When is an ideal of a ring radical or prime? By examining its generators, one may in many cases definably and uniformly test the ideal’s properties. We seek to establish such definable formulas in rings of p-adic power series, such as $\mathbb Q_{p}\langle X\rangle $, $\mathbb Z_{p}\langle X\rangle $, and related rings of power series over more general valuation rings and their fraction fields. We obtain a definable, uniform test for radicality, and, in the one-dimensional case, for primality. This builds (...) upon the techniques stemming from the proof of the quantifier elimination results for the analytic theory of the p-adic integers by Denef and van den Dries, and the linear algebra methods of Hermann and Seidenberg.prepared by Madeline G. Barnicle.E-mail: [email protected]: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6t02q9s4. (shrink)

Organoids are quickly becoming an accepted model for understanding human biology and disease. Pluripotent stem cells (PSC) provide a starting point for many organs and enable modeling of the embryonic development and maturation of such organs. The foundation of PSC‐derived organoids can be found in elegant developmental studies demonstrating the remarkable ability of immature cells to undergo histogenesis even when taken out of the embryo context. PSC‐organoids are an evolution of earlier methods such as embryoid bodies, taken to a new (...) level with finer control and in some cases going beyond tissue histogenesis to organ‐like morphogenesis. But many of the discoveries that led to organoids were not necessarily planned, but rather the result of inquisitive minds with freedom to explore. Protecting such curiosity‐led research through flexible funding will be important going forward if we are to see further ground‐breaking discoveries. (shrink)

Resolutions in the United Nations Human Rights Council and General Assembly provide clarification of economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights, and most of these resolutions pass by consensus. Yet these resolutions are more contentious than they appear. This article analyzes a case study of contestation over resolutions on two ESC rights: water and sanitation. Drawing from theories of norms contestation, this article analyzes how the USA, UK, and Canada challenged the creation of the rights to water and sanitation as rights (...) and as norms. An analysis of all resolutions, archival research, and interview data reveals that while challengers failed to stop water and sanitation from becoming legal human rights, they successfully delayed the process and weakened the normative aspect of the rights. The findings show that while powerful actors may not be opposed to ESC rights in theory, they worked to keep these rights weak and aspirational. (shrink)

Au début des années Trente, Georges Bataille écrit pour La Critique Sociale « La structure psychologique du fascisme ». Ce texte, destiné à penser le fascisme – à le théoriser – fait émerger deux concepts qui traverseront, d’une certaine manière, l’œuvre entière de Bataille : l’homogénéité et l’hétérogénéité. Nous revenons ici sur l’emploi de ces notions, sur ce qu’elles désignent en politique au début des années trente, au temps fâcheux de la montée du fascisme.

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists ascribed to a model of health that was predicated on the existence of objective and strictly defined laws of nature. The allegedly “natural” rules governing the production of consumption of food, however, were structured by a set of distinctively bourgeois moral values that demonized over-indulgence and intemperance, encouraged self-discipline and productivity, and treated gentility as an index of social worth. Accordingly, the asylum acted not only as a therapeutic instrument but also as a moral machine that was designed (...) to remake lazy, indolent transgressors into useful, “decorous” citizens. Because the theory and mechanics underlying this machine seemed straightforward and self-evident to psychiatrists, they were confounded when the asylum failed to translate its ideals into reality. While psychiatrists tended to blame this failure on the intractable immorality and weakness of individual patients, particularly paupers and immigrants, a review of the various meanings and uses of food in the hospital reveals the fault lines that ran through the asylum’s ideological structure. (shrink)

In this commentary on a previous Ethics and Social Welfare publication, the authors argue that inclusive and expansive dialogue about interprofessional ethics is more a matter of ??revitalizing?? traditional professional ethics than developing a new field. The dialogue will be most productive of care improvements if it incorporates the service user, includes both health and social care professions, and occurs across countries.

