Jonathan Beever and Nicolae Morar’s article “The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine” and its accompanying commentaries in the American Journal of Bioethics—though insightful, innovative, and provocative—overlook key interlocutors necessary for any discussion of whether the mid-twentieth-century biomedical principle of autonomy should be revised or revoked. The conversation sparked by “The Porosity of Autonomy” will remain both incomplete and politically untenable so long as there is no meaningful engagement with persons/communities who appeal to the (...) principle of patient autonomy in order to articulate and challenge the conditions of their oppression. (shrink)

This article argues that an intentional acrostic spanning the first five lines of Propertius’ elegy for Cynthia's birthday (3.10), MANE[T], contributes significantly to the poignancy and purpose of the poem. MANE can be read as māne, ‘in the morning’, or manē, ‘stay!’, both of which emphasize the fleeting nature of dawn—and of Cynthia's youthful beauty. MANET can suggest both ‘[art] remains’ and ‘[death] awaits’. All four of these meanings work together to capture the tension between human transience and artistic immortality. (...) The theme is further enhanced by a balancing reverse telestich at the poem's end, ROSA RVES (‘[a] rose, you will fall to ruin’). (shrink)

As the classic of classics and the bridge between pagan antiquity and the Christian era, Virgil’s Aeneid stands at the center of the humanities’ Great Conversation. Yet this poem of Empire, with its flawed hero and its ambivalence toward divine and temporal power, raises more questions than it answers about the nature of human history. The epic’s true moral complexity, mirroring the insoluble conundrum that is human life, makes it especially relevant in an era whose political polarization resembles civil war. (...) Reflecting on centuries of readers’ deeply personal relationships with the Aeneid, this article discusses how even today the “greatest text” can provide companionship and inspiration on our life’s journey. (shrink)

A growing trend within feminist animal studies is to eschew the abolitionism/welfarism binary in favor of attending carefully to the politics of existing interspecies relationships in context. This literature maintains that domestication produces special interspecies relationships which generate ongoing responsibilities for human companions and communities. With the goal of clarifying how tending to these ongoing responsibilities to domesticated animals can qualify as enduring forms of interspecies justice, this paper unpacks the politics of these special relationships and obligations in context, specifically, (...) that of fancy rat breeders’ attempts to eliminate aganglionic megacolon. Contrasting fanciers’ efforts with those of laboratory breeders and researchers, I argue that what sets the fancy apart is its shared code of ethics and the loving, principled form of life from which it emerges. Furthermore, the knowledge that rats are worth loving not only enables fanciers to attend to the injustice of megacolon but facilitates transformative justice for domestic rats more broadly. (shrink)

In the United States, a longstanding legal rule exists against patenting natural phenomena. The Supreme Court recently had an opportunity to help define the boundaries and clarify the implications of this “natural phenomenon doctrine” in Laboratory Corporation of America v. Metabolite Labs., dismissed as improvidently granted. This article argues that the natural phenomenon doctrine renders both the patent claim at issue in LabCorp, and the patents that directly or indirectly claim biological correlations between genotypes and medical phenotypes, invalid or unenforceable (...) under U.S. patent law. (shrink)

Molecular genetic testing has increasingly been incorporated into clinical medicine, and this trend is likely to accelerate in the future. The introduction of genetic testing into medical practice is beginning to collide head on with patents that claim ownership of correlations between human genetic variants and predisposition to disease, response to therapeutic drugs, and susceptibility to pharmacologic side effects. Patent holders or licensees of genes, genetic variants, and their genotype-phenotype correlations are already using the threat of litigation to monopolize genetic (...) tests for important well-known syndromes like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and inherited breast and ovarian cancer, in addition to a host of less commonly discussed conditions. (shrink)

