Every man, the journalist -- Balancing digital identities -- Evaluating websites for credibility -- Attribution and anonymous sources -- Credibility and personal bias -- Glossary -- For more information -- For further reading.

Persons with dementia often prefer to participate in decisions about their health care, but may be prevented from doing so because healthcare decision-making law facilitates use of advance directives or surrogate decision makers for persons with decisional impairments such as dementia. Federal and state disability law provide alternative decision-making models that do not prevent persons with mild to moderate dementia from making their own healthcare decisions at the time the decision needs to be made. In order to better promote autonomy (...) and wellbeing, persons with dementia should be accommodated and supported so they can make their own healthcare decisions. (shrink)

The source texts for Ovid's Heroides often contain precedents for his heroines as message senders at moments in their tradition especially ripe for elegiac refashioning. The first part of this paper suggests that the disputed first word of Heroides 1, a hanc with no apparent referent, signals Penelope's penchant for composing messages, both in Ovid's elegiac letter and in Homer's epic, and functions as a programmatic opening to the collection. The second part more briefly treats letters 4, 5, 6, 7, (...) 9, and 13 to show how their authors' previous mythographical correspondence also provides points of origin for the Heroides. (shrink)

Discussion of supported decision making has been dominated by legal scholars, philosophers, and advocates for persons with disabilities. Peterson et al.’s primary contribution is introducing...

BackgroundCommunity engagement within biomedical research is broadly defined as a collaborative relationship between a research team and a group of individuals targeted for research. A Community Advisory Board is one mechanism of engaging the community. Within genomics research CABs may be particularly relevant due to the potential implications of research findings drawn from individual participants on the larger communities they represent. Within such research, CABs seek to meet instrumental goals such as protecting research participants and their community from research-related risks, (...) as well as intrinsic goals such as promoting the respect of participants and their community. However, successful community engagement depends on the degree to which CABs legitimately represent and engage with communities targeted for research. Currently, there is little literature describing the use of CABs in genomics research taking place in developing countries, and even less in the field of genomics research relating to mental illness. The aim of this article is to describe and consider the contributions made by a researcher-driven, population-specific CAB in a genomics of schizophrenia research project taking place in South Africa, from the perspective of the research team.DiscussionFour broad discussion topics emerged during the CAB meetings namely: 1) informed consent procedures, 2) recruitment strategies, 3) patient illness beliefs and stigma experiences, and 4) specific ethical concerns relating to the project. The authors consider these discussions in terms of their contributions to instrumental and intrinsic goals of community engagement.SummaryThe CAB gave valuable input on the consent processes and materials, recruitment strategies and suggested ways of minimizing the potential for stigma and discrimination. All of these contributions were of an instrumental nature, and helped improve the way in which the research took place. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the CAB made a unique and important contribution relating to intrinsic functions such as promoting the respect and dignity of research participants and their community. This was particularly evident in ensuring sensitivity and respect of the community’s traditional beliefs about schizophrenia and its treatment, and in this way promoting a respectful relationship between the research team and the participants. (shrink)

Although scientific images have begun to receive significant attention from philosophers, one type of image has thus far been ignored: moving images. As techniques such as live cell imaging and videomicroscopy are becoming increasingly important in many areas of biology, however, this oversight needs to be corrected. Biologists often claim that there are relevant differences between video and static images. Most interesting is the idea that video images allow us to see causal relationships. By identifying the conditions that would be (...) required for this to be true and showing that they are not satisfied at the micro level, I will show that videomicroscopy does not provide us with special access to causal information. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4; e-mail: mdelehan@ucalgary.ca. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Shavelson and colleagues (2023) describe how medical aid-in-dying laws in the United States prohibit assistance in administering aid-in-dying medication. This prohibition distinguishes aid in dying...

