Improving the resilience of urban road networks suffering from various disruptions has been a central focus for urban emergence management. However, to date the effective methods which may mitigate the negative impacts caused by the disruptions, such as road accidents and natural disasters, on urban road networks is highly insufficient. This study proposes a novel adaptive signal control strategy based on a doubly dynamic learning framework, which consists of deep reinforcement learning and day-to-day traffic dynamic learning, to improve the network (...) performance by adjusting red/green time split. In this study, red time split is regarded as extra traffic flow to discourage drivers to use affected roads, so as to reduce congestion and improve the resilience when urban road networks are subject to different levels of disruptions. In addition, we utilize the convolution neural network as Q-network to approximate Q values, link flow distribution and link capacity are regarded as the state space, and actions are denoted as red/green time split. A small network is utilized as a numerical example, and a fixed time signal control and other two adaptive signal controls are employed for the comparisons with the proposed one. The results show that the proposed adaptive signal control based on deep reinforcement learning can achieve better resilience in most of the cases, particularly in the scenarios of moderate and severe disruptions. This study may shed light on the advantages of the proposed adaptive signal control dealing with major emergencies compared to others. (shrink)

O objetivo deste trabalho reside na elaboração de um breve apanhado das discussões acadêmicas acerca das relações étnico-raciais no âmbito da educação matemática brasileira. Em especial, pontuarei um dos tópicos que as pesquisas indicam como necessidade urgente para que haja avanços nessa área: a implementação de um debate profícuo na formação de professoras/ies/es que ensinam matemática. Pretendo, neste trabalho, chamar atenção para a necessidade das/des/dos pesquisadoras/ies/es em educação matemática lançarem um olhar para os currículos da formação inicial de professoras/ies/es de (...) matemática em escala nacional para investigar a presença das discussões sobre questões raciais no projeto dos cursos de licenciatura das Instituições de Ensino Superior (IES). Tal necessidade se mostra importante dado que as pesquisas que discutem as relações étnico-raciais na educação matemática vêm apontando a falta de formação docente como um dos grandes desafios para implementar as Leis 10.639/2003 e 11.645/2008. Por meio de trabalhos de investigação como o que aqui indico, poderemos visualizar o panorama da formação de professoras/ies/es no Brasil no que diz respeito às questões raciais, possibilitando o aprendizado a partir das instituições que já contam com essas discussões prescritas em seus currículos. Assim como incentivar a aderência àquelas que ainda não estão seguindo a resolução do Conselho Nacional de Educação, que institui a obrigatoriedade das IES que ofertam cursos de formação de professores a terem disciplinas e atividades que abarquem a educação das relações étnico-raciais nos currículos desses cursos. (shrink)

The fast-developing field of neuroscience has given philosophy, as well as other disciplines and the public broadly, many new tools and perspectives for investigating one of our most pressing challenges: addressing the health and well-being of our mental lives. In some cases, neuroscientific innovation has led to clearer understanding of the mechanisms of mental illness and precise new modes of treatment. In other cases, features of neuroscience itself, such as the enticing nature of the data it produces compared to previous (...) behavioral methods, together with its costliness and “coldness” have complicated understanding of mental illness and decision making about mental illness. Taking neuroscientific information into account can leave practitioners in psychiatry and law with difficult questions, stemming not only from the complexity of these fields, but also from our rapidly evolving understanding of and facility with neuroscience. In this chapter, we will review several examples of the insights and dilemmas that have unfolded as mental illness has been examined through the lens of neuroscience, covering diagnoses such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia, addiction, and severe mood disorders. (shrink)

Cutting-edge essays on theory, aesthetics, and human and nonhuman ontology.

