Background The COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt every society as SARs-CoV-2 variants surge among the populations. Health care providers are exhausted, becoming ill themselves, and in some instances have died. Indeed, hospitals are struggling to find staff to care for critically ill patients most in need. Previous work has reported on the unending work-related conditions that hospital staff are laboring under and their subsequent mental and physical health strains. Health care providers need support, but it is not clear where that (...) support is to come from. While much research has reported on the COVID-19-related fears of nurses and physicians, fewer studies have focused on supportive features of the hospital work environment and how it may provide relief to front-line health care providers.Purpose This purpose of this study was to explore an often-overlooked resource within hospital systems across the United States—clinical ethicists—and examine their many roles during COVID-19 and the types of ethical issues they addressed with nurses, physicians, administrators, and others.Methods This was a primary analysis of semi-structured, qualitative interviews with 23 clinical ethicists across the United States. The interviews were conducted from November 2020–April 2021 and were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and de-identified; both inductive and deductive analyses were used to identify qualitative themes.Results Five major themes were identified: ethical issues that were increasingly more complex, moral distress that was “endemic,” shifting ethical paradigms from the focus on the individual to the population, fostering a supportive environment, and organizational ethics: variation in the value, roles, and policy input of clinical ethicists.Conclusions Our findings report on the integral and expanded role of clinical ethicists at an unprecedented time in our nation, and how they stepped forward to support front-line clinicians in hospitals across the country. (shrink)

This article examines verbal humour in routine interactions within professional workplaces, using material recorded in four New Zealand government departments. The problem of defining humour is discussed, followed by a brief outline of the theoretical models which underpin the analysis of the various functions which humour serves in professional organizations. Humour can express positive affect in interaction. It can also facilitate or `licence' more negative interpersonal communicative intent. While politeness theory can account for the former, as a means of expressing (...) collegiality at work, or de-emphasizing power imbalances, in its standard form politeness theory does not explain barbed, competitive or confrontational humour. For this it is necessary to look to `the dark side of politeness'. An alternative perspective thus examines the extent to which humour functions, especially in unequal encounters, as an acceptable strategy to help superiors maintain a position of power but also as a strategy used by subordinates to licence challenges to the power structures within which they operate, and as a legitimizing strategy in attempts at subverting the repressive or coercive discourse of superiors. (shrink)

COVID-19 has posed a serious threat to more than 200 countries, causing over one million deaths worldwide and leading to lockdowns that are unprecedented in modern times. Give...

Understanding science requires appreciating the values it presupposes and its social context. Both the values that scientists hold and their social context can affect scientific communication. Philosophers of science have recently begun studying scientific communication, especially as it relates to public policy. Some have proposed “guiding principles for communicating scientific findings” to promote trust and objectivity. This paper contributes to this line of research in a novel way using behavioural experimentation. We report results from three experiments testing judgments about the (...) trustworthiness, competence and objectivity of scientists. More specifically, we tested whether such judgments are affected by three factors: consulting or not consulting nonscientists, conducting research under a restrictive or non-restrictive governmental communication policy, and the source of a lab’s funding (i.e., government funding, private funding, or a combination of the two). We found that each of these factors affects ordinary judgments of trustworthiness, competence and objectivity. These findings support several recommendations that could help improve scientific communication and communication policies. (shrink)

Workplace narratives are one means of satisfying the complex demands of identity construction at work. Following reference to the relevant literature, this article discusses the range of narratives identified in our extensive New Zealand corpus of workplace interactions, distinguishing between more socially-oriented ‘workplace anecdotes’, and more transactionally-oriented ‘working stories’. While both orientations are often relevant, the distinction is useful in examining how different types of narratives function in the construction of diverse facets of an individual's identity. In the final section, (...) one particular workplace narrative illustrates the complexities involved in accomplishing a narrative in a formal meeting, and the analysis explores how two members of a senior management team use the narrative to negotiate contrasting aspects of their professional and social workplace identities. (shrink)

Although the authors' ingenuity in identifying criteria for innovation for field studies is appealing, most field studies will lack adequate data. Additionally, their definition does not clearly distinguish innovation from individual learning and is vague about cognitive mechanisms involved. We suggest that developmental data are essential to identifying the causes and consequences of learning new behaviors.

