As in other societies, medical professionalism in the Peoples’ Republic of China has been rapidly evolving. One of the major events in this process was the endorsement in 2005 of the document, “Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter,” by the Chinese Medical Doctor Association (hereafter, the Charter). More recently, a national survey, the first on such a large scale, was conducted on Chinese physicians’ attitudes toward the fundamental principles and core commitments put forward in the Charter. Based (...) on empirical findings from that study and comparing them to the published results of a similar American survey, the authors offer an in-depth interpretation of significant cross-cultural differences and important transcultural commonalities. The broader historical, socio-economic, and ethical issues relating to salient Chinese cultural practices such as family consent, familism (the custom of deferring decisions to family members), and the withholding of medical information, as well as controversial topics such as not respecting patients’ autonomy, are examined. The Chinese Survey found that Chinese physicians supported the principles of the Charter in general. Here we argue that Chinese culture and traditional medical ethics are broadly compatible with the moral commitments demanded by modern medical professionalism. Methodologically and theoretically—recognizing the problems inherent in the hoary but still popular habit of dichotomizing cultures and in relativism—a transcultural approach is adopted that gives greater (due) weight to the internal moral diversity present within every culture, the common ground shared by different cultures, and the primacy of morality. Genuine crosscultural dialogue, including a constructive Chinese-American dialogue in the area of medical professionalism, is not only possible, but necessary. (shrink)

Cultural influences are pervasive throughout human behaviour, and as human–robot interactions become more common, roboticists are increasingly focusing attention on how to build robots that are culturally competent and culturally sustainable. The current treatment of culture in robotics, however, is largely limited to the definition of culture as national culture. This is problematic for three reasons: it ignores subcultures, it loses specificity and hides the nuances in cultures, and it excludes refugees and stateless persons. We propose to shift the focus (...) of cultural robotics to redefine culture as an emergent phenomenon. We make use of three research programmes in the social and cognitive sciences to justify this definition. Consequently, cultural behaviour cannot be explicitly programmed into a robot, rather, a robot must be designed with the capability to participate in the interactions that lead to the arising of cultural behaviour. In the final part of the paper, we explore which capacities and abilities are the most salient for a robot to do this. (shrink)

As leadership discourses in higher education are increasingly being mediated online, texts previously reserved for staff are now being made available in the public domain. As such, these texts become accessible for study, critique and evaluation. Additionally, discourses previously confined to the written domain are now increasingly multimodal. Thus, an approach is required that is capable of relating detailed, complex multimodal discourse analyses to broader sociocultural perspectives to account for the complex meaning-making practices that operate in online leadership discourses. For (...) this purpose, a digital multimodal discourse approach is proposed and illustrated via a small-scale case study of the online leadership discourse of an Australian university. The analysis of two short video texts demonstrates how a digital multimodal discourse perspective facilitates the identification of key multimodal systems used for meaning-making in online communication, how meaning arises through combinations of semiotic choices, and how the results of multimodal discourse analysis using digital technology can reveal larger sociocultural patterns – in this case, divergent leadership styles and approaches as reflected in online discourse, at a time of immense change within the higher education sector. (shrink)

Extending the dialogue on corporate social performance (CSP) as descriptive stakeholder management (Clarkson, Acad Manage Rev 20: 92, 1995), we examine differences in CSP activity between family and nonfamily firms. We argue that CSP activity can be explained by the firm's identity orientation toward stakeholders (Brickson, Admin Sci Quart 50: 576, 2005; Acad Manage Rev 32: 864, 2007). Specifically, individualistic, relational, or collectivistic identity orientations can describe a firm's level of CSP activity toward certain stakeholders. Family firms, we suggest, adopt (...) a more relational orientation toward their stakeholders than nonfamily firms, and thus engage in higher levels of CSP.Further, we invoke collectivistic identity orientation to argue that the higher the level of family or founder involvement within a family firm, the greater the level of CSP toward specific stakeholders. Using social performance rating data from 1991 to 2005, we find that family and nonfamily firms demonstrate notable differences in terms of social initiatives and social concerns. We also find that the level of family and founder involvement is related to the type and frequency of a family firm's social initiatives and social concerns. (shrink)

