This book seeks to explain long-term economic development and institutional change in terms of the cognitive features of human learning and communication processes. Martens links individual cognitive processes to macroeconomic growth theories, including economies of scale and scope, and to theories of institutional development based on asymmetric information in production processes and economies of scale in enforcement technology. With considerable flair, Bertin Martens has applied the hot new area of psychological and behavioural economics to notions of growth and development (...) and has created a unique and impressive volume. (shrink)

Annie Besant is primarily remembered as the international president of the Theosophical Society. One of the most important aspects of her career were the years that she was a professional atheist, which has given her a place in history as a pioneer feminist. _The Origins of Theosophy _contains thirteen of Besant’s pamphlets, originally published from 1883-1890. This book is ideal for students of theology.

This article argues that the (epi)genetic, cultural, symbolic, and environmental transmission channels are insufficient to explain the structure of modern human societies. Economic exchange of knowledge embodied in goods and services constitutes an additional transmission channel that makes more efficient use of limited human cognitive capacity. Economic exchange results in a gradual shift in societies from task-based division of labor to cognitive specialization. This shifts scarce cognitive resources away from production and into learning. It accelerates learning and reinforces the drive (...) towards specialization. Cognitive specialization may constitute another “major transition” towards a higher level of aggregation in human societies, with properties that differ from symbolic transmission. Collective control of individual market-based exchange is ensured by means of economic institutions that put a constraint on individual behavior. (shrink)

David Annis is professor of philosophy at Ball State University. In this essay, Annis offers an alternative to the foundationalist-coherent controversy: "contextualism." This theory rejects both the idea of intrinsically basic beliefs in the foundational sense and the thesis that coherence is sufficient for justification. he argues that justification is relative to the varying norms of social practices.

On June 28, 1993, the United States Supreme Court ruled on the admissibility of expert scientific opinion and evidence in federal court cases. The importance of the case can be measured by the interest it stimulated. The scientific community turned out in particular force to register its views. At the heart of the controversy was a debate over the nature of scientific knowledge and its relation to law. More than any other Supreme Court case in recent memory, the amici seemed (...) to view the Daubert case both as posing a potential challenge to basic scientific premises and as an opportunity to reclaim a lost prerogative to determine how science is applied in courts. (shrink)

The proteins encoded by early region 1 A (E1A) of human adenoviruses (Ad) modulate the expression of both adenovirus genes and various host cell genes. With these transcription‐regulating properties the E1A proteins redirect the cell's metabolism, which enables them to induce oncogenic transformation in rodent cells. The E1A proteins modulate transcription by interacting both with gene‐specific and general cellular transcription factors. Various members of the AP‐1 and ATF/CREB families of transcription factors are targets for E1A‐dependent regulation, including cJun, the protein (...) product of the c‐jun proto‐oncogene. The E1A proteins modulate cJun‐dependent transcription both positively and negatively, and affect the activity as well as the expression levels of cJun. By increasing the phosphorylation status of cJun, E1A can stimulate transcription regulated by cJun/ATF2 heterodimers. In contrast, E1A inhibits the expression of various metalloproteases by interfering with the DNA‐binding capacity of cJun/cJun and cJun/cFos dimers, which might involve the association of E1A with the putative transcriptional coactivator p300. Since the ability of E1A to alter cJun‐dependent transcription correlates with its transforming capacity, interference with cJundependent transcription may be an essential step in E1A‐induced transformation. (shrink)

Comme ailleurs dans le monde, les courants évangéliques et pentecôtistes ont tenté dès les années 1980 de s’imposer dans l’espace public de l’Afrique de l’Ouest. Bien qu’apparus au début du XX e siècle, ce n’est que dans la deuxième moitié du siècle que l’on observe un changement dans l’engagement évangélique vis-à-vis de la société : d’un retrait du monde à une « ouverture vers l’activité politique », marquée par le thème du combat spirituel pour les territoires. En Afrique de l’Ouest, (...) cette nouvelle visibilité dans l’espace public s’est concrétisée par l’élection de présidents évangéliques, comme Matthieu Kérékou au Bénin en 1996, ou Laurent Gbagbo en Côte d’Ivoire en 2000. Mais au sein d’une même société, les relations entre évangélismes et politique peuvent ainsi être multiples. Pour les saisir, il est nécessaire d’adopter différents points de vue, depuis les instances de pouvoir jusqu’aux relations interpersonnelles de la vie quotidienne. (shrink)

In this book they describe the density wave theory with the goal of making the key concepts and astrophysical implications explicit and accessible.

