Because of cultural differences between East and West, any attempt at outright adaptation of Western ideas in Asia will undoubtly encounter problems, if not rejection. Transferring an idea from one place to another is just like transplanting an organ from a donor to a recipient—rejection is to be expected. Human cultures respond to new ideas from different value systems in very much the same way.Recently, biomedical ethics has received much attention in Asia. Fundamental advances in medicine have motivated medical scientists (...) to look at the ethical issues arising from this progress. Will the principles upheld by the bioethicists in the West meet the challenge in Asia? This article argues that Asian bioethicists must develop a bioethics responding to their own cultural contexts. If Western principles are adopted, then they must be re-interpreted and even modified, if necessary, in light of Asian beliefs. (shrink)

Because of cultural differences between East and West, any attempt at outright adaptation of Western ideas in Asia will undoubtly encounter problems, if not rejection. Transferring an idea from one place to another is just like transplanting an organ from a donor to a recipient—rejection is to be expected. Human cultures respond to new ideas from different value systems in very much the same way.Recently, biomedical ethics has received much attention in Asia. Fundamental advances in medicine have motivated medical scientists (...) to look at the ethical issues arising from this progress. Will the principles upheld by the bioethicists in the West meet the challenge in Asia? This article argues that Asian bioethicists must develop a bioethics responding to their own cultural contexts. If Western principles are adopted, then they must be re-interpreted and even modified, if necessary, in light of Asian beliefs. (shrink)

In contrast to Western science and religion, a topic which has been studied very much since the twentieth century, less research has been done on science and Confucianism. By way of a comparative viewpoint within the history of science, this article will deal with some aspects of science and Confucianism in retrospect, for instance, the Confucian origin of the idea of tian yuan di fang 天圓地方, the natural philosophy of qi, and the wu xing li tian zhi qi 五行沴天之氣 bringing (...) abnormal astrological phenomena and reflecting a negative Confucian relation between politics, ethics, and nature. In the late Ming, Xiong Mingyu found that abnormal astrological phenomena, as atmospheric events, happened in the sublunar region rather than in the stars, and in the present time we can reinterpret the crisis of air pollution or global climate change as reflecting a negative Confucian relation between politics, ethics, and nature and as a warning of collective misbehavior in our use of modern scientific technologies. (shrink)

With the rapid development of biotechnology, the physician is now more able to keep a patient's life going indefinitely on a life support system. The question of whether we should switch off the machine often arises when, according to the medical prognosis, there is no hope of recovery, or in a no-win situation where you are 'damned if you do and damned if you don't'. In a case which seems without hope, the dilemma of whether to prolong a life or (...) let it go disturbs many people, including health professionals as well as the family of the patient. In this painful situation, an ethics consultant who has received intensive training can help the concerned parties to arrive at what may be the best decision. How do Asians, especially those living in countries influenced by Confucian teachings, reach their answers? Three aspects are usually considered: (1) motivation and situation; (2) reasonableness and propriety; and (3) lawfulness and legality. More specifically, three questions are deliberated, as follows. (1) Where an action has already been taken, what motivated it and in what situation? Or, where a decision has still to be made, what should motivate it, and what are the relevant features of the situation? (2) Was the attempted resolution of the dilemma, or is its prospective resolution, reasonable and in accordance with traditional principles of ethical behaviour? (3) Was the action taken lawful, or would the intended action be lawful? This approach to finding an answer has been practised for centuries in Confucian society. But what is legal may not always be reasonable, what is reasonable may not always be compassionate, and what is compassionate may not always be either legal or reasonable. Principles to guide decision-making are therefore called for. This article, written by Michael Cheng-tek Tai in collaboration with Donald Hill, discusses the Confucian method of solving a problem and examines its principal features and how they are applied in ethics consultations. The article is followed by a series of questions and answers and a commentary by Donald Hill. (shrink)

