MASK NARRATIVES PROMOTED BY ANTI-VACCINATION ACCOUNTS ON INSTAGRAM PRIOR TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked passionate debate worldwide on matters of public health. A portion of this debate has been dedicated to the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. While the majority of health officials agree that wearing a mask is efficacious, there has been a widespread movement against masks. The “anti-mask” movement is often characterized for spreading misinformation about masks and for its overlap with the anti-vaccine movement. This paper focuses on the mask sentiments of the anti-vaccination community prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to identify if the anti-vaccination movement held prior beliefs about masks to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases and if those beliefs differ from their mask sentiment today. Through thematic analysis of 44 Instagram posts prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that online vaccine safety communities have, in the past, regarded mask-wearing as a viable alternative to vaccines. Notably, posts supported the efficacy of mask-wearing while criticizing the mandates to wear masks in healthcare settings. In this paper, we elaborate on these mask narratives, as well as their implications in how the anti-vaccination group had a dramatic shift in mask sentiment during the pandemic.

When Problem Solving Followed by Instruction Works: Evidence for Productive Failure

When learning a new concept, should students engage in problem solving followed by instruction (PS-I) or instruction followed by problem solving (I-PS)? Noting that there is a passionate debate about the design of initial learning, we report evidence from a meta-analysis of 53 studies with 166 comparisons that compared PS-I with I-PS design. Our results showed a significant, moderate effect in favor of PS-I (Hedge’s g 0.36 [95% confidence interval 0.20; 0.51]). The effects were even stronger (Hedge’s g ranging between 0.37 and 0.58) when PS-I was implemented with high fidelity to the principles of Productive Failure (PF), a subset variant of PS-I design. Students’ grade level, intervention time span, and its (quasi-)experimental nature contributed to the efficacy of PS-I over I-PS designs. Contrasting trends were, however, observed for younger age learners (second to fifth graders) and for the learning of domain-general skills, for which effect sizes favored I-PS. Overall, an estimation of true effect sizes after accounting for publication bias suggested a strong effect size favoring PS-I (Hedge’s g 0.87).

Towards a New Form of Undemocratic Capitalism: Introducing Macro-Equity to Finance Development Post COVID-19 Crisis

Sustainable Development Goal 16 talks about Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, and goal 10 talks about reducing inequality. A major problem exposed by the COVID-19 crisis is that public deficits seem to be the normal state in the business cycle’s booms and downturns, limiting capacity for emergencies. Corporate capitalism has an incentive to perpetuate deficits to increase growth, provide risk-free interest income to financial institutions, and to increase inequalities and economic injustice. To counter this problem, the purpose of this communication is to suggest that countries need to issue equity capital, which we term macro-equity. This macro-equity will give dividends to its shareholders in times of public surplus and issue new shares in times of public deficits. The communication is written as a mind experiment, debating the issues that may arise. This proposal raises many questions of an ethical and moral nature that will lead to passionate debate. The use of macro-equity will reduce countries’ stress, created by high public debt. With appropriate incentives, it may create an entrepreneurial mindset in political leaders that may even reduce corruption and promote redistribution. The moral and ethical issues need to be weighed against the street violence in the absence of any change.

Why female birds of prey are larger than males

The causes of the reversed sexual size dimorphism (RSD; females larger than males) in birds of prey are subject to a centuries-old, passionate debate. A crucial difficulty is to distinguish whether the postulated benefits derive from the proposed causal process(es) or are incidental. After reviewing the existing literature, we present a methodology that overcomes this difficulty and renders unnecessary any speculative a priori distinctions between evolved function and incidental effects. We can thus justify the following novel version of the well-known nest defence hypothesis as the most likely to explain the phenomenon in all birds of prey that show RSD: if the female predominates in actively defending the eggs and young against predators, then she is the heavier sex, and her relatively greater body mass is adaptive. That is, heavier females are favoured (independently of males) by natural selection. The attractiveness of this hypothesis is that it has the potential to explain the phenomenon in all raptors exhibiting RSD, can deal with the exceptional cases in this group, explains the direction of the dimorphism, focuses on a key factor in the reproductive success of most raptors, is parsimonious, i.e. does not require supporting hypotheses, and is supported by a substantial body of evidence.

