Surgery is the most invasive intervention taken on behalf of health, but significant discrepancies exist between patient expectations and standard operating room practices, especially in teaching institutions. These discrepancies arise from the dual obligations of surgical faculty to present and future patients. On the one hand, in line with a patient’s autonomous election of a procedure and choice of a doctor, faculty are charged with treating patients to the utmost capacity of their knowledge and skill; on the other, in support (...) of a critical community good, they must prepare novice physicians to treat those who will require at least this level of knowledge and skill in the future. Within a broad, contrasting framework of approaches to knowledge, judgment, experience, and nature as described by Hume and Kant, this article explores the complicated concepts of trust, loyalty, assessment, and communications that presently exist between surgical patients, faculty surgeons, and surgical trainees within academic medical centers. (shrink)

Surgery is the most invasive intervention taken on behalf of health, but significant discrepancies exist between patient expectations and standard operating room practices, especially in teaching institutions. These discrepancies arise from the dual obligations of surgical faculty to present and future patients. On the one hand, in line with a patient’s autonomous election of a procedure and choice of a doctor, faculty are charged with treating patients to the utmost capacity of their knowledge and skill; on the other, in support (...) of a critical community good, they must prepare novice physicians to treat those who will require at least this level of knowledge and skill in the future. Within a broad, contrasting framework of approaches to knowledge, judgment, experience, and nature as described by Hume and Kant, this article explores the complicated concepts of trust, loyalty, assessment, and communications that presently exist between surgical patients, faculty surgeons, and surgical trainees within academic medical centers. (shrink)

This title invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others.

Die rasanten Wandlungsprozesse in Wirtschaft, Politik, Medien, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft konnen verunsichern und Angste hervorrufen. In einer Zeit tiefgreifender Umbruche sucht der Band nach Ressourcen gemeinschaftlicher Problembewaltigung und entwickelt Orientierungsperspektiven fur ein menschliches Zusammenleben in der Gesellschaft von morgen. U.a. mit folgenden Themen: Kunstliche Intelligenz und Big Data; Digitalisierung der Arbeitswe.

The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays from experts in a variety of fields seeking to redefine the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The essayists place the legacy of the study within the evolution of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Contributors include two leading historians on the study, two former United States Surgeons General, and other prominent scholars from a wide range of fields.

Comparative risk assessment is playing an ever-increasing role in environmental policy priority setting, as manifested in national and numerous subnational comparative risk projects. It is widely accepted that public values, interests, and concerns should play an important role in CRA. However, the philosophical basis for public involvement in CRA has not been adequately explored, nor have comparative risk projects always made explicit their rationales for public involvement. The author examines the political, normative, and epistemic rationales for public involvement and explores (...) the case for public involvement in the making of ethical, valuation, and evidentiary judgments. The author considers key issues each rationale raises, problems eachfaces, and some of the implications of each for specific aspects of CRA. (shrink)

Introduction: Searching for the covert agent of consciousness -- The devil's pact (or, why the hard problem is now so hard) -- Action at the macro level : an agent-based theory of intentionality -- Action imagery and representation of the external world -- Do we need an emergency metaphysician? : action versus reaction at the micro level -- Herding neurons : the causal structure of self-organizing systems -- The paradoxes of phenomenal consciousness -- The self-organizing imagination : addressing the mind-body (...) problem -- Introspection and private access -- Action imagery and the role of efference -- Connecting physiology with phenomenology. (shrink)

In two recent studies we have examined the prose rhythms in the clausulae of late imperial Latin authors. We found two clausular systems to be prevalent, the cursus and the cursus mixtus. The cursus involves the use of accentual rhythms and consists of three basic cadences: planus, tardus, and velox. The cursus mixtus has been defined by modern scholars as a type of prose rhythm in which the clausula is structured along both accentual and metrical lines, that is by the (...) combination of one of the three forms of the cursus with one of the standard metrical forms derived from Cicero's system — cretic-spondee, dicretic, cretic-tribrach, or ditrochee. (shrink)

The concepts of the innateness, universality, species-specificity, and autonomy of the human language capacity have had an extreme impact on the psycholinguistic debate for over thirty years. These concepts are evaluated from several neurobiological perspectives, with an emphasis on the emergence of language and its decay due to brain lesion and progressive brain disease.Evidence of perceptuomotor homologies and preadaptations for human language in nonhuman primates suggests a gradual emergence of language during hominid evolution. Regarding ontogeny, the innate component of language (...) capacity is likely to be polygenic and shared with other developmental domains. Dissociations between verbal and nonverbal development are probably rooted in the perceptuomotor specializations of neural substrates rather than the autonomy of a grammar module. Aphasiologicaldata often assumed to suggest modular linguistic subsystems can be accounted for in terms of a neurofunctional model incorporating perceptuomotor-based regional specializationsand distributivity of representations. Thus, dissociations between grammatical functors and content words are due to different conditions of acquisition and resulting differences in neural representation. Human brains are characterized by multifactorial interindividual variability, and strict universality of functional organization is biologically unrealistic.A theoretical alternative is proposed according to which (1) linguistic specialization of brain areas is due to epigenetic and probabilistic maturational events, not to genetic ”hard-wiring,” and (2) linguistic knowledge is neurally represented in distributed cell assemblies whose topography reflects the perceptuomotor modalities involved in the acquisition and use of a given item of knowledge. (shrink)

The desire for founding educational reform on a sound empirical basis has coincided with a period of impressive progress in the field of neuroscience and wide public interest in its findings, leading to an ongoing debate about the potential of neuroscience to inform education reform. But is neuroscience really suited to provide specific instructions for improving learning conditions at school? This paper explores the educational implications of neuroscience.

As a student and collaborator of Louis Agassiz on the study of fishes, F. W. Putnam gave promise of becoming a leading ichthyologist with special interest in taxonomy generally and the Etheostomidae in particular. While he was noted briefly in these fields, contributed a number of minor papers, and aided in the posthumous publications of some of Agassiz's work on fishes, he neither reached his original goal nor completed his major projected works. For in 1874 he switched careers and was (...) appointed Curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and is remembered today primarily as a founder of American archaeology rather than as a systematic ichthyologist. (shrink)

This short poem is an Emersonian interpretation of the Hindu concept.

Several authors have hypothesized that completely positive maps should provide the means for generalizing quantum dynamics. In a critical analysis of that proposal, we show that such maps are incompatible with the standard phenomenological theory of spin relaxation and that the theoretical argument which has been offered as justification for the hypothesis is fallacious.