MENDENHALL TJ, BERGE JM, HARPER P, GREENCROW B, LITTLEWALKER N, WHITEEAGLE S and BROWNOWL S. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 359–372 The Family Education Diabetes Series (FEDS): community‐based participatory research with a midwestern American Indian communityIndigenous people around the globe tend to struggle with poorer health and well‐being than their non‐indigenous counterparts. One area that this is especially evident is in the epidemic of diabetes in North America’s American Indians (AIs) – who evidence higher prevalence rates and concomitant disease‐related complications than (...) any other racial/ethnic group. As researchers and AI communities work together to transcend conventional top‐down, service‐delivery approaches to care, community‐based participatory research is beginning to show promise as a way to partner contemporary biomedical knowledge with the lived‐experience, wisdom, and customs of Indigenous people. This study describes the Family Education Diabetes Series (FEDS) as an example of such effort, and highlights pilot findings assessing its value and impact across key diabetes‐relevant variables. Following 36 intervention participants across baseline, 3‐month, and 6‐month time periods, data show significant improvements in weight, blood pressure, and metabolic control (A1c). Strengths and limitations of this investigation are presented, along with suggestions about how to further advance and empirically test the work across other Indigenous communities. (shrink)

In two recent papers, Mr Robert Young maintains that all attempts by philosophers to bolster the-violation-of-law concept of miracles are bound to fail and propounds what he claims to be a novel non-reductivist concept of miracles which avoids the conceptual difficulties of the violation-model. His view of miracles is of god being ‘an active agent-factor in the set of factors which actually was causally operative’ [p. 123] in an event dubbed a miracle. God is put in among ‘the plurality of (...) causes’ [p. 122, S p. 33] that could determine the event, but if he acts in a miracle, then ‘his presence…alters the outcome from what it would have been if, contrary to fact , he had not been present’ [p. 122]. Young claims that his concept ‘is neither a violation of … laws nor is it a coincidental occurrence religiously interpreted’ [p. 122, S p. 33], and so it avoids the difficulties, which he thinks are faced by the violation-model, of having an intelligible notion of an occurrence of the physically impossible, and also the reductivism inherent in taking mere coincidences as miracles. He also suggests a procedure of settling the epistemological issue regarding particular alleged miracles, an inquiry he thinks he has made possible by having first given a sense to miracles. [p. 126]. (shrink)

We develop a series of small infinitary epistemic logics to study deductive inference involving intra-/interpersonal beliefs/knowledge such as common knowledge, common beliefs, and infinite regress of beliefs. Specifically, propositional epistemic logics GL are presented for ordinal α up to a given αo so that GL is finitary KDn with n agents and GL allows conjunctions of certain countably infinite formulae. GL is small in that the language is countable and can be constructive. The set of formulae Lα is increasing up (...) to α = ω but stops at ω We present Kripke-completeness for GL for each α ≤ ω, which is proved using the Rasiowa–Sikorski lemma and Tanaka–Ono lemma. GL has a sufficient expressive power to discuss intra-/interpersonal beliefs with infinite lengths. As applications, we discuss the explicit definability of Axioms T, 4, 5, and of common knowledge in GL Also, we discuss the rationalizability concept in game theory in our framework. We evaluate where these discussions are done in the series GL, α ≤ ω. (shrink)

O estudo etnográfico permite aos professores uma ampla percepção dos aspectos socioeducacionais que perpassam o contexto escolar, permitindo que se desenvolvam, a partir deste estudo, ações pedagógicas para problematizar conhecimentos socioambientais do contexto local e global. No Pibid Interdisciplinar: Educação Ambiental, o estudo etnográfico foi realizado em uma escola do campo, no interior de Jequié-BA, situada numa zona de mata atlântica. O objetivo desse artigo é apresentar a etnografia como propulsora da realização das ações socioambientais de replantio de árvores e (...) da Semana de Meio Ambiente. Os resultados indicam que a articulação dos diversos saberes coloca os alunos campesinos como protagonistas do seu contexto sociocultural, além de permitir uma integração maior do que foi observado etnograficamente e do que pode ser trabalhado na perspectiva socioambiental no contexto da educação do campo. (shrink)

