This article examines the mobilization of resources for the Human Genome Mapping Project in the United Kingdom. The Project was established through an award of additional funds to the Medical Research Council at a time of financial stringency within publicly funded science, accompanied by relatively little of the debate that had surrounded the U.S. initiative. It is argued, following Fujimura and Star’s terminology, that the project was “packaged” and repackaged by its proponents so that it aligned the, otherwise disparate, agendas (...) of several “social worlds.” Furthermore, by bringing together certain social worlds and not others, some issues were also excluded from discussion. In this instance, the social and ethical issues surrounding genetic mapping were accorded a much lower profile than in other national programs. (shrink)

Drawing on interviews and observational work with practicing U.K. plant scientists, this article uses Michel Callon's work as a tool to explore the issue of collaboration between academic science and business, in particular, calls by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council for a return to “public good” plant science. In an article titled “Is Science a Public Good?” Callon contributed to the debate about the commercialization of science by suggesting that commercialization and the public good need not be incompatible. (...) Moving away from arguments that center on the effects of business involvement in science, he suggested that analysts use another model, centered on “diversity.” This model allows us to ask what society might want from science, what public good science might look like, and how public good science can be ensured while also recognizing that science cannot be easily separated from the market. (shrink)

Informed consent, decision-making styles and the role of patient-physician relationships are imperative aspects of clinical medicine worldwide. We present the case of a 74-year-old woman afflicted with advanced liver cancer whose attending physician, per request of the family, did not inform her of her true diagnosis. In our analysis, we explore the differences in informed-consent styles between patients who hold an "independent" and "interdependent" construal of the self and then highlight the possible implications maintained by this position in the context (...) of international clinical ethics. Finally, we discuss the need to reassess informed-consent styles suitable to the needs of each patient regardless of whether he or she resides in the United States or in Japan. (shrink)

In the forty‐year history of U.S. bioethics commissions, these government‐sanctioned forums have often demonstrated their power to address pressing problems and to enable policy change. For example, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, established in 1974, left a legacy of reports that were translated into regulations and had an enormous practical impact. And the 1982 report Splicing Life, by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and (...) Behavioral Research, became the basis for the National Institutes of Health's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee as well as for the Food and Drug Administration's developing “Points to Consider” when contemplating the introduction of recombinant DNA into human beings. Some efforts of bioethics commissions, however, are not tightly connected to policy change or to outcomes directly linked to a specific report. While direct policy impact is indeed a useful metric for government bioethics commissions, it is not their only legitimate utility. For instance, bioethics commissions can also be incubators for deliberation on a hot topic, giving policy‐makers time to think through options while the political heat has some time to dissipate. Or a bioethics commission may stake out a position that enables a politician to take action while not necessarily following its recommendations. (shrink)

In “Now the French are invading England” (Analysis 62, 2002, pp. 34-41), Komarine Romdenh-Romluc offers a new theory of the relationship between recorded indexicals and their content. Romdenh-Romluc’s proposes that Kaplan’s basic idea, that reference is determined by applying a rule to a context, is correct, but we have to be careful about what the context is, since it is not always the context of utterance. A few well known examples illustrate this. The “here” and “now” in “I am not (...) here now” on an answering machine do not refer to the time and place of the original utterance, but to the time the message is played back, and the place its attached telephone is located. Any occurrence of “today” in a newspaper or magazine refers not to the day the story in which it appears was written, nor to the day the newspaper or magazine was printed, but to the cover date of that publication. Still, it is plausible that for each (token of an) indexical there is a salient context, and that “today” refers to the day of its context, “here” to the place of its context, and soon. Romdenh-Romluc takes this to be true, and then makes a proposal about what the salient context is. It is “the context that Ac would identify on the basis of cues that she would reasonably take U to be exploiting.” (39) Ac is the relevant audience, “the individual who it is reasonable to take the speaker to be addressing”, and who is assumed to be linguistically competent and attentive. (So Ac might not be the person U intends to address. This will not matter for what follows.) The proposal seems to suggest that it is impossible to trick a reasonably attentive hearer about what the referent of a particular indexical is. Since such trickery does seem possible, Romdenh-Romluc’s theory needs (at least) supplementation. I present two examples of such tricks. (shrink)

