Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 140-149.

The 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act aims to promote the use of electronic health records by providing over $27 billion in financial incentives for eligible health care providers who become “meaningful users” of them. The goal of increased “meaningful” electronic health record adoption is to create a more efficient, patient‐centered health care system by lowering providers’ administrative costs, improving coordination of care among multiple providers, and increasing patients’ participation in and responsibility for their own (...) care. Recently published data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics indicate that the HITECH Act's passage has led to a significant increase in electronic health record use among physicians. However, everyone involved in the conversations surrounding the HITECH Act—health care analysts, policy‐makers, and providers alike—must recognize that “meaningful use” of electronic health records can only be authentically meaningful to both clinicians and patients when certain structural issues are also addressed. (shrink)

Not to brag, but I am a hit at parties. I tend to shine in the company of new faces, oftentimes scientists who work with my spouse.

Despite promising early work into the role of immune cells such as eosinophils in adipose tissue (AT) homeostasis, recent findings revealed that elevating the number of eosinophils in AT alone is insufficient for improving metabolic impairments in obese mice. Eosinophils are primarily recognized for their role in allergic immunity and defence against parasitic worms. They have also been detected in AT and appear to contribute to adipose homeostasis and drive energy expenditure, but the underlying mechanisms remain elusive. It has long (...) been recognized that immune cells such as macrophages respond to external signals to regulate adipose homeostasis and energy balance, however, less is known about the relevance of eosinophil activity in AT. As the authors propose in this review, given recent debate over the relative importance of their tissue‐specific abundance, the stage is now set for exploring the functionality and activation states of AT eosinophils. (shrink)

Roots present first‐hand accounts of discoveries in genetics, molecular biology, cellular biology, and developmental biology. In the following article, Murray L. Barr describes the background to and the events surrounding the discovery of the cytogenetic evidence for inactive × chromosomes in mammals. In the accompanying article, Michael W. McBurney reviews current molecular knowledge about the inactive × and proposes a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) contend that mandated choice is the most practical nudge for increasing organ donation. We argue that they are wrong, and their mistake results from failing to appreciate how perceptions of meaning can influence people's responses to nudges. We favor a policy of default to donation that is subject to immediate family veto power, includes options for people to opt out (and be educated on how to do so), and emphasizes the role of organ procurement (...) organizations and in-house transplant donation coordinators creating better environments for increasing the supply of organs and tissues obtained from cadavers. This policy will provide better opportunities for offering nudges in contexts where in-house coordinators work with families. We conclude by arguing that nudges can be introduced ethically and effectively into these contexts only if nudge designers collaborate with in-house coordinators and stakeholders. (shrink)

Pietraszewski asserts that social psychological research on groups is too vague, tautological, and dependent on intuitions to be theoretically useful. We disagree. Pietraszewski's contribution is thought-provoking but also incomplete and guilty of many of the faults he attributes to others. Instead of rototilling the existing knowledge landscape, we urge for more integration of new and old ideas.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 160-162.

This chapter suggests that descriptive epidemiological studies like the Global Burden of Disease Study can usefully be divided into four tasks: describing individuals’ health states over time, assessing their health states under a range of counterfactual scenarios, summarizing the information collected, and then packaging it for presentation. The authors show that each of these tasks raises important and challenging ethical questions. They comment on some of the philosophical issues involved in measuring health states, attributing causes to health outcomes, choosing the (...) counterfactual against which to assess causes, aggregating and summarizing complex information across multiple domains, discounting, age-weighting, handling fetal deaths, measuring health inequalities, representing uncertainty, and assessing personal responsibility for health outcomes. (shrink)

The English term religion is used to refer to local Christian churches, their organizations, and their practices. Nevertheless, Western anthropologists have tried to utilize it as if it were a technical term with universal applicability. Anthropologists have sought to characterize religion by several dichotomies, although their own field researches have revealed the irrelevance of such dichotomies as well as the fact that non‐Western peoples do not recognize an entity equivalent to religion. Were the characteristics used by anthropologists in defining religion (...) precisely applied to Western societies, then several other kinds of organizations, ceremonials, and practices would have as much, or even greater, claim to being included within the rubric of religion as the Christian and allied churches. The consequence of this conceptual imprecision has been the theoretical stagnation noted by eminent theorists. (shrink)

Disclosure of financial interests in scientific research is the centerpiece of the new conflict of interest regulations issued by the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Science Foundation that became effective October 1, 1995. Several scientific journals have also established financial disclosure requirements for contributors. This paper measures the frequency of selected financial interests held among authors of certain types of scientific publications and assesses disclosure practices of authors. We examined 1105 university authors (first and last cited) from Massachusetts (...) institutions whose 789 articles, published in 1992, appeared in 14 scientific and medical journals. (shrink)

