Privacy is protected in biobank-based research in the US primarily by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule and the Federal Policy for Protection of Human Subjects. Neither rule, however, was created to function in the unique context of biobank research, and therefore neither applies to all biobank-based research. Not only is it challenging to determine when the HIPAA Privacy Rule or the Common Rule apply, but these laws apply different standards to protect privacy. In addition, many other (...) federal and state laws may be applicable to a particular biobank, researcher, or project. US law also does not directly address international sharing of data or specimens outside of the EU–US Safe Harbor Agreement, which only applies to receipt of data by certain US entities from EU countries, and is in the process of revision. Although new rules would help clarify privacy protections in biobanking, any implemented changes should be studied to determine the sufficiency of the protections as well as its ability to facilitate or hinder international collaborations. (shrink)

From the modern scientific perspective, Olympia is a ruin at the far end of a fading sense of history that represents little more than the origins from which sport has continuously evolved. Quantitative measurements show continued increases in human performance, equipment efficiency and funding. But some question this athletic evolution. We worry about qualitative issues, such as virtue, meaning and beauty. The source of this contrast is a difference in values: Olympic vs. Efficiency values. Such values establish an ethos in (...) sporting communities that influences how we behave, explain and even conceptualize our activities. I argue from the perspectives of metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics and politics, that Olympic Ethos is needed to balance out the modern Efficiency Ethos, which threatens to dehumanize sport. (shrink)

Beauty varies with each age. In a young man, it consists in possessing a body capable of enduring all efforts, either of the racecourse or of bodily strength, while he himself is pleasant to look u...

Despite the rich philosophical heritage of the East, the connection between athletics and education for character or virtue is more commonly associated with the West. Classical Eastern philosophy does focus on virtue, but it seems to exclude sport as a means of cultivation since the Confucian is uninterested in victory and the Daoist seeks passivity and avoids contention. A closer look reveals, however, that Eastern conceptions of virtue have much in common with those of Ancient Greece so often linked to (...) sport. Combining research in the history and philosophy of sport with analysis of such texts such as the Analects of Kongzi (Confucius), Laozi's Daodejing , Plato's Republic and Epictetus's Handbook , this paper argues that the enlightened practice of sport has the potential to cultivate qualities common both to de and aret . The fact that sport was linked to virtue in Ancient Greece but not Ancient China derives from different ideas about social prestige more than different conceptions of ethical education. Indeed, the enlightened practice of modern sport may develop a more universal kind of virtue; thereby providing common ground upon which to heal the East-West split in a way characterised by mutual respect and emphasising our common humanity. (shrink)

Wreathed in myrtle, my sword I'll conceal Like those champions devoted and brave, When they plunged in the tyrant their steel And to Athens deliverance gave. (Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Hymn to Harmodius an...

The ancient Greek word kalon can be translated as beautiful, good, noble, or fine—yet somehow it transcends any one of those concepts. In art and literature, it can apply straightforwardly to figures like Helen or Aphrodite, or enigmatically to the pais kalos: the youthful athlete that decorates so much sympotic pottery. In the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, meanwhile, it takes on an ethical, even transcendent dimension. And yet, the thread between a beautiful painting and the Platonic form of (...) the beautiful is never completely broken. In the summer of 2018, a group of scholars from varying disciplines gathered in Siracusa, Sicily – a place of not indifferent beauty itself – to discuss the nature of to kalon in ancient Greek culture. We were especially interested in the large part of that heritage that derives from or was influenced by Western Greece – the ancient Hellenic cities of Sicily and Southern Italy. The result is a volume that considers art, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy in exploring the nature of beauty. (shrink)

Using my experience at a stage of the 2014 Giro d'Italia, I argue that de is the soul of cycling and that ancient Chinese philosophy's insight into the conditions that promote de may help the sport. I compare the relationship between sages and virtuous practitioners, to the ancient Greek relationship between heroes and athletes, both of which depend on the performance of de. I also criticize modern cycling for its focus on technology, stark commercialism, and emphasis on the individual, prescribing (...) as antidotes the connection between de and wuwei, the rejection of acquisitiveness and the emphasis on collectivity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: My Last Race Rolling Up to the Starting Line Racing Toward the Truth Climbing Up Mountains Keeping the Rubber Side Down My Best Race Notes.

