Is the existence of God a question of fact? To the majority of theists, both now and in the past, I think it has seemed clear that, if the phrase ‘God exists’ is to be meaningful, then it is a fact, either that God exists or that he does not. This assertion may even seem trivially true; and yet it has evidently been denied, in recent years, by many theologians. The reasons for such a denial are, in part, to be (...) found in the general reaction against metaphysical philosophy, which was characteristic of the early years of this century, and which is, in Britain, epitomised by A. J. Ayer's stipulation that no proposition can be factually significant unless it is verifiable; unless, in principle at least, some series of observations could conceivably show it to be true. By restricting ‘observation’ to the senses of the physical body, and by emphasising the fact that God, as transcendent by definition, was not a possible object of the senses, some philosophically sensitive theologians were startled into denying that ‘God’ was, even in principle, verifiable; and consequently into denying that propositions purporting to assert his existence were factual. (shrink)

Governments must keep agricultural systems free of pests that threaten agricultural production and international trade. Biosecurity surveillance already makes use of a wide range of technologies, such as insect traps and lures, geographic information systems, and diagnostic biochemical tests. The rise of cheap and usable surveillance technologies such as remotely piloted aircraft systems presents value conflicts not addressed in international biosurveillance guidelines. The costs of keeping agriculture pest-free include privacy violations and reduced autonomy for farmers. We argue that physical and (...) digital privacy in the age of ubiquitous aerial and ground surveillance is a natural right to allow people to function freely on their land. Surveillance methods must be co-created and justified through using ethically defensible processes such as discourse theory, value-centred design and responsible innovation to forge a cooperative social contract between diverse stakeholders. We propose an ethical framework for biosurveillance activities that balances the collective benefits for food security with individual privacy: establish the boundaries of a biosurveillance social contract; justify surveillance operations for the farmers, researchers, industry, the public and regulators; give decision makers a reasonable measure of control over their personal and agricultural data; and choose surveillance methodologies that give the appropriate information. The benefits of incorporating an ethical framework for responsible biosurveillance innovation include increased participation and accumulated trust over time. Long term trust and cooperation will support food security, producing higher quality data overall and mitigating against anticipated information gaps that may emerge due to disrespecting landholder rights. (shrink)

To many who develop and use free software, the GNU General Public License represents an embodiment of the meaning of free software. In this paper we examine the definition and meaning of free software in the context of three events surrounding the GNU General Public License. We use a case involving the GPU software project to establish the importance of Freedom 0 in the meaning of free software. We analyze version 3 of the GNU General Public License and conclude that (...) although a credible case can be made that the added restrictions are consistent with the definition of free software, the case requires subtle arguments. Strong arguments against the added restrictions are less subtle, and may therefore be more convincing to many users and developers. We also analyze the Affero General Public License and conclude that it is inconsistent with the definition of free software. (shrink)

Rising rates of female incarceration within the United States are incompatible with the lack of federal standards outlining the rights of incarcerated mothers and their children. A robust body of evidence demonstrates that prison nurseries, programmes designed for mothers to keep their infants under their care during detainment or incarceration, provide essential and beneficial care that could not otherwise be achieved within the current carceral infrastructure. These benefits include facilitation of breastfeeding, bonding during a critical period of child development, and (...) decreased recidivism rates for participants. Legal precedent exists to support the rights of the mother to continue to parent their child but remains in stark opposition to current prison infrastructure that could allow them to do so. Existing state policies also have inconsistent mechanisms for determining child eligibility and should move to centre decision-making on a case-by-case basis. This work will demonstrate that a just society, supported by law and ensuring maternal–child welfare supports the establishment of prison nursery programmes as a part of the existing right to healthcare for incarcerated individuals. (shrink)

The Declaration of Helsinki and the Council of the International Organization of Medical Sciences provide guidance on standards of care and prevention in clinical trials. In the current and increasingly challenging research environment, the ethical status of a trial design depends not only on protection of participants, but also on social value, feasibility, and scientific validity. Using the example of a study assessing efficacy of a vaccine to prevent human papilloma virus in HIV-1 infected adolescent girls in low resource countries (...) without access to the vaccine, we compare several trial designs which rank lower on some criteria and higher on others, giving rise to difficult trade-offs. This case demonstrates the need for developing more nuanced guidance documents to help researchers balance these often conflicting criteria. (shrink)

Postulating the subcortical organization of human consciousness provides a critical link for the construal of pain in patients with impaired cortical function or cortical immaturity during early development. Practical implications of the centrencephalic proposal include the redefinition of pain, improved pain assessment in nonverbal humans, and benefits of adequate analgesia/anesthesia for these patients, which certainly justify the rigorous scientific efforts required. (Published Online May 1 2007).

