The twenty‐six‐year‐old patient requested a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction because of an extensive family history of cancer. She reported that she had developed melanoma at twenty‐five; that her mother, sister, aunts, and a cousin all had breast cancer; that a cousin had ovarian cancer at nineteen; and that a brother was treated for esophageal cancer at fifteen. The treating team was skeptical about this history, and they could find no documentation of the patient's reported melanoma. The surgeon wrote the (...) patient's primary care physician, explaining that he had seen the patient and planned to proceed with the bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction. The primary care physician responded that he was unable to substantiate several of the patient's claims; some of his colleagues believed the family history to be fabricated. Trying to make sense of the discrepancies, the genetic counselor called a counselor colleague who had met with this patient. The colleague suggested that the in‐house genetic counselor “google” the patient. The search revealed two Facebook pages linked to the patient. In one, apparently a personal profile, the patient stated that in addition to battling stage four melanoma, she had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. She provided a link to a site where she solicited donations to attend a summit for young cancer patients. The other Facebook page featured numerous pictures of her with a bald head, as though she has been through chemotherapy. The genetic counselor showed the Facebook pages to the surgeon, who then decided not to operate. Should health care professionals “google” their patients? (shrink)

Bainbridge’s well known “Ironies of Automation” Analysis, design and evaluation of man–machine systems. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp 129–135, 1983. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-029348-6.50026-9) laid out a set of fundamental criticisms surrounding the promises of automation that, even 30 years later, remain both relevant and, in many cases, intractable. Similarly, a set of ironies in technologies for sensor driven self-quantification is laid out here, spanning from instrumental problems in human factors design to much broader social problems. As with automation, these ironies stand in the way (...) of many of the promised benefits of these wearable technologies. It is argued here that without addressing these ironies now, the promises of wearables may not come to fruition, and instead users may experience outcomes that are opposite to those which the designers seek to afford, or, at the very least, those which consumers believe they are being offered. This paper describes four key ironies of sensor driven self-quantification: know more, know better versus no more, no better; greater self-control versus greater social control; well-being versus never being well enough; more choice versus erosion of choice. (shrink)

I. INTRODUCTIONIs Jesus the perfect human being? An affirmative response seems unavoidable for classical Christology. Indeed, at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the gathered bishops and representatives of the church across Africa, Asia, and Europe agreed that Jesus Christ was “perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity”: teleion…en Theótæti kai teleion…en anthropótæti.Theologians and patristics scholars alike often sort through the second part of this formula in the way that the remainder of the conciliar definition itself seems to indicate, interpreting (...) it to mean that nothing that belongs to the humanity we share can be lacking in the humanity of Jesus, and nothing belongs to Him that would compromise the human form. He does not, for instance, have a body animated by a divine spirit in place of a human will, or a superhuman ability to translocate. This is theologically appropriate as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. (shrink)

A volume by leading economists and philosophers that explores the contributions that virtue ethics can make to economics. Provides historical and modern insights in both economics and philosophy and offers suggestions for incorporating the ethics of virtue into economics to make it more applicable to moral dilemmas in the world outside the models.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Motile bacteria respond to environmental cues to move to more favorable locations. The components of the chemotaxis signal transduction systems that mediate these responses are highly conserved among prokaryotes including both eubacterial and archael species. The best‐studied system is that found in Escherichia coli. Attractant and repellant chemicals are sensed through their interactions with transmembrane chemoreceptor proteins that are localized in multimeric assemblies at one or both cell poles together with a histidine protein kinase, CheA, an SH3‐like adaptor protein, CheW, (...) and a phosphoprotein phosphatase, CheZ. These multimeric protein assemblies act to control the level of phosphorylation of a response regulator, CheY, which dictates flagellar motion. Bacterial chemotaxis is one of the most‐understood signal transduction systems, and many biochemical and structural details of this system have been elucidated. This is an exciting field of study because the depth of knowledge now allows the detailed molecular mechanisms of transmembrane signaling and signal processing to be investigated. BioEssays 28:9–22, 2006. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Objections to the use of assistive technologies in elite sports are generally raised when the technology in question is perceived to afford the user a potentially “unfair advantage,” when it is perceived as a threat to the purity of the sport, and/or when it is perceived as a precursor to a slippery slope toward undesirable changes in the sport. These objections rely on being able to quantify standards of “normal” within a sport so that changes attributed to the use of (...) assistive technology can be judged as causing a significant deviation from some baseline standard. This holds athletes using assistive technologies accountable to standards that restrict their opportunities to achieve greatness, while athletes who do not use assistive technologies are able to push beyond the boundaries of these standards without moral scrutiny. This paper explores how constructions of fairness and “normality” impact athletes who use assistive technology to compete in a sporting venue traditionally populated with “able-bodied” competitors. It argues that the dynamic and obfuscated construction of “normal” standards in elite sports should move away from using body performance as the measuring stick of “normal,” toward alternate forms of constructing norms such as defining, quantifying, and regulating the mechanical actions that constitute the critical components of a sport. Though framed within the context of elite sports, this paper can be interpreted more broadly to consider problems with defining “normal” bodies in a society in which technologies are constantly changing our abilities and expectations of what normal means. (shrink)

