5,608 research outputs found
Making an impact in healthcare contexts::insights from a mixed-methods study of professional misconduct
The scarcity of public sector healthcare resources and the vulnerability of service users make the conduct of health professionals critically important. Health regulators, in delivering their core objective of patient protection, use empirical evidence to identify professionalsâ misconduct, improve their understanding of why misconduct occurs, and to maximize the effectiveness of regulatory actions that safeguard public trust in the healthcare system. This paper outlines the contribution of comparative academic analysis of three professions in the UK (doctors, nurses & midwives, and allied health professions) based on 6714 individual cases of professional misconduct. Three dynamic strands of ongoing impact are identified: âdialogueâ, that creates an international multi-stakeholder community of interest; âknowledge generationâ, which advances conceptual and empirical understanding of counterproductive work behaviour through sequential quantitative and qualitative study; and âdisseminationâ, where practical learning is utilized by regulators, employers and other academics
The Ontology of Intentional Agency in Light of Neurobiological Determinism: Philosophy Meets Folk Psychology
The moot point of the Western philosophical rhetoric about free will
consists in examining whether the claim of authorship to intentional, deliberative
actions fits into or is undermined by a one-way causal framework of determinism.
Philosophers who think that reconciliation between the two is possible are known as
metaphysical compatibilists. However, there are philosophers populating the other
end of the spectrum, known as the metaphysical libertarians, who maintain that claim
to intentional agency cannot be sustained unless it is assumed that indeterministic
causal processes pervade the action-implementation apparatus employed by the agent.
The metaphysical libertarians differ among themselves on the question of whether the
indeterministic causal relation exists between the series of intentional states and
processes, both conscious and unconscious, and the action, making claim for what has
come to be known as the event-causal view, or between the agent and the action,
arguing that a sort of agent causation is at work. In this paper, I have tried to propose
that certain features of both event-causal and agent-causal libertarian views need to be
combined in order to provide a more defendable compatibilist account accommodating
deliberative actions with deterministic causation. The ââagent-executed-eventcausal
libertarianismââ, the account of agency I have tried to develop here, integrates
certain plausible features of the two competing accounts of libertarianism turning
them into a consistent whole. I hope to show in the process that the integration of these
two variants of libertarianism does not challenge what some accounts of metaphysical
compatibilism proposeâthat there exists a broader deterministic relation between the
web of mental and extra-mental components constituting the agentâs dispositional
systemâthe agentâs beliefs, desires, short-term and long-term goals based on them,
the acquired social, cultural and religious beliefs, the general and immediate and
situational environment in which the agent is placed, etc. on the one hand and the
decisions she makes over her lifetime on the basis of these factors. While in the
ââIntroductionââ the philosophically assumed anomaly between deterministic causation
and the intentional act of deciding has been briefly surveyed, the second section is
devoted to the task of bridging the gap between compatibilism and libertarianism. The
next section of the paper turns to an analysis of folk-psychological concepts and
intuitions about the effects of neurochemical processes and prior mental events on the
freedom of making choices. How philosophical insights can be beneficially informed
by taking into consideration folk-psychological intuitions has also been discussed,
thus setting up the background for such analysis. It has been suggested in the end that
support for the proposed theory of intentional agency can be found in the folk-psychological intuitions, when they are taken in the right perspective
Very Luminous Carbon Stars in the Outer Disk of the Triangulum Spiral Galaxy
Stars with masses in the range from about 1.3 to 3.5 Mo pass through an
evolutionary stage where they become carbon stars. In this stage, which lasts a
few Myr, these stars are extremely luminous pulsating giants. They are so
luminous in the near-infrared that just a few of them can double the integrated
luminosity of intermediate-age (0.6 to 2 Gyr) Magellanic Cloud clusters at 2.2
microns. Astronomers routinely use such near-infrared observations to minimize
the effects of dust extinction, but it is precisely in this band that carbon
stars can contribute hugely. The actual contribution of carbon stars to the
outer disk light of evolving spiral galaxies has not previously been
morphologically investigated. Here we report new and very deep near-IR images
of the Triangulum spiral galaxy M33=NGC 598, delineating spectacular arcs of
carbon stars in its outer regions. It is these arcs which dominate the
near-infrared m=2 Fourier spectra of M33. We present near-infrared photometry
with the Hale 5-m reflector, and propose that the arcs are the signature of
accretion of low metallicity gas in the outer disk of M33.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. Revised version submitted to A&A Letter
Low Temperature Magnetic Properties of the Double Exchange Model
