In the aftermath of World War II, the government of the United States provided considerable funding for military projects that promised to provide a technological edge during the nascent Cold War. The most famous example is likely the V-2 rocket-testing program that began in the late 1940s. The 67 rockets launched from White Sands developed a knowledge base that was critically important to the launch of the first U.S. satellite in 1958 and to the subsequent manned space program. Less well (...) known are the large-scale information technology projects, undertaken in the 1950s and early 1960s, that provided a significant catalyst for research into digital computing, information processing, and the. (shrink)

Various cell types cooperate to create a highly organized and dynamic micro-environmental niche in the bone marrow. Over the past several years, the field has increasingly recognized the critical roles of the interplay between bone marrow environment and hematopoietic cells in normal and deranged hematopoiesis. These advances rely on several new technologies that have allowed us to characterize the identity and roles of these niches in great detail. Here, we review the progress of the last several years, list some of (...) the outstanding questions in the field and propose ways to target the diseased environment to better treat hematologic diseases. Understanding the extrinsic regulation by the niche will help boost hematopoiesis for regenerative medicine. Based on natural development of hematologic malignancies, we propose that combinatory targeting the niche and hematopoietic intrinsic mechanisms in early stages of hematopoietic malignancies may help eliminate minimal residual disease and have the highest efficacy. The bone marrow is the home for blood-forming hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. Normal generation of blood and immune cells depends on highly regulated interactions between these stem and progenitor cells with their surrounding environment. Emerging evidence suggests that therapeutic interventions directed at these cellular interdependencies can help boost hematopoiesis and eradicate malignant hematopoietic cells. (shrink)

Since the Nuremberg trials (1947–1949), informed consent has become central for ethical practice in patient care and biomedical research. Codes of ethics emanating from the Nuremberg Code (1947) recognize the importance of protecting patients and research subjects from abuses, manipulation and deception. Informed consent empowers individuals to autonomously and voluntarily accept or reject participation in either clinical treatment or research. In some cases, however, the underlying mental or physical condition of the individual may alter his or her cognitive abilities and (...) compromise the informed consent process. This is particularly true in chronic psychiatric conditions such as Treatment-Resistant Depression (TRD), where individuals may fail to respond to traditional antidepressant treatments (e.g., psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy). Moreover, it may raise further concerns for an individual’s motivation to consent and the level of understanding of the treatment or research procedure. This paper focuses on the informed consent process for Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) in the treatment of individuals diagnosed with TRD. Specifically, the paper addresses how depression may affect the decision-making capacity of an individual and the potential ethical and legal impact of failure to appreciate the seven elements of the consenting process (competence, voluntariness, disclosure, recommendation, understanding, decision, and authorization). To ensure the protection of vulnerable individuals with psychiatric disorders such as TRD and promote ethical behavior in biomedical research and patient care while avoiding potential legal pitfalls, we propose a paradigm that requires a stringent evaluation process of decision-making capacity for informed consent. (shrink)

Linear chromosomes shorten in every round of replication. In Drosophila, telomere‐specialized long interspersed retrotransposable elements (LINEs) belonging to the jockey clade offset this shortening by forming head‐to‐tail arrays at Drosophila telomere ends. As such, these telomeric LINEs have been considered adaptive symbionts of the genome, protecting it from premature decay, particularly as Drosophila lacks a conventional telomerase holoenzyme. However, as reviewed here, recent work reveals a high degree of variation and turnover in the telomere‐specialized LINE lineages across Drosophila. There appears (...) to be no absolute requirement for LINE activity to maintain telomeres in flies, hence the suggestion that the telomere‐specialized LINEs may instead be neutral or in conflict with the host, rather than adaptive. (shrink)

