Background: Little is known about what factors may contribute to the growth of a consultation service or how a practice may change or evolve across time. Methods: This study examines data collected from a busy ethics consultation service over a period of more than two decades. Results: We report a number of longitudinal findings that represent significant growth in the volume of ethics consultation requests from 19 in 1990 to 551 in 2013, as well as important changes in the patient (...) population for which ethics help is requested. The findings include (1) a steady growth in requests from primary care providers (e.g., physicians and nurses), as well as increases in ancillary services (e.g., social workers); (2) a decrease in length of stay (days) before ethics help is requested; (3) an increase in the reasons that individuals ask for help from ethics; (4) an upsurge in consults requests from areas outside the intensive care unit (ICU); (5) a decrease in patients that died during hospitalization (e.g., live discharges); and (6) growth in the numbers of patients lacking decision-making capacity. Conclusions: We believe the increases in consult requests reflect appropriate and necessary growth because recent consultations have also been associated with consultations requiring (7) additional interventions and (8) reasonably high time intensity scores. (shrink)

The article presents so-called “derivational” theory of legal interpretation and analyzes its basic assumptions. The derivational theory of legal interpretation is still little known outside of Poland. The article is divided into two parts. The first part is presenting the normative model of legal interpretation according to the derivational theory. In the second part, the basic assumptions and features of the theory are analysed in context of some other approaches to legal interpretation. The author argues that there are two levels (...) of the derivational theory: local and universal. The local level of theory is related to the fact that it was designed for Polish legal system and legal culture. However, beyond its local features, the derivational theory is presenting strong theoretical framework and some significant universal ideas about legal interpretation. This creates universal level that can be called the “hard core” of the theory. The author characterizes the elements of this hard core, and in particular the most important element: the idea that the legal interpretation consists in the reconstruction of legal norms from legal provisions. (shrink)

Herbert Spencer is one of the most distinguished representatives of Nineteenth-Century liberalism. Originality of his doctrine is based on combined concepts of social evolutionism with postulates of conservative liberalism. Ethics of an individual were the conceptual point of his philosophical reflection. Thus he believed that a free market economy is the economic foundation of ethical and material development of every individual. Material development may be summarized as achieving ever improving results of performed actions. According to Spencer, the free market critically (...) assesses the quality of goods through increasing demand for goods of better quality. In this manner effective producers develop, because they achieve greater gain from their work. Moral development of an individual is in turn focused on continuous self-improvement. Through developing his skills a man increases the quality of actions carried out by him or of objects that he creates. The “law of equal freedom” – also described by Spencer – is in direct connection with the aforementioned issues. This rule states that every man has the right to do anything, as long as his actions do not infringe upon the freedom of another man which is defined in exactly the same manner. Thus the law of equal freedom can be characterized as a negative freedom if juxtaposed with relations that occur between individuals themselves or between individuals and the state. Combining of ethical and economic topics leads to the presentation of inhibitions that, according to Spencer, should be placed upon the activity of the State in the field of economy. Spencer believed that the State should not interfere with the economy, since all individuals should be granted full freedom of participating in comply with their own interests. (shrink)

We show that the Axiom of Countable Choice is necessary and sufficient to prove that the existence of a Borel measure on a pseudometric space such that the measure of open balls is positive and finite implies separability of the space. In this way a negative answer to an open problem formulated in Górka (Am Math Mon 128:84–86, 2020) is given. Moreover, we study existence of maximal $$\delta $$ δ -separated sets in metric and pseudometric spaces from the point (...) of view the Axiom of Choice and its weaker forms. (shrink)

The history of political transformation in Poland is an uninterrupted process of forming identifications along party lines, as well as of the political milieus’ searching, for a response to the question regarding the location of their own subjective space within the wider political sphere. It is worthwhile, when we discuss this, to ask whether the building up of a party’s identity is dictated by ideological and programmatic reasons or whether it is an incidental matter. The values and beliefs concealed in (...) the 80s, when the opposition belonged to the underground, have been permanently inscribed into the Polish political landscape. A group of doctrines which served as a component in the build-up of party identity may be perceived. The religious and national values, as well as the historical and cultural issues, which emerged into the daylight, may be treated as the embryo of certain ideas, which in time, as a result of public debates, have become fundamental determinants of many political parties. (shrink)

(2013). Evolutionary modules and Bayesian facilitation: The role of general cognitive resources. Thinking & Reasoning: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 27-53. doi: 10.1080/13546783.2012.713177.

Traductor: Jesús María Ayuso Díez. Ediciones Sígueme, Salamanca, 2019.

