Increasing ethical attention and debate is focusing on whether individuals who take part in clinical trials should be given access to post-trial care. However, the main focus of this debate has been upon drug trials undertaken in low-income settings. To broaden this debate, we report findings from interviews with individuals (n = 24) who participated in a clinical trial of a closed-loop system, which is a medical device under development for people with type 1 diabetes that automatically adjusts blood glucose (...) to help keep it within clinically recommended ranges. Individuals were recruited from UK sites and interviewed following trial close-out, at which point the closed-loop had been withdrawn. While individuals were stoical and accepting of the requirement to return the closed-loop, they also conveyed varying degrees of distress. Many described having relaxed diabetes management practices while using the closed-loop and having become deskilled as a consequence, which made reverting back to pre-trial regimens challenging. Participants also described unanticipated consequences arising from using a closed-loop. As well as deskilling, these included experiencing psychological and emotional benefits that could not be sustained after the closed-loop had been withdrawn and participants reevaluating their pre- and post-trial life in light of having used a closed-loop and now perceiving this life much more negatively. Participants also voiced frustrations about experiencing better blood glucose control using a closed-loop and then having to revert to using what they now saw as antiquated and imprecise self-management tools. We use these findings to argue that ethical debates about post-trial provisioning need to be broadened to consider potential psychological and emotional harms, and not just clinical harms, that may result from withdrawal of investigated treatments. We also suggest that individuals may benefit from information about potential nonclinical harms to help make informed decisions about trial participation. (shrink)

In the history of thermodynamics, two dates stand out as especially important: 1824, when Sadi Carnot's brilliant memoirRéflexions sur la puissance motrice du feuappeared in print; and 1850, when Rudolf Clausius published his similarly titled paper ‘Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Wärme’. In this paper Clausius narrowly beat the Scottish physicist William Thomson to the solution of a puzzle which had been highlighted in the latter's recent publications: how could Carnot's theory, with all its intellectual attractions, be reconciled with the (...) newly discovered principle of the inter-convertibility of heat and work? Clausius's solution (as is well known) was to replace Carnot's axiom of heat conservation, with the axiom now known as the second law of thermodynamics. (shrink)

This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Améry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness.

This (by no means exhaustive) survey of Postman’s work reflects on his penetrating analyses of contemporary technology. He focused attention on the ways technology today, especially the television and the computer, inevitably change us. The essential questions he asks us to ask (and answer) are, How does technology affect us? Is it for good or ill? and Must we accept all technological advances? Postman recognized the current dominance and autonomy of technology as well as the concomitant dangers and consequently made (...) the case and the plea for the reassertion of human over technological values. (shrink)

Artikelen en lezingen uit de periode 1970-1982.

Feigning symptoms distorts diagnostic evaluations. Therefore, dedicated tools known as symptom validity tests have been developed to help clinicians differentiate feigned from genuine symptom presentations. While a deviant SVT score is an indicator of a feigned symptom presentation, a non-deviant score provides support for the hypothesis that the symptom presentation is valid. Ideally, non-deviant SVT scores should temper suspicion of feigning even in cases where the patient fits the DSM’s stereotypical yet faulty profile of the “antisocial” feigner. Across three studies, (...) we tested whether non-deviant SVT scores, indeed, have this corrective effect. We gave psychology students and clinical experts a case alluding to the DSM profile of feigning. In successive steps, they received information about the case, among which non-deviant SVT outcomes. After each step, participants rated how strongly they suspected feigning and how confident they were about their judgment. Both students and experts showed suspicion rates around the midpoint of the scale and did not respond to non-deviant SVT outcomes with lowered suspicion rates. In Study 4, we educated participants about the shortcomings of the DSM’s antisocial typology of feigning and the importance of the negative predictive power of SVTs, after which they processed the case information. Judgments remained roughly similar to those in Studies 1–3. Taken together, our findings suggest that students and experts alike have difficulties understanding that non-deviant scores on SVTs reduce the probability of feigning as a correct differential diagnosis. (shrink)

Contemporary society needs the recognition of a moral middle ground, where human behavior can be evaluated as permissible, understandable, or even valuable. As a counterforce to polarization and divisive politics, an identity model is proposed in which individual and group identities are transcended by a human and ecological identity.

First published in 1908 as the second edition of a 1900 original, this book explains the content of the fifth and sixth books of Euclid's Elements, which are primarily concerned with ratio and magnitudes. Hill furnishes the text with copious diagrams to illustrate key points of Euclidian reasoning. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of education.

While executive functions and self-regulated learning strategy use have been found to be related in several populations, this relationship has not been studied in adult online distance education. This is surprising as self-regulation, and thus using such strategies, is very important here. In this setting, we studied the relation between basic executive functions and reported SRL-strategy use within a correlational design with 889 adult online distance students. In this study, we performed regression analyses and took age and processing speed into (...) consideration, as processing speed and EFs decrease with age, whereas self-regulation is reported to increase with age. Cognitively measured working memory was not related to reported SRL-strategy use in adult ODE students. Thus, even though the SRL-components within the strategies seem to elicit working memory, reported SRL-strategy use is not related to the functioning of this basic EF. This means that if SRL-strategy use needs to be increased in adult ODE students, training of working memory might not be an effective manner for achieving that goal. Better shifting and processing speed were related to less reported SRL-strategy use, which might suggest that SRL-strategies might be used to compensate for lower shifting and lower processing speed. With increasing age, the number of contacts with peers or teachers decreases. This latter finding might be of relevance during the pandemic since contacts with others is importance during lockdown. (shrink)

The Bohr-Heisenberg scheme, which forms the basis of any current version of the standard or Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, is shown to be internally inconsistent. Although the inconsistencies demonstrated here are directly relatable to Einstein's opinion that it is unsatisfactory to interpret physical theory solely in terms of the knowledge gained from experimental outcomes, it is nevertheless shown that Einstein's view requires important modification. The implications of the Bohr-Heisenberg schem's self-inconsistency are discussed in relation to Bell's theorem and Aspect's (...) experiments. (shrink)

This commentary discusses whether abstract metrical frames are stored. For stress-assigning languages (e.g., Dutch and English), which have a dominant stress pattern, metrical frames are stored only for words that deviate from the default stress pattern. The majority of the words in these languages are produced without retrieving any independent syllabic or metrical frame.