As part of a larger research study, we present model language for disclosing financial interests in clinical research to potential research participants, and we describe the empirical basis and theoretical assumptions used in developing the language. The empirical process for creating appropriate disclosure language resulted in a generic disclosure statement for cases in which no risk to participants’ welfare or the scientific integrity of the research is expected, and nine more specific disclosure statements for cases in which some risk is (...) expected. The disclosure statements are not meant to be canonical, but were instead designed to reflect the typical situations in which disclosure of financial interest might be considered by an institutional review board or conflict of interest committee. Individual institutions could modify key phrases to suit their purposes, and others could use the language in future empirical work on informed consent to better refine the options for disclosing financial interests in clinical research. (shrink)

Medium- and high-spin states of Pr-134 were populated using the Cd-116(Na-23, 5n) reaction and studied with the GAMMASPHERE spectrometer. Several new bands have been found in this nucleus, one of them being linked to the previously observed chiral-candidate twin-band structure. The ground state of Pr-134 could be determined through establishing a level structure that connects the two previously known long-lived isomeric states. Unambiguous spin-parity assignments for the excited states could be performed based on the known 2(-) spin-parity of the ground (...) state combined with the present experimental data. Intrinsic single-particle configurations have been assigned to the newly observed bands on the basis of the measured B(M1)/B(E2) ratios, alignments, band-crossing frequencies, bandhead spins, the observed single-particle configurations in the neighboring nuclei, and taking into account the predictions of total Routhian surface and tilted-axis cranking calculations. (shrink)

The power of technology to transform religions, science, and political institutions has often been presented as nothing short of revolutionary. Does technology have a similarly transformative influence on societies’ morality? Scholars have not rigorously investigated the role of technology in moral revolutions, even though existing research on technomoral change suggests that this role may be considerable. In this paper, we explore what the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change, amounts to. We do (...) so by investigating four historical episodes of radical moral change in which technology plays a noteworthy role. Our case-studies illustrate the plurality of mechanisms involved in technomoral revolutions, but also suggest general patterns of technomoral change, such as technology’s capacity to stabilize and destabilize moral systems, and to make morally salient phenomena visible or invisible. We find several leads to expand and refine conceptual tools for analysing moral change, specifically by crystallizing the notions of ‘technomoral niche construction’ and ‘moral payoff mechanisms’. Coming to terms with the role of technology in radical moral change, we argue, enriches our understanding of moral revolutions, and alerts us to the depths of which technology can change our societies in wanted and unwanted ways. (shrink)

The question of how an individual firm's social and environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decrease its market risk or is environmental performance just a disadvantageous cost that increases such risk levels for these firms? Answers to this question have important implications for the management of companies and the investment decisions of individuals and institutions. The purpose of this paper is to (...) examine the relationship between corporate environmental performance and firm risk in the British context. Using the largest dataset assembled so far, with community and environmental responsibility (CER) rankings for all rated UK companies between 1994 and 2006, we show that a company's environmental performance is inversely related to its systematic financial risk. However, an increase of 1.0 in the CER score is associated with only a 0.028 reduction in its β. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the case of Tay, the Microsoft AI chatbot that was launched in March, 2016. After less than 24 hours, Microsoft shut down the experiment because the chatbot was generating tweets that were judged to be inappropriate since they included racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic language. We contend that the case of Tay illustrates a problem with the very nature of learning software that interacts directly with the public, and the developer's role and responsibility associated with it. (...) We make the case that when LS interacts directly with people or indirectly via social media, the developer has additional ethical responsibilities beyond those of standard software. There is an additional burden of care. (shrink)

