Developing a care plan in a critical care context can be challenging when the therapeutic alliance between clinicians and families is compromised by anger. When these cases occur, clinicians often turn to clinical ethics consultants to assist them with repairing this alliance before further damage can occur. This paper describes five different reasons family members may feel and express anger and offers concrete strategies for clinical ethics consultants to use when working with angry families acting as surrogate decision makers for (...) critical care patients. We reviewed records of consults using thematic analysis between January 2015 and June 2016. Each case was coded to identify whether the case involved a negative encounter with an angry family. In our review, we selected 11 cases with at least one of the following concerns or reasons for anger: perceived or actual medical error, concerns about the medical team’s competence, miscommunication, perceived conflict of interest or commitment, or loss of control. To successfully implement these strategies, clinical ethics consultants, members of the medical team, and family members should share responsibility for creating a mutually respectful relationship. (shrink)

Attentional control theory suggests that high cognitive demands impair the flexible deployment of attention control in anxious adults, particularly when paired with external threats. Extending this...

In this article, we consider infants’ acquisition of foundational aspects of language and emotion through the lens of statistical learning. By taking a comparative developmental approach, we highlight ways in which the learning problems presented by input from these two rich communicative domains are both similar and different. Our goal is to encourage other scholars to consider multiple domains of human experience when developing theories in developmental cognitive science.

This rich and varied collection of essays addresses some of the most fundamental human questions through the lenses of philosophy, literature, religion, politics, and theology. Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey have fashioned an interdisciplinary consideration of such perennial and enduring issues as the relationship between nature and history, nature and grace, reason and revelation, classical philosophy and Christianity, modernity and postmodernity, repentance and self-limitation, and philosophy and politics.

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

L R Perry; Training and Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 6, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 7–29, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1972.tb00.

Philosophers of experiment have acknowledged that experiments are often more than mere hypothesis-tests, once thought to be an experiment's exclusive calling. Drawing on examples from contemporary biology, I make an additional amendment to our understanding of experiment by examining the way that `wide' instrumentation can, for reasons of efficiency, lead scientists away from traditional hypothesis-directed methods of experimentation and towards exploratory methods.

Social conditions of race and class continue to combine in ways that raise systemic questions about the adequacy and legitimacy of liberal, capitalist democracy in America. More radical alternatives, however, are still generally held to be irrelevant in the American context. The following is an effort to correct this widespread misrepresentation of socialism’s relevance to America generally, and to matters of race in particular. I consider the work of C.L.R. James who, fifty years ago, developed a class-oriented, explicitly Marxist theory (...) in which the aspirations and struggles of African-Americans were given a central place, both analytically and politically. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of species have focused on multicellular, sexual animals and have often neglected to consider unicellular organisms like bacteria. This article begins to fill this gap by considering what species concepts, if any, apply neatly to the bacterial world. First, I argue that the biological species concept cannot be applied to bacteria because of the variable rates of genetic transfer between populations, depending in part on which gene type is prioritized. Second, I present a critique of phylogenetic bacterial species, (...) arguing that phylogenetic bacterial classification requires a questionable metaphysical commitment to the existence of essential genes. I conclude by considering how microbiologists have dealt with these biological complexities by using more pragmatic and not exclusively evolutionary accounts of species. I argue that this pragmatism is not borne of laziness but rather of the substantial conceptual problems in classifying bacteria based on any evolutionary standard. (shrink)

George Christopher Stead's aim, throughout his scholarly work, was to lay bare and explain. He was very good at it, as this first piece in 1961 shows. It is a fine example of Stead's mature thinking. All the features that distinguish his work and made it fresh at the time are apparent here: clarity and directness, thoroughness of research, a gift for illustration of a technical point of logic from plain examples; and the, perhaps most noticeable, sign of an essay (...) on some patristic theme's being his very own–the presence in it of critical appraisal. Though Stead was, sometimes and in other contexts, to voice sharply destructive criticism, his appraisals are usually conducted, as in this first essay, so that sympathy with the ancient writer is preserved. (shrink)

The third edition gives particular attention to neuroimaging, which has emerged in the past decade as one of the most active areas of research in the field.

Apart from the predictable end-of-the-century tendency to look backwards in time, it is not surprising that much commentary on contemporary American politics has taken on a reflective tone as we approach the end of the 20th century. Unresolved issues of race, class, and culture continue to raise fundamental questions about the legitimacy and functioning of modern liberalism. This is as true today as it was at the beginning of the century when the capitalist social order took on its characteristically modern (...) form in America. Thus, one finds increasing numbers of contemporary academics and activists struggling to understand from whence we have come so as to provide insight and guidance for the future. (shrink)

Objective: To explore the accounts and perspectives of junior doctors who were offered an HIV test by their employing National Health Service (NHS) trust and discuss ethical issues posed by this new policy. Design: Qualitative in-depth interview study. Setting: 4 NHS hospital trusts. Participants: 24 junior doctors who had been offered an HIV test as part of their pre-employment occupational health checks. Results: The manner in which HIV tests were offered to junior doctors varied both between and within the NHS (...) trusts. Overall, the doctors were highly critical of the way the HIV test was offered. Recurrent themes surrounding a lack of discussion and information regarding the indications for the test and implications of a positive result influenced the the doctors’ perception of their experiences. As a consequence of the shortcomings of how the test was offered, most of the doctors held the misperception that HIV testing was mandatory and many felt unable to decline the test. The majority of doctors referred to patient protection as adequate justification for being offered an HIV test. Conclusions: Junior doctors offered an HIV test under new Department of Health occupational health guidance were disparaging about how the test was offered. The findings of this study affect thousands of junior doctors in the UK, and the impact of these results is extensive. Participants’ suggestions regarding how the process of offering an HIV test can be improved are discussed and ethical issues regarding the new Department of Health policy are highlighted. (shrink)

After summarizing my own views of 'I' and the first-person perspective, I consider a well-known autistic, Temple Grandin, who claims that she thinks only in pictures, not in language. I argue, to the contrary, that Grandin's mental life as she describes it in fact requires language, which, as a writer, she undoubtedly has. Finally, I turn to the question of whether thought as Temple Grandin describes it is independent of language.

In this book, Mark Rowlands challenges the Cartesian view of the mind as a self-contained monadic entity, and offers in its place a radical externalist or environmentalist model of cognitive processes. Drawing on both evolutionary theory and a detailed examination of the processes involved in perception, memory, thought and language use, Rowlands argues that cognition is, in part, a process whereby creatures manipulate and exploit relevant objects in their environment. This innovative book provides a foundation for an unorthodox but increasingly (...) popular view of the nature of cognition. (shrink)