Medical research must involve the participation of human subjects. Knowledge of patients' perspectives and concerns with their involvement in research would enhance recruitment efforts, improve the informed consent process, and enhance the overall trust between patients and investigators. Several studies have examined the views of patients from Western countries. There is limited empirical research involving the perspectives of individuals from developing countries. The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes of Egyptian individuals toward medical research. Such information would (...) help clarify the type and extent of concerns regarding research participation of individuals from cultural, economic, and political backgrounds that differ from those in developed countries. (shrink)

BackgroundStudies have shown that research participants fail to appreciate the difference between research and medical care, labeling such phenomenon as a "therapeutic misconception" (TM). Since research activity involving human participants is increasing in the Middle East, qualitative research investigating aspects of TM is warranted. Our objective was to assess for the existence of therapeutic misconception amongst Egyptians.MethodsStudy Tool: We developed a semi-structured interview guide to elicit the knowledge, attitudes, and perspectives of Egyptians regarding medical research.Setting: We recruited individuals from the (...) outpatient settings (public and private) at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt.Analysis: Interviews were taped, transcribed, and translated. We analyzed the content of the transcribed text to identify the presence of a TM, defined in one of two ways: TM1 = inaccurate beliefs about how individualized care can be compromised by the procedures in the research and TM2 = inaccurate appraisal of benefit obtained from the research study.ResultsOur findings showed that a majority of participants (11/15) expressed inaccurate beliefs regarding the degree with which individualized care will be maintained in the research setting (TM1) and a smaller number of participants (5/15) manifested an unreasonable belief in the likelihood of benefits to be obtained from a research study (TM2). A total of 12 of the 15 participants were judged to have expressed a TM on either one of these bases.ConclusionThe presence of TM is not uncommon amongst Egyptian individuals. We recommend further qualitative studies investigating aspects of TM involving a larger sample size distinguished by different types of illnesses and socio-economic variables, as well as those who have and have not participated in clinical research. (shrink)

The book is the first dedicated volume in English on some aspects of Ḥamīd Dīn Kirmānī's and Mullā Ṣadrā's political thought.Kirmānī was a key Isma'ili figure who represented and advocated "moderate" Isma'ili thought during the imamate of the Fatimid imam/caliph in Cairo, al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allah. Mullā Ṣadrā is the most eminent Shi'Imami philosopher in the last four hundred years and the founder of the school of transcendent philosophy who has received huge attention in Muslim and in Western academia.In her extremely (...) useful study, Sayeh Meisami addresses the philosophical link between the theoretical and practical philosophies of the two thinkers, particularly the... (shrink)

This work examines the evolution of law and legal method, and challenges the law's claim to neutrality by examining its role in creating and reproducing inequality between the sexes. It considers many of the current debates, and in each, the law is stated with reference to recent developments in statute and judicial decisions in the UK and other jurisdictions. The author illustrates how each issue is shaped by the current political climate and, where relevant, by the European Court. Reference is (...) also made to US and Australian case law. The book should be of interest to students studying women and the law, family law, criminal law and jurisprudcence, as well as those on criminology and sociology courses. It should also be useful to family and criminal practitioners. (shrink)

For ages, medicine has had poor access to the fetus inside the mother's womb. But in relatively recent years, the human body has become transparent. The latest breakthroughs of technology have made it possible, from the very beginning of pregnancy, to consider the fetus as an individual who can be examined and sampled. His or her physician may now establish a diagnosis and prognosis and prescribe a treatment in the same way as in traditional medicine.

For ages, medicine has had poor access to the fetus inside the mother's womb. But in relatively recent years, the human body has become transparent. The latest breakthroughs of technology have made it possible, from the very beginning of pregnancy, to consider the fetus as an individual who can be examined and sampled. His or her physician may now establish a diagnosis and prognosis and prescribe a treatment in the same way as in traditional medicine.

In this paper, we review two seemingly unrelated debates. In business ethics, the argument is about values: are they universal or emergent? In entrepreneurship, it is about opportunities – are they discovered or constructed? In reality, these debates are similar as they both overlook contingency. We draw insight from pragmatism to define contingency as possibility without necessity. We analyze real-life narratives and show how entrepreneurship and ethics emerge from our discussion as parallel streams of thought.

First published in 1985, the _Handbook for Achieving Gender Equity Through Education_ quickly established itself as the essential reference work concerning gender equity in education. This new, expanded edition provides a 20-year retrospective of the field, one that has the great advantage of documenting U.S. national data on the gains and losses in the efforts to advance gender equality through policies such as Title IX, the landmark federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, equity programs and research. Key features include:_ (...) Expertise_ – Like its predecessor, over 200 expert authors and reviewers provide accurate, consensus, research-based information on the nature of gender equity challenges and what is needed to meet them at all levels of education._ Content Area Focus_ – The analysis of gender equity within specific curriculum areas has been expanded from 6 to 10 chapters including mathematics, science, and engineering._ Global/Diversity Focus_ – Global gender equity is addressed in a separate chapter as well as in numerous other chapters. The expanded section on gender equity strategies for diverse populations contains seven chapters on African Americans, Latina/os, Asian and Pacific Island Americans, American Indians, gifted students, students with disabilities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. _ Action Oriented_ – All chapters contain practical recommendations for making education activities and outcomes more gender equitable. A final chapter consolidates individual chapter recommendations for educators, policymakers, and researchers to achieve gender equity in and through education._ New Material_ – Expanded from 25 to 31 chapters, this new edition includes: *more emphasis on male gender equity and on sexuality issues; *special within population gender equity challenges ; *coeducation and single sex education; *increased use of rigorous research strategies such as meta-analysis showing more sex similarities and fewer sex differences and of evaluations of implementation programs; *technology and gender equity is now treated in three chapters; *women’s and gender studies; *communication skills relating to English, bilingual, and foreign language learning; and *history and implementation of Title IX and other federal and state policies. Since there is so much misleading information about gender equity and education, this _Handbook_ will be essential for anyone who wants accurate, research-based information on controversial gender equity issues—journalists, policy makers, teachers, Title IX coordinators, equity trainers, women’s and gender study faculty, students, and parents. (shrink)

The random]ized clinical trial is widely accepted as the optimal approach to evaluating the safety and efficacy of medical treatments. Resistance to randomized treatment assignment arises regularly, most commonly in situations where the disease is life-threatening and treatments are either unavailable or unsatisfactory. Historical control designs, in which all participants receive the experimental treatment with results compared to a prior cohort, are advocated by some as more ethical in such circumstances; however, such studies are often highly biased in favor of (...) the new treatment and frequently yield misleading results. Alternative controlled designs motivated by the desire to maximize the number of patients with the treatment ultimately determined to be superior have been proposed, but have been challenged on both methodological and ethical grounds. Debates about appropriate and ethical study designs recurred during the recent Ebola Virus Disease epidemic in West Africa. Despite its devastating nature, the EVD epidemic showed the ongoing necessity of conducting randomized trials to obtain convincing evidence of the safety and efficacy of therapeutic interventions. (shrink)

This book explores an ethical value central to all mental health professions. Although "dignity" appears near the beginning of many codes of ethics, it has been largely unexamined in the professional literature. Potter Stewart famously declared about pornography that we can't define it but we know it when we see it. Likewise with dignity. This book addresses that gap. The book considers the role of dignity as an ethical dimension of practice: in individual psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic work; in the therapeutic (...) community; and in groups, organizations and nations. It outlines dignity in individual development and families, the role of dignity violations in the understanding and treatment of trauma, and how dignity and its violations can be a powerful force in conflict resolution. The book will also address dignity in relations to specific populations, with chapters on the African-American and the LGBT experiences. Listening, with the question of dignity in mind, offers a fresh non-pathologizing framework for the practitioner. (shrink)

Useful Servants: Psychodynamic Approaches to Clinical Practice provides a simple but not simplistic overview of nine major approaches to psychodynamic theory and psychotherapeutic practice. Each chapter includes clinical vignettes as well as an extensive case illustration of how theories may be used in the consulting room. For beginners in the field, Useful Servants makes accessible the central ideas that have shaped the discourse of psychotherapy. The advanced clinician will find this book an invaluable review and reference tool; in particular, the (...) chapter on Lacan offers a fresh and digestible summary of the clinical application of this immensely complex thinker. (shrink)

Selected as Outstanding Academic Book by Choice magazine.