In this paper we report a study of the approach of six U.K. water and electricity companies towards managing the relationship with their ''green'' stakeholders. Stakeholders are accorded increasing importance in political discourse and stakeholder theory is emerging as a promising framework for the analysis of corporate social performance.We studied the companies'' general approach towards green stakeholders, their dealings with specific stakeholder groups and whether they emphasised the consultation or the information aspect of stakeholder management. We found that none of (...) the six companies had a systematic stakeholder approach that extended to all potential green stakeholders. Rather, the importance of specific stakeholder groups seemed to be determined by managers'' intuition and by the stance that the stakeholders themselves displayed towards the company. (shrink)

This essay uses a specific example—proposals to exclude sugary drinks from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program —to explore some features of the contemporary U.S. administrative state. Dating back to the Wilsonian origins of the U.S. administrative state there has been uncertainty about whether we can and should separate politics and administration. On the traditional view, the agencies are to be kept separate from politics—technocratic and value-neutral—although they are indirectly accountable to the president and Congress. The SNAP exclusions example shows, however, (...) that agencies often must make complex and controversial decisions on their own, decisions that go beyond value-neutral technocratic administration. When authorizing legislation has multiple goals, as we’ll argue is the case in the SNAP example, an agency will have to choose between conflicting statutory mandates. Moreover, as the SNAP example shows, agencies often face complex normative questions of ethics and justice that go beyond the question of how to balance competing aims. The appropriate response to the SNAP exclusions example is not to keep politics out of administrative decision-making, but to develop procedures that allow ethical and political questions to be addressed in agency policy-making, consistent with overarching commitments to fairness and democracy. (shrink)

In Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), the only U.S. federal case on teaching Intelligent Design in public schools, the plaintiffs used the same argument as in the creation-science trials of the 1980s: Intelligent Design is religion, not science, because it invokes the supernatural; thus teaching it violates the Constitution. Although the plaintiffs won, this strategy is unwise because it is based on problematic definitions of religion and science, leads to multiple truths in society, and is unlikely to succeed before the present (...) right-leaning Supreme Court. I suggest discarding past approaches in favor of arguing solely from the evidence for evolution. (shrink)

The proposed adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the United States has ignited a debate as to whether the principles‐based nature of these standards better serves the interests of investors. While it is argued that these principled‐based standards will encourage more transparent financial reporting than the current rules‐based U.S. standards, critics argue that IFRS will invite more aggressive financial reporting through the liberal exercising of professional judgment. This empirical study aims to understand what individual and organizational factors may (...) affect aggressiveness when making accounting judgments. In particular, we examine the influence that prior ethics training, codes of ethics and an individual's predominant moral reasoning schema have on adherence to company policy in an accounting‐related (depreciation) judgment. Results of the study show that respondents with prior ethics training are more likely to adhere to company accounting policy than those who have not had formal ethics education. Respondents presented with a company ethics code also were less aggressive in their accounting judgments than those who were not presented with a code prior to reading the scenario. Finally, decision aggressiveness was moderated by individuals who used conventional moral reasoning schemas. (shrink)

In Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), the only U.S. federal case on teaching Intelligent Design in public schools, the plaintiffs used the same argument as in the creation-science trials of the 1980s: Intelligent Design is religion, not science, because it invokes the supernatural; thus teaching it violates the Constitution. Although the plaintiffs won, this strategy is unwise because it is based on problematic definitions of religion and science, leads to multiple truths in society, and is unlikely to succeed before the present (...) right-leaning Supreme Court. I suggest discarding past approaches in favor of arguing solely from the evidence for evolution. (shrink)

We critically evaluate arguments in a recent Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics article by Svoboda, Adler, and Van Howe disputing the 2012 affirmative infant male circumcision policy recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics. We provide detailed evidence in explaining why the extensive claims by these opponents are not supported by the current strong scientific evidence. We furthermore show why their legal and ethical arguments are contradicted by a reasonable interpretation of current U.S. and international law and ethics. After (...) all considerations are taken into account it would be logical to conclude that failure to recommend male circumcision early in infancy may be viewed as akin to failure to recommend childhood vaccination to parents. In each case, parental consent is required and the intervention is not compulsory. Our evaluation leads us to dismiss the arguments by Svoboda et al. Instead, based on the evidence, infant male circumcision is both ethical and lawful. (shrink)

