The upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has the potential to eliminate or severely restrict access to legal abortion care in the United States. We a...

This paper examines the current position of copyright for the music industry in the light of innovation and diffusion of technologies which enable audio file sharing amongst web users. We note that there currently appears to be conflicting assessments between the major corporations and the many small firms in Europe with regard to the business potential for online music. In particular, we show that the convergence of technologies together with the emergence of particular practices of ‘net culture’ have posed a (...) number of marketing opportunities and threats for industry incumbents. The role of the Napster program, as well as subsequent innovations in peer‐to‐peer software, is examined together with the responses that have been made by different sections of industry. (shrink)

The rapid rise of international collaborative science has enabled access to genomic data. In this article, it is argued that to move beyond mapping genomic variation to understanding its role in complex disease aetiology and treatment will require extending data sharing for the purposes of clinical research translation and implementation.

Young children's early understanding of emotion was investigated by examining their use of emotion terms such as happy, sad, mud, and cry. Five children's emotion language was examined longitudinally from the age of 2 to 5 years, and as a comparison their reference to pains via such terms as burn, sting, and hurt was also examined. In Phase 1 we confirmed and extended prior findings demonstrating that by 2 years of age terms for the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, (...) and fear are commonly used by children as are terms for such related states as crying and hurting. At this early age children produce such terms to refer to self and to others, and to past and future as well as to present states. Over the years from 2 to 5 children's emotion vocabulary expands, their discussion of hypothetical emotions gets underway, and the complexity of their emotion utterances increases. In Phase 2 our analyses go beyond children's production of emotion terms to analyses of their conception of emotion. We focus especially on when children use emotion terms to refer to subjective experiential states of persons. From their earliest uses of these terms in our data children. (shrink)

Over the last several years, as cesarean deliveries have grown increasingly common, there has been a great deal of public and professional interest in the phenomenon of women 'choosing' to deliver by cesarean section in the absence of any specific medical indication. The issue has sparked intense conversation, as it raises questions about the nature of autonomy in birth. Whereas mainstream bioethical discourse is used to associating autonomy with having a large array of choices, this conception of autonomy does not (...) seem adequate to capture concerns and intuitions that have a strong grip outside this discourse. An empirical and conceptual exploration of how delivery decisions ought to be negotiated must be guided by a rich understanding of women's agency and its placement within a complicated set of cultural meanings and pressures surrounding birth. It is too early to be 'for' or 'against' women's access to cesarean delivery in the absence of traditional medical indications – and indeed, a simple pro- or con- position is never going to do justice to the subtlety of the issue. The right question is not whether women ought to be allowed to choose their delivery approach but, rather, taking the value of women's autonomy in decision-making around birth as a given, what sorts of guidelines, practices, and social conditions will best promote and protect women's full inclusion in a safe and positive birth process. (shrink)

Parents in Iran, China and the United States were asked 1) about their potential influence on their children’s religious and scientific views and 2) to consider a situation in which their children expressed dissent. Iranian and US parents endorsed their influence on the children’s beliefs in the two domains. By contrast, Chinese parents claimed more influence in the domain of science than religion. Most parents spoke of influencing their children via Parent-only mechanisms in each domain, although US parents did spontaneously (...) note Multiple sources for the transmission of religious views. Parents proposed a similar stance towards children’s dissenting religious and scientific views. Chinese and US parents were more likely to express Supportive approaches and Iranian parents were more likely to express a Directive approach by comparison. The present research informs our understanding of the cultural transmission of views about science and religion. (shrink)

Alterations to cognitive function are often reported with depression and anxiety symptoms, yet few studies have examined the same associations with mental well-being. This study examined the association between mental well-being, depression and anxiety symptoms and cognitive function in 1502 healthy adult monozygotic and dizygotic twins, and the shared/unique contribution of genetic and environmental variance. Using linear mixed models, mental well-being was positively associated with sustained attention, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, motor coordination and working memory, whereas depression and anxiety symptoms were (...) associated with poorer sustained attention, inhibition, cognitive flexibility and executive function. Bivariate twin modelling showed well-being shared a small environmental correlation with motor coordination and a small genetic correlation with working memory. Trivariate twin modelling showed well-being shared a small genetic correlation with inhibition, whereas depression and anxiety symptoms shared a small environmental correlation with inhibition. The remaining variance was mostly driven by unique G and/or E variance. Overall, well-being and depression and anxiety symptoms show both independent and shared relationships with cognitive functions but this is largely attributable to unique G or E variance and small shared G/E variance between pairs of variables. (shrink)

