John Evelyn (1620-1706) is best remembered for Sylva - his magnum opus - and his Diary . Alongside Pepys' diary, Evelyn's is as well known now as anything else written in their time. A connoisseur of architecture, painting, music, coins, and sermons, Evelyn was renowned for his practical knowledge on horticulture and arboriculture, and he was one of the original Fellows of the Royal Society. His Diary begins with an account of his early life and travels in (...) Europe. In addition to his own jottings of events, Evelyn drew on contemporary newspapers and pamphlets. (shrink)

Mother-to-child transmission of the Human Immunodeficiency –Virus is a serious public health problem, contributing up to 90% of childhood HIV infections. In Tanzania, the prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission feature of the HIV programme was rolled out in 2000. The components of PMTCT include counselling and HIV testing directed at antenatal clinic attendees. It is through the process of Provider Initiated Counseling and Testing that counselling is offered participant confidentiality and voluntariness are upheld and valid consent obtained. The objective of the study was to (...) explore antenatal clinic attendees’ experiences of the concept of voluntariness vis- a- vis the implementation of prior counseling and subsequent testing for HIV under the PITC as part of their antenatal care. In-depth interviews were conducted with17 antenatal clinic attendees and 6 nursing officers working at the Muhimbili National Hospital antenatal clinic. The study data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Antenatal clinic attendees’ accounts suggested that counselling and testing for HIV during pregnancy was voluntary, and that knowledge of their HIV status led them to access appropriate treatment for both mother and her newborn baby. They reported feeling no pressure from nursing officers, and gave verbal consent to undergo the HIV test. However, some antenatal clinic attendees reported pressure from their partners to test for HIV. Healthcare providers were thus faced with a dilemma of disclosure/ nondisclosure when dealing with discordant couples. Antenatal clinic attendees at MNH undertook the PITC for HIV voluntarily. This was enhanced by their prior knowledge of HIV, the need to prevent mother- to- child transmission of HIV, and the effectiveness of the voluntary policy implemented by nursing officers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRobert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain. These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the (...) psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Word... (shrink)

The essays included here represent Fox Keller's attempts to integrate the insights of feminist theory with those of her contemporaries in the history and philosophy of science.

The practices of outstanding schools selected through the U.S. Department of Education's Blue Ribbon School of Excellence recognition program. Short articles describe the specific practices that led to excellence. Both Vol. 1: Elementary and Middle Schools and Vol. 2: Middle and Secondary Schools offer a rich resource of successful practices.

Researchers have considered individual and organizational factors of ethical decision making. However, they have little interest in situational factors :101–125, 2013) which is surprising given the many situations sales persons face. We address this issue using two pilot qualitative studies successively and a 2 by 2 within-subject experiment with sales scenarios. Qualitative and quantitative data are obtained from front-line employees of the main French retail banks that serve low-income customers. We show that the recognition of an ethical issue differs depending (...) on the role behavior salespersons are engaged in and the nature of the conflict of interest they face. Moreover, the combined effect of these two situational characteristics is mediated by moral intensity. This study not only adds evidence on situational factors affecting ethical decision but also extends empirical research on sales ethics by revealing sales situations that are not considered in the empirical literature. The research implications of the findings are discussed along with the study’s limitations and suggestions for future research. (shrink)

A review of literature published a decade ago noted a significant increase in empirical papers across nine bioethics journals. This study provides an update on the presence of empirical papers in the same nine journals. It first evaluates whether the empirical trend is continuing as noted in the previous study, and second, how it is changing, that is, what are the characteristics of the empirical works published in these nine bioethics journals. A review of the same nine journals was conducted (...) for a 12-year period from 2004 to 2015. Data obtained was analysed descriptively and using a non-parametric Chi-square test. Of the total number of original papers published in the nine bioethics journals, 18.1% collected and analysed empirical data. Journal of Medical Ethics and Nursing Ethics led the empirical publications, accounting for 89.4% of all empirical papers. The former published significantly more quantitative papers than qualitative, whereas the latter published more qualitative papers. Our analysis reveals no significant difference between the proportion of empirical papers published in 2004–2009 and 2010–2015. However, the increasing empirical trend has continued in these journals with the proportion of empirical papers increasing from 14.9% in 2004 to 17.8% in 2015. This study presents the current state of affairs regarding empirical research published nine bioethics journals. In the quarter century of data that is available about the nine bioethics journals studied in two reviews, the proportion of empirical publications continues to increase, signifying a trend towards empirical research in bioethics. The growing volume is mainly attributable to two journals: Journal of Medical Ethics and Nursing Ethics. This descriptive study further maps the still developing field of empirical research in bioethics. Additional studies are needed to completely map the nature and extent of empirical research in bioethics to inform the ongoing debate about the value of empirical research for bioethics. (shrink)

