Thermodynamics is the foundation of many of the topics of interest in the religion‐science dialogue. Here a nonmathematical outline of the principles of thermodynamics is presented, providing a historical and conceptually understandable development that can serve teachers from disciplines other than physics. The contributions of Gibbs to both classical and rational thermodynamics, emphasizing the importance of the ensemble in statistical mechanics, are discussed. The seminal ideas of Boltzmann on statistical mechanics are contrasted to those of Gibbs in a discussion of (...) the microscopic interpretation of the second law. The role of information theory is discussed, and the modern ideas of Prigogine and nonequilibrium are outlined in some detail with further reference to the second law. Implications for our interaction with God are considered. (shrink)

Abstract.The basic laws of physics for particles and fields can be formulated in terms of variational principles. The initial development of a variational principle had distinct teleological implications. The formulation of physical laws in terms of variational principles is outlined with specific reference to classical and quantum mechanics and field theory. Because of time irreversibility no variational principle exists for thermodynamics. In order to obtain time irreversibility molecular trajectories must be abandoned in the lowest‐level description of complex multicomponent systems. A (...) more open set of possibilities results. I suggest that this may be more consistent with a modern teleology. (shrink)

This paper suggests an alternative reading of Practice in Christianity to Merold Westphal’s interpretation of the text as defining what he calls “religiousness C.” Attending closely to the rhetorical construction of Practice, and situating it in the context of Kierkegaard’s intensive reading of Luther late in his life, I argue that this text extends the Postscript’s meditation on inwardness and writing to one of the central theological constructs of Lutheranism, the distinction between law and gospel. On my reading, Practice both (...) defends the primacy of faith and grace within Christianity, and refuses their commodification into directly communicable results. At the end of this paper, I consider Kierkegaard’s seeming retraction, in 1855, of two rhetorical features of Practice that my reading emphasizes. Iconclude that this gesture in fact intensifies Kierkegaard’s appropriation of the law/gospel paradigm, and speaks to the impossibility of any direct, comprehensive, and final account of authentic Christian life. (shrink)

While there is significant consensus that undergraduate medical education should include bioethics training, there is widespread debate about how to teach bioethics to medical students. Educators disagree about course methods and approaches, the topics that should be covered, and the effectiveness and metrics for UME ethics training. One issue that has received scant attention is the timing of bioethics education during medical training. The existing literature suggests that most medical ethics education occurs in the pre-clinical years. Follow-up studies indicate that (...) medical students in their clinical rotations have little recall or ability to apply ethics concepts that were learned in their pre-clinical training. Trainees also report a desire for medical ethics to be taught in the context of practical application, which would suggest that the timing of pre-clinical ethics education is flawed. However, moving bioethics training to the clinical years should not be assumed to be the solution to the problems of recall and theory application. We argue that the effectiveness of timing bioethics education will depend on when medical students witness or experience particular categories of ethical dilemmas during their training. Our overarching hypothesis is that ethics education will be most effective when the bioethics training on a particular topic correlates to experiential exposure to that ethical issue. The purpose of our current study was to describe medical students exposure to particular categories of ethical conflicts, dilemmas, or issues. Our results may help bioethics educators better strategize about the most effective timing of medical ethics training in UME. (shrink)

At least seven orphan members of the nuclear receptor superfamily are transcriptionally regulated by the steroid hormone ecdysone and expressed during the onset of Drosophila metamorphosis. A recent paper provides functions for two of these receptors, E75B and DHR3, through trans‐regulation and heterodimerization(1). DHR3 appears to function as a switch that defines the transition from a late larva to a prepupa, and E75B functions as a timer that modulates this transition. This study provides a biological function for orphan receptor interactions (...) during development. (shrink)

