The recent piece ‘When Does Catholic Social Teaching Imply a Duty to be Vaccinated for the Common Good?’ by Stephen M.A. Bow (29 [4], 304–321) provides 12 criteria for the duty to vaccinate in acco...

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

The exhibition ba [does not equal to] b+a explores the question of how a museum's activities--its mechanisms, modes of operation, and logics--are reflected in the works in its collection. On the occasion of MUSA's tenth anniversary, the museum's program of exhibitions and publications takes a self-reflective turn, shedding light on the specific characteristics of Vienna's municipal art collection, whose origins go back to the 1950s, and raising far-reaching questions concerning the museum as an institution. The assumption underlying the exhibition is (...) that the objects in a museum's collection are crucial to its character. They may seem to be innumerable separate pieces--but the museum is more than their mere juxtaposition. "That which is composed of something in such a way that the whole is a unity," Aristotle writes, "is a unity not as an aggregate is a unity, but as a syllable is. The syllable is not the letters, nor is BA the same as B and A; nor is flesh fire and earth." It is only in the interweaving of the individual components, in their layering and inexhaustible potential constellations, that they engender the necessary density that lets us understand, and interact with, the museum as a living archive. (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)

Was Interkulturelle Philosophie ist, und worin ihr besonderer Beitrag zur Philosophie im ganzen bestehen kann, das kann sich allein in konkreten Ausarbeitungen erweisen. Der vorliegende Band repräsentiert eine breitgefächerte Auswahl sowohl der unterschiedlichen Ansatzpunkte, von denen interkulturelles Philosophieren ausgeht, als auch der diversen Forschungsgebiete innerhalb der Philosophie, die durch interkulturelle Fragestellungen angesprochen sind. Die Vielfalt der historischen und systematischen Zugangsweisen reflektiert die Überzeugung, daß Interkulturelle Philosophie kein in sich geschlossenes Lehrgebäude ist und ein solches auch nicht werden kann, sondern interkulturelles (...) Philosophieren eine bestimmte Einstellung und eine Haltung darbietet, die auf der grundlegenden Annahme beruht, daß die letzte philosophische Einsicht, _die_ Wahrheit im Singular, von niemandem allein erlangt worden ist und auch nicht erlangt werden kann. (shrink)

The essay investigates the possibilities and limitations of cross-denominational, intercultural and inter-religious hospital chaplaincy. With a view to the actual situation of hospital chaplaincy in Germany and the economic, social and theological constraints under which it offers its services, the author concludes, that the different Christian denominations must organizationally cooperate and share their work if such services are to survive the growing pressures. Constructivist cognition theory is invoked for analyzing the hermeneutical and theological implications of inter-denominational, intercultural and inter-religious pastoral (...) care and counselling. A Lutheran interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma provides a foundational frame of reference. (shrink)

For centuries, China’s farmers practiced agriculture in ways that sustained a high level of food production without depleting or deteriorating local resources. These were smallholder farmers, who came to be called peasants, or nongmin, in the early twentieth century. Narratives on the figure of the peasant have changed dramatically and often in the intervening years, expressing broader political debates, and suggesting the question, “what, then, is a Chinese peasant?” This paper attempts to answer that question in the context of reform (...) era China (post-1978). Using a critical discourse analysis of nongmin in contemporary political and popular discourse, the paper aims to further clarify politics on the figure of the peasant in China today, specifically in relation to state policy on rural and agricultural development. The central argument is that in addition to complex meanings and uses of nongmin, a Chinese peasant is also a social category used by political and economic elites to stand in for the ills of China’s agrifood system, and to promote a model of development that tries to separate the country’s current trajectory from its long agrarian history. In the context of state-led agroindustrialization aimed at developing a robust domestic agribusiness sector, both peasants as a social form and smallholding as an agricultural form are targets for capitalist transformation. Put another way, political discourses define peasants and small-scale farming as China’s agrifood “problems” for which further capitalist industrialization is posed as the only and inevitable “solution.” The paper concludes by arguing that changing China’s current trajectory away from the crises of industrial agriculture will require also changing the discursive frame: it is agroindustrialization that is the problem, for which nongmin and China’s tradition of smallholder farming are part of the solution. (shrink)

