Good agricultural practices certification schemes have been promoted to enhance agricultural sustainability. This study seeks to explain the adoption of GAP certification schemes through an analysis of the role of personal values in guiding such choice. It is a departure from approaches taken in previous studies in the area. Through the laddering interview technique of means-end chain analysis, a hierarchical value map was systematically schematized to illustrate the relationship between adoption of GAP, outcomes, and personal values driving the choice. The (...) personal values identified in this study cluster under the headings of “better life”, “religious responsibility”, “healthy life”, and “responsible farmer”. Amongst these, the main evidence pointed to the desire to have “better life” through the enhanced financial position that is perceived to arise as a consequence of GAP adoption as being of primary importance. These findings suggest that, while profit is not the sole end driver of adoptive behavior, GAP certification schemes have to be seen as lucrative and to enhance the goals of achieving core personal values. Other empirical information in this study also has significant policy implications. It is a key finding of this paper that effective promotions of GAP should be tailored and targeted at specific segments of the farmer population. (shrink)

Gender is perhaps the most pervasive, fundamental, and universally accepted way we separate and categorize human beings. Yet in recent years, U.S. courts and administrative state agencies have confronted a growing challenge from individuals demanding to have their gender reclassified. Transgender people create a profound category crisis for social institutions built on the idea that biological sex is both immutable and dichotomous. During the past four decades, the central legal question shifted from how to allocate specific individuals to categories to (...) the permeability of gender categories themselves. This analysis of 38 judicial gender determinations provides a glimpse of the literal construction of the gender order and of the ways institutions gender individuals. It also provides powerful evidence that cultural anxieties about reproduction and the heterosexual, conjugal family underscore institutional efforts to manage the uncertainty of postmodern gender identities. (shrink)

This paper presents an adaptive fuzzy sliding-mode controller for multiple Euler–Lagrange systems communicated with directed topology. Based on the graph theory and Lyapunov–Krasovskii functions, a delay-dependent sufficient condition for the existence of sliding surfaces is given in terms of linear matrix inequalities. The asymptotic stability is analyzed by using the Lyapunov method in the presence of unknown parametric dynamics, actuator faults, and time-varying delays. The usage of adaptive techniques is to adapt the unknown parameters so that the objective of globally (...) asymptotic stability is achieved. Finally, simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. (shrink)

This article investigates the often cited and dismissed, but rarely examined, relationship between legalizing same-sex marriage and polygamy. Employing a comparative historical analysis of U.S. and South African jurisprudence, ideology, and cultural politics, we examine efforts to expand, restrict, and regulate the gender and number of legally recognized conjugal bonds. South African family jurisprudence grants legal recognition to both same-sex marriage and polygyny, while the United States prohibits and resists both. However, social and material conditions make it easier to practice (...) family diversity in the U.S. than in South Africa. Our analysis of the very different histories of polygamy and same-sex marriage in the two societies suggests the centrality of racial politics to marriage regimes, yielding paradoxical narratives about the implications of legal same-sex marriage for the future of polygamy and sexual democracy. If there is a slippery marital slope, we argue, it does not tilt in a singular or expected direction. (shrink)

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is an essential component of legal assistant systems, which aims to automatically predict judgment results from a given criminal fact description. As a vital subtask of LJP, researchers have paid little attention to the numerical LJP, i.e., the prediction of imprisonment and penalty. Existing methods ignore numerical information in the criminal facts, making their performances far from satisfactory. For instance, the amount of theft varies, as do the prison terms and penalties. The major challenge is how (...) the model can obtain the ability of numerical comparison and magnitude perception, e.g., 400 < 500 < 800, 500 is closer to 400 than to 800. To this end, we propose a judicial knowledge-enhanced magnitude-aware reasoning architecture, called NumLJP, for the numerical LJP task. Specifically, we first implement a contrastive learning-based judicial knowledge selector to distinguish confusing criminal cases efficiently. Unlike previous approaches that employ the law article as external knowledge, judicial knowledge is a quantitative guideline in real scenarios. It contains many numerals (called anchors) that can construct a reference frame. Then we design a masked numeral prediction task to help the model remember these anchors to acquire legal numerical commonsense from the selected judicial knowledge. We construct a scale-based numerical graph using the anchors and numerals in facts to perform magnitude-aware numerical reasoning. Finally, the representations of fact description, judicial knowledge, and numerals are fused to make decisions. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets and select several competitive baselines. The results demonstrate that the macro-F1 of NumLJP improves by at least 9.53% and 11.57% on the prediction of penalty and imprisonment, respectively. (shrink)

According to Hobbes, individuals care about their relative standing in a way that shapes their social interactions. To model this aspect of Hobbesian psychology, this paper supposes that agents have social preferences, that is, preferences about their comparative resource holdings. Introducing uncertainty regarding the social preferences of others unleashes a process of trust-unravelling, ultimately leading to Hobbes’s ‘state of war’. This Trust-unravelling Model incorporates important features of Hobbes’s argument that past models ignore.