Continuing the investigation in his earlier Individuals and individuality, Martine (philosophy, U. of Alabama) demonstrates that indeterminacy in our experience is logically bound to the determinate dimensions of thought and practice.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Socially Engaged BuddhismBrian KarafinSocially Engaged Buddhism. By Sallie B. King. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. 192 pp.In a chapter on the philosophical and ethical foundations of the socially engaged Buddhist movement, Sallie King retells a story from the Burmese liberation struggle against military dictatorship. The story was originally told by Aung San Suu Kyi (b. 1945), the Burmese Buddhist activist who is one of the several representative (...) figures (heroes and heroines) of King’s synoptic account of the modern tradition of Engaged Buddhism. An activist against the dictatorship, Uncle U Kyi Maung, being interrogated by officers of military intelligence as to why he had joined the National League for Democracy, the organization headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, Uncle Maung replied: “For your sake” (p. 32).This story of Buddhist resistance can stand as a representative anecdote for King’s useful history of Engaged Buddhism. The context is one of political oppression and torture, abuse of human rights and repression of democracy, and the attempt to respond to this historical situation from a perspective rooted in the traditional Buddhist spirituality of Asia in a fashion that makes that spirituality relevant to the crises of modernity. The interrogated activist responds to the threat of torture with courage rooted in a Buddhist spiritual practice, and thus is able to assert a political stance grounded in a compassionate recognition of his interdependence with the so-called enemy who is temporarily holding power over him. This constellation of factors illustrates the phenomenon of Engaged Buddhism: It is a form of Buddhist spirituality, not a departure from tradition but an application of traditional ideas—of compassion, interdependence, impermanence, no-self, karma, and others—to the modern period, and specifically to a modern Buddhist Asia riven by war, political oppression, ecological crisis, and capitalist globalization in economics and culture. [End Page 215] This application of Buddhist spirituality to modern Asian (and global, though King’s focus is on Asia) history represents an alternative form of politics, and specifically of political resistance: nonviolent, nonadversarial, rooted in indigenous Asian cultures rather than imported from the West (as would be the case with the various Marxist and liberal political ideologies also at play in the colonial and postcolonial period that saw the development of engaged Buddhism). This is a political resistance, in King’s presentation, grounded in compassion rather than justice, and thereby offering to global observers a significantly different slant on modern politics than the Western ideologies and movements, secular as well as religious.“Engaged Buddhism” as a term, says King, was coined by Thích Nhất Hạnh (b. 1926) in the context of the war in Vietnam. This was to be a form of Buddhism that drew on the traditional sources (wisdom that knows interdependence/emptiness and compassion that acts on that wisdom) but found skillful means to intervene concretely in the multiple crises related to the war: in the form of social service work including education, but also political activism to address the underlying causes of the war. King demonstrates with this example of Thích Nhất Hạnh and Vietnam the combination of traditional Buddhist ideas with modern contexts of practical application that characterize the movement as a whole. The template of the “four noble truths” is foundational to Thích Nhất Hạnh’s thought—suffering, its causes, the cessation of suffering and the path to that cessation. But in a world of war and political oppression the causes of suffering cannot be only located intra-psychically—yes, the afflictive mental states of greed, hatred, and delusion are the ultimate sources, but the deluded collective hatred that issues in war must be seen as a relatively autonomous factor calling for its own analysis and response. If the orphans of a bombed-out village can be said to suffer from afflictive mental states it is really the minds of those carrying out the bombing who must be transformed, and this obviously requires intervention into the political realm, given that the war makers are not themselves usually willing to sit down and explore the causes of their unskillful behavior. Hence, engaged Buddhism is Buddhism in... (shrink)

