Prometheus' Legacy: Responsibility and Technology

A prominent view in contemporary philosophy of technology suggests that more technology implies more possibilities and, therefore, more responsibilities. Consequently, the question ‘What technology?’ is discussed primarily on the backdrop of assessing, assigning, and avoiding technology-borne culpability. The view is reminiscent of the Olympian gods’ vengeful and harsh reaction to Prometheus’ play with fire. However, the Olympian view leaves unexplained how technologies increase possibilities. Also, if Olympians are right, endorsing their view will at some point demand putting a halt to technological development, which is absurd. Hence, we defend an alternative perspective on the relationship between responsibility and technology: Our Promethean view recognises technology as the result of collective, forward-looking responsibility and not only as a cause thereof. Several examples illustrate that technologies are not always the right means to tackle human vulnerabilities. Together, these arguments prompt a change in focus from the question ‘What technology?’ to ‘Why technology?

A pilot study of quality of life in German prehospital emergency care physicians

Background: Quality of life in patients represents an important area of assessment. However, attention to health professionals should be equally important. The literature on the quality of life (QOL) of emergency physicians is scarce. This pilot study investigated QOL in emergency physicians in Germany. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study from January to June in 2015. We approached the German Association of Emergency Medicine Physicians and two of the largest recruitment agencies for emergency physicians in Germany and invited their members to participate. We used the WHO Q-BREF to obtain QOL scores in four domains that included physical, mental, social, and environmental health. Results: The 478 German emergency physicians included in the study held board certifications in general medicine (n = 40; 8.4), anesthesiology (n = 243; 50.8), surgery (n = 63; 13.2), internal medicine (n = 81; 17.0), or others (n = 51; 10.7). The women surveyed tended to report a better QOL but worse general health than the men. Regarding specific domains, women scored worse in physical health, particularly energy during everyday work (relative risk ratio RRR: 1.98 1.21–3.24). Both men and women scored worse in psychological health than general health, particularly young women. Women were also more likely to view their safety (RRR: 1.87 1.07–3.28) and living place (RRR: 2.51 1.10–5.73) as being poor than their male counterparts. Conclusion: QOL in German prehospital emergency care physicians is satisfactory for the included participants; however, there were some negative effects in the psychological health domain. This is particularly obvious in young female emergency physicians

Testing the human factor: Radiocarbon dating the first peoples of the South Pacific

Archaeologists have long debated the origins and mode of dispersal of the immediate predecessors of all Polynesians and many populations in Island Melanesia. Such debates are inextricably linked to a chronological framework provided, in part, by radiocarbon dates. Human remains have the greatest potential for providing answers to many questions pertinent to these debates. Unfortunately, bone is one of the most complicated materials to date reliably because of bone degradation, sample pretreatment and diet. This is of particular concern in the Pacific where humidity contributes to the rapid decay of bone protein, and a combination of marine, reef, C₄, C₃ and freshwater foods complicate the interpretation of ¹⁴C determinations. Independent advances in bone pretreatment, isotope multivariate modelling and radiocarbon calibration techniques provide us, for the first time, with the tools to obtain reliable calibrated ages for Pacific burials. Here we present research that combines these techniques, enabling us to re-evaluate the age of burials from key archaeological sites in the Pacific

An inflamed necrotic appendix epiploicum with immediate contact to a non-inflamed appendix vermiformis: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Epiploic appendagitis is a rare cause of focal abdominal pain which, depending on its localisation, can mimic a variety of abdominal diseases. We describe a patient with an inflamed necrotic appendix epiploicum with immediate contact to a non-inflamed appendix vermiformis mimicking acute appendicitis. Considering the rare localization, this is the first report of this kind in the literature.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We present the case of a 50-year-old Caucasian man who presented with classic signs of acute appendicitis. On clinical exam, McBurney and Blumberg signs were positive. Additionally he had fever, leucocytosis (12/nl) and a slight increase in C-reactive protein (1 mg/dl). Based on the clinical presentation, the patient was taken to the operating room to perform an appendicectomy. Surprisingly, we found an inflamed necrotic appendix epiploicum, located immediately on a non-inflamed appendix vermiformis, which was ligated and excised.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This case report demonstrates that epiploic appendagitis can mimic acute appendicitis on clinical exam and should be considered in the broad spectrum of abdominal disease presenting with right lower quadrant pain.</p

Motion denoising with application to time-lapse photography

Motions can occur over both short and long time scales. We introduce motion denoising, which treats short-term changes as noise, long-term changes as signal, and re-renders a video to reveal the underlying long-term events. We demonstrate motion denoising for time-lapse videos. One of the characteristics of traditional time-lapse imagery is stylized jerkiness, where short-term changes in the scene appear as small and annoying jitters in the video, often obfuscating the underlying temporal events of interest. We apply motion denoising for resynthesizing time-lapse videos showing the long-term evolution of a scene with jerky short-term changes removed. We show that existing filtering approaches are often incapable of achieving this task, and present a novel computational approach to denoise motion without explicit motion analysis. We demonstrate promising experimental results on a set of challenging time-lapse sequences.United States. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NEGI-1582-04-0004)Shell ResearchUnited States. Office of Naval Research. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Grant N00014-06-1-0734)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (0964004

Moral Luck and Unfair Blame

Values Technology and InnovationEthics & Philosophy of Technolog

Word order in Topic-Focus structures in the Balkan languages

The paper examines the word order patterns of Balkan languages with respect to the representation of the discourse categories of Topic and Focus in the Left Periphery of the Balkan clause. It is argued that Balkan languages share a number of syntactic properties relevant to the discourse organization of their embeddded clauses, and it is claimed that such discourse similarities must have been favored by multi-linguistic speakers in contact situations, in particular those that led to the establishment of the Balkan Srachbund