The purpose of the study was to assess medical journals’ conflicts of interest in the publication of book reviews. We examined book reviews published in 1999, 2000, and 2001 in five leading medical journals: Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and New England Journal of Medicine. The main outcome measure was journal publication of reviews of books that had been published by the journal’s own publisher, that had been edited or authored by (...) a lead editor of the journal, or that posed another conflict of interest. We also surveyed the editors-in-chief of the five journals about their policies on these conflicts of interests. During the study period, four of the five journals published 30 book reviews presenting a conflict of interest: nineteen by the BMJ, five by the Annals, four by JAMA, and two by the Lancet. These reviews represent 5.8%, 2.7%, 0.7%, and 0.7%, respectively, of all book reviews published by the journals. These four journals, respectively, published reviews of 11.9%, 25.0%, 0.9%, and 1.0% of all medical books published by the journals’ publishers. Only one of the 30 book reviews included a disclosure statement addressing the conflict of interest. None of the journals had a written policy pertaining to the conflicts of interest assessed in this study, although four reported having unwritten policies. We recommend that scientific journals and associations representing journal editors develop policies on conflicts of interest pertaining to book reviews. (shrink)

This book proposes a new, unified view of the mind which integrates the insights of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. Through a detailed discussion of major theories from all these, and related disciplines, the author gradually reveals fundamental links between these previously unconnected approaches to human thought and experience. The author has studied medicine, philosophy, mathematics and history, and is currently a practising psychiatrist and a teacher at the Harvard Medical School. He discusses diverse fields of thought with depth and clarity, (...) and his unique perspective should stimulate a re-evaluation of our traditional approaches to the mind. (shrink)

The theories of reasoned action and planned behaviour have fundamentally changed the view that attitudes directly translate into behaviour by introducing intentions as a crucial intervening stage. Much research across numerous ethical contexts has drawn on these theories to offer a better understanding of how consumers form intentions to act in an ethical way. Persistently, researchers have suggested and discussed the existence of an intention–behaviour gap in ethical consumption. Yet, the factors that influence the extent of this gap and its (...) magnitude have not been systematically examined. We, therefore, contribute to the debate on the intention–behaviour gap by reviewing the empirical TRA/tpb studies that have assessed both intention and behaviour in ethical contexts. The findings from our review show that few studies assessed the intention–behaviour relationship and as a result, there is limited empirical evidence to date to quantify more accurately the intention–behaviour gap in ethical consumption. Our second contribution aims to provide an empirical case study which assesses the magnitude of the intention–behaviour gap in the context of avoidance of sweatshop clothing and to assess the roles of planning and actual behavioural control in potentially reducing the intention–behaviour gap. The findings of our case study suggest that there is indeed a large gap between intention and behaviour, and we conclude by calling for more empirical longitudinal studies to assess the complex nature of the relationship between intention and behaviour. (shrink)

Two experiments are reported that evaluated survey learning of youth with DS and typically developing children (TD) matched on Mental Age (MA). In Experiment 1, the experimenter navigated participants through a novel virtual environment along a circuitous path, beginning and ending at a target landmark (i.e., a door). Then, the participants were placed at a pre-specified location in the environment and instructed to navigate to the same door using the shortest possible path from their current location. They completed the task (...) three times: once after being shown the environment one time, once after three exposures, and once after five exposures. Results indicated that the participants with DS exhibited significantly less skill at identifying the shortcut than did the TD participants. In Experiment 2, participants learned two overlapping routes through a simple environment. Following acquisition, they were tested on several measures of survey knowledge: finding a shortcut, identifying the direction of landmarks not currently visible from their location in the environment, and recognizing a bird’s-eye representation of the overall environment. The results of Experiment2 indicated that the participants with DS were at least as good as the TD participants on all of our measures of survey learning. Hence, we concluded that people with DS can acquire some survey knowledge when they learn a simple environment. However, the performance of both groups was relatively poor in Experiment 2, indicating a need to consider identifying the mechanisms underlying the poor performance on wayfinding of people with DS. Identifying the underlying mechanisms, is a logical first step in devising methods of enhancing environmental learning of people with DS. (shrink)

The second of two commentaries on “Respecting Donors to Biobank Research,” from the January‐February 2013 issue.

