This paper is a study about Philadelphia’s comprehensive user engagement sites (CUESs) as the authors address and examine issues related to the upcoming implementation of a CUES while seeking solutions for its disputed questions and plans. Beginning with the federal drug schedules, the authors visit some of the medical and public health issues vis-à-vis safe injection facilities (SIFs). Insite, a successful Canadian SIF, has been thoroughly researched as it represents a paradigm for which a Philadelphia CUES can expand upon. Also, (...) the existing criticisms against SIFs are revisited while critically unpackaged and responded to in favor of the establishment. In the main section, the authors propose the layout and services of the upcoming CUES, much of which would be in congruent to Vancouver’s Insite. On the other hand, the CUES would be distinct from Insite, as the authors emphasize, in that it will offer an information center run by individuals in recovery and place additional emphasis on early education for young healthcare professionals by providing them a platform to work at the site. The paper will also briefly investigate the implementation of a CUES site under an ethical scope of the Harm Reduction Theory. Lastly, the authors recommend some strategic plans that the Philadelphia City government may consider employing at this crucial stage. (shrink)

Let us call an integer part of an ordered field any subring such that every element of the field lies at distance less than 1 from a unique element of the ring. We show that every real closed field has an integer part.

Doctors are regularly confronted with requests for sterilisation of mentally handicapped people who cannot give consent for themselves. They ought to act in a medical vacuum because there doesn't exist a consensus about a model for decision making on this matter. In this article a model for decision making is proposed, based on a review of the literature and our own research data. We have attempted to select and classify certain factors which could enable us to arrive at an ethically (...) justifiable method of making a medical decision. In doing so we distinguish two major criteria: heredity and parenting competence, and six minor criteria: conception risk, IQ, age, personality, medical aspects and prognosis and finally support and guidance for the mentally handicapped person. The major criteria give rise to a "situation of necessity". In this situation the physician is confronted with a conflict of values and interests. The minor criteria are of an entirely different ethical order. They can only be considered once the major criteria have created a "situation of necessity". Ultimately it comes down to deciding whether the benefits of sterilisation outweigh the drawbacks and whether the means are appropriate to the end, where efficient contraception is the end and irreversible sterilisation is the means. (shrink)

Quantum entanglement has been focus of fundamental debate since the original paper of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [1] and the work of Bell [2], discussing its implications on fundamental issues related to the concepts of physical reality and locality. It has only been during the last few years when it has been recognized that this feature of Quantum Mechanics may also have important applications in the fields of communication and computation. In particular, it has been shown that using entanglement would (...) allow to perform certain computational tasks, such as factoring, much faster. On the other hand, it provides the basis for provably secure secret communication and cryptography. (shrink)

This collection of essays is the definitive version of a widely discussed debate over the origins of the New Theory of Reference. In new articles, written especially for this volume, Quentin Smith and Scott Soames, the original participants in the debate, elaborate their positions on who was responsible for the ideas that Saul Kripke presented in his Naming and Necessity. They are joined by John Burgess, who weighs in on the side of Soames, while Smith adds a further dimension in (...) discussing the contributions of philosophers such as Follesdal, Geach, Hintikka, and Plantinga. Also included are lengthy excerpts from Follesdal's 1961 Harvard dissertation and a careful examination by Sten Lindstrom of the respective contributions of Kripke and Stig Kanger to the development of modal semantics. The collection will be essential reading for anyone acquainted with these influential ideas. (shrink)

Patient centred diagnosis is best practised through shared decision making; an iterative dialogue between doctor and patient, whichrespects a patient’s needs, values, preferences, and circumstances. -/- Shared decision making for diagnostic situations differs fundamentally from that for treatment decisions. This has important implications when considering its practical application. -/- The nature of dialogue should be tailored to the specific diagnostic decision; scenarios with higher stakes or uncertainty usually require more detailed conversations.

This book consists of two Tibetan, Buddhistically-oriented texts about Khotan. The texts are given in what now is an archaic transliteration, Li Yul Lun-bstan-pa for seventy-five pages with translation as The Prophecy of the Li Country and Li Yul Chos-kyi Lo-Rgyus for fourteen pages with no translation. The latter is mostly included within the former. There also are an index of proper names and a word index.--J. P. H.

The concept of joint action is at the core of numerous diverse research topics, including philosophical explorations of social action, studies of human dialogue, human-computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, multiagent systems, distributed artificial intelligence, distributed simulation, and contract law. It is therefore remarkable that so central a concept has received so little detailed analysis, in comparison with studies of individuals. However, in recent years, the study of joint action has begun to undergo more intense scrutiny, primarily from philosophers and researchers (...) in artificial intelligence. These two disciplines often address similar topics but with different motivations, methodologies, tools, and criteria for success. Although this paper is inspired by philosophical work, it is squarely motivated by the concerns of building intelligent systems that are capable of collaborative behavior, either with a user, or with other such systems. Still, we hope that the paper sheds light on philosophical issues, and treats the subject of joint action at a sufficiently precise level to be illuminating of problems that any philosophical account needs to confront. (shrink)

We discuss saturating ultrafilters on N, relating them to other types of nonprincipal ultrafilter. (a) There is an (ω,c)-saturating ultrafilter on $\mathbf{N} \operatorname{iff} 2^\lambda \leq \mathfrak{c}$ for every $\lambda and there is no cover of R by fewer than c nowhere dense sets. (b) Assume Martin's axiom. Then, for any cardinal κ, a nonprincipal ultrafilter on N is (ω,κ)-saturating iff it is almost κ-good. In particular, (i) p(κ)-point ultrafilters are (ω,κ)-saturating, and (ii) the set of (ω,κ)-saturating ultrafilters is invariant under (...) homeomorphisms of $\beta\mathbf{N\backslash N}$ . (c) It is relatively consistent with ZFC to suppose that there is a Ramsey p(c)-point ultrafilter which is not (ω,c)-saturating. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: To determine the relationship between ethical reasoning and gender and occupation among a group of male and female nurses and doctors. DESIGN: Partialist and impartialist forms of ethical reasoning were defined and singled out as being central to the difference between what is known as the "care" moral orientation (Gilligan) and the "justice" orientation (Kohlberg). A structured questionnaire based on four hypothetical moral dilemmas involving combinations of (health care) professional, non-professional, life-threatening and non-life-threatening situations, was piloted and then mailed (...) to a randomly selected sample of doctors and nurses. SETTING: 400 doctors from Victoria, and 200 doctors and 400 nurses from New South Wales. RESULTS: 178 doctors and 122 nurses returned completed questionnaires. 115 doctors were male, 61 female; 50 nurses were male and 72 were female. It was hypothesised that there would be an association between feminine subjects and partialist reasoning and masculine subjects and impartialist reasoning. It was also hypothesised that nurses would adopt a partialist approach to reasoning and doctors an impartialist approach. No relationship between any of these variables was observed. (shrink)