Xenotransplantation is defined as “any procedure that involves the transplantation, implantation, or infusion into a human recipient of either live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source, or human body fluids, cells, tissues or organs that have had ex vivo contact with live nonhuman animal cells, tissues, or organs.” Xenotransplantation has been viewed by desperate patients and their surgeons as a solution to the problem of the paucity of human organs available for transplantation. Foes of xenotransplantation argue that (...) the use of animal organs degrades the human race and should be avoided.In this paper, we briefly review the cultural context of xenotransplantation and explore the infectious disease risk of xenotransplantation. The United States Code of Federal Regulations requires life-long surveillance of a xenotransplantation recipient due to the largely unknown risk of novel infectious disease transmitted across species, known as xenogeneic infectious disease. We argue that despite being in the interest of protecting the public health, the imposition of lifelong surveillance requirements on xenotransplant recipients effectively abrogates the right to withdraw from a clinical trial after the transplantation has taken place. Moreover, we argue that a waiver of the right to withdraw should be made explicit in the interest of full disclosure, out of respect for the research subject’s right of self-determination. (shrink)

It has been widely theorized and empirically proven that self-regulated learning (SRL) is related to more desired learning outcomes, e.g., higher performance in transfer tests. Research has shifted to understanding the role of SRL during learning, such as the strategies and learning activities, learners employ and engage in the different SRL phases, which contribute to learning achievement. From a methodological perspective, measuring SRL using think-aloud data has been shown to be more insightful than self-report surveys as it helps better in (...) determining the link between SRL activities and learning achievements. Educational process mining on the basis of think-aloud data enables a deeper understanding and more fine-grained analyses of SRL processes. Although students’ SRL is highly contextualized, there are consistent findings of the link between SRL activities and learning outcomes pointing to some consistency of the processes that support learning. However, past studies have utilized differing approaches which make generalization of findings between studies investigating the unfolding of SRL processes during learning a challenge. In the present study with 29 university students, we measured SRLviaconcurrent think-aloud protocols in a pre-post design using a similar approach from a previous study in an online learning environment during a 45-min learning session, where students learned about three topics and wrote an essay. Results revealed significant learning gain and replication of links between SRL activities and transfer performance, similar to past research. Additionally, temporal structures of successful and less successful students indicated meaningful differences associated with both theoretical assumptions and past research findings. In conclusion, extending prior research by exploring SRL patterns in an online learning setting provides insights to the replicability of previous findings from online learning settings and new findings show that it is important not only to focus on the repertoire of SRL strategies but also on how and when they are used. (shrink)

Allison, Lyn; Cannold, Leslie It is great to see such a good turnout for this important occasion and I congratulate the Humanist Society again on this award. It really makes a difference to people's lives: when they get the award, when they know about it, when there is publicity for the person concerned. It is an all-round good thing to do and I congratulate you for it.

Like Alice following the white rabbit into a topsy-turvy world where the laws of logic don't apply, subversive thinking unearths the mysteries behind the mundane. Tracking the White Rabbit is a fascinating, original work that invites us to use depth psychology to challenge our deepest assumptions about world politics, theology, social norms, everyday speech, and usual ideas of sex and emotion. Raised in an environment of McCarthyism and rock-and-roll, Jungian analyst Lyn Cowan shows readers-through provocative essays on memory and homosexuality, (...) music and the art of cursing-that we can flip our ingrained attitudes on their heads and achieve a better understanding of our cultural landscape. America has been plagued by a flattening of its psychic life, Cowan argues, exhibited in the escalating need for external stimulation and the distrust of intense emotion. With humor and insight, she confronts the "isms" that entrap our imaginations (capitalism, fundamentalism, feminism, sexism, antisemitism, communism) in order to unearth a more soul-serving culture. Encouraging us to mine the creativity of spontaneous imagination, this psychology brings dramatic new ideas and themes into focus, breaking down barriers and yielding fresh perspectives on some of the more pressing individual dilemmas of our time: abortion, gender, language, homosexuality, and victimization. (shrink)

