We do not dispute the findings of Ceci et al.'s study, though they are based on survey research which does not always reflect real-life experiences. We report on cases we have defended on the basis of the tenure system, few of which mirror the situations reported in the target article. We end with a strong defense of the tenure system in the modern university. (Published Online February 8 2007).

Fieldworkers (FWs) are community members employed by research teams to support access to participants, address language barriers, and advise on culturally appropriate research conduct. The critical role that FWs play in studies, and the range of practical and ethical dilemmas associated with their involvement, is increasingly recognised. In this paper, we draw on qualitative observation and interview data collected alongside a six month basic science study which involved a team of FWs regularly visiting 47 participating households in their homes. The (...) qualitative study documented how relationships between field workers and research participants were initiated, developed and evolved over the course of the study, the shifting dilemmas FWs faced and how they handled them. Even in this one case study, we see how the complex and evolving relationships between fieldworkers and study participants had important implications for consent processes, access to benefits and mutual understanding and trust. While the precise issues that FWs face are likely to depend on the type of research and the context in which that research is being conducted, we argue that appropriate support for field workers is a key requirement to strengthen ethical research practice and for the long term sustainability of research programmes. (shrink)

Background Protecting a person’s right to privacy and confidentiality is important in healthcare services. As future health professionals, nursing students should bear the same responsibility as qualified health professionals in protecting patient privacy. Objectives To investigate nursing students’ practices of patient privacy protection and to identify factors associated with their practices. Research design A cross-sectional study design was adopted. A two-part survey was used to collect two types of data on nursing students: (1) personal characteristics, including demographics, clinical experience and (...) use of information and communication technology and social media and (2) practice of patient privacy protection, collected using the Patient Privacy Scale. Participants and research context: A total of 319 nursing students aged 18 or above, studying pre-registration nursing programmes and who had attended at least one block of clinical placement, were recruited from a university in Hong Kong. Ethical considerations The study received ethical approval from the Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The participants were informed of the study aim and written consent was obtained before completing the survey. Findings: The mean total score on the Patient Privacy Scale was 119.7 out of 135. Nursing students who were regular users of Instagram and those who had never taken photographs with patients and hence did not need to obtain patient consent were associated with better practices of patient privacy protection (higher total scores on the Patient Privacy Scale). Conclusions The findings improve our understanding of nursing students’ practice of patient privacy protection and the associated factors. This will inform the development and revision of current strategies to enhance nursing students’ practice of patient privacy protection, especially their use of social media. (shrink)

The Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA) requires hospitals to ask patients upon admission whether they have an advance directive. Although the PSDA has received extensive criticism, little attention has been paid to the cost of the law, either during its legislative course or following its implementation. Nonetheless, several tangible and intangible costs are associated with the PSDA. Such costs may be incurred by different parties. This paper examines the costs and benefits of the PSDA and illustrates the extent of some of (...) its tangible costs. The incremental start-up cost for one institution's response to the PSDA is estimated to be $49,304 ($1.31 per admission) and the total implementation cost of the program to be $114,528. In addition, the national incremental start-up cost for hospitals to implement the PSDA is estimated to be between $43,625,114 and $101,569,922. Finally, the potential implications of the PSDA for future governmental health care ethics regulation are discussed. (shrink)

Whilst there is a growing volume of literature exploring the ethical implications of organisational change for HRM and the ethical aspects of certain HRM activities, there have been few published U.K. studies of how HR managers actually behave when faced with ethical dilemmas in their work. This paper seeks to enhance the foundations of such knowledge through an examination of the influence of organisational values on the ethical behaviour of Human Resource Managers within a sample of charities in the U.K. (...) and the Republic of Ireland. A qualitative research design is adopted utilising semi-structured interviews. Findings highlight ethical inconsistency in people management in the charity sector arising from the clear application of strong and explicit organisational values to external client groups but their limited influence on people management strategies and practices within the organisation. Many of the ethical issues faced by HRM professionals in both countries arise from this inconsistency. In their handling of ethical dilemmas, the HRM professionals exhibit a combination of a care ethic and a concern for justice but it is also clear that in situations of management intransigence, a desire to be conscience driven often gives way to a contingent approach. Whilst respondents considered it inappropriate for the HRM function to be the conscience of the organisation, it is seen to have a key role in providing management with advice on ethical action. However, the ability of HRM to influence ethical behaviour is highly dependent on the status of the function within the organisation. (shrink)

