Reasonable Demands Research Articles

Factors Associated With Job Satisfaction of Frontline Medical Staff Fighting Against COVID-19: A Cross-Sectional Study in China.

Purpose: The current research on frontline medical staff in China fighting against COVID-19 has not yet addressed job satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to investigate the job satisfaction of those who were sent to support Hubei province, China, or worked in local designated hospitals, and then analyze the associated influencing factors.Materials and Methods: A total of 455 medical staff who worked at the frontline of the prevention and control of COVID-19 in Hubei province was selected using simple random sampling. They were asked to fill out a self-developed general information questionnaire as well as the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ), from 10 January to 10 March 2020.Results: The average job satisfaction score of the participants was 82.58 ± 11.11. The influencing factors include education (P = 0.002), years of work experience (P = 0.006), anti-epidemic work duration (P = 0.048), daily sleep duration (P < 0.001), and the form of participation (P < 0.001).Conclusions: This study, for the first time, measures the job satisfaction of frontline medical staff in fighting against COVID-19 in China. The job satisfaction of frontline medical staff was at a “relatively decent” level, higher than the previous similar measures among medical staff. Related management departments should further improve the job satisfaction of frontline medical staff by meeting their reasonable demands, strengthening the emergency response and practical operation training of junior staff, and ensuring their ample time for sleep and rest. This study is of great reference value for improving the job satisfaction level of frontline medical staff during public health emergencies, developing medical staff security policies, and promoting the establishment of emergency response teams.

Opposing Laws with Religious Reasons

Opposing Laws with Religious Reasons

Texas Says No to Oil Production Quotas, Yes to Well-Plugging and Pit-Cleanup Delays

After weeks of talk and deliberation, the Texas Railroad Commission officially decided it will not go back into the production management business. Rather than trying to influence prices, the commissioners changed a handful of rules to allow operators to delay the plugging of wells and the cleaning up of waste pits, reduced fees and fines, and encouraged construction of new underground oil storage facilities. Those motions preceded the final decision on a plan to try to push up oil prices by cutting production. The lone commission member who had supported a 20% production cut, Ryan Sitton, did not bring up the motion because it was clear he did not have the votes to pass it on the three-member commission. Railroad Commission Chairman Wayne Christian said there was no point in cutting Texas production unless other states and producing countries would do the same. “We could not confirm any other state would join us and that was a requisite of the motion,” based on a request for action submitted by Pioneer Natural Resources and Parsley Energy, Christian said. He also pointed to the opposition of every oil and gas industry association to state intervention at a time when producers are cutting production because of low prices and dwindling oil storage space. When the chairman proposed to dismiss the motion, which led to a marathon hearing in April, Sitton said he would oppose it because “Parsley and Pioneer asked us to determine reasonable market demand, which we did not do.” The commission has begun gathering data to answer a critical market variable - how much storage is available in Texas. As of 20 April, unfilled storage capacity owned by Texas refineries and pipeline companies was 71.2 million bbl (about 75% responded to the commission’s query). To encourage more storage, the commission passed an emergency motion allowing underground oil storage in formations other than salt domes. Producers will need to convince commission staffers that the formation will securely contain the oil and not harm water supplies. To speed the process, no hearing will be required except for protests of the commission’s ruling. Also, several fees were waived as an incentive to build storage. Some of the fees, related to injection into disposal wells, could benefit a broader group of companies. Also, in the name of helping struggling operators, the commissioners extended the deadlines for plugging nonproducing wells and cleaning up waste pits from 1 year to 2 years. Commissioner Christi Craddick said the plugging change would apply to marginal wells with some production this year that produce nothing for the year beginning after 1 March. The hope is it will help some companies stay in business, and perhaps allow the restarting of some of those wells in the future. But Sitton pointed out that industry conditions now are so bad that the commission might inherit a lot of wells and pits that need cleanup after oil companies have failed. Paul Dubois, assistant director at the commission, said that in past downturns the commission had taken on more abandoned wells and facilities. The cleanups are supposed to be paid by the financial security insurance required of operators. The hope is that the extended deadlines will reduce current expenses for financially pressed operators. “Maybe there will be some more liabilities, but also some more operators around to take care of it” because they did not have to pay to comply this year,” Craddick said. The potential cost of abandoned wells and pits is unknown. Dubois said the commission has “not enumerated” the number of wellsites that will be left behind after this deep downturn. The potential cleanup cost is likely to be significantly higher than after the 2014 price crash. After years of high-volume drilling, the percentage of older, low-producing wells is much greater, as is the pressure on producers.

