Reform of the federal income tax system has become a perennial item on the domestic policy agenda of the United States, although there is considerable uncertainty over specifics. Indeed the recent report of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform recommended not one but two divergent policy directions. In Fundamental Tax Reform, top experts in tax policy discuss a wide range of issues raised by the prospect of significant tax reform, identifying the most critical questions and considering whether the (...) answers are known, unknown--or unknowable. The debates over tax reform usually concern the advantages and disadvantages of income-based taxation as opposed to any of the several alternative forms of consumption-based taxation. The book opens with chapters that discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and political feasibility of these options. Other chapters consider the effect of tax reform on businesses, especially their investment behavior, and include a discussion of possible problems in any transition to a consumption-based tax; international taxation issues arising in an era of globalization; and individual behavioral response to tax reform, including a view of the topic from the perspective of the relatively new field of behavioral economics. ContributorsRosanne Altshuler, Alan J. Auerbach, John W. Diamond, Harry Grubert, Arnold C. Harberger, Kevin A. Hassett, Thomas J. Kniesner, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Edward J. McCaffery, Kathryn Newmark, David Rapson, Daniel Shaviro, Joel Slemrod, James P. Ziliak, George R. ZodrowDiscussants James Alm, Henry J. Aaron, Charles L. Ballard, Leonard E. Burman, Robert S. Chirinko, Robert D. Dietz, Malcolm Gillis, Roger H. Gordon, Jane G. Gravelle, Timothy S. Gunning, James M. Poterba, Thomas S. Neubig, Alan Viard, George Yin John W. Diamond is Edward and Hermena Kelly Fellow in Tax Policy and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University. George R. Zodrow is Professor of Economics and Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute and International Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford University. (shrink)

We are printing, by kind permission of the Law Commission, two sections of the report of the Law Commission on injuries to unborn children. This report was the result of a request to the Law Commission by the Lord Chancellor at the time (Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone) to advise on `what the nature and extent of civil liability for antenatal injury should be'. The Law Commission followed its usual practice in such circumstances of consulting various bodies and obtaining expert (...) advice on the subject and then embodying the results in a working paper (Working Paper No. 47 - injuries to unborn children) published on 19 January 1973, which preceded their report (Cmnd 5709). Meanwhile a Royal Commission is considering much wider issues of civil liability for injury (including antenatal injury) but the terms of reference for the Law Commission were much narrower and confined to the position of children injured before birth. In the section relating to the present law the report makes it clear that it is probable that liability under the common law already exists. The Scottish Law Commission has also issued a report (Cmnd 5371). They were given different terms of reference and came to somewhat different conclusions. We are printing from this long report the paragraphs discussing the medical background and the summary of recommendations. As will be evident on reading the paragraphs on the medical background to injuries to the unborn child, events are moving very rapidly, particularly in the study of congenital defects and the effects of drugs but the problems of proof present great difficulty. Other causes of injury to the unborn child are better known to the general public: for example, those following the illness, infection and disease of the mother during pregnancy, injury caused in attempted termination of pregnancy and the risks resulting from the mother's condition. The summary of the recommendations sets out very clearly the legal position of the unborn child, as the Law Commission sees it, arising from injury before birth, the final conclusion being that `legislation is desirable'. These extracts from the report, apart from their intrinsic interest, lead on to the paper by Mr Kennedy and Dr Edwards in which they set out their criticisms of it, and provide quick references to the original document. (shrink)

Can parents who choose not to vaccinate their children be held legally liable for any harm that results? The state of laboratory and epidemiological understanding of a disease such as measles makes it likely that a persuasive causal link can be established between a decision to not vaccinate, a failure to take appropriate precautions to isolate a non-vaccinated child who may have been exposed to measles from highly vulnerable persons, and a death. This paper argues that, even if a parent (...) chooses to not vaccinate a child under a state law permitting exemptions, that decision does not create complete protection against liability for the adverse consequences of that choice. (shrink)

Consider this hypothetical scenario involving a choice not to vaccinate a child. Ms. S has a niece who is autistic. The girl's parents are suspicious that there is some relationship between her autism and her Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccination. They have shared their concerns with Ms. S. She then declines to have her own daughter, Jinny S., vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. To bypass the state's mandatory vaccination requirement, Ms. S claims a state-legislated philosophical exemption, whereby she simply attests (...) to the fact that she is opposed to vaccinating her daughter due to a conscientiously held belief. At the age of four, Jinny goes on a trip by airplane to Germany with her mother. After returning to the United States, she attends daycare despite having some mild cold symptoms. Subsequently, she develops a classic measles rash, at which point her mother brings her to a pediatrician and keeps her home from daycare. (shrink)