Francis Bacon (15611626) wrote that good scientists are not like ants (mindlessly gathering data) or spiders (spinning empty theories). Instead, they are like bees, transforming nature into a nourishing product. This essay examines Bacon's "middle way" by elucidating the means he proposes to turn experience and insight into understanding. The human intellect relies on "machines" to extend perceptual limits, check impulsive imaginations, and reveal nature's latent causal structure, or "forms." This constructivist interpretation is not intended to supplant inductivist or experimentalist (...) interpretations, but is designed to explicate Bacon's account of science as a collaborative project with several interdependent methodological goals. (shrink)

In developing artificial intelligence (AI), researchers often benchmark against human performance as a measure of progress. Is this kind of comparison possible for moral cognition? Given that human moral judgment often hinges on intangible properties like “intention” which may have no natural analog in artificial agents, it may prove difficult to design a “like‐for‐like” comparison between the moral behavior of artificial and human agents. What would a measure of moral behavior for both humans and AI look like? We unravel the (...) complexity of this question by discussing examples within reinforcement learning and generative AI, and we examine how the puzzle of evaluating artificial agents' moral cognition remains open for further investigation within cognitive science. (shrink)

We make choices about our own appearance and evaluate others' choices – every day. These choices are meaningful for us as individuals and as members of communities. But many features of personal appearance are due to luck, and many cultural beauty standards make some groups and individuals worse off (this is called “lookism”). So, how are we to square these two facets of personal appearance? And how are we to evaluate agency in the context of personal beauty? I identify three (...) ways of responding to these questions: beauty advo- cacy, beauty skepticism, and beauty revisionism. Advocates connect an honorific sense of beauty with personal charac- ter. Skeptics focus on beauty standards, and primarily offer a social critique of beauty standards. Some skeptics suggest embracing other aesthetic ideals – even ugliness. Revision- ists critique beauty standards, but retain an honorific sense of beauty. Each position offers tools to evaluate personal agency as aesthetic agency, whether first-personally or through our appreciation of others' appearance. (shrink)

The instability inherent in the historical inventory of mathematical objects challenges philosophers. Naturalism suggests we can construct enduring answers to ontological questions through an investigation of the processes whereby mathematical objects come into existence. Patterns of historical development suggest that mathematical objects undergo an intelligible process of reification in tandem with notational innovation. Investigating changes in mathematical languages is a necessary first step towards a viable ontology. For this reason, scholars should not modernize historical texts without caution, as the use (...) of anachronistic notation tends to impede, rather than enhance, our ability to recognize the emergent nature of mathematical objects. (shrink)

The rash of high-profile accounting frauds involving internal corporate accountants calls into question the individual accountant’s perceptions of the ethical climate within their organization and the limits to which these professionals will tolerate unethical behavior and/or accept it as the norm. This study uses social cognitive theory to examine the antecedents of individual corporate accountant’s perceived personal fit with their organization’s ethical climate and empirically tests how these factors impact organizational attitudes. A survey was completed by 203 corporate accountants to (...) assess their perception of relevant variables. The results of the structural equation model indicate three significant antecedents relating to ethical climate fit: higher internal levels of locus of control; greater numbers of prior job changes; and higher perceptions of an increasingly better fit with the firm’s ethical climate. Our results also indicate that higher levels of perceived fit to the ethical climate of a firm are associated with higher levels of perceived job satisfaction and organizational commitment. We also theorize that perceptions of an organization’s ethical climate may be reflections of client narcissism and serve a potential indicator of fraud risk. This is an important topic of study, since current auditing standards call for auditors to examine organizational attitudes toward fraud, but offer minimal guidance in doing so. (shrink)

Hope for persons with disabilities is most often associated with the possibility of cure. When cure is not achievable, there remains a dire lack in our socio-cultural imagination around and construction of hopeful disabled futurity. This paper explores Karl Rahner’s eschatology as a means of both deconstructing narrow visions of curative hope and affirming the presence of theological hope that already exists in the lives of disabled people. Ultimately, this paper argues that “crip time”—the time embodied by persons with disabilities—witnesses (...) to a prophetic relationship with time in its openness to the life-giving possibilities of the absolute future. (shrink)

A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.” Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of the twenty-first-century cities. Thus, models abound in urban life and governance. However, a model is not only a tool for control but a way of defining a situation. Framing the city so as to render it susceptible to interpretation and intervention is an exercise not merely with (...) scientific or technological value but with rhetorical power. The tradition of comprehensive urban models, beginning with the advent of computers and culminating in the self-analyzing “smart city,” I argue, sidelines this rhetorical power in favor of a tone of scientific authority that, while justifiable in technical domains, does not legitimately scale to the level of a political community. Making good on the civic potential of Big Data thus requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city, allowing for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings. (shrink)

