The body relation of the sexes, Naked Reality, is an ever present fact -- in us, of us, is us as fleshed race factors, Human Race Creators. An old philosopher asks us to get out of our bodies to think; to him..

While new regulations obligate or recommend people to wear medical masks at public places to prevent further spread of the Covid-19 virus, there are still open questions as to what face coverage does to social emotional communication. Previous research on the effects of wearing veils or face-covering niqabs showed that covering of the mouth led to the attribution of negative emotions and to the perception of less intense positive emotions. The current study compares a sample from the Netherlands with a (...) sample from the United Arab Emirates on their perception of emotions from faces covered by a niqab, censoring black bars, or uncovered faces. The results show that covering the mouth area leads to greater anxiety in participants in both countries. Furthermore, although participants did not report greater decoding difficulties for faces that were covered as compared to fully visible, results show that face coverage did influence emotion perception. Specifically, happiness and anger were perceived as being less intense. Further, face coverage by a niqab, as compared to black bars, yielded lower emotional intensity ratings. We conclude that face coverage in particular can modulate the perception of emotions, but that affective contextual cues may play a role as well. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Rosalind Franklin is best known for her informative X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA that provided vital clues for James Watson and Francis Crick's double-stranded helical model. Her scientific career did not end when she left the DNA work at King's College, however. In 1953 Franklin moved to J. D. Bernal's crystallography laboratory at Birkbeck College, where she shifted her focus to the three-dimensional structure of viruses, obtaining diffraction patterns of Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) of unprecedented detail and clarity. During (...) the next five years, while making significant headway on the structural determination of TMV, Franklin maintained an active correspondence with both Watson and Crick, who were also studying aspects of virus structure. Developments in TMV research during the 1950s illustrate the connections in the emerging field of molecular biology between structural studies of nucleic acids and of proteins and viruses. They also reveal how the protagonists of the “race for the double helix” continued to interact personally and professionally during the years when Watson and Crick's model for the double-helical structure of DNA was debated and confirmed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Rosalind Franklin is best known for her informative X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA that provided vital clues for James Watson and Francis Crick's double-stranded helical model. Her scientific career did not end when she left the DNA work at King's College, however. In 1953 Franklin moved to J. D. Bernal's crystallography laboratory at Birkbeck College, where she shifted her focus to the three-dimensional structure of viruses, obtaining diffraction patterns of Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) of unprecedented detail and clarity. During (...) the next five years, while making significant headway on the structural determination of TMV, Franklin maintained an active correspondence with both Watson and Crick, who were also studying aspects of virus structure. Developments in TMV research during the 1950s illustrate the connections in the emerging field of molecular biology between structural studies of nucleic acids and of proteins and viruses. They also reveal how the protagonists of the “race for the double helix” continued to interact personally and professionally during the years when Watson and Crick's model for the double-helical structure of DNA was debated and confirmed. (shrink)

Here, a moral case is presented as to why sign languages such as Auslan should be made compulsory in general school curricula. Firstly, there are significant benefits that accrue to individuals from learning sign language. Secondly, sign language education is a matter of justice; the normalisation of sign language education and use would particularly benefit marginalised groups, such as those living with a communication disability. Finally, the integration of sign languages into the curricula would enable the flourishing of Deaf culture (...) and go some way to resolving the tensions that have arisen from the promotion of oralist education facilitated by technologies such as cochlear implants. There are important reasons to further pursue policy proposals regarding the prioritisation of sign language in school curricula. (shrink)

Each decade since 1979, the Healthy People initiative establishes the national prevention agenda and provides the foundation for disease prevention and health promotion policies and programs. Law and policy have been included in Healthy People objectives from the start, but not integrated into the overall initiative as well as possible to potentially leverage change to meet Healthy People targets and goals. This article provides background on the Healthy People initiative and its use among various stakeholder groups, describes the work of (...) a project aiming to better integrate law and policy into this initiative, and discusses the development of Healthy People 2030 — the next iteration of health goals for the nation. Lessons from the preliminary stages of developing Healthy People by the HHS Secretary's Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2030 and a Federal Interagency Workgroup will be included. Efforts by the Committee focused on the role of law and policy as determinants of health and valuable resources around health equity are also shared. Finally, the article discusses ways that law and policy can potentially be tools to help meet Healthy People targets and to attain national health goals. (shrink)

