This book explores interdisciplinary approaches to animal-focused curriculum and pedagogy in environmental education, with an emphasis on integrating methods from the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences. Each chapter, whether addressing curriculum, pedagogy, or both, engages with the extant literature in environmental education and other relevant fields to consider how interdisciplinary curricular and pedagogical practices shed new light on our understandings of and ethical/moral obligations to animals. Embracing theories like intersectionality, posthumanism, Indigenous cosmologies, and significant life experiences, and considering (...) topics such as equine training, meat consumption and production, urban human-animal relationships, and zoos and aquariums, the chapters collectively contribute to the field by foregrounding the lives of animals. The volume purposefully steps forward from the historical marginalization of animals in educational research and practice. (shrink)

Personality traits describe dispositions influencing individuals' behavior and performance at work. However, in the context of personnel selection, the use of personality measures has continuously been questioned. To date, research in selection settings has focused uniquely on predicting task performance, missing the opportunity to exploit the potential of personality traits to predict non-task performance. Further, personality is often measured with self-report inventories, which are susceptible to self-distortion. Addressing these gaps, the planned study seeks to design new personality measures to be (...) used in the selection context to predict a wide range of performance criteria. Specifically, we will develop a situational judgment test and a behavior description interview, both assessing Big Five personality traits and Honesty-Humility to systematically compare these new measures with traditional self-report inventories regarding their criterion-related validity to predict four performance criteria: task performance, adaptive performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and counterproductive work behavior. Data will be collected in a simulated selection procedure. Based on power analyses, we aim for 200 employed study participants, who will allow us to contact their supervisors to gather criterion data. The results of this study will shed light on the suitability of different personality measures to predict an expanded range of performance criteria. (shrink)

Implementation of guidelines regarding breaches of electronic health information requires an anticipatory stance and physician and patient education regarding security and monitoring measures and methods of redress. Adopting a preventive ethics, rather than a crisis management, model may also increase physician awareness of how the information they choose to include and privilege within the health record may expose patients to added harms if not done mindfully.

Entomophagy—the practice of eating insects—has been touted as a means to combat undernutrition and food insecurity globally. Insects offer a nutritious, environmentally friendly alternative to resource-intensive livestock. But the benefits of edible insects cannot be realized if people do not choose to eat them. We therefore examine the social acceptability of edible insects in rural Zambia, where entomophagy is common but underexplored. Through a village case study, we show that edible insects are not valued equally, are understood socially, and seem (...) to reflect and reinforce social values. We utilize grounded theory and ethnographic methods, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and observation to examine collective entomophagy beliefs. While we expected to see differentiation in perceptions across groups based on kinship, we demonstrate that social values related to class, urbanism, gender, and age emerge as more germane explanations for entomophagy perceptions, reflecting their social weight. By expanding on current apperception of entomophagy behavior, our findings inform future research and efforts to promote entomophagy through minilivestock farming. Systems designed to maximize output, minimize labor, and highlight benefits are more likely to be widely accepted. We do not anticipate tribal association will be the primary limitation on minilivestock adoption in this context. (shrink)

The co-evolutionary concept of Three-modal stable evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens is developed. The concept based on the principle of evolutionary complementarity of anthropogenesis: value of evolutionary risk and evolutionary path of human evolution are defined by descriptive (evolutionary efficiency) and creative-teleological (evolutionary correctly) parameters simultaneously, that cannot be instrumental reduced to others ones. Resulting volume of both parameters define the trends of biological, social, cultural and techno-rationalistic human evolution by two gear mechanism ˗ gene-cultural co-evolution and techno- humanitarian balance. (...) The resultant each of them can estimated by the ratio of socio-psychological predispositions of humanization/dehumanization in mentality. Explanatory model and methodology of evaluation of creatively teleological evolutionary risk component of NBIC technological complex is proposed. Integral part of the model is evolutionary semantics (time-varying semantic code, the compliance of the biological, socio-cultural and techno-rationalist adaptive modules of human stable evolutionary strategy). (shrink)

