The increasing willingness of people to agree that societies currently spend too much on health care is noted. It is argued that this is more an expression of financial pressures on the state than a reflection of new technological possibilities. The meaning of such statements is questioned in the context of demonstrated social underutilization of skilled personnel and wasteful expenditure. The discussion then focusses on approaches to defining medical need in clinical situations. It is pointed out that this issue has (...) risen to prominence with the establishment of a right to care and the subsequent attempt to define limits to this right. Two basic approaches, the scientific and the subjective, are presented and both are shown to be incapable of providing absolute criteria for decision-making. It is concluded that the issue of establishing needs is a complex technical and political one, where medical ethics can contribute by clarifying the issues and illuminating the alternatives. (shrink)

This paper discusses health policy and systems research in complex and rapidly changing contexts. It focuses on ethical issues at stake for researchers working with government policy makers to provide evidence to inform major health systems change at scale, particularly when the dynamic nature of the context and ongoing challenges to the health system can result in unpredictable outcomes. We focus on situations where ‘country ownership’ of HSR is relatively well established and where there is significant involvement of local researchers (...) and close ties and relationships with policy makers are often present. We frame our discussion around two country case studies with which we are familiar, namely China and South Africa and discuss the implications for conducting ‘embedded’ research. We suggest that reflexivity is an important concept for health system researchers who need to think carefully about positionality and their normative stance and to use such reflection to ensure that they can negotiate to retain autonomy, whilst also contributing evidence for health system change. A research process informed by the notion of reflexive practice and iterative learning will require a longitudinal review at key points in the research timeline. Such review should include the convening of a deliberative process and should involve a range of stakeholders, including those most likely to be affected by the intended and unintended consequences of change. (shrink)

How does one arrive at a life in politics and policy? What happens to one's ideals when confronted with the reality that the only way to get things done in Washington is compromise? Who are the men and women who help shape our national agenda, and what drives their work? Dispatches From the Eastern Front provides fascinating, intensely personal, yet universal answers to these central questions. Recounting four decades inside Washington politics, Gerald Felix Warburg brings remarkable candor to a (...) most unusual memoir. An idealistic California baby boomer transported to the intimidating world of Capitol Hill policymaking at a young age, Warburg finds himself working to reform nuclear energy, strategic arms control, and foreign policy. As his access and power grow, greater challenges loom: how to maintain principles while cutting deals, and how to balance public purpose with private interests. An eclectic career reveals the slow and often painful development of emotional intelligence for work at the highest reaches of the public arena. (shrink)

Mortal and immortal DNA : Craig Venter and the lure of "lamia" -- Homeopathy : Holmes, hogwarts, and the Prince of Wales -- Citizen Pinel and the madman at Bellevue -- The experimental pathology of stress : Hans Selye to Paris Hilton -- Gore's fever and Dante's Inferno : Chikungunya reaches Ravenna -- Giving things their proper names : Carl Linnaeus and W.H. Auden -- Spinal irritation and fibromyalgia : Lincoln's surgeon general and the three graces -- Tithonus and the (...) fruit fly : new science and old myths -- Swiftboating "America the beautiful" : Katharine Lee Bates and a Boston marriage -- Nothing makes sense in medicine except in the light of biology -- Apply directly to the forehead : Holmes, Zola, and Hennapecia -- Elizabeth Blackwell breaks the bonds -- Chronic lyme disease and medically unexplained syndromes -- Eugenics and the immigrant : Rosalyn Yalow and Rita Levi-Montalcini -- Science in the Middle East : Robert Koch and the cholera war -- How to win a Nobel prize : thinking inside and outside the box -- Homer Smith and the lungfish : the last gasp of intelligent design -- DDT is back : let us spray! -- Academic boycotts and the Royal Society -- Teach evolution, learn science : John William Draper and the "bone bill" -- Diderot and the yeti crab : the encyclopedias of life -- Dengue fever in Rio : Macumba versus Voltaire. (shrink)

