The focus on translational research in clinical trials has the potential to generate clinically relevant genetic data that could have importance to patients. This raises challenging questions about communicating relevant genetic research results to individual patients. An exploratory pharmacogenetic analysis was conducted in the international ovarian cancer phase III trial, AGO-OVAR 16, which found that patients with clinically important germ-line BRCA1/2 mutations had improved progression-free survival prognosis. Mechanisms to communicate BRCA results were evaluated, because these findings may be beneficial to (...) patients and their families. Communicating individual BRCA results was not anticipated during clinical trial design. Consequently, options were not available for patients to indicate their preference for receiving their individual results when they signed pharmacogenetic informed consent. Differences in local requirements, clinical practice, and opinion regarding the ethical aspects of how to convey genetic results to patients are all potential barriers to returning individual BRCA results to patients. Communicating the aggregate BRCA result from this study provided clinical investigators with a mechanism to disseminate the overall study finding to patients while taking individual circumstances, local guidelines and clinical practice into account. This study illustrates the importance of increasing the clarity and scope of informed consent and the need for patient engagement to ensure clinical trial participants can indicate their preference regarding receipt of potentially important individual pharmacogenetic results. This study was registered in the NCT Clinical Trial Registry under NCT00866697 on March 19, 2009, following approval from participating ethics committees. (shrink)

Taiwan was affected by an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in early 2003. A questionnaire survey was conducted to determine (1) the perceptions of risk of SARS infection in nurses; (2) the proportion of nurses considering leaving their job; and (3) work as well as non-work factors related to nurses' consideration of leaving their job because of the SARS outbreak. Nearly three quarters (71.9%) of the participants believed they were 'at great risk of exposure to SARS', 49.9% felt'an (...) increase in workload', and 32.4% thought that people avoided them because of their job; 7.6% of the nurses not only considered that they should not care for SARS patients but were looking for another job or considering resignation. The main predictors of nurses' consideration of leaving their job were shorter tenure, increased work stress, perceived risk of fatality from SARS, and affected social relationships. The findings are important in view of potential impending threats of pandemics such as avian influenza. (shrink)

Designing a data-responsive system requires accurate input to ensure efficient results. The growth of technology in sensing methods and the needs of various kinds of data greatly impact data fusion (DF)-related study. A coordinative DF framework entails the participation of many subsystems or modules to produce coordinative features. These features are utilized to facilitate and improve solving certain domain problems. Consequently, this paper proposes a general Multiple Coordinative Data Fusion Modules (MCDFM) framework for real-time and heterogeneous data sources. We develop (...) the MCDFM framework to adapt various DF application domains requiring macro and micro perspectives of the observed problems. This framework consists of preprocessing, filtering, and decision as key DF processing phases. These three phases integrate specific purpose algorithms or methods such as data cleaning and windowing methods for preprocessing, extended Kalman filter (EKF) for filtering, fuzzy logic for local decision, and software agents for coordinative decision. These methods perform tasks that assist in achieving local and coordinative decisions for each node in the network of the framework application domain. We illustrate and discuss the proposed framework in detail by taking a stretch of road intersections controlled by a traffic light controller (TLC) as a case study. The case study provides a clearer view of the way the proposed framework solves traffic congestion as a domain problem. We identify the traffic features that include the average vehicle count, average vehicle speed (km/h), average density (%), interval (s), and timestamp. The framework uses these features to identify three congestion periods, which are the nonpeak period with a congestion degree of 0.178 and a variance of 0.061, a medium peak period with a congestion degree of 0.588 and a variance of 0.0593, and a peak period with a congestion degree of 0.796 and a variance of 0.0296. The results of the TLC case study show that the framework provides various capabilities and flexibility features of both micro and macro views of the scenarios being observed and clearly presents viable solutions. (shrink)

