The Birkhoff-Maltsev problem asks for a characterization of those lattices each of which is isomorphic to the lattice L(K) of all subquasivarieties for some quasivariety K of algebraic systems. The current status of this problem, which is still open, is discussed. Various unsolved questions that are related to the Birkhoff-Maltsev problem are also considered, including ones that stem from the theory of propositional logics.

In this paper we develop a new methodology for normative theorising, which we call Directed Reflective Equilibrium. Directed Reflective Equilibrium is based on a taxonomy that distinguishes between a number of different functions of hypothetical cases, including two dimensions that we call representation and elicitation. Like its predecessor, Directed Reflective Equilibrium accepts that neither intuitions nor basic principles are immune to revision and that our commitments on various levels of philosophical enquiry should be brought into equilibrium. However, it also offers (...) guidance about how different types of cases ought to be sequenced to achieve this result. We argue that this ‘directional’ approach improves, in various ways, upon the non-directional approach of traditional Reflective Equilibrium. (shrink)

The subjective effects and therapeutic potential of the shamanic practice of journeying is well known. However, previous research has neglected to provide a comprehensive assessment of the subjective effects of shamanic-like journeying techniques on non-shamans. Shamanic-like techniques are those that demonstrate some similarity to shamanic practices and yet deviate from what may genuinely be considered shamanism. Furthermore, the personality traits that influence individual susceptibility to shamanic-like techniques are unclear. The aim of the present study was, thus, to investigate experimentally the (...) effect of shamanic-like techniques and a personality trait referred to as "ego boundaries" on subjective experience including mood disturbance. Forty-three non-shamans were administered a composite questionnaire consisting of demographic items and a measure of ego boundaries (i.e., the Short Boundary Questionnaire; BQ-Sh). Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: listening to monotonous drumming for 15 minutes coupled with one of two sets of journeying instructions; or sitting quietly with eyes closed for 15 minutes. Participants' subjective experience and mood disturbance were retrospectively assessed using the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI) and the Profile of Mood States-Short Form, respectively. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between conditions with regard to the PCI major dimensions of visual imagery, attention and rationality, and minor dimensions of imagery amount and absorption. However, the shamanic-like conditions were not associated with a major reorganization of the pattern of subjective experience compared to the sitting quietly condition, suggesting that what is typically referred to as an altered state of consciousness effect was not evident. One shamanic-like condition and the BQ-Sh subscales need for order, childlikeness, and sensitivity were statistically significant predictors of total mood disturbance. Implications of the findings for the anthropology of consciousness are also considered. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Closing the Gaps in Pediatric HIV/AIDS Care, One Step at a TimeLisa V. Adams, Helga Naburi, Goodluck Lyatuu, Paul Palumbo, and C. Fordham von ReynFatuma's* doctors were completely perplexed. It was 2003 and she had returned to the DARDAR clinic in her hometown of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania three times that week with vague complaints of various pains and aches. Her doctors were considering whether these symptoms were due (...) to the initiation of her recent treatment with antiretroviral medications for her HIV infection or related to the last administration of the investigational tuberculosis (TB) vaccine that the DARDAR Health Study was evaluating. Fatuma's doctor, Dr. Lillian Mtei, consulted with Dartmouth's chief of Infectious Disease, Dr. Ford von Reyn, who happened to be in Dar that week on a site visit. Neither physician could determine the basis for her symptoms. Dr. Mtei returned to the exam room once more and this time emerged with the answer: Fatuma had just learned that her three year old daughter was HIV-infected, likely contracted from Fatuma during or shortly after she gave birth to her daughter. Fatuma believed that her HIV diagnosis was a death sentence for her daughter since antiretroviral therapy was not widely available for children.Dr. von Reyn, Dartmouth's lead clinical researcher in Africa and a father, knew too well the harsh reality of inequities in a resource-limited country. He turned to Dr. Mtei and said decidedly, "we need to do something about this."Thus the DARDAR Pediatric Program was born.Pediatric HIV: A Neglected DiseaseThe need for HIV treatment among children in Tanzania, as in most of sub-Saharan Africa, is compelling. At the end of 2009, approximately 160,000 children aged zero to fourteen in Tanzania were living with HIV (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS [UNAIDS], 2011). Even with successful roll out of prevention of mother to child transmission programs in Tanzania, there were nearly 29,000 perinatal infections in 2009. As of December 2010, only 18% of these were enrolled in HIV treatment programs (UNAIDS, 2011; World Health Organization [WHO], 2011). Without antiretroviral therapy (ART), one-half of HIV-infected children will die before their second birthday. Since clinical research to determine efficacy and safety of new medical treatments is conducted almost exclusively in adults, provision of new medical treatments to [End Page 75] children always lags behind advances for adults. Furthermore, children are often underrepresented in programs for antiretroviral drugs for the following reasons: 1) they are not prioritized for care; 2) facilities lack infant diagnostic capabilities; 3) there is limited pediatric HIV training and consequently, a shortage of pediatric providers; and 4) pediatric antiretroviral formulations are frequently unavailable. The unacceptable delays in pediatric HIV drug development and treatment access led the international organization Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative to publish an editorial in which they referred to pediatric HIV as a "neglected disease" (Lallemant, Chang, Cohen, & Pecoul, 2011).The Tip of the Iceberg: More than Just MedicinesWith a grant from the New York-based Foundation for the Treatment of Children with AIDS, the DARDAR Pediatric Program, a joint collaboration between Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences, began seeing patients in May 2006. It was the first dedicated pediatric HIV Care and Treatment Center in Tanzania and operates in accordance with Tanzania's National AIDS Control Programme's guidance. Testing for both children and infants (the latter of which requires a more sophisticated assay) is available.The day the clinic opened we celebrated this collaborative effort that would provide HIV-infected children in Dar es Salaam access to antiretroviral treatment. One of our first patients was a six-year-old boy whose mother, like Fatuma, was a participant in our TB vaccine trial. She had been advised to bring her son to us for HIV screening. Her son looked healthy so she was surprised and understandably distraught when his test results indicated that not only was he HIV-infected, but his CD4 percentage was very low. His mother was reluctant to have him started on antiretrovirals given his general appearance and young age—and that he was... (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 8, August 2021.

