Fire safety expertise was in great demand following the Grenfell Tower fire in London in June 2017. The government established a review of building regulations and an expert panel to inform its responses to Grenfell, and many other relevant organisations also formed their own expert panels. However, expert knowledge in fire safety is a highly contested domain, with knowledge claims based on differing sources. Fire fighters can claim expertise based on their experience of fighting fires, scientists (...) and science-based engineers can claim expertise from experimentation, and those who create and enact regulations can claim expertise in what can termed ’codespeak’—the language of regulation. Although distanced from fundamental empirical experience of fire, codespeak is powerful because of its relative clarity and certainty, and legal status. Building users also bring their own form of ‘local’ expertise—they have first-hand experience of the practicalities of the solutions wrought by the other experts. Policy-makers thus face many competing forms of expert advice on fire safety, and their ability to judge what is most relevant in any particular case rests on the existence of a sufficient range and depth of in-house government expertise. (shrink)

The proliferation of multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs) over the past years has sparked an intense debate on the political role of corporations in the governance of global business conduct. To gain a better understanding of corporate political behavior in multistakeholder governance, this article investigates how firms construct a political identity when participating in MSIs. Based on an in-depth case study of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh—an MSI established after the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory (...) complex in 2013 to improve working conditions in the Bangladeshi garment industry—we introduce the construct of a political CSR (corporate social responsibility) identity (PCSRI) and explore how firms construct their PCSRIs in MSIs. Employing a qualitative, inductive theory-building method, we analyze interviews and archival data to develop a framework that elucidates how companies construct their PCSRIs within a continuum ranging from conservative to progressive. We show that constructing a PCSRI involves enacting specific, yet interrelated, political strategies that are themselves shaped by several forces over time. This article contributes to the literature by providing a political perspective on organizational identity construction that extends the emerging integrative perspective in political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) research. We suggest that MSIs should be conceptualized as inherently political governance mechanisms that are driven by multidirectional and dynamic political processes of identity construction. Our study shows that corporate political engagement in MSIs is a more nuanced and complex phenomenon than presently theorized. (shrink)

The fire safety of industrial buildings has always been a great concern. An excellent evacuation indicator system can guide the personnel to escape quickly, thus reducing the casualties. In this study, we present a virtual simulation fire scene based on virtual reality to explore the impact of different colors, brightness values, and flashing frequencies on escape time in case of fire emergencies. The presented scene can help shorten the time required for evacuation in an industrial plant by (...) identifying the escape path under the fire and smoke environment and improve the escape efficiency. The results show that the green color is the most suitable color for evacuations; the escape efficiency increases with an increase in brightness, and there is no significant difference between the escape times under high and medium brightness; the evacuation time decreases with an increase in the flicker frequency. Based on these experimental results, the fire evacuation indicating system is designed. A virtual reality verification experiment is used to compare the escape efficiency of the improved design with an original factory’s indicating system. The verification results show that the improved scheme reduces the evacuation time and significantly improves the psychological stress on the evacuees. This work provides a theoretical basis for safe evacuation designs. (shrink)

This article address the issue of employee safety and the social responsibility of multinational apparel retailers who contract with Bangladesh manufacturers in their global supply chain. Both the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety and the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh have been identified as the two primary facilitators for global apparel industry efforts to actively address this serious human rights issue; thus, they have the potential to help drive the success of the industry's corporate citizenship efforts (...) to successfully manage the issue of fire and building safety in Bangladesh. The article further explores these relationships within the context of the “global corporate citizenship” concept, and develops a rationale for the limits of a socially responsible supply chain. In the context of global corporate citizenship, the article describes the existing state of these two industry organizations remediation efforts to ensure a stable supply chain in Bangladesh, and offers an analysis of existing industry nonmarket strategy approaches to improving contractor's factory fire and building safety environments for their employees. Lastly, a comprehensive set of nonmarket strategies for multinational apparel retailers is recommended when addressing their global corporate citizenship commitments to a safe working environment for Bangladesh garment manufacturing employees. (shrink)

Capturing the interrelations among risks is essential to thoroughly understand and promote coal mining safety. From this standpoint, 105 risks and 135 interrelations among risks had been identified from 126 typical accidents, which were also the foundation of constructing coal mine risk network. Based on the complex network theory and Pajek, six parameters were employed to reveal the topological properties of CMRN. As indicated by the results, CMRN possesses scale-free network property because its cumulative degree distribution obeys power-law distribution. This (...) means that CMRN is robust to random hazard and vulnerable to deliberate attack. CMRN is also a small-world network due to its relatively small average path length as well as high clustering coefficient, implying that accident propagation in CMRN is faster than regular network. Furthermore, the effect of risk control is explored. According to the result, it shows that roof collapse, fire, and gas concentration exceeding limit refer to three most valuable targets for risk control among all the risks. This study will help offer recommendations and proposals for making beforehand strategies that can restrain original risks and reduce accidents. (shrink)

Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, risk-taking, and sociability. During night-time, individuals are generally tired and show decreased self-control and increased impulsive behaviors. The lower visibility during night-time favors the partial concealment of identity and opens (...) more opportunities for disinhibition of self-interested behaviors. Indeed, individuals with an evening-oriented chronotype are more paranoid, risk-taking, extraverted, impulsive, promiscuous, and have higher antisocial personality traits. However, under some circumstances, such as respiratory pandemics, the psychobehavioral traits favored by the nocturnal niche might be counter-productive, increasing contagion rates of a disease that can evade the behavioral immune system because its disease cues are often nonexistent or mild. The eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis presented here suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the evening-oriented psychobehavioral profile can have collectively harmful consequences: there is a clash of core tendencies between the nocturnal chronotype and the recent viral transmission-mitigating safety guidelines and rules. The pandemic safety protocols disrupt much normal social activity, particularly at night when making new social contacts is desired. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is contagious even in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, which enables it to mostly evade our evolved contagious disease avoidance mechanisms. A growing body of research has indirectly shown that individual traits interfering with social distancing and anti-contagion measures are related to those of the nocturnal chronotype. Indeed, some of the social contexts that have been identified as superspreading events occur at night, such as in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Furthermore, nocturnal environmental conditions favor the survival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus much longer than daytime conditions. We compare the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis with other factors related to non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, namely sex, age, and life history. Although there is not yet a direct link between the nocturnal chronotype and non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, security measures and future empirical research should take this crucial evolutionary mismatch and adaptive metaproblem into account, and focus on how to avoid nocturnal individuals becoming superspreaders, offering secure alternatives for nocturnal social activities. (shrink)

Ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) is gaining popularity due to its superior mechanical properties, including high strength, toughness, durability, and excellent seismic performance. However, the risk of explosive spalling in UHPC structures exposed to fire poses a significant challenge, fundamentally hindering comprehensive studies on fire safety and limiting the broader engineering applications of UHPC. In this study, the mixture proportion of UHPC was developed and optimized by comparing the usage of yellow river and standard sands, different types of chemical admixtures, (...) and different curing regimes. Furthermore, a sensitive case study was also conducted to optimize the calcined bauxite content to improve UHPC's fire resistance. For these purposes, 189 UHPC cubes, incorporating variations in particle types, superplasticizer types, and curing regimes, were tested under three thermal levels, such as 200℃,400℃, and 600℃. The microstructural evolution of heated cube specimens was then observed using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) examination. Calcined bauxite was then considered to replace the standard sand to improve the fire resistance of UHPC and enhance the residual compressive strength of cube specimens under thermal conditions. For this purpose, 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% calcined bauxite content was designed as six case studies. Furthermore, the degradation of UHPC strength was also investigated for the corresponding six case studies by conducting the uniaxial compressive experiments. Finally, the microstructural evolution under both thermal conditions and calcined bauxite content was observed and discussed. (shrink)

The present study scrutinizes the role of societal culture in cases of sexual violence in Greek sport, as presented in the media after a two times Olympic medalist of Greece fired up the “‘me too’ Movement” in the country. Specifically, data for this study consisted of 36 media articles, reporting multiple cases of sexual abuse and harassment in Greek sport and were published between January 2021 and January 2022. We drew on the cultural praxis heuristic to explore how the cultural (...) setting operates as an underlying factor in priming athletes for harassment and abuse and in oppressing them into not speaking up. Our thematic analysis of media data revealed two overarching themes, namely, keeping the home intact and failed negotiations with power. Based on these findings, we discuss how subtle manifestations of patriarchy and collectivism perpetuate sexualized violence in Greek sport as they promote a climate of silence, prevent safeguarding, maintain underreporting of sexual violence, and delayed the arrival of the #metoo. We conclude that under the current circumstances, change seems to be a threat to all involved in Greek sport, yet for different reasons. For the coaches, sport officials, stakeholders, state system, change would require them to relinquish male powers and authority, find new meaning of what it means to be and do as a man, and allow women to be seen as counterparts. For the female athletes-survivors, it would require them to prioritize the self and their self-care and let go of the in-group loyalty and subordination learned and exhibited from infancy. We also contend that mere translations of international and regional safeguarding guidelines and toolkits cannot foster awareness raising, nor the implementation of measures within cultural settings that divert from the Global North. If we care to combat the universal phenomenon of sexualized violence in sport, a glocal approach is needed, where local socio-cultural factors are acknowledged, their role is addressed, and violence is understood within its context. (shrink)

Artificial neural networks, in interaction with fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and fuzzy neural networks, represent an example of a modern interdisciplinary field, especially when it comes to solving certain types of engineering problems that could not be solved using traditional modeling methods and statistical methods. They represent a modern trend in practical developments within the prognostic modeling field and, with acceptable limitations, enjoy a generally recognized perspective for application in construction. Results obtained from numerical analysis, which includes analysis of the (...) behavior of reinforced concrete elements and linear structures exposed to actions of standard fire, were used for the development of a prognostic model with the application of fuzzy neural networks. As fire resistance directly affects the functionality and safety of structures, the significance which new methods and computational tools have on enabling quick, easy, and simple prognosis of the same is quite clear. This paper will consider the application of fuzzy neural networks by creating prognostic models for determining fire resistance of eccentrically loaded reinforced concrete columns. (shrink)

Texas festivals are given credit for providing benefits for both the festival's community and for the people who visit the community. As a result of these perceived benefits, communities across Texas stage a broad range of festivals and events. These events require substantial planning and skilled management to be successful. Those involved in the planning are often volunteers and have little or no background in event planning and management. Regardless of their experience level however, most event coordinators have ongoing needs (...) for information that will help them produce successful events. To produce a successful event, coordinators seek information from a variety of sources. These sources may include their personal network of friends and colleagues to professional consultants or formal workshops, conferences, and seminars. The primary purpose of this project is to provide information that will help the Texas Agricultural Extension Service Recreation, Park & Tourism Program evaluate its future role in responding to the needs of Texas festival coordinators. To accomplish this end, this study seeks to identify information needs of Texas festival coordinators and to describe how current sources of information are utilized by festival coordinators. This paper outlines the development and implementation of an information needs assessment of Texas festival coordinators and a description of current information sources being used by them. The project seeks to identify gaps in the provision of information and the access Texas festival coordinators perceive they have to information. The "importance"/"access" scale of this survey clearly identifies a range of important information topics which organizations could address. The following are the top 10 information needs of Texas festival coordinators as indicated by mail survey respondents: 1. Writing press releases 2. How to measure advertising success 3. Regulations for food, fire, safety, etc. 4. How to find regional talent 5. Insurance issues 6. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 7. How to find and contract for professional entertainment 8. How to determine space requirements for event activities 9. How to create a layout for people/vehicle flow and activities 10. Estimating amount and type of security need It is indicated that most coordinators are aware of the six organizations and agencies that serve the needs of the festival industry. 1. International Festivals & Events Association (IFEA) 2. Texas Agricultural Extension Service (TAEX) - Department of Recreation, Park & Tourism at Texas A&M University 3. Texas Travel Industry Association (TTIA) 4. Texas Festivals & Events Association (TFEA) 5. Texas Department of Economic Development (TDED) 6. Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Of respondents to the needs assessment mail survey, 82.8% to 72.6% of Texas festival coordinators are aware of the programs and services of these organizations and agencies. While coordinators show a high level of awareness of conferences, seminars, and workshops, only 13% to 24.7% have attended. Coordinator networks and the internet are viable sources of information. The majority (88%) of festival coordinators (n=216) indicated they have access to the internet and 81.9% of respondents (n=215) said they use the internet. Organizations can use this study and its results to focus on information needs that coordinators indicate are important and have low accessibility. January and February followed by June and July would be the best months for conferences, seminars, and workshops. Seminars may be held during the "off peak" months of January and February while brochures about how to better market an event can be distributed during the peak festival times of September and April. Coordinators' responses as to the best months they would be able to attend Certified Festival Manager (CFM) training also corresponded with event seasonality patterns. Using multiple distribution methods can improve access to festival planning information. Workshops, internet sites, brochures, and publications are just a few of the ways organizations may vary their distribution of information resources. Coordinators indicted their main source of information comes from coordinator networks (48.9%). This finding should be used to note the importance of networking at coordinator informational events. The internet is a viable source of information. Of the respondent coordinators, 98% indicted they have access to the internet. It is reasonable to suggest that more information can be provided via the internet. There are clearly overlapping functions among these organizations', however, many programs are carried out as partners in serving the festival industry. While this study did not examine these overlapping roles, it would be appropriate that areas of overlap should be examined more closely. (shrink)

The legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as institutions for social and environmental governance in the global economy has received much scholarly attention over the past years. To date, however, research has yet to focus on assessing the legitimacy of MSIs in their interactions with other actors within larger systems of deliberation. Drawing on the deliberative systems perspective developed within deliberative democracy theory, we theorise a normative framework to evaluate the roles of MSIs within the broader systems of governance they co-construct (...) through their interactions with other initiatives, governments, non-governmental organisations, and other external actors. As we demonstrate in our evaluation of the illustrative case of the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety as a MSI in the context of the Bangladeshi garment industry, this framework can help researchers assess whether a MSI ultimately serves to enhance or undermine the deliberative legitimacy of the overall system of which it forms a part. (shrink)

Private certification as a means of risk regulation and quality assurance can offer advantages over government regulation, including superior technical expertise, better inspection and monitoring of regulated entities, increased responsiveness to consumers, and greater efficiency. This Article examines two examples of reliable private certification in regulatory arenas - fire safety and kosher food - where political opposition and resource constraints have frustrated government regulatory efforts. The Article identifies key features of reliable private certification and analyzes its comparative institutional advantages (...) over government regulation. Critics of private certification question its legitimacy, asserting that private regulation is less participatory, transparent, and accountable than government regulation. The Article responds to these claims, arguing that the two examples of private certification presented here compare favorably with government regulation based on these criteria of legitimacy. (shrink)

The problem of fires in Poland is an important element of public safety. One of the reasons ofthe fires are different types of arson of buildings, crops or forests. This paper presents a quantitative scale of the phenomenon of arson in Poland. Basing on data from the General Headquarters of the Police and Fire Headquarters it analyzes the scale offire danger. It also presents the role of specialists in the detection of causes of fires. The article points the role (...) ofinsurance in the compensation of fire damage. (shrink)

Packed with examples, this book offers a clear and engaging overview of ethical issues in business. -/- It begins with a discussion of foundational issues, including the objectivity of ethics, the content of ethical theories, and the debate between capitalism and socialism, making it suitable for the beginning student. It then examines ethical issues in business in three broad areas. The first is the market. Issues explored are what can be sold (the limits of markets) and how it can be (...) sold (ethics in marketing). The second is work. Topics in this area are health and safety, meaningful work, compensation, hiring and firing, privacy, and whistleblowing. The third area is the firm in society. Here readers explore corporate social responsibility, corporate political activity, and the set of ethical challenges that attend international business. -/- Issues are introduced through real-world examples that underscore their importance and make them come alive. Arguments for opposing positions are given fair hearings and students are encouraged to develop and defend their own views. (shrink)

Mass casualty attacks in recent years have demonstrated the need to include “evil intent” as a design consideration. Three recent actual or potential weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attacks did not involve nuclear bombs or other devices designed as weapons, but rather benign objects used with evil intent. Just as unplanned events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and user misuse have been codified into design requirements based on the likelihood and potential impact of the event, “evil intent” has to become (...) part of the design process for buildings, vehicles, equipment, and other items. The endstate should be reasonable additions to existing codes and standards such that it is clear what is and is not designed for. In the absence of specific design guidance, professionals with appropriate expertise can assess potential for “evil intent” and provide recommendations to design out or warn against this potential harm to public safety, particularly when codified requirements are not present. (shrink)

Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue (...) that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun. -/- Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics. (shrink)

We like to think we own our memories: if technology someday enables us to alter our memories, we should have certain rights to do so. But our freedom of memory has limits. Some memories are simply too valuable to society to allow individuals the unfettered right to change them. Suppose a patient regains consciousness in the middle of surgery. While traumatized by the experience and incapable of speaking, he coincidentally overhears two surgeons make plans to set fire to the (...) hospital. Assuming there is no way to erase his traumatic memories of intraoperative awareness and still prosecute the surgeons, a patient may well have a moral duty to retain the memories for the greater good. And if the patient has such a moral duty, I argue in this brief comment, then the state plausibly has the right to limit our abilities to erase memories when necessary to protect public safety or prosecute offenders. (shrink)