In a previous article (2019), I motivated and defended the idea of teaching philosophy through computer science. In this article, I will further develop this idea and discuss how machine learning can be used for pedagogical purposes because of its tight affinity with philosophical issues surrounding induction. To this end, I will discuss three areas of significant overlap: (i) good / bad data and David Hume’s so-called Problem of Induction, (ii) validation and accommodation vs. prediction in scientific theory selection (...) and (iii) feature engineering and Nelson Goodman’s so-called New Riddle of Induction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology”Francis G. Lu (bio), David Lukoff (bio), and Robert P. Turner (bio)Jackson and Fulford have written an impor-tant paper which addresses an area of increasing interest in the United States—the relationship between religious/spiritual experiences and psychopathology. Using primarily the Present State Examination as the diagnostic framework, the authors describe in rich clinical detail three patients where certain phenomena lead to a possible diagnosis (...) of schizophrenia. However, the patients’ outcomes were uniformly positive—how can this be? The authors argue persuasively for the importance of a contextual assessment “in which psychotic phenomena themselves are embedded in the values and beliefs of the person concerned.” In this commentary, we will first present innovations in the DSM-IV relevant to cultural and religious/spiritual issues, which complement the authors’ conclusions, and then comment upon the paper from this perspective.In the DSM-IV Introduction (1994), a section entitled “Ethnic and Cultural Considerations” provides a rationale for innovations in DSM-IV that better enables its use with culturally diverse individuals: “A clinician who is unfamiliar with the nuances of an individual’s cultural frame of references may incorrectly judge as psychopathology those normal variations in behavior, belief, or experience that are particular to the individual’s culture. For example, certain religious practices or beliefs (e.g., hearing or seeing a deceased relative during bereavement) may be misdiagnosed as manifestations of a Psychotic Disorder” (xxiv). In the introduction, three types of information are cited: 1) sections entitled “Age, Gender and Cultural Considerations” in the text of ninety diagnostic categories discuss clinical variations due to these factors; 2) an Outline for Cultural Formulation designed to assist the clinician in systematically evaluating and reporting the impact of the individual’s cultural context; and 3) a Glossary of Culture-Bound Syndromes. These innovations, based on recommendations of the NIMH Workgroup on Culture, Diagnosis and Care to the Task Force on DSM-IV, are described in extensive detail in an important recent book (Mezzich, Kleinman, Fabrega, and Parron 1996).As an example of the importance of the Age, Gender, and Cultural Consideration section relevant to religious and spiritual experiences, consider the section in the text describing schizophrenia, where the following appears: “Clinicians assessing the symptoms of Schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations that are different from their own must take cultural differences into account. Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft) may be commonly held in another. In some cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a [End Page 75] religious content may be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing God’s voice)” (281). Secondly, in the analogous section of the text describing Brief Psychotic Disorder, the following appears: “It is important to distinguish symptoms of Brief Psychotic Disorder from culturally sanctioned response patterns. For example, in some religious ceremonies, an individual may report hearing voices, but these do not generally persist and are not perceived as abnormal by most members of the person’s community” (303).The Outline for Cultural Formulation provides the clinician a concise tool to specify the following information concerning the cultural context that is relevant to clinical care: cultural identity of the individual, cultural explanations of the individual’s illness, cultural factors related to psychosocial environment and levels of functioning, cultural elements of the relationship between the individual and the clinician, and overall cultural assessment for diagnosis and care. Religion is explicitly mentioned in the third section so as to encourage the assessment of “the role of religion... in providing emotional, instrumental, and information support” (1994, 844). This outline for cultural formulation is more fully explicated in a recent chapter by Lu, Lim, and Mezzich (1995).A major innovation in DSM-IV relevant to this topic is the new diagnostic category entitled Religious or Spiritual Problem defined as follows: “This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is a religious or spiritual problem. Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of spiritual values that may not necessarily be related to an organized... (shrink)

Ryan Darby, Judith Edersheim, and Bruce Price (DEP) argue that patients with Behavioral-Variant Frontotemporal Dementia have intact moral knowledge. In effect, they assume a motivational externalist understanding of moral knowledge. We question this by probing the cases they present as evidence for their position.