Siopis has always engaged in a critical and controversial way with the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in South Africa. For politically sensitive artists whose work has involved confronting the injustices of apartheid, the current post-apartheid situation has forced a reassessment of their practice and the terms on which they might engage with the fundamental changes which are now affecting all of South African society. Where mythologies of race and ethnicity have been strategically foregrounded in the art of any engaged (...) artist, to the exclusion of many other concerns, the demise of apartheid offers the possibility of exploring other dimensions of lived experience in South Africa. For feminists, this is potentially a very positive moment when questions of gender – so long subordinated to the structural issue of ‘race’ under apartheid – can now be explored. Penny Siopis’ work has long been concerned with the lived and historical relations between black and white women in South Africa. The discussion focuses on the ambivalent and dependent relationships formed between white middle-class women and black domestic labour during apartheid. Siopis’ work engages with how the appropriation of black women's time, lives, labour and bodies has shaped her ‘own’ history. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the perception of actual and ideal ethical climate type among 95 nurses working in the internal medicine wards of one central hospital in the state of Israel. We also examined whether nurses’ demographic characteristics influence that perception and if a relationship between perceptions of an actual and an ideal ethical climate type influences nurses’ job satisfaction. A questionnaire composed of three subquestionnaires was administered and the responses analyzed using multiple linear regressions, analysis of variance and (...) Pearson’s correlation coefficient. The results demonstrated that demographic characteristics (such as: gender, job tenure and level of education) partially influence the perception of an ideal ethical climate. Incongruence in perceptions of ‘caring’ and ‘independence’ climate types indicated a decline in nurses’ job satisfaction, while perception of actual ‘caring’ and ‘service’ climates positively influenced all aspects of job satisfaction. We recommend constructing training programs emphasizing the ethics of nursing practice and also to help lead nurses to clarify an ethical framework and guide nursing staff in dealing with ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Twenty-first-century biology rejects genetic determinism, yet an exaggerated view of the power of genes in the making of bodies and minds remains a problem. What accounts for such tenacity? This article reports an exploratory study suggesting that the common reliance on Mendelian examples and concepts at the start of teaching in basic genetics is an eliminable source of support for determinism. Undergraduate students who attended a standard ‘Mendelian approach’ university course in introductory genetics on average showed no change in their (...) determinist views about genes. By contrast, students who attended an alternative course which, inspired by the work of a critic of early Mendelism, W. F. R. Weldon, replaced an emphasis on Mendel’s peas with an emphasis on developmental contexts and their role in bringing about phenotypic variability, were less determinist about genes by the end of teaching. Improvements in both the new Weldonian curriculum and the study design are in view for the future. (shrink)

Friendship was an important topic for classical philosophers; the analysis, Value, And duties of friendship all received considerable attention. But friendship has been a relatively dormant topic among more recent philosophers. This paper (a) presents an analysis of friendship and explains its core elements, (b) discusses several different models for explaining the value of friendship, And (c) argues that there are special duties of friendship and that these aren't based solely on utilitarian considerations.

Policies and position statements regarding decision-making for extremely premature babies exist in many countries and are often directive, focusing on parental choice and expected outcomes. These recommendations often state survival and handicap as reasons for optional intervention. The fact that such outcome statistics would not justify such approaches in other populations suggests that some other powerful factors are at work. The value of neonatal intensive care has been scrutinized far more than intensive care for older patients and suggests that neonatal (...) care is held to a higher standard of justification. The relative value placed on the life of newborns, in particular the preterm, is less than expected by any objective medical data or any prevailing moral frameworks about the value of individual lives. Why do we feel less obligated to treat the premature baby? Do we put newborns in a special and lesser moral category? We explore this question from a legal and ethical perspective and offer several hypotheses pertaining to personhood, reproductive choices, “precious children,” and probable evolutionary and anthropological factors. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper aims to illustrate the contribution of Acquisition Linguistics combined with the dialogic view driven by Bakhtin’s ideas, in order to describe morpho-syntactic acquisitions. According to the first approach, interaction is the main driver of syntactic acquisition processes, especially adults’ adjustments to the morpho-syntactic attempts of children and children’s repetitions of adults’ speech. In parallel, a dialogic approach to language acquisition focuses on how the two speakers’ co-construction of discourse leads children to use and acquire the linguistic ability (...) to share and construct meaning in discourse. We analyse conversations between adults and children aged between 2 and 4 years old, with typical and atypical developments. Our results show how inter-discursive facts in dialogue and repetition in interaction are major contributors of language acquisition processes. (shrink)

On June 28, 1993, the United States Supreme Court ruled on the admissibility of expert scientific opinion and evidence in federal court cases. The importance of the case can be measured by the interest it stimulated. The scientific community turned out in particular force to register its views. At the heart of the controversy was a debate over the nature of scientific knowledge and its relation to law. More than any other Supreme Court case in recent memory, the amici seemed (...) to view the Daubert case both as posing a potential challenge to basic scientific premises and as an opportunity to reclaim a lost prerogative to determine how science is applied in courts. (shrink)