Suddenly unable to walk, I found resources for facing disability in the works of Aristotle and Nietzsche, even though their respective ethical schemes are incommensurable. Implementing Amélie Rorty's notion of crop rotation, I show how each scheme offers the patient something quite indispensable, having to do with how each has its own judgmentally-motivated psychological underpinnings. Aristotle's notion of empathy, wherein the moral move occurs whenever we take up someone else's good as our own, is empowering, especially to those who face (...) an imperiled embodiment. However, Nietzsche teaches us that pity is demeaning both to the pitier and to the pitied, because it falsely assumes that life should be easy so that we are filled with ressentiment when it isn't. Those facing disability need empathy, not pity. The richness of this distinction is vividly conveyed in narratives that show how empathy and pity play out in lived situations, thereby avoiding the dissociation that too often characterizes ethical theorizing. By honoring narrative accounts of how these relational moves are either snagged or successfully made, the attuned moral agency of medical practitioners can be fostered. (shrink)

Counselor educators can utilize the ideas of philosopher Michel Foucault in preparing preservice school counselors for their work with K?12 students in public schools. The Foucaultian ideas of governmentality, technologies of domination, received truths, power/knowledge, discontinuity, and archaeology can contribute to students' understanding of the hidden power relations in the assumptions and techniques of counseling. Because most students enter counseling programs without a background in Foucault, it falls to counselor educators to incorporate his ideas into the curriculum. This article describes (...) areas in which Foucaultian ideas can be introduced into the counseling curriculum, in particular, in the practicum courses. (shrink)

The question of how actin filaments are attached to membranes is of central importance to an understanding of how actin gives rise to shape and movement in cells. A number of approaches to this question have been taken, but there have been few definitive answers. Some of the limitations of these approaches are discussed, as well as possible avenues for overcoming them.

This paper aims to identify some of the values held by physicians in the United States that are relevant to physician strikes and other collective actions, and to articulate a position about collective actions that is consistent with medical professionalism. The concept of medical professionalism includes several elements to which physicians should aspire, but the fundamental definition of professionalism is based on just one of these elements, the virtue of altruism. As stated by a committee project paper of the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine. (shrink)

Homologies in amino‐acid sequence indicate that all known protein kinases share a conserved catalytic core, and, thus, belong to a related family of proteins that have evolved in part from a common ancestoral origin. This family includes cellular kinases, oncogenic viral kinases and their protooncogene counterparts, and growth factor receptors. One of the simplest and certainly the best characterized of the protein kinases at the biochemical level is the kinase that is activated in response to cAMP. The properties of this (...) cAMP‐dependent protein kinase are reviewed with particular emphasis on the features of nucleotide binding and catalytic mechanism that are likely to be shared by all protein kinases. In spite of this conserved catalytic core, these kinases vary widely in overall structure and in the mechanisms by which each is regulated, and these differences also are compared. (shrink)

: Using Judith Butler's notion that bodies are materialized via performances, "resignifying" disability involves a "democratizing contestation" of staircases because they exclude those in wheelchairs. Paleoanthropologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone shows how consistent bipedal locomotion, together with the knowledge that we will die (upon which mutuality is based), are ingredients of our pan-hominid speciation, not contingent constructions. As axiologically important as contestation is, it forecloses the possibility of achieving a mutuality with others, that is wonderfully possible.

Using Judith Butler's notion that bodies are materialized via performances, “resig-nifying” disability involves a “democratizing contestation” of staircases because they exclude those in wheelchairs. Paleoanthropologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone shows how consistent bipedal locomotion, together with the knowledge that we will die, are ingredients of our pan-hominid speciation, not contingent constructions. As axiologically important as contestation is, it forecloses the possibility of achieving a mutuality with others that is wonderfully possible.

