Absolute Standards Research Articles

Philosophy and Politics

Hannah Arendt Philosophy and Politics THE GULF BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS OPENED HISTORICALLY with the trial and condemnation of Socrates, which in the histoiy of political thought plays the same role of a turning point that the trial and condemnation of Jesus plays in the history of religion. Our tradi­ tion of political thought began when the death of Socrates made Plato despair of polis life and, at the same time, doubt certain fundamen­ tals of Socrates’ teachings. The fact that Socrates had not been able to persuade his judges of his innocence and his merits, which were so obvious to the better and younger of Athens’ citizens, made Plato doubt the validity of persuasion. We have difficulty in grasping the importance of this doubt, because “persuasion” is a very weak and inad­ equate translation of the ancient peithein, the political importance of which is indicated by the fact that Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, had a temple in Athens. To persuade, peithein, was the specifically politi­ cal form of speech, and since the Athenians were proud that they, in distinction to the barbarians, conducted their political affairs in the form of speech and without compulsion, they considered rhetoric, the art of persuasion, the highest, the truly political art. Socrates’ speech in the Apology is one of its great examples, and it is against this defense that Plato writes in the Phaedo a “revised apology” that he called, with irony, “more persuasive” (pithanoteron, 63B), since it ends with a myth of the Hereafter, complete with bodily punishments and rewards, calcu­ lated to frighten rather than merely persuade the audience. Socrates’ point in his defense before the citizens and judges of Athens had been© 1990 The Hannah Arendt Blucher Literary Trust. Reprinted with permission of Jerome Kohn, Trustee, Hannah Arendt Blucher Literary Trust. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN SOCIAL RESEARCH VOL. 5 7 , NO. 1 (SPRING 1 9 9 0 ) social research Vol 71 : No 3 : Fall 2 0 0 4 427 that his behavior was in the best interest of the city. In the Crito he had explained to his friends that he could not flee but rather, for political reasons, must suffer the death penalty. It seems that he was not only unable to persuade his judges but also could not convince his friends. In other words, the city had no use for a philosopher, and the friends had no use for political argumentation. This is part of the tragedy to which Plato’s dialogues testify. Closely connected with his doubt about the validity of persuasion is Plato’s furious denunciation of doxa, opinion, which not only ran like a red thread through his political works but became one of the corner­ stones o f his concept of truth. Platonic truth, even when doxa is not mentioned, is always understood as the veiy opposite of opinion. The spectacle of Socrates submitting his own doxa to the irresponsible opin­ ions of the Athenians, and being outvoted by a majority, made Plato despise opinions and yearn for absolute standards. Such standards, by which human deeds could be judged and human thought could achieve some measure of reliability, from then on became the primaiy impulse of his political philosophy, and influenced decisively even the purely philosophical doctrine of ideas. I do not think, as is often maintained, that the concept of ideas was primarily a concept of standards and measures, nor that its origin was political. But this interpretation is all the more understandable and justifiable because Plato him self was the first to use the ideas for political purposes, that is, to introduce absolute standards into the realm of human affairs where, without such tran­ scending standards, everything remains relative. As Plato him self used to point out, we do not know what absolute greatness is, but experience only something greater or smaller in relationship to something else. TRUTH AND OPINION The opposition oftruth and opinion was certainly the most anti-Socratic conclusion that Plato drew from Socrates’ trial. Socrates, in failing to convince the city, had shown that the city is no safe place for the philosopher, not only in the sense that his life is not safe because of the truth...

Quality assurance in undergraduate medical education: standards for accreditation

Quality assurance in medical education, with special reference to standards for accreditation was investigated, and a set of national standards was developed for use in self-evaluations of medical schools and in the accreditation of medical education programmes in South Africa. An extensive literature study formed the basis for the investigation, and the Delphi technique was used for the empirical study. A set of 110 standards, catagorised according to specific areas, was designed, comprising absolute standards and standards aimed at encouraging development. The standards are suitable for verifying the quality of medical education, to be used as a lever for change and reform and as principles guiding quality assurance. The areas covered by the standards and the aspects addressed in each are described. SAJHE Vol.18(1) 2004: 221-227

New information technology systems and a Bayesian hierarchical bivariate probit model for profiling surgeon quality at a large hospital

New information technology systems at hospitals and medical centers provide administrators and policymakers with greater information than ever before on both the characteristics of patients and on the outcomes associated with individual surgeons. This paper develops a Bayesian hierarchical bivariate probit model describing surgeon performance in terms of the 30-day mortality and 30-day morbidity of their patients. We apply the model to a sample of 2,578 patients who received care from one of 36 surgeons at a large hospital. The model is estimated using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation methods. After accounting for observed differences in the health status of patients prior to surgery and the complexity of the procedure performed, we construct quality indices measuring surgeon performance in terms of morbidity and mortality. These indices are used to evaluate surgeon performance against absolute standards for morbidity and mortality rates, and then to conduct “head to head” comparisons of individual surgeons within subspecialty surgery departments at the hospital. Our approach highlights the potential benefits of new information technologies for monitoring surgeon quality.

