Parental Responsibility and Gene Editing

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-140
Author(s):  
Nicole A Vincent ◽  
Emma A. Jane
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Genetic Screening ◽  
Gene Editing ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Social Pressure ◽  
Parental Responsibility ◽  
Over Time

Once genetic screening and intervention technologies become safe, effective, and inexpensive, should parents use them to safeguard their children’s happiness, and would parents who do not use them be reckless and irresponsible? This line of thinking is troubling for many reasons, but in particular because it overlooks that social pressure, not a sense of responsibility, is what will most likely lead parents to use such technologies. This matters because unless more attention is paid to how people’s choices are affected by group dynamics, then over time nobody may even notice when such technologies start being used in troubling ways. To address this concern, the chapter argues that social institutions are needed that enable society as a whole to reflect on its own evolution over time. Until such institutions are created—to oversee, to evaluate, and to control social factors that influence people’s choices—it makes little sense to debate parental responsibilities.

Domestic Integration and Suicide in the Provinces of Canada

Crisis ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoon A. Leenaars ◽  
David Lester
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Positive Association ◽  
Negative Association ◽  
Birth Rates ◽  
Marriage Rates ◽  
Suicide Rates ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divorce Rates ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
Over Time

Canada's rate of suicide varies from province to province. The classical theory of suicide, which attempts to explain the social suicide rate, stems from Durkheim, who argued that low levels of social integration and regulation are associated with high rates of suicide. The present study explored whether social factors (divorce, marriage, and birth rates) do in fact predict suicide rates over time for each province (period studied: 1950-1990). The results showed a positive association between divorce rates and suicide rates, and a negative association between birth rates and suicide rates. Marriage rates showed no consistent association, an anomaly as compared to research from other nations.

“That’s well good”: A Re-emergent Intensifier in Current British English

2020 ◽  
pp. 007542422097914
Author(s):  
Karin Aijmer
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
British English ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Time Gap ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Semantic Types ◽  
Over Time ◽  
National Corpus

Well has a long history and is found as an intensifier already in older English. It is argued that diachronically well has developed from its etymological meaning (‘in a good way’) on a cline of adverbialization to an intensifier and to a discourse marker. Well is replaced by other intensifiers in the fourteenth century but emerges in new uses in Present-Day English. The changes in frequency and use of the new intensifier are explored on the basis of a twenty-year time gap between the old British National Corpus (1994) and the new Spoken British National Corpus (2014). The results show that well increases in frequency over time and that it spreads to new semantic types of adjectives and participles, and is found above all in predicative structures with a copula. The emergence of a new well and its increase in frequency are also related to social factors such as the age, gender, and social class of the speakers, and the informal character of the conversation.

The Influence of Social Factors on Common Mental Disorders

1990 ◽  
Vol 156 (5) ◽  
pp. 704-713 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Goldberg ◽  
Keith Bridges ◽  
Diane Cook ◽  
Barbara Evans ◽  
David Grayson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Common Mental Disorders ◽  
Anxiety And Depression ◽  
Symptom Dimensions ◽  
Personality Variables ◽  
Over Time

This study distinguishes between processes that cause individuals to experience symptoms – destabilisation – and those that are associated with loss of symptoms over time – restitution. It is shown that different clinical, social, and personality variables are associated with each of these processes. Where destabilisation is concerned, it is shown that different variables were associated with the development of symptoms of anxiety and those of depression. Different variables were associated with restitution, and they did not show the same relationship with the symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression as those which were associated with destabilisation.

Social and Economic Factors of Development

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-46
Author(s):  
Bogdan Ershov ◽  
Natalia Muhina ◽  
Igor Asmarov
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Quantitative Composition ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
The People ◽  
Russian State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material State

Russian statehood has more than a thousand-year history and traditions. It is obvious that the social, economic, and political development of the country had its direct or indirect influence on the Russian state and statehood itself. Therefore, in this chapter we separately single out the social factors of the development of Russian statehood and the economic factors of the development of Russian statehood, which stand apart from each other. Social factors in the development of Russian statehood are factors in the development of society as a single and complex organism and its social institutions. Social factors are, in essence, domestic political, because they represent the political and spiritual state of the elite and the people, the established system of social relations, internal social contradictions, and social conflicts. The economic factors of the development of Russian statehood are divided into external and internal ones. External economic factors are the proximity or remoteness from the trade routes, and the qualitative and quantitative composition of the country's exports and imports. Internal economic factors are the achieved material state of society, the availability of natural resources and their involvement in the economy, the availability of transport and production infrastructure and its development, and economic crises.

