Meaningful Choices Research Articles

Theoretical and numerical investigation of filament onset distance in atmospheric turbulence

We analyze and simulate the propagation of laser beams with powers larger than the nonlinear self-focusing power through atmospheric turbulence. Turbulence-induced filamentation is theoretically described in terms of whole-beam self-focusing and transverse modulational instability. We describe a numerical simulation method to model nonlinear focusing in turbulence. We find good agreement between our simulation and a previously published laboratory-scale experiment. Simulations are then performed to calculate probability distributions for filament onset and wander over kilometer distances, and are compared with theory. The theoretical model can be made to agree with the simulations for physically meaningful choices of a few fitting parameters. We also examine the use of focusing optics to control filamentation range of modulationally unstable beams.

Privacy, Security and Surveillance: New Insights into Preferences of European Citizens

In 2013, concerns of mass-surveillance capabilities deployed in the interest of security received unprecedented attention across the globe. Ongoing media coverage sparked public debate about the pros and cons of such capabilities. This debate is characterised by lack of robust empirical evidence on the extent to which individuals are in favour or against surveillance in the name of security. Each argument 'against' or 'in favour' of relevant security interventions and technologies is based on sources like key/expert opinions, public opinion-polls and scholarly opinion.This paper reports on insights into citizens' preferences regarding privacy, security and surveillance derived from an innovative large-scale survey. In particular, we explore the apparent dichotomy between how people respond to abstract questions about the importance of privacy and security compared to their preferences in real world contexts where individuals appear to be exhibit a greater degree of comfort with interventions that may adversely affect their privacy.Our research elaborates upon this ‘privacy paradox’ through stated preference discrete choice experiments which enable respondents to express preferences over security, privacy and surveillance within real-world contexts, namely Internet use, travel on train or underground and purchase of a personal health-record storage device/system. Respondents are presented with scenarios described in terms of context dependent features relating to privacy and security implications e.g. the breadth of CCTV-camera information sharing, or the stringency of oversight regarding internet surveillance by the authorities.Systematic combinations - based on principles of experimental design of these features - create each of the options. Respondents are then asked to choose among three options presented across variations of these three different contexts with associated monetary implication. Alongside these data we gather socio-economic and demographic information and attitudinal statements relating to trust, privacy and security.Data was collected across a sample of 26,800 participants across 27 EU through a mix of face-to-face and online methods and was broadly representative of the population within each country.Choices from respondents were subjected to discrete choice analysis. This framework enables us to determine which combination of features comprising each of the alternative options drives (in terms of utility lost/gained) the choices of participants. In order to account for a range of perspectives which may colour these preferences, the analysis takes into account respondents' characteristics and their level of familiarity with each particular context, their attitudes to privacy, security and surveillance and their appetite for risk-taking behaviour in general.Analysis enables us to bring new insights into the passionate debate around privacy and surveillance. It illustrates a number of new insights, not previously explored using quantitative approaches including measurement of the extent people may balance privacy or security. We find that individuals derive markedly different utility for privacy versus security in different contexts, supporting the view that privacy and security are highly context specific. For example, all else being equal, respondents appear to prefer measures to improve online privacy compared to that derived from stand-off surveillance common in transportation. We observe that data sharing is governed by complex trust relationships. We also find that certain socio-demographic characteristics are correlated with people’s preferences.Overall, preference regarding privacy, security and surveillance are context specific. For example, in some cases privacy is considered as the form of control of personal information and others as control of physical space. Our research suggests that security measures and relevant decision-making needs to be matched to different settings in order to provide the appropriate mix of protections and meaningful choice.

Is the Jamaican Two Party System in Danger of Biblical Armageddon? The Role of Political Party Organization

Political parties are an essential component of Jamaica's democracy. By competing in elections and mobilizing citizens behind particular visions of society as well as through their performance in the legislature, parties offer citizens meaningful choices in governance, avenues for political participation, and opportunities to shape their country’s future.In Jamaica, however, political parties fail to respond to citizens’ concerns (political perception) and are widely distrusted by the public. When public confidence in political parties is compromised, the entire democratic process suffers. In all sustainable democracies, the party system must be deeply and durably entrenched in the fabric of society.