Theological language has always faced a fundamental dilemma: it seeks to put the divine reality into limited human language. While this dilemma can obfuscate our theological pathways, it can also generate a new awareness of the task and possibilities of the discipline. New testimonials, or uniquely accented human experiential utterances, have emerged in theological discourse in the past decades, greatly increasing our vision of the expansiveness of theology. The tools for integration into systematic or discursive development are still, however, lacking. (...) This article suggests that an extension of the innovative methodology of Thomas Aquinas, beginning and ending with ‘what seems’ to be the case, putting testimony into discursive forms, and testing for a fittingness with the mysterious and excessive mystery of the divine reality, offers a promising path for discerning common and trustworthy theological language. (shrink)

Advances in technology are bringing greater insight into the mind, raising a host of privacy concerns. However, the basic psychological mechanisms underlying the perception of privacy violations are poorly understood. Here, we explore the relation between the perception of privacy violations and access to information related to one’s “self.” In two studies using demographically diverse samples, we find that privacy violations resulting from various monitoring technologies are mediated by the extent to which the monitoring is thought to provide access to (...) self-relevant information, and generally neuromonitoring did not rate among the more invasive monitoring types. However, brain monitoring was judged to be more of a privacy violation when described as providing access to self-relevant information than when no such access was possible, and control participants did not judge the invasiveness of neuromonitoring any differently than those told it provided no access to self-relevant information. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of TraditionHarold D. BakerOsip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition, by Clare Cavanagh; xii & 365 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, $39.50.The great, enigmatic poet of twentieth-century Russia, Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), employed a poetics based on recollection. The word-soul or psyche is not contained within a linguistic body but hovers amorously over it, [End Page 257] fleeing any too crude (...) attempt at capture. The reader must trace out Mandelstam’s personal networks of association, both inside and outside the text, before a kernel of thought and emotion can be recognized (“only the moment of recognition is sweet to us,” goes a famous line from his “Tristia”). Although Clare Cavanagh’s book does not emphasize this theme, her tactics could hardly be better suited to Mandelstam’s peculiar poetic sensibility.Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition is an exhaustive exploration of historical and cultural context. It opposes itself explicitly to the traditional structuralist and semiotic approaches to Mandelstam, and takes his works in their “secular” rather than their “hermetic” aspect (to borrow terms from Robert Scholes). In that sense it seeks to recollect and bring to mind everything that might affect our understanding of Mandelstam’s oeuvre. This turns out to be a varied field: Pound and Eliot (coeval modernists whose ideas resonate significantly with his), François Villon, Byzantine and Gothic church architecture, the marginalized yet culturally dynamic position of the Russian Jew, Pindar (an exemplar of the social-economic relation of poet to state), Dante, the psychology of literary play, and even Charlie Chaplin. Although it does not use extensive biographical framing, the book proceeds through Mandelstam’s poetry and prose in chronological order, alternately pursuing aspects of context and concentrating on selected works by Mandelstam for sustained analysis.What results is perhaps the most serious comprehensive work on the poet produced so far. Cavanagh’s approach may appear diffuse at first, but it enables her to capture a great deal of this elusive genius without confining Mandelstam within a narrow critical purview. The book’s argument is that Mandelstam qualifies as a central modernist poet through his agonistic relation to an ideal of “world culture.” He attempts to recreate an authoritative literary and cultural tradition that his own innovative work would both continue and transform. And it is from this point of view that Mandelstam’s Jewishness