Private governance raises important questions about democratic representation. Rule making is rarely based on electoral authorisation by those in whose name rules are made—typically a requirement for democratic legitimacy. This requires revisiting the role of representation in input legitimacy in transnational governance, which remains underdeveloped. Focussing on private labour governance, we contrast two approaches to the transnational representation of worker interests in global supply chains: non-governmental organisations providing representative claims versus trade unions providing representative structures. Studying the Bangladesh Accord for (...) Fire and Building Safety, we examine their interaction along three dimensions of democratic representation: 1) creating presence, 2) authorisation, and 3) accountability to affected constituents. We develop a framework that explains when representative claims and structures become complementary but also how the politics of input legitimacy shapewhoseinterests get represented. We conclude by deriving theoretical and normative implications for transnational representation and input legitimacy in global governance. (shrink)

It begins as a regular day in March of 1997, but by 9:00 a.m. all communications are down at the Worcester Airport in Massachusetts. Telephone service at the airport and its fire department are cut off without warning. Six hours later all telephone service has been disabled in the entire surrounding area. Emergency services are jeopardized as the city's residents have lost the means to make calls for help, putting the health and safety of the public at risk. The (...) airplanes have lost the means to coordinate landings and takeoffs at the airport, creating delays across the nation. In the span of a few hours, a juvenile computer hacker has single-handedly disrupted several sectors of the nation's critical infrastructure using only his personal computer as an aid. This is just one of the thousands of instances in the past decade in which a cyber security breach has jeopardized the critical infrastructure of this nation. (shrink)

Multi-stakeholder initiatives involve actors from several spheres of society in collaborative arrangements to reach objectives typically related to sustainable development. In political CSR literature, these arrangements have been framed as improvements to transnational governance and as being somehow democratic. We draw on Mouffe’s works on agonistic pluralism to problematize the notion that consensus-led multi-stakeholder initiatives bring more democratic control on corporate power. We examine two initiatives which address two very different issue areas: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the (...) Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety. We map the different kinds of adversarial relations involved in connection with the issues meant to be governed by the two initiatives, and find those adversarial relations to take six main shapes, affecting the initiatives in different ways: competing regulatory initiatives; pressure-response relations within multi-stakeholder initiatives; pressure-response relations between NGOs and states through multi-stakeholder initiatives; collaboration and competition between multi-stakeholder initiatives and states; pressure-response relations between civil society actors and multi-stakeholder initiatives; and counter-hegemonic movements against multi-stakeholder initiatives as hegemonic projects. We conclude that multi-stakeholder initiatives cannot be democratic by themselves, and we argue that business and society researchers should not look at democracy or politics only internally to these initiatives, but rather study how issue areas are regulated through interactions between a variety of actors—both within and without the multi-stakeholder initiatives—who get to have a legitimate voice in this regulation. (shrink)

Personal medical information is now bought and sold on the open market. Companies use it to make hiring and firing decisions and to identify customers for new products. The justification for providing such access to medical information is that doing so benefits the public by securing public safety, controlling costs, and supporting medical research. And individuals have supposedly consented to it. But we can achieve the common goods while better protecting privacy by making institutional changes in the way information is (...) maintained and protected. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Operating Through HatredAndrew G. Shuman“You’re not cutting my ***ing neck. The cancer is in my ***ing mouth.”While many patient encounters are memorable, Mr. K’s introduction to the head and [End Page 20] neck surgical oncology clinic is indelibly imprinted into the minds of all of the clinicians present on that certain autumn morning. This was, quite simply, a man who resonated hate. He was rude and disruptive. He insisted (...) on an expedited workup “without any waiting.” He questioned the ethnicity and nationality of his care providers. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that he did not appreciate my Jewish heritage—the swastika tattooed on his bicep underscored the point. He bragged about his recent incarceration for armed robbery. While my colleagues and I were tempted to simply refuse to assume his care, Mr. K had a bad problem—his recurrent tongue cancer required a major operation in order to offer him any hope for cure.Mr. K initially received an abbreviated course of radiation at an outside institution, which was limited by his non–compliance. While one might debate the wisdom of this decision in retrospect—in general, surgery is preferred for his type of tumor—the die was already cast. A heroic attempt at surgical salvage was now his only curative option. He previously sought care elsewhere... only to be fired by this original surgeon when Mr. K physically threatened him in the outpatient office during preoperative consultation. [It was the doctor’s fault for insulting him in the first place, Mr. K maintained... and no charges were filed.] We were, indeed, his last resort. Other than his recurrent cancer, Mr. K was robust; he was in his sixth decade, physically fit, and on the whole, fairly healthy. In the classic surgical lexicon, he was a reasonable surgical candidate. But was it reasonable to operate on such a person?I remember thinking, at the time, about our obligation to care for such an individual. Of course, being a medical professional carries with it many obligations, including a judicious assumption of personal risk. And, working in a tertiary care center begets the responsibility to assist referring clinicians in the management of difficult cases. Although professional obligations certainly have their limits, defining their bounds is decidedly more difficult. Paramount is creating an atmosphere of mutual trust and acceptance. Naturally, this was easier said than done in regard to Mr. K.Perhaps against our better judgment, we agreed to operate under the condition that he abide by strict behavioral ground rules, on our terms. We agreed upon the extent of the necessary operation (which indeed involved cutting his ***ing neck, much to his chagrin and reluctant acceptance). Mr. K promised to follow instructions for postoperative care. He assured us that he would not swear or yell (again). And, in the presence of hospital security, who reinforced our institutional policies regarding patient behavior, he guaranteed that he would not be verbally or physically violent or inappropriate, and would not make disparaging comments to other patients or staff. It seemed, at least, that we had an understanding.Needless to say, these rules were broken shortly after he awoke from surgery. I vividly remember being summoned from the OR when he threatened to murder his impressionable and terrified nurse a few days later, who would not acquiesce to his unreasonable demands. From that point onward, hospital security was deployed to his room regularly, and anything resembling a potential weapon was safeguarded. Any semblance of a mutual doctor–patient bond was shattered. At this point, everyone’s goal was simply to get Mr. K home.My visceral reactions to his behavior, while intense, were not unexpected, and fell in line with those of the entire team of clinicians caring for him. His antics brought his healthcare team together in collective unity (and condemnation). However, my surgical colleagues and I also felt somewhat guilty and responsible. While surgeons can choose to assume some degree of inherent personal danger in caring for a violent and angry patient, we also put the safety and soundness of the entire perioperative team in jeopardy, without necessarily seeking their input. But once we had decided to... (shrink)

