As society becomes more aware of the rights of individuals, ethical issues become of increasing importance. Many research funders, including the research councils, increasingly emphasise research governance and ethical review in their consideration of submitted proposals. Little is known, however, about what universities do over ethical scrutiny and in order to find out the authors undertook a national study of all universities in the United Kingdom. The focus of the study was on human volunteers for research outside the remit of (...) the National Health Service. The key questions being: to what extent do universities undertake ethical scrutiny of research and, if so, how? The broad conclusion is that when this survey was carried out in the autumn of 2003, the majority of universities were aware of the need for the ethical scrutiny of research on human subjects although in many of those universities the scrutiny system was being developed at the time of completion of the questionnaire. In some cases practice appeared to lag behind awareness and whilst there were some very good examples there were also some which were below an ‘acceptable’ standard. Recommendations are made concerning structures, coverage and membership for systems of ethical scrutiny within the university sector. (shrink)

The increase in drop-out rates, especially among older people, in longitudinal studies is a matter for concern if the results are to be valid. The research reported here contains a number of pieces of evidence that might help address the problem. These include a literature review, a survey of some longitudinal studies, secondary (quantitative and qualitative) analysis of the data from a longitudinal study of civil servants (the Whitehall II study), and new data from focus groups and telephone interviews with (...) participants from this current study. The findings relate to reasons why older people continue to take part in such studies, why they drop out and what might encourage them to continue participating. The main reasons for drop out relate to being older, having cognitive impairment and poor functioning, living alone, being a woman and being less educated. There were also a range of practical reasons including the study being too time-consuming and problems with transport. (shrink)

New techniques have made genome modification cheaper, easier, and faster than before, leading to a boom in research—both “basic” research and research applied to many species, and to germlines as well as somatic cells, with especially strong interest in biomedical uses. Given the scope and potential power of this work, it is vital that people be provided with accurate information about what is being done or proposed, and why. Such information is crucial to their making good decisions both in their (...) private roles as patients and in their public roles as citizens. Communicating this information, however, is not easy.Metaphors can be useful in explaining these kinds of complex biological processes. They present the... (shrink)

:Academic Medical Centers offer patient care and perform research. Increasingly, AMCs advertise to the public in order to garner income that can support these dual missions. In what follows, we raise concerns about the ways that advertising blurs important distinctions between them. Such blurring is detrimental to AMC efforts to fulfill critically important ethical responsibilities pertaining both to science communication and clinical research, because marketing campaigns can employ hype that weakens research integrity and contributes to therapeutic misconception and misestimation, undermining (...) the informed consent process that is essential to the ethical conduct of research. We offer ethical analysis of common advertising practices that justify these concerns. We also suggest the need for a deliberative body convened by the Association of American Medical Colleges and others to develop a set of voluntary guidelines that AMCs can use to avoid in the future, the problems found in many current AMC advertising practices. (shrink)

Numerous social, economic and academic pressures can have a negative impact on representations of biomedical research. We review several of the forces playing an increasingly pernicious role in how health and science information is interpreted, shared and used, drawing discussions towards the role of narrative. In turn, we explore how aspects of narrative are used in different social contexts and communication environments, and present creative responses that may help counter the negative trends. As traditional methods of communication have in many (...) ways failed the public, changes in approach are required, including the creative use of narratives. (shrink)

We report on the small-scale (0.5 13 h - 1M, a large-scale bias of ~2.0 and a satellite fraction of 12 ± 2 per cent. Thus, these galaxies occupy haloes with average masses in between those of the higher redshift BOSS CMASS sample and the original SDSS I/II luminous red galaxy sample © 2012 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society © doi:10.1093/mnras/sts314.

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

The guiding premise of this chapter is that we, as teachers in higher education, must consider how the content and form of our teaching can foster inclusivity through a responsiveness to neurodiverse learning styles. A narrow pedagogical focus on lectures, textual engagement, and essay-writing threatens to exclude neurodivergent students whose ways of learning and making sense of the world may not be best supported through these traditional forms of pedagogy. As we discuss in this chapter, we, as engineering ethics educators, (...) designed and implemented a new engineering ethics exercise with which we aimed to promote inclusivity at the levels of form and content. At the content level, students were invited to critically engage with inclusivity-undermining ableist assumptions in technology development. This took shape, at the form level, through a hands-on ‘material tinkering’ workshop in which students collaboratively and creatively altered (or ‘hacked’) artifacts used in contexts of disability and healthcare, so as to operationalize values of inclusivity and accessibility. Our hunch was that this hands-on tinkering workshop would simultaneously encourage a meaningful way of engagement with these ethical issues and values, while also enacting a more inclusive learning environment by enriching the range of pedagogical activities and learning formats available to our students.As we aim to show in this chapter, we believe this hunch largely panned out – though there are clear areas for future improvement pertaining to the pilot exercise itself and the research we conducted on the exercise. We begin by offering a description of our tinkering exercise. We discuss the exercise’s source of inspiration (Sect. 16.2.1) and its implementation (Sect. 16.2.2), which is visually captured via photographic documentation. We then discuss (Sect. 16.3) how we utilized a triangulated research method to assess the pedagogical value of the exercise. After we discuss our findings, we conclude by identifying areas for future improvement (Sect. 16.4). (shrink)