ArgumentIn the 1970s a public controversy erupted over the proposed use of brain operations to curtail violent behavior. Civil libertarians, civil rights and community activists, leaders of the anti-psychiatry movement, and some U.S. Congressmen charged psychosurgeons and the National Institute of Mental Health, with furthering a political project: the suppression of dissent. Several government-sponsored investigations into psychosurgery rebutted this charge and led to an official qualified endorsement of the practice while calling attention to the need for more “scientific” understanding and (...) better ethical safeguards. This paper argues that the psychosurgery debate of the 1970s was more than a power struggle between members of the public and the psychiatric establishment. The debate represented a clash between a postmodern skepticism about science and renewed focus on ultimate ends, on the one hand, and a modern faith in standards and procedures, a preoccupation with means, on the other. These diverging commitments made the dispute ultimately irresolvable. (shrink)

We start with a nearly arbitrary standard classical first order "language" $C\sb{o},$ which is expanded to $C\sb{M,T}$ = "$C\sb{o}+M+T$", where for any variable x, M and T are unary formulas. We start also with a model ${\cal T}\sb{o},$ which together with $C\sb{o}$ represents a fixed non-problematic interpreted first order language. For each $\mu,\tau\subseteq U\sb{o},$ the universe of discourse for ${\cal T}\sb{o},$ the model ${\cal T}\sb{\mu,\tau}$ over $C\sb{M,T}$ is given so that its reduct to $C\sb{o}$ is just ${\cal T}\sb{o},$ and so (...) that for any $C\sb{M,T}$-variable x, the set-extensions of M and T are $\mu$ and $\tau$ respectively. For each $C\sb{M,T}$-expression e, $\vec e$ is its distinctly chosen representative in $U\sb{o},$ and $\lbrack\!\lbrack e\rbrack\!\rbrack$ is a constant $C\sb{o}$-term which names $\vec e.$ ;The goal is to find $\mu\sb*$ and $\tau\sb*,$ such that $\mu\sb*$ and $\tau\sb*$ plausibly and "self-referentially" approximate meaningfulness and truth respectively for any interpreted language represented by ${\cal T}\sb{\mu\sb*,\tau\sb*},$ by satisfying at least the following conditions. ; $\tau\sb*\subseteq\mu\sb*,$ and for each $C\sb{M,T}$-sentence $\sigma$ such that ${\cal T}\sb{\mu\sb*,\tau\sb*}\models M\lbrack\!\lbrack\sigma\rbrack\!\rbrack,$ $$\eqalign{&\ {\cal T}\sb{\mu\sb*,\tau\sb*} \models\sigma\Longleftrightarrow{\cal T}\sb{\mu\sb*,\tau\sb*}\models T\lbrack\!\lbrack\sigma\rbrack\!\rbrack,\ {\rm and}\cr&\ {\cal T}\sb{\mu\sb*,\tau\sb*}\models T\lbrack\!\lbrack\sigma\\leftrightarrow T\lbrack\!\lbrack\sigma\rbrack\!\rbrack\rbrack\!\rbrack.\cr}$$ ; There is a class of expression representatives $\mu\sp{D}\subseteq\mu\sb*$ containing every $C\sb{o}$-expression representative, such that the set $\tau\sp{D}=\mu\sp{D}\ \cap\ \tau\sb*$ itself satisfies the following properties. ;First, for each $\vec\sigma$ such that $\sigma$ is a $C\sb{M,T}$-sentence, if for all $\mu,\tau\subseteq U\sb{o}$ satisfying $\mu\supseteq\mu\sb*$ and $\tau\supseteq\tau\sp{D},$ it is the case that ${\cal T}\sb{\mu,\tau}\models\sigma,$ then $\vec\sigma\in\tau\sp{D}.$ ;Second, whenever $\vec\sigma\in\tau\sp{D},$ then also $\sp{\vec{\enspace}}\ \in\tau\sp{D}.$ ;Third, $\tau\sp{D}$ is "upwardly closed" with respect to the strong-Kleene rules for the truth-value evaluation of Boolean combinations of formulas. For example, for $C\sb{M,T}$-sentences $e\sb1$ and $e\sb2$: $$\eqalign{&\ \vec e\sb1\in\tau\sp{D}\Longleftrightarrow)\sp{\vec{\enspace}}\ \in\tau\sp{D}.\cr&\ {\rm If}\ \vec e\sb1\in\tau\sp{D}\ {\rm or}\ \vec e\sb2\in\tau\sp{D},\ {\rm then\ so\ is}\ \sp{\vec{\enspace}}\ \in\tau\sp{D}.\cr&\ {\rm If}\ \sp{\vec{\enspace}}\ \in\tau\sp{D}\ {\rm and}\ \sp{\vec{\enspace}}\ \in\tau\sp{D},\ {\rm then}\ )\sp{\vec{\enspace}}\ \in\tau\sp{D}.\cr}$$ ; For each $C\sb{M,T}$-expression e not involving T, ${\cal T}\sb{\mu\sb*,\tau\sb*}\models M\lbrack\!\lbrack e\rbrack\!\rbrack$; in particular, for any $C\sb{M,T}$-expression e whatsoever, ${\cal T}\sb{\mu\sb*,\tau\sb*}\models M\lbrack\!\lbrack\\neg M\lbrack\!\lbrack e\rbrack\!\rbrack\rbrack\!\rbrack.$ ; ;In this dissertation, it is shown for the first time that there are in fact $\mu\sb*$ and $\tau\sb*$ which simultaneously satisfy all three conditions , , and , even when the consequent of the Godel fixed point theorem must hold. (shrink)