In the study of education, as in many more travelled regions of Classical scholarship, democratic Athens is something of a special case. The cautions formulation is appropriate: in the case of education, surprisingly few studies have sought to establish quite how special Athens was, and those which have, have often raised more questions than they answered. The subject itself is partly to blame. The history of education invites comparison with the present day, while those planning the future of education rarely (...) fail to invoke the past. The place of Classical Athens in European culture has ensured a place for Athenian education in almost every debate from the relation between education and democracy to the value of educationversustraining, and as the original champion of causes as varied as mass education, co-education, and the national curriculum. Desirable as it is to be in demand, such treatment is not calculated to produce the most circumspect account of the subject. The study of education is further hampered by the fact that our knowledge of Athenian culture is so vibrant and diverse in some ways and so partial in others. Plato and Aristophanes present a vivid fictional picture of education in the late fifth century. If we add a few passages from Xenophon and Aristotle, a large number of vases depicting men, women, and children reading, playing the lyre, and doing athletics, and one or two archaeological finds of an educational appearance, it is tempting to take the result as a clear portrait of a society at school. (shrink)

This study examines the cross‐cultural generality of Hering's (1878/1964) color‐opponent theory of color appearance. English‐speaking and Somali‐speaking observers performed variants of two paradigms classically used to study color‐opponency. First, both groups identified similar red, green, blue, and yellow unique hues. Second, 25 English‐speaking and 34 Somali‐speaking observers decomposed the colors present in 135 Munsell color samples into their component Hering elemental sensations—red,green,blue, yellow, white, and black—or else responded “no term.” Both groups responded no term for many samples, notably purples. Somali (...) terms for yellow were often used to name colors all around the color circle, including colors that are bluish according to Hering's theory. Four Somali Grue speakers named both green and blue elicitation samples by their term for green. However, that term did not name the union of all samples called blue or green by English speakers. A similar pattern was found among three Somali Achromatic speakers, who called the blue elicitation sample black or white. Thus, color decomposition by these Somali‐speaking observers suggests a lexically influenced re‐dimensionalization of color appearance space, rather than a simple reduction of the one proposed by Hering. Even some Somali Green‐Blue speakers, whose data were otherwise similar to English, showed similar trends in yellow and blue usage. World Color Survey data mirror these results. These within‐ and cross‐cultural violations of Hering's theory do not challenge the long‐standing view that universal sensory processes mediate color appearance. However, they do demonstrate an important contribution of language in the human understanding of color. (shrink)

In ‘Discrimination Against the Dying’, Phillip Reed argues that terminally ill patients are subjected to a distinct form of discrimination called ‘terminalism’. One of Reed’s primary examples of terminalism is right to try laws, which offer terminally ill patients the option to request medications that are not FDA-approved and without IRB involvement. In this analysis, we consider additional contextual factors about right to try, suggesting that it may not neatly count as an exemplar of terminalism. When pursued with appropriate protocols (...) and oversight, right to try has the potential to broaden treatment opportunities for the terminally ill by bypassing FDA and IRB restrictions, functioning as a less stringent alternative to expanded access for patients with limited time and dwindling options. Reed acknowledges that differential treatment of patients is not inherently unjust. For instance, Reed praises expanded access laws that grant patients with severe or life-threatening diseases access to treatment options otherwise unavailable. Patients not afflicted by severe illness or who have found success with standard treatment options are unlikely to face discrimination for inability to access nonessential treatment. Conversely, availability of these treatments for the terminally ill could enhance their well-being and prolong their lifespan. It is also significant to highlight important …. (shrink)

