Computational models of relevance in case-based legal reasoning have traditionallybeen based on algorithms for comparing the facts and substantive legal issues of aprior case to those of a new case. In this paper we argue that robust models ofcase-based legal reasoning must also consider the broader social and jurisprudentialcontext in which legal precedents are decided. We analyze three aspects of legalcontext: the teleological relations that connect legal precedents to the socialvalues and policies they serve, the temporal relations between prior andsubsequent (...) cases in a legal domain, and the procedural posture of legal cases,which defines the scope of their precedential relevance. Using real examples drawnfrom appellate courts of New York and Massachusetts, we show with the courts' ownarguments that the doctrine of stare decisis (i.e., similar facts should lead to similar results) is subject to contextual constraints and influences. For each of the three aspects of legal context, we outline an expanded computational framework for case-based legal reasoning that encompasses the reasoning of the examples, and provides a foundation for generating a more robust set of legal arguments. (shrink)

Being hit or being given away are subabusive, common behaviors that harm companion animals. Violent childhood socialization increases the risk of adult abuse of animal companions, but relatively little is known about the origins of societally tolerated maltreatment of pets by adults. University students completed surveys about general attitudes toward animals, family socializaton, and current relationships with pets. These students generally had positive childhood socialization about pets and reported high levels of current attachment. Adults whose parents had given children's companion (...) animals away had a heightened likelihood of giving their own pets away. Mothers' kindness to their children's pets was associated with adults' attachment to animal companions, but attachment was not related to the likelihood of hitting current pets. People who score high on a measure of pet abuse potential hit their pets. The pattern of findings related to gender implies that males are at somewhat greater risk for having negative socialization experiences involving pets, for greater pet abuse potential as adults, and for weaker attachments. However, females were equally likely to hit their pets or give them away. The childhood predictors of attitudes about animals, pet abuse potential, hitting pets, giving away pets, and attachment found in this nonclinical, noncriminal sample contribute to our understanding of developmental influences upon relationships with companion animals. (shrink)

Envisioning the future of positive psychology requires looking at its past. To that end, I first review prior critiques of PP to underscore that certain early problems have persisted over time. I then selectively examine recent research to illustrate progress in certain areas as well as draw attention to recurrent problems. Key among them is promulgation of poorly constructed measures of well-being and reliance on homogeneous, privileged research samples. Another concern is the commercialization of PP, which points to the need (...) for greater oversight and quality control in profit-seeking endeavors. Looking ahead, I advocate for future science tied to contemporary challenges, particularly ever-widening inequality and the pandemic. These constitute intersecting catastrophes that need scientific attention. Such problems bring into focus “neglected negatives” that may be fueling current difficulties, including greed, indifference, and stupidity. Anger, which defies easy characterization as positive or negative, also warrants greater scientific study. Going forward I advocate for greater study of domains that likely nurture good lives and just societies – namely, participation in the arts and encounters with nature, both currently under study. Overall, my entreaty to PP is to reckon with persistent problems from its past, while striving toward a future that is societally relevant and virtuous. (shrink)

López-Escobar, E. G. K. Introduction.--Kueker, D. W. Back-and-forth arguments and infinitary logics.--Green, J. Consistency properties for finite quantifier languages.--Cunningham, E. Chain models.--Gregory, J. On a finiteness condition for infinitary languages.

An empirically sensitive formulation of the norms of transformative criticism must recognize that even public and shared standards of evaluation can be implemented in ways that unintentionally perpetuate and reproduce forms of social bias that are epistemically detrimental. Helen Longino’s theory can explain and redress such social bias by treating peer evaluations as hypotheses based on data and by requiring a kind of perspectival diversity that bears, not on the content of the community’s knowledge claims, but on the beliefs and (...) norms of the culture of the knowledge community itself. To illustrate how socializing cognition can bias evaluations, we focus on peer-review practices, with some discussion of peer-review practices in philosophy. Data include responses to surveys by editors from general philosophy journals, as well as analyses of reviews and editorial decisions for the 2007 Cognitive Science Society Conference. (shrink)

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because (...) proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

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The authors of the concept Health-Related Digital Autonomy have laid the first building block to examine the interactions between artificial intelligence, social media, and depression f...

