Designing Robots for Care: Care Centered Value-Sensitive Design

The prospective robots in healthcare intended to be included within the conclave of the nurse-patient relationship—what I refer to as care robots—require rigorous ethical reflection to ensure their design and introduction do not impede the promotion of values and the dignity of patients at such a vulnerable and sensitive time in their lives. The ethical evaluation of care robots requires insight into the values at stake in the healthcare tradition. What’s more, given the stage of their development and lack of standards provided by the International Organization for Standardization to guide their development, ethics ought to be included into the design process of such robots. The manner in which this may be accomplished, as presented here, uses the blueprint of the Value-sensitive design approach as a means for creating a framework tailored to care contexts. Using care values as the foundational values to be integrated into a technology and using the elements in care, from the care ethics perspective, as the normative criteria, the resulting approach may be referred to as care centered value-sensitive design. The framework proposed here allows for the ethical evaluation of care robots both retrospectively and prospectively. By evaluating care robots in this way, we may ultimately ask what kind of care we, as a society, want to provide in the futur

Candidate Materials as Gain Media in Organic, Triplet-Based, Room-Temperature masers Targeting the ISM Bands

While lasers have enjoyed greater popularity, masers—which emit coherent radiation in the microwave spectrum—are also of critical importance to a variety of applications. Recently, an organic gain medium has been developed, which allows emission at room temperature without the traditional encumbrances of cryogenic cooling or an externally applied magnetic field, at vastly improved power efficiency. This discovery opens up new avenues for applications that were previously impractical. However, further investigation is still required for frequency tuning of the device, through the selection of alternate gain media beyond the original choice of pentacene-doped p-terphenyl and some linear acenes similar to the pentacene prototype. This chapter outlines some of the essential criteria necessary to achieve masing with an organic semiconductor gain medium, including zero-field splitting (ZFS), triplet sublevel division, and metastable population inversion. Three tables of possible candidate materials are presented based on this roster of criteria, particularly targeting emission in one of the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands. A selection of preferred guest molecules is recommended for in-situ testing as room-temperature masers gain media candidates

Conservation and Variation of Structural Flexibility in Protein Families

In this issue, Raimondi et al. (2010) obtained interesting insights concerning structural flexibilities in the Ras superfamily that are essential to both function retention and specialization by analyzing the deformation patterns from physical models of protein structure and from crystal structures of homologous proteins

The Dawning of the Ethics of Environmental Robots

Environmental scientists and engineers have been exploring research and monitoring applications of robotics, as well as exploring ways of integrating robotics into ecosystems to aid in responses to accelerating environmental, climatic,and biodiversity changes. These emerging applications of robots and other autonomous technologies present novel ethical and practical challenges. Yet, the critical applications of robots for environmental research, engineering, protection and remediation have received next to no attention in the ethics of robotics literature to date. This paper seeks to fill that void, and promote the study of environmental robotics. It provides key resources for further critical examination of the issues environmental robots present by explaining and differentiating the sorts of environmental robotics that exist to date and identifying unique conceptual, ethical, and practical issues they present

Protein structural variation in computational models and crystallographic data

Normal mode analysis offers an efficient way of modeling the conformational flexibility of protein structures. Simple models defined by contact topology, known as elastic network models, have been used to model a variety of systems, but the validation is typically limited to individual modes for a single protein. We use anisotropic displacement parameters from crystallography to test the quality of prediction of both the magnitude and directionality of conformational variance. Normal modes from four simple elastic network model potentials and from the CHARMM forcefield are calculated for a data set of 83 diverse, ultrahigh resolution crystal structures. While all five potentials provide good predictions of the magnitude of flexibility, the methods that consider all atoms have a clear edge at prediction of directionality, and the CHARMM potential produces the best agreement. The low-frequency modes from different potentials are similar, but those computed from the CHARMM potential show the greatest difference from the elastic network models. This was illustrated by computing the dynamic correlation matrices from different potentials for a PDZ domain structure. Comparison of normal mode results with anisotropic temperature factors opens the possibility of using ultrahigh resolution crystallographic data as a quantitative measure of molecular flexibility. The comprehensive evaluation demonstrates the costs and benefits of using normal mode potentials of varying complexity. Comparison of the dynamic correlation matrices suggests that a combination of topological and chemical potentials may help identify residues in which chemical forces make large contributions to intramolecular coupling.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

