The authors consider reflexive games that describe the interaction of subjects making decisions based on an awareness structure, i.e., a hierarchy of beliefs about essential parameters, beliefs about beliefs, and so on. It was shown that the language of graphs of reflexive games represents a convenient uniform description method for reflexion effects in bélles-léttres.

Changes in healthcare financing increasingly rely upon patient cost-sharing to control escalating healthcare expenditures. These changes raise new challenges for physicians that are different from those that arose either under managed care or traditional indemnity insurance. Historically, there have been two distinct bases for arguing that physicians should not consider costs in their clinical decisions—an “aspirational ethic” that exhorts physicians to treat all patients the same regardless of their ability to pay, and an “agency ethic” that calls on physicians to (...) be trustworthy advisors to their patients. In the setting of greater patient cost-sharing, physicians' aspiration and agency roles increasingly conflict. Satisfactorily navigating the new terrain of consumer-driven healthcare requires physicians to consider these two roles and how they can best be reconciled so as to maximize quality of care while respecting the heterogeneity of patients' financial resources and willingness to pay. (shrink)

We provide an introduction to methods and recent results on infinitely generated abelian groups with decidable word problem.

The growth of managed care was accompanied by concern about the impact that changes in health care organization would have on the doctor-patient relationship. We now are in a “post-managed care era,” where some of these changes in health care delivery have come to pass while others have not. A re-examination of the DPR in this setting suggests some surprising results. Rather than posing a new and unprecedented threat, managed care was simply the most recent of numerous strains on the (...) DPR that have occurred throughout the century. These strains are a constant, inevitable consequence of the varying needs and concerns of patient and physicians as they seek to balance their desires for a certain type of DPR with their simultaneous desire for other aspects of care such as lower costs, greater technological sophistication, and improved outcomes. (shrink)

We show that for every computable ordinal of the form β=δ+2n+1>1, where δ is zero or a limit ordinal and n∈ω, there exists a torsion-free abelian group having an X-computable copy if and only if X is nonlowβ.

As the world watches the current crisis in Kosovo unfold through intensive daily media coverage, particularly by major networks in the US and Europe, one can only wonder why the same attention is not given to the crises in Africa. The military intervention by NATO allied forces, including the United States, to avert Milosevic ’ s genocidal campaign towards the Kosovo Albanians, can only be characterized as an exclusive European mission to resolve Europe ’ s problem. This is not, by (...) all means, to subvert or undermine the suffering of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo but to give some perspective as to how the super powers are responding to other similar crises in the world. Today, any crime against humanity, in any part of the world, regardless of this nations political or economic interest, should not be tolerated. Most Americans, perhaps most of the world, do not know about the mass genocide that took place in Rwanda and the civil war in the Southern Sudan that has left more than a million and half people dead. And now we can add to this list, the recent border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea that has emerged into a full - scale war. The most recent conflict has already claimed thousands of lives while world superpowers are watching si -. (shrink)

We prove that for any computable successor ordinal of the form α = δ + 2k there exists computable torsion-free abelian group that is relatively Δα0 -categorical and not Δα−10 -categorical. Equivalently, for any such α there exists a computable TFAG whose initial segments are uniformly described by Σαc infinitary computable formulae up to automorphism, and there is no syntactically simpler family of formulae that would capture these orbits. As far as we know, the problem of finding such optimal examples (...) of Δα0-categorical TFAGs for arbitrarily large α was first raised by Goncharov at least 10 years ago, but it has resisted solution 315–356]). As a byproduct of the proof, we introduce an effective functor that transforms a 0″-computable worthy labeled tree into a computable TFAG. We expect that this techni... (shrink)

In his Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant presents four anti- nomies. In his attempt to solve the first of these antinomies he examines and analyzes"thesis" and "antithesis" more thoroughly and employs the terms `part', `whole' and `boundary' in his argumentation for their validity. According to Kant, the whole problem surrounding the antinomy was caused by applying the concept of the world to nature and then using both terms interchangeably. While interesting, this solution is still not that much more than (...) a well thought out idea if it does not also include an adequate formal explication. Since the aforementioned terms all have counterparts in modern mereotopology, a discipline that has seen significant progress in recent times, we will apply these concepts to Kant's analysis in an attempt to evaluate Kant's solution in light of modern analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Physicians have special professional obligations to respond to medical emergencies. A bioterrorism attack would be a medical emergency. Thus, it seems that physicians would have an obligation to respond to a bioterrorist attack. However, the scope of those obligations, and their limits, are vexed topics. General rules may be comforting but the details and nuances of particular situations will always be relevant.

