RationaleThere are growing concerns over the occurrence of adverse physiologic events occurring in pilots during operation of United States Air Force and Navy high-performance aircraft. We hypothesize that a heightened inspiratory work of breathing experienced by jet pilots by virtue of the on-board life support system may constitute a “distraction stimulus” consequent to an increased sensation of respiratory muscle effort. As such, the purpose of this study was to determine whether increasing inspiratory muscle effort adversely impacts on attentional performance.MethodsTwelve, healthy (...) participants were recruited for this study. Participants completed six repetitions of a modified Masked Conjunctive Continuous Performance Task protocol while breathing against four different inspiratory threshold loads to assess median reaction times. A computer-controlled threshold loading device was used to set the inspiratory threshold loads. Repeated measures analysis of variances were performed to examine: the efficacy of the threshold loading device to impose significantly higher loading at each loading condition; the effects of loading condition on respiratory muscle effort sensation; and the influence of hypercapnia on MCCPT scores during inspiratory threshold loading. Generalized additive mixed effects models were used to examine the potential non-linear effects of respiratory muscular effort sensation, device loading, and hypercapnia, on MCCPT scores during inspiratory threshold loading.ResultsInspiratory threshold loading significantly augmented inspiratory effort sensation and the inspiratory pressure-time product. Our analyses also revealed that median hit RT was positively associated with inspiratory effort sensation during inspiratory loading trials.ConclusionThe findings of this work suggest that it was not increasing inspiratory muscle effort per se, but rather participant’s subjective perception of inspiratory “load” that impacts negatively on attentional performance; i.e., as the degree of inspiratory effort sensation increased, sotoo did median hit RT. As such, it is reasonable to suggest that minimizing inspiratory effort sensation during high-performance flight operations may prove useful in reducing pilot RTs during complex behavioral tasks. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

BackgroundStory recall tests have shown variable sensitivity to rate of cognitive decline in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers. Although SR tasks are typically scored by obtaining a sum of items recalled, item-level analyses may provide additional sensitivity to change and AD processes. Here, we examined the difficulty and discrimination indices of each item from the Logical Memory SR task, and determined if these metrics differed by recall conditions, story version, lexical categories, serial position, and amyloid status.Methodsn = 1,141 participants from (...) the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention longitudinal study who had item-level data were included in these analyses, as well as a subset of n = 338 who also had amyloid positron emission tomography imaging. LM data were categorized into four lexical categories, and by serial position. We calculated difficulty and discriminability/memorability by item, category, and serial position and ran separate repeated measures ANOVAs for each recall condition, lexical category, and serial position. For the subset with amyloid imaging, we used a two-sample t-test to examine whether amyloid positive and amyloid negative groups differed in difficulty or discrimination for the same summary metrics.ResultsIn the larger sample, items were more difficult in the delayed recall condition across both story A and story B. Item discrimination was higher at delayed than immediate recall, and proper names had better discrimination than any of the other lexical categories or serial position groups. In the subsample with amyloid PET imaging, proper names were more difficult for Aβ+ than Aβ−; items in the verb and “other” lexical categories and all serial positions from delayed recall were more discriminate for the Aβ+ group compared to the Aβ− group.ConclusionThis study provides empirical evidence that both LM stories are effective at discriminating ability levels and amyloid status, and that individual items vary in difficulty and discrimination by amyloid status, while total scores do not. These results can be informative for the future development of sensitive tasks or composite scores for early detection of cognitive decline. (shrink)

Foreword -- 1. The War Within -- 2. The Cult of Experience -- 3. The Long March -- 4. America's Transformers -- 5. American Restoration -- 6. Twenty-twenty Vision -- Acknowledgments.

“Clinical ethics consultants” have been practicing in the United States for about 50 years. Most of the earliest consultants—the “pioneers”—were “outsiders” when they first appeared at patients' bedsides and in the clinic. However, if they were outsiders initially, they acclimated to the clinical setting and became “insiders” very quickly. Moreover, there was some tension between traditional academics and those doing applied ethics about whether there was sufficient “critical distance” for appropriate reflection about the complex medical ethics dilemmas of the day (...) if one were involved in the decision making. Again, the pioneers deflected concerns by identifying and instituting safeguards to assure professional objectivity in clinical ethics consultation services. One might suggest that in moving inside and establishing normative practices, the pioneer clinical ethics consultants anticipated adoption of their routines and professionalization of the field. (shrink)