The experimental validity of research in the experimental philosophy of free will has been called into question. Several new, important studies (Murray et al. forthcoming; Nadelhoffer et al., Cognitive Science 44 (8): 1–28, 2020 ; Nadelhoffer et al., 2021; Rose et al., Cognitive Science 41 (2): 482–502, 2017 ) are interpreted as showing that the vignette-judgment model is defective because participants only exhibit a surface-level comprehension and not the deeper comprehension the model requires. Participants, it is argued, commit _bypassing_, _intrusion_, (...) and _fatalism_ errors. We respond in two ways: (1) we critique and improve existing methods for assessing deeper comprehension and (2) we develop videos to convey deterministic principles of change that succeed in significantly reducing participants’ bypassing, intrusion, and fatalism errors. Consequently, we have the best existing instrument for gauging folk intuitions about the relationship between free will and determinism. (shrink)

In “Punishing Intentions and Neurointerventions”, Birks and Buyx (2018) provide a novel argument on why the use of mandatory neurointerventions on convicted criminals is morally objectionable “in a...

Part of the appeal of the biological approach to personal identity is that it does not have to countenance spatially coincident entities. But if the termination thesis is correct and the organism ceases to exist at death, then it appears that the corpse is a dead body that earlier was a living body and distinct from but spatially coincident with the organism. If the organism is identified with the body, then the unwelcome spatial coincidence could perhaps be avoided. It is (...) argued that such an identification would be a mistake. A living organism has a different part/whole relationship and persistence conditions than the alleged body. A case will be made that the concept ‘human body’ is a conceptual mess, vague in an unprincipled manner, and that an eliminativist stance towards dead bodies is the appropriate response. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 310—311. Writing Death . Jeremy Fernando, foreword by Avital Ronell. Den Haag: Uitgeverij. 2011 ISBN: 978-90-817091-0-1 Rite and ceremony as well as legend bound the living and the dead in a common partnership. They were esthetic but they were more than esthetic. The rites of mourning expressed more than grief; the war and harvest dance were more than a gathering of energy for tasks to be performed; magic was more than a way of commanding forces of nature (...) to do the bidding of man; feasts were more than a satisfaction of hunger. Each of these communal modes of activity united the practical, the social, and the educative in an integrated whole having esthetic form.(1) Jeremy Fernando’s Writing Death is a sensitive attempt at exploring the depths and heights to which the processes of mourning can take us. Death, as an absence, renders all gestures (for what is mourning but a gesture with many faces) surrounding it at once as a possibility and an impossibility. Fernando poses questions that often elude the mourner and the mourned—the same, and different—by raising the specter of subject and object; by compelling the examination of what it actually means to mourn; and most crucially, by considering the very status of possibility itself that the act of mourning foregrounds. Mourning, he reminds us, is premised upon memory (remembrance, recollection), the shadow of forgetting upon which is perpetually cast—the inextricability between memory and forgetting haunts the living more than it does the dead. And if grief has anything to do with it, mourning can quite easily be mistaken for an attempt to remember in order to forget; an attempt, in other words, to deny death, deny the one thing that confirms mortality. As if living has anything to do with it. What, then, of writing death? It becomes an unceasing process of locating—and addressing—possibility itself: the passing as possibility; loss as possibility; impossibility as, and of, naming this possibility. In confronting the passing on, it is possible, nay inevitable, to move on, move away from the site of loss, of grief. All the while, we forget, Fernando reminds us, that mourning has little to do with the dead, and a whole lot to do with the living, the mourning self. Here, he echoes Dewey’s consolidation of rituals and ceremonies, of the dead and of the living, all as parts of a larger unity, of a social, public gesture meant to sate a private need: In trying to “get over it,” are we trying to get over ourselves? Or more than that: are we trying to get over the fact that we can never quite get over ourselves? (Fernando, 77) As if guilt has anything to do with it. And “it” continues to be the point that he is driving at, driving towards. “It” is the possibility and impossibility, death and life, memory and forgetting, lost and cherished. “It” is what eludes mourning, eludes attempts to overcome grief. Nonetheless, move on, he must. And Fernando does this in fewer moves than a 12-step program—hardly therapeutic, but intellectually satisfying. Writing Death attends to some of the pertinent aspects of the act of mourning—both as gesture and as meditation: eulogy, distress (call), tears, and the question of how (beyond ritual, beyond sentimentality) to mourn. And what’s love got to do with it? Everything and nothing. Mourning, after all, is an articulation of love, but it is also one that forces the mourner to be selective, as with myth-making, in the recollection: Remembering only ever occurs in exception to memory—quite possibly in betrayal of a memory. In this way, each remembrance is a naming of that memory, a naming of something as memory, bringing with it an act of violence. (40) Mourning is thus not only an act of fictionalizing, it is also an act of reading, to continually be compelled to respond to another, all the while keeping vigil against a reconceptualization of the dead, without, therefore, misreading the dead. This can only be done, Fernando argues, by all the while “maintaining the otherness of the other. After all, one must try not to forget that one cannot be too close—space is needed—to touch.” (82) There is also tacit acknowledgement that doing so foregrounds the fact that the selectivity of memory becomes exclusive, and concretizes into a singularity, thus negating the multi-dimensionality of a life lived – and thus killing the already dead. Writing Death is framed by two eulogies—or the approximations of eulogies; approximation because both foreground and call into question the eulogy as a genre. The first is Avital Ronell’s foreword to the book, remembering Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; the second is Fernando’s own response to the passing of a mentor, Jean Baudrillard. Both are not merely attempts to philosophize their way out of the act of mourning. Both are in fact deeply moving pieces that remind us of the emotional possibilities that may reside within any intellectual undertaking, that the latter need not be cold and devoid of feelings. And whereas Writing Death does not attempt to make any philosophical claim for humanism, the underlying wistfulness of both pieces does suggest that there is a proper place for deep-seated human response to death. We can (and the book does) intellectualize and problematize the acts of mourning and grieving, but these do not diminish the fact that we mourn and grieve. And, framing Writing Death as the two eulogies do, Jeremy Fernando perhaps finally, and inadvertently, names “It”—it is, above everything else, Human. August, 2011 Singapore NOTES (1) Dewey, John. Art as Experience . New York: Perigee, 1934. (shrink)

