The making of a moral economy: women\u27s views of monetary transactions in an ‘egg sharing for research’ scheme*

There are growing debates about the appropriateness of offering money in exchange for the provision of bodily materials for clinical treatment and research. The bioethics literature and many practice guidelines have generally been opposed to such entanglement, depicting the use of money as contaminating, creating undue inducement, exploitation and commodification of the human body. However, two elements have been missing from these debates: (i) the perspectives of those people providing bodily materials when money is offered; and (ii) systematic empirical engagement with the notion of ‘money’ itself. This article seeks to fill those gaps in knowledge by providing detailed insights from a project investigating the views and experiences of women who volunteered to provide eggs for research in exchange for reduced fees for fertility treatment. Analysis of 29 semi-structured interviews reveals multiple ways in which volunteers reason through the involvement of ‘money’ in this domain and shows how their accounts diverge from pessimistic understandings of the role of monies in everyday life. When volunteers speak in detail about the monetary aspects of their participation they draw major, recurring, distinctions in five overlapping areas: their depiction of the monetized world of fertility treatment; their views of the different forms that money can take; a distancing of their actions from their understandings of how markets and commodities work; their location of the transactions within a particular clinic, and the ongoing importance of their eggs, post-transaction.This article: (i) responds to calls for concrete case studies to assist understandings of the inter-relationships of money and specific aspects of social life; (ii) adds to the sociology of money literature by providing empirical insights into how notions of money are deployed; (iii) presents much-needed perspectives from providers of bodily materials; and (iv) contributes to ongoing conversations between bioethics and sociology

Aircraft computations using multigrid and an unstructured parallel library

This paper examines the application of unstructured multigrid, using a sequence of independent tetrahedral grids. The test cases examined are for inviscid flow over an aircraft and an M6 wing. The sensitivity of the method to grid sequence and cycling strategy are investigated. \ud \ud All of the calculations were performed on a parallel computer. This was achieved by using the OPlus library which, by the straightforward insertion of subroutine calls, facilitates parallelisation of the resulting code. A single source OPlus application code can be compiled to executed on either a parallel or sequential machine. This greatly increases the usability of the parallel machine, and the maintainability of the code

Generating Multi-objective Optimized Business Process Enactment Plans

Declarative business process (BP) models are increasingly used allowing their users to specify what has to be done instead of how. Due to their flexible nature, there are several enactment plans related to a specific declarative model, each one presenting specific values for different objective functions, e.g., completion time or profit. In this work, a method for generating optimized BP enactment plans from declarative specifications is proposed to optimize the performance of a process considering multiple objectives. The plans can be used for different purposes, e.g., providing recommendations. The proposed approach is validated through an empirical evaluation based on a real-world case study.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009-1371

Risk-Driven Design Processes: Balancing Efficiency with Resilience in Product Design

Current design methods and approaches focus on increasing the efficiency of the product design system by, for example, eliminating waste and focusing on value creation. However, continuing failures in the development of complex, large scale products and systems point towards weaknesses in the existing approaches. We argue that product development organizations are hindered by the many uncertainties that are inherent in the process. Common management heuristics ignore uncertainty and thus overly simplify the decision making process. Creating transparency regarding uncertainties and the associated risks (i.e. effect of uncertainties on design objectives) is not seen as an explicit priority. Consequently organizations are unable to balance risk and return in their development choices. Product development processes do not emphasize reduction of risks, particularly those risks that are apparent early in the process. In addition, the resilience of the PD system, i.e. its ability to deliver on-target results under uncertainty, is not deliberately designed to match the level of residual uncertainty. This chapter introduces the notion of Risk-Driven Design and its four principles of 1. Creating transparency regarding design risks; 2. Risk-driven decision making; 3. Minimizing uncertainty; and 4. Creating resilience.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lean Advancement InitiativeCenter for Clean Water and Clean Energy at MIT and KFUP

Decisional Conflict and User Acceptance of Multicriteria Decision-Making Aids *

Despite the development of increasingly sophisticated and refined multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methods, an examination of the experimental evidence indicates that users most often prefer relatively unsophisticated methods. In this paper, we synthesize theories and empirical findings from the psychology of judgment and choice to provide a new theoretical explanation for such user preferences. Our argument centers on the assertion that the MCDM method preferred by decision makers is a function of the degree to which the method tends to introduce decisional conflict. The model we develop relates response mode, decision strategy, and the salience of decisional conflict to user preferences among decision aids. We then show that the model is consistent with empirical results in MCDM studies. Next, the role of decisional conflict in problem formulation aids is briefly discussed. Finally, we outline future research needed to thoroughly test the theoretical mechanisms we have proposed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73461/1/j.1540-5915.1991.tb00371.x.pd

A Randomized Trial to Identify Accurate and Cost-Effective Fidelity Measurement Methods for Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Project FACTS Study Protocol

