Genetic testing for cancer susceptibility is an application of biotechnology that has the potential both to improve the psychosocial and physical wellbeing of the population and to cause significant psychosocia1 and physical harms. In spite of the uncertain value of genetic testing, it has captured the interest of biotechnology companies, researchers, health care providers, and the public. As more tests become feasible, pressure may increase to make the tests available and reimbursable. Both the benefits and harms of these tests lie (...) not as much in the tests themselves, as in their power to predict or alter the future. The value of the tests does not derive from the information per se, but from the ability to communicate effectively the information to patients and providers, and the behavioral responses of patients, providers, and others to this information. (shrink)

Genetic testing for cancer susceptibility is an application of biotechnology that has the potential both to improve the psychosocial and physical wellbeing of the population and to cause significant psychosocia1 and physical harms. In spite of the uncertain value of genetic testing, it has captured the interest of biotechnology companies, researchers, health care providers, and the public. As more tests become feasible, pressure may increase to make the tests available and reimbursable. Both the benefits and harms of these tests lie (...) not as much in the tests themselves, as in their power to predict or alter the future. The value of the tests does not derive from the information per se, but from the ability to communicate effectively the information to patients and providers, and the behavioral responses of patients, providers, and others to this information. (shrink)

This book presents a unifying framework for using priority arguments to prove theorems in computability. Priority arguments provide the most powerful theorem-proving technique in the field, but most of the applications of this technique are ad hoc, masking the unifying principles used in the proofs. The proposed framework presented isolates many of these unifying combinatorial principles and uses them to give shorter and easier-to-follow proofs of computability-theoretic theorems. Standard theorems of priority levels 1, 2, and 3 are chosen to demonstrate (...) the framework's use, with all proofs following the same pattern. The last section features a new example requiring priority at all finite levels. The book will serve as a resource and reference for researchers in logic and computability, helping them to prove theorems in a shorter and more transparent manner"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Perceptual experience, that paradigm of subjectivity, constitutes our most immediate and fundamental access to the objective world. At least, this would seem to be so if commonsense realism is correct — if perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Commonsense realism raises many questions. First, can we be more precise about its commitments? Does it entail any particular conception of the nature of perceptual experience (...) and its relation to perceived objects, or any particular view of the way perception yields knowledge? Second, what explains the apparent intuitive appeal of commonsense realism? Should we think of it as a kind of folk theory held by most human adults or is there a sense in which we are pre-theoretically committed to it — in virtue of the experience we enjoy or in virtue of the concepts we use or in virtue of the explanations we give? Third, is commonsense realism defensible, in the face of formidable challenges from epistemology, metaphysics and cognitive science? The project of the present volume is to advance our understanding of these issues and thus to shed light on the commitments and credentials of commonsense realism. As you may have guessed from the title, the volume also aims to highlight the key role the concept of causation plays in these debates. Central issues to be addressed include the status and nature of causal requirements on perception, the causal role of perceptual experience, and the relation between objective perception and causal thinking — issues that, as many chapters in the volume bring out, are inseparable from concerns with the very nature of causation. (shrink)

This study examined whether having attended a public, private or religious affiliated grade and/or high school influenced a college student’s ethical decision making process. We also examined whether having taken an ethics course in college influences a student’s ethical decision making process. Our sample included 508 accounting students (237 men and 271 women) from Albania, Ecuador, Ireland and the United States. Our analyses indicated no differences in ethical decision making that associated with either grade-or-high-school education. While our data showed no (...) difference in the reported attitudes between students from Ecuador and the United States after controlling for social desirability response bias, we found significant differences between the attitudes students from the United States and students from both Albania and Ireland. While gender was also significant for six of our seven scenarios, social desirability response bias was significant in all of our scenarios. (shrink)

I first seriously contemplated writing a book on degree theory in 1976 while I was visiting the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. There was, at that time, some interest in ann-series book about degree theory, and through the encouragement of Bob Soare, I decided to make a proposal to write such a book. Degree theory had, at that time, matured to the point where the local structure results which had been the mainstay of the earlier papers in the area (...) were finding a steadily increasing number of applications to global degree theory. Michael Yates was the first to realize that the time had come for a systematic study of the interaction between local and global degree theory, and his papers had a considerable influence on the content of this book. During the time that the book was being written and rewritten, there was an explosion in the number of global theorems about the degrees which were proved as applications of local theorems. The global results, in turn, pointed the way to new local theorems which were needed in order to make further progress. I have tried to update the book continuously, in order to be able to present some of the more recent results. It is my hope to introduce the reader to some of the fascinat ing combinatorial methods of Recursion Theory while simultaneously showing how to use these methods to prove some beautiful global theorems about the degrees. (shrink)

