Sort Of Thinking Research Articles

‘Nothing happens here, but that’s ok’: reflexivity, immobility and staying among young people in marginalised rural locations

ABSTRACT Research and policy analysis often presumes a ‘mobility imperative’ in respect of rural youth; to ‘get on’ they have to ‘get out’. Those who stay, therefore, tend to be depicted as socially and economically deficient, backward, lacking agency and ‘left behind’. The aim of our paper is to provide a corrective to this sort of thinking. We present new, extensive, qualitative, longitudinal research conducted with fifty young men and women who have chosen to stay in rural, ‘Peripheral Denmark’. Our sample were doubly marginalised; by the lack of opportunities of their localities and by their lack of progress and achievement in their school-to-work transitions. We found that young people practised an intriguing and complex emotional reflexivity about staying. Our analysis documents their entangled feelings of ‘stuckness’ (e.g. in relation to lack of transport and services, isolation from typical youth leisure, in on-going family commitments) and of ‘stillness’ (e.g. in the serenity of nature, in family belonging and in educational support). In conclusion, we suggest that the concept of ‘reflexive stayers’ captures these young people’s lived experiences of ‘stillness’ and ‘stuckness’ and could be beneficial to future research and policy analysis on rural youth, mobility and marginalisation.

Religious instruction in the post-truth world: A critique of Australia’s controversial religious instruction classes in public schools

Even though religious schools are common in Australia, many government schools provide religious instruction (RI) classes. Religious instruction involves students being segregated into faith based groups so as to receive instruction in the beliefs and practices of one religion. This practice also occurs in many other countries. In Australia, the provision of RI in government schools has become increasingly controversial, resulting in numerous government reviews, law and policy changes and frequent media coverage. In this paper, I examine Australia’s RI laws, policies and other relevant literature. I argue that RI aims to indoctrinate. Consequently, it may conflict with educational efforts to combat the sorts of thinking and problems that characterise the ‘post-truth world’ – that is, a world flooded with disinformation, conspiratorial thinking and science denialism, which fosters social divisiveness and undermines effective responses to serious global problems (e.g. COVID-19, climate change). A more educational alternative to teaching about religions is recommended.

THINKING CATASTROPHIC THOUGHTS: A TRAUMATIZED SENSIBILITY ON A HOTTER PLANET.

While catastrophizing has traditionally been pathologized within psychoanalytic traditions, in this paper I suggest that cataclysmic realities of climate change call upon all of us to cultivate catastrophic thinking. Our new climatic normal demands of us not only new concepts and language, but also a new sort of thinking, building on Wilfred Bion’s ideas that to think is to use our mind’s capacity to be in touch with internal and external realities. I suggest that sometimes people are able to learn from their experiences of trauma in ways that disrupt the culturally dominant anenvironmental orientation, that is, an orientation that brackets out the more-than-human environment. Instead, they develop a capacity to think catastrophically about and to be permeable to the more-than-human environment. What I call their “traumatized sensibility” can offer guidance as we come to co-exist with and respond more consciously to our hotter planet.

An ethically-motivated, Bayesian, adaptive design clinical trial bringing hope to women with menorrhagia…and warmth to statisticians' hearts.

An ethically-motivated, Bayesian, adaptive design clinical trial bringing hope to women with menorrhagia…and warmth to statisticians' hearts.

Permeable barriers: a conversation about poetry

ABSTRACT A great many successful poets earn their living as members of the university community. While teaching, research and administration can provide a reasonable and a reliable income, it has an impact not only on how much time is available for writing, but also what sorts of thinking emerge; on the ways in which relationships and responsibilities intertwine, and how to find ways to balance competing priorities. In this conversation between two poet academics, Jen and Katharine talk through their own experiences, grounded in scholarly thinking, and particularly address the role of language, meaning and materiality in the charting and the crafting of a life.