In 2017 and 2018 [Name of research project] organized two transnational youth resistance art workshops. These workshops addressed online social justice issues and placed emphasis on pushing back against technology-facilitated violence and surveillance in networked spaces. Our engagement with these workshops raised three dilemmas associated with these sorts of resistive social justice art projects. This article explores these dilemmas, which include how to enable the production of digital art in a manner that is attentive to intersectional issues of digital literacy (...) and access; artistic appropriations of sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful speech and their relation to cultural appropriation; and defamation, privacy, copyright and trademark considerations relating to artistic appropriations. In addressing these dilemmas, examples of regulatory frameworks shaping resistance opportunities and social justice initiatives are highlighted, along with suggestions for addressing these dilemmas for those who may wish to facilitate or engage in youth resistance art workshops in future. (shrink)

“Indulging herself in air and exercise” as she wanders down a lane near the great house of Rosings, Elizabeth Bennet is unaware that she is just about to experience one of her most difficult challenges, and that Mr. Darcy is on his way with his letter.1 Just like present-day personality theorists, Jane Austen manifestly directed a great deal of creative and intellectual energy into devising a great variety of tests. But what are such situations designed to test for? What aspects (...) of character or personality, or traits and abilities, are meant to be scrutinized? A likely response from critics interested in Austen’s ethics is that such challenges should reveal which, if any, of the virtues are in good working order. .. (shrink)

To Wayne Booth it was clear, authors seek to exert control and writers like Jane Austen endeavor to satisfy this imperative through rhetorical techniques that may include the creation of a wise male figure who can be counted upon to provide the necessary guidance for flawed heroine and reader alike. We require help "to direct our reactions," and thus throughout Austen's novel Emma, her hero and "chief corrective," Mr. Knightley, stands in the reader's mind for what Emma lacks.1 Subsequent scholars (...) have questioned Booth's interpretation of Mr. Knightley's role and narrative status, and the subtitle of Mary Waldron's influential essay—"The Confusions of Mr. Knightley"—anticipates her views on the subject.2In... (shrink)

Public officials rely on performance data that are self-reported by organizations to evaluate progress on a wide range of prosocial outcomes. Policies that require public disclosure of performance in health care are thought to enable patients to select high-quality providers, which in turn may spur quality improvements as providers seek to protect their reputation or increase economic returns. Drawing on institutional theory that examines how conflicting institutional pressures influence organizational decisions, we theorize how profit orientation may mediate the response of (...) health care providers to disclosure mandates in a public health crisis. We focus on measures of data quality—completeness and accuracy—in self-reported data on COVID-19 status and outcomes generated by thousands of long-term care facilities. Using pooled regressions and a difference-in-differences style design, we find that overall, for-profit and not-for-profit facilities report similarly complete data but that for-profit facilities report less accurate data than their not-for-profit counterparts. Our results suggest that it may be important to incentivize each dimension of data quality separately to address differential institutional pressures that affect reporting practices. (shrink)

The authors assess the collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley’s Community Assessment of Renewable Energy and Sustainability program and the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, a small Native American tribal nation in northern California. The collaboration focused on creating culturally inspired, environmentally sustainable housing for tribal citizens using a codesign methodology developed at the university. The housing design process is evaluated in terms of both its contribution to Native American “cultural sovereignty,” as elaborated by Coffey and Tsosie, and as a potential (...) example of the democratization of scientific practice. (shrink)

Hisashi Nasu, Lester Embree, George Psathas, and Ilja Srubar (eds.), Alfred Schutz and His Intellectual Partners; Sandra P. Thomas and Howard R. Pollio, Listening to Patients, A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice; Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation.

