Re-consent in research, the asking for a new consent if there is a change in protocol or to confirm the expectations of participants in case of change, is an under-explored issue. There is little clarity as to what changes should trigger re-consent and what impact a re-consent exercise has on participants and the research project. This article examines applicable policy statements and literature for the prevailing arguments for and against re-consent in relation to longitudinal cohort studies, tissue banks and biobanks. (...) Examples of re-consent exercises are presented, triggers and non-triggers for re-consent discussed and the conflicting attitudes of commentators, participants and researchers highlighted. We acknowledge current practice and argue for a greater emphasis on ‘responsive autonomy,’ that goes beyond a one-time consent and encourages greater communication between the parties involved. A balance is needed between respecting participants' wishes on how they want their data and samples used and enabling effective research to proceed. (shrink)

BackgroundGenealogical research and ancestry testing are popular recreational activities but little is known about the impact of the use of these services on clients’ biological and social families. Ancestry databases are being enriched with self-reported data and data from deoxyribonucleic acid analyses, but also are being linked to other direct-to-consumer genetic testing and research databases. As both family history data and DNA can provide information on more than just the individual, we asked whether companies, as a part of the consent (...) process, were informing clients, and through them clients’ relatives, of the potential implications of the use and linkage of their personal data.MethodsWe used content analysis to analyse publically-available consent and informational materials provided to potential clients of ancestry and direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies to determine what consent is required, what risks associated with participation were highlighted, and whether the consent or notification of third parties was suggested or required.ResultsWe identified four categories of companies providing: 1) services based only on self-reported data, such as personal or family history; 2) services based only on DNA provided by the client; 3) services using both; and 4) services using both that also have a research component. The amount of information provided on the potential issues varied significantly across the categories of companies. ‘Traditional’ ancestry companies showed the greatest awareness of the implications for family members, while companies only asking for DNA focused solely on the client. While in some cases companies included text recommending clients inform their relatives, showing they recognised the issues, often it was located within lengthy terms and conditions or privacy statements that may not be read by potential clients.ConclusionsWe recommend that companies should make it clearer that clients should inform third parties about their plans to participate, that third parties’ data will be provided to companies, and that that data will be linked to other databases, thus raising privacy and issues on use of data. We also suggest investigating whether a ‘generational consent’ should be created that would include more than just the individual in decisions about participating in genetic investigations. (shrink)

We review current theoretical cosmology, including fundamental and mathematical cosmology and physical cosmology (as well as cosmology in the quantum realm), with an emphasis on open questions.

In “IRBs and The Protection Inclusion Dilemma: Finding a Balance,” Friesen et al. (2023) argue that IRBs ought to attend more, and better, to the need for the inclusion of under-researched populati...

Commentator: Mark Purvis Commentator: Sheena McMain Commentator: Clare Connolly Commentator: Maggie Eisner Commentator: Shirley Brierley Commentator: Becky Ship.

In two experiments, participants solved anagram problems while their eye movements were monitored. Each problem consisted of a circular array of five letters: a scrambled four-letter solution word containing three consonants and one vowel, and an additional randomly-placed distractor consonant. Viewing times on the distractor consonant compared to the solution consonants provided an online measure of knowledge of the solution. Viewing times on the distractor consonant and the solution consonants were indistinguishable early in the trial. In contrast, several seconds prior (...) to the response, viewing times on the distractor consonant decreased in a gradual manner compared to viewing times on the solution consonants. Importantly, this pattern was obtained across both trials in which participants reported the subjective experience of insight and trials in which they did not. These findings are consistent with the availability of partial knowledge of the solution prior to such information being accessible to subjective phenomenal awareness. (shrink)

Experiential education produces numerous benefits to students in terms of higher order thinking skills such as the ability to evaluate, analyze, and synthesizeinformation , engagement , and work-readiness . Partnering with community organizations provides a means to create experiential education opportunities for students. In this symposium, we discussed three examples of experiential education to promote learning around themes of sustainability, providing a brief outline of the activities, the intended outcomes, and the lessons learned from our experiences. We concluded with a (...) meditation on the importance of working with community partners and managing expectations so that students, the community, and the institutions gain the best possible outcomes when creating town-gown partnerships for sustainability education. (shrink)

