Obstetric ultrasound is the well-recognized prenatal test used to visualize and determine the condition of a pregnant woman and her fetus. Apart from the clinical application, some businesses have started promoting the use of fetal ultrasound machines for nonmedical reasons. Non-medical fetal ultrasound (also known as ‘keepsake’ ultrasound) is defined as using ultrasound to view, take a picture, or determine the sex of a fetus without a medical indication. Notwithstanding the guidelines and warnings regarding ultrasound safety issued by governments and (...) professional bodies, the absence of scientifically proven physical harm to fetuses from this procedure seems to provide these businesses with grounds for rapid expansion. However, this argument is too simplistic because current epidemiological evidence is not synchronous with advancing ultrasound technology. As non-medical fetal ultrasound has aroused very significant public attention, a thorough ethical analysis of this topic is essential. Using a multifaceted approach, we analyse the ethical perspective of non-medical fetal ultrasound in terms of the expectant mother, the fetus and health professionals. After applying four major theories of ethics and principles (the precautionary principle; theories of consequentialism and impartiality; duty-based theory; and rights-based theories), we conclude that obstetric ultrasound practice is ethically justifiable only if the indication for its use is based on medical evidence. Non-medical fetal ultrasound can be considered ethically unjustifiable. Nevertheless, the ethical analysis of this issue is time dependent owing to rapid advancements in ultrasound technology and the safety issue. The role of health professionals in ensuring that obstetric ultrasound is an ethically justifiable practice is also discussed. (shrink)

Spitale, Germani, and Biller-Andorno’s (2024) PHERCC matrix sets out a useful and systematic framework for risk and crisis communication in public health emergencies. A problem in ensuring effective messaging is the extent to which the messaging environment is *quiet* or *noisy*: in other words, whether or not a message has to *compete with other messages* at the same time. I use the example of the UK’s experience during COVID-19, which was marked by tensions between the devolved regional governments—and consequently divergent (...) policy responses—which sowed confusion among the populace. More generally, if policymakers try to account for the needs of competing publics simultaneously (in order to meet the inclusivity and understandability principles), this may increase the noise problem and so actually undermine effective public health messaging. The issue of noisy messaging environments reveals a tradeoff between inclusivity and understandability versus effectiveness in risk and crisis communication. (shrink)

[Adapted from publisher-provided promotional materials by English Book Review Editor, Janny HC Leung]M. Catherine Gruber (2014) I’m Sorry for What I’ve Done: The Language of Courtroom Apologies. Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN: 978-0-19-932566-5This book examines 52 apologetic allocutions produced during federal sentencing hearings. The practice of inviting defendants to make a statement in their own behalf is a long-standing one and it is understood as offering defendants the opportunity to impress a judge or jury with their remorse, which could (...) be a factor in the sentence that is imposed. Defendants raised the topics of the offense, mitigation, future behaviour and the sentence in different ways and this book explores the pros and cons associated with the different strategies that they used. Based on corpus data, Gruber argues that the application of Austin’s (1962) performative–constative continuum reveals that offense-related utterances that fall closer to the constative end are.. (shrink)

An accessible introduction to Confucian moral philosophy.

Cross-dressing, as a cultural practice, suggests gender ambiguity and allows freedom of self expression. Yet, it may also serve to reaffirm ideological stereotypes and the binary distinctions between male and female, masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual. To explore the nature and function of cross-dressing in Chinese and Western cultures, this paper analyzes the portrayals of cross-dressing heroines in two Chinese stories: The Ballad of Mulan, and The Butterfly Lovers. Distorted representations in the English translated texts are also explored..

本书以新旧全球化为历史平台,以交往实践观为哲学视界,重新梳理了马克思主义哲学的发展过程,并由此论述了邓小平理论,江泽民“三个代表”重要思想的哲学基础。.

The concept of field philosophy challenges a common self-understanding in Western philosophy. One question regarding this challenge is the extent to which it might be relevant to a philosophical an...

The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on finance, with a special focus on stock markets. It presents new methodologies for analyzing stock markets' behavior and discusses theories and methods of finance from different angles, such as the mathematical, physical and philosophical ones. The book, which aims at philosophers and economists alike, represents a rare yet important attempt to unify the externalist with the internalist conceptions of finance.