Ursula Coope's volume sets out to answer the question of why "true freedom" necessitates "freedom from bodies" according to the Neoplatonists. As a result, while the title suggests a work on ethics, the volume handles such questions within a broader metaphysical framework. Coope admirably traces the initially separate treatments of freedom and responsibility in earlier thinkers before examining how they merge into twin aspects of a related discussion. The handling of Plato's concept of freedom in the first chapter outlines a (...) series of relevant issues, rather than evaluating their relative significance, since the primary focus is on the subsequent tradition. The title is somewhat misleading since much of the... (shrink)

John Polkinghorne is a significant contributor to the religion and science dialogue, bringing the expertise of a scientist coupled with serious theological study, ordination, and service as a parish priest. He takes both theology and science with utmost seriousness and describes himself as a bottom‐up thinker, confronting the scriptural record as a scientist does data. But he refrains from giving scientific explanations of scripture. Polkinghorne's concern is with hope, and specifically with eschatological hope. The framework for his theological thinking is (...) the Nicene Creed, in which is found the counterintuitive openness common to theoretical physics. He acknowledges the need for thinking beyond the confines of present scientific understanding in proposing active information as a concept for considering the mind. (shrink)

Sixteen years ago, Michael Ashburner and his colleagues proposed a hierarchical model for the genetic control of polytene chromosome puffing by the steroid hormone ecdysone. The recent molecular isolation and characterization of three early ecdysone‐inducible genes has confirmed many aspects of this model — these genes are directly induced by ecdysone, repressed by ecdysone‐induced proteins, and appear to encode DNA binding regulatory proteins. The three early genes are also remarkably similar in structure. They are all unusually long and complex, with (...) multiple transcripts that direct the synthesis of several related proteins from each locus. Proteins encoded by two of the early genes bind to both early and late ecdysone‐induced puffs, implying that they are key regulators in the hierarchy. (shrink)

Programmed cell death is a critical part of normal development, removing obsolete tissues or cells and sculpting body parts to assume their appropriate form and function. Most programmed cell death occurs by apoptosis of individual cells or autophagy of groups of cells. Although these pathways have distinct morphological characteristics, they also have a number of features in common, suggesting some overlap in their regulation. A recent paper by Lee and Baehrecke provides further support for this proposal.(1) These authors present, for (...) the first time, a genetic analysis of autophagy, using the steroid‐triggered metamorphosis of Drosophila as a model system. They demonstrate a remarkable degree of overlap between the control of apoptosis and autophagy as well as a key role for the steroid‐inducible gene E93 in directing the autophagic death response. This paper also shows that E93 can direct cell death independently from the known death‐inducer genes, defining a novel death pathway in Drosophila. BioEssays 23:677–682, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Recently, the outsourcing of Information Technology activities to offshore locations has been gaining significant momentum, with some associated backlash by the workforce in the United States. Based on their 2005 survey [6], Global Insight, a private consulting firm, estimated that U.S. companies will spend about $38.2 billion in offshore IT services by 2010, compared with about $15.2 billion in 2005, primarily because the expected cost savings will grow by $11.7 billion in the same time period. Binder writing in "Foreign Affairs" (...) [2] states that offshoring expenditures will continue to increase dramatically, and the changes the offshoring phenomenon will bring will transform society. This paper focuses on the social impact of offshoring and the effects of the weighing of costs and benefits as a result of offshoring activities. (shrink)

The quantum‐measurement problem and the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle are presented in the language of the Dirac formulation of the quantum theory. Particularly the relationship between quantum state prior to measurement and the result of the measurement are discussed. The relation between the indeterminacy principle and the analog between quantum and classical systems is presented, showing that this principle may be discussed independently of the wave‐particle duality. The importance of statistics in the treatment of many body systems is outlined and the (...) approach to investigating God's interaction with human beings is discussed in this context. The treatment is nonmathematical. (shrink)

Abstractftz is one of the ‘pair rule’ segmentation genes of Drosophila melanogaster, and is an important component of the segmentation process in the fruit fly. We discuss the transcriptional mechanism which causes ftz to be expressed in a seven stripe pattern during embryogenesis.

