Over the last decade, successive New Zealand governments have instituted social, political and economic changes that have fundamentally challenged nurses’ sense of themselves and their position in society. Major upheavals in the health service have occurred as a result of reforms promoting competition and contestability. This paper deals with the impact of one aspect of the reforms, that of the deregulation of the labour market through the Employment Contracts Act 1991. More specifically, the way in which discussions and decisions regarding (...) the withdrawal of nursing labour are shaped by the language available to those involved are considered. The intersection of ethics and union discourses may exacerbate feelings of ambiguity and confusion in nurses facing strike action. The result can be unnecessary and unproductive division and conflict: among nurses, between employers and employees, between unions, between nurses and the public, and between nursing organizations and the Government. An examination of some of the discourses of strike action may serve as a tool to elucidate the way nurses see themselves and their clients in the context of social change and social action. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence (AI) thrives and propagates through modern life, a key question to ask is how to include humans in future AI? Despite human involvement at every stage of the production process from conception and design through to implementation, modern AI is still often criticized for its “black box” characteristics. Sometimes, we do not know what really goes on inside or how and why certain conclusions are met. Future AI will face many dilemmas and ethical issues unforeseen by their (...) creators beyond those commonly discussed (e.g., trolley problems and variants of it) and to which solutions cannot be hard-coded and are often still up for debate. Given the sensitivity of such social and ethical dilemmas and the implications of these for human society at large, when and if our AI make the “wrong” choice we need to understand how they got there in order to make corrections and prevent recurrences. This is particularly true in situations where human livelihoods are at stake (e.g., health, well-being, finance, law) or when major individual or household decisions are taken. Doing so requires opening up the “black box” of AI; especially as they act, interact, and adapt in a human world and how they interact with other AI in this world. In this article, we argue for the application of cognitive architectures for ethical AI. In particular, for their potential contributions to AI transparency, explainability, and accountability. We need to understand how our AI get to the solutions they do, and we should seek to do this on a deeper level in terms of the machine-equivalents of motivations, attitudes, values, and so on. The path to future AI is long and winding but it could arrive faster than we think. In order to harness the positive potential outcomes of AI for humans and society (and avoid the negatives), we need to understand AI more fully in the first place and we expect this will simultaneously contribute towards greater understanding of their human counterparts also. (shrink)

It is hard to imagine a threat to international security or a tension within U.S. foreign policy that does not involve the imposition of economic sanctions. The United Nations Security Council has fourteen sanctions regimes currently in place, and all member states of the United Nations are obligated to participate in their enforcement. The United States has some thirty sanctions programs, which target a range of countries, companies, organizations, and individuals, and many of these are autonomous sanctions that are independent (...) of the measures required by the United Nations. Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and others also have autonomous sanctions regimes, spanning a broad range of contexts and purpose. Most well-known are those concerning weapons proliferation, terrorism, and human rights violations; but sanctions are also imposed in such contexts as money laundering, corruption, and drug trafficking. States may also impose sanctions as a means to achieve foreign policy goals: to pressure a foreign state to bend to the sanctioner's will, to punish those who represent a threat to the sanctioner's economic or political interests, or to seek the end of a political regime toward which the sanctioner is hostile, to give but a few examples. (shrink)

In 1984 the renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote that we are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought. To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry (...) and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.1 This poetical quote nicely captures the essence of Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis. While the notion .. (shrink)

Literary racial impersonation occurs when a narrative work fails to express the perspective of a minority ethnic or racial group. Interestingly, even when these works express moral themes congenial to promoting empathetic responses towards these groups, they can be met with public outrage if the group’s perspective is portrayed inaccurately. My goal in this paper is to vindicate the intuition that failure to express the perspective of a minority group well renders the work defective, both aesthetically and morally. I argue (...) that available frameworks exploring the connections between aesthetic and moral realms of value are inadequate to analyzing this phenomenon and propose a novel connection between aesthetic and moral values. Specifically, I demonstrate that the primary defect of literary racial impersonation is aesthetic and contingently constitutes a moral defect in our current social context. (shrink)

Empirical studies that have attempted to describe nurses' ethical practice have used conceptual frameworks derived primarily from the disciplines of bioethics and psychology. These frameworks have not incorporated important concepts developed by nursing theorists over the past two decades. This article points out flaws in the past research frameworks and proposes a synthesis of ethical theory, nursing practice contexts, and empirical research methods to enrich theoretical development in nursing ethics. Keywords: ethics, ethics studies, nursing, theory development CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's (...) this? (shrink)

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, a team of U.S. political scientists and computer specialists designed an automated, computerized information system that could ostensibly forecast conflict earlier and more accurately than human analysts. Named the Crisis Early Warning and Monitoring System (EWAMS), it sought to bring international relations scholarship and U.S. national security policy—traditionally qualitative and interpretive domains—under the jurisdiction of a man–machine system. Drawing together the histories of social science, computing, and foreign policy, this essay argues that (...) deep epistemic insecurities led social scientists to apply information technology to the production of policy knowledge. Computers, they hoped, could overcome the innate cognitive limitations that imperiled human decision making. By showing how social scientists’ computational zeal overshadowed their commitment to human agency, this essay also demonstrates that the history of science has an important role to play in contemporary debates about the implications of big data projects for knowledge and policy. (shrink)