Dynamics in the Personal and Professional Development of Life-orientation Teachers in South Africa, Gauteng Province

KEYWORDS Life Orientation. Personal and Professional Teacher Development. Curriculum Reform. Teacher Support. Bio-Ecological ABSTRACT Worldwide schools are confronted with a myriad of contextual challenges such as teenage pregnancy, HIV and AIDS, poverty, substance abuse, child headed households, suicide, to mention a few. South Africa, a country that is yet to win the war against poverty and underdevelopment is not an exception. Life Orientation (LO) as a subject presents schools in South Africa with opportunities to empower young people with knowledge and life skills to make meaningful choices. Whist the Department of Basic Education in South Africa has developed a clearly set LO curriculum, which has well-defined outcomes; it is not clear whether their training as LO teacher s adequately equips them to deal with these multiple social issues affecting learners. The focus of this phenomenological study was to explore the dynamics in the Personal and Professional Development (PPD) of LO teachers in South Africa, in the Gauteng Province. Data were collected through nine individual interviews, two focus group interviews and two collages by participants from 14 districts within the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE). The findings suggested that the PPD of LO teachers was impeded by the fact that it did not address issues such as their personal experiences, their attitudes towards LO, the LO curriculum delivery, and the complex roles they play in dealing with challenging issues. Based on these findings recommendations are made on how to best address these dynamics through their PPD and how to best support LO teachers to ensure meaningful teaching of LO.

Metalanguage Instruction within an Adult Literacy Program: Lexicogrammar as Source for Socially Meaningful Choices

Metalanguage Instruction within an Adult Literacy Program: Lexicogrammar as Source for Socially Meaningful Choices

Material Culture, Landscapes of Action, and Emergent Causation

After a century of research, there is still no widely accepted explanation for the spread of farming in Europe. Top-down explanations stress climate change, population increase, or geographic diffusion, but they distort human action reductionistically. Bottom-up explanations stress the local, meaningful choices involved in becoming a farmer, but they do not account for why the Neolithic transition in Europe was so widespread and generally unidirectional. The real problem is theoretical; we need to consider the transformative effects of human–material culture relationships and to relate humans, things, and environments at multiple scales. This article views the Neolithic as a set of new human-material relationships which were experimented with variably but which had unintended consequences resulting in an increasingly coherent, structured, and narrowly based social world. This interplay of local human action and emergent causation made the Neolithic transition difficult to reverse locally; the Neolithic wa...

Buy or Bite?

Why is there so much violence in the vampire world? In brief, our thesis is that most vampire violence is the result of legal failure: the lack of a legalized market for the purchase and sale of blood. This short essay is organized as follows: in part one we analyze the market for blood in the vampire world and explain the logic of vampire violence. Next, in part two, we propose a simple method for reducing such vampire violence. Simply put, we propose giving vampires a meaningful choice: “buy” instead of “bite.” That is, we propose a legal market in which vampires would have the choice to buy blood through voluntary exchange instead of taking it by force. Lastly, in part three, we explain the absence of legal markets in the vampire world, examine the causes of this epic legal failure, and refute the standard arguments against the commodification of blood.

Making the Case for Workplace Democracy: Exit and Voice as Mechanisms of Freedom in Social Life

This article contrasts associations where members’ freedom can be safeguarded by the capacity to “exit” with associations where freedom requires democratic “voice.” The article first examines several familiar types of associations in an effort to illuminate the extent to which workers have an inherent right to a democratic voice in their workplaces—or, workplace democracy. Although workplaces are typically contrasted with states, towns, and clubs, a better analogy is with marriages. The article’s central argument, which flows from this analogy, is that the current system of work is deeply unjust because most workers are compelled to join hierarchical workplaces within which they are structurally unequal. They thereby become, in a functional sense, servants. It is very difficult for the average worker to choose the alternative of workplace democracy. Although there is no inalienable right to workplace democracy, no one should be compelled to be subservient at work, and everyone should have a meaningful choice of democracy at work. For such a choice to be real, the state needs to facilitate the expansion of democratic workplaces.

Dutch Health Insurance Exchanges

Dutch Health Insurance Exchanges Ewout van Ginneken and coauthors described the Swiss and Dutch models of managed competition and offered five key lessons for the operations of the US exchanges (Apr 2013). We agree with the authors’ main conclusion that managed competition among health plans by itself will not substantially drive down costs, but we do not agree that “insurers in the Netherlands are clearly engaged in robust competition.” In 2010 we found that the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI)— used by the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission to calculate market concentration—for the Dutch health care system was 2,111, which placed it in the category of “concentrated” markets. Markets with a score of 1,000–1,800 are considered “moderately concentrated,” and markets with a score of more than 1,800 are considered “concentrated.” Based on the figures available for 2012, the Dutch health care system’s HHI has increased to 2,277, putting it further into the “concentrated” category. In the year prior to the reforms of 2006, the Dutch system was only “moderately concentrated,” with an HHI of 1,346. There are strong arguments for and against consolidation in the US health care market. However, we should at least bear in mind the lessons of the Dutch reform, including the risk that managed competition could lead to a highly concentrated insurancemarket bereft of meaningful choice for consumers.