We surveyed the approaches of 661 geneticists in 18 nations to 14 clinical cases and asked them to give their ethical reasons for choosing these approaches. Patient autonomy was the dominant value in clinical decision-making, with 59% of responses, followed by non-maleficence (20%), beneficence (11%) and justice (5%). In all, 39% described the consequences of their actions, 26% mentioned conflicts of interest between different parties and 72% placed patient welfare above the welfare of others. The U.S., Canada, Sweden, and U.K. (...) led in responses favoring autonomy. There were substantial international differences in moral reasoning. Gender differences in responses reflected women's greater attention to relationships and supported feminist ethical theories. (shrink)

My mother is losing her mother to Alzheimer's disease. Although my mother feels loss, I am connecting through my grandmother to our ancestors, including a deceased father and paternal grandmother. I am also connecting to a daughter who has lost her mother, through a grandmother who, through her loss of memory, is more open to kin networks than my mother. Through deepening connections to my maternal grandmother and to my daughter, I feel I am losing my mother. I look to (...) revolutionary mothering as a way to reconnect shattered bonds and find lost mothers. This article honors the important work of Saidiya Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, and countless revolutionary mothers. (shrink)

At the occasion of the annual banquet of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the President commemorated Robert K. Merton, Dorothy Nelkin, and David Edge, who all died in 2003. The address highlights some of the contributions of these three scholars and past presidents to the development of the social studies of science, and to 4S.

This chapter discusses Edgington’s probabilistic, degree-theoretic semantics for vagueness. After describing Edgington’s semantics, her suggestion that it and classical semantics provide non-competing descriptions of a single phenomenon is examined. It is argued that the suggestion should be rejected because classical semantics is incompatible with plausible principles about the relationship between the two frameworks. Edgington also argues that the many degrees assigned to sentences in her semantics are not new truth-values. It is argued that these arguments presuppose a certain non-semantic conception (...) of truth. Although Edgington’s arguments do force a distinction between two theoretical roles typically associated with the notion of truth, one properly semantic and one merely expressive, they do not preclude identification of the many degrees of her probabilistic formalism with new truth-values in the semantic sense. (shrink)

The Oxford or Tractarian Movement and later Ritualists and Anglo-Catholics schooled numerous converts in elements of the Catholic faith. Foremost among them was John Henry Cardinal Newman, one of the original founders of the Oxford Movement. Converts numbered in the hundreds and included another cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, the second Archbishop of Westminster, the religious foundress Cornelia Connelly, the priest novelist Robert Hugh Benson and later literary figures such as G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh and Mgr Ronald Knox. American historian, Patrick (...) Allitt, has argued that on both sides of the Atlantic converts dominated Catholic intellectual life between 1840 and 1960. While such 'Tractarian' converts have indeed greatly influenced Catholic life, many 'Tractarians' who never converted have also had a considerable impact on English-speaking Catholicism. C.S. Lewis is an obvious example. But there have been others, including author Charles Williams, poet T.S. Eliot and theologians John Macquarrie and Michael Ramsey. The author Dorothy L. Sayers also deserves to be counted among their number. (shrink)