Increasing complexity and specialisation of modern sciences has led to increasingly collaborative publications, as well as the involvement of commercial services. Modern integrative taxonomy likewise depends on many lines of evidence and is increasingly complex, but the trend of collaboration lags and various attempts at ‘turbo taxonomy’ have been unsatisfactory. We are developing a taxonomic service in the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance to provide fundamental data for new species descriptions. This will also function as a hub to connect a global (...) network of taxonomists, assembling an alliance of scientists working on potential new species to tackle both the extinction and inclusion crises we face today. The current rate of new species descriptions is simply too slow; the discipline is often dismissed as old fashioned, and there is a crisis level need for taxonomic descriptions to come to grips with the scale of Anthropocene biodiversity loss. Here, we envision how the process of describing and naming species would benefit from a service supporting the acquisition of descriptive data. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/E8q3KJor_F8. (shrink)

Environmentalism has long placed heavy emphasis on strategies that seek to ensure the environment of today and the future roughly mirror the past. Yet while past-oriented approaches have come under increased scrutiny, environmental ethics in the time of climate change is still largely conceptualized as that which could pull humanity back from the brink of disaster or, at least, prevent the worst of it. As a result, practical and conceptual tools for grappling with what is owed to the dead and (...) dying victims of environmental injustice have been and continue to be woefully underdeveloped. This paper advances scaffolding for robust environmental death ethics that are temporally pluralistic and at home within intergenerational climate justice. (shrink)

Building off Manulani Aluli-Meyer’s theory of holographic epistemology, this article explores how our understanding of intergenerational justice shifts when informed by relational interspecies ethics and nonlinear temporalities. Both intergenerational and interspecies ethics are greatly enriched if the dead, the living, and those yet-to-be are not (only) distinct generations of beings along a linear sequence but coexistent facets of every being. The second focal point of this article concerns what holographic epistemology reveals about Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of the planetary. Ultimately, the (...) article argues that holographic intergenerational ethics highlight the need for a third earthly domain beyond the planet and the globe. (shrink)

Building off Manulani Aluli-Meyer’s theory of holographic epistemology, this article explores how our understanding of intergenerational justice shifts when informed by relational interspecies ethics and nonlinear temporalities. Both intergenerational and interspecies ethics are greatly enriched if the dead, the living, and those yet-to-be are not distinct generations of beings along a linear sequence but coexistent facets of every being. The second focal point of this article concerns what holographic epistemology reveals about Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of the planetary. Ultimately, the article (...) argues that holographic intergenerational ethics highlight the need for a third earthly domain beyond the planet and the globe. (shrink)

Committee composition is a recurrent theme within the literature on Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs). The ability of IACUCs to ensure the ethical treatment of nonhuman research subjects depends upon who makes up these committees. Non-scientists and those not affiliated with the research institution have been deemed indispensable for the democratic, objective review of protocols and, thus, for ethical treatment. IACUCs’ critics and partners alike have persistently offered suggestions for how to further optimize committee composition towards these ends. (...) This paper contributes to the ongoing conversation by advocating for the addition of holistic species experts to IACUCs, arguing that holistic species experts are as indispensable for the political and epistemic viability of protocol reviews as non-scientists and non-affiliates. Holistic species experts are defined here as members of the larger community who have extensive firsthand experience with animals living and dying under relatively ideal conditions. If we accept that non-scientists and non-affiliates are crucial for IACUCs' ethical treatment of animals, then we have every reason to embrace holistic species experts. The values, welfare expertise, and productive epistemic dissonance that these experts bring to the table would prove invaluable. (shrink)

For Erasmus, the two fountains streaming milky juice—a new mother’s breasts—represent powerful symbols of love and authority. Erasmus describes the mother’s breasts as fountains oozing love to the sucking child. Elizabeth Clinton extends the image of Mother to represent God, reminding the nursing mother that when she looks on her sucking child, she should remember that she is God’s new born babe, sucking His instruction and His word, even as the babe sucks her breast. Dorothy Leigh extends the image of (...) the nursing mother to an image of Christ himself. Mother’s love, especially a breast-feeding or “lying in” mother’s love, is one of the most authoritatively gendered representations of love. Issues of gender and authority converge often around the image of the breast-feeding mother. Drawing on the image of the nursing mother, Dorothy Leigh and other early modern writers actively engaged in the most contentious and public debates of their day, including the authority of men, preachers and kings. (shrink)

