Religious belief, once in the domain of the humanities, has found a new home in the sciences. Promising new developments in the study of religion by cognitive scientists and evolutionary theorists put forward empirical hypotheses regarding the origin, spread, and character of religious beliefs. Different theories deal with different aspects of human religiosity - some focus on religious beliefs, while others focus on religious actions, and still others on the origin of religious ideas. While these theories might share a similar focus, there is plenty of disagreement in the explanations they offer. This volume examines the diversity of new scientific theories of religion, by outlining the logical and causal relationships between these enterprises. Are they truly in competition, as their proponents sometimes suggest, or are they complementary and mutually illuminating accounts of religious belief and practice? Cognitive science has gained much from an interdisciplinary focus on mental function, and this volume explores the benefits that can be gained from a similar approach to the scientific study of religion.

Increasing knowledge of the biological is fundamentally transforming what life itself means and where its boundaries lie. New developments in the biosciences - especially through the molecularisation of life - are (re)shaping healthcare and other aspects of our society. This cutting edge volume studies contemporary bio-objects, or the categories, materialities and processes that are central to the configuring of 'life' today, as they emerge, stabilize and circulate through society. Examining a variety of bio-objects in contexts beyond the laboratory, Bio-Objects: Life in the 21st Century explores new ways of thinking about how novel bio-objects enter contemporary life, analysing the manner in which, among others, the boundaries between human and animal, organic and non-organic, and being 'alive' and the suspension of living, are questioned, destabilised and in some cases re-established. Thematically organised around questions of changing boundaries; the governance and regulation of bio-objects; and changing social, economic and political relations, this book presents rich new case studies from Europe that will be of interest to scholars of science and technology studies, social theory, sociology and law.

Poultry Quality Evaluation: Quality Attributes and Consumer Values provides a new reference source that covers these aspects with the same scientific authority as texts on traditional poultry meat quality values. The book's first section explores new developments in our understanding of how muscle structure affects the eating qualities of cooked meat. The second section highlights new techniques for measuring, predicting, and producing poultry meat quality and how these new techniques help us minimize variability in eating quality and/or maximize value. The final section identifies the current qualities of consumer and public perceptions, including what is sustainable, ethical, desirable, and healthy in poultry production and consumption.

The past decade has witnessed a renaissance in scientific approaches to the study of morality. Once understood to be the domain of moral psychology, the newer approach to morality is largely interdisciplinary, driven in no small part by developments in behavioural economics and evolutionary biology, as well as advances in neuroscientific imaging capabilities, among other fields. To date, scientists studying moral cognition and behaviour have paid little attention to virtue theory, while virtue theorists have yet to acknowledge the new research results emerging from the new science of morality. Theology and the Science of Moral Action explores a new approach to ethical thinking that promotes dialogue and integration between recent research in the scientific study of moral cognition and behaviour-including neuroscience, moral psychology, and behavioural economics-and virtue theoretic approaches to ethics in both philosophy and theology. More particularly, the book evaluates the concept of moral exemplarity and its significance in philosophical and theological ethics as well as for ongoing research programs in the cognitive sciences.

E-Governance as a field of study is relatively new when considered within the broader historical context of US democracy. The advent of the modern Internet in the early 1990s yielded new technologies that began to shift citizen expectations of how government can -- and in many cases should -- govern. Though innovations continue to emerge at a rapid pace, these technologies may be used to reinforce long-held deliberative democracy principles, including transparency, accountability and flexibility. Advances in E-Governance offers a comprehensive exploration of the role that technological innovation plays in facilitating government action and citizen participation. In this timely book, author Anthony Trotta differentiates e-governance from e-government and examines the increasingly important role social media and crowdsourcing have come to play in our democracy, and the interactions between technology, polling, voting, and outcomes. Including practical cases ranging from DMV registration to online tax filing and markers of successful implementation, Advances in E-Governance carefully addresses how the adoption and expansion of electronic platforms align with new government paradigms and looks to future trends in this rapidly expanding field.

