As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

It was not until the nineteenth century that Western nations came to replace mutilation, corporal punishment, and banishment as the favored method of criminal punishment with the more humane concept of imprisonment. Even then, however, a convicted inmate was viewed as nothing more than a slave of the state, entitled only to the most basic of human rights and subject to the whim and peril of his jailor's desire. The shift to imprisonment gradually was accompanied by the additional humanitarian demand (...) that prisons avail their charges of some minimum standard of human decency and necessity, which, by the early part of the twentieth century, had come to encompass the provision of medical care. The courts later came to acknowledge this as a fundamental right grounded in the Eighth Amendment's proscription against cruel and unusual punishments.Although the scope of a prisoner's constitutional right to medical care has been the subject of much debate before the courts, the majority of cases have focused only on the circumstances under which the deprivation of care will amount to a violation of the rights guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Brief Mention: Shameless Interests: The Decent Scholarship of Indecency*Kenneth J. ReckfordGood intentions go astray. I had meant simply to celebrate the ease and naturalness with which classical scholars treat obscene subject-matter nowadays, but there were difficulties, which may prove instructive.I had felt oddly grateful, after reading and reviewing Dover’s 1993 Frogs, for how he explained (and of course, printed) the old scatological jokes that Merry (1905) had omitted, and (...) which Adam Parry copied onto the blackboard for our fascinated Greek 106a class in fall, 1951. How strange they seem now, all those expurgated editions, those unhelpful commentaries, those mystery-keeping professors. Like Byron, we all had comic encounters with the “grosser parts”:They only add them all in an appendix,Which saves, in fact, the trouble of an index...Perhaps we worked harder than Byron. I remember, early on, struggling with Cat. 56 (which even Housman misinterpreted in his notorious 1931 “Praefanda,” for Catullus does not look on, masturbating, but plunges in, making a threesome); and I struggled with Martial. I may even, at sixteen, have been the last of the Victorians, learning about sexual by-paths from Latin poetic grammar and syntax. (Loebs were forbidden under pain of death: but had I consulted Ker’s Martial, I would have found the offending passages translated into Italian, not English: “On the theory,” Rolfe Humphries once said, “that God doesn’t understand Italian.”) We laughed; it was good fun. Yet our half-prurient inquisitiveness was mixed with genuine philological research; we resented roadblocks to learning; and years later, when Fordyce’s Catullus appeared with twenty-two “dirty poems” left out, we felt absolutely betrayed.So I give thanks for unexpurgated texts and helpful commentaries (such as Dover’s Clouds and Frogs, and Henderson’s Lysistrata, and Ferguson’s Juvenal); for good translations, too, like Charles Martin’s The Poems of Catullus (Johns Hopkins, 1990), which combines plain speaking with a certain subtle elegance. I honor the pioneers: Arrowsmith and Parker, and Sullivan; Henderson’s Maculate Muse (1975) and Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (1978; earlier writings too); Adams’ Latin Sexual [End Page 311] Vocabulary (1982) and Richlin’s Garden of Priapus (1983).* Here were basic materials for further study and interpretation. Definitions and distinctions came first: between primary obscenities and euphemisms; between different generic conventions and expected attitudes (as in oratory, comedy, epigram). In art, too, the blacking-out of erect penises on Greek vases has been removed; wall-paintings from Pompeian brothels have been made accessible, even without a bribe; budding scholars of both sexes discourse learnedly on such subjects as “Male Discharge Imagery on Greek Vase-Painting” (at a 1995 colloquium); and now Martin Kilmer’s Greek Erotica (1994) has brought new precision to the study of, e.g., intercrural intercourse between “courting” men and youths, and heterosexual intercourse a tergo (where an oil flask may suggest anal penetration, as against vaginal). The details, the illustrations and descriptions, are increasingly accurate. Gradually, too, old-time scholarly taboos have been breached, so we can handle “dirty” words and pictures without fear of degradation. We are most grateful that obscenities are no longer kept in quarantine, or treated as the exclusive hunting preserve of a “gentleman’s club” (writing in Latin, of course), so that, taking our cue from Catullus and Martial, whose “poems are dirty but our lives were pure,” we may pursue the decent scholarship of indecency.Let me, though, introduce two caveats for philologists. First, that the poetic indecencies of Aristophanes, Catullus, Martial, and Juvenal remain “untranslatable”: not from embarrassment now, but from linguistic impotence. Take Catullus’ mentula, that ugly, dangling noun, so much more evocative than “prick” or “cock”; or take irrumabo and irrumator, those powerful, almost onomatopoeic four-syllable words. “Fuck in the [End Page 312] mouth” (early Richlin) explains but loses the tone. Martin does better with Cat. 16:I’ll fuck the pair of you as you prefer it,oral Aurelius, anal Furius...a touch of wit, accessible to non-Latinists. (Will Shackleton Bailey’s new Loeb of Martial send American students scurrying to their dictionaries to look up “sodomized”?)My second caveat is more nostalgic. In our innocent (or... (shrink)