If only implicitly, social anthropology has long incorporated joint attention as a research technique employed in what anthropologists call “the field”. This paper outlines the crucial role joint attention plays in anthropolgical fieldwork—specifically in Participant Observation—and advances the position that joint attention is a goal rather than a starting point of fieldwork practice. Exploring how anthropologists tentatively use attention as a methodological tool to understand other people’s lifeworlds, this paper draws parallels between Participant Observation and ordinary everyday interactions, thus teasing (...) out a view of joint attention as a goal to be reached only by means of knowing what matters to others in the context of the lifeworld they inhabit. (shrink)

Having laid the groundwork in his critically acclaimed books Neural Darwinism (Basic Books, 1987) and Topobiology (Basic Books, 1988), Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman now proposes a comprehensive theory of consciousness in The Remembered ...

The author takes the reader on a tour that covers such topics as computers, evolution, Descartes, Schrodinger, and the nature of perception, language, and invididuality. He argues that biology provides the key to understanding the brain. Underlying his argument is the evolutionary view that the mind arose at a definite time in history. This book ponders connections between psychology and physics, medicine, philosophy, and more. Frequently contentious, Edelman attacks cognitive and behavioral approaches, which leave biology out of the picture, as (...) well as the currently fashionable view of the brain as a computer. (shrink)

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist and a leading brain researcher show how the brain creates conscious experience.

Emotion regulation choices are known to be profoundly consequential across affective, cognitive, and social domains. Prior studies have identified two important external factors of emotion regulati...

If only implicitly, social anthropology has long incorporated joint attention as a research technique employed in what anthropologists call “the field”. This paper outlines the crucial role joint attention plays in anthropolgical fieldwork—specifically in Participant Observation—and advances the position that joint attention is a goal rather than a starting point of fieldwork practice. Exploring how anthropologists tentatively use attention as a methodological tool to understand other people’s lifeworlds, this paper draws parallels between Participant Observation and ordinary everyday interactions, thus teasing (...) out a view of _joint_ attention as a goal to be reached only by means of knowing what matters to others in the context of the lifeworld they inhabit. (shrink)

A theory is presented to explain how accurate, single-joint movements are controlled. The theory applies to movements across different distances, with different inertial loads, toward targets of different widths over a wide range of experimentally manipulated velocities. The theory is based on three propositions. (1) Movements are planned according to “strategies” of which there are at least two: a speed-insensitive (SI) and a speed-sensitive (SS) one. (2) These strategies can be equated with sets of rules for performing diverse movement tasks. (...) The choice between SI and SS depends on whether movement speed and/or movement time (and hence appropriate muscle forces) must be constrained to meet task requirements. (3) The electromyogram can be interpreted as a low-pass filtered version of the controlling signal to the motoneuron pools. This controlling signal can be modelled as a rectangular excitation pulse in which modulation occurs in either pulse amplitude or pulse width. Movements to different distances and with loads are controlled by the SI strategy, which modulates pulse width. Movements in which speed must be explicitly regulated are controlled by the SS strategy, which modulates pulse amplitude. The distinction between the two movement strategies reconciles many apparent conflicts in the motor control literature. (shrink)

This contemporary, comprehensive, and practical text helps you discover and determine your own guidelines for helping within the broad limits of professional codes of ethics and divergent theoretical positions. This text is the relied-upon, essential text for students in any helping field-the book many students return to well into their professional careers. The authors raise what they consider to be central issues, present a range of diverse views on the issues, discuss their position, and present opportunities for you to refine (...) your own thinking and actively develop your own informed position. Questions explored include: What role do the therapist's personal values play in the counseling relationship? What ethical responsibilities and rights do clients and therapists have? What considerations are involved in adapting counseling practice to diverse client populations? And more... (shrink)