Diese Arbeit untersucht den Begriff der Autonomie und des Menschenrechts bei Kant. Sie geht davon aus, dass die kantische Rechtsphilosophie nicht nur der grundlegenden rechtlichen Frage, ob und inwieweit eine Gesetzgebung überhaupt allgemeingültig sein kann und muss, sondern auch aktuellen Grundsatzfragen des Rechts eine plausible Antwort geben kann. Der Gesichtspunkt des Übergangs vom unbedingt guten Willen zur allgemeinen weltbürgerlichen Verfassung begleitet dabei den ganzen Verständnisprozess der kantischen Rechtsphilosophie. Erst durch die grundsätzliche Klärung des kantischen Autonomieprinzips in seiner Moralphilosophie und Rechtslehre (...) wird der umstrittenen aktuellen Menschenrechtsfrage, insbesondere der Frage nach dem Menschenrecht auf sittliche Autonomie, eine neue Interpretationsmöglichkeit eröffnet. (shrink)

This paper presents the critical role of corporate responsibility in the sustainability of health care programs in lower income communities mostly located in the rural areas. The Leaders for Health Program (LHP)—a tri-partite partnership between the Philippine Department of Health, the Health Unit of the Ateneo de Manila University Graduate School of Business, and Pfizer Philippines, Inc.—is an innovative approach focusing on health promotion and education as the cornerstone for community development. LHP adopts a systemic and comprehensive approach that takes (...) into consideration all the major stakeholders in health, especially in rural communities. This paper aims to support the viability of education as the main catalyst for community empowerment and self-sufficiency. (shrink)