The Buchanan report: 40 years on

The 1963 Buchanan report made significant contributions to the theory and methodology of planning that are of continuing significance, albeit generally unrecognised. Most important was the concept of absolute environmental standards, basic to Buchanan's entire approach, which led him to fundamental and repeated conflict with the economists’ notion that all standards had an economic price capable of tradeoff. It came to a head in the contemporary criticisms of the Buchanan report by Michael Beesley and Christopher Foster, never resolved in debates at the time, and was repeated in the deliberations of the Roskill Commission on the Third London Airport, when Buchanan's 1971 minority report rejected both the cost-benefit approach of the other commissioners and its conclusion that the new airport should be located at Cublington in the Aylesbury Vale. It continues today in the debates about the environment, where environmentalists take an absolute position and economists a relative one.

The Buchanan report: 40 years on

The 1963 Buchanan report made significant contributions to the theory and methodology of planning that are of continuing significance, albeit generally unrecognised. Most important was the concept of absolute environmental standards, basic to Buchanan's entire approach, which led him to fundamental and repeated conflict with the economists’ notion that all standards had an economic price capable of tradeoff. It came to a head in the contemporary criticisms of the Buchanan report by Michael Beesley and Christopher Foster, never resolved in debates at the time, and was repeated in the deliberations of the Roskill Commission on the Third London Airport, when Buchanan's 1971 minority report rejected both the cost-benefit approach of the other commissioners and its conclusion that the new airport should be located at Cublington in the Aylesbury Vale. It continues today in the debates about the environment, where environmentalists take an absolute position and economists a relative one.

Relativity and Religion: The Abuse of Einstein's Theory

AbstractEinstein's special theory of relativity has had a wide influence on fields far removed from physics. It has given the impression that physics has shown that there are now no absolute truths, that all beliefs are relative to the observer, and that traditional stable landmarks have been washed away. We each have our own frame of reference that is as good as any other frame, so that there are no absolute standards by which our actions may be judged. The predictions of relativity theory, such as the elimination of simultaneity, the variation of mass with velocity, and the equivalence of mass and energy, are all highly counterintuitive and yet are precisely confirmed by detailed measurements. The clear rocklike mechanical physics of Newton seems to have dissolved into a swirling mist of unintelligible concepts, and familiar certainties seem to have disappeared.A detailed analysis of relativity theory shows, however, a completely different picture. Properly understood, it is a logical extension of Newtonian physics that expresses the relations of space and time in a more exact and elegant way and in the process shows forth more clearly the invariant features of the world. The apparently counterintuitive features appear as natural consequences that extend and refine our classical concepts. The traditional landmarks remain, but God's world is more subtle than we had previously imagined.

Laser desorption/ionization cluster studies for calibration in mass spectrometry

Precise mass calibration is mandatory in many fields of mass spectrometry. We have performed laser desorption/ionization cluster studies with a MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer on gold and fullerene targets to produce atomic clusters. These investigations demonstrate that clusters are ideally suited for this purpose. Pulsed N 2 -laser and Nd:YAG-laser ablation was used to produce positively as well as negatively charged clusters. Earlier observations of dianionic metal clusters are confirmed. First results from the tandem Penning trap mass spectrometer ISOLTRAP using carbon clusters as mass references show how carbon clusters can be applied to precision mass spectrometry by providing absolute mass standards.

Relative or Absolute Standards for Child Poverty: A State-Level Analysis of Infant and Child Mortality

The purpose of the present study was to compare the associations of state-referenced and federal poverty measures with states' infant and child mortality rates. Compressed mortality and Current Population Survey data were used to examine relationships between mortality and (1) state-referenced poverty (percentage of children below half the state median income) and (2) percentage of children below the federal poverty line. State-referenced poverty was not associated with mortality among infants or children, whereas poverty as defined by national standards was strongly related to mortality. Infant and child mortality is more closely tied to families' capacity for meeting basic needs than to relative position within a state's economic hierarchy.