"-Barbara Ehrenreich, Mother Jones "This book represents the expression of a particular feminist perspective made all the more compelling by Keller's evident commitment to and understanding of science.

L’alternance entre N2’s N1/N1 of N2/N2N1 est généralement expliquée en France par le recours au modèle de la grammaire métaopérationnelle, selon lequel c’est la « soudure » entre les référents de N2 et N1 qui détermine le choix de structure. Le modèle est mis à mal par l’analyse des occurrences du corpus : il est inapte à rendre compte de leur emploi, et sur un plan plus général, il ne remplit pas les principaux critères scientifiques de validité : universalité, raisonnement (...) non circulaire, réfutabilité et pouvoir de prédiction. L’article propose une autre explication de l’alternance en question, élaborée dans un cadre théorique qui rejette l’idée de l’existence systématique d’un invariant sémantique. L’hypothèse avancée est que le choix de structure, en dehors des cas de spécialisation fonctionnelle, se fait principalement selon la fonction de N2. De plus, il est suggéré que s’opère aujourd’hui une poussée du schéma N2N1 et une baisse de productivité du génitif, en cohérence avec le déclin historique du système casuel de l’anglais. (shrink)

Assistive technology has great potential to contribute to health, functioning, and quality of life. To date, as exemplified in the Canadian context, variations and inequities in access to assistive technology are evident; the development of legislation, policies, and programs has not kept up with the increasing use of assistive technology. In this article, we apply ;Daniels’s (2008) theory of just health to argue that equitable access to assistive technology funding and services is necessary for justice. In doing so, we offer (...) theoretical guidance for the development of legislation, policies, and programs to guide such access in health and social services. (shrink)

Le couple vient consulter au moment où monsieur a reconnu la photo du corps nu de sa femme exhibé sur Internet. L’auteur interroge la fonction de cette image pour le couple et la fonction du regard du thérapeute de couple. L’image servirait à dire l’indicible, à savoir le sentiment d’inexistence et le sacrifice du couple pour élever leur enfant psychotique. Mais l’image persécute chacun et, dans le cadre de la thérapie, une mise à mort de la relation haineuse à la (...) mère se rejoue avec difficulté. (shrink)

The map of Jerusalem, which appeared in 1320 in Marino Sanudo's book, Liber secretorum fidelium crucis, has no obvious precursor, though it draws on textual sources from the works of Josephus to the thirteenth-century description of the Holy Land by Burchard of Mt. Sion. Surrounded by an irregular polygon of walls, the city is mapped in a style similar to the other maps in the book, drawn by the sea-chart maker Pietro Vesconte. These maps emphasize the contemporary, physical reality of (...) an area, the Holy Land, often seen through a romantic veil. Sanudo's book was a plea for the revival of the crusading movement and a programme of practical suggestions for its success. Of special interest on the map is the depiction of the city's water resources, important to future Crusaders. (shrink)