Utopia and the Anthropocene

Utopia and the Anthropocene

Counterfactual Imagination as a Mental Tool for Innovation

In the article I demonstrate some of the possible ways by which counterfactual imagination can lead people to innovation and the creation of novel and valuable solutions. I start with adopting the broad definition of counterfactuals, by which counterfactual imagination is understood as the ability to imagine alternative states of affairs which can relate to the past, present or future. I explain how counterfactual imagination differs from other sorts of imaginative and creative thoughts, pointing out that counterfactual types of thinking always rely on facts and involve a change in some features of the actual world, leaving other such features unaltered. I also show that the concept of counterfactual imagination can be useful when we aim to describe the very earliest manifestations of imaginative capacities in children, which can be seen in their make-believe games. All the mentioned characteristics of counterfactual imagination are further used to examine how what if and would be sorts of thinking and imagining might influence people’s creative performance. I conclude with the suggestion that—if guided properly—counterfactual imagination could be a truly valuable mental tool for innovation. This demonstration is partly influenced by Ruth Byrne’s multi-faceted analysis of counterfactual imagination, mainly from her book, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality .

Deep narrow territories

It is always a pleasure to observe Peter Harrison deploying his skill in argument, repertoire of apt quotations, and power of analogy. One argument joins so neatly to the next that it seems willful to withhold assent from the conclusion. Having enjoyed the sparkle, however, it is well to consider how it is achieved. The principal means, conspicuous also in Harrison’s earlier book, The Bible: Protestantism and the Rise of Science (1998), is a very tight focus: the argument, repertoire, and analogies achieve their effect by operating in a domain of inquiry restricted more severely, and sometimes less justifiably, than might at first appear. In The Bible, Harrison argued that by doing away with allegorical readings of scripture, Protestants liberated ‘‘the study of the natural world from the specifically religious concern of biblical interpretation.’’ The fruit of this liberation fell far from the tree. ‘‘The literalist mentality initiated by the Protestant reformers, and sponsored by their successors [was]....by far the most significant [cause]...for the rise of modern science.’’ With this bold extrapolation, Harrison made the reformers’ method of sola scriptura serve as a motive, indeed, the main motive, for the very diverse sorts of thinking and acting required to investigate and apply natural knowledge. The ascendency of bible reading over all other putative causes of the Scientific Revolution, however brilliantly argued, is not very convincing. The Territories of Science and Religion follows the method of sola scriptura to conclude that clashes between the territories could not have occurred before the Reformation. In England they started even later, in the last third of the nineteenth century. Harrison’s crisp argument for this chronology is quickly summarized. He observes that ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘religion’’ (SR that before the watershed they had to do with the internal cultivation of the individual and after it with a public confession

Preventive Chemotherapy Versus Innovative and Intensified Disease Management in Neglected Tropical Diseases: A Distinction Whose Shelf Life Has Expired.

Preventive Chemotherapy Versus Innovative and Intensified Disease Management in Neglected Tropical Diseases: A Distinction Whose Shelf Life Has Expired.

Taste and appetite

In this short paper, I discuss two interpretations of the implications of food reward for healthy eating. It is often argued that foods that are palatable and provide sensory pleasure lead to overeating. I discuss an example of an experiment that claims to demonstrate this, to many people, intuitively reasonable result. I point out a number of assumptions about reward and eating behaviour underlying this sort of thinking and ask whether overeating might not instead, to a large extent, result from avoiding reward and sensory satisfaction. Four different experimental results that support the suggestion that ‘quality can replace quantity’ are briefly reviewed.

In Defence of the Lecture

In response to the lecture format coming under ‘attack’ and being replaced by online materials and smaller tutorials, this paper attempts to offer not only a defence but also to assert that the potential value of the lecture is difficult to replicate through other learning formats. In this paper some of the criticisms against lectures will be challenged, in particular that they are monological and promote a banking concept to learning. To make this argument I shall be drawing upon Freire’s ‘banking concept’ and Vygotsky’s notion of ‘inner speech’ and shall claim that listening is a virtue to be encouraged in our students. There is a review of some of the unique features of lectures and it shall be argued that the sort of thinking, appropriate for higher education, can be encouraged by the lecturer as ‘expert thinking aloud’, embodying what it means to know, to think and to action one’s academic freedom as a curriculum worker.