This paper draws on data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) (over 4,000 randomly selected households) to tease out the dimensions of the ‘second shift’. Predictions that as women entered the paid workforce men would contribute more to household labour have largely failed to eventuate. This underpins the view that women are working a second shift because they are shouldering a dual burden of paid and unpaid work. However, time use research seems to (...) show that when both paid and unpaid work is counted, male and female workloads are in total very similar. This has led to suggestions that a literal second shift is a myth; that it exists in the sense that women do more domestic work than men, but not in the sense that they work longer hours in total. Using a more accurate and telling measure of workload than previous research (paid and unpaid labour including multitasked activities), this paper explores the second shift and how it relates to family configuration, ethnicity and indicators of class and socioeconomic standing. It finds a clear disparity between the total workloads of mothers and fathers, much of which consists of simultaneous (secondary) activity, and some demographic differences in female (but not male) total workloads. It concludes that the view that the second shift is a myth is only sustainable by averaging social groups very broadly and by excluding multitasking from the measurement of total work activity. (shrink)

Rodney Syme, retired medical doctor, urologist and advocate for medically assisted dying for 20 years, has helped scores of people die peacefully - people whose suffering has become unbearable to them. He takes on governments, the law and the medical profession. Most recently he won his challenge of an order by the Medical Board of Australia to prohibit him from doing anything that has the primary purpose of ending a person's life. The case in question was a 71-year-old man dying (...) of tongue and lung cancer whose life, the man said, was as miserable as hell. The Medical Board argued that the assistance in dying was a departure from accepted standards and presented a significant risk to that person. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 9, Page 14-15, September 2011.

Background Physician-assisted suicide is a controversial issue and has sometimes raised emotion-laden reactions. Against this backdrop, we have analyzed how Swedish physicians are reasoning about physician-assisted suicide if it were to be legalized. Methods and participants We conducted a cross-sectional study and analyzed 819 randomly selected physicians’ responses from general practitioners, geriatricians, internists, oncologists, psychiatrists, surgeons, and all palliativists. Apart from the main questions about their attitude toward physician-assisted suicide, we also asked what would happen with the respondents’ own trust (...) in healthcare if physician-assisted suicide were legalized. Response options were that trust would decrease, not be influenced, or would increase. Results We identified a strong statistical association between on the one hand those whose own trust would increase and who were pro physician-assisted suicide, and on the other hand those who were against physician-assisted suicide and whose own trust would decrease [relative risk: 16.7 (95% confidence interval: 10.2–27.2)]. Among those whose own trust would not be influenced (n = 456), 60% were pro pysician-assisted suicide, 16% were against, and 24% were undecided. Of those whose trust would increase or not be influenced, a large majority supported autonomy-based arguments, whereas those whose trust would decrease supported non-maleficence-based arguments. Conclusion Analyzing the answers after having divided respondents into those whose own trust in healthcare would decrease or increase and not be influenced brings about interesting results such as how the three groups prioritize arguments for and against physician-assisted suicide. This way of analyzing the data seems to be a promising strategy when identifying value-impregnated factual claims. (shrink)

