Research shows that the physician’s personal attributes and social characteristics have a strong association with their end-of-life decision making. Despite efforts to increase patient, family and surrogate input into EOL decision making, research shows the physician’s input to be dominant. Our research finds that physician’s social values, independent of religiosity, have a significant association with physician’s tendency to withhold or withdraw life sustaining, EOL treatments. It is suggested that physicians employ personal social values in their EOL medical coping, because they (...) have to cope with existential dilemmas posed by the mystery of death, and left unresolved by medical decision making mechanisms such as advanced directives and hospital ethics committees. (shrink)

Le Prophète - que la bénédiction et le salut de Dieu soient sur lui - a dit : " La recherche du licite est une obligation pour tout musulman ". C'est là une obligation d'entre les obligations, la plus difficile à comprendre et à mettre en pratique. C'est ce qui explique la quasi-disparition de la science du licite et de sa mise en application. La difficulté à la saisir est la cause de sa disparition car les ignorants pensent que le (...) licite est perdu et qu'il ne reste de sain que l'eau douce et l'herbe qui pousse dans les terres en friche tout le reste ayant été souillé par des mains malignes et corrompu par de mauvaises pratiques. Ce prétexte de l'herbe justifierait le recours à l'illicite. Ils ont totalement rejeté ce principe de la religion et ne peuvent différencier les choses. Hélas! Le licite est clair et l'illicite aussi, et, entre les deux, se situe l'ambigu. Ces trois cas demeurent liés, quelle que soit la situation. Et puisque cette hérésie s'est répandue dans la religion et que ses méfaits se sont propagés parmi les gens, il est un devoir d'en dévoiler la corruption en amenant, par une argumentation rigoureuse, à la faculté de distinguer entre le licite et l'illicite pour atteindre une clarté que nul obstacle ne pourra voiler. (shrink)

Este artigo tem por objetivo descrever a Brigada Anti Publicidade em Paris, que opera semanalmente no âmbito da capital metropolitana. A pesquisa participante foi realizada em 2006 e 2007, e hoje conta a especificidade do ativismo pós-moderno. Novas perspectivas são elaboradas na seqüência dos trabalhos de Luc Boltansky e Eve Chiapello, relativos ao novo espírito do capitalismo. Uma abordagem em antropologia urbana no presente trabalho tem como objetivo destacar a performatividade desse Novo Movimento Social (NMS).

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has had profound effects on global health, healthcare, and public health policy. It has also impacted education. Within undergraduate healthcare education of doctors, nurses, and allied professions, rapid shifts to distance learning and pedagogic content creation within new realities, demands of healthcare practice settings, shortened curricula, and/or earlier graduation have also challenged ethics teaching in terms of curriculum allotments or content specification. We propose expanding the notion of resilience to the field of ethics education under the (...) conditions of remote learning. Educational resilience starts in the virtual classroom of ethics teaching, initially constituted as an “unpurposed space” of exchange about the pandemic’s challenging impact on students and educators. This continuously transforms into “purposed space” of reflection, discovering ethics as a repertory of orientative knowledge for addressing the pandemic’s challenges on personal, professional, societal, and global levels and for discovering (and then addressing) that the health of individuals and populations also has moral determinants. As such, an educational resilience framework with inherent adaptability rises to the challenge of supporting the moral agency of students acting both as professionals and as global citizens. Educational resilience is key in supporting and sustaining professional identify formation and facilitating the development of students’ moral resilience and leadership amid moral complexity and potential moral transgression—not only but especially in times of pandemic. (shrink)

According to Pylyshyn, depictive representations can be explanatory only if a certain kind of first-order isomorphism exists between the mental representations and real-world displays. What about a system with second-order isomorphism (similarities between different mental representations corresponding with similarities between different real-world displays)? Such a system may help to address whether “depictive” representations contribute to the visual nature of imagery.