"Permanent Things reminds us that some of the century's most imaginative minds - G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh - were profoundly at odds with the secularist spirit of the age, seeing progressive enlightenment as ushering in, not a millennium of perfect freedom, but a Waste Land whose inhabitants - Waugh's "vile bodies," Eliot's "hollow men," Lewis's "men without chests" - can find refuge from their boredom and anomie only in the (...) ceaseless acquisition of things or in the consoling illusions of pseudo religions - "distracted from distraction by distraction," as Eliot memorably put it." "How does one explain the desolation of a world which, though richly endowed with material comforts, is mentally and spiritually impoverished? The essayists here are united, as were their subjects, by a need to try to answer this question. Modern man's poverty of spirit, visible alike in so much of his art and architecture, his literature and philosophy and political science, reflects his loss of any good reasons for living - his loss of the Permanent Things." "The Christian writers whose work is eloquently interpreted in this book repay our attention for at least two reasons. First is their ability to sharpen our awareness of what, by any previous civilized standards, must be called the abnormal condition of modern man. For all the writers treated in this book, it was never enough to simply capture the spiritual aridity of modern life. It was also necessary to speak of a moral order that may yet be restored by the expressive power and beauty of the written word."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In the standard and traditional view, the concept of conditional probability is defined with what is known as the ratio formula: the probability of B given A is the ratio between the probability of A and B and the probability of A. It is well known that this definition does not match the conceptual and mathematical expectations that we have from conditional probability, especially for the probability values at the limits. Thus, as pointed out by several philosophers such as Popper (...) and Hájek, it is fair to conclude that we have yet to have a satisfactory definition for the concept of conditional probability. E.J. Lowe, in a debate with Dorothy Edgington, proposed two different definitions of conditional probability, and unfortunately his definitions have gone unnoticed in the literature. In this paper, my main aim is to renew interest in Lowe’s definitions. I achieve this aim by showing that E.J. Lowe’s definitions have great potential in providing us with a satisfactory definition of conditional probability.Standard Olasılık kuramında bir olayın bir diğer olaya koşullu olasılığı rasyo formülü olarak bilinen bir formül ile tanımlanmaktadır. Bu formüle göre B olayının A olayına koşullu olasılığı olayının olasığının sadece A olayının olasılığına bölünmesi ile bulunan değerdir. Bu standard tanımın özellikle limitlerdeki olasılık değerleri için kavramsal ve matematiksel beklentilerimizi karşılamadığı bilinen bir durumdur. Aralarında Popper ve Hájek gibi isimlerin de bulunduğu birçok felsefecinin de belirttiği gibi, bu durumdan elimizde tatmin edici bir koşullu olasılık tanımı olmadığını çıkarsamak yanlış olmayacaktır. E.J. Lowe, Dorothy Edgington ile girdiği bir tartışma bağlamında koşullu olasılığın iki alternatif tanımını önermiştir. Ne yazık ki, literatürde bu tanımlara gereken önem verilmemiştir. Literatürdeki bu eksikliği gidermeyi hedefleyen bu makalenin genel amacı, Lowe’ün önerilerinin tatmin edici bir koşullu olasılık tanımı sunma potansiyeline sahip olduğunu göstermektir. (shrink)

Wexler and Specker (2023) offer a review of criticisms directed against what they describe as the relatively new field of neuroethics and offer as solution the development of a more “integrated, in...

Welcome to the world of cutting-edge math, physics, and neuroscience, where the search for the ultimate vacuum, the point of nothingness, ground zero of theory, has rendered the universe deep, rich, and juicy. "Modern physics has animated the void," says K. C. Cole in her entrancing journey into the heart of Nothing. Every time scientists and mathematicians think they have reached the ultimate void, new stuff appears: a black hole, an undulating string, an additional dimension of space or time, repulsive (...) anti-gravity, universes that breed like bunnies. Cole's exploration at the edge of everything is as animated and exciting as the void itself. Take Cole's hand on this adventure into the unknown, and you'll come back informed, amused, and excited. (shrink)

We study the structure of algebraic -closed subsets of an algebraic lattice L, where is some Browerian binary relation on L, in the special case when the lattice of such subsets is an atomistic lattice. This gives an approach to investigate the atomistic lattices of congruence-Noetherian quasivarieties.

Papers presented at an annual inter-disciplinary seminar held to facilitate the 60th birthday of Kalarikkal Poulose Aleaz, b. 1947, theologist from Kerala, India during 20-21 September 2007.

A review of Dretske's Naturalizing the Mind.

Stone, J. Thoughts on supposed "Death of law".--Krishna Iyer, V. R. Jurisprudence and jurisconscience.--Sharma, G. S. Law and social change in India.--Sharma, S. D. The concept of justice in Manu.--Chand, H. Legal values for a developing country.--Ramarao, T. S. The new international law relating to the rights and duties of States.--Sinha, B. S. Custom and customary law in Indian jurisprudence.--Mazumdar, D. L. Techno-economic structure of our industrial society.--Subrahamanian, N. Law and social change.

In this essay I argue for a line of descent, in terms of methodology as an apologist, from J.H. Newman to G.K. Chesterton, and hence to C.S. Lewis. I analyse aspects of Chesterton's methodology as an apologist which strongly suggest the influence of Newman. I then argue that Newman may have exercised a greater influence on Lewis's methodology as an apologist, through Chesterton, than has previously been realised. This raises questions for future study concerning Newman's possible influence, not only on (...) Lewis, but on the other Inklings and related thinkers such as Dorothy Sayers. (shrink)