Final decisions: How hospice enrollment prompts meaningful choices about life closure

The purpose of this study was to explore and describe decisions that faced newly enrolled hospice patients and their caregivers after hospice enrollment. An exploratory, descriptive, cross-sectional design was employed using qualitative methods. In-depth in-person interviews were conducted with current hospice patients (n = 35) and caregivers (n = 45) from 53 families. The decision to enroll in hospice was a critical juncture on the trajectory of a terminal illness that allowed patients and their families an opportunity to consider subsequent tasks that were important for life closure. A typology of five decisions is presented: (1) operationalized advance care planning (ACP): a renewed focus on decisions about care at life's end; (2) surrogate decision-making: caregivers begin making both informal and formal decisions for the dying person; (3) meaning-making: the foreshortened time brings into focus decisions about seeing special people, attending events, and creating memories; (4) Location of death: decisions about whether the person wants to and can remain at home to die; and (5) final acts: decisions about funeral arrangements, wills, and leaving a legacy become central. ACP was found to exist on a continuum that ranged from absent ACP, dormant ACP, simplified ACP to activated ACP. Hospice enrollment became a catalyst for reactivating discussion of end-of-life choices. Hospice enrollment prompts the need to consider subsequent important choices that contribute to meaningful life closure, are central to the completion of a family relationship, and may influence adaptation in bereaved caregivers. It is important for clinicians to recognize that well-timed encouragement to consider and explore the use of hospice services, although it may indeed diminish hope for cure or recovery, simultaneously offers an opportunity to engage with important and time-sensitive developmental tasks.

Evolutionary and variable step size strategies for multichannel filtered‐x affine projection algorithms

This study is focused on the necessity to improve the performance of the affine projection (AP) algorithm for active noise control (ANC) applications. The proposed algorithms are evaluated regarding their steady-state behaviour, their convergence speed and their computational complexity. To this end, different strategies recently applied to the AP for channel identification are proposed for multichannel ANC. These strategies are based either on a variable step size, an evolving projection order, or the combination of both strategies. The developed efficient versions of the AP algorithm use the modified filtered-x structure, which exhibits faster convergence than other filtering schemes. Simulation results show that the proposed approaches exhibit better performance than the conventional AP algorithm and represent a meaningful choice for practical multichannel ANC applications.

Educating for Autonomy: Liberalism and Autonomy in the Capabilities Approach

Martha Nussbaum grounds her version of the capabilities approach in political liberalism. In this paper, we argue that the capabilities approach, insofar as it genuinely values the things that persons can actually do and be, must be grounded in a hybrid account of liberalism: in order to show respect for adults, its justification must be political; in order to show respect for children, however, its implementation must include a commitment to comprehensive autonomy, one that ensures that children develop the skills necessary to make meaningful choices about whether or not to exercise their basic capabilities. Importantly, in order to show respect for parents who do not necessarily recognize autonomy as a value, we argue that the liberal state, via its system of public education, should take on the role of ensuring that all children within the state develop a sufficient degree of comprehensive autonomy.

Optional law for firms and consumers: An economic analysis of opting into the Common European Sales Law

The European Commission has launched the Regulation Proposal on a Common European Sales Law as an optional instrument for European firms and consumers. Several critical opinions have been raised against the optional nature, characterizing it as an instrument for social dumping (i. e. lowering consumer protection standards, given that no set of rules with higher levels of protection would ever be chosen by firms), as depriving consumers of any meaningful choice, and emphasizing its futility. In this paper we present a simple model showing how these critiques present theoretical flaws, even if one does not rely on the efficiency gains that increasing cross border trade may bring in terms of having more efficient firms serving consumers in other national markets. The role of verification or compliance costs, and of the impact of legal diversity on firms' operating costs is crucial for understanding the effects of an optional instrument, and may make high levels of consumer protection, and consumer choice implementable. We also characterize how different levels of the standard may lead to complete replacement of national standards and to the joint use of European and national standards.

Veranderende perspektiewe op seksualiteit en die huwelik in ’n postmoderne kerk

Shifting ecclesial perspectives on sexuality and marriage in a postmodern world. The aim of the article is to critically question whether the church is still able to guide people to make meaningful choices with regard to marriage and sexuality when values keep shifting. This question is especially relevant where the church still tends to uphold premodern values (heteronormative, patriarchal, monogamous) with regard to sexuality and marriage as the only (prescriptive) model for marriage in a postmodern world. The article consists of the following sections: changing values versus traditional values; marriage and sexuality from biblical times to the present; church in crisis; and eco-feminist family ethics.

