During the 1940s and 1950s, the Australian microbiologist F. Macfarlane Burnet sought a biologically plausible explanation of antibody production. In this essay, we seek to recover the conceptual pathways that Burnet followed in his immunological theorizing. In so doing, we emphasize the influence of speculations on individuality, especially those of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead; the impact of cybernetics and information theory; and the contributions of clinical research into autoimmune disease that took place in Melbourne. We point to the influence of (...) local experimental and intellectual currents on Burnet’s work. Accordingly, this essay describes an arc distinct from most other tracings of Burnet’s conceptual development, which focus on his early bacteriophage research, his fascination with the work of Julian Huxley and other biologists in the 1920s, and his interest in North Atlantic experimental investigations in the life sciences. No doubt these too were potent influences, but they seem insufficient to explain, for example, Burnet’s sudden enthusiasm in the 1940s for immunological definitions of self and not-self. We want to demonstrate here how Burnet’s deep involvement in philosophical biology – along with attention to local clinical research – provided him with additional theoretic tools and conceptual equipment, with which to explain immune function. (shrink)

Involuntary autobiographical memories are typically discussed in the context of negative memories such as trauma ‘flashbacks’. However, IAMs occur frequently in everyday life and are predominantly positive. In spite of this, surprisingly little is known about how such positive IAMs arise. The trauma film paradigm is often used to generate negative IAMs. Recently an equivalent positive film was developed inducing positive IAMs . The current study is the first to investigate which variables would best predict the frequency of positive IAMs. (...) Higher levels of positive mood change to the film were significantly associated with the number of positive IAMs recorded in the subsequent week. Results demonstrate the importance of positive emotional reaction at the time of an event for subsequent positive IAMs. (shrink)

This book describes the adventures in Russia of Samuel Bentham, the brother of the famous law-reformer, Jeremy Bentham. Shipbuilder, technical expert and inventor, his talents were employed for several years in serving the government of Catherine II, involving him in activities both in peace and war, and in extensive travel through the Russian Empire. The Russian court, war against the Turks, commercial enterprise in Siberia, are a few of the themes illuminated by his correspondence which forms the basis for this (...) book. (shrink)

Koriat & Goldsmith propose that the correspondence metaphor captures the essence of everyday memory research. We suggest that correspondence is often not at issue because objective assessments of everyday events are frequently lacking. In these cases, other questions arise, such as how individuals evaluate the validity of memories and the significance they attach to those evaluations.

De Neys proposed a “switch” model to address what he argued to be lacuna in dual-process theory, in which he theorized about the processes that initiate and terminate analytic thinking. We will argue that the author neglected to acknowledge the abundant literature on metacognitive functions, specifically, the meta-reasoning framework developed by Ackerman and Thompson (2017), that addresses just those questions.

Current research into the molecular biology of blood‐clotting factors suggests that the basis of inherited bleeding disorders may soon be understood. In addition, the expression of cloned genes for the factors in mammalian cell lines provides the hope of pure factors being available for replacement therapy, uncontaminated with the causative agents for Hepatitis and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), identified in the blood products at present available. The recent findings on the molecular biology of several of the key blood clotting (...) genes are described here. (shrink)

PurposeIn addition to data transforming the insurance sector from within, insurance consumers and their behaviour has transformed significantly over the past 20 years from traditional retail to, predominantly, online trading. Data are a fundamental part of how the sector operates, and the use of data in insurance is constantly evolving. This paper aims to explore consumer perceptions about digital privacy and their subsequent motivations to disclose personal data for insurance purposes.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses an exploratory research approach based on in-depth interviews (...) to generate metathemes to provide an understanding of consumer perceptions about digital privacy and data sharing in the insurance sector.FindingsConsumers were extrinsically motivated to disclose data by financial reward and convenience; however, subsequent intrinsic motivations may be an influence on the initial motivations. Consumers perceived transactions as “fair” if they received the expected rewards, retained control of the data, and the data was not unilaterally used to their detriment. Concern for privacy was generally low, provided antecedent conditions were met.Research limitations/implicationsAs the study uses an exploration for discovery approach, the main limitation of this study is its small sample. However, this research aimed to identify metathemes and issues that may be the focus of future research in this area and is, therefore, not proposing to suggest strong conclusions and definitive answers.Originality/valueThis paper presents the first empirical research to examine data privacy issues in the UK insurance context. It contributes to knowledge in the areas of motivation, applied ethics and online consumer behaviour in general. (shrink)