Unlimited paid time off policies are currently fashionable and widely discussed by HR professionals around the globe. While on the one hand, paid time off is considered a key benefit by employees and unlimited paid time off policies are seen as a major perk which may help in recruiting and retaining talented employees, on the other hand, early adopters reported that employees took less time off than previously, presumably leading to higher burnout rates. In this conceptual review, we discuss the (...) theoretical and empirical evidence regarding the potential effects of UPTO on leave utilization, well-being and performance outcomes. We start out by defining UPTO and placing it in a historical and international perspective. Next, we discuss the key role of leave utilization in translating UPTO into concrete actions. The core of our article constitutes the description of the effects of UPTO and the two pathways through which these effects are assumed to unfold: autonomy need satisfaction and detrimental social processes. We moreover discuss the boundary conditions which facilitate or inhibit the successful utilization of UPTO on individual, team, and organizational level. In reviewing the literature from different fields and integrating existing theories, we arrive at a conceptual model and five propositions, which can guide future research on UPTO. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and societal implications of UPTO. (shrink)

Ronna Burger offers a reading of the Ethics that views the text as a dialogue with, and very much in the spirit of, the Platonic Socrates. In reading the text as a dialogue, Burger is not making a claim about Aristotle’s intentions. She is proposing “a tool of interpretation, to be judged by the philosophical result it yields, in particular, the underlying argument it discloses whose movement makes the work a whole”. Treating the text this way entails focusing as much (...) on the action, or, as she refers to it, the deed of the text, as on any alleged conclusions or doctrines. This deed turns out to be the very energeia of theoria concerning the best life for a human being that Aristotle, like Socrates, takes to be the activity conducive to living the happiest human life. Consequently, Burger is far more inclined to open issues up than she is to close them off.The dialogue with Socrates, Burger argues, has two distinct but related phases. Each phase begins by putting forward a view that differs from the Socratic view but which, upon examination, ends up motivating a position much like that of Socrates. The first phase begins with an understanding of ethics that separates the. (shrink)

For the last thirty years, the nation's mental health and social service systems have been under relentless assault, with dramatically rising costs and the fragmentation of service delivery rendering them incapable of ensuring the safety, security, and recovery of their clients. The resulting organizational trauma both mirrors and magnifies the trauma-related problems their clients seek relief from. Just as the lives of people exposed to chronic trauma and abuse become organized around the traumatic experience, so too have our social service (...) systems become organized around the recurrent stress of trying to do more under greater pressure: they become crisis-oriented, authoritarian, disempowered, and demoralized, often living in the present moment, haunted by the past, and unable to plan for the future.Complex interactions among traumatized clients, stressed staff, pressured organizations, and a social and economic climate that is often hostile to recovery efforts recreate the very experiences that have proven so toxic to clients in the first place. Healing is possible for these clients if they enter helping, protective environments, yet toxic stress has destroyed the sanctuary that our systems are designed to provide.This thoughtful, impassioned critique of business as usual begins to outline a vision for transforming our mental health and social service systems. Linking trauma theory to organizational function, Destroying Sanctuary provides a framework for creating truly trauma-informed services. The organizational change method that has become known as the Sanctuary Model lays the groundwork for establishing safe havens for individual and organizational recovery. The goals are practical: improve clinical outcomes, increase staff satisfaction and health, increase leadership competence, and develop a technology for creating and sustaining healthier systems. Only in this way can our mental health and social service systems become empowered to make a more effective contribution to the overall health of the nation.Destroying Sanctuary is a stirring call for reform and recovery, required reading for anyone concerned with removing the formidable barriers to mental health and social services, from clinicians and administrators to consumer advocates. (shrink)

Concise and understandable, the book explains pertinent findings of modern neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains.

Business people often consider spirituality a means of increasing integrity, motivation and job satisfaction. Yet certain spiritualities are superficial and unstable. Religion gives depth and duration to a spirituality, but may also sew divisiveness. A spirituality's ability to develop good moral habits provides a positive test of the "appropriateness" of that spirituality for business. Many successful business executives demonstrate a spirituality that does develop good moral habits.

