The papers in this issue are based on presentations by the authors at the 163nd National Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Seattle, Washington, 13–18 February 1997 in the session entitled Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: What the Scientific Community Can Do about Whistleblowing organized by Stephanie J. Bird and Diane Hoffman-Kim. The papers have been modified following double blind peer review.

This article reflects a conversation between Jan G. van der Watt and Stephan Joubert. The article serves as the introduction to the Special Collection: ‘From timely exegesis to contemporary ecclesiology: Relevant hermeneutics and provocative embodiment of faith in a Corona-defined world – Festschrift for Stephan Joubert, sub-edited by Willem Oliver ’. Following a brief bio-statement as introduction, the following issues are discussed: the collection for the Jerusalem church; relevance of theology for society; social-scientific exegesis; the ancient concept of grace; Bible (...) translation in South Africa; public theology on the electronic platform; biblical examples of leadership and electronic media in religious activities and education.Contribution: This Festschrift represents current trends in biblical scholarship and ecclesial leadership. It contributes to the public discourse in church and society, especially the role of the electronic media in current Fourth Industrial Revolution. (shrink)

In this paper an "unconscious" structure common to such altered psychological states as dreaming, schizophrenic disintegration, out-of body experiences, and creative acts is described. This description is accomplished by setting psychoanalytic, clinical, and empirical studies zuithin a phenomenological framework. Phenomenological self-reflection is first made a party to discussions which focus on memories and the experience of the lived body. The configurations of "unconsciousness" then take precedence in describing relationships between the "I" of waking consciousness and a transformative body image . (...) A unique experience of the self-as undergoing a process of ego "duplication" and body "doubling"-is highlighted. (shrink)

ObjectivePhysical isolation measures, known as lockdown or shelter-in-place, experienced during coronavirus disease 2019 have the potential to cause psychological distress. This study was conducted to examine parents’ perceived stress and whether reports of rewards and challenges during lockdown impact stress.MethodsData were collected using a cross-sectional online survey in New South Wales, Australia, across the 4-week lockdown. The survey was completed by 158 parents of children aged under 6 years. Stress was measured using the short form of the Perceived Stress Scale. (...) Rewards and challenges were reported in response to two open-ended questions.ResultsThere was a weak negative correlation between PSS-4 scores and days in isolation, with parents who had spent longer in isolation reporting fewer stress symptoms. The relationship between time in isolation and stress was moderated by the degree to which parents described more rewards than challenges: parents who perceived high rewards and low challenges reported lower PSS-4 scores with more days in lockdown, whereas parents who perceived low rewards and high challenges reported higher PSS-4 scores with more days in lockdown. The moderation model examining associations between time in isolation and rewards ratio explained 13% of the variance in PSS-4 scores.ConclusionLockdowns are not uniformly or consistently negative experiences for parents. Identifying positive aspects of the experience may serve to buffer negative mental health risks across time. Understanding resilience strategies is critical for supporting current psychological wellbeing and to adequately prepare for future pandemic experiences. (shrink)

This volume, the third in this Springer series, contains selected papers from the four workshops organized by the ESF Research Networking Programme "The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective" in 2010: Pluralism in the Foundations of Statistics Points of Contact between the Philosophy of Physics and the Philosophy of Biology The Debate on Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences Historical Debates about Logic, Probability and Statistics The volume is accordingly divided in four sections, each of them containing papers coming (...) from the workshop focussing on one of these themes. While the programme's core topic for the year 2010 was probability and statistics, the organizers of the workshops embraced the opportunity of building bridges to more or less closely connected issues in general philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and philosophy of the special sciences. However, papers that analyze the concept of probability for various philosophical purposes are clearly a major theme in this volume, as it was in the previous volumes of the same series. This reflects the impressive productivity of probabilistic approaches in the philosophy of science, which form an important part of what has become known as formal epistemology - although, of course, there are non-probabilistic approaches in formal epistemology as well. It is probably fair to say that Europe has been particularly strong in this area of philosophy in recent years.​. (shrink)

