The Survey of Organizational Research Climate (SORC) is a validated tool to facilitate promotion of research integrity and research best practices. This work uses the SORC to assess shared and individual perceptions of the research climate in universities and academic departments and relate these perceptions to desirable and undesirable research practices. An anonymous web- and mail-based survey was administered to randomly selected biomedical and social science faculty and postdoctoral fellows in the United States. Respondents reported their perceptions of the research (...) climates at their universities and primary departments, and the frequency with which they engaged in desirable and undesirable research practices. More positive individual perceptions of the research climate in one’s university or department were associated with higher likelihoods of desirable, and lower likelihoods of undesirable, research practices. Shared perceptions of the research climate tended to be similarly predictive of both desirable and undesirable research practices as individuals’ deviations from these shared perceptions. Study results supported the central prediction that more positive SORC-measured perceptions of the research climate were associated with more positive reports of research practices. There were differences with respect to whether shared or individual climate perceptions were related to desirable or undesirable practices but the general pattern of results provide empirical evidence that the SORC is predictive of self-reported research behavior. (shrink)

Development and targeting efforts by academic organizations to effectively promote research integrity can be enhanced if they are able to collect reliable data to benchmark baseline conditions, to assess areas needing improvement, and to subsequently assess the impact of specific initiatives. To date, no standardized and validated tool has existed to serve this need. A web- and mail-based survey was administered in the second half of 2009 to 2,837 randomly selected biomedical and social science faculty and postdoctoral fellows at 40 (...) academic health centers in top-tier research universities in the United States. Measures included the Survey of Organizational Research Climate (SORC) as well as measures of perceptions of organizational justice. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses yielded seven subscales of organizational research climate, all of which demonstrated acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s α ranging from 0.81 to 0.87) and adequate test–retest reliability (Pearson r ranging from 0.72 to 0.83). A broad range of correlations between the seven subscales and five measures of organizational justice (unadjusted regression coefficients ranging from 0.13 to 0.95) document both construct and discriminant validity of the instrument. The SORC demonstrates good internal (alpha) and external reliability (test–retest) as well as both construct and discriminant validity. (shrink)

Neuroscientists are searching for the engram within the conceptual framework established by John Locke's theory of mind. This framework was elaborated before the development of information theory, before the development of information processing machines and the science of computation, before the discovery that molecules carry hereditary information, before the discovery of the codon code and the molecular machinery for editing the messages written in this code and translating it into transcription factors that mark abstract features of organic structure such as (...) anterior and distal. The search for the engram needs to abandon Locke's conceptual framework and work within a framework informed by these developments. The engram is the medium by which information extracted from past experience is transmitted to the computations that inform future behavior. The information-conveying symbols in the engram are rapidly generated in the course of computations, which implies that they are molecules. (shrink)

Ancillary care is care that research participants need that is not essential to make the research safe or scientifically valid and is not needed to remedy injuries that eventuate as a result of the research project itself. Ancillary care duties have recently been defended on the grounds of beneficence, entrustment, utility and consent. Justice has also been mentioned as a possible basis of ancillary care duties, but little attention has been paid to this approach. In this paper, the author seeks (...) to rectify this omission by arguing that ancillary care duties can be based on a principle of justice as rectification. (shrink)

Today's college students have more knowledge available to them than can be absorbed; mastery of a subject area creates siloes where nearly every course is tailored to comprehending subject matter that may be outdated before they graduate. But learning is more than subject-matter expertise. Our fast-paced environment requires instantaneous reactions to complex questions. Our instant-messaging age champions quick response over reflection or thought--even the president governs by Twitter. Yet the ethical dilemmas are no less complex than the subject matter; cyber (...) security, prison reform, labor rights, abortion, artificial intelligence, or gun laws are common table topics over lunch. Struggling through that complexity is central to understanding its implications for our culture. This book brings together some of the leading ethicists in the country to consider the rightful place of ethics in the university today. The authors make the case that higher education has a special duty to empower students to cultivate their character, ethically assess situations, and prepare them for an increasingly complex world. -- back cover. (shrink)

