This paper, for two upcoming volumes, makes what I consider to be the definitive textual case for finally rejecting the phenomenalist interpretation of Ernst Mach's works, and his customary association with the Vienna Circle, in favor of a stronger realistic neutral monist reading connecting him to James, Russell and the American realist movement and today's neutral monism (for example my 2014). I hope that this reading will eventually supplant the previously mistaken view of Mach's work and that his (...) views of science and philosophy of space and time can be revised as well. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell claimed in the Analysis of Matter that physics is purely structural or relational and so leaves out intrinsic properties of matter, properties that, he said, are evident to us at least in one case: as the internal states of our brains. Russell's hypothesis has figured in recent discussions of physicalism and the mind body problem, by Chalmers, Strawson and Stoljar, among others, but I want to reject two popular interpretations: 1. a conception of intrinsic properties of matter as (...) categorical properties and 2. a fallacious line of descent argument that attributes pan-psychist or proto-experientialist properties to matter by analogy with human minds. Instead, I think Russell's hypothesis points us toward 1. a doctrine of concretely instantiated dispositions in matter and 2. selectively instantiated relations. (shrink)

Umbilical cord blood has become the focus of intense efforts to collect, screen and bank haematopoietic stem cells in hundreds of repositories around the world. UCB banking has developed through a broad spectrum of overlapping banking practices, sectors and institutional forms. Superficially at least, these sectors have been widely distinguished in bioethical and policy literature between notions of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’, the commons and the market respectively. Our purpose in this paper is to reflect more critically on (...) these distinctions and to articulate the complex practical and hybrid nature of cord blood as a ‘bio-object’ that straddles binary conceptions of the blood economies. The paper draws upon Roberto Esposito’s reflections on biopolitics and his attempt to transcend the dualistic polarisations of immunity and community, or the private and the public. We suggest that his thoughts on immunitary hospitality resonate with many of the actual features and realpolitik of a necessarily internationalised and globally distributed UCB ‘immunitary regime’. (shrink)

More impetus needs to be placed on cord blood donationIn July, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists released a report on the uses and the potential perils of umbilical cord blood collection.1 This report has had the positive effect of drawing attention to what has hitherto been an under addressed topic of medical research and ethics. However, the focus and recommendations of the report say little about one important aspect of cord blood usage—research. Such an omission, (...) although understandable from an organisation primarily concerned with maternal and neonatal health, may nevertheless have implications for the broader applicability of the report’s recommendations, outside the immediate arena of patient care.The RCOG report deals with various aspects of cord blood collection and use—the harvesting procedure itself; cord blood transplantation treatment, either as an autologous cell transplant or as a donation for community use; and whether cord blood banking for personal use should be permitted or encouraged as a privately funded commercial enterprise. It also makes note of some of the legal and ethical issues surrounding cord blood and tissue banking more generally, concerns that will be of increasing importance as more biobanks are established worldwide. A large part of the report deals with concerns on neonatal and maternal safety and whether cord blood collection may pose a risk. These concerns may be valid and certainly, the health of mothers and children should not be compromised. The guidance provided by this report in relation to the collection procedure will undoubtedly assist maternity health professionals in this area.The main relevance of the RCOG …. (shrink)

Education as Freedom is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, a dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism. Education as Freedom is a long awaited text that historicizes the current racial achievement gap as well as illuminates the myriad of African American voices and actions to define the purpose of education and to (...) push the limits of the democratic experiment in the United States. (shrink)

This article distinguishes between Machian empiricism and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and associated philosophers. Mach's natural philosophy was a first order attempt to reform and reorganize physics, not a second order reconstruction of the "language" of physics. Mach's elements were not sense data but realistic events in the natural world and in minds, and Mach admitted unobserved elements as part of his world view. Mach's critique of metaphysics was far more subtle and concerned the elimination of sensory (...) visual imagery from natural science, leaving only concrete elements and functions, very much an inspiration to the young Einstein and Heisenberg and a useful engine of theory construction in physics. (shrink)