PROTOCOL: The Effects Of Economic Self‐Help Group Programs On Women's Empowerment: A Systematic Review

PROTOCOL: The Effects Of Economic Self‐Help Group Programs On Women's Empowerment: A Systematic Review

Two conceptions of state sovereignty and their implications for global institutional design

Social liberals and liberal nationalists often argue that cosmopolitans neglect the normative importance of state sovereignty and self-determination. This paper counter-argues that, under current global political and socio-economic circumstances, only the establishment of supranational institutions with some (limited, but significant) sovereign powers can allow states to exercise sovereignty, and peoples’ self-determination, in a meaningful way. Social liberals have largely neglected this point because they have focused on an unduly narrow, mainly negative, conception of state sovereignty. I contend, instead, that we should more closely consider the positive aspects of sovereignty, understood as the capacity to maintain internal problem-solving capacities and make meaningful discretionary choices on a range of national issues.

Therapist's Autonomy Support and Patient's Self-Criticism Predict Motivation during Brief Treatments for Depression

Zuroff et al. (2007) showed that autonomous motivation, defined as the extent to which patients experience participation in treatment as a personally meaningful choice, predicted outcome in a study of 95 depressed outpatients who were randomly assigned to one of three 16-week manualized treatments. Further analyses were undertaken to test hypotheses derived from Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2008a, 2008b). Autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, perceived therapist autonomy support, and depressive severity were assessed at Sessions 3, 8, 13, and posttreatment. Autonomous and controlled motivation displayed both trait and contextual influences and were only moderately correlated with one another. Multilevel modeling was used to separate the predictive influences of within-person and between-person differences. Better treatment response (i.e., lower depressive severity) was predicted positively by between-person and within-person differences in autonomous motivation and inversely by between-person differences in controlled motivation. Higher perceived autonomy support from the therapist predicted higher autonomous motivation both between-person and within-person. Controlled motivation was unrelated to autonomy support, but instead was predicted by trait Self-Criticism. The results did not differ across treatment conditions, supporting the suggestion that SDT can be used to identify novel common factors in psychotherapy.

Participant-centric initiatives: Tools to facilitate engagement in research

Clinical genomic research faces increasing challenges in establishing participant privacy and consent processes that facilitate meaningful choice and communication capacity for longitudinal and secondary research uses. There are an evolving range of participant-centric initiatives that combine web-based informatics tools with new models of engagement and research collaboration. These emerging initiatives may become valuable approaches to support large-scale and longitudinal research studies. We highlight and discuss four types of emerging initiatives for engaging and sustaining participation in research.

THE INFLUENCE OF INCREASING LIFE EXPECTANCY ON THE DYNAMICS OF SIRS SYSTEMS WITH IMMUNE BOOSTING

AbstractEndemic infectious diseases constantly circulate in human populations, with prevalence fluctuating about a (theoretical and unobserved) time-independent equilibrium. For diseases for which acquired immunity is not lifelong, the classic susceptible–infectious–recovered–susceptible (SIRS) model provides a framework within which to consider temporal trends in the observed epidemiology. However, in some cases (notably pertussis), sustained multiannual fluctuations are observed, whereas the SIRS model is characterized by damped oscillatory dynamics for all biologically meaningful choices of model parameters. We show that a model that allows for “boosting” of immunity may naturally give rise to undamped oscillatory behaviour for biologically realistic parameter choices. The life expectancy of the population is critical in determining the characteristic dynamics of the system. For life expectancies up to approximately$50$years, we find that, even with boosting, damped oscillatory dynamics persist. For increasing life expectancy, the system may sustain oscillatory dynamics, or even exhibit bistable behaviour, in which both stable point attractor and limit cycle dynamics may coexist. Our results suggest that rising life expectancy may induce changes in the characteristic dynamics of infections for which immunity is not lifelong, with potential implications for disease control strategies.

Competitive and Coherent? Profiling the Europarties in the 2009 European Parliament Elections

On the bases of the new EU Profiler data for the 2009 European Parliament elections, this work looks at two basic criteria to assess the representative potential of the EU party system: its competitiveness and the policy coherence of its parties. It is here argued that, if the national parties are successfully able to aggregate their programmes and agendas at the EU level, proposing different options to the European voters, the EU ‘democratic deficit' might not be as severe as it is often lamented. It is found that the Europarties, despite the enlargements towards Central and Eastern Europe, are sufficiently coherent and different to seek to fulfil an expressive, or representative, function. By selectively placing its focus on the ‘supply-side' of politics, this work shows that European voters could indeed make meaningful choices, which the Europarties might turn into concrete policies through their parliamentary activity.