Contrasting institutionalism and sexual liberation is the essence of Black Mirror episode, Striking Vipers, which challenges the socially constructed boundaries imposed on sexual experiences in its consideration of how two conflicting lifestyles, traditional commitment and sexual openness, can cohabitate together. Through use of virtual eroticism, the episode takes the privileged standing of heteronormative monogamy and exposes its inadequacy as an institution without concluding that it must be jettisoned entirely. By contrasting real‐world intimacy with virtuality, it considers the meaningfulness of sexual (...) fantasies, thereby questioning the very definition of true intimacy. Striking Vipers ultimately explores the possibility that what is real may not always be what is most meaningful. Physical relationships can be just as artificial as fantasy, and imagination can be just as meaningful as reality. It concludes with the suggestion that neither heteronormative monogamy nor virtual escapism are fully satisfying. Instead, both romantic expressions may provide the necessary balance between monotonous devotion and unrestrained sexuality. (shrink)

Seth MacFarlane’s space adventure, The Orville, is not “Family Guy in Space.” It is a social commentary of the most direct and compelling sort. Through satire, humor, and symbolism, The Orville explores the potential dangers of religion. It does so in individual episodes, such as “If the Stars Should Appear” and “Mad Idolatry,” as well as through the series as a whole in its depiction of how the Union resolves its political differences with the Krill and the Moclans. In this (...) chapter, we will look at how The Orville criticizes religion, both generally and specifically. We will see that while it is not a condemnation of all religious believers, it is a critique of religion itself, suggesting that it can become dangerous when it merges religious dogma with political power. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Considerable attention has been paid recently to the gendering of organizations and occupations. Unfortunately, the gendered-organizations approach remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped, as there have as yet been few clear answers to the question central to the perspective: What does it really mean to say that an organization itself, or a policy, practice, or slot in the hierarchy, is “gendered”? Reviewing literature in the gendered-organizations tradition, the author discusses three of the most common ways the perspective has been applied and (...) argues that all of these definitions pose potential problems for the project of meaningful social and organizational change. The article concludes with some suggestions about how a more useful conception of the gendered organization might be built. (shrink)

The prevailing metaphor for understanding the persistence of gender inequalities in universities is the “chilly climate.” Women faculty sometimes resist descriptions of their workplaces as “chilly” and deny that gender matters even in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. I draw on interviews with women academics to explore this apparent paradox, and I offer a theoretical synthesis that may help explain it. I build on insights from Ridgeway and Acker to demonstrate that women do experience gender at work, (...) but the contexts in which they experience it have implications for how they understand gender’s importance and whether to respond. Specifically, I find that women are likely to minimize or deny gender’s importance in interactions. When it becomes salient in structures and cultures, women understand it differently. Placing gender in organizational contexts can better inform our understanding of gender inequality at work and can help in crafting more effective efforts to foster gender equity. (shrink)

This article uses Acker's theory of gendered organizations to frame an analysis of the ways in which policies and practices in a men's and a women's prison reflect and reproduce gendered inequalities. The article offers a working definition of one of Acker's key theoretical concepts, the notion of “gendered organizational logic.” Then, using interview data collected from correctional officers in a men's and a women's prison, the article examines the ways in which officer training and assignments, although designed to be (...) nominally generic, assume a male worker and disproportionately benefit male officers working in men's institutions. These findings imply that the perspective could more usefully be conceived as a theory of “masculinized” organizations. (shrink)

This chapter describes the potential far‐reaching consequences of contemplative higher education for the fields of science and medicine.

Scholars have advocated for the inclusion of metacognition in our understanding of the ethical decision making process and in support of moral learning. An instrument to measure metacognition as a domain-specific capacity related to ethical decision making is not found in the current literature. This research describes the development and validation of the 20-item Moral Metacognition Scale. Psychometric properties of the scale were assessed by exploration and confirmation of the factor structure, and the demonstration of convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. (...) Moral metacognition, as measured by the MMS, was significantly correlated with ethical awareness and ethical judgment. Limitations of our research, suggestions for future exploration, and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

With a large number of forcibly displaced people seeking safety, the EU is facing a challenge in maintaining solidarity. Europe has seen millions of asylum seekers crossing European borders, the largest number of asylum seekers since the second world war. Endemic diseases and often failing health systems in their countries of origin, and arduous conditions during transit, raise questions around how to meet the health needs of this vulnerable population on arrival in terms of screening, vaccination, and access to timely (...) and appropriate statutory health services. This paper explores the potential role of the principle of reciprocity, defined as the disposition ‘to return good in proportion to the good we receive, and to make reparations for the harm we have done’, as a mid-level principle in infectious disease screening policies. More than half of the European countries implemented screening programmes for newly arrived asylum seekers. Screening may serve to avoid potential infectious disease risks in the receiving countries as well as help identify health needs of asylum seekers. But screening may infringe upon basic rights of those screened, thus creating an ethical dilemma. The use of the principle of reciprocity can contribute to the identification of potential improvements for current screening programmes and emphasizes the importance of certain rights into guidelines for screening. It may create a two way moral obligation, upon asylum seekers to actively participate in the programme, and upon authorities to reciprocate the asylum seekers’ participation and the benefits for the control of public health. The authors argue that the reciprocity principle leads to a stronger ethical justification of screening programmes and help achieve a balance between justifiable rights claims of the host population and the asylum seekers. The principle deserves a further and more thorough exploration of its potential use in the field of screening, migration and infectious diseases. (shrink)

