Expanded and up-to-date-the ultimate guide that explores meaning and philosophy of all six seasons of Lost Lost is more than just a popular television show; it's a complex examination of meaningful philosophical questions. What does good versus evil mean on the island? Is it a coincidence that characters John Locke and Desmond David Hume are named after actual philosophers? What is the ethics of responsibility for Jack? An action-adventure story with more than a touch of the metaphysical, Lost forces viewers (...) to ask difficult questions of themselves just as the story asks difficult questions of its characters. Ultimate Lost and Philosophy helps you explore the deeper meaning and philosophical questions hidden within every complex twist and turn in the historic show's entire six-season run. Includes every season of Lost, including 2010's final, highly anticipated season Connects events on the show to core philosophical issues such as truth, identity, and morality Explores a host of intriguing topics such as time travel, freedom, love, and loss For fans of Lost who are interested in what the show reveals about ourselves and the human condition, Ultimate Lost and Philosophy is an entertaining, informative, and enlightening resource. (shrink)

BackgroundInnovations in technology have contributed to rapid changes in the way that modern biomedical research is carried out. Researchers are increasingly required to endorse adaptive and flexible approaches to accommodate these innovations and comply with ethical, legal and regulatory requirements. This paper explores how Dynamic Consent may provide solutions to address challenges encountered when researchers invite individuals to participate in research and follow them up over time in a continuously changing environment.MethodsAn interdisciplinary workshop jointly organised by the University of Oxford (...) and the COST Action CHIP ME gathered clinicians, researchers, ethicists, lawyers, research participants and patient representatives to discuss experiences of using Dynamic Consent, and how such use may facilitate the conduct of specific research tasks. The data collected during the workshop were analysed using a content analysis approach.ResultsDynamic Consent can provide practical, sustainable and future-proof solutions to challenges related to participant recruitment, the attainment of informed consent, participant retention and consent management, and may bring economic efficiencies.ConclusionsDynamic Consent offers opportunities for ongoing communication between researchers and research participants that can positively impact research. Dynamic Consent supports inter-sector, cross-border approaches and large scale data-sharing. Whilst it is relatively easy to set up and maintain, its implementation will require that researchers re-consider their relationship with research participants and adopt new procedures. (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, there has been growing recognition of the importance of studying the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of genetic and genomic research. A large investment into ELSI research from the National Institutes of Health Human Genomic Project budget in 1990 stimulated the growth of this emerging field; ELSI research has continued to develop and is starting to emerge as a field in its own right. The evolving subject matter of ELSI research continues to raise new research (...) questions as well as prompt re-evaluation of earlier work and a growing number of scholars working in this area now identify themselves as ELSI scholars rather than with a particular discipline. Due to the international and interdisciplinary nature of ELSI research, scholars can often find themselves isolated from disciplinary or regionally situated support structures. We conducted a workshop with Early Career Researchers in Oxford, UK, and this paper discusses some of the particular challenges that were highlighted. While ELSI ECRs may face many of the universal challenges faced by ECRs, we argue that a number of challenges are either unique or exacerbated in the case of ELSI ECRs and discuss some of the reasons as to why this may be the case. We identify some of the most pressing issues for ELSI ECRs as: interdisciplinary angst and expertise, isolation from traditional support structures, limited resources and funding opportunities, and uncertainty regarding how research contributions will be measured. We discuss the potential opportunity to use web 2.0 technologies to transform academic support structures and address some of the challenges faced by ELSI ECRs, by helping to facilitate mentoring and support, access to resources and new accreditation metrics. As our field develops it is crucial for the ELSI community to continue looking forward to identify how emerging digital solutions can be used to facilitate the international and interdisciplinary research we perform, and to offer support for those embarking on, progressing through, and transitioning into an ELSI research career. (shrink)

