Frederick Douglass (1818?1895) was the most significant African?American leader of the nineteenth century. Secretly acquiring literacy as a slave, he grew into a brilliant speaker whose essential genius was to articulate and impeach the ideologies of the day. Douglass was one of the foremost defenders of black emancipation and women?s rights. He developed a dual philosophy of resistance and integration. He taxed blacks with the need for self?reliance; he recalled whites to the justice of racial equality. Freedom would be (...) won by securing to all workers, white or black, the fruit of their labour. Economic progress and enhanced social equality would be achieved by hard work, thrift, education and sobriety. Underlying all his thought and action was an ideology of free labour conjoined with republicanism. He early embraced the ideal of moral suasion. As the prospect of civil war loomed, he accepted the legitimacy of violence ? in self?defence, and to liberate the slaves. (shrink)

If well-designed, the results of a Randomised Clinical Trial can justify a causal claim between treatment and effect in the study population; however, additional information might be needed to carry over this result to another population. RCTs have been criticized exactly on grounds of failing to provide this sort of information Evidence, inference and enquiry. Oxford University Press, New York, 2011), as well as to black-box important details regarding the mechanisms underpinning the causal law instantiated by the RCT result. (...) On the other side, so-called In Silico Clinical Trials face the same criticisms addressed against standard modelling and simulation techniques, and cannot be equated to experiments Philosophy of molecular medicine: foundational issues in research and practice, Routledge, New York, 2017; Parker in Synthese 169:483–496, 2009; Parke in Philos Sci 81:516–536, 2014; Diez Roux in Am J Epidemiol 181:100–102, 2015 and related discussions in Frigg and Reiss in Synthese 169:593–613, 2009; Winsberg in Synthese 169:575–592, 2009; Beisbart and Norton in Int Stud Philos Sci 26:403–422, 2012). We undertake a formal analysis of both methods in order to identify their distinct contribution to causal inference in the clinical setting. Britton et al.’s study :E2098–E2105, 2013) on the impact of ion current variability on cardiac electrophysiology is used for illustrative purposes. We deduce that, by predicting variability through interpolation, ISCTs aid with problems regarding extrapolation of RCTs results, and therefore in assessing their external validity. Furthermore, ISCTs can be said to encode “thick” causal knowledge —as opposed to “thin” difference-making information inferred from RCTs. Hence, ISCTs and RCTs cannot replace one another but rather, they are complementary in that the former provide information about the determinants of variability of causal effects, while the latter can, under certain conditions, establish causality in the first place. (shrink)

In this article, the author argues that we need to conceptualize gender as a social structure, and by doing so, we can better analyze the ways in which gender is embedded in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of our society. To conceptualize gender as a structure situates gender at the same level of general social significance as the economy and the polity. The author also argues that while concern with intersectionality must continue to be paramount, different structures of inequality (...) have different constructions and perhaps different influential causal mechanisms at any given historical moment. We need to follow a both/and strategy to understand gender structure, race structure, and other structures of inequality as they currently operate while also systematically paying attention to how these axes of domination intersect. Finally, the author suggests we pay more attention to doing research and writing theory with explicit attention to how our work can indeed help transform as well as inform society. (shrink)

Delivering high quality genomics-informed care to patients requires accurate test results whose clinical implications are understood. While other actors, including state agencies, professional organizations, and clinicians, are involved, this article focuses on the extent to which the federal agencies that play the most prominent roles — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services enforcing CLIA and the FDA — effectively ensure that these elements are met and concludes by suggesting possible ways to improve their oversight of genomic testing.

The individual right of access to one’s own data is a crucial privacy protection long recognized in U.S. federal privacy laws. Mobile health devices and research software used in citizen science often fall outside the HIPAA Privacy Rule, leaving participants without HIPAA’s right of access to one’s own data. Absent state laws requiring access, the law of contract, as reflected in end-user agreements and terms of service, governs individuals’ ability to find out how much data is being stored and how (...) it might be shared with third parties. Efforts to address this problem by establishing norms of individual access to data from mobile health research unfortunately can run afoul of the FDA’s investigational device exemption requirements. (shrink)

Regulatory policy for genomic testing may be subject to biases that favor reliance on existing regulatory frameworks even when those frameworks carry unintended legal consequences or may be poorly tailored to the challenges genomic testing presents. This article explores three examples drawn from genetic privacy regulation, oversight of clinical uses of genomic information, and regulation of genomic software. Overreliance on expedient regulatory approaches has a potential to undercut complete and durable solutions.