How did physicians come to dominate the medical profession? Lyn Bennett challenges the seemingly self-evident belief that scientific competence accounts for physicians' dominance. Instead, she argues that the whole enterprise of learned medicine was, in large measure, facilitated by an intensely classical education that included extensive training in rhetoric, and that this rhetorical training is ultimately responsible for the achievement of professional dominance. Bennett examines previously unexplored connections among writers and genres as well as competing livelihoods and classes. Engaging the (...) histories of rhetoric, medicine, literature, and culture throughout, she goes on to focus specifically on the work of women who professed as well as practiced medicine. Pointing to some of the ways women's writing shapes realities of body, mind, and spirit as it negotiates social, cultural, and professional ideologies of gender, this book offers an important corrective to some long-held beliefs about women's role in early modern discourse. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe concept of ‘vulnerability’ is well established within the realm of research ethics and most ethical guidelines include a section on ‘vulnerable populations’. However, the term ‘vulnerability’, used within a human research context, has received a lot of negative publicity recently and has been described as being simultaneously ‘too broad’ and ‘too narrow’.1 The aim of the paper is to explore the concept of research vulnerability by using a detailed case study – that of mineworkers in post‐apartheid South Africa. In (...) particular, the usefulness of Kipnis’s taxonomy of research vulnerability will be examined.2In recent years the volume of clinical research on human subjects in South Africa has increased significantly. The HIV and TB pandemics have contributed to this increase. These epidemics have impacted negatively on the mining industry; and mining companies have become increasingly interested in research initiatives that address these problems. This case study explores the potential research vulnerability of mineworkers in the context of the South African mining industry and examines measures that can reduce this vulnerability. (shrink)

This article uses diary data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey to compare by gender total child care time calculated in the measurements of main activity, main or secondary activity, and total time spent in the company of children. It also offers an innovative gender comparison of relative time spent in the activities that constitute child care, child care as double activity, and time with children in sole charge. These measures give a fuller picture of (...) total time commitment to children and how men and women spend that time than has been available in previous time use analyses. The results indicate that compared to fathering, mothering involves not only more overall time commitment but more multitasking, more physical labor, a more rigid timetable, more time alone with children, and more overall responsibility for managing care. These gender differences in the quantity and nature of care apply even when women work full-time. (shrink)

This essay presents an overview of the TRC— its establishment, procedures, and operating principles — and examines the way in which the commission emphasizes forgiveness rather than retribution for past wrongs.

Epidemiological studies indicate that the incidence of shaken baby cases is overestimated and that this is due to biased classifications, based on ethical rather than scientific considerations. In...

We comment on the similarities and differences of Mitchell et al.'s framework for understanding classical and operant conditioning and the theoretical framework put forth by Rumbaugh et al. (2007). We propose that all nonhuman and human learning may be based on amalgams created by co-occurring stimuli that share their response-eliciting properties and that these amalgams may be propositional in nature.

Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 60-62, January-March.

Older single women in Australia are increasingly experiencing homelessness. Age and gender seem inherently related to single older women’s housing crises, but no attempt has been made to account for the causes of their homelessness through an intersectional lens. This article develops a complex and contingent causal explanation of the structures and mechanisms implicated in growing homelessness for this group. We demonstrate an original use of critical realist-informed intersectional analysis which is characterized by stratified social ontology and emergence. We theoretically (...) reframe existing literature to demonstrate how the intersectional causal powers of gender and age (‘gender*age’) discrimination and conventional life course experiences intersect to generate financial precarity for older women. Our causal model explains how economic insecurity, structural and individual contexts, and crisis events interact, challenging older women’s housing security and precipitating first-time homelessness later in life. (shrink)

