We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

This distinctive collection by scholars from around the world focuses upon the cultural, educational, and political significance of Richard Rorty's thought. The nine essays which comprise the collection examine a variety of related themes: Rorty's neopragmatism, his view of philosophy, his philosophy of education and culture, Rorty's comparison between Dewey and Foucault, his relation to postmodern theory, and, also his form of political liberalism.

A significant number of asylum seekers who largely survived torture live in the United States. Asylum seekers have complex social and medical problems with significant barriers to health care access. When evaluating and providing care for survivors, health providers face important challenges regarding medical ethics and professional codes. We review ethical concerns in regard to accountability, the patient–physician relationship, and moral responsibilities to offer health care irrespective of patient legal status; competing professional responsibility toward society and the judiciary system; concerns (...) about the consistency of asylum seekers’ claims; ethical concerns surrounding involving trainees and researching within the evaluation setting; and the implication of broader societal views towards rights and social justice. We discuss contributing factors, including inadequate and insufficient provider training, varying and inadequate institutional commitment, asylum seekers’ significant medical and social problems, and the broader health and social system issues. We review existing resources to address these concerns and offer suggestions. (shrink)

"A celebrated master of the spoken as well as the written word, Isaiah Berlin here gives us a rare memoir in the form of a dialogue." "Isaiah Berlin is renowned the world over for his analysis of the ideas that have influenced or transformed societies. He has a deep commitment to liberty and pluralism, and has devoted the half century and more of his professional life as a teacher and lecturer to exploring the conditions that allow these ideals to flourish, (...) and those that threaten them." "Berlin here intersperses insights into the development of his ideas and political philosophy with rich personal reminiscences. He discusses Machiavelli, Marx, Vico, Herder, and Herzen, among others, and their influence over him." "As he leads us from Petrograd to Oxford, Washington, Moscow, London, and Jerusalem, he speaks of his friends and contemporaries: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Igor Stravinsky, A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and many others. He tells of his moving encounters with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Chaim Weizmann, and of his passion for music and literature." "Frank and engaging, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin is a remarkable record of one of the great intellectual odysseys of our time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Mahatma Gandhi was one of those rare human beings who was simultaneously a theoretician and practitioner of tolerance. Gandhi was possessed of an inner conviction that tolerance was not only one of the key words of his own century but of centuries still to come. It is in this sense that his ideas on non-violence and tolerance transcend the context of India itself, even though these ideas were initially conceived in relation to India's independence and future. Nevertheless, in spite of (...) what may seem obvious, it is no mere truism to state that Gandhi would not have been Gandhi had he not been born Indian. We say this in order to underscore that Gandhi's concept of tolerance was rooted in Indian culture. (shrink)

It has now become a realistic prospect for smart care to be provided at home for those living with long-term conditions such as dementia. In the contemporary smart care scenario, homes are fitted with an array of sensors for remote monitoring providing data that feed into intelligent systems developed to highlight concerning patterns of behaviour or physiological measurements and to alert healthcare professionals to the need for action. This paper explores some ethical issues that may arise within such smart care (...) systems, focusing on the extent to which ethical issues can be addressed at the system design stage. Artificial intelligence has been widely portrayed as an ethically risky technology, posing challenges for privacy and human autonomy and with the potential to introduce and exacerbate bias and inequality. While broad principles for ethical artificial intelligence have become established, the mechanisms for governing ethical artificial intelligence are still evolving. In healthcare settings the implementation of smart technologies falls within the existing frameworks for ethical review and governance. Feeding into this ethical review there are many practical steps that designers can take to build ethical considerations into the technology. After exploring the pre-emptive steps that can be taken in design and governance to provide for an ethical smart care system, the paper reviews the potential for further ethical challenges to arise within the everyday implementation of smart care systems in the context of dementia, despite the best efforts of all concerned to pre-empt them. The paper concludes with an exploration of the dilemmas that may thus face healthcare professionals involved in implementing this kind of smart care and with a call for further research to explore ethical dimensions of smart care both in terms of general principles and lived experience. (shrink)

This book brings together a series of interviews conducted by noted Iranian social scientist Ramin Jahanbagloo. These interviews cover the ideas of Indian-ness, Indian thought, religion, politics, secularism, and pluralism, as well as Gandhi, India and Pakistan, democracy, globalization and culture.