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"Covers its subject well, provides useful context, and makes lively reading for anyone interested in the history of technology, the social context of electricity and radioactive materials, or the history of alernative medicine."--"Technology and Culture"

"Not only provides a richly detailed and suprising account of long-forgotten artifacts, but also fleshes out the longer history of some still-familiar attitudes toward health and vitality."
--"Journal of Social History"

"De la Pena's fascinating study melds social history with material culture and the history of science and technology to explain Americans' enthusiastic embrace of modern mechanization and emergent industrial culture."
--"CHOICE"

"In this engaging and well-written study Carolyn Thomas de la Pena offers a detailed cultural history of the medical-technological interface in the period 1850-1940, and in so doing tells us a great deal about how the body and its relation to modernity were conceived."
--"American Historical Review"

"Exellent. Carolyn de la Pena's superbly researched project examines how Americans in the period between 1870 and 1935 sought to supplement their physical energy through engagement with a variety of popular health technologies, including muscle-building machines: electrical invigorators, such as belts and collars: and radioactive elixirs."
--"American Quarterly"

"It's an irresistible account of fads and fascinating foibles, including electric belts and radioactive tonics."
--"Christian Science Monitor"

"Transforming archival research into sparkling prose, "The Body Electric" explains how Americans learned to usemachines to seek health, sexual rejuvenation, and physical transformation. This innovative book is both an entertaining history of fads and foibles and a groundbreaking cultural critique of the continuing obsession with achieving physical perfection."
--David E. Nye, author of "Electrifying America and America as Second Creation"

""The Body Electric" is the so-far missing puzzle piece in our nineteenth-twentieth century knowledge of the social history of the human body and technology a richly illustrated study showing two centuries of technologizing the human body against fears of weakness, enervation, sexual depletion."
--Cecelia Tichi, author of "Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America"

Between the years 1850 and 1950, Americans became the leading energy consumers on the planet, expending tremendous physical resources on energy exploration, mental resources on energy exploitation, and monetary resources on energy acquisition. A unique combination of pseudoscientific theories of health and the public's rudimentary understanding of energy created an age in which sources of industrial power seemed capable of curing the physical limitations and ill health that plagued Victorian bodies. Licensed and "quack" physicians alike promoted machines, electricity, and radium as invigorating cures, veritable "fountains of youth" that would infuse the body with energy and push out disease and death.

The Body Electric is the first book to place changing ideas about fitness and gender in dialogue with the popular culture of technology. Whether through wearing electric belts, drinking radium water, or lifting mechanized weights, many Americans came to believethat by embracing the nation's rapid march to industrialization, electrification, and "radiomania," their bodies would emerge fully powered. Only by uncovering this belief's passions and products, Thomas de la PeAa argues, can we fully understand our culture's twentieth-century energy enthusiasm.

This book borrows from the intellectual labor of queer theory in order to unsettle-or "queer"-the discourses of "religion" and "science," and, by extension, the "science and religion discourse." Drawing intellectual and social cues from works by influential theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, chapters in this volume converge on at least three common features of queer theory. First, queer theory challenges givens that on occasion still undergird religiously and scientifically informed ways of thinking. Second, it takes embodiment seriously. Third, this engagement inevitably generates new pathways for thinking about how religious and scientific "truths" matter. These three features ultimately lend support to critical investigations into the meanings of "science" and "religion," and the relationships between the two.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Technological developments move at lightening pace and can bring with them new possibilities for social harm. This book brings together original empirical and theoretical work examining how digital technologies both create and sustain various forms of gendered violence and provide platforms for resistance and criminal justice intervention. This edited collection is organised around two key themes of facilitation and resistance, with an emphasis through the whole collection on the development of a gendered interrogation of contemporary practices of technologically-enabled or enhanced practices of violence. Addressing a broad range of criminological issues such as intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, online sexual harassment, gendered political violence, online culture, cyberbullying, and human trafficking, and including a critical examination of the broader issue of feminist 'digilantism' and resistance to online sexual harassment, this book examines the ways in which new and emerging technologies facilitate new platforms for gendered violence as well as offering both formal and informal opportunities to prevent and/or respond to gendered violence.

Ethical Challenges in Oncology: Patient Care, Research, Education, and Economics covers a wide variety of topics and viewpoints about ethical issues that arise in oncology throughout the full cancer care continuum. This book provides a holistic view on oncology ethics, incorporating the knowledge and expertise of authors from various departments and oncology specialties within the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The first section focuses on the ethical issues associated with treating cancer patients. Next, the ethical challenges associated with oncology research, including funding, regulation, subject selection and the big picture are explored. The third section covers ethical issues associated with education in oncology as it reflects both past and future trends in developing proficient health care providers, patients and even executives. Final sections concentrate on the ethical dilemmas associated with the economic repercussions of oncology, offering thoughts on how to alleviate the ethical consequences that can arise from the global effects of cancer and cancer treatment. Each chapter includes discussion topics, answers pertinent questions and provides an ethical framework for problem- solving in each scenario. The topics uncover the ethical apprehensions and problems associated with oncology research and practice in order to determine best practices as well as provide guidance for all parties involved.

