Here we identify approximately 40,000 healthy human volunteers who were intentionally exposed to infectious pathogens in clinical research studies dating from late World War II to the early 2000s. Microbial challenge experiments continue today under contemporary human subject research requirements. In fact, we estimated 4,000 additional volunteers who were experimentally infected between 2010 and the present day. We examine the risks and benefits of these experiments and present areas for improvement in protections of participants with respect to safety. These are (...) the absence of maximum limits to risk and the potential for institutional review boards to include questionable benefits to subjects and society when weighing the risks and benefits of research protocols. The lack of a duty of medical care by physician–investigators to research subjects is likewise of concern. The transparency of microbial challenge experiments and the safety concerns raised in this work may stimulate further dialogue on the risks to participants of human experimentation. (shrink)

Recent reports of the discovery of a “God module” in the human brain derive from the fact that epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe are associated with ecstatic feelings sometimes described as an experience of the presence of God. The brain area involved has been described as either (a) the seat of an innate human faculty for experiencing the divine or (b) the seat of religious delusions.In fact, religious experience is extremely various and involves many parts of the brain, (...) including some that are prehuman in their evolutionary history and some that are characteristically human. In the continuing integration of such experiences, spiritual formation takes place. Thus the entire human brain might be described as a “God module.”Such a process is only possible because of the brain's complexity. The human brain is the most complex entity for its size that we know of. As used here, complexity is a specialized term denoting the presence of a web of interlinked and significant connections—the more intricate the web, the more complex the entity. Complex systems develop only in a milieu that provides both lawfulness and freedom, and they tend to be self‐organizing, becoming more complex and more effective as a result of both inward and outward experience. The evidence suggests that both personal growth and spiritual growth are processes of complexification of character, and of the brain itself. This thesis is tested in light of the work of William James and James W. Fowler. (shrink)

Recent reports of the discovery of a “God module” in the human brain derive from the fact that epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe are associated with ecstatic feelings sometimes described as an experience of the presence of God. The brain area involved has been described as either (a) the seat of an innate human faculty for experiencing the divine or (b) the seat of religious delusions.In fact, religious experience is extremely various and involves many parts of the brain, (...) including some that are prehuman in their evolutionary history and some that are characteristically human. In the continuing integration of such experiences, spiritual formation takes place. Thus the entire human brain might be described as a “God module.”Such a process is only possible because of the brain's complexity. The human brain is the most complex entity for its size that we know of. As used here, complexity is a specialized term denoting the presence of a web of interlinked and significant connections—the more intricate the web, the more complex the entity. Complex systems develop only in a milieu that provides both lawfulness and freedom, and they tend to be self‐organizing, becoming more complex and more effective as a result of both inward and outward experience. The evidence suggests that both personal growth and spiritual growth are processes of complexification of character, and of the brain itself. This thesis is tested in light of the work of William James and James W. Fowler. (shrink)

A content analysis of 253 Great Ideas for Teachers (GIFTs) found that most of the 18 activities suitable for ethics courses relied on traditional methods of teaching, mainly discussions, teamwork, and case studies. Few used online technology, games, or simulations, compared with activities in other areas of journalism education. While most ethics ideas were designed to stimulate higher order learning, they were less likely than other GIFTs to incorporate varied elements that might improve student engagement. The authors make suggestions, based (...) on the education literature and GIFT analysis, for incorporating dynamic, interactive activities in ethics courses. (shrink)

This study examined more than 2,500 war images from U.S. television news, newspapers, news magazines, and online news sites during the first five weeks of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and found that only 10% showed injury or death. The paper analyzes which media platforms were most willing to show casualties and offers insights on when journalists should use gruesome war images or keep them secret.

In an analysis of 47 U.S. journalism ethics codes, we found that although most consider images, only 9 address a gripping issue: how to treat images of tragedy and violence, such as those produced on the battlefields of Iraq, during the 2005 London bombings, and after Hurricane Katrina. Among codes that consider violent and tragic images, there is agreement on what images are problematic and a move toward green-light considerations of ethical responsibilities. However, the special problems of violence and truth (...) telling in wartime and issues of how to handle graphic images across media platforms receive virtually no attention. (shrink)

Public service organization's increasingly are considering diversification into new “for-profit” or “high-profit” enterprises. Such undertakings offer a number of potential benefits to both the organization and the public. They also have potential problems. This article examines some of the major types of benefits and problems in hopes that both public service managers and public policy makers will give a balanced consideration to these diversification efforts.