As in other countries, the traditional doctor-patient relationship in the Japanese healthcare system has often been characterised as being of a paternalistic nature. However, in recent years there has been a gradual shift towards a more participatory-patient model in Japan. With advances in technology, the possibility to use digital technologies to improve patient interactions is growing and is in line with changing attitudes in the medical profession and society within Japan and elsewhere. The implementation of an online patient engagement platform (...) is being considered by the Myotonic Dystrophy Registry of Japan. The aim of this exploratory study was to understand patients’ views and attitudes to using digital tools in patient registries and engagement with medical research in Japan, prior to implementation of the digital platform. We conducted an exploratory, cross-sectional, self-completed questionnaire with a sample of myotonic dystrophy patients attending an Open Day at Osaka University, Japan. Patients were eligible for inclusion if they were 18 years or older, and were diagnosed with MD. A total of 68 patients and family members attended the Open Day and were invited to participate in the survey. Of those, 59 % submitted a completed questionnaire. The survey showed that the majority of patients felt that they were not receiving the information they wanted from their clinicians, which included recent medical research findings and opportunities to participate in clinical trials, and 88 % of patients indicated they would be willing to engage with digital technologies to receive relevant medical information. Patients also expressed an interest in having control over when and how they received this information, as well as being informed of how their data is used and shared with other researchers. Overall, the findings from this study suggest that there is scope to develop a digital platform to engage with patients so that they can receive information about medical care and research opportunities. While this study group is a small, self-selecting population, who suffer from a particular condition, the results suggest that there are interested populations within Japan that would appreciate enhanced communication and interaction with healthcare teams. (shrink)

Objective Futile treatment, which by definition cannot benefit a patient, is undesirable. This research investigated why doctors believe that treatment that they consider to be futile is sometimes provided at the end of a patient9s life. Design Semistructured in-depth interviews. Setting Three large tertiary public hospitals in Brisbane, Australia. Participants 96 doctors from emergency, intensive care, palliative care, oncology, renal medicine, internal medicine, respiratory medicine, surgery, cardiology, geriatric medicine and medical administration departments. Participants were recruited using purposive maximum variation sampling. (...) Results Doctors attributed the provision of futile treatment to a wide range of inter-related factors. One was the characteristics of treating doctors, including their orientation towards curative treatment, discomfort or inexperience with death and dying, concerns about legal risk and poor communication skills. Second, the attributes of the patient and family, including their requests or demands for further treatment, prognostic uncertainty and lack of information about patient wishes. Third, there were hospital factors including a high degree of specialisation, the availability of routine tests and interventions, and organisational barriers to diverting a patient from a curative to a palliative pathway. Doctors nominated family or patient request and doctors being locked into a curative role as the _main_ reasons for futile care. Conclusions Doctors believe that a range of factors contribute to the provision of futile treatment. A combination of strategies is necessary to reduce futile treatment, including better training for doctors who treat patients at the end of life, educating the community about the limits of medicine and the need to plan for death and dying, and structural reform at the hospital level. (shrink)

The rapid rise of international collaborative science has enabled access to genomic data. In this article, it is argued that to move beyond mapping genomic variation to understanding its role in complex disease aetiology and treatment will require extending data sharing for the purposes of clinical research translation and implementation.

Biobanks are increasingly being created specifically for research purposes. Concomitantly, we are seeing significant and evolving shifts in research ethics in relation to biobanking. Three discrete shifts are identified in this article. The first extends the ethical focus beyond the protection of human subjects to the promotion of broader community benefits of research utilizing biobanked resources, and an expectation that these benefits will be shared. The second involves the evolution of the traditional consent paradigm for future research uses of biobanks (...) resources that are not in contemplation at the time of donation. The third involves a move away from single project management to more dynamic governance accountability to research participants and the public. These shifts may take different local and institutional forms but share common recognizable elements. (shrink)

In this chapter, we investigate the idea of trade marks as property. Three questions need to be answered. The first is a conceptual matter: are trade marks capable of being property or are they ruled out as a matter of conceptual necessity? The second is conceptual-cum-descriptive: is the current law's treatment of trade marks treatment of them as property? The third is normative: if the current law does in fact treat them as property, is it right to do so? The (...) questions need to be tackled in turn. (shrink)