As ever more countries enter the global economy, reshaping the body has become the means by which women are encouraged to enter modernity. Once bodies were local, marked by their own local traditions. Today, variety is replaced by uniformity. The formerly plump Miss Nigeria is superseded by a thin westernized version and sets the trend for how contemporary Nigerian women are to look. Encouraged to see the body as a consuming center, a personal logo that signifies our membership of the (...) global community, bodies across the world are being commercialized and restructured. This development means that we are losing bodies as we lose mother tongue languages. Standardization is supplanting diversity as facsimile bodies become the new calling card of belonging and identity. (shrink)

A história da ética filosófica é, em grande parte, uma tentativa de elucidar a maneira na qual os seres humanos podem fomentar um êthos, para atingir a própria plenitude. Fosse Peirce convidado a mostrar, primeiro, o que ele entendia pelo êthos do filósofo ou do cientista, ele responderia facilmente que é a busca por um ideal e verdades eternas, isto é, a própria razoabilidade que rege o universo. Fosse ele questionado, logo após, o que o êthos dos seres humanos é, (...) em geral, quer dizer, o que guia e dá sentido à vida de cada pessoa, sua resposta não diferiria muito da anterior: todos os seres humanos, por meio de suas ações concretas, devem encarnar a razoabilidade, o ideal admirável ou o summum bonum em suas próprias vidas. A resposta bem conhecida de Peirce contém uma visão criativa muito profunda da vida ética: esta é a construção progressiva e contínua de diversas possibilidades de ação, por meio da qual cada pessoa configura seu próprio êthos, segundo esse fim admirável, que é uma representação daquilo que seria uma vida boa, desejável e próspera. Isto pode não parecer original no contexto da história da ética filosófica – Aristóteles já tinha dito algo semelhante. Entretanto, há duas noções muito ricas e sugestivas no pensamento de Peirce, as quais podem sem dúvida ser recuperadas, visto que elas podem contribuir de maneira significativa para essa reflexão, a saber: a razoabilidade e a abdução. Como tentarei mostrar, para Peirce viver eticamente é viver criativamente. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important thinkers of this century. His work has been highly influential not only in philosophy, but particularly in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection that explores the connections between his body of work and North America's biggest philosophical movement, pragmatism. Habermas and Pragmatism investigates the influences of pragmatism on Habermas' thought in a collection of stellar essays with contributions by Habermas himself, leading representatives of pragmatism, as well (...) as critical and legal theorists. The essays cover a range of subjects including philosophy of language, democracy, nature of rationality and social theory as well as the relation of major figures such as Hegel, Pierce, Mead and Dewey to Habermas and pragmatism. (shrink)

This Article explores several meanings of a regulatory preference for government inaction. It explains the rise to dominance of this inaction preference in the United States and its distorting influence on the perception and understanding of regulation. Specifically, the Article demonstrates how basic terms in regulation, such as “government failure,” “regulatory capture,” and “deregulation,” acquired misleading connotations suggesting that government inaction is always superior to government action. The Article further explains how, through government inaction, the U.S. legal system accommodates rent (...) extraction - the profitable exploitation of market imperfections and favorable laws. Several developments in recent decades have considerably improved the capacity of very small groups in society to collect rents, namely, use talent and positional advantages to gain increasing levels of earnings. The Article argues that the parallel rise of the inaction preference has contributed to this trend, primarily because the availability of rent extraction opportunities draws talent that utilizes them with growing effectiveness. The purpose of the Article is to clarify several aspects of the relationships between regulation and rent extraction or, more precisely, to emphasize that government inaction may entail undesirable income effects. (shrink)

Disaster response is a highly collaborative and critical process that requires the involvement of multiple emergency responders (ERs), ideally working together under a unified command, to enable a rapid and effective operational response. Following the 9/11 and 11/13 terrorist attacks and the devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it is apparent that inadequate communication and a lack of interoperability among the ERs engaged on-site can adversely affect disaster response efforts. Within this context, we present a scenario-based terrorism case study to (...) highlight the challenges of operational disaster command and response. In this article, which is based on the French emergency response doctrine, we outline a semantics-based common operational command system that is designed to guarantee an efficient information flow among ERs. Our focus is on offering to all ERs, a real-time operational picture of the situation in order to enable multilevel coordination among firefighters, police, healthcare units, public authorities, and other stakeholders. Our approach consolidates information to promote timely sharing of data among ERs. The proposed system is based on an ontology that has been developed to represent the different types of knowledge on the part of ERs, providing a shared vocabulary that covers a variety of interoperability concerns. (shrink)

