The increasing incidence of ethical dilemmas in long-term care settings, in concert with recommendations from the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, has prompted long-term care institutions to develop mechanisms to address these concerns. Some facilities have chosen to set up an ethics committee, although estimates obtained in the past few years indicate that only between 2 and 27% of institutional long-term care settings have such committees. Ethics committees are responsible for (...) assisting staff, residents, and families with the resolution of ethi- cal concerns, and typically engage in policy review and development, case review, and education. Such committees usually count among their membership representatives from a variety of disciplines, with family members, patients, and representatives from patient advocacy groups supplementing the professional component of the committee. (shrink)

When I first started to think about the neural basis of aesthetic experiences in the late 1990s, little was written on the topic. Unlike other domains of psychology, such as attention, or perception, or memory, aesthetics had not gained purchase in cognitive neuroscience. In fact, aesthetics was barely visible in psychology itself despite being rooted in Fechner's writings over a hundred years earlier. In 1999, papers by Zeki (1999) and Ramachandran and Hirstein (1999) were initial forays into scientific aesthetics by (...) established neuroscientists. While undeniably important as initial markers for the field, their papers were but a first step. They were speculative and did not offer a framework for a systematic research program. Scholars in the humanities latched on to these initial papers, in ways that were detrimental to the field. For the most part, they ignored subsequent careful experimental work done by neuroscientists, as if neuroaesthetics began and ended in 1999 (Chatterjee, 2011). Missing in early discussions was a basic question: what would a framework that could guide experimental progress in the neuroscience of aesthetics entail? (shrink)

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) severely impacts sleep and has long-term health consequences. Treating sleep apnea with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) not only relieves obstructed breathing, but also improves sleep. CPAP improves sleep by reducing apnea-induced awakenings. CPAP may also improve sleep by enhancing features of sleep architecture assessed with electroencephalography (EEG) that maximize sleep depth and neuronal homeostasis, such as the slow oscillation and spindle EEG activity, and by reducing neurophysiological arousal during sleep (i.e., beta EEG activity). We examined (...) cross-sectional differences in quantitative EEG characteristics of sleep, assessed with power spectral analysis, in 29 adults with type 2 diabetes treated with CPAP and 24 adults undergoing SHAM CPAP treatment (total n = 53). We then examined changes in spectral characteristics of sleep as the SHAM group crossed over to active CPAP treatment (n = 19). Polysomnography (PSG) from the CPAP titration night was used for the current analyses. Analyses focused on EEG frequencies associated with sleep maintenance and arousal. These included the slow oscillation (0.5–1 Hz), sigma activity (12–16 Hz, spindle activity), and beta activity (16–20 Hz) in F3, F4, C3, and C4 EEG channels. Whole night non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and the first period of NREM spectral activity were examined. Age and sex were included as covariates. There were no group differences between CPAP and SHAM in spectral characteristics of sleep architecture. However, SHAM cross-over to active CPAP was associated with an increase in relative 12–16 Hz sigma activity across the whole night and a decrease in average beta activity across the whole night. Relative slow oscillation power within the first NREM period decreased with CPAP, particularly for frontal channels. Sigma and beta activity effects did not differ by channel. These findings suggest that CPAP may preferentially enhance spindle activity and mitigate neurophysiological arousal. These findings inform the neurophysiological mechanisms of improved sleep with CPAP and the utility of quantitative EEG measures of sleep as a treatment probe of improvements in neurological and physical health with CPAP. (shrink)

DNA methylation is a repressive epigenetic mark vital for normal development. Recent studies have uncovered an unexpected role for the DNA methylome in ensuring the correct targeting of the Polycomb repressive complexes throughout the genome. Here, we discuss the implications of these findings for cancer, where DNA methylation patterns are widely reprogrammed. We speculate that cancer‐associated reprogramming of the DNA methylome leads to an altered Polycomb binding landscape, influencing gene expression by multiple modes. As the Polycomb system is responsible for (...) the regulation of genes with key roles in cell fate decisions and cell cycle regulation, DNA methylation induced Polycomb mis‐targeting could directly drive carcinogenesis and disease progression.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays Unmasking risk loci: DNA methylation illuminates the biology of cancer predisposition Abstract. (shrink)

