The world’s third largest producer of scientific research, Germany, is the origin of the research university and the independent, extra-university research institute. Its dual-pillar research policy differentiates these organizational forms functionally: universities specialize in advanced research-based teaching; institutes specialize intensely on research. Over the past decades this policy affected each sector differently: while universities suffered a lingering “legitimation crisis,” institutes enjoyed deepening “favored sponsorship”—financial and reputational advantages. Universities led the nation’s reestablishment of scientific prominence among the highly competitive European and (...) global science systems after WWII. But sectoral analysis of contributions to science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medical and health journal publications finds that Germany’s small to medium-sized independent research institutes have made significant, growing contributions, particularly in publishing in higher impact journals proportionally more than their size. Simultaneously—despite dual-pillar policy implications—the university sector continues to be absolutely and relatively successful; not eclipsed by the institutes. Universities have consistently produced two-thirds of the nation’s publications in the highest quality journals since at least 1980 and have increased publications at a logarithmic rate; higher than the international mean. Indeed, they led Germany into the global mega-science style of production. Contrary to assumed benefits of functional differentiation, our results indicate that relative to their size, each sector has produced approximately similar publication records. While institutes have succeeded, the larger university sector, despite much less funding growth, has remained fundamental to German science production. Considering these findings, we discuss the future utility of the dual-pillar policy. (shrink)

This paper traces an expanded ethical perspective for youth and community work (YCW) practice in response to the climate and biodiversity crises. Discussing ecological ethics, we problematise the liberal humanist emphasis on utilitarianism and reject it as inappropriate for YCW in these times. Instead, we argue for an ecocentric practice ethic which intrinsically values the non-human world. To advance an ecocentric ethical perspective for YCW we draw on decolonial and posthuman theory. Inspired by a Freirean dialogical approach, we apply these (...) theoretical domains as lenses to problematise YCW practice, seeking a generative dialogue between perspectives. Through this, we identify three emergent tasks for ecocentric YCW: (a) thinking and acting beyond the individual; (b) cultivating reciprocal care and connection and (c) practicing critical pedagogies of place. This third element builds on YCW's social pedagogic tradition and provides a practical means to incorporate ecocentric ideas into practice. We conclude that, given the unprecedented implications of climate crises and biodiversity collapse, a YCW ethics that does not consider these implications for young people is insufficient for the context of practice today. Enacting an ecocentric YCW ethics requires ongoing collective praxis and dialogue between young people, practitioners, educators, managers and students. (shrink)

The right to conceive and bear children has been protected both in law and in policy. Human society has from its earliest time valued children and defended procreation as a basic right.Modern health technology offers the possibility of conception to the estimated 2.5 million infertile couples who may wish to have children. For these persons, infertility treatment offers the hope of having children, an activity deemed basic and essential in human society.In general, the state has been reluctant to directly interfere (...) in the reproductive decisions of individuals. However, the state may act to increase or reduce access to reproductive services in a variety of ways. For example, recent legislation regulating fertility clinics affects the distribution of assisted reproductive technology in the United States. The purpose of this paper is to describe this legislation, project its probable effects on the distribution of ART services, and analyze these effects based on distributive theories of justice. (shrink)

This book outlines the realist and pluralist philosophy of John Anderson, Australia's most original thinker. His teaching at Sydney University and his arti6es have deeply influenced Australian intellectual life. Several main themes run through his work, but Anderson never gave an overall account of his views. This is remedied here: exhibiting the range of Anderson's thought from logic, epistemology and theory of mind, to language and social theory, this volume sketches realism as a systematic philosophical position, while showing something of (...) the history of ideas in Australia. (shrink)

This book outlines the realist and pluralist philosophy of John Anderson, Australia's most original thinker, whose articles and teaching at Sydney University have deeply influenced Australian intellectual life. Several main themes run though his work, but Anderson never gave an overall account of his views. This is remedied here: in exhibiting the range of Anderson's thought, from logic, epistemology and theory of mind, to language and social theory, Baker's work sketches realism as a systematic philosophical position and shows something (...) of the history of ideas in Australia. This book will be of particular interest to historians of modern philosophy and those studying realism. (shrink)

The author contends that the analogies between "the logical roles of singular and universal statements" are important but do not "justify the conclusion that singular statements are reducible to propositions" of the forms a, E, I, And o. (staff).

