Clark and Fischer argue that humans treat social artifacts as depictions. In contrast, theories of distributed cognition suggest that there is no clear line separating artifacts from agents, and artifacts can possess agency. The difference is likely a result of cultural framing. As technology and artificial intelligence grow more sophisticated, the distinction between depiction and agency will blur.

This paper develops an account of misandrogyny that is modeled on Kate Manne’s account of misogyny. On Manne’s view, misogyny is a system of mechanisms that together police and enforce the gendered hierarchy of a patriarchal order. On the account developed here, misandrogyny is a system of mechanisms that together police and enforce the gender binary of a patriarchal order. The gender binary is constituted by norms that preclude the existence of persons who aren’t consistently ‘read’ either as a man (...) (and only a man) or as a woman (and only a woman). Misandrogyny thus polices and enforces the nonexistence of people who are neither women (only) nor men (only). After some clarifying preliminaries, section 1 describes mechanisms of misandrogyny that push individuals into specific binary gender positions; section 2 describes structures and institutions that compel gender non-conforming people to assimilate to the gender binary; section 3 describes mechanisms that target gender non-conforming persons for fatal violence. (shrink)

Coral bleaching has attracted considerable study, yet one central question remains unanswered: given that corals and their Symbiodinium symbionts have co‐evolved for millions of years, why does this clearly maladaptive process occur? Bleaching may result from evolutionary conflict between the host corals and their symbionts. Selection at the level of the individual symbiont favors using the products of photosynthesis for selfish replication, while selection at the higher level favors using these products for growth of the entire host/symbiont community. To hold (...) the selfish lower‐level units in check, mechanisms of conflict mediation must evolve. Fundamental features of photosynthesis have been co‐opted into conflict mediation so that symbionts that fail to export these products produce high levels of reactive oxygen species and undergo programmed cell death. These mechanisms function very well under most environmental conditions, but under conditions particularly detrimental to photosynthesis, it is these mechanisms of conflict mediation that trigger bleaching. (shrink)

Theories on categorization have led to numerous technical innovations. Starting with artificial intelligence and neural models, scientists have leveraged psychological theories to drive forward innovative technology. More recently, software companies and Internet firms have implemented high technology software developed from cognitive theory. One class of systems rooted in the philosophical tradition stresses the importance of explanation and function. Another focuses on feature similarity and rule-based reasoning. Both approaches have had modest success and solve fundamental problems, but neither has achieved the (...) higher-levels of categorization found in humans. The current paper critically analyzes the various theories of categorization and their collective impact on recent technology innovations. (shrink)

Decision making theory in general, and mental models in particular, associate judgment and choice. Decision choice follows probability estimates and errors in choice derive mainly from errors in judgment. In the studies reported here we use the Monty Hall dilemma to illustrate that judgment and choice do not always go together, and that such a dissociation can lead to better decision-making. Specifically, we demonstrate that in certain decision problems, exceeding working memory limitations can actually improve decision choice. We show across (...) four experiments that increasing the number of choice alternatives forces people to collapse choices together, resulting in better decision-making. While choice performance improves, probability judgments do not change, thus demonstrating an important dissociation between choice and probability judgments. We propose the Collapsing Choice Theory (CCT) which explains how working memory capacity, probability estimation, choice alternatives, judgment, and regret all interact and effect decision quality. (shrink)

Industrial wind turbines have been operating in many parts of the globe. Anecdotal reports of perceived adverse health effects relating to industrial wind turbines have been published in the media and on the Internet. Based on these reports, indications were that some residents perceived they were experiencing adverse health effects. The purpose of the WindVOiCe health survey was to provide vigilance monitoring for those wishing to report their perceived adverse health effects. This article discusses the results of a self reporting (...) health survey regarding perceived adverse health effects associated with industrial wind turbines. (shrink)