Background: Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups have a high need for organ transplantation but deceased donation is low. This restricts the availability of well-matched organs and results in relatively long waiting times for transplantation, with increased mortality risks. Objective: To identify barriers to organ donor registration and family consent among the BAME population, and to develop and evaluate a training intervention to enhance communication with ethnic minority families and identify impacts on family consent. Methods: Three-phase programme comprising community-based research (...) involving two systematic reviews examining attitudes and barriers to organ donation and effective interventions followed by 22 focus groups with minority ethnic groups; hospital-based research examining staff practices and influences on family consent through ethics discussion groups with staff, a study on intensive care units and interviews with bereaved ethnic minority families; and development and evaluation of a training package to enhance cultural competence among ICU staff. Setting: Community focus group study in eight London boroughs with high prevalence of ethnic minority populations. Hospital studies at five NHS hospital trusts. Participants: Community studies: 228 focus group participants; hospital studies: 35 nurses, 28 clinicians, 19 hospital chaplains, 25 members of local Organ Donation Committees, 17 bereaved family members; and evaluation: 66 health professionals. Data sources: Focus groups with community residents, systematic reviews, qualitative interviews and observation in ICUs, EDGs with ICU staff, bereaved family interviews and questionnaires for trial evaluation. Review methods: Systematic review and narrative synthesis. Results: Community studies: Organ Donor Register – different ethnic/faith and age groups were at varying points on the ‘pathway’ to organ donor registration, with large numbers lacking knowledge and remaining at a pre-contemplation stage. Key attitudinal barriers were uncertainties regarding religious permissibility, bodily concerns, lack of trust in health professionals and little priority given to registration, with the varying significance of these factors varying by ethnicity/faith and age. National campaigns focusing on ethnic minorities have had limited impact, whereas characteristics of effective educational interventions are being conducted in a familiar environment; addressing the groups’ particular concerns; delivery by trained members of the lay community; and providing immediate access to registration. Interventions are also required to target those at specific stages of the donation pathway. Hospital studies: family consent to donation – many ICU staff, especially junior nurses, described a lack of confidence in communication and supporting ethnic minority families, often reflecting differences in emotional expression, faith and cultural beliefs, and language difficulties. The continuing high proportion of family donation discussions that take place without the collaboration of a specialist nurse for organ donation reflected consultants’ views of their own role in family consent to donation, a lack of trust in SNODs and uncertainties surrounding controlled donations after circulatory death. Hospital chaplains differed in their involvement in ICUs, reflecting their availability/employment status, personal interests and the practices of ICU staff. Evaluation: professional development package – a digital versatile disk-based training package was developed to promote confidence and skills in cross-cultural communication. Initial evaluation produced positive feedback and significant affirmative attitudinal change but no significant difference in consent rate over the short follow-up period with requirements for longer-term evaluation. Limitations: Participants in the focus group study were mainly first-generation migrants of manual socioeconomic groups. It was not permitted to identify non-consenting families for interview with data regarding the consent process were therefore limited to consenting families. Conclusions: The research presents guidance for the effective targeting of donation campaigns focusing on minority ethnic groups and provides the first training package in cultural competence in the NHS. Future work: Greater evaluation is required of community interventions in the UK to enhance knowledge of effective practice and analysis of the experiences of non-consenting ethnic minority families. Funding: The National Institute for Health Research Programme Grants for Applied Research programme. (shrink)

We bear witness to a sweeping social movement for change—fostered and driven by a powerful group of Black nurses and nursing students determined to call out and dismantle anti‐Black racism and discrimination within the profession of nursing. The Black Nurses Task Force, launched by the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO) in July 2020, is building momentum for long‐standing change in the profession by critically examining the racist and discriminatory history of nursing, listening to and learning from the lived experiences (...) of the Black nursing community, and shaping concrete, actionable steps to confront anti‐Black racism and discrimination in academic settings, workplaces, and nursing organizations. The Black Nurses Task Force and the RNAO are standing up and speaking out in acknowledgment of the magnitude of anti‐Black racism and discrimination that exist in our profession, health system, justice system, and economic system. This social movement is demonstrating, in actions, how individuals and a collective act as change agents to drive meaningful and widespread change for our present and future Black nurses. We also acknowledge the Black nurses who have gone before us. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