Spontaneous mutations that perturb myelination occur in a range of species including man, and together with engineered mutations have been used to study disease, normal myelination and axon/glial inter‐relationships. Only a minority of the currently defined mutations have an apparently simple pathogenesis due to lack of a functional protein. Mutations in the myelin basic protein gene lead to a lack of protein, resulting in changes in the structure of myelin, which can be rescued by transgenic complementation. The pathogenesis of autosomal (...) dominant and X‐linked mutations affecting either oligodendrocytes or Schwann cells is more complex. Point mutations may act in a dominant negative manner and gene dosage is clearly linked to phenotypic change. Mutations in regulatory genes, such as those encoding transcription factors, can also disturb myelination by selected cell types. Other less‐well studied and unexpected consequences of myelin mutations, such as seizures in mutations affecting genes expressed in Schwann cells and axonal changes associated with dysmyelination, are also considered. With the major developments in gene mapping and cloning it is now relevant to study mutations in a variety of species with the real prospect of defining their molecular basis. Examples are given of unusual, but potentially useful, uncharacterised mutations in dog and bovine. (shrink)

There is nothing more humbling to one’s inner moral compass than to realize that you do not initially know what is right or wrong! I found myself in just such a situation after reading the above case. Much has been written, both in the professional literature and the popular media, about the “Ashley Treatment” since Gunther and Diekema published their article in 2006. It is unclear if others in the United States or around the world have, to any significant degree, (...) adopted growth attenuation therapy and/or surgical intervention for children with severe neurological compromise, but the case quoted above suggests that hospital ethics committees may also be struggling with these decisions. An informal survey of pediatric endocrinologists, mentioned in a recent article on the topic, claims that many physicians are facing this dilemma as well. (shrink)

I would like to present the details of an actual case from my own experience over which I, along with the family, have agonized. I think this case brings into focus some of the unique issues in perinatal medicine where multiple patients, some real and some potential, can enter into a single decision. I hope that through this presentation others may gain insight into the complexities of applied ethics in perinatal medicine.

How people react emotionally to the positive or negative events that they experience in their lives depends in part on whether particular outcomes are perceived to be deserved or undeserved. For ex...

It describes and explains the patient-centered model examining and evaluating qualitative and quantitative research. It comprehensively covers the evolution and the six interactive components of the patient-centered clinical method, taking the reader through the relationships between the patient and doctor and the patient and clinician. All the editors are professors in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

Few topics in contemporary science hold the wide interest commanded by immunology, so this graceful and timely account of the development of this science is a welcomed addition to the literature. Succinct, well-written, and informed, Intolerant Bodies narrates the history of immunology through the lens of autoimmune disease. In what the authors call “a biography” , they have focused on four central illnesses: multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 1 diabetes mellitus. However, the story told here extends (...) far beyond the topic of “attack against self” to provide perhaps the best overview of immunity available for the general reader. The specialist will also appreciate the rich anecdotal material and benefit from the historical insights scattered throughout the text. So the book is, in fact, more than a history of autoimmunity and offers a compact history for those who need not consult more comprehensive accounts (e .. (shrink)

Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences (HHEs) accompanying sleep paralysis (SP) are often cited as sources of accounts of supernatural nocturnal assaults and paranormal experiences. Descriptions of such experiences are remarkably consistent across time and cultures and consistent also with known mechanisms of REM states. A three-factor structural model of HHEs based on their relations both to cultural narratives and REM neurophysiology is developed and tested with several large samples. One factor, labeled Intruder, consisting of sensed presence, fear, and auditory and visual (...) hallucinations, is conjectured to originate in a hypervigilant state initiated in the midbrain. Another factor, Incubus, comprising pressure on the chest, breathing difficulties, and pain, is attributed to effects of hyperpolarization of motoneurons on perceptions of respiration. These two factors have in common an implied alien ''other'' consistent with occult narratives identified in numerous contemporary and historical cultures. A third factor, labeled Unusual Bodily Experiences, consisting of floating/flying sensations, out-of-body experiences, and feelings of bliss, is related to physically impossible experiences generated by conflicts of endogenous and exogenous activation related to body position, orientation, and movement. Implications of this last factor for understanding of orientational primacy in self-consciousness are considered. Central features of the model developed here are consistent with recent work on hallucinations associated with hypnosis and schizophrenia. (shrink)

Perceptual learning involves an improvement in perceptual judgment with practice, which is often specific to stimulus or task factors. Perceptual learning has been shown on a range of visual tasks but very little research has explored chromatic perceptual learning. Here, we use two low level perceptual threshold tasks and a supra-threshold target detection task to assess chromatic perceptual learning and category effects. Experiment 1 investigates whether chromatic thresholds reduce as a result of training and at what level of analysis learning (...) effects occur. Experiment 2 explores the effect of category training on chromatic thresholds, whether training of this nature is category specific and whether it can induce categorical responding. Experiment 3 investigates the effect of category training on a higher level, lateralized target detection task, previously found to be sensitive to category effects. The findings indicate that performance on a perceptual threshold task improves following training but improvements do not transfer across retinal location or hue. Therefore, chromatic perceptual learning is category specific and can occur at relatively early stages of visual analysis. Additionally, category training does not induce category effects on a low level perceptual threshold task, as indicated by comparable discrimination thresholds at the newly learned hue boundary and adjacent test points. However, category training does induce category effects on a supra-threshold target detection task. Whilst chromatic perceptual learning is possible, learnt category effects appear to be a product of left hemisphere processing, and may require the input of higher level linguistic coding processes in order to manifest. (shrink)