Locally-developed measures represent great tools for institutions to use in assessing student outcomes. Such measures can be easy to administer, can be cost-effective, and can provide meaningful data for improving student learning. However, many institutions struggle with questions surrounding the quality of their locally-developed assessments. Are their instruments reliable? Are their instruments valid? Can the data generated from these instruments be trusted to drive change and improvement? The good news for faculty, staff, and assessment professionals is that there are steps (...) they can take to address these concerns and help to ensure the validity and reliability of their processes. This article describes the development and testing of a novel research instrument of students’ attitudes and abilities relating to critical thinking, metacognition, and intellectual humility. Using a $1,000 assessment grant from Sam Houston State University (SHSU), Dr. Glenn Sanford and Dr. David Wright devised the early drafts of the instruments, collaborated with colleagues, and joined with Mr. Jeff Roberts, Director of Assessment at SHSU, to develop and to test this new instrument. What follows is a description of the development of the resulting research instrument, results from the factor analysis and reliability testing of that instrument, and an overview of how those results have been used to make further instrument improvements. (shrink)

There is a paucity of research into the prevalence of academic dishonesty within Canada compared to other countries. Recently, there has been a call for a better understanding of the particular characteristics of educational integrity in Canada so that Canada can more meaningfully contribute to current discussions surrounding academic integrity. Here, we present findings from student and faculty surveys conducted within a medium-sized Canadian university. These surveys probed perceptions towards, and experiences with, academic dishonesty, in which we aimed to understand (...) how students and faculty regarded academically dishonest practices during their postsecondary careers. We also aimed to understand how often students engaged in, and faculty had witnessed, academic dishonesty, whether or not witnessing incidents of academic dishonesty corresponded with gender, year of experience, highest level of educational attainment, discipline, or their personal perceptions towards the importance of academic honesty, and whether students had been adequately taught what constitutes academic dishonesty. We found that an overwhelming majority of students viewed academic honesty as important, and that most students reported not engaging in academic dishonesty themselves despite 45.8% reporting that they had witnessed others engage in academic dishonesty. We also found that students were more likely to witness cheating as their postsecondary experience increased, that witnessing varied across disciplines and educational attainment, and that witnessing varied with student perceptions. However, we found no such patterns in faculty responses, but found that faculty are split on whether or not they believe incidents of academic honesty are increasing. (shrink)

Recent judicial rulings and changes in federal and state legislation have given for-profit corporations a growing list of rights and constitutional protections, including the right to practice religion free from many types of federal or state restriction. In this paper, we highlight the implications of these developments using Rawls’ Theory of Justice to explore the consequences of for-profit corporate religious freedom for consumers and employees. We identify preliminary principles to spark a discussion as to how expanding religious freedom for businesses (...) and fair access to goods and services can coexist in the for-profit marketplace. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 118-120.

Governments have used several mechanisms to deal with intractable policy conflicts about issues in bioethics. One mechanism is the installment of an ethics committee and another one is the organization of public debates. Often, ethics committees have an implicit or explicit role in the stimulation of such public debate. However, this role is not self-evident and we therefore analyse the relation between committees and public debate. What should the function of biotechnology ethics committees be, how does this relate to their (...) composition, and to what extent are these functions met in practice? To this end, we have examined the three national committees of the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Australia in the field of animal and plant biotechnology. We argue that there is often a mismatchbetween the goals one wants to reach by stimulating public debate and the way this has been given shape, partly through ethics committees. In fact, installing (biotechnology) ethics committees is to a certain extent a premature move that contains rather than stimulates public debate. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

BackgroundThe process of peer-review in academia has attracted criticism surrounding issues of bias, fairness, and professionalism; however, frequency of occurrence of such comments is unknown.MethodsWe evaluated 1491 sets of reviewer comments from the fields of “Ecology and Evolution” and “Behavioural Medicine,” of which 920 were retrieved from the online review repository Publons and 571 were obtained from six early career investigators. Comment sets were coded for the occurrence of “unprofessional comments” and “incomplete, inaccurate or unsubstantiated critiques” using an a-prior rubric (...) based on our published research. Results are presented as absolute numbers and percentages.ResultsOverall, 12% of comment sets included at least one unprofessional comment towards the author or their work, and 41% contained incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critiques.ConclusionsThe large number of unprofessional comments, and IIUCs observed could heighten psychological distress among investigators, particularly those at an early stage in their career. We suggest that development and adherence to a universally agreed upon reviewer code of conduct is necessary to improve the quality and professional experience of peer review. (shrink)