Particular visions of urban development are often codified in multi-year resource management policies. These policies, and the negotiations leading to them, are based in specific problem frames and narratives with long legacies. As conditions change and knowledge improves, there is often a need to revisit how problems, opportunities, and development pathways were defined historically, and to consider the viability of alternative pathways for development. In this article, we examine the case of agriculture near Metropolitan Phoenix, in the Central Arizona region, (...) to highlight how frames and narratives embedded in policy can reinforce particular development pathways, even as information, conditions, and values evolve. Using expert interviews and secondary data, we document alternative frames and narratives that may offer different pathways for development and sustainability in the region. By highlighting alternative narratives, we demonstrate the uncertainties and limitations associated with all narratives about development pathways, and explore the possibilities that narrative shifts can alter future outcomes. (shrink)

Information is a force multiplier. Knowledge of the enemy's capability and intentions may be of far more value to a military force than additional troops or firepower. Situation assessment is the ongoing process of inferring relevant information about the forces of concern in a military situation. Relevant information can include force types, firepower, location, and past, present and future course of action. Situation assessment involves the incorporation of uncertain evidence from diverse sources. These include photographs, radar scans, and other forms (...) of image intelligence, or IMINT; electronics intelligence, or ELINT, derived from characteristics (e.g., wavelength) of emissions generated by enemy equipment; communications intelligence, or COMINT, derived from the characteristics of messages sent by the enemy; and reports from human informants (HUMINT). These sources must be combined to form a model of the situation. The sheer volume of data, the ubiquity of uncertainty, the number and complexity of hypotheses to consider, the high-stakes environment, the compressed time frame, and deception and damage from hostile forces, combine to present a staggeringly complex problem. Even if one could formulate a decision problem in reasonable time, explicit determination of an optimal decision policy exceeds any reasonable computational resources. While it is tempting to drop any attempt at rational analysis and rely purely on simple heuristics, we argue that this can lead to catastrophic outcomes. We present an architecture for a ``complex decision machine'' that performs rational deliberation to make decisions in real time. We argue that resource limits require such an architecture to be grounded in simple heuristic reactive processes. We thus argue that both simple heuristics and complex decision machines are required for effective decision making in real time for complex problems. We describe an implementation of our architecture applied to the problem of military situation assessment. (shrink)

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched (...) to each other. Reidentification, the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants. The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research. (shrink)

[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativity of judgement is made (...) possible by naturalist views of truth, that is, views which do not presuppose normativity in explaining truth. /// [Julia Tanney] This paper attempts to describe why it is not possible to account for normative phenomena in non-normative terms. It argues that Papineau's attempt to locate norms of judgement 'outside' content, grounded in an individual's desires or reasons, mislocates the normativity that is thought to resist appropriation within a 'world that conceives nature as the realm of law'. It agrees, however, that a theory of content that locates norms 'inside' content will not be forthcoming-at least if this is to require fashioning the norms that in some sense govern judgment or thought into individually necessary conditions for contentful states. (shrink)

Let R be a real closed field. An integer part I for R is a discretely ordered subring such that for every \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${r \in R}$$\end{document}, there exists an \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${i \in I}$$\end{document} so that i ≤ r < i + 1. Mourgues and Ressayre (J Symb Logic 58:641–647, 1993) showed that every real closed field has an integer part. The procedure of Mourgues and (...) Ressayre appears to be quite complicated. We would like to know whether there is a simple procedure, yielding an integer part that is \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\Delta^0_2(R)}$$\end{document} —limit computable relative to R. We show that there is a maximal Z-ring \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${I \subseteq R}$$\end{document} which is \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\Delta^0_2(R)}$$\end{document}. However, this I may not be an integer part for R. By a result of Wilkie (Logic Colloquium ’77), any Z-ring can be extended to an integer part for some real closed field. Using Wilkie’s ideas, we produce a real closed field R with a Z-ring \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${I \subseteq R}$$\end{document} such that I does not extend to an integer part for R. For a computable real closed field, we do not know whether there must be an integer part in the class \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\Delta^0_2}$$\end{document}. We know that certain subclasses of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\Delta^0_2}$$\end{document} are not sufficient. We show that for each \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${n \in \omega}$$\end{document}, there is a computable real closed field with no n-c.e. integer part. In fact, there is a computable real closed field with no n-c.e. integer part for any n. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Encounters Between Patients and Doctors: An Anthology. By John D. Stoeckle.