Recent controversy surrounding the Surfactant Positive Airway Pressure and Pulse Oximetry Trial and the Office for Human Resource Protection’s judgment that its informed consent procedures were inadequate has unmasked considerable confusion about OHRP’s definition of research risks. The controversy concerns application of that definition to trials comparing multiple treatments within the existing standard of care. Some have argued that it is impossible for such trials to pose research risks on the grounds that all risks associated with a standard-of-care treatment should (...) instead be considered risks of treatment. However, analysis of OHRP’s definition demonstrates that some risks in such trials can be research risks. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a substantial amount of work in reverse mathematics concerning natural mathematical principles that are provable from RT, Ramsey's Theorem for Pairs. These principles tend to fall outside of the "big five" systems of reverse mathematics and a complicated picture of subsystems below RT has emerged. In this paper, we answer two open questions concerning these subsystems, specifically that ADS is not equivalent to CAC and that EM is not equivalent to RT.

We investigate homomorphisms of degree structures with various relations, functions and constants. Our main emphasis is on pseudolattices, i.e., partially ordered sets with a join operation and relations simulating the meet operation. We show that there are no finite quotients of the pseudolattice of degrees or of the pseudolattice of degrees 0′, but that many finite distributive lattices are pseudolattice quotients of the pseudolattice of computably enumerable degrees.

In this paper we evaluate how to effectively use the crowdsourcing service, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), to content analyze textual data for use in psychological research. MTurk is a marketplace for discrete tasks completed by workers, typically for small amounts of money. MTurk has been used to aid psychological research in general, and content analysis in particular. In the current study, MTurk workers content analyzed personally-written textual data using coding categories previously developed and validated in psychological research. These codes were (...) evaluated for reliability, accuracy, completion time, and cost. Results indicate that MTurk workers categorized textual data with comparable reliability and accuracy to both previously published studies and expert raters. Further, the coding tasks were performed quickly and cheaply. These data suggest that crowdsourced content analysis can help advance psychological research. (shrink)

According to John McDowell and Bill Brewer, our experiences have the type of content which can be the content of judgements - content which is the result of the actualization of specific conceptual abilities. They defend this view by arguing that our experiences must have such content in order for us to be able to think about our environment. In this paper I show that they do not provide a conclusive argument for this view. Focusing on Brewer’s version of the (...) argument, I show that it rests on a questionable assumption - namely, that if a subject can recognize the normative bearing of a mental content upon what she should think and do, then this content must be the result of the actualization of conceptual capacities (and in this sense conceptual). I argue that considerations regarding the roles played by experience and concepts in our mental lives may require us to reject this assumption. (shrink)

We exhibit a finite lattice without critical triple that cannot be embedded into the enumerable Turing degrees. Our method promises to lead to a full characterization of the finite lattices embeddable into the enumerable Turing degrees.

We define a class of finite partial lattices which admit a notion of rank compatible with embedding constructions, and present a necessary and sufficient condition for the embeddability of a finite ranked partial lattice into the computably enumerable degrees.

We present a necessary and sufficient condition for the embeddability of a principally decomposable finite lattice into the computably enumerable degrees. This improves a previous result which required that, in addition, the lattice be ranked. The same condition is also necessary and sufficient for a finite lattice to be embeddable below every non-zero computably enumerable degree.

John McDowell (in Mind and World) and Bill Brewer (in Perception and Reason) argue that the content of our perceptual experience is conceptual in the following sense. It is of the type of content that could be the content of a judgement – that is, a content which results from the actualization of two (or more) conceptual abilities. Specifically, they suggest that the conceptual abilities actualized in experience are demonstrative abilities, and thus the resulting content is of the type we (...) may express by means of sentences of the form ‘this is thus’. In this paper I argue that we cannot construe experiential contents in this way. I first outline a construal of the ability to think about a thing being thus which is based on Brewer's discussion of conceptual experiential contents, and which I take to be the best construal available to the conceptualist. I then show that on this construal the demonstrative abilities that account for our experience of properties require intentional focused attention to the relevant properties. The conceptualist is thus committed to holding that we experience only the properties we are intentionally attending to, and I argue that this is implausible. The interest in examining Brewer's conceptualist construal of experiential content and pointing out its shortcoming is not limited merely to an interest in whether there is a workable conceptualist account of experiential content. I suggest that certain aspects of Brewer's construal capture important (and often neglected) aspects of our perceptual experience, and that understanding why the account fails can contribute to our understanding of both experiential content and demonstrative thought. (shrink)

