Must treatment be provided to subjects who acquire HIV during the course of a prevention study? An analysis of ethical foundation, regulation, and recent argumentation provides no basis for the obligation. We outline an alternative approach to the problem based on moral negotiation.

Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?In July of 2004, Cambodian sex workers staged a protest of an HIV prevention trial set to enroll 900 sex workers in Phnom Penh, charging the study planners with exploitation. The Cambodian study was one of a series of international clinical trials sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and (...) the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation testing the safety and efficacy of tenofovir, an antiretroviral drug produced by Gilead Sciences, Inc., to prevent HIV transmission. To date, two of these international studies have been closed and one is suspended, prompting calls for re-examination of the ethics of HIV prevention trials. (shrink)

Issues: We present key aspects of our paper, commissioned by UNAIDS in 2005, entitled, “Revisiting the ethics of HIV prevention research in developing countries.” In 2004 and 2005 we witnessed the closure or suspension of three international clinical trials testing tenofovir in the prevention of HIV infection in high risk groups due to the failure to provide free treatment to those who seroconvert during the conduct of the study. We examine critically moral claims for the provision of treatment to those (...) who seroconvert in HIV prevention trials and ask whether it is a matter of moral obligation or moral negotiation?Description: Using the tools of philosophical and regulatory analysis we examine the moral foundations of research ethics, international regulation, and the contemporary literature in search of valid arguments in support of a moral obligation to treat. Arguments supporting the obligation to provide such treatment are found in a wide variety of documents. These claims are variously rooted in the demand to compensate for research-related injury, maximization of research benefit, justice as reciprocity, and justice as equality.Lessons learned: Our analysis reveals that there is as of yet no robust moral argument supporting a moral obligation to provide treatment to participants in HIV prevention trials who seroconvert. We argue that moral negotiation offers distinct advantages over moral obligation. Moral negotiation finds support in the principle of respect for communities that holds researchers responsible to respect communal values, protect and empower social institutions and abide by the decisions of accepted communal authorities.Recommendations: Moral negotiation, rather than moral obligation, reduces the chance of polarization of positions by inviting trial participants, sponsors, researchers and all other involved parties to the table for discussion. Moral negotiation favors middle ground solutions that fit the specific health needs and priorities of the community in question. (shrink)

Analyzes the relationship of power, bureaucracy, and change in modern society.

Moral and self-conscious emotions like guilt and shame can function as internal negative experiences that punish or deter bad behaviour. Individual differences exist in people’s tendency to experience guilt and shame. Being disposed to experience guilt and/or shame may predict students’ expectations of their emotional reactions to engaging in immoral behaviour in the form of academic misconduct, and thus dissuade students from intending to engage in this behaviour. In this study, students’ (n = 459) guilt and shame proneness, their expectations (...) of feeling guilt and shame if they engaged in academic misconduct, and their intentions to engage in academic misconduct were measured. Three of the four facets of the guilt and shame proneness scale [GASP: Guilt–Negative-Behavior-Evaluation (NBE), Guilt-Repair, Shame–Negative-Self-Evaluation (NSE)] had significant negative correlations with academic misconduct intentions, and these relationships were mediated by anticipating shame and guilt related to engaging in academic misconduct. These results suggest that for some students expecting to experience negative moral emotions when engaging in academic misconduct may protect them from breaching ethical assessment rules. (shrink)

Provability, Computability and Reflection.

Many elementary school students have difficulties in reading and writing. However, researches showed that effective teaching practices have positive impacts in the success of students at school precisely in their reading and writing learning process. This paper presents results of a study on reported reading and writing teaching practices conducted on four sixth grade teachers by following a literature review on social constructivist theories winning practices. The results showed that they use innovative practices that incorporate reading, writing and oral communication (...) teachings in class ; even if they still have traditional practices such as dictation. They also focused on interdisciplinary and cross-functional projects. Those activities are more significant because of their closeness with the children’s reality and interests. In sum, the interviews revealed the teachers’ methods as a whole and an open-plan, which many effective practices studies recommend. (shrink)

Introductions to the parts of the book cover the history of the contributions and their importance. The essays have been thoroughly revised since their publication in learned journals.

