Guidelines for training in the ethical conduct of scientific research

Historically, scientists in training have learned the rules of ethical conduct by the example of their advisors and other senior scientists and by practice. This paper is intended to serve as a guide for the beginning scientist to some fundamental principles of scientific research ethics. The paper focuses less on issues of outright dishonesty or fraud, and more on the positive aspects of ethical scientific behavior; in other words, what a scientist should do to maintain a high level of ethical conduct in research. There are a number of fairly specific rules, guidelines, or commonly accepted operating principles that have evolved for the ethical conduct of science. In order to discuss this code of ethics, this paper is divided into sections dealing with specific areas of scientific ethics. These areas are: data collection and storage, ownership of data, confidentiality, communication, authorship, collaboration, the peer review system, and rules of dealing with ethical complaints. Illustrative case histories are presented to provide examples of the type of ethical dispute or problem being discussed. If scientific trainees learn the accepted rules of behavior that govern the conduct of science, ethical problems that arise out of ignorance, misunderstanding, or poor communication can be avoided.     

Some values guiding community research and action

The dual purposes of applied research-contributing to understanding and improvement-are only partially served by method systems that encourage studying (with increasing precision) a narrow range of questions of modest societal importance. To optimize contributions to challenging societal problems, a field's cherished standards should be adapted to support more adventuresome forms of community research and action. This paper outlines 10 values for community research and action, based on insights from the fields of behavioral and community psychology. These values-reflect the goals and challenges of establishing collaborative relationships with research participants, determining research goals and methods, designing and disseminating interventions, communicating research findings, and advocating for community change. Critical challenges are outlined, and implications for the field and its clients are discussed.     

Learning algorithm for an intelligent decision making system based on multi-agent neurocognitive architectures

The paper presents the formalism of an intelligent decision-making system based on multi-agent neurocognitive architectures, which has an architectural similarity to the human brain. An invariant of the organizational and functional structure of the intellectual decision-making process based on the multi-agent neurocognitive architecture is developed. An algorithm for teaching intelligent decision-making systems based on the self-organization of the invariant of multi-agent neurocognitive architectures is presented. Using this algorithm, an intelligent agent was trained and the architecture of the learning process was built on the basis of an invariant of neurocognitive architecture. Further research is related to training an intelligent agent in more complex behavior and expanding the capabilities of an intelligent decision-making system based on multi-agent neurocognitive architectures.     

Evaluating agents’ trustworthiness within virtual societies in case of no direct experience

A great deal of effort has been made to introduce trust models to assess trustworthiness within virtual societies. The great majority of them makes extensive use of direct experience as the main source of information, considering recommendation/reputation and inferential processes just later, as a secondary mechanism to refine trust assessment. In this kind of networks, unfortunately, direct experience might not always represent the best solution to assess trustworthiness. In fact, their highly dynamic structure promotes an increase of the average number of interconnections among agents. This in turn negatively affects the degree of knowledge the agents possess about each specific individual, i.e. direct experience. To date, however, it has not been said much about how to face these situations.It is fundamental to find an effective approach for trust assessment even in lack of direct experience, which is the central focus of this research. By the means of a multi-agent social simulation, we consider the situation in which an agent can just access indirect knowledge for trust assessment, namely recommendations of specific individuals or whole categories of individuals. Then, we compare the efficiency of these two approaches in order to identify when it is more convenient to rely on the first or on the second one. As expected, our results confirm that the dynamic nature of these networks strongly affects the role of categories. We modeled this feature introducing the “turnover” in the simulations, whereby the higher is the turnover the more convenient it is relying on categories. Besides this confirmatory result, our simulations highlight the higher degree of robustness of categories in the presence of unreliable recommenders. Such a result is even more significant if there is no available information about how reliable the recommenders are.The results we obtained are in accordance with the current literature and can be of important interest for the development of this sector.     