Disparities in access to, and utilization of, treatment for depression among African-American and Caucasian elderly adults have been well-documented. Less fully explored are the multidimensional factors responsible for these disparities. The intersection of cultural constructs, socioeconomic factors, multiple levels of racism, and stigma attending both mental health issues and older age may help to explain disparities in the treatment of the depressed elderly. Personalized medicine with its promise of developing interventions tailored to an individual's health needs and genetically related response (...) to treatment might seem a promising antidote to the documented underutilization of standard depression treatments by African Americans. However, this paper examines the multidimensional factors associated with disparities in effective treatment of depression among African-American and Caucasian elderly adults and argues the scientific and ethical importance of pursuing various paths to address multiple levels and sources of stigma and mistrust if pharmacogenomics is to help, rather than exacerbate, disparities in depression treatment. Seven recommendations are offered to increase the likelihood that developments in pharmacogenomics will reduce disparities in depression treatment. (shrink)

Personalized medicine with its promise of developing interventions tailored to an individual's health need and genetically related response to treatment might seem a promising antidote to the documented underutilization of standard depression treatments by African Americans. In addition, understanding depression not merely in biochemical terms but also in genetic terms might seem to counter cultural beliefs and stigma that attach to depression when conceived as a mood or behavioral problem under an individual's control. After all, if there is one thing (...) for which a person is not responsible and cannot be blamed, it is her genes. Nevertheless, for multiple reasons, a personalized medical approach to depression treatment, and its attendant conceptualization of depression and treatment response as genetically influenced, present the risk of exacerbating well-documented disparities in access to, and utilization of, treatment for depression among African-American and Caucasian elderly adults. (shrink)

Reduced Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST) alters the balance of sensory input to the nervous system by systematically attenuating sensory signals from visual, auditory, thermal, tactile, vestibular, and proprioceptive channels. Previous research from our group has shown that REST via floatation acutely reduces anxiety and blood pressure while simultaneously heightening interoceptive awareness in clinically anxious populations. Anorexia nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterized by elevated anxiety, distorted body representation, and abnormal interoception, raising the question of whether REST might positively impact (...) these symptoms. However, this approach has never been studied in eating disorders and it is unknown whether exposure to REST might worsen AN symptoms. To examine these possibilities we conducted an open-label study to investigate the safety and tolerability of REST in AN. We also explored the impact of REST on affective symptoms, body image disturbance, and interoception. Twenty-one partially weight-restored AN outpatients completed a protocol involving four sequential sessions of REST: reclining in a zero-gravity chair, floating in an open pool, and two sessions of floating in an enclosed pool. All sessions were 90 minutes, approximately one week apart. We measured orthostatic blood pressure before and immediately after each session (primary outcome), in addition to collecting blood pressure readings every 10 minutes during the session using a wireless waterproof system as a secondary outcome measure. Each participant's affective state, awareness of interoceptive sensations, and body image was assessed before and after every session (exploratory outcomes). There was no evidence of orthostatic hypotension following floating, and no adverse events (primary outcome). Secondary analyses revealed that REST induced statistically significant reductions in blood pressure, anxiety and negative affect, heightened awareness of cardiorespiratory but not gastrointestinal sensations, and reduced body image dissatisfaction. The findings from this initial trial suggest that individuals with AN can safely tolerate the physical effects of REST via floatation. Future randomized controlled trials will need to investigate whether these initial observations of improved anxiety, interoception, and body image disturbance can be effectively extended to acutely ill AN populations. (shrink)

It is fortunate for the community in which she lives that one of the things about which Elinor Dashwood cares a great deal is the social duty of “general civility”—the practice, in Hume’s words, of “gentle usage.” The heroine of Sense and Sensibility is respectful and considerate toward others, whether or not these are dearly loved family members or comparative strangers. According to Karen Stohr, throughout the novel, “Elinor is the exemplar of moderation, propriety and moral rectitude,” and the reader’s (...) assessment is seemingly quite straightforward: we can rest assured that although others may be unscrupulous, self-aggrandizing, and/or self-deceiving, Elinor Dashwood is virtuous from beginning to end.1.. (shrink)