In 2005 the member states of the United Nations recognized a “responsibility to protect” (“R2P”) victims of mass atrocities such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. They acknowledged a special role for the U.N. Security Council in responding to these atrocities, including potentially authorizing military action using its extensive powers under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. However, the Council has very rarely been able to agree on appropriate action, and the five permanent Council members (“P5”), most notably (...) China and Russia, have often vetoed or threatened to veto Council resolutions authorizing R2P action. The article argues that the veto poses a major impediment to the Council acting on its R2P responsibilities, and that to resolve it, the P5, and all U.N. member states, need to agree on a common ethical approach. The article proposes such an approach based on ethical concepts that are widely endorsed by states, especially in the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and explores its implications for legal and ethical controversies relating to the role of the Council, its obligations under R2P, and proposed reforms of the veto. (shrink)

Aircraft with increasingly high performance were important to the war effort in World War II. Changes in technology allowed aircraft to reach faster speeds and to complete missions at higher altitudes. With these changes came new obstacles for pilots who had to tolerate these stresses. Of primary concern to the U.S. War Department was the loss of consciousness that often occurred with high-speed maneuvers and especially during pull-up after dive-bombing missions. In some cases, pilots would experience up to 9G of (...) force during rapid ascent, much more than the 6G threshold that typically leads to loss of consciousness. In 1941, a research team in Red Wing, MN, proposed experiments to elucidate the mechanism .. (shrink)

This article reviews the relationship between managed care and public health. Managed care, with its seemingly infinite structural and organizational variation, dominates the modern American health-care system for the non-elderly U.S. population. Through its emphasis on standarhzed practice norms and performance measurement, coupled with industrial purchasing techniques, prepayment, risk downstreaming, and incentives-based compensation, managed care has the potential to exert considerable influence over the manner in which the health-care system is organized and functions. Given the degree to which the attainment (...) of the basic public health goal of protecting the public against population health threats for which there are known and effective medical interventions depends on the successful interaction between public health policy and the medical care system, the importance of a viable working relationship between public health and managed care is difficult to overstate.The potential for conflict between public health and medical care is nothing new; indeed, delineating the boundaries of public health to shape and influence medical practice has occupied the energies of policymakers and the medical industry for well over a century. (shrink)

This article reviews the relationship between managed care and public health. Managed care, with its seemingly infinite structural and organizational variation, dominates the modern American health-care system for the non-elderly U.S. population. Through its emphasis on standarhzed practice norms and performance measurement, coupled with industrial purchasing techniques, prepayment, risk downstreaming, and incentives-based compensation, managed care has the potential to exert considerable influence over the manner in which the health-care system is organized and functions. Given the degree to which the attainment (...) of the basic public health goal of protecting the public against population health threats for which there are known and effective medical interventions depends on the successful interaction between public health policy and the medical care system, the importance of a viable working relationship between public health and managed care is difficult to overstate.The potential for conflict between public health and medical care is nothing new; indeed, delineating the boundaries of public health to shape and influence medical practice has occupied the energies of policymakers and the medical industry for well over a century. (shrink)

This is a book review of Grégoire Webber, Paul Yowell, Richard Ekins, Maris Köpcke, Bradley W. Miller, and Francisco J. Urbina, "Legislated Rights" (Cambridge U. Pr., 2018).