Investigation of the Percept is a short work that focuses on issues of perception and epistemology. Its author, Dignaga, was one of the most influential figures in the Indian Buddhist epistemological tradition, and his ideas had a profound and wide-ranging impact in India, Tibet, and China. The work inspired more than twenty commentaries throughout East Asia and three in Tibet, the most recent in 2014.This book is the first of its kind in Buddhist studies: a comprehensive history of a text (...) and its commentarial tradition. The volume editors translate the root text and commentary, along with Indian and Tibetan commentaries, providing detailed analyses of the commentarial innovations of each author, as well as critically edited versions of all texts and extant Sanskrit fragments of passages. The team-based approach made it possible to study and translate a corpus of treatises in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese and to employ the methods of critical philology and cross-cultural philosophy to provide readers with a rich collection of studies and translations, along with detailed philosophical analyses that open up the intriguing implications of Dignaga's thought and demonstrate the diversity of commentarial approaches to his text.This rich text has inspired some of the greatest minds in India and Tibet. It explores some of the key issues of Buddhist epistemology: the relationship between minds and their percepts, the problems of idealism and realism, and error and misperception. (shrink)

We can understand viewed scenes and extract task-relevant information within a few hundred milliseconds. This process is generally supported by three cortical regions that show selectivity for scene images: parahippocampal place area (PPA), medial place area (MPA) and occipital place area (OPA). Prior studies have focused on the visual information each region is responsive to, usually within the context of recognition or navigation. Here, we move beyond these tasks to investigate gaze allocation during scene viewing. Eye movements rely on a (...) scene’s visual representation to direct saccades, and thus foveal vision. In particular, we focus on the contribution of OPA, which is i) located in occipito-parietal cortex, likely feeding information into parts of the dorsal pathway critical for eye movements, and ii) contains strong retinotopic representations of the contralateral visual field. Participants viewed scene images for 1034 ms while their eye movements were recorded. On half of the trials, a 500 ms train of five transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulses was applied to the participant’s cortex, starting at scene onset. TMS was applied to the right hemisphere over either OPA or the occipital face area (OFA), which also exhibits a contralateral visual field bias but shows selectivity for face stimuli. Participants generally made an overall left-to-right, top-to-bottom pattern of eye movements across all conditions. When TMS was applied to OPA, there was an increased saccade latency for eye movements toward the contralateral relative to the ipsilateral visual field after the final TMS pulse (400ms). Additionally, TMS to the OPA biased fixation positions away from the contralateral side of the scene compared to the control condition, while the OFA group showed no such effect. There was no effect on horizontal saccade amplitudes. These combined results suggest that OPA might serve to represent local scene information that can then be utilized by visuomotor control networks to guide gaze allocation in natural scenes. (shrink)

Legal norms serve as practical standards for individuals and officials. While this ‘normative aspect’ of law is widely acknowledged, its significance for theories of law remains contested. In this paper, I examine three views on the matter. First, that we should explain legal norms as reason-giving. Second, that we should explain legal discourse as being about reasons for action. Third, that we should explain law as capable of being reason-giving. I survey some challenges associated with each of these views. What (...) they have in common is an implicit assumption about the form that normative explanation must take: that it must be a linear, non-reductive explanation. There is an alternative model for normative explanation available, however. That model explains normative notions in terms of the practices and attitudes involved in recognizing, offering, and demanding them. I highlight the potentials, and limitations, of this practice-centered alternative. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative - and hence unanalyzable - whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled. Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought (...) processes used to discover scientific laws. The programs - BACON, DALTON, GLAUBER, and STAHL - are all largely data-driven, that is, when presented with series of chemical or physical measurements they search for uniformities and linking elements, generating and checking hypotheses and creating new concepts as they go along. "Scientific Discovery examines the nature of scientific research and reviews the arguments for and against a normative theory of discovery; describes the evolution of the BACON programs, which discover quantitative empirical laws and invent new concepts; presents programs that discover laws in qualitative and quantitative data; and ties the results together, suggesting how a combined and extended program might find research problems, invent new instruments, and invent appropriate problem representations. Numerous prominent historical examples of discoveries from physics and chemistry are used as tests for the programs and anchor the discussion concretely in the history of science. Pat Langley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.Herbert Simon is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science, and Philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University. Gary L. Bradshaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Jan M. Zytkow is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wichita State University. (shrink)

This study examines Australian tax agents' perceptions of the ethical environment in which they practice, within the context of an income tax system based on self-assessment principles. The research identifies and ranks an inventory of ethical issues in terms of perceived frequency of occurrence and importance to Western Australian tax agents. In addition, the extent and influence of ethical concerns in the profession are evaluated.The study has determined that the most frequently cited ethical issue is the failure to make reasonable (...) enquiries where information or documentation provided by a client appears to be inaccurate or incomplete. The most important ethical problem is a failure to ensure confidentiality with regard to privileged client information. When the frequency of occurrence and importance means are compared, inadequate technical competence, failure to make reasonable enquiries/conduct research, continuing to act for a client where there is incorrect information, and conflicts in distinguishing between tax planning and tax avoidance emerge as the high frequency/high importance issues. Although acknowledging the potential for unethical actions in tax practice, Western Australian tax agents consider that they carry out their professional activities within an ethical environment. (shrink)