For a biological anthropologist interested in the prehistory of religion, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen's book is welcome and resonant. Van Huyssteen's central thesis is that humans' capacity for spirituality emerges from a transformation of cognition and emotions that takes place in the symbolic realm, within Homo sapiens and apart from biology. To his thesis I bring to bear three areas of response: the abundant cognitive and emotional capacities of living apes and extinct hominids; the role of symbolic ritual in the (...) evolutionary history of Homo sapiens; and the closely intertwined nature of biology and culture in the workings of evolutionary change. (shrink)

The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are thought to threaten democracy through the spread of propaganda on (...) online social networks, or to threaten privacy through the aggregation of datasets that include increasingly personal information, or to threaten justice when machine learning is used in such high-stakes, decision-making contexts as loan application reviews, employment procedures, or parole hearings. It is insufficient to ethically assess technology after it has produced negative social impacts, as has happened, for example, with facial recognition software that discriminates against people of color and with self-driving cars that are unable to cope with pedestrians who jay-walk. Developers of new technologies should aim to identify potential harmful consequences early in the design process and take steps to eliminate or mitigate them. This task is not easy. Designers will often have to negotiate among competing values—for instance, between efficiency and accessibility for a diverse user population, or between maximizing benefits and avoiding harm. There is no simple recipe for identifying and solving ethical problems. -/- Computer science education can help meet these challenges by making ethical reasoning about computing technologies a central element in the curriculum. Students can learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology. Learning to reason this way requires courses unlike those currently standard in computer science curricula. A range of university courses on topics in areas of computing, ethics, society and public policy are emerging to meet this need. Some cover computer science broadly, while others focus on specific problems like privacy and security; typically, these classes exist as stand-alone courses in the computer science curriculum. Others have integrated ethics into the teaching of introductory courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Tale of Three Zoras:Barbara Johnson and Black Women WritersHortense J. Spillers (bio)Talking about Zora Neale Hurston is like approaching the Sphinx—so much riddle, so many faces, and all of it occurring on fairly high holy ground since Alice Walker's remarkable discovery a couple of decades ago.1 But Barbara Johnson's criticism cracks the code on Her Majesty and brings the sign vehicle—"Zora Neale Hurston"—to the table (...) of juxtapositions and comparisons. There is the iconic Hurston, whose positioning between the Harlem Renaissance2 and the post-World War II writers gives her a priority of status that marks the woman artist's entry into literary modernism. The latter, in its variety of contexts and alignments, opened the way to certain experimental forms for these writers and might not have been completed as a systematic gesture before the late sixties and early seventies, when this generation of practitioners was free to create antiheroic figures and to probe the limits of representability. In short, with Zora Neale Hurston a window is pried open, a breeze blows through, and by the time of Toni Morrison's Beloved, an opening has become a prospect, a landscape of vistas of possibility. We can think of Hurston, then, as an enabler, who was not particularly encouraged by the literary politics of her age, from first to last; whether by the "maledom" of Harlem Renaissance avenues to reward and achievement, or by the paradigm shift of race politics in the 1950s,3 Hurston seems to have been equipped with the uncanny ability to create a kind of chaos, to behave outside the parameters of fashion, and to create dimensions of the mythical about her as she modeled versions of self.In her role as classically trained anthropologist and folklorist, Hurston is considered today one of the major theoreticians of black culture.4 Her collections of lore, a [End Page 94] motherlode of a southern-centered orality,5 of the countryside, are fruitfully poised against the displaced metaphysical traditions of discourse that we especially associate with figures like Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBois.6 As it now appears, the oppositional currents that run between the Hurstonian and the DuBoisian figurations have yet to be reconciled: the latter is text-based, and the former exceeds the abiding centrality of the word. Barbara Johnson argues in A World of Difference that Hurston "tried to explain the difference between a reified 'art' and a living culture in which distinctions between spectator and spectacle, rehearsal and performance, experience and representation are not fixed" [159]. For Hurston, folklore was "'the arts of the people before they find out that there is such a thing as art.'" For Hurston, unlike DuBois, for example, black culture was not a project in the modality of Bildung, or the Hegelian notion, but, rather, a repertoire of gestures that might be said to belong to a second skin—the kinetic thing that is done or said.From our current perspective, what Hurston called "folklore" and what offered the occasion for the ethnographic foray might be given other names, though renaming these acts and gestures of the everyday does not make it any easier to reconcile the conceptual split in black culture theory between textuality and orality, or between "urban" and "countryside." But all of these locutions have been essentially eviscerated by radical changes in the availability and transmission of consumer goods that have rendered US local and indigenous cultures virtually indistinguishable from Jackson, Mississippi to Boston, Massachusetts. Take any interstate network across the land, east to west, or north to south: between McDonald's and the food/gas mart, scattered along ten- to twenty-mile sequences of roadway, one is quite astonished at the sameness and homogeneity of motifs that have translated particularity into an item of commerce and exchange. At one time, the critics were calling this outcome the postmodern flow, but my own hunch is that this apparent repetition and replication of the same are riddled with a variety of timbres and accents, still, that the Hurston ear was so sharp to articulate and define six decades ago. And in that intricate choreography between the life... (shrink)

