happens, how it happens, and why it happens. Our assumption ought to be that this is as true in education as it is in atomic physics. But this leaves many other questions to answer. The crucial ones: What kind of science is proper or appropriate to education? How does it differ from physics? What is wrong with the prevai1~ ing, virtually unopposed research tradition in education? What could or should be done to replace it with a more adequate tradi tion? (...) What concepts are necessary to describe and explain what we find there? It is in this realm that we find ourselves. Where to start? One place - our place, needless to say - is with one limited but central concept in education, teaching. A long philosophical tradition concerned with the nature of teaching goes back (along with everything else) to Plato, divulging most recent ly in the work of such philosophers as B. O. Smith, Scheffler, Hirst, Komisar, Green, McClellan, Soltis, Kerr, Fenstermacher, et al. An empirical tradition runs parallelto the philosophers -it has its most notable modern proponents in Gage, the Soars, Berliner, Rosen shine, but its roots can be traced to the Sophists. These two tradi tions have been at loggerheads over the centuries. (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotional events tend to be remembered better than neutral events, but emotional states and stimuli may also interfere with cognitive processes that underlie memory performance. The current study investigated the effects of emotional content on working memory capacity, which involves both short term storage and executive attention control. We tested competing hypotheses in a preregistered experiment. The emotional enhancement hypothesis predicts that emotional stimuli attract attention and additional processing resources relative to neutral stimuli, thereby making it easier to encode and (...) store emotional information in WMC. The emotional impairment hypothesis, by contrast, predicts that emotional stimuli interfere with attention control and the active maintenance of information in working memory. Participants completed a common measure of WMC (the operation span task; Turner, M. L., & Engle, R. W. [1989]. Is working memory capacity task dependent? Journal of Memory and Language, 28,... (shrink)

The empirical rule that systems of identical particles always obey either Bose or Fermi statistics is customarily imposed on the theory by adding it to the axioms of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, with the result that other statistical behaviors are excluded a priori. A more general approach is to ask what other many-particle statistics are consistent with the indistinguishability of identical particles. This strategy offers a way to discuss possible violations of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and it leads to some interesting (...) issues related to preparation of states and a superselection rule arising from invariance under the permutation group. (shrink)

This is a supplemental text for all philosophy courses that facilitates, invigorates, and enhances student learning by teaching students to read and write effectively.

As genomic science has evolved, so have policy and practice debates about how to describe and evaluate the ways in which genomic information is treated for individuals, institutions, and society. The term genetic exceptionalism, describing the concept that genetic information is special or unique, and specifically different from other kinds of medical information, has been utilized widely, but often counterproductively in these debates. We offer genomic contextualism as a new term to frame the characteristics of genomic science in the debates. (...) Using stasis theory to draw out the important connection between definitional issues and resulting policies, we argue that the framework of genomic contextualism is better suited to evaluating genomics and its policy-relevant features to arrive at more productive discussion and resolve policy debates. (shrink)

In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often‐ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science—including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes—can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and potential benefits. They conclude with a discussion of responsible behavior in the context of SBG research. (...) SBG research that compares individuals within a group according to a “sensitive” phenotype requires extra attention to responsible conduct and to responsible communication about the research and its findings. SBG research (1) on sensitive phenotypes that (2) compares two or more groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) requires a compelling justification to be conducted, funded, or published. All authors agree that this justification at least requires a convincing argument that a study's design could yield scientifically valid results; some authors would additionally require the study to have a socially favorable risk‐benefit profile. (shrink)

