In the United States, the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act specifies that students with disabilities should be educated in the “least restrictive environment,” yet little is known about how successfully schools have been able to apply appropriate supports, practices and resources so that all students benefit from inclusion. Using a quasi-experimental method and a longitudinal data-set provided by the Florida Department of Education that spans an eight-year panel from 2001 through 2009, this paper analyses the relationship between the density (...) and diversity of peers with special educational needs and general education students’ absence rates in grades three through eight. Results show that a one standard deviation increase in the measure of special education peers is associated with an increase in general education students’ absences of.03 to.43 more days per year, depending on the empirical specification chosen. This represents as much as a five percent increase in the a... (shrink)

I argue that Democritus can reasonably be regarded as a eudaimonist, though we have to be cautious, given that his work has come down to us in fragments and that some of these are rejected by some scholars. Despite these difficulties, I argue that the best interpretation of his ethical fragments overall is that he is a eudaimonist.

This book, based on lectures, examines ways that the tradition of 'Middle' Platonism can point us to aspects of Plato's thinking which contemporary discussions often overlook, and which give us a better-rounded account of Plato.

Men often make riskier decisions than women across a wide range of real-life behaviors. Whether this sex difference is accentuated, diminished, or stable under stressful conditions is, however, contested in the scientific literature. A critical blind spot lies amid this contestation: Most studies use standardized, laboratory-based, cognitive measures of decision making rather than complex real-life social simulation tasks to assess risk-related behavior. To address this blind spot, we investigated the effects of acute psychosocial stress on risk decision making in men (...) and women using a standardized cognitive measure and a novel task that simulated a real-life social situation. Participants were exposed to either an acute psychosocial stressor or an equivalent control condition. Stressor-exposed participants were further characterized as high- or low-cortisol responders. Results confirmed that the experimental manipulation was effective. On the IGT, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders made significantly riskier decisions than those characterized as high-cortisol responders. Similarly, in the online chatroom, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders were, relative to those in the Non-Stress group, significantly more likely to make risky decisions. Together, these results suggest that at lower levels of cortisol both men and women tend to make riskier decisions in both economic and social spheres. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held in the fall of 2005 at the University of Notre Dame.

R. G. Bury’s translations of Sextus Empiricus for the Loeb Library have served English language readers well, but new translations, taking account of advances in scholarship since Bury’s day, have long been needed. We now have two new English versions of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. They take different and in some ways complementary approaches to the task.

Recent EEG studies on the early postmortem interval that suggest the persistence of electrophysiological coherence and connectivity in the brain of animals and humans reinforce the need for further investigation of the relationship between the brain’s activity and the dying process. Neuroscience is now in a position to empirically evaluate the extended process of dying and, more specifically, to investigate the possibility of brain activity following the cessation of cardiac and respiratory function. Under the direction of the Center for Healthy (...) Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, research was conducted in India on a postmortem meditative state cultivated by some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in which decomposition is putatively delayed. For all healthy baseline and postmortem subjects presented here, we collected resting state electroencephalographic data, mismatch negativity, and auditory brainstem response. In this study, we present HB data to demonstrate the feasibility of a sparse electrode EEG configuration to capture well-defined ERP waveforms from living subjects under very challenging field conditions. While living subjects displayed well-defined MMN and ABR responses, no recognizable EEG waveforms were discernable in any of the tukdam cases. (shrink)

Scholars and leaders have assumed that prosocial motivation is the primary driver for social enterprises (SEs) to do good. Despite the significance of prosocial motivation, we argue that it may not be the single driver for SE motivation. A dual-motivations approach based on insights from motivation research is proposed to examine how different types of SE motivation can act together to influence the outcomes of SEs. Empirical findings based on survey data from Hong Kong demonstrate that dual motivations—prosocial-intrinsic and prosocial-extrinsic (...) motivations—explain the outcomes of SEs beyond what the direct effects of prosocial motivation can explain separately. Based on moderation analyses, intrinsic motivation enhances the positive relationships between prosocial motivation and business and social outcomes, whereas extrinsic motivation undermines the relationship related to business outcomes. Implications for research on social entrepreneurship and business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

This important new work surveys the source and ramifications of the famed Nuremburg Code -- recognized around the world as one of the cornerstones of modern bioethics.