Kolmogorov's account in his [1933] of an absolute probability space presupposes given a Boolean algebra, and so does Rényi's account in his [1955] and [1964] of a relative probability space. Anxious to prove probability theory ‘autonomous’. Popper supplied in his [1955] and [1957] accounts of probability spaces of which Boolean algebras are not and [1957] accounts of probability spaces of which fields are not prerequisites but byproducts instead.1 I review the accounts in question, showing how Popper's issue from and how (...) they differ from Kolmogorov's and Rényi's, and I examine on closing Popper's notion of ‘autonomous independence’. So as not to interrupt the exposition, I allow myself in the main text but a few proofs, relegating others to the Appendix and indicating as I go along where in the literature the rest can be found. (shrink)

Understanding arithmetic word problems involves a complex interaction of text comprehension and mathematical processes. This article presents a computer simulation designed to capture the working memory demands required in “bottomup” comprehension of arithmetic word problems. The simulation's sentence‐level parser and text integration component reflect the importance of processing the problem from its original natural language presentation. Children's probability of solution was analyzed in exploratory regression analyses as a function of the simulation's sentence‐level and text integration processes. Working memory variables measuring (...) the combined effects of concepts to remember and text integration inferences account for a significant proportion of variance in children's solution probabilities across the first four grade levels (K‐3). Consistent with previous results from others, which highlighted the significance of small changes in problem wording, the simulation offers a process‐oriented perspective as to why natural language presentation constrains the comprehension of mathematical relationships. (shrink)

Teddy Seidenfeld recently claimed that Kolmogorov's probability theory transgresses the Substitutivity Law. Underscoring the seriousness of Seidenfeld's charge, the author shows that (Popper's version of) the law, to wit: If (∀ D)(Pr(B,D)=Pr(C,D)), then Pr(A,B)=Pr(A,C), follows from just C1. 0≤ Pr(A,B)≤ 1 C2. Pr(A,A)=1 C3. Pr(A & B,C)=Pr(A,B & C)× Pr(B,C) C4. Pr(A & B,C)=Pr(B & A,C) C5. Pr(A,B & C)=Pr(A,C & B), five constraints on Pr of the most elementary and most basic sort.

Quand tu es seul, debout au milieu de la haute plaine d'Asie,sous la coupole insondable où parfois un piloteou un ange sème dans l'azur une coulée d'amidon;quand tu tressailles sentant ta petitesse,apprends-le: l'espace auquel semble-t-il il ne fautrien, a grandement besoin en réalitéd'un regard extérieur, de distance, de vide.Tu es seid à pouvoir lui rendre ce service.Joseph BrodskyIn the course of this century, a number of authors have asserted that geographic knowledge is useful for the development of programs to parcel (...) out land. Hoping to foster this link between insight and action, applied geography saw the light of day. In order to be genuinely effective, the practice of this kind of planning, so it was thought, needed to rely on the expertise of the geographer who studied forms of human settlement. More fundamentally, the utilitarian claim of applied geography rested on the conviction according to which the spatial organization of human societies brought into play the question of justice and commonweal. As Jean Gottmann wrote, our epoch is particularly sensitive to the fact that everyone, whoever or from wherever they may be, consider themselves “to be entitled to live just as well as all others.” In this way a “popular will” was affirmed “that the necessary measures be taken to envisage, prepare, and provide for an improvement of life's comforts …, for a better life.” Inspired by the “modern idea of planning,” applied geography set itself the goal of “establishing justice […] by a more even distribution of people, of their means of subsistence, [and] of their living standard.”. (shrink)

St. Thomas Aquinas is generally seen as having an anthropocentric and instrumentalist view of nature, in which the rational human is the point of the universe for which all else was created. I argue that, to the contrary, his metaphysics is consistent with a holistic ecophilosophy. His views that natural things have intrinsic value and that the world is an organic unity in which diversity is itself a value requiringrespect for being and life in all their manifestations.

Consider a language SL having as its primitive signs one or more atomic statements, the two connectives ‘∼’ and ‘&,’ and the two parentheses ‘’; and presume the extra connectives ‘V’ and ‘≡’ defined in the customary manner. With the statements of SL substituting for sets, and the three connectives ‘∼,’ ‘&,’and ‘V’ substituting for the complementation, intersection, and union signs, the constraints that Kolmogorov places in [1] on probability functions come to read:K1. 0 ≤ P,K2. P) = 1,K3. If (...) ⊦ ∼, then P = P + P,K4. If ⊦ A ≡ B, then P = P.2. (shrink)