Thinking about Thinking: Implications for Patient Safety

Clinical medicine, a learned, rational, science-using practice, is labelled a science even though physicians have the good sense not to practise it that way. Rather than thinking like scientists - or how we think scientists think - physicians are engaged in analogical, interpretive reasoning that resembles Aristotle's phronesis, or practical reasoning, more closely than episteme, or scientific reasoning. In medicine, phronesis is clinical judgment; and while it depends on both a fund of information and extensive experience, somehow it is not quite teachable. This practical, clinical rationality relies on case narrative for teaching and learning about illness and disease, for recording and communicating about patient care and, inevitably, for thinking about and remembering the details, as well as the overarching rules of practice. At the same time, "anecdotal" remains the most pejorative word in medicine, and the tension between the justifiable caution this disdain expresses and the pervasive narrative structure of medical knowledge is characteristic of clinical knowing generally: a tug-of-war between apparent irreconcilables that can be settled only by an appeal to the circumstances of the clinical situation. Practical rationality in the clinical encounter is characterized by a productive circulation between the particular details of the patient's presentation and general information about disease stored as a taxonomy of cases. Evidence-based medicine can improve this negotiation between general knowledge and the patient's particulars, but it cannot replace it. In a scientific era, clinical judgment remains the quintessential intellectual strength of the clinician. Why, then, do we not teach the epistemology of medicine? Understanding the mis-description of physicians' thinking - and the accompanying claim that medicine is, in itself, a science - could mitigate the misplaced perfectionism that makes mistakes in medicine personal and unthinkable.

Lernen von Nürnberg

Drum-Taps: Revisions and Reconciliation

Examines the 1865 Drum-Taps and “Sequel to Drum-Taps” in comparison to the 1871 “DrumTaps” sequence in Leaves of Gra, tracking Whitman’s growing “participation in a Northern liberal turn toward nostalgia” in the aftermath of the Civil War, a “reflective rather than restorative” nostalgia that erases ideological difference between North and South in order to celebrate “reconciliatory nation-building,” silencing the iues of slavery and sedition that generated the war.

Liminal Spaces: Literal and Conceptual Borderlines in Whitman's Civil War Poems

Reads Whitman’s Civil War poems “in the context of liminality, a cultural discourse that calls attention to margins and borderlines as transitional points but also focuses specifically on the ‘limen’ or the spaces between, as literal and conceptual sites of potential and illumination” and suggests that “in the more photographic poems, liminality provides Whitman with a framing technique, allowing him to sharpen his focus on the verisimilitude of a scene by delineating the outlines and interstices of the natural landscape,” while another use of liminality “calls attention to hospital spaces as literal and figurative symbols of transition for wounded or dying soldiers,” and yet another “mystical use of liminality allows Whitman to further define his role as an interpreting agent from the borderlines and margins of the war, the poet who gives meaning to the ultimate paage from life into death for all the nation’s dead.”

Roper, Robert. Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War [review]

Constitutional Rights for Nonresident Aliens

I argue that nonresident aliens, in places that are clearly not U.S. territory, should benefit from constitutional rights. This is a matter of mutuality of obligation. The U.S. claims the authority to hold all people accountable for respecting certain laws, such as the law of war as defined in the Military Commissions Act. Accordingly, it must accord them basic legal rights in return. At the same time, I argue, contra Benjamin Wittes, that this would not lead to absurdly opening the courthouse doors, nor does it require abandoning principle to keep the flood of litigation reasonably contained. Not all harms inflicted by the U.S. government can give rise to a lawsuit, and that the distinction between those who should have a right to sue and those who should not can be drawn in a principled way.

Automatische Wortschatzerschließung großer Textkorpora am Beispiel des DWDS

In the past years a large number of electronic text corpora for German have been created due to the increased availability of electronic resources. Appropriate filtering of lexical material in these corpora is a particular challenge for computational lexicography since machine readable lexicons alone are insufficient for systematic classification. In this paper we show - on the basis of the corpora of the DWDS - how lexical knowledge can be classified in a more fine- grained way with morphological and shallow syntactic parsing methods. One result of this analysis is that the number of different lemmas contained in the corpora exceeds the number of different headwords of current large monolingual German dictionaries by several times. 1 Einleitung Bei der Frage nach der Zugehörigkeit eines Wortes zum Wortschatz der deutschen Sprache beschränken sich Wörterbücher, auch die Großwörterbücher, bewusst. Um in ein Wörterbuch aufgenommen zu werden, muss ein Wort über längere Zeit von mehreren Sprechern, am besten in mehreren Textsorten, mit einer gewissen Häufigkeit verwendet werden. Es sollte sich auch nicht völlig einfach aus den Wortbestandteilen erschließen lassen, also nicht semantisch transparent sein, zumindest jedoch "usualisiert" sein oder eine orthographische Besonderheit (z. B. Ich-AG) aufweisen. In diesem Zusammenhang stellt sich jedoch die Frage, auf welcher Beleggrundlage diese Häufigkeiten ermittelt werden können, und ob es nicht wichtige Wörter geben kann, die in ihrer Häufigkeit unter dem gewählten Schwellwert liegen oder nicht in allen Textsorten vorkommen. Darüber hinaus ist zu klären, wie die reine Quantität der Beleggrundlage mit der Menge an darin vorkommenden verschiedenen Wörtern zusammenhängt. Ist es so, dass ein Textarchiv ab einer gewissen Größe alle Wörter des deutschen Wortschatzes umfasst, zumindest all diejenigen, die heutzutage im Gebrauch sind, oder findet man bei der Betrachtung von immer größeren Textmengen auch immer mehr neue Wörter? Noch nie in der Geschichte der Wortschatzforschung war es möglich, diesen Fragen in derselben empirischen Breite nachzugehen. In den letzten 15 Jahren wuchs die Anzahl an digital verfügbaren Texten nahezu exponentiell. Einen besonders großen Anteil daran haben Zeitungen, die wie kein anderes Druckerzeugnis digital erhältlich sind, sowie im World Wide Web verbreitete Texte, die nur noch digital verbreitet werden. Gleichzeitig verbessern sich die technologischen und computerlinguistischen Voraussetzungen, sehr große Textmengen maschinell durchsuchbar zu machen. Stützten sich die Wörterbuchmacher noch bis vor wenigen Jahren auf manuell erstellte Exzerpte von Wortbelegen in einem Umfang von ein paar tausend, allenfalls, wie im Falle des größten deutschen Wörterbuchs, dem Grimmschen Wörterbuch, ein paar Millionen Belege, so enthält heute jedes große Zeitungsarchiv mehrere Millionen Dokumente und somit mehrere