Purpose: Performance measurement systems (PMS) in Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs) are more complex than in for-profit organizations. NPOs have an orientation towards social mission and values, and they consider not only organizational efficiency and viability, but also the social impact of the organization. This research provides a comprehensive synthesis of PMSs in NPOs. Design/methodology/approach: Using a literature review, supported by bibliometric and network analyses. A paper set of 240 articles related to this research field is examined. Topics that are the most (...) prevalent in this research area and their interrelationships are identified, presenting an outline of current efforts. Findings: Despite the descriptive analyses for the paper set, a framework is proposed for organizing the design-implementation factors of PMSs in nonprofit organizations, identifying the main requirements for their successful development. Originality/value: Investigation on performance measurement in nonprofit organizations is still in its early stages of development with many opportunities to further develop the field. Conceptual frameworks and models, as well as specific theories, are being generated for this field of research, and the process of adapting models from the general field of performance measurement is taking place. The meta-framework that organizes the main research topics of PMS in nonprofit organizations and the framework that consolidates factors that influence the design-implementation of PMSs in nonprofit organizations developed represents this paper contribution. (shrink)

Heidegger's history of hermeneutics discovered nothing more than a “diluted” understanding of hermeneutics in Schleiermacher and Dilthey. In contrast, Gadamer's and Ricoeur's histories of hermeneutics placed little or no emphasis on the premodern period, focusing instead on the rise of the “hermeneutic problem” in Schleiermacher's work and the development of that problematic in works by Dilthey and Heidegger. Ricoeur added Gadamer to that list, recognizing that Gadamer was instrumental in the way he had received and perceived the problem in question. (...) Charles R. Bambach argues that it was, in fact, Karl Barth's “crisis theology” that had inspired Heidegger's “destructive” alternative to the conventional view of historical research. He revealed that he had followed Hegel when writing his history of hermeneutics, noting that his decision to do so had consequences for the way he depicted the rise of hermeneutics; and the way his history of hermeneutics ended. (shrink)

Summary Long-standing claims have been made for nearly the entire twentieth century that the biometrician, Karl Pearson, and his colleague, W. F. R. Weldon, rejected Mendelism as a theory of inheritance. It is shown that at the end of the nineteenth century Pearson considered various theories of inheritance (including Francis Galton's law of ancestral heredity for characters underpinned by continuous variation), and by 1904 he ?accepted the fundamental idea of Mendel? as a theory of inheritance for discontinuous variation. Moreover, in (...) 1909, he suggested a synthesis of biometry and Mendelism. Despite the many attempts made by a number of geneticists (including R. A. Fisher in 1936) to use Pearson's chi-square (X 2, P) goodness-of-fit test on Mendel's data, which produced results that were ?too good to be true?, Weldon reached the same conclusion in 1902, but his results were never acknowledged. The geneticist and arch-rival of the biometricians, Williams Bateson, was instead exceptionally critical of this work and interpreted this as Weldon's rejection of Mendelism. Whilst scholarship on Mendel, by historians of science in the last 18 years, has led to a balanced perspective of Mendel, it is suggested that a better balanced and more rounded view of the hereditarian-statistical work of Pearson, Weldon, and the biometricians is long overdue. (shrink)

Perched on the ramparts of Volterra last July, I gaze over i dolci colli toscani, the sweet hills of Tuscany, drenched in summer sun. Warm, content and at peace, I am bemused at how much at home I feel in this strange land. I have felt this way since 1991 when I returned for the first time to la bell' Italia thirty-seven years after having lived in Rome as a young child in a Foreign Service family. In its sensuous beauty (...) and riotous disorder, Rome was stunning. My wife Eileen and I explored old childhood haunts, including the Embassy apartment residences on viale villa Graziole where my family had lived for four years in Rome—two consecutive two-year posts—in the 1950s. Memory cells exploding, I was assailed by vivid images from childhood. Once when I was five or six, my brother David and I accompanied our housemaid Marcella to her simple country home and joined villagers in the fields as they all turned out—men, women, and children—to harvest the bean crop. As dusk set in, fires were lit, simple musical instruments appeared with the wine, and the feasting and dancing began. Bonfires were soon aglow for miles up and down the sweet rolling hills. (shrink)