Under the terms of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Australia has ratified, children have a right to know who their genetic parents are. As a result, we have a duty to establish these facts and to make this information available for children to access should they wish to know. Introducing mandatory DNA testing of newborns and their alleged genetic parents is one viable option to ensure that this information is available for children to access. Indeed, (...) it may be the only viable option to address childrens' right to the fulfilment of Article 7 of the CRC. There are a number of benefits to obtaining this benefit for children. For one, mandatory DNA testing could solve all disputed paternity cases and finalise them early in the lives of children, thus making life more financially secure for those children in the long term. This could reduce or eliminate the need for fathers to secretly carry out DNA tests in order to disestablish paternity. The large number of benefits gained from identifying genetic parents for children and the small possible risks that they may suffer when this information is withheld give us good reasons to support mandatory DNA testing. (shrink)

This book offers a new theory of property and distributive justice derived from Talmudic law, illustrated by a case study involving the sale of organs for transplant. Although organ donation did not exist in late antiquity, this book posits a new way, drawn from the Talmud, to conceive of this modern means of giving to others. Our common understanding of organ transfers as either a gift or sale is trapped in a dichotomy that is conceptually and philosophically limiting. Drawing on (...) Maussian gift theory, this book suggests a different legal and cultural meaning for this property transfer. It introduces the concept of the 'divine lien', an obligation to others in need built into the definition of all property ownership. Rather than a gift or sale, organ transfer is shown to exemplify an owner's voluntary recognition and fulfilment of this latent property obligation. (shrink)

Westworld calls attention to the fact that freedom comes in kinds as well as in degrees, something philosophers have been trying to explain for as long as people can remember. This chapter explains how distinct Westworld's characters are from each other, and how fresh and real their agonies feel despite reliance on well‐worn tropes. As monstrous humans and hosts play out their hideous fictions but shed tears as they meet their even more horrible fates. One of the premises that makes (...) Westworld work is that hosts are programmed to ignore anything that might disrupt their continued belief in who they are meant to be. The most salient moral of Westworld is that agency and purpose come in endless varieties, wondrous to behold. The constraints upon Westworld's residents and guests remind us that humans live in inherited institutions and internalize one another's ideas. (shrink)

This essay discusses the unity of mathematics by comparing the philosophies of Mill and Frege. While Mill is remembered as a progressive social thinker, his contributions to the development of logic are less widely heralded. In contrast, Frege made important and lasting contributions to the development of logic while his social thought, what little is known of it, was very conservative. Two theses are presented in the paper. The first is that in order to pursue Mill’s progressive sociopolitical project, one (...) must embrace Frege’s distinction between logic and psychology. The second thesis is that in order to pursue Frege’s project of accounting for the unity of mathematics, we must understand mathematics as a human activity and consider the role that history and psychology play in the growth of mathematics. (shrink)

When rare documents are collected and reprinted as Opere, Oeuvres, and Gesammelte Schriften, new diagrams are introduced. For the most part the new are faithful reproductions of the old. Sometimes, however, editors correct or simplify diagrams. Thus, before one writes, “so-and-so represents the area to be squared by seven parallelograms,” the more meticulous among us make a before-and-after comparison to insure that the “So-and-so” dividing the space is in fact the mathematician under scrutiny, and not some subsequent draftsman. This underlines (...) the importance of the facsimile edition. (shrink)

Nurses in all practice roles and settings need to understand the therapeutic use and potential for abuse of prescription drugs. Nursing roles, which include the administration and prescription of medication, health teaching and the implications of application, and the detection of drug-related problems, require that such education be timely and comprehensive. This paper discusses the state of knowledge dissemination about prescription drugs within the general context of nursing education. It highlights educational needs and explores the attitudinal factors and knowledge deficits (...) that influence the nursing practices of prescribing, pain management, nursing assessment, and care of persons with drug problems.Standard educational requirements in all nursing curricula undergird teaching about licit and illicit drugs and medication, as well as their therapeutic use, misuse, and abuse. It has been recognized widely since the early 1980s, however, that clinical experiences and didactic content on licit and illicit drugs presented in nursing programs is inadequate. (shrink)