How the Railroads Changed American Government

Review of: Wolmar, Christian (2013). The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America. New York, PublicAffairs. Anyone reading the scholarly literature on the "e-government revolution" might be tempted to think that technological change has never affected American government so profoundly as it does today. Christian Wolmar's The Great Railroad Revolution provides an invaluable corrective to this sort of thinking. The advent of the railroad was probably a more important technological shock, and Wolmar's book provides an unusual opportunity to examine how it affected the role and structure of American government. The current fashion is to emphasize the ways in which ideology and institutional inertia constrain the governmental response to such shocks. But Wolmar tells a different story. In the long run, The Great Railroad Revolution suggests, the governmental response to this innovation was pragmatic, hard-headed, and flexible.

Reflections on the omission of social capital from enterprise education and business start training

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the case for the inclusion, in enterprise education, of training and/or guidance in the acquisition and use of social capital. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers the reasons, not just why social capital should be included as a factor at least as important as financial capital, but also the possible reasons why so far it has largely been omitted – and then explores the implications behind that omission. Findings – The core assertion of the paper is that, despite its clear relevance, social capital is rarely included in enterprise education because the basis for much enterprise education is a traditional business plan menu which is in turn based on big business thinking. Practical implications – The implications of this are not just that social capital should be given a key place in enterprise education but that, before this can happen, the different nature of small business needs to be accepted and the basis of small business training adjusted accordingly. Originality/value – To date a lot of enterprise education and training has been based on the assumption that the traditional components of a business plan form a suitable agenda for enterprise education – either because it is directly based on a business plan or drawn from the same sort of thinking. The paper questions the validity of that assumption which excludes important factors such as social capital.

Interpenetrating Polar and Nonpolar Sublattices in Intermetallics: The NaCd2 Structure

AbstractChemInform is a weekly Abstracting Service, delivering concise information at a glance that was extracted from about 200 leading journals. To access a ChemInform Abstract, please click on HTML or PDF.

Preventive War and U.S. Foreign Policy

This article examines the claim that the Bush strategy of dealing with developing threats “preemptively” marked a total break with American tradition. It turns out that preventive war thinking played a much greater role in shaping u.s. policy than most people realize. During the early Cold War period, this sort of thinking was by no means limited to the lunatic fringe. Could the United States simply sit back and allow first the Soviets and then the Chinese to develop nuclear capabilities of their own? Many people, both inside and outside the government, were worried about what would happen if America did nothing and thought that the possibility of preventive action had to be taken seriously. In the post-Cold War period, the Clinton administration seemed ready to do whatever was necessary to prevent North Korea from going nuclear; it seemed prepared, in fact, to go to war over the issue. Even in the pre-nuclear world, preventive war thinking played a major role in shaping policy: American policy in 1941 was strongly influenced by this kind of thinking.

Interpenetrating Polar and Nonpolar Sublattices in Intermetallics: The NaCd2Structure

In the 1960s, Samson solved the structures of some of the most complicated intermetallic phases known, including those of NaCd(2), Mg(2)Al(3), and Cu(3)Cd(4) (each with over 1000 atoms per unit cell). Following remarkable earlier constructions by Samson and by Andersson, we use quantum-mechanical calculations as a guide to describing and understanding these structures. Our electronic Aufbau begins with the relatively simple Mg(17)Al(12) structure and works up to Samson's NaCd(2) structure. In both structures, a division of the sites into electron-rich and electron-poor (with respect to an average electron count) reveals MgCu(2)-type fragments. Between the interiors and exteriors of these fragments, a change in bonding character takes place-the interiors are more polar, the interfaces relatively nonpolar. This electronic situation is traced to the geometry of the interface sites; they lie simultaneously on electron-rich and electron-poor networks. The resulting polar and nonpolar sites in NaCd(2) are separated by a minimal surface, the D surface. The driving force for assuming this structure is electronic: NaCd(2) features an interpenetration of polar and nonpolar bonding regions. This sort of thinking can be applied to other structures.

