Abstract Recent progress in large language models has led to applications that can (at least) simulate possession of full moral agency due their capacity report context-sensitive assessments open-domain conversations. However, automating decision-making faces several methodological as well ethical challenges. They arise the fields bias mitigation, missing ground truth for “correctness”, effects...

The standard of reporting in diagnostic studies has generally been low. Fortunately, this issue has begun to be addressed in recent years through the discussion of important methodological issues in educational series, textbooks, and checklists. Double-blind, placebo-controlled, oral food challenges (DBPCFC) are considered to be the gold standard for diagnosis of food allergy. However, there is...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies involve substantial acoustic noise. This review covers the difficulties posed by such noise for auditory neuroscience, as well as a number of possible solutions that have emerged. Acoustic noise can affect the processing of auditory stimuli by making them inaudible or unintelligible, and can result in reduced sensitivity to auditory activatio...

Biofield therapies are noninvasive therapies in which the practitioner explicitly works with a client's biofield (interacting fields of energy and information that surround living systems) to stimulate healing responses in patients. While the practice of biofield therapies has existed in Eastern and Western cultures for thousands of years, empirical research on the effectiveness of biofield the...

Studies of cognitive development in human infants have relied almost entirely on descriptive data at the behavioral level - the age at which a particular ability emerges. The underlying mechanisms of cognitive development remain largely unknown, despite attempts to correlate behavioral states with brain states. We argue that research on cognitive development must focus on theories of learning, ...

The recent federal push under the No Child Left Behind Act to finalize means for gauging school improvement has stoked public anxiety, but especially for public school officials who are charged with crafting and implementing de-fensible accountability systems. Other than the omnipresent political issues attending any proposal for shaping educational change, the methodological challenges of an a...

The case for undertaking policy analysis has been made by a number of scholars and practitioners. However, there has been much less attention given to how to do policy analysis, what research designs, theories or methods best inform policy analysis. This paper begins by looking at the health policy environment, and some of the challenges to researching this highly complex phenomenon. It focuses...

It was only a matter of time before the portmanteau term ‘‘genethics’’ would be coined and a whole field within bioethics delineated. The term can be dated back at least to 1984 and the work of James Nagle, who claims credit for inventing the word, which he takes ‘‘to incorporate the various ethical implications and dilemmas generated by genetic engineering with the technologies and application...

Land-change science has emerged as a foundational element of global environment change and sustainability science. It seeks to understand the human and environment dynamics that give rise to changed land uses and covers, not only in terms of their type and magnitude but their location as well. This focus requires the integration of social, natural, and geographical information sciences. Each of...