This study used fMRI to investigate the neural substrates of moral cognition in health resource allocation decision problems. In particular, it investigated the cognitive and emotional processes that underpin utilitarian approaches to health care rationing such as Quality Adjusted Life Years. Participants viewed hypothetical medical and nonmedical resource allocation scenarios which described equal or unequal allocation of resources to different groups. In addition, participants were assigned to 1 of 2 treatments in which they either did or did not receive advanced (...) instructions about the principles of utilitarianism. In all cases, participants were asked to judged the proposed allocations as “fair” or “unfair.” More brain activity was observed within the superior parietal lobe, angular gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and bilateral caudate nucleus when participants viewed scenarios depicting equal divisions of resources. Conversely, unequal resource divisions were associated with more activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and insula cortex. Furthermore, instructions about the principles of utilitarianism led to significant activation differences within the inferior frontal gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus. Significant differences in activity were also found within the inferior frontal cortex and anterior insula between medical and nonmedical scenarios. The implications for cognitive control mechanisms and the cognitive and neural bases of utilitarian ethical judgment are discussed. (shrink)

The possible integration of genomic sequencing (including whole‐genome and whole‐exome sequencing) into the three contexts addressed in this special report—state‐mandated screening programs, clinical care, and direct‐to‐consumer services—raises related but distinct legal issues. This essay will outline the legal issues surrounding the integration of genomic sequencing into state newborn screening programs, parental rights to refuse and access sequencing for their newborns in clinical and direct‐to‐consumer care, and privacy‐related legal issues attending the use of sequencing in newborns.

Have social media sites like Facebook become such a significant part of our social fabric that people face negative consequences for not joining and sharing? What role does a right to privacy play in circumstances where self-disclosure is the norm? We surveyed students about teammate preferences for team members based on information availability and Facebook membership. Students report a strong preference for teammates for whom there is information and Facebook participation.

In this study, undergraduate business students indicated the degree to which three activities were ethical or unethical, how likely they would be to commit each action, and how likely they thought the average student would be to commit each action. Significant declines in ethicality were found between comparisons of the ethical appropriateness of each scenario and the students’ personal intentions to commit the action, and between personal intention and the students’perceptions of other students’ actions. The comparison between self and others (...) was attenuated by academic classification with seniors perceiving their peers’ behavior as similar to their own. This demonstrates that business students do have an ethical blind spot both in acting contrary to their own stated ethical beliefs and in believing that their peers will commit unethical actions while they would not. We encourage faculty to develop reflective curricula that require students to actively engage in ethical decision-making. In addition, ethical training should, when possible, address the entire ethical decision-making process, from awareness, to intention, to actual behavior. Finally, students should be made aware of the unfounded disparities between their perceptions of their own actionsand their perceptions of their peers’ actions. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin was a central figure in twentieth-century political thought. This volume highlights Berlin's significance for contemporary readers, covering not only his writings on liberty and liberalism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Russian thinkers and pluralism, but also the implications of his thought for political theory, history, and the social sciences, as well as the ethical challenges confronting political actors, and the nature and importance of practical judgment for politics and scholarship. His name and work are inseparable from the revival of (...) political philosophy and the analysis of political extremism and defense of democratic liberalism following World War II. Berlin was primarily an essayist who spoke through commentary on other authors and, while his own commitments and allegiances are clear enough, much in his thought remains controversial. Berlin's work constitutes an unsystematic and incomplete, but nevertheless sweeping and profound, defense of political, ethical, and intellectual humanism in an anti-humanistic age. (shrink)

The fact that racism and other forms of discrimination and injustice have persisted in our own nursing communities despite our rhetoric of caring and compassion can no longer be denied. This fact gave rise to a webinar in which the scholars represented in this issue of Nursing Philosophy appear. The webinar centered on the philosophy, phenomenology and scholarship of Indigenous nurses and nurses of color. The authors of the articles in this issue are giving us the precious gift of their (...) ideas. All of us, white scholars and scholars of color, must come together to receive this gift, learn from their words and their insight, debate the ideas, honor the perspectives, and consider ways that we can move this discourse forward to create new possibilities for nursing, new possibilities to shape the future development of our discipline. (shrink)

Psychological contracts represent perceived reciprocal obligations between an employer and an employee. Most research has focused on employee or employer rights (the entitlement side of the obligation equation). We examine the responsibilities inherent in psychological contracts. After reviewing the moral aspect of psychological contracts, we use the issue of tenure as a discussion point for this topic.

