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)

An attempt has been made to find some valuable information for particle detection with the help of Solid State Nuclear Track Detectors. The detector is characterized by a critical value of the energy-loss rate by the charged particle. Only those charged particles which give up energy exceeding the critical value alone can produce teachable tracks. The detection thresholds of nuclear track detectors can be specified in terms of their energy loss rates. The findings have been found within a good agreement (...) with the other works. (shrink)

BackgroundSchool based running programmes, such as The Daily Mile™, positively impact pupils’ physical health, however, there is limited evidence on psychological health. Additionally, current evidence is mostly limited to examining the acute impact. The present study examined the longer term impact of running programmes on pupil cognition, wellbeing, and fitness.MethodData from 6,908 school pupils, who were participating in a citizen science project, was examined. Class teachers provided information about participation in school based running programmes. Participants completed computer-based tasks of inhibition, (...) verbal and visual-spatial working memory, as well as the Children’s Feeling scale and Felt arousal scale to determine subjective wellbeing. A multistage 20-m shuttle run test was used to estimate fitness.ResultsFrom our total sample of 6,908 school pupils, 474 participants had been taking part in a running programme for 3 months); and 5,430 did not take part in a running programme. The Longer Term participation group had higher fitness levels than both other groups and this remained significant when adjusted for age, sex and SES. Moderated regression analysis found that for the Shorter Term participation group, higher shuttle distance was associated with better visual-spatial working memory. Effect sizes were small though.ConclusionWe identified small and selective positive impact of participation in school based running programmes on fitness and cognition. While no long term benefit was identified for cognition or wellbeing, the impact on fitness and short term benefit suggest schools should consider participation. (shrink)

Serial music was one of the most important aesthetic movements to emerge in post-war Europe, but its uncompromising music and modernist aesthetic has often been misunderstood. This book focuses on the controversial journal die Reihe, whose major contributors included Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur, Dieter Schnebel and G. M. Koenig, and discusses it in connection with many lesser-known sources in German musicology. It traces serialism's debt to the theories of Klee and Mondrian, and its relationship to developments in concrete art, modern poetry (...) and the information aesthetics and semiotics of Max Bense and Umberto Eco. M. J. Grant sketches an aesthetic theory of serialism as experimental music, arguing that serial theory's embrace of both rigorous intellectualism and aleatoric processes is not, as many have suggested, a paradox, but the key to serial thought and to its relevance for contemporary theory. (shrink)

In this article, I follow up on a suggestion made by Josephine Donovan that a Hume-inspired ethic of sympathy would be a better foundation for an animal ethic than more rationalistic approaches of both utilitarianism and deontology. I then expand on Donovan’s suggestion by further suggesting that Hume’s “sentiment of humanity” could easily be expanded to include other animals. Hume’s ethic of sympathy, I argue, answers the need for an ethic that is at once both personal, contextual, and sufficiently (...) universalizable to incorporate the political need for something like justice. I say, “something like justice,” because animals are explicitly ruled out of justice relationships by Hume due to his more narrow definition of that term. What I mean by “something like justice” is a more impersonal and objective element that transcends exclusively personal or private interests. (shrink)

Over the years, companies have adopted hiring algorithms because they promise wider job candidate pools, lower recruitment costs and less human bias. Despite these promises, they also bring perils. Using them can inflict unintentional harms on individual human rights. These include the five human rights to work, equality and nondiscrimination, privacy, free expression and free association. Despite the human rights harms of hiring algorithms, the AI ethics literature has predominantly focused on abstract ethical principles. This is problematic for two reasons. (...) First, AI principles have been criticized for being vague and not actionable. Second, the use of vague ethical principles to discuss algorithmic risks does not provide any accountability. This lack of accountability creates an algorithmic accountability gap. Closing this gap is crucial because, without accountability, the use of hiring algorithms can lead to discrimination and unequal access to employment opportunities. This paper makes two contributions to the AI ethics literature. First, it frames the ethical risks of hiring algorithms using international human rights law as a universal standard for determining algorithmic accountability. Second, it evaluates four types of algorithmic impact assessments in terms of how effectively they address the five human rights of job applicants implicated in hiring algorithms. It determines which of the assessments can help companies audit their hiring algorithms and close the algorithmic accountability gap. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

In _Beyond Animal Rights_, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams introduced feminist "ethic of care" theory into philosophical discussions of the treatment of animals. In this new volume, seven essays from _Beyond Animal Rights_ are joined by nine new articles-most of which were written in response to that book-and a new introduction that situates feminist animal care theory within feminist theory and the larger debate over animal rights. Contributors critique theorists' reliance on natural rights doctrine and utilitarianism, which, they (...) suggest, have a masculine bias. They argue for ethical attentiveness and sympathy in our relationships with animals and propose a link between the continuing subjugation of women and the human domination of nature. Beginning with the earliest articulation of the idea in the mid-1980s and continuing to the theory's most recent revisions, this volume presents the most complete portrait of the evolution of the feminist-care tradition. (shrink)