The secretory pathway delivers proteins synthesized at the rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER) to various subcellular locations via the Golgi apparatus. Currently, efforts are focused on understanding the molecular machineries driving individual processes at the RER and Golgi that package, modify and transport proteins. However, studies are routinely performed using non‐dividing cells. This obscures the critical issue of how the secretory pathway is affected by cell division. Indeed, several studies have indicated that protein trafficking is down‐regulated during mitosis. Moreover, the RER (...) and Golgi apparatus exhibit gross reorganization in mitosis. Here I provide a relatively neglected perspective of how the mitotic cyclin‐dependent kinase (CDK1) could regulate various stages of the secretory pathway. I highlight several aspects of the mitotic control of protein trafficking that remain unresolved and suggest that further studies on how the mitotic CDK1 influences the secretory pathway are necessary to obtain a deeper understanding of protein transport. (shrink)

Scholars have generally underestimated the level of Roman involvement in Africa in the period between the annexation of Carthage in 146 b.c. and Caesar's victory at Thapsus in 46 b.c., and the land in Africa which the Romans annexed has been conventionally called public land (ager publicus). This paper analyses the surviving text of the African provisions of the epigraphic lex agraria of 111 b.c. and notes that the term ager publicus is not attested in the provincial section of the (...) law. The land in Africa appears simply as ager in Africa and the term ager publicus is confined exclusively to Italy in the law of 111. However, Cicero's references to Rullus’ agrarian proposal in 64/3 b.c. in the De lege agraria suggest that the term ager publicus was used to qualify land existing outside Italy in Rullus’ proposal. This paper argues that the concept of ager publicus as opposed to private land developed in Africa between 111 and 63 b.c., and that this was linked to privatization of ager in Africa in this period. The results of this study suggest a high degree of Roman exploitation of African land prior to the Caesarean and Augustan colonies in the 40s b.c. (shrink)

The present research attempts to understand the importance of altruistic and egoistic values in determining consumers’ motives and intention to purchase organic foods. Using the face-to-face survey approach, a total of 1,067 responses were collected from consumers in China. Data analysis was performed using a two-step structural equation modeling approach, i.e., measurement and structural models. The findings indicated that both values influence the intention to purchase organic foods through the mediation of motives. Specifically, the altruistic value influences the environmental concern, (...) and the egoistic value influences the health concern. Moreover, the perceived uncertainty negatively moderates a relationship between consumer HC and organic purchase intention while positively moderating a relationship between consumer EC and organic purchase intention. Several implications and suggestions are also discussed. (shrink)

Community engagement (CE) is gaining prominence in global health research. A number of ethical goals–spanning the instrumental, intrinsic, and transformative–have been ascribed to CE in global health research. This paper draws attention to an additional transformative value that CE is not typically linked to but that seems very relevant: solidarity. Both are concerned with building relationships and connecting parties that are distant from one another. This paper first argues that furthering solidarity should be recognized as another ethical goal for CE (...) in global health research. It contends that, over time, CE can build the bases of solidaristic relationships—moral imagination, recognition, understanding, empathy—between researchers and community members. Applying concepts from existing accounts of solidarity, the paper develops preliminary ideas about who should be engaged and how to advance solidarity. The proposed approach is compared to current CE practice in global health research. Finally, the paper briefly considers how solidaristic CE could affect how global health research is performed. (shrink)

This is a study of 288 Korean and 323 Japanese Business executives. The result indicates that, (1) the business executives believe basically in higher level business ethics, but (2) they occasionally have to make unethical business decisions which conflict with their personal values, because of prevailing business practices. (3) However, they think higher ethical standards is useful for long-term profit and for improving workers' attitudes, and the standards can be improved, and (4) to improve ethical standards, model setting by superiors (...) is the most important and clear-cut company policies and code of ethics are essential. (shrink)

The current study examined the validity of HEXACO personality traits (at the broad trait-level and narrow facet-level) and Self-Control as predictors of counterproductive academic behavior (CAB; at the overall level and specific dimensional level) among college students. We collected data from 483 undergraduate students in South Korea who completed self-report measures of HEXACO personality traits, Self-Control, CAB. Results showed that Conscientiousness (r = −.23) and Honesty-Humility (r = −.25) were significantly correlated with CAB and that Self-Control provided incremental validity over (...) HEXACO personality traits in predicting CAB. The correlations of Conscientiousness and Self-Control with CAB were consistently negative at the facet-level. However, within each HEXACO trait, there was some variability in the strength (and sometimes, the direction) of the relationships between the facet traits and CAB dimensions. Additionally, hierarchical multiple regression analysis results showed that Self-Control provided incremental validity for predicting CAB beyond prediction provided by the HEXACO personality traits. The results provide further support for personality and Self-Control as meaningful predictors of counterproductive academic behavior in college. (shrink)