Chronic diseases represent the major illness burden of developed nations. A chronic disease databank system consists of parallel longitudinal data sets from diverse locations describing the courses of thousands of patients with chronic illness over many years. Illustrated by ARAMIS (The American Rheumatism Association Medical Information System), such data resources facilitate analysis of long term health outcomes and the factors associated with particular outcomes. A model for clinical investigation of contemporary disease is presented, based on the overwhelming prevalence (...) of chronic illness, the variability, complexity, and uniqueness of the individual patient course, the difficulties of traditional univariate reductionist approaches, and the time span required for study. In this model, data are systematically accrued and continually analyzed, and the data collected are gradually modified based upon evolving anticipation of future needs. The strategies underlying the development of ARAMIS are described, investigational results summarized, and future directions outlined. Keywords: ARAMIS, Chronic Disease Databanks, Prognosis, Health Outcomes CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The National Blood Policy in India relies heavily on voluntary blood donors, as they are usually assumed to be associated with low levels of transfusion-transmitted infections . In India, it is mandatory to test every unit of blood collected for hepatitis B, hepatitis C, HIV/AIDS, syphilis and malaria. Donors come to the blood bank with altruistic intentions. If donors test positive to any of the five infections, their blood is discarded. Although the blood policy (...) advocates disclosure of TTI status, donors are not, in practice, informed about their results. The onus is on the donor to contact the blood bank. Out of approximately 16 000 donations in the past 2 years, 438 tested positive for TTI, including 107 for HIV. Only 20% of the donors contacted the blood bank; none of them were HIV positive. Disclosure by blood banks of TTI status by telephone or mail has resulted in serious consequences for some donors. Health providers face an ethical dilemma, in the absence of proper mechanisms in place for disclosure of test results, regarding notification to donors who may test positive but remain ignorant of their TTI status. Given the high cost of neglecting to notify infected donors, the authors strongly recommend the use of rapid tests before collecting blood, instead of the current practice, which takes 3 h to obtain results, and disclosure of results directly to the donor by a counsellor, to avoid dropouts and to ensure confidentiality. (shrink)

I examine Mach's influence on American philosophy from 1890-1910, on Carus, James, Peirce, the American Realists and J.B. Stallo. I also consider the question of whether Mach was a pragmatist in the sense of Peirce and James. I conclude that early pragmatism was a method-centric theory whereas Mach's empiricism prized agreement with experience and downplayed the significance of inductive-scientific methods in general as a guide to discovery.

*Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author's and should not be ascribed to the American Medical Association.

Abstract. The American dream of the “self-made man” is as central to the functioning of our capitalist society as Wall Street and as familiar as the Statue of Liberty. According to this dream, the tired masses have a shot at making it on their own if they have the will power, stamina, and intestinal fortitude to survive and compete. What do we do now that we are faced with scientific evidence that this very strategy is driving society into disconnection, (...) despair, and even poor health? Relational-cultural theory states that growth happens through and toward relationships not toward increased separation and autonomy. Relational-cultural theory describes empathy and mutuality as key components to healthy relationships. This essay will focus on the latest research in the neuroscience of relationships—the development of the capacity to connect within relationships, the systems that help us read and empathize with others, the adaptability and plasticity of the central nervous system, and the destructive nature of isolation. (shrink)

*The views expressed are the author's own. This article should not be construed as representing policies of the American Medical Association.

BackgroundPrivate umbilical cord blood banking is a for-profit industry in which parents pay to store blood for potential future use. Governments have noted the tendency for private banks to oversell the potential for cord blood use, especially in relation to speculative cell therapies not yet supported by clinical evidence. We assessed the regulatory landscape governing private cord bank marketing in Canada.Main bodyBecause the problematic marketing of private cord blood banking for future use often relates to (...) speculative future cell therapies that do not exist and are not being advertised for current clinical use, most private blood bank marketing seems to fall outside Health Canada’s regulatory scope. However, this problematic marketing is regulated by the Competition Bureau pursuant to the Competition Act. While representations relating to future hypothetical treatments may not always be subject to the legal requirement for claim substantiation, the law also prohibits individuals and companies from knowingly or recklessly making representations that are “false or misleading in a material respect.” A representation is materially false or misleading when it could “influence a consumer’s behavior or purchasing decisions,” and consumers are likely to be considered to be “credulous and inexperienced” for the purposes of assessing an advertisement’s general impression. Because all of the potential benefit of the banking is derived from the potential future use of the biological material for health interventions directed toward the customers and their relatives, and because we know the best available medical evidence indicates a very low probability of utility in this context, we can say with confidence that some private cord blood banking claims are materially misleading. Moreover, to the extent that medical professionals are involved in private bank interactions with customers or hold ownership stakes in private banks, they are subject to professional codes, standards of practice, and potentially fiduciary obligations that further prohibit misleading marketing.ConclusionsPrivate cord blood bank marketing that advertises hypothetical future treatments can be misleading and may influence consumer behaviour. This marketing may breach existing advertising law. Regulatory bodies should enforce the law in order to help prevent public health and personal financial harm. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This article examines two cases that present ethical challenges encountered by social workers in making decisions either to maintain professional boundaries or fulfil moral obligations while working with service users in vulnerable situations. In the first case, a Lebanese social worker narrates how she was motivated to step out of her official responsibilities to assist a refugee mother of three who showed suicidal ideation. In the second case, a Ugandan social worker recounts her experience while working with a family whose (...) 12-year-old daughter was raped and became pregnant, but whose parents refused to accept abortion when medical diagnosis showed that the girl’s life was in danger. A commentary from the authors is provided after each case. Both social workers were arguably motivated to act based on their concern to care for people, protect human rights, and save lives in the two case scenarios. This underscores the relevance of the ethics of care and virtue ethics in describing the associated ethical challenges in both cases. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of the ethical challenges encountered by the social workers demands open minds and flexibility in decision-making. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Corporate social performance (CSP) has been studied extensively by business and society scholars, yet most approaches to its measurement continue to be ambiguous, controversial and difficult to use (Wood, 2010). In this paper, we propose measuring CSP via the construct of stakeholder satisfaction through social media like Facebook and Twitter. We argue that the satisfaction of stakeholder expectations can be explained with organizational justice theory particularly in the exercise of voice by stakeholders when they perceive unjust behavior on the part (...) of the firm. We test our idea using event study methodology with a sample of 5,440 observations from ten U.S. companies: We found some evidence for the sensitivity of social media to social events of interest to Twitter users. (shrink)