Résumé Dans les situations sociomotrices, l’engagement des participants n’est pas seulement réductible aux communications directes. Il est surtout lié à l’émergence de systèmes de signes assurant la dynamique globale du jeu. Nous proposons d’appréhender la communication comme un système d’interaction global constitué de plusieurs canaux. On y retrouve les communications directes mais aussi quatre systèmes de signes : celui des praxèmes, des gestèmes, des gestes et des communications verbales. Ce travail interroge la place de chaque canal communicationnel dans deux sports (...) et deux jeux traditionnels. Nous recrutons trois groupes de 20 étudiants pour participer aux jeux mentionnés. Les communications sont filmées, décryptées, triées et catégorisées. On constate une forte prévalence des praxèmes dans les sports collectifs, tandis que la répartition des communications est plus équilibrée dans les jeux traditionnels. La quantité, la variabilité et l’organisation des signes sont sensibles à la logique interne. Globalement, cette recherche tend à montrer que les jeux sont un formidable laboratoire in vivo pour comprendre l’organisation des systèmes de signes. Spécifiquement, elle apporte des informations sur le pouvoir socialisant de la sémiotricité de chaque jeu et sur le renouvellement des pédagogies qu’elle peut engendrer. (shrink)

In Survive and Resist: The Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics Shauna L. Shames and Amy L. Atchison aim to give the readers an insight into various key concepts in political science by analyzing some of the world's most famous dystopian fictional works. Among them are George Orwell's 1984, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but also more recent novels such as Scott Westerfield's 2005 Uglies Trilogy. In separate chapters, the authors draw on a wide array of concepts in political philosophy to (...) confront real-life and fictional dystopias. The book makes for an excellent introduction to political theory that is highly approachable to dilettantes.The book consists of eight chapters, a preface, an introduction, an... (shrink)

L’Union européenne nous invite à repenser les conditions et les attributs de la souveraineté traditionnellement rattachée aux États-nations. Dans cet article, est proposée une tentative de re-conceptualisation à partir des différentes définitions de la souveraineté, et de l’analyse d’un exemple : celui de la politique étrangère et de l’exercice diplomatique de l’Union européenne. En effet, la souveraineté possède toujours deux faces : une face interne qui se charge de définir la loi, le droit, et de les faire appliquer sur un (...) territoire délimité ; une face externe qui exporte et affirme les intérêts, les valeurs et les principes qui prévalent en interne. La politique étrangère et son outil principal qu’est l’action diplomatique, consistent dans l’expression vers l’extérieur de la souveraineté d’un corps politique. Nous nous interrogerons ainsi sur la nature de la souveraineté incarnée par l’Union européenne. (shrink)

The authors aim in this article to show why it is extremely difficult to expect representatives of missionary religions to engage in productive interreligious dialogue. The article demonstrates how the imperative to convert, which is rooted in a sense of epistemic authority that one holds the best version of truth, precludes interreligious dialogue among religionists. The authors note, on the one hand, that the primary condition for any dialogue is that each of those involved come to the dialogue intellectually humble. (...) On the other hand, the authors note that for missionary religionists to embrace intellectual humility requires a fundamental rethink of their claims of epistemological certainty and final epistemic authority. This implies abandoning the missionary mandate and witnessing built on a sense of intellectual certainty and pride. The authors therefore argue that intellectual humility is a necessary condition for productive interreligious dialogue. Because representatives of missionary religions claim certainty about the knowledge they espouse, what is paraded as interreligious dialogue is largely a myth. It will remain a mere concept that yields little to no tangible result unless these representatives embrace intellectual humility, which is more achievable within a secularist framework.Contribution: This research contributes to the seemingly easy but difficult discourse and practice about interreligious dialogue. It brings to the limelight a more appropriate conception of dialogue in the context of interreligious dialogue, and explains how side-lining that conception empties the predominant practice of interreligous dialogue. This contribution is useful to HTS, which focuses on theological and religious studies, as well as critical study of religions. (shrink)