In recent years, Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism has been repeatedly associated with the loss of truth and a post-factual age. At the same time, Rorty is presented as a strict opponent of such positions. How is it that the same thinker who is held responsible for a postmodern decline is also to be understood as the most severe critic? To answer this question, this paper reconstructs Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism as a practice of solidarity by referring to his theory of recognition and virtue of (...) contingency. Subsequently, it can be shown why the accusations of post-facticity and ethnocentrism fall short. On the contrary, because his theory combines different political archetypes, the paper presents Rorty’s description of anti-authoritarianism as a social paradigm of contemporary societies. (shrink)

The World Medical Association (WMA), the global representation of the medical profession, first adopted the International Code of Medical Ethics (ICoME) in 1949 to outline the professional duties of physicians to patients, other physicians and health professionals, themselves and society as a whole. The ICoME recently underwent a major 4-year revision process, culminating in its unanimous adoption by the WMA General Assembly in October 2022 in Berlin. This article describes and discusses the ICoME, its revision process, the controversial and uncontroversial (...) issues, and the broad consensus achieved among WMA constituent members, representing over 10 million physicians worldwide. The authors analyse the ICoME, including its response to contemporary changes and challenges like ethical plurality and globalisation, in light of ethical theories and approaches, reaching the conclusion that the document is a good example of international ethical professional self-regulation. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine a few potential problems when inquiring into the ethics of medieval Christian and Islamic mystical traditions: First, there are terminological and methodological worries about defining mysticism and doing comparative philosophy in general. Second, assuming that the Divine represents the highest Good in such traditions, and given the apophaticism on the part of many mystics in both religions, there is a question of whether or not such traditions can provide a coherent theory of value. Finally, the (...) antinomian tendencies and emphasis on passivity of some mystics might lead one to wonder whether their prescriptive exhortations can constitute a coherent theory of right action. We tackle each of these concerns in turn and discuss how they might be addressed, in an attempt to show how medieval mysticism, as a fundamentally practical enterprise, deserves more attention from practical and moral philosophy than it has thus far received. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDeath as an inevitable reality is a subject of study in various philosophical schools. This concept can be reviewed within three realms: semantics, ontology, and epistemology. The objective of this article is to examine death within the ontological realm in the thoughts of Mullā Sadrā and Schopenhauer, and it attempts to answer the question whether philosophical discussions on the concept of death in Sadrā’s transcendental wisdom, despite differences in principles, methods, and objectives, are comparable to Schopenhauer’s intellectual framework. Using a (...) descriptive-analytical approach, the present study first investigates the issue of death in the thought of both philosophers and then focuses on their comparative analysis. The findings of this study show that both philosophers believe in the dichotomy in the world, immortality of human nature after death, existence of suffering in the world, asceticism, austerity, love, and affection to all human beings. However, each of them analyzes and explains the issue of death within his own intellectual framework. (shrink)

The Declaration of Geneva is one of the core documents of medical ethics. A revision process was started by the World Medical Association in 2016. The WMA has also used this occasion to examine how the Declaration of Geneva is used in countries throughout the world by conducting a survey of all WMA constituent members. The findings are highly important and raise urgent questions for the World Medical Association and its National Medical Associations : The Declaration of Geneva is only (...) rarely used as an oath text despite the fact that physicians’ oaths are generally widespread. This is not consistent with the intention and claim of the Declaration of Geneva. The article then discusses three questions. Should there be one single binding oath? Which organization should be responsible for such an oath? Which oath is the most obvious candidate? In a globalized world and despite all cultural diversity, the medical profession should have one core moral basis which is binding for physicians all over the world. The most obvious candidate for an oath incorporating this moral basis is the Declaration of Geneva. (shrink)

