In the visual representation of ontologies, in particular of part-whole relationships, it is customary to use graph theory as the representational background. We claim here that the standard graph-based approach has a number of limitations, and we propose instead a new representation of part-whole structures for ontologies, and describe the results of experiments designed to show the effectiveness of this new proposal especially as concerns reduction of visual complexity. The proposal is developed to serve visualization of ontologies conformant to the (...) Basic Formal Ontology. But it can be used also for more general applications, particularly in the biomedical domain. (shrink)

Wright’s “adaptive landscape” has been influential in evolutionary thinking but controversial, especially because the landscape that organisms encounter is altered by the evolutionary process itsel...

Conflict over who belongs in women-only spaces is now part of mainstream political debate. Some think women-only spaces should exclude on the basis of sex, and others think they should exclude on the basis of a person’s self-determined gender identity. Many who take the latter view appear to believe that the only reason for taking the former view could be antipathy towards men who identify as women. In this paper, we’ll revisit the second-wave feminist literature on separatism, in order to (...) uncover the reasons for women-only spaces as feminists originally conceived them. Once these reasons are understood, those participating in debates over women-only spaces will be in a better position to adjudicate on whether shifting from sex to gender identity puts any significant interests at stake. (shrink)

Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects—such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes—or, as they are known in biology, “model systems.” Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that (...) have played a role comparable to that of biology’s model systems, serving not only as points of reference and illustrations of general principles or values but also as sites of continued investigation and reinterpretation. The essays in this collection assess the scope and function of model objects in domains as diverse as biology, geology, and history, attending to differences between fields as well as to epistemological commonalities. Contributors examine the role of the fruit fly Drosophila and nematode worms in biology, troops of baboons in primatology, box and digital simulations of the movement of the earth’s crust in geology, and meteorological models in climatology. They analyze the intensive study of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, ritual in anthropology, the individual case in psychoanalytic research, and Athenian democracy in political theory. The contributors illuminate the processes through which particular organisms, cases, materials, or narratives become foundational to their fields, and they examine how these foundational exemplars—from the fruit fly to Freud’s Dora—shape the knowledge produced within their disciplines. Contributors Rachel A. Ankeny Angela N. H. Creager Amy Dahan Dalmedico John Forrester Clifford Geertz Carlo Ginzburg E. Jane Albert Hubbard Elizabeth Lunbeck Mary S. Morgan Josiah Ober Naomi Oreskes Susan Sperling Marcel Weber M. Norton Wise. (shrink)

This paper applies Plato’s cave allegory to Enron’s success and downfall. Plato’s famous tale of cave dwellers illustrates the different levels of truth and understanding. These levels include images, the sources of images, and the ultimate reality behind both. The paper first describes these levels of perception as they apply to Plato’s cave dwellers and then provides a brief history of the rise of Enron. Then we apply Plato’s levels of understanding to Enron, showing how the company created its image (...) and presented information to support that image, and how the public eventually emerged from the cave to realize the truth about Enron’s actual accounting practices and financial state, which led to the corporation’s downfall. We find Plato’s allegory both useful in analyzing the relationship between Enron and the public and instructive about the power and moral responsibility of Enron’s executives. (shrink)

The compelling case that Anderson makes for neural reuse and against modularity as organizing principle of the brain is further supported by evidence from developmental disorders. However, to provide a full evolutionary-developmental theory of neural reuse that encompasses both typical and atypical development, Anderson's (MRH) could be further constrained by considering brain development across ontogeny.