Abstract:Statutory approaches toward whistle-blowing currently appear to be based on the assumption that most observers of wrongdoing will report it unless deterred from doing so by fear of retaliation. Yet our review of research from studies of whistle-blowing behavior suggests that this assumption is unwarranted. We propose that an alternative legislative approach would prove more successful in encouraging valid whistle-blowing and describe a model for such legislation that would increase self-monitoring of ethical behavior by organizations, with obvious benefits to society (...) at large.A defense contractor’s inspectors used improper calibration standards when inspecting missile parts and other military products, used noncertified inspectors when inspecting such products, and used employees without top-secret clearance to work on classified projects. This created potentially life-threatening products as well as potential compromises of military secrets.Quality-control officials on the Trans Alaska Pipeline were threatened with physical harm, demoted, and spied on in an effort to force them not to turn in negative reports or report problems. As a result, the likelihood of damaging oil spills due to improperly built and maintained equipment is heightened.A major corporation allegedly initiated an analysis of the cost savings that would result from circumventing or reducing compliance with health, safety and environmental standards. Two officers who objected to this noncompliance cost/benefit analysis were subsequently fired. (shrink)

“There's a new whistleblower in Washington,” according to CNN News. He is Food and Drug Administration scientist David Graham, who claims that the FDA failed to warn the public about certain drugs' dangerous side effects and pressured him to change his research's conclusion that the arthritis drug Vioxx caused heart attacks. Another Washington whistleblower, Dr. Jonathan Fishbein of the National Institutes of Health, alleged that he was fired because “he had raised concerns about sloppy practices that might endanger patient safety” (...) in a study of the AIDS drug nevirapine.Graham and Fishbein thus joined the ranks of whistleblowers who have gained some prominence in recent years for their reporting of corporate or institutional misconduct. The best-known whistleblowers—the FBI's Coleen Rowley, Enron's Sherron Watkins, and WorldCom's Cynthia Cooper, who together received Time magazine's Whistleblower Person of the Year Award in 20024 - focused public attention on the reform of corporate accounting and legal practices. (shrink)

This begins before 1896. This begins before Arkansas. But “this can't be right grandmother. who are our Ancestors! she said, shit gal, i don't know”. One of my ancestors walks toward me. She be Gertrude. Gertrude Grant. I have no pictures of her. I have no living memories of her. Yet I remember. Her. My Nana's mama, born around 1890 in the lumber town of Canfield in southern Arkansas.Canfield, Arkansas, 1896We're childrenBabies reallywhen the fires startA mob is always ready to (...) takeour wagesRun us awayAlways ready to lynch usWhen a volley of shotsbe my lullabiesI won't live to see 36I learn about the Canfield Race War of 1896 through online searches, old newspaper clippings, doctoral dissertations. Great-Grandma Gertrude would have been around six when the rioting happened, when white laborers became jealous of Black laborers and tried to push them, beat them, burn them out of town. Free library access to census documents and land deeds tells me that Gertrude's daddy, James W. Grant, purchased eighty acres of land in Canfield on February 1, 1893, perhaps thanks to the Southern Homestead Act, which made millions of acres of land available to homesteaders, including migrating and free Negroes. James and his wife, Susie A. Lewis, raised their children on their land in Canfield. How did the riots affect them, their land, their kin, their safety, their daily lives? I ask all the questions. I was raised with the permission to ask all the questions. I ask all the questions before I'm trained in the academy to ask all the questions. (shrink)

In 2007, there were 182,479 injury-related deaths in the United States — including homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries – making injuries the leading cause of death for persons under age 45. Also in 2007, nearly 30 million Americans suffered a non-fatal injury serious enough to warrant hospital treatment. The lifetime cost of fatal and non-fatal injuries occurring in 2000 is estimated to exceed $400 billion.Efforts to prevent injuries have often focused on changes to the built environment or potentially dangerous products (...) to reduce risks. Building safety into a product or environment — especially in ways that require little or no user action to confer protection — is often more effective than trying to change consumer behavior. For example, improving the crashworthiness of cars through design changes such as air bags, fire-resistant fuel systems, or electronic stability programs, is more effective than simply trying to teach operators to become safer drivers. (shrink)

The effects of humankind during the Capitalocene period caused planetary changes that resulted in the devastation and destruction of the Earth. The nuclear tragedy at the Chornobyl NPP on April 26, 1986, should serve as a constant reminder to society as it provided an example of dysfunctional totalitarian management. The topic of Chornobyl has become socially tiresome in recent years due to the trivialization of this large-scale anthropogenic, ecological, economic, and humanitarian disaster. The image of Ukraine as a hazard area (...) has gradually been replaced in world consciousness. When Russia, the aggressor country, started to intimidate the world with nuclear and thermonuclear weapons and to take the nuclear power plants in Ukraine under fire, the danger of radioactive materials came up once again. Phosphorous ammunition used in Ukraine in 2022 demonstrates that the terrorist state is capable of anything. Scientists also relate to earthquake motions that occurred in Turkey in February 2023 and Japan in January 2024, with the displacement of continental plates of the Earth’s crust resulting from missile attacks at the surface of the Earth. In the 21st century, there was a need to reconsider and refresh memories as well as to reread the works under a new perspective to draw attention to crimes against the safety of humanity and the environment, as well as to popularize, preserve and pass historical knowledge to future generations to protect them from traumatic experiences and self-destruction. The article aims to look at the postcolonial environment in contemporary literature of fact through the spectacle of ecocritical discourse via reading the works on the Chornobyl disaster. The objects of the study are Galia Ackerman’s work “Crossing Chornobyl”, the documentary and publicist chapter “Chornobyl Scenario” from the novel “Non-format Journalism” by Hryhorii Krymchuk, Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi’s semidocumentary short story “Chornobyl: I Saw It”, the chapter “Elon Musk, “Tesla”, and Nuclear Power Engineering” from Maks Kidruk’s popular scientific book “Theory of Improbability”, Oleksii Radynskyi’s literary report “Chornobyl Is Ukraine”, and Markiian Kamysh’s travelogue “Stalking the Atomic City”. Study methods include principles of science, objectivity, and source verification. General scientific and special scientific research methods used in the study are a descriptive method for synthesizing and systematizing selected material; comparative and typological methods involving the elements of cultural, comparative, and narrative studies to compare the ways various authors have covered the Chornobyl topic; an ecocritical method that has made it possible to apply naturecentric approach to conceptualizing interaction between a human and nature to develop eco-conscious society; a postcolonial method aimed at conceptualizing the consequences of colonial rule via non-fiction text. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