Adolescence is a crucial time for social development, especially for helping and compassionate behaviors; yet brain networks involved in adolescent prosociality and compassion currently remain underexplored. Here, we sought to evaluate a recently proposed domain-general developmental network model of prosocial cognition by relating adolescent functional and structural brain networks with prosocial and compassionate disposition. We acquired resting state fMRI and diffusion MRI from 95 adolescents along with self-report questionnaires assessing prosociality and compassion. We then applied the Network-Based Statistic to inductively (...) investigate whether there is a significant subnetwork related to prosociality and compassion while controlling for age and sex. Based on the Do-GooD model, we expected that this subnetwork would involve connectivity to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex from three domain-general networks, the default mode network, the salience network, and the control network, as well as from the DMN to the mirror neuron systems. NBS revealed a significant functional subnetwork related to prosociality and compassion connecting 31 regions, showing DMN and DLPFC connectivity to the VMPFC; DMN connectivity to mirror neuron systems; and connectivity between the DMN and cerebellum. These findings largely support and extend the Do-GooD model of prosocial cognition in adolescents by further illuminating network-based relationships that have the potential to advance our understanding of brain mechanisms of prosociality. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making frameworks assist in identifying the issues at stake in a particular setting and thinking through, in a methodical manner, the ethical issues that require consideration as well as the values that need to be considered and promoted. Decisions made about the use, sharing, and re-use of big data are complex and laden with values. This paper sets out an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research developed by a working group convened by the Science, Health and (...) Policy-relevant Ethics in Singapore Initiative. It presents the aim and rationale for this framework supported by the underlying ethical concerns that relate to all health and research contexts. It also describes a set of substantive and procedural values that can be weighed up in addressing these concerns, and a step-by-step process for identifying, considering, and resolving the ethical issues arising from big data uses in health and research. This Framework is subsequently applied in the papers published in this Special Issue. These papers each address one of six domains where big data is currently employed: openness in big data and data repositories, precision medicine and big data, real-world data to generate evidence about healthcare interventions, AI-assisted decision-making in healthcare, public-private partnerships in healthcare and research, and cross-sectoral big data. (shrink)

As the United States population ages, there is a growing group of aging, elderly, individuals who may consider "preemptive suicide"(Prado, 1998). Healthy aging patients who preemptively attempt to end their life by suicide and who have clearly expressed a desire not to have life -sustaining treatment present a clinical and public policy challenge. We describe the clinical, ethical, and medical-legal decision making issues that were raised in such a case that presented to an academic emergency department. We also review and (...) evaluate a decision making process that emergency physicians confront when faced with such a challenging and unusual situation. (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.

Levels of organization and their use in science have received increased philosophical attention of late, including challenges to the well-foundedness or widespread usefulness of levels concepts. One kind of response to these challenges has been to advocate a more precise and specific levels concept that is coherent and useful. Another kind of response has been to argue that the levels concept should be taken as a heuristic, to embrace its ambiguity and the possibility of exceptions as acceptable consequences of its (...) usefulness. In this chapter, I suggest that each of these strategies faces its own attendant downsides, and that pursuit of both strategies (by different thinkers) compounds the difficulties. That both kinds of approaches are advocated is, I think, illustrative of the problems plaguing the concept of levels of organization. I end by suggesting that the invocation of levels may mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them, so our use of the levels concept should be updated accordingly. (shrink)