Studying via the Internet using information tools is a common activity for students in higher education. With students accessing their subject material via the Internet, studies have shown that students have difficulty understanding the complete purpose of an assessment which leads to poor information search practices. The selection of relevant information for particular learning assessments is the topic of this paper as it describes a case study that focuses on the information tool use of a small group of participants and (...) is a continuation of similar research studies. The study and discussed research findings point to the benefit of students use of a visualisation tool to provide relevant learning cues and to transition to improved engagement with online assessment. (shrink)

In this study, we examined moral issues and gender differences in ethical judgment using Reidenbach and Robin’s [Journal of Business Ethics9 (1990) 639) multidimensional ethics scale (MES). A total of 340 undergraduate students were asked to provide ethical judgment by rating three moral issues in the MES labeled: ‚sales’, ‚auto’, and ‚retail’ using three ethics theories: moral equity, relativism, and contractualism. We found that female students’ ratings of ethical judgment were consistently higher than that of male students across two out (...) of three moral issues examined (i.e., sales and retails) and ethics theories; providing support for Eagly’s [1987, Sex Differences in Social Behavior: A Social-role Interpretation. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, Hillsdale, NJ, England)] social role theory. After controlling for moral issues, women’s higher ratings of ethical judgment over men’s became statistically non-significant. Theoretical and practical implications based on the study’s findings are provided. (shrink)

Capacities for abstract thinking and problem‐solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and brains, they may in fact be contingent on human‐specific modes of collaboration, dialogue, and shared attention. In an experimental study, we test the hypothesis that social interaction enhances cognitive processes of rule‐induction, which in (...) turn improves problem‐solving performance. Through three sessions of increasing complexity, individuals and groups were presented with a problem‐solving task requiring them to categorize a set of visual stimuli. To assess the character of participants’ problem representations, after each training session, they were presented with a transfer task involving stimuli that differed in appearance, but shared relations among features with the training set. Besides, we compared participants’ categorization behaviors to simulated agents relying on exemplar learning. We found that groups performed superior to individuals and agents in the training sessions and were more likely to correctly generalize their observations in the transfer phase, especially in the high complexity session, suggesting that groups more effectively induced underlying categorization rules from the stimuli than individuals and agents. Crucially, variation in performance among groups was predicted by semantic diversity in members’ dialogical contributions, suggesting a link between social interaction, cognitive diversity, and abstraction. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

In the graphical representation of ontologies, it is customary to use graph theory as the representational background. We claim here that the standard graph-based approach has a number of limitations. We focus here on a problem in the graph-based representation of ontologies in complex domains such as biomedical, engineering and manufacturing: lack of mereotopological representation. Based on such limitation, we proposed a diagrammatic way to represent an entity’s structure and various forms of mereotopological relationships between the entities.

As disparities and data science researchers, we write in response to Char and colleagues paper on “Identifying Ethical Considerations for Machine Learning Healthcare Applications.” While the...

Categorization and decision making are combined in a task with photorealistic faces. Two different types of face stimuli were assigned probabilistically into one of two fictitious groups; based on the category, faces were further probabilistically assigned to be hostile or friendly. In Part I, participants are asked to categorize a face into one of two categories, and to make a decision concerning interaction. A Markov model of categorization followed by decision making provides reasonable fits to Part I data. A Markov (...) model predicting decision making followed by categorization is rejected. In Part II, a no-parameter model predicts decisions using categorization and decision responses collected in separate trials, suggesting that Part 1 results are not an artifact of the presentation of categorization and decision questions within a single trial. Decisions concerning interaction appear to be based on information from the category decision, and not from the face stimuli alone. (shrink)

This article is part of a For-Discussion-Section of Methods of Information in Medicine about the paper "Biomedical Informatics: We Are What We Publish", written by Peter L. Elkin, Steven H. Brown, and Graham Wright. It is introduced by an editorial. This article contains the combined commentaries invited to independently comment on the Elkin et al. paper. In subsequent issues the discussion can continue through letters to the editor.

In this study, we explored student team debates as a tool in teaching a business ethics course using a sample of upper level undergraduate business students enrolled in two sections of a business ethics course in the U.S. Eight teams each consisting of 4-5 students debated four topics throughout the spring semester of 2016. Their oral arguments were evaluated in the classroom by their non-debating peers. Results showed that after watching the debates, non-debating students changed their position on three out (...) of four debate issues. Further, we found that non-debating students discounted their political orientation in judging which team won the debate. We offer a discussion and implications on teaching business ethics using team debates. (shrink)

First in-depth analysis of engineers working in resource extraction, focusing particularly on those who viewed social responsibility as fundamental to their profession.