Vaccine Rationing and the Urgency of Social Justice in the Covid-19 Response.

The Covid‐19 pandemic needs to be considered from two perspectives simultaneously. First, there are questions about which policies are most effective and fair in the here and now, as the pandemic unfolds. These polices concern, for example, who should receive priority in being tested, how to implement contact tracing, or how to decide who should get ventilators or vaccines when not all can. Second, it is imperative to anticipate the medium‐ and longer‐term consequences that these policies have. The case of vaccine rationing is particularly instructive. Ethical, epidemiological, and economic reasons demand that rationing approaches give priority to groups who have been structurally and historically disadvantaged, even if this means that overall life years gained may be lower.

Analysis of Obstacles to Sustainable Development of Ecotourism in Nature Reserves: A Field Investigation of Three National Nature Reserves in Liaoning Province

Nature reserves are key sites for ecotourism. In the context of sustainable development, a great number of ecotourism practices have been carried out in nature reserves around the world. Important ecotourism practices in nature reserves include the establishment of ecotourism certification systems, the development of management mechanisms promoting effective community participation and the development of standards for ecotourism practices. This paper uses questionnaires, a field investigation and interviews to examine the obstacles influencing the sustainable development of ecotourism in nature reserves, taking three nature reserves in Liaoning Province to serve as examples. The study found that there are two kinds of obstacles to the sustainable development of ecotourism in nature reserves. The first group of obstacles all represent common problems in China including: (1) environmental education is ignored; (2) community participation occurs on an ad hoc basis; (3) tourism management is not rigorous; (4) nature reserve administration is in a state of confrontation with local governments and residents. The second group of obstacles consists of specific problems faced by ecotourism in the three nature reserve, each of which has its own natural, social, cultural and economic environment that generate unique difficulties for ecotourism. In order to promote the healthy improvement of nature reserve ecotourism and achieve the goal of sustainable development, the research team puts forward five suggestions, developing correct understanding, striving to meet the reasonable demands of stakeholders, establishing scientific mechanisms, increasing the social responsibility of management departments of nature reserve ecotourism, and providing separate supervision and management.

The Limited Case for Discrimination's Legality

Is there something about law — and legality, more generally — that makes certain morally wrongful acts of market discrimination legal? The ambition of this paper is to identify a limited case for the legality of (morally wrongful) discrimination. This case is grounded in a concern for free agency, namely, that treating persons as free and equal agents requires recognizing them as entitled to change their minds by revising their discriminatory motivations and acting in conformity with the demands of right reason.

Personalizing the demands of reason.

Children come to joint action with a generalized sense of "reason," which carries normative implications, before personalizing reasons. A general sense of ought precedes specific notions of individual perspective.

A Sufficiently Just Liberal Society is an Illusion

Matteo Bonotti’s book on Partisanship and Public Reason in Diverse Societies is grounded on a theory of partisanship that sees the demands of public reason as internal to the very definition of a party. Bonotti suggests that partisanship is not only compatible with but essential to the stability and legitimacy of a well-ordered liberal society. My paper aims to raise some questions internal to the liberal account of partisanship so as to probe the methodological foundations and plausibility of the liberal framework taken as a whole. My argument is that the assumption of a sufficiently just liberal society on which the book grounds its defence of partisanship makes us ill-equipped to face some of the most critical challenges that liberal societies face in the world that we live.

Menginterkoneksi Sains dan Agama dalam Pembelajaran IPA di Sekolah Dasar

The development of science is interwoven with ideology. Therefore, a fundamental problem that always arises: is Islam complementary with natural science in harmony, or is there an unresolved complication between the metaphysical system based on religion and the demands of reason with empirical research? For a thousand years philosophers and Islamic theologians have considered this problem, which constantly invites intense and disagreeable debate. The word science comes from the Latin "scientia" which means knowledge. According to Webster New Collegiate Dictionart, the definition of science is "knowledge acquired through learning and proof" or "knowledge that covers a general truth of the natural laws that occur. Whereas according to Ibn Kaldun in Miqowin, science is a history of science developed almost entirely based on reason and empirical world experience.

