We explore the various ethical challenges that arise during the practical implementation of an emergency resource allocation protocol. We argue that to implement an allocation plan in a crisis, a hospital system must complete five tasks: (1) formulate a set of general principles for allocation, (2) apply those principles to the disease at hand to create a concrete protocol, (3) collect the data required to apply the protocol, (4) construct a system to implement triage decisions with those data, and (5) (...) create a system for managing the consequences of implementing the protocol, including the effects on those who must carry out the plan, the medical staff, and the general public. Here we illustrate the complexities of each task and provide tentative solutions, by describing the experiences of the Coronavirus Ethics Response Group, an interdisciplinary team formed to address the ethical issues in pandemic resource planning at the University of Rochester Medical Center. While the plan was never put into operation, the process of preparing for emergency implementation exposed ethical issues that require attention. (shrink)

Visuomotor adaptation to novel environments can occur via non-physical means, such as observation. Observation does not appear to activate the same implicit learning processes as physical practice, rather it appears to be more strategic in nature. However, there is evidence that interspersing observational practice with physical practice can benefit performance and memory consolidation either through the combined benefits of separate processes or through a change in processes activated during observation trials. To test these ideas, we asked people to practice aiming (...) to targets with visually rotated cursor feedback or engage in a combined practice schedule comprising physical practice and observation of projected videos showing successful aiming. Ninety-three participants were randomly assigned to one of five groups: massed physical practice, distributed physical practice, or one of 3 types of combined practice: alternating blocks, or all observation before or after blocked physical practice. Participants received 100 practice trials. All groups improved in adaptation trials and showed savings across the 24-h retention interval relative to initial practice. There was some forgetting for all groups, but the magnitudes were larger for physical practice groups. The Act and Obs_During groups were most accurate in retention and did not differ, suggesting that observation can serve as a replacement for physical practice if supplied intermittently and offers advantages above just resting. However, after-effects associated with combined practice were smaller than those for physical practice control groups, suggesting that beneficial learning effects as a result of observation were not due to activation of implicit learning processes. Reaction time, variable error, and post-test rotation drawings supported this conclusion that adaptation for observation groups was promoted by explicit/strategic processes. (shrink)

Both Carnap and Quine made significant contributions to the philosophy of mathematics despite their diversedviews. Carnap endorsed the dichotomy between analytic and synthetic knowledge and classified certainmathematical questions as internal questions appealing to logic and convention. On the contrary, Quine wasopposed to the analytic-synthetic distinction and promoted a holistic view of scientific inquiry. The purpose of thispaper is to argue that in light of the recent advancement of experimental mathematics such as Monte Carlosimulations, limiting mathematical inquiry to the domain of (...) logic is unjustified. Robustness studies implemented inMonte Carlo Studies demonstrate that mathematics is on par with other experimental-based sciences. (shrink)

Accountability is viewed as a civilizing element in society, with professional accountability formalized in most cases as duties dating to the Greeks and Socrates; journalists must find their own way, without formal professional or government regulation or licensing. Three scholars look at the process in a line from the formal professional discipline to suggesting problems the journalism fraternity faces without regulation to suggesting serious internal ethics conferences as 1 solution to the problem.

The neural correlates of rapid eye movements (REMs) in sleep are extraordinarily robust; including REM-locked activation in the retrosplenial cortex, the supplementary eye field and areas overlapping cholinergic basal nucleus. The phenomenology of REMs speaks to the notion that perceptual experience in both sleep and wakefulness is a constructive process – in which we generate predictions of sensory inputs and then test those predictions through actively sampling the sensorium with eye movements. On this view, REMs during sleep may index an (...) internalized active sampling or ‘scanning’ of self-generated visual constructs that are not constrained by visual input. If this view is correct, it renders REMs an ideal probe to study consciousness as “an exclusively internal affair” (Metzinger 2009). In other words, REMs offer a probe of active inference – in the sense of predictive coding – when the brain is isolated from the sensorium in virtue of the natural blockade of sensory input during REM sleep. REMs are temporally precise events that enable powerful inferences based on timeseries analyses. As a natural, task-free probe, [REMs] could be used in non-compliant subjects, including infants and animals. In short, REM constitutes a promising probe to study the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of consciousness and perhaps its abnormal development in schizophrenia and autism, which have been considered in terms of aberrant predictive coding. (shrink)

It is traditionally believed that cerebral activation (the presence of low voltage fast electrical activity in the neocortex and rhythmical slow activity in the hippocampus) is correlated with arousal, while deactivation (the presence of large amplitude irregular slow waves or spindles in both the neocortex and the hippocampus) is correlated with sleep or coma. However, since there are many exceptions, these generalizations have only limited validity. Activated patterns occur in normal sleep (active or paradoxical sleep) and during states of anesthesia (...) and coma. Deactivated patterns occur, at times, during normal waking, or during behavior in awake animals treated with atropinic drugs. Also, the fact that patterns characteristic of sleep, arousal, and waking behavior continue in decorticate animals indicates that reticulo-cortical mechanisms are not essential for these aspects of behavior. (shrink)

In orthodox quantum mechanics, it has virtually become the custom to identify properties of a physical system with operationally testable propositions about the system. The causes and consequences of this practice are explored mathematically in this paper. Among other things, it is found that such an identification imposes severe constraints on the admissible states of the physical system.