Beam alignment for scanning beam interference lithography

By interfering two small diameter Gaussian laser beams, scanning beam interference lithography (SBIL) is capable of patterning linear gratings and grids in resist while controlling their spatial phase distortions to the nanometer level. Our tool has a patterning area that is up to 300 mm in diameter. The motive for developing SBIL is to provide the semiconductor industry with a set of absolute metrology standards, but the technology is easily adaptable to other important applications such as the making of high precision optical encoders. In this article, we describe a system for carrying out automated beam alignment for SBIL. Our design goals require tight alignment tolerances, where beam position and angle alignment errors must be controlled to ∼10 μm and ∼10 μrad, respectively. We describe our system setup, and discuss the so-called iterative beam alignment principle, focusing specifically on deriving a mathematical formalism that can guide the development of similar systems in the future. Repeatability experiments demonstrate that our system fulfills the alignment requirements for nanometer-level SBIL writing.

A note on the use of a single inequality index in testing the effect of income distribution on mortality

A new literature has recently emerged which suggests that among the developed economies, at least in terms of health status, the distribution of income may be more important than its absolute level. In this literature, the effect of income inequality, in particular, relative inequality on health status is tested by examining the relationship between aggregate mortality and a single measure of inequality (such as the Atkinson Index). In this paper we look at whether a single measure of income inequality, even augmented by a measure of representative income can at the aggregate level, distinguish between the effects of relative as opposed to absolute income. An alternative approach that uses disaggregated income to distinguish between the effects of changes in relative and absolute income levels is applied to data from the 1990 US Census and mortality figures from the National Centre for Health Statistics. Our results indicate that the rate of mortality is sensitive to absolute, but not relative poverty and therefore suggest that to improve the health of the poor the focus must be on raising their absolute standard of living. The results also indicate that government supported programs may have important health enhancing effects and may therefore represent a key policy tool to improve the health of those at the bottom of the income distribution.

The Effect of Nonlinear Incentives on Performance: Evidence from “Econ 101”

This paper analyzes both theoretically and empirically how an absolute grading standard that allows only a small number of distinct grades affects student course performance outcomes. The clearest prediction of the model is that course performance of “grade-motivated” students will tend to be clustered slightly above the boundaries that separate grades, as long as the variance of the random component of performance is not too large. A more tenuous prediction is that the proximity of a grade-motivated student to a grade boundary going into the final exam should influence final exam performance, after controlling for prefinal exam performance. An empirical investigation of the course performance of university students who were enrolled in introductory economics classes that used an absolute grading standard finds evidence in favor of both of these predictions. The results suggest that student effort decisions respond to the incentives created by the grading system.

Medical economics and the assessment of value in cardiovascular medicine: Part I.

Medical economics and the assessment of value in cardiovascular medicine: Part I.

Poverty, Inequality, and Economic Growth: The Case of Thailand

Thailand has recently experienced a prolonged economic boom followed by a collapse. During the boom the incidence of absolute poverty fell dramatically but relative inequality increased. The collapse of 1997 had the reverse effects. The poor initially became significantly worse off in an absolute sense but proportionately less so than the rich. Inequality thus declined. The significance of these events depends on a fundamental question: does the welfare of the poor depend on their absolute standard of living, as reflected in measures of poverty incidence, or on their position relative to the rich, as reflected in measures of inequality?

Fluorescence quantum yields and their relation to lifetimes of rhodamine 6G and fluorescein in nine solvents: improved absolute standards for quantum yields.

Absolute fluorescence quantum yields are reported for the rhodamine 6G cation and the fluorescein dianion dyes in nine solvents. This information is combined with previously reported fluorescence lifetimes to deduce radiative and nonradiative decay rates. Along the alcohol series from methanol to octanol, rhodamine 6G displays an increasing radiative rate, in parallel with the square of the refractive index increase, and a slightly decreasing nonradiative rate. Fluorescein is different: the apparent radiative rate actually decreases, suggesting that the emissive species is perturbed in some fashion. For both dyes, fluorescence yields are enhanced in D2O, rising to 0.98, in parallel with a corresponding increase in lifetimes. Protonated solvents invariably give shorter lifetimes and lower quantum yields, contrary to some previous speculation. From this work and an analysis of existing literature values, more precise values have been obtained for two previously proposed absolute quantum yield standards. The yield of fluorescein in 0.1 N NaOH(aq) is 0.925+/-0.015, and for rhodamine 6G in ethanol, it is 0.950+/-0.015. In both cases, the solutions are assumed to be in the limit of low concentration, excited close to their long-wave absorption band and at room temperature but may be either air-saturated or free of oxygen.