Carte Blanche is the alarming tale of how the right of Americans to say "no" to risky medical research is eroding at a time when we are racing to produce a vaccine and treatments for Covid-19. This medical right that we have long taken for granted was first sacrificed on the altar of military expediency in 1990 when the Department of Defense asked for and received from the FDA a waiver that permitted it to force an experimental anthrax vaccine on (...) the ranks of ground troops headed for the Persian Gulf. Since then, the military has pressed ahead to impose nonconsensual testing of the blood substitute PolyHeme in civilian urbanities, quietly enrolling more than 20,000 non-consenting subjects since 2005. Most Americans think that their right to give or withhold consent is protected by law, but the passing in 1996 of modifications to the Code of Federal Regulations, such as statute CFR 21 50.24, now permit investigators to conduct research with trauma victims without their consent or event their knowledge. More than a dozen studies since have used the 1996 loophole to recruit large numbers of subjects without their knowledge. The erosion of consent is the result of a U.S. medical-research system that has proven again and again that it cannot be trusted. (shrink)

My reflections on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial were provoked some time ago in a quite natural way, by a visit to the memorial itself. I happened upon it almost by accident, a fact that is due at least in part to the design of the Memorial itself . I found myself reduced to awed silence, and I resolved to attend the dedication ceremony on November 13, 1982. It was an extraordinary event, without question the most moving public ceremony I have (...) ever attended. But my own experience of the Memorial on that and other occasions is far from unique. It is almost commonplace among the many visitors to the VVM—now the most visited of all the memorials in Washington—a fact so striking as to have compelled journalists, art historians, and architects to write countless articles about the monument. And although philosophers traditionally have had little to say about architecture in general or about that of memorials in particular, there is much in the VVM and its iconography worthy of philosophical reflection. Self-knowledge includes, I hazard to say, knowledge of ourselves as members of the larger social and political context, and so includes knowledge of that context.Architecture need not memorialize or symbolize anything; or it may symbolize, but not in a memorializing way, let alone in a way that is tied to a nation’s history. The structures on the Washington Mall belong to a particular species of recollective architecture, a species whose symbolic and normative content is prominent. After all, war memorials by their very nature recall struggles to the death over values. Still further, the architecture by which a people memorializes itself is a species of pedagogy. It therefore seeks to instruct posterity about the past and, in so doing, necessarily reaches a decision about what is worth recovering. It would thus be a mistake to try to view such memorials merely “aesthetically,” in abstraction from all judgments about the noble and the base. To reflect philosophically on specific monuments, as I propose to do here, necessarily requires something more than a simply technical discussion of the theory of architecture or of the history of a given species of architecture. We must also understand the monument’s symbolism, social context, and the effects its architecture works on those who participate in it. That is, we must understand the political iconography which shapes and is shaped y the public structure in question. To do less than this—if I may state a complex argument in hopelessly few words—is to fall short of the demands of true objectivity, of an understanding of the whole which the object is. To understand the meaning of the VVM requires that we understand, among other things, what the memorial means to those who visit it. This is why my observations about the dedication of the VVM and about the Memorial’s continuing power over people play an important role in this essay. Charles L. Griswold, associate professor of philosophy at Howard University, is the author of Self-Knowledge in Plat’s “Phaedrus” and has published widely in the areas of Greek philosophy, German Idealism, hermeneutics, and political philosophy. He is an editor of the Independent Journal of Philosophy and a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Currently he is working on a project which centers on Adam Smith’s notion of the “self” and Smith’s relationship to Stoicism and to the American Founding. (shrink)