Losing an arm to rescue a child from a burning building is supererogatory. But is losing an arm to save two children more supererogatory than losing two arms to save a single child? What factors make one act more supererogatory than another? I provide an innovative account of how to compare which of two acts is more supererogatory, and show the superiority of this account to its chief rival.

An examination of the unconscious as it relates to popular music and the first truly interdisciplinary book on philosophy and popular music with equal weight given to each discipline.

This book is a joint effort of like-minded researchers to define the concept of process within a psychological setting. Although minor differences exist as regards choice of background theory, their common focus is on personality in a broad psychodynamic context. Their definition of personality rests on a series of test instruments that have been validated during decades of thorough and vigorous empirical work. These were originally designed to open up micro-processes underlying the adaptation to or construction of reality, and have (...) subsequently proven diagnostically efficient. Coming from both sides of the Atlantic, the contributors have their background in psychological as well as medical institutions. The contributions in the book are examples of a vital source sustaining our efforts to get a more profound understanding of the vicissitudes of the human mind. (shrink)

This thought-provoking book examines the science behind human attractiveness—the ratios, proportions, and other factors that to a large extent dictate what we find "beautiful." It's said that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," but recent scientific research suggests that human attractiveness is much more objective than we once thought, deeply rooted in our biology and evolutionary history. For instance, facial symmetry is considered extremely attractive because it indicates good health and nutrition during the formative developmental years. This book (...) explores these insights. Part I of The Biology of Beauty: The Science behind Human Attractiveness takes a closer look at what traits we find the most alluring and why. It discusses why attractiveness is important from an evolutionary standpoint and the advantages (and disadvantages) of being attractive. In addition to exploring these beauty "universals," it examines how beauty ideals can be shaped by factors such as culture, religion, and the media. Part II provides an in-depth analysis of individual features that contribute to attractiveness, offering scientific explanations for our preferences. The book also includes a collection of insightful sidebars that highlight beauty ideals in different parts of the world and at other times in history. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that the gradual emergence of the modern nation-state is associated with intensified interest in the government of childhood. Grounded in the Foucauldian literature on governmentality and drawing on a broad range of disciplines, this book examines the government of childhood in the West from the early modern period to the present. The book deals with three key time periods, examining shifts in the conceptualization and regulation of childhood and child-rearing between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth (...) century; between the late eighteenth century and the mid/late twentieth century and the period from the late twentieth century to the present day. Building on the work of Chris Jenks, The Government of Childhood deploys the images of the Dionysian and Apollonian images of childhood as symbolic targets of power/knowledge and presents a third model - the Athenian child - as a symbolic target of modes of exercising power over the young that is grounded in children's capacity for agency. (shrink)

Morality is often defined in opposition to the natural "instincts," or as a tool to keep those instincts in check. New findings in neuroscience, social psychology, animal behaviour, and anthropology have brought us back to the original Darwinian position that moral behaviour is continuous with the social behavior of animals, and most likely evolved to enhance the cooperativeness of society. In this view, morality is part of human nature rather than its opposite. This interdisciplinary volume debates the origin and working (...) of human morality within the context of science as well as religion and philosophy. Experts from widely different backgrounds speculate how morality may have evolved, how it develops in the child, and what science can tell us about its working and origin. They also discuss how to deal with the age-old facts-versus-values debate, also known as the naturalistic fallacy. The implications of this exchange are enormous, as they may transform cherished views on if and why we are the only moral species. (shrink)

Cognitive categories in the geographic realm appear to manifest certain special features as contrasted with categories for objects at surveyable scales. We have argued that these features reflect specific ontological characteristics of geographic objects. This paper presents hypotheses as to the nature of the features mentioned, reviews previous empirical work on geographic categories, and presents the results of pilot experiments that used English-speaking subjects to test our hypotheses. Our experiments show geographic categories to be similar to their non-geographic counterparts in (...) the ways in which they generate instances of different relative frequencies at different levels. Other tests, however, provide preliminary evidence for the existence of important differences in subjects’ categorizations of geographic and non-geographic objects, and suggest further experimental work especially with regard to the role in cognitive categorization of different types of object-boundaries at different scales. (shrink)