The Hub

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-181
Author(s):  
James N. Stanford
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Mixed Effects ◽  
Regression Modeling ◽  
Linear Mixed Effects ◽  
Eastern Massachusetts ◽  
Over Time

This is the first of two chapters (Chapters 6 and 7) that analyze fieldwork results in eastern Massachusetts. This chapter analyzes the eastern Massachusetts “Hub” region as a whole, providing a statistical overview of speakers interviewed in the Dartmouth-based fieldwork in this area. It examines the results in terms of major traditional Eastern New England dialect features, including Linear Mixed Effects regression modeling in terms of phonetic environments and social factors like age, gender, social class, and ethnicity. The chapter also plots these dialect features in terms of speakers’ birth year and other factors, showing how these features are changing over time.

Regulating Pollution: Alara, Batneec and Beyond

1996 ◽  
Vol 210 (5) ◽  
pp. 335-343
Author(s):  
A Robson
Keyword(s):  
Health Economic ◽  
Radiation Exposure ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Pollution Control ◽  
Nuclear Industry ◽  
Best Available Techniques ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Pollution Regulation ◽  
Integrated Pollution Control ◽  
Over Time

Pollution regulation in the United Kingdom has developed over many years, with different agencies developing different approaches to protect air, water and land. Furthermore, regulation of the nuclear industry developed separately from other industries. In the 1990s an era of Integrated Pollution Control began. The aim is to unify the way pollution is regulated by building on concepts like the reduction of radiation exposure to levels of As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) and the prevention of conventional pollution via the Best Available Techniques Not Entailing Excessive Cost (BATNEEC). Regulatory methodologies suffer from difficulties inherent in dealing with a mixture of health, economic, environmental and social factors. Guidance on how this should be undertaken has developed over time, but is still far from being clear and unambiguous in some key areas. This paper reviews the background to concepts like ALARA and BATNEEC, and discusses the optimization of impacts across more than one medium to achieve the Best Practicable Environmental Option (BPEO). The paper looks beyond current procedures by discussing the problems associated with their application to developing issues.

Introduction

2010 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela T. Ragusa
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Sandra Harding ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Over Time

Epistemology is the concept used to describe ways of knowing. In other words, how you know what you know. Sociologists have been interested in how knowledge is produced since the discipline was founded in the 19th Century. How we come to know our world and make sense of it are influenced by social institutions, individual attitudes and behaviors, and our demographic position within the social order. The social order is an historical product which continues to change over time. To facilitate our learning from our socio-historical experiences, sociologists frequently turn to ideas expressed by social theorists. Social theory, whether classical or contemporary, may thus be employed to help us make sense of changes in our social and material world. Although technology is arguably as ancient as our first ancestors, as the chapters in this book reveal, the characteristics of and communications within our postindustrial society vary greatly from those which occurred in the age of modernity. This introductory chapter identifies a few well-known social theorists who have historically attempted to explain how and why social systems, at macro and micro levels, change over time. Next, it contextualizes communication as a cultural product, arguing the best way to examine the topic is from multiple, local perspectives. In the feminist tradition of postmodernist Sandra Harding, it implores us to consider the premise and source of the knowledge sources we use and espouse while communicating and interacting in specific ways and environments. Finally, grounded in the systemic backdrop of social inequality, this chapter encourages readers to begin the task of critical thinking and reflecting about how each of us, as individuals and members of local communities, nations and the world, assuage or reproduces the structurally-derived inequalities which the globalization of communication and technical systems and interacting in a global environment manifests.