We describe our explicit Lorentz-invariant solution of the Einstein and null geodesic equations for the deflection experiment of 2002 September 8 when a massive moving body, Jupiter, passed within 3.7’ of a line-of-sight to a distant quasar. We develop a general relativistic framework which shows that our measurement of the retarded position of a moving light-ray deflecting body (Jupiter) by making use of the gravitational time delay of quasar’s radio wave is equivalent to comparison of the relativistic laws of the (...) Lorentz transformation for gravity and light. Because, according to Einstein, the Lorentz transformation of gravity field variables must depend on a fundamental speed c, its measurement through the retarded position of Jupiter in the gravitational time delay allows us to study the causal nature of gravity and to set an upper limit on the speed of propagation of gravity in the near zone of the solar system as contrasted to the speed of the radio waves. In particular, the v/c term beyond of the standard Einstein’s deflection, which we measured to 20% accuracy, is associated with the aberration of the null direction of the gravity force (“aberration of gravity”) caused by the Lorentz transformation of the Christoffel symbols from the static frame of Jupiter to the moving frame of observer. General relativistic formulation of the experiment identifies the aberration of gravity with the retardation of gravity because the speed of gravitational waves in Einstein’s theory is equal to the speed of propagation of the gravity force. We discuss the misconceptions which have inhibited the acceptance of this interpretation of the experiment. We also comment on other interpretations of this experiment by Asada, Will, Samuel, Pascual–Sánchez, and Carlip and show that their “speed of light” interpretations confuse the Lorentz transformation for gravity with that for light, and the fundamental speed of gravity with the physical speed of light from the quasar. For this reason, the “speed of light” interpretations are not entirely consistent with a retarded Liénard–Wiechert solution of the Einstein equations, and do not properly incorporate how the phase of the radio waves from the quasar is perturbed by the retarded gravitational field of Jupiter. Although all of the formulations predict the same deflection to the order of v/c, our formulation shows that the underlying cause of this deflection term is associated with the aberration of gravity and not of light, and that the interpretations predict different deflections at higher orders of v/c beyond the Shapiro delay, thus, making their measurement highly desirable for deeper testing of general relativity in future astrometric experiments like Gaia, SIM, and SKA. (shrink)

Idiopathic Parkinson’s disease impairs working memory, but the exact nature of this deficit in terms of the underlying cognitive mechanisms is not well understood. In this study patients with mild clinical symptoms of PD were compared with matched healthy control subjects on a computerized battery of tests designed to assess spatial working memory and verbal working memory. In the spatial working memory task, subjects were required to recall a sequence of four locations. The verbal working memory task was methodologically identical (...) except for the modality of the stimuli used, requiring subjects to orally recall a sequence of six digits. In either case, half of the sequences were structured in a way that allowed ‘chunking’, while others were unstructured. This manipulation was designed to dissociate the strategic component of task performance from the memory-load component. Mild medicated patients with PD were impaired only on the structured versions of the verbal working memory tasks. The analogous deficit in the spatial working memory was less pronounced. These findings are in agreement with the hypothesis that working memory deficits in PD reflect mainly the executive component of the tasks and that the deficits may be at least partly modality-independent. (shrink)

Cook et al. argue that mirror neurons originate from associative learning processes, without evolutionary influence from social-cognitive mechanisms. We disagree with this claim and present arguments based upon cross-species comparisons, EEG findings, and developmental neuroscience that the evolution of mirror neurons is most likely driven simultaneously and interactively by evolutionarily adaptive psychological mechanisms and lower-level biological mechanisms that support them.

Book reviewed in this article: On Human Nature. By Edward O. Wilson.

RAID-II is a high-bandwidth, network-attached storage server designed and implemented at the University of California at Berkeley. In this paper, we measure the performance of RAID-II and evaluate various architectural decisions made during the design process. We first measure the end-to-end performance of the system to be approximately 20 MB/s for both disk array reads and writes. We then perform a bottleneck analysis by examining the performance of each individual subsystem and conclude that the disk subsystem limits performance. By adding (...) a custom interconnect board with a high-speed memory and bus system and parity engine, we are able to achieve a performance speedup of 8 to 15 over a comparative system using only off-the-shelf hardware. (shrink)

Within a given culture – whether industrialized or more tradition oriented – essentially the same fundamental medical theories, practices, and pharmacopoeia tend to be applied to human and non-human sickness and patients. In modern industrialized societies, however, healthcare services are sharply divided between human and veterinary medicine. There is likewise a sharp division between practitioners in these two health sectors: medical doctors and veterinarians. Yet in non-Western, traditional or indigenous medical systems, the same practitioners often treat both humans and animals. (...) There is a growing body of literature that attests to the efficacy of traditional health practices and herbal medicines for the prevention and treatment of both human and livestock ailments.The authors argue for an intersectoral approach to human and veterinary health services in poor countries, especially those targeted to rural people with LIMITED access to modern health services. Extension of conventional medical and veterinary services is particularly difficult and costly in Third World countries where the necessary infrastructure (roads, clinics, labs, cold chains, etc.) is poorly developed and where much of the populace and their livestock reside in remote, rural areas, or where people may be nomadic or transhumant. Consideration should therefore be given to the joint delivery of human and livestock healthcare and related services, as well as to linking informal, ethnoveterinary practices and practitioners with more formalized systems of veterinary AND medical practice. Several advantages of such an approach are identified and explored. (shrink)

