In 1992 M.W. Evans proposed the O(3) symmetry of electromagnetic fields by adding a constant longitudinal magnetic field to the well-known transverse electric and magnetic fields of circularly polarized plane waves, such that certain cyclic relations of a so-called O(3) symmetry are fulfilled. Since then M.W. Evans has elevated this O(3) symmetry to the status of a new law of electromagnetics. As a law of physics must be invariant under admissible coordinate transforms, namely Lorentz transforms, in 2000 he published a (...) proof of the Lorentz invariance of O(3) symmetry of electromagnetic fields. As will be shown below this proof is incorrect; more, after simple correction it will turn out here that the O(3) symmetry cannot be Lorentz invariant. (shrink)

Amblyopia, or lazy eye, is a neurological vision disorder that studies have shown to affect two to five percent of the population. Current methods of treatment produce the best visual outcome, if the condition is identified early in the patient's life. Several early screening procedures are aimed at finding the condition while the patient is a child, including an automated vision screening system. This paper aims to use artificial intelligence techniques to automatically identify children who are at risk for developing (...) the amblyopic condition and should therefore be referred to a specialist, i.e., pediatric ophthalmologist. Three techniques, namely, decision tree learning, random forest, and artificial neural network, are studied in this paper in terms of their effectiveness, using metrics of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The features used by the techniques are extracted from images of patient eyes and are based on the color information. The efficacy of pixel color data is investigated with respect to the measurement of the rate of change of the color in the iris and pupil, i.e., color slope features. A 10-fold stratified cross validation procedure is used to compare the effectiveness of the three AI techniques in this medical application domain. (shrink)

Counterfactuals all the way down? Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9437-9 Authors Jim Woodward, History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Barry Loewer, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA John W. Carroll, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8103, USA Marc Lange, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB#3125—Caldwell Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA Journal Metascience (...) Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796 Journal Volume Volume 20 Journal Issue Volume 20, Number 1. (shrink)

Very little has been done to find out what corporations have done to build ethical values into their organizations. In this report on a survey of 1984 Fortune 1000 industrial and service companies the Center for Business Ethics reveals some facts regarding codes of ethics, ethics committees, social audits, ethics training programs, boards of directors, and other areas where corporations might institutionalize ethics. Based on the survey, the Center for Business Ethics is convinced that corporations are beginning to take steps (...) to institutionalize ethics, while recognizing that in most cases more specific mechanisms and strategies need to be implemented to make their ethics efforts truly effective. (shrink)

Ethical approval must be obtained before medical research can start. We describe the differences in EA for an pseudonymous, non-interventional, observational European study. Sixteen European national coordinators of the international study on very old intensive care patients answered an online questionnaire concerning their experience getting EA. N = 8/16 of the NCs could apply at one single national ethical committee, while the others had to apply to various regional ECs and/or individual hospital institutional research boards. The time between applying for (...) EA and the first decision varied between 7 days and 300 days. In 9/16 informed consent from the patient was not deemed necessary; in 7/16 informed consent was required from the patient or relatives. The upload of coded data to a central database required additional information in 14/16. In 4/16 the NCs had to ask separate approval to keep a subject identification code list to de-pseudonymize the patients if questions would occur. Only 2/16 of the NCs agreed that informed consent was necessary for this observational study. Overall, 6/16 of the NCs were satisfied with the entire process and 8/16 were unsatisfied. 11/16 would welcome a European central EC that would judge observational studies for all European countries. Variations in the process and prolonged time needed to get EA for observational studies hampers inclusion of patients in some European countries. This might have a negative influence on the external validity. Further harmonization of ethical approval process across Europe is welcomed for low-risk observational studies. Getting ethical approval for low-risk, non-interventional, observational studies varies enormously across European countries. (shrink)