Both introspection and empirical studies suggest that visual attention can affect the phenomenology of our visual experience. However, the exact character of such effects is far from clear. My aim in this chapter is to spell out the main difficulties involved in attempting to achieve a clearer view of these effects, and to make some suggestions as to how we can make progress with this issue while avoiding tempting mistakes. I do this by discussing the question of whether there is (...) a sense in which attention to a seen object can be said to contribute to the object’s visual phenomenal salience. It is often suggested that focusing visual attention on a seen object renders the object phenomenally salient. I look at potential evidence for this suggestion, and consider what form, if any, of visual phenomenal salience it may support. (shrink)

The degrees of unsolvability were introduced in the ground-breaking papers of Post [20] and Kleene and Post [7] as an attempt to measure theinformation contentof sets of natural numbers. Kleene and Post were interested in the relative complexity of decision problems arising naturally in mathematics; in particular, they wished to know when a solution to one decision problem contained the information necessary to solve a second decision problem. As decision problems can be coded by sets of natural numbers, this question (...) is equivalent to: Given a computer with access to an oracle which will answer membership questions about a setA, can a program be written which will correctly compute the answers to all membership questions about a setB? If the answer is yes, then we say thatBisTuring reducibletoAand writeB≤TA. We say thatB≡TAifB≤TAandA≤TB. ≡Tis an equivalence relation, and ≤Tinduces a partial ordering on the corresponding equivalence classes; the poset obtained in this way is called thedegrees of unsolvability, and elements of this poset are calleddegrees.Post was particularly interested in computability from sets which are partially generated by a computer, namely, those for which the elements of the set can be enumerated by a computer. (shrink)

We show that the lattice L 20 is not embeddable into the lattice of ideals of computably enumerable Turing degrees (J). We define a structure called a pseudolattice that generalizes the notion of a lattice, and show that there is a Π 2 necessary and sufficient condition for embedding a finite pseudolattice into J.

A choice set for a computable linear ordering is a set which contains one element from each maximal block of the ordering. We obtain a partial characterization of the computable linear order-types for which each computable model has a computable choice set, and a full characterization in the relativized case; Every model of the linear order-type α of degree ≤ d has a choice set of degree ≤ d iff α can written as a finite sum of order-types, each of (...) which either has finitely many blocks, or has order-type n · η for some integer n. (shrink)

Martin [4, Theorems 1 and 2] proved that a Turing degree a is the degree of a maximal set if, and only if, a′ = 0″. Lachlan has shown that maximal sets have minimal many-one degrees [2, §1] and that every nonrecursive r.e. Turing degree contains a minimal many-one degree [2, Theorem 4]. Our aim here is to show that any r.e. Turing degree a of a maximal set contains an infinite number of maximal sets whose many-one degrees are pairwise (...) incomparable; hence such Turing degrees contain an infinite number of distinct minimal many-one degrees. This theorem has been proved by Yates [6, Theorem 5] in the case when a = 0′. The need for this theorem first came to our attention as a result of work done by the author [3, Theorem 2.3]. There we looked at the structure / obtained from the recursive functions of one variable under the equivalence relation f ~ g if, and only if, f(x) = g(x) a.e., that is, for all but finitely many x ∈, where M is a maximal set, and M is its complement. We showed that / 1 ≡ / 2 if, and only if, 1 = m 2, i.e., 1. and 2 have the same many-one degree. However, it might be possible that some Turing degree of a maximal set contains exactly one many-one degree of a maximal set. Theorem 1 was proved to show that this was not the case, and hence that the theory of / is not an invariant of Turing degree. (shrink)

We show the decidability of the existential theory of the recursively enumerable degrees in the language of Turing reducibility, Turing reducibility of the Turing jumps, and least and greatest element.

We describe the motivation for the construction of a general framework for priority arguments, the ideas incorporated into the construction of the framework, and the use of the framework to prove theorems in computability theory which require priority arguments.

Ethics researchers advise managers of organizations to link rewards and punishments to ethical and unethical behavior, respectively. We build on prior research maintaining that organizations operate at Kohlbergs stages of moral reasoning, and explain how the over-reliance on rewards and punishments encourages employees to operate at Kohlbergs lowest stages of moral reasoning. We advocate designing organizations as ethical communities and relying on different assumptions about employees in order to foster ethical reasoning at higher levels. Characteristics associated with ethical communities are (...) identified and AES Corporation and Semco S/A serve as examples of corporations exhibiting the design characteristics and assumptions of ethical organizations. (shrink)