Five‐ to 11‐year‐old U.S. children, from either a religious or secular background, judged whether story events could really happen. There were four different types of stories: magical stories violating ordinary causal regularities; religious stories also violating ordinary causal regularities but via a divine agent; unusual stories not violating ordinary causal regularities but with an improbable event; and realistic stories not violating ordinary causal regularities and with no improbable event. Overall, children were less likely to judge that religious and magical stories (...) could really happen than unusual and realistic stories although religious children were more likely than secular children to judge that religious stories could really happen. Irrespective of background, children frequently invoked causal regularities in justifying their judgments. Thus, in justifying their conclusion that a story could really happen, children often invoked a causal regularity, whereas in justifying their conclusion that a story could not really happen, they often pointed to the violation of causal regularity. Overall, the findings show that children appraise the likelihood of story events actually happening in light of their beliefs about causal regularities. A religious upbringing does not impact the frequency with which children invoke causal regularities in judging what can happen, even if it does impact the type of causal factors that children endorse. (shrink)

Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation of imaginary worlds, (...) and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

Tarihte herhalde çok az soru Tanrı’nın varlığı sorusu kadar sık sorulmuş, çok yanıtlanmış ve verilen birbirinden farklı onca yanıta rağmen kesin bir sonuca ulaştırılamayıp tartışılmaya devam etmiştir. Yine de geçmişe dönüp baktığımızda bu soruya verilen farklı yanıtların farklı uygarlıkların inşa edilmesine, bazılarının yıkılmasına, acımasız çatışmalara ve her şeye rağmen kucaklaşmalara da vesile olduğunu görüyoruz. Tanrı var mı? Varsa onu nasıl bilebiliriz? Tanrı yoksa her şey mubah mı? İnsan aklı ilahi olanı kavrayabilir mi? Tanrı’nın varlığı ahlaklı olmanın şartı mı? Evren akıllı (...) bir tasarımcının imzasını taşıyor mu? Bu kitapta felsefeci William David Beck, bu sorulara tarihte verilen yanıtları ve bu konudaki tartışmaları ele alarak meselenin genel ve tarihsel bir tablosunu bize sunuyor. Platon, Aristoteles, Marcus Aurelius gibi Eski Yunan ve Roma düşünürlerinden Anselmus, Thomas Aquinas, Augustinus ve Yahudi-Hıristiyan geleneğine, Doğu’nun bilgelerine, İbni Rüşd, Fârâbî ve Gazzâlî gibi İslam düşünürlerinden Alvin Plantinga, Graham Oppy, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Max Tegmark gibi Batılı modern ilahiyatçılara, bilim insanlarına ve Yeni Ateizm hareketine kadar uzanan bir çizgide “Tanrı var mı?” sorusuna verilen çeşitli yanıtları ve bu yanıtlara sunulan akılcı gerekçeleri ortaya koyarak soruya felsefece bir yanıt vermenin nasıl bir iş olduğunu da gösteriyor. (shrink)

Locating stance -- Structures of stance in lived experience -- Stance and others, stance and lives -- The social life of stance and the politics of expressive culture.

