Emotions and Values

There are close links between emotions and values, or at least this is what our ordinary ways of talking suggest. For many, if not all, types of emotion it is thus possible to find a corresponding evaluative term, one often derived from the name of the emotion in question. These are for example evaluative terms such as ‘shameful’, ‘offensive, ‘annoying’, ‘dangerous’, ‘contemptible’, ‘admirable’, ‘amusing’, ‘exciting’, ‘boring’, and the like. Starting perhaps from these linguistic observations, the philosophical task is of course to elucidate the nature of the links between emotions and values, and attempts at doing so have traditionally revolved around the following three questions: first, what is the role of emotions in elucidating the nature of value? For example, should dangerousness be understood in term of the fear response? Second, what is the role of emotions in our getting access to values? For example, what may be the role of fear in becoming aware that a given animal is dangerous? Third, what value do emotions have? For example, is fear of special value because it helps behaving appropriately towards its object? We hall take up these questions in turn and survey the most important answers they have received in the literature. As we shall discover, answering the first question amounts to surveying a variety of theories according to which there is an ontological relation between values and emotions since the former should be elucidated in terms of the latter (Sec. 1). Addressing the second question consists in reviewing theories according to which there is an intentional relation between emotions and values because the former are apprehensions of value or evaluations (Sec. 2). Grappling with the third question, we shall explore some reasons for thinking that emotions can exemplify values (Sec. 3).

Regulatory Objectives for Contemporary Electronic Communications : Talking Business or Talking Culture?

The common mantra in telecommunications regulatory fora (be it national, regional or international) now goes along the lines of 'deregulation-good; regulation-bad' and competition is said to be the ultimate answer to basically every question. A generalised dictum like this is in itself suspicious and even more so, when it refers to a sector such as telecommunications, which has a history of heavy regulation and has been the very epitome of state intervention. In the contemporary environment of vibrant communications, subcribing to a purely 'black-or-white' aproach may be, to put it mildly, unsafe. Before answering the question of appropriate regulatory model for communications markets, it is essential to figure out what goals are to be pursued in order to consider what kind of measures could bring about their attainment. In the words of Robert Bork, 'only when the issue of goals has been settled is it possible to frame a coherent body of substantive rules'. Against this backdrop, the present paper looks into the goals and objectives of telecommunications regulation, their complexity and inherent tension between commercial and public interests.

Emotionen im Schulalltag: Wirkungen und Regulationsformen

Der Text versucht, einen Einblick in die Bedeutung von Emotionen für das Lernen in der Schule zu geben und einen Beitrag zur Diskussion um die Bedeutung des Umgangs mit Emotionen in der Schule zu leisten. Zunächst werden Grundlagen zur Wirkung von Emotionen in der Schule erläutert und am Beispiel von Fehlersituationen illustriert. Der zweite Teil widmet sich der Regulation von Emotionen, um sich theoretisch und empirisch der Beantwortung der folgenden Frage anzunähern: Wie gehen Schülerinnen und Schüler mit ihren negativen Lern- und Leistungsemotionen um?

Grazing response patterns indicate isolation of semi-natural European grasslands

Identifying drivers of species diversity is a major challenge in understanding and predicting the dynamics of species-rich semi-natural grasslands. In particular in temperate grasslands changes in land use and its consequences, i.e. increasing fragmentation, the on-going loss of habitat and the declining importance of regional processes such as seed dispersal by livestock, are considered key drivers of the diversity loss witnessed within the last decades. It is a largely unresolved question to what degree current temperate grassland communities already reflect a decline of regional processes such as longer distance seed dispersal. Answering this question is challenging since it requires both a mechanistic approach to community dynamics and a sufficient data basis that allows identifying general patterns. Here, we present results of a local individual- and trait-based community model that was initialized with plant functional types (PFTs) derived from an extensive empirical data set of species-rich grasslands within the `Biodiversity Exploratories' in Germany. Driving model processes included above- and belowground competition, dynamic resource allocation to shoots and roots, clonal growth, grazing, and local seed dispersal. To test for the impact of regional processes we also simulated seed input from a regional species pool. Model output, with and without regional seed input, was compared with empirical community response patterns along a grazing gradient. Simulated response patterns of changes in PFT richness, Shannon diversity, and biomass production matched observed grazing response patterns surprisingly well if only local processes were considered. Already low levels of additional regional seed input led to stronger deviations from empirical community pattern. While these findings cannot rule out that regional processes other than those considered in the modeling study potentially play a role in shaping the local grassland communities, our comparison indicates that European grasslands are largely isolated, i.e. local mechanisms explain observed community patterns to a large extent.

The Moldable Inspector: a framework for domain-specific object inspection

Answering run-time questions in object-oriented systems involves reasoning about and exploring connections between multiple objects. Developer questions exercise various aspects of an object and require multiple kinds of interactions depending on the relationships between objects, the application domain and the differing developer needs. Nevertheless, traditional object inspectors, the essential tools often used to reason about objects, favor a generic view that focuses on the low-level details of the state of individual objects. This leads to an inefficient effort, increasing the time spent in the inspector. To improve the inspection process, we propose the Moldable Inspector, a novel approach for an extensible object inspector. The Moldable Inspector allows developers to look at objects using multiple interchangeable presentations and supports a workflow in which multiple levels of connecting objects can be seen together. Both these aspects can be tailored to the domain of the objects and the question at hand. We further exemplify how the proposed solution improves the inspection process, introduce a prototype implementation and discuss new directions for extending the Moldable Inspector.

Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora

Discourse connectives are lexical items indicating coherence relations between discourse segments. Even though many languages possess a whole range of connectives, important divergences exist cross-linguistically in the number of connectives that are used to express a given relation. For this reason, connectives are not easily paired with a univocal translation equivalent across languages. This paper is a first attempt to design a reliable method to annotate the meaning of discourse connectives cross-linguistically using corpus data. We present the methodological choices made to reach this aim and report three annotation experiments using the framework of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank.