Collectives’ and individuals’ obligations: a parity argument

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts.     

A Review on Spinal Muscular Atrophy: Awareness,Knowledge, and Attitudes

Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) is one of the most common genetic causes of infant death. There is presently no cure, but the therapeutic pipeline is promising. Given the prevalence of SMA coupled with the potential for new treatment options, universal carrier screening, and newborn screening, we conducted a literature review of the awareness, knowledge, and attitudes held by the public and non-geneticist clinicians about various aspects of SMA. We then identify recommendations for targeting additional research, training, and educational efforts to increase awareness. In the limited available literature, we found that the public is generally unfamiliar with SMA but has favorable views of carrier and newborn screening. Clinicians also had limited understanding of SMA. Further research into knowledge and attitudes of healthcare providers and the general public will help develop a better understanding of education gaps and inform outreach efforts. These educational efforts are needed to complement the momentum as treatments are being developed and tested. Furthermore, professional societies are proposing routine carrier screening and SMA may achieve newborn screening status, which will change the SMA landscape for genetics professionals and families. Thus, it is important to explore knowledge and attitudes about SMA to allow us to prepare for when SMA attains higher public and clinician recognition.     

Non-violence as a Shifting Signifier on the Tibetan Plateau

In nomadic areas, Tibetans are wearing a new amulet, called an ‘amulet for peace’, depicting a globe with a dove flying above it. The dove carries a bodhi leaf in its mouth and a gold peace sign in its claws, combining Buddhist and global symbols for peace. However, the amulet is not being marshalled for Gandhian-style non-violent resistance nor world peace for that matter, but rather for something more local. This local cause is a campaign to end fighting over the grasslands, a sustained social problem in nomadic areas of eastern Tibet. The amulet for peace is a recent innovation, launched in 2012 as part of an ethical reform movement spearheaded by Larung Buddhist Academy, the largest monastic institution on the Tibetan plateau. This article discusses the latest developments in this emerging movement and, specifically, the significance of the amulet for peace and the discourses in which it is embedded.     

A Review of Loss,Trauma and Resilience: Therapeutic Work With Ambiguous Loss

Book reviewed in this article: Pauline Boss (2006). Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work With Ambiguous Loss.     

An experimental comparison between rival theories of rapid automatized naming performance and its relationship to reading

Two studies investigated the degree to which the relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) performance and reading development is driven by shared phonological processes. Study 1 assessed RAN, phonological awareness, and reading performance in 1010 7- to 10-year-olds. Results showed that RAN deficits occurred in the absence of phonological awareness deficits. These were accompanied by modest reading delays. In structural equation modeling, solutions where RAN was subsumed within a phonological processing factor did not provide a good fit to the data, suggesting that processes outside phonology may drive RAN performance and its association with reading. Study 2 investigated Kail's proposal that speed of processing underlies this relationship. Children with single RAN deficits showed slower speed of processing than did closely matched controls performing normally on RAN. However, regression analysis revealed that RAN made a unique contribution to reading even after accounting for processing speed. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Why compositional nihilism dissolves puzzles

Synthese - One of the main motivations for compositional nihilism, the view that there are no composite material objects, concerns the many puzzles and problems associated with them. Nihilists...     

Horizontal saccadic eye movements enhance the retrieval of landmark shape and location information

Recent work has demonstrated that horizontal saccadic eye movements enhance verbal episodic memory retrieval, particularly in strongly right-handed individuals. The present experiments test three primary assumptions derived from this research. First, horizontal eye movements should facilitate episodic memory for both verbal and non-verbal information. Second, the benefits of horizontal eye movements should only be seen when they immediately precede tasks that demand right and left-hemisphere processing towards successful performance. Third, the benefits of horizontal eye movements should be most pronounced in the strongly right-handed. Two experiments confirmed these hypotheses: horizontal eye movements increased recognition sensitivity and decreased response times during a spatial memory test relative to both vertical eye movements and fixation. These effects were only seen when horizontal eye movements preceded episodic memory retrieval, and not when they preceded encoding (Experiment 1). Further, when eye movements preceded retrieval, they were only beneficial with recognition tests demanding a high degree of right and left-hemisphere activity (Experiment 2). In both experiments the beneficial effects of horizontal eye movements were greatest for strongly right-handed individuals. These results support recent work suggesting increased interhemispheric brain activity induced by bilateral horizontal eye movements, and extend this literature to the encoding and retrieval of landmark shape and location information.