The return of individual research results and incidental findings from biobanking research is a much debated ethical issue globally but has extensive relevance in India where the burden of out of pocket health care expenses is high for the majority. The views of 21 ethics committee (EC) members and 22 researchers from Bengaluru, India, concerning the ethics of biobanking research were sought through in‐depth interviews using an unfolding case vignette with probes. A shared view among most was that individual research (...) results which are ‘actionable’ or have ‘clinical significance’ should be returned to the sample contributors through their treating physicians. This was seen as an ethical obligation and a moral duty on the side of the researcher to “give back” to the person who contributed to the research. The challenges foreseen were that of resources, both financial and personnel, for the time and counseling needed to accompany the disclosure of results. Perceptions of ‘ownership’ appear to influence the concept of benefit sharing. While benefit sharing in financial terms was considered ethically challenging, certain researchers and ethics committee members made a case for “two way altruism” where the researcher in return for the altruistic ‘valuable contribution’, shares with the contributor/ community, benefits of the research which could include research findings, improved patient care, and more affordable access to the new diagnostic tests or products arising from the research. This defines the emerging ethic of “giving back” which goes beyond individual rights and ensures reciprocity and distributive justice. (shrink)

On Advaita philosophy; Sanskrit text with commentary and translation.

RAID-II is a high-bandwidth, network-attached storage server designed and implemented at the University of California at Berkeley. In this paper, we measure the performance of RAID-II and evaluate various architectural decisions made during the design process. We first measure the end-to-end performance of the system to be approximately 20 MB/s for both disk array reads and writes. We then perform a bottleneck analysis by examining the performance of each individual subsystem and conclude that the disk subsystem limits performance. By adding (...) a custom interconnect board with a high-speed memory and bus system and parity engine, we are able to achieve a performance speedup of 8 to 15 over a comparative system using only off-the-shelf hardware. (shrink)

Ni-44 at.% Al and Ni-50 at.% Al single crystals were tested in compression in the hard d 001 ¢ orientation. The dislocation processes and deformation behaviour were studied as a function of temperature, strain and strain rate. A slip transition in NiAl occurs from a d 111 ¢ slip to non- a d 111 ¢ slip at intermediate temperatures. In Ni-50 at.% Al single crystals, only a d 010 ¢ dislocations are observed above the slip transition temperature. In contrast, a (...) d 101 ¢ {101} glide has been observed to control deformation beyond the slip transition temperature in Ni-44 at.% Al. a d 101 ¢ dislocations are observed primarily along both d 111 ¢ directions in the glide plane. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy observations show that the core of the a d 101 ¢ dislocations along these directions is decomposed into two a d 010 ¢ dislocations, separated by a distance of approximately 2 nm. The temperature window of stability for these a d 101 ¢ dislocations depends upon the strain rate. At a strain rate of 1.4 2 10 m 4 s m 1 , a d 101 ¢ dislocations are observed between 800 and 1000 K. Complete decomposition of a d 101 ¢ dislocations into a d 010 ¢ dislocations occurs beyond 1000 K, leading to a d 010 ¢ climb as the deformation mode at higher temperatures. At lower strain rates, decomposition of a d 101 ¢ dislocations has been observed to occur along the edge orientation at temperatures below 1000 K. Embedded-atom method calculations and experimental results indicate that a d 101 ¢ dislocations have a large Peierls stress at low temperatures. Based on the present microstructural observations and a survey of the literature with respect to vacancy content and diffusion in NiAl, a model is proposed for a d 101 ¢ {101} glide in Ni-44 at.% Al, and for the observed yield strength versus temperature behaviour of Ni-Al alloys at intermediate and high temperatures. (shrink)

Many metaphor theorists argue that our mental experience of time is grounded in our understanding of space, including motion through space. Results from recent experiments – in which people think about motion, which in turn influences their thinking about time – support this position. Still, many questions remain about the nature of the metaphorical connection between time and space. Can the mere suggestion of motion influence how people reason about time, and if so, when and how? Three experiments investigated how (...) thinking about “abstract” motion through sequences of numbers or letters would influence reasoning about time. Our results extend earlier psychological work on the link between time and space by showing that even motion in non-physical domains can influence temporal reasoning. The results provide further evidence that metaphorical understanding is grounded in our everyday physical and conceptual experience. (shrink)

In clinical lectures given between 1850 and 1852, William Pultney Alison, a senior Edinburgh physician, reflected on whether therapeutic bloodletting could be useful in some cases of pneumonia but harmful in others. If so, Alison reasoned, a change in the form of the disease—a change of type—could explain why therapeutic bloodletting had been nearly abandoned in treating a disease for which, only a few years earlier, it had been the standard therapy. In response, a young pathologist, John Hughes Bennett, denied (...) that anything like a change of type had occurred and insisted that bloodletting had never been an effective therapy. Over the next two decades, more than forty physicians debated the usefulness of bloodletting and the reasons for its decline. This debate, known as the Edinburgh Bloodletting Controversy, has attracted the attention of contemporary historians. Those who have discussed the debate side with Bennett and give Alison little serious attention. I argue that by examining the texts to determine what the issues really were, we can see that Alison may actually have been right. Moreover, this examination illuminates the practice of bloodletting and reveals one hitherto unrecognized factor that contributed to its decline. (shrink)

This book provides a defence of epistemological relativism against its most powerful opponents.