The political integration of the European Union is fragile for many reasons, not least the reassertion of nationalism. That said, if we examine specific practices and infrastructures, a more complicated story emerges. We juxtapose the political fragility of the EU in relation to the ongoing formation of data infrastructures in official statistics that take part in postnational enactments of Europe’s populations and territories. We develop this argument by analyzing transformations in how European populations are enacted through new technological infrastructures that (...) seek to integrate national census data in “cubes” of cross-tabulated social topics and spatial “grids” of maps. In doing so, these infrastructures give meaning to what “is” Europe in ways that are both old and new. Through standardization and harmonization of social and geographical spaces, “old” geometries of organizing and mapping populations are deployed along with “new” topological arrangements that mix and fold categories of population. Furthermore, we consider how grids and cubes are generative of methodological topologies by closing the distances or differences between methods and making their data equivalent. By paying attention to these practices and infrastructures, we examine how they enable reconfiguring what is known and imagined as Europe and how it is governed. (shrink)

How did we end up here, masters of scientific insight, purveyors of ever more powerful technologies, astride the burning planet that created us, and now responsible for cleaning up the mess and determining the future direction of all of life? And what do we do about it? Technology is Dead attempts to answer both of those questions. It is a book of both challenge and hope, written for those who are able or willing to lead us out of our global (...) predicament. It is for the politicians, CEOs, community leaders, everyday parents and young people who understand that we must change our ways to ensure a sustainable future for all living things and the planet we rely on. The book's premise is that technology (like capitalism) has been an unprecedented force for prosperity, while at the same time bringing unrelenting, and unplanned downsides. Technology has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of modern society, ignoring many of our human truths while preying on our vulnerabilities. It has resulted in both profound economic progress and a multitude of troubling unintended consequences, from deepening divides and loss of collective responsibility to a growing list of existential threats. The only viable response is to reconnect with our collaborative roots and undertake what the authors call a humanist revolution, a global effort to redefine human progress, rebuild our core systems to contribute to that progress, and reset our all too human behaviors and aspirations, while becoming the active, careful human-first stewards of technology itself. The revolution, guided by what the authors call a 21st Century Humanist Code asks all of us to work towards the world we want to live in - for each and every human to become the center and source of change in their lives, in their communities and the world beyond. The future of humankind and our planet depends on it. (shrink)

Among Bryan Norton’s most influential contributions to environmental philosophy has been his analysis and evaluation of democratic processes for environmental decision-making. He examines actual cases of environmental decision-making in their legal, political, ethical and scientific contexts, and, with contextual constraints and goals in mind, he theorizes concerning what they accomplish and how they can be improved. Informed by the political theories of both John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas, Norton’s pragmatist approach holds that appropriate democratic decision procedures will generate broadly defensible (...) decisions. Thus, his view of environmental decision-making is based in—and requires—inclusive, democratic, empirical inquiry. While accepting these criteria, I examine how, in practice, it is difficult to identify when these conditions have been adequately met. I investigate the limitations of Norton’s proceduralist approach through a case study in community-based forest management in a New York State urban old-growth park. I argue that Norton’s procedural priorities are too rigid given the contextual constraints of local decision-making. While they are useful for guiding an ideal, high standards sense of the decision-making process, less rigid Deweyan considerations of social learning and community engagement often provide sufficient guidelines for evaluating success. (shrink)

Our focus in this article concerns Leibniz’s views on evil. Our goal is to examine which are the consequences of his conception of moral agency for the moral psychology of the genuinely evil person. For Leibniz, moral failure is an epistemic error since it involves some false practical judgement. Moral maxims may be represented in blind or symbolic cognitions, but then moral agents can misrepresent the evil consequences of their behaviour. Finally, we discuss Leibniz’s view on habits that may help (...) virtuous persons strive for perfection but also enable evil persons to continue sinning. (shrink)

Philosophical pragmatism provides a theory and practical guidance for engaged philosophy. The movement to apply philosophy to real-world problems gained traction in the 1970s and has become an important area of philosophical inquiry. Applied philosophy draws connections between philosophical principles and real-life problems. This has been a valuable methodology for many purposes, and it especially serves the purposes of philosophers. Unfortunately, it often starts from existing frameworks or principles that are recognized by philosophers but does not start from real-life problems (...) as they are experienced by people. Indeed, sometimes people observe miscommunication and disconnections but are not clear what the source of the problem is. Identifying the nature of a social problem from the perspective of the people who deal with it is a large part of what is required to then analyze the problem philosophically. This requires communicating directly with practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in the field at issue. Paul Thompson’s engaged philosophical approach to agricultural ethics demonstrates the diversity of philosophical activities that are required to accomplish this goal, and it is rooted in pragmatism. Engaged philosophy is more expansive than applied philosophy because it serves many functions and the frameworks produced are emergent rather than prescribed. Engaged philosophy offers an implicit critique of contemporary norms of applied philosophical practice, and it opens up creative opportunities for philosophers to engage in real-life problem solving. This essay traces Paul Thompson’s strategies for engaged philosophy and their relation to pragmatism. (shrink)

