Biobanks and biospecimen collections are becoming a primary means of delivering personalized diagnostics and tailoring individualized therapeutics. This shift towards precision medicine requires interactions among a variety of stakeholders, including the public, patients, healthcare providers, government, and donors. Very few studies have investigated the role of healthcare students in biobanking and biospecimen donations. The main aims of this study were to evaluate the knowledge of senior healthcare students about biobanks and to assess the students’ willingness to donate biospecimens and the (...) factors influencing their attitudes. A cross-sectional study was conducted among senior healthcare students at King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. The data were obtained using a self-administered questionnaire in English. In addition to the respondents’ biographical data section, the questionnaire assessed the respondents’ general knowledge about biobanking, the factors influencing their willingness to donate biospecimens to biobanks and their general attitudes towards biomedical research. A total of 597 senior healthcare students were included in the study. The general knowledge score was 3.2 out of 7. Only approximately 44% and 27% of students were aware of the terms “Human Genome Project” and “biobank,” respectively. The majority of the students were willing to donate biospecimens to biobanks. Multiple factors were significantly associated with their willingness to donate, including their perceived general health, past experience with both tissue testing and tissue donation, biobanking knowledge score and biomedical research attitude score. The main reasons for students’ willingness to donate were advancement of medical research and societal benefits, whereas misuse of biospecimens and confidentiality breaches were the main reasons for a reluctance to donate. Despite their strong willingness to donate biospecimens, students exhibited a notable lack of knowledge about biobanking and the HGP. To expedite the transition towards PM, it is highly recommended to enhance healthcare curricula by including more educational and awareness programmes to familiarize students with OMICs technologies in addition to the scope of research and clinical applications. (shrink)

Drawing on John Dewey and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book employs philosophy as a conceptual resource to develop new methodological and analytical tools for conducting in situ empirical investigations. Chapter one explores the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Dewey. Chapter two exposits Deweyan ideas of embodiment, the primacy of the aesthetic encounter, and aesthetically expressive meaning underdeveloped in Wittgenstein. Chapter three introduces the method of practical epistemological analysis and a model of situated epistemic relations to investigate the learning of body (...) techniques in dinghy sailing. The concluding chapter introduces a model of situated artistic relations to investigate the learning of artistic techniques of self-expression in the Swedish sloyd classroom. (shrink)

This is the definitive collection of the ethical work of the great Oxford moral philosopher H. A. Prichard. Prichard is famous for his ethical intuitionism: he argued that moral obligation cannot be reduced to anything else, but is perceived by direct intuition. The essays previously included in the posthumous collection Moral Obligation are now augmented by a selection of previously unpublished writings from Prichard's manuscripts, allowing for the first time a full view of his distinctive contribution to moral philosophy, at (...) just the time when intuitionism is enjoying a revival of interest. (shrink)

On 26 March 20091, I introduced in the U.S. Senate a piece of legislation designed to establish a National Criminal Justice Commission. The Presidential level blue-ribbon commission would be charge...

Entrepreneurship has flourished in recent years; however, since education on how to raise funds has received little attention from scholars, obtaining funds remains a difficult task. The development of crowdfunding has provided new opportunities to entrepreneurs, thus solving the funding, marketing, and distribution problems they previously faced. The main purpose of this study is to organize crowdfunding literature and to develop a crowdfunding curriculum grounded on output-based education. Students are asked to develop a product and a crowdfunding plan within the (...) span of one semester. This study explains the teaching content separately from the crowdfunding plan competition, course elements, and timetable. (shrink)

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the design of narrative within Mass Effect 2: a game whose narrative is highly regarded in both scholarly and vernacular communities. We follow the classic humanities methodology of “close-reading”: (...) the detailed observation, deconstruction, and analysis of a text. Our close-reading employs a critical framework from our previous work to isolate and highlight the central narrative design parameters within digital games. This framework is grounded in the scholarly discourse around games and narrative, and has been tested and revised in the process of close-reading and analyzing contemporary games. The narrative design parameters we examine are character, storyworld, narrativized interface, emotion, and plot coherence. Our analysis uses these parameters to explicate a series of design decisions for the effective creation of narrative experience in Mass Effect 2, and by extension, for game narratives in general. We also expand our previous methodology through a focused “edge-case” strategy for exploring the limits of character, action, and story in the game. Finally, we position our analysis of Mass Effect 2 within contemporary discourses of “bounded agency”, and explore how the game negotiates the tension between player-expression, and narrative inevitability to create opportunities for sophisticated narrative poetics including tragedy and sacrifice. (shrink)

In Beyond Disruption: Technology's Challenge to Governance, experts from academia, media, government, and the military wrestle with understanding the nature of these technologies' threats to our societies and their great potential for our economies. In a series of vivid analyses and colorful commentary from a conference as Stanford University's Hoover Institution, the authors expand upon their first-hand interpretations of what's at stake for the global operating system in the midst of turbulent change. In the dynamic game of world order, it's (...) a primer for decision makers on where the puck is headed. (shrink)

Military exigencies should not preclude planning for the economics of peace.

