Cyber security: Attack of the health hackers

Kara Scannell and Gina Chon
FT.com
Originally published December 21, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Hackers accessed over 100m health records — 100 times more than ever before — last year. Eight of the 10 largest hacks into any type of healthcare provider happened this year, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Insurers scrambled to hire cyber security companies to scrub their systems. Premera Blue Cross, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, and Excellus Health Plan announced breaches affecting at least 22m individuals in total since March, including hacks that stretched back more than a year. Investigators told the FT that they believe some of the hacks are related and trace back to China.

The insurers face multiple investigations from state insurance regulators and attorneys-general and some could face fines for failing to comply with state data privacy laws, while federal law enforcement agencies are investigating who is behind the hacks.

The article is here.

A Fight for the Soul of Science

By Natalie Wolchover
Quanta Magazine
Originally published December 16, 2015

Here are two excerpts:

Critics accuse string theory and the multiverse hypothesis, as well as cosmic inflation — the leading theory of how the universe began — of falling on the wrong side of Popper’s line of demarcation. To borrow the title of the Columbia University physicist Peter Woit’s 2006 book on string theory, these ideas are “not even wrong,” say critics. In their editorial, Ellis and Silk invoked the spirit of Popper: “A theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.”

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Nowadays, as several philosophers at the workshop said, Popperian falsificationism has been supplanted by Bayesian confirmation theory, or Bayesianism, a modern framework based on the 18th-century probability theory of the English statistician and minister Thomas Bayes. Bayesianism allows for the fact that modern scientific theories typically make claims far beyond what can be directly observed — no one has ever seen an atom — and so today’s theories often resist a falsified-unfalsified dichotomy. Instead, trust in a theory often falls somewhere along a continuum, sliding up or down between 0 and 100 percent as new information becomes available. “The Bayesian framework is much more flexible” than Popper’s theory, said Stephan Hartmann, a Bayesian philosopher at LMU. “It also connects nicely to the psychology of reasoning.”

The entire article is here.

Gender Equality in Science Will Require a Culture Shift

By Claire Pomeroy
Scientific American
Published on January 1, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Unconscious bias also appears in the form of “microassaults” that women scientists are forced to endure daily. This is the endless barrage of purportedly insignificant sexist jokes, insults and put-downs that accumulate over the years and undermine confidence and ambition. Each time it is assumed that the only woman in the lab group will play the role of recording secretary, each time a research plan becomes finalized in the men's lavatory between conference sessions, each time a woman is not invited to go out for a beer after the plenary lecture to talk shop, the damage is reinforced.

When I speak to groups of women scientists, I often ask them if they have ever been in a meeting where they made a recommendation, had it ignored, and then heard a man receive praise and support for making the same point a few minutes later. Each time the majority of women in the audience raise their hands. Microassaults are especially damaging when they come from a high school science teacher, college mentor, university dean or a member of the scientific elite who has been awarded a prestigious prize—the very people who should be inspiring and supporting the next generation of scientists.

The entire article is here.

Moral judgment as information processing: an integrative review

Steve Guglielmo
Front Psychol. 2015; 6: 1637.
Published online 2015 Oct 30. doi:  10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01637

Abstract

How do humans make moral judgments about others’ behavior? This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two distinct questions: (1) What input information guides moral judgments? and (2) What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, identifying critical information elements (including causality, intentionality, and mental states) that shape moral judgments. A subclass of Biased Information Models holds that perceptions of these information elements are themselves driven by prior moral judgments. Processing Models address the second question, and existing models have focused on the relative contribution of intuitive versus deliberative processes. This review organizes existing moral judgment models within this framework and critically evaluates them on empirical and theoretical grounds; it then outlines a general integrative model grounded in information processing, and concludes with conceptual and methodological suggestions for future research. The information-processing framework provides a useful theoretical lens through which to organize extant and future work in the rapidly growing field of moral judgment.

The entire article is here.

Less Blame, Less Crime? The Practical Implications of Moral Responsibility Skepticism

By Neil Levy
Journal of Practical Ethics
Volume 3 Issue 2. December 2015

Abstract

Most philosophers believe that wrongdoers sometimes deserve to be punished by long prison sentences. They also believe that such punishments are justified by their consequences: they deter crime and incapacitate potential offenders. In this article, I argue that both these claims are false. No one deserves to be punished, I argue, because our actions are shot through with direct or indirect luck. I also argue that there are good reasons to think that punishing fewer people and much less harshly will have better social consequences, at a reduced overall cost, then the long prison sentences that are usually seen as required for social protection.