Our recent paper reported that 43% of reviewer comment sets shared with authors contained at least one unprofessional comment or an incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critique. Publication of this work sparked an online conversation surrounding professionalism in peer review. We collected and analyzed these social media comments as they offered real-time responses to our work and provided insight into the views held by commenters and potential peer-reviewers that would be difficult to quantify using existing empirical tools. Overall, 75% of comments (...) were positive, of which 59% were supportive and 16% shared similar personal experiences. However, a subset of negative comments emerged, that provided potential insight into the reasons underlying unprofessional comments were made during the peer-review process. These comments were classified into three main themes: forced niceness will adversely impact the peer-review process and allow for publication of poor-quality science ; dismissing comments as not offensive to another person because they were not deemed personally offensive to the reader ; and authors brought unprofessional comments upon themselves as they submitted substandard work. Here, we argue against these themes as justifications for directing unprofessional comments towards authors during the peer review process. We argue that it is possible to be both critical and professional, and that no author deserves to be the recipient of demeaning ad hominem attacks regardless of supposed provocation. Suggesting otherwise only serves to propagate a toxic culture within peer review. While we previously postulated that establishing a peer-reviewer code of conduct could help improve the peer-review system, we now posit that priority should be given to repairing the negative cultural zeitgeist that exists in peer-review. (shrink)

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York (Barlow, 2017). Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement constituted (...) a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo have legal rights. To date, no judge has been willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. Such a ruling would mean that these chimpanzees have rights that confinement might violate. Instead, the judges have argued that chimpanzees cannot be bearers of legal rights because they are not, and cannot be persons. In this book we argue that chimpanzees are persons because they are autonomous. (shrink)

The use of Big Data—however the term is defined—involves a wide array of issues and stakeholders, thereby increasing numbers of complex decisions around issues including data acquisition, use, and sharing. Big Data is becoming a significant component of practice in an ever-increasing range of disciplines; however, since it is not a coherent “discipline” itself, specific codes of conduct for Big Data users and researchers do not exist. While many institutions have created, or will create, training opportunities to prepare people to (...) work in and around Big Data, insufficient time, space, and thought have been dedicated to training these people to engage with the ethical, legal, and social issues in this new domain. Since Big Data practitioners come from, and work in, diverse contexts, neither a relevant professional code of conduct nor specific formal ethics training are likely to be readily available. This normative paper describes an approach to conceptualizing ethical reasoning and integrating it into training for Big Data use and research. Our approach is based on a published framework that emphasizes ethical reasoning rather than topical knowledge. We describe the formation of professional community norms from two key disciplines that contribute to the emergent field of Big Data: computer science and statistics. Historical analogies from these professions suggest strategies for introducing trainees and orienting practitioners both to ethical reasoning and to a code of professional conduct itself. We include two semester course syllabi to strengthen our thesis that codes of conduct can be harnessed to support the development of ethical reasoning in, and a sense of professional identity among, Big Data practitioners. (shrink)

Intervention studies with developmental samples are difficult to implement, in particular when targeting demographically diverse communities. Online studies have the potential to examine the efficacy of highly scalable interventions aimed at enhancing development, and to address some of the barriers faced by underrepresented communities for participating in developmental research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we executed a fully remote randomized controlled trial language intervention with third and fourth grade students from diverse backgrounds across the United States. Using this as a case (...) study, we discuss both challenges and solutions to conducting an intensive online intervention through the various phases of the study, including recruitment, data collection, and fidelity of intervention implementation. We provide comprehensive suggestions and takeaways, and conclude by summarizing some important tradeoffs for researchers interested in carrying out such studies. (shrink)