For much of their history, the relationship between anthropology and psychology has been well captured by Robert Frost's poem, “Mending Wall,” which ends with the ironic line, “good fences make good neighbors.” The congenial fence was that anthropology studied what people think and psychology studied how people think. Recent research, however, shows that content and process cannot be neatly segregated, because cultural differences in what people think affect how people think. To achieve a deeper understanding of the relation between process (...) and content, research must integrate the methodological insights from both anthropology and psychology. We review previous research and describe new studies in the domain of folk biology which examine the cognitive consequences of different conceptualizations of nature and the place of humans within it. The focus is on cultural differences in framework theories among Native Americans and European American children and adults living in close proximity in rural Wisconsin. Our results show that epistemological orientations affect memory organization, ecological reasoning, and the perceived role of humans in nature. This research also demonstrates that cultural differences in framework theories have implications for understanding intergroup conflict over natural resources and are relevant to efforts to improve science learning, especially among Native American children. (shrink)

Unrecognized conventions—practices that are conventional even though their participants do not recognize them as such—play central roles in shaping our lives. They range from the indispensable (e.g. unrecognized linguistic conventions) to the insidious (e.g. some of our gender conventions). Unrecognized conventions pose a challenge for accounts of conventions because it is difficult to incorporate the distinctive arbitrariness of conventions—the fact that conventions always have alternatives—without accidentally excluding many unrecognized conventions. I develop an Accessibility Requirement that allows us to account for (...) both arbitrariness and unrecognized conventions. Specifically, I argue that a conventional practice must have at least one alternative that is at least approximately as good and at least approximately as accessible as the conventional practice itself, independent of the dominance the practice gained as it became conventional. In the course of arguing for this requirement, I also show that two prominent accounts of conventions, David Lewis’s and Ruth Garrett Millikan’s, run into problems with capturing the arbitrariness of conventions. The Accessibility Requirement opens the door to improved accounts of conventions by precisely identifying the way in which conventions are arbitrary. (shrink)

To address climate change fairly, many conflicting claims over natural resources must be balanced against one another. This has long been obvious in the case of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas sinks including the atmosphere and forests; but it is ever more apparent that responses to climate change also threaten to spur new competition over land and extractive resources. This makes climate change an instance of a broader, more enduring and - for many - all too familiar problem: the problem (...) of human conflict over how the natural world should be cared for, protected, shared, used, and managed. -/- This work develops a new theory of global egalitarianism concerning natural resources, rejecting both permanent sovereignty and equal division, which is then used to examine the problem of climate change. It formulates principles of resource right designed to protect the ability of all human beings to satisfy their basic needs as members of self-determining political communities, where it is understood that the genuine exercise of collective self-determination is not possible from a position of significant disadvantage in global wealth and power relations. These principles are used to address the question of where to set the ceiling on future greenhouse gas emissions and how to share the resulting emissions budget, in the face of conflicting claims to fossil fuels, climate sinks, and land. It is also used to defend an unorthodox understanding of responsibility for climate change as a problem of global justice, based on its provenance in historical injustice concerning natural resources. (shrink)

There is a long philosophical tradition of skepticism about the possibility of adequate paraphrases for metaphorical utterances. And even among those who favor paraphrasability, there is a tendency to think that paraphrases of metaphorical utterances may themselves have to be non-literal. I argue that even the most evocative and open-ended metaphorical utterances can be literally and adequately paraphrased, once we recognize that they are actually indirect speech acts—specifically, indirect directives that command the hearer to engage in an open-ended comparison. This (...) leads to an overall picture in which trite, unevocative metaphorical utterances admit of just straightforward, usually non-directive literal paraphrases, while the most evocative metaphorical utterances admit of only indirect directive paraphrases, and metaphorical utterances in a third category admit of two literal paraphrases, one of which is straightforward and usually non-directive, and the other of which takes the indirect directive form. This argument for literal paraphrasability is intended to demystify metaphor, but not to undercut metaphor’s tremendous value as a communicative device. (shrink)

The task of designing an ontology through reuse is difficult, and a major challenge in this effort is choosing between different ontologies that are candidates for reuse. To address this challenge,...