In order to investigate whether addressees can make immediate use of speaker‐based constraints during reference resolution, participant addressees' eye movements were monitored as they helped a confederate cook follow a recipe. Objects were located in the helper's area, which the cook could not reach, and the cook's area, which both could reach. Critical referring expressions matched one object (helper's area) or two objects (helper's and cook's areas), and were produced when the cook's hands were empty or full, which defined the (...) cook's reaching ability constraints. Helper's first and total fixations showed that they restricted their domain of interpretation to their own objects when the cook's hands were empty, and widened it to include the cook's objects only when the cook's hands were full. These results demonstrate that addressees can quickly take into account task‐relevant constraints to restrict their referential domain to referents that are plausible given the speaker's goals and constraints. (shrink)

This paper provides a new interpretation of the three natures theory of Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda thought by means of an examination of the path theory associated with it, which has not been previously examined in scholarly literature. The paper first examines this path theory in a number of foundational texts to show that the widely accepted pivotal model is not in fact the three natures model that predominates in foundational Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda literature. Second, the paper offers a new interpretation of the three natures (...) theory as providing a new causal model of the arising of suffering, and a corresponding theory of its cessation. This new causal model both makes possible the continued use of the kind of dharma analysis that Abhidharma thought employs to provide a causal analysis of the arising of suffering, and also couches such dharma analysis within the Mahāyāna framework of the emptiness of dharmas. (shrink)

We illustrate an explicit counterexample to Bell's theorem by constructing a pair of dichotomic variables that exactly reproduce the EPR-Bohm correlations in a manifestly local-realistic manner.

A multidisciplinary text for the health professions, with relevance across the various health disciplines. International scholars, researchers, and teachers contribute their ideas, research findings, and experiences to promote discussion on the nature and teaching of clinical reasoning. Models, guidelines, and strategies are presented. These aim to promote effective clinical reasoning in practice, creative and successful clinical reasoning learning programs, and directions for future research. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Contrary to our immediate and vivid sensation of past, present, and future as continually shifting non-relational modalities, time remains as tenseless and relational as space in all of the established theories of fundamental physics. Here an empirically adequate generalized theory of the inertial structure is discussed in which proper time is causally compelled to be tensed within both spacetime and dynamics. This is accomplished by introducing the inverse of the Planck time at the conjunction of special relativity and Hamiltonian mechanics, (...) which necessitates energies and momenta to be invariantly bounded from above, and lengths and durations similarly bounded from below, by their respective Planck scale values. The resulting theory abhors any form of preferred structure, and yet captures the transience of now along timelike worldlines by causally necessitating a genuinely becoming universe. This is quite unlike the scenario in Minkowski spacetime, which is prone to a block universe interpretation. The minute deviations from the special relativistic effects such as dispersion relations and Doppler shifts predicted by the generalized theory remain quadratically suppressed by the Planck energy, but may nevertheless be testable in the near future, for example via observations of oscillating flavor ratios of ultrahigh energy cosmic neutrinos, or of altering pulse rates of extreme energy binary pulsars. (shrink)

This article, written as a tribute to Paul Ricoeur, examines a number of his own reflections on the topics of life and death.

The Hipparchus features a conversation between Socrates and an un-named companion, at an unknown time and place, about gain and whether we should in any way limit our pursuit of gain. Socrates argues intransigently that we should not place any limits on our pursuit of gain, while the companion, despite being unable to counter his arguments, is equally firm in his rejection of Socrates’ moral position. The dialogue thus shows the strength of the conviction, in the souls of decent people, (...) that unrestrained pursuit of the good things is not good for you. This conviction exists prior to calculation, and the action of the dialogue thereby testifies to the existence of man’s natural conscience. (shrink)

Unlike our basic theories of space and time, quantum mechanics is not a locally causal theory. This well known fact was brought forth by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in 1935. Today it is widely believed that any hopes of restoring local causality within a realistic theory have been undermined by Bell's theorem and its supporting experiments. By contrast, we provide a strictly local, deterministic, and realistic explanation for the correlations observed in two such supporting experiments performed at Orsay and Innsbruck. (...) To this end, a pair of local variables is constructed to simulate detections of photon polarizations at various angles, chosen freely by Alice and Bob. These generate purely random outcomes: A = +/-1 and B = +/-1. When these outcomes are compared, however, the correlation between them turn out to be exactly equal to -cos2, with the corresponding CHSH inequality violated for the polarization angles alpha, alpha', beta, and beta' in precisely the manner predicted by quantum mechanics. The key ingredient in our explanation is the topology of 3-sphere, which remains closed under multiplication, thus preserving the locality condition of Bell. (shrink)