We can understand viewed scenes and extract task-relevant information within a few hundred milliseconds. This process is generally supported by three cortical regions that show selectivity for scene images: parahippocampal place area (PPA), medial place area (MPA) and occipital place area (OPA). Prior studies have focused on the visual information each region is responsive to, usually within the context of recognition or navigation. Here, we move beyond these tasks to investigate gaze allocation during scene viewing. Eye movements rely on a (...) scene’s visual representation to direct saccades, and thus foveal vision. In particular, we focus on the contribution of OPA, which is i) located in occipito-parietal cortex, likely feeding information into parts of the dorsal pathway critical for eye movements, and ii) contains strong retinotopic representations of the contralateral visual field. Participants viewed scene images for 1034 ms while their eye movements were recorded. On half of the trials, a 500 ms train of five transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulses was applied to the participant’s cortex, starting at scene onset. TMS was applied to the right hemisphere over either OPA or the occipital face area (OFA), which also exhibits a contralateral visual field bias but shows selectivity for face stimuli. Participants generally made an overall left-to-right, top-to-bottom pattern of eye movements across all conditions. When TMS was applied to OPA, there was an increased saccade latency for eye movements toward the contralateral relative to the ipsilateral visual field after the final TMS pulse (400ms). Additionally, TMS to the OPA biased fixation positions away from the contralateral side of the scene compared to the control condition, while the OFA group showed no such effect. There was no effect on horizontal saccade amplitudes. These combined results suggest that OPA might serve to represent local scene information that can then be utilized by visuomotor control networks to guide gaze allocation in natural scenes. (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)

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 American Medical Association enacted its Code of Ethics in 1847, the first such national codification. In this volume, a distinguished group of experts from the fields of medicine, bioethics, and history of medicine reflect on the development of medical ethics in the United States, using historical analyses as a springboard for discussions of the problems of the present, including what the editors call "a sense of moral crisis precipitated by the shift from a system of fee-for-service medicine to a (...) system of fee-for-system medicine, better known as 'managed care.'" The authors begin with a look at how the medical profession began to consider ethical issues in the 1800s and subsequent developments in the 1900s. They then address the sociological, historical, ethical, and legal aspects of the practice of medicine. Later chapters discuss current and future challenges to medical ethics and professional values. Appendixes display various versions of the AMA's Code of Ethics as it has evolved over time. Contributors: George J. Annas, J.D., M.P.H., Arthur Isak Applbaum, Ph.D., Robert B. Baker, Ph.D., Chester R. Burns, M.D., Ph.D., Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., Alexander Morgan Capron, J.D., Christine K. Cassel, M.D., Linda L. Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D., Eliot L. Freidson, Ph.D., Albert R. Jonsen, Ph.D., Stephen R. Latham, J.D., Ph.D., Susan E. Lederer, Ph.D., Florencia Luna, Ph.D., Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D., Charles E. Rosenberg, Ph.D., Mark Siegler, M.D., Rosemary A. Stevens, Ph.D., Robert M. Tenery, Jr., M.D., Robert M. Veatch, Ph.D., John Harley Warner, Ph.D., Paul Root Wolpe, Ph.D. (shrink)

Bioethicists function in an environment in which their peers - healthcare executives, lawyers, nurses, physicians - assert the integrity of their fields through codes of professional ethics. Is it time for bioethics to assert its integrity by developing a code of ethics? Answering in the affirmative, this paper lays out a case by reviewing the historical nature and function of professional codes of ethics. Arguing that professional codes are aggregative enterprises growing in response to a field's historical experiences, it asserts (...) that bioethics now needs to assert its integrity and independence and has already developed a body of formal statements that could be aggregated to create a comprehensive code of ethics for bioethics. A Draft Model Aggregated Code of Ethics for Bioethicists is offered in the hope that analysis and criticism of this draft code will promote further discussion of the nature and content of a code of ethics for bioethicists. (shrink)