A compilation of international humanist thought spans centuries and includes the writings of skeptics, novelists, philosophers, and religious critics.

In this paper, I will focus on the nature and appropriation of political power, and explore the right appropriation of political power given the present political and social condition. I discuss first the nature of political power, and then the three political alternatives in the appropriation of political power, namely, the centralized, the dispersed, and the balanced power. I argue that although there are still states that hold on to the centralized power, given the present political and social condition, the (...) balanced appropriation of political power is the best alternative. (shrink)

In History and Revolution, a group of respected historians confronts the conservative, revisionist trends in historical enquiry that have been dominant in the last twenty years. Ranging from an exploration of the English, French, and Russian revolutions and their treatment by revisionist historiography, to the debates and themes arising from attempts to downplay revolution's role in history, History and Revolution also engages with several prominent revisionist historians, including Orlando Figes, Conrad Russell and Simon Schama. This important book shows the inability (...) of revisionism to explain why millions are moved to act in defence of political causes, and why specific political currents emerge, and is a significant reassertion of the concept of revolution in human development. (shrink)

The Australian Health Ethics Committee’s National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans (1999) expanded the health and medical focus of preceding statements by including all disciplines of research. The Statement purports to promote a uniformly high ethical standard for this expanded range of research, and is endorsed by, inter alia, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian Academy of Science, and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.High ethical standards should apply to all research involving humans. However, (...) uniformity in the review processes of disparate research endeavours is not a necessary condition for uniformly high ethical standards. Bringing the ethical review of all research under a model which has developed within the context of health and medical research ethics for over thirty years may be inappropriate and at times incoherent. The language, methods, nature and products of research in areas such as the Humanities are often very different from those of health, medical and other sciences.The Behavioural and Social Sciences Ethics Review Committee at The University of Queensland (UQ) had, since the mid-1980s, considered that the guidelines of the time did, in fact, cover all aspects of human experimentation. We describe the ways in which this position was implemented, how issues raised by the new wording in the National Statement have been recently managed by UQ’s research ethics committees, and point to outstanding questions. (shrink)

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

This book collects the work of leading scholars on Alain Badiou and G.W.F. Hegel, creating a dialogue between, and a critical appraisal of, these two central figures in European philosophy.

Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for (...) material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism. (shrink)

This is a volume of twelve essays published in the successful tradition of _Essays in Philosophy_. These essays in metaphysics merge the eternal, the historical, and the immediately encountered dimensions of man’s experience to illustrate what is permanently valuable in the tradition of Western thought. Contributors: John M. Anderson; Karel Berka; Hiram Canton; Joseph C. Flay; Richard A Gotshalk; Carl R. Hausman; Henry W. Johnstone, Jr.; Joseph J. Kockelmans; Robert G. Price; Stanley H. Rosen; Albert Tsugawa; Carl G. Vaught.

Vaught identifies the place where religion and philosophy meet--and he does so in constant conversation with Augustine, Hegel, Heidegger and Jaspers. Vaught argues that both religious and philosophical discourse assume one of four modes: figurative, analytical, systematic, and analogical. Any real innovation occurs by moving from one mode of discourse to another. Vaught also explores the relationship among "space," "time," and "place" as well as "mystery," "power," and "structure." Remarkably, Vaught shows how the category of "place" (...) serves as the intersection of both triads. In the end, "place" is the orientation that guides the discussions of Being and God, where philosophy and religion are joined. (shrink)

This paper compares the relative merits of two alternatives to traditional accounts of causal explanation: Jim Woodward's counterfactual invariance account, and the Mechanistic account of Machamer, Darden, and Craver. Mechanism wins (a) because we have good causal explanations for chaotic effects whose production does not exhibit the counterfactual regularities Woodward requires, and (b)because arguments suggested by Belnap's and Green's discussion of prediction (in'Facing the Future' chpt 6)show that the relevant counterfactuals about ideal interventions on non-deterministic and deterministic systems lack truth (...) value. (shrink)

In The Other Half of Church, pastor Michel Hendricks and neurotheologian Jim Hendricks couple brain science and the Bible to identify how to overcome spiritual stagnation by living a full-brained faith. They also identify the four ingredients necessary to develop and maintain a vibrant transformational community where spiritual formation occurs, relationships flourish, and the toxic spread of narcissism is eradicated.

This essay uses Györgi Buzsáki's use of EEG data to draw conclusions about brain function as an example to show that investigators sometimes draw conclusions from noisy data by analyzing the noise rather than by extracting a signal from it. The example makes vivid some important differences between McAllister's, Woodward's, and my ideas about how data are interpreted.