We study the {\it ferromagnetic} (FM) Kondo lattice model in the strong
coupling limit (double exchange (DE) model). The DE mechanism proposed by Zener
to explain ferromagnetism has unexpected properties when there is more than one
itinerant electron. We find that, in general, the many-body ground state of the
DE model is {\it not} globally FM ordered (except for special filled-shell
cases). Also, the low energy excitations of this model are distinct from spin
wave excitations in usual Heisenberg ferromagnets, which will result in unusual
dynamic magnetic properties.Comment: 5 pages, RevTeX, 5 Postscript figures include
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Revised chronology for late Pleistocene Mono Lake sediments based on paleointensity correlation to the global reference curve
Lakes are highly sensitive recorders of climate processes, but are extremely difficult to correlate precisely to ice-core and marine records, especially in the absence of reliable radiocarbon dates. Relative paleointensity (RPI) of Earth's magnetic field is an independent method of correlating high-resolution climate records, and can be applied to both marine and terrestrial sediments, as well as (inversely) correlated to the cosmogenic nuclide records preserved in ice cores. Here we present the correlation of an RPI record from Mono Lake, California to GLOPIS, the Global PaleoIntensity Stack, which increases the age estimation of the basal Mono Lake sediments by > 20 000 yr (20 kyr), from âŒ40 ka (kyr before present) to 67 ka. The Mono Lake sediments thus preserve paleoclimatic records of most of the last glacial period, from 67 to 14 ka. In addition, the paleointensity-based age of 40 ka for the geomagnetic excursion preserved at Mono Lake indicates that this is a record of the global Laschamp excursion
Relating imperatives to action
The aim of this chapter is to provide an analysis of the use of logically complex imperatives, in particular, imperatives of the form Do A1 or A2 and Do A, if B. We argue for an analysis of imperatives in terms of classical logic which takes into account the influence of background information on imperatives. We show that by doing so one can avoid some counter-intuitive results which have been associated with analyses of imperatives in terms of classical logic. In particular, I address Hamblin's observations concerning rule-like imperatives and Ross' Paradox. The analysis is carried out within an agent-based logical framework. This analysis explicates what it means for an agent to have a successful policy for action with respect to satisfying his or her commitments, where some of these commitments have been introduced as a result of imperative language use
"How May I Help You?": Modeling Twitter Customer Service Conversations Using Fine-Grained Dialogue Acts
Given the increasing popularity of customer service dialogue on Twitter,
analysis of conversation data is essential to understand trends in customer and
agent behavior for the purpose of automating customer service interactions. In
this work, we develop a novel taxonomy of fine-grained "dialogue acts"
frequently observed in customer service, showcasing acts that are more suited
to the domain than the more generic existing taxonomies. Using a sequential
SVM-HMM model, we model conversation flow, predicting the dialogue act of a
given turn in real-time. We characterize differences between customer and agent
behavior in Twitter customer service conversations, and investigate the effect
of testing our system on different customer service industries. Finally, we use
a data-driven approach to predict important conversation outcomes: customer
satisfaction, customer frustration, and overall problem resolution. We show
that the type and location of certain dialogue acts in a conversation have a
significant effect on the probability of desirable and undesirable outcomes,
and present actionable rules based on our findings. The patterns and rules we
derive can be used as guidelines for outcome-driven automated customer service
platforms.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, IUI 201
Cognitive Computation sans Representation
The Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) holds that cognitive processes are essentially computational, and hence computation provides the scientific key to explaining mentality. The Representational Theory of Mind (RTM) holds that representational content is the key feature in distinguishing mental from non-mental systems. I argue that there is a deep incompatibility between these two theoretical frameworks, and that the acceptance of CTM provides strong grounds for rejecting RTM. The focal point of the incompatibility is the fact that representational content is extrinsic to formal procedures as such, and the intended interpretation of syntax makes no difference to the execution of an algorithm. So the unique 'content' postulated by RTM is superfluous to the formal procedures of CTM. And once these procedures are implemented in a physical mechanism, it is exclusively the causal properties of the physical mechanism that are responsible for all aspects of the system's behaviour. So once again, postulated content is rendered superfluous. To the extent that semantic content may appear to play a role in behaviour, it must be syntactically encoded within the system, and just as in a standard computational artefact, so too with the human mind/brain - it's pure syntax all the way down to the level of physical implementation. Hence 'content' is at most a convenient meta-level gloss, projected from the outside by human theorists, which itself can play no role in cognitive processing
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