Bulang He,1,2 Jeffrey M Hamdorf2 1Liver and Kidney Transplant Unit, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Perth, WA, Australia; 2School of Surgery, The University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia Aims: The aim of this paper was to review the current status of laparoscopic/robotic kidney transplant and evaluate its feasibility and safety in comparison with conventional standard "open" kidney transplant. Methods: An electronic search of PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane library database was performed to identify the papers between January 1980 and (...) June 2013 that reported on laparoscopic/robotic kidney transplantation. The terms "laparoscopic kidney/renal transplant" and "robotic kidney/renal transplant " were used. Cross-referencing was also used to find the further publications. Only English language reports were selected and accepted for descriptive analysis. Results: A total of 17 papers and abstracts were retrieved. There were two case-control studies of small volume. High-level evidence comparing the safety and efficacy of laparoscopic/robotic kidney transplant with conventional open kidney transplant was not available at the time of this review. Conclusion: The limited published data have suggested that laparoscopic/robotic kidney transplant may offer the advantages of less pain, better cosmesis, possible shorter hospital stay, and fewer wound complications, without compromising graft function. Accordingly, some immunosuppressive agents, such as sirolimus, might be able to be commenced earlier, after laparoscopic/robotic kidney transplant. The techniques are various at this early stage. A uniformed operative technique may be established in the near future. With refinement of laparoscopic devices, this technique may be widely employed. Further studies will be needed to demonstrate the advantages of laparoscopic/robotic kidney transplant over the conventional open kidney transplant. Keywords: laparoscopic surgery, robotic surgery. (shrink)

Should engineering ethics be taught? Despite the obvious truism that we all want our students to be moral engineers who practice virtuous professional behavior, I argue, in this article that the question itself obscures several ambiguities that prompt preliminary resolution. Upon clarification of these ambiguities, and an attempt to delineate key issues that make the question a philosophically interesting one, I conclude that engineering ethics not only should not, but cannot, be taught if we understand “teaching engineering ethics” to mean (...) training engineers to be moral individuals (as some advocates seem to have proposed). However, I also conclude that there is a justification to teaching engineering ethics, insofar as we are able to clearly identify the most desirable and efficacious pedagogical approach to the subject area, which I propose to be a case study-based format that utilizes the principle of human cognitive pattern recognition. (shrink)

Pressures to contain budgets and provide cost‐effective care are widespread in the American health care system, no less in psychiatry than elsewhere. The ethical implications of such economically motivated trends, however, become even more important in the area of psychiatric medicine.

The author starts from the traditional American notion that technology might offer a way to decrease the horror and suffering of warfare. He points out that historically this assumption is flawed in that past technological advances, from gunpowder weapons to bombers, have only made warfare more--not less--bloody. With a relentless logic, Colonel Dunlap takes to task those who say that the Revolution in Military Affairs has the potential to make war less bloody. He covers the technological landscape from precision-guided munitions (...) and Information Warfare to the use of space for military operations to raise issues that could pose difficult ethical, legal and moral problems for statesmen and soldiers. Some of these conundrums are so confounding that the author could claim that in all humility his only purpose was to raise these issues to prompt debate. But Colonel Dunlap takes the next step to outline several broad thematic avenues that may help us all address the difficult problems that lie ahead. (shrink)

This essay seeks to identify significant theological, philosophical, cultural, political, and moral issues that are raised by the four participants of the exchange on responding to terrorism. It argues that the “just war” concept, as classically developed and refined within the mainstream of the Christian moral tradition over the last two millennia, furnishes the best—indeed, the only morally responsible—alternative to addressing and deterring the terrorist phenomenon, given the commitment to justice and neighbor-love which underpins the tradition.

