Multiple Sclerosis is a debilitating chronic autoimmune disease of the central nervous system that results in lower quality of life. Medication adherence is important for reducing relapse, disease progression, and MS-related symptoms, particularly during the early stages of MS. However, adherence may be impacted by negative emotional states. Therefore, it is important to identify protective factors. Past research suggests that the ability to discriminate between negative emotional states, also known as negative emotion differentiation, may be protective against enactment of maladaptive (...) risk-related behaviors. However, less is known as to how NED may promote adaptive health behaviors such as medication adherence. Utilizing weekly diaries, we investigated whether NED moderates the association between negative affect and medication adherence rates across 58 weeks among patients newly diagnosed with MS. Results revealed that NED significantly moderated the relationship between negative affect and medication adherence. Specifically, greater negative affect was associated with lower adherence only for individuals reporting low NED. However, this link disappeared for those reporting moderate to high NED. Building upon past research, our findings suggest that NED may promote adaptive health behaviors and have important clinical implications for the treatment and management of chronic illness. (shrink)

On March 30, 1995, the Supreme Court of Nevada, in Greco v. United States, determined that medical professionals who fail to make a timely diagnosis of gross and disabling fetal defects, thereby denying a pregnant woman her right to terminate a pregnancy, had acted negligently, and a malpractice claim could be brought against them. The court supported the plaintiff's claim of “wrongful birth,” but determined that the disabled child born to the plaintiff has no personal cause of action for “wrongful (...) life.” Sundi Greco, the plaintiff, alleged that her doctors at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada failed to make a timely diagnosis of her son's physical defects and abnormalities before his birth. Their negligence denied her the opportunity to terminate her pregnancy, causing her damages attendant to the avoidable birth of a child with birth defects. On her child's behalf, Greco asserted that the physicians' negligence, and resultant denial of his mother's right to terminate the pregnancy, allowed him to be born into a “grossly abnormal life of pain and deprivation.”. (shrink)

Vaccine research, as well as the development, testing, clinical trials, and commercial uses of vaccines involve complex processes with various biological data that include gene and protein expression, analysis of molecular and cellular interactions, study of tissue and whole body responses, and extensive epidemiological modeling. Although many data resources are available to meet different aspects of vaccine needs, it remains a challenge how we are to standardize vaccine annotation, integrate data about varied vaccine types and resources, and support advanced vaccine (...) data analysis and inference. To address these problems, the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO) has been developed through collaboration with vaccine researchers and many national and international centers and programs, including the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) Initiative, and the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). VO utilizes the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the top ontology and the Relation Ontology (RO) for definition of term relationships. VO is represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and edited using the Protégé-OWL. Currently VO contains more than 2000 terms and relationships. VO emphasizes on classification of vaccines and vaccine components, vaccine quality and phenotypes, and host immune response to vaccines. These reflect different aspects of vaccine composition and biology and can thus be used to model individual vaccines. More than 200 licensed vaccines and many vaccine candidates in research or clinical trials have been modeled in VO. VO is being used for vaccine literature mining through collaboration with the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI). Multiple VO applications will be presented. (shrink)

The question of the moral significance of Scripture is in reality a question about what kind of community the church must be to make the narratives of Scripture central for its life.

This article is concerned with exploring the idea of places as providing persons with nourishment. This version of person–place relations is displayed in a paper by McHugh and, in provocative fashion, in Michel Serres’s analysis of the human condition as a parasitic one. Unlike McHugh, Serres combines his analysis of parasites with a concern that principled actors may be insufficiently attached to places. His views are revealed in his interpretations of works by Molière and Plato. By reinterpreting these works, I (...) try to suggest that Serres’s well-founded scepticism as to the level of commitment of principled actors to the places that, as he rightly points out, are nourishing them, may not apply to the sub-set of principled actors who deserve to be called particular. (shrink)

This paper augments Hailperin's substantial efforts to place Boole's algebra of logic on a solid footing. Namely Horn sentences are used to give a modern formulation of the principle that Boole adopted in 1854 as the foundation for his algebra of logic—we call this principle The Rule of 0 and 1.