Whole–exome sequencing (WES) has increased our ability to analyze large parts of the human genome, bringing with it a plethora of ethical, legal, and social implications. A topic dominating discussion of WES is identification of “secondary findings” (SFs), defined as the identification of risk in an asymptomatic individual unrelated to the indication for the test. SFs can have considerable psychosocial impact on patients and families, and patients with an SF may have concerns regarding genomic privacy and genetic discrimination. The Genetic (...) Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) currently excludes protections for members of the military. This may cause concern in military members and families regarding genetic discrimination when considering genetic testing. In this report, we discuss a case involving a patient and family in which a secondary finding was discovered by WES. The family members have careers in the U.S. military, and a risk–predisposing condition could negatively affect employment. While beneficial medical management changes were made, the information placed exceptional stress on the family, who were forced to navigate career–sensitive “extra–medical” issues, to consider the impacts of uncovering risk–predisposition, and to manage the privacy of their genetic information. We highlight how information obtained from WES may collide with these issues and emphasize the importance of genetic counseling for anyone undergoing WES. (shrink)

This article describes the development and validation of a scale specifically designed to measure one's propensity for Objectivism. The scale developed in this article assesses metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. A three-stage process of scale development results in a multidimensional scale that largely supports Rand's original conception of the construct in the United States and Lithuania. Several challenges are identified, including problems with select items referencing specific political preferences and addressing notions of a higher being. Prospects for future research are (...) identified, including tests for associations between Objectivism and individual factors such as leadership style, organizational commitment, and job performance. (shrink)

Open‐ended tasks can be decomposed into the three levels of Newell's Cognitive Band: the Unit‐Task level, the Operation level, and the Deliberate‐Act level. We analyzed the video game Co‐op Space Fortress at these levels, reporting both the match of a cognitive model to subject behavior and the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) to track subject cognition. The Unit Task level in this game involves coordinating with a partner to kill a fortress. At this highest level of the Cognitive Band, there is (...) a good match between subject behavior and the model. The EEG signals were also strong enough to track when Unit Tasks succeeded or failed. The intermediate Operation level in this task involves legs of flight to achieve a kill. The EEG signals associated with these operations are much weaker than the signals associated with the Unit Tasks. Still, it was possible to reconstruct subject play with much better than chance success. There were significant differences in the leg behavior of subjects and models. Model behavior did not provide a good basis for interpreting a subject's behavior at this level. At the lowest Deliberate‐Act level, we observed overlapping key actions, which the model did not display. Such overlapping key actions also frustrated efforts to identify EEG signals of motor actions. We conclude that the Unit‐task level is the appropriate level both for understanding open‐ended tasks and for using EEG to track the performance of open‐ended tasks. (shrink)

BackgroundAs a number of commentators have noted, SARS exposed the vulnerabilities of our health care systems and governance structures. Health care professionals (HCPs) and hospital systems that bore the brunt of the SARS outbreak continue to struggle with the aftermath of the crisis. Indeed, HCPs – both in clinical care and in public health – were severely tested by SARS. Unprecedented demands were placed on their skills and expertise, and their personal commitment to their profession was severely tried. Many were (...) exposed to serious risk of morbidity and mortality, as evidenced by the World Health Organization figures showing that approximately 30% of reported cases were among HCPs, some of whom died from the infection. Despite this challenge, professional codes of ethics are silent on the issue of duty to care during communicable disease outbreaks, thus providing no guidance on what is expected of HCPs or how they ought to approach their duty to care in the face of risk.DiscussionIn the aftermath of SARS and with the spectre of a pandemic avian influenza, it is imperative that we (re)consider the obligations of HCPs for patients with severe infectious diseases, particularly diseases that pose risks to those providing care. It is of pressing importance that organizations representing HCPs give clear indication of what standard of care is expected of their members in the event of a pandemic. In this paper, we address the issue of special obligations of HCPs during an infectious disease outbreak. We argue that there is a pressing need to clarify the rights and responsibilities of HCPs in the current context of pandemic flu preparedness, and that these rights and responsibilities ought to be codified in professional codes of ethics. Finally, we present a brief historical accounting of the treatment of the duty to care in professional health care codes of ethics.SummaryAn honest and critical examination of the role of HCPs during communicable disease outbreaks is needed in order to provide guidelines regarding professional rights and responsibilities, as well as ethical duties and obligations. With this paper, we hope to open the social dialogue and advance the public debate on this increasingly urgent issue. (shrink)