Healthcare workers’ voice is of importance in decreasing medical accidents and improving the efficacy of hospital units. To investigate the impact and the underlying mechanisms of supervisors’ negative mood on healthcare workers’ voice behavior, based on the mood contagion perspective, we designed a cross-sectional study, with 299 healthcare workers from mainland China completed the questionnaires. The results indicated supervisors’ negative mood was positively related to healthcare workers’ negative mood, which further led to less constructive voice and more defensive voice. Moreover, (...) the healthcare worker’s emotional intelligence aspect of self-emotion appraisal moderated this relationship, but not others-emotion appraisal. We believe healthcare workers’ supervisors should pay attention to their negative mood expression and regulation. In the hope of reducing being influenced by supervisors’ negative mood, training about noticing and recognizing their own emotions are needed for healthcare workers. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate nonnormal modal systems in the vicinity of the Lewis system S1. It might be claimed that Lewis's modal systems (S1, S2, S3, S4, and S5) are the starting point of modern modal logics. However, our interests in the Lewis systems and their relatives are not (merely) historical. They possess certain syntactical features and their frames certain structural properties that are of interest to us. Our starting point is not S1, but a weaker logic S1 (S1 (...) without the schema [T]). We extend it to S1D, which can be considered as a deontic counterpart of the alethic S1. Soundness and completeness of these systems are then demonstrated within a prenormal idiom. We conclude with some philosophical remarks on the interpretation of our deontic logic. (shrink)

Despite the growing interest in female expatriates, few empirical studies have focussed on corporate career development activities available to women. Given the faltering corporate support for female business expatriates in general, one may presume that such organizational activities are less available to women than to men. To test this proposition, a large number of Western female and male business expatriates assigned to Hong Kong responded to a mail survey. Controlling for differences between the two gender groups, three significant gender differences (...) were found, all indicating a lower availability of these corporate activities to women than to men, partially supporting expectations. These corporate career development activities were fast track programs, individual career counseling and career planning workshops. Implications of these findings for globalizing firms as well as for their female employees are discussed in detail. (shrink)

In Heidegger’s Black Notebooks some ideas about political embodiment can be found, which have come under suspicion to justify the Third Reich’s race law. In the following article, the analysis and discussion of Heidegger’s political embodiment will firstly be traced back to the traditional understanding of the human as a “rational animal”, and will then look at how the “racial being” is subsequently developed and eventually transformed into political absolute subjectivism. Moreover, Heidegger’s in-depth explanation and critique on Nietzsche’s metaphysics, which (...) he views as having transformed human experiences to a metaphysical representation and thus misunderstanding human nature, will also be clarified. Through Heidegger’s critic on biologism, a profound disclosure which potentially imply an attack of the racism at his time can be shown. Furthermore, Heidegger’s thinking of Being as a kind of emancipation of European political embodiment will also be analyzed. Lastly, although Heidegger and Confucianism have different ideas of lived-body, both schools basically show the same fundamental understanding of human nature. In regard to this, their understanding of political embodiment, their similarities and divergences, will be elucidated. (shrink)

Our aim was to describe Chinese nurses' experiences of workplace distress and ethical dilemmas on a neurological ward. Qualitative interviews were performed with 20 nurses. On using latent content analysis, themes emerged in four content areas: ethical dilemmas, workplace distress, quality of nursing and managing distress. The ethical dilemmas were: (1) conflicting views on optimal treatment and nursing; (2) treatment choice meeting with financial constraints; and (3) misalignment of nursing responsibilities, competence and available resources. The patients' relatives lacked respect for (...) the nurses' skills. Other dilemmas could be traced to the transition from a planned to a market economy, resulting in an excessive workload and treatment withdrawal for financial reasons. Lack of resources was perceived as an obstacle to proper patient care in addition to hospital organization, decreasing the quality of nursing, and increasing moral and workplace distress. The nurses managed mainly by striving for competence, which gave them hope for the future. (shrink)

The position of individuals' bodies (e.g., holding a pencil in the mouth in a way that either facilitates or inhibits smiling musculature) can influence their emotional reactions to the stimuli they encounter, and can even impact their explicit preferences for one item over another. In this article we begin by reviewing the literature demonstrating these effects, explore mechanisms to explain this body-preference link, and introduce new work from our lab that asks whether one's bodily or motor experiences might also shape (...) preferences in situations where the body is not contorted in a particular position, or when there is no intention to act. Such work suggests that one consequence of perceiving an object is the automatic and covert motor simulation of acting on this object. This, in turn, provides individuals with information about how easy or hard this action would be. It transpires that we like to do what is easy, and we also prefer objects that are easier to act on. The notion that judgments of object likeability are driven by motoric information furthers embodied cognition theories by demonstrating that even our preferences are grounded in action. (shrink)

The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on finance, with a special focus on stock markets. It presents new methodologies for analyzing stock markets’ behavior and discusses theories and methods of finance from different angles, such as the mathematical, physical and philosophical ones. The book, which aims at philosophers and economists alike, represents a rare yet important attempt to unify the externalist with the internalist conceptions of finance.

