Johns and Johnson analyze the invasion of Panama in order to explore the ways in which the War on Drugs has been used as an ideological justification for a projection of U.S. state power into Latin America. They characterize the Bush Administration's reasons for the invasion as cynical ideological rhetoric which covered up strategic interests the United States had in deposing Noriega and replacing him with a more cooperative regime. The authors particularly discuss the role of media coverage, including the (...) demonization of Noriega and the immediate adoption by the corporate media of the name Operation Just Cause, in legitimating the invasion and transforming it in popular ideology as a law enforcement operation. Finally, they examine the aftermath of the invasion in the United States--Bush's popularity ratings, the distortion of civilian casualty information, the macho celebration of the war--and in Panama--the destruction of the labor and independence movements, the puppet Endara government, and the increased drug trafficking through Panama. (shrink)

Dimensions of character are often overlooked in professional practice at the expense of the development of technical competence and operational efficiency. Drawing on philosophical accounts of virtue ethics and positive psychology, the present work attempts to elevate the role of ‘good’ character in the professional domain. A ‘good’ professional is ideally one that exemplifies dimensions of character informed by sound judgement. A total of 2340 professionals, from five discrete professions, were profiled based on their valuation of qualities pertaining to character (...) and judgement. Profile differences were subsequently examined in the self-reported experience of professional purpose towards a wider societal ‘good’. Analysis of covariance, controlling for stage of career, revealed that professionals valuing character reported higher professional purpose than those overweighting the importance of judgement or valuing neither character nor judgement, F = 7.92, p <.001. No differences were found between the two groups valuing character, irrespective of whether judgement was valued simultaneously. This profiling analysis of entry-level and in-service professionals, based on their holistic character composition, paves the way for fresh philosophical discussion regarding what constitutes a ‘good’ professional and the interplay between character and judgement. The empirical findings may be of substantive value in helping to recognise how the dimensions of character and judgement may impact upon practitioners’ professional purpose. (shrink)

Essays honoring the work of Catholic ethicist James F. Keenan.

Children’s exposure to the marketing of energy-dense nutrient-poor (EDNP) foods is a public health concern and marketing investment is known to be shifting to non-broadcast media, such as the Internet. This paper examines the perceptions of parents and children on ethical aspects of food marketing to which children are exposed. The research used qualitative methods with parent-child (aged between 8–13 years), from South Australia. Thirteen parent-child pairs participated in this research. Ethical concerns raised by parents and children included, the marketing (...) of EDNP foods, pester power and family conflict and the use of powerful techniques via the Internet. Their views on rights and responsibilities represented a complex mixture of idealistic and pragmatic positions. They appeared to be caught within the tensions of problematizing unhealthy food marketing to children, both as a social problem and as an individual problem. Their dilemmas are not dissimilar to the broader policy debate in Australia on the matter of food marketing to children. The stale-mate on statutory regulations to protect children from exposure to EDNP food marketing could be advanced by stronger use of ethical arguments to protect children from harmful exploitation and to protect parents from forces that undermine their authority. (shrink)

This work is the first to demonstrate the differences and similarities between Plato's myths and the traditional kind of which he was critical. It also actively demonstrates the extent to which his own myths support or undermine the philosophical ideas of the dialogues in which they are set. It offers new arguments and criticism on point of detail concerning modern interpretations.

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance through engagement with the legacies of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

It has often been claimed that our believing some proposition is dependent upon our not being committed to a non-epistemic explanation of why we believe that proposition. Very roughly, I cannot believe that p and also accept a non-epistemic explanation of my believing that p. Those who have asserted such a claim have drawn from it a range of implications: doxastic involuntarism, the unacceptability of Humean naturalism, doxastic freedom, restrictions upon the effectiveness of practical (Pascalian) arguments, as well as others. (...) If any of these implications are right, then we would do well to have a precise statement of the nature of this phenomenon central to first-person doxastic explanations, as well as of our reasons for believing that it holds. Both of these are lacking in the literature. This paper is an attempt to elucidate and defend this claim. (shrink)

