BURGESS J and PURKIS ME. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 297–308 The power and politics of collaboration in nurse practitioner role developmentThis health services study employed participatory action research to engage nurse practitioners (NPs) from two health authorities in British Columbia, Canada, to examine the research question: How does collaboration advance NP role integration within primary health‐care? The inquiry was significant and timely because the NP role was recently introduced into the province, supported by passage of legislation and regulation and (...) introduction of graduate education programs. In separate and concurrent inquiry groups, the NPs discussed their practice patterns, role development progress and understanding of collaboration and role integration. The inquiry revealed the political nature of the NP role and the extent to which NPs relied on collaborative relations at all levels of the health system to advance role integration. Given that NP role development is still at an early stage in this province, as well as other provinces in Canada, this study provides important insights into the power and politics of role development, and offers direction for future role advancement. (shrink)

A look at political ethics covers cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal and misanthropy, and is accompanied by a description of modern public opinion about ...

Revisiting Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution, Butler has come to a startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical ...

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Recently, amid growing awareness that computer algorithms are not neutral tools but can cause harm by reproducing and amplifying bias, attempts to detect and prevent such biases have intensified. An approach that has received considerable attention in this regard is the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology, which aims to contribute to both the critical analysis of (dis)values in existing technologies and the construction of novel technologies that account for specific desired values. This article provides a brief overview of the key (...) features of the Value Sensitive Design approach, examines its contributions to understanding and addressing issues around bias in computer systems, outlines the current debates on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning, and discusses how such debates could profit from VSD-derived insights and recommendations. Relating these debates on values in design and algorithmic bias to research on cognitive biases, we conclude by stressing our collective duty to not only detect and counter biases in software systems, but to also address and remedy their societal origins. (shrink)

The “reproductive suppression hypothesis” states that the strong desire of adolescent girls in our culture to control their weight may reflect the operation of an adaptive mechanism by which ancestral women controlled the timing of their sexual maturation and hence first reproduction, in response to cues about the probable success of reproduction in the current situation. We develop a model based on this hypothesis and explore its behavior and evolutionary and psychological implications across a range of parameter values. We use (...) the process of model development to identify assumptions implicit in the reproductive suppression hypothesis and variables that need to be measured in order to investigate it more fully. In addition, because costs were probably associated with weight control, an important part of this analysis is the specification of situations in which the benefits of adaptive adjustment of the maturation schedule could have outweighed the costs of achieving that adjustment by slowing adolescent weight gain. (shrink)

In this paper, we critically and constructively examine the methodology of evidence-based development economics, which deploys randomized field experiments as its main tool. We describe the...

Martin Heidegger is the 20th century theology philosopher with the greatest importance to theology. A cradle Catholic originally intended for the priesthood, Heidegger's studies in philosophy led him to turn first to Protestantism and then to an atheistic philosophical method. Nevertheless, his writings remained deeply indebted to theological themes and sources, and the question of the nature of his relationship with theology has been a subject of discussion ever since. -/- This book offers theologians and philosophers alike a clear account (...) of the directions and the potential of this debate. It explains Heidegger's key ideas, describes their development and analyses the role of theology in his major writings, including his lectures during the National Socialist era. It reviews the reception of Heidegger's thought both by theologians in his own day (particularly in Barth and his school as well as neo-Scholasticism) and more recently (particularly in French phenomenology), and concludes by offering directions for theology's possible future engagement with Heidegger's work. - See more at:. (shrink)

A great deal of philosophical work has explored the complex conceptual intersection between ethics and epistemology in the context of issues of testimony and belief, and much of this work has significant educational implications. In this paper, I discuss a troubling example of a case of testimony that seems to pose a problem for some established ways of thinking about these issues and that, in turn, suggests some equally troubling educational conclusions.