Social and personality psychology have been criticized for overreliance on potentially biased self-report variables. In well-being science, researchers have called for more “objective” physiological and cognitive measures to evaluate the efficacy of well-being-increasing interventions. This may now be possible with the recent rise of cost-effective, commercially-available wireless physiological recording devices and smartphone-based cognitive testing. We sought to determine whether cognitive and physiological measures, coupled with machine learning methods, could quantify the effects of positive interventions. The current 2-part study used a (...) college sample (N = 245) to contrast the cognitive (memory, attention, construal) and physiological (autonomic, electroencephalogram) effects of engaging in one of two randomly assigned writing activities (i.e., prosocial or “antisocial”). In the prosocial condition, participants described an interaction when they acted in a kind way, then described an interaction when they received kindness. In the “antisocial” condition, participants wrote instead about an interaction when they acted in an unkind way and received unkindness, respectively. Our study replicated previous research on the beneficial effects of recalling prosocial experiences as assessed by self-report. However, we did not detect an effect of the positive or negative activity intervention on either cognitive or physiological measures. More research is needed to investigate under what conditions cognitive and physiological measures may be applicable, but our findings lead us to conclude that they should not be unilaterally favored over the traditional self-report approach. (shrink)

Bringing between two covers the most influential and accessible articles on Plato's Republic, this collection illuminates what is widely held to be the most important work of Western philosophy and political theory. It will be valuable not only to philosophers, but to political theorists, historians, classicists, literary scholars, and interested general readers.

Literacy is an essential skill. Learning to read is a requirement for becoming a self-providing human being. However, while spoken language is acquired naturally with exposure to language without explicit instruction, reading and writing need to be taught explicitly. Decades of research have shown that well-structured teaching of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and letter-to-sound mapping is crucial in building solid foundations for the acquisition of reading. During the COVID-19 pandemic, children worldwide did not have access to consistent and structured teaching (...) and are, as a consequence, predicted to be behind in the development of their reading skills. Subsequent evidence confirms this prediction. With the best evidence-based practice in mind, we developed an online version of a well-structured early literacy training program for 5-year-old children. This 2-week online Reading Camp program is designed for pre-K children. It incorporates critical components of the fundamental skills essential to learning to read and is taught online in an interactive, multi-sensory, and peer-learning environment. We measure the participants’ literacy skills and other related skills before and after participating in the online Reading Camp and compare the results to no-treatment controls. Results show that children who participated in the online Reading Camp improved significantly on all parameters in relation to controls. Our results demonstrate that a well-structured evidence-based reading instruction program, even if online and short-term, benefits 5-year-old children in learning to read. With the potential to scale up this online program, the evidence presented here, alongside previous evidence for the efficacy of the in-person program, indicates that the online Reading Camp program is effective and can be used to tackle a variety of questions regarding structural and functional plasticity in the early stages of reading acquisition. (shrink)

The effect of prism adaptation on movement is typically reduced when the movement at test (prisms off) differs on some dimension from the movement at training (prisms on). Some adaptation is latent, however, and only revealed through further testing in which the movement at training is fully reinstated. Applying a nonlinear attractor dynamic model (Frank, Blau, & Turvey, 2009) to available data (Blau, Stephen, Carello, & Turvey, 2009), we provide evidence for a causal link between the latent (or secondary) aftereffect (...) and an additive force term that is known to account for symmetry breaking. The evidence is discussed in respect to the hypothesis that recalibration aftereffects reflect memory principles (encoding specificity, transfer-appropriate processing) oriented to time-translation invariance—when later testing conserves the conditions of earlier training. Forgetting or reduced adaptation effects follow from the loss of this invariance and are reversed by its reinstatement. (shrink)

