Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well-defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate the tractability and interest of our proposed measure by measuring the (...) specificity of coding DNA and other factors in a simple model of the production of mRNA. (shrink)

Childhood obesity is in important respects a result of legal policies that influence both dietary intake and physical activity. The law must shift focus away from individual risk factors alone and seek instead to promote situational and environmental influences that create an atmosphere conducive to health. To attain this goal, advocates should embrace a population-wide model of public health, and policymakers must critically examine the fashionable rhetoric of consumer choice.

This collection reports on the latest research on an increasingly pivotal issue for evolutionary biology: cooperation. The chapters are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and utilize research tools that range from empirical survey to conceptual modeling, reflecting the rich diversity of work in the field. They explore a wide taxonomic range, concentrating on bacteria, social insects, and, especially, humans. -/- Part I (“Agents and Environments”) investigates the connections of social cooperation in social organizations to the conditions that make (...) cooperation profitable and stable, focusing on the interactions of agent, population, and environment. Part II (“Agents and Mechanisms”) focuses on how proximate mechanisms emerge and operate in the evolutionary process and how they shape evolutionary trajectories. Throughout the book, certain themes emerge that demonstrate the ubiquity of questions regarding cooperation in evolutionary biology: the generation and division of the profits of cooperation; transitions in individuality; levels of selection, from gene to organism; and the “human cooperation explosion” that makes our own social behavior particularly puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. (shrink)

Background: Professional ethical codes are an important part of healthcare. They are part of the professionalisation of an occupation, are used for regulation of the professions and are intended to guide ethical behaviour in healthcare. However, so far, little is known about the practical use of professional codes in healthcare, particularly in paramedicine. Objective: The aim of this scoping review was to determine what is known in the existing literature about health professionals’ knowledge, awareness and use of their professional codes. (...) Method: A scoping review was performed based on a six-stage framework as described by Levac et al. Six databases were searched: OVID Medline, EMBASE, EMCARE, CINAHL, ProQuest and Scopus, in September 2020. Google Scholar, Trove and Google using.gov and.org websites were also searched for grey literature. Two reviewers independently assessed study eligibility. Results: The search yielded 1162 results after duplicate removal. Thirty-nine studies remained after title and abstract review. Twenty-five articles were included after full-text review. Sixteen examined nursing, eight examined medicine and one examined both nursing and medicine. No studies were identified that examined paramedicine. Twenty-one studies were of a cross-sectional design and four studies were of a qualitative design. Conclusion: Most health professionals know the codes exist, but do not think they know the content. Despite valuing professional codes highly, healthcare professionals do not use them regularly in clinical practice. Further research is needed, and professional codes should be made useful for practice and consideration given to how codes can be written, communicated and implemented to increase their actualisation in healthcare. Research should also begin in paramedicine to identify clinician’s knowledge and use of codes in this profession. Review registration: Open Science Framework – doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/NKBY4 Ethics Statement: This article does not contain any studies involving human participants performed by any of the authors. The review followed good scientific conduct. (shrink)

Access to communication is critical for individuals with late-stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and minimal volitional movement, but they sometimes present with concomitant visual or ocular motility impairments that affect their performance with eye tracking or visual brain-computer interface systems. In this study, we explored the use of modified eye tracking and steady state visual evoked potential BCI, in combination with the Shuffle Speller typing interface, for this population. Two participants with late-stage ALS, visual impairments, and minimal volitional movement completed a (...) single-case experimental research design comparing copy-spelling performance with three different typing systems: commercially available eye tracking communication software, Shuffle Speller with modified eye tracking, and Shuffle Speller with SSVEP BCI. Participant 1 was unable to type any correct characters with the commercial system, but achieved accuracies of up to 50% with Shuffle Speller eye tracking and 89% with Shuffle Speller BCI. Participant 2 also had higher maximum accuracies with Shuffle Speller, typing with up to 63% accuracy with eye tracking and 100% accuracy with BCI. However, participants’ typing accuracy for both Shuffle Speller conditions was highly variable, particularly in the BCI condition. Both the Shuffle Speller interface and SSVEP BCI input show promise for improving typing performance for people with late-stage ALS. Further development of innovative BCI systems for this population is needed. (shrink)

In this article, we examine scholarly analyses of justice and develop a framework that can help assess the claims from the parties in the Russian state-led doping scandal, including, but not limited to, Russian athletes, non-Russian athletes, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and sport governing bodies. The two key components of this justice framework are pluralism and relationality/contextuality. We argue that a justice framework built upon these elements better captures the nature of justice. We conclude that no party in the Russian (...) state-led doping case has exclusive access to justice. Rather, all the parties have legitimate calls for justice against one another. Thus, the administration of justice will fail to serve justice, in its different meanings, for all parties. (shrink)

Context Opioid treatment agreements (OTAs) are documents that clinicians present to patients when prescribing opioids that describe the risks of opioids and specify requirements that patients must meet to receive their medication. Notwithstanding a lack of evidence that OTAs effectively mitigate opioids’ risks, professional organizations recommend that they be implemented, and jurisdictions increasingly require them. We sought to identify the jurisdictions that require OTAs, how OTAs might affect the outcomes of lawsuits that arise when things go wrong, and instances in (...) which the law permits flexibility for clinicians and health care institutions to adopt best practices. -/- Methods We surveyed the laws and regulations of all 50 states and the District of Columbia to identify which jurisdictions require the use of OTAs, the circumstances in which OTA use is mandatory, and the terms OTAs must include (if any). We also surveyed criminal and civil judicial decisions in which OTAs were discussed as evidence on which a court relied to make its decision to determine how OTA use influences litigation outcomes. -/- Findings Results show that a slight majority (27) of jurisdictions now require OTAs. With one exception, the jurisdictions’ requirements for OTA use are triggered at least in part by long-term prescribing. There is otherwise substantial variation and flexibility within OTA requirements. Results also show that even in jurisdictions where OTA use is not required by statute or regulation, OTA use can inform courts’ reasoning in lawsuits involving patients or clinicians. Sometimes, but not always, OTA use legally protects clinicians from liability. -/- Conclusions -/- Our results show that OTA use is entwined with legal obligations in various ways. Clinicians and health care institutions should identify ways for OTAs to enhance clinician–patient relationships and patient care within the bounds of relevant legal requirements and risks. (shrink)

