Type two diabetes and eye health

This thesis contributes to the understanding of how people with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) negotiate self-care and management of diabetes and eye health. The study aims to deliver an Enhanced Diabetic Optometric Practice (EDOP) which involves a graphic portrayal of diabetic retinopathy, as it manifests itself in the eye and in the patient’s own eyes, whereby retinal images will be discussed within a normal optometric practice environment. This PhD research study used the qualitative method of thematic and Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) to investigate if an EDOP is able to heighten the participant’s concern of sight loss and thus lead to better diabetic control, and improved self-motivation and management. The research progressed in three stages; Study (1) A systematic review and meta-synthesis of qualitative research investigating the barriers to self-care for people with T2D, Study (2) A qualitative analysis of diabetes self-help literature and eye health, and Study (3) Evaluation of an Enhanced Diabetic Optometric Practice (EDOP). A review of the literature evaluates research in the field of optometry and ophthalmology with regard to the use of retinal images for educating people with T2D about their diabetes and the ocular complications. The findings of the three studies revealed, valuable insight into the barriers and constraints to self-care that people with T2D routinely face, enabling greater understanding of how to facilitate effective diabetes self-management Study (1). Study (2) discerned that self-help texts cannot facilitate the empowerment of people with diabetes who aspire to selfregulation, as they are constrained by the dominant compliant discourse of the expert-patient relationship. Finally, in Study (3) EDOP, optometrists can provide an enhanced optometric service, educating and motivating people with T2D to better self-care practices. This thesis concludes that the optometrist, by way of the EDOP and the pertinent threat of sight loss can assist people with T2D to gain the confidence to apply the skills to effective self-management and so prevent blindness

In good form : arguing for epistemic norms of credence

The main topic of the book is how to argue for formal epistemic norms of credence. The author advocates formal justificational pluralism, suggesting that it is reasonable to use various formal tools, e.g. different "scoring rules", in arguments for synchronic and diachronic norms. The author first examines various occasions on which modern formal epistemology fails to live up to its "formal" label. Among the topics considered next are: the Dutch Book Theorem and Arguments (which fails according to the author), a novel version of the Principal Principle, and a constructive approach to higher order probabilities. The author argues then that the best method for dealing with various belief update problems is that of minimizing inverse relative entropy, and defends the claim that for evaluating an agent’s credal state at a single moment the Brier Score seems to be the way to go

A New Look at Familiar Words: Formation, Supervision, Ministry

oai:rpfs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/37Volume 27 The Complete Journa

The Private, the Public, and the Published: Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric

At the 2003 Rock the Vote debate, one of the questions posed by a student to the eight Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination was have you ever used marijuana? Amazingly, all but one of the candidates voluntarily answered the question. Add to this example the multiple ways in which we now see public intrusion into private lives (security cameras, electronic access to personal data, scanning and wanding at the airport) or private self-exposure in public forums (cell phones, web cams, confessional talk shows, voyeuristic reality TV). That matters so private could be treated as legitimate-in some cases even vital-for public discourse indicates how intertwined the realms of private and public have become in our era. Reverse examples exist as well. Around the world, public authorities look the other way while individual rights are abused--calling it a private matter--or officials appeal to sectarian morés to justify discrimination in public policies. The authors of The Private, the Public, and the Published feel that scholarship needs to explore and understand this phenomenon, and needs to address it in the college classroom. There are consequences of conflating public and private, they argue--consequences that have implications especially for what is known as the public good. The changing distinctions between private and public, and the various practices of private and public expression, are explored in these essays with an eye toward what they teach us about those consequences and implications. Ultimately, the authors recommend a humane and ethical reconciling of the two realms in the tradition of rhetoric since Aristotle. This means, they argue, that scholars must work to create the conditions in public-in classrooms, meeting rooms, Congress, international forums--that respect and defend the ethical treatment of private lives.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1147/thumbnail.jp

Cognitive Akrasia in Moral Psychology and Normative Motivation

A number of persistent questions surround akrasia. Is akrasia (acting intentionally against one's own better judgment) possible? If it is, how best to explain akrasia in a way consistent with acceptable theories of normative motivation? I argue that akrasia is possible--in fact, akrasia is actual. Research in psychology and information science, suitably interpreted, contains an empirically informed account of akrasia that is consistent with the traditional philosophical concept of akrasia as notably explored by Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Hare, and Davidson. My account of akrasia appeals to our best current research in order to develop an account of how someone could have knowledge of the good without attending to that knowledge, or could make normative judgments that motivate, but that do not include all of the factors at play in a more complete normative judgment (i.e. better judgment) that would motivate the agent differently. Adopting this empirically informed account of akrasia requires abandoning positions that are incompatible with its existence. One such view is the view that normative judgments are necessarily connected to motivation (often called normative judgment internalism, or NJI). Drawing on works by Sarah Stroud and Ralph Wedgwood, I demonstrate that NJI can be amended to allow akrasia, long thought to be a straightforward counterexample to NJI, while preserving what is plausible about NJI. My account of akrasia is termed `cognitive akrasia' because I appeal to cognitive states as playing a central role in identifying and understanding akrasia. Preserving an amended NJI by means of a strongly cognitive understanding of akrasia means arguing against an opponent of NJI, which is normative judgment externalism (NJE). The most common form of NJE is Humean in character, and explains akrasia in terms of desiderative or other affective states. That is, one is akratic when one judges that A is better than B but has less desire to do A than B. My response to NJE as a view that explains akrasia is also empirically informed. I make use of clinical research into addiction and addiction treatment, because addiction has long been a fruitful source of examples of akrasia. Many addicts judge it better not to be addicts and yet occasionally or repeatedly fail to reform their addictive behavior. In this analysis, I provide a plausible family of everyday accounts of persons changing their behavior without changing their desires. I also point out that recent research indicates that specifically cognitive bias modification provides better clinical outcomes among addicts than approaches that attempt to change the addicts' desires. One important consequence of cognitive akrasia, then, is that it represents support for theories that hold that motivation can be a product of cognitive and not only affective states

The Material Theory of Induction

The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it.The content of that logic and where it can be applied are determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference

Pseudo-contractions as Gentle Repairs

Updating a knowledge base to remove an unwanted consequence is a challenging task. Some of the original sentences must be either deleted or weakened in such a way that the sentence to be removed is no longer entailed by the resulting set. On the other hand, it is desirable that the existing knowledge be preserved as much as possible, minimising the loss of information. Several approaches to this problem can be found in the literature. In particular, when the knowledge is represented by an ontology, two different families of frameworks have been developed in the literature in the past decades with numerous ideas in common but with little interaction between the communities: applications of AGM-like Belief Change and justification-based Ontology Repair. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between pseudo-contraction operations and gentle repairs. Both aim to avoid the complete deletion of sentences when replacing them with weaker versions is enough to prevent the entailment of the unwanted formula. We show the correspondence between concepts on both sides and investigate under which conditions they are equivalent. Furthermore, we propose a unified notation for the two approaches, which might contribute to the integration of the two areas