Efforts by governments, firms, and patients to deliver pioneering drugs for critical health needs face a challenge of diminishing efficiency in developing those medicines. While multi-sectoral collaborations involving firms, researchers, patients, and policymakers are widely recognized as crucial for countering this decline, existing incentives to engage in drug development predominantly target drug manufacturers and thereby do little to stimulate collaborative innovation. In this mini review, we consider the unexplored potential within pharmaceutical regulations to create novel incentives to encourage a diverse (...) set of actors from the public and private spheres to engage in the kind of collaborative knowledge exchange requisite for fostering enhanced innovation in early drug development. (shrink)

The papers in Richard Vallée's Words and Contents span twenty-one years. The author navigates the discovery and exploration of different expressions and perspectives on language in this volume. Beginning with referring expressions and later addressing context sensitivity, the book examines how specific words contribute to the contents of utterances and the philosophical issues that surround them.

Much international debate over access to medicines focuses on whether patent law accords with international human rights law. This article argues that this is the wrong question to ask. Following an analysis of both patent and human rights law, this article suggests that the better approach is to focus on national debates over the best calibration of patent law to achieve national objectives.

Patents and free trade make strange bedfellows. For most of their history, patents have been instruments deployed to resist trade with other countries, not to enhance it. Whether one looks at Venetian laws that punished citizens who practiced local crafts outside the city, the Mercantilist uses to which patents were put in Elizabethan England, or the cartels of the 19th and 20th centuries created on a foundation of interlocking patent rights, patents have had a distinctly protectionist function. It is thus (...) ironic that it is intellectual property rights in general, and patents in particular, that have been held up in recent years as the poster child of much that is wrong with globalization and free trade. Nowhere is this more so than in debates concerning international human rights law and patents, in particular the position that patents violate an international right to health. (shrink)

In remote regions of the eastern Andaman, into the 1990s, a remarkable rapport with nature's forces was occurring.1 Most strikingly expressed during adolescence, it emerged spontaneously from a local type of consciousness. Both the capability and the underlying consciousness were conceived within a pervasive milieu of lushly sensual infant nurture.2 So dependable was the pattern of affection, it spawned a tactile language long before onset of speech. Speech, learning and sociality then followed in the eros‐driven paradigm already set. So did (...) a rare rapport with nature's forces.With nothing in the culture to discourage it, eros was not walled‐off as children grew. It remained firmly at the root of consciousness on through teens. To be a child out in those seas was to move spontaneously and digressively out into life pursuing sundry passion pulses. When erotic power escalated during adolescence, rapport with natural forces dramatically increased. Spectacular gambolings with nature began bursting forth—sometimes astonishingly complex rhythmic ones. No clouds of moody adolescent angst discouraged spontaneity; no flattening of affect suppressed adolescent verve; no emotional dissimulation confounded purpose. Adolescence was a time for a blossoming of affect, for melding deeply and dynamically with habitat. It was a time to profoundly dance with nature's forces.Possessing a protean character, love lies more fluidly within the human frame than language. Following its own inner protocols, love seems able to evade the stable kinds of labeling required for logical inquiry. In exotic cultures it is hard to see at all. In the eastern Andaman, its workings were initially invisible to Western eyes. It was necessary to firm up subliminal awarenesses before the workings out of eros could even be detected there. Though difficult to deal with scientifically, love plays such a profound role in the affairs of humankind that it begs experimental types of scrutiny.A fracturing of love into Bacchanalian and Sublime occurred during the early Greek foundations of Western culture. Out of that schism Western ethos grew. The ethos molded the Western type of consciousness. In the eastern Andaman, eros was not cleaved at all. It shaped a type of psyche not countenanced by the West since its prehistory. (shrink)

I am often asked how one finds isolated people whose whereabouts or existence is unsure. There is even greater curiosity about how one can join such people in the absence of common customs or spoken language. Moreso about how one makes sense of what one sees under such circumstances. After several years of contact with variously acculturated groups of settled and semi‐settled sea nomads in the Sea of Andaman Moken, Moklen, and Urak Lawoi (and its Lonta subgroup) two out‐of‐the‐blue opportunities (...) unexpectedly occurred to travel with fully nomadic pagan ones, a type no longer thought to exist. The first trip was short, but it prepared me for the long next one. The first was a band of unknown origin, the second an aboriginal Moken‐related group off southern Burma. (shrink)

Taxation and government policy related to it have only episodic appearance in classical Protestant ethical sources. Of the early sixteenth century reformers, Luther gave most attention to the subject, justifying taxation in general as necessary for the just service of government to the public good and calling the princes to spend tax monies for that good rather than their own luxury. Calvin made much the same claims but called more clearly for official church scrutiny of all government than did Luther. (...) Two centuries later John Wesley criticized English tax policy, appealing to standards of economic efficiency and compassion for the poor with little reference overtly to theology. The churches of colonial and post-revolutionary America developed no systematic, theologically rooted rationale for taxation ethics, either; but official Protestant denominational concern for such ethics has grown measurably in the most recent fifteen years. After a survey of these recent national church statements, and on the basis of them and the slender Protestant heritage on this issue, we end by posing four questions which we see as worthy of much serious thinking by contemporary American Protestant ethicists and church bodies. (shrink)