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Greek tragedy shows a serious preoccupation with family concerns. Some of these concerns seem beyond the scope of ordinary family experience, particularly in the matter of the behaviour of women. The apparent discrepancy between historical evidence and the literary presentation of women has long been noted and variously explained. I want to suggest that this discrepancy reflects a way of distinguishing between the objectives and behaviour of the great aristocratic clans and of those families which were neither so wealthy nor (...) so politically influential. A dichotomy is thus presented between dynastic interests and the interests of the ordinary family as a well-regulated part of the Athenian city state. (shrink)

Foucault proposes at the end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality to shift the focus of sexual studies from sex-desire to bodies and pleasures. This article seeks to establish what he means by this shift, how he proposes it be made, and what the consequences are for thinking about sexuality together with `sex'. Foucault's shift involves a historiographical claim about the superability of the recent past, and can be read as an effort to relegate the concerns about (...) sexual difference and kinship to the past, and to establish a contemporary field for sexuality that involves bodies without history, pleasures without sex. The article suggests a way around this questionable historiographical assumption and marks a different departure for a Foucauldian study of sexuality. It also seeks to highlight some of the contemporary tensions between feminist and lesbian and gay studies, especially queer studies, in light of this reading of Foucault. (shrink)

This article examines three terms associated with the take-up of Foucault’s analysis of the biopolitical, namely identity, nature and life. It argues that Foucault opposes their reduction respectively to sameness, to origin, or to some primordial force. These reductions not only fall into species of metaphysics, they fail to recognize the integration of difference and of constitutive relationality in Foucault’s conceptualization of the process of subjectivation and becoming as historically dynamic and mobile. The article emphasizes the importance of historicization and (...) of a constructive genealogy in Foucault’s approach, running counter to metaphysics, and opening new avenues for political action based on the recognition of the interiority of resistance to dispositifs of power and of the creative force in individuation. (shrink)

Moral theory -- Abortion -- Genetic engineering, cloning, and stem cell research -- Euthanasia and assisted suicide -- The death penalty -- Drug and alcohol use -- Sexual intimacy and marriage -- Feminism, motherhood, and the workplace -- Freedom of speech -- Racial discrimination and global justice.

Julia Kristeva attempts to expose the limits of Lacan's theory of language by revealing the semiotic dimension of language that it excludes. She argues that the semiotic potential of language is subversive, and describes the semiotic as a poeticmaternal linguistic practice that disrupts the symbolic, understood as culturally intelligible rule-governed speech. In the course of arguing that the semiotic contests the universality of the Symbolic, Kristeva makes several theoretical moves which end up consolidating the power of the Symbolic and paternal (...) authority generally. She defends a maternal instinct as a pre-discursive biological necessity, thereby naturalizing a specific cultural configuration of maternity. In her use of psychoanalytic theory, she ends up claiming the cultural unintelligibility of lesbianism. Her distinction between the semiotic and the Symbolic operates to foreclose a cultural investigation into the genesis of precisely those feminine principles for which she claims a pre-discursive, naturalistic ontology. Although she claims that the maternal aspects of language are repressed in Symbolic speech and provide a critical possibility of displacing the hegemony of the paternal/symbolic, her very descriptions of the maternal appear to accept rather than contest the inevitable hegemony of the Symbolic. In conclusion, this essay offers a genealogical critique of the maternal discourse in Kristeva and suggests that recourse to the maternal does not constitute a subversive strategy as Kristeva appears to assume. (shrink)