The growing potential of biomedical technologies has increasingly been associated with discussions surrounding the ethical aspects of the new technologies in different societies. Advances in genetics, stem cell research and organ transplantation are some of the medical issues that have raised important ethical and social issues. Special attention has been paid towards moral ethics in Islam and medical and religious professions in Iran have voiced the requirement for an emphasis on ethics. In the last decade, great strides have been made (...) in biomedical ethics, especially in the field of education, research and legislation. In this article, contemporary medical ethics in Iran, and the related moral philosophy, have been reviewed in brief and we have discussed some of the activities in the field of medical ethics that have been carried out in our country within recent years. These activities have included the establishment of the National and Regional Committees for Medical Research Ethics and the production of national codes of ethics in biomedical research in the 1990s and the introduction of a comprehensive strategic plan for medical ethics at the national level in 2002. This paper will discuss these issues, along with the production, in 2005, of the Specific National Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research. (shrink)

We thank our commentators for their thoughtful responses to our paper 1 covering among other issues the relationships of ethics law and professional codes, the tensions between ethical universalism and cultural relativism and the phenomenon of moral judgement required when ethical norms conflict, including the norms of patient care versus obligations to others both now and in the future. Although the comments deserve more extensive discussion, in what follows we respond briefly to specific aspects of each commentary and remind readers (...) that professional codes of ethics are necessarily brief and that the International Code of Medical Ethics (ICoME) explicitly refers to the World Medical Association’s (WMA) mutually concordant and far more extensive ‘body of policies’. 2 Should ethics shape law or vice versa? Sarela raises a fundamental and, as stated in the commentary, unresolved debate: ‘should ethics shape law or is it the converse’? 3... (shrink)

Iranian scholar Ramin Jahanbegloo interviews one of the leading political thinkers of our time, Bhikhu Parekh, and in the process, addresses issues ranging from cultural diversity, religion, and global ethics to identity politics, liberal democracy, Islam and Europe, Gandhi's role as a political thinker and social reformer, and the significance of multiculturalism and pluralism in the twenty-first century.

Recent advances in life-sustaining treatments and technologies, have given rise to newly-emerged, critical and sometimes, controversial questions regarding different aspects of end-of-life decision-making and care. Since religious values are among the most influential factors in these decisions, the present study aimed to examine the Islamic scholars' views on end-of-life care. A structured interview based on six main questions on ethical decision-making in end-of-life care was conducted with eight Shiite experts in Islamic studies, and was analyzed through deductive content analysis. Analysis (...) revealed certain points in Islamic views on the definition of death and the persons making decisions about end-of-life care. According to the participants, in addition to conventional criteria such as absence of heartbeat and respiration, the irreversible cessation of human voluntary acts are considered to be the criteria in establishing death. The participants also recognized physicians as the main authorities in verifying signs of death. Furthermore, it was emphasized that life preservation and continuation of care must be sensible, and the patient can request not to have death-prolonging procedures started or continued. In the view of participants, patient's autonomy cannot be the sole basis for all measures, but Islamic ethical and jurisprudential principles should be relied upon to make correct and sensible decisions whether to continue or stop terminal patients' care. Final decisions should be made by a team of experts, and physicians must be at the center of such a team. Finally, we suggest that a guideline in keeping with Islamic norms on human life and death, purpose of life, God's will, boundaries of man's authority, and the physician's ethical duties and obligations should be developed. (shrink)

Talking Philosophy is as much a recollection of Sorabjis childhood and his scholarly life at Oxford as it is a philosophical reflection on issues as varied and complex as whether animals have reason or whether Gandhi could be considered an ethical role model.