Organizational change surrounding the security of identifiable health information has become imperative. This is a significant challenge for managers who are held responsible for loss of privacy through faulty security procedures. Management cannot completely secure the organization and still provide employees and customers with the information and services they need. Organizations must decide how much and what type of security they need, how to assign priorities, and how to manage security as the organization evolves in a competitive environment.

Environmental governance has emerged as a recent perspective to explain the link between corporate governance mechanisms and environmental performance such as pollution reduction. We extend current models by incorporating the crucial role of the underlying institutional logics in terms of an a priori focus on either shareholder rights or stakeholder inclusion, which, in turn, can be traced back to the legal origin of a specific country. Using data on a sample of common and civil law countries, we find support for (...) our predictions that a shareholder-focused common law legal origin is associated with significantly higher emissions of CO2, and also that international environmental agreements like the Kyoto protocol seem to have a more pronounced effect in shareholder-centric economies than thus far assumed. (shrink)

We address Turkheimer’s argument that genome-wide association studies of behaviors and psychiatric traits will fail to produce coherent explanations. We distinguish two major sources of potential i...

Ethics researchers advise managers of organizations to link rewards and punishments to ethical and unethical behavior, respectively. We build on prior research maintaining that organizations operate at Kohlbergs stages of moral reasoning, and explain how the over-reliance on rewards and punishments encourages employees to operate at Kohlbergs lowest stages of moral reasoning. We advocate designing organizations as ethical communities and relying on different assumptions about employees in order to foster ethical reasoning at higher levels. Characteristics associated with ethical communities are (...) identified and AES Corporation and Semco S/A serve as examples of corporations exhibiting the design characteristics and assumptions of ethical organizations. (shrink)

In recent years, it has become commonplace among the Global Burden of Disease study authors to regard the disability-adjusted life year primarily as a descriptive health metric. During the first phase of the GBD, it was widely acknowledged that the DALY had built-in evaluative assumptions. However, from the publication of the 2010 GBD and onwards, two central evaluative practices—time discounting and age-weighting—have been omitted from the DALY model. After this substantial revision, the emerging view now appears to be that the (...) DALY is primarily a descriptive measure. Our aim in this article is to argue that the DALY, despite changes, remains largely evaluative. Our analysis focuses on the understanding of the DALY by comparing the DALY as a measure of disease burden in the two most significant phases of GBD publications, from their beginning to the most recent releases. We identify numerous assumptions underlying the DALY and group them as descriptive or evaluative. We conclude that while the DALY model arguably has become more descriptive, it remains, by necessity, largely evaluative. (shrink)

Recent studies indicate that patients who are diagnosed with vegetative states may retain more awareness than their clinical assessments suggest. Disorders of consciousness traditionally have been diagnosed on the basis of outwardly observable behaviors alone, but new functional imaging studies have shown surprising levels of brain activity in some patients, indicating that even higher-level cognitive functions like language processing and visual imagery may be preserved. For example, one recently developed method purports to detect voluntary mental imagery solely on the basis (...) of neural response patterns observed with functional magnetic resonance imaging. This line of research has already led to some widely reported cases of patients who were discovered to have more brain activity than expected. In November 2009, Rom Houben, a Belgian man who was thought to be in a coma for 23 years, was diagnosed with locked-in syndrome through the use of neuroimaging; however, that assessment was later overturned by further testing. (shrink)

Th is article examines the extent to which spaces are structuring influences on, or targets of, action. Two factors and their interactions are presented: the extent to which a space is 1) maintained and 2) used. As these factors increase in strength, the structural influences of a space increase while agential opportunities are diminished. Conversely, as spaces become dilapidated and abandoned, structural forces are weakened and the potential for creative action heightens. These spaces can be conceptualized as elements of the (...) ‘residual landscape’: spaces left behind by socio-historical processes and practices. Special cases are considered where the factors are inversely related and issues of structure and agency are complicated. A brief case study serves to illustrate each type of spaceand the factors which operate therein. (shrink)