BackgroundIn response to COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of Uganda adopted public health measures to contain its spread in the country. Some of the initial measures included refusal to repatriate citizens studying in China, mandatory institutional quarantine, and social distancing. Despite being a public health emergency, the measures adopted deserve critical appraisal using an ethics and human rights approach. The goal of this paper is to formulate an ethics and human rights criteria for evaluating public health measures and use it to (...) reflect on the ethical propriety of those adopted by the government of Uganda to contain the spread of COVID-19.Main bodyWe begin by illustrating the value of ethics and human rights considerations for public health measures including during emergencies. We then summarize Uganda’s social and economic circumstances and some of the measures adopted to contain the spread of COVID-19. After reviewing some of the ethics and human rights considerations for public health, we reflect upon the ethical propriety of some of Uganda’s responses to COVID-19. We use content analysis to identify the measures adopted by the government of Uganda to contain the spread of COVID-19, the ethics and human rights considerations commonly recommended for public health responses and their importance. Our study found that some of the measures adopted violate ethics and human rights principles. We argue that even though some human rights can sometimes be legitimately derogated and limited to meet public health goals during public health emergencies, measures that infringe on human rights should satisfy certain ethics and human rights criteria. Some of these criteria include being effective, strictly necessary, proportionate to the magnitude of the threat, reasonable in the circumstances, equitable, and least restrictive. We reflect on Uganda’s initial measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 and argue that many of them fell short of these criteria, and potentially limit their effectiveness.ConclusionThe ethical legitimacy of public health measures is valuable in itself and for enhancing effectiveness of the measures. Such legitimacy depends on the extent to which they conform to ethics and human rights principles recommended for public health measures. (shrink)

There is increasing consensus that the right to health can provide ethical, policy and practical groundings for health systems development. The goals of the right to health are congruent with those of health systems development, which are about strengthening health promotion organizations and actions so as to improve public health. The poor shape and performance of health systems in Chad question the extent of realization of the right to health. Due to its comprehensiveness and inclusiveness, the right to health has (...) the potential of being an organizational and a normative backbone for public health policy and practice. It can then be understood and studied as an integral component of health systems development. (shrink)

‘Substance’ (substantia, zelfstandigheid) is a key term of Spinoza’s philosophy. Like almost all of Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary, Spinoza did not invent this term, which has a long history that can be traced back at least to Aristotle. Yet, Spinoza radicalized the traditional notion of substance and made a very powerful use of it by demonstrating – or at least attempting to demonstrate -- that there is only one, unique substance -- God (or Nature) -- and that all other things are (...) merely modes or states of God. Some of Spinoza’s readers understood these claims as committing him to the view that only God truly exists, and while this interpretation is not groundless, we will later see that this enticing and bold reading of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’ comes at the expense of another audacious claim Spinoza advances, i.e., that God/Nature is absolutely and actually infinite. But before we reach this last conclusion, we have a long way to go. So, let me first provide an overview of our plan. In the first section of this paper we will examine Spinoza’s definitions of ‘substance’ and ‘God’ at the opening of his magnum opus, the Ethics. Following a preliminary clarification of these two terms and their relations to the other key terms defined at the beginning of the Ethics, we will briefly address the Aristotelian and Cartesian background of Spinoza’s discussion of substance. In the second section, we will study the properties of the fundamental binary relations pertaining to Spinoza’s substance: inherence, conception, and causation. The third section will be dedicated to a clarification of Spinoza’s claim that God, the unique substance, is absolutely infinite. This essential feature of Spinoza’s substance has been largely neglected in recent Anglo-American scholarship, a neglect which has brought about an unfortunate tendency to domesticate Spinoza’s metaphysics to more contemporary views. The fourth section will study the nature of Spinoza’s monism. It will discuss and criticize the interesting yet controversial views of the eminent Spinoza scholar, Martial Gueroult, about the plurality of substances in the beginning of the Ethics; address Spinoza’s claim in Letter 50 that, strictly speaking, it is improper to describe God as “one”; and, finally, evaluate Spinoza’s kind of monism against the distinction between existence and priority monism recently introduced into the contemporary philosophical literature. The fifth and final section will explain the nature, reality, and manner of existence of modes. We therefore have an ambitious plan; let’s get down to business. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 3, Page 193-209, July 2022. This study aimed to explore experiences and practices of key research team members in obtaining informed consent for pharmacogenetics research and to identify the approaches used for enhancing understanding during the consenting process. Data collection involved 15 qualitative, in-depth interviews with key researchers who were involved in obtaining informed consent from HIV infected individuals in Uganda for participation in pharmacogenetic clinical trials. The study explored two prominent themes: approaches used to (...) convey information and enhance research participants’ understanding and challenges faced during the consenting process. Several barriers and facilitators for obtaining consent were identified. Innovative and potentially effective consenting strategies were identified in this study that should be studied and independently verified. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to think systematically about, formulate, and begin addressing some of the challenges to applying theories of moral responsibility to behaviors shaped by a particular subset of unsettling psychological complexities: namely, implicit biases.