Chefs have been recognized as potentially important partners in efforts to promote local food systems. Drawing on the diffusion of innovation framework we (a) examine the characteristics of chefs and restaurants that have adopted local foods; (b) identified local food attributes valued by restaurants; (c) examine how restaurants function as opinion leaders promoting local foods; (d) explored network linkages between culinary and production organizations; and (e) finally, we consider some of the barriers to more widespread adoption of local foods in (...) the culinary community. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data collected from interviews with individuals from 71 restaurants, we compare and contrast restaurants that utilize relatively large amounts of locally-produced ingredients with restaurants using few, if any, local products. Results reveal that chefs are most interested in intrinsic food qualities, such as taste and freshness, and less interested in production standards. As opinion leaders, chefs utilize signage, wait staff, and cooking classes to promote local foods; however, the diffusion process across restaurants, and between restaurants and producers, is limited by network associations. Structural barriers such as distribution problems and lack of convenience were identified as limiting more widespread use of locally-grown foods. We offer several implications of this research for further work that seeks to engage chefs as opinion leaders who are important to building greater support for local food systems. (shrink)

Aboriginal fringe-dwellers in Central Australia emphasize their independence of the white-dominated world around them. Because of differences in their means of support, men and women have developed variations on this perspective of independence and personal power. Men present themselves in terms of their white employers and base their personal collateral on those links. Women stress their ability to care for their families without help from others and present themselves as able to play all social roles in the Central Australian world. (...) This image of woman as universal actor places moral premiums on the protection of domestic interests at the expense of wider gender, ethnic, or class interests. These ideas are explored through analysis of the life story of one woman, Katy Mayhew. Although obtained in an interview setting, the occasion of Katy's story became a life event through which she, her daughter, and her “sisters” reflected upon their lives as Aboriginal women in Central Australia. It is argued that life events are particularly appropriate ways for people to reflect on the meaning of their mundane, everyday lives in contexts such as Aboriginal Australia, which are dominated by bureaucratic frames, processes, and power. (shrink)

This article is the lead piece in a special report that presents the results of a bioethical investigation into chimeric research, which involves the insertion of human cells into nonhuman animals and nonhuman animal embryos, including into their brains. Rapid scientific developments in this field may advance knowledge and could lead to new therapies for humans. They also reveal the conceptual, ethical, and procedural limitations of existing ethics guidance for human‐nonhuman chimeric research. Led by bioethics researchers working closely with an (...) interdisciplinary work group, the investigation focused on generating conceptual clarity and identifying improvements to governance approaches, with the goal of helping scholars, funders, scientists, institutional leaders, and oversight bodies (embryonic stem cell research oversight [ESCRO] committees and institutional animal care and use committees [IACUCs]) deliver principled and trustworthy oversight of this area of science. The article, which focuses on human‐nonhuman animal chimeric research that is stem cell based, identifies key ethical issues in and offers ten recommendations regarding the ethics and oversight of this research. Turning from bioethics’ previous focus on human‐centered questions about the ethics of “humanization” and this research's potential impact on concepts like human dignity, this article emphasizes the importance of nonhuman animal welfare concerns in chimeric research and argues for less‐siloed governance and oversight and more‐comprehensive public communication. (shrink)

This study investigates the significant relationship between mental health and academic motivation among graduating students. Thus, the study employed a correlational design to determine if there is a significant relationship between mental health and academic motivation among 150 graduating college students. Hence, the Mental Health Inventory 38 (MHI-38) and Academic Motivation Scale (AMS-C28) were employed to measure the study variables. Moreover, statistical analysis reveals that the r coefficient of 0.35 indicates a low positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of (...) 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. (shrink)

In this brief, we argue that there is a diversity of ways in which humans (Homo sapiens) are ‘persons’ and there are no non-arbitrary conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can include all humans and exclude all nonhuman animals. To do so we describe and assess the four most prominent conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can be found in the rulings concerning Kiko and Tommy, with particular focus on the most recent decision, Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc v Lavery.

A growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and (...) understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care. (shrink)

In response to Anderson and Arzyutov’s paper, I argue that ambiguities in the Russian social-scientific concept of “etnos” reveal its place in what I call a “field style” for thinking and doing science. Tolerance for ambiguity is, I suggest, a methodological strength of the field sciences. I support these reflections by also addressing the etnos concept’s origins in the complex history of Ukrainian nationalism.

ABSTRACT:A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inquiry when using genetic ancestry, they are also creating analytical frameworks with broader societal ramifications. This essay presents an ethics framework in the spirit of virtue ethics for these researchers: rather than focus on (...) rule following, the framework is designed to build researchers’ capacities to react to the ethical dimensions of their work. The authors identify one overarching principle of intellectual freedom and responsibility, noting that freedom in all its guises comes with responsibility, and they identify and define four principles that collectively uphold researchers’ intellectual responsibility: truthfulness, justice and fairness, anti-racism, and public beneficence. Researchers should bring their practices into alignment with these principles, and to aid this, the authors name three common ways research practices infringe these principles, suggest a step-by-step process for aligning research choices with the principles, provide rules of thumb for achieving alignment, and give a worked case. The essay concludes by identifying support needed by researchers to act in accord with the proposed framework. (shrink)

We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. We reject arbitrary distinctions that deny adequate protections to other animals who share with protected humans relevantly similar vulnerabilities to harms and relevantly similar interests in avoiding such harms. We strongly urge this Court, in keeping with the best philosophical standards of rational judgment and ethical standards of justice, to recognize that, as a nonhuman person, Happy should be (...) released from her current confinement and transferred to an appropriate elephant sanctuary, pursuant to habeas corpus. (shrink)

We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. The Supreme Court, Bronx County, declined to grant habeas corpus relief and order Happy’s transfer to an elephant sanctuary, relying, in part, on previous decisions that denied habeas relief for the NhRP’s chimpanzee clients, Kiko and Tommy. Those decisions use incompatible conceptions of ‘person’ which, when properly understood, are either philosophically inadequate or, in fact, compatible with Happy’s personhood.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 704-705, August 2012.

This is a review of Christine M. Korsgaard's "Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals" (2018).

In this study, we examine the problem of belief revision, defined as deciding whic h of several initially-accepted sentences to disbelieve, when new information presents a l ogical inconsistency with the initial set. In the first three experiments, the initial sentence set included a conditional sentence, a non-conditional sentence, and an inferred conclusi on drawn from the first two. The new information contradicted the inferred conclusion. Results indicated that the conditional sentences were more readily abandoned than non-c onditional sentences, even (...) when either choice would lead to a consistent belief state, and that this preference was more pronounced when problems used natural language cover sto ries rather than symbols. The pattern of belief revision choices differed depending on whe ther the contradicted conclusion from the initial belief set had been a modus ponens or m odus tollens inference. Two additional experiments examined alternative model-theoretic definitions of minimal change to a belief state, using problems that contained multiple mo dels of the initial belief state and of the new information that provided the contradiction. The results indicated that people did not follow any of four formal definitions of minimal change on these problems. The new information and the contradiction it offered was not, for example, used to select a particular model of the initial belief state as a way of reconci ling the contradiction. The preferred revision was to retain only those initial sentences th at had the same, unambiguous truth value within and across both the initial and new info rmation sets. The study and results are presented in the context of certain logic-based for malizations of belief revision, syntactic and model-theoretic representations of belief stat es, and performance models of human deduction. Principles by which some types of sent ences might be more "entrenched" than others in the face of contradiction are also discuss ed from the perspective of induction and theory revision. (shrink)

Weight of evidence continues to be a powerful metaphor within formal approaches to epistemology. But attempts to construe the metaphor in precise and useful ways have encountered formidable obstacles. This paper shows that two quite different understandings of evidential weight can be traced back to one 1878 article by C.S. Peirce. One conception, often associated with I.J. Good, measures the balance or net weight of evidence, while the other, generally associated with J.M. Keynes, measures the gross weight of evidence. Conflations (...) of these two notions have contributed to misunderstandings in the literature on weight. This paper shows why Peirce developed each conception of weight, why he distinguished them, and why they are easily mistaken for one another. (shrink)