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)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The primary function of smooth muscle cells is to contract and alter the stiffness or diameter of hollow organs such as blood vessels, the airways and the gastrointestinal and urogenital tracts. In addition to purely structural functions, smooth muscle cells may play important metabolic roles, particularly in various inflammatory responses. In cell culture, these cells have been shown to be metabolically dynamic, synthesizing and secreting extracellular matrix proteins, glycosaminoglycans and a wide variety of cell–cell signaling proteins, such as interleukins, chemokines (...) and peptide growth factors. Secreted cell signaling proteins participate in the inflammatory response of smooth muscle‐containing organs, and some can also stimulate smooth muscle migration, proliferation and contraction. The cellular signaling pathways controlling synthesis of these signaling proteins are similar to those used by cells mediating innate immunity and may contribute to pathogenesis of diverse diseases including atherosclerosis, asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases and preterm labor. Appreciating the role of smooth muscle cells in these diseases may lead to better understanding of the beneficial effects of anti‐inflammatory drugs as well as identification of new targets for anti‐inflammatory therapy. BioEssays 26:646–655, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

We report evidence further supporting homology between proteins in the F1FO‐ATP synthetase and the bacterial flagellar motor (BFM). BFM proteins FliH, FliI, and FliJ have been hypothesized to be homologous to FO‐b + F1‐δ, F1‐α/β, and F1‐γ, with similar structure and interactions. We conduct a further test by constructing a gene order dataset, examining the order offliH,fliI, andfliJgenes across the phylogenetic breadth of flagellar and nonflagellar type 3 secretion systems, and comparing this to published surveys of gene order in the (...) F1FO‐ATP synthetase, its N‐ATPase relatives, and the bacterial/archaeal V‐ and A‐type ATPases. Strikingly, thefliHIJgene order was deeply conserved, with the few exceptions appearing derived, and exactly matching the widely conserved F‐ATPase gene orderatpFHAG, coding for subunits b‐δ‐α‐γ. The V/A‐type ATPases have a similar conserved gene order. Our results confirm homology between these systems, and suggest a rare case of synteny conserved over billions of years, predating the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). (shrink)

Patient safety has only recently been subjected to wide-spread systematic study. Healthcare differs from other high risk industries in being more diverse and multi-contextual, and less certain and regulated. Also many patient safety problems are low-frequency events associated with many, varied contributing factors. The subject of this paper is the epistemology of patient safety (the science of the method of finding out about patient safety). Patient safety research is considered here on the background of a risk management framework which requires (...) researchers to: • Understand the context - as a subset of healthcare quality, services and systems research, with technical and human behavioural (cultural) components and a range of external and internal organisational influences, a wide range of research disciplines is necessary • Identify the risks - identify the things that go wrong and the frequency and nature of different types of incidents from sources such as medical record review, observational studies, audit, incident and medico-legal reports • Analyse the risks - deconstruct the things that go wrong, identifying contributing factors and trying to detect trends and patterns in contributing factors, detection, mitigation factors, ameliorating factors and actions taken to reduce risk • Evaluate the risks - decide on priorities, identifying preventive and corrective strategies and judging the risk- and cost-benefit of potential corrective strategies such as standardisation or simplification of a process or device • Manage the risk - evaluate and scope preventive and/or corrective strategies and then implement these, or place the problem on a risk register pending solution, or accept that what is needed is unaffordable • Communicate and consult - use interactive sessions, audit, on-going feedback, reminders and patient mediated prompts • Monitor and review the state of the problem - get baseline trends and patterns so that changes can be tracked and properly attributed to an intervention A hierarchy of levels of evidence has been proposed for clinical research and we argue that insufficient weighting has been given to lower ranked levels of research and to qualitative research, although critical interpretive synthesis is now gaining acceptance in mainstream thinking (e.g. by the Cochrane Collaboration). Fundamental challenges remain including how to grasp the elusive concept of patient safety, how to quantify, characterise and cost the problems, how to judge the extent to which harm can be attributed to errors, violations or system failures, how to identify contributing factors and the extent to which they can be implicated, how to judge whether incidents or their precursors are preventable, how to generate strong evidence to make healthcare safer and how to translate research into practice. Future directions include addressing the mundane as well as rare, dramatic events, and developing further research in non-hospital settings and in developing countries. In summary, a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, using information from all available data sources and combining retrospective, real time and prospective study designs, is necessary to address some of the more difficult patient safety problems. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