Copernicus and the Hypothetico-Deductive Method of Correspondence Thinking

This article is a development of my earlier papers entitled “Copernicus’ corres-pondence thinking” and “Copernicus’ astronomical works — A remarkable case of applying the methodological idea of correspondence” which were delivered at the XIXth International Congress of History of Science (22-29.08.1993, Zaragoza, Spain) and 10th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (19-25.08.1995 Florence, Italy). To avoid misunderstandings at the very beginning of this article, let us explain here, that the term the ‘correspondence thinking’ has for us a special, methodological character that is closely connected, among other things, with the process of framing by theorists the theories which are linked by the correspondence principle. Regarding the linguistic form, the term ‘correspondence thinking" is comprehended by us as equivalent to Feyerabend’s German term “Korrespondenzdenken” that denotes the sort of thinking of Bohr, Kramers and Heisenberg, which was centered on Bohr’s correspondence principle (see Feyerabend [1962a] p. 203, p. 254 fn. 2). However, the term the ‘correspondence thinking’ will be comprehended by us in the broader sense on which we will say more below.

Giving People More Green Space

The Latin word urbs gives us both “urban” and “urbane” presumably because, for some curious reason, city life used to be associated with refinement. That was not true of ancient Rome and hardly seems appropriate for any city today so when a team from the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research writes about “urbanity” we should not be surprised to find that they are referring to the number of households per square km rather than polished manners.1 “Urbanicity”is preferred by others.2 Maas et al., working in the very overcrowded Netherlands, have been looking at the notion of “environmental injustice” whereby socioeconomic factors and urban planning combine to deprive many city dwellers of access to green space.1 This study is the first bit of a 4-year three-part program, due to finish at the end of 2008, called Vitamin G (G for green).3 The next two will look at mechanisms other than stress reduction as possible explanations for the health benefits of local or accessible green space, such as physical activity and social cohesion, and at the effects on wellbeing of allotments, parcels of land commonly made available for rental in several parts of Europe for those who have no gardens of their own or only very small ones. As Maas et al. point out, previous studies in this area have tended to look at extremes of green-space access and deprivation. They wanted to know if there was a continuum, a dose–response relationship in other words. Over 250,000 people of all ages who had been registered with the same family physician for at least 12 months completed a questionnaire which sought basic demographic information and the answer to a simple question on their self-perceived health—namely, “In general, would you say your health is very good, good, etc.” Green space within 1 or 3 km was assessed from the Dutch National Land Cover Classification database. The key finding was a steady decline in the percentage of people perceiving their health to be less than good as the percentage of green space within 3 km of where they lived rose, and that was after controlling statistically for demographic and socioeconomic factors and population density itself (urbanity). The finding is significant but hardly dramatic because the frequency of perceived poor health was not that high, ranging from about 16% when there was no green space nearby to 10% when there was greenery galore. Nonetheless Maas et al. conclude that their research shows that “green space is more than just a luxury.” Planners should bear in mind the health benefits of green space, they argue. This sort of thinking is not unique to the Netherlands. For example, last year in the UK the organization GreenSpace (formerly the Urban Parks Forum but now with a wider remit; see http://www.green-space.org.uk) held a conference with the “Natural Health Service” as its theme. Earlier this year the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (http://www.cabe.org.uk) organized a Health Week which included the interesting speculation that if Hyde Park in central London contributes 10% to the physical activity of 100,000 people living nearby that might spare the British economy £3 million (about $4.2 million) in a year and the National Health Service £600,000. Those keen on there being a health dimension to urban design must be wondering what sort of evidence planners and politicians will find persuasive. Will it be estimates of the economic benefit, for example, or data indicating that the life expectancy of senior citizens increases if they have access to walkable green space 4 or the gentle gradient of benefit to self-assessed health recorded by Maas et al.?