It is interesting, that with the notable exception of the Cologne-based geneticist Benno Müller-Hill, German historians of medicine have not bothered a great deal with looking into German medical history during the Third Reich. We owe Pennsylvania State University's Robert N Proctor a great deal of gratitude for uncovering more and more of this history, and for making it accessible in a highly readable format. Proctor has established himself rapidly as the pre-eminent US American historian of science on all (...) aspects of Nazi medical research and health policy. In this most recent book Proctor looks at Nazism's pioneering contributions in public health research and policy, as well as in environmental health, occupational health, and preventive medicine. This book holds some disturbing lessons for those who hold the view that basically good people will undertake ethical research, and support good health …. (shrink)

This article examines multinational banks’ approaches to corporate social responsibility in developing countries’ subsidiaries, particularly in Latin America. Building on in-depth case studies of two MNBs that are based in Europe and market leaders in Latin America, we analyze their CSR motivations and outcomes in host countries. We examine institutional environments by applying the national business system framework, and we suggest missing categories in its financial and educational dimensions. We theorize how institutional necessity determines MNBs' CSR in developing countries. (...) Finally, we examine the CSR outcomes in Latin America, where banks’ responsible conduct has led to major improvements in educational levels and financial inclusion. These improvements alleviate poverty and enhance both country's social wellbeing and MNBs’ legitimacy, leading to mutual prosperity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:That St(r)ain Again:Blood, Water, and Generic Allusion in Horace's Bandusia OdeGottfried MaderAbstractHorace's vivid picture of the blood sacrifice to the spring of Bandusia has left many readers feeling somewhat uneasy, for while animal sacrifices appear elsewhere in the Odes,1 none matches this for its pathos or detail:O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro,dulci digne mero non sine floribus, cras donaberis haedo, cui frons turgida cornibusprimis et venerem et proelia (...) destinat.frustra: nam gelidos inficiet tibi rubro sanguine rivos lascivi suboles gregis.(Carm. 3.13.1-8)O spring of Bandusia, brighter than glass, worthy of sweet wine and flowers: tomorrow you will be presented with a kid whose forehead, swelling with first horns, destines him for both love and battles—but in vain, for to honour you the offspring of the wanton herd will dye your icy waters with his crimson blood.Hence the protest or surprise expressed at this allegedly offensive intrusion of blood into an otherwise idyllic scene: "Who wants a drink out of the fountain of Bandusia after that?" (Campbell 1924, 2); "[Horace] visualizes with aesthetic relish the mingling of the cool water and the red blood.... [His] behaviour was strange even by ancient criteria" (Nisbet 1962, 198); "somewhat macabre" (Williams 1969, 89); "the scandal of the sacrificial kid, whose death is dwelt upon... with a cruel brilliance quite out of proportion to any decorative needs" (Wilson 1968, 289).2 Others [End Page 51] have attempted to domesticate the sacrifice, urging that the ancients were less sentimental in these matters and justifying the description as rustic realism.3 But neither view accounts adequately for the densely suggestive detail or the perceptible emphasis on the blood offering—in a word, for the poetic intensity of these lines.The sacrifice begins to make sense when we explore its metaphorical possibilities and integrate it into the ode's thematic and intellectual design.4 Recent criticism has emphasized the metapoetic dimension of 3.13, interpreting Horace's homage to the spring as a tribute to the poetry which secures it a place among the celebrated fountains of Greek and Roman literature: "fies nobilium tu quoque fontium / me dicente cavis inpositam ilicem / saxis, unde loquaces / lymphae desiliunt tuae " (13-16; "you too will take your place among the famous springs when I celebrate the ilex set upon the hollow rocks, from which your clear-voiced waters come cascading down"). Further, since springs and water have a long metaphorical association with poetry (cf. below, note 12), the literal shades off easily into the literary, and the fons reflects the ideals and aspirations of Horace's own lyric art.5 From this perspective, the blood sacrifice too acquires a metaphorical nuance. Here is Steele Commager: "Readers have often been repelled by the details of the kid's sacrifice (6-8). Perhaps the description is not there for its realistic effect alone. Destined for love and battle, the 'offspring of the wanton flock' epitomizes life's comprehensive vitality, and as his warm blood mingles with the lucid water it is easy to sense a suggestion of the transformation of life into art" (Commager 1962, 323-24). Ralph Hexter continues on this trajectory: "The image of the red blood of the goat staining the cold spring water reflects the transmutation of life into poetry.... I believe a close reading of the poem supports a further insight: that Horace means to show us how life is transferred to the water of poetry, and by showing us how it is, he shows us that it is."6 Most recently, Gregson Davis has suggested a further association: "Unmixed wine, flowers, and young animal constitute the sine quibus non of the banqueting apparatus.... Horace's fons is to be honored with the irreducible tokens of convivial [End Page 52] poetry. This ensemble of tokens, and not the presumed reference to an obscure festival, is what principally determines the speaker's choice of offerings." And once the choice of offerings has established the lyric orientation, the goat's death suggests to Davis also the mortality topos or the "dark background," typically a foil to the convivial motifs in the context of... (shrink)