Technical expertise must be accompanied by an appreciation of the social, political, and moral questions involved in its application. However, because such questions do not serve a utilitarian purpose in achieving short-term economic advantage, they are generally considered as superfluous frills, lying outside the framework of technical education. Therefore, a new philosophy is proposed—one that incorporates values thought to be important for a humane, just, and sustainable society. The author shares a perspective gained from 15 years of engineering experience in (...) industry and 15 years of community college teaching in engineering and technology. (shrink)

Alfred Loisy and Maude Petre, like others who were associated with the Modernist movement in the Roman Catholic Church, shared hopes in a renewed Catholicism that would bring it into a positive relationship with modernity. With the Vatican condemnation of Modernism in 1907, Loisy abandoned all optimism for viable reform in the Church, and instead looked forward to a Religion of Humanity. While Petre found Loisy's ideal attractive, she retained a hope that the Church would undergo renewal at some future (...) point. Each of them had to come to terms with a dark side of modernity that emerged with the Great War. Loisy's Guerre et religion and Petre's Reflections of a Non-Combatant preserve a record of their struggles to preserve their faith in modernity and in humanity. (shrink)

The first part of the paper sketches the rationale for the classical theistic thesis that, though God is not really related to the world, the world is really related to God. Part II delineates four sets of recent criticisms ofthis thesis: (a) an objection which assesses it as conflating transparent and opaque construals of intentional propositions, (b) a dilemma which regards it as undermining either free divine creativity or God’s knowledge of the contingent, (c) arguments which view its adherence to (...) an absolute divine immutability and independence as in conflict both with God’s knowledge of a changing creation and with human knowledge of God, and (d) two religiously inspired objections which contend that the thesis is contradictory to the biblical claim that God is personally related to the world. Part III develops the linguistic essence of the classical thesis through the syntactical insights of Sommers’ logic and defends it against the objections posed. (shrink)

Louis Frédéric Ancillon was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres whose imagined dialogue between Berkeley and Hume was read to the Academy in 1796 and published in 1799. It is important as an indicator of the reception of Hume and Berkeley in francophone philosophical circles in late eighteenth-century Prussia. Our introduction is followed by an English translation with notes.

This essay-response attempts to underscore the priority of broader moral-philosophical questions over specific “difficult” scenarios in which human behavior has been “determined” by genetic predilection or changes in brain structure. That is to say, a society must be capable of making basic moral distinctions—between good and evil, justice and injustice, acceptable and unacceptable behavior—before it can even begin to adjudicate the more “difficult” cases—cases such as those wherein brain structure has been chemically or surgically altered. In the end, at issue (...) is whether human beings—all human beings, only some human beings, or no human being—can be held personally morally responsible for any actions. Notwithstanding the complexity of human behavior, in theological and moral-philosophical terms the matter is governed by our convictions about what it means to be truly “human” and how we understand the implications of being fashioned in the imago Dei. (shrink)

The H‐NS protein is a major component of the nucleoid in Gram‐negative bacterial cells. It is a global regulator of transcription that affects the expression of many genes, including virulence genes in pathogenic species. At a local level, it facilitates the formation of nucleoprotein structures that repress transcriptional promoter function. H‐NS can form bridges between different DNA molecules or between different sections of the same molecule, allowing it to compact and impose structure on the nucleoid. A recent paper by Dame (...) et al.1 reports new insights into H‐NS‐mediated DNA bridging that were obtained using an optical tweezers device. BioEssays 29: 212–216, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)