The Collective Dynamics of Genocidal Violence in Cambodia, 1975–1979

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 411-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter B. Owens
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Central State ◽  
Collective Dynamics ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Individual Effects ◽  
Local Patterns ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Over Time

While previous research conceptualizes genocide as an outcome of complex interactions between multiple social factors, the specific ways in which these factors interact and combine with each other, and how their individual effects may be mediated through such interaction, remain to be empirically specified. Using historical accounts given by survivors of the Cambodian genocide, and drawing from insights in the collective action literature, this study presents a configurational and comparative analysis of the collective dynamics of genocidal violence. The analysis focuses on how changing local patterns of relational and cognitive collective mechanisms created distinctly local patterns of violence, affecting both levels of victimization and the targeting of different groups over time. While the expansion and consolidation of central state power accounts for a generalized increase in violence, official framing practices mediated how groups became targeted. These findings confirm and extend the insights of other meso-level studies of genocide, and demonstrate the utility of comparative configurational methods for further inquiry.

scholarly journals Combining Crowdsourcing and Deep Learning to Assess Public Opinion on CRISPR-Cas9

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Müller ◽  
Manuel Schneider ◽  
Marcel Salathé ◽  
Effy Vayena
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Gene Editing ◽  
Technology Development ◽  
Medical Engineering ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
High Temporal Resolution ◽  
Social Media Networks ◽  
Over Time

AbstractThe discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9-based gene editing method has opened un-precedented new potential for biological and medical engineering, sparking a growing public debate on both the potential and dangers of CRISPR applications. Given the speed of technology development, and the almost instantaneous global spread of news, it’s important to follow evolving debates without much delay and in sufficient detail, as certain events may have a major long-term impact on public opinion and later influence policy decisions. Social media networks such as Twitter have shown to be major drivers of news dissemination and public discourse. They provide a vast amount of semi-structured data in almost real-time and give direct access to the content of the conversations. Such data can now be mined and analyzed quickly because of recent developments in machine learning and natural language processing. Here, we used BERT, an attention-based transformer model, in combination with statistical methods to analyse the entirety of all tweets ever published on CRISPR since the publication of the first gene editing application in 2013. We show that the mean sentiment of tweets was initially very positive, but began to decrease over time, and that this decline was driven by rare peaks of strong negative sentiments. Due to the high temporal resolution of the data, we were able to associate these peaks with specific events, and to observe how trending topics changed over time. Overall, this type of analysis can provide valuable and complementary insights into ongoing public debates, extending the traditional empirical bioethics toolset.

scholarly journals Forma mentis networks map how nursing and engineering students enhance their mindsets about innovation and health during professional growth

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Stella ◽  
Anna Zaytseva
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Professional Growth ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Over Time

Reconstructing a “forma mentis”, a mindset, and its changes, means capturing how individuals perceive topics, trends and experiences over time. To this aim we use forma mentis networks (FMNs), which enable direct, microscopic access to how individuals conceptually perceive knowledge and sentiment around a topic, providing richer contextual information than machine learning. FMNs build cognitive representations of stances through psycholinguistic tools like conceptual associations from semantic memory (free associations, i.e., one concept eliciting another) and affect norms (valence, i.e., how attractive a concept is). We test FMNs by investigating how Norwegian nursing and engineering students perceived innovation and health before and after a 2-month research project in e-health. We built and analysed FMNs by six individuals, based on 75 cues about innovation and health, and leading to 1,000 associations between 730 concepts. We repeated this procedure before and after the project. When investigating changes over time, individual FMNs highlighted drastic improvements in all students’ stances towards “teamwork”, “collaboration”, “engineering” and “future”, indicating the acquisition and strengthening of a positive belief about innovation. Nursing students improved their perception of ‘robots” and “technology” and related them to the future of nursing. A group-level analysis related these changes to the emergence, during the project, of conceptual associations about openness towards multidisciplinary collaboration, and a positive, leadership-oriented group dynamics. The whole group identified “mathematics” and “coding” as highly relevant concepts after the project. When investigating persistent associations, characterising the core of students’ mindsets, network distance entropy and closeness identified as pivotal in the students’ mindsets concepts related to “personal well-being”, “professional growth” and “teamwork”. This result aligns with and extends previous studies reporting the relevance of teamwork and personal well-being for Norwegian healthcare professionals, also within the novel e-health sector. Our analysis indicates that forma mentis networks are powerful proxies for detecting individual- and group-level mindset changes due to professional growth. FMNs open new scenarios for data-informed, multidisciplinary interventions aimed at professional training in innovation.

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