Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

There can be few other uses in the Latin language which afford us so great an insight into the mental attitude of a writer at the moment of his writing, or which endow writing with so much of that personal colour which the voice alone gives in perfection, as does the singular use of the pronoun nos. All forms of this word which occur in the speeches of individuals, who are at the moment speaking independently, are either wholly singular uses, (...) or partly plural uses with more or less justification for the plural form according to the extent to which the speaker is identifying himself with his surroundings. Thus we find all degrees of plurality in such forms, and it is those instances in which the plural form can be least definitely justified which we call ‘singular’ or ‘unreal plural’ uses, and which prove to be the most fascinating from a psychological point of view. The object of the present essay is to inquire how far the varieties of meaning in the singular use of nos, which Professor R. S. Conway has pointed out in Cicero, appear also in Vergil. (shrink)

The theoretical and empirical link between leadership and workplace bullying needs further elaboration. The aim of the study is to examine the relationship between quality of leadership and the occurrence of workplace bullying 2 years later. Furthermore, we aim to examine a possible mechanism from leadership to bullying using social community at work as mediator. Using survey data that were collected at two different points in time among 1664 workers from 60 Danish workplaces, we examined the total, direct and indirect (...) effects between quality of leadership and workplace bullying. Our results indicate that quality of leadership plays a role in establishing working conditions that lead to workplace bullying. Furthermore, social community at work fully mediates the effect of poor quality of leadership on workplace bullying. This longitudinal study adds to previous cross-sectional studies on the substantial role played by leaders in the bullying process. Within the leadership–bullying relationship, social community at work acts as a full mediator, adding a significant contribution to the discussion of mechanisms involved in the bullying process. Plausible explanations of this mechanism and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is widely recoginized as a leading figure in the Western tradition of Philosophy. These volumes are designed to allow current debates on key themes to studied without seeking additional sources.

In his seminal work, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman suggests that the common view of human intelligence is far too narrow and that emotions play a much greater role in thought, decision-making and individual success than is commonly acknowledged. The importance of emotion to human experience cannot be denied, yet the relationship between law and emotion is one that has largely been ignored until recent years. However, the last two decades have seen a rapidly expanding interest among scholars of all disciplines (...) into the way in which law and the emotions interact, including the law's response to emotion and the extent to which emotions pervade the practice of the law. In The Emotional Dynamics of Law and Legal Discourse a group of leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic explore these issues across key areas of private law, public law, criminal justice and dispute resolution, illustrating how emotion infuses all areas of legal thought. The collection argues for a more positive view of the role of emotion in the context of legal discourse and demonstrates ways in which the law could, in the words of Goleman, become more emotionally intelligent. (shrink)

This is a collection of chapters by some of the most influential memory researchers.

The early evolution of metazoans is a major focus of biological attention, but is the historical record revealed in the Cambrian “explosion” an accurate reflection of original events? The key questions concern the nature of the earliest animals and when they originated. One widely-mooted suggestion is that planktotrophic larvae, typified by the annelidan trochophore and echinoid pluteus, existed long before the metazoan radiations evident in the Cambrian fossil record. This idea could be consistent for recent evidence of divergence times, based (...) on molecular “clocks,” of phyla appearing well before the Cambrian. Now a surprising new discovery of eggs with blastomeres and embryos with well-defined anatomy from the Cambrian (c.530 Myr ago) of China and Siberia promises to extend the arena of debate. In one case a convincing ontogeny can be traced from eggs to adult tube-dwelling cnidarians. In the other example a possible protostome, unhatched and wrapped around the egg, shows segmentation and possibly nascent sclerites. In both, these cases development is direct, i.e., there is no evidence for any planktotrophic larval stage. The implications for our perceptions of both the Cambrian ‘explosion’ and metazoan phylogeny could be considerable. BioEssays 20:676–682, 1998.© 1998 John Wiley & Sons Inc. (shrink)

Inspired by a mathematical ecology of thearre (M. Dinu) and the eco-grammar systems (E. Csuhaj-Varju et al.), this paper gives a brief analysis of simple cellular automata games in order to demonstrate their primary semiotic features. In particular, the behaviour of configurations in Conway's game of life is compared to several general features of Uexküll's concept of Umwelt. It is concluded that ecological processes have a fundamental semiotic dimension.

e live on a wonderful planet that not only teems with life but shows a marvellous exuberance of form and variety. In comparison with the size of the Earth its living skin (the so-called biosphere) may be thin, but it is by no means negligible. From high in the atmosphere, where ballooning spiders wafted aloft on their silk-strings have been trapped at heights of more than 4500 m and birds such as condors cross tropical storms at altitudes well above 6000 (...) in, via the oceans and the green continents, to deep within the Earth's crust where bacteria are known to live at depths of at least several kilometres, life is pervasive. (shrink)