Conditionals and conditional reasoning have been a long-standing focus of research across a number of disciplines, ranging from psychology through linguistics to philosophy. But almost no work has concerned itself with the question of how hearing or reading a conditional changes our beliefs. Given that we acquire much—perhaps most—of what we believe through the testimony of others, the simple matter of acquiring conditionals via others’ assertion of a conditional seems integral to any full understanding of the conditional and conditional reasoning. (...) In this paper we detail a number of basic intuitions about how beliefs might change in response to a conditional being uttered, and show how these are backed by behavioral data. In the remainder of the paper, we then show how these deceptively simple phenomena pose a fundamental challenge to present theoretical accounts of the conditional and conditional reasoning – a challenge which no account presently fully meets. (shrink)

Although the terms mentor and thesis advisor (or research supervisor) are often used interchangeably, the responsibilities associated with these roles are distinct, even when they overlap. Neither are role models necessarily mentors, though mentors are role models: good examples are necessary but not sufficient. Mentorship is both a personal and a professional relationship. It has the potential for raising a number of ethical concerns, including issues of accuracy and reliability of the information conveyed, access, stereotyping and tracking of advisees, and (...) the abuse of power. Nevertheless, mentors can be critically important for professional success and are one of a number of elements that affect the responsible conduct of research. In addition, the community as a whole has a responsibility to mentor junior members. (shrink)

If one formulates Helmholtz's ideas about perception in terms of modern-day theories one arrives at a model of perceptual inference and learning that can explain a remarkable range of neurobiological facts. Using constructs from statistical physics it can be shown that the problems of inferring what cause our sensory inputs and learning causal regularities in the sensorium can be resolved using exactly the same principles. Furthermore, inference and learning can proceed in a biologically plausible fashion. The ensuing scheme rests on (...) Empirical Bayes and hierarchical models of how sensory information is generated. The use of hierarchical models enables the brain to construct prior expectations in a dynamic and context-sensitive fashion. This scheme provides a principled way to understand many aspects of the brain's organisation and responses. In this paper, we suggest that these perceptual processes are just one emergent property of systems that conform to a free-energy principle. The free-energy considered here represents a bound on the surprise inherent in any exchange with the environment, under expectations encoded by its state or configuration. A system can minimise free-energy by changing its configuration to change the way it samples the environment, or to change its expectations. These changes correspond to action and perception, respectively, and lead to an adaptive exchange with the environment that is characteristic of biological systems. This treatment implies that the system's state and structure encode an implicit and probabilistic model of the environment. We will look at models entailed by the brain and how minimisation of free-energy can explain its dynamics and structure. (shrink)

Trust is a critical component of research: trust in the work of co-workers and colleagues within the scientific community; trust in the work of research scientists by the non-research community. A wide range of factors, including internally and externally generated pressures and practical and personal limitations, affect the research process. The extent to which these factors are understood and appreciated influence the development of trust in scientific research findings.

Humans are powerful and clever, and also more ignorant than they know. As a result, they too often fail to acknowledge or even recognize their limitations, and are more arrogant than humble regarding their capabilities. Education that explicitly recognizes and addresses the context of science and technology, their inherent values and ethical implications and concerns, and their problematic as well as beneficial impacts can potentially rescue the human species from itself.

Humans are powerful and clever, and also more ignorant than they know. As a result, they too often fail to acknowledge or even recognize their limitations, and are more arrogant than humble regarding their capabilities. Education that explicitly recognizes and addresses the context of science and technology, their inherent values and ethical implications and concerns, and their problematic as well as beneficial impacts can potentially rescue the human species from itself.

This thought-provoking book discusses the concept of progress in economics and investigates whether any advance has been made in its different spheres of research. The authors look back at the history, successes and failures of their respective fields and thoroughly examine the notion of progress from an epistemological and methodological perspective. The idea of progress is particularly significant as the authors regard it as an essentially contested concept which can be defined in many ways – theoretically or empirically; locally or (...) globally; or as encouraging or impeding the existence of other research traditions. The authors discuss the idea that for progress to make any sense there must be an accumulation of knowledge built up over time rather than the replacement of ideas by each successive generation. Accordingly, they are not concerned with estimating the price of progress, reminiscing in the past, or assessing what has been lost. Instead they apply the complex mechanisms and machinery of the discipline to sub-fields such as normative economics, monetary economics, trade and location theory, Austrian economics and classical economics to critically assess whether progress has been made in these areas of research. -/- Bringing together authoritative and wide-ranging contributions by leading scholars, this book will challenge and engage those interested in philosophy, economic methodology and the history of economic thought. It will also appeal to economists in general who are interested in the advancement of their profession. (shrink)