appears so significant to Cavanagh (a chief issue in three out of eight chapters): it gives a precise formula for that position both inside and outside of the dominant culture. Cavanagh even contends quite suggestively that, for Mandelstam, both Dante and Chaplin function as avatars of Jewishness.All this is well-founded and important, but perhaps the best thing about her book is that its central argument doesn’t do justice to the richness of Cavanagh’s own materials. Her discussion does not weaken, for instance, as it leaves Mandelstam’s early period, when the notion of “world culture” was indeed an obsessive one for him. The book is equally effective on the brilliant late poems of the Voronezh cycle, by which time not only a place in world culture but even a secure place in human society seemed futile dreams to Mandelstam. Cavanagh’s readings of the prose and especially the poetry are flexible and sensitive; she gives beautiful accounts of the poetic wordplay and follows closely the ebb and flow of musicality in the verse from one period and [End Page 258] collection to another. More than a milestone in Mandelstam studies, this book brings the poet closer to realizing his fondest dream: a responsive, understanding readership or “interlocutor.”Harold D. BakerUniversity of California, IrvineCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Law is indispensable to the public's health. The twentieth century proved this true as law contributed to each of the century's ten great public health achievements: vaccination, healthier mothers and babies, family planning, safer and healthier foods, fluoridation of drinking water, the control of infectious diseases, the decline in death from heart disease and stroke, recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard, motor vehicle safety, and safer workplaces.The readers of this journal can give examples of the relevant types of (...) laws with ease: Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination; mandatory immunization for school admission; authorization of state prenatal care programs; mandatory fortification of foods; Title X of the Public Health Service Act; the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906; the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, and hundreds of state and local enactments regulating food; fluoridation ordinanceswater, and sanitation; the Surgeon General's warning notices on cigarette packs and restrictions on marketing tobacco; seat belt laws and mandated vehicle and highway design features; and laws like the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 that regulate working conditions. (shrink)

Law is indispensable to the public's health. The twentieth century proved this true as law contributed to each of the century's ten great public health achievements: vaccination, healthier mothers and babies, family planning, safer and healthier foods, fluoridation of drinking water, the control of infectious diseases, the decline in death from heart disease and stroke, recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard, motor vehicle safety, and safer workplaces.The readers of this journal can give examples of the relevant types of (...) laws with ease: Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination; mandatory immunization for school admission; authorization of state prenatal care programs; mandatory fortification of foods; Title X of the Public Health Service Act; the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906; the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, and hundreds of state and local enactments regulating food; fluoridation ordinanceswater, and sanitation; the Surgeon General's warning notices on cigarette packs and restrictions on marketing tobacco; seat belt laws and mandated vehicle and highway design features; and laws like the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 that regulate working conditions. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

Kidder's checklistfor ethical decrsion making is recommended as an addition to the existing canon of modelsfor mass media ethics. Contributions in Kidder's approach include his dichotomy between ethical dilemmas m d moral temptations, his tests for right-versus-wrong and right-versus-right issues, his framework by which to clarify values in ethical dilemmas, nnd his sequencing of the decision-making process. Kidder's model is surnmnrized nnd discussed, revisions are suggested for classroom use in medin ethics courses, nnd tke revised model is applied to media (...) ethics cases. (shrink)