The law has therefore had two conflicting impacts on medical ethics: the positive effect of eroding paternalism and replacing it with a patient-centered ethic; and the negative effect of encouraging physicians to be more concerned with avoiding litigation than doing the "right" thing.

American healthcare -- Bioterror and bioart -- State of emergency -- Licensed to torture -- Hunger strikes -- War -- Cancer -- Drug dealing -- Toxic tinkering -- Abortion -- Culture of death -- Patient safety -- Global health -- Statue of security -- Pandemic fear -- Bioidentifiers -- Genetic genocide.

Recently, scholars have looked more closely at the philosophical importance of the imaginative and literary aspects of Plato's writing, and have begun to appreciate the methods of ancient philosophers and commentators who studied Plato. This study brings together leading philosophical and literary scholars to investigate these new-old approaches.

Since at least the advent of Jack Kevorkian’s “suicide machine” the major argument against adopting physician-assisted suicide laws has been that they will lead us down a slippery slope to state-sa...

BackgroundAn increasing number of studies utilize intracranial electrophysiology in human subjects to advance basic neuroscience knowledge. However, the use of neurosurgical patients as human research subjects raises important ethical considerations, particularly regarding informed consent and undue influence, as well as subjects’ motivations for participation. Yet a thorough empirical examination of these issues in a participant population has been lacking. The present study therefore aimed to empirically investigate ethical concerns regarding informed consent and voluntariness in Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing deep brain (...) stimulator (DBS) placement who participated in an intraoperative neuroscience study.MethodsTwo semi-structured 30-minute interviews were conducted preoperatively and postoperatively via telephone. Interviews assessed participants’ motivations for participation in the parent intraoperative study, recall of information presented during the informed consent process, and participants’ postoperative reflections on the research study.ResultsTwenty-two participants (mean age = 60.9) completed preoperative interviews at a mean of 7.8 days following informed consent and a mean of 5.2 days prior to DBS surgery. Twenty participants completed postoperative interviews at a mean of 5 weeks following surgery. All participants cited altruism or advancing medical science as “very important” or “important” in their decision to participate in the study. Only 22.7% (n = 5) correctly recalled one of the two risks of the study. Correct recall of other aspects of the informed consent was poor (36.4% for study purpose; 50.0% for study protocol; 36.4% for study benefits). All correctly understood that the study would not confer a direct therapeutic benefit to them.ConclusionEven though research coordinators were properly trained and the informed consent was administered according to protocol, participants demonstrated poor retention of study information. While intraoperative studies that aim to advance neuroscience knowledge represent a unique opportunity to gain fundamental scientific knowledge, improved standards for the informed consent process can help facilitate their ethical implementation. (shrink)

Federal regulations in the United States have shaped Institutional Review Boards to focus on protecting individual human subjects. Health services research studies focusing on healthcare institutions such as hospitals or clinics do not have individual human subjects. Since U.S. federal regulations are silent on what type of review, if any, these studies require, different IRBs may approach similar studies differently, resulting in undesirable variation in the review of studies focusing on healthcare institutions. Further, although these studies do not focus on (...) individual human subjects, they may pose risks to participating institutions, as well as individuals who work at those institutions, if identifying information becomes public. (shrink)

Ideas about heredity and evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations. In Evolution in Four Dimensions, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb argue that there is more to heredity than genes. They trace four "dimensions" in evolution -- four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. These systems, they argue, can all (...) provide variations on which natural selection can act. Evolution in Four Dimensions offers a richer, more complex view of evolution than the gene-based, one-dimensional view held by many today. The new synthesis advanced by Jablonka and Lamb makes clear that induced and acquired changes also play a role in evolution.After discussing each of the four inheritance systems in detail, Jablonka and Lamb "put Humpty Dumpty together again" by showing how all of these systems interact. They consider how each may have originated and guided evolutionary history and they discuss the social and philosophical implications of the four-dimensional view of evolution. Each chapter ends with a dialogue in which the authors engage the contrarieties of the fictional "I.M.," or Ifcha Mistabra -- Aramaic for "the opposite conjecture" -- refining their arguments against I.M.'s vigorous counterarguments. The lucid and accessible text is accompanied by artist-physician Anna Zeligowski's lively drawings, which humorously and effectively illustrate the authors' points. (shrink)