Certainly principles of criminal liability may be understood as rules or norms outlining orders or prohibitions and standing out among other norms with their weight, for legal culture, legal doctrine, etc. In such a classic approach they are norms defining basic rights and obligations in the applicable criminal law. However, is it the only possible and cognitively interesting meaning of the word “principle” in jurisprudence? From the semiotic point of view, they can occur in three forms: special-kind norms, teleological directives, (...) rules which constitute valid performance of conventional activities. In an extra-directival sense these principles may be understood as models-descriptions of shaping the system of criminal law. From a theoretical and practical point of view principles addressed to the legislator are extremely weighty—they can be called rules constructing the system of criminal liability. These all problems are discussed in the article. (shrink)

Number processing abilities are important for academic and personal development. The course of initial specialization of ventral occipito-temporal cortex sensitivity to visual number processing is crucial for the acquisition of numeric and arithmetic skills. We examined the visual N1, the electrophysiological correlate of vOTC activation across five time points in kindergarten, middle and end of first grade, second grade, and fifth grade. A combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal EEG data of a total of 62 children at varying familial risk for (...) dyslexia were available to form groups of 23, 22, 27, 27, and 42 participants for each of the five time points. The children performed a target detection task which included visual presentation of single digits, false fonts, and letters to derive measures for coarse and fine digit sensitive processing across development. The N1 amplitude analyses indicated coarse and fine sensitivity characterized by a stronger N1 to digits than false fonts across all five time points, and stronger N1 to digits than letters at all but the second time point. In addition, lower arithmetic skills were associated with stronger coarse N1 digit sensitivity over the left hemisphere in second grade, possibly reflecting allocation of more attentional resources or stronger reliance on the verbal system in children with poorer arithmetic skills. To summarize, our results show persistent visual N1 sensitivity to digits that is already present early on in pre-school and remains stable until fifth grade. This pattern of digit sensitivity development clearly differs from the relatively sharp rise and fall of the visual N1 sensitivity to words or letters between kindergarten and middle of elementary school and suggests unique developmental trajectories for visual processing of written characters that are relevant to numeracy and literacy. (shrink)

In the Introduction to the Polish-language version of the present book I expressed the hope that Polish studies in semiotics would before long be numerous enough to make possible another anthology on semiotics in Poland containing material published since 1970. That hope has in fact come true. The fact that semiotic research has been gaining momentum in this country is reflected in the growing interest in the discipline, in expanding international contacts, and in the steady increase in the number of (...) publications. Thus, 1972 saw the setting up of the Department of Logical Semiotics, headed by the present writer, at Warsaw University Institute of Phi losophy. The seminar on semiotics, which I started in 1961, had met more than two hundred times by the end of 1976; since 1968, meetings have been held jointly with the Polish Semiotic Society. Another semi nar, confined to university staff and concerned with logical semiotics, which was inithted in 1970, had met more than fifty times by the end of 1976. The former seminar often plays host to foreign visiting pro fessors; so far scholars from Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, the German Democratic Republic, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, and the United States have attended. (shrink)

A proposal by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) to identify individuals who are qualified to perform ethics consultations neglects case complexity in candidates’ portfolios. To protect patients and healthcare organizations, and to be fair to candidates, a minimum case complexity level must be clearly and publicly articulated. This proof-of-concept study supports the feasibility of assessing case complexity. Using text analytics, we developed a complexity scoring system, and retrospectively analyzed more than 500 ethics summaries of consults performed at (...) an academic medical center during 2013. We demonstrate its use with seven case summaries that range in complexity from uncomplicated to very complicated. We encourage the ASBH to require a minimum level of case complexity, and recommend that attestation portfolios include several cases of moderate complexity and at least one very complex case. (shrink)

We performed an EEG graph analysis on data from 31 typical readers and 24 dyslexics, recorded while they were engaged in an audiovisual task and during resting-state. The task simulates reading acquisition as participants learned new letter-sound mappings via feedback. EEG data was filtered for the delta, theta, alpha, and beta bands. We computed the Phase Lag Index to provide an estimate of the functional connectivity between all pairs of electrodes per band. Then, networks were constructed using a Minimum Spanning (...) Tree, a unique sub-graph connecting all nodes without loops, aimed at minimizing bias in between groups and conditions comparisons. Both groups showed a comparable accuracy increase during task blocks, indicating that they correctly learned the new associations. The EEG results revealed lower task-specific theta connectivity, and lower theta degree correlation over both rest and task recordings, indicating less network integration in dyslexics compared to typical readers. This pattern suggests a role of theta oscillations in dyslexia and may reflect differences in task engagement between the groups, although robust correlations between MST metrics and performance indices were lacking. (shrink)

The neural basis of developmental changes in transitive reasoning in parietal regions was examined, using voxel-based morphometry. Young adolescents and adults performed a transitive reasoning task, subsequent to undergoing anatomical magnetic resonance imaging brain scans. Behaviorally, adults reasoned more accurately than did the young adolescents. Neural results showed less grey matter density in superior parietal cortex in the adults than in the young adolescents, possibly due to a developmental period of synaptic pruning; improved performance in the reasoning task was negatively (...) correlated with grey matter density in superior parietal cortex in the adolescents, but not in the adult group; and the latter results were driven by the more difficult trials, requiring greater spatial manipulation. Taken together, the results support the idea that during development, regions in superior parietal cortex are fine-tuned, to support more robust spatial manipulation, resulting in gre... (shrink)