Research has shown that addressing and integrating the existential dimension in treatment settings reduce symptoms like anxiety, depression and substance abuse. Healthcare chaplains are key personnel in this practice. A nationwide, cross-sectional survey influenced by a mixed-methods approach was used to examine the attitudes, practices, understanding and perceptions of mental health professionals, including healthcare chaplains, regarding the value of addressing the existential dimension in treatment programmes. The existential group practice was led by the healthcare chaplains as an integrated part of (...) specialist mental health services. A positive and open attitude towards addressing the existential dimension was identified among the informants. Despite this, a small gap between attitude and practice was reported. Existential, religious and spiritual concerns are reported as part of the existential dimension and as relevant topics to be discussed in specialist mental health services. The findings indicate that the existential group practice could have a positive influence on the co-leaders’ competence to address existential, religious and spiritual concerns; however, this should be further investigated. (shrink)

The first study, along with edition and translation, of Chrysostomus Javelli’s epitome of the _Liber de bona fortuna_ (1531), a work permitting insight into the early modern understanding of fortune, fate, and free will.

How should you live? Should you devote yourself to perfecting a single talent or try to live a balanced life? Should you lighten up and have more fun, or buckle down and try to achieve greatness? Should you try to be a better friend? Should you be self-critical or self-accepting? And how should you decide among the possibilities open to you? Should you consult experts, listen to your parents, or should you do lots of research? Should you make lists of (...) pros and cons, or go with your gut? These are not questions that can be answered in general or in the abstract. Rather, these questions are addressed to the first person point of view, to the perspective each of us occupies when we reflect on how to live without knowing exactly what we're aiming for. To answer them, this book focuses on the process of living one's life from the inside, rather than on defining goals from the outside. Drawing on traditional philosophical sources as well as literature and recent work in social psychology, this book argues that to live well, we need to develop reflective wisdom: to care about things that will sustain us and give us good experiences, to have perspective on our successes and failures, and to be moderately self-aware and cautiously optimistic about human nature. Further, we need to know when to think about our values, character, and choices, and when not to. A crucial part of wisdom, the book maintains, is being able to shift perspectives: to be self-critical; to be realistic; to examine life when reflection is appropriate, but not when we should lose ourselves in experience. (shrink)

What is well-being? This is one of humanity's oldest and deepest questions; Valerie Tiberius offers a fresh answer. She argues that our lives go well to the extent that we succeed in what matters to us emotionally, reflectively, and over the long term. So when we want to help others achieve well-being, we should pay attention to their values.

This volume contains thirteen papers that were presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/Société canadienne d’histoire et de philosophie des mathématiques, which was held at Ryerson University in Toronto. It showcases rigorously reviewed modern scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century. A series of chapters all set in the eighteenth century consider topics such as John Marsh’s techniques (...) for the computation of decimal fractions, Euler’s efforts to compute the surface area of scalene cones, a little-known work by John Playfair on the practical aspects of mathematics, and Monge’s use of descriptive geometry. After a brief stop in the nineteenth century to consider the culture of research mathematics in 1860s Prussia, the book moves into the twentieth century with an examination of the historical context within which the Axiom of Choice was developed and a paper discussing Anatoly Vlasov’s adaptation of the Boltzmann equation to ionized gases. The remaining chapters deal with the philosophy of twentieth-century mathematics through topics such as an historically informed discussion of finitism and its limits; a reexamination of Mary Leng’s defenses of mathematical fictionalism through an alternative, anti-realist approach to mathematics; and a look at the reasons that mathematicians select specific problems to pursue. Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible to not only mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also anyone with a general interest in mathematics. (shrink)