Competition among scientists for funding, positions and prestige, among other things, is often seen as a salutary driving force in U.S. science. Its effects on scientists, their work and their relationships are seldom considered. Focus-group discussions with 51 mid- and early-career scientists, on which this study is based, reveal a dark side of competition in science. According to these scientists, competition contributes to strategic game-playing in science, a decline in free and open sharing of information and methods, sabotage of others’ (...) ability to use one’s work, interference with peer-review processes, deformation of relationships, and careless or questionable research conduct. When competition is pervasive, such effects may jeopardize the progress, efficiency and integrity of science. (shrink)

How should judges decide which linguistic canons to apply in interpreting statutes? One important answer looks to the inside of the legislative process: Follow the rules that lawmakers contemplate. A different answer, based on the “ordinary meaning” doctrine, looks to the outside: Follow the rules that would guide an ordinary person’s understanding of the legal text. Empirical scholars have studied statutory interpretation from the inside—revealing what rules drafters follow—but never from the outside. We offer a novel framework for empirically testing (...) interpretive canons “from the outside,” recruiting 4,500 people from the United States, as well as a sample of U.S. law students, to evaluate hypothetical scenarios that correspond to each canon’s triggering conditions. -/- The empirical findings provide crucial evidence about which traditional canons “ordinary meaning” actually supports, and they carry several further implications. First, interpretive canons are not a closed set. We discovered new canons that are not yet reflected as legal canons, including one we term the “non-binary gender canon” and another the “quantifier domain restriction canon.” Second, the results support a new understanding of the ordinary meaning doctrine itself, as one focused on the ordinary interpretation of rules, as opposed to the traditional focus on “ordinary language” generally. Third, many of the canons reflect that ordinary people interpret rules with an intuitive anti-literalism. This anti-literalism finding challenges textualist assumptions about ordinary meaning, as well as offering a theme for researching other currently unrecognized canons. Most broadly, we hope the Essay initiates a new research program in empirical legal interpretation. If ordinary meaning is relevant to legal interpretation, interpreters should look to evidence of how ordinary people actually understand legal rules. We see our experiments as a first step in that new direction. (shrink)

This exploratory study investigates the ways in which secondary U.S. history teachers who attended two iterations of a teacher professional development workshop, focusing on the history of school desegregation in Virginia, planned to teach the history of school desegregation through historical inquiry. Conceptualizing the history of school desegregation as difficult history, the authors conducted the content analysis of 23 written lesson plans generated by workshop participants. The historiography of school desegregation, and research on four dimensions of historical inquiry such as (...) Change and Continuity, Causation, Multiple Perspectives and Historical Sources, guided the data analysis. The findings suggest that teachers in this study were most likely to design their inquiry around Causation, framing the history of school desegregation within the classical timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, which begins with the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and ends with the Civil Rights Act of 1968. What was often absent in these inquiries was Massive Resistance, the backlash against the Brown v. Board of Education decision, collective and political actions of African American communities to implement the Brown decision, and varying perspectives within African American communities as well as Whites who opposed the Brown decision. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

In his 1923 play R.U.R.: Rossum s Universal Robots, Karel Capek coined In 1993, we began a humanoid robotics project aimed at constructing a robot for use in exploring theories of human intelligence. In this article, we describe three aspects of our research methodology that distinguish our work from other humanoid projects. First, our humanoid robots are designed to act autonomously and safely in natural workspaces with people. Second, our robots are designed to interact socially with people by exploiting natural (...) human social cues. Third, we believe that robotics offers a unique tool for testing models of human intelligence drawn from developmental psychology and cognitive science. (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)

Graphical AbstractScience and technology consortia provide a viable solution for the recent unsustainable academic growth in biomedical research.