IntroductionFew studies have examined psychological distress in healthcare workers across the care continuum. This study describes distress levels reported by HCWs across care settings and factors associated with distress.MethodsA cross-sectional survey of HCWs from Windsor, Ontario, was conducted between May 30th, 2020, and June 30th, 2020. The survey included the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, sociodemographic, frontline status, perceptions of training, protection, support, respect among teams, and professional and personal stressors. Univariate analyses were used to compare across settings and multivariate logistic (...) regression assessed factors associated with distress.ResultsFour hundred and three HCWs from the hospital, community health and social service, first responder, primary care, home, and long-term care participated in the survey. Common concerns included fear of transmitting COVID-19 to family, safety on the job, and balancing personal care with work demands. LTC and home-care HCWs reported greater concern about workload and staffing levels, whereas community health workers were more anxious about their financial security. Overall, 228 HCWs who completed the K10 reported high distress, with greater rates among hospital and LTC HCWs. Distress was more likely in HCWs who identified as female, younger than 55, perceived lower respect among team, and experienced greater worry about physical and mental health and managing high workloads.ConclusionResults showed a high degree of distress experienced by HCWs across care settings and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on personal and work-related stress. Promoting self-care and supportive and collaborative healthcare teams are promising avenues for mitigating symptoms of distress. (shrink)

The customary assumption about dying is that one would rather not. The event of death itself should be postponed for as long as possible, and comfort may be gained from doctrines which promise a victory over it. We celebrate those who try to cheat it. The dying Henry James thought he was Napoleon, and there is something in that, over and above the pathos of a wandering mind, that exemplifies, however parodically, the mental set we expect to find and what (...) we relish in those who attempt to press their own strong case against the disintegrative flow of time and change. We assume that one should struggle against death, setting such a stamp on life that even if the body must die, something the mind has done may not. Attitudes that run counter to this stubbornness are thought defeatist or unwholesome. In his own decline, Charles Baudelaire, catching sight of himself in a mirror, bowed, thinking himself a stranger. That confusion is more chilling than Jams’ because it undermines the treasured integrity of the self: it shows that death is not an invader attacking suddenly from outside. We are in one sense always in its keeping. In this essay I shall argue that whatever revolt against death may catalyse the act of writing poetry, poems are intimately tied to death in ways that complicate and even undermine that revolt. Indeed, since the inception of Romanticism , a poem in order to be a poem has had to engage not only with the fact that in the midst of life we are in its negation, but also with death’s analogues: madness, trance, divisions and questionings of the self. The relationship between poetry and the disruption of the customary self may even be celebratory.But before investigating the relationship between poetry and death, we had better be sure that one can indeed die:At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes in order to be able to die is an affront to common sense. It would seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any approach on our part, without our bestirring ourselves at all; yes, it will come. That is true, but at the same time it is not true, and indeed quite possibly it lacks truth altogether. At least it does not have the kind of truth which we feel in the world, which is the measure of our action and of our presence in the world. What makes me disappear from the world cannot finds its guarantee there; and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This explains why no one is linked to death by real certitude. No one is sure of dying.1No one can think to cheat death, but to contemplate death is to introduce into thought the epitome of doubt. The one thing I can never know in advance or know demonstrably, by my very nature and by its, is the actual instant of my own death. Conventionally, “I will go when my time comes”: the phrase gestures toward the privacy of each human death, and the Protestant tone of “my time”—part predestination, part ownership—barely hides the inaccessibility of death inside that privacy. There are two certainties in life. One is that death will come. The other is that no one can be sure of this. Perhaps no one has truly died yet. 1. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock , p. 95; all further references to this work, abbreviated SL, will be included in the text. Geoffrey Ward is lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is at present completing his first critical book, The Poetry of Estrangement. His published articles include essays on symbolism in John Ashbery, Conrad’s English, metaphor in Shelley’s longer poems, the novels of Henry Green, and Wyndham Lewis. He has also published five volumes of poetry, mot recently Not the Hand Itself. (shrink)