Criminal law and the proceedings surrounding it work, at least in theory, much like an author works when writing a play or a novel. Both the lawyer and the writer follow traditional formulae that allow them to create and express a vision of reality. When done well, the reality created is virtually seamless. This, however, is the point at which law and literary works diverge. Although we embrace creativity in literary endeavors, we would prefer that the foundation of our legal (...) system be something more substantial. Unfortunately, where US. criminal HIV exposure statutes are concerned, there appears to be little if any concrete connection between proscribed behaviors and what we know about HIV transmission risk. Twenty-four states in the U.S. make it a criminal offense for a person who has HIV to expose another to the virus through consensual sexual activities. The relationship between the activities prohibited by these laws and actual risk of virus transmission is tenuous at best. (shrink)

Criminal law and the proceedings surrounding it work, at least in theory, much like an author works when writing a play or a novel. Both the lawyer and the writer follow traditional formulae that allow them to create and express a vision of reality. When done well, the reality created is virtually seamless. This, however, is the point at which law and literary works diverge. Although we embrace creativity in literary endeavors, we would prefer that the foundation of our legal (...) system be something more substantial. Unfortunately, where US. criminal HIV exposure statutes are concerned, there appears to be little if any concrete connection between proscribed behaviors and what we know about HIV transmission risk. Twenty-four states in the U.S. make it a criminal offense for a person who has HIV to expose another to the virus through consensual sexual activities. The relationship between the activities prohibited by these laws and actual risk of virus transmission is tenuous at best. (shrink)

Twenty-four U.S. states have enacted HIV exposure laws that prohibit HIV-positive persons from engaging in sexual activities with partners to whom they have not disclosed their HIV status. There is little standardization among existing HIV exposure laws, which vary substantially with respect to the sexual activities that are prohibited without prior serostatus disclosure. Logical analysis and mathematical modeling were used to explore the HIV prevention effectiveness of two types of HIV exposure laws: “strict” laws that require HIV-positive persons to disclose (...) their serostatus to prospective partners prior to any sexual activity and “flexible” laws that require seropositive status disclosure only prior to high-risk sex . These laws were compared relative to each other and to a no-law alternative. The results of these analyses indicate that, under most circumstances, both strict and flexible exposure laws can be expected to reduce HIV transmission risk relative to the no-law alternative, with flexible exposure laws producing the greater reduction in risk. This study demonstrates how logical analysis and mathematical modeling techniques can make an important contribution to the construction of a rational basis for decisions about a highly contested public health policy issue. (shrink)

Twenty-four U.S. states have enacted HIV exposure laws that prohibit HIV-positive persons from engaging in sexual activities with partners to whom they have not disclosed their HIV-status. From a public health perspective, HIV serostatus exposure laws can be viewed as structural interventions that seek to limit the spread of HIV by acting at the policy level. A central premise of these laws is that informed partners are more likely to protect themselves by declining sex, by substituting less risky activities for (...) higher-risk ones, or by using condoms, than are uninformed partners. However, the effectiveness of these laws at preventing HIV transmission is not known.There is little standardization among existing HIV exposure laws, which vary substantially with respect to the sexual activities that are prohibited without prior serostatus disclosure. Among the strictest laws are those in Arkansas, Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio which mandate disclosure prior to almost any type of sexual contact. (shrink)

Background and PurposeMany critically ill patients in intensive care units (ICUs) are unable to communicate their wishes about goals of care, particularly about the use of life-sustaining treatments. Surrogates and clinicians struggle with medical decisions because of a lack of clarity regarding patients’ preferences, leading to prolonged hospitalizations and increased costs. This project focused on the development and implementation of a tool to facilitate a better communication process by (1) assuring the early identification of a surrogate if indicated on admission (...) and (2) clarifying the decision-making standards that the surrogate was to use when participating in decision making. Before introducing the tool into the admissions routine, the staff were educated about its use and value to the decision-making process.Project and MethodsThe study was to determine if early use of a simple method of identifying a patient’s surrogate and treatment preferences might impact length of stay (LOS) and total hospital charges. A pre- and post-intervention study design was used. Nurses completed the surrogacy information tool for all patients upon admission to the neuroscience ICU. Subjects (total N=203) were critically ill patients who had been on a mechanical ventilator for 96 hours or longer, or in the ICU for seven days or longer. The project included staff education on biomedical ethics, critical communication skills, early identification of families and staff in crisis, and use of a simple tool to document patients’ surrogates and previously expressed care wishes. Data on hospital LOS and hospital charges were collected through a retrospective review of medical records for similar four-month time frames pre- and post-implementation of the assessment tool.ResultsSignificant differences were found between pre- and post-groups in terms of hospital LOS (F=6.39, p=.01) and total hospital charges (F=7.03, p=.009).ConclusionsProject findings indicate that the use of a simple admission assessment tool, supported by staff education about its completion, use, and available resources, can decrease LOS and lower total hospital charges. The reasons for the difference between the pre- and post-intervention groups remain unclear. Further research is needed to evaluate if the quality of communications between patients, their legally authorized representatives, and clinicians—as suggested in the literature—may have played a role in decreasing LOS and total hospital charges. (shrink)