For the most part, the primary driver for international businesses in establishing operations in other countries is the reduction of overall operating costs. Host countries, especially developing nations, welcome multinational corporations (MNCs) because of the perceived economic benefits that international businesses can bring to their local communities. Surprisingly, one of the most understudied, under-analyzed, and sometimes even completely neglected factors when international businesses consider setting up shop in other countries is the local culture of their chosen destination country. This paper (...) substantiates the thesis that international businesses should adapt their corporate practices to the local cultures in which they operate to achieve effective and superior businessperformance. The paper goes further in identifying corporate practices that were adapted or revised by international businesses to respond to the culture of local communities in the Philippines. (shrink)

The development of the CRISPR gene editing technique has been hyped as a technique that could fundamentally change scientific research and its clinical application. Unrecognized is the fact that it joins other technologies that have tried and failed under the same discourse of scientific hype. These technologies, like gene therapy and stem cell research, have moved quickly passed basic research into clinical application with dire consequences. Before hastily moving to clinical applications, it is necessary to consider basic research and determine (...) how CRISPR/Cas systems should be applied. In the case of single gene diseases, that application is expected to have positive impacts, but as we shift to more complex diseases, the impact could be unintentionally negative. In the context of common disabilities, the level of genetic complexity may render this technology useless but potentially toxic, aggravating a social discourse that devalues those with disabilities. This paper intends to define the issues related to disability that are associated with using the CRIPSR/Cas system in basic research. It also aims to provide a decision tree to help determine whether the technology should be utilized or if alternative approaches beyond scientific research could lead to a better use of limited funding resources. (shrink)

As a continuation of the work of the third author in [5], we make further observations on the features of Galois cohomology in the general model theoretic context. We make explicit the connection between forms of definable groups and first cohomology sets with coefficients in a suitable automorphism group. We then use a method of twisting cohomology (inspired by Serre’s algebraic twisting) to describe arbitrary fibres in cohomology sequences—yielding a useful “finiteness” result on cohomology sets. Applied to the special case (...) of differential fields and Kolchin’s constrained cohomology, we complete results from [3] by proving that the first constrained cohomology set of a differential algebraic group over a bounded, differentially large, field is countable. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Faith (Islam); liberty; religious aspects; Islam.

Human reproductive technology; law and legislation; religious aspects; Islam.

I have developed transcendental arguments to refute several versions of Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis. I called some of these arguments the SIM-style argument. In this paper, I have four main aims. First, I employ the SIM-style argument to remedy a defect in Hilary Putnam’s Brain-in-vat argument. Second, I show that the most radical skepticism, which Tim Button called the nightmarish Cartesian skepticism, can be refuted by the SIM-style argument or by another transcendental argument I develop here. Third, I compare my (...) approach to radical skepticisms with Donald Davidson’s, as it is often regarded as an exemplar of transcendental arguments. Fourth, I explain how the prominent objections, mainly developed by Barry Stroud, to transcendental arguments can incur two undesirable results: psychologism and Kantian skepticism. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is set to transform healthcare. Key ethical issues to emerge with this transformation encompass the accountability and transparency of the decisions made by AI-based systems, the potential for group harms arising from algorithmic bias and the professional roles and integrity of clinicians. These concerns must be balanced against the imperatives of generating public benefit with more efficient healthcare systems from the vastly higher and accurate computational power of AI. In weighing up these issues, this paper applies the deliberative (...) balancing approach of the Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research. The analysis applies relevant values identified from the framework to demonstrate how decision-makers can draw on them to develop and implement AI-assisted support systems into healthcare and clinical practice ethically and responsibly. Please refer to Xafis et al. in this special issue of the Asian Bioethics Review for more information on how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end of this paper. (shrink)