We summarize several experiments indicating that the saccadic system is capable of simultaneously programming two movements toward different goals. This concurrent processing of saccades can lead to the execution of two saccades separated by an extremely short intersaccadic interval. This supports the idea of target competition proposed in Findlay & Walker's article, but suggests a greater degree of parallel processing. We provide evidence that concurrent processing of two saccades is not limited to higher-level planning subsystems; rather, it also involves both (...) regions close enough to the motor output that it can systematically affect saccade trajectory. (shrink)

Probability is not an unambiguous concept within the sciences or in vernacular language, yet it is fundamental to much of behavior analysis. The present paper examines some problems this ambiguity creates in general,as well as within the experimental analysis of behavior, in particular. As background material, we first introduce the three most common theories of probability in mathematics and science, discussing their advantages and disadvantages, and their relevance to behavior analysis. Next, we discuss the concept of probability as encountered in (...) the writings of B.F. Skinner and in the contemporary behavior analysis more generally, the latter being based on material drawn from the professional literature and from a questionnaire survey. Although the exercise is basically a descriptive one, we do conclude with some suggestions that may promote more effective action on those occasions when behavior analysts speak of "probability.". (shrink)

In this study, we propose and test a model of the effects of organizational ethical culture and organizational architecture on the perceived unethical behavior of employees towards customers. This study also examines the relationship between organizational ethical culture and moral acceptability judgment, hypothesizing that moral acceptability judgment is an important stage in the ethical decision-making process. Based on a field study in one of the largest financial institutions in Europe, we found that organizational ethical culture was significantly related to the (...) perceived frequency of unethical behavior towards customers and to the moral acceptability judgment of this type of unethical behavior. No support was found for the claim that features of organizational architecture are associated with the perceived frequency of unethical behavior towards customers. This is the first study to document the differential effects of organizational architecture and organizational ethical culture on perceived unethical behavior of employees towards customers, in wholesale banking. Implications for managers and future research are discussed. (shrink)

Plagiarism is a serious, yet widespread type of research misconduct, and is often neglected in developing countries. Despite its far-reaching implications, plagiarism is poorly acknowledged and discussed in the academic setting, and insufficient evidence exists in Latin America and developing countries to inform the development of preventive strategies. In this context, we present a longitudinal case study of seven instances of plagiarism and cheating arising in four consecutive classes of an Epidemiology Masters program in Lima, Peru, and describes the implementation (...) and outcomes of a multifaceted, “zero-tolerance” policy aimed at introducing research integrity. Two cases involved cheating in graded assignments, and five cases correspond to plagiarism in the thesis protocol. Cases revealed poor awareness of high tolerance to plagiarism, poor academic performance, and widespread writing deficiencies, compensated with patchwriting and copy-pasting. Depending on the events’ severity, penalties included course failure and separation from the program. Students at fault did not engage in further plagiarism. Between 2011 and 2013, the Masters program sequentially introduced a preventive policy consisting of: intensified research integrity and scientific writing education, a stepwise, cumulative writing process; honor codes; active search for plagiarism in all academic products; and a “zero-tolerance” policy in response to documented cases. No cases were detected in 2014. In conclusion, plagiarism seems to be widespread in resource-limited settings and a greater response with educational and zero-tolerance components is needed to prevent it. (shrink)

Information on the factors influencing parents’ decision-making process following a lethal, life-limiting or severely debilitating prenatal diagnosis remains deficient. A comprehensive systematic review and meta-synthesis was conducted to explore the influencing factors for parents considering termination or continuation of pregnancy following identification of lethal, life-limiting or severely debilitating fetal abnormalities. Electronic searches of 13 databases were conducted. These searches were supplemented by hand-searching Google Scholar and bibliographies and citation tracing. Thomas and Harden’s thematic synthesis method was used to synthesise data (...) from identified studies. Twenty-four papers were identified and reviewed, but two papers were removed following quality assessment. Three main themes were identified through systematic synthesis. Theme 1, entitled ‘all life is precious’, described parents’ perception of the importance of the fetus’ life, a fatalistic view of their situation alongside moral implications as well as the implications decisions would have on their own life, in consideration of previous life experiences. Theme 2 contained two sub-themes which considered the parent’s own imagined future and the influence of other people’s experiences. Finally, Theme 3 presented three sub-themes which may influence their parental decision-making: These described parental consideration of the quality of life for their unborn child, the possibility of waiting to try for another pregnancy, and their own responsibilities and commitments. The first review to fully explore parental decision-making process following lethal, life-limiting, or severely debilitating prenatal diagnosis provided novel findings and insight into which factors influenced parents’ decision-making process. This comprehensive and systematic review provides greater understanding of the factors influential on decision-making, such as hope, morality and potential implications on their own and other’s quality of life, will enable professionals to facilitate supported decision-making, including greater knowledge of the variables likely to influence parental choices. (shrink)

