This study aims to investigate the awareness and perception level of bioethical issues among pre-service science teachers at one of the Malaysian Education Institutions. A total of 67 respondents studying science major and science elective were involved. A questionnaire based survey with an alpha Cronbach of approximately 0.93 was used. Data were analysed using SPSS version 22. The results showed that the average awareness and perception level were =4.218±0.758 (very high level) and =3.991±0.923 (high level), respectively. There was a statistically (...) significant difference according to religion and course. Cloning showed the highest awareness level followed by organ donation, genetic modification, stem cells, abortion, gene therapy, gene screening and euthanasia. Overall, the findings indicated that pre-service science teachers were aware of the existence of bioethical issues. However, the authorities may implement bioethical issues more firmly in the future to increase pre-service science teachers’ awareness and perception level. (shrink)

Trust features prominently in a number of policy documents that have been issued in recent years to facilitate data sharing and international collaboration in medical research. However, it often remains unclear what is meant by ‘trust’. By exploring a concrete international collaboration between Denmark and Pakistan, we develop a way of unpacking trust that shifts focus from what trust ‘is’ to what people invest in relationships and what references to trust do for them in these relationships. Based on interviews in (...) both Pakistan and Denmark with people who provide blood samples and health data for the same laboratory, we find that when participants discuss trust they are trying to shape their relationship to researchers while simultaneously communicating important hopes, fears and expectations. The types of trust people talk about are never unconditional, but involve awareness of uncertainties and risks. There are different things at stake for people in different contexts, and therefore it is not the same to trust researchers in Pakistan as it is in Denmark, even when participants donate to the same laboratory. We conclude that casual references to ‘trust’ in policy documents risk glossing over important local differences and contribute to a de-politicization of basic inequalities in access to healthcare. (shrink)

Background Moral distress is a common challenge among professional nurses when caring for their patients, especially when they need to make rapid decisions. Therefore, leaving moral distress unconsidered may jeopardize patient quality of care, safety, and satisfaction. Aim To estimate moral distress among nurses. Methods This systematic review and meta-analysis conducted systematic search in Scopus, PubMed, ProQuest, ISI Web of Knowledge, and PsycInfo up to end of February 2022. Methodological quality of included studies was assessed using the Newcastle Ottawa checklist. (...) Data from included studies were pooled by meta-analysis with random effect model in STATA software version 14. The selected key measure was mean score of moral distress total score with its’ 95% Confidence Interval was reported. Subgroup analyses and meta-regressions were conducted to identify possible sources of heterogeneity and potentially influencing variables on moral distress. Funnel plots and Begg’s Tests were used to assess publication bias. The Jackknife method was used for sensitivity analysis. Ethical consideration The protocol of this project was registered in the PROSPERO database under decree code of CRD42021267773. Results Eighty-six manuscripts with 19,537 participants from 21 countries were included. The pooled estimated mean score of moral distress was 2.55 on a 0–10 scale [95% Confidence Interval: 2.27–2.84, I2: 98.4%, Tau2:0.94]. Publication bias and small study effect was ruled out. Moral distress significantly decreased in the COVID-19 pandemic versus before. Nurses working in developing countries experienced higher level of moral distress compared to their counterparts in developed countries. Nurses' workplace (e.g., hospital ward) was not linked to severity of moral disturbance. Conclusion The results of the study showed a low level of pooled estimated score for moral distress. Although the score of moral distress was not high, nurses working in developing countries reported higher levels of moral distress than those working in developed countries. Therefore, it is necessary that future studies focus on creating a supportive environment in hospitals and medical centers for nurses to reduce moral distress and improve healthcare. (shrink)

Old stories, rather than being a means to shorten the long winter nights or make children's eyelids heavy, were the hidden treasures of peoples’ social and psychological history. They contained, more than anything else, archetypal motifs which were expressed through various symbols. One such old stories was SamakAyyar which appeared in the north-eastern region of the Iranian plateau. The initial narrators of SamakAyyar were most probably the Aryan branch of the Indo-Aryan settlers. The fact that Aryans were neighbouring the Hindu (...) cultures on the one hand, and the common ancestors as well as ideas of the two nations on the other, resulted in the footprints of Buddhist beliefs and Hindu rituals in this story. The influence of these beliefs can clearly be observed in the description of the buildings which appear in the story.Suchbuildings become sacred due to their association with the story plot, i.e. the journey from childhood to maturity. Whether a prison, palace or a castle, the structural image of these buildings, generally and frequently, resemble the Hindu temple. It seems as though such similarity follows the same sense as that in the construction of sacred buildings, especially Hindu temples. The inner journey, moving in circular directions, and the relationship between heaven and earth are instances of this holy meaning. Such concepts are discussed in the analysis of the symbolic meaning of the buildings in the story. (shrink)

