Health care professionals often face moral dilemmas. Not dealing constructively with moral dilemmas can cause moral distress and can negatively affect the quality of care. Little research has been documented with methodologies meant to support professionals in care for the homeless in dealing with their dilemmas. Moral case deliberation is a method for systematic reflection on moral dilemmas and is increasingly being used as ethics support for professionals in various health-care domains. This study deals with the question: What is the (...) contribution of MCD in helping professionals in an institution for care for the homeless to deal with their moral dilemmas? A mixed-methods responsive evaluation design was used to answer the research question. Five teams of professionals from a Dutch care institution for the homeless participated in MCD three times. Professionals in care for the homeless value MCD positively. They report that MCD helped them to identify the moral dilemma/question, and that they learned from other people’s perspectives while reflecting and deliberating on the values at stake in the dilemma or moral question. They became aware of the moral dimension of moral dilemmas, of related norms and values, of other perspectives, and learned to formulate a moral standpoint. Some experienced the influence of MCD in the way they dealt with moral dilemmas in daily practice. Half of the professionals expect MCD will influence the way they deal with moral dilemmas in the future. Most of them were in favour of further implementation of MCD in their organization. (shrink)

Error is protean, ubiquitous and crucial in scientific process. In this paper it is argued that understanding scientific process requires what is currently absent: an adaptable, context-sensitive functional role for error in science that naturally harnesses error identification and avoidance to positive, success-driven, science. This paper develops a new account of scientific process of this sort, error and success driving Self-Directed Anticipative Learning (SDAL) cycling, using a recent re-analysis of ape-language research as test example. The example shows the limitations of (...) other accounts of error, in particular Mayo’s (Error and the growth of experimental knowledge, 1996) error-statistical approach, and SDAL cycling shows how they can be fruitfully contextualised. (shrink)

Many physicists regard the flow of time as an illusion. There is an upper level flow of time, the phenomenon of past/present/future; and there is a lower level flow of time which is really a flow of events. Perceptual completion accounts for the lower level flow of time in a few ways: apparent movement; amodal completion; and dynamic change as exemplified by a newly described modal completion that we called happening. It acts like an illusory percept connecting discrete stimuli in (...) all sensory modalities. The past/present/future distinction cannot exist unless an object is perceived to be the same now as it is then. This cognition requires object persistence. Experiments with object persistence suggest the circumstances when that, too, is an illusory percept. The illusory percepts of object persistence and perceptual completion can account for the entire flow of time. Our findings and conclusions are congruent with a few time theories and cosmologies that suggest that the flow of time is an illusion. (shrink)

Interactive technology assessment (iTA) provides an answer to the ethical problem of normative bias in evaluation research. This normative bias develops when relevant perspectives on the evaluand (the thing being evaluated) are neglected. In iTA this bias is overcome by incorporating different perspectives into the assessment. As a consequence, justification of decisions based on the assessment is provided by stakeholders having achieved agreement. In this article, agreement is identified with wide reflective equilibrium to show that it indeed has the potential (...) of justifying decisions. We work out several conditions for this agreement to be achievable and just. (shrink)

Following promulgation of the Nuremberg code in 1947, the ethics of research on human subjects has been a challenging and often contentious topic of debate. Escalation in the use of research participants in low-income countries over recent decades , has intensified the debate on the ethics of international research and led to increasing attention both to exploitation of vulnerable subjects and to considerations of how the 10:90 gap in health and medical research could be narrowed. In 2000, prompted by the (...) discussions over several years that led to the US NIH launching a capacity building programme on research ethics for members of research ethics committees in developing countries, we advanced a ‘new look’ for the ethics of international research.1 Since then progress has been made on several fronts.First, our ideas—considered somewhat radical and impractical at the time—have been provocatively addressed by scholars who have either contested them or advanced similar conceptions of what obligations international researchers have to research participants and communities in low income countries before, during and after clinical trials. Second, those researchers who have been sympathetic to our ideas have either endeavoured to put these into practice or have investigated the feasibility of doing so. Third, the intractability of the 10/90 gap and the escalation of interest in global health have sensitised many to the need to amplify the uptake of these ideas in practice.Here, we briefly review the conceptual and practical developments in international research ethics. While much conceptual progress has been made (and the concepts are now appearing …. (shrink)

Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...) entities to be both the subject and object of their own social evolution. Some important cases of the evolution of cooperation have the side-effect of causing changes in the hierarchical level at which the evolutionary process acts. This is because the traits that act to align the fitness interests of particles in a collective can also act to diminish the extent to which those particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance, while augmenting the extent to which collectives of such particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance. In this way, we can explain upward transitions in the hierarchical level at which the Darwinian machine operates in terms of particle-level selection, even though the outcome of the process is a collective-level selection regime. Our theory avoids the logical and metaphysical paradoxes faced by other attempts to explain evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