Background: Medical tourism involves patients travelling internationally to receive medical services. This practice raises a range of ethical issues, including potential harms to the patient's home and destination country and risks to the patient's own health. Medical tourists often engage the services of a facilitator who may book travel and accommodation and link the patient with a hospital abroad. Facilitators have the potential to exacerbate or mitigate the ethical concerns associated with medical tourism, but their roles are poorly understood. -/- (...) Methods: 12 facilitators were interviewed from 10 Canadian medical tourism companies. -/- Results: Three themes were identified: facilitators' roles towards the patient, health system and medical tourism industry. Facilitators' roles towards the patient were typically described in terms of advocacy and the provision of information, but limited by facilitators' legal liability. Facilitators felt they played a positive role in the lives of their patients and the Canadian health system and served as catalysts for reform, although they noted an adversarial relationship with some Canadian physicians. Many facilitators described personally visiting medical tourism sites and forming personal relationships with surgeons abroad, but noted the need for greater regulation of their industry. -/- Conclusion: Facilitators play a substantial and evolving role in the practice of medical tourism and may be entering a period of professionalisation. Because of the key role of facilitators in determining the effects of medical tourism on patients and public health, this paper recommends a planned conversation between medical tourism stakeholders to define and shape facilitators' roles. (shrink)

Introduction i. Adam Smith's Lectures at Glasgow University Adam Smith was elected to the Chair of Logic at Glasgow University on 9 January, and admitted to ...

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) challenges political theorists to think about data ownership and policymakers to regulate the collection and use of public data. AI producers benefit from free public data for training their systems while retaining the profits. We argue against the view that the use of public data must be free. The proponents of unconstrained use point out that consuming data does not diminish its quality and that information is in ample supply. Therefore, they suggest, publicly available (...) data should be free. We present two objections. First, allowing free data use promotes unwanted inequality. Second, contributors of information did not and could not anticipate that their contribution would be used to train AI systems. Therefore, charging for extensive data use is pro tanto permissible and desirable. We discuss policy implications and propose a progressive data use tax to counter the inequality arising. (shrink)

The paper provides an OWL ontology for legal cases with an instantiation of the legal case Popov v. Hayashi. The ontology makes explicit the conceptual knowledge of the legal case domain, supports reasoning about the domain, and can be used to annotate the text of cases, which in turn can be used to populate the ontology. A populated ontology is a case base which can be used for information retrieval, information extraction, and case based reasoning. The ontology contains not only (...) elements for indexing the case (e.g. the parties, jurisdiction, and date), but as well elements used to reason to a decision such as argument schemes and the components input to the schemes. We use the Protégé ontology editor and knowledge acquisition system, current guidelines for ontology development, and tools for visual and linguistic presentation of the ontology. (shrink)