Background: This randomized trial will compare three methods of assessing fidelity to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for youth to identify the most accurate and cost-effective method. The three methods include self-report (i.e., therapist completes a self-report measure on the CBT interventions used in session while circumventing some of the typical barriers to self-report), chart-stimulated recall (i.e., therapist reports on the CBT interventions used in session via an interview with a trained rater, and with the chart to assist him/her) and behavioral rehearsal (i.e., therapist demonstrates the CBT interventions used in session via a role-play with a trained rater). Direct observation will be used as the gold-standard comparison for each of the three methods. Methods/design: This trial will recruit 135 therapists in approximately 12 community agencies in the City of Philadelphia. Therapists will be randomized to one of the three conditions. Each therapist will provide data from three unique sessions, for a total of 405 sessions. All sessions will be audio-recorded and coded using the Therapy Process Observational Coding System for Child Psychotherapy-Revised Strategies scale. This will enable comparison of each measurement approach to direct observation of therapist session behavior to determine which most accurately assesses fidelity. Cost data associated with each method will be gathered. To gather stakeholder perspectives of each measurement method, we will use purposive sampling to recruit 12 therapists from each condition (total of 36 therapists) and 12 supervisors to participate in semi-structured qualitative interviews. Discussion: Results will provide needed information on how to accurately and cost-effectively measure therapist fidelity to CBT for youth, as well as important information about stakeholder perspectives with regard to each measurement method. Findings will inform fidelity measurement practices in future implementation studies as well as in clinical practice. Trial registration: NCT02820623, June 3rd, 2016

Attitudes on the donation of human embryos for stem cell research among Chinese IVF patients and students

Bioethical debates on the use of human embryos and oocytes for stem cell research have often been criticized for the lack of empirical insights into the perceptions and experiences of the women and couples who are asked to donate these tissues in the IVF clinic. Empirical studies that have investigated the attitudes of IVF patients and citizens on the (potential) donation of their embryos and oocytes have been scarce and have focused predominantly on the situation in Europe and Australia. This article examines the viewpoints on the donation of embryos for stem cell research among IVF patients and students in China. Research into the perceptions of patients is based on in-depth interviews with IVF patients and IVF clinicians. Research into the attitudes of students is based on a quantitative survey study (n=427). The empirical findings in this paper indicate that perceptions of the donation of human embryos for stem cell research in China are far more diverse and complex than has commonly been suggested. Claims that ethical concerns regarding the donation and use of embryos and oocytes for stem cell research are typical for Western societies but absent in China cannot be upheld. The article shows that research into the situated perceptions and cultural specificities of human tissue donation can play a crucial role in the deconstruction of politicized bioethical argumentation and the (often ill-informed) assumptions about “others” that underlie socio-ethical debates on the moral dilemmas of technology developments in the life sciences

Avoiding philosophy as a trump-card in sociological writing. A study from the discourse of evidence-based healthcare

In this article I explore a situation where health sociologists encounter pure-philosophical reasoning in the fabric of social life. Accounts of the relationship between philosophy and sociology tend to be framed in abstract theory, so there is a need for practical ways to anchor philosophical reasoning in sociological writing. I consider the use of philosophies as strategic tools for socially grounded understanding, rather than rhetorical trump-cards which bypass socio-political questions. I present my understanding in two stages: first, I discuss my example topic of Evidence-Based Healthcare (EBHC), reviewing some philosophical contributions by writers in that discourse. These niche-writings I contextualise briefly in relation to other academic meetings between philosophy and sociology. Second, I offer three philosophical perspectives on the topic of EBHC, and outline their significance for understanding it sociologically. I conclude that to navigate the difficult ground where philosophy and sociology meet, sociologists can entrain pure-philosophical argumentation to the purpose of critical, socially situated understandings.PostprintPeer reviewe

Inflationary differential evolution for Constrained Multi-Objective Optimisation Problem

In this paper we review several parameter-based scalarisation approaches used within Multi-Objective Optimisation. We propose then a proof-of-concept for a new memetic algorithm designed to solve the Constrained Multi-Objective Optimisation Problem. The algorithm is finally tested on a benchmark with a series of difficulties

“Being Guided”: What Oncofertility Patients’ Decisions Can Teach Us About the Efficacy of Autonomy, Agency, and Decision-Making Theory in the Contemporary Critical Encounter

Recent research on patient decision-making reveals a disconnect between theories of autonomy, agency, and decision-making and their practice in contemporary clinical encounters. This study examines these concepts in the context of female patients making oncofertility decisions in the United Kingdom in light of the phenomenon of “being guided.” Patients experience being guided as a way to cope with, understand, and defer difficult treatment decisions. Previous discussions condemn guided decision-making, but this research suggests that patients make an informed, autonomous decision to be guided by doctors. Thus, bioethicists must consider the multifaceted ways that patients enact their autonomy in medical encounters