Critical examination of the concept of property in the body, with particular relevance to Stephen Munzer's work on umbilical cord blood.

We present updated estimates of central bank transparency for 100 countries up through 2006 and use them to analyze both the determinants and consequences of monetary policy transparency in an integrated econometric framework. We establish that there has been significant movement in the direction of greater central bank transparency in recent years. Transparent monetary policy arrangements are more likely to be found in countries with strong and stable political institutions. They are more likely to be found in democracies, with their (...) culture of transparency. Using these political determinants as instruments for transparency, we show that more transparency in monetary policy operating procedures is associated with less inflation variability, though not also with less inflation persistence. (shrink)

In this article we consider an argument put forth by Selgin in support of the claim that there exists a mechanism for limiting coordinated expansions of fiduciary media under a system of fractional reserve free banking. Selgin argues that such banks hold risk-adjusted reserves against expected losses, and even if the expectation of reserve losses remains zero, the variance of such losses increases under an in-concert expansion . It is this increased variability that is claimed to act as a (...) brake on the expansion. We take issue with this argument on the basis of the fact that such a characterization of observed clearings would require that characteristics of the underlying data-generating process be obtainable from pathwise realizations of that process. In other words, there is an implicit assumption of stationarity in Selgin’s argument, and this assumption is at odds with well-known empirical facts of non-stationarity associated with most economic time series. We also point out ways in which techniques of risk management commonly found in the modern financial industry are unlikely to be effective in addressing this problem. (shrink)

The evidence on gender discrimination in lending remains controversial. To capture gender biases in banks’ loan allocations, we observe the impact on the applicants of a microfinance institution and exploit the natural experiment of a regulatory change imposing a strict EUR 10,000 loan ceiling on microcredit. Descriptive statistics indicate that the presence of the ceiling is associated both with bank-MFI co-financing and with harsher treatment of female borrowers. To investigate causal links, we develop an econometric approach that addresses the (...) concerns of selection biases, multicollinearity, and endogeneity. Our empirical findings suggest that the change in the MFI’s gender-related attitude was triggered by banks through co-financing. Hence, we speculate that co-financing pushes ceiling-constrained MFIs to import whatever biases in loan granting that the banks are prone to. Overall, this paper stresses that apparently benign regulations such as loan ceilings can significantly harm the women’s empowerment efforts made by MFIs. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between banking access and farm household investment. The assets we examine are non-retirement financial assets, retirement financial assets, and real estate assets not owned by the farm operation. Using data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey and the universe of commercial bank branches from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, we find that distance to commercial banks is negatively related to the degree of investment in each of these assets for farm households. We also find (...) that internet availability, as measured by the share of farms in the county with internet, is positively associated with farm households’ investment in each of these assets. Further our results show that farm households that are located in the South have the lowest bank access as measured by bank proximity and internet availability. (shrink)

The Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs of the American Medical Association examines physicians’ professional ethical responsibility in the event that the security of patients’ electronic records is breached.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a vision for leadership in business, banking, and politics based on a recovery of virtue. It draws principally on the works of the classical philosophers Aristotle and Plato in line with the contemporary resurgence of Aristotle associated with Alasdair MacIntyre and others. In the context of an ethical analysis of the Irish banking crisis, the paper will show how virtue ethics can contribute to the avoidance of a repetition of the disastrous (...) financial crisis of 2008 in Ireland and globally. It proposes a holistic approach that integrates virtue and culture, ethics and governance. (shrink)

: This paper is a response to a series of five papers—by Michael Eldridge, Bruce Kuklick, John Lachs, Erin McKenna, and John Ryder—that examine my recently published volume, A Thoughtful Profession: The Early Years of the American Philosophical Association. It discusses those papers in two phases: What they have to say about the volume's account of the history of the philosophy profession in America, and what they have to say about the present and future of the profession based (...) upon its past. Each of the papers demonstrates a sincere interest in exploring the history or the meaning of the APA. (shrink)

In China, under the heading of “private-for-public” banking, hybrid UCB banking has been politically supported by the government and is based on regulation developed since the 1990s. Although hybrid UCB banking was regarded as an “ethical” alternative to private UCB banking due to its accessibility to “the people”, this study, based on archival research and interviews with bankers, medical professionals, scientists and pregnant women contends that the practice of this ideal needs to be closely scrutinized. Analysing UCB bank networks in (...) China in terms of “public biovalue” and “ethical biocapital”, we illustrate, first, how the synergy of public and private storage of UCB in hybrid models benefit private storage, and how transparency and oversight may increase donation and the uptake of UCB. Second, we describe the problems associated with this hybrid model. Finally, we show how the biovalue of public storage is used as ethical biocapital to buttress UCB networks. (shrink)

At one time, the American Medical Association had a strong pro-life position regarding unborn human beings. Using an online AMA archives database, this research note contrasts early AMA pro-life commentary with its eventual pro-choice position. Strong pro-life advocacy in the mid-to-late 1800s, led by doctors such as Horatio Storer, gave way in the 1900s to a waning of pro-life zeal, and eventually developed into a pro-choice stance on abortion.

Positive Youth Development (PYD) is an approach that promotes resilience and focuses on youth strengths rather than their weaknesses as done by the traditional deficit-based perspective. Research in Europe and North America show that developmental assets are associated with school success, psychological well-being, and lower health risks among youth and young adults. However, not much research has been done on these associations in Latin American contexts. The purpose of this research study is to assess the association between substance (...) use behaviors, such as drunkenness and the use of illicit drugs, and mental health, together with the mediating role of developmental assets representing youth strengths (e.g., social competence) and contextual resources (e.g., social support at home or school). Cross-national data was collected from Colombian (n= 210; 70.4% females) and Peruvian(n= 349; 66.5% females) 1st year university students. Results shed light on the protective role of developmental assets regarding substance use behaviors and mental well-being. Specifically, the results showed direct negative associations between developmental assets and substance use behaviors and positive associations of developmental assets with mental health indicators. Internal assets appear to be a stronger predictor of social, emotional, and psychological well-being compared to external assets. We did not find any statistical significance in the association of substance use behavior and mental health. We discuss implications regarding research, policy, and practice. (shrink)

Education for Sustainable Development supports processes of change in complex socio-ecological systems. Where and how this change takes place are important considerations as we seek to enhance our capacity to challenge existing systems and thus produce and reproduce our life activities in more sustainable ways. This paper considers the possibilities for change in a system as deeply embedded in our social and material existence as capitalism. It rejects the notion that there is no alternative and considers the implications of Evald (...) Ilyenkov’s exploration and development of the Dialectic of the Ideal as the basis for change. I reflect on Ilyenkov’s work in relation to a recent national study into the potential for creating a more sustainable banking sector and the associated education and skills development requirements. The individualising response to sustainability challenges is rejected through the opening up of a more nuanced understanding of the role of contradictions evident in the reciprocal movement and mutual transformations between society and the material structures, both natural and built, within which society exists. (shrink)