Conley and colleagues (2023) conduct a fascinating analysis of how influential organizations in the global governance of human genome editing debate conceptualize and perform public engagement. Whi...

As they age, many people are afraid that they might become a burden to their families and friends. In fact, fear of being a burden is one of the most frequently cited reasons for individuals who request physician aid in dying. Why is this fear so prevalent, and what are the issues underlying this concern? I argue that perceptions of individual autonomy, dependency, and dignity all contribute to the fear of becoming a burden. However, this fear is misplaced; common conceptions (...) of these values should be re-framed and re-examined. Practices that support a more community-centered type of autonomy can be found in dependency and dignity. This paper offers some practical examples of how to address common end-of-life situations that may cause anxiety to patients who are worried about being a burden. These practices include discussing expectations, both for care and how the relationship among the participants might change, and modeling respectful caregiving behaviors. Most difficult of all, though, includes cultural and societal attitude changes so that people recognize the good in receiving care and get used to the idea that they do not need to do anything to be valuable. (shrink)

The essays included here represent Fox Keller's attempts to integrate the insights of feminist theory with those of her contemporaries in the history and philosophy of science.

In this powerful critique, the esteemed historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller addresses the nature-nurture debates, including the persistent disputes regarding the roles played by genes and the environment in determining individual traits and behavior. Keller is interested in both how an oppositional “versus” came to be inserted between nature and nurture, and how the distinction on which that opposition depends, the idea that nature and nurture are separable, came to be taken for granted. How, she asks, did (...) the illusion of a space between nature and nurture become entrenched in our thinking, and why is it so tenacious? Keller reveals that the assumption that the influences of nature and nurture can be separated is neither timeless nor universal, but rather a notion that emerged in Anglo-American culture in the late nineteenth century. She shows that the seemingly clear-cut nature-nurture debate is riddled with incoherence. It encompasses many disparate questions knitted together into an indissoluble tangle, and it is marked by a chronic ambiguity in language. There is little consensus about the meanings of terms such as nature, nurture, gene, and environment. Keller suggests that contemporary genetics can provide a more appropriate, precise, and useful vocabulary, one that might help put an end to the confusion surrounding the nature-nurture controversy. (shrink)

We propose a modification of the exhaustivity operator from Fox Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 71–120, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210752_4) that on top of negating all the Innocently Excludable alternatives affirms all the ‘Innocently Includable’ ones. The main result of supplementing the notion of Innocent Exclusion with that of Innocent Inclusion is that it allows the exhaustivity operator to identify cells in the partition induced by the set of alternatives whenever possible. We argue for this property of (...) ‘cell identification’ based on the simplification of disjunctive antecedents and the effects on free choice that arise as the result of the introduction of universal quantifiers. We further argue for our proposal based on the interaction of only with free choice disjunction. (shrink)

Legal decision-support systems have the potential to improve access to justice, administrative efficiency, and judicial consistency, but broad adoption of such systems is contingent on development of technologies with low knowledge-engineering, validation, and maintenance costs. This paper describes two approaches to an important form of legal decision support—explainable outcome prediction—that obviate both annotation of an entire decision corpus and manual processing of new cases. The first approach, which uses an attention network for prediction and attention weights to highlight salient case (...) text, was shown to be capable of predicting decisions, but attention-weight-based text highlighting did not demonstrably improve human decision speed or accuracy in an evaluation with 61 human subjects. The second approach, termed semi-supervised case annotation for legal explanations, exploits structural and semantic regularities in case corpora to identify textual patterns that have both predictable relationships to case decisions and explanatory value. (shrink)

Recent observations of power-law distributions in the connectivity of complex networks came as a big surprise to researchers steeped in the tradition of random networks. Even more surprising was the discovery that power-law distributions also characterize many biological and social networks. Many attributed a deep significance to this fact, inferring a “universal architecture” of complex systems. Closer examination, however, challenges the assumptions that (1) such distributions are special and (2) they signify a common architecture, independent of the system's specifics. The (...) real surprise, if any, is that power-law distributions are easy to generate, and by a variety of mechanisms. The architecture that results is not universal, but particular; it is determined by the actual constraints on the system in question. BioEssays 27:1060–1068, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The laboratory animal environment: room for concern.

Some 41 million Americans, many of them children, currently live below the official poverty level. As a proportion of the population, the number has been stable for several decades. But what it mea...