The anti-sceptic can try to argue that regardless of the strength of the epistemic factors that suggest live scepticism, positive epistemic factors such as evidence and reliability are sufficiently strong to defeat it head on, so to speak. This is the Defeated Threat strategy, which comes in three varieties. The Safety-Sensitivity solution is an attempt to solve the puzzle by claiming that worlds in which people falsely believe, e.g., that fire engines are red, are too metaphysically distant to sabotage (...) their knowledge. The Extreme Externalism solution says, roughly, that the reliability of people’s beliefs is enough of a factor to neutralize the sceptical hypotheses. The Tenacity solution insists that knowledge is not the kind of state that can easily be unseated; thus, since people once knew that fire engines are red, that knowledge stays with them even after they become mere mortals with regard to colour error theory. (shrink)

Since becoming the globe’s most populous city in the early eighteenth century, Tokyo has risen, collapsed and boomed again as no other metropolis. For 300 years spectacular bursts of growth occurred against a background of earthquakes, fires and floods, until in 1923 a horrific quake wiped it out. The bombing of the rebuilt city in 1945 was deadlier than the atomic attacks on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Relative seismic and political stability after the war underpinned an economic miracle and transformed Tokyo (...) into a global business and cultural icon, but the ‘lost decades’ that followed brought back socioeconomic uncertainty and undercurrents of anxiety. Manmade calamities, including a terrorist attack on the subway in 1995 and a nuclear leak in a neighboring prefecture in 1999, shook confidence in a city that normally enjoys high health and safety standards, while the massive earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima in 2011, just 240 km away, reminded inhabitants of the tectonic time bomb underneath them. Not surprisingly, physical, social and psychological fragility feature prominently in cinematic portrayals of Tokyo, with destruction and reconstruction of the cityscape and of the lives of those who inhabit it a common theme. Cinematic stories typically revolve around characters dwelling on the past, living cautiously for the moment or fearing the future. This paper explores how directors have incorporated physical destruction and socioeconomic devastation into their depictions of the city, focusing particularly on the use of images of the built environment. (shrink)

On May 13, 2014, a fire due to the combustion of accumulated methane gas in the Soma Eynez Mine in Turkey killed 301 miners. This case chronicles the events on the day of the accident and investigates the factors leading up to it. It depicts the chaos and confusion resulting from missing emergency protocol, inadequate responses of major stakeholders such as safety experts in the mine, company executives, and the political leadership at the ministry and prime ministry levels. It (...) shows how the interplay of a culture of leniency towards mining safety, insufficient mining policies and even less effective inspections coupled with nepotism and the local population’s desperation for work, all led to serious neglect in a major mine resulting in needless deaths. The Soma Eynez Mine disaster highlights how corporate greed fed into breaches of mining protocol and ethical conduct, eventually leading to the bankruptcy of a mining conglomerate and the imprisonment of 14 men. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Heidegger and OntologyEmmanuel Levinas (bio)The prestige of Martin Heidegger 1 and the influence of his thought on German philosophy marks both a new phase and one of the high points of the phenomenological movement. Caught unawares, the traditional establishment is obliged to clarify its position on this new teaching which casts a spell over youth and which, overstepping the bounds of permissibility, is already in vogue. For once, (...) Fame has picked one who deserves it and, for that matter, one who is still living. Anyone who has studied philosophy cannot, when confronted by Heidegger’s work, fail to recognize how the originality and force of his achievements, stemming from genius, are combined with an attentive, painstaking, and close working-out of the argument—with that craftsmanship of the patient artisan in which phenomenologists take such pride. In this study, it is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him.To get to the heart of Heidegger’s system, it seems fitting to begin with a problem that is generally familiar. We choose the problem of knowledge, a deeper understanding of which takes us to the very threshold of Heidegger’s thought. For this problem, central to modern philosophy, is one of the main obstacles of modern philosophy that Heidegger wishes to surmount. Neo-Kantianism, which takes knowledge as the philosophical problem of the first rank, is the movement against which Heidegger rebels with all his strength. We have, thus, every chance of gaining access to his thought by the main door, so to speak. Once inside the system we will try to trace its outlines, 2 reserving, for a second part of our work, the determination of Heidegger’s place in the history of ideas, especially in the phenomenological movement, as well as of his relations with the philosopher to whom he owes so much—Edmund Husserl. 31In its most general form, the problem of the theory of knowledge has a critical significance. It consists in delineating a domain where knowledge can be certain and in determining the criteria for the legitimate scope of knowledge. But this problem, as normal and as simple as it may appear, has deeper roots. That knowledge should need a criterion at all presupposes that truth is not identical to all that is known and that the course [End Page 11] of things can fail to correspond with the course of thought. “How does knowledge correspond to being?” is a more profound formulation of the problem of knowledge.But we are not going to touch anymore on the primordial phenomenon that generates the problem. The problem of correspondence between thing and thought presupposes a free activity of thought and its isolation in relation to the object. It is precisely this presupposition which renders their harmony and even their contact problematic. “How does the subject take leave of itself to attain the object?” is what the problem of knowledge, in the last analysis, boils down to. Its true source is thus the concept of “subject” as elaborated by modern philosophy. The cogito presided over the subject’s birth. The cogito was the affirmation of the privileged nature of the subject’s immanent sphere, of its unique place in existence; hence, the cogito was the specificity of the subject’s connection to the rest of reality, the sui generis nature which opens up the passage from immanence to transcendence, the passage from ideas contained in the thinking substance to 4 their “formal existence.”The concept of the subject, understood as a substance having a specific position in the entire domain of being, presents us with difficulties of two kinds. First, how do we understand this leave-taking from the self which the thinking substance brings about and which displays an entirely original aspect? Indeed, we could say that thought, in reaching out toward objects, does not actually take leave of itself, since its objects—considered as ideas and contents of thought—are, in a certain sense, already within it. In order to make sense of this paradox, Descartes... (shrink)