_Introduction:_ Clinically relevant information can go uncaptured in the conventional scoring of a verbal fluency test. We hypothesize that characterizing the temporal aspects of the response through a set of time related measures will be useful in distinguishing those with MCI from cognitively intact controls. _Methods:_ Audio recordings of an animal fluency test administered to 70 demographically matched older adults (mean age 90.4 years), 28 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 42 cognitively intact (CI) were professionally transcribed and fed into (...) an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to estimate the start time of each recalled word in the response. Next, we semantically cluster participant generated animal names and through a novel set of time-based measures, we characterize the semantic search strategy of subjects in retrieving words from animal name clusters. This set of time-based features along with standard count-based features (e.g., number of correctly retrieved animal names) were then used in a machine learning algorithm trained for distinguishing those with MCI from CI controls. _Results:_ The combination of both count-based and time-based features, automatically derived from the test response, achieved 77% on AUC-ROC of the support vector machine (SVM) classifier, outperforming the model trained only on the raw test score (AUC, 65%), and well above the chance model (AUC, 50%). _Conclusion:_ This approach supports the value of introducing time-based measures to the assessment of verbal fluency in the context of this generative task differentiating subjects with MCI from those with intact cognition. (shrink)

Pediatric biobanking is considered important for generating biomedical knowledge and improving health care. However, the inclusion of children’s samples in biobanks involves specific ethical issues. One of the main concerns is how to appropriately engage children in the consent procedure. We suggest that children should be involved through a personalized assent procedure, which means that both the content and the process of assent are adjusted to the individual child. In this paper we provide guidance on how to put personalized assent (...) into pediatric biobanking practice and consider both the content and process of personalized assent. In the discussion we argue that the assent procedure itself is formative. Investing in the procedure should be a requirement for pediatric biobank research. Although personalized assent will require certain efforts, the pediatric community must be aware of its importance. The investment and trust earned can result in ongoing engagement, important longitudinal information, and stability in/for the research infrastructure, as well as increased knowledge among its participants about research activity. Implementing personalized assent will both respect the child and support biobank research. (shrink)

Dynamic Consent is both a model and a specific web-based tool that enables clear, granular communication and recording of participant consent choices over time. The DC model enables individuals to know and to decide how personal research information is being used and provides a way in which to exercise legal rights provided in privacy and data protection law. The DC tool is flexible and responsive, enabling legal and ethical requirements in research data sharing to be met and for online health (...) information to be maintained. DC has been used in rare diseases and genomics, to enable people to control and express their preferences regarding their own data. However, DC has never been explored in relationship to historical collections of bioscientific and genetic heritage or to contexts involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.In response to the growing interest by First Peoples throughout Australia in genetic and genomic research, and the increasing number of invitations from researchers to participate in community health and wellbeing projects, this article examines the legal and ethical attributes and challenges of DC in these contexts. It also explores opportunities for including First Peoples' cultural perspectives, governance, and leadership as a method for defining DC on cultural terms that engage best practice research and data analysis as well as respect for meaningful and longitudinal individual and family participation. (shrink)

Indigenous people (IP) have faced multiple difficulties in education. Indigenous students often do worse academically than non-indigenous student peers. These stated the low enrollment rates showed a dropout rate, absenteeism, repetition rates, literacy rate, and thus the educational outcomes, with retention and completion being two significant issues. Further, this study explores the lived experiences and challenges faced by indigenous high school students amidst the new normal education. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: (1) The reason (...) why IP learners were not satisfied with their performance is that they cannot understand some of the lessons due to the language barrier. (2) IP learners are committed to finishing their studies, however, some of the students lack resources for studying, like gadgets for researching, and they do not have cell phones. And the other students may have gadgets or cellphones, but their internet connection is low or not accessible in some places at their location. (shrink)