The human sentence processor is able to make rapid predictions about upcoming linguistic input. For example, upon hearing the verb eat, anticipatory eye-movements are launched toward edible objects in a visual scene. However, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie anticipation remain to be elucidated in ecologically valid contexts. Previous research has, in fact, mainly used clip-art scenes and object arrays, raising the possibility that anticipatory eye-movements are limited to displays containing a small number of objects in a visually impoverished context. In (...) Experiment 1, we confirm that anticipation effects occur in real-world scenes and investigate the mechanisms that underlie such anticipation. In particular, we demonstrate that real-world scenes provide contextual information that anticipation can draw on: When the target object is not present in the scene, participants infer and fixate regions that are contextually appropriate. Experiment 2 investigates whether such contextual inference requires the co-presence of the scene, or whether memory representations can be utilized instead. The same real-world scenes as in Experiment 1 are presented to participants, but the scene disappears before the sentence is heard. We find that anticipation occurs even when the screen is blank, including when contextual inference is required. We conclude that anticipatory language processing is able to draw upon global scene representations to make contextual inferences. These findings are compatible with theories assuming contextual guidance, but posit a challenge for theories assuming object-based visual indices. (shrink)

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty, including cheating and plagiarism, is on the rise in colleges, particularly among engineering students. While students decide to engage in these behaviors for many different reasons, academic integrity training can help improve their understanding of ethical decision making. The two studies outlined in this paper assess the effectiveness of an online module in increasing academic integrity among first semester engineering students. Study 1 tested the effectiveness of an academic honesty tutorial by using a between groups design with a (...) Time 1- and Time 2-test. An academic honesty quiz assessed participants’ knowledge at both time points. Study 2, which incorporated an improved version of the module and quiz, utilized a between groups design with three assessment time points. The additional Time 3-test allowed researchers to test for retention of information. Results were analyzed using ANCOVA and t tests. In Study 1, the experimental group exhibited significant improvement on the plagiarism items, but not the total score. However, at Time 2 there was no significant difference between groups after controlling for Time 1 scores. In Study 2, between- and within-group analyses suggest there was a significant improvement in total scores, but not plagiarism scores, after exposure to the tutorial. Overall, the academic integrity module impacted participants as evidenced by changes in total score and on specific plagiarism items. Although future implementation of the tutorial and quiz would benefit from modifications to reduce ceiling effects and improve assessment of knowledge, the results suggest such tutorial may be one valuable element in a systems approach to improving the academic integrity of engineering students. (shrink)

En faisant usage des intuitions de la philosophie de la science, l'étude compare les voies d'approches en recherche néotestamentaire et en philologie classique. La recherche néotestamentaire a mis en oeuvre une certaine méthode qui était en vogue en philologie classique durant le 19ème siècle, mais qui fut finalement rejetée par la plupart des philologues classiques. Il s'agit d'une méthode sceptique plutôt que critique, car elle rend toute prétention à la connaissance problématique ou même impossible. Son origine dernière se trouve dans (...) la méthode du doute systématique proposée par Descartes. Telle qu'elle est pratiquée aujourd'hui, cependant, la méthode sceptique est semblable à la philosophie de la science suggérée par le cercle de Vienne en les années 1920, mais que les héritiers de cette école regardent aujourd'hui comme trop simpliste. Des exemples concrets, tirés de la pratique courante de la recherche, montrent comment une méthode sobrement critique peut trouver place dans les études du Nouveau Testament, à condition seulement que les dangers de la méthode sceptique soient clairement aperçus. (shrink)

Despite the many well-documented similarities -- genetic, cognitive, behavioral, social -- between our human selves and our evolutionary forebears, a significant gulf remains between us and them. Why is that? How did it come about? And how did we come to be the way we are? In this book fourteen distinguished scholars -- including humanist, atheist, and theist voices -- address such questions as they explore how and when human personhood emerged. Representing various disciplines, the contributors all offer significant insights (...) into new scientific research about the origins of human nature -- research that challenges some traditional views. CONTRIBUTORS Francisco J. Ayala Justin L. Barrett Roy F. Baumeister Warren S. Brown Richard W. Byrne Matthew J. Jarvinen Malcolm Jeeves Timothy O'Connor Lynn K. Paul Colin Renfrew Ian Tattersall Anthony C. Thiselton Alan J. Torrance Adam Zeman. (shrink)