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (...) to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inquiry when using genetic ancestry, they are also creating analytical frameworks with broader societal ramifications. This essay presents an ethics framework in the spirit of virtue ethics for these researchers: rather than focus on (...) rule following, the framework is designed to build researchers’ capacities to react to the ethical dimensions of their work. The authors identify one overarching principle of intellectual freedom and responsibility, noting that freedom in all its guises comes with responsibility, and they identify and define four principles that collectively uphold researchers’ intellectual responsibility: truthfulness, justice and fairness, anti-racism, and public beneficence. Researchers should bring their practices into alignment with these principles, and to aid this, the authors name three common ways research practices infringe these principles, suggest a step-by-step process for aligning research choices with the principles, provide rules of thumb for achieving alignment, and give a worked case. The essay concludes by identifying support needed by researchers to act in accord with the proposed framework. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CompassionEdward J. VolpintestaTo the Editor: In his essay, “Can We Mandate Compassion?” (March–April 2011), Ron Paterson, a former health and disability commissioner in New Zealand, discusses the decline of physicians’ compassion—an issue that is receiving more attention in the media, and in our journals, hospitals, and medical societies, as well.He decided—and I agree—that compassion should not be mandated. How could it be? After all, it’s unquantifiable; it’s not meted (...) out in milliliters or grams. Compassion is a spontaneous emotion that arises from the individual caregiver’s spiritual reservoirs. Trying to regulate or mandate it would be absurd—the ultimate attempt at dehumanizing medicine. Giving students more exposure to the humanities, however, and teaching doctors what is not acceptable in “terms of conduct, attitudes, and behavior” may increase awareness of its importance. Putting that awareness into action is another thing.Could it be that physicians are too hard-pressed for time and too overstressed with ordering and interpreting tests that they have little time and energy left for compassion? Has the threat of malpractice suits made physicians distrust patients, seeing them more as potential lawsuits than as suffering human beings, as horrible as that may sound to some? Or has the vast amount of new medical knowledge that rapidly reaches doctors given them an information overload so great that they have room only for cognition and none for emotion? When one adds the pressure physicians feel to control costs and to follow guidelines that often clash with their judgment, it becomes clear why compassion has declined.As a primary care doctor, there are days when all I have to offer some patients is compassion. A divorce, problems with personal finances, depression, a recent death, a child in trouble with the law or with drugs, an unwanted pregnancy—these are some of the problems that are the most difficult and time-consuming for me. They do not require any new scientific knowledge. Like compassion, they are not quantifiable, and there are no board exams to test how well I help my patients cope with them. There is also no code that I can send to an insurance company that will accurately convey what I have done, or its value to my patients. Only my patient and I are aware of whether I was able to use compassion in a way that helped. How could it be otherwise?It is much easier for me to treat a patient with pneumonia or conjunctivitis. I doubt that there ever will be a foolproof way to teach compassion to physicians. Perhaps performing psychological tests on incoming medical students may be the best way to determine which are most inclined to become compassionate physicians.The Flexner Report of 1910, which contained many recommendations for improving medical education, may have overstressed the importance of science while neglecting the human dimensions of medical practice. The Carnegie Foundation, which funded the original study, has undertaken a second examining any unintended consequences of the first. Unlike the first, which was dominated by one man, the second comprises a broad team of educators, doctors, philosophers, and psychologists. Perhaps this broader approach will restore compassion to its rightful place.Letters to the editor may be sent by e-mail to [email protected], or to Managing Editor, Hastings Center Report, 21 Malcolm Gordon Road, Garrison, NY 10524; (845) 424-4931 fax. Letters appearing in the Report may be edited for length and stylistic consistency.Statement of Ownership, Management, and CirculationThe Hastings Center Report is a bimonthly journal published by The Hastings Center, 21 Malcolm Gordon Road, Garrison, NY 10524. The editor is Gregory Kaebnick, at the same address. The annual subscription price is $80; contact person is Anne Marie Schoonhoven; telephone number is 845-424-4040. The tax status of the organization has not changed during the preceding twelve months.As of the filing date of September 6, 2011, the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding twelve months was 3,342; the actual number of copies of the single issue published nearest to the filing date was 3,150. The journal has a total paid and/or requested circulation... (shrink)

Distance education has a long and complex history. It accounts for more than one-third of all higher education students in the world and, because of its very nature, has produced some of the top graduates worldwide who were unable to study fulltime and on-campus for various reasons. One of the most prestigious graduates of the DE system was the former state president of South Africa, the late Nelson Mandela. Online learning is a form of DE and fast becoming the preferred (...) method of instruction and delivery. Critiques of online learning, and of DE itself, will argue that, because of the separation of the teacher and the student, only academic skills can be taught and learnt using this medium. The so-called ‘softer skills’ – those that focus on the development of the person – are best taught in a face-to-face, traditional environment. This article focuses on a review of DE theories and models. A particular emphasis is placed on online learning theories, and how the teaching of formational learning skills can be successfully incorporated into this educational setting. The article draws from a range of studies that have been conducted, based on conceptual and empirical research evidence from various authors. Drawing from Garrison, Anderson and Archer’s Community of Inquiry framework for online education, it presents key elements that relate to the formational training of theology students. The article examines research that both supports and cautions against online learning for formative development. It concludes by suggesting a blended model of both face-to-face and online learning, where meaningful interactions between the learner and teacher take place, is desirable. The article highlights the important role that DE can play in developing the human component of education. (shrink)

While Continental thought has no shortage of criticism and diagnosis of social, political, and ethical issues, it tends to avoid offering guidance on what to do about such issues. In Reconsidering the Life of Power, Garrison argues for a radical new alternative for the Continental tradition: it ought to stage an encounter with the Confucian tradition. This is because, he argues, both traditions have at the center of their political thought a focus on the social formation of subjects, that (...) is, the process of subjectivation. While Continental thought often takes this process to empty the subject of all but nominal forms of autonomy, the Confucian tradition sees subjectivation as the very source of real human autonomy. This paper explores one such possible encounter by synthesizing Deleuze’s account of individuation with the constructivist reading of Xunzi’s view that artifice is the source of human autonomy and virtue. Ultimately, I argue that coupling Deleuze’s defense of the possibility of the New with Xunzi’s transformational account of human nature provides an understanding of subjectivation that is optimistic about the shaping of human autonomy as well as practical guidance for how to do so. (shrink)

Two essays on utilitarianism, written from opposite points of view, by J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams. In the first part of the book Professor Smart advocates a modern and sophisticated version of classical utilitarianism; he tries to formulate a consistent and persuasive elaboration of the doctrine that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined solely by their consequences, and in particular their consequences for the sum total of human happiness. In Part II Bernard Williams offers a sustained (...) and vigorous critique of utilitarian assumptions, arguments and ideals. He finds inadequate the theory of action implied by utilitarianism, and he argues that utilitarianism fails to engage at a serious level with the real problems of moral and political philosophy, and fails to make sense of notions such as integrity, or even human happiness itself. This book should be of interest to welfare economists, political scientists and decision-theorists. (shrink)