Research funders, regulatory agencies, and journals are increasingly expecting that individual-level data from health research will be shared. Broad consent to such sharing is considered appropriate, feasible and acceptable in low- and middle-income settings, but to date limited empirical research has been conducted to inform the design of such processes. We examined stakeholder perspectives about how best to seek broad consent to sharing data from the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, which implemented a data sharing policy and broad consent (...) to data sharing in January 2016. Between February and August 2017 qualitative data were collected at two sites, Bangkok and the Thai-Myanmar border town of Mae Sot. We conducted eighteen semi-structured interviews. We also conducted four focus group discussions with a total of nineteen people. Descriptive and thematic coding informed analysis of aspects of data sharing that are considered most important to inform participants about, and the best ways to explain complex and abstract topics relating to data sharing. The findings demonstrated that clinical trial participants prioritise information about the potential benefits and harms of data sharing. Stakeholders made multiple suggestions for clarifying information provided about data sharing on such topics. There was significant variation amongst stakeholders’ perspectives about how much information should be provided about data sharing, and it was clear that effective information provision should be responsive to the study, the study population, the individual research participant and the research context. Effectively communicating about data sharing with research participants is challenging in practice, highlighting the importance of robust and effective data sharing governance in this context. Broad consent should incorporate effective and efficient explanations of data sharing to promote informed decision-making, without impeding research participants’ understandings of key aspects of the research from which data will be shared. Further work is required to refine both the development of core information about data sharing to be provided to all research participants, and appropriate solutions for context specific-challenges arising when explaining data sharing. (shrink)

Since January 2016, the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit has trialled a data-sharing policy where requests to access research datasets are processed through a Data Access Committee. In this paper, we share our experiences establishing data management systems and data-sharing infrastructure including a data-sharing policy, data access committee and related procedures. We identified a number of practical and ethical challenges including requests for datasets collected without specific or broad consent to data sharing and requests from pharmaceutical companies for data (...) to support drug registration applications. We also encountered significant resource constraints which required the development of appropriate human resources and infrastructure. We suggest a research agenda to promote responsible and equitable data sharing while safeguarding the rights and interests of research participants and researchers. (shrink)

In view of the fact that vigorously promoting recycling has become a viable means to promote sustainable development, it is important to better understand the impact of recycling efforts on subsequent resource saving behavior. This research empirically examines the effects of recycling efforts on subsequent resource saving by analyzing the survey data of 356 college students in China. The recycling efforts, environmental self-identity and feeling of pride were measured using existing scales while saving behaviors and recycling cost were measured by (...) developing new scales. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was performed to test the structural relationships among recycling efforts, environmental self-identity, feeling of pride, and saving behaviors. Further, the moderation role of recycling cost was tested. The results showed that saving behaviors could be classified into two types based on their costliness; recycling efforts have a positive effect on costless saving behaviors, while having a negative effect on costly saving behaviors; both the positive and negative effect of recycling efforts on resource saving is mediated by pride feeling and environmental self-identity; and recycling cost negatively moderates the effects of recycling efforts on pride feeling. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of the findings. (shrink)

In Search of a New Institutional Structure for Chinese Civilization.

Faithful DNA replication and accurate chromosome segregation are the key machineries of genetic transmission. Disruption of these processes represents a hallmark of cancer and often results from loss of tumor suppressors. PTEN is an important tumor suppressor that is frequently mutated or deleted in human cancer. Loss of PTEN has been associated with aneuploidy and poor prognosis in cancer patients. In mice, Pten deletion or mutation drives genomic instability and tumor development. PTEN deficiency induces DNA replication stress, confers stress tolerance, (...) and disrupts mitotic spindle architecture, leading to accumulation of structural and numerical chromosome instability. Therefore, PTEN guards the genome by controlling multiple processes of chromosome inheritance. Here, we summarize current understanding of the PTEN function in promoting high-fidelity transmission of genetic information. We also discuss the PTEN pathways of genome maintenance and highlight potential targets for cancer treatment. PTEN is a guardian of the genome. However, the role of PTEN in guarding the genome has not been revealed until recently. PTEN controls multiple fundamental processes of genomic transmission. By physically interacting with key molecules in DNA replication, DNA repair/decatenation, and chromosome segregation during the cell cycle, PTEN maintains genomicintegrity and fitness. (shrink)