This study examined more than 2,500 war images from U.S. television news, newspapers, news magazines, and online news sites during the first five weeks of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and found that only 10% showed injury or death. The paper analyzes which media platforms were most willing to show casualties and offers insights on when journalists should use gruesome war images or keep them secret.

Law plays a critical role in all stages of a public health emergency, including planning, response, and recovery. Public health emergencies introduce health concerns at the population level through, for example, the emergence of a novel infectious disease. In the United States, at the federal, state, and local levels, laws provide an infrastructure for public health emergency preparedness and response efforts: they grant the government the ability to officially declare an emergency, authorize responders to act, and facilitate interjurisdictional coordination. Law (...) is perhaps most visible during an emergency when the president or a state's governor issues a disaster declaration establishing the temporal and geographic parameters for the response and making financial and other resources available. This legal authority has increasingly been used during the last decade. (shrink)

Law plays a critical role in all stages of a public health emergency, providing an infrastructure for planning, response, and recovery efforts. A growing body of research has underscored the potential for certain types of state laws, such as those granting liability protections to responders, to influence the public health workforce's participation in emergency responses. It is therefore especially important to focus on particular state-level laws that may be associated with individuals' increased or decreased willingness to respond. We conducted a (...) systematic identification and analysis of specific state emergency preparedness laws that may affect individuals' willingness to respond and offer recommendations for policymakers seeking to promote more effective responses to public health emergencies. (shrink)

Embedding theories of language production and comprehension in theories of action-perception is realistic and highlights that production and comprehension processes are interleaved. However, layers of internal models that repeatedly predict future linguistic actions and perceptions are implausible. I sketch an ecological alternative whereby perceiver/actors are modeled as dynamical systems coupled to one another and to the environment.

The orderly output constraint (OOC) is extraneous. Talkers “speak in lines” in its absence. Further, there is no perceptual motivation for an OOC; perceivers ignore the linearity between F2 at consonant-vowel onset and F2 in the vowel. In any case, the analogy with bat and barn owl localization systems underlying the theory is extreme, Sussman et al.'s comments to the contrary notwithstanding.

The main purpose of this article is to consider the significance of different types of memory and non-genetic inheritance and different biosemiotic systems for the origin and evolution of language. It presents language and memory as distributed, heteronomous and system-determined processes implemented in biological and social domains. The article emphasises that language and other sign systems are both ecological and inductive systems that were caused by and always correlate with the environment and deductive systems that are inherited by and depend (...) on the internal development of organisms, individuals, and societies. The article also claims that the origin, re-occurrence and evolution of naturally-emerging sign systems presuppose their retention and accumulation in physical, biological, individual, and social types of memory and reinforcement and maintenance by conventional and deliberate social regulation and accumulation. All of this allows language and other sign systems to be situation-relevant and to be transmitted through generations without their constant reinvention. The novelty of the proposed theory of language origin and evolution is in interdisciplinary integration of biosemiotic studies, systems approaches to language and studies of inheritance systems presented by ‘Extended evolutionary synthesis’. (shrink)

Rapid advances in computer technology and what is termed ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in the past 70 years have led to speculation about the ultimate capabilities of electronic devices, including speculation about whether they will make humans obsolete at some future time. Zubiri’s distinction between sensible intelligence and sentient intelligence can be applied to understanding of the limitations of AI. Machines can only operate on the sensible intelligence paradigm, which entails limits. Sentient intelligence allows humans to carry out functions that sensible intelligence-based (...) devices can never do. Sensible intelligence-based devices, including AI, will therefore be restricted to amplifying human (i.e. sentient intelligence) capabilities, but never replacing them. Historically, extravagant claims for AI have not been borne out, despite many orders of magnitude increase in computation speed and memory capacity. Theoretical arguments, based on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, also confirm this. (shrink)

The present description of the Merge model addresses only auditory, not audiovisual, speech perception. However, recent findings in the audiovisual domain are relevant to the model. We outline a test that we are conducting of the adequacy of Merge, modified to accept visual information about articulation.