Cultivating an understanding of ethical responsibilities and the societal impacts of technology is increasingly recognized as an important component in undergraduate engineering curricula. There is growing research on how ethics-related topics are taught and outcomes are attained, especially in the context of accreditation criteria. However, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical understanding of the role that educators play in ethics and societal impacts instruction and the factors that motivate and shape their inclusion of this subject in the courses (...) they teach and co-curricular activities they mentor. The goal of this research was to explore the role of faculty’s personal influences on their inclusion of ESI instruction in these settings. Personal influences are distinguished from external or environmental drivers such as teaching assignments, university policies, and department curriculum decisions. This research employed a grounded theory methodology and extracted data from interviews with 19 educators who teach ESI to engineering students to develop an emergent conceptualization of personal influences. Four categorie were identified: intrapersonal, interpersonal, academic, and professional. The findings suggested a wide range of entry points into ESI instruction for faculty members who do not currently teach ESI and for those looking to expand the inclusion of ESI in their courses. Based on these findings, departments and administrators are encouraged to foster educators’ agency, support access to professional development and engagement, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, and broaden hiring decisions to account for the impact of educators’ holistic identity on their instruction. (shrink)

Crisis standards of care are a significant change in the standard level of medical care that can be given compared to normal healthcare operations. CSC are implemented when a healthcare facility is overrun due to catastrophic events like earthquakes, or in the case of SARS-CoV-2, a global pandemic. Especially in disasters, resources like hospital beds, pharmaceuticals, and staff become stretched thin, and facilities must adapt their allocation strategies for distributing scarce resources. Inevitably, a question arises: How do we allocate scarce (...) resources justly? During the coronavirus pandemic, bioethicists, healthcare practitioners, and policymakers have asked this question. A recurring worry among them... (shrink)

The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant. By Dana Sajdi. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 293. $60.

The Evolving Social Responsibilities of Internet Corporate Actors: Pointers Past and Present Content Type Journal Article Category Commentary Pages 455-461 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0049-0 Authors Robert Madelin, Directorate General Information Society and Media, European Commission, BU25 06/183, 1049 Brussels, Belgium Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433 Journal Volume Volume 24 Journal Issue Volume 24, Number 4.

This paper explores the psychological phenomena of sex stereotypes and their consequences for the occurrence of sex discrimination in work settings. Differential conceptions of the attributes of women and men are shown to extend to women and men managers, and the lack of fit model is used to explain how stereotypes about women can detrimentally affect their career progress. Commonly-occurring organizational conditions which facilitate the use of stereotypes in personnel decision making are identified and, lastly, data are provided demonstrating the (...) way in which affirmative action programs and practices can act to promote the stereotyping of women suggesting, that rather than being a remedy for sex discrimination, such programs might in fact be another contributor to the problem. Conclusions focus on the importance of attending to the role sex stereotypes play in hindering women's career progress when procedures to combat sex discrimination in organizations are designed and implemented. (shrink)

While in this paper I focus on adoptees, my argument is applicable to donor-conceived children and children of misattributed paternity. I address some of the noted risks of closed adopted and the benefits of open adoption, which is more in keeping with Article 7 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which provides all children with a right to know about their genetic parents and which the Australian government ratified in 1980.

Fear is a common and potentially distressful psychological response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The factors associated with such fear remains relatively unstudied among older adults. We investigated if fear of COVID-19 could be associated with a combination of psychological factors such as anxiety and depressive symptoms, and risk perception of COVID-19, and demographic factors in a community sample of older adults. Older adults (N= 413,Mage= 69.09 years,SD= 5.45) completed measures of fear of COVID-19, anxiety and depressive symptoms, and risk (...) perception of COVID-19, during a COVID-19 lockdown. These variables, together with demographics, were fitted to a structural equation model. Anxiety and depressive symptoms were highly correlated with each other and were combined into the higher order latent variable of affective symptoms for analyses. The final model revealed that fear of COVID-19 was positively associated with psychological factors of affective symptoms and risk perception. Older age was associated with greater fear of COVID-19. Our findings showed that fear of COVID-19 can be a projection of pre-existing affective symptoms and inflated risk perceptions and highlighted the need to address the incorrect risk perceptions of COVID-19 and socio-affective issues among older adults in the community. (shrink)