The Questions We Left Behind: Reflections from a Teaching Theologian

Abstract : While the ordination of women made great strides in ending gender injustice for women in church‐related vocations, women also have raised other questions, specifically: the appropriate role of experience in theological discourse and moral deliberation; the displacement of advocacy by representation; and the tension between the personal and the political. Fore‐mothers leave behind these issues for their after‐daughters, as they meet challenges their fore‐mothers in the faith could hardly imagine.     

Additive factors and stages of mental processes in task networks

To perform a task a subject executes mental processes. An experimental manipulation, such as a change in stimulus intensity, is said to selectively influence a process if it changes the duration of that process leaving other process durations unchanged. For random process durations a definition of a factor selectively influencing a process by increments is given in terms of stochastic dominance (also called “the usual stochastic order”). A technique for analyzing reaction times, Sternberg’s Additive Factor Method, assumes all the processes are in series. When all processes are in series, each process is called a stage. With the Additive Factor Method, if two experimental factors selectively influence two different stages by increments, the factors will have additive effects on reaction time. An assumption of the Additive Factor Method is that if two experimental factors interact, then they influence the same stage. We consider sets of processes in which some pairs of processes are sequential and some are concurrent (i.e., the processes are partially ordered). We propose a natural definition of a stage for such sets of processes. For partially ordered processes, with our definition of a stage, if two experimental factors selectively influence two different processes by increments, each within a different stage, then the factors have additive effects. If each process selectively influenced by increments is in the same stage, then an interaction is possible, although not inevitable.     

Anomalous global effects induced by ‘blind’ distractors in visual hemifield defects

Previous research has revealed that a stimulus presented in the blind visual field of participants with visual hemifield defects can evoke oculomotor competition, in the absence of awareness. Here we studied three cases to determine whether a distractor in a blind hemifield would be capable of inducing a global effect, a shift of saccade endpoint when target and distractor are close to each other, in participants with lesions of the optic radiations or striate cortex. We found that blind field distractors significantly shifted saccadic endpoints in two of three participants with lesions of either the striate cortex or distal optic radiations. The direction of the effect was paradoxical, however, in that saccadic endpoints shifted away from blind field distractors, whereas endpoints shifted towards distractors in the visible hemifields, which is the normal global effect. These results provide further evidence that elements presented in the blind visual field can generate modulatory interactions in the oculomotor system, which may differ from interactions in normal vision.     

Refining the visual-cortical hypothesis in category learning

Participants produce steep typicality gradients and large prototype-enhancement effects in dot-distortion category tasks, showing that in these tasks to-be-categorized items are compared to a prototypical representation that is the central tendency of the participant’s exemplar experience. These prototype-abstraction processes have been ascribed to low-level mechanisms in primary visual cortex. Here we asked whether higher-level mechanisms in visual cortex can also sometimes support prototype abstraction. To do so, we compared dot-distortion performance when the stimuli were size constant (allowing some low-level repetition-familiarity to develop for similar shapes) or size variable (defeating repetition-familiarity effects). If prototype formation is only mediated by low-level mechanisms, stimulus-size variability should lessen prototype effects and flatten typicality gradients. Yet prototype effects and typicality gradients were the same under both conditions, whether participants learned the categories explicitly or implicitly and whether they received trial-by-trial reinforcement during transfer tests. These results broaden out the visual-cortical hypothesis because low-level visual areas, featuring retinotopic perceptual representations, would not support robust category learning or prototype-enhancement effects in an environment of pronounced variability in stimulus size. Therefore, higher-level cortical mechanisms evidently can also support prototype formation during categorization.     

从医学整合的角度谈现代肺癌的防治

肺癌是严重影响群众健康的常见恶性肿瘤,当前肺癌防治工作中面临一系列由于分科过细、欠缺协作等导致的问题。加强肺癌防治领域中学科、技术、资源的整合,才能够有效应对越来越严峻的肺癌防治形势。建立以疾病为中心的肺癌整体防治模式,对于其他单一重大疾病的防治也有重要参考意义。     

哲学思想为医学生创新思维提供启思与导向

创新能力与哲学素养直接相关,创新思维是哲学素养的运用和拓展。目前,医学思维能力培养中存在极大限制医学生想象力和创造力的问题,一是受权威迷信的束缚,二是受传统思维框架的束缚。基于此现状,本研究探讨培养医学生创新思维能力应采取的对策与措施,体现了哲学思想对医学生创新思维的启思与导向作用。     

精准医疗的理念及其技术体系

精准医疗模式本着患者的最大获益和社会医疗投入的高效配置为宗旨,结合现代流行病学和预防医学、临床诊断学和治疗学、分子医学、医学信息学技术以及卫生经济学和医学社会学,使传统的医疗模式走向整合化,为每一个人提供量体裁衣般的疾病预防、筛查、诊断、治疗和康复计划,以最小资源投入获取最大健康保障,从而提高整体人群的健康水平。     

妊娠期急性脂肪肝诊治中的科学思维应用

现代科学思维方法中系统思维及模糊思维方法具有普遍适用意义。妊娠期急性脂肪肝临床上极为罕见,并发症多,病死率极高,1例并发腹部卒中的妊娠期急性脂肪肝患者通过科学诊疗转危为安,及时终止妊娠、对症处理、多学科协作联合治疗,积极预防并发症是确保救治成功的关键。本文尝试介绍科学思维方法在该病诊疗中的一些体会。     

Patient Perspectives on the Learning Health System: The Importance of Trust and Shared Decision Making

We conducted focus groups to assess patient attitudes toward research on medical practices in the context of usual care. We found that patients focus on the implications of this research for their relationship with and trust in their physicians. Patients view research on medical practices as separate from usual care, demanding dissemination of information and in most cases, individual consent. Patients expect information about this research to come through their physician, whom they rely on to identify and filter associated risks. In general, patients support this research, but worry that participation in research involving randomization may undermine individualized care that acknowledges their unique medical histories. These findings suggest the need for public education on variation in practice among physicians and the need for a collaborative approach to the governance of research on medical practices that addresses core values of trust, transparency, and partnership.