Currently living people cannot be said to be wronged because of the wrongless emissons of greenhouse gases by past people. According to the usual subjunctive-historical understanding of harm, currently living people cannot be said to be harmed by the impact of greenhouse emissions on their well-being. By relying on a subjunctive-threshold notion of harm we can justify conclusions about both the present generation’s duties not to violate the rights of future generations, and the present generation’s duties to compensate currently living (...) people for the harms inflicted upon them through the lasting impact of wrongless past harms. This interpretation supports a forward-looking understanding of the grounds of our relating to wrongless past harms. The significance of past harms lies in their consequences for the well-being of currently living and future people. The subjunctive-threshold notion of harm lends support to a standard of minimal, general, and universal justice. Those actors who are in a position to fulfill its requirements are under a duty to do so. Especially the rich and powerful countries ought to counteract the harmful impact of past greenhouse emissions. (shrink)

It is difficult to understand the meaning of 'dignity' in human rights, bioethics and nursing literature because the word is used so vaguely. Unless dignity's meaning is spelt out it can disappear beneath more tangible priorities. In this article we define dignity and show how this can help health workers to maintain the dignity of people in their care.

Here, an epidemiological model considering pro and anti-vaccination groups is proposed and analyzed. In this model, susceptible individuals can migrate between these two groups due to the influence of false and true news about safety and efficacy of vaccines. From this model, written as a set of three ordinary differential equations, analytical expressions for the disease-free steady state, the endemic steady state, and the basic reproduction number are derived. It is analytically shown that low vaccination rate and no influx to (...) the pro-vaccination group have similar impacts on the long-term amount of infected individuals. Numerical simulations are performed with parameter values of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the analytical results. The possible relevance of this work is discussed from a public health perspective. (shrink)

There are doubtless many with personal experience of suffering, or of comforting others in distress, who would agree with Milton thus far that philosophic argument is powerless to satisfy those who in their anguish ask the question ‘Why did it happen to me?’ Yet to think so is to underestimate both the necessity and the power of reason: clarity of mind and the disposition to argue are commonly enhanced rather than diminished by suffering; and if reason is an essential part (...) of man's nature, it should serve him, if anywhere, in the trials of life. We have every justification, therefore, despite common opinion, for seeking a rational answer to the question proposed. It must, however, be admitted at the outset that there is no direct answer to the question which can both withstand critical scrutiny and bring genuine comfort to the afflicted, an answer, that is, which accepts the question as it stands with its attendant presuppositions; but there is an indirect answer, which, precisely by rejecting one or more of these presuppositions and restating the question, can indeed satisfy these two requirements. Before such an answer can be outlined, however, the question in its traditional form must be examined and the traditional answers to it critically reviewed. (shrink)

The proportion of older people in the total population is increasing in most countries because of advances in medical technology and resulting longer life expectancy. The role that older people play in our communities does not reflect this. Sometimes they are reduced to mere statistics and stereotypes in economic and political discussions on the financial burdens of care for older people. I argue that we need to rebuild inclusive communities in which older people are respected as valuable members. I suggest (...) that this can be done by studying the characteristics of past communities and by learning from the work of environmental ethicists who advocate the preservation of our heritage. Nurses share with them a holistic perspective on complex issues such as ageing. They are therefore in a position to empower older people to play a role in our communities as unique individuals with integrity and wisdom. (shrink)

The relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States seems to embody most fully the type of the ‘special relationship’ today. It is a relationship founded ultimately on biological kinship, structured by mutual economic and strategic interests and cemented by a sense of political and ‘spiritual’ affinity. At least the broad contours of such contemporary ‘special relationships’ are sufficiently clear. This is far from being the case with those of the Archaic and Classical Greek world, for two main reasons. (...) First, and more decisively, our sources for the history of that world – literary, epigraphical, archaeological – are normally scrappy, discontinuous and variously slanted. Second, and only in part because of the nature of the evidence, the workings of all ancient Greek interstate relationships, whether ‘special’ or not, are in principle controversial. For in the absence of governments and parties in the modern sense it is frequently impossible to explain confidently a particular foreign policy decision taken by a Greek state. A fortiori it is in principle even more difficult to describe and account for ‘special’ relationships between states that apparently transcended purely immediate, local and narrowly self-interested considerations. (shrink)