Since the publication of a lecture called ‘Where Was Vergil's Farm?’ in the John Rylands' Library Bulletin in 1923, and its appearance in a fuller form as Ch. II. of my Harvard Lectures on the Vergilian Age, no hostile criticism has appeared except from writers in Mantua itself , until the book of my friend Prof. E. K. Rand, In Quest of Vergil's Birthplace. This describes in a delightful way his travels in the region of Mantua and Carpenedolo, in the (...) summer of 1929, and re-examines the question in the light of his experience. It also includes several valuable photographs and a map of the Provincia di Mantova, from all of which I have been glad to learn much. The reproductions of pages from the three manuscripts and two editions of the Life by Probus are particularly welcome. (shrink)

This paper addresses the indifference of students in higher education to the importance of self-reflection. As the economic justifications for higher education lose their hold, students display an absence of reasons for getting a college degree. The result of this, their indifference to the task of self-reflection, cannot be tackled from a perspective that presupposes the importance of self-reflection (e.g. traditional courses or coursework). Instead, the author holds that students need texts that demonstrate the path to self-reflection. Turning to literary (...) texts, the author discusses why stories are so capable of speaking to and moving students on a personal level. The author concludes by presenting a number of texts from a course he designed and explaining their philosophical role in the course. (shrink)

Variability in the symptom experience in patients diagnosed with chronic conditions may be related to social determinants of health (SDoH). The purpose of this critical review was to (1) summarize the existing literature on SDoH and symptom clusters (i.e., multiple, co‐occurring symptoms) in patients diagnosed with common chronic conditions, (2) evaluate current variables and measures used to represent SDoH, (3) identify gaps in the evidence base, and (4) provide recommendations for the incorporation of SDoH into future symptom cluster research. We (...) identified 118 articles including information on SDoH in chronic condition symptom cluster research. Articles primarily focused on cancer populations. Few articles had the explicit purpose of investigating relationships between SDoH and symptom clusters, and the inclusion of SDoH was often limited to variables used to describe samples. Future studies should be designed to “move beyond Table 1” in their utilization of SDoH as variables and examine relationships between SDoH and symptom clusters. Attention should be paid to the appropriateness of measures being used to collect information on SDoH, and analysis methods that estimate causal connections between variables should be considered. Research regarding the relationship of SDoH with symptom clusters in patients with chronic conditions has the potential to reveal mechanisms of symptom disparities and guide changes to alleviate these disparities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] Crime, Compassion, and The Reader John E. MacKinnon IN "WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ," Günter Grass describes how at the age of seventeen he stubbornly refused to believe the evidence arrayed before him and his classmates of Nazi atrocities, the photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and bones. "Germans never could have done, never did do a thing like that," (...) he recalls thinking. And "when the Never collapsed," he and other young Germans were assured that they were free of responsibility. "It took several more years," Grass reports, "before I began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot be repressed or come to terms with." Later, he confesses that those of his age "belonged to the Auschwitz generation—not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals." 1Although one would be hard-pressed to find a novel more dramatically different in style and narrative development than Grass's own dark, audacious fables, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader 2 nonetheless shares this fascination with the notion of collective guilt, in particular the burden of inheritance endured by Germany's "second generation." Set in a university town in the late 1950s, the novel tells the story of a high school student, Michael Berg, who falls in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. Though capable of genuine concern and deep affection, Hanna is oddly secretive, often brusque and officious, occasionally given to cruelty and sarcasm, and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. She also has an endearing quirk: she likes Michael to read to her. Eventually, and without explanation, she vanishes from Michael's life. It is seven years before he sees her again, when, as a law student, he attends a trial of concentration-camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. She stands accused, along with four other [End Page 1] women, of serving at both Auschwitz and a satellite camp near Cracow, of being actively involved in the selection of prisoners for almost certain death, and of locking several hundred women in a church, where they burned to death during a bombing raid.In light of testimony given at trial, Hanna's puzzling conduct, and his own recollections of their time together, it finally dawns on Michael that Hanna cannot read, that she was and remains illiterate. But while in retrospect this may explain certain episodes of frustration, incomprehension, and overreaction on her part, does it have any bearing on her guilt? What would Michael himself have done if similarly situated, and similarly limited? Thus, the story of Michael and Hanna serves as an allegory of the relation between the two generations of Germans, those who were Nazis, or who at least assisted or accommodated them, and the "lucky late-born." It is against this background that Schlink is able most searchingly to investigate questions of complicity, recrimination, and atonement.As much courtroom drama as rite-of-passage tale, The Reader is also something of a philosophical investigation. According to Eva Hoffman, in fact, Schlink has managed to compose "a fictionalized essay... a kind of philosophical parable." For all the briskly evocative prose, she adds, The Reader "gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view." 3 In a recent article, Jeremiah P. Conway offers a sympathetic interpretation of the novel, attending in particular to the philosophical issues that it raises. Conway challenges Martha Nussbaum's claim that it is logically incoherent for us to feel compassion for one whom we hold responsible for a morally reprehensible act. 4 For in Hanna, he suggests, we have a compelling counterexample, a fit object of our compassion no less than our condemnation. And yet, Conway's challenge is grounded in an even more fundamental denial that The Reader is at all concerned to establish the circumstances of Hanna's life as mitigating her crime.In what follows, I will argue that this interpretation is untenable... (shrink)