Pragmatic language competence plays a central role in how aviation flight crews perform crew resource management ; this competence significantly affects aviation safety. This paper contributes to existing literature on interventionist applications of conversation analysis by defining and evaluating a novel collaborative transcription and repair based learning method for aviation CRM learning. CTRBL was evaluated using a quantitative quasi-­experimental repeated-measure design with 42 novice, university pilots. Results support that CTRBL is an effective, low-resource CRM learning method that will benefit from (...) exploratory applications and further study in pragmatics, aviation, and other sociotechnical domains. The views in this article were the result of independent research of the authors. Views herein do not necessarily represent the views of the National Transportation Safety Board or the United States. (shrink)

Social norm transgressions are assumed to be at the root of numerous substantial negative outcomes for transgressors. There is a prevailing notion among lay people and scholars that transgressing social norms can negatively impact one’s mental health. The present research aimed to examine this assumption, focusing on clinically relevant outcomes such as anxiety and depression. The present research further aimed to examine a social cognitive process for these outcomes in the form of fear of negative evaluations as a result of (...) one’s norm transgressing behavior. Specifically, it examined whether it is negative evaluations about ourselves or about those close to us that mediates the effect of social norm transgressions, and whether those may vary as a function of culture. Results of the present research, including a study with a community sample, suggest a positive association between social norm transgressions and psychological distress. Results also suggest that increased fear of negative evaluation mediates that association but does so differently for people from more collectivistic cultures and people from less collectivistic cultures. For people from more collectivistic cultures increased fear of negative evaluation of close others may mediate the association between social norm transgressions and psychological distress. However, for people from less collectivistic cultures that association may be mediated by increased fear of negative evaluation of oneself. Implications for research on consequences of social norm transgressions and cross-cultural differences in perceptions of such consequences are discussed as are practical implications for motivating social norm adherence and the maintenance of constructive social norms. (shrink)

No progress has been made over the past decade in improving equity of access to higher education for young people from low socio-economic backgrounds. New evidence indicates that both family income and cultural factors explain this situation. The cultural factor is particularly strong for boys from blue collar backgrounds. Current Government equity policy ignores these findings.

As engineering applications require management of ever larger volumes of data, ontologies offer the potential to capture, manage, and augment data with the capability for automated reasoning and semantic querying. Unfortunately, considerable barriers hinder wider deployment of ontologies in engineering. Key among these is lack of a shared top-level ontology to unify and organise disparate aspects of the field and coordinate co-development of orthogonal ontologies. As a result, many engineering ontologies are limited to their scope, and functionally difficult to extend (...) or interoperate with other engineering ontologies. This paper demonstrates how the use of a top-level ontology, specifically the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), greatly facilitates interoperability of multiple engineering-related ontologies. We constructed a system of formal linked ontologies by re-engineering legacy ontologies to be conformant with BFO and developing new BFO-conformant ontologies to capture knowledge in the engineering design, enterprise, human factors, manufacturing, and application domain of additive manufacturing. The resulting Integrated Framework for Additively Manufactured Products (IFAMP), including the body knowledge instantiated on its basis, serve as the basis for a proposed Design with Additive Manufacturing Method (DWAM), which we believe can support the design of innovative products with semantically enhanced ideation tools and enhanced access to application domain knowledge. The method and its facilitation through the ontological framework are demonstrated using a case study in medicine. (shrink)

In the paper “An archeology of corruption in medicine”, Miles Little, Wendy Lipworth, and Ian Kerridge present an account of corruption and describe its prevalent forms in medicine. In presenting an individual-focused account of corruption found within “social entities”, Little et al. argue that these entities are corruptible by nature and that certain individuals are prone to take advantage of the corruptibility of social entities to pursue their own ends. The authors state that this is not preventable, so the way (...) to remedy corruption is via management and, where necessary, punishment. This commentary will briefly lay out the key features and functions of corruption as presented by Little et al., before providing a critical discussion that will focus on whether corruptibility is a necessary feature of social entities. I will propose that it is not a necessary feature, though it may frequently arise where individualistic values are unchecked. Corruption can be prevented within social entities by enhancing structures that direct toward virtue and which promote and reward cooperation instead of competition. (shrink)

_Fifty Major Political Thinkers _introduces the lives and ideas of some of the most influential figures in Western political thought, from ancient Greece to the present day. The entries provide a fascinating introduction to the major figures and schools of thought that have shaped contemporary politics, including: Aristotle Simone de Beauvoir Michel Foucault Mohandas Gandhi Jurgen Habermas Machiavelli Karl Marx Thomas Paine Jean-Jacques Rousseau Mary Wollstonecraft. Fully cross-referenced and including a glossary of theoretical terms, this wide-ranging and accessible book is (...) essential reading for anyone with an interest in the evolution and history of contemporary political thought. (shrink)