Managing shared residence in Britain and France: questioning a default ‘primary carer’ model

Social Policy Review" provides students, academics and all those interested in welfare issues with critical analyses of progress and change in areas of major interest during the past year. This year the "Review" takes the opportunity of the 60th anniversary of the key legislation founding the welfare state in the UK to provide a comprehensive overview of policy developments in the UK and internationally. The first part brings together a selection of papers which have been commissioned to examine historical and contemporary developments in policy tackling Beveridge's five evils of want, idleness, disease, squalor and ignorance, looking at how policy has changed since the aims and ideology of the inception of the post-war welfare state. The second part looks at the issue of the current challenges facing children's welfare services internationally: always a contemporary and contentious issue. The final part brings together a selection of papers looking at the effect of policy development at various governance levels on social policy. The contributions bring together an exciting mix of internationally renowned authors to provide comprehensive discussion of the some of the most challenging issues facing social policy today.

Did it really happen? Memory, history and myth in Eugenia Tsoulis´ Between the ceiling and the sky.

World War II, the Nazi occupation and several dictatorships forced many Greek men and women into migration. In 1952 Greece signed an agreement on assisted migration to Australia and more than “250 000 Greek and Cypriot migrants from Greece (1952-74), Rumania (1952-8), Egypt and the Middle East (1952-2) [sic], Cyprus (1974-84) and other politically turbulent countries of Eastern Europe and Latin America” moved to Australia (Tamis, Anastasios M. The Greeks in Australia, 2005: 47). The lives of those migrants changed radically as they left home behind. Some of them, or their children, wrote fictional texts explaining some of their experiences. An example of this is Eugenia Tsoulis´ Behind the Ceiling and the Sky (1998), where the main characters live their lives between present and past and between memories and myths, on the one hand, and facts and the lifeworld that surround them, on the other. This paper will analyse this novel and the sometimes blurred boundaries between memory, history and myth.

Watson: The thinking man's behaviourist

The first World War disrupted the proposal to hold an international congress of philosophy in England in 1915. When the philosophers got together again it was at a meeting in Oxford in 1920 jointly organized by the Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society and the British Psychological Society; invitations were extended to delegates from America and France. The roll call of luminaries was impressive: it included Bertrand Russell (who, in fact, failed to appear) Henri Bergson, James Ward, Sir James Frazier, Frederic Bartlett, Henry Head, and even the philosopher–statesmen, A. J. Balfour and Lord Haldane (Hoernlé, 1921). J. B. Watson, at that time a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, was greatly flattered to be invited to take part in a symposium on his behaviouristic theory of thinking and was determined to attend. When his university failed to come up with the fare he asserted (in jest, one supposes) that if necessary ‘I am going to try to work my passage either as an engineer’s assistant : : : or a husky freight mover’ (Cohen, 1979). That he failed to make it in the end was for quite other reasons. The scandal surrounding his affair with a graduate student and the separation from his wife, events that came to a head in the spring and summer of 1920, put paid to his plans. None the less his views, as described in his 1919 book Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviourist, were discussed at the congress and criticized by Bartlett and his wife (E. M. Smith), by G. H. Thomson (subsequently renowned for his work in mental testing), by T. H. Pear (the first professor of psychology at Manchester), and by A. Robinson (professor of Logic and Psychology at Durham). Watson’s response was published alongside the comments in this journal in 1920. That Watson’s theorizing should be the object of such sustained and serious attention may seem surprising to psychologists of later generations. In so far as he is discussed at all, it is almost as a figure of fun – a proponent of self-evidently absurd notions. As I recall, two of his proposals were held up for particular derision. One was the suggestion that perception should be studied by means of conditioning procedures (why do this when human subjects can be instructed to respond verbally with ‘red’, or ‘green’, or whatever?); the other was his suggestion that thinking consists of subvocal