Omnipresent calls for more women in university administration assume these women will prioritize using resources and power to increase female representation, especially in STEM fields where women are most underrepresented. However, empirical evidence is lacking for systematic differences in female versus male administrators’ attitudes. Do female administrators agree on which strategies are best, and do men see things differently? To answer this question, we explored United States college and university administrators’ opinions regarding policies, strategies, and structural changes in their organizations (...) designed to increase women professors’ representation and retention in STEM fields. A comprehensive review of past research yielded a database of potentially-effective, recommended policies (e.g., increasing emphasis on teaching, service, and administration during promotion reviews; stopping the tenure clock for childbearing; providing on-campus childcare; couples-hiring; sharing tenure lines; having more women chair search committees; setting gender quotas for promotion). A survey based on these recommended policies was sent to provosts, deans, associate deans, and department chairs of STEM fields at 96 public and private research universities (formerly called R1s) across the U.S. These administrators were asked to rate the quality and feasibility of each recommended policy; 474 provided data, of which 334 contained complete numerical data used in the analyses, so our results are based on a large, geographically diverse group of administrators at research universities. Our data revealed that female administrators perceived the 44 strategies to be higher in quality overall than did male administrators--but not higher in feasibility--with 9 policies perceived differently when rated by women versus men administrators, after imposing conservative statistical controls. There was broad general agreement on the relative rankings of the 44 policies in terms of their perceived quality. Overall, our national survey of U.S. administrators supported the assertion that placing women in administrative roles creates greater emphasis on the importance of enacting policies to attract and retain women in STEM. Topics of disagreement between women and men regarding strategy quality are important focuses of future policy and planning, because female administrators may have insights into how to retain women professors that male administrators do not share. (shrink)

The U.S. stock market is one of the largest and most complex marketplaces in the global financial system. Over the past several decades, this market has evolved at multiple structural and temporal scales. New exchanges became active, and others stopped trading, regulations have been introduced and adapted, and technological innovations have pushed the pace of trading activity to blistering speeds. These developments have supported the growth of a rich machine-trading ecology that leads to qualitative differences in trading behavior at human (...) and machine time scales. We conduct a longitudinal analysis of comprehensive market data to quantify nonstationary dynamics throughout this system. We quantify the relationship between fluctuations in the number of active trading venues and realized opportunity costs experienced by market participants. We find that information asymmetries, in the form of quote dislocations, predict market-wide volatility indicators. Lastly, we uncover multiple micro-to-macro level pathways, including those exhibiting evidence of self-organized criticality. (shrink)

The idea about this special issue came from a paper published as an updated and upridged version of an older memorial lecture given by Brian D. Josephson and Michael Conrad at the Gujarat Vidyapith University in Ahmedabad, India on March 2, 1984. The title of this paper was “Uniting Eastern Philosophy and Western Science” (1992). We thought that this topic deserves to be revisited after 25 years to demonstrate to the scientific community which new insights and achievements were attained (...) in this fairly broad field during this period. (shrink)