As opposed to a ‘one size fits all’ approach, precision medicine uses relevant biological, medical, behavioural and environmental information about a person to further personalize their healthcare. This could mean better prediction of someone’s disease risk and more effective diagnosis and treatment if they have a condition. Big data allows for far more precision and tailoring than was ever before possible by linking together diverse datasets to reveal hitherto-unknown correlations and causal pathways. But it also raises ethical issues relating to (...) the balancing of interests, viability of anonymization, familial and group implications, as well as genetic discrimination. This article analyses these issues in light of the values of public benefit, justice, harm minimization, transparency, engagement and reflexivity and applies the deliberative balancing approach found in theEthical Framework for Big Data in Health and Research to a case study on clinical genomic data sharing. Please refer to that article for an explanation of how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end. Our discussion is meant to be of use to those involved in the practice as well as governance and oversight of precision medicine to address ethical concerns that arise in a coherent and systematic manner. (shrink)

Children’s early science interest begins well before middle school, and parents can be important in generating and sustaining such interest. This qualitative study addresses how parental occupations shape physical scientists’ early science interest. Our framework uses Social Cognitive Career Theory, and our research question is, “How do parental occupations create learning opportunities for children and motivate them to pursue physical science?” We examine interviews from 17 physical scientists in Project Crossover, a sequential mixed-methods study that broadly examines factors influencing entry (...) into physics and chemistry doctoral programs. Parental occupations can create learning opportunities through role modeling, encouragement, exposure, familiarity, and bonding. Thus, parents can be valuable in creating learning opportunities for children outside classrooms. Study limitations include a small sample and lack of information about familial structure. Our research contributes to the emergent understanding of the role of parental occupations in science interest, which further influences individual career trajectories. (shrink)

This book presents the methodological framework of combining Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to interpretively analyse translanguaging practices in educational contexts. Beginning with an overview of the three uses of translanguaging - translanguaging as a theory of language, as a pedagogical practice and as an analytical perspective - the book goes on to critically examine the different methodological approaches for analysing translanguaging practices in multilingual classroom interactions. It explains how MCA and IPA are useful methodologies for (...) understanding how and why translanguaging practices are constructed by participants in the classroom and discusses types of data collected and data collection procedures. The author, Kevin W. H. Tai, shows how combining these approaches enables researchers to study how translanguaging practices are constructed in multilingual classrooms and how teachers make sense of their own translanguaging practices at particular moments of classroom interaction. This detailed and concise guide is indispensable for students, practitioners, policymakers, and researchers from across the globe, particularly those working in the fields of applied linguistics and language education. (shrink)

Neste artigo, traço um breve panorama da crise das narrativas na história e na crítica de arte para pensá-la a partir de uma perspectiva do sujeito que narra. Trago os princípios que fundamentam a história da arte, a crítica de arte em sua origem, para atentar ao momento em que, através de Marcel Duchamp, a escrita realizada pelos artistas ganha uma nova qualidade e um outro tipo de legitimidade e dá início a um borro nas separações sugeridas pela narrativa moderna (...) – expressão e produto, subjetividade e objetividade, privado e público. Por fim, na impossibilidade de uma escrita que alcança a universalidade, sugiro pensarmos as narrativas da arte junto ao conceito de escritas de si, de Michel Foucault.Palavras-chave: História da arte. Crítica de arte. Escritos de artista. Escrita de si. (shrink)

A emergência climática e o possível colapso político, ambiental e social que se avizinha nos convida a pensar em futuros possíveis, haja vista que habitar o planeta Terra tem se caracterizado pelo risco constante de catástrofes. Com isso, este artigo visa mergulhar na obra “A extinção das abelhas” de Natalia Borges Polesso, para que possamos compreender o antropoceno como o tempo da perturbação humana.