Environmental pragmatists are committed to analyzing questions of environmental policy. Bryan Norton's pragmatic critique of environmental decision-making shows how an implicit commitment to the fact/value distinction has hindered productive environmental action. Nonetheless, Norton, as well as the majority of environmental ethicists, have devoted more attention to theorizing value disagreements as a primary cause of controversy than to examining epistemic structures. A case study demonstrates why and how Norton's procedural account may be supplemented with sensitive attention to the construction of epistemic (...) authority in environmental disputes. I recommend supporting the development of local knowledges and just distributions of epistemic authority. (shrink)

En tant qu’être sensible, à la fois sentant et senti, le corps ne cesse d’interroger les philosophes sur le sens et les enjeux de cette sensibilité, par laquelle chacun est toujours déjà en relation avec le monde, avec les choses, avec les autres. La relation érotique pose de façon cruciale la question de l’unité du sensible : si l’union des corps n’est pas unité, mais séparation, cette unité est-elle pour autant impensable? Où la situer? Plus fondamentalement peut-on penser l’être sensible (...) du corps à partir d’une philosophie du sujet et de ses catégories (je/tu, moi/toi, le même/l’autre)? Ou faut-il adopter un point de vue plus large, celui de l’Être qui ouvre notre corps sensible à d’autres types de corporéité (artistique, politique, historique)? C’est l’occasion de croiser et de confronter les approches d’Emmanuel Lévinas et de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, pour tenter d’éclairer l’aventure à laquelle notre corps nous convie : et si le corps avait quelque chose à nous apprendre? Et s’il renouvelait la question du sens? (shrink)

Dans le système français, comme dans celui des familles de droit continental, le droit est édicté par un pouvoir et son interprétation est placée sous le contrôle des seules cours suprêmes. Ce modèle vertical a été mis à l’épreuve au début des années soixante par l’introduction de l’informatique juridique. Les premières banques de données décisionnelles s’adressent aux professionnels, et se fondent sur un principe documentaire (I). Le décret du 7 août 2002 pose le principe d’un droit d’accès gratuit du public (...) aux données essentielles du droit, fondé sur la sélection des sources (II). En 2007, le principe d’exhaustivité est à l’origine d’une base décisionnelle des arrêts d’appel, mais sans ouverture au public (III). Enfin, la loi du 7 octobre 2016 introduit un principe d’accès gratuit du public aux décisions des juridictions du fond, ouvrant un droit de réutilisation dont s’emparent les producteurs de logiciels de justice prédictive (IV), et impliquant un renouvellement de la théorie de la jurisprudence (conclusion). (shrink)

We develop the concept of ‘aesthetic practices’ to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education’s Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required so that data produced at dispersed sites can be brought into relation and (...) projected as populations in forms such as bar charts, heat maps and tables. Two examples of aesthetic practices are analysed based on ethnographic studies we have conducted on the production of data for the Hub and Warehouse: metadata and data cleaning. Metadata enables data to come into relation by containing and accounting for the differences between data. Data cleaning deals with the indeterminacies and absences of data and involves algorithms to determine what values data can obtain so they can be brought into relation. We attend to how both aesthetic practices involve normative decisions that make absent what exceeds them: embodied knowledge that cannot or has not been documented as well as data that cannot meet the forms required of data portals. While these aesthetic practices are necessary to sustain data portals as ‘sites of projection,’ we also bring critical attention to their performative effects for knowing, enacting and governing populations. (shrink)