Setting optimal significance levels that minimize Type I and Type II errors allows for more transparent and well‐considered statistical decision making compared to the traditional α = 0.05 significance level. We use the optimal α approach to re‐assess conclusions reached by three recently published tests of the pace‐of‐life syndrome hypothesis, which attempts to unify occurrences of different physiological, behavioral, and life history characteristics under one theory, over different scales of biological organization. While some of the conclusions reached using optimal α (...) were consistent to those previously reported using the traditional α = 0.05 threshold, opposing conclusions were also frequently reached. The optimal α approach reduced probabilities of Type I and Type II errors, and ensured statistical significance was associated with biological relevance. Biologists should seriously consider their choice of α when conducting null hypothesis significance tests, as there are serious disadvantages with consistent reliance on the traditional but arbitrary α = 0.05 significance level. (shrink)

BackgroundThe pursuit of a cure for HIV is a high priority for researchers, funding agencies, governments and people living with HIV (PLWH). To date, over 250 biomedical studies worldwide are or have been related to discovering a safe, effective, and scalable HIV cure, most of which are early translational research and experimental medicine. As HIV cure research increases, it is critical to identify and address the ethical challenges posed by this research.MethodsWe conducted a scoping review of the growing HIV cure (...) research ethics literature, focusing on articles published in English peer-reviewed journals from 2013 to 2021. We extracted and summarized key developments in the ethics of HIV cure research. Twelve community advocates actively engaged in HIV cure research provided input on this summary and suggested areas warranting further ethical inquiry and foresight via email exchange and video conferencing.DiscussionDespite substantial scholarship related to the ethics of HIV cure research, additional attention should focus on emerging issues in six categories of ethical issues: (1) social value (ongoing and emerging biomedical research and scalability considerations); (2) scientific validity (study design issues, such as the use of analytical treatment interruptions and placebos); (3) fair selection of participants (equity and justice considerations); (4) favorable benefit/risk balance (early phase research, benefit-risk balance, risk perception, psychological risks, and pediatric research); (5) informed consent (attention to language, decision-making, informed consent processes and scientific uncertainty); and (6) respect for enrolled participants and community (perspectives of people living with HIV and affected communities and representation).ConclusionHIV cure research ethics has an unfinished agenda. Scientific research and bioethics should work in tandem to advance ethical HIV cure research. Because the science of HIV cure research will continue to rapidly advance, ethical considerations of the major themes we identified will need to be revisited and refined over time. (shrink)

Background: There is evidence that household point-of-use water treatment products can reduce the enormous burden of water-borne illness. Nevertheless, adoption among the global poor is very low, and little evidence exists on why. Methods: We gave 600 households in poor communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh randomly-ordered two-month free trials of four water treatment products: dilute liquid chlorine, sodium dichloroisocyanurate tablets, a combined flocculant-disinfectant powdered mixture, and a silver-coated ceramic siphon filter. Consumers also received education on the dangers of untreated drinking water. (...) We measured which products consumers used with self-reports, observation, and chlorine tests. We also measured drinking water's contamination with E. coli. Findings: Households reported highest usage of the filter, although no product had even 30% usage. E. coli concentrations in stored drinking water were generally lowest when households had Water Guard. Households that self-reported product usage had large reductions in E. coli concentrations with any product as compared to controls. Conclusion: Traditional arguments for the low adoption of POU products focus on affordability, consumers' lack of information about germs and the dangers of unsafe water, and specific products not meshing with a household's preferences. In this study we provided free trials, repeated informational messages explaining the dangers of untreated water, and a variety of product designs. The low usage of all products despite such efforts makes clear that important barriers exist beyond cost, information, and variation among these four product designs. Without a better understanding of the choices and aspirations of the target end-users, household-based water treatment is unlikely to reduce morbidity and mortality substantially in urban Bangladesh and similar populations. © 2011 Luoto et al. (shrink)