Conventional teacher education programmes do not equip practitioners adequately to navigate ethically complex situations that arise in teaching. One initiative responding to this deficit is ‘Philosophy for Teachers’ (‘P4T’), a 24-hour residential approach to community philosophy. Piloted originally in England, a further workshop took place in South Africa in October 2017, comprising student teachers, teacher educators and philosophers from three historically different universities in the Western Cape. Significant new insights to emerge included greater clarity on the respective contributions of P4T (...) and other initiatives already applying ‘P4C’ to address professional ethics within teacher education. In particular, P4T re-framed within this new context can be seen to create shared space for reflection on teacher identity and the complexity of difference and ‘otherness’ in classroom practice. (shrink)

In isolated English word reading, readers have the optimal performance when their initial eye fixation is directed to the area between the beginning and word center, that is, the optimal viewing position (OVP). Thus, how well readers voluntarily direct eye gaze to this OVP during isolated word reading may be associated with reading performance. Using Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models, we discovered two representative eye movement patterns during lexical decisions through clustering, which focused at the OVP and the (...) word center, respectively. Higher eye movement similarity to the OVP-focusing pattern predicted faster lexical decision time in addition to cognitive abilities and lexical knowledge. However, the OVP-focusing pattern was associated with longer isolated single letter naming time, suggesting conflicting visual abilities required for identifying isolated letters and multi-letter words. In contrast, in both word and pseudoword naming, although clustering did not reveal an OVP-focused pattern, higher consistency of the first fixation as measured in entropy predicted faster naming time in addition to cognitive abilities and lexical knowledge. Thus, developing a consistent eye movement pattern focusing on the OVP is essential for word orthographic processing and reading fluency. This finding has important implications for interventions for reading difficulties. (shrink)

This article examines three films made during the 1950s by Elwyn James Anthony at the psychotic clinic for children at the Maudsley Hospital that marked an important transition in the purpose and practice of visual documentation in a clinical setting: film as a research tool was transitioning from the recording of external signs as indicators of internal subjective states, to the capture of the visual flow of communication between subjects. It is a shift that had a particular impact on the (...) emergent classification of autism, a modality not yet properly separated from the broader term of psychosis, as a non-relational condition whose visual capture demonstrated a void of inter-human communicational exchange. Film was significant not only as a recording apparatus, but as a method of cutting and crafting sequences of movements into brief repetitive motifs. The filmed behaviour of children remained opaque to interpretation, a ‘finding’ that facilitated the modelling of an emergent autism as subjects who were isolated, alienated and automaton-like, inhabiting a separate temporality. The article situates this ‘second’, affectless autism, within a broader context of post-war research into gestures as a language of the body, developed largely through an intellectual network of German émigré psychoanalysts who had fled to the US and UK in the 1930s. (shrink)

Contrary to Vaesen's argument that humans are unique with respect to nine cognitive capacities essential for tool use, we suggest that although such cognitive processes contribute to variation in tool use, it does not follow that these capacities arenecessaryfor tool use, nor that tool use shaped cognition per se, given the available data in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral biology.

There is now a wealth of information that histone proteins play a primary role in the structural and transcriptional properties of chromatin, the protein‐DNA complex which constitutes the eukaryotic genome1, 2. In light of the crucial role of histones in cellular function, it is not surprising that their structural genes are found to be controlled in conjunction with the cell cycle, with the synthesis of most histones tightly coupled to nuclear DNA replication. The evidence suggests that this linkage between DNA (...) replication and histone synthesis involves the regulated adjustment of histone mRNA levels through both transcriptional and posttranscriptional control process. The possible mechanisms underlying these diverse control processes are described here. (shrink)

In September 2006, when 45 scholars and activists from 19 countries around the world gathered amid the spires and gargoyles of Oxford for a conference entitled, “Hope: Probing the Boundaries,” complex dialectics of hope and despair circulated through the meeting rooms by day, and the conversations in quadrangles and pubs late into the night. On the one hand, the remarkable social and political openings and possibilities of the previous decade, from Berlin to Johannesburg, Leningrad to the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas, (...) seemed to be ever-more constrained by political and economic forces as brutal as those that preceded them, but, on the other hand, there were the Zapatistas and a thousand other movements persisting in the belief that, to echo the mantra of the World Social Forums, “another world is possible,” and there we were from around the world, to do the work of theorizing, describing, and enacting the persistence of individual and collective hope despite grim realities. The essays developed from that conference and collected here reflect both the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings and the cultural and political praxes of “hope against hope.”. (shrink)

An essential and neglected distinction between contract and administrative law is in how each conceives of the Crown as a juristic person. This article explores the extent of this distinction, and its implications for the rule of law and the separation of powers. It offers explanations—historical, jurisprudential and pragmatic—for why contract law conceives of the Crown as a corporation aggregate with the powers and liberties of a natural person, and why administrative law disaggregates the State into named officials.