L2 Learners’ and Professionals’ Perceptions of Cognitive Task Complexity : Towards Developing an Index of Task Difficulty

This paper attempts to broaden our understanding on how cognitive task complexity (TC) contributes to L2 learners’ and language professionals’ perceptions of task difficulty (TD). This study was conducted to allow a deeper investigation of the extent to which manipulating TC can influence perceptions of TD, what TC-factors contribute to perceptions of TD, and whether there is a perceptual match between L2 learners and language professionals. The study employed a mixed-method design in which 68 students and 26 language professionals evaluated the TD of two video-based narrative tasks. The students, who were L2 learners of English at a Jordanian secondary school, performed two tasks with increased TC manipulated by intentional reasoning (IR) demands. Data on learners’ perceptions of TD were collected qualitatively and quantitatively using a retrospective questionnaire. The language professionals, who were researchers with a TESOL background, read the tasks instructions and watched the two clips before deciding which task would be considered more difficult and why. Results showed a match between learners and language professionals on their perceptions of TD. Both groups rated the more complex task (+IR) as more difficult. Two categories of higher cognitive demands imposed by IR requirement, i.e. task-induced and task-inherent, were found to be the major contributors to the perceptions of TD. The findings have significant implications for the development of an index of TD, which is considered a priority for language teaching, testing and syllabus design.

Kant’s Regulative Metaphysics of God and the Systematic Lawfulness of Nature

AbstractIn the “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic” of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contends that the idea of God has a positive regulative role in the systematization of empirical knowledge. But why is this regulative role assigned to this specific idea? Kant's account is rather opaque, and this question has also not received much attention in the literature. In this article, I argue that an adequate understanding of the regulative role of the idea of God depends on the specific metaphysical content Kant attributes to it in the Critique and other writings. I show that neither a heuristic principle of conceptual systematicity, nor conceiving God as a hypothesis of an intelligent designer, can satisfy the demands of reason to make the unity and necessity of the laws of nature intelligible. Regarding the positive account about the metaphysical content of the idea of God, I support my argument by referring to Kant's precritical discussion of the usefulness of the conception of God for the project of science, and by expounding Kant's critical account of the necessity of the laws of nature. Thus, my account sheds light on the continuity of Kant's conception of God and his appropriation of his own rationalistic metaphysics.

A block Arnoldi method for the SPN equations

ABSTRACTThe simplified spherical harmonics equations are a useful approximation to the stationary neutron transport equation. The eigenvalue problem associated with them is a challenging problem from the computational point of view. In this work, we take advantage of the block structure of the involved matrices to propose the block inverse-free preconditioned Arnoldi method as an efficient method to solve this eigenvalue problem. For the spatial discretization, a continuous Galerkin finite element method implemented with a matrix-free technique is used to keep reasonable memory demands. A multilevel initialization using linear shape functions in the finite element method is proposed to improve the method convergence. This initialization only takes a small percentage of the total computational time. The proposed eigenvalue solver is compared to the standard power iteration method, the Krylov-Schur method and the generalized Davidson method. The numerical results show that it reduces the computational time to solve the eigenvalue problem.

Using the Method of Medical Insurance Payment Reform to Promote the Path Selection of Large Hospital Development