B2B online reverse auctions technology (ORAs) emerged as a popular tool for large buying firms in the late 1990s. However, its growing use has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in unethical behaviors to a point that it has been described as the technology that has triggered more ethical concerns in the e-commerce arena than in any other segment of activity. Our findings first indicate that the establishment of formal ethical criteria based on the restrictive interpretation of ethics as honesty (...) is not enough to resolve the ethical issues that surround the introduction of a technology because it ignores the ethical values shared by most acton in the sector in terms of fairness. We show the extent to which lobbying, rumor, technical problems, and public discourse can impact on the interpretations of the technology regarding ethics. Highlighting the importance of incorporating ORAs into the broader context of relationship management that integrates ethics as fairness and not only ethics as honesty serves to illustrate why the future of ORAs might not be as bright as predicted by a theoretical interpretation of the technology that is sometimes disconnected from the realities of the field. (shrink)

Abstract In light of the complexity of unfolding disasters, the diversity of rapidly evolving events, the enormous amount of generated information, and the huge pool of casualties, emergency responders (ERs) may be overwhelmed and in consequence poor decisions may be made. In fact, the possibility of transporting the wounded victims to one of several hospitals and the dynamic changes in healthcare resource availability make the decision process more complex. To tackle this problem, we propose a multicriteria decision support service, based (...) on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, that aims to avoid overcrowding and outpacing the capacity of a hospital to effectively provide the best care to victims by finding out the most appropriate hospital that meets the victims’ needs. The proposed approach searches for the most appropriate healthcare institution that can effectively deal with the victims’ needs by considering the availability of the needed resources in the hospital, the victim’s wait time to receive the healthcare, and the transfer time that represents the hospital proximity to the disaster site. The evaluation and validation results showed that the assignment of hospitals was done successfully considering the needs of each victim and without overwhelming any single hospital. (shrink)

Reflective capacity is integral to core healthcare professional practice competencies. Reflection plays a central role in teacher education as reflecting on teaching behaviours with critical analysis can potentially improve teaching practice. The humanities including narrative and the visual arts can serve as a valuable tool for fostering reflection. We conducted a multinational faculty development workshop aiming to enhance reflective capacity in medical educators by using a combination of abstract paintings and narratives. Twenty-three family physicians or physicians-in-training from 10 countries participated (...) in the workshop. Qualitative assessment of the workshop showed that the combined use of art and narrative was well received and perceived as contributing to the reflective exercise. Participants generally felt that viewing abstract paintings had facilitated a valuable mood transformation and prepared them emotionally for the reflective writing. Our analysis found that the following themes emerged from participants’ responses: narratives from different countries are similar; the use of art helped access feelings; viewing abstract paintings facilitated next steps; writing reflective narratives promoted examination of educational challenges, compassion for self and other, and building an action plan; and sharing of narrative was helpful for fostering active listening and appreciating multiple perspectives. Future research might include comparing outcomes for a group participating in arts–narrative-based workshops with those of a control group using only reflective narrative or in combination with figurative art, and implementing a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of assessment. (shrink)

Managing complex disaster situations is a challenging task because of the large number of actors involved and the critical nature of the events themselves. In particular, the different terminologies and technical vocabularies that are being exchanged among Emergency Responders may lead to misunderstandings. Maintaining a shared semantics for exchanged data is a major challenge. To help to overcome these issues, we elaborate a modular suite of ontologies called POLARISCO that formalizes the complex knowledge of the ERs. Such a shared vocabulary (...) resolves inconsistent terminologies and promotes semantic interoperability among ERs. In this work, we discuss developing POLARISCO as an extension of Basic Formal Ontology and the Common Core Ontologies. We conclude by presenting a real use-case to check the efficiency and applicability of the proposed ontology. (shrink)

Researchers have wondered how the brain creates emotions since the early days of psychological science. With a surge of studies in affective neuroscience in recent decades, scientists are poised to answer this question. In this target article, we present a meta-analytic summary of the neuroimaging literature on human emotion. We compare the locationist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions) with the psychological constructionist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories (...) are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to those categories) to better understand the brain basis of emotion. We review both locationist and psychological constructionist hypotheses of brain–emotion correspondence and report meta-analytic findings bearing on these hypotheses. Overall, we found little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions. Instead, we found evidence that is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to the mind: A set of interacting brain regions commonly involved in basic psychological operations of both an emotional and non-emotional nature are active during emotion experience and perception across a range of discrete emotion categories. (shrink)

