The ethical treatment of cancer patientsparticipating in clinical trials requiresthat patients are well-informed about thepotential benefits and risks associated withparticipation. When patients enrolled in phaseI clinical trials report that their chance ofbenefit is very high, this is often taken as evidence of a failure of the informed consent process. We argue, however, that some simple themes from the philosophy of language may make such a conclusion less certain. First, the patient may receive conflicting statements from multiple speakers about the expected (...) outcome of the trial. Patients may be reporting the message they like best. Second, there is a potential problem of multivocality. Expressions of uncertainty of the frequency type can be confused with expressionsof uncertainty of the belief type. Patients may be informed using frequency-type statements and respond using belief-type statements. Third, each speech episode involving the investigator and the patient regarding outcomes may subservemultiple speech acts, some of which may beindirect. For example, a patient reporting ahigh expected benefit may be reporting a beliefabout the future, reassuring family members,and/or attempting to improve his or her outcome by apublic assertion of optimism. These sources oflinguistic confusion should be considered injudging whether the patient's reported expectation isgrounds for a bioethical concern that there hasbeen a failure in the informed consent process. (shrink)

As part of a larger research study, we present model language for disclosing financial interests in clinical research to potential research participants, and we describe the empirical basis and theoretical assumptions used in developing the language. The empirical process for creating appropriate disclosure language resulted in a generic disclosure statement for cases in which no risk to participants’ welfare or the scientific integrity of the research is expected, and nine more specific disclosure statements for cases in which some risk is (...) expected. The disclosure statements are not meant to be canonical, but were instead designed to reflect the typical situations in which disclosure of financial interest might be considered by an institutional review board or conflict of interest committee. Individual institutions could modify key phrases to suit their purposes, and others could use the language in future empirical work on informed consent to better refine the options for disclosing financial interests in clinical research. (shrink)

The considerable attention to financial interests in clinical research has focused mostly on academic medical centers, even though the majority of clinical research is conducted in community practice settings. To fill this gap, this article maps the practices and policies in 73 community hospitals and several hundred specialized facilities around the country for reviewing clinical investigators’ financial relationships with research sponsors. Community hospitals face a substantially different mix of issues than academic medical centers do because their physician researchers are usually (...) not employees, and more of their studies are later-phase, multicenter trials. Accordingly, community physicians stand to benefit personally from per capita payments, but they tend to have less direct influence over research findings when compared with their academic peers. These and other contrasts require separate guidance for community-based organizations that takes into account their particular needs, circumstances, and institutional capacities. (shrink)

Strategies for disclosing investigators' financial interests to potential research participants have been adopted by many research institutions. However, little is known about how decisions are made regarding disclosures of financial interests to potential research participants, including what is disclosed and the rationale for making these determinations. We sought to understand the attitudes, beliefs, and practices of institutional review board chairs, conflict of interest committee chairs, and investigators regarding disclosure of financial interests to potential research participants. Several themes emerged, including general (...) attitudes toward conflicts of interest, circumstances in which financial interests should be disclosed, rationales and benefits of disclosure, what should be disclosed, negative effects of and barriers to disclosure, and timing and presentation of disclosure. Respondents cited several rationales for disclosure, including enabling informed decision making, promoting trust in researchers and research institutions, and reducing legal liability. There was general agreement that disclosure should happen early in the consent process. Respondents disagreed about whether to disclose the amounts of particular financial interests. Clarifying the goals of disclosure and understanding how potential research participants use the information will be critical in efforts to ensure the integrity of clinical research and to protect the rights and interests of participants. (shrink)

Investigator and institutional financial conflicts of interest have raised concerns about both the integrity of clinical research and protecting the rights and welfare of research participants. In response, professional groups and governmental bodies have issued guidance for managing conflicts of interest to minimize their potential untoward effects. Although a variety of approaches have been offered, a common protection is to disclose financial interests in research to potential research participants as part of the recruitment and informed consent process. This approach reinforces (...) a basic norm of candor, ideally allowing potential research participants to evaluate whether financial interests should affect their decision to participate in research. Disclosure to potential research participants is viewed as an alternative to having regulators or research institutions limit or prohibit all financial interests in research, assuming that not all such interests are unacceptable. (shrink)

Statʹi, razmyshlenii︠a︡, ocherki -- Pisʹma v redakt︠s︡ii -- Perepiska s chlenami Soi︠u︡za svobodomysli︠a︡shchikh -- Pisʹma k M.I. Barskoĭ -- Perepiska mezhdu K.P. Krizhanovskim i I.G. Khusidom -- Iz materialov dela K.P. Krizhanovskogo.

We would like to thank an anonymous referee for his helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.