Background Over the last decade, the return of results (ROR) in precision medicine research (PMR) has become increasingly routine. Calls for individual rights to research results have extended the “duty to report” from clinically useful genetic information to traits and ancestry results. ROR has thus been reframed as inherently beneficial to research participants, without a needed focus on who benefits and how. This paper addresses this gap, particularly in the context of PMR aimed at increasing participant diversity, by providing investigator (...) and researcher perspectives on and questions about the assumed value of ROR in PMR.Methods Semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of investigators and researchers across federally funded PMR studies in three national consortia, as well as observations of study activities, focused on how PM researchers conceptualize diversity and implement inclusive practices across research stages, including navigating ROR.Results Interviewees (1) validated the value of ROR as a benefit of PMR, while others (2) questioned the benefit of clinically actionable results to individuals in the absence of sufficient resources for translating findings into health care for diverse and disadvantaged populations; (3) expressed uncertainties in applying the presumed value of ROR as a benefit for non-clinical results; and (4) and debated when the promise of the value of ROR may undermine trust in PMR, and divert efforts to return value beyond ROR.Conclusions Conceptualizations of diversity and inclusion among PM researchers and investigators raise unique ethical questions where unexamined assumptions of the value of ROR inform study recruitment efforts to enroll minoritized and under-represented populations. A lack of consideration for resources and infrastructure necessary to translate ROR into actionable information may hinder trustworthy community-research relationships. Thus, we argue for a more intentional interrogation of ROR practices as an offer of benefit and for whom. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

How should our beliefs change over time? Much has been written about how our beliefs should change in the light of new evidence. But that is not the question I’m asking. Sometimes our beliefs change without new evidence. I previously believed it was Sunday. I now believe it’s Monday. In this paper I discuss the implications of such beliefs for philosophy of language. I will argue that we need to allow for ‘dynamic’ beliefs, that we need new norms of belief (...) change to model how they function, and that this gives Perry’s (1977) two tier account the advantage over Lewis’s (1979) theory -/- . (shrink)

Is God's foreknowledge compatible with human freedom? One of the most attractive attempts to reconcile the two is the Ockhamistic view, which subscribes not only to human freedom and divine omniscience, but retains our most fundamental intuitions concerning God and time: that the past is immutable, that God exists and acts in time, and that there is no backward causation. In order to achieve all that, Ockhamists distinguish ‘hard facts’ about the past which cannot possibly be altered from ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past which are alterable, and argue that God's prior beliefs about human actions are soft facts about the past. (shrink)

Feminist Geneaologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures provides a feminist anaylsis of the questions of sexual and gender politics, economic and cultural marginality, and anti-racist and anti-colonial practices both in the "West" and in the "Third World." This collection, edited by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, charts the underlying theoretical perspectives and organization practices of the different varieties of feminism that take on questions of colonialism, imperialism, and the repressive rule of colonial, post-colonial and advanced capitalist nation-states. It provides a (...) comparative, relational, historically grounded conception of feminist praxis that differs markedly from the liberal pluralist, multicultural understanding that sheapes some of the dominant version of Euro-American feminism. As a whole, the collection poses a unique challenge to the naturalization of gender based in the experiences, histories and practices of Euro-American women. (shrink)

This article looks at some of the salient analyses of moderation in the ancient Greek and the Islamic traditions and uses them to develop a contemporary view of the matter. Greek ethics played a huge role in shaping the ethical views of the Muslim philosophers and theologians, and thus the article starts with an overview of the revival of contemporary western virtue ethics--in many ways an extension of Platonic-Aristotelian ethics--and then looks at the place of moderation or temperance in Platonic-Aristotelian (...) ethics. This sets the stage for an exposition of the position taken by Ibn Miskawayh and al-Ghazali, which is then used as a backdrop for suggesting a revival of the Quran's virtue ethics. After outlining a basis for its virtue ethics, the Quranic view of wasatiyya or moderation is discussed briefly. (shrink)

In “Imposing Risks,” Judith Thomson gives a case in which, by turning on her stove, she accidentally causes her neighbor’s death. She claims that both the following are true: (1) she ought not to have caused her neighbor’s death; (2) it was permissible for her to turn her stove on. In this paper it is argued that it cannot be that both (1) and (2) are true, that (2) is true, and that therefore (1) is false. How this is so (...) is explained, and the implications of this position regarding the relation between rights and duties is explored. (shrink)