Durée et nature sont chez Bergson deux termes liés en ce que l'intuition majeure du philosophe, qui est l'expérience de se replacer dans la durée, induit une nouvelle conception, dynamique et évolutive de la nature. Loin d'introduire dans un subjectivisme métaphysique, Bergson avec la durée nous ouvre une nouvelle philosophie de la nature. Le but de cet ouvrage est de contribuer à replacer Bergson dans le débat contemporain en passant par la voie royale de sa philosophie, l'intuition de la durée.

Sex and sensibility: The role of social selection Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9464-6 Authors Erika L. Milam, Department of History, University of Maryland, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA Roberta L. Millstein, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA Angela Potochnik, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Joan E. Roughgarden, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020, USA Journal Metascience (...) Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

The genetic revolution is well underway, with genetic research and knowledge expanding at an exponential rate. Much of the new genetics research is focused on population groups, and proponents of “population genomics” argue that such studies are necessary since genetic “variation” among human populations holds the most promise for technological innovations that can improve human health and lead to increased understanding of the origin of human populations. Population genomic research thus targets specific groups to discover variation that could lead to (...) knowledge about genetic disorders, possible cures, and the origin and migration patterns of distinctive peoples. Research on genetic differences among groups or populations, however, raises many pressing ethical and legal questions. For example, focus on biological differences of racial and ethnic groups has in the past lead to assumptions about superiority and inferiority between groups, and in practice resulted in stigmatization and discrimination. Consequently, attention on groups should raise legal and moral red flags and compel us to move cautiously in this area. Pragmatically, targeting population groups as the object of study requires the determination of the nature and scope of “population groups” for purposes of genetics research. (shrink)

This volume presents the history of Western education through the biographies of some 70 individuals, past and present, who exemplify the education of their times or have made important contributions to the development of educational theory or practice. In so doing, it links major issues and ideas in education to key historical personalities. Each chapter includes substantive background information, a summary, and chapter notes.

Professional workplaces that embody an “ideal worker” image that is implicitly white and male set-up persistent biases against the competence and suitability for authority of those who are not white men, forcing them to work harder to prove their competence and fit in. The added labor of coping with these burdens is largely invisible to dominant actors in the workplace who do not experience them. To facilitate change by making such burdens visible for all, we present data from a survey (...) of 1,349 architects, including white, Asian, Black, Latinx, and mixed race/other underrepresented men and women, about their specific behavioral experiences of prove-it-again bias, tightrope bias, problems of fit, exclusion, emotion work, and interruptions. Across all measures, white men architects report significantly lower levels of these burdens than do women of any race and almost all non-white men. Consistent with status expectations and stereotype prototypicality theories, we find intersectional patterns in the relative burdens experienced by women and men of different racial groups. Gender differences in bias experiences are greatest among white, less among Asian, and least among Black architects. Women of color report the highest levels of bias overall. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by the increasing popularity of efficient designs for stated choice experiments. The objective in efficient designs is to create a stated choice experiment that minimizes the standard errors of the estimated parameters. In order to do so, such designs require specifying prior values for the parameters to be estimated. While there is significant literature demonstrating the efficiency improvements of employing efficient designs, the bulk of the literature tests conditions where the priors used to generate the efficient (...) design are assumed to be accurate. However, there is substantially less literature that compares how different design types perform under varying degree of error of the prior. The literature that does exist assumes small fractions are used, which is in contrast to computer-aided surveys that readily allow for large fractions. Further, the results in the literature are abstract in that there is no reference point to provide clear insight on the magnitude of any issue. Our objective is to analyze the robustness of different designs within a typical stated choice experiment context of a trade-off between price and quality. We use as an example transportation mode choice, where the key parameter to estimate is the value of time. Within this context, we test many designs to examine how robust efficient designs are against a misspecification of the prior parameters. The simple mode choice setting allows for insightful visualizations of the designs themselves and also an interpretable reference point for the range in which each design is robust. Not surprisingly, the D-efficient design is most efficient in the region where the true population VOT is near the prior used to generate the design: the prior is $20/h and the efficient range is $10–$30/h. However, the D-efficient design quickly becomes the most inefficient outside of this range, and the estimation significantly degrades above $50/h. The orthogonal and random designs are robust for a much larger range of VOT. The robustness of Bayesian efficient designs varies depending on the variance that the prior assumes. Implementing two-stage designs that first use a small sample to estimate priors are also not robust relative to uninformative designs. Arguably, the random design performs as well as any design, and it will perform even better if data cleaning is done to remove choice tasks where one alternative dominates the other. (shrink)

Children's understanding of the human mind has been found to be related to many social and experiential factors such as interactions with peers (Astington & Jenkins, 1995), parental socioeconomic a...