A non-universal Immediate Dominance Condition on identity deletion is proposed to explain the systematic differences between languages like Chinese and languages like English in their respective patterns of coordination, topicalization, dislocation, and relativization. By assuming that this condition holds for languages of the Chinese-type, but not for those of the English-type, it is possible to account for the well-formed coordinations of all languages by means of a single universal principle of coordination reduction, and it is possible to derive the well-formed (...) topicalizations, dislocations, and relative clause constructions of all languages by means of the same set of universal principles of Copying, Deletion, and Pronominalization. (shrink)

According to a familiar reading of Kant, he denies the possibility alleged by the rationalists of our having non-sensible or intellectual intuition. I argue in this article that he simply holds the possibility to be groundless. To put the contrast in terms of a distinction Kant makes in the A-Paralogisms, he raises a “dogmatic” objection to the rationalists in the former case, and a “critical” one in the latter. By analyzing the two-step argument in the B-Deduction, I defend the “critical” (...) reading, which may, I hope, shed light on how Kant can justify his claim – which may be regarded as a second-order, methodological one pivotal to his Critical project – that possible experience serves as the only guideline for proving that we can cognize objects a priori. (shrink)

The fluctuation-dissipation theorem is a central theorem in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics by which the evolution of velocity fluctuations of the Brownian particle under a fluctuating environment is intimately related to its dissipative behavior. This can be illuminated in particular by an example of Brownian motion in an ohmic environment where the dissipative effect can be accounted for by the first-order time derivative of the position. Here we explore the dynamics of the Brownian particle coupled to a supraohmic environment by considering (...) the motion of a charged particle interacting with the electromagnetic fluctuations at finite temperature. We also derive particle’s equation of motion, the Langevin equation, by minimizing the corresponding stochastic effective action, which is obtained with the method of Feynman-Vernon influence functional. The fluctuation-dissipation theorem is established from first principles. The backreaction on the charge is known in terms of electromagnetic self-force given by a third-order time derivative of the position, leading to the supraohmic dynamics. This self-force can be argued to be insignificant throughout the evolution when the charge barely moves. The stochastic force arising from the supraohmic environment is found to have both positive and negative correlations, and it drives the charge into a fluctuating motion. Although positive force correlations give rise to the growth of the velocity dispersion initially, its growth slows down when correlation turns negative, and finally halts, thus leading to the saturation of the velocity dispersion. The saturation mechanism in a supraohmic environment is found to be distinctly different from that in an ohmic environment. The comparison is discussed. (shrink)

This exploratory qualitative study investigated how doctoral students reported their personal and professional interaction experiences that they believed might facilitate or impede their academic pursuits in biomedical research. We collected 19 in-depth interviews with doctoral students in biomedical research from eight universities, and we based our qualitative analytic approach on the work of Miles and Huberman. The results indicated that among different sources and types of interaction, academic and emotional interactions from family and teachers in various stages essentially affected students’ (...) persistence in the biomedical science field. In addition, co-mentorship among peers, departmental environment, and volunteer experiences were other essential factors. This study also found related experiences among women and underrepresented minority students that were important to their academic pursuit. (shrink)

Research shows that early scientific interest is associated with science degree completion and career selection. However, little is known about the conditions that support early scientific interest. Using a “funds of knowledge” theoretical framework, this study examined the role of parents, family, and extended social networks in fostering early interest in science. Using interview narratives from 116 scientists (physicists and chemists) in the United States, we conducted a qualitative thematic content analysis. Findings suggest that children who become scientists in adulthood (...) often received early, informal opportunities to use and manipulate material objects and discover how the world works. Second, families used a wide variety of scientific terms at home and encouraged children to pursue their interests whether in science or other fields. Third, these future scientists were often networked with extended family members or friends to observe and do science when they were quite young. Collectively, these findings highlight the specific ways in which families fostered early scientific interest and aided in supporting a student-directed learning environment. (shrink)