Take a colorful walk through human ingenuity. Humans have been unpacking the earth to use pigments since cavemen times. Starting out from surface pigments for cave paintings, we've dug deep for minerals, mined oceans for colors and exploited the world of plants and animals. Our accidental fumbles have given birth to a whole family of brilliant blues that grace our museums, mansions and motorcars. We've turned waste materials into a whole rainbow of tints and hues to color our clothes, our food and ourselves. With the snip of a genetic scissor, we've harnessed bacteria to gift us with "greener" blue jeans and dazzling dashikis. As the pigments march on into the future, who knows what new and exciting inventions will emerge? Mary Virginia Orna, a world-recognized expert on color, will lead you through an illuminating journey exploring the science behind pigments. Pausing for reflections en route to share stories around pigment use and discoveries informed by history, religion, sociology and human endeavour, this book will have you absorbing science and regaling tales. Jam packed with nuggets of information, March of the Pigments will have the curiously minded and the expert scientist turning pages to discover more.

Analysis of Step-Stress Models: Existing Results and Some Recent Developments describes, in detail, the step-stress models and related topics that have received significant attention in the last few years. Although two books, Bagdonavicius and Nikulin (2001) and Nelson (1990), on general accelerated life testing models are available, no specific book is available on step-stress models. Due to the importance of this particular topic, Balakrishnan (2009) provided an excellent review for exponential step-stress models. The scope of this book is much more, providing the inferential issues for different probability models, both from the frequentist and Bayesian points-of-view.

In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. In Parenting for a Digital Future, Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross draw on extensive and diverse qualitative and quantitative research with a range of parents in the UK to reveal how digital technologies characterize parenting in late modernity, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent or support. They chart how parents often enact authority and values through digital technologies since "screen time," games, and social media have become both ways of being together and of setting boundaries. Parenting for a Digital Future moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change.

Contemporary consumer society is increasingly saturated by digital technology, and the devices that deliver this are increasingly transforming consumption patterns. Social media, smartphones, mobile apps and digital retailing merge with traditional consumption spheres, supported by digital devices which further encourage consumers to communicate and influence other consumers to consume. Through a wide range of empirical studies which analyse the impact of digital devices, this volume explores the digitization of consumption and shows how consumer culture and consumption practices are fundamentally intertwined and mediated by digital devices. Exploring the development of new consumer cultures, leading international scholars from sociology, marketing and ethnology examine the effects on practices of consumption and marketing, through topics including big data, digital traces, streaming services, wearables, and social media's impact on ethical consumption. Digitalizing Consumption makes an important contribution to practice-based approaches to consumption, particularly the use of market devices in consumers' everyday consumer life, and will be of interest to scholars of marketing, cultural studies, consumer research, organization and management.

This book is a definitive collection of Keith Pavitt's seminal articles in the analysis of technology and innovation. He presents realistic, empirical accounts of the economic impact of technological change on firms, emphasising the cognitive dimensions of technical change. The theme throughout is that technological knowledge remains largely tacit, and the transformation of advances in knowledge is complex, uncertain and requires continuous learning.The book explores the appropriate location of innovative activities, the size structure of innovating firms, the implications of technological trajectories for corporate strategies and organization, the influence of national systems of innovation on corporate behaviour and the usefulness of publicly funded research. The conclusions drawn challenge established theories, policies and practices. Technology, Management and Systems of Innovation will prove invaluable to students and scholars of both the economics and management of evolutionary technical change.

