We recently discovered a novel subset of beta cells that resemble immature beta cells during pancreas development. We named these “virgin” beta cells as they do not stem from existing mature beta cells. Virgin beta cells are found exclusively at the islet periphery in areas that we therefore designated as the “neogenic niche.” As beta cells are our only source of insulin, their loss leads to diabetes. Islets also contain glucagon‐producing alpha cells and somatostatin‐producing delta cells, that are important for (...) glucose homeostasis and form a mantle surrounding the beta cell core. This 3D architecture is important and determines access to blood flow and innervation. We propose that the distinctive islet architecture may also play an important, but hitherto unappreciated role in generation of new endocrine cells, including beta cells. We discuss several predictions to further test the contribution of the neogenic niche to beta cell regeneration. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to consider the following three problems:(1) Whether selective conscientious objection is morally reasonable in general; and if so,(2) Whether selective conscientious objection should be recognized as a constitutional right by judicial interpretation; or(3) Whether selective conscientious objection should become part of any new draft law that would be passed by Congress.

Remember the words of Cain, Am I my brother's keeper? God said to him that his brother's blood cries out from the ground. What do these words suggest for the role of government? I assert that there is an ethic of accountability, caring and sharing fundamental to individual and corporate life. Creation was provided for all humanity. Until we can grasp a global view of resource stewardship we cannot begin to consider wise utilization. The goal must be an ethical renaissance (...) that will bring security more effective than any military force. (shrink)

Poverty using the United Nations’ criteria refers to denial of choices, opportunities, and the lack of capacity as a result of low income for a person to effectively participate in society. Poverty creates problems such as ill-health, inability to acquire the basic necessities of life, deprivation of full exercise of civic and political rights, and so forth. In spite of the enormous wealth in both human and natural resources in MENA, many people in the region are living in abject poverty. (...) Using phenomenological hermeneutics and existential critical analysis, the paper argues for ethical philanthropy to be used to alleviate the poverty in the region. Poverty is an ethical issue for it affects the quality of lives that humans can live as moral beings and impacts human behaviour. It is unacceptable that the enormous wealth of the region is not used for the benefit of all. Outside government efforts and the imperative of efficient political leadership, wealthy individuals and non-governmental groups have a moral responsibility to help to alleviate poverty in the region. It is this ethical role of individuals and groups in rendering philanthropic help to alleviate and if possible end poverty in the region that is the thrust of this paper. The paper affirms that abject and other forms of poverty are present in the region. The paper concludes that individuals and groups have an ethical duty in philanthropy to alleviate poverty in the region. The people of the region will become better and achieve a higher level of happiness and peace through the practice of ethical philanthropy. (shrink)

Sub-Saharan Africa like some other parts of the world is plagued by myriads of problems such as environmental degradation, climate change, illegal migration, human trafficking, terrorism, resources conflicts, bad and inept leadership, failing states, armed banditry, drug smuggling, youth restiveness, unemployment, etc. One of these problems, unemployment, has led to the devastation of many human lives and equally made some persons to live in degrading manner that affect environmental resources. Unemployment is not simply about statistics or numbers but about actual (...) human lives who are holders of rights and dignity. Unemployment can impede the exercise of human rights and prevent people from living meaningful lives. In spite of the region’s enormous natural resources and human capital unemployment remains drastically unabated. Why is this situation so? This situation is problematized here. Consequently, this paper critically and analytically examines this problem of unemployment in Sub-Saharan Africa in the light of an ethics of solidarity. The paper hermeneutically interprets the concepts involved in the study. The grave reasons for unemployment in the region will be examined with likely solutions. Besides these possible solutions, the paper sees the issue as also bordering on ethical realities. Many of the factors that causes employment borders on human behaviours and morality. There are ethical dimensions to the issue then. This is why the paper takes the vantage point of an ethics of solidarity to argue for an additional solution to the problem. This is equally the theoretical frame from which the problem of unemployment is examined. Living in solidarity makes individuals to easily collaborate and overcome societal problems like unemployment. The paper finds that unemployment is a pervasive problem in the sub-continent and is causing grave consequences for both human lives and the environment. The paper concludes that an ethics of solidarity can help in mitigating the problem of unemployment in the sub-continent. And that when this is done it will help to create a happier and peaceful sub-continent. (shrink)