Pickering, Newton-Howes, and Young assert that the traditional view of decisional capacity, premised on assessing patients’ abilities to communicate, understand, appreciate,...

Land is becoming increasingly scarce relative to the demands of the global economy; a problem significantly exacerbated by climate change. In response, some have suggested that land should be conceptualised as a global commons. This framing might seem like an appealing way to promote sustainable and equitable land use. However, it is a poor fit for the worldʼs land because global commons are generally understood as resources located beyond state borders. I argue that land can be seen to fit the (...) definition of a global commons, if viewed in a particular way; namely, as a biogeochemical resource system that sequesters carbon emissions. The question then arises whether land should be conceptualised as a global commons. I consider this question by reference to three contemporary problems of land justice (land grabbing, forced displacement, and unfairness in land-based climate mitigation); arguing that the global-commons framing will not be conducive to understanding or responding to these problems. I leave the question of how the global community should conceptualise land in the context of climate change open, claiming that any answer must include the voices and perspectives of those whose livelihoods and identities are closely connected to the land. (shrink)

As members of the fetal surgery advisory board at a large tertiary care center, we read with great interest Hendriks’ et al. target article proposing a new ethical framework for fetal therap...

Despite recent empirical interest, the links between optimism and pessimism with pro-environmental behavior remain equivocal. This research is characterized by a reliance on cross-sectional data, a focus on trait-level at the neglect of state-level optimism–pessimism, and assessments of retrospective self-reported ecological behavior that are subject to response bias. To attend to these gaps, 140 North American adults were experimentally primed with bogus optimistic or pessimistic environmental news articles, and then asked to report their levels of state optimism–pessimism, intentions to purchase (...) green products, in vivo PEB, and support for geoengineering technologies. Results confirmed that optimistic environmental messaging enhanced the expression of state optimism, which then contributed to PEB and support for geoengineering. These results have important implications for the framing of environmental messaging intended to promote ecologically conscious behavior. (shrink)

Some claim that a commitment to egalitarianism is in tension with support for reparations for historical injustice. This tension appears to arise insofar as egalitarianism is a forward-looking approach to justice: an approach that tells us what kind of world we should aim to build, where that world is not defined in terms of the decisions or actions of previous generations. Some have claimed that egalitarianism thereby renders reparations redundant. One popular option for egalitarians who aim to reject this thesis (...) is to insist that historical injustices demand reparations when they have caused present-day inequality. A promising alternative, skilfully defended by Alasia Nuti in Injustice and the Reproduction of History, is to argue that historical injustices stand in need of repair when they are reproduced into the present-day, such that some past and present injustices are in fact the same injustice. In this paper, I assess these egalitarian responses to the redundancy thesis. I find that Nuti’s account is equipped to reject this thesis, but that the same lines of reply can be adopted by proponents of the causal approach. I suggest that both approaches therefore be viewed as potential ways to conceptualise the relationship between historical injustice and our present normative circumstances; and that in choosing between them, we should understand ourselves to be engaged in an ameliorative project – a project that is guided by, and designed to help us to achieve, our legitimate purposes. (shrink)