This book reflects on the many contributions made in and to European bioethics to date, in various locations, and from various disciplinary perspectives. In so doing, the book advances understanding of the academic and social status of European bioethics as it is being supported and practiced by various disciplines such as philosophy, law, medicine, and the social sciences, applied to a wide range of areas. The European focus offers a valuable counter-balance to an often prominent US understanding of bioethics. The volume is split into four parts. The first contains reflection on bioethics in the past, present and future, and also considers how comparison between countries and disciplines can enrich bioethical discourse. The second looks at bioethics in particular locations and contexts, including: policy, boardrooms and courtrooms; studios and virtual rooms; and society, while the third part explores the translation of theories and concepts of bioethics into the clinical setting. The fourth and final section focuses on academic expressions of bioethics, as it is theorised in various disciplines and also as it is taught, whether in classrooms or at the patient's bedside. The book features unique contributions from a range of experts including: Alastair V Campbell; Ruth Chadwick; Angus Dawson; Raymond G. De Vries; Suzanne Ost; Renzo Pegoraro; Rouven Porz; Paul Schotsmans; Jochen Vollmann; Guy Widdershoven and Hub Zwart. Chapter 10 of this book ''You Don't Need Proof When You've Got Instinct!': Gut Feelings and Some Limits to Parental Authority' by Giles Birchley is available under an open access CC BY NC ND license and can be viewed at: http://www.tandfebooks.com/userimages/ContentEditor/1438250845242/9780415737197_chapter10.pdf .

Throughout history, humans have explored new places, making both good and bad moral decisions along the way. As humanity proceeds to explore space, it is important that we learn from the successes and not repeat the mistakes of the past. This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to ethics as it applies to space exploration and use. It examines real-world case studies that exemplify the ethical challenges we face in exploring beyond Earth: space debris, militarization in space, hazardous asteroids, planetary protection, the search for extraterrestrial life, commercial and private sector activities in space, space settlements, very long duration missions, and planetary-scale interventions. Major themes include human health, environmental concerns, safety and risk, governance and decision-making, and opportunities and challenges of multidisciplinary and international contexts. Ideal for classroom use and beyond, the book provides ways of thinking that will help students, academics and policymakers examine the full range of ethical decisions on questions related to space exploration.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 was a major update to the UK's laws on the use and regulation of reproductive technology and assisted reproduction. Since the enactment of the new law, the sector's regulatory body, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has also consulted on various related topics including barriers to egg and sperm donation in the UK, multiple births/single embryo transfer and using IVF technology to prevent mitochondrial disease. This book critically considers recent developments in human fertilisation legislation, asking whether the 2008 Act has achieved its stated aim of being fit for purpose. Bringing together a range of international experts, the book evaluates the fresh risks and challenges emerging from both established and existing technologies and techniques in the field of human fertilisation and embryology, as well as offering valuable insights into the social and regulatory challenges that lie ahead. Key topics include problems with DIY assisted conception; the lack of reform in respect of the regulation of surrogacy arrangements; and mitochondrial DNA transfer. As a review of the status of assisted reproduction legislation, this book will be of great use and interest to students, researchers and practitioners in medical law, bioethics, medicine and child welfare.

In his bestselling book, The Language of God, Francis Collins--the new director of the National Institutes of Health and the scientist who led the Human Genome Project--attempted to harmonize the findings of scientific research with Christian belief. In this response to Collins's work, fellow geneticist George C. Cunningham presents a point-by-point rebuttal of The Language of God, arguing that there is no scientifically acceptable evidence to support belief in a personal God and much that discredits it.
Written with admirable clarity for the nonscientist, Decoding the Language of God covers much of the same ground addressed by Collins in his book:
- Do moral behavior, altruism, and similar moral standards across cultures indicate that humans are somehow in touch with a divine lawgiver, as Collins argues? Cunningham cites data from behavioral genetics that suggest a purely naturalistic explanation for morality.
- The existence of evil, both natural and human-caused, has always been a major stumbling block for religious apologists. Cunningham points out how Collins fails to adequately address this issue and the difficulty of reconciling belief in a good God with the existence of evil.
- Collins refers to the origin of the universe and anthropic coincidences as evidence of God as creator of all of reality. By contrast, Cunningham notes that there are naturalistic interpretations for the big bang and the fine-tuning of the universe, which adequately explain this evidence. Cunningham also devotes chapters to the unreliability of the Bible as a basis for belief; the conflict between naturalistic explanations of reality, which are anchored in scientific research, and supernatural interpretations, which are not; and the many difficulties in conceptualizing the origins of the universe in terms of a personal God. Unlike recent hostile attacks on religious belief, Cunningham's respectful, well-reasoned discussion will appeal to open-minded people across the whole spectrum of belief and unbelief. As Collins' appointment once again casts a spotlight on the ability of a individual who publicly promotes his faith to serve the best interests of science, this response to his work is more timely than ever.