Our report and bibliography concentrate on research in the philosophy of science carried out in Austria within the last 20 years. The term 'philosophy of science' is here to be understood in the broad sense of 'Wissenschaftstheorie', that is, syntactics, semantics and pragmatics of the natural sciences and of the humanities, including law. After a general introduction to the philosophy of science scene in Austria, we report about those institutions in Austria at which relevant research has been conducted, starting with (...) institutions in Graz and then continuing - in alphabetical order - with institutions in Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Linz, Salzburg, and Wien. Our report is supplemented by a bibliography; please note that this contains only references to original publications which deal mainly with questions in the philosophy of science, hence no contributions to lexica, no reviews, no translations, no articles in mass media, no editorial and no unpublished works are cited. Finally, there is an appendix, Alphabetical List of Austrian Institutions at which Philosophy of Science is Conducted, to facilitate communication between you and Austrian philosophers in whose work you may become interested by reading this report. (shrink)

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Basic statements play a central role in Popper's "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", since they permit a distinction between empirical and non-empirical theories. A theory is empirical iff it consists of falsifiable statements, and statements (of any kind) are falsifiable iff they are inconsistent with at least one basic statement. Popper obviously presupposes that basic statements are themselves empirical and hence falsifiable; at any rate, he claims several times that they are falsifiable. In this paper we prove that (...) no basic statement is falsifiable, if the term 'basic statement' is to be understood according to Popper's definitions of that term. More precisely, we prove not only that no Popperian basic statement in the narrow sense of the word is falsifiable, but also that no Popperian basic statement in the broader sense, and even in the broadest possible sense, is falsifiable. This leads to the paradoxical result that, according to Popper's definitions of 'basic statement', the basis of the empirical sciences is not itself empirical. Furthermore, we point out a similar paradox as regards Popper's falsifiability scheme for theories. We close with a look at possibilities for overcoming these paradoxes. DEUTSCHE ZUSAMMENFASSUNG: Basissätze spielen eine zentrale Rolle in Poppers Logik der Forschung, denn sie erlauben die Unterscheidung zwischen empirischen und nichtempirischen Theorien: Eine Theorie ist empirisch genau dann, wenn sie aus falsifizierbaren Aussagesätzen besteht, und Aussagesätze (beliebiger Art) sind falsifizierbar genau dann, wenn sie mindestens einem Basissatz widersprechen. Popper setzt offensichtlich voraus, dassŸ die Basissätze selbst empirisch und somit falsifizierbar sind. Jedenfalls behauptet er mehrmals ihre Falsifizierbarkeit. Wir beweisen in unserem Aufsatz, dassŸ die Basissätze nicht falsifizierbar sind, und wir beweisen dies nicht nur für Poppersche Basissätze im engeren Sinn, sondern auch für Poppersche Basissätze im weiteren Sinn und schlieߟlich für Poppersche Basissätze im weitesten, mit den Vorstellungen Poppers gerade noch verträglichen Sinn. Dies führt zu dem paradoxen Ergebnis, dass nach Poppers eigenen methodologischen Postulaten die Basis der empirischen Wissenschaften nicht selbst empirisch ist. Darüber hinaus entwickeln wir ein ähnliches Paradoxon bezüglich Poppers Falsifizierbarkeitsschema für Theorien. Zum AbschlussŸ unseres Aufsatzes betrachten wir einige Möglichkeiten, die von uns entdeckten Paradoxa zu überwinden. (shrink)

Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences—learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership—influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then made a large number of unsupervised categorization decisions about new items. In all three experiments, the unsupervised experience altered participants’ implicit and explicit mental category boundaries, their explicit beliefs about the most representative members of each category, and even their memory (...) for the items encountered during the supervised learning phase. These changes were influenced by both the range and frequency distribution of the unlabeled stimuli: mental category boundaries shifted toward the middle of the range and toward the trough of the bimodal distribution of unlabeled items, whereas beliefs about the most representative category members shifted toward the modes of the unlabeled distribution. One consequence of this shift in representations is a false-consensus effect (Experiment 3) where participants, despite receiving very disparate training experiences, show strong agreement in judgments about representativeness and boundary location following unsupervised category judgments. (shrink)

