Upholding the Maxim of Relevance during Patient-Centered Activities

This paper addresses "kinds and focuses of relevance" that a language-generating clinical decision-support system should adhere to during activities in which a health care provider's attention is on his or her patient and not on a computer screen. During such "patient-centered" activities, utterances generated by a computer system intrude on patient management. They must be thus seen by HCPs as having immediate clinical relevance, or, like the continual ringing of ICU monitors, they will be ignored. This paper describes how plan recognition and plan evaluation can be used to achieve clinical relevance. The work is being done in the context of the TraumAID project, whose overall goal is to . improve the delivery of quality trauma care during the initial definitive phase of patient management. Given an early pilot study that showed that physicians using TraumAID disliked the continuous presentation of its entire management plan, we decided to explore how TraumAID could restrict commentary to only those situations in which a comment could make a clinically significant difference to patient management. We took advantage of the fact that actions that involve resources that need to be brought to the trauma bay or that can only be done elsewhere must be ordered. Since or- ders can be rescinded, comments pointing out problems with an order can potentially make a clinically significant difference to patient management. The contributions of this paper are (1) pointing out additional *This work has been supported in part by the Army Research Organization under grant DAAL03-89C0031PRI, the National Library of Medicine under grant R01 LM05217-01 and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research under grant RO1 HS06740. The authors would like to thank Mark Steedman and Jonathan Kay..

The Knowledge Norm of Assertion: Debates and Criticisms

Both in philosophy of science and philosophy of language, there exists a long-time debate on the knowledge norm of assertion. Recently, the focus of the discussion has been shifted from the necessity claim to the sufficiency claim. People who hold the view of “Isolated second-hand knowledge” challenge the sufficiency claim based on several counterexamples. They contend that a speaker’s assertion based solely on second-hand knowledge is epistemically inappropriate. This perspective has ignited a more profound debate between advocates and critics of the knowledge norm of assertion. What factors actually determine the appropriateness of an assertion? Aiming at the question, the present study puts forward an idea that the appropriateness of an assertion is influenced by hearer’s conceptual saturation of the speaker rather than the isolated second-hand knowledge

Research in the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania

This report takes its name from the Computational Linguistics Feedback Forum (CLiFF), an informal discussion group for students and faculty. However the scope of the research covered in this report is broader than the title might suggest; this is the yearly report of the LINC Lab, the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania. It may at first be hard to see the threads that bind together the work presented here, work by faculty, graduate students and postdocs in the Computer Science and Linguistics Departments, and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. It includes prototypical Natural Language fields such as: Combinatorial Categorial Grammars, Tree Adjoining Grammars, syntactic parsing and the syntax-semantics interface; but it extends to statistical methods, plan inference, instruction understanding, intonation, causal reasoning, free word order languages, geometric reasoning, medical informatics, connectionism, and language acquisition. Naturally, this introduction cannot spell out all the connections between these abstracts; we invite you to explore them on your own. In fact, with this issue it’s easier than ever to do so: this document is accessible on the “information superhighway”. Just call up http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cliff-group/94/cliffnotes.html In addition, you can find many of the papers referenced in the CLiFF Notes on the net. Most can be obtained by following links from the authors’ abstracts in the web version of this report. The abstracts describe the researchers’ many areas of investigation, explain their shared concerns, and present some interesting work in Cognitive Science. We hope its new online format makes the CLiFF Notes a more useful and interesting guide to Computational Linguistics activity at Penn

Notice and the New Deal

The New Deal Supreme Court revised a well-known set of constitutional doctrines. Legal scholarship has principally focused on the changes that occurred in three areas—federalism, delegation, and economic liberty. This Article identifies a new and important fourth element of New Deal constitutionalism: a change in the constitutional doctrine of due process notice, the doctrine that specifies the minimum standards for constitutionally adequate notice of the law. The law of due process notice—which includes the doctrines of vagueness, retroactivity, and the rule of lenity—evolved dramatically over the course of the New Deal to permit lesser clarity and to tolerate more retroactivity. The upshot has been the near-total elimination of successful notice-based challenges other than in the limited context of First Amendment vagueness attacks. Unlike the more famous doctrinal changes of this period, changes to due process notice doctrine were not obviously necessary to accommodate the New Deal legislative agenda, either as a matter of jurisprudence or as a matter of politics. Due process notice doctrine nonetheless underwent a radical transformation in this era, as the Court came to regard its broader shift toward deferring to legislative and executive policy decisions as requiring the relaxation of due process notice doctrine. The link forged between deference and notice had significant functional effects on the most important audience for the Court\u27s notice jurisprudence—Congress. By loosening the strictures of due process notice doctrine, the Court lowered sharply the enactment costs of federal legislation and thereby facilitated its proliferation. This is a distinct, and hitherto unacknowledged, mechanism by which the Court in this period enhanced national power and encouraged the flourishing of the emerging administrative state. Like much of the New Deal settlement, the New Deal reformulation of due process notice doctrine is today the subject of ferment in the courts. Recognizing the New Deal roots of due process notice doctrine is critical for understanding these ongoing judicial debates—and for beginning the conceptual work of mapping the future shape of this vital cluster of doctrines