A adoção de um catálogo constitucional de direitos e o fortalecimento do judicial review, trouxeram como consequência a judicialização da política em inúmeras democracias, onde se verifica uma expansão da atuação do Poder Judiciário em detrimento das esferas representativas do Estado. Neste contexto, tem se observado em países do Sul Global, o emprego de novos mecanismos procedimentais em casos que envolvem a violação contínua e generalizada de direitos fundamentais, de alguns grupos menos favorecidos, decorrente de bloqueios políticos e institucionais, denominados (...) de “litígios estruturais”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eclecticism RediscoveredUlrich Johannes SchneiderMichael Albrecht, Eklektik. Eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994 (Quaestiones 5), 771p.Patrice Vermeren, Victor Cousin. Le Jeu de la Philosophie et de l’Etat, Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1995 (Collection “La philosophie en commun”), 390p.Not so long ago eclecticism was held to be little more than a non-systematic form of thinking or constructing, and still today that is the generally accepted (...) meaning of the term. Moreover, eclecticism has lost its traditional bad reputation and seems increasingly attractive to late twentieth-century thought in search of non-dogmatic and non-systematic forms of philosophizing. At the same time, however, historians of philosophy are discovering that eclecticism was a distinct and important feature of European intellectual history. In particular eclecticism can be recognized within early modern thinking especially at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in France the philosophy of the nineteenth century can be seen as essentially eclectic until the revolution of 1848.Whatever the significance of the postmodern state of mind, recent views concerning philosophical eclecticism are largely the product of researches into the history of philosophy. There is an obvious inclination of today’s intellectual historians to investigate background figures of European modernity. The increasing willingness of historians to enlarge the notion of philosophy in both its disciplinary and historical definition seems to be in agreement with a similar disposition of contemporary philosophers. As we can learn from Michael Albrecht’s and Patrice Vermeren’s books, a critical appreciation of eclecticism throws light both on the conditions of contemporary philosophizing and on the politics of philosophy in the modern age.What Albrecht does in his encyclopedic examination of eclectic ideas is very different in scope and method from Vermeren’s study of Cousin. However, [End Page 173] both authors address philosophy as a university discipline, and both suggest that eclecticism resonates in certain strategic ways with contemporary lines of thinking. Although the eclecticism of early modern Germany and that of nineteenth-century France arose in different contexts, here, too, there are important similarities. Both varieties wanted to distance themselves from the mainstream philosophy of their time—German eclectics fighting the influence of Cartesianism, while France’s foremost eclectic, Cousin, was trying to supersede Hegel and Schelling.The first to point out the importance of eclecticism in early modern European philosophy was Helmut Holzhey, 1 and the most condensed account of the whole “syndrome” was given by Horst Dreitzel. 2 We know now that eclecticism was unjustly removed from the history of philosophy. In its past articulation, mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eclectic thinking combined the claim for freedom of thought with the rejection of dogmatism and sectarianism. Michael Albrecht shows with great diligence and with more than abundant evidence that eclecticism is a genuine part of modern scientific and philosophical thought, and any reader of Albrecht’s long list of eclectic thinkers can have no doubt about the importance of the idea.Over more than six hundred pages Albrecht divides his findings into forty-eight chronological chapters. He tries not to comment on his subject, although eclecticism quickly reveals itself as a tricky thing. Albrecht talks loosely about “the idea of eclecticism,” the “eclectic thought,” the “eclectic claim” because he wants to keep the idea of eclecticism close to the literal sense of the word: in Greek ek-legere means selecting, or choosing. Broadly speaking, philosophical eclecticism turns out to be in general just a claim. It was used by those who did not want to be regarded as dogmatic, sectarian, or systematic thinkers. Albrecht reports that claiming to be eclectic did in practice not amount to very much, and indeed he notes (457) that no philosopher ever wrote an eclectic work.Around 1600 Justus Lipsius and Jacopo Manzoni were among the very first to advocate eclecticism openly, and here already Albrecht draws his general conclusion: “Practically no author embracing eclecticism... has made the idea work” (382). This is especially true for philosophers. In medicine and in physics we know of Daniel Sennert and Johann Christoph Sturm who practiced a method based on... (shrink)

Existing research on developing countries emphasizes the decisive power of teacher unions in education politics. Yet that power varies, and a full understanding of the roots of union power and the sources of cross-national variation requires deeper analysis of organizational dynamics within unions. This analysis supports four arguments. First, teachers have a range of advantages in overcoming obstacles to collective action. Second, unions are not all alike; they vary widely, from interest groups to powerful political machines. Third, the source of (...) this variation lies in factors that shift power within unions from members to leaders in political-machine unions. Fourth, analyzing the dimensions of variation helps explain the different outcomes of recent reforms to teacher careers in Latin America, especially in highlighting the staunch opposition from political-machine unions. (shrink)

A brief personal history is given about how information theory can be applied to binding sites of genetic control molecules on nucleic acids. The primary example used is ribosome binding sites in Escherichia coli. Once the sites are aligned, the information needed to describe the sites can be computed using Claude Shannon’s method. This is displayed by a computer graphic called a sequence logo. The logo represents an average binding site, and the mathematics easily allows one to determine the components (...) of this average. That is, given a set of binding sites, the information for individual binding sites can also be computed. One can go further and predict the information of sites that are not in the original data set. Information theory also allows one to model the flexibility of ribosome binding sites, and this led us to a simple model for ribosome translational initiation in which the molecular components fit together only when the ribosome is at a good ribosome binding site. Since information theory is general, the same mathematics applies to human splice junctions, where we can predict the effect of sequence changes that cause human genetic diseases and cancer. The second example given is the Pribnow “box,” which, when viewed by the information theory method, reveals a mechanism for initiation of both transcription and DNA replication. Replication, transcription, splicing, and translation into protein represent the central dogma, so these examples show how molecular information theory is contributing to our knowledge of basic biology. (shrink)