New pedagogical visions and technological developments have brought argumentation to the fore of educational practice. Whereas students previously 'learned to 'argue', they now 'argue to learn': collaborative argumentation-based learning has become a popular and valuable pedagogical technique, across a variety of tasks and disciplines. Researchers have explored the conditions under which arguing to learn is successful, have described some of its learning potentials and have developed Internet-based tools to support such learning. However, the further advancement of this field presently faces (...) several problems, which the present book addresses. Three dimensions of analysis - historical, theoretical and empirical - are integrated throughout the book. Given the nature of its object of study - dialogue, interaction, argumentation, learning and teaching - the book is resolutely multidisciplinary, drawing on research on learning in educational and psychological sciences, as well as on philosophical and linguistic theories of dialogue and argumentation. (shrink)

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess strong (...) innate predispositions that are critical for success in this task. (shrink)

Was Descartes a Cartesian Dualist? In this controversial study, Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris argue that, despite the general consensus within philosophy, Descartes was neither a proponent of dualism nor guilty of the many crimes of which he has been accused by twentieth century philosophers. In lively and engaging prose, Baker and Morris present a radical revision of the ways in which Descartes' work has been interpreted. Descartes emerges with both his historical importance assured and his philosophical (...) importance redeemed. (shrink)

We agree with Jones & Love (J&L) that much of Bayesian modeling has taken a fundamentalist approach to cognition; but we do not believe in the potential of Bayesianism to provide insights into psychological processes. We discuss the advantages of associative explanations over Bayesian approaches to causal induction, and argue that Bayesian models have added little to our understanding of human causal reasoning.

The decision-theoretic account of probability in the Everett or many-worlds interpretation, advanced by David Deutsch and David Wallace, is shown to be circular. Talk of probability in Everett presumes the existence of a preferred basis to identify measurement outcomes for the probabilities to range over. But the existence of a preferred basis can only be established by the process of decoherence, which is itself probabilistic.

This paper examines relationships between accountants’ personal values and their moral reasoning. In particular, we hypothesize that there is an inverse relationship between accountants’ “Conformity” values and principled moral reasoning. This investigation is important because the literature suggests that conformity with rule-based standards may be one reason for professional accountants’ relatively lower scores on measures of moral reasoning (Abdolmohammadi et al. J Bus Ethics 16 (1997) 1717). We administered the Rokeach Values Survey (RVS) (Rokeach: 1973, The Nature of Human Values (...) (The Free Press, New York)) and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) (Rest: 1979, Development in Judgment Moral Issues (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)) to164 graduating accounting students enrolled in capstone courses at two universities in the Northeastern United States. As potential entrants into the accounting profession, these subjects bring their values and moral reasoning to bear on attitudes and behaviors in the workplace. We find a highly significant inverse relationship between “Conformity” values and principled moral reasoning (i.e., those who prefer Conformity values have lower levels of moral reasoning). However, we also find that accounting students as a group do not prefer Conformity values above other values such as Self-actualization and Idealism, and we find positive relationships between Self-actualization and Idealism values and moral reasoning. Implications for values and ethics research are discussed. (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)