Innovations in information technologies have facilitated the development of new styles of research networks and forms of governance. This is evident in genomics where increasingly, research is carried out by large, interdisciplinary consortia focussing on a specific research endeavour. The UK10K project is an example of a human genomics consortium funded to provide insights into the genomics of rare conditions, and establish a community resource from generated sequence data. To achieve its objectives according to the agreed timetable, the UK10K project (...) established an internal governance system to expedite the research and to deal with the complex issues that arose. The project’s governance structure exemplifies a new form of network governance called ‘pop-up’ governance. ‘Pop-up’ because: it was put together quickly, existed for a specific period, was designed for a specific purpose, and was dismantled easily on project completion. In this paper, we use UK10K to describe how ‘pop-up’ governance works on the ground and how relational, hierarchical and contractual governance mechanisms are used in this new form of network governance. (shrink)

This work is comprised of personal essays by some of the most noted Holocaust educators working in or with Holocaust museums, resource centers, or educational organizations across the globe.

Positive Youth Development (PYD) is an approach that promotes resilience and focuses on youth strengths rather than their weaknesses as done by the traditional deficit-based perspective. Research in Europe and North America show that developmental assets are associated with school success, psychological well-being, and lower health risks among youth and young adults. However, not much research has been done on these associations in Latin American contexts. The purpose of this research study is to assess the association between substance use behaviors, (...) such as drunkenness and the use of illicit drugs, and mental health, together with the mediating role of developmental assets representing youth strengths (e.g., social competence) and contextual resources (e.g., social support at home or school). Cross-national data was collected from Colombian (n= 210; 70.4% females) and Peruvian(n= 349; 66.5% females) 1st year university students. Results shed light on the protective role of developmental assets regarding substance use behaviors and mental well-being. Specifically, the results showed direct negative associations between developmental assets and substance use behaviors and positive associations of developmental assets with mental health indicators. Internal assets appear to be a stronger predictor of social, emotional, and psychological well-being compared to external assets. We did not find any statistical significance in the association of substance use behavior and mental health. We discuss implications regarding research, policy, and practice. (shrink)

Recognizing and incorporating the diverse values of nature into decision-making is critical for transformative change toward sustainability. This is particularly true for relational values involving reciprocity, care, and responsibility, especially in unsustainable production systems replacing rapidly diverse tropical forests. Our study reveals the diversity of relational values in agroecosystems through a creative Participatory Video (PV) process embedded within a long-term transdisciplinary project at the agroforestry frontier of southeastern Mexico. Informal chats and interviews were followed by a workshop to present the (...) PV tools, storyboarding, filming, and video editing. The process concluded with a public screening at the community. The video content and interviews analysis revealed a great diversity of relational values of agroecosystems, such as individual and cultural identity, social cohesion, social responsibility, moral responsibility to non-humans, stewardship, self-determination, and some differences in narratives associated with intersectionality. PV allowed participants to express their deepest feelings, highlighting how relational values shape daily life in the community and nurturing self-determination to foster collective action. The diversity and prevalence of these values were striking, given that families arrived only 40 years ago, and the tropical forest is rapidly disappearing. Deep leverage points and shifts in sustainable management visions pave the way for transformative changes in the local food system and potential scaling to other similar communities. (shrink)

Se realizó una investigación cualitativa, entre octubre de 2015 y junio de 2016, en la Casa de Abuelos No. 2 de Santa Clara con el objetivo de caracterizar la representación social de la sexualidad de los adultos mayores. Se seleccionó una muestra de 24 adultos mayores. Se utilizaron técnicas como: observación, entrevista, debate grupal, asociación de palabras, de cuestionamiento del núcleo central y la triangulación de datos. Como resultados se determinó que en la representación de la sexualidad se observó un (...) campo estructurado y un contenido que se aleja de su significado. Se concluyó que la representación social de la sexualidad de los adultos mayores se identificó con las relaciones sexuales, con el acto sexual. Las informaciones que poseen carecen de calidad y denotan un carácter prejuiciado y estereotipado. Manifestaron actitudes de rechazo hacia la sexualidad lo que se explicó por: el desconocimiento, la inadecuada relación entre sexualidad y reproducción, la existencia de prejuicios sociales y asociar el envejecimiento con la enfermedad. With the aim of characterizing the social representation of sexuality in senior citizens, a qualitative research was carried out from October 2015 to June 2016 in Grandparents House No. 2 in Santa Clara City. A sample of 24 people was selected. Methods such as observation, interview, group debate, words association, central core questioning technique and data triangulation were used. It was determined that in the representation of sexuality there is a structured field and a content that goes away from its meaning. Social representation of sexuality in senior citizens was identified with sexual relationships and with sexual intercourse. They lack quality information and show a prejudiced and stereotyped character. They expressed rejection attitudes towards sexuality which were based on: ignorance, inadequate connection between sexuality and reproduction, existence of social prejudice and association of aging with disease. (shrink)