Every person has his/her own unique signature that is used mainly for the purposes of personal identification and verification of important documents or legal transactions. There are two kinds of signature verification: static and dynamic. Static(off-line) verification is the process of verifying an electronic or document signature after it has been made, while dynamic(on-line) verification takes place as a person creates his/her signature on a digital tablet or a similar device. Offline signature verification is not efficient and slow for a (...) large number of documents. To overcome the drawbacks of offline signature verification, we have seen a growth in online biometric personal verification such as fingerprints, eye scan etc. In this paper we created CNN model using python for offline signature and after training and validating, the accuracy of testing was 99.70%. (shrink)

ObjectivesDepression and anxiety persist in cancer patients, creating an additional burden during treatment and making it more challenging in terms of management and control. Studies on the prevalence of depression and anxiety among cancer patients in the Middle East are limited and include many limitations such as their small sample sizes and restriction to a specific type of cancer in specific clinical settings. This study aimed to describe the prevalence and risk factors of depression and anxiety among cancer patients in (...) the inpatient and outpatient settings.Materials and MethodsA total of 1,011 patients formed the study sample. Patients’ psychological status was assessed using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the Patient Health Questionnaire, and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale. The prevalence rate of depressive and anxious symptomatology was estimated by dividing the number of patients who exceeded the borderline score: 10 or more for each subscale of the HADS scale, 15 or more for the GAD-7 scale, and 15 or more in the PHQ-9 by the total number of the patients. Risk factors were identified using logistic regression.ResultsThe prevalence of depressive and anxious symptomatology among all patients was 23.4% and 19.1–19.9%, respectively. Depressive symptomatology was more prevalent across patients who were hospitalized compared with patients in the outpatient setting. Similarly, anxious symptomatology was more prevalent in the inpatient setting. In the inpatient setting, depressive symptomatology was more prevalent among patients with bladder cancer, while severe anxious symptomatology was more prevalent across patients with lung cancer. In the outpatient setting, depressive and anxious symptomatology was more prevalent among breast and prostate cancer patients, respectively. Despite that, around 42.7% and 24.8% of the patients, respectively, reported that they feel anxious and depressed, and only 15.5% of them were using medications to manage their conditions.ConclusionOur study findings demonstrated a higher prevalence of depressive and anxious symptomatology in the inpatient setting and advanced disease stages. In addition, the underutilization of antidepressant therapy was observed. There is a need to consider mental disorders as part of the treatment protocol for cancer patients. Enhanced clinical monitoring and treatment of depression and anxiety of cancer patients are required. (shrink)

Abstract:Business ethicists are eager to connect the ethical treatment of stakeholders with financial rewards. However, little attention has been paid to the cultural and industry context that influences how stakeholders are regarded by the firm, and how innovative strategies for engaging stakeholders can help a firm outperform its competitors. By reconnecting stakeholder theory to its roots in the field of strategy, we provide a framework for understanding the dynamic interplay between stakeholder relationships, innovation, and competitive advantage. The result is a (...) set of testable propositions aimed at better characterizing when and how “ethics pays” (Paine 2003). (shrink)

Abstract:Business ethicists are eager to connect the ethical treatment of stakeholders with financial rewards. However, little attention has been paid to the cultural and industry context that influences how stakeholders are regarded by the firm, and how innovative strategies for engaging stakeholders can help a firm outperform its competitors. By reconnecting stakeholder theory to its roots in the field of strategy, we provide a framework for understanding the dynamic interplay between stakeholder relationships, innovation, and competitive advantage. The result is a (...) set of testable propositions aimed at better characterizing when and how “ethics pays” (Paine 2003). (shrink)

The coauthors of this dialogue, a surgeon and an internist, work together on an institutional patient selection committee for transplantation of solid organs. They have observed a spectrum of outcomes of organ transplantation, mostly favorable, at several institutions.