The same research proposal was submitted to 24 district health authority (DHA) research ethics committees in different parts of the country. The objective was to obtain permission for a multi-centre research project. The study of neonatal care in different types of unit (regional, subregional and district), required that four health authorities were approached in each of six widely separated health regions in England. Data were collected and compared concerning aspects of processing, including application forms, information required, timing and decision-making. The (...) key finding was that ethics committees received and processed the applications variably, reflecting individual factors and local problems. To improve consensus and facilitate multicentre studies, standard forms and instructions are suggested and the establishment of a national committee or advisory group advocated. (shrink)

This article explores how older adults negotiate and partially counter normative expectations of “health citizenship” that stress individual responsibility for maintaining health and preventing health problems. Based on interviews with 55 participants in Canada and the U.K. about what healthy living means to them in their everyday lives, we examine how the dominant discourse of personal responsibility in participants’ responses is counterpointed by a more muted, yet significant, alternative critical perspective on the relative roles and responsibilities of government and citizens (...) in making healthy living possible. Drawing on Hauser’s (1999) concept of vernacular rhetoric along with recent theories of environmental citizenship, we analyze how participants exercise their civic-political judgment by using a logic of dissociation to argue that what government says about the importance of healthy living is incompatible with what government does to support citizens’ abilities to eat healthily and live actively. By deploying this technique of argumentation to address structural-political-economic dimensions of healthy living, participants enact, in modest ways, an alternative, critical-collective mode of health citizenship that complicates and, at least partially, disrupts neoliberal constructions of the individually responsible, “good” health citizen. (shrink)

A set A is symmetric enumeration (se-) reducible to a set B (A ≤\sb se B) if A is enumeration reducible to B and \barA is enumeration reducible to \barB. This reducibility gives rise to a degree structure (D\sb se) whose least element is the class of computable sets. We give a classification of ≤\sb se in terms of other standard reducibilities and we show that the natural embedding of the Turing degrees (D\sb T) into the enumeration degrees (D\sb e) (...) translates to an embedding (ι\sb se) into D\sb se that preserves least element, suprema, and infima. We define a weak and a strong jump and we observe that ι\sb se preserves the jump operator relative to the latter definition. We prove various (global) results concerning branching, exact pairs, minimal covers, and diamond embeddings in D\sb se. We show that certain classes of se-degrees are first-order definable, in particular, the classes of semirecursive, Σ\sb n ⋃ Π\sb n, Δ\sb n (for any n \in ω), and embedded Turing degrees. This last result allows us to conclude that the theory of D\sb se has the same 1-degree as the theory of Second-Order Arithmetic. (shrink)

Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation of imaginary worlds, (...) and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

Imagining is something we use everyday in our lives and in a wide variety of ways. In spite of the amount of works devoted to its study from both psychology and philosophy, there are only a few formal systems capable of modelling it; besides, almost all of those systems are static, in the sense that their models are initially predefined, and they fail to capture the dynamic process behind the creation of new imaginary scenarios. In this work, we review some (...) influential theories of imagination and use their insights to distil an algorithm describing such process. Then, we use this algorithm to define a dynamic logical system built upon on a single-agent epistemic logic that provides the necessary tools to capture how the agent voluntarily creates new imaginary worlds; in other words, our system allows the model to be expanded dynamically at any time as a result of the agent performing an act of imagination. Furthermore, we provide an axiomatization and prove that the system is sound and complete. (shrink)

A. The Problem: Since A. Gercke's fundamental work, there has been no complete reappraisal of the manuscript tradition of the Natural Questions, yet a reappraisal is long overdue. Gercke divided the manuscripts into two branches, Δ and Φ but this division has been seriously undermined from two quarters. First, H. W. Garrod questioned the status which Gercke assigned to Δ, arguing, quite rightly, that in every case where Δ has the truth against Φ, Δ's reading can reasonably be attributed to (...) conjecture, which is known to be rife in Δ Certainly nothing is proved about Δ's integrity by the passages which Gercke adduced, such as the following :3. (shrink)

In this paper, we review three influential theories of imagination in order to understand how the dynamics of imagination acts could be modeled using formal languages. While reviewing them, we notice that they are not detailed enough to account for all the mechanisms involved in creating and developing imaginary worlds. We claim those theories could be further refined into what we call the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, which defines a framework that can be used to study the dynamics of (...) imagination using formal languages, and we support our claim by showing how the framework allows to model certain imagination acts step by step. Then, we introduce the Rhombus of Imagination, which is a visual tool that can be used in conjunction with our framework to study the procedural structure of different kinds of imagination acts and identify their dynamic properties. (shrink)