The ancient world witnessed a meaningful transition in the conception of human thought and belief. What some have called the “discovery” of the mind can also be understood as a release from dependence on oracular wisdom and mythological explanation, made possible by the invention of more reliable and democratic methods for discovering and explaining truths. During roughly the same epoch, Hellenic sport distinguished itself by developing objective mechanisms for selecting single winners from varied pools of contestants. Is there a connection? (...) Following the general thesis that sport is an expression of thehuman desire to know, this paper will explore the epistemological nature of the earliest forms Hellenic athletics. I begin by interpreting the funeral games depicted in Homer’s Iliad as an unbiased, publicly monitored means for settling questions of social honor. I then consider the ancient Olympic games, arguing that their religious foundations motivated a new focus on objective and reliable methods for selecting single winners who could be symbolically sacrificed to the god. In both manifestations, athletic games are used to objectively answer important questions about merit. Eventually, competitive methods of truth‐seeking would become commonplace in Western thought. By examining early the origins of Greek sport in this light, however, Olympia may be identified as a key source of epistemological testing methods, and sport itself may be characterized fundamentally as a search for knowledge. (shrink)

The inspiration for this paper came rather unexpectedly. In February 2006, I made the long trip from my home in Sioux City, Iowa, to Torino, Italy in order to witness the Olympic Winter Games. Barely a month later, I found myself in California at the newly-renovated Getty Villa, home to one of the world's great collections of Greco-Roman antiquities. At the Villa I attended a talk about a Roman mosaic depicting a boxing scene from Virgil's Aeneid. The tiny tiles showed (...) not only two boxers, but a wobbly looking ox. ‘What is wrong with this ox?’ asked the docent. ‘Why is he there at the match?’ The answer, of course, is that he is the prize. And the reason he is wobbly is because the victor has just sacrificed this prize to the gods in thanksgiving, by punching him between the eyes. A light went on in my head; I turned to my husband and whispered, ‘Just like Joey Cheek in Torino.’ My husband smiled indulgently, but my mind was already racing. I realized that by donating his victory bonus to charity, Cheek had tapped into one of the oldest and most venerable traditions in sport: individual sacrifice for the benefit of the larger community. It is a tradition that derives from the religious function of the ancient Olympic Games and it deserves to be revived the modern world. (shrink)

Sport was included in ancient educational systems because it was thought to promote aretê or human excellence which could be applied to almost any endeavor in life. The goal of most modern scholastic athletic programs might be better summed up in a word: winning. Is this a sign that we have lost touch with the age-old rationale for including sport in education? I argue that it need not be by showing that we value winning precisely for the virtues associated with (...) it. I then take Plato's traditional parts of aretê: piety, sophrosunê, courage and justice and show how they are manifest in modern athletic ideals of self-knowledge, discipline, courage and justice. To the extent that scholastic athletic programs develop these virtues, I conclude, their pursuit of winning is not at odds with the institutional mission of educating students. If an athletic program's pursuit of victory allows such character-building to fall by the wayside, however, it deserves no place in our high schools, colleges or universities. (shrink)

Ethics in sport demand not only that we respect ourselves and others, but also that we respect sport itself. But the question of respecting sport seems to create a kind of moral dilemma between the obligation to “play one’s best” by maximizing performance, and the obligation to follow rules and traditions that ban the use of ergogenic aids. It is often argued that bans on performance-enhancing substances, equipment, and training techniques are paternalistic and violate athletes’ liberty to rationally accept risks (...) in their pursuit of excellence. Against advocates for the legalization of ergogenic aids, however, I argue in this paper that such bans must be respected because they are an essential part of the nature of sport. Whether one understands sports metaphysically to be Suits’ “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” or a MacIntyrean social practice, inefficiency of means is an essential component sport that demands respect from all participants. The performance principle in sport is ontologically posterior to the prescription of inefficiencies upon which sport depends, so ethical respect for sport demands that we limit the efficiencies provided by ergogenic aids. (shrink)

