The Commission looking into the possibility of a British bill of rights is supposed to support diversity and inclusivity, but is fatally compromised by its narrow membership base

As debates on the role of the European Court of Human Rights in UK society continue, Nick Clegg and Ken Clarke have recently launched a Commission to look at the possibility for a UK Bill of Rights. Conor Gearty writes that despite its apparent ‘independence’, the Commission is weakened by its own obvious lack of diversity

A comment on "A fast L_p spike alignment metric" by A. J. Dubbs, B. A. Seiler and M. O. Magnasco [arXiv:0907.3137]

Measuring the transmitted information in metric-based clustering has become something of a standard test for the performance of a spike train metric. In this comment, the recently proposed L_p Victor-Purpura metric is used to cluster spiking responses to zebra finch songs, recorded from field L of anesthetized zebra finch. It is found that for these data the L_p metrics with p>1 modestly outperform the standard, p=1, Victor-Purpura metric. It is argued that this is because for larger values of p, the metric comes closer to performing windowed coincidence detection.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures included as late

Heaney and the neighbour: poetry between politics and ethics

In this essay I argue that Heaney uses the figure of the neighbour to examine questions of otherness and cultural difference and their relationship to history and politics. The neighbour is of course a figure that has played a central role in Western philosophy and theology for centuries, from the Gospels and Kant to Freud and Lacan. It is also a concept to which Western poetry often returns, particularly in the work of Herbert, Clare, Eliot and Auden. Heaney too belongs to this tradition, in that his oeuvre contains many poems which consider the relationship between neighbours, and do so in ways profoundly suggestive for consideration of the relationship between historical events, social structures, cultural difference and psychic affect. In my essay I argue that Heaney sketches a profoundly materialist conception of subjectivity in its relationship with the Other. In doing so I contrast Heaney’s treatment of the neighbour, with its emphasis on questions of politics and locality, to the treatment of the neighbour in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

The photosynthesis-foliar nitrogen relationship in deciduous and evergreen forests in New Hampshire

Biomass production in forests is a key process in the global carbon (C) cycle that is strongly linked to photosynthesis and related leaf traits. Spatially, relationships among leaf traits can vary as a function of climate, soils and species composition. As modeling approaches to estimate C gain improve, the need to understand variability in leaf traits becomes increasingly important. Here, we characterized the relationship between photosynthetic capacity (Amax), foliar nitrogen and leaf mass per area (LMA) within and across species in northern hardwood and evergreen stands of the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, a region that has been underrepresented in past leaf trait studies. Results were used to parameterize a forest ecosystem model (PnET) that has been widely used in the Northeast region to predict ecosystem C fluxes. Within all species, Amax was strongly and positively related to mass-based foliar percent nitrogen (%N). The observed relationship between foliar %N and Amax differed significantly from the previously used model parameterization that was based on leaf trait data from forest stands in Wisconsin, and was largely a function of differences in leaf mass per area. Using site-specific foliar %N and LMA to estimate Amax in PnET improved the estimation of GPP by 5.5% in comparison with GPP estimates derived from an eddy covariance tower

Escaping Hobbes: liberty and security for our democratic (not anti-terrorist) age

The terms 'liberty' and 'security' are analysed against a background of contemporary concerns about terrorism and the decline of freedom. The influence of Hobbes’s approach to liberty has been pervasive, and the effect of this has been to promote an approach to freedom which has been too willing to sacrifice individual liberty to the needs of the state. Republican attitudes to freedom have been likewise disinclined to allow the individual to get in the way of what the exigencies of the moment demand. The result of these two large-scale and important sets of historical ideas has been a democratic polity (in Britain and the US, but across the world, as well), which has been too consumed with (national) security and not sufficiently alive to the demands either of a broader kind of human security rooted in human flourishing or to the political liberty necessary to its achievement. The essay argues for a new reconciliation between liberty and security based on the language of human rights and manifested in, firstly, a wider approach to security (encompassing social and economic rights) and, secondly, a renewed commitment to the criminal law as the best means available for squaring security from harm with an unequivocal respect for the person, which must always be at the core of any human rights framework

Empirical Evidence of Group Impact in the Context of Ethical Decision Making

Recent accounting scandals involving the collapse of large corporate firms have brought into question the adequacy of ethics education within accounting programs. This paper investigates the ethical decisions of accountancy students and in particular analyses the effect of group (as opposed to individual) decision-making on ethical decisions. Two classes of final year accountancy students were presented with five (5) ethical vignettes which they completed as individuals. The two classes were subsequently divided into groups of 3 participants and each group completed the same survey instrument. Group responses yielded a significantly more ethical attitude in three of the five scenarios, the other two displaying no significant difference. Evidence also exists however of groups restraining potential whistleblowing, suggesting group work can have both a positive and negative effect. The critical implication of this finding is in relation to how accounting educators attempt to convey the ethical message. Many accounting programs place emphasis on group work. Group work may enhance students’ abilities to work as a team and may be an effective means of producing the optimal decision in complex areas such as ethical decision-making but may on occasion retard highly ethical individual

Pushing Elephants Uphill - Teaching Ethics. It Works!

Recent releases from the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) highlight the importance of ethics education. Academic institutions employ varying methods of teaching ethics and place varying levels of emphasis on ethics teaching during a business/accounting degree. This paper attempts to evaluate whether teaching ethics to final year accountancy students is beneficial. At the commencement of a semester one class of 155 students were given five ethical scenarios on which to make an ethical decision. During the semester they were subject to three different methods of teaching ethics, a traditional lecture/tutorial; use of a computer based interactive case study to work through an ethical dilemma; and, forming groups to complete a group written assignment solving another ethical dilemma. The subjects were subsequently given the original five ethical scenarios and asked to complete them again. In all five instances the mean responses were more ethical after the instruction methodologies (4 significantly so). When asked to evaluate the methodologies the subjects considered all three to have a positive effect on their ethical thinking and the combined effect was more positive than any individual method. Hence it appears teaching ethics can impact positively, the challenge is to find the optimal method(s)

The validity of smartphone data and its relationship to clinical symptomatology and brain biology: an exploratory analysis

BACKGROUND: Presently, there is very little research on the clinical validity of mental health smartphone application data, its relationship to brain biology, and its ability to inform clinical decisions. This paper seeks to explore these relationships within a sample of schizophrenic patients through the analysis of data collected on the mental health smartphone application Biewe. OBJECTIVES: To validate mental health smartphone applications and support their potential to augment clinical practice. METHODS: The application involved a series of 21 questions from several questionnaires including Patient Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ-8), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), Warning Signals Scale (WSS), Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and the psychosis subscale of the Mini Mental State Examination. Data was collected over a period of 3 months, and patients attended a total of 4 clinic visits during this timeframe. Seven study participants also had brain scan data available from the BSNIP, PARDIP and Biceps studies currently in progress at MMHC which has been used for analysis. The structural MPRAGE T1 scans were processed using Free Surfer 6 in which thickness and volume measures were extracted. All statistical analyses on the data were carried out using R statistics software. RESULTS: Clinic and application responses within the same week were not significantly different from each other. The application answers, however, appeared to be more sensitive to structural abnormalities in the brain. Symptoms defined as a lack of normal emotional responses (i.e. negative symptoms of schizophrenia) were negatively correlated to home time and positively correlated to distance travelled, which was a counterintuitive result. CONCLUSIONS: The results show that mobile monitoring has the potential to be a valid and reliable method of data collection and that it may be able to augment clinical decision making