This chapter, ‘Friendship and the Moral Life in Iris Murdoch’s Novels’ revisits the subject of sexual relationships, not from the problematic perspective brought to them in Anne Rowe’s earlier chapter, but in a positive light. In his analysis of the educational potential of friendship and sexuality Robert Baker contends that sexual intimacy teaches Murdoch’s characters not only about themselves and their own identity but also about the reality of the other person. It thus acts as a force for learning (...) to attend to the world outside the self which is the desideratum of Murdoch’s moral pilgrimage. He surveys the apparent acceptance by Murdoch scholars that such moral development is necessarily a solitary and lonely endeavour before juxtaposing that impression—given prominence in the M and D scenario Murdoch creates in The Sovereignty of Good (1970)—with the relationships she portrays in her novels. Close readings of the friendship of Tom MacCaffrey and Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) and of Harvey Blackett’s relationship with Sefton Anderson in The Green Knight support Baker’s contention that physical affection can be a guide to the good. Borrowing an image from the latter novel he claims that in her fiction ‘Murdoch represents the moral life not as a lonely pilgrimage toward reality, but as a passeggiata with others in which one gives way to a movement larger than and beyond oneself’ (177), a viable interpretation which reads the passeggiata with an interestingly different slant from other current critics such as Rebecca Moden, who regards it as Murdoch’s ‘metaphor for the nature of human existence’ and ‘a troubling image of the impoverished quality of human consciousness in the late twentieth century’. (shrink)

E. D. Swinton's The Defence of Duffer's Drift: A Lesson in the Fundamentals of Small Unit Tactics, originally published in 1904, uses the device of a series of recurring but progressive nightmares to teach a set of tactical lessons that Swinton derived from his service in the Second Anglo-Boer War. Now a minor classic, The Defence of Duffer's Drift has had an enduring and international impact. The book's popularity has also led to the publication of several narratives inspired by the (...) original, many of them authored by serving members of the US Army. Although this subset of the ‘progeny’ of Swinton's work are focused on teaching tactical lessons, read together they provide a small but fascinating window into the evolution of the US Army's understanding of the ethics of armed conflict at the tactical level. The texts that are the focus of this paper span a period of 88 years, covering the post-First World War emphasis on positional warfare, through the shift to a focus on large-scale mechanized warfare that.. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Cet article examine les conséquences pour l’inégalité sexuelle au Canada des coupures gouvernementales dans les soins de santé et les services sociaux, et les évalue à l’aune de la jurisprudence relative à la Charte. L’auteure soutient que ce recul a en fait désavantagé les femmes d’une manière disproportionnée, et qu’on pourrait y voir, du point de vue de la Charte, une discrimination à leur endroit. Or les gouvernements n’ont offert aucune justification de ces effets discriminatoires qui satisferait aux critères (...) de la Charte en en montrant le caractère raisonnable dans une société libre et démocratique. Présenter l’action gouvernementale comme un exercice neutre de transfert de responsabilités vers les familles et les communautés ne saurait constituer une telle justification. (shrink)

RésuméCet article examine les conséquences pour l'inégalité sexuelle au Canada des coupures gouvernementales dans les soins de santé et les services sociaux, et les évalue à I'aune de la jurisprudence relative à la Charte. L'auteure soutient que ce recul a en fait désavantagé les femmes d'une manière disproportionnée, et qu'on pourrait y voir, du point de vue de la Charte, une discrimination à leur endroit. Or les gouvernements n'ont offert aucune justification de ces effets discriminatoires qui satisferait aux critères de (...) la Charte en en montrant le caractère raisonnable dans une société libre et démocratique. Présenter l'action gouvernementale comme un exercice neutre de transfert de responsabilités vers les families et les communautés ne saurait constituer une telle justification. (shrink)

Les États cheminent entre concurrence et convergence, les entreprises trans-nationales entre opportunisme et autorégulation. Il est futile d’imaginer qu’un ordre unifié et stable émerge de cette tension. Le monde normatif des entreprises transnationales doit plutôt être compris en appréhendant la direction de ses changements, et non pas en cher-chant à trouver un état d’équilibre. Pour l’auteur, les convections essentielles relèvent tant des efforts des États pour ajuster leur pouvoir normatif et promouvoir leur attractivité dans un monde globalisé, que de la (...) perméabilité croissante des entreprises et de leurs dirigeants à certains objectifs sociétaux qui vont au-delà du juridique et qui viennent se rajouter à la performance financière comme indicateurs complémentaires de la vitalité d’une entreprise. (shrink)