Liver transplantation offers a lifesaving treatment for patients suffering from end-stage liver failure, but not all candidates in the United States are eligible owing to center-specific criteria. When a patient is rejected at a transplantation center for medical, surgical, or psychosocial issues, they are often referred to other centers. We focus on this practice of reevaluation at a second center when the candidate was rejected for psychosocial reasons. We review the criteria used by health professionals to determine psychosocial eligibility and (...) present three case examples from a large teaching hospital that demonstrate this phenomenon in practice. The cases illustrate the conflicts among autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. We present arguments for and against this practice and provide concrete solutions as a path forward. (shrink)

Deliberations and discussions on inter-caste relationships in South Asia so far have been fixed within the confines of heterosexuality. Not only are heterosexual inter-caste relationships the default imagination of an inter-caste love, but also notions of heteronormativity dominate discussions of inter-caste love, relationship and, importantly, inter-caste marriages. In asking ‘queer’ questions about caste, this article analyses what an inter-caste dynamic means for social movements which rally around notions of love and desire or choose to reject them. This article recentres desire (...) and intimacy into caste to imagine queer (im)possibilities of dalit love. In doing so, the article asks: where is the dalit lover? Building upon conversations and interviews with five dalit-queer scholars, intellectuals and activists, as well as provocations offered by them, this article complicates ‘inter-caste love’ itself as a site of power and politics, of social categorisation as well as of critical theorisation. (shrink)

For many decades, cognition has been viewed as a computational process in the brain. For cognition, the brain, body and the interaction with the environment are important. Conventional views are inclined towards the existence of discrete and internal representations realised by highly specific mechanisms in the brain. The Embodied approach challenges this view and accepts the evolution of cognitive abilities. There is a shift in focus from the belief that the brain is solely responsible for cognition to the thought that (...) the body is somehow deeply integrated into cognition. However, it does not deny the central position of the brain in the process of cognition but opens the doors for other factors for integration. At the basic level, there are three ways in which an agent’s body can be utilised for the cognitive process. An agent’s body may help to generate, operate and distribute the cognitive processes. As a result, this approach tries to diminish the monopoly of the brain by taking into account the importance of the body and the environment for cognition. (shrink)

Finally, this volume offers a self-reflective look at the social and political location of anthropologists in relation to the questions of culture, power, and ...

Game trees (or extensive-form games) were first defined by von Neumann and Morgenstern in 1944. In this paper we examine the use of game trees for representing Bayesian decision problems. We propose a method for solving game trees using local computation. This method is a special case of a method due to Wilson for computing equilibria in 2-person games. Game trees differ from decision trees in the representations of information constraints and uncertainty. We compare the game tree representation and solution (...) technique with other techniques for decision analysis such as decision trees, influence diagrams, and valuation networks. (shrink)

The notion of epistemic injustice has become an important topic of inquiry in recent times. It refers to the injustice committed to a person when her claim to knowledge is not given due consideration. This article argues that there are two major sources of epistemic injustice: One is the dominating tendencies present in us, and the other is susceptibility to cognitive biases and distortions. When societies become more complex, injustice increases and one can see countless instances of epistemic injustice in (...) everyday life. To reduce epistemic injustice, one has to tackle both sources. Increasing cooperative behaviour is the key in this regard which, in turn, may require revisiting the way the self is automatically understood. (shrink)

Repeatedly performing a submaximal motor task for a prolonged period of time leads to muscle fatigue comprising a central and peripheral component, which demands a gradually increasing effort. However, the brain contribution to the enhancement of effort to cope with progressing fatigue lacks a complete understanding. The intermittent motor tasks closely resemble many activities of daily living, thus remaining physiologically relevant to study fatigue. The scope of this study is therefore to investigate the EEG-based brain activation patterns in healthy subjects (...) performing IMT until self-perceived exhaustion. Fourteen participants repeated elbow flexion contractions at 40% maximum voluntary contraction by following visual cues displayed on an oscilloscope screen until subjective exhaustion. Each contraction lasted ≈5 s with a 2-s rest between trials. The force, EEG, and surface EMG data were simultaneously collected. After preprocessing, we selected a subset of trials at the beginning, middle, and end of the study session representing brain activities germane to mild, moderate, and severe fatigue conditions, respectively, to compare and contrast the changes in the EEG time-frequency characteristics across the conditions. The outcome of channel- and source-level TF analyses reveals that the theta, alpha, and beta power spectral densities vary in proportion to fatigue levels in cortical motor areas. We observed a statistically significant change in the band-specific spectral power in relation to the graded fatigue from both the steady- and post-contraction EEG data. The findings would enhance our understanding on the etiology and physiology of voluntary motor-action-related fatigue and provide pointers to counteract the perception of muscle weakness and lack of motor endurance associated with ADL. The study outcome would help rationalize why certain patients experience exacerbated fatigue while carrying out mundane tasks, evaluate how clinical conditions such as neurological disorders and cancer treatment alter neural mechanisms underlying fatigue in future studies, and develop therapeutic strategies for restoring the patients' ability to participate in ADL by mitigating the central and muscle fatigue. (shrink)