We apply Benacerraf’s distinction between mathematical ontology and mathematical practice to examine contrasting interpretations of infinitesimal mathematics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in the work of Bos, Ferraro, Laugwitz, and others. We detect Weierstrass’s ghost behind some of the received historiography on Euler’s infinitesimal mathematics, as when Ferraro proposes to understand Euler in terms of a Weierstrassian notion of limit and Fraser declares classical analysis to be a “primary point of reference for understanding the eighteenth-century theories.” Meanwhile, scholars like (...) Bos and Laugwitz seek to explore Eulerian methodology, practice, and procedures in a way more faithful to Euler’s own. Euler’s use of infinite integers and the associated infinite products are analyzed in the context of his infinite product decomposition for the sine function. Euler’s principle of cancellation is compared to the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity. The Leibnizian law of continuity similarly finds echoes in Euler. We argue that Ferraro’s assumption that Euler worked with a classical notion of quantity is symptomatic of a post-Weierstrassian placement of Euler in the Archimedean track for the development of analysis, as well as a blurring of the distinction between the dual tracks noted by Bos. Interpreting Euler in an Archimedean conceptual framework obscures important aspects of Euler’s work. Such a framework is profitably replaced by a syntactically more versatile modern infinitesimal framework that provides better proxies for his inferential moves. (shrink)

There is a difference between someone breaking a glass by accidentally brushing up against it and smashing a glass in a fit of anger. In the first case, the person’s cognitive state has little to do with the event, but in the second, the mental state qua anger is quite relevant. How are we to understand this difference? What is the proper way to understand the relation between the mind, the brain, and the resultant behavior? This paper explores the popular (...) “middle ground” reply in which mental phenomena are claimed to be “as real as” other higher level properties. It argues that this solution fails to answer epistemological difficulties surrounding how to chose the appropriate factors in an explanation. A more sophisticated understanding of scientific theorizing and of the relation between ontology and explanation give us a framework in which we can determine when we should refer to mental states as being the causally efficacious agents for some behavior. (shrink)

In the winter of 1872, while still a young professor in Basel, having just published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche delivered a series of lectures entitled “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.”1 These five lectures were well received at the time. It appears that Nietzsche intended to add two more lectures and to publish the whole series as a book. By the end of the year, however, the title of the series featured only as the (...) second title in his self-parodying essay, “Five Forwards to Five Unwritten Books.”2 The lectures remained unpublished during Nietzsche's lifetime…. (shrink)

Hermeneutic research in nursing: developing a Gadamerian‐based research method This paper takes the stance that although there are many different approaches to phenomenological and hermeneutic research, some of these have become blurred due to multiple interpretations of translated materials. Working from original texts by the German philosophers, this paper reconsiders the relevance of phenomenology and hermeneutics to nursing research. We trace the development of Gadamer's philosophy in order to propose a research method based in this tradition. Five steps have been (...) identified as a guide for nurse researchers. These are deciding upon a question, identification of preunderstandings, gaining understanding through dialogue with participants, gaining understanding through dialogue with text and establishing trustworthiness. (shrink)

The article presents a portrait and analysis of the existential-psychocultural situation in postmodern Sweden. Drawing from recent research exploring psychology of religion and existential worldviews, and the Swedish findings from the international World Values Survey, an argument is made for thinking about existential function and dysfunction as public health issues. This is portrayed against the background of Sweden as one of the most secularized countries and simultaneously a country with one of the most encompassing welfare systems. Psychology of religion's updated (...) role here would be to take responsibility for identifying and assessing the categories of function and dysfunction for an existential public health system. This role would also include the planning of policy for societal existential wellbeing, as well as planning prevention and intervention efforts for avoiding existential epidemiology. This new role fits well with public health's third revolution agenda focusing on health, wellbeing and quality of life. (shrink)