Durante el proceso independentista rioplatense, el ejemplo de los Estados Unidos, país también independizado de un imperio mediante una revolución, estuvo presente de modo permanente en la prensa y en los discursos de la dirigencia rioplatense, en particular la de Buenos Aires. Este artículo rastrea esas apreciaciones a lo largo del cuarto de siglo que siguió a la revolución de 1810, cuando fueron abrumadoramente positivas. Autonomistas e independentistas, republicanos, federales, proteccionistas, todos pudieron referenciarse en los Estados Unidos. Pero las miradas (...) de admiración fueron más allá: el caso norteamericano pudo ser utilizado a su favor por grupos diferentes y para proyectos políticos muy distintos. Incluso los centralistas enemigos del federalismo encontraron en la experiencia estadounidense argumentos útiles. En 1831, un incidente en las islas Malvinas produjo un quiebre diplomático y prefiguró miradas menos favorables sobre los Estados Unidos. (shrink)

Informed consent in medical practice is essential and a global standard that should be sought at all the times doctors interact with patients. Its intensity would vary depending on the invasiveness and risks associated with the anticipated treatment. To our knowledge there has not been any systematic review of consent practices to document best practices and identify areas that need improvement in our setting. The objective of the study was to evaluate the informed consent practices of surgeons at University teaching (...) Hospitals in a low resource setting. (shrink)

BackgroundGenetics and genomics research (GGR) is increasingly being conducted around the world; yet, researchers and research oversight entities in many countries have struggled with ethical challenges. A range of ethics and regulatory issues need to be addressed through comprehensive policy frameworks that integrate with local environments. While important efforts have been made to enhance understanding and awareness of ethical dimensions of GGR in Africa, including through the H3Africa initiative, there remains a need for in-depth policy review, at a country-level, to (...) inform and stimulate local policy development and revision on the continent.MethodsTo identify and characterize existing ethics-related guidelines and laws applicable to GGR across much of Africa, we conducted a scoping review of English language policy documents identified through databases, repositories, and web searches. Thirty-six documents were included and coded using a framework that contained a range of themes across five analytical categories: (1) respect, (2) beneficence, (3) justice, (4) independent oversight, and (5) bans and prohibitions. Data analysis software (NVivo 12) was used to organize, code, and tabulate information according to document characteristics and topics. Illustrative examples of policy requirements were selected for inclusion.ResultsDocuments that met inclusion criteria spanned 20 years; published between 1996 and 2018, with the majority (58%) published after 2009. About two-thirds were denoted as “guidelines,” and slightly more than half were non-exclusive to GGR. Very few (six) country-level documents identified were specific to GGR. Requirements related to the principle of “respect” appeared most often across all documents, relative to other principles and processes. The most commonly stated ban was on reproductive cloning. Other prohibitions applied to germline editing, undue inducements in research, sample use for commercial purposes, employee mandatory DNA testing, fetal sex selection, stem cell use, eugenics, and research without public health benefits.ConclusionsEnforceable policies that are indispensable to the ethical conduct and review of GGR are either deficient or missing in many African countries. Existing international, GGR-specific ethics guidelines can be used to inform GGR policy development at a country-level, in conjunction with insight from country specific ethics committees and other local stakeholders. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I suggest in this essay that the responses to the coronavirus pandemic by the North Atlantic elite ought to be accounted in part to the circulation of nihilism as a structure of feeling under late capitalism. I then pose the question, how ought we think of meaning and meaning making under the shadow of ongoing extinction?