At the beginning of the establishment of the basic medical insurance system in China, the primary implementation was a single project-based payment. At present, it has gradually explored a single or mixed way to pay, mainly including payment by disease type, payment by the number of people, payment by medical service unit and payment by the DRGs (Diagnosis Related Group System). This paper discusses the reform of payment mode of basic medical insurance in large hospitals and summarizes the main features of the reform of the payment mode of basic medical insurance in the past. First of all, the basic medical insurance management department has absolute choice and pricing power. The government is responsible for the management of basic medical insurance, and the hospital is in a state of passive implementation of government policies. In addition, the reasonable demands of large hospitals can hardly be effectively reflected in the policy. Last but not least, the improvement of hospital serviceability and the promotion of patients' reasonable medical treatment effect have not been realized effectively. The research results of this paper mainly discuss the reform path of basic medical insurance payment methods in large hospitals. For one thing, large hospitals can proactively report to the basic medical insurance management department the reformed disease types and disease charges for basic medical insurance payments. For another thing, the large hospitals can determine the diagnosis and treatment plan of the disease according to the clinical path of disease diagnosis and treatment. The basic medical insurance management department can explore the new path method of reforming the basic medical insurance payment method in large hospitals according to the reform idea of “the same disease insurance standards are consistent” and individual “differentiated self-payment. At the same time, it is recommended that the government use the professional management ability of commercial insurance companies to improve the performance of basic medical insurance by purchasing commercial insurance company services. Give play to the third-party role of commercial insurance companies to help alleviate the asymmetry of the hospital and patient medical information and the contradiction between doctors and patients.

Wyzwania Amoris laetitia dla teologa moralisty

Ambiwalencja niektórych sformułowań VIII rozdziału adhortacji Apostolskiej Amoris laetitia i w następstwie tego konflikt jego interpretacji w Kościele, stawiają teologa-moralistę przed bezprecedensowym wyzwaniem. Tylko interpretacja zgodna z Tradycją i w szczególności z nauczaniem Jana Pawła II w Familiaris consortio i w Veritatis Splendor, jest zdolna sprostać głębokiemu zamiarowi (intencji), który miał papież Franciszek: duszpasterska uwaga (pochylenie się) skierowana do rodzin „zranionych” oraz tych „oddalonych”. Odpowiedzią na oczekiwania adhortacji apostolskiej nie jest „zmiana paradygmatu”, która wprowadza wyjątki „przypadek po przypadku”, ale raczej zaangażowanie w rewizję (rekonstrukcję) moralnego podmiotu chrześcijanina a zatem kwestia wychowania w perspektywie cnót, w zgodności z wymaganiami praktycznej racjonalności oraz prymatu łaski.

Transparency in Algorithmic and Human Decision-Making: Is There a Double Standard?

We are sceptical of concerns over the opacity of algorithmic decision tools. While transparency and explainability are certainly important desiderata in algorithmic governance, we worry that automated decision-making is being held to an unrealistically high standard, possibly owing to an unrealistically high estimate of the degree of transparency attainable from human decision-makers. In this paper, we review evidence demonstrating that much human decision-making is fraught with transparency problems, show in what respects AI fares little worse or better and argue that at least some regulatory proposals for explainable AI could end up setting the bar higher than is necessary or indeed helpful. The demands of practical reason require the justification of action to be pitched at the level of practical reason. Decision tools that support or supplant practical reasoning should not be expected to aim higher than this. We cast this desideratum in terms of Daniel Dennett’s theory of the “intentional stance” and argue that since the justification of action for human purposes takes the form of intentional stance explanation, the justification of algorithmic decisions should take the same form. In practice, this means that the sorts of explanations for algorithmic decisions that are analogous to intentional stance explanations should be preferred over ones that aim at the architectural innards of a decision tool.

Bayesian calibration for multiple source regression model

Abstract In large variety of practical applications, using information from different sources or different kind of data is a reasonable demand. The problem of studying multiple source data can be represented as a multi-task learning problem, and then the information from one source can help to study the information from the other source by extracting a shared common structure. From the other hand, parameter evaluations obtained from various sources can be confused and conflicting. This paper proposes a Bayesian based approach to calibrate data obtained from different sources and to solve nonlinear regression problem in the presence of heteroscedastisity of the multiple-source model. An efficient algorithm is developed for implementation. Using analytical and simulation studies, it is shown that the proposed Bayesian calibration improves the convergence rate of the algorithm and precision of the model. The theoretical results are supported by a synthetic example, and a real-world problem, namely, modeling unsteady pitching moment coefficient of aircraft, for which a recurrent neural network is constructed.