I present a general theory for the initial domestication of plants and animals that is based on niche construction theory and incorporates several behavioral ecological concepts, including central-place provisioning, resource catchment, resource ownership and defensibility, and traditional ecological knowledge. This theory provides an alternative to, and replacement for, current explanations, including diet breadth models of optimal foraging theory, that are based on an outmoded concept of asymmetrical adaptation and that attempt to explain domestication as an adaptive response to resource imbalance (...) resulting from either environmental decline or human population growth. The small-scale human societies that first domesticated plants and animals share a number of basic interrelated attributes that when considered as an integrated and coherent set of behaviors provide the context for explaining initial domestication not as an adaptive response to an adverse environmental shift or to human population growth or packing but rather as the result of deliberate human enhancement of resource-rich environments in situations where evidence of resource imbalance is absent. (shrink)

As clinical ethics consultants move toward professionalization, the process of certifying individual consultants or accrediting programs will be discussed and debated. With certification, some entity must be established or ordained to oversee the standards and procedures. If the process evolves like other professions, it seems plausible that it will eventually include a written examination to evaluate the core knowledge competencies that individual practitioners should possess to meet peer practice standards. The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities has published core knowledge (...) competencies for many years that are accepted by experts as the prevailing standard. Probably any written examination will be based upon the ASBH core knowledge competencies. However, much remains to be done before any examination may be offered. In particular, it seems likely that a recognized examining board must create and validate examination questions and structure the examination so as to establish meaningful, defensible parameters after dealing with such challenging questions as: Should the certifying examination be multiple choice or short-answer essay? How should the test be graded? What should the pass rate be? How may the examination be best administered? To advance the field of health care ethics consultation, thought leaders should start to focus on the written examination possibilities, to date unaddressed carefully in the literature. Examination models—both objective and written—must be explored as a viable strategy about how the field of health care ethics consultations can grow toward professionalization. (shrink)

Can we legitimately speak of ethicsexperts? Recent literature in philosophy and medical ethics addresses this important question but does not offer a satisfactory answer. Part of the problem is the absence of an examination of what it means to be an expert in general. I therefore begin by reviewing my analysis of expertise which appeared earlier in this journal. We speak of two kinds of experts: persons whose expertise is in virtue of what theyknow (epistemic expertise), or what theydo (performative (...) expertise). Applying this analysis to the domain of ethics, I argue that we may speak of ethical expertise in three epistemic senses: a) expertise indescriptive ethics, b) expertise inmetaethics, c) expertise innormative ethics, and in a performative sense: d) expertise inliving a good life. I conclude with a brief description of some social roles of ethics experts. (shrink)

In many scientific fields, the practice of self-experimentation waned over the course of the twentieth century. For exercise physiologists working today, however, the practice of self-experimentation is alive and well. This paper considers the role of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and its scientific director, D. Bruce Dill, in legitimizing the practice of self-experimentation in exercise physiology. Descriptions of self-experimentation are drawn from papers published by members of the Harvard Fatigue Lab. Attention is paid to the ethical and practical justifications (...) for self-experimentation in both the lab and the field. Born out of the practical, immediate demands of fatigue protocols, self-experimentation performed the long-term, epistemological function of uniting physiological data across time and space, enabling researchers to contribute to a general human biology program. (shrink)

Experts play an important role in society, but there has been little investigation about the nature of expertise. I argue that there are two kinds of experts: those whose expertise is a function of what theyknow (epistemic expertise), or what theydo (performative expertise). Epistemic expertise is the capacity to provide strong justifications for a range of propositions in a domain, while performative expertise is the capacity to perform a skill well according to the rules and virtues of a practice. Both (...) epistemic and performative experts may legitimately disagree with one another, and the two senses are conceptually and logically distinct. (shrink)

This study examines firms that have experienced an industrial and/or environ-mental crisis and proposes that top management team (TMT) characteristics will affect a firm's ability to minimize the severity of these crisis events. Specifically, heterogeneity in the TMT will exhibit a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship with the severity of firm crises. Our results suggest that a moderate level of age and tenure heterogeneity are positively related to a firm's ability to successfully minimize the severity of crises. Variance in educational backgrounds was (...) unrelated to crisis severity. Functional background heterogeneity exhibited a curvilinear relationship with crisis severity but was not U-shaped as hypothesized. (shrink)

The principles for universal reading models proposed by Frost correspond to developmental theories, in which neurocognitive constraints and cultural experiences shape development. We question his contention that Hebrew word identification is fundamentally about roots, excluding verbal and nominal word-pattern morphemes; and we propose that readers use all information available in stimuli, adjusting for volume and usefulness.

Three forms of implicit knowledge are presented (functional, structural, and procedural). These forms differ in the way they are made explicit and hence in how they are represented by the individual. We suggest that the framework presented by Dienes & Perner does not account for these differences.