James Adam was a Scottish classics scholar who taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A strong defender of the importance of Greek philosophy in a well-rounded education, Adam published a number of Plato's works including Protagoras and Crito. This two-volume critical edition of the Republic was another major contribution to the field. Though his preface claims 'an editor cannot pretend to have exhausted its significance by means of a commentary,' Adam's depth of knowledge and erudite analysis of the (...) Greek text ensured that his edition remained the standard reference for decades to follow, and it remains a thought-provoking evaluation of one of the great works of Western thought. Volume 1 is devoted to Books 1–5, which discuss justice and the ideal society. (shrink)

This crucial volume contains a newly-edited cache of over thirty essays on a diverse range of topics from the renowned philosopher, Adam Ferguson, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Following on from The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, this collection aims to set the essays more fully in the history of western philosophy, to which they made an important contribution. They give an exhaustive picture of the thinking of the author and expound ideas which build on and extend (...) the originality of his earlier work. The need for systematic writing in his earlier, published work inevitably marginalized the topics of interest that Ferguson would resume in the leisure of his retirement, when he was free to rethink and clarify earlier problems. Long-unpulished, his later essays represent a re-appraisal of the philosophical, historical and anthropoligical themes that he had examined before. In this authoritative edition, Ferguson's views on disparate philosophical, anthropological and historical topics can at last be viewed in one impressive volume. His texts are transcribed as faithfully as possible and are accompanied by extensive introductions from the general editor and both contributing editors. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on an argument in my book *Perception*. It has two parts. In the first part, I argue against what I call "basic" naive realism, on the grounds that it fails to accommodate what I call "internal dependence" and it requires an empirically implausible theory of sensible properties. Then I turn Craig French and Ian Phillips’ modified naïve realism as set out in their recent paper "Austerity and Illusion". It accommodates internal dependence. But it may retain the empirically (...) implausible theory of sensible properties. And it faces other empirical problems. Representationalism about experiences avoids those problems and is to be preferred. (shrink)

"Adam Wiegner's work belongs to Polish analytical philosophy, but it falls outside of its main current, the Lvov-Warsaw School, which was influenced by Hume's ideas. Wiegner, influenced by neo-Kantianism, developed a non-Humean conception of "holistic empiricism," which anticipates some of the ideas of K. R. Popper and W. V. O. Quine. Some of his ideas remain original to this day. His main research interests included epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science especially philosophy of psychology, analytical history of philosophy, (...) and interpretation of traditional logic in terms of mathematical logic."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

In this article I address the contributions of Anna Brożek, Marek Lechniak and Jacek Wojtysiak as formulated in the course of their discussion of my monographic study Pytania i odpowiedzi. Ujęcie teoriomnogościowe [Questions and answers: A Set-theoretic approach]. My responses in the article are divided into substantive and methodological ones, depending on whether the comments and suggestions for improvement formulated in their contributions refer to the actual conception proposed in the book or to the methods used in its construction. In (...) my substantive comments, I respond to issues relating to the structure, types and accuracy of questions. I argue that: (i) the schematisations of question structure proposed in the monograph are a development of the so-called “Polish schema” that is such as to make it possible to exhibit and remove the elements of ambiguity in any interrogative sentences and questions based on them; (ii) although the general schematic structure is common to all questions, the division of questions adopted in the monograph—especially into questions to be resolved and others—is substantively justified and logically correct; (iii) the claims put forward regarding the relations between the accuracy of questions and the truth of their assumptions are correct—even though a general inference to the accuracy of the questions at issue from the truth of their assumptions requires (as J. Wojtysiak has observed) an additional condition to be met. My methodological remarks concern the so-called component-combinatorial method of analysing questions, the notion of so-called “generalised negation”, and the evaluation of the philosophical methods on display in the monograph in the light of the relevant model of the philosophical method (as described by A. Brożek). I show that: (iv) the method of representing and analysing interrogative sentences used in the monograph provides a tool for distinguishing all of their possible meanings (possible questions), which in the reconstruction of question situations narrows down the analyses to questions that comply with the rules of language (excluding as it does the construction of meaningless combinations, as warned against by M. Lechniak), while on the other hand enabling it to be the case that out of the total number of possible ones, only questions relevant in a given situation are taken into account; (v) the negation non, though ultimately based on propositional negation ~ (it is defined by disjunction  and negation ~), is its generalisation, since it can be applied not only to the whole matrix p of the question “Is it the case that p?”, but also to any of its parts, right down to its individual components, and at the same time is equivalently replaceable with ~ in the situation of negation of the entire matrix p; (vi) the mode of philosophising that I have employed in the monograph is consistent with a method combining analysis, paraphrasing, and axiomatisation, even if it is far removed from model axiomatisation especially, and needs further completion in respect of the so-called theoretical “verbal corpus” — i.e. in terms of the references it makes to other conceptions of questions and answers. (shrink)