The article is here.

Moral Reasoning and Personal Behavior: A Meta-Analytical Review

By Villegas de Posada, Cristina; Vargas-Trujillo, Elvia
Review of General Psychology, Vol 19(4), Dec 2015, 408-424.

Abstract

The meta-analysis examined the effect of moral development on 4 domains of action (real life, honesty, altruism, and resistance to conformity), and on action in general. The database, comprised by 151 studies across 71 years, stemmed from a previous narrative synthesis conducted by Blasi (1980), updated with studies published up to 2013. Results showed that (a) moral development was significantly related to action in general and to each domain, (b) the effect sizes were similar for altruism, real life, and resistance to conformity, with coefficients higher than r = .20, (c) the effect size for honesty was lower than for the other 3 types of behaviors, and (d) demographic or methodological variables did not affect the association between moral development and action. Discussion centers on similarities among domains of action, perfect and imperfect duties, and the need for other constructs to account for moral action.

Here is an excerpt:

Morality is essential to social life, and moral decisions and actions are the expression of this morality. They are linked to our rational ability to judge and make decisions. Although this link may seem obvious to many psychologists, it has been denied by influential scholars in psychology and philosophy, who come from different streams of a noncognitive tradition. Moral reasoning has a consistent effect on action, across domains, age, sex, and methodological approaches, an effect that cannot be minimized. This effect, on the range of medium rather than low, indicates that the strategy of promoting moral reasoning to enhance morality is a sound strategy and a way to overcome immorality and moral indifference.

The article is here.

Peer-Review Fraud — Hacking the Scientific Publication Process

Charlotte J. Haug
N Engl J Med 373;25 nejm.org december 17, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

How is it possible to fake peer review? Moon, who studies medicinal plants, had set up a simple
procedure. He gave journals recommendations for peer reviewers for his manuscripts, providing
them with names and email addresses.  But these addresses were ones he created, so the requests
to review went directly to him or his colleagues. Not surprisingly, the editor would be sent favorable
reviews — sometimes within hours after the reviewing requests had been sent out. The fallout from Moon’s confession: 28 articles in various journals published by Informa were retracted, and one editor resigned.

Peter Chen, who was an engineer at Taiwan’s National Pingtung University of Education at the time, developed a more sophisticated scheme: he constructed a “peer review and citation ring” in which he used 130 bogus e-mail addresses and fabricated identities to generate fake reviews. An editor at one of the journals published by Sage Publications became suspicious, sparking a lengthy and comprehensive investigation, which resulted in the retraction of 60 articles in July 2014.

The article is here. 

Seeking better health care outcomes: the ethics of using the "nudge".

Blumenthal-Barby JS, Burroughs H.
Am J Bioeth. 2012;12(2):1-10.
doi: 10.1080/15265161.2011.634481.

Abstract

Policymakers, employers, insurance companies, researchers, and health care providers have developed an increasing interest in using principles from behavioral economics and psychology to persuade people to change their health-related behaviors, lifestyles, and habits. In this article, we examine how principles from behavioral economics and psychology are being used to nudge people (the public, patients, or health care providers) toward particular decisions or behaviors related to health or health care, and we identify the ethically relevant dimensions that should be considered for the utilization of each principle.

The article is here.

Is the sale of body parts wrong?

Julian Savulescu
J Med Ethics 2003;29:138-139
doi:10.1136/jme.29.3.138

Discussion of the sale of organs is overshadowed by cases of exploitation, murder, and corruption. But there is also a serious ethical issue about whether people should be allowed to sell parts of the body. It applies not only to organs, such as the kidney or parts of the liver, but also to tissues, such as bone marrow, gametes (eggs and sperm) and even genetic material. The usual argument in favour of allowing the sale of organs is that we need to increase supply. In the US, as few as 15% of people who need kidney transplants ever get a kidney. Cadaveric organs will never satisfy the growing demand for organs. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, die while waiting for a transplant.

The entire article is here.