Physicians,entrepreneurism and the problem of conflict of interest

This paper examines the ethical issues of conflict of interest raised by the burgeoning development of physician involvement in for-profit entrepreneurial activities outside their practice. After documenting the nature and extent of these activities, and their potential for conflicts of interest, the paper assesses the major arguments for and against physicians' referral of patients to facilities they own or in which they invest. The paper concludes that an outright ban on such activity seems ethically warranted.     

HIV and the obligation to treat

The paper is an attempt to review the basis for the claim that physicians have a professional obligation to treat AIDS patients. Considered are the historical record, two professional codes of ethics, and several recent articles. The paper concludes that the arguments considered, which attempt to support the claim that physicians have an obligation to treat, fail. It is suggested, rather, that common humanity, which physicians share with those who suffer from AIDS, ought to be the basis for engaging in the care of AIDS patients.     

BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN

Abstract. The paper consists of an argument that goes as follows. Symbols and their elaboration into myths constitute Homo sapiens 's most primitive reading of the world and the relation of humans to that world. They are, in other words, primordial units of cultural information, emerging very early in human history, representing a significant achievement in the evolution of human self-consciousness and reflection. The classic myths of Fall and Original Sin, as well as the doctrines to which they gave rise, are further interpretations of this primordial information. The doctrinal traditions of the first four centuries of Christianity are surveyed. Three sets of data as interpreted by the biological sciences are offered as resources for understanding the biogenetic grounds of the experience that the symbols, myths, and doctrines of Fall and Original Sin seek to interpret. The conclusions to be drawn are that (1) the symbolic material is indeed commensurate with the scientific understandings, and (2) the scientific interpretations deepen our understanding of the symbols, while (3) the conversation between the symbols and the science once again raises certain perennial questions about human existence.     

驾驶员心理品质检测中的杆型人形图法

在汽车驾驶员心理品质检测研究中,我们根据数学中的多变量图分析方法,并汲取简笔画的优点,用19个人形图变量代表检测所得的17种心理品质数据,来具体、形象地再现每个驾驶员心理品质变量的整体关系。这对于检测结果的分类或进行系统化分析具有重要的实用意义。     

The crane's foot: The rise of the pedigree in human genetics

The standard pedigree used by geneticists is intimately connected to the history of genetics. Pedigrees drawn today are based on standards established in the early decades of the twentieth century. Those standards were established by geneticists who pursued an active interest in eugenics. The slightly different standards followed in America vs. England to some extent followed the stronger support of Mendelism by the Americans, as well as the individual preferences of the leading human geneticists in those countries.     

The substitutability of reinforcers

Substitutability is a construct borrowed from microeconomics that describes a continuum of possible interactions among the reinforcers in a given situation. Highly substitutable reinforcers, which occupy one end of the continuum, are readily traded for each other due to their functional similarity. Complementary reinforcers, at the other end of the continuum, tend to be consumed jointly in fairly rigid proportion, and therefore cannot be traded for one another except to achieve that proportion. At the center of the continuum are reinforcers that are independent with respect to each other; consumption of one has no influence on consumption of another. Psychological research and analyses in terms of substitutability employ standard operant conditioning paradigms in which humans and nonhumans choose between alternative reinforcers. The range of reinforcer interactions found in these studies is more readily accommodated and predicted when behavior-analytic models of choice consider issues of substitutability. New insights are gained into such areas as eating and drinking, electrical brain stimulation, temporal separation of choice alternatives, behavior therapy, drug use, and addictions. Moreover, the generalized matching law (Baum, 1974) gains greater explanatory power and comprehensiveness when measures of substitutability are included.     

Delay reduction: current status.

Delay-reduction theory states that the effectiveness of a stimulus as a conditioned reinforcer may be predicted most accurately by the reduction in time to primary reinforcement correlated with its onset. We review support for the theory and then discuss two new types of experiments that assess it. One compares models of choice in situations wherein the less preferred outcome is made more accessible; the other investigates whether frequency of conditioned reinforcement affects choice beyond the effect exerted by frequency of primary reinforcement.     

Violations of transitivity: Implications for a theory of contextual choice

Violations of strong stochastic transitivity in concurrent-chains choice were first reported by Navarick and Fantino. In a series of articles, Navarick and Fantino concluded that neither a unidimensional model capable of predicting exact choice probabilities nor a fixed-variable equivalence rule was possible for the concurrent-chains procedure. I show that when choice is modeled contextually (i.e., when preference for a schedule is affected by factors other than the schedule itself, e.g., aspects of the alternative schedule), a unidimensional, exact-choice probability model is possible that both predicts the intransitivities reported by Navarick and Fantino and provides a fixed-variable equivalence rule for the concurrent-chains procedure. The contextual model is an extension of the generalized matching law and violates a key assumption underlying traditional choice models—simple scalability—because of (a) schedule interdependence and (b) bias from procedural contingencies. Therefore, strong stochastic transitivity cannot be expected to hold. Contextual scalability is analyzed to reveal a hierarchy of context effects in choice. Navarick and Fantino's intransitivities can be satisfactorily explained by bias. If attribute sensitivity is context dependent, however, and if there are similarity structures among choice alternatives, the contextual model is shown to be able to predict violations of ordinal preference. Therefore, it may be possible to formulate a deterministic, general psychophysical model of choice as a behavioral alternative to probabilistic, multidimensional choice theories.