Chipping Away at the First Amendment: Newspapermen Must Disclose Sources

This Comment will explore the background and history of the journalistic privilege in light of case law and early constitutional argument. It will analyze the recent Supreme Court decisions denying a privilege to newsmen to conceal their sources, and attempt to explain how this privilege can best be maintained

Caring for Fat Patients: Bioethical Considerations Surrounding the Duty of Care

Healthcare providers’ (HCP) duty of care explains what HCPs owe to all their patients, but this thesis will focus on how the duty of care informs the treatment of fat patients. Currently, the foundation of the duty of care is rooted in a set of principles enumerated by the American Medical Association. This current conception of the duty of care fails to provide basic protections against harm to fat individuals, primarily because it is unable to prevent the negative attitudes HCPs have about fat people from permeating healthcare. The negative attitudes HCPs have about fat patients stem from a societal emphasis on framing fatness as an individual moral failing as opposed to a systemic problem. The social narrative around fatness falsely claims that fat people choose to be fat and that they have a personal responsibility to choose otherwise. This framework causes harm to fat patients through the negative attitudes of HCPs. These harms include a decreased quality of healthcare, damaged relationships between providers and patients, mistrust of diagnoses, and much more. After exploring the harms endured by fat patients and the failure of the current duty of care to protect fat patients from these harms it will be clear that a revised duty of care is needed. The revised duty of care will be constructed from a new set of principles combined with increased educational standards for all providers. The new set of principles will rely on Beauchamp and Childress’s Principlism, an account of medical ethics which concentrates on the adoption of four basic principles: respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice (2019). Furthermore, this thesis argues for the need to increase educational requirements for all providers as a means of successfully employing Principlism and guaranteeing fat patients the same protections as others. The revised duty of care will establish a framework that challenges HCPs to ground their attitudes about fat patients in scientific research instead of social narratives and ensure the obligations which stem from the duty of care are applied impartially to all patients

Infusing Ethical Considerations in Knowledge Management Scholarship: Toward a Research Agenda

The authors of this paper believe that scholarly work on knowledge management (KM) has largely overlooked ethical considerations. As such, this paper argues for the infusion of ethical considerations into knowledge management (KM) research. Using the lens of the classical ethical theories in philosophy, this paper revisits key areas of KM—knowledge creation, storage and access, transfer, and application—and generates relevant research questions in each of these areas. The paper highlights the importance of examining ethical issues related to KM, and offers an illustrative set of ethically-informed research themes and questions that can potentially be investigated by future studies

Islamic Performance Instrument (IPI): An Alternative Servant Leadership (SL) tool for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

In the search for measures to keep the society sustained, a qualitative study was conducted to explore a Tawhidic Paradigm (TP) alternative for servant leaders, building upon Greenleaf servant leadership (SL) theory. The aim is to ground an Islamic Performance Instrument (IPI) favourable to sustainable development (SD). Adopting Charmaz's (2006) constructivist Grounded Theory Method (GTM), 5 Muslim managers were identified and interviewed through purposive sampling. The coding process produced an IPI-5es principles (expertise, ethereal, emotional, ethical and empowering) essentially required by servant leaders to transform SDGs around the globe. The Islamic constructs of ‘Aqidah (Creed), Khalifa (Vicegerent) and ‘Adl (Justice) were critical in grounding these principles. Theoretically, the research outcome contributes to  body of knowledge on Tawhidic Paradigm (TP) and Islamic Servant Leadership (ISL). This paper projects leaders forming polices that synchronizes meeting SDGs with spiritual responsibilities. Practically, it offers leaders the ideal purpose of SL: servitude to the Creator – (Allah) and, also to humanity (fulfilling SDGs), as against the conventional SL theory which excludes the former. By implication, TP projects service to humanity (SDGs) as acts of worship (Ibadah). The paper was limited by fewer GTM research on Islamic SL principles for SDGs. Future study may conduct a time series analysis on servant leaders imbued with IPI-5es principles to determine SDGs success rate. The paper offers a pioneer model (IPI-5es principles) that extends conventional SL theory for SD