This study investigated people’s ethical concerns of surveillance technology. By adopting the spectrum of technological utopian and dystopian narratives, how people perceive a society constructed through the compulsory use of surveillance technology was explored. This study empirically examined the anonymous online expression of attitudes toward the society-wide, compulsory adoption of a contact tracing app that affected almost every aspect of all people’s everyday lives at a societal level. By applying the structural topic modeling approach to analyze comments on four Hong (...) Kong anonymous discussion forums, topics concerning the technological utopian, dystopian, and pragmatic views on the surveillance app were discovered. The findings showed that people with a technological utopian view on this app believed that the implementation of compulsory app use can facilitate social good and maintain social order. In contrast, individuals who had a technological dystopian view expressed privacy concerns and distrust of this surveillance technology. Techno-pragmatists took a balanced approach and evaluated its implementation practically. (shrink)

Huangdi Yin fu jing -- Tai bai yin jing -- Su shu --Tian shu -- Tong xun zhen jing.

From the point of view of the development of Chinese Marxist philosophy, this paper comprehensively analyzes the current phenomenon of “Return to Marx” by pointing out: (1) the phenomenon of “Return to Marx” meets the need to reconstruct ideology during the time of social change in China and it is a theoretical manifestation of the shift from planned economy to market economy in China; (2) the phenomenon of “Return to Marx” embodies the academic path of the past ten years of (...) Chinese Marxist philosophy; (3) the phenomenon of “Return to Marx” places too much emphasis on logic while too little emphasis on history. This understanding, the epistemological root of “Return to Marx”, has caused the negative effect and is also worth our attention and further study. (shrink)

本书围绕"春秋穀梁传"的政治哲学与伦理哲学, 通过对"穀梁传"思想研究之背景的天命信仰, 时间观念与宗法渊源的研究, 论析了"穀梁传"政治哲学之纵向演进的尊周与内鲁倾向,横向展开的华夷观和重民思想, 及作为"穀梁传"伦理哲学之典范的夫妇伦理与兄弟伦理; 并对中国哲学史中的先秦儒道思想, 魏晋有无之辩, 宋代东莱学与事功学等问题作了探讨.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework of ethics education that promotes the structured learning of ethics in the accounting discipline. The Ethics Education Framework (EEF) is based on three key inter-related components that includes: Rest’s (1986) Four-Component Model of ethical decision-making and behaviour; the key cognitive and behavioural objectives of ethics education; and the discrete and pervasive approaches to delivering content. The EEF providesuniversity students and professional accountants a structure to learn to identify, analyse, and resolve (...) ethical issues to the point of action. The EEF is a four-stage learning continuum represented as a set of building blocks which introduces ethical concepts and then reinforces and develops new levels of understanding with progressive stages. This paper describes the EEF, and includes a discussion of how it compares with other ethics education models, and an analysis of the support through responses by professional organisations (based on an Exposure Draft issued by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), as the initial International Education Practice Statement). The IFAC has now revised its International Education Standard (IES 4) in relation to ethics, with a commentary period till July 2011. (shrink)

In this study we present a self-organizing connectionist model of early lexical development. We call this model DevLex-II, based on the earlier DevLex model. DevLex-II can simulate a variety of empirical patterns in children's acquisition of words. These include a clear vocabulary spurt, effects of word frequency and length on age of acquisition, and individual differences as a function of phonological short-term memory and associative capacity. Further results from lesioned models indicate developmental plasticity in the network's recovery from damage, in (...) a non-monotonic fashion. We attribute the network's abilities in accounting for lexical development to interactive dynamics in the learning process. In particular, variations displayed by the model in the rate and size of early vocabulary development are modulated by (a) input characteristics, such as word frequency and word length, (b) consolidation of lexical-semantic representation, meaning-form association, and phonological short-term memory, and (c) delayed processes due to interactions among timing, severity, and recoverability of lesion. Together, DevLex and DevLex-II provide an accurate computational account of early lexical development. (shrink)