Advances in prosthetic design should benefit people with limb difference. But empirical evidence demonstrates a lack of uptake of prosthetics among those with limb difference, including of advanced designs. Non-use is often framed as a problem of prosthetic design or a user’s response to prosthetics. Few studies investigate user experience and preferences, and those that do tend to address satisfaction or dissatisfaction with functional aspects of particular designs. This results in limited data to improve designs and, we argue, this is (...) pragmatically and ethically problematic. This paper presents results of a survey we conducted in 2017 with people with upper limb difference in Australia. The survey sought to further knowledge about preferences surrounding prosthetics and understanding of how preferences relate to user experience, perspective, and context. Survey responses demonstrated variety in the uptake, use and type of prosthetic—and that use of, preferences about, and impacts of prosthetics rely not just on design factors but on various contextual factors bearing on identity and social understandings of disability and prosthetic use. From these results, we argue that non-use of prosthetics could be usefully reframed as an issue of understanding how prosthetics can best support users’ autonomy. This supports the claim that there is a need to incorporate user engagement into design processes for prosthetic limbs, though further work is needed on methods for doing so. (shrink)

This study was conducted to gain opinions about euthanasia from nurses who work in intensive care units. The research was planned as a descriptive study and conducted with 186 nurses who worked in intensive care units in a university hospital, a public hospital, and a private not-for-profit hospital in Adana, Turkey, and who agreed to complete a questionnaire. Euthanasia is not legal in Turkey. One third (33.9%) of the nurses supported the legalization of euthanasia, whereas 39.8% did not. In some (...) specific circumstances, 44.1% of the nurses thought that euthanasia was being practiced in our country. The most significant finding was that these Turkish intensive care unit nurses did not overwhelmingly support the legalization of euthanasia. Those who did support it were inclined to agree with passive rather than active euthanasia (P = 0.011). (shrink)

This paper presents an effort to induce a Bayesian belief network (BBN) from crime data, namely the national crime victimization survey (NCVS). This BBN defines a joint probability distribution over a set of variables that were employed to record a set of crime incidents, with particular focus on characteristics of the victim. The goals are to generate a BBN to capture how characteristics of crime incidents are related to one another, and to make this information available to domain specialists. The (...) novelty associated with the study reported in this paper lies in the use of a Bayesian network to represent a complex data set to non-experts in a way that facilitates automated analysis. Validation of the BBN’s ability to approximate the joint probability distribution over the set of variables entailed in the NCVS data set is accomplished through a variety of sources including mathematical techniques and human experts for appropriate triangulation. Validation results indicate that the BBN induced from the NCVS data set is a good joint probability model for the set of attributes in the domain, and accordingly can serve as an effective query tool. (shrink)

There is a strong association between reliance on the promotional activities of pharmaceutical companies and a generally less appropriate use of prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies direct some of their promotion towards health workers who do not have the authority to prescribe medicines, such as nurses in certain countries. The aim of this study was to determine the impact that exposure to the marketing methods of pharmaceutical companies has on judgments made by nursing students about health worker—pharmaceutical company relationships. A cross-sectional (...) survey was carried out with 442 nursing students in Istanbul, Turkey. The exposure of students to the marketing methods of pharmaceutical companies, whether it be indirectly through observation or directly by first-hand experience, increases the probability that students will adopt rationales that underlie affirmative judgments of health worker—pharmaceutical company relationships. Based on the pervasiveness and ability of drug promotion to influence the perceptions of students, it is imperative that attempts be made to reduce its negative impact. (shrink)

1. Esistenza e libertà -- 2. Interiorità e persona -- 3. Verità e linguaggio -- 4. Storia e politica.

En jetant la sonde de l’interrogation philosophique au lieu de soi, Jean-Luc Marion nous donne une approche organique et originale à la pensée d’Augustin, en entrecroisant entre eux deux plans herméneutiques : sur le premier, l’on poursuit un itinéraire de rapprochement au cœur de la confessio augustinienne permettant de réduire le vaste univers sémantique d’Augustin à un noyau génétique unifiant; sur le second plan, le parcours philosophique de l’auteur se développe ultérieurement, tendant à désarticuler un bloc théorique d’ontologie et métaphysique (...) et atteignant ainsi par une voie phénoménologique une idée de philosophie finalement affranchie de la présupposition du caractère central de la question de l’étant et du fondement. En tout cas, même si l’on ne veut pas donner trop d’éclat à la critique anti-ontologique et antimétaphysique caractérisant l’approche à la pensée augustinienne proposée dans cet ouvrage, l’acquis spéculatif de celle-ci ne semble pas diminuer. Un parmi les mérites principaux de ce livre est d’avoir restitué à la confessio sa dignité théorique, en y apercevant un lieu phénoménologique originaire où la relation entre moi et Dieu se noue; une relation dont le caractère paradoxal, autrement insoutenable, est résolu par le primat du don et de l’amour. Ce sont tous ces traits originaux qui nous mènent à dire qu’Au lieu de soi n’est pas seulement un livre sur Augustin, car il est plus qu’un livre sur Augustin. (shrink)