Many prominent critiques of philosophical methods proceed by suggesting that some method is unreliable, especially in comparison to some alternative method. In light of this, it may seem natural to conclude that these (comparatively) unreliable methods should be abandoned. Drawing upon work on the division of cognitive labour in science, we argue things are not so straightforward. Rather, whether an unreliable method should be abandoned depends heavily on the crucial question of how we should divide philosophers’ time and effort between (...) different methods, in order to maximise our prospects of achieving epistemic success. We show that, in a range of cases, even a (comparatively) unreliable method deserves to be allocated some of these resources. (shrink)

What is it for philosophy to make progress? While various putative forms of philosophical progress have been explored in some depth, this overarching question is rarely addressed explicitly, perhaps because it has been assumed to be intractable or unlikely to have a single, unified answer. In this paper, we aim to show that the question is tractable, that it does admit of a single, unified answer, and that one such answer is plausible. This answer is, roughly, that philosophical progress consists (...) in putting people in a position to increase their understanding, where ‘increased understanding’ is a matter of better representing the network of dependence relations between phenomena. After identifying four desiderata for an account of philosophical progress, we argue that our account meets the desiderata in a particularly satisfying way. Among other things, the account explains how various other achievements, such as philosophical arguments, counterexamples, and distinctions, may contribute to progress. Finally, we consider the implications of our account for the pressing and contentious question of how much progress has been made in philosophy. (shrink)

This essay motivates a revised version of the epistemic condition of safety and then employs the revision to (i) challenge traditional conceptions of apriority, (ii) refute ‘strong privileged access’, and (iii) resolve a well-known puzzle about externalism and self-knowledge.

Online social networks have rapidly become a prominent and widely used service, offering a wealth of personal and sensitive information with significant security and privacy implications. Hence, OSNs are also an important—and popular—subject for research. To perform research based on real-life evidence, however, researchers may need to access OSN data, such as texts and files uploaded by users and connections among users. This raises significant ethical problems. Currently, there are no clear ethical guidelines, and researchers may end up performing ethically (...) questionable research, sometimes even when more ethical research alternatives exist. For example, several studies have employed “fake identities” to collect data from OSNs, but fake identities may be used for attacks and are considered a security issue. Is it legitimate to use fake identities for studying OSNs or for collecting OSN data for research? We present a taxonomy of the ethical challenges facing researchers of OSNs and compare different approaches. We demonstrate how ethical considerations have been taken into account in previous studies that used fake identities. In addition, several possible approaches are offered to reduce or avoid ethical misconducts. We hope this work will stimulate the development and use of ethical practices and methods in the research of online social networks. (shrink)

There is some consensus that for S to know that p, it cannot be merely a matter of luck that S’s belief that p is true. This consideration has led Duncan Pritchard and others to propose a safety condition on knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the safety condition is not a proper formulation of the intuition that knowledge excludes luck. We suggest an alternative proposal in the same spirit as safety, and find it lacking as well.

On their journeys toward senior athletic status, junior endurance athletes are faced with a multitude of stressors. How athletes react to stressors plays a vital part in effective adaptation to the demanding, ever-changing athletic environment. Sleep, the most valued recovery strategy available to athletes, has the potential to influence and balance athletic stress, and enable optimal functioning. However, sleep is sensitive to disturbances by stress, which is described by the concept of sleep reactivity. Among athletes, poor sleep quality is frequently (...) reported, but our understanding of the associations between stress and sleep in junior athletes is currently incomplete. The present study therefore investigated the themes of stress and sleep, and the associations between these variables with the use of in-depth semi-structured interviews in six junior endurance athletes. Data was analyzed qualitatively based on the Grounded Theory. The qualitative material was supplemented with quantitative data on subjective sleep quality, sleep reactivity, and mental strain. The main results showed that stress could be differentiated into relevant stressors and reactions to stress. Sleep could be differentiated into sleep benefits and sleep quality. All athletes identified relevant stressors, and all athletes were aware of the benefits of sleep for athletic functioning. However, athletes formed two distinctive categories based on the interactions between stress and sleep: three exhibited facilitative reactions to stress and good sleep quality, as well as low sleep reactivity, and low mental strain. The remaining participants exhibited maladaptive reactions to stress and poor sleep quality, as well as high sleep reactivity and high mental strain. Conceptualizing sleep quality based on the evaluation of stressors, reactions to stress, degree of mental strain, and the propensity to stress-related sleep disturbance may offer a plausible explanation for why the occurrence of stressors leads to poor sleep quality in some athletes, but not others. (shrink)