The reconcilability of gravitational with electromagnetic clocks suggests that a rigorous analysis of time will provide understanding of the unity of gravity and electromagnetism. Time is found to be fundamentally a property of elementary particles, only derivatively a property of clocks. A declaration is made: that the flow of an elementary particle's timeis the change of its radius, that time is therefore illusory. The de Sitter expanding universe is derived from this principle by treating elementary particles as spheres in Euclidean (...) space. The hyperspheres of de Sitter space call up a five-dimensional metric manifold whose geometry models gravity, electromagnetism, and other phenomena tied to the structure of matter; neutrinos are provided for. Distance in this manifold is related to a secondary time, not correlated to primary time, but just as illusory. A particle's inertial rest mass is the relative rate of its two proper times; mass and charge are jointly, not individually, conserved. (shrink)

Zuidema et al. illustrate how empirical AGL studies can benefit from computational models and techniques. Computational models can help clarifying theories, and thus in delineating research questions, but also in facilitating experimental design, stimulus generation, and data analysis. The authors show, with a series of examples, how computational modeling can be integrated with empirical AGL approaches, and how model selection techniques can indicate the most likely model to explain experimental outcomes.

A high school drop-out who served in the American army and then managed to slip into Oxford on the G.I. bill, Frank Cioffi gained a considerable public reputation in Freudian and Wittgensteinian circles. Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Context is an account of his conversation is written in a Boswellian spirit, capturing the sharp intelligence, boisterous sense of humour and wealth of illustration Cioffi was able to bring to bear on life's biggest problems when he was, as if were, off-duty. (...) Tackling subjects such as the unruly body, the challenge of art, dealing with failure, the lure of science, the meaning of life, our understanding of others, depression, the case for suicide, and death, David Ellis describes how a philosopher who was profoundly influenced by Wittgenstein dealt with general issues and creates a vivid impression of an unusual and gifted individual. This portrait is followed by a post-script in which Nicholas Bunnin, who worked in the philosophy department at Essex when Cioffi was a professor there, situates him in a more strictly academic context and discusses his less well-known essays on literary criticism and the behavioural sciences, arguing for Cioffi's potential to inspire those seeking a role for analytic philosophy within the broader scope of humanistic philosophy. A mixture of personal portrait and academic introduction, Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Context provides an elegant and enjoyable tribute to Cioffi as both man and philosopher. (shrink)

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

© 2016 Regents of the University of California.The Review summarizes much of particle physics and cosmology. Using data from previous editions, plus 3,062 new measurements from 721 papers, we list, evaluate, and average measured properties of gauge bosons and the recently discovered Higgs boson, leptons, quarks, mesons, and baryons. We summarize searches for hypothetical particles such as supersymmetric particles, heavy bosons, axions, dark photons, etc. All the particle properties and search limits are listed in Summary Tables. We also give numerous (...) tables, figures, formulae, and reviews of topics such as Higgs Boson Physics, Supersymmetry, Grand Unified Theories, Neutrino Mixing, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Cosmology, Particle Detectors, Colliders, Probability and Statistics. Among the 117 reviews are many that are new or heavily revised, including those on Pentaquarks and Inflation. The complete Review is published online in a journal and on the website of the Particle Data Group. The printed PDG Book contains the Summary Tables and all review articles but no longer includes the detailed tables from the Particle Listings. A Booklet with the Summary Tables and abbreviated versions of some of the review articles is also available. (shrink)

In this study, we are addressing the call for further research (Aikhenvald 2015) into how languages, in our case Modern Greek, mark the unexpected. Our first research question is: Can we identify a class of mirative evidential markers in Modern Greek? The expected answer is that we can, if we take account of frequency rates in a variety of sources in the real world, namely plays, corpora and tags in social media. The second research question is: Do these markers convey (...) propositional or non-propositional meaning? Our findings suggest that the Greek data involves predominantly non-propositional types of meaning since mirativity is not delivered by the semantic content of the utterance (e.g., Ooo! Tí vlépoun ta mátia mou? “Oh! What do I see?”, Ma ti les tóra? “But what are you saying now?”, Ba ba ti akoúo? “Well, well, what do I hear?” Mi mou pis! ‘Don’t tell me!’). (shrink)