Background The use of lengthy, detailed, and complex informed consent forms is of paramount concern in biomedical research as it may not truly promote the rights and interests of research participants. The extent of information in ICFs has been the subject of debates for decades; however, no clear guidance is given. Thus, the objective of this study was to determine the perspectives of research participants about the type and extent of information they need when they are invited to participate in (...) biomedical research. Methods This multi-center, cross-sectional, descriptive survey was conducted at 54 study sites in seven Asia-Pacific countries. A modified Likert-scale questionnaire was used to determine the importance of each element in the ICF among research participants of a biomedical study, with an anchored rating scale from 1 to 5. Results Of the 2484 questionnaires distributed, 2113 were returned. The majority of respondents considered most elements required in the ICF to be ‘moderately important’ to ‘very important’ for their decision making. Major foreseeable risk, direct benefit, and common adverse effects of the intervention were considered to be of most concerned elements in the ICF. Conclusions Research participants would like to be informed of the ICF elements required by ethical guidelines and regulations; however, the importance of each element varied, e.g., risk and benefit associated with research participants were considered to be more important than the general nature or technical details of research. Using a participant-oriented approach by providing more details of the participant-interested elements while avoiding unnecessarily lengthy details of other less important elements would enhance the quality of the ICF. (shrink)

The Lorentz transformation relates the Einstein-defined measures, associated with two inertial frames, of the space and time coordinates of a body or event. From such information relative velocities and accelerations may be deduced, and their appropriate transformations derived. All other transformations of special relativity are derived from the Lorentz transformation and hence depend on the coordinate measures related by the transformation. In particular, the transformation of forces depends on that for accelerations; hence it may not be appropriately applicable to equilibrium (...) phenomena involving null-acceleration. It is suggested that this is the root of the apparent paradox which arises when the conventional force transformation is applied to the consideration of a right-angled lever in equilibrium in its proper inertial frame. It is shown that this paradox is resolved by the employment of a nonconventional but appropriate special relativistic transformation for forces not associated with corresponding accelerations. (shrink)

The considerable attention to financial interests in clinical research has focused mostly on academic medical centers, even though the majority of clinical research is conducted in community practice settings. To fill this gap, this article maps the practices and policies in 73 community hospitals and several hundred specialized facilities around the country for reviewing clinical investigators’ financial relationships with research sponsors. Community hospitals face a substantially different mix of issues than academic medical centers do because their physician researchers are usually (...) not employees, and more of their studies are later-phase, multicenter trials. Accordingly, community physicians stand to benefit personally from per capita payments, but they tend to have less direct influence over research findings when compared with their academic peers. These and other contrasts require separate guidance for community-based organizations that takes into account their particular needs, circumstances, and institutional capacities. (shrink)

A superconducting transition temperature as high as 100 K was recently discovered in one monolayer FeSe grown on SrTiO3. The discovery ignited efforts to identify the mechanism for the markedly enhanced Tc from its bulk value of 8 K. There are two main views about the origin of the Tc enhancement: interfacial effects and/or excess electrons with strong electron correlation. Here, we report the observation of superconductivity below 20 K in surface electron-doped bulk FeSe. The doped surface layer possesses all (...) the key spectroscopic aspects of the monolayer FeSe on SrTiO3. Without interfacial effects, the surface layer state has a moderate Tc of 20 K with a smaller gap opening of 4.2 meV. Our results show that excess electrons with strong correlation cannot induce the maximum Tc, which in turn reveals the need for interfacial effects to achieve the highest Tc in one monolayer FeSe on SrTiO3. (shrink)

As the annual air passenger traffic in India is increasing steeply, an environmental impact assessment on important cities connected by air is becoming increasingly indispensable. This study proposes an innovative screening method that uses a modified Environmental Vulnerability Index. This modified EVI calculator includes aviation-related parameters and can be used to assess the environmental vulnerabilities of political states and cities, in addition to countries as is being already done. This study also suggests the need to include aspects of human comfort (...) in the screening process through the use of state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamical software and large eddy simulations which can be used to estimate forces experienced by aircraft of different sizes during in-flight turbulence for various weather conditions. A comparative analysis is presented on how changing the size of the aircraft operating in a particular route between the cities of Chennai and Bengaluru has better implications on both passenger comfort and the environment. It is observed that if commercial airlines incorporated fewer medium-sized aircraft, there would be a significant reduction in the environmental vulnerability of the two connected cities. (shrink)