This book has been prompted by the dishonesty of much contemporary treatment of the Bible. It is not a 'debunking' of the Bible, but an attempt to show what qualities and what preliminary assumptions are needed for the Bible to be genuinely understood and interpreted. Honest scholarship and honest interpretations must acknowledge that a revolution has taken place in the understanding of the Bible during the last two hundred years and that to try to deny or play down or disguise (...) the results of this revolution is to be faithful neither to God nor to ourselves. With that conviction, and with their customary panache, the authors then go on to look at the facts about the Bible; the New Testament interpretation of scripture; the interpretation of the Bible in the early church; historical criticism; fundamentalism; and prophecy. 'They analyse the books of the Bible, examine the canon and the Bible as norm and as the church's book, consider the role of faith and conclude with a chapter 'In Praise of the Bible'. Here, in the last book together, the Professors Hanson are indeed on top of their form. (shrink)

We discuss five kinds of representations of rationales and provide a formal account of how they can alter disputation. The formal model of disputation is derived from recent work in argument. The five kinds of rationales are compilation rationales, which can be represented without assuming domain-knowledge (such as utilities) beyond that normally required for argument. The principal thesis is that such rationales can be analyzed in a framework of argument not too different from what AI already has. The result is (...) a formal understanding of rationales, a partial taxonomy, and a foundation for computer programs that represent and reason with rationales.The five kinds of rationales are as follows: (c)ompression and (s)pecialization, which yield rules, and (d)isputation, which yields a decision. These are modeled as potentially changing the focus of the dispute. Then there are (f)it, a rationale for rules, and (r)esolution, a rationale for decisions. These cannot be modeled as simply; they force disputation to a meta-level, at least temporarily. (shrink)

Gray takes an information-processing paradigm as his departure point, invoking a comparator as part of the system. He concludes that consciousness is to be found “in” the comparator but is unable to point to how the comparison takes place. Thus, the comparator turns out not to be an entity arising out of brain research per se, but out of the logic of the paradigm. In this way, Gray both reinvents dualism and remains trapped in the language game of his own (...) model – ending up dealing with the unknowable. (shrink)

The aim of this work was to compare experimental investigations on effects of lidocaine, calcium and, BRL 34915 on reentries to simulated data obtained by use of a model of propagation based on the Huygens' constriction method already described in previous works. Calcium and lidocaine effects are investigated on anisotropic conduction conditions. In both cases, reduction in conduction velocities are observed. In lidocaine case, a refractory area is located along the longitudinal axis. In agreement with experimental electrical mapping, the simulations (...) show that the stabilization of reentrant excitation is mainly due to the existence of this refractory area around which the reentrant circuit can develop. The experimental study shows that BRL 34915 has both arrhythmogenic and antiarrhythmic effects. A detailed electrophysiological analysis has shown that drug infusion act on normal cardiac cells by decreasing the relative and absolute refractory period. BRL 34915 action is simulated by a decrease in the refractory period showing that the time frequency of the reentrant activity is increased and that the spatial size where the reentry is developing is becoming smaller. These two effects are arrhythmogenic, the simulated data being so in good agreement with the experimental ones. (shrink)

We analyze phase-space approaches to relativistic quantum mechanics from the viewpoint of the causal interpretation. In particular, we discuss the canonical phase space associated with stochastic quantization, its relation to Hilbert space, and the Wigner-Moyal formalism. We then consider the nature of Feynman paths, and the problem of nonlocality, and conclude that a perfectly consistent relativistically covariant interpretation of quantum mechanics which retains the notion of particle trajectory is possible.

UPtSn is known as a semimetal with a bandgap in the electronic density of states. We report the results of measurements of the cubic lattice parameter a , coefficient of thermal expansion f , magnetic susceptibility h , magnetization † , specific heat C and electrical resistivity „ . We give arguments that this compound is antiferromagnetically ordered with T N = 35 K, although this is not confirmed by neutron diffraction. For carefully annealed samples of UPtSn we provide a (...) phenomenological description of electron transport properties in terms of the fact that the temperature-dependent bandgap is closed at T = 0 K. Results of electrical measurements on the isostructural compounds ThPtSn and ZrPtSn provide evidence for bandgap formation in these two compounds as well. (shrink)

Hutsuls, as one of the ethnic groups of the Ukrainian people, are undoubtedly, along with fights and lemmas, among the most striking exponents of the spiritual culture of the Carpathian Ukrainians. The great attractiveness of the Hutsul's geographical space of habitation could not but affect their worldviews, bright mentality and original patterns of traditional culture. Along with unsurpassed specimens of folk architecture, folk art, choreography, the original pearls of the Hutsul's spiritual heritage include their songs.