Collaboration and knowledge exchange between scholars in Britain and the empire, 1830–1914

In recent years there has been a growing interest among historians in the British Empire as a space of knowledge production and circulation. Much of this work assumes that scholarly cooperation and collaboration between individuals and institutions within the Empire had the effect (and often also the aim) of strengthening both imperial ties and the idea of empire. This chapter argues, however, that many examples of scholarly travel, exchange, and collaboration were undertaken with very different goals in mind. In particular, it highlights the continuing importance of an ideal of scientific internationalism, which stressed the benefits of scholarship for the whole of humanity and prioritized the needs and goals of individual academic and scientific disciplines. As the chapter shows, some scholars even went on to develop nuanced critiques of the imperial project while using the very structures of empire to further their own individual, disciplinary and institutional goals

Practicing physiotherapy in Danish private practice: an ethical perspective.

Despite an increasingly growth of professional guidelines, textbooks and research about ethics in health care, awareness about ethics in Danish physiotherapy private practice seen vague. This article explores how physiotherapists in Danish private practice, from an ethical perspective, perceive to practice physiotherapy. The empirical data consists of interviews with twenty-one physiotherapists. The interviews are analysed from a hermeneutic approach, inspired by Ricoeur's textual interpretation of distanciation. The analysis follows three phases: naïve reading, structural analysis and comprehensive analysis. Four main themes are constructed: Beneficence as the driving force; Disciplining the patient through the course of physiotherapy; Balancing between being a trustworthy professional and a businessperson; The dream of a code of practice. Private practice physiotherapy is embedded in a structural frame directed by both political and economical conditions that shape the conditions for practicing physiotherapy. It means that beneficence in practice is a balance between the patient, the physiotherapists themselves and the business. Beneficence towards the patient is expressed as an implicit demand. Physiotherapeutic practice is expressed as being an integration of professionalism and personality which implies that the physiotherapists also have to benefit themselves. Private practice seems to be driven by a paternalistic approach towards the patient, where disciplining the patient is a crucial element of practice, in order to optimise profit. Physiotherapists wish for a more beneficent practice in the future by aiming at bridging 'to be' and 'ought to be'

Qualia: The Geometry of Integrated Information

According to the integrated information theory, the quantity of consciousness is the amount of integrated information generated by a complex of elements, and the quality of experience is specified by the informational relationships it generates. This paper outlines a framework for characterizing the informational relationships generated by such systems. Qualia space (Q) is a space having an axis for each possible state (activity pattern) of a complex. Within Q, each submechanism specifies a point corresponding to a repertoire of system states. Arrows between repertoires in Q define informational relationships. Together, these arrows specify a quale—a shape that completely and univocally characterizes the quality of a conscious experience. Φ— the height of this shape—is the quantity of consciousness associated with the experience. Entanglement measures how irreducible informational relationships are to their component relationships, specifying concepts and modes. Several corollaries follow from these premises. The quale is determined by both the mechanism and state of the system. Thus, two different systems having identical activity patterns may generate different qualia. Conversely, the same quale may be generated by two systems that differ in both activity and connectivity. Both active and inactive elements specify a quale, but elements that are inactivated do not. Also, the activation of an element affects experience by changing the shape of the quale. The subdivision of experience into modalities and submodalities corresponds to subshapes in Q. In principle, different aspects of experience may be classified as different shapes in Q, and the similarity between experiences reduces to similarities between shapes. Finally, specific qualities, such as the “redness” of red, while generated by a local mechanism, cannot be reduced to it, but require considering the entire quale. Ultimately, the present framework may offer a principled way for translating qualitative properties of experience into mathematics

Irrelevant tactile stimulation biases visual exploration in external coordinates

Ossandón JP, König P, Heed T. Irrelevant tactile stimulation biases visual exploration in external coordinates. Scientific Reports. 2015;5(1): 10664