In recent years there has been an upsurge of research aimed at removing the mystery from insight and creative problem solving. The present special issue reflects this expanding field. Overall the papers gathered here converge on a nuanced view of insight and creative thinking as arising from multiple processes that can yield surprising solutions through a mixture of “special” Type 1 processes and “routine” Type 2 processes.

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective (...) autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)

Unlike the principles of Kant, Mill, and Rawls, those of principlism are not action guides that stem from an underlying, integrated moral theory. Hence problems arise in reconciling the principles with each other and, indeed, in interpreting them as action guides at all, since they have no content in and of themselves. Another approach to "theory and method in bioethics" is presented as an alternative to principlism, though actually the "alternative" predates principlism by about 10 years. The alternative's account of (...) morality stays close to ordinary, common morality with its rules and ideals, which in turn are grounded in aspects of human nature. As such, morality must be understood to be a rational, impartial, and public system that is incumbent on everyone. Morality is a unified and integrated system. The moral rules and ideals are also "culture-" and "profession-sensitive" in that they are interpreted more specifically within these various contexts. (shrink)

Recent research in the cognitive science of religion suggests that humans intuitively believe that others survive death. In response to this finding, three cognitive theories have been offered to explain this: the simulation constraint theory (Bering, Citation2002); the imaginative obstacle theory (Nichols, Citation2007); and terror management theory (Pyszczynski, Rothschild, & Abdollahi, 2008). First, I provide a critical analysis of each of these theories. Second, I argue that these theories, while perhaps explaining why one would believe in his own personal immortality, (...) leave an explanatory gap in that they do not explain why one would intuitively attribute survival of death to others. To fill in the gap, I offer a cognitive theory based on offline social reasoning and social embodiment which provides for the belief in an eternal social realm in which the deceased survive—the afterlife. (shrink)

Analyses of biological concepts of disease and social conceptions of health indicate that they are structurally interdependent. This in turn suggests the need for a bridge theory of illness. The main features of such a theory are an emphasis on the logical properties of value terms, close attention to the features of the experience of illness, and an analysis of this experience as action failure, drawing directly on the internal structure of action. The practical applications of this theory are outlined (...) for a number of problems in each of the three main practical areas, clinical work, teaching and research. In each case the resources of the theory suggest new models and generate new results. The full practical significance of the theory, however, is shown to consist in the way in which it ties together biological and social theories into an integrated picture of the conceptual structure of medicine as a whole. It is argued, finally, that practical efficiency of this kind is a test of theory not only in the philosophy of medicine but also in general philosophy. (shrink)

This unique anthology of new, contributed essays offers a range of perspectives on various aspects of ontic vagueness. It seeks to answer core questions pertaining to onticism, the view that vagueness exists in the world itself. The questions to be addressed include whether vague objects must have vague identity, and whether ontic vagueness has a distinctive logic, one that is not shared by semantic or epistemic vagueness. The essays in this volume explain the motivations behind onticism, such as the plausibility (...) of mereological vagueness and indeterminacy in quantum mechanics and they offer various arguments both for and against ontic vagueness; onticism is also compared with other, competing theories of vagueness such as semanticism, the view that vagueness exists only in our linguistic representation of the world. Gareth Evans’s influential paper of 1978, “Can There Be Vague Objects?” gave a simple but cogent argument against the coherence of ontic vagueness. Onticism was subsequently dismissed by many. However, in recent years, researchers have become aware of the logical gaps in Evans’s argument and this has triggered a new wave of interest in onticism. Onticism is now widely regarded as at least a coherent view. Reflecting this growing consensus, the present anthology for the first time puts together essays that are focused on onticism and its various facets and it fills in the lacuna in the literature on vagueness, a much-discussed subject in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

In mirror mark tests dolphins twist, posture, and engage in open-mouth and head movements, often repetitive. Because postures and an open mouth are also dolphin social behaviours, we used self-view television as a manipulatable mirror to distinguish between self-examination and social behavior. Two dolphins were exposed to alternating real-time self-view and playback of the same to determine if they distinguished between them. The adult male engaged in elaborate open-mouth behaviors in mirror mode, but usually just watched when playing back the (...) same material. Mirror mode behavior was also compared to interacting with real dolphins . Mark tests were conducted, as well as switches from front to side self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to the self-view television and turned. The results suggest self-examination over social behavior. (shrink)

This article considers the differential absorption and integration of refugee physicists into various countries during the 1930s, and the social and intellectual factors responsible for this, focusing particularly on the social functions of the British and American university at that period, as well as continuing ideological struggles in the Soviet Union. More generally, the issue of the relative absorption of refugee physicists is used to examine the nature of the physics communities and other institutions of the host societies.