Marketers use autobiographical advertising as a means to create nostalgia for their products. This research explores whether such referencing can cause people to believe that they had experiences as children that are mentioned in the ads. In Experiment 1, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with Mickey Mouse as a child. Relative to controls, the ad increased their confidence that they personally had shaken hands with Mickey as a child at a Disney resort. The (...) increased confidence could be due to a revival of a true memory or the creation of a new, false one. In Experiment 2, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with an impossible character (e.g., Bugs Bunny). Again, relative to controls, the ad increased confidence that they personally had shaken hands with the impossible character as a child at a Disney resort. The increased confidence is consistent with the notion that autobiographical referencing can lead to the creation of false or distorted memory. ᭧ 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Cognitive-pragmatic approaches to how metaphors are understood view the activation of perceptual or motor effects as inferred. Crucially, inferences elicit conceptual representations, e.g. in the form of implicatures, and/or mental simulations, e.g. in the form of imagery, memory, an impression and other private elements. Emotional effects, being non-conceptual, must be left out of this picture. But evidence in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics has shown that metaphors activate brain regions linked to emotions, and that in L2, in the absence of fully-propositional meaning, (...) metaphors yield meaningful interpretations by evoking imagery, impressions, emotions. Drawing on relevance-theoretic views, we would like to argue that metaphors are processed in not entirely propositional terms. Subjective experience heuristics allows making rapid responses by absorbing emotions, imagery, impressions, into the interpretation process, an ability which outweighs standard inferential reasoning processes. Such a position is likely to apply to non-metaphorical language, too and thus pervade linguistic processing in general. (shrink)

Cognitive-pragmatic approaches to how metaphors are understood view the activation of perceptual or motor effects as inferred (Steinhart 2001; Bergen 2005; Wilson and Carston 2006; Carston 2010; Gibbs and de Macedo 2010; Wilson and Carston 2019). Crucially, inferences elicit conceptual representations, e.g. in the form of implicatures, and/or mental simulations, e.g. in the form of imagery, memory, an impression and other private elements. Emotional effects, being non-conceptual, must be left out of this picture. But evidence in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics has (...) shown that metaphors activate brain regions linked to emotions (for a review, see Ifantidou 2019; Citron 2020), and that in L2, in the absence of fully-propositional meaning (due to unknown words), metaphors yield meaningful interpretations by evoking imagery, impressions, emotions (Ifantidou 2019, 2021a, 2021b; Ifantidou and Hatzidaki 2019). Drawing on relevance-theoretic views, we would like to argue that metaphors are processed in not entirely propositional terms. Subjective experience heuristics (originally proposed as “availability heuristic” by Tversky and Kahneman 1974; Schwarzand and Wänke 2002; “affect heuristic” by Zajonc 1980) allows making rapid responses by absorbing emotions, imagery, impressions, into the interpretation process, an ability which outweighs (the need for) standard inferential reasoning processes. Such a position is likely to apply to non-metaphorical language, too and thus pervade linguistic processing in general. (shrink)

This book presents Robert S. Hartman’s formal theory of value and critically examines many other twentieth century value theorists in its light, including A.J. Ayer, Kurt Baier, Brand Blanshard, Paul Edwards, Albert Einstein, William K. Frankena, R.M. Hare, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, G.E. Moore, P.H. Nowell-Smith, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Charles Stevenson, Paul W. Taylor, Stephen E. Toulmin, and J.O. Urmson.

We show that for any countable homogeneous ordered graph G, the conjugacy problem for automorphisms of G is Borel complete. In fact we establish that each such G satisfies a strong extension property called ABAP, which implies that the isomorphism relation on substructures of G is Borel reducible to the conjugacy relation on automorphisms of G.