The objective of this survey was to assess the extent to which nurses encounter and identify dilemma-generating situations in the light of the publication and circulation of the Israeli code of ethics for nurses in 1994. The results are being used as a basis for a programme aimed at promoting nurses' decision-making skills in coping with ethical dilemmas. In this era of major advances in medicine, the nurse's role as the protector of patient rights may bring about conflicts with physicians' (...) orders, with institutional policies, or with patients' families. Nurses will then become confronted with ethical and moral dilemmas. A nationwide survey was carried out to identify and describe the ethical conflicts with which nurses in Israel are confronted in the course of their work. A third of the enumerated dilemmas were encountered by more than 50% of the nurses. The major determinant influencing encounters with dilemmas, as perceived by the participating nurses, was their work setting, namely, the hospital versus the community. It was shown that nurses seek support mainly among their peers, they are barely familiar with the Israeli Code, and they consider their own families as the predominant factor in shaping their ethical attitudes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Public health communication campaigns have been credited with helping raise awareness of risk from chronic illness and new infectious diseases and with helping promote the adoption of recommended treatment regimens. Yet many aspects of public health communication interventions have escaped the scrutiny of ethical discussions. With the transference of successful commercial marketing communication tactics to the realm of public health, consideration of ethical issues becomes an essential component in the development and application of public health strategies. Ethical issues in (...) public health communication are explored as they relate to eight topics: ‘targeting’ and ‘tailoring’ public health messages to particular population segments; obtaining the equivalence of informed consent; the use of persuasive communication tactics; messages on responsibility and culpability; messages that apply to harm reduction; and three types of unintended adverse effects associated with public health communication activities that may label and stigmatise, expand social gaps, and promote health as a value. We suggest that an ethical analysis should be applied to each phase of the public health communication process in order to identify ethical dilemmas that may appear subtle, yet reflect important concerns regarding potential effects of public health communication interventions on individuals and society as a whole. (shrink)

In recent years, inter-medial studies have attracted increasing attention in arts theory. The notion of 'inter-mediality' presupposes that each established art - such as theatre, painting, and cinema - indicates the existence of a particular medium, which preserves its distinct features in translations from art to art and, especially, in its combinations with others in single works. Nonetheless, this field of research is presupposed already in the traditional studies of 'ekphrasis', which focus on the verbal accounts of nonverbal works of (...) art; and in Wagner's notion of Gesamtkuntswerk. This renewed interest generated new fields of research, such as (a) the likelihood of the arts reflecting common grounds; (b) the necessity of a shared metalanguage; (b) the possibility of inter-medial translation; and (d) the inter-medial coexistence within a single work of art, without hindering the reading, interpreting and experiencing abilities of receivers. In honor of Eli Rozik, Ph.D., professor emeritus, former head of the Department of Theatre Studies, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Tel Aviv University, this collection provides overviews of all these theoretical issues, and tackles the contemporary practical questions that arise from attempts to transgress the boundaries between the established disciplines of arts studies. Considering first the theoretical aspects of inter-art, inter-mediality, and nonverbal literacy, Exploring the Common Grounds of the Arts goes on to discuss by means of performance analysis; dialogues between the arts within a single work; and correspondences between visual and auditory stimuli in musical contexts. It concludes with a discussion of practical examples of inter-mediality in religious representations, official processions, and public performances. (shrink)

Modern societies are characterized by group-based hierarchies. Similar to attackers, disadvantaged-group members wish to change the status quo; like defenders, advantaged-group members wish to protect it. However, the psychological arrays that are typical of disadvantaged- and advantaged-group members are opposite to those of attackers and defenders – suggesting that the Attacker-Defender Game does not capture the dynamics between advantaged and disadvantaged groups.

¿Cómo veían los ulemas musulmanes a los seguidores de otras religiones, especialmente a los ahl al-kitāb ? Las leyes islámicas, en dos áreas concretas - el sacrificio ritual y el matrimonio -, reflejan al tiempo el intento por separar a los musulmanes de los no monoteístas y la permisibilidad del contacto entre los musulmanes y los ahl al-kitāb. Estos contactos respondían a dos motivos contradictorios: el deseo de mantener vínculos con los ahl al-kitāb, y el deseo de evitar el peligro (...) que tales vínculos podían representar. En consecuencia, los juristas musulmanes, en general, permitían consumir carme de animales sacrificados por los ahl al-kitāb - incluso cuando no se había seguido la obligación de mencionar el nombre de Allāh -, pero la mayoría de los juristas prohibía consumir carne de animales sacrificados por un cristiano que hubiese recitado el nombre de Jesús durante el sacrificio. Igualmente, el derecho matrimonial, que permite ciertos tipos de matrimonio entre los musulmanes y los ahl al-kitāb, prohíbe aquellos casamientos que tengan como resultado la inferioridad del cónyuge musulmán con respecto al cónyuge kitābī , pues tal inferioridad trae consigo el peligro de asimilación. (shrink)

This article presents the complicated ethical dilemmas that arise in the procedures and proceedings of the Nursing Disciplinary Committee, which deals with matters of life and death (e.g. patients' rights to quality. and safe care, professional integrity and account ability, and the nurse's future). The article also describes the composition and function of the Committee, the type of case it deliberates, its limitations, and the dilemmas its members may encounter.