ArgumentThis paper traces the changing fortunes of natural theology in two generations of an English family. The group is represented in the first generation by the Unitarian radical, William Frend, and in the second by the spiritualist Sophia Frend De Morgan and her husband, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan. The Frend/DeMorgans were distinguished from the naturalistic Darwins by their commitment to reason; they were a quintessentially urban group whose impulses to natural theology flowed from a God they encountered through their (...) minds. For William Frend, natural theology was rooted in a tightly disciplined, linguistic view of reason that linked theological and mathematical understandings; in the De Morgan's generation, however, understandings of mathematics and of language changed in ways that undercut the power of Frend's reasoned approach. In its rise and fall this family story of reasoned theology is co-temporal with the natural theology that was wrecked on the rocks of Darwinian evolutionary theory. (shrink)

The ArgumentIt has long been apparent that in the nineteenth century, mathematics in France and England developed along different lines. The differences, which might well be labelled stylistic, are most easy to see on the foundational level. At first this may seem surprising because it is such a fundamental area, but, upon reflection, it is to be expected. Ultimately discussions about the foundations of mathematics turn on views about what mathematics is, and this is a question which is answered by (...) a variety of different groups including mathematicians, students, curricular planners, parents, etc. Mathematical practice rests on some kind of mixture of the answers to this fundamental question which come from these diverse groups. Comparing the cultural matrices which supported mathematics in France and Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century sheds light on the real though often subtle differences in the ways the subject was pursued in the two countries. (shrink)

This paper presents research on the moral sensibility of six pre-service teachers in an undergraduate teacher education program. Using their reflective writing across their first two semesters of coursework as well as focus group interviews in their third semester as sources of data, the paper identifies and describes three distinctive types of moral sensibility and examines ways in which moral sensibility interacts with experiences in teacher education. Suggestions for explicitly incorporating the moral in pre-service teacher education are presented.

Organ donation after cardiac or circulatory death (DCD) has been introduced to increase the supply of transplantable organs. In this paper, we argue that the recovery of viable organs useful for transplantation in DCD is not compatible with the dead donor rule and we explain the consequential ethical and legal ramifications. We also outline serious deficiencies in the current consent process for DCD with respect to disclosure of necessary elements for voluntary informed decision making and respect for the donor's autonomy. (...) We compare two alternative proposals for increasing organ donation consent in society: presumed consent and mandated choice. We conclude that proceeding with the recovery of transplantable organs from decedents requires a paradigm change in the ethics of organ donation. The paradigm change to ensure the legitimacy of DCD practice must include: (1) societal agreement on abandonment of the dead donor rule, (2) legislative revisions reflecting abandonment of the dead donor rule, and (3) requirement of mandated choice to facilitate individual participation in organ donation and to ensure that decisions to participate are made in compliance with the societal values of respect for autonomy and self-determination. (shrink)

In 1968, the Harvard criteria equated irreversible coma and apnea with human death and later, the Uniform Determination of Death Act was enacted permitting organ procurement from heart-beating donors. Since then, clinical studies have defined a spectrum of states of impaired consciousness in human beings: coma, akinetic mutism, minimally conscious state, vegetative state and brain death. In this article, we argue against the validity of the Harvard criteria for equating brain death with human death. Brain death does not disrupt somatic (...) integrative unity and coordinated biological functioning of a living organism. Neurological criteria of human death fail to determine the precise moment of an organism’s death when death is established by circulatory criterion in other states of impaired consciousness for organ procurement with non-heart-beating donation protocols. The criterion of circulatory arrest 75 s to 5 min is too short for irreversible cessation of whole brain functions and respiration controlled by the brain stem. Brain -based criteria for determining death with a beating heart exclude relevant anthropologic, psychosocial, cultural, and religious aspects of death and dying in society. Clinical guidelines for determining brain death are not consistently validated by the presence of irreversible brain stem ischemic injury or necrosis on autopsy; therefore, they do not completely exclude reversible loss of integrated neurological functions in donors. The questionable reliability and varying compliance with these guidelines among institutions amplify the risk of determining reversible states of impaired consciousness as irreversible brain death. The scientific uncertainty of defining and determining states of impaired consciousness including brain death have been neither disclosed to the general public nor broadly debated by the medical community or by legal and religious scholars. Heart-beating or non-heart-beating organ procurement from patients with impaired consciousness is de facto a concealed practice of physician-assisted death, and therefore, violates both criminal law and the central tenet of medicine not to do harm to patients. Society must decide if physician-assisted death is permissible and desirable to resolve the conflict about procuring organs from patients with impaired consciousness within the context of the perceived need to enhance the supply of transplantable organs. (shrink)

Advance health care directives and informed consent remain the cornerstones of patients' right to self-determination regarding medical care and preferences at the end-of-life. However, the effectiveness and clinical applicability of advance health care directives to decision-making on the use of life support systems at the end-of-life is questionable. The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) has been revised in 2006 to permit the use of life support systems at or near death for the purpose of maximizing procurement opportunities of organs medically (...) suitable for transplantation. Some states have enacted the Revised UAGA (2006) and a few of those have included amendments while attempting to preserve the uniformity of the revised Act. Other states have introduced the Revised UAGA (2006) for legislation and remaining states are likely to follow soon. (shrink)