Consumers do not always follow their ideological beliefs about the need to engage in environmentally friendly consumption. We propose that Commitment to Beliefs —the general tendency to follow one’s value-based beliefs—can help identify who is most likely to follow their environmental ideologies. We predicted that CTB would amplify the effect of beliefs prescribing environmental stewardship, or neglect, on corresponding intentions, behavior, and purchasing decisions. In two studies, CTB amplified the positive and negative effects of relevant EF ideologies on EF purchase (...) decisions, and consumption and conservation attitudes, intentions, as well as future behavior. In each study, only people with higher levels of CTB demonstrated the most ideologically consistent consumption and conservation intentions and behavior. These findings clarify who is most likely to align their decisions and lifestyles according to their sustainable consumption ideologies. The amplification effect of CTB, and the CTB variable itself, present new contributions to consumer behavior research and the domains of sustainable or ethical consumption in particular and offer wide-ranging potential for marketing practitioners and researchers. (shrink)

Background: Patients undergoing invasive neurosurgical procedures offer researchers unique opportunities to study the brain. Deep brain stimulation patients, for example, may participate in research during the surgical implantation of the stimulator device. Although this research raises many ethical concerns, little attention has been paid to basic studies, which offer no therapeutic benefits, and the value of patient-participant perspectives.Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with fourteen individuals across two studies who participated in basic intraoperative research during their deep brain stimulator surgery. Interviews (...) explored interpretations of risks and benefits, enrollment motivations, and experiences of participating in awake brain research. Reflexive thematic analysis was conducted.Results: Seven themes were identified from participant narratives, including robust attitudes of trust, high valuations of basic science research, impacts of the surgical context, and mixed experiences of participation.Conclusion: We argue that these narratives raise the potential for a translational misconception and motivate intraoperative re-consent procedures. (shrink)

In light of scientific advances such as genomics, predictive diagnostics, genetically engineered agriculture, nuclear transfer cloning, and the manipulation of stem cells, the idea that genes carry predetermined molecular programs or blueprints is pervasive. Yet new scientific discoveries—such as rna transcripts of single genes that can lead to the production of different compounds from the same pieces of dna—challenge the concept of the gene alone as the dominant factor in biological development. Increasingly aware of the tension between certain empirical results (...) and interpretations of those results based on the orthodox view of genetic determinism, a growing number of scientists urge a rethinking of what a gene is and how it works. In this collection, a group of internationally renowned scientists present some prominent alternative approaches to understanding the role of dna in the construction and function of biological organisms. Contributors discuss alternatives to the programmatic view of dna, including the developmental systems approach, methodical culturalism, the molecular process concept of the gene, the hermeneutic theory of description, and process structuralist biology. None of the approaches cast doubt on the notion that dna is tremendously important to biological life on earth; rather, contributors examine different ideas of how dna should be represented, evaluated, and explained. Just as ideas about genetic codes have reached far beyond the realm of science, the reconceptualizations of genetic theory in this volume have broad implications for ethics, philosophy, and the social sciences. Contributors. Thomas Bürglin, Brian C. Goodwin, James Griesemer, Paul Griffiths, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Evelyn Fox Keller, Gerd B. Müller, Eva M. Neumann-Held, Stuart A. Newman, Susan Oyama, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, Sahotra Sarkar, Jackie Leach Scully, Gerry Webster, Ulrich Wolf. (shrink)

William H. Simon, The Practice of Justice: A Theory of Lawyers? Ethics Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, viii + 253 pp.

Lloyd Weinreb, Oedipus at Fenway Park: What Rights There Are and Why There Are Any Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, viii, 221 pp.

Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm Of Rights Harvard University Press, 1990, viii, 383pp.

Kent Greenawalt, Conflicts of Law and Morality New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; xii, 383pp.