Macmurray provides a conceptual and personal reference point around which we can locate a tradition of social humanism that unfolds from the British idealists to the communitarians. Some communitarian themes appear in the thought of the idealists: these include a vitalist analysis of behaviour, a 'thick' view of the person, and a positive concept of freedom defined in relation to others. Macmurray developed these themes and introduced others largely as a result of reworking idealism so as to come to terms (...) with the crisis of reason associated with the First World War. He rejected objective idealism with its concept of absolute mind for a personal idealism that incorporated an action-based metaphysics. Doing so prompted him to adopt other communitarian themes: these include an appeal to friendship and love, a contrast between society and community, and an appeal to religion to transcend the limits of justice. While contemporary communitarians have inherited much from philosophers such as Macmurray, they have also developed the tradition of social humanism. Philosophers such as Sandel, Taylor and Walzer have done so through grappling with the implications of multiculturalism for the idea of a cosmopolitan community. Ethical socialists like Tony Blair and Raymond Plant have done so through grappling with issues such as a decline in solidarity as it influences the welfare state. (shrink)

In June 2007, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer met in La Rochelle, France to reconsider the premises they developed twenty-five years before in their frighteningly prescient classic, Pure War. Pure War described the invisible war waged by technology against humanity, and the lack of any real distinction since World War II between war and peace. Speaking with Lotringer in 1982, Virilio noted the "accidents" that inevitably arise with every technological development: from car crashes to nuclear spillage, to the extermination of (...) space and the derealization of time wrought by instant communication. In this new and updated edition, Virilio and Lotringer consider how the omnipresent threat of the "accident"--both military and economic--has escalated. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, the balance of power between East and West based on nuclear deterrence has given way to a more diffuse multi-polar nuclear threat. Moreover, as the speed of communication has increased exponentially, "local" accidents--like the collapse of the Asian markets in the late 1980s--escalate, with the speed of contagion, into global events instantaneously. "Globalization," Virilio argues, is the planet's ultimate accident.Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an immigrant Italian family. Trained as an urban planner, he became the director of the École Speciale d'Architecture in the wake of the 1968 rebellion. He has published twenty-five books, including Pure War and The Accident of Art, both with Sylvère Lotringer and published by Semiotext. Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext, lives in New York and Baja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions, 2007) and other books. (shrink)

Harrowing stories reported in the media describe Covid‐19 ravaging through families. This essay reports professional experiences of this phenomenon, family clustering, as encountered during the pandemic's spread across Southern California. We identify three ethical challenges following from it: Family clustering impedes shared decision‐making by reducing available surrogate decision‐makers for incapacitated patients, increases the emotional burdens of surrogate decision‐makers, and exacerbates health disparities for and the suffering of people of color at increased likelihood of experiencing family clustering. We propose that, in (...) response to these challenges, efforts in advance care planning be expanded, emotional support offered to surrogates and family members be increased, more robust state guidance be issued on ethical decision‐making for unrepresented patients, ethics consultation be increased in the setting of conflict following from family clustering dynamics, and health care professionals pay more attention to systemic and personal racial biases and inequities that affect patient care and the surrogate experience. (shrink)

Storytelling is a pervasive part of our daily lives and culture. The task of creating stories for the purposes of entertaining, educating, and training has traditionally been the purview of humans. This sets up the conditions for a creative authoring bottleneck where the consumption of stories outpaces the production of stories by human professional creators. The automation of story creation may scale up the ability to produce and deliver novel, meaningful story artifacts. From this practical perspective, story generation systems replicate (...) the creative abilities of humans and can thus be considered instances of computational creativity. Computational systems that are purported to be creative typically utilize one of three general approaches: exploration of a space of concepts, combination of concepts, and transformation of concepts. In this article we present an approach to story generation that utilize exploration, combination, and transformation. Our approach, implemented in the Vignette Based Partial Order Causal Link story planner, is an algorithm that searches through a space of possible story solutions, guided by combinations of existing story fragments called vignettes. The vignettes are made relevant to novel story generation contexts through an automated transformation pre-process. Through these processes, we show that story generation can incorporate multiple perspectives on computational creativity. Our approach is presented at both the theoretical and technical levels. (shrink)