This second visit to the place of Virgil's birth was made partly in actuality—for my wife and I, before taking part in the Virgilian Cruise of last summer, spent two delightful days at Pietole with our hosts, the Signori Prati, and our guest and friend Bruno Nardi—and partly in a renewed pondering of the arguments presented by my friend Professor Conway both in his earlier article and in his recent review of the question, to which, as he says, I (...) had urged him to return. I promised him at the time that if he should not speak the last word on the subject, I would still further defend the view commonly accepted until he bestowed an extraordinary publicity on Calvisano and Carpenedolo. He declares that I maintain the traditional site at Pietole, ‘though not perhaps with very great confidence.’ He further implies that I ‘do not want to accept the evidence of Probus because “I prefer” to believe a mediaeval tradition.’ Let me assure him and the reader that I do not regard a mediaeval tradition per se as better proof than the certain statement of an ancient authority. I have been led, by studies in various fields, to respect tradition in general until it is disproved, and to lay the burden of the argument on those who would disprove it. But the mere sight of something hoary and mediaeval does not prompt me to exclaim, ‘Media Aetas locuta est; causa finita est’ I relish the attempts of an iconoclast to destroy rigid error, and accept his destruction if it is accomplished. In the present case, however, I have ‘very great confidence’ that Conway's assault on the tradition has come to naught. Possibly some new and unexpected evidence may yet be discovered, showing that Virgil was born at Calvisano, or Carpenedolo, or at some other site than Pietole—but nobody has presented it yet. (shrink)

We may now consider this ancient evidence that Andes lay three miles away from Mantua in connection with Conway's remaining arguments and with Virgil's ‘own statement’ in his Bucolics.In the matter of the inscriptions, Conway's ‘impenitence’ does nothing to strengthen his case. All the points that he raises in an apparent refutation had been met by me. I had distinguished between public and private inscriptions, as Conway had not done in his earlier article, where he declared the (...) period of the two monuments to be ‘Virgil's own,’ the inscriptions being ‘cut in the style which marks the best work between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50.’ I had not, as he asserts, failed to notice the point that caps the climax of his recent article, that ‘the P. Magius who wrote the inscription of Casalpoglio … was related to Virgil's mother.’ I was inclined to date both inscriptions, with the approval of Professor Egbert, somewhere in the third quarter of the first century of our era, but ‘even allowing for them both a date as early as the end of the first century B.C.,’ which is apparently as far back as Conway means to stretch their date, I clamored for an inscription of the time of Virgil's birth if it were to serve as evidence for his birthplace. This point is not met by Conway. If Virgil was born at Pietole, his fame and his family could certainly have extended as far north as Casalpoglio and Calvisano at the time of his death in 19 B.C. Supposing that we knew on other evidence that he was born at Calvisano, the presence of an inscription with the name of Magius or Vergilius would corroborate that evidence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] Crime, Compassion, and The Reader John E. MacKinnon IN "WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ," Günter Grass describes how at the age of seventeen he stubbornly refused to believe the evidence arrayed before him and his classmates of Nazi atrocities, the photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and bones. "Germans never could have done, never did do a thing like that," (...) he recalls thinking. And "when the Never collapsed," he and other young Germans were assured that they were free of responsibility. "It took several more years," Grass reports, "before I began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot be repressed or come to terms with." Later, he confesses that those of his age "belonged to the Auschwitz generation—not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals." 1Although one would be hard-pressed to find a novel more dramatically different in style and narrative development than Grass's own dark, audacious fables, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader 2 nonetheless shares this fascination with the notion of collective guilt, in particular the burden of inheritance endured by Germany's "second generation." Set in a university town in the late 1950s, the novel tells the story of a high school student, Michael Berg, who falls in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. Though capable of genuine concern and deep affection, Hanna is oddly secretive, often brusque and officious, occasionally given to cruelty and sarcasm, and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. She also has an endearing quirk: she likes Michael to read to her. Eventually, and without explanation, she vanishes from Michael's life. It is seven years before he sees her again, when, as a law student, he attends a trial of concentration-camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. She stands accused, along with four other [End Page 1] women, of serving at both Auschwitz and a satellite camp near Cracow, of being actively involved in the selection of prisoners for almost certain death, and of locking several hundred women in a church, where they burned to death during a bombing raid.In light of testimony given at trial, Hanna's puzzling conduct, and his own recollections of their time together, it finally dawns on Michael that Hanna cannot read, that she was and remains illiterate. But while in retrospect this may explain certain episodes of frustration, incomprehension, and overreaction on her part, does it have any bearing on her guilt? What would Michael himself have done if similarly situated, and similarly limited? Thus, the story of Michael and Hanna serves as an allegory of the relation between the two generations of Germans, those who were Nazis, or who at least assisted or accommodated them, and the "lucky late-born." It is against this background that Schlink is able most searchingly to investigate questions of complicity, recrimination, and atonement.As much courtroom drama as rite-of-passage tale, The Reader is also something of a philosophical investigation. According to Eva Hoffman, in fact, Schlink has managed to compose "a fictionalized essay... a kind of philosophical parable." For all the briskly evocative prose, she adds, The Reader "gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view." 3 In a recent article, Jeremiah P. Conway offers a sympathetic interpretation of the novel, attending in particular to the philosophical issues that it raises. Conway challenges Martha Nussbaum's claim that it is logically incoherent for us to feel compassion for one whom we hold responsible for a morally reprehensible act. 4 For in Hanna, he suggests, we have a compelling counterexample, a fit object of our compassion no less than our condemnation. And yet, Conway's challenge is grounded in an even more fundamental denial that The Reader is at all concerned to establish the circumstances of Hanna's life as mitigating her crime.In what follows, I will argue that this interpretation is untenable... (shrink)