In this target article by Morain and Largent (2023), the authors focus on an investigator’s duty to patient-subjects specifically regarding incidental or collateral findings within the context of e...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:684 Feminist Studies 43, no. 3. © 2017 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Megan Kaminski This Century This century is full-on burning the past past carrying back lost to re-memory the year brings millennial want: a bright new coat red shoes an end to oil pipelines and student loans encase us all in warmth not waged labor drab curtains pulled aside reveal window onto window echo us many permutations (...) bring responses wrought and metaled down empty that treasury steal back from church coffers there is something that binds more than moth-eaten sweaters more than stripped-soled shoes we wanting we to mean banks burning profits redistributed we holding the soft hands of we Megan Kaminski 685 This Century This century is not so good filled with tsunamis and snowstorms people displaced by capital and rising waters threaten to make even Kansas beach-front I’d like to stick a fork in the eye of the governor and the Koch brothers too help liberate people from bad shit minimum wage jobs and medical bills give all of us something real to be happy about like city parks clean water and a few fewer grams of rocket fuel in the arugula cats sunning themselves on warm days no old dudes wanting to mess with my uterus and a new sundress trimmed with ribbon This Century This century makes me say things about burning and baddies and whether poetry can really do much of anything unacknowledged legislator or just a lady ass atrophying perched in front of a laptop this century makes me write about changing and loving all of you and getting closer with warm-nosed nudges under your chin embraces while wearing my softest of sweaters these poems want to get out of my chair out of the house and the neighborhood out of capital and with people in favor of all of us animals and plants 686 Megan Kaminski This Century This century takes place in the streets in living rooms of friends in shared words exchanged across borders bridging the distance between you and me and we and ours and taking from board rooms and markets this century is full of things eroding making way for bodies for gardens for libraries for a commoning a burning of gates and fences and debts we spring forth in multitudes occupy more than street corners cordoned off we singing we and the streets the open fields... (shrink)

German rabbi, scholar, and theologian Abraham Geiger is recognized as the principal leader of the Reform movement in German Judaism. In his new work, Ken Koltun-Fromm argues that for Geiger personal meaning in religion—rather than rote ritual practice or acceptance of dogma—was the key to religion’s moral authority. In five chapters, the book explores issues central to Geiger’s work that speak to contemporary Jewish practice—historical memory, biblical interpretation, ritual and gender practices, rabbinic authority, and Jewish education. This is essential (...) reading for scholars, rabbis, rabbinical students, and informed Jewish readers interested in Conservative and Reform Judaism. Published with the generous support of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation. (shrink)

Video‐recording healthcare interactions provides important opportunities for research and service improvement. However, this method brings about tensions, especially when recording sensitive topics. Subsequent reflection may compel the researcher to engage in ethical and moral deliberations. This paper presents experiences from a South African genetic counselling study which made use of video‐recordings to understand communicative processes in routine practice. Video‐recording as a research method, as well as contextual and process considerations are discussed, such as researching one's own field, issues of trust (...) and anonymity, the challenge of providing true informed consent and capturing details which may cause psychological harm. Several recommendations for research practice in diverse healthcare settings are made. This includes the value of reflective pieces, the importance of retrospective consent, disclosure of the limitations to anonymity, as well as the collective responsibility of those involved to produce ethical research. These recommendations have value for genetic counselling and other healthcare fields. (shrink)

Richard Stanley Peters appreciates the centrality of concepts for everyday life, however, he fails to recognize their pedagogical dimension. He distinguishes concepts employed at the first-order (our ordinary language-use) from second-order conceptual clarification (conducted exclusively by academically trained philosophers). This distinction serves to elevate the discipline of philosophy at the expense of our ordinary language-use. I revisit this distinction and argue that our first-order use of concepts encompasses second-order concern. Individuals learn and teach concepts as they use them. Conceptual understanding (...) is an obligation that all individuals, and not just academically trained philosophers, must fulfil. I conclude that the role of philosophy in education is to provide a conversational context for the pedagogical dimension of concepts. I draw upon the philosophies of Cora Diamond, Stephen Mulhall, Iris Murdoch and Rush Rhees. (shrink)

SUMMARYContemporary scholars seeking to advance the study of political phenomena identify their inquiry as a ‘science' that attains success through rigorous method. Thus the ‘methodological anarchism' of Paul Feyerabend's philosophy of science might seem an inauspicious place to find a fruitful disciplinary vision. Nonetheless, it echoes a longstanding conception of the ‘science' of politics articulated by Niccolò Machiavelli. Looking to Feyerabend, we propose to surmount the impasse between Machiavelli's account of politics and the demands of modern science and recover his (...) contribution to the scientific study of politics. In doing so, Machiavelli illustrates the potential of a Feyerabendian political science. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 2, February 2025, Page 61-64.