Neuroscience research, like all science, is vulnerable to the influence of extraneous values in the practice of research, whether in research design or the selection, analysis and interpretation of data. This is particularly problematic for research into the biological mechanisms that underlie behavior, and especially the neurobiological underpinnings of moral development and ethical reasoning, decision-making and behavior, and the other elements of what is often called the neuroscience of ethics. The problem arises because neuroscientists, like most everyone, bring to their (...) work assumptions, preconceptions and values and other sources of potentially inappropriate bias of which they may be unaware. It is important that the training of neuroscientists, and research practice itself, include open and in-depth discussion and examination of the assumptions that underlie research. Further, policy makers, journalists, and the general public, that is, the consumers of neuroscience research findings (and by extension, neurotechnologies) should be made aware of the limitations as well as the strengths of the science, the evolving nature of scientific understanding, and the often invisible values inherent in science. (shrink)

Humans are powerful and clever, and also more ignorant than they know. As a result, they too often fail to acknowledge or even recognize their limitations, and are more arrogant than humble regarding their capabilities. Education that explicitly recognizes and addresses the context of science and technology, their inherent values and ethical implications and concerns, and their problematic as well as beneficial impacts can potentially rescue the human species from itself.

A New York court recently struck down state Office of Mental Health regulations governing research involving subjects with impaired decisionmaking capacity. The court held that neither incapacitated adults nor minors could participate in any research protocol that contained a nontherapeutic element, irrespective of possible benefits to the subject or the importance of the knowledge to be gained. Although the decision rested on a technical point of law and dealt only with psychiatric research, the court's holding has significantly broader implications.

In discussions of professional standards and ethical values it is reasonable to consider who will develop the codes of conduct and guidelines for behavior that will reflect the standards and values of the community. Also worthy of consideration is whether the standards or guidelines are enforceable, and how and to what extent they will be enforced. The development of guidelines or professional codes of conduct is a responsibility that has been adopted by many professional societies. Useful to this discussion is (...) an examination of the rationale behind the development of ethical codes by professional societies. The Ethics in Science Committee of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) has examined the codes of some of its member societies and some observations regarding them are pertinent. The nature and uses of ethical statements, codes and guidelines developed by professional societies are multiple and diverse. Their enforcement raises both practical and ethical concerns. (shrink)

This study suggests a new approach to EEG data classification by exploring the idea of using evolutionary computation to both select useful discriminative EEG features and optimise the topology of Artificial Neural Networks. An evolutionary algorithm is applied to select the most informative features from an initial set of 2550 EEG statistical features. Optimisation of a Multilayer Perceptron is performed with an evolutionary approach before classification to estimate the best hyperparameters of the network. Deep learning and tuning with Long Short-Term (...) Memory are also explored, and Adaptive Boosting of the two types of models is tested for each problem. Three experiments are provided for comparison using different classifiers: one for attention state classification, one for emotional sentiment classification, and a third experiment in which the goal is to guess the number a subject is thinking of. The obtained results show that an Adaptive Boosted LSTM can achieve an accuracy of 84.44%, 97.06%, and 9.94% on the attentional, emotional, and number datasets, respectively. An evolutionary-optimised MLP achieves results close to the Adaptive Boosted LSTM for the two first experiments and significantly higher for the number-guessing experiment with an Adaptive Boosted DEvo MLP reaching 31.35%, while being significantly quicker to train and classify. In particular, the accuracy of the nonboosted DEvo MLP was of 79.81%, 96.11%, and 27.07% in the same benchmarks. Two datasets for the experiments were gathered using a Muse EEG headband with four electrodes corresponding to TP9, AF7, AF8, and TP10 locations of the international EEG placement standard. The EEG MindBigData digits dataset was gathered from the TP9, FP1, FP2, and TP10 locations. (shrink)