Although informed consent is important in clinical research, questions persist regarding when it is necessary, what it requires, and how it should be obtained. The standard view in research ethics is that the function of informed consent is to respect individual autonomy. However, consent processes are multidimensional and serve other ethical functions as well. These functions deserve particular attention when barriers to consent exist. We argue that consent serves seven ethically important and conceptually distinct functions. The first four functions pertain (...) principally to individual participants: (1) providing transparency; (2) allowing control and authorization; (3) promoting concordance with participants' values; and (4) protecting and promoting welfare interests. Three other functions are systemic or policy focused: (5) promoting trust; (6) satisfying regulatory requirements; and (7) promoting integrity in research. Reframing consent around these functions can guide approaches to consent that are context sensitive and that maximize achievable goals. (shrink)

Two experiments examined how affective values from visual and auditory modalities are integrated. Experiment 1 paired music and videos drawn from three levels of valence while holding arousal constant. Experiment 2 included a parallel combination of three levels of arousal while holding valence constant. In each experiment, participants rated their affective states after unimodal and multimodal presentations. Experiment 1 revealed a congruency effect in which stimulus combinations of the same extreme valence resulted in more extreme state ratings than component stimuli (...) presented in isolation. An interaction between music and video valence reflected the greater influence of negative affect. Video valence was found to have a significantly greater effect on combined ratings than music valence. The pattern of data was explained by a five parameter differential weight averaging model that attributed greater weight to the visual modality and increased weight with decreasing values of valence. Experiment 2 revealed a congruency effect only for high arousal combinations and no interaction effects. This pattern was explained by a three parameter constant weight averaging model with greater weight for the auditory modality and a very low arousal value for the initial state. These results demonstrate key differences in audiovisual integration between valence and arousal. (shrink)

It is shown that the jet mechanism derivable from the Lorentz deformation picture leads to a nearly constant average jet transverse momentum. It is pointed out that this is consistent with the high-energy experimental data. It is pointed out further that this result strengthens the physical basis for the minimal time-energy uncertainty combined covariantly with Heisenberg's space-momentum uncertainty relation.

Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge is (...) to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

Modern longitudinal studies collect feature data at many timepoints, often of the same order of sample size. Such studies are typically affected by dropout and positivity violations. We tackle these problems by generalizing effects of recent incremental interventions to accommodate multiple outcomes and subject dropout. We give an identifying expression for incremental intervention effects when dropout is conditionally ignorable and derive the nonparametric efficiency bound for estimating such effects. Then we present efficient nonparametric estimators, showing that they converge at fast (...) parametric rates and yield uniform inferential guarantees, even when nuisance functions are estimated flexibly at slower rates. We also study the variance ratio of incremental intervention effects relative to more conventional deterministic effects in a novel infinite time horizon setting, where the number of timepoints can grow with sample size and show that incremental intervention effects yield near-exponential gains in statistical precision in this setup. Finally, we conclude with simulations and apply our methods in a study of the effect of low-dose aspirin on pregnancy outcomes. (shrink)

In 2022, students at North American universities with third-dose COVID-19 vaccine mandates risk disenrolment if unvaccinated. To assess the appropriateness of booster mandates in this age group, we combine empirical risk-benefit assessment and ethical analysis. To prevent one COVID-19 hospitalisation over a 6-month period, we estimate that 31 207–42 836 young adults aged 18–29 years must receive a third mRNA vaccine. Booster mandates in young adults are expected to cause a net harm: per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least (...) 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation). We also anticipate 1430–4626 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity interfering with daily activities (although typically not requiring hospitalisation). University booster mandates are unethical because they: (1) are not based on an updated (Omicron era) stratified risk-benefit assessment for this age group; (2) may result in a net harm to healthy young adults; (3) are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission; (4) violate the reciprocity principle because serious vaccine-related harms are not reliably compensated due to gaps in vaccine injury schemes; and (5) may result in wider social harms. We consider counterarguments including efforts to increase safety on campus but find these are fraught with limitations and little scientific support. Finally, we discuss the policy relevance of our analysis for primary series COVID-19 vaccine mandates. (shrink)

George Herbert Mead's lectures at the University of Chicago are more important to understanding Mead's views on social psychology than some commentators, such as Hans Joas, have emphasized. Mead's 1898-99 lecture series, preserved through the notes of his student H. Heath Bawden, demonstrate his devotion to Hegelianism as a method of thinking and how this influenced his non-reductive approach to functionalist psychology. In addition, Mead's breadth of historical knowledge and his commitments in the natural and social sciences are on display (...) here, culminating in the Darwinian observation that human animals only achieve the degree of control they have over their environment by the achievement of social organization. (shrink)