It has been quite a year so far(!) and as the wenches we are, we have been taking our time to collect our thoughts and reflections before sharing them at the start of this issue of the journal. In this editorial we think through the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating effects on the world, on our lives and on our editorial processes. We renew our commitment to improving our operations as a journal and its health along with our own as (...) we deploy wench tactics to restore, sustain and slow down to negotiate this new reality, this new world. We conclude with an introduction to the fascinating contents of this issue along with a collaborative statement of values on open access as part of a collective of intersectional feminist and social justice editors. Through all of the pain and suffering we focus our gaze on hope: hope that we can come through this global crisis together engaging in critical conversations about how we can be better and do better as editors, academics and individuals for ourselves, our colleagues and our journal. (shrink)

It has been three years since we held the Feminism, Legality and Knowledge seminar to respond to our developing frustrations and excitement around feminist legal studies and academic publishing. In the wake of our 25th anniversary in 2018, we critically reflect further on our original intention to stock up on decolonising techniques to mix feminism, legality and knowledge whilst building on previous consideration of our self-proclaimed ‘international’ status. These reflections are prompted by editorial board members’ experiences as participants in the (...) Cardiff Law and Global Justice Centre’s British Academy-funded Global South Socio-Legal Writing Workshops in Accra, Nairobi and Recife in 2018. Following an explanation of the concerns with academic publishing that have prompted this reflection, we provide a narrative of our experiences in each of the three workshops exploring the lessons learned and their impact on our practice as editors and scholars in feminist legal studies. We finish with a renewal of our commitment to decolonise our minds and practices by continuing to struggle to earn the label ‘international’ for the journal now and in future. A brief introduction to the contents of this issue of FLS follows the reflection. (shrink)

Construction cost estimation is one of the essential processes in construction management. Project cost is a complex engineering problem due to various factors affecting the construction industry. Accurate cost estimation is important in construction management and significantly impacts project performance. Artificial intelligence models have been effectively implemented in construction management studies in recent years owing to their capability to deal with complex problems. In this research, extreme gradient boosting is developed as an advanced input selector algorithm and coupled with three (...) AI models, including random forest, artificial neural network, and support vector machine for cost estimation. Datasets were gathered based on a survey conducted on 90 building projects in Iraq. Statistical indicators and graphical methods were used to evaluate the developed models. Several input predictors were used, and XGBoost highlighted inflation as the most crucial parameter. The results indicated that the best prediction was attained by XGBoost-RF using six input parameters, with r-squared and the mean absolute percentage error equal to 0.87 and 0.25, respectively. The comparison results revealed that all AI models showed good prediction performance when applied to datasets affected by more than two parameters. The outcomes of this research revealed an optimistic strategy that can help decision makers select the influencing parameters in the early phases of project management. Also, developing a prediction model with high precision results can assist the project’s estimators in decreasing the errors in the cost estimation process. (shrink)

As science focuses exclusively on the physical, it seems to assume that the brain has a key role in the origin if not also the constitution of our consciousness; and thus the destruction of the brain, the nervous system, and the body makes it pointless or even absurd to think of any personal consciousness after death. But one need not be convinced by this. However, any effort to investigate a possible post-mortem life depends on forming a coherent conception of what (...) such a life could be. Can we speak, without incoherence or contradiction, of a person continuing to exist after death in a disembodied state? Our concern in this study lies here. Based on Lund’s view, we will present and defend an argument that one can conceive of a self who is fully embedded in the natural world and deeply embodied in a physical organism, and yet could have a rich variety of experiences in an afterworld encountered after death. In this theory, the close association of the mental and the physical is due to a causal connection - a connection that fails to establish that the physical brings the mental into existence and is compatible with theories that the source of consciousness is not in the brain. (shrink)

This paper has two goals. First, we develop frameworks for logical systems which are able to reflect not only non-monotonic patterns of reasoning, but also paraconsistent reasoning. Our second goal is to have a better understanding of the conditions that a useful relation for nonmonotonic reasoning should satisfy. For this we consider a sequence of generalizations of the pioneering works of Gabbay, Kraus, Lehmann, Magidor and Makinson. These generalizations allow the use of monotonic nonclassical logics as the underlying logic upon (...) which nonmonotonic reasoning may be based. Our sequence of frameworks culminates in what we call plausible, nonmonotonic, multiple-conclusion consequences relations . Our study yields intuitive justifications for conditions that have been proposed in previous frameworks and also clarifies the connections among some of these systems. In addition, we present a general method for constructing plausible nonmonotonic relations. This method is based on a multiple-valued semantics, and on Shoham's idea of preferential models. (shrink)