Higher education institutions are mining and analyzing student data to effect educational, political, and managerial outcomes. Done under the banner of “learning analytics,” this work can—and often does—surface sensitive data and information about, inter alia, a student’s demographics, academic performance, offline and online movements, physical fitness, mental wellbeing, and social network. With these data, institutions and third parties are able to describe student life, predict future behaviors, and intervene to address academic or other barriers to student success (however defined). Learning (...) analytics, consequently, raise serious issues concerning student privacy, autonomy, and the appropriate flow of student data. We argue that issues around privacy lead to valid questions about the degree to which students should trust their institution to use learning analytics data and other artifacts (algorithms, predictive scores) with their interests in mind. We argue that higher education institutions are paradigms of information fiduciaries. As such, colleges and universities have a special responsibility to their students. In this article, we use the information fiduciary concept to analyze cases when learning analytics violate an institution’s responsibility to its students. (shrink)

We raise two objections to Slote’s article. First, empathy cannot provide information about the world in the direct way Slote proposes. Emotional contagion might be able to do so, but this type of process is different from the empathic one. Second, even if we accept his view of empathy, his claim that we make moral judgments via empathizing with the ‘warmth’ or ‘coldness’ of the actor seems misguided because, we usually empathize with the patient, and we empathize with emotions, not (...) “temperatures”. (shrink)

In recent years, educational institutions have started using the tools of commercial data analytics in higher education. By gathering information about students as they navigate campus information systems, learning analytics “uses analytic techniques to help target instructional, curricular, and support resources” to examine student learning behaviors and change students’ learning environments. As a result, the information educators and educational institutions have at their disposal is no longer demarcated by course content and assessments, and old boundaries between information used for assessment (...) and information about how students live and work are blurring. Our goal in this paper is to provide a systematic discussion of the ways in which privacy and learning analytics conflict and to provide a framework for understanding those conflicts. -/- We argue that there are five crucial issues about student privacy that we must address in order to ensure that whatever the laudable goals and gains of learning analytics, they are commensurate with respecting students’ privacy and associated rights, including (but not limited to) autonomy interests. First, we argue that we must distinguish among different entities with respect to whom students have, or lack, privacy. Second, we argue that we need clear criteria for what information may justifiably be collected in the name of learning analytics. Third, we need to address whether purported consequences of learning analytics (e.g., better learning outcomes) are justified and what the distributions of those consequences are. Fourth, we argue that regardless of how robust the benefits of learning analytics turn out to be, students have important autonomy interests in how information about them is collected. Finally, we argue that it is an open question whether the goods that justify higher education are advanced by learning analytics, or whether collection of information actually runs counter to those goods. (shrink)

There is a nationwide resurgence of tuberculosis in the country’s urban centers; New York City stands at the forefront of this resurgence. The root causes are increased homelessness, drug addiction and poverty, all symbols of deteriorating social and economic conditions in the city. The inadequate level of public health resources devoted to TB has also contributed to its spread. Still, even with these factors, it is questionable whether the escalating number of TB cases in this country would have occurred without (...) the reservoir of immunosuppressed persons, who are less resistant to the disease, created by the AIDS epidemic. The fear and urgency of this public health crisis, which has been emerging since the beginning of the last decade, are fueled by the rise of TB strains resistant to the first-line drugs and by the disease’s contagiousness. (shrink)

“Big Data” and data analytics affect all of us. Data collection, analysis, and use on a large scale is an important and growing part of commerce, governance, communication, law enforcement, security, finance, medicine, and research. And the theme of this symposium, “Individual and Informational Privacy in the Age of Big Data,” is expansive; we could have long and fruitful discussions about practices, laws, and concerns in any of these domains. But a big part of the audience for this symposium is (...) students and faculty in higher education institutions (HEIs), and the subject of this paper is data analytics in our own backyards. Higher education learning analytics (LA) is something that most of us involved in this symposium are familiar with. Students have encountered LA in their courses, in their interactions with their law school or with their undergraduate institutions, instructors use systems that collect information about their students, and administrators use information to help understand and steer their institutions. More importantly, though, data analytics in higher education is something that those of us participating in the symposium can actually control. Students can put pressure on administrators, and faculty often participate in university governance. Moreover, the systems in place in HEIs are more easily comprehensible to many of us because we work with them on a day-to-day basis. Students use systems as part of their course work, in their residences, in their libraries, and elsewhere. Faculty deploy course management systems (CMS) such as Desire2Learn, Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas to structure their courses, and administrators use information gleaned from analytics systems to make operational decisions. If we (the participants in the symposium) indeed care about Individual and Informational Privacy in the Age of Big Data, the topic of this paper is a pretty good place to hone our thinking and put into practice our ideas. (shrink)