Final report on key comparison CCM.P-K4 of absolutepressure standards from 1 Pa to 1000 Pa

A key comparison of low absolute pressure standards, organized under the auspices of theConsultative Committee for Mass and Related Quantities (CCM), was carried out at seven national metrologyinstitutes (NMIs) between March 1998 and September 1999 in order to determine the degrees of equivalence of the standards at pressures in the range 1 Pa to 1000 Pa. The primary standards, which represent two principal measurement methods, included five liquid-column manometers and four static expansion systems. The transfer standard package consisted of four high-precision pressure transducers: two capacitance diaphragm gauges to provide high resolution at low pressures, and two resonant silicon gauges to provide the required calibration stability. Two nominally identical transfer packages were used to reduce the time required for the measurements, with Package A being circulated among laboratories in the European region (Istituto di Metrologia G. Colonnetti, Italy; National Physical Laboratory, UK; Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Germany) and Package B in the Asia-Pacific region (CSIRO-National Measurement Laboratory, Australia; Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science; National Physical Laboratory of India). The results obtained were normalized using data obtained from simultaneous calibrations of the two packages at the pilot laboratory (National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA). The degrees of equivalence of the measurement standards were determined in two ways: deviations from key comparison reference values and pairwise differences between these deviations. Apart from results from one NMI that were identified as outliers, the absolute-pressure standards of the participants were generally found to be equivalent and the results revealed no significant relative bias between the two principal methods tested.

Commitment to health: a shared ethical bond between professions

It is commonly assumed that Codes of Ethics are supported by concrete ethical principles, that adherence to Codes of Ethics guarantees ethical behaviour and that there is widespread agreement about ethical standards. Each of these assumptions is false. Codes of Ethics are inevitably open to wide interpretation, and it is impossible to demonstrate absolute moral standards. Health and social care workers should not adhere to unexplained 'ethical principles' insufficient to guide practical decision making. Anyone who recognises that all human actions potentially have ethical content may choose to make an ethical commitment. In order to work for health, health workers ought to commit to a substantial theory of health. One such theory--the foundations theory of health--is briefly explained and illustrated. The foundations theory can form a shared ethical bond between health and social care professionals, since both professions regularly strive to achieve foundational health for their patients and clients.

Standardisation of 11C

The increasing use of positron emission tomography for medical imaging and the availability of short-lived positron emitters has raised concerns about the accuracy of calibration of secondary standard measurement systems and the viability of using a single long-lived positron emitter as a reference calibration source for all positron emitters. Potential problems arise because the 511 keV quanta arising from positron annihilation are not generally produced at the same point as the original disintegration. In addition, the secondary standard may also be responsive to the associated bremsstrahlung radiation. The magnitude of both effects depends on the positron end-point energy. In order to resolve these problems, it is necessary to produce absolute standards of these positron-emitting radionuclides and the work presented here details the results of such work with 11C.

Prehospital and resuscitative care of the head-injured patient.

The ultimate neurologic outcome following severe head trauma depends on the extent of primary brain insult sustained at the time of the trauma itself, and the subsequent neurochemical and neurophysiologic pathologic changes occurring as a result of the injury. Although there are currently no specific therapies that have proven to be consistently effective in reversing the devastating consequences of primary brain insult, the reduction or prevention of secondary brain insult is possible. The emergent resuscitation and care of the severely head injured patient can therefore impact the patient's final neurologic outcome. As new data are accumulated, traditional and new therapies for severe head injury have come under scrutiny. While no absolute standards have been advanced, guidelines have been established that can help direct the acute stabilization of severely head injured patients.

Establishment of Absolute Measurement Standards for In-Situ Calibration of Acoustic Emission Energy

Establishment of Absolute Measurement Standards for In-Situ Calibration of Acoustic Emission Energy

Statistical issues in reporting quality data: small samples and casemix variation.

To present two key statistical issues that arise in analysis and reporting of quality data. Casemix variation is relevant to quality reporting when the units being measured have differing distributions of patient characteristics that also affect the quality outcome. When this is the case, adjustment using stratification or regression may be appropriate. Such adjustments may be controversial when the patient characteristic does not have an obvious relationship to the outcome. Stratified reporting poses problems for sample size and reporting format, but may be useful when casemix effects vary across units. Although there are no absolute standards of reliability, high reliabilities (interunit F > or = 10 or reliability > or = 0.9) are desirable for distinguishing above- and below-average units. When small or unequal sample sizes complicate reporting, precision may be improved using indirect estimation techniques that incorporate auxiliary information, and 'shrinkage' estimation can help to summarize the strength of evidence about units with small samples. With broader understanding of casemix adjustment and methods for analyzing small samples, quality data can be analysed and reported more accurately.