Debate on the potential and uses of human stem cells tends to be conducted by two constituencies—ethicists and scientists. On many occasions there is little communication between the two, with the result that ethical debate is not informed as well as it might be by scientific insights. The aim of this paper is to highlight those scientific insights that may be of relevance for ethical debate.Environmental factors play a significant role in identifying stem cells and their various subtypes. Research related (...) to the role of the microenvironment has led to emphasis upon “plasticity”, which denotes the ability of one type of stem cell to undergo a transition to cells from other lineages. This could increase the value given to adult stem cells, in comparison with embryonic stem cell research. Any such conclusion should be treated with caution, however, since optimism of this order is not borne out by current research.The role of the environment is also important in distinguishing between the terms totipotency and pluripotency. We argue that blastocysts and embryonic stem cells are only totipotent if they can develop within an appropriate environment. In the absence of this, they are merely pluripotent. Hence, blastocysts in the laboratory are potentially totipotent, in contrast to their counterparts within the human body which are actually totipotent. This may have implications for ethical debate, suggesting as it does that arguments based on potential for life may be of limited relevance. (shrink)

Abstract Physiological psychology has its conceptual roots in stimulus?response behaviourism. The resurgence of cognitive concepts in mainstream psychology has led to a separation between the two, largely due to the failure of most cognitive theories to specify how their explanatory processes could be realised in the nervous system. Connectionism looks as if it may be able to bridge this gap. The problem is that connectionism takes a radically different view of the brain from that adopted in traditional physiological psychology. This (...) paper looks at some of the implications of connectionism for how physiological psychology should develop. It also looks at the implications of the findings of physiological psychology for connectionism. (shrink)

Christian miller invites further clarification about the relationship between accountability and autonomy. Whereas embracing accountability to others for one’s responsibilities in those relationships emphasizes relationality, autonomy accents the individual’s own capacities to exhibit agency in enacting one’s decisions. Accordingly, we theorize that relational capacities for empathic concern and perspective-taking are especially important in the virtue of accountability. The capacity for self-regulation may serve both one’s autonomous pursuits and accountability for carrying out one’s responsibilities...

The Health Protection Agency has recently attempted to create a postmortem tissue archive to determine the prevalence of abnormal prion protein. The success of this archive was prevented because the Health Protection Agency could not convince coroners to support the study’s methodology and participate on that basis. The findings of this paper detail and support the view that the Coroners’ Society of England and Wales’s refusal to participate was misguided and failed to appreciate that coroners have a moral obligation to (...) protect public health. Measures to assist coroners in fulfilling this role are proposed. (shrink)

Recent research on the relations of personality to well-being shows that the people who are most healthy, happy and fulfilled are those who are high in all three of the character traits of self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence as measured by the Temperament and Character Inventory. In the past, the healthy personality has often been considered to require only high self-directedness and high cooperativeness. However, now the self-centred behaviour of people who are low in self-transcendence is degrading the conditions needed for (...) sustainable life by all human beings. Consequently, human beings need to and can develop their capacity for self-transcendence in order to maintain their individual and collective well-being. (shrink)

Pain is not a primitive sensory event but rather a complexperception and a process by which a person interacts with theinternal and external environments, constructs meaning, andengages in action. Because folk beliefs are central to meaning,folk concepts of pain play multiple causal roles in a painpatient's interaction with health care providers and others.In every case, the notion of pain is linked to a goal-directedbehavior that is useful to the person. The wide variation inconcepts of pain across individuals suffering with painunderscores (...) the richness and complexity of the pain experience.In some cases involving chronic pain, the patient may form amaladaptive cluster of behaviors around the concept of pain.Patient beliefs and expectations are an important part of manychronic pain syndromes, and patients can benefit fromintervention directed at revising the individual's folk model of pain. Memetics offers a framework for identifying the memesthat patients hold and determining whether patient memes fitor clash with provider memes. (shrink)

We propose a Quantum Field Theory description of beams on a Mach–Zehnder interferometer and apply the method to describe Interaction Free Measurements, concluding that there is a change of momentum of the fields in IFMs. Analysing the factors involved in the probability of emission of low-energy photons, we argue that they do not yield meaningful contributions to the probabilities of the IFMs.

This book charts new ground, specifically, in its negotiation of a definition of animal welfare, in its systematic discussion of the organizations actually ...