Slippery Slope Research Articles

Involvement of TRPV4 in temperature-dependent perspiration in mice.

Reports indicate that an interaction between TRPV4 and anoctamin 1 (ANO1) could be widely involved in water efflux of exocrine glands, suggesting that the interaction could play a role in perspiration. In secretory cells of sweat glands present in mouse foot pads, TRPV4 clearly colocalized with cytokeratin 8, ANO1, and aquaporin-5 (AQP5). Mouse sweat glands showed TRPV4-dependent cytosolic Ca2+ increases that were inhibited by menthol. Acetylcholine-stimulated sweating in foot pads was temperature-dependent in wild-type, but not in TRPV4-deficient mice and was inhibited by menthol both in wild-type and TRPM8KO mice. The basal sweating without acetylcholine stimulation was inhibited by an ANO1 inhibitor. Sweating could be important for maintaining friction forces in mouse foot pads, and this possibility is supported by the finding that wild-type mice climbed up a slippery slope more easily than TRPV4-deficient mice. Furthermore, TRPV4 expression was significantly higher in controls and normohidrotic skin from patients with acquired idiopathic generalized anhidrosis (AIGA) compared to anhidrotic skin from patients with AIGA. Collectively, TRPV4 is likely involved in temperature-dependent perspiration via interactions with ANO1, and TRPV4 itself or the TRPV4/ANO 1 complex would be targeted to develop agents that regulate perspiration.

Social Media and Suicidal Behavior in Youth: Slippery Slope or Simply Overstressed?

Social Media and Suicidal Behavior in Youth: Slippery Slope or Simply Overstressed?

Vascular Access status at Initiation of Hemodialysis in a Tertiary Care Hospital.

Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) 5 are on a slippery slope towards dialysis, however, as is the usual observation, most of the patients’ requiring dialysis do so in an urgent or emergent way using temporary non-tunneled hemodialysis catheter. While temporary vascular access provides a ready access in emergency, nevertheless may be associated with serious complications. In this study we determined the frequency of vascular access at initiation of hemodialysis. Methodology: This was a retrospective analysis of our hemodialysis registry maintained at our dialysis center for the past three years. Total of 124 patients’ complete records were available for analysis. Results: The use of non-tunneled hemodialysis catheter was most common n=101 (81.5%), arteriovenous fistula n=22 (17.7%). Conclusion: Non-tunneled hemodialysis catheter use is highly prevalent in our population initiating hemodialysis.

Accountants’ perspective on tax amnesty enhances tax compliance dimensions in extended slippery slope framework

Accountants’ perspective on tax amnesty enhances tax compliance dimensions in extended slippery slope framework

Assisted dying in Swedish healthcare: a qualitative analysis of physicians’ reasoning about physician-assisted suicide

To explore Swedish physicians’ arguments and values for and against physician-assisted suicide (PAS) extracted from the free-text comments in a postal survey. A random selection of approximately 240 physicians from each of the following specialties: general practice, geriatrics, internal medicine, oncology, surgery and psychiatry. All 123 palliative care physicians in Sweden. A qualitative content analysis of free-text comments in a postal questionnaire commissioned by the Swedish Medical Society in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The total response rate was 59.2%. Of the 933 respondents, 1107 comments were provided. The free-text comments entailed both normative and factual arguments for and against PAS. The analysis resulted in two main categories: (1) “Safe implementation of PAS is unachievable” (with subcategories “Criteria of PAS difficult to fulfil” and “PAS puts societal norms and values at risk”) and (2) “The role of PAS in healthcare” (with subcategories “No medical need for PAS”, “PAS is not a task for physicians”, “No ethical difference to other end-of-life decisions” and “PAS is in the patient’s best interest”). The respondents brought up well-known arguments from academic and public debate on the subject. Comments from physicians against PAS were more often emotionally charged and used devices like dysphemisms and slippery-slope arguments.

“Why Is the Old Dying and the New Is Not Being Born?” The Church’s Struggle with Public Justice and Righteousness in Zimbabwe

