The history of the recovery movement began with a pushback against treatment, and the philosophies that it was founded upon still have relevant applications to contemporary social work practice. Financial aspects of service provision for people with serious mental illnesses have enabled other actors in the medical model of psychosis treatment to benefit, while disempowering and dehumanizing the consumers of those services. Since then, other movements like Psychopolitics and the Mad Movement have helped empower psychosis survivors to advocate for their (...) right to self-determination amid the epistemological pressure to identify as disabled. Social workers would like to believe that the field has moved beyond the philosophies that perpetuated institutionalization of people with serious mental illnesses. Contemporary examples, however, reveal how social services in the US maintain the status quo of sanism for psychosis survivors. (shrink)

These essays critically reassess the widely accepted view that statistical methods of analysis can, and do, yield causal understanding of social phenomena. They emphasize the historical, philosophical and conceptual perspectives that underlie and inform current methodological controversies.

The microbiome has become one of the most recognizable research subjects and presences in the headlines of news and scientific articles published in almost every biological science area in the last few years. The steady decline in the price of DNA sequencing has enabled metagenomics, community analysis and genome sequencing to enter routine research in microbiology and biotechnology laboratories all around the world. The already open access to national and international databases that include nucleotide (including full genomes) and protein sequences (...) such as GenBank or EMBL-Bank and a multitude of free bioinformatic software resources accessible online, along with the international efforts towards open science publication and open data, allow the possibility of the microbiome and microbiota to be envisaged as a potential data and material resource for new media art projects especially for artists interested in biological processes. Recent results on the creation of synthetic life that are already testing the boundaries of life could be another approach for the creative exploration of microbiology and microbial processes from the artistic point of view. This article will attempt to uncover and reflect on the potential for further exploration of this resource. (shrink)

Boundary crossings in academia are rarely addressed by university policy despite the risk of problematic or unethical faculty - student interactions. This study contributes to an understanding of undergraduate college student perceptions of appropriateness of faculty - student nonsexual interactions by investigating the influence of gender and ethnicity on student judgments of the appropriateness of numerous hypothetical interactions. Overall, students deemed the majority of interactions as inappropriate. Female students judged a number of interactions as more inappropriate than did male students, (...) and with a few exceptions, Mexican American and Anglo American students were similar in their ratings of the appropriateness of faculty - student interactions. These findings suggest that universities need to be proactive in establishing guidelines concerning faculty-student boundary crossings. (shrink)

We employ the support vector machine classifier, over different types of kernels, to investigate whether observable variables of individuals and their household information are able to describe their consumption decision of film at theaters in Brazil. Using a very big dataset of 340,000 individuals living in metropolitan areas of a whole large developing economy, we performed a Knowledge Discovery in Databases to classify the film consumers, which results in 80% instances correctly classified. To reduce the degrees of freedom for SVM (...) and to learn the more important determinants of film consumption, we apply the Linear Discriminant Analysis that allows us to identify the key determinants of this consumption. The main individual characteristics are age, education, income, and preferences for cultural goods. Regarding the main geographic characteristics, these are the timing of sample, population concentration, and supply of movie theaters. The results point to an ineffective policy for the sector at the time investigated. (shrink)

IntroductionIn this study we compared the effects of a mindfulness-based intervention with a story reading intervention on the executive functions and psychological profile of children in two different public schools in São Paulo, Brazil.MethodsIn this controlled clinical trial, 207 children aged 8 to 9 years old responded to the Five-Digit Test, stress levels, depression, anxiety, positive and negative affect, at baseline and 8 weeks later. From T0 to T1, school 1 participated in MBI classes and school 2 in IS classes.ResultsIn (...) school 1, children improved their scores on all tests except reading and counting compared with school 2. No differences were observed between groups in terms of emotional health.ConclusionIt is feasible to implement MBI or SI in Brazilian public schools. Students in the MBI group presented broader effects in executive functions, while students in the SI group showed a trend toward reduced negative affect and depression symptoms. (shrink)

The development of the Functional Genomics Investigation Ontology (FuGO) is a collaborative, international effort that will provide a resource for annotating functional genomics investigations, including the study design, protocols and instrumentation used, the data generated and the types of analysis performed on the data. FuGO will contain both terms that are universal to all functional genomics investigations and those that are domain specific. In this way, the ontology will serve as the “semantic glue” to provide a common understanding of data (...) from across these disparate data sources. In addition, FuGO will reference out to existing mature ontologies to avoid the need to duplicate these resources, and will do so in such a way as to enable their ease of use in annotation. This project is in the early stages of development; the paper will describe efforts to initiate the project, the scope and organization of the project, the work accomplished to date, and the challenges encountered, as well as future plans. (shrink)

Most writing on informed consent in Africa highlights different cultural and social attributes that influence informed consent practices, especially in research settings. This review presents a composite picture of informed consent in Nigeria using empirical studies and legal and regulatory prescriptions, as well as clinical experience. It shows that Nigeria, like most other nations in Africa, is a mixture of sociocultural entities, and, notwithstanding the multitude of factors affecting it, informed consent is evolving along a purely Western model.Empirical studies show (...) that 70–95% of Nigerian patients report giving consent for their surgical treatments. Regulatory prescriptions and adjudicated cases in Nigeria follow the Western model of informed consent. However, adversarial legal proceedings, for a multiplicity of reasons, do not play significant roles in enforcing good medical practice in Nigeria. Gender prejudices are evident, but not a norm. Individual autonomy is recognized even when decisions are made within the family. Consent practices are influenced by the level of education, extended family system, urbanization, religious practices, and health care financing options available. All limitations notwithstanding, consent discussions improved with increasing level of education of the patients, suggesting that improved physician's knowledge and increasing awareness and education of patients can override other influences.Nigerian medical schools should restructure their teaching of medical ethics to improve the knowledge and practices of physicians. More research is needed on the preferences of the Nigerian people regarding informed consent so as to adequately train physicians and positively influence physicians’ behaviors. (shrink)

The announcement of the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep evoked widespread response from the Christian Churches. These responses are identified, organized thematically, and discussed critically. The churches have viewed reproductive human cloning either with unqualified opposition or with grave suspicion. Some statements have discussed animal cloning, generally granting limited approval, and nonreproductive human cloning, either in opposition or expressing an openness to entertain specific proposals as the technology develops.

The Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Business Ethics provides clear, concise and highly informative definitions and explanations of the key concepts in one of the most important fields in contemporary business.

This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology and queer theory and tackle questions such as: how can we define queer death studies as a research field? How can queer death studies problematize and rethink the life-death binary? Which notions and hermeneutic tools could be borrowed from other disciplines in order to better (...) define queer death studies? The present article includes the following contributions: – MacCormack P., What does queer death studies mean?; – Radomska M., On queering death studies; – Lykke N., Death as vibrancy; – Hillerup Hansen I., What concreteness will do to resolve the uncertain; – Olson P., Queer objectivity as a response to denials of death; – Manganas N., The queer lack of a chthonic instinct. (shrink)

An alternative to objectifying approaches to understanding Post-traumatic Stress Disorder grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology is presented. Nurses who provided care for soldiers injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and sixty-seven wounded male servicemen in the rehabilitation phase of their recovery were interviewed. PTSD is the one major psychiatric diagnosis where social causation is established, yet PTSD is predominantly viewed in terms of the usual neuro-physiological causal models with traumatic social events viewed as pathogens with dose related effects. Biologic models (...) of causation are applied reductively to both predisposing personal vulnerabilities and strengths that prevent PTSD, such as resiliency. However, framing PTSD as an objective disease state separates it from narrative historical details of the trauma. Personal stories and cultural meanings of the traumatic events are seen as epiphenomenal, unrelated to the understanding of, and ultimately, the therapeutic treatment of PTSD. Most wounded service members described classic symptoms of PTSD: flashbacks, insomnia, anxiety etc. All experienced disturbance in their sense of time and place. Rather than see the occurrence of these symptoms as decontextualized mechanistic reverberations of war, we consider how these symptoms meaningfully reflect actual war experiences and sense of displacement experienced by service members. (shrink)

This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology and queer theory and tackle questions such as: how can we define queer death studies as a research field? How can queer death studies problematize and rethink the life-death binary? Which notions and hermeneutic tools could be borrowed from other disciplines in order to better (...) define queer death studies? The present article includes the following contributions: – MacCormack P., What does queer death studies mean?; – Radomska M., On queering death studies; – Lykke N., Death as vibrancy; – Hillerup Hansen I., What concreteness will do to resolve the uncertain; – Olson P., Queer objectivity as a response to denials of death; – Manganas N., The queer lack of a chthonic instinct. (shrink)

We investigated the role of honour concerns in mediating the effect of nationality and gender on the reported intensity of anger and shame in reaction to insult vignettes. Spain, an honour culture, and The Netherlands, where honour is of less central significance, were selected for comparison. A total of 260 (125 Dutch, 135 Spanish) persons participated in the research. Participants completed a measure of honour concerns and answered questions about emotional reactions of anger and shame to vignettes depicting insults in (...) which type of threat was manipulated. It was found that Spanish participants responded especially intensely to insults that threaten family honour, and that this effect of nationality on emotional reactions to threats to family honour was mediated by individual differences in concern for family honour. (shrink)

The concept of meaning, since Frege initiated the linguistic turn in 1884, has been the subject of numerous theories, hypotheses, methodologies and distinctions. One distinction of considerable strategic value relates to the location of meaning: some aspects of meaning can be found in language and are modelled with semantic values of various kinds; some aspects of meaning can be found in communicative processes and are modelled with pragmatic inferences of one sort or another. One hypothesis of great heuristic utility concerns (...) the relationship that is assumed between the semantic and the pragmatic. This collection of especially commissioned papers examines current thinking on the plausible nature of the semantic, the possible character of the pragmatic and the mechanics of their intersection. (shrink)

Jones's (1991) issue-contingent model of ethical decision making posits that six dimensions of moral intensity influence decision markers' recognition of an issue as a moral problem and subsequent behavior. He notes that "organizational settings present special challenges to moral agents" (1991, p. 390) and that organizational factors affect "moral decision making and behavior at two points: establishing moral intent and engaging in moral behavior" (1991, p. 391). This model, however, minimizes both the impact of organizational setting and organizational factors on (...) these experiences of ethical issues. In this theory, context is modeled as affecting the moral intent and behavior of the actor rather than directly affecting the issue's moral intensity. Here we look specifically at the effect of context on the moral intensity of ethical issues through a phenomenological study. Our results indicate that in certain environments, context may be critical in affecting the moral intensity of ethical issues. Thus, researchers should consider it more fully when assessing these issues' moral intensity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Brief History of Corporate Responsibility The Nature of Corporate Obligations and the Scope of Corporate Responsibility Some Promising Approaches to the Study of Corporate Responsibility Corporate Responsibility and the Limits of Minimalism.

This chapter contains sections titled: Two Traditional Topics in Business Ethics: Agency and Responsibility Traditional Business Ethics and the Separation Thesis Stakeholder Theory Emerging Lines of Research Some Contemporary Topics Conclusion.