Cultural safety is a relatively new concept that has emerged in the New Zealand nursing context and is being taken up in various ways in Canadian health care discourses. Our research team has been exploring the relevance of cultural safety in the Canadian context, most recently in relation to a knowledge-translation study conducted with nurses practising in a large tertiary hospital. We were drawn to using cultural safety because we conceptualized it as being compatible with critical theoretical perspectives that foster (...) a focus on power imbalances and inequitable social relationships in health care; the interrelated problems of culturalism and racialization; and a commitment to social justice as central to the social mandate of nursing. Engaging in this knowledge-translation study has provided new perspectives on the complexities, ambiguities and tensions that need to be considered when using the concept of cultural safety to draw attention to racialization, culturalism, and health and health care inequities. The philosophic analysis discussed in this paper represents an epistemological grounding for the concept of cultural safety that links directly to particular moral ends with social justice implications. Although cultural safety is a concept that we have firmly positioned within the paradigm of critical inquiry, ambiguities associated with the notions of 'culture', 'safety', and 'cultural safety' need to be anticipated and addressed if they are to be effectively used to draw attention to critical social justice issues in practice settings. Using cultural safety in practice settings to draw attention to and prompt critical reflection on politicized knowledge, therefore, brings an added layer of complexity. To address these complexities, we propose that what may be required to effectively use cultural safety in the knowledge-translation process is a 'social justice curriculum for practice' that would foster a philosophical stance of critical inquiry at both the individual and institutional levels. (shrink)

Recent research has identified a tension between the Safety principle that knowledge is belief without risk of error, and the Closure principle that knowledge is preserved by competent deduction. Timothy Williamson reconciles Safety and Closure by proposing that when an agent deduces a conclusion from some premises, the agent’s method for believing the conclusion includes their method for believing each premise. We argue that this theory is untenable because it implies problematically easy epistemic access to one’s methods. Several possible solutions (...) are explored and rejected. (shrink)

In “Knowledge Under Threat” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2012), Tomas Bogardus proposes a counterexample to the safety condition for knowledge. Bogardus argues that the case demonstrates that unsafe knowledge is possible. I argue that the case just corroborates the well-known requirement that modal conditions like safety must be relativized to methods of belief formation. I explore several ways of relativizing safety to belief-forming methods and I argue that none is adequate: if methods were individuated in those ways, safety would fail (...) to explain several much-discussed cases. I then propose a plausible externalist principle of method individuation. On the one hand, relativizing safety to belief-forming methods in the way suggested allows the defender of safety to account for the cases. On the other hand, it shows that the target known belief of Bogardus’s example is safe. Finally, I offer a diagnosis of a common error about the kind of cases that are typically considered potential counterexamples to the necessity of the epistemic condition: proponents of the alleged counterexamples mistake a strong condition that I call super-safety for safety. (shrink)

In this paper, I first seek a relatively plausible formulation of the safety principle. To this end, I refute a recent form of safety by Duncan Pritchard and then defend another weaker form of safe...

IntroductionDeep brain stimulation (DBS) is increasingly used to treat the symptoms of various neurologic and psychiatric conditions. People can undergo the procedure during reproductive years but the safety of DBS in pregnancy remains relatively unknown given the paucity of published cases. We thus conducted a review of the literature to determine the state of current knowledge about DBS in pregnancy and to determine how eligibility criteria are approached in clinical trials with respect to pregnancy and the potential for pregnancy.MethodsA literature (...) review was conducted in EMBASE to identify articles involving DBS and pregnancy. Two reviewers independently analyzed the articles to confirm inclusion. Data extracted for analysis included conditions treated, complications at all stages of pregnancy, neonatal/pediatric outcomes, and DBS target. A second search was then conducted using www.clinicaltrials.gov. The same two reviewers then assessed whether each trial excluded pregnant individuals, lactating individuals, or persons of childbearing age planning to conceive. Also assessed was whether contraception had to be deemed adequate prior to enrollment.ResultsThe literature search returned 681 articles. Following independent analysis and agreement of two reviewers, 8 pregnancy related DBS articles were included for analysis. These articles described 27 subjects, 29 pregnancies (2 with subsequent pregnancies), and 31 infants (2 twin pregnancies). There was 1 preterm birth at 35 weeks, and 3 patients who experienced discomfort from the DBS battery (i.e., impulse generator) placement site. All 27 patients had a DBS device implanted before they became pregnant, which remained in use throughout their pregnancy. There was exclusion of pregnant individuals from 68% of 135 interventional trials involving DBS. Approximately 44% of these trials excluded persons of childbearing age not on “adequate contraception” or wishing to conceive in the coming years. Finally, 22% excluded breastfeeding persons.ConclusionThe data from 29 pregnancies receiving DBS treatment during pregnancy was not associated with unexpected pregnancy or post-partum complication patterns. Many clinical trials have excluded pregnant individuals. Documentation of outcomes in larger numbers of pregnancies will help clarify the safety profile and will help guide study designs that will safely include pregnant patients. (shrink)

Knowledge closure is, roughly, the following claim: For every agent S and propositions P and Q, if S knows P, knows that P implies Q, and believes Q because it is so implied, then S knows Q. Almost every epistemologist believes that closure is true. Indeed, they often believe that it so obviously true that any theory implying its denial is thereby refuted. Some prominent epistemologists have nevertheless denied it, most famously Fred Dretske and Robert Nozick. There are closure advocates (...) who see other virtues in those accounts, however, and so who introduce revisions of one sort or another in order to preserve closure while maintaining their spirit. One popular approach is to replace the “sensitivity” constraint at the heart of both of those accounts with a “safety” constraint, as advocated by Timothy Williamson, Duncan Pritchard, Ernest Sosa, Stephen Luper, and others. The purpose of this essay is to show that this approach does not succeed: safety does not save closure. And neither does a popular variation on the safety theme, the safe-basis or safe-indicator account. (shrink)

The Epistemic Objection says that certain theories of time imply that it is impossible to know which time is absolutely present. Standard presentations of the Epistemic Objection are elliptical—and some of the most natural premises one might fill in to complete the argument end up leading to radical skepticism. But there is a way of filling in the details which avoids this problem, using epistemic safety. The new version has two interesting upshots. First, while Ross Cameron alleges that the Epistemic (...) Objection applies to presentism as much as to theories like the growing block, the safety version does not overgeneralize this way. Second, the Epistemic Objection does generalize in a different, overlooked way. The safety objection is a serious problem for a widely held combination of views: “propositional temporalism” together with “metaphysical eternalism”. (shrink)