When contemplating the origins of philosophical paideia one is tempted to think of Socrates, perhaps because we feel that Socrates has been a philosophical educator to us all. But it is Plato and his literary genius that we have to thank as his dialogues preserve not just Socratic philosophy, but also the Socratic educational experience. Educators would do well to better understand Plato's pedagogical objectives in the Socratic dialogues so that we may appreciate and utilize them in our own educational (...) endeavors, and so that we may adapt the Socratic experience to new interactive educational technologies. Plato designed his Socratic dialogues to arm students for real world challenges and temptations. First, in both form and function the dialogues attempt to replicate the Socratic experience for their audience. They demand from their readers what Socrates demanded from his students: active learning, self-examination, and an appreciation for the complexity and importance of wisdom. Second, the dialogues challenge the conflation of professional and personal excellence, best exemplified by sophists such as Hippias, and exhort their reader to pursue personal aretê separately from and alongside practical and professional skills or technai. Third, they aim not to transmit some prepackaged formula for success, but to teach students to learn for themselves; that is to love and pursue wisdom. The Socratic dialogues, and philosophic dialogue itself, are educationally important in that they teach us to be philosophers in the literal sense. (shrink)

The Olympic movement sometimes claims that sport has nothing to do with politics, yet its goal of promoting peace is explicitly political. The Olympics' association with peace, furthermore, is inherited from the ancient version of the festival which took place in a very distant time and place. This essay examines the ancient political heritage of the Olympic Games and questions its relevance to such modern Olympic challenges as globalisation, cultural hegemony, social discrimination and environmental degradation. It suggests that these challenges (...) are not so different from those addressed in the ancient Olympic Games, and argues that a better understanding of the ancient games' political achievements may increase the modern Olympic movement's chances of realising their own political goals. After all, the basic structures of sport, which underpin the political achievements of the Olympic Games, have changed little over the last 2,500 years. (shrink)

It often surprises modern readers to find the cerebral philosopher Socrates hanging out in gymnasia and wrestling schools. We tend to downplay Socrates’ association with athletes and contest as mere literary window-dressing. I would like to suggest, to the contrary, that Plato’s depiction of Socrates as an athlete goes beyond dramatic setting and linguistic metaphor. Plato actually presents Socrates as an athlete of the soul, engaged in intellectual contest, occasionally defeating his opponents, and coaching young protégées toward victory in the (...) struggle for aretē. Socratic dialogue is itself an agōn. Sometimes it is aimed at defeating famous opponents such as Euthyphro, Euthydemus, Gorgias, or Protagoras. By refuting these challengers, Socrates elicits shame—a benevolent shame “in service of the god” that serves as a starting point to re-launch and redirect the investigation. At other times Socratic dialogue tests personal beliefs about virtue, amounting to a revelation and examination of the soul that corresponds to gymnastic nudity and competition. In every case Socratic contest aims to serve the greatest agōn: the struggle to be good. Socrates appropriates the competitive spirit (philonikia) he finds in his comrades, and he directs it beyond the relativistic goal of defeating ones opponent towards the idealistic goals of education, virtue, and wisdom. In this way he transforms philonikia into philosophia. Socrates’ approach to and engagement in agōn not only connects the worlds of philosophy and athletics, it serves as a model for how athletic agōn can be put in the service of psychic as well as physical virtue. (shrink)

Twilight Zone and Philosophy attempts to bring the insights and paradoxes of Rod Serling's project to contemporary audiences through a variety of philosophical perspectives"--Publisher.

Este artículo intenta iluminar el problema de las traducciones de inscripciones árabes medievales durante el Barroco, en particular, las propuestas por Rodrigo Caro en 1643 de las inscripciones de Sevilla, traducciones primero ignoradas y luego consideradas, en el siglo XIX, como fraudulentas. Aquí se propone que estas falsas traducciones están condicionadas por el contexto de las de los Plomos del Sacromonte, por el ideal de la época de «antigüedad sagrada» y por el interés contrarreformista en ensalzar mártires y reliquias. Estos (...) eran todos elementos de un programa consciente de invención de un pasado cristiano, ficticio pero lleno de significado, en Andalucía. Los principales protagonistas de las traducciones de Sevilla, Rodrigo Caro, Pedro de Castro, Adán Centurión, estuvieron implicados en este proceso además de formar parte de una red, que implicaba a toda la península, de entusiastas anticuarios y falsarios. Su juicio crítico, cuando se enfrentaba con fraudes evidentes, quedaba obnubilado por su deseo de promover determinados fines religiosos y políticos. Sus traductores, que a menudo compartieron, era los productores de caprichosos instrumentos con que alcanzar dichos fines. (shrink)