The function of meiotic recombination has remained controversial, despite recent inroads into mechanisms. Ideas concerning a possible role of recombination in the elimination or efficient incorporation of mutations have been backed by theoretical studies but have lacked empirical support. Recent investigations into the basis for local variations in recombination frequency in yeast have uncovered a strong association between recombination initiation sites and transcriptional regulatory sequences. Other recent studies indicate a strong correlation between transcription and mutation rates in yeast genes. Taken (...) together, these data imply that distributions of recombination and mutation frequencies may be strongly correlated. This suggests that recombination may be targeted to genomic sites of high mutation frequency; such a ‘mutation‐tracking’ function would clearly aid in the shuffling of mutations to break up unfavorable and create favorable allelic combinations. Moreover, recent insights into the mechanism of gene conversion in yeast reveal a very strong inherent bias in favor of alleles on the non‐initiating homolog. Combined with mutation tracking, these findings suggest a novel and general mechanism by which allelic gene conversion may act to eliminate mutations. (shrink)

Studies of childhood abuse and neglect haveimportant lessons for considerations of natureand nurture. While each child has uniquegenetic potentials, both human and animalstudies point to important needs that everychild has, and severe long-term consequencesfor brain function if those needs are not met. The effects of the childhood environment,favorable or unfavorable, interact with all theprocesses of neurodevelopment (neurogenesis,migration, differentiation, apoptosis,arborization, synaptogenesis, synapticsculpting, and myelination). The time coursesof all these neural processes are reviewed herealong with statements of core principles forboth genetic and (...) environmental influences onall of these processes. Evidence is presentedthat development of synaptic pathways tends tobe a ``use it or lose it'' proposition.Abuse studies from the author's laboratory,studies of children in orphanages who lackedemotional contact, and a large number of animaldeprivation and enrichment studies point to theneed for children and young nonhuman mammals tohave both stable emotional attachments with andtouch from primary adult caregivers, andspontaneous interactions with peers. If theseconnections are lacking, brain development bothof caring behavior and cognitive capacities isdamaged in a lasting fashion.These effects of experience on the brainimply that effects of modern technology can bepositive but need to be monitored. Whiletechnology has raised opportunities forchildren to become economically secure andliterate, more recent inadvertent impacts oftechnology have spawned declines in extendedfamilies, family meals, and spontaneous peerinteractions. The latter changes have deprivedmany children of experiences that promotepositive growth of the cognitive and caringpotentials of their developing brains. (shrink)

If how we envisage substances prepares the trajectory of our behavior towards them, art objects, substantial through the manner of their fashioning, can reorderhow we comport ourselves in a world that is not for us, to the extent that what we call by the name of “world” cannot be apprehended as the price paid for humanavarice when confronting a global plenitude sacrificed, always, to the scale of our need for it. To frustrate that desolation, we must enrich our view of (...) things, andthis essay examines the thinking of Merleau-Ponty and Virginia Woolf at the service of that imperative. (shrink)

In the two-envelope problem, a reasoner is offered two envelopes, one containing exactly twice the money in the other. After observing the amount in one envelope, it can be traded for the unseen contents of the other. It appears that it should not matter whether the envelope is traded, but recent mathematical analyses have shown that gains could be made if trading was a probabilistic function of amount observed. As a problem with a purely probabilistic solution, it provides a potentially (...) interesting way to test people's consistency with probabilistic models. Three experiments did this by varying the size of both the observed and maximum amounts, and their possible distribution. The results showed that trading decisions were affected by where the observed amount in the opened envelope fell in the distribution, though its size did not always do so. This suggests that participants’ trade decisions could be affected by the perceived probabilities of different observed amounts, which is consistent with the pro.. (shrink)

Explores the impact of expert witnessing on the integrity of forensic scientific information. Complaints on the behavior of expert witnesses; Factors stimulating the susceptibility of experts to abandon their scientific integrity; Implications of the reliance of expert witnesses on ethics codes.

Questions concerning issues in Christology in Conflict are addressed. James Buckley’s attention to Barth’s metaphysical account and Rahner’s notion of Jesus as Realsysmbol are highlighted and clarified. Criticisms by Robert Krieg are briefly discussed and answered. Finally, though Rahner’s transcendental account of the person of Jesus is shown to lead to certain logical inconsistencies, it is argued, nevertheless, that his christology, though internally incoherent, is valuable.

Questions concerning issues in Christology in Conflict are addressed. James Buckley’s attention to Barth’s metaphysical account and Rahner’s notion of Jesus as Realsysmbol are highlighted and clarified. Criticisms by Robert Krieg are briefly discussed and answered. Finally, though Rahner’s transcendental account of the person of Jesus is shown to lead to certain logical inconsistencies, it is argued, nevertheless, that his christology, though internally incoherent, is valuable.

Uses real-life examples and five basic moral principles to encourage teens to make the right choices in various situations related to friends, family, school, and relationships.

An expert on ethical issues offers straightforward, easy-to-follow advice on how to handle difficult and complex situations at work, in relationships, and in everyday life, presenting a four-step program designed to help readers make the best decisions possible. Original.