This article critiques contemporary feminist theory's frequent ocularcentric readings of the anorexic body as a surface of cultural inscription or as a paradigmatic sign of the female body's alienation through sexual difference. In an initial speculative attempt to find a theoretical framework that might sustain a more generative and embodied account of anorexia, I read anorexia through Butler's theory of gender as psychic `incorporation' because she problematizes an interior/exterior topography of the subject. This Butlerian framework proves problematic because, by establishing (...) an association between visibly queer gender and subversion, it effectively designates as hegemonic any sense of gender as a felt interiority. In a second framework, I draw on Prosser's anti-ocularcentric reading of transsexual `body narratives' derived from Anzieu's theory of the `skin ego'. Filtering Butler's theory of melancholia through this skin ego framework, I find a theoretical space for anorexia as a transitional embodied subjectivity which both re-lives and relieves the melancholic trauma of gender. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Poems JOSEPHINE BALMER The House Opposite (Walbrook, London, 78 CE) Give this note to the cooper Junius, just opposite the house of Catullus... —Bloomberg Writing Tablets, 14 I unpack my treasures of Syrian glass, plates sourced from the slopes of Vesuvius. The walls I paint with frail shoots of grass and a poppy—my own hidden message for those who know the poet, my namesake: a flower fallen (...) at the meadow’s edge... I had pictured myself as a pioneer composing stark, startling, northern poems as fêted (one day) as my famed forebear. Besides, I’d been priced out of Rome. Yet each word I write I later delete. I watch the starlings rising up at dusk above the teeming, cloud-fogged streets like a simile slipping out of grasp. I hear the drunken Rhenish equites chant their taproom verse, swilled in vomit our bleak reward for six months’ back pay. My voice still clogs with Londinium clay. All I am here is the house opposite the cooper, two doors from the brewer. The only lines that come, come in error and for them: barrels, bills, more calls for beer. arion 27.2 fall 2019 Catullus the Slave (Walbrook, London, 79 CE) To Catullus the slave of Romanius Faustinus: 2000 units, 65 denarii [lines struck through] —Bloomberg Writing Tablets, 70 Six months on, the ice kicked in. My page was frost-white, its lines still frozen. By the following year I had given up, sold everything— volcanic crockery to the cooper, ink-smudged glass to the brewer who was branching out to wine. When even that was not enough I sold myself to Romanius Faustinus, a scrawny Gallic works contractor (a literary man, he said, was worth more than most). I did his books. I counted bricks, tessera for mosaics shifting back into the face of Orpheus, accounts closed, nothing outstanding. I learnt silence where once I spoke— he owned the air, he owned my breath— so I mouthed the verse I used to quote, the finest Catullus (snr) had written: you pea-brain, hairy-legged hick whose farts are your best feature... And concurred re bastard Caesar: why did he ever eye up Britain, that cursed place, ugly and remote? two poems 136... (shrink)

Abstract:Natural law theory has a long history, going back to the Stoics. Ernst Bloch, a twentieth-century Marxist theorist, offered a compelling radical reconstruction of natural law, locating its source in the resistance of those whose natural law entitlements are being denied. That resistance, Bloch held, constitutes a critical standpoint, which forms the basis for radical natural law. Bloch restricted the concept to humans, but it is here proposed that animals too have critical standpoints which constitute the basis for radical natural (...) law. (shrink)

Background There is now rising consensus that community engagement is ethically and scientifically essential for all types of health research. Yet debate continues about the moral aims, methods and appropriate timing in the research cycle for community engagement to occur, and whether the answer should vary between different types of health research. Co-design and collaborative partnership approaches that involve engagement during priority-setting, for example, are common in many forms of applied health research but are not regular practice in biomedical research. (...) In this study, we empirically examine the normative question: should communities be engaged when setting priorities for biomedical research projects, and, if so, how and for what purpose? Methods We conducted in-depth interviews with 31 members of the biomedical research community from the UK, Australia, and African countries who had engaged communities in their work. Interview data were thematically analysed. Results Our study shows that biomedical researchers and community engagement experts strongly support engagement in biomedical research priority-setting, except under certain circumstances where it may be harmful to communities. However, they gave two distinct responses on what ethical purpose it should serve—either empowerment or instrumental goals—and their perspectives on how it should achieve those goals also varied. Three engagement approaches were suggested: community-initiated, synergistic, and consultative. Pre-engagement essentials and barriers to meaningful engagement in biomedical research priority-setting are also reported. Conclusions This study offers initial evidence that meaningful engagement in priority-setting should potentially be defined slightly differently for biomedical research relative to certain types of applied health research and that engagement practice in biomedical research should not be dominated by instrumental goals and approaches, as is presently the case. (shrink)

Trying to obtain a medical history from a patient, I listen to her story. She’s a difficult patient, as in noncompliant, narcotic-seeking chronic-pain-in-the-ass patient. There’s a Physician’s Field Guide to the Difficult Patient, a chapter for each type. If you stop to listen, to question the words used, you may never finish this medical..