James Madison wrote, 'Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob'. The contributors to this volume discuss and for the most part challenge this claim by considering conditions under which many minds can be wiser than one. With backgrounds in economics, cognitive science, political science, law and history, the authors consider information markets, the internet, jury debates, democratic deliberation and the use of diversity as mechanisms for improving collective decisions. At the same (...) time, they consider voter irrationality and paradoxes of aggregation as possibly undermining the wisdom of groups. Implicitly or explicitly, the volume also offers guidance and warnings to institutional designers. (shrink)

On April 26, 1995, the United States Supreme Court limited the reach of the preemption provision of ERISA in New York State Conference of Blue Cross & Blue Shield Plans v. Tavelers Insurance Co. ). In Travelers, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of a New York statute requiring hospitals to collect surcharges from patients covered by commercial insurers and requiring health maintenance organizations to pay a surcharge to the state's general fund that varies depending on the number of Medicaid-eligible (...) HMO members enrolled. Neither patients insured by Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans nor the plans themselves are similarly charged under the statute. Several commercial insurers and HMOs claimed the surcharges should be preempted under ERISA because they are levied on patients whose insurance or HMO membership premiums are purchased by an ERISA plan.The ERISA preemption clause means that federal regulation, or lack thereof, supersedes state regulation that is related to employee pension and benefit plans. This preemption clause prevents states from changing health care and benefit law for a significant portion of state residents. (shrink)

The problem of stability in population dynamics concerns many domains of application in demography, biology, mechanics and mathematics. The problem is highly generic and independent of the population considered (human, animals, molecules,…). We give in this paper some examples of population dynamics concerning nucleic acids interacting through direct nucleic binding with small or cyclic RNAs acting on mRNAs or tRNAs as translation factors or through protein complexes expressed by genes and linked to DNA as transcription factors. The networks made of (...) these interactions between nucleic acids (considered respectively as edges and nodes of their interaction graph) are complex, but exhibit simple emergent asymptotic behaviours, when time tends to infinity, called attractors. We show that the quantity called attractor entropy plays a crucial role in the study of the stability and robustness of such genetic networks. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Vaccine hesitancy continues to pose a formidable obstacle to increasing national COVID-19 vaccination rates in the US, but this is not the first time that American vaccination efforts have confronted resistance and apathy. This study examines the history of US vaccination efforts against smallpox, polio, and measles, highlighting persistent drivers of vaccine hesitancy as well as factors that helped overcome it. The research reveals that logistical barriers, negative portrayals in the media, and fears about safety stymied inoculation efforts as early (...) as the 18th century and continue to do so. However, vaccine hesitancy has been markedly diminished when trusted community leaders have guided efforts, when ordinary citizens have felt personally invested in the success of the vaccine, and when vaccination efforts have been tied to broader projects to improve public health and social cohesion. Deliberately cultivating such factors could be an effective strategy for lessening opposition today, when COVID-19's distinctive characteristics make addressing vaccine hesitancy more urgent than it has ever been. (shrink)

There are doubtless many with personal experience of suffering, or of comforting others in distress, who would agree with Milton thus far that philosophic argument is powerless to satisfy those who in their anguish ask the question ‘Why did it happen to me?’ Yet to think so is to underestimate both the necessity and the power of reason: clarity of mind and the disposition to argue are commonly enhanced rather than diminished by suffering; and if reason is an essential part (...) of man's nature, it should serve him, if anywhere, in the trials of life. We have every justification, therefore, despite common opinion, for seeking a rational answer to the question proposed. It must, however, be admitted at the outset that there is no direct answer to the question which can both withstand critical scrutiny and bring genuine comfort to the afflicted, an answer, that is, which accepts the question as it stands with its attendant presuppositions; but there is an indirect answer, which, precisely by rejecting one or more of these presuppositions and restating the question, can indeed satisfy these two requirements. Before such an answer can be outlined, however, the question in its traditional form must be examined and the traditional answers to it critically reviewed. (shrink)

This work extend to residuated lattices the results of [7]. It also provides a possible generalization to this context of frontal operators in the sense of [9].Let L be a residuated lattice, and f : Lk → L a function. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for f to be compatible with respect to every congruence on L. We use this characterization of compatible functions in order to prove that the variety of residuated lattices is locally affine complete.We study (...) some compatible functions on residuated lattices which are a generalization of frontal operators. We also give conditions for two operations P(x, y) and Q(x, y) on a residuated lattice L which imply that the function \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${x \mapsto min\{y \in L : P(x, y) \leq Q(x, y)\}}$$\end{document} when defined, is equational and compatible. Finally we discuss the affine completeness of residuated lattices equipped with some additional operators. (shrink)

Harris levels two main criticisms against our original defence of QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years). First, he rejects the assumption implicit in the QALY approach that not all lives are of equal value. Second, he rejects our appeal to Rawls's veil of ignorance test in support of the QALY method. In the present article we defend QALYs against Harris's criticisms. We argue that some of the conclusions Harris draws from our view that resources should be allocated on the basis of (...) potential improvements in quality of life and quantity of life are erroneous, and that others lack the moral implications Harris claims for them. On the other hand, we defend our claim that a rational egoist, behind a veil of ignorance, could consistently choose to allocate life-saving resources in accordance with the QALY method, despite Harris's claim that a rational egoist would allocate randomly if there is no better than a 50% chance of being the recipient. (shrink)

