The success of digital COVID-19 contact tracing requires a strategy that successfully addresses the digital divide—inequitable access to technology such as smartphones. Lack of access both undermines the degree of social benefit achieved by the use of tracing apps, and exacerbates existing social and health inequities because those who lack access are likely to already be disadvantaged. Recently, Singapore has introduced portable tracing wearables (with the same functionality as a contact tracing app) to address the equity gap and promote public (...) health. We argue that governments have an ethical obligation to ensure fair access to the protective benefits of contract tracing during the pandemic and that wearables are an effective way of addressing some important equity issues. The most contentious issues about contact tracing apps have been the potential infringements of privacy and individual liberty, especially where the use of apps or other technology (such as wearables or QR codes) is required for access to certain spaces. Here we argue that wearables, as opposed to apps alone, will make a digital contact tracing mandate more practical and explain some conditions under which such a mandate would be justified. We focus on Singapore as a case study that has recently deployed contact tracing wearables nationally, but also reference debate about wearables in Australia and New Zealand. Our analysis will be relevant to counties trialling similar portable tracing wearables. (shrink)

COVID-19 has stolen millions of lives and devastated livelihoods around the world and led to the exacerbation of existing inequities within and between countries. This part of a tragic pattern in catastrophes, where the most vulnerable populations are typically the ones to bear the greatest burdens. Jecker and Au1 offer a keen observation of how one particular COVID-19 response—Zero COVID—appears particularly problematic from a health equity perspective. Under Zero COVID, countries enact stringent lockdowns and movement restrictions in order to keep (...) cases as low as possible. Yet such restrictive policies hurt disadvantaged populations the most, by severely curtailing their ability to earn a living and forcing them to remain in cramped living spaces for potentially extended periods of time. However, the link between Zero COVID and health inequity is more complex than it might at first appear. This is because Zero COVID is itself compatible with meaningful efforts to mitigate inequities, including those caused by Zero COVID policies themselves. Conversely, certain inequities seemingly characterised by Zero COVID may persist even when Zero COVID is abandoned, indicating their ultimate root and …. (shrink)

Njik ka Amaka: Further Discussions on the Philosophy of Integrative Humanism (A Contribution to African and Intercultural Philosophies) presents philosophy from the view point of African thought system and logic. It presents African philosophy not as a reactionary to another brand of philosophy as is popularly the case among writers of African philosophy but as an unspoken, unstated rival of the positions of other philosophical traditions, with great emphasis on the importance of intercultural philosophizing. Somehow, the work manages to be (...) eclectic in welding orientations in the spirit of intercultural philosophy and it makes no pretense that it was written primarily for the contemporary lover of wisdom. The focal point which remains unwavering throughout was the further development of integrative humanism as a theory in African philosophy. The language style of this work was carefully knitted in simplistic and in some places bombastic forms. Simplistic to appeal to all class of readers and bombastic to demonstrate the emerging orientation that one way to hit back at the domineering colonial languages would be to speak them in deconstructive manner. The Englishness or the Frenchness of those colonial languages are in this book broken; traditional meanings of words are in some places altered to reflect the African senses; some other words are reshaped in various forms to reflect what the African has in mind and what he means; idioms are reinterpreted to reflect the unabashed and highest degree of indomitable Africanness; this is because a language that would bear forth African truths if it yet remains foreign can only emerge from the ruins of the one that bore Western truths. The benchmark of the theory of integrative humanism as a vanguard for intercultural philosophy is a passage from bivalent to trivalent mode of logical interpretation wherein the intermediate position is hoisted as the necessary missing link of reality. (shrink)

Outlines a method of solving mathematical problems for teachers and students based upon the four steps of understanding the problem, devising a plan, carrying out the plan, and checking the results.

Reviewer gives a survey of the new phylogenetic theory of language recently published by Prof. Dr. G. Révész, founder and director of the Laboratory for experimental psychology of the University of Amsterdam ). The starting-point of the theory is the conception of "contact", defined by the author as the innate trend to be together or to co-operate, common to all socially living beings. This "theory of contact" is developed by the author in different directions and gives rise to the distinction (...) 1. of three degrees of communication: cry , call and word , 2. of three periods in the development of language: a pre-phase , a primevalphase and a final phase and 3. of three main functions of language: impelling , indication and interrogation , and leads to the conclusion that most probably the oldest form of human intercourse was restricted to the function of impelling . Prof. R. lays great stress on the in his opinion unsurmountable barrier between human and animal forms of communication. (shrink)