Social distancing has become the most prominent measure many countries have implemented to combat the spread of COVID-19. The aim of the current study was to explore the potential role of empathy and self-construal styles, as individual personality traits, on self-reported social distancing. Participants completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the Singelis Self-Construal Scale, and were asked to rate their level of social distancing and how much they endorsed social distancing on a five-point Likert-scale. Across a large and diverse sample, results (...) showed that trait-levels of empathic concern and perspective taking positively correlates with social distancing. However, we did not find evidence to suggest that trait-levels of personal distress correlates with social distancing. We interpret these findings as suggesting that empathy, both its altruistic and cognitive dimensions, plays an important role in motivating people to socially distance and should be emphasized during times of crisis. Furthermore, we suggest that emphasizing a person’s self-distress during times of crisis may not be an effective approach in promotion social distancing policies. We also found that both independence and interdependence self-construal styles positively correlates with social distancing. While we expected the latter result, we did not expect the former. This suggests that more work is needed to fully understand how self-construal styles, along with their cultural level analogs, influences social distancing. Overall, these results provide us with novel multi-national data about the role of individual differences on social distancing tendencies specifically, and human behavior during a global health crisis more generally. (shrink)

Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. In this paper, we show that the case for preventing catastrophe does not depend on longtermism. (...) Standard cost-benefit analysis implies that governments should spend much more on reducing catastrophic risk. We argue that a government catastrophe policy guided by cost-benefit analysis should be the goal of longtermists in the political sphere. This policy would be democratically acceptable, and it would reduce existential risk by almost as much as a strong longtermist policy. (shrink)

This inclusive, cross-cultural study rethinks the nexus between engineering, development, and culture. It offers diverse commentary from a range of disciplinary perspectives on how the philosophies of today’s cultural triumvirate—American, European and Chinese—are shaped and given nuance by the cross-fertilization of engineering and development. Scholars from the humanities and social sciences as well as engineers themselves reflect on key questions that arise in this relational context, such as how international development work affects the professional views, identities, practice and ethics of (...) engineers. The first volume to offer a systematic and collaborative study that cuts across continental boundaries, the book delineates the kinds of skills and competences that tomorrow’s engineering success stories will require, and analyzes fascinating aspects of the interplay between engineering and philosophy, such as how traditionally Chinese ways of thinking can influence modern engineering practice in the world’s most populous country. China’s problematic mix of engineering woes and wonders, from the high-profile crash on its high-profile rail network to its ‘bird’s nest’ Olympic stadium, adds to the urgency for reform, while Europe’s Enlightenment-informed legal frameworks are contrasted with Chinese mechanisms in their governance of the field of nanotechnology, a crucial element of future technical evolution. Fascinating and compelling in equal measure, this volume addresses one of the topics at the leading edge of humanity’s quest to survive, and to thrive.​. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt and the Problem of the Realization of Law 1. The famous pithy aphorisms that Carl Schmitt used to open his major works - 'the sovereign is he who decides on the exception', 'the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political', etc. - have become a part of the common discourse of contemporary scholarship on politics and the law. The theoretical framework that animates these slogans, however, has remained somewhat opaque. It has often been (...) argued that there is no such framework, that Schmitt was a situational thinker whose works are best understood as interventions in concrete political debates that do not add up to a grand theoretical vision. (shrink)

The practical goal of preventing premature death seems uncontroversial. But the term ‘premature death’ is vague with several, sometimes conflicting definitions. This ambiguity results in several conceptions with which not all will agree. Moreover, the normative rationale behind the goal of preventing premature deaths is masked by the operational definition of existing measures. In this article, we argue that ‘premature death’ should be recognized as a normative concept. We propose that normative theories should be used to justify measures of premature (...) death to provide them with normative validity and public legitimacy. (shrink)

How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental evidence from the (...) past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood, with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions. (shrink)

Costly signalling theory has become a common explanation for honest communication when interests conflict. In this paper, we provide an alternative explanation for partially honest communication that does not require significant signal costs. We show that this alternative is at least as plausible as traditional costly signalling, and we suggest a number of experiments that might be used to distinguish the two theories.