Perched on the ramparts of Volterra last July, I gaze over i dolci colli toscani, the sweet hills of Tuscany, drenched in summer sun. Warm, content and at peace, I am bemused at how much at home I feel in this strange land. I have felt this way since 1991 when I returned for the first time to la bell' Italia thirty-seven years after having lived in Rome as a young child in a Foreign Service family. In its sensuous beauty (...) and riotous disorder, Rome was stunning. My wife Eileen and I explored old childhood haunts, including the Embassy apartment residences on viale villa Graziole where my family had lived for four years in Rome—two consecutive two-year posts—in the 1950s. Memory cells exploding, I was assailed by vivid images from childhood. Once when I was five or six, my brother David and I accompanied our housemaid Marcella to her simple country home and joined villagers in the fields as they all turned out—men, women, and children—to harvest the bean crop. As dusk set in, fires were lit, simple musical instruments appeared with the wine, and the feasting and dancing began. Bonfires were soon aglow for miles up and down the sweet rolling hills. (shrink)

Discourse ethics represents an exciting new development in neo-Kantian moral theory. William Rehg offers an insightful introduction to its complex theorization by its major proponent, Jürgen Habermas, and demonstrates how discourse ethics allows one to overcome the principal criticisms that have been leveled against neo-Kantianism. Addressing both "commun-itarian" critics who argue that universalist conceptions of justice sever moral deliberation from community traditions, and feminist advocates of the "ethics of care" who stress the moral significance of caring for other individuals, Rehg (...) shows that discourse ethics combines impartiality with solidarity. He provides the first systematic reconstruction of Habermas's theory and explores its relationship to the work of such contemporary philosophers as Charles Taylor. His book articulates a bold alternative to the split between the "right" and the "good" in moral theory and will greatly interest philosophers, social and legal scholars, and political theorists. (shrink)

Spinoza’s account of human agency is presented as a solution to the fundamental dichotomy between physicalism and mentalism in psychology. It is argued that this dichotomy originates in the 17th century with the Cartesian and Hobbesian responses to the collapse of the Scholastic synthesis. Spinoza’s view of nature as equally Mind and Body, and his understanding of efficient causality as grounded in a self-caused natural totality are described. Spinozism’s relative lack of influence on contemporary scientific culture is attributed to his (...) work having been marginalized during the 1st century after his death by political and religious authorities. Contemporary responses to the mentalist/physicalist dichotomy are discussed, as are trends in contemporary psychology that were foreshadowed by Spinoza’s observations. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The application of constructivism to “nature” and “wilderness” is intellectually and politically objectionable. Despite a proclivity for examining the social underpinnings of representations, constructivists do not deconstruct their own rhetoric and assumptions; nor do they consider what socio-historical conditions support their perspective. Constructivists employ skewed metaphors to describe knowledge production about nature as though the loaded language use of constructivism is straightforward and neutral. They also implicitly rely on a humanist perspective about knowledge creation that privileges the cognitive sovereignty of (...) human subject over nature. Politically, the constructivist approach fails to take the scientific documentation of the biodiversity crisis seriously; it diverts attention toward discourses about the environmental predicament, rather than examining that predicament itself; and it indirectly cashes in on, and thus supports, human colonization of the Earth. (shrink)

Kit Fine and Gideon Rosen propose to define constitutive essence in terms of ground-theoretic notions and some form of consequential essence. But we think that the Fine–Rosen proposal is a mistake. On the Fine–Rosen proposal, constitutive essence ends up including properties that, on the central notion of essence, are necessary but not essential. This is because consequential essence is closed under logical consequence, and the ability of logical consequence to add properties to an object’s consequential essence outstrips the ability of (...) ground-theoretic notions, as used in the Fine–Rosen proposal, to take those properties out. The necessary-but-not-essential properties that, on the Fine–Rosen proposal, end up in constitutive essence include the sorts of necessary-but-not-essential properties that, others have noted, end up in consequential essence. (shrink)

Hartry Field’s epistemological challenge to the mathematical platonist is often cast as an improvement on Paul Benacerraf’s original epistemological challenge. I disagree. While Field’s challenge is more difficult for the platonist to address than Benacerraf’s, I argue that this is because Field’s version is a special case of what I call the ‘sociological challenge’. The sociological challenge applies equally to platonists and fictionalists, and addressing it requires a serious examination of mathematical practice. I argue that the non-sociological part of Field’s (...) challenge amounts to a minor reformulation of Benacerraf’s original challenge. So, I contend, Field’s challenge is not an improvement on Benacerraf’s. What is new to Field’s challenge is as much a problem for the fictionalist as it is for the platonist. (shrink)

Essays link Gaian science to such global environmental quandaries as climate change and biodiversity destruction, providing perspectives from science, ...