Epistemic agency is a crucial concept in many different areas of philosophy and the cognitive sciences. It is crucial in dual process theories of cognition as well as theories of metacognition and mindreading, self-control, and moral agency. But what is epistemic agency? The Tinkering Mind argues that epistemic agency has two distinct and incompatible definitions. It can be simply understood as intentional mental action, or as a distinct non-voluntary form of evaluative agency. The core argument of the book demonstrates (...) that both definitions lead to surprising and counterintuitive consequences. If epistemic agency is a form of intentional action, then this implies that the radical theory of extended cognition has to be true. If, on the other hand, epistemic agency is not intentional action but evaluative agency, then intentional epistemic actions like deliberation are not truly cognitive but merely catalytic. Once established, the distinction between these two options sheds new light on various and diverse philosophical and psychological debates from dual process theories to debates on choice and self-control. (shrink)

The general anti-abortionist line is that abortion is wrong because it is the killing of innocent people. The main pro-abortionist response to this has been to deny that what is killed in an abortion is, properly speaking, a person. Killing these things merely prevents another person from being added to the world, just as would contraception, except at a later stage in the total process; abortion is not, therefore, any kind of murder, any deprivation of a person's life. Kelly and (...) Schedler now raise an interesting new question about this: suppose we do not kill the fetus, but merely painlessly prevent it from developing? This process they call ‘tinkering’. And they infer, from an apparently reasonable reconstruction of this standard pro-abortionist argument that “5′, Therefore, any non-viable fetus may be tinkered with”, and they affirm, “Presumably 5′ is morally repugnant”, And from this, in turn, they eventually infer that abortion itself is morally wrong, the argument being that there is no relevant difference between abortion and tinkering. This is an interesting argument. It is a good one? I will argue that it is not. (shrink)

The guiding premise of this chapter is that we, as teachers in higher education, must consider how the content and form of our teaching can foster inclusivity through a responsiveness to neurodiverse learning styles. A narrow pedagogical focus on lectures, textual engagement, and essay-writing threatens to exclude neurodivergent students whose ways of learning and making sense of the world may not be best supported through these traditional forms of pedagogy. As we discuss in this chapter, we, as engineering ethics educators, (...) designed and implemented a new engineering ethics exercise with which we aimed to promote inclusivity at the levels of form and content. At the content level, students were invited to critically engage with inclusivity-undermining ableist assumptions in technology development. This took shape, at the formal level, through a hands-on ‘material tinkering’ workshop in which students collaboratively and creatively altered (or ‘hacked’) artifacts used in contexts of disability and healthcare, so as to operationalize values of inclusivity and accessibility. Our hunch was that this hands-on tinkering workshop would simultaneously encourage a meaningful way of engagement with these ethical issues and values, while also enacting a more inclusive learning environment by enriching the range of pedagogical activities and learning formats available to our students. As we aim to show in this chapter, we believe this hunch largely panned out - though there are clear areas for future improvement pertaining to the pilot exercise itself and the research we conducted on the exercise. We begin by offering a description of our tinkering exercise. We discuss the exercise’s source of inspiration (2.1) and its implementation (2.2), which is visually captured via photographic documentation. We then discuss (3) how we utilized a triangulated research method to assess the pedagogical value of the exercise. After we discuss our findings, we conclude by identifying areas for future improvement (4). (shrink)

Using a design-based research approach, we studied ways to advance opportunities for children and families to engage in engineering design practices in an informal educational setting. 213 families with 5–11-year-old children were observed as they visited a tinkering exhibit at a children’s museum during one of three iterations of a program posing an engineering design challenge. Children’s narrative reflections about their experience were recorded immediately after tinkering. Across iterations of the program, changes to the exhibit design and facilitation (...) provided by museum staff corresponded to increased families’ engagement in key engineering practices. In the latter two cycles of the program, families engaged in the most testing, and in turn, redesigning. Further, in the latter cycles, the more children engaged in testing and retesting during tinkering, the more their narratives contained engineering-related content. The results advance understanding and the evidence base for educational practices that can promote engineering learning opportunities for children. (shrink)