What I suggest we can see in this brief overview of the literature is an extensive interpenetration on both sides of these debates between scientific, political, and social values. Important shifts in political and social values were of course occurring over the same period, some of them in parallel with, and perhaps even contributing to, these transitions I have been speaking of in evolutionary discourse. The developments that I think of as at least suggestive of possible parallels include the progressive (...) encroachment of public values into the private domain of post-World War II American life, the cold war, the rise of consumerism, and the flowering of what Christopher Lasch calls a “narcissistic individualism.”35 In popular language, the 1960s gave birth to the “me” generation. Perhaps the most tantalizing analogue is suggested by Barbara Ehrenreich's argument for the emergence of a new meaning of masculinity — an ideal of masculinity measured not by commitment, responsibility, or success as family provider, but precisely by the strength of a man's autonomy in the private sphere, his resistance to the demands of a hampering female.36 It is tempting to speculate about possible connections between changes in scientific discourse and developments in the social and political spheres, but such connections, however suggestive, would clearly have to be demonstrated.For now, however, I want to focus on another kind of change —a transformation not so much in the social or political sphere as in the scientific sphere. I make this turn, or return, in support of a more complex account of scientific change that incorporates reverberations within the scientific communty along with social and political changes.In the 1960s, all of biology was undergoing a major transformation in direct response to the dramatic successes of molecular biology. These successes seemed to completely vindicate the values on which the molecular revolution was premised — namely, simplicity and mechanism. Following the victory of Watson and Crick, and of others after them, the fever of that endeavor swept through biology leaving in its wake a new standard of science, and of scientific discourse — one predicated on clarity, simplicity, and analyzability; on the definition of legitimate questions as those capable of clear and unambiguous answers. Every biological discipline felt it — even evolutionary biology, which in some respects was at the furthest pole. Perhaps precisely because it seemed conceptually so remote, evolutionary biology may have felt it most of all. Lewontin inadvertently provides us with some direct support for this view. Indeed, he begins his introduction to Population Biology and Evolution with the following remarks: The twenty years since World War II have seen a vindication in biology of our faith in the Cartesian method as a way of doing science. Some of the most fundamental and interesting problems of biology have been solved or are very nearly solved by an analytic technique that is now loosely called “molecular biology.” But it is not specifically the “molecular” aspect of biology of the last twenty years that has led to its success. It is, rather, the analytic aspect, the belief that by breaking systems down into their component parts, by simplifying them or using simpler organisms, one can learn about more complex systems. As it happens, the problems that were attacked and are being attacked by this method lead to answers in terms of molecules and cell organelles.... There is a host of problems in biology, however, that has been much neglected in these twenty exciting years, because the answers to them cannot be meaningfully framed in molecular and cellular terms.37Lewontin is referring, of course, to problems in evolution. The remainder of his remarks is devoted to an argument for the applicability of the method, if not the content, of molecular biology to these problems. He writes, “It is not the case that molecular biology is Cartesian and analytic while population biology is holistic. Population biology is properly analytic and operates, within the framework of its own problems, by the process of simplification, analysis, and resynthesis.”38 With these remarks, he leads into the criticism of the “holists” who have “held up progress.”This new ethic of simplicity, clarity, and mechanism — embodying the very virtues lauded by Williams — was explicitly carried into evolutionary biology in the name of scientific progress. As it happened, the values implied also fit conveniently well with other values — each set of values providing crucial support for the other.However substantive the scientific gains may have been in some respects, the net effect of this ethic has also been a systematic “perceptual bias” — a bias with profound practical consequences for the entire program of methodological individualism in evolutionary biology, if not elsewhere as well. It may well be that the whole is equivalent to the reconstituted aggregate of its parts, if, in the process of aggregation or summation, all possible interactions among the parts are included. But if certain kinds of interactions are systematically excluded, our confidence in that program necessarily founders. My claim here is that such systematic exclusion does occur, and that it occurs on a number of different levels. To briefly review the interlocking kinds of “bias” that I see occurring in practice, I suggest the following schematic listing:On the most general level: The ethic of simplicity — the privileging of certain values, even certain methodologies, as having an a priori superior claim to scientific credibility.Only slightly less general, and crucially related, is the equation of “scientific” with “tractible”: Given the techniques of analysis available, the equation of science with what we can do inevitably leads to a systematic technical bias favoring simplicity. That is, because we don't know how to model complex dynamics, nonlinear interactions are systematically biased against because of the limitations of our technical know-how. The consequences of this equation of the scientific with the tractible are greatly compounded by the additional equation between what we can do and what is — that is, by our temptation to confuse tractibility with reality.Finally, and also closely related, a further kind of elision occurs even within the confines of tractibility. This kind of elision — taking the form almost of inferring tractibility from one's prior assumptions of what is real — is exemplified by the history of a mathematical ecology of mutualism. Even when mutualism can be introduced into the same technical machinery, it is still not pursued. The basic assumption is that competition is what is real, not because it is easier to model, but because it is what we expect. When the actual difficulties of modeling competition are then in turn suppressed, as in the Robert May story, what we have, given the temptation to equate the tractible with the real, is the possibility of a truly self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

