B. Thompson

Mathematics disproportionately shapes undergraduates’ introduction to, and experiences with, quantitative methodologies. Mathematics departments contribute a major share of general education quantitative reasoning courses, attracting significant enrollment and typically taken by first-year students. Across most higher education institutions, these courses purport to support quantitative literacy and prepare students to think “critically,” despite a gap in the literature showing the integration of critical theories and its impact. This article explores perspectives on criticality and quantification and their implications for undergraduate mathematics general education. We argue that critical inquiry during early quantitative experiences supports these goals and fosters authentic, deep, and interdisciplinary inquiry in students. We explore this interdisciplinary approach using a mixed methodological design through a literature scan, curricular analysis, and duoethnography. We include examples integrating critical inquiry into a variety of undergraduate quantitative reasoning courses and call for mathematical professional guidelines on quantitative literacy to move more intentionally toward criticality.

There was a proliferation of fake news during the 2016 election cycle. Grinberg et al. analyzed Twitter data by matching Twitter accounts to specific voters to determine who was exposed to fake news, who spread fake news, and how fake news interacted with factual news (see the Perspective by Ruths). Fake news accounted for nearly 6 of all news consumption, but it was heavily concentrated—only 1 of users were exposed to 80 of fake news, and 0.1 of users were responsible for sharing 80 of fake news. Interestingly, fake news was most concentrated among conservative voters. Science, this issue p. 374; see also p. 348 A small proportion of voters share and are exposed to the majority of online fake news. The spread of fake news on social media became a public concern in the United States after the 2016 presidential election. We examined exposure to and sharing of fake news by registered voters on Twitter and found that engagement with fake news sources was extremely concentrated. Only 1 of individuals accounted for 80 of fake news source exposures, and 0.1 accounted for nearly 80 of fake news sources shared. Individuals most likely to engage with fake news sources were conservative leaning, older, and highly engaged with political news. A cluster of fake news sources shared overlapping audiences on the extreme right, but for people across the political spectrum, most political news exposure still came from mainstream media outlets.

There is something it is like to see a bright red cardinal, to touch a stucco wall, or to hear an ambulance pass by. Each of these experiences has a distinctive phenomenal character. But in virtue of what it is like to have a particular experience---in virtue of the experience's phenomenal character---the world is presented to the subject as being a certain way. ;The dissertation is concerned with the nature of this "phenomenal content". In Chapter One I argue that there is such a thing as phenomenal content, understood as intentional content that supervenes necessarily on phenomenal character. The rest of the dissertation is concerned with the nature of this phenomenal content, and in particular the phenomenal content of visual experiences. In Chapter Two I present and critique the dominant view about phenomenal color content, what I call "standard Russellianism". According to standard Russellianism, the content of color experience consists solely in the representation of specific mind-independent physical color properties. I present an argument against such views based on the possibility of spectrum inversion without illusion. Further, I argue that such views fail to properly accommodate the phenomenon of color constancy. In Chapter Three, I address a different form of Russellian theory of phenomenal content advocated by Sydney Shoemaker. ;I present my own positive view of phenomenal color content in Chapter Four. There I argue that color content is a kind of Fregean content, involving modes of presentation of colors. In particular, I argue that phenomenal color content involves indexical, response-dependent, and holistic modes of presentation. Finally, in Chapter Five I turn to the spatial aspects of visual experience. I argue against Russellianism for spatial phenomenal content, based on the consideration of a kind of spatial Twin Earth thought experiment. In its place, I argue that spatial phenomenal content is also a kind of Fregean content.

Since the cognitive revolution, psychologists have developed formal theories of cognition by thinking about the mind as a computer. However, this metaphor is typically applied to individual minds. Humans rarely think alone; compared to other animals, humans are curiously dependent on stores of culturally transmitted skills and knowledge, and we are particularly good at collaborating with others. Rather than picturing the human mind as an isolated computer, we can imagine each mind as a node in a vast distributed system. Viewing human cognition through the lens of distributed systems motivates new questions about how humans share computation, when it makes sense to do so, and how we can build institutions to facilitate collaboration.

Temporal regularities in speech, such as interdependencies in the timing of speech events, are thought to scaffold early acquisition of the building blocks in speech. By providing on-line clues to the location and duration of upcoming syllables, temporal structure may aid segmentation and clustering of continuous speech into separable units. This hypothesis tacitly assumes that learners exploit predictability in the temporal structure of speech. Existing measures of speech timing tend to focus on first-order regularities among adjacent units, and are overly sensitive to idiosyncrasies in the data they describe. Here, we compare several statistical methods on a sample of 18 languages, testing whether syllable occurrence is predictable over time. Rather than looking for differences between languages, we aim to find across languages (using clearly defined acoustic, rather than orthographic, measures), temporal predictability in the speech signal which could be exploited by a language learner. First, we analyse distributional regularities using two novel techniques: a Bayesian ideal learner analysis, and a simple distributional measure. Second, we model higher-order temporal structure—regularities arising in an ordered series of syllable timings—testing the hypothesis that non-adjacent temporal structures may explain the gap between subjectively-perceived temporal regularities, and the absence of universally-accepted lower-order objective measures. Together, our analyses provide limited evidence for predictability at different time scales, though higher-order predictability is difficult to reliably infer. We conclude that temporal predictability in speech may well arise from a combination of individually weak perceptual cues at multiple structural levels, but is challenging to pinpoint.