Abstract This article attempts to present how the church has struggled with public justice and righteousness in Zimbabwe where the past and old dominate the national debate without giving room for emerging personalities and ideas. The church introduced programmes, organisations and documents in an attempt to theoretically break away with the past. The documents are results of transformative projects designed to address the holistic needs of people in Zimbabwe against both the localised and internationalised neoliberal paradigms of Capitalism, Colonialism and Christianity that disempowered rather than liberated followers. Being critical of the past, Derrida says: “To ask such questions, such difficult questions, requires that we change the most resistant, archaic structures of our desire”. The Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD s) introduced the post-liberation discourse through the Zimbabwe We Want Document (ZWWD) in 2006, and a national economic discussion through the National Holistic Agenda for Renewal and Empowerment (NHARE) in 2019 against the idea that the Church must be confined in the pews and politicians in the public arena. These documents and programmes engaged with both politicians and citizens in critical ways to achieve both justice and righteousness. Justice and righteousness are big themes in the Bible and Christian doctrine. Breaking away with the past promised to reverse the slippery slope on public life in Zimbabwe that increased national poverty, class inequalities, and factionalised politics. The opening of space in public life by the ZHOCD allowed citizens to engage in all public life and justice struggles, which is “a revival of a voice that has been silenced after independence, or was send to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), paralysed, captured, neutralised or unauthorised”. It explored new alternatives to engaging state theology in relationship to the margins. Scripture has been useful in the church’s engagement with the state on public life goods, hence the question: “Why is the old dying and the new not being born”? The article pursues this question in view of the church programmes and documents.

Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?

Abstract Although identity politics dates back to the 1960 s, it has acquired a new urgency since the ascendance of Black Lives Matter in the late 2010 s. And while identity politics, as a critical framework, was developed in the United States, its rhetoric has since been taken up in much of the rest of the world. This article argues that the terminology of US-style identity politics is especially ill-suited to Germany, a country in which race does not exist as a legal category, and discrimination and inequality do not revolve around a Black/white axis. It points out, moreover, that the German appropriation of certain words and concepts – such as diversity, political correctness, cancel culture, woke, intersectionality, and others – clashes both with their usage and meaning in the US and with the demographic changes that have transformed post-Second World War German culture. In order to illustrate this clash, this article compares Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop (2019) with Yael Ronen’s Slippery Slope (2021), a critically acclaimed musical performed in English at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater. It critiques Slippery Slope’s appropriation of the buzzwords of identity politics and notes with regret that German theatres are ill-equipped to perform the plays of the most important playwrights working in the US today, a new generation of African American writers, including Jackson, whose work is steeped in the performance traditions of Black American cultures.

Tax Compliance Actions by Tax Authorities and Voluntary Compliance with Tax Obligations by Individual Taxpayers

Research objective: Tax compliance actions aim to improve the relationship between the tax authorities and taxpayers, increasing voluntary compliance with tax obligations and reducing administrative and judicial litigation. In this sense, the defined objective was to analyze whether tax compliance actions increase voluntary compliance with tax obligations. Methodology: Thus, a quantitative approach was used, through analysis of latent classes, carried out on the baseed on longitudinal data from the Federal Revenue, with 531 individual taxpayers, related to compliance action. Results: After the action, it was found that the taxes owed had a statistically significant increase and the tax gap was increasingly reduced between 2015 and 2018, indicating that the implemented tax compliance actions were effective in promoting voluntary compliance with tax obligations by taxpayers. In addition, the action also presented advantages to taxpayers, since, when there is a spontaneous regularization, there is less possibility of facing a tax procedure, as well as a reduction in administrative costs and the amount of litigation. Practical and theoretical contributions: The practical contributions are aimed at enhancing future tax compliance initiatives carried out by Federated Entities. Furthermore, the theoretical contribution utilizes the Slippery Slope Model, which illustrates an upsurge in voluntary compliance with tax obligations following a compliance action, attributed to heightened authority and confidence in the tax regulatory body. As a result, this theoretical contribution underscores the significance of the Slippery Slope Model in comprehending taxpayer behavior and in devising more efficient tax compliance strategies.

Core tax administration system: the power and trust dimensions of slippery slope framework tax compliance model

Core tax administration system: the power and trust dimensions of slippery slope framework tax compliance model

Assisted Suicide and Slippery Slopes: Reflections on Oregon

Slippery slope argumentation features prominently in debates over assisted suicide. The jurisdiction of Oregon features prominently too, especially as regards parliamentary scrutiny of assisted suicide proposals. This paper examines Oregon’s public data (including certain official pronouncements) on assisted suicide in light of the two basic versions of the slippery slope argument, the empirical and moral-logical versions. Oregon’s data evidences some normatively interesting shifts in its assisted suicide practice which in turn prompts consideration of two elements of moral-logical slippage that are not widely discussed. One is slippage from an initial autonomy-based public justification for assisted suicide which does not include burden-based concerns within its operative account of voluntariness to an evolved public justification that does. The other is an expansion of a terminal illness ground to include chronic illnesses effectively rendered terminal via a refusal of treatment.