We respond to Morgan and Feeley’s critique on our article “Mass Media in Organ Donation: Managing Conflicting Messages and Interests.” We noted that Morgan and Feeley agree with the position that the primary aims of media campaigns are: “to educate the general public about organ donation process” and “help individuals make informed decisions” about organ donation. For those reasons, the educational messages in media campaigns should not be restricted to “information from pilot work or focus groups” but should include evidence-based (...) facts resulting from a comprehensive literature research. We consider the controversial aspects about organ donation to be relevant, if not necessary, educational materials that must be disclosed in media campaigns to comply with the legal and moral requirements of informed consent. With that perspective in mind, we address the validity of Morgan and Feeley’s claim that media campaigns have no need for informing the public about the controversial nature of death determination in organ donation. Scientific evidence has proven that the criteria for death determination are inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act and therefore potentially harmful to donors. The decision by campaign designers to use the statutory definition of death without disclosing the current controversies surrounding that definition does not contribute to improved informed decision making. We argue that if Morgan and Feeley accept the important role of media campaigns to enhance informed decision making, then critical controversies should be disclosed. In support of that premise, we will outline: (1) the wide-spread scientific challenges to brain death as a concept of death; (2) the influence of the donor registry and team-huddling on the medical care of potential donors; (3) the use of authorization rather than informed consent for donor registration; (4) the contemporary religious controversy; and (5) the effects of training desk clerks as organ requestors at the Department of Motor Vehicles offices. We conclude that organ donation is a medical procedure subject to all the ethical obligations that the medical profession must uphold including that of transparency and truthfulness. (shrink)

Book-carrying styles of 1,133 school-age children (kindergarten through high school) were observed, and anatomical measurements (hips, waist, and underarm) of the space between the trunk and fall line of the arm in 735 of the students was recorded. With the exception of handedness, the results replicated those of earlier studies of sexual differences in bookcarrying styles and implicated the protrusion of female hips as instrumental in this phenomenon.

Organ donation after cardiac or circulatory death (DCD) has been introduced to increase the supply of transplantable organs. In this paper, we argue that the recovery of viable organs useful for transplantation in DCD is not compatible with the dead donor rule and we explain the consequential ethical and legal ramifications. We also outline serious deficiencies in the current consent process for DCD with respect to disclosure of necessary elements for voluntary informed decision making and respect for the donor's autonomy. (...) We compare two alternative proposals for increasing organ donation consent in society: presumed consent and mandated choice. We conclude that proceeding with the recovery of transplantable organs from decedents requires a paradigm change in the ethics of organ donation. The paradigm change to ensure the legitimacy of DCD practice must include: (1) societal agreement on abandonment of the dead donor rule, (2) legislative revisions reflecting abandonment of the dead donor rule, and (3) requirement of mandated choice to facilitate individual participation in organ donation and to ensure that decisions to participate are made in compliance with the societal values of respect for autonomy and self-determination. (shrink)

Cancer and its treatment pose challenges that affect not only patients but also their significant others, including intimate partners. Accumulating evidence suggests that couples’ ability to communicate effectively plays a major role in the psychological adjustment of both individuals and the quality of their relationship. Two key conceptual models have been proposed to account for how couple communication impacts psychological and relationship adjustment: the social-cognitive processing (SCP) model and the relationship intimacy (RI) model. These models posit different mechanisms and outcomes, (...) and thus have different implications for intervention. The purpose of this project is to test and compare the utility of these models using comprehensive and methodologically rigorous methods. Aims are: (1) to examine the overall fit of the SCP and RI models in explaining patient and partner psychological and relationship adjustment as they occur on a day-to-day basis and over the course of 1 year; (2) to examine the fit of the models for different subgroups (males vs. females, and patients vs. partners); and (3) to examine the utility of various methods of assessing communication by examining the degree to which baseline indices from different measurement strategies predict self-reported adjustment at 1-year follow up. The study employs a longitudinal, multi-method approach to examining communication processes including: standard self-report questionnaires assessing process and outcome variables collected quarterly over the course of 1 year; smartphone-based ecological momentary assessments to sample participant reports in real time; and laboratory-based couple conversations from which we derive observational measures of communicative behavior and affective expression, as well as vocal indices of emotional arousal. Participants are patients with stage II-IV breast, colon, rectal, or lung cancer and their spouses/partners, recruited from two NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers. Results will be published in scientific journals, presented at scientific conferences, and conveyed to a larger audience through infographics and social media outlets. Findings will inform theory, measurement, and the design and implementation of efficacious interventions aimed at optimizing both patient and partner well-being. (shrink)