We studied collaborative skill acquisition in a dynamic setting with the game Co-op Space Fortress. While gaining expertise, the majority of subjects became increasingly consistent in the role they adopted without being able to communicate. Moreover, they acted in anticipation of the future task state. We constructed a collaborative skill acquisition model in the cognitive architecture ACT-R that reproduced subject skill acquisition trajectory. It modeled role adoption through reinforcement learning and predictive processes through motion extrapolation and learned relevant control parameters (...) using both a reinforcement learning procedure and a new to ACT-R supervised learning procedure. This is the first integrated cognitive model of collaborative skill acquisition and, as such, gives us valuable insights into the multiple cognitive processes that are involved in learning to collaborate. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers who pose moral dilemmas to understand moral judgment typically specify outcomes as certain to occur in them. This contrasts with real-life moral decision-making, which is almost always infused with probabilities (e.g., the probability of a given outcome if an action is or is not taken). Seven studies examine sensitivity to the size and location of shifts in probabilities of outcomes that would result from action in moral dilemmas. We find that moral judgments differ between actions that result (...) in an equal increase in probability of harm (equal size), but have different end-states (e.g., an increase in harm probability from 25% to 50% or from 50% to 75%). This deviation from expected value is robust under separate evaluation, and increases when the comparison between shifts is made explicit under simultaneous evaluation. Consistent with the centrality of perceived harm in some models of moral judgment, perceived harm partially mediates sensitivity to location of harm probability shift. Unlike for shifts in harm probabilities, participants are insensitive to the location of shifts in probability of beneficial outcomes. They are also insensitive to the location of shifts in probability of analogous monetary losses and gains, suggesting an asymmetry between harm and benefit in moral reasoning, as well as an asymmetry between moral and monetary decision-making more broadly. Implications for normative philosophical theory and moral psychological theory, as well as practical applications, are discussed. (shrink)

Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

Testosterone fluctuates in response to competitive social interactions, with the direction of change typically depending on factors such as contest outcome. Watching a competition may be sufficient to activate T among fans and others who are invested in the outcome. This study explores the change in T associated with vicarious experiences of competition among combat sport athletes viewing a teammate win or lose and assesses how individual differences in social identification with one’s team relates to these patterns of T reactivity. (...) Twenty-six male combat athletes completed a social identity questionnaire on a neutral day. Later, salivary samples were obtained before and after athletes viewed a video of a teammate engaged in a formal contest. T reactivity to viewing a teammate compete varied among participants in both the magnitude and direction of change, independent of contest outcome. Individual differences in cognitive centrality, a core feature of social identification, showed a strong positive relationship with T reactivity, particularly if their teammate won. Initial findings suggest that dominance-linked androgen responses associated with watching a teammate win a competition might depend on the belief that team membership is central to one’s own identity. These exploratory results in a small sample of combat athletes should be interpreted with caution. Uncovering the role of social group dynamics in influencing T responses to competition is particularly important in light of the evolutionary history of coalitional combat in humans. (shrink)

In this author-meets-critics dialogue, Sanjay Lal, author of, argues that Gandhian values of nonviolence raise aspirations of liberal democracy to a higher level. Since Gandhian values of nonviolence are closely associated with religious values, liberal democracy should make public commitments to religions on a non-sectarian basis, except for unreasonable religions. Critic Jeff Shawn Jose agrees that Gandhian values can strengthen liberal democracy. However, Jose finds a contradiction in Lal’s proposal that a liberal state should support reasonable religions only. A (...) more consistent Gandhian approach would focus on everyday interactions between citizens and groups rather than state-directed preferences. Critic Douglas Allen also welcomes Lal’s project that brings Gandhian philosophy into relation with liberal democratic theory; however, he argues that universalizing the Absolute Truth of genuine religion is more complicated than Lal acknowledges. D. Allen argues for a Gandhian approach of relative truths, which cannot be evaluated apart from contingency or context, and he offers autobiographical evidence in support of his critical suspicion of genuine religion. Critic Michael Allen argues that Lal’s metaphysical approach to public justification violates a central commitment of political liberalism not to take sides on any metaphysical basis. M. Allen argues that democratic socialism is closer to Gandhi’s approach than is liberalism. Lal responds to critics by arguing that Gandhi’s evaluation of unreasonable religions depends upon an assessment of violence, which is not as problematic as critics charge, either from a Gandhian perspective or a liberal one. Furthermore, by excluding unreasonable or violent religions from state promotion, Lal argues that he is not advocating state suppression. Finally, Lal argues that Gandhian or Kingian metaphysics are worthy of support by liberal, democratic states seeking to educate individuals regarding peaceful unity in diversity. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis review essay of Shawn Loht’s new book, Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience, not only offers an ontological reading of the filmic experience inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy but also contributes substantially to the ongoing debate of whether or not film is a medium that is legitimately philosophical. In addition to confronting unique ideas about film that emerge from Loht’s analysis of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology of Dasein, including a reading of later Heidegger of the “Turn,” (...) this essay also seeks to think with and then beyond Loht in a way that might inspire readers to further pursue these issues in relation to a potentially reconceived understanding of the practice of film-as-philosophy. (shrink)