"We become what we love," states Jim Garrison in Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. This provocative book represents a major new interpretation of Dewey's education philosophy. It is also an examination of what motivates us to teach and to learn, and begins with the idea of education of eros (i.e., passionate desire)-"the supreme aim of education" as the author puts it-and how that desire results in a practical philosophy that guides us in recognizing what (...) is essentially good or valuable. Garrison weaves these threads of ancient wisdom into a critical analysis of John Dewey's writings that reveal an implicit theory of eros in reasoning, and the central importance of educating eros to seek "the Good." Chapters: Plato's Symposium: Eros, the Beautiful, and the Good • Care, Sympathy, and Community in Classroom Teaching: Feminist Reflections on the Expansive Self • Play-Doh, Poetry, and "Ethereal Things" • The Aesthetic Context of Inquiry and the Teachable Moment • The Education of Eros: Critical and Creative Value Appraisal • Teaching and the Logic of Moral Perception This book can be used in graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, philosophy of education, qualitative research, arts and education, language and literacy, and women and education. Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. He is pastpresident of the John Dewey Society and a winner of the Society's Outstanding Achievement Award. (shrink)

Til(l)ipāda/Tilopā, conventionally called Tilopa (10th/11th century), is among the most influential figures in the history of tantric Buddhism and considered the major transmission holder in the Tibetan bKa’ brgyud pa traditions. One of his most prominent works, the Gaṅges Mahāmudrā (Gaṅgāma), has been translated multiple times and received considerable attention in academic research. However, a Dohākośa, another work ascribed to a Tilopā, has received little consideration. Also, despite the obvious importance of Tilopā for the traditions, the Gaṅgāma and Tilopā’s Dohākośa (...) have not yet been compared. The present paper compares them regarding content, style, and Tibetan reception. It also provides critical editions of the two songs along with their commentaries: The Dohākośa in Apabhraṃśa including its Sanskrit commentary Sārārthapañjikā, in which it is preserved, and the Gaṅgāma (using the not yet published Dohā mDzod brgyad version) with its Tibetan commentary by the Third Karmapa. This investigation of the Indo-Tibetan formation and reception of spiritual poetry (dohā, mgur, etc.) shows that we are dealing with more than an individual’s (spontaneous) composition. These works rather draw from a shared textual heritage that has been used in three ways: to promote tantra, as framework for exegesis, and to contextualise mahāmudrā. Such comparative analysis constitutes a further step towards a more nuanced understanding of the genre within the Indian siddha-movement and aims to provide insights about the genre’s re-shaping in Tibet. Authors: Tilopa, Tillipāda; Rang ’byung rdo rje (1), Genre: Great Seal (mahāmudrā, phyag chen) (2), Indo-Tibetan (Tantric) Buddhism (3), Apabhraṃśa-dohā, mgur/songs of realisation (4), Titles: *Mahāmudropadeśa-bhāṣya (Ganges Mahāmudrā, *Mahāmudrā-Gaṅgāma-bhāṣya; Phyag rgya chen po gaṅgā’i sa bcad dang phyag rgya chen po gaṅgāma’i ’grel pa) (5), Dohākoṣapañjikā Sārārthapañjikā (6). (shrink)

Genuine religion always involves the worship of what is genuinely ultimate. Religion, worship, and ultimate reality are thus indissolubly related. The task of reflective thought in this domain is to distinguish what is sound from what is spurious in religion; to characterise the meaning of religious devotion; and to attempt to articulate the nature of the ultimate reality to which men's worship is directed.

This article explores the philosophical underpinnings and implications of the idea of the public in the US state processes of knowledge production and control. In it we take up questions of public and counterpublic political philosophical knowledge production and mediation in relation to an expanding state. Specifically, we examine the political philosophies of racialized counterpublics since the 1960s, considering the particular knowledge production genre of the political prison letter. We suggest that the philosophical principles of the dominant public in the (...) US have a proclivity to merge with state mechanisms of domination and to thwart counterpublics and their modes of political knowledge production. (shrink)

In this important work, Jim Kanaris provides a unique approach to the study of religion, aiming to alleviate the methodological and ideological barriers that divide philosophers, theologians, and social scientists. This is a "philosophy of religion" for a wider audience than that designation usually circumscribes, and, for that reason, Kanaris opts for the broader "philosophy of religious studies." He hybridizes insights principally from the works of Bernard Lonergan and Martin Heidegger but also those of Jacques Derrida, Charles Winquist, and Tyler (...) Roberts, among others. Kanaris combines this with a distinctive hermeneutical approach that gives rise to what he calls "enecstatic" philosophy, one that manages the irreducible complexity of one's individuality, a singularity, in the negotiation of one's objects of concern. Toward a Philosophy of Religious Studies is unlike any other book in religious studies. It provides a unique way to surface personal involvement in the study of religion without compromising scholarly objectivity and philosophical integrity. (shrink)