Academic Deans,Codes of Ethics,and……Fiduciary Duties?

College and university academic deans must comply with two sets of professional regulations. As faculty members, they must adhere to their institution's internally generated code of ethics. As administrators and agents of their institution, they must meet the fiduciary duties of diligence and loyalty. Both sets of regulations are similar in the obligations they impose on a dean, the degree of care they demand of a dean in the execution of those obligations, the nature of a breach of those obligations by a dean, the procedures by which the breach of an obligation is addressed, and the remedies available to the institution against a dean following a breach. Colleges and universities should develop and publish both an ethics code and a fiduciary code. Both sets of regulations, however, should avoid common shortcomings. Ethics codes should not be too specific or too general, overly simplistic or highly complex, or outstripped by the rapidly changing world of academia. A codification of fiduciary duties should avoid the problems of poor definition or ambiguity. Developing an institutional code of professional responsibility that incorporates both ethical and fiduciary responsibilities would provide an academic dean with a more comprehensive benchmark for professional expectations and responsibilities. The interplay between the two sets of complementary regulations would further clarify the professional expectation of an academic dean and may also ameliorate some of the shortcomings inherent in an ethics code.     

The effects of social ties on coordination: conceptual foundations for an empirical analysis

This paper investigates the influence that social ties can have on behavior. After defining the concept of social ties that we consider, we introduce an original model of social ties. The impact of such ties on social preferences is studied in a coordination game with outside option. We provide a detailed game theoretical analysis of this game while considering various types of players, i.e., self-interest maximizing, inequity averse, and fair agents. In addition to these approaches that require strategic reasoning in order to reach some equilibrium, we also present an alternative hypothesis that relies on the concept of team reasoning. After having discussed the differences between the latter and our model of social ties, we show how an experiment can be designed so as to discriminate among the models presented in the paper.     

The role of working memory in inferential sentence comprehension

Existing literature on inference making is large and varied. Trabasso and Magliano (Discourse Process 21(3):255–287, 1996) proposed the existence of three types of inferences: explicative, associative and predictive. In addition, the authors suggested that these inferences were related to working memory (WM). In the present experiment, we investigated whether WM capacity plays a role in our ability to answer comprehension sentences that require text information based on these types of inferences. Participants with high and low WM span read two narratives with four paragraphs each. After each paragraph was read, they were presented with four true/false comprehension sentences. One required verbatim information and the other three implied explicative, associative and predictive inferential information. Results demonstrated that only the explicative and predictive comprehension sentences required WM: participants with high verbal WM were more accurate in giving explanations and also faster at making predictions relative to participants with low verbal WM span; in contrast, no WM differences were found in the associative comprehension sentences. These results are interpreted in terms of the causal nature underlying these types of inferences.     

Preparation of forefinger’s sequence on keyboard orients ocular fixations on computer screen

This study examined the links between attention, hand movements and eye movements when performed in different spatial areas. Participants performed a visual search task on a computer screen while preparing to press two keyboard keys sequentially with their index. Results showed that the planning of the manual sequence influenced the latency of the first saccade and the placement of the first fixation. In particular, even if the first fixation placement was influenced by the combination of both components of the prepared manual sequence in some trials, it was affected principally by the first component of the prepared manual sequence. Moreover, the probability that the first fixation placement did reflect a combination of both components of the manual sequence was correlated with the speed of the second component. This finding suggests that the preparation of the second component of the sequence influence simultaneous oculomotor behavior when motor control of the manual sequence relied on proactive motor planning. These results are discussed taking into account the current debate on the eye/hand coordination research.     

Exploration in free word association networks: models and experiment

Free association is a task that requires a subject to express the first word to come to their mind when presented with a certain cue. It is a task which can be used to expose the basic mechanisms by which humans connect memories. In this work, we have made use of a publicly available database of free associations to model the exploration of the averaged network of associations using a statistical and the adaptive control of thought–rational (ACT-R) model. We performed, in addition, an online experiment asking participants to navigate the averaged network using their individual preferences for word associations. We have investigated the statistics of word repetitions in this guided association task. We find that the considered models mimic some of the statistical properties, viz the probability of word repetitions, the distance between repetitions and the distribution of association chain lengths, of the experiment, with the ACT-R model showing a particularly good fit to the experimental data for the more intricate properties as, for instance, the ratio of repetitions per length of association chains.     