Cognitive science is an inter-disciplinary approach that applies a set of methods to study the cognitive structures and faculties in human being’s life. These methods pursue the cognitive structures that are needed - in the light of this approach - to represent and acquire the religious concepts and the actions that institutionalize these structures. These goals are pursued through the process of change and evolution that supernatural concepts had been undergone during the historical life of mankind and also during the (...) growth of any individual. In this paper cognitive science of religion is introduced with a general report of cognitive science and considering its philosophical bases and then tries to give an broad outlook to its approach to religion through its sub-disciplines, depending on the role of each of them in constructing the cognitive science of religion; cognitive anthropology and cognitive psychology have the most importance here, comparing to the rest like cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive Science, Cognitive Anthropology of Religion, Cognitive Psychology of Religion, Philosophy of Cognitive Science. (shrink)

We carry out some of Galois' work in the setting of an arbitrary first-order theory T. We replace the ambient algebraically closed field by a large model M of T, replace fields by definably closed subsets of M, assume that T codes finite sets, and obtain the fundamental duality of Galois theory matching subgroups of the Galois group of L over F with intermediate extensions F ≤ K ≤ L. This exposition of a special case of [10] has the advantage (...) of requiring almost no background beyond familiarity with fields, polynomials, first-order formulae, and automorphisms. (shrink)

As one of the main competencies, professionalism is to be taught and evaluated during the residency period. The aim of this research is to investigate the professionalism perception among medical residents of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2017 using Persian Professionalism Questionnaire American Board of Internal Medicine. Probability proportional to size sampling was used to recruit the participants. Data analysis was done using SPSS24 through descriptive and analytical statistics. The mean age of residents was (...) 33.28. About 46% of residents were not familiar with professionalism. Mean of perceived professionalism score by the residents was to be 6.85 ± 1.52. Honor/Integrity dimension with a score of 7.53 ± 2.1 had the highest mean, while professional excellence with a score of 6.2 ± 1.43 had the lowest mean. No statistically significant relationship was observed between residents’ demographic characteristics and perceived professionalism. Medical residents’ professionalism perception was not at an acceptable level. It is necessary to spread the concept of professionalism in the form of formal and informal training programs to promote residents’ professional behaviors. Moreover, it was experienced that peer to peer observation could be used to assess professionalism in the working environment. (shrink)

In the past decade, Islam has come to be associated more than ever with images of extremism and violence. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are stock characters in this association, in the aftermath of 11 September and the ‘war on terror’. Lost in all this is a long record of Muslim experience of non-violent change and peace-making. Yet Islam hardly glorifies violence — and does quite explicitly glorify its opposite. History offers much evidence of Muslim tolerance and civil engagement (...) with other faith and cultural traditions. Non-violent Islam could give fresh life to secularism in Muslim societies. It may help steer public space away from state-dominated as well as other forms of political Islam, with their foolish utopias. Realizing the ideals of non-violence is a perennial struggle for Islamic communities around the world - and is part of the struggle for democratic life. (shrink)

What do we mean by nonviolence? What can nonviolence achieve? Are there limits to nonviolence? These are the questions that Ramin Jahanbegloo tackles in his journey through the major political advocates of nonviolence during the 20th century. Focusing on examples of their way of thinking in different cultural, geographic and political contexts, from the Indian Independence Movement and US Civil rights and Anti-Apartheid movements to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and nonviolent protests in Tunisia, Iran, Serbia and Hong-Kong, Jahanbegloo (...) explores why nonviolence remains relevant as a form of resistance against injustice and oppression around the world. (shrink)

This book suggests a link between the citizen-philosopher Socrates and the radical, disobedient, and nonviolent Socrates. Ramin Jahanbegloo explains how these two complementary characteristics were transmitted to nonviolent reformers and practitioners Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Albert Camus.

Inspired from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, this work is in the form of letters from an old philosopher to a young student, guiding, instructing, and passing on wisdom gathered from the experiences of life. They cover a comprehensive introduction to philosophy, wisdom, and the art of thinking, as well as discuss a range of themes and issues such as love, education, friendship, violence, ignorance, mediocrity, and happiness.