Perhaps the most distinct question in science throughout the ages has been the one of perceivable reality, treated both in physics and philosophy. Reality is acting upon us, and we, and life in general, are acting upon reality. Potentiality, found both in quantum reality and in the activity of life, plays a key role. In quantum reality observation turns potentiality into reality. Again, life computes possibilities in various ways based on past actions, and acts on the basis of these computations. (...) This book is about a new approach to biology. Its subtitle suggests a perpetual movement and interplay between two elusive aspects of modern science — reality/matter and potentiality/mind, between physics and biology — both captured and triggered by mathematics — to understand and explain emergence, development and life all the way up to consciousness. But what is the real/potential difference between living and non-living matter? How does time in potentiality differ from time in reality? What we need to understand these differences is an integrative approach. This book contemplates how to encircle life to obtain a formal system, equivalent to the ones in physics. Integral Biomathics attempts to explore the interplay between reality and potentiality. (shrink)

The psychology of aesthetics and the arts is dedicated to the study of our experiences of the visual arts, music, literature, film, performances, architecture and design; our experiences of beauty and ugliness; our preferences and dislikes; and our everyday perceptions of things in our world. The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Aesthetics and the Arts is a foundational volume presenting an overview of the key concepts and theories of the discipline where readers can learn about the questions that are (...) being asked and become acquainted with the perspectives and methodologies used to address them. The psychology of aesthetics and the arts is one of the oldest areas of psychology but it is also one of the fastest growing and most exciting areas. This is a comprehensive and authoritative handbook featuring essays from some of the most respected scholars in the field. (shrink)

The success of business firms and other organizations relies on the trustworthiness of reports and other documents prepared by management accountants. This study examines the personal ethical values and ethical value types of management accountants. Data were obtained from a survey of members of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). The survey, composed of the Rokeach Values Survey and demographic questions, was delivered by the IMA Research Lab to membership samples. Importantly, the results indicated that the highest-ranked values were consistent (...) with values included in the IMA’s Statement of Ethical Professional Practice. That management accountants hold high ethical values better enables them to provide reliable and meaningful work to business firms and other organizations. Another important finding is that older management accountants are more concerned with moral values than their younger colleagues. This finding has notable implications for the future of the profession. (shrink)

The aesthetic experience may be defined as people's interactions with, and reactions to, objects, places, but also to the environment. Most psychological perspectives on the aesthetic experience argue that it results from the coordination of different mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, imagination, thought, and emotion. Physiological and neurological responses are also involved. Aesthetic experiences can take place while we observe works of art in museums and galleries as well as in other contexts such as natural and built environments. (...) Looking at a landscape, walking in a park, meeting people in a square, and walking into a building that is architecturally appealing are examples of natural and built environments where we can experience beauty, pleasure, attraction, and interest, among other aesthetic reactions.Research on aesthetic experiences has a long history, and in recent decades, the field has experienced tremendous growth in the number of empirical studies conducted. One of the areas that researchers have yet to fully address is the influence of the context (natural and built environments) on aesthetic experiences. We refer to context according to three broad categories: Context as natural environments, context as built environments, and environments for aesthetic experiences.Context as natural environments: People show a basic tendency to associate the natural environment with positive evaluations. According to an evolutionary explanation know... (shrink)

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology provides a consensus-based realist framework (...) for formulating such characterizations in a computable fashion. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in the Space Object Ontology and stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space domain awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators. This paper presents the core of the Space Object Ontology, discusses its advantages over other approaches to space object classification, and demonstrates its ability to combine diverse sets of data from multiple sources within an expandable framework. Finally, we show how the ontology provides benefits for enhancing and maintaining longterm space domain awareness. (shrink)

Achieving space situational awareness requires, at a minimum, the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Leveraging the resultant space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and conjunction assessment presents major challenges. This is in part because in characterizing space objects we reference a variety of identifiers, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, operational processes, operational statuses, and so forth, which tend to be defined in highly heterogeneous and sometimes inconsistent (...) ways. The Space Domain Ontologies are designed to provide a consensus-based realist framework for formulating such characterizations in a way that is both consistent and computable. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in a suite of ontologies built around the existing Space Object Ontology. They are stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space situational awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators and analysts. This paper provides an overview of the Space Domain Ontologies and their development and use. It presents the motivation for and advantages of the Space Domain Ontologies, including the benefits they provide for enhancing and maintaining long-term space situational awareness. (shrink)

