Principled Autonomy and Plagiarism

Every semester, professors in every discipline are burdened with the task of checking for plagiarized papers. Since plagiarism has become rampant in the university, it can be argued that devoting time to checking for plagiarism is nothing more than a fool’s errand. Students will continue to plagiarize regardless of the consequences. In this paper, I will argue that professors do have a categorically binding obligation to confirm whether papers have been plagiarized. I will use Onora O'Neill’s account of “principled autonomy” as the foundation for my argument. Moral agents can only act on principles that can be adopted by all. Dishonesty cannot be adopted since honesty would cease to exist. Furthermore, failing to check for plagiarized papers is a failure to treat all students and professors and ends-in-themselves.     

Identity and Substance in Hume and Kant

According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting "fictions". Each rests upon a "mistake", the commingling of "qualities of the imagination" or "impressions of reflection" with "external" impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither. Among Kant's aims in the First Critique is the securing of precisely these entitlements. Like Hume, he acknowledges the correlativity of the notions of temporal duration and persisting self-identical objects (i.e., continuant substances). Unlike Hume, however, he undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes. This essay formulates Hume's problem and then explores Kant's complex argument for the legitimacy of our concepts of substantial identity and temporal duration, from its origins in his accounts of the forms of inner and outer sense and the transcendental unity of apperception through the Transcendental Deduction of the unschematized category of inherence and substance and its schematized counterpart, substance as permanence, in the First Analogy. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Newborn Screening for Cystic Fibrosis: Parents’ Preferences Regarding Counseling At the Time of Infants’ Sweat Test

Newborn screening (NBS) protocols for cystic fibrosis (CF) are the first regional population-based programs to incorporate DNA analysis into their procedures. Research about these programs can inform policy and practice regarding how best to counsel families with abnormal NBS results. The grounded theory method guided interviews with 33 families whose infants had abnormal CF NBS results. A dimensional analysis of these interviews provided a theoretical framework describing parents’ preferences regarding counseling during their infant's sweat test appointment. This framework describes the contexts and characteristics of the two main dimensions of parents’ preferences: factual information and emotional support. Factual information included learning about the probability of a CF diagnosis, CF disease facts, sweat test procedure, and CF genetics. Social support consisted of offering parents a choice about the timing and amount of CF information, showing empathy for their distress, instilling hope, personalizing counseling, and providing hospitality. This framework also explains the consequences of counseling that matched versus mismatched parental preferences in these domains. Counseling that matched parents preferences reduced parents’ distress while mismatched counseling tended to increase parents’ worry about their infant.     

Dopamine D2 receptors mediate reversal learning in male C57BL/6J mice

Dopamine is critical for directing goal-oriented behavior. We investigated dopamine D₂ receptor involvement in reversal learning and reinforcement efficacy in mice lacking functional dopamine D₂ receptors and their heterozygous and wild-type littermates. Mice discriminated between two odors to receive a food reinforcer: One odor signaled a reinforcer (S⁺); the other odor signaled no reinforcer (S⁻). After mice learned the S⁺/S⁻ relationship, we inverted the reinforcement contingencies. The necessary number of trials to relearn the new reinforcement contingencies served as our index of reversal learning. Mice lacking functional dopamine D₂ receptors repeatedly failed to inhibit previously reinforced responses during reversal trials. In a separate experiment, mice responded for reinforcers on a progressive ratio schedule of reinforcement. Mice lacking functional dopamine D₂ receptors earned significantly fewer reinforcers than did heterozygous mice. Our results suggest that dopamine D₂ receptors regulate reversal learning and influence the reinforcing efficacy of natural rewards.     

Considering rational self-interest as a disposition: organizational implications of other orientation

In contrast with major theories of attitudes and behavior, the authors propose that individuals are not equally motivated to pursue their self-interests. The authors show that differences in other orientation affect the extent to which actions and attitudes reflect self-interested calculation (instrumental rationality) and the extent to which beliefs represent their external environment (epistemic rationality). These differences have consequences for processes underlying a wide range of attitudes and behavior typically assumed to be rationally self-interested. Thus, the authors' model exposes a common explanation for diverse organizational phenomena. It also clarifies inconsistencies surrounding the validity of certain attitudinal and motivational models, the relationship between job attitudes and actions, cross-cultural differences in attitudes and behavior, escalation of commitment, and the relationship between chief executive officer characteristics and organizational performance.     

Development of an ethanol model using social insects: III. Preferences for ethanol solutions

Experiments are designed to assess whether free-flying honey bees have an aversion to an ethanol solution when given a choice between targets containing an ethanol solution in sucrose or sucrose only. Animals given a choice between a 1% ethanol solution and sucrose only show no aversion to the ethanol solution either in acquisition or extinction. Honey bees given a choice between a 5% ethanol solution and sucrose only show no differences in the initial choice of targets but some ees do switch over to the sucrose-only target. Performance during extinction indicates that bees landed on the previously reinforced sucrose-only target more than the target previously containing the 5% ethanol solution. An experiment in which bees were given a single 5%, ethanol target showed that of 20 bees, 11 returned for the entire 12 trials of the experiment. All bees returned at least 6 times to the 5% ethanol target. Additional experiments were run on harnessed foragers in a palatability study of alcoholic beverages consumed by humans. The results of the palatability experiment indicate that in general, bees prefer more sweet drinks with less alcohol.     

Discrimination training of phonemic contrasts enhances phonological processing in mainstream school children

Auditory perceptual learning has been proposed as effective for remediating impaired language and for enhancing normal language development. We examined the effect of phonemic contrast discrimination training on the discrimination of whole words and on phonological awareness in 8- to 10-year-old mainstream school children. Eleven phonemic contrast continua were synthesised using linear interpolation coding from real speaker endpoints. Thirty children were pre-tested on the Word Discrimination Test (WDT) and the Phonological Assessment Battery (PhAB). Eighteen then trained for 12 x 30min sessions over 4 weeks using an adaptive three interval two alternative phonemic matching task. The remaining children participated in regular classroom activities. In Post-testing, trained children significantly increased their age-equivalent scores on both the WDT and PhAB by about 2 years. For the PhAB, no improvement was found in the controls. Enhanced performance in the trained children was maintained in a delayed test 5-6 weeks following training. Enhancements on the trained discriminations were weak and variable. The results indicate a dramatic improvement in phonological awareness following phonemic discrimination training without matching perceptual learning.     

Single and multiple suicide attempts and associated health risk factors in New Hampshire adolescents

In this study we examined self-reported suicide attempts and their relationship to other health risk factors in a community sample of 16,644 adolescents. Fifteen percent endorsed suicide attempts (10% single; 5% multiple attempts) We hypothesized that multiple attempters would show higher prevalence of comorbid health risks than single or non-attempters. The three groups showed significant differences in ten health risk domains, on factors such as depressed mood, sexual assault, weight problems, and drug and alcohol use (ORs: 3.26-13.57). Repeated suicide attempts appear to be related to increased vulnerability and likelihood of harm in multiple domains of health risk.