The notion of bilattice was introduced by Ginsberg, and further examined by Fitting, as a general framework for many applications. In the present paper we develop proof systems, which correspond to bilattices in an essential way. For this goal we introduce the notion of logical bilattices. We also show how they can be used for efficient inferences from possibly inconsistent data. For this we incorporate certain ideas of Kifer and Lozinskii, which happen to suit well the context of our work. (...) The outcome are paraconsistent logics with a lot of desirable properties.1. (shrink)

Constructions of Intersubjectivity shows that the meaning of grammatical constructions often has more to do with the human cognitive capacity for taking other peoples' points of view than with describing the world. Treating pragmatics, semantics, and syntax in parallel and integrating insights from linguistics, psychology, and animal communication, Arie Verhagen develops a new understanding of linguistic communication. In doing so he shows the continuity between language and animal communication and reveals the nature of human linguistic specialization. Professor Verhagen uses Dutch (...) and English data from a wide variety of sources and considers the contributions of grammar to the coherence of discourse. He argues that important problems in semantics and syntax may be resolved if language is understood as an instrument for exerting influence and coordinating different perspectives. The grammatical phenomena he discusses include negative expressions, the let alone construction, complementation constructions, and discourse connectives.This powerfully argued and original explanation of the nature and operation of communication will interest a wide range of scholars and advanced students in linguistics, cognitive science, and human evolution. (shrink)

An ℵ1-Souslin tree is a complicated combinatorial object whose existence cannot be decided on the grounds of ZFC alone. But fifteen years after Tennenbaum and Jech independently devised notions of forcing for introducing such a tree, Shelah proved that already the simplest forcing notion—Cohen forcing—adds an ℵ1-Souslin tree. In this article, we identify a rather large class of notions of forcing that, assuming a GCH-type hypothesis, add a λ+-Souslin tree. This class includes Prikry, Magidor, and Radin forcing.

In Part I of this series, we presented the microscopic approach to Souslin-tree constructions, and argued that all known ⋄-based constructions of Souslin trees with various additional properties may be rendered as applications of our approach. In this paper, we show that constructions following the same approach may be carried out even in the absence of ⋄. In particular, we obtain a new weak sufficient condition for the existence of Souslin trees at the level of a strongly inaccessible cardinal. We (...) also present a new construction of a Souslin tree with an ascent path, thereby increasing the consistency strength of such a tree's nonexistence from a Mahlo cardinal to a weakly compact cardinal. Section 2 of this paper is targeted at newcomers with minimal background. It offers a comprehensive exposition of the subject of constructing Souslin trees and the challenges involved. (shrink)

Longer-term developments shape the present and endogenous futures of institutions and practices of science and technology in society and their governance. Understanding the patterns allows diagnosis and soft intervention, often linked to scenario exercises. The book collects six articles offering key examples of this perspective, addressing ongoing issues in the governance of science and technology, including nanotechnology and responsible research and innovation. And adds two more articles that address background philosophical issues.

Some people claim that evolution is "just a theory". Do you know what a scientific theory really is? Just a theory is an overview of the modern concepts of science. A clear understanding of the nature of science will enable you to distinguish science from pseudoscience (which illegitimately wraps itself in the mantle of science), and real social issues in science from the caricatures portrayed in postmodernist critiques. Prof. Ben-Ari's style is light (even humorous) and easy to read, bringing the (...) latest concepts of science to the general reader. Of particular interest is his analysis of the terminology of science (fact, law, proof, theory) in relation to the colloquial meaning of these terms. Between chapters are biographical vignettes of scientists — both familiar and unfamiliar — showing their common commitment to the enterprise of science, together with a diversity of backgrounds and personalities. This accessible, informative, and comprehensive work will give lay readers a good grasp of real science. (shrink)

Within the space of a few years, the idea of Responsible Research and Innovation, and its acronym RRI, catapulted from an obscure phrase to the topic of conferences and attempts to specify and realize it. How did this come about, and against which backdrop? What are the dynamics at present, and what do these imply for the future of RRI as a discourse, and as a patchwork of practices? It is a social innovation which creates opening in existing divisions of (...) moral labour, a notion that is explained with the help of the history of responsibility language. It is filled in for the present situation and ongoing developments. Some elements may stabilize and this creates a path into the future. There will be reductions of the originally open-ended innovation, some productive, others less so. This is a reason to regularly inquire into the value of the reductions and the directions the path is taking. (shrink)