The ethical dimensions of health communicators' interventions and campaigns are brought into question in this thought-provoking book. Examining the efforts to effect behavior change, the author questions how far health communication can and should go in changing people's values. The author broadens the current analysis of interventions and presents conceptual frameworks that help identify values and justifications that are embedded in health communication goals, strategies, and evaluation criteria. This critical approach helps explain how and why choices are made in design (...) and implementation, and provides constructs and frameworks to examine them. It also widens the criteria for program evaluation and policymaking, and provides practitioners, planners, policy-makers, researchers, and students with practice-oriented questions. (shrink)

Because the number of organs available for transplantation does not meet the needs of potential recipients, some have proposed that a potentially effective way to increase registration is to offer a self‐benefit incentive that grants a 'preferred status' or some degree of prioritization to those who register as potential donors, in case they might need organs. This proposal has elicited an ethical debate on the appropriateness of such a benefit in the context of a life‐saving medical procedure. In this paper (...) we review arguments and ethical concerns raised by scholars, and studies of views of members of the public regarding the prioritization incentive system. We also report on our study of the views of those involved in organ transplant and of other medical professionals in Israel, as over half a decade ago Israel implemented a prioritization incentive system. Bioethicists propose that key stakeholders' views can provide additional arguments and perspectives on controversial issues. Proponents justify the prioritization incentive drawing mainly on arguments related to its potential effectiveness, reciprocity and fairness. Opponents point to the fact that registering is not binding and not an actual donation, and raise concerns regarding equity, autonomy and gaming the system. Ethical concerns raised by the practitioners in the study were examined in light of scholars' arguments and actual registration and donation data. Practitioners involved in transplantation raised ethical concerns corresponding to those raised by scholars as well as additional concerns. They also challenged proponents' assumptions regarding the utility of the incentive system from their own experience and argued that proponents obscure the meaning of reciprocity. (shrink)

In 1933 Margaret Lasker, a biochemist who worked at the labs of Montefiore Hospital in New York, developed an accurate method for the differentiation between pentosuria and diabetes. Research into pentosuria, and mostly its genetic aspects, became Lasker’s lifelong passion. Since research was not part of her job description, she conducted the chief part of her study in her home kitchen. Lasker’s extensive and personal correspondence with her patients and their families may be the secret key for her success in (...) maintaining a prolonged research career against all odds. Laker’s last article was published in 1955 in Human Biology, presenting data on 72 cases of pentosuria, which occurs almost exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews. More than half a century later, and long after Lasker was gone, her well kept data and family records allowed the discovery of two mutations in the DCXR gene, by Mary-Claire King and her team. (shrink)

Esta carta a Pêro Vaz de Caminha, el primer navegador portugués a llegar a Brasil, expone las transformaciones que han tenido lugar desde la llegada de los portugueses al territorio brasileño hasta los días de hoy. El texto sintetiza la trayectoria de destrucción y violencia resultantes del proceso de colonización, sobre todo contra los pueblos indígenas, los quilombolas y las comunidades tradicionales.

This letter to Pero Vaz de Caminha, the first Portuguese explorer to reach Brazil, presents the transformations that have taken place since the arrival of the Portuguese to the land until today. The text synthesizes the trajectory of destruction and violence stemming from the process of colonization, above all against indigenous peoples, peoples of African descent, and traditional communities.

Leibovich et al. propose that non-symbolic numerosity abilities develop from the processing of more basic, continuous magnitudes such as size, area, and density. Here I review similar arguments arising in the visual perception field and further propose that the evolvement of discrete representations from continuous stimulus properties may be a fundamental characteristic of cognitive development.