Since the Persian Wars, the Areopagus had allegedly usurped certain ‘additional functions’. By removing them, and assigning them instead to the Council, the assembled People, and the jury-courts, Ephialtes undid the last institutional bastion of aristocratic political authority, and set the copestones on Athens' democratic order.

Since the Persian Wars, the Areopagus had allegedly usurped certain ‘additional functions’. By removing them, and assigning them instead to the Council, the assembled People, and the jury-courts, Ephialtes undid the last institutional bastion of aristocratic political authority, and set the copestones on Athens' democratic order.

Caesar left off writing de Bello Gallico at the end of the Alesia campaign in 51 B.C., and his account of the civil war begins in January 49. There was therefore a gap ofa year and more between the narratives in the two collections of Caesar's own Commentaries. Some time soon after Caesar's death, his officer A. Hirtius decided toknit together these unlinked narratives, supplying a preface to account for hisprocedure. It is usually assumed, and it is assumed here, that (...) this Preface, whichappears at the start of B.G. 8 in the MSS, should be taken to mean that its author wasthe author too of the book immediately following, which connects de Bello Gallico with de Bello Civili by narrating, essentially, the transactions of the year 50. (shrink)

"A splendidly illuminating book." —The New York Times Like it or not, George W. Bush has launched a revolution in American foreign policy. He has redefined how America engages the world, shedding the constraints that friends, allies, and international institutions once imposed on its freedom of action. In America Unbound, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay caution that the Bush revolution comes with serious risks–and, at some point, we may find that America’s friends and allies will refuse to follow his (...) lead, leaving the U.S. unable to achieve its goals. This edition has been extensively revised and updated to include major policy changes and developments since the book’s original publication. (shrink)

The volume brings together a collection of original papers on some of the main tenets of Joseph Raz's legal and political philosophy: Legal positivism and the nature of law, practical reason, authority, the value of equality, incommensurability, harm, group rights, and multiculturalism. James Griffin and Yael Tamir raise questions concerning Raz's notion of group rights and its application to claims of cultural and political autonomy, while Will Kymlicka and Bernhard Peters examine Raz's theory of multicultural society. Lukas Meyer investigates the (...) applicability of the notion of harm in the intergenerational context. Other papers are devoted to fundamental theoretical tenets of Raz's work. Hillel Steiner and Andrei Marmor examine Raz's account of value pluralism and incommensurability in light of what these authors consider to be goods whose equal distribution must be valued for its own sake. Robert Alexy and Timothy Endicott discuss traditional issues of jurisprudence and legal philosphy with special attention to Raz's contribution. Rüdiger Bittner, Bruno Celano, and J. E. Penner discuss and criticize aspects of Raz's theory of practical reason. Jeremy Waldron presents a critique of Raz's interpretation of authority.This volume concludes with a chapter by Joseph Raz in which he responds to arguments in the foregoing essays. (shrink)

In contrast to attempts that have been made to measure the clarity of reporting of the methods of clinical trials in journal articles, we report here an attempt to measure the accuracy of methods reporting. We focus in this article on eligibility criteria as a test case for the reporting of clinical trial methods. We examined the reporting of eligibility criteria in the protocol, methods paper (if applicable), journal article, and Clinical Alert for articles appearing in print between January 1988 (...) and September 1994 for which a Clinical Alert had been issued. Eligibility criteria were further classified into five categories in order to examine the content of information loss, if any. On average, 82% of protocol eligibility criteria were reported in methods papers. Journal articles and Clinical Alerts fared somewhat worse: 63% of criteria were reported in journal articles, 19% in Clinical Alerts. In all three categories of medical communication, the reporting of criteria that defined the study disease tended to be complete; reporting of criteria relating to trial precision, patient safety, legal and ethical concerns, and administrative considerations, was not complete. We found that criteria for clinical trial eligibility are frequently under-reported in medical communications. Moreover, some of the criteria omitted are of considerable clinical importance. We suggest that in the design phase of clinical trials, proposed eligibility criteria be scrutinized closely. Those criteria that survive this scrutiny and that have clinical import must be reported upon fully and accurately when communicating trial results. (shrink)