Rashi's Commentary on the Torah

Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah explores the reception history of the most important Jewish Bible commentary ever composed, the Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040–1105). The Commentary has shaped perceptions of the meaning of the Torah, Judaism’s foundation document, among leading scholars, lay readers, and initiates in Jewish learning for more than nine centuries. The Commentary has benefited from enormous scholarly attention but analysis of diverse reactions to this work has been amazingly scant. Viewing the Commentary’s path to preeminence through a wide array of religious, intellectual, and literary lenses, Lawee focuses considerable attention on a hitherto unexamined—and wholly unexpected—feature of the work’s reception: critical, and at times astonishingly harsh, resistance to it. At the same time, he shows how Rashi’s interpretation of the Torah became an exegetical classic, a staple in the curriculum, a source of shared religious vocabulary for Jews across time and place, and a foundational text that shaped the Jewish nation’s collective identity. The book takes as its larger integrating perspective processes of canonicity as they shape how traditions flourish, disintegrate, or evolve. Rashi’s scriptural magnum opus, the foremost work of Franco-German (Ashkenazic) biblical scholarship, faced stiff completion for canonical preeminence in the form of rationalist reconfigurations of Judaism abroad in Mediterranean seats of learning. It nevertheless emerged triumphant in an intense medieval battle for Judaism’s future. Investigation of the reception of Rashi’s Commentary throws light on issues in Jewish scholarship and spirituality that continue to stir reflection, and even passionate debate, in the Jewish world today.

THE TWO REVOLUTIONS, LANDED ELITES, AND EDUCATION DURING THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Understanding the causes of the Industrial Revolution, namely the process of transition from a Malthusian equilibrium to modern economic growth, has been the subject of passionate debate. This paper contributes to insights into the process of industrialization and the demographic transition that followed. We present a model that proposes a mechanism behind the claim that landed elites had strong incentives to block education reforms. By applying the theory of interest groups to landownership, landowners could delay education. However, they could not prevent its introduction indefinitely since gains for the landed elites derived from education would at some moment surpass the costs associated with them. We also sustain that improvements in agricultural productivity prior to the Industrial Revolution may have induced a positive impact on the landowners’ decision to educate the population, which led to an earlier introduction of education reforms. The conclusions fit the patterns of the late boom of industrialization and demographic transition and help explain why some countries (e.g., Britain and The Netherlands) had accelerated education reforms and a faster process of industrialization than most continental countries. A theoretical model is presented, and numerical simulations are exhibited to illustrate our claims.

Technology-Based Education

The expansion of technological applications such as computers and mobile phones in the past three decades has impacted our lives from different perspectives. Educational contexts are no exceptions, and like other environments, they have also been influenced by new teaching sources and software. More recently, there has been a passionate debate about the usefulness of the smart-phones for educational purposes and their possible uses in educational instruction; therefore, in this chapter, a review of the current published literature focusing on the use of technology-based instruction by instructors or students was conducted. The results of the study demonstrated that technology-based instruction has significant effects on learners' achievements; however, there are some challenges such as social and technical barriers in blending technology and education in different educational contexts.

Do we Plan through Gestures? Evidence from Children, Adolescents and Adults in Solving of Tower of Hanoï Task

The aim of this research was to study the planning of the execution of the Tower of Hanoï task (TOH) through gesture and speech. The effects of age and task complexity on gestures-speech mismatches were analyzed in 144 participants (48 children from 8 to 10 years old, 48 adolescents from 12 to 14 years old, and 48 adults from 18 to 20 years old) during their early explanations of the solution to the problem of the TOH. Results suggested effects from task complexity but not from age. Gesture-speech mismatches could be a possible way to analyze early explanations of the tasks, and the level of difficulty could be considered as a developmental indicator. The question of the relationship between gestures and speech during the planning of complex problems is in fact at the center of a passionate debate on the close relationship between thought and language. It is also at the heart of research on multimodal communication and thinking, according to which human cognition is based on verbal and nonverbal aspects of communicative behavior.

Editor's Note

The following question was asked during the 2017 International Conference of the Consortium for Comparative Research on Regional Integration and Social Cohesion (RISC) on “Integrated and Coherent Sustainable Development”: “If forced to choose one of the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs] to prioritize, which would it be?” Of course, this provocation elicited numerous responses, and passionate debate as each of the SDGs is worthy and the policy community supporting sustainable development is heterogeneous, including stakeholders who are implicated in discussions on the environment, human rights, public health, food security, water security, gender equality, and so on. None of the responses forwarded can be considered “wrong.”