The integrity of research findings and the safety of participants who voluntarily consent to participate in research studies must be assured through ethical approaches. Additionally, ethical guidelines and the ethics committee protect participants from unfair practices by the research team. Therefore, this study aims to assess the knowledge and attitudes toward the ethics committee and research ethical practices among the researchers of a diabetes institute in Kuwait. An anonymous survey was conducted through an online questionnaire using Microsoft Forms. The study (...) had a response rate of 86%. Among the 55 participants in this study, 43 (78%) had ethics training. Researchers involved in more than four research projects were shown to have a much higher awareness of the ethics committee and its role than researchers involved in no projects. Approximately 90% of researchers had training in research ethics and were knowledgeable about informed consent forms and assent, as well as additional protections for vulnerable populations. Ninety-eight percent of respondents were of the view that an ethics committee was necessary. Our study concluded that most of the researchers at the institute were aware of the role of the ethics committee, and ethical principles. However, we recommend that continuous and customized training on research ethics should be provided. (shrink)

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points (...) that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms. (shrink)

Disorders of sexual development are a heterogeneous group of disorders in which chromosomal, gonadal or anatomical sex development is atypical. The majority of these children are recognized at birth by ambiguous genitalia. Legal and societal pressures require the physician and parents to assign sex rapidly. Though sex assignment is undebated in several disorders of sexual development, many others need an individualized approach to gender-related concerns. Gender dysphoria is prevalent in disorders of sexual development, and early gender-defining surgeries have potentially lifelong (...) consequences. We use two cases, one of partial androgen insensitivity and another of simple virilizing congenital adrenal hyperplasia to illustrate that in disorders of sexual development, the ethical management principles remain the same at their core despite the vast differences in phenotypes. Sex assignment should maximize functional, psychological and sexual needs. Sex assigned should coincide with gender identity. We propose that we manage such children with the mutual participation of the physician, parents and the child. Though the parents and the physician have the child's best interests when making a decision, the child's developing autonomy should be protected. The communication of the health provider to the parent must be honest if early sex assignment is difficult. (shrink)

Akhil Reed Amar, The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, xi + 272 pp.

Akhil Reed Amar, The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, xi + 272 pp.

Brams’ paradox of new members and Shenoy’s paradox of smaller coalitions are, in a sense, equivalent. They are both implied by the monotonicity of a power index: while the first is exhibited on every simple game that is not strong, the latter can be observed on every simple game in which players are not almost symmetric. For the Shapley–Shubik index, this symmetry condition is not only necessary but also sufficient to avoid the paradox of smaller coalitions.

Much ink has already been spilled on the relationship of constitutional originalism to precedent. The debate includes contributions from Randy Barnett, Steven Calabresi, Kurt Lash, Gary Lawson, John McGinnis with Michael Rappaport, Michael Paulsen, and Lee Strang, not to mention Justice Antonin Scalia—all representing originalism in some form. Living constitutionalism has also been represented both implicitly and explicitly, with important contributions from Phillip Bobbitt, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Gerhardt, Randy Kozel, and David Strauss. Some writers are more difficult to classify; (...) class='Hi'>Akhil Amar comes to mind. And there are many other contributions to the debate. Opinions range from the view that precedent should invariably prevail over the original public meaning of the constitutional text to the polar opposite view, that precedent must give way to original meaning in almost every case. Here is the roadmap. Part I provides a brief introduction to contemporary originalism. Part II describes the problem of precedent for originalism, emphasizing that the nature of the problem depends in part on our understanding of precedent. Part III offers some reflections on the question as to the constitutional status of the doctrine of horizontal stare decisis in the United States Supreme Court. (shrink)

Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of. Field Science. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson eds. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 1997. viii. 275 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).