Physicians have special professional obligations to respond to medical emergencies. A bioterrorism attack would be a medical emergency. Thus, it seems that physicians would have an obligation to respond to a bioterrorist attack. However, the scope of those obligations, and their limits, are vexed topics. General rules may be comforting but the details and nuances of particular situations will always be relevant.

We give a systematic technical exposition of the foundations of the theory of computably compact metric spaces. We discover several new characterizations of computable compactness and apply these characterizations to prove new results in computable analysis and effective topology. We also apply the technique of computable compactness to give new and less combinatorially involved proofs of known results from the literature. Some of these results do not have computable compactness or compact spaces in their statements, and thus these applications are (...) not necessarily direct or expected. (shrink)

This study examines the public's and physicians' willingness to support deception of insurance companies in order to obtain necessary healthcare services and how this support varies based on perceptions of physicians' time pressures. Based on surveys of 700 prospective jurors and 1617 physicians, the public was more than twice as likely as physicians to sanction deception (26% versus 11%) and half as likely to believe that physicians have adequate time to appeal coverage decisions (22% versus 59%). The odds of public (...) support for deception compared to that of physicians rose from 2.48 to 4.64 after controlling for differences in time perception. These findings highlight the ethical challenge facing physicians and patients in balancing patient advocacy with honesty in the setting of limited societal resources. (shrink)

We solve a problem posed by Goncharov and Knight 639–681, 757]). More specifically, we produce an effective Friedberg enumeration of computable equivalence structures, up to isomorphism. We also prove that there exists an effective Friedberg enumeration of all isomorphism types of infinite computable equivalence structures.

We report on a study of the religious correlates of generalized trust. Our critical frame leads us to explore novel questions about how nonreligion may encourage social trust. We find that those who believe the bible to be a book of fables are more trusting than those with other beliefs about the text, and that nontheists report a greater willingness to trust. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research about religious belief and generalized trust.

Review by: Alexander G. Melnikov The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, Volume 19, Issue 3, Page 400-401, September 2013.

University based academic Research Ethics Boards (REB) face the particularly difficult challenge of trying to achieve representation from a variety of disciplines, methodologies and research interests. Additionally, many are currently facing another decision – whether to have students as REB members or not. At Ryerson University, we are uniquely situated. Without a medical school in which an awareness of the research ethics review process might be grounded, our mainly social science and humanities REB must also educate and foster awareness of (...) the ethics review process throughout the academic community. Our Board has had and continues to have students as active members. While there are challenges to having students as Board members, these are clearly outweighed by the advantages, for both the academic community and the future of ethically sound research in the social sciences and humanities. Moreover, the challenges are often based on misconceptions and can be easily overcome through increased education and understanding of the research ethics review process by the academic community at large. The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss the experiences, advantages and challenges of having students as REB members. The advantages of having students as REB members include the following: (1) Students are the proposed participants in many of our reviewed protocols and student members may illuminate unique issues of participation. (2) Students are active and highly engaged members of the REB. (3) Having students on the REB enhances awareness of research ethics within the University. (4) Student REB members have an opportunity to mentor other students and provide leadership for both undergraduate and graduate students. (5) Students are more vigorously recruited than faculty members and often apply for student positions with enthusiasm and preparation. (6) In creating an atmosphere of excellence in research, engaging students at the beginning of their research career will help in creating tomorrow’s leaders in research and research ethics. The challenges of having students as REB members include the following: (1) Faculty members may be uneasy regarding the prospect of students reviewing protocols. (2) Faculty members may be concerned about confidentiality and respect with students reviewing faculty research protocols. (3) There may be an increased burden for students who serve as members on an REB. (4) There is concern that students will offer less continuous service to the REB. (5) There is a common misconception that students do not have the experience to carry out ethical reviews. While there are challenges from faculty members and others regarding having students as REB members, these challenges are often based on misconceptions about the nature of the REB work and the ethics review process in general. These challenges are also often based on the misconception of the ethics review process as one of peer review and evaluation, instead of a community-based and inclusive process. Having student members is a long-term strategy for both overcoming the misconceptions of the REB as a “necessary evil” and for fostering an awareness of the imperative for ethically sound research in the social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Taste metaphors provide a rich vocabulary for describing emotional experience, potentially serving as an adaptive mechanism for conveying abstract emotional concepts using concrete verbal references to our shared experience. We theorized that the popularity of these expressions results from the close association with hedonic valence shared by these two domains of experience. To explore the possibility that this affective quality underlies the semantic similarity of these domains, we used a behavioral “odd-one-out” task in an online (...) sample of 1059 participants in order to examine the semantic similarity of concepts related to emotion, taste, and color, another rich source of sensory metaphors. We found that the semantic similarity of emotion and taste concepts was greater than that of emotion and color concepts. Importantly, the similarity of taste and emotion concepts was strongly related to their similarity in hedonic valence, a relationship which was also significantly greater than that present between color and emotion. These results suggest that the common core of valence between taste and emotion concepts allows us to bridge the conceptual divide between our shared sensory environment and our internal emotional experience. (shrink)