Using the corpus of JSTOR articles, we investigate the role of gender in collaboration patterns across the scholarly landscape by analyzing gender-based homophily--the tendency for researchers to co-author with individuals of the same gender. For a nuanced analysis of gender homophily, we develop methodology necessitated by the fact that the data comprises heterogeneous sub-disciplines and that not all authorships are exchangeable. In particular, we distinguish three components of gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and (...) non-gendered authorship norms of a scholarly community, a compositional component which is driven by varying gender representation across sub-disciplines, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. Using minimal modeling assumptions, we measure and test for behavioral homophily. We find that significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of female representation in a field is positively associated with significant behavioral homophily. (shrink)

The HRAF databases, eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology, each containing large corpora of curated text subject-indexed at the paragraph-level by anthropologists, were designed to facilitate rapid retrieval of information. The texts describe social and cultural life in past and present societies around the world. As of the spring of 2018, eHRAF contains almost three million indexed “paragraph” units from over 8000 documents describing over 400 societies and archaeological traditions. This chapter first discusses concrete problems of scale resulting from large (...) numbers of complex elements retrieved by any given search. Second, we discuss potential and partial solutions that resolve these problems to advance research, whether based on specific hypotheses, classification or identifying and evaluating embedded patterns of relationships. Third, we discuss new kinds of research possibilities that can be further advanced, have not yet been successfully attempted, or have not even been considered using anthropological data because of scale and complexity of achieving a result. (shrink)

Although we find Gangestad & Simpson's argument intriguing, we question some of its underlying assumptions, including: (1) that fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is consistently heritable; (2) that symmetry is driving the effects; (3) that use of parametric tests with FA is appropriate; and (4) that a short-term mating strategy produces more offspring than a long-term strategy.

In their article, Char et al. have created a model intended to tidy up the messy landscape of ethical concerns arising from machine-learning health care applications. The novel con...

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

In recent years, a number of prominent scholars have touted the use of litigation as an effective tool for making public health policy. For example, Stephen Teret and Michael Jacobs have asserted that product liability claims against car makers have played a significant role in reducing automobile-related injuries, Peter Jacobson and Kenneth Warner have argued that litigation against cigarette manufacturers has advanced the cause of tobacco control, and Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig have suggested that lawsuits against the firearms industry (...) can reduce gun violence. Critics have attacked this use of litigation as doing more harm than good to public health and as a misuse of the courts. This debate involves two distinct controversies: one over whether the public health benefits of litigation outweigh its costs and the other over the proper role of courts within our system of government. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of prominent scholars have touted the use of litigation as an effective tool for making public health policy. For example, Stephen Teret and Michael Jacobs have asserted that product liability claims against car makers have played a significant role in reducing automobile-related injuries, Peter Jacobson and Kenneth Warner have argued that litigation against cigarette manufacturers has advanced the cause of tobacco control, and Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig have suggested that lawsuits against the firearms industry (...) can reduce gun violence. Critics have attacked this use of litigation as doing more harm than good to public health and as a misuse of the courts. This debate involves two distinct controversies: one over whether the public health benefits of litigation outweigh its costs and the other over the proper role of courts within our system of government. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

In this article we report the findings of a randomised control clinical trial that assessed the impact of a Philosophy for Children program and replicated a previous study conducted in Scotland by Topping and Trickey. A Cognitive Abilities Test was administered as a pretest and a posttest to randomly selected experimental groups and control groups. The students in the experimental group engaged in philosophy lessons in a setting of structured, collaborative inquiry in their language arts classes for one hour per (...) week for a number of weeks. The control group received the standard language arts curriculum in that one hour. The study found that the seventh grade students who had experienced the P4C program showed significant gains relative to those in the seventh grade control group at a high level of statistical significance, but the eighth grade students in the experimental group did not show such gains over the eighth grade control group. It was discovered that the seventh grade teachers started the program early in the school year and continued it for a period of 22 to 26 weeks, while the eighth grade teachers started much later and used the program for only 4 to 10 weeks. Our findings suggest that the P4C program must involve students in activities for a significant period of time before the program shows results, but that a meaningful impact on students’ cognitive abilities can be achieved in about 24 weeks of lessons, less than half the time evidenced by the study by Topping and Trickey. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO) provides a formal, logically-based classification of specific protein classes including structured representations of protein isoforms, variants and modified forms. Initially focused on proteins found in human, mouse and Escherichia coli, PRO now includes representations of protein complexes. The PRO Consortium works in concert with the developers of other biomedical ontologies and protein knowledge bases to provide the ability to formally organize and integrate representations of precise protein forms so as to enhance accessibility to results of protein (...) research. PRO (http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro) is part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. (shrink)