Autonomous Driving and Public Reason: a Rawlsian Approach

In this paper, we argue that solutions to normative challenges associated with autonomous driving, such as real-world trolley cases or distributions of risk in mundane driving situations, face the problem of reasonable pluralism: Reasonable pluralism refers to the fact that there exists a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive moral doctrines (religions, philosophies, worldviews) within liberal democracies. The corresponding problem is that a politically acceptable solution cannot refer to only one of these comprehensive doctrines. Yet a politically adequate solution to the normative challenges of autonomous driving need not come at the expense of an ethical solution, if it is based on moral beliefs that are shared in an overlapping consensus and systematized through public reason. Therefore, we argue that a Rawlsian justificatory framework is able to adequately address the normative challenges of autonomous driving and elaborate on how such a framework might be employed for this purpose

A New Method for Structured Integration of User Needs in Two Health Technology Development Projects: Action Sheets

An early integration of users and stakeholders is needed for a successful innovation process. Nonetheless, the integration of users is often hard to realize - especially when dealing with persons with chronic diseases. In addition, patients or users in general often are not able to formulate the requirements in a technical manner. Therefore, even if user requirements are collected, it is not certain that the developers know or understand \u27what is really wanted\u27. To overcome these \u27gaps\u27, we have developed so-called Action Sheets (AS). This article presents the use of AS in two projects: the development of health technologies for people with cancer (INFOPAT) and dementia (QuartrBack). Depending on the project context, group sessions were conducted with different stakeholders to identify the needs of (potential) users. Within the INFOPAT project, ten focus groups were conducted with patients, physicians and other healthcare professionals. In QuartrBack stakeholders like e.g. care professionals, technical assistance organizations and citizens participated in two focus groups and three world cafes. Their requirements were then \u27fed\u27 into the technology development by the use of AS. AS appear to be a promising tool to make user needs based on social values more tangible and implementable into technology development processes. In addition, it shows up that four phases seem to be necessary for transferring identified user and stakeholder needs into AS, which can therefore be seen as essential to translate non-technically formulated requirements into technically feasible ones. The case study shows as lessons learned that despite the successful integration of user needs, context-sensitive adjustments are still necessary

Transport, optical and electronic properties of the half metal CrO2

The electronic structure of CrO_2 is critically discussed in terms of the relation of existing experimental data and well converged LSDA and GGA calculations of the electronic structure and transport properties of this half metal magnet, with a particular emphasis on optical properties. We find only moderate manifestations of many body effects. Renormalization of the density of states is not large and is in the typical for transition metals range. We find substantial deviations from Drude behavior in the far-infrared optical conductivity. These appear because of the unusually low energy of interband optical transitions. The calculated mass renormalization is found to be rather sensitive to the exchange-correlation functional used and varies from 10% (LSDA) to 90% (GGA), using the latest specific heat data. We also find that dressing of the electrons by spin fluctuations, because of their high energy, renormalizes the interband optical transition at as high as 4 eV by about 20%. Although we find no clear indications of strong correlations of the Hubbard type, strong electron-magnon scattering related to the half metallic band structure is present and this leads to a nontrivial temperature dependence of the resistivity and some renormalization of the electron spectra.Comment: 9 Revtex 2 column pages, including 8 postscript figures. Two more figures are included in the submission that are not embedded in the paper, representing DOS and bandstructure of the paramagnetic CrO