Hope or hype: The obsession with medical advances and the high cost of false promises

In March 2005, 3,000 doctors and scientists converged on Monte Carlo to attend the Anti-Aging World Conference, cosponsored by the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. The delegates heard presentations from many branches of medicine, mostly dedicated to the pursuit of the unquestioned goal that medicine should do all it can to make cashed-up very old people in wealthy nations live longer or at the very least look younger. Each year, more and more of the world’s health care budget is poured into efforts to stop elderly people dying sooner rather than a few months or years later. There could be few more telling indictments of the moral malaise into which areas of modern medicine have been seduced, and it is safe to say that most of the conference delegates would find Richard A. Deyo and Donald L. Patrick’s new book Hope or hype: the obsession with medical advances and the high cost of false promises a catalog of profanity. This is a scholarly, thoroughly referenced, and entirely accessible book that deserves to be read alongside two recent books that cover partially similar territory, although through far narrower lenses: Marcia Angell’s The truth about the drug companies and Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels’s Selling sickness: how the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are turning us all into patients. The book begins by taking the reader through five broad myth-busting themes in medical advancement (“Don’t we need life-saving treatments?” “Medical innovations and American culture,” “Why more isn’t always better,” “Why newer isn’t always better,” and “What we lose by uncritical use of new treatments”). These set the foundational values for the second section of the book, which examines the main players propelling the imperatives for ever-onward medical advances: the pharmaceutical industry, the research community, the media, doctors and hospitals, and patient advocacy groups. Part 3 of the book is a series of case studies of disabling treatments and surgery, ineffective and needless drugs, and the weight-loss industry. The final section is a collection of manifestos for all players with responsibilities in the mix: doctors, insurers, researchers, regulators, and consumers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they offer no advice to the pharmaceutical industry. The authors’ combined erudition in health policy analysis and in clinical work combine to take us from the very human needs, foibles, and vulnerabilities that cause patients to supplicate physicians for help through to the broader consequences, as when the values of medicine are confounded by the influence of other interest groups. The head of the US National Cancer Institute, Andrew von Eschenbach, has caught the spirit of George Bush’s all-conquering zeitgeist and challenged America to completely eliminate death from cancer by 2015. In Sweden, it is official policy that the road death toll should strive to reach zero, not merely to fall. Single-issue health organizations often talk of research that might one day eliminate their diseases. The eradication of smallpox and the imminent departure of polio from the planet are evidently wonderful achievements. So why not conquer everything else, the thinking goes. Deyo and Patrick consider the values that propel this sort of thinking and the interests that stand to benefit from it. Von Eschenbach’s go-for-gold gauntlet draws on millennia of death-defying rhetoric among healers and doctors. This has been staged alongside countless replays of folkloric quests for fountains of youth and medicine’s holy grail of defeating death. Deyo and Patrick’s book is an encyclopedia of the manifestations of this quest in the last quarter of the twentieth century. If no one died from cancer, what would take its place? What would we die from if not from any of the diseases that medicine now tries to cure and public health policies try to prevent? And would this be progress? If you scratch the surface of the human genome project, assumptions about eternal life are not hard to find. The director of the US Hastings Center, Daniel Callahan, wrote a humane and masterly book in 1998 titled False hopes: why America’s quest for perfect health is a recipe for failure. He wrote of the deeply ingrained “pathology of hope” and its beneficiaries in the pharmaceutical industry. Together, these fuel exponentially rising health care expenditure in aging populations. Callahan’s heretical proposal is that civil society should supplant medicine’s present open-ended goal of prolonging life at all costs with a radical re-focusing on quality of life and the “compression of morbidity” during a decent life span. If Deyo and Patrick’s book has a fault, it is its lack of international perspective on ways that different governments have sought to stem the tide of wasteful medical resource squandering. Except for this parochialism, it is a classic exposition that deserves a wide readership.

Teaching Today's Students how to Examine Ethical Issues and Be More Actively Involved in the Learning Process

In response to the difficulty of teaching an increasingly large number of students who are ill prepared for the sort of abstract thinking and well-structured essay writing that are essential to the field of Philosophy, I have discovered a five-step method for teaching students in my “Philosophy and Social Ethics” course how to examine any ethical issue and write well-structured essays discussing the issue. Just as important, students are now required to take more responsibility for the learning process which, I believe, is an appropriate goal for a course in Ethics.