Organisms and the form of freedom in Kant's third Critique

AbstractIn the second half of the third Critique, Kant develops a new form of judgment peculiar to organisms: teleological judgment. In the Appendix to this text, Kant argues that we must regard the final, unconditioned end of creation as human freedom, due to reason's demand that we regard nature as a system of ends. In this paper, I offer a novel interpretation of this argument, according to which judgments of freedom within nature are possible as instances of teleological judgment. Just as individual organisms are to be regarded as governed by supersensible teleological laws, so too is nature as a whole to be regarded as given laws from a supersensible ground. This supersensible ground in the case of nature as a whole is freedom. Freedom and teleological judgments are to be regarded as unifiable with mechanism in the supersensible, and we are to subordinate mechanical explanations to teleological judgments as well as to freedom. This interpretation makes sense both of Kant's claim that he overcomes the “incalculable gulf” between nature and freedom in the third Critique, and also of the location of this argument, as following after and relying on the results of the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment.

Feasibility of simplifying renal dosimetry in 177Lu peptide receptor radionuclide therapy

BackgroundRecently, 177Lu-dotatate therapy for neuroendocrine tumours has received regulatory approval. Dosimetry can be used to optimize treatment on an individual basis, but there is no international consensus as to how it should be done.The aim of this study is to determine a feasible and accurate dosimetry method to guide individualized peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) for patients with neuroendocrine tumours.As part of a clinical trial on 177Lu-dotatate therapy, renal dosimetry was performed for all patients in each treatment cycle, using a hybrid planar-SPECT/CT method. In the present study, we use the image data acquired from 22 patients and 119 cycles and define a set of alternative treatment planning strategies, each representing a simplification in terms of image acquisition and dosimetric calculations. The results from the simplified strategies are compared to the results from the protocol-prescribed hybrid planar-SPECT/CT-based method by analysing differences both in per-cycle and total cumulative absorbed dose (AD) analyses.ResultsIn general, the SPECT-based methods gave results that were largely consistent with the protocol-specified hybrid method, both in the per-cycle and cumulative AD analyses. Notably, performing one SPECT/CT per cycle at 96 h yielded ADs that were very similar to the protocol method. The methods using planar dosimetry resulted in larger variations, as expected, while giving 4 cycles to all patients resulted in the largest inter-individual differences in cumulative AD.ConclusionsPerforming one SPECT/CT at 96 h in every treatment cycle gives sufficiently reliable dosimetric results to base individualized treatment planning on, with a reasonable demand on resources.

A Demand Response Scheme for Wind Integrated Power System Based on Mechanism Design Theory

The increasing integration of high penetration of wind power into power systems have created great challenges for stable operation of the power system. It is important to design a reasonable demand response scheme (DRS) to make decision the optimal load relief, specially, for the wind power suppliers (WPS) and their customers (WPSC). Therefore, this paper proposes a demand response scheme for wind integrated power system based on mechanism design theory. Firstly, we derive the outage cost function and incentive function modeled by the two variables: the customers’ type parameter and the location value. Secondly, incorporate customers’ type parameter and locational flexibility into the DRS, and based on game theory, a demand response scheme with incentive compatible constraint and participation constraint is designed to maximize the benefit both the wind power suppliers and their customers. The implication of demand response scheme is to design an incentive structure that encourages customers to sign up for the right scheme and reveal their true value of load reduction. Finally, the eight-bus system example can demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

What does “learning organization” mean?

PurposeThe paper aims to offer an overview of the definition of the concept of learning organization to be used, related to and taken as a starting point for further conceptual developments by others writing about and using the learning organization concept. An additional purpose is to suggest how the concept of learning organization could be demarcated to define what would be demanded from any particular organization to be counted as a learning organization.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper. To define the learning organization, a label-focused approach and a content-focused approach are used. A contextual approach is suggested as the most appropriate tool for demarcating the concept of learning organization.FindingsIt is suggested that there are four versions of learning organization, which can all be related to three different forms of organizational aspects. Furthermore, a contextual approach is suggested to demarcate how to define learning organization to develop a much-needed contingency model, which places reasonable demands on organizations in various contexts to qualify them as learning organizations.Originality/valueAn overview definition, which anybody writing about the learning organization could relate to, is presented. It is also discussed what a learning organization is not, something which only few others have done, and a contextual approach to demarcating the learning organization concept is suggested.