The legal basis of informed consent in Texas may on first examination suggest an unqualified affirmation of persons as the source of authority over themselves. This view of individuals in the practice of informed consent tends to present persons outside of any social context in general and outside of their families in particular. The actual functioning of law and medical practice in Texas, however, is far more complex. This study begins with a brief overview of the roots of Texas law (...) and public policy regarding informed consent. This surface account is then contrasted with examples drawn from the actual functioning of Texas law: Texas legislation regarding out-of-hospital do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders. As a default approach to medical decision-making when patients lose decisional capacity and have failed to appoint a formal proxy or establish their wishes, this law establishes a defeasible presumption in favor of what the law characterizes as “qualified relatives” who can function as decision-makers for those terminal family members who lose decisional capacity. The study shows how, in the face of a general affirmation of the autonomy of individuals as if they were morally and socially isolated agents, space is nevertheless made for families to choose on behalf of their own members. The result is a multi-tier public morality, one affirming individuals as morally authoritative and the other recognizing the decisional standing of families. (shrink)

The use of the Quality Adjusted Life-Year (QALY) as a measure of the benefit obtained from health care expenditure has been attacked on the ground that it gives a lower value to preserving the lives of people with a permanent disability or illness than to preserving the lives of those who are healthy and not disabled. The reason for this is that the quality of life of those with illness or disability is ranked, on the QALY scale, below that of (...) someone without a disability or illness. Hence we can, other things being equal, gain more QALYs by saving the lives of those without a permanent disability or illness than by saving the lives of those who are disadvantaged in these ways. But to do so puts these disadvantaged people under a kind of double jeopardy. Not only do they suffer from the disability or illness, but because of it, a low priority is given to forms of health care that can preserve their lives. This, so the objection runs, is unjust or unfair. This article assesses this objection to the use of QALYs as a basis for allocating health care resources. It seeks to determine what is sound in the double jeopardy objection, and then to show that the defender of QALYs has an adequate response to it. (shrink)

BackgroundResuscitation and treatment of critically ill newborn infants is associated with relatively high mortality, morbidity and cost. Guidelines relating to resuscitation have traditionally focused on the best interests of infants. There are, however, limited resources available in the neonatal intensive care unit, meaning that difficult decisions sometimes need to be made. This study explores the intuitions of lay people regarding resource allocation decisions in the NICU.MethodsThe study design was a cross-sectional quantitative survey, consisting of 20 hypothetical rationing scenarios. There were (...) 119 respondents who entered the questionnaire, and 109 who completed it. The respondents were adult US and Indian participants of the online crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk. Respondents were asked to decide which of two infants to treat in a situation of scarce resources. Demographic characteristics, personality traits and political views were recorded. Respondents were also asked to respond to a widely cited thought experiment involving rationing.ResultsThe majority of respondents, in all except one scenario, chose the utilitarian option of directing treatment to the infant with the higher chance of survival, higher life expectancy, less severe disability, and less expensive treatment. As discrepancy between outcomes decreased, however, there was a statistically significant increase in egalitarian responses and decrease in utilitarian responses in scenarios involving chance of survival, life expectancy, and cost of treatment. In the classic ‘lifeboat’ scenario, all but two respondents were utilitarian.ConclusionsThis survey suggests that in situations of scarcity and equal clinical need, non-health professionals support rationing of life-saving treatment based on probability of survival, duration of survival, cost of treatment or quality of life. However, where the difference in prognosis or cost is very small, non-health professionals preferred to give infants an equal chance of receiving treatment. (shrink)

While in the research area known,as ’philosophy of science' there is a growing interest in separate disciplines of the empirical sciences, applied sciences and even technologies, one can find hardly any reference to the discipline of chemistry other than some preliminary discussions of chemical concepts or studies concerning the rational reconstruction of the history of chemistry. No analyses, which might be called 'philosophy of chemistry’ can be found to date. It is hoped that this review paper on what has been (...) published on the philosophy of chemistry will show that chemistry is a philosophically rich field. After an introduction, in section 2, a more detailed classification is given of the various areas from which a (marginal) interest in the philosophy of chemistry has emerged.In section 3 there is a review of the opinions on the subject matter of chemistry, be it straightforward definition or indications of the relation to other natural sciences, in particular physics. In section 4 publications on the philosophy of chemistry are reviewed which fit the conventional format of the philosophy of science (discussing laws, theories,explanations, models). In section 5 some of the literature on the concept of chemical species is reviewed. In section 6 and 7 a review of the literature on the concepts of chemical structure and chemical reactions is presented. (shrink)

We review the history of the road to a manifestly covariant perturbative calculus within quantum electrodynamics from the early semi-classical results of the mid-twenties to the complete formalism of Stueckelberg in 1934. We choose as our case study the calculation of the cross-section of the Compton effect. We analyse Stueckelberg's paper extensively. This is our first contribution to a study of his fundamental contributions to the theoretical physics of the twentieth century.

PREFACE The author has ventured into a topic which is delicate and under researched by South African intellectuals and scholars. ...

A user-friendly textbook for students and teachers, The Philosophy of Public Administration covers all aspects of the public administration and management process as an instrument of serving the public. It lays a sound foundation of the basic principles and values, and it facilitates excellence in all the varied circumstances a professional public manager/administrator may encounter in practice. An MS PowerPoint presentation is also available on CD-ROM for instruction.