Científicos del sistema Tierra han demostrado que el planeta es un sistema adaptativo-complejo y que algunos procesos naturales ya no operan en condiciones seguras para preservar la vida. Destaca que poco se ha hecho por explorar las implicaciones en la arena jurídica para responder ante los retos que estas condiciones presuponen para la vida humana y para nuestra supervivencia como especie. Aquí se sostiene que, para mantener el buen funcionamiento planetario, se requiere de una articulación efectiva entre el razonamiento jurídico, (...) su argumentación y la ciencia del sistema Tierra. Al hacer una exploración de la literatura jurídica y del sistema Tierra, este artículo tiene como objetivo exponer el primer esfuerzo sobre cómo debería adaptarse el razonamiento jurídico y su argumentación a un enfoque del sistema Tierra, utilizando para ello diferentes casos de estudio, resoluciones y tesis jurisprudenciales. Al hacerlo, se exhibe la necesidad de erradicar concepciones erróneas subyacentes al antropocentrismo jurídico, para ajustar la interpretación y aplicación del derecho a realidades ecológicas científicamente más precisas. (shrink)

This study investigates the strategies for learning Cantonese that are adopted by non-Chinese English-speaking ethnic minority university students in Hong Kong. The aim is to identify the challenges these students face in applying their strategies to learn Cantonese and to explore their learning experiences when implementing them. Drawing on questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews with 30 EM students at a university in Hong Kong, this study identifies these learners’ strategies, elicits their views on the use of these strategies and examines (...) their learning experiences. The findings suggest that EM students are “medium strategy users,” with social strategies being their most commonly used types of learning strategies, followed by compensation and metacognitive strategies. The more proficient Cantonese users tend to use metacognitive strategies that promote planning and are goal-oriented. Taken together, this study sheds light on the complex interplay of sociocultural variables in shaping EM university students’ Cantonese learning experience in Hong Kong. It also highlights the importance of analysing EM students’ linguistic repertoire and the local language ecology in understanding Cantonese learning in a multilingual context like Hong Kong. (shrink)

The covert administration of medication occurs with incapacitated patients without their knowledge, involving some form of deliberate deception in disguising or hiding the medication. Covert medication in food is a relatively common practice globally, including in institutional and homecare contexts. Until recently, it has received little attention in the bioethics literature, and there are few laws or rules governing the practice. In this paper, we discuss significant, but often overlooked, ethical issues related to covert medication in food. We emphasise the (...) variety of ways in which eating has ethical importance, highlighting what is at risk if covert administration of medication in food is discovered. For example, losing trust in feeders and food due to covert medication may risk important opportunities for identity maintenance in contexts where identity is already unstable. Since therapeutic relationships may be jeopardised by a patient’s discovery that caregivers had secretly put medications in their food, this practice can result in an ongoing deception loop. While there may be circumstances in which covert medication is ethically justified, given a lack of suitable alternatives, we argue that in any particular case this practice should be continually re-evaluated in light of the building moral costs to the relational agent over time. (shrink)

The language of “participant-driven research,” “crowdsourcing” and “citizen science” is increasingly being used to encourage the public to become involved in research ventures as both subjects and scientists....

In this fascinating study, the author analyzes the conceptual roots of molecular biology and the social matrix in which it was developed.