Ebola,epidemics, and ethics - what we have learned

The current Ebola epidemic has presented challenges both medical and ethical. Although we have known epidemics of untreatable diseases in the past, this particular one may be unique in the intensity and rapidity of its spread, as well as ethical challenges that it has created, exacerbated by its geographic location. We will look at the infectious agent and the epidemic it is causing, in order to understand the ethical problems that have arisen.     

The specificity triad: notions of disease and therapeutic specificity in biomedical reasoning

Biomedicine is typically defined as the branch of medicine that is based on the principles of biology and biochemistry. A central tenet for biomedicine is the notion of disease and therapeutic specificity, i.e. the idea of tailored treatments for discrete disorders underpinned by specific pathologies. The present paper is concerned with how notions of disease and therapeutic specificity guide biomedical reasoning. To that end, the author proposes a model – the specificity triad – that draws on late philosopher and physician Ludwik Fleck’s concept of “style of thought” to offer a frame for investigating the intricate process through which links between disorders, mechanisms, and therapeutics are established by biomedicine. Next by applying the specificity triad model to scrutinize research efforts in two discrete areas of medicine—psychiatry and regenerative medicine—this paper seeks to stimulate pertinent discussions in and about biomedicine. These include discussions on the ambiguous epistemic status of psychiatry within contemporary biomedicine, as well as the relationship between developmental biology — historically relatively disjointed from biomedical enterprise — and the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine.     

Spanning our differences: moral psychology,physician beliefs,and the practice of medicine

Moral pluralism is the norm in contemporary society. Even the best philosophical arguments rarely persuade moral opponents who differ at a foundational level. This has been vividly illustrated in contemporary debates in bioethics surrounding contentious issues such as abortion and euthanasia. It is readily apparent that bioethics discourse lacks an empirical explanation for the broad differences about various topics in bioethics and health policy. In recent years, social and cognitive psychology has generated novel approaches for defining basic differences in moral intuitions generally. We propose that if empirical research using social intuitionist theory explains why people disagree with one another over moral issues, then the results of such research might help people debate their moral differences in a more constructive and civil manner. We illustrate the utility of social intuitionism with data from a national physician survey.     

Discourse on medicine: meditative and calculative approaches to ethics from an international perspective

Heidegger’s two modes of thinking, calculative and meditative, were used as the thematic basis for this qualitative study of physicians from seven countries (Canada, China, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, & Thailand). Focus groups were conducted in each country with 69 physicians who cared for the elderly. Results suggest that physicians perceived ethical issues primarily through the lens of calculative thinking (76%) with emphasis on economic concerns. Meditative responses represented 24% of the statements and were mostly generated by Canadian physicians whose patients typically were not faced with economic barriers to treatment due to Canada’s universal health care system.     

Performance enhancement,elite athletes and anti doping governance: comparing human guinea pigs in pharmaceutical research and professional sports

In light of the World Anti Doping Agency’s 2013 Code Revision process, we critically explore the applicability of two of three criteria used to determine whether a method or substance should be considered for their Prohibited List, namely its (potential) performance enhancing effects and its (potential) risk to the health of the athlete. To do so, we compare two communities of human guinea pigs: (i) individuals who make a living out of serial participation in Phase 1 pharmacology trials; and (ii) elite athletes who engage in what is effectively ‘unregulated clinical research’ by using untested prohibited or non-prohibited performance enhancing substances and methods, alone or in combination. Our comparison sheds light on norms of research ethics that these practices exacerbate with respect to the concepts of multiplicity, visibility, and consistency. We argue for the need to establish a proper governance framework to increase the accountability of these unregulated research practices in order to protect the human guinea pigs in elite sports contexts, and to establish reasonable grounds for the performance enhancing effects, and the risks to the health of the athlete, of the methods and substances that might justify their inclusion on the Prohibited List.