We consider a proportional-prize contest to forecast future events, and show that, in equilibrium, this mechanism possesses perfect forecasting ability for any group size when the contestants share common knowledge about the probabilities by which future events realize. Data gathered in a laboratory experiment confirm the performance invariance to group size. By contrast, when realization probabilities are not common knowledge, there are some differences across group sizes. The mechanism operates marginally better with three or four compared to two players. However, (...) this effect is mainly driven by players’ behavior rather than by differences in the beliefs they form about the realization probabilities. (shrink)

We examine the process of strategization of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) within 12 Israeli firms using a longitudinal qualitative approach. We analyzed the process of CSR strategization under Jarzabkowski’s framework. Our findings identify the differentiating characteristics of CSR strategization processes, including the requirement for informative communications rather than persuasive negotiations, and the absence of resistance within the organizational community. These unique aspects of CSR strategization may be attributed to the moral and value-centric nature of CSR activity.

Background:Nurse managers are placed in a unique position within the healthcare system where they greatly impact upon the nursing work environment. Ethical dilemmas and moral distress have been reported for staff nurses but not for nurse middle managers.Objective:To describe ethical dilemmas and moral distress among nurse middle managers arising from situations of ethical conflict.Methods:The Ethical Dilemmas in Nursing–Middle Manager Questionnaire and a personal characteristics questionnaire were administered to a convenience sample of middle managers from four hospitals in Israel.Results:Middle managers report (...) low to moderate levels of frequency and intensity of ethical dilemmas and moral distress. Highest scores were for administrative dilemmas.Conclusion:Middle managers experience lower levels of ethical dilemmas and moral distress than staff nurses, which are irrespective of their personal characteristics. Interventions should be developed, studied, and then incorporated into institutional frameworks in order to improve this situation. (shrink)

Genes induced by the plant hormone auxin are probably involved in the execution of vital cellular functions and developmental processes. Experimental approaches designed to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of auxin action have focused on auxin perception, genetic dissection of the signaling apparatus and specific gene activation. Auxin‐responsive promoter elements of early genes provide molecular tools for probing auxin signaling in reverse. Functional analysis of several auxin‐specific promoters of unrelated early genes suggests combinatorial utilization of both conserved and variable elements. These (...) elements are arranged into autonomous domains and the combination of such modules generates uniquely composed promoters. Modular promoters allow for auxin‐mediated transcriptional responses to be revealed in a tissue‐ and development‐specific manner. (shrink)

Dementia, a prevalent disorder of the brain, has negative effects on individuals and society. This paper concerns using Spontaneous Speech Challenge of Interspeech 2020 to classify Alzheimer's dementia. We used VGGish, a deep, pretrained, Tensorflow model as an audio feature extractor, and Scikit-learn classifiers to detect signs of dementia in speech. Three classifiers were 59.1% accurate, which was 3% above the best-performing baseline models trained on the acoustic features used in the challenge. We also proposed DemCNN, a new PyTorch raw (...) waveform-based convolutional neural network model that was 63.6% accurate, 7% more accurate then the best-performing baseline linear discriminant analysis model. We discovered that audio transfer learning with a pretrained VGGish feature extractor performs better than the baseline approach using automatically extracted acoustic features. Our DepCNN exhibits good generalization capabilities. Both methods presented in this paper offer progress toward new, innovative, and more effective computer-based screening of dementia through spontaneous speech. (shrink)

Does the way we think about our personal self-complexity affect how we accept others? Researchers have offered various conceptualizations of how individuals manage their complex identities, while others have identified links between cognitive complexity and acceptance of outgroups. This paper integrates the two bodies of work by positing a route by which personal identity conflicts may lead to cognitive and cultural pluralism. For individuals committed to multiple identities perceived as conflicting, the intra-psychic experience of value conflicts may lead to a (...) recognition of self-complexity, which is then transposed from the personal domain to the social one and expressed as a pluralistic attitude towards others. This argument find support in a study of Israeli Jewish Orthodox psychoanalytic therapists who belong to what they perceive as non-pluralistic religious groups, yet express value pluralism, which they attribute to their complex identities. One of the educational implications of this study is that facilitating engagement with internal complexity, multiple identities and personal value conflicts may promote pluralistic thinking for individuals in religious societies. (shrink)

From 2000 to 2007, Jay Wolke photographed in the south of Italy to capture the complexity of a region that is colloquially known as Il mezzogiorno. What he found in this historic and often troubled landscape was an elaborate set of physical, social, and political forces manifested in an extraordinary tapestry of visual information. Both referential and suggestive, Wolke's pictures reveal the marks of a long line of invaders, conquerors, and occupiers from the Greeks to the Spanish to the Camorra. (...) Architectural and structural adaptations and “resignations” are evident in every scene and serve as the photographer's focus. Although the landscape is marred by layers of dysfunction and greed, we can't help but view it through the lens of the timeless belief in the bel paese—the beautiful country. (shrink)

