In a modern democratic society appearance has great importance. This is especially true of the dress code in health care sphere. More recently, changing your appearance by getting tattoos and body modifications has been decried by different generations in the medical community. However, what is significance of appearance of a medical officer during epidemiological instability around the world? The response to this question was given in our study. The objectives of the study are: to interrogate the attitude of medical university (...) students to medical officers with tattoos as well as to identify medical students who are "exposed" to the fashionable trend of tattoos and body modifications. To implement these objectives, the study involved 106 medical students of various levels of degree and faculties of Rostov state medical University. The results of the study showed that the majority of medical students has not resorted to changes in their appearance, although tattoos and body modifications did not avoid the community of medical students. (shrink)

William Burnside was one of the three most important algebraists who were involved in the transformation of group theory from its nineteenth-century origins to a deeper twentieth-century subject. Building on work of earlier mathematicians, they were able to develop sophisticated tools for solving difficult problems. His works are of enormous historical importance; they remain also a source of inspiration and information. The works of his contemporaries, such as Klein, Frobenius, Schur, have been published as also have the works of his (...) immediate successors such as Phillip Hall. All of Burnside's papers are reproduced here, organized chronologically and with a detailed bibliography. Walter Feit has contributed a foreword, and a collection of introductory essays are included to provide a commentary on Burnside's work and set it in perspective along with a modern biography that draws on archive material. This is the first reference volume of Burnside's collected papers, enhanced by a series of critical essays on his work, and is important for group theorists and historians and philosophers of mathematics and fills the gap in this area of literature. (shrink)

In his paper, “Human Germline Genome Editing: On the Nature of Our Reasons to Genome Edit,” Rob Sparrow argues that “genome editing is highly unlikely to be person affecting for the foreseeable fut...

Purpose: Explore public attitudes towards the trade-offs between justice and medical outcome inherent in organ allocation decisions.Background: The US Task Force on Organ Transplantation recommended that considerations of justice, autonomy and medical outcome be part of all organ allocation decisions. Justice in this context may be modeled as a function of three types of need, related to age, clinical urgency, and quality of life.Methods: A web-based survey was conducted in which respondents were asked to choose between two hypothetical patients who (...) differed in clinical urgency , age, pretransplant and post-transplant quality of life, and life expectancy.Results: A pool of 1600 people were notified via email about the survey; 623 responded. Respondents preferred giving organs to younger people up to an age difference of <15.4 years and more clinically urgent people up to a difference in urgency of <2.54 months . Priority varied with the quality of life of the worst-off patient and the relative status of the patients. If both had worse than average quality of life, respondents preferred the better-off patient. When both had better than average quality of life, they preferred the worse-off patient. In analysis according to age versus clinical urgency, the older the patient, the more urgency needed to receive priority. In quality of life versus clinical urgency, the better the control’s quality of life, the more urgency the competing patient required. The worse the patient’s post-transplant outcome, the more urgency needed to receive priority.Conclusions: It appears that clinical urgency is only one of many factors influencing attitudes about allocation decisions and that respondents may invoke different principles of fairness depending the relative clinical status of patients. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Nicholas Dixon's defence of the moderate partisan as the ideal fan of team sports. For Dixon, the moderate partisan is someone who combines a partisan fan's loyalty for a particular team with a purist fan's desire to see fair and skilful play by all participants. My aim is to argue that there is no ideal fan of team sports. In particular, there is nothing specially commendable about the moderate partisan's loyalty that justifies the claim (...) to be the ideal fan. There are many other ways of being a fan than being a purist or a partisan as described by Dixon. None of them is morally superior to the other, assuming that they meet basic requirements of respect for others and for fair play. I argue that the commitment of partisan fans to particular teams is better explained by other values than the moral virtue of loyalty. A better explanation and justification of partisanship, and indeed of fan interest in sport generally, is found in the human attachment to narrative as a way of creating meaning in our lives. (shrink)

The strange story of the von Neumann impossibility proof is recalled, and the even stranger story of later impossibility proofs, and how the impossible was done by de Broglie and Bohm. Morals are drawn.

In Professor W. B. Anderson's interesting paper on this subject there seems a certain hesitation about the treatment of Lucan's famouset quantum mihi restat ad Culicem ? .The following passages may be cited as fixing the sense of this rather rare idiom:1…crebro querens incolumi filio adiutorem imperii alium uocari. Et quantum superesse ut collega dicatur ? ,i.e. from adiutor to collega is ‘a mere step.’.

The phenomenon of ambivalence is an important one for any philosophy of action. Despite this importance, there is a lack of a fully satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon. Although many contemporary philosophers recognize the phenomenon, and address topics related to it, only Harry Frankfurt has given the phenomenon full treatment in the context of action theory – providing an analysis of how it relates to the structure and freedom of the will. In this paper, I develop objections to Frankfurt's account, (...) all revolving around the charge that his account contains a serious ambiguity between willing and identifying. With such objections in place, I then develop an analysis that avoids the difficulties and ambiguities that Frankfurt's analysis is prey to. I briefly distinguish ambivalence from other types of internal conflict. This paper aims to offer conceptual clarification on the phenomenon of ambivalence, which will then allow for discussions about the normative merits and demerits of ambivalence, the effects of ambivalence on autonomous action, and methods of resolution of ambivalence. (shrink)