In his Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant presents four antinomies. In his attempt to solve the first of these antinomies he examines and analyzes "thesis" and "antithesis" more thoroughly and employs the terms `part', `whole' and `boundary' in his argumentation for their validity. According to Kant, the whole problem surrounding the antinomy was caused by applying the concept of the world to nature and then using both terms interchangeably. While interesting, this solution is still not that much more than (...) a well thought out idea if it does not also include an adequate formal explication. Since the aforementioned terms all have counterparts in modern mereotopology, a discipline that has seen significant progress in recent times, we will apply these concepts to Kant's analysis in an attempt to evaluate Kant's solution in light of modern analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Many nuclear proteins have been found recently to interact with short conserved sequences which are involved in regulating the transcription of various genes. Nuclear transcription factors may be arbitrarily subdivided into two groups, ubiquitous and tissue‐specific. The transcription of one gene is usually regulated by several factors which interact with different sequences located either in the promoter region of the gene or outside it. The appearance or disappearance of transcription factors for some genes corresponds to certain phases of cell differentiation (...) or dedifferentiation and even to individual stages of the cell cycle. (shrink)

Apoptosis‐inducing factor (AIF) is expelled from mitochondria after some apoptotic stimuli and translocates to the nucleus, which may contribute to DNA and nuclear fragmentation in some non‐physiological mammalian cell deaths. Conversely, the requirement for mitochondrial AIF in oxidative phosphorylation and energy generation provides a plausible explanation for the embryonic lethality or neurodegeneration that has been found in different AIF‐deficient mouse models. These findings may help illuminate the ability of mitochondrial AIF to suppress cytoplasmic stress granule formation and to promote the (...) tumorigenic growth of cancer cells. AIF is ideally located in the mitochondrion to perform a vital normal function in energy production. Once it translocates to the nucleus, however, the cell might die either of energy failure or nuclear fragmentation (or both). We propose that the main function of AIF is to support energy production in both normal and transformed cell physiology, whereas nuclear‐translocated AIF might contribute to stress‐induced or pathological cell death in certain scenarios. BioEssays 28: 834–843, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Ever since it was discovered that hallucinations and illusions are not all that compatible with our natural view of the relation between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, according to which we always perceive the object itself (or, as most epistemologists prefer to say, we perceive it directly), the philosophical position of Direct (or Naïve) Realism which is meant to be the epistemological equivalent of this view, has begun to falter. To express these problems more explicitly, the argument from (...) hallucination and the argument from illusion were created and brought direct realists in dire need of explaining how phenomenons such as hallucinations and illusions could possibly go together with their position. One of the main direct (or naïve) realists’ responses to these arguments is Disjunctivism, a position that, while being able to efficiently deal with both arguments, is subject to quite a few problems in its postulations as well. The intuitive plausibility of both arguments seems to have led many a philosopher to take their validity for granted. Because of this, it will be attempted to give an accurate and adequate reformulation of both arguments in this paper to find out whether their impact on the philosophy of perception is justified in the first place. (shrink)

BackgroundThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration traditionally has kept confidential significant amounts of information relevant to the approval or non-approval of specific drugs, devices, and biologics and about the regulatory status of such medical products in FDA’s pipeline.ObjectiveTo develop practical recommendations for FDA to improve its transparency to the public that FDA could implement by rulemaking or other regulatory processes without further congressional authorization. These recommendations would build on the work of FDA’s Transparency Task Force in 2010.MethodsIn 2016-2017, we convened (...) a team of academic faculty from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Yale Medical School, Yale Law School, and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to develop recommendations through an iterative process of reviewing FDA’s practices, considering the legal and policy constraints on FDA in expanding transparency, and obtaining insights from independent observers of FDA.ResultsThe team developed 18 specific recommendations for improving FDA’s transparency to the public. FDA could adopt all these recommendations without further congressional action.FundingThe development of the Blueprint for Transparency at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. (shrink)