Where should one look to find a medieval theology of Biblical inspiration? Some scholars believe it does not exist. Denis Farkasfalvy takes to task neo-scholastics primarily of the period between Vatican Councils I and II for falsifying the theology: “Thomists and neo-Thomists like to use Thomas’s thought on prophecy for developing a scholastic theology of biblical inspiration,” but although “theological textbooks of the early twentieth century often pretended to be articulating St. Thomas’s actual teaching … Aquinas never asked the question (...) of how divine and human actions had jointly produced the Bible.”1 Farkasfalvy’s analysis applies equally to Albert.A comprehensive rebuttal of his claim lies beyond the scope... (shrink)

Abductive reasoning is central to reconstructing the past in the geosciences. This paper outlines the nature of the abductive method and restates it in Bayesian terms. Evidence plays a key role in this working method and, in particular, traces of the past are important in this explanatory framework. Traces, whether singularly or as groups, are interpreted within the context of the event for which they have evidential claims. Traces are not considered as independent entities but rather as inter-related pieces of (...) information concerning the likelihood of specific events. Exemplification of the use of such traces is provided by dissecting an example of their use in the environmental reconstruction of mountain climate. (shrink)

This study addresses a range of central topics in Anglo-American philosophy of language.

Prompted by the development of the Theory of Challenge and Threat States in Athletes (Jones et al, 2009), recent years has witnessed a considerable increase in research examining challenge and threat in sport. This manuscript provides a critical review of the literature examining challenge and threat in sport, tracing its historical development and some of the current empirical ambiguities. In an attempt to reconcile some of these ambiguities, and utilising neurobiological evidence associated with approach- and avoidance-motivation (cf. Elliot & Covington, (...) 2001), this paper draws upon the Evaluative Space Model (ESM: Cacioppo et al., 1997) and considers the implications for understanding challenge and threat in sport. For example, rather than see challenge and threat as opposite ends of a single bipolar continuum, the ESM implies that individuals could be (1) challenged, (2) threatened, (3) challenged and threatened, or (4) neither challenged or threatened by a particular stimulus. From this perspective it could be argued that the appraisal of some sport situations as both challenging and threatening could be advantageous, whereas the current literature seems to imply that the appraisal of stress as a threat is maladaptive for performance. In drawing upon the ESM, we outline the Evaluative Space Approach to Challenge and Threat and provide several testable hypotheses for advancing understanding of challenge and threat (in sport). We also outline a number of cardiovascular and experiential measures that can be used to examine these hypotheses. In sum, this paper provides a significant theoretical, empirical and practical contribution to our understanding of challenge and threat (in sport). (shrink)

Mark Morford provides a lively, succinct, and comprehensive survey of the philosophers of the Roman World, from Cato the Censor in 155 BCE to the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE. These men were asking philosophical questions whose answers had practical effects on people's lives in antiquity--and still do today--yet this is an era of philosophy somewhat neglected in recent decades. Morford puts this right by discussing the writings and ideas of numerous famous and lesser-known figures. Using extensive (...) and fully-translated quotations from their works, he illuminates each of the philosopher's meanings within the historical, political, and cultural contexts of their day. This book serves as the ideal introduction to the newcomer to Roman philosophy. (shrink)

In a vivid re-creation of late sixteenth-century Flemish intellectual life, Mark Morford explores the intertwined careers of one of the period's most influential thinkers and one of its most original artists: Justus Lipsius and Peter Paul Rubens. He investigates the scholarship of Lipsius (1547-1606), whose revival of Roman Stoicism guided his contemporaries during the revolt of the Netherlands from the rule of Spain and whose teaching prepared future leaders in church and state. Maintaining that Lipsius' thought reached Peter Paul (...) Rubens through his brother, Philip Rubens, Morford analyzes the artist's use of Stoic philosophical and political allegory, beginning with his painting The Four Philosophers. This book discusses the revival of Stoicism in northern Europe, focusing on Lipsius' editions of Tacitus and Seneca, his widely read handbooks on constancy and politics, and his interaction with leading scholars and public figures. As his letters reveal, Lipsius was inconsistent in his life and unsuccessful in reconciling Stoicism with Catholic doctrine; Rubens, although at first sympathetic to the doctrines of Lipsius, is shown to have later transcended their limitations. (shrink)