If two subjects have phenomenally identical experiences, there is an important sense in which the way the world appears to them is precisely the same. But how are we to understand this notion of 'ways of appearing'? Most philosophers who have acknowledged the existence of phenomenal content have held that the way something appears is simply a matter of the properties something appears to have. On this view, the way something appears is simply the way something appears to be . This identification supports a Russellian theory of phenomenal content, according to which phenomenal content is exhausted by facts about what specific properties are represented by an experience. The present paper motivates and develops an alternative Fregean theory of phenomenal colour content. According to Fregean theories, the phenomenal content that is shared by any two phenomenally identical experiences is a matter of how the world is represented, and need not involve sameness in what is represented. It is argued that ways of appearing are modes of presentations of external properties and objects, and a detailed theory is presented about the nature of the modes of presentation involved in colour experience

Representationalism, the view that phenomenal character supervenes on intentional content, has attracted a wide following in recent years. Most representationalists have also endorsed what I call 'standard Russellianism'. According to standard Russellianism, phenomenal content is Russellian in nature, and the properties represented by perceptual experiences are mind-independent physical properties. I argue that standard Russellianism conflicts with the everyday experience of colour constancy. Due to colour constancy, standard Russellianism is unable to simultaneously give a proper account of the phenomenal content of colour experience and do justice to its phenomenology.

Acting classes and theatre education have long been framed as activities during which children can learn skills that transfer outside the acting classroom. A growing empirical literature provides evidence for acting classes’ efficacy in teaching vocabulary, narrative, empathy, theory of mind, and emotional control. Yet these studies have not been based in what is actually happening in the acting classroom, nor on what acting teachers report as their pedagogical strategies. Instead, previous work has been unsystematic and fragmented in its measured transfer outcomes, and absent mechanistic explanation. Expanding research on this topic requires more grounding in teachers’ beliefs about the acting classes they teach, as well as observation of the classes themselves. As a first step, we surveyed 173 acting teachers online, asking them about the activities within acting classes they believed caused change in their students, as well as which outcomes they believed were changed as a result of acting classes. Teachers taught across educational levels (elementary to professional) and had a variety of training in teaching acting. Overall, teachers rated almost every activity within classes as important for and causing impact on students, and almost every outcome as being positively influenced as a result of acting class. When forced to rank order outcomes, teachers focused on collaboration, communication, creativity, confidence, and empathy as most likely to change. Teachers rated importance of class activities and outcomes differently depending on what level they taught. This study shows the difficulty of surveying highly motivated teachers, given the globally high rankings, but also proposes candidate psychological skills likely to change as a result of acting classes, and the mechanistic behaviors that may cause change.

Persistent pain is a common health problem and increasingly, qualitative research is being used to explore the impact on daily lived experience. Stigmatisation and “othering” is reported in these studies, and health professionals indicate they struggle to know how best to help this group of people. In this autoethnography, I provide an account of my life as a clinician, educator, researcher and social media commentator who lives with fibromyalgia. Through this narrative I consider the social factors influencing my attitudes towards my own pain over time, and the position I hold as a member of many different social groups discussing persistent pain management.Clinical ImplicationsPeople seeking help for their pain are influenced by family habits and attitudes towards healthcare and accepting clinical opinion.Although persistent pain is common, “othering” or the tendency to see those with persistent pain as different from clinicians is frequently encountered. This may be inadvertent but results in stigma.Information about pain mechanisms is insufficient for supporting a new way of living life for people with persistent pain.People with persistent pain may reject the narratives of people who have learned to live well with their pain, and this can be isolating and difficult to deal with.There is little research investigating how clinicians advise people of their persistent pain diagnosis, leaving a gap in our understanding of the best way to convey this information.Researchers who themselves live with persistent pain provide a unique insight into what it is like and may offer new ways for clinicians to carry out their work.

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers.

Background Despite advances in supportive care, moderate-severe acute respiratory distress syndrome is associated with high mortality rates, and novel therapies to treat this condition are needed. Compelling pre-clinical data from mouse, rat, sheep and ex vivo perfused human lung models support the use of human mesenchymal stem cells as a novel intravenous therapy for the early treatment of ARDS. Methods This article describes the study design and challenges encountered during the implementation and phase 1 component of the START trial, a phase 1/2 trial of bone marrow-derived human MSCs for moderate-severe ARDS. A trial enrolling 69 subjects is planned. Results This report describes study design features that are unique to a phase 1 trial in critically ill subjects and the specific challenges of implementation of a cell-based therapy trial in the ICU. Conclusions Experience gained during the design and implementation of the START study will be useful to investigators planning future phase 1 clinical trials based in the ICU, as well as trials of cell-based therapy for other acute illnesses. Trial registration Clinical Trials Registration: NCT01775774 and NCT02097641. © 2014 Liu et al.; licensee Springer.

When I open my eyes and look at a Rubik’s cube, there is something it is like for me visually in looking at it. Various color qualities are presented to me, and they are arranged in a specific pattern. By having an experience with this particular phenomenal character I am also thereby visually representing the world outside my experience as being a certain way. If I experience a blue square to the left of a red square, the world outside my experience is represented as being one way. As I turn the cube, and come to view a green square to the left of another green square, I have an experience with a different phenomenal character. But I also come to represent the world differently. In virtue of the difference in phenomenology there is a corresponding difference in how the world is represented as being. Moreover, it seems that any two experiences with the same phenomenal character will share a certain sort of intentional content.1 If two subjects have phenomenally identical experiences, there is an important sense in which the way the world appears to them is precisely the same. I will call this intentional content that supervenes on phenomenal character “phenomenal content”. But how are we to understand this notion of “ways of appearing”? Most philosophers who have acknowledged the existence of phenomenal content have held that the way something appears to a subject is simply a matter of the properties..