Research using mHealth apps has the potential to positively impact health care management and outcomes. However, choosing an appropriate mHealth app may be challenging for the health researcher. The author team used existing evaluation tools, checklists, and guidelines to assess selected mHealth apps to identify strengths, challenges, and potential gaps within existing evaluation tools. They identified specific evaluation tool components, questions, and items most effective in examining app content, usability, and features, including literacy demand and cultural appropriateness; technical information; practical (...) aspects of app functionality; and evolving capabilities of mobile medical apps. Challenges included the subjective nature of the results, time required to complete the evaluation, lack of emphasis on evidence‐based content, and inadequate tool flexibility. Health researchers considering the integration of mobile apps into research will benefit from evaluation tools that assess both evidence‐based content and the ability of the mobile app to securely integrate with other digital technologies involved in patient care. Next steps will include the involvement of health care providers and professionals, including nurses a wide range of expertise, to develop an mHealth evaluation tool that focuses on identifying quality, evidence‐based mobile apps into patient outcomes research. (shrink)

Each of the following papers gives an account of a different UK clinical ethics committee. The committees vary in the length of time they have been established, and also in the main focus of their work. The accounts discuss the development of the committees and some of the ethical problems that have been brought to them. The issues raised will be relevant for other National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the UK that wish to set up such a committee.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

(No abstract is available for this citation).

In this paper, I critically reconstruct the development of Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology and “radical embodied cognitive science” out of Berlin-School Gestalt theory. I first lay out the basic principles of Gestalt theory and then identify two ways of revising that theory: one route, followed by enactivism and ecological psychology, borrows Gestaltist resources to defend a pragmatic ontology. I argue, however, that Merleau-Ponty never endorses this kind of ontology. Instead, I track his second route toward an ontology of “flesh.” I show how (...) Merleau-Ponty’s arguments for this ontology depend upon criticisms of Gestalt Psychology to which radical embodied cognitive science remains vulnerable, and show that it leads him to a romantic philosophy of nature. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty wrote prolifically throughout his life on psychology, aesthetics, and politics, on pedagogy, physics, and painting. Between his appointment to the Université de Lyon in 1945 and his sudden death in Paris in 1961—a copy of Descartes’ Dioptrique on the desk in front of him—the survey of courses he taught is dizzying in scope. For all its promise, however, the interdisciplinary nature of Merleau-Ponty’s work, and the abruptness of its end, raises the question of how these projects connect. The question (...) is encouraged by Merleau-Ponty’s own notes, which indicate that the book he was working on at the time of his death was meant to return to problems left “insoluble” in Phenomenology of Perception (VI 200). Did he hope this work would supersede the Phenomenology? to correct for its false start? to press on in the same direction? (shrink)

The effectiveness of decision rules depends on characteristics of both rules and environments. A theoretical analysis of environments specifies the relative predictive accuracies of the “take-the-best” heuristic (TTB) and other simple strategies for choices between two outcomes based on binary cues. We identify three factors: how cues are weighted; characteristics of choice sets; and error. In the absence of error and for cases involving from three to five binary cues, TTB is effective across many environments. However, hybrids of equal weights (...) (EW) and TTB models are more effective as environments become more compensatory. As error in the environment increases, the predictive ability of all models is systematically degraded. Indeed, using the datasets of Gigerenzer et al. (1999, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, New York: Oxford University Press), TTB and similar models do not predict much better than a naïve model that exploits dominance. Finally, we emphasize that the results reported here are conditional on binary cues. (shrink)

The trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s career is often seen as a progressive development: he begins by analyzing scientific consciousness in The Structure of Behavior, complements that account with a phenomenological analysis of behavior as lived in Phenomenology of Perception, and then overcomes the “philosophy of consciousness” to which the earlier texts are committed in the turn toward an ontology of flesh in The Visible and the Invisible. Through close readings of Merleau-Ponty’s engagements with Gestalt psychology in The Structure of Behavior, I (...) argue that the immanent critique of Gestalt theory in that text already anticipates the chiasmic logic of flesh. This challenges the idea of a turn in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. I begin by outlining the elemental, carnal, and reversible status of flesh. With careful attention to his source materials, I then distinguish Merleau-Ponty’s appropriations of Gestalt theoretical insights from his critical adaptations, defending three claims: (1) The Structure of Behavior borrows insights from Gestalt theorists that are undermined by their own, realistic ontology; (2) it modifies those insights to explicitly acknowledge the elemental status of nature; and (3) those modifications enable Merleau-Ponty to re-interpret Gestalt psychologists’ empirical findings, outlining how consciousness must emerge from nature as both carnal and reversible. (shrink)

Both the recent 'Warner' review of the UK research ethics committee (REC) system and the subsequent consultation document produced by the Central Office for Research Ethics Committees (COREC) emphasize the need to distinguish 'research' from what might be termed 'non-research'. This is to be determined through a process of filtering or 'triage', the intention being that RECs will avoid considering proposals with 'no material ethical issues'. In this paper we argue that trying to distinguish 'true' research from other projects is (...) counterproductive, misleading and potentially unethical. Our case is built around three assertions: (1) the distinction between research and non-research is imprecise; (2) both medical research and non-research can generate similar ethical issues; and (3) projects should be judged according to what they involve, not how they are labelled. (shrink)

Davey suggests that increased resistance to extinction of CRs conditioned to fear-relevant stimuli may be due to more persistent expectancies of the UCS following these stimuli. However, this viewpoint is contradicted by existing empirical evidence that fear-relevant CRs survive an extinction trials series producing extinction of expectancies whereas CRs conditioned to non-fear-relevant CSs do not.

I read Sara Kofman's work on Nietzsche, Charles Mills' _The Racial Contract_, and Kodwo Eshun's Afrofuturist musicology to argue that most condemnations of "faking it" in music rest on a racially and sexually problematic fetishization of "the real.".

ABSTRACT Framed by a critical assessment of R. M. Hare’s classic paper “What Is Wrong With Slavery?,” this article argues that traditional forms of philosophical analysis miss chattel slavery’s specifically racialized harm. A crucial reason is the failure to attend to how slavery was experienced by those who were enslaved. To remedy this neglect, and adapting Calvin Warren’s reading of the Dred Scott decision, I show that slave narratives are rich philosophical resources for thinking about the existential reality of enslavement (...) and that they anticipate later insights from the Afro-pessimist and Black nihilist traditions. I conclude by showing how these insights construe the harm of chattel slavery in ways that are inexpressible through the kinds of traditional philosophical sense-making that Hare pursues. (shrink)

Some feminists have argued that the “master's tools” cannot be utilized for feminist projects. When read through the lens of non-ideal theory, Judith Butler's reevaluation of “autonomy” and “universality” and Peaches's engagement with guitar rock are instances in which implements of patriarchy are productively repurposed for feminist ends. These examples evince two criteria whereby one can judge the success of such an attempt: first, accessibility and efficacy; second, that the use is deconstructive of its own conditions.

My paper is motivated by two thoughts: that there’s significant overlap between J. G. Herder’s romanticism and, what I call, the ‘late’ conceptualism of John McDowell; that recognizing this helps to settle a dispute in contemporary epistemology concerning the contents of perception. I argue, on the basis of that overlap, that “romantic conceptualism” avoids two pressing criticisms of conceptualism: It offers a reply to the argument from the fineness of grain of perceptual experience and it explains the relationship between human (...) perceptual experience and the perceptual experiences of non-human animals. I start with the interpretation of McDowell’s views, tracing the significant revisions in the period following the publication of Mind and World; then I try to compare his views with Herder’s, trying to establish a framework for responding to the more trenchant criticisms of McDowell’s non-conceptualist opponents, and the explanatory force of conceptualist hypotheses beyond the context of contemporary epistemology. The first arc of the paper, therefore, traces the evolution of McDowell’s thought concerning perceptual contents. The second attempts to demonstrate where that view converges with a romantic philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In conducting experiments, economists take more care than psychologists in specifying characteristics of people and tasks and are clearer about the conditions to which results can be generalized. Psychologists could learn much from this practice. They should also think in terms of programs of research – involving laboratory and field studies – that will allow them to test the generality of their theories.