What makes for good societies and good lives in a global world? In this landmark work of political and ethical philosophy, Omedi Ochieng offers a radical reassessment of a millennia-old question. He does so by offering a stringent critique of both North Atlantic and African philosophical traditions, which he argues unfold visions of the good life that are characterized by idealism, moralism, and parochialism. But rather than simply opposing these flawed visions of the good life with his own set (...) of alternative prescriptions, Ochieng argues that it is critically important to step back and understand the stakes of the question. Those stakes, he suggests, are to be found only through a social ontology – a comprehensive and in-depth account of the political, economic, and cultural structures that mark the boundaries and limits of life in the twenty-first century. It is only in light of this social ontology that Ochieng then proffers an alternative normative account of the good society and the good life – which he spells out as emergent from ecological embeddedness; social entanglement; embodied encounter; and aesthetic engenderment. At once sweeping and rigorous, incisive and subtle, original and revisionary, this book does more than just appeal to intellectuals and scholars across the humanities and social sciences – rather, it opens up the academic disciplines to a whole new landscape of exploration into the biggest and most pressing questions animating the human experience. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

Background The globalization of clinical research in the last two decades has led to a significant increase in the volume of clinical research in developing countries. As of 2016, Uganda was the third largest destination for clinical trials in Africa. This requires adequate capacity and systems to facilitate ethical practice. Methods This was a retrospective study involving review of laws, guidelines, policies and records from 1896 to date. Results Modern medicine evolved from 1896 and by the time of Uganda's independence (...) in 1962, a 1500 bed national referral hospital was in place and a fully‐fledged medical school was established at the Makerere University. As the practice of medicine evolved in the country, so did medical research that addressed priority health issues. The growth in modern medicine was not matched with development of research infrastructure and regulatory systems. The first documented regulation of research activities was in 1970 while the first research ethics committee established in 1986 was to facilitate review of research related to the HIV/AIDs pandemic. In 1990 an Act of Parliament was passed to facilitate development and implementation of policies, hence the development of the national guidelines in 1997, training, establishment and accreditation of research ethics committees, conferences and research site monitoring. Conclusion Over the past 120 years, the implementation and structural aspects of research ethics in Uganda have evolved through 70 years of no regulation, followed by 30 years of rudimentary regulation while the last 20 years have shown significant growth in the regulatory system associated with supportive laws, institutionalization of regulatory and training processes. (shrink)

DICTIONARY OF SPANISH VERBS WITH THEIR ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS AND MODELS OF CONJUGATION/DICCIONARIO CON LOS VERBOS EN ESPAÑOL, SU TRADUCCIÓN AL INGLÉS Y CONJUGACIONES.

BackgroundHuman biological materials are usually stored for possible future use in research because they preserve valuable biological information, save time and resources, which would have been spent on collection of fresh samples. However, use of these materials may pose ethical challenges such as unauthorized disclosure of genetic information, which can result in dire consequences for individuals or communities including discrimination, stigma, and psychological harm; has biosecurity implications; and loss of control or ownership of samples or data. To understand these problems (...) better, we evaluated the extent to which tuberculosis (TB) clinical research protocols that were used to collect and store biological materials for future use conform to the requirements stated in the Uganda national guidelines for research involving humans as participants.MethodsThis was a retrospective review of TB clinical research projects approved by the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST) from 2011 to 2015, to examine whether they fulfilled the requirements for ethical collection and use of human materials. Data were abstracted through review of the project protocols using a template developed based on the informed consent and the Materials Transfer Agreement (MTA) requirements in the national guidelines.ResultsOut of 55 research protocols reviewed, most of the protocols 83.6% had been used to collect the stored samples (sputum, blood and sometimes urine), 28% had a section on specimen collection and 24% mentioned ownership of the biological materials. With respect to review of the consent forms used in the studies that stored materials for future use, only 9% of the protocols had a separate consent form for storage of materials, 4.5% of the consent forms explained the risks, 11.4% explained the purpose of the study while 6.8% mentioned the place of storage for the collected materials.ConclusionMany of the studies reviewed did not meet the requirements for collection and storage of biological materials contained in the national guidelines, which indicates a need to additional training on this topic. (shrink)