While scientific terms lack the stability of physical objects, they are generally far more stable than the various meanings associated with them. As a consequence, they tend to carry older conceptions alongside those more recently acquired, thereby exerting an effective drag against conceptual change. I illustrate this claim with an analysis of the shifting meanings of the term genome, originally used to refer to a collectivity of genes, but more recently to an organism’s complement of DNA. While genes were originally (...) regarded as effectively autonomous formal agents, and DNA as collections of genes, contemporary research suggests that an organism’s DNA constitutes a far more complex system designed to adapt and respond to the environment in which it finds itself. (shrink)

Professor Kathryn George's Use and Abuse Revisited does not contain an accurate assessment of my On Vegetarianism, Morality, and Science: A Counter Reply. I show that she has misrepresented my moral and empirical argumentation.

That Cicero as a young didactic poet embraced the traditions of Hellenistic hexameter poetry is well recognized. Those traditions encompass various forms of wordplay, one of which is the acrostic. Cicero's engagement with this tradition, in the form of an unusual Greek-Latin acrostic at Aratea 317–20, prompts inquiry regarding both the use of the acrostic technique as textual commentary and Cicero's lifelong concerns regarding translation.

From all this some unexpected results become apparent:Labriola is not the father of Italian Eurocommunism, but rather a thorough-going internationalist.Labriola might reasonably be called a Marxist humanist. In the light of his acknowledged dependence on Engels, this would seem directly to challenge the post-Lukács tendency variously to blame Engels for dialectical materialism, the Soviet scholastic spirit, or even Stalin.Croce's critique of Labriola is telling and Gramsci's direct response is ineffective in so far as he simply tries to revindicate Labriola the (...) classical Marxist.It is at least curious that Gramsci attacks primarily Croce, the liberal idealist, rather than Gentile, the fascist idealist. Much of the criticism is that Croce does not go far enough, is not immanentist and historicist enough.This, in turn, suggests that one should look for Gramsci's original contribution and his overriding concern in political philosophy and not at all in metaphysics. (shrink)

At the intersections of social anthropology, philosophy, and Asian studies, my paper explores the body ecologic through a phenomenological frame in the context of Chinese culture engaging both theory and method. How can qì cultivation experiences transporting bodies and persons in movement, within the world and their “life‐world,” be interpreted through a phenomenology of perception? Based on ethnographic study data collected mainly in South China (Guangzhou) and in Taiwan (1990s–2000s), this exploration is situated within qìgōng experiences (training, cultivating and mastering (...) the qì). Anchored in martial, religious, and healing arts and their meanings, qìgōng’s myriad of forms and infinite variations invite journeys into religious Daoist and Buddhist practice, Chinese thought, and politico‐religious issues of past and present Chinese society. The qìgōng world, paths of knowledge transmission, healing horizons, claimed affiliations, and views of practitioners unveil an ontology and a cosmology grounded in religious (Daoist and Buddhist) lore. (shrink)