Development of Two Wheel Drive Electric Bikes for Extreme Road and A Long-Range Capabilities

This paper aims to develop the electric bicycle by using a two-wheel drive that has a long range of use. This development is motivated by many extreme roads and the absence of a charging station except in the user’s own house. A folding bicycle type bicycle for adults with 16-inch wheels was used in this study. The two-wheel drive can be adjusted using the driving motor to be more flexible and adapt to road conditions, although the motor power used is small, 350-Watt 24 Volt for one wheel. The battery capacity used is quite large for the range quite far away, which is 24 volts 80 Amps, and the charging time is about 2 hours. The placement of the battery has calculated the center of gravity and balance of the bike. Results show that this electric bicycle can be used for slippery road conditions and slopes of not more than 1A maximum speed of the bicycle can reach up to 30 km/hour, on flat road conditions. Likewise, the bicycle’s range for a full charge is around 220-260 km, with an average speed of 15-16 km/hour. Two drives can be implemented independently, adjusting the running conditions by moving the drive motor selection button. For extreme conditions, it is recommended to use two electric motors.

Power of Pixels: Examining the Influence of Digital Tactics on Modern Elections and Political Campaigning

This essay tech's swing at selecting and crusades, with a aim on digital strategies and their impacts. It plunges into how developments in tech acquire changed the landscape of campaigning and explores the changing ways that politicians work applied sciences instruments to hit voters. The analyze additionally analyzes the likely outcomes of those strategies, adding issues about elector maneuvering and secrecy breaches. This essay aims to provide a comprehensive comprehension of the intersection between tech and policies in today's society through an informative method. It delves into digitals schemes slippery slopes and their outcomes, traveling from how advancements in computing have revolutionized the realm of campaigning to the potential perils of these tactics, like issues about manipulation of the voter base and violations of privacy defenses. The study also scrutinizes the changing ways politicians surf that ongoing digital sea to contact constituents. Through an knowledgeable technique, this essay goals to offer a complete understanding of the meeting between engineering and politics in today's international the place techniques waves continuously roll onto the shore, reworking strategies and concerns. It takes readers out on that digitally choppy sea and back along to analyze tech's effect on elections and campaigns drift whereas shielding against unintended riptides of misunderstanding.

The ethically significant difference between dual use and slippery slope arguments, in relation to CRISPR-Cas9: philosophical considerations and ethical challenges

Biomedical research, on the one hand, contributes to important goals from generation of knowledge about the human body to the development and testing of therapeutics of all kinds. On the other hand, it can produce serious and sometimes unforeseeable consequences. In the ethical analysis of these two aspects of biomedical research, two important argumentative strategies play a major role. First, slippery slope arguments are used to warn of potential risks and to highlight knowledge-based limitations. Second, a dual-use problem describes the challenge that already established techniques can be used for both morally wrong and morally right purposes. These two argumentative strategies appear to share several similarities, which will be investigated in this article. For this purpose, the article will first provide clear working definitions for both types of argument. This lays the foundation for the further ethical analysis. In a second step, and in order to investigate the similarities and differences of the argumentative strategies with an example from current ethical debates, CRISPR-Cas9, a currently very promising tool of genome editing, will be examined. The extent to which the possible applications of this genome editing tool can be addressed by slippery slope arguments or the dual use problem will be investigated. For this purpose, selected studies involving the use of CRISPR-Cas9 will be examined. Based on this two-step, analytic and example-based comparison of slippery-slope argumentation and dual-use considerations, the article will detail the ethically relevant difference between the two argumentative strategies and at the same time contribute to the ongoing ethical debate about CRISPR-Cas9.

The British Royals in Australia

The British Royals in Australia

TRUST–POWER RELATIONSHIP AND TAX REPORTING BY PLATFORM WORKERS: A MODERATED MEDIATION MODEL

The power and trust relationship between tax authorities and taxpayers is thought to be important in shaping taxpayer compliance behaviour. Although a growing number of studies have considered moral and emotional elements in tax decision-making, the nexus between taxpayers’ honest intention and feelings of guilt towards their tax-reporting decision remains unclear. In support of studies on the digital or platform economy and the rising number of individuals earning income digitally, this study seeks to identify factors that influence individuals’ tax reporting decision of their digital income. Applying the Slippery Slope Framework, this study uses a 2 x 2 between-subjects factorial experimental design, in which the independent variables of this study, i.e., power and trust are manipulated. This study conducts a scenario-based experiment with eighty platform workers on an established digital platform. The findings reveal that high trust in authorities increases platform workers' intention for honesty reporting and guilt for misreporting, promoting tax-reporting compliance. Moreover, this relationship is significantly moderated by the high-power condition. Specifically, it is believed that both enforcement and trust matter in achieving compliance in taxpayers’ reporting.