Cutting across Chicago's South Side in a broad swath of concrete, steel, and overpasses, the Dan Ryan Expressway is one of America's busiest, and perhaps most chaotic highways. Yet underneath the cacophony of its ten lanes lies an intriguing world of urban ecology and human networks. In The Dan Ryan Expressway, artist and photographer Jay Wolke unearths an ecosystem unto itself that weaves human and industrial elements into an essential feature of Chicago's identity. Between 1981 and 1985, Wolke shot thousands (...) of photographs on and along the Dan Ryan during the day and night, traveling up and down the expressway in an effort to accurately capture it. In the twenty years since the photographs were taken, Wolke has organized his pictures into a complex and fascinating portrait of this iconic highway, which he characterizes as an "arterial organism" with its own "cycles and flows, causes and effects." The book is a dynamic narrative that explores the Dan Ryan's enormous influence over the people who drive on it, the neighborhoods lined alongside it, and the industrial environs it weaves through. As Chicago transportation officials prepare to launch a massive renovation of the Dan Ryan Expressway, Wolke here presents a historical chronicle of the development of the Dan Ryan and its rapid integration into Chicago's urban life. His photographs create an arresting visual representation of the expressway that provides an important window into the structure of Chicago's urban landscape and culture. The Dan Ryan Expressway ultimately examines where the highway fits within the trope of the American road and explores how it became "a massive expression of the urban lexicon." "As chilling as Blade Runner--unfortunately this is not a dytopian vision set in a distant, fictional future--this is Chicago, and this is America now. The automobile has utterly changed the landscape and our lives--Jay Wolke has found a powerful way to record this historic transformation in this unique, important photographic achievement."--Joel Sternfeld. (shrink)

Definition of the problem. In the field of biomedical research on humans, ethical committees have an important role. They ensure the necessary protection of the subjects and contribute to quality assurance in medical research. Originally established as an instrument of ethical self-regulation in the medical profession, the ethical committee soon advanced to a statutory institution and is now on the way to becoming the body charged with judicial control in medical research. This development implies the need for changes in both (...) position and function of the ethical committee, but these have not been made with due consideration for all the developments there have been. Arguments and conclusion. The existing uncertainties are hampering medical research, which is in the interests of neither the public nor the actual medical research. Owing to the different and obscure legal arguments used, it has not been possible to make any definitive decision on the legal standing of decisions made by ethical committees. It seems obvious that these problems cannot be solved unless the work of ethical committees can be based on a clear and reliable legal basis regulating the judicial nature of the committees’ decisions, the composition of the actual committees and the procedures they are to follow in reaching their decisions. With regard to the existing regulations, this might be best achieved by integrating the work of the ethical committees into the approval procedures of an administrative authority. (shrink)

The book addresses the representation of three groups of "others" in Israeli schoolbooks: Holocaust victims, presented as the stateless persecuted Jews "we" might become again if "we" lose control over the second group of "others" - Palestinian Arabs - who are racialized, demonized and Nazified, and presented as "our" potential exterminators. The third group comprises non-European (Mizrahi and Ethiopian) Jews, portrayed as backward people who lack history or culture, requiring constant acculturation by "Western" Israel. Thus, a rhetoric of victimhood and (...) power evolves, and a nationalistic interpretation of the "never again" imperative is inculcated, justifying the Occupation and oppression of Palestinians and the discrimination of non-European Jews. Advocating a multidirectional memory, the book proposes an alternative Hebrew-Arabic, multi-voiced and poly-centered curriculum that would relate the untold accounts of the people whom the pedagogic version of history seeks exclude. Instead of traumatizing and urging vengeance, it will encourage discussion and celebrate diversity and hybridity. (shrink)

The Age of Enlightenment continues the debate with traditional elements from Neo-Platonism and Hermetism, Pythagoreanism, magic, alchemy and Kabbalah which today are subsumed under the heading of early modern age esotericism. The reactions range from the critical or historicising to emphatic acceptance and integration. At the same time, however, the discourse of the age also gives rise to polemic confrontations with the newly emerging esoteric formations. The papers in this volume explore these tense constellations with their progression in the 18th (...) century. (shrink)

The Age of Enlightenment continues the debate with traditional elements from Neo-Platonism and Hermetism, Pythagoreanism, magic, alchemy and Kabbalah which today are subsumed under the heading of early modern age esotericism. The reactions range from the critical or historicising to emphatic acceptance and integration. At the same time, however, the discourse of the age also gives rise to polemic confrontations with the newly emerging esoteric formations. The papers in this volume explore these tense constellations with their progression in the 18th (...) century. (shrink)