Three-time New York Times bestselling author Dan Ariely teams up with legendary The New Yorker cartoonist William Haefeli to present an expanded, illustrated collection of his immensely popularWall Street Journal advice column, “Ask Ariely”. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely revolutionized the way we think about ourselves, our minds, and our actions in his books Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. Ariely applies this scientific analysis of the human condition in his “Ask Ariely” Q & A (...) column in the Wall Street Journal, in which he responds to readers who write in with personal conundrums ranging from the serious to the curious: What can you do to stay calm when you’re playing the volatile stock market? What’s the best way to get someone to stop smoking? How can you maximize the return on your investment at an all-you-can-eat buffet? Is it possible to put a price on the human soul? Can you ever rationally justify spending thousands of dollars on a Rolex? In Ask Ariely, a broad variety of economic, ethical, and emotional dilemmas are explored and addressed through text and images. Using their trademark insight and wit, Ariely and Haefeli help us reflect on how we can reason our way through external and internal challenges. Readers will laugh, learn, and most importantly gain a new perspective on how to deal with the inevitable problems that plague our daily life. (shrink)

The article revisits the large n problem as it relates to the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox to compare the frequentist, Bayesian, and likelihoodist approaches to inference and evidence. It is argued that what is fallacious is to interpret a rejection of as providing the same evidence for a particular alternative, irrespective of n; this is an example of the fallacy of rejection. Moreover, the Bayesian and likelihoodist approaches are shown to be susceptible to the fallacy of acceptance. The key difference is that (...) in frequentist testing the severity evaluation circumvents both fallacies but no such principled remedy exists for the other approaches. (shrink)

Many believe that the ethical problems of donation after cardiocirculatory death (DCD) have been "worked out" and that it is unclear why DCD should be resisted. In this paper we will argue that DCD donors may not yet be dead, and therefore that organ donation during DCD may violate the dead donor rule. We first present a description of the process of DCD and the standard ethical rationale for the practice. We then present our concerns with DCD, including the following: (...) irreversibility of absent circulation has not occurred and the many attempts to claim it has have all failed; conflicts of interest at all steps in the DCD process, including the decision to withdraw life support before DCD, are simply unavoidable; potentially harmful premortem interventions to preserve organ utility are not justifiable, even with the help of the principle of double effect; claims that DCD conforms with the intent of the law and current accepted medical standards are misleading and inaccurate; and consensus statements by respected medical groups do not change these arguments due to their low quality including being plagued by conflict of interest. Moreover, some arguments in favor of DCD, while likely true, are "straw-man arguments," such as the great benefit of organ donation. The truth is that honesty and trustworthiness require that we face these problems instead of avoiding them. We believe that DCD is not ethically allowable because it abandons the dead donor rule, has unavoidable conflicts of interests, and implements premortem interventions which can hasten death. These important points have not been, but need to be fully disclosed to the public and incorporated into fully informed consent. These are tall orders, and require open public debate. Until this debate occurs, we call for a moratorium on the practice of DCD. (shrink)

Ariès traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret.

We define in precise terms the basic properties that an ‘ideal propositional paraconsistent logic’ is expected to have, and investigate the relations between them. This leads to a precise characterization of ideal propositional paraconsistent logics. We show that every three-valued paraconsistent logic which is contained in classical logic, and has a proper implication connective, is ideal. Then we show that for every n > 2 there exists an extensive family of ideal n -valued logics, each one of which is not (...) equivalent to any k -valued logic with k < n. (shrink)

Paradefinite logics are logics that can be used for handling contradictory or partial information. As such, paradefinite logics should be both paraconsistent and paracomplete. In this paper we consider the simplest semantic framework for introducing paradefinite logics. It consists of the four-valued matrices that expand the minimal matrix which is characteristic for first degree entailments: Dunn–Belnap matrix. We survey and study the expressive power and proof theory of the most important logics that can be developed in this framework.