Lent is not normally thought of as a time for adding to or enriching the church's liturgy with visual art. This essay explores possibilities for using visual art that corresponds to the purpose of the season of Lent as a time for somber reflection and reconciliation.

About one in forty babies is born with a recognisable congenital anomaly at birth. Rapid progress is being made in recognising the genetic contribution to these defects. From over 2000 likely single gene malformation syndromes in humans the gene has been isolated or mapped in about 10%. Despite the availability of animal models, the study of malformations in humans continues to reveal novel genes and unpredicted functions for known genes. The importance of the study of clinical malformations to the understanding (...) of embryological development in humans and other organisms is discussed and reviewed. (shrink)

Objectives To conduct an independent evaluation of the first phase of the Health Foundation’s Safer Patients Initiative (SPI), and to identify the net additional effect of SPI and any differences in changes in participating and non-participating NHS hospitals. Design Mixed method evaluation involving five substudies, before and after design. Setting NHS hospitals in the United Kingdom. Participants Four hospitals (one in each country in the UK) participating in the first phase of the SPI (SPI1); 18 control hospitals. Intervention The SPI1 (...) was a compound (multi-component) organisational intervention delivered over 18 months that focused on improving the reliability of specific frontline care processes in designated clinical specialties and promoting organisational and cultural change. Results Senior staff members were knowledgeable and enthusiastic about SPI1. There was a small (0.08 points on a 5 point scale) but significant (P<0.01) effect in favour of the SPI1 hospitals in one of 11 dimensions of the staff questionnaire (organisational climate). Qualitative evidence showed only modest penetration of SPI1 at medical ward level. Although SPI1 was designed to engage staff from the bottom up, it did not usually feel like this to those working on the wards, and questions about legitimacy of some aspects of SPI1 were raised. Of the five components to identify patients at risk of deterioration—monitoring of vital signs (14 items); routine tests (three items); evidence based standards specific to certain diseases (three items); prescribing errors (multiple items from the British National Formulary); and medical history taking (11 items)—there was little net difference between control and SPI1 hospitals, except in relation to quality of monitoring of acute medical patients, which improved on average over time across all hospitals. Recording of respiratory rate increased to a greater degree in SPI1 than in control hospitals; in the second six hours after admission recording increased from 40% (93) to 69% (165) in control hospitals and from 37% (141) to 78% (296) in SPI1 hospitals (odds ratio for “difference in difference” 2.1, 99% confidence interval 1.0 to 4.3; P=0.008). Use of a formal scoring system for patients with pneumonia also increased over time (from 2% (102) to 23% (111) in control hospitals and from 2% (170) to 9% (189) in SPI1 hospitals), which favoured controls and was not significant (0.3, 0.02 to 3.4; P=0.173). There were no improvements in the proportion of prescription errors and no effects that could be attributed to SPI1 in non-targeted generic areas (such as enhanced safety culture). On some measures, the lack of effect could be because compliance was already high at baseline (such as use of steroids in over 85% of cases where indicated), but even when there was more room for improvement (such as in quality of medical history taking), there was no significant additional net effect of SPI1. There were no changes over time or between control and SPI1 hospitals in errors or rates of adverse events in patients in medical wards. Mortality increased from 11% (27) to 16% (39) among controls and decreased from 17% (63) to 13% (49) among SPI1 hospitals, but the risk adjusted difference was not significant (0.5, 0.2 to 1.4; P=0.085). Poor care was a contributing factor in four of the 178 deaths identified by review of case notes. The survey of patients showed no significant differences apart from an increase in perception of cleanliness in favour of SPI1 hospitals. Conclusions The introduction of SPI1 was associated with improvements in one of the types of clinical process studied (monitoring of vital signs) and one measure of staff perceptions of organisational climate. There was no additional effect of SPI1 on other targeted issues nor on other measures of generic organisational strengthening. (shrink)