The concept of embedded values and the example of internet security

Many current technological devices used in our everyday lives confront us with a host of new ethical issues to be addressed. Facebook, Twitter, or smart phones are all examples of technologies used quite pervasively which call into question culturally significant values like privacy, among others. The embedded values concept presents the compelling idea that engineers, scientists and designers can create technologies which intentionally enhance cultural and societal values while at the same time minimizing threats to other values. Although the embedded values concept (and the resulting design theories that follow) is of great utility, it remains unclear how to utilize this concept in practice. Added to this is the difficulty of utilizing this concept when engaged in fundamental research or experiments rather than in the creation of a commercial product. This paper presents a novel approach for collaboration between an ethicist and a computer engineering PhD researcher working on the Internet Bad Neighborhoods concept for spam filtering. The results proved beneficial in terms of both the utility of the embedded values concept as well as a strengthening of the engineering PhD researcher’s work

De Brusselse metropool: naar een ontwikkelingsmodel tussen dat van Rijsel en Berlijn?

Van alle mogelijke scenario’s voor Brussel zijn de minst bekende wellicht die van de metropool en de stadsgemeenschap. Die twee scenario’s kunnen in hun minimalistische versie in overweging worden genomen zonder institutionele hervorming en zonder te raken aan de grenzen van Brussel. Dat maakt ze minder ’onbespreekbaar’ dan de oplossingen die verschillende gesprekspartners voorstellen, zoals de uitbreiding van Brussel, het condominium-statuut (gezamenlijk beheer) of Brussel als Europees district. Rijsel heeft zich ontwikkeld op twee grondgebieden: de stadsgemeenschap die uit 85 gemeenten bestaat en de metropool die verder reikt dan de landsgrenzen. Berlijn en Brandenburg hebben een fusie overwogen, maar dat plan werd na een referendum tegengehouden. Er werden echter wel vormen van metropolitane samenwerking geformaliseerd. Rijsel en Berlijn leveren ons vier scenario’s op die interessant kunnen zijn voor de verdere ontwikkeling van Brussel.De tous les scénarios évoqués pour Bruxelles, les moins connus sont sans doute ceux de la métropole et de la communauté urbaine. Ces deux pistes sont envisageables, dans leur version minimale, sans réforme institutionnelle et sans toucher aux frontières de Bruxelles, ce qui les rend moins « onbespreekbaar » que l’élargissement de Bruxelles, la cogestion ou le district européen, selon les interlocuteurs. Lille s’est développée autour de deux territoires : la communauté urbaine regroupant 85 communes et la métropole transcendant les frontières étatiques. Berlin et le Brandebourg ont envisagé la fusion, mais le projet a été bloqué par un referendum. Cependant, des collaborations de type métropolitaines ont été formalisées. Les quatre scénarios issus de ces deux villes offrent autant de leçons pour le développement de Bruxelles.The least known of the different scenarios being debated for Brussels are probably those for the development of a metropolis or an urban community. In their minimalist versions, both scenarios can be envisaged without requiring institutional reform and without touching the borders of Brussels, which makes them less “onbespreekbaar” – depending on the interlocutor – than enlargement of the city, co-management, or the European district. Lille’s development is based on two territories: the urban community that groups 85 municipalities and the metropolis that transcends state borders. Berlin and Brandenburg have explored a merger, but the project was blocked by a referendum. However, various types of formal “metropolitan”-type cooperation have been put in place. The four scenarios resulting from these two cities offer lessons for the development of Brussels