Groundwork for the intellectual life: ontology, imagination, and praxis -- Radical knowledge: toward a critical contextual ontology of intellectual practice -- Embodied knowledge: intellectual practices as ways of life -- Radical world-building: notes toward a critical contextual aesthetic -- Geographies of the imagination: figurations of the aesthetic at the intersection of African and global arts -- Theses on the intellectual imagination.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Limit Formations:Violence, Philosophy, RhetoricOmedi Ochieng For Megha Sharma SehdevNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.—W. B. Yeats, "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"Violence is (...) a limit formation. It is neither reducible to a brute fact nor is it ineffably ethereal. To write about violence, then, is to confront—if only as disavowed remainder—critical limits, no less of the writer than of the writing itself. Fewer subjects have proven as confounding for philosophy and rhetoric, this journal's primary charge. In both its general particulars and its specific manifolds, violence nonpluses philosophical commonplaces, upends rhetorical tropologies.Philosophy imagines itself mediator to reality's arche, the bedrock of being. Ancient Greek philosophy sought to distinguish necessity from contingency, essence from accident, dialectic from rhetoric, logic from fallacy. Those who took up this intellectual tradition came to conceptualize violence as first and foremost a question of "nature"—more specifically, those marked out by nature to rule (propertied male citizens) and those marked [End Page 330] out by nature for subjection (the enslaved, women, nonhuman animals). In the early modern context of European philosophy, still, despite its pretensions, deeply indebted to this Mediterranean legacy, the canonical lexicon of sensemaking centered on legitimacy and its conceptual appurtenances of sovereignty, will, and rights.Strikingly, it is in the opposed registers of analytic and continental philosophy that violence's cataphilosophic figuration appears most salient. Consider, for example, one such famous symposium convened in the analytic journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, as narrated by political philosopher Michael Walzer:In an earlier issue of Philosophy & Public Affairs there appeared a symposium on the rules of war which was actually (or at least more importantly) a symposium on another topic. The actual topic was whether or not a man can ever face, or ever has to face, a moral dilemma, a situation where he must choose between two courses of action both of which it would be wrong for him to undertake. Thomas Nagel worriedly suggested that this could happen and that it did happen whenever someone was forced to choose between upholding an important moral principle and avoiding some looming disaster. R. B. Brandt argued that it could not possibly happen, for there were guidelines we might follow and calculations we might go through which would necessarily yield the conclusion that one or the other course of action was the right one to undertake in the circumstances (or that it did not matter which we undertook). R. M. Hare explained how it was that someone might wrongly suppose that he was faced with a moral dilemma: sometimes, he suggested, the precepts and principles of an ordinary man, the products of his moral education, come into conflict with injunctions developed at a higher level of moral discourse. But this conflict is, or ought to be, resolved at the higher level; there is no real dilemma.(1973, 160–61)Analytic political philosophy's resolute disavowals could not be here better splayed. Morality is construed as all-encompassing. The political is not so much effaced as it is rendered derivative to a foundational drama of will, obligation, choice. Analytic philosophy's oft-preened claim to clear, transparent, terse style proves constitutive of its desire to contain, if it cannot altogether moralize away violence. [End Page 331]Where analytic philosophy conceives of violence as an object, its limits defined by morality's handmaiden, the "well-ordered society" (Rawls 2001, 8), continental philosophy conjures a sublime violence that shatters and transfigures normative violence. Walter Benjamin posits a binary opposition between mythical and divine violence: "If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates, if the former threatens, the latter strikes, if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling... (shrink)