Faculty plagiarism and fraud are widely documented occurrences but little analysis has been conducted. This article addresses the question of why faculty plagiarism and fraud occurs and suggests approaches on how to develop an environment where faculty misconduct is socially inappropriate. The authors review relevant literature, primarily in business ethics and student cheating, developing action steps that could be applied to higher education. Based upon research in these areas, the authors posit some actions that would be appropriate in higher education (...) and suggest topics for continued study. (shrink)

In this study, we test the interactive effect on ethical decision-making of (1) personal characteristics, and (2) personal expectanciesbased on perceptions of organizational rewards and punishments. Personal characteristics studied were cognitive moral developmentand belief in a just world. Using an in-basket simulation, we found that exposure to reward system information influenced managers’ outcome expectancies. Further, outcome expectancies and belief in a just world interacted with managers’ cognitive moral development to influence managers’ ethical decision-making. In particular, low-cognitive moral development managers who (...) expected that their organization condoned unethical behavior made less ethical decisions while high cognitive moral development managers became more ethical in this environment. Low cognitive moral development managers also behaved less ethically when their belief in a just world was high. (shrink)

In this study, we test the interactive effect on ethical decision-making of (1) personal characteristics, and (2) personal expectanciesbased on perceptions of organizational rewards and punishments. Personal characteristics studied were cognitive moral developmentand belief in a just world. Using an in-basket simulation, we found that exposure to reward system information influenced managers’ outcome expectancies. Further, outcome expectancies and belief in a just world interacted with managers’ cognitive moral development to influence managers’ ethical decision-making. In particular, low-cognitive moral development managers who (...) expected that their organization condoned unethical behavior made less ethical decisions while high cognitive moral development managers became more ethical in this environment. Low cognitive moral development managers also behaved less ethically when their belief in a just world was high. (shrink)

Despite a long period of neglect, research on emotion in organizational behavior has developed into a major field over the past 15 years, and is now seen to be part of an affective revolution in the organization sciences. In this article, we review current research on emotion in the organizational behavior field based on five levels of analysis: within person, between persons, dyadic interactions, leadership and teams, and organization-wide. Specific topics we cover include affective events theory, state and trait affect (...) and mood, emotional intelligence, emotional labor, emotional contagion, emotions and leadership, and building a healthy emotional climate. We conclude with suggestions for future research. (shrink)

This paper reports the results of a survey of ethical attitudes, values, and propensities in public sector employees in Australia. It was expected that demographic variables, personal values, and contextual variables at the individual level, and group- and organisational-level values would predict use of formal codes of ethics and ethical tolerance (tolerance of unethical behaviour). Useable data were received from 500 respondents selected at random across public sector organisations in a single Australian state. Results supported the study hypotheses, but indicated (...) that different mechanisms underlie each of the criterion variables. Use of ethical codes was determined primarily on the basis of a perception that others use the code, while ethical tolerance was determined by personal values. At an applied level, the research highlights the need for orgasnizations to establish a critical mass of code users, so that this operates as a normative influence on others in the organization. (shrink)

In the United States, final amendments to the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (“the Common Rule”) were published on January 19, 2017, and they will take effect on January 21, 2019. One of the most widely discussed provisions is that for the first time, federal regulations governing research with humans authorize the use of broad consent for future, unspecified research on individually identifiable biospecimens and associated data. Many questions have been raised about broad consent, including what effect (...) it will have on research and whether it adequately protects the interests of research participants.There are lessons to be learned for the U.S. and other countries by looking to countries that already have experience with broad consent for biobank collection and with the storage and subsequent use of the biospecimens and data. This article describes how broad consent works in five countries—Canada (in Quebec), Israel, Nigeria, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom—and with different types of biobanks: national biobanks, federated biobanks, and regional biobanks. Evaluating the provisions and challenges of the broad consent approaches in these countries can inform policies for this increasingly used approach to biobank regulation. (shrink)

Clinical trials for acute conditions such as myocardial infarction and stroke pose challenges related to informed consent due to time limitations, stress, and severe illness. Consent processes shou...

How people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend reference, and how children acquire an understanding of and an ability to use reference.