Contemporary debates on decolonising knowledge production, inclusive of research on Africa, are crucial and challenge researchers to reflect on the legacies of colonial power relations that continue to permeate the production of knowledge about the continent, its peoples, and societies. Yet these are not new debates. Sixty years ago, Ghana’s first president and pan-Africanist leader, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, highlighted the importance of Africa-centred knowledge. Similarly, in the 1980s, Claude Ake advocated for endogenous knowledge production on Africa. But progress has been (...) slow at best, indicated by the enduring predominance of non-African writers on African issues within leading scholarly journals. Thus, we examine why decolonisation of knowledge production remains so necessary and what can be done within the context of scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. These questions are addressed at two levels, one more practical and one more reflective . At both levels, issues of power inequalities and injustice are critical. At the practical level, the asymmetrical power relations between scholars in the Global North and South are highlighted. At a deeper level, the critiques of contemporary African authors are outlined, all contesting the ongoing coloniality and epistemic injustices that affect knowledge production on Africa, and calling for a more fundamental reorientation of ontological, epistemological, and methodological approaches in order to decolonise knowledge production. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

We introduce a general approach for representing and reasoning with argumentation-based systems. In our framework arguments are represented by Gentzen-style sequents, attacks between arguments are represented by sequent elimination rules, and deductions are made according to Dung-style skeptical or credulous semantics. This framework accommodates different languages and logics in which arguments may be represented, allows for a flexible and simple way of expressing and identifying arguments, supports a variety of attack relations, and is faithful to standard methods of drawing conclusions (...) by argumentation frameworks. Altogether, we show that argumentation theory may benefit from incorporating proof theoretical techniques and that different non-classical formalisms may be used for backing up intended argumentation semantics. (shrink)

Maximality is a desirable property of paraconsistent logics, motivated by the aspiration to tolerate inconsistencies, but at the same time retain from classical logic as much as possible. In this paper we introduce the strongest possible notion of maximal paraconsistency, and investigate it in the context of logics that are based on deterministic or non-deterministic three-valued matrices. We show that all reasonable paraconsistent logics based on three-valued deterministic matrices are maximal in our strong sense. This applies to practically all three-valued (...) paraconsistent logics that have been considered in the literature, including a large family of logics which were developed by da Costa's school. Then we show that in contrast, paraconsistent logics based on three-valued properly nondeterministic matrices are not maximal, except for a few special cases (which are fully characterized). However, these non-deterministic matrices are useful for representing in a clear and concise way the vast variety of the (deterministic) three-valued maximally paraconsistent matrices. The corresponding weaker notion of maximality, called premaximal paraconsistency, captures the "core" of maximal paraconsistency of all possible paraconsistent determinizations of a non-deterministic matrix, thus representing what is really essential for their maximal paraconsistency. (shrink)

Brain death has been accepted worldwide medically and legally as the biological state of death of the organism. Nevertheless, the literature has described persistent problems with this acceptance ever since brain death was described. Many of these problems are not widely known or properly understood by much of the medical community. Here we aim to clarify these issues, based on the two intractable problems in the brain death debates. First, the metaphysical problem: there is no reason that withstands critical scrutiny (...) to believe that BD is the state of biological death of the human organism. Second, the epistemic problem: there is no way currently to diagnose the state of BD, the irreversible loss of all brain functions, using clinical tests and ancillary tests, given potential confounders to testing. We discuss these problems and their main objections and conclude that these problems are intractable in that there has been no acceptable solution offered other than bare assertions of an ‘operational definition’ of death. We present possible ways to move forward that accept both the metaphysical problem - that BD is not biological death of the human organism - and the epistemic problem - that as currently diagnosed, BD is a devastating neurological state where recovery of sentience is very unlikely, but not a confirmed state of irreversible loss of all [critical] brain functions. We argue that the best solution is to abandon the dead donor rule, thus allowing vital organ donation from patients currently diagnosed as BD, assuming appropriate changes are made to the consent process and to laws about killing. (shrink)

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, (...) from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death. (shrink)

This article calls into question the charge that frequentist testing is susceptible to the base-rate fallacy. It is argued that the apparent similarity between examples like the Harvard Medical School test and frequentist testing is highly misleading. A closer scrutiny reveals that such examples have none of the basic features of a proper frequentist test, such as legitimate data, hypotheses, test statistics, and sampling distributions. Indeed, the relevant error probabilities are replaced with the false positive/negative rates that constitute deductive calculations (...) based on known probabilities among events. As a result, the ampliative dimension of frequentist induction—learning from data about the underlying data-generating mechanism—is missing. *Received August 2009; revised January 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Economics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This discussion note offers a preliminary analysis of what recent developments in human germline gene editing tell us about the effectiveness of speculative and anticipatory modes of techno-ethics. It argues that the benefits of speculative discussions are difficult to detect thus far, and that pushing the focal point of ethical discourse well ahead of the current state of technology may prematurely undermine existing norms long before a broad consensus would justify moving beyond them.