Dynamic Consent is both a model and a specific web-based tool that enables clear, granular communication and recording of participant consent choices over time. The DC model enables individuals to know and to decide how personal research information is being used and provides a way in which to exercise legal rights provided in privacy and data protection law. The DC tool is flexible and responsive, enabling legal and ethical requirements in research data sharing to be met and for online health (...) information to be maintained. DC has been used in rare diseases and genomics, to enable people to control and express their preferences regarding their own data. However, DC has never been explored in relationship to historical collections of bioscientific and genetic heritage or to contexts involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.In response to the growing interest by First Peoples throughout Australia in genetic and genomic research, and the increasing number of invitations from researchers to participate in community health and wellbeing projects, this article examines the legal and ethical attributes and challenges of DC in these contexts. It also explores opportunities for including First Peoples' cultural perspectives, governance, and leadership as a method for defining DC on cultural terms that engage best practice research and data analysis as well as respect for meaningful and longitudinal individual and family participation. (shrink)

The field of science communication is plagued by challenges. Communicators face the difficulty of responding to unjustified public skepticism over issues like climate change and COVID-19 while also acknowledging the fallibility and limitations of scientific knowledge. Our goal in this paper is to suggest a new model for science communication that can help foster more productive, respectful relationships among all those involved in science communication. Inspired by the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, we develop an experience model, according to which (...) science communication consists in people’s experiences with science and the meanings they develop from those experiences. Three principles are central to the model: experience is cumulative, context matters, and audiences have agency. We argue that this model has significant implications both for communication research and practice, which we illustrate by applying it to the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy. We show how science communicators can help to identify and alleviate structural factors that contribute to skepticism as well as fostering opportunities for meaning making around shared experiences. (shrink)

We were interested to read the current target article, given our admiration for the senior author’s comprehensive coverage of these same topics a decade ago (Donley, Hul...

Given that many imaging technologies in biology and medicine are non-optical and generate data that is essentially numerical, it is a striking feature of these technologies that the data generated using them are most frequently displayed in the form of semi-naturalistic, photograph-like images. In this paper, I claim that three factors underlie this: (1) historical preferences, (2) the rhetorical power of images, and (3) the cognitive accessibility of data presented in the form of images. The third of these can be (...) argued to provide an epistemic advantage to images, but I will further argue that this is often misleading and that images can in many cases be less informative than the corresponding mathematical data. (shrink)

Here are two widely held positions on the ethics of dating: First, people are generally morally justified in excluding people they don’t find attractive from their dating pool. Second, people are not justified in maintaining a dating pool that is racially exclusive, even on grounds like attraction. In this paper, we demonstrate how these positions are consistent. To do so we differentiate our attitudes in dating and our dating behavior. Then we show how existing criticisms of racialized attitudes in dating (...) are incomplete as practical criticisms of our behavior. Finally, we give our account of the moral reasons whites have to change their dating preferences when they exclude people of color. In doing so, we supplement existing discussions of race-based discrimination in dating. (shrink)