A sentence containing disjunction in the scope of a possibility modal, such as _Angie is allowed to buy the boat or the car_, gives rise to the free choice inference that Angie can freely choose between the two. This inference poses a well-known puzzle, in that it is not predicted by a standard treatment of modals and disjunction (e.g., Kamp (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74:57–74, 1974 )). To complicate things further, free choice tends to disappear under negation: _Angie is (...) not allowed to buy the boat or the car_ doesn’t merely convey the negation of free choice, but rather the stronger double prohibition reading that Angie cannot buy either one. There are two main approaches to the free choice - double prohibition pattern in the literature. While they both capture the relevant data points, they make a testable, divergent prediction regarding the status of positive and negative sentences in a context in which Angie can only buy one of the two objects, e.g., the boat. In particular, the implicature-based approach (e.g., Fox (Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, pp. 71–120, 2007 ); Klinedinst (Plurality and possibility, PhD diss., UCLA, 2007 ); Bar-Lev and Fox (Proceedings of SALT 27, pp. 95–115, 2017 ); Bar-Lev and Fox (Natural Language Semantics 28:175–223, 2020 )) predicts that the positive sentence is true in such a context, but associated with a false implicature, while it predicts the negative sentence to be straightforwardly false. The homogeneity-based approach in Goldstein (Semantics & Pragmatics 12:1–53, 2019 ) predicts both the positive and negative sentences to be equally undefined (see also Aloni (Semantics & Pragmatics 15:5, 2022 ); Willer (Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, pp. 511–520, 2017 )) for similar predictions). Investigating the contrast between these sentences in such a context therefore provides a clear way to address the debate between implicature and non-implicature accounts of free choice. We present a set of four experiments aiming to do just this, by comparing free choice inferences to regular implicatures, using a ternary judgment task. The results overall present a challenge for the implicature approach. We discuss how the implicature approach could be amended to account for our results, based on a recent proposal by Enguehard and Chemla (Linguistics & Philosophy 44:79–112, 2021 ) on the distribution of implicatures. (shrink)

In this paper, I utilise key postcolonial perspectives on multiculturalism and boundaries to reconsider some of science education's scholarship on cultural diversity in order to extend the discourses and methodologies of science education. I begin with a brief overview of postcolonialism that argues its ability to offer theoretical insights to help revise science education's philosophical frameworks in the face of the newly intercivilisational encounters of contemporaneity. I then describe the constructs of multiculturalism, and borders and ‘border thinking’ that become useful (...) to develop postcolonial readings as an active methodology of critique able to intervene and develops more revealing interpretations of some of science education's scholarship and differentiated experiences. As the focus of these interventions, I have selected to discuss Cobern and Loving's ‘Defining “Science” in a Multicultural World: Implications for science education’ and Siegel's ‘Multiculturalism, Universalism and Science Education: In search of common ground’ from the ongoing discussion on multiculturalism and cultural diversity within the journal Science Education. Finally, I conclude this paper with some general comments regarding postcolonialism and the science education scholarship on cultural diversity. (shrink)

Carminati (2002) shows that the existence of both phonetically full and phonetically null pronouns (pro) in Italian reflects a division of labor with respect to anaphora resolution. Pro prefers to link to prominent antecedents more than its phonetically overt counterpart does (where prominence is determined by syntactic position in intrasentential anaphora cases).

In an interesting article, Dr Zuzana Parusniková claimed: (i) that Semmelweis’ colleagues did not recognise the importance of his animal experiments, (ii) that the resistance to Semmelweis’ hypothesis and results was due mainly to applying mono-causality and (iii) Semmelweis inability to communicate, (iv) that the New Vienna Medical School applied evidence-based medicine, and (v) that the philosophy of Karl Popper is the best interpretation of Semmelweis’ scientific approach. Here, we present some factual aspects of Semmelweis’ text from 1861 and discuss (...) Dr Parusniková’s claims against this backdrop. We conclude that Semmelweis might intentionally have abstained from communicating his hypothesis and results between 1847 and 1849 – including the results from his animal experiments – as he thought that they would eventually be understood and accepted. Semmelweis’ hypothesis was that cadaveric matters and decaying particles were the cause of childbed fever and increased maternal mortality. This hypothesis might have been controversial, but we claim that the major reason for the resistance was eminence-based and induced by the publication of preliminary and suboptimal results, based on a premature version of his hypothesis. If the New Vienna Medical School had been influenced by evidence-based medicine, we believe that Semmelweis’ empirical results would have been accepted - as they were based on an almost randomised controlled trial - and if the results had not been associated with his hypothesis but instead had focused on a black box procedure. We agree that the philosophy of Popper might be appropriate when analysing Semmelweis’ scientific approach when abandoning low-level theories. However, to understand the resistance against Semmelweis’ hypothesis and results, it is not sufficient to refer to a Pickwickian discussion; a Kuhnian framework is more adequate. (shrink)

