Pharmaceutical companies routinely engage physicians, particularly those with prestigious academic credentials, to deliver “educational” talks to groups of physicians in the community to help market the company's brand-name drugs.Although presented as educational, and even though they provide educational content, these events are intended to influence decisions about drug selection in ways that are not based on the suitability and effectiveness of the product, but on the prestige and persuasiveness of the speaker. A number of state legislatures and most academic medical (...) centers have attempted to restrict physician participation in pharmaceutical marketing activities, though most restrictions are not absolute and have proven difficult to enforce. This article reviews the literature on why Speakers' Bureaus have become a lightning rod for academic/industry conflicts of interest and examines the arguments of those who defend physician participation. It considers whether the restrictions on Speakers' Bureaus are consistent with principles of academic freedom and concludes with the legal and institutional efforts to manage industry speaking. (shrink)

Pharmaceutical companies routinely engage physicians, particularly those with prestigious academic credentials, to deliver educational talks to groups of physicians in the community to help market the company's brand-name drugs. These speakers receive substantial compensation to lecture at events sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, a practice that has garnered attention, controversy, and scrutiny in recent years from legislators, professional associations, researchers, and ethicists on the issue of whether it is appropriate for academic physicians to serve in a promotional role. These relationships have (...) become so contentious that three years ago the pharmaceutical industry trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, adopted voluntary guidelines stating that drug companies should stop giving doctors free pens, calendars, sports bags, or tickets to entertainment events. Further, numerous medical associations, such as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Board of Internal Medicine and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, and government bodies such as the Institute of Medicine have recommended that medical schools and teaching hospitals prohibit or strongly discourage faculty from participating in so-called industry Speakers Bureaus — promotional events designed solely to market pharmaceutical products. (shrink)

To a great extent, Kant more than Tolstoy influenced twentieth-century aesthetics in Eurocentric cultures. Formalist theorists insisted that disinterested apprehension of directly perceivable properties (color, rhythm, meter, balance, proportion, etc.) distinguished aesthetic experiences from all others. Kant never won the day in many non-Eurocentric cultures, however. Native Americans, for example, continued to connect aesthetic activity directly to "interested" and functional objects and events. Decriptions of objects or events as "beautiful" in most African cultures never required distinguishing "What is it for?" (...) from "How does it look?" Even in Eurocentric cultures, outside the rather narrow "mainstream" art world (professional artists, critics, curators, etc.) formalism was never wholly accepted or practiced. Attributions of beauty made by ordinary persons-on-the-street have been unabashedly affected by moral values and factual beliefs. Recognition of this has resulted in what I have elsewhere described as a "contextual turn" in aesthetics. Feminists and ethicists have contributed greatly to this turn. As the title of this symposium suggests, beauty matters (verb) and beauty matters (noun) have really never stopped being centrally important for a whole lot of reasons beyond the pleasure taken in morally and factually disinterested apprehension of form. Tolstoy thought if Kant were correct, beauty could not matter--or at least could not matter enough. His tack was to look elsewhere to explain the importance of art. but suppose we go another way and say, _but beauty does matter_. then Kant must not be correct. But just where did he go astray? (shrink)

On June 18, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court in the matter of Amgen, Inc. et al. v. Sanofi, et al.1 unanimously upheld the 2021 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit,2 striking down as overbroad Amgen’s patent claim to an entire functional genus of monoclonal antibodies. Amgen’s patent claims were not limited to antibody structure or antibody amino acid sequences. This is significant because Amgen’s patent claims did have amino acid sequences, but they were directed to (...) the epitope. (shrink)

Existe uma tensão entre Teoria e História: “[...] a poesia é mais filosófica e de caráter mais elevado que a história, porque a poesia permanece no universal e a história estuda apenas o particular” (Aristóteles, 2007, 43). Esta afirmação de Aristóteles talvez tenha sido a primeira indicação da referida tensão entre as duas formas de conhecimento: a histórica e a teórica. Na citação acima, a filosofia é a referência de um pensamento hierarquicamente superior, sendo que sua legitimação enquanto tal passa (...) pela universalidade de suas verdades. É importante salientar que a poesia nesta reflexão aristotélica é uma forma de conhecimento, embora difira da história no que concerne à matéria do conhecido: na primeira, o fato poderia ter acontecido; na segunda, aconteceu. Porque aconteceu, o fato é singular, e que poderia ter acontecido cai no âmbito do universal. Neste sentido, a chave para a compreensão da tensão entre história e teoria é a universalidade ou singularidade do conhecimento adquirido: “[...] é evidente que não compete ao poeta narrar exatamente o que aconteceu; mas sim o que poderia ter acontecido, o possível, segundo a verossimilhança ou a necessidade. O historiador e o poeta não se distinguem um do outro, pelo fato de o primeiro escrever em prosa e o segundo em verso [...]. Diferem entre si porque um escreveu o que aconteceu e o outro o que poderia ter acontecido” (Aristóteles, 2007, 43). Ao situar a história em nível menos elevado que a poesia, Aristóteles parece ter suscitado em pensadores contemporâneos a ideia da distinção entre conhecimento histórico e conhecimento teórico. O presente estudo versa sobre a natureza do conhecimento histórico e seus impasses metodológicos no uso dos referenciais teóricos necessários às suas indagações fundamentais. (shrink)

Objective: To evaluate moral development as an indicator of the capacity to consent among two groups of patients from the Hospital de Clínicas in Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.Method: Fifty-nine adolescents and 60 patients over 60 years of age participated in a cross-sectional study to assess moral development using Loevinger’s model of ego stages.Results: Age and moral development showed no association, with most participants in the two groups being in the conscientious phase.Conclusions: Age is probably not an adequate variable to measure (...) decision-making capacity, because questions of medical consent relate to participants’ own personal health. Decision-making capacity should be viewed as a continuous function. While the age of the person whose consent is needed should be considered, age alone, from a moral perspective, is not the main determinant of this capacity. (shrink)