Thinking about thought -- Everything's an inference -- Out of context or the situation -- The rational unconscious -- The formerly dismal science -- Should you think like an economist? -- Spilt milk and free lunch -- Foiling foibles -- Coding, counting, correlation, and causality -- Odds and Ns -- Linked up -- Experiments -- Ignore the hippo -- Experiments natural and experiments proper -- Eekonomics -- Don't ask, can't tell -- Thinking, straight and curved -- Logic -- Dialecticism -- (...) Knowing the world -- Kiss and tell -- Keeping it real -- Whom to believe. (shrink)

Foundations of Algorithms, Fifth Edition offers a well-balanced presentation of algorithm design, complexity analysis of algorithms, and computational complexity. Ideal for any computer science students with a background in college algebra and discrete structures, the text presents mathematical concepts using standard English and simple notation to maximize accessibility and user-friendliness. Concrete examples, appendices reviewing essential mathematical concepts, and a student-focused approach reinforce theoretical explanations and promote learning and retention. C++ and Java pseudocode help students better understand complex algorithms. A chapter (...) on numerical algorithms includes a review of basic number theory, Euclid's Algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor, a review of modular arithmetic, an algorithm for solving modular linear equations, an algorithm for computing modular powers, and the new polynomial-time algorithm for determining whether a number is prime. The revised and updated Fifth Edition features an all-new chapter on genetic algorithms and genetic programming, including approximate solutions to the traveling salesperson problem, an algorithm for an artificial ant that navigates along a trail of food, and an application to financial trading. With fully updated exercises and examples throughout and improved instructor resources including complete solutions, an Instructor's Manual and PowerPoint lecture outlines, Foundations of Algorithms is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate courses in the design and analysis of algorithms. Key features include: • The only text of its kind with a chapter on genetic algorithms • Use of C++ and Java pseudocode to help students better understand complex algorithms • No calculus background required • Numerous clear and student-friendly examples throughout the text • Fully updated exercises and examples throughout • Improved instructor resources, including complete solutions, an Instructor's Manual, and PowerPoint lecture outlines. (shrink)

This book examines two questions: Do people make use of abstract rules such as logical and statistical rules when making inferences in everyday life? Can such abstract rules be changed by training? Contrary to the spirit of reductionist theories from behaviorism to connectionism, there is ample evidence that people do make use of abstract rules of inference -- including rules of logic, statistics, causal deduction, and cost-benefit analysis. Such rules, moreover, are easily alterable by instruction as it occurs in classrooms (...) and in brief laboratory training sessions. The fact that purely formal training can alter them and that those taught in one content domain can "escape" to a quite different domain for which they are also highly applicable shows that the rules are highly abstract. The major implication for cognitive science is that people are capable of operating with abstract rules even for concrete, mundane tasks; therefore, any realistic model of human inferential capacity must reflect this fact. The major implication for education is that people can be far more broadly influenced by training than is generally supposed. At high levels of formality and abstraction, relatively brief training can alter the nature of problem-solving for an infinite number of content domains. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. By E. Richard Brown.

Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, unaware of the existence of the response, and unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do (...) so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (shrink)

An eminent psychologist boldly takes on the presumptions of evolutionary psychology in an engaging exploration of the divergent ways Eastern and Western societies see and understand the world.

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the (...) origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process–content distinction. (shrink)

Critics have often misunderstood the higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global The higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness has often been misunderstood by critics. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global workspace theory (GWT) and early sensory models (e.g. first-order local recurrency theories). For example, HOT has been criticized for over-intellectualizing consciousness. We show (...) that while higher-order states are cognitively assembled, the requirements are actually considerably less than often presumed. In this sense HOT may be viewed as an intermediate position between GWT and early sensory views. Also, we clarify that most proponents of HOT do not stipulate consciousness as equivalent to metacognition or confidence. Further, compared to other existing theories, HOT can arguably account better for complex everyday experiences, such as of emotions and episodic memories. This makes HOT particularly useful as a framework for conceptualizing pathological mental states. (shrink)

Staged 2 different videotaped interviews with the same individual—a college instructor who spoke English with a European accent. In one of the interviews the instructor was warm and friendly, in the other, cold and distant. 118 undergraduates were asked to evaluate the instructor. Ss who saw the warm instructor rated his appearance, mannerisms, and accent as appealing, whereas those who saw the cold instructor rated these attributes as irritating. Results indicate that global evaluations of a person can induce altered evaluations (...) of the person's attributes, even when there is sufficient information to allow for independent assessments of them. Furthermore, Ss were unaware of this influence of global evaluations on ratings of attributes. In fact, Ss who saw the cold instructor actually believed that the direction of influence was opposite to the true direction. They reported that their dislike of the instructor had no effect on their rating of his attributes but that their dislike of his attributes had lowered their global evaluations of him. (shrink)

Bioethics has been subject to considerable social criticism in recent years. One criticism that has caused particular discomfort in the bioethics community is that bioethicists, because of the way their work is funded, are involved in profound conflicts of interest that undermine their title to be considered independent moral commentators on developments in biomedicine and biotechnology. This criticism draws its force from the assumption that bioethics is, or ought to be, a type of normative social criticism. Versions of this criticism (...) come from both the political left and right. For instance, such criticisms include allegations that bioethics is inherently socially conservative, that it is inherently “pro-technology”, that it lays spurious claims to moral and social authority and expertise, that its focus on autonomy links it to neoliberal theories of choice, and that it is an ideological mystification of real social relationships and political power. This commentary paper analyses the problem of bioethical conflict of interest, and argues that the types of conflict of interest facing bioethics are inherent to the role of “public intellectual” that bioethicists generally wish to assume. The paper defends this conception of the role of the bioethicist, arguing that bioethicists should be interested and openly so. (shrink)