The explosion of cable networks, cinema distributors, and mobile media companies explicitly designed for sexual minorities in the contemporary moment has made media culture a major factor in what it feels like to be a queer person. F. Hollis Griffin demonstrates how cities offer a way of thinking about that phenomenon. By examining urban centers in tandem with advertiser-supported newspapers, New Queer Cinema and B-movies, queer-targeted television, and mobile apps, Griffin illustrates how new forms of LGBT media are less "new" than we often believe. He connects cities and LGBT media through the experiences they can make available to people, which Griffin articulates as feelings, emotions, and affects. He illuminates how the limitations of these experiences-while not universally accessible, nor necessarily empowering-are often the very reasons why people find them compelling and desirable.

An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that come along with tremendous medical progress, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a primer for all Americans to talk more honestly about health care. Beginning in the 1950s when doctors still paid house calls but regularly withheld the truth from their patients, Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno explore an unprecedented revolution in health care and explain the problem with Americans wanting everything that medical science has to offer without debating its merits and its limits. The result: Americans today pay far more for health care while having amongst the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality of any affluent nation. Gutmann and Moreno-"incisive, influential, and pragmatic thinkers" (Arthur Caplan)-demonstrate that the stakes have never been higher for prolonging and improving life. From health care reform and death-with-dignity to child vaccinations and gene editing, they explain how bioethics came to dominate the national spotlight, leading and responding to a revolution in doctor-patient relations, a burgeoning world of organ transplants and new reproductive technologies that benefit millions but create a host of legal and ethical challenges. With striking examples, the authors show how breakthroughs in cancer research, infectious disease and drug development provide Americans with exciting new alternatives, yet often painful choices. They address head-on the most fundamental challenges in American health care: Why do we pay so much for health care while still lacking universal coverage? How can medical studies adequately protect individuals who volunteer for them? What's fair when it comes to allocating organs for transplants in truly life-and-death situations? A lucid and provocative blend of history and public policy, this urgent work exposes the American paradox of wanting to have it all without paying the price.

This book offers a detailed exploration of three examples of humanitarian uses of new technology, employing key theoretical insights from Foucault. We are currently seeing a humanitarian turn to new digital technologies, such as biometrics, remote sensing, and surveillance drones. However, such humanitarian uses of new technology have not always produced beneficial results for those at the receiving end and have sometimes exposed the subjects of assistance to additional risks and insecurities. Engaging with key insights from the work of Foucault combined with selected concepts from the Science and Technology Studies literature, this book produces an analytical framework that opens up the analysis to details of power and control at the level of materiality that are often ignored in liberal histories of war and modernity. Whereas Foucault details the design of prisons, factories, schools, etc., this book is original in its use of his work, in that it uses these key insights about the details of power embedded in material design, but shifts the attention to the technologies and attending forms of power that have been experimented with in the three humanitarian endeavours presented in the book. In doing so, the book provides new information about aspects of liberal humanitarianism that contemporary critical analyses have largely neglected. This book will be of interest to students of humanitarian studies, peace and conflict studies, critical security studies, and IR in general.

While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.

Recent debate about the ethical and regulatory dimensions of developments in genetics has sidelined societal and cultural aspects, which arguably are indispensable for a nuanced understanding of the complexities of the topic. Regulatory and ethical debates benefit from taking seriously this 'third dimension' of culture, which often determines the configurations and limits of the space within which scientific, ethical and legal debate can take place. To fill this gap, this volume brings together contributions exploring the mutual relationships between genetics, markets, societies and identities in genetics and genomics. It draws upon the recent transdisciplinary debate on how socio-cultural factors influence understandings of 'genetics2.0' and shows how individual and collective identities are challenged or reinforced by cultural meanings and practices of genetics. This book will become a standard reference for everyone seeking to make sense of the controversies and shifts in the field of genetics in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Environmental issues appear deceptively simple: science tells us what the problems are and how to solve them, and, for Christians, the Bible motivates us to care for creation. And yet, both in society in general as well as in the Christian church in particular, we cannot seem to agree on what to do regarding environmental issues. In The Nature of Environmental Stewardship, climate scientist Johnny Wei-Bing Lin argues that determining the content of environmental stewardship, far from being a straightforward exercise, is a difficult and complex endeavour. He sets forth a general taxonomy, drawing from worldviews, ethical theories, science epistemology, sciencepolicy studies, politics, and economics, that can help us better understand what excellent creation care consists of and how to bridge the differences people have regarding environmental issues.