Depuis la fin des années 1990, la « complexité » a le vent en poupe. Ce texte présente une réflexion menée à l’Institut rhône-alpin des systèmes complexes sur le rôle que peuvent avoir les instituts pour promouvoir une étude réflexive des systèmes complexes. Il s’appuie également sur une étude empirique du domaine des systèmes complexes perçu à travers le prisme d’une base d’articles de sciences dures. Nous concluons sur la nécessité de permettre la maturation de projets interdisciplinaires.Since the late 1990s, (...) the "complexity" has the wind in its sails. This paper presents a discussion conducted at the Institute Rhône-Alpes complex systems on the role that institutions may have to promote a reflexive study of complex systems. It is also based on an empirical study of the field of complex systems seen through the prism of a base articles sciences. We conclude on the need to allow the maturation of interdisciplinary projects. (shrink)

Children acquiring languages with noun classes have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the hypothesis that children are classifying nouns optimally with respect to a distribution that does not match the surface distribution of statistical features in their input. We propose three ways in which children's apparent statistical (...) insensitivity might arise, and find that all three provide ways to account for the difference between children's behavior and the optimal classifier. A fourth model combines two of these proposals and finds that children's insensitivity is best modeled as a bias to ignore certain features during classification, rather than an inability to encode those features during learning. These results provide insight into children's developing knowledge of noun classes and highlight the complex ways in which statistical information from the input interacts with children's learning processes. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled ‘What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?’ examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on (...) the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra‐activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany—including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter. (shrink)

In this article we examine the specific contributions Native American thought can make to the ongoing search for a Western ecological consciousness. We begin with a review of the influence of Native American beliefs on the different branches of the modem environmental movement and some initial comparisons of Western and Native American ways of seeing. We then review Native American thought on the natural world, highlighting beliefs in the need for reciprocity and balance, the world as a living being, and (...) relationships with animals. We conclude that Native American ideas are important, can prove inspirational in the search for a modem environmental consciousness, and affirm the arguments of both deep ecologists and ecofeminists. (shrink)

In an age of professionalization and specialization, the practice of clinical ethics is facing an identity crisis. Are clinical ethicists moral experts, ethics experts, or merely quasi-lawyers giving legal advice? Are they extensions of the hospital, always working to advance the hospital’s interests? Or is there another option? Since 1998, when the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities first issued its Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation, there has been debate about the role of standardization and proceduralism in clinical ethics (...) consultation. Now, as ASBH continues to move forward with its credentialing program, proceduralism in clinical ethics must be critically examined. In this paper, I argue that the proceduralist approach to clinical ethics consultation, as espoused by the ASBH’s call for credentialing, creates a demeaning experience for all parties involved and precludes goods internal to the practice of clinical ethics consultation from being actualized. As a practice embedded in medicine and in institutions such as the hospital, clinical ethics consultation must define and examine its own goods in order to bring about more than a sterile, law-like solution to difficult moral quandaries, as these sterile solutions leave patients, families, and providers unsatisfied, abandoned, and disappointed. Thus, in an effort to push back against this proceduralism in clinical ethics consultation, I will offer a preliminary exploration of what these goods might be. (shrink)

The extremely preterm infant, born before 28 weeks of gestational age, has been the focus of much ethical discussion. These infants have a significant risk of mortality and morbidity, and it is not...

Though we fully agree that unconscious processing produces explicit representations that form the conscious phenomenal experience of the subject, identifying phenomenal experience with stable patterns of activation in a PDP network seriously limits O'Brien & Opie's thesis. They fail to recognize the constructive role of consciousness during the learning episode itself, reducing consciousness to a resulting outcome of the learning episode. We illustrate how consciousness can guide and shape the formation of increasingly structured representations of the world by presenting a (...) brief outline of a model for speech segmentation. (shrink)

The monstrous power of the blind in Diderot’s 1949 Letter is not due to its ability to make people laugh or afraid, as its most common etymology would indicate: monstrum, monstrare, to point to an abnormal fact. The monstrous power of Diderot’s monster is that of one who shows: monere, monitor, in the manner of a guide or pathfinder. It shows us that everything that lives, and especially the human being, is a hybrid. It takes the idea of a possible (...) mixture of animals and humans into account, thus the boldness of an ‘anti-speciesism’ as presented in the fantastical bestiary of Alembert’s Dream. It brings the humanism of essence to an end and invites us to redefine a new social bond. (shrink)