For years a debate has raged within the various literatures of philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology over whether, and to what degree, the concepts that characterize psychopathology are social constructions that reflect cultural values. While the majority position among philosophers has been normativist, i.e., that the conception of a mental disorder is value-laden, a vocal and cogent minority have argued that psychopathology results from malfunctions that can be described by terminology that is objective and scientific. Scientists and clinicians have tended to (...) endorse the objectivist position, with some notable exceptions. (shrink)

This paper describes an AFOSR-supported basic research program that focuses on developing a new framework for combining hard with soft data in order to improve space situational awareness. The goal is to provide, in an automatic and near real-time fashion, a ranking of possible threats to blue assets (assets trying to be protected) from red assets (assets with hostile intentions). The approach is based on Conceptual Spaces models, which combine features from traditional associative and symbolic cognitive models. While Conceptual Spaces (...) are revolutionary, they lack an underlying mathematical framework. Several such frameworks have attempted to represent Conceptual Spaces, but by far the most robust is the model developed by Holender. His model utilizes integer linear programming in order to obtain an overall similarity value between observations and concepts that support the formation of hypotheses. This paper will describe a method for building Conceptual Spaces models for threats that utilizes ontologies as a means to provide a clear semantic foundation for this inferencing process; in particular threat ontologies and space domain ontologies are developed and employed in this approach. A space situational awareness use-case is presented involving a kinetic kill scenario and results are shown to assess the performance of this fusion-based inferencing framework. (shrink)

This volume is a serious attempt to open up the subject of European philosophy of science to real thought, and provide the structural basis for the interdisciplinary development of its specialist fields, but also to provoke reflection on the idea of ‘European philosophy of science’. This efforts should foster a contemporaneous reflection on what might be meant by philosophy of science in Europe and European philosophy of science, and how in fact awareness of it could assist philosophers interpret and motivate (...) their research through a stronger collective identity. The overarching aim is to set the background for a collaborative project organising, systematising, and ultimately forging an identity for, European philosophy of science by creating research structures and developing research networks across Europe to promote its development. (shrink)

This volume is a serious attempt to open up the subject of European philosophy of science to real thought, and provide the structural basis for the interdisciplinary development of its specialist fields, but also to provoke reflection on the idea of ‘European philosophy of science’. This efforts should foster a contemporaneous reflection on what might be meant by philosophy of science in Europe and European philosophy of science, and how in fact awareness of it could assist philosophers interpret and motivate (...) their research through a stronger collective identity. The overarching aim is to set the background for a collaborative project organising, systematising, and ultimately forging an identity for, European philosophy of science by creating research structures and developing research networks across Europe to promote its development. (shrink)

The real history of the covey of attention-artists who call themselves "The Birds." A great deal of uncertainty--and even some genuine confusion--surrounds the origin, evolution, and activities of the so-called Avis Tertia or "Order of the Third Bird." Sensational accounts of this "attentional cult" emphasize histrionic rituals, tragic trance-addictions, and the covert dissemination of obscurantist ontologies of the art object. Hieratic, ecstatic, and endlessly evasive, the Order attracts sensual misfits and cabalistic aesthetes--both to its ranks, and to its scholarship. In (...) recent years, however, the revisionist work of the research collective ESTAR(SER) has done much to clear the air, bringing archival precision to the history of this covey of attention-artists who call themselves "The Birds." Gathering the best articles of the last twenty years of The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), this volume represents a landmark in the history of aesthetic practices, and will be a point of departure for future work wading the muddy marshes at the limits of historicism."--Publisher description. (shrink)

Host-microbiome interactions (HMIs) are critical for the modulation of biological processes and are associated with several diseases, and extensive HMI studies have generated large amounts of data. We propose that the logical representation of the knowledge derived from these data and the standardized representation of experimental variables and processes can foster integration of data and reproducibility of experiments and thereby further HMI knowledge discovery. A community-based Ontology of Host-Microbiome Interactions (OHMI) was developed following the OBO Foundry principles. OHMI leverages established (...) ontologies to create logically structured representations of microbiomes, microbial taxonomy, host species, host anatomical entities, and HMIs under different conditions and associated study protocols and types of data analysis and experimental results. (shrink)