Although ethics is an essential component of undergraduate medical education, research suggests current medical ethics curricula face considerable challenges in improving students’ ethical reasoning. This paper discusses these challenges and introduces a promising new mode of graduate and professional ethics instruction for overcoming them. We begin by describing common ethics curricula, focusing in particular on established problems with current approaches. Next, we describe a novel method of ethics education and assessment for medical students that we have devised, the Medical Ethics (...) Bowl. Finally, we suggest pedagogical advantages to MEBs when compared to other ethics curricula. (shrink)

The ideas behind open source software are currently applied to the production of encyclopedias. A sample of six English text-based, neutral-point-of-view, online encyclopedias of the kind are identified: h2g2, Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium and Knol. How do these projects deal with the problem of trusting their participants to behave as competent and loyal encyclopedists? Editorial policies for soliciting and processing content are shown to range from high discretion to low discretion; that is, from granting unlimited trust to (...) limited trust. Their conceptions of the proper role for experts are also explored and it is argued that to a great extent they determine editorial policies. Subsequently, internal discussions about quality guarantee at Wikipedia are rendered. All indications are that review and ?super-review? of new edits will become policy, to be performed by Wikipedians with a better reputation. Finally, while for encyclopedias the issue of organizational trust largely coincides with epistemological trust, a link is made with theories about the acceptance of testimony. It is argued that both non-reductionist views (the ?acceptance principle? and the ?assurance view?) and reductionist ones (an appeal to background conditions, and a?newly defined??expertise view?) have been implemented in editorial strategies over the past decade. (shrink)

My article began as a very short 250 words inspired by astrophysicist Jeff Hester's (pro-evolution) pages on entropy (Astronomy magazine - Oct. and Nov. 2017 - http://www.astronomy.com/magazine/jeff-hester/2017/09/entropys-rainbow and http://www.astronomy.com/magazine/jeff-hester/2017/10/entropy-redux). The letter I wrote pointed out evolution's pluses (eg adaptations) and minuses (regarding origins). It went on to speak of a human, scientific, entirely natural explanation for what is called God. It proposes that the true human condition after death and before birth is as a member of the (...) Elohim - a name used for God in the Old Testament which, according to World Book Encyclopedia, means the PLURAL MAJESTY OF THE ONE GOD. This led to a few hundred more words about why some people call an entirely natural process "supernatural". I speculate that it must be because of the applications in thousands of years of finding a successful theory of quantum gravity (union of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity - general relativity). Like quantum mechanics and gravitation, those apps would include all space and all time, and would undoubtedly be as mysterious to us as our technology would initially be to the builders of Egypt's first pyramids. In years past, the denial of divine beings by science may have been logical. But times sometimes change radically. Such a paradigm shift seems to be upon us now, with the recent discovery of gravitational waves and the anticipation of quantum gravity. In changing times, scientists and philosophers and everyone must always keep open minds. Of course, proposing that the human condition after death and before birth is as a member of the Elohim means that humans of the far distant future must be capable of the creation attributed to God by many people throughout the centuries. Therefore, a subsection entitled "Creation Of The Infinite, Eternal Cosmos Using Electronic BITS, Pi And Imaginary Time" has been added to the end of this article. -/- . (shrink)