Ethics: Classical Western Texts in Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives offers students a unique introduction to ethics by integrating the historical development of Western moral philosophy with both feminist and multicultural approaches. Engaging and accessible, it provides an introductory sampling of several of the classical works of the Western tradition in ethics and then situates these readings within feminist and multicultural perspectives so that they can be better understood and evaluated in our contemporary environment. While some of the non-Western works parallel (...) the views defended in the Western works, others question the Western perspectives. Confucius, Jorge Valadez, Ward Churchill, Moshoeshoe II, and Eagle Man present multicultural perspectives to the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Rawls, MacIntyre, Korsgaard, and others. Noted feminists Christine de Pizan, Simone de Beauvoir, Carol Gilligan, Annette Baier, Susan Okin, and Rosemarie Radford Ruether also offer alternative views. Ideal for courses in introduction to ethics, history of ethics, and feminist ethics, Ethics: Classical Western Texts in Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives is also intriguing reading for interested general readers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Technology and Our Relationship with GodAnselm Ramelow O.P.God's Original Plan and the FallTechnology may appear to be a very secular thing, but to assume that technology can be understood without God would be a mistake. Technology is deeply involved in our relationship with God. This involvement is, moreover, profoundly ambivalent.1To begin with the positive side of this ambivalence: the growing awareness of the dangers of technology should not lead (...) Christians to think that technology is necessarily a bad thing. It is, in fact, not even merely a "necessary evil." Rather, we can find in the use of technology an unfolding of our God-given rational nature. If we believe that God "made us in his image and likeness," then this quite directly implies two things: (1) God is a maker (he made us), and (2) since he made us in his image and likeness, we are makers as well. The making of technology thus reflects our dignity as made in the image and likeness of God.2 Accordingly, the Church has been more positive towards the development of technology than one might expect, and some of our technologies (e.g., agricultural, architectural, and time-keeping technologies) have their roots in medieval monasteries.3 [End Page 159]We should therefore expect that Adam and Eve, had they not fallen, nevertheless would have become makers of technology in some form or other. They would have exhibited inventiveness and tool use, though perhaps not a tool use focused on warding off evil (which did not exist in Eden), but concerned with promoting positive forms life, such as tools of art and communication. Art and communication technologies are, like all tools, means to an end; but these in particular contain their ends in themselves. In Aristotelian terms, their making (poiesis) concerns a praxis (such as "making conversation"). That is why we sometimes forget to list such technologies among our typical examples of technologies. We forget, for example, that, among the technologies of communication, language as a physical tool (sounds or written marks) is an obvious example. And it is a prelapsarian feature: the book of Genesis has Adam naming things before the Fall. In doing so, Adam echoes God's own creative "technique" of speaking or calling things into being.4 Even in its oral form, language is a matter of human making and a technology of communication. In paradise, communication would not have been merely instrumental, not merely a means, but an intrinsic good, embodying knowledge and intersubjective communion.Other forms of prelapsarian technology, however, are a matter of speculation. And whether or not one agrees with Jacques Ellul's thesis that there was no such prelapsarian technology,5 the ambivalence of technology is clear from the very beginning as well. This is at least what we see in the book of Genesis. For, as a matter of biblical record, it was Cain and his descendants who founded cities and developed technology (e.g., Tubal-Cain as the "forger of all instruments of bronze and iron" in Gen 4:22). And the history [End Page 160] of these urban civilizations does not display the best part of human behavior. But if, as we have said, technology is not necessarily a bad thing, then this must be a corruption of technology. What might this corruption consist in?I want to suggest that it consists precisely in the corruption of our relationship with God, from which technology can never abstract and in which it is, for better or for worse, embedded. Unsurprisingly, therefore, as technology progresses, this relationship becomes more and more explicit, and it does so in a paradoxical way: initially, it is an attempt to put humanity in charge and control, to replace our need for reliance on God by allowing us to play God ourselves. But in our current situation, particularly with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the roles appear reversed: rather than putting humanity in charge, technology in turn is increasingly in control—to the point of becoming itself a god or idol that rules human life. As a result, we only end up having replaced one God with another... (shrink)