Muslim women consumers: Critical interpretations of US modest fashion brands entangled with the fashion-advocacy-capitalist-façade

Following 9/11, some young Muslim American women have been wearing hijabs to assert their Islamic identities. They are also seeking fashionable modest clothing, yet, despite their growing buying power, the US modest fashion market targeting Muslim women appears underserved. The purpose of this study was to critically examine how niche modest fashion brands in the United States target Muslim women while drawing upon theoretical concepts centring on oppression and agency related to the long history of gendered Islamophobia Muslims have experienced. We analysed eleven brands’ websites and social media applying the constant comparative method and identified four themes: empowering Muslim women, reclaiming modesty as modern and beautiful, meeting fashionable modest wear demand, and rejecting and perpetuating colourism. In our analysis of the digital discourses of US modest fashion brands, we revealed that these brands emerged to meet the demand of young Muslim woman in the United States who are embracing the hijab and modest clothing as a potent symbol of resistance against western ideologies, the fashion system’s oppressive acts towards Muslim women and traditional Islamic dress codes. Yet, their advocacy-centred messages – empowerment, reclaiming modesty as beautiful – operate within a profit-driven system, which we theorize as a fashion-advocacy-capitalistic-façade. The fashion-advocacy-capitalist-façade concept helps explain the slippery slope that fashion brands are tiptoeing as they aim to empower Muslim women, offer trendy modest clothing, reject traditional Islamic dress codes for women and create space in the fashion market for this unmet demand. Although these brands aim to promote a positive sense of self for Muslim women, they cannot be withheld from critical examination and potential interpretations when operating within the capitalist-driven industry that is so often plagued with significant injustices.

Fraud Power Laws

ABSTRACTUsing misstatement data, we find that the distribution of detected fraud features a heavy tail. We propose a theoretical mechanism that explains such a relatively high frequency of extreme frauds. In our dynamic model, a manager manipulates earnings for personal gain. A monitor of uncertain quality can detect fraud and punish the manager. As the monitor fails to detect fraud, the manager's posterior belief about the monitor's effectiveness decreases. Over time, the manager's learning leads to a slippery slope, in which the size of frauds grows steeply, and to a power law for detected fraud. Empirical analyses corroborate the slippery slope and the learning channel. As a policy implication, we establish that a higher detection intensity can increase fraud by enabling the manager to identify an ineffective monitor more quickly. Further, nondetection of frauds below a materiality threshold, paired with a sufficiently steep punishment scheme, can prevent large frauds.

Human reason versus arrogance technoscience and the replacement shadow. -Ethical evaluation and social control to regain power on the means and ends from the work of José Sanmartín

This essay analyzes from a personalistic bioethics the model of technological progress supported by an autonomy without controls and an imperative that is governed by the maxim: if it can be done, let's do it!, as a necessary and sufficient condition of progress. This puts us on the slippery slope between the technically feasible and the morally lawful. The pioneering work of the philosopher, José Sanmartin Esplugues 2 , urges reflection in the face of a technological profusion that sees the human being as a useful embodied object and offers powers of intervention on human life that were previously unimaginable. The reduction of the person to mere biological-material data opens the door to increasing deshumanization by subordination to the calculations of an instrumental rationalism. Underlying the desire to see ourselves at the top of the world and genetic techniques are the ultimate expression of a longing for human emancipation that aspires to take the reins of evolution through an abstract postbiological imaginary. Sanmartin proposes a model of ethical evaluation and social insertion of technoscientific activity that goes beyond the conventional categories of impact, use and effectiveness to distinguish social, cultural, economic, political and values correlates, in order to embroider a pattern that decides on the means and ends of human life through technologies that are neither innocuous nor neutral. A society without antidotes to manipulation that also teaches us to cultivate utopian dreams about human nature is easily malleable by elites who promise happy worlds and redeem us from our vulnerability.

Research on the moral slippery slope risk of unethical pro-organizational behavior and its mechanism: a moderated mediation model

Research on the moral slippery slope risk of unethical pro-organizational behavior and its mechanism: a moderated mediation model

“Are we not going too far?“: Socio-ethical considerations of preimplantation genetic testing using polygenic risk scores according to healthcare professionals

The recent introduction of polygenic risk scores within preimplantation genetic testing (PGT-P) has been met with many concerns. To get more insights into the perspectives of relevant stakeholders on the socio-ethical aspects of PGT-P, an interview study with 31 healthcare professionals involved in reproductive medicine and genetics in Europe and North-America was performed. Healthcare professionals in our study were concerned that PGT-P was going too far in terms of selection, with regards to both medical conditions and non-medical traits. Healthcare professionals were worried about the ethical ‘slippery slope’ of PGT-P, the increasing medicalization of reproductive health, the commercial context of PGT-P, and potential stigmatization and discrimination. There were also concerns that the availability and the ‘technological imperative’ of PGT-P could lead to pressure and a sense of responsibility for parents to use PGT-P. Additionally, it could cause new anxieties about the child's health before the child has even been born. Since PGT-P provides polygenic risk scores before birth, the autonomy of the child has to be considered. These socio-ethical concerns heighten existing debates regarding reproductive genetic technologies and show that the specifics of PGT-P make this screening option especially ethically controversial.