You can use the power that roams your nocturnal mind to improve your daily life. Learn what dream work is and how it has been practiced from ancient times to the present, for healing, for self-development, and as a means of contacting the creative inner self. Dream-work techniques, like remembering and recording, incubation, gestalt, guided visualization, working with symbols, and a host of others, will help you reach your goals. Understand what each dream symbol means to you, in essence piecing (...) together an unconscious story of your experiences. (shrink)

Clinical decisions are expected to be based on factual evidence and official values derived from healthcare law and soft laws such as regulations and guidelines. But sometimes personal values instead influence clinical decisions. One way in which personal values may influence medical decision-making is by their affecting factual claims or assumptions made by healthcare providers. Such influence, which we call ‘value-impregnation,’ may be concealed to all concerned stakeholders. We suggest as a hypothesis that healthcare providers’ decision making is sometimes affected (...) by value-impregnated factual claims or assumptions. If such claims influence e.g. doctor–patient encounters, this will likely have a negative impact on the provision of correct information to patients and on patients’ influence on decision making regarding their own care. In this paper, we explore the idea that value-impregnated factual claims influence healthcare decisions through a series of medical examples. We suggest that more research is needed to further examine whether healthcare staff’s personal values influence clinical decision-making. (shrink)

The future of art is dirt and decomposing shit. A deconstructed intestinal sea of microorganisms, spread out into the soil they were released back into following the extinction of their complex vessel. The genetic information they exchanged with each other as well as with their container, now existing in a vague memory, perhaps a feeling of sadness and longing, as they digest the once cherished artifacts of their human predecessors.

Older single women in Australia are increasingly experiencing homelessness. Age and gender seem inherently related to single older women’s housing crises, but no attempt has been made to account for the causes of their homelessness through an intersectional lens. This article develops a complex and contingent causal explanation of the structures and mechanisms implicated in growing homelessness for this group. We demonstrate an original use of critical realist-informed intersectional analysis which is characterized by stratified social ontology and emergence. We theoretically (...) reframe existing literature to demonstrate how the intersectional causal powers of gender and age (‘gender*age’) discrimination and conventional life course experiences intersect to generate financial precarity for older women. Our causal model explains how economic insecurity, structural and individual contexts, and crisis events interact, challenging older women’s housing security and precipitating first-time homelessness later in life. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that physicians’ restrictive attitudes in offering abortions during 1946–1965 in Sweden were due to their private values. The values, however, were rarely presented openly. Instead physicians’ values influenced their assessment of the facts presented—that is, the women's’ trustworthiness. In this manner the physicians were able to conceal their private values and impede the women from getting what they wanted and needed. The practice was concealed from both patients and physicians and never publicly discussed. It (...) is also argued that a similar tacit practice could currently be applied by palliative care physicians. Such practice might allow palliative care physicians to be restrictive when offering sedation therapy without appearing paternalistic or declaring conscientious objections. However, the practice runs counter to patients’ right to participate in making decisions. The women seeking abortion began to oppose the situation and eventually a new abortion law was introduced 1975. Patients at the end of life will never be able to protest against palliative care physicians’ restrictive attitudes. This is a vulnerable and weak group, unable to lodge complaints after the treatment. In order to respect patients’ autonomy, even suffering patients at the end of their lives, it is suggested that physicians should openly declare their values when it comes to providing treatments that might shorten life. Such transparency might facilitate more genuine shared decision-making and accordingly less suboptimal end-of-life care. (shrink)

These essays apply influential, pathbreaking psychological studies about women's lives to literature. In their analyses of fictional portraits, contributors both challenge and confirm psychological theories about female identity, about 'connection/separation' as developmental catalysts, and about the impact of gender on 'voice,' moral decision-making, and epistemology in relation to classical and contemporary literary texts, written by both women and men.