The lymphatic vasculature plays a critical role in the regulation of body fluid volume and immune function. Extensive research into the molecular mechanisms that control blood vessel growth has led to identification of molecules that also regulate development and growth of the lymphatic vessels. This is generating a great deal of interest in the molecular control of the lymphatics in the context of embryogenesis, lymphatic disorders and tumor metastasis. Studies in animal models carried out over the past three years have (...) shown that the soluble protein growth factors, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)‐C and VEGF‐D, and their cognate receptor tyrosine kinase, VEGF receptor‐3 (VEGFR‐3), are critical regulators of lymphangiogenesis. Furthermore, disfunction of VEGFR‐3 has recently been shown to cause lymphedema. The capacity to induce lymphangiogenesis by manipulation of the VEGF‐C/VEGF‐D/VEGFR‐3 signaling pathway offers new opportunities to understand the function of the lymphatic system and to develop novel treatments for lymphatic disorders. BioEssays 24:1030–1040, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In recent years, the law in the area of recovered memories in child sexual abuse cases has developed rapidly. See J.K. Murray, “Repression, Memory & Suggestibility: A Call for Limitations on the Admissibility of Repressed Memory Testimony in Abuse Trials,” University of Colorado Law Review, 66 : 477-522, at 479. Three cases have defined the scope of liability to third parties. The cases, decided within six months of each other, all involved lawsuits by third parties against therapists, based on treatment (...) in which the patients recovered memories of sexual abuse. The New Hampshire Supreme Court, in Hungerford v. Jones, 722 A.2d 478, allowed such a claim to survive, while the supreme courts in Iowa, in J.A.H. v. Wadle & Associates, 589 N.W.2d 256, and California, in Eear v. Sills, 82 Cal. Rptr. 281, rejected lawsuits brought by nonpatients for professional liability. (shrink)

Although there is a large and growing literature on children’s developing concepts of illness transmission, little is known about how children develop contagion knowledge before formal schooling begins, and how these informal learning experiences can impact children’s health behaviors. Here we asked two important questions: First, do children’s informal learning experiences, such as their experiences reading storybooks, regularly contain causal information about illness transmission; and second, what is the impact of this type of experience on children’s developing knowledge and behavior? (...) In Study 1, we examined whether children’s commercial books about illness regularly contain contagion-relevant causal information. In Study 2, we ran a pilot study examining whether providing children with causal information about illness transmission in a storybook can influence their knowledge and subsequent behavior when presented with a contaminated object. The results from Study 1 suggest that very few (15%) children’s books about illness feature biological causal mechanisms for illness transmission. However, results from Studies 2 suggest that storybooks containing contagion-relevant explanations about illness transmission may encourage learning and avoidance of contaminated objects. Altogether, these results provide preliminary data suggesting that future research should focus on engaging children in learning about contagion and encouraging adaptive health behaviors. (shrink)

In recent decades, urban agriculture has drawn practitioners seeking ways to increase both environmental sustainability and social equity in their cities. The practice has also drawn criticism for the ways it reproduces inequalities based on differences of class and race. In this paper, I argue contestations around urban agriculture are part of ongoing yet shifting processes of class formation intersecting with racial differentiation, in particular the emergence of green middle-class identity. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in a small (...) city in Michigan, USA, I examine urban agriculture as a historic spatial and aesthetic practice, drawing on examples of chicken-keeping, permaculture-style gardening, and concerns with neatness and blight. By positioning urban agriculture within historical narratives of landscape aesthetics and land use policy, I demonstrate how this practice becomes bound up in the ongoing production of class distinctions and inequalities. Throughout, I draw attention to how processes of class formation unfold in ways that diverge from, or are in excess of, local gardeners’ and agriculturalists’ intentions. In conclusion, I gesture to the ways the instability and dynamism of class formation via urban agriculture presents opportunities for addressing the reproduction of race- and class-based inequalities and for nurturing more equitable and sustainable forms of urban agriculture practice. (shrink)

On November 9, 2002, a few hundred people, mostly mental health clinicians, gathered at the New York University Medical Center for two days of discussions on the theme, September 11th: Psychoanalytic Reflections in the Second Year. The conference was sponsored by the five New York Societies of the International Psychoanalytical Association. The presentations described various bits of learning that seemed to be emerging from the crisis clinical work with so many traumatized people since the attack on the World Trade Center. (...) This paper discusses three of those presentations in the context of the author’s reflections based on his psychotherapeutic work with very troubled patients in a therapeutic community setting. He emphasizes the effect of trauma, not only on individuals, but on the holding environments and symbolic order on which human beings depend for their psychic survival. (shrink)