldest Hindu systems of philosophy, pleasure, pain and dejection are produced by sattva, rajas and tamas which are modes of mind. In human beings, sattva, rajas and tamas are found in differing proportions. In each a particular guna predominates, representing different stages of personal growth. Yet all the three gunas are present in each of us. Depending which one of the three gunas is predominant within us, it influences how we react to situations, make decisions, make choices and live our lives (Jayaram, n.d.)Sattva component is nearest to divinity. It's predominance in a person is characterized by happiness, strong will power, contentment, patience, perseverance and spiritual yeaming.Rajas likes to be active. Such people are always on the go. Rajas has two ways of respondinganger and greed. For him end justifies means. He has tempestuous passions but not the will to govern them. Tamas literally means darkness. It is a damp squib; frozen power. There is no sensitiveness in tamas, no awareness. People in whom tamas predominates are easily overcome by inertia, who procrastinate and have very little energy and desire.It is very rare that a person is found to be entirely sattvic, rajasic or tamasic. Mostly a person is either sattva-raja, raja-sattva or raja-tama predominant.Bhagavad Gita, one of the greatest scriptures of Hinduism gives elaborate explanation the role of Trigunas in human psyche.Ram (2002) looked at personality from an Indian perspective based Bhagwadgita. It was elaborated that the Bhagwadgita puts forth a type as well as trait theory of personality, the traits being determined by the type. In the description of the Trigunas: sattva, rajas, tamas, we find an astoundingly detailed account of the characteristic thought patterns, sleep habits, choice of food and many other behaviours for each of the trigunas. It thus goes far beyond the body types (e.g. Kretschmer, Sheldon) and far deeper than any of the trait theories.An attempt was made to examine the relationship between Sattva, Rajas and Tamas and Quality of Life in patients with anxiety disorders (Salvi & Sharma, 2009) where results revealed that patients with anxiety disorders had significantly more rajasic and tamasic characteristics as compared to normal controls along with poor quality of life in all domains. Rajasic and tamasic tendencies negatively correlated with quality of life and predicted poor quality of life.Many people think that color is just a matter of how things look and it is often dismissed as being purely cosmetic. However the truth is that color is light, the source of life itself.Scientifically it is the first thing we register when we are assessing anything. In 1666, English scientist Sir Isaac Newton discovered that when pure white light is passed through a prism, it separates into all of the visible colors.Science has always recognized the link between color and mood or behavior and there is a large body of scientific research into it. Light consists of seven color energies: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. Each color is connected to various areas of our body and affects us emotionally, physically and spiritually in a different manner. …

The use of narrative hermeneutical approach in the counselling of abortion patients within an African context

Our country has celebrated democracy for more than a decade now, the democracy in which everyone enjoys all the basic human rights, including the right to an abortion. Public and private hospitals and some traditional healers are engaged in this act where some give pre-abortion and post-abortion counselling to their patients whilst others do not. It becomes a serious question of course to ask whether those patients who did not receive counselling, cope with life after the experienced trauma. By the looks of things it seems very clear that the people who commit abortion have a special need for help in order to cope with life thereafter. Another question now is whether the little counselling that they receive in the hospital before and after an abortion is satisfactory to their individual needs. That is why the author’s focus is on the method or approach which the author thinks will better help the patients who find themselves in such a traumatic situation. The concentration is on the narrative-hermeneutical approach as one of the applicable approaches from the author’s point of view.

A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: II. Conceptual and theoretical foundations.

Our first review article (Wagemans et al., 2012) on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Gestalt psychology focused on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. It concluded that further progress requires a reconsideration of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which is provided here. In particular, we review contemporary formulations of holism within an information-processing framework, allowing for operational definitions (e.g., integral dimensions, emergent features, configural superiority, global precedence, primacy of holistic/configural properties) and a refined understanding of its psychological implications (e.g., at the level of attention, perception, and decision). We also review 4 lines of theoretical progress regarding the law of Prägnanz-the brain's tendency of being attracted towards states corresponding to the simplest possible organization, given the available stimulation. The first considers the brain as a complex adaptive system and explains how self-organization solves the conundrum of trading between robustness and flexibility of perceptual states. The second specifies the economy principle in terms of optimization of neural resources, showing that elementary sensors working independently to minimize uncertainty can respond optimally at the system level. The third considers how Gestalt percepts (e.g., groups, objects) are optimal given the available stimulation, with optimality specified in Bayesian terms. Fourth, structural information theory explains how a Gestaltist visual system that focuses on internal coding efficiency yields external veridicality as a side effect. To answer the fundamental question of why things look as they do, a further synthesis of these complementary perspectives is required.