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework to contextualize young people’s lived experiences of privacy and invasion online. Social negotiations in the construction of privacy boundaries are theorized to be dependent on individual preferences, abilities and context-dependent social meanings.Design/methodology/approach– Empirical findings of three related Ottawa-based studies dealing with young people’s online privacy are used to examine the benefits of online publicity, what online privacy means to young people and the social importance of privacy. Earlier philosophical (...) discussions of privacy and identity, as well as current scholarship, are drawn on to suggest that privacy is an inherently social practice that enables social actors to navigate the boundary between self/other and between being closed/open to social interaction.Findings– Four understandings of privacy’s value are developed in concordance with recent privacy literature and our own empirical data: privacy as contextual, relational, performative and dialectical.Social implications– A more holistic approach is necessary to understand young people’s privacy negotiations. Adopting such an approach can help re-establish an ability to address the ways in which privacy boundaries are negotiated and to challenge surveillance schemes and their social consequences.Originality/value– Findings imply that privacy policy should focus on creating conditions that support negotiations that are transparent and equitable. Additionally, policy-makers must begin to critically evaluate the ways in which surveillance interferes with the developmental need of young people to build relationships of trust with each other and also with adults. (shrink)

We tested the hypothesis that choices determined by Type 1 processes are compelling because they are fluent, and for this reason they are less subject to analytic thinking than other answers. A total of 104 participants completed a modified version of Wason's selection task wherein they made decisions about one card at a time using a two-response paradigm. In this paradigm participants gave a fast, intuitive response, rated their feeling of rightness for that response, and were then allowed free time (...) to reconsider their answers. As we predicted, answers consistent with a matching heuristic were made more quickly than other answers, were given higher FOR ratings, and received less subsequent analysis as measured by rethinking time and the probability of changing answers. These data suggest that reasoning biases may be compelling because they are fluently generated; this is turn creates a strong FOR, which acts as a signal that further analysis is not necessary. (shrink)

Although widely studied in other domains, relatively little is known about the metacognitive processes that monitor and control behaviour during reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we examined the conditions under which two fluency cues are used to monitor initial reasoning: answer fluency, or the speed with which the initial, intuitive answer is produced, and perceptual fluency, or the ease with which problems can be read. The first two experiments demonstrated that answer fluency reliably predicted Feeling of Rightness judgments to (...) conditional inferences and base rate problems, which subsequently predicted the amount of deliberate processing as measured by thinking time and answer changes; answer fluency also predicted retrospective confidence judgments. Moreover, the effect of answer fluency on reasoning was independent from the effect of perceptual fluency, establishing that these are empirically independent constructs. In five experiments with a variety of reasoning problems similar to those of Alter et al., we found no effect of perceptual fluency on FOR, retrospective confidence or accuracy; however, we did observe that participants spent more time thinking about hard to read stimuli, although this additional time did not result in answer changes. In our final two experiments, we found that perceptual disfluency increased accuracy on the CRT, but only amongst participants of high cognitive ability. As Alter et al.’s samples were gathered from prestigious universities, collectively, the data to this point suggest that perceptual fluency prompts additional processing in general, but this processing may results in higher accuracy only for the most cognitively able. (shrink)

Yule, Valerie Review(s) of: Heroes and heretics: A political history of western thought, by Barrows Dunham, Publisher, Alfred A. Knopf in 1964.

Black feminist theory has shown how respectability politics shape cultural discourses about African American women's sexuality. Responding to ‘silent’ depictions resulting from racial uplift strategies among turn-of-the-century middle-class black women, subsequent work theorises alternative discourses that portray a desiring and agentic black female sexual subject. Locating these alternative discourses in a ‘politics of irreverence’, I argue that respectability/irreverence oppositional logic narrowly frames theorising of black female sexuality. Although recent work emphasises dialectical – rather than oppositional – dynamics, this analytic approach (...) is unevenly applied. Binary frameworks continue to shape analyses of women's rap. Drawing upon lyrics of rappers Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, I highlight three discursive strategies whereby women rappers render the respectability/irreverence binary problematic: (1) using irreverence to claim respectability, (2) ‘claiming both’ or, embracing contradiction, and (3) beating to the punch. This analysis shows how dialectical approaches account for potential ‘third spaces’ where more complex representational politics are possible. (shrink)