This article argues that individuals paradigms have predominated social scientific explanations for gendered behavior in intimate relationships but that a microstructural paradigm adds necessary additional information. The results of a study designed to test the relative strengths of individualist and microstructural explanations for “mothering behavior” are presented. The microstructural hypothesis is that single fathers will adopt parental behavior that more closely resembles that of women who mother than that of married fathers. Parenting behaviors of single fathers, single mothers, married parents (...) with mothers at home, and married two-paycheck couples are compared. Overall, the hypothesis is supported. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of the microstructural perspective for social change in a feminist direction. (shrink)

Andrea Wiggins and John Wilbanks offer a rich and nuanced description of citizen science, which they define as “a range of participatory models for involving non-professionals as collaborators in s...

The genetic testing industry is in a period of potentially major structural change driven by several factors. These include weaker patent protections after Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics and Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc.; a continuing shift from single-gene tests to genome-scale sequencing; and a set of February 2014 amendments to the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 regulations and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule. This article explores the nature of these changes (...) and why they strain existing regulatory frameworks for protecting patients, research subjects, and other consumers who receive genetic testing.Oversight of genetic testing has, at least to date, had two major thrusts: privacy and ethical protections and traditional consumer health and safety regulations. Examples of the first are the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act and the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which after 2013 amendments expressly protects genetic privacy as well as other medical privacy. (shrink)

my comments focus on jane addams's methode of ethical deliberation, as understood through Dr. Fischer's detailed explication, especially as offered in chapter 2, "An Evolutionary Method of Ethical Deliberation." As Fischer points out, this explication is of one iteration of Jane Addams's method, a particularized response to how Jane Addams believed the settlement residents should respond to the many labor strikes in Chicago during the 1890s. I offer my comments from the perspective of both a scholar, seeking to better apply (...) Addams's insights to my own work, and an educator, seeking to better integrate Addams's work into my teaching. My hope is to flesh out more clearly my own understanding and, in so doing... (shrink)

To return to last week’s yammering, I want to say that I've been getting some interesting responses to the personal/political/feminist article, responses that are underlining for me the fact that I'm still pretty conflicted about defining feminism. A lot of you have said that feminism is a belief set like a religion, and that because of this there will naturally be a certain amount of disagreement among feminists and feminisms. I agree on the second point: debate is essential to learning, (...) to be sure. And I certainly wasn’t arguing that there should be any sort of unchanging rule-book. Quite the contrary—I believe feminists should disagree with one another, debate one another, learn from each other. (Can you say feminist praxis?) (3.5.98) 1. (shrink)

The handbook contains more than 50 chapters by leaders from around the world and a broad range of sectors of academia and clinical practice spanning the ...

This clinical case report illustrates the potential dilemmas that can arise from knowledge gained through genetic analysis. These conflicts require careful ethical analysis of presumed duties to protect patient privacy and maintain confidentiality, the duty to warn a second party of a health risk, and the duty of veracity. While the questions raised by genetic testing of one individual for disease that reveals potentially important information about relatives, such as risk for Huntington chorea or breast cancer, have been discussed, the (...) continuing expansion in our capacity for sophisticated genetic analysis continues to present new and challenging situations. The resolution of this case and others like it requires close collaboration among the treatment team, geneticists, and clinical ethicists. (shrink)

Laland et al.'s bidirectional model is a welcome starting point that can be enhanced by a full incorporation of systems thinking into its framework. Systems thinkers note that culture is not transmitted linearly in chunks but is co-constructed within subgroups. Niche construction, particularly among primates, should be studied primarily through the effects that social relationships have on selection pressures.

Ontogeny, specifically the role of language in the human family now and in prehistory, is central to Locke & Bogin's (L&B's) thesis in a compelling way. The unique life-history stages of childhood and adolescence, however, must be interpreted not only against an exceptionally “high quality” human infancy but also in light of the evolution of co-constructed, emotionally based communication in ape, hominid, and human infancy.

Our starting point for the origins of language goes beyond prosody or infant-directed speech to highlight the affective, multimodal, and co-constructed nature of meaning-making that was likely present before the split between African great apes and hominins. Analysis of vocal and gestural caregiving practices in hominins, and of meaning-making via gestural interaction in African great apes, supports our thesis.

Aggleton & Brown predict that recognition and episodic recall depend on different brain systems and can thus be dissociated from one another. However, intact recall with impaired recognition has not yet been demonstrated if the same type of information is used in both tests. Current evidence suggests that processes underlying familiarity-based recognition are redundant with processes underlying episodic memory.

Studies of neuropsychological patients are relevant to models of how long-term memories are stored. If amnesia is considered a binding deficit and not a difficulty in transferring information from short-term to long-term memory, it is unclear why context-free semantic learning is impaired. Also the model should account for the reverse temporal gradient seen in patients with semantic dementia.