We believe that the professional responsibility of bioscience and biotechnology professionals includes a social responsibility to contribute to the resolution of ethically fraught policy problems generated by their work. It follows that educators have a professional responsibility to prepare future professionals to discharge this responsibility. This essay discusses two pilot projects in ethics pedagogy focused on particularly challenging policy problems, which we call “fractious problems”. The projects aimed to advance future professionals’ acquisition of “fractious problem navigational” skills, a set of (...) skills designed to enable broad and deep understanding of fractious problems and the design of good policy resolutions for them. A secondary objective was to enhance future professionals’ motivation to apply these skills to help their communities resolve these problems. The projects employed “problem based learning” courses to advance these learning objectives. A new assessment instrument, “Skills for Science/Engineering Ethics Test”, was designed and administered to measure the success of the courses in doing so. This essay first discusses the rationale for the pilot projects, and then describes the design of the pilot courses and presents the results of our assessment using SkillSET in the first pilot project and the revised SkillSET 2.0 in the second pilot project. The essay concludes with discussion of observations and results. (shrink)

In vitro fertilization using donated oocytes has proven to be an effective treatment option for many prospective parents struggling with infertility, and the usage of donated oocytes in assisted reproduction has increased markedly since the technique was first successfully used in 1984. Data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the use of assisted reproductive technologies in the United States indicate that approximately 12% of all ART cycles in the country now use donated oocytes. The increased use (...) of oocyte donation in the United States has prompted discussion regarding risks associated with the process and how best to ensure the safety of oocyte donors.Physical risks associated with oocyte donation include bleeding, infection, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and a potential, although unconfirmed, increased risk of developing various forms of cancer, such as uterine, colon, breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancers. (shrink)

This study analyzes 435 oocyte donor recruitment advertisements to assess whether entities recruiting donors of oocytes to be used for in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures include a disclosure of risks associated with the donation process in their advertisements. Such disclosure is required by the self-regulatory guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and by law in California for advertisements placed in the state. We find very low rates of risk disclosure across entity types and regulatory regimes, although risk (...) disclosure is more common in advertisements placed by entities subject to ASRM's self-regulatory guidelines. Advertisements placed in California are more likely to include risk disclosure, but disclosure rates are still quite low. California-based entities advertising outside the state are more likely to include risk disclosure than non-California entities, suggesting that California's law may have a modest “halo effect.” Our results suggest that there is a significant ethical and policy problem with the status quo in light of the known and unknown risks of oocyte donation and the importance of risk disclosure to informed consent in the context of oocyte donation. (shrink)

Nous commençons à mesurer l’importance culturelle du numérique comme nouvelle idée unificatrice d’une université totalement redimensionnée. Au-delà d’une simple question de littéracie informatique ou informationnelle, les humanités numériques nous offrent l’occasion de développer une approche critique de l’écriture numérique conçue comme une forme d’alphabétisation et de littérature, de façon à développer une culture numérique partagée comme une nouvelle forme de Bildung. Tandis que les technologies numériques produisent de nouvelles formes de subjectivités computationnelles, les humanités numériques peuvent nous aider à aller (...) au-delà d’un rapport consumériste aux nouveaux gadgets et à casser ces boîtes noires qui, à la fois comme objets techniques et comme métaphores, absorbent aujourd’hui une si grande partie de notre attention. (shrink)

Research suggests that metacognitive monitoring ability does not decline with age. For example, judgments-of-learning accuracy is roughly equivalent between younger and older adults. But few studies have asked whether younger and older adults’ metacognitive ability varies across different types of memory processes. The current study tested the relationship between memory and post-decision confidence ratings at the trial level on item and associative memory recognition tests. As predicted, younger and older adults had similarmetacognitive efficiency, when using meta-d’/d’, a measure derived from (...) Signal Detection Theory, despite a significant age effect favoring younger adults on memory performance. This result is consistent with previous work showing age-equivalent metacognitive efficiency in the memory domain. We also found that metacognitive efficiency was higher for associative memory than for item memory across age groups, even though associative and item recognition memory were statistically equivalent. Higher accuracy on post-test decision confidence ratings for associative recognition relative to item recognition on resolution accuracy itself and when corrected for performance differences are novel findings. Implications for associative metacognition are discussed. (shrink)

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...) made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration. (shrink)

The political philosophy of health care has been characterized by considerable conceptual inflation in recent years. First, the concept of health that lies at its core has come to encompass ever-increasing aspects of individuals’ existences. And second, the emergence of the public health perspective has increased the range of resources relevant to health equity. This expansion has not been without cost. The decision to include more rather than less within the ambit of "health" is ultimately a moral/political rather than an (...) ontological or metaphysical one, and there are several ethical reasons to define the scope of theories of distributive justice in health narrowly. (shrink)

Plotinus maintains that our intellect is always thinking. This is due to his view that our intellect remains in the intelligible world and shares a natural kinship with the hypostasis Intellect, whose being and activity consists in eternal contemplation of the Forms. Moreover, Plotinus maintains that although our intellect is always thinking we do not always apprehend our thoughts. This is due to his view that “we“ descend into the sensible world while our intellect remains in the intelligible world. Furthermore, (...) Plotinus maintains that it is only when logoi unfold the content of our thoughts into the imagination that we apprehend them. This is due to a complex account between, on the one hand, the relationship between intellect and discursive reasoning, and on the other hand, the relationship between discursive reasoning and language. Plotinus tells this story with remarkable brevity in Ennead 4.3.30. In this paper I explain the role the imagination plays in the apprehension of thoughts through a close analysis of this treatise in connection with Ennead 1.4.10. (shrink)

The publish-or-perish paradigm is a prevailing facet of science. We apply game theory to show that, under rather weak assumptions, this publication scenario takes the form of a prisoner’s dilemma, which constitutes a substantial obstacle to beneficial delayed publication of more complete results. One way of avoiding this obstacle while allowing researchers to establish priority of discoveries would be an updated “pli cacheté”, a sealed envelope concept from the 1700s. We describe institutional rules that could additionally favour high-quality work and (...) publications and provide examples of such policies that are already in place. Our analysis should be extended to other publication scenarios and the role of other stakeholders such as scientific journals or sponsors. (shrink)