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)

Introduction of deep neural networks to the machine translation research ameliorated conventional machine translation systems in multiple ways, specifically in terms of translation quality. The ability of deep neural networks to learn a sensible representation of words is one of the major reasons for this improvement. Despite machine translation using deep neural architecture is showing state-of-the-art results in translating European languages, we cannot directly apply these algorithms in Indian languages mainly because of two reasons: unavailability of the good corpus and (...) Indian languages are morphologically rich. In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation (NMT) system for four language pairs: English–Malayalam, English–Hindi, English–Tamil, and English–Punjabi. We also collected sentences from different sources and cleaned them to make four parallel corpora for each of the language pairs, and then used them to model the translation system. The encoder network in the NMT architecture was designed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN). Evaluation of the obtained models was performed both automatically and manually. For automatic evaluation, the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score was used, and for manual evaluation, three metrics such as adequacy, fluency, and overall ranking were used. Analysis of the results showed the presence of lengthy sentences in English–Malayalam, and the English–Hindi corpus affected the translation. Attention mechanism was employed with a view to addressing the problem of translating lengthy sentences (sentences contain more than 50 words), and the system was able to perceive long-term contexts in the sentences. (shrink)

A new model for the aether is suggested according to which it is a superfluid state of fermion and antifermion pairs, describable by a macroscopic wave function. The vacuum state of this superfluid pervades the entire universe and may account for the missing matter. The visible matter in the universe appears as excitations from the underlying superfluid vacuum.

Mr. Raghavendrachar has undertaken the difficult task of representing the system to which he is bound by religion in the impartial way of an objective philosophical study. Philosophy to him means: to reveal the nature of the ultimate reality, but, on the other hand, he claims that philosophy has the practical and ethical ends of the world's uplift. Here already two different aims, a merely epistemological and a pedagogical one, are taken together. Further considerations come in from the religious angle. (...) As an orthodox Vedic scholar Mr. Raghavendrachar defines philosophy proper as philosophy together with the interpretations of the Veda. Besides, as a devout follower of the Madhva School of Visnuism, he propagates as a means of philosophy the study of Visnuite teaching. It is from these divergent presuppositions that Mr. Raghavendrachar's essay is written. While taking his starting point from epistemology, the author puts into the foreground the investigations of the ultimate reality and know- ability. Thus he emphasizes less those problems which are generally considered as the central ones of Indian philosophy, i.e. the problems of philosophy of religion, than those of philosophy general, of Consciousness and Ego, of Error and canons of Truth, etc. This results in an unusual explanation, or rather repudiation, of the term "Dvaita Philosophy." Mr. Raghavendrachar claims that the theological problem of the identity or difference between the Jlva, the individual Soul, and the Brahman, the universal Spirit, has not essential bearing. He asserts that the so-called Dvaitam is in reality a Brahma-Advaitam, not unlike the classical Advaitam, monism and identification between the highest and the individual Atman, and not unlike also the Visistddvaitam, the modified monism or dualism. Mr. Raghaven- drachar points out that Madhva, the founder of the so-called Dvaita-school, never himself used the term Dvaitam, but only draws the distinction between svatantram and a-svatantram, between independent and dependent entities. Brahman, which is here identified with Visnu, is interpreted as the only inde- pendent ground of the world from which originate all dependent, i.e. empirical, phenomena in which the Jwvas, the individual Souls, are included. Thus the religious question is turned into an epistemological one, and he strives to put Safikara, the pure Monist, logically in the wrong, as confusing through his identification of Brahman and Jiva the "condition" with the "conditioned." On the other hand, Mr. Raghavendrachar approaches the problem as a pro- fessed Realist. "Actual difference is the core of reality". Thus the very same empirical world which he beforehand claims as but "conditioned," becomes now for him the centre of his investigation. The confusion between "condition" and "conditioned," for which he blames Safikara, the Idealist, arises for himself from his realistic standpoint. Safikara, in the opinion of the reviewer, avoids the difficulty of such a confusion by proclaiming that all "conditioned," all empirical singleness, is only of lesser truth, is only a laukika expression for the understanding of the masses, while in reality all differentiation is non-existent. Madhva and his present interpreter, on the other hand, emphasize that even in the unifying stage of liberation differences between the Divine and the Jiva and among the single Jivas themselves are still upheld. Mr. Raghavendrachar's second definition of philosophy quoted above is that of philosophy as a practical means of betterment of the world. This peda- gogical purpose of philosophy gives the author the opportunity of advocating his own sectarian standpoint. The Vedanta is for him the best of all possible systems and reveals undoubtable and unquestionable truth. Thus it comple- ments, or it even corrects, the truth gained from empirical facts. Among the Vedantic Schools he considers his own, the Madhva School, the most accom- plished one. Consequently, he has to devalue ankiara's views from this angle also. Safikara, he claims, has only made use of mahdvdikyas, great sayings of the Upanisads; he has to concede to his opponent that he finds support for his interpretations in the most significant Upanisadic teachings. Not many other equally valid mahdvakyas, nor lesser Upanisadic sayings are, however, intro- duced by the author in favour of his own against Saikara's standpoint, Partly this omission is due to Mr. Raghavendrachar's basic dogma that the Veda as a whole is revealed truth and cannot be contradictory to itself; partly-at any rate as the reviewer sees it-it is due to the fact that Safikara's explanations are the most representative of the main Upanisadic doctrines. The difficulty of Mr. Raghavendrachar's self-imposed task of subjective and at the same time objective representation is clearly evident throughout his work. Equally evident, however, throughout Mr. Raghavendrachar's exposi- tions are his two remarkable gifts: genuine religious devotion and excellent training in logical discussion. Review by: Betty Heimann. (shrink)

Papers presented at an annual inter-disciplinary seminar held to facilitate the 60th birthday of Kalarikkal Poulose Aleaz, b. 1947, theologist from Kerala, India during 20-21 September 2007.