Information is a force multiplier. Knowledge of the enemy's capability and intentions may be of far more value to a military force than additional troops or firepower. Situation assessment is the ongoing process of inferring relevant information about the forces of concern in a military situation. Relevant information can include force types, firepower, location, and past, present and future course of action. Situation assessment involves the incorporation of uncertain evidence from diverse sources. These include photographs, radar scans, and other forms (...) of image intelligence, or IMINT; electronics intelligence, or ELINT, derived from characteristics (e.g., wavelength) of emissions generated by enemy equipment; communications intelligence, or COMINT, derived from the characteristics of messages sent by the enemy; and reports from human informants (HUMINT). These sources must be combined to form a model of the situation. The sheer volume of data, the ubiquity of uncertainty, the number and complexity of hypotheses to consider, the high-stakes environment, the compressed time frame, and deception and damage from hostile forces, combine to present a staggeringly complex problem. Even if one could formulate a decision problem in reasonable time, explicit determination of an optimal decision policy exceeds any reasonable computational resources. While it is tempting to drop any attempt at rational analysis and rely purely on simple heuristics, we argue that this can lead to catastrophic outcomes. We present an architecture for a ``complex decision machine'' that performs rational deliberation to make decisions in real time. We argue that resource limits require such an architecture to be grounded in simple heuristic reactive processes. We thus argue that both simple heuristics and complex decision machines are required for effective decision making in real time for complex problems. We describe an implementation of our architecture applied to the problem of military situation assessment. (shrink)

Acute exercise consistently benefits both emotion and cognition, particularly cognitive control. We evaluated acute endurance exercise influences on emotion, domain-general cognitive control, and the cognitive control of emotion, specifically cognitive reappraisal. Thirty-six endurance runners, defined as running at least 30 miles per week with one weekly run of at least 9 miles (21 female, age 18-30 years) participated. In a repeated measures design, participants walked at 57% age-adjusted maximum heart rate (HRmax) (range 51-63%) and ran at 70% HRmax (range 64-76%) (...) for 90 minutes on two separate days. Participants completed measures of emotional state and the Stroop test of domain-general cognitive control before, every 30 minutes during, and 30 minutes after exercise. Participants also completed a cognitive reappraisal task after exercise. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy tracked changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin levels in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Endurance exercise elevated positive emotion and cognitive reappraisal success. Endurance exercise reduced Stroop response time and test-evoked PFC oxygenation during exercise. Results suggest that even at relatively moderate intensities, endurance athletes benefit emotionally from running both during and after exercise, and task-related prefrontal cortex oxygenation reductions do not appear to hinder prefrontal-dependent cognitive control. (shrink)

This rich and varied collection of essays addresses some of the most fundamental human questions through the lenses of philosophy, literature, religion, politics, and theology. Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey have fashioned an interdisciplinary consideration of such perennial and enduring issues as the relationship between nature and history, nature and grace, reason and revelation, classical philosophy and Christianity, modernity and postmodernity, repentance and self-limitation, and philosophy and politics.

Despite tremendous investment to promote gender equity, U.S. public accounting firms continue to be gendered organizations. Our archival study examines gender equity within the partnership of these large firms for a one-year period. We find female partners are clustered in lower prestige client types including investment funds, benefit plans, and single audits, rather than higher prestige public company clients. Second, we consider whether there is gender bias in prestige of client served by female partners who lead public company audits. In (...) these tests of those individuals who have already achieved the partnership and lead public company audits, we find no evidence of bias. This research contributes to the understanding of gender bias in U.S. public accounting firms and helps inform the societal narrative on where women continue to be marginalized even when they have achieved the highest levels in an organization. (shrink)