This article focuses on two possible missions for a national bioethics commission. The first is handling differences of worldview, political orientation, and discipline. Recent work in political philosophy emphasizes regard for the dignity of difference manifested in "conversation" that seeks understanding rather than agreement. The President's Council on Bioethics gets a mixed review in this area. The second is experimenting with prophetic bioethics. "Prophetic bioethics" is a term coined by Daniel Callahan to describe an alternative to compromise-seeking "regulatory bioethics." It (...) involves a critique of modern medicine. In the contemporary context, the areas of biotechnology and access to health care cry out for prophetic attention. The Council has addressed biotechnology; unfortunately, that experience suggests that the kind of prophecy that it practices poses risks to conversation. With regard to access issues, the article proposes an effort that unites themes of human dignity, solidarity, and limits in support of reform, while highlighting, rather than papering over, differences. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:In research, in policy, and in the media, there is a clear focus on alleviating child poverty. Child poverty is cast as an urgent societal problem, in part reflecting recognition of the impact of early life circumstances on health across the life course. However, focusing on child poverty can have unintended consequences. First, calls to alleviate child poverty position children as a worthy investment in future population health, while adult poverty is represented as a misallocation of scarce resources. Second, children (...) are positioned as blameless in talk about child poverty, whereas adults are viewed as potentially blameworthy for living in poverty. This ignores the ways early poverty shapes opportunities throughout the life course. These accounts are inconsistent: if a childhood of poverty shapes long-term outcomes, then poverty in adulthood cannot be an individual failing. Building arguments for poverty alleviation on social investment and personal responsibility ultimately supports rather than undermines the social structural arrangements that entrench inequalities. Recognizing the interconnectedness of families and communities and the destructiveness of poverty at every point in the life course has the potential to improve health in a way that can never be achieved by focusing solely on child poverty. (shrink)

"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea," Ruefle announces before proceeding to do just that. Marshaling Wittgenstein, Jane Goodall, Gertrude Stein, Jesus, and Emily Dickinson, alongside Ukrainian Easter egg dyeing traditions and teddy bear tea parties, Ruefle presents a curio cabinet of the human imagination's boundless forms.

There are many obvious morphological and behavioural differences between male and female Drosophila, whose differing phenotypes are produced by a hierarchy of sex determination genes. These genes have been well characterised at the genetic and molecular level. Similarly, a number of sex‐specific differentiation genes have been characterised, such as the chorion and vitelline membrane genes in females and the sex peptide and other accessory gland proteins in males. Despite the depth of these parallel studies, there is only one example of (...) a direct link between the sex determination pathway and the downstream sex differentiation genes, namely the regulation of the female‐specific yolk protein genes. The yolk proteins are synthesised in the fat body and ovarian follicle cells of the adult female and are subsequently transported to the oocyte where they are stored for utilization during embrygenesis. The expression of the yolk protein genes is not entirely controlled by the sex determination hierarchy, as several different regulatory pathways must interact to direct their correct sexual, temporal and spatial regulation during development. (shrink)