This paper develops a stronger version of ‘inference-to-the-best explanation’ scientific realism. I argue against three standard assumptions of current realists: realism is confirmed if it provides the best explanation of theories’ predictive success ; the realist claim that successful theories are always approximately true provides the best explanation of their success ; and realists are committed to giving the same sort of truth-based explanation of superseded theories’ success that they give to explain our best current theories’ success. On the positive (...) side, I argue that the confirmation of realism requires explaining theories’ explanatory success, not just their predictive success ; in turn this task requires a richer realist model of explanation that brings into the explanans both successful theories’ epistemic virtues and the standards governing these virtues, as well as truth; this richer realist model is further confirmed because it can better explain the success of theories in gaining wide acceptance among scientists; and the model is further supported because it is superior to ‘preservative realism ’ in providing a plausible rebuttal of the pessimistic meta-induction from the many past successful-but-false theories to the like- lihood that our best current theories are likewise false. (shrink)

Abstract:Our critics confuse the role normative ethical theory can take in business ethics. We argue that as a practical discipline, business ethics must focus on norms, not the theories from which the norms derive. It is true that our original work is defective, but not in its form, but in its neglect of contemporary advances in feminist ethics.

In Veritas, Gerald Vision defends the correspondence theory of truth -- the theory that truth has a direct relationship to reality -- against recent attacks, and critically examines its most influential alternatives. The correspondence theory, if successful, explains one way in which we are cognitively connected to the world; thus, it is claimed, truth -- while relevant to semantics, epistemology, and other studies -- also has significant metaphysical consequences. Although the correspondence theory is widely held today, Vision points to (...) an emerging orthodoxy in philosophy that claims that truth as such carries no significant weight in philosophical explanations. He devotes much of the book to a criticism of that outlook and to a less vulnerable formulation of the correspondence theory.Vision defends the correspondence theory by both presenting evidence for correspondence and examining the claims made by such alternative theories as deflationism, minimalism, and pluralism. The techniques of the argument are thoroughly analytic, but the problem confronted is broadly humanistic. The question examined -- how we, as thinking beings, are connected to and manage to cope in a world that was not designed for our comfort or convenience -- is more likely to be raised by continentalists, but is approached here with the tools of clarity and precision more highly prized in analytic philosophy. The book seeks to avoid both the obscurantism that infects much continental thought and the overly technical concerns and methodology that limit the interest of much work in analytic philosophy. It thus provides a rigorous but largely nontechnical treatment of the topic that will be of interest not only to readers familiar with philosophy but also to those with a background in literary theory and linguistics. (shrink)

If I utter the sentence: Hitler caused the outbreak of the second world war, some interested logician may translate my sentence into the words: Hitler necessitated the outbreak of the second world war, If that translation be made I do not accept it, unless the dragoman makes it clear to me that by the word “necessitate” he means nothing more than I mean by the word “cause.” In which case I can dispense with his services. But if he is embodying (...) in his translation the thought that the outbreak of war followed from the existence of Hitler at a given moment of time, as the equality of the angles in a triangle follows from the equality of the sides, then I repudiate his translation, because I do not agree that a statement or proposition such as event x caused event y is a hypothetical proposition of the type if x then y. A fortiori it cannot be regarded by me as a reciprocal hypothetical proposition: if x then y if y then x ; nor, to complete the possibilities, can I infer what I call the cause from the effect. (shrink)

The Zofingia Club was a discussion group to which C.G. Jung belonged as a medical student: in 1897 he became Chairman, and gave five lectures. These have survived and are published here in a supplementary volume to the _Collected Works._ The lectures are of great interest to anyone concerned with Jung's early ideas, as a young medical student from a strongly Swiss Protestant background. The Lectures are: The Border Zones of Exact Science ; Some Thoughts on Psychology ; An Inaugural (...) Address on Becoming Chairman of the Zofingia Club; Thoughts on the Nature and Value of Speculative Inquiry ; and Thoughts on the Interpretation of Christianity with Reference to the Theory of Albrecht Ritschl. (shrink)

The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious. In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition (...) between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)

This book contains the material for a first course in pure model theory with applications to differentially closed fields.