Background: The American Medical Association, the British Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Association have guidelines that specifically discourage physicians from self-prescribing or prescribing to family members, but only the BMA addresses informal prescription requests between colleagues. Objective: To examine the practices of paediatric providers regarding self-prescribing, curbsiding colleagues, and prescribing and refusing to prescribe to friends and family. Methods: 1086 paediatricians listed from the American Academy of Paediatrics 2007 web-based directory were surveyed. Results: 44% of eligible survey respondents returned (...) usable surveys. Almost half of respondents had prescribed for themselves. An equal number had informally requested a prescription from a colleague. Three-quarters stated they had been asked to prescribe a prescription drug for a first-degree or second-degree relative, and 51% had been asked by their spouse. Eighty-six per cent stated that they had refused to write a prescription on at least one occasion for a friend or family member. The following reasons “strongly influenced” their decision to refuse a prescription request: outside of provider’s expertise ; patient’s need for his or her own physician ; not medically indicated ; need for a physical examination. Conclusion: These data confirm that most physicians have engaged in self-prescribing or curbside requests for prescriptions. It can be argued that curbsiding is more morally problematic than self-prescribing because it implicates a third party, and should be discouraged regardless of whether the requester is a colleague, family member or friend. (shrink)

Johanna Knapstein,1 Daniel Grimm,1 Marcus A Wörns,1 Peter R Galle,1 Hauke Lang,2 Tim Zimmermann111st Department of Internal Medicine, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany; 2Department of General, Visceral and Transplantation Surgery, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, GermanyIntroduction: Hepatitis C virus reinfection occurs universally after liver transplantation, with accelerated cirrhosis rates of up to 30% within 5 years after liver transplantation. Dual antiviral therapy with pegylated interferon-2a and ribavirin only reaches sustained virological response rates of ~30% after liver transplantation. With the approval of viral NS3/4A (...) protease inhibitors telaprevir, boceprevir, and simeprevir and the NS5B polymerase inhibitor sofosbuvir, combination therapy offers new therapeutic options for HCV-infected patients, resulting in considerably higher sustained virological response rates in the nontransplant setting. Case presentation: We report three cases of TVR-based triple antiviral therapy in HCV genotype 1 reinfected patients after liver transplantation, of whom a 57-year-old Caucasian female and a 43-year-old Caucasian male were therapy naïve, and a 49-year-old Caucasian male patient was pretreated ineffectively. After 4 weeks of therapy, viral load decreased one to three log10 and became negative in weeks 6 to 8 in the therapy naïve patients. The pretreated patient showed a negative viral load in week 4. TVR was administered over 12 weeks, 750 mg thrice daily. Doses of immunosuppression with cyclosporine were reduced four to six fold. Initial peg-IFN and RBV doses ranged from 135–180 µg/week and 800–1,200 mg/day, according to the patient's body weight. Doses of peg-IFN and RBV were adapted to 90–135 µg/week and 400–800 mg/day after 2 to 12 weeks of protease inhibitor therapy. Dual therapy was continued for 36 weeks with total treatment duration of 48 weeks in the therapy naïve patients leading to a sustained virological response 12 weeks after the end of therapy. In the pretreated patient a breakthrough was detected in week 24 and therapy was discontinued. Overall, antiviral therapy was well tolerated. Side effects included dysgeusia and anemia leading to erythropoietin application and blood transfusions. Conclusion: This case series emphasizes that triple therapy with TVR is an efficient treatment for therapy naïve HCV genotype 1 reinfected patients after liver transplantation. But therapeutic options for pretreated patients require improvement. Keyword: cyclosporine, interferon, ribavirin, hepatitis C, protease inhibitor. (shrink)

Research involving recently deceased humans that are physiologically maintained following declaration of death by neurologic criteria—or ‘research involving the recently deceased’—can fill a translational research gap while reducing harm to animals and living human subjects. It also creates new challenges for honouring the donor’s legacy, respecting the rights of donor loved ones, resource allocation and public health. As this research model gains traction, new empirical ethics questions must be answered to preserve public trust in all forms of tissue donation and (...) in the practice of medicine while respecting the legacy of the deceased and the rights of donor loved ones. This article suggests several topics for immediate investigation to understand the attitudes and experiences of researchers, clinical collaborators, donor loved ones and the public to ensure research involving the recently deceased advances ethically. (shrink)