Social epistemologists should be well-equipped to explain and evaluate the growing vulnerabilities associated with filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization in social media. However, almost all social epistemology has been built for social contexts that involve merely a speaker-hearer dyad. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization all presuppose much larger and more complex network structures. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for a properly social epistemology that gives the role and structure of networks their due. In particular, (...) we formally define epistemic constructs that quantify the structural epistemic position of each node within an interconnected network. We argue for the epistemic value of a structure that we call the (m,k)-observer. We then present empirical evidence that (m,k)-observers are rare in social media discussions of controversial topics, which suggests that people suffer from serious problems of epistemic vulnerability. We conclude by arguing that social epistemologists and computer scientists should work together to develop minimal interventions that improve the structure of epistemic networks. (shrink)

In the study reported here we examined the impact of population size and two proxies of risk of resource failure on the diversity and complexity of the food-getting toolkits of hunter–gatherers and small-scale food producers. We tested three hypotheses: the risk hypothesis, the population-size hypothesis, and a hypothesis derived from niche construction theory. Our analyses indicated that the toolkits of hunter–gatherers are more affected by risk than are the toolkits of food producers. They also showed that the toolkits of food (...) producers are more affected by population size than are the toolkits of hunter–gatherers. This pattern is inconsistent with the predictions of both the risk hypothesis and the population-size hypothesis. In contrast, it is consistent with the predictions of the niche construction hypothesis. Our results indicate that niche construction has affected the evolution of technology in small-scale societies and imply that niche construction must be taken into account when seeking to understand technological variation among food producers and the technological changes that occurred in association with the various transitions to farming that have occurred over the last 10,000 years. (shrink)

Metaphors used to describe new technologies mediate public understanding of the innovations. Analyzing the linguistic, rhetorical, and affective aspects of these metaphors opens the range of issues available for bioethical scrutiny and increases public accountability. This article shows how such a multidisciplinary approach can be useful by looking at a set of texts about one issue, the use of a newly developed technique for genetic modification, CRISPRcas9.

Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 experts and stakeholders using the World Café method to identify key governance challenges and explore how public involvement can (...) meet these challenges. This brief report discusses four cross-cutting themes from the study: the need to move beyond individual consent; issues in benefit and data sharing; the challenge of delineating and understanding publics; and the goal of clarifying justifications for public involvement. The report aims to provide a starting point for making sense of the relationship between public involvement and the governance of population-level biomedical research, showing connections, potential solutions and issues arising at their intersection. We suggest that, in population-level biomedical research, there is a pressing need for a shift away from conventional governance frameworks focused on the individual and towards a focus on collectives, as well as to foreground ethical issues around social justice and develop ways to address cultural diversity, value pluralism and competing stakeholder interests. There are many unresolved questions around how this shift could be realised, but these unresolved questions should form the basis for developing justificatory accounts and frameworks for suitable collective models of public involvement in population-level biomedical research governance. (shrink)

The philosophers of the Roman world were asking questions whose answers had practical effects on people's lives in antiquity, and which still influence our thinking to this day. In spite of being neglected in the modern era, this important age of philosophical thought is now undergoing a revival of interest. Mark Morford's lively survey makes these recent scholarly developments accessible to a wide audience, examining the writings and ideas of both famous and lesser known figures - from Cato the (...) Censor in 155 BCE to Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE. Based around extensive and fully translated quotations from the philosophical texts of the era, full consideration is given throughout to historical, political and cultural context. (shrink)

A globe-spanning investigation into the Transhumanist movement, considering the tech billionaires, scientific luminaries, and DIY body-hackers attempting to prolong, improve, and ultimately transcend the limits of human life.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

In this paper, we explain and showcase the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. Our use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, we show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discussion of vaccine safety on Twitter. Roughly half the (...) accounts engaging with this topic are pro-vaccine, while the other half are con-vaccine. We also show that these two camps rarely engage with one another, and that the con-vaccine camp has greater epistemic reach and receptivity than the pro-vaccine camp. In light of these findings, we question whether testimonial networks as they are currently constituted on popular fora such as Twitter are living up to their promise of delivering the wisdom of crowds. We conclude by pointing to directions for further research in digital social epistemology. (shrink)