The Flesh as the Folding of the OutsideDeleuze’s Reading of the last Merleau-PontyBy describing the flesh in terms of a “torsion” of “an Outside more distant than any exterior,” Deleuze in his 1986 book on Foucault sketches an ambivalent reading of Merleau-Ponty’s final philosophy. Insofar as it grants to the Outside an ontological primacy, Deleuze’s definition seems to indicate that the Flesh is not an originary agency, but rather a derived state of a primordial folding. If the flesh is derived, (...) then the inconstituability of the carnal fold, which Merleau-Ponty defends, would be radically challenged. But at the same time, the difficulty that Merleau-Ponty encounters in his final writings – that of giving an account of the specificity of my Flesh in relation to the Flesh of the world – would in this way perhaps be overcome. We shall show in fact that the absence of a specific ontological difference between the Flesh of the body and the Flesh of the world in The Visible and the Invisible – an absence that Deleuze points out when he invokes an “ideal coincidence” between the two kinds of flesh, could be avoided by recourse to the living Flesh conceived as stemming from a torsion of aprimordial Outside. To what extent is Deleuze, in his metaphysical reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s project, still faithful to this primordial Outside? To what extent does he twist this speculative reformulation in the direction of his own conception of life? These are the questions which my article would like to disentangle.La carne come piega del FuoriDeleuze lettore dell’ultimo Merleau-PontyDescrivendo, in un passo del suo libro su Foucault, la carne come torsione di un “Fuori più lontano di ogni mondo esterno”, Deleuze abbozza una lettura ambigua della filosofi a dell’ultimo Merleau-Ponty. In quanto concede al Fuori un primato ontologico, questa defi nizione deleuziana sembra costituire l’indice di una concezione secondo la quale la carne non sarebbe più un’istanza originaria, ma uno stato derivato da un piegarsi primordiale. Se così fosse, è l’incostituibilità della piega carnale, difesa da Merleau-Ponty, che verrebbe rimessa in questione. Al contempo, però, la difficoltà di rendere conto della specificità della mia carne rispetto alla carne del mondo verrebbe semplicemente aggirata. Come si tratterà di dimostrare, l’assenza di una differenza ontologica netta tra la carne del corpo e la carne del mondo ne Il visibile et l’invisibile, sottolineata da Deleuze nell’evocazione di una “coincidenza ideale” delle due carni,potrebbe venir risolta dal richiamo ad una carne ricavata dalla torsione di un Fuori primordiale. In che misura Deleuze, nella sua ricostruzione metafisica del progetto merleau-pontiano, si mantiene fedele ad esso? In che misura Deleuze inflette questa riformulazione speculativa in direzione della sua propria concezione della vita? Sono le questioni che il presente articolo si propone di affrontare. (shrink)

The Science Museum, London, has recently acquired four fragments of a portable sundial with associated calendrical gearing. All the fragments are made of low zinc brass of substantially the same composition. The sundial is of a type known in other examples, some the products of recent archaeological excavations and all dated to the Late Antique or Early Byzantine period. Dating by the place names included in the latitude table, by the style of the heads of the planetary gods used to (...) identify the days of the week, and by the style of the script, all indicate that the instrument dates from the late fifth century of the Christian era or the first half of the sixth.The gearing, of which two arbors survive, carrying four toothed wheels and one ratchet, seems to have resembled that of a calendrical device described by al-Bīrūnī in about AD 1000. Like al-Bīrūnī's device and the geared calendar associated with a Persian astrolabe of AD 1221/2 now in the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, the Byzantine instrument displayed the shape of the Moon and its age in days. Probably the calendar further resembled its Islamic counterparts in also displaying the positions of Sun and Moon in the Zodiac.The emergence of Byzantine mathematical gearing indicates that the Hellenistic tradition attested by the Antikythera machine continued to be active in the Byzantine period, and suggests that it may have influenced the Islamic tradition. Once again an artefact has shown up the inadequacy of the evidence derived from literary sources. (shrink)

Book-carrying styles of 1,133 school-age children (kindergarten through high school) were observed, and anatomical measurements (hips, waist, and underarm) of the space between the trunk and fall line of the arm in 735 of the students was recorded. With the exception of handedness, the results replicated those of earlier studies of sexual differences in bookcarrying styles and implicated the protrusion of female hips as instrumental in this phenomenon.

Choisir un livre, c'est en exclure beaucoup d'autres, contribuer à circonscrire le cercle lumineux de l'attention, participer à une aventure dont l'enjeu est la survie; vivre dans les lettres, ce n'est pas s'installer dans un patrimoine mais l'inventer, faire du soleil et de la place, inséparablement. Rééditer ce livre dans une édition de poche, ce n'est pas seulement faire en sorte qu'il soit de nouveau disponible; c'est en prolonger le rayonnement mais aussi le déplacer, l'inscrire autrement dans l'aventure de la (...) survie. Dans sa première vie, La Mémoire des œuvres s'est imposé à quelques-uns comme un bréviaire. Écrit pour tous et pour chacun, il demande et appelle l'amitié d'un plus large public, c'est un livre ami de la mémoire, qui aide à penser et qui aide à vivre, à habiter plus librement le séjour des livres. (shrink)