La filosofía de Anne Finch, Viscondesa de Conway ha sido estudiada desde la perspectiva del papel crítico de su monismo vitalista frente a la filosofía de sus contemporáneos, así como en la valoración de su papel en la historia de la filosofía. No obstante, la atención que han recibido sus tesis epistemológicas ha sido escasa en razón del carácter fragmentario de sus Principios de la más antigua y moderna filosofía (1690). El presente artículo parte de la idea de que (...) es posible sistematizar la filosofía de esta autora moderna, lo cual, implica la reconstrucción de sus tesis epistemológicas a través de los conceptos de percepción sensible e imaginación. Lo anterior, nos permitirá no sólo comprender estas tesis bajo la lógica de su correlación con la ontología y la filosofía moral de Conway, también permite acceder a una propuesta original alterna a los modelos mecanicistas imperantes en la época. (shrink)

Anne Conway’s philosophy has been categorized as “vitalism,” “vital monism,” “spiritualism,” “monistic spiritualism,” “immaterial vitalism,” and “antimaterialism.” While there is no doubt that she is a monist and a vitalist, problems arise with the categories of “spiritualism,” “immaterial vitalism,” and “antimaterialism.” Conway conceives of created substances as gross and fixed spirit, or rarefied and volatile matter. While interpreters agree that Conway’s “spirit” shares characteristics traditionally attributed to matter (e.g., extension, divisibility, impenetrability), and that she is critical of (...) Henry More’s immaterial spirit, Conway’s spirit is still conceived as an immaterial soul-like or mind-like entity. I argue that Conway’s vitalism is material, and is best understood in the tradition of Renaissance vital naturalism. First, Conway does not criticize materialism per se, only mechanical materialism, which characterizes matter as lifeless. Her vitalism has to be materialistic in some sense, since only God is an immaterial substance. Second, Conway’s conceptions of matter and spirit, the language she uses, and the fact that she attributes thinking to extended, divisible, and impenetrable substances all place her within the tradition of Renaissance vital naturalism, wherein Bernardino Telesio, Tommaso Campanella, and Francis Bacon used “spirit” to account for all natural processes. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Conway and Kochen proposed what is now known as the “Free Will theorem” which, among other things, should prove the impossibility of combining GRW models with special relativity, i.e., of formulating relativistically invariant models of spontaneous wavefunction collapse. Since their argument basically amounts to a non-locality proof for any theory aiming at reproducing quantum correlations, and since it was clear since very a long time that any relativistic collapse model must be non-local in some way, (...) we discuss why the theorem of Conway and Kochen does not affect the program of formulating relativistic GRW models. (shrink)

Inspired by a mathematical ecology of thearre (M. Dinu) and the eco-grammar systems (E. Csuhaj-Varju et al.), this paper gives a brief analysis of simple cellular automata games in order to demonstrate their primary semiotic features. In particular, the behaviour of configurations in Conway's game of life is compared to several general features of Uexküll's concept of Umwelt. It is concluded that ecological processes have a fundamental semiotic dimension.