This article argues that Mohandas K. Gandhi and Isaiah Berlin remain the two main thinkers of pluralism in the 20th century. Though the two never met and despite their essential differences, the two political thinkers can be read as complementary in order to hold on to the idea of a common human horizon. As such, Gandhi’s transformative conception of pluralism, exemplified by his universal method of transforming liberal citizenship into a civic friendship, offers definitely a way to enlarge the Berlinian (...) concept of value pluralism as an alternative of moral monism. Consequently, the reading of Gandhi could complete Isaiah Berlin’s idea of value pluralism by adding an effective exercise of plurality through his antagonism to monism as a tradition of thought that does not possess the resources to change and the potential for the moral and spiritual growth of humanity. As a result, this article suggests that it is worth trying to strike a balance between the Gandhian and Berlinian concepts of pluralism in order to be able to differentiate pluralism and relativism and to search for a core of shared or universal values which allows us to reach an agreement on at least some moral issues in today’s world. (shrink)

Motivated by the significant amount of successful collaborative problem solving activity on the Web, we ask: Can the accumulated information propagation behavior on the Web be conceived as a giant machine, and reasoned about accordingly? In this paper we elaborate a thesis about the computational capability embodied in information sharing activities that happen on the Web, which we term socio-technical computation, reflecting not only explicitly conditional activities but also the organic potential residing in information on the Web.

Amidst the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East and the reshaping of political systems in the region, the Iranian people remain mired in difficulties on their path to democratization. Much of this can be blamed on the gradual decline in activity within Iranian civil society and the stagnation of political imagination. If Iran is to have a future built on the solid foundation of a viable and legitimate political authority, Iranian civic actors must reimagine and revisit the notion of constitution-making (...) through sustained dissent and deliberation. Hannah Arendt's ideas are extremely helpful in this regard. The main purpose of this essay will be to explore how some of her most useful concepts may be applicable in the Iranian context. Briefly tracing the history of Iran since the Islamic Revolution, the paper then turns to a deeper examination of Arendt’s ideas to determine how they can foster resistance, civic engagement and eventual legitimate authority. The focus in the end will be on what Iranians can do to begin anew, to build foundations for the future, and to tell themselves a new story about their identity. (shrink)

Much research on judgment and decision making has focussed on the adequacy of classical rationality as a description of human reasoning. But more recently it has been argued that classical rationality should also be rejected even as normative standards for human reasoning. For example, Gigerenzer and Goldstein and Gigerenzer and Todd argue that reasoning involves “fast and frugal” algorithms which are not justified by rational norms, but which succeed in the environment. They provide three lines of argument for this view, (...) based on: the importance of the environment; the existence of cognitive limitations; and the fact that an algorithm with no apparent rational basis, Take-the-Best, succeeds in an judgment task. We reconsider –, arguing that standard patterns of explanation in psychology and the social and biological sciences, use rational norms to explain why simple cognitive algorithms can succeed. We also present new computer simulations that compare Take-the-Best with other cognitive models. Although Take-the-Best still performs well, it does not perform noticeably better than the other models. We conclude that these results provide no strong reason to prefer Take-the-Best over alternative cognitive models. (shrink)

In this paper, aspects of observable and non-observable based models are discussed. A survey of recent literature was done to show how using non-observable-based language carelessly may cause disagreement, even in professional research programs and incorrect assertions, even in prestigious journals. The relation between physical measurements and observables is discussed and it is shown that, in contrast to general belief, this relation may be complicated and not always straightforward. The decomposition of the system into basic subsystems (physical or conceptual) is (...) traced as the origin of non-observable-based languages. The possibility of defining new quantum mechanical observables for open quantum subsystems and of replacing them with non-observable-based concepts has been mentioned and the AIM theory is explained as an example. An account of some current non-observable-based models for molecular geometry is discussed and it is shown that not all non-observable-based languages possess the same effectiveness. In the end, the need to develop a clear chemical language is stressed. (shrink)

A powerful and moving philosophical reflection on revenge and forgiveness in our contemporary, conflict-fuelled world.