One barrier to optimal pain management in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is how the healthcare community perceives, and therefore manages, neonatal pain. In this paper, we emphasise that healthcare professionals not only have a professional obligation to care for neonates in the NICU, but that these patients are intrinsically worthy of care. We discuss the conditions that make neonates worthy recipients of pain management by highlighting how neonates are (1) vulnerable to pain and harm, and (2) completely dependent (...) on others for pain management. We argue for a relational account of ethical decision-making in the NICU by demonstrating how an increase in vulnerability and dependence may be experienced by the healthcare community and the neonate’s family. Finally, an ethical framework for decisions around neonatal pain management is proposed, focussing on surrogate decision-making and the importance of compassionate action through both a reflective and an affective empathy. As empathy can be highly motivating against pain, we propose that, in addition to educational programs that raise awareness and knowledge of neonatal pain and pain management, healthcare professionals must cultivate empathy in a collective manner, where all members of the NICU team, including parents, are compassionate decision-makers. (shrink)

El artículo ingresa en la ontología del acontecer y recorre cuatro momentos. En primer lugar, distingue la visión del mundo en general, propia de la llamada “metafísica” de la visión del ser como acontecer, y busca un diálogo entre la perspectiva del ser en la metafísica y ontología de Hans-Georg Gadamer. En segundo lugar, analiza la estructura del acontecer o el modo como se despliega el movimiento del sentido, para determinar la lógica de la pregunta como estructura del acontecer. En (...) tercer lugar, entabla un diálogo entre la idea de acontecer y la categoría de finitud, para evidenciar que, cuando se piensa en una ontología del acontecer, esta remite a la determinaciónde la finitud. Y, finalmente, plantea algunas líneas de desarrollo para profundizar en esta investigación. (shrink)

Regularization may be used as an alternative to dimensionality reduction when the number of variables in a model is much larger than the number of available observations. In a recent study from our group regularized regression was employed to quantify brain functional connectivity in a sample of healthy controls using a brain parcellation and resting state fMRI images. Here regularization is applied to evaluate resting state connectivity abnormalities at the voxel level in a sample of patients with schizophrenia. Specifically, ridge (...) regression is implemented with different degrees of regularization. Results are compared to those delivered by the weighted global brain connectivity method, which is based on averaged bivariate correlations and from the non-redundant connectivity method, a dimensionality reduction approach that applies supervised principal component regressions. Ridge regression is able to detect a larger set of abnormally connected regions than both GBC and NRC methods, including schizophrenia related connectivity reductions in fronto-medial, somatosensory and occipital structures. Due to its multivariate nature, the proposed method is much more sensitive to group abnormalities than the GBC, but it also outperforms the NRC, which is multivariate too. Voxel based regularized regression is a simple and sensitive alternative for quantifying brain functional connectivity. (shrink)

Este artículo vuelve sobre el clásico y complejo concepto de alienación y se propone contribuir a elaborarlo para la filosofía social actual. La idea es ir articulando las propuestas sobre la alienación que han elaborado Rahel Jaeggi y Axel Honneth, desarrolladas a partir de un filósofo presuntamente ajeno a la teoría crítica, a saber, Martín Heidegger, e irnos desligando de estos autores a medida que vamos perfilando el concepto. Pretendemos ofrecer un análisis estructural del concepto que permita identificar ciertos rasgos (...) básicos que después sirvan para elaborar un diagnóstico de las patologías sociales en el mundo contemporáneo. (shrink)

A través de un largo excurso por la historia de España, el autor se propone descubrir la particularidad de la Ilustración en el país ibérico para desmontar la tesis según la cual, aquende los Pirineos, no hubo propiamente un Siglo de las Luces, y por lo tanto, tampoco una auténtica filosofía moderna. Presenta en un segundo momento la figura intelectual del padre Benito Feijoo como ejemplo paradigmático de lo que fue la Ilustración española y su diferencia con el Enlightement inglés, (...) las Lumières francesas y la Aufklärung alemana. Se desarrolla la idea según la cual el siglo XVIII sentó las bases de una revolución cultural de carácter supranacional que se materializó en la Constitución de Cádiz de 1812, luego abortada por la Restauración absolutista de Fernando VII. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss critically Stalnaker's views on content.