Only 27 percent of Americans in a 1995 Harris poll said they had read or heard “quite a lot” about genetic tests. Nonetheless, 68 percent said they would be either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to undergo genetic testing even for diseases “for which there is presently no cure or treatment.” Perhaps most astonishing, 56 percent found it either “very” or “somewhat acceptable” to develop a government computerized DNA bank with samples taken from all newborns, and their names attached to (...) the samples. This does not necessarily mean the public is unconcerned about genetic privacy. More likely it means that the public is still uninformed about the risks associated with genetic testing, and has not thought at all about the risks involved in storing identifiable DNA samples.A central question presented by genetic screening and testing is whether the genetic information so obtained is different in kind from other medical information, and, if so, whether this means that it should receive special legal protection. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inquiry when using genetic ancestry, they are also creating analytical frameworks with broader societal ramifications. This essay presents an ethics framework in the spirit of virtue ethics for these researchers: rather than focus on (...) rule following, the framework is designed to build researchers’ capacities to react to the ethical dimensions of their work. The authors identify one overarching principle of intellectual freedom and responsibility, noting that freedom in all its guises comes with responsibility, and they identify and define four principles that collectively uphold researchers’ intellectual responsibility: truthfulness, justice and fairness, anti-racism, and public beneficence. Researchers should bring their practices into alignment with these principles, and to aid this, the authors name three common ways research practices infringe these principles, suggest a step-by-step process for aligning research choices with the principles, provide rules of thumb for achieving alignment, and give a worked case. The essay concludes by identifying support needed by researchers to act in accord with the proposed framework. (shrink)

Transient receptor potential vanilloid 4 (TRPV4), a member of the TRP superfamily, is a broadly expressed, cell surface‐localized cation channel that is activated by a variety of environmental stimuli. Importantly, TRPV4 has been increasingly implicated in the regulation of cellular morphology. Here we propose that TRPV4 and the cytoskeletal remodeling small GTPase RhoA together constitute an environmentally sensitive signaling complex that contributes to pathological cell cytoskeletal alterations during neurological injury and disease. Supporting this hypothesis is our recent work demonstrating direct (...) physical and bidirectional functional interactions of TRPV4 with RhoA, which can lead to activation of RhoA and reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton. Furthermore, a confluence of evidence implicates TRPV4 and/or RhoA in pathological responses triggered by a range of acute neurological insults ranging from stroke to traumatic injury. While initiated by a variety of insults, TRPV4–RhoA signaling may represent a common pathway that disrupts axonal regeneration and blood–brain barrier integrity. These insights also suggest that TRPV4 inhibition may represent a safe, feasible, and precise therapeutic strategy for limiting pathological TRPV4–RhoA activation in a range of neurological diseases. (shrink)

Only 27 percent of Americans in a 1995 Harris poll said they had read or heard “quite a lot” about genetic tests. Nonetheless, 68 percent said they would be either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to undergo genetic testing even for diseases “for which there is presently no cure or treatment.” Perhaps most astonishing, 56 percent found it either “very” or “somewhat acceptable” to develop a government computerized DNA bank with samples taken from all newborns, and their names attached to (...) the samples. This does not necessarily mean the public is unconcerned about genetic privacy. More likely it means that the public is still uninformed about the risks associated with genetic testing, and has not thought at all about the risks involved in storing identifiable DNA samples.A central question presented by genetic screening and testing is whether the genetic information so obtained is different in kind from other medical information, and, if so, whether this means that it should receive special legal protection. (shrink)