Disaster response requires the cooperation of multiple emergency responder organizations (EROs). However, after‐action reports relating to large‐scale disasters identity communication difficulties among EROs as a major hindrance to collaboration. On the one hand, the use of two‐radio communication, based on multiple orthogonal frequencies and uneven coverage, has been shown to degrade inter‐organization communication. On the other hand, because they reflect different areas of expertise, EROs use differing terminologies, which are difficult to reconcile. These issues lead to ambiguities, misunderstandings, and inefficient (...) exchange of data and information among those involved, which can impede the response process and slow decision making. We, therefore, hypothesize that promoting semantic interoperability across ERO information systems might improve information exchange among stakeholders and thereby allow a more coherent response to the disaster. We propose an ontology‐based messaging service on the basis of the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) standards. The parties involved will continue to use the terminologies to which they are accustomed, but the system will resolve inconsistencies and thereby enhance mutual understanding among EROs by ensuring semantic translation of the exchanged information. The evaluation of the semantic translation demonstrated the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed service. (shrink)

Baudrillard's remarkably prescient meditation on terrorism throws light on post-9/11 delusional fears and political simulations. Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media society (...) meaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social." Once invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronic media society, all the masses can do—and all they will do—is enjoy the spectacle. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions. (shrink)

Building a meaningful model of biological regulatory network is usually done by specifying the components and their interactions, by guessing the values of parameters, by comparing the predicted behaviors to the observed ones, and by modifying in a trial-error process both architecture and parameters in order to reach an optimal fitness. We propose here a different approach to construct and analyze biological models avoiding the trial-error part, where structure and dynamics are represented as formal constraints. We apply the method to (...) Hopfield-like networks, a formalism often used in both neural and regulatory networks modeling. The aim is to characterize automatically the set of all models consistent with all the available knowledge. The available knowledge is formalized into formal constraints. The latter are compiled into Boolean formula in conjunctive normal form and then submitted to a Boolean satisfiability solver. This approach allows to formulate a wide range of queries, expressed in a high level language, and possibly integrating formalized intuitions. In order to explore its potential, we use it to find cycles for 3-nodes networks and to determine the flower morphogenesis regulatory network of Arabidopsis thaliana. Applications of this technique are numerous and concern the building of models from data as well as the design of biological networks possessing specified behaviors. (shrink)

In our response, we clarify important theoretical differences between basic emotion and psychological construction approaches. We evaluate the empirical status of the basic emotion approach, addressing whether it requires brain localization, whether localization can be observed with better analytic tools, and whether evidence for basic emotions exists in other types of measures. We then revisit the issue of whether the key hypotheses of psychological construction are supported by our meta-analytic findings. We close by elaborating on commentator suggestions for future research.

Lindquist et al. convincingly argue that the brain implements psychological operations that are constitutive of emotion rather than modules subserving discrete emotions. However, thenatureof such psychological operations is open to debate. I argue that considering appraisal theories may provide alternative interpretations of the neuroimaging data with respect to the psychological operations involved.

There is an expectation that all researchers will act ethically and responsibly in the conduct of research involving humans and animals. While research ethics is mentioned in quality indicators and codes of responsible researcher conduct, it appears to have little profile in doctoral assessment. There seems to be an implicit assumption that ethical competence has been achieved by the end of doctoral candidacy and that there is no need for candidates to report on the ethical dimensions of their study nor (...) for examiners to assess this integral aspect of researcher development. In the context of ensuring that institutions are fulfilling their responsibility of producing ethically sensitive and competent researchers, it is salient to investigate whether doctoral thesis examiners make comment about ethical issues in their reports. This study analysed an archive of examiner reports to identify the frequency, magnitude and nature of examiner comment about ethics. Although comment was rare examiners provided: prescriptive instruction on ethical review processes; formative instruction on the design, conduct, and reporting of research projects; and positive or negative judgments about a candidate's ethical competence, the latter often aligned with meeting, or not meeting, 'doctoral standards'. The scarcity of ethics in examination criteria and examiner reports implies a silence that needs to be addressed to ensure graduating candidates are prepared to conduct ethical and responsible research. (shrink)

We agree that conceptualisation is key in understanding the brain basis of emotion. We argue that by conflating facial emotion recognition with subjective emotion experience, Lindquist et al. understate the importance of biological predisposition in emotion. We use examples from the anxiety disorders to illustrate the distinction between these two phenomena, emphasising the importance of both emotional hardware and contextual learning.