Scholars consider Mary Wollstonecraft an early feminist political theorist for two reasons: her explicit commitment to educational equality, and her implicit suggestion that the private‐sphere role of motherhood holds political import. My reading of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Womanuses Wollstonecraft's works and draws upon recent claims made by Sandrine Bergès inThe Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft to connect these points: educated women are better at performing motherly duties and, therefore, of greater benefit to society. Although (...) many scholars have read Wollstonecraft's arguments for educational equality as a starting point for greater equality, Bergès does not. In this article, I further Bergès's claims and argue that Wollstonecraft's project is limited and likely to reinforce inequality between the sexes. Specifically, I show that Wollstonecraft's educational reforms incentivize women to become nothing more than highly educated housewives. In the process of fulfilling their social and political duty to instill public spirit and private virtue in future citizens, women are re‐entrenched in domestic affairs instead of being freed for public pursuits. This realization, I contend, should cause us to be wary of panaceas for women's subordination that rest on increasing their education. (shrink)

While the research programs in early cognitive science and artificial intelligence aimed to articulate what cognition was in ideal terms, much research in contemporary computational neuroscience looks at how and why brains fail to function as they should ideally. This focus on impairment affects how we understand David Marr's hypothesized three levels of understanding. In this essay, we suggest some refinements to Marr's distinctions using a population activity model of cortico-striatal circuitry exploring impulsivity and behavioral inhibition as a case study. (...) In particular, we urge that Marr's computational level should be redefined to include a description of how systems break down. We also underscore that feed-forward processing, cognition disconnected from behavioral context, and representations do not always drive cognition in the way that Marr originally assumed. (shrink)

Ten years ago, Megan Shinal sought the care of neurosurgeon Steven Toms for the surgical treatment of a recurrent nonmalignant tumor in the pituitary region of her brain. In their twenty-minute meeting, Shinal did not make a final decision about which surgical approach she wished to pursue. Subsequently, she spoke with Tom's physician assistant once by phone and once in person, when she signed the consent form, which did not appear to designate which surgical approach she had chosen. During the (...) operation—a total resection—Toms perforated Shinal's carotid artery, resulting in hemorrhage, stroke, brain injury, and partial blindness. The jury found that Toms had fulfilled his informed-consent obligations prior to performing the resection; however, in June 2017, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania overturned the decision, relying on the Pennsylvania Medical Care Availability and Reduction of Error Act. The court found that the language of the act is unambiguous in its requirement that “a physician's duty to provide information to a patient sufficient to obtain her informed consent is non-delegable.” Presumably, this rule of nondelegation applies beyond the surgical theater to other major treatment decisions. And it is unclear whether it applies to other professionals in a subordinate position to the treating physician, such as residents and fellows. (shrink)

BackgroundBiobanks are considered to be key infrastructures for research development and have generated a lot of debate about their ethical, legal and social implications. While the focus has been on human genomic research, rapid advances in human microbiome research further complicate the debate.DiscussionWe draw on two cystic fibrosis biobanks in Toronto, Canada, to illustrate our points. The biobanks have been established to facilitate sample and data sharing for research into the link between disease progression and microbial dynamics in the lungs (...) of pediatric and adult patients. We begin by providing an overview of some of the ELSI associated with human microbiome research, particularly on the implications for the broader society. We then discuss ethical considerations regarding the identifiability of samples biobanked for human microbiome research, and examine the issue of return of results and incidental findings. We argue that, for the purposes of research ethics oversight, human microbiome research samples should be treated with the same privacy considerations as human tissues samples. We also suggest that returning individual microbiome-related findings could provide a powerful clinical tool for care management, but highlight the need for a more grounded understanding of contextual factors that may be unique to human microbiome research.ConclusionsWe revisit the ELSI of biobanking and consider the impact that human microbiome research might have. Our discussion focuses on identifiability of human microbiome research samples, and return of research results and incidental findings for clinical management. (shrink)