Answering important public health questions often requires collection of sensitive information about individuals. For example, our understanding of how HIV is transmitted and how to prevent it only came about with people's willingness to share information about their sexual and drug-using behaviors. Given the scientific need for sensitive, personal information, researchers have a corresponding ethical and legal obligation to maintain the confidentiality of data they collect and typically promise in consent forms to restrict access to it and not to publish (...) identifying data.The interests of others, however, can threaten researchers' promises of confidentiality when legal demands are made to access research data. In some cases, the subject of the litigation is tightly connected to the research questions, and litigants' interest in the data is not surprising. Researchers conducting studies on tobacco or occupational or other chemical exposures, for example, are relatively frequent targets of subpoenas. (shrink)

Dominique Lestel is a French philosopher whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human–animal relations. Throughout such important books as L'Animalite? , Les Origines animales de la culture and L'Animal singulier , he offers a scathing critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to etho-ethnographic and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred around hybrid human–animal communities of shared interests, affects and meaning, his critical and speculative approach to the animal (...) sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, who form their own worlds and transform them in concert with human and other partners. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives with animals in the texture of animality, Lestel's cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the most animal of animals. (shrink)

Im Zentrum dieses Bandes steht die Untersuchung des Wechselspiels und der Eigenlogik von Politik, Religion und Philosophie im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit. Untersucht wird die Differenzierung religiöser und politischer Diskurse im Medium der aristotelischen Philosophietradition. Den Leitgedanken bildet dabei die Frage nach der Art und Weise, in der verschiedene Autoren jener Epoche – teils affirmativ, teils polemisch – auf Aristoteles und seine Philosophie Bezug nahmen und so zur Herausbildung einer bestimmten Form von Politischem Aristotelismus beitrugen, der religiöse und (...) philosophische Argumentationen in ihren Geltungsansprüchen kritisch gegeneinander abhebt. Die diachrone Perspektive und die Gleichzeitigkeit von historischer und philosophischer Betrachtungsweise der Studien dieses Buchs fördern nicht nur bedeutende Ergebnisse im Hinblick auf die jeweils untersuchten Autoren und Problemzusammenhänge zutage, sondern erproben anhand des Politischen Aristotelismus zugleich ein Deutungsmuster für das Verhältnis von Wissenskultur und gesellschaftlichem Wandel überhaupt. (shrink)

In Testing for Athlete Citizenship: Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport, Kathryn E. Henne provides ‘a genealogical account of anti-doping regulation by questioning the meanings we take from sport’ (...

Augmentative and alternative communication brain-computer interface systems are intended to offer communication access to people with severe speech and physical impairment without requiring volitional movement. As the field moves toward clinical implementation of AAC-BCI systems, research involving participants with SSPI is essential. Research has demonstrated variability in AAC-BCI system performance across users, and mixed results for comparisons of performance for users with and without disabilities. The aims of this systematic review were to describe study, system, and participant characteristics reported in (...) BCI research, summarize the communication task performance of participants with disabilities using AAC-BCI systems, and explore any differences in performance for participants with and without disabilities. Electronic databases were searched in May, 2018, and March, 2021, identifying 6065 records, of which 73 met inclusion criteria. Non-experimental study designs were common and sample sizes were typically small, with approximately half of studies involving five or fewer participants with disabilities. There was considerable variability in participant characteristics, and in how those characteristics were reported. Over 60% of studies reported an average selection accuracy ≤70% for participants with disabilities in at least one tested condition. However, some studies excluded participants who did not reach a specific system performance criterion, and others did not state whether any participants were excluded based on performance. Twenty-nine studies included participants both with and without disabilities, but few reported statistical analyses comparing performance between the two groups. Results suggest that AAC-BCI systems show promise for supporting communication for people with SSPI, but they remain ineffective for some individuals. The lack of standards in reporting outcome measures makes it difficult to synthesize data across studies. Further research is needed to demonstrate efficacy of AAC-BCI systems for people who experience SSPI of varying etiologies and severity levels, and these individuals should be included in system design and testing. Consensus in terminology and consistent participant, protocol, and performance description will facilitate the exploration of user and system characteristics that positively or negatively affect AAC-BCI use, and support innovations that will make this technology more useful to a broader group of people.Clinical trial registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42018095345, PROSPERO: CRD42018095345. (shrink)

Ethics courses are most commonly evaluated using reaction measures. However, little is known about the specific types of reaction data being collected and how these reaction data relate to improvements in trainee performance. Using a sample of 381 ethics training sessions, major reaction data categories were identified. Content and course satisfaction were the most frequently collected types of reaction criteria. Furthermore, content relevance and course satisfaction showed strong, positive relationships with performance criteria, whereas content satisfaction demonstrated a moderate, negative relationship. (...) These results and future directions for ethics training evaluation are discussed. (shrink)

:This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Vinciane Despret's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; stories and storytelling; feminism; philosophical anthropology; animal studies; collaborative research; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in books. It touches on thinkers and artists including Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Luc Petton.