Edward Said's mode of intellectual thinking cannot be categorized in terms of concepts such as liberal, socialist or anarchist. In this sense, Said remained all his life, through his work and his action, an "outsider. " This "outsiderhood" created in him an acute awareness of the world and a critical sense of resistance to all forms of political and intellectual domination. In consequence, Said detects a particularly revealing relationship between a deep-seated commitment to the secular principles of humanism andoutsiderhood as (...) the ideal ontological position for the intellectual. (shrink)

After 30 years of research, the mechanisms underlying the evaluative priming effect are still a topic of debate. In this study, we tested whether the evaluative priming effect can result from associative relatedness rather than evaluative congruency. Stimuli that share the same evaluative connotation are more likely to show some degree of non-evaluative associative relatedness than stimuli that have a different evaluative connotation. Therefore, unless associative relatedness is explicitly controlled for, evaluative priming effects reported in earlier research may be driven (...) by associative relatedness instead of evaluative relatedness. To address this possibility, we performed an evaluative priming study in which evaluative congruency and associative relatedness were manipulated independently from each other. The valent/neutral categorisation task was used to ensure evaluative stimulus processing in the absence of response priming effects. Results showed an effect of associative relatedness but no effect of evaluative congruency. Our findings highlight the importance of controlling for associative relatedness when testing for evaluative priming effects. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced significant disruptions and challenges to the learning environment for many post-secondary students with many shifting entirely to remote online learning. Barriers to academic success already experienced in traditional face-to-face classes may be compounded in the online environment and exacerbated by stressors related to the pandemic. In 2020–2021, post-secondary institutions were faced with the reality of rolling out fully online instruction with limited access to resources for assisting students in this transition. Instructional interventions that target students’ ability (...) to self-regulate their learning have been shown to improve academic performance and self-regulated learning competencies have also been found to mediate the effect of SRL interventions on higher education. However, few studies have examined the efficacy of fully online SRL intervention on mitigating the impact of psychological distress and academic challenges on academic success. This study examined the moderating roles of self-regulatory practices and SRL intervention in buffering the influence of COVID-related psychological distress and academic challenges on academic outcomes and academic challenges) in a Canadian sample of undergraduate students. We found levels of metacognitive and motivational challenges fully mediated the impact of COVID distress on GPA, SRL adapting practices moderated the impact of metacognitive challenges on GPA, and semester-long SRL intervention buffered the impact of COVID distress on academic challenges and resulted in lower levels of social-emotional, cognitive, and metacognitive challenges for first year undergraduate students. (shrink)

Since their discovery over two decades ago, the molecular and cellular functions of the NIPSNAP family of proteins (NIPSNAPs) have remained elusive until recently. NIPSNAPs interact with a variety of mitochondrial and cytoplasmic proteins. They have been implicated in multiple cellular processes and associated with different physiologic and pathologic conditions, including pain transmission, Parkinson's disease, and cancer. Recent evidence demonstrated a direct role for NIPSNAP1 and NIPSNAP2 proteins in regulation of mitophagy, a process that is critical for cellular health and (...) maintenance. Importantly, NIPSNAPs contain a 110 amino acid domain that is evolutionary conserved from mammals to bacteria. However, the molecular function of the conserved NIPSNAP domain and its potential role in mitophagy have not been explored. It stands to reason that the highly conserved NIPSNAP domain interacts with a substrate that is ubiquitously present across all species and can perhaps act as a sensor for mitochondrial health. (shrink)

A new layer of complexity, constituted of networks of information token recurrence, has been identified in socio-technical systems such as the Wikipedia online community and the Zooniverse citizen science platform. The identification of this complexity reveals that our current understanding of the actual structure of those systems, and consequently the structure of the entire World Wide Web, is incomplete, which raises novel questions for data science research but also from the perspective of social epistemology. Here we establish the principled foundations (...) and practical advantages of analyzing information diffusion within and across Web systems with Transcendental Information Cascades, and outline resulting directions for future study in the area of socio-technical systems. We also suggest that Transcendental Information Cascades may be applicable to any kind of time-evolving system that can be observed using digital technologies, and that the structures found in such systems comprise properties common to all naturally occurring complex systems. (shrink)