Over the last couple of decades, a call has begun to resound in a number of distinct fields of inquiry for a reattachment of form to matter, for an understanding of ‘information’ as inherently embodied, or, as Jean-Marie Lehn calls it, for a “science of informed matter.” We hear this call most clearly in chemistry, in cognitive science, in molecular computation, and in robotics—all fields looking to biological processes to ground a new epistemology. The departure from the values of a (...) more traditional epistemological culture can be seen most clearly in changing representations of biological development. Where for many years now, biological discourse has accepted a sharp distinction between information and matter, software and hardware, data and program, encoding and enactment, a new discourse has now begun to emerge in which these distinctions have little meaning. Perhaps ironically, much of this shift depends on drawing inspiration from just those biological processes which the discourse of disembodied information was intended to describe. (shrink)

A virtual particle is an elementary particle in a quantum field theory that serves to symbolise the interaction of its counterparts, the so called real particles. In the last 20 years, philosophers of physics have put forth several arguments for and against an interpretation of virtual particles as being like ordinary objects in space and time. In this article, I will attempt to systematise the major arguments and argue that no pro-argument is ultimately satisfactory, and that only one contra-argument—that of (...) superposition—is sufficient to deny the realistic interpretation of virtual particles. The secondary aim of this paper is to argue that even the philosophical considerations of virtual particles overestimate their role in that these entities are merely pictorial descriptions of a mathematical approximation method. This description, while helpful, is not necessary to understand particle interactions. In the end, quantum field theory is not the place to explain what actually happens in the very centre of an individual particle interaction. (shrink)

Complexes of two or more proteins form many, if not most, of the intracellular “machines” that execute physical and chemical work, and transmit information. Complexes can form from stochastic post‐translational interactions of fully formed proteins, but recent attention has shifted to co‐translational interactions in which the most common mechanism involves binding of a mature constituent to an incomplete polypeptide emerging from a translating ribosome. Studies in yeast have revealed co‐translational interactions during formation of multiple major complexes, and together with recent (...) mammalian cell studies, suggest widespread utilization of the mechanism. These translation‐dependent interactions can involve a single or multiple mRNA templates, can be uni‐ or bi‐directional, and can use multi‐protein sub‐complexes as a binding component. Here, we discuss benefits of co‐translational complex assembly including accuracy and efficiency, overcoming hidden interfaces, localized and hierarchical assembly, and reduction of orphan protein degradation, toxicity, and dominant‐negative pathogenesis, all serving to improve cell fitness. (shrink)

Whether or not youth work should professionalise and to what degree governments should regulate youth work services have been a widely debated topic within the Australian youth sector in recent tim...

Online dispute resolution (ODR) is an alternative to traditional litigation that can both significantly reduce the disadvantages suffered by litigants unable to afford an attorney and greatly improve court efficiency and economy. An important aspect of many ODR systems is a facilitator, a neutral party who guides the disputants through the steps of reaching an agreement. However, insufficient availability of facilitators impedes broad adoption of ODR systems. This paper describes a novel model of facilitation that integrates two distinct but complementary (...) knowledge sources: cognitive task analysis of facilitator behavior and corpus analysis of ODR session transcripts. This model is implemented in a decision-support system that (1) monitors cases to detect situations requiring immediate attention and (2) automates selection of standard text messages appropriate to the current state of the negotiations. This facilitation model has the potential to compensate for shortages of facilitators by improving the efficiency of experienced facilitators, assisting novice facilitators, and providing autonomous facilitation. (shrink)

Though much has been written about when paternalistic intervention is justified, and about how it is justified, much less has been written about who may do the intervening. This is a substantial lacuna in our understanding of the nature of justified paternalism. By examining the question of who it is that may most appropriately interfere with the course of our decision-making, we can learn something useful both about paternalism and about the nature of friendship.In this essay I will argue that (...) friendship and paternalistic intervention are linked. Friendship of the close, intimate variety that I will be discussing is in part constituted by the fact that one friend is morally justified in interfering with the other’s decisions. Intimate friendship involves a partial meshing of identities. This meshing of identities manifests itself in part by the liberties that one friend takes in guiding the life of the other. Paternalistic intervention between friends can thus be justified because it expresses the union of the friends, and because it preserves that union. (shrink)

The human sciences—including psychology, anthropology, and social theory—are widely held to have been born during the eighteenth century. This first full-length, English-language study of the Enlightenment sciences of humans explores the sources, context, and effects of this major intellectual development. The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the physical world operated (...) according to orderly, discoverable laws. Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to cap this achievement with a science of _human_ nature. Belief in the existence of laws governing human will and emotion; social change; and politics, economics, and medicine suffused the writings of such disparate figures as Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith and formed the basis of the new sciences. A work of remarkable cross-disciplinary scholarship, this volume illuminates the origins of the human sciences and offers a new view of the Enlightenment that highlights the period's subtle social theory, awareness of ambiguity, and sympathy for historical and cultural difference. (shrink)

They have watched, as insiders, the first fumbling attempts to transplant kidneys, then hearts, then live‐donated lobes of liver and lung. Now the two sociologists most closely identified with organ transplantation have concluded that they must leave the field.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (shrink)

In the expanding repertoire of practices designed to increase the supply of organs for transplantation, non-heart-beating cadaver organ donation has generated an ongoing debate in the literature. The continuing stream of articles is disquieting in part because it documents a troubling "trial-and-error ethics" approach to the formulation of organ procurement policy, and because it raises serious questions about the reasons that the development of this policy is being mediated by published communication. In the light of concerns about the implicit support (...) and credibility that professional publications give to organ procurement policies, restraint in publishing articles about non-heart-beating organ donation as well as in devising such policies is strongly advocated. (shrink)