We examine the ethical, social, and regulatory barriers that may hinder research on therapeutic potential of certain controversial controlled substances like marijuana, heroin, or ketamine. Hazards for individuals and society and potential adverse effects on communities may be good reasons for limiting access and justify careful monitoring of these substances. Overly strict regulations, fear of legal consequences, stigma associated with abuse and populations using illicit drugs, and lack of funding may, however, limit research on their considerable therapeutic potential. We review (...) the surprisingly sparse literature and address the particular ethical concerns pertinent to research with illicit and addictive substances, such as undue inducement, informed consent, therapeutic misconception, and risk to participants, researchers, and institutions. We consider the perspectives of key research stakeholders and explore whether they may be infected with bias. We conclude by proposing an empirical research agenda to provide an evidentiary basis for ethical reasoning. (shrink)

Recent observations of power-law distributions in the connectivity of complex networks came as a big surprise to researchers steeped in the tradition of random networks. Even more surprising was the discovery that power-law distributions also characterize many biological and social networks. Many attributed a deep significance to this fact, inferring a “universal architecture” of complex systems. Closer examination, however, challenges the assumptions that (1) such distributions are special and (2) they signify a common architecture, independent of the system's specifics. The (...) real surprise, if any, is that power-law distributions are easy to generate, and by a variety of mechanisms. The architecture that results is not universal, but particular; it is determined by the actual constraints on the system in question. BioEssays 27:1060–1068, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Cet article rend compte des singularités du travail nocturne et de ses temporalités via le suivi d’un projet de « micro-sieste » au sein d’un service hospitalier, dans une visée d’amélioration des conditions de récupération des professionnels de jour comme de nuit. Il s’appuie sur une étude de cas dans un service de soins fonctionnant en 12 heures, mêlant observations (de nuit et de jour) et entretiens formels et informels. Si les professionnels de jour sont peu nombreux à pratiquer la (...) « micro-sieste » telle qu’elle est proposée, c’est notamment en raison de la difficulté à prendre un temps de pause du fait des exigences et de la densité du travail, _a fortiori_ en s’absentant du service. De nuit, c’est bien plutôt le risque qu’elle empiète sur les temps disponibles pour le collectif (entraide et socialisation) qui la freine. L’article montre comment les temporalités du nocturne, les pratiques de repos, les apprentissages et les valeurs qui y sont associés, engagent et entretiennent l... (shrink)

In business and government, databases contain large quantities of digital transactional data (purchases made, services used, finances transferred, benefits received, licences acquired, borders crossed, tickets purchased). The data can be understood as ongoing and dynamic measurements of the activities and doings of people. In government, numerous database devices have been developed to connect such data across services to discover patterns and identify and evaluate the performance of individuals and populations. Under the UK’s New Labour government, the development of such devices (...) was part of a broader policy known as ‘joined-up thinking and government’. Analyses of this policy have typically understood joining up as an operation of adding together distributed data about subjects, which can then be used in the service of government surveillance, the database state or informational capitalism. But rather than such technical or managerialist analytics, I argue that topological analytics capture what these database devices enact and do: they materialize the ‘individuality’ of subjects in intensified, distributed and fluctuating ways and materialize and intensify a logic of what Deleuze describes as modulating controls. Through examples of UK New Labour social policy initiatives over the past decade, I argue that topological analytics can account for these as immanent rather than exceptional properties of database devices and, as such, part and parcel of a governmental logic and ontology of subjects. (shrink)

The primary objective of the research was to validate the Emotional Leadership Questionnaire for Training, as proposed by McKee et al. (2008). The study included a sample of 97 school principals. An analysis of the original questionnaire was conducted, which comprises four factors and 25 items. Of these, three items and 13 factors were retained. The results demonstrated an optimal fit of the model and high-reliability indices. This instrument provides a practical self-perception tool to assess emotional leadership, underscoring the importance (...) of empathy, adaptability, and self-knowledge in the training of school principals. The content validity was established through the assessment of 15 experts using Lawshe's formula, which demonstrated the validity of all items and dimensions. The reliability was evaluated through Cronbach's alpha and Omega indices, which yielded values between 0.77 and 0.86 and between 0.79 and 0.87, respectively. These results indicate high reliability for all factors. Construct validity was confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis. (shrink)