Acoustical changes in the prosody of mothers’ speech to infants are distinct and near universal. However, less is known about the visible properties of mothers’ infant-directed (ID) speech, and their relation to speech acoustics. Mothers’ head movements were tracked as they interacted with their infants using ID speech, and compared to movements accompanying their adult-directed (AD) speech. Movement measures along three dimensions of head translation, and three axes of head rotation were calculated. Overall, more head movement was found for ID (...) than AD speech, suggesting that mothers exaggerate their visual prosody in a manner analogous to the acoustical exaggerations in their speech. Regression analyses examined the relation between changing head position and changing acoustical pitch ( F0 ) over time. Head movements and voice pitch were more strongly related in ID speech than in AD speech. When these relations were examined across time windows of different durations, stronger relations were observed for shorter time windows (< 5 sec). However, the particular form of these more local relations did not extend or generalize to longer time windows. This suggests that the multimodal correspondences in speech prosody are variable in form, and occur within limited time spans. (shrink)

Acoustical changes in the prosody of mothers’ speech to infants are distinct and near universal. However, less is known about the visible properties of mothers’ infant-directed speech, and their relation to speech acoustics. Mothers’ head movements were tracked as they interacted with their infants using ID speech, and compared to movements accompanying their adult-directed speech. Movement measures along three dimensions of head translation, and three axes of head rotation were calculated. Overall, more head movement was found for ID than AD (...) speech, suggesting that mothers exaggerate their visual prosody in a manner analogous to the acoustical exaggerations in their speech. Regression analyses examined the relation between changing head position and changing acoustical pitch over time. Head movements and voice pitch were more strongly related in ID speech than in AD speech. When these relations were examined across time windows of different durations, stronger relations were observed for shorter time windows. However, the particular form of these more local relations did not extend or generalize to longer time windows. This suggests that the multimodal correspondences in speech prosody are variable in form, and occur within limited time spans. (shrink)

Acoustical changes in the prosody of mothers’ speech to infants are distinct and near universal. However, less is known about the visible properties of mothers’ infant-directed speech, and their relation to speech acoustics. Mothers’ head movements were tracked as they interacted with their infants using ID speech, and compared to movements accompanying their adult-directed speech. Movement measures along three dimensions of head translation, and three axes of head rotation were calculated. Overall, more head movement was found for ID than AD (...) speech, suggesting that mothers exaggerate their visual prosody in a manner analogous to the acoustical exaggerations in their speech. Regression analyses examined the relation between changing head position and changing acoustical pitch over time. Head movements and voice pitch were more strongly related in ID speech than in AD speech. When these relations were examined across time windows of different durations, stronger relations were observed for shorter time windows. However, the particular form of these more local relations did not extend or generalize to longer time windows. This suggests that the multimodal correspondences in speech prosody are variable in form, and occur within limited time spans. (shrink)

In the United States, final amendments to the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (“the Common Rule”) were published on January 19, 2017, and they will take effect on January 21, 2019. One of the most widely discussed provisions is that for the first time, federal regulations governing research with humans authorize the use of broad consent for future, unspecified research on individually identifiable biospecimens and associated data. Many questions have been raised about broad consent, including what effect (...) it will have on research and whether it adequately protects the interests of research participants.There are lessons to be learned for the U.S. and other countries by looking to countries that already have experience with broad consent for biobank collection and with the storage and subsequent use of the biospecimens and data. This article describes how broad consent works in five countries—Canada (in Quebec), Israel, Nigeria, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom—and with different types of biobanks: national biobanks, federated biobanks, and regional biobanks. Evaluating the provisions and challenges of the broad consent approaches in these countries can inform policies for this increasingly used approach to biobank regulation. (shrink)

Toddlers exhibit poor transfer between video and real-world contexts. Contingently responsive video such as that found in touchscreen apps appears to assist transfer for some toddlers but not others. This study investigated the extent to which toddlers' working memory moderates the impact of contingency on toddler's transfer of learning from video. Toddlers watched a hiding event on either contingent video that advanced only after touch input or non-contingent video that proceeded automatically. Toddlers then searched for a corresponding object on a (...) felt board. Additionally, toddlers' working memory was assessed. Findings indicate WM and age moderated the impact of contingency on transfer: Contingency decreased transfer in younger children while increasing transfer among older children. However, this was only true for children with relatively low WM. Contingency had little impact on transfer among children with relatively high WM, regardless of age. Results from this study suggest that WM is one specific moderator that predicts whether toddlers are likely to learn from contingent vs. non-contingent video, yet WM does not operate in isolation. Together, these findings underscore the importance of considering multiple child characteristics when identifying the optimal conditions for toddlers' learning from symbolic media. (shrink)