There is a nationwide resurgence of tuberculosis in the country’s urban centers; New York City stands at the forefront of this resurgence. The root causes are increased homelessness, drug addiction and poverty, all symbols of deteriorating social and economic conditions in the city. The inadequate level of public health resources devoted to TB has also contributed to its spread. Still, even with these factors, it is questionable whether the escalating number of TB cases in this country would have occurred without (...) the reservoir of immunosuppressed persons, who are less resistant to the disease, created by the AIDS epidemic. The fear and urgency of this public health crisis, which has been emerging since the beginning of the last decade, are fueled by the rise of TB strains resistant to the first-line drugs and by the disease’s contagiousness. (shrink)

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self‐assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the design evolves in an essentially random fashion or according to an overall heuristic. The results indicated a macrostructure in the evolution of the design, characterized by two (...) stages. For the majority of participants, the first stage is marked by the introduction and modification of novel objects and their local and global aspects; the second stage is characterized by changes in their global composition. The minority that showed the better designs has a different strategy, in which most global changes were made in the beginning. Although participants did not consciously apply these strategies, their self‐assessment scores reflect the stages of the process. (shrink)

There is increasing concern about “surveillance capitalism,” whereby for-profit companies generate value from data, while individuals are unable to resist (Zuboff 2019). Non-profits using data-enabled surveillance receive less attention. Higher education institutions (HEIs) have embraced data analytics, but the wide latitude that private, profit-oriented enterprises have to collect data is inappropriate. HEIs have a fiduciary relationship to students, not a narrowly transactional one (see Jones et al, forthcoming). They are responsible for facets of student life beyond education. In addition to (...) classrooms, learning management systems, and libraries, HEIs manage dormitories, gyms, dining halls, health facilities, career advising, police departments, and student employment. HEIs collect and use student data in all of these domains, ostensibly to understand learner behaviors and contexts, improve learning outcomes, and increase institutional efficiency through “learning analytics” (LA). ID card swipes and Wi-Fi log-ins can track student location, class attendance, use of campus facilities, eating habits, and friend groups. Course management systems capture how students interact with readings, video lectures, and discussion boards. Application materials provide demographic information. These data are used to identify students needing support, predict enrollment demands, and target recruiting efforts. These are laudable aims. However, current LA practices may be inconsistent with HEIs’ fiduciary responsibilities. HEIs often justify LA as advancing student interests, but some projects advance primarily organizational welfare and institutional interests. Moreover, LA advances a narrow conception of student interests while discounting privacy and autonomy. Students are generally unaware of the information collected, do not provide meaningful consent, and express discomfort and resigned acceptance about HEI data practices, especially for non-academic data (see Jones et al. forthcoming). The breadth and depth of student information available, combined with their fiduciary responsibility, create a duty that HEIs exercise substantial restraint and rigorous evaluation in data collection and use. (shrink)

Ethical consumption is on the rise, however little is known about the degree and the implications of the sometime conflicting sets of values held by the broad category of consumers who report consuming ethically. This paper explores convergence and divergence of ethical consumption values through a study of organic, fair trade, and local food consumers in Colorado. Using survey and focus group results, we first examine demographic and attitudinal correlates of ethical consumption. We then report evidence that while many organic, (...) fair trade, and local food consumers converge around similar values, some Colorado consumers support only local food, while opposing the consumption of organic and fair trade products. Next, we investigate how ethical consumers who converge and diverge frame their commitment to consuming ethically. The discussion and conclusion suggest that community development planners of projects that focus on ethical consumption will need to successfully traverse issues stemming from convergence and divergence to enjoy long-term sustained success. (shrink)

Strategies to address misinformation and hesitancy about vaccines, including the fear of needles, and to overcome obstacles to access, such as the refrigeration that some vaccines demand, strongly suggest the need to develop new vaccine delivery technologies. But, given widespread distrust surrounding vaccination, these new technologies must be introduced to the public with the utmost transparency, care, and community involvement. Two emerging technologies, one a skin‐patch vaccine and the other a companion dye and detector, provide excellent examples of greatly improved (...) delivery technologies for which such a careful approach should be developed in order to increase vaccine uptake. Defusing fears and conspiracy mongering must be a key part of their rollout. (shrink)