Suppose that a school restricts student expression critical of homosexual conduct yet allows or actively supports student expression that promotes acceptance and tolerance of gays and lesbians. Can such a policy be justified if the anti-gay speech disrupts the educational environment of the school while the pro-gay speech does not? Or does the differential treatment of anti-gay and pro-gay speech constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination because it distorts the marketplace of ideas within the school? Can viewpoint discrimination ever be justified on (...) the ground that anti-gay speech invades the rights of others under Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969)? These were among the questions debated by Judges Reinhardt and Kozinski in the Ninth Circuit's now-vacated panel opinion in Harper v. Poway Unified School District, 445 F.3d 1166 (9th Cir. 2006), but their significance to the law of student speech is quite general. Courts are increasingly becoming concerned with the question of whether Tinker allows viewpoint-based restrictions of student speech, but so far jurists have not reached agreement on this question or even on the simpler question of what counts as viewpoint discrimination. This article attempts to clarify the emerging debate about the permissibility of viewpoint discrimination under Tinker and proposes modifications to the Tinker framework that would enable courts to deal more fruitfully with charges that school officials have imposed viewpoint-based restrictions on student speech. I argue that we should think of viewpoint discrimination as purposeful restriction of expression on the basis of governmental disagreement with the message. Tinker must be understood to bar purposeful viewpoint discrimination, but the conclusion that a school speech restriction constitutes purposeful viewpoint discrimination will come at the end rather than at the beginning of constitutional analysis. A school will never announce that it has restricted student speech on the basis of disagreement with the message; instead, it will claim that it has regulated speech to prevent harm. And this is something that schools (and the state more generally) may sometimes do - at least with sufficient justification. Tinker obviously contemplates the regulation of speech where necessary to prevent two specific sorts of harms - disruption to the school's mission and violations of the rights of other students - and so must require courts to distinguish between school speech restrictions based on impermissible ideological purposes and those based on the permissible purposes of preventing disruptions or violations of student rights. Tinker's substantial disruption test, I contend, should primarily be understood as a mechanism for helping courts to smoke out these impermissible purposes. (shrink)

In response to arguments against the existence of God, and in response to perceived conflicts between divine attributes, theists often face pressure to give up some pretheoretically attractive thesis about the divine attributes. One wonders: when does this unacceptably water down our concept of God, and when is it, as van Inwagen says, ‘permissible tinkering’ with the concept of God? A natural and widely deployed answer is that it is permissible tinkering iff it is does not violate the (...) claim that God is the greatest possible being. Call this the ’perfect being defense.’ In this paper I lay out some influential uses of the perfect being defense, and then argue that this strategy for defending theism fails. (shrink)

Tinkering with technologies and other human-made artifacts is a longstanding practice. Freedom to tinker has largely existed without formal legal recognition. Tinkering has typically taken place in an unregulated zone within which people were at liberty to act unobstructed by others so long as they did not harm others. The main reason why it now seems desirable to articulate some legal principles about freedom to tinker and why it needs to be preserved is because freedom to tinker is (...) being challenged by some legal developments. This Article explains that user-innovators have traditionally had considerable freedom to tinker under trade secrecy, patent, and trademark laws. Although copyright law permits a modest degree of tinkering with existing products, it restricts freedom to tinker more than other IP laws. Copyright law and sometimes contract law place substantial constraints on user rights to tinker with and modify computer programs and other digital works. These constraints are of particular concern to tinkerers because computer programs are embedded in such a wide range of technologies these days. This Article offers suggestions about how and why the law should protect a zone of freedom to tinker for socially beneficial purposes. (shrink)

We examine the distribution and interpretation of post-copular noun phrases in French when they appear with and without an indefinite article (_Marie est (une) physicienne_). We propose that the alternation is due to the fact that the indefinite article marks saturation of an NP-internal argument slot, and show that because of this, post-copular indefinite NPs are usually but not always existentially quantified, while bare NPs are predicative. This theory leads to new perspectives both on cross-linguistic marking of post-copular NPs and (...) on the treatment of the indefinite article. (shrink)

On Jagiello et al.'s cultural action framework, end-goal resolvability and causal transparency make possible the transmission of complex technologies through low-fidelity cultural learning. We offer three further features of goal-directed action sequences – specificity, riskiness, and complexity – which alter the effectiveness of low-fidelity cultural learning. Incorporating these into the cultural action framework generates further novel, testable predictions for bifocal stance theory.

Cognitive Gadgetsoffers a new, convincing perspective on the origins of our distinctive cognitive faculties, coupled with a clear, innovative research program. Although we broadly endorse Heyes’ ideas, we raise some concerns about her characterisation of evolutionary psychology and the relationship between biology and culture, before discussing the potential fruits of examining cognitive gadgets through the lens of active inference.