Harris’ reply to our defence of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence’s (NICE) current cost-effectiveness procedures contains two further errors. First, he wrongly draws a conclusion from the fact that NICE does not and cannot evaluate all possible uses of healthcare resources at any one time and generally cannot know which National Health Service (NHS) activities would be displaced or which groups of patients would have to forgo health benefits: the inference is that no estimate is or can be made (...) by NICE of the benefits to be forgone. This is a non-sequitur. Second, he asserts that it is a flaw at the heart of the use of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) as an outcome measure that comparisons between people need to be made. Such comparisons do indeed have to be made, but this is not a consequence of the choice of any particular outcome measure, be it the QALY or anything else. (shrink)

Given Lewis’s views about recombination and spatial relations, there are possible worlds in which space is discrete and yet the Pythagorean theorem is true – contrary to the so-called Weyl-Tile argument that concluded that the Pythagorean theorem must fail if space is discrete.

An Institute of Medical Ethics working party argues that an ethically desirable relationship of mutual empowerment between patient and clinician is more likely to be achieved if patients understand the ground rules of medical confidentiality. It identifies and illustrates ambiguities in the General Medical Council's guidance on AIDS and confidentiality, and relates this to the practice of different doctors and specialties. Matters might be clarified, it suggests, by identifying moral factors which tend to recur in medical decisions about maintaining or (...) breaching confidentiality. The working party argues that two such factors are particularly important: the patient's need to exercise informed choice and the doctor's primary responsibility to his or her own patients. (shrink)

The debate about the moral status of the embryo has gained new impetus because of the advances in reproductive technology that have made early human embryo experimentation a possibility, and because of the public concern that this arouses. Several philosophical arguments claiming that fertilisation is the event that accords moral status to the embryo were initially formulated in the context of the abortion debate. Were they formulated with sufficient precision to account for the scientific facts as we now understand them? (...) Or do these arguments need modification? Aspects of three arguments for moral status being acquired at fertilisation are examined in relation to current scientific knowledge, highlighting the reasons why such arguments, at present, seem to provide an inadequate basis for the determination of moral status. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Past, Present—and Future Perfect?Taking Psychiatry Beyond Its Single Message MythologiesK. W. M. Fulford (bio)I am grateful to John Sadler and his colleagues for their generous invitation to contribute to this collection marking Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology (PPP)'s thirtieth birthday. True to our editorial tradition of "no nonsense" publishing, the "ask" was a reflection on PPP's past, present and future, limited to 500 words. In fact, one word does it (...) for me—collegiality.Collegiality was our watch word from the start. I still treasure a group photo taken at an early pre-meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry (AAPP) convened by Michael Schwartz at his home in 1992, when, among other initiatives, PPP was conceived through transferring our then-nascent journal proposal from a small British publishing house to its current international publisher, the Johns Hopkins University Press. Michael and I had met earlier by phone when he had called the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London to enquire about its recently launched Philosophy Group and (by mere chance) I happened to be standing next to the person who took the call! PPP, with John and myself its founder editors, was subsequently born as, and has remained, a joint venture between our two groups: and Peter Zachar's recent initiative in building closer links with the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP) has taken us an important step towards the vision shared by Michael, John and myself that PPP should grow to reflect and represent a global open society of philosophy and mental health.As a pointer to the future, this global open society was no mere utopian vision but a joint commitment to what we conceived as a necessary ambition. Contemporary disenchantment with the repeated failures of translation of current narrowly empirical models of psychiatry, points to the truth of our German colleague, Paul Hoff's, characterization of the history of psychiatry as a history of serial collapses into single message mythologies. This disenchantment might seem to offer an opportunity for colonial expansion of philosophy into psychiatry (a re-assertion, perhaps, of phenomenology?). But PPP was born out of the "decade of the brain" and has remained throughout an ally of, not competitor to, the neurosciences. [End Page 3] So, while it is true that, with Peter's initiative, and with editorial and other innovations introduced by John, PPP is actively extending its reach (to new areas of philosophy, and to new voices, informed notably by experience as well as by training), this expansion remains a collegial not colonial enlargement of the field. I need hardly point to the challenges presented by the inclusive ambitions of such enlargement (not least to maintaining the highest standards of editorial and peer review). But PPP's collegiality provides the foundation for the work needed to deliver on these challenges. Even if imperfectly realized, this collegiality will help to take us beyond the single message mythologies by which our discipline has too long been hobbled. [End Page 4]K. W. M. Fulford K.W.M. (Bill) Fulford is a Fellow of St Catherine's College and Member of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick Medical School; and Founder Director of the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice, St Catherine's College, Oxford (valuesbasedpractice.org).Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)