Researchers conducting large community-based studies among underserved populations may collect data on health conditions that are little-acknowledged in the local setting, and for which there are few if any services for referral of participants who need follow-up diagnosis and care. In the design and planning of studies for such settings, investigators and research ethics committees may struggle to determine what constitutes effective referral and whether it is reasonably available. We offer a guiding framework for referral planning, informed by our experiences (...) of research in the field and of service on research ethics committees, to support evaluation of local referral resources and consideration of the benefits, burdens and risks of referral in the local setting. The framework addresses both the impact of referral on the well-being of the people who would be referred and the impact that referral of study participants would have on local people outside the study. We use a sustained discussion of three field-based case examples to illustrate the ethical concerns at issue and to demonstrate the use of the referral planning framework. (shrink)

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of COVID-19 on high school students' psychological symptoms and to understand how ready counselors and school counseling services are based on the data we have. Therefore, this research is designed under two different studies: Study 1: Effects of COVID-19 pandemic on students' psychological symptoms and Study 2: Views and expectations of students and school counselors about school counseling services. The first study was a quantitative study and included 549 high (...) school students. A structural equation model was created to examine the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on participants' psychological symptoms. The Impact of Event Scale-Revised scores showed that 107 individuals had a score of 50 and above pointing out that individuals in this group had severe impact of event/trauma symptomologies. The SEM analysis indicated that IES-R scores had a total effect of 0.79 on anxiety, 0.75 on depression, 0.74 on negative self-concept, 0.68 on somatization, and 0.66 on hostility scores. Furthermore, female students had significantly higher scores on anxiety, depression, negative self-concept, somatization, hostility, and impact of events variables than male students. Study 2 was a qualitative design and consisted of five school counselors and five students from different schools. The results indicated that students' difficulties during the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak were educational, cognitive, emotional, physiological, relational, technological, and related to routines. Academic, social, emotional, and behavioral issues came to the fore among the difficulties that can be experienced if students start face-to-face education. On the other hand, the school counselors listed that family relations, personal–social, emotional, and academic themes were the difficulties experienced by the students at the beginning of the COVID-19. In addition, when COVID-19 started, the services offered by school counselors were discussed under services for the student, services for the family, and services for the teacher. Finally, according to the opinions of the school counselors, if students start face-to-face education, they may experience emotional, academic, and relational difficulties. In summary, it is vital that student personality services be prepared and implemented by school counseling services for schools based on the results. (shrink)

ABSTRACT To bring attention to medical ethics and to enhance the quality of health care in Iran, the Ministry of Health and Medical Education has introduced a strategic plan for medical ethics at a national level. This plan was developed through the organization and running of workshops in which experts addressed important areas related to medical ethics. They analysed strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and outlined a vision, a mission and specific goals and essential activities surrounding medical ethics. The (...) current strategic plan has six main goals that will be reviewed in this paper. Some major activities that were carried out in recent years, and some future plans, will be also reviewed. (shrink)

During the early Cambrian period metazoan life forms diverged at an accelerated rate to occupy multiple ecological niches on earth. A variety of explanations have been proposed to address this major evolutionary phenomenon termed the “Cambrian explosion.” While most hypotheses address environmental, developmental, and ecological factors that facilitated evolutionary innovations, the biological basis for accelerated emergence of species diversity in the Cambrian period remains largely conjectural. Herein, we posit that morphogenesis by self‐organization enables the uncoupling of genomic mutational landscape from (...) phenotypic diversification. Evidence is provided for a two‐tiered interpretation of genomic changes in metazoan animals wherein mutations not only impact upon function of individual cells, but also alter the self‐organization outcome during developmental morphogenesis. We provide evidence that the morphological impacts of mutations on self‐organization could remain repressed if associated with an unmet negative energetic cost. We posit that accelerated morphological diversification in transition to the Cambrian period has occurred by emergence of dormant (i.e., reserved) morphological novelties whose molecular underpinnings were seeded in the Precambrian period. (shrink)