全球化语境下的多元文化能力模型及其在跨文化合作中的应用

全球化带来了丰富的多元文化经验, 开阔了人们视野的同时, 也造成了认知负担, 进而可能引发对外文化群体的抵触情绪和排斥行为。多元文化经验的普遍性和两面性突显了对其进行合理管理和灵活应用的重要性。然而, 现有的文化能力的理论大多在全球化研究早期提出, 已经无法应对全球化带来的新变化。在文化会聚主义理论框架下, 将文化视为动态发展的系统, 建构以元知识为核心的多元文化能力模型将有助于深入理解全球化问题。新模型的效用检验计划从文化知识管理和群际接触应对两方面检验多元文化能力在跨文化合作情境中的效用与机制, 以期为全球化环境中个人与组织开展跨文化交流与合作的实践提供理论指导。     

Tribal Participatory Research: Mechanisms of a Collaborative Model

Although much social science research has been conducted within American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) communities, relatively little research has been conducted by or for those communities. We describe an approach that facilitates the active involvement of AIAN communities in the research process, from conceptualizing the issues to be investigated to developing a research design, and from collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the data to disseminating the results. The Tribal Participatory Research (TPR) approach is consistent with recent developments in psychology that emphasize the inclusion of community members and the social construction of knowledge. We describe the foundations of the approach and present specific mechanisms that can be employed in collaborations between researchers and AIAN communities. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the use of TPR regarding project timelines and budgets, interpretation of the data, and ultimately the relationships between tribes and researchers.     

Client Advocacy and Collaboration with Insurance and Laboratory Testing Agencies: A Case Study Illustrating Genetic Counselor Roles

Genetic counseling and the many roles a genetic counselor must assume to provide quality genetic health care are becoming increasingly complex, especially when the genetic condition is rare, and DNA testing is costly and not yet routinely used. A case study of a couple with a family history of retinoblastoma and their pursuit of DNA testing for prenatal diagnosis is presented. The case study illustrates the instrumental role of the genetic counselor in advocating for clients for genetic services such as DNA testing and in educating insurance companies in the nature and importance of such services to achieve improved client health care outcomes.     

External communication of automated vehicles in mixed traffic: Addressing the right human interaction partner in multi-agent simulation

The urban traffic system is most likely to change in the next years to a mixed traffic with human drivers, vulnerable road users, and automated vehicles. In the past, the development of external communication approaches for automated vehicles focused on scenarios where an automated vehicle communicates with either a pedestrian or a human driver. However, interactions with more than one traffic partner are more realistic. Therefore, a study with 42 participants was conducted with a multi-agent simulation in which an automated vehicle interacted simultaneously with two participants, a pedestrian and a driver of a manual vehicle. In this study, two main scenarios were investigated in order to evaluate the safety and efficiency of the interactions and to determine whether the human road users feel correctly addressed. In one scenario, the pedestrian had to cross the road in front of the automated and the manual vehicle, which were approaching from different sides. In the other, the manual vehicle had to drive through a bottleneck in front of the oncoming automated vehicle, while the pedestrian had to cross the road after both vehicles passed. The communication approach of the automated vehicle consisted of implicit signals using a speed profile and lateral offset within its lane, and explicit signals using an external human–machine interface. The results of the study show that no collisions were observed in terms of safety and no significant negative effects on efficiency were measured. However, in contrast to single agent interactions, a majority of participants felt wrongly addressed in situations where the automated vehicle signals the right-of-way to the other human road user. It can be concluded that the communication approach of the automated vehicle needs to be modified in order to address certain road users more clearly.     

Changing dominance in mixed profession groups: putting theory into practice

An extended professional identity theory is proposed to enhance interprofessional collaboration. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether comparative feedback on interprofessional interaction can decrease the degree of profession-based dominance and general dominance in mixed profession groups. This observational study comprised a randomized double-blind pretest-posttest control group design with 19 mixed profession groups (10 intervention and nine control groups, each with three dental and three dental hygiene students). All groups received reflective feedback during two consecutive two hour team development meetings. Intervention groups also received comparative feedback. Profession-based dominance concerned the sum of three observation items (conversational turn-taking, dominance and contributing ideas) with a three-point scale: ?1 = dental dominance, 0 = no dominance, +1 = dental hygiene dominance. Polychoric correlations confirmed positive associations with the latent trait and an unidimensional underlying structure. Observation items were internally consistent (α > .70). General dominance concerned the sum of absolute values of observation items with a minimum value of zero (no dominance) and the maximum value of three (strong dominance). A two-way factorial ANOVA was performed. The results revealed a significant interaction effect with regard to general dominance, F(1,17) = 6.630, p = 0.020 and large effect size (partial eta squared = 0.28). Comparative feedback on interprofessional interaction decreases general dominance in mixed profession groups.