Defect detection is a major concern in quality control of various products in industries. This paper presents two different machine-vision based methods for detecting defects on periodically patterned textures. In the first method, input defective image is split into several blocks of size same as the size of the periodic unit of the image and chi-square histogram distances of each periodic block with respect to itself and all other periodic blocks are calculated to get a dissimilarity matrix. This dissimilarity matrix (...) is subjected to Ward's hierarchical clustering to automatically identify defective and defect-free blocks. The second method of defect detection is based on Universal Quality Index which is a measure of loss of correlation, luminance distortion and contrast distortion between any two signals. Quality indices of a periodic block with respect to itself and all other periodic blocks are calculated to get a similarity matrix containing quality indices. Specific variances of the periodic blocks are derived from the quality index matrix through orthogonal factor model based on eigen decomposition. These variances are subjected to Ward's hierarchical clustering to automatically identify defective and defect-free blocks. Results of experiments on real fabric images with defects show that the defect detection methods based on chi-square histogram distance and universal quality index yield a success rate of 98.6% and 97.8% respectively. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Lived Experience and Cognitive Science Reappraising Enactivism’s Jonasian Turn” by Mario Villalobos & Dave Ward. Upshot: As a reply to the criticism that anthropomorphism and modern science are incompatible, targeting Jonasian phenomenology and Varelian enactivism, I suggest considering the concept of modern anthropomorphism, which seems prima facie compatible with the pluralistic situation of today’s life sciences. My further claim is that the phenomenological method is intrinsically linked with this sort of anthropomorphism.

Background: Despite a gradual shift in the focus of medical care among terminally ill patients to a palliative model, studies suggest that many children with life-limiting chronic illnesses continue to die in hospital after prolonged periods of inpatient admission and mechanical ventilation.Objectives: To examine the characteristics and location of death among hospitalised children, investigate yearwise trends in these characteristics and test the hypothesis that professional ethical guidance from the UK Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health would lead to significant (...) changes in the characteristics of death among hospitalised children.Methods: Routine administrative data from one large tertiary-level UK children’s hospital was examined over a 7-year period for children aged 0–18 years. Demographic details, location of deaths, source of admission , length of stay and final diagnoses were studied. Statistical significance was tested by the Kruskal–Wallis analysis of ranks and median test , χ2 test and Cochran–Armitage test .Results: Of the 1127 deaths occurring in hospital over the 7-year period, the majority were among infants. The main diagnoses at death included congenital malformations , perinatal diseases , cardiovascular disorders and neoplasms . Most deaths occurred in an intensive care unit environment , with a significant increase over the years . There was a clear increase in the proportion of admissions from in-hospital among the ICU cohort . Infants with congenital malformations and perinatal conditions were more likely to die in an ICU , and older children with malignancy outside the ICU . Children stayed for a median of 13 days on a hospital ward before being admitted to an ICU where they died.Conclusions: A greater proportion of hospitalised children are dying in an ICU environment. Our experience indicates that professional ethical guidance by itself may be inadequate in reversing the trends observed in this study. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: To study the accuracy of reviewing ward notes (chart review) as a measure of the quality of care rendered to patients with "Do Not Resuscitate" (DNR) orders. DESIGN: We reviewed the charts of 19 consecutive, competent inpatients with DNR orders for evidence that the staff addressed a broad range of patient care needs called Concurrent Care Concerns (CCCs), such as withholding treatments other than resuscitation itself, and attention to patient comfort needs. We then interviewed the patient, consultant physician, (...) house officer, and primary nurse and compared the ward notes with the understandings of these staff members. SETTING: The medical service of an urban university medical centre. RESULTS: The average number of documented CCCs addressed per DNR order was 1.1. The ward notes generally agreed with the perceptions of patients, house officers, and nurses (% agreement with notes = 79%, 77%, and 82%; kappa = 0.43, 0.40, 0.50). Consultant physicians' understandings were poorly reflected in the ward notes (% agreement = 59%; kappa = 0.18). They overestimated attention to CCCs compared with the notes (P < 0.0001) and with other observers (P < 0.0001). CONCLUSION: Chart review for attention to CCCs accurately reflects the understandings of patients, house officers, and nurses, but consultant physicians report more attention to CCCs than is recorded in the ward notes or understood by other observers. Better communication regarding end-of-life care plans should be encouraged. (shrink)