Public, private, non-profit and for-profit nursing education enterprises in the U.S. are competing with one another in a newly complex and volatile educational landscape, placing academic leaders into situations fraught with moral, ethical and legal compromise with few precedents for guidance. This case study provides a richly contextualized narrative exploration of ethical and legal challenges to one leader’s moral courage, a fictionalized exploration drawn from multiple sources over time, to form a composite that is nonetheless firmly rooted in the complexity (...) and competitiveness characteristic of nursing education today. Our purpose is three-fold: 1) to direct the reader to moral and ethical questions that require thoughtful discourse and analysis among current and future academic nursing leaders; 2) to raise the issue of the need for regulations and oversight that reflect the changing realities of today’s increasingly complex and competitive educational arena; and 3) to encourage nursing education leaders to share additional cases that resonate for them, and in so doing, to expand the wellspring of ideas from which we can all draw in becoming more effective and morally courageous leaders. (shrink)

This book attempts to reframe abortion rights by focusing not on a woman's right to choose abortion, but rather on a woman's right to consent to pregnancy. Drawing on legal, medical, and philosophical definitions of pregnancy, it disaggregates the consent to sexual intercourse from the consent to pregnancy and argues that men and women have equal right to bodily integrity, which is defined as the freedom from nonconsensual bodily intrusion. The work provides the grounds for a woman's right to an (...) abortion and state funding of abortions. (shrink)

How can women’s rights be seen as a universal value rather than a Western value imposed upon the rest of the world? Addressing this question, Eileen Hunt Botting offers the first comparative study of writings by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill were the primary philosophical architects of the view that women’s rights are human rights, Botting shows how non-Western thinkers have revised and internationalized their original theories since the nineteenth century. Botting explains why this (...) revised and internationalized theory of women’s human rights—grown out of Wollstonecraft and Mill but stripped of their Eurocentric biases—is an important contribution to thinking about human rights in truly universal terms. (shrink)

This essay investigates an underappreciated way in which trust and testimonial injustice are closely connected. Credibility deficit and credibility excess cases both (in their own distinctive ways) contribute to a speaker’s being harmed in her capacity a knower. But moreover, as we will show—by using the tools of a performance-theoretic framework—both credibility deficit and credibility excess cases also feature incompetent trusting on the part of the hearer. That is, credibility deficit and excess cases are shown to manifest qualities of thinkers (...) that are inconducive to trust’s being reliably fulfilled. What this implies is an interesting result about testimonial injustice: to the extent that we want to mitigate against testimonial injustice—one promising way to do so will be to target incompetent trusting of the sort that underlies it. We conclude by outlining and defending what we take to be a promising substantive version of such a mitigation strategy, one which is centred around the cultivation of higher-order trusting competences. (shrink)

Conversations in Metaphysics: Ever Ancient, Ever New introduces students to metaphysics through a set of contemporary readings based on classical metaphysical texts, thinkers, and concepts. It challenges readers to consider and seek possible answers to questions of metaphysics relative to human knowledge and the nature of reality. Organized historically, the readings endeavor to define and probe the concepts of metaphysics, existence, being, God, evil, and morality from antiquity to the present. The historical lens provides students with deeper context for the (...) contemporary readings and helps them establish a basic knowledge of metaphysics and its place within philosophical tradition. In later readings, students are invited to explore how metaphysics relates to religion, science, and technology in the modern world, as well as how metaphysics has shaped and continues to shape the reality of our universe. Rich with engaging material and endless opportunities for critical thought, Conversations in Metaphysics is an ideal ancillary text for courses in philosophy that call attention to metaphysics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)