Causality has been a key concept throughout the history of philosophy. One of its main uses has been in securing proofs of the existence of God. A review of the history of causality discloses five distinct phases, with major changes to the uses and understanding of causality, with the last ending in a very confused idea of causality. Zubiri pointed out that there are really three elements conflated in the common idea of causality: real production of effects, functionality, and power (...) of the real. By sorting these out, and recognizing that causality in the majority of cases is merely a type of functional relation between "cause" and "effect", many problems are greatly clarified. The type of functionality involved varies greatly, and can involve notions unknown to Aristotle, Hume, or Kant. But especially important is the case of causality involving human beings, since knowledge of direct production of effects is available there that is absent elsewhere. Combined with understanding of the. (shrink)

When we attend a dance performance we expect to see human beings performing various sorts of bodily movements. Movement is, uncontroversially, the primary medium of a dance. Our intuition, then, is to think that our response to and understanding of the dance must be connected in some way to this movement. Attempts to relate our understanding of a dance, specifically our grasping the meaning of a dance, to the medium of movement, through a movement-oriented response have taken the form of (...) theories that rely on a notion of kinesthetic response or kinesthetic empathy. My intentions in this essay are to show that the intuition that our understanding of a dance is kinesthetically based is correct and that how the kinesthetic brings us to understand the dance is different from the earlier empathy theories, in a number of important ways. But I will also argue that current analytic strategies will not suffice and that the full defense of kinesthetic understanding, as I will call it, will require a different manner of explaining and understanding of the activities of human beings. My own analysis will draw on a number of resources, primarily the case study of Alexander Technique, a body therapy that seems to give us access to the kinesthetic organization of our activities and the philosophical work of a number of people, centrally Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argues strongly for the role movement plays in constituting our world. I will show how kinesthetic understanding, given the historical trajectories permitted by tradition and the mechanics of the human body, can bring dancers, choreographers, and critics to a point of intersection where they can experience and talk about dance in terms of its kinesthetic basis, and that without this intersection the kind of meaning in movement I am discussing cannot take place. They will miss the preferred intersection unless they achieve kinesthetic understanding. (shrink)

The contemporary Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri developed his philosophy in constant dialogue with the past. Zubiri believed that there are fundamental flaws with classical philosophy that require a fresh approach. His critique of classical philosophy falls into three areas: conceptual, factual, and scope. The first is treated in this paper with respect to five subjects. Zubiri believed that the structure of human intellection is incorrect in classical philosophy. This error contributes in large part to two key errors which he termed (...) "entification of reality" and "logification of intellection." Closely related are errors concerning essence and the relationship of truth and reality. (shrink)

Zubiri was especially keen on unde rstanding what mathematics is, and what literature is,not in the operational terms often employed to describe them, but as knowledge about reality. Through his philosophy of sentient intelligence, he came to understand that in bothcases, a new reality is created which is then explored, and the essential ingredient ispostulation. This insight was only possible because Zubiri recognized that reality is not azone of things, but formality. Zubiri’s notion of postulated reality can be extended to (...) a thirdarea, political theory, where analysis reveals that key realities are postulated by the action of politically empowered entities, usually states. However, postulated reality in thisarea differs in some important ways from mathematics and literature. Zubiri tuvo gran interés en entender qué es la matemática, y qué es la literatura, no ensentido funcional, sino en sentido de saber acerca de la realidad. Por su filosofía de inteligencia sentiente, llegó a entender que en ambos casos, se crea una realidad nueva que seexplora después, y el ingrediente esencial es la postulación. Tal percepción solo fue posibleya que Zubiri se dio cuenta de la realidad no es una zona de cosas, sino formalidad. Su noción de realidad por postulación se puede extender a un campo tercero, la teoría de la polí-tica, donde el análisis revela que las realidades claves son postulados por acción de entidades autorizadas políticamente, en general, estados nacionales. Pero, la realidad postuladaen este campo difiere de la matemática y de la literatura en sentidos importantes. (shrink)