Variation in transcription is due in large part to variability in transcribers' theoretical and methodological commitments and goals. This reply addresses issues raised in the commentaries on the article `Variation in Transcription' concerning problems of representing different discourse genres in transcripts, the question of how research relationships shape the transcription process, the intellectual and institutional contexts in which transcription occurs and circulates, and the injunction to consider the practices as opposed to the products of transcription.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Between Deleuze and DerridaMary Beth MaderPaul Patton and John Protevi, editors. Between Deleuze and Derrida. New York: Continuum, 2003. Pp. ix + 207. Cloth, $105.00. Paper, $29.95.One of the many provisions of Gilles Deleuze's prodigious philosophical invention, Difference and Repetition, is an ontological account of how invention is actual. That book itself is an instance of that of which it offers an account. An element of this account (...) is the notion of an intensive system. The intensive system is proposed as a way in which novelty and movement come about. It requires as its basic constituents two heterogeneous organized series which are put into communication through their differences, producing a resonance internal to the system which then yields a novel forced movement. Several of the essays in Between Deleuze and Derrida so put the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida into communication as to themselves amount to intensive systems: movement and novelty emerge in our grasp of the separate oeuvres of the two philosophers.Essays by Daniel W. Smith and Leonard Lawlor tackle in detail the task of comparative explication. Since Deleuze and Derrida treat many of the same philosophical topics, often employing identical terms, these clear cases for their divergences and similarities are especially useful. Smith's historical situation of Deleuze and Derrida relative to the thought of Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche is exemplary. Dense with connections, Lawlor's decisive expositions pursue the implications of his interpretative distinctions rigorously to their ends, tracing the divergent constructions of the two thinkers to a common source in the notion of a simulacrum. Smith and Lawlor themselves part company, however, over the issue of whether Derrida and Deleuze are best characterized as philosophers of immanence or transcendence. Paul Patton crafts a sophisticated cross-reading of their shared vision of philosophy as a "utopian vocation," without homogenizing the differing voices they hear in this call or its unshared ontology.Branka Arsiæ's imaginative contribution on the topic of passive events and Melville's Bartleby is enlightening even without mention of Deleuze's notion of static ordinal genesis. The essays of John Protevi and Tamsin Lorraine are also rich in philosophical imagination. Protevi's extension of Derrida's aporias of the gift and friendship to an "aporia of love" illuminates Derrida's own evolution while refusing a version of undecidability that remains in static indecision. His discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the girl, with its isotropic implications for sexuality per se, is one of the best in print. Lorraine displays the novelty of Deleuze and Derrida's post-Heideggerian thought on the temporality of sense and the limits of representation in readings of Alice in Wonderland and Hamlet that clarify by example some of the more forbiddingly elaborate proposals in the philosophy of time that these thinkers offer.Arkady Plotnitsky's chapter addresses the crucial questions of Deleuze's and Derrida's relations to various sub-fields of mathematics and happily considers Derrida, with his deployment of a notion of undecidability, as a legatee of Gödel. It is confusing, however, that this stimulating essay treats Deleuze's and Derrida's invocations of algebra, geometry and topology by means of the "tropes" of "algebra, geometry and topology." This is especially puzzling in the case of Deleuze, whose use of mathematics in Difference and Repetition is avowedly not metaphorical. Further, although algebra is said to be the prime instrument of Plotnitsky's analysis, it turns out that "the general quasi-algebraic inscriptive structure or operation" (111; my italics) is most fundamental to that analysis. For this reason, it would be preferable to locate in both Deleuze and Derrida a post-structuralist concern with structure itself, making "algebra" another in the Derridean syntagmatic chain of names for a descendent of "structure."The book does contain some disappointing stretches. Eric Alliez's chapter does not read well despite its reliable translation. Alphonso Lingis's ruminations of a blithely bewildered Western roamer ("you" and then "me") on his "detour into exoticism" thanks to the "willing" concupiscence of an Asian female bed-mate ("she" and never "you" or "me") make one regret the era of easy... (shrink)

For much of the 20th century, dance writers and critics regularly bemoaned a shortage of male dancers. As one writer put it, the average American father would rather see his son dead than performing on stage in tights. This article looks at commentary about male dancing as a means of understanding popular conceptions of effeminacy. It addresses the way discourses about sport, physical prowess and hard bodies have been appropriated in attempts to validate the manliness of male dancers. Drawing on (...) works by dance educators, critics and dancers, such as Gene Kelly and American modern dancer Ted Shawn, the article looks at gendered notions of the body and movement and the way these have been shaped by the late 19th-century conflation of effeminacy and homosexuality. The athleticism and muscularity of male dancers were to have brought them mainstream respect; that they have yet to do so at all but elite levels reminds us that even the hardest bodies must be read through the limitations of the discursive contexts in which they move. (shrink)

In a time of rapid technological and social change, business organizations must help their employees develop a new appreciation of how social and ethical values are being shaped and challenged by evolving information technologies. Many ethical and social conflicts have arisen around the advanced information technology used today. The emerging technologies continue to create situations not previously encountered. There are numerous risks facing corporations involved in the use of computing technology. Leaders of organizations looking ahead to assess the impact of (...) technological changes can try to prepare their employees for the future. This paper addresses the urgent need for individuals in corporations to become more knowledgeable about computing technologies and their impact. (shrink)