Neurofeedback has been suggested as a potential complementary therapy to different psychiatric disorders. Of interest for this approach is the prediction of individual performance and outcomes. In this study, we applied functional connectivity-based modeling using electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) modalities to (i) investigate whether resting-state connectivity predicts performance during an affective neurofeedback task and (ii) evaluate the extent to which predictive connectivity profiles are correlated across EEG and fNIRS techniques. The fNIRS oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin concentrations and the (...) EEG beta and gamma bands modulated by the alpha frequency band (beta-m-alpha and gamma-m-alpha, respectively) recorded over the frontal cortex of healthy subjects were used to estimate functional connectivity from each neuroimaging modality. For each connectivity matrix, relevant edges were selected in a leave-one-subject-out procedure, summed into “connectivity summary scores” (CSS), and submitted as inputs to a support vector regressor (SVR). Then, the performance of the left-out-subject was predicted using the trained SVR model. Linear relationships between the CSS across both modalities were evaluated using Pearson’s correlation. The predictive model showed a mean absolute error smaller than 20%, and the fNIRS oxyhemoglobin CSS was significantly correlated with the EEG gamma-m-alpha CSS (r = −0.456, p = 0.030). These results support that pre-task electrophysiological and hemodynamic resting-state connectivity are potential predictors of neurofeedback performance and are meaningfully coupled. This investigation motivates the use of joint EEG-fNIRS connectivity as outcome predictors, as well as a tool for functional connectivity coupling investigation. (shrink)

In the first author's thesis [10], a sequential language, LRT, for real number computation is investigated. That thesis includes a proof that all polynomials are programmable, but that work comes short of giving a complete characterization of the expressive power of the language even for first-order functions. The technical problem is that LRT is non-deterministic. So a natural characterization of its expressive power should be in terms of relations rather than in terms of functions. In [2], Brattka examines a formalization (...) of recursive relations in the style of Kleene's recursive functions on the natural numbers. This paper is an expanded version of [13] which establishes the expressive power of LRTp, a variant of LRT, in terms of Brattka's recursive relations. Because Brattka already did the work of establishing the precise connection between his recursive relations and Type 2 Theory of Effectivity, we thus obtain a complete characterization of first-order definability in LRTp. (shrink)

This article surveys different philosophical theories about the nature of truth. We give much importance to truth; some demand to know it, some fear it, and others would even die for it. But what exactly is truth? What is its nature? Does it even have a nature in the first place? When do we say that some truth-bearers are true? Philosophers offer varying answers to these questions. In this article, some of these answers are explored and some of the problems (...) raised against them are presented. (shrink)

Grigorieff showed that forcing to add a subset of ω using partial functions with suitably chosen domains can add a generic real of minimal degree. We show that forcing with partial functions to add a subset of an uncountable κ without adding a real never adds a generic of minimal degree. This is in contrast to forcing using branching conditions, as shown by Brown and Groszek.

Advances in genomics have led to calls for developing population-based preventive genomic sequencing programs with the goal of identifying genetic health risks in adults without known risk factors. One critical issue for minimizing the harms and maximizing the benefits of PGS is determining the kind and degree of control individuals should have over the generation, use, and handling of their genomic information. In this article we examine whether PGS programs should offer individuals the opportunity to selectively opt out of the (...) sequencing or analysis of specific genomic conditions or whether PGS should be implemented using an all-or-nothing panel approach. We conclude that any responsible scale-up of PGS will require a menu approach that may seem impractical to some, but that draws its justification from a rich mix of normative, legal, and practical considerations. (shrink)

We show that if there is a nonconstructible real, then every perfect set has a nonconstructible element, answering a question of K. Prikry. This is a specific instance of a more general theorem giving a sufficient condition on a pair $M\subset N$ of models of set theory implying that every perfect set in N has an element in N which is not in M.

Over the last decade, numerous interventions and techniques that aim to engender, strengthen, and expand compassion have been created, proliferating an evidence base for the benefits of compassion meditation training. However, to date, little research has been conducted to examine individual variation in the learning, beliefs, practices, and subjective experiences of compassion meditation. This mixed-method study examines changes in novice meditators’ knowledge and contemplative experiences before, during, and after taking an intensive course in CBCT®, a contemplative intervention that is increasingly (...) used for both inter- and intrapersonal flourishing. The participants in this study were Christian healthcare chaplains completing a 1-year residency in Clinical Pastoral Education who learned CBCT as part of their professional chaplaincy training curriculum. Prior to and upon completion of training, we surveyed participants to assess their beliefs about the malleability of compassion, types of engagement in compassion meditation, and perceptions of the impact of taking CBCT. We also conducted in-depth interviews with a subset of participants to gain a qualitative understanding of their subjective experiences of learning and practicing compassion meditation, a key component of CBCT. We found that participants reported increases in the extent to which they believed compassion to be malleable after studying CBCT. We also found high levels of variability of individual ways of practicing and considered the implications of this for the study of contemplative learning processes. This multi-methodological approach yielded novel insights into how compassion practice and compassion-related outcomes interrelate, insights that can inform the basic scientific understanding of the experience of learning and enacting compassion meditation as a means of strengthening compassion itself. (shrink)

Aramaic in Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity. Edited by Eric M. Meyers and Paul V. Flesher. Duke Judaic Studies Series, vol. 3. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2010. Pp. xx + 300. $49.50.