BackgroundSharing de-identified individual-level health research data is widely promoted and has many potential benefits. However there are also some potential harms, such as misuse of data and breach of participant confidentiality. One way to promote the benefits of sharing while ameliorating its potential harms is through the adoption of a managed access approach where data requests are channeled through a Data Access Committee (DAC), rather than making data openly available without restrictions. A DAC, whether a formal or informal group of (...) individuals, has the responsibility of reviewing and assessing data access requests. Many individual groups, consortiums, institutional and independent DACs have been established but there is currently no widely accepted framework for their organization and function.Main textWe propose that DACs, should have the role of both promotion of data sharing and protection of data subjects, their communities, data producers, their institutions and the scientific enterprise. We suggest that data access should be granted by DACs as long as the data reuse has potential social value and provided there is low risk of foreseeable harms. To promote data sharing and to motivate data producers, DACs should encourage secondary uses that are consistent with the interests of data producers and their own institutions. Given the suggested roles of DACs, there should be transparent, simple and clear application procedures for data access. The approach to review of applications should be proportionate to the potential risks involved. DACs should be established within institutional and legal frameworks with clear lines of accountability, terms of reference and membership. We suggest that DACs should not be modelled after research ethics committees (RECs) because their functions and goals of review are different from those of RECs. DAC reviews should be guided by the principles of public health ethics instead of research ethics.ConclusionsIn this paper we have suggested a framework under which DACs should operate, how they should be organised, and how to constitute them. (shrink)

The use of placebos in randomised controlled trials is a subject of considerable ethical debate. In this paper we present a set of considerations to evaluate the ethics of placebo controlled trials that includes: social value of the study; need for a randomised controlled trial and placebo; standards of care; risks of harm due to administration of placebo and the harm benefit balance; clinical equipoise; and double standards. We illustrate the application of these considerations using a case study of a (...) large ongoing multicentre, placebo-controlled, double-blinded, randomised trial to determine primaquine anti-relapse efficacy in vivax malaria. There is an urgent need for primaquine anti-relapse studies in order to rationalise the management of a potentially fatal disease. An ethical justification for the use of the placebo arm is provided on the grounds that the actual current applied standard of care in most endemic places does not include primaquine. It has also been argued that there is clinical equipoise among the primaquine study arms and that the risk of harms of being in the placebo arm is the risk of having relapse, which is no more than not being included in the trial, and that there are no double standards. Based on our set of considerations, we conclude that a placebo arm is not only justified but imperative in this study. We propose that similar considerations should be prospectively applied to other placebo controlled trials and observational control arms where no treatment is offered. (shrink)

Cellular events must be executed in a certain sequence during the cell division in order to maintain genome integrity and hence ensure a cell's survival. In M phase, for instance, chromosome segregation always precedes mitotic exit (characterized by mitotic kinase inactivation via cyclin destruction); this is then followed by cytokinesis. How do cells impose this strict order? Recent findings in budding yeast have suggested a mechanism whereby partitioning of chromosomes into the daughter cell is a prerequisite for the activation of (...) mitotic exit network (MEN). So far, however, a regulatory scheme that would temporally link the initiation of cytokinesis to the execution of mitotic exit has not been determined. We propose that the requirement of MEN components for cytokinesis, their translocation to the mother–daughter neck and triggering of this translocation by inactivation of the mitotic kinase may be the three crucial elements that render initiation of cytokinesis dependent on mitotic exit. BioEssays 24: 659–666, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Part 1. Human capability in light of God's power -- Divine power and the creation -- God's will and human destiny -- Part 2. Human capability to understand God -- Human knowledge -- Human knowledge of God -- Part 3. Human capability in relation to doctrinal ordination -- Criteria of Christian authorities -- Philosophical freedom and doctrinal minimalism : two test cases -- Conclusion.

Background The ownership status of individual-level health data affects the manner in which it is used. In this paper we analyze two competing models of the ownership status of the data discussed in the literature recently: private ownership and public ownership. Main body In this paper we describe the limitations of these two models of data ownership with respect to individual-level health data, in particular in terms of ethical principles of justice and autonomy, risk mitigation, as well as technological, economic, (...) and conceptual issues. We argue that undifferentiated application of neither private ownership nor public ownership will allow us to resolve all the problems associated with effective, equitable, and ethical use of data. We suggest that, instead of focusing on data ownership, we should focus on the institutional and procedural aspects of data governance, such as using Data Access Committees (DACs) or equivalent managed access processes, which can balance the elements of these two ownership frameworks. Conclusion Undifferentiated application of the ownership concept (private or public) is not helpful in resolving problems associated with sharing individual-level health data. DACs or equivalent managed access processes should be an integral part of data governance. They can approve or disapprove data access requests after considering the potential benefits and harms to data subjects, their communities, primary researchers, and the wider society. (shrink)