This article tracks Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as an emergent organizational process that places the employee at its center. Predominantly, research on CSR tends to focus on external pressures and outcomes leading to a neglect of CSR as a dynamic and developing process that relies on the involvement of the employee as a major stakeholder in its co-creation and implementation. Utilizing case study data drawn from a study of a large multinational energy company, we explore how management relies on employees' (...) interaction with CSR as the process of initiation → implementation → maturation develops. Employee involvement grows from a minor element in the CSR initiation stage to a vital contributory factor in CSR's success in the later stages of the process. The article offers new insights into a processual and interactional approach to CSR that accounts for the actions of different actors involved at each stage. Most unusually, it also recognizes the dual impact this has on broader issues concerning the management and involvement of employees through CSR actions, and gaining legitimacy in the eyes of not only external stakeholders but internal too. (shrink)

The language $L_A(\Finv)$ is formed by adding the quantifier $\Finv x$ , "few x", to the infinitary logic L A on an admissible set A. A complete axiomatization is obtained for models whose universe is the set of ordinals of A and where $\Finv x$ is interpreted as there exist A-finitely many x. For well-behaved A, every consistent sentence has a model with an A-recursive diagram. A principal tool is forcing for $L_A(\Finv)$.

"This book offers a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on Catholic universities and on Augustine of Hippo, engaging in "Augustinian inquiry" and pointing to possibilities for renewal in liberal education in the twenty-first century."--BOOK JACKET.

The language $L_A$ is formed by adding the quantifier $\Finv x$ , "few x", to the infinitary logic L A on an admissible set A. A complete axiomatization is obtained for models whose universe is the set of ordinals of A and where $\Finv x$ is interpreted as there exist A-finitely many x. For well-behaved A, every consistent sentence has a model with an A-recursive diagram. A principal tool is forcing for $L_A$.

The spatial dynamics of the optical emission from an array of 50 times 50 individual microcavity plasma devices is investigated. The array is operated in argon and argon-neon mixtures close to atmospheric pressure with an ac voltage. The optical emission is analysed with phase and space resolution. It has been found that the emission is not continuous over the entire ac period, but occurs once per half period. Each of the observed emission phases shows a self-pulsing of the discharge, with (...) several bursts of emission of fixed width and repetition rate. The number of emission bursts depends on applied voltage and frequency. Spatially resolved measurements prove that the emission bursts are formed by overlapping emission pulses from single discharge cavities. Intensity differences between positive and negative half-wave can be interpreted through spatially resolved measurements of single discharge cavities. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility involvement and disclosure has been becoming increasingly popular among US public firms, including those that qualify as real estate investment trusts. This paper aims to discover the relationship between CSR involvement and potential determinants such as growth opportunities, profitability, visibility, and agency costs. Types of CSR involvement are assessed in terms of environmental, community, and governance disclosures and are quantified using word count from the company’s voluntary disclosure. Our results support the hypothesis that CSR has a strategic (...) element and that REITs have greater CSR involvement when they have greater growth and investment opportunities. When the type of disclosure is broken into subcategories, the results show that not all dimensions of CSR are alike: environmental, community, and governance CSR disclosures appear to be motivated by different sets of incentives and reasons. (shrink)

Philosophical orthodoxy holds that pains are mental states, taking this to reflect the ordinary conception of pain. Despite this, evidence is mounting that English speakers do not tend to conceptualize pains in this way; rather, they tend to treat pains as being bodily states. We hypothesize that this is driven by two primary factors—the phenomenology of feeling pains and the surface grammar of pain reports. There is reason to expect that neither of these factors is culturally specific, however, and thus (...) reason to expect that the empirical findings for English speakers will generalize to other cultures and other languages. In this article we begin to test this hypothesis, reporting the results of two cross-cultural studies comparing judgments about the location of referred pains between two groups—Americans and South Koreans—that we might otherwise expect to differ in how they understand pains. In line with our predictions, we find that both groups tend to conceive of pains as bodily states. (shrink)

In the maximal form of indirect development found in many taxa of marine invertebrates, embryonic cell lineages of fixed fate and limited division capacity give rise to the larval structures. The adult arises from set‐aside cells in the larva that are held out from the early embryonic specification processes, and that retain extensive proliferative capacity. We review the locations and fates of set‐aside cells in two protostomes, a lophophorate and a deuterostome. The distinct adult body plans of many phyla develop (...) from homologous set‐aside cells within homologous larvae. We argue that the stocks from which these phyla arose utilized these respective larvae, and the diversity of their adult body plans reflects diverse pattern formation processes executed in their set‐aside cell populations. Chordates and arthropods develop directly, but share adult characters with indirectly developing phyla. Thus the deuterostome and protostome stocks that were ancestral to chordates and arthropods, respectively, also utilized maximal indirect development. (shrink)