Brian Leftow offers a theist theory of necessity and possibility, and a new sort of argument for God's existence. He argues that necessities of logic and mathematics are determined by God's nature, but that it is events in God's mind - his imagination and choice - that account for necessary truths about concrete creatures.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52
eviews WITTGENSTEIN APPROACHED G L Philosophy / U. of Iowa Iowa City,  ,  -@. Brian McGuinness. Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers. London and New York: Routledge, . Pp. xv, . .. his book is a joy to read. Brian McGuinness is among the foremost Tscholars of Wittgenstein’s life and work. For better than  years, his papers (...) have given perhaps the most clear and authoritative account of the complex intellectual and personal journey of Wittgenstein. The collection of these important papers in one book is an outstanding gift to all who are interested in early analytic philosophy. The papers are not presented diachronically, but topically, starting with McGuinness’s discussions of the interplay between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his conception of himself, as Austrian patriot, as teacher, as Jew, as architect, as penitent. There is much controversy in all of this. It is upsetting to learn that Wittgenstein remarked (likely sometime shortly after the events of Pearl Harbor in ) that “Things will be terrible when the war is over, whoever wins. Of course very terrible if the Nazis won, but terribly slimy if the Allies win” (p. ). In spite of McGuinness’s attempts at charitable explanation, it is hard to excuse this remark. Wittgenstein should have recognized that it was imperative that the Allies win, for surely he could not, by then, have been blind to the pogroms of Nazism (if not the implementation of their Final Solution to the Jewish question). It is just disappointing to discover Wittgenstein’s dalliance with anti-Semitism or with Weininger’s deplorable Sex and Gender. Nonetheless, McGuinness offers a wonderful and balanced portrait of Wittgenstein with a welcome minimum of hyperbole either concerning his genius, achievements and influences, or his eccentricities and failings.  As also in McGuinness’s Wittgenstein, a Life: Young Ludwig (London: Duckworth, and Berkeley : U. of California P., ; reprinted as Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life, – with a new Preface [Oxford: Clarendon P., ]) russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (winter –): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U.  - _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52  Reviews In a second part, the book delves into the origins and nature of Wittgenstein ’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Since the papers in this part do not come diachronically, it would be nice for each to have a date by its title, so that if there is an historical development of McGuinness’s ideas it could be more easily tracked. But evolving or not, the interpretations in McGuinness’s papers are of the very highest quality. I know of no one else who has come closer to unravelling the often cryptic entries in the Tractatus. Though some of McGuinness’s assumptions about Russell’s philosophy are now challenged by new interpretations —in particular, it seems that Russell never held a theory of types of entities —there remain a great many gems in these papers. Among them are the following: Wittgenstein’s conception of solipsism is not Cartesian and epistemic, but concerns the limits of logical form and the proper ethical attitude towards life (p. ); the Notes on Logic were offered as satisfying the dissertation requirement for Wittgenstein’s .. degree (p. ); Wittgenstein included among the “logical constants” such notions as that of a “predicate” and a “dual complex”, not just logical particles such as “not”, “or”, “all” and “some” (p. ); Wittgenstein’s Grundgedanke was independent of his “picture theory” (p. ); Wittgenstein’s “logical atomism” was to be a purified form of Russell’s so that it forms “true logical atomism” with no differences of type and with the unification provided by neutral monism of mental and physical particulars (p. ); Wittgenstein and Russell had similar attractions to Spinozistic ethics, the conception of the world sub specie aeternitatis and the “mystical” as what inspires the scientific attitude (pp. , ); Hertz’s elimination of the concept of “force” in physics was an inspiration for Wittgenstein’s elimination of “classes”, “probability”, and the logical constants (p. ); structured variables were central to Wittgenstein’s Tractarian programme (p. ); Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical analysis has important ties to Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm (pp. , , ). These... (shrink)

A textbook on modal logic, intended for readers already acquainted with the elements of formal logic, containing nearly 500 exercises. Brian F. Chellas provides a systematic introduction to the principal ideas and results in contemporary treatments of modality, including theorems on completeness and decidability. Illustrative chapters focus on deontic logic and conditionality. Modality is a rapidly expanding branch of logic, and familiarity with the subject is now regarded as a necessary part of every philosopher's technical equipment. Chellas here offers (...) an up-to-date and reliable guide essential for the student. (shrink)

A theoretical and sociological exploration of the relationship between law and society, this book constructs an approach to law that integrates legal theory with sociological approaches to law. Law is generally understood to be a mirror of society--a reflection of its customs and morals--that functions to maintain social order. Focusing on this common understanding, the book conducts a survey of Western legal and social theories about law and its relationship within society, engaging in a theoretical and empirical critique of this (...) common understanding. (shrink)

In the first full-length analysis of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, Brian R. Clack presents a fresh and innovative interpretation of Wittgenstein's conception of religion. While previous commentators have tended to sideline the Remarks on Frazer, Clack shows how the key to Wittgenstein's thought on religion lies in these remarks on primitive magico-religious observances. This book shows that Wittgenstein neither embraces expressivism, as it is generally assumed, nor straightforwardly denies instrumentalism. Focusing instead on Wittgenstein's suggestion that magic is (...) somehow akin to metaphysics, a view of ritual as the spontaneous expression of human beings is presented. (shrink)

Todos los humanos, cualquiera sea su edad y en cualquier momento de la historia en que los situemos, se han preguntado de una forma u otra, acerca del origen de nuestra especie, del origen de la tierra, del universo, del origen, en fin, del tiempo y del espacio. Son preguntas eternas que de una forma u otra, reflejan la magia del misterio que envuelve nuestra presencia como especie en este hermoso globo azulado perdido en la inmensidad del universo infinito. Esta (...) Historia del Universo de Thom.. (shrink)