This is a philosophical rumination on Shawn Loht’s important extension of “film as philosophy” into a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the philosophical response that cinema can engender. After considering the importance of these kinds of approaches, I turn to Loht’s phenomenological engagement with Terrence Malick’s early masterpiece, Days of Heaven (1978). After sympathetically reviewing his “interpretation”, I expand upon its delineation of “earth and world” to include the “fallenness” of the world as well as the possibility of a metanōetic (...) awakening to the vocation of “mud doctor”, that is, to heal the rift between earth and world, a rift made more exigent by world war, economic exploitation, and the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

11We thank Rohan French for a detailed discussion of this review. We also wish to reciprocally thank Shawn Standefer for detailed discussions about the book.Logical pluralism is the view according...

11We thank Rohan French for a detailed discussion of this review. We also wish to reciprocally thank Shawn Standefer for detailed discussions about the book.Logical pluralism is the view according...

This new translation of Leibniz's long-neglected magnum opus is eminently readable. As such it is likely to replace the Langley translation as the standard English version. Hopefully it will attract to this philosophic classic the attention it so richly merits--on its own account, because of its impact on Kant, and its continued service as a generative source of much of the European philosophic tradition of thought.

We present an extension of the basic revision theory of circular definitions with a unary operator, □. We present a Fitch-style proof system that is sound and complete with respect to the extended semantics. The logic of the box gives rise to a simple modal logic, and we relate provability in the extended proof system to this modal logic via a completeness theorem, using interpretations over circular definitions, analogous to Solovay’s completeness theorem forGLusing arithmetical interpretations. We adapt our proof to (...) a special class of circular definitions as well as to the first-order case. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the (...) view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore. (shrink)

This paper examines the task of understanding dialogues in terms of the mental states of the participating agents. We present a motivating example that clarifies the challenges this problem involves and then outline a theory of dialogue interpretation based on abductive inference of these unobserved beliefs and goals, incremental construction of explanations, and reliance on domain-independent knowledge. After this, we describe UMBRA, an implementation of the theory that embodies these assumptions. We report experiments with the system that demonstrate its ability (...) to accurately infer the conversants’ mental states even when some speech acts are unavailable. We conclude by reviewing related research on dialogue and discussing avenues for future study. (shrink)

Various theorists have endorsed the “communication argument”: communicative capacities are necessary for morally responsible agency because blame aims at a distinctive kind of moral communication. I contend that existing versions of the argument, including those defended by Gary Watson and Coleen Macnamara, face a pluralist challenge: they do not seem to sit well with the plausible view that blame has multiple aims. I then examine three possible rejoinders to the challenge, suggesting that a context-specific, function-based approach constitutes the most promising (...) modification of the communication argument. (shrink)

Gilroy and Wade wrote 20 years ago that every policy presupposes an underlying moral argument that justifies it. This claim is now rarely contested: policy making is an inescapably moral enterprise...

In classically based modal logic, there are three common conceptions of necessity, the universal conception, the equivalence relation conception, and the axiomatic conception. They provide distinct presentations of the modal logic S5, all of which coincide in the basic modal language. We explore these different conceptions in the context of the relevant logic R, demonstrating where they come apart. This reveals that there are many options for being an S5-ish extension of R. It further reveals a divide between the universal (...) conception of necessity on the one hand, and the axiomatic conception on the other: The latter is consistent with motivations for relevant logics while the former is not. For the committed relevant logician, necessity cannot be the truth in all possible worlds. (shrink)