Microbiologists are transitioning from the study and characterization of individual strains or species to the profiling of whole microbiomes and microbial ecology. Equipped with high-throughput methods for studying the taxonomic and functional characteristics of diverse samples, they are just beginning to encounter the conceptual, theoretical, and experimental problems of comparing taxonomy to function, and extracting useful measures from such comparisons. Although still unresolved, these problems are well studied in macro-ecology and are reiterated here as an historical precautionary for microbial ecologists. (...) Beyond expected and unresolved terminological vagueness, we argue that assessments and comparisons of taxonomic and functional profiles in micro-ecology suffer from theoretically unresolvable arbitrariness and ambiguities. We divide these into problems of scale, individuation, and commensurability. We argue that there is no technically/theoretically “correct” scale, individuation, or comparison of taxonomy and function, but there are nonetheless better and worse methodologies for profiling. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internal models of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Ramsey endorses the structural conception of mental representation, but uses it to develop a novel argument against representationalism, the widespread view that cognition essentially involves the manipulation of (...) mental representations. Ramsey argues that although theories within the ‘classical’ tradition of cognitive science once posited structural representations, these theories are being superseded by newer theories, within the tradition of connectionism and cognitive neuroscience, which rarely if ever appeal to structural representations. Instead, these theories seem to be explaining cognition by invoking so-called ‘receptor representations’, which, Ramsey claims, aren’t genuine representations at all—despite being called representations, these mechanisms function more as triggers or causal relays than as genuine stand-ins for distal systems. I argue that when the notions of structural and receptor representation are properly explicated, there turns out to be no distinction between them. There only appears to be a distinction between receptor and structural representations because the latter are tacitly conflated with the ‘mental models’ ostensibly involved in offline cognitive processes such as episodic memory and mental imagery. While structural representations might count as genuine representations, they aren’t distinctively mental representations, for they can be found in all sorts of non-intentional systems such as plants. Thus to explain the kinds of offline cognitive capacities that have motivated talk of mental models, we must develop richer conceptions of mental representation than those provided by the notions of structural and receptor representation. (shrink)

Activity in the prefrontal cortex may distinguish the meta-awareness experienced during lucid dreams from its absence in normal dreams. To examine a possible relationship between dream lucidity and prefrontal task performance, we carried out a prospective study in 28 high school students. Participants performed the Wisconsin Card Sort and Iowa Gambling tasks, then for 1 week kept dream journals and reported sleep quality and lucidity-related dream characteristics. Participants who exhibited a greater degree of lucidity performed significantly better on the task (...) that engages the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, but degree of lucidity achieved did not distinguish performance on the task that engages the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, nor did it distinguish self-reported sleep quality or baseline characteristics. The association between performance on the Iowa Gambling Task and lucidity suggests a connection between lucid dreaming and ventromedial prefrontal function. (shrink)

This book is a rich blend of analyses by leading experts from various cultures and disciplines. A compact introduction to a complex field, it illustrates biotechnology's profound impact upon the environment and society. Moreover, it underscores the vital relevance of cultural values. This book empowers readers to more critically assess biotechnology's value and effectiveness within both specific cultural and global contexts.

The use of Big Data—however the term is defined—involves a wide array of issues and stakeholders, thereby increasing numbers of complex decisions around issues including data acquisition, use, and sharing. Big Data is becoming a significant component of practice in an ever-increasing range of disciplines; however, since it is not a coherent “discipline” itself, specific codes of conduct for Big Data users and researchers do not exist. While many institutions have created, or will create, training opportunities to prepare people to (...) work in and around Big Data, insufficient time, space, and thought have been dedicated to training these people to engage with the ethical, legal, and social issues in this new domain. Since Big Data practitioners come from, and work in, diverse contexts, neither a relevant professional code of conduct nor specific formal ethics training are likely to be readily available. This normative paper describes an approach to conceptualizing ethical reasoning and integrating it into training for Big Data use and research. Our approach is based on a published framework that emphasizes ethical reasoning rather than topical knowledge. We describe the formation of professional community norms from two key disciplines that contribute to the emergent field of Big Data: computer science and statistics. Historical analogies from these professions suggest strategies for introducing trainees and orienting practitioners both to ethical reasoning and to a code of professional conduct itself. We include two semester course syllabi to strengthen our thesis that codes of conduct can be harnessed to support the development of ethical reasoning in, and a sense of professional identity among, Big Data practitioners. (shrink)