The terms “competency” and “decision making capacity” are often used interchangeably in the medical setting. Although competency is a legal determination made by judges, “competency” assessments are frequently requested of psychiatrists who are called to consult on hospitalised patients who refuse medical treatment. In these situations, the bioethicist is called to consult frequently as well, sometimes as a second opinion or “tie breaker”. The psychiatric determination of competence, while a clinical phenomenon, is based primarily in legalism and can be quite (...) different from the bioethics approach. This discrepancy highlights the difficulties that arise when a patient is found to be “competent” by psychiatry but lacking in DMC by bioethics. Using a case, this dilemma is explored and guidance for reconciling the opinions of two distinct clinical specialties is offered. (shrink)

In the past decade donor commitments to health have increased by 200 percent. Correspondingly, there has been a swell of new players in the global health landscape. The unprecedented, global response to a single disease, HIV/AIDS, has been responsible for a substantial portion of this boon. Numerous health success have followed this windfall of funding and attention, yet the food, fuel, and economic crises of 2008 have shown the vulnerabilities of health and development initiatives focused on short term wins and (...) reliant on a constant flow of foreign funding. For too long, the international community has responded to global health and development challenges with emergency solutions that often reflect the donor's priorities, values, and political leanings, rather than funding durable health systems that can withstand crises. Progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals has stalled in many countries. Disease specific initiatives have weakened health systems and limited efforts to improve maternal and child health. As we enter this era of scarce resources, there is a need to return to the foundations of the Alma Ata Declaration signed thirty years ago with the goal of providing universal access to primary healthcare. The global health community must now objectively evaluate how we can most effectively respond to the crises of 2008 and take advantage of this moment of extraordinary attention for global health and translate it into long term, sustainable health improvements for all. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on AI-based cognitive and perceptual enhancements. AI-based brain enhancements are already under development, and they may become commonplace over the next 30–50 years. We raise doubts concerning whether radical AI-based enhancements transhumanists advocate will accomplish the transhumanists goals of longevity, human flourishing, and intelligence enhancement. We urge that even if the technologies are medically safe and are not used as tools by surveillance capitalism or an authoritarian dictatorship, these enhancements may still fail to do their job for (...) philosophical reasons. In what follows, we explore one such concern, a problem that involves the nature of the self. We illustrate that the so called transhumanist efforts to “merge oneself with AI” could lead to perverse realizations of AI technology, such as the demise of the person who sought enhancement. And, in a positive vein, we offer ways to avoid this, at least within the context of one theory of the nature of personhood. (shrink)

Argumentation mining is an application of natural language processing (NLP) that emerged a few years ago and has recently enjoyed considerable popularity, as demonstrated by a series of international workshops and by a rising number of publications at the major conferences and journals of the field. Its goals are to identify argumentation in text or dialogue; to construct representations of the constellation of claims, supporting and attacking moves (in different levels of detail); and to characterize the patterns of reasoning that (...) appear to license the argumentation. Furthermore, recent work also addresses the difficult tasks of evaluating the persuasiveness and quality of arguments. Some of the linguistic genres that are being studied include legal text, student essays, political discourse and debate, newspaper editorials, scientific writing, and others. The book starts with a discussion of the linguistic perspective, characteristics of argumentative language, and their relationship to certain other notions such as subjectivity. Besides the connection to linguistics, argumentation has for a long time been a topic in Artificial Intelligence, where the focus is on devising adequate representations and reasoning formalisms that capture the properties of argumentative exchange. It is generally very difficult to connect the two realms of reasoning and text analysis, but we are convinced that it should be attempted in the long term, and therefore we also touch upon some fundamentals of reasoning approaches. Then the book turns to its focus, the computational side of mining argumentation in text. We first introduce a number of annotated corpora that have been used in the research. From the NLP perspective, argumentation mining shares subtasks with research fields such as subjectivity and sentiment analysis, semantic relation extraction, and discourse parsing. Therefore, many technical approaches are being borrowed from those (and other) fields. We break argumentation mining into a series of subtasks, starting with the preparatory steps of classifying text as argumentative (or not) and segmenting it into elementary units. Then, central steps are the automatic identification of claims, and finding statements that support or oppose the claim. For certain applications, it is also of interest to compute a full structure of an argumentative constellation of statements. Next, we discuss a few steps that try to 'dig deeper': to infer the underlying reasoning pattern for a textual argument, to reconstruct unstated premises (so-called 'enthymemes'), and to evaluate the quality of the argumentation. We also take a brief look at 'the other side' of mining, i.e., the generation or synthesis of argumentative text. The book finishes with a summary of the argumentation mining tasks, a sketch of potential applications, and a—necessarily subjective—outlook for the field. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Argumentative Language / Modeling Arguments / Corpus Annotation / Finding Claims / Finding Supporting and Objecting Statements / Deriving the Structure of Argumentation / Assessing Argumentation / Generating Argumentative Text / Summary and Perspectives / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index. (shrink)